Mediterranean Identities in the Premodern Era

Entrepôts, Islands, Empires

John Watkins, Kathryn L. Reyerson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138245433
• eBook ISBN: 9781317098041
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: Literature

The first full length volume to approach the premodern Mediterranean from a fully interdisciplinary perspective, this collection defines the Mediterranean as a coherent region with distinct patterns of social, political, and cultural exchange. The essays explore the production, modification, and circulation of identities based on religion, ethnicity, profession, gender, and status as free or slave within three distinctive Mediterranean geographies: islands, entrepôts and empires. Individual essays explore such topics as interreligious conflict and accommodation; immigration and diaspora; polylingualism; classical imitation and canon formation; traffic in sacred objects; Mediterranean slavery; and the dream of a reintegrated Roman empire. Integrating environmental, social, political, religious, literary, artistic, and linguistic concerns, this collection offers a new model for approaching a distinct geographical region as a unique site of cultural and social exchange.

Chapter 1
Mediterranean Identities in the Premodern Era: Entrepôts, Islands, and Empires

John Watkins and Kathryn L. Reyerson

Anyone who has ever read Homer knows the constancy of the sea mocks the flux of human existence. Heroes and cities rise and fall, empires come and go, but the “wine-dark sea” remains. Homer first uses the now-famous epithet when Achilles turns to look “out over the sea” before the funeral of his beloved Patroclus (

, Iliad 23:143).¹ It recurs in some of the most emotionally fraught passages in the Odyssey. When Telemachus sets out for Pylos, Athena sends him a west wind sounding “over the wine-dark sea” (Odyssey 2:421). When Odysseus’ men eat the cattle of the Sun, Zeus vows to destroy their ship “in the middle of the wine-dark sea,” a phrase that Kalypso and Odysseus later echo in describing the same event (Odyssey 12:388, 7:250, 5:221). The wine-dark sea becomes the one constant in these poems recounting the loss of countless human lives. The epithet still resonates so powerfully that over a dozen recent works adopt it in their titles, including a novel by Patrick O’Brien, a popular history by Thomas Cahill, a documentary about monk seals, a collection of horror stories by Robert Aikman, a song by electronic musician Suzanne Ciani, and a rock symphony by Stephen Caudel. Each work in its own way evokes Homer’s phrase as a gesture toward timelessness.

But was Homer’s sea really so immune to the vicissitudes of empires, cities, dynasties, individuals, and ways of life? Even the phrase that so readily evokes it has a complex history. The titles cited above are recent because nobody ever translated “

” and its derivatives as the “wine-dark sea” before the nineteenth century. George Chapman’s 1616 translation simply has Achilles “looking on the sea” and Telemachus sailing “through the dark deep main.” “

” disappears entirely. Alexander Pope’s “great Achilles stands apart in prayer” but does not turn toward the sea at all. The English words “wine-dark sea” originally had nothing to do with either the Mediterranean or even Homer. It became a commonplace in Victorian locodescriptive poetry after the Irish poet Clarence Mangan used it in a ballad in 1845: “Sawest thou the castle that beetles over / The wine-dark sea?” Philip Stanhope Worlsley first associated the phrase with Homer in his 1861 translation of the Odyssey into Spenserian stanzas. Although Worsley used “the wine-dark sea” and a variant, the “wine-dark mere,” as recurring epithets, he takes so many liberties that the phrase rarely correlates with Homer’s “

.” Andrew Lang, Walter Leaf, and Ernest Myers were more exact when they used it in their 1883 translation of the Iliad. While later translators like Robert Fitzgerald adopted their “winedark sea,” Richmond Lattimore evoked a “wine-blue water” reflecting numerous scholarly debates over why Homer first associated the sea with wine. Instead of capturing a fundamental timelessness, Homer’s “

”—whatever it might mean—has spawned its own history of contested scholia and translations.²

