Crossroads region: the Mediterranean

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In the summer of 1499, disastrous news reached Venice, provoking panic on the market and ruining several companies and banks. In previous years, the Ottomans had seized many of the republic's outposts on the Greek mainland.

War and discovery, then, determined - or were long considered to determine - a symbolic turning point, epitomising the decline not just of Venice, but of the Mediterranean as a whole. Following the rise of the Ottomans in the east and the first oceanic discoveries in the west, what had once been the cradle of civilization turned into a battlefield between fanatically opposed blocks, an embattled frontline that, moreover, became increasingly irrelevant as new powers came to dominate the world, and new routes to bypass the old sea.

Closer consideration leads to a different interpretation. The Venetians, who first heard of the Portuguese feat from commercial agents based in Egypt, quickly dispatched envoys to Lisbon in order to assess the extent of the challenge; they later offered themselves as intermediaries for the spices' further transportation to Antwerp.

How, then, are we to interpret this crisis and the long period in which it took place? Was this a time of stiffening frontiers or of increasing connections, both between the shores of the Mediterranean and between it and the world beyond? Historians who focus on political and military events have long underlined the emergence of opposite blocks, and described the power struggle as a clash of civilisations. By contrast, the most influential twentieth-century historian of the early modern Mediterra­nean, Fernand Braudel, insisted that deep geographical structures and long­term economic conjunctures made for a fundamental unity of the region, transcending political and religious boundaries. More recently, anthropo­logically trained cultural historians have underlined less the unity of the sea than the high degree of connections among the diverse societies that thrived on its shores since ancient times, on both the macro-scale of long-distance trade and the micro-level of local life. Economic historians have concerned themselves with the social and cultural preconditions that made regular long-distance trade possible, while historians of so-called high culture - ideas, art, architecture - have underlined cross-pollination, whether in the form of attentive study or deforming stereotype.

Emerging frontiers

In order to understand the true significance of the contacts that, as we shall see, so many people and institutions were willing to institute across boundaries, we first need to take into account the massive rifts that divided the sea. They were cultural and political more than geographical. A narrow space dotted with reprovisioning points that made navigation relatively easy, the Mediterranean was since ancient times a region marked by a high degree of intense exchanges. Historians now agree that both the fall of the Roman Empire and the Arabic conquests had changed, but not ended, these strong traditions. Since the Norman conquest of Sicily and the Crusades in the eleventh century, Christians controlled most crucial islands and peninsulas. What changed in the fifteenth century was that this long Western domination gave way to polarisation, breaking the sea into hostile spheres of influence.

The rise of Muslim powers brought substantial aggregation and consoli­dation to the eastern basin. Following the death of Temur in 1405, the last remnants of the Byzantine Empire and a host of Muslim and Christian statelets in Anatolia and the Aegean fell first to the Mamluk rulers or Egypt and then to the Ottomans, a Turkic tribe originating from Central Asia. The Ottomans' new imperial expansion climaxed with the highly symbolic capture of Constantinople in 1453. In the following decades, they also expanded their dominions in the Balkans (which they had entered in the previous century), annexed Albania, permanently secured a foothold on the eastern coast of the Adriatic, and also briefly captured a number of towns on the heel of the Italian peninsula. In their seemingly unstoppable advance, they defeated the Mamluks in 1517 and went on to subdue the caliphates of North Africa.

The rise of Muslim sea power was due in part to the Ottomans' vassals on the Barbary coast, who operated the pirate centres of Algiers and Tunis in the west, but above all to solid control of the coasts and effective patrolling in the eastern basin. Traumatic as this might have been for Christian powers and churchmen, it brought about a security not seen since late antiquity to the vast area stretching from the Bosphorus to Egypt, where Christian raids had until then been a regular feature. This made it possible to protect both traditional trading routes connecting the Mediterranean to Asia, via the Black Sea, and to the Indian Ocean, via the Red Sea. In due course, the Ottomans also captured the last large islands that were still in Christian hands in the east: Rhodes (1522), Cyprus (1573) and Crete (1669).

Meanwhile, the western basin fell under Christian control. The Aragonese, who ruled over Catalonia and the Balearic islands, captured Sicily in 1392 and completed the subjection of Sardinia in 1409. Under Alfonso the

17.i Europe and the Mediterranean c. 1400

Magnanimous (1416 to 1458), they defeated the Genoese, secured a strong­hold in Corsica and annexed the kingdom of Naples, including the whole of southern Italy. In parallel fashion to the Ottomans, but building on solid nautical traditions, they thus put together an impressive ‘thalassocracy', a far- flung state united by systematic and frequent navigation, and benefiting the great ports of Barcelona and Valencia. As the Portuguese captured Ceuta in 1415 and the Castilians Gibraltar in 1462, the Western Mediterranean became an overwhelmingly Christian area, with the consequent decline of once flourishing Muslim ports such as Malaga, Almeria and Ceuta itself.

The clash between Muslim, mainly Ottoman, power in the east, and Christian, mainly Spanish, power in the west developed along a double frontier. One ran between north and south in the western basin, opposing Italian and Aragonese, later Spanish, fleets to those of the Ottomans and of their allies and dependents in North Africa. The other separated the western from the eastern basins. It is no coincidence that some of the greatest and most protracted clashes of the whole period took place along that border, as in the contest for Tripoli (1510 to 1551) and Tunis (1534 to 1574), the siege of Malta (1565), and the great naval battles of Prevesa (1538) and Lepanto (1571). The latter especially was a great symbol of Christian recov­ery, but, by that time, a stalemate was reached that was to last substantially until the end of the early modern period, as the Ottomans refrained from pursuing domination in the west and even Spain opened diplomatic negoti­ations with the Porte.

Between violence and adaptation

War had a serious impact on the ways in which people lived and related to one another on all shores of the Mediterranean, not least because they provoked displacement on a scale rarely seen before this period. In the fifteenth century, faced with the Ottoman invaders, scores of Greek-speaking Christian subjects of the old Byzantine emperors escaped west, while the completion of the Reconquista paved the way for the expulsion of Jews and

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17.2 Europe and the Mediterranean c. 1750

Muslims, who in huge numbers moved east and south. War did not domin­ate Mediterranean life in this period, however, and in fact was relatively rare. The Ottoman envoy bringing the declaration of war that would lead to the War of Cyprus and the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 knew as much: ‘with a pale face and trembling voice, he said [to the doge]: “Your Serenity rest well, this war will not last forever, and then we shall again make peace”'.^[320]

