Which of the following about afro-eurasian trade is supported by the map above?

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When the process of compilation of this volume started in 2014, migration was without doubt already a “hot” topic. Yet, it were only the events of 2015, 1 which put migration on top of the discussion about the Euro and the economic crisis in the agenda of politicians, the wider public and the media. In this heated debate, the events of past migrations have been employed in a biased manner as arguments against a new “Völkerwanderung” destined to disintegrate Europe as it did with the (Western) Roman Empire. Thus, the present volume could be seen, among other things, also as an effort to provide a corrective to such oversimplifying recourses to the ancient and medieval period. 2 It should be noted, however, that it was planned and drafted before the events.

The volume emerged from a series of papers given at the European Social Science History Conference in Vienna in April 2014 in two sessions on “Early Medieval Migrations” organized by Professors Dirk Hoerder and Johannes Koder. Their aim was to integrate the migration history of the medieval period into the wider discourse of migration studies and to include recent research.The three editors have added contributions by specialists for other periods and regions in order to cover as wide an area and a spectrum of forms of migration as possible. Still, it was not possible to cover all regions, periods and migration movements with the same weight; as one of the anonymous reviewers properly pointed out, the “work’s centre of gravity is (…) between the Eastern Mediterranean region and the Tigris/Euphrates”, with Africa not included in a similar way as Asia or Europe. Therefore, the following sections of the introduction aim first to provide some methodological considerations and then to contextualise the individual chapters within an overview on the wider migration history of the “Afro-Eurasian Transition Zone” during the centuries between 300 and 1500 a.d., in Western European historiographical tradition called the “medieval” ones. 3

1 Medieval Migration History and its Study

Migration can been defined as permanent or long-term dislocation of the place of residence, both by individuals and by groups of any size. 4 Earlier research on the medieval period focused on the upper end of this scale, such as the assumed mass migration of peoples during the “Völkerwanderung” of the 4th–6th centuries a.d. and its impact on the Late Roman Empire and its territorial and “cultural” integrity. 5 This approach found its basis in the Latin and Greek historiography of late antiquity, which actually described a “landslide” of “barbarians” affecting the Imperium Romanum, especially starting with the “arrival” of the Huns in 375. 6 This culminated in a first shocking defeat of the Roman imperial army at Adrianople (modern-day Edirne in Turkey) in 378. 7 However, scholars of the 18th–20th centuries were equally interested in these migrating peoples as potential founding fathers of various “modern” nation-states such as France or Germany. These efforts in historiographical “nation-building” spread from Western Europe into Eastern Europe and beyond, creating similar discourses onto other early medieval migrations such as the one of the Slavs (in the 6th–9th centuries) or of the Magyars/Hungarians (in the 9th–10th centuries). 8 Written evidence was increasingly enriched with archaeological findings, which, however, were also primarily interpreted within the framework of ancient and medieval historiography, trying to identify ethnic groups named in the sources with specific material cultures. Thereby, it was attempted to trace migration routes back beyond the horizon of the Latin and Greek sources to Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, Central Asia or – in the case of the Huns – even to East Asia, where connections were sought with ethnic labels from Chinese sources (such as the “Xiongnu”, for the first time by Joseph de Guignes in 1756). 9

These attempts at grand linear narratives, aiming at “histories of origin” of modern-day peoples and their entitlements to “nation-hood” within specific geographical borders, obscured the actual complexity of archaeological and written evidence and its inconsistencies and obstreperousness against simpleinterpretations. When the massacres of World War ii at least partly de-legitimised the nationalist history writing of the previous decades, more nuanced interpretative models gained currency. It became evident that there is almost never a one-to-one equivalence of archaeological findings and historiography, and that the latter implied a high flexibility of ethnic identities. Ethnic labels as well as individuals and groups could move from one social formation to another, and some groups not only became visible for the first time in Roman, Persian or Chinese historiography but they actually took shape on the frontiers of these imperial spheres or even on their soil. Assumptions on a fixed composition and ethnicity of these “peoples” over centuries, symbolised through colourful balls or arrows moving across maps in historical atlases, were thus rejected. Migration as such was identified as decisive for group and identity formation. Furthermore, the settlement of these groups on new territories and their interaction with long-established populations and elites were now interpreted less as the results of conquest and subjugation but of negotiations and processes of accommodation and assimilation. As Walter Pohl has summed up: “Unfortunately, we do not know much about the ethnic identities beyond the borders of the empire. (…) It is not a people (…) who wandered, but various groups that re-formed themselves after multiple breaks, and which in doing so attached themselves to (ethnic) traditions. (…) The struggles for power in the Empire required large groups whose success strengthened their ethnic cohesion”. 10 Similar models have then been adopted from the Late Roman case for other migration processes of the period, from 4th–7th century China to the Arab conquest of the 7th–8th centuries or the Seljuq invasion into Byzantine Anatolia in the 11th century. 11

