Conclusion: Crossing the Sea

It is tempting to try to reduce the history of the Mediterranean to a few common features, to attempt to define a ‘Mediterranean identity’ or to insist that certain physical features of the region have moulded human experience there (as Braudel strongly argued). Yet this search for a fundamental unity starts from a misunderstanding of what the Mediterranean has meant for the peoples who have inhabited its shores and islands, or have crossed its surface. Rather than searching for unity, we should note diversity. At the human level, this ethnic, linguistic, religious and political diversity was constantly subject to external influences from across the sea, and therefore in a constant state of flux. From the earliest chapters of this book, where the first settlers in Sicily were described, to the ribbon developments along the Spanish costas, the edges of the Mediterranean Sea have provided meeting-points for peoples of the most varied backgrounds who have exploited its resources and learned, in some cases, to make a living from transferring its products from better-endowed to ill-endowed regions. From within its waters came fish and salt, two ingredients of the much-traded garum sauce of ancient Rome, and the basis for the early prosperity of one of the greatest of Mediterranean cities, Venice. As predicted in the preface, fishermen have not featured prominently in this book, in part because the evidence they have left behind is often very slight, but in part too because fishermen seek what is by definition under the surface of the sea and are less likely to make contact with communities on the opposing shores of the Mediterranean. The great exceptions are within the narrows near Malta, where the Genoese established a colony at Tabarka on the coast of Tunisia between 1540 and 1742 specializing in coral-fishing, and where Tunisian fishermen have now joined Sicilian fleets in the matanza, the great seasonal slaughter of tuna. Even more than fish, which keeps well only after salting or drying, grain has long been the major product carried across the sea, originally grown around its shores or brought down from the Black Sea, but, by the seventeenth century, increasingly of north European origin.