A Companion to Mediterranean History

0002063973.INDD 1 2/18/2014 2:59:17 PM WILEY BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO HISTORY This series provides sophisticated and authoritative overviews of the scholarship that has shaped our current understanding of the past. Defined by theme, period and/or region, each volume comprises between twenty-five and forty concise essays written by individual scholars within their area of specialization. The aim of each contribution is to synthesize the current state of scholarship from a variety of historical perspectives and to provide a statement on where the field is heading. The essays are written in a clear, provocative, and lively manner, designed for an international audience of scholars, students, and general readers.

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0002063973.INDD 2 2/18/2014 2:59:17 PM A Companion to Mediterranean History

Edited by

Peregrine Horden and Sharon Kinoshita

0002063973.INDD 3 2/18/2014 2:59:17 PM This edition first published 2014 © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd except chapter 9 © David Abulafia and chapter 18 © Tehmina Goskar Registered Office John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK Editorial Offices 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148–5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell. The right of Peregrine Horden and Sharon Kinoshita to be identified as the authors of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and editors have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services and neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for damages arising herefrom. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-publication data applied for Hardback ISBN: 978-0-470-65901-4 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Cover image: Portolan chart drawn by Placido Caloiro, from MS. Canon Ital. 140, pp. 3–4. Reproduced by permission of The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. Cover design by RBDA. Set in 10/12pt Galliard by SPi Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India

1 2014

0002063973.INDD 4 2/18/2014 2:59:17 PM Contents

List of Figures viii Notes on Contributors ix Acknowledgements xiv

Introduction 1 Peregrine Horden

Part i Climate and Vegetation 9 1 The Mediterranean Climate 11 Fredric Cheyette 2 The Vegetative Mediterranean 26 Paolo Squatriti

Part ii Turning Points and Phases 43 3 Mediterranean “Prehistory” 45 Cyprian Broodbank 4 The Ancient Mediterranean 59 Nicholas Purcell 5 The Medieval Mediterranean 77 Dominique Valérian 6 The Early Modern Mediterranean 91 Molly Greene 7 Mediterranean Modernity? 107 Naor Ben-Yehoyada 8 Po-Mo Med 122 Michael Herzfeld vi contents

Part iii politics and power 137 9 Thalassocracies 139 David Abulafia 10 Nautical Technology 154 Ruthy Gertwagen 11 Piracy 170 Clifford R. Backman 12 Cartography 184 Emilie Savage-Smith

Part iv settlement and society 201 13 Settlement Patterns 203 John Bintliff 14 Cave Dwelling 219 Valerie Ramseyer 15 Family and Household 234 Paola Sacchi and Pier Paolo Viazzo 16 Disease 250 Robert Sallares 17 Forms of Slavery 263 Youval Rotman

Part v language and culture 279 18 Material Culture 281 Tehmina Goskar 19 Visual Culture 296 Cecily J. Hilsdale 20 Mediterranean Literature 314 Sharon Kinoshita 21 Lingua Franca 330 Karla Mallette 22 Hybridity 345 Steven A. Epstein

Part vi religions in conflict and co-existence 359 23 Ethno-Religious Minorities 361 Brian A. Catlos contents vii

24 Shared Sacred Places 378 Maria Couroucli 25 Jews 392 Fred Astren

Part Vii the Mediterranean and a Wider World 409 26 The Mediterranean and the Atlantic 411 Teofilo F. Ruiz 27 The Mediterranean and Africa 425 Ray A. Kea 28 The Mediterranean and Asia 441 Nicholas Doumanis 29 The Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean 457 Elizabeth Ann Pollard

Index 475 List of Figures

Figures

12.1 Explanatory diagram showing the basic features of a T–O map. 185 12.2 Map of the Mediterranean Sea from the treatise by al-Iṣtakhrı̣ .̄ 188 12.3 The Mediterranean Sea from the anonymous Book of Curiosities. 192 19.1 Detail of the marble revetment of the interior of Hagia Sophia. 297 19.2 Detail of tribute bearers from the Apadana. 299 19.3 Detail of frieze and metopes of the Parthenon. 300 19.4 Interior of Cappella Palatina, Palermo, Sicily. 303 Notes on Contributors

David Abulafia is Professor of Mediterranean History in the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, and a Fellow of the British Academy. His numerous books include The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (London and New York: Allen Lane and Oxford University Press, 2011), and The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008). Fred Astren (PhD Berkeley) is Professor of Jewish Studies and a member of the Faculty in Middle East and Islamic Studies at San Francisco State University. He has published Karaite Judaism and Historical Understanding (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004), and works on early medieval Jewish history in the Mediterranean and in the orbit of Islam. Clifford R. Backman has taught at Boston University since 1989. He has published three books: The Decline and Fall of Medieval Sicily (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), The Worlds of Medieval Europe (2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), and The Cultures of the West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). He is currently at work on a study of the idea of tolerance in medieval Christianity, Islam and Judaism. Naor Ben-Yehoyada is Research Fellow in Social Anthropology at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge. He specializes in Mediterranean maritime, political, and historical anthropology, specifically the maritime aspect of Israeli- Palestinian history and post-World War Two region formation processes between Sicily and Tunisia. John Bintliff is Professor of Classical and Mediterranean Archaeology at Leiden University, the Netherlands, and Professorial Fellow, Edinburgh University. He ­studied Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge University, where he also com- pleted his PhD in 1977 on the (pre)history of human settlement in Greece. He was Senior Lecturer in Archaeology at Bradford University, where he taught from 1977, then moved to Durham University as Reader in Archaeology in 1990, where he taught until moving to Leiden in 1999. In 1988 he was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. Since 1978 he has been co-directing (with Cambridge University) the x notes on contributors

Boeotia Project, an interdisciplinary program investigating the ­evolution of settle- ment in Central Greece. He has published over 20 books. Cyprian Broodbank is Professor of Mediterranean Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, co-director of the Kythera Island Project, and author of The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World (London and New York: Thames and Hudson and Oxford University Press, 2013). Brian A. Catlos is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and Research Associate of Humanities at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He works on ethno-religious identity, minority-majority ­relations, and the economic, social, and institutional history of the Medieval Christian and Islamic Mediterranean. See www.brianacatlos.com. Fredric Cheyette is Emeritus Professor of History at Amherst College, where he taught from 1963 to 2005. He is the author of Ermengard of Narbonne and the World of the Troubadours (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001), and “The Disappearance of the Ancient Landscape and the Climatic Anomaly of the Early Middle Ages” in Early Medieval Europe, 16 (2008). He has worked on the history of the medieval landscape since the 1970s. Maria Couroucli (MA Cantab., PhD EHESS Paris, HDR Paris Ouest Nanterre) is Senior Researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (Laboratoire d’Ethnologie et Sociologie Comparative, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense) and Director of Modern Studies at the Ecole française d’Athènes (Greece). She has co-edited (with Dionigi Albera) Sharing Sacred Spaces in the Mediterranean (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2012). Nicholas Doumanis teaches history at the University of New South Wales. His books include Myth and Memory in the Mediterranean: Remembering Fascism’s Empire (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997) and Before the Nation: Muslim-Christian Coexistence and its Destruction in Late-Ottoman Anatolia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). He is working on a history of the eastern Mediterranean in the Wiley-Blackwell History of the World series. Steven A. Epstein is the Ahmanson-Murphy Distinguished Professor of Medieval History at the University of Kansas. He is the author of numerous works on Genoa and the wider Mediterranean and European contexts, including most recently The Medieval Discovery of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Ruthy Gertwagen is Senior Lecturer in Maritime History and Marine Archaeology at Haifa University and Oranim Academic College of the Byzantine and Medieval Mediterranean. Her research and publications focus on: Venice and its maritime empire; the Byzantine Empire; ships and shipping; trade and warfare; navigation; ports and port towns; and marine environmental history. Tehmina Goskar runs a heritage consultancy in Penzance, Cornwall, UK. She is also Research Associate at Swansea University. Her areas of research are on medieval to modern material culture and industry, particularly textiles and metals. She has published­ on Mediterranean material culture, industrial heritage and historical copper. notes on contributors xi

