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CMES and the Committee on Medieval Studies present the Annual Joint Lecture in Medieval Middle Eastern Studies featuring
Paul M. Cobb
Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, University of Pennsylvania
In 1396, a German teenager, Johann Schiltberger, was taken captive while on crusade against the Ottoman Turks and he became a personal attendant of the sultan Bayezid I. At Bayezid's death, he joined the household of the Central Asian warlord Timur (Tamerlane) and spent the next thirty years of his life in service to various Timurid princes across the Middle East and Central Asia. After escaping back to his Bavarian home, he dictated his remarkable account of this captivity and the work survived in various guises into the early modern period. What can Schiltberger's text teach us about the Middle East (and Middle Europe) at the close of the Middle Ages?
Paul M. Cobb is Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, University of Pennsylvania. He is a social and cultural historian of the pre-modern Islamic world. He has been teaching at Penn since 2008. His areas of interest include the history of memory, animal studies, Islamic relations with the West, and travel and exploration. He is, in particular, a recognized authority on the history of the medieval Crusades in their Islamic context. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including White Banners: Contention in ‘Abbasid Syria, 750-880 (SUNY Press, 2001); Usama ibn Munqidh: Warrior-Poet of the Age of Crusades (Oneworld, 2005); The Book of Contemplation: Islam and the Crusades, a translation of the “memoirs” and other works of Usama ibn Munqidh (Penguin Classics, 2008), and The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades (Oxford University Press, 2014). He is also the co-editor (with Wout van Bekkum) of Strategies of Medieval Communal Identity: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Peeters, 2003) and (with Antoine Borrut) of Umayyad Legacies: History and Memory from Syria to Spain (E. J. Brill, 2010).
Contact: Liz Flanagan