The Sea in the Middle: The Mediterranean World, 650–1650

THE SEA IN THE MIDDLE

THE SEA IN THE MIDDLE

THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD, 650–1650

THOMAS E. BURMAN

BRIAN A . CATLOS

MARK D. ME YERSON

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2021 by Thomas Burman, Brian Catlos, and Mark Meyerson

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Burman, Thomas E., author. | Catlos, Brian A., author. | Meyerson, Mark D., author.

Title: The sea in the middle : the Mediterranean world, 650–1650 / Thomas E. Burman, Brian A. Catlos, and Mark D. Meyerson.

Other titles: Mediterranean world, 650–1650

Description: Oakland : University of California Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021054312 (print) | LCCN 2021054313 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520296527 (paperback) | ISBN 9780520969001 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Mediterranean Region—History—476–1517— Textbooks. | Mediterranean Region—History—1517–1789— Textbooks. | BISAC: HISTORY / Europe / Medieval | HISTORY / Europe / Great Britain / Middle Ages (449-1066)

Classification: LCC DE94 .B87 2022 (print) | LCC DE94 (ebook) | DDC 909/.09822—dc23/eng/20211202

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021054312

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021054313

Manufactured in the United States of America

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To the memory of J. N. Hillgarth

1929–2020

On, si tu, fil, est amador de prudencia, ages saviea e sciencia, per la qual vules e sapies concordar prudencia e cautela, maestria, sens falsia e engan.

Therefore, son, if you are a lover of prudence, have wisdom and knowledge, through which you desire and know how to bring prudence and precaution, mastery, into concordance, without falseness and deceit.

—Ramon Llull, Doctrina pueril (1274–1276 CE)

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

A Note on Conventions

Introduction. The Mediterranean: Land, Sea, and People

PART I. THE HELLENO-ISLAMIC MEDITERRANEAN (650–1050 CE): THE MAKING OF THE HELLENO-ISLAMIC MEDITERRANEAN

1 The Legacy of Empire

The Age of Empires

ARTIFACT: Negotiating Conquest: The Pact of ꞌUmar and the Treaty of Tudmir

Faith and Power

ARTIFACT: Images of Empire: Basil II, Otto III, and ꞌAbd al-Malik

2 Mediterranean Connections

Conflict and Integration

ARTIFACT: al-Qahira (Cairo): The Evolution of an Imperial Capital

Connection and Exchange

ARTIFACT: The Ribat-Funduq of Sousse (Susa): Military, Commercial, and Religious Infrastructure in the Islamic Mediterranean

3 Conversion and the Consolidation of Identities

Muslim Conquest and Christian Conversion

ARTIFACT: The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem

Byzantine Christianity and the Eastern Churches

The Imperial Church under Siege

ARTIFACT: The Church of Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom) in Constantinople

The Latin Church in the West

An Islamo-Judaic Mediterranean

4 Peoples of the Book Reading Their Books

ARTIFACT: Wearing God’s Book in Medieval Egypt

God’s Books

Holy Books and Scholars

Holy Books and Greco-Roman Thinking

ARTIFACT: Medieval Readers: Greco-Roman Texts

Interpretation, Unity, and Power

ARTIFACT: Jewish Responsa and Muslim Fatwas

PART II. AN AGE OF CONFLICT AND COLLABORATION (1050–1350 CE): THE MEDITERRANEAN FROM THE EDGES

5 Holy and Unholy War

Pilgrims and Predators, ca. 1050–1150

ARTIFACT: Holy War

The Contested Mediterranean, ca. 1150–1250

ARTIFACT: Venice’s St. Mark’s Square and the Plundering of the Past

6 A Connected Sea

Conflict and Integration, ca. 1250–1350

ARTIFACT: Whose Art? Transregional Sensibilities and Itinerant Objects

Mediterranean Connections, ca. 1050–1350

ARTIFACT: To the Sea in Ships

Strategies and Structures, ca. 1050–1350

ARTIFACT: Mapping the Mediterranean and the World

7 Mediterranean Societies

The Politics of Diversity

ARTIFACT: The Many Faces of Roger II

Complex Societies

ARTIFACT: The Mosque and Hospital at Divriği

Cosmopolitan Communities

ARTIFACT: The Architecture of Power in the Iberian Peninsula

8 Reading Each Others’ Books

Translators and Terrific Stories

ARTIFACT: Alexander the Great in Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic

Their Scripture, Our Language

Talking Religion

ARTIFACT: Interreligious Conversations, Real and Imagined

9 A Sea of Technology, Science, and Philosophy

Technology

ARTIFACT: Qanat and Noria

Science

ARTIFACT: The Seven Heavens

Aristotle: The Master of All Who Know

PART III. THE CONTEST FOR THE MEDITERRANEAN (1350–1650 CE): NEW EMPIRES, NEW SECTS, NEW WORLDS

10 Imperial Rivalry and Sectarian Strife

The Rise of Frontier Empires, ca. 1350–1500

ARTIFACT: Papal Propaganda in Renaissance Rome

The Duel of Empires and the Web of Alliances, ca. 1500–1650

ARTIFACT: Dueling Caesars: Representations of Ottoman and Habsburg Imperial Power

