Saracens

Sonograms are images produced by sound; more specifically, they are produced by ultrasound—sound waves vibrating at frequencies well above the range of what humans can hear, but suitable for producing maps below surfaces such as skin or oceans. Long before scientific devices transduced vibrating air waves into graphics, cultural devices such as voices, instruments, pens and parchment, transmitted sounds in the form of love songs that had an ultrasonic function to produce sonograms that mapped subjects and objects of desire. This essay unites musicology’s concerns with the discursive force of organized sound, and sound studies’ concern with the discursive force sonic environments, recording formats, and media networks, to consider how the widely transmitted medieval song Lanqan li jorn son lonc en mai  by Jaufre Rudel, with its famous refrain of amor de lonh  (“love from afar”) and evocations of the Saracen kingdom, reverberates across time and space to map subjects and objects of desire below skin and across oceans. The first half of the essay examines Lanqan li jorn son lonc en mai  in the context the transcultural sound networks, medieval notions of global geography, and the material formatting of songs. The second half of this essay turns to two modern-day resoundings of Jaufre’s song of distant love:  these are the 1977 recording by the Clemencic Consort directed by René Clemencic; and the 2000 opera by Finish composer Kaija Saariaho called L’amour de loin with a libretto by the Lebanese author Amin Maalouf.  In both cases the song, and the medieval legend that sprung from it, are sonically reimagined to express twentieth-century strife in the Middle East.  Thus while the notes of Jaufre’s medieval song have all but disappeared from these reformattings, its ultrasonic function continues to produce sonograms of desire born of distance.

“Mirror of Chivalry: Salâh al-Dîn in the Medieval European Imagination,” in Images of the Other: Europe and the Muslim World before 1700. Cairo Papers on Social Science 19:2 (Summer, 1996), 7-38. Republished in J. Tolan, Sons of Ishmael: Muslims through European Eyes in the Middle Ages. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008.

This paper is concerned with finding evidence of Arab military development in defence of their territory and against the superstates on the periphery of desert-lands. This examination concerns the growth of cultural/political groups as a result of military pressure on Arabian territory from Yemen, Roman and Sasanian forces. The model searched for is that of the Germans and Slavs in Europe due to political developments directed by the Roman state and the pressure from other forms of foreign invasion (unlikely true on a largely desert land with few profitable urban centres). The Arab/Islamic invasions here are seen as products of events surrounding Arabia identified as an increase in Saracen activity (seen here as Arab raiders and mercenaries) and the identification of large group formation.

Tussen de 8ste en 20ste eeuw zijn miljoenen Europeanen als slaaf weggevoerd naar islamitisch gebied. Daaronder waren ook veel Nederlanders. De slavenjachten door Moren, Saracenen, Turken, Tataren en Barbarijse zeerovers hebben grote impact gehad op zowel de directe slachtoffers als op de achterblijvers die het konden navertellen. Hun verhalen hebben zich in de loop der tijd omgevormd tot volksverhalen en tradities.

“Sons of Ishmael”: this is the epithet that many Christian writers of the Middle Ages gave to Muslims.  Bible and Koran both agree, after all, that the Arabs were the descendants of Ishmael, son of Abraham and Hagar.  Genesis describes him as “a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him”; this, to many medieval Christian authors, is a prophecy of the violent contention between his progeny and the Christians, supposed spiritual descendants of his half-brother Isaac.
Sons of Ishmael brings together ten essays on the history of conflict and convergence between Latin Christendom and the Arab Muslim world.  These articles explore, in greater depth than was possible in my recently published and critically acclaimed Saracens (NY: Columbia University Press, 2002), such themes as the polemical strategies of polemicists Peter the Venerable or Pedro Pascual, common Christian-Muslim devotion to the Virgin in twelfth-century Syria and Egypt, or the chivalrous myths surrounding Saladin and other Muslim princes.  The book provides a close look at the varying ways in which Europeans perceived Islam and Muslims in the Middle Ages and a window into understanding the roots of current stereotypes of Muslims and Arabs in European and American culture.

