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the difficulties of sailing out of the Mediterranean, well-established maritime trade
routes linked the city of Rome (through its ports at Ostia) to Barcelona, its great
colony of Gades (Cádiz) in Atlantic Spain, and to England. The well-regulated and
frequent traffic through the Straits of Gibraltar was disrupted after the waning of
Roman power in the West and the establishment of Germanic kingdoms on the
Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts of Iberia, as well as in France and England.
By 711, the Mediterranean had become a Muslim lake (see also Valérian, this
volume). From their Mediterranean bases in North Africa, Iberia, southern France,
and Sicily, the Muslims had a stranglehold on the western Mediterranean. Even
though Islamic powers in North Africa did not promote extensive explorations into
the Atlantic, nonetheless, the Muslim ports on what is today Atlantic Morocco (Sale,
Mogador, and Tangier, the latter just at the western side of the Straits of Gibraltar)
allowed for a permanent contact between the two seas. In the ninth and tenth centu-
ries, the Vikings raided the Atlantic coast of Iberia. In 844, they sailed up the
Guadalquivir River, sacked Seville, and held it against Muslim counter-attacks for
more than a month. By the ninth century, they entered the Mediterranean in their
bold two-pronged move (through the Russian fluvial networks and through land and
sea routes into the Mediterranean) to reach Byzantium. They raided the Muslim coast
of North Africa and threatened Corsica and Sardinia. In the eleventh century,
Normans (from Normandy), established their rule in Sicily. Trade existed between
Scandinavia and the Muslim western Mediterranean, attesting to the double character
of Viking expansion: traders and raiders. But the Vikings often came to stay. It was
mostly a one-way traffic, bringing northern people and Atlantic cultures into the
Mediterranean world. Getting out was more difficult after the collapse of Rome, and
not fully under way until the late Middle Ages.
The Mediterranean and the Atlantic in the late
middle ages and the early modern periodThe eventual demise of the western Mediterranean and the rise of the Atlantic in world
history was a long-term development, coming to a high point only in the sixteenth
century. The reasons for this shift from one sea to the other were not just the outcome
of voyages of exploration and settlement in the New World from 1492 onwards or of
the Portuguese exploration of the coast of Africa and their epic voyage to India in the
fifteenth century. Many other factors came into the equation. And it was the sum total
of these factors that meant the death knell for the centrality of the western Mediterranean
in western European history. Below, I try to examine some of these factors in a succinct
fashion. Please note that although these different explanations for the eventual demise
of the western Mediterranean are examined individually, they constituted an overlapping
pattern of historical developments (see also Greene, this volume).
The impact of war and trade before ColumbusIn 1212, a large international Christian army defeated the Almohads at the battle of
Las Navas de Tolosa. The crushing defeat of the Almohads (a North-African Berber
dynasty that had invaded southern Spain in the twelfth century and pushed back
Castilian and Arago–Catalan advances on the frontier) was swiftly followed by