NES Lecture

MARTINO DIEZ is Associate Professor of Arabic Language and Literature at the Catholic University of Milan. He is scientific director of the Oasis International Foundation. In 2019 he was a visiting member to the School of Historical Studies at the IAS, where he began this project.

The chronography of al-Makīn Ibn al-ʿAmīd (1206–1293) is a major work in the Copto-Arabic historiographical tradition. Its importance is twofold: on the one hand, its author, a high-ranking official in the Ayyubid and Mamluk administration, drew from different sources, some of them still close to late antiquity, to present an orderly picture of the events from Creation to his own time. On the other hand, his summary of Biblical, Graeco-Roman, and Islamic history attracted the interest of various readerships. It enjoyed widespread popularity among Oriental Christians, in Arabic-speaking communities but also in Ethiopia. It was consulted and quoted by several Mamluk historians, including Ibn Ḫaldūn and his pupil al-Maqrīzī; and finally, it was translated into Latin as early as 1625 by the Dutch Arabist Erpenius, providing early modern Europe with the first clear exposé of Islamic history. Thus, Ibn al-ʿAmīd’s chronography proved influential upon different audiences in various epochs; at the same time, it also constituted a major instance of Christian-Muslim intellectual interaction in the pre-modern era.

Online event, pre-registration is required: https://bit.ly/3RvHvVb