11 Minorities and Diasporas

Toward Religious Uniformity in the Catholic Mediterranean

ARTIFACT: The Lead Books of Granada

Religious Pluralism in the Muslim Mediterranean

ARTIFACT: Orthodox Monasteries and the Ottoman Empire

Diasporas

ARTIFACT: The Jewish Ghetto in Venice

12 Slavery and Captivity, 650–1650

Medieval Transformations of an Ancient Institution

Life of the Enslaved

ARTIFACT: The Ottoman Harem

Captives and Ransoming

ARTIFACT: Malta Transformed: The Impact of the Order of the Knights of St. John

Slavery and Racism

ARTIFACT: Black Africans in the Art of Western Mediterranean Christians

13 Mystical Messiahs and Converts, Humanists and Armorers

Mediterranean Mystics

ARTIFACT: El Greco: Painting the Mystical across the Mediterranean

Mediterranean Messiahs

ARTIFACT: Mediterranean Predictions of the End, 1450–1650

Converts

Humanists and Philosophers, Scientists and Engineers

ARTIFACT: Optics and Eyeglasses

14 Family, Gender, and Honor, ca. 650–1650

Honorable Families

ARTIFACT: Marriage Issues in the Jewish Diaspora: The Case of the Ottoman Near East

Women Inside, Women Outside

ARTIFACT: Women and Inquisitors in the Early Modern Mediterranean

Men and Violence

15 Mediterranean Economies and Societies in a Widening World

Economy and Society after the Black Death

ARTIFACT: The Venetian Arsenal and Venetian Galleys

Economic and Social Problems in an Age of Empire

The Mediterranean and the Atlantic

ARTIFACT: Profit, Fear, and Fascination: Elizabethan England and the Muslim World

Epilogue: Luís de Torres in Cuba, Ishmael in the South Pacific: A World Grown Larger, a Sea Grown Smaller?

Index

PREFACE

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: first 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 identified 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 reflected 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 environmental historian, began to study the region in its own right. Braudel’s work was immediately influential in the development of Atlantic studies, a field 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 defined zone. It has no borders that demarcate it. Rather than end at a definite 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 defined 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 off 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 fields to look beyond supposed national boundaries and to examine the influence 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 fields such as art history, intellectual history, and the history of science and technology. And finally, 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 influence 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 first 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 fit their own interests and specialized knowledge into what students will find 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 figures, movements, and institutions, which are not always defined 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-off 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 find 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-five 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 first 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), Infidel 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. MEYERSON (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 twenty-five 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.

*These studies focus on the documents found in the Cairo geniza, a storage area discovered in a synagogue in Old Cairo that was the repository of thousands of discarded documents, most of which date from the tenth to thirteenth century. They have provided scholars with an intimate view of the life of the Cairo Jewish community, which was connected by trade to points across the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, and as far afield as India.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This textbook project took shape over a long eight years of collaboration, and we, the authors, received indispensable feedback, suggestions, and help from so many people that we have undoubtedly lost track of all of them. Apologies to those who contributed but have been over-looked in this list. You know who you are, and we want you to know we are grateful.

Thanks are due to the Mediterranean Seminar, notably, codirector Sharon Kinoshita (University of California, Santa Cruz) and the many participants of the seminar workshops who read and provided feedback on drafts of the textbook and accompanying document reader. Thanks particularly to the University of Colorado, Boulder, the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame, the University of Toronto, and the Marco Institute at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville for funding workshops at which we discussed and refined the manuscript.

Individuals we would like to thank include (in alphabetical order) Hussein Abdulsater (University of Notre Dame), Fred Astren (San Francisco State), Mohammad Ballan (SUNY Stony Brook), David Bocquelet, Remie Constable (of fond memory, late of the University of Notre Dame), John Dagenais (University of California, Los Angeles), Oren Falk (Cornell University), Abigail Firey (University of Kentucky), Alexandra Garnhart Bushakra (University of Tennessee, Knoxville), Claire Gilbert (Saint Louis University), William Granara (Harvard University), Dan Green (POM), Monica Green, Mayte Green-Mercado (Rutgers University), Daniel Gullo (Hill Museum and Manuscript Library), Harvey Hames (Ben Gurion University of the Negev), Demetrios Harper (Holy Trinity Orthodox Seminary), Peregrine Horden (Oxford University), Spencer Hunt (University of Notre Dame), Sergio La Porta (Fresno State), Danny Lasker (Ben Gurion University of the Negev), Mahan Mirza (University of Notre Dame), Lee Mordichai (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Stephen Ogden (University of Notre Dame), Karen Pinto, Amy Remensnyder (Brown University), Gabriel Reynolds (University of Notre Dame), Denis Robichaud (University of Notre Dame), Teo Ruiz (University of California, Los Angeles), Cana Short (University of Notre Dame), Bogdan Smarandache (University of Toronto), Stefan Statchev (Arizona State University), David Wacks (University of Oregon), Lydia Walker (University of Tennessee, Knoxville), Kenneth Baxter Wolf (Pomona College), Fariba Zarinebaf (University of California, Riverside), and Nina Zhiri (University of California, San Diego).

