“They are like your Arabs”: Giovanni Villani on Ibn Khaldūn’s Tunis (The Ḥafṣid Civil War)

The famous Florentine chronicler Giovanni Villani (d. 1348), a basic source of information about his city and Europe, composed a detailed and overlooked account of a civil war among the Ḥafṣids, a North African Muslim dynasty, an event known primarily through the writings of Villani’s famous contemporary Ibn Khaldūn, an eyewitness. Villani’s account reveals a nuanced understanding of the social and cultural fabric of the Ḥafṣid Tunis that, paired with Ibn Khaldūn’s description, provides insight into Christian and Muslim Mediterranean perceptions. Villani viewed the conflict not as a faraway affair among nonbelievers but as emblematic of the universal effects of internecine family strife.