The transfer of Saracen arms into Frankish ownership is a leitmotif of many chansons de geste, but one whose significance for inter-imperial translation or translatio imperii has yet to be elucidated. In this essay, I focus on the Chanson d’Aspremont, a twelfth-century epic set in Calabria that narrates the pre-history of Durendal, Roland’s sword of Song of Roland fame, as an object inherited by Roland from its former royal Muslim owner. Drawing on cultural history and object-translation models derived from material and spolia studies, I read the sword’s symbolic transfer as evidence of Norman desire for and appropriation of former Fatimid imperium in Sicily.

“The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages”—a two-part article—questions the widely-held belief in critical race theory that “race” is a category without purchase before the modern era.

Surveying a variety of cultural documents from the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries—chronicles, hagiography, literature, stories, sculpture, maps, canon law, statuary, illustrations, religious commentary, and architectural features—the study considers racial thinking, racial law, racial formation, and racialized behaviors and phenomena in medieval Europe before the emergence of a recognizable vocabulary of race.

One focus is how a political hermeneutics of religion—so much in play again today—enabled the positing of fundamental human differences in biopolitical and culturalist ways to create strategic essentialisms demarcating human kinds and populations. Another focus is how race figures in the emergence of homo europaeus and the identity of Western Europe (beginning as Latin Christendom) in this time.

Part I—“Race Studies, Modernity, and the Middle Ages”—surveys the current state of race theory, and puts in conversation race studies and medieval studies, fields that exist on either side of a vast divide.

Part II—“Locations of Medieval Race”—identifies and analyzes specific concretions of medieval race, while continuing to develop the theoretical arguments of Part I.

The paper will examine illuminated scenes and sculpted iconographic devices whose protagonists are anthropomorphic animals or beasts. It will be highlighted the influence which ideas concerning Jews' and Muslims' alleged faults and flaws had on the characterisation of animal-shaped figures; also, how a number of caricatures hid the fear of moral subversion while attempting to exorcise social disorder; and lastly, the points of contact between the satirical and discrediting function of animal presences in illuminations, and the alienating and derisory effect introduced into religious architecture by the transfiguration of the Enemy, sculpted into a beast-like being.
This session will focus on the depiction of Jewish Otherness in architecture. It will focus on the sculptural and painted decorations showing Jewish dance, flowers, plants, and animals related to Jewish tradition, Hebrew and Hebraic inscriptions which show foreign tradition regarding Christian tradition in Europe. The focus is set on the link between private and public spaces, political, economic and cross-cultural relationships focusing on the architectural and spatial construction of Jewish and Christian otherness and identity during the Middle Ages (1215-1500).

“The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages”—a two-part article—questions the widely-held belief in critical race theory that “race” is a category without purchase before the modern era.

Surveying a variety of cultural documents from the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries—chronicles, hagiography, literature, stories, sculpture, maps, canon law, statuary, illustrations, religious commentary, and architectural features—the study considers racial thinking, racial law, racial formation, and racialized behaviors and phenomena in medieval Europe before the emergence of a recognizable vocabulary of race.

One focus is how a political hermeneutics of religion—so much in play again today—enabled the positing of fundamental human differences in biopolitical and culturalist ways to create strategic essentialisms demarcating human kinds and populations. Another focus is how race figures in the emergence of homo europaeus and the identity of Western Europe (beginning as Latin Christendom) in this time.

Part I—“Race Studies, Modernity, and the Middle Ages”—surveys the current state of race theory, and puts in conversation race studies and medieval studies, fields that exist on either side of a vast divide.

Part II—“Locations of Medieval Race”—identifies and analyzes specific concretions of medieval race, while continuing to develop the theoretical arguments of Part I.

The fall of the crusader-controlled city of Acre to the Muslims in 1291 inspired many schemes for crusades to recover Jerusalem and its environs. One of these proposals is How to Defeat the Saracens, written around 1317 by William of Adam, a Dominican who traveled extensively in the eastern Mediterranean, Persia, and parts of India. The treatise, poorly known even among specialists, presents a five-pronged plan for retaking the Holy Land. In particular, it focuses on cutting off economic and military support for Egypt. William’s personal experience in the lands he describes comes through, for example, when he recollects his encounters in Persia with a captive Greek woman whose child he baptized, and in India with a lapsed Christian who said that God had abandoned him.

