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Visions of the Mediterranean:

A Classication
Palmira Brummett
University of Tennessee
Knoxville, Tennessee
Dr. Samuel Johnson once said, Te grand object of all travel is to see the
shores of the Mediterranean. So true is this statement that it may be ques-
tioned whether all the rest of the world can muster such a combination of mar-
velous beauty, fascinating romance, unique scenes and sacred associations.
D. E. Lorenz, Te Mediterranean Traveller (I9II)
Te Mediterranean is repeated over and over as a concept, a center, a limit,
an edge. It forms the basis for classes on civilization and for explorations
of economics and identity. It is a space where things come, go, or happen;
and it is a hole (into which things disappear), like Central Asia in certain
formulations of world history.
I
Te Mediterranean is seldom simply a sea
space; rather (as its name suggests) it is embedded in the land and in the
imaginations of land-based peoples. It marks the rivers mouth, the limits of
the space in which soldiers can march or ride, the borders of a comfort zone
dened by access to food, drinkable water, weapons, and some vestiges of
safety or authority. It may be conceived as a whole in the sovereign claims
of monarchs and in the front pages of the mapmakers atlas. Yet it is more
often composed of fragments: separate seas, stretches of coast, zones of liveli-
hood, points of departure, and points of arrival. Ships on its waters function
as moving pieces of sovereign space, receptacles for goods and their atten-
dant expectations, and living platforms for those members of society, and
attendant organisms, who, willingly or unwillingly, traverse the water. States
claim it but cannot hold it. Te Mediterranean is west of Istanbul, south of
the Danube, east of Gibraltar, north of Algiers. It is a line, a block, a chain
of ports, a dumping ground measured in names, coins, wine, recipes, roof
types, shing lines, corpses. It gets things wet. It constitutes the imaginary
boundary between Christendom and Islam; and yet it is posed more often
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37:1, Winter 2007
DOI I0.I2I5/I0829636-2006-009 2007 by Duke University Press
10 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 37.1 / 2007
as commercial space than as sacred space or war space. Te Mediterranean
begins with the lines and colors of Ptolemy and al-Idrs and ends with the
microcosms of Fernand Braudel and attendant scholars.
2
Te Mediterranean,
in Western historiography, is presumed to be ours, rather then theirs, the
Afro-Eurasian oikumene of Marshall Hodgson notwithstanding.
3
It is
the space of Odysseus, Marc Anthony, St. Paul, Boccaccio, the Crusaders,
the pilgrims, the takers of the Grand Oriental tour (always going east,
more or less, and returning west, if they can). It is the realm of West-
ern antiquity, a Roman, Venetian, Muslim, Spanish, French, or English
lake, bearing goods to and for a space sooner or later called Europe, until
the Age of Discovery when interest, ambition, and slavery miraculously
shift to the Atlantic and until the colonial era when the inland sea
becomes a conduit to eastern conquests and possessions. It is the old sea, to
which seascapes like those of the Atlantic world, the Indian Ocean, and the
Pacic rim are added to make an image of the world that seems more global.
Its captivity narratives are the stories of we the captives and they the pirates;
although the pirates seldom tell their own tales and the captives narratives
are often sagas of woes on land rather than at sea.
As an Ottomanist historian who has examined seapower in the early
modern era, I too have a particular vision of the Mediterranean, one which
focuses on the eastern end of the sea and privileges its own set of hegemons.
4

Despite the rhetorical claims of the Ottoman sultans to be lords of the two
seas, the Black and the White (Mediterranean), I do not tend to think of
the Mediterranean as an integral unit of analysis. For me, that sea is indel-
ibly fragmented into its ports, islands, coasts, and their attendant interiors.
It is divided into a set of city-linking itineraries, routes for the transmission
of ideas, goods, and military forces. If I do imagine the Mediterranean as a
whole, it is not a space divided into Christian and Muslim halves; rather,
it is a space bounded on three sides by the multicultural Ottoman empire,
with its large nal side, the West, controlled by a set of rulers (both Mus-
lim and Christian) whom the Ottomans were unable to subordinate. It is
not marked by ecological zones but by complex, overlapping, ethnolinguis-
tic, commercial, and cultural identities. Te Mediterranean has appending
seas, the Black, the Red, the Aegean, and the Adriatic. But the Atlantic is
far away; and the direction of signicant interest and attachment is, in any
case, east not west.
My vision diers, sometimes markedly, from a large portion of con-
temporary Western historiography of the Mediterranean, a historiography
which has pronounced the European identity of the inland sea, divided it
Brummett / Visions of the Mediterranean 11
into Christian and Muslim zones along a north-south axis, and argued for a
unity (of sorts) based either on the enduring structures of Braudel, the inter-
secting microecologies of Horden and Purcell, or the centuries-long eco-
nomic logics of world history.
5
While all of these models eschew an emphasis
on political history, they cannot completely avoid the concept of possession
(a designation of the peoples, lands, or states to whom the sea belongs), an
element of analysis which is central to my conceptualization of the Mediter-
ranean. Indeed, the use of the terms Mediterranean and Levant, by virtue
of their derivation from Latin, conveys a sense of Western possession. Con-
versely, both terms also transcend possession, suggesting a bridging or sub-
version of nation and sovereignty in order to privilege transnational (trans-
ethnic, transcommunal) movement, association, or ecology. Nonetheless, we
see that historiographies of the Mediterranean do grant possession: to the
Romans, to Philip II, to Christians and Muslims, or to Dutch, French, and
English trading companies, with Phoenicians, Jews, and other diasporas,
intermediaries, transgressors, and traders moving in and about in between.
Tey pose the question, explicit or implicit, Whose space? and divide the
sea accordingly.
At the eastern end of the sea, the Ottoman Empire, despite its lon-
gevity and the scope of its conquests, does not replace the Roman Empire
in the majority historiographic Mediterranean paradigm. It remains an ele-
phant (a land based military power) rather than a whale, and hence it cannot
truly possess the sea, even though no serious scholar debates the supremacy
of its eets in the sixteenth century.
6
Possession and identity, it would seem,
require more than eets.
7
Tus the city-state of Venice serves as placeholder
in the category of Mediterranean Empire. On a broader level, the Ottoman
polity is the Turk, assigned the task of embodying Islam in the late medi-
eval and early modern eras, and serving as quintessential rival, opponent,
obstacle, and threat to Europe, European ambitions, and the European space
called Christendom. Tis historiographic characterization has isolated
Anatolia from the Mediterranean and deected the Ottoman Empire from
serving a more complex set of roles.
8
It can be a trading partner and a Levan-
tine power, but not a truly Mediterranean Empire. Tis partitioning-o of
the Ottomans derives in part from the ways in which Ottomanist and Medi-
terranean studies have evolved, in part from the association of the Mediter-
ranean with Europe (and the concomitant failure to acknowledge the Otto-
mans as a European power), and in part from a failure adequately to explore
the rhetorics and realities of the early modern Afro-Eurasian world and to
distinguish them from historiographic models based on region or faith.
12 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 37.1 / 2007
In the interests of pursuing that exploration I propose here to pre-
sent a series of historical visions of the Mediterranean to suggest how they
may or may not jibe with contemporary historiographic models. Other
scholars have grappled with identifying the spatial and temporal limits of
the Mediterranean; determining the relevance of its hegemons, empires,
cities, and states; measuring change; and distinguishing between maritime
history and the histories of societies surrounding the sea.
9
My treatment
will instead foreground the idea of mapping. It will begin by presenting
eight texts (spanning the fourteenth to the nineteenth century) that map the
Mediterranean: the political sociology of Ibn Khaldun; the travel accounts
of Ibn Battuta, Evliya elebi, and Muhammad as-Sar; and four maps of
the Mediterranean or its parts. Ibn Khaldun frames the Mediterranean. Te
three travelers illustrate the varying ways that the Mediterranean encounter
could be narrated from the perspective of Muslims situated on the southern
and eastern shores of the sea. Te maps provide images of space and rhetorics
of connectivity and possession (from the perspectives of the northern side of
the sea). Having employed these texts to outline Mediterranean space, I will
comment briey on their intersections with contemporary historiographic
models, including Braudels sixteenth-century Mediterranean world, Hor-
den and Purcells three-thousand-year-long regional unit, the Afro-Eurasian
civilizational paradigm of Marshall Hodgson, and the long-term economic
cycles of world history. I conclude by suggesting that an approach to the
early modern Mediterranean which foregrounds mapping (privileging itin-
erary, visuality, connectivity, and possession in concert) can facilitate a bet-
ter understanding of the ways in which early modern peoples envisioned the
Mediterranean space. Further, this combination of emphases helps dissolve
the still-persistent partitioning of the Mediterranean along Muslim-Christian
or European-Asian lines, a division that only partially reects early mod-
ern sensibilities. I do not claim that the Muslim-Christian divide was an
inconsequential element in early modern understandings of the Mediter-
ranean far from it. War space and sacred space were crucial to those
understandings. By war space and sacred space, however, I mean more
than homogenous, conictual blocks labeled Christian and Muslim. I mean
those territories associated either with war or with religious ritual and iden-
tity in all their messy and mixed social, political, economic, and rhetorical
contexts. If we begin with the map of the Mediterranean, we nd that the
Muslim-Christian divide was not an uncomplicated factor in the rhetorics
shaping the intricate contours of Mediterranean space and time.
Brummett / Visions of the Mediterranean 13
Knowledge, travel, space
Ptolemys Geography suggests a starting point for the mapping of the Mediter-
ranean in Western historiography. In the left half of a planisphere, the inner
sea appears, embraced on three sides by a series of peninsulas, and sitting, to
the south, upon the great, solid, unending landmass of Africa.
I0
Tere is no
human presence in Ptolemys map, only the faces of the twelve winds blow-
ing the known world in upon itself. Tese two options, the human and the
spatial, remain as enduring qualiers of the Mediterranean. Tey constitute
the poles around which early modern visions of the sea are formed: a socially
empty space, or a set of places that move in slide-strip sequence before the
eye, important as settings for the moving human drama.
II