It was Traci Crowell (then of Bedford/St. Martin’s) who kickstarted this project, when she originally approached us to publish a Mediterranean textbook, at the precise moment that we had begun to discuss among ourselves. Several years later the University of California Press took on the project and brought it to completion, thanks to Lyn Uhl, who commissioned it, and Eric Schmidt and Cindy Fulton, who saw it through production. Kathy Borgogno did an excellent job tracking down images and coordinating cartography as did Marian Rogers with copy editing. To these must be added the anonymous readers who reviewed the manuscripts at various stages of development and production both for Bedford/St. Martin’s and UC Press.

Alongside those named above, Thomas E. Burman would like to thank in particular his wife, Elizabeth Raney Burman, for her constant, indeed enthusiastic, support during the many years of work on this project. Though it has been nearly thirty years since he finished graduate school, he would like to thank his doctoral supervisors at the University of Toronto, the late J. N. Hillgarth and the late George Michael Wickens, both of whom energetically encouraged him to work on a project that brought the Latin-Christian and Arab-Muslim (and Arab-Christian) worlds together. The outside reader for that dissertation was Thomas F. Glick (Boston University), who, like Hillgarth, had long been thinking about medieval Spain from a broad Mediterranean point of view, and whose pathbreaking work—and congenial friendship —has been a constant inspiration. He would also like to thank the History Department and Marco Institute at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and the History Department and Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame for their institutional support along the way, and especially his graduate students in courses on the Mediterranean. Those in a joint University of Tennessee and University of Kentucky seminar a half decade ago (taught on Zoom with his dear friend Abigail Firey) read and gave valuable feedback on the first part of the book. More recently, graduate students at Notre Dame have read earlier drafts of the whole manuscript and have provided useful comments and insights. Notre Dame faculty and graduate participants in the Religion and Pluralism in the Medieval Mediterranean Working Group, supported by the Medieval Institute, have been and continue to be a source of collegial learning and discussion. He thanks that group in particular for reading and commenting on the portions of the book for which he was primary author. Collaborating with Brian Catlos and Mark Meyerson on this project has been one of the great pleasures of his academic life. They have been a constant source of deeply learned insight, helpful and good-natured criticism, and deep friendship.

In addition to those named above, Brian Catlos would like to thank his wife and partner, Núria Silleras-Fernández (University of Colorado, Boulder), both for the feedback she gave on this project and for her patience in surviving yet another book project. For deep and enduring inspiration thanks are due to Thomas F. Glick (Boston University), Andrew Watson (University of Toronto), and of course the link that joins him with his collaborators, the late J. N Hillgarth (University of Toronto), to whom this book is dedicated. He is grateful to the University of Colorado, Boulder and the University of California, Santa Cruz for their support, particularly his colleagues in Religious Studies and the departments and programs at CU Boulder that support the CU Mediterranean Studies Group. Thanks are also due to the many scholars and graduate students who have taken part in the activities of the Mediterranean Seminar since 2007—encounters that have transformed and enriched his scholarly life and understanding of the premodern Mediterranean, and made this project possible. The Institució Milà i Fontanals (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas) has provided a summer research home, and a venue in Barcelona for our seminar events. Finally, he thanks his coauthors, Thomas Burman and Mark Meyerson—exemplary scholars and model collaborators—for their constancy, generosity, and support.

Mark Meyerson would like to thank, in addition to those named above, Jill Ross, Benjamin Meyerson, and Samuel Meyerson for their support and encouragement. Inspiration has come from so many scholars working in this burgeoning field of Mediterranean studies, but special acknowledgment goes to our late, great teacher, J. N. Hillgarth, to the late Frank Talmage (University of Toronto), and to Thomas F. Glick, whose work has been such a great stimulus since the 1970s. He would also like to thank colleagues in the Department of History at the University of Notre Dame, and the Department of History and Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, for giving him the freedom and encouragement to teach Mediterranean-related courses, which were once regarded as novel. The Jackman Institute for the Humanities at the University of Toronto provided a congenial environment in which to write some chapters of this book. He would also like to thank his many students, undergraduate and graduate, whose enthusiasm and questions have spurred him to explore new (to him) corners of the Mediterranean and to consider interfaith relations from new perspectives. Finally, he would like to express his gratitude to his coauthors, Thomas Burman and Brian Catlos, for their immense learning, patience, and friendship, the best companions one could have for traveling through 1,000 years of Mediterranean history.