The earlier research focus on early medieval phenomena of mass migration has been complemented with an attention on the mobility of smaller groups or even individuals and its potential impact on cultural change. 12 Migrations could be seasonal or circular and across smaller ranges, both in “sedentary” and in “nomadic” societies, such as cases of transhumance or recurrent labour migration. “Trade diasporas” have become a special field of research. These refer to “communities of merchants living in interconnected networks among strangers”, such as the Sogdians between Iran and China in the 4th–9th centuries, and diasporas in general, such as Jewish or Armenian communities or other ethnic/religious minorities. 13 The impact of individual travellers such as missionaries (as in the prominent cases of Christian Irish monks migrating to mainland Europe in the 6th to 8th centuries) or members of elites (cases of marriages to foreign courts, for instance) equally has to be taken into consideration. 14

Already in the 1880s, E.G. Ravenstein classified mobile individuals by distance and time into local migrants, short-journey migrants, long-journey migrants, migrants by stages and temporary migrants. His “Laws of Migration” identified economic factors as main causes of migration within a framework of “push and pull”, where socio-economic or political conditions in the place of origin motivate mobility while the character of these conditions in the place of destination attracts mobility. Of course, this framework underwent several modifications since then, but core concepts are still applied today, especially within economic theories of mobility. 15

A “global perspective” on mobility was developed based on the “World-System Theory” as established by Immanuel Wallerstein and as adapted by Janet Abu-Lughod for the “late medieval World System”. A “world system” is characterised by a differentiation between highly developed core areas, less developed peripheries and semi-peripheries in between, connected via “labour supply systems”, within which mobility takes place. Especially for “core centres” such as Venice, attracting work force from nearby and far away “peripheries” across the Eastern Mediterranean, the value of such an approach can be illustrated for the late medieval period (see especially the chapter of Charalampos Gasparis). 16

Such a macro-perspective, however, pays little attention to the agency of individuals, while recent research on migration has very much focused on the interplay between “structure” and individual “agency”. These concepts have been described by Robert A. McLeman as follows: “The terms structure and agency are inherently linked, but their precise definitions can vary according to the context in which they are used. In simplest terms, agency refers to the degree of freedom an individual has in choosing his or her actions, while structure refers to the societal norms, obligations, and institutions that shape and set limits on the individual’s actions”. 17 Structure and agency are also core concepts within the “systems approach” towards migration phenomena as developed recently. 18 It focuses on the interplay between socio-economic, political and spatial structures both in the “society of departure” 19 and in the “receiving societies”, 20 which very much defined the scope of action and the actual agency of individuals and groups. Equally, it highlights the significance of social networks established and/or used by individuals to effect mobility as well as integration within the socio-economic framework in the places of destination (for such an approach see the chapter of Johannes Preiser-Kapeller). 21 Moreover, Charles Tilly analysed the relevance of “solidarity networks” which “provide a setting for life at the destination, a basis for solidarity and mutual aid as well as for division and conflict” for the mobility of individuals. He emphasised, however, the potentially constraining effects of such networks through which “members of immigrant groups often exploited one another as they would not have dared to exploit the native-born”; he also made clear that “every inclusion also constitutes an exclusion”. 22 On the whole, migration systems have been defined as “a set of delicately balanced social and economic processes that emerged gradually over many years” in order to allow for “population movements” that had a “characteristic form, and over time (…) acquired relatively stable structure and a well-defined geographic organization” following “predictable paths”. 23 Among the examples discussed in the present volume, especially the various imperial formations (Roman/Byzantine, Sasanian, Arab, Mongol, Venetian, etc.) could be identified as migration systems. For their expansion and maintenance of imperial rule across Afro-Eurasia, they depended on the “occupational” mobility and migration of elites, troops and other populations at large, established enduring axes of mobility within their sphere of influence and thus have been described as “regimes of entanglements”. 24

To what extent such theoretical approaches in general can be applied on the periods and regions under consideration in the present volume of course depends on the amount and character of source evidence. 25 Across all centuries, we have to deal with “the disadvantages of scanty information and virtual non-existence of worthwhile statistics”, as one of the anonymous reviewers pointed out. We are of course informed best on individuals of an elite background, “cosmopolitan nobles and their households”, as Dirk Hoerder has called them, but sometimes we also encounter “itinerant administrators” and other office holders or military commanders in the service of one of the empires or polities dealt with in the following pages. The same is true for “pilgrims and clerics”, not least because of the often close connection of religious function and “writtenness”. The later was also relevant for “merchants and traders” who were mobile as “economically informed actors”, although with some exceptions – such as the Cairo Genizah documents starting already in the late 9th century – the bulk of our evidence in this regard comes from the 13th–15th centuries. During this period, we sometimes encounter individual representatives (and individual agency) of the “rural people, labourers and servants”, while before that time they are often aggregated under ethnic or socio-economic umbrella terms in the sources, and their mobility is frequently described as coerced by the state or forced due to warfare or other catastrophes. The extreme form of forced mobility is of course slavery, which will also feature prominently in some of the chapters of the present volume. Nevertheless, Dirk Hoerder has suggested keeping at least at the back of one’s mind the probably often-considerable degree of “agency” of individuals within non-elite strata of societies also in those cases when it does not become visible in our sources. 26 The longitudinal perspective on more than a millennium of migration history in the present volume should therefore also help to explore possibilities for individual agencies when comparing different periods and regions within the so-called “Middle Ages”.

