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As a 'Medieval Warm Period' prevailed in Western Europe during the tenth and eleventh centuries, the eastern Mediterranean region, from the Nile to the Oxus, was suffering from a series of climatic disasters which led to the decline of some of the most important civilisations and cultural centres of the time. This provocative study argues that many well-documented but apparently disparate events - such as recurrent drought and famine in Egypt, mass migrations in the steppes of central Asia, and the decline in population in urban centres such as Baghdad and Constantinople - are connected and should be understood within the broad context of climate change. Drawing on a wealth of textual and archaeological evidence, Ronnie Ellenblum explores the impact of climatic and ecological change across the eastern Mediterranean in this period, to offer a new perspective on why this was a turning point in the history of the Islamic world.
- Sales Rank: #598445 in eBooks
- Published on: 2012-08-02
- Released on: 2012-11-23
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
"We have long been familiar with the famines that struck Egypt in the mid-1000s, but Ellenblum is the first to show how these are part of a broad regional pattern. This comprehensive and clearly argued book advances our understanding of the complex political, social, and economic processes of the late 10th and 11th century in SW Asia and, more broadly, our capacity to link these processes to those underway in other parts of Eurasia."
Stephen Humphreys, Professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern History, University of California, Santa Barbara
"To climatologists who study the past by looking into geological and chemical evidence imprinted in silent natural archives, Ellenblum's work adds the missing element of contemporaneous human observation, experience, and response. His thorough synthesis of numerous documents that reported the occurrence of extreme climate events, weaved together across space and time with records of related conflict and civic system response, adds an invaluable resource for understanding how climate varied in the past and how it has affected humanity."
Yochanan Kushnir, Lamont Research Professor, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
"Ellenblum has mined sources from many languages, ancient and modern, especially those of chroniclers writing in Arabic, to construct a powerful story: from northeastern Africa through Central Asia severe droughts and extreme cold conditions in the 10th and 11th centuries resulted in famines, migrations, anarchy, wars, the fall of states, and all manner of social, economic, and political dislocations. No study on 'collapse' and its consequences is as persuasive as this one."
Norman Yoffee, Professor Emeritus, Department of Near Eastern Studies and Anthropology, University of Michigan
"This book contains a gold mine of written descriptions for the time period that should be useful for scholars."
Journal of Historical Geography
About the Author
Ronnie Ellenblum is an Associate Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a life member of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. He is the author of the prize-winning Crusader Castles and Modern Histories (Cambridge University Press, 2007). His first book, Frankish Rural Settlement in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (Cambridge University Press, 1998), has become a standard work for the study of Crusader Geographies.
Most helpful customer reviews
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
A convincing argument... for a first draft
By Kirialax
In this book Ronnie Ellenblum notes that the beginning of the so-called medieval warm period was only a positive thing for the western half of the Mediterranean, and that in fact in the east the lands there suffered a series of prolonged natural disasters related to the climate. He posits that a number of droughts and cold years led to the movement of nomads into the sedentary world, first with Turks in Iran who then moved into Iraq, and then Oghuz Turkish groups moving into the Balkans. The ultimate results of this was a landscape that appeared increasingly Islamic as populations moved around, and several new governments as famine and unrest brought the Fatimids to power in Egypt, and the movement, formation, and success of the Seljuk Turks in Iran had them firmly established as de facto rulers of the Abbasid Caliphate by the 1060. As a whole Ellenblum's portrait is convincing from the sheer volume of medieval sources he cites, which do indeed seem to point to a difficult period in the tenth and eleventh centuries as a whole.
This book argued effectively for a series of severe climatological crises affected in the Near East in the eleventh century, but it has some problems. First and foremost, it reads far too much like a series of disconnected essays. The author's work on rainfall collection in Jerusalem was interesting, but I remain unconvinced that it deserved the space it was given in this book as it does not appear to be a terribly important point. Instead of effectively weaving the sections together, Ellenblum usually just restates the primary thesis of the book. This is not a bad method per se, but it made me feel that the book was rushed to press and not adequately fleshed out or finished. The second major problem is how the historical sources are treated. Early on, Ellenblum discusses how a problem shared by proponents of both resilience and collapse theories failed to sufficiently examine the historical data, but the author's own failure to give any sort of advanced treatment to the literary sources is the same sort of problem. Ellenblum simply treats the relevant sources as factual pieces from which historical data can be extracted, and at no point does he subject the literary sources to the sorts of rigorous criticism that historians regularly do. Rarely are dates of works mentioned, or whether the authors lived in the regions they were describing, or whether their descriptions of years of dearth might be influenced by Biblical or literary precedents. The third major criticism is that Ellenblum strains a bit too hard to connect every major event to the climate problems. I remain utterly unconvinced about his attempts to explain the so-called "Great Schism" of 1054 in this light; two churches that had drifted apart for a long time and a confrontation between two churchmen with massive egos is mostly sufficient to understand it. In another example, the spread of violence against Christians in the Islamization chapter is described in a largely narrative manner. Apparently this somehow is connected to the climate through the movement of the nomads, but it needs more nuance. Finally, I was expecting much more scientific data. Ellenblum mentions at the end how Dead Sea samples and dendochronology can be useful when paired with the literary sources, but this hardly appears to be integrated at all. Nor does economic data from archaeology make much of an appearance, other than the reproduction of some charts demonstrating the decline of the Byzantine gold coinage, something that has been well-known for a long time.
