10 - Astrology as a Node of Connectivity between the Pre-modern Mediterranean and Gulf

Summary

Perhaps it is old-hat to begin a chapter focusing on the pre-modern Mediterranean with a quotation from Fernand Braudel. Nevertheless, one must always pay credit where credit is due, and one could do far worse than citing a scholar as indispensable as he. Regarding the climatic boundaries of the Mediterranean Basin, in his magisterial two-volume work The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Braudel remarked: ‘The Mediterranean climate lies between the northern limit of the olive tree and the northern limit of the palm grove.’ Obviously, as Paolo Squatriti notes in his work on the vegetative Mediterranean, published in the indispensable vade mecum on trends and methodologies in Mediterranean studies edited by Peregrine Horden and Sharon Kinoshita, the Braudelian limits of olive and palm are simultaneously evocative and enduring. Granted ‘historical respectability’ on account of Braudel's scholarly legacy, they yet remain fundamentally incorrect. Still, the attempt to impose boundaries on the Mediterranean – or on any maritime or terrestrial expanse allowing for significant exchange of multiple perspectives, ethnicities and ideas – is an eternal endeavour, albeit frustrating in the arena's inherent resistance to the deed. One must always be wary, especially when dealing with maritime histories, of falling into the trap of what Kären Wigen has termed ‘basin thinking’, of granting particular exceptional qualities to the Mediterranean, or the Gulf that centres geographically this present collection of essays, that elides the subtle intricacies of these regions’ histories. Nevertheless, in the cases of both the Mediterranean and the Gulf, their specific geographic qualities, their peninsulas, their coves, and their islands, marked them as venues that provided the sailors, missionaries, colonists, pirates and merchants traversing their deep blue waters with relatively easy exposure to a multiplicity of languages, faiths, cultures and identities, thus permitting them to engage in centuries’ worth of political, economic and cultural encounter and exchange.

A singularly important study that has made a most profound impact on the study of the pre-modern Mediterranean is Peregrine Horden and Nicolas Purcell's 2000 publication The Corrupting Sea. For Horden and Purcell, the Mediterranean Basin must not be read via purportedly eternal qualities of unity or disrupture, as evidenced in earlier Mediterranean scholarship, therefore romanticising the Mediterranean Basin and technically engaging in the exact type of ‘basin thinking’ which Wigen warned against.