Law and Lawlessness in Late-Medieval Representations of the Indian Ocean World

This article reveals the preoccupation with the law evident in medieval travellers’ ethnographic descriptions of the world of the Indian Ocean. It examines the emergence of a growing juridical awareness of the Orient by the Christian West between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries by way of two traditions inherited from the Roman of Alexander and the Lettre of Prester Jean. Christian travellers’ observations of juridico-political diversity enabled the unknown to be introduced into familiar categories.