The Mediterranean Sea has never been only a body of water separating Europe, Africa, and Asia. For thousands of years, it has served as one of the great meeting places of human history. Ships crossed it carrying grain, wine, metals, soldiers, merchants, slaves, diplomats, and migrants, but they also carried stories about gods, sacred objects, religious texts, ritual practices, pilgrims, missionaries, priests, and competing ideas about the divine.
Long before Christianity or Islam existed, the Mediterranean connected the religious worlds of Egypt, the Levant, Cyprus, Anatolia, Greece, Italy, North Africa, Iberia, and countless islands scattered between them. Phoenician sailors established communities across the sea. Greek settlers built temples far from the Aegean. Egyptian deities became familiar outside Egypt. Roman conquest later placed an extraordinary variety of religions within the political boundaries of a single empire.
Then the religious map changed again. Judaism developed communities far beyond Judaea. Christianity spread along the roads and sea lanes of the Roman world. Islam transformed North Africa, Egypt, Syria, Iberia, and Mediterranean islands. Medieval Jewish merchants wrote letters between ports separated by hundreds or thousands of miles. Christian pilgrims sailed toward Jerusalem. Muslim travelers passed through Christian Sicily. Crusaders, merchants, captives, diplomats, and refugees crossed boundaries that political and religious authorities often tried to make permanent.
The Mediterranean therefore offers something larger than the history of individual religions. It shows what happened when religious communities lived beside one another, traveled through one another’s territories, borrowed from older cultures, defended their own boundaries, and tried to understand people whose gods, scriptures, rituals, and institutions were different from their own.
Modern historians increasingly treat the sea itself as part of that story. David Abulafia describes the Mediterranean as a place where religions, political systems, and economies repeatedly met and influenced one another, while merchants, pilgrims, sailors, and migrants supplied much of the movement that made those encounters possible.
A Sea Between Three Continents
Geography helped make the Mediterranean a religious crossroads.
Unlike an immense open ocean, the Mediterranean contains peninsulas, islands, narrow channels, bays, and coastlines that repeatedly bring different regions within sailing distance of one another. Italy reaches toward North Africa. Sicily stands between them. Greece dissolves into islands facing Anatolia. Cyprus sits between Anatolia, the Levant, and Egypt. The Strait of Gibraltar offers passage between the Mediterranean and Atlantic, while the eastern Mediterranean connects with older routes into Mesopotamia, Arabia, and eventually the Indian Ocean.
Ancient geographers recognized this interconnected world. Strabo described a Mediterranean that stretched from the Pillars of Hercules through Sicily, Greece, Rhodes, and the eastern shores of the sea. His Geography did more than identify coastlines. It described cities, peoples, sanctuaries, customs, political systems, and landscapes, preserving a picture of a world in which geography and culture were inseparable.
The religious history of this region survives through an unusually rich collection of evidence. Literary works can be compared with inscriptions, papyri, coins, archaeological sites, maps, legal texts, commercial documents, and monumental remains. Databases such as Perseus, Trismegistos, Papyri.info, the Packard Humanities Institute’s Greek inscriptions, the Epigraphic Database Heidelberg, and Roman Provincial Coinage make it increasingly possible to place the testimony of famous writers beside the evidence left by ordinary worshippers, merchants, soldiers, and local communities.
That distinction matters because Mediterranean religion was never created only by theologians and rulers. Much of it was lived in ports, households, cemeteries, temples, shrines, marketplaces, ships, and roads.
Bronze Age Sacred Networks Before Greece and Rome
Religious exchange across the Mediterranean began long before the civilizations normally called Greek and Roman reached their classical forms.
Bronze Age rulers maintained diplomatic and commercial relationships across the eastern Mediterranean. The Amarna Letters preserve correspondence between the Egyptian court and rulers in places such as Canaan, Syria, and Cyprus. Mycenaean Linear B tablets record offerings, sacred personnel, and deities within palace economies. Ugaritic texts from the Syrian coast preserve a religious world associated with gods such as Baal, El, and Anat. Shipwrecks such as Uluburun demonstrate the enormous geographical range of Mediterranean exchange, carrying copper, tin, glass, luxury materials, and manufactured goods between societies that also exchanged religious symbols and ideas.
Egypt already possessed one of the Mediterranean world’s oldest and most elaborate religious systems. Temples controlled land and resources, priests maintained rituals, and divine kingship bound religion to government.
