nine The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Peiresc Peter N. Miller In the early 1930s, while a lycée teacher in Algiers, Fernand Braudel met Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc (1580–1637). He seems to have been assigned the task of making sense of the correspondence between Peiresc and Sanson Napollon, governor of the French presidio of Bastion de France between 1628 and 1633. He seems not to have understood how Peiresc managed his correspondence network, and so concluded that the results of his inquiry were “disappointing.”1 But what might the history of scholarship in the twentieth century have looked like if the young Braudel had really come to understand how Peiresc managed the practicalities of his Mediterranean-wide correspondence?2 Could we imagine how someone with Braudel’s sense for the material dimension of life might tackle the practice of a scholar? Which is another way of asking how a materially oriented historian might tackle a corpus of culturally oriented evidence, or, how economic history and cultural history intersect. Could one pay attention to the material side of history without losing sight of the fact that history is made by human beings, with all their strengths and weaknesses?3 Peiresc offers an especially favorable vantage point for trying to bring together the questions of the cultural historian and the historian of material culture. His literary remains, for which I will use the term archive, contain on the order of fifty or sixty thousand pieces of paper. And these range widely, as befits one of the great early modern polymaths. Because of what survives we are able to evaluate his own thinking through a range of media and materials, including objects (or their drawings), informal sketches, drafts of essays, reading and conversation 251 252 The Sea notes, memoranda, and letters. There are thousands upon thousands of these, the vast majority unread and unpublished, and the whole not yet calendared. Peiresc, who worked on almost everything, did not leave Provence between his return from Paris in 1623 and his death in 1637. And since his intellectual life was mostly local, as was true for nearly everyone, it means that most of his intellectual life was necessarily conducted in the Mediterranean. Additionally, he was interested in antiquities, which inevitably meant a dense Italian correspondence network, and Oriental studies, which required contact with the Levant and North Africa.4 But this could be accidental Mediterraneanism, what Nicholas Purcell and Peregrine Horden have called “histories in the Mediterranean” as opposed to “of the Mediterranean.”5 So let us instead focus on Peiresc historian of the Mediterranean. He studied its natural history, its currents, tides, mountains, fossils, winds, and tectonic fractures. He mapped it and helped remap it.6 He also studied its human history. He paid especial attention to the House of Barcelona-Counts of Provence, the rise, almost-empire, and fall of the Angevins, and the movement of Provencaux to the Kingdom of Jerusalem on crusade, and their landholding and ownership there.7 This is the kind of history of the Mediterranean, on its axes of animate and inanimate, that was not supposed to exist before the middle of the twentieth century. Partly, this work is unknown because Peiresc did not publish his researches and, partly, because research and history have had such a tense relationship, going back to the Renaissance.8 Was Peiresc the antiquarian also Peiresc the thalassographer? If what we mean by this term is, as we have seen throughout this volume, a kind of historical scholarship permeated by the realities of maritime existence, but centered on the human experience of those realities, then the perspective of Peiresc of Marseille, not the usual one of Aix, gives us an early modern example. Just as “antiquarianism” is not exactly the same as “history” as we usually think about it today, Peiresc’s “thalassographic” practice might not be the same as what we might think about as our own. And yet, these parallels show us connections between past and present that we may have missed, and reveal continuities which, once discovered, can change our sense of the norm against which both deviations and innovations are to be measured. Because Peiresc’s histories of the Mediterranean were conducted in the Mediterranean, the surviving documentation of his correspondence with those who facilitated his research—approximately 700 let- The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World 253 ters in two distinct dossiers—opens a window on to the everyday life of the Mediterranean in the 1620s and 1630s. The study of merchant letters is the key to this inside-outside perspective, both in and of the Mediterranean. Braudel the head of the VIe Section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études understood this by the time he was fifty (see chap. 1), even if he had not at thirty. Correspondence itself now appears as an agent of cultural exchange.9 More particularly, London, Livorno, Greek, and Armenian merchants have been recently studied as subjects, not merely as vehicles of statistics.10 There is no Geniza for the early modern Mediterranean republic of letters, but if there were, it would be the municipal library of Carpentras, where these letters are held. Attending to the structure as well as content of Peiresc’s Mediterranean correspondence, which Braudel did not, not only gives access to a Mediterranean that Braudel ignored (there is almost nothing on Marseille in La Meditérranée) but perhaps a different kind of sea-writing as well. Let us begin with the letters themselves. Jean Boutier, in a penetrating examination of the correspondence of the érudit Étienne Baluze, has used the term constellation to describe the letters to the lesser lights, defined either by smaller numbers or more occasional content. The Peiresc archive suggests that the more appropriate term might be Cloud. For, as in the astronomical imagery, we find clouds of correspondents clustered around, but also spreading out from, individual “stars.”11 In these dossiers, letters to merchants cluster chronologically around the departure of ships to the Levant. Thus, for example, on May 14, 1629, Father Théophile Minuti departed for the Levant on Peiresc’s bidding. A page from Peiresc’s log of outgoing correspondence for that day (fig. 1) shows that in addition to the letters and memoranda carried by Minuti, and the twenty gold écus of Italy that Peiresc gave him, Peiresc also wrote letters to Estelle, vice consul in Sidon; Espannet, vice consul in Cyprus; Guez, a merchant in Constantinople; l’Empereur, in Jerusalem; Gabriel Farnoux and Cesar Lambert in Alexandria; and to the Marseillebased merchants de Gastines, Salicoffres and Messrs Mary, Douaille, and Fraise, for shipment to their unnamed contacts in Egypt. Those to the Marseille merchants would of course have stayed on this shore of the sea. But the others must all have been carried by Minuti, as if in his diplomatic pouch. The departure of a ship could, therefore, easily occasion the writing of upwards of ten to twelve letters. And all these were written by Peiresc within the space of a single day, after he learned exactly when the ship was to set sail.12 Fig. 1. Page from Peiresc’s log of outgoing correspondence. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris B.N. MS. N.a.f. 5169, fol.40v. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World 255 Let us now turn from the structure of Peiresc’s letter-writing to the social structures we can tease out from the letters. This cloud of Marseillebased Mediterranean correspondence can be analyzed into several categories of persons (fig. 2). There are his contacts in the city of Marseille itself, mostly merchants, but also including some government officials and intellectuals. There are the shipowners and ships captains. There is also a much smaller circle in Toulon which must be included because during the years of plague in Marseille, roughly 1630–1632, Peiresc had to conduct most of his Mediterranean business through Toulon. Captains belong both to the near and distant shores of the sea. Diplomats were another category of correspondent who moved back and forth between Marseille and Ottoman North Africa and Levant. Then there are the Marseille merchants based in the Levantine ports—the Échelles of Aleppo, Sidon, Alexandria, and Cairo. Many of these represented family businesses with partners remaining back in Marseille. Finally, there were the travelers themselves. Some of these were personal friends such as Minuti, whom he sent on two expeditions, in 1629 and 1631, who was his confessor, and who closed Peiresc’s eyes for eternity on June 24, 1637. But others were missionaries, including the Recollet Father Daniel Aymini, the Discalced Carmelite Celestin de Ste Lidwine and a group of Capuchins from the province of Tours who were staking out the French claim to Syria and Egypt. There were aristocrats such as the Parisian grandee François Auguste de Thou, and the Provençal François Galaup Sieur de Chasteuil. And, finally, there was a shadowy group of jewelergoldsmiths who travelled east, to Ethiopia and India, in search of both raw materials and employment at Eastern courts. What we learn from these letters is what a learned life by, in, on, and across the sea was like. One could write intellectual history from the Peiresc letters and come up with an account of the origins of oriental studies in Europe. One could write a cultural history from the Peiresc letters and come up with an account of the questions and practices that drove oriental studies.13 But one could also read these letters and come up with a material history of scholarship, one in which the categories could be those of the social or economic historian—numbers of ships travelling, shipping frequency, names of ships, names of captains, travel times across the sea, financing structures of overseas trade, profit margins and insurance premiums, quarantine practices, foreign merchant presence in the Mediterranean, etc. One could study these themes sequentially, but also synthetically, through the microhistories found in the archive, 256 The Sea each of which demonstrates the varying impact of these material conditions. These might include the details of how to conserve books, metals, and a crocodile skin which had fallen into the sea, the naturalization of foreign-born Marseille merchants, the plan for ethnomusicological research at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the market for oriental manuscripts in Damascus, the depredations of Provencal corsairs on Provencal shipping, and the Mediterranean-wide hunt for a manuscript taken by corsairs.14 The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World 257 Fig. 2. Peiresc correspondence by category. Author’s chart. Lucien Febvre, famously, replying to Fernand Braudel’s original idea for a study of Philip II, answered: “Philip II and the Mediterranean, a good subject. But why not the Mediterranean and Philip II? A subject far greater still.”15 “Peiresc and the Mediterranean,” understood as Braudel did not—or at least did not in 1930—is a great subject for a historian because its central figure himself transcends dichotomization. He is an antiquarian but also historian; he studies natural and human events; he works with scholars and with merchants; he is fanatical about precision 258 The Sea but unafraid to conjecture. He was both in and of the Mediterranean. Studying him in some sense means following him—and because he and his way of working has been so long forgotten that takes us, paradoxically, to a frontier of today’s historical scholarship.16 The Mediterranean has become, since Pirenne’s landmark book of 1937, but even more Braudel’s of 1949, the arena for spectacular historiographical leaps forward. Braudel was followed by Goitein in the 1960s and 1970s. By the 1980s the first of the journals appeared (the Mediterranean Historical Review, in 1981), and then in the 2000s the monumental revisionist projects of Nicholas Purcell and Peregrine Horden, of Michael McCormick, and Chris Wickham.17 But “Mediterranean” can, I think, be legitimately thought of not merely as a model of regional history. For its leading visionaries also used their Mediterranean scholarship to present models of how to do history that were quite self-consciously contrasted with practices elsewhere in the discipline. One crucial dimension so distinguished was the importance of material evidence. From Pirenne’s “virtual material culture”—discussing objects only insofar as they are mentioned in texts—through Braudel’s geography and social science, we have now come into an age in which archaeology, anthropology, and ecology drive the argument. For Michael McCormick, orienting economic history toward the movement of human actors and their agency led him to Communications and Commerce as the subtitle of a book with economic history in its title.18 In fact, Peiresc described his own practice and priorities as “correspondance et communication” and “le commerce et la correspondence.”19 Peiresc’s language suggests an affinity between his practice, and today’s. Peiresc reminded Samuel Petit of Nîmes of his close relationship to commerce and yet of the ultimate difference between the goals of merchants and scholars. Discussing the implications of a possible breakdown in the Ottoman trade he wrote: “you know that I profess interests more sensitive than those of the merchants.”20 The micro-ecological perspective of The Corrupting Sea is also echoed in the Peiresc correspondence. He was, as we have seen, attentive to the specific ecology of the Mediterranean, and always through the micrological lens afforded by correspondence. Writing to one person, in one place, his interest in the land and the sea was framed locally; writing to another, somewhere else, the question shifted to what that correspondence could know of and could answer. In the following pages, I will try to sketch in outline the story of Peiresc and the sea, drawing out where possible its implications for a material culture of cultural history. This is an example of how thalas- The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World 259 sography offers opportunities for historiography (though not of course, to minimize the material turn elsewhere, in history of science, history of the book, and art history.) It also underlines the importance of the practical, and how the sea was one key contemporary junction of the learned and the commercial in the seventeenth century. Finally, looking back to the ambitions of Goitein and, especially, Braudel in the 1950s, we can see how a study of this sort could well have wound up in Affaires et gens d’affaires had it then been undertaken. Marseille and the Mediterranean Marseille, a city which does not figure at all in Braudel’s Mediterranean, is at the heart of Peiresc’s. Growing up and living in Aix would have put him only a day’s travel away, and Peiresc was indeed often found in Marseille—sketches of ancient monuments and copies of inscriptions in his hand testify to a direct acquaintance from early in his life. His brother, Palamède, served as viguier—an honorary municipal chief executive—in 1633 and his financier, Pierre Fort, presented him and gave the laudatio.21 But more important is that Marseille was the main French gateway to the Mediterranean. The years spanned by Peiresc’s life, 1580–1637, saw the rise of Marseille to a position of preeminence in the East, largely at the expense of Venice. By the end of the period, however, talk of decline was everywhere, including in the Peiresc archive, and spurred much discussion of reform. As important as Marseille was, historians of the early seventeenth century remain reliant upon a single fifty-year-old history of Marseille’s trade. Its age of Louis XIV and its eighteenth century are both now well studied. But no one has gone back to the first half of the seventeenth century in half a century.22 Accounts of French Mediterranean trade are invariably centered on the later seventeenth century,23 and wider histories of the Mediterranean for the most part persist in underrating its importance, and that of the French trade through it.24 The reason for this becomes clear when one actually goes to the archives: for the period in which Peiresc was active the public record is thin. It is thicker for the first two decades of the seventeenth century, and picks up again in the 1640s. For whatever reason, the 1620s and 1630s are very poorly documented.25 Not only, then, does the Peiresc archive offer an unexpectedly rich vantage point on issues of economic history, 260 The Sea but for the economic historian it is one of the few sources for learning about them. As a magistrate and as a scholar, Peiresc showed a strategic interest in Mediterranean activity. This is attested in several different kinds of archival traces. There are documents which we could call “position papers,” reflecting internal French discussions about whether and how much government support should be offered for maritime trade to the west and east. We also find a memo Peiresc drew up on the fisheries. Peiresc’s commitment to these issues was such that he was thanked by the bishop of Marseille, Gabriel d’Aubespine, in 1627 for working to dispose the king toward “the re-establishment of trade in our seas.” In this, Peiresc is presented as a crucial spokesman for a Mediterraneanist, commerceoriented foreign policy, very much in the tradition of the high Gallican magistracy (Savary de Breves, Jacques Auguste de Thou).26 The outbreak of open war between France and Spain in 1635 drew Peiresc still deeper into purely naval matters and made his news a valuable commodity for friends and contacts in metropolitan France. One of Peiresc’s friends was Alphonse de Richelieu, bishop of Aix. When he was elevated to the See at Lyon Peiresc kept him informed of Mediterranean affairs,27 making the argument that the wealth of Lyon was connected to that of Marseille, thus simultaneously invoking the connectivity of commerce and casting himself as its defender.28 Since his friend’s brother was the Cardinal Richelieu we can imagine that some of this information flowed on to Paris. Richelieu himself appointed Peiresc’s brother-in-law, Henri de Seguiran, as his “lieutenant grand master of navigation” and gave him the task of drafting a report on military readiness on France’s southern coast and of preparing a map. It is hard to believe that Seguiran did not consult Peiresc, since the first choice as cartographer was Pierre Gassendi—Peiresc’s closest colleague and, later, biographer—and the second was Jacques Maretz, professor of mathematics at Aix. While the main part of the document was published in the nineteenth century, only in Peiresc’s archive is an annex preserved (“Côte Maritime de Provence”) which presents a detailed history of Marseille’s trading relations in the Ottoman empire in the preceding decades.29 The author of the annex, whoever it was, explained the success of Marseille at displacing Venice in the first decades of the seventeenth century as directly related to the very nature of Marseille’s maritime commerce: its more numerous, lighter, smaller, faster ships could make three trips in the time it took for the Venetians to make one. And, since the The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World 261 majority of the goods picked up in the East were textiles, paper, and other smaller items, speed and frequency mattered more than size. The luxury trades were smaller in size and smaller in overall volume, though they did account for a substantial amount of value.30 The economic historians who have tackled this subject, though, have remained within the familiar terrain of “big” versus “small,” whether phrased in terms of subsistence versus luxury, commerce de gros, commerce de détails, or simply “the Northern invasion.” In the end, the argument is always the same: because the northerners had the bigger ships they were inevitably going to be more successful and, implicitly, that carrying food for the masses always determines the course of history. Rethinking this in terms of the Mediterranean luxury trade follows from the general trend in recent decades toward consumption studies. And yet, in a striking indication of the current limits of even revisionist economic history, no economic historian has felt the need to make the obvious point that if the smaller, faster, more numerous Marseille shipping was well adapted for transporting small high-value goods, this same set of characteristics made it ideal for cultural communication. For letters, manuscript, memoranda, and books take up no more room than luxuries such as silk, coffee, spices, or even paper. Marseille, in short, offered an ideal base for someone with Peiresc’s interests: a greater frequency, volume, and speed of shipping meant that his “commerce et correspondence” could reach further and faster than if he had been based anywhere else. It also explains why Braudel’s favorite metric—tonnage —is not relevant to the cultural historian. The Mediterranean in the age of Peiresc, based on cultural practice, would measure connectivity; the Mediterranean of Phillip II, based on economic activity, would measure bulk. Braudel’s observation about the lasting importance of the invasion of the Mediterranean by Dutch and English shipping in the 1620s and 1630s finds corroboration in the Peiresc archive, but also takes on a different shape.31 Braudel measures numbers. And we could, in fact, count mentions of Dutch ships or English shipping in the Peiresc correspondence. But it is more interesting—which is to say, the data is self-contextualized, and thus already interpreted for us—if we look at how the northern presence is found in Peiresc’s practice. He is himself less interested in their numbers than in their quality. Thus, he urges his merchant contacts in both Marseille and Egypt to use northern shipping whenever possible because the Dutch and especially the English were much tougher, hardier sailors. When confronted by corsairs the Provencaux fled, while the English fought back. This offered 262 The Sea much better chances of survivability and of the safe return of cargo (and investment). The northerners, all Protestants, were also much less superstitious. They transported the Egyptian mummies that the Catholic Provençaux shunned. The other clear and extraordinary demonstration of a northern, in this case Dutch, commercial role in Peiresc’s Mediterranean has nothing at all to do with tonnage. It is the presence in Marseille of a branch of the Dutch trading firm of the Ruts family famous from Rembrandt’s later portrait of the Russia trader, Niklaes Ruts, in The Frick Collection. (In fact, it may be this Niklaes, or another with this name, who was at Marseille.) “Ruts and Martin” was based in Marseille. And in the 1630s, especially from 1633, as Peiresc becomes very engaged with Aleppo, we find him turning to them to manage the communications and financing of his operations there. Hugh Mace de Gastines, his chief Marseille fixer, still plays a role, but one has the sense that the Dutch are better placed for the Aleppo trade. Even more surprising is that “Ruts and Martin,” at least at one point, also had the more reliable connection to Bordeaux. When Peiresc needed to insure the transfer of funds from his abbey near St. Émilion to his bankers in Marseille, he turned to this Dutch firm to effectuate the transfer. Peiresc explained to Jean-Baptiste Magy, the Marseille-based brother of his Egyptian factor, that “there are only these English who traffic between Bordeaux and Marseille.”32 Yet perhaps the most interesting commentary on the whole question of the Dutch penetration of the Mediterranean is the fact that when Jacob Golius in Leiden wanted to get in touch with his brother, Pierre, a discalced Carmelite who went by the name of Celestin de Ste Lidwine, he sent his letters via Paris to Peiresc, who then bundled them on board Marseille shipping to Aleppo, and then did the same in the opposite direction. No matter how mighty the Dutch fleet, no matter how well managed on the Syro-Lebanese coast, for speed, frequency, and reliability— what individuals sending precious goods, whether letters, manuscripts, or gems care about the most—Peiresc’s Marseille was the destination. Space and Time From Marseille, the Mediterranean spread out. To Barcelona in the west, sailing time could be as short as a few days. But Peiresc had no regular correspondents in Spain. The iron curtain had already descended; Peiresc wrote to a French expatriate, Antoine Novel, in San Lucar de The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World 263 Barrameda, to a noble Fleming, Lucas Torrius, in Madrid and to a visiting French cleric, Jean François of the Minims, in Barcelona. Beyond, to Lisbon, there were no Marseille connections at all. To the south, it was around a fortnight’s sail to Algiers. Peiresc’s connection here was with Napollon and his entourage. More or less the same fortnight’s sail connected Marseille to Tunis, where from 1631 Peiresc communicated with Thomas d’Arcos, a humanist secretary who apostatized and collected for Peiresc inscriptions, chameleons, and ethnographic data. There is even a small correspondence with Antoine Bayon in Tripoli in Lybia from whom Peiresc sought information about a lost manuscript (now in the Vatican Library as MS. Barb.