Introducing the Byzantine world in this way is to minimize the empire as a Mediterranean state. As a geographical region the Mediterranean is defined by its climate: hot dry summers, mild wet winters. (Almost everywhere else rain either falls in the hot season, or throughout the year.) It is also characterized by its vegetation, most obviously by the rarity of forests and the widespread presence of scrub and grassland, or by the olive, which is almost confined to the region (Grove and Rackham 2001: 11; Braudel 1972-3: i, 231-67). Recently Horden and Purcell (2000: 9-25) have focused attention on the Mediterranean as a conglomeration of microregions, a region united by its extreme variety, tied together through the medium of the sea. By any of these measures only the Mediterranean islands and the coastal fringes of the Balkans, western and southern Anatolia, and the Levant can be regarded as ‘Mediterranean’. Justinian’s conquests in the sixth century brought significant Mediterranean territories under imperial control: Africa (effectively modern Tunisia), Sicily, Italy, Sardinia, Corsica, the Balearics, and southern Spain (see II.3.2B Political-historical survey, 518-800). If Herakleios had moved the capital to Carthage or Constans II to Syracuse, that would certainly have created a Mediterranean empire, but a state with a capital at Constantinople inevitably had a rather different orientation, Balkan and Anatolian, terrestrial and continental as much as Mediterranean, maritime, and insular (Whittow 1996:163). Even the Aegean, a classic Mediterranean environment by any definition, was for most of Byzantium’s existence rather marginal save at particular periods, such as between the conquest of Crete in 961 and the Venetian conquests that followed 1204 (Malamut 1988: 25-104). The empire of the final two centuries may have been largely confined to Mediterranean territories, but, with the sea dominated by the Italians, Palaiologan Byzantium existed in the Mediterranean rather than itself being a Mediterranean empire (see II.3.2D Political-historical survey, 1204-1453).
World History