Centuries later, Herodotus traveled through or gathered information about Egypt and devoted much of the second book of his Histories to Egyptian religion and customs. He described priests, temples, festivals, animals regarded as sacred, purification practices, and the worship of Isis and Osiris. He also repeatedly interpreted Egyptian gods through Greek equivalents, identifying Egyptian deities with figures familiar to his Greek readers.
His account is valuable precisely because it reveals both connection and misunderstanding.
Herodotus believed that Greeks had learned certain religious practices from Egypt. Some of his conclusions cannot simply be accepted as historical fact, and his habit of translating Egyptian religion into Greek categories can obscure important differences. Yet the very attempt to compare the gods of Egypt and Greece demonstrates how Mediterranean travelers tried to make foreign religions understandable within their own religious language.
Phoenicians, Carthaginians, and Traveling Gods
Few peoples demonstrate Mediterranean connectivity better than the Phoenicians.
From cities such as Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos, Phoenician merchants and settlers moved westward through Cyprus, Sicily, Sardinia, North Africa, Iberia, and beyond the Strait of Gibraltar. Carthage eventually became the greatest Phoenician-founded power in the western Mediterranean, but Phoenician expansion was never simply an economic story.
Religion traveled with the settlements.
Phoenician inscriptions preserve names, dedications, rulers, and gods. Carthaginian stelae document devotion to deities including Tanit and Baal Hammon. Surviving examples combine inscriptions with crescents, solar symbols, divine signs, and imagery that sometimes reflects interaction between Punic and classical artistic traditions. The British Museum’s collection includes Punic votive stelae from Carthage naming Tanit and Baal Hammon and displaying religious symbols that continued older Canaanite traditions in a North African setting.
Objects such as the famous Pyrgi Tablets are particularly important because they reveal religious connections that crossed linguistic and cultural boundaries. Their Phoenician and Etruscan inscriptions show that relationships between Mediterranean societies cannot be understood by placing each civilization in isolation.
A person could belong politically to one community while participating in a religious world that had been shaped through centuries of contact with others.
Greek Sanctuaries and a Shared Sacred Geography
Greek expansion added another network of sanctuaries and religious communities to the Mediterranean.
Between the eighth and sixth centuries BC, Greek settlements appeared around the Black Sea and Mediterranean, including southern Italy, Sicily, southern Gaul, North Africa, and the Iberian coast. Settlers carried religious practices with them, but they did not simply reproduce identical versions of their home communities.
Local landscapes created local cults.
Gods received particular titles in particular cities. Heroes became attached to local foundation stories. Colonies consulted oracles. Sanctuaries helped connect communities separated by sea.
Some sacred places drew worshippers from much wider areas. Delphi became famous for the oracle of Apollo. Olympia attracted competitors and visitors to festivals associated with Zeus. Delos became an important sacred center in the Aegean.
Strabo understood that sanctuaries could perform a social function extending beyond ritual alone. In discussing Delphi, he connected common sacred places with festivals, assemblies, shared meals, and the gathering of people from different communities. Religious space could therefore create relationships between populations that remained politically independent or even hostile to one another.
Mediterranean religion was already developing one of the patterns that would repeatedly characterize its later history. Sacred destinations created movement. Movement created contact. Contact did not eliminate conflict, but it ensured that religious communities rarely developed without knowledge of others.
Rome Turns the Mediterranean Into an Imperial Religious World
Roman expansion eventually changed the scale of Mediterranean interaction.
By the second century BC, Rome had defeated Carthage, intervened throughout the Greek world, expanded into Iberia, and established power across much of the Mediterranean. In later centuries, Roman government connected Britain and Gaul with Italy, North Africa, Greece, Egypt, Syria, Judaea, and Asia Minor.
The Romans called the Mediterranean mare nostrum, “our sea.”
Political control did not produce a single religion.
Traditional Roman cults continued beside Greek worship, Egyptian cults, Jewish communities, local North African religions, Syrian deities, mystery religions, household practices, philosophical traditions, and eventually Christianity. Soldiers, traders, slaves, migrants, and government officials moved religious ideas across the same routes that carried taxes and military orders.
Imperial religion added another layer. Augustus presented himself as restorer of temples and traditional religious institutions while carefully connecting political authority with religious honor. His Res Gestae, preserved most famously at Ankara in both Latin and Greek, recorded the honors, offices, expenditures, and accomplishments through which he wanted posterity to understand his rule. The document itself demonstrates the geographic breadth of Roman political culture because an account created for the Roman emperor survived on a temple far from Rome in Asia Minor.