Especially since the end of the sixteenth century, open war gave way to more endemic violence, occasionally masked by the rhetoric of religious fervour, but in fact operated by mixed crews against co-religionists as much as infidels. Piracy increased to an extent not seen since the Saracens in the tenth century, as practised more or less systematically by groups of all religions, causing insecurity among merchants and wreaking terror on coastal villages and towns. Southern Italians feared the incursions of Barbary corsairs operating from their bases in North Africa, especially Algiers, Tripoli and Tunis, just as the Arabs feared the slave-raids of the Christian Knights of StJohn, operating a sort of permanent crusade first from Rhodes and, after 1530, from Malta.^[321]

It would be wrong to divide pirates too neatly along religious lines, however, as they also included Orthodox Greek subjects of the Ottomans, Latin-Christian pirates based on small remnants of Aegean fiefs gained during the crusades, and Uskok Croatians and Slavs operating from the dominions of the Austrian Habsburgs, as well as Dutch and English Protestants who found employment with the Barbary corsairs. Unsurprisingly, Neapolitan officials complained with equal strength about the ‘Affricani' and the French, whom they regarded as supporting pirates.^[322] The response against such piratical activities equally crossed confessional lines in occasionally surprising ways. In 1464, the Knights of Rhodes stopped two Venetian galleys on the way from Alexandria to Tunis and seized all Muslim and Jewish passengers despite the protests of the commanders. Anxious to protect its trade with Egypt, the Venetian Senate sent the war fleet - then supposed to engage in war against the Ottomans - to Rhodes, where it ravaged the island until all prisoners were handed back.^[323]

As these episodes suggest, if some states chose war, others preferred pragmatic adaptation. As intra-confessional rivalries trumped hostility to the infidel, new and unprecedented diplomatic contacts became possible between fellow rivals of a common enemy. In the 1480s and 1490s, Venice was prepared to make more or less secret deals with the Ottomans against the Aragonese in the Adriatic. In the 1520s, Francis I of France made deals first with the Barbary corsairs and then with the Ottoman sultan himself, urging him to attack the Spanish possessions in Italy. In 1543, a Franco-Ottoman fleet captured Nice (part of the dominions of the duke of Savoy, Spanish ally and imperial subject), after which the Turkish fleet wintered in Toulon and for six months turned the city's cathedral into a mosque.^[324] Joint operations continued into the 1550s against the Balearic Islands and the Neapolitan coastline. Both sides regarded these alliances as temporary measures barely permissible under Christian or Islamic ideology - yet they renewed their agreements time and again. Meanwhile, on the other side of both the sea and the religious divide, the Hafsid dynasty of Algiers tried to stop the Ottoman advance through an alliance with Spain itself.

By the early seventeenth century, such contacts extended Mediterranean diplomatic networks beyond the Mediterranean itself, as several enemies of the Ottoman Empire, including the papacy, cultivated contacts with Persia. In 1600, the sultan of Morocco sent an envoy to the Queen of England to foster an anti-Spanish alliance, while England and the United Provinces pursued similar goals by establishing permanent diplomatic relations with the Porte itself in 1582 and 1615. By the 1750s, even Vienna-Istanbul alliances became conceivable, as a way of countering the common Russian enemy. For their part, in order to create buffers against the Habsburgs, the Ottomans were ready to rule through Christian dependencies, such as Transylvania and Walachia, and they tolerated the vassalage of Dubrovnik, a Catholic republic whose rulers had in Istanbul the same recognition as the North African beys.

The evolving framework of exchange

Meanwhile, a series of disparate developments facilitated mobility and trade even in the face of war and piracy. Some of them consolidated earlier advances in commercial techniques that helped to meet the burgeoning costs deriving from the permanent danger of armed encounter. Different forms of contracts made it possible to collect investments from associates and so contain the costs for each investor, whether with agreements relating to single voyages or with more long-lasting partnerships. The maritime insurance business also helped to spread the risks deriving from insecure navigation - although skyrocketing premiums occasionally indicated real difficulties.^[325]

Foreseeing dangers and exploiting business opportunities required infor­mation, which in this age travelled along markedly improved channels to reach unprecedented levels of distribution. Medieval networks of merchants exchanged regular letters with detailed news, but in the fifteenth century, the practice grew more systematic and could avail itself of better communi­cation systems; later, the model of the merchant letter led to the diffusion of manuscript newsletters - avvisi, avisos - prepared by professionals for customers paying a subscription. From the seventeenth century onwards, printed newspapers kept people abreast of developments on both sides of the sea, while travel literature became a popular genre. One should not exaggerate the progressive, unifying effect of the press - gazettes also served to inspire hatred for the enemy, and travel accounts popularised received stereotypes as much as they spread accurate knowledge. But one way or another, the availability of information was a product of increased communi­cation across the sea that also permitted greater mobility. While economic historians focus on the exchange of goods, historians of information have shown that news influenced the social and professional behaviour even of people who had little exposure to the luxury items that were a staple of Mediterranean trade; as we saw at the start, the arrival of news determined the price of commodities and shaped the performance of markets.^[326] System­atic knowledge was a prerequisite of long-distance credit relations and trade cooperation.

A series of nautical innovations also helped because they facilitated long-distance sailing. Here, it is important to remember that the notion of dominion of the sea only really applied to coastal waters. As the Venetians found out on even as narrow a space as the Adriatic, enemy navigation could only effectively be prevented close to land, detecting and attacking ships or denying them access to ports. From the fifteenth century onwards, more sailors could steer longer courses, thanks to the diffusion of portolan charts, first introduced in the previous century, and to the improvement of astro­nomic navigation. Most importantly, ships grew larger and less dependent on oar-power, therefore requiring smaller crews and, so, fewer calls in ports.^[327] From about 1400, there was a steady increase in the size of the square-rigged round ship, or cog, recently introduced from Northern Europe, but perfected with the addition of a second mast and of sails derived from the autochthon­ous tradition of the lateen. Their manoeuvring required fewer crewmen, and they carried larger quantities of cargo and could defend themselves with heavier cannons. In Venice, the number of ships trading with the east did not substantially alter in the period 1448 to 1558, but the overall tonnage increased by more than a third.^{[328] [329]} By the end of the century, they completely displaced the galley for commerce, although more manoeuvrable light galleys, which could add oar-power to wind propulsion, were still the backbone of navies at Lepanto. Naval construction did not essentially change in the rest of the period, but ships grew even larger, with the appearance of carracks and galleons, and later of frigates and ships-of-the-line. With mul­tiple decks and three or four masts rigged with more numerous and smaller sails, they could navigate closer to the wind and stay at sea longer than any of their predecessors.

