A Companion to Mediterranean History, First Edition. Edited by Peregrine Horden and Sharon Kinoshita.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
chapter six
Fernand Braudel (1972–3) reminds us that changes in the Mediterranean world can
have their origin in events which take place far from the shores of the inland sea. Such
an event took place in 1258, when the Mongol leader Hülegü sacked Baghdad, the
fabled capital of the Abbasids. The city’s fall to the invaders, conventionally seen as
the end of the classical period in Islamic history, was part of Hülegü’s very wide-
ranging western conquests. Although the Mongols themselves would prove to have
limited staying power, their western campaigns left a very lasting imprint indeed. The
fall of Baghdad, which had been the cultural and political center of Islam for five cen-
turies, and the flight of Muslim populations to the west, fleeing the Mongols as best
they could, had the effect of raising the stature of the western Islamic world in a way
that had not been seen since the Umayyads ruled in Damascus. Along with ordinary
subjects, Muslim theologians, poets and mystics flocked to the Mamluk court in
Egypt and to the various Turkish beyliks in Anatolia.
The Ottomans emerged from this chaotic thirteenth-century milieu. They
entered the historical record around 1300, at which point they were just one of
many small, competing principalities. Over the next century-and-a-half they dis-
pensed with their Turkish rivals, entered and conquered the Balkans and, most
dramatically, put an end to the 1000-year Byzantine Empire when they took
Constantinople in May of 1453. In the following century they became masters of
the Arab heartland; Syria and Egypt were added to the Ottoman domains in 1516,
and 1517, respectively. Thus by the beginning of the early modern period the era
of political fragmentation was over and there was, once again, a great Islamic
empire. But this empire was a long way from Mesopotamia and the Tigris River.
It was, instead, a Mediterranean empire, with its capital at the north-eastern
corner of the sea and possession of the entire Mediterranean littoral except for the
north-west coast.
More than once in the medieval period the Arabs had tried to take the storied
capital of the Byzantine Empire; each attempt had failed. It would be the Turks in the
end who realized this enduring Muslim dream. But was it all for naught? By which I
The Early Modern Mediterranean
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