Download PDF | (Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages Ser) Clara Almagro Vidal - Minorities in Contact in the Medieval Mediterranean-Brepols Publishers (2021).
380 Pages
Foreword
In 2015, a workshop convened by Ana Echevarria and Nora Berend at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge invited medievalists to discuss contacts between religious minorities in the medieval period. Participants considered case studies from different historical and geographical contexts to analyse a range of groups and individuals and the dynamics of their interactions, while also discussing current uses of the term ‘minority’.
Concurrently another workshop, organized at Saint Louis University, Madrid, by Luke Yarbrough, discussed the apparent paradox of religious alterity and political power in medieval polities. The speakers focused on persistent patterns of out-group empowerment that arose from relationships between minorities, both those who lacked access to ideological hegemony or political power and elites who were numerical minorities, short on legitimacy and access to mechanisms of local control. Participants also discussed the discourses that such empowerment motivated among the ostensible majorities.
Both conferences spurred debate about the implications of being a minority and the limitations of the term ‘minority’ itself to refer to medieval realities. It became clear that the topics at hand merited further analysis in the form ofa coherent publication that could contribute to broader scholarly discussions of these problems.
Although those workshops provided the initial impetus for this collection, to which some of the participants have contributed, the concept and rationale of this volume are new. The contributions of participants in the workshops are joined here by other specialists who have recently pioneered innovative approaches to the topic. The final result provides, we hope, fresh perspectives on how difference was experienced and managed in the medieval Mediterranean.
Introduction , Overview
The renowned Persian geographer al-Istakhri (fl. fourth/tenth century) described the Khazar tribesmen, who lived north of the Caspian Sea, in the following manner: “The Khazars are Muslims, Christians, and Jews. Among them, too, are idol-worshippers. The Jews are the smallest of the sects and the Muslims the most numerous, yet the king and his intimates are Jews. For the most part their customs are those of the idolaters’' Historians might well debate whether or not al-Istakhri (or the Khazars) belonged properly to the Mediterranean, the Central Asian, or the Iranian cultural orbit, but there is no doubt that the corporate religious identities in this passage — Jews, Christians, Muslims, and pagans — were also the ones that predominated in the medieval Mediterranean. Rule by members of a demographic minority, too, was far from unknown there. Indeed, while modern scholars habitually discuss the coexistence of these broad medieval identity-groups using the terms ‘minority’ and ‘majority’, al-Istakhri’s description of the Khazars highlights the drawbacks of these terms. Were Khazar Jews, one of whom was king, a ‘minority’? Were their numerous Muslims, who neither ruled nor even dictated prevailing customs, a ‘majority’? The passage serves as a reminder that medieval identity was multidimensional. The Khazars, themselves a composite of tribal and professional subgroups, were religiously diverse. Conversely, they shared each of their multiple religious identities with countless other tribes and peoples.
In this and numerous comparable examples, the term ‘minority’ begins to appear dangerously simplistic, or at least begs for careful historical contextualization.
As the title of this book indicates, we argue that the term is worth retaining, yet we consider its utility to lie in its potential as a relative descriptor, not an absolute one. Although demographic imbalances and unequal access to such resources as power, wealth, and legitimacy were real and pervasive historical phenomena, no medieval individuals belonged to minorities simpliciter. Instead, it is meaningful to speak of minorities only in relation to specific resources and in particular contexts. Although different cases have common features, the studies here show how an uncritical application of the term ‘minority’ as a shorthand — tempting as it may sometimes be — risks ignoring or silencing the nuances and complexities created by each context and its internal dynamics.
As with any historical inquiry, it is crucial to understand and write about people and peoples on their own terms, at particular times and in particular places, acknowledging that their relative power and/or lack thereof changed and fluctuated. Although an individual might belong to a particular group or community, such belonging was almost always multiple; religious, professional, economic, and ethnic divisions were cross-cutting and ubiquitous. That someone could be ‘minor’ in certain respects and at certain moments, but not others, suggests that the complexity inherent in the term renders it useful only so long as the user and reader are highly alert to context, that is, to change over time and space. Thus it should not be presumed that a ‘minority’ at one moment shares characteristics/experiences with another ‘minority’ at another.’
The medieval Mediterranean provides the researcher with particularly apt temporal and geographical spaces in which to examine dynamics of interconnectedness and interdependence. It comprised diverse contexts and arenas, in which actors with multiple religious, political, and social affiliations interacted pacifically and antagonistically in numerous permutations. Considering medieval Mediterranean minorities, and who and when they were, is consequently particularly fruitful, complex, and interesting.
