Frontier Narratives

This book uses a wide range of sources, factual and fictive, in many languages to examine how slaves and ‘renegades’ developed a frontier consciousness that took into account how the ‘others’ thought and acted, and how Muslims, Christians and Jews developed mutual understanding despite the hostile conditions of the early modern Mediterranean. -- .

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This book explores how human interaction in the frontier zones of the early modern Mediterranean was represented during the period, across genres and languages. The Muslim-Christian divide in the region produced an unusual kind of slavery, fostered a surge in conversion to Islam and offered an ideal habitat for Catholic martyrdom. The book argues that identities and alterities were multiple, that there was no war between Christianity and Islam and that commerce prevailed over ideology and dogma. Inspired by Braudel, who asserts that ‘the Mediterranean speaks with many voices; it is a sum of individual histories’, it endeavors to allow the people of the early modern Mediterranean to speak for themselves. -- .