The development of heavy artillery was another technological innovation that had far-reaching consequences including, paradoxically, making life in Mediterranean ports more rather than less secure. Gunpowder was originally imported from China, and in the fifteenth century applied to ever larger cannons, first in continental Europe and then in the Ottoman Empire. In the very same year, 1453, the Ottomans made large-scale use of artillery to knock down the ancient walls of Constantinople, and the French to achieve the victory which put an end to the Hundred Years War. Artillery made naval attacks on ports more difficult. Once defended by well-placed cannons, no harbour could be stormed, as had previously happened frequently, such as the pillaging of Beirut and Alexandria in 1422, by two Catalan ships unhindered by local archers.¹¹ Of course, cities could be subject to devastat­ing bombardments, as Genoa was to find out at the hands of Louis XIV's fleet in 1684. But even the French could not force their way into the harbour.

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A final point relates to the institutional framework of cross-cultural con­tacts and trade. In rejecting Braudel's idea of the unity of the Mediterranean, political historians have rightly shown that he neglected the agency of states, but they have focused exclusively on the aggressive role of states in foreign politics. However, states also, and increasingly, created the infrastructure for economic exchange. For example, they granted foreign merchants con­cessions, protected quarters and legal security; they included clauses for the respect of merchant shipping in their diplomatic treaties; they established and maintained networks of consular representatives, in agreement with merchants and often drawn from the merchants themselves. Non-state actors sometimes did this as well, including pirates such as the Knights of Malta, who issued safe-conducts, until the French monarchy intervened to rein in their pirateering. With encouragement came regulation: this was the great age of bureaucracy, ranging from health checks to customs and borders control, to the issuing of travelling documents.¹²

Routes old and new

Such developments made it possible for traders to exploit commercial opportunities that were expanding as a result of growing demand for distant products. Between 1400 and 1800, the population recovered from the crisis of the Black Death and went on to increase massively on all Mediterranean shores. In the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Empire grew according to some from some 12 to perhaps 35 million.¹³ Europe grew from about 80 million in 1500 to 104 million in 1600, then slowed down, reaching 115 million in 1700, but picked up again in the eighteenth century, reaching more than 150 million by 1800. As the period was also marked by increasing urbanization, the result was greater demand for agricultural products to feed and clothe increasingly large populations living far away from the fields.

A huge number of trading routes continued to tie together distant regions on either side of the borders described above. Of course, some declined, and the goods they once transported had to be sourced elsewhere. This is the case of alum - a crucial material for tanning and wool production, which the Genoese had long been trading from Anatolian mines through their base in Chios to the west. The Ottoman expansion led to a steep increase in taxes and a drop in export. But Roman miners - helped by an expert who had long lived in Constantinople - discovered new sources in Latium, a feat which Pope Pius II described as ‘a victory against the Turks', and this went on to feed a thriving commerce from Italy to France, England and Flanders.¹⁴

More often, conquest changed rather than stopped patterns of exchange, as new merchants took over old routes and built on the networks established by their predecessors. For example, it is true that Mehmed the Conqueror closed the Black Sea to Christian merchants, just as Byzantine emperors had done to non-Byzantine subjects until 1204. But the Ottomans put their monopoly at the service of profitable trade, first in Bursa and later in Istanbul. The latter grew to become a commercial centre for eastern-western exchange in a way that Constantinople had not been for a long time: crucial in the export of ceramics, cotton and foodstuffs, and in the mediation of long-distance commerce in silk, spices and porcelain from China and India. Historians no longer regard the Ottoman Empire as a ‘warfare state' uninterested by com­merce, and have recently underlined how the governing apparatus was keen to increase customs and the income generated by the rental of khans and covered markets. The Ottomans attracted foreign merchants with special privileges, and brought security to the crucial Istanbul-Alexandria route, which was the one most used at sea by their own subjects - in 1645, they unleashed war on Crete precisely in order to protect that route from unrelenting piracy.

The Venetians continued to play a solid role as intermediaries, especially as their traditional competitors, the Genoese, turned away from commerce to finance. In the fifteenth century, they sent regular convoys of merchant galleys (mude), protected by the state, along five regulated routes: Constan­tinople; Cyprus and Syria; Alexandria; Languedoc (‘Aque morte') and Cata­lonia; England and Flanders. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, they added two more to North Africa. In the meantime, they also established fortified ports along the entire coast of the Adriatic, and so secured the movement of their galleys. The mude later shrank and eventually ended in 1564, but historians now agree that this should not be seen as a sign of absolute commercial decline. In fact, regulated convoys always only consti­tuted a small proportion of Venetian trade, which between the late fifteenth and late sixteenth centuries made increasing use of large cogs and other round ships that required less state protection and regulation.¹⁵

1 ⁴ Jean Delumeau, L'Alun de Rome, XVe-XIXe siecle (Paris: SEVPEN, 1962), p. 21.

1 ⁵ Claire Judde de Lariviere, Naviguer, commercer, gouverner. Economie maritime et pouvoirs a Venise (XVe-XVIe siecles) (Leiden: Brill, 2008).

Thereafter, Venice turned from a long-distance to a regional centre, loading goods originating from all outlying regions and then operating as a port of call for large foreign ships that knew they could quickly load and unload their cargoes there. But the Venetians also had to face unexpected competition - for example, from the collaboration between the papal city of Ancona and Dubrovnik, where merchants encouraged a new route across the Balkans. When Venice responded by investing in the coastal city of Split, further to the north, this in fact reinforced the new land route, which acquired considerable importance throughout the period, especially as it could be used through all seasons, compared to sailing, which was still restricted to some nine months of the year.

In the seventeenth century, French traders, who had long been over­shadowed by Catalan competitors, emerged as serious and later dominant players in east-west commerce, partly thanks to French cooperation with the Ottomans from the late sixteenth century onwards. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they organised large convoys - known as caravanes - to Syrian ports, where they met land traders who brought goods from further east. Even Muslims, including both merchants and pilgrims, made use of French ships in order to escape Maltese pirates. In the eighteenth century, French shipowners had to face increasing competition from Greek orthodox ones, who established themselves as the principal carriers on the sea routes of the eastern Mediterranean, whether on their own or on Muslim-owned ships.¹⁶ But French merchants still dominated the north-south trade in the western Mediterranean, particularly between Marseilles, Algiers and Tunis.1⁷

Expanding horizons

Long-established as well as recently introduced routes, then, undermined the frontiers that were emerging inside the Mediterranean. From the fifteenth century onward, such routes started intersecting with, and extending into, new ones, which expanded the horizons of the sea far from its close geographical boundaries. Thanks to the silk roads, European and Arabic merchants had long traded with China and India; but in the sixteenth century, the global framework in which they acted expanded massively as they were joined by explorers, soldiers, missionaries and permanent settlers.

1 ⁶ Molly Greene, Catholic Corsairs and Greek Merchants: A Maritime History of the Mediterra­nean, 1450-1700 (Princeton University Press, 2010).

1 ⁷ Daniel Panzac, La caravane maritime: marins europeens et marchands ottomans en Medi­terranee, 1680-1830 (Paris: CNRS, 2004).