A NOTE ON CONVENTIONS

Who, Where, When . . .

There are many names in this book that may sound foreign and strange. For the most part we have used modern forms of people’s names in the language those individuals used. Hence, Marco Polo, Pere the Ceremonious, Suleyman the Magnif icent, and Alexios Komnenos. Exceptions are made for popes, saints, and emperors, and other individuals whose names are customarily given in English.

The first name-surname system we use in the Anglo-European world today only began to coalesce in the late Middle Ages and was not used uniformly. Last names began as references to one’s place of origin, profession, some notable characteristic, or one’s father or some important family ancestor. Arabic names are similar, but a little bit more complicated. They consist of several elements: normally a first name and a series of patronymics (e.g., ibn for son of or bint for daughter of, in Arabic) that effectively chart the individual’s genealogy, as well as titles, honorifics, and other components relating to place of origin or residence, profession, clan, tribe, or accomplishment. Sometimes a name is added to the beginning and prefaced by Abu or Umm, which can mean father of and mother of or used figuratively to indicate some remarkable characteristic. A given individual might be referred to by any of these. For example, the caliph of al-Andalus, ꞌAbd al-Rahman III, was ꞌAbd al-Rahman ibn Muhammad ibn ꞌAbd Allah al-Nasir li-Din Allah. He is typically referred to as ꞌAbd al-Rahman or al-Nasir (but never ꞌAbd or Rahman). The III is a modern addition; rulers were not typically referred to numerically in this era. The patronymic used in the plural (banu) can function like a surname, particularly if it relates to an ancestor regarded as illustrious or the founder of the family. For example, the Umayyad (Banu Umayya) caliphs who descended directly from the caliph Marwan (684–685) and who thus carried ibn Marwan as one of their patronymics were known together as the Banu Marwan (the sons, descendants, or clan of Marwan), or Marwanids, in English. Names in Hebrew function in a similar manner.

Many names and terms referred to in this book are from languages such as Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and Armenian that use alphabets different from the Latin alphabet we use for English. In each case we have used a simplified form of transliteration that avoids special characters. Because in most cases there are a number of different transliteration systems in use, in other publications you may find spellings of the same word or name that differ from the ones you find here.

For the most part we have referred to places by the name used by their modern inhabitants, except when there is a standard, modern American English equivalent. So, while you will read of Zaragoza (as opposed to Saragossa), Thessaloniki (as opposed to Salonika), and Lleida (as opposed to Lérida), you will find places like Florence, Fez, Mecca, and Jerusalem, rather Firenze, Fas, al-Makka, and Yerushalayim or al-Quds.

All dates in the text are provided in the calendar of the Common Era (BCE/CE)—a modern adaptation of the Christian Gregorian calendar (BC/AD) used since 1582. It is based on a solar year of 365.25 days that begins on January 1 and is counted from the notional birth-year of Jesus (now reckoned at 4 BCE). Previous to this the most common way of marking dates in Latin Christendom was the Julian calendar, which was the basis of the Gregorian, and in which the new year was reckoned from various dates (e.g., January 1, January 11, March 25, December 25) according to time and place. The Byzantines used various calendars, but preferred Anno Mundi—which, like the Hebrew calendar, began with Creation (5509 BCE and 3761 BCE, respectively). Other ethnic groups and religious communities—Armenians, Copts, Persians, Ethiopians—had their own solar calendars. The hijri, or Islamic calendar (AH), has a year of twelve lunar months counted from July 16, 622 CE, which is the date associated with Muhammad’s departure for Medina (the hijra, or emigration) and is held to mark the foundation of the Muslim community. Muslims refer to the period before this as al-Jahiliyya, the Time of Ignorance. Because the hijri year is shorter than the solar year, they do not exactly coincide. Thus, one hijri year usually spans parts of two Common Era years; for example, 720 AH includes parts of 1320 and 1321 CE. Because it has fewer days and moves relative to the solar year, the hijri calendar is not practical for agriculture; hence, Muslims in this period often used the solar calendar of one of their subject peoples alongside the hijri calendar.

For Arabic and Hebrew we have used a simplified transliteration system without diacritics or special characters, and in which the Arabic ꞌayn and hamza are both represented by the character ꞌ (with initial hamzas omitted). The Arabic ta’ marbuta is usually transliterated as a (although occasionally as ah as in surah). In most cases the names of dynasties and collectives that occur in Arabic and Persian have been Anglicized (e.g., Kharijites, Safavids) except in cases where the Arabized version has become part of the standard English lexicon (e.g., Sunnis, Shiꞌis).

