The Mediterranean has always attracted the imagination of modern historians as the epicentre of great political entities, such as the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Ottomans, Venetians, and Spanish. However, it seems that the sea itself was always on the margins of historical inquiry -- at least, until the publication of the famous two-volume work by F. Braudel in 1949, which profoundly shaped the understanding of how societies living around the Mediterranean interacted in a single period of history, offering what David Abulafia has coined "a horizontal history of the Mediterranean." This collection of essays aims to offer a rather vertical history of war in the Mediterranean Sea, from the early Middle Ages to the early modernity, putting the emphasis on the changing face of several different aspects and contexts of war over time.