The aim of the essays in this volume is therefore to provide a new perspective from which the term ‘minority’ and, more importantly, those whom scholars frequently identify as ‘minorities’ can be re-examined. Rather than examining the interactions of ‘minorities’ with those who are usually designated the ‘majority’, here they are examined alongside and interacting with other putative minorities. As noted, these designations are a matter of perspective, and thus authors have taken care to explain the criteria on the basis of which they have determined that particular individuals should be associated with a ‘minority’ or a ‘majority:
The goal of these introductory pages is to explain the general approach taken in this volume, which aims to problematize and nuance the use of the term ‘minority’ to describe particular people and moments in the medieval Mediterranean. Here, we consider what a ‘minority’ might be;’ what speaking of ‘minorities’ implies about human interactions; to what extent having characteristics ascribed to a particular ‘minority’ inflects the strategies and decisions of historical agents; and whether ‘minority’ and ‘majority’ are mutually exclusive descriptors, or relative and overlapping ones that can apply simultaneously to a given individual.
Definition(s)
The lack of agreement regarding even the definition of the term ‘minority’ and its cognates in contemporary vernaculars highlights the difficulties in establishing the parameters of what a minority might have been in the past and the implications of applying the label now. Taking only English as an example, definitions of the word vary. While the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines ‘minority’ as ‘a small group of people within a community or country, differing from the main population in race, religion, language, or political persuasion’ the Merriam-Webster Dictionary conceptualizes ‘minority’ as ‘a part of a population differing from others in some characteristics and often subjected to differential treatment: Thus, whereas the OED implies that a ‘minority’ group must be ‘small’ as well as ‘differing’ with respect to the ‘main’ population, Merriam-Webster allows that ‘minority’ status can be determined on the basis of difference alone, with no necessary quantitative discrepancy, while still presuming that a ‘minority’ is often a weaker ‘subject’ population in some sense. Both definitions seem to imply that ‘minority’ status incorporates the entire identity of those categorized in that ‘group’ or ‘part’, rather than allowing that they may be ‘minor’ only in certain respects.
Additionally, in both dictionaries, ‘minority’ has a secondary definition as a state or condition, specifically in relation to age. This is nearer to the Latin from which the term is derived: minor, which as an adjective is a comparative of parvus, meaning ‘lesser’, ‘inferior’, or ‘smaller’, and as a noun means ‘subordinate’ It might well be argued that projecting a modern definition backwards, rather than either coining a new term or deliberately delineating a meaning of ‘minority’ specifically relevant for a medieval Mediterranean context, has sometimes contributed to simplistic and anachronistic use of the term. Rather than a fixed, unchanging, and unbending characteristic, we argue that ‘minority’ in a medieval Mediterranean context should be considered, with an ear to the Latin, a condition in which most individuals and groups participate to some degree, though in diverse ways, and which can be malleable, temporary, or intermittent depending on circumstances.
The Term ‘Minority’ in Medieval Mediterranean Historiography
The study of those in the past who are now regularly characterized as ‘religious minorities’ has a long tradition in the historiography of the medieval Mediterranean,‘ especially in certain areas, such as the Iberian Peninsula. Whether one is speaking of Muslims or Jews in medieval Christian Iberia, Muslims and Jews in the Italian Peninsula, Jews in France, or Christians in Islamic Egypt and Syria, a broad framework for historical study is now in place. The internationalization of research, as well as efforts to develop comparative history in Europe and in regions connected to the Mediterranean,” are enabling scholars to understand the mechanisms and patterns of inter- and intra-religious and inter-social interactions — friendly, antagonistic, and indifferent — in widely separated locales. However, amidst these developments there has been relatively little reflection on the rationale behind the label, or its implications.’
The regular use of the term ‘minority’ in the study of medieval peoples can be traced at least back to the mid-twentieth century.* Modern understandings of the term were developed primarily by scholars of sociology and law, whence it has been ‘borrowed’ by historians. Consequent interpretations are inseparable from the problematic implications of applying an otherwise modern term,’ with particular modern referents, to peoples and groups in the past who, in very different contexts, ostensibly displayed similar characteristics to those in the present. This includes the retention of a quantitative implication — that is, the implication that a ‘minority’ is usually numerically ‘minor’ with respect to a ‘majority. Additionally, the main qualitative aspects that define ‘minority groups’ today are regularly taken as given for the past, too, namely non-dominant status, socially, religiously, ethnically, politically, and economically. Thus, the term ‘minority’ appears with frequency along with the adjective ‘religious’, mostly to describe Muslims and Jews under Christian rule and Christians and Jews under Muslim rule.’° Yet so-called religious minorities are also frequently considered together with other minorities, such as those from certain ethnic backgrounds,” ‘heretics,* homosexuals,® women,"* and even serfs.’ The inclusion of such a wide range of cases follows the rigid contemporary meaning of the word, showing how the condition of minority is dependent on context, both the context of those under study and of the scholar in the present. But using the term in this fashion may short-change historical perspectives; there is no direct equivalent for the general term ‘minority’ in the languages of the Middle Ages. Medieval people's comprehension of difference varied both from the modern conception and contemporaneously according to circumstances.”
