Cradle of History

Know'st thou the land where the lemon trees bloom,

Where the gold orange glows in the deep thicket's gloom,

Where a wind ever soft from the blue heaven blows,

And the groves are of laurel and myrtle and rose?

GOETHE, like others before him and others since, was moved to poetry by the sights of the blue Mediterranean. "All the dreams of my youth I beheld realized before me," exclaimed Goethe--for generations of fogbound northerners gazing for the first time at the sun-gilt beauties of Venice, Rome, and the isles of Greece. On the shores of this history-steeped sea were said, done, written and made the best part of what the West still lives by. The story of the Mediterranean is the story of Christ and Moses and Mohammed, of Homer and Socrates, Caesar and Cleopatra, of Alexander and Saladin and Richard Lion-Heart. It is also the story of Mussolini and Gamal Abdel Nasser.

The Mediterranean, a place of serene blue skies for many, has been an object of ambition to an important few. The eight pages of maps that follow show the restless flow of conquest across this ancient sea: the days when it was Rome's mare nostrum, then Islam's crescent empire, at last the shared hegemony of three great empires--British, French and Ottoman. Now once again it is a fragmented place; there is no peace; and the Mediterranean is again the center of history and the clashing of rival ambitions.

FAVORED beyond all other great waters by climate and position, this million-square-mile sea of coves and arms and islets is made to man's measure. "Like frogs around a pond," said Plato, "we have settled down upon the shores of this sea." Island-hopping along Aegean shores in the haze of lazy, sunlit waters, the Phoenicians and Greeks of 30 centuries ago first learned the arts of maritime commerce, and of naval war--including the amphibious landing. Across the golden bridge of the Grecian islands the civilizations of the Valleys of the Nile and Euphrates first advanced to Europe. Across this strategic roadway world conquerors from Babylon to Berchtesgaden have sped to their brief zenith and decay. In their day both Ramses II and Darius dug canals between the Nile and the Red Sea. As the North African sands still drift over the last burned-out tanks of Rommel, the newest Pharaoh of the Nile cries his claim for the road to the East.

THIS sea "in the midst of lands" unites and divides three continents. The mighty Xerxes once had it scourged (300 lashes) because a storm on the Hellespont wrecked his invasion fleet. By its shores Greeks and Phoenicians founded 130 famed cities, from Massilia (Marseille) and Malaca (Malaga) to Neapolis (Naples) and Syracuse. From its teeming commerce, Carthage was already taking $43 million in tariffs and annual tributes in the 3rd century B.C. When the Romans called it mare nostrum, ships plied regularly from Alexandria's 530-ft. lighthouse in the east to Gades (Cadiz) beyond the Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar) in the west. Across these waters Arab traders in their time brought cotton, steel, numbers and the long-lost writings of the Greeks to the benighted West. For three centuries, while seafaring Venice held "the gorgeous East in fee," the Doge himself annually hurled his gold ring into the Mediterranean with the shout: "We have wedded thee, O Sea, in token of our rightful and perpetual domination!"

Then the voyages of discovery swung world power to the Atlantic. The day Venice heard the news of Columbus' safe return from what everybody supposed was India, stocks and bonds plunged 50 points on Venice's Rialto. For the first time since the Argonauts, the Mediterranean sank into stagnation. But in 1869 De Lesseps cut the canal through Suez, and the Mediterranean was back on history's main line. This time it was Britain's lifeline of empire, short-cutting to India through Suez.

THENCEFORTH the stakes were global. De Lesseps had turned Suez into a strait, and Mediterranean straits have been battlegrounds since the Greeks launched their thousand ships to wreck the Trojan fortress commanding the Dardanelles. Twice in 30 years the land-based European powers lunged for control of the Mediterranean straits. The first time, British seapower, partnered with the French, beat them off. The second time the French collapsed, and Rommel's Panzers, crossing the sea, rolled almost into Cairo's gates. But neither Rommel nor his boss Adolf ever made it.

Neither yet have the Russians, inching glacially southward ever since Peter the Great sought a warm-water outlet in the 17th century--though his Communist successors saw their chance after World War II to burst through the defenses that two great wars had weakened. A Communist regime won Yugoslavia and Albania on the Mediterranean shores. Then the Russians applied pressure in Greece, and the protecting British, weakened at home by the exertions of war, asked U.S. help. Sending the Missouri to Istanbul and General Van Fleet to Athens, the U.S. held the Eastern Mediterranean for the West.

But an even more explosive force was at work. The sleeping nationalism of the Middle East came awake after World War I, and to power after World War II. The French were thrown out of Syria and Lebanon, slowly gave independence to Tunisia and Morocco, and fought to keep their presence in Algeria. The British withdrew from Palestine, Egypt, the Sudan, fought to hold a last imperial base in Cyprus.

Today new sovereignties, without much power (the principal export of Libya is dried grass) and sometimes without much sense of responsibility, are trying to fill the vacuum. In Cairo, a new Arab leader cries that he will unite all Islam as in the Caliphate's days. Russia has leapfrogged past the Turks into the Mediterranean, and thrust guns, tanks and MIG-15s into the hands of Suez' newest defenders. The Western Powers find that they have lost their Mediterranean monopoly at precisely the moment their dependence on Suez for Mideast oil has grown greatest.

EVEN in the era of great conquests, when the Mediterranean was under one power's dominance, there were always times when everything threatened to become unstuck; what had been violently won had to be violently defended. Pax Britannica was gained by Nelson at the Nile and at Trafalgar; it was maintained by a necklace of bases--Gibraltar, Malta, Alexandria--and a panoply of dreadnoughts. France and Britain, who had fought for control of the Mediterranean, in time agreed to divide the spoils. Newer ambitious powers tried to nudge their way in: World War I once threatened to break out three years earlier than it did, over the Kaiser's ambitions in North Africa. Mussolini, with his flatulent ambition to create a second Roman Empire, subdued Libya.

