A small collection of Syriac courtroom manuals survives that was written by and for Christians during the ‘Abbasid era to prescribe specific social behaviors for a variety of relatively common scenarios, such as how to address a new emir. These texts have largely avoided scholarly scrutiny, perhaps due to their generic and unassuming nature and relative lack of controversial or manifestly fascinating contents. Regardless, this communication contends that these texts offer important insights into constitutive dimensions in the early construction of Christian-Muslim relations that have not been adequately mined due to the lack of an adequate method that is equipped to illumine their contents. To that end, I propose a new historiographical method, largely under the aegis of social history, that draws on the theoretical work of two Finnish scholars, Essa Saarinen and Raimo Hämälainen, called “Systems Intelligence.” While they introduced and developed this concept and its methodological apparatus to account for successful (and unsuccessful) dimensions of human interrelationality in the present, especially by examining the meaning of human microbehaviors in feedback-intensive context for the construction of larger social structures, I believe social history can be enriched by drawing on the analytical and conceptual resources developed by Systems Intelligence theoreticians. Specifically, I draw attention to the embedding of prescriptions that regulated and scripted Christian microbehaviors to navigate the “system” of the Islamic courtroom “intelligently” in the interest of sketching a picture of early mutual understanding between members of these two faiths.

The global trade of South East Asian diamonds and gems in the early modern period has attracted the attention of a number of scholars in the last decades, who have mostly focused on the way the European East India Companies, such as the Dutch, the Portuguese and the English conducted private trade in gems based on those companies’ archival records. Diamonds and gems fitted perfectly into the range of commodities that were easy to carry, move and smuggle with and were one of the most luxurious and valuable items circulating during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’ flows of commodities being accessible to only the privileged. While the global trade of diamonds and gems in the early modern period was largely conducted by the East India companies of Europe, it was also a niche commercial activity for Armenian merchants from New Julfa and their counterparts from the Sephardic trade diaspora in Europe. Although scholarly work on the involvement of Sephardic Jews and the East India Companies in early modern global gem trade is sufficient, scholarly work on New Julfa Armenian merchants’ involvement in it is almost next to nothing. With representatives and agents always on the move from the Russian Empire to Bandar Abbas, Izmir, Aleppo, Amsterdam, London, Venice, Livorno all the way to Surat and other cities, the Minasian firm of professional gem merchants became one of the most influential family firms involved in seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’ diamond and gem trade. By looking at around forty lengthy and obscurely written commercial letters of this firm dating from 1684-1700 mostly sent from New Julfa (Isfahan) to all the cities covered by the network of agents of the Minasian family firm, my paper sheds light on the inner workings of a global early modern family firm of gem merchants. On the example of the Minasians, it argues that the exchange of European corals and Indian diamonds was a vital part of early modern gem trade among Armenian New Julfa merchants and beyond. Additionally, my paper argues that the exclusive involvement of this firm and its representatives in luxury trade of gems gave them the opportunity of navigating through economic, political and religious worlds of Europe and Asia thanks to their mobility, knowledge, mediation skills, flexibility, but most importantly business dealings with the upper echelons of the business world and religious hierarchy.

Since their forced expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula in the first quarter of the seventeenth century, Moriscos in Tunis wrote several didactic texts intended to facilitate the community’s assimilation into Islamic society. Written primarily in Spanish, this corpus is comprised of polemics and instructional manuals of faith, which have long been seen only as philological curiosities or sources of information. As a result, these texts are seldom studied on the basis of their own unique literary and philosophical merit despite incorporating important poetic elements that elucidate their didactic premise and likewise shed light on the lived Morisco experience in exile. One of these texts is the "Tratado de los dos Caminos, por un Morisco refugiado de Tu?nez". Penned circa 1650 in Tunis by an anonymous Morisco, the Tratado is an exceptional example of this instructional corpus. In this text, the didactic premise is represented as an allegorical search for Truth that alludes to the lived experience of the author and, more broadly, the exiled Moriscos for which he writes. In this essay, I analyze the most imaginative section of this text: the prologue. Here the author invokes the notion of Truth and Falsehood in order to bolster his authority as author and religious guide. These concepts are portrayed through imagery and narrative conventions that conflate the act of writing with its material culture. Though the Tratado does not directly reference medieval Islamic calligraphic treatises, its representation of ink and writing along with truth and falsehood bears a close resemblance to the way that the Islamic calligraphic and book arts tradition engages with these concepts. Reading the Tratado alongside texts such as al-Mu?izz ibn B?d?s’s (d. 454/1062) treatise on penmanship, "Kitab ?umdat al-kutt?bwa wa ?uddat dhaw? al-alb?b" and Q??? A?mad, ibn M?r-Munsh? treatise on calligraphers and painters (circa 1015/1606), I aim to bring this Morisco text into conversation with this complex philosophical and theological tradition. Doing so, I argue, will facilitate a more nuanced reading of the prologue and, following suit, the didactical text as a whole. This reframing of the text will afford the researcher a better understanding of the author’s philosophical and theological worldview, helping to demonstrate connections of Islamic thought and philosophy across the Mediterranean as influenced by the migration and networks of the Morisco diasporic community.