Precisely because it fails to set the sea apart from history, Homer’s epithet provides the perfect opening for a collection of essays on the historical Mediterranean. Until recently, scholars have more or less treated the sea as a wine-dark constant with imperial, dynastic, national, and colonial histories unfolding along its shores. This historiography infects the name they eventually gave it. As David Abulafia reminds us, the ancient Israelites called it the “Great Sea,” a vast expanse of waters stretching west from Palestine without defined limits.³ The Romans domesticated it as “mare nostrum,” their local lake surrounded by lands they conquered. By calling it the “Mediterranean” later Europeans reduced it further by casting it as a vaguely defined space between the landmasses of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Only with Fernand Braudel did the Great Sea enter history as a subject in its own right. Braudel’s Mediterranean extended inland away from the sea and was defined by olive cultivation. His focus was on the environment where he discerned many continuities and similarities across the Mediterranean watershed, with constants over time, the longue durée. People moved throughout this landscape as a labor force. Products of the agricultural hinterland and the river valleys were exchanged across the sea. Yet as later historians have remarked, Braudel’s full title—The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II—marked an uneasy compromise between an emergent thallasic historiography in its own right and dominant terrestrial ones divided along familiar lines of period and national culture.⁴ There is timelessness to Braudel’s impressionistic vision, punctuated less by political and military events than by climate and geography. What finally made the Mediterranean visible for Braudel as something more than a space between land-based states was the Hapsburg and Ottoman ambition to transform the sea once again into a local, imperial lake. Those ambitions ultimately failed, and the Mediterranean passed into modernity as the water between contending continental forces. Braudel’s Mediterranean foregrounded a moment of partial imperial unification between centuries of political division.

Braudel drafted The Mediterranean in the Age of Philip II while in a German prison camp during the Second World War. The subsequent Cold War and the division of the world into spheres of superpower influence contributed little to a sense of the Mediterranean as a distinct area of investigation. But a Global Age that dates itself from the collapse of the Soviet Union has given the Mediterranean an unprecedented level of scholarly visibility. Recent years have witnessed numerous popular and scholarly works approaching the region from multiple disciplinary perspectives.⁵ Scholars of national histories as far afield as England, the Hanseatic North, and sub-Saharan Africa have found in it a common research focus. In English studies alone, plays on Mediterranean topics like The Merchant of Venice, Othello, The Battle of Alcazar, and A Christian Turn’d Turk have sparked new critical interest. Scholars no longer dismiss their settings in Venice or Tunis as a mere cover for English interests but see them as part of larger mercantile developments that drew English ships into the Mediterranean and later made Mediterranean trade a pattern for ventures into the Atlantic and Caribbean.⁶

The Mediterranean’s new relevance arises from its potential as a microcosm of a world of interdependent societies linked by ever faster channels of communication. Those are terms through which Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell account for the region’s coherence and distinction in The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History, a magisterial survey developed in explicit counterpoint to Braudel’s work. For Horden and Purcell, what first made the Mediterranean special was the existence of ecologically diverse microregions with unstable and unpredictable climates connected by the sea. Islands were unique. Connectivities, offsetting the limitations of climate and landscape variation, facilitated trade ranging from the smallest exchange of needed supplies along the coast to large adventures across the length and breadth of the sea. The possibilities for cultural as well as material exchange were endless. No single society was immune to the sea’s corrupting promise.

Horden and Purcell argue that the classical Mediterranean ended with the advent of modernity and the subordination of microregional trading patterns to a global credit economy. But the globalization that subverted traditional Mediterranean economies has given the entire region a new historiographic significance, one that has supplanted an older focus on the Mediterranean’s northern shore as the cradle of western civilization. Perhaps we can only now begin to understand the complexities of premodern Mediterranean social structures because we think of ourselves as members of a global economy dependent on other societies to compensate for our own scarcities and insufficiencies. The airways and the shipping lanes of the World Ocean have become our Mediterranean. This development in turn has made the original Mediterranean a primary site for reinterpreting our experiences of ecological change, the fluctuations of multiple intersecting markets, the peculiarities of empire grounded in trade rather than territorial possession, immigration and diaspora, and religion as a catalyst and solvent of interethnic and interstate relations. Few other places in the premodern world could serve as such a rich environment to begin considering the complexities of human social identity.

