The Mediterranean in the Spanish Imaginary During the Age of Exploration

2020 ◽  
pp. 21-42
Author(s):  
Andrew W. Devereux
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
Western Mediterranean ◽  
Early Church ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Western Asia ◽  
Age Of Exploration ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Mediterranean

This chapter explores the ways that late medieval Spaniards thought about the Mediterranean and the lands surrounding its shores. The chapter mentions the geographers' belief that the three constituent parts of the earth, namely Asia, Africa, and Europe, met in the Mediterranean and that the lordship of the world could only be attained through control of the inner sea. It also points out that the early expansion of primitive Christianity suggest that the Mediterranean possessed a latent religious unity. Aware of the history of the early Church in North Africa and western Asia, jurists devised arguments to the effect that Christian conquests in those regions were in fact acts of recuperation or defense. It then describes the nuances of fifteenth-century Spaniards' perspectives on Mediterranean space by demonstrating that the proximate western Mediterranean was familiar and known, while the more distant eastern Mediterranean was more exotic and often depicted as the site of fabulous wonders.

scholarly journals XEROPHILIC ENDEMES OF THE FLORA OF THE RUSSIAN CAUCASUS AND THEIR RELATED RELATIONS

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 532-541
Author(s):  
Musa TAISUMOV ◽  
◽  
Raisa MAGOMADOVA ◽  
Marjan ASTAMIROVA ◽  
Mukhadi UMAROV ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Family System ◽  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
Western Mediterranean ◽  
Asia Minor ◽  
The Caucasus ◽  
Greater Caucasus ◽  
Western Asia ◽  
Analysis And Synthesis ◽  
Central Caucasus ◽  
History Of

The article is devoted to the study of endemics of xerophilous flora of various regions of the Russian Caucasus, adjacent and remote territories (Western Mediterranean, Caucasus, Greater Caucasus, Transcaucasia. Asia Minor and Western Asia, Eastern Mediterranean, Pontic region, Palaearctic). The purpose of the study is to identify their species composition, genetic links between them, which are necessary for solving the problems of florogenesis. The article analyzes the results of many years of floristic research in different territories of the Caucasus, publications on the flora of these, adjacent and alienated territories. The study used methods of historical reconstruction, morphological-ecological-geographical analysis, including the method of evolutionary series, as well as the method of phlorogenetic analysis and synthesis. Information on the genetic and geographical relationships of the taxa under discussion was obtained by analyzing the position of the species in the genus system (in the case of monotypic genera, the position in the family system), which made it possible to identify the closest relatives, determine their geographic localization, and suggest the time and directions of migration flows of ancestral species. As a result of the analysis of the distribution of 52 species of endemics of the xerophilic flora of the studied regions of the Russian Caucasus, as well as the flora of adjacent and remote areas, possible genetic links between them were revealed. The closest relationships of endemic euxerophytes were noted within the territory of the Greater Caucasus (26.3%), they are significant with endemic species of the Western Mediterranean, Anterior and Asia Minor (9.6% each) and weaker - with species of the Eastern Mediterranean (5.1%), The Pontic region and the Palaearctic (1.3% each). Based on the analysis of the relationship of paleoand neoendemics, it was concluded that the process of formation of the endemic nucleus of the flora of euxerophytes took place at least in three stages: due to heterochronous waves of migration from distant western and eastern centers of formation of xerophilic flora of the Ancient Mediterranean, through the formation of secondary centers in Asia Minor and Western Asia, and then in the Western Mediterranean; the most recent most intensive speciation, which took place in the territories of Inland Dagestan, the Central Caucasus and Northwestern Transcaucasia, on a Caucasian genetic basis in Tertiary speciation centers, led to the loss of many types of distant family ties. The results obtained expand our understanding of migration processes and the history of the formation of the flora of the Caucasus.

