The Fluctuating Sea

Architecture and Movement in the Medieval Mediterranean

Saygin Salgirli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000426120
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architektur
• Subtopic: Architekturgeschichte

This volume fluctuates between conceptualizations of movement; either movements that buildings in the medieval Mediterranean facilitated, or the movements of the users and audiences of architecture.

From medieval Anatolia to Southern France and the Genoese colony of Pera across Constantinople, The Fluctuating Sea investigates how the relationship between movement and the experiences of a multiplicity of users with different social backgrounds can provide a new perspective on architectural history. The book acknowledges the shared characteristics of medieval Mediterranean architecture, but it also argues that for the majority of people inhabiting the fragmented microecologies of the Mediterranean, architecture was a highly localized phenomenon. It is the connectivity of such localized experiences that The Fluctuating Sea uncovers.

The Fluctuating Sea is a valuable source for students and scholars of the medieval Mediterranean and architectural history.

1
Sequence

The beginning requires some imagination, and an affinity with science fiction. It involves an all-seeing eye, something far more advanced than existing satellite technologies, floating over thirteenth-century Anatolia, and observing with clarity from varying proximities all sites and movements, while itself remaining completely unknown to the life below. For simplicity, let’s call this all-seeing eye “the Lens.” What would such an impossible vantage reveal, and what would it hide? From the mid-range of the Lens, gone would be the political boundaries; clear lines drawn with designations such as Seljuq, Danishmendid, Mengüchekid, Byzantine, etc, and superimposed on historical maps as neat borders separating polities with certainty. Replacing them would be movements, reflecting the fluidities of lived and experienced space on a grand scale: nomadic pastoralists moving between summer and winter pastures, peasants sowing and harvesting, fields changing colour over seasons and across rotating crops, raiders pillaging, armies invading, tax-collectors appearing and disappearing, itinerant masons and artisans searching for commissions, dervishes and preachers searching for new followers, urban dwellers, ambassadors, curious travellers, crusaders, ceremonial processions; all oscillating on and across a vast canvas.

Gradually, on this canvas certain lines appear, and crooked though they may be, they form a network with knots irregularly spread over Anatolia. The lines are roads, not the only ones, or the most frequently travelled ones, but very probably the most densely travelled ones, connecting towns and ports. Tying the lines together into a commercial network are the architectural knots, built primarily to accommodate merchants: the caravanserais. The Lens, from its mid-range, would also reveal the diverse sizes and plans of the caravanserais; some truly monumental, others more modest, some with visible courtyards, others without.¹

By the 1250s, and from the wider perspective of the Lens, the canvas resembles the serpentine version of Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie. Over two hundred caravanserais, all built between the late twelfth and the mid-thirteenth century, speckle the canvas, with caravans of various sizes and origins scurrying between them.² Broadening the view further, the emerging picture becomes one of lines and points, extending from China to Iberia, on which the points unusually densify in central Anatolia. Undoubtedly, this is the picture of a connected world, maintained by merchants traveling along caravan routes and shipping lanes, transporting all sorts of commodities, from raw materials and dyestuff to luxury goods and slaves.³ With the Mediterranean as a mediator between different corners of Eurasia and North Africa, this is almost the visualized confirmation of Goitein’s idealized medieval world, democratized by free trade and merchant capital.⁴ Undoubtedly, this is also a beautiful picture. It is beautiful, because it is peaceful, clean, and pristine, devoid of irregularities. In that sense, it is also mathematically beautiful. It presents movement as a controlled, calculable, and predictable sequence, where again, there is no room for irregularities. And here, we start encountering the problems with the wide-range of the Lens, in relation to both what it reveals and what it hides.

Although it is no revelation any more, the exposition of the medieval world as connected, rather than regionally isolated provides a useful perspective, even when one is concerned with just a single region. However, the Lens only shows connections of high-volume commerce between major ports and towns, which presents not a false, but an incomplete picture. Other modes of connectivity, the unpredictable (or less predictable) and irregular movements between the lines and around the points are invisible.⁵ Equally undisclosed are the regional and trans-regional commercial practices, treaties, pacts, and negotiations; storms, natural disasters, epidemics, and wars that facilitate or obstruct high-volume commerce. Focusing the Lens closer, we come across additional problems. For instance, we can see the clustering of caravanserais in central Anatolia, but this says nothing about why they were so densely built in a geography which was not necessarily a commercial hotspot. Similarly, although such a view shows the different layouts and sizes of the caravanserais, it provides no information as to how and why they came to be so. Also lacking is any indication of how they would have been experienced and perceived by their users. All we can see are movements in and out of the caravanserais. Finally, and most importantly, the Lens completely hides the political operations of architecture, where politics is not concerned with states, but with everyday experiences; with micro, rather than macro-level relations.

