Jan-Maat’s Reviews > De Middellandse Zee en de mediterrane wereld ten tijde van Philips II. Deel I > Status Update

In an essay on 1860 the historian J. Gounon-Loubens argued that the most serious mistake that King Philip II made was not making Lisbon the caputal of his empire in 1580. Lisbon was placed to become a Naples or a London, while bring based in Madrid was like Louis XIV in Versailles.

Istanbul as an agglomeration of many cities; Istanbul, Galata,Skutari (Üsküdar), and Eyüp across them 133 bakeries laboured e ery day to transform 300-500 tonnes of grain into fresh bread. The city also consumed almost 4 million sheep, 3 million lambs, and 200,000 cattle annually. Maybe the number of aubergines was uncountable?

Genoa lost an empire in the east (in crimea, syria, Crete, Cyprus, chios) , compensated by developing a banking network through Spain and then the spanish americas

Braudel puts the fall of Constantinople 1453 in the context of the capitulation of Barcelona to the king of Aragon 1472, of Provence and Marseille to the king of france 1480, the expansion of Florence to control Tuscany, Venice to take over part of mainland north italy etc. City states were now too small to resist the power that larger states were now capable of mobilising

Trade network of Genoa spread from the Black sea into the interior if Bulgaria, while on the otherside of the Balkans that of Ragusa (Dubrovnik) extended into Bosnia and Serbia- this was helped because the roads north to Sarajevo or soth towards Montenegro and Albania were particularly bad.

Lucien Febvre schreef:'De Middellandse Zee is een verzameling van wegen'.

Average duration of journeys from Venice to the holy land 1507 to 1608 43 days
Average duration of tbe return journey over the same period 93 days!

Er zat echter een positieve kant aan de winter: er werden onderhandelingen en diplomatieke gesprekken gevoerd ten behoeve van vreedzame oplossingen. In dit opxicht was de winter een heilzame rustperiode. Het was in ieder geval een feit dat de in dit boek bestudeerde vredes ver drsgen uit de winter stammen voor de zomerse onlusten.

Sugar required firewood and manpower (=slave labour) which seems to have limited the places where it was grown.
Other islands also specialised in a few products/monoculture:crete, corfu -wine, Djerba - oliveoil, ibiza-salt, elba-iron, naxos- salt and wine,

Spread of sugar India-Egypt-Cyprus-Sicily (11thcentury)-Maderia-the Azores-Canary Islands-cape verde islands- the Americas