Agathokles of Syracuse

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher de Lisle
Keyword(s):  
Southern Italy ◽  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
Western Mediterranean ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
The World ◽  
Important Player ◽  
Hellenistic World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of

Agathokles of Syracuse ruled large areas of Sicily and southern Italy between 317 and 289 BC. This book argues that Agathokles was an important player in the Mediterranean world at a key moment in its history. His career has important implications for our definition of the Hellenistic world and its relationship to both the western Mediterranean and earlier Greek history. However, he has tended not to feature in studies of the Hellenistic world or of ancient Sicily. This work—the first book-length study of Agathokles in English in over a century—places him in the context of both the earlier history of Sicily and the developments in the eastern Mediterranean that mark the start of the Hellenistic era. In ancient discourse about Agathokles, in the coins he issued, in his interactions with the world around him, and in the way he ruled, Agathokles is simultaneously heir to a long tradition and actively engaged in his contemporary world. The failure to place Agathokles in both of these contexts has contributed to the development of an excessively deep separation between the western and eastern Mediterranean and between the Classical and Hellenistic periods.

scholarly journals Review Article: Atmospheric conditions inducing extreme precipitation over the Eastern and Western Mediterranean

2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (6) ◽  
pp. 3687-3732 ◽  
Author(s):  
U. Dayan ◽  
K. M. Nissen ◽  
U. Ulbrich
Keyword(s):  
Extreme Precipitation ◽  
Mediterranean Basin ◽  
Heavy Rainfall ◽  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
Western Mediterranean ◽  
Atmospheric Conditions ◽  
Synoptic Scale ◽  
Extreme Precipitation Events ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
The Mediterranean Basin

Abstract. This review discusses published studies of heavy rainfall events over the Mediterranean Basin, combining them in a more general picture of the dynamic and thermodynamic factors and processes producing heavy rain storms. It distinguishes the Western and Eastern Mediterranean in order to point at specific regional peculiarities. The crucial moisture for developing intensive convection over these regions can be originated not only from the adjacent Mediterranean Sea but also from distant upwind sources. Transport from remote sources is usually in the mid-tropospheric layers and associated with specific features and patterns of the larger scale circulations. The synoptic systems (tropical and extra-tropical) accounting for most of the major extreme precipitation events and the coupling of circulation and extreme rainfall patterns are presented. Heavy rainfall over the Mediterranean Basin is caused at times in concert by several atmospheric processes working at different atmospheric scales, such as local convection, upper-level synoptic-scale troughs, and meso-scale convective systems. Under tropical air mass intrusions, convection generated by static instability seems to play a more important role than synoptic-scale vertical motions. Locally, the occurrence of torrential rains and their intensity is dependent on factors such as temperature profiles and implied instability, atmospheric moisture, and lower-level convergence.

scholarly journals The effect of cyclones crossing the Mediterranean region on sea level anomalies at the Mediterranean Sea coast

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Piero Lionello ◽  
Dario Conte ◽  
Marco Reale
Keyword(s):  
Mediterranean Sea ◽  
Sea Level ◽  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
Storm Track ◽  
Western Mediterranean ◽  
Residual Water ◽  
Positive Anomaly ◽  
Western Basin ◽  
Sea Level Anomalies ◽  
The Mediterranean

Abstract. Large positive and negative sea level anomalies at the coast of the Mediterranean Sea are linked to intensity and position of cyclones moving along the Mediterranean storm track, with dynamics involving different factors. This analysis is based on a model hindcast and considers nine coastal stations, which are representative of sea level anomalies with different magnitude and characteristics. When a shallow water fetch is present, the wind around the cyclone center is the main cause of sea level positive and negative anomalies, depending on its onshore or offshore direction. The inverse barometer effect produces a positive anomaly at the coast near the cyclone pressure minimum and a negative anomaly at the opposite side of the Mediterranean Sea, because a cross-basin mean sea level pressure gradient is associated to the presence of a cyclone. Further, at some stations, negative sea level anomalies are reinforced by a residual water mass redistribution within the basin, which is associated with a transient response to the atmospheric pressure forcing. Though the link between presence of a cyclone in the Mediterranean has comparable importance for positive and negative anomalies, the relation between cyclone position and intensity is stronger for the magnitude of positive events. Area of cyclogenesis, track of the central minimum and position at the time of the event differ depending on the location where the sea level anomaly occurs and on its sign. The western Mediterranean is the main cyclogenesis area for both positive and negative anomalies, overall. Atlantic cyclones mainly produce positive sea level anomalies in the western basin. At the easternmost stations, positive anomalies are caused by Cyclogenesis in the Eastern Mediterranean. North Africa cyclogeneses are a major source of positive anomalies at the central African coast and negative anomalies at the eastern Mediterranean and North Aegean coast.

