The tide rises and falls
The beautiful sea is also the sea of war
Europe's 3,000-year-old Mediterranean dilemma
Revealing 3,000 years of European Mediterranean littoral war conflicts
At present, the conflict in the Middle East is continuous, and the refugee problem in Europe has re-emerged, all around this beautiful sea, which is also the sea of war - the Mediterranean Sea.
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Caesar crossed the Rubicon River
In 49 BC, in northern Italy, on the Rubicon River, a man over half a hundred years old led a large army across the river, leaving the famous phrase "The dice have been thrown down", which means that the war has begun and the bet on fate has begun.
The history of human civilization is a history of war, and victory or defeat in war often determines the survival of tribes and city-states, and even the rise and fall of countries and civilizations. As Sun Wu, the ancient Chinese "soldier saint", said: "Soldiers, the great affairs of the country, the place of death and life, the way of survival, must not be unaware." ”
As the cradle of Western civilization, the Mediterranean coast has been plagued by smoke and wars since ancient times. The book "History of Mediterranean Warfare" by Mr. Wen Pingyuan, an old scholar of Peking University, continues the author's usual popular and vivid, in-depth and simple style, and outlines the history of thousands of years of war along the Mediterranean coast with pictures and texts, and thus arises from this, thinking about many issues in history and the present, the West and the East, China and the world. When I first read this book, I felt refreshed; when I read it carefully, I felt that the aftertaste was endless.
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The great affairs of the country
"The great affairs of the country are in the worship and the rong." The phrase "Zuo Biao" is confirmed in the Mediterranean Sea, thousands of miles away.
When I first read the sample book, I once questioned why a work that connects the history of war is not called "History of Mediterranean Warfare", but is called "History of Mediterranean Warfare". Reading through the whole book, I found that the difference between one word and the author can be described as unique. Compared with the war as "politics continues through another means", the so-called "war" is an act, but also a spiritual temperament, a state of existence and even a form of life, tribes gather because of war, countries stand because of war, civilization arises from war, and ideology rises because of war.
As the author summarizes in the first chapter of the book: "War can be said to be the totem of the entire mediterranean history—if such a complex Mediterranean could have a totem or symbol." In this sense, the Mediterranean sea is a sea of war. ”
Eastern Mediterranean
According to incomplete statistics, counting the Trojan War in Homer's Epic, there have been at least more than 2,000 wars around the Mediterranean, and the longest lasted for more than 200 years.
It is already difficult to sort out the intricate relations between different tribes, city-states, countries and even civilizations from the continuous wars, but the "Mediterranean War History" is not satisfied with sorting out historical materials, but to see the subtle knowledge, focusing on excavating the basic role of war in the formation of surrounding civilizations, and presenting the shaping of the character of the surrounding peoples by war.
Taking the rise of Rome, which is highlighted in the History of the Mediterranean Wars, as an example, external conquest and internal reform are mutually causal and mutually reinforcing the development of civilization: initially it was the "royal era" with the legacy of primitive society, and later formed a republican system of "separation of powers" of consuls, senates, and citizens' assemblies. With wars of conquest, the expansion of the radius of domination required a strong center of power whose system moved from republican to authoritarian and into the age of empire. The Empire's efficient administrative, especially military mobilization mechanism, made larger wars of conquest possible, eventually turning the Mediterranean into a Roman lake.
Returning to the topic of "the great affairs of the country, in the worship and rong", it is not difficult to see that if civilization is regarded as an "imaginary community", as two means of maintaining the community, "qi" and "rong" can be described as two sides of the same coin. "祀" aims to construct and maintain the ideological foundation of the community, "I worship therefore I am"; "Rong" continuously extends the radius of the "ideological community" in the form of blood and fire, "I fight and I am strong".
Clash of civilizations
"If you are not of my race, your heart will be different." Although this statement is too absolute, it is not empty.
In The Clash of Civilizationsand the Remaking of World Order, the eminent scholar Samuel P. Huntington argues that after experiencing clashes of monarchs, nation-states, and ideologies, humanity will enter the stage of clashes of civilizations, and the dividing line of future civilizations will become the "front line" of conflict.
Whether the above statements are in line with the future development trend of international relations remains to be tested by time. However, if the "clash of civilizations" is placed in the history of the Mediterranean, it is undoubtedly appropriate. The book "History of Mediterranean Warfare" outlines the ins and outs of the clash of coastal civilizations in a relatively complete way.