Although this textbook can be read alone, readers are advised to use it conjunction with Texts from the Middle: Documents from the Mediterranean World, 650–1650 CE (University of California, 2022), a collection of primary source documents relating to the major themes discussed here. Cross-references to these texts can be found in this book and are noted as SEE SOURCEBOOK, followed by the chapter number and document reference.

INTRODUCTION

The Mediterranean: Land, Sea, and People

The Mediterranean was known to the Hebrews as the Great Sea, the Western Sea, or simply the Sea, and to the Greeks as the Sea of the Middle of the Earth. The Romans adopted this name as Mediterranean, when they did not refer to it as Our Sea (Mare Nostrum)—an association Arab geographers acknowledged when they came to call it the Sea of the Romans. As historians we are used to thinking of seas as dividing people, but from the time of even the remotest prehistory, the Mediterranean brought people together, through trade, travel, conquest, colonization, and migration. By the late Neolithic, systems of specialized production, distribution, and the storage of surplus had developed here, and as navigation improved, the shores and islands were linked both by regular long-distance and incremental local and regional trade. Under the Romans the sea would become the center of a complex commercial system in which high volumes of staples, natural resources, and luxury goods—not to mention people—circulated. In late antiquity this system—particularly the high-value and luxury trades—began to decline as a consequence of the general contraction of the Roman economy, but it would recover and expand under the Pax Islamica established from the ninth century in the wake of the Muslim conquests.

In the period covered by this book, the Mediterranean was not a region defined by linguistic unity, cultural homogeneity, or a common institutional framework, yet it was bound by overlapping networks of production, distribution, and commerce within a money economy, by a cosmopolitan urban culture, a common Abrahamic religious framework, a common Perso-Hellenic intellectual orientation, and a common set of literary languages, including Arabic, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, that were used by the cultural elite across the region. Most importantly, the inhabitants of the Mediterranean shared a generally similar set of expectations as regards social and political interactions, and their acts were informed by the same general set of assumptions and presuppositions. It was a region characterized by religious difference, but also by integration: significant religious minority communities lived as legitimate subjects in the various principalities across the Mediterranean. It was a region that was profoundly integrated, even in the face of its political and confessional divisions—no less so, in its own way, than regions that we are accustomed to accepting as frameworks for historical inquiry, such as Medieval Europe.

The Physical Environment

The Mediterranean was formed a little over five million years ago in the most spectacular flood in our planet’s history. Previous to that it had been a low-lying dry depression (almost two miles deep at points) marking the boundary zone of the African, Eurasian, and Arabian tectonic plates, and cut off from the Atlantic by a mountainous ridge in what is now Morocco and Spain. When that ridge began to suddenly give way, water poured into the Mediterranean basin at a breathtaking rate; the entire sea—all four million cubic kilometers of water— cascaded in within a period of two years, and perhaps as little as two months. What was left was a salty, almost tideless sea, 2,700 miles from east to west at its longest point, and 1,100 miles from north to south at its widest, divided into a western and an eastern basin. Elongated and serpentine, its surface was pierced by the rocky peaks of pre-historic mountain ranges, now islands. Much of the sea is quite shallow, and its sprawling shape and crenellated shoreline give it a high proportion of coast to area, and means that there are few points in the sea from where land cannot be sighted—a fact that facilitated navigation here and served to integrate the region since prehistoric times.

MAP 0.1 The Mediterranean: Lines of Sight. republished with permission of John wiley & Sons—Books, from Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History , 2000; permission conveyed through copyright clearance center, Inc.

With the exception of the Nile, it is not fed significantly by rivers, but by a continuous inflow from the Atlantic and a smaller one from the Black Sea. The surface currents are predominantly westerly, with significant eddies, while the airstream is subject to dramatic shifts due to strong seasonal winds sweeping in from Europe, Africa, and Asia. The landscape is characterized by rapid changes in altitude and significant zones of volcanism and seismic activity. Generally, the climate is mildly subtropical, characterized by hot, dry summers and wet winters, and vegetation includes scrubby trees, including pines, oak, cypress, sycamore and fruit trees, shrubs, and grasses. Soil is generally thin and poor. Islands are home only to small game, while the continental hinterlands support larger herbivorous and predatory mammals. The chief exception to this panorama is the wetlands: most importantly, the Nile Delta, but also the mouths of the Ebro, Rhone, and Po, as well as other river outlets and marshlands on the coasts of Ifriqiya, Anatolia, and the Balkan Peninsula. Major bird migration routes cross the region, and in premodern times there was abundant marine life, including a rich variety of fish and crustaceans, and large species such as tuna, sea turtles, sharks, and even whales. As a whole it comprised a dense and highly fragmented physical environment consisting predominantly of an array of tiny microregions, each with marked variations of climate and vegetation, surrounded by continental hinterlands (Africa, Europe, and West Asia), each with distinct climate conditions and abundant and varied natural resources. This, together with the ease of navigation around the sea, meant that from the Neolithic, the various microregions of the Mediterranean were able to develop specialized economies that were integrated through trade, which in turn stimulated the development of strategies and institutions for the storage and redistribution of surpluses, and enabled the region to support a population far greater than would have been the case had these micro-regions remained isolated. From the earliest times, the Mediterranean was a region profoundly integrated by trade, migration, acculturation, and exchange.

