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Mediterraneans 67
another, literally and figuratively, and that flow carried goods,
cultures, even religions.
Written in these terms, the maritime history of the Classic
Mediterranean, or any other Mediterranean, ceases to be simply
the history of naval encounters between rival powers, of trade
and piracy, but becomes the history of human encounters. It is
not just the history of what happened on the sea, but the history
of the way the inhabitants of the opposing shores of the sea
interacted across the sea. In this way we can hope to restore one
of the missing elements in the Braudelian Mediterranean:
human beings.
2. the classic mediterranean
and its sub-mediterraneans
Of all these Mediterraneans, the Classic Mediterranean is perhaps
the most complex, for, as Purcell and Horden observe, the
Classic Mediterranean is itself a group of interconnected seas,
sub-Mediterraneans with their own history of cross-cultural
exchange. Thus the Adriatic Sea is a miniature Mediterranean;
the Adriatic has, since the early Middle Ages, brought the
inhabitants of Italy face-to-face with Slavs, Albanians, and
other Balkan peoples, and the linguistically and ethnically
mixed societies created along the Dalmatian coast reflect these
contacts. The Adriatic was a special theatre of operations for
Venice, which relied on the region for wood, salt, foodstuffs,
and raw materials, dominating Adriatic navigation from the
eleventh century onwards: it was known to late medieval writers
as ‘The Venetian Gulf’. Yet the Adriatic had long been a route
by which eastern goods reached the West, and in that sense it
was indeed well integrated into the trade networks of the rest of
the Mediterranean: the Etruscan port of Spina was already
importing prodigious numbers of Greek vases in the fifth century
bc.
The Aegean too, from the time of the Ionian colonization of
Asia Minor, is rich in evidence for the exchange of goods, ideas,
and literature between its western and eastern shores, and
indeed it was a city close to its north-eastern shore, Troy, that
would provide the greatest theme in the literature of the Greek
and Roman world. But these little Mediterraneans within the