Tat drama is the subject of the famous Tunisian scholar, Ibn Khal-
dun (I332 I382). In Human Civilization in General, the rst chapter of
his introduction to history (the Muqaddimah), this philosopher of society
and space cites the geographical works of Claudius Ptolemy (ca. 90 I68)
and Muhammad al-Idrs (b. ca. II00) as authorities on the civilized parts of
the world and delimiters of the Mediterranean.
Tese men divided the cultivated area into seven parts which they
called the seven zones. Te borders of the seven zones are imagi-
nary. Tey extend from east to west. . . . (Te geographers) men-
tion that the Mediterranean which we all know branches o from
the Surrounding Sea in the western part of the fourth zone. . . .
[Where it terminates] is bordered by the coast of Syria. On the
south, it is bordered by the coast of the Maghrib, beginning with
Tangier at the Straits, then Ifrqiyah, Barqah, and Alexandria.
On the north, it is bordered by the coast of Constantinople, then
Venice, Rome, France, and Spain, back to Tarifa at the Street [sic]
(of Gibraltar) opposite Tangier. Te Mediterranean is also called
the Roman Sea or the Syrian Sea. It contains many populous
islands. Some of them are large, such as Crete, Cyprus, Sicily,
Majorca, and Sardinia.
I2
Ibn Khalduns description goes on to suggest the separation into
parts that characterizes later visions of the Mediterranean.
In the north, they say, two other seas branch o from the Medi-
terranean though two straits. One of them is opposite Constan-
tinople. It starts at the Mediterranean in a narrow strait, only an
14 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 37.1 / 2007
arrow-shot in width. It ows for a three days run and touches
Constantinople. Ten it attains a width of four miles. It ows
in this channel for sixty miles, where it is known as the Straits
[sic] of Constantinople. Trough a mouth six miles wide, it then
ows into the Black Sea. . . . It passes the land of Heracleia (in
Bithynia) and ends at the country of the Khazars, I,300 miles
from its mouth. Along its two coasts live the Byzantine, the Turk-
ish, the Bulgar, and the Russian nations. . . . Te second sea that
branches o from the two straits of the Mediterranean is the Gulf
of Venice. It emerges from Byzantine territory at its northern
limit. . . . On its two shores live the Venetians, the Byzantines,
and other nations. It is called the Gulf of Venice. (Muqaddimah,
5I)
Interestingly, in this description, the sea is held in by its coasts and by its
peoples. For Ibn Khaldun, the Mediterranean is not just a division of space,
it is a realm bordered by peoples, nations, and occupations. He says that the
Maghrib and Ifrqiyah are
on the southern shore of the Mediterranean. Along its southern
shore the lands of the Berbers extend from Ceuta to Alexandria
and on to Syria. Along its northern shore are the countries of
Spain and of European Christians (Franks), the Slavs, and the
Byzantines, also extending to Syria. It is called the Byzantine Sea
or the Syrian Sea, according to the people who inhabit its shores.
Tose who live along the coast and on the shores of both sides of
the Mediterranean are more concerned with (maritime) condi-
tions than any other maritime nation. (Muqaddimah, 208)
Te Mediterranean is thus, for the author, a sea of two sides, with
the southern coasts just as important as the northern. It is anchored by
Tangier on the west and south and Constantinople to the east and north.
Along its edges, peoples choose the name of their own region or sovereign
state to designate the sea, thus projecting a sense of possession out onto the
entire body of water. Possession is embodied not only in naming but in war,
as the ships of one people traverse the sea to subordinate another people and
seize its lands:
Te Byzantines, the European Christians, and the Goths lived on
the northern shore of the Mediterranean. Most of their wars and
Brummett / Visions of the Mediterranean 15
most of their commerce was by sea. Tey were skilled in navigat-
ing (the Mediterranean) and in naval war. When these people
coveted the possession of the southern shore, as the Byzantines
(coveted) Ifrqiyah and as the Goths the Maghrib, they crossed
over in their eets and took possession of it. Tus, they achieved
superiority over the Berbers and deprived them of their power.
Tey had populous cities there, such as Carthage, Sbeitla, Jall,
Murnq, Cherchel, and Tangier. Te ancient master of Carthage
used to ght the master of Rome and to send eets loaded with
armies and equipment to wage war against him. Tus, (seafaring)
is a custom of the inhabitants of both shores of the Mediterra-
nean, which was known in ancient as in modern times. (Muqad-
dimah, 208 9)
Ibn Khaldun traces this maritime model of covetousness, ships bearing
armies, and the seizing and building of coastal cities, through all of history
up to his own time. Te hegemons change but the will to power does not.
Initially, the Arabs had a Bedouin attitude and hence no aptitude for the
sea. But they learned the sea and its navigation in order to construct ships,
fulll their desire to wage the holy war by sea, and send warriors to ght
the unbelievers across the sea (Muqaddimah, 209).
Te man sometimes called the father of sociology thus describes
seapower in terms of crafting identities, controlling shores, and intimidat-
ing ones enemy. Seapower passes from the once-strong who weaken to the
newly strong; and the author writes, not quite dispassionately, of the alter-
nating dominance of Muslim and Christian dynasties:
[In the later tenth and early eleventh centuries] the Christian
nations withdrew with their eets to the north-eastern side of the
Mediterranean, to the coastal regions inhabited by the European
Christians and Slavs, and to the Aegean islands, and did not
go beyond them. Te Muslim eet had pounced upon them as
eagerly as lions upon their prey. Tey covered most of the surface
of the Mediterranean with their equipment and numbers and
traveled its lanes (on missions both) peaceful and warlike. Not
a single Christian board oated on it. Eventually, however, the
Ubaydid (Fatimid) and Umayyad dynasties weakened and soft-
ened and were aected by inrmity. Ten, the Christians reached
out for the eastern islands of the Mediterranean, such as Sicily,
16 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 37.1 / 2007
Crete, and Malta, and took possession of them. Tey pressed on
against the shores of Syria during this interval, and took pos-
session of Tripoli, Ascalon, Tyre and Acro. Tey gained control
over all the seaports of Syria. Tey conquered Jerusalem and built
there a church as an outward manifestation of their religion and
worship. . . . In the fth [i.e., eleventh] century, they had the lead
in the Mediterranean. (Muqaddimah, 2I0 II)
Ibn Khaldun crafts a model of the Mediterranean and its region that privi-
leges a two-sided division of war space and sacred space inhabited by nations
that press out into the sea and up onto its coasts when they have the power
to do so. Constantinople, Jerusalem, North African ports, and Mediterra-
nean islands are important demarcators and anchors of that space. Warfare
is natural and the Muslim-Christian divide is characteristic. Peoples move,
but travel is not a central theme.
If one looks at medieval and early modern narratives or maps, how-
ever, one is not surprised to nd that the Mediterranean is presented in terms
of travel: the stages of the journey; the towns, cities, and resting places; rivers
crossed; ports approached and departed from. Te Mediterranean is pre-
sented as a series of itineraries, each one variously imagined, with more or
less content and context, with dierent scales of measurement, and with
attitudes ranging from endurance to adventure, pragmatism, fear, or won-
der. In the travel narrative, the reader may learn of important personages,
the depredations of bandits, enticing foods, ineective remedies, religious
rituals, the ways in which womens dress maps space, or of goods and gifts
exchanged. Te sea is more or less present. As suggested by the three Muslim
travelers whose accounts are presented below, the sea may appear as a barrier,
a theater of war, a mode of existence, or simply as that which lies to one side
as one pursues a journey.
Te traveler Ibn Battuta (I304 ca. I369) has long been joined
to Marco Polo in Western historiography as a transcendent gure, mov-
ing across (and narrating) continents in ways not necessary or expected in
the medieval era. Set alongside those of other travelers, his stories illustrate
the roles that personality, training, politics, and socioeconomic context play
in the crafting of Mediterranean space. Tis scholar from the Maghrib is
celebrated for the detail of his travel narrative, which elaborates on monu-
ments, histories, notable families, shrines, food, ceremonies, ethnicity, gifts,
and goods. But oriented as he was toward cities, their institutions, and their
educated elites, Ibn Battuta wrote a Mediterranean that, for the most part,
Brummett / Visions of the Mediterranean 17
wasnt there. As he wended his way across North Africa to Cairo, Damascus,
and Mecca in I325 26, he paid little attention to the sea.
I3

Ibn Battuta does begin the tale of his pilgrimage from Tangier with
a reference to the sea, noting of the former Marinid king, Ab Ysuf Yaqb
(I258 I286) that his squadrons wrought havoc among the worshippers of
the Cross (Travels, I:9). Tus, as in so many other craftings of the inland
sea, the Mediterranean serves as war space, a space in which eets divide
the sea into Muslim and Christian spheres. Ibn Battuta, however, does not
dwell on this seaborne division.
I4
Continuing his tale of the ardors of travel
and the people he met, he often addresses the sea only by allusion. Te chief
qadi (judge) of Tunis was the scion of a family from Valencia; or, departing
from Tunis, one followed the coast road (I:I4 I5). Only when he comes
to Alexandria does Ibn Battuta feel compelled to face the sea, and briey
describe the citys magnicent harbor, which he compares to other harbors
of the world, and its lighthouse. Te edge of the sea is thus a place where
the building talents of mankind are displayed. Ibn Battuta, nonetheless, is
more interested in scholarly accomplishments; so, after this brief paean to
the ancient harbor, he turns his attention to the learned men and sheykhs
of the city.
In that context the sea reappears, in literary form, as the litany of
the sea, a prayer designed to protect pilgrims crossing the Red Sea. It reads
in part:
do thou establish us and succour us, and subject to us this sea as
Tou didst subject the sea unto Moses. . . . Subject to us every sea
that is Tine on earth and in heaven, in the world of sense and
in the invisible world, the sea of this life and the sea of the life to
come. . . . Be Tou our Companion in our journey, and guardian
of our households in our absence. Blot out the faces of our ene-
mies, and transform them into vile creatures in the place where
they be; then shall they not be able to go nor to come against us.
(Travels, I:25 27)
Ibn Battuta provides this long litany without further comment. But it sug-
gests his associations with the sea. It is a place that is crafted into literature
by scholars, a metaphor for the unknown and for the trials faced by man.
Only God controls the sea; and if God wills it, pilgrims will arrive safely at
their destinations and men will be protected from their enemies. Te litany
does not ask for victory, but for protection, because danger is the watchword
18 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 37.1 / 2007
of the sea. Tough an intrepid traveler and struck by wanderlust, Ibn Battuta
seems to approach the sea in that vein.
Another prolic travel writer, the Ottoman raconteur and court-
ier Evliya elebi, whose multivolume Seyahatname (Book of Travels) details
the peregrinations of forty years (I640 80), provides a later set of visions
of the sea. Evliyas Mediterranean is the setting for itineraries, familiar and
unfamiliar. It consists of war space, sacred space, commercial space, and
historical space the staging area for a procession of diverse societies, con-
tending individuals, and epic feats. Beyond that which he personally wit-
nessed (or claimed to have witnessed), Evliya had a theory of the Mediter-
ranean (which diverges from that of Ibn Khaldun). Te Mediterranean, he
wrote, was an appendage of the Black Sea, source of all the worlds seas.
Alexander the Great had cut open the straits between Istanbul and the
Mediterranean, resulting in a radical diminution of the Black Sea. Further,
according to the histories of the Greeks, Alexander had also cut a passage
at Gibraltar by which the Mediterranean could then ow into the Atlan-
tic.
I5
With that theory of the ancient, expansive, connected sea, Evliya pro-
vides a historical ground upon which his own journeys and experiences are
acted out.
Like Ibn Battuta, Evliya saw the Mediterranean as a border to his
travel. But like Ibn Khaldun, he imagined the sea in terms of seapower; it
was a space into which the political and economic ambitions of the land
could be extended. Te Mediterranean and its attendant seas were the site of
an ongoing struggle among peoples and monarchs for possession of lands,
goods, communal allegiance, and prestige. Indeed, the rival ambitions of
those who claimed or traversed the Mediterranean were made manifest at
sea, on the coasts, and even on the streets of Istanbul. On those streets the
various Ottoman guilds, including the sea captains guild, contended with
one another for precedence in public parades. In one such procession, Evliya
tells us, the saddlers attempted to take their place after the bakers, but the
ship captains and sea merchants protested.
When Sultan Murad [IV, r. I623 40] got wind of the matter, he
consulted with the ulema and the guild shaikhs. Tey all agreed
that it made sense for the ship-captains to proceed after the bak-
ers, because it was they who transported the wheat, and bakers
were dependent on them, and also because Noah was their patron
saint.
Brummett / Visions of the Mediterranean 19
Te sultan decided to allow the Black Sea captains to march after the bakers.
Tat decision, however, did not solve the problem of precedence, because
the butchers believed they were then scheduled to march after the Black Sea
captains:
when the Mediterranean Sea captains heard about this, they all
went before Sultan Murad and said, My padishah, we have heard
that the bloody butchers are to take precedence over us. . . .
Because our peers, the Black Sea captains, are Noahs dancing
boys, they were allowed to go ahead in accordance with your
decree; but we belong to the same group. We service your Cairo,
which is the gate of the Holy Cities. We make Istanbul plentiful
and cheap with the goods of Egypt. We transport 70,000 Muslim
pilgrims annually back and forth. Why is our service valued so
little that the butchers should take precedence over us? (Seyahat-
name, 86 87)
Noting their service as a band of ghazis and jihad warriors, who
engage in sea-battles with the Hell-slated indels, the sultan granted the
Mediterranean captains a more exalted position in this ordering of men
(Seyahatname, 87). So, the Ottoman ruler, in Evliyas narrative, mapped out
precedence in terms of manning sea battles, provisioning the city, access-
ing sacred space, and participating in the struggle against the unbelievers.
Te Mediterranean directly connected Istanbul, Cairo, and Mecca (major
city-nodes of the empire); it was a source of supply and an avenue for the
movement of warriors and pilgrims. Tose who sailed the sea projected and
defended imperial claims and sultanic power.
Tese functions are echoed in Evliyas account of his travels in Alba-
nia in I662 and I670. Te Adriatic (one of Ibn Khalduns branches of the
Mediterranean) bounds these travels to the west. Its waters bear the rival
eets of Venice and the Ottoman Empire as well as the vessels of a transna-
tional group of pirates. Its ports serve as commercial emporia in a matrix of
land and sea-based trade, and as launching points for raiders:
All the Albanian ghazis [holy warriors] from this town [Lezha]
cross the sea on their frigates and maraud in Venetian territory
and along the coast of Spanish Puglia [Apulia in SE Italy]. Tey
then return with their booty and their indel captives, alive or
dead, to the fortress of Lezha where they throw the corpses into
the Drin River.
I6
20 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 37.1 / 2007
Evliya uses fortresses as markers of possession to label territory in
the Adriatic as either Venetian or Ottoman, Christian or Muslim.
I7
But the
inhabitants of the land defy that dichotomous classication. Te warriors
resident thereabout may ght alternately on the side of Venice or on the
side of the sultan. Evliya denes them, often enough, in terms of customs,
commerce, and conict at sea rather than in terms of clear allegiance, either
to religion or to sovereign state. For example, in the course of his descrip-
tion of the city of Gjirokastr, Evliya repeats a bawdy story which he claims
is locally derived. A woman in the throes of sex with her husband, sud-
denly recalls the prowess of her seventeenth husband, who had been killed
in a naval battle in the Mediterranean between the Ottoman admiral Jafer
Pasha and some English galleys in the year I043 (I633 34 a.o.) (Albania,
83 84). She begins to tear her hair and to lament so vociferously that, not
surprisingly, the interlude with her current spouse is ruined. Tough the
protagonists are presumably Muslim, Evliya relates their story as part of his
commentary on the strange mourning rituals of the people of Gjirokastr.
He nds those rituals pointless, but shrugs them o, noting that every
country has its own rites and traditions (83). Evliya thus feels no particular
anity with these coreligionists and fellow subjects of the sultan; their ritu-
als are not his. Te story is no doubt apocryphal, but it suggests the precari-
ous nature of existence in the Mediterranean frontier zone, satirizing both
the local women and what must have been a very real scenario of loss for
women and their seafaring men.
War and sex combine with trade and faith, past and present, in
Evliyas mapping of the Adriatic coast.
I8
It consists of islands, fortresses,
ports, and harbors with their hinterlands and their Mediterranean networks
of exchange. Goods ow out from the ports as do brigands for whom the
coast is a marker between modes of transport. Te town of Vlora, with
its abundance of fruit, gardens, and vineyards, is ruled by the Ottomans
but functions as a Venetian emporium. It is a hidden Egypt, potential
source of great wealth, and its honey is better than that made in Athens
and on the island of Crete (Albania, I4I 43). From its harbor sultan Slei-
man (r. I520 66) attacked Venetian Corfu. In this frontier zone, identi-
ties are mixed, exible, and ambiguous. Between Vlora and the sea, Evliya
tells us, is a village of one hundred fty indel houses, occupied by dis-
solute Christians who make their living by shing and extracting salt,
which is loaded onto hundreds of ships and exported to Europe (I42 43).
Te Adriatic coast, in this narrative, is commercial space lying in between
Europe and the Ottomans. Its indel connections link it to the lands
Brummett / Visions of the Mediterranean 21
across the sea; but its residents resist attempts at either Ottoman or Vene-
tian control. Oshore is the island of Sazan where the Venetian unbelievers
spend the winter greasing their ships; and southeast of the town is the
region of Dukat with I00 rebellious Albanian villages. Te inhabitants are
black indels with black heads and black hats, but if you call them indels,
they will kill you

