Medieval Mediterranean World Research Articles

Intractable Cities: Urbanism in the Islamic Sphere of the Later Medieval Mediterranean World

ABSTRACT The urbanism of the medieval Islamic world has often been understood as a type of urbanism in which cities and the structures of states were closely entwined – a trait that has been foregrounded as a major difference from the urbanism of Christian Europe in this period. Based on a close-up study of six cities in the later medieval Mashriq and Maghrib, this article argues for a reappraisal of this interpretation. While there was a close link between urban and imperial structures in the early Islamic period, the urbanism that emerged in the period after the collapse of the ʿAbbāsid Empire was of an altogether different nature. Cities and states intersected in various ways, but cities were important political arenas which rulers surprisingly often struggled to control: only in some cities were rulers able to impose urbanistic schemes that dominated the spatial organisation of cities and in many cities they were frequently met with conflict and resistance from city-based populations.

Fragments of Alchemy from a Cairene Synagogue: Context, Codicology, and Contents of the Alchemical Corpus of the Cairo Genizah

This article presents the results of a survey and a first assessment of the corpus of alchemical manuscripts retrieved from the Cairo Genizah, a storage room mainly intended for sacred writings that is attached to the Ben Ezra synagogue of Old Cairo. The alchemical manuscripts are described in their codicological and palaeographic features; their content is analysed in the context of the medieval production of alchemical texts in the surrounding Islamic world. The alchemical corpus of the Genizah represents a unique and widely unstudied source for our understanding of the relationship between Jews and alchemy in the medieval Mediterranean World.

Dawn Marie Hayes, Roger II of Sicily. Family, Faith, and Empire in the Medieval Mediterranean World

Dawn Marie Hayes, Roger II of Sicily. Family, Faith, and Empire in the Medieval Mediterranean World

“As [Healthy] Women Should”

Abstract Expanding the discussion highlighting the role of slavery in the production of medical knowledge beyond the much more extensively studied Atlantic world and the nineteenth-century US South, this article explores the exploitation of enslaved women’s bodies as clinical subjects in fifteenth-century Iberia. Menstrual disorders figured prominently among “hidden defects” cited in slave warranty suits filed by disgruntled buyers across the late medieval Mediterranean world. Reflective of their heightened interest in female physiology during this period, university-trained male physicians were the expert witnesses most frequently called on to resolve disputes concerning what an enslaved woman’s lack of menses meant. Through a close analysis of “expert” testimony in seven lawsuits filed before the court of the Justicia Civil in Valencia in the 1440s, the slave market emerges as a site offering unparalleled opportunities for physicians to directly touch and probe female genitalia. Insofar as they could be poked and prodded with relative impunity, the bodies of enslaved women bought and sold in late medieval Mediterranean markets were instrumental to the expansion of learned gynecological knowledge.

Dawn Marie Hayes, Roger II of Sicily. Family, Faith, and Empire in the Medieval Mediterranean World. (Medieval Identities: Socio-Cultural Spaces, Vol. 7.) Turnhout, Brepols 2020

Article Dawn Marie Hayes, Roger II of Sicily. Family, Faith, and Empire in the Medieval Mediterranean World. (Medieval Identities: Socio-Cultural Spaces, Vol. 7.) Turnhout, Brepols 2020 was published on February 1, 2023 in the journal Historische Zeitschrift (volume 316, issue 1).