2 An Overview of Migration History in the Afro-Eurasian Transition Zone (4th–15th Century)

Already the original selection of papers had focused on what we called “Afro-Eurasian Transition Zone”, the vast area between the Arctic Sea and the Indian Ocean, and the Mediterranean and Central Asia, where the three continents of the “Old World” meet. The high density of overlapping routes (of commerce, pilgrimage or other forms of mobility), of imperial as well as religious and cultural spheres, made it a most promising area for the exploration of past migration. 27 In what follows, we will present a short chronological overview of the history of these migration processes from the 4th to the 15th century a.d., addressed to non-specialist readers in particular. 28 Such a macro-perspective of necessity prioritises larger-scale migration movements and often resorts to the (especially ethnic) “umbrella terms”, which often hide the actual complexity of the emergence, composition and cohesion of these groups, as discussed above. Nevertheless, the following pages allow for a glimpse at the multiplicity of mobilities across various spatial ranges within the selected period and area and provide a historical embedding of the chapters in this volume.

The two centuries after the year 375 a.d. (the “arrival” of the Huns in Eastern Europe) have been identified as the period of “Barbarian invasions” into the Roman sphere. It transformed the Western Roman Empire into a mosaic of “Germanic” kingdoms from Anglo-Saxon England via the Frankish Merovingian realms and the Visigoths in Spain to the Ostrogoths in Italy and the Vandals in North Africa. 29 The latter two polities, however, were “re-conquered” in the 530s to 550s by the Eastern Roman Empire, which continued the imperial tradition from Constantinople, the “New Rome”. Yet, large parts of Italy were again lost after 568 to the invasion of the Lombards, which was interpreted as the “last” of the Germanic migrations of Late Antiquity. 30 Around the same time (and originally as allies of the Lombards), the Avars established themselves as heirs of the 5th century Steppe Empire of the Huns in the Carpathian Basin. Their arrival in the steppes to the north of the Black Sea in 557, however, indicates more far-reaching political upheavals beyond Europe. Most probably (although this identification is still contested), a core element of the people now emerging as the Avars was constituted by groups of the Rouran, whose empire in the steppes north of China had been crashed in 552 by a new alliance of tribes under the leadership of the Gök-Turks. 31 The Turks in turn achieved dominance in the vast areas between China and the Caspian Sea, allying themselves with the Persian Empire of the Sasanians in 560 in order to conquer the realms of the Hephthalites, the last empire of the so-called “Iranian Huns”. These various groups had migrated into the regions between Iran, Central Asia and India since the mid-4th century and had troubled the neighbouring Sasanians and the Gupta Empire in Northern India, whose collapse around 500 was accelerated by invasions of the “Hunas”. 32

In the west, the Sasanian Empire was competing with the Roman Empire across the Afro-Eurasian transition zone from the Caucasus via the Middle East to South Arabia and East Africa, also through proxy wars between regional powers allied with the one or the other imperial centre. One of these conflict zones emerged between the Kingdom of Aksum in modern-day Ethiopia and Eritrea and the Kingdom of Himyar in modern-day Yemen, especially after the former became Christianised and therefore got into closer contact with Constantinople from the 330s onwards. As George Hatke, however, demonstrates in his chapter, already the previous centuries had been characterised by intensive mobility across the Red Sea, in particular with groups from Aksum migrating to Southwest Arabia and intervening into the wars between the competing polities of the region before Himyar achieved hegemony. Warfare and migration got especially intensive again in the 6th century, with Himyar becoming a client state of Aksum for some time before Sasanian Persia intervened with an army around 570 – an intervention which led to the settlement of Iranian troops and workers in that area. 33

The two predominant empires of Western Afro-Eurasia, (Eastern) Rome and (Sasanian) Persia mutually undermined their power with long and devastating wars (especially in the years 571–590 and 602–628) before they were shattered by the newly emerged community (“umma”) of Islam. Under its banner, the now unified Arab tribes occupied the richest Roman provinces in Syria, Palestine and Egypt between 632 and 642 and conquered the Persian Empire up to Central Asia in its entirety by 652. These campaigns included also large-scale movements of people into the new territories (see below).