The great imperial powers exploited the land, but also developed it. They brought efficiency and order, and could not understand why the resident peoples did not think this enough. Now that the imperialists have pulled out or pulled back, some of that order and some of that efficiency are gone. For the ruling elites who have succeeded the imperialists, independence is enough--and worth the price. But the rest of the world, granting the justice of independence, can also see the instability it has brought, and the temptation to insecure politicians to court cheap popularity by rash and negative acts.

The Mediterranean, birthplace of Western civilization, is still a cradle, endlessly rocking. It is no longer within the means of any power on earth alone to control its movement. Today its peace, if peace is to be had, is apt to be the peace of rival ambitions in tension, and enforceable only by nations acting in concert.

And while this struggle goes on, on stony, barren, brown hillsides men eke out a hard living under the bright skies, much as they did in Homer's day.

ANCIENT EMPIRES

OUT of mud huts by the mighty Nile sprang Egypt, circa 3400 B.C., the world's first major power. Through 30 dynasties and 3,000 years Egypt created pharaohs and pyramids and provincial bureaucracy, built the first Suez Canal. In 1479 B.C. Thutmose III scattered his foes at Megiddo (Armageddon), "as if by spirits."

ASSYRIA'S spearmen swept out of the upper Tigris valley, sacking Tarsus, obliterating Babylon, sweeping Egypt from the Delta to Thebes. Assyria's army was its state, equipped with iron weapons, disposing of its captives by impaling them. But Assyria got overextended, fell to the Medes and Chaldeans in 612 B.C.

A PERSIAN prince named Cyrus beat the Medes and Chaldeans, set himself up in 538 B.C. as King of "the four quarters of the world." Darius I pressed on to the Danube and Indus, worked out a civil service, postal and highway networks. Persia was contained by the Greek city-states after the Battle of Marathon, 490 B.C., "the birth cry of Europe."

PHILIP of Macedon conquered the Greek city-states--Sparta, Athens, Thebes; his son Alexander led the Greek phalanx into India in quest of homonoia, the brotherhood of man. At 32 Alexander died of malaria dreaming of fresh worlds to conquer, leaving Macedonia to fall apart and newer empires--Rome and Carthage--to glare across the central sea.

ROMAN MEDITERRANEAN

TO the blare of trumpets and the shuffle of war elephants, Hannibal of Carthage crossed the Alps in 218 B.C., engulfing Rome's legions at Lake Trasimeno and Cannae. Rome leaped back vengefully across the sea and broke Hannibal's hopes and homeland at Zama, 202 B.C. In the last century before Christ, Rome's Julius Caesar, "a portent of in credible speed," took 800 cities and 1,000,000 prisoners. In 30 B.C. Caesar's adopted son Octavianus (later Augustus) hounded down Antony and Cleopatra in Egypt, rounded out the Mediterranean conquest and founded Pax Romano--200 years of broken peace in which Latin-Hellenic culture swept western Europe, and Christianity took root.

Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Vespasian, Trajan, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius, the big-name emperors conjured up roads and aqueducts, central heating and crucifixions, weights and measures, gladiators, banks. But Rome was to rot internally (in 395 the Empire was split into West and East) before the glittering city fell to the Goths and Vandals amid what Gibbon called "the inevitable effect of immoderate greatness."

ISLAM'S MEDITERRANEAN

IMPELLED by the drivings of Islam, their green banners streaming in the desert wind, an astonishing army raged out of Arabia to take Syria (636), Persia (637), Egypt (642), Carthage (695,. Morocco (710), and almost all of Spain (711-718). The Moslems were stopped short of the Loire by a Prankish commander named Charles Martel and "the men of the north . . . like a belt of ice frozen together.'' Martel's grandson Charlemagne conceived the Holy Roman Empire. The Moslems fell back to bickering amid musk and slave girls but they rallied, maddened by red crosses blazing from chain mail, to batter three waves of Christian Crusaders.

In 1453 the Moslems conquered Constantinople, shrieking "Yagma! Yagma!" (To the sack!), and later swept on to Vienna. Eventually the West dispelled the Moslems but not the memory of 1,000 years of dread. ''Alone and apart," Dante bequeathed his vision of the Inferno, "I beheld Saladin."

IMPERIALISM'S HIGH TIDE

WHY is the sun so red?" Western seafarers inquired as they headed their frail caravels toward the edge of the world. "Because it looketh down upon hell," others replied--and yet they all sailed on across the fearful horizon seeking glory, God and gold. Royal Britain sounded the fanfare, demolishing the Spanish Armada in 1588, dashing France off Cape Trafalgar in 1805, ushering in Pax Britannica with its Mediterranean life line--Gibraltar, Malta, Suez--and its rich markets for the Industrial Revolution. "Talk of fun!" Winston Churchill cried beside the Nile. ''Where will you beat this? On horseback, at daybreak, within shot of an advancing army, seeing everything!"

In World War I (1914-18) Pax Britannica, sickening, died. Europe poured out its blood into the muck of Flanders and France--2,706.154 casualties for the British; 4,974,000 for the French; 4,846,340 for the Germans--but carved new conquests out of the vanquished Ottoman Empire. The last of the Empire builders, Italy's Benito Mussolini, grasped vast Libya only to lose it, his nation and his own life, in World War II.

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