In this volume Giles Constable provides a critical edition of the Latin text and a facing English translation. Extensive notes, produced in collaboration with other experts, guide the reader through the political, geographical, economic, military, and historical context of this fascinating work.

Throughout most of the Latin middle ages, “Saracen” (Saracenus, Sarracenus, Sarrasin, etc.) is the standard term used by most Latin authors to refer to Muslims. By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, it has clearly religious overtones: Islam is referred to as “lex Sarraceni” or “lex Mahometi”, terms which are used more or less interchangeably. Yet “Saracenus” was originally a term used by Greek and Roman geographical/ethnographical writers to refer to certain peoples of the Arabian peninsula. The medieval image of “Saracens” in fact is a fusion of two traditions: biblical discourse on the “Ishmaelites”, descendants of Abraham’s illegitimate eldest son, and Roman discourse on marauding “Scenitae” or “Sarraceni” of the Arabian peninsula. This fusion is made well before the rise of Islam: we find it in Jerome. This talk will concentrate on the image of the Saracen/Ishmaelite in three Latin authors: Jerome, Isidore and Bede. We will see that the image of fierce Saracens found in Jerome is still quite operative in Bede and that the rise of Islam has not fundamentally altered it.

La vita della città di Lucera nel XIII secolo, periodo in cui divenne la residenza dei siciliani di fede islamica esiliati da Federico II, è stata oggetto di diversi studi, a partire dai lavori di Pietro Egidi La colonia saracena di Lucera e la sua distruzione e il Codice diplomatico dei Saraceni di Lucera. Questi due studi, si concentrano in particolare sull'amministrazione dei sovrani e sugli avvenimenti di fine XIII secolo. Gli studi successivi, comparsi quasi tutti dopo la fine della seconda guerra mondiale, si basarono sul Codice Diplomatico, in quanto unica testimonianza rimasta basata sugli ormai perduti registri angioini. Per questo motivo, i periodi meno conosciuti della storia di Lucera, come i regni dei successori di Federico II, rimasero in secondo piano. La storia di Lucera è strettamente legata alle guerre per il possesso del regno di Sicilia; tuttavia, non è mai stato approfondito il ruolo della colonia nel seno di quelle lotte.
Questo lavoro si propone di analizzare e dimostrare il protagonismo esercitato dalla comunità pugliese di musulmani italiani nello scontro tra gli Svevi e la Chiesa di Roma, tra il 1250 e il 1269. Dall'analisi dei documenti e delle cronache riguardanti la storia di Lucera nel ventennio in questione, già tutti editi, appare evidente l'attenzione riservata agli islamici della Capitanata da parte di Manfredi e Corradino, da un lato, e dei pontefici e di Carlo d'Angiò, dall'altro. In particolare, risalta il rilievo strategico e politico-militare della città, nell'ambito del regno del Sud dell'Italia, e l'importanza della sua presenza per la propaganda morale e religiosa, perpetrata da parte dei pontefici contro gli Hohenstaufen. Da entrambe le parti in conflitto, Lucera era vista come un'opportunità che, se ben sfruttata, avrebbe potuto portare alla vittoria la propria fazione.
