The City in Late Medieval Anatolia

Late medieval Anatolia was characterised by widespread political instability. Yet despite these difficulties, the cities themselves were relatively stable spaces populated by complex and syncretic communities, and managed by various models of grass roots, urban self-governance. Rachel Goshgarian here offers the first social history of the region in this period to draw on Armenian sources. She reads these alongside other locally-written texts, primarily those in Arabic, Persian and Turkish, and uses recent scholarship on medieval Iberia and the convivencia paradigm - the method by which social cohesion and coexistence could be created between different ethnic and cultural communities - to offer a fuller and vital picture of the region's cities. Focusing on the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, The City in Late Medieval Anatolia addresses a wide range of timely debates - including inter-faith interaction, urbanism, social history and the politics of space.