초록/요약

This article aims to reconstruct Christian-Muslim Relations in the period of Ibn Jubayr’s pilgrimage. The famous Iberian Muslim Ibn Jubayr composed a travel account after having accomplished his pilgrimage which took more than two years from February 1183 to September 1184. His vivid description of the twelfth-century Mediterranean world permits us to gain not only a great amount of geographical information but also knowledge of ships, sailors, their capabilities, life on board, patterns of commercial sailing, etc. The analysis of his travel account shows that a remarkable continuity of maritime practice has continued from Antiquity to the twelfth century. Additionally, we can see a small amount of progress in maritime technology, which made the time of sea navigation a little longer and permitted a wider exploitation of the sea than in previous centuries. His travel account compels us to review some historical interpretations, particularly the hostile Christian versus Muslim divide. The relationship between Christians and Muslims was not definitely fixed but vacillated between mutual respect and tolerance on one hand, and tensions and conflicts on the other. It is the word “diversity” that accurately characterizes the relation between Christians and Muslims from war and hostility to peaceful convivencia. Ibn Jubayr's pilgrimage account reveals that the mutual economical necessities of Christianity and Islam were so strong as to support commercial exchange even during the wars of the Crusades.