2026-06-27 –, Room 201 (Seats 42)
Stretching from the Carpathians to Mongolia, the Eurasian steppe has for millennia served not only as a corridor of exchange—connecting polities, religions, and intellectual traditions across Afro-Eurasia—but also as a frontier of imagination. It was a space described by outsiders who used it as a mirror through which they defined themselves and their others. This paper examines how three medieval authors—Ibn Fadlān from the Abbasid Caliphate (10th century CE), Anna Komnene in Byzantium (12th century CE), and William of Rubruck from western Europe (13th century CE)—portrayed the steppe and its peoples both through their own observations and within inherited paradigms of ethnographic thought.
The three authors offered distinctive visions of this vast region from three different vantage points and in three different languages. The Arab envoy Ibn Fadlān traveled from Baghdad to the Volga, describing—in Arabic—the Bulgars, Turks, and the Norse traders he encountered along the river’s banks. The Byzantine princess and historian Anna Komnene, writing—in Greek—from the imperial center of Constantinople, depicted the Pechenegs and other Turkic nomadic peoples who threatened or negotiated with her father’s empire. A century later, the Franciscan friar William of Rubruck crossed Central Asia to the Mongol court at Karakorum, recording—in Latin—the geography, customs, and beliefs of its peoples. Juxtaposing these three authors reveals a common pattern: the weaving of direct experience with perennial ethnographic motifs stretching back to Pliny the Elder and Herodotus.
Through a close reading of works that are normally studied in isolation, this paper explores how medieval global awareness was shaped by an interplay of inherited intellectual traditions and fresh observation. In doing so, it offers both a comparative and a longue durée perspective on how societies have imagined and constructed the global.
Speaker Bio (as requested): Erik Hermans is an intellectual historian of the global Middle Ages whose research bridges European, Byzantine, and Islamic intellectual traditions. He hails from the Netherlands, and was educated at the universities of Nijmegen, Amsterdam, Ghent, and Oxford before earning his Ph.D. in History and Classics from New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. He currently teaches in the Graduate Program of Classical Studies at Villanova University in the United States. For his research, he engages with primary sources in Latin, Greek, and Arabic to bring a global perspective to the history of premodern intellectual life. He is the editor of A Companion to the Global Early Middle Ages (Arc Humanities Press, 2020) and of the special issue The Global Dissemination of Classical Learning (International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 2023).