This situation means that, notwithstanding assumptions in some contemporary studies, in the traditional use of the term by medieval historians, a single marker — for example, religion — defines ‘the majority’ and, conversely, ‘the minority(ies): In addition, although the concept of minority, as a somewhat artificial frame of categorization, may be a useful tool with which historians can understand certain dynamics in the past, it is, at the very least, problematic to apply a term to people who cannot possibly have self-identified as such.” Being a minority is far from the only factor at play guiding interactions in which ‘minorities’ took part; it is one of many concurrent variables. Even in modern uses of the term, accurate analysis relies on acknowledging that the effects of dominance on the dominant and the subordinate parties are by no means uniform.” Also, not all the markers for being ascribed to a ‘minority’ according to today’s standards had the same weight in the past. Religion seems to have been a strongly differentiating factor that was difficult to overlook. For this reason, we have focused on this element as an axis for the case studies, and also because, as we will see, there were also differences between ‘minorities’ defined on the basis of religion.
For example, the legitimation of power through religion, and the consequent establishment of a dominant religion connected to the political authority, implies a potential devaluation and marginalization of dissenters. However, when adherents of the ‘minority’ religion are situated in a position close to power, that situation mitigates to some extent the experience of marginalization they shared with their non-elite coreligionists. Closeness to power thus moderates the existing category, but does not erase it completely, even when members ofa religious minority are deliberately chosen by rulers as a consequence of their adherence.”
This association between power and religion also tends to carry over to the gradual constructions ofa differentiated legal status for those not adhering to the dominant religion. Such is the case of Muslims and Jews in the Iberian Peninsula, or non-Muslim ‘dhimmis’ under Islam. However, even in such cases it has been emphasized ‘how necessary it is to analytically differentiate between legal norms and societal practice when conducting historical research on religious minorities’ and, it might be added, to explain how legal norms were negotiated in dialogue with changing societal practice.*° What the surviving legal texts imply at best only approximates the situation ‘on the ground. Additionally, the types of evidence available to the modern researcher can significantly influence conclusions regarding legal marginalization. For example, in Christian-ruled regions of the Iberian Peninsula, the legal differentiation of Jews and Muslims from Christians, which seems evident from Christian legal texts, in reality was mitigated by Jews’ and Muslims’ use of separate, internal communal courts, the records of which have often disappeared. In light of this, the term ‘minority’ as a reflection of a monolithic reality is a misnomer. It implies the existence of more commonalities than differences between ‘minorities’, yet the evidence demonstrates that these commonalities are mostly evident only from the perspective of the ‘majority’
The Term ‘Minority’ in this Volume
We propose that, since people have multiple affiliations and allegiances, no single marker should serve to place individuals in an absolute ‘minority’; and that examining ‘minorities’ in connection with one another allows for a more considered and multidimensional assessment. Our solution thus includes the traditional usage, but also extends beyond it. Take for instance a Mamluk emir in Egypt. He might accurately be said to belong at once to an ethnic and linguistic minority (Turkic, Circassian), a religious majority (Sunni Islam), a political majority with respect to coercive power that is also a demographic minority (the foreign-born ruling elite), an educational minority with respect to capacity (non- or semi-literate) that, as such, is also a demographic majority, a minority with respect to personal prestige (as a slave or freedman) that is for the same reason, along with the peasantry, a demographic majority, and so forth.
By examining a range of interactions through the conceptual lens of minority — construed as a relative condition — from religious, social, and political angles, this volume is concerned to understand the degree to which historical evidence shows assumed ‘minorities’ to have been ‘minor’ in specific respects. Taking into consideration the artificiality of ‘minority’ as a concept of analysis, the editors and authors in this volume have adopted a flexible interpretation of the term to allow for a deeper reconsideration of who scholars might conceptualize as being minorities and how the label might most fruitfully be applied.
Here, then, the term ‘minority’ refers to those who were inferior numerically, or ‘minor’ with respect to power and access to other such scarce resources — that is, those things people want and spend time and energy seeking.” It should be noted that possessing attributes connoting ‘minority’ status (including numerical inferiority, along with marginalization and disempowerment on a variety of bases) does not mean that an individual will be considered and treated as a ‘minority’ in a consistent manner and in every context. Likewise, we have not presumed that those whom historians may deem ‘majorities’, either quantitatively or qualitatively, cannot also belong to a minority in some other respect. One example of the former case is Uriel Simonsohn’s analysis of the role of women in the context of conversions between Christianity or Judaism and Islam, in which his protagonists — who are generally represented as disempowered — display authority and leverage in the form of brokerage in transitions between religions.
In this way we seek to blur the boundaries between minorities, understood in a broad sense. We thus step away from a two-dimensional situation, and towards a multifaceted one, in which more actors are included in a historical discourse that, by not being artificially demarcated, reflects with more accuracy the complex dynamics in the past.” It also avoids the accidental erasure of peripheral groups which can occur when majority—minority relations are at the centre. Furthermore, by questioning the term ‘minority’ itself and how it is employed when, for example, those in power are a numerical minority, the contributors develop and problematize the image of the medieval Mediterranean as characterized by extensive majority-minority relations, while opening new possibilities for historical investigation.
