This Special Subject explores the tension between order and disorder in the great cities of the late medieval Mediterranean world – Cairo and Milan, Venice and Jerusalem, Damascus and Florence. We will contrast and compare cities across the Mediterranean world during an era which saw violent confrontations, but also economic and cultural exchange between the different civilisations which met in the region of the Great Sea.

Cities stood at the heart of these interactions. They 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 the degree to which such apparent disorder was itself an ordinary feature 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 Ottoman Empire. 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.

Passages to Jerusalem: The Crusades and the Medieval World, 1095-1291 (Dissertation) (HIST0318)

This course traces the negotiations of British art with the image-making of other places through the conflictual artistic practices anticipated and produced by...