The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Epoch of Philip II.

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Nautical map of the Mediterranean region ( Portolan ), which, in addition to the geographical names, also contains geometric auxiliary lines ( Rumbenlinien ) for orientation on the sea using a compass. This testimony to the highly developed trade on the Mediterranean from 1619 largely reflects the conditions of the time of Philip II.

The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world in the epoch of Philip II ( French La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II ) is the main work of the French historian Fernand Braudel , the main representative of the second generation of the Annales , written in the middle of the 20th century -School . The three-volume work is dedicated to the geography, economic and social history of the Mediterranean region up to the time of Philip II of Spain in the sense of a histoire totale , i.e. with a comprehensive claim . This was one of the first historiographical works to focus not on a state or a person, but on a geographical area.

Emergence

Conception and research

Braudel worked from 1923 to 1932 as a high school teacher in Algiers and Constantine , at that time part of French North Africa . The contact with the Mediterranean there, as he later emphasized, had a decisive effect on his research interests: Since he now viewed the Mediterranean “from the other side” as the northern perspective that he was used to as a French, the geographical area became strict national orientation more in his consciousness. As early as 1923 he was thinking about a habilitation thesis ( French thèse ) on a topic related to the history of diplomacy: Philip II of Spain and the Mediterranean region in the second half of the 16th century. The first concept, however, still envisaged a traditional historical investigation with a focus on political history .

In 1927 Braudel began researching his subject - first in Paris , later in some Spanish archives (especially Simancas and Madrid ), then in Italy ( Genoa , Rome , Venice , Palermo ) and finally in Ragusa (now Dubrovnik ), in particular was useful due to its shipping registers and thereby significantly influenced the direction of the work. He devoted all available free time to these archive studies, especially the summer vacation. With the help of a camera he had bought in Algiers, he was able to capture a large number of historical documents in a small space in a short time (several thousand on some days alone). The material collected in this way was evaluated during the rest of the year in collaboration with his wife Paule, in which one person read the document that had been photographed and the other took notes on it.

Fernand Braudel's interest shifted from the actual protagonist of his work, Philip II, to the Mediterranean as a geographical area and to a more universal view of the past. In 1928 he published the essay “Les Espagnols et l'Afrique du Nord, 1492–1577” (“The Spaniards and Northern Africa 1492–1577”) in the Revue africaine , which was already the focus of historiography, as a by-product of his studies criticized wars and statesmen and instead focused on economic and everyday contacts. In the 1930s he came into contact with the newly created “Annales” school , among other things by attending lectures by Henri Pirenne in Algiers. The Annales School also included Professor Lucien Febvre , who had previously encouraged Braudel to change the direction of the work and later took over her supervision. From 1935 to 1937 Braudel was a visiting professor at the University of São Paulo in Brazil, where he had a lot of time to work on the conception of his font. During the several weeks return trip in October 1937, he met Febvre again on the ship, who had already worked on Philip II, and entered into a closer, friendly relationship with him. The older researcher encouraged him to reverse the topic “Philip II of Spain and the Mediterranean”: “Why not 'The Mediterranean and Philip II'. ? Isn't that a nice but different topic? ”In the following year Braudel was appointed to the École pratique des hautes études .

Writing and publication

Braudel completed his extensive research in 1939 a few days before the French army was mobilized against the backdrop of the outbreak of the Second World War . In the summer he was able to start writing his work in Febvre's summer house, but was then called up for military service. On 29 June 1940 he got into the Vosges in German captivity and remained until 1945 in different Officer camps . Meanwhile, with an enormous memory performance, without access to his accumulated material collection, he wrote three versions of his future book in countless exercise books on around 4000 pages and sent them one after the other via the Swiss embassy to Lucien Febvre, who saved them from destruction despite the chaos of war could. In addition to his memory, Braudel also benefited from the fact that shortly before the outbreak of war he had carefully looked through all the notes and research results.

Depiction of life in a German oflag by E. Arnaud

For a time Braudel was "allegedly rector of the camp university in Oflag XII B near Mainz ", which is why he was able to deal intensively with German-language literature from the Mainz university library and, in comparison, found French human geography and economics to be backward. He also had extensive correspondence with colleagues such as Lucien Febvre and with his family, such as his wife Paule. In 1942, because of his political stance as a supporter of Charles de Gaulle, he was taken to a camp near Lübeck , where living conditions were poor, but Braudel said he was able to concentrate better on the topic in isolation and work more productively. Only then did his conception of history finally develop; he could only distract himself from the tragic experiences of those years by concentrating on a “long-time scale” of history.

