Scripta Mediterranea (E-Journal)

Kilpatrick, Ross S.

English

LANDSCAPE WITH DEATH AND APOLLO: The Hour Glass (School of Giorgione): The Phillips Collection, Washington DC

SCRIPTA, SCRIPTA

Masthead

Catlos, Brian

Mallette, Karla

INTRODUCTION 
The study of Muslims in Europe is, in academic terms, a growth industry. 
From the foundations of the work of the nineteenth century 
"orientalist" philologists the edifice of Middle Eastern and Islamic 
studies has taken shape over the last century. The literary historians 
of the first half of this century introduced the Arabic literatures of me-
dieval Europe to a western audience, and established the methodologi-
cal and literary-historical guidelines that are still largely accepted by 
European scholars. As the century progressed, some scholars began to 
explore strictly historical questions which were inspired by the work of 
those pioneers. They began to utilise non-literary sources and ap-
proaches, and the European study of Islamic history took on an identity 
which gradually came to distinguish itself from literary studies. To-
day more than ever, as Western society grows more conscious of its own 
plurality and perceptions of the Muslim world become more sophisti-
cated, not only are new questions being posed, but old issues and ap-
proaches are being re-appraised. As more scholars are being drawn to 
the field, they bring with them a set of new methodologies and ana-
lytical and comparative approaches, and incorporate perspectives 
drawn from a wide range of disciplines: post-colonial critiques, new 
trends in archaeological research, uses of different written sources, an-
thropological approaches, new readings of the figure of the Muslim in 
Western literature and of the Arabic literature written in Europe. 
This volume presents a range of Western scholarly readings of Is-
lamic society in the European Mediterranean and of Muslim contribu-
tions to the formation of European culture and history. Suzanne Conklin 
Akbari works with Western literary texts, using new literary critical 
methodologies to read responses to Islam in Christian works often writ-
ten at a historical and geographic distance from the Muslim world. Pa-
trizia Onesta's rigorously philological readings of Arabic, Occitan, and 
Latin lyric reopen the question of Arabic influence on Provern;:al courtly 
culture. Karla Mallette parallels the revolutionary vernacular poetic 
traditions that emerged in the Arabic - and Romance-speaking 
worlds, demonstrating the similarity of the fundamental urges that 
inspired and shaped those literary movements. In his examination of 
Andalusi kharjas, Otto Zwartjes questions the relation between courtly 
poetic styles and popular traditions. Maria Rosa Menocal has produced 
SCRIPTA MEDITERRANEA, Vols. XIX-XX, 1998-1999, 5 
6 Brian Catlos - Karla Mallette 
some of the most provocative and vital work on the question of literary 
connections between Muslims and Christians in southern Europe; her 
article in this volume reflects on the changes in perceptions of that 
question during the years between her first interventions in the field 
and the present. In the "review" of her most recent book, four scholars 
working in different disciplines respond to the challenges her work 
poses to literary-historical tradition. Arnold Cassola and Oliver 
Friggieri explore a literary tradition that represents, in purest form, 
the legacy of the cohabitation of Muslims and Christians in medieval 
Europe -the literature of Malta, whose language combines Semitic and 
Romance elements- and follow the evolution of Maltese cultural self-
awareness through the modem, post-colonial period. Antonio Pellitteri 
re-reads the Sicilian historians of the nineteenth century, exploring 
the influence of continental philosophical developments on Sicilians' 
conception of Sicilian history. 
Among the articles which can be most strictly termed as historical 
studies are two contributions based on unedited archival material. Such 
sources are instrumental in our understanding of Muslim minorities liv-
ing in Christian lands, and there is a wealth of such documentation for 
medieval Iberia. Maria Teresa Ferrer i Mallol gives a preliminary 
sketch of the institutions and administration of the Muslim community 
of Christian Tortosa (Catalonia) from its origins in the twelfth century 
through to the fifteenth. Brian Catlos, looking at documents from 
around the whole of the Crown of Aragon, studies cases of the abduction 
of Christian children and attempts to underscore the importance of un-
derstanding the Muslim minority as part of Christian society rather 
than apart from Christian society. Thomas Burman, by examining 
twelfth-century Latin translations of the Quran, investigates the ways 
by which contemporary Christian Europeans strove to understand their 
neighbours across the religious divide; and Hava Lazarus-Yafeh, in 
her reading of an early modern translation of the Qur'an into Hebrew, 
considers a Jewish European response to Islam. A similar approach is 
taken by Michael Weber who uses al-Farabi's "Mathematical Sci-
ences," a scientific rather than a religious text, as the basis of his 
study. Charles Burnett's investigation of the Arabic roots of the Latin 
Sortes regi Amalrici, takes the comparative approach to the far East of 
the European Mediterranean, the Crusader Kingdoms of the twelfth 
and thirteenth centuries, forcing us to reconsider the traditional schol-
arly canon that the Holy Land was not a region where cultural ex-
change took place. The independent society of Islamic Spain is the set-
ting for Manuela Marin's work, and she demonstrates how a well-
known source, the Islamic biographical dictionary, may be used in an 
innovative manner as an exciting new tool for social history. Focusing on 
Introduction 7 
a single historical narrative, William Granara uses the biography of 
the eighth-century political/religious figure Ibn al-Furat to explore 
the socio-religious values of early Islamic society in the Mediter-
ranean. Finally, Harry T. Norris takes us to a often neglected comer of 
the Islamic Mediterranean - the Balkans, and beyond to the Caucasus 
in his work on early Islamic folk epic. 
The work of these eighteen contributors illustrates a wide range of 
possibilities for exploring and evaluating this significant and integral 
component of Mediterranean culture and society. The various method-
ologies and approaches taken help us to re-appraise traditional schol-
arship in the field, and suggest new directions and departures for future 
research. 
Brian Catlos, University of Toronto 
Karla Mallette, University of Toronto 


Introduction

Pérez, Janet

Oliver and Amat: Myth, Gender and the Mediterranean (Two Novels by Contemporary Women Writers)

Dendle, Brian J.