For example, Alejandro Garcia-Sanjuan and Luke Yarbrough’ contributions show how the quasi-automatic association that is made between numerical minorities and marginality is not always applicable and, as such, must be reconsidered.* Likewise, and as the chapters of this book show, minorities — in the wider definition of the term — were not necessarily marginalized or disenfranchised, nor did they all react in a homogeneous manner to the challenges they faced.
Such an approach allows for nuance. A condition of ‘minority’ becomes only a starting point from which to observe other variables that determine a person’s allegiances, alliances, motivations, and limitations within the time and space in which s/he is situated. By beginning with minority as a means of interpreting perceived difference, the minutiae of how that difference plays out come into clearer contrast, while also allowing for blurriness when the reasons for difference are removed. By using the term ‘minority’ in this sense, one stresses the inevitable mutual dependency of ever-shifting social groups and the multiplicity and relativity of individual identities and affiliations in any medieval Mediterranean society.”
Speaking of ‘minorities’ can also be a way to emphasize the complex and differentiated social and economic structures of medieval societies and the mechanisms of their functions. It acknowledges that resource concentrations were endemic and historically important, but also that there were many kinds of resources, as well as many identities that individuals could assume. By speaking of a particular set of people as a ‘minority’ (always a relative and context-specific term) rather than simply a ‘group’, one marks that set as a relationally dynamic one that is perennially vulnerable and perpetually poised to enter into negotiation, conflict, and exchange with others for needed resources.
By choosing the widest possible meaning of the term, including its quantitative and qualitative implications, and comparing and connecting the case studies, we are able to probe its limits and to take advantage of its artificiality to highlight human states of existence and interactions from new perspectives. By seeing religious, social, and political attributes as overlapping in an individual’s external and internal conceptualization and, in turn, in notions of the collective to which s/he adheres or can be ascribed, the term takes on a new meaning. Being a minority situates a person in a certain position in relation to other aspects of personal identity and those of contemporaries. However, that position is only a relative one. It then needs to be calibrated with respect to other factors, and also to personal intentions, aspirations, and self-image.
Overview of the Essays in the Volume
The essays in this volume represent a diverse, comparative collaboration among medieval historians, philologists, and literary scholars. They shed light on collective and individual interactions in medieval societies around the Mediterranean basin, incorporating numerous regions, periods, and peoples, and highlight both the commonalities and the differences that characterized such interactions across space and time. The chronological scope of the volume stretches from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries and spans the Mediterranean, with a focus on its eastern and western extremities: the Iberian Peninsula, Egypt, and Greater Syria.
Broadly speaking, the essays are arranged in descending level of generality and abstraction, from those which deal with methodological issues and elite literary sources, to those which use documentary evidence that may be assumed to track closely with lived experience. The early essays thus continue and extend the methodological and conceptual discussions in the present introduction, going on to examine the thought-worlds of medieval subjects through the lens of surviving theological, legal, and literary texts. The essays in the middle of the volume connect such intellectual-historical topics to others, no less complex, in the realms of political and institutional history, still using evidence that is more literary than documentary in character. Finally, the concluding essays shed light on the ways in which highly specific historical interactions, revealed mainly in documentary and material evidence, bear out or problematize the themes that emerge from the foregoing studies of literary texts. Coincidentally, there is also a general drift in the focus of the essays from the eastern to the western Mediterranean as the volume progresses.
The opening essay, by Annliese Nef, explores the limitations of the term ‘minority’ for the analysis of medieval societies, with special reference to the case of medieval Sicily. Among the several conceptual shortcomings that Nef discerns in contemporary usage of the term is that its use tends to reify particular social groups in an ahistorical fashion, dulling our awareness of the contingent ways in which social formations, along with their particular markers, were historically perceived and continually revised. This tendency is symptomatic of a larger one in modern scholarship, namely to flatten the social complexity of medieval societies by tacitly adopting the religious and/or juridical classification schemata of dominant groups, referring casually to all non-Muslim subjects of Muslim rulers, for instance, as dhimmis. A potential way around these problems, Nef suggests, is to use ‘majority-minority’ terminology sparingly, if at all, and instead to attend to how historical actors continually (re) constructed and (re)conceived contemporary social formations; how numerous individuals helped to fashion the very societies from which their supposed ‘minority’ status might have been expected to exclude them; and how historical ruptures led to striking discontinuities in the cohesion of ‘groups’ that historians often treat as persistent and static across time. A brief concluding study of eleventh- and twelfth-century Sicily illustrates Nef’s proposal; the Norman conquest of the island stimulated ways of reimagining social identity that were quite novel, that did not take cues primarily from religious or ethnic markers, and that, in addition, complicate our usual ideas about how ‘medieval Christian societies’ were configured.