The traditional historical consensus is that the European expansion across the Atlantic and in the Indian Ocean turned the Mediterranean from the centre of the medieval economy into a periphery of economic empires.¹⁸ This Euro-centric perspective of one-way, westerly displacement is now giving way to one that highlights growing interconnections between all coasts of the sea and the rest of the world.

First, it was not just Christian European states that experienced an age of imperial expansion. In the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Ottomans also made gains that had profound effects on the Mediterra­nean's political and commercial relations with the outside world. To the south, they permanently secured the Red Sea and so eliminated the high taxes paid to the different emirs ruling its coastline; they established their control over the holy sites of Islam, and tried to assert themselves as protectors of Muslim pilgrims from three continents; and they seized large stretches of the Persian Gulf, which emerged as an alternative route in the spice trade, especially once the conquest of Baghdad in 1534 facilitated movement across Mesopotamia to Aleppo and Beirut. To the north, the Ottomans extended their influence over the Tatar Khanate and the Black Sea region. Meanwhile, they also asserted themselves as a global sea power, and from their new arsenal at Suez - provisioned with timber from Lebanon, sailcloth from Anatolia and gunners from Istanbul - they mustered a succession of daring campaigns in the Indian Ocean with expeditions as far as Sumatra. While fighting the Safavids in Persia, they also cultivated good relations with other Muslim powers in Gujarat and the Horn of Africa.¹⁹ Meanwhile, at the other end of Africa, the Saadian sultan of Morocco captured the Songhay Empire in Mali in 1590 to 1591, the first time that a Mediterranean power established a permanent stronghold south of the Sahara desert. Throughout the period, moreover, Muslim merchants trav­elled on the backs of camels from North to Central Africa in search of gold, ivory and slaves destined for Mediterranean trade.

Second, the oceanic expansion of the sixteenth century resulted not so much in provincialisation, but in new opportunities for political, economic and cultural transactions with distant regions on a totally unprecedented scale. As is well known, the exploration of the New World drew from the experience of Mediterranean sailors and captains. But a city like Genoa did

1 ⁸ Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System, 3 vols. (New York: Academic Press, 1974-80).

1 ⁹ Giancarlo Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration (Oxford University Press, 2010).

not just give birth to Columbus; it also financed Spain's Atlantic expeditions and participated in the profits. Regular advances of money from Genoa to Spain, earned in Mediterranean commerce, served in the wars of the Netherlands, and were repaid through an easterly flow of American silver from Spain through Italy to, eventually, the Levant.²⁰ In fact, it may be argued that the reason why the Ottoman Empire was interested in trading with Western Europe was because of America. Largely self-sufficient in terms of basic raw materials and foodstuffs, the empire had no substantial gold or silver mines, so it exported to European states in exchange for the bullion which the latter drew, directly or indirectly, from Mexico and Peru. It was partly through Istanbul that the impact of America's precious metals seriously expanded on a global scale, as Ottoman merchants used bullion to buy coffee, spices and silk from (respectively) Yemen, India and China.²¹ Some Mediterranean cities availed themselves of growing colonial connec­tions to act as intermediaries. Thus, in the period 1729 to 1788, Marseilles, a port that was central in intra-Mediterranean transport, saw its imports from the French Caribbean rise more than twelvefold.²²

Just as with the new frontiers emerging inside the Mediterranean, so the expansion of the sea's horizons outside resulted in some changes to traditional patterns of exchange. Some routes declined, but others emerged. Thus, the Mediterranean spice trade lost importance compared to the routes south of Africa - especially when the latter became dominated not by the Portuguese, but, later, by the Dutch. Sugar cane, first imported from India, was successfully refined in warm islands such as Sicily, Crete and Cyprus in the fifteenth century; at that time it was also planted in the Azores and brought to the Caribbean. By 1600, Brazil became Europe's largest source of sugar.²³ But other products gained ground too, such as coffee. Cultivated in Yemen and first brewed along the Red Sea, it became a product of widespread consumption throughout Ottoman coffeehouses in the sixteenth century and, later, a staple of European (and American) drinking habits: from the Arabian Peninsula through the Mediterranean, coffee conquered the world.^[330] In reverse, some crops were imported from America but successfully commercialised to become mass commodities from their Medi­terranean fields. Maize was cultivated in Egypt and is still known in Italy not under its Mesoamerican name, but as ‘granturco' or ‘Turkish grain'. For its part, tobacco, for a time known as ‘bortugal' in Arabia, was imported to Anatolia and extensively cultivated there and in Egypt to feed the market both at home and in the rest of the Mediterranean.^[331]

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Aurelio Musi, Mercanti genovesi net regno di Napoti (Naples: Edizioni scientifiche italiane, 1996).

Suraiya Faroqhi, The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004), pp. 137-60.

Pierre Goubert and Daniel Roche, Les Francais et FAncien Regime, 2 vols. (Paris: Colin, 1984), vol. i, p. 326.

Sidney Wilfred Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985).

The late sixteenth century also saw an intensification in the contacts between Northern Europe and the Mediterranean, as English and Dutch traders increasingly came to compete directly with local merchants for trade. For a long time, for example, Venice had prevented Greek islanders from selling their highly valued currants directly to English merchants, but by the early seventeenth century this proved impossible.^[332] Some historians have described this as a ‘northern invasion', but this characterisation requires revision. Dutch and English ships were more active in long-distance voyages than in the regional networks, which remained in the hands of locals. In the eastern Mediterranean, the northerners never really displaced Greek Ottoman merchants who, in fact, launched their own ‘eastern invasion' of the Atlantic.^[333] Also, increased competition was not necessarily a bad thing. Favouring the local monopoly of traffic in and out of harbours such as Venice and Genoa had pushed up the price of shipping. By the late sixteenth century, freight charges began diminishing: what was a net loss for well-established investors constituted an opportunity for the more numerous smaller traders.

Many merchants, moreover, began enlisting the services of the shipbuilding industry in Northern Europe in order to tackle the decrease in timber from Mediterranean forests depleted by centuries of exploitation. In this sense, connections between distant regions helped to overcome a regional deficiency. The same goes for the trade in basic foodstuffs, as Mediterranean Europe saw a drop in the productivity of wheat, and so began to import it from the north and the east of the continent, especially from the Baltic area where, one after the other, the main Italian states established consular representations in the seventeenth century. Here, increasing reli­ance on non-Mediterranean products originated not from the impoverish­ment, but rather from the enrichment, of Mediterranean countries. For example, the renewed growth of Istanbul following centuries of contraction under the last Byzantine emperors meant that the city absorbed much of the grain produced in the Black Sea.

