Emma Snowden

Narrating Conquest and Colonization in the Medieval Western Mediterranean

My project examines how medieval Muslims and Christians narrated the history of political and religious conflict in the western Mediterranean, taking Iberian and North African chronicles written in Arabic, Latin, and Romance from the 8th through the 14th centuries as my main source base. I argue that at various times, medieval states on both sides of the Strait acted colonially and that the region’s chronicle tradition reflects the ways their colonial aspirations and agendas often drew on claims about the past. I show that Muslim and Christian chroniclers were often in conversation with one another, sometimes engaging in direct borrowing across religious, linguistic, and geopolitical lines, and other times drawing on a broader shared cultural archive. Such borrowing and engagement with common cultural-intellectual frameworks was both facilitated by and, frequently, in pursuit of colonization and conquest efforts, which brought Muslims and Christians into closer contact with one another while simultaneously promoting ideologies of conquest and absorption. Though modern historical narratives too often reduce North Africa to a passive site of perpetual colonization by European and Middle Eastern powers, North Africans were active and equal players in the medieval western Mediterranean and, like Iberian Christians, they sometimes used identifiably colonial strategies and narratives. My comparative analysis of Muslim and Christian chronicles from across the Strait brings these parallel developments into sharper focus, suggesting that by acknowledging the colonial ambitions expressed in the historical narratives of both North Africans and Iberians in this period, we can gain a more accurate and nuanced sense of how medieval Muslims and Christians understood the relationship between Europe and Africa—one that was often framed very differently than in our modern imaginary.

Emma Snowden is a historian of the medieval Mediterranean, focusing in particular on Iberia and North Africa. Her research explores how people from different religious, linguistic, and ethnocultural backgrounds interacted with one another and how this influenced the ways they wrote about their shared past. After completing her PhD at the University of Minnesota in 2021, she spent two years as a Visiting Assistant Professor teaching premodern global history at Hollins University. In fall 2023, she started a position as an Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, teaching courses in medieval Islamic and premodern world history. Her articles have appeared in La corónica and Gender & History, and she is currently at work on her first monograph, Narrating Conquest and Colonization in the Medieval Western Mediterranean.