War and religion are the enduring themes of history and they, or at least war and the Church (for theology gets short shrift), are the chief matters in John Julius Norwich’s latest book. It attempts the difficult job of making a coherent entity of the history of Mediterranean lands from antiquity to the close of the first world war and it does not altogether succeed. The idea of a discrete Mediterranean history makes most sense for the millennium when Greece, then Rome, had reason to think of their compass as the ‘known world’ and the Middle Sea as their lake. A coherent theme is also provided by the mediaeval contest for mastery between Christian Europe and successive Arab empires. But ancient Greece and Rome get only one short chapter each and when Constantinople falls to the Ottomans in 1453, the story has not yet reached its midway point.
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Bill Sander
December 30th, 2007 7:10amI've just started to read this book. While highly readable and entertaining, it's really nothing more than a chronological of rulers and wars. As commented above, there is little description of the life and business of the people of the Mediterranian. More importantly, little or no thought to the whys of history: why did the barbarians push against the borders of the the Roman empire? His brief paragraph on the Huns borders on racism. Why did Christianity supplant the old poly-theism? And, although I haven't gotten there yet, just from looking at the maps, there is a large emphasis on Churchill's mis-adventure in Gallipoli. I think there was much more that took down the Ottoman Empire.
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