Molly Greene is Professor of History and Hellenic Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of A Shared World: Christians and Muslims in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) and Catholic Pirates and Greek Merchants: A Maritime History of the Mediterranean (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). Michael Herzfeld is Ernest E. Monrad Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, where has taught since 1991. His research in Greece, Italy, and Thailand has addressed the social and political impact of historic conservation and gentrification, the dynamics of nationalism, ­gender, and bureaucracy, and the ethnography of knowledge among artisans and intellectuals. Cecily J. Hilsdale is Assistant Professor of Art History at McGill University in Montreal, and specializes in the arts of Byzantium and the wider Mediterranean world. Her research focuses on diplomacy and cultural exchange, in particular the circulation of Byzantine luxury items as diplomatic gifts as well as the related ­dissemination of eastern styles, techniques, iconographies and ideologies of impe- rium. She is the author of Byzantine Art and Diplomacy in an Age of Decline (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Ray A. Kea is Professor of History at the University of California, Riverside, where he has taught African and World History since 1991. He received his doctorate from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Sharon Kinoshita is Professor of Literature and co-director of the Center for Mediterranean Studies (mediterraneanseminar.org) at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Medieval Boundaries: Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 2006) and numerous essays in medieval French, Mediterranean, and world literatures (ucsc.academia.edu/ SharonKinoshita). Karla Mallette is Professor of Italian and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Michigan. She is author of European Modernity and the Arab Mediterranean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010) and co-editor of A Sea of Languages: Rethinking the Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013). Elizabeth Ann Pollard is Associate Professor of History at San Diego State University, where she teaches courses in Roman history, historiography of witchcraft, and world history. She has published articles exploring images of witches in Roman art, Roman- Indian trade, and the impact of world historical models on traditional Greek and Roman history. She is currently working on a book entitled Women and Witchcraft Accusation in the Roman World. Nicholas Purcell has been Camden Professor of Ancient History in the University of Oxford since 2011. He works on ancient, especially Roman, social, cultural and ­economic history. He is joint author, with Peregrine Horden, of The Corrupting Sea (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), and has also worked on a number of other aspects of Mediterranean history. xii notes on contributors

Valerie Ramseyer is Associate Professor of History at Wellesley College. Her main field of research is the history of southern Italy and Sicily in the early and central Middle Ages. In 2006 she published a book with Cornell University Press entitled The Transformation of a Religious Landscape: Medieval Southern Italy, 850–1150. Youval Rotman is senior lecturer in history at Tel Aviv University and is a social his- torian of the Eastern Mediterranean world of the first millennium. His research ascribes a central role to the social and cultural processes in this region under Roman and Byzantine rule. In this framework he has worked on slavery, captives and redeem- ing of captives, child labor, religious conversion, and social models of sanctity. He is the author of Byzantine Slavery and the Mediterranean World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). Teofilo F. Ruiz is a Distinguished Professor of History and Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama in 2012 and elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2013. His two most recent books are The Terror of History: On the Uncertainties of Life in Western Civilization (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011) and A King Travels: Festive Traditions in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). Paola Sacchi is Assistant Professor of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Anthropology at the University of Turin, Italy. She has carried out ethnographic fieldwork in the Negev Desert and her research centers on gender, kinship and family, honor, ethnicity and migration, in Israel, Italy, and more generally in the Mediterranean. Robert Sallares studied classics and ancient history at Cambridge University and moved into biomolecular archaeology and medical history at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. He is the author of Malaria and Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) and The Ecology of the Ancient Greek World (London: Duckworth, 1991) as well as numerous articles. Emilie Savage-Smith recently retired as Professor of the History of Islamic Science at the Oriental Institute, University of Oxford, and is a Fellow of the British Academy. Her most recent publications include (with co-author Yossef Rapoport) An Eleventh- Century Egyptian Guide to the Universe: The “Book of Curiosities”, edited with an anno- tated translation (Leiden: Brill, 2014). Paolo Squatriti teaches history and Romance languages and literatures at the University of Michigan. He studies medieval European environments. His book on chestnut woodlands, Landscape and Change in Early Medieval Italy, published by Cambridge University Press, appeared in 2013. Dominique Valérian is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Lyon 2 and a member of the Centre Interuniversitaire d’Histoire et d’Archéologie Médiévale. He published Bougie, port maghrébin, 1067–1510 (Rome: École française de Rome, 2006) and co-edited Espaces et réseaux en Méditerranée médiévale, 2 vols. (Paris: notes on contributors xiii

Bouchène, 2007 and 2010) and Islamisation et arabisation de l’Occident musulman médiéval, VIIe-XIIe siècle (Paris: Sorbonne, 2011). Pier Paolo Viazzo is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Turin, Italy. Formerly a research associate of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population, he has specialized in the historical and anthropological study of marriage patterns and household structures in Alpine and Mediterranean Europe. Acknowledgements

The editors are grateful to Tessa Harvey who commissioned this work and seemed never to doubt that it would one day appear; to Humaira Erfan-Ahmed and Anna Boeles Rowland for invaluable editorial help with the “typescript;” to Georgina Coleby at Wiley Blackwell for smoothing the book’s passage through the press; to Jo Curtis for vigilant copy-editing; and, above all, to the contributors for all their ­scholarly labours, their willingness to revise their chapters against tight deadlines, and their patience with the whole lengthy process. This is their book.

Peregrine Horden Sharon Kinoshita Introduction

Peregrine Horden

In July 2009 the bishop of the Sicilian town of Mazara del Vallo celebrated mass in an unusual way.1 He set up his altar on the deck of an Italian coastguard ship. The ship, with a fishing boat tied alongside it, was anchored off the Italian island of Pantelleria, almost equidistant between the bishop’s cathedral church on Sicily and the Tunisian coast. The maritime setting of the mass was explicitly “the Mediterranean, this great Lake of Tiberias.” The floor of the enlarged virtual church was the seabed, its ceiling the sky. The bishop cast the Mediterranean Sea as a macrocosm of the Sea of Galilee, the coastguard ship as St Peter’s boat, the fishermen-communicants as the disciples. The Italian state and the European Union might be said to have taken on the role of the Pharisees. In his voice, his prayer and his “affection,” the bishop even identified himself with Christ “walking on the waters of this sea.” During the mass, the bishop reminded the fishermen of Christ’s injunction to Simon and Andrew: “Follow me and I will make you fishers of men” (Matthew 4.19). Those to be fished—physically as well as spiritually—were clandestine migrant souls, in danger of drowning as they made the crossing from southern (African) to northern (European) Mediterranean at the point of their greatest proximity. This strange ceremony needs to be set in a variety of overlapping contexts. First, the political. A little earlier in the same year, in May, Italy and Libya had signed a “Friendship Pact” by which migrant boats halted at sea could be brought to Libyan rather than Italian ports. Second, the demographic and the humanitarian. This mari- time area was a death trap. It would, within two years of the mass, in March 2011, be marked by the outright failure of Italian, Spanish and other European Union fleets to respond to repeated pleas for help, and to save from death by exposure or drowning, all but some nine out of 72 in a boatload of men, women and children. They were trying to cross from Tripoli to the Italian island of Lampedusa, migrants’ usual European destination.2 In March 2013 Pope Francis arrived on the same island (with presumably unintended irony, by coastguard ship) in order to say mass, in a conven- tional way, for such migrants. Third, the economic. The bishop’s seat, Mazara del Vallo, is famed throughout Italy for its seafood delicacies brought in by a large fleet of

