352 steven a. epstein
though exceeding even those of Turmeda and Leo Africanus in twists and turns,
lacks the kind of personal motivation we find there. Unlike Moses and Paul, Fatima’s
religious impulses are not taken very seriously by subsequent observers.
If we look first for a simple test of hybridity we can turn to the mixed child, result-
ing from marriage or without it. The physical existence of this child raised legal,
religious, and moral issues. This type of mixing occurred across the planet, but the
comparative ease of travel and warfare across the Mediterranean made it easier for sex
to mix “blood,” as the peoples of the past conceived their ethnic purity, however
mythical. Since the “inland sea” was the cradle of the Abrahamic monotheistic faiths,
it fostered the paradox of pure religions loathe to syncretize and people who fre-
quently interbred. This is another reason to study people rather than culture in the
search for the hybrid. The status of the mixed marriage or person is a value con-
structed by humans, changing over time and hence historical. People tended to focus
on what they could see, skin color and other marks of ethnicity, or what they valued,
the mysterious properties of blood. Valuing purity of blood is a theme in Mediterranean
cultures (but not only them) from the beginning to the present. This value urged
people to stay away from mixtures, or at least be suspicious of them or consider them
destined for tragic outcomes. Defining the hybrid by its mixed and muddied blood
evoked, as we will see, troubling creatures like mules, the archetypical hybrids. Another
way at looking at the hybrid, perhaps heeding the lessons of nature to be learned from
a mule, could teach that the mixed creature, drawing on the best qualities of the par-
ents (horse and donkey), was the strongest and best (yet puzzlingly sterile). We will
have to look more closely at these extreme positions but an initial appraisal suggests
that the negative opinions on the hybrid outnumbered the positive ones.
The terms of a truce between Venice and the Byzantine Empire in 1277 mention
for the first time people called guasmuli, the mixed children resulting from relation-
ships between Venetian men and local women (Epstein, 2007: 39, 109–110). By now
there were enough of them for the Venetians to desire that they be treated as free
persons like themselves. The ethnocrat who made these decisions was to be a Venetian
official. This is a familiar circumstance in all sorts of border zones across the planet
where traveling men, soldiers, hunters, merchants, or pirates, cross long distances
without their women and have children whose identity, mothers, and status need to
be defined. What complicated matters in the Mediterranean in this case was partly
religion, though most likely these men and women having children were mostly
Christians. The women were subjects of the Byzantine emperor, while the men
insisted on their identity as free Venetian citizens, with rights secured by the laws of
nations and treaties. Greek-speaking men no longer ventured to the western
Mediterranean in search of riches and marriages, as they had more than a millennium
ago in the classical period. In this medieval case the name for these children came
from a word meaning a special type of colt, a mule. Contemporaries thought, prob-
ably on both sides of the boundary, that the offspring was a hybrid, not obviously
Venetian or, let us say, Roman, as the Greek-speaking subjects of the emperor called
themselves. To be labeled a mule was no compliment in the Latin or Greek versions
of this treaty and no doubt in the common parlance of the day (and our own). But
they had to be called something, because they were a new people. Perhaps because in
many cases the union of the parents took on the form of marriage or concubinage, the
fathers ensured that the status of their children followed their condition. In a more