Around the turn of the thirteenth century, the Georgian Queen Tamar (r. 1184– 1212) asked the poet Shota Rustaveli (fl. 1200) to sing her praises. He was in doubt, however, about what he should offer his sovereign:
Although he expresses reluctance to embark on the bold task of praising Tamar, he nonetheless explains that his skills make him most apt to compose laudatory works for her. Rustaveli did not, however, offer encomiastic verses on the queen. Instead, he chose to tell the sorrowful story of Tariel – the titular Man in the Panther’s Skin – and his friend Avtandil as well as their quest for their beloveds. This dramatic and tragic story, the author adds, would move every listener’s heart to the utmost sorrow. Continuing his admiration and longing for Tamar, but in a self-confident manner, Rustaveli describes his composition of the work:
In Tamar’s thrall, Rustaveli claims to have rendered a “Persian” (i.e. non- Christian) story into Georgian verses, thereby refining this pearl of a story, which had hitherto been passed from hand to hand without the proper setting, and turning it into an adornment fit for a queen. While this literary choice to adapt a non-Christian tale on the forces of love might have been unremarkable in a society where love stories were a ubiquitous part of courtly and literary culture, such as in Persia or France, versifying a love story was a revolution – indeed, a scandal – in thirteenth century Georgia.4 As Nikoloz Aleksidze argues, this transgressive quality is why Rustaveli calls his versification “dubious”:5 a masterpiece of aesthetic and literary quality, but of strongly non-Christian content. This ambivalence, evident even in Rustaveli’s own account of his poem, would mark its history for centuries to come: censored and scorned by the powerful Georgian Orthodox church, it later became the national epic of modern Georgia, the pole star in the Georgian cultural firmament. Its themes and literary motives have been imitated by many later Georgian authors and studied by every schoolchild in Georgia up to the present day.
The circumstances of the composition of Shota Rustaveli’s epic poem are, in many ways, representative of larger literary developments in the later medieval period (here broadly defined as the twelfth to fifteenth centuries). Far less familiar outside of Georgia than the more canonical verse narratives of French or Persian authors such as Chrétien de Troyes (fl. second half of the twelfth c.) or the slightly earlier Abū al-Qāsim Ferdawsī Tūsī (d. 1019 or 1025), The Man in the Panther’s Skin illustrates many of the transcultural poetic practices that characterize this period. Rustaveli’s reference to an Eastern, non-Christian background of the story gestures to the literary and cultural entanglement of Muslim and Christian communities in Western Asia, especially in the realm of storytelling. His dedication to Queen Tamar is also characteristic of the strong connection between writing poetry and patronage networks so vital to medieval literary production. Furthermore, Rustaveli not only stresses that his work is in the Georgian language, but also that is in verse – an indicator of how poetry was often seen as a mode of expression superior to prose. Studying the Man in the Panther’s Skin and the exact circumstances of its production thus not only opens up the world of Georgian literature, but invites readers to look beyond this epic to the much larger, interconnected literary cosmos of the later Middle Ages.
The present special issue aims to undertake this very task: to invite a broad audience interested in medieval literature and culture to engage with texts from less familiar cultures and traditions, and to instigate a larger discussion about poetry as a universal literary form in Europe and Western Asia in the later medieval period. The question uniting these diverse contributions is: “Why write poetry, for what reason, and to what end?” This question intersects with a wide array of broader concerns, ranging from the social conditions of poetic composition to the entanglement and adaptation of diverse literary and cultural traditions as well as the diversity of literary forms. It does not imply or presuppose that there is a binary opposition between prose and poetry composition during this period. Instead, it aims to highlight some distinctive characteristics of poetry which we hope will contribute to a better understanding of medieval literary production more broadly.
