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mean that, in the conventional historical narrative, the momentary blip that is Mehmet
the Conqueror’s victory in 1453 is quickly overshadowed by 1492 and European
maritime ventures across the globe more generally. After all, no less a person than
Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations that “The discovery of America and that
of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest and
most important events recorded in the history of mankind” (Smith, 1937: 590). And
their significance is even further magnified, if that is possible, for our purposes since it
was precisely to bypass the Mediterranean that these voyages were undertaken. As
Dominique Valérian points out elsewhere in this volume, an essential distinction
between the medieval and early modern Mediterranean is that the latter lost its central
place in the world economy.
The “Smithian” narrative does indeed leave the Mediterranean, and thus the
Ottomans, in the dust. It also leaves unexplored several vital questions that form
around the particular circumstances of the early modern period. Some of them, more-
over, can illuminate perennial themes in Mediterranean history and thus help us see
what is distinctive (or not) about the early modern period. As this essay is organized
around answering these questions, let me lay out here what they are.
Early in the sixteenth century the Ottomans conquered Egypt and Syria and thus,
for the first time since the seventh century, the northern and southern shores of the
eastern Mediterranean were once again ruled from Istanbul. Although the unity or
disunity of the Mediterranean is a perennial question for scholars of the inland sea, the
significance of this particular unification is rarely posed.
The Ottomans also eliminated one of the most enduring features of the
Mediterranean landscape, the Byzantine Empire. For nearly a millennium the sea had
been divided into three cultural and political blocks but now, in the fifteenth century,
it became a bipolar world.
Finally, Ottoman successes not only brought three-quarters of the Mediterranean
coastline under Istanbul’s control; they also brought a powerful Islamic Empire
within reach of European shores, most dramatically in North Africa where the new
province of Algiers was little more than 300 miles away from Barcelona.
The magnitude of the Ottoman advance in the Mediterranean generates our first
question, which is the fate of that equilibrium which, Valérian argues, came to char-
acterize the sea in the medieval period. Byzantines, Latins and Muslims learned how
to share the sea. From the eleventh century on, shipping and navigation were domi-
nated by Europeans but even so, no one power ever enjoyed complete hegemony.
Surely Ottoman victories from Rhodes to Alexandria and Algiers must have upset that
equilibrium and turned the tide in favor of Islam? And if they did not, then why not?
The second question concerns the place of the Mediterranean in the world econ-
omy after 1492. There is no doubt that, in the long run, it was marginalized but the
question of chronology still needs to be resolved. In addition, what did marginaliza-
tion look like and what were the consequences for the inhabitants of this early modern
world?
Finally, at the far end of the early modern period, that is, in the eighteenth
century, the question of equilibrium re-emerges but in a different way. Historians
of colonialism across the globe have been debating at what point European trad-
ers turned into European imperialists. We shall take up that question for the
Mediterranean.