ECOMEDS_Economic and cultural connections within Mediterranean ecosystems c.1250-c.1550

Spanning 2500 miles, encompassing over 3000 islands, and connecting the worlds of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, in the Middle Ages the Mediterranean was a place of tremendous traffic in people, goods and ideas. The Mediterranean was home to Muslims, Jews, Christians, to diverse ethnicities, languages, and political entities spread across innumerable landscapes and seascapes - on land inhabiting a shared biome defined by fire and resistance to it, and encompassing a sea of enormous biodiversity, in a complex and dynamic ecosystem. The later Middle Ages were also a period of population pressure, settlement expansion and intense resource extraction, set against a background of significant climate change. This is the first large-scale study to use commodity trade to understand the relationships between economy, environment and culture within the Mediterranean biome, c.1250-1550. It will bring together three distinct strands of research: that of the medieval economy and the development of networks of exchange; environmental history and the impact of ecological instabilities and communal resiliencies on commodity production; and the
religions of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, which shaped worldviews and set the contexts for many forms of contact, demand and consumption. Four commodities will be examined: coral, honey, citrus, and cheese, each representing a different facet of this environment, each embedded in the cultural and economic life of the Mediterranean, and each drawing together networks of producers, merchants, and consumers from different communities. The commodities will be studied via a new holistic methodology combining qualitative and quantitative evidence from multiple regions set alongside paleoclimatological data. The aim is to write a new environmental history of the Mediterranean, tied to its economic activity and cultural exchange, shedding light on the long-term genesis and management of the land- and seascapes we inhabit today.