Striking Middle Sea

With summer on its way, thoughts turn south to olive groves and manicured vineyards, to the warm water and hot beaches of the Mediterranean. But this sea that is a place of rest and beauty for some of us is the scene of drama and often despair for many others, among them people trying to cross from North Africa. So which is it, a place of calm and beauty, of refinement and culture, or one of drama and much tragedy, buffeted by the consequences of geo-political shifts?

The Mediterranean has long been used to reconciling opposites, as two new books make abundantly clear. To ancient Greeks and Romans, the Mediterranean and its neighbouring seas was literally the ‘middle earth’, the centre from which everything radiated. Jump forward 1,000 years from the end of the Pax Romana to Habsburg-led Christendom and the sea was a barrier between the long-established, civilised lands of Europe and the newly emergent empire of the Ottoman Turks.