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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).
Speaker: Pere Benito i Monclús (Serra Húnter Professor of Medieval History, University of Lleida)
Organizers: Pablo Sanahuja Ferrer (RCCHU), Andy Chen (Department of History, HU)