War and Society in the Eastern Mediterranean, 7th-15th Centuries.

• Author: PETRY, CARL F.
• Position: Review

War and Society in the Eastern Mediterranean, 7th-15th Centuries. Edited by YAACOV LEV. The Medieval Mediterranean: Peoples, Economies and Cultures, 400-1453, vol. 9. Leiden: BRILL, 1997. Pp. 410.

Yaacov Lev has assembled fourteen articles that treat the broad concept of warfare in the central Islamic lands and the Ottoman state from the Arab conquest to the period of escalating tensions between the Mamluks and Ottomans in the late fifteenth century. Lev states that his motivation to organize the volume stemmed from a conference convened in St. Petersburg by Efim A. Rezvan in 1994. Rezvan did not himself contribute to this collection. Lev divides the essays into three "chronological frameworks": the early Muslim period (seventh-eleventh centuries), the Crusaders and Ayyubids in the later Middle Ages, and the era of Mongol, Mamluk, and Ottoman rivalry (mid-thirteenth to early sixteenth centuries). Predictable in a composite volume, the essays vary widely in organization, style, and particular focus on the topic of warfare.

David Nicolle opens the collection with a detailed inventory of armaments employed by Byzantines, Umayyads, and Sassanids during the conquest era. He argues (p. 10) that the rapidity of the Arab advance promoted the spread of technical, tactical, and related military influences across a vast area. His contribution consists in the main of a descriptive catalogue divided into pictorial and archaeological evidence--each with illustrative plates keyed numerically to textual and biographical sources.

The second essay, by Khalil [Athamina.sup.[contains]], discusses the administration of Egypt in the conquest era. Relying primarily on printed narrative literature in Arabic well known to specialists in the field, he offers few original insights. Nor does he refer to such recent secondary studies as Sylvie Denoix's Decrire le Caire: Fustat-Misr d'apres lbn Duqmaq et Maqrizi, (Cairo: Institut Francais d'archeologie orientale du Caire, 1992) which compares and contrasts the growth of Fustat-Misr and Fatimid al-Qahira on the basis of probing textual and archaeological analyses. The editor, Yaacov Lev, surveys the development of the administrative bureaucracy in Egypt from the ninth through the twelfth centuries, in the context of its intimate relationship with the hegemonic military institution. His objective is to trace the evolution of this bureaucracy up to its mature form under the Fatimids and Ayyubids. Much of Lev's detailed...