Abstract

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] Fromherz has already written a very useful book on the Almohads, and he now attempts to set his work on their remarkable empire within a much wider setting, from the seventh century, when Islam reached the Maghreb, all the way to the fifteenth century, and in the entire western Mediterranean. His thesis is that we should think of western Mediterranean civilization in the Middle Ages as a shared culture and experience, embracing the much-ignored history of what are now Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia alongside the study of Spanish, Italian and other histories, predominantly Christian. Close attention to the Christian shores of the western Mediterranean has, he avers, created a narrative of worlds apart: Christians on the northern flanks who had little in common...