Although literary studies have advanced significantly with contributions from transcultural perspectives, scholars have largely ignored the poetry of the later medieval period in Eastern Europe and Western Asia.6 The papers presented here originate from an exploratory workshop that we co-organized with Andreas Rhoby at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in January 2020, in what was to be one of the last in-person events in Vienna before the Covid-19 pandemic engulfed the world. Thereafter, transcultural connections and discussions had to move to a socially distanced, digitally connected world. It is our pleasure as guest editors of this issue to bring together and elevate some products of our discussions and to give, as the eleventh-century Constantinopolitan writer John Mauropous (c.1000–c.1080) described an anthology of his works, “a small taste of an array of wines” that the rich vintages of medieval poetry offer us.7
Comparative literary studies face various challenges, the most significant of which is doubtlessly that no single scholar can master all the literary languages used in the culturally and geographically expansive area stretching from Sicily to Iran. Such competence would include not only the languages dealt with in this collection (Persian, Arabic, Georgian, Greek, Hebrew, and Latin), but also Ottoman Turkish, Armenian, Church Slavonic, Old French, Syriac, and others. Moreover, fruitful comparisons require a common framework to enable transcultural engagement. Many of these literary traditions do not conform to the same systems of periodization nor have they emerged from the same sociohistorical dynamics. For example, the Mongol conquest of Baghdad and end of the Abbasid Caliphate in 1258 is considered to be an important caesura for the Arabic literary culture, signifying the end of the classical period. Mongol invasions also affected the Persian and Georgian traditions, though they had no appreciable impact on Byzantine literature. The most important turning point for Byzantine literary culture was also a conquest, but one two centuries later: in 1453, when Constantinople fell to the Ottomans.
Despite the wide variety of linguistic, sociohistorical, political, and religious contexts in which the poetry analyzed in this issue was composed and consumed, these texts nevertheless share a common background, what we call the Hellenistic-Abrahamitic, or Eurasian, tradition. All poets discussed herein shared an interest in learning that was at least partly based on ancient and late antique models. The interest, perhaps universal, in storytelling fostered the spread of narrative poems across the Mediterranean and beyond, without regard to linguistic boundaries. Such entanglements speak to the deep dependencies evident within the Eurasian tradition: Persian literature was in its origins modelled on the Arabic tradition, while Ottoman literature is highly dependent on Persian. Medieval Latin and Byzantine Greek not only drew on Greco-Roman literature, but also on the Bible, thus sharing characteristics with Hebrew poetry. Greek and Georgian literature, in turn, share the Orthodox Church as a cultural driver and Biblical as well as patristic texts as a literary foundation.
Even beyond this common cultural ground shared by many of these traditions, we suggest the existence of a universal concept of poetry, despite the manifold forms that poetry took. The poems dealt with here are written in Indo-European, Caucasian, Semitic, and Turkic languages, differing significantly in lexicon, morphology, and syntax. The poetic forms themselves vary greatly as well, including both rhythmical and prosodic verses, strophic and non-strophic poems ranging from two to thousands of verses, featuring alliteration, rhyme and other aesthetic effects. Yet for all this diversity, there are some elements in their form that unite these poems.
The first is the existence of a poetic language itself: a specific form of phrasing that follows recurrent (metrical) patterns. This presupposes the existence of a non-poetic language without predictable patterns, what we generally call prose. Even so, both poetry and prose are highly rhythmical in many medieval literatures, including Arabic, Persian, Latin, and Greek, so that authors had a wide range of options for how to deal with meter and rhythm. Why, then, would authors write poetry instead of prose? Was verse considered a more appropriate medium by an author or his patron? When was poetry preferred for pragmatic reasons, such as its mnemonic merits?
The second unifying theme is the usage of various linguistic registers. All languages contain various registers, from the everyday language spoken on the street to highly rhetorical language used in official decrees and ceremonies. Poets have always played with these registers to a greater or lesser degree. The use of so-called vernacular, or lower register, language allowed for literary creativity and novelty, while stylized high register language in poetry came to serve other purposes, such as the adherence to a poetic tradition or the demonstration of formal skill.
