This lecture reinserts the events leading up to the Eighth Crusade into their African contexts. Guérin argues that the reason for the so-called diversion of French King Louis IX’s second crusade was that the king, and his brother Charles of Anjou, had learned that Tunis was the outlet for West African gold coming across the Sahara, a lesson learned on the Italian peninsula. Hitherto unremarked, two documents drafted in the shadows of Carthage, days after Louis IX’s death, definitively prove that his two brothers, Charles of Anjou and Alphonse of Poitiers, as well as his son and heir Philippe le Hardi, knew that the gold obtained from the Hafsid emir al-Mustanstir was “auro de palolus.” This term, of still uncertain etymology, had been used in Latin, French and Italian documents since at least 1181 to refer explicitly to gold from West Africa. These documents demonstrate that the Eighth Crusade was not just a Mediterranean or Eurasian crisis, as Michael Lower has recently argued, but rather, they properly situate the Tunisian Crusade within its Saharan milieu. Guérin's project underscores the importance of the socio-economic history of the Bilad al-Sudan, the Land of the Blacks, to Mediterranean power struggles in the years around 1300.
About the Speaker
Sarah M. Guérin is Associate Professor of Medieval Art in the History of Art Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research centres on materiality, emphasizing socio-economic circumstances surrounding production and use. Her first monograph, French Gothic Ivories: Material Theologies and the Sculptor’s Craft, concentrated on the medium of elephant ivory, a topic which also calls for engagement with the material culture of Africa contemporary with the European Middle Ages. Accordingly, Sarah has published widely trans-Saharan trade routes in the medieval economic system, including being a member of the steering committee for the award-wining exhibition Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa. She is currently working on a book project entitled Goldrush 1270: Paris, Florence, Tunis, Ni-Jimi.
The event is part of the Art History Seminar 220B, and is moderated by Professor Lamia Balafrej (UCLA).
Sponsor(s): Center for Near Eastern Studies, UCLA Division of Humanities