148 david abulafiainstance, he reflects on the survival of a lost Latin-based language in North Africa
until the central Middle Ages (1972–3: 774). The Algiers historians saw Islam as
an interruption in the history of the Mediterranean, whose identity was
fundamentally Latin (Paris, 1999).
It was not just the French who posed as new Romans. Competition between
the new kingdom of Italy and France for control of Tunisia whetted the appetite
of the Italians for an imperial role in the Mediterranean, and the revival of a
notion of the Mediterranean as mare nostrum. This was already visible from 1912
onwards with the Italian occupation of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, as well as the
acquisition of the Dodecanese islands from the Ottomans; though Mussolini, like
the French, became distracted by dreams of empire in inner Africa, his occupation
of Albania and his ambition to incorporate Dalmatia, Corsica and Malta all
confirmed that he dreamed of making Italy great upon the seas. Whether he
understood the importance of naval power is, however, a moot point. In the
1920s and 1930s there was a recognition that air power was the way forward, and
that navies were increasingly vulnerable to submarine attacks. But relying on such
“progressive” thinking, he simply could not exclude Great Britain from the
Mediterranean.
The period after the Second World War saw the disengagement of the colonial
powers from their Mediterranean possessions. Italy was deprived of Libya; Israel
was created within much of the British Mandate of Palestine; France eventually
accepted that it was impossible to maintain power in Algeria, despite the fiction
that the coastline was an integral part of the French Republic. Apart from a few
Spanish possessions in Morocco, held for many centuries, and apart from Gibraltar
and the extensive British sovereign bases in troubled Cyprus, the colonial powers
have now evacuated the Mediterranean. This provided an opportunity for the
Soviet Union and even China to try to establish influence there, notably in Egypt,
Libya, Algeria and Albania, where radical socialist regimes were susceptible to
financial inducements from Moscow (or, in the case of Albania, Beijing); even
independent Malta gravitated away from a British alliance towards the socialist
countries. Meanwhile the countries on the northern shores of the Mediterranean
saw their destiny to lie not in the sea they share but in the European Common
Market that evolved into the European Union. These processes have resulted in a
fractured Mediterranean; colonialism had tied north and south together, even if
unhappily, but in the post-war order north and south have been sundered from
one another, sometimes with violent repercussions—the Suez Crisis of 1956 is
one example, the mischief wreaked by Colonel Gaddafi from his Libyan base is
another. Mediterranean thalassocracy belongs to the past.
These examples show not just how varied the character of Mediterranean thalas-
socracies has been. Access to resources, particularly the foodstuffs of islands such as
Sardinia, Sicily and Crete, has been a constant factor in attempts to secure mastery
over the islands. Thalassocracies greatly facilitated trade, as we see in the Catalan case;
and there are certainly cases of networks founded primarily upon trade. A good exam-
ple of that is Genoa, which acquired rather few large territories, the most notable
being Chios, and even Chios was actually ruled by a confederation of commercial
families known as the Giustiniani. This raises the question of what sort of infrastructure
was necessary to maintain a thalassocracy.0002063951.INDD 148 2/17/2014 11:36:30 AM