the mediterranean and the atlantic 423
Pernambuco (Brazil) or Cuba, and cotton from the US southern states flowed into
Barcelona, a pattern of trade probably replicated for other Mediterranean ports. And
yet, the most revealing evidence in all the documentation is the absence of references
to North African ports. The western Mediterranean Sea’s trade and economy were
not just overtaken by the rise of the Atlantic but were also severed from its North
African counterpart until the beginnings of the European colonial projects there.
ConclusionThe opening of the Atlantic world (Africa and the Americas) to conquest and trade
signaled an important change in Mediterranean history. By the sixteenth century, the
slow demise of Italian political autonomy and the commercial shift to an Atlantic
economy transformed western Mediterranean life and initiated a period of decline for
the entire region that has somewhat lasted until today. The problem of the “south” or
mezzogiorno—which also includes, from a whole series of social and economic per-
spectives, Africa’s northern coast—remains an important issue today. The migration
of North Africans across the Mediterranean into western Europe provides yet another
opportunity to study the Middle Sea as a laboratory in which diverse people encoun-
ter each other and are dramatically transformed by their location in those points of
convergence. But this is an old story, a Mediterranean story, that was carried out of
the Straits of Gibraltar into the open waters of the Atlantic Ocean and to new settle-
ments across the world.
ReferencesBraudel, F. (1972–3) The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II,
London: Collins.
Braudel, F. (1981) Civilization and Capitalism, vol. 1: The Structures of Everyday Life, London:
Collins.
Cary, M. (1924) The Greeks and ancient trade with the Atlantic. Journal of Hellenic Studies, 44
(2): 166–179.
Cary, M. (1963) The Ancient Explorers, Baltimore: Penguin Books.
Calendar of the Patent Rolls ... Edward III (1891–1916) vol. 4, London: HMSO.
Cantera Burgos, F. (1931) El Judio Salmantino Abraham Zacut: Notas para la historia de la
astronomía en la España medieval, Madrid: C. Bermejo.
Collantes de Terán Sánchez, A. (1977) Sevilla en la Baja Edad Media: la ciudad y sus hombres,
Seville: Sección de Publicaciones del Excmo, Ayuntamiento.
Constable, O.R. (1994) Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain: The Commercial Realignment of
the Iberian Peninsula, 900–1500, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Dumas, A. (2003) The Count of Montecristo (trans. R. Buss), London: Penguin.
Fernández-Armesto, F. (1987) Before Columbus: Exploration and Colonisation from the
Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1229–1492, Basingstoke: Macmillan Education.
Harris, W.H. (2005) (ed.) Rethinking the Mediterranean, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lewis, A.R. (1976) Northern European sea power and the Straits of Gibraltar, 1031–1350
a.d., in Order and Innovation in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honor of Joseph R. Strayer (eds
W.C. Jordan, B. McNab, and T.F. Ruiz), Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 139–164.
MacKay, A. 1977 Spain in the Middle Ages: From Frontier to Empire, 1000–1500, London:
Macmillan.