FIGURE 0.1 The physical Mediterranean, seen from space. Photo: NASA, modified by Eric Gaba, provided by Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons License.

FIGURE 0.2 Exotic animals being transported for a hunt. Detail of a mid-fourth-century CE floor mosaic, Villa Romana del Casale, Piazza Armerina, Italy. Photo: Le Museé absolu, Phaidon, 10–2012, provided by Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons License.

The Mediterranean in 650

The Sea in the Middle looked much different halfway through the seventh century than it had, say, two hundred and fifty years earlier in 400 CE. In that year, the centuries-old Roman Empire still ruled over all the lands surrounding the Mediterranean, but also territories at a great distance from it, such as England. It is true that by this point, the empire had long since been divided into two parts—a Latin-dominated western half, extending from the Balkans, Italy, and the middle of what is now Libya to the Atlantic Ocean, and a Greek-dominated eastern half that included Egypt, Syria, Anatolia, and the Greek heartlands—ruled over by two co-emperors. It is true too that there were real threats to the empire, not least from Germanic and Central Asian peoples who threatened Rome from the north. Indeed, already in the last years of the fourth century, Germanic Visigoths had begun a circuitous migration through the empire beginning in northern Greece, continuing through the Balkans, and, in the years after 400 eventually all the way through Italy across what is now southern France and into Spain. But the Mediterranean was still an entirely Roman sea, and Latin and Greek still dominated it as languages of daily speech, governmental administration, and learned discourse, just as they had for hundreds of years.

The coming two and half centuries changed this picture dramatically, as we will see if we take a tour around the Sea in the Middle in the year 650, beginning in the East, where the changes had been most dramatic and enduring. Foremost was the creation and rapid expansion of an Arab-dominated realm inspired by a religion that did not even exist in 400: Islam—a word meaning submission (to God). The Arabs had been a known quantity to the Romans—some had been long-time allies of Rome, while others were allies of Rome’s great enemy to the east, Persia. But they had never seemed a real threat to Rome (or to Persia). Then, suddenly, the Prophet Muhammad (570–632) united the unruly Arab tribes under Islam and the Qurꞌan, which declared that God was absolutely one, and all must submit to Him. Soon after Muhammad’s death in 632, a formidable Arab army, inspired by this new religion, and under the authority of his successors, called caliphs, struck out from Arabia. By 650 they had managed to conquer not only the Syrian and Egyptian territories that had long been under Roman control, but also almost all of the Persian Empire—both empires having been severely weakened by internal tensions and decades of warfare between themselves in the early decades of the century. However, the occupying Arab armies of this new empire, which is often referred to as the caliphate, constituted only a tiny percentage of the populations they ruled over. With the exception of some pagan groups, the followers of Islam, or Muslims (meaning those who have submitted to God), did not force those they conquered to convert to their faith, but allowed those they called the Peoples of the Book—Christians, Jews, and other monotheistic peoples—to continue to practice their religions as before, and to raise their children as Christians and Jews, as long as they recognized the political authority of Islam, and paid a special tax called the jizya.

This meant that while the new Muslim caliphate dominated much of the eastern and southern seaboard of the Mediterranean, the great majority of the population in these regions remained Christian and Jewish, and would remain so for centuries. However, neither of these groups was united. Over the course of the fourth and fifth centuries a series of theological disagreements erupted between Christian bishops and abbots regarding both the exact nature of Jesus as at once a divine and a human being, and the nature of the Trinity—all Christians believed that God was somehow at one and the same time both One and Three, in the form of the Father, the Son (that is, Jesus Christ), and the Holy Spirit. While the Trinitarian disagreements had largely been settled, the nature of Jesus has divided the Christians in the Middle East ever since. There were, in fact, three major groups of Christians who disagreed among themselves about this issue, each with its own institutional identity and hierarchy of bishops and priests.

MAP 0.2 The Roman Empire. Original source unknown.

FIGURE 0.3 The Prophet Muhammad with the Black Stone of the Kaꞌaba. Miniature from a manuscript (1314 CE) of The Compendium of Chronicles of Rashid al-Din (d. 1318). The Picture Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo.

MAP 0.3 The Islamic Conquests. Original source unknown.