(I44 45).

Te young men of Vlora, Evliya adds, are all brigands. Tey live by
their own rules and style themselves in ways that are transnational, Medi-
terranean, and reective of their participation in a web of commercial and
piratic networks:
[Tey] wear short skin-tight clothes, as is the fashion throughout
the Mediterranean Archipelago, with bare calves, fezzes on their
heads, black Circassian-style shoes on their feet, and white Bed-
ouin-style cloaks on their backs. (Albania, I44 45)
So Evliya maps the environs of Vlora, which could easily constitute one (or
more) of Horden and Purcells microecologies. Te city-based circuits of
trade invoke those delineated for the thirteenth century world system of
Janet Abu-Lughod, although Evliyas are more dense and peopled.
I9
Unlike
Abu-Lughods world system (and more like the Islamic world crafted by
Marshall Hodgson), Evliyas pan-Ottoman world encompasses the circula-
tion of ideas and fashions as well as that of goods. It is, signicantly, a space
framed by warfare, conict, and pilgrimage. As Evliya travels from town to
fortress, connectivity is very much in evidence: the movement of goods, cap-
tives, or customs through Mediterranean networks of trade; the attachment
of fortress to port; and the attempt of centers to possess subjects, cities, and
resources. But Evliya has enlivened the view with visions of sexuality, fash-
ion, and ambivalent religiosity. Here Muslim and Christian space is dicult
to discern, as is allegiance to faith or monarch. Rulers and their governors
are clearly in evidence; but their ability to control those who move from
hillside to sea is limited and mutable. Te ghazi raiders submit only when
forced to do so; and the sea is not a clear divider of religious space.
Quite a different tale, one of contending nations and religious
blocks, is found in the itinerary of Muhammad as-Sar, secretary to the
Moroccan envoy to France who journeyed from Tetuan to Paris in I845.
Te era of Muslim seapower was long over, but notions of the seven climes
and the terrors of sea voyages were much the same as they had been in the
fourteenth century. As-Sar and companions boarded a steamship sent
22 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 37.1 / 2007
especially for them from France, and were provided with every sort of com-
fort. He tells his readers in his Travels that as he embarked on the voyage to
Marseille on the northern shore of the sea he reminded himself: Tere is no
doubt that he who travels by sea is nothing but a worm on a piece of wood, a
trie in the midst of a powerful creation. Te waters play about with him at
will, and no one but God can help him.
20
For as-Sar, the Mediterranean
served as a clear dividing line between the land of the believers and the land
of the indels, with God over all. Its southern shore was home and its north-
ern shore a place sought only out of duty. It was also a piece of geography to
be named and situated:
You should know that this sea is called the Sea of Rm [Rome]
because of the great number of countries of Rm along its shores,
especially to the north. It used to be called the Sea of Shm
because it ended in the land of Shm [Syria]; also [it was called]
the Middle Sea. But today it is known among most people of
Morocco as the Small Sea in contrast to the Surrounding [Sea],
which we call the Great Sea. It being in the narrow opening
between Tangier and Tarifa . . . [and] has no other outlet to the
Surrounding Sea than this. Te straits are in the fourth zone
[iqlm]. (Travels, 79 80)
Rm was the land of the Christians, but also the space of successive
empires: Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman. Te fact that the Mediterranean
had become the Small Sea for Morocco suggests a sense of evolving peri-
odization with a shift in attention to the broader contexts of the Atlantic
Ocean and Atlantic empires.
Te Mediterranean was also a period of interim travel between
land-based itineraries. Te traveler approached it unwillingly even when the
accommodations were ne.
for four days we traveled in the greatest comfort and luxury. Some-
times the waves lifted us up; at other times when the wind subsided
and the weather became pleasant, they set us down. As the distance
grew shorter our joy increased, for we were in dread of the terrors
of the sea and our voyage was in the month of December. But god
kept us safe from its trickery, although each of us received a share of
its motion. . . . [when we anchored] Our insides settled down and
our excitement abated; each of us regained vitality, our dizziness
stopped, and we returned to life. (Travels, 85 86)
Brummett / Visions of the Mediterranean 23
Te sea voyage (as in Ibn Battutas litany of the sea) is a trial, a suspension of
life, and an endeavor that aects ones health and draws one closer to God.
What is important is the destination and the fact that one arrives safely. For
as-Sar, the Mediterranean also represented a technological and cultural
divide. Once in France, he assessed Moroccos Mediterranean rival in terms
of its power, its cultural modes, its technology, and its failures of faith. He
marveled at the industry of Parisian businesswomen, the productive capacity
of French printing presses, and the fearsome repower of the French navy,
which allowed France to project its power into the sea. He expressed relief
that he would return home where dinners were less tedious and faith more
abiding. But rst he had to endure another seacrossing, a perilous space that
only partially divided one state, one king, and one people from another.
As-Sars Mediterranean presumes a confrontation between Muslim and
Christian worlds, but not one that takes place in the historiographic space
dened by the designations East and West. Rather it is a confrontation
of power, polity, and culture which juxtaposes South and North across a sea
space which includes both Mediterranean and Atlantic.
The Mediterranean in maps
Such travel narratives are intimately related to another type of text, the
map a purposefully visual crafting and circumscribing of space. Tus the
itinerary of the traveler (a list of places ordered according to stopping or
looking places) translates into an isolario or a map sheet, with places ordered,
squeezed, and realigned to serve the order and vision of the journey.
2I
In the
isolario, each island is a step in a journey, for example that from Venice
to Constantinople. Each step may be accompanied by a description that
includes goods produced, distance to the next port of call, and an indica-
tion of the sovereign power that controls the space. In the legends of maps
(or in the texts surrounding them), noted travelers and historians are cited
as authorities to make the maps more authoritative and more marketable.
Within this visual matrix, the points of departure and arrival, the modes of
seeing, and the rationales for seeing may all be revealed. Te familiar layers
of history, the logistics of travel, the claims of monarchs, and the exigencies
of pilgrimage and war shape the map just as do the sciences of measurement
and the experiences of the witness observer.
Maps, as the early modern era progressed, evolved in their tech-
nologies of measurement, but there was no simple progression toward the
scientically accurate.
22
Maps collapsed time, layered histories without
24 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 37.1 / 2007
regard for ground-level political realities, and aunted scientic depictions
in favor of impressionistic ones that better conveyed the messages desired
by states, cartographers, and consumers.
23
From the early sixteenth century
to the later eighteenth century maps changed their conventions of naming,
increasingly depicted borders and bounded sovereign states, and adopted the
ethnographic vignette to portray the peoples inhabiting the spaces. But the
map remained a manifestation of history and imagination as well as of sci-
ence and function.
24
It showed the Mediterranean as a space possessed and
as a space that escaped possession. Like the Mediterranean of Ibn Khaldun,
the Mediterranean of early modern maps could be imagined as a whole, a sea
embedded in and crossing through the climes of the known world. But more
often it was a sea divided, a set of fragments serving a variety of objectives.
Te Mediterranean is the sea in Piri Reiss famous early-sixteenth-
century Ottoman atlas, Kitab- Bahriye (Book of the Sea); it is the central sea,
the White Sea that on which the mariners of the one empire sail and navi-
gate.
25
A later manuscript edition of the atlas, which was reproduced many
times, displays the Mediterranean in a two-page spread, verso and recto of
an open book, the center of a world which has seas at its edges, and one
sea at its center (see g. I).
26
Like the Mediterranean described by Ibn Khal-
dun, this central sea has connecting seas, southern and eastern edges, and an
irregular mass of land that lies on top of it. It is illuminated, decorated with
intersecting lines and compass rosettes, and devoid of a legend (its legend
key has not been lled in). Te Mediterranean on these pages is marked by
islands and domains (memalik) but not by peoples or cultures.
27
Te map
suggests unied physical and sovereign space but leaves the boundaries to
the imagination or knowledge of the viewer.
Most of Te Book of the Sea, however, is devoted to the pieces of
a journey, a set of coastal itineraries by which ships moved from one port
or island to the next, stopping periodically to secure fresh water or to load
and unload goods. Tis Mediterranean consists of connected, traversable
spaces, starting with Istanbul and moving around the sea in a counterclock-
wise direction. Te drawing of those spaces is both celebratory of the world-
protecting power of the Ottoman sultan, and pragmatic, designed to pro-
vide concrete images of navigable and nonnavigable space.
Beyond the images of a sea spread across both pages of an open
manuscript book, or of a segmented journey around its coasts, the Mediter-
ranean was mapped into its parts: the Aegean, the Adriatic, the eastern end,
the southern shores. From the sea one viewed coasts or ports, with their ban-
ners and fortications. In the sea were islands; and the Mediterranean was
Brummett / Visions of the Mediterranean 25
the sometimes named and sometimes anonymous context for these lands
surrounded by water. Beyond the island, the mapped sea led o the page
to unseen destinations whose distances from the island were sometimes
marked, sometimes not.
In wider perspectives, the Mediterranean was shown as a segment
of the whole sea, occupying two sides or one corner of the map. It displayed
the lands (and sovereignties) adjacent to it and the eets sailing in its midst.
Tese ships might be decorative, or suggestive of encounters, historic or
imagined. Tey represented the sovereign ambitions and commercial actions
of various lords. Such a map is Lafreris I570 chart entitled, Depiction of
the Island of Cyprus, with the limits of Caramania, Syria, Judea, and Egypt
(see g. 2).
28
Tis map shows the eastern end of the Mediterranean, a wide
expanse of sea surrounded on three sides by land. Tese surrounding lands,
from Anatolia to Egypt, are not, however, the focus of the map. Te sea is a
canvas upon which an island, a eet, and a legend are displayed. Te legend
provides the position, ecology, and demographics of the island of Cyprus: its
weather, produce, circuit in miles, number of inhabitants. Using the scale
of miles, the legend informs the reader, one can see its situation and the
distance to many ports and maritime places of Caramania, Syria, Judea,
and Egypt, such as Tripoli of Syria, Jaa, and Alexandria. It is the relative
location of Cyprus, then (or, beyond that, its connectivity), which is more
signicant than the image of the island itself.
Arrayed before the island, to the south and west, is a large eet.
Various types of ship are indicated as is the location of the commanders ves-
sel. Te viewer is invited to imagine the formidable Venetian eet, depicted
much larger than scale, sailing in its accustomed order, before Cyprus, a
Venetian possession. No naval combat is depicted, as it is in news-maps of
the time, and no enemy is designated; but warfare is implicit. Te undes-
ignated enemy is the Ottoman state, which, by early January of I570, had
made public its intentions to take Cyprus.
29
While there is no evidence of
Ottoman sovereignty on this map, the surrounding lands are almost entirely
Ottoman space. Lafreris image of a fruitful island, formidable eet, and
implied threat may have been designed to bolster morale or engender sup-
port for the defense of the island in the Mediterranean Christian world. His
map declared Cyprus as a possession of Venice. Nonetheless the Ottomans
seized the island that same year and, in Venice, maps indicating posses-
sion were transformed into images of tragedy and loss. For the Ottomans,
however, the victory cemented the position of the sultan as hegemon of the
eastern Mediterranean.
30
Tus Lafreris map serves as a vision of a region, a
26 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 37.1 / 2007
Brummett / Visions of the Mediterranean 27
F
i
g
u
r
e

I
.
P
i
r
i

R
e
i
s
,

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i
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i
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.

