Research Project: A Connected History of the Middle Ages. Communication and Circulation from the Mediterranean

This project aims to analyze the articulation between spaces and communities in the medieval Mediterranean, through phenomena of communication and circulation that had this sea as their axis. The project's spatial framework is the Mediterranean and its connected spaces, from Saharan Africa to Northern Europe, from the Iberian Peninsula to the Arab-Byzantine East. The chronological framework lies between the end of Roman hegemony in the Mediterranean, in the 5th century, and the First Globalization, in the 17th century, when the Christian monarchies of Western Europe projected their power beyond the Mediterranean space. The Connected History methodology that will be used helps to solve the problem created by national archives, which is the compartmentalization of documents that were not produced according to a national logic. This methodology makes it possible to re-establish the connections that the documentary networks originally had and which were broken by the interference of the logic of the organization of the national archives. These archives collected local documents which were then studied as representative of a national circumscription, a national jurisdiction or a national cultural logic.