A Companion to Mediterranean History, First Edition. Edited by Peregrine Horden and Sharon Kinoshita. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 2 peregrine horden motorized trawlers. Half of the crews of these trawlers are made up of Tunisian labor migrants, many of whom will have started their migratory careers clandestinely.­ Final context: the broadly ideological. The wider framework for this is the “Union for the Mediterranean” of 2008, a continuation of the Barcelona Process of 1995 (original co-presidents Nicolas Sarkozy and Hosni Mubarak)—“working for the creation of an area of peace, stability, security and shared economic prosperity.”3 Italy—like other nearby countries such as Libya under Gadhafi and like Israel—has been (re)discover- ing its Mediterranean-ness.4 Through cultural projects in its own south, individual pacts with North African countries, and a proliferation of study centers that re-­ ­examine its history, Italy has been rebranding itself as a Mediterranean state. There seems to be no limit to the ways in which the Mediterranean region may be reimagined, as a sea, as an area involving physical movements, maritime spaces, terri- torial arrangements, and political processes that seek to transcend national boundaries and enmities (even as they often also reinforce them) and, in the case of our Sicilian bishop, to sidestep ecclesiastical jurisdictions also.5 Mediterranean themes infiltrate the politics, economics and social and religious developments of the early twenty-first century to an extent that bewilders in its protean variety. The sea and its hinterlands are everywhere, it often seems, and in cultural as well as political and economic spheres. Think of the so-called Mediterranean diet (a fantasy of post-modern capital- ism as Michael Herzfeld, evidently no fan of Elizabeth David, notes in his chapter below), or the equally suspect Mediterranean architecture (best designed in Florida according to one report: Ben-Yehoyada 2013: 80) and “Mediterranean noir” crime ­fiction (Kinoshita, this volume). And on, and on. History, whether recovered or imagined, is at the heart of all this. To revert for a moment to Sicily and the papacy: when in May 1993 John Paul II visited Mazara, before going on to Agrigento to preach against the mafia, he offered a history lesson in his homily. He looked back to the Norman conquest of the area in 1072 and the establishment of a diocese, and he depicted the city as “a crossroads between the Euro- Christian civilization and the Arab-Muslim one,”6 continuously living “the challenge of tolerance and dialogue.” Had it suited his purpose, the pontiff could have added that the River Mazaro which debouches in Mazara’s old port once marked the fron- tier between ancient Greek and Carthaginian settlement, and that the suffix “del Valo” in its name comes from the Arabic term for administrative district, wilaya, and thus recalls Sicily’s pre-Norman Islamic phase. The political maneuvering of Italy and Libya over illegal migrants is only the latest in a very long and complex series of ­demographic and political shifts and confrontations. The bishop’s altar on the sea of God is but one striking modern instance of a millennia-long sacralization of various aspects of Mediterranean space (Horden and Purcell, 2000: 403–460). As the “Mediterranean novelist” Lawrence Durrell wrote, more appreciatively of course than most would venture nowadays, “the Mediterranean is an absurdly small sea; the length and greatness of its history makes us dream it larger than it is” (Balthazar, 1958). Conceptualizing, studying and writing that lengthy history within an explicitly Mediterranean framework is a surprisingly young vocation. Long-distance voyaging, which slowly began to knit the whole sea together, may date back as far as 130 000 years ago (Strasser et al., 2010, but compare Broodbank, below). And the notion of a Great Sea is widely evident in the Semitic languages of the Levant by the early first millennium bce. But the Mediterranean as a region and not only a stretch of water, a introduction 3 sea and an ensemble of hinterlands—the Mediterranean of the eponymous diet, of the history that Pope John Paul knew—is an invention of the nineteenth century. It does not emerge earlier (Horden and Purcell, 2000: 532–533). In his defining work, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1972–3), Braudel is in one sense a descendant of those Enlightenment and romantic Mediterraneanists for whom “the Mediterranean” was really a metonym for “Italy.”7 More importantly, perhaps, he can be seen as falling into a “scientific” tradition that begins in a German systematic geography that was not much more than a century old when he first plot- ted and drafted his book—in a German prisoner of war camp (Paris, 1999). In the current plethora of themes and images of the region, it is hard to appreciate how novel that attempt to capture the “rhythms of life” of the whole Mediterranean was then, the 1940s. It was still novel when Braudel published his second edition in 1966 (the French original of his 1972–3). And so to a considerable extent it remained. One of the, in retrospect, less clairvoyant dicta in Horden and Purcell’s Corrupting Sea is its prediction of “the end of the Mediterranean” (2000: 39). But that really was how it seemed in the early 1990s when the book was being drafted. The Mediterranean Action Plan of 1975 had produced no real academic impact and the political econo- mists, sociologists, ecologists, and anthropologists whom Purcell and I had been reading since the late 1980s did not seem to think that “the Mediterranean” had any great future as a distinct field of study (2000: 19–21). The Barcelona Process, 1995, similarly had little intellectual impact. Indeed, all the relevant disciplines seemed to have ignored or skirted round “the Mediterranean” as a category. Historians were reading, or at least citing, Foucault. Microhistories were preferred to grand regional syntheses. In social anthropology, “area studies” and “culture areas” had rightly fallen into disrepute, as products of a Cold-War mentality. John Davis’ 1977 survey of “peo- ple of the Mediterranean,” based on field work in Libya as well as southern Italy and also on wide reading, had, for all its learning and its avoidance of easy generalization, given way to the “anti-Mediterraneanism” of Michael Herzfeld and others, for whom “the Mediterranean” was a category as crude, self-serving and politically odious as “the Orient” (Horden and Purcell, 2000: 486–487).8 Meanwhile, the linguistic/­ cultural “turn” militated against the materialism seen to be inherent in regional work of the kind we were pursuing. If one really wanted geographical history of the Mediterranean, none the less, then Braudel had surely said it all. How the whole outlook has changed, and how rapidly. We need look no further than the proliferation of journal or periodical titles with the word “Mediterranean” in them. The first part of the story of this growth of “serial cultivation” has been told by Alcock (2005) and Morris (2009). The growth in numbers began in the 1970s, after Braudel’s work appeared in French, but the real “take off” did not come until the 1990s. In the 2000s, searching in a major library catalogue for “Mediterranean” as a word in periodical titles will yield 130 or so entries—not all of them historical or scholarly of course, but part of a far wider phenomenon that has both reflected and stimulated the growth of academic preoccupations: the Mediterraneanization, as we could call it, echoing Morris’ (2009) article, of titles of books, websites, list servers, study centers, research projects, and undergraduate courses, as well as journals. Why this explosion of interest? The headings for a proper, wide-ranging historical answer—about historiography, about the social sciences more widely, and about the wider cultural history that gives rise to the “Mediterranean diet”—would include, but 4 peregrine horden not be limited to: globalization; “the clash of civilizations” debate (Bonney, 2008); 9/11 and the “war on terror”; post-colonialism with its de-centering, its inversion of cores and peripheries; anti-nationalism and “anti-continentalism” in politics; ­anti-essentialism about geographical areas generally; the growing vogue for cultural studies; a related vogue for comparison in the humanistic disciplines, or better, for a “trans-national” successor, in which everything is “entangled.” Which of these was most important, it is, as Zhou Enlai would agree, too early to tell. The Mediterranean has been literally a site on which so many global anxieties and controversies can focus. In academic (and maritime) terms the wave has yet to crest. None the less this is a good moment to take stock. Hence this Companion. Mediterranean history may be a surprisingly popular discipline, but it is not an estab- lished one, with clear parameters, agendas or methods. Any new scholarly initiative that invokes the Mediterranean is an invitation—whether implicit or explicit—to debate. What is “Mediterranean history”—if anything? How should it be pursued—if at all? What definitions of the Mediterranean might appropriately animate it? What should its scope be, in terms of both period and subject matter? On none of these questions is there anything like consensus. Even amongst those most committed to the Mediterranean project, diversity reigns. Yet of the many ways in which Mediterranean history is being presented in the early twenty-first century, four stand out. Type 1: the Mediterranean may be a flag of convenience, a way of glamorizing a subject or approach that is actually very traditional, or that makes little reference to the geographical setting, or that is actually dealing only with a small part or aspect of the region’s past. This usage benefits from the long tradition of romantic Mediterraneanism, whose greatest exponent was Goethe and whose least distin- guished is all around us, in touristic ephemera.9 So, in a different way, does Type 2. There may be no agreed definitions of the Mediterranean region, and the anti-Mediterraneanists would say that that is because “it” does not exist except as a subject of various self-serving “discourses” (Herzfeld, 2005). But the Mediterranean Sea is out there as an unbroken, if subdivided, stretch of water—big as it must have seemed to the mariners of “deep time,” small to Durrell— and people cross it and live on its islands. It is that ensemble of island populations and Mediterranean-wide crossings, by people, their goods and their cultures, that makes Mediterranean history. The foremost exponent of this “hyper-maritime” approach to Mediterranean history is David Abulafia, especially in his The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (2011). Type 3 is environmental-cum-geographical history. Here, in this region, is a clash, not so much of civilizations, as of tectonic plates. On top of that lies the world’s larg- est inland sea, within a greater zone of topographical fragmentation that has few analogues worldwide except perhaps in South-East Asia. There is a distinctive climatic­ regime and a level of biodiversity that again has few counterparts elsewhere. The Mediterranean region of the geographers and geologists is not unique but it is to the highest degree unusual. That ought to count for something in the historical under- standing of this part of the world—whether the model adopted be Braudel’s limited environmental determinism or Horden and Purcell’s ecological approach. Type 4 is the youngest within this still young discipline. It reintroduces the Mediterranean as a culture area. Gone, though, are the old clichés of the supposed introduction 5 commonalities of Mediterranean life—as John Davis caricatured it, “a certain kind of agriculture, a certain respect for towns, a climate, a type of plough and a couple of syndromes” (1977: 12–13). Instead we encounter a region with suitable post-modern­ credentials—a region of cultural fluidity, even perhaps hybridity, and of the move- ments in space that promote such mixing. In this historiography, the categories of national traditions (in the arts, in literature, in material culture) or the polarities of East and West, Christianity and Islam, Europe and the Middle East can be produc- tively transcended by Mediterranean-wide trail-finding. Apart from the “flag of convenience” and, we hope, the “romantic,” all those approaches—the maritime, the environmental, the cultural—are represented in the following 29 chapters of this Companion. Mediterranean historical writing is, at least for the moment, always in some way writing against established categories. Therefore the last thing that would have been imposed on contributors was some stipulative definition of what the Mediterranean has been and how to view it. It was for each writer, independently, to articulate and defend—or critique—a conception of the region, and to show whether or not a Mediterranean paradigm can be heuristically valuable. Put another way: each chapter is a historia in the ancient sense, an enquiry. It is an enquiry into the “Mediterranean-ness” of its topic. The only ground rules for contributors were these. First, there could be no distinc- tion between “prehistory” and “history”—prehistory is certainly not off limits in a companion to Mediterranean history. On the contrary, it is indispensable—as it was to Braudel (2001). Secondly, a chronological approach, though obviously useful at times, was not essential. We have an excellent and comprehensive narrative, from “prehistory” onwards, in Abulafia’s Great Sea. There was no need to reproduce or condense it here. As is clear from the Contents, above, we do have a chronological section to the book, running from the earliest hominins to post-modernity. But the point of each chapter in that section is not to retell a story but to re-examine the periodization that underlies it, and, where necessary, to question the agreed narratives of growth and decline, continuity and crisis, unity and fragmentation. Elsewhere, outside the section on “Turning Points and Phases,” all is thematic. Contributors were urged to pick examples from several different periods, and above all, to compare, not only within the Mediterranean (however defined) but between Mediterranean and non-Mediterranean so as to clarify such distinctiveness as the region may have possessed. Comparison across presumed boundaries is even more prominent in the final ­section, “The Mediterranean and a Wider World.” Mediterranean history is nothing if it is not also, to some extent, global history, alive to the wider entanglements that may explain or reflect Mediterranean phenomena. The Mediterranean may or may not be different from other “inland seas,” whether maritime or, by analogy, terrestrial (the Steppes, for example).10 Either way it cannot be considered in isolation from them, to bring out its peculiarities or to show that it is impossible to delimit. The editors hope that this book encourages those new to the field to explore its manifold possibilities, and those already immersed in one part of it to find congenial company elsewhere. We want skeptics about the Mediterranean to be brought up short and passionate devotees to re-examine their assumptions. We want to show the exciting work that has been and is being done and to suggest new paths for the future. In its breadth and complexity, the subject deserves no less. 6 peregrine horden

