Acccessing the Sea in the Middle Ages

Specific source types provide access to medieval maritime history. This volume assesses them comprehensively. Case studies from the Western, Central and Eastern Mediterranean reveal these records’ potential and ways to exploit them by using quantitative methods. This volume presents papers from an international conference organised at Heidelberg University in 2024. Its aim is to approach mobility in the medieval Mediterranean in a novel manner: by systematically focussing on administrative sources and by discussing ways of mining them with the help of computational tools. The authors present new technological and methodological means of collecting, retrieving, reassembling, and visualising data. The contributions compellingly reveal the minutia of harbours and ports, navigation and taxation, shipping and sailors. The combination of a close reading of medieval sources and computational methods proves to be an extremely effective way of “Accessing the Sea”.