Medieval Mediterranean

"In his recent book „The Collapse of the Eastern Mediterranean“ (Cambridge 2012), Ronnie Ellenblum argues that a series of climatic disasters in the 11th cent. led to the decline of polities in the Near East and prepared the ground for both the advance of the Seljuks and of the Crusaders into the region. Focused on the Byzantine case during the „Comnenian period“, this paper will critically review this hypothesis on the basis of both textual and natural scientific evidence and propose a more nuanced picture of the interplay between society, climate and environment in the Eastern Mediterranean from the 11th to the 13th century. As will become clear, neither the complexity of natural phenomena nor the complexity of medieval societies should be reduced to mere linear lines of causation.
This research was made possible with support of the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit-Foundation during a stay at the Institute for Historical Research of the National Hellenic Research Foundation in Athens.
The following pages provide a first short overview over some material to be presented and discussed in this lecture.
Contact: Johannes.Preiser-Kapeller@oeaw.ac.at
"

This course examines the interconnected medieval worlds of Europe, Africa, and Eurasia from the death of Muhammad to the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople. Content extends from the emergence of Islam to the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453. After a survey of late antiquity, Unit One of the semester, “The Shattering of Mediterranean Unity?” (632-1031), concentrates on the rise of Islam and the development of three distinct civilizations in the Mediterranean Basin: the Latin West, Byzantium, and the Caliphates. Unit Two, “Recovery and Revival” (1031-1227), examines the struggle between church and state, crusading and holy violence, the rise of towns and states, and trends in late medieval religion. Particular attention is given to women, religious minorities, and other marginalized groups. Unit Three (1215-1453) explores the close of the Middle Ages as signaled by the rise of the Ottoman Empire in the 1400s.

This paper deals with archaeological structures related to one specific aspect of Frankish daily life in the Holy Land during the 12th and 13th centuries: cooking and baking as part of food preparation. Observations made about forms of ovens and their size and positioning within a dwelling allow conclusions to be drawn, not only about cooking and baking methods and the amount of food that was prepared, but also about storage of processed food, meal-serving and food consumption. This contribution presents a comparative analysis of archaeological
evidence for cooking and baking in indigenous and Frankish contexts. The similarities and dissimilarities in the dwellings inhabited by indigenous locals and by Frankish newcomers, and in the paraphernalia of food preparation, clearly demonstrate that cooking and baking in both a narrow and a wider sense were quite different. Frankish behavior in relation to cooking and baking, whether on an intimate familial scale or at a collective-communal level, was not only a function of family structure and the specific cultural settings, but also reflected religious attitudes and cross-cultural interactions that resulted in the adoption or rejection of different customs.
Introduction

Comment comprendre l’émergence du monde islamique aux VIIe-Xe siècles ? L’empire islamique est-il le dernier des grands empires antiques ou au contraire le premier empire médiéval ? Cet ouvrage propose de dépasser l’opposition entre rupture et continuité. Si l’empire islamique emprunte à l’existant, il engage aussi la création d’un monde nouveau, fruit d’une révolution symbolique inscrite dans un temps long. Ce processus révolutionnaire accompagne les conquêtes et produit des répliques dans les régions nouvellement intégrées qui, en retour, co-produisent ce monde nouveau. Une attention particulière est portée ici sur l’Occident islamique, trop souvent encore considéré comme périphérique, et sur la nature de la révolution shiite fatimide que cette région a connue au Xe siècle.

In this study, the focus is on the volcano Etna (in Sicily) and the Aeolian volcanoes – Volcano and Stromboli. The first part of the text presents and analyzes the descriptions of the volcanic activity in the Antiquity. The second part briefly outlines the monotheistic theses for the abyss and the connection between the fire and Hell. It has an important role because draws the starting point of view of the medieval monotheistic authors. In the third part the medieval texts about Etna, Volcano and Stromboli are analyzed. It is divided into two sub-parts – Christian descriptions and Islamic (Arabic) descriptions.
The survey contributes to ongoing discussions about the connection between the ancient and the medieval conceptions and perceptions, especially in the volcanic topic. The concrete differences between Christian and Muslim visions on the volcanic activity are marked and discussed. The analyzes make it possible to conclude that there is a selective and modifying adaptation of knowledge and images from the ancient texts in the Medieval period.

