Karla Mallette

The Metropolis and Its Languages: Baghdad and Venice

This essay situates a discussion of two cosmopolitan metropolises at distinct historical moments—Baghdad (ca. 780 CE) and Venice (ca. 1250 CE)—in order to highlight two of the characteristics that distinguish classical Arabic and Latin, the mega-languages of the premodern world, from the national languages of European modernity.1 First, unlike national languages, Arabic and Latin were languages that were not bounded by territory and, in fact, held a far-ranging, if discontinuous, currency. They were languages of high culture and imperial bureaucracy. Both gave rise to a multitude of other languages and idioms: the mother tongues, local spoken languages, and literary languages of the populace. Second, both cosmopolitan languages—governed by strict, institutionalized laws of grammar—were self-consciously designed to resist historical change, and therefore refused to be shaped by spoken linguistic practice. They were steady-state languages; their capacity to resist change through time allowed them to communicate across the millennia. Immediacy—granted by continuity with current linguistic practice in a given location—is the crowning virtue of the European national languages. But the cosmopolitan languages of the Middle Ages, rather than being keyed to geochronological or cultural specificities, float free of micro-histories and micro-regions.

Chapter 3. I nostri Saracini: Writing the History of the Arabs of Sicily

During the nineteenth century, Sicilian Orientalists wrote the story of Sicily’s domination by the Arabs and the Arabic-language culture of the Normans – centuries of eventful history that had been lost to the West because European historians could not read Arabic documents. In their histories, Sicilians identified an alternate origin for European modernity: the vibrant Arab culture of the medieval Mediterranean transmitted to the continent through borderland states like the Kingdom of Sicily. This essay examines the lives and scholarship of three nineteenth-century Sicilian Orientalists – Pietro Lanza, Vincenzo Mortillaro, and Michele Amari – who worked to articulate a Mediterranean origin for European modernity.