Session Abstract

This panel considers networks of hegemony in the pre-modern Mediterranean, the systems that legislated the movement of people, commodities, cultural artifacts and information across the sea and that might use political, religious or economic discourses to analyze and articulate their interests. Luca Zavagno looks at the interesting case of Cyprus, the only territory in the Mediterranean where Muslim and Christian administrators shared tax revenues. Stefan Stantchev studies the interplay between papal economic policies and mercantile interests in the late medieval Mediterranean. And Marie Kelleher addresses state-sponsored piracy: the paradoxical deployment of pirates – identified by Cicero, in a passage familiar to the Latin Middle Ages, as “the common enemy of all” – as actors in a war supported by a centralized political authority.