Victoria History of the County of Middlesex Book

I reviewed this for someone, maybe the Spectator, a few years ago - like this:

‘Its character is complex, awkward, and unique,’ wrote the French historian Fernand Braudel, in the preface to the First Edition of his The Med and the Med World in the Age of Philip II. ‘No simple biography beginning with date of birth can be written of this sea; no simple narrative of how things happened would be appropriate to its history.’
But then, no French historian could reckon on JJN, either. Historian, broadcaster, champion of Venice, he can be viewed almost any day in the year in the Reading Room of the London Library, where he bones up on his facts, and writes his books. Over the years these have included a history of Sicily, two volumes on Venice, and three on Byzantium. If anyone could come up with a simple narrative of how things happened in the Mediterranean, it would be the man who has travelled and guided other travellers across those wine dark seas for well over half a century.
In the preface to this amusing, absorbing and companionable history, Norwich claims to be an amateur, not a scholar; a claim we can take with a pinch of sel gris, because he has done an impressive amount of research here, taking us from the first pyramids to the outbreak of the First World War. The airy disavowal is, I suppose, a reminder that history can be a pleasure; it helps to establish his role as a genial storyteller, slipping across a surprisingly large amount of important information. The trick is always to make it look easy, and Norwich never falters; his tone, throughout, is that of a brilliant conversation with his reader.
It’s a totally one-sided conversation, of course, like the talk that opens a Conrad novel, between men drawing on cigars in the warm darkness. Norwich must cover the whole of classical civilization, as well as the renaissance. He must deal with Nelson, Nice, Nineveh and the War of the Sicilian Vespers. It is a Muslim story, a Christian story – and the cockpit of the Jewish story, too. Art, music, sailing rigs, gunpowder: these are a few of the obvious topics; but Julius Caesar, Constantine, Jesus Christ and Roger, the Norman king of Sicily, need their say, too, among a cast of characters which must run into the thousands.
Above all, it’s the weave, as any decent rug merchant from Tyre to Gadez would be likely to point out. Now that the shores of the Med are coated in an almost continuous line of resinous foliage and concrete holiday houses, lapped by a warm embrocation of salt, algae and Factor 15, connected like a cat’s cradle by no-frills airlines, charter yachts, ferries and motorways, borders extinguished between Gibraltar and Kylithos, poverty to the south, prosperity to the North, with euros doubling as currency the whole way round – we need reminding that the Middle Sea was, until recent times, a varied universe; a stew of such variety that only a fisherman’s paella could do it justice.
Norwich’s answer is to toggle the focus as the centuries unwind. Egypt, Crete and ancient Greece, the rise and fall of Rome: all these are covered in the first seventy pages. He devotes fifty pages to the Napoleonic escapade, and its fallout in Egypt, as well as Italy, Spain and France. He often uses great set pieces – the Battle for Malta, the story of Gibraltar – as forward bases to launch raids into neighbouring territories – a technique which allows full rein to his enthusiasm for vigorous narrative and the telling detail.
And when Norwich says he’s no scholar, all he means is that he lacks the desire to be dispassionate. The Middle Sea is a book that Braudel could never have foreseen, but he might have welcomed its air of high-tone gossip. Piazza San Marco, which Norwich knows so well, was the finest drawing room in Europe; but step through the French windows and there’s a party on the lawn going on outside, too. Those Phoenicians? ‘Herodotus tells us that in about 600BC, at the behest of Pharaoh Necho, they circumnavigated the continent of Africa.’ Fellow with the red beard? Kheir-ed-Din. ‘He may not have had quite the panache of Aruj, but he possessed all his brother’s ambition, all his courage, and – arguably – rather more statesmanship and political wisdom.’ Avoid the kumiss, by the way, ‘that fermented mare’s milk so unaccountably popular with Turks and Mongols alike.’
Stout lady in a veil? Caterina, wife of James of Lusignan; her father was a diplomat, her uncle the Auditor of Cyprus; ‘on her mother’s side her lineage was still more distinguished: there she could boast as a great-grandfather no less a person than John Comnenus, Emperor of Trebizond.’
The Emperor, of course, is there as well; and so with the urbane Lord Norwich murmuring the introductions at your elbow, you move gracefully through the best Mediterranean society. ‘There is little point in speculating on how history might have been changed had Constantine Dragases indeed married Maria Brankovich,’ he murmurs; but it’s worth a small aside, isn’t it? The Byzantines were doomed – we shake our heads - and now we’re off again, with the Ottomans rolling up the eastern Mediterranean, to discover the fate of the islands and the shores of Greece.
Everyone stands to learn things from this book. However well we think we know our patch, most of us have difficulty placing our knowledge in context; the march of events eludes us; whole epochs and areas are to us a closed book. Our historical training and experience, from school to university, has been bitty and selective, in direct opposition to the sort of history Norwich – or Braudel, for that matter – revel in. We need these grand sweeps, these energetic narratives, because we just don’t know enough.
How did the Knights of Rhodes wind up in Malta? Why did the puff go out of the Venetians? What was, all jokes aside, the War of Jenkins’ Ear? How did we get Gibraltar – and who won the War of Spanish Succession? Norwich is a superb narrative historian: he will give you the lowdown on, say, the history of Greek independence, or Giulia Gonzaga’s escape from Barbarossa’s clutches, without distorting the facts, or leaving out the jokes; his grasp of the diplomatic essence is no less assured than his command of strategy.
Nor does he overreach. Nowhere does he really present an argument for taking Mediterranean history as a whole: he assumes it, just as we do. People connect; battle is joined; there may not have been, since the time of the Greeks, a pan-Mediterranean culture, but the sea has always been a stage. Constantine moved his capital from Rome to Byzantium, 2000 miles across the sea; Roger of Sicily lit up the world with his fertile tolerance; Barbarossa quartered his sailors in Toulon, with French connivance, in 1546; and an English admiral, Nelson, destroyed the French fleet, and effectively created the emperor Napoleon, on the Nile in 1799.
Norwich leaves us with the impression that we share an old friend: the wide locus of our hopes, our speech, our culture and ideals, with ever a leavening hint of spice from the world beyond.
You can take your Blue Guide, or your Rough Guide, anywhere you like; but if you are planning to go anywhere south of the Alps, or north of the Sahara, to an island, perhaps, studded with Venetian fortresses, orthodox churches, cafes and pines, this is your book.