Introduction

This introduction outlines the origins and development of the conference "Environmental Challenges in Premodern Eurasian and Mediterranean Narratives", whose contributions are gathered in this special issue. The conference was conceived within the framework of the PRIN 2022 project "Environmental Anomalies and Political Legitimacy in Global Eurasia-12th–14th century". Despite the fact that natural disasters have attracted considerable scholarly attention in recent years, prompted both by contemporary climate change and the global experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, many questions remain unanswered, and several aspects still await systematic investigation. Certain types of catastrophes—such as earthquakes and epidemics—have been the focus of much research (DOLS 1977; CONRAD 1982; STEARNS 2011; AKASOY 2007 and 2009; DUCÈNE 2024), while others have received comparatively little attention. Likewise, specific regions and historical periods, particularly Egypt and Syria at the time of the Black Death (WIET 1962; DOLS 1977; BORSCH 2005), have been more thoroughly studied than others. Moreover, most existing studies have adopted a primarily historical approach, aiming to reconstruct the plague’s origin and spread and to assess its economic or demographic consequences (DOLS 1977 and 1981, BENEDICTOW 2021). Less attention, however, has been paid to the ways in which disasters were interpreted, especially to the interplay between religious understandings, political imperatives and the broader social context—how these perspectives shaped each other, how they were mobilised to support or contest authority, how they were influenced by other religious or political traditions, and how they could foster inclusion and solidarity within an interconfessional umma, or, conversely, reinforce exclusion and otherness. Building on these considerations, this special issue investigates the interpretation of natural disasters from an explicitly interdisciplinary perspective, combining historical, religious, literary and philological approaches to illuminate the complex ways in which pre-modern societies perceived, understood and responded to environmental anomalies. While its chronological focus is on the pre-modern period, the ultimate goal is to provide a comparative and interdisciplinary platform to explore how environmental phenomena were conceptualised and narrated across different temporal and cultural horizons, fostering a dialogue between classical and modern hermeneutical systems and reconsidering their endurance, transformation and limitations.