-Or. 2). To the east, letters reached Genoa in five to six days, and Genoa was a stop on the way to Civitavecchia, port of Rome. Rome, for the learned world of Oriental studies, had eclipsed Venice by the 1630s.33 Then there are the longer reaches, via Sicily or Malta to Rhodes or Chios for Constantinople and to Cyprus for Aleppo, Sidon, and Alexandria. How far was the long route? A Capuchin named Adrian de la Brosse made it in fifteen days from Marseille to Sidon, including a day-and-a half stop at Malta, and de Thou made it from Alexandria to Siracusa in Sicily in ten days. On the other hand, we learn of a forty-three-day trip from Sidon to Damiette instead of the usual six, because of a pirateprovoked flight to Cyprus.34 More standard was a forty-day trip from Marseille to Egypt, including time spent in Malta and taking evasive action against corsaires.35 The letters map out the trunk routes, much as McCormick’s prosopography helped him describe the roads of the sea in the early Middle Ages. There were, for example, “la routte ordinaire de Constantinople,”36 and “la voye ordinaire de Marseille.”37 The route to Malta Peiresc actually called “the Malta caravan” (la caravane de Malthe). To the Toulon merchant de la Tuillerie, Peiresc described the route from Catalonia to Italy as “like a canal.”38 This meant direct, without stopping, which is how de Gastines described to Peiresc the route of de Thou from Malta to Barcelona, “ayant fait canal sans toucher a Rome.”39 In the shipping lanes, there were choke points. Islands, and by extension those who controlled them, Peiresc wrote to de Thou, were “Maitres de la Mer.”40 For Peiresc, though, maps were not just metaphors. He possessed a map of the North African coast and another in which the portion around Tunisia had been rendered as if for a portolan, with rhumb lines and coastal detail.41 D’Arcos in Tunis provided him with detailed line drawings of the area of Carthage, sometimes going into great detail and pro- 264 The Sea viding enough information to enable Peiresc to link ancient monuments referred to in texts, or the activities of ancients such as Scipio Africanus in 146 BCE, with extant physical remains.42 Peiresc, himself, from 1612 onwards—that is, as soon as he had mastered Galileo’s observations of Jupiter’s moons and realized that their movements could serve as a celestial clock for the purpose of regulating longitude at sea, all the way to the 1630s, when he switched to eclipse observation for its greater ease of record-keeping—was interested in clarifying the shape of the sea. He believed that the observation of 1635 would lead to a substantial correction in the shape and measurement of the Mediterranean and offered as proof of his approach the approval of the captains and seamen with whom he had shared his research.43 And then there are the distant reaches, the widest Mediterranean which Braudel bequeathed to us. From his Eastern correspondents Peiresc learned that it took forty days for the Aleppo caravan to reach Constantinople.44 And, as he recorded: D’Alep en Bassora par le desert en 33 jours De Bassorà par mer à Muscat, en sept jours De Muscat a Ormes par mer en une jour à peu prez. De Muscat à Goa ou passe en 15 jours, a peu prez. De Goa on va à Surate, qui est un port du Mogor, ou à Gaya, qui est moings mercantile. De Gaya à Lahor y a 8 ou 10 jours de chemin. de Surate il y a moings.45 Merchants Peiresc thought about the sea, and he thought about in terms of space and time. But above all, he thought about it in terms of people. In the Peiresc archive, we learn of a number of Arabs, North Africans, and Turks who were found in and around Marseille. Several of them we know well because they worked with Peiresc at different points on various Oriental-language projects, such as the Aleppo-born Mattouk Chiassan and the Berber Sayet of Taroudant in Marocco—the latter, together with the Greek Jew Salomon Casino, transcribed and translated Peiresc’s collection of Islamic coins.46 We also come across seasonal visitors, like the Ligurian citrus merchants—Domenico Majolo, Benedetto Gnieco, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World 265 and Domencio del Monte—who passed through Provence every winter. There are also Maronite priests fleeing civil strife in the Lebanon in search of learned patronage, and maybe a cushy job as a professor or tutor, in Italy or France—three are mentioned in the Peiresc archive, Rabias, Moyse de Giacomo, and Sergio Gamario Reiskalla. But most of the people in motion in the Mediterranean were merchants. Peiresc’s age was one in which the Mediterranean was gradually ceasing to be a confrontation zone between Europe (what Peiresc generally called “Chrestienté”) and the Ottomans. Corsairs, especially North Africans, but also rogue Christians, were a problem. Organized warfare was not. This made merchant life much more comfortable. Of the great scholars and intellectuals of the seventeenth century it would be hard to imagine a closer set of working relationships with a merchant community. Peiresc entertained the merchants of Marseille at his home, and visited with them at theirs. They managed his financial affairs and he charged them with tasks both intellectual and practical, locally and overseas. He shared his research agendas with them, and they in turn helped him refine them. We can build up, prosopographically, a dense picture of the merchant community of Marseille, as perhaps from no other contemporary source, through Peiresc’s correspondence.47 Peiresc also worked closely with the captains who sailed the ships fitted out by the merchants. Peiresc wrote to the captains directly, they visited him at Aix, and he shared with them his ideas, plans, and projects. They were in many cases his agents, and he was obliged to rely on their good judgment 2,000 miles from home. From his archive we can establish a list of the captains, seamen, and patrons who worked many of the Mediterranean routes: forty-nine are named and also thirteen ships. Peiresc seems to have shared none of the contemporary prejudices about the inevitable superiority of the head to the hand, or theory to practice. He even articulated this in a letter of 1633. “There was,” he wrote to the philosopher and mystic Jacques Gaffarel, “no evil but the defense of convention, which is no small ‘impediment to acting well.’”48 This defense of “convention” was an attack on practical people and practical affairs. Peiresc had many friends in the highest of circles, but sometimes he preferred to work through a purely merchant channel. For instance, when he wanted a coin of Hadrian’s from Belgium he wrote to the jeweler Henriqué Alvares in Paris and explained that he normally would have written to his friends Peter-Paul Rubens or Nicolaes Roccox for help on this, “But since the commerce of businessmen is freer than that of others, it would be easier for you to get this done than me.”49 266 The Sea Among the intellectual projects Peiresc entrusted to merchants were 1. The measuring of ancient vases in Genoa.50 2. A Mediterranean-wide eclipse observation in August 1635—the key observation being made by Baltasar Claret, chancellor of the French consulate at Aleppo.51 3. Collecting of natural historical specimens, such as chameleons in Turkey—a task given to Baltasar Grange.52 4. Ethnographic reports on food ways in Egypt—from Jean Magi.53 5. Vases in Yemen—from the Turk from Aleppo, Mattouk Chiassan.54 6. Sub-Saharan caravan routes—also from Magi.55 7. Egyptian weights & measures—from a conversation with Cesar Lambert.56 8. Translation of Arabic documents—done by Philibert Bremond.57 9. Arabic epigraphy—the collaboration of Chiassan and Laurent Bremond of Marseille (the brother of Philibert).58 Peiresc gave—and took—with merchants in a way not so very different from how he operated with scholars. A long letter to the merchant Meynier in Damascus went into great detail about the language, literature, and script of the Samaritans so as to enable him to make somewhat informed purchases on Peiresc’s behalf.59 Another letter, to Santo Seghezzi in Egypt, took his understanding of canopic jars seriously enough to refute it.60 Peiresc sharing his thoughts with merchant friends was part of the compensation they received for doing these favors for him: they were admitted to the world of erudition.61 Sometimes, indeed, it was their specific commercial training that was desired, as when Peiresc asked François Marchand in Rome to review evidence of tax revenues in Roman church registers.62 Merchants were trained to pay attention to statistics, to revenue, and to expenses. Scholars usually were not. But Peiresc was different. His archive preserves three different analyses of Egyptian government administration, tax revenues and economic production, prepared by Cesar Lambert, Jacques Albert, and Santo Seguezzi.63 These three merchants had been based in Egypt for decades and were closely involved with Marseille and Peiresc.64 Their fascinating treatises, which blend ethnography, economic history, travel writing, and political science—they have since been published—belong to a genre that would be invented in Göttingen in the 1760s: Statistik.65 Some of the most interesting examples of the interpenetration of The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World 267 scholarly pursuits in the practical domain of merchants take us to the furthest reaches of Peiresc’s Mediterranean: Ethiopia, India, and Yemen. A fascinating aspect of these is that in each of these three cases Peiresc’s intellectual partner was a jeweler or goldsmith. In Ethiopia, we find a jeweler from Montpellier, Zacharie Vermeil, probably a Huguenot, who left for Egypt—where he met some of Peiresc’s friends—and then moved to Ethiopia where his talents caught the attention of the emperor. Once introduced into court, Vermeil became even more important as a military theorist, bringing modern Dutch notions of warfare to the Horn of Africa. He transmitted to Peiresc a request for books in 1633 via Cairo, and in a very long letter of February 1634, Peiresc replied.66 The Marseille jeweler Nicolas Jailloux had made two trips to the Levant and India before 1629, when he undertook his third and last. Peiresc had purchased gems and medals from him, and also solicited information about the Deccan.67 Augustin Herryard, of Bayonne and then Lahore, who worked as a jeweler for the Mughal ruler, provided information about jewels and precious stones, but also about court ceremonial. We know of his existence alongside of other French jewelers who worked at the Mughal courts.68 But it is because of Peiresc that we possess his letters. Peiresc, in turn, asked him about the mountains in which gems were mined, and also about the fossils and shells, especially marine petrifications, found there.69 Peiresc may have learned of Herryard from Henriqué Alvarez in Paris. Alvarez had a brother named Fernand Nunes (though he was also called Guillaume Corner) and was from Hamfort in Holland. Alvarez, in turn, was married to the sister of Manuel da Costa Casseretz; Manuel had a brother named Gaspar da Costa Casseretz, and Gaspar da Costa and Fernand Nunes visited Peiresc in Aix on their way to India. Their background, profession—they were diamond merchants—and geographical dispersion identifies them as a family of Portuguese Conversos, or New Christians. There is no direct evidence of this in the Peiresc archive, but there is in that of the Lisbon Inquisition.70 These family ties were summarized by Peiresc in an undated memo, probably prepared in 1630, when Nunes and da Costa visited him in the countryside near Toulon.71 It was from them that Peiresc derived the information contained in his “Memoire pour les Indes.” Letters, sent via Egypt, followed them to Goa. The challenge of the Dutch and English East Indian ventures to Marseille’s silk route was spelled out to Peiresc in a letter from one of his first 268 The Sea Marseille bankers, Gaspar Signier, already in March 1626. The English had begun to load silks at Ormuz, bypassing the Levantine emporia of Alexandria and Aleppo, and then shipping huge quantities back to England in their heavy merchant ships (600 bales of silk while no Marseille ship could carry more than 30).72 The solution Signier proposed was for Marseille to found its own Indian ocean entrepôt. We have seen that Peiresc took the protection of Marseille’s Mediterranean commerce very seriously, as his own intellectual project of “correspondance et communication” depended upon it. He seems to have heard what Signier was saying because from then on we find Peiresc paying careful attention to Yemen. In the spring of 1629 Peiresc was soliciting news about Yemen, and already viewed it as a place of significance.73 There are several memoranda74 drawn up by Peiresc on the state of Yemen, its rebellion against the Ottomans, its governance, natural history, and arts and crafts. These seem to reflect face-to-face conversations with Jean Magy.75 It was, in the end, another “lapidaire” from Aix based in Marseille— Benoit Pelissier—who brought Peiresc to the mouth of the Indian Ocean. A memorandum composed by Peiresc in February 1635 and likely destined for de Thou at court, outlined a plan to send Pelissier to Moucal, or Mokka, on the Red Sea. From there he would be able to tap into the luxury trade not just of south Arabia (Arabia Felix), but of the Indies and Ethiopia, taking advantage of his contacts with Vermeil, Herryard, and Nunes.76 The archive also explains something of why it never happened: we learn that Pelissier was murdered, on the road to Venice, sometime in the first half of 1636.77 Names At this point an apology is in order. The preceding pages have been a fairly unremitting bombardment of names, almost all of them unfamiliar. I have done this on purpose, knowing all the while that it is bad technique, in order to convey something of the effect of reading through Peiresc’s papers: the constant presence of names, almost always unidentified—and many unidentifiable outside of the correspondence itself. The gap between the strangeness of this to us and the obviousness of this to him outlines the contour of a question we need to ponder. The attention to names was not accidental. Peiresc prepared whole memoranda that are lists of names with brief biographical information. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World 269 Three of them are from Egypt, which says something both about the density of foreigners there and about the value of the Egyptian trade to Marseille and Peiresc. One seems to have been drawn up before 1633, probably with information derived from Cesar Lambert.78 A second was drawn up in July 1633 during conversations with Jean Magy, then visiting from Cairo.79 A third seems to derive from the period before 1631.80 Similar memoranda survive from Chios, which the Genoese held as a trading post,81 and from Sicily.82 Names, in fact, may mark out the precise fault line between different historiographical regimes. Braudel, famously, omitted discussion of Philip II himself until the final pages of an 1,100–1,200 book. Goitein, sticking close to his documents, produced a picture of the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean traders that was full of names. If we want to understand Peiresc’s thinking, we will find Goitein a much more helpful guide. In reading through some of the letters published in Goitein’s India book, we find this same thick nominative web. Yes, business was at a human scale. But it is also the case that names, especially far away, provided correspondents with hand-holds, people to whom they could turn for help. In a world where family constituted a ready-made network, names opened out on to whole prosopographies. Families, in turn, also shaped how people saw the past. Peiresc, for instance, built his history of Provence on the foundation of his genealogical studies of medieval Provencal families.83 Names also allowed for the independent parallel reconstruction of projects if one or another part of it fell out, whether by accident, aggression, or ignorance. Names were shorthands for sets of associations, none of which needed to be spelled out. A name, in short, was worth a thousand words. Names, then, take us into a whole world of belief structures and motivations. Names tell us what Peiresc thought was important for others, and for himself. Names remind us, even when they are only the names of long-forgotten merchants, customs officials, bankers, travelers, wanderers, sea captains, missionaries, and consuls, that all kinds of history, whether economic history or the history of scholarship, and however antiquarian, are, in the end, histories of people. Peiresc’s Mediterranean was four hundred years ago. But its reconstruction speaks directly to the concerns of historians today. As I explained in the introduction to this volume, the human subject has returned to the center in the best work being done today on the Mediterranean, and these—whether relating to corsairing, merchants, or mobility—are 270 The Sea themselves creating models for historians outside of the Mediterranean. Once we get beyond the glare produced by Braudel’s masterpiece, we see that from the beginning of modern historical research the Mediterranean has incubated scholarly practices which later spread widely, such as Peiresc’s kind of antiquarianism. The same remains true today. But in an age of thalassography we can expect that evidence-rich archives, episodes, and microhistories from elsewhere ought also to begin enriching the historian’s palette. In the meantime, the close encounter of Braudel with the Peiresc archive, like that of Braudel with Goitein, offers a roadmap of sorts through the historiography of the twentieth century. These were less opportunities missed—that would be a very anachronistic approach, and would obscure the great force of what Braudel did accomplish—than markers of a whole series of affinities, blind spots, and accidents. Yet, from the perspective of the early twenty-first century, a more or less clear direction can be discerned. Peiresc’s keywords—“commerce,” “communication,” and “correspondence,” now mark our own interests. Peiresc and his archive may be as important for the future of historical scholarship as for its past. Notes Earlier versions of this argument were presented to the Early Modern European Seminar at Princeton University, the Graduate Student Colloquium at the University of Chicago, the Centre Norbert Elias at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Marseille, and the Early Modern History Seminar at the Université de Paris-I (Sorbonne) in Paris. I am grateful especially to Tony Grafton, David Nirenberg, Jean Boutier, and Wolfgang Kaiser for their comments. A full-scale treatment is forthcoming with the title The Mediterranean from Marseille: Merchants, Mariners, Missionaries and a Scholar. 1. Jacques Ferrier exposed this story in “Une symphonie algérienne (letters inédites de Peiresc à Sanson Napollon),” in L’Eté Peiresc Fioretti II, Nouveaux Mélanges, ed. Jacques Ferrier, (Académie du Var: Aubanel, 1988), 215–60. 2. Braudel himself undertook the Peiresc-Napollon project for the Society (“Une Symphonie algérienne,” 217). Ferrier’s jumbling of other facts, such as placing the publication of Napollon’s Discorso in 1932 rather than 1929, does not inspire confidence. And yet, the fact remains that Braudel was once active and remained always a member of this society—a series of facts not acknowledged in any of the now substantial autobiographical, biographical or hagiographical literature but which surely bears on Braudel’s problematic relationship to North Africa in his La Mediteranée (see Colin Heywood, “Fernand Braudel and the Ottomans: The Emergence of an Involvement (1928–50),” Mediterranean Historical Review 23 (2008): 177). The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World 271 3. David Abulafia’s critical alternative to a Braudellian Mediterranean makes just this point in its subtitle: The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (London: Allen Lane, 2011). 4. For all this see the essays in Peiresc’s Orient: Antiquarianism as Cultural History in the Seventeenth Century (London: Ashgate/Variorum, 2012). 5. Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 43. 6. Miller, “Peiresc and the First Natural History of the Mediterranean,” in Sintflut und Gedächtnis, eds. Jan Assman and Martin Mulsow (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2006), 167–98; and Miller, “Mapping Peiresc’s Mediterranean: Geography and Astronomy, 1610–1636,” in Communicating Observations in Early Modern Letters, 1500–1575. Epistolography and Epistemology in the Age of the Scientific Revolution, ed. Dirk van Miert (Oxford: Warburg Institute Colloquia, 2013). 7. Miller, Peiresc’s ‘History of Provence’ and the Discovery of a Medieval Mediterranean. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, volume 101 (Philadelphia, 2011). 8. This is, of course, a huge subject. I survey some of the relevant issues in “Writing Antiquarianism: Prolegomenon to a History,” in Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Early Modern Europe and China, 1500–1800, eds. Miller and François Louis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), chapter 1. 9. For example, Correspondence and Cultural Exchange in Europe, 1400–1700, ed. Francisco Bethencourt and Florike Egmond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 10. David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009); Molly Greene, Catholic Pirates and Greek Merchants: A Maritime History of the Mediterranean (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), esp. 131–37; Sebouh David Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011). Compare their treatments with an outstanding exemplar of the previous generation’s perspective: Paul Bushkovitch, The Merchants of Moscow 1580–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 11. Jean Boutier, “Étienne Baluze et l’Europe savante à l’age classique,” in Etienne Baluze, 1630–1718. Erudition et pouvoirs dans l’Europe Classique, ed. Jean Boutier (Limoges: Presses Universitaires de Limoges, 2008), 291. 12. Paris B.N. MS. Nouvelles acquisitions français (henceforth N.a.f.) 5169, fol.40v. 13. These are the perspectives of, respectively, Peiresc’s Orient and Peiresc’s ‘History of Provence’. 14. This paragraph describes the goal of my forthcoming Mediterranean from Marseille. 272 The Sea 15. J. H. Hexter, “Fernand Braudel and the Monde Braudellien . . . ,” Journal of Modern History 44 (1972): 510. 16. Putting intellectual history into manifold of maritime history precisely delineates the “next” frontier of sea studies as envisioned by Kären Wigen, “Introduction,” in Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges, eds. Jerry H. Bentley, Renate Bridenthal, and Kären Wigen (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007), 15–16. 17. Horden and Purcell, The Corrupting Sea; Michael McCormick, Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce AD 300–900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Chris Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). For a review of the proliferating journals and smaller projects see Susan E. Alcock, “Alphabet Soup in the Mediterranean Basin: The Emergence of the Mediterranean Serial,” in Rethinking the Mediterranean, ed. W. V. Harris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 314–36. 18. The study of mobility has not only been his: see the essays in Gens de passage en Méditerranée de l’Antiquité à l’époque moderne: Procédures de contrôle et d’identification, eds. Claudia Moatti and Wolfgang Kaisar (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2007). 19. Carpentras, Bibliothèque Inguimbertine (henceforth Carp. Bib. Inguimb.) MS. 1777, fol.128r. 20. Peiresc to Petit, 7 April 1634, Carpentras, Bibliothèque Inguimbertine (henceforth Carp. Bib. Inguimb.) MS. 1875 fol. 268v: “Nous avons eu de grande apprehensions d’une rupture entiere du commerce avec le Turc ou vous scavez que je pretends des interests plus sensibles que les marchands sur les bruictz venuz du costé de Constantinople.” 21. See Carp. Bib. Inguimb. MS. 1882, fols. 415r–419v. 22. This tendency continues up to the very minute; namely, Junko Thérèse Takeda, Between Crown and Commerce: Marseille and the Early Modern Mediterranean (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). 23. For example, Michel Fontenay, “Le Commerce des occidentaux dans les échelles du Levant vers la fin du XVIIe siècle,” in Chrétiens et musulmans à la Renaissance, eds. Bartolomé Bennassar and Robert Sauzet (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1998), 337–70. The sole exception that I know of is over forty years old! Michel Morineau, “Flots de commerce et trafics français en mediterranée au XVIIe siècle (jusqu’en 1669),” XVIIe siècle, 86–87 (1970), 135–72. 24. Typical is the treatment in Faruk Tabak, The Waning of the Mediterranean 1550–1870: A Geohistorical Approach (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 176, 224. An exception might be Romano Canosa, Storia del Mediterraneo nel Seicento (Roma: Sapere 2000, 1997). The recent boomlet in the study of the corso as itself a kind of trade has somewhat remedied this: see, for example, Wolfgang Kaisar, “Les ‘hommes de crédit’ dans les rachats provençaux (XVIe–XVIIe siècles),” in Le Commerce des captifs. Les intermédiaires dans l’échange et le rachat des prisonniers en Méditerannée, XVe–XVIIIe siècle, ed. Kasiar (Rome: Mélanges de l’École française de Rome, 2008), 291–318. 25. There is nothing for the later years of Peiresc’s life at all like Wolfgang Kaisar’s masterful Marseille im Bürgerkrieg: Sozialgefüge, Religionskonflikt und Fak- The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 273 tionskämpfe von 1559–1596 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991) for its earlier part. Aubespine to Peiresc, 11 August 1627, Carp. Bib. Inguimb. MS. 1871, fol. 410r [Les Correspondants de Peiresc, 2 vols (Geneva: Slatikine Reprints, 1972), I, 250]. Peiresc to Richelieu, 24 July 1628, Carp. Bib. Inguimb. MS. 1875, fol. 486v. Peiresc to Richelieu, 20 March 1633, Carp. Bib. Inguimb. MS. 1875, fol. 495r; Peiresc to Villeauxclercs, 20 March 1633, Carp. Bib. Inguimb. MS. 1876, fol. 623r. The presentation copy of the report, Paris BN MS. F.fr. 24169, matches what is found in Carp. Bib. Inguimb. MS. 1775 fols. 1–75, adding only two more pages proposing additional seats of the admiralty for Provence (fols.81–2). Fontenay, “Le Commerce des occidentaux dans les échelles du Levant,” 348–49. I will not dwell on this here, as it is a theme that has been touched on in several of my essays on Peiresc’s Oriental studies. But it suffices as a place holder to note that when Peiresc was assembling books to send to Gedoin “le Turc” they included Greek books from England and Arabic ones from Holland (Peiresc to Aubery, 24 August 1629, Carp. Bib. Inguimb. MS. 1871, fol. 54v). On this more generally, see Molly Greene, “Beyond the Northern Invasion: The Mediterranean in the Seventeenth Century,” Past and Present 174 (2000): 41–70, and now Colin Heywood, “The English in the Mediterranean, 1600–1630. A Post-Braudelian Perspective on the ‘Northern Invasion,” in Trade and Cultural Exchange in the Early Modern Mediterranean: Braudel’s Maritime Legacy, eds. Maria Fusaro, Colin Heywood, Mohamed-Salah Omri (London: IB Tauris, 2010), 23–44. Peiresc to Jean-Baptiste Magy, 5 April 1636, Carp. Bib. Inguimb. MS. 1874, fol. 413r. For the latest detailed study of early seventeenth-century Roman erudition, see Federica Missere Fontana, Testimoni parlanti. Le monete antiche a Roma tra Cinquecento e Seicento (Rome: Edizioni Quasar, 2009). Adrian de la Brosse to Raphael de Nantes, 25 November 1629 (from Beirut), Paris B.N. MS. N.a.f. 10220, fol. 95; Gilles de Losches to Raphael de Nantes, 15 December 1630 (from Cairo), fol. 103r. Michelange de Nantes to Raphael de Nantes, 24 January 1633 (from Aleppo), Paris B.N. MS. N.a.f.) 10220, f.123r. Peiresc to Guez (in Marseille), 6 September 1628, Carp. Bib. Inguimb. MS. 1876, fol. 372r. Carp. Bib. Inguimb. MS. 1769, fol. 242v. Peiresc to M. de la Tuillerie, undated, Carp. Bib. Inguimb. MS. 1873, fol. 425r: “il y a de l’apparence qu’il seroit canal pour aller aborder en Sardaigne & se joindre a ceux d’Italie avant que revenir en nos coste.” Gastines to Peiresc, 18 June 1629, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS. Fonds français (henceforth Paris B.N. MS. F.fr.) 9537, fol. 312. Peiresc to de Thou, 31 July 1635, Carp. Bib. Inguimb. MS. 1877, fol. 463r. The context for this is the Spanish seizure of the Isles de Lerins. Carp. Bib. Inguimb. MS. 1831, fols. 416v, 417v–418r. 274 The Sea 42. Carp. Bib. Inguimb. MS. 1831, fols. 423–432. 43. “Mapping Peiresc’s Mediterranean: Geography and Astronomy, 1610– 1636,” in Communicating Observations in Early Modern Letters. 44. Peiresc to Aycard, 5 June 1633, Carp. Bib. Inguimb. MS. 1871, fol. 31v. 45. Carp. Bib. Inguimb. MS. 1777, fol. 390r. 46. The story is told in “Peiresc and the Study of Islamic Coins in the Early Seventeenth Century,” in The Rebirth of Antiquity: Numismatics, Archaeology and Classical Studies in the Culture of the Renaissance, ed. Alan G. Stahl (Princeton University Library Chronicle, Winter 2008), 315–85, reprinted as chapter 3 in Peiresc’s Orient. 47. For example, while Boubaker Sadak is unusual in paying attention to the Marseille merchant community, he nevertheless feels the need to note that “Avant 1660, notre connaissance du commerce des Françias, essentiellement provençaux, est fragmentaire,” La Régence de Tunis au XVIIe siècle: ses relations commerciales avec les ports de l’Éurope méditerranéenne, Marseille et Livorne (Zaghouan, 1987), 147. For Smyrna in 1851 Michel Morineau has produced a smaller scaled “map.” “Naissance d’une domination. Marchands Européens, marchands et marchés du Levant aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles,” in Commerce de Gros, Commerce de detail dans les pay méditérranéens (XVIe–XIXe siècles. Actes des journées d’études, Bendor 25–26 Avril 1975 (Nice, 1976), “Annexe,” 184 48. Peiresc to Gaffarel, 4 July 1633, Carp. Bib. Inguimb. MS. 1873, fol. 403r: “Il n’y a aucun mal que la deffense de la prattica, qui n’est pas un petit Impedimentum rerum bene agendarum, car les bonnes lettres ont de besoing d’une correspondance et communication plus libre et sans entremise de tant de truchementz et tierces personnes.” I thank my friend Jérôme Delatour for discussion of this phrase. 49. Peiersc to Alvares, 1 August 1634, Carp. Bib. Inguimb. MS. 1871, fol. 334v. This letter is omitted from those to Alvares printed by Tamizey de Larroque in volume VII of Lettres de Peiresc. 