Ossamenta

Posted by Jonathan Jarrett

https://tenthmedieval.wordpress.com/2026/04/26/deaths-of-the-titans/

http://tenthmedieval.wordpress.com/?p=24419

I almost wish I had never started writing obituaries on this blog. Obviously, there were good reasons to do so (as well as some bad ones) and people I felt I owed, but still. I should have realised that it would mean chronicling the passage of the generation where as a student and young academic I found my teachers and patrons, and as that generation reaches the kind of extent which can be expected, of course the bad news keeps coming. However, very rarely am I expecting it when it comes, and certainly in neither of these cases, the latter of them especially. On 24th January we lost Professor David Abulafia, long of Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, and while I was still reacting to that news reached me that Professor Stephen Baxter, by then of St Peter’s College Oxford but in the time I knew him of King’s College London, had preceded him by three days on 21st January. They were born twenty years apart; David was 77 and Stephen only 57.

These are difficult men for me to write for, although that is not the reason this comes as late as it does (sorry; life, rather than death, to blame there). But still. David taught me as an undergraduate, but my contact with him after that was limited, I think, to one conversation after he gave a keynote address somewhere, and it must have been either before the blog began or in the mysterious backlog somewhere, I suspect the former. Stephen, on the other hand, was a regular at, indeed sometime convenor at the Institute of Historical Research Earlier Middle Ages seminar I went to for so long, and for a short while a senior colleague of mine when I taught a term at KCL. My lectures repeatedly overran into his classes, which he was polite but understandably cross about. I’m not sure I could say I got on with either of them, but I had a great deal of respect for them as scholars and teachers and I feel privileged that I knew them. And they were both titans in their fields, so I think I have to say something.

Professor David Abulafia presenting his work at the Holberg Prize Symposium on 8th June 2010, photo by Marit Hommedal, licensed under CC BY 4.0 via Flickr

David Abulafia was a historian of the Mediterranean Sea and its cultures, and it is hard to pin him down more than that.¹ He had strong interests in Italy, the Iberian Peninsula and especially Mallorca and in trading and Jewish communities (overlapping but not congruent sets), but also wrote a biography of Emperor Frederick II of Germany and got involved in Crusading scholarship now and then.² He also wrote about the Canary Islands and there really aren’t many medievalists in that group.³ Also, he was mostly always right; I haven’t necessarily been looking but I don’t remember ever seeing a piece where someone set out to correct or take down something David had written, at least about the Middle Ages. People didn’t always like it and he was quite capable of being very contrary, but he was clever enough to justify himself and always true to his evidence, even if others might have found different emphases.⁴ You can read his work and know it’s sound; in fact, I’d say that’s evident from it. And I tell you what, I know I cannot certainly say the same of myself and maybe not many of us can.

Furthermore, David is one of the long list of people without whom I wouldn’t be here doing what I’m doing. I was in the last cohorts for an undergraduate course on the Muslim Iberian Peninsula which I believe he convened; either way, he gave me my tutorials for it, and I have been relying on what he told me to read and what he just told me ever since then to some degree. It was my first non-Christian history and opened up a whole set of intellectual traditions to me I’d had no idea about, as well as sending me to read some very little-used stuff.⁵ And somewhere in there, he set me what was then very recent work by one of the new fires in the field, Eduardo Manzano Moreno, about the mysterious communities in the unrecorded zones of the Christian-Muslim frontier and I was super interested in that, so that when I needed a topic for an essay during my M.Phil. it came right back to me and started me, with the guidance of Professor Rosamond McKitterick and indeed as recounted here Professor Peter Linehan, looking into frontier Catalonia.⁶ But without David, I wouldn’t have known where to start.

Furthermore, and it may seem an odd thing to make a point of, but I believe David was a happy man. I quite often saw him in argumentative mode, which is kind of how tutorial teaching works but was also the flavour of more and more of his academic speaking as he grew more senior. But, in Cambridge one could also find him and his wife Professor Anna Abulafia, who also taught me and with whom my thoughts are as I write all this, out walking together wreathed in smiles as they talked. Especially in academia, we don’t always or all get to be happy and he was a salient reminder that it could, in fact, be done. I hope he was still so till the end, and I’m sorry it had to come.