Seasonal ecosystem vulnerability to climatic anomalies in the Mediterranean

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johannes Vogel
Keyword(s):  
Soil Moisture ◽  
Mediterranean Basin ◽  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
Western Mediterranean ◽  
Ecosystem Productivity ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Ecosystem Vulnerability ◽  
Dry Conditions ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
The Mediterranean Basin

<p>The ecosystems of the Mediterranean Basin are particularly prone to climate change and related alterations in climatic anomalies. The seasonal timing of climatic anomalies is crucial for the assessment of the corresponding ecosystem impacts; however, the incorporation of seasonality is neglected in many studies. We quantify ecosystem vulnerability by investigating deviations of the climatic drivers temperature and soil moisture during phases of low ecosystem productivity for each month of the year over the period 1999 – 2019. The fraction of absorbed photosynthetically active radiation (FAPAR) is used as a proxy for ecosystem productivity. Air temperature is obtained from the reanalysis data set ERA5 Land and soil moisture and FAPAR satellite products are retrieved from ESA CCI and Copernicus Global Land Service, respectively. Our results show that Mediterranean ecosystems are vulnerable to three soil moisture regimes during the course of the year. A phase of vulnerability to hot and dry conditions during late spring to midsummer is followed by a period of vulnerability to cold and dry conditions in autumn. The third phase is characterized by cold and wet conditions coinciding with low ecosystem productivity in winter and early spring. These phases illustrate well the shift between a soil moisture-limited regime in summer and an energy-limited regime in winter in the Mediterranean Basin. Notably, the vulnerability to hot and dry conditions during the course of the year is prolonged by several months in the Eastern Mediterranean compared to the Western Mediterranean. Our approach facilitates a better understanding of ecosystem vulnerability at certain stages during the year and is easily transferable to other study areas and ecoclimatological variables.</p>

Ottoman Exit, 1900–1918

The Great Sea ◽  
2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Abulafia
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Jewish Education ◽  
High Volume ◽  
The United States ◽  
Great Artery ◽  
Western Mediterranean ◽  
Professional Class ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Mediterranean

The history of the Mediterranean has been presented in this book as a series of phases in which the sea was, to a greater or lesser degree, integrated into a single economic and even political area. With the coming of the Fifth Mediterranean the whole character of this process changed. The Mediterranean became the great artery through which goods, warships, migrants and other travellers reached the Indian Ocean from the Atlantic. The falling productivity of the lands surrounding the Mediterranean, and the opening of high-volume trade in grain from Canada or tobacco from the United States (to cite two examples), rendered the Mediterranean less interesting to businessmen. Even the revived cotton trade of Egypt faced competition from India and the southern United States. Steamship lines out of Genoa headed across the western Mediterranean and out into the Atlantic, bearing to the New World hundreds of thousands of migrants, who settled in New York, Chicago, Buenos Aires, São Paulo and other booming cities of North and South America in the years around 1900. Italian emigration was dominated by southerners, for the inhabitants of the southern villages saw none of the improvement in the standard of living that was beginning to transform Milan and other northern centres. For the French, on the other hand, opportunities to create a new life elsewhere could be found within the Mediterranean: Algeria became the focus of French emigration, for the ideal was to create a new France on the shores of North Africa, while keeping the wilder interior under colonial rule. Two manifestations of this policy were the rebuilding of large areas of Algiers as a European city, and the collective extension of French citizenship to 35,000 Algerian Jews, in 1870. The Algerian Jews were seen as évolé, ‘civilized’, for they had embraced the opportunities provided by French rule, opening modern schools under the auspices of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, founded to promote Jewish education on the European model, and transforming themselves into a new professional class.

Diasporas in Despair, 1560–1700

The Great Sea ◽  
2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Abulafia
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
The Other ◽  
Religious Identities ◽  
Muslim Population ◽  
Sephardic Jews ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
Jewish Descent

