David Abulafia

Biographic Data

ID179609
NAMEDavid Abulafia
GIVEN NAMESDavid
FAMILY NAMEAbulafia
SIGNATUREABULAFIA D
AFFILIATIONSCanisius College
VERIFIEDNo
TOTAL WORKS110
TOTAL CITATIONS95
AUTHOR COUNT109
EDITOR COUNT1
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1974
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2024
H-INDEX4

  • On Savage Shores

    David AbulafiaARTICLEHispanic Research Journal2024

  • The Boundless Sea

    Open AccessDavid AbulafiaARTICLEIlles i imperis2022

    Cabe la inmensidad ilimitada del océano en un libro, aunque sea de más de mil páginasy 51 capítulos? En esta monumental obra, Abulafia, que ya lo intentó con el Mar Mediterráneoen su El gran mar (2013), se propone atrapar ni más ni menos que los tres grandesocéanos: el Pacífico, el Índico y el Atlántico. ¿Cómo lo hace? La red que despliega paraatrapar el mar, la misma que usó para su anterior historia del Mediterráneo, se revela enel subtítulo: «…

  • Comparing Two Italies

    Open AccessDavid AbulafiaARTICLERenaissance Quarterly2022

    Comparing Two Italies: Civic Tradition, Trade Networks, Family Relationships between the Italy of Communes and the Kingdom of Sicily. Patrizia Mainoni and Nicola Lorenzo Barile, eds. Mediterranean Nexus 1100–1700: Conflict, Influence and Inspiration in the Mediterranean Area 7. Turnhout: Brepols, 2020. 258 pp. €85. - Volume 75 Issue 2

  • Medieval Frontiers

    David Abulafia, Nora BerendBOOKMedieval Frontiers2017

    Contents: Preface, Nora Berend Introduction: Seven types of ambiguity c.1100-c.1500, David Abulafia Crossing the frontier of 9th-century Hispania, Ann Christys Emperors and expansionism: from Rome to Middle Byzantium, Jonathan Shepard Byzantium's eastern frontier in the 10th and 11th centuries, Catherine Holmes Were there borders and borderlines in the Middle Ages? The example of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, Ronnie Ellenblum Government and the…

  • The Near West

    David AbulafiaARTICLEJournal of Islamic Studies2017

    Allen Fromherz has already written a very useful book on the Almohads, and he now attempts to set his work on their remarkable empire within a much wider setting, from the seventh century, when Islam reached the Maghreb, all the way to the fifteenth century, and in the entire western Mediterranean. His thesis is that we should think of western Mediterranean civilization in the Middle Ages as a shared culture and experience, embracing the much-ign…

  • New Horizons

    Kristin Platt, Andreas Eckl et al.BOOKNew Horizons2016

  • The French Descent into Renaissance Italy, 1494–95

    David AbulafiaBOOKFrench Descent into Renaissance…2016

    The French invasion of Italy under Charles VIII in 1494-95 has long been seen as inaugurating a new and wretched era in Italian history. The present volume, the work of an international team of contributors, seeks to question that assumption by focusing anew on the intricate politics of Renaissance Italy and the long history of Angevin attempts to impose their rule in southern Italy. It was later invasions, it is argued, that did most to reshape …

  • A Companion to Medieval Palermo

    Open AccessDavid AbulafiaARTICLEThe English Historical Review2015

    Amid the growing number of histories of medieval Sicily, there are few works dedicated to Palermo, even though other Mediterranean capitals such as Naples, Barcelona and Valencia have been well favoured with single-author and collaborative studies. This book therefore fills a notable gap, and, by taking as its time-span the entire millennium from the early Byzantine town to the end of the fifteenth century, it also offers a panorama of Sicilian h…

