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Mediterraneans
David Abulafia
1. the mediterranean and the
mediterranean sea
We talk of the Mediterranean and of the Mediterranean Sea,
and we often assume we mean much the same thing. But here
lies the root of a significant confusion. ‘Mediterranean’ means
that which is between the surrounding lands. Yet histories and
geographies of ‘the Mediterranean’ may concern themselves
mainly with the lands that surround the Mediterranean Sea
and the peoples who have inhabited them, to the extent of
paying rather little attention to the bonds that have linked the
opposing shores of the Mediterranean world: studies of Mediterranean
Europe, for example, that are more concerned with
the inner history of Provence or Catalonia than with the impact
of the Great Sea upon the societies that developed in such
regions. Many associations of ‘Mediterranean historians’ are
really concerned with research on the lands that border the
Mediterranean, and the Society of Mediterranean Studies
based in the United States goes even further afield, taking in
all those societies that trace their cultural origins back to the
ancient and medieval Mediterranean, including not merely Portugal
(which for various reasons has often been counted as an
honorary Mediterranean land) but Brazil and Spanish South
America. This is certainly defensible: the impact of the cultures
formed around the shores of the Mediterranean on the wider
world has quite simply been enormous. And indeed those who
lived close to its shores in the Middle Ages generally saw it, and
not the outer Ocean, as the central sea of the world, the Yam
Gadol, the ‘Great Sea’ of the rabbis.