Rather than the provincialisation of the Mediterranean, the centuries between 1400 and 1800 saw the diversification of its trade into a new global framework bringing distant cultures and economies into regular contact. The export of manufactured goods from the Old to the New World shaped consumer habits in the Americas just as the ability to turn exotic luxuries into products for mass consumption lay at the heart of a consumer revolution in the Mediterranean.

Crossroads centres

Where did roads actually cross? The geography of the Mediterranean, with its numerous islands and peninsulas, together with the simultaneous pres­ence of different political entities and cultural groups, created a particularly large number of places where the possibilities for economic and cultural exchange were especially thick, including regions, cities and, as we shall see, even smaller places.

On the edge of empires, large areas were defined as frontiers not so much by the presence of boundaries as by the long tradition of exchange between different religious, linguistic and ethnic groups on either side of those boundaries.^[334] The spirit of jihad or crusade incited empires to con­quest, but they showed markedly different attitudes to religious minorities in their midst. The Ottomans wished to protect Muslims - particularly pilgrims on alien roads - from the infidel, but they preferred to tolerate religious minorities (and occasionally majorities) in their own territories. They recog­nised and protected Orthodox and Armenian Christians, and Jews, in exchange for special taxes, and even granted official honours to their reli­gious leaders, notably the Greek Orthodox patriarch and the chief rabbi. By contrast, Christian states enacted increasing repression of minorities in this period, perhaps because, divided by rivalry and competition, each ruler had to reinforce the conformity of his subjects. Even relatively tolerant Christian cities such as Venice would have seemed hostile to non-Christian subjects of the sultan, in comparison with the freedom and coexistence back home. That Christians were prepared to live in the Muslim Mediterranean, while no openly Muslim group could be found in Western Europe, has to do with the difference in the treatment of minorities, not with the often-cited Islamic law that forbade Muslims to live in non-Muslim countries, a rule that had not prevented large Muslim communities from living under non-Muslim rule in Africa and Indonesia.

The Iberian kings, who had already allowed widespread violence against the Jews since the 1390s, forced them to convert or leave Iberia immediately after the capture of Granada in 1492. In the sixteenth century, a similar fate was reserved for Muslims even in regions that had long been ‘re-conquered' already, such as Valencia, where Muslims made up perhaps one-third of the population. Those who wished to retain their faith were expelled in 1502 from Castile and in 1525 from Aragon and Valencia. For some time, a degree of coexistence continued, as large communities of Moriscos went on living and working with little more than outward conformity to Christianity. But as enforcement stiffened, violence broke out, culminating in the Alpujarras rebellion of 1568 to 1571 followed by the traumatic deportation of some 300,000 Moriscos to North Africa forty years later.

And yet military conquests could not change culture overnight. Even in Valencia, the Spanish crown accepted the request of local Morisco leaders in 1528 that after conversion they would be free for two generations from any prosecution by the Inquisition: the authorities recognised that people could not shed all their customs at once.^[335]

If, in the long run, all forms of religious dissent were repressed in Spain, other regions went through different developments. Crete, Venice's largest overseas territory, was long a crucial station on the trade routes between east and west; as an agriculturally prosperous island, it exported wine to Europe and olive oil to the Ottoman Empire. The different communities living on the island - Latin and Greek Christians as well as Muslims - were united by a high degree of conversion and intermarriage, and the main religious conflict was not between Christians and Muslims, but between Catholics and Orthodox, as the former - in control under Venice - hindered the latter's clergy, disestablished their bishopric and allowed no ties with the patriarch in Constantinople. Unsurprisingly, after the Ottoman conquest in 1669, the religiously Latin (but linguistically Greek) Christian elite left for Venice, but the Orthodox population was happy to stay and benefit from the large Ottoman trading network. The conversion rate was so high that soon the Ottoman military presence on the island was assured by formerly Christian soldiers, and most merchants became Muslims.^[336]

In addition to old traditions of coexistence, the economy of trade brought familiarity with other cultures to entire regions. Long-distance routes passed through even landlocked regions, and in the process identified those valleys and passes as contact areas. Thus, in Bosnia - itself an area of mixed religion and culture populated by Orthodox, Catholics and Muslims, as well as Jews, Greeks, Vlachs, Roms and Armenians - the traders who moved between Istanbul, Split and Dubrovnik (and later Triest) became a regular presence that hugely benefited the local economy.^[337] Other areas thrived on supplying goods and labour to important ports, which then redeployed both in long­distance commerce, as Catalonia did for Barcelona and Liguria for Genoa. Entire stretches of coast could thrive on commerce, especially in the earlier part of the period, when most maritime travelling consisted of short trips in sight of land. As shown in contemporary portolan maps, a huge number of ports dotted coastlines on all sides. At each stop, merchants and sailors exchanged part of their merchandise and information for local products which they either consumed on board or sold elsewhere. As long-distance exchange functioned through networks of small-scale interactions, the global and the local were tied together at all sorts of levels, and even small centres could develop strong connections with the rest of the world.

Where roads crossed, cities grew, and in turn they fuelled trade because they could muster investments, technologies and far-flung connections. We have already seen that this was a period of increasing urbanisation, leading to the formation of veritable metropolises. Around 1600, Istanbul had some 300,000 inhabitants (some estimate even more) and Cairo was beginning to emerge as a significant rival with some 200,000; Naples had as many as 400,000. The late sixteenth century also saw the creation of free ports, such as Livorno in Italy and Izmir in Anatolia, followed in the eighteenth century by papal Ancona and Habsburg Fiume and, especially, Triest. They thrived on their ‘freedom', in the double sense that they attracted long-distant traders by granting customs reductions or exceptions, and because they allowed a degree of peaceful coexistence between different religious and ethnic communities. Livorno was home to the second largest Jewish community in the West after Amsterdam, at 10 per cent of the total population.^[338] Izmir saw increasing numbers of English, Dutch and, to a lesser extent, French, shipping, while the city also attracted Sephardic Jews from Spain who contributed to the diffusion in Anatolia of a form of Spanish known as Ladino, still spoken today in some communities of modern Turkey.^[339]

Some cities were special intermediaries on a number of levels. Thus, Dubrovnik, from 1472 a vassal of the sultan, benefited from this status to maintain rights of trade in the Black Sea; it enjoyed close relations to the north, with Venice, but traded in the west with Spanish Apulia and in the east with the Ottoman Balkans. It mediated not just in commodities, but also as a centre of information for the Spaniards and the popes about the Ottomans and, vice versa, about European powers in Istanbul. As neutral ground, it was also frequently chosen as a site for the exchange of prisoners.^[340]

On a smaller scale, specific neighbourhoods can be described as global villages where patterns of exchange combined with the daily experience of mutual knowledge. In the Istanbul neighbourhood of Galata, for example, across the Golden Horn from the sultan's Topkapi palace, Latin and Ortho­dox Christians, Armenians, Jews and Turks lived side by side in a microcosm that at once represented all the different communities of the Mediterranean as a whole and also made it possible to overcome its macro conflicts. The Venetian ghetto at once enclosed the Jews of Venice, but also made it possible for them to live in the city; not only were there daily encounters between Jews and Christians, but also between Jews of different origins: Levantines, Ponentines, Germans and Italians.