Moreover, in the European provinces of Eastern Rome, since the 6th century, groups of Slavs had migrated across the entire Balkans as well as into eastern Central Europe. This process intensified with the establishment of Avar power in the Carpathian Basin after 568 (see above), which additionally weakened Constantinople’s control over the Danube frontier. 34 Johannes Koder discusses in his chapter the Slavic immigration in the Balkans as “the most relevant population movement for the present ethnic composition of south eastern Europe”, extending to the southernmost parts of the Peloponnesian peninsula. Koder mostly follows a “traditional” approach based on written and onomastic evidence, which has been used to favour an interpretation of large-scale Slavic migration into the Balkans since the second half of the 6th century. In contrast, Florin Curta provides a more critical analysis of the current state of debate of migrations in the archaeology of Eastern and Southeastern Europe during the Early Middle Ages, which casts doubt on the thesis that Slavic migrations across the Danube took place at large already in the 6th century. 35 Most problematic in his view is the relation between written and archaeological sources and their attempted combination in unsuitable models. 36 This also extends to a field, which has become even more prominent in the last years: the use of ancient dna and other natural scientific indicators. 37 Therefore, the chapters of Koder and Curta can be read as illustrative case studies for these possible tensions between historiography and archaeology.

The situation on the Balkans was further complicated for Byzantium with the establishment of the polity of the Bulgars. Some of the steppe formations under this name making up a (short-living) empire north of the Black Sea from ca. 680 onwards occupied territories at both banks of the Lower Danube to the north of the Balkan Mountains, integrating Slavic groups into their realm. 38 Since the 660s (after the collapse of the Western Turkic Khanate), the steppes to the north of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea were dominated by a federation of various ethnic groups under the hegemony of the Khazars, whose political centre was first located to the northeast of the Caucasus in modern-day Dagestan and since the 730s at the lower Volga river (with the until today un-located capital of Itil). 39

One factor intensifying these various crises in the late 6th and 7th century may have been climate change. The “Late Antique Little Ice Age” between 536 and 660 brought about significantly cooler and more adverse climatic conditions across Afro-Eurasia. These also promoted the outbreak and diffusion of a major global plague epidemic that returned in waves between 542 and 750 especially in the west of Afro-Eurasia and possibly led to demographic depression in various areas. 40 Around the time when the plague disappeared, an Arab army and Chinese troops of the Tang dynasty clashed in the Battle of Talas (in modern-day Kyrgyzstan) in July 751, thus also symbolising the new geopolitical framework of Afro-Eurasia of the 8th–9th centuries. 41

The expansion and maintenance of imperial rule across Afro-Eurasia included the “occupational” mobility and migration of elites at large. 42 The rapid expansion of the caliphate from the Mediterranean to North Africa and Spain as well as to Iran, Central Asia and the borders of India in the 7th and 8th centuries, for instance, was accompanied by large migrations of elites and their followers from the Arabian Peninsula to these areas, which also allowed for the spatial diffusion of Islam. The new arrivals did not represent a homogeneous mass, but consisted of different, even competing groups, mostly linked by tribal loyalties, who by no means always acted according to central planning. 43 The Islamic expansion set also other ethnic groups in motion, such as the Berbers from North Africa who played a decisive role in the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in 711 where they settled alongside the Arabs. 44 The new Abbasid dynasty in the mid-8th century found supporters among regional elites in Eastern Iran and Central Asia. In the following century, several members of these groups migrated in waves as retinues of the Abbasids to Iraq and their newly founded capital of Baghdad in 762 as well as into other regions of the Caliphate. 45 For the case of Iranians in 9th century Egypt, Lucian Reinfandt demonstrates how even the migration of smaller groups of administrative elites could affect local conditions and “adjacent social milieus” in the area of destination. In addition, Myriam Wissa deals with Islamic Egypt, using the Christian-Egyptian’s revolt of 831/832 as case study for the interaction between “indigenous” population and “newcomers” after the Arab conquest. These migrations from Central Asia, however, also had an involuntary aspect. Lutz Berger surveys the case of military slavery in the medieval Islamic world up to the 13th century. He demonstrates that “far from being an extraordinary institution”, it was “just one instance of military work being left to people from the margin (socially or geographically) of a society”; during the period under consideration, especially the northern peripheries of the Islamic World from Central Asia to Caucasia served as sources of “mamlūks”. 46