Tributary World-Ecologies, Part II

This essay—the second in a two part series—reconceptualizes the High Medieval Mediterranean World as a tributary world-ecology. Area Studies view the High Medieval Mediterranean as a culturally fragmented world, while the Commercialization Theorists only unite these fragments externally through trade relations. In contrast, Marxist Theorists almost exclusively focus on Medieval Europe through production relations. I argue that the High Medieval Mediterranean can be theorized as a tributary world-ecology. I advance two interrelated arguments. First, I underline the socio-ecological similarities and differences between the North Sea (addressed in Part I) and the Mediterranean Worlds. The Mediterranean world-ecology was premised upon the breakdown of world-imperial redistribution mechanisms and localization of peasant exploitation. This was exemplified by the development of iqta’, pronoia and similar land-tenure regimes across the Mediterranean World. The localization peasant exploitation, however, did not result in autarchy, but rather in the formation of a world-market. In fact, novel agrarian relations, coupled with the climatological upturn and technological innovations, led to the growth of surpluses in the hands of the aristocracies. This in turn stimulated artisanal production and revival of trade. Consequently, the Mediterranean World, like the North Sea World, witnessed further geographical integration and economic growth. Second, I emphasize the similarities and differences between the crises of the North Sea and the Mediterranean Worlds. Their socio-ecological relations reached their limits when the climate began to cool and destabilize, and organizational innovations could no longer produce sufficient surpluses. Consequently, both world-ecologies collapsed, finding its clearest expression in the Black Death. In turn, the Mediterranean, just like the end of the Roman period, disintegrated. The Western Mediterranean and the North Seas were integrated on the basis of capitalist productive and commercial networks, resulting in the birth of European capitalist world-ecology. In contrast, the Eastern Mediterranean would be reintegrated on the basis of the tributary networks of the Ottoman World-Empire.

Inverse Trajectories: Elite Music and Dance in the Medieval Mediterranean World (ca. 400–1400)

ABSTRACT Despite some interchange between the two shores of the medieval Mediterranean world, particularly in Sicily and Iberia after about 1000 CE, one may distinguish differences in between the enjoyment of secular music between Christian upper classes and Islamic upper classes on the shores of the sea in this era. Where the Islamic world is concerned, a distinction may be drawn between an initially more sophisticated east, including Egypt, the Levant, Arabia, and especially Iraq, which inherited much from the Persian and Byzantine musical heritage and from Greek philosophy of music, and a culturally remote west (North Africa and Iberia) that received some impetus from the east and only later developed its own distinctive forms. The early history of these arts in the Christian lands is more obscure but comes into sharper focus after about 1200. The two histories can be seen as almost exactly the inverse of one another, as cultural and religious discourses produced quite different attitudes toward both music and dance.

Roger II of Sicily. Family, faith, and empire in the medieval Mediterranean world. By Dawn Marie Hayes. (Medieval Identities: Socio-cultural Spaces, 7.) Pp. 221 incl. 18 figs, 4 tables and 2 maps. Turnhout: Brepols, 2020. €75. 978 2 503 58140 8

Roger II of Sicily. Family, faith, and empire in the medieval Mediterranean world. By Dawn Marie Hayes. (Medieval Identities: Socio-cultural Spaces, 7.) Pp. 221 incl. 18 figs, 4 tables and 2 maps. Turnhout: Brepols, 2020. €75. 978 2 503 58140 8 - Volume 73 Issue 1

City States in the Later Medieval Mediterranean World

Abstract This article offers a comparative study of city states in the Christian and Islamic spheres of the later medieval Mediterranean world, with a particular focus on Italy, Syria and al-Andalus. Medieval city states are not usually associated with the Islamic world, but rather with a narrative that has foregrounded the exceptional nature of European cities in world history, especially the famous city republics in Northern and Central Italy, and the role that city states played in the formation of European states. Yet city states were a phenomenon that could be observed across urbanized regions of the Mediterranean world where cities turned into important political arenas in the context of sustained political fragmentation. City states are best approached as political systems that were characterized by brittle regimes and experienced high levels of political volatility: they often lacked a clear boundary between the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of city states and were characterized by the multiple political organizations that crystallized in, and fought hard to control, urban political space. The most commonly shared type of political organization in city states was the urban lordship, but city-based lords usually found themselves in intense competition with elite-based collective associations, families and factions, and popular political organizations.

