It is with great sadness that we pass on the news that John H. Pryor, Emeritus Professor of Medieval History at Sydney University, passed away early on Tuesday March 24th. Professor Pryor’s son Sean has indicated that although his father’s death was somewhat sudden, he had been unwell for a long time. Nonetheless, John Pryor had been down at the family’s holiday house south of Sydney until the morning before he died and had walked out along his favourite beach a few days earlier. Characteristically, he had asked not to have a funeral or memorial service.
Professor Pryor will be very well known to many scholarly audiences for his pathbreaking scholarship which brought together the study of the western Middle Ages, the Islamic world, the Crusades and Byzantium. The focus of his research was on maritime history, particularly in the Mediterranean. Author of multiple publications which combined analyses of the practicalities of sea-faring, trade and naval warfare, his most notable book was Geography, Technology, and War : Studies in the Maritime History of the Mediterranean, 649-1571 (Cambridge, 1988), a widely reviewed volume which was regarded as soon as it appeared as a landmark publication. Integral to JP’s analysis was his identification of the fundamental significance of the counterclockwise current in the Mediterranean for shipping, trade and conflict across the medieval centuries. Professor Pryor was notable for his focus on Byzantium as a central component of a complex Mediterranean world, with his collaboration with the late Professor Elizabeth Jeffreys leading to another landmark publication The Age of the Dromon: The Byzantine Navy ca. 500-1204 (Leiden: Brill, 2006). He was a regular participant in Byzantine conferences including the Spring Symposium. And he was still publishing important articles and book chapters into the 2020s. An index of the significance of JP’s scholarship was the 2016 Festschrift, Shipping, Trade and Crusade in the Medieval Mediterranean, published by Routledge, which ran to more than 400 pages and included contributions from twenty of the most significant scholars in the many fields on which he had made such a profound impact. His students will remember him as an extraordinarily generous, stimulating and intellectually rigorous teacher, whose enjoyably sardonic humour came with great warmth.
Catherine Holmes, Amanda Power
