412 teofilo f. ruiz
Introduction: preludesToward the conclusion of Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, one of the
quintessential novels about the Mediterranean, Dumas describes the sea as a “huge
lake that extends from Gibraltar to the Dardanelles and from Tunis to Venice”
(Dumas, 2003: 1230). Although the Mediterranean is certainly not a lake, Dumas’
words convey the author’s sense of, and his characters’ intimacy with, the Middle Sea.
They also expressed how the Mediterranean linked together all the lands bounding
the sea on the four points of the compass. That sense of the distinctiveness of the
Mediterranean, clearly present in Dumas’ novel, has also been one of the many issues
animating long and vigorous historiographical debates about the Mediterranean
since the publication of the first edition of Fernand Braudel’s paradigmatic The
Mediterranean in 1949 (Braudel, 1972–3; Harris, 2005).
Of these many questions or problems, I would like to focus on one issue: what was
the historical reason for the demise of the Mediterranean as the center of European
economic, cultural, and political life, and the rise of the Atlantic world in the late
Middle Ages and early modern period? Although there were several factors leading to
this shift, the process began in earnest with the Portuguese and Castilian sea voyages
into the Atlantic from the fourteenth century onwards. It was soon followed by the
European exploration of, and settlements in, Africa, Asia, and the New World during
the next two centuries. There were of course many earlier precedents. The connections
between the two seas are as old as mankind itself. Yet, even if from the eighteenth
century onwards, a neglected Mediterranean was reinserted into a growing world
economy, as new seafaring technologies allowed for easier sailing in and out of the
Middle Sea, these increased links between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic did not
mark a return to a hegemonic role for the former. In the late Middle Ages and early
modern Europe, the fate of the Middle Sea was fixed into peculiar historical paths.
The Mediterranean and the AtlanticIf Dumas imagined the Mediterranean as a lake, his vision was based upon very real
geographical factors. Nowadays, the Straits of Gibraltar do not offer the obstacles to
navigation that they did until the nineteenth century. Huge cruise and cargo ships,
propelled by powerful engines, sail in and out of the Mediterranean without great
difficulty. Corsairs do not wait on either the European or North African coast to
pounce on vessels slowly laboring from the Mediterranean into the Atlantic. Travelers
sailing into the Mediterranean barely notice the transition between one body of water
and the next. For earlier voyagers it was not so simple.
Sailing out of the Mediterranean into the Atlantic has never been easy. An upper
current flowing from the Atlantic inwards (on top of another current which, running
below, flows outwardly) often made the transit from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic
an ordeal. As late as the nineteenth century ships waited for favorable winds in
Algeciras for weeks and months (Lewis, 1976). Storms were also quite common in the
area of the Straits, as the protests against the sea accumulated at the Archive of the
Crown of Aragon for the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries dramatically
show (Archivo de la Corona de Aragon. Consulado de Comercio: Protestas contra el
mar, IRPM, 1766–1868). In addition, in the Middle Ages and as late as the nineteenth