David Abulafia was a distinguished and pioneering maritime historian whose research on medieval Mediterranean trade, in Sicily, the Balearic Islands and the Levant, led him to write acclaimed books such as a large history of the Mediterranean across time, entitled The Great Sea, which was awarded the British Academy Medal in 2013, and The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans, which explored how the oceans became connected through long-distance trade, and for which he was awarded the Wolfson History Prize.
He was also well known for his passionate interest in medieval and early Renaissance Italy, with an emphasis on southern Italy and the major islands. Other works included a biography of Emperor Frederick II and a series of articles about the kingdom of Naples in the 15th century from economic, cultural and political perspectives. His interest in the meeting of religions in medieval Spain and Sicily led him to the Atlantic, and a study of the first encounters between Europeans and the native peoples of the eastern and western Atlantic around the time of Columbus.
David Samuel Harvard Abulafia was born in Twickenham, Middlesex, into a Sephardic Jewish family on December 12, 1949. He was educated at St. Paul’s School (1963-67) and King’s College, Cambridge, where he completed his PhD on the Kingdom of Sicily, which became the basis of his first book.
He spent most of his career at the University of Cambridge, where he became a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College in 1974, was appointed to his first Faculty post in 1978, and became Professor of Mediterranean History from 2000-2017. Abulafia was Chairman of the History Faculty at Cambridge University from 2003–2005, and was elected a member of the governing Council of Cambridge University in 2008. He retired in 2017 as Professor Emeritus of Mediterranean History.
Abulafia was a hugely prolific author, specialising in Mediterranean history, beginning with his book The Two Italies in 1977. Much of his work focused on the economic history of the Mediterranean and in the meeting of the three Abrahamic faiths in the Mediterranean. He was influenced by the great French historian Fernand Braudel, in particular, his masterpiece, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949).
But he became increasingly critical of Braudel’s structuralist approach, arguing that Braudel did not pay sufficient attention to human agency. In a later book of essays which he edited, The Mediterranean in History, Abulafia wrote, “in writing the history of the Mediterranean it is essential to write a human history of the Mediterranean Sea expressed through the commercial, cultural and religious interaction that took place across its surface.”
Over more than 40 years Abulafia wrote numerous books including Italy, Sicily, and the Mediterranean, 1100-1400 (1987), Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor (1988), Commerce and Conquest in the Mediterranean, 1100–1500 (1993), The Western Mediterranean Kingdoms, 1200–1500: The Struggle for Dominion (1997), The Mediterranean in History (2003), Italy in the Central Middle Ages (2004), The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus (2008), The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (2011) and The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans (2019), exploring the people who moved across the open sea, and emphasising the role of maritime trade in the political, cultural and economic history of humanity. It won the Wolfson History Prize and the Mountbatten Award in 2020.
He wrote on subjects ranging from the origins of the Inquisition in 15th-century Spain to the Catalan Kingdom of Majorca. At the heart of much of his work, he told one interviewer, was “an interest in the ways that connections across quite wide spaces – economic links but also cultural links –have been effected, and the interactions between these economic relationships and political developments.” His best work showed an extraordinary range and he combined this with an astonishing eye for detail.
He received numerous awards during his long and distinguished academic career. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2010 and a member of the Academia Europaea. In 2013 he was awarded one of three inaugural British Academy Medals for his work on Mediterranean history. In 2023 he was made a Commander of the British Empire for services to scholarship.
In his later years he became an increasingly outspoken public intellectual. He wrote opinion pieces criticising the UK’s membership in the European Union and in 2023 he wrote an article in the Daily Telegraph titled: “It would be uncivilised to give Greece the Elgin Marbles”, where he wrote that they belong “in London, in a great universal museum, not in the narrow confines of Athens’s Acropolis”.
In recent years he became a founder member of History Reclaimed, which set out to challenge the idea that we should be ashamed of our past, perhaps particularly slavery, and he became a fearless champion of intellectual and academic freedom.
Simon Sebag Montefiore, a fellow Jewish historian, said he had “lost a friend and a mentor”, describing Abulafia as “both an outstanding historian of world history, author of several masterpieces and also an academic who campaigned for free speech and against anti-Jewish racism in the public realm. His two master works, The Great Sea: a Human History of the Mediterranean and The Boundless Sea: a Human History of the Oceans – along with his earlier Frederick II – were outstanding works of literature and scholarship, distinguished by a genuine, rarely equalled polymathic knowledge of world history and culture, a superb instinct for anecdote and data, and a beautiful writing style, breath-taking span and depth and boldness of vision.”
In 1979 Abulafia married Anna Brechta Sapir, also a distinguished historian, who specialised in medieval Christian-Jewish relations. She survives him with their daughters Rosa and Bianca.
David Abulafia: born December, 12 1949. Died January 24, 2026
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