The Island of Aegina: An Example of Modus Vivendi in the Medieval Mediterranean

The medieval Mediterranean has predominantly been considered to be a place of continuous conflict in matters of political and territorial ambitions, and, of course, religious dominance. The constant incursions on the islands of the Mediterranean have been considered by historians, legitimately in many instances, to be destructive of local communities, and to have caused turbulence in the economy, society, and culture. However, there is documentation which proves that such invasions were frequently followed by improvement in administration, and subsequently by production of art and a new type of culture that was an amalgam of Western and Eastern elements.

This article aims to illustrate certain positive side effects of this interaction in the Mediterranean through a specific example: the medieval city of Aegina in the Aegean Sea. During its history, the island passed through the hands of the Franks, the Venetians, the Catalans, and eventually the Ottomans. The architectural forms and artistic patterns that will be discussed support the argument that the medieval Mediterranean became a place for the exchange of ideas, and a canvas for multicultural activities.     

The Tin Trade and Medieval Ceramics: Tracing the Sources of Tin and its Influence on Mediterranean Ceramics Production

This paper examines the role played by the availability of tin in the development of a commercial, glazed ceramics industry in the medieval workshops of Paterna, in eastern Spain. Tin was an essential ingredient that was used by potters since the ninth century in Iraq to make ceramic glazes opaque. However, it is a relatively scarce raw material, which had to be sourced and imported by many potters; in this paper I explore these possible sources of tin, from the Far East to Iberia and south-west England. Although many factors contributed to the development of a ceramics industry in eastern Spain in the medieval period, I argue that one hitherto overlooked and important stimulus was the expansion of the trade in tin from south-west England – Devon and Cornwall – to the Mediterranean.     

A Mediterranean of Relations for the Medieval Maghrib: Historiography in Question

References to relations between states, regions, communities and cultures have been a staple of historical thinking on the Mediterranean from the nineteenth century to the present day. Weathering changing academic trends and fashions, this vision of the Mediterranean has shaped the development of relevant historiographies, defining assumptions and approaches to an unrecognised extent. Focusing on the trajectory of this “Mediterranean of relations” in the historiography of the medieval Maghrib, this paper outlines some of the effects of its prevalence on the evolution of the concept of Mediterranean and argues for the inclusion of these considerations in the ongoing discussions around the medieval Mediterranean.     

Material Worlds: The Shared Cultures of Southern Italy and its Mediterranean Neighbours in the Tenth to Twelfth Centuries

As scholars of people's physical environments, we tend to view the past according to our own forms of categorisation rather than those of contemporaries. From a medieval Mediterranean perspective, the fragmentation of scholarship caused by modern disciplinary constraints—Islamic, Byzantine, Western—has artificially set apart cultures which had more in common than has hitherto been acknowledged. This is a comparative study of the dress and textile cultures of southern Italy, particularly Apulia, Egypt and the Fatimid Caliphate and regions in the Byzantine Empire, as recorded in dowries, wills and other documents. This article also demonstrates how using the Mediterranean as a framework for comparison allows us to identify new areas where cultural differences really lay.     

The Poet and Daughter of the Sea: Animated Ships in Andalusian Arabic Poetry

The Mediterranean Sea has stirred the imagination of Andalusian poets of the tenth and eleventh centuries. They wrote many poetic maritime scenes with lively details about sea and ships. Describing ships as camels ranging over the land is the central core-image of these scenes. The poets’ perspective of ships reveals their unique character and aspires to an aesthetic truth. This article will concern itself with some of the ships’ depictions in Andalusian Arabic poetry, and will illustrate, in particular, the ways by which poets refer to the ships’ external characteristics in order to represent them as animated beings in the sea vista. These epithets coincide with the medieval perception of animals that generally particularize their appearance by some qualitative characteristics. By means of some of animal epithets like physiological features, anatomical references, behavioural traits and feminine characters, poets succeeded in referring to ships as the most animated objects on the maritime scene.     

Louis IX in Medieval Arabic Sources: The Saint,the King,and the Sicilian Connection

This article examines the portrayal of Louis IX in medieval Arabic historiography to show the importance of cross-cultural Mediterranean interaction. It argues that the image of Louis was influenced by information originating from the Sicilian Hohenstaufen court and reports that Frederick II sent to Egypt. Arab historians connected to the courts of Frederick and Manfred disseminated a “Sicilian narrative” that shaped Louis's portrayal in Arabic historiography. This argument on the importance of cross-cultural transfer in understanding Arabic historiography is buttressed by reports about the King, the Pope, and the Emperor that are traced back to the entourage of prominent Muslims closely linked to Sicily. Moreover, it is argued that Arab authors were aware of Louis's proto-sanctity and pious reputation. This led to the infusion of medieval Arabic historiography with Western ideas about sacrosanctity. Finally, this research assesses how the portrayal of King Louis during his captivity was used in internal Muslim rivalries.     