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a
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r
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u
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u
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M
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,

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.
28 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 37.1 / 2007
Brummett / Visions of the Mediterranean 29
warning, and a memento of a lost colony.
Te produce of Cyprus and the distances
to Mediterranean ports remained the
same; only the hegemon had changed.
Te divided Mediterranean was
sacred space as well as war space in the
maps of the early modern era. Across that
space, layers of history were displayed,
invoked there for the traveler and for
the reader of travel literature. Jerusalem,
holy city of the Abrahamic faiths, was a
primary node in this layering of history.
Indelibly connected to the inner sea, it
was the end-point for a journey of pil-
grimage that crossed the Mediterranean
or traversed its surrounding lands. The
Englishman Tomas Fuller (an Anglican
clergyman), in his I639 work Historie of
the Holy Warre, illustrated this vision of
the Mediterranean.
3I
For Fuller, the Med-
iterranean was the site of a centuries-long
battle between Christian kings and the
Turks for possession of the Holy Land.
Saladin is thus a Turk, and his seizing of
Jerusalem in II87 is placed in a direct con-
tinuum with the Ottoman conquest of
that city in I5I6.
32
In his own time, Fuller
warned, access to Jerusalem was blocked
or impeded by a Levant infested with
Turks. Christendom, he advised, must not
Figure 2.
Antonio Lafreri, Disegno de
lIsola di Cypro con li Con-
ni della Caramania, Soria,
Giudea et Egitta (Rome,
I570). British Library Maps
C.7.e.2.(I7). By permission of
the British Library, London.
30 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 37.1 / 2007
Figure 3.
Tomas Fuller, Te Historie of
the Holy Warre, insert map
of Palestine (I639). Folger
Shakespeare Library, STC II464,

copy I. By Permission of the
Folger Shakespeare Library,
Washington, D.C.
Brummett / Visions of the Mediterranean 31
rest until those Turks were expelled from the
Holy Land and the Christian pilgrims again in
possession of their sacred sites instead of sub-
ject to the humiliations and abuses imposed by
Jerusalems indel Muslim overlords.
Te path to the Holy Land in Fullers
history is both imagined and real. Te fron-
tispiece of his book portrays the pilgrimage
iconographically on a single page, collapsing
the journey from Europe (depicted as the
Church) to Jerusalem (embodied in the Tem-
ple of the Sepulcher) into a short but hazard-
ous overland route.
33
Pilgrims face death in the
form of violent Turks, fearful disease, and an
avenging angel. It is the striving and the des-
tination that are important in this map. Inside
Fullers history, however, one nds a dierent
type of map, one depicting a tranquil Pales-
tine at the eastern end of the Mediterranean
(see g. 3). Te sea that washes this Holy Land
is called Te Syrian Phenician or Mediterra-
nean Sea, thus evoking both region and his-
tory. Te waters a little further to the west are
labeled Te Egyptian Sea, suggesting that
the Mediterranean is divided into segments
according to the identity of nearby peoples or
lands. Neither the itinerary of the pilgrims nor
the dangers they face, nor Jerusalems Muslim
rulers are envisioned here, just the destination,
a Mediterranean destination.
In Historie of the Holy Warre, however,
Fuller does characterize the Ottoman overlords
of Palestine and elements of what one could
call the microecology of Jerusalem.
Good guard is kept about the citie,
and no Christians with weapons suf-
fered to enter. But the deepest ditch
to defend Jerusalem from the West-
32 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 37.1 / 2007
ern Christians, is the remotenesse of it; and the strongest wall to
fense it, is the Turkish Empire compassing it round about. . . .
Te [Padre] Guardian farmeth the Sepulchre of the Turk at a
yearly rent: and the Turks which reap no benet by Christs death,
receive much prot by his buriall; and not content with their
yearly rent, squeeze the Friars here on all occasions, making them
pay large summes for little oenses. (Historie, 276)
Jerusalem is thus embedded in the Ottoman Empire, a small, contained
economic system in which pilgrim visitors and resident Christian religious
orders serve to ll the coers of the sultan.
Beyond Jerusalem, the Ottomans rule a multicontinental empire,
one that is Mediterranean and more than Mediterranean.
Te Turkish Empire is the greatest and best-compacted (not
excepting the Romane it self in the height thereof ) that the sunne
ever saw. Take sea and land together (as bones and esh make
up one bodie) and from Buda in West to Tauris in the east, it
stretcheth about three thousand miles: little lesse is the extent
thereof North and South. It lieth in the heart of the world, like a
bold champion bidding deance to all his borderers, command-
ing the most fruitfull countreys of Europe, Asia, and Africa: Only
America (not more happie in her rich mines then in her remote-
nesse) lieth free from the reach thereof. . . . Nor must we forget
the Pirates of Tunis and Algier; which are Turks and no Turks:
Sometimes the Grand Signor disclaimeth, renounceth and casteth
them o to stand upon their own bottom; as when those Chris-
tian Princes which are confederate with him, complain to him of
the wrongs those sea robbers have done them. But though he sen-
deth them out to seek their own meat, he can clock them under
his wings. (Historie, 282 83)
In these passages, the Ottoman Empire is a Mediterranean empire, span-
ning three continents. (America is the Western other, too far away either
to be threatened or enmeshed in the struggle for the Holy Land.) As regards
possession of the inland sea, the author links the Turks of the eastern
Mediterranean to those of the western. Te sea is coincident with the heart
of the world that the Ottomans rule; and its borderers must pay attention
both to the empires imperial might and to the piratic commanders that it
Brummett / Visions of the Mediterranean 33
employs. Tese pirates of the North African city-states extend the power of
empire, though they are not truly subordinated to the Ottomans. Fullers
Turks and no Turks, are reminiscent of Evliyas Adriatic indels who do
not like to be called indels; their identity is ambiguous, and their allegiance
to any state is called into question. Tey may be given religious or ethnic
tags; but they fail to conform to those labels. Like Evliyas travel narrative,
Fullers description of the history of the Holy Land is multidimensional. It
highlights empire, faith, the ambiguity of identity, the limits of sovereign
authority at sea, and the fragility of dividing lines based only on religion.
Sovereignty and the dividing lines between peoples and regions are
also the subject of a later English map produced by William Berry in I680,
and entitled Asia, Divided into Its Principall Regions (see g. 4).
34
Tis is a
secular map, not preoccupied with pilgrims or the Christian-Muslim divide.
But even in this map, printed at a time when European cartography was
xing state borders, the edge of Europe and the ownership of the Medi-
terranean Sea remain ambiguous. Berrys map shows the Mediterranean in
the upper left-hand corner, an arm of water dividing a mostly blank Part of
Figure 4.
William Berry, Asia Divided
into Its Principall Regions
(London, I680). Newberry

Library, Ayer I35 B48. Courtesy
of Te Newberry Library,
Chicago.
34 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 37.1 / 2007
Europe from Asia. Its western end is cut o. In that same corner, the map is
marked with an elaborate cartouche, the most visible elements of which are
the words Asia, and Charles II, the English king to whom Berry dedi-
cated the map. So, to whom do Asia and the Mediterranean belong? Not,
apparently, to the Ottoman Empire which still controlled most of the Medi-
terranean coasts depicted in the map. Rather the empire has been divided
(and reduced) into Anatolia, now called Turkey in Asia, and the Greek
and Balkan peninsula, labeled Turkey in Europe.
Tis cartographic product provides ample material for a discussion
of the emblems of empire; but I include it here to note, rather, the forms of
attachment and division that early modern maps might present. In them,
the Mediterranean could be in the east or the west. It could be one body
of water, among others attached to Empires, Monarchies, Kingdoms, and
States, the entities noted in Berrys cartouche. It could also be the stage
for ethnographic mapping of peoples and cities; the centerpiece for con-
icts over belief, authority and land; or one element of the reach of empires
(whether those empires were Roman, Ottoman, or English). Such maps pro-
vide visual representations of the lands, seas, hegemons, and itineraries pre-
sented in accompanying narrative texts.
35
Tey allocate and conne space,
and label it as owned, contested, and infused with historical or religious
signicance. Tey reveal, conceal, or obfuscate sovereign space, by project-
ing power where it does not exist, neglecting it where it does, or privileging
the sovereigns of the past over those of the present.
Tis set of maps and travel accounts suggests a classication for the
Mediterranean in what we might call the long early modern (or the eroding
medieval) era, an era extending at least from the thirteenth to the eigh-
teenth century.
36
Te Mediterranean is a sea situated in history and in geo-
graphic space. It is marked by cities and fortresses, with people, ideas, and
goods circulating among them. It is indelibly war space and sacred space,
though its representations, connections, and identities transcend claims of
sovereignty and faith. Christians and Muslims seem to inhabit sides of the
sea, but those sides are fragmented, unreliable, and do not divide comfort-
ably into East and West or North and South. Te Mediterranean is mapped
and narrated in terms of travel (employing a set of itineraries that transcend
time), and in terms of possession (marked by ships, ports, fortresses, shrines,
occupations, customs, the names of kings, and the interventions of gods). It
is mapped through its major cities, which capture space and reshape it to suit
the imagining of travel, the rhetorics of state, and the demands of faith-based
allegiances. Te Mediterranean can be envisioned as a whole, but is more
Brummett / Visions of the Mediterranean 35
readily presented as divided into its parts. In those partial views, the sea may
seem to wash far into its surrounding lands, attached to Europe, Christen-
dom, Egypt, Islam, Mecca, or Rome. Or it may simply form a frontier along
the coasts, measuring space in journeys from port to island, from seas edge
to the object of pilgrimage, or from the point at which goods are seized to the
point at which they are fenced. Te Mediterranean is as European, African,
or Asian as its mapmakers and narrators want to make it through their craft-
ing of regions, city centers, itineraries, sovereignties, and historic pasts. Tere
is an Ottoman Mediterranean, in the long early modern era, a power sphere
for which Anatolia, North Africa, and the Graeco-Balkan Peninsula are key,
linked regions. Its itineraries lead to and from Istanbul, Cairo, and parts east
and west. It is identied in maps, sometimes directly, sometimes by allusion,
and sometimes not at all, depending on cartographic convention, and on the
ideologies and intentions of the mapmakers and their patrons.
Modern historiographic frames and
the early modern Mediterranean
Te mapmakers and travelers of the long early modern Mediterranean world
crafted war space, commercial space, and sacred space in terms of historically
layered itinerary, possession, and connectivity. Tose terms are reected in
contemporary historiography, although the notion of war space has been
muted, the visuality of narrative and map has often been lost in historio-
graphic translation, and the Muslim-Christian divide has been rendered too
literally. Modern scholarship has crafted paradigms of the inland sea as the
full and the empty, the united and the divided, debating how and if the
region can be seen as a whole.
37
Braudels master narrative, Te Mediter-
ranean, and Horden and Purcells meganarrative, Te Corrupting Sea, have
in the last half-century set the tone for those debates through their attempts
to dene the Mediterranean as a unit, for a century, or for three thousand
years. Other scholars, like Marshall Hodgson, in Te Venture of Islam, have
made the Mediterranean a space across which cultures and cultural arti-
facts diuse, defying the boundaries of state and empire. Still others, such as
Janet Abu-Lughod, in Before European Hegemony, have privileged the Medi-
terranean in their assessments of trade routes and commodities.
Trade, or more broadly exchange in all its ramications, remains
the central theme in work produced on the Mediterranean. Beyond that,
there are themes or emphases in the contemporary historiography of the
Mediterranean that one might designate as relatively new: Mediterranean
36 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 37.1 / 2007
identities, migration studies, seas in global context, approaches to travel lit-
erature that highlight modes of cultural dierentiation or spaces of trans-
gressive sexuality. In the basic strands of its conceptualization, however, the
historiography still pursues well-worn tracks. It consists, more or less, of
the following overlapping categories: grand attempts at framing and lling
in the Mediterranean as a coherent region; essays (philosophic, historical,
anthropological, economic, literary) on aspects of the Mediterranean world;
historical analyses of trade, travel, sovereignty, empires, nations, relations,
commodities, societies, language, and culture in some part or parts of the
Mediterranean world; city studies; maritime history; and documentary stud-
ies (including those for which the documents are not texts).
The Mediterranean in documentary studies is seen through its
fragments its communal relations, its goods, and its trading nations, all
of which are often more important than the spaces themselves.
38
Notable
among them is the work of S. D. Goitein on the Cairo Geniza documents,
which situates medieval (tenth- through thirteenth-century) Levantine Jew-
ish communities in the Mediterranean as primary setting.
39
Goiteins explo-
ration of this rich documentary source assembles a variety of themes (includ-
ing merchant diasporas, a world economy, daily life, and intercommunal
interaction), which are emblematic of the modes by which the regions archi-
val resources have been approached and which also mirror major themes of
early modern historiography. Te Mediterranean (or its smaller but equally
amorphous segment, the Levant) in these sources serves as a stage for
examinations of the conduct of trade; the writing of contracts; the inter-
actions and modes of existence of Jews, Christians, and Muslims (among
others); and the performance of rituals associated with peoples, goods, and
authorities. On this stage collections of documents or essays based on those
collections divide the Mediterranean into eras; sovereignties; ideologies; or
commercial acts, organs, and groups. Society, power, and intellectual net-
works are addressed, but trade is the primary prism through which visions
called Mediterranean are crafted.
40
Numerous other documentary works
use the overlapping categories of intercommunal or East-West relations as
the frame for their assessments of Mediterranean political, sociocultural,
and economic relations.
4I
In those assessments, the Christian-Muslim (and
Jewish) divides may either be privileged or subordinated to transcommunal
factors.
42