When looking at literature from a comparative point of view there are several possible approaches. The first and perhaps most obvious is direct cultural contact. As we increasingly recognize, many areas of the medieval world were much more multiethnic and multireligious than traditional historiography has conceded. Constantinople, as a major urban center connecting Europe and Asia, was inhabited not only by Greek-speaking Byzantines, but also by all kinds of Westerners (Italians, Germans, and Scandinavians among them), as well as Armenians, Georgians, Jews, Ottomans, and others. Under the Ottomans, Constantinople preserved this multicultural legacy. The Ottomans brought with them influences from Persian, a highly esteemed literary language, as well as the Ottoman Turkish vernacular that was becoming a literary language itself. Anatolia, where Byzantine, Turkic, and Armenian populations met with the Westerners in the time of the crusades was another major hub of cultural encounter. Sicily and Southern Italy both had large Arabic, Greek, and Latin or Italian speaking populations. Crete in the later Middle Ages was ruled by Venetians, but preserved vibrant Greek and Hebrew linguistic communities. Georgia was also a place where Georgians met Byzantines, Seljuks, Mongolians, and Turks. In these multicultural and polylinguistic environments, literary compositions often borrowed, adapted, or indeed consciously rejected elements from the cultural traditions in close proximity. Medieval poetry took shape amid such cultural entanglements, resulting in complex interweavings of poetic traditions.
Beyond direct contact and influence, comparative literary studies can permit scholars to compare structurally similar phenomena occurring in various cultural contexts even in the absence of a direct connection between them. One such case is the phenomenon of “begging poetry” in Byzantium. From the twelfth century onwards, various Byzantine poets – including Theodoros Prodromos (c.1100–c.1156/58), Manganeios Prodromos (c.1100–after 1159), the so-called Ptochoprodromos, and others – addressed their patrons in verse beseeching these benefactors for favors. In doing so, they stressed, indeed exaggerated, their misery and poverty, hunger, illnesses and wretched condition. This seemingly vulgar emphasis created the conditions for unexpected literary freedom, creativity, and even subversive humor. Intriguingly, around the same time, a similar phenomenon emerged in Latin poetry in Western Europe with the Goliards. Purporting to wander the countryside in poverty and misery, they were in fact respected members of the middle and upper strata of society who wrote their poems for entertainment. The famous Archpoet (c.1130–c.1165), for instance, was a member of the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa (c.1122–1190), while his contemporary Hugh Primas (fl. 1130) was a renowned teacher. In twelfth-century Arabic al-Andalus, the nobleman, Ibn Quzmān (d. 1160), likewise composed begging poems in which he played with various language registers and the literary tradition of classical Arabic belles lettres. In addition to German, French, and Occitan poetry, we come across similar complaints even in early Scandinavian sagas, where many thirteenth-century poets complain that the gifts their lords and patrons have granted them are insufficiently generous. Comparing this poetic phenomenon across literary cultures allows us to investigate both the motif itself and the literary potential it offered to poets in different contexts.
Finally, the comparative approach is fundamental for advances in literary history and theory in the widest sense. In sociologies of literature, patronage plays a fundamental role in premodern literary composition. We can discern similar techniques in the ways in which poets of the same literary tradition fostered their relations with their patrons with their verses, even in regions that were geographically remote from one another. The Arabic poets in al-Andalus, Aleppo, Cairo, and Baghdad or the Greek poets in Constantinople and Southern Italy illustrate these similarities across space. The close ties between poets and their (real or potential) patrons shaped the form and content of poetry in many ways. Some poetic genres or forms were used by poets of different traditions. The Arabic qaṣīda, a type of poem closely associated with occasionality and patronage, spread to Persian, Hebrew, Turkish, and Urdu poetry. What constitutes patronage in different cultural contexts and how it shapes both the production and the reception of texts is crucial for our understanding of medieval literature.
At the same time, a transcultural perspective on poetry can highlight genre-related questions, such as the relationship between narrative and non-narrative poems. What impact does the poetic form have on narrative choices and structures? And how does the presence or absence of narrativity influence the poetic form? For example, how does the form of epigrammatic poetry differ from that of large narrative poetry? How does narrativity inhibit or amplify cultural transmission? That is, do stories travel more easily than smaller, non-narrative poetic forms? And, if so, what role do the poetic language and metrical form play in these transmissions? How does poetry – both its composition and reception – contribute to building individual or group identities? How does literature contribute to dynamics of cultural assimilation or marginalization?
