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66 Mediterraneans
trade. Here a comparative perspective can be revealing: to see
how medieval Japan acquired Buddhism along with Chinese
trade goods, to see, indeed, how its rulers and nobles long
sought to model their culture on that of China, is to observe a
phenomenon not so very different in its essential aspects from
the receptivity of al-Andalus to eastern Mediterranean Islamic
culture, or the spread of Byzantine models outwards from metropolitan
Constantinople to Italy, the Slav perimeter, and
beyond. Questions can also be asked in all these cases about
the relationship between trade and tribute, about the spread of
technology (in all these instances, in fact, sericulture features
prominently), and about the relationship between conquering
elites and older native populations.
Another theme that will be addressed here is the relationship
between these different Mediterraneans. The emphasis
throughout will be on the later Middle Ages, a period when,
in many cases, these contacts between Mediterraneans were
particularly intense and profitable. In certain cases, most obviously
the desert Mediterranean of the Sahara and the ‘Mediterranean
of the North’ comprising the Baltic and the North Seas,
the commercial networks and even certain key cultural strands
were linked across the landmass to the trade and civilization of
the Classic Mediterranean, as the Mediterranean Sea will be
called here. (The term ‘Northern Mediterranean’ employed by
Lopez to describe the Baltic-North Sea complex has been
altered slightly here, since his own terminology is confusing).
Constantinople, for its part, acted as a bridge between two
Mediterraneans, the Classic Mediterranean and the Black Sea
or Pontus. In the period we shall mainly be examining here, the
central and late Middle Ages, these Mediterraneans were far
from being closed worlds. This, of course, was stressed by
Braudel, whose Mediterranean extended at times as far as
Cracow and Madeira, as its merchants searched for raw materials,
foodstuffs, and luxury items. Yet some of the Mediterraneans
under examination here, in particular the Indian Ocean
Mediterranean described by Kurti Chaudhuri, had open sides
as well as coastal flanks, and the same applies to the ‘Mediterranean
Atlantic’ (or ‘Atlantic Mediterranean’) which was created
by Iberian navigators in the late Middle Ages around the islands
of the eastern Atlantic. Mediterraneans thus flowed into one