Sicily and the medieval Mediterranean: Communication networks and inter-regional exchange.

摘要

Located in the center of the Mediterranean, with access to both northern and southern shores of the sea as well as routes between east and west, Sicily appears to be an obvious candidate for the position of hub within medieval Mediterranean shipping and travel patterns. As a hub, Sicily would have been indispensable to any entity seeking political or economic supremacy in the Mediterranean region, and an important player in the trans-Mediterranean economy. However, my analysis of Sicily's place within the Mediterranean system of communication and exchange reveals that the island was not a major hub of political, military, social, or commercial relations during the Byzantine or Islamic periods (sixth--eleventh centuries). Although individual travelers and commercial goods went to and from Sicily throughout the Middle Ages, it was only with the advent of the Normans in the mid-eleventh century that Sicily became a base for political and economic power radiating out of the island. In order to more fully understand these patterns of travel between Sicily and other Mediterranean regions, this dissertation places the island within its larger Mediterranean context across a broad chronological framework, from the sixth to the twelfth centuries.;Rather than being a hub, during the Byzantine and Islamic periods, Sicily functioned as a province of larger states and thus participated in more restricted patterns of communication and exchange. These communication networks are reconstructed from data about the travelers and products that passed through the island and why those people and things traveled to or from Sicily. Such patterns of communication included economic, diplomatic, administrative, social, religious and cultural contacts between Sicily and other areas of the Mediterranean. Islamic Sicily was in the closest contact with the Islamic regions of North Africa and Egypt. After the Norman conquest, Sicily's rulers were able to exploit economic and cultural connections to North Africa in order to develop the island's simultaneous linkages with multiple regions of the Mediterranean. Therefore, it was only due to Norman policies of expansion into the central and eastern Mediterranean that Sicily's interconnectivity broadened to make the island a regionally important center of shipping and communications.