Endnotes 1 The event can be viewed on YouTube starting at www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHBfx­ DgtBzc (accessed July 13, 2013). I owe my knowledge of it, however, to a forthcoming paper by Naor Ben-Yehoyada (who interviewed the bishop), a paper that he has generously allowed me to draw on and cite here. 2 www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/08/nato-ship-libyan-migrants (accessed July 13, 2013). 3 www.ufmsecretariat.org/history/ (accessed July 13, 2013). 4 For Israel see Herzfeld, Astren, this volume. 5 Celebrating mass on Lampedusa, many illegal migrants’ destination, rather than at sea, would have required the permission of the bishop of Agrigento. 6 Compare Goitein (1966) on Tunisia as the “hub” of the Mediterranean. 7 Compare Goskar, this volume, on Josiah Wedgwood and his factory named Etruria. 8 For a limited and highly qualified retraction see Ben-Yehoyada (2013: 79): “I [Herzfeld] also feel that, having battered my head for forty years against the notion of the Mediterranean, a little gracious retreat does not do any harm …” But do not expect too much retreat, thank goodness: see further the chapter on post-modernity below. 9 See Goskar and Herzfeld, this volume. 10 For contrasting statements see Abulafia (2005) and Horden and Purcell (2006).

References Alcock, S.E. (2005) Alphabet soup in the Mediterranean Basin: The emergence of the Mediterranean serial, in Rethinking the Mediterranean (ed. W.V. Harris), Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 314–336. Abulafia, D. (2005) Mediterraneans, in Rethinking the Mediterranean (ed. W.V. Harris), Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 64–93. Abulafia, D. (2011) The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean, London: Penguin. Ben-Yehoyada, N. (2013) The sea of scales and segments: Interview with Hashim Sarkis and Michael Herzfeld. New Geographies (Harvard University Graduate School of Design), 5: 59–80. Bonney, R. (2008) False Prophets: The “Clash of Civilizations” and the Global War on Terror, Oxford: Peter Lang. Braudel, F. (1972–3) The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, London: Collins. Braudel, F. (2001) The Mediterranean in the Ancient World, London: Allen Lane. Davis, J. (1977) People of the Mediterranean: An Essay in Comparative Social Anthropology, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Goitein, S.D. (1966) Medieval Tunisia: The hub of the Mediterranean, in Goitein, Studies in Islamic History and Institutions, Leiden: Brill, pp. 308–328. Herzfeld, M. (2005) Practical Mediterraneanism: Excuses for everything from epistemology to eating, in Rethinking the Mediterranean (ed. W.V. Harris), Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 45–63. Horden, P. and Purcell, N. (2000) The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History, Oxford: Blackwell. Horden, P. and Purcell, N. (2006) The Mediterranean and the new thalassology. American Historical Review, 111 (3): 722–740. AHR Forum, “Oceans of History.” Morris, I. (2009) Mediterraneanization. Mediterranean Historical Review, 18 (2) (2009): 30–55.­ introduction 7

Paris, E. (1999) La genèse intellectuelle de l’œuvre de Fernand Braudel: “La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II” (1923–1947), Athens: Institut de Recherches Néohelléniques/F.N.R.S. Strasser, T. et al. (2010) Stone Age seafaring in the Mediterranean: Evidence from the Plakias region for Lower Palaeolithic and Mesolithic habitation of Crete. Hesperia 79: 145–190.

Further Reading Abulafia, D. (2011) The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean, London: Penguin. Braudel, F. (1972–3) The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, London: Collins. Broodbank, C. (2013) The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World, London and New York: Thames and Hudson and Oxford University Press. Horden, P. and Purcell, N. (2000) The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History, Oxford: Blackwell.