  • Imperial Ambition in the Early Modern Mediterranean

    David AbulafiaARTICLEThe English Historical Review2015

    The important role played by Genoese financiers in the Habsburg Empire is not in doubt, as excellent research by Ramón Carande and Ruth Pike in the Spanish and Genoese archives has demonstrated. Yet what has been lacking is a study of the role of the Genoese in southern Italy, looked at not simply from the perspective of finance or commerce but in the wider context of Mediterranean power relationships and of the Habsburg Empire as a whole. Céline…

  • Die Stadt der Neuchristen

    Open AccessDavid AbulafiaARTICLEThe English Historical Review2015

    The south of Italy contained by far the largest proportion of the Jewish population of medieval Italy during the middle ages, although, by the fifteenth century, communities had begun to spring up in northern towns as well. The history of the south Italian Jews, and of the protection extended to them by most of the kings of Sicily/Naples, has been told by Nicola Ferorelli, whose Storia degli Ebrei nell’Italia meridionale of 1915 was reissued in 1…

  • Uomini d’affari e mercanti toscani nella Barcellona del Quattrocento, by Maria Elisa Soldani

    Open AccessDavid AbulafiaARTICLEThe English Historical Review2014

    The economic condition of the fifteenth-century lands of the Crown of Aragon, from Aragon, Catalonia and Valencia to Sardinia and Sicily, has been the subject of lively historical debate. Writing in the mid-twentieth century, Jaume Vicens Vives and Pierre Vilar characterised the Spanish territories, in particular, as victims of a severe economic and social crisis, manifested in the tensions between the factions of the Biga and the Busca in Barcel…

  • Europe and the Islamic World

    Open AccessDavid AbulafiaARTICLEThe English Historical Review2014

    The idea of bringing together historians of medieval, early modern and modern European relations with the Islamic world is a good one, and it is sad that the distinguished author of the early modern section, Gilles Veinstein of the Collège de France, died around the time that this useful book appeared. A brief introduction by John Esposito rejects the facile concept of a ‘clash of civilisations’, famously set out by Samuel Huntington. If anything…

  • La battaglia nel Rinascimento meridionale

    Open AccessDavid AbulafiaARTICLERenaissance Quarterly2013

    Giancarlo Abbamonte, Joana Barreto, Teresa D’Urson, Alessandra Perriccioli Saggese, and Francesco Senatore, eds. La battaglia nel Rinascimento meridionale: Moduli narrativi tra parole e immagini. I libri di Viella 126. Rome: Viella, 2011. 564 pp. + 48 b/w pls. €58. ISBN: 978–88–8334–491–6. - Volume 66 Issue 1

  • A Kingdom of Stargazers

    Open AccessDavid AbulafiaARTICLEThe English Historical Review2013

  • Mediterranean History

    David Abulafia, Jerry H BentleyBOOKThe Oxford handbook of world…2012Cited by: 19

    The first part of this article discusses the different approaches to Mediterranean history. People talk of the Mediterranean and refer to the waters that stretch eastward from the Straits of Gibraltar, linked to the Red Sea by the man-made channel of the Suez Canal and to the Black Sea by the natural channel of the Dardanelles and Bosphorus. The discussion insists that the study of Mediterranean history encapsulates many important aspects of worl…

  • Diasporas in Despair, 1560–1700

    David AbulafiaCHAPTERThe great sea2011

    Ottoman sultans and Spanish kings, along with their tax officials, took a strong interest in the religious identity of those who crossed the areas of the Mediterranean under their control. Sometimes, in an era marked by the clash of Christian and Muslim empires, the Mediterranean seems to be sharply divided between the two faiths. Yet the Ottomans had long accepted the existence of Christian majorities in many of the lands they ruled, while other…

  • The View through the Russian Prism, 1760–1805

    David AbulafiaCHAPTERThe great sea2011

    The increasing debility of the Ottoman Empire brought the Mediterranean to the attention of the Russian tsars. From the end of the seventeenth century Russian power spread southwards towards the Sea of Azov and the Caucasus. Peter the Great sliced away at the Persian empire, and the Ottomans, who ruled the Crimea, felt threatened. For the moment, the Russians were distracted by conflict with the Swedes for dominion over the Baltic, but Peter soug…

