Article of Note - January 2024
 “‘Bees in the Medieval Maghrib: Wax, Honey, and Cross-Cultural Trade
in the Western Mediterranean”
(Alexandra Sapoznik: History, King's College, London)

Alexandra Sapoznik, “Bees in the Medieval Maghrib: Wax, Honey, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Western Mediterranean,” Medieval Encounters 27 (2021): 434-455.

Read the article here.

Keywords: bees • wax • honey • beekeeping • cross-cultural trade

Abstract:
Believed to originate in Paradise and set apart in their chastity, bees were potent religious symbols in medieval Christianity and Islam. This article explores how these beliefs drove an extensive trade in wax and honey, and examines the role of Jews, conversos, Christians, and Muslims in this trade. Further, it considers the environmental context and the extent to which religious prohibitions against trade between Christians and Muslims may have provided economic opportunities for Jewish merchants, while examining the economic and cultural relationships between members of the three Abrahamic religions.

Nomination Statement:
Taking advantage of the rich commercial and ecclesiastical archives of medieval Catalonia, Sapoznik’s elegantly argued article centers on wax, one of the most common commodities in the medieval Mediterranean. The article weaves together environmental, economic, and religious history to show how a specific environmental context shaped the trade of wax and how religious culture justified taking advantage of the local environmental features. Sapoznik demonstrates that the role honey played in the religious life of medieval Muslims increased the production of wax, making it available to converso and Jewish intermediaries, who shipped it to Catalonia. In its turn, the ever-increasing Christian demand for Maghrebi wax intensified the Maghrebi consumption of honey. The article sheds new light on hitherto unnoticed, yet significant connectivities between the Maghrib and Europe, and simultaneously provides a model for interdisciplinary research at is best.

Authors’ Comment:
This article was part of the project ‘Bees in the Medieval World: Economic, environmental and cultural perspectives’ (Leverhulme Trust RPG-080-2018) for which I was Principal Investigator. The project studied bees, beekeeping and bee products in Europe and the wider Mediterranean over the later Middle Ages. Honey bees (Apis mellifera) produce wax and honey in varying quantities, and across the study region beekeeping was integrated into systems of land use and household production. Yet despite this, the extensive use of wax candles for Christian devotional practice meant that demand outstripped domestic supply. This drove a lucrative long-distance trade from several major wax-producing zones, the most important of which for the Mediterranean was North Africa. The article examines the confluence of cultural, environmental and economic factors specific to central and western Maghreb which drove the cross-cultural trade in wax (and the lack thereof for honey) and the potential opportunities for Jewish and converso merchants that the moral quandaries of this trade may have offered. The focus here is on bees, and certainly there is much more to say about them! But the relationships between culturally driven consumption patterns, the impact of specific environments for production capacities, and the role of demand in driving the exploitation of these capacities within mosaic landscapes of people, plants and animals, have broader resonances for our understanding of the Mediterranean. These will be explored further in my current project, ‘ECOMEDS: Economic and cultural connections within Mediterranean ecosystems, c.1250-c.1550’ (selected by the ERC, funded by the UKRI). This project looks at four highly sought-after, location-specific commodities (coral, honey, citrus and cheese) whose trade in the Middle Ages drew together networks of producers, merchants, processors and consumers from different communities. The ideas in this article are the jumping off point for the new project, and came from a paper given at the ‘Money Matters’ conference at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, as part of the ERC project ‘Beyond the Elite’ led by Elisheva Baumgarten. I am grateful to her and to my colleagues on the bees project, Mark Whelan and Lluís Sales i Favà for the chance to think about the themes here

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