Il primo capitolo ripercorre la storia della colonia dalla fondazione negli anni '20 del XIII secolo fino alla distruzione nel 1300. Lo spostamento dalla Sicilia, cominciato nel 1224, continuò fino al 1246, alternando momenti di tranquillità a grandi trasferimenti di ribelli catturati nelle operazioni di repressione. Nonostante dalla lettura delle Costituzioni di Melfi sia evidente l'inferiorità giuridica dei musulmani nei confronti dei cristiani, è innegabile che, fino all'arrivo degli Angioini, alla città di Lucera fosse garantita una certa autonomia amministrativa e giuridica. Le disuguaglianze maggiori si possono riscontrare nella fiscalità: oltre a gravose imposte per poter coltivare campi di proprietari cristiani, i maomettani erano costretti a pagare un testatico, la gesia, per poter professare liberamente la propria religione. Questa tassa doveva essere pagata da tutti gli uomini in età adulta e ammontava intorno ai 4 o 5 grana a persona. La condizione dei musulmani rimase sempre di servi camere, ma nel particolare contesto di un esperimento di tolleranza. Il negotium Lucerie del 1300 fu il risultato di calcoli politici ed economici operati dal sovrano di un regno in guerra e con gravi difficoltà finanziarie, che non poteva permettersi di sopportare una nuova ribellione dei propri sudditi.
La parte centrale del lavoro è incentrata sul periodo meno conosciuto della vita di Lucera, che va dalla morte di Federico II al trionfo di Carlo I d'Angiò. Si è voluto presentare un'analisi del ruolo occupato dai musulmani lucerini nell'ambito politico e militare nel Sud dell'Italia in un periodo di scontri per la corona del regno di Sicilia. Gli anni dal 1250 al 1269 mostrano il protagonismo di Lucera: la città acquisì una sempre maggiore importanza politica e militare nell'ambito delle guerre per il possesso del regno di Sicilia. Inoltre, si è approfondito l'atteggiamento e la cultura dei sudditi maomettani e le loro conoscenze. L'interesse si è soffermato sulla loro fedeltà alla casata sveva e sulle loro convinzioni religiose. Si è analizzato il livello di conoscenza della cultura islamica da parte dei lucerini per spiegare come i superstiti della repressione angioina furono in grado di sopravvivere e di non rinunciare all'islam, per mezzo di una pratica di nascondimento.
Nel capitolo finale si è voluta concentrare l'attenzione sull'importanza conferita alla presenza di un enclave maomettana all'interno di un regno cristiano ed è stato messo in risalto come si è evoluto il ruolo dei Saraceni di Lucera nel determinare un giudizio negativo nei confronti di Federico II, Manfredi e Corradino. Inizialmente, i Saraceni erano appena citati nelle scomuniche dell'imperatore come dimostrazione di malafede nei confronti della Sede Apostolica. Gradualmente il ruolo di Lucera divenne sempre più centrale nella retorica antisveva, fino a diventare la prova dell'adesione di Manfredi alla religione islamica e oggetto di una crociata. Tuttavia, la strumentalizzazione dell'esistenza della città musulmana divenne evidente nel momento in cui gli Angioini presero il potere. Infatti, negli ultimi 30 anni di vita della colonia, né Carlo I né suo figlio furono mai rimproverati da un pontefice a causa della presenza di Lucera. Entrambi, senza mai tradire alcuna simpatia per i Saraceni, continuarono però a garantire alla città la propria protezione e la libertà religiosa per la sua importanza economica, strategica e militare.