Nef’s parting plea for more extensive comparative work is answered, to a degree, by the essays that follow, even if few of these express the same level of scepticism about the utility of ‘majority-minority’ terminology. Whereas Nef briefly references medieval women’s history as a model for how the simultaneous agency and limitations of religious ‘others’ could be reimagined, Uriel Simonsohn’s contribution focuses squarely on women, specifically on the ways that male literate elites represented their roles in religiously mixed families in early Islamic societies. As Simonsohn makes clear at the outset, this study, too, complicates simplistic notions of dominant (Muslim) majorities and subordinate (non-Muslim) minorities, both by reminding us that communal boundaries were often quite permeable and by showing that non-Muslim women, who are too easily assumed to be doubly marginal, were important actors in religiously mixed domestic spaces. The particular dilemmas that such spaces posed for clerical elites are reflected in both Jewish and Christian sources, indicating the existence ofa shared social problematic that was occasioned both by conversion to Islam and by religious exogamy. The absence of Jewish-Christian examples serves as a reminder of how large ‘majority-minority’ interactions loom in the sources. Still, this shared problematic, coupled with Simonsohn’s observation that the former social ties of non-Muslim women often survived into their marriages with Muslim men, suggests that Jews and Christians responded to a condition of minority (with respect to power) in mutually intelligible ways. Male elites from both groups encouraged their women — whom Simonsohn calls ‘confessional gatekeepers’ — to ‘raise their children in a manner that would sustain their non-Muslim affiliation.
Alexandra Cuffel’s chapter echoes similar themes — of conversion, gender, and the prescriptive views of clerical elites in an Islamicate context — but the later Egyptian settings she discusses provide more substantial evidence of Jewish—Christian interaction. Particularly salient is conversion into the two ‘minority’ communities, in the face of the moratorium that Islamic law imposed on such conversions in principle. In fact, Muslim authorities seem generally to have been reluctant to involve themselves in such cases. In some instances, the converts were enslaved persons, members of a ‘minority’ in Egypt who had been imported from elsewhere, as evidence from the Cairo Geniza and Coptic chronicles reveals. Placed alongside slaves, free non-Muslims appear surprisingly powerful — gatekeepers to the prospect of freedom — and conversion to their ‘minority’ religions emerges as a way for unfree persons to improve their status and for poor ones to obtain financial security. Cuffel extends her study of the encounter to polemic, pointing out that the abundance of Arabic polemic from the period attests to greater inter-minority’ competition under Muslim rule than is usually supposed. And, like Simonsohn, she stresses that conversion did not necessarily sever ties to former coreligionists, further demonstrating that the model of ‘contact’ between discrete communities has its limitations.
Jewish-Christian competition and polemic in the Islamic world come to the fore in the next two chapters, by Y. Zvi Stampfer and Barbara Roggema. Noting that, under Muslim rule, Jews and Christians were generally in no position to coerce one another, Stampfer argues that such settings encouraged the continuation of late antique theological polemic between the two minority groups, producing novel ideas that later became known in Europe. He focuses on interpretations of Jeremiah 3. 8, which early Christian commentators had taken to foretell God’s divorce of the Jews, eliciting an exegetical defence by Jewish sages. Jewish scholars of the Islamic period carried forward the same themes in their explanations of the verse, inspired perhaps by formal or personal debates with contemporary Christians, discussions with converts, or the intercommunal exchange of written materials. Stampfer is able to identify the likely agent by whom exegeses of Jeremiah 3. 8 developed by Jews in the Islamic world were then carried to Christian Europe: the twelfth-century figure Ibn Ezra, or Abenezra in Latin. The payoff is a concrete example of how the advent of Muslim rule was not in every instance a watershed event. Instead, Jewish-Christian polemicists within the former borders of the Roman world evidently perceived a need to carry on with their late antique quarrels.
In her contribution, Barbara Roggema focuses on Arabic polemical texts written against Jews and Judaism by Christians in the early Islamic period, showing that considerably more such texts were composed (and survive) than scholars have generally recognized. Against the prevalent view, which holds that Christians turned their polemical energies away from Judaism and towards Islam after the conquests, Roggema argues that the long-standing rivalry between Jewish and Christian communities continued to inspire textual production throughout the eighth and ninth centuries. Christian identities thus continued to be constructed, in part, by reference to Jewish ‘others. Debates about God’s favour towards the Jewish people, its alleged revocation, and the future prospects for Jewish political authority in Palestine, among other topics, played out against an exegetical background of duelling interpretations of Scripture and a political background in which a Muslim demographic minority enjoyed thorough dominance. A remarkable feature of Roggema’s study is the alignment that she demonstrates among Christian polemical themes, contemporary Jewish attacks upon Christianity, and concrete hopes (or fears) for Jewish communal unification and political resurgence. The picture that emerges is a striking one, in which Christians and Jews in the ‘Islamic’ world could on occasion set aside their dealings with Islam in order to spar vigorously with one another.
