The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean - Softcover

9781844133086: The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean
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A one-volume narrative history of the Mediterranean from Ancient Egypt to 1919.

This magnificent undertaking tackles a vast subject — vast in time (from the oldest surviving pyramid to the First World War); vast in geography (from Gibraltar to Jerusalem); and vast in culture, including as it does the civilizations of the Phoenicians, the Ancient Egyptians, Greece, Carthage, Rome, Byzantium, as well as the Borgias and the Medicis, Mohammed and El Cid, Napoleon and Nelson, Moslems, Jews and Christians.

The Middle Sea is not a dry record of facts; it is a rackety read about historical figures — dissolute Popes and wily Emperors, noble-hearted Generals and beautiful Princesses. But the author’s greatest strength is naval and military history: from the Crusades to the expulsion of the Moors from Spain; from Trafalgar to Gallipoli. Towns are besieged and sacked, Kingdoms are won and lost. The narrative covers the glories of Constantinople and Venice, and the stirring history of the islands of the Mediterranean — Malta, Sicily, Crete and Cyprus.

The Middle Sea is the culmination of John Julius Norwich’s long and distinguished career as one of the greatest enthusiasts for anecdotal history, and the highways and byways of scholarship.

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About the Author:
John Julius Norwich is the author of histories of Norman Sicily, of the Republic of Venice and of the Byzantine Empire. He has also written on architecture, music and the history plays of Shakespeare, and has presented some thirty historical documentaries on BBC television.
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Chapter I

Beginnings
The Mediterranean is a miracle. Seeing it on the map for the millionth time, we tend to take it for granted; but if we try to look at it objectively we suddenly realise that here is something utterly unique, a body of water that might have been deliberately designed, like no other on the surface of the globe, as a cradle of cultures. Almost enclosed by its surrounding lands, it is saved from stagnation by the Straits of Gibraltar, those ancient Pillars of Hercules which protect it from the worst of the Atlantic storms and keep its waters fresh and – at least until recent years – unpolluted. It links three of the world's six continents; its climate for much of the year is among the most benevolent to be found anywhere.

Small wonder, then, that the Middle Sea should not only have nurtured three of the most dazzling civilisations of antiquity, and witnessed the birth or blossoming of three of our greatest religions; it also provided the principal means of communication. Roads in ancient times were virtually nonexistent; the only effective method of transport was by water, which had the added advantage of being able to support immense weights immovable by any other means. The art of navigation may have been still in its infancy, but early sailors were greatly assisted by the fact that throughout much of the eastern Mediterranean it was possible to sail from port to port without ever losing sight of land; even in the western, a moderately straight course was all that was necessary to ensure an arrival on some probably friendly coast before many days had passed.(1) To be sure, life at sea was never without its dangers. The mistral that screams down the Rhône valley and lashes the Gulf of Lyons to a frenzy, the bora in the Adriatic that can make it almost impossible for the people of Trieste to walk unassisted down the street, the gregale in the Ionian that has ruined many a winter cruise – all these could spell death for the inexperienced or unwary. Even the mild meltemi in the Aegean, usually a blessing to ships under sail, can transform itself within an hour into a raging monster and drive them on to the rocks. True, there are no Atlantic hurricanes or Pacific typhoons, and for most of the time – given a modicum of care – the going is easy enough; still, there was no point in taking unnecessary risks, so the earliest Mediterranean seafarers kept their journeys as short as possible.

When possible, too, they kept to the northern shore. To most of us today, the map of the Mediterranean is so familiar that we can no longer look at it objectively. If, however, we were to see it for the first time, we should be struck by the contrast between the littorals to the north and south. That to the north is full of incident, with the Italian and Balkan peninsulas flanked by three seas – Tyrrhenian, Adriatic and Aegean – and then that extraordinary conformation of the extreme northeast corner, where the Dardanelles lead up to the little inland Sea of Marmara, from the eastern end of which the city of Istanbul commands the entrance to the Bosphorus and ultimately to the Black Sea. The southern coast, by contrast, is comparatively featureless, with few indentations; there one is always conscious, even in the major cities, that the desert is never far away.

