422 teofilo f. ruiz
Portuguese hands by 1418 and 1427–1431, respectively. Cape Verde and the Cape
Verde islands were reached in the 1450s. Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of
Good Hope in 1487–1488 while other Portuguese explorers reached as far inland as
the fabled Timbuktu, sailing up the Congo River deep into the heart of sub-Saharan
Africa. Vasco da Gama’s historic expedition to India (1497–1499) and his return to
Lisbon in a ship laden with spices marked, far more than Columbus’ earlier voyages
into the Atlantic, a real shift in the late medieval and early modern economy. But it
also altered the geographical centrality of the Mediterranean in a global context
(Subrahmanyam, 1997).
The relationship between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, once so dramatically
represented in the natural and human deterrents (currents and corsairs) that made
sailing out of the Mediterranean difficult, shifted after the European expansion into
the Atlantic world and Asian markets. Northern and Atlantic ports no longer needed
access to the Mediterranean for the life-blood of their respective economies. Although
the Mediterranean would eventually be linked to this New World economy, the
Middle Sea lost its centrality as the privileged site of European culture and commerce.
What Pirenne (1960) had claimed had taken place with the coming of Islam into the
western Mediterranean in the seventh and eighth centuries, in his rightly famous
though incorrect great book, really did take place in the early modern period. The
opening of Atlantic, African, and Asian markets represented a watershed in
Mediterranean history, as the Sea and the lands around the western Sea would not
begin to play a significant role in world affairs again until the present period.
Aftermath: from the Atlantic to the MediterraneanIn the centuries following the slow decline of the western Mediterranean trade and its
centrality in European life, Ottoman power also began to wane. Religious wars
came to an end in the mid-seventeenth century. Spain’s military hegemony was shat-
tered at the battle of Rocroi in 1643. New powers rose to prominence. They were all
Atlantic powers—England, France, the Dutch republic—even if their interests were
essentially global. Italy became the terminus for eager visitors in search of antiquities
and curiosities. It became an impoverished land. In 1715, Spain came under
Bourbon rule, firmly in the orbit of France. Although Spain was able to preserve most
of its colonial empire until 1821, the Iberian peninsula lost a great deal of its impor-
tance in European and global affairs. Portugal came under England’s political and
economic influence. Yet in the late eighteenth and most of the nineteenth centuries
(and even before), Atlantic goods, that is, northern-European manufactured goods
and wood and agricultural products from Scandinavia and the Americas, began to flow
back into the Mediterranean. Braudel has, as he did for the Mediterranean Sea, pro-
vided us with a bird’s eye view of the transformation of the world economy and the
new place of the Mediterranean in those commercial transactions (Braudel, 1981). As
part of another research project, I have examined the protests against the sea kept at
the Archive of the Crown of Aragon. These are formulaic depositions by merchant sea
captains complaining of bad weather and damage to their cargo. There are more than
25 000 such depositions for the period between 1766 and 1868. These protests show
unequivocally the growing trade from Atlantic and northern European locations into
the Mediterranean. Wood from Scandinavia, machinery from England, sugar from