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.
In July 2009 the bishop of the Sicilian town of Mazara del Vallo celebrated mass in an
unusual way.^1 He set up his altar on the deck of an Italian coastguard ship. The ship,
with a fishing boat tied alongside it, was anchored off the Italian island of Pantelleria,
almost equidistant between the bishop’s cathedral church on Sicily and the Tunisian
coast. The maritime setting of the mass was explicitly “the Mediterranean, this great
Lake of Tiberias.” The floor of the enlarged virtual church was the seabed, its ceiling
the sky. The bishop cast the Mediterranean Sea as a macrocosm of the Sea of Galilee, the
coastguard ship as St Peter’s boat, the fishermen-communicants as the disciples. The
Italian state and the European Union might be said to have taken on the role of
the Pharisees. In his voice, his prayer and his “affection,” the bishop even identified
himself with Christ “walking on the waters of this sea.” During the mass, the bishop
reminded the fishermen of Christ’s injunction to Simon and Andrew: “Follow me and
I will make you fishers of men” (Matthew 4.19). Those to be fished—physically as
well as spiritually—were clandestine migrant souls, in danger of drowning as they
made the crossing from southern (African) to northern (European) Mediterranean at
the point of their greatest proximity.
This strange ceremony needs to be set in a variety of overlapping contexts. First,
the political. A little earlier in the same year, in May, Italy and Libya had signed a
“Friendship Pact” by which migrant boats halted at sea could be brought to Libyan
rather than Italian ports. Second, the demographic and the humanitarian. This mari-
time area was a death trap. It would, within two years of the mass, in March 2011, be
marked by the outright failure of Italian, Spanish and other European Union fleets to
respond to repeated pleas for help, and to save from death by exposure or drowning,
all but some nine out of 72 in a boatload of men, women and children. They were
trying to cross from Tripoli to the Italian island of Lampedusa, migrants’ usual
European destination.^2 In March 2013 Pope Francis arrived on the same island (with
presumably unintended irony, by coastguard ship) in order to say mass, in a conven-
tional way, for such migrants. Third, the economic. The bishop’s seat, Mazara del
Vallo, is famed throughout Italy for its seafood delicacies brought in by a large fleet of
Introduction
Peregrine Horden