On the first week of January 2020, The Haifa Center for Mediterranean History (HCMH) hosted Dr Georg Christ from the University of Manchester. Christ is a distinguished scholar of the history of the Eastern Mediterranean. His book ‘Trading Conflicts: Venetian Merchants and Mamluk Officials in Late Medieval Alexandria’ (2012) is a reference point in the studies of trade embargoes, trading diasporas, and knowledge management in the late Middle Ages. In Haifa, Georg chaired a methodological workshop on the topic of ‘The Agency of Climatic and Environmental Factors in Mediterranean History’, and delivered a public talk on the subject of ‘Portuguese ships in India and rotting pepper in Alexandria: A self-fulfilling news crisis? (1503–1505)’. Georg held a series of meetings with HCMH affiliated researchers in the fields of history and archaeology: Dr Rabei G. Khamisy, Prof. Judith Bronstein, Prof. Uriel Simonsohn, Prof. Efraim Lev, Prof. Adrian Boas, Dr. Hassan Khalilieh, Dr Ruthy Gertwagen, and visited the teams in the laboratories of Prof. Assaf Yasur-Landau and Prof. Guy Bar-Oz.