One of the many unsolved questions of ancient history is why, after countless millennia of caveman existence, the first glimmerings of civilisation should have made their appearance in widely separated areas at much the same time. Around the Mediterranean that time is, very roughly, about 3000 BC. It is true that Byblos (the modern Jbeil, some fifteen miles north of Beirut), which gave its name to the Bible - the word actually means papyrus - was settled in palaeolithic times and is believed by many to be considerably older still; indeed, it may well be the oldest continuously inhabited site in the world. But the remains of a few one-room huts and a crude idol or two can hardly be considered civilisation, and there as elsewhere nothing much really happens until the coming of the Bronze Age at the beginning of the third millennium BC. Then at last things start to move. There are some extraordinary monolithic tombs in Malta dating from about this time, and others in Sicily and Sardinia, but of the people who built them we know next to nothing. The three great cultures that now emerge have their origins a good deal further east: in Egypt, Palestine and Crete.

Of the traditional Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, only the oldest, the Pyramids of Egypt, survives today; and there is little doubt that they will still be standing five thousand years hence. The most venerable of all, the step pyramid at Saqqara, is said to date from 2686 BC; the grandest and noblest, that of the Pharaoh Khufu – known to Herodotus and so, normally, to us as Cheops – from a century later. Their longevity should cause us no surprise; their shape alone is almost enough to confer immortality. No buildings in the world are less top–heavy. Not even an earthquake could seriously shake them. Gazing up at them, one is dumbfounded by the sheer magnitude of the achievement, and of the underlying ambition: that a man, nearly five thousand years ago, should take it upon himself to build a mountain, and succeed in doing so. Only twenty–five years later, Cheops’s son Chefren built another, connected to a monumental hall of alabaster and red granite, along the walls of which were twenty–three seated statues of himself. Finally, he commissioned the Sphinx. It may well be his portrait; it can certainly claim to be the oldest piece of monumental sculpture – it is actually carved from an outcrop of rock – known to man.

Egypt, having started so early, was always slow to change. Cheops and Chefren belonged to the Fourth Dynasty; of the first three we know nothing but the names of some of the rulers. The last dynasty was the Thirty-First, which ended in 335 bc with the conquest of the country by the Persians; three years later they in their turn were thrown out by Alexander the Great. Alexander did not linger - he never did - but marched on to Mesopotamia and the further east. After his death in 323 Egypt passed to his former general, Ptolemy, whose line, more Greek than Egyptian, continued for another three centuries. Thus, from the shadowy beginnings with the First Dynasty until the death of Cleopatra in 30 BC, there extended a period of more than three thousand years; yet the untutored eye, balefully staring at relief carvings on the walls of tombs or at endless columns of hieroglyphics, finds it hard to distinguish the art of one millennium from that of the next.

