In the aftermath of the Crusade of 1270, when Louis IX of France died on African soil outside the ruins of Carthage, in Hafsid Ifriqiya, Louis’s younger brother Charles of Anjou, king of Sicily, negotiated an extremely generous tribute from the Hafsids after he called off the siege: 210,000 pieces of gold, each worth 50 silver dirhems, in addition to the arrières owed on the annual tribute to Sicily for the last five years. The Hafsid caliphs obtained their almost unimaginable gold through access to trans-Saharan trade. How aware were the Crusader forces of the origins of the pure bullion that so stoked their desires? Explicit references to gold transactions in the financial records of 1270 describe the gold as “auro de Paleola (gold of Paleolus),”a term in use since at least Ptolemy to describe a mythical West African “Island of Gold.” Probing the knowledge and motivation of the Capetians and Angevins in the lead up to 1270 allows us to re-examine the proto-colonial ambitions of the powerhouses of Western Europe, and to re-situate the role sub-Saharan Africa played in the medieval Mediterranean.

Sarah Guérin is Assistant Professor in the Department of History of Art at Penn. Her teaching focuses on the art of Medieval Europe, 700–1400. She received a B.Sc. from the University of Saskatchewan (2001), and her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto (2009). Before joining the faculty at Penn in 2016, she was Assistant Professor at the Université de Montréal (2013–2016), and held postdoctoral positions at Columbia University and the Courtauld Institute of Art. Her research centers on the material conditions of medieval art, with an emphasis on the socio-economic circumstances surrounding production and use, including trade, artisanal organization, techniques, function as well as the theological conceits that influenced and enabled production. Focusing on art objects, which are defined more strongly by their material composition (ivory, gold, silver, precious stones), opens a wide range of questions regarding not only the meaning of certain materials but also the economic conditions that enable their very conception.

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