Download PDF | Trading Conflicts: Venetian Merchants and Mamluk Officials in Late Medieval Alexandria, by Georg L K a Christ, Brill , 2012.
365 Pages
INTRODUCTION
Today, the West often understands Islam and the Islamic world as a threat. Many, such as Samuel Huntington, have considered these two civilizations as being in stark contrast to one another and their interac- tion tantamount to a 'clash'.' Recent popular literature on Islam solidifies the conception of these two separate and mutually hostile civilizations. By contrast, scholarly studies investigate the interdependent nature of the 'Islamic' and 'Christian culture' and seek to illuminate problems of integration and concerns with terrorism or civil unrest. Edward Said famously questioned the fitness of categories like 'Orient' (and concomi- tantly 'Islam') in principle.
He posited that the conception of the 'Orient' as fashioned by Western orientalists (i.e. the scholars studying the Orient and therefore Islam), is a construction of the West, or even a deliberate device to control the Middle East. He criticised the use of one-sided ana- lytic categories like 'Orient' or 'Islam' axiomatically. Certainly, affiliation with a religion or a particular civilization is only one aspect of many that structure human encounters. However, Said's criticism of the orientalists does not provide a solution to the problem.
The fact remains that it is only those orientalists and 'occidentalists', who have acquired an understanding of the cultural phenomena of the respective 'other' civilization and in particular its languages, who are better qualified to evaluate how religion, relative to cultural and natural factors, shapes the encounters of men and women from different civilizations.s Indeed, we must determine the extent to which religion, along with other aspects of 'civilization' such as economic, linguistic, demographic, and social aspects, determines the encounter and subsequent cohabi- tation of different groups, in different places and at different times." We must examine, whether such explanatory models enable us to assess threats and changes in a more differentiated manner than models based on the contrast between two religions or on the presumed 'imperialism' of the orientalists. The present study attempts to follow the former model. In the form of an extended 'field-work', it examines the conflicts between Egyptians and Venetians in Alexandria from 1418 to 1420 against the back- ground of the two encountering 'civilizations'.
The seemingly narrow focus of this study only two years is due to the fact that extensive portions of the legacy of the Venetian merchant and consul Biagio Dolfin were brought back to Venice and preserved in the State Archives of Venice (ASVe). With these documents, it is possible to reconstruct the world of the Venetians in Alexandria from 1418 to 1420 in minute detail and consider them in a wider historical context. It was a'time of crisis; Egypt suffered epidemics, rapid government changes and an economy in recession. The two years were marked by a proto-colonial infiltration of European products and currency into the Egyptian econ omy, as well as persecutions of Christians.
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