Levant

The countries bordering on the eastern Mediterranean Sea from Turkey to Egypt.

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The Levant covers the eastern Mediterranean, its islands, including Crete, Cyprus, Rhodes, Chios, and Lesbos, and the lands it borders: modern-day Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, and Egypt. Around 1300, the region was under the control of a variety of different rulers, the Turco-Circassian Mamluk dynasty in Egypt and Syria, various Turkish states in western Anatolia, and the Byzantines. The Genoese controlled Chios and Lesbos and had established themselves on the Anatolian mainland and in Constantinople, while Venice controlled Crete, Negroponte, Naxos, Andros, Mykonos, Karpathos, and Santorini. The Hospitallers ruled Rhodes and, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, built a castle on the Anatolian coast at Bodrum.

From about the mid-fifteenth century, the Ottomans became increasingly dominant. They defeated the Venetians in war from 1463 to 1479 and, in the following century, destroyed the Mamluks, capturing Syria (1516) and Egypt (1517), took Rhodes from the Hospitallers (1522), and conquered Cyprus (1571). While Ottoman control of the Levant weakened thereafter, such weakness was relative, for in 1669 the Ottomans took Crete from the Venetians. As Genoese and Venetian importance declined in the area, that of France, Britain, and Holland increased. Later, Russia also became increasingly active in the region. In 1770 the Russian navy wiped out the Ottoman fleet at Cesme.

Trade

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Western traders, in particular those from Genoa and Venice, imported goods such as textiles, soap, cloth, wine, and war materials into the Levant and exported commodities such as slaves, grain, alum, cotton, and spices. Apart from being a producer of commodities itself, the Levant was also a central point for the transit trade in luxury items from the East.

With the Portuguese activities in the Red Sea and the opening up of the sea route to the East, the Levant suffered some decline, particularly as a region for the transit trade in luxury items such as spices, which had formed an important part of Egypt's trade. However, the area continued to be of major commercial importance into the eighteenth century and beyond.

From the late sixteenth century, the English became increasingly important in the commerce of the Levant. English trade, consisting largely of the import of woolen cloth, was to a great extent under the control of the English Levant Company in London, which was granted its first charter in 1581. Dominant through the seventeenth century, English trade went into a temporary decline in the eighteenth century, when the Marseilles merchants became the dominant European traders. The French had established close diplomatic relations with the Ottomans from the early sixteenth century. From 1661, their trade was subject to very firm royal control. The Dutch also came to play a commercial role in the Levant. The interests of these western merchants were represented by their various consuls and ambassadors, and these countries conducted much of their trade through Ottoman middlemen, who liased among the western merchants, the Ottoman authorities, and the local producers. Such middlemen tended often to be Greeks, Armenians, or Jews.

Religion

Throughout this period the Levant represented a world of religious plurality in which Christianity (including Greek Orthodox, Maronite, Suryani, Armenian, Catholic, and Protestant), Judaism, and Islam coexisted, and in which Muslims, Jews, and Christians very much shared a common cultural heritage. From the beginning of the seventeenth century, Catholic missionaries began to proselytize among the various eastern-rite churches. Such efforts were often successful and there were many conversions, particulary among the Suryani. The eastern churches were much concerned by the threat such missionary activity posed to their communities, and Christian authorities in Aleppo, for example, appealed to the Ottoman sultan to protect them against this religious encroachment. The Ottoman government responded, backing the local religious establishment against the interloper, less in the interests of religion than from a desire for internal stability, and they issued decrees forbidding the Christian population from changing sects.

In the eighteenth century, religion came to be used as a political lever by the great powers, each seeking to protect the interests of a particular religious community within the Ottoman Empire in an attempt to gain influence over internal Ottoman political affairs. Russia claimed to represent the interests of the Othodox community, using a clause in the Treaty of Kucuk Kaynarca, concluded between Catherine the Great (ruled 1762–1796) and the Ottoman Empire in 1774, to justify their right to intervene in favor of the Orthodox subjects of the sultan. The French claimed to represent the Catholics, and the British concerned themselves with the Protestants.

