4 CHAPTER ONE
awareness of the concept’s popularity led to a conscious attempt to ex-
amine its validity. Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, in their dra-
matically titled monumental work The Corrupting Sea, thus embarked
on an analysis (and defense) of Mediterraneanism.^11
But what is “the Mediterranean” for the historian? Unlike the well-
defi ned geo graphical boundaries of the Mediterranean Sea, the cultural
boundaries of “the Mediterranean world” are surprisingly fl exible, and
at times reach impressive dimensions. The center of gravity of Braudel’s
Mediterranean lies in its western and northwestern part: Spain, the
Maghreb, and Italy, whereas Palestine and Egypt play a relatively minor
role in his study— smaller, in fact, than the role accorded to decidedly
non-Mediterranean countries such as the Netherlands. Beyond the geo-
graphical confi nes of the Mediterranean stretched Braudel’s “greater” or
“global Mediterranean,” which he described as “a Mediterranean with
the dimensions of history.”^12 For the sixteenth century, these dimensions
expanded to include the Atlantic shores as well as the Portuguese, Span-
ish, French, and En glish colonies in the Americas.^13 By contrast, the
Mediterranean society described by Goitein on the basis of the docu-
ments or the Cairo Geniza tilted toward the east and south. Moreover, it
occupied not only the shores of the Mediterranean, but also those areas
defi ned today as the Near East, and its “global” or “historical” dimen-
sions stretched eastward, as far as India.
The term “Mediterranean” is problematic not only because of its geo-
graphical inaccuracy. In recent years, the usefulness of treating the Medi-
terranean as an historical, anthropological, or economic unit has been
increasingly questioned. In an interesting volume of essays dedicated to
the examination of the thesis of Horden and Purcell, the classical scholar
William Harris, for example, cites the defi nition of “Mediterraneanism”
as “the doctrine that there are distinctive characteristics which the cul-
tures of the Mediterranean have, or have had, in common.”^14 He notes
“the fact that Mediterraneanism is often nowadays little more than a re-
fl ex” and adds that “the Mediterranean seems somehow peculiarly vul-
Contents and Infl uences of Islamic Civilization and Arabic Philosophy and Science Dedi-
cated to Gerhard Endress on His Sixty- Fifth Birthday (Leuven, 2004).
(^11) P. Horden and N. Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Ox-
ford, 2000); and see Adnan A. Husain and K. E. Fleming, eds., A Faithful Sea: The Reli-
gious Cultures of the Mediterranean, 1200– 1700 (Oxford, 2007), 4– 7.
(^12) Braudel,The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World, 153, 155. Cf. also R. Brague,
Au moyen du Moyen Age: Philosophies médievales en chrétienté, judaïsme et islam (Chatou,
2006), 241.
(^13) Ibid., pt. 2, chap. 4.
(^14) W. Harris, “The Mediterranean and Ancient History,” in W. V. Harris, ed., Rethinking
the Mediterranean (Oxford and New York, 2000), 38.