The Crusades and the Near East
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The second issue that arises from an examination of these vitae derives from those sections of the text in which the author chose a particular mode of presentation to inform his readers. Why did he do so? Whereas traditionally applied terminology tends to prevail and resist time and personal choice, the addition of an idiosyncratic detail may be significant, especially if it appears unaltered in several texts.
At the beginning of the twelfth century, Latin Christendom had experienced recent military success on several fronts. Christian victory at Toledo in 1085 had furthered the Spanish reconquista (temporarily at a halt); the Norman conquest 131
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of Muslim Sicily had been completed in 1091; and the last Byzantine settlements in Apulia and Calabria had come under Norman rule. On the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, the conquests of Antioch and Jerusalem during the First Crusade (1095–9) had resulted in the founding of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. In the Near East, the first major setback would not occur until 1144, when the first of the crusader states, the County of Edessa, would fall before Zengi. The first four decades of the twelfth century represent a period in European history during which hopes for a universal Christian conquest were high and crusading enthusiasm was unchallenged by large-scale military failure.
John Tolan has convincingly argued that western twelfth- and thirteenth-century responses to Islam were provoked as a defensive reaction to the strengthening power of the Muslim world.3 This is a valid conclusion, to which I would like to add one observation. While the defensive tone sharpens throughout the period, it becomes clearly audible only from the mid-twelfth century onward, when the failure of the Second Crusade begins to gnaw at the credibility of the Christian championship. This upswing in crusader propaganda against Islam was preceded by a century of relative silence, but when we proceed to the early eleventh-century source material, it seems that a similar reaction had taken place already in the 1020s and 1030s, although on a minor scale. Around the 1020s the first instances of heresy occurred in the west, died away, and were revived a century later. By the mid-twelfth century heresy had become an acute challenge of the western Church.
This is no coincidence. Onward from Ademar of Chabannes, who vividly attacks the heretics of Aquitaine and central France in his Chronicon from c.1028,4
the Catholic texts tend to refer to pagans, Jews, heretics and Saracens as the members of a joint conspiracy against the Church. In those cases when non-Catholic groups are also discussed independently, they represent a common source of diabolic menace. The polemical texts against Islam should not be read as an isolated expression of crusade-provoked xenophobia, but rather as an integral part of the Catholic counter-attack against the concept of religious dissidence, which was intensified by the reformist revival and the clash of popular beliefs and new clerical elites from the 1140s onward.
Crusading remained a crucial theme in the official preaching of the Church throughout the twelfth century, and, along with papal instigation, stories and songs of various sorts were circulated all over Catholic Europe.5 The Saracen enemy had an important role within this tradition. The western image of Islam, spontaneously fusing traits from ecclesiastical textual tradition and popular notions, took the form of negation and caricature. Moreover, it served an audience comprising both the learned and the unlearned sectors of society; whether produced for laymen or ecclesiastics, in Latin or the vernacular, prose or rhyme, the texts share a common stock of ideas. Its historical longevity prevailed from the late twelfth century well into the modern era.
While learned Christian authors from Byzantium and the Iberian peninsula wrote treatises on Islam from the seventh century onward, the great masses of 132
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transmontane Europe first came to terms with Islam only at the turn of the twelfth century with the outbreak of crusading fervour. The knowledge of Islam among the learned strata of the western society remains a matter of academic conjecture. Clearly some people had some information on Islam in the pre-crusade west,6 but who they were, what kind of material they were familiar with, and how many they numbered remain matters of speculation. Obviously, such information would have been scattered and unevenly distributed. In about 1108, the Benedictine abbot Guibert of Nogent wrote that since he had not been able to find any information on this Mathomus in texts of the Church fathers, it was likely that this man lived after their time, and that in the absence of any authoritative ecclesiastic sources he was compelled to base his description upon contemporary oral tradition.7
Even more crucial than the question of available information are why and by what contextual means crusading raised the general western interest in Islam. Or did the latter generate the former? And to what extent did the relative topicality of Islam arise from extensive structural changes in the intellectual and ideological climate, the rise of popular heresy and the so-called twelfth-century Renaissance?