Single buildings provided shelter for the encounters between foreigners and between foreigners and locals. On the other side of Venice's Grand Canal from the Ghetto, Ottoman merchants, including Muslims, found accommo­dation and storage space at the ‘fondaco dei Turchi', whose rooms were formally assigned to two groups: ‘Asiatic and Constantinopolans', and ‘Bosnian and Albanians'. The word - which also applied to other hostelries, including the large German fondaco near Rialto - came from the Arabic, and was used in Middle Eastern cities too, where there were plentiful Venetian, Genoese, French and English funduqs.^[341]

Crossroads areas were not just fixed points in space. Thousands of ships were mobile meeting places between people of different social and ethnic origins, and between them and the inhabitants of the ports they visited. As well as the sailors, officers and merchants, they embarked chaplains (who also served as notaries), doctors, barbers, diplomats, pilgrims and other paying passengers. Large Venetian galleys were also required to carry small groups of noblemen with the explicit purpose of furthering their mercantile education; from 1559, they had to employ pauper children as cabin boys. A Venetian commander advocated making place on his galley for an Ortho­dox priest because the Catholic one could not take the confessions of the largely Greek crews. On most ships, even the lowliest mariners were to some extent active participants in trade, because each had a right to collect and carry, freight-free, a small amount of goods that increased over time from 10 to 20 ducats for each galley oarsman. Aboard the more capacious carracks, the value was even greater, as the crews of between fifty and seventy could carry variable amounts, from half a ton for the deck hands to one and a half for craftsmen such as carpenters.^[342] As ships entered a harbour, they were surrounded by swarms of small craft peddling a variety of foods and merchandise, while pilgrims describe galeotti going ashore and setting up booths to trade their wares at every stop.

Crossroads people

This brings us from the spaces to the human protagonists of encounters: the people for whom it was normal or necessary to travel along the routes we have seen so far, moving between different crossroads centres, or mediating between different groups in particular places. What was it like to live at the crossroads, in places where a large part of life was dominated by the coexistence between diverse languages, religions, ethnicities, dietary habits and dress?

Some acquired spectacular expertise in crossing boundaries, like Hasan Al-Wazzan, known in the west as Ioannes Leo Africanus (i486 to 1554).^[343] Born in Granada, in 1492 he took refuge with his family in Fez, was trained as a legal scholar and travelled as a diplomat to Songhay Mali and Mamluk Egypt (at the time of the Ottomans' conquest). Captured by Spanish pirates in 1518, he was given as a slave to Pope Leo X and baptised. He spent the next ten years in Rome writing, amongst other things, an Arabic grammar, possibly a bilingual translation of the Qur'an, and a description of Africa which was later translated into many European languages. He escaped probably during the sack of Rome and returned to Morocco. As an exile and later a captive, but also as a professional emissary and a man who spread great knowledge about distant lands, his life symbolises the capacity to adapt to events he could not control, by moving between different worlds.^[344]

Many others chose to spend much of their lives travelling, and systematic­ally turned the expertise gained into a source of recognition at home and abroad. Samuel Pallache (1550 to 1616),^[345] a Jewish merchant from Fez, worked for the sultan of Morocco as an agent in the Netherlands, informed the Spanish, the Dutch and the Moroccans about one another, and was an active privateer.^[346] Pietro della Valle (1586 to 1652) was a Roman scholar who acquired huge knowledge of Oriental cultures and languages. Having set out on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1614, he visited Egypt, Anatolia, Persia and India, and finally returned in 1626; his Syrian Nestorian wife also travelled with him for five years, although she died at Hormuz on the way back. Conversely, others sought abroad the status they were denied at home, as in the case of Mulay Alal Merin, Marinid pretender to the throne of Fez, who in 1570 fled Morocco and travelled in search of military support, was baptised and, as Don Gaspar Beninmarin, fought for the King of Spain, then settled down and married in Naples.^[347]

These individuals may have been special, but they were not isolated, as travel and mobility often involved entire kin-groups. Many Venetians had second lives and families in Istanbul, like Andrea Gritti, the merchant and diplomat who brokered peace with the Ottomans in 1502. As well as a son and two grand-daughters in Venice, he had four children with a Greek woman and lived with them for twenty years in his house in the district of Pera. In late life, he became doge of the republic; when Venice entered a war against the Ottomans, under his rule but against his judgment, one of his sons moved back to Istanbul - another one, Alvise, had stayed behind, risen as favourite of the grand visir and died while leading Ottoman troops in Transylvania.^[348] Men had more opportunities than women for travelling, but women, too, could cross borders. Kin strategies meant that women in the Ottoman world could move to Istanbul from the provinces, and then cultivate family networks back home from inside the sultan's or a pasha's harem. Conversely, border-crossing was a choice for other women wishing to escape overbearing families and husbands, as shown for example by Beatrice Michiel, who fled from Venice to Istanbul where she adopted the name Fatima Hatun, and by the three Muslim sisters of Milos who moved to Corfu and converted to Christianity to escape the neglectful husband of one of them. But in such cases, women had no way back, in contrast to men, who could shuttle back and forth.^[349]

If some travellers were extraordinary, travelling itself was beginning to turn into a habit. Pilgrimage had long been a relatively normal moment in life, for Christians and especially for Muslims. Both benefited from networks of institutions - hospitals, religious houses, caravanserais - which contributed to helping the faithful to cross the Mediterranean or to reach it from more distant parts of the world.^[350] Christian pilgrimages, long associated with the era of the crusades, continued under the Mamluks and then began to increase in the eighteenth century. Since the seventeenth century, rich Northern Europeans began considering it normal to spend part of their education on a ‘grand tour' of Mediterranean countries, including initially mostly Italy, but then looking further south, to Morocco and the Middle East.^[351] It was an elite occupation that then contributed to spreading distant knowledge, however slanted by the Orientalist stereotypes of the travellers, among wider social strata. We know more about Western travellers to the east than about eastern ones in the west, but this is not because, as was once thought, Muslims had no interest in the outside world. It is true that educated Ottomans tended to have greater familiarity with the world further east, the Arabic peninsula and North Africa - knowledge of Persian and Arabic was common in Istanbul's elite. But there are exceptions, such as the traveller and travel writer Evliya Qelebi (1611 to 1685).^46,47

Some of these apparently extraordinary individuals belonged to professional groups with regular and stable patterns of exchange, such as the merchants who occasionally settled overseas in new-style diasporas with their own representatives (the consuls), decision-making institutions (the nations) and (as we have seen already) collective stores or storage places. By definition, merchants thrived on the ability to move away from home and to make home in more than one place, like the English ‘pashas' of the Levant Company in Aleppo. Even when they did not personally move, merchants required knowledge and familiarity with distant agents in alien communities; cultivating far-flung connections, whether through family or contractual engagement, was a key to success in long-distance trade for the Christian and Jewish mercantile elite of eighteenth-century Anatolian harbours, who were honorary citizens of France and other European commercial powers, or for Anatolian Armenians and Livorno Jews, who both relied on networks of agents to trade as far as the Indian Ocean on one side and the Netherlands on the other.^{[352] [353] [354]} Without wishing to exaggerate the internal coherence of these groups, it is important to bear in mind the opportunities afforded by their connections and accumu­lated experience in combining local with global knowledge.

