MESA Banner
Reframing Intellectual History of the Eastern Mediterranean in the Late Middle Ages: Intellectual Networks and Epistemological Commonalities
Abstract
The Turkish Mediterranean lived and breathed with the same rhythms as the Christian, that the whole sea shared a common destiny, a heavy one indeed, with identical problems and general trends if not identical consequences. —Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean His theoretical concerns aside, Braudel’s conceptualization of the Mediterranean in the sixteenth century was based on geography, economy and society in a path breaking way. Taking a cue from Braudel, this presentation proposes a cultural and intellectual oecumene within the Eastern Mediterranean basin in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Although it seemed politically divided, the Eastern Mediterranean’s idiosyncratic commonalities within its intellectual context transcended all boundaries that were imagined in political spheres including those among the Byzantines, Mamluks and Ottomans as well as their borders with Italian Renaissance. This presentation will investigate contemporary scholars in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, their activities and oeuvre and scholarly networks across the Mediterranean. In line with this purpose, it will particularly focus on three scholars, Gemistus Pletho (d. 1452), Abd al-Rahman al-Bistami (d. 1455), and Bedreddin of Simavna (d. 1420) who were representatives of complex and multivalent networks and members of clandestine scholarly organizations. While drawing the map of their scholarly network, this presentation also hopes to create a textual relationship through intercommunal discussions, especially the one between Platonism and Aristotelianism. In doing so, it aims to offer fresh insights into the study of intellectual history beyond limitations which are imposed by traditional methodologies, unquestioned genres, and undisputed literary and linguistic traditions. Therefore, this presentation suggests a new map of an intellectual world by connecting seemingly disparate parts of the eastern Mediterranean where scholars developed their long-distance communication and communal sense without borders, and shows that before the domination of the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, the Mediterranean witnessed a time when thoughts and thinkers breathed in the same rhythms.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Mediterranean Countries
Sub Area
13th-18th Centuries