50. Peiresc to Pallavicino, 7 September 1634, Carp. Bib. Inguimb. MS. 1872, fol. 389r. 51. Peiresc to Constans, 13 May 1635, Carp. Bib. Inguimb. MS. 1873, fol. 46v. The best example of this is the work of Baltasar Claret in Aleppo: Peiresc to Claret, 21 May 1636, Paris B.N. MS. N.a.f. 5172, fol. 73r. See also Peiresc to Dupuy, 12 August 1636, Lettres de Peiresc, III, pp. 542–3 and discussed in Miller “Mapping Peiresc’s Mediterranean. 52. Peiresc for Grange, 5 January 1635, Carp. Bib. Inguimb. MS. 1874, fol. 363r: “Memoire au sieur Jehan Grange allant à Smyrne, et au sieur François Grange son cousin. Neveux du sieur Baltasar Grange.” 53. Paris B.N. MS. F.fr. 9530, fol.179r. 54. Paris B.N. MS. F.fr. 9532, fol. 43r. 55. Peiresc to Magy, 27 July 1636, Carp. Bib. Inguimb. MS. 1874, fol.422r. 56. Paris B.N MS. F.fr. 9532, fol. 38r. 57. Peiresc to Petit, 2 November 1633, Carp. Bib. Inguimb. MS. 1875, fol. 263r. 58. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS. Lat. 9340, fol. 226v. 59. Peiresc to Meynier, 16 November 1629, Carp. Bib. Inguimb. MS. 1876, fol. 363r–v. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World 275 60. Peiresc to Seghezzi, 25 April 1636, Carp. Bib. Inguimb. MS. 1874, fol. 423r. 61. Peiresc to Gela, 13 January 1636, Carp. Bib. Inguimb. MS. 1874, fol. 409v. 62. Peiresc to Marchand, early March 1633, Carp. Bib. Inguimb. MS. 1874, fol. 570r. 63. Lambert’s is now in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS. Dupuy 669, fols. 219–36; Albert’s in V Cents Colbert 483 (formerly Dupuy 475), fols.554–56 with a copy at MS. Dupuy 669, fols. 239–51v; Seghezzi’s in Carp. MS. 1777, fols. 157–61 with copies at MS.V Cents Colbert 483 (Dupuy 475), fols. 554– 564 and MS. Dupuy 669, fols.253–58. 64. Albert’s “Memoire ample de l’estate de l’AEgypte” was written in 1634, Cesar Lambert’s relation of Egypt around 1633 (see Lambert to Peiresc, 10 March 1633, Carp. Bib. Inguimb. MS. 1777, fol.342r), and Santo Seghezzi’s detailed examination of the “Revenues d’Egypte” sometime in the early to mid-1630s. 65. They are published and discussed in Oleg V. Volkoff, À la recherce de manuscrits en Égypte. Recherches d’archéologie, de philologie et d’histoire, vol. 30 (Institut francais d’archéologie orientale) (Cairo, 1974); see also Sydney Aufrère, “Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc et ses correspondants de la nation du Caire: Santo Seghezzi, Jacques Albert et César Lambert,” Annales Islamologiques 25 (1991): 311–19. 66. For more on this story, see Miller, “Peiresc’s Ethiopia: How? and Why?,” Lias 37 (2010): 55–88, reprinted as chapter 10 in Peiresc’s Orient. 67. For Jailloux’s activities, see Miller, “Peiresc and the Study of Islamic Coins in the Early Seventeenth Century.” 68. Nuno Vassallo e Silva, “Precious Stones, Jewels and Cameos: Jacques de Coutre’s Journey to Goa and Agra” in Goa and the Great Mughal, eds. Jorge Flores and Nuno Vassallo e Silva (Lisbon: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 2004), 116–33. The throne made by Herryard for Jahangir is described on page 132. 69. Sneyders de Vogel, “Une lettre de Herryard, joaillier du Grand Mogol,” Neophilologus 39 (1955): 1–8. 70. James Boyajian, Portuguese Trade in Asia under the Habsburgs, 1580–1640 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 138–41. I am grateful to Sanjay Subrahmanyam for drawing my attention to this parallel account. 71. Carp. Bib. Inguimb. MS. 1777, fol. 390r: A Gaspar da Costa Casseretz | ausente a Fran.co Tinoco de Carvallo E em ausensia d’ambos a Ruy. Lopes da Silva que de Sr g.de [?] Em Goa” This is all in another’s writing. Peiresc adds, beneath, “India Oriental,” and continues in his own hand. “Fernand Nunes ou Guill. Corner de Hamfort en Hollande qu’a un frere a Paris nommé Mr Alvarez Flamand qui se tient rüe Michel le Comte. Manuel de la Costa Casseretz, qui a une soeur marie audit Alvarez et qui est frere dudit Gaspar de Costa.” 72. Signier to Peiresc, 20 March 1626, Carp. Bib. Inguimb. MS. 1879, fol. 636r. 73. Peiresc to de Thou, 25 April 1629, Carp. Bib. Inguimb. MS. 1876, fol. 354v: “Ceste affaire de l’Hyemen est de de trez grande importance si on l’eust mesnager mais on l’aura sans doubte laissé ruiner comme celle d’Erzeron.” The context here suggests what we learn later of the province’s rebellion against its Ottoman suzerains. 276 The Sea 74. Peiresc to Magy, 17 May 1635, Carp. Bib. Inguimb. MS. 1874, fol. 368v. Peiresc added that Magy was not to tell the Venetian consul anything of this. Peiresc to Magy, 10 August 1635, Carp. Bib. Inguimb. MS. 1874, fol. 382bis v, thanking him for news of Suaquin and Moucal. 75. For example, Carp. Bib. Inguimb. MS.1777, fol. 374r: “1633. 7 Juill. IEAN MAGI avec le memoire des livres & graines / pour le ROY D’AETHIOPIE” [Aix, Bib. Mejanes MS. 207 (1025), 3]. 76. Carp. Bib. Inguimb. MS.1777, fol.128r–v. 77. Peiresc to Gela, 24 Feb 1637, Carp. Bib. Inguimb. MS. 1874, fol. 442r. 78. Paris B.N. MS. N.a.f. 5174, fols. 25r–v. 79. Carp. Bib. Inguimb. MS. 1864, fol. 256r. 80. Carp. Bib. Inguimb. MS. 1864, fol. 257r. 81. Carp. Bib. Inguimb. MS. 1777, fol. 365r. In addition to the memo’s index, we know that Stefano Giustiniani of Scio was in Aix with the Capuchins for a legal case. Peiresc to Aycard, 31 October 1636, Carp. Bib. Inguimb. MS. 1871, fol. 67v. 82. Carp. Bib. Inguimb. MS. 1821, fol. 140r. 83. This is elaborated in my Peiresc’s “History of Provence” and the Discovery of a Medieval Mediterranean. 

one Two Men in a Boat: The Braudel-Goitein “Correspondence” and the Beginning of Thalassography Peter N. Miller The concluding section of Abraham ibn Daud’s Sefer ha-Qabbalah (c. 1261 CE) tells the story of four men—rabbis—in a boat sailing from Bari. The boat is captured by Muslim pirates and three of the rabbis are distributed, or ransomed away, to the cities of Fustat (Old Cairo), Qairawan, and Cordoba. The story, plainly, is a parable of the establishment of autonomous, post-Babylonian, Jewish communities in the West, even down to the silent evocation of the medieval Jewish parody “From Bari shall go forth Torah, and the Word of the Lord from Otranto.”1 Near the beginning of their magnum opus, The Corrupting Sea, Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell present the historiography of the Mediterranean upon which their work rests in terms of “four men in a boat.” Without reference to ibn Daud, or perhaps even knowing of his tale, they proceed straightforwardly to survey the contributions made by their chosen ancestors—Mikhail Rostovtzeff, Henri Pirenne, Shlomo Dov Goitein, and Fernand Braudel.2 It is with the last of these men that this essay is concerned. And though real boats play a major role in their lives, as well as work—Goitein, famously, travelled from Germany to Palestine in 1923 on the same vessel as Gershom Scholem, and Braudel, even more famously, drew close to Lucien Febvre on the long passage from Brazil back to France in 1937— it is to a metaphorical boat that I point. For though they seem very different scholars, and though no one has thus far found any reason to link them directly—Horden and Purcell, for example, make no effort to show that any of their four figures were personally connected—the fact 27 28 The Sea is that for about ten years Braudel and Goitein were “in the same boat,” as we would say: engaged upon a common project. It is this story that I wish to tell for the first time. And it is a story of no small significance. For these first thalassographers were two of the greatest historians of the twentieth century, one known to all of today’s practitioners, the other known to far too few. The one defined the study of the sea in terms of the slow-moving facts against which the lives of individuals vanished, as in the long exposure times of early photography. The other defined the study of the sea in terms of the fastchanging events and thoughts and actions of the individuals whose lives gave meaning to the inanimate world around them. Together Fernand Braudel and Shlomo Dov Goitein defined—and define still—the parameters of a possible thalassography. As scholars, Braudel and Goitein seem to represent two distinct paths in twentieth-century historiography. It is fitting, therefore, to begin this volume with a study not of their work—others have, and can, do this much better—but of their unknown relationship. For historians, even great ones, are human beings and their interactions can have a shaping impact even on their intellectual creations. On the first page of A Mediterranean Society, borrowing a Gibbonian trope, Goitein (1900–1985) writes that the “idea of this book was first conceived by me on September 17, 1954, while in Oxford, searching the treasures of the Bodleian Library for Geniza documents relating to the India trade for a book still in preparation on that subject.” In the very next sentence, Goitein explains that “On June 15, 1955, I wrote about my intention to publish a volume of this character to Clemens Heller of the École Pratique des Hautes Études (VIe section), Paris, who had done much to further the preparation of the book about the India trade.”3 Heller appears nowhere else in Goitein’s published oeuvre. He remains, surely, an unknown name to nearly every reader of A Mediterranean Society. But those with an eye for historiography and an ear for dates would note that the head of the VIe section in 1954 was none other than Fernand Braudel. This veiled reference is the only indication either ever gave of the other. For Braudel never cites Goitein in La Méditerranée, and Goitein himself explains that he did not read Braudel until after the publication of its English translation—The Mediterranean—in paperback in 1972 (he writes 1966). Of course, Braudel’s history would have been more compelling if he could have figured out how to accommodate the reality of human agency, and Goitein’s more usable if he had been able to tell a story rather than curate individual documents. Two Men in a Boat 29 On the surface, this one sentence on the first page of Goitein’s book seems to point to one of the great near-misses in the history of twentiethcentury practice. Yet it actually points to a relationship between Goitein and the VIe section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE) that extended over 10 years and 124 letters to and from Heller and his friend and colleague, the head of the section, Fernand Braudel.4 This connection to the VIe section is not mentioned by Goitein anywhere, not even in the India Book, published in 2008, but initially solicited by Heller and Braudel in the fall of 1954 for the VIe section’s publication series.5 The one sentence mentioning Heller masked all of that. It also cast a retrospective sheen on the past. For Heller did not “further the preparation of the book on the India trade,” he—and through him Braudel— actually commissioned it and paid for much of the research that went into it, and into what became A Mediterranean Society.6 Goitein, in that book’s preface, explained his leaving the Indian Ocean for the Mediterranean Sea in a second sentence that also conceals more than it reveals. Goitein mentions that when, on August 18, 1958, he received a letter from G. E. von Grunebaum of the Near East Center at the University of California inviting him to publish in their new series he was “off India and on the Mediterranean.” It was in trying to satisfy Grunebaum that “there ripened the bold resolution first to make a survey of the documentary Geniza in toto.”7 But it was Braudel, in fact, who first proposed publishing this kind of book. The story of these letters provides the “backstory” to one of the great scholarly projects of the twentieth century, Goitein’s reconstruction of a medieval trading society from fragments of documents, mostly letters. It also suggests the breadth of Braudel’s vision and a sense of his priorities very different from what one might deduce from his printed scholarship alone. The whole story of the pre-history of Goitein’s Mediterranean Society cannot be told here, but his relationship with Braudel and the VIe section can. And, finally, this story outlines a historiographical orientation which, if sadly impossible fifty years ago, may now finally be coming into view, in which human mobility and connectivity provide the historian’s armature. Fernand Braudel is famous as a scholar. We evaluate his achievement, as we do all scholars, based on what he wrote. Sometimes, of course, we celebrate a scholar by the celebrity of their students. But Braudel should also be famous as an administrator. It was under his guidance of the VIe section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE) that a range of 30 The Sea institutional projects were launched which culminated in the refounding of the VIe section as the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in 1975 and the creation of the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme on the Boulevard Raspail as its home. And, in particular, at the EPHE Braudel launched a series of publishing projects of extreme originality. When we evaluate his intellectual orientation we must include these publications, which he often solicited, encouraged, organized, and subsidized, alongside his own. In short, I am suggesting that the academic administrator or, more precisely, the administrative initiatives undertaken by an academic can and should, under certain circumstances, be understood as more or less mediated reflections of an intellectual vision. But once we broaden out our scope for the history of scholarship to include initiatives launched and managed but implemented through others, then we are also broadening out our range of actors from the professor-administrator to the administrator-academic. If we look at Braudel’s tenure at the VIe section, and then the EHESS, we see powerful administrator-academics. But one name stands out as of exceptional importance for our story, and exceptional interest over all: Clemens Heller (1917–2002). He is ignored in Lutz Raphael’s essential treatments of the Annales empire, but he does have a substantial role in F. Gemelli’s study of how Braudel created the EHESS.8 In this story, Heller and Braudel worked as a team, with Heller leading the way on international diplomacy, especially with American foundations. Born in Austria, and later a refugee in the United States, Heller went to Paris in 1949 after completing his doctorate at Harvard University (and founding the Salzburg Seminar) in order to work on account books from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. He became a confidant of Braudel’s and moved through a series of positions in the VIe section— (Chargé de conférences (1952–1956), Chargé de la mise en œuvre du programme des Aires culturelles (1955), Chargé des fonctions de sousdirecteur d’études (EPHE-VIe) (1957), Chargé du secrétariat et de la coordination de la Division des Aires culturelles (1957–1972), Directeur d’études associé (1972)—and after his official retirement in 1985 followed Braudel as Administrator of the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (1986–1992). Yet the working relationship between Braudel and Heller was much closer than any title might indicate. Indeed, we might want to consider their connection as something close to that of Warburg and Saxl when they remade the KBW into more than a privatgelehrter’s library in 1920s Hamburg.9 Two Men in a Boat 31 Heller has not been studied much on his own, reflecting the general tendency of historians of scholarship to focus on the scholars who write the scholarship, rather than the administrators who make it possible for that scholarship to be written. What follows, therefore, could be as much a demonstration piece for taking seriously the academic dimension of institutional histories, as it is a piece focusing on Heller. And, I should add, because of his position and ideas, the Fonds Heller in the archive of the EHESS is a fantastic trove for anyone interested in the global shaping of historical scholarship in the second half of the twentieth century. At the center of this institution-building project was the Centre de Recherches Historiques (CRH), created by Febvre and Braudel, born with the VIe Section itself in 1949 but only really active from 1951. Lutz Raphael has written about it within his study of the Annales project and also in a separate monograph published in the Cahiers of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.10 And at the core of the CRH lies a group of publication series which reflected Braudel’s vision. Indeed, the publication series launched by the CRH in the early 1950s may represent Braudel’s postwar thinking even better than his Mediterranean which, while only published in 1949 was substantially finished by 1938 or 1939. The Braudel of the early 1950s was a different person and the second edition of The Mediterranean grew directly out of the research foci of the CRH, as represented in its monograph series.11 The two most significant collections established by the CRH were “Affaires et gens d’affaires” and “Ports-Routes-Trafics.” These series are anchored in a perception that economic activity is cultura in the strong sense, and that studying merchants is therefore central to any future cultural history. The first volume in “Affaires et gens d’affaires” was Armando Sarpori’s Le Marchand Italien au Moyen Age, with its four chapters divided into “Physionomie du marchand,” “Les marchands au travail,” “Les italiens dans le monde,” and “Les sources,” which included statutes, notarial acts, books, merchant letters—described as absolutely essential but hard to find—“manuels de commerce, mémoires et journaux, et chroniques.” Right from the start there was equal emphasis on the role of the historian as a key figure in this story, not as someone hidden behind a veil of pseudo-objectivity. As Lucien Febvre wrote in his preface to Sapori’s book, “the author of this very fine book . . . this author is a man . . . concerned with yesterday, preoccupied with tomorrow—because tomorrow and yesterday find a common link within the heart of man.”12 In his preface to an exactly contemporary publication in the parallel 32 The Sea series Ports-Routes-Trafics (Étienne Trocmé and Marcel Delafosse, Le Commerce Rochelais de la fin du XVe siècle au début du XVIIIe), Fernand Braudel made an impassioned plea to treat ostensibly economic sources as windows into lived life. It is another, and rarer thing, which would fill many of our colleagues in history with joy, not to consider economic life as a reality in itself, a closed world of numbers, but as a sector of life among others, and one that must be replaced in a set of circumstances and varied links to restore its full value. For Etienne Trocmé, his merchants are men, his city is not only streets, a harbor, some ramparts, a ‘suburb’, local foods, distant commerce—but also institutions in the richest sense of the word. La Rochelle gradually reveals itself to us in the fullness of its life, in its dignity, and in its urban force d’état.13 For Braudel and the CRH, letters were the type of source that offered the most. The key statement of purpose was made by Braudel in his preface to a volume in Affaires et gens d’affaires on the letters of a Marseille merchant family at the turn of the seventeenth century. “[Their interest,] if I am not mistaken, is to insert us into the heart of the practices and realities of merchants’ everyday lives: these realities, on their own or because of their repetition, often go beyond the merely anecdotal detail.” Then, taking a single letter as an example, he notes that it sheds light on “the city and the position of Marseille, the role of the Genoese silk buyers, the importance of exchange in Lyon, the attraction of Seville and Cadiz, the transport of ‘American’ cochineal eastwards, the price of silver reals in Marseille, the journey of ships towards Alexandria and Tripoli.”14 Braudel, whose famous book, The Mediterranean, was famously depopulated, in these prefaces emphasized the value of letters precisely because of their individualized, “granular,” view of reality. And he identified this with the aspirations of the VIe section as a whole. The VIe section of the École des Hautes-Études was even more interested in these letters as it had in the works two analogous publications [Lettres d’un marchand vénitien Andrea Berengo (1553–1556) (Affaires et gens d’affaires 10, 1957); Simon Ruiz et les ‘asientos’ de Philippe II (Affaires et gens d’affaires 6, 1953)] . . . But these letters from Marseillais merchants have their value and will acquire importance by being thus compared to similar documents and plunged back into an Two Men in a Boat 33 economic history of the XVIth century as seen day by day, explained by its actors, a history which, in general, has but distant relationships with the images presented by, when they are presented, the great books of synthesis.15 One of Braudel’s younger followers, J. Gentil da Silva, who published his edition of merchant letters as Affaires et gens d’affaires 9 in 1956, described the way letters had to be read. On the face of it, they often might appear of little value. “For their correspondence does not say all about their activities or their calculations. The hardest, and we are going to try in a moment, is to understand their language, to follow their procedures, their tactics, their art of diagnosing and taking action.”16 In short, in the early 1950s, there was no place in the world in which merchant letters were as central, as valued, and as “theorized,” as the Centre de Recherches Historiques in Paris.17 Our thalassographic close encounter begins on October 10, 1954, when Heller, at the heart of this project, wrote a letter out of the blue to Goitein, sparked by the appearance in Speculum of Goitein’s essay, “From the Mediterranean to India: documents on the trade to India, South Arabia and East Africa from the eleventh and twelfth centuries.”18 Heller had read it, and was impressed. Right off the bat, Heller puts the collaborative project on the table, linking the Centre’s interests to those of Goitein (or, so interpreting them as to link): “I have just read with great interest your article in SPECULUM. For me the article has been one of the most exciting and rewarding ones I have seen in a long time, especially since the Geniza papers promise to be of great value for the studies on commercial credit in antiquity & the middle ages, which I am now undertaking.” Heller then went on to write: But I should like to write you today not so much on my own behalf, but as a member of the 6th Section of the École des Hautes Études at the Sorbonne and its Centre de Recherches Historiques. Under the leadership of Prof. Fernand Braudel of the College de France we are just developing a programme for a comparative study of Asiatic & Occidental economic & social history & of economic & social movements which involve as well Asia as the Occident. It is intended to build up several research projects, & to invite international cooperation for them, to expand the publications of 34 The Sea the 6th Section in the direction of these investigation [sic], and to start, beginning in October 1955, a new Journal (in French & English) devoted to the study of the problems of comparative economic history. Obviously Jewish Commerce will have to constitute a major problem of investigation, and you can well see how the Geniza papers, and the programme you outline for the future, are of immense interest to us. I should therefore like to ask you, whether it would be possible for you, not only to keep the Centre abreast of your studies, but to cooperate in its efforts and perhaps to you use our journal for other articles by yourself or by colleagues of yours which deal with the economic and legal implications of the Geniza papers. Heller put this into very concrete terms, opening the door to what would be a nearly sixty-year-long project. I note that you speak only of a “possible” publication of the Geniza documents. I take it that the publication is by no means assured, but if this should not be the case, it might be possible for the Centre to assume responsibility for the publication, unless costs turn out to be entirely prohibitive. In conclusion, invoking Braudel’s personal research project again, Heller concludes: Prof. Braudel has asked me to inquire whether the Geniza papers contain important material on the Indian and on Mediterranean trade in the 15th & 16th century, and whether you think it worthwhile to set some young scholars in Paris to work on these papers.19 Goitein immediately replied, writing on October 27 from England, “I am enthusiastic about the prospect of cooperating with you.” But then he quickly qualified, identifying himself almost reflexively, and defensively, against what he might have perceived as too-high expectations. This is a passage of extraordinary value for its autobiographical hue. I am a philologist and historian of Mediaeval Islam and Judaism, but will never write economic history. I regard it my duty to edit, to translate and explain as exactly and completely as possible those texts of the Cairo Geniza. The conclusions to be drawn from them for the Two Men in a Boat 35 history of economy will be made by the scholars specializing in this field. In my article “The Cairo Geniza as a source for the History of Muslim Civilization” in the forthcoming issue of Islamic Studies (Paris) you will find a number of important conclusions drawn from my collection of papers dealing with the trade to India. But these are summaries of facts rather than abstractions made by a specialist. Nevertheless, at this stage he presented the gap between his own philologist’s approach and that of the historian, perhaps with Braudel as the model, as fruitful. “Thus, I believe that cooperation with the Centre de Recherches Historiques will be very useful.” Heller marked this in orange pencil in the margin. Turning to details, Goitein explained that he was “delighted that you consider the possibility of publishing my book on the trade in the Indian Ocean.” Heller underscored this passage. “So far,” Goitein continued, “only very informal talks have been made with other scientific bodies.” Then Goitein turned to an issue that would run through his Parisian correspondence, and perhaps be of decisive importance. “Of course the book has to appear in English (Heller’s emphasis). For although French is not unknown to me, I could not take upon myself the responsibility to translate these difficult texts into a language which I never use actively.” The shadow of Braudel looms always over this correspondence. In concluding this first letter, Goitein turns directly to Heller’s transmitted question about the possible presence in the Geniza of material bearing on the later, early modern, history of the Mediterranean. “Please inform Professor Braudel,” Goitein writes, “that the Geniza contains a lot of material from later times, especially, I believe, from the 18. century, from the 16. too, while—if I am not mistaken—there is little from the 15.” Braudel had raised the possibility of setting a young person on to this material, a very forward-thinking proposal. Goitein agreed, but with an illuminating caveat. “I think, it is an excellent idea to set a young scholar to work on this material, but only one, for the very secret of the study of these fragments is that one person has to concentrate on a whole field.”20 This insistence on one person reflects his own view that the Geniza could only be understood if one had a view of it as a whole, and therefore the need for a person to have mastered everything in order to say anything. Whether this is in fact true—could it not be said of any documentary trove? And yet it is not standard practice in other fields—or not, there is no doubt that this premise had more than anything to do with the rate at which Goitein produced his own books on the Geniza. 