Lower down the economic scale, artisans too migrated, both short and long distances, leading to the diffusion of skills and technologies. Most famously, highly mobile German craftsmen spread printing from the Rhine­land throughout Europe, but some of their Ottoman and Venetian colleagues moved in the opposite direction to disseminate knowledge of glass and porcelain and of silk production. In Istanbul, artisans' guilds included foreigners from Iran and the West.^[355] Mercenaries constituted a special case of professional migration: Scottish and Irish Catholics in the service of Spain;

Bosnians deployed in Hungary and Eastern Anatolia; Christian privateers embarked on Barbary ships every time a peace treaty back home endangered their activities; Dutch and English Protestants who fought for Venice against the Habsburgs and provoked fears (and hopes) of religious schism inside Italy; and Albanians who served on both sides of the Ottoman-Venetian front. It is well known that the military revolution of the long sixteenth century was also the golden age of mercenaries, but more attention should be given to their role as cultural intermediaries.^[356]

As we have seen already, migration did not take place only in the name of pleasure or profit, but also resulted from captivity. Slave-raiders operated on both sides of the Mediterranean: Muslim Circassians were brought from the Black Sea to Italy, and Berbers from North Africa to Spain; Greek subjects of the Venetians and southern Italian subjects of the King of Spain were sold in the Ottoman Empire and North Africa. Slaves, both male and female, were objects of exploitation - mental, economic and physical.^[357] But some were fortunate enough to turn the experience into a spur for great achievements. Uruj Khaireddin Barbarossa, the pirate ‘king' of Algiers, was a Calabrian who had been captured and sold as a galley slave in his youth, a fate that had also befallen Jean de la Valette, the Grand Master of the Knights of Malta who oversaw the defence of the island against the Ottoman fleet. A special case of forced migration was the devsirme (literally ‘collection') of Christian boys levied from the Balkans, separated from their families, forcibly converted to Islam, and trained for the Ottomans' infantry or, for the most gifted, for the imperial service. Until the early seventeenth century, the great majority of the Ottoman ruling apparatus was selected in this way, although later the Turkish elites managed to obtain the best posts for themselves.

Behind mobile individuals and groups, entire communities lived perman­ently as minorities. Some were displaced by wars, as the Croatian Uskoks (literally ‘refugees'), who lived on piracy perpetrated against both Ottoman traders and Venetian ships, or the Greek Orthodox who resettled as peasants in southern Italy. Others were left behind by moving frontiers, as in the case of the Almogataces, a socio-professional class of Muslim informers, guides and auxiliaries who played especially important roles in helping the Spanish conquerors of Oran, particularly as intermediaries with the popula­tion in and outside the city.^[358] Similarly, in the fifteenth century, the Genoese established a colony at Tabarka, in Tunisia, which continued well into the eighteenth; only then did they move to the island of San Pietro in Sardinia, where they brought their Genoese language and mixed eating habits, includ­ing both pesto and couscous. Others migrated to escape hardship, particularly from mountains - Braudel's ‘reserves of labour' - to lowlands, first in small numbers and later followed by larger groups: in 1562, on his way to Constan­tinople (to promote French-Ottoman cooperation against the Genoese rule in Corsica), Sampiero Corso visited Algiers and there found a thriving community of Corsican immigrants (estimated at 6,000), while Bergamasco quarters could be found in many Italian cities throughout this period.^[359]

Conclusion

The different societies that lived in the Mediterranean crossroads were accus­tomed to a great many contacts and exchanges both with one another and, increasingly, with people further away. Coexistence did not preclude conflict, but even conflict could result in the diffusion of knowledge, as in the case of the Byzantine refugees who taught Italian humanists eager to learn Greek in the fifteenth century, or the SpanishJews who set up printing workshops that published books in Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish and Hebrew in the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth.^[360] The reception of new knowledge was rarely neutral. At one end of the spectrum was adaptation and even syncretism, as in the art and architecture of some centres, like the moresque pottery of Christian Spain, the oriental arches of Venetian buildings, and the increasingly realistic portraiture of Istanbul miniaturists. At the other end, the distant other inspired fear and condemnation, as witnessed in the negative representations of the Turks in Western iconography, historiography and civic ceremonials.^[361] They amounted to an obsession whose force was related to an imagined danger as much as to the real threat posed by the Ottomans, as it emerged in places that were far from the frontier, like Renaissance Ferrara.^[362]

In between conscious choices ranging from borrowing to rejection, the experience of encounter marked everyone's culture. Language, as is so often the case, bears powerful testimony of the effects of continuous interaction. The juxtaposition of different languages was a fact of everyday life in many crossroad centres. Venice was only one of many polyglot cities, where various Italian and European vernaculars could be heard alongside the Yiddish and Ladino of the Jews, Slavic languages, Turkish and Arabic. Even more remarkably, languages mixed following the contacts between popula­tions, from the Italian and Greek nautical vocabulary used by the Turks to Arabic words used by Italians and French to describe customs control. Meanwhile, in North Africa, corsairs and diplomats were equally familiar with lingua franca - Frankish, or free, tongue - a fluid mixture that was essential in everyday transactions.^[363] For most people, a degree of adaptation to this multifaceted linguistic landscape was a normal fact of everyday life, as for the CretanJew Abraham Balanzas. Descended from Spain and the son and father of rabbis, in 1626 he recorded his will, ending with the desire to end his life in Jerusalem, in favour of his daughter Parigoria (the Greek translation of the Spanish name Consolacion) before two Greek Orthodox witnesses. He declared that he knew only Hebrew writing and signed in Hebrew, but dictated the will in a Cretan Greek full of Italian words, all of which the Venetian notary wrote down in the Latin alphabet.^[364]