The volume’s focus remains on the eastern Mediterranean with the contribution of Jan Vandeburie, which examines intra-Christian contacts in the thirteenth-century Latin East. By rereading the writings of the crusade preacher and Bishop of Acre Jacques de Vitry concerning the Eastern Christian denominations he encountered, Vandeburie is able to show how the agenda of Pope Innocent III following the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 influenced Latin Christian approaches to indigenous Christians in the Levant. The Fourth Crusade and the Frankish conquest of Constantinople in 1204 had placed the prospect of Eastern Christian reunion with Rome on a new footing, while Saladin’s capture of Jerusalem in 1187 encouraged crusaders to seek alliance with Eastern Christians in an effort to retain and expand their beleaguered territories. Jacques, mindful of these priorities in his extensive writings about indigenous Levantine Christians, stressed the possibility of their union with Rome as well as their military potential. His concerns mirrored the agenda of the Fourth Lateran Council: pastoral care and reform (reformatio) and crusade (recuperatio). The latter theme loomed larger in Jacques’s writing after he had grasped the difficulty of the situation on the ground. In Vandeburie’s essay, we see how even the dominant group in the area — Latin Christians, themselves a quantitative minority in the larger region — felt an acute need for resources that other Christian ‘minorities’ could furnish. Such appeals would cast a long shadow, as Muslim accusations of treachery dogged indigenous Christians in the region during the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
The essay by Tamar Boyadjian also deals with contact between Latin and indigenous Christians in the era of the Crusades. In the cases she examines, the indigenes in question are Armenians, the sources are primarily poetic, and the city of Jerusalem serves as a shared point of reference for minority-minority contacts. A poetic lament by the late twelfth-century Armenian Catholicos Grigor Tlay at the loss of Jerusalem in 1187, Boyadjian argues, was a rhetorical appeal to Latin Christians for a new crusade that would serve Armenian political interests, particularly in Cilicia. The lament inscribed Jerusalem within a vision of medieval world geography that not only placed the city at the centre, as was typical of Latin Christian maps, but also gave prominent place to the Pontus and Caspian Sea, thereby drawing an implicit connection to historical Greater Armenia. The poem’s focus on Mount Zion likewise drew attention to the historical Armenian presence in the city, gesturing — at a moment of recent rapprochement between the Armenian and Roman churches — to the Armenian churches and monasteries situated there. The poems chief purpose, however, is to mourn the loss of the city to the forces of Saladin, and thereby to urge Frankish and Armenian forces to recapture it. Grigor’s lament points to the ubiquity of ‘minorities in contact’, particularly given the diversity and political multipolarity of the eastern Mediterranean in the late twelfth century.
Armenians, an important ‘minority’ throughout the medieval eastern Mediterranean, are also central to the contribution by Juan Pedro MonferrerSala. Here the salient contact is that between the ethnically Armenian viziers of later Fatimid Egypt, notably the Muslim ex-slave Badr al-Jamili (d. 1094), and the Coptic Christians of Egypt, specifically the author of the anonymous Arabic ‘Apocalypse of Pseudo-Athanasius’ This work is a continuation of an eighth-century Coptic-language apocalypse. In those sections that, as MonferrerSala argues, refer to the late eleventh century in the manner of vaticinium ex eventu, the figure of Badr al-Jamali appears as a just and able ruler, an energetic builder, and a friend to the Copts. Indeed, certain portions of the text appear to portray him as a Christian. While both Armenians and Coptic Christians are commonly understood as ‘minorities’ in Fatimid Egypt, this study allows for a more finely grained appreciation of what such a characterization might mean. Inasmuch as the former held power and the latter were probably in the demographic majority, neither qualifies as a ‘minority’ by most definitions. However, the working alliance between the Armenian vizierate and the Coptic Church, alluded to in the Apocalypse, suggests that the vizier may have relied upon the latter for broad-based support, while the Copts stood to gain from beneficial policies that Badr, unlike certain other Muslim rulers, was content to enact. The more complex conception of ‘minority’ implied here allows for a richer appreciation of sociopolitical dynamics than does the two-dimensional notion of a Muslim majority coexisting with various Christian and Jewish minorities.
The perspective — though not the locale — is markedly different in the following essay, by Antonia Bosanquet. Bosanquet examines a curious section within the legal work Ahkam ahl al-dhimma (‘Rulings concerning resident non-Muslims’), by a fourteenth-century Damascene Muslim jurist, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya. Bosanquet shows that the section concerning non-Muslim state scribes differs from most others in the book. Its source is not identified, and it is closer in character to literary anecdote than to the Muslim jurisprudence with which the Hanbali Ibn al-Qayyim is in dialogue elsewhere in the text. It narrates a series of incidents from Islamic history in which righteous Muslim rulers act to cleanse their states of nefarious Christian and Jewish scribes, and is also unusually critical of the ruler. Bosanquet notes that the inclusion of this anomalous passage is only partly explained by the salience of the issue in the fourteenth-century Mamluk Empire; equally relevant, she suggests, is its rhetorical effect within a work that pervasively advocates the social subordination of non-Muslims. The section is thus a kind of unsigned warning of the chaos that might ensue if rulers invert the traditional hierarchy. Bosanquet argues that the scholarly class to which Ibn al-Qayyim belongs can be productively understood as a vulnerable elite minority, joined in precarious, intermittent alliance with the foreign ruling elites of the Mamluk Empire. Seen this way, the book’s harsh polemic against non-Muslim scribes is evidence not for the top-down suppression of minorities by a Muslim majority, but rather for sharp jockeying among the elites of multiple minorities, defined as such with respect to attributes that include religion but are not limited to it.
