Seas and Shores of Islam: From the Atlantic to the Mediterranean.

Christophe Picard, through his rich output and his teaching at the universities of Saint-Étienne, Toulouse, and Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, never took his eyes off the maritime horizons. He demonstrated the early development of coasts controlled by Islamic powers and traced the evolution of the presence of medieval Islamic fleets, both in the Mediterranean and in the Atlantic Ocean. He also extensively explored the lands of al-Andalus, particularly those surrounding present-day Portugal, studying in turn the dynamics of settlement, relations between Muslims and Christians, and trade. In doing so, he addressed themes and spaces that had been neglected and which he was among the first to bring to light. He thus participated in drawing the contours of a Mediterranean that was less exclusively Byzantine and Latin, and of an Islamic world that was restoring its rightful place to its western extremity.
While the Maghreb and the Iberian Peninsula primarily held his attention, he collaborated extensively with his colleagues specializing in the Latin West and the Islamic East. A historian of texts, he was also keen to combine archaeology with his reflections. The articles collected in this volume in his honor, donated by his students and colleagues, invite us to follow in his footsteps by traveling, between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean but also beyond, this profoundly decompartmentalized world that was medieval Islam.