2012/08/01 by Patricia Skinner · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Business, Management and Accounting · #Medieval History and Crusades #Historical Studies of Medieval Iberia #Islamic Finance and Banking Studies #Caliphate #Eleventh #Historiography #Context (archaeology) #History #Islam #Period (music) #Mythology #Classics #Ancient history #Literature #Philosophy #Art #Archaeology #Aesthetics
paper · doi:10.1080/09503110.2012.684742
openalex publication_date 2012/08/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
This article concerns itself with the references in Ibn Ḥayyān's Muqtabis, Book V, to an Amalfitan presence at the court of Cordoba in the middle of the fourth/tenth century. It will be argued that these isolated references to a precociously early, Italian, mercantile presence in Spain, taken largely at face value by the text's editor and all but neglected in Amalfitan historiography, need to be interrogated to determine whether they fit the fourth/tenth-century context of Amalfitan–Muslim relations, or should be read against their fifth/eleventh-century context as evidence for a golden age of the Caliphate which, by Ibn Ḥayyān's day, was already passing into memory and myth. Using contemporary, comparative evidence from Barcelona, the article examines the possibility of communications between Italy and Spain in the earlier period, and concludes that the conditions were probably right for an Amalfitan arrival, but rapidly changed by Ibn Ḥayyān's day to exclude them from further contacts.