The Strait of Gibraltar is one of a kind: its geomorphological configuration not only creates a unique current and wind conditions that determine its shipping lanes and anchoring places, but also produces specific flora and fauna. Yet it is less this uniqueness than its divisive function that dominates its current perception: this waterway between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, which is around 60 km long and (at its narrowest point) 14 km wide currently divides two continents, two religions and two ways of life. But times have existed in which it connected the two coasts--as in the Roman imperial period, when the territories on both banks were part of one political-administrative unity, or under Philip II, when fishermen travelled from Seville down to Mauretania and on Sundays attended mass at one of the Portuguese presidios along the Moroccan shore. It is on the temporal nature and thus changeability of such relations that the present volume sets its sights, studying its multiplicity of facets, from the social and political to the military and economic, offering individual studies that together reveal a new narrative for a region that has remained geostrategically vital throughout the millennia.
The present volume originated in a research project titled “DÉTROIT: Le détroit de Gibraltar, à la croisée des mers et des continents (époques ancienne et médiévale),” conducted between 2011 and 2015 at the École des hautes études hispaniques et ibériques (EHEHI) – Casa de Velázquez in Madrid, financed by the Agence nationale de la recherche (ANR), and initiated by the medievalist Daniel Baloup (Université de Toulouse) as well as the ancient historian and archaeologist Laurent Callegarin (Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour). The French institutions were joined in their work by the Universidad de Cádiz and the Universidade de Lisboa, as well as the Centre Jacques-Berque and the Institut national des sciences de l’archéologie et du patrimoine, both based in Rabat. For five years, archaeologists along with historians, philologists, geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, archaeo-botanists, and biologists from France, Spain, Portugal, and Morocco dedicated themselves to researching the Strait of Gibraltar, turning their attentions to the time from the Second Punic War in the third century BCE to the start of European expansion in Africa in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This research phase was followed by a phase dedicated to publishing the results of this international and interdisciplinary teamwork, one now brought to a close with this volume, the last of four. In parallel, the project members created a database that seeks to combine the sources and bibliographies from this geographic sphere across the centuries--a mission that has not proved exactly easy in light of the sources’ diversity, comprising, for example, Latin inscriptions, Late Antique ceramics, and medieval administrative texts. In any case, the books complement each other but can also be read separately: three appeared in the Collection de la Casa de Velázquez, one in the Presses universitaires du Midi in Toulouse. They are conceived to cover three subject areas stretching along the three research axes Représentations, Administrations et Circulations: I, Représentations, perceptions, imaginaires; II, Espaces et figures de pouvoir; III, Circulations, mobilités et réseaux d’échanges.
The first volume--published by Françoise des Boscs and Arthur Haushalter in 2019 [1]--aims to elucidate the peculiarities of the Strait of Gibraltar by comparing it to other straits, thereby grasping it more clearly not just in its functionality but as a symbolic category; it finally establishes the paradoxes of a strait that, given certain knowledge and technological possibilities, could be crossed with ease and safety for fishing, travel, and conquest, but that also served as finis terrae in the imaginations of those who contemplated it--as a place where the sun set and the world ended in the West. The second volume, meanwhile, concentrates on this geographic sphere’s political use. It was created under the editorship of Gwladys Bernard and Aurélian Montel. [2] Its articles explore the scope of action available to both the Phoenicians and Rome and its successors to conquer, control and explore this geostrategically vital area--with the goal of ultimately securing it militarily and administrating it efficiently. Why? Because for empires like Rome or the “Early Islamic Empire,” consolidating their power in the Strait of Gibraltar developed into a “test case” of their ruling practices. Also in 2022, but outside the Collection de la Casa de Velázquez, Sabine Lefebvre, Christophe Picard, Laurent Callegarin and Valérian Dominique published Le Détroit de Gibraltar: À la croisée des mers et des continents--a volume that can be considered part of the Anglo-American genre of “companion.” [3] This book not only offers a history of the region as its own unit--not, that is, from the perspective of either the Iberian Peninsula or North Africa--but is also organised trans-epochally, from the Second Punic War to 1492. Moreover, it reflects a didactic impulse and clearly addresses itself to a broader audience, as seen in the structure of the individual chapters and elements such as a dossier of maps, a timeline, and a glossary of the most important terms.