Beyond these Mediterranean fragments, there is a unied, more
enduring Mediterranean, though one still infused with communal identities
and notions of possession. Fernand Braudel crammed the Mediterranean
Brummett / Visions of the Mediterranean 37
space full of occupations, material culture, and mentalits to such an extent
and in such a way that the debate over his interpretation has been abun-
dant and ongoing. Te literature on his contribution and its implications is
vast. Elizabeth Clark, for example, has noted that, In a move calculated to
illustrate the demise of event history, Braudel moved the event of Philip IIs
death to the concluding pages of Te Mediterranean; the history of kings
was here displaced by the history of the sea.
43
Braudel did write a history of
the sea, dividing the Mediterranean into component parts (the Archipelago,
the Adriatic, the narrow seas, etc.) in ways that echo the divisions of early
modern cartography.
44
Tat said, the history of kings (or, for that matter, the
history of the Ottoman Empire) is hardly absent from Braudels Mediterra-
nean. In fact, the inland sea, in volume two of his work, is a ground for the
interplay of imperial power politics. Of the battle of Lepanto in I57I, Braudel
wrote that beneath the surface of events we shall nd that the ripples from
Lepanto spread silently, inconspicuously, far and wide. Te spell of Turkish
supremacy had been broken.
45
Te identity of the hegemon and the divi-
sion of the Mediterranean into Christian and Muslim space are, thus, key
elements he discerns beneath the surface of events. Kings mobilized eets,
humiliated foes, conducted negotiations, set policy, and (whether Hapsburg
or Ottoman) taxed the two massive invasions of Atlantic shipping into the
Mediterranean between I450 I552 and after I572 73.
46
Tose same kings
claimed, divided, and mapped the lands and the seas. Philip II, after all, was
famous for sponsoring the mapping of Spain, by Pedro de Esquivel and a
team of cartographers, in the Escorial Atlas, which was completed around
I580.
47
Tat act of patronage (like Charles IIs patronage of maps such as
Berrys Asia Divided a century later in I680) was a project at once imperial,
national, and Mediterranean.
Horden and Purcell, in some ways, may be said to have expanded
upon (as well as transformed) Braudels project, theorizing a type of Mediter-
ranean unity that is apparent in an era stretching at least from the archaic to
the medieval.
48
Teir work, Te Corrupting Sea, does not directly attend to
the early modern era, although it projects its analyses into that time frame.
49

Its enormous sweep of time is not undierentiated, but it does serve to sub-
merge, mute, and homogenize empires, nations, and intellectual, religious,
or political markers of time. Teir Mediterranean exceptionalism is geo-
graphical rather than imperial-attitudinal. Spatially, the authors have cre-
ated a kaleidoscopic (their term) landscape of microecologies, in which
they understate the importance of towns and highlight exchange across
localities. Interestingly, their four case studies of larger, denite places, the
38 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 37.1 / 2007
Biqa in Syria, South Etruria, Cyrenaica, and Melos, conne the Mediterra-
nean to its eastern two-thirds.
50
Tey argue that the distinctiveness of the
Mediterranean results . . . from the paradoxical coexistence of a milieu of
relatively easy seaborne communications with a quite unusually fragmented
topography of microregions in the seas coastlands and islands.
5I
Seaborne
communication thus trumps seaborne power, while the cities so crucial to
early modern maps and the cultural production so critical to early modern
travelers is muted. Te authors thus provide some of the ingredients of a
distinctively Mediterranean sense of place, through highlighting the eco-
logical while avoiding the exercise of power.
52
Tey have captured the sense
of movement and mutability within contained spaces, but they do not proj-
ect, as maps do, the visuality of the Mediterranean world what it looks
like.
53

Unlike Horden and Purcell, Marshall Hodgson did not write a his-
tory of the Mediterranean. And yet, in his synthesizing, comparative cul-
tural history of Islamic civilization, Hodgson provided an important set
of paradigms by which the Mediterranean can be measured. Bridging the
gap between world and regional history, the author of Te Venture of Islam
succeeded in proposing a spatial and cultural frame (the Afro-Eurasian
oikumene) in which to situate a Mediterranean that faced eastwards.
54
As
in the work of Horden and Purcell, connectivity is inherent in this concep-
tualization. Hodgsons oikumene was a historically developing complex in
which all the peoples involved came to be historically inter-related to some
degree, tied into the trade network and subject to at least the indirect impact
of the historical developments that arose in the citied regions in the older
agricultural areas.
55
As a result of his primary focus on this vast cultural
complex, it is the citied regions that are of particular interest to Hodg-
son. His concentration on the urban and the literate distinguishes his model
from that of Horden and Purcell and approximates it to the constructions
of Ibn Khaldun, Ibn Battuta, Evliya elebi, and to our early modern maps.

Hodgson employs the Mediterranean (without alluding to it) as one end of
the oikumene and one of a series of world centers. He maps it in terms of its
eastern connections. Islamdom is the central entity, although its borders are
ill-dened. Hodgson was an early advocate of the notion of the porosity of
borders (intellectual, literary, cultural, and economic).
In terms of periodization, Hodgson, Horden, and Purcell all see the
Mediterranean era ending with a technical modern age sometime around
the eighteenth or nineteenth century.
56
Andr Raymond, in his classic study
of Cairo, moved that ending into the twentieth century, as travellers ceased
Brummett / Visions of the Mediterranean 39
to arrive at Alexandria by sea, and as Egyptian nationalism transformed
colonial society.
57
For Braudel, however, the Mediterranean lingered on in
the local, permanent, unchanging and much repeated features of Mediter-
ranean history with which he was concerned:
Tey are to be found unchanged in Mediterranean life today:
one may stumble across them in a journey, or in the books of
Gabriel Audisio, Jean Giono, Carlo Levi, Lawrence Durrell or
Andr Chamson. All western writers who have at some time in
their lives encountered the Mediterranean, have been struck with
its historical or rather timeless character. Like Audisio and Dur-
rell, I believe that antiquity lives on round todays Mediterranean
shores.
58
World historians, with their models of long economic cycles, have
generally dispensed with both the journey and the literature invoked by
Braudel.

Sometimes preserving a division of the Mediterranean into histori-
cal power spheres, they have also tended to make individual hegemons irrel-
evant. Because the world historical project has been at pains to distance itself
both from civilizational models and from a Eurocentric vision of the world, it
has, to a large degree, downplayed an emphasis on the Mediterranean.
59
Te
inland sea has not, for example, been seized upon as an African sea in the
course of a reconguration of that continents role in world history, despite
the gauntlet thrown by Martin Bernal.
60
World history has homogenized
the Mediterranean space, globalizing it, detaching it from Europe, subordi-
nating culture to economy, and integrating the sea into world regions, cores,
circuits of trade, or even slivers of the universe. It has collapsed temporal
frames and highlighted the ecological over the civilizational. In a historio-
graphic discourse where grand economic systems, intracultural technology
transfer, and contact with others of various sorts have been employed in
part to break down a triumphalist Western civilizational narrative, the dimi-
nution of the Mediterranean is not, perhaps, surprising.
6I
In a global sense,
it is seen as having been, historiographically, too big for its britches. But
even in world historical models, the notion of the Mediterranean region as
divided into Muslim and Christian halves is an enduring one. Tat division
reects both historic realities and conventions of narrative and cartographic
representation.
World history has mapped the Mediterranean in ways that violate
and transcend divisions based on the hegemony of continent, commune,
40 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 37.1 / 2007
or culture. Andre Gunder Frank, argues, for example, challenging both
Wallerstein and Braudel, that early modern history was shaped by a long
since operational world economy and not just by the expansion of a Euro-
pean world-system.
62
Frank does not speak of the Mediterranean per se (his
relevant regional units being Europe and West Asia); and when he maps
the sea, it is in broad geographic contexts. His Mediterranean, for the early
modern era, appears as a channel for trade coming from the Atlantic world
and moving to East Africa and South Asia.
63
Interestingly, Franks maps of
trade routes of the Atlantic region (I500 I800) and the Afro-West Asian
region (I400 I800) both emphasize the eastern rather than the western
Mediterranean. In the Atlantic map, routes bearing silver and a long list of
other commodities pass through the inland sea (just west of Italy) or over-
land along its northeastern edge, linking western Europe through the Red
Sea and Persian Gulf to points east (see g. 5). In the latter map, those same
goods move in two lines, one across the eastern Mediterranean and the other
across Anatolia, connecting western Europe to West Asia, East Africa, and
Figure 5.
From Andre Gunder Frank,
ReOrient: Global Economy
in the Asian Age (Berkeley:

University of California Press,
I998), 68. Courtesy of the Regents
of the University of California.
Brummett / Visions of the Mediterranean 41
India (see g. 6). Tis map suggests the possibility of imagining the Medi-
terranean as an annex of the Indian Ocean.
Religion, civilization, and the specicity of borders play little or
no role in Franks general paradigm. His insistence on the connectedness
of the Mediterranean eastwards echoes Hodgson. Like Braudel, however,
when it comes to the Ottoman Empire, both power spheres and the Mus-
lim-Christian divide appear in Franks work: Ottoman Muslims fought,
indeed sought to displace, the Christian Europeans in the Balkans and the
Mediterranean where economic plums were to be picked.
64
Religion thus
creeps back in as a divider of peoples for whom the Mediterranean is an
object in the contest for power.
Somewhat more manageable (and more telling in terms of peri-
odization) than Gunder Franks economic world model is that of Janet
Figure 6.
From Andre Gunder Frank,
ReOrient, 76. Courtesy of the

