Download PDF | Thomas E Burman, Brian A. Catlos, Mark D. Meyerson - The Sea in the Middle_ The Mediterranean World, 650–1650-University of California Press (2022).
493 Pages
This is a new sort of course book for students and teachers interested in understanding the origins of the modern West. It is new because until very recently both scholars and the broader public have assumed that “the West” and “modernity” were phenomena that grew directly out of the cultures and societies of western Europe, and in particular, Britain, France, Germany, and the north of Italy. These were seen as the epicenters of the developments that gave shape to the modern West: frst of all, the Hellenized Roman Empire, and then after the long parenthesis of the “Dark Ages,” the Renaissance, the Reformation, the emergence of the nation-state, and eventually representative, constitutional democracy and the free-market economy.
The past was imagined as a progression, whether guided by God or some imprecise Providence, out of primitivism and barbarity toward some ever-more perfect future. This is not so surprising, perhaps, when one considers that until recently our world has been dominated by these countries and their colonial heirs in the Anglo-American world, and that both the scholars who created this narrative, and the students who assimilated it, were natives of these nation-states, and identifed in an intuitive and largely uncritical way with their values. It is a narrative that in retrospect could easily seem to be obviously true and was immensely appealing and self-validating. It was a narrative ground in presumptions, both historical and moral. However, both society and scholarship have changed.
The Anglo-European world can no longer presume to represent “the end of history,” and, in any case, that same Anglo-European world is now made up of persons of diverse origins, genders, cultural backgrounds, and religious orientations, all of whom play crucially important roles in society and history. Indeed, this has long been the case; however, history was generally studied from the narrow perspective of upper-class white Christian men (and to a lesser extent, women), and the role of other groups was downplayed or dismissed—a historical exercise now dismissed as one focusing on “Dead White Men.” But such a bias is not surprising, given that until the twentieth century power and prestige within both the academy and society as a whole lay largely in the hands of a narrow, privileged group of economically advantaged Christian European males. But, today, both the academy and society have been transformed, as men and women of diverse cultural, social, and ethnic backgrounds have become full participants in the scholarly enterprise—a fact refected in the new demographic diversity of both scholars and students. Consequently, over the last half century or so, the way we do history has changed.
Historical populations previously thought of as irrelevant to the grand narrative of “Western civilization”—peasants, the poor, women, Jews, and Muslims, to name a few—have become recognized as legitimate and important objects of study, whose role in the development of the modern world must be understood. This alone should be enough to provoke a reconsideration of how we conceive of and teach the development of Western society and culture, but there are other reasons, no less compelling, to do so. First among these, perhaps, is the realization that the paradigm of the nation-state is simply not an appropriate framework for the study of the premodern period. European nationalism did not coalesce as a mode of identity until the nineteenth century, and it only emerged as an apparently valid historical category when scholars— whether deliberately or unconsciously—suppressed aspects of the past that appeared not to validate it and imposed anachronistic perspectives on the evidence they chose to use. Whereas previously, historians focused primarily on the writings and artistic expressions of the elite, they now also explore other sources—tax records, court and inquisition transcripts, objects of daily use, irrigation systems, folk literature and traditions, and so on—that were previously ignored or neglected because they did not seem likely to yield information relating to the history of “great men” and the national values these were believed to embody. New data, new technology, and new perspectives employed by historians and scholars of art, literature, and philosophy have led to serious reconsiderations of what constitutes the building blocks of our history, and in particular the value of the paradigm of the nation-state, for the period prior to the nineteenth century.
Other categorical distinctions that have been long presumed to be fundamental and undeniable—Europe versus Africa and Asia, the “Occident” versus the “Orient,” Christian culture as opposed to Jewish and Islamic cultures, North versus South—have now been revealed to be if not ephemeral, at the very least, contextual, subjective, and relative in nature. Indeed, the very notion of “the West” has evolved, and for the purposes of this book, it will refer in broadest terms to the cultures and societies stretching west from the Indus to the Atlantic and from sub-Saharan Africa to the Baltic—those shaped by what might be referred to as Persian-Abrahamic religion. And this brings us to the Mediterranean.
Mediterranean Studies and Studying the Mediterranean
The Mediterranean is, of course, where Africa, Asia, and Europe meet, the sea around which the Roman Empire was once arrayed, and the region in which the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic worlds intersected and overlapped. Until the last few decades, this is how most scholars of history saw it. In the mid-twentieth century, however, a few historians, notably Shlomo Goitein, the pioneer of geniza studies,* and Fernand Braudel, an early environ-mental historian, began to study the region in its own right. Braudel’s work was immediately infuential in the development of Atlantic studies, a feld that built upon the notion that a body of water, rather than a body of land, can frame a broad and meaningful historical analysis. For us, the authors of this book, the Mediterranean is not merely the sea, nor the islands and coast that surround it. It is a region, and like any region—it is an area bound by common features and characteristics, rather than a formally constituted and clearly defned zone. It has no borders that demarcate it.
