Mediterranean: Portrait of a Sea
Ernle Bradford
574 pages including index
published in 1971

I read Ernle Bradford's book on the 1565 Ottoman siege of Malta, The Great Siege, some four years ago and enjoyed Bradford's obvious enthusiasm and interest in the subject, though at times he made the siege sound a bit too much like a boy's adventure. Other people seem to like it too, as not a week goes by without recieving hits on the review of it I did back. Apart from The Great Siege however I've never seen any other Ernle Bradford book, until Mediterranean: Portrait of a Sea caught my eye on the Amsterdam library's shelves two weeks ago. Bradford did a great job with his book on the siege of Malta, so I thought it would be interesting to see how he would do with a slightly bigger subject.

And subjects don't come much bigger than this: the complete story of the Mediterranean, one of the most important areas in human history, from the earliest beginning to the present day. As the subtitle indicates, Bradford isn't interested as much in the history of the various countries and empires that have bordered the Mediterranean, as he is in the sea itself. He focuses therefore on the ebb and flow of human exploration of the Mediterranean, on how the traderoutes through it were established and fought over, on the maritine empires that were established on it, on how their domination of the sea led succesive empires to rule the countries surrounding it.

As soon becomes clear Bradford has experience as both a sailor and a soldier in the Mediterranean. He knows the regions he talks about not just from study, but from personal experience as well. One of the major themes in his book is how despite changing technology and the rise and fall of successive civilisations, the sea remains the same. Like Fernand Braudel, Bradford knows that it's the Mediterranean's geography and climate that dictate the shape of events in any age, though he approaches it more through a sailor's instinct rather than a historian's theories.

It should come as no surprise that Bradford uses Malta as one of his examples demonstrating this important fact. Bradford shows how its location in the middle of important traderoutes connecting not just the west and east of the Mediterranean, but also North Africa with Italy, Spain and France, made it an important strategic place to hold for any seagoing empire determined to control the western end of the sea, be they Phoenician, Carthenigian, Roman, Ottoman or British. The Ottoman empire failed to gain control of it and this failure meant it could not establish itself in the west, the English did and because of this could keep the route to Egypt open, even against the combined might of nazi Germany and fascist Italy.

Mediterranean: Portrait of a Sea is divided into four parts, which together track the human history in this sea. Part I introduces the Mediterranean and how it differs from other seas. After this introduction the fate of the first major sea-empires (or thalassocraties) is followd, from the Mythican civilisation of Bronze Age Greece and Crete, through the Phoenician trade empires up to the defeat of the Persian invasion of Europe by Sparta and Athene, leading an alliance of all Greek cities. Book II continues this story, telling the story of the classic Graco-Roman period, from the Peloponnesian War to the establishment of the Byzantine Empire, as the successor to the Romans. In book III the struggle between Byzantium and successive challengers is told, from the "barbarian" invasions of the Vandals, through the battle against the Arabs and finally the subjugation of the empire by the Ottomans. With book IV we come to the time that the Mediterranean starts to devolve into a backwater, with the establishment of new trade routes over the world's oceans to Africa and Asia, not to mention the discovery of the Americas. This is the weakest part of the book, as Bradford seems to lose interest here once the Mediterranean loses its importance.

Bradford is somewhat of an oldfashioned historian, and it's clear in each part of his history who his favourites are: Greece over Persia, Athens over Sparta, Rome and Byzantium over their eastern challengers, and so on. It can be somewhat annoying, especially when he goes on and on about how "the dead hand of the Ottomans" held down development of the countries they ruled. He may have a point, but he isn't very nuanced. There are also parts of the story he tells where he seems to lose interest -- most noticably, as said, in the final part of the book -- and when he does, the story sags and it becomes a chore to read on. Within these limitations however, this is a rather good overview of the history of the Mediterranean. What I especially like is that Bradford takes the time to show what various parts of it and islands in it look like, obviously written from personal experience.

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