Soap Bars and Silk Cocoons: Microecologies of Connectivity in Late Medieval Mediterranean Architecture

Abstract

Abstract This article discusses connectivity in late medieval Mediterranean architecture from a microecological point of view, as initially formulated by Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell. Combining their approach with Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality, it argues that Ottoman multipurpose buildings of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries operated as architectures of governmentality on a microecological level. Their composite architectures became relevant and meaningful through their penetrations into everyday experiences, and through their management of a multitude of relationships. On the one hand, this made them world-making institutions in their own localities, and on the other, imperceptibly connected them to distant corners of the Mediterranean, and to different but comparable experiences.