Before the Arabs conquered northwest Africa in the seventh century, Ramzi Rouighi asserts, there were no Berbers. There were Moors (Mauri), Mauretanians, Africans, and many tribes and tribal federations such as the Leuathae or Musulami; and before the Arabs, no one thought that these groups shared a common ancestry, culture, or language. Certainly, there were groups considered barbarians by the Romans, but "Barbarian," or its cognate, "Berber" was not an ethnonym, nor was it exclusive to North Africa. Yet today, it is common to see studies of the Christianization or Romanization of the Berbers, or of their resistance to foreign conquerors like the Carthaginians, Vandals, or Arabs. Archaeologists and linguists routinely describe proto-Berber groups and languages in even more ancient times, while biologists look for Berber DNA markers that go back thousands of years. Taking the pervasiveness of such anachronisms as a point of departure, Inventing the Berbers examines the emergence of the Berbers as a distinct category in early Arabic texts and probes the ways in which later Arabic sources, shaped by contemporary events, imagined the Berbers as a people and the Maghrib as their home.

Key both to Rouighi's understanding of the medieval phenomenon of the "berberization" of North Africa and its reverberations in the modern world is the Kitāb al-'ibar of Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1406), the third book of which purports to provide the history of the Berbers and the dynasties that ruled in the Maghrib. As translated into French in 1858, Rouighi argues, the book served to establish a racialized conception of Berber indigenousness for the French colonial powers who erected a fundamental opposition between the two groups thought to constitute the native populations of North Africa, Arabs and Berbers. Inventing the Berbers thus demonstrates the ways in which the nineteenth-century interpretation of a medieval text has not only served as the basis for modern historical scholarship but also has had an effect on colonial and postcolonial policies and communal identities throughout Europe and North Africa.

Analizzando la tradizione storiografica su Ruggero II si mette in evidenza come la politica di proiezione mediterranea di Ruggero II, in particolare verso l'Africa, sia un elemento rilevante della politica del sovrano normanno ma solitamente poco considerato quando non trascurato del tutto.

This book focuses on the ethnically composite, heterogeneous, mixed
nature of the Mediterranean cities and their cultural heritage between
the late Middle Ages and early modern times. How did it affect the
cohabitation among different people and cultures on the urban scene?
How did it mold the shape and image of cities that were crossroads
of encounters, but also the arena of conflict and exclusion? The 13
case studies collected in this volume address these issues by exploring
the traces left by centuries of interethnic porosity on the tangible and
intangible heritage of cities such as Acre and Cyprus, Genoa and Venice,
Rome and Istanbul, Cordoba and Tarragona

Enrico di Castiglia è un caso emblematico di cavaliere e principe alla ricerca di una signoria. Dopo aver guidato senza successo una ribellione nobiliare contro il celebre fratello Alfonso X el Sabio (1252-1284) re di Castiglia, prese la via dell’esilio. Barcellona, Londra e Tunisi furono le mete dei suoi viaggi. In Africa guadagnò grandi onori e ricchezze combattendo con i suoi cavalieri al servizio del sultano di Tunisi, che nel 1258 si era proclamato califfo. Venuto a sapere della spedizione angioina volta alla conquista del regno di Sicilia, il principe castigliano prestò la somma di 40.000 once d’oro a Carlo d’Angiò chiedendo come interesse in caso di vittoria la concessione di una signoria. La vittoria angioina di Benevento tuttavia lo lasciò a mani vuote e, dopo alcuni incontri, infruttuosi, con il papa e con Carlo d’Angiò, Enrico accettò l’elezione a senatore di Roma. Governò il comune capitolino sostenendo il “popolo” contro le aspirazioni nobiliari e angioine. Sottomise all’autorità comunale diversi centri del Patrimonium Beati Petri con la diplomazia o con la forza delle armi. Nel 1267 si schierò dalla parte di Corradino che scendeva in Italia per reclamare l’eredità paterna del regno di Sicilia, e utilizzò l’arma della propaganda politica (poesia di argomento politico, cerimonie pubbliche, laudes regiae) per sostenere la sua causa, denigrare Carlo d’Angiò e trovare nuovi alleati. Nel frattempo anche la corte papale metteva in atto una propaganda contraria al principe Enrico e favorevole a Carlo d’Angiò, in particolare con i sermoni del cardinale francese Odo da Châteauroux, che dipingeva Enrico di Castiglia, Corradino e il sultano di Babilonia come i tre spiriti immondi dell’Apocalisse e presentava invece il fratello del re di Francia come campione e difensore della Chiesa e del popolo cristiano. I due piani si intersecano in occasione della battaglia di Tagliacozzo presentata dalla propaganda di Enrico come una facile vittoria per Corradino e tutti coloro che avessero militato sotto le sue bandiere, e vissuta invece momento per momento dal cardinale francese a causa delle notizie, ora cattive, poi confuse e infine buone, che man mano arrivavano alla corte papale. Giustiziato Corradino nella pubblica piazza, Enrico fu condannato all’ergastolo. Dopo 23 anni di prigionia verrà liberato da Carlo II lo Zoppo e, tornato prima a Tunisi e poi in patria, divenne principe-reggente al trono di Castiglia-Leon per il nipotino Fernando IV.

