The human record of the past is untidy, and reveals itself only in fits and starts. In this cheerfully ambitious history of the people who have lived beside and traveled across the Mediterranean, David Abulafia serves as a masterful guide through the cluttered murk of time. He draws clear, unbroken lines that illuminate the continuity of human events from the Neanderthals of Gibraltar to last year’s Gaza flotilla raid.

In some ways, Abulafia is a descendant, albeit a rebellious one, of Fernand Braudel (familiar to all history majors here), whose towering influence has dominated the study of Mediterranean history since the mid-twentieth century. Abulafia’s work, however, rejects his predecessor’s admonition that a proper telling of history subordinates individual events to deeper forces. The Great Sea overflows with wars, empires, kings, and commoners. Most of all, however, the book is populated with vivid and compelling personalities, and never do these happenings or historical actors blend together into the fuzzy mishmash the reader might fear. Instead, Abulafia manages an unlikely feat: a coherent, compelling account of the history of the “liquid continent.”

Abulafia does not deny the importance of the fishermen who have fed the Mediterranean world, nor the climatological, geological, and agricultural trends that have affected the region’s development. But he chooses instead to focus on the armies, the merchants, and the travelers—agents of the cultural, economic, religious, and political interactions that have shaped human society.

“My ‘Mediterranean,’” he writes, “is resolutely the surface of the sea itself, its shores and islands, particularly the port cities that provide the main departure and arrival points for those crossing it.”

Although he is a prominent scholarly historian at Cambridge (as well as a gifted literary communicator, and judging by the content of this book, somewhat of a walking encyclopedia), Abulafia makes no pretense at concealing his own laudatory attitude toward the Mediterranean culture and history. A Sephardic Jew with deep Mediterranean ancestry, he does not fail to mention a medieval Kabbalist–also named Abulafia–who amassed a great knowledge of the Great Sea. Our Abulafia cannot resist positioning himself as the continuation of this legacy. And what better successor could a thirteenth-century traveler have asked for?

The Mediterranean, Abulafia writes, “has played a role in the history of human civilization that far surpasses any other expanse of sea.”

Like the sailors who first ventured out on its waters, bold readers will find here worlds to discover.