Jo Van Steenbergen
Biographic Data
| ID | 5012156 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jo Van Steenbergen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jo |
| FAMILY NAME | Van Steenbergen |
| SIGNATURE | VAN STEENBERGEN J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Ghent University Hospital |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0026-0174 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 7 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 4 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Introduction. History Writing, Mamlukisation and Social Memory in Late Medieval Egypt
In November 2021 the Mamlukisation of the Mamluk Sultanate‐II project (MMS‐II, European Research Council “Consolidator Grant” project, 2017–2021) organized its closing conference in Cairo, Egypt. This journal issue brings together a selection of papers presented at this conference. They all question in different ways the complex contextual, textual, and semiotic layers which connect texts of history from late medieval Egypt to the social, cultura…
In the Sultan’s Salon
Journal Article In the Sultan's Salon: Learning, Religion, and Rulership at the Mamluk Court of Qāniṣawh al-Ghawrī (r. 1501–1516) By Christian Mauder Get access In the Sultan's Salon: Learning, Religion, and Rulership at the Mamluk Court of Qāniṣawh al-Ghawrī (r. 1501–1516)By Christian Mauder (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2021. Islamic History and Civilization: Studies and Texts, 169/1&2), v. 1 xxv + 775; v. 2 xii + 776–1302 pp. Price HB €299.00…
Historiography and the Making of the Sultan’s Court in 15th Century Cairo. The case of the court office of ‘the Chief Head of the Guards’ (raʾs nawbat al‐nuwab)
This article addresses the changing organization of the leadership of the Syro-Egyptian sultanate of Cairo between the late 14th and the early 16th centuries. Our aim is to further the understanding of how Arabic manuals of courtly protocol and texts of history from the 15th and early 16th centuries were active participants in a contested discourse of state formation that was directly involved in this changing organization on the one hand and tha…
Social Infrastructures, Military Entrepreneurship, and the Making of the Sultan’s Court in Fifteenth-Century Cairo
This paper engages with the organization of the leadership of the Syro-Egyptian sultanate in the long ninth/fifteenth century, focusing particularly on the case of the court position of ‘the Chief Head of the [sultan’s] Guards’ ( raʾs nawbat al-nuwab ). It explores narrative source reports to identify the sultanate’s sixty ‘Chief Heads’ and to reconsider what they did in this capacity. Through the analytical categories of the court, social infras…
Political Culture in the Latin West, Byzantium and the Islamic World, c.700–c.1500
This comparative study explores three key cultural and political spheres – the Latin west, Byzantium and the Islamic world from Central Asia to the Atlantic – roughly from the emergence of Islam to the fall of Constantinople. These spheres drew on a shared pool of late antique Mediterranean culture, philosophy and science, and they had monotheism and historical antecedents in common. Yet where exactly political and spiritual power lay, and how it…
New Readings in Arabic Historiography from Late Medieval Egypt and Syria
The present volume contributes to research on historic Arabic texts from late medieval Egypt and Syria. Departing from dominant understandings of these texts through the prisms of authenticity and “literarization,” it engages with questions of textual constructedness and authorial agency. It consists of 13 contributions by a new generation of scholars in three parts. Each part represents a different aspect of their new readings of particular text…
Political Culture in the Latin West, Byzantium and the Islamic World, C. 700-C. 1500
The Islamic World
The Qurʾan, and the problems of its interpretation, is even more central to Islamic political culture than is the Bible to the Latin west and Byzantium. It became accepted in the mid-ninth century that interpretation of the law and many case rulings should be the preserve of the ʿulamaʾ . So although the caliph was revered as the guardian of the faith and supreme leader, his rule was not engrained in the courts of law and the maintenance of prope…
Maps
State Formation in the Fifteenth Century and the Western Eurasian Canvas
Introduction to the volume Trajectories of State Formation across Fifteenth-Century Islamic West-Asia — Eurasian Parallels, Connections and Divergences, arguing for the importance of pursuing more 'entangled' and connected historical as well as historiographical trajectories to conduct inquiries into the concept, practice, institution and appearance of 'the state'. This introduction clarifies the theme and approach of the volume, explains and con…
From Temür to Selim