Likewise, the Jews living under Islam were divided between the Rabbanite Jews and the Samaritans. Rabbanite Jews were the ancestors of modern Judaism, whose learned leaders had finished compiling the Talmud, the vast supplement to the Bible that would shape the practice and theology of Jews all the way down to the present. The Samaritans, by contrast, adhered only to the first five books of the Hebrew Bible—their Samaritan Pentateuch has a number of small textual differences from the Rabbanite version—and maintained more of the ancient Hebrew religious hierarchy than Rabbanites did.

Moreover, while Greek had been the dominant learned language of the region for nearly a thousand years, other local languages had lived on as well. Most important were Coptic in Christian Egypt, alongside Syriac in what is now Israel, Palestine, Syria, and Iraq, Georgian in the Persianoccupied Caucasus, and Armenian in the Christian kingdom of Armenia, which would fall under Muslim control just a few years after 650. By the middle of the seventh century, all these languages had developed into thriving languages of Christian theology and worship, though Greek continued to be in use, as we will see, among one Christian sect in the early medieval Islamic world.

In conquering Egypt in particular, the Muslims had wrested away from Rome one of its wealthiest provinces. But that did not mean that the Roman Empire had ceased to exist, as we will see if we continue our tour north and west. Indeed, Rome survived, in a drastically changed form for centuries after the catastrophic loss of its southeastern territories. What endured was the descendant of the old Eastern Roman Empire, the Western Roman Empire having ceased to exist in the aftermath of a series of migrations of outside peoples over the course of the fifth century in the aftermath of the Visigothic meanderings from north of the Danube to Spain. The wealthier, more urban eastern empire managed to keep those migrating German and Central Asian peoples who had crossed the northern border of the empire out of its territories for the most part. Moreover, under the ambitious emperor Justinian (527–565), the Eastern Roman Empire had launched a vastly expensive and time-consuming attempt to regain the western Roman Empire from the Germanic kingdoms that had replaced it, with significant but partial success. At Justinian’s death Rome once more included extensive parts of western North Africa and of Spain, as well as all of Italy. By the third decade of the seventh century, though, much of Italy had been lost to the incursions of the Lombards, another migrating Germanic people, and Spain had thrown off Roman control entirely. Furthermore, Slavic peoples, the ancestors of the modern Croatians, Serbs, Bosnians, and Macedonians, had migrated from north of the Danube down into the Balkans and western Greece, snatching those regions from eastern Roman control as well. Nevertheless in 650 the eastern Romans still possessed key coastal regions in the western Aegean, as well as all of Anatolia (what is now Turkey), Crete, a substantial part of the coast of North Africa, as well as several key islands in the western Mediterranean, including Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica.

FIGURE 0.4 The Ashtiname (Covenant) of Muhammad to St. Catherine’s monastery, sixteenth-century copy, Sinai, Egypt. The History Collection / Alamy Stock Photo.

While the rest of North Africa would soon be lost to the expanding Arab-Muslim empire, the core lands of Greece and Anatolia, as well as Crete, Sicily, Sardinia, and parts of Italy would remain part of the Eastern Roman Empire well after 650. Though its emperors and people continued to consider themselves as Romans down until the empire’s final demise in 1453, the eastern empire was now thoroughly Greek in speech, culture, and administration. While its church was still united with the Latin-speaking church of the lands of the former Western Roman Empire, the Latin and Greek branches had already begun growing apart in certain ritual practices, and these differences would grow over the centuries to come. The capital city, Constantinople, was one of the largest cities in the Mediterranean, and one of the most important trading hubs in the land- and seaborne trade that had been thriving in the region for millenia, and would continue to be so in the centuries to come. While this Greek-speaking empire was regarded for the rest of its history as the Roman Empire (in the face of an upstart Latin Holy Roman Empire), scholars refer to the medieval version of it by convention as Byzantium, or the Byzantine Empire. Byzantion was the original name of the city of Constantinople, which had been chosen centuries earlier as capital of the eastern empire, by Constantine I (306–337), who renamed it in his own honor.

Continuing our tour to the west, we come to the wedge of Slavic-controlled territory in parts of what had been Greece and the Balkans. This pagan, Slavic territory now separated Greek-Christian Byzantium from the territories of the old Western Roman Empire, where the Latin-speaking church of Rome held sway. Over the coming generations both Greek and Latin prelates and missionaries would seek to convert these pagan Slavs to their particular form of Christianity. Most eventually swore allegiance to the patriarch of Constantinople, the senior bishop of the Greek Church, rather than to the pope in Rome, the senior bishop of the Latin Church. While the western part of this Slavic wedge occupied land that had been part of the old western empire, much of its destiny over the coming centuries would be bound up with Byzantium as a result of its confessional orientation.

FIGURE 0.5 Saint Remy baptizing King Clovis, late-ninth-century ivory book binding. The History Collection / Alamy Stock Photo.