Brian J. Dendle 
THE MEDITERRANEAN CULTURE OF 
MAURICIO WACQUEZ: CLASSICAL ALLUSIONS 
IN FRENTE A UN HOMBRE ARMADO 
Mauricio Wacquez is the most "French" of Spanish authors. 
Born in 1939 in Colchagua, Chile, of a French father and a 
Chilean mother, Mauricio Wacquez - who has French, 
Spanish, and Chilean nationalities - made frequent visits in 
his youth to his French cousins in the Bordeaux region. He 
taught philosophy at the Sorbonne (1967-1969), obtained the 
Diplome d'Etudes Superieures from the Sorbonne in 1966 with a 
thesis on the language of St. Anselm, and in 1977 presented to 
the Sorbonne his doctoral thesis La preuve de Dieu chez Saint 
Anselme. His study of Sartre, Conocer Sartre y su obra, ap-
peared in Spain in three editions (1977, 1979, 1981). The short 
stories of Excesos (Barcelona: Planeta, 1976) were written in 
France. The experimental novel Parentesis (Barcelona: Barral, 
1975) is set in France. Ella o el suefio de nadie (Barcelona: Tus-
quets, 1983) contains untranslated passages in French. From 
1972, Mauricio Wacquez has lived in Spain, devoting himself 
to literary translations of French authors (Jean Cocteau, Gus-
tave Flaubert, Julien Green, Michel Leiris, Prosper Merimee, 
Raymond Queneau, Stendhal, et al.). He is a devotee of the 
work of Marguerite Yourcenar. 
In an interview with Elsa Arana Freire, Mauricio W acquez 
declared his nationality to be "Mediterranean": 
Podria decir que viviendo en Chile, en una region que repite es-
plendidamente el clima del Mediterraneo europeo, adquiri eso 
que Anthony Burgess llama la "nacionalidad mediterranea," 
algo que participa a la vez de la geograffa, de la meteorologia y 
de la historia. 
SCRIPTA MEDITERRANEA, Vols. XVI-XVII, 1995-96, 71 
72 Brian/. Demile 
Para bien o para mal, como te digo, la tinica nacionalidad que 
reconozco es esa mediterranea. Porque hay razones de tipo cul-
tural que lo apoyan. El Mediterraneo y sus orillas han propici-
ado las tinicas culturas que pueden ser tomadas en cuenta como 
realmente humanas.Yo tengo una formaci6n humanista, en el 
peor sentido de la palabra. De la que no voy a renegar nunca. 
En esas culturas existe una anchura, una capacidad de res-
piraci6n que no se compadece con los paises y nacionalidades 
modemos. Eran regiones y conceptos del hombre intema-
cionales ... 1 
I could say that, living in Chile, in a region which splendidly 
repeats the climate of the European Mediterranean, I acquired 
what Anthony Burgess calls "Mediterranean nationality," 
something which has in common geography, meteorology, and 
history. 
For good or ill, as I say, the only nationality that I recognize is 
that of the Mediterranean. Because there are reasons of a cul-
tural nature to support it. The Mediterranean and its shores 
have provided the only cultures that can be considered as really 
human. My formation is humanistic, in the worst sense of the 
word. This I shall never repudiate. In these cultures there exist 
a breadth, a capacity to breathe, which is incompatible with 
modem countries and nationalities. They were international 
regions and concepts of man ... 
The French background, both literary and physical, to 
Mauricio Wacquez's most ambitious novel, Frente a un hombre 
armada (1981), is marked. The novel's subtitle ("Cacerias de 
1848") echoes that of Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Nair 
("Chronique de 1830"); the novel begins with an epigraph from 
Apollinaire ("Hommes de l'avenir, souvenez-vous de moi, I Je 
vivais a l'epoque OU finissaient les rois"); the protagonist Juan 
de Warni claims to be "El Aventurero" (The Adventurer) de-
scribed by Pierre Loti; the narrator offers the novel as a pas-
tiche of the nineteenth-century French novel of adventures or 
folletin ; Leon de Warni and his class represent the iniquities of 
the society portrayed by Balzac (115, 246); the numerous philo-
sophical reflections of the narrator are those of a generation 
raised on Pascal and the thinkers of the Enlightenment (246). 
Central to the novel is the Proustian recreation of the chiiteau 
1 Elsa Arana Freire, "zLa impostura de un escritor?", 98. 
The Mediterranean Culture of Mauricio Wacquez 73 
Perier, which dominates the thoughts of Juan de Warni. The 
action takes place in the France of the 1840s. However, as Juan 
de Warni dies, strangled by his lover Alexandre, he has a 
"flash-forward" (an oneiric vision of the life he would not live 
to lead) to the Revolution of 1848, to the Franco-Prussian War, 
and to his return to Perier in 1946. 
Frente a un hombre armada is one of the most complex of 
late-twentieth-century novels, breaking as it does conventional 
limits of time and of character to explore through the 
"adventures" I homosexually-obsessed dreams I death-agony 
visions (the narrator suggests all possibilities) of the 
adolescent Juan de Warni the dialectics of power. Juan de 
Warni strives to achieve a total reality ("Vision y reflejo, el 
ser que mira y es mirado, sugieren el consuelo de la totalidad," 
220) (Vision and reflection, the being who watches and is 
watched, suggest the consolation of totality) by becoming the 
Other, whether through the playing of games (sexual, 
literary), the wearing of masks, the acting of roles in the 
musarafi.a, temporal and geographical confusion, reversal of 
sexual roles, and defiance of all sexual taboos. Throughout the 
novel a lucid narrator ("no hay ficci6n inocente," 241) (no fiction 
is innocent) controls and plays with both reader and narrative. 
Reviewers, both in France and Spain, stressed the French 
background to Frente a un hombre armado.2 A further dimension 
to the novel, not noted by critics, is provided by references to 
the classical universe of ancient Greece and Rome. In a novel 
where all essay roles, and where the "essence" of a person is 
hidden and mysterious, there are frequent allusions to the 
masks worn by the actors of Greek theater. Juan de Warni (who 
had "died" a century previously) is presented in 1946 as an 
"adolescente," "como los actores del antiguo teatro eran a veces 
la mascara de la juventud" (19) (as the actors of classical the-
ater were at times the mask of youth) . From the studies of 
Greek, Latin, and philosophy imposed by Monsieur Albert, the 
young and passionate Juan de Warni retains as relevant to his 
truth only "algiln poema, o la tragedia griega o Shakespeare" 
(39) (an occasional poem or Greek tragedy or Shakespeare). The 
2 For a summary of critical opinions on Frente a un hombre armada, see 
Brian J. Dendle, "Mauricio Wacquez (1939- ): A Preliminary Biblio-
graphy." 
74 Brian J. Detulle 
removal of masks, exposure to the light of the sun, threatens 
annihilation: "el encuentro con un nuevo orden moral, la de-
saparici6n de una mascara que me dejaba el rostro a plena luz, 
amenazando con calcinarlo" (48) (the encounter with a new 
moral order, the removal of a mask which left my face exposed 
to full light, threatening it with calcination). All wear masks: 
"todos llevan consigo su juego de mascaras" (63) (all bear with 
them their set of masks). The imprecise contours of the typhus-
ridden Juan de Warni's surroundings recall "los cuadros de moda 
en los que la corte se regodea imitando tragedias griegas" (107) 
(the fashionable paintings in which the court takes pleasure in 
imitating Greek tragedies). Juan realizes that our parts in life 
are assigned "con la equidad de los roles en el teatro" (135) 
(with the impartiality of roles in the theater). With this re-
alization, Juan allots himself the role of tyrant in a Greek 
tragedy, whose destiny (and meaning in life) is to be killed and 
supplanted (in this case by his conqueror, the fair Alexandre): 
"Pense en Alexandre como en el verdadero destinatario de mi 
puesto, senti una inexplicable dulzura al imaginarlo cuajado de 
luces y de oros, hiriendome en el coraz6n con un dardo o una es-
pada, como en las tragedias antiguas, donde el despota encuen-
tra en el derrocamiento y la muerte el verdadero sentido de su 
gloria" (135) (I thought of Alexandre as the true heir to my po-
sition; I felt an inexplicable sweetness as I imagined him 
adorned with lights and gold, stabbing me in the heart with an 
arrow or a sword, as in the ancient tragedies, where the despot 
finds in his overthrow and death the true meaning of his 
glory). Juan explains the dialectic of power to His Highness the 
Prince; true victory produces what the "ancients" termed 