Braudel submitted his habilitation in 1947 after he and his wife had revised the contents of the booklet again and compared it with the notes. They survived the war unscathed in a metal container in the basement of their Paris apartment. Two years later the work was published for the first time with 1,160 pages, as the economic situation did not allow the production of such an extensive book again until four years after the war. Another revision followed in 1966, with the volume of the work growing to 1222 pages. This was followed by translations into numerous languages ​​and numerous new editions.

Conception

Braudel differentiates in the three volumes of his Méditerranée three time levels , for which the work is widely known among historians: The first and most important time level he called the longue durée ("long duration"), which refers to the geographical framework and the social, political and the economic structures of a historical event. It is hardly changeable and change is very slow. The second time level consists of “medium duration” cycles ( moyenne durée ), which mean a change over the course of years or decades and encompass the history of state systems, social groups and cultural movements. On the third level of the classic history of events ( histoire événementielle ), laws or changes of government take place within weeks and days. Following Braudel, this level is not valued by historians of the Annales School, as it is not seen as meaningful for conditions and developments.

Braudel begins his presentation with the geological formation of the Mediterranean and ends with the death of Philip II on September 13, 1598. According to the tripartite division into time levels, he describes in the first part the recurring events, the seasons, their effects on the conditions on the sea and the storms, the recurring shepherd migrations ( transhumance ), the effects of the swampy plains and the mountains on the course of human history. The second and longest part is devoted to medium-term history, economic and social conditions, trade routes and economic cycles. The third and shortest part deals with history in the classical sense, the course of events, which Braudel describes as “foam on the wave” of history.

Braudels concern was to write a histoire global (literally "global history") with the Méditerranée . This must not be confused with the concept of world history ; Rather, he is concerned with going beyond the limits of the problem at hand: the Mediterranean is therefore not just the Mediterranean itself, not just its coast, but Braudel also examines the “extended Mediterranean”, which includes Flanders and the Hanseatic League as well as the Atlantic , the Sahara and the Indian Ocean . The aim is to embed the research topic in an overall system.

meaning

With his novel method of placing a geographical area in the center of historical interest and differentiating history according to three time levels, Braudel had a great influence on the development of historical science, especially the "Annales" school. Whether the author actually succeeded in creating a “global” or “total history” of the Mediterranean region is assessed differently. The focus of his book is clearly on the western Mediterranean; Due to the limitations of his linguistic and historical knowledge, Braudel could not devote himself directly to Arabic or Slavic sources .

The first part emphasizes that the geographical conditions do not always have the decisive influence on the story, but the limits and opportunities determine its development. The second part deals with the social and economic conditions and creates a multi-layered picture of everyday life and the living environment in the treated period through a large number of individual investigations . In addition to topics such as the cultural history of warfare , the author particularly goes into economic tendencies without, however, attaching great importance to them. In the third, the event-related part, Braudel relies most of all on the existing literature, sometimes even on outdated literature. It covers a wide range of historical storylines, which, however, he always relates to one another and thus also shows the connections, for example, between Central European politics and that of the western Mediterranean.

Braudel's presentation was particularly criticized for the enormous wealth of facts that grew out of the endeavor to write a “total story”. The difficulty for the reader would be to relate the successive levels of time to one another and to get an overall picture. The author was unable to streamline the material in such a way that the material can be easily processed by the reader. But this does not diminish his merits and his work performance. From a methodological point of view, the work is to be regarded as an important step in French historiography, especially since it stimulated numerous other research work and in this way contributed to the development of the Annales school.