In the following pages a story will unfold. Various views of the Lens, from its gargantuan width to its infinitesimal macro, will meet imaginary and real travellers to introduce different modalities of movement that maintained the connectivity of the Mediterranean. Soon, these movements will mingle with architecture, where two building types will emerge as the protagonists of the story. We will first encounter the Seljuq caravanserais of medieval Anatolia, then the pilgrimage churches of Western Europe as two institutions that similarly relied on their abilities to facilitate long-distance sequential movements, but simultaneously coexisted with and depended on other kinds of movement, both physical, in the sense of distances covered, and relational, in the sense of how buildings connected to their localities. The story will conclude with a conceptual movement that will bring these distinct typologies together. It will argue that the sculptural programs of caravanserais and pilgrimage churches were designed with specific audiences in mind, and in a manner to guarantee the continuation of their ability to orchestrate long-distance sequential movements and localized relational movements, the latter of which intimately connected buildings to the lives of people whom the patrons initially did not perceive as their target audiences, and redefined the perception and experience of architecture.

Lines and points

In the eleventh book of The Odyssey, Odysseus visits the underworld and seeks advice from the soul of Teirésias the blind prophet, in order to see whether he will reach Ithaka, and if so how. After accounting the perils that await the hero, Teirésias tells him what he must do once he eliminates his wife’s suitors:

start off, bearing an oar in your hands, well-fitted for rowing; travel until you arrive at a place where people have never heard of the sea and they eat no food that is mingled with sea-salt; nor in fact do they know anything about purple-cheeked galleys nor of the well-fitted oars which serve as the wings of a galley. This unmistakable sign I will tell you, and never forget it: when on the road you are met by another wayfarer who says that it is a winnowing fan you hold on your glistening shoulder, straightaway, when in the earth your well-fitted oar you have planted, making oblation of excellent victims to lordly Poseidon.⁶

There are multiple ways to interpret Odysseus’s journey to the underworld and his encounters there.⁷ However, the specific quote above unmistakably prophesies an encounter with the unfamiliar, defined in relation to the distance between the sea and the inland. Odysseus will know that he has arrived where he is supposed to only when he meets people who do not know the sea, and cannot distinguish an oar from a winnowing fan. To be straightforwardly literal, this is an encounter between a king-captain and a peasant-subject. After all, Odysseus is instructed to start off from his palace, and walk inland without ever leaving Ithaka, his island. Having already met, or destined to meet many strange lands, fantastic beings, ghosts, and deities, the most unfamiliar land for Odysseus seems to be (or is supposed to be) the interior regions of his own kingdom, and the most unfamiliar people are his own subjects who live away from the shores and outside the polis of Ithaka.⁸

There is also a bizarre degree to such unfamiliarity. When Odysseus encounters a cyclops, he will surely know that he is facing the unknown, but as he walks on Ithaka, the people he will meet inland will initially appear no different from his comrades and the residents of his polis. It is their lack of knowledge about the sea, about what it provides, and how it is navigated, and their attachment to the soil rather than to the water that defines their foreignness. Moreover, this encounter may take place sixty steps or six-hundred-thousand steps from the palace. Therefore, the distance that separates the familiar from the unfamiliar cannot be measured quantitatively. It is a qualitative distance that is neither physiognomic, nor ethnographic, nor linguistic. The measure of the familiar, again quite literally, is anchored in the sea.⁹

The world of The Odyssey is an imaginary one, but already in the antiquity it was associated with the real topography of the Mediterranean.¹⁰ There is no question that The Odyssey is a Mediterranean poem, that Homer’s imaginary world is based on the customs and beliefs of the Greeks before they were Greeks; that there is at least a glimpse into how the sea might have been experienced at the time.¹¹ Although it is tempting to read the above passage along similar lines as a poetic reflection on an actual divide between the coast and the inland, it is important to recognize that Homer’s description of the unfamiliar is simultaneously a blurring of boundaries and definitive zones.¹² In this one prophesied instance, Odysseus wilfully abandons his reliance on lines and points, and on conventional trajectories between ports.

Drifting around the Mediterranean, desperately in search of his home, he was already in between the lines, always around the points, but never on them. This time, however, as he carries his meanderings inland, he inescapably connects the sea and the land, the city and the country, the ruler and the subject. Different modes of living, different practices of production, different habits and customs will eventually be mingled. The sea and its fruits will be known to the peasant, and the land and its produce to the sailor. The king will meet his subjects, and the subjects will know what a king is.

In this one passage, we encounter the paradigm for Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s definition of Mediterranean connectivity: how fragmented microecologies “cohere, both internally and with one another,” without so much dependency on fixed lines and points that can be easily projected on a map.¹³ There are three key concepts that run through The Corrupting Sea, and hold the book together; not as binding agents, but rather as threads weaved throughout the work: microecology, fragmentation, and con...