"catharsis," to be found in the acceptance of death, that is, in 
submission to the penetration of the stronger: "Es lo que los an-
tiguos llamaban catarsis y que yo he vivido y buscado mas de 
una vez en mi vida" (145) (It's what the ancients called cathar-
sis and what I have lived and sought more than once in my 
life). 
Masks permit concealment and also facilitate metamorpho-
sis, as in the game of the musarafia. A related classical theme 
is that of the hunt and of the reversal of roles of the hunter and 
the hunted. Hunting is power ("la caza, como ejercicio del 
poder," 97), power over the animal kingdom, over the Indians 
whom Warni slaughters as a mercenary, and potentially over 
oneself and one's lovers in the struggle for domination. During a 
The Mediterranean Culture of Mauricio Wacquez 75 
hunt, Juan de Warni's universe is shattered, as he falls prey to 
the charms of the young peasant Alexandre: "ese amino-
ramiento de mi ser mediante el cual pasaba de ser el cazador a 
ser la presa" (49) (this diminishing of my being by which I 
passed from being the hunter to being the prey). The hunt al-
lows the union of opposites: "la ambigiiedad de la adolescencia 
me permitia ser el cazador y la caza, mi contrario y mi doble" 
(188) (the ambiguity of adolescence allowed me to be the hunter 
and the prey, my adversary and my double). In its essence, 
however, the hunt in Frente a un hombre armada assimilates 
the events of the novel to an archetypal, mythical universe. In 
front of Perier stands the statue of Diana (the goddess of the 
hunt, of chastity, and of adolescence, the goddess whose priest 
must first slay his predecessor) with her quiver of arrows. 
References to Diana pervade the novel (19, 65, 107, 184, 251). 
Only the statue of Diana remains unchanged after the destruc-
tion of World War II (19); the final sentence of the novel returns 
us to "la mirada de Diana, que desde su pedestal proseguia 
acechando a su presa" (251) (Diana's gaze, which from her 
pedestal continued to await her prey).3 
There are further references to the classical world. Juan de 
Warni (the hunter and the hunted, sodomizer and sodomee) 
adapts as his own Monsieur Albert's phrase "extrema se tan-
gunt" (21). Juan de Warni's meditation on death refers us to an 
ancient world: the burnt offering of myrtle and laurel, the in-
scription on the sarcophagus, "el balsamo corrupto de los gestos 
antiguos" (the corrupt balsam of ancient gestures), the coin 
placed between the corpse's lips (70). The pain of the act of 
sodomy is related to Apollo (Diana's brother): "es el desgarro 
que divide las aguas y eleva la frente de Apolo en un espasmo 
c6smico" (98) (it's the rent which divides the waters and lifts 
Apollo's brow in a cosmic spasm); "el relajamiento apolineo de 
la espera, la ansiedad desnuda de la belleza" (98) (the 
Apollonian relaxation of expectation, the naked desire for 
beauty); "En ese momento todo se halla dispuesto y ambos nece-
sitan el coraje divino de Orfeo violentando a Apolo, ese Apolo 
3 In Mauricio Wacquez's unpublished outline of a screenplay for Frente 
a un hombre armado two of the fifty sequences - the second and the 
fourteenth - give prominence to the statue of Diana. 
76 Brian/. Demile 
encabritado al sentirse desnudo bajo el calor de su mitad per-
dida" (99) (At this moment, everything is ready and both need 
the divine courage of Orpheus possessing Apollo, this Apollo 
reared up in his nakedness beneath the heat of his lost half). 
The sexual act takes place without the caresses which belong to 
the "dios del amor" (100). The withered but chaste breast of 
the Prince is that of "una vieja vestal" (138) (an old Vestal). 
The destroyed Perier of 1946 reminds Juan de Warni of "una 
catastrofe antigua como la de Pompeya" (214) (an ancient catas-
trophe such as that of Pompeii). Greek and Hebrew mythology 
coincide in the mysterious Eugenio, who never appears in the 
novel, and is identified only by the "sonidos griegos" (Greek 
sounds) of his name; Eugenio is, the narrator conjectures, possi-
bly confused by the Chevalier with Juan, whose name has 
Hebraic roots (244). 
In a novel in which conventional concepts of time and 
"reality" are relentlessly undermined, dreams reveal an under-
lying truth, which is related to that of classical myth. Dreams, 
with their apparent irresponsibility, are imposed on us by an 
obscure and strange god: "al pensar en la irresponsabilidad que 
se deriva de los suefios, sobre los que no tenemos que justificarnos, 
puesto que nos son impuestos por un dios oscuro y peregrino contra 
el que solo cabe la perplejidad" (55) (thinking of the irresponsi-
bility which comes from dream, for which we don't have to jus-
tify ourselves, since they are imposed on us by an obscure and 
strange god before whom the only attitude possible is wonder). 
Dreams also evoke an ancestral memory, perhaps that of 
"aquel tribuno germano que rindio pleitesia a Roma a cambio de 
su vida" (101) (that German tribune who rendered hommage to 
Rome in exchange for his life). 
The sight of a naked boy and his horse refers Juan de Warni 
to his nightly "suefio mitico" (mythic dream) of a centaur: 
"Mirandolo desde atras, descubri de donde venia el sombrio 
suefio mitico que me asaltaba cada noche: un centauro entraba en 
el agua y buscaba a su dios, un dios ancho y profundo como el rio, 
un objetivo lejano y complicado que solo la clarividencia de un 
efebo podia entrever" (217) (Looking at him from behind, I dis-
covered the source of the dark, mythic dream which nightly 
assaulted me: a centaur entered the water and sought its god, a 
god as broad and deep as the river, a distant and complicated 
object which only the clairvoyance of an ephebus could imper-
fectly perceive). The dream takes on "reality" as the unnamed 
The Mediterranean Culture of Mauricio Wacquez 77 
lad ("el otro Juan"?) possesses in a centaur's embrace Juan who is 
sprawled across the horse's neck: "Clavado en mi, se qued6 qui-
eto, el caballo y el dentro de mi, el caballo, el y yo mezclados 
por la sangre y el valor del centauro" (218) (Pierced in me, he 
remained still, the horse and he inside me, the horse, he and I 
mingled by the blood and the courage of the centaur). The 
"centaur" is killed the same night; Juan places a coin between 
his lips, recalling /1 el golpe de su fuerza, mis manos y mi cuerpo 
ocupados por la sangre y la semilla del dios" (219) (the thrust 
of his strength, my hands and my body filled by the blood and 
the seed of the god). The confusion of classical and Hebraic 
mythology is reflected in Alexandre's mixture of "inocencia" 
and "abismo" (abyss), for which "mas de un dios fue arrojado 
del paraiso" (232) (more than one god was cast from paradise). 
Mauricio Wacquez provides little guidance to the reader in 
the complex and deceitful universe of Frente a un hombre ar-
mado, with its anachronisms, metamorphoses, and elusive pro-
tagonist. Juan de Warni escapes the superficial and corrupt civ-
ilization of nineteenth-century France, ruled by the fluctuations 
of the Stock Exchange (245), to enter an archetypal and violent 
universe, that of Mediterranean classical antiquity. The 
huntress goddess Diana's dominion over Perier, the numerous 
references to masks and Greek tragedy, the emphasis on homo-
sexuality and incest (cf. 104-05), the role of myth and dream, 
the savage mutual killing of Juan and Alexandre (which mir-
rors, in myth, the violent deaths of the priests of Diana), the 
ritualistic placing of a coin in the mouth of the dead, Juan de 
Warni's "Apollonian" gift of foreseeing the future, the inter-
vention of obscurely-intentioned deities to control man's des-
tiny, refer us - at a level far deeper than that of the pastiche 
of a Balzacian or Stendhalian novel - to sacred mysteries. The 
references to the classical world not only illuminate regions of 
Juan de Warni's unconscious; they also, by adding a further 
layer of reference, heighten the mythical, oneiric quality of 
this most multi-dimensioned of novels. 
University of Kentucky 
78 Brian J. Dentile 
WORKS CITED 
Arana Freire, Elsa. "i,La impostura de un escritor?" Momento, 
(Caracas), 1977 or later, 98-99. 
Dendle, Brian J. "Mauricio Wacquez (1939-): A Preliminary Biblio-
graphy." Revista Interamericana de Bibliografia 44 (1994): 579-93. 
Wacquez, Mauricio. Frente a un hombre armada. Barcelona: Bruguera, 
1981. 
- . Frente a un hombre armada. Guion de secuencias. Unpublished 
manuscript. 


