A Companion to Mediterranean History, First Edition. Edited by Peregrine Horden and Sharon Kinoshita.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
chapter five
What is the “medieval Mediterranean”? Is it even legitimate to speak of the Middle
Ages for the Mediterranean? The concept, as we know, was initially forged to delimit
a (dark) period between two Golden Ages, antiquity on the one hand, and the
Renaissance on the other. Today, scholars instead view the Middle Ages as a formative period,
as the moment of a first construction of modern Europe, underscoring the continui-
ties, rather than the ruptures, with both antiquity and the Renaissance. Even if we
accept this periodization for Western-European history, we must ask how relevant it
is for Islamic or Byzantine—and thus for Mediterranean—history. In other words,
what constitutes the unity or the identity of the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages,
compared to other periods?
The differentiation with antiquity (the Roman Empire and the “classical” period:
Purcell, this volume) is marked by the end of the political and economic unity that
characterized the Mediterranean under Roman domination. The partition of the
Empire, the barbarian invasions, and the emergence of Islam and of new kingdoms
led to the construction of a shared Mediterranean, disputed particularly, but not only,
between Christians and Muslims. Therefore, even if the changes during what is called
today “late antiquity” were not necessarily always brutal, the two periods are funda-
mentally different, despite forms of continuity. The differentiation with the early
modern period is less obvious. On a geopolitical level, Ottoman conquests and the
end of the Byzantine Empire after the fall of Constantinople (1453) caused significant
changes, and the reformulation of a vast Islamic empire on the eastern and southern
shores of the Mediterranean undoubtedly opened a new period in the history of Islam
in the Mediterranean (Greene, this volume). But if territorial limits changed, the gen-
eral configuration did not; as in the Middle Ages, the Mediterranean remained a
border between Islam and Christendom, marked simultaneously, as previously, by
both conflict and exchanges. The major change lies elsewhere: in the place the
Mediterranean now occupied in trade networks, widely expanded across the world
after the “discovery” of America. Thus, what defines the medieval Mediterranean
compared to the early modern period is its central place in the trade networks in a
The Medieval Mediterranean
dominique Valérian