This chapter presents both a general overview and trans-dynastic interpretation of the power elites of fifteenth century Islamic West-Asia, their institutions and practices, and the many transformations that marked their trajectories across the rough political landscape of the time.1 As far as that overview is concerned, the chapter retraces the general contours of these many crisscrossing trajectories of trans-regional, regional and local empowe…
Why Do We Need a New Textbook
Islamic history research had, however, been expanding rapidly, and its diversifying fields of specialization continued to generate exciting new insights and interpretations, which even the more recent of these textbooks had not yet managed to fully acknowledge. I therefore became one of the many colleagues who take it upon themselves to integrate this ongoing research into their lectures and generate
Trajectories of State Formation Across Fifteenth-Century Islamic West-Asia
"The concept, practice, institution and appearance of 'the state' have been hotly debated ever since the emergence of history as a discipline within modern scholarship. The field of medieval Islamic history, however, has remained aloof from most of these debates. Rather it tends to take for granted the particularity of dynastic trajectories within only slowly changing bureaucratic contexts. Trajectories of State Formation promotes a more critical…
Studying Rulers and States across Fifteenth-Century Western Eurasia
In this second chapter we seek to embed the preceding chapter as well as the other contributions to this volume within various interpretative traditions of state formation studies in order to determine a heuristic ground for better understanding the parallels, connections and divergences of fifteenth-century 'statist' appearances in the historiography of Islamic West-Asia, and of Western Eurasia more generally.1 The main questions at stake are as…
Trajectories of State Formation across Fifteenth-Century Islamic West-Asia
On the morning of the tenth of January 1420, four high-ranking Venetian merchants made their way towards the office of the Venetian consul, Biagio Dolfin, in the fondaco in Alexandria, Egypt.1 The four, Carlo Contarini, Lorenzo Bembo, Angelo Michiel, and Polo Michiel then proceeded to copy pages 45, 95 and 111 of the consul's ledger ('libro'). Each of them produced their own copy of these pages and each of them added a note specifying that they h…
Mamluk Cairo, a Crossroads for Embassies
.
Developing Perspectives in Mamluk History
This volume brings together seventeen papers that engage with diverse sets of issues that pertain to the social and cultural histories of late medieval Egypt and Syria. These range in overlapping ways from the study of structures of kinship, marriage and gender, over discussions of practices, institutions, representations and realities of social distinction and dominance, to engagements with environmental, textual, architectural and numismatic ma…
Denise Aigle (dir.) Le Bilad al-Šām face aux mondes extérieurs. La Perception de l’Autre et la représentation du pouvoir, études arabes, médiévales et modernes, Pifd 275, Presses de l’Ifpo
This edited volume brings together research that was conducted in the context of the programme “Le Bilād al-Šām face aux mondes extérieurs : Croisés et Mongols. Réactions, adaptations, échanges (xie-xive siècle)”. Between 2008 and 2013 Denise Aigle, editor of this volume, pursued this research programme in close collaboration with the Institut français du Proche-Orient and with various other research groups and institutions in France and in Leban…
L’exercice du pouvoir à l’âge des sultanats. Production, manifestation, réception, Dossier sous la direction de Irene Bierman et Sylvie Denoix, Annales islamologiques 46 (2012), Institut Français d’ar…
From the 5th/11th century onwards the representation of political power in Islamic West-Asia was increasingly monopolised by new institutional forms, topped by the sultanate. These forms accommodated substantial shifts and changes in the identities, practices, discourses and contexts of the elites of the Nile-to-Oxus region. Sultans and martial leaders and their followers, Sunni leaderships and intellectual communities of scholars and mystics, an…
The Mamlukization of the Mamluk Sultanate? State Formation and the History of Fifteenth Century Egypt and Syria
This is the first of two connected articles that aim to offer a new perspective on the history of late medieval Egypt and Syria, on 15th‐century political history of the so‐called Mamluk Sultanate in particular. Informed by a comparative look at a selection of wider relevant scholarship, we propose to reconsider 15th‐century Syro‐Egyptian political action within the particular framework of a complex process of state formation. This perspective, d…
The Mamlukization of the Mamluk Sultanate? State Formation and the History of Fifteenth Century Egypt and Syria