36 The Sea This first exchange of letters flags many of the main themes that will recur in the later correspondence of these two men. From a letter written on December 1, 1954, from Jerusalem, Goitein noted that Heller’s letter reached him on November 8 in Cambridge, just before he left England. He had been out of the country for sixteen months and was drowning in old business. It makes no reference to his earlier letter, however.21 He thought his book on India would nicely complement that of a Mr. Kirpas on the India trade in the sixteenth century.22 Goitein explained his time frame, and his dependence on foundation financial support. What he really hoped, eventually was “in collaboration with my colleagues and graduates, to cover the whole field of the documentary Geniza.”23 Based on Goitein’s one letter, Heller offered him a subsidy, which Goitein later acknowledged as 60,000 francs per month. One can only marvel at the remarkable sure-footedness and speed with which Heller— and behind him, of course, Braudel—worked.24 Goitein again brought up the language question, asking if he could publish in English. He was already thinking in terms of a complex project. “This volume I would be exclusively in French, containing a very detailed Introduction and the Translations of the texts, while a second, smaller, volume would bring the texts (of course in Hebrew letters) with a philological Introduction and detailed Arabic (in Latin or/and Arabic letters)—French Indices. Do you think this is feasible?”25 Heller must have tried to paint a picture of Braudel’s project by sending him some of the volumes produced in the CRH’s series, for in his letter of February 6, 1955, Goitein thanked Heller for the two packets of publications of “your institute.” By this date, the CRH would have published at least fifteen titles. “I believe now,” Goitein replies, that my Indiabook fits better into the series ‘Affaires et Gens d’Affaires.’” This was, as we have noted, the flagship series in which Braudel promoted his argument about the centrality of merchants in the making of the modern world through the writings of merchants themselves. “In English,” Goitein concludes, “I would call it ‘The Jewish India merchants of the Middle Ages’. In German, there exists even a word corresponding exactly to the Arabic ‘Musafirun al-Hind,’ namely ‘Indienfahrer’; I doubt, however, whether there exists such a word in French.” Goitein offered that the texts were already typed and ready for translation, and that only time in a major library was needed for him to complete the introduction.26 Goitein’s formal request for funding was made to the CRH in a second letter of February 6, 1955. This was addressed to Two Men in a Boat 37 Heller but Goitein explains, as if to a committee, that he had collected “about 160 items referring to the trade between the Mediterranean and the countries of the Indian Ocean” and wanted to remain in Europe to complete the study. He wrote that he believed the Centre would recognize the value of this work because it has done so much for “research in the history of economy.”27 Goitein’s first letter to Braudel was written on February 20 in order to thank him personally for the grant which he received of the 60,000 francs. “Dr. Clemens Heller informs me that you most kindly consented to grant me a scholarship of 60.000 francs per month for a period of two months, in order to enable me to work on my book on the India merchants of the Middle Ages. I was indeed deeply moved by this generous allocation, and in particular by the spirit in which it was granted. The connections between the Centre de Recherches Historiques and myself were brought about entirely by the initiative of the Centre. This I call a real policy in planning and executing of scientific research. The stupendous literary output of the Centre shows that this farsighted policy is bearing fruit. But in the midst of this very important letter Goitein’s seeming insecurity about his lacking command of the French language surfaced. “I have to apologize for writing to you in English instead of French. I am a great admirer of France and in particular of her literature and science. However, as I have to use constantly four different languages for my work of research, teaching and writing, I found it was not conducive to the health of the soul to try using French as a means of expression.”28 In his letter to Heller of February 20, which accompanied that to Braudel, Goitein explained that “After having looked through the publications of the Centre, I think we better shelve the idea of printing the Judaeo-Arabic originals. This is a big Orientalist undertaking and is better left to a project of bringing out the Geniza in toto” (Heller’s underscore). “Thus,” he concludes, “the book will be in French from the beginning to the end.” This distinction between the India Book and the Geniza in toto, or “documentary Geniza,” is fundamental, for in it lies the seed of the ultimate bifurcation of Goitein’s project.29 Heller’s response of March 30, 1955, stressed the capabilities of the Imprimerie Nationale in the area of oriental-language printing. He also explained that the CRH had made a series of appointments in “Oriental problems.”30 Turning to the question of Goitein’s team, Heller asked 38 The Sea about Eliyahu Ashtor and Murad Mikh’ail and their readiness to publish, and emphasized the value the CRH put on collaboration. A broader collaboration was for a broader project. It was Braudel himself to whom he assigned the vision for this. And this brings me to a very large question with [which?] M. Braudel and I have discussed without coming to any definite conclusions: that is whether we should propose to cooperate with you in bringing out the Geniza in toto if you do not find another institution to support such publication. But this may well be beyond our possibilities and economic means. I wonder if you would care to make any comments?31 Goitein’s response directly took up Braudel’s challenge. You are perfectly right in the assumption that the India book should be planned within the frame of the whole Geniza projects; and it is a testimony to the broadness of your and Braudel’s conceptions of History that you consider to bring out the Geniza as a whole. No doubt, this treasure house of information on social and economic history should be made accessible, if not in a total edition, at least in the form of Regesta. This was the kernel of A Mediterranean Society. Goitein was also willing to collaborate with the CRH, but he suggested broadening it out to include also the Hebrew University and “some American organisation or University.” In Goitein’s view “this would solve also the question of the language. As Hebrew and German, the languages with which we are familiar, are ruled out for a publication of the character of the Geniza project, we should use English, the language in which our publications appear, as far as they are not destined for the Hebrew reading public.” Again, we see that language was an ongoing issue for Goitein. He explained that his notes were all in English and that translating from it—which was already translated from the medieval Hebrew or Arabic—into a fourth language, French, “would be a source of many mistakes or inaccuracies.” Therefore, he concluded, “I thought to bring out the India book solely in French and to leave the philological aspects to a later publication, which should be a part of the Geniza project as a whole.” And this, presumably, would have been in English. In conclusion, Goitein invited Heller to Jerusalem to meet the pos- Two Men in a Boat 39 sible participants in the big Geniza project. He specifically mentioned Ephraim Urbach, F. Baer and H. H. Ben Sasson. One of the fascinating what-ifs of our story is the possibility, had Heller gone to Jerusalem, and had this collaboration blossomed, of a very different Jerusalem School arising in the 1950s, one linked much more closely to Braudel, the CRH, and the Annales.32 Writing back immediately (six days after Goitein put pen to paper), Heller reported that a discussion of the Geniza papers had been held, but that more information about scope was needed. He had, however, been able to secure Braudel’s agreement to Goitein’s proposed institutional collaboration. “In principle, an arrangement could be considered, in which the University of Jerusalem would assume responsibility for the scholarly preparation of the volumes, in which we would take care of the printing by the Imprimerie Nationale, and an American institution would assume responsibility for additional expenses.”33 Again, turning the correspondence around quickly, Goitein wrote back from Jerusalem on the 25th. “My final decision is that I offer the Centre my India book for publication and suggest that you put the costs for translation and printing into your budget of 1956.” Goitein planned to be in Europe in the summer writing the book’s Introduction and would know the “exact extent” of the book by October. He proposed meeting Heller in Paris at the end of October or early November and going over the details. He also suggests auditioning Paul Klein, once of Paris and the Bibliothèque Nationale and now of Jerusalem, to see how well he translated three or four extensive documents.34 Since Goitein’s definitive-sounding pronouncement had made no mention of language of publication, or of the relationship of the India Book to the wider Geniza project, Heller queried precisely this in his next letter, written after a lapse of four weeks. “Please do let me know whether the idea of joined publication of the Geniza papers is dead or not, what should be done about the translation of your book and whether it is going to include the original text or not.”35 Heller also put his money where his mouth was, offering Goitein 120,000 francs for the summer.36 In exchange, Goitein made clear his relationship to the CRH. “I offer to the Centre,” he wrote to Heller, “the publication of my book ‘The Geniza Archives of the Jewish India Merchants.’ You will have to put into your budget for 1956 . . . the cost of translation from Hebrew, as well as the printing [of] the French text and of the originals, which will be in Hebrew characters with some additional dots (denoting the Arabic). . . . As to the Geniza project as a whole, you 40 The Sea need not worry about it now, as no other volume will be ready, before the end of . . . .”37 Heller, going back to the U.S. for the summer, slightly lamented Goitein’s failure to rise to the bait about the Geniza project in toto. “With more information about the great Geniza project, I might have had an occasion to discuss it over there.” He left the Rockefeller Foundation as his forwarding address.38 This caught Goitein’s attention. Five days later he sent Heller a plan for what a published Geniza might look like. “Our provisional plans for the Geniza: 8 volumes to be brought out in about twelve years. 1. The Archives of the India merchants. To be ready in 1956 (Goitein). [In the margin, Heller penciled “To be ready in 1956.”] 2. The Archive of Nahrai ben Nissim: letters from Egypt, North Africa, Sicily, Syria, and Palestine. To be ready in 1957 (Murad Mikha’el). 3. Letters from other archives related to the Mediterranean . . . 4. A general volume illustrating social life. I am collecting material for this volume all the time. [In the margin, Heller noted “Goitein ed.”] 5. Letters from the Egyptian country side or inner Egyptian correspondence. 6. Marriage, Divorce and other documents related to family life. 7. Other legal deeds. These seven volumes will contain material in the main from eleventh thru [sic] the thirteenth centuries. 8. A selection from later documents (16 to 18 centuries). Goitein concluded: “I personally intend to undertake, beside the volume on the trade to India, only volume 4. I see, however, suitable candidates for the other volumes, although some of them will have to grow.” Heller commented in the margin: “Edition of Geniza Papers relating to Social & Economic History. Edition S.D. GOITEIN.”39 This is the letter Goitein referred to on the opening page of Mediterranean Society. It clearly is written as a response to Heller’s challenge to produce something for him to show the Rockefeller Foundation. Heller’s response to the big plan was immediate and welcoming. But he also perceived a certain ambiguity, if not downright ambivalence, in Goitein’s reply. Was it one volume they were discussing, or several? And were they all the same, and if not, how different? Nevertheless, Heller’s— Two Men in a Boat 41 and the CRH’s—position was clear: “I do not know whether such a permanent relationship with Paris would be of interest to you, but we would certainly welcome it.”40 Heller, in turn, in his next letter, asked if Goitein, who was then in England, could come to Paris by the end of October in order to meet Braudel.41 Goitein was “awfully sorry,” but deferred the invitation. Instead, he enclosed “a table showing the final arrangements of the texts in the India volume (which has again a new name). I should very much appreciate if Prof. Braudel had time to have a look on it, for then he would get a more detailed idea about the content of the book.”42 This “table” seems not to have survived. A long letter from Heller that may have crossed with Goitein’s shows how deeply Goitein’s project had gotten bound up with those of the CRH. Heller explained that “M. Braudel would like to bring out the 1st Volume of the Geniza Papers in an exemplary fashion, and therefore, considerations of money should not bother you in deciding whether or not to publish documents in full.” This was a pretty extraordinary extension of carte blanche. Heller went on. “I presume you are in agreement that we should publish all the eight vol. together; naturally, we could add related volumes, which you may care to suggest.” He asked what Goitein had done about translation because budget decisions needed to be made before Braudel’s departure. Heller also noted that the VIe section was undertaking a major expansion in its Asian and Islamic studies. He asked for Goitein’s feeling about the “Geniza Papers” being published in a series containing volumes on India, China, and the world of Islam. Heller ended by asking for a quick reply “so that I can still discuss it with M. Braudel.”43 In his reply, dashed off only two days later, and just after the post arrived at 8:30 a.m.—“when one is burning to run off to the Library”— Goitein rejected the Islamic series as a home for his India Book. He suggests instead “Intermediate civilization or something similar.” He also noted that while the “The India volume—as well, I hope that about social life—is my literary property, [but] the Geniza project as a whole is an affair of the Hebrew University & we have to await its decision. It will certainly be decided before the India volume is ready for print.”44 This is somewhat puzzling as the Geniza documents were themselves scattered around the world; the claim that the Hebrew University had a right to the project could only stem from the fact of his being salaried by the University. But why Goitein thought that his curatorial or interpretative work and that of his students somehow belonged to the University in a way 42 The Sea that differed from the India Book is not self-evident. In the light of what came later, we cannot rule out the possibility that this was a stalling tactic. In a letter written on that very same day (September 23) Heller proposed splitting the India Book into two parts. “In talking over the publication of the Indian book”—presumably with Braudel, but perhaps with others as well—“the suggestion was made to publish your introduction, the translation of the texts, perhaps in French and English, (and, if you think it valuable, the transcriptions) and the indexes, etc., in one volume, and to publish a complete set of the original documents, in the form of microfilm or microcards, available for general distribution.”45 Goitein’s trip to Paris brought him in on the 13th and took him out on the 20th.46 A month later, after thanking Heller for hospitality during his visit, Goitein announced that under separate cover he was sending the French translation of the preface to the India Book, made by Klein. He apologizes for the matter of fact style, and says the book itself “will be more colourful in general,”47 The preface was sent the following day, accompanied by the question “When will Professor Braudel be back from USA?”48 Intriguingly, although Goitein seems to have been in no hurry to accommodate his schedule to Braudel’s, he did seem acutely attentive to his comments. Goitein’s next letter to Heller, on December 12, begins where the previous one had ended: “I wonder whether Prof. Braudel has already come back from his visit to the States.” He had spoken to Prof. Mazar, President of the Hebrew University, who was enthusiastic about the project. He and Goitein had agreed that 1) The publication of the Judaeo-Arabic Geniza documents will be a joint undertaking of the HU and the CRH. 2) the HU will provide the scholars and graduates doing the collection, deciphering, translation and preparation for printing, while the CRH will put at the disposal of the undertaking its wide experience in scientific planning, especially in the fields of economic and social history. Likewise, the Centre will bear the financial burden of the undertaking. In the margin, Heller scrawled “!!” The first volume in this series was to be Goitein’s essay, “From Spain to India,” and it was to appear in French. Goitein, in a marginal note, waived the idea of an English summary. He also looked to a formal collaboration between the Hebrew University and the CRH which included Two Men in a Boat 43 the opportunity for “HU scholars and graduates to work in Paris, while visits of relevant French scholars will be welcome in Jerusalem.”49 The next letter from Heller, sent by his secretary, Alice Vidal, on his behalf, was dated January 16, 1956. It apologized for the delay but explained that “Mr Braudel was absent for some time.” And since the remainder of the letter discusses the “joint edition of the Geniza papers,” the explanation seems to imply that on the Centre’s part it was Braudel who developed the publication strategy presented now in this letter. “You say,” it begins, that “the Centre will bear the financial burden of the undertaking. This needs more precisions to avoid later misunderstanding. Offhand, we are ready to pay for all costs of publication, including translation, and I presume that is what you mean.” Offhand or not, this is no small offer on Heller’s part. But he said that the volumes ought to appear in French, and that no English edition should appear until at least two years had passed after the French edition’s publication. This, again, seems very open minded on the part of Heller and Braudel. And, Braudel agreed that Goitein’s choice of translator, Mr. Catane, né Klein, could be entrusted with the India Book. Heller asks if Goitein wanted a formal letter “written by Mr. Febvre or Mr. Braudel to the President of the Hebrew University, proposing in a formal manner this joint undertaking?”50 On January 22, Goitein replied, correcting the trivia—how “Catane” should be spelled—and aiming at the truly important—“Is Professor Braudel satisfied with M. Catane’s French style?” His approval was necessary in order for the translator to be he hired. Summarily, Goitein reiterated his approval to points a, b, and c of Heller’s letter of January 16 and proposed that no official communication was necessary above and beyond his letter of December 12, 1955—the one in which Goitein approved doing the India book in French. Goitein was also now in a position to inform Heller that the India book would not be completed in the fall of 1955. No comment about the delay, and certainly no apology for the delay, is offered up by Goitein. Instead, turning to the offer made by Heller “that a young man who had worked on the Geniza, should come out to Paris, to study under Braudel and thus form a kind of link between the Centre and the Geniza project,” Goitein offered up his current assistant, Joseph Eliash.51 Having a Geniza person in Paris, Goitein added, would help a great deal with proofreading “and if Prof. Braudel too would be satisfied with him, we could confide to him, later on, on his own account, e.g. the volume on 44 The Sea the Mediterranean trade, as represented in the Geniza papers.” Here, we see Goitein thinking in terms of Braudel’s project as first articulated to him by Heller a year earlier.52 As for the question of Goitein’s man in Paris, Heller thought that he might be able to use Rockefeller Foundation money to cover the costs if his time was split between medieval and modern research matters. “But, I shall try in any case,” Heller concluded, “to use French funds for him so that he could concentrate on the Geniza.”53 Goitein, having proposed Eliash and interested Heller, now reported in his next letter that he wanted to put off the visit until 1957. Having proposed Catane and gotten Heller’s approval, Goitein now backed away, saying that before he submitted a formal proposal to translate the India Book “I would like to make sure that Prof. Braudel is really satisfied with his French style.” Amidst Goitein’s puzzling but now increasingly typical hesitation, one detects the ghostly presence of Braudel in their epistolary exchange.54 Heller immediately picked up on this. Catane’s French was fine, he wrote back. Just “go ahead and get him to do the work,” he concluded.55 The India Book seemed almost within grasp in late March 1956— but then slipped away. “I hope to be able to send a typewritten copy of the volume of the Texts (about 400 pages) in about three weeks time,” Goitein wrote. The book as a whole, he thought, could not be printed until the French part was ready. “I do not believe to be able to finish it in 1956.”56 Heller procured funds to begin the translation.57 Yet by May, the India book, which only a few months earlier was three weeks away from completion, was now slipping out to sea. “This India-book will be a magnificent collection of documents, like one of those big publications which were the pride of the nineteenth century. However, although I am working on it daily, it will take quite a time, before the whole will be ready for print.”58 In this clearest presentation of the content, Goitein was gesturing at grand collections of documents, such as the Monumenta Germaniae Historicae, rather than at a connected monograph. Does that mean that Goitein had always envisioned it taking this form, or that he no longer felt able to reduce the material to a single narrative line? We do not know. A substantial gap in the correspondence ensues. Where the record picks up again in January 1957, it is Heller complaining that he received no answer to a letter he wrote in early autumn.59 In reply, puzzled, Goitein writes that this letter of January 16 was the first he had received since Heller and Vidal’s of April 20.60 The remainder of 1957 is very poorly at- Two Men in a Boat 45 tested in the archive. Yet we do know that Heller offered Goitein 350,000 francs for the summer months of 1957.61 These were months of crisis. In the fall of 1957, the long silence of the archive was broken by a letter from the great French orientalist Claude Cahen to the medievalist Maurice Lombard. It sheds a wholly different light on the correspondence. Not planning to come to Paris for a fortnight, and fearing that Braudel was away, Cahen wrote to Lombard rather than to Heller whom he did not know. That summer, at the Orientalists Congress in Munich he had met Goitein and we spoke of his plans about the Geniza. He said he had intended to publish a book under the auspices of the Centre de Recherches Historiques and in accordance to the offer that Braudel made to him, on the documents of the Geniza in relation to commerce in the Indian Ocean. But later, because of language questions, and especially because the letters he had written to the Center remained without a response, or with late or insufficient responses, he changed his mind and because he will spend some time at the University of Philadelphia, he would figure out how to publish it there.62 Thus we see that Heller’s silence from the second half of 1956 through the end of 1957 seemed to have soured Goitein on the project. There is the question, of course, as to whether this only served as a more publically acceptable pretense than the language issue, which Cahen mentioned and which clearly did bother Goitein. Cahen did not know Goitein but had tremendous respect for him as a scholar and for his work. Though having himself no connection with the CRH, he thought it would be a black eye for France if a project of importance promised to the Centre wound up being published overseas. “I am not able to judge if Goitein has any particular susceptibilities; what I know is that he is a great scholar, that his book will be major, and, although I have no relationship with the Centre, that it will be an unfortunate affair that a book promised to a French collection ends up being published abroad.”63 And while unable to speak in the name of the Centre, Cahen nevertheless expressed what he believed was Braudel’s commitment to the project. However, he did not believe that he had succeeded in persuading Goitein. “In Munich I could not naturally speak in the name of the Centre; however I believed I could affirm to him that Braudel, whom I recently heard say that which yourself, when we talked in the spring, had 46 The Sea confirmed. And I tried to plead the case of the Centre, without much apparent success.”64 The latest turn in the story, Cahen related, was that he had heard from Goitein, who had come to treat him as something of an official French representative, that he had met Heller in New York and that they had smoothed things over, “recovering” the project for the CRH. Goitein promised an article for Annales and Heller promised to arrange the translation. Cahen made a point, again, of how uncomfortable Goitein was with a language over which he had no command, which apparently extended even to checking another’s translation (this is implied, not stated). “Now Goitein, who seems to treat me as an agent for France, writes to me that he met Clemens Heller in New York who seems to have been able to arrange things, to recover the project for the Centre, and also to obtain the promise from Goitein of an article for the Annales; the book could be translated in English instead of French, which would suit Goitein better since he doesn’t feel capable of writing good French and distrusts translations that he is not able to review closely enough.”65 In conclusion, Cahen reported that Goitein remained suspicious (“sur le qui-vive et méfiant”) and that some official communication from Braudel was now needed to assuage him. Heller’s lack of accessibility was scored for pouring fuel on the fire. Goitein remained wary, so much so that he even said that if he did not hear from the Centre within six weeks of his sending his article to the Annales, he would pull it. It is nevertheless obvious that he remains on-guard and suspicious; he probably wishes a detailed and official letter or a contract in due form to clarify and guarantee the conversation. However, he told me that since the interview with Heller, ‘with the exception of a very flimsy short letter, I have not heard from them since then.’ As for the Annales article, which he ought to have sent a week after the letter he sent me, this is what he writes: ‘In case I shall not hear from the Centre for, say, six weeks after having sent the article there, I shall offer it somewhere else.’66 Therefore, Cahen concluded, someone at the Centre—Braudel if he were there, but certainly Heller—should immediately write to Goitein “so that there be no new rupture, which this time would be irremediable.” While some in Paris might be inclined to think him “especially difficult,” he was convinced that publishing this material was worth bearing these sorts of “little inconveniences.”67 Two Men in a Boat 47 Lombard immediately passed along Cahen’s letter to Heller. He asked after the state of things and offered to write to Goitein himself in the absence of Braudel if Heller thought it useful.68 Lombard set off alarm bells on the rue Varenne. The very next day, Heller drafted a long letter to Goitein. He began, knowing his correspondent, with money matters. Travel monies were being put into the 1958 budget for Goitein. The Agence Friedland, which the CRH used in Paris, would send a bon d’échange to Globe Travel Service in Philadelphia. Moreover, dangling the opportunity to see new Geniza materials before Goitein’s eyes, Heller allowed that the cost of a trip from Paris to Russia could be paid for by the CRH. Heller then turned to the publication schedule. If I understood our conversation in New York correctly you proposed that in 1958 the first four volumes of the Geniza Papers should be ready for publication: -Vol. I: Goitein and Baneth, Introduction to the Geniza Papers; -Vol. II to IV: Indian Merchants. Several other volumes were discussed for later date, especially those by Mr Murat Michaely and Mr Golb. We also discussed the possibility of two articles for the Annales, a shorter one which you would send before the end of the year and another one which you would send later next year. I presume it would be best if you would be kind enough to draw up a detailed program as you envisaged it so that there would be a formal document serving as a base for all future action. Turning back to money, Heller demonstrated the depth of the Centre’s commitment to Goitein. As far as financial agreements are concerned I understand that the Centre de Recherches Historiques will cover the cost of your trip to Europe next year (plane tourist class or the equivalent on a boat) and will cover your frais de séjour up to 100,000 francs a month during the months June, July and August. Please let me know whether any additional financial requirements exist and I shall let you know whether or not they can be assumed by the Centre. Naturally we are completely responsible for the cost of the publication of the books.69 48 The Sea And the day after that, it was Braudel himself who wrote to Goitein. This was the formal action that Cahen had thought necessary. Mr. Heller told me about the conversation you had with him during his stay in New York. In principle, I agree with everything you discussed and in particular that which Mr. Heller suggested to you in his letter of November 7th, 1957. In other words, I agree with the printing of the ‘Documents de la Genisa’ and agree to your trip to Europe in 1958. I must unfortunately leave Paris once again for a month and hope that Mr. Heller can resolve all the details with you. However, if I must sign official documents upon my return, I will do what is necessary as soon as possible.70 Amidst the official-sounding language, Braudel added a concluding paragraph making clear how important Goitein was for him, as well as for the VIe section. “I am taking this opportunity to reiterate that the École Pratique des Hautes Études is proud to be of use to you in the publication of your work and I look forward to the articles that you kindly put forward to the Annales.”71 Goitein wrote back immediately, still a bit on edge, accompanying the submission of an article on “The Socio-Economic Background of the Muslim Friday Worship.” In case it was “too Islamistic,” he wrote, “you need not worry; I shall have no difficulty publishing the article in an orientalistic journal. Please inform me of the decision of the editor of the Annales and, in case it is negative, I shall advise to which journal in Paris to send it.”72 Still feeling Cahen’s prod, Heller wrote back three days later—which is to say, immediately after the letter arrived—thanking Goitein for submitting the article and informing him that a formal letter from Braudel as editor accepting the article would come soon.73 Undated, in the dossier, is a note from Braudel to Heller saying that he was going to write to Goitein telling him that he had accepted the article.74 It is at this point that one realizes that there had been no direct communication between Braudel and Goitein between February 1955 and November 1957. All Goitein’s queries about Braudel’s involvement might in fact be read as a desire for direct contact. And yet there was none. Braudel’s letter seems, at least on the surface, to have assuaged Goitein’s doubts. In any event it elicited from him a response, dated November 21, 1957, reflecting on the history of their relationship. Two Men in a Boat 49 Please accept my sincere thanks for your kind letter of November 8. I feel it is a great honor for me that my proposed publication of the Geniza papers has been included in the magnificent program of your Centre. I appreciated in particular that it was the initiative of your section which created the connection between your school and my work on the Geniza, and I hope that the publication will live up to the high standard set by the École Pratique des Hautes Études.75 On the same day, November 21, Goitein addressed a longer letter to Heller, responding to the plans laid out in Heller’s letter of November 7, which itself resumed, or purported to resume, the conclusions reached during their conversations in New York. The main point Goitein wished to clarify was delivery date. Heller had said all four volumes would be ready in 1958. This was incorrect. “Concerning the publications discussed by us in New York, I would like to make the following qualifications to your letter: The material for volume I, ‘An Introduction to the Study of the Documentary Geniza,’ is ready.” It would be organized into a book during his visit to Europe in summer of 1958. But as for the India book, Goitein wrote, “I told you that the last volume, which contains the texts (Arabic and Hebrew letters), is more or less ready for print. Concerning volume I (the general introduction) and volume II (summaries, translations, commentaries), I can only say that they will certainly not be ready next summer, for, as you remember, I wrote the whole thing first in Hebrew and in extenso.”There is some confusion here, because volume I refers to what elsewhere is called volume II, and volume II to what elsewhere is called volume III.“However, we have decided, at our meeting in New York, as you remember, to bring out this book in English for the benefit of many scholars in India and elsewhere who are not fluent in French . . . In addition, only a selection of texts will be translated in full, while many others will be given in summaries. All this implies a complete re-shuffle of all I have done . . . I do not [sic] hope to complete a considerable part of it until next May.” Finally, Goitein promised to send to Annales an article dealing with some aspect of the India project. “In connection with my work on the India book, I shall send a comprehensive article on one of its aspects to the Annales.” This never happened.76 From then on, things fell apart. The correspondence focuses on the details of printing, and by the middle of 1958, Goitein had already become an author for the University of 50 The Sea California Press. Heller carried on his correspondence, trying to keep some contact for the CRH, but it was clear by then that Goitein’s heart was not any longer in this relationship.77 So, what are the stakes in this story? At one immediate level, it gives some concreteness to the mystery of the India Book, one of the great historical mirages of the twentieth century. It is said by Goitein to have been ready in 1955, 1956, 1958, 1959, and 1963, and yet it was never ready, not even in 1985 when Goitein died. Why Goitein was unable to pronounce it as finished probably offers us a very fine insight into his function as a scholar, and his vision of the Geniza. Goitein viewed perfect scholarship as complete compilation. We might long have abandoned this, but working with a defined corpus, even one of astounding difficulty, gave Goitein the illusion that this was possible. And thus, the ever-receding perfection, and ever-receding publication target, was an inevitable function of this illusion. Without the India Book, scholars in cognate fields have of course suffered. Even an incomplete India Book would have been better for scholarship than none. But Goitein, the philologist, obviously did not think this way. He wanted it perfect, and trusted only himself to deliver that perfection to posterity. The bitter irony of the outcome is inevitable: the work was not finished under his supervision, appeared half a century later, under the care of another, in a form different from how Goitein might have done it, and with editorial and technical decisions that were another’s. And yet, the first, introductory volume has been followed by three others, yielding the four volumes that Goitein had imagined, though configured somewhat differently.78 And still to be published but already in some state are three additional works—a biography of Halfon ha-Levi, an edition of the documents related to Halfon ha-Levi, and a Judeo-Arabic lexicon compiled from the Geniza documents.79 Without the India Book we have looked with only one of Goitein’s eyes. The full impact of Goitein therefore, will only now be dawning. The very recent work of Avner Greif, Roxani Margariti, Marina Rustow, Jessica Goldberg, Philip Lieberman, and others demonstrates that the usefulness of what Goitein assembled is finally now being harvested by those interested in the dynamics of social and economic life in the Middle Ages.80 And wider still, scholars with interests as diverse as Chris Wickham and Sanjay Subrahmanyam have incorporated Goitein’s work into their own and others, such as David Hancock, Francesca Trivellato, and Sebouh David Aslanian are carrying Goitein’s approach, knowingly or un- Two Men in a Boat 51 knowingly, to domains far from his own.81 In a way, then, only now is the promise held out by the CRH, of putting Goitein into the Affaires et gens d’affaires, finally being realized: a vision of economic history as cultural history, with individual experiences at the center, but so densely documented as to endow the whole with more than anecdotal significance. More profoundly, however, the absence of the India book has obscured the greatness of Goitein’s vision. Long before there was transnational or global history, long before transmission, translation, networks, communication, correspondence, or exchange were the Schlagwörte of the day, Goitein saw a historical project driven by and exemplifying all of these. Had he sent the India Book off into the world at half the size of its 1964 state, and then finished the five volumes of Mediterranean Society, Goitein’s would justly have already been hailed as one of the greatest feats of historical scholarship of the twentieth century, and even of modern historical research tout court. It is very difficult to assess the impact on Goitein of his decade-long association with the CRH. On the surface, there was obviously very little: no references to the kind of projects sponsored by the CRH filtered into Goitein’s published oeuvre, and no real sense of conversation with work being done at, or sponsored by, the Centre. Nor was there any acknowledgement for the years of subsidy and encouragement provided from the highest levels. And yet, perhaps the “miss” was not complete. For we have the epilogue Goitein prepared for the concluding volume of A Mediterranean Society. In it, he offered as an autobiographical account the description of his method as “interpretative historical sociography.” This category he supports through a reading of Clifford Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures (1973). Geertz, whom he would have met during his retirement to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, might have resonated so powerfully with Goitein because of his own experience as an ethnographer. For we know that Goitein worked for many years on and with Yemenite Jews. This led him to read anthropological theory and, on his visits to England, to consult with Evans-Pritchard and Fortes about the Yemenites. From his fieldwork, and for the benefit of future fieldworkers, Goitein put together a “questionnaire for the study of the Jews of Yemen, especially those from villages and small towns.” This is published.82 Sociography, then, might gesture at the encounter between Goitein the philologist and Goitein the ethnographer.83 And yet, readers of A Mediterranean Society’s epilogue recognize in its tone not merely the valedictory, but also the desire to situate his work in 52 The Sea a social scientific context. And if it was not that of his Parisian patrons, that still does not mean he was not in some more mediated way shaped by the encounter with them. We know that he referred to his “Geniza Lab,” just as the CRH was often, especially in its early years, referred to as a Laboratoire de recherches historiques.84 And this brings us to Braudel, who always is included in lists of the greatest historians. The Heller-Goitein correspondence sheds further light on the administrator whose vision drove the CRH, some of which can be deduced from prefatory materials to the volumes in Affaires et Gens d’Affaires and Port-Routes-Trafics. Braudel the head of the VIe section and the CRH was much more open to human-centered history than Braudel the historian of The Mediterranean. The Braudel who valued Goitein was the Braudel who wrote “For to challenge the enormous role that has sometimes been assigned to certain outstanding men in the genesis of history is by no means to deny the stature of the individual as individual and the fascination that there is for one man in poring over the fate of another.”85 And yet, as great an administrator as Braudel was, one wonders whether in every case he maintained at arm’s length a relationship with those he was trying to woo. While delegation to Heller might have made sense from an administrative point of view, when dealing with someone like Goitein it clearly would have helped had the great man himself taken more of a role in this pursuit. Some share of the blame for the collapse of this collaboration must then be laid at his door. For whatever reason, it is the failed meeting of Braudel and Goitein that pains. For had they met, had Goitein published with the CRH, had he, as might be expected, have gone and lectured as Braudel’s guest at the École and, conversely, had Heller or even Braudel come to Jerusalem, one could envision a very different shape to both the Jerusalem School and to the Annales School. The impersonal social science history of the 1950s and 1960s would have had a hard time digesting Goitein’s human-scaled project. But the force of his vision could have helped hasten the age of microhistory, mentalités, merchants, and the Mediterranean and commerce might have featured then, as they do now. But one could go even further. Goitein’s project was about letters, and had Affaires et gens d’affaires become a dominant historical vision, as well it might have, the possibility of joining economic to cultural history, a vision that went back to Karl Lamprecht at the end of the nineteenth century, might well have come to pass. A cultural history cognizant of material reality could have emerged in the 1950s—it is only happening now. And who knows how this in turn might Two Men in a Boat 53 have helped sharpen up our vision of other republics of letters, both in and around the Mediterranean. In the possible collaboration between Braudel and Goitein, as in its failure, we can discern historical seascapes of past and future.86 Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Earlier versions of this chapter were presented to the annual meeting of the Medieval Academy of America, the Maison Méditeranéenne des Sciences de l’Homme in Aix, the Mediterranean Seminar at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and at the Scholion Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I wish to thank especially Youval Rotman, Brigit Marin, Wolfgang Kaiser, Claudia Moatti, Bernard Vincent, and Daniel Schwartz for these invitations. I am extremely grateful to Brigitte Mazon at the Archive of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales for facilitating my work in the Fonds Heller and for permission to quote from its contents. I am indebted to the brilliant essay by Gerson D. Cohen, “The Story of the Four Captives,” in Studies in the Variety of Rabbinic Cultures (Philadelphia and New York: The Jewish Publication Society, 1991), 157–208. Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000), 31–39. S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society 6 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965–1985), vol. I, vii. There are sixty-nine letters from Goitein to Heller; forty-two letters from Heller to Goitein; six letters from Goitein to others (two to Braudel, one to the University of California Press, one to Mouton & Co.); three letters from Heller to others (one to the University of California Press, one to Paul Lemerle of CNRS, one to a travel agent); two from Braudel (one to Goitein, one to Heller); one from Cahen to Lombard; one from Lombard to Heller; 1 from Lemerle to Heller. In addition to these letters, the Goitein dossier in the Fonds Heller in the EHESS in Paris contains the annual research reports Goitein drafted for Heller in exchange for funding for the years 1958, 1959, 1960, 1964, as well as a preface to the India book and a list of its documents drawn up for Heller in 1955. S. D. Goitein and Mordechai Friedman, India traders of the Middle Ages: documents from the Cairo Geniza, the ‘India Book,’ Études sur le Judaïsme Médiéval 31 (Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2008). Publication of the India Book does seem to have turned attention to Goitein’s contribution, as in a recent forum in the Jewish Quarterly Review that devotes two articles to Goitein and twentieth-century historiography, though without reference to the contents of either the Heller or Goitein archives: Elliott Horowitz, “Scholars of the Mediterranean and the Mediterranean of Scholars,” and Fred Astren, “Goitein, Medieval Jews, and the ‘New Mediterranean Studies’,” Jewish Quarterly Review 102 (2012): 477–90 and 513–31. S. D. Goitein, “Preface,” in A Mediterranean Society, vol. 1 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965), vii. Goitein, “Preface,” in A Mediterranean Society, viii. 54 The Sea 8. Giuliana Gemelli, Fernand Braudel, e l’Europa universale (Venezia: Marsilio, 1990). No biography of Heller exists yet. Basic facts can be found in Paul Lewis, “Clemens Heller, 85, Founder of Postwar Salzburg Seminar,” New York Times, September 6, 2002, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/06/world/clemensheller-85-founder-of-postwar-salzburg-seminar.html?scp=1&sq=clemens%20 heller&st=cse. He is currently the subject of the Habilitationsprojekt of Anne Kwaschik, Von Harvard nach Paris, Clemens Heller, und die Internationsalisierung der europäischen Sozialwissenschaften nach 1945, http://www .geisteswissenschaften.fu-berlin.de/frankreichzentrum/forschung/kwas chik.html. 9. This association between the CRH and Warburg Institute is not adventitious. See A. Tenenti, “Quindici anni di attività del Centre de recherches historiques di Parigi,” Studi storici, (1967): 203–11, esp. pages 204, 211. “Il Centre ha assolto a più riprese la funzione di laboratorio e di campo d’esperienza: . . . ora il Centre, come in certo qual modo anche il Warburg Institute ad esempio, ha voluto imboccare una strada ben diversa : e ci sembra che sia riuscito sufficientemente a dimostrare—non solo con la rapidità esteriore del suo sviluppo—quale diversa capacità di accelerazione acquistava la ricerca una volta impostata su di un piano collettivo o di équipe.” 10. Lutz Raphael, Die Erben von Bloch und Febvre. ‘Annales’-Geschichtsschreibung und ‘nouvelle histoire’ in Frankreich 1945–1980 (Stuttgart, Germany: KlettCotta, 1994), 169–99; idem, “Le Centre de recherches historiques de 1949 à 1975,” Les Cahiers du Centre de Recherches Historiques 10 (1993), http://ccrh .revues.org/index2783.html. Gemelli emphasizes 1951 because that was when Frederic Lane arrived with the Rockefeller Foundation’s money, and the Centre’s activities could accelerate (Fernand Braudel e l’Europa universale, 256). 11. Gemelli, Fernand Braudel, 256–57, citing an observation by David S. Landes. 12. “l’auteur de ce très beau livre . . . cet auteur est un homme. . . . Soucieux d’hier, préoccupé de demain—parce que demain et hier trouvent dans le coeur de l’homme un lien commun.” Armado Sapori, Le Marchand Italien au Moyen Age. Conférences et bibliographie. Afffaires et Gens d’Affaires I, Introduction de Lucien Febvre (Paris: Armand Colin, 1952), vii. 13. “C’en est un autre, et des plus rares, qui remplira d’aise beaucoup de nos collègues en histoire, que de ne pas considérer la vie économique comme une réalité en soi, un monde fermé de chiffres, mais bien comme un secteur de la vie entre quelques autres, et qu’il faut remplacer dans un ensemble de circonstances et de liaisons diverses pour lui rendre sa pleine valeur. Pour Etienne Trocmé, ses marchands sont des hommes, sa ville non seulement des rues, un havre, des remparts, une ‘banlieu’, des nourritures proches, des commerces lointains—mais aussi des institutions au sens le plus riche du mot. La Rochelle peu à peu se révèle à nous dans la plénitude de sa vie, dans sa dignité et sa force d’état urbain.” Fernand Braudel, “Avant-propos,” Étienne Trocmé et Marcel Delafosse. Le Commerce Rochelais de la fin du XVe siècle au début du XVIIIe. Ports-Routes-Trafics V (Paris: Armand Colin, 1952), i. 14. “Leur intérêt, si je ne me trompe, est de nous introduire au coeur des pratiques et réalités de la vie quotidienne des marchands: ces réalités, par elles- Two Men in a Boat 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 55 mêmes ou du fait de leur répétition, dépassement souvent le détail simplement anecdotique.” Then, taking a single letter as an example, he notes that it sheds light on “la ville et la place de Marseille, le role des Génois acheteurs de soie, l’importance des changes de Lyon, l’attraction de Seville et de Cadix, les transpsorts de cochenille ‘américane’ vers le levant, le cours de réaux d’argent à Marseille, les voyages de navires vers Alexandrie et Tripoli.” Fernand Braudel, “Avant propos,” Lettres de négociants marseillais: Les Frères Hermite (1570–1612). Affaires et gens d’affaires 3, ed. Micheline Baulant, (Paris: Armand Colin, 1953), v. “La VIe Section de l’École des Hautes-Études s’est d’autant plus intéressée à ces lettres qu’elle avait en chantier deux publications analogues [Lettres d’un marchand vénitien Andrea Berengo (1553–1556) (Affaires et gens d’affaires 10, 1957); Simon Ruiz et les ‘asientos’ de Philippe II (Affaires et gens d’affaires 6, 1953)] . . . Mais ces lettres de marchands marseillais ont leur valeur et gagneront en importance à être ainsi rapprochées de documents analogues et replongées dans une histoire économique du XVIe siècle vue au jour le jour, expliquée par ses acteurs, histoire qui, en général, n’a que de lointains rapports avec les images qu’en offrent, quand ils les offrent, les grands livres de synthèse.” Lettres de négociants marseillais, v. “Car leur correspondance ne dit pas tout de leurs activitiés ou de leurs calculs. Le plus difficile, et nous allons nous y essayer dans un instant, c’est encore de bien comprendre leur langage, de suivre leurs procédés, leur tactique, leur art de diagnostiquer et d’agir.” José Gentil da Silva, Stratégie des Affaires à Lisbonne entre 1595 et 1607. Lettres marchandes des Rodrigues d’Evora et Veiga, Affaires et gens d’affaires IX (Paris: Armand Colin, 1956), 9. The best known demonstration of this practice was, however, not produced in Paris (nor, even, by an academic). Iris Origo’s The Merchant of Prato (1957) made use of Francesco Maria Datini’s personal correspondence; Federigo Melis, who had begun publishing on Datini in 1954 and in May 1955 opened an international exhibition on him, strictly separated the business history from the personal. Melis, for all his later inclination to Braudel and Paris (he made Braudel President of the newly founded Istituto Datini in 1967) seems to have resented Origo’s non-quantitative approach (Giampiero Nigro, “Introduction,” in Francesco di Marco Datini. The Man, the Merchant, ed. Nigro (Florence: Firenze University Press, 2010), xiii–xiv). The generally favorable review of Origo’s book in Annales—by none other than Gentil da Silva—acknowledged that it was au courant with the latest work being done in and around the CRH, but was critical of its narrowly biographical focus (José Gentil da Silva, “Un capitaliste toscan du XIVe siècle,” Annales. ESC 13 (1958): 398–402. Speculum 29 (1954): 181–97. Heller to Goitein, 10 October 1954, Archives de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Fonds Heller, Dossier “Israël”, unpaginated [all subsequent references are to this archive and will include only the date of correspondence]. Goitein to Heller, 27 October 1954. Goitein to Heller, 1 December 1954. This seems like a direct answer to part of Heller’s first letter, but Goitein’s next letter, written from Jerusalem, makes no mention of having answered earlier—unless there is a letter 56 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. The Sea that is missing which might make sense, since the letter of December 1, below, does not directly respond to Heller’s first, but as if to a different, more advanced, round of questions. I have been unable thus far to identify this work. Goitein to Heller, 1 December 1954. Goitein to Heller, 18 December 1954. From its beginnings the CRH subsidized research done by scholars elsewhere. These included the research of P. Jeannin on the traffic of Rouen (1955–1956) and M. Mollat in the archives of Lille (also 1955–1956). “Le démarrage improvisé : 1949–1956,” Les Cahiers du Centre de Recherches Historiques, 10 (1993), http://ccrh.revues. org/index2788.html. Goitein to Heller, 18 December 1954. Goitein to Heller, 6 February 1955. Goitein to Heller et al., 6 February 1955. Goitein to Braudel, 20 February 1955. Goitein to Heller, 20 February 1955. “As you know, your book will be printed by the Imprimerie Nationale and they have a very good department for oriental characters (better than Brill). Technically, there should be no difficulty and economically, I think we could support the cost of including the printing of the originals. Besides, the Centre de Recherches Historiques has undergone some important transformations since I wrote you first and [the] character of its publications will expand considerably towards Oriental problems. This week, four sinologists have been appointed to the Faculty, at the VIème Section, one indologist and one specialist on Northern Africa. This is only the beginning of further developments in a programme of social and economic studies regarding Asia, the Islamic world and Russia. A young French rabbin, Mr. Schwarzfuchs, has already joined our effort and I am enclosing an outline of the programme he set himself.” Heller to Goitein, 30 March 1955. Heller to Goitein, 30 March 1955. Goitein to Heller, 14 April 1955. Goitein allowed himself a bit of humor here: “On that occasion, we could discuss the Geniza business. I shall be glad to put you up. Like most Israelis, during weekdays we are mostly ichtyophagists, but you will not starve.” On the Jerusalem School, see David N. Myers, Re-Inventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Heller also politely declined Goitein’s invitation to Jerusalem, saying that there was no money available for this. Heller to Goitein, April 20, 1955. Goitein to Heller, 25 April 1955. Heller to Goitein, 25 May 1955. Goitein to Heller, 28 May 1955, referring to Heller to Goitein of May 3. Goitein to Heller, 31 May 1955. Heller to Goitein, 10 June 1955. Goitein to Heller, 15 June 1955. Heller to Goitein, 29 June 1955. Heller to Goitein, 14 September 1955. Goitein to Heller, 16 September 1955. Heller to Goitein, 21 September 1955. Two Men in a Boat 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 57 Goitein to Heller, 23 September 1955. Heller to Goitein, 23 September 1955. Goitein to Heller, 11 October 1955. Goitein to Heller, 20 November 1955. Goitein to Heller, 21 November 1955. Goitein to Heller, 12 December 1955. Vidal (for Heller) to Goitein, 16 January 1956. “His curriculum vitae is interesting and makes him an ideal candidate for the position offered. His name: Joseph Eliash. He is 24, of German Jewish origin, but educated in Baghdad, where he first visited a French school (St Joseph of the Peres Carmes), then a Jewish higher Secondary school with Arabic and English as languages of instruction, he made the London matric Honours, then came here and studied at the Hebrew University “Middle East in modern Times” and Economics (B.A., 1954) and is going to get his M.A. in Arabic language and Literature and Islamic studies this summer. He is married to a girl from Rumania, who knows French well.” “Mr. Eliash has worked on the Geniza since January 1955 and I am able now to state that I am very satisfied with his work. Besides Arabic and Hebrew, he speaks French, English and German. He has a very amiable personality and it is pleasant to work with him.” Goitein to Heller, 22 January 1956. Goitein to Heller, 22 January 1956. Heller to Goitein, 30 January 1956. Goitein to Heller, 15 February 1956. Heller to Goitein, 20 February 1956. Goitein to Heller, 25 March 1956. Heller to Goitein, 10 April 1956. Goitein to Heller, 18 May 1956 Heller to Goitein, 16 January 1957. Goitein to Heller, 24 January 1957. Goitein to Heller, 9 October 1957. This is Goitein’s first letter on University of Pennsylvania stationery. “et nous nous sommes entretenus de ses projets sur la Geniza. Il m’a dit qu’il avait eu l’intention de publier sous les auspices du Centre de Recherches Historiques un ouvrage sur les documents de la Geniza relatifs au commerce dans l’Océan Indien, conformément à l’offre que Braudel lui en avait faite. Mais ultérieurement, un peu pour des questions de langue, mais surtout parce que les lettres qu’il avait écrites au Centre étaient restées sans réponses, ou avec des réponses tardives et insuffisantes, il y avait renoncé, et, puisqu’il va passer quelque temps à l’Université de Philadelphia, il allait voir comment le publier là-bas.” Cahen to Lombard, 4 November 1957. “Je ne suis pas en état de juger si Goitein a des susceptibilités particulières; ce que je sais est que c’est un grand savant, que son ouvrage sera capital, et, bien que je n’aie aucun rapport avec le Centre, qu’il serait de facheux exemple qu’un ouvrage promis à une collection française finisse par paraitre à l’étranger.” Cahen to Lombard, 4 November 1957. “Je ne pouvais naturellement pas à Munich parler au nom du Centre; toutefois j’ai cru pouvoir lui affirmer que Braudel, auquel je l’avais récemment 58 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. The Sea entendu dire, ce que toi-même, lors de notre entretien printanier, m’avais confirmé. Et j’ai essayé de plaider la cause du Centre, sans succès apparent.” Cahen to Lombard, 4 November 1957. “Maintenant Goitein, qui parait me traiter en fondé de pouvoir pour la France, m’écrit qu’il a rencontré a New-York Clemens Heller, et celui-ci parait avoir réussi à arranger les choses, à recouvrer le projet pour le Centre, et aussi à obtenir de Goitein la promesse d’un article pour les Annales; le livre pourrait etre traduit en anglais au lieu de français ce qui arrangerait mieux Goitein, qui ne s’estime pas capable de rédiger en bon français et se méfie des traductions qu’il ne peut revoir d’assez près.” Cahen to Lombard, 4 November 1957. “Néanmoins il est évident qu’il reste sur le qui-vive et méfiant; il souhaite certainement qu’une lettre officielle et circonstanciée ou un contrat en bonne et dûe forme vienne préciser et garantir la conversation. Or, me ditil, depuis l’entrevue avec Heller, ‘with the exception of a very flimsy short letter, I have not heard from them since then.’ Et, pour ce qui est de l’article pour les Annales, qu’il devait envoyer une semaine après l’envoi de la lettre qu’il m’écrit, voici ce qu’il m’écrit: ‘In case I shall not hear from the Centre for, say, six weeks after having sent the article there, I shall offer it somewhere else.’” Cahen to Lombard, 4 November 1957. “J’ai cru bon de te mettre au courant pour que tu puisses tout de suite, avec Braudel s’il est là, et avec Heller en tous cas, aviser à ce qu’il n’y ait pas une nouvelle rupture, qui serait cette fois irrémédiable. Peut-etre seront-ils enclins à le trouver bien difficile; mais il me semble que la chose vaut la peine de passer sur de petits inconvénients comme ceux-là.” Cahen to Lombard, 4 November 1957. “Où en est exactement la question de la publication des documents de Geniza que Goitein doit faire dans la collection du Centre et celle de la parution de son article pour les Annales ? Et serait-il bon—en l’absence de Fernand Braudel—que j’entre en contact avec Goitein pour arranger les choses et calmer ses appréhensions? Ou bien vous chargez-vous de lui écrire vous-meme, vous qui le connaissez bien?” Lombard to Heller, 6 November 1957. Heller to Goitein, 7 November 1957. “Baneth,” sometimes spelled here “Paneth” is David H. Baneth, a specialist of Maimonides, Judah Halevi, etc. See Studia Orientalia: Memoriae D.H. Baneth Dedicata, ed. J. Blau et al. (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1979), which includes an essay by Goitein. I thank Sanjay Subrahmanyam for bringing this to my attention. “Monsieur Heller m’a mis au courant de l’entretien que vous aves eu avec lui pendant son séjour à New York. Je suis en principe d’accord pour tout ce dont vous avez discuté et en particulier pour ce que Monseiur Heller vous a proposé dans sa lettre du 7 novembre 1957. Autrement dit, je suis d’accord pour l’impression des ‘Documents de la Genisa’ et pour votre voyage en Europe en 1958. Je dois malheureusement m’absenter encore une fois de Paris pour un mois et j’espère que Monseiur Heller pourra régler tous les détails avec vous. Toutefois si je dois signer des documents officiels après mon retour, je ferai le nécessaire aussi vite que possible.” Braudel to Goitein, 8 November 1957. “Je profite de cette occasion pour vous redire combien l’École Pratique des Two Men in a Boat 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 59 Hautes Études est fière de pouvoir vous être utile dans la publication de vos travaux et j’attends avec impatience les articles que vous avez bien voulu proposer pour les Annales.” Braudel to Goitein, 8 November 1957. Goitein to Heller, 12 November 1957. Heller to Goitein, 15 November 1957. Braudel to Heller, undated, (after November 1957). Goitein to Braudel, 21 November 1957. Goitein to Heller, 21 November 1957. I plan to discuss Goitein and this latter part of the story in a separate publication. The Ben Zvi Institute in Jerusalem published in 2009–2010 Mordechai Friedman’s three volumes of Goitein’s work on Joseph Lebedi, Madmun Nagid of Yemen, and Abraham ben Yiju. All these, as well, will be edited by Friedman. Avner Greif, Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy: Lessons from Medieval Trade (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. 2006); Jessica Goldberg, Trade and Institutions in the Medieval Mediterranean: The Geniza Merchants and Their Business World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Marina Rustow, Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008); Roxani Margariti, Aden and the Indian Ocean Trade: 150 Years in the Life of a Medieval Arabian Port (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Phillip Lieberman-Ackerman, “A Partnership Culture: Jewish Economic and Social Life Viewed through the Legal Documents of the Cairo Geniza” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2007). Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Notes on Circulation and Asymmetry in Two Mediterraneans, c.1400–1800,” in From the Mediterranean to the China Sea: Miscellaneous Notes, eds. Glaude Guillot, Denys Lombard, and Roderich Ptak (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1998), 32; David Hancock, Oceans of Wine: Madeira and the Organization of the Atlantic Market, 1640–1815 (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 2009); Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009); Sebouh David Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa (Berkeley and Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2010); Chris Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800 (Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 2005), 718n48. Goitein, The Yemenites: History, Communal Organization, Spiritual Life (Jerusalem, 1983), 345–55. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, vol. V, 496–502. Raphael, Die Erben von Bloch und Febvre, 162n22. I owe the reference to Goitein’s habitual use of the term Geniza Lab to Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole. See their discussion of Goitein in Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (New York: Schocken Books, 2011), ch.10. Fernand Braudel, “The Situation of History in 1950,” in On History, trans. Sarah Matthews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 20. The second part of this study is published in the Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes 55 (2013). The Sea The Bard Graduate Center Cultural Histories of the Material World The Bard Graduate Center Cultural Histories of the Material World is a series centered on the exploration of the material turn in the study of culture. Volumes in the series examine the ways human beings have shaped and interpreted the material world from a broad range of scholarly perspectives and show how attention to materiality can contribute to a more precise historical understanding of specific times, places, ways, and means. Peter N. Miller, Series Editor Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China, 1500–1800 Peter N. Miller and François Louis, Editors The Sea: Thalassography and Historiography Peter N. Miller, Editor The Sea: Thalassography and Historiography Peter N. Miller, Editor The University of Michigan Press Ann Arbor Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2013 All rights reserved This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publisher. Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America c Printed on acid-free paper 2016 2015 2014 2013 4 3 2 1 A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The sea : thalassography and historiography / edited by Peter N. Miller. pages cm. — (The Bard Graduate Center cultural histories of the material world) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-472-11867-0 (cloth : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-0-47202901-3 (e-book) 1. Oceanography—History. 2. Seas—History. 3. Seas— Historiography. 4. Seas—Social aspects—History. 5. Ocean and civilization—History. 6. World history. 7. Material culture—History. I. Miller, Peter N., 1964– GC29.S43 2013 551.46--dc23 2012047391 For Istvan Das Meer flutet immer Das Land behält es nimmer —Goethe, West-Östlich Divan Series Editor’s Preface Why invoke a neologism? While Alexander Agassiz’s historic voyages in the Atlantic, Caribbean, and Gulf of Mexico in 1877 and 1880 were published as a “Contribution to American Thalassography,” the term has generally lain dormant. Even a recent attempt to encourage more thinking about the sea used the term Thalassology. But a term that is not used or known is also a term that carries few erroneous connotations to be cleared away like some luxuriant but obscuring underbrush. The turn to “Thalassography” explicitly emphasizes the writing about the sea; its coupling to “Historiography” emphasizes the reciprocity we are asserting between historical scholarship in general and historical scholarship about the sea in particular. Thalassography offers a means of exploring global history through local contexts. It represents a microhistorical approach to large-scaled frameworks. In so doing, it focuses on the role of commerce, communications, exchange, and networks. These rubrics are all mediating and so are suited to the movement between local and global that drives this research inquiry. The essays in this volume explore specific sea-contexts, emphasizing the differences between oceans and seas, and the similarities between different seas around the world. The various contributors also make clear the historiographical stakes in this project: given the state of practice today, thalassography offers a model for a future practice that could extend well beyond writing about the “sea.” In this way, The Sea: Thalassography and Historiography complements the comparative and material perspective of Antiquarianianism and Intel- x Series Editor’s Preface lectual Life in Europe and China, 1500–1800 (CHMW 1), the deep relationship between the man-made and the natural announced in the title of this series and the companion volume, Cultural Histories of the Material World (CHMW 3), and the practice-based focus of Ways of Making and Knowing (CHMW 4). It is no surprise that each of these volumes is deeply engaged with local historiographies. For the project of outlining the possibilities of a cultural history of the material world—the purpose of this series—which has been neglected or simply not noticed for so long, actually requires a historiographical engagement if we are to move beyond a simple game of replacing one older fashionable swing of the pendulum with another newer one. Acknowledgments In 2009, celebrating the 400th anniversary of the trans-oceanic voyage that created New Amsterdam, two professors at the Bard Graduate Center, Deborah Krohn and myself, along with a curator at The New-York Historical Society, Marybeth DeFilippis, organized an exhibition about the life of a woman who was born in Amsterdam, came of age in Malacca, and died in Brooklyn. How to study a maritime life was the question that generated the symposium which, in turn, gave birth to this book. It is a pleasure to thank again all those who made the exhibition and symposium such a success. This book, like all those produced in this series, reflects the careful attention of Daniel Lee, Managing Editor of the Bard Graduate Center’s learned publications, Laura Grey, its Art Director, and on the web side, Vanessa Rossi, its Digital Content Developer. At the University of Michigan Press we have benefited from a close working relationship with Thomas Dwyer and Christopher Dreyer. As the volume’s editor, I would like again to thank Heather Topcik, Janis Ekdahl, Karyn Hinkle, and Tom Treadway, the librarians whose supply of new books and inter-library loans made it possible to explore this new line of inquiry. A long time ago, I learned that thinking something new about something familiar was only possible if one held oneself and one’s argument to the highest standard of truth. The person who taught me this was Istvan Hont. In the year of his sixty-fifth birthday, after twenty-two years of friendship, I am honored to dedicate this volume to him. Contents Introduction: The Sea Is the Land’s Edge Also Peter N. Miller 1 one Two Men in a Boat: The Braudel-Goitein “Correspondence” and the Beginning of Thalassography Peter N. Miller 27 two Atlantic and Caribbean Perspectives: Analyzing a Hybrid and Entangled World Wim Klooster 60 three Tide, Beach, and Backwash: The Place of Maritime Histories Nicholas Purcell 84 four The East Asian “Mediterranean”: A Medium of Flourishing Exchange Relations and Interaction in the East Asian World Angela Schottenhammer 109 five Metaphorical Perspectives of the Sea and the Sulu Zone, 1768–1898 James Francis Warren 145 six Connecting Maritime and Continental History: The Black Sea Region at the Time of the Mongol Empire Nicola Di Cosmo 174 seven An Ocean of Islands: Islands, Insularity, and Historiography of the Indian Ocean Roxani Margariti 198 eight Skerries, Haffs, and Icefloes: Small Seas and Maritime Histories David Kirby 230 nine The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Peiresc Peter N. Miller 251 Afterthoughts: Histories in Bottles Sanjay Subrahmanyam 277 Contributors Index 289 285 

Introduction: The Sea Is the Land’s Edge Also Peter N. Miller There was a depression over the Atlantic. It was travelling eastwards, towards an area of high pressure over Russia, and still showed no tendency to move northwards around it. The isotherms and isotheres were fulfilling their functions. The atmospheric temperature was in proper relation to the average annual temperature, the temperature of the coldest as well as of the hottest month, and the a-periodic monthly variation in temperature. The rising and setting of the sun and of the moon, the phases of the moon, Venus and Saturn’s rings, and many other important phenomena, were in accordance with the forecasts in the astronomical yearbooks. The vapour in the air was at its highest tension, and the moisture in the air was at its lowest. In short, to use an expression that describes the facts pretty satisfactorily, even though it is somewhat old-fashioned: it was a fine August day in the year 1913.1 The opening of Roberrt Musil’s Man Without Qualities is as good an introduction to the problematics of thalassography as it is to a long novel about the end of the Habsburg Empire. Musil was trying to locate his story, not without some irony and even perhaps some satire, in space and time, but also to convey by analogy the way in which our microscopic world is affected by changes in the macrocosm. Leo Tolstoy’s War & Peace does the same. Yet by using weather, rather than war, as the lever, Musil takes something completely ordinary and defamiliarizes it through distance. Its ability to effect change is from far away and is heavily mediated. How weather systems affect other weather systems, let alone humans, is extremely complicated. There is no calculus for the interaction of the weather nor, he proposes, for the interaction of people. 2 The Sea Musil’s beginning is apt for ours, too, because in its literal sense it describes a way in which sea affects land, and the weather at sea affects the weather on land. Metaphorically, this stands to remind us that that the histories of what human beings do at sea affects the history they make on land and thus our writing of that history. Translated into historical practice, thalassography affects historiography. But in just the same way, of course, historiography affects thalassography. Just as the question asked frames the answer given, the history of questions asked shapes the history of answers given. And though, as we shall see, many people have written about the sea, and seas have been studied, especially recently, with great intelligence and enthusiasm, the history of sea studies, and the history of writing about the sea, has been, thus far, no one’s concern. Finally, still in the realm of metaphor but transposed into an even more distant key, Musil models for us the relationship between largescale narrative and the micro-reality of individual existence. Historians interested in concrete experiences invariably grapple with the additive nature of microhistories: do they ever add up to more than the sum of their little stories? Musil, like Tolstoy before him, believes that they do, but unlike Tolstoy finds in weather a model for how this works. In effect, Musil, like all great writers, was casting about for the starkest contrast between the large and small scale, initiating his readers into one of the great mysteries of existence. Oceans Musil models connection: how things concatenate, in ever-changing scale. Meterology is a powerful example of this alchemy, since it operates on a level that we still do not fully comprehend—even though our generation is much much more aware than Musil’s of the stakes at play, or risk, in these interactions. Musil, of course, wrote about an ocean (the “low” was an “Atlantic low”), not a sea. Yet, historicizing the role of oceans did not, of course, begin with him. Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, identified oceancrossing as the greatest event in human history since the establishment of the Roman Empire (the Spanish golden age poet Góngora had gone further: the greatest thing since the advent of Jesus Christ himself).2 Ocean-thinking gets sophisticated during the era of European expansion and was theorized then for its importance. But thinking about the Introduction 3 oceans goes back to humans’ first encounters with it. Pytheas of Massilia wrote about oceans in the 4th-century BCE and had sailed the North Atlantic to Iceland, at least according to Barry Cunliffe. Cunliffe himself has argued for the importance of the oceans surrounding Europe at least as early as the Mesolithic (7000 BCE) where they served as enormous protein stores and, imaginatively, as lures to go beyond—plus ultra.3 Charles Baudelaire, more than two centuries after Sir Francis Bacon saw going beyond as our destiny, and more than five after Dante Alighieri saw in it our glory, saw the black canker of disappointment in the mismatch between our hopes and our reality, as mirrored in the ocean. Sigmund Freud’s “oceanic feeling” turned Baudelaire’s open wound into a feeling rather of vague helplessness.4 As much as the fifteenth century, the twentieth was a century of oceans. The two world wars made the realities of the Atlantic and the Pacific central to the destinies of the world, and in the Cold War that followed the United States projected its power via battle fleets (second in the Atlantic, third in the eastern Pacific, and seventh in the southwestern Pacific). Valuable international commodities, such as petroleum, in turn cut superhighways across the oceans. And though the rise of the British Empire created its school of “bluewater historians,” the ocean itself was always the passive actor in this story: an adversary to be conquered, or a passive space to be tamed and traversed. It was only in the second half of the twentieth century that the Atlantic, on which hinged the West—defined by the North Atlantic Treaty (1949) and NATO—became a subject for study in a way that oceans never had been before. Bernard Bailyn in the United States, and Pierre Chaunu in France, each saw in the early modern Atlantic the beginning of the modern histories of Europe and the Americas. Before long, and continuing with accelerated rhythm up to our own day and the late work of Bailyn and J. H. Elliott, Atlantic history has become one of the key ways in which early modern history has been articulated, with implications for scholarship, teaching, and professional advancement. The birth and flourishing of Atlantic history may well come to be viewed as one of the great historiographical creations of the twentieth century. Seas And yet, for those in sympathy with this watery turn, it is something of a puzzlement that the terms ocean and sea are still used so interchangeably, 4 The Sea even thoughtlessly. In 1861, Jules Michelet published La Mer: probably the first time a historian had made a body of water his subject. Yet though he uses the word mer nearly all the time, Michelet is almost always writing about the ocean. Today, Routledge publishes a series entitled Seas in History, with volumes on the Mediterranean, Baltic and North Seas, and the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans.5 Even as one can point to an increasing rhythm of publishing about “seascapes,” no greater clarity has come with it. Thus, a recent book about perceptions of the ocean in modern Western culture is called Sea Change: Historicizing the Ocean, and uses the terms interchangeably. Even John Mack’s wonderful cultural history of the sea is as much about oceans as about seas.6 (Even though, in an earlier essay, Mack himself asked the question: “Yet an enclosed seascape like the Mediterranean is one thing; are open oceans signficantly different?”)7 When a few years ago, the American Historical Review convoked a printed forum on “Oceans of History,” these highly self-conscious, super-specialized scholars spoke without precision about ocean and sea.8 And a conference at the Library of Congress on littorals and maritime history led to a volume that, again, made no distinction between how oceans and seas function.9 Some of this confusion may go all the way back to antiquity: Aristotle talks about esô thálassa—inner sea (i.e., the Mediterranean) and exô thálassa—outer sea, meaning ocean. But he uses the same word to refer to both.10 Our choice here of the term thalassography is designed to make clear that our focus is on seas, and that we are distinguishing between seas and oceans. Each offers very different historiographical opportunities. The appeal of oceans—for scholars as for novelists—is fundamentally that they offer us a history that escapes all bounds, just as the ocean encircles the globe. If settled life is left behind at the quay, so too are academic divisions separated by discipline, nation, language, or religion. Instead, everything flows together. Sanjay Subrahmayam, for example, has described his work on the Indian Ocean as essays in “connected history.”11 The very vastness of the Atlantic, and multiplicity of its connectedness, strains at our ability “to gear” its causality.12 In its mature practice, those ironically inclined might find Atlantic history, too, vulnerable now for the young Bailyn’s critique of Braudel’s La Méditerranée, published in 1951 in The Journal of Economic History: dazzling in detail but not a whole.13 Bailyn’s point was that beneath the beautiful prose, La Méditerranée was a book that did not do what it purported to do; namely, showing how all the different registers geared together could make the history of the period newly intelligible. Introduction 5 Bailyn’s own work—first on London merchants, then on colonial governors, then on political ideology, and then, after a first brilliant career, on the peopling of British North America—now appears as an alternative to what he at the beginning of his career perceived to be Braudel’s more rhetorically grounded achievement.14 Indeed, Voyagers to the West (1986) as a piece of craft, with its different registers of argumentation— descriptive; quantitative; structural, “multiple, career-line narration”; and even visual—may be one of the most perfect products of the historian’s worktable produced in the twentieth century. And yet, what might be seen now as the triumph of Atlantic historiography—its ability to paint an Atlantic stretching from the American backcountry and Argentinian pampas deep into Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, and to conjoin political, economic, social, cultural, and intellectual history—may only have produced a mirror image of the Mediterraneanism that is Braudel’s ever-giving gift: all things to all historians in all places at all times. Then there is maritime history—an older term being repurposed to describe the range of complex narratives happening on the water.15 From our perspective, however, there remain two limitations to this term and practice. On the one hand, by sidestepping the whole question of ocean versus sea, it does not add clarity. And on the other hand, aside from its location, one can legitimately ask whether maritime history is at all different from terrestrial history, or whether it just happens under a different set of local conditions. Indeed, the return of maritime history has coincided with an interest in human mobility, with the sea as background, not subject. To make this point even clearer, let us imagine a “celestial history.” If all it did was narrate the daily life of people in space, of their loves, angers, losses, and errors, would we really feel that this was a different kind of history? Or just history elsewhere, perhaps? If we are to talk about thalassography, it must be because putting the sea at the center and the land on the periphery—geographically but also conceptually— somehow makes it a different kind of history. To paraphrase Horden and Purcell, it should be history not in the sea, but history of the sea, and while this does not preclude a discussion of its constituent material, water, nor does it require it. “Of” the sea remains always about the human experience. The great irony, of course, noted right from the outset in yet another one of those early reviews of Braudel, is that the single biggest inspiration for maritime history, La Méditerranée, is a poor specimen of history of the sea. Garret Mattingly noted some of Braudel’s limitations as a maritime