Rather than end at a defnite point, the Mediterranean world fades, as it were, the farther one gets from its “center.” In any case, the precise way in which “Mediterranean” is defned in any scholarly exercise depends on the context one is considering, and the characteristics one is focusing on. For Braudel it may have been “region of the vine and the olive,” but it was much more. Thus, as the reader will see, our Mediterranean can include both the Middle East and Portugal, the Black and Red Seas, and trails of into central Africa, northern Europe, and Central Asia. In other words, the Mediterranean for us is not a thing, not a unity. Rather, it represents a whole spectrum of overlapping modes of identity, action, and expression in history, and of perspectives for understanding the history of the medieval world. In the last decades of the twentieth century, scholars— and particularly medievalists—were turning back toward the Mediterranean.
There were a number of reasons for this. First, the growth of comparative history encouraged historians in a range of felds to look beyond supposed national boundaries and to examine the infuence that various cultures—particularly Islamic, Jewish, and Christian cultures—exerted on each other in the Middle Ages. Second, the importance of the Mediterranean as a cradle of commercial development encouraged historical approaches that set out to uncover networks of individuals and institutions that spanned the shores of the sea, and this spilled over into felds such as art history, intellectual history, and the history of science and technology. And fnally, as scholars reexamined familiar sources with fresh eyes, it became clear just how connected the worlds of Africa, Asia, and Europe, and of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, were in the Middle Ages, and how crucial their infuence on one another was in the formation of what would become modern Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Many events and patterns that appeared to be anomalous, paradoxical, or inexplicable when seen through the narrow lens of European or Islamic history, could be revealed as coherent when viewed as part of a Mediterranean panorama. For many scholars of the Middle Ages—at least those who work in Mediterranean lands—it was becoming obvious that in many ways the region was central to the historical developments of the premodern West and deserved to be studied as such.
For many historical questions, the Mediterranean is simply a more appropriate frame of reference than “Europe,” “Africa,” or “the Islamic world.” In 2000, when Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell published their mammoth revision of Braudel’s environmental approach, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History, a new wave of Mediterranean studies was already gathering momentum, characterized by the establishment of centers, programs, and journals across Europe and North America. Whereas some of these initiatives relate to the modern Mediterranean or represent a repackaging of classics and the study of antiquity, most are focused on the Middle Ages and early modern era and are driven by the evidence that there was indeed a distinct premodern Mediterranean world that not only bridged, but encompassed the hinterlands that surrounded it, and the peoples who inhabited them. Since then, this impressively interdisciplinary scholarly movement has continued to gather force, as can be seen in the publication of special journal editions, volumes of collected essays, and monographs that take the Mediterranean as their frame, or engage in transregional comparative approaches. Academic research projects and conferences appear regularly under the Mediterranean rubric, and scholarly organizations with this orientation have proliferated, notably the Mediterranean Seminar (www.mediterraneansem inar.org), a forum for the development of research and pedagogy that counts nearly 2,000 scholars worldwide as associates, and serves as the fulcrum for a consortium of more than a dozen programs and centers around the world.
What is missing at this point is an accessible course book for teachers and students interested in this rewarding but challenging way of approaching the history of the West and the origins of modernity. As the frst Mediterranean studies textbook, we hope The Sea in the Middle will constitute a useful framework for such a course, and will convey the complexity and importance of the region in this time, as well as the excitement and pleasure of studying it.
How to Use This Book
This book is designed to provide a tool for college and university teachers to lead a course on the political, cultural, intellectual, and economic history of the medieval or premodern West from a Mediterranean perspective. It is a starting point, and it is intended to present a narrative that incorporates the various peoples and faiths of the Mediterranean region, and to provide a knowledge base for the study of later developments in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Most scholars are trained in only one tradition or area, and so teaching the Mediterranean perspective is a daunting task. We hope that this book will enable teachers to build on their own specialized knowledge and incorporate it into a larger, comparative picture. We have settled on a three-part chronology.
The first part begins with the disintegration of the world of antiquity and coincides with the emergence of Islam. Running from about 650 CE to 1050 CE, it describes an Islamic- and Byzantine-dominated world. The period from 1050 CE to 1350 CE saw the collapse of the imperial/ caliphal structures that had united the region, and a dramatic ingress of peoples from the continental peripheries, such as Franks, Turks, and Berbers. The Black Death and related crises of the mid-fourteenth century mark the next phase of our history, in which the Mediterranean remained central to the development of the West, but became more clearly contested between a European north and west, and an Islamic south and east. By 1650 CE, the Mediterranean was losing its character as the center of the Western world, thanks to the development of new oceanic trade routes to Africa, the Americas, and South and East Asia, the rise of northern Europe and the Safavid east, and the emergence of new notions of identity and society. By this time, the Mediterranean groundwork for modernity had been laid.