This is the second of two connected articles that aim to offer a new perspective on the history of late medieval Egypt and Syria, on 15th‐century political history of the so‐called Mamluk Sultanate in particular. Informed by a comparative look at a selection of wider relevant scholarship, we propose to reconsider 15th‐century Syro‐Egyptian political action within the particular framework of a complex process of state formation. This perspective, …
Mamluk authorities and Anatolian realities
This article engages with the 838–841/1435–1437 Anatolian adventures of the Mamluk amir Jānibak al-Ṣūfī. It demonstrates how Jānibak's narrative is a remarkable story full of meanings, which enable a more nuanced understanding of Mamluk engagements with southern and eastern Anatolia during the reign of sultan al-Ashraf Barsbāy (825–41/1422–38). First Jānibak's whereabouts in Anatolia are reconstructed on the one hand as they appear from contempor…
Caught between heredity and merit
From medieval times until today ideas of heredity through lineage and of merit through slave status have jostled for pre-eminence as explanations for transitions of Mamluk royal authority. This article contributes to this debate through an analysis of events in late 1341 marking the transition from the reign of one of the sultanate's most successful rulers, al-Nāṣir Muḥammad b. Qalāwūn, to that of his sons. This is achieved by focusing on the whe…
Islamic Law in Action
In 780/1378, a church in the area of Bū al-Nimris in Giza was destroyed by order of the Grand Amir and effective ruler of the Cairo sultanate, Barqūq. According to the contemporary historian al-Maq
The Mamluk Sultanate as a Military Patronage State
This article focuses on the conceptualisation of Mamluk socio-political organisation in late thirteenth and early to mid-fourteenth-century Egypt and Syria. Breaking free of the heuristic constraints imposed on Mamluk studies by the paradigm of the political elite as defined by the normative exclusivism of elite military slavery—the so-called Mamluk system—it demonstrates that apparent dynastic attitudes were no mere façade for that system but ra…
The Mamlukization of the Mamluk Sultanate? State Formation and the History of Fifteenth Century Egypt and Syria
This is the first of two connected articles that aim to offer a new perspective on the history of late medieval Egypt and Syria, on 15th‐century political history of the so‐called Mamluk Sultanate in particular. Informed by a comparative look at a selection of wider relevant scholarship, we propose to reconsider 15th‐century Syro‐Egyptian political action within the particular framework of a complex process of state formation. This perspective, d…
The Mamluk Sultanate as a Military Patronage State
This article focuses on the conceptualisation of Mamluk socio-political organisation in late thirteenth and early to mid-fourteenth-century Egypt and Syria. Breaking free of the heuristic constraints imposed on Mamluk studies by the paradigm of the political elite as defined by the normative exclusivism of elite military slavery—the so-called Mamluk system—it demonstrates that apparent dynastic attitudes were no mere façade for that system but ra…
The Mamlukization of the Mamluk Sultanate? State Formation and the History of Fifteenth Century Egypt and Syria
This is the second of two connected articles that aim to offer a new perspective on the history of late medieval Egypt and Syria, on 15th‐century political history of the so‐called Mamluk Sultanate in particular. Informed by a comparative look at a selection of wider relevant scholarship, we propose to reconsider 15th‐century Syro‐Egyptian political action within the particular framework of a complex process of state formation. This perspective, …
Mamluk authorities and Anatolian realities
This article engages with the 838–841/1435–1437 Anatolian adventures of the Mamluk amir Jānibak al-Ṣūfī. It demonstrates how Jānibak's narrative is a remarkable story full of meanings, which enable a more nuanced understanding of Mamluk engagements with southern and eastern Anatolia during the reign of sultan al-Ashraf Barsbāy (825–41/1422–38). First Jānibak's whereabouts in Anatolia are reconstructed on the one hand as they appear from contempor…
Qalāwūnid Discourse, Elite Communication and the Mamluk Cultural Matrix
This article analyses a brief panegyric text from mid-14th-century Egypt, authored by the court scribe Ibrāhīm b. al-Qaysarānī (d. 1352) and dedicated to the Qalāwūnid Mamluk sultan al-Malik al-Ṣāliḥ Ismāʿīl (r. 1342-5). It challenges this panegyric’s standard treatment as a work of history and as a product of court propaganda, and instead connects it to wider issues of Mamluk literary production and social organisation. In doing so, a new unders…
Order Out of Chaos
