Striking Middle Sea

With summer on its way, thoughts turn south to olive groves and manicured vineyards, to the warm water and hot beaches of the Mediterranean. But this sea that is a place of rest and beauty for some of us is the scene of drama and often despair for many others, among them people trying to cross from North Africa. So which is it, a place of calm and beauty, of refinement and culture, or one of drama and much tragedy, buffeted by the consequences of geo-political shifts?

The Mediterranean has long been used to reconciling opposites, as two new books make abundantly clear. To ancient Greeks and Romans, the Mediterranean and its neighbouring seas was literally the ‘middle earth’, the centre from which everything radiated. Jump forward 1,000 years from the end of the Pax Romana to Habsburg-led Christendom and the sea was a barrier between the long-established, civilised lands of Europe and the newly emergent empire of the Ottoman Turks. Both sides had charismatic rulers — Charles V and Suleiman the Magnificent — and there was no shortage of flamboyant ‘players’, none more so than the Greek-born Hayreddin Pasha, known as Barbarossa, who was the scourge of Christian shipping while he and his Barbary corsairs were based in Algiers, but was eventually put in command of the imperial Ottoman fleet. This extended Ottoman and Habsburg confrontation across the Mediterranean has been well covered recently by Barnaby Rogerson and Roger Cowley. Noel Malcolm has not attempted another general history; instead he has found a way to approach this ongoing conflict between East and West, between Christian and Muslim, in an original and revealing way.

Forget the book’s sensational subtitle. Yes, there are knights and corsairs, Jesuits and plenty of spies, but this is micro-history and the focus of Malcolm’s story is two, related Venetian families — the Bruni and the Bruti — whose interests spread along the Adriatic and some of whose members settled south of Dubrovnic in Ulcinj, now in Montenegro.