the mediterranean and the atlantic 421
The Mediterranean that Braudel envisions in his great book extended into the
Baltic, the North Sea, and the Atlantic. The reality was not as promising. Although
religious conflicts did not bring trade and cultural exchanges to a standstill, the wars
of religion made relations between the Catholic Mediterranean and the Protestant
North less vibrant and frequent. Northern Europe no longer had to depend on Italian
merchants as intermediaries between Asia, the eastern Mediterranean, and the world
north of the Alps. Spanish wool that had been exported to Flanders in large quantities
from the 1300s onwards declined into a less-profitable commodity as the Low
Countries became the site of fierce conflict between its Spanish Catholic overlords
and the Protestants in its Northern Provinces. We often tend to discount religion, but
religion mattered. It affected patterns of trade and relations. Italy, the kingpin of the
western Mediterranean, became less relevant. Even Italian artists and philosophers
began to go abroad in search of patrons: Leonardo went to France and Giordano
Bruno went to England and France.
The triumph of the AtlanticWhile all these developments affected the history of the Mediterranean and the sea’s
place in European affairs, the reality was that Portugal and Castile had long been
involved in the Atlantic. Even without war, the Protestant Reformation, and the
Ottoman threat, the Mediterranean’s central role in Europe’s economy and culture
would have declined. Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s Before Columbus traces this flow
from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic (Fernández-Armesto, 1987). Here it is impor-
tant to emphasize, once again, the symbiotic relationship between the two seas. A
great deal of the technical know-how or the administrative practices that would allow
for conquest and settlement in the Atlantic world had already been tried out in Sicily,
Majorca, and southern Spain before being implemented in Africa and the New World.
Earlier, we have also seen how the development over time of new technologies of
seafaring, shipbuilding, broadside artillery, and the like (a good number of them
originating in the Mediterranean) made possible the bold voyages of Portuguese
and Castilian seamen down the coast of Africa, to Asia, and to the New World.
Mediterranean sea charts, geographical treatises, the revival of ancient classical sources
(development that took place most of all in Italy) underpinned and deeply influenced
the new Atlantic expansion. In the early Atlantic crossing and settlements in the New
World, Italians, serving the Castilian Crown, often provided the cultural narratives of
these new ventures. Columbus was, after all, from Genoa. And he had sailed the
Atlantic: to Iceland, to the Canary Islands, and down the coast of Africa long before
1492 (Fernández Armesto, 1987; Phillips and Phillips, 1992).
Yet long before the Spanish invasion of Italy, in response to French military incur-
sions in the peninsula, the Portuguese had begun their expeditions along the coast of
Africa to the Cape of Good Hope and, eventually, to India and the fabulous profits to
be found there. These voyages would have been impossible without new types of sailing
vessels (the caravela redonda), without the astrolabe, compass, and sea charts. Propelled
by these new seafaring technologies, the Portuguese progress southwards along the
coast of Africa read like a clear guide to the eventual demise of the Mediterranean.
Conquering Ceuta in 1415, the Portuguese established a foothold in Africa at the
opening of the Straits of Gibraltar. The Madeira Islands and the Azores fell into