  • The Lighthouse of the Mediterranean, 350 BC–100 BC

    David AbulafiaCHAPTERThe great sea2011

    In 333 BC Alexander III, king of Macedon, whose claims to Greekness were treated with some scepticism down in Athens, wreaked vengeance on the Persian kings who had posed such a threat to Greece in past centuries, by defeating a massive Persian army at the battle of the Issos, beyond the Cilician Gates. Yet he did not pursue the Persian king, Darius III, into the Persian heartlands. He well understood the need to neutralize Persian power along th…

  • Merchants, Mercenaries and Missionaries, 1220–1300

    David AbulafiaCHAPTERThe great sea2011

    The collapse of empires in the central and eastern Mediterranean was matched in the far west by the disintegration of Almohad power. The caliphs lost their enthusiasm for the extremist doctrines of Almohadism, and were accused of betraying the principles of their movement. Following military defeat at the hands of Christian kings of Spain at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212 the caliph is said to have been strangled by one of his slaves. The Almohad te…

  • Thalassocracies, 550 BC–400 BC

    David AbulafiaCHAPTERThe great sea2011

    The Mediterranean coasts might be expected to serve as the natural limit to imperial expansion by the great powers of the Middle East – the Hittites, Assyria, even Pharaonic Egypt. The Assyrians did occasionally try to browbeat Cyprus into submission, as did the Egyptians, for its resources in timber and metal were too precious to ignore. But no attempt to gain mastery over the eastern Mediterranean matched the Persian conquests in Anatolia and t…

  • A Tale of Four and a Half Cities, 1900–1950

    David AbulafiaCHAPTERThe great sea2011

    From a Mediterranean perspective, the First World War was only part of a sequence of crises that marked the death throes of the Ottoman Empire: the loss of Cyprus, Egypt, Libya, the Dodecanese, then the war itself with the loss of Palestine to British control, soon followed by a French mandate in Syria. All these changes had consequences, sometimes drastic, in the port cities where different ethnic and religious groups had coexisted over the cent…

  • Mediterranean Troughs, 600–900

    David AbulafiaCHAPTERThe great sea2011

    By the sixth century, the unity of the Mediterranean had been shattered; it was no longer mare nostrum, either politically or commercially. There have been attempts to show that the fundamental unity of the Mediterranean as a trading space, at least, survived until the Islamic conquests of the seventh century (culminating in the invasion of Spain in 711), or even until the Frankish empire of the incestuous mass-murderer Charlemagne acquired contr…

  • Old and New Faiths, AD 1–450

    David AbulafiaCHAPTERThe great sea2011

    As in any port city of the Roman world, the population of Ostia was very mixed. An extraordinary discovery was made on the outskirts of Ostia in 1961, while a road was being constructed linking Rome to its new door to the world, Fiumicino airport: the synagogue of Ostia, the oldest synagogue structure to have survived in Europe. The earliest part dates from the first century AD, but the building was repaired or partly rebuilt in the fourth centur…

  • Dis-integration, 400–600

    David AbulafiaCHAPTERThe great sea2011

    Ever since Edward Gibbon wrote his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire the question why, when and indeed whether this great Roman Empire fell has been vigorously pursued by historians. It has been observed that at least 210 explanations have been offered, some frankly ridiculous (‘Semitization’, homosexuality, decline in manliness). The argument that it was the barbarian invasions that destroyed Rome – both the city and its empire – lost favour …

  • Would-be Roman Emperors, 1350–1480

    David AbulafiaCHAPTERThe great sea2011

    Following the arrival of the plague, and the dramatic fall in population, pressure on food supplies within the Mediterranean diminished. This did not mean that the old Mediterranean grain trade withered. In fact, it flourished: as inferior lands were abandoned and turned over to pasture, and as other areas became dedicated to products such as sugar and dyestuffs, the economic life of the lands bordering the Great Sea became more varied. As specia…