Roman religion therefore became both intensely local and remarkably international. A city might maintain its traditional gods while honoring the emperor. A merchant could encounter Egyptian religious imagery in Italy. A soldier stationed far from home might participate in a cult introduced by people from another province.
Rome did not erase Mediterranean religious diversity. In many places, its roads, armies, ports, and cities made that diversity more visible.
Judaism Across the Mediterranean
Judaism also became an increasingly Mediterranean religion.
The destruction of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, earlier migrations, Hellenistic expansion, trade, war, slavery, and voluntary movement had created Jewish communities far beyond Judaea before the Roman Empire reached its height. Alexandria became one of the most important Jewish centers outside the land of Israel. Jewish populations also existed in Asia Minor, Greece, Italy, North Africa, and other Mediterranean regions.
This geography matters for understanding both Jewish history and the origins of Christianity.
Archaeological evidence from Ostia, Rome’s major port, demonstrates the presence of an organized Jewish community within one of the busiest commercial environments of the empire. The synagogue at Ostia became a long-lived center of Jewish religious life, illustrating how Jewish communities could remain distinctive while participating in the wider urban and commercial world of Roman Mediterranean cities.
Josephus provides another perspective. His writings on Jewish history, the revolt against Rome, and political relationships throughout the eastern Mediterranean preserve indispensable evidence, although his position as a participant in the Jewish War who later lived under Roman patronage requires careful reading.
Jewish Mediterranean history was therefore neither simply a story of exile nor of assimilation. Communities remained connected through scripture, law, family, correspondence, pilgrimage, trade, and memory while adapting to very different political environments.
That network would later become one of the foundations on which early Christianity spread.
Christianity Travels the Roman Sea
Christianity emerged in the eastern Mediterranean but quickly became a religion of movement.
The earliest Christian communities developed within the Jewish world of Roman Judaea and the wider Jewish diaspora. From there, missionaries traveled through cities that were already connected by Roman roads and shipping routes.
The Acts of the Apostles presents one of the clearest narratives of this process. Paul’s journeys repeatedly carried him through Mediterranean cities and islands. His final voyage toward Rome passed through dangerous seas before a shipwreck on Malta. Acts then describes travel from Malta to Syracuse in Sicily, Rhegium in southern Italy, Puteoli, and finally Rome.
The geography is almost as important as the narrative.
Christianity did not spread across an empty map. It moved through existing ports and cities occupied by Jews, Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Syrians, merchants, sailors, government officials, enslaved people, and migrants. Christian congregations grew within the same Mediterranean urban network that had carried older religions for centuries.
By Late Antiquity, Christian communities stretched around much of the sea.
Rome and Constantinople became major Christian capitals. Alexandria and Antioch were centers of theology and ecclesiastical authority. North Africa produced figures such as Tertullian, Cyprian, and Augustine. Councils attempted to resolve disputes that crossed political boundaries. Pilgrims traveled toward Jerusalem and other sacred sites. Monks established communities in Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and elsewhere.
The Mediterranean had not ceased being religiously diverse, but Christianity had become one of its most powerful organizing forces.
North Africa and the Religious Conflicts of Late Antiquity
North Africa demonstrates why the Christianization of the Roman Empire should not be mistaken for religious uniformity.
Christian communities there became entangled in theological disputes, questions of ecclesiastical authority, local identity, and imperial intervention. The Donatist controversy divided North African Christianity for generations.
Augustine’s letters reveal how serious these divisions became at the local level. He wrote about communities divided between Catholics and Donatists, disputes concerning church legitimacy, and the difficulties of governing congregations spread across the North African landscape. His correspondence also reveals how African church controversies were connected with Christians elsewhere in the Mediterranean rather than existing as isolated provincial disagreements.
At the same time, older religious practices did not disappear immediately when emperors favored Christianity.
Temples, festivals, sacred landscapes, philosophical traditions, local customs, Jewish communities, Christian sects, and competing interpretations of orthodoxy continued to overlap. Conversion was a long historical process that could involve belief, law, family tradition, social pressure, patronage, and political power.
Mediterranean Christianity was built through all of these forces.
Islam and a New Mediterranean Religious Geography
The seventh century produced another transformation.
Islam emerged in Arabia and expanded rapidly into regions that had been central to the Roman and Byzantine Mediterranean. Muslim armies conquered Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa before crossing into Iberia early in the eighth century. Later Muslim states controlled Sicily, while Islamic powers remained central to Mediterranean politics for more than a thousand years.
