Table Of ContentThe Waning of the Mediterranean, 1550–1870
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The Waning of the Mediterranean,
1550–1870
A Geohistorical Approach
faruk tabak
The Johns Hopkins University Press
Baltimore
∫ 2008 The Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved. Published 2008
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tabak, Faruk.
The waning of the Mediterranean, 1550–1870 : a geohistorical approach / Faruk Tabak.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn-13: 978-0-8018-8720-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-8018-8720-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Human geography—Mediterranean Region—History. 2. Human ecology—
Mediterranean Region—History. 3. Mediterranean Region—History. 4. Mediterranean
Region—Environmental conditions. I. Title.
gf541.t23 2007
909%.0982205—dc22 2007020364
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contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Unrelieved Weight of Wealth in the Inner Sea 1
part i of cities of saints and rich trades
1 Empires and Empire-Building City-States 33
2 City-States and the Inner Sea 84
3 Eclipse of the City-States and the Resurfacing of the Mediterranean 134
part ii of malarial plains and arboreal hills
4 Reversal in the Fortunes of the Plains 189
5 New World of the Hills 242
Conclusion: The Mediterranean between the Leek-Green Sea and
the Green Sea 299
Notes 309
Bibliography 369
Index 417
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Introduction
Unrelieved Weight of Wealth in the Inner Sea
From the fourteenth century to the turn of the sixteenth, the Mediterranean
was a world unto itself, a world-economy. The economic fabric of this world was
initially woven by city-states strung along the northern shores of the Italian
peninsula, and it was under their aegis that ‘‘the whole sea shared a common
destiny, with identical problems and general trends if not identical conse-
quences.’’∞ Thus was the history of the Mediterranean in its heyday, from the
sugarcane fields in Madeira to the spice emporium in Alexandria and from the
silver mines of Bohemia to the gold mines of Takru¯r. In the historiography of
the region, this shared unitary history rapidly fades into obscurity past the
region’s prime—past the early seventeenth century, to be precise. For most
scholars, it was then that the steady shift in the terminus of the spice trade from
the Levant to the ports on the Atlantic and the North Sea was finally sealed to
the benefit of the latter.≤ The conventional designation of the close of the
sixteenth century as the onset of the erosion of the Mediterranean’s gilded age
has not been without its ramifications, however. Rare if not outright extinct, as a
result, have become ecumenical histories of the Inner Sea in studies chronicling
developments from the turn of the seventeenth century. In a perverse fashion,
the very paucity of holistic accounts of the basin has eventually turned into one
of the distinguishing features of its age of twilight—in stark contrast, of course,
with the depictions of its heyday, sketched almost habitually with broad idio-
2 The Waning of the Mediterranean, 1550–1870
graphic, colorful strokes. This volte-face in the historiography of the Inner Sea
away from holistic accounts to singular and sectorial histories can therefore be
attributed to the underlying assumptions that the forces that had fostered unity
along the Mediterranean had, in its autumn, lost their coherence and that the
destiny shared by polities in the basin at the zenith of its power had conse-
quently ceased to be common. Hence the divergent and solitary destinies of its
denizens from the first half of the seventeenth century, if not earlier.≥
Definitely, the Mediterranean had, by the opening decades of the sixteenth
century, started to lose its centrality in world-economic flows when the union
of the kingdoms of Aragón and Castile had led to a gradual but steady re-
anchoring of the Habsburg empire in the Atlantic, under Charles V in particu-
lar. Especially after 1563, when the Manila galleons started to traverse the
Pacific on a regular basis, Philip II’s empire became veritably globe spanning.∂
In the process, Venice’s reign was gravely weakened by the shift in the center
of gravity of world-economic flows away from the Mediterranean, the Mare
Nostrum of the city of St. Mark. The Venetian, and to a lesser degree the
Genoese, colonial empires su√ered dismemberment contemporaneously with,
but not necessarily as a result of, the relentless westerly march of the house of
Osman. For one, the port-cities of the western Mediterranean, from Tripoli to
Oran, fell to the Ottomans only after the region was, for all practical purposes,
vacated by the Genoese merchants, first, in favor of the Atlantic and, later, in
favor of royal finance at the employ of the Castilian throne. By the closing
decades of the sixteenth century, the Sublime Porte itself had already turned
east to contain Shah Abbas and secure the flow of the silk trade through its
imperial dominions.∑ By and by, the Mediterranean was fast turning into a
millpond as the Indian Ocean was penetrated by Portuguese galleys and the
Atlantic connected by trunk lines. Correlatively, the unity of the Mediterranean
basin was being inescapably and irreparably fractured much to the chagrin of its
august custodian, the Serene Republic. The Mare Internum was thus falling
prey to subversive forces operating from within and without, and mostly beyond
the control of the Serenissima.