historian in 1950, and Colin Heywood still others in 2008.16 It was Brau- 6 The Sea del’s claim to have created a geo-history.17 And yet, once we isolate out what is original in his work we find that it is not, in fact, geography, and certainly not the sea. Part I of La Méditerranée, as we know so well, came to him from Vidal de la Blache by way of Lucien Febvre. Readers of La Méditerranée possessing copies of Febvre’s La Terre et l’evolution humaine (1923) will find there discussions of mountains, plains, plateaux, islands, coasts, and oases, as well as routes and towns—all of which is generally considered the most original part of Braudel’s work. Nor can it be part III, with its rather traditional account of the clash between the Eastern and Western Mediterranean empires of Spain and Turkey, as this was first written up by Ranke more than a century earlier in Die Osmanen und die spanische Monarchie im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (1827). Part II, the realm of what Braudel called, following economists, the conjuncture, but which, instead following archaeologists, we might call “middle range theory,” the interrelationship of politics, economics, and culture—and much better articulated in the second edition than in the first—is fascinating to read, but only because it shows a historiographical revolutionary trying to fit himself into traditional costume. Today, what seems clear is that what was truly captivating about Braudel’s La Méditerranée was the sheer audacity of proposing a relationship between so much nearly unrelated data. His rhapsodic, kaleidoscopic, material, and climatological approach, mixing the human, the natural and the divine perspective, puts La Méditeranée in a line of direct descent from Michelet’s La Mer. Readers of Michelet’s work today cannot fail to be captivated by the pointillist attention to details, and to aspects of the human-sea interface. At the same time, there is something slightly jarring in the utterly romanticized mode of presentation. Once we see it in Michelet we can recognize it in Braudel. Pirenne, whose Mohammed and Charlemagne was published in 1937 (though parts of the argument were in print a decade earlier), surely defined the place of the Mediterranean at the heart of any debate about the “end” of the ancient world, but its style and substance seem to have excited little response until much later—after archaeology could complement or contradict the arguments of its “virtual” material culture.18 The impact of Braudel on writing about the oceans and seas (used interchangeably, as is typical) is vast. It has launched journals, conferences, and professorships. Even critics find it an inescapable touchstone.19 Beyond the details of academic criticism, Braudel still serves up enough force to drive two large grant-driven projects: the VW-Stiftung-backed “East Asian ‘Mediterranean,” and the Indian Ocean World Centre at Introduction 7 McGill University. Each represents an attempt to derive a comparative project from an idea of Braudel’s La Méditerranée. Neither acknowledges any value in distinguishing between oceans and seas. “The East Asian ‘Mediterranean,’ c.1500–1800: A New Quality in the Development of its Neighbouring Countries” was launched with the support of the Volkswagen Foundation in May 2002, and concluded in May 2009. The idea of the project grew out of a conference held in Paris in March 1997.20 It was designed to shift attention away from bilateral relations between nation-states and to look at “the supra-regional and international economic (and cultural) exchange within the region of greater East Asia.” Illustrating connections, rather than separation or seclusion, was its goal. Roderich Ptak had been exploring the Asian seas for much of the previous decades,21 but this project represented a huge step towards a staffed and funded venture for which Harrassowitz Verlag undertook publication of fourteen collective volumes mapping out the extensive connections between the different parts of this maritime world (which include three PhD dissertations).22 At its heart is the fact of trade and how it effects change, through whom, and why and when: all ultimately about the desire for goods, the means by which this desire was satisfied (or not), and the consequences of its satisfaction (or failure to do so).23 The root of this project lies in a comment made by José de Acosta in 1590, and made famous by Braudel in 1949: “Until now there has been no discovery in the New World of a Mediterranean sea such as Europe, Asia, and Africa possess, where arms of that great ocean enter and form different seas.”24 Where Braudel turned it back on Europe, David Abulafia has seized upon Acosta’s seemingly commonplace treatment of the Mediterranean as a type of body of water, and built out a provocative and extremely stimulating mapping of Mediterranean seas all over the world.25 Schottenhammer’s project, “The East Asian Mediterranean,” follows directly from this, and from it emerges also the possibility of “Mini-Mediterraneans”—a status Ptak has himself proposed for the Gulf of Tongking.26 But there has been some caution about the application of this term to Southeast Asian waters.27 At the other extreme, the Indian Ocean World Centre, based at the History Department of McGill University, Montreal (after earlier stints at the Universities of Witwatersrand and Avignon), was established in 2007 to study the history, economy, and cultures of the lands and peoples of the Indian Ocean World, from China to Africa. As in the case of the “The East Asian Mediterranean,” this Canadian project also acknowledges that 8 The Sea its approach was inspired by Braudel, or at least the Braudel of part I of La Méditerranée summarized as: “history as an ongoing interaction between human and natural forces, encompassing geography, environment, climate and disease.” The projects of the center focus on the “first global economy”—human migration, slavery, and exchange.28 With this “industry” flourishing, what is remarkable is how little attention has been given to the history of histories of the sea. It is, for all those who have worked on this subject, a “given” that writing about seas means being an heir of Braudel. And so before we embark upon our main theme—the impact of thalassography upon historiography—we need to begin at the beginning, with the historiography of thalassography itself. That is the purpose of Miller’s opening essay—recovering a lost conversation between Braudel and S. D. Goitein (1900–1985) in the middle of the 1950s, and through it the contours of possibility. These were the years in which Braudel was working on a second edition of La Méditerranée while directing the VIth section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études and editing Annales E.S.C. Goitein, in turn, was working on a project he entitled “From Spain to India,” which soon would split into two projects, the second of which, A Mediterranean Society, was published in six volumes between 1967 and 1985, and the first of which, the India book, in four parts (three more are envisioned) beginning only in 2008.29 With the appearance, finally, of the India book, the relationship between Braudel and Goitein can be considered for the very first time. What the story of their relationship reveals is the rich possibilities of thalassography and of the Mediterranean, which were visible at the time to the two men, but never fulfilled in the work of either of them. In terms of our accurate understanding of the past, and of Braudel in particular, we see that Braudel in the 1950s was thinking precisely along the lines of an integration of the maritime context (environment, trade, police) with the individuals who drove it (merchants, pirates, government). The works he sponsored through the publication series of the Centre de Recherches Historiques reveal this breadth of vision, and these aspirations were passed on to the younger scholars who carried them out. This Braudel was not the one for whom human life was mere “froth on the waves.” He saw in Goitein’s Geniza the possibility for a Mediterranean defined not by space but by people. Even the second edition of La Méditerranée does not go nearly as far toward revealing to us the breadth of its author’s vision as does his work as an academic publisher and administrator.30 Goitein’s, in turn, with an approach to archival artifacts born of the Introduction 9 union of philology and ethnography—he was trained in Arabic philology but worked in Israel as an ethnographer of newly arrived Yemenite Jews—connects the 1950s to the antiquarianism of the 1650s.31 How Is the Sea Different from the Ocean? In this context one would ask whether something essential about the coherence of a closed sea is inevitably lost in the wide reaches of the Indian, or the Atlantic, or the Pacific Ocean. If, looking from the perspective of “seas,” one sees the limitations of a globalized Mediterraneanism, the best Atlantic history, from the other end of the spectrum, is alert to the constraints of the histoire du large échelle that is inevitably the oceanic perspective. Wim Klooster, the noted Atlanticist, acknowledges this in the question which he poses in the very first sentence of his essay: “How has a thalassographic prism enabled new approaches in the historiography of the Atlantic oceanic world?” In other words, while some still confound oceans and seas, Klooster alerts us to a large difference between them. What is a problem for Atlantic history as a practice—its inevitable centrifugalness—points to the need for a thalassography. Atlantic history came about, according to Klooster, as a way of overcoming the previous generations’ privileging of local, regional, and imperial institutions. “Their Atlantic world was one with clear national divisions, with each colony closely tied to its mother country . . . They displayed scant interest in integration, networks, social history, transimperial comparisons, and actors across boundaries. Their Atlantic world was shaped by Europeans, with Native Americans and Africans at best reacting to European initiatives, but not actively creating their own destinies.”32 Klooster then outlines five paths taken in Atlantic history since the 1980s. In his elegant shorthand, these emphasize agency, adaptation, comparisons, entanglement, and networks. What Atlantic historians thus far have not done, he writes, is to “gravitate to the microecological approach that Purcell and Horden favor for the Mediterranean.”33 The Atlantic Ocean was obviously far too variegated for that. Indeed, Klooster’s discerning survey of Atlanticist historiography cannot avoid acknowledging that the scale of the oceanic is inevitably dissociative. All in the end unravels. The careful pursuit of those five options seems instead to lead toward 10 The Sea a “microhistorical,” if not always microecological, approach. In this context, microhistory means more than just small scale. For in its origin, as Italian microstoria, or German Alltagsgeschichte, it was directed against “macro” histories—whether in the first instance of kings, and states, and battles, and in the second—that of the dominant Marxist “social history.” Jacques Revel observed wisely that the shift to a microhistorical frame introduces the notion of “scale,” and therefore creates the historiographical option of interpretation that moves between.34 Siegfried Kracauer, at the end of the 1960s, but unbeknownst to Carlo Ginzburg, who was simultaneously formulating his own approach to microhistory, wrote of a “law of levels” governing movement between the micro and macro scales. Short of the theodicy that undergirds Leibniz’s attempt to legislate this relationship in the Monadology, much of this “game” must remain metaphorical or ideological.35 Klooster proposes to look closely at the Caribbean—a sea, but also an appendage of the wider ocean. It is here, he argues, that the current tendency to careful, detailed, up-close scholarship can actually be fulfilled, whereas it is likely to be stymied, or certainly attenuated, in the wider wash of the great ocean. Klooster’s three avenues for future research— comparatism across imperial boundaries, entanglements of empires, and examination of networks—are all easily, amply, and powerfully on view in the scope of Caribbean history. If “connectivity” is where there are now the greatest gaps in Atlantic history, according to Klooster, it is by looking to the narrower seas that the breakthroughs are to be made. Klooster’s distinction takes us to the heart of the matter, and our jumping off point. For while oceans are big history, seas are small-scale history. Oceans are the grand narrative, seas the microhistories. In other words, the sea can be viewed as the mirror image of the ocean: smaller, with identifiable networks, and full of local meaning. Let us be clear: seas are small only in comparison with oceans. This is microhistory only because of the density of available historical texture. But the move to the smaller scale is also a move to a different kind of history, one tuned more closely to questions of the relationships between. Klooster, from within the new field of Atlantic history, proposes study of the Caribbean as a way of pursuing these meanings. Indeed, the 2012 Seminar in Atlantic History at Harvard University was devoted to precisely this relationship: “The Caribbean, the Atlantic and the Significance of Regional History.” At the same time, in New York City, three museums collaborated on an exhibition entitled “Caribbean: Crossroads of the World.” Perhaps the Carib- Introduction 11 bean will replace the Mediterranean as the “case” on which scholars of all stripes will soon cut their teeth. Purcell traces for us the implications of thalassography for wider forms of writing history. He begins with the notion of “maritime history.” This term, he explains, has two important virtues. First, maritime history allowed for study of the material aspects of the past (ecological, economic, practical) that were often ignored by historians interested in the perceptual or cognitive. Second, maritime histories lent themselves to a regional focus that transcended the narrowness of conventional political categories. Yet, he argues, both of these gains still stopped short of what could be achieved, and which in fact had now become possible goals precisely because of the success of maritime histories. Thalassography, for Purcell, allows historians to join together cognitive and material lines of inquiry. At the same time, it provides a framework for the comparison of maritime historical systems. Both these dimensions emphasize connectivity, whether between historical tool kits or environmental-economic systems. Even more crucially for Purcell’s argument is that thalassography, but not maritime history, allows for the centrality of the human actor at the point where different registers converge: regional networks with material and cultural historical methods. “It is indeed precisely the nature of the behaviour of individuals,” he writes, “which must provide the foundation for the characterisations of the systems of contact between places. Only then can we do history with the physical regions which have patterned those contacts.”36 For him, this human dimension can be articulated through three metaphorical arenas of action—and hence foci for a future thalassography: beach, tide, and backwash. The “beach” is where the sea impacts on people. “Tides” teach us that there is no single disposing human power but rather multiple agencies. “Backwash” reminds us of the recursivity of land and sea, people and nature, past and future. At its best, the pursuit of “mediterraneans”—or “caribbeans”— around the world could well mean the flourishing of this approach to framing history. As Schottenhammer suggests, the identification of, in her case, an “East Asian ‘Mediterranean,’” has a historiographical payoff: “to emphasize the history of exchange relations rather than that of more or less isolated states.”37 In fact, one could argue that the East Asian Mediterranean, like all possible mediterraneans, is a purely historiographical reality. It is, as Schottenhammer makes clear, a means of bringing Chinese history into 12 The Sea the same field of vision as its neighbors.38 Moreover, criticizing prior attempts to domesticate Braudel to Asian waters, she argues that these have: ignored the human-environment interaction (aside from the Monsoon); imported big, exogenous, and therefore inevitably ill-fitting categories like “nation-state” or “region”; and generally been fixated on issues of progress and thus invariably narrate the rising and falling of China. Thus if, for Purcell, Braudel had to be made true to himself by emphasizing the micro scale, whether of environment or sociology, for Schottenhammer the essence of Braudel to emerge from a second distillation was “exchange.” It is, her work powerfully argues, through the lens of trade in the China seas that things clarify. “Therefore, only by considering China as a part of the East Asian networks, at the same time paying attention to political, socio-economic, and cultural changes both within China and in the East Asian world in general, can we come a bit closer to the historical truth.”39 Historiography is of course never without “real world” implications, however mediated: Subrahmanyam notes its great “subversive potential” in destabilizing the inevitable Sino-centrism of Southeast Asian historiography.40 One of Schottenhammer’s most interesting observations closely resembles Klooster’s proposal for a Caribbean Atlantic. A trade-based vision is essentially one of networks, and network studies can (almost) always be analyzed down to smaller units. Schottenhammer suggests that regions and sub-regions, and even villages, could be studied in terms of their role in the functioning of far-flung trading networks. The implicit suggestion that thalassographies resolve into microsociological analyses is a project taken up by James Warren in his essay in this volume.41 The Celebes Sea, or more precisely, “Sulu Zone”— comprising the Sulu Archipelago, the northeast coast of Borneo, the foreland of southern Mindanao, and the western coast of Celebes— offers a local reframing of the insular and nationalist perspectives of Indonesian, Malaysian, and Philippine historiography. Again explicitly inspired by Braudel, Warren uses the zone as a way of exploring “larger scale systemic processes of socio-economic change and a borderless history of a wide-ranging maritime trading network oriented toward China, Singapore, Europe, and the United States.”42 But true to the thalassographer’s microhistorical descent, Warren has the eye of an anthropologist. And so nomadic fishermen, slash-andburn agriculturalists, and slaves on the one hand, and merchants, sailors, and court consumers on the other, are woven together with practices of consumption, production, and depredation and with materials such as Introduction 13 shells, foodstuffs, ceramics, and textiles. To Braudel’s many metaphors, Warren adds his own, and uses them to organize his vision of this local sea. The sea is, alternately and simultaneously, a place of abundance, fear, opportunity, change, and of history itself. “It is a central argument of this book,” Warren writes of his book on the subject, though it as much true of our own, “that we cannot think of societies and cultures in isolation, as self-maintaining, autonomous, enduring systems.”43 Thalassography as an Opportunity for Historiography Reading these essays one begins to perceive that writing about the sea, today, is a way of partaking in the wider historiographical shift towards microhistory, exchange relations, networks, and, above all, materiality— both literally and figuratively. Let us turn to the most beautiful definition of thalassography I have found. Claudio Magris who supplied it, used a different word to describe his project, one that is anchored deeply in the revolution in how the West wrote the past. He calls it the “Philology of the Sea.” The science of the sea encompasses not only the tracing of currents and routes, the chemical analysis of salinity, the study of stratigraphy and of maps and of the benthic and the pelagic layers of marine life, its euphotic, oliophotic, and aphotic zones, and the measurement of temperatures and winds but also stories of shipwrecks, myths of galleons gone under and ancient leviathans, the amniotic fluid of humanity and the cradle of civilization, Greek beauty, which like Aphrodite arises perfect from the sea, the great temptation of the soul as told by Musil, the clash between symbols of eternity and conviction, that is, life itself, resplendent in a pure present and the plenitude of its meaning.44 “Philology” indeed moves us closer to our project. For like it, thalassography focuses not on questions of discipline and professionalization, so much as on the writing, and therefore the planning and organizing, of histories of the sea. Revel’s explanation that the jeu d’échelles is carried by literary style—each scale has its own—explicitly gears explanation to exposition, to the active role of the historian as agent.45 But this focus on writing immediately raises the question of the connection between thalassographies and the planning and organizing of historical 14 The Sea projects more generally. Our argument would be that writing about the sea has been, and remains, an engine of historiographical innovation. Hannah Baader and Gerhard Wolf recently argued for “einer kulturwissenschaftlichen Thalassographie,” evoking Aby Warburg’s grand vision of a “kunstgeschichtlichen Kulturwissenschaft.”46 And perhaps not only of historiographical innovation. In the realm of fiction-writing as well, an attempt to grasp the sea in literary form gave birth to Peter Matthiessen’s extraordinary Far Tortuga, an utterly compelling effort at marrying thalassography and the novel. “At sea-ness” permeates the structure as well as the content—fragments, floating, bobbing, coasting merge content and mood, just as air, water, and land melt together in his Caribbean.47 Nicholas Purcell’s essay reflects on how a self-consciously derived thalassography could be used to push the horizon of historiographical accomplishment. The four essays that follow each explore different implications of thalassography for historiography more broadly. Nicola di Cosmo, as if borrowing from Purcell’s notion of connectivity, gives us an example of a story told from these premises, and focuses on the Black Sea. Roxani Margariti suggests that the history of the Indian Ocean could be rewritten through the specifically “connective” lens of nesiology (island studies), and gives examples of some of the questions derived from that perspective. David Kirby identifies this set of concerns and possibilities with the concept of the littoral and puts it at the heart of his notion of thalassographic possibility. And, in conclusion, Peter Miller provides an example of this human-based history of the sea, picking up on what Braudel envisioned for the book series he sponsored in the 1950s after a gap of half a century. Nicola di Cosmo’s essay provides a small-scale example of the possibilities inherent in Purcell’s proposal. He focuses on connections: “communications, economic exchange, political and administrative control.” And these processes, in turn, can be redescribed as networks. Networks then bridge individual and institutional actors. For Di Cosmo, what marks the modernity of the post-1500 world is that “it began to be shaped as a growing mesh of networks of which the maritime routes were the supporting scaffolding.”48 This connection between networks, or systems, is what Di Cosmo is pursuing; not a single maritime history but the point where maritime histories connect (or collide). This, in his terms, is where the possibility of world history occurs; in Purcell’s, it is where thalassography starts. For both, modernity can be defined in terms of the converging of networks. The focus of Di Cosmo’s essay, however, is not to illuminate a single Introduction 15 maritime historical system—and as a historian of central Asia he writes illuminatingly here about the whole question of whether the steppes constitute a sea or not—but the seam where systems meet. The Black Sea zone in the Mongol century is where the Mediterranean system of the Venetians and the Genose met that of central Asia. That one was maritime and the other terrestrial made things “interesting,” according to Di Cosmo. That this was the first time when we “we have a clear, deliberate construction of institutions, social bodies, and political apparatus that allowed the linkage between the continent-based overland trade networks and the Mediterranean exchange and transportation system to become operative” makes it a crucial historiographical node.49 Roxani Margariti takes islands, perhaps the most obvious instance of disconnected space, and shows, much as Di Cosmo does for the steppe lands, that the received view is upside down. Islands—especially when situated near shore, near other islands, or in sea lanes—functioned as links in a chain. Pitcairn Island, St. Helena, Chateau d’If, Devil’s Island, and Alcatraz aside, most islands were not cut off (Chateau d’If and Alcatraz are just offshore, as is Napoleon’s first refuge, Elba). She calls, both explicitly and by example, for a new “nesiology”—or island studies. Nesiology from one perspective, thalassography from another. Because what Margariti’s essay in this book documents is the extent to which studying islands means studying their connections to elsewhere, mediated by water. These connections are through people who move around and through objects which move around. No island is an island, Carlo Ginzburg has pronounced.50 Margariti’s study demonstrates this well enough. But Ginzburg’s phrase is itself a commentary on Malinowski’s Kula Ring, the best piece of nesiology we possess—even if most people think of it as anthropology. One could read Malinowski, too, as a thalassographer, for his subject is the interaction of watery wastes and human intention. In the Trobriand Islands, as in the Dahlak archipelago, the gross categories of nature and culture melt into something much less clear, but much more transparent. In the Baltic, David Kirby reminds us, the divisions between land and water blur, with its thousands upon thousands of islands and inlets. In this environment, relations between land and sea become complicated, but also, perhaps, paradigmatic. Kirby is author of a wide-ranging survey of the Baltic and North Seas that covers the geology of the region, the sea as imagined by people, the physical realities of travel on the sea from boats to instruments to havens, the economic realities, the fish, the sociology of mariners, life at sea, and the role of women.51 He is himself 16 The Sea somewhat wary of the emphasis on connectivity, noting sagely that as with islands—themselves, in the Baltic, often part of the coastline (85 percent of Finland’s coast, for instance, is islands)—littorals can separate as much as they connect. And, more generally still, as the concrete historical example of the Baltic shows, the littoral is often a place where central authority can and needs to demonstrate its ability to act. For Kirby, more microanalysis is required, but at the level of mentalité, as well as tonnage. It is worth comparing Kirby’s use of “littoral” to frame issues of connectivity with Alain Corbin’s use of “beach”—the very same physical place—in terms of the history of human emotions and the search for meaning.52 If cultural history and economic history still seem separated even at the level of language, Purcell’s ambition to join cultural to material history through the singularity of human action complements Michael McCormick’s reenvisioning of economic history in terms of “communications and commerce.” In his book, Origins of the European Economy (2001), McCormick put the human being in motion, transporting goods, ideas, and, not least, him or herself, at the center of the historian’s skein. That both Purcell and McCormick come to discern the horizons of the “cultural history of the material world” through writing about the sea suggests something of the power of thalassography to open up new historiographical terrain. One of the lingering doubts about our age’s pleasure in microhistory must be the concern about whether, additively, one can get beyond anecdotalism as history. Thalassography as a study of the world made by individuals in motion provides an armature that can respect the integrity of the microhistorical without giving up on the ambition that there is (or ought to be) a whole at the end of the tunnel.53 Moreover, if seabased historiography was long seen as a way of escaping from nationalist conventions, it also brought to the attention of historians a raft of transnational individuals: people whose life in some way is defined by being on the move, and never belonging. Natalie Zemon Davis’s al-Hassan alWazam, or Mercedes García-Arenal’s and Gerard Wiegers’s Samuel Pallache are such examples.54 These essays in this volume provide exemplary demonstrations of how a sea-based history-writing that focuses on connectivity, networks, and individuals describes the horizons and the potential of thalassography. The volume’s conclusion returns to the Mediterranean, and to the seventeenth century, but also to the Paris of the 1950s. Subrahmanyam, even without knowing of this correspondence, saw very clearly that Goit- Introduction 17 ein’s Mediterranean was only half a project, and that until his India Book appeared, our vision of a global Mediterranean could only be impressionistic.55 Peiresc’s correspondence network also stretched from Spain to India, and with it we see not only the details of a global Mediterranean, but we see it in Goitein’s own terms: letters, memoranda, fragments of documents, and above all, people. Goitein called his approach “sociography,” suggesting that it aimed at a description of society, rather than a theory of society. Looking at the Mediterranean through the lens of Peiresc’s archive, we can see that historically this same practice of reconstruction was once called “antiquarianism.”56 But we can also see “The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Peiresc” as just the kind of project that Braudel would have sought for his series “Affaires et gens d’affaires,” in which merchant letters were used to reconstruct the daily life and daily thoughts of the merchants who made the Mediterranean home. This Mediterranean—Braudel plus Goitein—directs us to look backward as well as forward. When Karl Lamprecht, more than a century ago, wrote one of the first significant pieces of economic history while describing it as cultural history he was arguing that how humans transform and interact with the natural world is cultura in the old sense and economics in the new. With McCormick, this precise gambit is being revived (the “origins of the European economy” practiced as cultural history). And alongside his work we can now point to a new generation of economic historians who focus on human actors and their interaction with macro-systems such as Francesca Trivellato, David Hancock, and Avner Greif, and who base their work on merchants and their correspondence. Molly Greene even writes of her book on Maltese pirates and their victims, “this study revisits Goitein’s argument, but for the early modern rather than the medieval Mediterranean.”57 The promise of the Goitein-Braudel correspondence, and the aspirations Braudel had for the CRH, are only now being realized, though without those who are doing the work being aware of this lineage. Historians, as Sanjay Subrahmanyam writes in his Afterthoughts, have never quite been able to put the sea at the center. And yet, his image of histories in bottles is apt, for there have always been historians working on these themes, but on their own and disconnected from one another and from wider conversations. One of the goals of this book, then, is to reestablish this link to the past; another is to suggest how it offers ways to connect research programs and scholars in the future. 