The Mediterranean Culture of Mauricio Wacquez: Classical Allusions in Frente a un Hombre Armado

Palmer, José Simón

Jose Simon Palmer 
THE LIFE OF ST. SABAS THE YOUNGER AS A SOURCE FOR 
THE HISTORY OF THE CATALAN GRAND COMPANY 
The Life and Conduct of Our Holy and God-Bearing Father St. 
Sabas the Younger [henceforth, Life of St. Sabas the Younger or 
Life,1 written by Philotheos Kokkinos, patriarch of Constan-
tinople (1353-1354/5; 1364-1376), is a piece of Byzantine ha-
giography from the fourteenth century which, in spite of its re-
ligious character, is a valuable source for the history of the 
Catalan Grand Company, Roger de Flor's famous band of Span-
ish mercenaries hired by the Byzantine emperor Andronikos II 
Palaiologos (1282-1328) to fight the Turks in Anatolia. How-
ever, this aspect of the Life has usually been neglected by his-
torians who have studied the Catalan presence in Byzantium 
and Greece during the fourteenth century. A remarkable excep-
tion is Angeliki E. Laiou, who uses this testimony for her study 
of the Catalan campaigns against Mount Athos (in the 
Chalkidike peninsula) and Thessaloniki in a book which is the 
standard reference for Andronikos Il's period (220-223). Nev-
ertheless, being the Byzantine emperor's foreign policy - and 
not the adventures of the Catalan Company - the aim of her 
research, she does not fully exploit the evidence found in the 
Life. This is also the case of Mirjana Zhivojinovic ' in her study 
on the life of Archbishop Daniel II, abbot of the Serbian 
monastery of Chilandar in Athos during the Catalan 
campaigns of 1307-1309 (254, 258). As for Antoni Rubio i Lluch 
and R. M. Dawkins, they seem to ignore the existence of 
Philotheos Kokkinos' work.2 A revision of the Life of St. Sabas 
1 References to the Life of St . Sabas the Younger are by page and line of 
the Papadopoulos-Kerameus' edition, listed in Works Cited. 
2 See A. Rubio i Lluch's and R. M. Dawkin' articles, listed in Works 
Cited. 
SCRIPTA MEDITERRANEA 1997, Vol. 18, 35 
36 Jose Sim6n Palmer 
the Younger as a source for the history of the Catalan Grand 
Company is therefore necessary. 
St. Sabas, born in Thessaloniki around 1283, entered the 
Holy Mountain of Athas, which from the late tenth century 
had been the most important center of Eastern monasticism, 
approximately at the age of 18 (199, 1.18). Seven years later, 
his life changed because of the "Italians who had come from 
Sicily" (210, 1.16), as the Life calls the soldiers of the Catalan 
Company because they had been fighting until the Peace of 
Caltabellotta (1302) for Frederick III of Sicily against Charles 
II of Anjou. 
After the assassination of their leader Roger de Flor near 
Adrianople in 1305, the Catalans, who laid the blame for this 
murder on the Byzantines, raided the surrounding countryside of 
the Kallipolis peninsula - their base of operations - for two 
years (1305-1307). In 1307 they moved west and, as the Life 
says, "they destroyed Thrace without mercy, like a hurracane" 
(210, 11.17-18). After this, the Catalans "hurried up to overrun 
immediately the Macedonians, having Thessaly itself already 
in their minds" (210, 11.28-29). 
As A. Laiou remarks, "the Catalan campaign in Macedonia 
had two related main objectives: the conquest of Thessaloniki 
and the creation of a kingdom of Macedonia, with its capital at 
Thessaloniki. At the same time, the Catalans planned to at-
tack and plunder the monasteries of Mount Athas, which were 
famous for their wealth" (220). They occupied Kassandreia, in 
Chalkidike, at the neck of the Kassandra peninsula, and put 
their operational base there. I From this city they made incur-
sions into the west on Thessaloniki and into the east on the 
Holy Mountain. Their first attack on a monastery in Athas -
the Serbian cloister of Chilandar - took place in the early 
summer of 1307 (Laiou 221) . 
According to the Life, Andronikos' first concern was to pro-
tect the Holy Mountain, since he thought that the salvation of 
the Empire depended on the "choir of saints" living there. Be-
ing unable to defend the monks with the help of an army, "he 
wrote a letter to them at once in his own hand" (210, 11.4-5), 
probably in 1307 (Laiou 220). He was worried not only about the 
1 On the demographic consequences which the Catalan campaign, had in 
the population of the Chalkidike peninsula, see P. Karlin-Hayter's 
article in Works Cited. 
The Life of St. Sabas the Younger 37 
anchorites, who practised ascetism alone or in pairs in the 
Holy Mountain, but also about many monks who lived together 
in various communities. Some monasteries were not fortified at 
all, while others could be taken easily by the enemy "because 
of the ruinous state of their walls and the scarce number of their 
inhabitants." In order to prepare the defense of Mount Athas, 
the emperor ordered all these monks either to move into the 
well fortified monasteries or to take refugee in the closest cities 
if they wished (211, 11.5-11). According to the Life, some monks 
preferred "to remain [in their huts and their monasteries) and 
die" rather than "get away and save their lives." But others 
