medieval worlds. Urban Agencies: Reframing Anatolian and Caucasian Cities (13th-14th Centuries) & Movement and Mobility in the Medieval Mediterranean: Changing Perspectives from Late Antiquity to the Long-Twelfth Century, II. Volume 14 (2021). [Open Access]
CONTENTS INCLUDE
Reframing Medieval Anatolia, Caucasia, and the Aegean: Narratives, States, and Cities
Matthew Kinloch
There is no single totalising modern historiographical narrative for thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Anatolia, Caucasia, and the Aegean. The modern narration of this past is constituted by a collage of narratives, each of which is centred on specific state projects. This article sketches the limitations of the statist common sense that has framed the modern narration of this period, with specific reference to the two most prominent narratives, the decline of Byzantium and the rise of the Ottomans. It then outlines in broad terms the heuristic potential in replacing the state with the city as the foundational unit of analysis for the study of medieval Anatolia, Caucasia, and the Aegean. This approach is intended to build on the theoretical groundwork laid by the pioneers of a holistic medieval Anatolian studies and the increasing number and quality of studies centred on urban centres. The study finishes with a case study, examining the manner in which the failed siege of Attaleia/Antalya/Satalia in 1206 and the successful conquest of the city in 1207 have been integrated into and made meaningful within state-centric reconstructions of the history of the early thirteenth century. In particular, it demonstrates how the centring of these states emphasises elite male characters and obscures the roles played by the city’s population. This article is intended to set out a broad framework for the other, more fine-grained contributions to this thematic section.
Urban Agency and the City Notables of Medieval Anatolia
A. C. S. Peacock
Scholarship on the city in the Islamic world has generally played down the autonomy and collective agency of cities. This article explores the case of Anatolia, usually neglected in discussions of Islamic urbanism, focusing on the Seljuq period of the 13th century. While much scholarship on Anatolia acknowledges the role of futuwwa (trade-based confraternities somewhat analogous to guilds), I argue the independence of these organisations has been overestimated, for many were closely linked to sultanic power. The paper suggests that in fact power was negotiated between rulers and urban notables (a‘yān), who had considerable autonomy and who brokered binding contracts (sawgandnāmas) with sultans that expressed their rights and obligations. A‘yān played a crucial role in decisions such as the surrender of their cities to conquerors and in negotiating terms, a role for which analogies can be identified elsewhere in the Middle East. Finally, the article makes some preliminary suggestions as to the identities of these a‘yān.
Cities and Imperial Authority in the Western Provinces of the Byzantine Empire, 12th-14th Centuries
Teresa Shawcross
Chrysobulls issued »in common« to the inhabitants of cities, together with a large number of other surviving sources, shed light on the interplay in the Byzantine Empire during the long thirteenth century between, on the one hand, growing claims to civic autonomy advanced by communes and, on the other, efforts by imperial authority to control its territory. This chapter examines the emergence of a new kind of empire – based on commerce and trade – under the Palaiologoi. It analyses the changing circumstances of urban centres in the western provinces, and assesses the degree of fiscal, legal and political emancipation that these centres achieved. It discusses the creation of leagues and other types of alliances that successfully bound cities and towns together into regional associations. It also considers the mechanisms behind revolts and other forms of armed and unarmed protest that occurred against the central regime. Particular attention is paid to the region of northern Greece (Thrace and Macedonia) dominated by the city of Thessalonike, for which the evidence is most plentiful.
A Conceptual Account of Market Morals that Resonated in Medieval Anatolia under Christian and Muslim Rule
İklil Selçuk
This paper surveys several prescriptive, descriptive and narrative sources of moral conduct from patristic teachings to Islamic commanding good and futuwwa (t. fütüvvet) that had resonating effects on the definition of appropriate behavior in urban markets in medieval Anatolia. The purpose of this scrutiny is to highlight converging notions among central governments and religious authorities of honesty in trade, and ways to fight inequalities born out of commerce. A closer look at these resonating moral codes suggests that while actual market conditions, crises, political and economic turmoil of periods of transition gave rise to variations in the interpretation of pre-modern market morals, prevailing common themes allow for a conceptual comparison.
