ABSTRACT
Italy in the late fifth century a.d. and Persia in the mid-thirteenth were lands of ancient and deeply-rooted culture. One had been at the centre of the western Roman Empire; the other had formed a significant part of the society of medieval Islam, and its traditions stretched back further still. Both lands found themselves invaded, conquered, and ruled by wandering ‘barbarians’, Ostrogoths and Mongols respectively, from beyond the then recognized frontiers of ‘civilization’.