The last volume of the series, edited by Laurent Callegarin and Valérian Dominique and focused on the exchange of goods, the mobility of people, and the construction of networks, then followed in 2024. It is structured in the same manner as the first two volumes, with the title’s three key words corresponding to three sections, each of which contains six or seven articles addressing the subject matter. Here, these studies are draw from the provenances of ancient history, medievalism, and archaeology. The first section--Ports, itinéraires et hinterland dans la zone du Détroit--brings together discussions on the port layouts of the North African side, paying particular attention to Mauretania Tingitana (Enrique Gozalbes Cravioto; Abdelmohcin Cheddad, Mohamed Habibi), and discusses the common connecting routes and time required to cross over. It also calls into question the visibility of these layouts (Darío Bernal-Casasola): frequently, the book argues, these were not ports in the modern sense but rather simple anchoring places. Shipyards and lighthouses, too, are barely evident amongst archaeological findings. Moreover, the traditional view that there existed constant, intensive exchange between the two banks must be revised (Gwladys Bernard): contacts became more frequent after Sertorius’s expeditions and thanks to Augustus’s policy of municipalisation, but it is more than questionable whether these can already be termed networks. In contrast, a topography of religious sites can be traced back as far as the Early Roman and the Phoenician period on both banks, one in which we must differentiate between the sacral sites of the coasts and those of the cities (Eduardo Ferrer Albelda, Benjamin Caparroy). In the Middle Ages, we find evidence of active trade relations between the two banks (Fernando Villada Paredes) but also of military conflicts between the Umayyads of al-Andalus and the Fatimids ofIfrīqiya, which led to the occupation of Northern Morocco from the early tenth to the second half of the eleventh century (Mohamed Belatik, Abdallah Fili).
The second section flips this perspective, so to speak, and focuses on L’intégration du détroit de Gibraltar dans les logiques régionales: Mer d’Alboran et golfe ibéro-maurusien. It begins with the Insulae Augustae--today’s Ibiza and Formentera--and uses this example to highlight the difference between flujos comerciales and rutas de navegación in the imperial period (Ricardo González Villaescusa). The text argues that the former by no means had to line up with the latter, as the processes of production and distribution involved not just producers and consumers but also middlemen, whose interests were not always synonymous with taking the direct path to the respective sales market. The Strait of Gibraltar’s function in the Umayyad period was geostrategic and political, but it was also shaped by economic interests--the precise motivations in play cannot be analysed in isolation (Christophe Picard; Aurélien Montel). What is clear is the burgeoning development of naval traffic, which was only enhanced by the founding of communities in Tingitana and the settlement of numerous Berbers in al-Andalus. Towards the end the millennium, only the Bosporus will have sported traffic of a comparable intensity. The case study of Dénia--one of the Iberian Peninsula's most critical ports in the eleventh century--shows how the perseverance of military, administrative and fiscal structures ultimately won it recognition (Travis Bruce). It is then Portugal’s rise as an independent kingdom into a full-fledged actor between the years 1090 and 1130 that shakes up the Iberian geostrategy and creates a counterpart to the Alboran Sea on the other side of the strait, one spanning the Canary Islands, the Azores, Morocco and Portugal itself (Stéphane Boisselier). The development of trading networks between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries is a logical consequence of the connectivité between these spheres, though one ultimately forced to make way in the light of political and economicpériphérisation (Yassir Benhima).
