The Mediterranean Graveyard
It is impossible to ignore the twenty-first-century tragedy that has been unfolding in the Mediterranean. The numbers of refugees and migrants crossing the Mediterranean are simply extraordinary.
To take only one eight-month period, by the end of August 2015 some 300,000 people had attempted the crossing to Europe from either Turkey or North Africa and 2,500 perished in the course of the journey.[493] Yehoyada has pointed out that - in keeping with the conventional separation between the historical study of the Mediterranean and the Mediterranean of the twenty- first century - there has been little attempt to consider these vast human waves in the context of earlier periods in the history of the inland sea.[494]The fact of so many desperate people drowning just a few hundred miles from European territory (it is only 290 miles from the west coast of Libya to the Italian island of Lampedusa) certainly underlines the argument that Braudel’s unified Mediterranean was attractive and compelling only when the Europeans dominated it.[495] When it is migration from the southern shores to the northern ones, the response is radically different. Fortress Europe, however, is not a new phenomenon. The city of Marseille, for example, grew to be one of the most important ports in the eighteenth-century Mediterranean even as it rigorously excluded anyone who was not a subject of the French king. The difference is that in earlier periods the Muslims of the southern and eastern shores were connected to vast hinterlands and to points further east - such as India - which meant that the Mediterranean was not as important. Now, with the desperate conditions that have engulfed much of Africa and the Middle East, crossing the Mediterranean looms as an avenue of escape. Braudel was certainly correct to point out that the Mediterranean has always been affected by events and trends that unfold far from its shores.
We have seen that successive waves of connection and separation between the Christian and Muslim halves of the Mediterranean have structured much of the writing about the sea. It is also the case that dramatic pronouncements of separation and divergence - whether it be the Pirenne thesis, Hess’s frontier in the western Mediterranean and the dagger of nationalism which supposedly finished a connected maritime world - have consistently been qualified and modified, such that the current weight of scholarly opinion falls on the side of connection. It turns out that even in the tremendously hostile western Mediterranean after 1492 Spanish merchants coming to North Africa were more than willing to do business even with the Muslim and the Jewish communities they had recently forced out of Iberia (and the reverse was true as well).[496] Willingness to do business, however, does not mean that cosmopolitan societies were either desired or achieved.
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This history of connection even within a larger context of hostility raises questions about how to think about current events in the Mediterranean. On the one hand the unprecedented deaths at sea, combined with antiimmigrant sentiment in Europe would suggest that now, more than ever perhaps, the Mediterranean is a frontier. But, using past historiography as a guide, we should be alert to the possibility that the current crisis echoes, in part, the long history of exchange - licit and illicit - across the inland sea and that now, as then, such projects always require partners on both shores.