This project, based on research conducted under the direction of Dr. Kathryn Reyerson, Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, examined maritime theft (piracy), by testing the hypothesis that violence in the medieval Mediterranean existed along a spectrum that included both piracy and warfare, using the career of Roger of Lauria, an admiral during the War of the Sicilian Vespers (1282-1302), as a test case.
Historians of piracy in the Middle Ages have been interested in distinguishing independent and unlicensed maritime theft (piracy) from acts of maritime belligerence—allowing for the reality that confrontations at sea could often wander between the two. While piracy has been present in the Mediterranean since antiquity, the situation was complicated by the introduction of privately-financed, publicly-sponsored maritime aggression, as corsairing or privateering, during the medieval and early modern periods. During the Middle Ages, international law authorized corsairing/privateering as “official piracy.” Pirates were allowed to sail under a commission of war and attack enemy vessels. Looking back, historians have attempted to parse the difference between sanctioned and unsanctioned piracy, neatly placing violence in categories.
The Continuum of Violence in the Mediterranean World utilized ArcGIS mapping technology to illustrate this test case. This exhibit will discuss several of the more technical aspects of this research and in the process, demonstrate how this technology can be used to further the field of medieval studies. The use of digital mapping technology to understand the premodern past is still in its infancy. As we discovered during the course of this project, Esri, the company that makes ArcGIS, did not have a base-map without modern borders before we undertook this project. Despite this novelty, there is much that can be uncovered using this approach, but it requires historians to consider their source material in different ways. Using the example of Roger of Lauria, this poster will discuss the development of datasets, their relationship to digital mapping projects, and future avenues for research.