This book focuses on the Mediterranean world of 400 years ago, but the perspective stretches back to the world of Homer, and the foreground reaches up to the 20th century. In considering the Mediterranean's history it is not treaties, wars and dynastic marriages that claim the author's attention, but such questions as how long it took for a cargo ship to work its way from Alicante to Alexandria, how much it cost to send a special courier from Madrid to Paris, how people lived and what they lived on and what happened in cities like Venice, Naples or Constantinople.