These conquests changed governments and religious institutions, but they did not empty the conquered lands of earlier communities.
Christians continued to live throughout Muslim-ruled territories. Jewish communities flourished in many Islamic cities. Arabic increasingly became a language of administration, scholarship, trade, theology, science, and literature. Muslim travelers and geographers described a Mediterranean filled with religious and linguistic diversity.
Political boundaries also failed to stop commerce.
Modern scholarship has emphasized how Muslim control over much of the southern Mediterranean created extensive commercial networks linking Egypt, North Africa, Iberia, Sicily, and the eastern Mediterranean. Jewish merchants appear particularly clearly because an extraordinary body of their correspondence happened to survive.
Religion therefore divided the Mediterranean while also helping organize communities that continued to cross it.
The Cairo Geniza and Everyday Mediterranean Religion
Few sources reveal this world more vividly than the Cairo Geniza.
For centuries, documents accumulated in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo. Because texts containing Hebrew writing or sacred references were often preserved rather than casually discarded, an enormous documentary collection survived.
The Geniza contains far more than theological manuscripts.
Letters, legal deeds, marriage documents, commercial accounts, family correspondence, petitions, and countless fragments preserve the ordinary concerns of medieval Jewish life. Princeton’s Geniza Project describes the collection as a portrait of Jewish communities throughout the Mediterranean and Red Sea regions, preserving evidence for daily life on a scale rarely available for the medieval world.
The documents reveal people whose religious identity was deeply important but whose daily lives constantly brought them into contact with wider Muslim and Christian societies.
One surviving twelfth-century letter connects Alexandria, Aden, Sicily, Mediterranean merchants, family concerns, debts, imported medicine, and long-distance travel within a single document. Other Geniza records trace Jewish traders through Egypt, North Africa, Sicily, the Levant, Arabia, and eventually India.
This is Mediterranean religious history at the human level.
It is not only the story of rabbis, caliphs, bishops, popes, and theologians. It is the story of someone waiting for a relative’s ship, sending money to a business partner, arranging a marriage, writing home from another country, worrying about debts, or wondering whether a merchant will return alive.
Religious communities crossed the sea because people did.
Sicily Between Christianity, Islam, and Judaism
Few places better represent the religious complexity of the Mediterranean than Sicily.
Its position near the center of the sea repeatedly brought Greeks, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Jews, Byzantines, Muslims, Normans, and other populations onto the island.
Muslim rule transformed Sicily beginning in the ninth century. Norman Christian conquest later changed political authority again, but Muslim communities did not simply vanish when Christian rulers took control.
The Andalusi traveler Ibn Jubayr visited Sicily in the 1180s after returning from pilgrimage to Mecca. His account provides an invaluable Muslim perspective on life under Norman Christian rule. He observed Muslim communities living within Christian-controlled Sicily and recorded their concerns about maintaining their religion and social position. Modern analysis of his account also warns that Ibn Jubayr and the Sicilian Muslims with whom he spoke had reasons to present their circumstances in particular ways to audiences elsewhere in the Muslim world.
That caution is important.
Words such as coexistence can make medieval Sicily sound more peaceful or equal than it necessarily was. Religious communities did interact, but interaction could occur alongside unequal laws, political conquest, taxation, suspicion, conversion, violence, and fear.
The Mediterranean repeatedly produced both cooperation and conflict at the same time.
Pilgrimage, Crusade, and the Struggle for Sacred Space
Sacred geography became especially powerful during the age of the Crusades.
Jerusalem stood at the center of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim religious memory. Pilgrims had traveled there long before the First Crusade, but the wars beginning at the end of the eleventh century militarized Christian claims to sacred space on an enormous scale.
The crusading movement connected religion to maritime power.
Italian cities supplied fleets and merchants. Crusader states depended heavily on Mediterranean ports. Muslim rulers confronted Christian armies arriving from Europe. Byzantium stood between Latin Christian powers and the eastern Mediterranean. Jewish communities faced their own dangers as crusading enthusiasm sometimes turned into anti-Jewish violence.
The sea became a route toward salvation for pilgrims, profit for merchants, captivity for prisoners, and conquest for soldiers.
Yet even crusading warfare did not end commercial contact. Ships continued carrying goods between territories ruled by Christians and Muslims. Merchants negotiated privileges with rulers whose religion differed from their own. Diplomats crossed political frontiers. Italian commercial colonies appeared in eastern ports.
