m
the Isthmus of Suez to the Sacred Promontory of Portugal, and in this
area a long-headed, brunette Mediterranean race, clearly unified as to
stock, despite local differentiations of culture, languages and nations
in the various islands, peninsulas and other segregated coastal regions
of this sea.[556] The basin appears therefore as an historical whole; for
in it a certain group of peoples concentrated their common efforts,
which crossed and criss-crossed from shore to shore. Phoenicia's trade
ranged westward to the outer coasts of Spain, and later Barcelona's
maritime enterprises reached east to the Levant. Greece's commercial and
colonial relations embraced the Crimea and the mouth of the Rhone, and
Genoa's extended east to the Crimea again. The Saracens, on reaching the
Mediterranean edge of the Arabian peninsula, swept the southern coasts
and islands, swung up the western rim of the basin to the foot of the
Pyrenees, and taught the sluggish Spaniards the art of irrigation
practiced on the garden slopes of Yemen. The ships of the Crusaders from
Venice, Genoa and Marseilles anchored in the ports of Mohammedanized
Syria, brought the symbol of the cross back to its birthplace In
Jerusalem, but carried away with them countless suggestions from the
finished industries of the East. Here was give and take, expansion and
counter-expansion, conquest and expulsion, all together making up a
great sum of reciprocal relations embracing the whole basin, the outcome
of that close geographical connection which every sharply defined sea
establishes between the coasts which it washes.

[Sidenote: North Sea and Baltic basins.]

The same thing has come to pass in the North Sea. Originally Celtic on
its western or British side, as opposed to its eastern or Germanic
coast, it has been wholly Teutonized on that flank also from the Strait
of Dover to the Firth of Tay, and sprinkled with Scandinavian settlers
from the Firth of Tay northward to Caithness.[557] The eleventh century
saw this ethnic unification achieved, and the end of the Middle Ages
witnessed the diffusion of the elements of a common civilization through
the agency of commerce from Bruges to Bergen. The Baltic, originally
Teutonic only on its northern and western shores, has in historical
times become almost wholly Teutonic, including even the seaboard of
Finland and much of the coast provinces of Russia.[558] Unification of
civilization attended this unification of race. In