Mobile Meanings: A Global Approach to a Dagger from Greater Syria

Among the holdings of the Furusiyya Art Foundation in Vaduz, Liechtenstein, a dagger datable to the twelfth or thirteenth century combines motifs from the Islamic princely cycle with an icon of a Christian warrior saint. It can be located within the thriving luxury industries of the eastern Mediterranean, where numerous objects combined styles, inscriptions, and iconography from the Christian and Islamic worlds. Despite much recent work on these cross-cultural objects, the Furusiyya dagger remains largely unstudied; this paper accordingly considers the dagger in relation to elite, transcultural practices of hunting, feasting, and self-presentation. It suggests that such mixed imagery was designed to convey messages of power and personal protection in a Christian idiom legible to diverse audiences