Mare Nostrum

• 1. Introduction

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  Mare Nostrum is two words in Latin that carry the weight of an entire civilization's ambition. They mean, simply, "Our Sea." Rome remains the only state in recorded history to have controlled the entire coastline of the Mediterranean, and that phrase was the name they gave it. But the story of Mare Nostrum does not end with Rome. It echoes through the centuries, resurfacing in the 19th century among Italian nationalists, and then again in the 20th century in the speeches of Benito Mussolini, who used it to justify a fascist empire's reach toward Egypt, Somalia, and eastern Kenya. How did two words become a vessel for so many different visions of power? And what does it mean when a phrase coined by one empire is borrowed by another to claim the same inheritance?

• 2. The Roman Original

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  Romans first applied the label Mare Nostrum not to the whole Mediterranean but to a smaller, closer sea. After their conquest of Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica during the Punic Wars with Carthage, they used the phrase specifically for the Tyrrhenian Sea, the stretch of water just off the western Italian coast. It was a territorial declaration as much as a geographical one. By 30 BC, Roman dominion had stretched from the Iberian Peninsula all the way to Egypt, and the name expanded with the empire's borders to cover the entire Mediterranean basin. Other Latin names circulated for the sea as well, among them Mare Internum, meaning "Internal Sea." What was not used was Mare Mediterraneum. That term was a Late Latin creation, attested only well after the Fall of Rome, making it a younger coinage than many people assume.

• 3. Italian Nationalism's Revival

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  Following Italy's unification in 1861, a generation of nationalists began looking south and east at the sea and seeing Rome's legacy waiting to be reclaimed. The drive had a specific historical trigger. During the Scramble for Africa in the 1880s, calls grew louder for an Italian colonial empire, and with them came the first modern reinvention of Mare Nostrum. The stakes of this framing were spelled out in a striking argument made by nationalists of the period: even if the coast of Tripoli were a desert, even if it would not support one peasant or one Italian business firm, they insisted, Italy still needed to take it to avoid being suffocated in Mare Nostrum. The sea had become, in this telling, not a resource to exploit but a perimeter to defend against rivals who might fence Italy in.

• 4. Mussolini's Mediterranean War

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  Benito Mussolini reached for the phrase Mare Nostrum much as Adolf Hitler reached for Lebensraum: as a slogan with classical authority behind it. Mussolini believed Italy was the most powerful of the Mediterranean countries after World War I, and he declared that "the twentieth century will be a century of Italian power." He built one of the most powerful navies of the era to back that claim. When World War II began, Italy already controlled the north and south shores of the central Mediterranean basin. The fall of France removed one major rival, leaving the British Mediterranean Fleet as the primary obstacle. Britain held bases in Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus, Egypt, and Mandatory Palestine. Italian forces moved against Albania, Greece, Yugoslavia, and Egypt, and laid siege to Malta, all in pursuit of sealing Axis control over the sea. Turkey's president, İsmet İnönü, felt the pressure directly. He promised that Turkey would enter the war only if the Soviet Union joined the Allies, a careful act of balance against what he saw as a threat to his country's neutrality. Mussolini's ultimate ambition stretched even beyond the Mediterranean. He imagined an enlarged Italian Empire running from the Mediterranean shores of Egypt to the Indian Ocean shores of Somalia and eastern Kenya, and he spoke of turning the Mediterranean itself into "an Italian lake."

• 5. Where the Vision Broke Down

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  Italian attempts to conquer Greece failed and stalled until German forces arrived to rescue the campaign. Across the Battle of the Mediterranean, the Axis managed only brief periods of real ascendancy. Allied armies and navies blocked the wider imperial project at every turn. The surrender of Italy in September 1943 drew a hard line under Mussolini's Mare Nostrum ambitions. The phrase that had promised a Roman inheritance ended up marking the outer limit of what fascist Italy could actually hold.

• 6. Literature, Law, and Rescue

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  Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, the Spanish author, gave the phrase a very different life. His novel titled Mare Nostrum, published in 1918, became a best-seller, and a film adaptation followed in 1948. The phrase also entered the language of international scholarship when it was chosen as the theme for the inaugural conference of the Society for Mediterranean Law and Culture, held in June 2012 at the University of Cagliari Faculty of Law in Sardinia. In that context, Mare Nostrum was turned outward rather than inward, intended to embrace the full diversity of Mediterranean cultures and to encourage cooperation among the nations that share its shores. Then in 2013, after a migrant shipwreck near Lampedusa, the Italian government used the name for a military and humanitarian operation designed to rescue migrants in the Mediterranean and arrest human traffickers. The same two words that once described an empire's exclusive claim on a sea were now the name of a mission to save lives within it.