This book offers an analysis of the Syro-Egyptian Mamluk Sultanate's political culture, focusing on the period between 1341 and 1382 CE, when twelve descendants of the regime's most successful sultan al-Nāṣir Muḥammad b. Qalāwūn reigned and the military were more deeply involved in the political process than ever. The book consists of three chapters, each of which discusses one major component of this period's political culture: political institu…
Qalāwūnid Discourse, Elite Communication and the Mamluk Cultural Matrix
This article analyses a brief panegyric text from mid-14th-century Egypt, authored by the court scribe Ibrāhīm b. al-Qaysarānī (d. 1352) and dedicated to the Qalāwūnid Mamluk sultan al-Malik al-Ṣāliḥ Ismāʿīl (r. 1342-5). It challenges this panegyric’s standard treatment as a work of history and as a product of court propaganda, and instead connects it to wider issues of Mamluk literary production and social organisation. In doing so, a new unders…
The Mamluk Sultanate as a Military Patronage State
This article focuses on the conceptualisation of Mamluk socio-political organisation in late thirteenth and early to mid-fourteenth-century Egypt and Syria. Breaking free of the heuristic constraints imposed on Mamluk studies by the paradigm of the political elite as defined by the normative exclusivism of elite military slavery—the so-called Mamluk system—it demonstrates that apparent dynastic attitudes were no mere façade for that system but ra…
Islamic Law in Action
In 780/1378, a church in the area of Bū al-Nimris in Giza was destroyed by order of the Grand Amir and effective ruler of the Cairo sultanate, Barqūq. According to the contemporary historian al-Maq
Caught between heredity and merit
From medieval times until today ideas of heredity through lineage and of merit through slave status have jostled for pre-eminence as explanations for transitions of Mamluk royal authority. This article contributes to this debate through an analysis of events in late 1341 marking the transition from the reign of one of the sultanate's most successful rulers, al-Nāṣir Muḥammad b. Qalāwūn, to that of his sons. This is achieved by focusing on the whe…
L’exercice du pouvoir à l’âge des sultanats. Production, manifestation, réception, Dossier sous la direction de Irene Bierman et Sylvie Denoix, Annales islamologiques 46 (2012), Institut Français d’ar…
From the 5th/11th century onwards the representation of political power in Islamic West-Asia was increasingly monopolised by new institutional forms, topped by the sultanate. These forms accommodated substantial shifts and changes in the identities, practices, discourses and contexts of the elites of the Nile-to-Oxus region. Sultans and martial leaders and their followers, Sunni leaderships and intellectual communities of scholars and mystics, an…
The Mamlukization of the Mamluk Sultanate? State Formation and the History of Fifteenth Century Egypt and Syria
This is the first of two connected articles that aim to offer a new perspective on the history of late medieval Egypt and Syria, on 15th‐century political history of the so‐called Mamluk Sultanate in particular. Informed by a comparative look at a selection of wider relevant scholarship, we propose to reconsider 15th‐century Syro‐Egyptian political action within the particular framework of a complex process of state formation. This perspective, d…
The Mamlukization of the Mamluk Sultanate? State Formation and the History of Fifteenth Century Egypt and Syria
This is the second of two connected articles that aim to offer a new perspective on the history of late medieval Egypt and Syria, on 15th‐century political history of the so‐called Mamluk Sultanate in particular. Informed by a comparative look at a selection of wider relevant scholarship, we propose to reconsider 15th‐century Syro‐Egyptian political action within the particular framework of a complex process of state formation. This perspective, …
Mamluk authorities and Anatolian realities
This article engages with the 838–841/1435–1437 Anatolian adventures of the Mamluk amir Jānibak al-Ṣūfī. It demonstrates how Jānibak's narrative is a remarkable story full of meanings, which enable a more nuanced understanding of Mamluk engagements with southern and eastern Anatolia during the reign of sultan al-Ashraf Barsbāy (825–41/1422–38). First Jānibak's whereabouts in Anatolia are reconstructed on the one hand as they appear from contempor…
Denise Aigle (dir.) Le Bilad al-Šām face aux mondes extérieurs. La Perception de l’Autre et la représentation du pouvoir, études arabes, médiévales et modernes, Pifd 275, Presses de l’Ifpo
This edited volume brings together research that was conducted in the context of the programme “Le Bilād al-Šām face aux mondes extérieurs : Croisés et Mongols. Réactions, adaptations, échanges (xie-xive siècle)”. Between 2008 and 2013 Denise Aigle, editor of this volume, pursued this research programme in close collaboration with the Institut français du Proche-Orient and with various other research groups and institutions in France and in Leban…
Mamluk Cairo, a Crossroads for Embassies
.