Of similar importance is the question of what factors and processes facilitated rapid establishment of a popular western image of Muslims once interest in the Muslim world had been aroused. It is remarkable how uniform this image already was at the beginning of the twelfth century and how its fundamentals would remain basically intact for centuries.
The first part of the twelfth century was more receptive to the production of western texts concerning Islam than earlier periods. Embricon of Mainz completed his work on Mammutius some sixty years before the First Crusade, but his text survives in versions contemporary with the works of Guibert of Nogent, Gautier of Compiègne and Adelphus. The dating and provenance of the western vitae of Machomet/Mammutius/Mathomus supports the idea of active circulation of written material from the late 1130s onwards, which would concur with Guibert’s complaint about the inaccessibility of source material around 1105–8.
About seventy years later, Alain of Lille briefly mentioned Mahomet’s monstrous sectarian life at the beginning of his De fide catholica contra haereticos against the Albigensian heretics, apparently assuming that the reader would be familiar with the story.8 If Mahometi monstruosa vita were understood to belong to common knowledge among the learned by the turn of the thirteenth century, the situation would have changed considerably from the time of Guibert’s writing.
If Europeans were not interested in Islam in the mid-eleventh century, why did they change their minds? Crusading had an integrating effect on the developing idea of western Christendom, and such a consensus was essentially supported by effective propaganda. One obvious explanation is that the principal idea of the new crusading institution was founded on the image of a violent encounter between Christendom and its arch-enemy, reflecting a variety of Jewish and Christian myths of the wars of the chosen people. Islam was ideologically close enough yet conveniently remote to form an appealing contrast to Christianity in 133
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polemical western writings. The crusading ideal depended on the presence of the bad religion set against the good.
Western writings on Islam in the twelfth century
From the 1140s, within a relatively short period, a wide range of texts concerning Islam emerged. Some of them, like chronicles, sermons, canon law and papal bulls and letters, belong to an established historical tradition. Others, like epic poetry or the western travesties of Machomet’s life, represent a textual tradition which either received a literary form to complement oral transmission or made its initial appearance at that point of time. If the terminology concerning Islam was not so well established, it would almost look to modern historian as if a whole new genre emerged from thin air.
Crusading ideology was manifested in a great variety of texts, which can be crudely divided into three categories: authorized preaching and history-writing (crusade chronicles written by ecclesiastics, sermons held in public, papal bulls and letters), popular stories (crusader chansons, oral poetry and songs) and texts intermingling material from both of these (crusader genealogy, hagiography and the lives o
f Machomet). There were no sharp boundaries between these groups, which typically borrowed narrative elements and stylistic patterns from each other.
Similarly, it is not possible to distinguish crusader fact from crusader fiction in an absolutely pure form. For an early twelfth-century historian, historical chronology involved inseparable unities of the ordinary and the extraordinary.
These texts represent an ample and loosely connected mixture of high medieval western ideas rooted in multiple cultural traditions. Consequently, their aim, emphasis and sphere of shared information vary, and although the basic attitude to crusading, the Holy War and Christian conquest is positive, the description of Muslims, or Saracens in medieval terms, is far from uniform. In most cases, Muslims are understood as religious and military opponents; objects to be eradicated. The emphasis on conflict, however, is not limited to Christian–Muslim relations; nor does it rule out the existence of Muslim allies, partners and kinsmen.
The terminology used by the medieval authors was relatively coherent across the different source groups, with ‘Saracen’ indicating Muslims in general. When necessary, ethnic subcategories such as Turks, Pechenegs, Persians and Babylonians (indicating Shi’ite Egyptians) were employed. Furthermore, biblical terms such as Ishmaelites, Agareni and sometimes ‘pagan’ replace or exist parallel to ‘Saracen’
in the sources.9 The name-variants of the Prophet in the sources refer to the leader of Saracens or their god in forms such as Mahon/Machomet/Machomete/
Mathomus. The words ‘Muslim’ and ‘Islam’ are absent, only emerging in English and French in the later sixteenth century.10
Parallel to the ecclesiastically oriented and scholarly works on Islam,11 popular stories of various origin circulated the ideas of ‘the other’. Many of these texts show no particular interest in the non-Christian case and, even when notable Muslim characters are involved, they tend to think and act according to the 134
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conventional social rules and settings of the western military elite. The influence of western Christianity on crusading was direct and absolute but, as a major cultural connector, religion inevitably also comprised layers other than the purely theological.
