Catalonia’s historical contribution to the construction of peace in the medieval Mediterranean
Our approach grows out of a view of the Mediterranean basin as a place of meeting and exchange between Christian and Islamic cultures throughout history. Today’s conflicts and the challenges of multicultural societies call on us to reflect upon Catalonia’s historical contribution to the construction of peace, and to seek out precedents for the necessary understanding between cultures. Our aim is to reflect on the long historical relationship between Catalonia and Islam to contribute to finding points of contact with cultures that are again today becoming prevalent among us, informing the habits and behaviours of an important part of our society. At the same time, we address the study and retrieval of a set of documents that are unique in the world. Unfortunately, they remain almost entirely unexplored by scholars and they are practically unknown by the general public.
When examining war and peace between Catalonia and medieval Islam, we must not fall into absolutes. Rather, we need to relativise our discussion to reflect the ever-present dualities and ambiguities of the subject. Clearly, war and peace have never been distinct and separate things. One thing is certain, however: in relations with Islam in the Middle Ages, “peace was not peace, and war was not war” in the way that we use these terms today. Neither did the absence of “declared peace” necessarily imply the existence of war, nor was “declared peace” a guarantee of actual peace.
As historians, the need to relativise is incumbent on us in many respects. First and foremost, peace and war, or war and non-peace, are not only ambivalent concepts, but have been and will always be open-ended terms that are ultimately revisable and negotiable as needed. They are evolving concepts or even concepts under permanent construction. While it is absolutely clear that any exchange between Christian political powers and Muslim sultanates invokes two distinct mental universes, it is nevertheless reasonable to ask about plausible divergences in the two cultures’ conceptions of peace. On this issue, the content is more important than the form or terminology. Nor can we emphasise enough the opportunity that we now have to build a response based on the extraordinary wealth of documents to hand.