Developing Perspectives in Mamluk History
This volume brings together seventeen papers that engage with diverse sets of issues that pertain to the social and cultural histories of late medieval Egypt and Syria. These range in overlapping ways from the study of structures of kinship, marriage and gender, over discussions of practices, institutions, representations and realities of social distinction and dominance, to engagements with environmental, textual, architectural and numismatic ma…
Maps
State Formation in the Fifteenth Century and the Western Eurasian Canvas
Introduction to the volume Trajectories of State Formation across Fifteenth-Century Islamic West-Asia — Eurasian Parallels, Connections and Divergences, arguing for the importance of pursuing more 'entangled' and connected historical as well as historiographical trajectories to conduct inquiries into the concept, practice, institution and appearance of 'the state'. This introduction clarifies the theme and approach of the volume, explains and con…
From Temür to Selim
This chapter presents both a general overview and trans-dynastic interpretation of the power elites of fifteenth century Islamic West-Asia, their institutions and practices, and the many transformations that marked their trajectories across the rough political landscape of the time.1 As far as that overview is concerned, the chapter retraces the general contours of these many crisscrossing trajectories of trans-regional, regional and local empowe…
Why Do We Need a New Textbook
Islamic history research had, however, been expanding rapidly, and its diversifying fields of specialization continued to generate exciting new insights and interpretations, which even the more recent of these textbooks had not yet managed to fully acknowledge. I therefore became one of the many colleagues who take it upon themselves to integrate this ongoing research into their lectures and generate
Trajectories of State Formation Across Fifteenth-Century Islamic West-Asia
"The concept, practice, institution and appearance of 'the state' have been hotly debated ever since the emergence of history as a discipline within modern scholarship. The field of medieval Islamic history, however, has remained aloof from most of these debates. Rather it tends to take for granted the particularity of dynastic trajectories within only slowly changing bureaucratic contexts. Trajectories of State Formation promotes a more critical…
Studying Rulers and States across Fifteenth-Century Western Eurasia
In this second chapter we seek to embed the preceding chapter as well as the other contributions to this volume within various interpretative traditions of state formation studies in order to determine a heuristic ground for better understanding the parallels, connections and divergences of fifteenth-century 'statist' appearances in the historiography of Islamic West-Asia, and of Western Eurasia more generally.1 The main questions at stake are as…
Trajectories of State Formation across Fifteenth-Century Islamic West-Asia
On the morning of the tenth of January 1420, four high-ranking Venetian merchants made their way towards the office of the Venetian consul, Biagio Dolfin, in the fondaco in Alexandria, Egypt.1 The four, Carlo Contarini, Lorenzo Bembo, Angelo Michiel, and Polo Michiel then proceeded to copy pages 45, 95 and 111 of the consul's ledger ('libro'). Each of them produced their own copy of these pages and each of them added a note specifying that they h…
Political Culture in the Latin West, Byzantium and the Islamic World, c.700–c.1500
This comparative study explores three key cultural and political spheres – the Latin west, Byzantium and the Islamic world from Central Asia to the Atlantic – roughly from the emergence of Islam to the fall of Constantinople. These spheres drew on a shared pool of late antique Mediterranean culture, philosophy and science, and they had monotheism and historical antecedents in common. Yet where exactly political and spiritual power lay, and how it…
New Readings in Arabic Historiography from Late Medieval Egypt and Syria
The present volume contributes to research on historic Arabic texts from late medieval Egypt and Syria. Departing from dominant understandings of these texts through the prisms of authenticity and “literarization,” it engages with questions of textual constructedness and authorial agency. It consists of 13 contributions by a new generation of scholars in three parts. Each part represents a different aspect of their new readings of particular text…
Political Culture in the Latin West, Byzantium and the Islamic World, C. 700-C. 1500
The Islamic World
The Qurʾan, and the problems of its interpretation, is even more central to Islamic political culture than is the Bible to the Latin west and Byzantium. It became accepted in the mid-ninth century that interpretation of the law and many case rulings should be the preserve of the ʿulamaʾ . So although the caliph was revered as the guardian of the faith and supreme leader, his rule was not engrained in the courts of law and the maintenance of prope…
Historiography and the Making of the Sultan’s Court in 15th Century Cairo. The case of the court office of ‘the Chief Head of the Guards’ (raʾs nawbat al‐nuwab)
This article addresses the changing organization of the leadership of the Syro-Egyptian sultanate of Cairo between the late 14th and the early 16th centuries. Our aim is to further the understanding of how Arabic manuals of courtly protocol and texts of history from the 15th and early 16th centuries were active participants in a contested discourse of state formation that was directly involved in this changing organization on the one hand and tha…
Social Infrastructures, Military Entrepreneurship, and the Making of the Sultan’s Court in Fifteenth-Century Cairo
This paper engages with the organization of the leadership of the Syro-Egyptian sultanate in the long ninth/fifteenth century, focusing particularly on the case of the court position of ‘the Chief Head of the [sultan’s] Guards’ ( raʾs nawbat al-nuwab ). It explores narrative source reports to identify the sultanate’s sixty ‘Chief Heads’ and to reconsider what they did in this capacity. Through the analytical categories of the court, social infras…
Islamic Studies and History (21 works) · History (20 works) · Ancient history (18 works) · Political science (18 works) · Law (17 works) · Art (13 works) · Politics (12 works) · Archaeology (11 works) · Mamluk (11 works) · Archaeology and Historical Studies (10 works)