Wondering if the world is going to end soon? We don’t blame you. Tsunamis and floods, earthquakes and nuclear melt-downs, Arctic iceberg melt-downs and tornados—and it’s not even 2012 yet. Just remember, people have been expecting the end of the world almost since it began. It’s all in how you interpret the “end.” Philip Mansel takes the time to notice one prediction of the Apocalypse in his highly detailed Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean.

A new Messiah appeared in 1648 in a city where “Asia and Europe meet” on the Mediterranean, one of the freest cities in the West at the time: Smyrna. Manic-depressive and self-proclaimed savior Sabbatai Sevi failed to consummate two marriages and decided instead to marry the Torah itself. After years of exile, he returned only to declare himself King of Israel and Sultan. His Jewish followers, who felt vulnerable in the wake of a growing Christian population, believed the end of the world was at hand, but their own world came crashing down when the man to whom they had sent their virgin daughters converted to Islam at the threat of impalement.

Perhaps predicting the end of the world was not so strange for a city that would see the end of its way of life in a particularly violent manner. The tiny blip on Smyrna’s radar that was Sabbatai Sevi in some ways foreshadowed the fall of the Levant region. Mansel examines the legendarily glorious histories of Smyrna, now Izmir, Turkey; Alexandria, Egypt; and Beirut, Lebanon. His descriptions leave little doubt as to wonders of the old Levant, whose main export was Chios silk and whose women and wine were attractive to sailors. Smyrna exported grain, raisins, and especially figs while Beirut was the “republic of merchants.” The naturally diverse aspect of all three cities, with people speaking countless languages and worshipping in synagogues and churches as well as mosques, made them seem limitless.

They were never utopias, however, or why else would some of Smyrna’s citizens have seen the need for a new Messiah? Even from its prosperous decades in the 1600s, there had always been tensions between nationalities and other factions. As Turkey, Greece, Britain, and other nations with their eye on the wealth of the Levant added heat to existing problems over the centuries, the three cities found themselves destroyed and transformed by massacres, wars, and dictators. The three “splendid” worlds of the Levant, by the mid-twentieth century, had long since ended.