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Mediterraneans 81
dissuaded historians such as Verlinden from describing the
region as a sort of Mediterranean. The interchangeable terms
‘Mediterranean Atlantic’ or ‘Atlantic Mediterranean’ have thus
come into use to describe the area; Fernández-Armesto justifies
the terms by arguing that this was a ‘middle sea’ surrounded by
mainlands and archipelagos which constituted, for a while, the
practical limits of navigation, but also because what was transplanted
into this zone was ‘traditional Mediterranean civilization’.
6 The Mediterranean Atlantic could thus be characterized
as in part an artificial Mediterranean, constructed around previously
uninhabited islands under the rule of Portugal, with one
important exception: the Canary archipelago, which was already
populated by Neolithic cultures and which was eventually
conquered and held by the Castilians. The physical boundary in
the west was a technological one: the difficulty of penetrating
further than the Azores before the time of Columbus and
Cabot. Before the end of the fifteenth century, even attempts
to go further west, such as that of Ferdinand van Olmen in the
1480s, were apparently guided by the belief that there were
more islands in the Ocean (Brazil, the Antilles, etc.) rather
than continents, whether these might be Asia or a New World.
This region took advantage of its ease of access not merely to
the Classic Mediterranean but also to the Mediterranean of the
North, with which the Portuguese merchants of Madeira and
the Azores developed intensive relations via Middelburg, Antwerp,
and other towns. The eastern flanks of this Mediterranean
were also important: Lisbon, and Lagos in the Algarve
itself, provided command centres for operations by Portuguese
merchants, as did Seville and Cádiz for the Castilians. The
colonizers had some contact, too, with the African coast opposite
the Canaries, though the trade with that area was probably
dominated by the purchase of slaves. There was a highly developed
inter-island trade by 1500, dealing in grain, animal
products, and wood, the article that gave its name to Madeira
itself. But the prize export, particularly from Madeira, was
sugar, though later wine took the lead instead, a product traditionally
sold to western merchants in large quantities in the
6 F. Fernández-Armesto, Before Columbus: Exploration and Colonisation
from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1229–1492 (London, 1987), 152.