Avery similar dynamic is at workin the essay that follows, by Luke Yarbrough, which also considers non-Muslim state officials in fourteenth-century Syria, using the surviving work of one such official, the Christian Ibn al-Suqa‘, a contemporary of Ibn al-Qayyim’s famous teacher Ibn Taymiyya. Although the non-Muslim official is a stock character in the annals of Islamic history, it is unusual for surviving texts by such officials to reflect upon their own position as simultaneously powerful and marginal. Yarbrough mentions isolated exceptions to this rule, notably in al-Andalus, but focuses on the extant biographical dictionary by Ibn al-Suqa‘i, a continuation of a famous work in the genre by the thirteenth-century Muslim Ibn Khallikan. He argues that in this work, Ibn al-Suqa‘I represents non-Muslim state officials such as himselfas entirely natural denizens of the ‘Islamic’ administrations in which he spent his own career. Indeed, he performed his own inclusion in the elite echelons of Mamluk-era Syrian society by electing to write in the genre, which had hitherto been dominated by Muslim authors. In the scores of biographical entries he includes, mainly of prominent Muslims, Ibn al-Suga ‘1 rarely exhibits partisanship or interest in the particular confessional identity of individuals. Only when profiling those few Muslims who are known to have targeted non-Muslim rivals as such does he break with his usual impassivity to deliver biting critiques. Yarbrough’s essay, like Bosanquet’s, suggests that rigorist medieval clerical elites who produced the discourses that have helped to ‘minoritize’ particular populations in the modern imagination should be regarded not as the most committed spokesmen of their religions, but rather as members of their own vulnerable subgroups. Much the same is true for the powerful but aloof and culturally distinct ruling class, whom literate elites of all descriptions sought to influence.
If Yarbrough refers to non-Muslim minority elites of al-Andalus only in passing, the essay by Alejandro Garcia-Sanjuan focuses squarely on one of the most famous such cases: that of the Bana Naghrila, Jewish viziers of eleventh-century Granada. Parting ways with Iberianists who have seen their case as emblematic of a wider phenomenon in al-Andalus, the essay argues that the degree and duration of power that were exercised by Isma‘il and Yusuf, father and son, were in fact exceptional. Garcia-Sanjuan also casts doubt on the widespread notion that Isma‘il acted as a kind of field general over the Granadan army, affirming, however, that both held considerable power and that the younger Ibn Naghrila conspired to betray his master. The essay carefully distinguishes pragmatic, propagandistic, and dogmatic strands in the sources’ presentation of the viziers. In addition to this revision of a well-known episode that is usually cast as a majority-minority relationship between Muslims and Jews in al-Andalus, Garcia-Sanjudn notes that the presence of an ethnic minority, the Berbers who ruled Granada, created the conditions for the exceptional career of the Bani Naghrila. In this sense, the dynamics of power, religious affiliation, and minority in al-Andalus are not unlike those studied by Bosanquet and Yarbrough in the Mamluk eastern Mediterranean, with its ruling veneer of Turkic slave soldiers.
With the next contribution, by Clara Almagro Vidal, the volume’s gaze remains fixed on Iberia, but shifts to a later period and, foreshadowing the remainder of the contributions, to conditions under Latin Christian rule. Examining a closely related set of court documents from fourteenth-century Castile that record local property transactions among Christians, Jews, and Muslims — some of whom acted as one another’s agents — Almagro Vidal is able to explore the subtleties of intercommunal relations in that setting. The work reveals that it was not unusual for ‘minorities’ to wield considerable agency and power, whether because of their material wealth or because of their alliance with influential Christians, with whom they sometimes joined in Castilian power struggles. Indeed, in this case their actions prove to be related to a kingdom-wide dynastic civil war, played out in disputes between local factions that had supported opposing sides. A Muslim in the employ of the military Order of Santiago, for example, turns out to be indispensable to accomplishing the order’s desiderata. Almagro Vidal thus shows that members of religious minorities were important go-betweens in medieval Iberia not only at royal courts, but also at a local level. In this sense, and in performing a rich contextualization of a seemingly obscure property dispute, she redirects our attention to contingent historical-contextual factors in any understanding of medieval contacts.
