2 peregrine horden
motorized trawlers. Half of the crews of these trawlers are made up of Tunisian labor
migrants, many of whom will have started their migratory careers clandestinely. Final
context: the broadly ideological. The wider framework for this is the “Union for the
Mediterranean” of 2008, a continuation of the Barcelona Process of 1995 (original
co-presidents Nicolas Sarkozy and Hosni Mubarak)—“working for the creation of an
area of peace, stability, security and shared economic prosperity.”^3 Italy—like other
nearby countries such as Libya under Gadhafi and like Israel—has been (re)discover-
ing its Mediterranean-ness.^4 Through cultural projects in its own south, individual
pacts with North African countries, and a proliferation of study centers that re- examine
its history, Italy has been rebranding itself as a Mediterranean state.
There seems to be no limit to the ways in which the Mediterranean region may be
reimagined, as a sea, as an area involving physical movements, maritime spaces, terri-
torial arrangements, and political processes that seek to transcend national boundaries
and enmities (even as they often also reinforce them) and, in the case of our Sicilian
bishop, to sidestep ecclesiastical jurisdictions also.^5 Mediterranean themes infiltrate
the politics, economics and social and religious developments of the early twenty-first
century to an extent that bewilders in its protean variety. The sea and its hinterlands
are everywhere, it often seems, and in cultural as well as political and economic
spheres. Think of the so-called Mediterranean diet (a fantasy of post-modern capital-
ism as Michael Herzfeld, evidently no fan of Elizabeth David, notes in his chapter
below), or the equally suspect Mediterranean architecture (best designed in Florida
according to one report: Ben-Yehoyada 2013: 80) and “Mediterranean noir”
crime fiction (Kinoshita, this volume). And on, and on.
History, whether recovered or imagined, is at the heart of all this. To revert for a
moment to Sicily and the papacy: when in May 1993 John Paul II visited Mazara,
before going on to Agrigento to preach against the mafia, he offered a history lesson
in his homily. He looked back to the Norman conquest of the area in 1072 and the
establishment of a diocese, and he depicted the city as “a crossroads between the Euro-
Christian civilization and the Arab-Muslim one,”^6 continuously living “the challenge
of tolerance and dialogue.” Had it suited his purpose, the pontiff could have added
that the River Mazaro which debouches in Mazara’s old port once marked the fron-
tier between ancient Greek and Carthaginian settlement, and that the suffix “del
Valo” in its name comes from the Arabic term for administrative district, wilaya, and
thus recalls Sicily’s pre-Norman Islamic phase. The political maneuvering of Italy and
Libya over illegal migrants is only the latest in a very long and complex series of
demographic and political shifts and confrontations. The bishop’s altar on the sea of
God is but one striking modern instance of a millennia-long sacralization of various
aspects of Mediterranean space (Horden and Purcell, 2000: 403–460). As the
“Mediterranean novelist” Lawrence Durrell wrote, more appreciatively of course than
most would venture nowadays, “the Mediterranean is an absurdly small sea; the length
and greatness of its history makes us dream it larger than it is” (Balthazar, 1958).
Conceptualizing, studying and writing that lengthy history within an explicitly
Mediterranean framework is a surprisingly young vocation. Long-distance voyaging,
which slowly began to knit the whole sea together, may date back as far as 130 000
years ago (Strasser et al., 2010, but compare Broodbank, below). And the notion of
a Great Sea is widely evident in the Semitic languages of the Levant by the early first
millennium bce. But the Mediterranean as a region and not only a stretch of water, a