Saracens

Islam in the Medieval European Imagination

John Tolan

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9780231506465
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

In the first century of Islam, most of the former Christian Roman Empire, from Syria to Spain, was brought under Muslim control in a conquest of unprecedented proportions. Confronted by the world of Islam, countless medieval Christians experienced a profound ambivalence, awed by its opulence, they were also troubled by its rival claims to the spiritual inheritance of Abraham and Jesus and humiliated by its social subjugation of non-Muslim minorities. Some converted. Others took up arms. Still others, the subjects of John Tolan's study of anti-Muslim polemics in medieval Europe, undertook to attack Islam and its most vivid avatar, the saracen, with words.

In an effort to make sense of God's apparent abandonment of Christendom in favor of a dynamic and expanding Muslim civilization, European writers distorted the teachings of Islam and caricatured its believers in a variety of ways. What ideological purposes did these portrayals serve? And how, in turn, did Muslims view Christianity? Feelings of rivalry, contempt, and superiority existed on both sides, tinged or tempered at times with feelings of doubt, inferiority, curiosity, or admiration. Tolan shows how Christian responses to Islam changed from the seventh to thirteenth centuries, through fast-charging crusades and spirit-crushing defeats, crystallizing into polemical images later drawn upon by Western authors in the fourteenth to twentieth centuries. Saracens explores the social and ideological uses of contempt, explaining how the denigration of the other can be used to defend one's own intellectual construction of the world.

Part One

FOUNDATIONS (SEVENTH-EIGHTH CENTURIES)

Chapter 1

GOD AND HISTORY IN THE CHRISTIAN WEST C. 600

It seems that whatever we perceive is organized into patterns for which we, the perceivers, are largely responsible. Perceiving is not a matter of passively allowing an organ—say of sight or hearing—to receive a ready-made impression from without, like a palette receiving a spot of paint…. It is generally agreed that all our impressions are schematically determined from the start. As perceivers we select from all the stimuli falling on our senses only those which interest us, and our interests are governed by a pattern-making tendency, sometimes called a schema. In a chaos of shifting impressions, each of us constructs a stable world in which objects have recognizable shapes, are located in depth, and have permanence…. Uncomfortable facts which refuse to be fitted in, we find ourselves ignoring or distorting so that they do not disturb these established assumptions. By and large anything we take note of is preselected and organized in the very act of perceiving. We share with other animals a kind of filtering mechanism which at first only lets in sensations we know how to use.

Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger

THESE OBSERVATIONS by anthropologist Mary Douglas aptly describe Christian attitudes toward Islam in the Middle Ages. Before the rise of Islam, Christians had established categories for the religious other: Jew, pagan, and heretic. When Christians encountered Muslims, they tried to fit them into one of those categories, “ignoring or distorting” those “uncomfortable facts” that did not fit the preestablished schema so as not to disturb these assumptions. Out of the chaos of the first centuries of Christian history, bedeviled by persecution, heresy, and the crumbling of much of the old Roman empire, Christian writers had labored to construct “a stable world in which objects have recognizable shapes.” This Christian “filtering mechanism” involved a belief that God is the moving force behind history: that everything in the natural world and every event in human history is part of God’s grand scheme, a scheme that reflects his reason and justice.

Medieval Christians who attempted to understand, define, and characterize Islam were anything but detached, objective observers. Their perceptions of Muslims are based less on Islam than on their own Christian preconceptions of divine history and divine geography. The patristic writers of the first Christian centuries forged a vision of the world—its peoples, its religions, its history—that the advent of Islam would not change. In other words, when medieval Christians looked at Islam, they did so through the filter of the Bible and of writers such as Eusebius, Jerome, Augustine, and Isidore.

This is why I begin this survey of Christian perceptions of Islam before the rise of Islam. The point is to show how key Latin Christian authors of the seventh century viewed their world: in particular, how they defined the differences between Christian and non-Christians (Jews, pagans, and heretics) and what they saw as their place in history. For when they first meet Muslims they will try to understand their military successes and their religion in terms familiar to them, to fit Islam into already existing Christian categories by portraying them, variously, as a divinely sent punishment, as pagan idolaters, as Christian heretics, as followers of Satan, or as devotees of Antichrist. When these Christian authors wish to understand Islam, they will turn only rarely to Muslims themselves, normally preferring those time-honored authorities, the Bible and the church fathers. Medieval Christians, with very few exceptions, did not use the words “Muslim” or “Islam”; instead they used ethnic terms such as “Arab,” “Saracen,” “Ishmaelite.” Information about these peoples could be found in the venerable books of old.

