{"title":"The Aksumites in South Arabia: An African Diaspora of Late Antiquity","authors":"George Hatke","doi":"10.1163/9789004425613_012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004425613_012","url":null,"abstract":"Much has been written over the years about foreign, specifically western, colonialism in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as about the foreign peoples, western and non-western alike, who have settled in sub-Saharan Africa during the modern period. However, although many large-scale states rose and fell in subSaharan Africa throughout pre-colonial times, the history of African imperial expansion into non-African lands is to a large degree the history of Egyptian invasions of Syria-Palestine during Pharaonic and Ptolemaic times, Carthaginian (effectively Phoenician) expansion into Sicily and Spain in the second half of the first millennium b.c.e, and the Almoravid and Almohad invasions of the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Ages. However, none of this history involved sub-Saharan Africans to any appreciable degree. Yet during Late Antiquity,1 Aksum, a sub-Saharan African kingdom based in the northern Ethiopian highlands, invaded its neighbors across the Red Sea on several occasions. Aksum, named after its capital city, was during this time an active participant in the long-distance sea trade linking the Mediterranean with India via the Red Sea. It was a literate kingdom with a tradition of monumental art and architecture and already a long history of contact with South Arabia. The history of Aksumite expansion into, and settlement in, South Arabia can be divided into two main periods. The first lasts from the late 2nd to the late 3rd century","PeriodicalId":149712,"journal":{"name":"Migration Histories of the Medieval Afroeurasian Transition Zone","volume":"88 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116665639","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mamluks in Abbasid Society","authors":"L. Berger","doi":"10.1163/9789004425613_015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004425613_015","url":null,"abstract":"Slave soldiers existed in many societies, already in the ancient Mediterranean world, but also in the age of European imperialism. Nonetheless, it is fair to say that there were few places, if at all, where the enslavement of foreigners was as important for recruiting elite soldiers as in the premodern Islamic world. Nor did slave soldiers anywhere else become as influential politically. The bestknown premodern Muslim polity based primarily on an elite of slave soldiers was the Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt. However, the Mamluk army of Egypt was by no means the only nor the earliest slave army in the Muslim world. The aim of the present paper is to present the reader with a short survey of what we know about the origins of Muslim slave armies in the early Abbasid period and with some ideas on their impact on the societies in question.1 The history of these armies has been subject to some debate among scholars ever since the late 1960s. Among the first studies were Ayalon’s who saw the functioning of slave armies of the Abbasids very much through the eyes of an expert on the late medieval Mamluk institution in Egypt (by projecting later facts back into early Abbasid times).2 The same holds true for Töllner’s 1971 dissertation.3 In the mid-1970s, Shaban in his revisionist tour de force of early Islamic history doubted that something like slave soldiers existed at all in Abbasid times. In his view, when the sources spoke of slavery it was just a metaphor for the fidelity of high-ranking soldiers towards their master, the caliph.4 Pipes and Crone in the late 1970s did not follow Shaban’s ideas. In their opinion, the armies of the 9th-century caliphs consisted primarily of foreign slaves, be it, as Pipes argues, because the Muslims were not willing to serve in the army anymore, be it, as Crone contends, that the rulers of the Islamic world","PeriodicalId":149712,"journal":{"name":"Migration Histories of the Medieval Afroeurasian Transition Zone","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114474453","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Migration of Syrian and Palestinian Populations in the 7th Century: Movement of Individuals and Groups in the Mediterranean","authors":"P. Theodoropoulos","doi":"10.1163/9789004425613_011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004425613_011","url":null,"abstract":"In 602, the Byzantine emperor Maurice was dethroned and executed in a military coup, leading to the takeover of Phokas. In response to that, the Sasanian Great King Khosrow ii (590–628), who had been helped by Maurice in 591 to regain his throne from the usurper Bahram, launched a war of retribution against Byzantium. In 604 taking advantage of the revolt of the patrikios Narses against Phokas, he captured the city of Dara. By 609, the Persians had completed the conquest of Byzantine Mesopotamia with the capitulation of Edessa.1 A year earlier, in 608, the Exarch of Carthage Herakleios the Elder rose in revolt against Phokas. His nephew Niketas campaigned against Egypt while his son, also named Herakleios, led a fleet against Constantinople. Herakleios managed to enter the city and kill Phokas. He was crowned emperor on October 5, 610.2 Ironically, three days later on October 8, 610, Antioch, the greatest city of the Orient, surrendered to the Persians who took full advantage of the Byzantine civil strife.3 A week later Apameia, another great city in North Syria, came to terms with the Persians. Emesa fell in 611. Despite two Byzantine counter attacks, one led by Niketas in 611 and another led by Herakleios himself in 613, the Persian advance seemed unstoppable. Damascus