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Remensnydermemhs Dear members of MEMHS, The following is the draft of an article that is intended for a festschrift in memory of Simon Barton (hence the reference to him in the first paragraph), though it increasingly doesn’t really fit the parameters of that volume. It is based on a keynote talk I gave last July in Barcelona at the conference “Movement & Mobility in the Medieval Mediterranean (6th–15th centuries),” back in the happy days when we were all much more mobile ourselves. I think it is sometimes in the nature of keynote lectures to be compendious, even sprawling, and I suspect those qualities remain in the article and make it at times rather rambling. I look forward to your comments and suggestions at our discussion on November 24. Amy Remensnyder DRAFT! NOT TO BE CITED OR CIRCULATED WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 2 THE RESTLESS SEA: STORM, SHIPWRECK AND THE MEDITERRANEAN, CA. 1000-CA. 1700 Amy G. Remensnyder “Know, oh reader, that sailing the sea has many principles … you should know all the coasts and…their various guides such as mud, or grass, animals or fish, sea-snakes and winds. You should consider the tides, and the sea currents and the islands on every route,” wrote the fifteenth-century navigator Ahmad ibn Mājid al-Najdī in his manual of instruction for mariners.1 He piloted ships in the Red and the Arabian Seas, but Muslim, Christian and Jewish seafarers in the medieval Mediterranean—including those Castilian and Portuguese mercenaries who, as Simon Barton so cogently demonstrated, crossed its waters to fight for North African rulers—would have agreed with his advice.2 They knew that they ignored the marine environment at their peril. After all, declared one of Ibn Mājid’s Christian contemporaries, “of all things the sea is the most unfaithful.”3 It was a particularly rough Mediterranean passage that compelled him to borrow these words from an ancient Greek philosopher. 1 G.R. Tibbets, Arab Navigation in the Indian Ocean Before the Coming of the Portuguese, being a Translation of Kitāb al-Fawā’id uṣūl al-baḥr wa’l-qawā’id of Ahmad b. Mājid al-Najdī (London, 1981), p. 77. 2 Simon Barton, “Traitors to the Faith? Christian Mercenaries in al-Andalus and the Mahgreb, c. 1100- 1300,” in Medieval Spain: Culture, Conflict, and Coexistence, ed. Roger Collins and Anthony Goodman (New York, 2002), pp. 23-45. 3 Itinéraire d’Anselme Adorno en Terre Sainte, ed. Jacques Heers and Georgette de Groer (Paris 1978), p. 370. DRAFT! NOT TO BE CITED OR CIRCULATED WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 3 Medievalists studying maritime Mediterranean mobility, however, mostly have yet to recognize importance of the sea as a living marine environment—its currents, its winds, its storms, its rocks, its flora, and its fauna—for those people who ventured on its back.4 The major exception is the scholarship on nautical technology, because it explores how vessels were built to work with and survive the sea’s physical demands.5 Medievalists are not alone in this neglect of the sea qua sea. Until very recently, much of the research resulting from what is variously called the oceanic turn, the new maritime history, or thalassography confines salt water to a supporting role, reducing it to a surface across which ships move to connect terrestrial points.6 But what if rather than treating the sea as a featureless substance serving human movement, medievalists instead paid 4 For example, David Abulafia, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (New York, 2011); Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford, 2000). 5 For example, Ruthy Gertwagen, “A Chapter on Maritime History: Shipping and Nautical Technology of Trade and Warfare in the Medieval Mediterranean, 11th-16th Century,” in Maritimes Mittelalter: Meere als Kommunikationsraüme, ed. Michael Borgholte and Nikolas Jaspert (Ostfildern, 2016), pp. 109-148; John H. Pryor, Geography, Technology, and War: Studies in the Maritime History of the Mediterranean, 649- 1571 (Cambridge UK, 1988), esp. pp. 12-101. 