“Mountains Come First”

To gaze at the mountains from the plains in the sixteenth-century Mediterranean world was to look back in time, according to Braudel. Mountains were both geologically old and socially primeval: they bore evidence of prehistoric folding and ancient, inland seas, as well as the marks of settlement from eras before the coastal plains were made safe from disease and enemies. Rome's impact was muted, and religious conversion – both Christianization and Islamization – developed more slowly than on the plains. These Mediterranean “hilltop worlds” were worlds apart, “semideserted” and “half-wild” zones of refuge for religious sects and “aberrant cults.” Yet, despite their reputation for slow change and inhabitants' “primitive credulity,” mountainous regions could also experience rapid and violent shifts as the result of conquest and reconquest by plains polities, most of which established only tenuous control over the highlands.

Like Johnson's mid-eighteenth-century musings about the craggy landscape of the Scottish islands blocking “national justice,” Braudel's portrait of mountain and hill regions as reserves for ancient practices promoted their association with legal primitivism.