This introductory essay outlines the aims, scope, and initial results of the work package Multilingualism in Eurasian Premodern Societies: Social Hierarchies and Spaces, part of the Cluster of Excellence »Eurasian Transformations«. The work package investigates multilingualism as a pervasive feature of premodern Eurasian societies and explores how language use intersected with social diversity, identity formation, and spatial organisation. By combining social, spatial, and linguistic approaches, the initiative seeks to illuminate the functional and ideological dimensions of historical multilingualism and to situate it within broader patterns of communication, mobility, and power. Since the 1990s, scholarship has recognised multilingualism not as an exception but as a structural norm of premodern polities. Building on this foundation, the work package examines multilingual practices in key urban settings – administrative, religious, and commercial – where social hierarchies were negotiated and reproduced. A series of workshops and a major conference held in Vienna between 2025 and 2026 addressed administrative multilingualism, elite linguistic repertoires, religious language spaces, and the linguistic dynamics of trade. These events highlighted how languages served as instruments of governance, social distinction, and economic interaction, and how multilingual practices were embedded in the spatial logic of cities and empires. The contributions by Marijana Mišević and Lena Sadovski exemplify the project’s approach. Mišević analyses Ottoman–Ragusan multilingual diplomatic communication and the shifting role of Slavic expertise in early Ottoman administration, while Sadovski investigates the pragmatic coexistence of Latin, Venetian, and Slavic in late medieval Spalato, emphasising the social distribution of language skills and the significance of vernacular communication. Together, these studies open up new comparative perspectives on multilingualism in premodern Eurasia and lay the groundwork for further interdisciplinary research within the Cluster of Excellence.

Schlagworte: Historical multilingualism, urban space, eliteness, identity

This article examines the multilingual dynamics of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Dalmatia, with a focus on the city of Spalato (modern Split). It argues that the region’s linguistic landscape was defined not by strict language hierarchies or rigid ethnic divisions but by a pragmatic and adaptive multilingualism. Latin and Italian dominated the spheres of formal administration, law, and commerce, functioning as the official languages of record. However, Slavic – spoken by the majority population – remained the principal medium of everyday communication and played a persistent, though often informal, role in public and administrative life. While Slavic was seldom used in official written documents, Latin and Italian records reflect Slavic input through references to translations, lexical borrowings, and direct quotations. Venetian authorities pragmatically accommodated the linguistic realities of their subjects by relying on translators, accepting bilingual communication, and tolerating unofficial scribes proficient in Slavic. The article first discusses the social distribution of language skills and multilingual spaces within the city, before giving an overview of the use of Slavic as an administrative language in the communication between town and hinterland. Slavic lexical borrowings and the incorporation of direct quotations into Latin and Italian texts are addressed next. The focus then switches to the flexible use of both Slavic and Romance personal names as well as the challenges involved in recording Slavic place names. All this points to a society in which language use was driven by functionality rather than ethnicity. This »Slavo-Romance symbiosis « challenges binary models of identity and instead suggests a deeply integrated urban culture. Attempts to classify Dalmatian populations strictly by linguistic or onomastic markers are shown to be inadequate in capturing the region’s social complexity.

Schlagworte: Spalato/Split, Venice, Multilingualism, urban history, administration, onomastics, Slavic, Croatian, Italian, Latin

This paper is an essay on the extant products of pragmatic literacy that testify to centurieslong written communication between Ottomans and Ragusans, emphasizing its multilingualism and multiscripturalism. It rests on the assumption that there is a benefit in studying this corpus by using language and literacy ideologies both as hermeneutical tools and as objects of historical investigation. This rarely, if ever, applied approach entails examining changing patterns in linguistic choices made within the distinct and/or intersecting realms of pragmatic literacy, as well as underlying explicit and implicit ideas about language and literacy use – issues that can be addressed, in the context of Ottoman-Ragusan relations, from at least the late 14th century onward. The main and modest ambition of this paper is to draw attention to the arguably neglected complexity of the history of this communication, and to suggest that its more detailed investigation could offer additional insights into the cultural and power relations between the two polities, the changing ways in which the Ottomans and Ragusans perceived and managed diversity, and the historically shifting relationships among users of multiple languages (Latin, Ragusan Romance, Italian, Slavic, Greek, Turkish, Arabic, Persian) and scripts (Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic, Greek). Although the relationship between the Ottomans and Ragusans – as it pertains to the movement of documents and people across vast geo-linguistic spaces – can be traced up to c. 1808 (the fall of the Dubrovnik Republic), the present discussion is confined to the period between the 1390s and the 1650s. This period may be further subdivided into several phases, each of which will be outlined in broad strokes and illustrated through representative literacy events.