The present work is a contribution to the Islamic geographical conceptualisation of the medieval world through the examination of the term Rūm (Roman). Rūm, in medieval Arabic, represented a territory that lay to the north and west of the Islamic Near East and North Africa. However, it is far from clear whether the term represented Europe, the Byzantine Empire or both. Study of Arabic geographical works from the ninth to the eleventh centuries shows that the term Rūm corresponded to the Byzantine Empire in the earlier geographical works, while the writers of later geographies began to use the term to define the Christian north in general, including Byzantium. The rest of the paper is devoted to an account of this transition in the meaning of the term.

This groundbreaking study investigates the early architecture of the Fatimids, an Ismaili Shi‘i Muslim dynasty that dominated the Mediterranean world from the 10th to the 12th century. This period, considered a golden age of multicultural and interfaith tolerance, witnessed the construction of iconic structures, including Cairo’s al-Azhar and al-Hakim mosques and crucial renovations to Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock and Aqsa Mosque. However, it also featured large-scale destruction of churches under the notorious reign of al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, most notably the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. Jennifer A. Pruitt offers a new interpretation of these and other key moments in the history of Islamic architecture, using newly available medieval primary sources by Ismaili writers and rarely considered Arabic Christian sources. Building the Caliphate contextualizes early Fatimid architecture within the wider Mediterranean and Islamic world and demonstrates how rulers manipulated architectural form and urban topographies to express political legitimacy on a global stage.

Joannes Leo Africanus, (c. 1494 – c. 1554?) (or al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Fasi, Arabic:حسن ابن محمد الوزان الفاسي) was an Andalusian Amazigh Moorish diplomat and author who is best known for his book Descrittione dell’Africa (Description of Africa) describing the geography of North Africa.

North Africa is rarely mentioned in scholarship on the medieval Mediterranean. This paper demonstrates the potential of archaeology for understanding the impact of the Arab conquests on settlement and society in seventh- and eighth- century North Africa. Despite difficulties in dating early medieval occupation, synthesis of the available evidence reveals that the Arab conquest was not catastrophic for settled life. Mapping the distribution of urban sites across North Africa shows that the majority of Byzantine towns were not abandoned but remained significant centres. The rural evidence is less clear, but suggests a relatively busy countryside of estates, farms and fortified villages. The paper then presents three detailed case-studies of the towns of Tocra, Sbeïtla and Volubilis in the early medieval period, before considering more broadly the evidence for fortifications, religious buildings (churches and mosques), housing and production in towns. It concludes with some preliminary observations on the nature of Arab rule in North Africa from the perspective of the archaeological evidence.

Proceedings of the conference Boccaccio veneto (Wake Forest University, Casa Artom, 20-22 June 2013).  Essays in English and in Italian on Boccaccio, Chaucer, Petrarch, Goldoni, Vivaldi and Venice.

L’opera raccoglie gli Atti del Convegno internazionale che si è svolto a Venezia (Wake Forest University — Casa Artom, 20–22 giugno 2013) in occasione del VII centenario della nascita di Giovanni Boccaccio. Pensato e organizzato da Roberta Morosini, il convegno intendeva proporre una lettura di Boccaccio alla luce di nuovi strumenti epistemologici, nell’àmbito di una filologia che l’organizzatrice ha significativamente definito “mediterranea”. Dove Venezia, crocevia tra Levante e Ponente e sintesi di incroci da e verso l’Italia, è il punto di arrivo e di partenza del viaggio dei testi boccacciani; un viaggio che i contributi ripercorrono seguendo una rete stradale e marittima che conduce tanto alla Francia, come a Firenze e a Napoli, con una diramazione non secondaria verso il mondo greco e quello arabo, fra il Trecento di Boccaccio e il Settecento di Zeno, Vivaldi e Goldoni.

