This article aims to compare the different conceptions of holy war in Islam and Christianity by way of its depiction by Muslim sources, and to examine if the Islamic context would have conceived of a war carried out by Christians, and therefore infidels, as a holy one. This leads to analysis of whether the Islamic idea of holy war could be understood as a transcultural one or if, on the contrary, its sole conception was limited to those actions carried out by Muslims. To that end, Ibn Khaldūn’s (d. 1406) Kitāb al-‘Ibar will be used as a case study, in which his famous Muqaddima serves as its introduction. The choice of this source is based on two considerations: it is one of the most important and influential historiographical works of the Islamic world; and Ibn Khaldūn maintains a universalist vision of history and its processes, and therefore specifically aims to be cross-cultural.

The Gulf region during the “Middle Period,” from around 1000 - 1500 CE, faced what seemed to be two insurmountable challenges: the fall of the ‘Abbasids in Baghdad in 1258 CE as well as increased competition from the Red Sea. Despite these two threats to the prosperity of trade in the region, however, Gulf ports remained vibrant and important centers of trade and cosmopolitanism. The Gulf, with its merchant economy and its relatively tolerant port cities, did not march in lockstep with the fate and fortunes of metropolitan cities such as Baghdad. Instead of William McNeill’s webs of history with their orbiting points, medieval Gulf ports were spiders spinning silk in the wind, attaching to whatever space along the shore was most convenient. Gulf port polities were diffuse, detached from imperial centers and, for dogmatists, sometimes dangerous, as they do not fit usual religious paradigms. Marshall Hodgson rightly identified the Middle Period as the crucial period for the Islamicate world. The centuries between 1000–1500 CE were characterized by a remarkable unity that existed across the Medieval Islamic world despite political divisions. However, there was far more to the story of medieval Gulf culture, and possibly the whole medieval Middle East, than Hodgson’s narrative of the consolidation of Islam, which focuses on trade, religious thought, and cultural influences setting out from agrarian, urban centers. The remarkable independence of Gulf ports from agrarian political power mixed with a heavy dependence on international trade fostered a distinctive cosmopolitan ethos directed beyond Hodgson’s Islamicate world.

The global turn in European medieval studies has attempted to present connections and comparisons that cover all corners of the Earth. Many of these histories rely on textual and material evidence for moments of encounter and exchange. This essay presents teaching strategies that center various approaches to mapping that look beyond the pages of books to include other oral and visual traditions. One approach is to engage with Indigenous ways of naming land, water, and region, and to meet with local Native communities especially for medievalists working in the Americas. Another is to model interdisciplinarity by looking to the history of science, conservation, climate, disease, and more to demonstrate how scholars can learn from other specializations. A final example involves mapping global pathways through museum collections and displays, with an example of finding premodern Africa in The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

This article offers a critical evaluation of a purported diplomatic mission from Genoa to the Marīnid sultan of Morocco, Abū Yaʿqūb Yusuf (r. 1286–1307 CE). Ibn Abī Zarʿ, author of a famous chronicle known as the Rawḍ al-qirṭās , or “Garden of Pages,” recorded the arrival of the Genoese along with their impressive gift: a golden or gilded tree with singing birds. His inclusion of the episode in a narrative otherwise devoted to the deeds of the dynasty and history of Fez raises several interesting questions. How did the Genoese construct or acquire the tree? Why was the nature of this gift important, and what might have been the goals of the Genoese embassy in bringing such a costly object along? I propose that we understand the embassy and its inclusion in the narrative as part of a Marīnid desire to promote the dynasty as legitimate heirs of previous Islamic rulers. This desire made use of symbols of pious and wise kingship, including the mechanical marvel represented by the tree, which bore an impressive ideological pedigree in Islamic and Christian literary and representational traditions. For their part, the Genoese may have been motivated by a desire to repair relations with Abū Yaʿqūb damaged by the activity of Benedetto Zaccaria in the straits of Gibraltar. Taken as a whole, this brief but under-studied event suggests both the Mediterranean scope of this symbol of kingship and its use by medieval diplomats to achieve practical ends.

This pedagogical article discusses sources and methods for teaching the history of imperial science and medicine in the Nahua world from 1400 to 1600, a period that ranges from the spectacular growth of the Aztec Empire through the conquest to the creation of New Spain. By providing students tools to explore non-European ontologies and world-building, this article presents several exercises in which students act as archival researchers and themselves puzzle out the complexities of information transfer in the archive of sixteenth-century Latin America. Combining European paleography workshops, linguistic tools pioneered by the IDIEZ Nahuatl program, the study of Mesoamerican archeological objects, and an engagement with Mexican medicinal plants to recreate early modern remedies, students gain access to a world of New Spanish knowledge-creation.