Yet, besides the military sector, slave trade mobilized at large individuals and communities across western Afro-Eurasia. Slavic-speaking groups from Eastern and Southeastern Europe now became an important “source” of unfree labour from the 7th century onwards. Latin texts called these groups “slavi”, Greek ones “sklaviniai” and Arabic authors “saqaliba”. The modern word “slave” derives most likely from these terms. The Slavs became the victims of military campaigns and slave hunts by the Frankish kingdom, the Italian maritime cities, the Bulgarian Empire, Byzantium, the Vikings, and the Khazars, as well as by competing Slavic neighbours who sold prisoners to traders from these realms. Trade routes ran in the west from the Frankish Kingdom and Italy to Spain and North Africa, in the eastern Mediterranean from the Balkans to Egypt and Syria, in the Caucasus from the Khazar Empire to Armenia and Mesopotamia and across Central Asia from Eastern Europe to eastern Iran and to Iraq. This trade over the centuries probably “mobilized” tens of thousands of people against their will over long distances, given the number of Arab silver coins partly traded in return for slaves to Eastern and Northern Europe. 47 Another main source of slaves was (East) Africa, whose coastal cities since the 9th century in general became focal points of mercantile and missionary activity from the Islamic world, leading to the emergence of the later so-called “Swahili”. In a similar way, Islamic mobility also affected the kingdoms of West Africa to the south of the Sahara. 48 The slaves becoming one of the commodities exchanged in these newly emerging networks were called “Zanj” in the Arabic sources (the origin of the term is unclear). In various texts, they are described as esteemed workers, especially in agriculture, but also characterized with “racist” prejudice. 49 The growing number of Zanj can be derived from their mobilization in the context of various uprisings from the later 7th century onwards. In the 9th century, many slaves from Africa worked in southern Iraq and neighbouring Khuzestan (now southwest Iran) in agriculture, especially on sugar cane plantations, or in the drainage of larger wetlands. These swamps also served as a refuge for rebels, robbers and religious deviants, and from this combination emerged a major uprising of the Zanj, who even established their own state in the years 869 to 883, contributing to the further destabilization of Abbasid rule and thus the transformation of the geo-political world order of the 7th–9th centuries. 50

Youval Rotman in his chapter examines how the Byzantines resorted to “forced migration and slavery”, which “were (…) two sides of the same coin”. He equally demonstrates how shifting religious borders became decisive for the (re)location of areas of provenance of slaves. The Byzantine Empire, in turn, attracted the movement of Syrian and Palestinian populations from these regions after the Arab conquest of the 630s–640s, as Panagiotis Theodoropoulos surveys in his chapter in comparison with other migrations within the Caliphate. 51 A similar pattern of migration can be equally observed for the Armenians, who had contributed especially to the military work force of the Eastern Roman Empire already before the Arab conquest, as Johannes Preiser-Kapeller explores in his chapter. Besides elite and military mobility, also (deliberate, coerced and forced) migrations of Armenians at large as well as commercial, occupational and religious mobility can be observed between the 5th and the 11th century. 52 For the same period, Yannis Stouraitis establishes in his chapter a typology of forced migration of groups in the geopolitical sphere of the East Roman Empire, which was mainly a consequence of war or state coercion, and he seeks to scrutinize the conditions and realities of such movements for their participants. 53

With the Varangians, a new group of migrants arrived in Byzantium in various capacities (merchants, mercenaries, but also looters) from the early 9th century onwards. They came from Scandinavia via the rivers of Eastern Europe and the Black Sea to the Bosporus. Together with Slavic groups, they founded the princedom(s) of the “Rus” in Eastern Europe that were Christianised from Constantinople after 988. 54 Alongside new steppe groups, emerging in the sources as “Magyars” (in Byzantine Greek texts actually first called “Tourkoi”) and as “Pechenegs” (in Byzantine Greek “Patzinakitai”) and migrating along the north of the Black Sea from East to West, the Varangians contributed to a de-stabilisation of the Khazar Empire as well (whose elite in the early 9th century converted to Judaism, probably under the influence of itinerant Jewish merchants as described in Arab sources under the term ar-Rādhāniyya). The Khazar Empire eventually collapsed due to attacks by the Rus in the 960s. By that time, the Magyars had established themselves in the Carpathian Basin (since the 890s) and the Pechenegs to the north of the Black Sea. 55 In his introductory essay, Dirk Hoerder discusses various facets and motives of mobility between Scandinavia, Eastern Europe and Byzantium from the 9th to the 15th century such as “migration”, “travel”, “commerce”, or “cultural transfer”. His methodological considerations on the enduring effects of human mobility in the long term as well as on the short-term dynamics of the networks and spatial axes of migration set the tone for the entire volume.

