‘Since nobody could yet tack into a headwind,’ he writes of northern European sailors in the centuries before the Vikings, ‘each journey had to wait for the right wind to blow the ship forwards.’ Decades of research into the sailing patterns of square-rigged ships (which were known in the North Sea and Baltic from at least 300 BC, and maybe some 500 years earlier than that, to judge from Swedish rock carvings) has established that they could make progress to windward at about 2½ knots: 50 miles a day of distance made good Bergen to Ipswich upwind in less than a week. ‘The Whale’ (12th-century English Bestiary)Ĭrucially, Pye has zero understanding of the way in which square-sailed ships - the ligaments of this culture - actually worked.

Everything about them is European nothing in that list distinguishes north from south, except perhaps for the lateness with which it made its way north. The success stories of early modern capitalism, from the Hanseatic League to Venice, Antwerp and Genoa, are all part of the same set of understandings. A professionalised, urbanised and commercialised world is the grand legacy of the Mediterranean - the astonishing Phoenician-Greek-Roman-Byzantine-Arab-Venetian-Turkish continuity you can know and feel today in any harbour town from Cadiz to Latakia. That is a good summary of what he has described - in essence, the medieval urbanisation of northern Europe - but not a single one of those aspects of life was not a reflection of what had already been long apparent in the south. That is Michael Pye’s question: do the North Sea and the connections across it constitute the missing half of the European story? How have its dynamics shaped our history? But more than that, is the north merely the ragged edge of the south, far less continuous in its culture, broken by a hostile climate and impoverished soils, the rough end of Europe? Or does it have a substance beyond that? Can you really say that ‘the North Sea made us who we are’?

Surely the North Sea deserves its human history too?

The Mediterranean glows in our conception of the Continent, the warm source of everything that is best in us, the seat of civilisation, from which one delicious wave after another has washed up on our shores.īut what about the Mediterranean’s twin, the other great lobe of the Atlantic which defines the northern edge of the European peninsula, a sea of enormous fertility, its edges laced with islands, fed into by the richest of rivers, with, in the Baltic, its own inner chamber, giving access to the giant hinterlands of Russia.

The Edge of the World by Michael Pye