Customer Reviews

The Mediterranean: And the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (Volume II)

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This is one of the essential books that bring a solid perspective on what is the reality of history, not what commentators or national prides would like it to be.. Braudel is one of the most gifted historians of this century, and few like him can go into the inner workings of the social and economical mechanisms that drive history, really. In this well written volume, excellently translated, one sees clearly where laid the "center" of the Western world in the XVI century: The Mediterranean. Assuredly, the gold of the Americas was coming in; and the North Sea and Baltic trades were going on briskly. Nevertheless, Venice still mattered. The Mediterranean links remained the prize for Spain, the Ottoman empire and whomever had access to the locked sea. Yet, the future was close and the through the XVI there were clear signs of the shifts in power to come. Mr. Braudel work is as comprehensive as it gets. This is a gigantic canvas of the Mediterranean of the time, from its geographical and climatic descriptions, to the way that the Ottoman Empire raised money for its needs. We do not have a single hero in this almost novelistic type of work, everybody gets its turn under the sun. The result is a deeper understanding of where we come from. Even if today you live in Fairbanks, Alaska, you will feel strangely linked to the Venetian Pepper trade of the times.....

I have written a review of the first volume of Braudel's history of the Mediterranean, and here will only say that it is necessary to read this second volume in order to appreciate what Braudel began in the first volume. The second volume is the more typical "history of events", but as Braudel concludes -- and correctly so in my opinion -- the history of events is founded on geography, demographics, and social and economic history. Braudel builds this foundation in the first volume, and the two volumes must be read jointly in order to fully appreciate Braudel's astounding accomplishment.

The second volume of Braudel's history of the Mediterranean region in the late sixeenth century opens with the final half of Part Two ("Collective Destinies and General Trends"), which examines political realities (empires and states), as well as social history, from landlords and nobles to bandits and slaves. Additional sections discuss culture and "civilization" (and debates the very meaning of the word), the "ubiquity" and plight of Jewish communities, and warfare and piracy. While impressionistic and necessarily sketchy, these chapters are nevertheless among the best in both volumes.

Throughout his work, Braudel repeatedly warns against such easy formulas that regard eras in terms of "rise and fall," emphasizing instead the cyclical nature of history and the "inter-relationship between change and the near-permanent." The quasi-bankruptcy of a national administration may correspond to a period of cultural renaissance, and vice versa, or might be simply a small blip on the chart of progress: "The long-term trends of civilizations, their flowering in the traditional sense of the word, can still surprise and disconcert us."

Part Three ("Events, Politics and People"), which concludes the volume, contains a "linear" and more "traditional' history highlighting the wars (and peace) between states regionally and between empires on either end of the Mediterranean. Braudel draws a fairly distinct line at the year 1580, the first year of a period of relative peace between the Christian West, which turned its attention from the Mediterranean to northern Europe and the Atlantic, and the Islamic (Ottoman) East, which became preoccupied with Persia and the Balkans. Quite notably--and deliberately--the author omits reference to the Spanish or English Armadas of 1588 and 1589; his focus is what radiates "outward" from (and inward to) the Mediterranean, not the various events, however important, that occur on its peripheries. Braudel makes a compelling case here, but too much of this "narrative" displays a tedious preoccupation with the number of boats each side launched (or was rumored to have launched) against the other in the ongoing naval offensives between 1550 and 1596. The section reads more like a specialized monograph than a survey, and, while essential to his argument, the evidence could have been more succinctly presented.

Even more so than the first volume, Braudel's history is a victim of its own success, since, inspired by his more universal approach, more accurate and compelling narrative histories of the late sixteenth century have been published during the last four decades. (Indeed, Braudel assumes the reader has more than a comfortable familiarity with the events and players he describes.) "The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World" is still an unsurpassed monument of historiography, but general readers looking for a more thorough grounding in the politics, wars, and diplomacies of the period would do well to look at more recent works on the Spanish empire of Philip II and the Ottoman empire from Suleiman I to Murad III.