This book addresses a question that has been somewhat neglected in the many studies of the mercantile operations of the 'merchant of Prato', Francesco di Marco Datini, in the years around 1400: the operations of his firm in the Maghrib, a region in which he and his colleagues had to operate through agents, rather than by means of branches or sister companies based in the region. Thanks to the voluminous material of the Datini archive in Prato, it offers a reconstruction of commercial strategies through the study of networks, of economic actors, their identity and their practices, and of the...

Whereas a great deal of research has been carried out on Crusader castles, churches and major buildings in the Latin East, almost no attention has been paid to domestic architecture and the domestic settings in which most of the population of the Crusader states spent most of their time. The present work attempts to address this deficiency by taking an in-depth look at the various domestic buildings that served the urban and rural population and the domestic apartments in castles and mosasteries. The basis for this survey is the wealth of published and unpublished archaeological data that has...

Philippe de Mezieres (1327-1405) was the quintessential man of all seasons of the fourteenth-century Mediterranean. A scholar, a soldier, a mystic, a man of affairs, a royal adviser and an incessant traveler around the Mediterranean, a prolific writer and an associate of religious orders, a champion of the crusade and no less an ardent advocate of peace in the West, a Frenchman, a Cypriot, and a Venetian citizen, he captures the spirit of his age like no other man. This volume, the first to address Philippe and his legacy comprehensively since 1896, gathers twenty-two contributions of...

Much of the past twenty years of scholarship on late-antique and medieval landscapes and settlement has introduced theoretical patterns reflecting meta-narratives of evolution and transition. This book draws on 5 years of archaeological and topographical fieldwork in order to attempt a rereading of Byzantine texts in accordance with recent perceptions of the historicity of space. The result is a fresh interpretation of settlement in Western Greece (Southern Epirus and Aetoloacarnania) from 600 to 1200 AD, springing from a postmodern theoretical background. While representing real progress in...

Publicly performed rituals and ceremonies form an essential part of medieval political practice and court culture. This applies not only to western feudal societies, but also to the linguistically and culturally highly diversified environment of Byzantium and the Mediterranean basin. The continuity of Roman traditions and cross-fertilization between various influences originating from Constantinople, Armenia, the Arab-Muslim World, and western kingdoms and naval powers provide the framework for a distinct sphere of ritual expression and ceremonial performance. This collective volume, placing...

In The Gattilusio Lordships and the Aegean World 1355-1462, Christopher Wright offers a window into the culturally and politically diverse late medieval Aegean. The overlapping influences of the contrasting networks of power at work in the region are explored through the history of one of many small and distinctive political units that flourished in this fragmented environment, the lordships of the Gattilusio family, centred on Lesbos. Though Genoese in origin, they owed their position to Byzantine authority. Though active in crusading, they cultivated congenial relations with the...

Diverging Paths? investigates an important question, to which the answers must be very complex: "why did certain sorts of institutionalisation and institutional continuity characterise government and society in Christendom by the later Middle Ages, but not the Islamic world, whereas the reverse end-point might have been predicted from the early medieval situation?" This core question lies within classic historiographical debates, to which the essays in the volume, written by leading medievalists, make significant contributions. The papers, drawing on a wide range of evidence and...

This book examines the social, institutional and cultural setting of medical practices in the medieval town of Montpellier which boasted one of the first universities of the middle ages and a famous school of medicine. Some of its most celebrated masters and their medical works have been thoroughly studied but few of them try to put these in context with a thriving urban community of merchants and craftsmen that were at the core of the city council. Their concurrent efforts will endow Montpellier of a rich health care system featuring not only the university masters but also the city's...

William of Tyre's history of the Kingdom of Jerusalem has long been viewed as one of the most useful sources for the Crusades and the Latin East from the beginnings of the First Crusade to William's death shortly before Saladin's conquest of Jerusalem. However, this text was most popular during the medieval period in an Old French translation. In The Old French of William of Tyre Philip Handyside identifies the differences between the Latin and French texts and analyses the translator motives for producing the translation and highlights significant changes that may provide a better...

From Constantinople to the Frontier: The City and the Cities provides twenty-five articles addressing the concept of centres and peripheries in the late antique and Byzantine worlds, focusing specifically on urban aspects of this paradigm. Spanning from the fourth to thirteenth centuries, and ranging from the later Roman empires to the early Caliphate and medieval New Rome, the chapters reveal the range of factors involved in the dialectic between City, cities, and frontier. Including contributions on political, social, literary, and artistic history, and covering geographical areas...