After their initial appearance in western textual tradition during the earlier part of the twelfth century, Saracen villains and heroes remained permanently in the literary imagination of the medieval west. Their distinctive characterizations in various genres of fact and fiction, already apparent by early years of the twelfth century, became more sharply discernible over the decades. While ecclesiastical propaganda persistently attacked the blasphemous error of Islam, in the vernacular storytelling tradition the Saracen religion never became a critical issue. At the same time as strengthening discriminatory canonical legislation on Christian–non-Christian relations and crusader propaganda, the chansons de geste and romances placed their Saracen princes in prominent roles.
Between factual and fictional texts, semi-fictional works of hagiography, crusading genealogy and the polemical lives of Machomet formed an interrelating historiographical connection between the learned and popular cultural layers.
Characteristically, these works borrowed material from both historical sources and the storytelling tradition. These lives are biographies of the Prophet, loosely compliant with the contemporary patterns of western hagiographical writing. In these texts, however, hagiographical models are deliberately inverted to produce a parody of the enemy, fundamentally transforming the initial Koranic example into a work of fantasy. In the western vitae, the Prophet of Islam acts as the obverse of the virtuous Christian, prone to diabolical ploys, false prophecies, fabricated miracles and spiritual corruption.
These lives conform to the official line of the Church, promoting the pre-eminence of Catholic Christendom. They underline the decadent basis of Islam, and support the defensive rhetoric of the crusading ideology, showing the necessity of protecting Christianity from its adversaries. The authors describe Machomet as a ruthless opportunist, a trickster keen to benefit from those willing to follow him. They also borrow material from fictional romances and the chansons de geste, and Gautier of Compiègne’s text may even be interpreted as a parody of knightly virtues.
The existence of the vitae is tangible evidence of the keen interest that medieval western Catholics had in the early history of Islam. It has been assumed that because of the absurdity of the accusations made against Machomet, the writers were unfamiliar with the tenets of Islam. While this might be a valid claim concerning the great western public and indeed some of the authors as well, in the case of the western lives of the founder of Islam this view does not bear close scrutiny. The vitae are polemical texts, diverting their audience with a wealth of fanciful details, but they were based upon the same traits that are apparent in the Hadith and the Arabic biographies of the Prophet, however blasphemous their interpretation would have seemed to any Muslim. These texts were not written to be critical analyses, but effective tools of public indoctrination. In this basic aim, they seem to have become 135
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successful as a by-product of crusading. Within the genre, the Vita Mahumeti, by Embricon of Mainz (by 1033), the description of Mathomus included in Guibert of Nogent’s Dei gesta per Francos, Otia de Machomete by Gautier of Compiègne (c.1138–55) and the Vita Machometi by Adelphus (c.1150) represent the earliest versions of the genre produced in the west.12
Of these authors, Guibert of Nogent (c.1055–1124), a crusade historian and the abbot of a small Benedictine house at Nogent-sur-Coucy, is the most well known. It is possible that Guibert attended the Council of Clermont in November 1095, thus witnessing the launch of the First Crusade (1095–9) by Pope Urban II. Guibert did not march to Jerusalem with the crusader army, and his history, as well as his description of Mathomus and the rise of Islam, was based upon secondary information. Gautier of Compiègne tells us that he was a Benedictine monk, writing in his house. We know only Embricon’s name and that he was connected to the city of Mainz. Adelphus does not reveal his place of origin, but he seems to have been an educated man of sufficient means. Guibert dedicates his chronicle to Bishop Lisiard of Soissons, while the other three texts do not include dedications.
