Description
Book SynopsisChristophe Picard recounts the adventures of Muslim sailors who competed with Greek and Latin seamen for control of the 7th-century Mediterranean. By the time Christian powers took over trade routes in the 13th century, a Muslim identity that operated within, and in opposition to, Europe had been shaped by encounters across the sea of the caliphs.
Trade Review[Picard is] the leading scholar of Islamic maritime history…This will surely become the standard work on Islam and the sea in the early Middle Ages. -- David Abulafia * Times Literary Supplement *
A leading authority on medieval Islamic history, Picard analyzes the involvement in and approach to the Mediterranean Sea by Muslims and their principalities from the dawn of Islam to the twelfth century, when the balance of power tilted in favor of Latin Christendom. Going beyond internal developments, he examines relations both collaborative and conflictive with Byzantium, the Latin world, and Berber nations. As a history of the Mediterranean, this book is unique in placing the Islamic world at the center. -- Brian A. Catlos, University of Colorado
By shining a light on this obscure period, Christophe Picard brings a new dimension to Braudel’s Mediterranean, as a place where the voices of Latins, Byzantines, and Muslims are integrated. * Livres Hebdo *
In
Sea of the Caliphs, Picard shows that the Mediterranean, long considered marginal to Islam, even reduced to a clichéd playground for pirates, was in reality a major site for the development of Muslim societies between the seventh and twelfth centuries. He recasts the traditional view of Fernand Braudel by making Islam the dominant actor in this space for several centuries, not only as a military power but also as a commercial and intellectual force. * Le Monde *
A masterful revision of the common view of Arabs and Muslims as primarily pirates in medieval Mediterranean history. -- B. Weinstein * Choice *
A comprehensive account of the various ways that medieval Islam’s highest political authorities—its caliphs, whether Sunni or Shi’ite—used naval warfare on the Mediterranean Sea to defend and expand the borders of their territories. -- Sarah Davis-Secord * H-Net Reviews *
