[BLANK AUDIO] My name Juan Luis Palos. I'm a lecturer in the Modern History Department at the University of Barcelona. And in today's lecture we're going to talk about how historians have viewed the the Mediterranean and its history. It might surprise you to know that the use of the term Mediterranean as a noun, the sea in the middle of lands, the Mediterraneus, is relatively recent. It was first used in the seventh century by Isidore of Seville. Before that it had been called almost as many different names as people who bathed in its waters. For the ancient Jews it was the Yam Gadol, the great sea. For the ancient Egyptians, it was called the Big Green, and the Romans, with a clearly imperialist tone, called it Mare Nostrum. As we'll soon see, this is no trivial matter. Even today, we might ask ourselves whether there is truly only one Mediterranean. So before we talk about the historians who have studied the Mediterranean over time, and especially in the modern age, we should ask ourselves, what are we talking about when we talk about the Mediterranean? In response to this question, experts have divided themselves, as we will also see later on, into two big groups: Ther are those who consider the Mediterranean to be a set of lands whose economies depend in some way on the sea, even though sometimes they might be lands whose actual land is located far from its waters. And another group with a more restrictive view of the Mediterranean as a set of port cities interconnected by a multitude of exchanges. But how many Mediterraneans are there? Of course, establishing the geographic area of the Mediterranean Sea is important. In fact one of the questions that experts have debated in recent years is whether, given its geography, one can really talk about a single Mediterranean. A single Mediterranean loved from Algeria to Istanbul, as Joan Manuel Serrat's famous song goes. Or maybe, on other hand, there are two Mediterraneans: and eastern Mediterranean and a western Mediterranean divided by the Strait of Sicily. Or maybe we should even be talking about three Mediterraneans, including a middle Mediterranean which would correspond to the Adriatic Sea - the sea that was historically under the area of infuence of the Serenissima, the Republic of Venice. What's more, we could even divide it in another way, and instead of separating east from west, perhaps think of another Mediterranean, a north shore of the Mediterranean, mainly Christian in the south of Europe and the south shore of the Mediterranean in Africa, mainly Muslim. Without dismissing these geographic issues, it's important to not lose sight of the fact that the term Mediterranean reflects a reality that is much more than a simple matter of geography. The Mediterranean is an idea that evokes a plethora of, at times contradictory, meanings. The Mediterranean is not a completely European space, or a completely non-European space. On one hand the Mediterranean Basin can be considered the cradle of Europe, the place where European civilization was born. But at the same time, for many Europeans the Mediterranean is seen today as an exotic place, a place which expresses a Dionysian instinct, an excessive vitality that the most advanced societies of northern Europe have managed to reign in. For many Europeans, the Mediterranean is halfway between the us and the them, between civilization and barbarity, between progress and decline, between development and stagnation. [BLANK AUDIO]