We have laid out big questions here, and this thematic cluster cannot claim to touch on all of them. But the four papers included aim to lay some groundwork and connect some dots for us in understanding the importance of poetry in the medieval world. In the first paper, Nikoloz Aleksidze explores the dual influence of the Byzantine and Persian traditions on Georgian poetry. He argues that Georgian poets found Byzantine verse relevant for mainly religious poetry, while adapting Persian verse for secular poetry. Many modern theorists of literature in Georgia have used this prima facie distinction between “religious” and “secular” poetry to set firm ideological boundaries between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, Hellenophilism and Persophilism, Christian theology and Marxist materialism. However, Aleksidze argues that we should view the difference between religious and secular not as a dichotomy, but rather as an orienting analytic tool. Indeed, the eleventh century marked a watershed in Georgian literary history with the emergence of a secular mode of poetic composition that dominated Georgian poetry through the nineteenth century. Aleksidze’s essay focuses on two works that illustrate important developments in Georgian poetic composition: 1) the poetic reflections in the Georgian adaptation of Gregory of Nazianzus’ gnomic quatrains by the eleventh-century philosopher and monk Ephrem Mc‘ire; and 2) the epic poem Man in the Panther’s Skin by Shota Rustaveli. Aleksidze shows how these poems used the appropriation of foreign literary trends to contribute to an emerging and novel Georgian poetics.
Turning to storytelling in verse, Cameron Cross explores the twelfth-century (re-)emergence of large-scale narratives in four different traditions of amorous poetry: Persian, Georgian, Greek, and French. Cross’s analysis demonstrates that verse played a significant role during the transformation of popular tales into elite literature in eleventh-century Persian poetry. The versification of many tales drawn from evening-entertainment literature elevated the medium for these stories and their value to the patrons, importing such tales to the reading practices of Persian elites. This development in Persian literature, Cross argues, may have been the origin for the near contemporaneous composition of novels in verse – evident in Greek, Georgian, and French – and he suggests Anatolia as a potential contact zone between Persian and the other three traditions. In this dynamic, the crusades may have acted as catalyst of much intensified intercultural contacts among peoples whose homelands were far apart.
The article by Krystina Kubina and Nikos Zagklas travels to Southern Italy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. During this period, the Normans as well as the Hohenstaufen dynasty that succeeded them brought relative political stability and economic prosperity, conditions for a cultural resurgence, including the composition of Greek poetry. Poets in Sicily wrote from within a multicultural context of Arabic- and Latin-speaking communities. Many of their poems illustrate the generative intersections between the Byzantine-Constantinopolitan, Latin, and Arabic traditions. Later in Salento, poetry was written in a rather closed Greek-speaking, Orthodox society. Comparing Greek poetry from Sicily and Salento shows some differences between composition in the two regions. Where Sicilian poetry includes especially creative narrative poems, composed for the rich and sophisticated courts of the island, the Salentine poetry bears the stamp of the schoolroom. In fact, most poems from both Sicily and Salento are transmitted in manuscripts that can be traced to a pedagogical environment. While the circulation of these poems was limited to their surrounding regions, their literary sophistication betrays remarkable creativity and the multicultural conditions of composition, further evidence of the vitality of Greek literary culture far from the heartland of the Byzantine Empire.
