Stupor Mundi

 

Sudden and very shocking.

He supervised me one on one for a single week in 1987 during the temporary absence of my regular supervisor that term.

Earlier, during my senior year at SPS, where he had himself been a pupil two decades previously, he had been something of a legend, his precocious levels of scholarship spoken of with awe.

He was then possibly most famous for his work on Frederick II Hohenstaufen (1194-1250), HRE and King of Sicily, one of those medieval figures that even people with minimal interest in the Middle Ages ought to know a bit about, I had long surmised.

So I chose to write about said unconventional German monarch that week, though unfortunately Professor Abulafia and I were not to see eye to eye once my essay was complete.

I believe this was largely down to the fact that he saw me as a rather irritating intrusion from the northern wastelands — not a Caius man — and perhaps, if I am to be honest, because he'd spotted my own lack of hellbent scholarship, let alone genius.

And also because I found the whole experience rather unsettling.

He was something of a Stupor Mundi himself. His rooms were possibly the most apparently disordered personal space I have ever visited, a labyrith of piled papers, journals and hardback books. Though I have no doubt he correctly recalled the precise location of every single line of text contained therein.

And I think if you'd told me then that he was still only 38 I would have been gobsmacked.

Just this morning I was pondering whether there were any serious public intellectuals in Britain who might be inclined to weigh in on the Beckham row, and it then occurred to me that there aren't that many left. Definitely a dying breed.

Following his 2017 retirement as Professor Emeritus of Mediterranean History, Abulafia had certainly been cropping up with increasing frequency in the UK's right-of-centre media, often as a champion of free speech, but also occasionally leaning into pro-Brexit and anti-Woke narratives.

He believed that the Elgin Marbles should be returned to Greece, but wrote in the Spectator last November that the Rosetta Stone 'does not belong in Egypt'.

His lasting legacy will be his tomes on the human histories of what Ishmael refers to as the 'watery part of the world', most notably The Great Sea, his grand account of the importance of the Mediterranean within human history.