mediterranean literature 321
Antioch and back, then to Tarsus, then to Cyrene—with unwitting ones occasioned
by the hazards of maritime travel: shipwreck, abduction by pirates, and aimless drift-
ing with the currents. The proximity of maritime spaces makes for an easy if not quite
routine connectivity, while their separation assures the distinctiveness of their political
and social cultures. “Few ancient novels managed a plot in which the perils of the sea
did not figure,” writes Margaret Mullett. “Without shipwrecks and pirates it is hard
to see how ... intrepid lovers [like the protagonists of Chaireas and Kallirhoe, Leukippe
and Klitophon, Hysmine and Hysminias, etc.] could have been separated—and then
there would have been no story” (2002: 269, 271). In Apollonius in particular, the
numerous maritime displacements make for an episodic structure which, like the frame
tale, can accommodate different tales (the incestuous father in Antioch; the unfaithful
guardian in Tarsus) with minimal narrative integration.
Here as elsewhere in Mediterranean literature, the same fragmented geography
that makes for maritime connectivity also produces an ongoing culture of piracy.
Apollonius goes so far as to make pirates the agents not of misfortune but of salvation,
rescuing the titular protagonist’s daughter on the beach at Tarsus when she is about
to be killed at the behest of her jealous foster mother: “Spare her, you thug ... don’t
kill her! This girl is booty [praeda] for us, not your victim” (Archibald, 1991: 147).
Most often, however, piracy was “intimately linked to the slave trade” which, in the
Middle Ages, was in turn linked to inter-religious relations, inasmuch as the three
great Abrahamic religions all forbade enslavement of one’s co-religionists (Backman,
this volume). As such, medieval Mediterranean piracy is often considered as an aspect
of holy war. Literary examples, however, lend credence to more nuanced historical
analyses that show piracy to be a practice of extreme, almost constitutive indetermi-
nacy. In the early thirteenth-century French chantefable Aucassin et Nicolette, the
titular protagonists are conveyed to the upside-down kingdom of Torelore in a mer-
chant ship but returned to their respective homes when abducted by Saracens who
come to pillage the coast and besiege its castle. In Decameron II.4, Landolfo Rufolo
of Ravello (on the pirate coast of Amalfi) turns to piracy after proving inept as a mer-
chant, until his ship is in turn plundered by the Genoese. Piracy, as Horden and
Purcell put it, “is not an exclusive calling: one season’s predator is next season’s entre-
preneur” (2000: 157).
As our last example suggests, many of the issues we have been examining come
together in the Decameron. A virtual casebook of Mediterranean themes, it was com-
posed c. 1350 by Giovanni Boccaccio, the Florentine writer who spent a formative
part of his youth in Angevin Naples. In the Decameron, the device of the frame tale
(introduced to Latin Europe beginning in the late twelfth century through texts like
the Sendebar/the Seven Sages/Dolopathos tradition) is adapted to the author’s own
time and place: Florence, at the height of the Black Death of 1348–1349. Alongside
the many tales of merchants, monks, and nobles situated in Florence and other towns
of the north, a significant number are set in sites and designed around themes that are
recognizably “Mediterranean” in character. Mercantile networks are everywhere in
evidence, as in the tale of N’Arnald Civada of Marseilles (IV.3), who returns from a
business trip to Spain to find that his three daughters have fled with their lovers to
Crete (via Genoa); after a series of mishaps, one pair ends up in Rhodes, where they
die in poverty and misery.^10 “Mutual intelligibility” (Catlos, this volume) makes for
alliances across confessional lines, as in the cordial relations and treaty obligations