70 nicholas purcell
exploited by sea-orientated communities looking inland from the coasts, or by
continental polities seeing the advantages of the way to the sea and its systems of
connectivity.
None of this is to deny that it was possible to be poised perfectly between worlds.
Just as the communities which did most to pattern cultural and social change were
those which stood between land and sea, and most of all those which were also where
parts of the Mediterranean joined up, so the communities where the Mediterranean
met the most complex neighboring zones became the most vital of all for historical
change. The Sidonians, for instance, reflected their city’s intermediate position
between a great web of maritime communications and a huge territory which reached
over the coastal uplands into a world away from the sea, in distinguishing a “Land
Sidon” from a “Sidon on the Sea.” But in the Levant above all, such a split reflected
in addition to mere local topography something much larger, the meeting place of
Asia and the Mediterranean which has been so potent an ingredient in the history of
that whole region.
Few medieval cities resemble the cities of antiquity so closely as Venice, whose
Mediterranean vocation and variable relationship to an adjacent productive territory
are directly comparable to the maritime hinterlands of so many ancient polities. As an
outlet for the Po plain, it was like many another Mediterranean gateway community.
But Venice can hardly be understood except in relation to the passes of the Alps,
north and north-east to the upper and middle Danube, and further west to the large
regions of central and western Europe whose conduit to the wider Mediterranean the
Adriatic provided. Integrative connections of just this kind were important in antiq-
uity too. The ports of Adria and Spina at the mouth of the Po gave access between the
seaborne milieu and the Etruscan cities of the Po plain, which had strong links with
the world to the north. Their Roman successors, Altinum and—above all —Aquileia,
were bases for exchanges across the same Alpine passes which later maintained the
inland network of Venice. As in the other cases, a plurality of locations, rising and
declining in relative importance, competing with each other socially and culturally,
may be discerned. The spectacular discoveries at Comacchio, next door to Spina, of a
commercial settlement of the seventh and eighth centuries, already functioning like
the first post-Roman ports of trade in north-western Europe but deeply traditional in
mediating the sea to the interior, show how this polity helps bridge the gap between
Aquileia and Venice.
Beyond the Mediterranean different macro-regions’ own histories provided a set of
other large-scale changes which shaped the fortunes of the regions where they abut-
ted. New seafaring circuits from the Hellenistic age joined up an Oceanic region
integrating the Arabian Sea, the routes beyond to south-east Asia, and the Swahili
coast beyond the equator, with the Mediterranean world by way of the Persian Gulf
and Red Sea. The Sahara offered routes from east to west, and from time to time
proved permeable to traffic joining the central oases to both the Mediterranean and
sub-Saharan Africa. The regularizing of the latter opening helped shift the geography
of the Mediterranean as antiquity ended.
The accidents of integration thus serve as a vital means of periodizing ancient his-
tories which are extroverted, as well as those which look inwards to the Mediterranean
world. They do this in multiple registers, but not least because the “integration” in
question includes the manifold processes of cultural change. This approach, indeed,