left their fellows in tears and sought refuge in the nearby for-
tified cities and islands (211, 1.13-212, 1.2). One of these monks 
was, in fact, Sabas' spiritual father. Being old and ill, he went 
to the monastery of the Mother of God in Thessaloniki (212, 11. 
3-9). 
Sabas did not return "to his native city of Thessaloniki for 
the duration of the Catalan attack on Mount Athas," (Laiou 
352), but remained in the monastery of Vatopedi, at the mid-
point of the northeast coast of the Mount Athas peninsula (212, 
11.11-12; 215, 11.10-11) . He missed his spiritual father very 
much and wished to join him in Thessaloniki, but he was afraid 
at the thought of seeing his parents and his friends from child-
hood again (212, 1.11-213, 1.27). His doubts vanished when he 
heard that the "Achaemenids" (i .e., the Catalans, compared 
to Darius and Xerxes) had ravaged Macedonia and were al-
ready plundering the neighbourhood of Thessaloniki (213, 1.32-
214, 1.5). Land communications between this city and Mount 
Athas had been cut by the enemies and there was no possibility 
for Sabas to visit his spiritual father. A voice coming from the 
bottom of his heart told him to go to Jerusalem and he set sail 
immediately (page 215.25-31) . He went to Cyprus across the 
Aegean sea and for a long time - about twenty years, according 
to A.-J. Festugiere (237) - he wandered around Palestine, 
Sinai, Syria, Egypt, the Aegean islands, the Peloponese and 
Hellas, always admired for his extreme ascetic practices. But 
on his way back to the monastery of Vatopedi in Athas he met 
the Catalans again. 
After two years in the Peloponese, "Sabas," - Philotheos 
Kokkinos says - "visited Athens, which was admired in An-
tiquity because of its wisdom. However, he could not see the 
much celebrated wonders of this city - on the contrary, only a 
38 Jose Sim6n Palmer 
barbarian language and way of life instead of the old glory of 
the past and the golden generation of wise men" (290, 1.30-291, 
1.2). This is a reference to the Catalan rule over Athens. After 
the battle of Halmyros in 1311, the Frankish domination of 
this city came to an end and the Catalan Grand Company 
settled in the Duchy of Athens for almost eight decades, until 
1388. When Sabas visited Athens in the last years before 
Andronikos II's fall (1328) the lingua franca had been already 
replaced by the bell catalanesch of Ramon Muntaner. But, as 
the Life shows, the Catalans could not change neither the 
poverty of the city nor the ignorance of the inhabitants (Setton 
216-260). 
We can thus conclude that the interest of the Life of St. 
Sabas the Younger as a source for the history of the Catalan 
Grand Company in the Eastern Mediterranean is double: On one 
hand, it provides information about the beginning of the Cata-
lan campaign against Mount Athos and Thessaloniki and about 
the preparation of the Byzantine defense (1307-1308), thus 
completing the evidence of the best source for the Catalan at-
tacks on the Holy Mountain, the Serbian Life of Archbishop 
Danilo . On the other hand, it clearly brings out the cultural 
decline of Athens under the Catalan rule almost twenty years 
after the departure of Saint Sabas from Athos in 1308. Whereas 
the first piece of information is relatively well known, the sec-
ond seems to have been neglected by historians of the Catalan 
Duchies of Athens and Neopatras to the best of my knowledge. 
Spanish Committee of Byzantine Studies, Barcelona 
WORKS CITED 
Dawkins, R. M."The Catalan Company in the Traditions of Mount 
Athos. "Homenatge a A. Rubio i Lluch. Miscel .limia d' estudis literaris, 
histories i linguistics. Vol. I. Barcelona: Institut d'Estudis Catalans, 
1935. 267-270. 
Festugiere, Andre Jean. "Appendice. Etude sur la vie de S. Sabas le Jeune 
qui simulait la folie". Leontios de Neapolis, Vie de Symeon le Fou et 
Vie de Jean de Chypre. Ed. A. J. Festugiere. Paris: Librairie Oriental-
iste Paul Geuthner, 1974. 223-249. 
The Life of St. Sabas the Younger 39 
Karlin-Hayter, Patricia. "Les Catalans et Jes villages de la Chal-
cidique"Byzantion 52. Brussels: Societe beige d'Etudes byzantines, 
1982. 244-263. 
Laiou, Angeliki E. Constantinople and the Latins: The Foreign Policy of 
Andronicus II, 1282-1328. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1972. 
Philotheos Kokkinos, Patriarch of Constantinople. Bias kai politeia tau 
hosiou kai theophorou patros hemon Saba tau Neou [Life and Conduct of 
Our Holy and God-Bearing Father St Sabas the Younger ). Ed. A. 
Papadopoulos-Kerameus in Analekta Hierosolymitikes Stachyologias. 
Vol. V. St. Petersburg, 1898. 190-359. 
Rubio i Lluch, Antoni. La Companyia Catalana sota'/ comandament de 
Teobald de Cepoys: campanyes de Macedonia i de Tessalia (1307-
1310). Barcelona: Institut d'Estudis Catalans, 1923. 
Setton, Kenneth M. Catalan Domination of Athens, 1311-1388. Rev. ed. 
London: Variorum, 1975. 
Zhivojinovic', Miriana. "Zhitije arhiepiskopa Danila II kao izvor za ra-
tovanja katalanske kompanije." ("The Life of Archbishop Daniel II 
as a Source on the Warring of the Catalan Company.") Zbornik 
Radovi Viz . lnstituta 19. Belgrade: Institute for Byzantine Studies, 
1980. 251-273. 