From the 13th century on, some ports of the Crown of Aragon established close commercial relations with Egypt, Syrie and 'Romania', links that underwent different phases of development as well as experiencing difficulties. Nevertheless, the oriental trade played an increasing role in the economy of the Crown of Aragon. It especially promoted the development of cloth making and exports. This enable the traditional historiographic thesis of an economic decline of the Crown of Aragon, and especially Catalonia, at the end of the Middle Ages, to be criticised. In the opposite direction, its merchants imported large volumes of spices, which generated huge profits.
After a long period of competition between the main ports of the Crown of Aragon, a repartition of the areas of commercialisation was progressivly organised. The kings encouraged this change while also maintaining good diplomatic relations with the eastern monarchs, to promote trade. However, in some phases, one can also observe that the monarchs' goals were very distinct from those of their merchants.

In 1328, Constance of Saluzzo, coming from a long line of Subalpine nobles related to the kings of Aragon, married Pietro, heir to the throne of Arborea. They governed peaceably and dedicated themselves to bettering their kingdom; in 1343 they founded a monastery of Poor Clares, for which they obtained particular Papal privileges. Use is made of both published and as yet unpublished documentation to shed light on the different stages of this foundation, the monastic community living first next the church of St. Vincent and then, once the construction was done, next that of St. Clare. Founding the monastery not only made available for the royals a place for their retreats, but also guaranteed them the prayers of the Poor Clares. Great civic and political value was
assigned to these prayers. Indeed, the nuns’ prayers for the royal couple, and for the safety of the kingdom, were thought of as an indispensable resource for the proper functioning of the State

Bernard the Monk's Itinerarium is a ten-page guidebook for pilgrims traveling from Rome and Bari to Babylon and Jerusalem. It has not been studied as a source for Mediterranean history. Bernard shows how the late ninth-century Mediterranean economy was characterized by religious ideology. Islam and Christianity acted differently in establishing the "ethos" of an economy of exchange. While Muslim law and authority channeled the exchange, Christian apocalypticism wished for its end. Bernard's apocalypticism was in particular a response to the Muslim occupation of southern Italy. Such a response has been regarded as typical of the "age of ignorance" about Islam. But Bernard was surprisingly knowledgeable, and his account illustrates a largely unknown chapter in the history of the Christian encounter with Islam.

Open access download: https://doi.org/10.17885/heiup.448.
The present contribution recounts the entangled history of Latin and Arabic from a macro-historical perspective. This entangled history can be divided into three phases. In Phase One, both linguistic systems came into contact in the ancient Roman Near East, in a time in which Arabic as a standardized supraregional language had not yet fully emerged. In Phase Two, the Arabic-Islamic expansion into the western Mediterranean, dominated linguistically by Latin and Romance, ushered in a period of intensive Latin-Arabic entanglement. Lasting approximately from the seventh to the fifteenth century, this period was particularly dynamic: the expansion of so-called “Latin-Christian societies” into Mediterranean regions hitherto under Muslim rule considerably transformed the geopolitical equilibrium of linguistic interaction. In Phase Three, i.e. from the late medieval and early modern periods onwards, the interaction of Latin and Arabic progressively receded into the sphere of academic endeavours.

Keynote lecture for the conference "Vom Buch aufs Feld – vom Feld ins Buch. Verflechtungen von Theorie und Praxis in Ernährung und Landwirtschaft (ca. 1300–1600)", organised by Dr. Stephan F. Ebert / Prof. Dr. Gerrit Jasper Schenk (TU Darmstadt) at the UNESCO Welterbe Kloster Lorsch, 31.03.2022 - 02.04.2022: https://www.hsozkult.de/event/id/event-116048