6 Such is the case with many of the foundational studies in this burgeoning field of history, including Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo- American Maritime World, 1700-1750 (Cambridge, 1987); Michel Mollat, Europe and the Sea, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Cambridge MA 1993); Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 1700-1920, ed. Margaret S. Creighton and Lisa Norling (Baltimore, 1996); Jerry H. Bentley, “Sea and Ocean Basins as Frameworks of Historical Analysis,” Geographical Review 89 (1999): 215-224; Horden and Purcell, Corrupting Sea; Philip E. Steinberg, The Social Construction of the Ocean (Cambridge, 2001); Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean, ed. Bernhard Klein and Gesa MacKenthun (New York, 2004); “Oceans of History: AHR Forum,” American Historical Review 111 (2006): 717-780; Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges, ed. Jerry H. Bentley, Renate Bridenthal and Kären Wigen (Honolulu, 2007); Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Disapora (Cambridge MA, 2008); Abulafia, Great Sea; Julia Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Era of Migrations, c. 1800-1900 (Berkeley, 2011); Cyprian Broodbank, The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World (Oxford, 2013); John Mack, The Sea: A Cultural History (London, 2013); The Sea: Thalassography and Historiography, ed. Peter N. Miller (Ann Arbor MI, 2013); Christophe Picard, La mer des caliphs: une histoire de la Méditerranée musulmane (VIIe-XIIe siècle) (Paris, 2015). For some recent salutary exceptions, see W. Jeffrey Bolster, The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Sunil Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants (Cambridge MA, 2013); Stuart Schwartz, Sea of Storms: A History of Hurricanes in the Greater Caribbean from Columbus to Katrina (Princeton, 2015); Johan Mathew, Margins of the Market: Trafficking and Capitalism Across the Arabian Sea (Berkeley, 2016); Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait (New York, 2019). DRAFT! NOT TO BE CITED OR CIRCULATED WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 4 attention to its “natural conditions,” as Michael Borgolte and Nikolas Jaspert urge, or incorporated insights from oceanography, as Ruthy Gertwagen proposes—or even heeded environmental historians’ call to dethrone humans as the sovereign historical subject?7 Environmental historians conceptualize humans and the non-human natural world as being inextricably linked in a complex web of reciprocal influences that renders both participants in history.8 This perspective offers the potential to chart new waters in the history of human maritime mobility in the Mediterranean. What might it look like to understand the Mediterranean as “both geo-cultural frame and nautical actor” and to explore how its “winds, seasons, climates, and currents … shaped political and economic pulses” as well as “dictate[d] who went where, when and how?” asks Julia Clancy-Smith, for example, of this sea’s more modern centuries.9 The questions I pose about the nexus between the Mediterranean and people on the move are often differently inflected, yet they too rest on the premise that the marine environment is a historical force to be reckoned with. 7 Michael Borgolte and Nikolas Jaspert, “Maritimes Mittelalter—Zur Einführung,” in Maritimes Mittelalter: Meere als Kommunikationsraüme, ed. Michael Borgholte and Nikolas Jaspert (Ostfildern, 2016), p. 28; Gertwagen, “A Chapter,” pp. 109-110. In her recent work on fishing in the premodern Mediterranean, Gertwagen explicitly adopts the methods of environmental history: see her “Bridging over ‘Stormy Gaps’ between Humanities and Science in Marine Environmental History’s and Marine Ecological History’s Methodology,” in When Humanities Meet Ecology: Historic Changes in Mediterranean and Black Sea Marine Biodiversity and Ecosystems since the Roman Period until Nowadays. Languages, Methodologies and Perspectives. Proceedings of the HMAP International Summer School, ed. Ruthy Gertwagen et al. (Rome, 2010), pp. 13-24; and her “Towards a Maritime Eco-history of the Byzantine and Medieval Eastern Mediterranean,” in The Inland Seas: Towards an Ecohistory of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, ed. Tønnes Bekker-Nielsen and Ruthy Gertwagen (Stuttgart, 2016), pp. 341-368. 8 For some programmatic statements of environmental history’s principles, see William Cronon, “The Uses of Environmental History,” Environmental History Review 17 (1993): 1-22; Ted Steinberg, “Down to Earth: Nature, Agency, and Power in History,” American Historical Review 107 (2002): 798-820; Ellen Stroud, “Does Nature Always Matter? Following Dirt through History,” History and Theory 42 (2003): 75- 81; Linda Nash, “The Agency of Nature or the Nature of Agency?” Environmental History 10 (2005): 67- 69; eadem, “Furthering the Environmental Turn,” The Journal of American History 94 (2013): 131-135. 9 Julia Clancy-Smith, “The Mediterranean of the Barbary Coast: Gone Missing,” in The Making of the Modern Mediterranean: Views from the South, ed. Judith E. Tucker (Oakland CA, 2019), pp. 37, 59. DRAFT! NOT TO BE CITED OR CIRCULATED WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 5 My time period is capacious and has ill-defined boundaries, which I cross freely. “Compared with
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