The Horoscope of Emperor Baldwin II: Political and Sociocultural Dynamics in Latin-Byzantine Constantinople

Nicholas Morton

doi:10.1080/09503110.2019.1614302

Morton, Nicholas

2019-05-04 00:00:00

BOOK REVIEWS 243 trophy display and suggests that reuse conferred a sense of antiquity and thus authority going back to Rome, the latter oﬀering a framework of reference throughout the medieval Mediter- ranean. Chapter 6 ascribes the reuse of marble columns to a shared aesthetic between Muslims and Christians, which was based on the combination of materials that reﬂected light and induced brightness. The author proposes that this organic connection to previous architecture normalised great mosques as members of the canon of exemplary buildings. Finally, Chapter 7 reiterates the dramatic change to the sacred landscape eﬀected by the prominent Islamisation of urban centres and their populations in the fourth/tenth and ﬁfth/ eleventh centuries, with many churches converted to mosques. This trend also had an impact on the post-ﬁfth/eleventh-century narratives of the earlier creation of mosques. A few points require further comment. Guidetti uses the term “early medieval” throughout the book, illustrating his unease with the use of “Islamic” to cover non-Muslim artifacts. This is perhaps useful for the non-specialist reader; the beneﬁt of avoiding dynastic or other chrono- logical speciﬁcity is not always obvious, though, as is also the case with the book’s usage of “med- ieval” and “late

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Al-Masaq: Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean Taylor & Francis

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