No less granular in scale is the study that follows, by Bogdan Smarandache, which examines Muslim minorities under Frankish rule in the Latin East. Synthesizing the published (though problematic) textual and archaeological sources for Frankish interaction with local Muslim populations in the twelfth century, Smarandache intervenes in the debate between ‘integrationists’, who posit a model of mixed coexistence under Latin rule, and ‘segregationists’, who hold that the Franks kept largely apart from indigenous populations. He lends cautious support to the former view, finding Muslims and Franks living cheek by jowl — in a variety of ratios and configurations — around Acre and Jerusalem, in the Galilee and Samaria, and in Mount Lebanon. The presence of Christian holy sites, Smarandache shows, is one of very few reliable predictors of Frankish settlement, which on the whole was quite unevenly scattered across the landscape. Such sites, however, were often revered by Jews, Muslims, and Eastern Christians as well, a fact that conduced to contact among these populations. The essay’s conclusions are as cautious as they are copiously documented: that meaningful contact between adherents of different creeds, who might or might not be considered ‘minorities’, depending on the criteria applied, was most common in areas of intensive cohabitation, and that Muslims were a significant part of ‘Frankish’ society in the Latin East.
The final two essays form a dyad that carries forward certain themes present in Smarandache’s work — ofintercommunal adjacency, contact, and exchange — into late medieval Iberia. Ana Echevarria considers non-elite cohabitation and convivencia between Jews and Muslims in Castilian Christian towns, primarily in the fifteenth century. The legal status of Jews and Muslims, though locally variable, had become interwoven in Castilian law in the course of the medieval period. The two communities also developed parallel structures of communal organization and leadership, partly in response to common expectations and pressures from the Castilian state. Interestingly, Echevarria notes that local Muslim communities resisted the authority of crown-appointed coreligionist overseers by turning to local Christian judges. Exploiting a broader range of sources than earlier scholars have done, she also detects other commonalities; Muslims and Jews were often pressured to live in close proximity to one another, they cooperated regularly in the face of encroachments by various Christian authorities, and they engaged in frequent transactions with one another, as notarial documents attest. Like Smarandache, Echevarria observes that contacts were more intensive in areas of close spatial proximity, though in the Castilian case it is clear that these contacts were accelerated by Christian authorities who treated Jews and Muslims in similar ways, nearly but not quite as Jewish/Christian dhimmis were viewed in the theory of Muslim jurists such as Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya. On the whole, the essay shows that new sources and new questions have much to tell us about contacts between religious minorities as these have been traditionally defined. In this case, what is revealed is a surprising degree of parallelism and cooperation.
In the book’s concluding essay, Filomena Barros provides an equally rich and compelling account of parallel contacts between Muslims and Jews in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Portugal. In her study, however, the emphasis is on difference. Muslims, unlike Jews, were treated as a conquered population, and there was little symmetry between the communal and leadership structures of their respective communities. In addition, Muslims were geographically concentrated south of the Tagus River, while Jews could be found throughout the realm. In comparison to the Castilian cases studied by Echevarria, the extant sources for Portugal reveal relatively little Muslim—Jewish contact.
Nevertheless, in isolated instances they can be found joining forces to protest detrimental legislation. In the unusual case of Loulé, Jews and Muslims took part in communal decision-making alongside the Christian population, sometimes in response to royal demands: demands that both promoted and impeded social homogeneity in other regions as well. Jews and Muslims alike, however, were subject to restrictions — unevenly applied, to be sure, as Barros shows in detail — arising from Christian anxieties about sexual purity and the danger of inadvertent intercommunal dalliance. Documented sexual contacts between Jews and Muslims, however, are rare, a situation which may arise from preferences for communal judicial institutions, the records of which were purged long ago. Barros concludes with a discussion of the few quotidian contacts that have been preserved in the sources, discovering intriguing signs of commonplace contacts that were more frequent and more comparable for Jews and Muslims than the literary sources might lead us to imagine. Barros’s contribution is thus a fitting reminder of the cautionary notes sounded by Annliese Nef at the outset. To wit, historians of the medieval Mediterranean must manage a constant dialectic between the literary sources — which create what Barros calls ‘a social and mental structure’ that both cleanly separates ‘minority’ groups and spoon-feeds modern historians blueprints of medieval societies — and the always-partial evidence of documentary sources and historical intuition, which points to lived experiences that were messier and more mutable.
It is easy to forget, amid a popular media chorus that reinforces narratives of ‘majorities’ and ‘minorities’ in the present, that no one descriptor has ever monopolized the identity of those whom it embraces. The most talked-about distinctions in any society have a way of amplifying themselves and drowning out all others; in that sense, to problematize narratives of ‘majority—minority’ relations is inevitably to deliver a minority report. Yet this is precisely what this volume seeks to do with respect to the medieval Mediterranean: to amplify the cross-cutting and subsurface distinctions that fractured medieval polities in multiple planes, and to explore the encounters that took place along and across those fault lines. To the extent that history informs current understandings of identity, these are stories for which an increasingly ‘majority-minority’ (or ‘minority-minority’) world may find new uses.’
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