Regents of the University of
California.
42 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 37.1 / 2007
Abu-Lughods seminal work, Before European Hegemony: Te World Sys-
tem, A.D. I250 I350. She proposes the existence of a world system in the
thirteenth century based on a set of eight linked (rather than hierarchical)
regional economic systems, interacting through circuits of trade based on
urban entrepots (see g. 7).
65
Te eight subsystems, spanning the territory
from Bruges to Hangchow, in turn, can be grouped into three larger cir-
cuits the western European, the Middle Eastern, and the Far Eastern.
66

Te Mediterranean subsystem encircles most of the Mediterranean as well
as the Black Sea. Its urban centers (Genoa, Venice, Constantinople, Caa,
Alexandria, and Cairo) are critical, just as they are in Hodgson or in medi-
eval and early modern Mediterranean cartographic schemes.
Abu-Lughod is not particularly interested in the details of travel, sea
sagas, or material culture. Like much of the documentary work on the Med-
iterranean, hers is focused on cities, routes, and economies of trade. Hence
one does not see war space, sacred space, the countryside, or even much of
the personnel of commerce in her study. Nor is the Muslim-Christian divide
a primary factor in this division of space. Visually, on Abu-Lughods map,
Figure 7.
From Janet L. Abu-Lughod,
Before European Hegemony:
Te World System, a.o.
I250 I350 (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, I989), g. I.
Courtesy of Oxford University
Press.
Brummett / Visions of the Mediterranean 43
the Mediterranean lies at one end of the world system, and its circuit is rela-
tively small. Nonetheless, in her analysis, the Mediterranean is the highly
active connector between the European and Middle Eastern systems.
67
Tis
is the space that became the Ottoman Empire, what Tomas Fuller, in his
Historie of the Holy Warre, called the heart of the world. It preserves the
eastern orientation that is often subordinated to the Atlantic interface and
the western gaze once one crosses the historiographic divide of I500.
68
While Abu-Lughods concentration on commerce violates the stric-
tures of the Muslim-Christian divide, other world history paradigms nd
those bonds dicult to escape. See for example, Martin Lewis and Karen
Wigen, Te Myth of Continents.
69
Te authors, like Horden and Purcell,
are interested in connectivity, though they are dealing in mega- and not
microregions. Tey are also attempting, admirably, to contend with racial
and colonial hierarchies of dierence and to reject the invisibility of cul-
tural entities that occurs in models such as those of Gunder Frank and Abu-
Lughod. In their enduring cultural regions scheme, however, religion is
the key cultural element. Te Mediterranean thus becomes a boundary
region or borderland zone (with hybrid culture), split north to south and east
to west (through the Adriatic). Islam and its European Christian other
(later European colonial other) divide the Mediterranean. Te Ottoman
Empire, a power sphere which created its own culture, cannot be accommo-
dated in this schema.

Dividing and envisioning space: Issues and options
Positioning contemporary historiographies alongside the maps and travelers
accounts presented here, I see a set of representational issues. First, those his-
toriographic divisions of the post-Roman Mediterranean space which take
power spheres into account tend to isolate the Ottomans, or conne them
to the eastern end of the sea.
70
Second, while the world historical situating
of the Mediterranean in more global perspectives (Abu-Lughod and Gunder
Frank) tends to level the long early modern playing eld, diminishing the
hegemony of Europe, shifting connectivity eastwards, and making the
Ottomans only one economic power among many, it tends to wash out war
space and neglect sacred space, two critical elements of the early modern
visions of the Mediterranean treated here. Yet the concepts of war space and
sacred space provide an alternative to the simple division of the Mediter-
ranean into Muslim and Christian blocks. Tird, approaches which either
present the Mediterranean as a unit, divide it into its economic fragments, or
44 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 37.1 / 2007
place it in global perspective often abjure the visuality that characterizes the
travel accounts and maps of the era in question.
Regarding the rst point, concepts of historical possession struc-
ture the ways in which the Mediterranean region is divided, allocating space
according to presumed political or cultural anities and spheres of inu-
ence. If one looks at the scholarly construction of Mediterranean space, the
notions of two ends or a separate southern sphere are apparent, as is the
default status of European lands as necessarily (or quintessentially) Mediter-
ranean. A basic Mediterranean unit is forged around the Roman Empire;
but when that unit collapses, Spain, North Africa, and Anatolia each seem
to function independently. Spain is attached to the Atlantic, and North
Africa to Mecca, while Anatolia loses its ancient Greek and Roman per-
sona and oats in an uncomfortable isolation, not quite Europe, not quite
the Middle East. North Africa is detached and labeled Muslim, with
the Maghrib and Egypt given separate identities but no territorial clarity.
7I

Egypt maintains an aura of uniqueness, despite its history as a part of larger,
regional political entities like the Ottoman Empire; and, as Roger Bagnall
has suggested, Egypt is often singularly invisible in discussions and con-
structions of the Mediterranean.
72
Te Maghrib, for the medieval period,
stands either as an autonomous Muslim foothold at the western end of the
sea, or as the southern end of a political and cultural Moroccan/Spanish
condominium. For the early modern period, the Maghrib is transformed
into a new incarnation of Roman and medieval Barbary, a place confront-
ing Western Europeans with an alien continent, indel religion, and piratic
predation. And, across the Strait of Gibraltar, despite Braudel and the Medi-
terranean-spanning Hapsburg Empire, Spain seems to be indelibly attached
to the Atlantic and the possession of the Americas, a Mediterranean power
that has gone outside Mediterranean space.
73
Indeed, Ricardo Padrn, in his
exploration of cartography, literature, and empire in early modern Spain,
speaks of the Atlantic, in the writings of Gonzalo Fernndez de Oviedo
(I478 I557), as replacing the Mediterranean, a Spanish mare nostrum, with
the Strait of Magellan as a new barrier to transgress, equivalent to the old
Pillars of Hercules.
74
War space and sacred space, along with commercial space, are staples
of early modern representation of the Mediterranean. But the economic and
transcultural paradigms of some contemporary historiographic approaches
have tended to set aside one or both of those spaces in the course of the great
civilizational purge. Commerce takes place and economies take shape with-
out war and pilgrimage as central themes. Tose themes, however, are inher-
Brummett / Visions of the Mediterranean 45
ent in early modern itineraries and maps. Further, a concentration on war
and on sacred space exposes the complex nature of the Muslim-Christian
divide. For Ibn Khaldun, the Mediterranean is a sea that has changed hands
through conict and will do so again. Lafreris map of Cyprus (a Christian
space surrounded by a big, undesignated Muslim zone) depicts a possessed
commercial space, but the ships in its surrounding sea signify the ubiquitous
threat of war. Tomas Fullers mapping of the Mediterranean as a Muslim
possession, the bones of the Ottoman Empire, the sea that washes the
coast of Palestine, and an obstacle to be skirted on the hazardous path to the
Holy Land, demonstrates the complexities and variations of early modern
rhetorics of space. His Mediterranean is important as historical space and as
a buer zone bordering the preeminent sacred space which has become war
space and requires redemption through prayer and force of arms. Fullers
audience, by and large, will never visit the Holy Land; rather, they must wit-
ness its history and conjure its vision in their minds. Tat desire for pilgrim-
age and the inclination to witness sacred landscapes frame Fullers narrative.
Tese are powerful emotions; but they are invisible, as Wigen and Lewis
note, in historiographic constructions which privilege the economic.
Finally, the visuality of early modern maps and travel narratives is
also set aside in much contemporary historiography. Horden and Purcell,
for example, reject as a viable paradigm the marvelous beauty, fascinat-
ing romance, unique scenes and sacred associations touted by Lorenz in
his early-twentieth-century travel guide (as quoted at the beginning of this
essay). Tey do not entirely eschew visuality and the cultural tale; indeed
their text is laced with the visions of ancient and contemporary observers
who provide points of entrance into their microecologies.
75
But unlike the
tourist, Horden and Purcell tell us they wish to step a little aside from
what we have broadly identied as the Romantic tradition of Mediterranean
description, with its seductive but misleading imagery.
76
It is, however,
that very seductive but misleading imagery that forms the essence of early
modern mapping that and what Barbara Fuchs has called recirculating
past narratives.
77
Te travel narrative and the map restore that visuality
(and its layering of the past) in the process disarticulating simple regional
or religious divisions of the inland sea.
78
Tey oer us a chance to refo-
cus the study of the Mediterranean (back) onto texts, images, personalities,
communities of letters, the movement of ideas, and what might be called
the new Levantines shape shifters, the not-so-liminal crossers of frontiers,
those who move from one identity to another reecting or embodying the
porosity of physical, ethnolinguistic, religious, and political borders (drago-
46 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 37.1 / 2007
men, translators, converts, renegades).
79
In the process, borders are prob-
lematized and the divide between Christendom and Islam made more
diuse and mutable, as suggested in the travelogue of Evliya elebi.
80
Also,
the travel narrative and the map situate the Ottoman Empire in the heart
of the Mediterranean world as a land and seaborne imperial power. Its rule
spans the long early modern era, and its space houses the cities of Hodgsons
oikumene, from which both cultural inuence and military power emanate.
In that space numerous sacred sites, beyond the quintessential shared com-
munal space of Jerusalem, are situated; and numerous itineraries (spanning
Horden and Purcells or Franks millennia) trace their ways across, around,
along, or up from the shores of the Mediterranean. Piri Reis presented this
Mediterranean as a rhetorical construction of Ottoman power and space
in the atlas he prepared for the sultan. Like Horden and Purcell, having
envisioned the Mediterranean as a whole, he broke it down into the pieces
of its islands and coasts. It was a sea that one could sail all the way around,
sometimes facing west and sometimes facing east.