Nonetheless, a few other great names imprint themselves on the memory: Queen Hatshepsut (1490-69 BC), for example, who, though technically only regent for her stepson and nephew Thutmose III, completed the temple at Karnak - erecting two obelisks there to commemorate the fact - and decorated the awe-inspiring pink granite temple of Deir el-Bahri at Thebes, on the walls of which she is represented as a man; Thutmose himself, who on her death in 1469, in what seems to have been a paroxysm of vindictive spite, ordered every portrait of her to be defaced and every inscription bearing her name chiselled away, but who later extended the bounds of his kingdom to the upper reaches of the Euphrates and proved himself - by his talents as general, lawgiver, builder and patron of the arts - one of the greatest of the pharaohs; Amenhotep IV, better known as Akhnaton (1367-50 BC) - instantly recognisable by his long, narrow, pointed face, stooping body and huge thighs - a religious fanatic who forbade the worship of the Theban sun god Amon, instituting instead that of the solar disc Aton, its rays as depicted ending in tiny hands outstretched to bless (or curse); his son-in-law and second successor the boy king Tutankhamun (1347-39 BC), who reverted to the old religion but would be obscure enough today were it not for Howard Carter's discovery on 5 November 1922 of his tomb, the sarcophagus almost invisible beneath the higgledy-piggledy piles of golden treasure - treasure which is to this day the chief glory of the Cairo Museum; and Rameses II, the Great (1290-24 BC), the megalomaniac who erected statues of himself all over Egypt and Nubia and may well have been the Pharaoh of the Exodus - though scholars are still arguing about this, and will continue to do so for many years to come. Finally we must make special mention of Akhnaton's queen, Nefertiti, whose bust - found in the excavated studio of an ancient craftsman in her husband's capital of Tell-el-Amarna and now in Berlin - suggests that she was one of the most ravishingly beautiful women who ever lived.1 Neither the Greeks nor the Romans, nor even the greatest sculptors of the Italian Renaissance, were ever to portray her equal. If ancient Egypt had produced no other work of art than this, those three millennia would still have been worth while.

Another reason for the strange timelessness of Egypt is its astonishing geography. Seen from the air, it looks exactly like a map of itself: vast expanses of yellow, with a thin blue-green line snaking up from the south, and a narrow border of green along each side before the yellow takes over again. To Egypt, the Nile is like the sun: a necessity to continuing national life in a way that no other river could ever be, as essential as a breathing tube to a deep-sea diver. In such conditions there is little opportunity for change; outside Cairo, Alexandria and one or two of the larger towns, life in most of Egypt carries on very much as it always has. There are few greater travelling pleasures than to board the night sleeper from Cairo to Luxor, and to awake early the next morning to find oneself moving at about ten miles an hour along the riverbank, while just outside the train window, golden in the early sunlight, there passes scene after scene straight out of a Victorian child’s geogra...

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  • PublisherPimlico
  • Publication date2007
  • ISBN 10 1844133087
  • ISBN 13 9781844133086
  • BindingPaperback
  • Number of pages784
  • Rating

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9781400034284: The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean

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Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. A magnificent undertaking- a one-volume narrative history of the Mediterranean Sea from Ancient Egypt to 1919, written in the racy readable prose for which John Julius Norwich is famous.An electrifying narrative history of the Mediterranean from Ancient Egypt to 1919, from the bestselling author of The Popes and Sicily- A Short HistoryThe Mediterranean has nurtured three of the most dazzling civilisations of antiquity, witnessed the growth of three of our greatest religions and links three of the world's six continents. John Julius Norwich has visited every country around its shores; now he tells the story of the Middle Sea - a tale that begins with the Pharaohs and ends with the Treaty of Versailles - in a dramatic account of the remarkable civilisations that rose and fell on the lands of the Mediterranean.Expertly researched and ingeniously executed, Norwich takes us through the Arab conquests of Syria and North Africa; the Holy Roman Empire and the Crusades; Ferdinand and Isabella and the Spanish Inquisition; the great sieges of Rhodes and Malta by the Sultan S leyman the Magnificent; the pirates of the Barbary Coast and the Battle of Lepanto; Nelson and Napoleon; the Greek War of Independence and the Italian Risorgimento.The Middle Sea is colourful, character-driven history at its most enjoyable and is the culmination of John Julius Norwich's distinguished career as one of the greatest enthusiasts for anecdotal history.'An expertly paced, exhilarating read.a landmark in popular history-telling.a splendid achievement for its memorable scope and vitality. This wonderfully riveting history reveals our favourite holiday destination in all its glorious, epic depth' Sunday Telegraph The Mediterranean has nurtured three of the most dazzling civilisations of antiquity, witnessed the birth or growth of three of our greatest religions and links three of the world's six continents. This book tells the story of the Middle Sea itself - a story that begins with the Phoenicians and the Pharaohs and ends with the Treaty of Versailles. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9781844133086

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