Part I

Climate and Vegetation

Chapter One

The Mediterranean Climate

Fredric Cheyette

Formation and structure of the mediterranean climate system The Mediterranean is the remnant of the Mesozoic and Cenozoic Tethys ocean (about 250–35 million years ago), which bounded the ancient land masses that geol- ogists call Laurasia and Gondwanna. As the African plate moved northward into the Eurasian plate and the mountain ranges that stretch along the southern rim of the Eurasian continent—the Alps, Dinarides, Carpathians, Taurus, Alborz, and others— were lifted up, the connections between the western part of this ocean and the Indian ocean, as well as those with the shallow sea (the Paratethys) that covered a basin reaching from north of the Alps to the area of the Aral sea, gradually narrowed and at last, about 11 million years ago, closed off. This left behind a string of inland seas, the Black, Caspian, and Aral to the east, and to the west an inland sea whose only (inter- mittent) connection to the world’s oceans was through the narrow and relatively shallow straits of Gibraltar. What one normally understands as “the Mediterranean climate” with its ­relatively wet winters and dry summers does not go back to this very early date. It emerged between 7000 and 5000 years ago, around the middle of what geoscientists call the Holocene, the period since the end of the last ice age, when the Mediterranean reached its modern high stand and changes in the forest cover near its shores produced envi- ronments favorable to human agricultural and pastoral settlements (Robinson et al., 2006; Perez-Obiol et al., 2011). Nevertheless, the very early geological history is essential to understanding the broader framework within which this late-Holocene climate evolved. The shrinking of the shallow Paratethys changed the Eurasian climate from oceanic to continental conditions, with colder winters and hotter summers. At the same time, the slow closing of the connection to the Indian Ocean led to drier conditions in Anatolia, the Arabian peninsula, and North Africa. All of these set the fundamental conditions for fresh water flows into the emerging Mediterranean, just as the narrowing of the western straits set those for oceanic flows (Lionello, 2012: 18–47). They also set the conditions for the complex seasonal atmospheric flows.

A Companion to Mediterranean History, First Edition. Edited by Peregrine Horden and Sharon Kinoshita. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 12 fredric cheyette

As an inland sea the Mediterranean is dominated by three atmospheric systems, with their pressure ridges and troughs and the storm systems associated with them. The first, and most important, is the flow coming across the north Atlantic, whose strength and direction is determined by the relative strengths of the low pressure ­system west of Iceland and the high pressure system south of the Azores. The varia- tion in this system is known as the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). When in its “negative” state, with a relatively weak pressure gradient, the westerly jet stream and its attendant storm centers (cyclones) flow along a southern route, commonly over Scotland and Denmark. Along with the wintertime Siberian high, this can push cold, wet winter storms as far south as Italy (as it did, for example, in 2000). In its ­“positive” state, with a steep pressure gradient, the jet stream travels further north, bringing milder winters to western and central Europe and drier winters to the Mediterranean (Pavan, 2008; Martin-Puertas et al., 2010). The second flow is the African monsoon, originating in the Intertropical Convergence Zone (the climatic equator), whose ­seasonal movement north brings late-summer precipitation to the sources of the Nile in the Sahel and the Sudan as it encounters the return flow of winds from the Indian monsoon. The latter, known locally as the “Etesian” winds, blowing off the Anatolian plateau bring arid summer weather to the Levant (Raicich et al., 2003). The winds from the African monsoon also blow Saharan sand over the North African coastal plain and dust as far as Iberia and France. There they encounter cold from the North Atlantic and may “seed” hail storms, such as the historic storm of July 13, 1788, the final blow to the northern French grain harvest that year and the antecedent to the bread riots that touched off the Revolution (Le Roy Ladurie, 1971: 76; Lionello, 2012: lxxii). Over the very long term, millennial and pluri-millennial, these atmospheric flows have been strongly affected by changes in the amount of incoming solar energy, changes caused by complex variations in the earth’s orbit. On a shorter term, they also appear to be affected by sun-spot cycles and other variations in solar energy, as well as by random events on earth, such as volcanic eruptions—the “years without a sum- mer” in 536 and 1816 ce, for example (Robock and Free, 1996; Gunn, 2000; Larson et al., 2008; McCormick et al., 2007 and 2012). Very recent changes in the climate have been caused by human activity that has pumped greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Whether or not there were past changes in climate due to human activity in Mediterranean lands remains a subject of debate. Because air and moisture flow over continental land masses before reaching the Mediterranean they form very different regional micro-climates. What is familiarly thought of as “the Mediterranean climate” of wet winters and hot, dry summers—the climate of the Costa Brava, the Côte d’Azur, and the Greek islands, the lands of olive and vine that fires the imagination of northern tourists and was lyrically evoked by Braudel—is only one of many surrounding the inland sea. Among them are the sub- tropical and mid-latitude steppe of south-western Iberia, western North African coastal areas, parts of Greece and Anatolia, the maritime and humid temperate zones in the Balkans, and the subtropical desert of North Africa (Lionello, 2012: map xl). Winter rainfall is heaviest around the Gibraltar strait, on parts of the Algerian and Tunisian coast, Calabria, the eastern Adriatic, Ionia, and the Syrian–Lebanese–Israeli coast, while in some areas not far inland amounts can drop by half. The Alps generate a year-round low-pressure region in the gulf of Genoa, which makes the eastern Alps the mediterranean climate 13 and the eastern Adriatic one of the wettest zones. During the winter these storms can track as far as the Ionian coast. At the same time, the winds off Anatolia can create another low-pressure center east of Crete, bringing winter rains to the Levantine coast. Meanwhile, from Morocco to Syria, the desert is everywhere close at hand. As anyone who has stood on Mount Scopus, north-east of Jerusalem, has seen, the line between vegetation and the desert can be as sharp as a knife’s edge. Summer mean temperatures reach 30 °C from Tunisia eastwards to Syria, 25 °C in southern Iberia and along the Moroccan-Algerian coast as well as along a narrow coastal band of France, Italy, Greece, and Turkey, while inland temperatures drop to means common to all of western Europe, and the cool of the Alps, the Dinarides, and Anatolia are not far away. These air, heat, and moisture flows also generate the winds whose names and force have been legendary since antiquity: the easterly Levante and the westerly Ponente blowing through the Strait of Gibraltar; the Mistral, whose force can reach 90 km per hour in the Rhone valley and often be felt as far as the African coast; the Bora from the eastern Alps blowing down the Adriatic, flooding the lagoon of Venice, and influ- encing weather east to the Aegean during the winter; further east, the Etesian, already mentioned; and finally, from the south, especially in fall and spring, comes the Sirocco, stirred up by North African highs. In the sea itself, alterations of temperature and salinity create two major basins, west and east, and a number of sub-basins within them. From the Atlantic and, in much lesser amounts, from the Black Sea, precipitation, and rivers, come fresher, colder water. Winter-time cold and dry winds from the north and summer-time heat cause evaporation. The result is a flow of relatively less salty surface water eastward along the African coast becoming increasingly salty as it moves in a counter-clockwise (cyclonic) gyre through the Tyrrhenian. Some of that west basin water flows through the Sicilian strait and rapidly becomes yet saltier and warmer than in the west, reach- ing its highest salinity between Cyprus and the Levantine coast, about 9% saltier than the water coming through the straits of Gibraltar and 13% saltier than the average of the world’s oceans (Rohling, 2001). Only the north-eastern Aegean, freshened by water flow from the Black Sea, has a salinity level as low as that just south-east of Gibraltar. As the surface saltiness gradient runs west to east, the surface temperature gradient runs north to south, cooled by winds off the European continent and thus coldest in the Gulf of Lion, the northern Adriatic, and the northern Aegean, and warmest along the Syrian–Lebanese–Israeli coast. These two gradients create the basic vertical movement of waters (and thus also of oxygen) within the two basins. The flow of surface water eastward would tend to sink were it not for its increasing temperature which keeps it lighter than the deeper waters. In the winter, however, as those surface waters are cooled, in particular by the winds blowing off the Anatolian plateau, they lose their relative buoyancy and sink, mixing with the waters below, carrying with them both oxygen and nutrients. Near the Sicilian “sill,” these lower lying waters (in technical terms Levantine Intermediate Water) mix with others stirred up and cooled by winds blowing from the Alps onto the Adriatic, forming the deepest strata of the sea, the Western Deep Water. To the west, winter winds also churn up currents in the Gulf of Lion. In both regions this mixing brings the oxygen and nutrients in the deeper water flowing from the Levant up to levels where light can penetrate, thus bringing together the three factors 14 fredric cheyette

­necessary to support plant and animal life. The same up-welling is found in shallow coastal areas of the northern Aegean, enriched by the inflow from the Black Sea; off the coast of Catalonia, enriched by nutrients from the Ebro river; and in the Alboran Sea just west of Gibraltar. These are the richest fishing grounds in a sea that, compared­ to the major fishing grounds of the world’s oceans, is relatively poor in plant and animal productivity (Lionello, 2012). That productivity was, furthermore, significantly­ reduced after 1964 by the construction of the Aswan Dam, which cut off the flow of nutrients from the upper Nile to the sea. All of these—winds, salinity and temperature differences that cause vertical exchanges within the various basins of the sea, all the various land masses around and islands in the sea, as well as the varied topography of the sea bottom—create the com- plex surface currents of the Mediterranean: the counter-clockwise circulations in the western and eastern basins and the various eddies that form both permanently and seasonally in both of them. It is also important to note that the conditions creating equilibria in these various flows remain in part unknown, and the consequences ­climate change might have for them are thus difficult to predict (technical details in Robinson et al., 2001).

