NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND CHRONOLOGY

This book uses the guidelines for Arabic transliteration established by the International Journal of Middle East Studies. These rules broadly specify that English terms should be used where available, that diacritics should be reserved for technical terms for which there is no suitable English equivalent, that Arabic names and titles should follow conventions for English capitalization, and that accepted English spellings should be used even if they contradict general transliteration rules (ex. Baalbek). The goal in using these guidelines is to create a text that is accessible to nonspecialists yet provides enough information to specialists so that they can parse relevant Arabic terms as necessary.

In citations and direct quotations from translated texts, I have preserved the transliteration system used in the cited text. For example, I retain the diacritical marks in the title of Jeremy Johns’s article “Malik Ifrīqiya: The Norman Kingdom of Africa and the Fāṭimids” though IJMES guidelines would specify the removal of the diacritical marks in “Ifriqiya” and “Fatimids.” I likewise preserve the transliteration of “al-Mahdiyya” in Mohamed Talbi’s entry from the second edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam even though I refer to this city as “Mahdia” throughout this book. This system is by no means perfect, but I hope that it makes the references in this book as easy to locate as possible.

I have utilized in this book a combination of Gregorian and Islamic (Hijri) calendars largely based on the systems used in the original medieval sources. When discussing Arabic sources and their chronologies, I typically provide the date in the Hijri year followed by the Gregorian year(s) in parentheses. Thus, the fall of Mahdia to the Normans, which is covered primarily by medieval Arabic sources, occurred in 543H (1148–49). When discussing Latin texts, I default to the Gregorian dating system. In cases where an event is considered in detail in both Arabic and Latin sources, I alternate between Hijri and Gregorian calendars, depending on which source I am describing. When providing date ranges, I tend to default to the Gregorian system for the sake of narrative comprehension, regardless of the sources used. Thus, when I write of growing Zirid disaffection with the Fatimids, I date this to the 1040s, even though most sources to consider this situation were written in Arabic.