Stephen Baxter speaking to Dan Snow for the BBC 2 television programme 1066: A Year to Conquer England

With Stephen Baxter I’m still further in shock, not just because of his lesser age but because Stephen was so actively, almost aggressively, alive. The obituary remembrances on the St Peter’s College webpage are full of references to being beaten by Stephen at cricket, squash, or just in debate; winning was something he was good at and part of how he navigated life. The main reason he and I didn’t get on better was that there was one subject where I would hold my ground when I thought I knew better than him, and that didn’t endear either of us to the other. (Plus which, I used to make his students late, but that was only three times, come on. It was coinage where we really had differences.⁷) However, I absolutely wouldn’t have argued with him on anything else to do with early English or Norman social relations or government, especially Domesday Book where he was one of a few people in a really busy last fifty years of scholarship to genuinely move debate and understanding onwards.⁸ There I read and cited him and learned from his work. In his normal fields he was as unassailable as he apparently was on a squash court, and just as agile. And, I should say, while combative as heck, in the academic company where I encountered him he was always polite, able to put a question down if something more important or pleasant intervened, and in short, as the likewise late and lamented Jinty Nelson would have put it, he kept things comradely. He was even good on television! And his students clearly adored him, as the tributes on the St Peter’s page likewise testify. It makes no sense that he’s gone, and with him some important energy and drive to find out more has also left, leaving only the rest of us to try to make up the gap.

I have a sufficiently gloomy view of the state of UK academia that I have left it behind, obviously, and when I have to report the loss of figures like these, it is perhaps natural that I wonder if it’s still possible to be a scholar with enough time to become as knowledgeable as these and enough energy and brilliance actually single-handedly to drive the subject forwards. Twenty years ago I might already have been looking around at my contemporaries and myself and wondering which, if any of us, would reach David’s kind of importance. And there was Stephen, live and on the spot, defying those odds twenty years further into whatever UK academia has been going through and finishing up at the height of the profession as well. They were, and are, both reminders that what looks impossible is still within reach for some of us and that maybe one can be one of that group even yet.

1. Most obviously in David Abulafia, The Great Sea: a human history of the Mediterranean (London 2011), although he subsequently went big even from there, with The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans (London 2020).

2. David Abulafia, Frederick II: a medieval emperor (London 1988); and e. g. David Abulafia, "Trade and Crusade, 1050-1250", in Jace Stuckey (ed.), The Eastern Mediterranean Frontier of Latin Christendom (Farnham 2014), pp. 373–392.

3. David Abulafia, "Neolithic meets Medieval: First Encounters in the Canary Islands" in Abulafia and Nora Berend (edd.), Medieval Frontiers: concepts and practices (Aldershot 2002), pp. 255-278.

4. Alternative views on Frederick II, especially, can be found in Wolfgang Stürner, Friedrich II. (Darmstadt 1992), 2 vols; Klaus van Eickels and Tania Brüsch, Friedrich II. Leben und Persönlichkeit in Quellen des Mittelalters (Düsseldorf 2000). I have to say I haven’t checked them, though.

5. I still remember fondly the look of mild thrill that passed over the face of the duty librarian in what was the Faculty of Oriental Studies Library whenever I went in that term to look at Ahmed ibn Mohammed al-Makkarí, The History of the Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain, Extracted from the Nafhu-t-Tíb Min Ghosni-l-Andalusi-r-Rattíb Wa Táríkh Lisánu-d-Dín Ibni-l-Khattíb, by Ahmed Ibn Mohammed al-Makkarí, a Native of Telemsán, Translated from the Copies in the Library of the British Museum, and Illustrated with Critical Notes on the History, Geography, and Antiquities of Spain, trans. Pascual de Gayangos (London 1843), 2 vols, because it had to be fetched from the reserve stacks, which I guess didn’t happen a lot…

6. The reading in question was Eduardo Manzano Moreno, "Christian-Muslim Frontier in al-Andalus: Idea and Reality", in Dionisius Agius and Richard Hitchcock (edd.), Arab Influence upon Medieval Europe (Reading, IL, 1994), pp. 83–96, which I still recommend.

7. These arose largely because Stephen was then supervising the work that concluded as Henry Fairbairn "The Nature and Limits of the Money Economy in Late Anglo-Saxon and Early Norman England" (Ph.D. thesis, Kings College London, August 2013).

8. I mainly mean Stephen Baxter, "The Domesday Controversy: A Review and a New Interpretation", Haskins Society Journal Vol. 29 (Woodbridge 2017), pp. 225–293, which I read and thought was brilliant, but I think now we should be mentioning Stephen Baxter, Julia Crick and C. P. Lewis, Making Domesday: Intelligent Power in Conquered England (Oxford 2025), which can only just have preceded his death. Julia Smith has a write-up and memorial focused on the book here.

https://tenthmedieval.wordpress.com/2026/04/26/deaths-of-the-titans/

http://tenthmedieval.wordpress.com/?p=24419