Climate variability since the mid-Holocene A half-century ago the title of this section would have been met with raised eyebrows, if not dismissed out of hand. The dominant view at that time was still that climate has not changed—apart from minor fluctuations—since temperatures reached their ­maximum after the last ice age about 9000 years ago. Because climate did not vary significantly, it could therefore be ignored in the analysis of historical events, short- term or even long-term. “Minor,” as in “minor fluctuations,” is of course a matter of scale. Project the size of human population since 100 000 years ago onto a graph, with time as the horizontal axis, and the sudden and huge demographic rise since the mid-eighteenth century will make it appear that there were no “significant” variations before then: the required size of the vertical axis reduces earlier rises and falls to changes invisible to the naked eye. Project European population from around 1000 to 1750 and the change in the dimen- sion of the vertical axis will make the great demographic wave of the central Middle Ages and the trough that begins with the great famine of 1314–1315 and plunges with the onset of the plague in 1348 all too clear. To those who lived through these events they were not “minor fluctuations.” And so with climatological data. A number of Arctic and Antarctic ice cores go back through the last glacial period and a handful to the glacial period before that (Bradley, 1999: 126). When one of the paleoclimato- logical “proxies” from those cores is graphed—for example changes over time in the relative concentration of oxygen isotopes reflecting changes in temperature—the dif- ference between the temperatures at the glacial minimum and those at the Holocene maximum are so great that even major Holocene cold events, such as the one that occurred about 8200 years ago (the “8.2 ka BP event” in paleoclimatologist short- hand), are reduced to what looks like a minor blip in a nearly straight line. In that very long view the climate has been “relatively stable.” But we must remember that the creation of all of what we think of as human civilization—the domestication of plants and animals, the building of permanent settlements and the social ­organizations the mediterranean climate 15 that developed within and around them—occurred since the mid-Holocene,­ and the agriculture on which it has depended is itself critically dependent on a narrow range of temperature and water supplies, “narrow” in comparison to the wide swings from ­glacial to inter-glacial. It is therefore to those “minor” variations during the Holocene that historians of human communities must pay attention. As recently as the 1960s relatively little was known about those variations, and ­historians were generally skeptical even about inquiring into what they might have been. At the beginning of the twentieth century the geographer Ellsworth Huntington, con- templating the vanished cities in the deserts of the eastern Mediterranean, argued that

unfavorable changes of climate have been the cause of depopulation, war, migration, the overthrow of dynasties, and the decay of civilization; while favorable changes have made it possible for nations to expand, grow strong, and develop the arts and sciences. (Huntington, 1913: 223, citing 1911: 251)

But his theory of worldwide climatic “pulses” and his strong climate determinism were enough for his contemporaries and generations of successors to put him on the shelf of science fantasy, along with his exact contemporary, Alfred Wegener and his theory of continental drift. There the subject of climate change would long remain. Braudel could consider the idea of an extended period of colder climate as the source of problems in the later sixteenth century to be but one speculative hypothesis among many (Braudel, 1972–3: 272–275). In retrospect, Braudel’s caution is hardly surprising. In 1962, the meteorologist Reid Bryson, in his introduction to a summary of findings of an international paleo­ climatology conference, had been unsparing in his evaluation of most current work:

[There is] too much theorizing about the causes of climatic change without a firm factual basis as to the nature of the change, and … for one reason or another the study of ­climatic change [is] plagued with an inordinate amount of mediocrity. (Bryson and Julian, 1962: 1)

That situation was about to change, to a large extent as a consequence of that ­conference and the work of the geologists, biologists, anthropologists, meteorolo- gists, and historians who attended it. The sixteenth century was set as one focus for these scholars, and the data they shared amply demonstrated the beginning of a long cold period over Europe, as well as related changes elsewhere in the northern hemi- sphere, beginning around the middle of that century. What Braudel considered ­speculation was shown to be an identifiable period of modern climate history, soon to be known as the Little Ice Age or simply the LIA (Le Roy Ladurie, 1971). For the eleventh century, the other conference focus, the specialists concluded that the ­available data were insufficient to judge whether that was also a period of climatic “anomaly” (a deviation from a set of mean values) in the opposite direction, a warm- ing period. The British meteorologist H.H. Lamb, who had been arguing forcefully for such a conclusion (Lamb, 1959 and 1968), must have been disappointed. The recognition of the Medieval Warm Period would take longer, but in time would also become part of the standard schema of the climate history of the last millennium (Jones et al., 2001; Osborn and Briffa, 2006). 16 fredric cheyette

More significantly, the assembled specialists envisaged the kinds of data they hoped to see collected and the scientific problems that would have to be addressed. They also called for continued cooperation and sharing. The seeds were planted that would soon grow into the flourishing field of paleoclimatology, with its research centers, its journals, its intergovernmental committees, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and its international programs, such as MedCLIVAR (Mediterranean Climate Variability), which brought together 134 scientists to pro- duce the massive survey The Climate of the Mediterranean Region: from the Past to the Future (2012). Although North American anthropologists–archaeologists participated in the 1962 conference, Old-World archaeologists were not invited. The reason was simple: in Western Europe, archaeology did not go beyond the classical period. Even late antique remains were commonly ignored. Only in Eastern Europe and Scandinavia did prac- titioners pay attention to material from the first millennium ce, as part of the “late Iron Age.” Elsewhere, “Christian archaeology,” as it was then sometimes called, was largely confined to the study of church buildings. That too was about to change. In 1969 the then young archaeologist and geoscientist Claudio Vita-Finzi brought attention to the alluvial soil that had buried Roman-era waterworks in North Africa, associating this alluvium with what he termed the “younger fill,” low terraces in river valleys around the Mediterranean, from Spain and Morocco to the Peloponnese and the Jordan rift. In some cases, such as Olympia in Greece, this fill covered whole cities. Given the dating of this fill, and above all its composition everywhere it is found, Vita- Finzi argued that one of the causes of the extensive erosion to which it testified was an important change in rainfall patterns, whose beginnings he dated to late antiquity (Vita-Finzi, 1969). Thus began a debate that still continues: was erosion around the Mediterranean caused by human “degradation” of the land by clearing, plowing, and putting animals to graze, or by climate change? Out of this debate has come extensive research by hydrologists, soil scientists, and archaeologists on kinds of erosion and the soil types, vegetation, and precipitation patterns that promote them.1 Vita-Finzi has been shown to be at least partially correct, and studies of erosion have contributed in a major way to identifying yet another major climate anomaly of the most recent two millennia: the fifth to the seventh century (for example Constante et al., 2011).

