The Last Mediterranean, 1950–2010

The late twentieth century was one of the great periods of Mediterranean migration. Migrations out of North Africa and into and out of Israel have been discussed in the previous chapter. The history of migration out of Sicily and southern Italy began as far back as the late nineteenth century, and it was largely directed towards North and South America. In the 1950s and 60s it was redirected towards the towns of northern Italy. Southern Italian agriculture, already suffering from neglect and lack of investment, declined still further as villages were abandoned. Elsewhere, colonial connections were important; for example, British rule over Cyprus brought substantial Greek and Turkish communities to north London. Along with these migrants, their cuisines arrived: pizza became familiar in London in the 1970s, while Greek restaurants in Britain had a Cypriot flavour. Not surprisingly, the food of the south of Italy took a strong lead among Italian émigrés: the sublime creation of Genoese cooks, trenette al pesto, was little known outside Italy, or indeed Liguria, before the 1970s. But the first stirrings of north European fascination with Mediterranean food could be felt in 1950, when Elizabeth David’s Book of Mediterranean Food appeared. It drew on her often hair-raising travels around the Mediterranean, keeping just ahead of the enemy during the Second World War. Initially, the book evoked aspirations rather than achievements: Great Britain was still subject to post-war food rationing, and even olive oil was hard to find. With increasing prosperity in northern Europe, the market for unfamiliar, Mediterranean produce expanded and finally, in 1965, Mrs David found the confidence to open her own food shop. By 1970 it was not too difficult to find aubergines and avocados in the groceries of Britain, Germany or Holland; and by 2000 the idea that a Mediterranean diet rich in fish, olive oil and vegetables is far healthier than traditional north European diets often based on pork and lard took hold. Interest in regional Mediterranean cuisines expanded all over Europe and North America – not just Italian food but Roman food, not just Roman food but the food of the Roman Jews, and so on.

A Fragmented Mediterranean, 1945–1990

The Allied victory over Germany in the Second World War, like that in the First, left the Mediterranean unsettled. After Greece emerged from its civil war with a pro-western government, there were ever louder rumbles in Cyprus, where the movement calling for enôsis, union with Greece, was gathering pace again. Precisely because the Greeks sided with the West, and because Turkey had kept out of the war, during the late 1940s the United States began to see the Mediterranean as an advance position in the new struggle against the expanding power of the Soviet Union. The explicit theme was the defence of democracy against Communist tyranny. Stalin’s realism had prevented him from supporting Communist insurgency in Greece, but he was keen to find ways of gaining free access to the Mediterranean through the Dardanelles. In London and Washington, the fear that Soviet allies would establish themselves on the shores of the Mediterranean remained real, since the partisan leader in Yugoslavia, Tito, had played the right cards during the last stages of the war, even winning support from the British. Moreover, the Italians had lost Zadar along with the naval base at Kotor and chunks of Dalmatia they had greedily acquired during the war, while Albania, after an agonizing period of first Italian and then German occupation, had recovered its independence under the Paris-educated Communist leader Enver Hoxha, whose uncompromising stance was to bring his country into ever-greater isolation. When he took power, Hoxha imagined that his country would form part of a brotherly band of socialist nations, alongside Tito’s renascent Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. Close ties with the Yugoslavs were sealed by economic pacts which reveal Tito’s hope of drawing Albania into the Yugoslav federation. Hoxha had other aspirations, and in his view Albania’s right to defend every square inch of the national territory extended into the waters off the Albanian coast: the Corfu Channel, long used as a waterway linking Greece to the Adriatic, was mined to prevent foreign incursions. Britain decided to send warships through the channel, asserting its right to police the Mediterranean on behalf of the nations of the world.

A Tale of Four and a Half Cities, 1900–1950

From a Mediterranean perspective, the First World War was only part of a sequence of crises that marked the death throes of the Ottoman Empire: the loss of Cyprus, Egypt, Libya, the Dodecanese, then the war itself with the loss of Palestine to British control, soon followed by a French mandate in Syria. All these changes had consequences, sometimes drastic, in the port cities where different ethnic and religious groups had coexisted over the centuries, notably Salonika, Smyrna, Alexandria and Jaffa. At the end of the war, the Ottoman heartlands were carved up between the victorious powers, and even Constantinople swarmed with British soldiers. The sultan was immobilized politically, providing plenty of opportunities for the Turkish radicals, in particular Mustafa Kemal, who had acquitted himself with great distinction fighting at Gallipoli. Allied mistrust of the Turks was compounded by public feeling: the mass deportation of the Armenians in spring and summer 1915 aroused horror among American diplomats based in Constantinople and Smyrna. Marched across the Anatolian highlands in searing heat, with harsh taskmasters forcing them on, men, women and children collapsed and died, or were killed for fun, while the Ottoman government made noises about the treasonable plots that were said to be festering among the Armenians. The intention was to ‘exterminate all males under fifty’. The worry among Greeks, Jews and foreign merchants was that the ‘purification’ of Anatolia would not be confined to persecution of the Armenians. In its last days, the Ottoman government had turned its back on the old ideal of coexistence. In Turkey too, as the radical Young Turks often revealed, powerful nationalist sentiment was overwhelming the tolerance of past times. Smyrna survived the war physically intact, with most of its population protected from persecution, partly because its vali, or governor, Rahmi Bey, was sceptical about the Turkish alliance with Germany and Austria, and understood that the prosperity of his city depended on its mixed population of Greeks, Armenians, Jews, European merchants and Turks. When he was ordered to deliver the Armenians to the Ottoman authorities, he temporized, though he had to despatch about a hundred ‘disreputables’ to an uncertain fate.