Religion could motivate war while commerce encouraged continued contact.
That contradiction was not an exception to Mediterranean history. It was one of its recurring features.
From the Medieval Sea to the Ottoman Mediterranean
The Ottoman expansion created another Mediterranean political system stretching across religious boundaries.
After the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Ottoman authority eventually included much of the Balkans, Anatolia, the eastern Mediterranean, Egypt, and most of North Africa. Christian powers including Venice, Spain, the Habsburgs, and the Knights Hospitaller competed against Ottoman influence.
The sixteenth-century Mediterranean could appear divided between powerful Christian and Muslim states.
The reality was more complicated.
Diplomats traveled between courts. Merchants obtained permission to trade across religious boundaries. Christian subjects lived under Ottoman government. Muslims lived in territories conquered by Christians. Jews displaced from Iberia established or enlarged communities within Ottoman cities. Captives crossed the sea through warfare and piracy. Converts sometimes moved between religious worlds.
Religious identity mattered greatly to states, laws, communities, and individuals, but the boundaries were never perfectly sealed. Scholarship on the early modern Mediterranean repeatedly finds people living, trading, negotiating, and sometimes changing identities within a sea supposedly divided between rival faiths.
Reading Mediterranean Religion Through Its Sources
The greatest danger in writing Mediterranean religious history is allowing a few famous texts to speak for everyone.
Herodotus tells us much about how a Greek observer understood Egypt, but he does not allow us to see Egyptian religion exactly as Egyptians themselves experienced it. Roman writers describe foreign cults through Roman assumptions. Christian authors could portray pagans, heretics, Jews, or Muslims polemically. Muslim travelers could misunderstand Christian customs or deliberately emphasize religious differences. Medieval Christian accounts of Islam often reveal as much about Christian anxieties as about Muslim belief.
That is why inscriptions, papyri, archaeology, coins, legal texts, letters, and material culture are so important.
A votive stone from Carthage can preserve the name of a worshipper absent from literary history. A papyrus can reveal how religion influenced a marriage contract. A synagogue can demonstrate the existence of a community barely mentioned by famous writers. A merchant’s letter can connect Alexandria with Sicily. A portolan chart can show the routes along which pilgrims and traders traveled. A coin can demonstrate how political rulers presented religious authority to people who might never read an official history.
Mediterranean religious history becomes much richer when those sources are read together.
Why the Mediterranean Matters to Religious History
The Mediterranean should not be reduced to a simple story in which one civilization replaces another.
Egypt did not simply disappear when Greeks arrived. Greek religion did not disappear when Rome became dominant. Judaism did not cease when Christianity emerged. Christianity did not vanish from the eastern and southern Mediterranean after the Islamic conquests. Muslim societies were never isolated from Christian Europe. Jewish communities repeatedly connected lands divided between both.
Instead, the Mediterranean created layers.
Temples were built near places sacred to earlier communities. New rulers inherited cities shaped by previous religions. Sacred languages traveled with migrants. Stories were translated. Gods were compared. Scriptures crossed borders. Pilgrims followed routes already used by merchants. Conquerors entered cities whose religious histories were much older than their empires.
Sometimes these encounters produced borrowing.
Sometimes they produced coexistence.
Sometimes they produced persecution, forced migration, destruction, or war.
Most often, they produced complicated combinations of all of them.
That is what makes the Mediterranean indispensable to the history of religion. For thousands of years, it placed different religious worlds close enough to influence one another but rarely close enough to erase their differences.
The ships changed. Empires rose and collapsed. Languages spread and receded. Temples became churches, churches became mosques, synagogues served communities whose merchants sailed between continents, and pilgrims continued crossing the same waters toward sacred destinations.
The Mediterranean remained.
And around its shores, some of the most important encounters in religious history continued to unfold.