While the enduring impact of the Imperium Romanum on agricultural traditions in Western and Central Europe also after antiquity is common knowledge (and even popularized in the semi-legendary introduction of winegrowing to the Danube provinces by Emperor Probus in the 3rd century CE), the “New Rome” of the East (the medieval Byzantine Empire) is rarely associated with such innovations. Only the alleged smuggling of silkworms (depending on the growing of mulberry trees) from China to Byzantium during the reign of Emperor Justinian I (527-565 CE) still finds its way even into schoolbooks.
Based on recent studies re-evaluating the written sources, and in combination with new archaeological and palaeobotanical evidence, the lecture embeds the agriculture in the Byzantine Empire within the wider dynamics of socio-political and environmental change as well as agrarian innovation in the medieval Eastern Mediterranean – including the introduction of new crops especially from South Asia (such as sugar cane, rice or cotton), which already began in Egypt and the Levant under late Roman rule, but intensified with was has been called an “Arab agricultural revolution” from the 8th century CE onwards. The adaptation to and share of Byzantium in these developments are discussed also with regard to changing food patterns.
These developments equally provided the basis for new forms of plantation economy introduced to the “Romania” by Italian sea powers (Venetians, Genoese) after the conquest of Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade of 1204. The Byzantine Empire was restored with the re-conquest of Constantinople in 1261, but was dramatically reduced in power and found itself now integrated at the periphery of new networks of exchange and circulation of commodities and technologies which entangled the Mediterranean with wider Afro-Eurasia.
The “proto-colonialism” of Venice or Genoa equally anticipated practices of land use and exploitation later adopted in the European colonies in the Atlantic; from America, in turn, new crops found their way to the Eastern Mediterranean (now under Ottoman rule) in the 16th century, marking also there a new epoch in the history of agriculture and nutrition.

Located in the heel of the Italian boot, the Salento region was home to a diverse population between the ninth and fifteenth centuries. Inhabitants spoke Latin, Greek, and various vernaculars, and their houses of worship served sizable congregations of Jews as well as Roman-rite and Orthodox Christians. Yet the Salentines of this period laid claim to a definable local identity that transcended linguistic and religious boundaries. The evidence of their collective culture is embedded in the traces they left behind: wall paintings and inscriptions, graffiti, carved ­­tombstone decorations, belt fittings from graves, and other artifacts reveal a wide range of religious, civic, and domestic practices that helped inhabitants construct and maintain personal, group, and regional identities.

The Medieval Salento allows the reader to explore the visual and material culture of a people using a database of over three hundred texts and images, indexed by site. Linda Safran draws from art history, archaeology, anthropology, and ethnohistory to reconstruct medieval Salentine customs of naming, language, appearance, and status. She pays particular attention to Jewish and nonelite residents, whose lives in southern Italy have historically received little scholarly attention. This extraordinarily detailed visual analysis reveals how ethnic and religious identities can remain distinct even as they mingle to become a regional culture.

The Liber historiae Francorum was influenced by different historiographical traditions. In this paper, I pursue two arguments. Firstly, I believe that the author of the Liber historiae Francorum juxtaposes and slightly transforms these traditions for his or her own purpose, which results in creating a new Frankish self-conception in which the Franks have utterly emancipated themselves from the Romans. This in particular can be observed in two previously somewhat neglected examples: the author’s use of the legend of Troy and his or her use of the Bible. Secondly, by doing so, the text responds to other texts within a network and therefore represents a competing model of a Frankish identity.

This public talk, "On the Edge of a Pandemic World: The Later Medieval Western Mediterranean within Afro-Eurasian Disease Networks," is part of a series organized at New York University entitled *Spanish Flus: Pandemic Disease in the Iberian World from the Middle Ages through the Present*. Information for this and all the lectures in the series can be found at this link: https://www.kjcc.org/news/spring-2022-lecture-series-spanish-flus-pandemic-disease-in-the-iberian-world-from-the-middle-ages-through-the-present/.

Background information on the diseases discussed in my lecture can be found in these two essays (both open-access):
Monica H. Green, "Climate and Disease in Medieval Eurasia" (2018), https://oxfordre.com/asianhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277727-e-6
Monica H. Green, "The Great Dying: The Epidemiological and Medical Implications of Old and New World Encounters in the Pre- and Post-Contact Eras", https://isiscb.org/special-issue-on-pandemics/essay.html?essayID=25

Between the 9th-10th and the 14th-15th centuries, the two high points of incursions originating from the Dâr al-islâm, the Gulf of Lion coast seems to have been spared the threat of Saracen raids. Of course, historiography did record some attacks in the 11th and 12th centuries, but saw them as insignificant. A diverse Latin literature – more so than Arab sources – attests to the fact that the threat always remained significant. The summary of expeditions from the power centers arising out of the fragmentation of the Caliphate of Córdoba (mainly the Emirates of Denia and Majorca) shows that they were able to mobilize significant resources and inflict severe damage. Beyond the traditional rhetoric of pagan depredation, the more generic allusions to raids against churches and defenses confirm how much the fear of the Saracens had taken root in people’s minds. Captivity was also a constant worry since expeditions essentially aimed to supply the slave trade. Finally, a chronology of these incursions must be linked both to the power struggles of the aristocracy in the South and to diplomatic and commercial relations in the Western Mediterranean.