The City Lament: Jerusalem Across the Medieval Mediterranean

The City Lament: Jerusalem Across the Medieval Mediterranean

William Granara, Narrating Muslim Sicily. War and Peace in the Medieval Mediterranean World

William Granara, Narrating Muslim Sicily. War and Peace in the Medieval Mediterranean World

Narrating Muslim Sicily: War and Peace in the Medieval Mediterranean World, written by William Granara

Narrating Muslim Sicily: War and Peace in the Medieval Mediterranean World, written by William Granara

Roger II of Sicily: Family, Faith, and Empire in the Medieval Mediterranean World by Dawn Marie Hayes

Reviewed by: Roger II of Sicily: Family, Faith, and Empire in the Medieval Mediterranean World by Dawn Marie Hayes Lindsay Diggelmann Hayes, Dawn Marie, Roger II of Sicily: Family, Faith, and Empire in the Medieval Mediterranean World (Medieval Identities: Socio-Cultural Spaces, 7), Turnhout, Brepols, 2020; hardback; pp. 221; 18 b/w illustrations, 4 b/w tables; R.R.P. €75.00; ISBN 9782503581408. One of the enduring fascinations of the twelfth century is the way in which Roger II of Sicily managed to carve out for himself a kingdom of enormous wealth and influence despite the fact that his father and uncles had been part of the first generation of Norman warriors to arrive in Italy as penniless mercenaries. Roger's achievements and the key narrative and administrative sources have been thoroughly studied, notably in the works of Graham Loud, and yet the glittering brilliance of Roger's court continues to draw new acolytes. Dawn Marie Hayes is among their number, as attested by the admiring yet thoughtful and perceptive tone of this recent addition to the Brepols series 'Medieval Identities: Socio-Cultural Spaces'. The themes listed in the book's subtitle indicate the division of the work into three parts (of two chapters each). While there are plentiful cross-references between sections, the study does have the feel of a collection of separate essays on a broadly similar theme and perhaps lacks a strong sense of overall coherence or coordinated argument from one section to the next. The introduction and conclusion are both brief for a work of this nature and neither offers more than a fairly superficial attempt to connect the major themes and arguments of the book's individual chapters. This impression is reinforced when it becomes apparent that three of the six substantive chapters are essentially reprints of the author's recent journal articles. A cross-check of Chapter 5 with the original version—which appeared in Viator in 2013—reveals that any 'revisions' are minor and cosmetic to help the article fit more comfortably into the current work. While this is disappointing, it is not to say that the book lacks scholarly value. Part I, 'Family', is where the bulk of the author's new work is found. Two chapters examine the marriages of Roger II and the possible motivations behind them. Roger was first married to the Spanish princess Elvira, daughter of Alfonso VI of León-Castile. Hayes argues persuasively for the political benefits of this marriage, considering that Roger, like Alfonso before him, ruled a peripheral region of the Christian world that involved dealing with Muslim neighbours. The king's brief [End Page 226] second and third marriages late in his life, necessitated in part by the death of male children and the desperate need to ensure dynastic continuity, were both to French noblewomen, one a descendant of Charlemagne. Here Hayes makes the case, also pursued in Chapter 5, of closer connections between Roger and the French monarchy and nobility than some scholars have previously allowed for. Roger's tantalizing connections with the Arabic and Byzantine worlds may have blinded previous critics to the more prosaic connections with the culture of Roger's own ancestors. Through an in-depth consideration of what we know about the careers and family backgrounds of each of Roger's wives, Hayes builds a careful argument about the potential diplomatic and dynastic benefits that may have led Roger to choose the brides he did. Part II, 'Faith', considers Norman connections to the cult of St Nicholas in Bari. Roger is a very distant figure in Chapter 3, one of the reprinted articles, which assesses the importance of Nicholas for earlier Normans active in Italy in the eleventh century. While the chapter is valuable in its own right, its inclusion in this collection must be questionable. Furthermore, the connection to Chapter 4 feels forced. The latter includes new work that makes a case for Roger's devotion to Nicholas but focuses more on the difficulties of creating a maritime state, over which Nicholas, the 'Christian Poseidon' (p. 126), might be considered a protector. Finally, Section 3, 'Empire', contains two essays examining the famous mosaic portrait of Roger...