Embricon, Guibert and Gautier came from areas that had never been occupied or populated by Saracens. It is indeed possible that none of the four authors ever talked to a Muslim in person, with the possible exception of Adelphus, who had visited Jerusalem as a (crusader) pilgrim. The authors do not describe their oral informants in great detail, but they are careful to point out their dependence on reliable eyewitnesses who had first-hand information on Saracens. Adelphus had learned of Machomet from a multilingual Greek dracoman on the way from Jerusalem to Antioch. Gautier of Compiègne had been informed by Abbot Warnerius, who had heard of Machomet from a converted Saracen at the cathedral of Sens.13 With the exception of Embricon, who does not reveal his sources, the authors refer to contemporaries and the primacy of oral transmission of information. Guibert stated unequivocably that the vita passage of his chronicle was based upon that which he had heard sung in public. As performance artists would have been sponsored by lay magnates and sporadic audiences in population centres rather than clerical societies or individual ecclesiastics, it seems reasonable to assume that this section of his text genuinely reflected popular ideas as the writer perceived them. Their lives of Machomet were also aimed at oral circulation, and various audiences would probably have been interested in the story for its vivid content and exotic scenery. The narrative is easy to follow, and the basic religious, social and cultural concepts would have been intelligible to illiterate listeners, including children and adolescents. In Guibert’s case, we know that he took up the matter out of personal interest, while Gautier was likely to have been commissioned by his abbot, perhaps the same Warnerius he mentions as his source. Of Embricon and Adelphus, we cannot tell. The texts reflect their awareness of their own culture as much as th
at of Muslims.
Unlike crusader chronicles, which tend to emphasize the importance of documenting rare and excellent deeds, the writers of the vitae did not mention 136
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their reasons for writing. The earliest and latest of the texts are in verse, while Guibert and Adelphus chose to write in prose. Guibert’s description of Mathomus was included in a more comprehensive crusader chronicle, while the other three sources survive as separate entities. Although the substance of the story is similar in all four works, all of them reflect personal tastes and show some originality. It is crucial to stress, however, that the writers’ freedom was limited by genre-specific conventions and the audience they addressed, perhaps much more than it would be today. The apparent contradictions within the same author’s texts may not be accidental marks of personal change of attitude, but ‘facts’ dictated by genre.14 In respect of the crusade-related textual tradition, these facts would support the idea of the Catholic faith as the only acceptable religion, the pre-eminence of the western code of manners, and the damnation of Christian heretics.
The lives of Machomet are as directly related to the outlook of the ecclesiastical and military elite of the Christian world as are the genres of crusader chronicle and vernacular poetry. The three text groups are closely interrelated, and hardly contradictory in their core ideologies and values. The approach in the lives of Machomet, however, differs from the other two genres in that they reverse familiar themes: spiritual struggle and the necessity of military conflict; submission to divine will; and prowess and loyalty. These now become subjects of religious parody.
Other than the Bible, the authors do not mention any written sources as regards Islam. Guibert tried and failed to find textual sources, but we do not know how extensive his search was. If Nogent had not purchased such material, Guibert might have been able to find interesting texts in some larger monastic libraries in France, and certainly in those on the Iberian peninsula. Before the so-called Cluniac corpus of 1142, including the first Latin translation of the Koran and other texts, such as the famous polemical Risala of Pseudo-Kindi, the available source material on Islam may have included Anastasius the Librarian’s mid-ninth-century translation of Theophanes’ Chronographia, and perhaps also De haeresibus by John of Damascus (c. 676–749), the Liber apologeticus martyrum of Eulogius (d. 859), or Petrus Alfonsi’s Dialogus from 1106, complemented by sporadic references in western annals and chronicles.15 Byzantium, the Christian kingdoms of Spain, southern Italy and Sicily formed possible channels of information. The number of pilgrims to Jerusalem also increased throughout the eleventh century, after the first decade.16 It is likely that the substance of the emerging popular interest in Islam had been incubating in the collective western memory, and that the preaching of the crusades brought this process to fruition.