Abstract This article explores the diplomatic mission of ambassador Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Wahāb al-Ghassānī (d. 1707) to seventeenth-century Spain, as detailed in his account The Journey of the Minister to Ransom the Captive (1690–1691), focusing on two pertinent dimensions. First, it aspires to read his use of Ibn Khaldūn’s philosophy of history to fathom Spanish modernity, as a decolonial attempt to utilize local Islamicate epistemology in the face of an engulfing modernity whose beginning was marked by the expulsion of his ancestors from Islamic Spain (1609). Second, it underscores the burgeoning of Islamicate diplomatic ethics which were dislodged from the secular formation of diplomacy in its early modern Western conception. In light of these two arguments, this study aspires to showcase the decolonial significance of the period 1492–1609 to the study of the Islamic Maghreb, particularly as it is premised upon confronting unprobed historical presuppositions about the paradigm of decline in the writing of Islamic cultural history.

Abstract Scholars of late medieval and early modern Iberia acknowledge the persistence of limpieza de sangre (blood purity) into the era of Habsburg control over Spain and the conquests of the Americas. Yet few writing in English appreciate the ways in which Juan Martínez Silíceo, archbishop of Charles V’s Toledo, both preserved the medieval ideal of blood purity and reshaped it to his own political ends when he enacted a limpieza statute in the city’s cathedral in 1547. Silíceo and the opposing faction of his cathedral chapter left a paper trail of the ensuing controversy. I read Silíceo’s letter to Charles – namely, his list of reasons, his opponents’ reasons, and his refutations of those reasons – to argue that Silíceo used histories both local and universalist to make claims about Old Christian racial supremacy. I conclude with the University of Alcalá’s humanist protest of Silíceo, which includes an allusion to monstrous blackness, marshalled as evidence of the church’s universalism.

Abstract The reception of classical Greek authors such as Aristotle into Arabic literature through translations is well known. The presence of Arabic literature in the Byzantine capital is much less attested, nor is it widely expected. Could Aristotle have returned to the center of Greek culture in Arab garb? Who would have been the audience of this translation? Who would have brought it there and for what purpose? A famous manuscript now preserved at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris shows that, indeed, at least one Anatolian Muslim scholar studied his Arabic Aristotle in Constantinople long before it was conquered by the Ottomans. The article uses minute manuscript notes as a means to provide surprising context for the literature that scholars tend to study as disembodied texts.

Abstract Any consideration of the premodern Mediterranean must attend to its culture of shared sexual practices. The cultural fluency and mobility of people across the region created spaces where multiple sexualities were legible across Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and across linguistic and political differences, suggesting the fluidity of the Mediterranean opened up discrete spaces and permitted transgressive acts. A panoply of sexual practices shows that the widespread custom of concubinage, the selling of sex, the sexual exploitation of children and the enslaved, and the age-differentiated sexual pairings among same-gender communities made these acts legible across multiple linguistic and religious communities. When we consider the tolerance for and permissibility of sexual activities outside of marriage in patriarchal societies that privileged male access to women, children, and the enslaved, the commonalities are striking. In addition, bisexuality was a common feature, especially for men who engaged in same-gender relationships prior to marriage but still participated in heterosexual sex and unions.

Abstract The Book of the Destruction of King Arthur’s Round Table is a Jewish rendering of Arthurian material dated 1278–79. It survives incompletely in a single manuscript, Rome, Vatican Library, codex Urbinate Ebraico 48, ff. 75r–77r. Past studies have identified The Book of the Destruction as a northern Italian text (via an analysis of the name variants appearing in it) and as a mostly literal translation into Hebrew of thoughtfully chosen passages from the Old French prose Merlin and Mort Artu. Much of that research assumes the single extant manuscript to be the autograph copy. Leviant’s edition (1969), which omits some codicological and paleographical details, is the basis of many of these studies. These details indicate that the manuscript is a non-authorial copy and, therefore, not a reliable indicator of the Hebrew romance’s ultimate provenance.

Abstract This article investigates the outset of Florence’s colony in Ottoman Constantinople until the conquest of Negroponte in 1470 by the Ottoman forces led by Mehmet II. It analyses the dynamics of the Florentine approach toward Constantinople and the inception of Florentine-Ottoman relations in order to provide a detailed political reconstruction of the events that would enable Florence to successfully establish a colony in the new Ottoman capital. The study intends to reconstruct Mehmet II’s original privileges as a ground to explore further the political interactions of the colony with the Ottoman sultan as well as thanks the support to institutional sources such as the letters of consulars and merchants living in Constantinople and – although with great care – Benedetto Dei’s chronicle. All these elements will be approached by taking into consideration the balance of power between the Florentine colony and the Ottoman court within Constantinople, which has not previously been taken into account by past historiography in order to verify whether the Florentine colony was effectively an honorable guest or a privileged hostage.

Abstract The article presents for the first time the Syriac text, an English translation and discussion of the surviving fragments of a newly discovered apologetic composition by Timothy I (fl. 780–823), the East Syrian patriarch of Baghdad. In this work, the catholicos defends Christian practice of veneration of the cross against possible critique by Jewish and Muslim adversaries. Discussed in the context of Timothy’s other works and of the earlier and contemporary polemical literature by Christians, the newly published material offers a valuable evidence on the development of the repertoire of anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim polemical arguments among Syriac and Arab Christians during the eighth and ninth centuries.