Ottoman Exit, 1900–1918

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.

The Greek and the unGreek, 1830–1920

An important feature of the Fifth Mediterranean was the discovery of the First Mediterranean, and the rediscovery of the Second. The Greek world came to encompass Bronze Age heroes riding the chariots described by Homer, and the Roman world was found to have deep roots among the little-known Etruscans. Thus, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries entirely new perspectives on the history of the Mediterranean were opened up. An early lead was given by the growth of interest in ancient Egypt, discussed in the previous chapter, though that was closely linked to traditional biblical studies as well. In the eighteenth century, the Grand Tour introduced well-heeled travellers from northern Europe to classical remains in Rome and Sicily, and Englishmen saw it as an attractive alternative to time spent at Oxford or Cambridge, where those who paid any attention to their studies were more likely to be immersed in ancient texts than in ancient objects. On the other hand, aesthetic appreciation of ancient works of art was renewed in the late eighteenth century, as the German art historian Winckelmann began to impart a love for the forms of Greek art, arguing that the Greeks dedicated themselves to the representation of beauty (as the Romans failed to do). His History of Art in Antiquity was published in German in 1764 and in French very soon afterwards, and was enormously influential. In the next few decades, discoveries at Pompeii and Herculaneum, in which Nelson’s cuckolded host, Sir William Hamilton, was closely involved, and then in Etruria, further enlarged northern European interest in ancient art, providing interior designers with rich patterns, and collectors with vast amounts of loot – ‘Etruscan vases’, nearly all in reality Greek, were shipped out of Italy as the Etruscan tombs began to be opened up. In Greece, it was necessary to purchase the consent of Ottoman officials before excavating and exporting what was found; the most famous case, that of the Parthenon marbles at the start of the nineteenth century, was succeeded by other acquisitions for northern museums: the Pergamon altar was sent to Berlin, the facings of the Treasury of Atreus from Mycenae were sent to the British Museum, and so on.

Diasporas in Despair, 1560–1700

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).

The Purple Traders, 1000 BC–700 BC

Recovery from the disasters of the twelfth century was slow. It is unclear how deep the recession in the Aegean lands was, but much was lost: the art of writing disappeared, except among the Greek refugees in Cyprus; the distinctive swirling styles of Minoan and Mycenaean pottery vanished, except, again, in Cyprus; trade withered; the palaces decayed. The Dark Age was not simply an Aegean phenomenon. There are signs of disorder as far west as the Lipari islands, for in Sicily the old order came to an end in the thirteenth century amid a wave of destruction, and the inhabitants of Lipari were able to preserve some measure of prosperity only by building strong defences. The power of the Pharaohs weakened; what saved the land of the Nile from further destruction was the falling away of raids from outside, as the raiders settled in new lands, rather than any internal strength. By the eighth century new networks of trade emerged, bringing the culture of the East to lands as far west as Etruria and southern Spain. What is astonishing about these new networks is that they were created not by a grand process of imperial expansion (as was happening in western Asia, under the formidable leadership of the Assyrians), but by communities of merchants: Greeks heading towards Sicily and Italy, consciously or unconsciously following in the wake of their Mycenaean predecessors; Etruscan pirates and traders, emerging from a land where cities were only now appearing for the first time; and, most precociously, the Canaanite merchants of Lebanon, known to the Greeks as Phoinikes, ‘Phoenicians’, and resented by Homer for their love of business and profit. So begins the long history of contempt for those engaged in ‘trade’. They took their name from the purple dye extracted from the murex shellfish, which was the most prized product of the Canaanite shores. Yet the Greeks also recognized the Phoenicians as the source of the alphabet which became the basis of their new writing system; and Phoenicia was the source of artistic models which transformed the art of archaic Greece and Italy in an age of great creative ferment.

