In the Introduction to this volume, the editors set an ambitious objective: the comprehensive and multifaceted study of pastoral communities in the Mediterranean world from the late Middle Ages to the beginning of the early modern period in a geographical range that is not often the subject of a single historical work: from Iberia to the Balkan peninsula. The geographical scope allows the study of human pastoral activity in its full breadth: from the extreme point of overlap between semi-nomadism and transhumant pastoralism, where the whole community, not only the male shepherds, participate in seasonal movement (not by chance Katerina Korrè speaks of nomads and pastoral families in permanent movement in the turbulent late medieval southern Balkans), to the sedentary pastoralism in many areas of southern Italy, through the state-organized systems of transhumance in the Italian and Iberian peninsula (Lidia Allué Andrés, Davide Cristoferi, Eleni Sakellariou).

The central idea of thematic groupage – the complex phenomenon of pastoralism in the pre-industrial era – has intrigued great historians of the Mediterranean for many decades. Fernand Braudel devoted a subchapter in the first part of his monumental work on the Mediterranean in the age of Philip II to the relationship between transhumance and nomadism. He classified in the former the practices of the Iberian Peninsula, Mediterranean France and central and southern Italy, and in the latter the pastoral activity of the Balkans and the southern and easternmost regions of the Mediterranean; but he pointed out that the boundaries between the different typologies were uncertain and permeable. He adopted the traditional view that the poverty of the highlands pushed their population towards the rich lowlands, and that this periodic descent had the characteristics of wandering and led to conflict between the farmers of the plains and the pastoralists of the highlands.