Notes
Te epigraph is from D. E. Lorenz, Te Mediterranean Traveller: A Handbook of Prac-
tical Information, 4th ed. (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, I9II), 9. Tis essay
is dedicated to Dr. John Voll, with admiration for his work in Islamic and world his-
tories. I am also grateful to Valeria Finucci and the journals anonymous reviewer for
their realignment of this essay.
I Tis juxtaposition derives from my discussions with Rob Williams, a graduate stu-
dent at the University of Tennessee specializing in the functioning of the boundaries
of China and Inner Asia. Sea and steppe, he notes, are both places of new loyalties,
hardships, and a nationhood of experience. I want to thank him for his assistance
with the research for this project.
2 Fernand Braudel, Te Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phil-
lip II, 2 vols., trans. Sin Reynolds (Berkeley: University of California Press, I995),
is of course the benchmark here, although Braudels work is less concerned with pin-
ning down Mediterranean borders than is the work of some later scholars. With this
text, as with other sources noted in this article, I have cited the English editions when
available.
3 Marshall Hodgson, Te Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civiliza-
tion, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, I974), vol. I, Te Classical Age of
Islam, I09 I0. Hodgson has provided an eloquent assessment of the terms (including
Levant, oikumene, and modern) of space and time by which the Mediterranean and
Islamic worlds have been divided (I:48 63).
Brummett / Visions of the Mediterranean 47
4 Palmira Brummett, Ottoman Seapower and Levantine Diplomacy in the Age of Discov-
ery (Albany: State University of New York Press, I994).
5 Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, Te Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterra-
nean History (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2000), 4. Tis work is envisioned by the
authors as the rst of two volumes.
6 Te orescence of Ottoman seapower is often depicted as temporary, prominent in
the early sixteenth century but then relinquished during the reign of Sleiman. Te
designations elephant and whale are taken from William Tompson; for a revi-
sion of this idea, see Palmira Brummett, Te Ottoman Empire, Venice, and the
Question of Enduring Rivalries, in Te Evolution of Great Power Rivalries, ed. Wil-
liam Tompson (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, I999), 225 53. See
also, Andrew Hess, Te Forgotten Frontier: A History of the Sixteenth-Century Ibero-
African Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, I978); and Kate Fleet, ed., Te
Ottomans and the Sea (Roma: Istituto per lOriente, 200I).
7 Braudel, Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World, I:II0 I2. Braudel wrote the
Ottomans into his history of the sea; they were both contenders for supremacy and an
obstacle to the movement of European traders into the Ottoman end of the Mediter-
ranean.
8 For alternatives, see Daniel Goman, Te Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), a general synthesis; Leila Fawaz et
al., eds., Modernity and Culture: From the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2002); or Abul-Rahim Abu Husayn, Te View
from Istanbul: Lebanon and the Druze Emirate in the Ottoman Chancery Documents,
I546 I7II (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004), which views the Levantine sea states through
the prism of Ottoman central administration.
9 For maritime history, see Frederic Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, I973); Alberto Tenenti, Piracy and the Decline of
Venice, I580 I6I5 (Berkeley: University of California Press, I967); John Guilmartin,
Gunpowder and Galleys: Changing Technology and Mediterranean Warfare at Sea in
the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, I980); and Lawrence
Mott, Sea Power in the Medieval Mediterranean: Te Catalan-Aragonese Fleet in the
War of the Sicilian Vespers (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003).
I0 For a late medieval version, see, for example, Claudius Ptolemy, Gographie de Ptolme:
traduction latine de Jacopo dAngiolo de Florence (Paris: Catala Frres, I926), plates
3 4 from folios 74v 75r of Paris, Bibliothque Nationale, MS lat. 4802 (ca. I469).
Of course Ptolemy begs the question of exactly what constitutes Western.
II See J. B. Harley, Te New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, ed. Paul
Laxton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 200I), 44, 67, 99, on the notion
of socially empty space.
I2 Ibn Khaldun, Te Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, trans. Franz Rosenthal,
ed. N. J. Dawood, 2nd ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, I967), 50;
further citations are given parenthetically in the text. On Ibn Khaldun, see M. Talbi,
Ibn Khaldn, Wal al-Dn Abd al-Rahman b. Muhammad b. Muhammad b. Ab
Bakr Muhammad b. al-Hasan, Encyclopedia of Islam, co-iox edition v.I.0 (Leiden:
Brill, I999). On Ptolemy and al-Idrs, respectively, see O. A. W. Dilke, Te Cul-
48 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 37.1 / 2007
mination of Greek Cartography in Ptolemy, in J. B. Harley and David Woodward,
eds. Te History of Cartography, vol. I, Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medi-
eval Europe and the Mediterranean (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, I987),
I77 200; and Gerald R. Tibbets, Te Balkh School of Geographers, in Te History
of Cartography, vol. 2, book I, Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian
Societies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, I992), I02, III, I42 43, I54 55 and
plate II.
I3 Often he dierentiates a port city from an inland one only by the brief statement that
it is on the coast. Ibn Battuta, Te Travels of Ibn Battta, A.D. I325 I354, trans. H.
A. R. Gibb, vol. I (New Delhi: Manoharla Publishers and the Hakluyt Society, I993),
83 85, on Acre, Tyre, Sidon, and Beirut. Te author does note that Acre was histori-
cally the harbor for the Franks in Syria, resembling the great city of Constantino-
ple. Further citations of this work are given parenthetically in the text.
I4 Ibid., I:27 28. Te conict between Muslim and Christian does reemerge when he
relates secondhand an account of a riot that ensued when the governor of Alexandria
favored Christian traders over Muslims.
I5 Evliya elebi, Seyahatname, quoted by Robert Danko, An Ottoman Mentality: Te
World of Evliya elebi (Leiden: Brill, 2004), I96. Further citations of the Seyahatname
from Dankos work are given parenthetically in the text.
I6 Evliya elebi, Evliya elebi in Albania and Adjacent Regions (Kosovo, Montenegro,
Ohrid), trans. and ed. Robert Danko and Robert Elsie (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 29,
5I 53. Further citations, noted as Albania, are given parenthetically in the text.
Tis vision of piracy can be compared to those found, for example, in Robert Davis,
Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary
Coast, and Italy, I500 I800 (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003);
and Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York:
Columbia University Press, I999). Te captivity narrative has become a quintessen-
tially Mediterranean form (often juxtaposed to New World captivities). It highlights
the Christian-Muslim divide, the ambiguities of race, and the mythology of the civi-
lized versus the barbarous.
I7 Evliya, Albania, 5I. Of the Montenegrin fortress of Budva he says, this has been in
the hands of the Venetian Franks from the very start.
I8 Tere is no consensus on whether the Mediterranean constitutes a coherent geo-
graphic and cultural zone where gender is the topic of analysis, although the notion
of a unifying patriarchy has helped subordinate distinctions based on religious dif-
ference. See Deniz Kandiyoti, Islam and Patriarchy: A Comparative Perspective,
in Nikki Keddie and Beth Baron, eds., Women in Middle Eastern History: Shift-
ing Boundaries of Sex and Gender (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, I99I),
23 44. Kandiyotis model insists that patriarchy not be made coincident with Islam.
For a perspective on Mediterranean masculinity, see Walter G. Andrews and Mehmet
Kalpakli, Te Age of Beloveds: Love and Beloved in Early-Modern Ottoman and Euro-
pean Culture and Society (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), 37. Setting
aside distinctions based on the Muslim-Christian divide, the authors argue that sexu-
ality (and, one might add, the satirical representation of sexuality) links literary com-
munities across Europe and Asia.
Brummett / Visions of the Mediterranean 49
I9 Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: Te World System, A.D. I250 I350
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, I989).
20 Muhammad as-Sar, Disorienting Encounters: Travels of a Moroccan Scholar in France
in I845 I846, trans. and ed. Susan Gilson Miller (Berkeley: University of California,
I992), 79; further citations, noted as Travels, are given in the text.
2I See Stephane Yerasimos, Les voyageurs dans lEmpire Ottoman (XIVe XVIe sicles):
bibliographie, itinraires et inventaire des lieux habits (Ankara: Socit turque dhis-
toire, I99I). Yerasimoss work is interesting because not only does it present biblio-
graphical information and details concerning translations, it delineates each travel
account as an itinerary (a list of cities, ports, monuments, monasteries, ruins, and
other sights, seen in a certain order).
22 Te most comprehensive treatment of cartography on the Mediterranean is found in
Harley and Woodward, History of Cartography. For a series of cartographic visions
of the Mediterranean, see Peter Whiteld, Te Charting of the Oceans: Ten Centu-
ries of Maritime Maps (London: British Library, I996), esp. 2I 3I, 52 53, 62 63,
86 87, 96 97. For cartography in its broader representational contexts, see Franc-
esca Fiorani, Te Marvel of Maps: Art, Cartography, and Politics in Renaissance Italy
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005); and Benjamin Schmidt, Innocence
Abroad: Te Dutch Imagination in the New World, I570 I670 (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 200I), 68 I84. Schmidts analysis treats Dutch imagery of
the New World, but his model could also be applied to the Mediterranean.
23 On sea charts and imperial cartography, see Alison Sandman, Mirroring the World:
Sea Charts, Navigation, and Territorial Claims in Sixteenth-Century Spain, in
Pamela Smith and Paula Findlen, eds., Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science,
and Art in Early Modern Europe (New York: Routledge, 2002), 83 I08.
24 For a treatment of these issues, see Palmira Brummett, Imagining the Early Mod-
ern Ottoman Space from Piri Reis to World History, in Virginia Aksan and Dan-
iel Goman, eds., Te Early Modern Ottomans: Remapping the Empire (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006), 24 67.
25 On Piri Reis and Ottoman mapmaking, see Svat Soucek, Piri Reis and Turkish Map-
making after Columbus: Te Khalili Portolan Atlas (London: Nour Foundation, I996);
also, Ahmet Karamustafa, Introduction to Ottoman Cartography, 206 8; J. M.
Rogers, Itineraries and Town Views in Ottoman Histories, 228 55; and Svat
Soucek, Islamic Charting in the Mediterranean, 263 92, all in Harley and Wood-
ward, History of Cartography, vol. 2, book I.
26 Piri Reis, Kitab- Bahriye, Baltimore, Walters Art Museum MS W.658, fols. 63v
64r. Te map in this version of Piri Reis has been identied as a seventeenth-century
map, but the sta at the Walters is still attempting to ascertain its date, and Tom
Goodrich, in personal communication, has speculated that the atlas may in fact be an
eighteenth-century edition.
27 Te other most notable mapmaker of the sixteenth-century Ottoman world, Matrak
Nasuh, also mapped tranquil, unpeopled, unbordered space, although the texts of
his cartographic campaign accounts were full of people and sovereign claims, and the
maps themselves suggest society through their portrayal of towns, routes, shrines, and
wells. See Kay Ebel, City Views, Imperial Visions: Cartography and the Visual Cul-
50 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 37.1 / 2007
ture of Urban Space in the Ottoman Empire, I453 I603, (Ph.D. diss., University of
Texas at Austin, 2002). Few Ottoman maps survive from the sixteenth century; many
more survive from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
28 Antonio Lafreri, Disegno de lIsola di Cypro con li Conni della Caramania, Soria,
Giudea et Egitta (Rome, I570); London, British Library Maps C.7.e.2.(I7). Te bor-
ders of those regions are, in fact, not drawn in.
29 John J. Norwich, Venice: Te Greatness and the Fall (London: Penguin Books, I98I),
209 2I.
30 Bronwen Wilson, Te World in Venice: Print, the City, and Early Modern Identity
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), I33 85, has written an elegant analysis
of the modes by which Venice mapped the Mediterranean and the Ottomans in map,
image, and allegory, speaking of war as landscape and including the Venetian gender-
ing of that landscape.
3I Tomas Fuller, Historie of the Holy Warre (Oxford, I639), STC II464, Folger Shake-
speare Library, Washington, D.C. Further citations are given parenthetically in the
text. See W. B. Patterson, Fuller, Tomas (I607/8 I66I), in H. Matthew and Brian
Harrison, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 2I (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2004), I59 63.
32 For studies of characterizations of the Ottomans in this era, see, for example, Ken
Parker, Reading Barbary in Early Modern England, I550 I685, in Matthew
Birchwood and Matthew Dimmock, eds., Cultural Encounters Between East and West,
I453 I699 (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2005), 76 I05; Larry Wol,
Venice and the Slavs: Te Discovery of Dalmatia in the Age of Enlightenment (Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 200I); Mustafa Soykut, Image of the Turk in Italy:
A History of the Other in Early Modern Europe (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 200I);
and Gerald MacLean, Te Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman
Empire, I580 I720 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
33 Tis impressionistic map can be compared to Bernardo Salvionis I597 map of Ven-
ice, which commemorates, in an inset, the Corpus Christi procession in which Vene-
tian senators marched in the company of pilgrims en route to Jerusalem. Fullers
image is allegorical, Salvionis is an impression of a past event. See Wilson, World in
Venice, 7, I63.
34 William Berry, Asia Divided into Its Principall Regions, Chicago, Newberry
Library Ayer I35 B48 (London, I680). Te use of blank (or unmapped) space to sig-
nify Europe in maps of Asia is not unique to Berrys map. Tose spaces on a map
which are attached to the primary area depicted may or may not be drawn in.
35 For other schema on mapping, see Christian Jacob, Mapping in the Mind: Te
Earth from Ancient Alexandria, in Denis Cosgrove, ed., Mappings (London: Reak-
tion, 200I), 24 49, esp. 25 27; and Jerry Brotton, Trading Territories: Mapping the
Early Modern World (London: Reaktion, I997).
36 Te notion of the eroding medieval comes courtesy of Dr. Joseph C. Miller, an
Africanist. It serves to emphasize the continuities between the medieval and early
modern eras rather than anticipating the modern.
37 Elizabeth Clark, History, Teory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), among other scholars, has traced the evolu-
Brummett / Visions of the Mediterranean 51