The following is a broad reflection on medieval travel and the ways in which western Christians encountered and imagined non-Christians and non-Europeans. It is interdisciplinary and multivalent, and it considers a variety of sources, both historical and literary, from the eleventh through the fifteenth centuries. An especial emphasis is placed upon the ways in which these sources—including material objects—were disseminated, “read,” and interpreted. In addition to presenting an overview of who travelled and why, where they went, and how they conveyed themselves, the principle aim of this essay is to demonstrate the wide variety of medieval responses to cross-cultural encounters. Medieval people were neither simplistic nor one-sided, and they often changed their minds, not only as the result of real-life interactions with foreign peoples, but also sometimes as the result of hearing or reading about them. Included are observations about the ways in which people at all levels of medieval society, including the illiterate and untraveled, perceived the “other.”

The waning influence of a Eurocentric paradigm paves the way for a close look at the maritime situation of the Indian subcontinent in the Indian Ocean during the first half of the second millennium C.E. Situated at the centre of the Indian Ocean, the two sea-boards of the subcontinent, along with Sri Lanka, appear in a wide variety of sources—literary (including letters of Jewish merchants), epigraphic, archaeological (including shipwreck archaeology)—as sites of vibrant commerce and cultural transactions across the sea. Nomenclatures and the historical geography of the Indian Ocean also form parts of the discussion. This essay pays particular attention to the exchange in daily necessity commodities, including plant products. A survey of ports dotting both the coasts of the subcontinent suggests the dynamic character of premier ports, shaped by their relation with subsidiary ports and their respective hinterlands and forelands. The paper highlights the role of seafaring groups, especially the ship-owners, active in and beyond South Asia. The available evidence irrefutably demonstrates that Indic people did take to sea during pre-modern times, thereby driving home the inefficacy of the taboos on seafaring in Sanskrit normative texts. To what extent the Indian Ocean experienced political contestations has been discussed in the light of a 14 th century Latin Crusade tract. The advent of the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean in 1498 did not signal the Age of Discoveries in the Indian Ocean in the light of seafaring in this maritime zone during 1000–1500 CE phase.

An ordinary ship and its cargo can tell the story of far-flung global markets, human voyaging, and early industrialization in China that supplied exports to the world. Sometime after 825 CE an Arab dhow set sail from the port of Guangzhou in coastal south China, having unloaded its goods from the Near East, and reloaded with some estimated 70,000 ceramics and other items, on its return voyage to the Abbasid empire. Taking the route that has been called “the maritime silk road,” this hand-sewn ship made of planks fastened with coconut fiber (without any nails) seems to have decided to offload some cargo first in maritime Southeast Asia, perhaps intending to pick up a secondary cargo of spices, resins, and aromatics for which the Indonesian islands were famed. The dhow sank near the island of Belitung, at a reef called Batu Hitam (“Black Rock”). Fifty-five thousand ceramic wares, along with gold and silver ornaments, ingots, mirrors, ewers, vases, jars, cups, incense burners, boxes, flasks, bottles, graters, and the like—and two objects that may have been children’s toys, and a re-soldered gold bracelet sized for a woman’s wrist—were excavated intact in 1998, and are housed at the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore. This ninth-century dhow is the only ship of its kind ever recovered, though hand-sewn ships that plied the Indian Ocean are described in travel accounts from as early as the first-century CE. The dhow is a remarkable example of the global ships carrying people, goods, ideas, religion, and culture, which knit the world into relationship along transoceanic routes. Its vast trove of ceramics is the earliest physical evidence attesting the industrial production of ceramics in China for export to foreign markets as early as the Tang Dynasty (618–907). Designs painted on the great majority of the ceramic wares were favored in the export market, not in China. Part of the trove includes prototypes of blue-and-white ceramics for which China would become famous 400 years later: ceramic experiments that feature Iraqi designs attesting global interrelationships in art and the exchange of ideas. The crews of ships such as this one were multiracial, multireligious, and assembled from everywhere: The cargo, knowledges, and stories these diverse, anonymous voyagers helped to transfer across the world transform our understanding of scale, time, and globalism.