Featured Image Credit: David Rose
Professor David Abulafia, who died suddenly on 24th January 2026, was one of the leading medieval historians in Britain, indeed anywhere. He grew up in London and the whole of his career was spent in Cambridge, but he ranged across the world in his academic interests, writing first about the history of the Mediterranean and later about the globe as a whole in his great work on the history of the oceans. Latterly, he championed traditional academic and cultural values against all those who would deny free expression, denude our great collections of their artefacts, overwhelm universities with their ideologies, and ignore or distort historical sources.
David Samuel Harvard Abulafia was born in London in 1949, the son of Leon Abulafia and his wife Rachel, nee Zafransky. When Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492 his father’s ancestors went to Galilee and lived for generations in Tiberias, in what is now northern Israel. One of his forebears, a Samuel Abulafia, was burned at the stake during the Spanish Inquisition.
His paternal grandparents met in Morocco: both were from families of Jewish merchants established in Mogador (now Essouira), who are commemorated in the local museum. David used to like showing photographs of his North African family in traditional costume. Coming from a Sephardi Jewish background and therefore following the rites and traditions of Jews from the Mediterranean area, it was something of a cultural challenge to grow up and worship in Ashkenazi Jewish communities, much more common in Britain, that derived from central and eastern Europe.
Credit: Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge
David was raised in Twickenham and was educated at St. Paul’s School in Hammersmith, going on to read History at King’s College, Cambridge. He then started a Cambridge PhD on the history of Sicily in the reign of the Holy Roman Emperor between 1220 and 1250, Frederick II, King of Sicily and of Jerusalem. Elected a Junior Research Fellow of Gonville and Caius College in 1974 on the strength of his research, David’s doctorate became his first book, published in 1977, The Two Italies.
The subject was much more interesting than the book’s academic subtitle Economic Relations Between the Norman Kingdom of Sicily and the Northern Communes. It concerned the commercial intertwining of Sicily and the emerging cities of Genoa, Pisa and Venice in the 12th century which established the long-term economic geography of Italy in which an agricultural south sent its basic commodities north to growing centres of commerce, industry and banking. The book’s scholarship and its success led to David’s appointment as an assistant lecturer and then, from 1983, a full university lecturer in the Cambridge History Faculty with a fellowship at Caius, a college notable then for the excellence of its History teaching and quality of its undergraduate intake. David was especially proud of his place there at the centre of ‘Cambridge History’.
His revisionist portrait of Frederic II as a cautious pragmatist rather than a bold and audacious leader and statesman, first set out in an article, led to his second book, Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor, published in 1988. It aroused both admiration and controversy in equal measure, the controversy largely coming from historians in Italy and Germany who preferred to think of Fredrick as a mighty imperial arbiter.
There followed further studies of this region and period including Commerce and Conquest in the Mediterranean 1100-1550, a collection of David’s essays (1993); volume 5, edited by David, in the New Cambridge Medieval History covering the period c.1198-1300 (1999); and then Italy in the Central Middle Ages (2004) in the Oxford History of Italy series. Between 1989 and 1995 he was general editor of the Journal of Medieval History.
David’s work on the history of the Mediterranean was brought to a conclusion in his magisterial survey The Great Sea (2011), a bestselling book that was awarded the Mountbatten Literary Award. Its subtitle on this occasion was more forthcoming because this really was A Human History of the Mediterranean with emphasis on the ‘human’. In this it contrasted with the ‘Annales school’ classic by Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949), in which human activity is dwarfed, and human choices constrained, by the environment. David’s book teemed with the people who had made the history of the region over more than five thousand years from the first temples erected on Malta, circa 3500 BC. David was intensely interested and aware of the commercial and material forces that made and destroyed nations and societies. But he was no Marxist determinist. In this book, and in all his work, he placed greater emphasis on human agency, on the capacity of people to shape their own destiny and transcend brute economic conditions. His own family’s long history in the Mediterranean region made that point quite clearly.
Yet before this, in 2008, his interests had begun to move beyond the Mediterranean as well, and he published in that years The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus. It was a pathbreaking study of first contacts in the 1490s between European explorers (and ultimately colonisers), and the peoples they encountered in the Atlantic basin. Written from primary sources and with natural sympathy for the indigenous peoples encountered and indeed exploited by Europeans, it is a model of how (and thus also of how not) to write about the processes and effects of the expansion of Europe in the early modern period. The book, based on deep scholarship, gave David the right to question those who opined about ‘colonialism’ on the basis of far less knowledge.
