the mediterranean and the atlantic 417
supplying France would often have been done through the roads that led along the
Rhône River valley from the Mediterranean to Flanders or to the ancient fairs at
Champagne, England and Gascony had to be reached by sea. Shifting alliances during
the war—Castile, for example, supported England from the 1340s to the 1360s,
then shifted its support to France in 1365 with the advent of a new dynasty—and
increased confrontation along the sea routes from the Straits into the English Channel
affected the volume and frequency of exchanges between the two seas. But war and
trade were not the only agents for the shift to the Atlantic. Other factors came to the
forefront towards the end of the Middle Ages, leading to a veritable revolution in the
relationship between the two seas.
Religion, conflict, and new technologies of seafaring and cartographyAlthough not all the new techniques of chart making, naval know-how, and seafaring
technology originated in the Mediterranean world, a good number of these new ways
of navigating the oceans did so (see also Savage-Smith, Gertwagen, this volume). As
these new technologies were exported to the Atlantic and improved and altered, they
also contributed to the slow demise of the Mediterranean. In addition, by the begin-
ning of the fifteenth century, the rivalry between Christendom and Islam took a sharp
turn. Ottoman successes in the eastern Mediterranean reanimated the search for the
mythical kingdom of Prester John as an ally in the struggle against Islam. As will be
seen below, Ottoman victories also had important economic consequences. Italian
merchants, mostly Venetians, were now challenged in their sole access to goods com-
ing into the eastern Mediterranean from Asia. The trade did not stop, but the price
for spices and luxury goods rose steeply under Ottoman control of the region. It
would take many decades for the Venetians to be fully dislodged from their trading
stations and colonies in Crete, Cyprus, and elsewhere, but dislodged they would be.
In this sense, the Portuguese capture of Ceuta in 1415 marked the opening of one
front in the West as a response to the increased Ottoman control of the eastern seas.
Geography and seafaringCardinal Pierre d’Ailly’s publication of his treatise, Imago Mundi (Image of the World),
in 1410 provided a wealth of new geographical information, collecting Greek, Latin,
and Arabic lore about the shape of the world. A highly-influential book, Imago Mundi
presented a description of the world that transcended the narrow confines of the
Mediterranean Sea. The problem, of course, now that one had that knowledge, was
how to sail into an open ocean and locate one’s position at sea accurately with no sight
of land. In the Mediterranean, most sailing was and remained coastal sailing. It was
quite easy to determine one’s location by observing land features along the coast.
Catalan and Italian hydrographers (makers of sea charts) had begun to map out the
coast of the European Mediterranean. The Portuguese would do the same for most
of the coast of western Africa. New astronomical knowledge and the use of compasses
allowed sailors and merchant captains to determine their latitude in the open sea.
The North Star (or Pole Star) also helped sailors, when no immediate land masses
were in sight, to determine where they were in terms of latitude. While the use of the
North Star, compasses, and new ship technology (see below) greatly facilitated sailing