Medieval Egypt

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Medieval Lives 7: Long Distance Relationships

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With all the medieval travel featured on the podcast—the trips across the Mediterranean, the Asian Steppe, and the Indian Ocean—of course we focus on the travellers themselves, the people actually making those trips, but whether they were merchants, envoys, or otherwise, they often left people behind, family that they were separated from for years at a time.

This episode is about those separations, the difficulties they caused, and what people did (or did not do) about them. We start with a letter from a merchant in Palermo, Sicily, move to one from an India trader in Aden, and finish with a pair of Rabbinic responses regarding a married couple in Egypt.

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Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi 5: The Year 598

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Another year of drought, another of famine, and even more disasters pile on for the early-13th-century Egyptians. We also see Abd al-Latif make a surprising 20th-century appearance.

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Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi 4: Consuming the Present

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What happens when the river fails to rise? In 597 (1200), Abd al-Latif found famine, crime, and cannibalism.

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Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi 3: Harvesting the Past

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Like many people ever since, and even now, Abd al-Latif was fascinated by Egypt's ancient sites and structures, the pyramids and the Sphinx. He was fascinated, but also disgusted with how their stones and contents had been treated as his contemporaries looked to them less with wonder, more with greed.

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Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi 2: On Egyptian Flora and Fauna

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We continue the Abd al-Latif series and dig into his observations on Egypt, its plants and animals, the hybrid banana and the terrifying sea horse.

Sir John Mandeville 3: Mamluk Egypt

Our traveller reaches Egypt. He writes of wondrous gardens of balsam, of the pyramids and their purpose, of the recent history of the sultanate, and of the Mamluk Sultan's views of Latin Christian life.