Across the Adriatic Sea from these now Slavic territories lies the Italian Peninsula, which had been reconquered by Justinian I when he retook it from the German Ostrogoths, who had ruled it for more than a century. By the late sixth century, however, it was becoming ever more difficult for the Byzantine emperors to effectively intervene militarily here. Indeed, the Lombards, the last of the Germanic peoples to move into the old western empire, took advantage of this weakness and invaded Byzantine Italy in the last decades of the sixth century. They conquered all of the north, a region still called Lombardy to this day, and Tuscany, which together formed the Kingdom of the Lombards. Separate Lombard forces conquered much of Italy to the south of Rome, establishing the two independent Lombard duchies Spoleto and Benevento. The far south of Italy and all of Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica remained, as we have seen, Byzantine territory.

Continuing our journey west, the enormous barrier of the Alps formed the boundary between the Lombard kingdom and the Frankish kingdoms. The Germanic Franks had moved into the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century and, under the rule of Clovis (ca. 466–511), who converted from paganism to Roman Christianity in 496, subjugated a large swath of territory that included large portions of modern France and Germany. His sons had continued his aggressive military campaigns, so that by the mid-sixth century theirs were the most dominant of the Germanic successor kingdoms that ruled over former western Roman lands, and remained so in 650. The Merovingians (the royal dynasty of Clovis and his descendants) followed Germanic custom in dividing their realms among their sons on their deaths, so that Frankish realms were often divided among several kings. In 650, however, only two Frankish kings—of Neustria and Austrasia, respectively—held sway in the Frankish realms. A subject Duchy of Bavaria (the Bavarians were another Germanic people who had settled in western Roman territories in the fifth century) recognized their overlordship, as did the Duchy of Aquitaine in what is now western France.

FIGURE 0.6 An Arian depiction of Christ’s baptism with apostles in senatorial garb. Detail of a fifth-/sixth-century mosaic ceiling, Ravenna, Italy. Photo: © José Luiz Bernardes Ribeiro / CC BY-SA 4.0, provided by Wikimedia Commons.

The Visigoths, the Germanic people who had famously sacked Rome in 410, had soon after established a kingdom that dominated almost all the Iberian Peninsula and the Mediterranean coast of France, west of the Rhone. In the process, they pushed out another Germanic people, the Vandals, who crossed into North Africa. Their kingdom, which covered the coastlands of North Africa, Sicily, and the western Mediterranean islands, would be conquered by Justinian in 534. In Spain, only the Basques of the western Pyrenees, who like the Sardinians, had arrived in the Mediterranean thousands of years earlier, and whose unique language originated in the Neolithic, were not subjects of the Visigothic kings. In the same way that the Christians living under Islam were divided between three different sects in the middle of the seventh century, the Visigothic kingdom had been divided on religious grounds up until 589. The great majority of the former Roman population, who lived on under the royal authority of a small Visigothic elite, were Catholics in communion with Rome. The Visigoths themselves, however, like most of the Germanic peoples, including the Vandals and Lombards, had converted to a version of Christianity, called Arianism, that would be deemed a heresy by both Rome and Constantinople. Arians, whose origins went back to the third century, had taught that Jesus Christ, though the divine son of the Father, was not coequal or coeternal with the Father, but had been begotten at a particular point in history. At a church council in 589, the Visigothic king, Reccared (586–601), renounced Arianism, and made Roman Catholicism the only allowable form of Christianity in his realm.

This is a process that had happened at various times, with most of the Germanic peoples entering the Roman Empire as Arians and at some point converting to Catholicism, which was the religion of most of the people they ruled over. The exception were the Franks, who were still pagans when they moved into the western Roman lands, but who were forcibly converted to Catholicism by the same Clovis who did so much to expand their realms (and thereby began a close alliance between the Franks and the popes in Rome). Unlike the Christians under Islam in 650, then, those in the former Western Roman Empire were united in belief, and subject to the same hierarchy, whose head was the pope, though some of the Lombards remained Arian until about 680.

MAP 0.4 Jewish Settlement in Antiquity. Original source unknown.

These Germanic successor kingdoms in what is now western Europe were by far the poorest regions in the Mediterranean in 650 (and would remain so for some centuries). The western half of the Roman Empire had never been as urbanized as the East, and over the course of the previous centuries, even those prosperous cities that did exist, such as Rome, began to lose population as the economy in the West became more and more agriculturally based, and much of the trade that had sustained urban centers vanished. In contrast, cities in both the Byzantine and the Islamic East, especially Constantinople, Antioch, and Alexandria, continued to thrive along with the dynamic trade that had long sustained them.

Our tour ends with North Africa. Directly across the Straits of Gibraltar at the southern tip of Spain, the Byzantine Empire still controlled a small area, including the Mediterranean cities of Septem (Ceuta) and Tangis (Tangier) as well as a large swath of the North