Where Three Worlds Met

‘The sublime objects of liminality’: the Byzantine insular-coastal koine and its administration in the passage from Late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages (ca. 600–ca. 850)

“…They were also actively involved in the Tyrrhenian politics with active links to Amalfi and Naples as both still nominally dependent on Byzantium. 65 On the one hand, then, such examples of 'physical mobility' as sublimated by 'mental proximity' help us to characterize Sicily in terms of liminal relational space as 'made up of the entanglements and comings together of material, cultural, political [and] boundary-defying forces of through wide ranges of networks of relations; for islands are indeed laboratories for thinking through relationalities'. 66 On the other hand, one should stress how contemporary material evidence and archaeology help us to read Sicilian insular spaces as liminal; for liminality often embodies the possibility of cultural hybridity without an implicit or forced hierarchy.…”

“…69 The boundary between Muslim and Christian spaces was in flux, and the Byzantine koine, as a borderland region, saw activity-both contestation and communication-both along and across the frontier. 70…”