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 twenty-six
Christopher Columbus’ voyage across the Ocean Sea (the Atlantic) and his unexpected
encounter with a New World in 1492—he was engaged in the ill-conceived idea that
he could easily reach the Indies by sailing westward—has long been considered one of
the chronological watersheds in western European and world history. A traditional
historiography has focused on 1492, together with the fall of Constantinople in 1453
and the invention of printing in the West in the 1460s, as historical turning points,
dividing the Middle Ages from the early modern period. Not unlike Henri Pirenne’s
famous thesis on the shift from the Mediterranean world to Frankish northern Europe
as the new center of western European civilization, Columbus’ momentous voyage has
also been seen as signaling the demise of the Mediterranean and the rise of the Atlantic
in world history. Nothing, of course, could be farther from the truth (Phillips and
Phillips, 1992: 3–36; Pirenne, 1960).
Commercial exchanges and the movement of people between the Atlantic and
the Mediterranean, a movement that flowed in both directions, have had a long
history, predating Columbus by more than a millennium. The encounter between
the Old World and the New in 1492 and in the decades following Columbus’ land-
ing in the Caribbean—in Mexico in the 1520s and Peru in the 1530s—did not lead
directly to the collapse of the Mediterranean as one of the foci of western history;
nor was the opening of Atlantic trade or the establishment of far-flung Portuguese
and Spanish imperial ventures beyond the Ocean Sea the sole cause for the geopo-
litical reshaping of the western world. In the pages that follow, I seek to illustrate
briefly the nature of Mediterranean–Atlantic contacts and to explore the changing
relationships between these two intertwined worlds. Though I briefly sketch a
prelude to this flow from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic and an epilogue to these
relations, my emphasis here is on the late medieval and very early modern period
when voyages of exploration increased, and slow but inexorable changes in the
western parts of the Middle Sea led to the waning of Mediterranean societies and
the rise of Atlantic ones.
The Mediterranean and the Atlantic
teoFilo F. ruiz