Schlagworte: late medieval, Multilingualism, pragmatic literacy, Ottomans, Ragusans, South-Slavia

This introduction presents the second part of a themed issue on Moving Jobs: Occupational Identity and Motility in the Middle Ages, whose first part appeared in volume 20 (2024). It discusses the advantages of considering the concept of motility to investigate the combination of movement and occupation, and its reflection on identity construction. Some of the issues that the contributions to both parts have addressed include how mobility could have important consequences on social advancement and the shaping of identities; the kinds of networks that helped the movement of individuals and were created by them; the importance of micro-mobilities and the local horizon of the medieval communities. The introduction also summarises the contents of the three new contributions. Irene Bavuso investigates the mobility of smiths in early post-Roman England; Robert Portass focuses on local mobilities in rural societies of tenth-century northern Spain; Joe Glynias concentrates on the highly mobile career and multiple identities of the eleventh-century intellectual Ibn Buṭlān. The introduction concludes with some reflections on how to approach female work and mobility – a theme that has been traditionally less visible in early medieval scholarship, and for which one may profit from theoretical refinements and well as from a cross-disciplinary broadening of the pool of investigated sources.

Schlagworte: Motility, medieval work, gendered division of labour, local mobility, peasantry, craftspeople, transcultural mobility, job identity, social mobility, Networks

This article seeks to re-evaluate the evidence for the itinerancy of smiths in the early medieval period, focusing especially on England between the fifth and the early seventh century. The »itinerant smith« is a well-known model to explain metalworking in north-western Europe during these centuries. Yet the idea of a totally itinerant smith relies heavily on outdated theoretical models, and on literary images that cannot be considered to represent reality at face value. Geographical mobility is to some extent inherent in metalworking, and it was also a way through which smiths could expand their networks and gain upward socioeconomic mobility and social standing. However, it is profitable to consider a more complex model, in which various forms of mobility and sedentism coexisted. Given the severely fragmentary state of the evidence, both written sources and archaeological remains from the Continent will be considered, including fundamental insights from early medieval technical treatises. A re-evaluation of the mobility of the smiths – this article holds – may also have theoretical consequences for broader questions about early post-Roman England, especially concerning the landscape of settlement, the connections between elites and crafts, and the mechanisms of construction and reproduction of hierarchical relationships.

Schlagworte: early medieval England, mobility, smiths, metalworking, craftsmanship, craft treatises

This article begins and ends by arguing that social historians of the early Middle Ages interested in the relatively neglected themes of work and mobility would do well to refocus their energies on the »small worlds« unearthed by charter-based reconstructions of local societies – the latter a methodology associated above all with the pioneering studies of Wendy Davies since the 1980s. It argues that this approach – that is, what we might call a »reversion to the local« – remains relevant because most people’s social experience – indeed, their entire referential system – took root and developed within a limited geographical compass, so if we want to understand the structures that gave shape and meaning to non-elite life, it is imperative that we consider work and mobility – the principal themes of this article – in the specific local contexts in which they operated. Such an approach is of course constrained by the patchy survival of evidence from across early medieval Europe. But the mundane affairs of the village society of tenth-century north-western Spain can be tracked in some detail, especially in certain unusually well-documented villages, such as Rabal, analysed herein, thanks to significant numbers of surviving charters, allowing us to see something of the potential richness of »the local« as a frame of analysis. This article proposes that by focusing on the small-scale and the quotidian, we address the lives of rural cultivators, as far as possible, on their own terms, enabling us, to the degree that it is indeed possible, to set those lives within carefully historicised contextual horizons.