Ways of Seeing: The First Medieval Islamic and Christian Depictions of Roderick,Last Visigothic King of Spain

In the early eighth-century palace of Qu.(s)ayr ‘Amra in Syria, an image survives of Roderick, last Visigothic king of Spain, whose passionate love affair with the beautiful La Cava precipitated the Muslim invasion of his country in 711. Startlingly, this Umayyad painting predates the earliest written historical source narrating the invasion, the Cronica mozarabe of 754, and of Hispanic origin, which recounts the barest details of the Muslim conquest. The written account was later developed by medieval Christian and Arabic historians who had opposing views of this momentous event, creating a legend of extraordinary power and longevity, which has evolved in many different artistic forms from the Middle Ages to the present day. This essay assesses current scholarly opinion regarding the interpretation of this Arabic visual image of the Visigothic king and considers its implications in relation to the development of the legend of Roderick and La Cava in written form during the medieval period.     

The Earthly Landscape of the Heavenly City: A New Framework for the Examination of the Urban Development of Frankish Jerusalem

This article introduces a new methodological framework for the examination of Frankish Jerusalem's urban development, based on a database encompassing documents relating to Jerusalem from the first half of the twelfth century. The deconstruction of documents according to their primary elements provides a new framework for their use in the study of the socio-economic mechanisms that propelled the transformation of Jerusalem's cityscape, hitherto commonly perceived as restricted to monumental construction. This supplements the panoramic view of the city, obtained from contemporary narrative sources and archaeological evidence, with an analytical depiction of the evolving urban environment. Such an analytical approach unveils previously undetected facets of Jerusalem's urban development, such as the early emergence and spatial distribution of residential areas, crystallisation of notions of property ownership and shifting patterns of economic conduct. It sheds new light on the periodisation and scope of urban change in Jerusalem and its correlation to wider socio-economic processes.     

The Venetian Consul and the Cosmopolitan Mercantile Community of Alexandria at the Beginning of the Ninth/Fifteenth Century

Abstract

Three case studies (Veneto-Cretan shipping of Egyptian-Arab merchandise, Catalan-Venetian cooperation, and Venice acting on behalf of Latin pilgrims) around the activities of the Venetian consul inform an investigation of the cosmopolitan community formed by local groups and foreign nations, and the role of the Venetian consul in this wider community. It will be argued that the Venetian consul was not only a Venetian envoy but also a Mamlūk official and an informal head of the cosmopolitan business community in late medieval Alexandria.     

The Sword and the Sun: The Old World Drought Atlas as a Source for Medieval Mediterranean History

The release of the Old World Drought Atlas (OWDA) in November 2015 provides historians with an unprecedented glimpse into the climate of the medieval world. Through the careful examination of tree-ring data provided by the OWDA, historians can better gauge how the environment affected the course of medieval Mediterranean history, particularly in times and places where textual data is sparse, such as North Africa. The case studies of the Norman conquest of the coast of Ifrīqiyya in the 1140s and the invasion by the Banū Hilāl in the mid-eleventh century show the utility of the OWDA for gaining a better understanding the medieval Mediterranean. In particular, OWDA data shows that the arrival of the Banū Hilāl into Ifrīqiyya coincided with a period of extended drought that is not documented in the written sources and suggests that increased competition for scarce resources was instrumental to their entrance into the region.     

The Jews of Venetian Candia: The Challenges of External Influences and Internal Diversity as Reflected in Takkanot Kandiyah

Takkanot Kandiyah is a collection of Hebrew-written legislative texts regarding the leadership of the Jewish community of Candia, the capital of the Venetian colony of Crete, which were issued by successive generations of communal leaders between the early thirteenth and late sixteenth centuries. The detailed information it provides on many areas of the communal life makes Takkanot Kandiyah a valuable source for historical research into Jewish life in the medieval and Early Modern Mediterranean. Through a study of the texts contained in Takkanot Kandiyah, this article attempts to identify and analyse the ways in which the leadership of the Candiot community responded to the challenges of coexistence with the Greek inhabitants of Crete and the Venetian rulers of the island, as well as with the Jewish immigrants whom the currents of history brought to Crete from various corners of the Mediterranean, and thus to examine the importance of the “Mediterranean dimension” of the life of Cretan Jewry.     

