The sea between

A new Mediterranean epic for the age of despair

What is the Mediterranean world? Most of us, I’d guess, would think of a place on a map. We might define the Mediterranean by its borders, those of the twenty-two countries that currently have sea access. Our sense of Mediterranean history might default to the cartographic, too, tracing the older empires and territories that once existed around its shores.

Maps can orient and disorient. The maps on our phones default to what’s known as the « Web Mercator projection », aka the « World Geodetic System 1984 ». One could, if one wanted, turn it upside down with one’s fingers so that it’s more like the Tabula Rogeriana of 1154, created by the Arab geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi at the request of King Roger of Sicily, his cosmopolitan Norman patron. North was on the bottom, south on top, Mecca at its center. « Europe » was relegated to peripheral status. Back in 2011, amid the simultaneous fevers of the Arab Spring and Occupy movements, I stumbled across another such map by the French cartographer Sabine Réthoré, which riffed on al-Idrisi’s proposal to striking effect: rotate the sea by ninety degrees, erase national boundaries, and our eyes will scan a Mediterranean defined not by geopolitical fractures but by … something else.

Mediterranean time has more than four dimensions. I remember as a student when I first read the historian Fernand Braudel’s masterpiece, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1972). Philip II, the book’s eponymous Spanish monarch, is barely a character; Braudel’s real subject was time itself — historical, cultural, even geological. How continental shifts and climate fluctuations forced population movement over millennia, how weather and wind shaped the rise and fall of entire civilizations. Where his contemporaries had hurried to archive and document historical events according to preconceived periodizations (« the Age of Philip II » was in that sense an ironic title), Braudel’s approach was multi- or non-chronological, process-driven yet suspicious of straightforward determinism. If Mediterranean time sprawled, so did Mediterranean space, extending beyond the sea into areas of the Sahara Desert, and to the Black Sea. The Mediterranean, untethered from place, emerged as a world of cultural contradiction, encounter and adventure.

Braudel was writing in the 1970s; his method pushed beyond Cold War dualisms. It also excavated a deep historical precedent to « globalization », then seemingly new — and seemingly unstoppable. Today is another era. The space of the Mediterranean is changing rapidly, with new kinds of wars, ecological devastation, mass migration, increasing poverty. Of course, it never wasn’t changing — that was Braudel’s premise, too, and his histories conveyed a powerful ongoingness, equipping his readers to see the present as ongoing, and therefore promising. The overtone of promise surely strikes differently now, in an era consumed with a sense of its own ending.