The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean

Brilliant

I think the best way to read this book is to start with the Greeks and Romans and then skip ahead to the 18th century or so. (Page 400) The Middle Ages are... middling. I think part of my disappointment lies in I was hoping for a more expansive history that would cover a wider scope than royal succession, pathetic palace intrigues, and the military battles. (Spoiler alert: Every siege is hot and ends in dysentery) I would have been interested in more on commerce, medicine, art etc... but the man had a lot to cover even in 600 pages.

That said, Norwich is a solid writer with parts droll wryness that one expects from English authors. I think his wit is hamstrung by the ultra Marathon of covering all the Med. countries from the Romans to WWI. There is frankly not a lot of time for dawdling on this epic road trip ("No we can't stop for an ice cream Wally World is 1800 miles away get back in the car!") And I wish there were because many of the book's best parts are when Norwich has time to take for digression and reflection.

Norwich perhaps when allowed a more leisurely pace would be a delight to read. And I'm glad I read the book overall because it brought to light new fascinating subjects that I know dreadfully little about from the Knights of St. John, the Knights Templar, the Venetian Empire etc...

Here's the thing... I'm a psychic and I talk to spirits. This book triggers spirits. They don't want anyone thinking about history in too much detail as they have much to hide. Earth is a game. Check out the chapter on Medieval Italy and the conflict between the Papacy and Kings. They don't want anyone thinking about this. Pope vs King, church vs state. It's a war, a game, an endless battle. It's still going on in different forms.

A full history up to the early 20th century and clearly written. It’s a little ponderous for my expectations.

Don’t expect me to write a comprehensive review of this magnificent narrative. In about six hundred pages Norwich has covered about five thousand years. It would be mad to try and summarize what is already a packed summary.

I also began this book about a year ago, then, halfway, I put it aside. Other readings took over my reading attention, not necessarily because they were more interesting, but because art exhibitions, trips, courses etc, required their prompt reading. I finally picked it up again and finished it with the determination that I shall read it again, taking notes. The account is so flowing as it moves from one major historical event to the next, that one feels as if gliding at great speed down a playground slide. Upon landing at the bottom one then wonders: what was that?

This book made it into my handbag last August as I was about to take a plane to Mallorca. Friends with a house perched on the Eastern coast of the island had invited me for the celebration of a special birthday. What a better place to read this account of the Middle Sea than sitting on a hammock in the middle of it?

Looking at the beauty of the blues and the sun combined with reading about a broad array of stories, in which wars loomed demoralisingly high, had a hypnotising effect. How could the scenery of such beauty have witnessed, for so long, so much violence?

Hypnotising is also the scope and the complexities of the material which Norwich had to tackle in offering us this superb account.

The proportion of centuries to pages decreases fast. About two and a half millennia are dealt with in under thirty pages. He chose to finish also after the WW1 because had he continued to the end of WW2, he would have had to add another volume of, at least, six hundred pages more. Apart from the acceleration of historical changes, which required the slowing of the narration, another difficulty was selecting the countries and the events which were properly Mediterranean. For some countries, such as Italy, it was clear--even if the peninsula was fragmented for a long part of its history. And Norwich’s explanation of the Risorgimento is one of the fascinating parts of the book. Other countries such as Greece are also clearly Mediterranean but, as he explains in his preface, for several centuries they don’t make a distinct presence in his pages, since it belonged to either Byzantium or the Ottoman Empire. Spain is a tricky case because a great part of its coast is on the Atlantic and it also shifted its interest to the West from the sixteenth century for about three centuries. And then the War of Spanish Succession was fought mostly outside its land. A similar problem is presented in other conflicts that had the Mediterranean as just one of its scenarios, such as its closing episode, WW1  Norwich identifies three occasions of this world conflict that played out in this region: the Dardanelles, Salonica and Palestine.. The book though, offers some gripping pages when dealing with the islands such as Corfu, Crete, Malta, that most of the time have belonged to other political units and tend to be left out of most histories.

I particularly enjoyed Norwich’s explanation of the hybrid episodes – meaning those that involved more than one country, and which happened in terrains with different frontiers to the present ones. To these I identify the various tribes that brought the downfall of Rome; Belisarius’s campaigns as he zoomed around sent by Constantinople; the never ending Christian efforts at launching their incomprehensible Crusades; the complex catalogue of pirates and corsairs; the constant tension amongst the three monotheistic religions – all born around this Middle Sea; the importance of the monarchical principle in the formation of new modern countries (such as the idea of putting a German prince as King on a modern Greece); the extraordinary story of the The Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem; the account of why would it be the Savoy and not the Bourbon who would spearhead the unification of the Italian peninsula; the growth of another catalogue of self-serving nationalisms in the Balkan region..

Norwich’s conclusion takes me back to the hypnotising effect that I felt while sitting on a hammock and looking at the blues--for he finishes with a warning. Now that the Mediterranean has ceased to have its former weight in world affairs and has become a massive tourism playground, we need to shift our attention to the damage caused by plastics, and the distorting effect of the large cruises.

Very, very interesting!

If I recall correctly, this was honestly pretty boring. History as some-dude-did-this, then-some-other-dude-did-that, but on a beach. Tedious accounting of increasingly inbred marriages. No Mameluks. Not nearly enough Ottomans. Didn't finish.

I always keep one or two non-fiction books around to read when I am too tired to immerse in a novel and Mr. Norwich's 3 volume history of the Byzantium is one of my all time favorite history books, so I read Middle Sea in about a year or so, a chapter once in a while. Good but due to the long time frame pretty shallow. Still very engaging as anything written by Mr. Norwich