After the crisis of the 7th–8th century, the Byzantine Empire recovered economically, demographically and finally also territorially in the 9th–11th century. This process attracted also merchants from the growing Italian cities of Amalfi, Venice, Genoa and Pisa in increasing numbers 56 as well as migrants of Syrian and Armenian backgrounds. On the other hand, Syriac- and Armenian-speaking population became subjects of Constantinople with the expansion in the East from the 960s to the 1060s, as did Slavic-speaking people after the conquest of the Bulgarian Empire in the Balkans between the 970s and 1020s. 57 The enlarged Byzantine Empire of the 11th century became more exposed to new large-scale migration movements, which turned into invasions of Byzantine territories. 58 The remaining provinces in Southern Italy were lost to the Normans by 1071. These had originally moved as mercenaries from Normandy to the region and between 1061 and 1091, they conquered Arab-ruled Sicily which had become the target of migration from the Islamic world since the 9th century. The emerging Norman Kingdom remained a threat for Byzantine territories to the east of the Adriatic until the late 12th century. 59 North of the Black Sea, the nomadic confederacy of the Pechenegs disintegrated due to the advance of the Oghuz and then Cumans (or Kipchaks) which in turn mobilised Pecheneg groups against the Byzantine Danube frontier. Some of these came to an agreement with Constantinople and were settled on imperial soil (or did the same in the Kingdom of Hungary). 60 The greatest threat for the Byzantine core provinces in Asia Minor, however, emerged from the East with the migration of new Turkish groups. They, partly under the leadership of the Seljuq dynasty, had been able to take over control over the former provinces of the Abbasid Caliphate in Central Asia and Eastern Iran since 1040 before capturing Baghdad itself in 1055. 61 The decisive moment for their advance into Anatolia is traditionally connected with the defeat of the Byzantine army at Manzikert in summer 1071. As Alexander Beihammer demonstrates in his chapter, however, the Byzantine frontier organisation had already been weakened long before that, whereas conflicts within the Byzantine elite after 1071 allowed for the establishment of various not only Turkish, but also Norman and Armenian power structures. In any case, Beihammer’s critical review of the sources highlights the actual complex dynamics of the “loss of Anatolia”, which cannot be described as one coherent process of Turkish “Landnahme”. 62 The resulting vulnerable situation of Byzantium contributed to the mobilisation of thousands of warriors and other migrants in Western Europe in the context of the Crusading movement, initiated by the Papacy in 1095. From the beginning, Constantinople viewed the arrivals from the West as potential allies but also as a threat, especially due to the participation of the Normans from Southern Italy in the First Crusade. This first “armed pilgrimage” was conducive for the Byzantine recovery of territories in the western and southern coastline of Asia Minor, but the breach of agreement between the Byzantine emperor and the Crusaders resulted in the latter establishing a series of independent princedoms along the Levantine coast after the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099. The so-called Crusader States attracted the merchants of the Italian cities and settlers from Western Europe. They followed a similar pattern of “conquest and colonisation”, as Robert Bartlett has called it, along the fringes of “Latin Europe” from the Iberian Peninsula to the Elbe (including the “German” settlement in Central and Eastern Europe) and from Ireland to Sicily between the 11th and 13th century. In contrast, Muslim populations from these regions were forced to abandon them and migrate to other parts of the Islamic world. 63 Overall, the 12th century was characterised by a significant increase of “Latin” presence in former and current Byzantine territories and the Eastern Mediterranean. Domestic political turmoil, alongside a series of military campaigns which either caused damage to Byzantine territories (for instance the Third Crusade, 1189/1190) or were aimed at conquering them (for instance the Norman conquest of Thessaloniki, 1185), resulted in “anti-Latin” assaults especially in Constantinople in 1170 and 1182. Against this background, inner-dynastic conflicts in 1203 caused the diversion of the Fourth Crusade towards Constantinople, which ended with the conquest and looting of the city by the Venetians and the Crusaders in April 1204. 64

The year 1204 (despite the Byzantine “re-conquest” of Constantinople in 1261) marked the end of the politically united and centralized East Roman world. The same period saw the end of the (competing) Islamic Caliphates of the Abbasids (with the Mongol conquest of Baghdad in 1258) and the Fatimids in Egypt and Syria (with the downfall of the dynasty in Cairo in 1171). Instead, the Mongol expansion during the 13th century resulted in the establishment of the new large-scale imperial formations of the Golden Horde in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and the Ilkhanids in Iran, Iraq and Anatolia. The complete conquest of all core regions of the Eastern Islamic World by the Ilkhanids was prevented by the Mamlūk Sultanate. The latter was a regime of warrior-slaves mostly stemming from the Black Sea and the Caucasus regions, who took over power in Egypt and Syria in 1250/1252. The increased influx of these slaves into Egypt in the decades before Ayyubid rule was partly caused by the turmoil created in their regions of origins (especially the areas of the Kipchaks) due to the Mongol invasions. Cuman/Kipchak groups also settled in Hungary as well as in the Balkans and in (at that time still Byzantine) Western Asia Minor after agreements with the rulers of these areas in the 1230s and 1240s. Some of them, as other speakers of Turkish languages before and after, were even integrated into the Byzantine elite through baptism. 65

Thus, even before their more permanent conquests in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, the campaigns of Genghis Khan and his successors provoked large-scale movements of displaced populations and troops within these areas. A telling example is the last Shāh of the Khwārazm-Empire in Eastern Iran and Central Asia, Jalāl al-Dīn, who after his defeat against the Mongols in 1221 plagued the Middle East and Caucasia with the remains of his original retinue and new followers in the search for a new realm until his death in 1231. The Ayyubid Sultan of Egypt, who used them to reconquer Jerusalem from the Crusaders in 1244, later hired parts of his troops. Around that time, the Mongols had already conquered larger parts of Eastern Europe and advanced into the core provinces of the former Abbasid Caliphate, where they captured Baghdad in 1258. 66 Besides the displacements caused by their wars, the Mongols like other empires before them resorted to the relocation of troops recruited in the conquered areas and the resettlement of population at large, which acquired a new “trans-Eurasian” dimension due the immense extent of their realm. Thousands of soldiers from Russia and the Alans, who had lived north of the Caucasus and of the Black Sea, took part in the Mongol conquest of China and served in the armies of the Yuan dynasty there until the end of Mongol rule in 1368. In addition, Russian peasants and skilled workers from Eastern Europe (including German miners from Transylvania, for instance) were transferred into the Steppes of Central Asia. 67 In the other direction, thousands of Oirats warriors with the families from the upper Yenissei region (together with Chinese artillerymen) took part in the Mongol conquest of Persia and Iraq and settled their. In 1296, reportedly 10,000 of them defected to the Mamlūks in the aftermath of domestic struggles in the Ilkhanate. They were settled as a welcome reinforcement at the Mediterranean coast of the Palestinian province. As Thomas T. Allsen summed up, the Mongol rulers as “herders of human beings” brought “East Asian colonists to the west to repair the damage caused by their own military operations, while European and Muslim colonists were taken east as human booty to produce specialty industrial and agricultural goods”, thus initiating a new “Völkerwanderung” of the 13th–14th centuries. 68