Sources & Further Reading
Herodotus. The Histories. Translated by A. D. Godley. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920. Perseus Digital Library. https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0126
Strabo. The Geography of Strabo. Translated by Horace Leonard Jones. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1917–1932. Perseus Digital Library. https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0239
Pausanias. Description of Greece. Translated by W. H. S. Jones and H. A. Ormerod. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1918. Perseus Digital Library. https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0160
Polybius. The Histories. Translated by Evelyn S. Shuckburgh. London: Macmillan, 1889. Perseus Digital Library. https://catalog.perseus.tufts.edu/catalog/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0543.tlg001
Diodorus Siculus. Library of History. Edited and translated by C. H. Oldfather et al. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933–1967. Scaife Viewer and Perseus Digital Library. https://atlas.perseus.tufts.edu/library/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0060.tlg001/
Josephus, Flavius. The Jewish War. Translated by William Whiston. Auburn and Buffalo, NY: John E. Beardsley, 1895. Perseus Digital Library. https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0148
Augustus. Res Gestae Divi Augusti. In Velleius Paterculus and Res Gestae Divi Augusti, translated by Frederick W. Shipley. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924. LacusCurtius. https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Augustus/Res_Gestae/home.html
Appian. Roman History. Translated by Horace White. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1912–1913. LacusCurtius. https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Appian/home.html
Eusebius of Caesarea. Church History. In Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 1, edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1890. Christian Classics Ethereal Library. https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf201.toc.html
Augustine of Hippo. Letters. In Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 1, edited by Philip Schaff. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1887. Christian Classics Ethereal Library. https://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf101.html
The Acts of the Apostles, especially Acts 13–28. Bible Gateway. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts%2013-28
Ibn Jubayr. The Travels of Ibn Jubayr. Translated by R. J. C. Broadhurst. London: Jonathan Cape, 1952. Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Fordham University. Internet Medieval Sourcebook
British Museum. “Votive Stela from Carthage Dedicated to Baal, with Symbols of Tanit.” Museum no. 125117. London: British Museum. https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/W_1857-1218-44
British Museum. “Punic Votive Stela from Carthage Naming Tanit and Baal Hammon.” Museum no. 125252. London: British Museum. https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/W_1886-0621-6
Princeton University. Princeton Geniza Project. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Geniza Lab. https://geniza.princeton.edu/
Packard Humanities Institute. Searchable Greek Inscriptions. https://inscriptions.packhum.org/
Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Epigraphic Database Heidelberg. Epigraphic Database Heidelberg
Trismegistos. Trismegistos: An Interdisciplinary Portal of the Ancient World. Leuven University and partner institutions. https://www.trismegistos.org/
Duke University, University of Heidelberg, and partner institutions. Papyri.info. https://papyri.info/
Ashmolean Museum and University of Oxford. Roman Provincial Coinage Online. https://rpc.ashmus.ox.ac.uk/
Pleiades. Pleiades: A Gazetteer of Past Places. Ancient World Mapping Center and Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. https://pleiades.stoa.org/
Perseus Digital Library. “Greek and Roman Materials.” Tufts University. https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/collections
Abulafia, David. The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. https://academic.oup.com/book/40877
Abulafia, David. “Mediterranean History.” In The Oxford Handbook of World History, edited by Jerry H. Bentley, 493–507. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/34513/chapter-abstract/292857604
Abulafia, David, ed. The Mediterranean in History. Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2003. The Mediterranean in History
Broodbank, Cyprian. The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. The Making of the Middle Sea
Horden, Peregrine, and Nicholas Purcell. The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. The Corrupting Sea
Horden, Peregrine, and Sharon Kinoshita, eds. A Companion to Mediterranean History. Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2014. A Companion to Mediterranean History
Goitein, S. D. A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza. 6 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967–1993. A Mediterranean Society
McCormick, Michael. Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce, A.D. 300–900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/origins-of-the-european-economy/D876211E6D0F00483666CF2FBAE84550
Greene, Molly. A Shared World: Christians and Muslims in the Early Modern Mediterranean. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. A Shared World
Malkin, Irad. A Small Greek World: Networks in the Ancient Mediterranean. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. A Small Greek World
Eckstein, Arthur M. Mediterranean Anarchy, Interstate War, and the Rise of Rome. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. https://www.ucpress.edu/books/mediterranean-anarchy-interstate-war-and-the-rise-of-rome/paper
Constable, Olivia Remie. Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain: The Commercial Realignment of the Iberian Peninsula, 900–1500. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain
Constable, Olivia Remie. Housing the Stranger in the Mediterranean World: Lodging, Trade, and Travel in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Housing the Stranger in the Mediterranean World
Wickham, Chris. Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Framing the Early Middle Ages
Laiou, Angeliki E., ed. The Economic History of Byzantium: From the Seventh through the Fifteenth Century. 3 vols. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2002. The Economic History of Byzantium
Shepard, Jonathan, ed. The Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire, c. 500–1492. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. The Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire
Robinson, Chase F., ed. The New Cambridge History of Islam. Vol. 1, The Formation of the Islamic World, Sixth to Eleventh Centuries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. The New Cambridge History of Islam