tion of historiographies, including those of Braudel and the Annalistes, which apply
to the crafting of the Mediterranean, with an eye to their application to premodern
texts.
38 Te documentary is a broad rather than a rened category here. It suggests a large
and amorphous group either of collections of documents or studies that may be phil-
ological in their orientation and that employ documentary evidence as the primary
core upon which their analysis is based.
39 S. D. Goitein, Mediterranean Society: Te Jewish Communities of the Arab World as
Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, 5 vols. (Berkeley: University of Cal-
ifornia Press, I999). University of California Press originally began publication of
Goiteins Geniza in I967. Te Geniza, a storeroom attached to a Cairo synagogue,
housed thousands of documents.
40 See, for example, David Abulaa, Commerce and Conquest in the Mediterranean,
II00 I500 (London: Ashgate, I993); and Dionisius Agius and Ian Netton, Across the
Mediterranean Frontiers: Trade, Politics, and Religion, 650 I450 (Turnhout: Brepols,
I997). Robert Lopez and Irving Raymond, Medieval Trade in the Mediterranean
World (New York: Columbia University Press, I968), employs documents taken from
Latin, Greek, Italian, Provenal, Old French, Catalan, and Arabic. Eliyahu Ashtor,
Levant Trade in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
I983), employs chronicles, state documents, and (especially Venetian) ship auctions
receipts, customs registers, and petitions. Kate Fleet, European and Islamic Trade in
the Early Ottoman State: Te Merchants of Genoa and Turkey (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, I999), organizes its material by commodity. Molly Greene, Chris-
tians and Muslims in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 2002), combines documentation from Ottoman and Latin languages
in her analysis and begins her study with a discussion of the models of Braudel and
Pirenne.
4I For example, Benjamin Arbel et al., Latins and Greeks in the Eastern Mediterranean
after I204 (London: Frank Cass, I989), which includes, for example, pieces by David
Morgan on Mongol interest in the Mediterranean and Elizabeth Zachariadou on
Holy War in the Aegean; Benjamin Arbel, ed., Intercultural Contacts in the Medieval
Mediterranean: Studies in Honour of David Jacoby (London: Frank Cass, I996); David
Abulaa, Mediterranean Encounters, Economic, Religious, Political, II00 I550 (Lon-
don: Ashgate, 200I); Alisa Ginia, ed., Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the Mediter-
ranean World after I492 (London: Frank Cass, I992), which focuses primarily on the
Jewish dimensions of Mediterranean relations; Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis,
eds., Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: Te Functioning of a Plural Soci-
ety, 2 vols. (Teaneck, N.J.: Holmes and Meier, I982); and Ronald Jennings, Chris-
tians and Muslims in Ottoman Cyprus and the Mediterranean World, I57I I640 (New
York: New York University Press, I993), which focuses on Ottoman documents and
includes a segment on piracy and smuggling.
42 Te Jewish-Muslim or Jewish-Christian divide is not analogous to the Muslim-
Christian divide because of its spatial dierences. Historiography and cartography,
for obvious reasons, have not allocated blocks of early modern Mediterranean space as
power spheres to the Jews as they have to the Muslims and Christians.
52 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 37.1 / 2007
43 Clark, History, Teory, Text, 66.
44 Braudel, Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World, I:I08 35.
45 Ibid., 2:I088. Braudel does go on to dene Lepantos impact in terms of a transfer
of oarsmen, the reemergence of Christian privateers, and the decay of Ottoman
seapower.
46 Ibid., I:606.
47 Richard Kagan, with Fernando Maras, Urban Images of the Hispanic World, I493
I793 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), 56 57.
48 Horden and Purcell, Corrupting Sea, 530 64I, provide a set of rich and extensive bib-
liographic essays on the Mediterranean.
49 For interesting critiques of the work, see Ian Morris, Mediterraneanization, Medi-
terranean Historical Review I8.2 (2003): 30 55; and Anthony Molho, review of Te
Corrupting Sea, by Horden and Purcell, Journal of World History I3 (2002): 486 92.
Horden and Purcell, Four Years of Corruption: A Response to Critics, in W. V.
Harris, ed., Rethinking the Mediterranean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005),
348 75, have not directly included the early modern in articulating the objectives of
their work. Tis later piece points out the authors framework, including fragmented
topography, mutable microecology, two-way interaction between humanity and envi-
ronment, connectivity, and their contrasting of history in and of the region (356).
50 Horden and Purcell, Corrupting Sea, 5I 77.
5I Ibid., 5.
52 Ibid., 40I.
53 Ibid., 443, as illustrated in the authors discussion of the moving of saints bones, for
example.
54 Richard Eaton, Islamic History as Global History, in Michael Adas, ed., Islamic
and European Expansion: Te Forging of Global Order (Philadelphia: Temple Univer-
sity Press, 200I), I 36, has commented upon Hodgsons model and contends that
Islam is the rst truly global civilization. See also John Voll, Islam as a Special
World System, Journal of World History 5 (I994): 2I3 26.
55 Hodgson, Venture of Islam, I:I09 I0.
56 Horden and Purcell, Corrupting Sea, 4. For a very dierent periodization, see David
Abulaa, ed., Te Mediterranean in History (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum,
2003). In this volume, one gets the impression that the important era of Mediterra-
nean history is that which precedes I500. Further, the medieval and early modern are
divided into Christian and Muslim halves.
57 Andr Raymond, Cairo, trans. Willard Wood (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 2000), I, originally published in French in I993: Fifty years ago, one
still traveled to Egypt by ship, landing rst at Alexandria, from which the last vis-
ible traces of antiquity have all but disappeared. Te Mediterranean port, rebuilt in
the nineteenth century, would lose its Levantine character after the I952 revolution,
and the subsequent departure of the British brought to an end a society that Lawrence
Durrell transformed into a literary myth.
58 Braudel, Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World, 2:I239. Bertram Gordon, Te
Mediterranean as a Tourist Destination from Classical Antiquity to Club Med,
Mediterranean Studies I2 (2003): 203 26, makes Braudel himself an element of peri-
Brummett / Visions of the Mediterranean 53
odization. He uses the publication of Braudels La Mditerrane, the popularization
of Mediterranean cooking through Elizabeth Davids A Book of Mediterranean Food,
and the creation of Club Med (all events of the years I949 50) as a trio of markers
for a new age in the consumption of the Mediterranean. David Mendelson, Te Idea
of the Mediterranean in Early Nineteenth-Century French Literature, Mediterranean
Historical Review I7.I (2002): 25 48, traces the modern idea of the Mediterranean
to French writers such as de Stal and Chateaubriand and the journey to the Ori-
ent style they invented. He speaks in terms of itinerary and visuality. Yaacov Shavit,
Mediterranean History and the History of the Mediterranean: Further Reections,
Journal of Mediterranean Studies 4 (I994): 3I3 29, in a piece on ideas of regional his-
torical identity in modern Israel, calls the notion of the Mediterranean a cultural c-
tion, existing mainly in the imagination of the outside observer (325).
59 Ross Dunn, Te New World History: A Teachers Companion (New York: Bedford/St.
Martins, 2000), provides a collection of relevant and foundational literature in the
world history eld, illustrating the rationales behind decentering the West (along
with the Mediterranean) and its story. Contributions to the Journal of World History
tend not to contain the word Mediterranean in their titles or abstracts, or to focus spe-
cically on that region. Although analyses in the journal do address issues of fram-
ing and interpretation that bear on or apply to the Mediterranean region, the inland
sea tends not to be either a focus or a basis for comparison. William McNeill (found-
ing father for the notion of the rise of the West and later advocate for world history)
includes no entry for the Mediterranean in the index to his fourth edition of A
World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, I999).
60 Martin Bernal, Black Athena: Te Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, 2 vols.
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, I987; repr. I99I).
6I But the themes of Manuel Castells, Te Information Age: Economy, Society, and Cul-
ture, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), a popular, wide-ranging,
sociological work that assesses the global ows of information, labor, social move-
ments, and crime, among other phenomena, echo rather neatly earlier themes by
which the Mediterranean has been measured: Levantine communities to match Cas-
tellss transnational identities and nancial networks, the acceptance or rejection of
state-based identities, the creation of new technical and political urban elites, the
variable work force in the urban ghetto, the articulation of umma and jihad in global
Islamic sociopolitical movements as a boundary maker between lands and peoples,
and the limits of patriarchalism.
62 Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, I998), 230, 327. See also, Immanuel Wallerstein, Te Modern
World System, vol. I (New York: Academic Books, I974).
63 Frank, ReOrient, 65 76.
64 Ibid., 80.
65 Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony, 34, shows a map depicting the eight circuits
of trade. On this map a ninth circuit might be added comprising the southeastern
coast of Africa; and one could easily update this world map to the sixteenth century
and draw in circuits which include the Americas.
66 Ibid., 32 33, 353, 364.
54 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 37.1 / 2007
67 Ibid., 45, II3, I23, I49, maps the Mediterranean routes of Genoa and Venice in the
Middle Ages, showing the highly complex connections throughout the Mediterra-
nean and its connecting seas.
68 See also Georey Gunn, First Globalization: Eurasian Exchange, I500 I800 (Oxford:
Rowman and Littleeld, 2003). Gunn deals directly with issues of mapping.
69 Martin Lewis and Karen Wigen, Te Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography
(Berkeley: University of California Press, I997), 53 54, I39 4I, I99.
70 Braudel, Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World, I:I35 37, on the two autono-
mous seas, the Spanish and the Turkish. Neither have Ottomanist historians written
on an Ottoman Mediterranean, thus impeding the dialogue.
7I For an interesting analysis (which takes both Braudel and Purcell into consideration)
of the Maghribs connection or lack of connection to the Mediterranean, see Brent
Shaw, A Peculiar Island: Maghrib and Mediterranean, Mediterranean Historical
Review I8.2 (2003): 93 I25. Shaw argues for the particular insularity of the Maghrib
in the premodern era.
72 Roger Bagnall, Egypt and the Concept of the Mediterranean, in Harris, ed.,
Rethinking the Mediterranean, 339 47. However, Abu-Lughod, Before European Hege-
mony, 2I2 I5, 242 44, makes Cairo central to medieval Mediterranean exchange (as
do other scholars whose work centers on commercial exchange).
73 A more nuanced vision of Iberia is found in Felipe Fernndez-Armesto, Before Colum-
bus: Exploration and Colonization from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, I229 I492
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, I987), a study of conquest that por-
trays the Mediterranean as one end of a seaborne enterprise, the anchor of empire. He
examines the logics, rhetorics, and itineraries through which lands, their goods, and
their peoples are subordinated.
74 Ricardo Padrn, Te Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early
Modern Spain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), I47.
75 For an emphasis on the cultural tale, see Predrag Matvejevi, Mediterranean: A Cul-
tural Landscape (Berkeley: University of California Press, I999), 7, 39, which focuses
on the ways in which Mediterranean peoples space was mapped and on the words by
which one type of journey (or ship) was distinguished from another. His essay is con-
cerned with visuality, ideas, gesture, and material culture. It orders the Mediterranean
as an idiosyncratic journey which takes cognizance of sovereign states and peoples but
does not dwell upon them.
76 Horden and Purcell, Corrupting Sea, 54; and Four Years of Corruption, 348 75.
Te Romantic tradition is embodied in the exhibition La mer: Terreur et fascina-
tion, Bibliothque Nationale, http://expositions.bnf.fr/lamer/, which assesses the ways
in which humans have represented, named, and tried to manage or master the sea.
Tat vision presumes the struggle to survive, to understand the sea itself, and to over-
come fear. It presumes invocations to the gods or goddesses of the sea and of sailing,
much as Horden and Purcell, Corrupting Sea, 438 40, have suggested in their treat-
ment of the religion of mobility. For a contrasting vision, of the pleasures of the sea,
see Alain Corbin, Te Lure of the Sea: Te Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World,
I750 I840, trans. Jocelyn Phelps (Berkeley: University of California Press, I994).
77 Barbara Fuchs, Rivalry and Rhetoric, paper presented at the Ottoman and Atlantic
Brummett / Visions of the Mediterranean 55
Empires in the Early Modern World Symposium, Omohundro Institute of Early Ameri-
can History and Culture and Boazii University, Istanbul, October 2005. For an elo-
quent treatment of the workings of the shades of old images and ideas in Renaissance
maps and texts, see Anthony Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: Te Power of Tradi-
tion and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, I992). See
also John Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Dierence (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, I994), 70. Gilles poses the Globe Teatre as a map of the cosmographic
imagination. He notes the poetic nature of geographic constructions.
78 Ivo Kamps and Jyotsna Singh, eds., Travel Knowledge: European Discoveries in the
Early Modern Period (New York: Palgrave, 200I); or Kenneth Parker, ed., Early Mod-
ern Tales of Orient: A Critical Anthology (London: Routledge, I999).
79 Te bridging of borders is embodied in the classic linguistic work by Henry Kahane,
Rene Kahane, and Andreas Tietze, Te Lingua Franca in the Levant: Turkish Nauti-
cal Terms of Italian and Greek Origin (Istanbul: ABC Kitabevi, I958; repr. I988). See
Danko, An Ottoman Mentality, 83, who employs this expansive seventeenth-century
source to provide a vision of the Ottoman world view and the public values associ-
ated with Ottomanness. See also, Natalie Rothman, Becoming Venetian: Conver-
sion and Transformation in the Seventeenth-Century Mediterranean, Mediterranean
Historical Review (Spring/Summer 2006), forthcoming; and Tomas Burman, Read-
ing the Quran in Latin Christendom, II40 I560 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl-
vania Press, 2007), forthcoming.
80 David Abulaa, Introduction: Seven Types of Ambiguity, c. II00 c. I500, in David
Abulaa and Nora Brend, eds., Medieval Frontiers: Concepts and Practices (London:
Ashgate, 2002), I 34, can serve as a useful launching point for the discussion of bor-
ders.

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