The Ottoman Empire was a geographically, economically, religiously and politically powerful empire that lasted from the late thirteenth century to the early twentieth century, expanding its influence not only to Europe but also to the Middle East, Asia Minor and North Africa. Especially in the late fifteenth century and the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Empire, as the leader and spreader of Islam, began to have a profound impact on three continents and achieved several military victories, which led Western Europeans to fear that it would bring the downfall of Christianity. The conquest of Constantinople (contemporary İstanbul) by Mehmed II giving the Ottomans a foothold in Europe, and Selim I’s becoming the caliphate in the Muslim world strengthened the idea that the Ottoman Empire was the leader of Islam which made the Ottomans a growing threat to Europe with its unavoidable advances. Accordingly, this article intends to discuss the representations of the Turks/Ottomans affiliated with the Muslims/Saracens in both medieval and the Elizabethan English poetry within the framework of The Turke and Gowin, Roland and Vernagu, The Romance of Otuel, Richard Coer de Lyon, Octovian, King Horn, Sir Ferumbras, The Sowdone of Babylone, The Sege off Melayne, Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella and The Defense of Poesy and their associations as the religious, cultural and ethnic ‘other’ in both periods.

Quaderno n. 10 –– Conferenze del 2007, stampato per conto del Circolo da Legatoria Manna, Rende (CS), marzo 2008 –– Sommario: (1) GUSSO Massimo, Il “Pio” Enea e le mitiche origini di Roma pp. 1-25; (2) TOMASI Giovanni, Camerone pp. 26-35; (3) TOMASI Giovanni, Incursione Musulmana in Italia pp. 36-58; (4) GUSSO Massimo, La Guerra per le Isole Falkland (2 aprile-14 giugno 1982) pp. 59-84; (5) GUSSO Massimo, L'affare del Telegramma Zimmermann (Tre mesi di oscure operazioni segrete, prima dell'entrata nel conflitto degli Stati Uniti d'America – gennaio-aprile 1917 – quando la Grande Guerra diventò “Guerra Mondiale”) pp. 85-119; (6) CADEDDU Lorenzo, L'anno di Guerra 1917 pp. 120-142; (7) ZOCCOLETTO Giorgio, Scoperta dell'Islanda e d'altre terre pp. 143-158 (con una nota di Loredana Imperio sul manoscritto dei fratelli Zeno, pp. 157-158)

In Charlemagne’s Survey of the Holy Land, Michael McCormick rehabilitates and reinterprets one of the most neglected and extraordinary sources from Charlemagne’s revival of the Roman empire: the report of a fact-finding mission to the Christian church of the Holy Land. The roll of documents translated and edited in this volume preserves the most detailed statistical portrait before the Domesday Book of the finances, monuments (including exact dimensions), and female and male personnel of any major Christian church.

Setting these documents in the context of economic trends, archaeological evidence, and a comparison of Holy Land churches and monasteries with their contemporaries west and east, this study shows that the Palestinian church was living in decline as its old financial links with Byzantium slackened. In recounting Charlemagne’s move to outflank the Byzantine emperor, McCormick constructs a microhistory of the Frankish king’s ambitions and formidable organizational talents for running an empire.

Supplementing McCormick’s major synthesis, The Origins of the European Economy, this volume will be indispensable reading for anyone interested in medieval rulership and economics, and in the history of the Holy Land, its Christian communities, and its late antique monuments.


"At its worst, microhistory is merely antiquarian button counting. But at its best, as exemplified here, small things serve as touchstones for studies of wider-ranging significance. McCormick examines the Basel Roll, a ninth-century manuscript relating the information gathered by envoys of Charlemagne, who inquired into the financial needs of churches in and around Jerusalem. The roll preserves three documents that provide personnel numbers and sizes of building roofs in area churches and monasteries, as well as partial annual expenditures for the patriarch of Jerusalem...McCormick shows that the Jerusalem church had shrunk since late antiquity; that contemporary Frankish houses were larger and richer; and that Einhard did not exaggerate Charlemagne's interest in faraway Christian communities. Among the many strengths of the book is the full-size facsimile of the Basel Roll included as a stand-alone poster. (C. J. Chandler Choice 2012-11-01)"

In the first century of Islam, most of the former Christian Roman Empire, from Syria to Spain, was brought under Muslim control in a conquest of unprecedented proportions. Confronted by the world of Islam, countless medieval Christians experienced a profound ambivalence, awed by its opulence, they were also troubled by its rival claims to the spiritual inheritance of Abraham and Jesus and humiliated by its social subjugation of non-Muslim minorities. Some converted. Others took up arms. Still others, the subjects of John Tolan's study of anti-Muslim polemics in medieval Europe, undertook to attack Islam and its most vivid avatar, the saracen, with words.

In an effort to make sense of God's apparent abandonment of Christendom in favor of a dynamic and expanding Muslim civilization, European writers distorted the teachings of Islam and caricatured its believers in a variety of ways. What ideological purposes did these portrayals serve? And how, in turn, did Muslims view Christianity? Feelings of rivalry, contempt, and superiority existed on both sides, tinged or tempered at times with feelings of doubt, inferiority, curiosity, or admiration. Tolan shows how Christian responses to Islam changed from the seventh to thirteenth centuries, through fast-charging crusades and spirit-crushing defeats, crystallizing into polemical images later drawn upon by Western authors in the fourteenth to twentieth centuries. Saracens explores the social and ideological uses of contempt, explaining how the denigration of the other can be used to defend one's own intellectual construction of the world.

