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.
chapter two
To the second, more luxurious, edition of his great work, the father of Mediterranean
history, Fernand Braudel, added a curious map of areas where olive and palm trees
will grow (1972–3: 232). The map falls in a segment of Braudel’s The Mediterranean
that probes “the role of the environment” in the sea’s past, and in a chapter that
evaluates the unity of Braudel’s subject. Ultimately, Braudel found the Mediterranean
in the presence of olive and absence of palm groves though, ironically, two species of
palm are native to the Mediterranean basin. The idea that the Mediterranean is
characterized by distinctive vegetation that elicits specific human adaptations
(Braudel’s “ways of life:” 232) is older than Braudel, of course. But he gave this topic
historical respectability, so that more recent efforts to summarize Mediterranean
history also include maps like Braudel’s. Map 1 in Horden and Purcell’s The
Corrupting Sea traces in the northern limit of olive growing, the southern limit of
“Mediterranean vegetation,” and rainfall patterns in a synoptic vision of what consti-
tutes the geo-cultural region.
Elsewhere in his masterpiece Braudel repeated a remark his mentor Lucien Febvre
made in a book review to the effect that Herodotus would have been bewildered to
repeat his circuit of the Inner Sea in the mid–1900s, 2300 years after writing his
inquiry (Braudel, 1972–3: 762). For the time-travelling Carian would not have rec-
ognized much of the flora deemed typically Mediterranean in the twentieth century:
orange and peach trees, planes, cypress and carob, cactus and cotton, as well as maize,
tomato, bean, and pepper plants all reached the Mediterranean long after Herodotus
died in 425 bce. Braudel considered the region’s receptivity to new plants the sign of
a “true” civilization, just as was resistance to unsuitable transplants (he mentioned
Arabic numerals and Protestantism: 1972–3: 763–773). Thus the dynamism of
Mediterranean vegetation, as well as its static, iconic quality, was written into the work
that shaped, and shapes, Mediterranean history. Both the more and the less human-
influenced (“natural”) vegetation of the area is capable of feats of impassive endurance
and of gymnastic agility.
The vegetative Mediterranean
Paolo Squatriti