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The Middle Sea, In his latest sweeping history, the author of "Byzantium" considers the "political fortunes" of the lands of the Mediterranean from the age of ancient Greece to the First World War. Taking as a starting point the region’s unique geography, which seems to have been "deliberately designed" as a "cradle of cultures," he focusses on the rise and fall of civilizations through battles and their heroes, paying particular attention to the Christian and Muslim struggle for dominance. At times, the geographical framework feels arbitrary. The Mediterranean’s bearing on the countries around it was not always as manifest as during antiquity; from 200 B.C. to 200 A.D., there was a higher density of commercial traffic than at any time in the following millennium. There are also some egregious omissions: art, social, and intellectual history are essentially passed over. But Norwich’s focus plays to his strengths as a military historian, and he produces, over six hundred pages, a highly readable chronicle.
Copyright © 2006

From

The littoral lands of the Mediterranean Sea are Norwich's stage for surveying millennia of power politics. An experienced expositor (_Paradise of Cities_, 2003), Norwich is irresistibly readable in his emphasis on would-be empire builders to whom the Mediterranean offered both a tempting avenue for embarking on conquest and a dangerous seaway from which enemies would appear. Norwich purposely excludes, however, navigation and navies as well as physical geography from his narrative. He favors the dramas inherent in the succession of empires that have risen and fallen around the Mediterranean from antiquity to World War I. In particular, Norwich emphasizes the characters and motivations of rulers who have affected affairs and frames them in consistently pithy descriptions that are by turns empathic and caustic. Along with the opinion, Norwich, superbly erudite yet having a sense of popular taste, efficiently chronicles the major wars and results and occasionally argues for the importance of battles history has overlooked. A fine single-volume history suited to any collection. Gilbert Taylor
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