| Abstract: | This article concerns itself with the references in Ibn ?ayyān's Muqtabis, Book V, to an Amalfitan presence at the court of Cordoba in the middle of the fourth/tenth century. It will be argued that these isolated references to a precociously early, Italian, mercantile presence in Spain, taken largely at face value by the text's editor and all but neglected in Amalfitan historiography, need to be interrogated to determine whether they fit the fourth/tenth-century context of Amalfitan–Muslim relations, or should be read against their fifth/eleventh-century context as evidence for a golden age of the Caliphate which, by Ibn ?ayyān's day, was already passing into memory and myth. Using contemporary, comparative evidence from Barcelona, the article examines the possibility of communications between Italy and Spain in the earlier period, and concludes that the conditions were probably right for an Amalfitan arrival, but rapidly changed by Ibn ?ayyān's day to exclude them from further contacts. |