Ottoman sultans and Spanish kings, along with their tax officials, took a strong interest in the religious identity of those who crossed the areas of the Mediterranean under their control. Sometimes, in an era marked by the clash of Christian and Muslim empires, the Mediterranean seems to be sharply divided between the two faiths. Yet the Ottomans had long accepted the existence of Christian majorities in many of the lands they ruled, while other groups navigated (metaphorically) between religious identities. The Sephardic Jews have already been encountered, with their astonishing ability to mutate into notionally Christian ‘Portuguese’ when they entered the ports of Mediterranean Spain. This existence suspended between worlds set off its own tensions in the seventeenth century, when many Sephardim acclaimed a deluded Jew of Smyrna as the Messiah. Similar tensions could also be found among the remnants of the Muslim population of Spain. The tragic history of the Moriscos was played out largely away from the Mediterranean Sea between the conversion of the last openly practising Muslims, in 1525, and the final act of their expulsion in 1609; it was their very isolation from the Islamic world that gave these people their distinctive identity, once again suspended between religions. The world inhabited by these Moriscos differed in important respects from that inhabited by the other group of conversos, those of Jewish descent. Although some Moriscos were hauled before the Inquisition, the Spanish authorities at first turned a blind eye to the continued practice of Islam; it was sometimes possible to pay the Crown a ‘service’ that bought exemption from interference by the Inquisition, which was mortified to discover that it could not boost its income by seizing the property of exempt suspects. Many Morisco communities lacked a Christian priest, so the continued practice of the old religion is no great surprise; even in areas where christianization took place, what sometimes emerged was an islamized Christianity, evinced in the remarkable lead tablets of Sacromonte, outside Granada, with their prophecies that ‘the Arabs will be those who aid religion in the last days’ and their mysterious references to a Christian caliph, or successor (to Jesus, not Muhammad).

Toward a history of the Trecento diptych: Format, materiality, and mobility in a corpus of diptychs from Angevin Naples

2018 ◽  
Vol 81 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-29
Author(s):  
Sarah K. Kozlowski
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
Central Italy ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
First Time

Abstract Laying the groundwork for a larger project, this essay brings together for the first time a working corpus of diptychs connected with the Angevin court in Naples in the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Comprising both surviving diptychs and diptychs now lost but recorded in inventories, this body of material reveals that objects of this type were commissioned and collected in significant numbers at the Neapolitan court, in a range of sizes, mediums, and subjects, and were produced by workshops linked not only to Naples but also to central Italy, Genoa, and the Eastern Mediterranean. In turn, diptychs in Naples raise larger questions about the histories, materialities, and meanings of the format in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in Europe and the Mediterranean. Above all, the objects brought together here press us to set diptychs in motion through networks of artworks, artists, and patrons on the move across the Mediterranean.

scholarly journals Review Article: Atmospheric conditions inducing extreme precipitation over the eastern and western Mediterranean

2015 ◽  
Vol 15 (11) ◽  
pp. 2525-2544 ◽  
Author(s):  
U. Dayan ◽  
K. Nissen ◽  
U. Ulbrich
Keyword(s):  
Extreme Precipitation ◽  
Mediterranean Basin ◽  
Heavy Rainfall ◽  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
Western Mediterranean ◽  
Atmospheric Conditions ◽  
Synoptic Scale ◽  
Extreme Precipitation Events ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
The Mediterranean Basin

Abstract. This review discusses published studies of heavy rainfall events over the Mediterranean Basin, combining them in a more general picture of the dynamic and thermodynamic factors and processes that produce heavy rain storms. It distinguishes the western and eastern Mediterranean in order to point out specific regional peculiarities. The crucial moisture for developing intensive convection over these regions can be originated not only from the adjacent Mediterranean Sea but also from distant upwind sources. Transport from remote sources is usually in the mid-tropospheric layers and associated with specific features and patterns of the larger-scale circulations. The synoptic systems (tropical and extratropical) that account for most of the major extreme precipitation events and the coupling of circulation and extreme rainfall patterns are presented. Heavy rainfall over the Mediterranean Basin is caused at times in concert by several atmospheric processes working at different atmospheric scales, such as local convection, upper synoptic-scale-level troughs, and mesoscale convective systems. Under tropical air-mass intrusions, convection generated by static instability seems to play a more important role than synoptic-scale vertical motions. Locally, the occurrence of torrential rains and their intensity is dependent on factors such as temperature profiles and implied instability, atmospheric moisture, and lower-level convergence.

The world is a room

Focaal ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 2012 (63) ◽  
pp. 8-19
Author(s):  
Blai Guarné
Keyword(s):  
Historical Context ◽  
History Of Anthropology ◽  
Academic History ◽  
Globalizing World ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Conditions Of Possibility ◽  
The Mediterranean

It is well accepted that the discussion about intellectual centers and peripheries has a reductionist character that conceals the complexity of a globalizing world. Despite this, we cannot ignore that in the academic history of anthropology central traditions and hegemonic discourses were established, while others were rendered as peripheral or marginal. This historical context has set a disciplinary framework of inequalities and imbalances that created the conditions of possibility for the global production and dissemination of anthropological knowledge. By re-examining the controversy surrounding the anthropology of the Mediterranean and its relation with debates about native anthropology, this article points out the challenge of revising this disciplinary framework in the project of developing a truly global anthropology.

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