Bridging the Strait: The Shared History of Iberia and North Africa in Medieval Muslim and Christian Chronicles

Abstract

This dissertation examines Arabic, Latin, and Ibero-Romance historical chronicles written by Muslims and Christians from the eighth through the fourteenth centuries to investigate connections between Iberia and North Africa on two levels. The first is the historical, considering the extent to which Muslim and Christian chroniclers across the Strait depicted their histories as related, writing about the same people and events. The second is the historiographical, exploring the extent to which chroniclers borrowed from one another directly, and wrote within a common cultural and intellectual framework. I argue that chroniclers on opposite shores of the Strait saw their histories as intrinsically connected, but did not always view all the individuals and populations in the region as participants in a larger community. Perceived differences were frequently rooted in religious identities, but also in ethnic and geopolitical ones. Despite these differences, I present evidence that chroniclers drew upon and elaborated a co-produced and mutually colonizing historical framework, employing similar narrative strategies and invoking a common past in an effort to resolve the ideological problem of competing North African and Iberian claims to power over the same territory. Individual chapters detail how historians across the Strait employed ethnonyms for one another that undermined claims to regional belonging, constructed a shared cultural archive of legendary, apocalyptic, and gendered elements to stake territorial claims, and invoked a rhetoric of emptying and elimination that I read through a settler colonial lens.