For most of the period we have considered, conflict was inescapable, but in the full knowledge that no one side could seriously or protractedly claim dominance over the others. In the eighteenth century, things began to change. International commerce experienced a new boom after the slump of the previous century, powered by renewed and unprecedented demographic growth, and fuelled by the increase in the output of agriculture and manu­factures. But the new economy was to a large extent dominated by Western traders. The Dutch, English and French wrested concessions from the Ottoman Empire that were increasingly damaging both to the Ottomans and to other competitors. This era also saw the emergence of increasingly aggressive states. The French navy supported French traders unleashing war against both Maltese and Barbary pirates. France obtained an agreement from the knights that they abstain from attacking French ships, but it allowed them to continue harassing merchants of other nations. Unsurprisingly, by the end of the period, many Venetian ships sailing west carried a French ‘convenience' flag to hoist when sailing near North Africa.^[365]

Thus, the decline of piracy did not open an era of peace. Instead, the Mediterranean became a battleground for European powers, especially France and Britain, who fought over it just as they did over North America and the Caribbean. In the 1680s, the French bombarded Algiers and Genoa and sailed close to Venice to give a similar message; in 1768, they purchased Corsica from Genoa and, in 1785, they obtained a monopoly of trade over the Suez isthmus. Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798 (which in the process ended the rule of the Knights of St John in Malta) was not just the dream of an ambitious general, but the culmination of French policy over more than a century. For its part, Britain became a serious contender for Mediterranean supremacy on gaining Gibraltar and Menorca from Spain in 1713; in the period before 1750, it stationed more soldiers in the Mediterranean than in North America, and soon it would capture Malta, too.^[366] Britain also pursued a systematic policy of expanding influence, for example by supplying - and controlling - the navy of the newly independent Kingdom of Naples (and Sicily), and by brokering deals with the Ottomans in North Africa.

New powers also entered the scene. Russia gained a foothold in the Balkans in 1699, and in 1768 to 1774 humiliated the Ottoman Empire in a war, with which it won not only free access to the Black Sea - thereby ending the Ottoman monopoly over its trade which, as we have seen, had been established at the time of Mehmed the Conqueror - but also the right to trade in the rest of the Mediterranean through the Bosphorus. The damages inflicted by Russia, in particular, together with the Russian claim of influence over Orthodox Chris­tians, facilitated the rise of quasi-autonomous provincial overlords in the Ottoman Empire and helped the rise of incipient national movements in its territories, from the Balkans to the Maghreb. In the following decades, one after the other, the North African beys obtained various degrees of autonomy from Istanbul, while the decline of shipyards and the construction of numerous fortresses reflected the new defensive outlook of the Ottomans. Here lay the foundations for a new age of Mediterranean relations, dominated by national independence movements and colonial expansion.

FURTHER READING

General introductions and discussions

Abulafia, David, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2011).

Braudel, Fernand, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (London: Harper Collins, 1992).

Horden, Peregrine and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford University Press, 2000).

MacLean, Gerald (ed.), Re-orienting the Renaissance: Cultural Exchanges with the East (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

Marino, John A., Early Modern History and the Social Sciences: Testing the Limits of Braudel's Mediterranean (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2002).

Said, Edward W., Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978).

Wallerstein, Immanuel, The Modern World System, 3 vols (New York: Academic Press, 1974-80).

War and peace

Earle, Peter, Corsairs of Malta and Barbary (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1970).

Goffman, Daniel, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2002).

Greene, Molly, Catholic Corsairs and Greek Merchants: A Maritime History of the Mediterra­nean, 1450-1700 (Princeton University Press, 2010).

Guilmartin, John Francis, Gunpowder and Galleys: Changing Technology and Mediterranean Warfare at Sea in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1974).

Hess, Andrew C., The Forgotten Frontier: A History of the Sixteenth-Century Ibero-African Frontier (Chicago University Press, 1978).

Isom-Verhaaren, Christine, Allies with the Infidel: The Ottoman and French Alliance in the Sixteenth Century (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011).

Panzac, Daniel, La marine ottomane: de Vapogee a la chute de l'Empire, 1572-1923 (Paris: CNRS, 2009).

Schwoebel, Robert, The Shadow of the Crescent: The Renaissance Image of the Turk, 1453-1517 (Nieuwkoop: B. de Graaf, 1967).

Tenenti, Alberto, Piracy and the Decline of Venice (London: Longmans, 1967).

Trade and trade routes

Ashtor, Eliyahu, Levant Trade in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 1983). Casale, Giancarlo, The Ottoman Age of Exploration (Oxford University Press, 2010).

Chaudhury, Sushil and Michel Morineau (eds), Merchants, Companies and Trade: Europe and Asia in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge University Press, 1999).

Faroqhi, Suraiya, The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004). Fleet, Kate, European and Islamic Trade in the Early Ottoman State: The Merchants of Genoa and Turkey (Cambridge University Press, 1999).

Pujades, Ramon, Les cartes portolanes: la representacio medieval d'una mar solcada (Barcelona: Institut d'Estudis Catalans, 2007).

Tabak, Faruk, The Waning of the Mediterranean 1550-1870: A Geohistorical Approach (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).

TriveUato, Francesca, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).

Crossroads centres, crossroads people

Ben-Zaken, Avner, Cross-Cultural Scientific Exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1560-1660 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).

Burnett, Charles and Anna Contadini (eds), Islam and the Italian Renaissance (London: Warburg Institute, 1999).

Davis, Natalie Zemon, Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim between Worlds (London: Faber, 2007).

Davis, Robert C., Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003).

Dursteler, Eric R., Renegade Women: Gender, Identity, and Boundaries in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).

Venetians in Constantinople: Nation, Identity, and Coexistence in the Early Modern Mediterra­nean (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

Earle, T. F. and K. J. P. Lowe (eds), Black Africans in Renaissance Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2005).

Eldem, Edhem, Daniel Gofiman and Bruce Alan Masters, The Ottoman City between East and West: Aleppo, Izmir, and Istanbul (Cambridge University Press, 1999).

Faroqhi, Suraiya, Pilgrims and Sultans: The Hajj under the Ottomans 1517-1683 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1994).

Goffman, Daniel, Izmir and the Levantine World 1550-1650 (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1990).

Husain, Adnan Ahmed and K. E. Fleming (eds), A Faithful Sea: The Religious Cultures of the Mediterranean, 1200-1700 (Oxford: Oneworld, 2007).

Levy, Avigdor, The Sephardim in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1992).

Krekic, Barisa, Dubrovnik: A Mediterranean Urban Society, 1300-1600 (Aldershot: Ashgate Variorum, 1997).

Maczak, Antoni, Travel in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Polity, 1995).

Prior, Michael and William Taylor (eds), Christians in the Holy Land (London: World of Islam Festival Trust, 1994).

Sahlins, Peter, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989).