Conflict and Convivencia in Eleventh- to Thirteenth-Century Anatolia

The Seljuk invasions and Turkish settlement of Eastern Anatolia inaugurated a period of intense military conflict and cultural hybridity between the Christian and Muslim inhabitants of the region. The interaction between the communities fits neither a traditional, idealized notion of ‘convivencia’ nor a simplistic ‘clash of civilizations’. Muslims and Christians did not form homogenous blocks and other forms of social identity—class, gender, sect, geography— also came into play during cultural negotiations. The complexity of these relations was recognized by contemporary observers, although their responses to them varied according to the situation and author. This paper proposes to analyze one mode of inter-communal relations, armed conflict and its resolution, as a vector of cultural negotiation and the ways in which opponents achieved a mutual sense of (mis)understanding through violence and its management. The differing layers of social identity and the intricacy of their intersection in this single and rather polar form of interaction underscore the insufficiency of the above models which foreground and prejudice only one aspect of communal identity.