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The Lost Libraries of Tunis
Only little is known about the book culture of Tunis, although the city had been a centre for teaching and learning throughout Ḥafṣid rule in Ifrīqiya (c. 1230 to 1574). The libraries of Tunis are considered lost since the sack of the city by the armies of the emperor Charles V in the summer of 1535. This study reconstructs for the first time the original holdings of Tunis' medieval libraries and shows what can still be learned from these recovered fragments. An in-depth analysis of a wide range of texts and artefacts shows that the Ḥafṣid libraries were looted and their collections redistributed, mostly among European collectors. The Lost Libraries of Tunis brings Early Modern scho...
A History of Diplomacy, Spatiality, and Islamic Ideals
Inspired by the “spatial turn,” this volume links for the first time the study of diplomacy and spatiality in the premodern Islamicate world to understand practices and meanings ascribed to territory and realms. Debates on the nature of the sovereign state as a territorially defined political entity are closely linked to discussions of “modernity” and to the development of the field of international relations. While scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds have long questioned the existence of such a concept as a “territorial state,” rarely have they ventured outside the European context. A closer look at the premodern Islamicate world, however, shows that “space” and...
Famagusta Maritima
Famagusta Maritima: Mariners, Merchants, Pilgrims and Mercenaries presents a collection of scholarly studies spanning the thousand year history of the port of Famagusta in Cyprus. This historic harbour city was at the heart of the Crusading Lusignan dynasty, a possession of both Genoa and Venice during the Renaissance, a port of the Ottoman Empire for three centuries, and in time, a strategic naval and intelligence node for the British Empire. It is a maritime space made famous by the realities of its extraordinary importance and influence, followed by its calamitous demise. Contributors are: Michele Bacci, Lucie Bonato, Tomasz Borowski, Mike Carr, Pierre-Vincent Claverie, Dragos Cosmescu, Nicholas Coureas, Marko Kiessel, Antonio Musarra, William Spates, Asu Tozan, Ahmet Usta, and Michael Walsh.
Egypt and Syria in the Fatimid, Ayyubid and Mamluk Eras IV
Each volume deals with a wide variety of scholarly subjects, all revolving around the central theme of Syro-Egypt's high and late medieval history. Topics dealt with include archaeology, architecture, codicology, economic, political, and religious history, as well as belles-lettres.
The Mamluk Sultanate from the Perspective of Regional and World History
The Mamluk Sultanate represents an extremely interesting case study to examine social, economic and cultural developments in the transition into the rapidly changing modern world. On the one hand, it is the heir of a political and military tradition that goes back hundreds of years, and brought this to a high pitch that enabled astounding victories over serious external threats. On the other hand, as time went on, it was increasingly confronted with "modern" problems that would necessitate fundamental changes in its structure and content. The Mamluk period was one of great religious and social change, and in many ways the modern demographic map was established at this time. This volume shows that the situation of the Mamluk Sultanate was far from that of decadence, and until the end it was a vibrant society (although not without tensions and increasing problems) that did its best to adapt and compete in a rapidly changing world.
Literary Spectacles of Sultanship
The so-called Mamluk sultans who ruled Egypt and Syria between the late thirteenth and early sixteenth centuries AD have often been portrayed as lacking in legitimacy due to their background as slave soldiers. Sultanic biographies written by chancery officials in the early period of the sultanate have been read as part of an effort of these sultans to legitimise their position on the throne. This book reconsiders the main corpus of six such biographies written by the historians Ibn ʿAbd al-Ẓāhir (d. 1293) and his nephew Shāfiʿ ibn ʿAlī (d. 1330) and argues that these were in fact far more complex texts. An understanding of their discourses of legitimisation needs to be embedded withi...
Food and Foodways of Medieval Cairenes
This monograph is a pioneering study and reconstruction of the food cultures and menu of medieval Cairenes and their daily practices, customs and habits in relation to food and eating, through the analysis of a large corpus of historical texts in Arabic. Paulina B. Lewicka explains what, why and how the inhabitants of medieval Cairo ate, and how food shaped their everyday lives, against the background of several relevant social, political and economic factors and circumstances.
Mamluk Descendants
Research on the Mamluk period has so far remained relatively silent about the Mamluk descendants, who are often referred to by the Arabic term awlād al-nās (roughly: children of the elite). After Ulrich Haarmann's fundamental theses, research on this group seems to have paused, in comparison to the study dedicated to other social groups of Mamluk society. This volume brings together the results of an international conference and presents the state of the art in approaching the Mamluk descendants, whose emic perception as a group and social roles were far more differentiated and variable than previously assumed. The contributions shed light on the status of the Mamluk descendants from a variety of viewpoints, including historiographies, archival material, and artifacts produced by Mamluk descendants.
In the Sultan’s Salon: Learning, Religion, and Rulership at the Mamluk Court of Qāniṣawh al-Ghawrī (r. 1501–1516) (2 vols)
Building on his award-winning research, Christian Mauder’s In the Sultan’s Salon constitutes the first detailed study of the intellectual, religious, and political culture of the court of the Mamluk Sultanate (1250–1517), one of the most important polities in Islamic history.
Narratives of Dependency
Given that strong asymmetrical dependencies have shaped human societies throughout history, this kind of social relation has also left its traces in many types of texts. Using written and oral narratives in attempts to reconstruct the history of asymmetrical dependency comes along with various methodological challenges, as the 15 articles in this interdisciplinary volume illustrate. They focus on a wide range of different (factual and fictional) text types, including inscriptions from Egyptian tombs, biblical stories, novels from antiquity, the Middle High German Rolandslied, Ottoman court records, captivity narratives, travelogues, the American gift book The Liberty Bell, and oral narratives by Caribbean Hindu women. Most of the texts discussed in this volume have so far received comparatively little attention in slavery and dependency studies. The volume thus also seeks to broaden the archive of texts that are deemed relevant in research on the histories of asymmetrical dependencies, bringing together perspectives from disciplines such as Egyptology, theology, literary studies, history, and anthropology
