War and religion are the enduring themes of history and they, or at least war and the Church (for theology gets short shrift), are the chief matters in John Julius Norwich’s latest book. It attempts the difficult job of making a coherent entity of the history of Mediterranean lands from antiquity to the close of the first world war and it does not altogether succeed. The idea of a discrete Mediterranean history makes most sense for the millennium when Greece, then Rome, had reason to think of their compass as the ‘known world’ and the Middle Sea as their lake. A coherent theme is also provided by the mediaeval contest for mastery between Christian Europe and successive Arab empires. But ancient Greece and Rome get only one short chapter each and when Constantinople falls to the Ottomans in 1453, the story has not yet reached its midway point.
The real trouble, however, is that concentration on dynastic quarrels, wars of conquest and ups and downs in high office overloads the narrative with a bewildering welter of persons and dates and places and battles in countries that happen to border on the Mediterranean.
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