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the internal complexity of Islam in the western Mediterranean (Fierro, unpublished).
As in the roughly contemporary Libre dels feyts (Book of Deeds, c. 1244), the Catalan
autobiography of Jaume I the Conqueror of Aragon, a puzzling reference or episode
turns out to be a complex textual trace of the multi-confessionalism of medieval Iberia
(Kinoshita, 2009: 603). What all this means is that, like visual culture, literary produc-
tion in sites of intense linguistic coexistence and interaction “cannot be explained
adequately from the perspective of singular fields. To attempt to do so misses their
logic entirely as they are the products fundamentally of cultural encounter and hence
in dialogue both with local realities as well as more distant Mediterranean traditions.”
Not incidentally, like Roger II of Sicily’s Cappella Palatina (Hilsdale, this volume), all
these texts articulate claims to royal power over multilingual or otherwise multicul-
tural populations—a context distinctly at odds with the ways of reading shaped by the
exigencies of nationally-defined literary cultures.
A literature of the MediterraneanIn The Corrupting Sea, Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell (2000) paradoxically
locate the unity of the Mediterranean region precisely in its high degree of geograph-
ical fragmentation. Sharply delineated topographies of land and sea, mountains and
valleys, they suggest, produced complex local ecosystems whose component parts
shifted frequently over time as the result of environmental as well as political, techno-
logical, economic, or cultural change. Whence the importance of connectivity: well
into early modernity, people and places are linked through transportation, communi-
cation, and trade in ways that can remain remarkably resilient through apparent
world-historical shifts like the rise and fall of empires or the emergence and spread of
new religions. Thus far, we have considered how human geographies of fragmenta-
tion and connectivity shaped the emergence and circulation of Mediterranean litera-
ture; in this section, we turn to texts that thematize these very characteristics at the
level of their content.
Few literary texts exemplify the connectivity of the Mediterranean better than the
anonymous romance Apollonius of Tyre. Thought to be based on a lost late second- or
early third-century bce Greek original, its earliest surviving form (so recognizably
“Hellenistic” as to be included in B.P. Reardon’s (1989) Collected Ancient Greek
Novels), is the Latin Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri. From the fifth- or early sixth- century
ce, it enjoyed widespread popularity throughout the Middle Ages; passing allusions in
authors such as Fulcher of Chartres, Honorius Augustodunensis, William of Tyre,
Lamprecht, and Chrétien de Troyes attest to its diffusion in the twelfth century. Its
complex transmission history extends through the seventeenth century and includes
several Latin recensions and vernacular translation-adaptations in lands and languages
far beyond the Mediterranean (Archibald, 1991: 47–51).
Loosely constructed around a series of recognizable folk motifs, Apollonius of Tyre
is set in the fragmented ecology of the eastern Mediterranean. A 1991 study literally
maps the plot of the romance through the 13 separate journeys made by the titular
protagonist, his wife, and daughter as they shuttle between Tyre, Antioch, Tarsus,
Cyrene, Ephesus, Egypt, and Mitylene (Archibald, 1991: inside cover)—sites that
repeatedly recur in other so-called Hellenistic tales.^9 In typical Mediterranean fashion,
these displacements combine purposeful journeys—Apollonius sails from Tyre to