surrendered in 613 and a year later Caesarea and all other coastal towns of Palestine fell as well. However, undoubtedly the most shocking event of the Persian conquest was the brutal capture of the Holy city, Jerusalem, in 614. The population of Jerusalem was slaughtered and many of its historical buildings were extensively damaged.4 In 615, the Persian menace reached Asia Minor, with the Sasanian army reaching as deep as Chalcedon. The Persian army invaded Egypt in 616/7; its","PeriodicalId":149712,"journal":{"name":"Migration Histories of the Medieval Afroeurasian Transition Zone","volume":"47 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120997802","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Aristocrats, Mercenaries, Clergymen and Refugees: Deliberate and Forced Mobility of Armenians in the Early Medieval Mediterranean (6th to 11th Century a.d.)","authors":"Johannes Preiser-Kapeller","doi":"10.1163/9789004425613_013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004425613_013","url":null,"abstract":"Armenian mobility in the early Middle Ages has found some attention in the scholarly community. This is especially true for the migration of individuals and groups towards the Byzantine Empire. A considerable amount of this research has focused on the carriers and histories of individual aristocrats or noble families of Armenian origin. The obviously significant share of these in the Byzantine elite has even led to formulations such as Byzantium being a “Greco-Armenian Empire”.1 While, as expected, evidence for the elite stratum is relatively dense, larger scale migration of members of the lower aristocracy (“azat”, within the ranking system of Armenian nobility, see below) or nonaristocrats (“anazat”) can also be traced with regard to the overall movement of groups within the entire Byzantine sphere. In contrast to the nobility, however, the life stories and strategies of individuals of these backgrounds very rarely can be reconstructed based on our evidence. In all cases, the actual significance of an “Armenian” identity for individuals and groups identified as “Armenian” by contemporary sources or modern day scholarship (on the basis of","PeriodicalId":149712,"journal":{"name":"Migration Histories of the Medieval Afroeurasian Transition Zone","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132936259","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Johannes Preiser-Kapeller, Lucian Reinfandt, Yannis Stouraitis
{"title":"Migration History of the Afro-Eurasian Transition Zone, c. 300–1500: An Introduction (with a Chronological Table of Selected Events of Political and Migration History)","authors":"Johannes Preiser-Kapeller, Lucian Reinfandt, Yannis Stouraitis","doi":"10.1163/9789004425613_002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004425613_002","url":null,"abstract":"When the process of compilation of this volume started in 2014, migration was without doubt already a “hot” topic. Yet, it were only the events of 2015,1 which put migration on top of the discussion about the Euro and the economic crisis in the agenda of politicians, the wider public and the media. In this heated debate, the events of past migrations have been employed in a biased manner as arguments against a new “Völkerwanderung” destined to disintegrate Europe as it did with the (Western) Roman Empire. Thus, the present volume could be seen, among other things, also as an effort to provide a corrective to such oversimplifying recourses to the ancient and medieval period.2 It should be noted, however, that it was planned and drafted before the events. The volume emerged from a series of papers given at the European Social Science History Conference in Vienna in April 2014 in two sessions on “Early Medieval Migrations” organized by Professors Dirk Hoerder and Johannes Koder. Their aim was to integrate the migration history of the medieval period into the wider discourse of migration studies and to include recent research. The three editors have added contributions by specialists for other periods and regions in order to cover as wide an area and a spectrum of forms of migration as possible. Still, it was not possible to cover all regions, periods and migration movements with the same weight; as one of the anonymous reviewers properly pointed out, the “work’s centre of gravity is (...) between the Eastern Mediterranean region and the Tigris/Euphrates”, with Africa not included in a similar way as Asia or Europe. Therefore, the following sections of the introduction aim first to provide some methodological considerations and then","PeriodicalId":149712,"journal":{"name":"Migration Histories of the Medieval Afroeurasian Transition Zone","volume":"87 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114490155","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introductory Essay: Migration—Travel—Commerce—Cultural Transfer. The Complex Connections Byzantium-Kiev-Novgorod-Varangian Lands, 6–14th Century","authors":"D. Hoerder","doi":"10.1163/9789004425613_003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004425613_003","url":null,"abstract":"Dealing with Varangian-Rus’/Kievan and Byzantine interactions in Europe’s so-called “Middle Ages” involves several macro-regions: the East Roman realm, the Iranian as well as the Mesopotamian and Egyptian realms, and the distant Scandinavian one. Scholarship has been hampered by terminological problems: The East Roman inhabitants—”Rhomaioi”, “Rhom”, or “Rum”—were misnamed “Byzantines” almost a century after the Empire’s demise by the Augsburg humanist Hieronymus Wolf (1516–1580). His reference to the Greek settlement Byzantion rather than to Constantinople, the Roman Empire’s continuity, and Orthodox Christianity was meant to reduce East Roman culture to an “in-between” and elevate Western Christianity and the Carolingian reinvention of western Rome as sole successor to “Rome” whether Empire or city or St. Peter’s Christianity.1 The still unified Roman Empire—through armed conquest—had established rule or held sway in the Anatolian-Eastern/ Mediterranean-West Asian region but could not annex the Iranian realm once conquered by Alexander [“the Great”] and “Hellenized” as much as the Macedonians were “Persianized”. When, from the 3rd to the 6th century, “Rome”, whether empire, federation of provinces, or region of connected urban centers, came apart as circum-Mediterranean and trans-alpine polity, the eastern half continued as a politically unified but territorially expanding or shrinking realm with Constantinople as capital. It was thus not a “Byzantine” successor state to a dissolved empire. To the north of Constantinople and Anatolia, the vast region from the Black to the Baltic Sea was an arena of migration and of settlement of Baltic-, Finno-Ugric, and Slavic-speaking peoples. Highly mobile groups from further","PeriodicalId":149712,"journal":{"name":"Migration Histories of the Medieval Afroeurasian Transition Zone","volume":"53 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133437326","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Iranians in 9th Century Egypt","authors":"Lucian Reinfandt","doi":"10.1163/9789004425613_009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004425613_009","url":null,"abstract":"The Islamic caliphate was an empire of migration, and one is tempted to ask whether migration was indeed the backbone of Islam. The hijra (lit. “migration”) of the prophet Muhammad in 622 a.d. from Mecca to Medina became the blueprint for all later migration.1 During the Arab conquests of the 7th and early 8th centuries, Arab tribes migrated and settled in all parts of the new empire as a military and political elite separated by religion from non-Muslim population majorities.2 Another phenomenon was a long-distance trade with networks of traders traveling over the Silk Road and the Indian Ocean, the proverbial Sindbad being but a representative for many real ones.3 Thirdly, there was a zest for learning in Islamic culture, which is summarized by a famous saying of the prophet Muhammad (“seek knowledge even as far as China!”).4 Migration between the urban intellectual centres of North Africa and the Middle East was a prevalent phenomenon during the whole era of pre-modern Islam, and celebrities such as Ibn Khaldun of Ibn Battuta (both 14th century) are only two examples out of many. Finally, there is the obligation for every Muslim to undertake the pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina at least once in a lifetime, which caused the regular movement of many pilgrims on an annual basis through all parts of the Muslim world.5","PeriodicalId":149712,"journal":{"name":"Migration Histories of the Medieval Afroeurasian Transition Zone","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121380338","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Migrating in the Medieval East Roman World, ca. 600–1204","authors":"Yannis Stouraitis","doi":"10.1163/9789004425613_006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004425613_006","url":null,"abstract":"Stouraitis The movement of groups in the Byzantine world can be distinguished between two basic types: first, movement from outside-in the empire; second, movement within the – at any time – current boundaries of the Constantinopolitan emperor’s political authority. This distinction is important insofar as the first type of movement – usually in form of invasion or penetration of foreign peoples in imperial lands – was mainly responsible for the extensive rearrange-ment of its geopolitical boundaries within which the second type took place. The the empire’s migration","PeriodicalId":149712,"journal":{"name":"Migration Histories of the Medieval Afroeurasian Transition Zone","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126029329","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Last Revolt of Bashmūr (831 a.d.) in Coptic and Syriac Historiography","authors":"Myriam Wissa","doi":"10.1163/9789004425613_010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004425613_010","url":null,"abstract":"In 831 A.D., parts of the Muslim and Coptic population in Egypt undertook a major uprising against Abbasid domination and against an oppressive caliphal tax regime in the provinces. The rebellion was aggressively put down by the Abbasid governor in most of Egypt with the exception of the region of Bashmūr. Here, in the northern Nile Delta, Copts were to continue to heavily resisting central rule for a long period. The conflict had revolved around temporal and spiritual powers and was the religious-political issue of the time. Earlier studies devoted to the events have invariably dealt with the onerous Abbasid tax regime as a main reason for the rebellion, which in its aftermath resulted in sizeable conversions to Islam in all of Egypt. In the following, I will focus on another aspect, which is the role of arbitration by the Coptic and Syriac patriarchs, Yūsāb i and Dionysius, in the handling of the conflict. My object of study is the processes of conciliation and the post-conflict outcome (forced migration, deportations and displacements?) as depicted in the Coptic and Syriac narratives of two central historiographical works, the History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria on the one hand, and the History of Dionysius of Tell Mahre on the other.1","PeriodicalId":149712,"journal":{"name":"Migration Histories of the Medieval Afroeurasian Transition Zone","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130572427","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}