This chapter contextualizes the six articles that form this Special Issue by situating them in relation to trends in the study of North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula. The Iberian Peninsula and the Maghrib are both set apart as marginal or exceptional in their respective fields of European and Middle Eastern studies. More recently, a number of scholars working in North Africa have edited and published medieval texts that underline the fundamental unity of the lands of the western Mediterranean and have written histories that consider these regions together. Muslim migrants moving into Iberia brought with them the Arabic language, the Muslim faith, and material and technological culture that led to the transformation of Iberian agriculture, as well as the introduction of Arabic science and learning. The complex web of traditions from Iberia and the Islamic world converged in Morisco expectations of an otherworldly savior. Keywords: Iberian Peninsula; Maghrib; nationalism; North Africa; western Mediterranean

Abstract This article examines how temporal and ecclesiastic authorities on Lusignan Cyprus used rhetoric and performance to mobilize support for the Alexandria Crusade. While King Peter I appealed to the chivalric ideals of his vassals in order to overcome their reluctance to endanger the kingdom’s economic and military security, papal legate Peter of Thomas led interfaith processions that presented Cyprus’s population as united in its Christian devotion despite long-standing tensions between the Latin and Greek communities. This presentation of a shared Cypriot identity reflected nascent moves away from the physical and social segregation of confessional groups. It also clarifies the role played by perceptions of a constant threat of Mamlūk invasion in this process of acculturation. Such concerns and responses were not unique to Cyprus. By considering late-medieval Cyprus as a frontier society, we can gain insight into the complex politics of holy war in other composite medieval communities.

Abstract Collective narratives that have been received by a society as part of its culture are based on and respond to prevalent norms and values. Whether they conform to or criticize existing conventions, collective narratives are created within a cultural historical context that should be reconstructed as a point of departure for interpretation. In this article I focus on “The Shining Robe”, a story incorporated in Hibbur Yafeh MeHa’yeshua authored by Rabbi Nissim Gaon of Kairouan (first half of the 11th century). The choice of this story is intriguing due to its foreign nature and its departure from the gender norms that prevailed in Ashkenaz, compared to the gender norms that were prevalent in the Jewish-Muslim context. I argue that the response that this story evoked in Ashkenaz, whether explicit or implicit, made it necessary to cross cultural bridges between Kairouan where it was created and the cultural context where it was received. I refer to the Judeo-Arabic version of Hibbur Yafeh in comparison to its translations-adaptations in Ashkenaz dated to the 13th-16th centuries. These adapted versions are briefly compared also to its parallel in Provence, translated from the Judeo-Arabic.

Abstract When the mendicant orders were founded in the thirteenth century, they quickly began to cultivate mutually beneficial relationships with the emerging merchant class. This special issue of Medieval Encounters is an interdisciplinary study of the complex connections that developed between the two groups throughout the Mediterranean during the late medieval period. These relationships have rarely been addressed in the scholarship on this period, but in urban centers throughout the medieval Mediterranean, friars and merchants crossed paths daily and the evidence of their interaction reveals the extent to which the two communities came to depend upon one another.

Abstract Although the versions of Pope Urban’s call for the First Crusade focus on the need to liberate the Holy Land from the Muslims, crusaders and locals attacked first the communities of the Franco-German (Ashkenazic) Jews. Both contemporary and modern historians have offered a variety of explanations for these uncalled-for devastating attacks. Without discounting some of these proposals, this article applies the psychological explanation of Displacement to offer an additional reason. The article suggests that the urgent call to retaliate against the Muslims immediately and the many graphic descriptions of alleged Muslim atrocities against Eastern Christians and Christian pilgrims in the propaganda of the First Crusade created mounting frustration in Europe. And since this frustration could not be expressed immediately and directly against its source, i.e., the faraway Muslims, the attackers displaced their aggression onto the nearby Jews. Moreover, Displacement also explains the many close parallels between the images of Muslim atrocities in crusading rhetoric and the idiosyncratic manifestations of the violence against European Jews in the early stages of the First Crusade.

This chapter employee's strategies of contextualization and interdisciplinary interpretation similar to those the author adopted in two recent publications concerned with the Mudejar phenomenon. Outside the context of discussions of methodology, to which the following two sections are devoted, Mudejar will be rejected as a useful designator of either a coherent group of monuments or a definable Islamicizing aesthetic. Topoi such as the towers, divine light, and birds that will form the particular focus of the chapter, while generalized throughout much of Islamic and Arabic speaking culture, acquire concrete associations once they are deployed in a Nasrid context. The Comares complex is the better understood of the Alhambra's two principal palaces. In the Mariale from Avila, as in Marian literature throughout Christian Europe, the Castilian Virgin is praised, among other epithets, as a sacred garden, a tower of refuge, and the Throne of Wisdom. Keywords:Alhambra; Castilian; Christian; divine light; Methodology; Mudejar; Nasrid; Virgin

Abstract The city of Rome is described in a number of Arabic and Persian geographical and historical texts produced between the ninth and thirteenth centuries. Despite the chronological range and geographical distances that separate many of these texts, a common thread of transmission unites them, testament to the fact that very few eyewitness accounts of the city were used. Instead, the descriptions of Rome drew on the authority of more ancient literary accounts, that were reproduced with variations and additions deriving from a number of different origins. While it is not possible to identify the exact web of sources used, nor whether some descriptions refer to Old Rome—the city of the Pope—or to the new Rome on the Bosporus, Constantinople, these texts nevertheless reveal a substantial knowledge of the city’s symbolic features. Indeed, it appears that accurate physical descriptions of Rome were considered less important than exemplary representations of the city. One of the figurative details assumes the iconographic form of a labyrinth, at times identified as a map of the city of Rome, and at other times as a prison located in the city. In this paper, it will be argued that the labyrinth icon is drawn from one of Rome’s own myths concerning the founding of the city by complex and at times obscure means that offer promising directions for further research. More generally, it would appear that the Arabic and Persian sources considered here share a view of the city of Rome that is nourished by a great respect and admiration.