This Special Subject explores the great cities of the late medieval Mediterranean world – Cairo and Venice, Damascus and Florence, Constantinople and Barcelona. We will be crossing the historiographical divide between Islamic and European history and use cities as a lens through which to study the Mediterranean world during the period that is often known as the Age of the Crusades. This was also a period of rapid urbanisation – in fact, the so-called medieval urban revolution was the largest push in urbanisation since Antiquity and before the onset of Industrialisation.

At the heart of our investigations is the uneasy tension between order and disorder which cities experienced in a way was that reflective of wider developments. Cities became the centres of emerging states, stood at the crossroads of networks of contact and exchange, and were sites of major new directions in art and culture. However, underneath the picture of order, harmony, and progress were high levels of conflict and fragmentation which manifested themselves through frequent revolts and civil wars, the marginalisation of particular social groups, and religious divisions that culminated in outbreaks of violence. We investigate what such apparent disorder can tell us about the nature of life in cities and explore the political, social and religious systems which lay behind the complexity of urban life in the Mediterranean world.

Rather than investigating them in isolation from each other, cities will be studied from an integrated perspective that considers connections and comparisons across real and perceived divides between Islamic and Christian civilizations as well as national and linguistic boundaries. We shall especially focus on Italy and the Near East, the Mediterranean world's most urbanised regions, but we will also look at Iberia and the Maghrib. Our sources range across the writings of prominent thinkers from these cities such as Machiavelli and Ibn Khaldun, chronicles and narratives, governmental and court records, and the wealth of surviving visual and material evidence (some of which is in London museums).

No prior knowledge is required and students who are new to this period and region have always enriched this module with the ideas that they brought from other subjects. Cities also offer a wonderful context within which to explore a large variety of themes for dissertations on the basis of a rich tapestry of sources.