Schlagworte: work, mobility, local society, the peasantry, communal management of resources

In this paper, I introduce a novel perspective on the Baghdadi physician Ibn Buṭlān, analyzing how he flexibly deployed his Christian identity, his Baghdadi medical education and connections, and his knowledge of the Greek and Arabic traditions to gain employment and fame as he traveled across both the Byzantine and Islamic worlds. Ibn Buṭlān is known to scholars of medieval Arabic medicine and literature as an exemplary Arabic litterateur of the Islamicate world. However, his actions and career as a Christian Arabic author – including his authorship of a treatise on the Eucharist for the Byzantine patriarch in the midst of East-West schism in Constantinople in 1054 – are much less well understood. In this paper, I show how Ibn Buṭlān marketed his Baghdadi intellectual heritage as he traveled across the Islamic world. Furthermore, I show that he converted to join the Byzantine church and became a Byzantine monk. This enabled him to join other Arabic-speaking Christian scholars active under Byzantine rule in the city of Antioch, and to market his Baghdadi heritage to new Byzantine audiences, both Arabic- and Greek-speaking. I argue that, by composing Arabic texts and instructing students in Antioch, he helped instigate a wider, long-lasting Byzantine interest in the Greco-Arabic medicine of Baghdad.

Schlagworte: Greco-Arabic translation, Baghdad, Constantinople, Antioch, Melkite, Byzantium, ʿAbbāsid Caliphate, History of Medicine

In the absence of documented information about papermaking during the early Islamic centuries, our knowledge of production methods, trade, types, and major centres remains fragmentary, limited to a few scattered references in primary sources. This article introduces a rare Persian treatise on the manufacture of cotton paper in the thirteenth century, entitled Kāghaẕ-nāma (»Book of Paper«), composed in a maqāma-like prosimetric style. It is the earliest known work on papermaking in Persian, dated 649 AH/1251 AD, and was written by ʿIzz al-Dīn Maṭlaʿī for a patron probably named Tāj al-Dīn in Khorasan. Although an edition of the text was published in Iran in 2013, it has never been examined in Western scholarship. This paper seeks to introduce the Kāghaẕ-nāma to a wider audience and to explore what it reveals about papermaking practices and the symbolic meanings attached to paper in Mongol Baghdad. After introducing the sole surviving manuscript (Istanbul, Ayasofya 4824), its author, and the dedicatee, I discuss the treatise’s allegorical and mystical dimensions, alongside its practical descriptions of papermaking. The evidence suggests that the author’s depiction of the process, though couched in metaphor, corresponds closely to the actual techniques used in thirteenth-century Islamic workshops.

Schlagworte: Kāghaẕ-nāma, ʿIzz al-Dīn Maṭlaʿī, Islamic papermaking, Mongol Baghdad

This research note introduces the Maronite Chronicle of 713, a hitherto unknown Christian world chronicle in Arabic, recently identified by the author in the collection of manuscripts at St. Catherine’s Monastery on Mt. Sinai. Extant in a single thirteenth-century manuscript (Sinai Ar. 597), this Arabic chronicle is a translation of a lost Syriac work, originally composed in 712-713 CE, probably in a Syriac Monothelete milieu with close ties to the Monastery of Mar Maron. The chronicle covers the history of the world from Adam to 692-693 CE and exhibits numerous parallels with the so-called »eastern source«, which informed the chronicles of Theophanes, Michael the Syrian, Agapius of Mabbug and the anonymous Syriac Chronicle of 1234. To demonstrate the links between these sources and the new chronicle, the note analyses, as a case study, a passage discussing the main events of the year 633-634 CE. The author argues that the Maronite Chronicle of 713 provides an alternative chronology of events for this year and thus represents an independent source for the early stages of the Arab conquests. A more detailed study and a critical edition and annotated translation of this new chronicle are in preparation.

Schlagworte: Syriac historiography, Christian world chronicles, Syriac-Arabic translations, Christian Arabic manuscripts, Maronites, St. Catherine’s Monastery Library, early Arab conquests, comet of 634 CE