The third section, lastly, tackles Les réseaux d’échanges entre Méditerranée et Atlantique, which existed in both antiquity and the Middle Ages. Dried fish,garum, wine, and olive oil rank among the products disseminated in both the Late Punic period (third to first c. BCE) and the Roman one (first c. BCE to fifth c. CE), though their trade was respectively regulated by specific laws (Enrique García Vargas, Antonio M. Sáez Romero; Françoise des Boscs). À la longue, these were to include a shift in the realities of the natural world, as demonstrated, e.g., by a shipwreck from the caliphate period that place around today’s Seville (Carlos Cabrera Tejedor): it shows that the riverbed of what was once known as the Baetis silted up to the point where it was no longer navigable. From the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, the networks in which the Strait of Gibraltar was embedded changed--on the one hand through the conquest of islands (Mallorca, Sicily and Sardinia), on the other through a peerless development of sea trade, impelled first by the ports of Italy (Genoa, Pisa and Venice), then of the Provence, and finally those belonging to the Crown of Aragón (Barcelona, Valencia and Mallorca) (Dominique Valérian; Enrico Basso). Yet fears of losing control of these trading networks provoked repeated conflicts. Trade wars interwove with political ones--like the fighting Sultan Abū Yūsuf sparked when he crossed the strait with his troops in 1274 (María Dolores López Pérez; Damien Coulon).
The volume’s access to its subject has been skilfully chosen and its articles correspond to the current state of research. Repetitions from the previously published volumes are unavoidable, as seen in the introduction (Laurent Callegarin, Dominique Valérian) and conclusion. Still, the medievalist Henri Bresc must be credited with joining the volume’s mosaic pieces together into an overarching picture and once again stressing the Strait of Gibraltar’s ambivalent character: as the transition from one ocean to another (poros), but also as a bridge between two continents (porthmos), he argues, the strait tied together resource-rich regions with a limited connectivity, one contingent on both geographical features, such as the steep and boggy coasts, and current and wind conditions, which complicated a North-South connection. The present volume thus completes a trilogy plus Companion that already qualifies as a reference work and has inspired subsequent studies. [4] We can therefore say that the traditional world’s end in the furthest West has already shifted to the centre of academic interest--and innovative discourses are generally the first step towards making changes to reality.
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Notes:
1. Françoise des Boscs, Yann Dejugnat, and Arthur Haushalter, eds., Le détroit de Gibraltar (Antiquité – Moyen Âge), Vol.1: Représentations, perceptions, imaginaires, Collection de la Casa de Velázquez 174 (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2019).
2. Gwladys Bernard and Aurélien Montel, eds., Le détroit de Gibraltar (Antiquité – Moyen Âge), Vol. 2: Espaces et figures de pouvoir, Collection de la Casa de Velázquez 191 (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2022).
3. Sabine Lefebvre, Christophe Picard, Laurent Callegarin, and Dominique Valérian, Le détroit de Gibraltar: À la croisée des mers et des continents (Antiquité – Moyen Âge) (Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Midi, 2022).
4. Anthony Álvarez Melero, Alfonso Álvarez-Ossorio Rivas, et al., eds., Fretum Hispanicum: Nuevas perspectivas sobre el Estrecho de Gibraltar durante la Antigüedad,Colección Historia y Geografía 355 (Seville: Editorial de la Universidad de Sevilla, 2018); Touatia Amraoui and Alejandro Quevedo, eds., D’une rive à l’autre: Circulations et échanges entre la Maurétanie césarienne et le sud-est de l’Hispanie (Antiquité-Moyen-âge), Archaeology of the Maghreb / Archéologie du Maghreb / اثار ;المغرب 4 (Summertown / Oxford: Archaeopress Archaeology, 2022); Sabine Panzram, Olivia Orozco de la Torre, and Gwladys Bernard, eds., De Gades a Tánger Med: La tradición del futuro en el Estrecho de Gibraltar = Awraq. Revista de análisis y pensamiento sobre el mundo árabe e islámico contemporáneo, 21. Nueva época (2023); Sabine Panzram and Mohcin Cheddad, eds., L’épigraphie au XXIe siècle: “Le Cercle du détroit de Gibraltar”. Un paradigme en révision, Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez. Nouvelle série (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, in press).