Throughout the High Middle Ages, various people, groups, and ‘worlds’ expanded their global horizons. Art, trade, and scholarly interests changed as Christians and Muslims encountered the ‘other’ and their religious brethren. For the Christian European, the story of Prester John resonated with them, the idea there was a Christian state lying beyond the lands of the Saracens. To the West and East African Muslims, the Hajj connected them to the Arab and Asian worlds through the flow of knowledge and goods. For both Christians and Muslims, pilgrimages served to connect these religious spaces towards one another; the engagement with the ‘other’ made them question the position of the ‘other’ within their world view and religious view. In this article, I will focus on three types of pilgrimages: the Hajj and its role in expanding the horizons of the Swahili people in East Africa, the importance of pre-Crusader pilgrimages in establishing a multi-ethnic and religious Sicily, and the importance of the Crusades in forging long lasting connections between both worlds in matters of trade and philosophy.
Firstly, when we talk about the Hajj in the Middle Ages, we imagine the journey of Mansa Musa and his display of power and wealth throughout the Maghreb into Arabia, before his unfortunate return to Mali was hampered by disease and forced him to borrow money from Egyptian merchants. However, West Africa still benefited from the performance of the Hajj as connections between Islamic West Africa and the Arab world were renewed with many Islamic theologians, scholars, and architects moving to West Africa, leading to Timbuktu emerging as a thriving centre of commerce and Islamic learning in the Sahel region.
Timbuktu became important for expanding the horizons of both Levantine and Maghrebi Arabs and West African Muslims for it served as a connecting rope between the two regions and a safe spot of rest, commerce, and travel. While Mansa Musa did expand the horizons of Islamic Africans and Muslims as a whole, I believe the Swahili State of Kilwa was far more influential in expanding the horizons of the East African and Islamic world than Mansa Musa’s journey on the Hajj. I believe this is primarily due to environmental factors; the Sultanate of Kilwa had always been traditionally ruled by either a Persian or Arab family because the Indian ocean served as a commercial and cultural connector rather than a hindrance like the Sahara. As such, Kilwa’s Hajj journeys were a routine way to flaunt their power as a state. The impact of this was the influx of minds from across the Islamic world, from the Maghreb to Indonesia, with scholars such as Ibn Battuta making pilgrimage to Kilwa due to their reputation of piety and wealth displayed domestically. Ceramics from China, carpentry from India, Arabian families, all were found in Kilwa, and these ties were forged through pilgrimage and common faith-based trade laws.
While the Hajj undoubtedly expanded global horizons for the Islamic World, the Christian pilgrimages to the Holy Land, both before and after the Crusades, expanded Christian connections with each other, brought them into proper contiguous contact with the Islamic world, and laid the foundations for the ever important trade networks which were vital to the prosperity of all Mediterranean coastlines. Firstly, we must look at the pilgrimages undertaken primarily by the Norman knightly class prior to the Crusades. The High Middle Ages in Europe were a time of religious reformation with the Church eliminating the practice of clerical marriage and plural bishopric holdings. It was also a time where pilgrimages occurred more frequently. One significant consequence of pre-Crusader pilgrimages was the Trinacria, or Norman Sicily. The Normans who had gone on pilgrimage to Jerusalem had ended up mostly stuck in Southern Italy as costs of their journey plateaued once they crossed the Alps. As a transalpine people, they found the cisalpine world extremely strange despite sharing a faith; while stuck in Southern Italy, they undertook work as mercenaries for local Lombard and Byzantine rulers against Islamic rulers or each other.
Eventually, these Norman pilgrims came to rule over all of Sicily, cultivating a multi-ethnic and multi-religious Kingdom which expanded Christian European horizons through the integration of Islamic and Greek styles of governance, philosophy, and art. These expanded horizons led to the revival of classicism in the 1200s and the future renaissance within the European artistic world, but its artistic and scholarly influence on the Islamic world cannot be understated. The Hauteville monarchs patronised many Islamic geographers and scholars from Andalusia to Anatolia. The so-called Trincaria period of Sicilian history was coupled with the crusades in the Levant. These crusades – beyond the war and harm caused to both Christians and Muslims – reconnected Eastern Christianity with the Latin Church, making many rulers and the church realise there was more beyond their own view of the faith. Additionally, intensive mercantile links between Iberia, the Maghreb, Sicily, Venice, Liguria, Egypt, and the Levant were forged because of the influx of Christian Knights and merchants into the Crusader states; such ties outlasted the Crusader states themselves and became the basis of Islamic-Christian relations into the 1500s.