The aim of this Atlas is to provide a broad overview of the history – political and military, economic and social, religious and cultural – of the medieval Muslim worlds, from late antiquity to the early modern era, based on almost two hundred original maps at all scales, accompanied by texts, extracts from sources and illustrations.
The Islamic conquests contributed to the formation of a vast group of territories where Muslims held political power, dominating peoples with different customs, languages and religions. It spanned three continents – from al-Andalus in the west to Islamized India in the east – and opened onto two major maritime spaces, the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. This atlas explores the routes taken by merchants, pilgrims, travellers, students and scholars; it testifies to the scale of the urban phenomenon and the wealth of exchanges in this area as a whole, and illustrates its integration into an emerging world-economy.
Muslim communities split into different branches: Sunnis and Shiites, but also a myriad of other minority currents that have marked the religious topography to this day. While fratricidal struggles were important, conflictual relations with various external enemies – conquests and jihad, crusades and invasions – reshaped internal balances as well as external borders. Diplomatic activity throughout Eurasia and from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and the circulation of ideas and literary and architectural models, bear witness not only to commercial exchanges, but also to the extent of the networks developed over the centuries.
The researchers behind this collective work, launched within the « Medieval Islam » team of the Orient & Méditerranée laboratory (CNRS), are specialists in various fields of the medieval history of the Muslim worlds. Through a renewed historiography, they provide an overview and understanding of a global and connected history of medieval Muslim worlds.
