There should not be lots of "what ifs" and "should have beens" in a history book. Still, the book is beneficial to whom have a general idea on the Mediterranean history.

مجرد كومة كبيرة من المعلومات والاحداث بدون محاولة لايجاد اطار تفسيري او مجرد عملية ربط بسيطة كتاب تاريخ مجرد سرد لهواة جمع المعلومات

Excellently readable history of the Mediterranean and the countries bordering it - from ancient, classical civilizations to the end of the first world war. Ancient Romans, Greeks, Renaissance Italy, the Balkans, Moorish Spain etc etc - considering the amount of dates, personages and political machinations going on - this never flagged with its erudite but anecdotal style.

I finished!
This book took months to read and not because it wasn't well written: it is. This is a fabulous book, easy to read, and thoroughly researched. It spans thousands of years of history so the sheer amount of information is overwhelming. I sometimes needed a break-not only from the amount of information but from all the bloodshed. The history of the Mediterranean is a blood-soaked one.

There are moments of humor in the book which help break up the cycle of death and subjugation. The asides Mr. Norwich includes are fascinating and often funny as well.

I did learn a great deal from this book. Names that floated through my brain had their places in history cemented although I do admit all the King Charleses tend to flow together after number IV or V. Names like Charlemagne and Barbarossa. Who knew there were two Barbarossas-brothers? I didn't but I do now.

This book was well worth taking the time to complete. I don't know that I'll ever pick it up again to read straight through-again, the amount of information in it tended to make my head spin-but it will definitely go on my shelf. I have no doubt I'll often pick it up for reference.

It's not the topic itself that makes this book so captivating, it's Norwich's special talent in telling a story of the past that has actual meaning regarding our present, and might even influence our future as well. It would be a terrible mistake to read this gem (and the other gems he penned, especially the ones about Byzantium and Venice) as a simple history book because it's so much more than that. (And we already know how the story of the Middle Sea still continues today when instead of mighty men of war and merchant ships poor souls try to cross the sea in small dinghies.)

Third history I've read by Lord Norwich--filling in the embarrassing gaps of my drug-soaked college years.... If you have this problem, too, I recommend Norwich for his entertaining prose-style, though what he mostly does is make me go back to the sources on the ancients: Herodotus, Thucydides, Suetonius. He moves very quickly, be warned, not like the leisurely pace of his Byzantium volumes.

An educational and entertaining book that falls well short of what it could've been.

Norwich describes in the Intro why he chose to start the book with the Phoenicians and end after the First World War. His reasoning made sense so I've no problems with that. And the book was entertaining (Norwich likes to be a wise-ass), well researched, and very informative.

However, this book is not a history of the Mediterranean so much as a history of the wars of the European powers. There is little info that isn't related to the wars, conflicts, monarchies, etc. There is very little info about the people, climate, industry, commerce, etc. Norwich pays very little attention to North Africa (unless it's in relation to the European powers) and its peoples; and despite the crimes and atrocities committed by all of the empires featured in the book, he takes the old-fashioned, European viewpoint that the Turks (Ottomans) are the aggressors. This is not over the top but calls to mind American authors of yesteryear taking the viewpoint American Indians were the aggressors and European settlers were, if not the good guys, the side to root for. I would have liked more objectivity from a book written in 2006. Norwich also muddles the story with a need to mention every sister, niece, uncle, half-brother, etc. of whatever figure happens to be the topic of a given chapter. Sometimes these characters are relevant but much of the time it comes across as historical and literary grandstanding.

I did much more criticizing than praising of this book. That's mostly from disappointment as I loved his history of Byzantium. I did enjoy and get value from the book, but it could have been so much more.

Good description of the Mediterranean'history .

I reviewed this for someone, maybe the Spectator, a few years ago - like this:

‘Its character is complex, awkward, and unique,’ wrote the French historian Fernand Braudel, in the preface to the First Edition of his The Med and the Med World in the Age of Philip II. ‘No simple biography beginning with date of birth can be written of this sea; no simple narrative of how things happened would be appropriate to its history.’
But then, no French historian could reckon on JJN, either. Historian, broadcaster, champion of Venice, he can be viewed almost any day in the year in the Reading Room of the London Library, where he bones up on his facts, and writes his books. Over the years these have included a history of Sicily, two volumes on Venice, and three on Byzantium. If anyone could come up with a simple narrative of how things happened in the Mediterranean, it would be the man who has travelled and guided other travellers across those wine dark seas for well over half a century.
In the preface to this amusing, absorbing and companionable history, Norwich claims to be an amateur, not a scholar; a claim we can take with a pinch of sel gris, because he has done an impressive amount of research here, taking us from the first pyramids to the outbreak of the First World War. The airy disavowal is, I suppose, a reminder that history can be a pleasure; it helps to establish his role as a genial storyteller, slipping across a surprisingly large amount of important information. The trick is always to make it look easy, and Norwich never falters; his tone, throughout, is that of a brilliant conversation with his reader.
It’s a totally one-sided conversation, of course, like the talk that opens a Conrad novel, between men drawing on cigars in the warm darkness. Norwich must cover the whole of classical civilization, as well as the renaissance. He must deal with Nelson, Nice, Nineveh and the War of the Sicilian Vespers. It is a Muslim story, a Christian story – and the cockpit of the Jewish story, too. Art, music, sailing rigs, gunpowder: these are a few of the obvious topics; but Julius Caesar, Constantine, Jesus Christ and Roger, the Norman king of Sicily, need their say, too, among a cast of characters which must run into the thousands.
Above all, it’s the weave, as any decent rug merchant from Tyre to Gadez would be likely to point out. Now that the shores of the Med are coated in an almost continuous line of resinous foliage and concrete holiday houses, lapped by a warm embrocation of salt, algae and Factor 15, connected like a cat’s cradle by no-frills airlines, charter yachts, ferries and motorways, borders extinguished between Gibraltar and Kylithos, poverty to the south, prosperity to the North, with euros doubling as currency the whole way round – we need reminding that the Middle Sea was, until recent times, a varied universe; a stew of such variety that only a fisherman’s paella could do it justice.
Norwich’s answer is to toggle the focus as the centuries unwind. Egypt, Crete and ancient Greece, the rise and fall of Rome: all these are covered in the first seventy pages. He devotes fifty pages to the Napoleonic escapade, and its fallout in Egypt, as well as Italy, Spain and France. He often uses great set pieces – the Battle for Malta, the story of Gibraltar – as forward bases to launch raids into neighbouring territories – a technique which allows full rein to his enthusiasm for vigorous narrative and the telling detail.
And when Norwich says he’s no scholar, all he means is that he lacks the desire to be dispassionate. The Middle Sea is a book that Braudel could never have foreseen, but he might have welcomed its air of high-tone gossip. Piazza San Marco, which Norwich knows so well, was the finest drawing room in Europe; but step through the French windows and there’s a party on the lawn going on outside, too. Those Phoenicians? ‘Herodotus tells us that in about 600BC, at the behest of Pharaoh Necho, they circumnavigated the continent of Africa.’ Fellow with the red beard? Kheir-ed-Din. ‘He may not have had quite the panache of Aruj, but he possessed all his brother’s ambition, all his courage, and – arguably – rather more statesmanship and political wisdom.’ Avoid the kumiss, by the way, ‘that fermented mare’s milk so unaccountably popular with Turks and Mongols alike.’
Stout lady in a veil? Caterina, wife of James of Lusignan; her father was a diplomat, her uncle the Auditor of Cyprus; ‘on her mother’s side her lineage was still more distinguished: there she could boast as a great-grandfather no less a person than John Comnenus, Emperor of Trebizond.’
The Emperor, of course, is there as well; and so with the urbane Lord Norwich murmuring the introductions at your elbow, you move gracefully through the best Mediterranean society. ‘There is little point in speculating on how history might have been changed had Constantine Dragases indeed married Maria Brankovich,’ he murmurs; but it’s worth a small aside, isn’t it? The Byzantines were doomed – we shake our heads - and now we’re off again, with the Ottomans rolling up the eastern Mediterranean, to discover the fate of the islands and the shores of Greece.
Everyone stands to learn things from this book. However well we think we know our patch, most of us have difficulty placing our knowledge in context; the march of events eludes us; whole epochs and areas are to us a closed book. Our historical training and experience, from school to university, has been bitty and selective, in direct opposition to the sort of history Norwich – or Braudel, for that matter – revel in. We need these grand sweeps, these energetic narratives, because we just don’t know enough.
How did the Knights of Rhodes wind up in Malta? Why did the puff go out of the Venetians? What was, all jokes aside, the War of Jenkins’ Ear? How did we get Gibraltar – and who won the War of Spanish Succession? Norwich is a superb narrative historian: he will give you the lowdown on, say, the history of Greek independence, or Giulia Gonzaga’s escape from Barbarossa’s clutches, without distorting the facts, or leaving out the jokes; his grasp of the diplomatic essence is no less assured than his command of strategy.
Nor does he overreach. Nowhere does he really present an argument for taking Mediterranean history as a whole: he assumes it, just as we do. People connect; battle is joined; there may not have been, since the time of the Greeks, a pan-Mediterranean culture, but the sea has always been a stage. Constantine moved his capital from Rome to Byzantium, 2000 miles across the sea; Roger of Sicily lit up the world with his fertile tolerance; Barbarossa quartered his sailors in Toulon, with French connivance, in 1546; and an English admiral, Nelson, destroyed the French fleet, and effectively created the emperor Napoleon, on the Nile in 1799.
Norwich leaves us with the impression that we share an old friend: the wide locus of our hopes, our speech, our culture and ideals, with ever a leavening hint of spice from the world beyond.
You can take your Blue Guide, or your Rough Guide, anywhere you like; but if you are planning to go anywhere south of the Alps, or north of the Sahara, to an island, perhaps, studded with Venetian fortresses, orthodox churches, cafes and pines, this is your book.

I've gotten about a third of the way through this book. Interesting, but really really dense. I think I'm done for now -- between this one and Blindness, I really need something lighter for a change.

As always, Norwich provides a very readable and entertaining overview of the subject; in this case the Mediterranean from the Phoenicians to the end of the First World War. With such a broad swath of time, the coverage is necessary light, but he does manage to give a good feel for the major points of history.

I learned a lot from reading this book, as it took me outside my usual focus on the Middle Ages and early Renaissance. Highly recommended to my fellow history geeks.

A wonderfully written book by one of my favorite writers. This tome is a history of "most" countries that live in the Mediterranean Sea. Not dry, not "academic", but excellent research. Four stars rather than five as I had hoped for more info as to the actual Sea. Tides, currents, impact of winds, some devastating storms. But, the author explains in the introduction that such will be not discussed. Despite being warned, I opted to read all 600 pages and it was well worth the time...and...GREAT MAPS!