From medieval Dar al-Islam to contemporary Malta: raḥl toponymy in a wider western Mediterranean context.

Abstract

The diffusion of raḥl placenames in Andalus and the islands of Majorca, Sicily and Malta in the High Middle Ages has long been noted, studied, and served as the subject of scholarly debate. With the transition of these western Mediterranean lands from Islam to Christianity in the wake of the Iberian Reconquista and the establishment of the Norman Kingdom of Sicily, the raḥl did not disappear, but rather became a staple of Christian colonization records in Majorca and Sicily. The same cross-cultural process extends to the example of Malta, where the survival of an Arabic dialect arguably assisted the retention of the raḥl as a living model for placenaming. The paper argues that the raḥl toponym, originally representing a small-scale and individual unit, lent itself particularly well in the insular contexts of the medieval Christian expansion, fitting flexibly in the wider framework of cultural hybridization.