18 The Sea Thalassography and Imagination There is another way of thinking about the difference between the connecting seas and the wide, wide ocean. And this has to do with writing. We have already noted that for Revel, it was writing that enabled the microhistorian’s movement between scales. Similarly, Jacques Rancière, in his provocative Names of History (1992), suggested that if, in contrast with the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, which so dominated the history of the modern era, does not dominate historiography at all, “it is because no writing covered it in advance.” The writers who did come to it, he wrote, emphasized its peripheries—whether African slaving, the Caribbean, Cape Horn, or the Pacific isles. We might, in the light of two more decades of scholarly production, want to amend the categorical judgment of the Atlantic’s marginality, yet the basic point remains true: there is no great Atlantic epic. Or rather, according to Rancière again, there is such an epic, but it is, rather, an anti-epic: Moby-Dick.58 Rancière’s point, I suppose (he doesn’t elaborate), is that Moby-Dick is about the Atlantic because the Pequod sails out of Nantucket. In fact, though, it is a global quest and thus rather than being one ocean’s epic, it is the oceanic epic. But Rancière is right where he does not realize it. For Moby-Dick, in its very structure, represents the fusion of antiquarian knowledge and narrative “history.” Like Braudel’s own La Méditerranée, Melville’s novel balances the tension between detailed description and over-determination (in his case, the romantic quest—in Braudel’s, geography). Baader and Wolf’s co-optation of Foucault’s presentation of the ship as the heterotopia par excellence perfectly suits Melville’s presentation of the Pequod in his novel.59 Without such writing, Rancière claimed, the Atlantic cannot sustain both narrative and structural interpretation and so ends up breaking down quickly into its local parts. In the hands of scholars it can yield only “The Odyssey of research in place of the Odyssey of the book.”60 As by now should be clear, thalassography as a kind of microhistory is not about water, but about people. This is the heritage of its Italian and German ancestry (microstoria, Alltagsgeschichte). Hence Thalassography, not Thalassology. As a practice that emphasizes the movement between scales, and uses the human experience, at its different scales, as the cogs which gear the story, thalassography also solves what might be called “the Braudel problem.” Bailyn’s point, long ago, was that the three different layers of time did not add up to a single story; a thalassographic reenvi- Introduction 19 sioning of the Mediterranean along the lines of what is modeled in this volume’s essays shows the way forward. The ocean, infinite and ageless—as in the concluding sentence of Moby-Dick—reminds us at all times of the gap between the human and the natural. The ocean only becomes somewhat knowable where it greets us, at the shore. The sea, however, is always in that closer relationship. It beckons us on, like the Sirens, to a sometimes fantastic sense of proximity and possibility. “The earth,” Michelet concludes, “supplies you with what you need to live, and of the best; the sea with what you need to rise up.”61 Imagination, whether Melville’s, Freud’s, or Michelet’s, is what we need if we are to understand this dimension of the sea. For Michelet, we encounter the ocean at the shore, where the human scale meets the infinite but it is only moving outward, away from land, that this water becomes the authentic ocean—and thus it is truly unknowable. Against Michelet we can balance T. S. Eliot, for whom the sea, by contrast, is progressively revealed as it comes towards us. The beach, or strand, communicates this truth. Moreover, its revelation is of the deeper meaning of life on land. The sea is the land’s edge also, the granite Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses Its hints of earlier and other creation: The starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale’s backbone; The pools where it offers to our curiosity The more delicate algae and the sea anemone. It tosses up our loses, the torn seine, The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar And the gear of foreign dead men.62 In thalassography, the sea’s reality is brought home. This dimension might, then, be most evident when exploring seas with the highest proportion of shore to “blue water”—in Purcell’s terms, those with more “beach,” “tide,” and “backwash,” in Kirby’s, more “littoral.” If we were speaking French we could add more portuaire, but in English portuary is a kind of prayer book.63 It is in Italian, however, that we shall end. For the Adriatic, with its complicated currents, islands, geology, and fauna was once described by Braudel as a miniature Mediterranean and “perhaps the most unified of all the regions of the sea” (though it was long denied the name “sea” 20 The Sea and called instead the “Gulf of Venice”).64 While writing is not one of the ways by which Braudel saw its unity, the Adriatic offers an example of the way in which, as per Rancière, the writer’s imagination creates a space for the historian’s writing. (We might wonder whether Klooster’s Caribbean could be reconstituted as “another Adriatic,” thinking about Derek Walcott’s poems or Timothy J. Reiss’s scholarship). Pedrag Matvejevic, in his wonderfully pointillist itinerarium, perhaps the most authentic heir to Braudel’s magnum opus, explains that the word “gulf” itself comes from the Greek kolpos, meaning bosom or lap. The gulf invites contact, closeness. It stands between the “bay,” which is an even smaller gulf, and the sea, which is a bigger one—but still embracing us, unlike the wide ocean. Even the division wrought by the larger sea between its northern and southern civilizations is mimicked by the role of the Adriatic dividing the religions and worlds, even, of its eastern and western banks. Before being drawn into Venice’s bosom, the Adriatic was already the most domesticated of seas. The Roman via Appia stopped at Brindisi, and its continuation, the via Egnazia, began directly across the sea, at Durazzo, so that the ships which plied the path could easily be seen as on a road. The arrival at one or another terminus was marked by the assertion of the human. When Hermann Broch’s Vergil came home to die he arrived at the roads of Brindisi, where “the sunny yet deathly loneliness of the sea changed with the peaceful stir of friendly human activity, where the channel, softly enhanced by the proximity of human life and human living, was populated by all sorts of craft.”65 Where water and land meet, the human imagination is always challenged. Goethe’s Faust, by the North Sea littoral, watches the waves crash against “the flat, wide shore” and decides “I’ll ban the lordly sea, I’ll curb its force. / I’ll set new limits to that watery plain / And drive it back into itself again.”66 Rilke, sitting at the head of the Adriatic, at Duino, climbed out on to the cliff in a storm out of which he thought he heard a voice calling, “‘Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies?”67 The poems he wrote at Duino dwell, like the place itself, on a threshold between worlds: between the visible, everyday world, and the heightened, supra-sensible world of time and love. If we compare this interpretation of the interaction between nature and the human or, specifically, between large bodies of water and human events, we can discern very clearly a big difference between Musil’s oceanic perspective and what we might call Rilke’s thalassographic one. With Musil, the huge impersonal forces act on us in ways so complicated and mediated as to register in an almost unfelt, magical way. The scale dif- Introduction 21 ference between ocean and individual is too great for us to comprehend its specific causalities. Rilke’s experience is the opposite. The sea meets the human in a way that sets in motion a very serious “game of scales”: questions about life and death, about memory and forgetfulness, seen from the finite towards the infinite, and the infinite towards the finite. When Burckhardt set out to paint his picture of the Italian Renaissance, the book which remains today a model for cultural history because of the way it tries to connect human lives with the social scale, he noted “On the wide ocean on which we shall venture out, the possible routes and courses are many. . . .”68 Revel, from the pulpit of Annales, saw the challenge of future historiography as reconciling, somehow, the challenge of the global with the disciplinary.69 From our perspective, it is clear what kind of historian can most easily do this: the thalassographer. “Connectivity,” “backwash”— whatever term one uses—thalassography is all about the movement between small and large scale. Siegfried Kracauer suggested long ago that microhistory was really “just” history because “the higher the level of generality at which a historian operates, the more historical reality thins out.”70 Thalassographies never thin out. This is what distinguishes them from the maritime history of old. In some way, then, this volume does not only define a historiographical practice, but also a human one. All of us, not only the contributors to this volume, play the thalassographer, always searching for connections, always setting off from the land’s edge. Notes 1. Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, vol. 1, trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser 3 vols. (London: 1979), 1. 2. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, eds. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner (Indianapolis, 1981), IV.vii.c.80, 626. 3. Barry Cunliffe, Facing the Oceans: The Atlantic and its Peoples, 8000 BC–AD 1500 (Oxford University Press, 2001), and Europe between the Ocean: Themes and Variations, 9000 BC to AD 1000 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). 4. Baudelaire, “L’homme et la mer” begins: “Homme libre, toujours tu chériras la mer!/ La mer est ton miroir; tu contemples ton âme/ Dans le déroulement infini de sa lame,/ Et ton esprit n’est pas un gouffre moins amer.” Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal (Boston: D. R. Godine, 1982), 200. 5. David Kirby and Merja-Liisa Hinkkanen, The Baltic and North Seas (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). 6. John Mack, The Sea: A Cultural History (London: Routledge, 2011). 7. John Mack, “The Land Viewed from the Sea,” Azania 42 (2007): 4. 22 The Sea 8. See for example Kären Wigen’s “AHR Forum Oceans of History: Introduction,” American Historical Review 111 (2006): 717; this forum contains contributions by Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, “The Mediterranean and ‘the New Thalassology,’” 722–40; Alison Games, “Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities,” 741–57; Matt K. Matsuda, “The Pacific,” 758–80. 9. Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges, eds. Jerry H. Bentley, Renate Bridenthal, and Kären Wigen (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007); Michael N. Pearson, “Littoral Society: The Concept and the Problems,” Journal of World History 17 (2006): 353–73. 10. Aristotle, Meterology, II.1 11. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Mughals and Franks: Explorations in Connected History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 12. See for example, Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500–1830, eds. Bernard Bailyn and Patricia L. Denault (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 13. Bernard Bailyn, “Braudel’s Geohistory. A Reconsideration,” Journal of Economic History 11 (1951): 277–82. 14. See Silvia Marzagalli, “Sur les origines de l’ ‘Atlantic History,’”Dix-Huitième Siècle 33 (2001): 17–31; Horst Pietschmann, “Atlantic History—History between European History and Global History,” in Atlantic History: History of the Atlantic System, 1580–1830, ed. Pietschmann (Göttingen: Vandenhoek and Ruprecht, 2002), 11–43. 15. These recent titles may be taken as in some way representative of the “new” maritime history: Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges; Trade and Cultural Exchange in the Early Modern Mediterranean: Braudel’s Maritime Legacy, eds. Maria Fusaro, Colin Heywood, and Mohamed-Salah Omri (London: IB Tauris, 2010); Molly Greene, Catholic Pirates and Greek Merchants: A Maritime History of the Early Modern Mediterranean (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); Maritime History as Global History, eds. Maria Fusaro and Amélia Polónia (St. John’s, Newfoundland: International Maritime Economic History Association, 2010). 16. Garret Mattingly, review of La Méditeranée et le monde méditerranean à l’époque de Philippe II, American Historical Review 55 (1950): 350–51; Colin Heywood, “Fernand Braudel and the Ottomans: the emergence of an involvement (1928–50)”, Mediterranean Historical Review 23 (2008): 176. 17. Two valuable and sympathetic recent assessments of Braudel are: Braudel Revisited: the Mediterranean World, 1600–1800, eds. Gabriel Piterberg, Teofilo F. Ruiz, and Geoffrey Symcox (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), and Early Modern History and the Social Sciences: Testing the Limits of Braudel’s ‘Mediterranean’, ed. John Mains (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2002). 18. Henri Pirenne, Mohammed & Charlemagne (New York: Dover, 1954); Pirenne published “Mahomet et Charlemagne” in the Revue belge de Philologie et d’Histoire in 1922. A fascinating assessment of this project from later on is Richard Hodges and David Whitehouse, Mhammed, Charlemagne & the Origins of Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983). Pirenne figures as Introduction 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 23 a central character in the majestic works of Michael McCormick (The Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce 300–900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), and Chris Wickham (Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean 400–800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 697. Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, “AHR Forum: The Mediterranean and “the New Thalassology,’” 722–40. “The Asian Mediterranean Sea/ La Méditerranée Asiatique,” organized by Raymond Ptak with the assistance of Claude Guillot, at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme. See for example his collections of essays containing material dating from 1983: China and the Asian Seas: Trade, Travel, and Visions of the Other (1400– 1750) (Aldershot, England and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate. Variorum, 1998); China’s Seaborne Trade with South and Southeast Asia (Aldershot, England and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate. Variorum, 1999); China, the Portuguese, and the Nanyang: Oceans and Routes, Regions and Trade (c.1000–1600) (Aldershot, England and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate. Variorum, 2004). http://www.eamh.net/index.html. The website lists the full range of participants and programming sponsored by the project. See Schottenhammer, “Introduction,” in Trade and Transfer Across the East Asian “Mediterranean,” ed. Schottenhammer (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2005), 1. José de Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies, ed. Jane E. Managan, trans. Frances M. López-Morillas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 123 David Abulafia, “Mediterraneans,” in Rethinking the Mediterranean, ed. W. V. Harris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 64–93. Roderich Ptak, “The Gulf of Tongking: A Mini-Mediterranean,” in The East Asian ‘Mediterranean’: Maritime Crossroads of Culture,Commerce and Human Migration, ed. Angela Schottenhammer (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2008), 53–72. See Heather Sutherland, “Southeast Asian History and the Mediterranean Analogy,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 34 (2003): 1–20. http://www.indianoceanworldcentre.com. For a one-man version of this, also explicitly inspired by Braudel, see Kirti Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). S. D. Goitein and Mordechai Akiva Friedman, India traders of the Middle Ages: documents from the Cairo Geniza : (‘India book’) (Leiden: Brill, 2008); Joseph Lebedi. Prominent India Trader. India Book I. Cairo Geniza Documents [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Institute, 2009); Friedman, Madmun Nagid of Yemen and the India Trade. India Book II. Cairo Geniza Documents [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Institute, 2010); Friedman, Abraham ben Yiju. India Trader and Manufacturer. India Book III. Cairo Geniza Documents [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Institute, 2010). There is no mention of the CRH in Franco Angiolini and Daniel Roche, eds. Cultures et formations négociantes dans l’Europe moderne (Paris: EHESS, 24 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. The Sea 1995), nor in Daniel Roche, “Une Expérience de recherche Européenne: Le projet ‘Negoce et Culture’ (Florence, 1987–1989),” Revue de Synthese 111 (1990): 289–91, and only a passing one in Anthony Molho and Diogo Curto, “Les Réseaux Marchands à l’Époque Moderne,” Annales 58 (2003). There is no memory any longer of the CRH projects and publications. S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 6 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965–85), “Epilogue,” V, 496–502. Klooster, in this volume. Klooster in this volume. Jacques Revel, “Presentation,” Jeux d’échelles. La micro-analyse à l’expérience (Paris: Le Seuil/Gallimard 1996), 19. Siegfried Kracauer, History. The Last Things Before the Last. Completed after the author’s death by Paul Oskar Kristeller (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 1995), 125–28. The examples given by Matti Peltonen (Benjamin, Auerbach, and Geertz) all refer back to Leibniz though he does not reflect on its implications, see “Clues, Margins, and Monads: The Micro-Macro Link in Historical Research,” History and Theory 40 (2001): 347–59, esp. 355. For Ginzburg’s assessment of Kracauer, see Carlo Ginzburg, “Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know About It,” Critical Inquiry 20 (1993), 26–28. Purcell in this volume. Schottenhammer in this volume. Asymmetry is defended as a historical reality by Wang Gungwu, “The China Seas: Becoming an Enlarged Mediterranean,” in The East Asian ‘Mediterranean’: Maritime Crossroads of Culture,Commerce and Human Migration, ed. Angela Schottenhammer (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2008), 15. Schottenhammer in this volume. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Notes on Circulation and Asymmetry in Two Mediterraneans, c.1400–1800,” in From the Mediterranean to the China Sea: Miscellaneous Notes, eds. Claude Guillot, Denys Lombard, Roderich Ptak, with the assistance of Richard Teschke (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1998), 40. This essay can very profitably be read alongside of Jennifer L. Gaynor, “Maritime Ideologies and Ethnic Anomalies: Sea Space and the Structure of Subalternity in the Southeast Asian Littoral,” in Seascapes, 53–68. Warren in this volume. Warren in this volume. Claudio Magris, “Introduction: A Philology of the Sea,” in Pedrag Matvejević, Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape, trans. Michael Henry Heim (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 1. Revel, “Presentation,” Jeux d’échelles, 34: “L’invention d’un mode d’exposition n’induit pas seulement des effets de connaissance. Elle contribue explicitement à la production d’un certain type d’intelligibilité dans des conditions expérimentales définies.” Hannah Baader and Gerhard Wolf, “Maritime Tableaus, Eine Vorbemerkung,” Das Meer, der Tausch und die Grenzen der Repräsentation, eds., Baader and Wolf (Zurich-Berlin: Diaphanes, 2010), 7. I am grateful to Stuart Schwartz for bringing this book to my attention. Di Cosmo in this volume. Introduction 25 49. Di Cosmo in this volume. 50. Carlo Ginzburg, No Island is an Island: Four Glances at English literature in a World Perspective (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). 51. Merja-Liisa Hinkkanen and David Kirby, The Baltic and North Seas (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). 52. Alain Corbin, Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World, 1750–1840 (Cambridge: Polity, 1994). 53. Colin Heywood, “The English in the Mediterranean, 1600–1630: A PostBraudelian Perspective on the ‘Northern Invasion,” in Trade and Cultural Exchange in the Early Modern Mediterranean, 23–44. 54. Natalie Zemon Davis, Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006); Mercedes García-Arenal and Gerard Wiegers, A Man of Three Worlds: Samuel Pallache, a Moroccan Jew in Catholic and Protestant Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). But there are many more in this genre, such as Eric Dursteler, Venetians in Constantinople: Nation, Identity and Coexistence in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), and Nathalie Rothman, Trans-Imperial Subjects: Boundary-Markers of the Early Modern Mediterranean (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011). 55. Subrahmanyam, “Notes on Circulation and Asymmetry in Two Mediterraneans, c.1400–1800,” in From the Mediterranean to the China Sea: Miscellaneous Notes, eds. Claude Guillot, Denys Lombard, and Roderich Ptak (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1998), 26. 56. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, “Epilogue,” V, 496–502. 57. Greene, Catholic Pirates and Greek Merchants, 10. 58. Jacques Rancière, The Names of History, trans. Hassan Melehy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 86. 59. Baader and Wolf, “Maritime Tableaus,” 7–8. 60. Rancière, The Names of History, 86. 61. Michelet, La Mer, preface by Jean Borie (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 328: “La Terre vous supplie de vivre; elle vous offre ce qu’elle a de meilleur, la Mer, pour vous relever.” 62. T. S. Eliot, “Four Quartets: The Dry Salvages,” in Collected Poems 1919–1962 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1982), 191–92. 63. And, in French, it has already found its poet laureate: Jean-Luc Le Cleac’h, Petite Philosphie des Ports Maritimes (Clermont-Ferrand, France: Pimientos, 2011). 64. Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), vol. I, 124–33. 65. Hermann Broch, The Death of Vergil, (New York: Vintage, 1995), 1. 66. Goethe, Faust. Part II, trans. David Luke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), ll.10223ff, 180. For a survey of “The view from the shore” in art and literature see Kirby and Hinkkanen (The Baltic and North Seas, 45–52), but note that they do not mention Goethe. 67. “Outside a violent north wind was blowing, but the sun shone and the water gleamed as if covered with silver. Rilke climbed down to the bastions which, 26 The Sea jutting out to the east and west, were connected to the foot of the castle by a narrow path along the cliffs, which abruptly drop off, for about two hundred feet, into the sea. Rilke walked back and forth, completely absorbed in the problem of how to answer the letter [a “troublesome business letter].” Then, all at once, in the midst of his thoughts, he stopped; it seemed that from the raging storm a voice had called to him: ‘Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies?’” Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe, Erinnerungen an Rainer Maria Rilke, 40ff, quoted in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Vintage International, 1989, 315. 68. Burckhardt, Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy trans. S.G.C. Middlemore (London and New York: S. Sonnenschein, 1904), 3. 69. Revel, “Histore et sciences sociales. Les paradigmes des Annales,” Annales 34 (1979): 1374. 70. Kracauer, History. The Last Things Before the Last, 118. He adds, baldly, that “we do not learn enough about the past if we concentrate on the macro units.”