From early on, the Holy Land attracted a growing number of pilgrims, both Christian and Muslim, visiting Jerusalem, Mecca, and Medina. Protection of the pilgrimage routes and of the Holy Cities formed an important part of the Ottoman sultan's image. While the sheer number of pilgrims could create problems for the authorities, temporarily swelling the population and placing additional strain on the resources of the cities, they also brought additional revenue. For example, in Jerusalem, the Christian pilgrims paid a tax to enter the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Relations between the Christian pilgrims were not always harmonious, reflecting the bitter hostility between the Greek and Latin churches for control of the holy places. In 1755 the Franciscans were driven out of the Holy Sepulchre by the Greek Orthodox. Despite energetic protests from France, the Ottoman authorities supported the Greek Orthodox in this dispute.

This religious plurality was also reflected in the great ethnic mix of the Levant, which was made up of a great assortment of ethnicities. While the islands had populations of Greeks and Latins, as well as Ottoman Muslims, the great trading cities such as Aleppo were populated by a variety of different ethnic groups, for example, Greeks, Armenians, Turks, Latins, Arabs, and Kurds.

The Levant was thus a mixed world, religiously, ethnically, and linguistically, which gave rise to a vibrant cosmopolitan commercial Levantine culture. Although there were trade wars and political upheavals, and divisions between different groups and religions, the overriding feature of this world was one of fluidity and accommodation, not hard-and-fast divisions and impermeable boundaries.

Bibliography

Brummett, Palmira. Ottoman Seapower and Levantine Diplomacy in the Age of Discovery. Albany, N.Y., 1994. Interesting presentation of the Ottomans as a naval power.

Goffman, Daniel. Izmir and the Levantine World, 1550–1650. Seattle, 1990. Detailed study.

Greene, Molly. A Shared World: Christians and Muslims in the Early Modern Mediterranean. Princeton, 2000. Crete in transition from Venetian to Ottoman rule.

Hamilton, Alastair, Alexander H. de Groot, and Maurits H. van den Boogert, eds. Friends and Rivals in the East: Studies in Anglo-Dutch Relations in the Levant from the Seventeenth to the Early Nineteenth Century. Leiden, 2000. A collection of articles on military, diplomatic, and commercial relations.

—KATE FLEET

Name for the nations on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea: Cyprus, Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey.

The Levant

"Shami" redirects here. For chamois leather, see Shammy.

This article is about the geographical region. For other uses, see Levant (disambiguation).

See also: Names of the Levant

The Levant (pronounced /ləˈvænt/) (Arabic: ‎, Bilad ash-Shām, also known as المشرق (Mashriq)) describes, traditionally, the Eastern Mediterranean at large, but can be used as a geographical term that denotes a large area in Western Asia formed by the lands bordering the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, roughly bounded on the north by the Taurus Mountains, on the south by the Arabian Desert, and on the west by the Mediterranean Sea, while on the east it extends towards the Zagros Mountains. The Levant includes the countries of Lebanon, Israel, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and occasionally Cyprus and the Sinai. The UCL Institute of Archeology describes the Levant as the "crossroads of western Asia, the eastern Mediterranean and northeast Africa".^[1]

Levant was originally applied to the "Mediterranean lands east of Italy", from the Middle French word levant meaning "the Orient". Historically, the "trade on the Levant" between Western Europe and the Ottoman Empire was of great economic importance. An imprecise term, Levant refers to an area of cultural habitation rather than to a specific geographic region, and its meaning shifts according to historical and cultural reference and preference.

Contents 1 Etymology 1.1 "Capitulations" 1.2 Since World War I 1.3 Further uses 2 See also 3 References 4 External links

Etymology

Inhabitants of the Levant, late nineteenth century.

The term Levant, which first appeared in English in 1497, originally meant a wider sense of "Mediterranean lands east of Venetia", as in French soleil levant "rising Sun" — from the verb lever, "to rise", from Latin levare "to raise". It thus referred to the Eastern direction of the rising Sun from the perspective of those who first used it and has analogues in other languages, notably Morgenland – or a closely related word meaning morning land – in most Germanic languages.

This is similar to the Ancient Greek name Ανατολία (Anatolía), which means the "land of the rising Sun", or simply the East. It derives from ἀνατολή "the rise", especially "the sunrise", resp. from ἀνατέλλω = to rise, esp. said of the Sun or Moon (ἀνά = up, above + τέλλω = to go, rise, come into existence). For the Greeks, Ανατολία (Anatolía) is a synonym of Μικρά Ασία (Mikrá Asía = Asia Minor), not of Levant, which is Λεβάντες (Levándes) in Modern Greek. Likewise, the Arabic term Mashriq, derived from the Arabic consonantal root sh-r-q (ش ر ق), relating to "the east" or "the sunrise", refers to "the land where the Sun rises", and designates a broad area encompassing the Levant. However, the most equivalent historically used Arabic term for the Levant is the "Sham" (الشام), now mostly used by Arabs in reference to Greater Syria; the same name "Sham" is also one of the Arabic names for Damascus.