Sources of data Although paleoclimatology is now a highly technical scientific enterprise, at its most basic the kinds of questions its practitioners ask are similar to those that all scholars face who attempt to understand the past. All start with objects the ­vanished past has left behind. The first question they must answer is: from when do they date? Then, why do they have their particular form, language, and content? Only then can they turn to the ultimate task, constructing a plausible narrative to make sense of what they have found and filtered. In the case of human history (in the older and now outdated sense that distinguishes “history” from “pre-­history”), the source materials have traditionally been written documents—newspapers, chronicles, laws, land titles, letters, literature. The questions about form and ­language will ask, for example, why particular words are used and what they meant at the time they were used; why a document has its particular shape and content the mediterranean climate 17 and what clues this might give to understanding what it tells and what it may occlude. The narrative will be a story of human thought and action, thus with a time scale gauged by human life spans. In archaeology the materials will be ­potsherds and bones, standing or buried buildings, or sometimes only dark stains in the soil that reveal ancient ditches or post-holes. The questions will be first of all about the particular form of those materials and what they may reveal about such things as food sources, commerce, wealth, and social organization. The nar- rative will again be about human actions, though the actors will most often be anonymous or collective, and the time scale will run from generations to centuries. In paleoclimatology the source material for very recent periods is instrumental data. In the Mediterranean region, continuous series go back to the early nineteenth century, but other discontinuous records go back as far as the seventeenth. These, of course, must be recalibrated to match modern measurements. In addition, many other sources of information can be exploited, though converting them into normal- ized series presents its own set of problems. There are ships’ log books which record wind speeds and directions, as well as a multitude of other kinds of individual records made for professional reasons (for example, by military officers, shipping companies, botanic gardens) or simply out of curiosity. These add to what is available for the last 300 years (Brázdil et al., 2010; Camuffo et al., 2010; Lionello, 2012: 92–98).2 Chronicle mentions of unusual or extreme weather events start to become volumi- nous in the fourteenth century (Alexandre, 1987). Records of the date of grape ­harvests (reflecting summer temperatures) have been reconstructed with increasing density from the fifteenth century on, and comparisons of variations in these dates with instrumental data from the eighteenth and nineteenth century show a strong correlation (Le Roy Ladurie, 1971 and 2011). By the eighteenth century, the indirect consequences of weather variation is increasingly reflected in records of local food supplies found, for example, in parish tithe records and the registers of towns and ­cities concerned with feeding their populations. These series can, likewise, be correlated with weather data (Pfister, 1984–1985; Frenzel et al., 1992). In the eastern Mediterranean, Byzantine and Arab narrative sources as well as the letters of the Cairo Geniza, likewise sometimes mention extreme weather events, and compilers from the fourteenth century onwards report the height of the Nile floods back to the begin- ning of the Islamic period (Stathakopoulos, 2004; Ellenblum, 2012). The recovery and correlation of this non-instrumental data has barely begun, however. One can only dream of what may still be hidden, for example, in the Venetian and Ottoman archives. To study climate before the advent of instrumental records, paleoclimatologists turn to what they call “proxies.” These are physical deposits that in some way reflect changes in precipitation and temperatures over time and thus stand in for instrumen- tal data. The great advances in the discipline since the 1970s have been, first, discovering what such deposits might be, and what about them might reflect changes in the ambi- ent atmosphere in a measurable way; second, learning how to date such deposits more accurately; and, finally, developing statistical operations that can turn this data into meaningful narratives. The time scales of these narratives (most commonly in the form of graphs) may, in rare cases, be as short as decades or even years, but far more often they are centuries or even millennia. Everything depends on the proxies being measured and the techniques of analysis and correlation. 18 fredric cheyette

In terms of time scales, proxies are either low resolution or high resolution, ­depending on the nature of the evidence, or sometimes on the interests of the research team publishing the results. Low temporal resolution proxies are those that register changes datable to centuries or millennia. Such are the data extracted, for example, from micro-fossils taken from the bottom of the sea. The profile of species popula- tions and the oxygen isotopes in their shells can reveal changes over time in sea surface temperature and the oxygenation of water at different depths, and therefore, by ­implication, changes in air temperature and rainfall. Similar kinds of data have been drawn from analyses of sea bottom sediments as well as sediments from lakes. More recently, work has been directed at extracting information from corals on long-term changes in water temperature, nutrient content, and water circulation. As we shall see, this research has raised important questions about the conditions in which Neolithic cultures developed in the eastern and southern regions of the Mediterranean basin. Because of the time it takes for bodies of water to respond to atmospheric changes and then for the populations of aquatic plants and animals to respond to changes in their environment, the dating of such changes must necessarily be quite broad. It is the same for other physical processes that change slowly over long periods of time: the accumulation of soil in ditches and alluvial fans, the alterations in regional plant ­populations, the rise and fall of lake levels which leave their marks in shore-line ­terraces, the uncovering of former moraines as glaciers retreat. Very different are physical, chemical, and biological processes that respond quickly to changes in temperature and precipitation: the seasonal growth of plants, the sedi- ments that mark river floods, annual layers in accumulated arctic and antarctic ice, even the growth rings of speleothems in limestone caves. Tree rings in a few species can be dated to the year (and thus to the growth season) as series have been recon- structed going back 5000 years or more (Büntgen et al., 2011). With somewhat less precision, the varves of lake sediments can be counted back from the present, thus dating the plant and micro-faunal remains in them as well as changes in their mineral content. What we might think of as medium-term resolution dates are provided by radioac- tive isotopes, most commonly C14 from organic material from the Holocene, whose dates are then calibrated using standardized curves (available from Cologne University at www.calpal-online.de).3 Other isotopes are used for deposits further back in time. Because the confidence range of such dates may be rather wide (a century or more), proxies dated in this manner are only congruent with geographic or economic changes occurring over an equally long period of time. Their temporal uncertainty is increased as the dates of strata in between those dated by C14 must be interpolated by assuming even sedimentation. Once proxies are dated, it remains to find the “signal” of climate variability in what one is measuring. For, unlike instruments, proxies do not directly measure the prop- erties of climate. In their formation, temperature and precipitation are mediated by complex physical, biological and chemical processes. Whether one is measuring changes in the width of tree rings, oxygen isotopes in the carbonate of mollusc shells, the silicates in lake sediments, or some other physical feature, climate variations are only a part of the complex physical systems that shape them. Other aspects of those physical systems, some of which may be quite random (that is, unspecifiable), may also be reflected in what one is measuring. They are the “noise” that one must the mediterranean climate 19

­somehow filter out to identify and measure the climate “signal.” Meeting this ­challenge is a constant preoccupation in the scientific analysis of paleoclimatological proxies. It is also one of the reasons why practitioners look for climate signals in a variety of ­different proxies. One hopes that the sources of noise in the measurement of one proxy are different from those in another. If this is the case, and the climate signal one has discovered in one proxy conforms to that in separate studies of others, together they increase confidence in the results. Paleoclimate research is, above all, cumulative. To find the climate signal, paleoclimatologists calibrate recent changes in the par- ticular material they are analyzing with instrumental weather records over the last 100 years or so registered nearby. Thus they assume that the biological and chemical pro- cesses in the plants or animals being studied have not changed over millennia. This, however, is the only way to measure mathematically what portion of the change they have detected comes from climatic variations. The need for nearby weather records also presents particular problems for Mediterranean research, for while there are many such weather records around the northern shores of the Mediterranean, around the southern shores they are rare, save in Tunisia, the Nile valley, Israel, and Cyprus. Of the proxies listed above, there are relatively numerous low-resolution examples available for the Mediterranean (Lionello, 2012: table 1.1 and 58–86) which present interesting questions especially for eastern regions from the early Holocene through the Bronze Age. Of high-resolution proxies for the most recent two millennia, ­however—the kind that would be of interest to most historians of the ancient, medi- eval and modern periods—written, archival evidence is potentially the richest source. Of physical evidence, only river flood records are at the moment sufficiently numer- ous and sufficiently lengthy: Tiber records, for example, go back to antiquity (Aldrete, 2007). More importantly, records are available for both western (Spain, France, Italy, Tunisia) and eastern (Greece, Turkey, Israel) river systems. Although some published studies have only centennial or longer-period resolution, others identify individual flood events on annual or decadal scales (Lionello, 2012: 108–112). In contrast, at the time of writing, there are only a handful of published tree-ring- based Mediterranean temperature and precipitation series reaching back more than 600 years, and the only one that includes the first millennium ce is from the Austrian Alps (Lionello, 2012: 99). Tree-ring research has focused primarily on high-altitude sites, where growth is particularly sensitive to temperature fluctuations and to early summer rainfall (May, June, July)—not the relevant season for Mediterranean agricul- ture. Furthermore, the published studies reflect only century to multi-century varia- bility. Thus tree-ring studies at the moment have relatively limited usefulness for historians of Mediterranean societies, but this could potentially change. Given the prevalence of karst areas and limestone caves around the Mediterranean, speleothems are also potentially a rich source for Mediterranean climate data, multi- millennial records with annual or even sub-annual resolution. Very few, however, have yet been published or analyzed for periods prior to the beginning of instrumental weather records (Lionello, 2012: 103–108). In interpreting almost all physical proxies around the Mediterranean, the most seri- ous problem, the most serious source of “noise” in the data, is the long history of human settlements. It was eastward of the Mediterranean’s most eastern shore that the Neolithic package of domesticated einkorn and emmer, chickpeas and barley, goats, sheep, pigs, and cattle, first appeared. With these came fixed settlements, fields, and 20 fredric cheyette pastures. Does the development of soil and deposition in the form of river ­terraces and alluvial fans reflect this human activity? Or does it reflect periods of increased rainfall? Or some mix of both (Bintliff, 1992 and 2005)? Does the abandonment of settlements reflect increased aridity, soil depletion, warfare, or social and political disruption?­ So likewise, do changes in plant or wild animal populations over time reflect changes in climate or selective cutting and hunting, planting and breeding by human beings? These have been major issues in the historiography of Mediterranean climate. In addition to collecting data on past variations in the earth’s climate, one ultimate goal of paleoclimatologists is to understand that climate as a system, that is, how changes in one aspect of climate in one region results in changes in aspects of climate in other regions, for example, how changes in the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) in the Pacific are related to changes in the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) or the Arctic Oscillation (AO). Since, as we have seen, Mediterranean climate is ­governed in different parts of the basin by three different atmospheric sub-systems, the North Atlantic, the African monsoon, and the Indian monsoon, and by their interactions, only when we understand the connections among these systems (and their connections to the hemispheric system) will we understand some peculiarities of the Mediterranean-wide climate. One of the most important of these is the east-west climate “see-saw,” evident, for example, in the developing aridity in the Levant from the seventh century ce onward, at the same time that anomalous wet conditions, already evident two centuries earlier, prevailed in the West (Martin-Puertas et al., 2010; Bakker et al., 2012). At other periods, strong Saharan winds may have given southern Iberia a very different climate than other regions of Mediterranean Europe (Nieto-Moreno et al., 2011). Correlating changes in temperature and rainfall over the entire Mediterranean basin has barely begun. For the moment there are still too many unknowns. We do not yet have the ability to “retrodict” the predominant weather patterns in, let us say, the Nile delta when we know the climatic patterns in southern France. Eventually, climate models may allow this, but not yet. For this reason it may be beside the point to refer to the Medieval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age, ­identifiable in a European context, when we talk of events in the eastern Mediterranean.

