Fourteenth-century merchants shipped coral, honey, citrus, and cheese across a Mediterranean basin already strained by climate change, population pressure, and intensive resource extraction. This project addresses a gap in historical knowledge: no large-scale study has used commodity trade to link medieval economic networks, environmental change, and religious worldviews across the entire Mediterranean biome. While historians have studied trade or climate separately, they have not combined them to understand how ecological instability shaped what people produced, bought, and consumed—and how religious laws and customs influenced those choices. If successful, the research will produce a new environmental history of the Mediterranean that connects past land- and seascape management to present-day ecosystems. Understanding how pre-industrial societies adapted to climate stress and resource scarcity could inform modern approaches to sustainable agriculture, coastal management, and biodiversity conservation in the region. The project is primarily fundamental historical research, but its insights into long-term human-ecosystem relationships may prove relevant for policymakers and environmental managers working on Mediterranean resilience today.
View original technical description
Spanning 2500 miles, encompassing over 3000 islands, and connecting the worlds of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, in the Middle Ages the Mediterranean was a place of tremendous traffic in people, goods and ideas. The Mediterranean was home to Muslims, Jews, Christians, to diverse ethnicities, languages, and political entities spread across innumerable landscapes and seascapes - on land inhabiting a shared biome defined by fire and resistance to it, and encompassing a sea of enormous biodiversity, in a complex and dynamic ecosystem. The later Middle Ages were also a period of population pressure, settlement expansion and intense resource extraction, set against a background of significant climate change. This is the first large-scale study to use commodity trade to understand the relationships between economy, environment and culture within the Mediterranean biome, c.1250-1550. It will bring together three distinct strands of research: that of the medieval economy and the development of networks of exchange; environmental history and the impact of ecological instabilities and communal resiliencies on commodity production; and the religions of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, which shaped worldviews and set the contexts for many forms of contact, demand and consumption. Four commodities will be examined: coral, honey, citrus, and cheese, each representing a different facet of this environment, each embedded in the cultural and economic life of the Mediterranean, and each drawing together networks of producers, merchants, and consumers from different communities. The commodities will be studied via a new holistic methodology combining qualitative and quantitative evidence from multiple regions set alongside paleoclimatological data. The aim is to write a new environmental history of the Mediterranean, tied to its economic activity and cultural exchange, shedding light on the long-term genesis and management of the land- and seascapes we inhabit today.
Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.
Is something wrong? Let us know