Book Talk: How did Christians & Muslims communicate in the Medieval Mediterranean? Dr. Roser Salicrú

Despite their religious, cultural and linguistic differences and their theoretical ideological divide, in the medieval Mediterranean, Christians and Muslims and Christian and Islamic powers needed to communicate and interact regularly, and had no choice but to be in contact.
The geographical proximity of the Crown of Aragon (ie, the lands of Catalonia, Valencia, and Majorca, in the eastern coast of Iberia) to the medieval western Islam (Nasrid Granada and North Africa) meant and implied intense interactions between people and political powers of the two worlds. In addition, the Crown of Aragon had subjects of Islamic religion and Arabic language, the Mudejars (free Muslims who remained in their former lands, under Christian rule, after the Christian conquest).
These historical conditions and the preservation of an enormous amount of archival sources make the Crown of Aragon a privileged observatory for the analysis of the forms of communication, both at the diplomatic and written level as well as at the oral level, between the Islamic and Christian worlds in the Middle Ages.
Prof. Roser Salicrú is Senior Researcher in Medieval Studies at the Institució Milà i Fontanals of the Spanish National Research Council (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas) in Barcelona. She received her PhD from the University of Barcelona in 1996, and is the author of several books on the relationships between Christianity and Islam across the Mediterranean, the history of maritime communications, slavery, and travel in the Middle Ages.