Narrating Muslim Sicily. War and Peace in the Medieval Mediterranean World, written by William Granara

Narrating Muslim Sicily. War and Peace in the Medieval Mediterranean World, written by William Granara

Against the Philosophers: Writing and Identity in Medieval Mediterranean Rhetoric

ABSTRACTThis article explores antiphilosophical polemics written by Muslim and Jewish thinkers in the medieval Mediterranean world. These writings demonstrate, in both traditions, a struggle with the incorporation of nontraditional texts and interpretations of theology and textuality. My examination of these writings “against the philosophers” suggests that, far from constituting the reflexive, antiphilosophical fundamentalism that typically characterizes assessments of these texts, authors like al-Ghazali, Halevi, and Ibn Arabi were concerned with what they believed to be the subordination of Jewish and Islamic tradition to Greek philosophy—a rhetoric that, for them, undermined the “conditions of identification” for Muslims and Jews. I argue that these antiphilosophical texts highlight the extent to which these thinkers believed that writing was the battleground for identity in the medieval Middle East.

Mastic Production in Medieval Chios: Economic Flows and Transitions in an Insular Setting

ABSTRACT The Aegean island of Chios provides a special case of insularity during the Middle Ages, aspects of which are reflected in the production of a highly-valued product, mastic resin, which was sought after across the Mediterranean world for use in medicine, fragrances and flavourings. Produced only on the island, high-quality mastic became an iconic Chian product that highlighted the island’s uniqueness and significantly contributed to its economy. This article presents a diachronic view of mastic production in and circulation from Chios during the periods of Roman, Byzantine and Genoese rule. The widespread demand for its luxury commodity meant that the island was always active in the wider maritime networks in this period. The lens of mastic production makes these connections visible in textual, archaeological and architectural evidence that highlights the role local products played in the ways islands, like Chios, navigated the economic and political transitions of the medieval Mediterranean world.

Financial Autonomy and Changing Economic Roles of Jewish Women in the Medieval Mediterranean World

Financial Autonomy and Changing Economic Roles of Jewish Women in the Medieval Mediterranean World

Studii su la storia di Sicilia dalla meta del XVIII secolo al 1820 di Michele Amari, ed. Amelia Crisantino

Michele Amari (1806–89) is best known for his pioneering studies on the medieval Islamic Mediterranean and his hugely successful history of the Sicilian Vespers, the popular revolt in Palermo in 1282 that forced the Angevins to abandon Sicily. This was an episode that, not surprisingly, Italian nationalists found attractive, but it was, above all, Amari’s carefully documented account of 1842 that made the story a powerful symbol of nineteenth-century Italian nationalist aspirations. Its success forced its author to leave Sicily for Paris, where he mixed with Italian political émigrés and French intellectuals, expanded his already prodigious knowledge of ancient and modern European literature and philosophy, and began his studies of Islam and the medieval Mediterranean world. In 1848, Amari returned to Palermo where he took a leading role in the revolution, resulting in another decade of exile. The failure of the revolutions cooled his earlier republican and democratic sympathies, however, and in the mid-1850s he became a supporter of Cavour’s project for Italian independence. In Palermo again in 1860, his support for Cavour’s policies set him at odds with Garibaldi, Crispi and Mazzini, although his expectations that the Sicilians would be granted wide autonomy in the new Italy were disappointed. In 1861 he became a Senator, and subsequently served as Italy’s first Minister of Education and then held university posts in Pisa and Florence. He completed his monumental History of the Muslims in Sicily (1854–74), but he never returned to live in Sicily.

Domestic medicine: slaves, servants and female medical expertise in late medieval Valencia

Domestic slaves and servants were ubiquitous figures in the late medieval Mediterranean world, whose health and physical condition were matters of special concern to their masters and mistresses. This concern not infrequently prompted legal action. Fifteenth‐century civil court records are rife with suits filed by disgruntled masters protesting that a recently purchased slave was ‘defective’ or an exasperated mistress claiming that a servant was ‘unfit’ for service. To distinguish normal human imperfections from critical defects, the court collected testimony not only from medical ‘professionals’ (male, university‐trained physicians) but also laywomen who, on occasion, offered their own alternative diagnoses. Using the rich body of court records extant from fifteenth‐century Valencia as its evidentiary base, this article examines the interplay between lay and ‘expert’ understandings of how the body functioned and reveals how in spite of the new valuation of the medical expertise of university‐trained physicians and surgeons, fifteenth‐century courts continued to solicit and cite the opinions of lay women, reflecting their ongoing importance in the provisioning of healthcare.

Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic by Ryan Szpiech (review)

Reviewed by: Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic by Ryan Szpiech Michelle M. Hamilton Keywords Religious Studies, Medieval Iberia, Intellectual History, Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Ramon Llull, Alfonso de Valladolid, Anselm Turmeda, Catalan Studies, Mediterranean Studies, Translation, Conversos, Jewish Studies, Ryan Szpiech, Michelle M Hamilton Szpiech, Ryan. Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2013. xi + 311 pp. In this study, Ryan Szpiech shows how various medieval authors (many of them Iberian) avoid or reify inherited models of conversion and conversion narratives to meet their needs as polemicists. Szpiech chooses from the large corpus of available material those conversion narratives associated with ‘‘explicitly polemical and interconfessional apologetic writing’’—beginning with Augustine, but focusing on the medieval Mediterranean world of Muslims, Jews, and Christians and how the latter either legitimate or discredit accepted authoritative knowledge and discourses. Szpiech’s comparative approach, which seeks patterns of similarity and of methodology across time and religion, proves fruitful and offers a portrait of polemical literature, often authored by converts, and of the changing and developing role of narrative within it. Each of the six chapters presents case studies of converts, and illustrates how their conversion narratives have been shaped to establish the authenticity of the convert’s new identity by paradoxically establishing his authority in the old faith. In chapter one, ‘‘From Peripety to Prose,’’ Szpiech explores how a convert from Islam, Juan Andrés, and a convert from Judaism, Pablo de Santa Marίa, both include autobiographical accounts of their conversions in fifteenth-century polemical treatises. Once converted, both Juan Andrés and Pablo de Santa Marίa use their knowledge of the proof texts of their former religion (the Quran and tafsir for the former, and Talmud and works of Jewish authorities like Rashi and Mai-monides in the case of the latter) in an attempt to convert their former coreligionists. These two examples reveal the strategies and models that are the end result of a long process of development and adaptation to which Szpiech turns in the following chapters. In the second chapter, ‘‘Alterity and Auctoritas,’’ Szpiech explores how two twelfth-century Jews, Judah/Herman of Cologne, and Petrus Alfonsi, a Judeo-Andalusi intellectual, adopt elements of the accepted Augustinian/Pauline conversion paradigms and meld them with the new Aristotelian rationalism entering Europe to forge a new type of conversion narrative. Both Alfonsi and Judah/Her-man introduce Jewish authorities and Scripture into their narratives, thus proving [End Page 251] their authenticity as former Jews, but also beginning a process of destabilizing traditional Christian authority. In Petrus Alfonsi’s Dialogue Against the Jews, his fictional converted self debates with his former Jewish self who demands an explanation, and in the process Alfonsi makes alterity visible. As Szpiech points out, Alfonsi uses Jewish texts both as authorities recognized by his former Jewish self, and as authoritative sources for Christological interpretations—thus he wants it both ways, and in so doing ‘‘throws the meaning of auctoritas into flux’’ (79). Szpiech explores in the following chapters how this crisis in authority played out as a growing ambivalence toward all authorities and toward the teleological notion of Christian history that undergird them. In chapter 3, ‘‘In the Shadow of the Hazards,’’ Szpiech takes up conversion to Judaism as an illustrative counterpoint to narratives of conversion to Christianity discussed in the second chapter. He compares the conversion of two ninth-century Christians, Bodo/Eleazar and the Austrian Wecelinus, with that of the legendary conversion of the king of the Khazars as recounted in the letters of the Genizah and in Judah Ha-Levi’s twelfth-century Book of the Khazars. Bodo/Eleazar’s account survives only in Paulus Alvarus’s account of the epistolary exchange he purportedly engaged in with the latter, and Wecelinus’s conversion account survives only in the work of the Benedictine chronicler Alpertus of Metz. Both are presented by their Christian narrators as invalid. In contrast, Judah Ha-Levi’s twelfth-century account of the conversion of the legendary King of the Khazars, although also polemic in nature, is presented as a logical and rational choice on the part of the...