In Interfaith Relationships and Perceptions of the Other in the Medieval Mediterranean. Essays in Memory of Olivia Remie Constable. Edited by Sarah Davis-Secord, Belen Vicens, Robin Vose (Cham: Springer Nature/Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 125–160.

LA MONTAGNA DI CERCEMAGGIORE (CB)
Studio  documentato con materiale archivistico fino ad oggi inedito dedicato alla “Montagna” di Cercemaggiore (centro molisano dell’appennino centro-meridionale), denominata “Monte Saraceno” solo a partire dall’epoca moderna ed esattamente dal 1876, quando il rilievo montuoso è attestato cartograficamente con l’odierno toponimo. La ricerca stravolge ogni precedente ipotesi tesa a insistere, pur in assenza di dati reali, dell’antichità del nome Saraceno a Cercemaggiore già invece noto localmente e chiamato con un toponimo longobardo di “Monte Piandolfo” o “Pianadolfo”e ancor più semplicemente come “la Montagna” o “Montagna di Cercemaggiore”.  -  ArcheoMolise, n. 26, anno VIII, Settembre-Dicembre 2016.

The paper aims at showing the peculiarities of the Martorana's dome, with special regard to the Arabic inscription which is displayed below the enthroned Christ and the  surrounding Archangels. The inscription's surviving portions reveal multiple links with the Prophets' quotations below and their coherence with the monarchic claim filtering through monumental iconographies and court scenery during the reign of Roger II.

This is the typescript of the introductory chapter of THE INVENTION OF RACE IN THE EUROPEAN MIDDLE AGES, published by Cambridge University Press on February 28, 2018.

https://smile.amazon.com/Invention-Race-European-Middle-Ages/dp/1108422780/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1516274798&sr=1-1&keywords=Geraldine+Heng

Miracles are found in abundance in Medieval English Literature across a range of literary and non-literary genres: popular romances, hagiographies, mystery and morality plays and even in travel writing. That they appear with such frequency in the corpus of Medieval literature available to us attests to their popularity, not just with their writers, but with their audiences.

Clemens Gantner, New Visions of Community in Ninth-Century Rome: The Impact of the Saracen Threat on the Papal World View, in: Visions of Community in the Post-Roman World: The West, Byzantium and the Islamic World, 300-1000, ed. Walter Pohl/Clemens Gantner/Richard Payne (Ashgate, Aldershot 2012) 403-421.

During the ninth century, the last major assaults of the early Islamic Empire began directly to affect Italy and papal Rome. As a result of a Saracen raiding party’s devastating attack on Rome in 846, the papacy underwent important changes in its world view that this article addresses.

La Corse proto-médiévale est mal connue, peu de sources la traitant entre le Ve et le XIe siècle. Une approche synthétique de ces références permet cependant de dégager une évolution chronologique. À la fin de l’Antiquité, c’est un espace dont les liens avec l’Italie paraissent distendus du fait des bouleversements méditerranéens. Vers le VIe et le VIIe siècle, elle fait l’objet de nouvelles préoccupations continentales, notamment au travers de l’entreprise réformatrice de Grégoire le Grand. Il faut attendre le VIIIe siècle et l’expansion carolingienne pour qu’elle soit revendiquée par la papauté aux dépens du royaume lombard. La menace maure et sarrasine sur les rivages italiens entraîne au IXe  siècle le placement de la Corse sous la protection des Francs qui l’érigent bientôt en frontière défensive face au Sud, avant qu’elle ne devienne à la fin du XIe  siècle un enjeu entre cités maritimes rivales.

A partir del examen del documento Remissió general a l’insult e robo de la morería de 1455, el artículo propone el análisis de la lógica y rasgos históricos que propiciaron este hecho. El asalto de 1455 muestra cómo tras la apariencia de un acontecimiento acaecido por motivos ideológicos, este hunde sus raíces en las principales contradicciones del reino de Valencia y en el papel de los sarracenos en el territorio estudiado. Complementaremos nuestro análisis documental con los registros de Manuals de Consell del Archivo Municipal de Valencia y de la Reial Cancelleria del Archivo del Reino de Valencia, además, utilizaremos la documentación editada por la producción historiográfica que aborda la temática.