That we know the Mediterranean as the world’s largest inland sea is a consequence of the Age of Discovery. And in conceptualizing it as a single large sea, we have attempted to comprehend its geography and ecology within that framework. So, in structural terms, the sea is understood to be compartmentalized into eastern and western basins separated by the Italian peninsula and Sicily. And within each basin, the northern coasts are distinguished from those along North Africa and the Levant by long indented coastlines providing numerous opportunities for secure harborage.
One of the problems of viewing the whole of the Mediterranean as a space unto itself is that it is often decontextualized from the spaces surrounding it and the influences they exerted upon it. This is most notable with respect to the Sahara. The Mediterranean is more profoundly affected by its proximity to the world’s largest desert than the temperate climatic forces of Europe to its north. Were it not for the climatic effects emanating northward from the desert, the famed “Mediterranean” climate of hot, dry summers and mild, intermittently rainy winters (sub-regional variations notwithstanding) would not exist. Indeed the great inland sea and the Sahara share much in common in “operat[ing] as bridges as well as barriers, as contact and exchange zones, places of work, habitation and transit” (Quinn, north
AFRICA.
It is also possible to conceptualize a specific Mediterranean ecology shaped by a combination of climate, the sea and a predominantly limestone landscape combining mountains, tablelands, wetland, desert, and islands that together foster a characteristic vegetation that includes various types of conifers, the Holm Oak, pistachio, carob, fig, maquis (the latter also a product of fire), and, most famously, the cultivation of the so-called Mediterranean triad of cereals, vines, and olives (Blake and Knapp 2006; Sallares, environmental history).
In sum, there is much that lends itself to the modern idea of the Mediterranean as a definable physical space within the larger world of south-west Eurasia and northern Africa. But, apart from Braudel and those who have held to a mytho-romantic view of the Mediterranean, this unitary framework has not achieved universal acceptance among historians, social scientists, and even modern policy makers (Horden and Purcell 2000; Morris 2003). The reasons for this are many, but in essence all aggregate around two opposing poles: the first, that it is too large a space, however defined, to be held together by a single idea across time, and the second, that it is not in the end a sufficiently validated space on which to frame human history.
World History
