Preface and Acknowledgments
“How to govern?” This short question was tackled by staff and fellows during the first academic year 2020–2021 of the Center for Advanced Study RomanIslam – Center for Comparative Empire and Transcultural Studies, based at Hamburg University (Germany) since 2020 and funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).1 The Center brings the disciplines of comparative empire and transcultural studies together into a broader historical and contemporary perspective. Our interdisciplinary and diachronic approach endeavors to compare transcultural assimilation processes in the historical region of the Western Mediterranean, paying particular attention to the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa during the first millennium CE, the so-called Long Late Antiquity, including the Early Islamic Period.
By working within a governance perspective, we have selected a focus that highlights questions concerning political action’s significance and its legitimation – applied to a period in which weakened political authority produced a substantial demand for new forms of legitimation, whose genesis required time, coordination, and cooperation. This perspective highlights those processes of transformation that took place – that were made to take place – over the mid- or long-term, stimulated by ebbing state guarantees and serious regional divergences. While traditional research has described these changes almost exclusively as the waning of antique statehood, application of the governance concept allows them to be understood as a conscious effort to alter existing structures and adapt them to new conditions. Moreover, it reveals that contemporaries dealt with the structures at their disposal in a thoroughly creative manner.
Answering the short question “How to govern?” was made more difficult by the fact that the RomanIslam Center’s first academic year coincided with the Corona(virus) pandemic, meaning it became a period of home office work, Zoom webinars, and regular online meetings. Yet despite this less-than-ideal form of communication prospects for academic exchange, colleagues representing ancient and medieval history, classical archaeology, art history, numismatics, and Islamic studies – from Algeria, Brazil, Denmark, Germany, Morocco, Spain, Tunisia, Hungary, and the UK – engaged in exchanges applying their respective case studies. These studies covered the time from the 4th to the 12th century and concerned a wide range of topics: administrative strategies as applied by the Church, or their episcopal representatives, as well as Visigothic kings working jointly with the aristocracy; strategies of assigning new meaning to once religious spaces through rebuilding; or the introduction of an entirely new dating system. Strategies may have been those inherent to the economic system, aimed at tax collection, paying the army, or at optimizing the use of natural resources. Finally, they could be strategies of capturing space itself – through conquests and settlements, through pacts and treaties, but also (and primarily) through management and administration.
This volume combines the work of junior and senior fellows of the first academic year of the RomanIslam – Center for Comparative Empire and Transcultural Studies. Their texts, which reflect the diversity of research questions and various forms for approaching them, bear their respective author’s responsibility for their content and images. The last task remaining for the editor is a pleasant one, that of thanking the fellows for their lively and controversially conducted discussions; Stefan Ardeleanu (Heidelberg) and Pieter Houten (Culemborg), for their careful and unflagging help in creating the maps, which Martin Grosch (Berlin) was responsible for designing and realizing; Florian Klein (Hamburg), for taking the editing into his practiced hands and offering untiring, constructive, and critical support; Timothy Wardell (Hopewell, New Jersey) for additional language assistance; and the anonymous readers for their helpful criticism, which has undoubtedly improved not just the individual studies, but the volume as a whole.
Sabine Panzram
Hamburg, June 2025
The Center for Advanced Study RomanIslam – Center for Comparative Empire and Transcultural Studies, directed by Sabine Panzram (Ancient History) and Stefan Heidemann (Islamic Studies), is funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) at the University of Hamburg with the objective to study “Romanization and Islamication in Late Antiquity – Transcultural Processes on the Iberian Peninsula and in North Africa” (2020–2026), see https://www.romanislam.uni-hamburg.de/.