'All historians of early modern Europe have a lot to learn from this book. Its themes of cultural, economic, religious and sometimes violent interaction in a world of shifting and ill-defined boundaries and of many languages powerfully evoke a Mediterranean in which the need to do business with others constantly dissolved the rigidities of difference and produced a broad capacity ... Read morefor intercultural tolerance of a loose and pragmatic sort.' - Glenn Burgess, Pro-Vice Chancellor and Professor of Early Modern History, The University of Hull; 'This exemplary and much needed volume returns the Mediterranean Sea to centre-stage. Rather than focusing on the Mediterranean as an icon, this book takes the Mediterranean of Braudel as a physical reality, with its commerce, human traffic and trafficking, disease, sailors and trade. It reminds and instructs historians and others of the physical and human realities, small-scale and large, of which grand ideas are made and with which they must remain connected. It is indeed the homage that Fernand Braudel would have wanted.' - Cornell Fleischer, Kanuni Suleyman Professor of Ottoman and Modern Turkish Studies, The University of Chicago Show Less