Mention of the term convivencia can cause eyes to roll involuntarily and make stomachs churn. In our era of growing sectarian tensions, some modern writers have taken to creating escapist literature as history, describing an al-Andalus in which Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived in sweet harmony and jointly created a brilliant culture. Using a highly selective approach to the evidence, these writers wistfully describe an idyllic society whose innocence we have lost. Two major problems plague such treatments: such a society never existed except in the modern imagination, and the interaction of religious communities in al-Andalus was not unique.

Stephen O'Shea has written a book that reveals how both convivencia and conflict characterized Muslim–Christian relations all across the Mediterranean basin during the European medieval era. His approach produces results very different from those we usually find on the shelves of bookstores. Rather than seeing convivencia only in al-Andalus, he ranges across the breadth of the Mediterranean, from the Guadalquivir to the Bosporus. Rather than trying to construct a story of peace and harmony, he organizes his book around a series of battles, all the while demonstrating that convivencia was the norm until the next military engagement occurred. He does not idealize convivencia: he shows that Christians and Jews in the Muslim world resented certain legal constraints that Islamic law imposed on them; nevertheless, they were free to become wealthy, they could perform the rituals of their religious traditions, and they could become scholars or creative artists. When Jews looked to the north to see how their cousins were faring in Christian Europe after the 10th century, their place in Muslim society looked good indeed.

The book is a pleasure to read. O'Shea possesses an enviable gift for description and for sustaining a narrative. The descriptions of the battles that he identifies as epochal—Yarmuk, Poitiers, Manzikert, Palermo, Toledo, Hattin, Las Navas de Tolosa, Constantinople, and Malta—are models of informed, concise, and vivid writing. The accounts of the battles convey a dramatic sense of immediacy, and the evocative descriptions of the terrain make it clear that O'Shea visited each of the battle sites. A nonspecialist in the history of the Muslim world, O'Shea engaged in an enormous amount of research that enabled him to write with confidence and accuracy and, most telling of all, to make insightful comparisons and contrasts between episodes far apart geographically or chronologically. Although the book is framed by the battles, it is a well-constructed history of the confrontation between Christian and Muslim states around the Mediterranean between the 7th and 16th centuries. The paperback edition will be useful supplementary reading in classrooms.

The quality of the writing and the historical information is of a high caliber, but the overall framework of the book is a bit creaky, leaving the reader with the feeling that a load-supporting wall is in jeopardy. In the introduction to the book, the author announces that he is covering the period from the battle of Yarmuk in 636, to the failed Ottoman attempt to capture Malta in 1565, a period that he says justifies calling the Mediterranean a “sea of faith.” He argues that the Mediterranean was a sea of faith as long as the dominant religions “gave respectable cover to the workings of age-old cupidity, by making the mundane violence of a feral time seem supernatural and sublime and by extending a blessing to even the most wanton instances of warrior atrocity.” Gradually, “the old religious justifications were slowly being eroded by the dawn of the Atlantic era and the workings of hard-headed commercial interest” (p. 8). Readers can only infer that, by the 16th century, religious faith had become eroded by the more glittery attractions of mammon.

By the end of the book, however, O'Shea concludes his account of the Malta episode by admitting that religious fervor was no less in evidence than it had been centuries earlier, as the recent outbreak of the Reformation made clear. Realizing he cannot argue that the power of religious faith was actually declining, he shifts his argument for why the Mediterranean was no longer a sea of faith by stating that Spain had lost interest in mastery of the Mediterranean. With this explanation, it was a sea of faith only as long as it was being contested.

In fact, as Andrew Hess and others have argued, Christian–Muslim attitudes in the Mediterranean had become harsher and more dangerous by the time of Malta, not less. Spain's persecutions of Moriscos until 1614; the fierce competition between Spaniards and Ottomans, from the 1530s to the 1570s, for control of North Africa; the exploits of the corsairs from the mid-16th to early 19th centuries; and the Ottoman wresting of Crete from Venetian control in the mid-17th century were incidents with clear religious overtones that kept tensions very high. On the other hand, Spain and the Ottomans did sign a truce, in 1580, when Spain realized that it was far more interested in New World silver than in fighting Moors. If O'Shea had begun his book with the “mastery of the Mediterranean” thesis with which he concluded it and provided a fuller discussion of the Spanish–Ottoman war and truce, this would have been an exceptional book.

As it is, it is merely excellent.