Linking climate variations to the events of human history What is required to connect the history of climate to the story of human actions? Since Ellsworth Huntington’s assertion that the ancient powers of the Fertile Crescent were brought low by climate change, to connect climate change to the fall of empires or civilizations has never been far below the surface of even the most scientific of paleoclimate studies, and even now occasionally surfaces without apology in plain sight. It is the not-so-hidden dream (McCormick et al., 2012). How can it be done? Coincidence is not causation. That simple rule is sometimes forgotten. Coincidence, at most, suggests a question; by itself it does not give an answer. And so, to connect climate variation to other historical phenomena, one must proceed link by link. Apart from sudden natural disasters, hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, volcanic eruptions, which can wipe out whole cities and destroy the livelihoods of large populations (and whose frequency may or may not be related to climate change), climate change will first of all have consequences, positive or negative, on food production. This, in turn, may have an impact on human fertility and mortality rates, again either positive or ­negative. the mediterranean climate 21

In exceptional cases, famine may lower tax revenues or spark food riots, with ­consequences for political stability. But such results can only be demonstrated by ana- lyzing and testing all the intermediate stages. In this, the historian differs from the paleoclimatologist: the latter seeks to identify the climate signal in an undifferentiated body of noise, the former to separate the varying strands of noise to see if climate has any identifiable role at all, and if so, exactly what it may be. The first question will therefore be what were the demands for water and warmth over the growing season of staple crops? What would have been the consequences for growth and productivity of too much or too little of either at different times of the year? Likewise, how did too much or too little water affect the availability of nutrients in the soil, above all nitrogen? How did the commonly available technologies manage variations in water supply, heat, and fertility? For different crops as for different socie- ties there will be different answers. Too much or too little water when seed is germi- nating may be more critical than temperatures, while at ripening time, temperature may be determinant. Thus much may depend on water management, which in turn may depend on labor availability and thus on factors other than climate. Through ­erosion, flooding, or aeolian drift, once fertile soils may become marginal. Each agri- cultural system will have its own labor demands, its own provisions for storage of grain and seed, its own distribution strategies, especially for times of crop failure. All of these will buffer, or amplify, the consequences of climate change (or any other change that affects population), and possibly drive the entire agricultural system to a very different equilibrium state (Borsch, 2004). Thus, the historian’s objective must be to work out as fully as possible the ways in which a particular society at a particular time mobilizes its necessarily limited resources to sustain itself. Only then can the consequences of climate change begin to be defined and measured. In the early modern period, when records begin to grow voluminous in parts of Europe, many of the links can be worked out in detail. Christian Pfister’s study of a group of Swiss cantons over more than three centuries is a model example (Pfister, 1984–1985). In places and times less well documented, more will have to be left open to hypothesis or supposition, but, as Haas, for example, has shown, many of these complexities can be approximately assessed even for a period with as limited documentation as the second and third century ce (Haas, 2006). The model of inquiry should hold even for changes over long periods of time, or when climate data is of relatively low temporal resolution. Shifts in the sites of settle- ments and crop production from lowlands and valley bottoms to uplands and hilltops, from heavy soils to lighter, or vice versa, may be in part a response to climate changes that turn marginal what had been usable soil (see also Bintliff, this volume). Such changes would be most evident in regions that are marginal even under favorable conditions and are then abandoned, or again, vice versa. Other alterations that mark major shifts in an agricultural economy—between mono- and poly-cultures, between exchange-orientated and “autarchic,” between demographic expansion and contraction—at the very least show a move to a new equilibrium state in which ­climate change may have played a role. One can certainly argue for millennial-scale climatic change in the transformation of what is now the northern and eastern Sahara. Before the mid-Holocene (around 7000 to 5000 years ago) there was sufficient rainfall here to allow big game and domestic cattle to flourish. Thousands of years later, Hannibal’s elephants were drawn 22 fredric cheyette from a relict “Tunisian” population of this ancient fauna. It also seems more plausible to associate the abandonment of the Neolithic settlements at Çatalhöyük in south- east Anatolia and Jerico in the Jordan valley with what paleoclimatologists call the 8.2 ka BP event, a sudden hemispheric cooling caused by the flooding of cold fresh water into the North Atlantic, rather than the common (and unprovable) explanation of land degradation caused by over-exploitation (Cunliffe, 2008; Barber et al., 1999; Kobashi et al., 2007; Maher et al., 2011). Another major transition, the late-Bronze- Age crisis around 3200 BP, marking the end of major east-Mediterranean civilizations amidst the turmoil induced by mysterious raiding “sea peoples,” has been shown to coincide with an abrupt onset of extended drought in the region (Kaniewski et al., 2013). Almost all proxies, eastern and western Mediterranean alike, point to more benign conditions between about 500 bce and 100 ce (usually referred to as the Roman Warm Period), the necessary precondition for feeding the great cities of antiq- uity as well as the armies that created the Roman Empire (Finne et al., 2011). As climate changes are integrated into the history of human societies around the Mediterranean, the major challenge for historians will continue to be identifying, amidst the “noise” of complex social and economic changes, exactly where the ­“signal” of climate change may be found. Not an impossible task, but one that will invite historians and archaeologists to venture far deeper into the landscape and the lives of the many anonymous men and women who drew their sustenance from that landscape than they have been wont to do.

Endnotes 1 Among the varied studies, particularly from the Mediterranean region: Bintliff, 1992; Berger, 1997 and 2003; Butzer, 2005; Constante et al., 2011 with bibliography. 2 Collection and calibration of Mediterranean data is being done under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization at www.omm.urv.cat/MEDARE (accessed June 30, 2013). 3 Raw C14 dates are usually given “BP,” for “before the present” with the “present” defined arbitrarily as 1950 ce; calibrated dates are commonly identified as such. Calibration gives a mean with dates of one and two standard deviations (68% and 95% confidence).

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