The Life of St. Sabas the Younger as a Source for The History of the Catalan Grand Company

Richard England, Poet of Malta and the Middle Sea

Menocal, Maria Rosa

Maria Rosa Menocal 
TEN YEARS AFTER: THE VIRTUES OF EXILE! 
"Finally, a foreign soil is proposed, since it, too, gives a 
man practice. All the world is a foreign soil to those who 
philosophise.... The man who finds his homeland sweet 
is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his 
native land is already strong; but he is perfect to whom 
the entire world is a foreign land ... . " 
Hugh of St. Victor 
The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History first came out in 1987, 
almost exactly ten years ago as I write this, although it is a book that 
had its beginnings more than a decade before. I recount part of the story 
in the "Preface" of the book itself, because it struck me at the time, as it 
still does, as emblematic: the story of a graduate student in medieval 
Romance languages more or less accidentally coming upon the Arabic 
verb taraba in a first-year Arabic class, and figuring out, bit by bit, the 
very long story of the tortured scholarly quarrels over the etymology of 
Provem;al trobar, and thus of the word "troubadour" as well as the en-
tire cultural complex that word evokes. It is, of course, not just any 
word, nor any random one of the thousands of disputed etymologies in 
our languages. Instead it is the evocation of an unusually powerful set of 
cultural features that lies at the heart, as Nietzsche had said, of the 
West's most profound and romantic notions of what it is, of its very 
essence. Even when we, as a culture, have pretty much forgotten 
what Proven~al is, as we almost have, we retain a strong sense (as well 
we should) of the distinctiveness of that culture, and it is a vexing issue 
to deal with the "origins" -by which we really mean the "identity"-
of that culture when it might appear that some significant and central 
aspect of it lies in a cultural complex that we are habituated, accultur-
ated, to see as quintessentially "Other," in Said's vastly influential ar-
ticulation of it. 
SCRIPTA MEDITERRANEA, Vols XIX-XX 1998-1999, 55 
1 Editor's note: This essay, translated into Arabic, will appear as the introduction to the 
Arabic translation of Prof. Menocal's The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History. 
56 Maria Rosa Menocal 
Ten years later, I believe more than ever that it is all about the 
question of identity, and that the intellectual challenge is to have 
aworking model, a language, of cultural identity that can account for 
the powerful hybridness of European cultural identity in its formative 
period. Ten years ago, I saw the principal impediment to the develop-
ment of such a vision as a rather crude, albeit powerful, prejudice "that 
Westerners -Europeans- have great difficulties in considering the 
possibility that they are in some way seriously indebted to the Arab 
world, or that the Arabs were central to the making of medieval Eu-
rope" (xiii). But during this past decade, in the American academic 
universe as well as in the wider world, the problem is subtly different, 
and perhaps more intractable: "identity" has become ever more nar-
rowly and rigidly defined, and the point seems all too often not to be 
the dissolution of the dichotomous conceits of Self and Other 
(Christian and Muslim, European and Arab, and so forth) but its hard-
ening. Edward Said's extraordinarily influential Orientalism (which 
appeared in 1978) radically altered the intellectual landscape in ways 
not only I but many others believed would help clarify how we think 
about cultures and their identities, and alert us to the kind of prejudice 
vis-a-vis Arab culture I had seen as the principal culprit. But I believe 
many of its premises have instead been almost perversely understood 
and absorbed as arguments for a greater, rather than a lesser, degree of 
cultural and scholarly "purity." 
As with many seminal insights in intellectual history (one thinks 
immediately of "the anxiety of influence" or "the structures of scientific 
revolutions") Said's key concepts have suffered reductive simplifica-
tion and, in my opinion, damaging misapplication, although it would 
be dangerous and unfair to necessarily attribute any of these views to 
Said himself. The brilliance of the original work lay in its setting out 
the ways in which disciplines are rooted principally in ideologies, in 
cultural constructs that define one culture's view of itself vis-a-vis an-
other.2 But among the many ironies that abound in the institutionalisa-
tion of Said's analyses is that the thrust of the argument has become 
that any student (reader, interpreter, speaker) of another's language 
2 The huge prooftext at hand for Said is of course "Orientalism," a term that existed before 
as a more or less neutral designation of the study of cultures of the Middle East princi-
pally, but which became, in the aftermath, a term so powerfully tainted by Said's often 
compelling denunciation of it as an instrument of imperial domination and as a mode of 
reductive analysis of a whole culture that was diminishing rather than celebratory, that 
it is scarcely useable any more except as a negative, an accusation. Many universities' 
departments, including what was the Department of Oriental Studies at the University 
of Pennsylvania, where I studied Arabic, have in fact changed their names as a result. 
Ten Years After: The Virtues of Exile 57 
(literature, culture) is virtually by definition indulging in a species of 
"orientalism" and is per force treating the other as an "Other." The 
widespread acceptance of this sophistry dovetailed perfectly with 
what I perceive as the most damaging institutional development in lit-
erary and cultural studies: nationalisation. This division into discrete 
national languages -of not just our departments but of our visions of cul-
tures and our ways of reading literatures- has become the sad hall-
mark of our times, and it has rendered the problem of understanding and 
appreciating complex cultural entities, even more difficult, I think, 
than "mere" prejudice ever did. Our fractured visions are more fractured 
than they were ten and twenty years ago and are now overtly hostile to 
notions of cultural empires and seems to be mostly seeking to identify 
and champion the most discrete and least ambiguous "identities." 
And it is, to say the least, ironic, that all of this has happened at 
precisely the historical moment at which we should, if anything, see 
clearly the absurd premises and tragic consequences of these urges to so 
