Natural Disasters and Political Catastrophes

In the year 456/1064, during a campaign described by historians as a proto-Crusade, a Christian coalition conquered the city of Barbastro, a Muslim frontier stronghold in the northern Iberian Peninsula. In his account of the event, the Andalusī historian Ibn Ḥayyān wrote that when news of the defeat reached Córdoba, the entire territory of al-Andalus trembled. A few decades later, in 548/1153, an earthquake struck Syria. The Egyptian chronicler Ibn Ruzzīk interpreted this natural disaster as divine punishment, linking it to the loss of Jerusalem to the Crusaders. This contribution focuses on the relationship between natural phenomena, especially natural disasters, and sociopolitical events such as military defeat and territorial dispossession. It seeks to examine why and how these two realms—natural and political—are intertwined in the historical thought, discourse, and imagination of medieval Islamic authors. Thus, I examine how processes of territorial loss—and the emotions and traumas they engender—are represented in historical sources through references to natural disasters, whether real or imagined. I also explore how and why the natural environment functions as a medium for generating and expressing emotional responses. In particular, I study how one form of response to territorial loss was articulated through a natural or ‘environmental’ imaginary, including the construction of an idealised landscape that stood in contrast to the catastrophic landscapes used to represent both natural calamities and military defeats. Keywords: natural disasters, feelings, landscape, eschatological fear, territorial loss, al-Andalus