Anxieties of Violence: Christians and Muslims in Conflict in Aghlabid North Africa and the Central Mediterranean*

Abstract

Abstract The Italo-Byzantine sources for Aghlabid Ifrīqiya present a vision of Muslim–Christian relations in the region that is often darkly violent, and that contrasts with the image of this time and place found not only in the Arabic accounts, but even in most contemporary Latin Christian ones. Critically, however, the Byzantine texts most concerned with violence in the Aghlabid amirate comprise a small but important collection of hagiographic narratives about Sicilian and southern Italian Christians carried off into slavery by North African raiders. Indeed, in the third/ninth century, the Byzantine central Mediterranean was particularly hard-hit by raiding staged from lands under Muslim control, and Ifrīqiya appears to have been the market of choice for slaves captured in expeditions of this sort. North African society was doubtless characterised by some degree of interfaith tension in the Aghlabid period; but far more central to the violent vision of the Byzantine sources is the fact that hagiography provided a narrative space within which authors and audiences alike could grapple with anxieties about the possibility of capture and its physical and spiritual consequences.