Genoa,Genoese Merchants and the Ottoman Empire in the First Half of the Fifteenth Century: Rumours and Reality

Among the Latin states, it was the maritime republic of Genoa that established the earliest official contacts with the Ottomans by concluding a treaty with them in 1352. This was the first step in the development of relatively smooth relations between the Genoese and the Ottoman Empire, which lasted from the mid-fourteenth until the mid-fifteenth century. Within Christendom, such familiarity earned the republic a negative reputation, which the adversaries of Genoa – Venice among others – tried to exploit for their own purposes. An element that contributed to the idea of a close connection between the Genoese and Ottomans was the outstanding position gained by some citizens of Genoa at the Ottoman court. They were influential men of affairs who owed their acquaintance with the sultans to their specific commercial activity. However, despite the fact that in some cases they held offices in the Genoese colonial administration, these merchants acted quite independently of Genoa itself and sometimes contrary to its directives.     

Western Medicine for the Masters of Damascus: Benvenutus Grapheus's Experimenta

This article examines a rediscovered work by the thirteenth-century physician Benvenutus Grapheus de Iherusalem. Surviving only in a late medieval German translation, it contains select recipes and medical procedures. The study of this compilation offers new insight into two important aspects of Benvenutus's life: It provides a more precise dating for his activities, and clarifies at least one facet of his connection to the Levant. An analysis of Benvenutus's sources, most notably the Antidotarium Nicolai but also the Circa instans, confirms the assumption of previous scholars that he had studied at the Salernitan school of medicine. This article also shows that, at least in this particular case, practitioners trained within the Arabic medical tradition did not view Western medicine as a priori inferior.     

Comfort,Class and Climate Change: The Rise of Glass in Late Medieval and Early Modern Domestic Architecture

ABSTRACT

In the modern world, glass windows are considered an indispensable element of the built environment. Throughout premodern times, however, glass was not universally used in European architecture. This article argues that the rise of glass in Western architecture was neither an inevitable nor a linear process, but rather a response to certain social, cultural and environmental factors that gained increasing relevance from the late medieval period onwards. In other words, glass windows are a cultural convention, reflecting some of the wide-ranging and transformative challenges that Europeans faced in the late medieval and early modern period.     

Heirs and Spares: Elite Fathers and Their Sons in the Literary Sources of Umayyad Iberia

ABSTRACT

In the medieval Islamic world, elite men were the benchmark of hegemonic masculinity and social power. A presumption of masculine authority within the household shaped the way early medieval rulers were described by chroniclers, and how medieval fathers related to their sons. The formal and informal ways in which they interacted with lower status men – whether their clients, their courtiers, or their sons – were hedged about with the symbolic language of gender. The article focuses on the ways in which certain Andalusī literary sources talk about relations of fathers and their sons with the ruling Umayyad family, to offer an additional dimension to our picture of how the dynasty conceptualised and legitimised its power.     

Usāma Ibn munqidh's book of the staff: autobiographical and historical excerpts

Usāma ibn Munqidh (d. 584/1188) is best known to historians for his “memoirs” entitled Kitāb al-i‘tibār, which provides a very personal and detailed window into the world of an aristocratic Syrian Muslim in the period of the Crusades. But historians have almost completely ignored a lesser-known work by Usāma called Kitāb al–‘a.(s)ā, or The Book of the Staff. This anthology consists mostly of poetic excerpts relating to walking-sticks and staves, but, scattered throughout, it also contains a handful of narrative anecdotes about Usāma and his times very much akin to the material found in his “memoirs”: tales of miracles, of encounters with the Franks, of Usāma's family, and the courts of the amirs and atabegs of his day. This article presents these extracts translated into English for the first time, with commentary, in the hope that the Book of the Staff will attract the attention of historians that it deserves.     

Portugal and the Mediterranean trade: A Prelude to the discovery of the “new world”

Before the century of great discoveries, and during most of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese developed important commercial activity in the Mediterranean. This is the central issue of this article as seen through two themes: the first is an assessment of the Portuguese organization of Mediterranean trade, with special attention given to the foodstuffs which were, and continued to be, a feature of such trade; and second, is to observe how Portuguese faced competition from others nations’ merchants in the region. The study of these two aspects will provide a better understanding of the re-orientation of Portuguese trade towards the Atlantic.