The most recent book to attempt a transhistorical account of the Mediterranean, David Abulafia’s The Great Sea, sets the scene for our study of identity with its particular emphasis on the sea and the peoples who used it.⁷ Event-filled history punctuates Abulafia’s treatment, but with a focus on people’s participation in and domination of the sea. As time passed, their interactions altered identities and created new ones. Yet Abulafia also prioritizes long-range trade over local and regional exchanges in ways our contributors do not always find compelling. His emphasis on long-range trade justifies Abulafia’s division of the Mediterranean into five discrete moments when such trade was technologically and politically possible. He calls them simply “The First Mediterranean,” “The Second Mediterranean,” and so on, to “The Fifth Mediterranean.” We are less willing to compartmentalize the sea’s longue durée history and are just as interested in periods when hostilities and other factors made long-distance trade unfeasible as in moments when it prevailed.

“Identity,” of course, is a notoriously slippery analytical category. Scholars have repeatedly criticized it for ambiguity, instability, and methodological imprecision.⁸ The term can hover uncertainly between communal and individual, objective and subjective shades of meaning. When used by historians and literary scholars, it runs the further risk of anachronism, of importing modern concepts of identity back into the premodern past. With respect to the presentist concerns with globalization that drive so much current interest in the historical Mediterranean, the attractions of anachronism are enormous. Yet, fully conscious of these dangers, we have decided to preserve the term as a central organizing focus for several reasons. Not the least, we have worried that an excessively wary historicism runs the opposite risk of degenerating into mere antiquarianism, of becoming a representation of the past so purged of any connection with the present that it loses in significance whatever it gains in credibility. The very flexibility of the term “identity,” moreover, allows our contributors to weigh the relative importance of several seemingly disparate social variables, as in Wadad Kadi’s chapter on the intersections of religious conversion and bureaucratic advancement in the Umayyad empire or in Cameron Bradley’s on the conflicting claims of religious and regional identities in a street brawl in early modern Istanbul.

Although we adopt the term in part because of its ability to invite comparisons and associations between and among diverse social variables, we want to be as precise as possible about what we mean—and equally, what we do not mean—by “identity.” As we and our contributors adopt the term, “identities” are the categories by which premodern people made sense of the social environments that they inhabited. They are neither synonymous nor coextensive with modern categories of race, gender, or class; indeed, many of our contributors engage continuing debates over the extent to which one can speak of things like “race” and “sexuality” in the premodern world. But the historical Mediterranean had its own categories. The Umayyad civil service was stratified in ways that invited certain ambitions and precluded others; Venetians were hyperconscious of the distinctions between aristocrats with names inscribed in the Libro d’oro and cittadini inscribed in the lesser Libro d’argento; merchant and diplomatic communities in major ports like Venice, Istanbul, and Alexandria were organized along lines of nationality, in the older sense of people of a single natio. As Kevin Mummey’s study of the medieval Balearics and Galina Yermolenko’s study of early modern Istanbul remind us, the distinction between free and slave persisted in the region for over a millennium after the disintegration of the western Roman Empire.

Several recent scholars have criticized North American Mediterraneanists for an overly expansive concept of what constitutes the region and its historiography.⁹ The term “Mediterranean” has become almost as conflicted as “identity.” Horden and Purcell, for example, distinguish between “history in the Mediterranean”—the story of events that happened to transpire in Mediterranean places—and “history of the Mediterranean,” the story of the region’s defining connectivities.¹⁰ Although our commitment to Mediterranean identities places our contributors in the “history of” camp, we also sound a cautionary note about limiting the future of Mediterranean Studies too exclusively to that analytical binary. As critics of Horden and Purcell have rightly pointed out, the distinction between “history in” and “history of” begs crucial areas of overlap: can you really ignore conditions internal to various Mediterranean societies in talking about their interrelation?¹¹ As much as we embrace the new thallasic history as a challenge to older models centered teleologically on the nation state, we also know that political developments are entangled with social and cultural experience throughout the region. Stories of diplomats as well as merchants, immigrants, and slaves have a place in this volume.

We are also wary of overly restrictive definitions of Mediterranean space. In a sea ringed by entrepôts where merchants from many non-Mediterranean lands met to trade, the history of the Mediterranean was inseparable from the histories...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Transculturalisms, 1400–1700
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Mediterranean Identities in the Premodern Era: Entrepôts, Islands, and Empires
• Part I Entrepôts
• Part II Islands
• Part III Empires
• Index