The remaining critiques remain with Cambridge University Press. The book has no bibliography, which is unacceptable. Undergradutes would be failed for this, so why a press would try to let an established scholar get away with it is beyond me. The titles of works are frequently inconsistently capitalized, and since I've read many a CUP book and have yet to see this, I am a bit bewildered. The press also appears to have employed editors who were very unfamiliar with the subject matter, as some bizarre errors got through, such as a reference to the "Aqueduct of Valence" in Constantinople, which should be "Valens" (p. 207). Finally, for what is essentially a draft, a $90 price tag is simply unacceptable.
This is a useful and important, if badly constructed and incomplete book. Ellenblum's thesis is convincing, but it needs a great deal more work both in dealing with the literary sources and in the use of scientific data. While the author is on to something important, for $90 I cannot recommend this book, but I do hope that Ellenblum returns to the topic and gives it the attention it deserves.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
The Dark Side of the Medieval Warm Period
By R. Albin
This very interesting book makes a strong case for a marked effect of climate fluctuations on the Medieval Middle East during the 10th and 11th centuries. This is part of the Medieval Warm Period, the stretch of relatively benign climate in much of Europe that is often credited as the base for the great expansion of Medieval Europe. Ellenblum's analysis is based on analysis of primary sources in a variety of languages, careful reading of prior secondary literature, and archaeological findings. He presents solid evidence of recurrent periods of multiyear drought across the Eastern Mediterranean and surrounding areas. These include periods of low Nile floods, suggesting drought in Eastern Africa, and markedly impairing the ability of Egypt to function as the great granary of the Eastern Mediterranean. At the same time, cold, dry weather in Central Asia caused an influx of pastoralists into the agricultural zones of the Eastern Mediterranean and surrounding areas like the Balkans and Iran.
Faced with the dual challenges of declining agricultural productivity, taxes, and internal disorder, and the incursions of large numbers of desperate nomads, a large number of existing states either crumbled or were reduced to shadows of their former selves. These included previously vigorous states in Iran, Mesopotamia, Syria, and Egypt, and the Byzantine Empire. Ellenblum does a very nice job of outlining some of the associated important changes. The decay of Byzantine Empire was probably a major contributing factor to the famous conquest of Byzantine Italy by Norman adventurers. Several Middle Eastern states came under the control of Turkic dynasties. Some major urban centers were either destroyed or declined markedly. Religious minorities such as Christians and Jews were either decimated or emigrated, replaced to a large extent by Turkic invaders newly converted to Islam. The result was the increasing Islamization of many regions. In a particularly interesting analysis, Ellenblum suggests a major resulting change in Islamic intellectual and educational life with a switch away from strongly Hellenic influenced traditions.
Ellenblum is a clear writer and careful analyst. There is also some thoughtful historiographic discussion. The book, however, is organized essentially into a series of linked topical essays and lacks a general narrative. Some of Ellenblum's more interesting analyses are embedded within more detailed discussions. As pointed out by a prior reviewer, this book was written primarily for specialists in his area. This is a pity because the general issues are of broad interest and Ellenblum's analyses deserve a wider audience.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Interesting work with some gaps aimed at a scholarly audience
By Rachel T. Howes
This is an interesting idea. The author looks at a series of crises in the Middle East in the eleventh century and links them to climatic crisis. She (he?) uses a combination of archeological work and contemporary literary texts to examine crises in the Abbasid/Buyid, Fatimid, Seljuk, and Byzantine empires. The most interesting section of the book is a discussion of the irrigation systems and aqueducts of Jerusalem.
While the work is a sorely needed contribution to the environmental history of the Medieval MIddle East and raises some interesting questions, there are some problems with it. The author feels that there was little the people or governments could do to prevent the crises, and this flies in the face of what the contemporary authors themselves say. This is particularly true of the Fatimid crisis of the 1060s. The major sources all point to human actions as the root of this crisis. While this does not necessarily invalidate Ellenblum's theory- it does need to be addressed. Secondly, there is an entire secondary literature on the Fatimids, Buyids, and Seljuks that is not even hinted at in this work. Again, this does not necessarily invalidate the work's main premise, it does lessen its value.
Lastly, and this may be a scholar's complaint, the kindle version does not have a bibliography, so the reader is forced to piece back through the notes to find references.
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