The Habsburg Mediterranean 1500–1800 ed. by Stefan Hanß and Dorothea McEwan

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Habsburg Mediterranean 1500–1800 ed. by Stefan Hanß and Dorothea McEwan Samuel J. Kessler Stefan Hanß and Dorothea McEwan, eds., The Habsburg Mediterranean 1500–1800. Archiv für österreichische Geschiche Band 145. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2021. 404 pp. The Mediterranean looms large in the history of the Western World. It longs to have its praises sung. Odysseus and the Argonauts sailed upon its wine-dark waves. The armies of Xerxes and Themistocles clashed at Salamis. Rome thought of it as her pleasure ground, a lake at the heart of her imperial grandeur. Then came the Arabs, uniting the world from Iberia to India. Then the crusaders, landing on Levantine shores. Then the Ottomans, crown of the East. Then the French. But Lord Nelson at Trafalgar put an end to that—though the British kept a few choice rubies, like lovely Gibraltar, perpetually chafing the Spaniards’ ego. Even the Nazis sought its domination. El Alamein will ring forever in Allied ears. Its shores are bejeweled with cities left over from these distant empires, their names calling forth romance, mystery, power. Istanbul. Alexandria. Marseille. Beirut. Barcelona. Naples. And Trieste. Little, forgotten Trieste. The only major Mediterranean port of the Austrian Habsburgs. Home at one point to James Joyce. But how many people know that? Its two most brilliant contemporary chroniclers, Jan Morris and Claudio Magris, have tried to raise its profile, but I haven’t met one American in a hundred who has even heard of the place. And that, intellectually if not geographically, is where this wonderful volume of essays begins: to make us notice again something that once was important but is now overlooked. In the words of Stefan Hanß and Dorothea McEwan, that means presenting “the Mediterranean as a crucial part of the social and cultural fabric of the early modern Habsburg world” (11), of [End Page 117] reconnecting the Great Sea with Vienna, Budapest, and Prague. Underpinning this work is the fusion of “assemblage theory,” in which parts of a whole are in constant fluid relation to one another (theorized by Deleuze and Guattari in Mille plateaux, 1980), and “thalassography,” the study of the human interactions with and around the sea (as opposed to oceanography, the study of the physical and zoological aspects of the sea). Bringing these together, the volume’s authors have all written about the varied and often underappreciated ways in which the peoples and lands of the Austrian Habsburgs (the Spanish branch of the family will need its own volume) were inexorably a part of the to-ing and fro-ing of events in and around the Mediterranean. Not just a (mostly) landlocked empire (the Habsburgs acquired Trieste all the way back in 1382, remember), Habsburg domains and the people who lived within them experienced the Mediterranean, the editors argue, as “spaces that engendered opportunities, exchange, and interaction as much as encounters and conflict” (21). The volume is divided into three parts. Part One, “Negotiating the Habsburg Mediterranean,” includes three essays which are, in many ways, traditional military histories of Habsburg interaction with other territorial or political powers: the first discusses Charles V and his son Philip’s negotiations over the status of Genoa; the second chronicles the Habsburg’s (failed) 1596 campaign to take the fortress of Clissa in Dalmatia; and the third traces the Habsburg’s complex relations with the Uskoks, a “pirate” nation under the protection of Vienna. Taken together, they suggest sustained Habsburg military and diplomatic engagement in the Mediterranean region, perhaps similar to the way in our own time France maintains a seat on the Security Council even though it doesn’t service an overseas fleet. Part Two, “Flows of People,” includes six essays, the largest of the three sections, and really begins to express the surprising possibilities of a “Habsburg Mediterranean.” The works in this section, as the overall title suggestions, tend more often to focus on “ordinary” people (though anyone who traveled the world before the ease of modern aircraft is, in a sense, far from ordinary), that is, folks without aristocratic title, who through profession (one essay discusses the interactions between Habsburg subjects and the Hospitallers/Knights of Malta; another a...