neatly define "identity." The recent tragedy of the destruction of the 
last iteration of the Ottoman Empire, the mutilation of Yugoslavia into 
"national" sectors, with its attendant denials (including genocidal 
ones) of religious and cultural tolerances and admixtures and kinships 
must be seen -although it rarely is- as a lamentable repetition of the 
end of the medieval era so powerfully marked by the year 1492. That 
year that does best represent not merely simple hatred of "others" - it 
is all too easy, and fundamentally false, to see it as the simple expul-
sion of "Jews" and the repression of "Islam" which will lead to the ex-
pulsion of "Arabs." What 1492 best represents (and I have written about 
this at some length in Shards of Love, a book that I think of as a 
"sequel" to The Arabic Role) is the utter fallacy of such reductive no-
tions of identities, notions based on the false belief that there really 
are (or were) such essentially pure identities and that they should be 
"understood" as such: in political reality by the (often bloody) asser-
tion of their sectors of dominance, and in the intellectual realm by the 
elevation of such divisions as the principal paradigms and divisions of 
our expertise and interest. And whether the impetus and justification 
for these assertions of essentially uncontaminated identity come from 
"old-fashioned" prejudice or newly-chic identity politics -from anti-
Semitism, in other words, or from the current practice of studying 
"Jewish" literature (or some diabolical combination of the two)- the 
results are disastrous and blinding. 
They blind us to the fact that, at least in the history of "the West," 
which we are still writing, cultural achievements of transcendent value 
are rarely "pure." And that even when political realities "success-
fully" impose such divisions into clear-cut identities - when Spain in 
58 Maria Rosa Menocal 
1492 expels its Jews and in 1609 its Muslims, when Israel is defined as a 
Jewish state, when Yugoslavia is carved up as it has been - the 
"success" is dependent on the radical falsification of history, the 
denial of the fact that Jews had been Spaniards for a millennium and 
were native Arabic speakers, or the denial of the fact that Arabs may 
be Christian and speak Hebrew as a native tongue, or the denial of the 
fact that Europe today (not to speak of America) is peopled with Mus-
lims who are originally of every conceivable ethnicity, some of them, 
indeed, originally and "authentically" as European as any Christian. 
The "success" of orthodoxies of all sorts must always be read against 
the far more complex and tragic truths that sometimes only literature 
reflects. When Cervantes publishes part I of the Quixote, in 1605 - it 
is at a moment in Spanish history (called the "Siglo de Oro" or "Golden 
Age" by Hispanists) when Spain is theoretically the monolingual and 
religiously uniform modem nation - he begins that greatest of the nov-
els of the European tradition by revealing that the book is actually a 
"translation." But even the lovely conceit of the translation, which at 
first sight we think is rather simply executed from "Arabic" to 
"Spanish" by a Morisco (what we call sixteenth-century Spaniards 
who clung to the Islamic faith of their ancestors even though most of 
them did not, in fact, know Arabic) is as much more complex as the real-
ities that are every day denied. The subtler truth, which remains half-
veiled in that most subtle of literary texts, is that the "original" text is 
itself impossibly corrupt: it is no doubt an "aljamiado" text, written in 
the noble but soon to be forgotten Arabic script, in a language that is the 
apocalyptic Spanish-laced-with-Arabic language that was one of 
Spain's very real languages, even when its existence was officially for-
bidden - and then finally expelled in 1609. But exiles have a way of 
being the condition of literature - and past and future exiles lie at the 
very beginning and at the heart of the adventures of the wandering Don 
Quixote. And it is perhaps in the full embracing of the revelations and 
virtues of exile, and of the rejection of the nationalisms and other illu-
sory orthodoxies of identity that have taken over literary and cultural 
studies in these last several decades, that we can read the past more 
truthfully. 
The best work that has been done in the past decade, and that is 
likely to be done in the near future, on "Muslims" and "Arabic culture" 
in medieval (or, for that matter, modem) Europe, must be either implic-
itly or explicitly rooted in the rejection of the simplicities and isola-
tions of its own categories and terms, in an appreciation of the profound 
ambivalences of such readily nameable identities, and of the necessary 
interconnectedness with other (equally ambivalent) identities. Among 
the most important recent publications are a series of translations and 
Ten Years After: The Virtues of Exile 59 
reprintings of very old works that reflect and dwell on the complexities 
of religious-literary identities: the republication in post-Franco Spain 
of Miguel Asin Palacios' controversial masterpiece La escatologia 
musulmana en la Divina Comedia, which first appeared in 1919, fol-
lowed close-on by its first translation into Italian, and translations, for 
the first time in both modem Spanish and modem Italian, of the Arabic 
mi<raj text which existed, in Dante's lifetime, in Latin and vernacular 
translation, and which Asin posits played a pivotal role in Dante's 
thinking and writing on the imaginative structure of the afterlife.3 
The translations of this remarkable and central text, after some 
five hundred years of widespread inaccessibility, reveal the other 
virtue that must be cultivated, a virtue clearly championed by Hugh of 
St. Victor: translation of every sort, and languages that explicitly 
speak intelligibly to others. And it is in that spirit (and in the rejec-
tion of the orthodoxies of national-language departments that claim 
that we can only know and read in "original" languages, as well as the 
disciplinary orthodoxy that makes scholars write in languages that 
are only readable to the minuscule clan of which they are a part) that 
the other most important development in this decade has been the pub-
lication of translations of the multifaceted "Jewish" poetry of al-An-
dalus. These volumes of translations with invaluable introductions, as 
well as a limited number of important studies stand in stark (and rebuk-
ing) contrast to those of the Arabic-Romance muwashshal)at with 
which they are inextricably linked. 
