hybridity 357
islands of the sea as a unit, a historical reason for having something in common that
transcended all the varieties of peoples across the sea. In other words the idea of Rome
argued that whatever pure types or hybrids existed, as people they once had some-
thing in common as subjects of a universal ruler in Rome. After the empire became
officially Christian in a series of steps in the late fourth century, for an even briefer
moment, lasting only to the arrival of Islam on the Mediterranean shores in the early
seventh century, all Mediterranean peoples (except the barely tolerated Jews, despised
pagans, and whomever could be labeled as heretics) had the Christian faith in com-
mon. For the last 1300 years the region has been contested ground between the shift-
ing strengths of Islamic and Christian powers, with the Jews for nearly all that period
in charge of nothing. Yet the memories of homogeneity and the vibrant claims of
purity endured. In such an atmosphere, hybrid people would find their bodies and
allegiances subject to harsh scrutiny.
Despite the strong and enduring claims of Jerusalem and Constantinople to have
defined Mediterranean Christianity, the fusion of the political dream of Rome, the
stories about the martyrdoms of Peter and Paul, and the history of the papacy, created
that enduring hybrid, Roman Christianity or Catholicism. The faith properly claims a
pure, apostolic state deprecating any notions that it represents some sort of syncretism
or compromise between pagan and early Christian practices. Despite periods of inqui-
sitions and holy warfare, the universalism of this church has been distinctly Roman in
its claim of respect for the customs of the earliest days, one language of faith—Latin,
up to living memory—and a deep respect for law and precedent. Around the year
400, this faith could lay claim to being universal on every part of the Mediterranean’s
shores. At the beginning of the twenty-first century this is far from the case. Yet if the
Mediterranean were ever a single unit of any kind again, perhaps only the city of
Rome could lay claim to be the place where some other allegiance than ethnic or racial
loyalty might prevail. The Union for the Mediterranean (the most recent universalist
dream) established its secretariat at Barcelona in 2008, doubtless for complex reasons,
in part resulting from the enduring meaning of Rome. Since its pre-Roman days,
Barcelona has been a frontier city with a heterogeneous population, now existing in
an uneasy, hybrid relationship with Catalonia, itself awkwardly part of the Kingdom
of Spain, then the European Union, and now the Union for the Mediterranean. Any
Barcelonan might claim some of these identities; all of them would please only a few,
and there are many other identities across ethnic, linguistic, creedal, and gender lines.
Hybridity is only a first step to finding the proper context for each person and culture.
ReferencesAbulafia, D. (2011) The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean, London: Penguin.
Assmann, J. (1997) Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism, Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Boase, R. (1996–1997) Autobiography of a Muslim convert: Anselm Turmeda (c. 1353–c. 1430).
Al-Masāq, 9: 45–98.
Braudel, F. (1972–3) The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II,
London: Collins.
Davis, N. Z. (2006) Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim between Worlds, New York:
Hill and Wang.