The Mediterranean and the Atlantic, 1400–1700
Authors: Ruiz Teofilo F. 
Published: August 2023

The histories of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic were closely intertwined in the late Middle Ages, the early modern period, and beyond. The topic of abundant historiographical debates—most of it originally influenced by Braudel’s iconic study of the Mediterranean (1949)—over the last two decades, historians have shifted their focus from the Mediterranean to the rise of the Atlantic world and to the links and exchanges that bound the Old and New Worlds. From earlier periods, Mediterranean sailors, merchants, and explorers had ventured through the Straits of Gibraltar’s treacherous currents into the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean. Long before Columbus, western European and North African Atlantic seafarers had probed the waters of the Ocean Sea, reaching the Canary and Azores Islands. In the North Atlantic, the bold voyages of Norsemen and Danes settled Iceland, Greenland, and, briefly, the New World five centuries before Columbus. By the end of the Middle Ages, radical changes were in the making. Propelled mostly by new geographical and seafaring knowledge and by new types of sailing vessels (most of them developed by the Portuguese), Europeans, most of them from the Mediterranean basin but also Portuguese and Castilians, traveled down the coast of Africa, settling strategic and profitable outposts on their way to India and the rich rewards of the spice and luxury trade to be found on the Malabar coast.

By the end of the 15th century and the beginnings of the 16th, the Old World encountered the New. Despite the Europeans’ (Castilians) sense of wonder at the marvelous nature of the flora and at the innocence (“the Natural Man”) of some of the inhabitants of this new world, the outcome was often violent (colonization) and fatal (diseases). From the Caribbean to the valley of Mexico, Peru, and elsewhere, and in less than four decades between 1493 (the first voyage of settlement and Columbus’s second visit to the Caribbean) and the 1530s, marking the final defeat of the Inca empire, Spain carved a vast empire in the New World. These encounters between Spaniards and indigenous people had many consequences. Most of them were horrific, leading to demographic catastrophes. Others yielded remarkable cultural exchanges and intellectual cooperation. Spanish missionaries (largely members of mendicant orders), motivated by their desire to Christianize the conquered populations (Christianity as an instrument of discipline and subjugation), created, with the help of native collaborators, native language dictionaries and accounts of the native past. Native people or the descendants of marriages between the conquistadores and indigenous noble women produced hybrid works that preserved the past from the unique perspective of people who lived in liminal spaces between two cultures. The Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Guaman Poma, and others are just a few of the names of the many who engaged in these processes of saving the past. In a more profound way, the exchange of commodities, products, illnesses, and people, what Alfred Crosby felicitously described as the “Columbian exchange,” impacted the ecology of Europe and America and paved the way for a Latin America that emerged from the intertwining of Mediterranean roots, Atlantic histories, African slavery, and enduring native cultures. Forged in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, this mélange of traditions and cultures is, with many modifications and additions, still with us.