"War, Crusade and the Making of Famine in the Mediterranean (11th-13th Centuries)”
Over the last two decades, the paleoscientific revolution has had a profound impact on the way we make history, generating new narratives that have challenged older historiographical paradigms. Studies on premodern food crises have been undergoing a similarly important renewal, spearheaded by specialists in the social and economic history of the Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds. Emerging new works integrate theories derived from the New Institutional Economics as well as the literature on contemporary famines, with emphasis on Amartya Sen's entitlement theory of famine.
Famine has been shown to be closely related instead to urbanization, development, market integration, and warfare. Where the latter is concerned, recent studies suggest that between the eleventh and the mid-thirteenth centuries, supra-regional famines were closely related to the projects of crusade. The aim of this talk is to examine this hypothesis in the context of the First and Second Crusades, the Catalan-Pisan crusade against Mallorca (1113-1115), and the first campaigns of conquest of the Kingdom of Valencia by the armies of James I (1234-1235).
Pere Benito i Monclús is Professor of Medieval History at the Universitat de Lleida (Spain). Between 2006 and 2008 he was Marie Curie Intra-European Fellow in the Laboratoire de Médiévistique Occidentale de Paris (Univ. Paris I/CNRS). His early research dealt with the management practices of the rural lordship and the relations between lords and peasants in Catalonia from the 11th to the 13th centuries. In the last twenty years, he has focused on the study of food markets and food and mortality crises in medieval Europe with the aim of revising the models and paradigms currently used by historiography to interpret them. Since 2009 he has been PI of 5 research projects obtained in competitive calls (4 national and one European) and has made contributions to several international projects on social and economic history of the Middle Ages, among them: “Les économies de la pauvreté au Moyen Âge en Europe méditerranénne (IXe-XVe ss)” (Casa de Velázquez - LaMOP, 2017-2020), “L’entreprise rurale en Méditerranée occidentale (XIIIe-XVe ss)” (Casa de Velázquez – U. Paris 8, 2015-2017) y “Expertise et valeur des choses au Moyen Âge (Xe-XVe ss)” (LaMOP, 2010-2012). He has promoted the creation of the thematic network of the École française de Rome “La mémoire des crises dans les sociétés méditerranéennes: Antiquité- début de l’époque moderne” (2024-2027), with A. Wilkin (Univ. Libre de Bruxelles), D. Castex (U. Bordeaux) and M. Candido da Silva (U. Sao Paolo). He has organized several cycles of international meetings devoted to the study of food crises and food markets in pre-modern Europe. He is a member of the editorial committee of the series "The Medieval Countryside," Brepols publ. He is the author of more than 90 contributions, including monographs, book chapters and journal articles.
