| Paper 1204-b | Income Interrupted: The Papacy, Byzantium, and Muslims in the Mediterranean, c. 900
(Language: English)
Brian Merlo, Department of History Saint Louis University Missouri
Index terms: Byzantine Studies, Military History, Politics and Diplomacy |
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| Abstract | Paper -a:
10th-century Provence was tumultuous for contemporaries and remains obscure for historians. Within it, the small Muslim settlement of Jabāl al-Qilāl (Latin: Fraxinetum) is particularly difficult to pinpoint: only attested by a highly fragmented set of sources, Latin writings unerringly depict it as a mountaintop bandit's reprieve, while Islamic ones describe a sedentarily settled island polity. Among the many thorny issues involving Fraxinetum, this paper aims to bring clarity to the questions of Fraxinetum's geographical location and of its proper place in the history of 9th-10th century Provence, in the process bringing together and comparing the many sources this requires
Paper -b:
This paper looks at the Christian 'team' response to Muslim incursions into Southern Italy from their base camp at Garigliano estuary on the border of Lazio and Campania. These incursions often devastated the countryside, adversely affecting the productivity of aristocratic estates and the health and functioning of city states, among them Rome and its patrimony. The pope united with rulers of southern principalities in an effort to evict the Muslims from the peninsula. Stunningly, they were joined by the Byzantine navy with its one-hundred-year resume of dealing with Muslim activity in the Mediterranean. This paper examines the nuances surrounding these unlikely alliances, as revealed through the 918 Treaty of Traetto, to which the names of key participants are fixed. It also asks whether or not the Italian team response was part of a larger Byzantine initiative.
Paper -c:
Portuguese in the late 15th century, when they started overseas expansion to the Moroccan Atlantic coast, found that the region was occupied by several tribal confederations, whose names remain on the maps today. However, it is difficult to identify them in the sources of preceding centuries. How were they formed? To answer the question, based on contemporary Arabic and Portuguese documents and focusing on a group called the Shawiyya, I will demonstrate that political factors played a critical role in the reorganisation of pastoral tribal groups in the period of dynastic turmoil triggered by the plague of the mid-14th century.
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