Few medieval authors embody the search for truth via dependence on authority better than Isidore of Seville, contemporary of Muhammad. Isidore not only compiles florilegia of earlier authorities but also becomes an authority who will be quoted throughout the Middle Ages. Both in the content and the method of his work, he illustrates the intellectual filtering common to many medieval authors. Authoritative explanations of the world around one are to be found in revered books. These books are timeless, never out of date; if the reality one sees around oneself does not seem to correspond to the models described on parchment, it is the evidence of the senses that must be questioned, not the authorities. Yet the authoritative books must be reread, reworked, reinterpreted in order to make sense of the reader’s ever-changing world.

Isidore’s numerous works include chronicles, biblical commentaries, theological tracts, and the Etymologies, which were perhaps the best-seller of the Middle Ages, surviving in close to one thousand medieval manuscripts.¹ They comprise a vast encyclopedic text into which Isidore poured knowledge gleaned from the Bible, Latin poets and geographers, and church fathers. Isidore’s ambitious intellectual program represents an attempt to grasp the rational order of God’s creation: to order human knowledge. The universe, for medieval Christians, was a rational creature. Created by God in six days, its structure was a reflection of divine wisdom. To study the universe was to study God’s reason. History, too, had a rational, divinely ordained structure. Isidore, one of the great systematizers among medieval chroniclers, was conscious of living on the cusp of a new era. He witnessed the definitive break of his native Spain from its Roman past and celebrated the legitimacy of its Visigothic kings, newly converted from Arian heresy to Catholic orthodoxy. Modern scholars know Isidore as an encyclopedist, a compiler of the wisdom of the ancients into digests that will be used by countless medieval readers. His works show little originality in their content; this was an age when originality and innovation were to be shunned, not sought out. Yet what impresses, throughout Isidore’s huge corpus of works (especially in his magnum opus, the Etymologies, or Origins), is a will to order the universe, to offer an organized, coherent summary of human knowledge.² While Isidore was compiling and constructing the sophisticated filtering system that generations of Christians would use to help perceive and understand the world around them, at the other end of the once-Roman world, Muhammad and the first generation of Muslims were creating a new religious community that would in time dominate most of that world. In order to understand how medieval Christian writers perceived Muslims, the Christian views of history and religious deviancy epitomized in the works of Isidore must first be understood.

Apocalypse Later: Isidore’s Vision of Christian History

History, to the Christian writer (as to the Jew and the Muslim) is the working out of God’s plan for humanity. For the three religions, the world has a beginning in time, the moment of God’s creation. The subsequent history of humanity is a drama of the tumultuous relations between God and his people, with key human actors for God (prophets, saints, mahdî) and against him (false prophets, heretics, Antichrist). History has not only a beginning but an end: the final cataclysm of destruction and redemption. While in other religions God is timeless and man’s history essentially cyclical, for the three Abrahamic monotheistic faiths, history is linear and the study of history is a window on the divine plan for humankind.³

Ever since the fourth century, when Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea and adviser to Constantine, penned his Ecclesiastical History and his Chronicle, two historical traditions were inextricably linked: biblical history and Roman imperial history.⁴ During the age of Roman persecution of Christians, Christian writers had vilified Rome as the whore of Babylon, reincarnation of the despised enemy of the Old Testament, the Babylonians who in their arrogance constructed the tower of Babel and later destroyed the Temple of Jerusalem and led the Jews into captivity. Eusebius, writing to glorify Constantine and his Christian Roman empire, overhauled Christian historiography. He provided an unbroken narration of human history from Abraham to his own day, calculating the periods between key biblical events. In the fifth century, Augustine of Hippo divided world history into six ages, following a Jewish tradition that, just as the world was created in six days, it would last six long “days” and be destroyed on the seventh, but Augustine refrained from calculating the lengths of these ages.⁵