"Capitulations"

The term became current in English in the 16th century, along with the first English merchant adventurers in the region: English ships appeared in the Mediterranean in the 1570s and the English merchant company signed its agreement ("capitulations") with the Grand Turk in 1579 (Braudel).

In 19th-century travel writing, the term incorporated eastern regions under then current or recent governance of the Ottoman empire, such as Greece. In 19th-century archaeology, it referred to overlapping cultures in this region during and after prehistoric times, intending to reference the place instead of any one culture.

Since World War I

The Eastern Mediterranean

When the United Kingdom took over Palestine in the aftermath of the First World War, some of the new rulers adapted the term pejoratively to refer to inhabitants of mixed Arab and European descent and to Europeans (usually French, Italian or Greek) who had assimilated and adopted local dress and customs.^{[citation needed]}

The French Mandates of Syria and Lebanon, from 1920 to 1946, were called the Levant states. The term became common in archaeology at that time, as many important early excavations were made then, such as Mari and Ugarit. Since these sites could not be classified as Mesopotamian, North Africa, or Arabian, they came to be referred to as "Levantine."

Today "Levant" is typically used by archaeologists and historians with reference to the prehistory and the ancient and medieval history of the region, as when discussing the Crusades. The term is also occasionally employed to refer to modern or contemporary events, peoples, states or parts of states in the same region, namely Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Cyprus (compare with Near East, Middle East, Eastern Mediterranean and Western Asia). Several researchers include the island of Cyprus in Levantine studies, including the Council for British Research in the Levant^[2], the UCLA Near Eastern Languages and Cultures department^[3], and the UCL Institute of Archaeology^[1], the latter of which has dated the connection between Cyprus and mainland Levant to the early Iron Age. Currently, a dialect of Levantine Arabic, Cypriot Maronite Arabic, is the most-spoken minority language in the country.

Further uses

It has been suggested that this section be split into a new article. (Discuss)

The name Levantine (French: Levantine, Italian: Levantino, Turkish: Levanten) is additionally applied to people of Italian (especially Venetian and Genoese), French, or other Euro-Mediterranean origin who have lived in Istanbul, İzmir and other parts of Anatolia (in present-day Turkey) or the eastern Mediterranean coast (the Levant, particularly in present-day Lebanon and Israel) since the period of the Crusades, the Byzantine period and the Ottoman period. The majority of them are descendants of traders from the maritime republics of the Mediterranean (such as the Republic of Venice, the Republic of Genoa and the Republic of Ragusa) or of the inhabitants of the Crusader states (especially the French Levantines in Lebanon, Israel and Turkey). They continue to live in Istanbul (mostly in the districts of Galata, Beyoğlu and Nişantaşı) and İzmir (mostly in the districts of Karşıyaka, Bornova and Buca.) Famous people of the present-day Levantine community in Turkey include Caroline Giraud Koç^[4] and Giovanni Scognamillo.^[5]

See also

• Canaan
• Eastern Mediterranean
• Fertile Crescent
• Greater Syria
• History of the Levant
• Land of Israel
• Mashriq
• Mesopotamia
• Mediterranean Sea
• Eastern Mediterranean
• Middle East
• Near East
• Western Asia

References

1. ^ ^{a b} The Ancient Levant, UCL Institute of Archaeology, May 2008
2. ^ Council for British Research in the Levant homepage
3. ^ Biblical and Levantine studies, UCLA
4. ^ Sabah daily newspaper: "Onlar İzmirli Hristiyan Türkler"
5. ^ NTV-MSNBC: "Giovanni Scognamillo ile sinema üzerine"

• Braudel, Fernand, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II
• Julia Chatzipanagioti: Griechenland, Zypern, Balkan und Levante. Eine kommentierte Bibliographie der Reiseliteratur des 18. Jahrhunderts. 2 Vol. Eutin 2006. ISBN 3981067428
• http://www.levantine.plus.com/index.htm. Levantine Heritage Site. Includes many oral and scholarly histories, and genealogies for some Levantine Turkish families.

This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (April 2009)

External links

• The History of the Ancient Near East The Ancient Levant
  Levantine Cultural Center in Los Angeles

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