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.