Merchant Capital, Taxation and Urbanisation. The City of Ani in the Global Long Thirteenth Century
Nicholas S. M. Matheou
This article addresses the themes of urban agency and state-centrism by analysing the agency of merchant capital and taxation in processes of urbanisation. The case study is the city of Ani, a now abandoned site in central south Caucasia straddling the Turkish-Armenian border, in the long thirteenth century c.1200-1350. This global-historical conjuncture is defined by the height of the medieval Commercial Revolution and its central Eurasian expression, the Silk Road. By 1200 Ani had developed as a thriving commercial centre for over two hundred years, with merchants coming to dominate the political economy in the city and its environs. By the mid-fourteenth century, however, this wealthy commercial class was no longer in evidence, with Ani’s urbanising process fundamentally transformed, beginning a rapid deurbanisation. Utilising contemporary theories of (de)urbanisation found in Ibn Khaldūn’s Muqaddima, this article first outlines Ani’s development up to 1200, focusing on the role of interregional and intercontinental commerce, and the urban elite’s rising dominance in landholding. Having established the mercantile and rentier regime of accumulation on which Ani’s development depended, we turn to the period of Zakarian-Mkhargrdzeli rule under the Georgian kingdom c.1200-1236, finding a wealthy commercial class hegemonic in the city’s political regime as well as the regime of accumulation. The final section, then, details the urban elite’s fortunes under Mongol Eurasian hegemony, and particularly the effects of drastically increased taxation in this political realisation of the medieval Silk Road. Ultimately the story of Ani in the global long thirteenth century forms a crucial case study for the combined agency of taxation and capital in urbanisation, both beneath and within the level of the state system, speaking to their contradictory symbiosis. At the same time, the city as a site of accumulation forms a crucial bridge in the Armenian merchant bourgeoisie’s trajectory from the medieval Commercial Revolution into the coalescence of capitalist modernity.
Looking for Urban Agency in a City of Memorials: Tomb Towers of Late-Thirteenth-Century Ahlat
Oya Pancaroğlu
In the medieval period, the city of Ahlat was an important urban center in the Lake Van region. The medieval city suffered serious depredations in the form of military assaults and earthquakes between the 13th and the 16th centuries that caused the urban center to be rebuilt at least twice at some distance from the medieval location. While only meager traces of the medieval urban fabric remain, Ahlat preserves a remarkable medieval funerary landscape of cemeteries and tomb towers that attest to the dynamic workings of local urban agency. This essay focuses on a discrete set of tomb towers of the late thirteenth century built by Muslim amirs of the Ilkhanate in order to explore the relationship between these new urban actors and the physically elusive urban stage of medieval Ahlat, in tandem with contemporary political circumstances. These tomb towers – built in the outskirts of the medieval city in the aftermath of much destruction witnessed in the course of the thirteenth century – represent some of the earliest indications of Islamization among Ilkhanid amirs but have hitherto been studied from a purely formalistic angle. In order to situate these monuments in their historical context, the essay is grounded in an extended summary of the medieval (7th-13th centuries) political and military history and the attendant demographic changes that significantly impacted the urban structure of Ahlat. The construction of tomb towers is investigated in the light of the compromised nature of the thirteenth-century urban settlement and the contemporary emergence of nodes of Sufi inhabitation in the peripheries of Ahlat as can be deduced from Ottoman-period tax registers. Amounting to a spatial externalization of urban agency, the tomb towers and Sufi lodges represent distinct but complementary claims to reconstitute social and political influence in the face of a ruptured urban center.
Urban Agency in the Borderlands: Turkmen Rulers and Administrative Elites in 13th-century Kastamonu
Bruno De Nicola
After the Battle of Manzikert (1071), in which the armies of the Great Seljuqs defeated the Byzantine Empire, different waves of Turkmen people settled across Anatolia. By the 12th century, many of these groups had organised under the command of local warlords and established military control over different areas of Asia Minor under the tutelage of the Seljuqs of Rum. However, the mechanisms by which the new rulers articulated their control, especially over the urban settlements located in the regions they conquered, are poorly understood. This is even more dramatic in the case of northwestern Anatolia, a region that, during the 13th century, was a borderland between an expanding Turco-Islamic world and a defensive Christian Byzantium. The lack of narrative sources dealing with this particular part of Asia Minor has aggravated this lacuna, often excluding the city of Kastamonu from the studies of urban settlement in 13th-century Anatolia. This article attempts to change this situation by looking at surviving architectural evidence and non-narrative-literary sources that offer a particular view of the agents and agencies at work in the interaction between Turkmen rulers and urban elites in 13th-century Kastamonu.
“These are the narratives of bygone years”: Conquest of a Fortress as a Source of Legitimacy
Dimitri Korobeinikov
In 1502 or 1503 Kemāl paşa-zāde (d. 1534), also known as Ibn-i Kemāl, the future Şeyh’ül-İslam (chief Muslim judge) under Sulaymān the Magnificent, described the world of Byzantium which the Ottomans had conquered. There, he reproduced the realia of the »fortress past« of the Ottomans. Ibn-i Kemāl described Byzantium as a commonwealth of fortresses, each headed by a tekvur (»emperor«), which was at odds with historical accuracy. This pointed to the period of the second half of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth century as a time of transition, when the cities in the frontier zone in Anatolia were sometimes reduced to the size of a fortress, and their inhabitants were forced to find a new location. The extant tales about the initial fortress, from which a new state formation (beylik) had begun, and the stories about the conquests of the chain of neighboring fortresses, per se reflected the growing importance of the small cities as chief colonization centers in the boundary zone in Asia Minor. The vision of the »fortresses’ past«, still remembered at the time of Sulaymān the Magnificent, even affected the imperial aspirations of the Ottomans and their self-representation as the new masters of the conquered lands.