While "kharja" studies became a wasteland of ever more spe-
cialised and unreadable technical minutia, turned ever further inwards 
and a prudish mockery of the original spirit of poetic and linguistic 
promiscuity that bred that exquisitely hybrid poetry, a handful of 
scholars and translators (Pagis, Scheindlin, Brann, Cole) who openly 
embraced the virtues of exile that permeate the culture of the Andalu-
sian Jewish community have produced a growing body of work that is 
opened outwards instead.4 Among the many benefits of these marvel-
lously door-opening studies -and among the delicious ironies- is that 
the non-specialist (which means anyone who has not done a decade's 
training as an Arabist) is far more likely to get a sense of the richness 
and openness of Arabic poetry and culture in al-Andalus from those vol-
3 II Libra del/a scala di Maametta, trans. Roberto Rossi Testa (Milan, 1991), and Libra de la es-
cala de Mahama, trans. Jose Luis Oliver Domingo (Madrid, 1996). For full bibliography 
and a history of the reprintings of the work of Asin Palacios see my review article "An 
Andalusianist's Last Sigh," LA Car6nica 24.2: 179-189. 
4 For a full discussion of all these works see my review article "More Sighs," La Car6nica 
25:1. 
60 Maria Rosa Menocal 
umes than from most of the work done by mainstream "Andalusianists" 
(Spaniards, Arabs and Americans alike), who principally write out of 
that belated and purifying notion of "Arabism" that so distorts most as-
pects of European-Arab culture. Al-Andalus produced a culture so 
"corrupt," in all directions, that its literature even includes iterations 
as unexpected and complexly veiled as the Divine Comedy's relation to 
the mi<raj tradition, or the varieties of "polymorphism" that are re-
vealed in the poetries of lbn ' Arabi or Ramon Llull or Judah Halevi. 
Indeed, all the other principal fine examples of criticism and 
scholarship recently published (or that I am aware are being written) 
are all, like that of Asin and like those revealing the infinite complex-
ities of Sefarad's poetry, centred on the most corrupt and impure texts, 
and guided by exilic principles: the studies and editions of Luce Lopez 
Baralt, especially the book-length study of the thoroughly "Islami-
cised" and "Arabised" Catholic saint, San Juan de la Cruz, and her 
edition of the Morisco "Kama Sutra espafiol"; L. Patrick Harvey's 
magnificent history of Islamic Spain between 1250 and 1500, which for 
the first time treats the fate of the Muslim populations of that period 
as a continuum, regardless of whether they lived in Christian states or 
Muslim states, as well as his forthcoming sequel, the history of the 
Moriscos themselves; and the study and edition that Consuelo L6pez-
Morillas has recently begun of the only complete Qur'an translated into 
Spanish, written in that same aljamiado that is the "authentic" origi-
nal of the Quixote within no more than a few years of Cervantes' text. 
In the destruction of the whole of the magnificent library of Sara-
jevo several years ago, it now appears only one significant book was res-
cued, the famous manuscript called the "Sarajevo Haggada." A Hag-
gada is of course a prayer book that is, appropriately, the collection of 
prayers to be said on Passover, the eve of exodus, but despite its name 
this gorgeous and elaborately illuminated manuscript, considered the 
best of its kind anywhere in the world, and much treasured by Jews ev-
erywhere, is not "Sarajevan" at all, nor "merely" Jewish, but rather 
"Spanish." And what can "Spanish" possibly mean, what do I mean it 
to be that is so different from what it seems to be in most other uses of 
this and other "identity" tags? Made in Spain in the late thirteenth 
century, it is, to put it most reductively, one of the many reflections of a 
Jewish culture that flourished and had its Golden Age, the Golden Age, 
precisely because it adopted the virtues of exile, and found its dis-
tinctly impure voice within an Arabic culture that was itself expansive 
and promiscuous and often exilic itself. It was thus altogether fitting 
that the precious object, the book that inscribes the story of the exile 
from Egypt, was carried out of Spain by members of the exiled 
Sephardic community in 1492 and remained, for the better part of the 
Ten Years After: The Virtues of Exile 61 
subsequent five hundred years, well-protected and cherished inside the 
Ottoman Empire, itself a remarkable example of the great good of em-
pires, which learn how to absorb and tolerate and intermarry 
"identities," and which became, after 1492, the place of refuge of most 
Sephardic Jews and of many Andalusian Muslims. But the manuscript 
had to be rescued once again, during World War 11, and it was when a 
Muslim curator in Sarajevo, as attached as most Muslims are to the 
memory of Spain, saved that Spanish Haggada from Nazi butchers. 
Surely, the morals of the story are perfectly clear: to understand 
the richness of our heritage we must be the guardians of the Haggada, 
the Muslim librarian who was not an Arab, of course, but who in saving 
the manuscript was fulfilling the best of the promises of Islamic Spain 
and Europe, and we must be the translators who reveal the exquisite 
ambivalence and sometimes painful conflict of identity of Judah 
Halevi, whose poetry is sung in so heavy an Arabic accent, and we must 
be the guardians and defenders of the interfaith marriage between the 
Christian girls who sang in corrupt Romance and the refined poets of 
the Arab courts, which is left inscribed, as a passionate and great love, 
in the muwash-shal:tat. We must, in other words, reject the falsehoods 
of nations in our work, and reveal, with the exquisite lbn 'Arabi, the 
virtues of what he more simply calls love. "My heart can take on any 
form," he tells us, and then he simply names those temples at which he 
prays, the temples that inhabit him: the gazelle's meadow, the 
monks' cloister, the Torah, the Ka'ba. These are the temples whose 
priests we need to be, if we are to understand what any of this history is 
about, and it is only there that there can be any future understanding of 
the complex "identity" of Europe in the Middle Ages, and almost un-
doubtedly in its present and future as well. 
Yale University 


Ten Years After: The Virtues of Exile

Onesta, Patrizia

Lauzengier-Wāshī-Index, Gardador-Custo: The "Enemies of Love" in Povençal, Arabo-Andalusian, and Latin Poetry

Granara, William

Ibn Sabīl: Crossing Boundaries in the Biography of Asad ibn al-Furāt

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