With the change in oceans, mapping the spectacular geographical expansion
of the world-economy in the long sixteenth century along the shores of the
Atlantic—the all-encompassing ocean, al-Bahr al-Muhit—has understandably
become more appealing a historiographical task than charting the unmaking of
the Mediterranean. After all, the seventeenth century in the Mediterranean was
a period of ‘‘dismal depression and sordid melancholy.’’∏ And the light that lit its
skies in the first half of the century got even dimmer after 1657, when the age of
the Genoese, el siglo de los Genoveses, which had been inaugurated in the 1550s,
Introduction 3
came to a terminal end. The control the bankers from the city of St. George had
established over the world-economy’s precious metal flows started to erode at a
relatively rapid pace. This was because the shift in the terminus of silver arriving
from the American mines, from Seville to Amsterdam, undermined the reign of
Genoese banker-financiers, who were promptly sidelined by the Portuguese
New Christians, marranos, ‘‘the front men for the merchants of Amsterdam.’’π
Ironically, the Genoese bankers, even before they were outmaneuvered by
the Dutch or their front men, actively contributed to the shift in direction of
world-economic flows from the shores of the Italian peninsula to those of the
North Sea. For what abetted this northward shift was the alacrity with which
the bankers from the city of St. George assumed the responsibility in 1557 of
administering monetary flows radiating out of Seville, the commercial nerve
center of Habsburg Spain, into Milan and Antwerp, the empire’s military out-
posts watching over the Mediterranean and the North Sea, respectively. The
privilege the Catholic king bestowed on the Genoese bankers provided these
men of money with access to the incoming American silver, a privilege given
with the expectation that the bankers convert the Castilian crown’s vast yet
irregular sources of income into regular streams of revenue.
In the process, Genoese bankers’ masterful orchestration of bullion and
financial flows across and beyond the Habsburg realm momentarily reincar-
nated the splendors of the Mediterranean by reviving the spice trade in the
latter half of the sixteenth century. In no small degree, this revival was owed to
the Genoese banker-financiers’ ability to make payments in gold, on account of
their sizeable reserves, in Philip II’s name in Antwerp and Milan. This invalu-
able service rendered to the Prudent King and the Castilian crown allowed
Genoese bankers to lay claim over the fabled cargoes of American silver.∫ They,
in turn, unloaded this relatively bounteous and hence inferior metal in the ports
of the Mediterranean.Ω The influx of American silver into the Mediterranean
via Genoese Seville from the mid-sixteenth century prompted the return of the
spice trade back to its centuries-old Levantine route. The abundance of the
white metal in the Mediterranean served to restore the spice trade, given the
soaring demand for silver in the Indian Ocean and Ming China, as attested by
the introduction of a single-whip tax that had to be paid in silver.∞≠ The estab-
lishment of Ottoman naval presence in the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean,
however feeble, reflected and abetted the revival of the spice trade.∞∞
This latter-day prosperity notwithstanding, the apportionment of the rela-
tively scarce and precious gold and the abundant and lowly silver, respectively,
between the ports of the North Sea and the Mediterranean subtly testifies to a
change in the fortunes of the two seas long before the turn of the seventeenth
