ABSTRACT
In his magisterial work, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1972), Fernand Braudel envisages a unified and coherent region surviving until as late as the sixteenth century, one in which the almost timeless realities of terrain, climate, agriculture, cities, trade, transport and population transcended cultural and political fragmentation (Prince 1975). Braudels vision is a powerful mental construction, one of the most telling examples of géohistoire. In this epistemology, history is conceptualised in slow motion, revealing permanent values that can be set against a relatively unchanging physical environment (Butlin 1993).
