Introduction to THE SPANISH MONARCHY AND PERSIA IN THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD

This course will examine the early modern Mediterranean as a contact zone, “where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power”. The Mare Nostrum in the early modern era was, although still a contested “frontier” between Islam and Christianity, also a “borderland”, a highway of transport, trade and cultural exchange, where different societies met and overlapped. With its focus on the “contact zone”, the course concentrates on people who crossed the frontiers of the early modern Mediterranean and facilitated the contact by getting in touch with different civilizations and diverse cultures. Agents of civilizational contact, i.e. spies, merchants, sailors, renegades, soldiers, corsairs, slaves, ambassadors, etc. are at the center of this course. Around their stories, several thematical issues of early modern Mediterranean history will be discussed: Conversion, flow of information, long-distance trade networks, intra-communal relations, extraterritoriality, religious tolerance, migration, resident diplomacy, transformation of identity, articulation of difference, technological transfer, cultural values, patronage, etc. These agents unintentionally undertook the hard task of harmonizing the cultures and unifying the economies and societies of the early modern Mediterranean. They were the means by which ideas were diffused, goods and cash transferred, technologies spread, information gathered and political agreements made. Their stories gave rise to the criticism, prevalent among the historians of the Early Modern Mediterranean, of the Orientalist disposition to consider “East” and “West”, “Islam” and Christianity” as trans-historical self-contained binaries and to depict an irredeemable hostility between different civilizations of exclusivist nature. By concentrating on this specific group of people on the margins of civilizations, the course discusses the extent to which the undisputed geographical/climatological unity of the Mediterranean resulted in its unity as a historical entity, i.e. socio-economically and culturally. It seeks an answer to the question to what extent relations between different societies and cultures were shaped by the geographical unity the sea imposed upon its peoples. Other historical trends come into focus inevitably; the lives on the Mediterranean were affected by political struggles as well as economic and social opportunities provided by the resources of not only the landlocked Mare Nostrum, but also the ambiguously defined geographical space called the “Greater Mediterranean”. Therefore, it also becomes imperative to discuss the structural changes that the Mediterranean experienced. The effects of the rapid technological changes in the warfare, imperial rivalries that dominated the sea, inflationary pressures in the world economy, population pressure, and finally the slowly changing climate on the “collective destinies” of the people inhabiting the Mediterranean were explained briefly in order to give relevant historical context.

Interfaith Relationships and Perceptions of the Other in the Medieval Mediterranean, 2021

Arabic (fundūq) occurred in places where these languages lived side by side for centuries; the institutional reworking of the Islamic fundūq into the Castilian alhóndiga-more government-regulated storage facility than the hostel/warehouse prototype 3-took place where Arab-Islamic commercial practices thrived for generations next to Iberian-Christian ones. Less obviously than the first two, Housing the Stranger discloses a third Mediterranean, a sea of distinctive temporal continuity and geographical unity. "A shared culture of trade and travel," Constable noted, "supported the ubiquitous distribution of these institutions." 4 Indeed, the constant rhythm of trade, the never-ending hum of commercial life, so alike in Barcelona, Bougie, Alexandria, Acre, Constantinople, Venice, Genoa, and Marseille is ever in the book's background, and not infrequently at center stage. The pandocheion/fundūq, moreover, only flourished where the music of seaborne trade played non-stop: "Despite its broad diffusion across political, religious, and linguistic frontiers, it only established firm roots in areas close to this sea." 5 But there is a fourth Mediterranean here as well. For despite the constant movement of words and institutions through the filtering mechanisms of frontier zones against the constant background melody of trade, there is a Mediterranean of irreducible difference and difference-making. It is true that the pandocheion/fundūq/fontico/fondaco/alhóndiga traveled

Mediterranean Europe(s): Rethinking Europe from its Southern Shores, 2023

This chapter examines the role that the Mediterranean played in constructions of imperial sovereignty and European national identity. In particular, it treats the ways in which Europe’s encounter with the Muslim Mediterranean engendered multiple forms of identity that often cut across imperial formations. France at once promoted ideas of itself as a “Latin” race and a “Muslim power.” Spanish colonialists and Africanistas agonized over their country’s European credentials and yet promoted a vision of a shared Iberian-Arab racial identity as Spain expanded into Morocco. Italian publicists and nationalists looked back to the glories of Rome and turned their eyes to Libya and the dreams of a colonial African empire. These and other examples reveal that the Mediterranean was an imperial space, but a space in which concepts of European sovereignty and identity were reformulated to fit the contours of imperial nationhood. Framed otherwise, the Mediterranean became a laboratory in which ideas of Europeanness were subject to refashioning and re-invention. ,

Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 2011

Scholars have turned with increasing interest in recent years to the history of the Mediterranean. The subject is not new, but the ways in which we approach it have changed. No longer viewed primarily from the vantage points of either economic or imperial histories, the Mediterranean has emerged as a site of immense cultural complexity. As a result, the rather sharply defined contours of religions and cultures that seemed to shape the identities of those who lived around its shores now appear far more fluid, much less fixed than they did to an earlier generation of scholars. Yet there were precursors to this shift in perspective. As long ago as the late 1940s, for example, Fernand Braudel called attention to the complexity of this environment in The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World. In numerous splendid passages, perhaps most notably in his romanticized but suggestive description of the folklore and religious beliefs of highlanders in the opening pages of his study, Braudel cautioned against thinking of their worlds in purely Christian or purely Muslim terms. 1 To the contrary, making sense of religious belief, Braudel maintained, requires attention to the whole social environment, and historians need to recognize not only the relative ease with which men and women of the Mediterranean could pass from one faith to another, but also the tenacity of ancient peasant beliefs, even as Christian and Muslim authorities sought to impose new ways of thinking. Braudel problematized the question of religious identities for largely stable populations. The studies in this issue of The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, by contrast, focus primarily, though not exclusively, on highly mobile populations: on travelers, runaways , merchants, missionaries, and warriors. While the case studies I have gathered here are diverse, their authors have-in their attempts to illuminate the making and unmaking of religious boundaries in the Mediterranean-drawn, either directly or indirectly, on new questions about the past enabled by recent work in

Images in the Borderlands: Te Mediterranean between Christian and Muslim Worlds in the Early Modern Period, 2022

Dear reader, Please note this article is published with Brepols Publishers as a Gold Open Access article under a Creative Commons CC 4.0: BY-NC license. The article is also freely available on the website of Brepols Publishers: https://www.brepolsonline.net/doi/abs/10.1484/M.MEMEW-EB.5.130597 under this same license.

Bustan: The Middle East Book Review, 2020

"simple believers" without the selection and filter applied on those concerns by the learned authors who report on them. Recent work on rural Christian communities based on those documents shows that on the whole, interreligious and interfaith issues were quite far from their everyday worries-and this was true in the period following Chalcedon as it was in the early Islamic period. Even personal letters between members of the same family rarely mention-or even allude to-religious debates and rival groups. Their interaction with clerics and monks was usually related to protection against abuse from powerful villagers or the authorities, sometimes about family disputes, and more rarely religious questions of very down-to-earth relevance. To a large extent, this material agrees with Tannous's positions and would have greatly reinforced, but also nuanced, his argument. 2 This is a book that will sit on the desks of social historians of the eastern Mediterranean for the foreseeable future. The footnotes alone have the potential to initiate several new research projects, as do the detailed discussions of case studies in individual chapters and the engaging style in which Tannous writes. Like the learned clerics of the medieval Middle East, he excels in persuasive rhetoric and transmits his enthusiasm in a very compelling manner. Even if his truth can be contested in its details, ultimately his message is incontrovertible: if they had not convinced the masses of simple believers, the sophisticated religious leaders of the time would have spent decades discussing theology in an ivory tower with little effect on historical change.

energies of Late Antiquity were thus reined in and, indeed, muzzledno longer free to bolt in new and unpredictable directions. Conrad Leyser provides an example of one unlikely architect of the social order that defined the late-and post-Carolingian periods. Gregory the Great had ironically shown no interest in the future of human society, given his belief in the imminent arrival of the Last Day. Nevertheless, in the centuries that followed his death, his works were repurposed to legitimate a Church that reared career clerics, incorporated monastic institutions, and operated independently from an emperor. This development ossified Christianity into a fundamentally conservative force within society. Thus, R.I. Moore details how ecclesiastical authorities worked with secular powers to utilise, manage and eventually control the potentially disruptive forces of popular religious sentiment that had featured so prominently in previous centuries. One such example, trial by ordeal, which had long served to ameliorate local conflicts in the absence of interventions from a centralised State, lost its flexibility in the newly bureaucratised world and, eventually, disappeared as potentates reclaimed ultimate judgement from the purview of God. Stephen D. White applies a similarly functionalist analysis to the feud, which, contrary to common assumptions, had long served to resolve, rather than perpetuate, cycles of violence by enabling local agents to quickly pressure disputants into making peace. Thus, two practices often held up as sources of social dysfunction and irrationality, the ordeal and the feud, had actually served the interests of order and cohesion. In this story, the Big Society gradually gave way to the Big State. These superb essays masterfully demonstrate the sort of new, counterintuitive insights that can be gained once the deep assumptions of traditional historical analysis are questioned and the starting point is shifted, from questions about governmental authority and agency to a focus on societal relationships and transregional networks. Such a splendid volume invites further studies, especially those comparing the aforementioned developments with those in North Africa and the Near East.

2023

This seminar focused on the Mediterranean world in which Hassan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Gharnati lived, with a focus upon the interaction between Christian, Islamic and Jewish communities and the ways in which al-Wazzan – alongside other transcultural figures like him – moved between them. Al-Wazzan al-Gharnati was born in Granada, moved to North Africa, was then kidnapped by pirates and worked in Rome for Pope Leo X. Known in Europe as Leo Africanus, he owes his fame to his Cosmography of Africa, which influenced how early modern Europeans viewed the continent well into the eighteenth century. We approached al-Wazzan against the rich background of Mediterranean diasporas, the frequent shifts of religious and political allegiances and identities they brought about, and the emotional traumas provoked by forced displacement. These exchanges across languages, religious faiths, and cultural outlooks took place simultaneously with frequent reformulations of the texts and the icons employed by each of the cultures that surrounded the wider Mediterranean to make sense of each other. They materialized in the documents, the texts, the disciplines, the ideas, and the objects that recorded them, which included history and cartography, epistolography and music, alongside practices such as translation, language teaching, trade, diplomacy and religious indoctrination.