322 sharon kinoshita
uniting the kings of Sicily and Tunis (IV.4), and in the warm friendship between
Messer Torello of Pavia and Saladin, “sultan of Babylon,” based on their shared inter-
est in falconry and respect for codes of hospitality (X.9). Identities are situational and
malleable, as in the case of Landolfo Rufolo, who, as we have just seen, turns to piracy
after failing as a merchant (II.4); or of Madonna Zinevra of Genoa who, escaping her
husband’s plot to kill her, flees to Alexandria aboard a Catalan ship and, cross-dressed,
becomes the sultan’s markets inspector for the trade fair of Acre (II.9). Except when
required to postpone revelation of a protagonist’s identity, linguistic difference poses
little barrier to communications: in X.9, Saladin and all the members of his party
“knew Latin [latino],” while in II.9, a cross-dressed Madonna Zinevra learns the
language of Alexandria in short order. It is hardly coincidental that several
Mediterranean-themed tales cluster in Day 2, devoted to “people who after a series of
misfortunes attain a state of unexpected happiness.” Storms, shipwrecks, and abduc-
tions play a key role in the tale of Alatiel (II.7), the princess of Babylon (Cairo) who,
dispatched to marry the king of Granada, traverses the Mediterranean from west to
east, passing through the hands of many lovers—including three whose titles (prince
of Achaea, duke of Athens, and emperor of Constantinople) were being actively dis-
puted among rival claimants in the decades preceding the Black Death (Kinoshita and
Jacobs, 2007).
In the pre-modern Mediterranean, the boundary between “literary” and “non-
literary” texts is porous and in large measure artificial. Histories, pilgrimage and travel
narratives, and saints’ lives often draw on the same historical contexts and narrative
conventions as epics, romances, and tales. In Byzantine hagiographies, saints “live on
deserted islands, or on the sea-shore and meet frequently with sea-faring folk, or are
moved on by Arab pirates. Monasteries kept boats and set out on embassy to the
emperor, on trading expeditions, or to borrow books” (Mullett, 2002: 263). In the
Jewish tradition, a case in point is “The Story of the Four Captives” from Abraham
ibn Daud’s Sefer ha-Qabbalah (see Astren, this volume). Set in the late tenth century,
it was composed c. 1161 in Iberia.^11 In an opening episode that scholarly consensus
sees as “a historical romance in which fact and legend are skillfully interwoven,” an
Andalusi corsair sailing “the Greek sea” captures a ship out of Bari carrying, inter alia,
four rabbis, whom he proceeds to sell, cabotage style, in Alexandria, Ifriqiya, and
Cordoba. Ultimately a justification of the transition from Babylonian hegemony to
the Rabbinate (particularly in Iberia), the tale gains narrative legitimacy through
elaboration of a classical Mediterranean motif, the capture by pirates (Cohen, 1991).
As a non-national and non-teleological category of literary analysis, the
Mediterranean creates a place for texts like the Chronicle of Morea, an early four-
teenth-century account of the French-ruled Crusader principality of Morea in the
Peloponnese. Eight surviving manuscripts in four languages (Greek, French,
Aragonese, and Italian) reflect the historical complexity of partisan perspectives, com-
prising a textual tradition so intricate that it has been a matter of debate in which
language, Greek or French, the “original” was composed (Shawcross, 2012: 141–
142). In forging an imagined community out of the local population and French
conquerors, the H text (Copenhagen Royal Library MS Fabricius 57), for one, puts
aside the ethnic stereotypes—Greek degeneracy versus Frankish moral rectitude—that
dominate two centuries of Latin–European historiography to cast the Moreots as
“men of one flesh” who are “bound together in fellowship”—over and against the