Chapter 4 - Corippus and the Moorish World

Summary

This chapter examines the different lenses through which Corippus represented the Moorish world. It looks first at the many terms the poet used to refer to all of the ‘Moorish’ groups within North Africa – ally or enemy alike. It then considers the specific ethnonyms within the Iohannis and addresses their value for our understanding of North Africa in this period. It notes that Corippus’ accounts of ‘Laguatan’ identity (an ethnonym preserved in many forms in the Iohannis, but unique to the poem) may well indicate forms of affiliation that were much more fluid than has previously been acknowledged, and incorporated a range of different groups, regardless of their origins.

The chapter closes with a discussion of the ‘catalogue of tribes’ in Iohannis Book II, which has been central to much modern scholarship. It argues that this catalogue was intended to evoke the final triumphal ceremony which marked the conclusion of John’s campaigns in 548. This has an important narrative function, but also reveals the cognitive assumptions which underpinned imperial views of the Moorish world from Carthage. This was not an ordered ‘map’ of tessellating tribal groups, but was instead an image of a diverse – but ultimately subjugated – world.