True to his passion for ordering knowledge, Isidore, in his Chronica maiora (composed in 615 and reworked in 624), became the first Christian chronicler to calculate the lengths of each of the six ages, fusing sacred and profane historiography to produce the first Christian universal chronicle.⁶ The first of the six ages had stretched from the creation of Adam to Noah (a period of 2,242 years, according to Isidore’s calculations); the second, from Noah to Abraham (942 years); the third, from Abraham to David (940 years); the fourth, from David to the Babylonian captivity (555 years); and the fifth, from the Babylonian captivity to the birth of Christ (549 years).⁷ Isidore (like his predecessors) placed himself in the sixth age, which was meant to stretch from the birth of Christ to his second coming: “it is 5813 years from the beginning of the world to the present era, which is the fifth year of the Emperor Heraclius [610–41] and the fourth of the most religious prince Sisebut [612–21].”⁸ Since he placed the beginning of the sixth age in the year 5228 after the Creation, this means that 586 years of the sixth age had gone by (he seems to be counting from the death, rather than the birth, of Jesus). As for what is to follow, Isidore simply says, “the remainder of time cannot be known to human investigation”; citing Acts he says, “it is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father has put in his own power.”⁹

While the six-age structure gives prominence to biblical history (key biblical people or events mark the beginning and end of each age), much of what Isidore places into the chapters of his Chronica majora reflects an imperial Roman conception of history. His narration of the first three ages is brief and largely based on the Bible, whereas his entries for the fourth age are largely a succession of kings of Israel: political and dynastic history take the upper hand. This tendency is accentuated in his description of the fifth age, where the organizing principle is the succession of Persian, Macedonian, and Roman rulers. While the birth of Christ is supposedly the great event separating the fifth age from the sixth, Isidore in fact makes the break between Julius Caesar and Augustus, even though Augustus’s reign begins before the birth of Christ. With the sixth age, Isidore rests firmly in the tradition of Roman imperial history: each emperor has a brief paragraph dedicated to his reign, while various other events and people (church councils, holy bishops, Germanic invaders, heresiarchs) are relegated to the end of each paragraph. Toward the end of the chronicle, as he approaches his own age, events in Spain become increasingly prominent, taking up more space in each successive chapter: one of the key events of the reign of the emperor Mauricius, for Isidore, is the teaching and preaching of Isidore’s brother Leander.¹⁰ Yet the imperial structure remains until the last chronological chapter (§120), dedicated to the reign of Heraclius.¹¹

If the world chronicle forces Isidore to adopt a Roman-centered chronology, his other major historical work, On the Origins of the Goths, focuses on rehabilitating the Visigoths. It was the Visigoths who had sacked Rome in 410; historians since Augustine had cast them in the role of divine scourge, a role well known to all steeped in the reading of the Old Testament: the Visigoths were to the Romans as the Assyrians and Babylonians had been to the Jews of old; this role seemed to fit them all the more since they were Arian heretics. But in 589, at the Third Council of Toledo, Reccared, king of the Visigoths, announced his conversion to Catholicism and the end of the (heretical) Spanish Arian church. Now that the Visigoth Reccared was both master of Spain and Catholic, the history of his Visigothic ancestors needed a face-lift. Two Spanish bishops set out to rewrite the history of the Visigoths: John of Biclaro and Isidore of Seville. For John, Reccared is a new Constantine; like the first Christian emperor, he presides over church councils and vanquishes enemies with the help of God.¹² Isidore attempts a legitimation on a much grander scale: his On the Origins of the Goths traces the glorious history of the Goths from the time of Noah to their current “marriage” with Spain.¹³

This optimistic view of the present colors Isidore’s view of the future: there is no sense, in any of his historical works, of the imminence of the world’s end, of the coming of Antichrist. Pope Gregory ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Riccoldo’s Predicament, or How to Explain Away the Successes of a Flourishing Rival Civilization
• Epigraph
• Part One. Foundations (Seventh-Eighth Centuries)
• Part Two. Forging Polemical Images (Eighth-Twelfth Centuries)
• Part Three. Thirteenth-Century Dreams of Conquest and Conversion
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index