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Four Years of Corruption 371
Mediterranean leaves our assault on typologies applying where
we want it to apply. (See Shaw (2001: 445–6) arguing for the
autonomous city-state as ‘the sign [author’s italics] of Mediterranean
unity in the pre-modern period’; if ‘pre-modern’ means
‘pre-Amsterdam’ that is a very large claim indeed).
7. managing monotheisms
The second chapter in CS which deals at length with one main
topic is that on the geography of religion (chapter X). This
chapter was hard to write in a balanced way. By comparison
with the literature on the ancient world there are few studies of
the geographical aspects of Christianity and Islam for us to
draw upon; this seems to us an undeveloped aspect of the
subject. Because of that, and still more because what we discussed
was only one very particular aspect of the subject of
Mediterranean religious practice, we stand accused (rather
harshly, we feel) of ‘little understanding how the coming of
the three great monotheistic religions transformed the religious
life of the Mediterranean’ (Abulafia 2000: 10, giving no supporting
example). 41
By contrast, Shaw, while largely accepting and indeed developing
our analysis, returns to the special place of towns and
cities in the landscape. He implies that the reassuring familiarity
of the standardized architecture of Christian basilicas (e.g. in
late Roman North Africa) ‘offers a rather different relation to a
local system of topography than do the network of springs,
groves, rivers, and caves’—a network on which we focus because
of our alleged predilection for the natural and the exotic
(Shaw 2001: 450). The essential difference in geographicalecological
terms between church and grove remains, however,
to be demonstrated. And a precondition for that demonstration
will, at least in part, surely be a comparison of the flows of people
and objects into, through, and away from the two different kinds
of cult centre and the relation of both to wider systems of
movement. We do not claim to have ‘explained’ the basilica
any more than to have explained the expansion of Islam. Yet
41 Nor do we learn more about this from Abulafia, The Mediterranean in
History, which is essentially a maritime history.