His magnum opus, The Boundless Sea. A Human History of the Oceans, published in 2019, followed naturally from his studies of the Atlantic and Mediterranean. It’s a narrative of the interconnectedness of the world over millennia, weaving together the histories of civilisations, empires, kingdoms and their inhabitants, not to mention the sailors whose exploits made the spread of commerce, culture and people possible through seafaring. Epic in scale, yet bringing together many micro-histories, biographies and personal vignettes, it is a history of the way the globe has been explored, populated and conquered. It deservedly won the Wolfson Prize for the best history book of the year in 2020.
By then David was three-years retired from his Chair in Mediterranean History in Cambridge to which he’d been appointed in 2000. Latterly, as readers of History Reclaimed will know, he became one of the leading figures in the opposition to cultural and academic decline in Britain and the West as a whole. Given David’s intellectual scope and breadth, no one was better able to discuss these matters across so many different fields and nations.
He fought the importation of ideology into the study of the past and became a tremendous enemy of history written to prove a pre-determined point or case. Having combed the archives of Europe and the Atlantic for the material that made his work possible, he championed the use of primary sources and poured scorn on historians whose loud opinions were just that, views held without research to back them. In universities he defended excellence rather than social engineering, reminding his fellow tutors and lecturers that every applicant should be treated as an individual and on their merits, not as a representative of a group or identity. Painfully aware of the tyranny of fashionable opinions in academic life, he fought for freedom of speech and the right to hold unfashionable views.
In 2015 David founded and led a group of ‘Historians for Britain’ who patiently made the historical case for Brexit. No one was better placed to understand Britain’s Atlantic and global identities based on our history than David, and as a medievalist he was very aware of the longstanding differences between the English-speaking common law traditions and later European Napoleonic legal systems. Some 282 historians signed a letter of protest criticising his ‘narrative of national exceptionalism’. David treated it as a mark of distinction: he was deeply attached to Britain and its culture, and wanted to conserve its many exceptional achievements and features, not least its academic prowess. He was also, of course, one the greatest scholars of European civilisation of his generation. It was simply impossible to criticise David of all people for ‘Little Englandism’.
Undaunted by criticism and ‘cancellation’, the torrent of historical distortion that coincided with the social hysteria of ‘lock-down’ at the start of this decade led David, in association with Robert Tombs, to found History Reclaimed in 2021. He was responsible for coining our name, in fact. He also took a leading role in the Pharos Foundation which is dedicated to raising funds for, and generally supporting, excellent scholarship at a time when public money is too often wasted on projects of slight intellectual importance. As David once put it, ‘We need to ensure that a good doctoral student who wants to work on the English exchequer in the 14th century gets his or her chance’.
David was deeply interested in museums for their own sake and as repositories for the medieval objects about which he often wrote. He once recalled the effect of ‘walking through Toledo and going into a museum and seeing a key which belonged to the Abulafia family.’ In the pages of The Spectator and the Daily Telegraph he often wrote about the widespread assault on museums, especially those with great international collections, now widely accused (usually incorrectly) of ‘looting’ artefacts and pressurised into ‘restoring’ them.
He was irked not just because the historical context of the supposed ‘theft’ was inevitably complex and nuanced but had been distorted or simplified to present these acquisitions in the worst possible light, but also because the movement for ‘restitution’ was an assault on his very approach to the past. David took the widest and most generous views of interactions between peoples, and he sought to encourage mutual understanding through the appreciation of different material cultures. To ‘return’ objects, often to an uncertain fate, rather than to display them and use them to educate millions of visitors to the great museums of the world was contrary to the human spirit and liberal values. Who, he asked, were the true cosmopolitans interested in humanity’s diversity: those who would destroy accessible international collections, or those who would preserve them?
David married Anna Brechta Sapir in 1979. They met at an academic conference. Professor Anna Sapir Abulafia is a historian of religion, especially of Christian-Jewish relations in the middle ages about which she has published several books. Until her recent retirement she held the chair of the Study of the Abrahamic Religions in the Theology Faculty in Oxford, and was a fellow of Lady Margaret Hall. They have two daughters, Rosa and Bianca. David Abulafia was a Fellow of the British Academy (2010) and was appointed CBE in 2023.
We who worked with David have lost a dear friend and deeply-admired colleague. We valued his opinions, his judgment, his common sense, and his good humour. Above all, we admired his unflinching commitment to the truth.
Credit: The British Academy
