Introduction: Movement and Mobility in the Medieval Mediterranean: Changing Perspectives from Late Antiquity to the Long-Twelfth Century. Medieval Worlds|Movement and Mobility & Ideologies of Translation, III - Volume 13. 2021 medieval worlds Volume 13. 2021|

This article introduces the themed section »Movement and Mobility in the Medieval Mediterranean: Changing Perspectives from Late Antiquity to the Long-Twelfth Century«. This series of articles engages with the ongoing debates in historiography on the role of movement and mobility in the socio-political frameworks of medieval societies throughout the Mediterranean world from Iberia to the Near East. The papers introduced here consider a wide range of contacts and exchange from the diplomatic encounters of late antique Byzantium via the exchange of (religious) ideas and spiritual objects in Italy and the Near East to the fundamental mobility of capital, slaves and goods. Rather than reveal a static, ossified and self-contained range of landscapes, this article will argue that there were not only cross-cultural, religious and political contacts but also economic and social connections that fused the Medieval Mediterranean into a heterogenous contact zone of cultures, ideas and products. Using this broader framework of the Mediterranean as a contact zone and border region between and across the longue durée represented by the period from Late Antiquity until the end of the twelfth century allows the contributions to demonstrate movement, not stasis after Rome and the expansion of horizons rather than their restriction