Each of the three chronological parts of the book begins with a brief overview, followed by four to six chapters that combine thematics with chronology. Two of the topical chapters in part 3 pull back to survey the entire period of this book. To sum up the political history of this region in a narrative form, or to review the plethora of dynasties, kingdoms, and rulers that rose and fell over the course of this thousand years, is beyond the scope of this book. What we aim to provide instead is enough information regarding the broad historical trends that shaped the Mediterranean and the various cultures and peoples who contributed to it, and to allow instructors to ft their own interests and specialized knowledge into what students will fnd is a complex, engaging, and refreshing view of the early history and development of the Western world. This approach entails its own challenges, and instructors may want to review the major events of each period before the students read each part. Having the class put together timelines could be a useful exercise. For each chapter a similar approach might be taken with major fgures, movements, and institutions, which are not always defned in detail in the text. The chapters themselves are divided into several larger sections each, most of which begin with exemplary “artifacts”—objects, texts, structures, or historiographical essays—which are analyzed with respect to the major themes of that section, and which we hope will provide a tangible jumping-of point for class discussion. The accompanying document reader is arranged to follow the textbook chapters. It presents short selections from contemporary primary sources, often several together on a related theme, along with questions for discussion. Both the artifacts and the documents in the source reader that complements this book are meant also to provide leads and possible topics for class discussion, research essays, or interpretive projects instructors might assign. It has been both rewarding and challenging for us, the authors, to put together The Sea in the Middle and Texts from the Middle. We hope instructors and students alike will fnd it similarly rewarding and even enjoyable to delve into the rich and diverse past that forms the foundation of the modern world we live in today.
The Authors
Thomas E. Burman (PhD, Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto, 1991) taught at the University of Tennessee for twenty-fve years before becoming Robert M. Conway Director of the Medieval Institute and Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame in 2017. His scholarly work focuses on the intellectual, cultural, and religious interactions between medieval Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the western Mediterranean. His frst book, Religious Polemic and the Intellectual History of the Mozarabs, c. 1050–1200 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1994), examined the learned culture of the Arabic-speaking Christians of Islamic Spain, while his Reading the Qurꞌan in Latin Christendom, 1140– 1560 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007) traced the reactions of medieval and early modern Europeans to Islam’s holy book, whether they read it in Latin translation or the Arabic original. The latter won the American Philosophical Society’s Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History. His research has been supported by fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is currently writing a book entitled Ramon Marti, OP, the Peoples of Many Books, and Latin Scholasticism.
Brian A. Catlos (PhD, Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto, 2000) is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder and Research Associate in Humanities at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His work centers on Muslim-Christian-Jewish relations and ethno-religious identity in medieval Europe and the Islamic world, and the history of the premodern Mediterranean. In addition to many articles, he has written The Victors and the Vanquished: Christians and Muslims of Catalonia and Aragon, 1050–1300 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), Infdel Kings and Unholy Warriors: Power, Faith, and Violence in the Age of Crusade and Jihad (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014), Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, 1050– ca. 1615 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), and Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain (New York: Basic Books, 2018). He has held several fellowships and won numerous prizes and distinctions. His work has been translated into ten languages. He is currently working on several projects, including Paradoxes of Plurality, which proposes a model for analyzing individual and group identity in the premodern Mediterranean. He codirects the Mediterranean Seminar, coedits the series Mediterranean Perspectives (Palgrave), and serves on numerous journal and monograph series boards.
Mark D. Me yerson (PhD, Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto, 1987) began his teaching career at the University of Notre Dame before moving to the University of Toronto in 1994, where he has supervised over twentyfve doctoral dissertations. His teaching and research focus on the history of Christian-Muslim-Jewish relations in premodern Spain and the Mediterranean, and on the history of violence. His publications include The Muslims of Valencia in the Age of Fernando and Isabel: Between Coexistence and Crusade (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), Jews in an Iberian Frontier Kingdom: Society, Economy, and Politics in Morvedre, 1248–1391 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2004), and A Jewish Renaissance in Fifteenth-Century Spain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), runner-up for the National Jewish Book Award, USA, and for the Koret International Book Prize for the Best Book in Jewish History. Among his current projects are Of Bloodshed and Baptism: Violence, Religion, and the Transformation of Spain, 1300–1614, an anthropological history of violence within and between Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Converso, and Morisco communities. His research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.
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