Finally, Saskia Dönitz takes us to early fourteenth-century Euboea, a formerly Byzantine island that became a crusader principality following the conquest of Constantinople in 1204. Shemarya ha-Ikriti (d. c.1350) from the Jewish community there composed panegyrics and liturgical poetry alongside exegetical and philosophical writings in Hebrew. Dönitz focuses on a cycle of four short encomiastic poems addressed to David ha-Nagid (d. 1300), the political leader of the Jewish diaspora in the Eastern Mediterranean, who was based in Cairo. Although Shemarya was writing far from the Iberian Peninsula, then a hub of Hebrew poetry production, his texts share some characteristics with poetry from this region, also one of the most important centers of Arabic panegyric poetry. Most importantly, however, his poems resemble the panegyrics of Joseph ben Tanḥum ha-Yerushalmi (d. 1291), a member of David ha-Nagid’s inner circle in Cairo. Through a literary analysis of Shemarya’s panegyrical cycle, Dönitz reveals the importance of formerly Byzantine territories as hubs for cultural circulation in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Let us conclude this brief introduction with an example that indicates the power of poetry in the medieval world. The Palazzo dei Normanni in Palermo was built and beautifully embellished as a royal residence under the Norman king Roger II (d. 1154) in the twelfth century. Together with the Cappella Palatina, the royal chapel that unites Norman, Byzantine, and Arabic architectural and artistic features, the Palazzo dei Normanni is one of the most impressive remnants of a multicultural medieval Sicily. In the palace, a stone epigraph is still visible. It is a dedicatory inscription for a water clock, now lost, which records that Roger himself had ordered the construction of the precious timepiece in 1142. Written in three languages (Latin, Greek, and Arabic) the inscription is a material witness to the multilingual character of twelfth-century Sicily [Figure 1].
Latin:
The lord and magnificent king Roger ordered this clock to be made in the year 1142 after the incarnation of the Lord, in the month of March, in the fifth indiction, in the thirteenth year of his merry reign.
Greek:
Arabic:
The command of the royal, venerated, and supreme Rogerian presence – may God make its days eternal and support its standards – went out to make this device for observing the hours in the protected city of Sicily, year 536.8
All three texts give the same basic data, yet place emphasis on slightly different aspects. Not only do we find the date of the clock’s construction in three different chronologies (the year anno domini in the Latin, anno mundi in the Greek, and anno Hegirae in Arabic) but the differing textual form of the inscription is revealing. In contrast to the Latin and Arabic, the Greek inscription is written in verse. Such verse inscriptions, called epigrams, are a ubiquitous phenomenon in the Byzantine Empire. The inscription in Palermo shows how in a multicultural setting poetry could be used in a culturally specific way. While Arabic and Latin prose were deemed suitable for the occasion, in Greek only poetry could convey the significance of the object, the moment, and the donor.
Palermo, Palazzo dei Normanni, stone inscription
Citation: Medieval Encounters 30, 5-6 (2024) ; 10.1163/15700674-12340197
© Andreas RhobyNote that Rustaveli calls Tamar king, not queen, thus emphasizing her imperial standing.
Shota Rustaveli, The Man in the Panther’s Skin, trans. Lyn Coffin (Tbilisi: Poezia Press, 2015), str. 3 and 4.
Rustaveli, The Man in the Panther’s Skin, str. 8 and 9; translation of v. 9.3 by Nikoloz Aleksidze.
On these issues, see in this volume Nikoloz Alekside, “‘The Sweetness of the Persian Tongue:’ The Limits of Poetry in Medieval and Early Modern Georgia,” in Why Write Poetry? Transcultural Perspectives from the Later Medieval Period, ed. Krystina Kubina and Nikos Zagklas (Medieval Encounters 30, no. 5–6) 2024, 553–585.
See Aleksidze, “The Sweetness of the Persian Tongue,” 579.
Recent attempts at a more transcultural analysis of medieval literature include David Wallace, ed., Europe: A Literary History, 1348–1418 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Carolina Cupane and Bettina Krönung, ed., Fictional Storytelling in the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean and Beyond (Leiden: Brill, 2016); as well as the journals Medieval Worlds; Journal of Late Antique, Islamic, and Byzantine Studies; Interfaces; and the present Medieval Encounters.
Floris Bernard and Christopher Livanos, eds., The Poems of Christopher of Mytilene and John Mauropous (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 319 (poem 1.29).
Michele Amari, ed., Le epigrafi arabiche di Sicilia, transc., trans., and illust. Francesco Gabrieli (Palermo: Flaccovio, 1971) (first published in 1875), 18. English translation by the authors, Krystina Kubina and Nikos Zagklas (Latin and Greek), and Cameron Cross (Arabic).
