ABSTRACT
All, Romans, Byzantines, Franks, ‘sought to achieve hegemony and clientage rather than to seal off their territory against their neighbours’. Certainly, the classical Islamic view of the world, which divided the oikoumene into Dar al-Islam or the lands already conquered for Islam, and Dar al-Harb, the ‘Abode of War’, or the lands which were yet to be conquered, may be seen as a phenomenon as much imperial and Mediterranean as it was specifically Islamic. The Ottoman frontier, of course, possesses its own history. Archaeology, like history, has become a flexible discipline. More complex, and meriting a separate study, is the case of Daniel Israel, a shipmaster of London, whose adventures on both sides of the maritime frontier between the summers of 1716 and 1717 encompass the ports of Gibraltar, Tetouan, Ceuta, Algiers and Minorca.
