Though I hardly understood the significance at the time, I actually traveled to Alexandria on the coast of Egypt by way of Venice on the coast of Italy. Both cities made it into our modern world after centuries of now-faded glory, making for an exquisite game of compare and contrast for anyone who reads two just-published books. Along the way, you can expect to learn from both authors a lot of things you did not know and possibly had never thought about before.
I made my first pilgrimage across the Mediterranean inspired by Lawrence Durrell’s then-hip Alexandria Quartet, four novels I’d devoured as a very young man to learn about sex, love, dust, truth, death and art. Many young men and women looked to Durrell as a kind of mentor or guru of all such things back then. Because of him, I climbed aboard the M.S. Egnatia of the old Hellenic Mediterranean Lines for the three-day crossing and settled into to my no-frills dorm accommodations. The moment I realized the blue sea had finally become muddy brown from the Nile and that the white strip climbing atop the horizon was an ancient city will live within me forever.
The books are quite different from each other in scope and tone. While the volume titled Alexandria is longer at 476 pages than the one beautifully titled Here Begins the Dark Sea at 300, the latter is actually more scholarly. And while Alexandria is entirely about the long history of its title city, Here Begins gives Venice only a piece of its subtitle. All the same, both works feature big personalities, significant events and cultures that did indeed change the world.
Here Begins the Dark Sea: Venice, a Medieval Monk, and the Creation of the Most Accurate Map of the World by Meredith F. Small. Pegasus Books, $28.95.
By the 14th and 15th centuries, Venice ruled the Mediterranean world. Egypt, Greece and Rome were long gone as superpowers that conquered and ruled, though always with an eye on the fiscal bottom line. Venice was a republic of merchants, a dizzying import-export operation built as a city on hundreds of small islands spread across a coastal lagoon. It traded with and sold to everyone it could, naturally, but its greatest achievement was opening up business with the exotic East, especially with the Byzantine Empire all the way to Constantinople. On one of those islands in the Venice lagoon, a monk named Fra Mauro started drawing maps – not just of his city or his state (which in Venice were one and the same) but of the entire world.
Meredith Small tells the remarkable story of Fra Mauro, sometimes called the father of modern cartography, and how he, a man of the cloth, lifted our understanding of geography from the shadowy realms of religion and myth to move into the future as science. And where better to draw maps than Venice, a port that welcomed sailing anywhere to do business with anybody?
Think about it: there were no satellite photos, though when there finally were such things in the 20th century, Fra Mauro’s maps were shown to be remarkably accurate. There were sailing ships and sailors visiting coastlines on most continents, and one way or the other, Fra Mauro got them talking to him about the things they’d seen. With the truths supplied by his famous mappamundi, for example, the world came to know that Africa was its own continent a ship could circumnavigate and that the Indian “Sea” was actually the Indian Ocean. This allowed trade, in the wild free-market spirit of the Venetian Republic, to expand across the earth.
Small, an anthropology professor emerita at Cornell University, understands well, and makes clear on virtually every page, that Fra Mauro’s masterpiece could not have been created without Venice’s art, society, wealth and culture. Her latest book is a tribute to the city and the difference it made in our understanding of the world. No wonder Fra Mauro has a crater and a formation on the moon named after him.
Alexandria: The City That Changed the World by Islam Issa. Pegasus Books, $35.
The primary reason for the length of Islam Issa’s book about the city founded by Alexander the Great based on a dream is that it covers so much turf. In time, not in miles. Issa is a popular British-Egyptian author based in Birmingham (the one not in Alabama), a regular contributor to magazines and even a sought-after “presenter” of television and radio programs from the BBC to Netflix. He brings a thoughtful but breezy tone to his saga, focusing less on complex politics, government, theology or law than on larger-than-life historical figures, beginning with the man who lives on in the city’s name.
Known as Iskander to the Greek-speaking world, Alexander arrived on the scene in Egypt centuries after most things tourists visit to see today were disappearing into the sand. It also becomes clear how different the ancient kingdom of the pharaohs was from the Venice that inspired and informed Fra Maura. The world of Ramesses II and Tut generally stayed inland and close to the Nile River, source of the boundless agricultural food supply that powered its glory days. We don’t picture Egyptians trading with, say, Libya or Tunisia to the west or with Syria or Lebanon to the east. Those graceful feluccas kept to themselves along the river, with most of what expansion there was pushing south into Nubia.
As we know from the maps of his conquests across Persia as far as today’s India, Alexander didn’t keep to himself much of anywhere. Dying at only 32, Alexander of Macedon did not live to see his sketches of Alexandria become reality. But as the city grew to be a center – arguably the center – for global learning, it also took on a passionate multiculturalism that was largely unknown in its time. Certainly, the pharaohs would have punished anyone who even attempted to build a city that diluted pure-blooded Egyptians with Greeks, Romans and Jews. Arabs and Ottomans came later, followed later still by the French and the British.
My old literary hero Durrell, whose writing first drew me to the city, served as a British press attache for the consulate in Alexandria during World War II, as his country’s troops were battling Rommel’s Afrika Korps across the sands of nearby El-Alamein. Durrell wrote to a friend (and Issa quotes) that the women of Alexandria are “certainly the loveliest and most world-weary women in the world.” He also met his second wife there, a Jewish woman named Eve Cohen, on whom he based his iconic first Alexandria novel, Justine.
Interestingly, both ancient reasons that we still invest our fascination in Alexandria begin with the letter L. And Issa tells both stories and many more with enthusiasm. Both the Library of Alexandria and the Lighthouse of Alexandria (one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World) are symbols of what can be when humans are more open to the world than closed – and more ambitious than afraid.