The Sicilian Tithe Business: State and Merchants in the Eleventh-Century Islamic Mediterranean
Lorenzo M. Bondioli
In the mid-eleventh century, Sicilian authorities levied the »Sicilian tithe«, a customs duty hitting foreign merchants. The imposition of this tax put in motion a long chain of events that would be lost to us were it not for the exceptional evidence of the Cairo Geniza. This article focuses on a handful of Geniza commercial letters and legal queries in Judeo-Arabic that chronicle the unfolding of the Sicilian tithe business, from the initial attempt by a group of Geniza merchants to evade it, through the harsh reaction of state authorities, to the eventual abolition of the tax through merchant lobbying at the Fatimid court in Egypt. The events surrounding the Sicilian tithe not only shed light on a chapter in the history of Islamic Sicily; they also offer fresh insights into the much broader question of the relationship between state and merchants in the Islamic Mediterranean of the Central Middle Ages. Addressing this theme, this article will advance three interrelated claims. First, it will argue that Sicilian state administrators adopted what we might call a protectionist fiscal policy with the aim of maximizing tax revenues while at the same time supporting a domestic merchant class. Second, it will show that to accomplish this goal state administrators categorized merchants on the basis of administrative procedures that were largely detached from the complex and shifting forms of identity that merchants themselves adopted. Third, it will argue that the state’s protectionist calculus clashed against the trans-territorial character of contemporary merchant consortiums, highlighting the fundamental misalignment between the tributary logic that animated state officials and the capitalist logic that animated merchants.
"Eager to Go to the Desert": Ambiguous Views on Ascetic Women’s Holy Travels in Late Antiquity
Andra Jugănaru
Starting with the fourth century, when religious travels to the Holy Land had gained popularity, Greek and Latin male Christian writers expressed their views on pilgrimages by women. While some of them advised their spiritual daughters to focus rather on the internal spiritual journey towards the Jerusalem of the heart, others acknowledged the merits of physical presence in holy places. The aim of this paper is to contextualize these views in order to explain why they varied.
Where the Long Way Ends: Descriptions of the Mediterranean Sea and Holy Land and the Criticism of Crusading at the Court of Henry II of England (1154-1189)
Fabrizio de Falco
The purpose of this essay is to explore Gerald of Wales’s Topographia Hibernica and Walter Map’s De Nugis Curialium, to assess how the authors treated and described the Mediterranean space, with particular reference to the Holy Land. The selected texts are often cited as typical of the style of literary production that took place at the court of Henry II of England (1154-1189) and of the strong correspondence that existed between the policies of the English king and the works of his courtiers. The first version of the Topographia Hibernica was written between 1186-1188 and is the first treatise on Ireland composed by a non-Irish author. The De Nugis Curialium, a collection of satirical invectives, folktales, and personal experiences, was written during the latter half of the twelfth century. In their respective texts, Gerald of Wales and Walter Map focus primarily on topics regarding the British Isles. Noticeably, however, both writers make relevant digressions in order to report information about Sicily, Greece and the Holy Land, and that both authors witnessed the arrival of the patriarch of Jerusalem in London. The present article has two goals: first, bearing in mind Henry II’s reluctance as a response to possible crusade, the aim of this analysis is to see if and how the descriptions of the Mediterranean space coincided with Henry II’s reluctance to travel to Jerusalem. The second aim is to show how such descriptions accorded with the structure of both works and, in particular, how they might serve the authors’ specific interests beyond their adherence to Henry II’s policies.
"I am a virgin woman and a virgin woman’s child". Critical Plant Theory and the Maiden Mother Conceit in Early Medieval Riddles
Alaric Hall and Shamira A. Meghani
While early medieval riddles in Old English and, to a lesser extent, Latin, have been studied extensively from ecocritical perspectives in recent years, the large corpora of riddles in other languages of western Eurasia have yet to benefit from or feed back into these methodological developments. Meanwhile, ecocritical research generally has focused on animals at the expense of plants. We respond to both problems by providing the first extensive study of riddles whose solutions are plants, through the lens of one recurrent conceit in ancient and medieval verse riddles in Arabic, Greek, Latin, Old Norse and, we argue, Hebrew. The conceit is that a plant is a virgin woman who nevertheless reproduces. By examining different permutations of this motif, we show how these riddles use plants to comment on human gendering, and how, while usually fundamentally patriarchal in their world-views, they register patriarchal anxiety at women’s reproductive capabilities, acknowledge critiques of patriarchal constraints on women, and queer gender norms in other ways; inter alia we note that the Old Norse riddle studied here may be the only explicit (albeit metaphorical) representation of female homosexual eroticism in the Old Norse corpus. However, we also draw on critical plant theory to explore how the riddles situate plants in medieval Abrahamicate cultures, uncovering implicit recognitions of the dynamic and reciprocal relationships between human farmers and their family structures, the plants that domesticate them, people’s and plants’ mutual shaping of the ecosystems they inhabit or colonise, and the economies that these interactions constitute.