The Mediterranean Sea covers an area of only 2.512 million square kilometers, equivalent to a quarter of China's land area, but there are many civilizations in the surrounding areas of "you sing and I appear", each civilization also has a different branch, "from the ancient Egyptians, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Persians, to later Greeks, Macedonians, Romans, Turks, Italians, especially Venetians..." Different civilizations "short armies", war is inevitable.
As the first great war between the East and the West, Asia and Europe, the Greek-Persian War was a typical "clash of civilizations", and the expansion of their influence between Greece, which advocated commercial civilization, and Persian, which advocated agricultural and nomadic civilization, eventually Chen Bing Marathon Plain. The course of the war may have long been forgotten, but history remembers marathon, a place name immortalized by the war.
At the Battle of Mikkel, the Persians and Athenians fought fiercely outside the Persian camp.
To be sure, in the era of the Greek-Polish War, the clash of civilizations was relatively mild. Later, with the formation and spread of world religions such as Christianity, Judaism, islam, etc., the "intensity" of the clash of civilizations rose significantly, and the landmark event was undoubtedly the Crusade and the fall of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turkish Empire, and many subsequent wars became a continuation of the above two major wars to a certain extent.
It is worth noting that the same is the clash of civilizations, the "protagonists" in different periods are not the same, and with the "geographical discovery", the forces outside the Mediterranean have more and more discourse power in the Mediterranean. Especially after World War II, the United States "occupied the magpie's nest" and became an indisputable new "sea hegemon" in the Mediterranean, "whoever controls the Mediterranean is tantamount to controlling many countries around the Mediterranean." ”
The "History of Mediterranean Warfare" accurately grasps the above changes, pointing out that the dominance of the United States in the Mediterranean has led to "asymmetry" becoming more and more the norm of war, not only in the weapons of war, but also in the comprehensive national strength based on the economy behind the war. The inhabitants of the Mediterranean coast are no longer the masters of the Mediterranean, is this a blessing or an unfortunate thing for the historic Mediterranean civilization?
Giant's back
"The mountains stand up, the scenery stops." Hero worship is the eternal complex of human beings.
However, although there is never a shortage of heroic stories in the world, the skill of the narrator is high or low, resulting in the heroic image shining in the mouth of some narrators and pale and dry in the mouth of others.
The author of the History of the Mediterranean War clearly belongs to the former, so in his account, the heroes who emerged in the war are ready to emerge, each with its own characteristics: from Achilles to Hector, from Alexander the Great to Caesar, from Hannibal to Charlemagne, from Roger to Napoleon, from Garibaldi to Churchill...
The Italian national hero Garibaldi is undoubtedly one of the most colorful figures in the History of the Mediterranean War, who traveled all over Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia, and even traveled to China in 1852 as a captain. In 1860, he led 1,000 "Red Shirts" on an expedition to Sicily, occupying the entire island for more than two months, and since then, the "Thousand Men Expedition" has become a proper name.
Garibaldi personally commanded the largest battle, the Battle of Wortunos, but was defeated.
However, the next section highlights Garibaldi's legend:
"It is said that on October 26, 1860, a scene occurred in which Garibaldi and Imanur II met on a bridge in Tenoa, southwestern Italy, shook hands and held friendly talks, and Garibaldi dedicated all the territory he had conquered to King Emmanuel II, while he himself returned to the island of Cappellera to grow food and vegetables."
"The thing is whisked away, and the name is hidden." Dashing and casual, only The first person in the history of the Mediterranean, Garibal.
When it comes to the characters in the "History of Mediterranean Warfare", women are equally vivid and vivid, although they may not have the heroic posture of "not loving red clothes and loving arms", but it is enough to prove that beauty is sometimes more lethal than force.
Thanks to the legendary beauty Helen, the Greek allied soldiers approaching the city, the Trojan War lasted for ten years, and cleopatra, the "Cleopatra", made the two men who conquered the Mediterranean, Caesar and Antony, submit to their pomegranate skirts. Of course, in the author's opinion, the legendary queen Theodora who was born in the Qinglou is undoubtedly a strange woman with wisdom and courage. In the face of the Nika Rebellion that broke out in 532 AD, Theodora "ordered" her husband Justinian the Great to stay in Constantinople to quell the rebellion, and left a famous saying: those who wear crowns should not live in defeat.
