A Companion to Mediterranean History, First Edition. Edited by Peregrine Horden and Sharon Kinoshita.
© 2014 David Abulafia. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Chapter NiNe
Meanings
Simply translated, the Greek term “thalassocracy” (thalassokratia) means sea-power
or rule over the sea.^1 More specifically, it is understood to mean an empire that not
merely crosses the sea but uses the sea to tie together scattered dominions, exercising
some degree of control over the sea. Thucydides did not actually use the word when
he described the first sea empire in the Greek world, but his conception of maritime
dominion fits the word extremely well. Thinking about what he said will help create
an agenda for the analysis of the term “thalassocracy,” because the region’s past has so
often been conceived as a sequence of maritime empires. The case Thucydides had in
mind was the maritime empire of the legendary king of Crete, Minos, for here he
certainly drew on distant memories of Bronze-Age Crete that were familiar to any
Athenian from the story of Theseus and the Minotaur. The Athenians had been sub-
ject to Cretan overlordship and paid a brutal tax: every few years they had to send
seven young men and seven young women to the island, where they were dispatched
into the labyrinth created for Minos at Knossos by the great engineer Daidalos, and,
once lost in its endless tunnels, they were consumed by the terrifying monster, half-
bull, half-man. Yet Thucydides knew more than that. What he says is:And the first person known to us by tradition as having established a navy is Minos. He
made himself master of what is now called the Hellenic sea, and ruled over the Cyclades,
into most of which he sent the first colonies, expelling the Carians and appointing his
own sons governors; and thus did his best to put down piracy in those waters, a necessary
step to secure the revenues for his own use. (Thucydides, History, 1.4, trans. Crawley,
1874: 4)Hard-headed Thucydides was not going to recycle fairy tales about Theseus, as
Herodotus would have done. But his statement still leaves difficulties. What is mastery
over the sea? How can one establish real control over watery spaces that at certain
times of the year are too dangerous to traverse, at least in light sailing vessels? The seasThalassocracies
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