[BLANK AUDIO] Professor Pablo, let�s go over some of the concepts you touched on in your class. You talk about the idea of the exotic Mediterranean. Is this considered to be a new idea, or does it have a previous historical basis? This is by no means a new view. The image of the Mediterranean in the minds of a lot of people today is largely conditioned by tourist services and products. But the source of this tourism has a lot to do with the tradition of �journeying�. Wealthy young northern Europeans, after completing their education, would travel around the Mediterranean. These young people from northern Europe were aware of the Mediterranean. It was considered an area of superior natural beauty: the sun, the climate, the countryside. It is also a place with excellent art, unsurpassable achievements. But they saw all of this in the context of an exotic world that they didn�t always understand. In your session you also spoke about Fernand Braudel. What studies or scholars do you think have best represented his legacy? The view of the Mediterranean as a crossroads, as a web of exchanges, that Braudel presents, these are explicitly presented in a book that in my opinion is the most important work to continue along the path laid out by the French historian. I�m referring to a collaborative work written by two authors: by a historian of classical antiquity, Nicholas Purcell, and a mediaeval historian, Peregrine Horden. The book was published in 2000 with a very telling title: The Corrupting Sea. We could probably translate that as �el mar corruptor�. The book offers a great interpretation [INAUDIBLE] of the history of the Mediterranean based on two basic concepts, the concept of connectivity and the concept of communication. Its central idea is that due to extreme topographical fragmentation, the Mediterranean is a conglomerate of micro-regions with drastic contrasts between them. So, they had to connect with each other to guarantee their survival. Moving on to another master, what do you think of the influence of the work of Goitein on Jewish communities in the Arab world? Goitein�s book is founded, in my opinion, on some of the more interesting studies that have been published recently� studies centred on specific figures, you might almost say figures that are typically Mediterranean. I'm thinking, for example, about the book by Natalie Davis called Leo the African. Leo belonged to a Muslim family that was expelled from the Kingdom of Granada in 1492. He moved to north Africa and later starting working as a diplomat at the service of the King of Fez until he was captured by Christian pirates, who took him to Rome. In Rome, Leo decided to convert to Catholicism. He was baptised in the church of Saint Peter by Pope Giovanni di Lorenzo de Medici, Pope Leo X. That�s also where the name Leo comes from. So was it an honest conversion? When the sack of Rome took place in 1527, Leo took advantage of that to escape from the capital of Christianity, Rome. Later he showed up again in north Africa reconverted to his original faith, Islam. According to Natalie Davis, Leo was a traveller between two worlds. Based on the considerations of Anthony Molho, it seems diversity constituted and continues to constitute an element of political weakness in the countries of the Mediterranean. Do you think this is the case? Really, as Anthony Molho explains, what for a long time was considered to be a weakness, i.e. plurality, diversity, etc. was really a strength in the Mediterranean world. For a long time, the nation states were very prominent. A strong political structure was considered to be one based on a strong state. Today we're realising that the world is much more complex than we thought for a long time. And historians are trying to understand what this new world of today is made of, a world without a fixed centre, a world of plurality, a world of interconnected networks, but one, as I said, without a nucleus. And this perspective of the Mediterranean as central network, according also to Braudel, serves as a model for understanding the dynamics of current-day politics, which are very different from the world of the Mediterranean. How did Abulafia�s view differ from Braudel�s in his concept of the Mediterranean? According to Abulafia, Braudel�s Mediterranean, and the Mediterranean of most of those who followed in his footsteps, consisted of a great mass of earth that extended much farther beyond the limits of the coastline. This meant that, according to Braudel, the Mediterranean included whole nations that never even came close to the sea. In my book I wrote that Abulafia focused on those that had a toe in the waters, and even more so on people who travelled those waters, and in some cases, took part directly in commerce between cultures. Abulafia�s view is very different from Braudel�s. While Braudel placed great importance on the geographic and climatic conditioners of the Mediterranean, Abulafia strived to put people at the centre of his history. The subtitle of his book is very telling, A Human History of the Mediterranean, how people who lived through the years on the shores of the Mediterranean, managed to forge their own destinies. And it was not only people, as Braudel thought, conditioned by the geographical and climatic environment. [BLANK AUDIO]