At the fringes of the Mongol empires, however, large areas of Eastern Europe, Asia Minor and the Balkans were characterised by political fragmentation. At the same time, especially the Venetians and Genoese integrated the cities of the Eastern Mediterranean as hubs and nodes into their commercial networks and into the Mediterranean subsystem of the late medieval “World System”. 69 This contributed to the emergence of a multitude of overlapping zones of power and commerce as well as of various religious, ethnic and linguistic backgrounds. Between the 13th and the 15th century, “no other region of Europe or the Mediterranean became a cynosure of so many ethnicities in such a small place”. 70 The Eastern Mediterranean was the stage of intensive contacts between Mongols, Byzantines, Armenians, Turks, Persians and Arabs, Slavonic-, Albanian- and Vlach-speaking people, “Latins” or “Franks”, and a large number of further ethnicities, members of which were of course also mobile across political borders; 71 moreover, between Orthodox, Oriental and Western Christian Churches as well as Islam (in its various denominations) and (within the Mongol Sphere) also Buddhism. 72 During that period, the first groups of people later known as “Gypsies” also appear in the records of Southeastern Europe, whom modern research since the 18th century tentatively has tried to connect with various groups originating in India. 73 Beyond traditional supra-regional contacts of members of medieval religious elites and nobilities which always had crossed borders within and beyond cultural-religious frontiers, 74 the increase in the number of contact zones, especially on the basis of commerce, opened paths to border-crossing also for non-aristocratic members of society. 75 Commercial interests and occupational mobility contributed to the establishment of a “middle ground” beyond religious or ethnic antagonisms. As Kate Fleet stated in her study of Genoese and Ottoman trade: “money largely formed the basis of the relationship between the Genoese and the Turks and this, rather than any religious scruple, dictated relations”. 76 One illustrative aspect of these relations, also pertaining to labour mobility, is the use of eastern-style textiles in Europe and of western-style textiles in the Islamic world. 77 “Networks of affinities” were created based on profession and know how, for instance. One most impressive result of entangled phenomena in this regard is the emergence of the Lingua franca of Mediterranean seafaring in the late medieval and early modern period. 78 The possibilities for (both deliberate and forced) migration that emerged in the Aegean imperial sphere of Venice after the Fourth Crusade in 1204, which involved individuals and groups of various ethno-linguistic, religious and cultural backgrounds with different chances of (upwards) social mobility, are analysed in the chapter of Charalampos Gasparis. He also demonstrates what kind of information on motives and modes of mobility can be retrieved from the more detailed (especially documentary) source evidence for this period, which we lack for earlier centuries (see also the discussion above). 79

The medieval “World System” emerging from the Mongol expansion, however, also created the pre-conditions for its demise; the increased connectivity and mobility across Afro-Eurasia allowed for the diffusion of the plague epidemic of the Black Death from East and Central Asia into Western Eurasia in the 1340s, with all its devastating effects. Even before the outbreak of the epidemic, political instability and internecine wars had contributed to the decline of the Mongol imperial formations and their eventual downfall or fragmentation. 80 The epidemic of the Black Death also motivated another wave of pogroms against the Jews. This intensified the already on-going shift of the core areas of Jewish settlement of the so-called Ashkenazim from Western and Central Europe – where there had been a significant growth in the number of Jewish communities between the 10th and the 13th century – to Eastern Central and Eastern Europe in the 14th–15th century. These regions finally became the homelands of the majority of all Jewish population until the Shoa during World War ii. 81