Theodora
It is not difficult to imagine that if Justinian the Great had abandoned Constantinople at that time, the history of the entire Eastern Roman Empire would probably have been rewritten, and the balance of power along the eastern Mediterranean coast would have changed.
In addition, in the "History of Mediterranean Warfare", some big people who play "small roles" also impress the reader. For example, in the Battle of Sicily, which Chinese may not be familiar with, the philosopher Plato met the tyrant Dionysius I, and the result was not only a "chemical reaction" similar to that between Wei Zheng and Li Shimin, but even the philosopher himself almost became a slave, which is ironic for Plato, who once claimed that "slaves will never become the master's friend". During the Battle of Lepanto, the largest in the world's ancient history, the Spanish literary young Man Cervantes took a pen and was disabled by several bullets in his left hand, and was later captured and taken hostage by pirates. I wonder if the sense of nothingness and disillusionment that runs almost through the novel "Don Quixote" comes from the helplessness of the "ashes and smoke of the trees" in the Mediterranean? George Byron, a famous English poet who enjoys the reputation of "Napoleon of poetry", destroyed his family and went to Greece to give young life an ideal breadth, in the eyes of the poet, life is not only in front of the eyes, but also sleepless nights on the battlefield in the distance.
He is the stone of the mountain
"He is the stone of the mountain, and he can attack jade." Looking at the ebb and flow of history, we know the success or failure of the moment.
The blue of the Mediterranean is the blue of dreams and the blue of melancholy, at least for contemporary Chinese, the memories of the Mediterranean are not all beautiful. A few years ago, the former Soviet Union's Varyag aircraft carrier, the predecessor of the "Liaoning Ship", encountered all kinds of difficulties when crossing the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus Strait, which made many Chinese people sigh.
The famous scholar Cao Xiren said in the preface to the book: "The 'Mediterranean civilization' that has achieved the source of Western civilization has interpreted the war to the fullest, and the 'legitimacy' of pursuing hegemony and hegemony is still retained in the central territory of the current world political concept." In other words, at a time when win-win cooperation is becoming more and more the mainstream of international relations, the "zero-sum game logic" that abuses Mediterranean civilization still stubbornly occupies the thinking of some people.
As one of the important measures to establish a new type of international relations and build a "community with a shared future for mankind", the "Belt and Road" initiative has been proposed for nearly five years, and the commercial and cultural exchanges between China and countries along the route have been deepening, including the countries bordering the Mediterranean. In the last chapter of the book, the author clearly states: "In terms of economic interests, as the world's largest trading power, China is the country with the greatest interests in the Mediterranean... It is necessary for China to have a certain naval force in the Mediterranean, so our navy will often cruise on the Mediterranean, and even become another powerful force in the Mediterranean. ”
The sorting out of the logic of "Mediterranean civilization" in the "History of Mediterranean Warfare" has profound enlightenment significance for China's future development. What cannot be avoided is that in the process of the rise of China's great powers, "going to the deep blue" is imperative, in the waters around China, especially in the South China Sea, which is known as the "Asian Mediterranean", although there are few battles in history, with the increase in the importance of the Asia-Pacific region in the global political and economic map, especially the continuous intervention of extraterritorial forces, the logic of "Mediterranean civilization" of state leadership, civilization conflict, hegemony competition, reform and innovation, it is entirely possible to "borrow the corpse to return the soul" in various ways. This is a problem that China must face in its future development.
A history of the Mediterranean is a history of war. The history of the Mediterranean war lasts for thousands of years, giving birth to heroes and poisoning lives; giving birth to civilizations and destroying homes. Looking back at history, when a thousand sails fall, casting swords for ploughs to watch for peace may be the only way out for mankind's future.
From this point of view, the Mediterranean Sea is also a "sea of hearts"; the History of Mediterranean Warfare is also a history of the human mind.
Author of this article:
Pang Shuwei: Freelance writer, former reporter for xinhua news agency Qinghai branch, is now a lecturer at the School of Journalism of Qinghai Normal University.
Book Author:
Wen Pingyuan is a researcher at the Social Science Research Center of Hainan University. So far, he has published more than 60 works, of which the 12-volume "Words of the West" has been a best-seller for several years. In addition to professional research works, he is good at telling literary, historical and philosophical knowledge from a popular perspective, and showing the little-known side of Western historical civilization, and has been rated as an outstanding social science popularization expert in China.
Inside the book