expenditure

  • Fernand Braudel: La méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II. Armand Colin, Paris 1949 (original edition).
  • Fernand Braudel: La méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II. 2 vols., Armand Colin, Paris 1966 (expanded new edition). New editions 1976, 1979, 1982, 1986, 1987, 1990.
  • Fernand Braudel: The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Epoch of Philip II (translated by Günter Seib). 3 volumes, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1990, ISBN 3-518-58056-6 . Paperback edition: Suhrkamp-Taschenbuch Wissenschaft 1354, Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-518-28954-3 .
  • Fernand Braudel: The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (translated by Siân Reynolds). 2 vols., Collins, London / Glasgow 1972/1973. New editions by Fontana Press, Glasgow 1986 and 1990. New edition by the University of California Press, Berkeley 1995/1996.
  • Fernand Braudel: Civiltà e imperi del Mediterraneo nell'età di Filippo II. (Translated by Carlo Pischedda). 2 vols., Biblioteca di Cultura Storica, vol. 48, Einaudi, Turin 1953. New edition in one volume 1965. New edition in the Collana Piccola Biblioteca vol. 85, Einaudi, Turin 1977. New edition in the Collana Piccola Biblioteca vol. 471, Einaudi , Turin 1994.
  • Fernand Braudel: El Mediterráneo y el mundo mediterráneo en la época de Felipe II. (Translated by Mario Monteforte Toledo and Wenceslao Roces). Fondo de cultura económica, México 1953. New edition with the collaboration of Vicente Simón, México 1980. New edition of the Fondo de cultura economica de España, Madrid 2001.

literature

  • Fernand Braudel: Personal Testimony. In: Journal of Modern History , Volume 44, 1972, Number 4, pp. 448-467. Translated by Jochen Grube in: Fernand Braudel: Writings on history. Volume 2: People and Ages. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1993, ISBN 3-608-93159-7 , p. 283 ff.
  • Hugh Trevor-Roper : Fernand Braudel, the Annales and the Mediterranean. In: Journal of Modern History , Volume 44, 1972, pp. 468-479.
  • Michael Erbe : Braudel's Mediterranean book as a classic work of the "Annales" historiography. In: Ders .: On recent French social history research. The group around the "Annales" (= income from research. Volume 110). Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1979, ISBN 3-534-07551-X , pp. 73-90.
  • Erato Paris: La genèse intellectuelle de l'œuvre de Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l'epoque de Philippe II (1923–1947). Athens 1999.
  • Peter Burke : The story of the "Annales". The emergence of the new historiography (original title: The French historical revolution , translated by Matthias Fienbork). 2nd edition, Wagenbach, Berlin 2004, ISBN 978-3-8031-2503-3 .
  • Howard Caygill: Braudel's Prison Notebooks . In: History Workshop Journal , Volume 57, 2004, pp. 151-160.
  • Eric R. Dursteler: Fernand Braudel (1902–1985). In: Philip Daileader, Philip Whalen (Eds.): French Historians 1900–2000. New Historical Writing in Twentieth-Century France. Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester 2010, pp. 62-76.
  • Peter Schöttler : Fernand Braudel as a prisoner of war in Germany. In: Fernand Braudel: History as a key to the world. Lectures in German captivity in 1941. Ed. By Peter Schöttler. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2013, ISBN 978-3-608-94843-1 , pp. 187-211.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Fernand Braudel: Personal Testimony. In: Journal of Modern History , Volume 44, 1972, Number 4, pp. 448-467, here pp. 450 f.
  2. ↑ Eric R. Dursteler: Fernand Braudel (1902-1985). In: Philip Daileader, Philip Whalen (Eds.): French Historians 1900–2000. New Historical Writing in Twentieth-Century France. Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester 2010, pp. 62–76, here p. 63 f.
  3. ↑ a b Laura Hannemann: The unleashed spirit. The French camp universities in World War II. In: Francia , Volume 33, 2006, Issue 3, pp. 95-120, here p. 107 ( online ).
  4. ↑ Eric R. Dursteler: Fernand Braudel (1902-1985). In: Philip Daileader, Philip Whalen (Eds.): French Historians 1900–2000. New Historical Writing in Twentieth-Century France. Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester 2010, pp. 62–76, here p. 65.
  5. ↑ Fernand Braudel: Personal Testimony. In: Journal of Modern History , Volume 44, 1972, Number 4, pp. 448-467, here p. 454.
  6. ^ Markus Völkel : Historiography. An introduction from a global perspective. Böhlau, Cologne / Weimar / Vienna 2006, ISBN 978-3-412-18605-0 , p. 334.
  7. ↑ Peter Burke : The story of the "Annales". The emergence of the new historiography. 2nd edition, Wagenbach, Berlin 2004, ISBN 978-3-8031-2503-3 , p. 152.
  8. ↑ Michael Erbe : Braudel's Mediterranean book as a classic work of the "Annales" historiography. In: Ders .: On recent French social history research. The group around the "Annales" (= income from research. Volume 110). Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1979, ISBN 3-534-07551-X , pp. 73-90, here pp. 87 f.