The 14th century saw equally the rise of a new imperial project with the establishment of the Ottoman dynasty, originally one of several Turkish groups who had started to conquer and migrate into Byzantine territories in Western Asia Minor due to Mongol pressure from the East since the second half of the 13th century. 82 From 1352 onwards, Ottoman armies expanded into Southeastern Europe. Some of the indigenous nobilities resisted but others joined the Ottoman elite, which remained open for various ethnic and religious backgrounds. In addition, non-Muslim populations were integrated into the service of the Ottoman state since the 1360s by force via the so-called devşirme, the collection of Christian boys from conquered territories as tax who were converted to Islam and later served as Janissaries in the army or administration. 83 By 1400, the Ottomans had become the pre-dominant power in Southeastern Europe and Anatolia and already laid siege to Constantinople. The city was only saved by a last outbreak of Mongol expansionism under Timur Leng. From his basis in Samarkand, he afflicted since the 1360s large parts of Central Asia, Eastern Europe, India, Iran, Iraq and Anatolia, where he defeated the Ottomans near Ankara in 1402. Timur’s military campaigns caused large-scale displacements of populations across the entire region from Eastern Europe to India and from Central Asia to the Aegean. 84 The Ottomans, however, were able to re-establish their empire, to conquer Constantinople in 1453, and within the next 100 years to integrate all territories from the Black Sea to Egypt and from Northwest Iran to Algeria into a new Islamic Empire. This provided the framework for a new chapter of intensified migration and mobility (including the immigration of many Jews expulsed from Spain in 1492) which is beyond the scope of the present volume. 85

Despite the impressive number of forced or voluntary migrations described in the papers of this volume, we have to be aware that many extensive population movements remained below the “radar” of state authorities or the interest of official historiography. 86 As an example, we may mention the long-distance migrating movements of nomadic groups who appear in various combinations and with different names in the records of neighbouring empires, such as the Chinese, then disappear from them and eventually re-appear in new composition and with new names, for instance in Roman historiography. The exact connections between these “peoples”, such as the Xiongnu and the Huns in the 4th century or the Rouran and the Avars in the 6th century, as well as the “pre-history” of the Magyars before they “emerged” in Byzantine and Latin sources inthe late 9th century, remain unclear. A further example of “hidden” migrations are the movements of Bantu-speaking groups across most of Sub-Saharan Africa in the first millennia b.c.e and a.d. 87 Yet, as one of the anonymous reviewers pointed out, we have to reckon not only “with the possibility of sizable movements occurring without being mentioned in our literary sources”. On the other hand, “there is the possibility of migrations recorded in medieval sources which did not actually occur!” For the latter case, one may reference the medieval “stories of origin” of peoples (in Latin “origo gentis”). They were often composed centuries after the “arrival” of groups in their “predetermined homelands” and traced their emergence and migrations across long distances many centuries back to biblical or “mythical” times, when totem animals such as a hind led the Huns or later the Bulgars across the Sea of Azov, for instance. Earlier research has attempted to “extract” remnants of the “actual” events and to draw these supposed routes of migration on maps. For present-day scholars, these texts hint rather at the significance of (actual or imagined) migrations for identity-constructions now and then. 88

3 Conclusion

All papers in this volume point to the heterogeneity and complexity of the phenomenon of migration. They thus caution against simplistic approaches to migration processes in pre-modern times, which tend to draw moving blocks ofpeople on historical maps (as, for instance, in the case of the “Völkerwanderung”)with allegedly distinct homogenous collective identities such as “Slavs”, “Muslims” etc. (even though we have unavoidably made use of such conventional “umbrella terms” in the historical outline above).

Against this background, the present volume hopes to contribute to and to motivate further research in the field of migration history beyond the modern era, by focussing on the medieval period and redirecting attention from Western Europe and the Atlantic towards the core transition zone between Africa, Asia and Europe. Moreover, it argues for an intensive and critical dialogue, in terms of both topics as well as methods, between historians, archaeologists, sociologists and natural scientists. Our aim was to avoid a recurrence of simplistic models, which only differ in the technical refinement of the underlying analytical tools or the novelty of terminology from earlier misconceptions.

Acknowledgement

The (open access) publication of this volume was financed within the framework of the project “Moving Byzantium: Mobility, Microstructures and Personal Agency”, directed by Prof. Claudia Rapp (Vienna) and funded by the fwf Austrian Science Fund (Project Z 288 Wittgenstein-Preis). For more information on this project, see https://rapp.univie.ac.at/.

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Which of the following was a major cause for the growth of cities throughout Afro

Which of the following is a major cause for the growth of cities throughout Afro-Eurasia from 800-1350 C.E.? "What they (the Franks) learned from the Arabs was indispensable in their subsequent expansion. The heritage of Greek civilization was transmitted through Arab intermediaries.

What affected trade in Afro

The development of new forms of credit and the formation of cooperative commercial partnerships were the most significant factors in expanding trade in Afro-Eurasia in the period 1200–1450.”

Which trade network has the largest impact on the development of Afro

The Silk Roads were the biggest land network in the time period, stretching from Constantinople all the way to the very eastern edge of China (Hangzhou). Needless to say, they were a pretty big deal in Afro-Eurasia.

Which of the following was a method rulers in Eurasia used to legitimize and consolidate their power?

Rulers used religious imagery to legitimize their political authority. Which of the following is true of both the Ottoman Empire and the Mughal Empire between 1450 and 1750 ? The rulers of both believed in strictly separating secular and religious concerns.