Sea Peoples and Land Peoples, 1250 BC–1100 BC

Both the fall of Troy and the Sea Peoples have been the subject of a vast literature. They were part of a common series of developments that affected the entire eastern Mediterranean and possibly the western Mediterranean too. Troy had been transformed at the end of the eighteenth century BC with the building of the most magnificent of the cities to stand on the hill of Hisarlık: Troy VI , which lasted, with many minor reconstructions, into the thirteenth century BC . The citadel walls were nine metres thick, or more; there were great gates and a massive watchtower, a memory of which may have survived to inspire Homer; there were big houses on two floors, with courtyards. The citadel was the home of an elite that lived in some style, though without the lavish accoutrements of their contemporaries in Mycenae, Pylos or Knossos. Archaeological investigation of the plain beneath which then gave directly on to the seashore suggests the existence of a lower town about seven times the size of the citadel, or around 170,000 square metres, roughly the size of the Hyksos capital at Avaris. One source of wealth was horses, whose bones begin to appear at this stage; Homer’s Trojans were famous ‘horse-tamers’, hippodamoi, and even if he chose this word to fit his metre, it matches the archaeological evidence with some precision. In an age when great empires were investing in chariots, and sending hundreds of them to perdition at the battle of Kadesh (or, according to the Bible, in the depths of the Red Sea), horse-tamers were certainly in demand. Opinion divided early on the identity of the Trojans. Claiming descent from Troy, the ancient Romans knew for sure that they were not just a branch of the Greek people. Homer, though, made them speak Greek. The best chance of an answer comes from their pottery. The pottery of Troy is not just Trojan; it belongs to a wider culture that spread across parts of Anatolia.

Isolation and Insulation, 22000 BC–3000 BC

Carved out millions of years before mankind reached its coasts, the Mediterranean Sea became a ‘sea between the lands’ linking opposite shores once human beings traversed its surface in search of habitation, food or other vital resources. Early types of humans inhabited the lands bordering the Mediterranean 435,000 years before the present, to judge from evidence for a hunters’ camp set up near modern Rome; others built a simple hut out of branches at Terra Amata near Nice, and created a hearth in the middle of their dwelling – their diet included rhinoceros and elephant meat as well as deer, rabbits and wild pigs. When early man first ventured out across the sea’s waters is uncertain. In 2010, the American School of Classical Studies at Athens announced the discovery in Crete of quartz hand-axes dated to before 130,000 BC, indicating that early types of humans found some means to cross the sea, though these people may have been swept there unintentionally on storm debris. Discoveries in caves on Gibraltar prove that 24,000 years ago another species of human looked across the sea towards the mountain of Jebel Musa, clearly visible on the facing shore of Africa: the first Neanderthal bones ever discovered, in 1848, were those of a woman who lived in a cave on the side of the Rock of Gibraltar. Since the original finds were not immediately identified as the remains of a different human species, it was only when, eight years later, similar bones were unearthed in the Neander Valley in Germany that this species gained a name: Neanderthal Man should carry the name Gibraltar Woman. The Gibraltar Neanderthals made use of the sea that lapped the shores of their territory, for their diet included shellfish and crustaceans, even turtles and seals, though at this time a flat plain separated their rock caves from the sea. But there is no evidence for a Neanderthal population in Morocco, which was colonized by homo sapiens sapiens, our own branch of humanity. The Straits apparently kept the two populations apart.

Mare Nostrum – Again, 1918–1945

While most naval action within the Mediterranean during the First World War took place in the east and in the Adriatic, in waters that lapped the shores of the disintegrating empires of the Ottomans and the Habsburgs, the entire Mediterranean became the setting for rivalry between 1918 and 1939. At the centre of the struggle for mastery of the Mediterranean lay the ambitions of Benito Mussolini, after he won control of Italy in 1922. His attitude to the Mediterranean wavered. At some moments he dreamed of an Italian empire that would stretch to ‘the Oceans’ and offer Italy ‘a place in the sun’; he attempted to make this dream real with the invasion of Abyssinia in 1935, which, apart from its sheer difficulty as a military campaign, was a political disaster because it lost him whatever consideration Britain and France had shown for him until then. At other times his focus was on the Mediterranean itself: Italy, he said, is ‘an island which juts into the Mediterranean’, and yet, the Fascist Grand Council ominously agreed, it was an imprisoned island: ‘the bars of this prison are Corsica, Tunisia, Malta and Cyprus. The guards of this prison are Gibraltar and Suez.’ Italian ambitions had been fed by the peace treaties at the end of the First World War. Not merely did Italy retain the Dodecanese, but the Austrians were pushed back in north-eastern Italy, and Italy acquired much of Italia irredenta, ‘unredeemed Italy’, in the form of Trieste, Istria and, along the Dalmatian coast, Zara (Zadar), which became famous for the excellent cherry brandy produced by the Luxardo family. Fiume (Rijeka) in Istria was seized by the rag-tag private army of the nationalist poet d’Annunzio in 1919, who declared it the seat of the ‘Italian Regency of Carnaro’; despite international opposition, by 1924 Fascist Italy had incorporated it into the fatherland. One strange manifestation, which reveals how important the past was to the Fascist dream, was the creation of institutes to promote the serious study (and italianità, ‘Italianness’) of Corsican, Maltese and Dalmatian history.