ABSTRACT
The global turn in the field of art history today dictates several considerations and restrictions for the study of the visual world around us; most of all, it offers a new frame for art history within a revised set of theoretical concepts in relation to interpreting art and artifacts. This chapter focuses on an aspect that involves the new dimension of global art history and mobility, beyond the object, as it were. It discusses the intersecting historiographies" and presents an overview of two major scholarly figures: Henri Pirenne and Ernst Herzfeld. Both were academically active and productive during the first half of the twentieth century, between the two world wars. Pirenne, in his discussion of the expansion of Islam in the Mediterranean, compares the past histories of conquests in the Mediterranean world to the Arab conquest of the seventh century.
