Sea of Faith

by Stephen O'Shea

  Then in the haughty presence of the Sultan,

  urged by a burning thirst for martyrdom,

  he preached Christ and his blessed followers,

  but, finding no one ripe for harvest there,

  and loath to waste his labors, he returned

  to reap a crop in the Italian fields.

  The sultan's meeting with the ecstatic genius of Assisi can be seen as emblematic of the next two cenmries around the Mediterranean. There would be more to the relationship between Christian and Muslim than merely the sword or the study room. On that occasion in Damietta, a steely-eyed realist came up against a foot-in-the-other-world fanatic. Others like them would meet in many places of the Mediterranean of the time, an era when medieval convivencia took on its broadest meaning. Muslim and Christian were no longer strangers anywhere around the inland sea; their commingling, cenmries old, had gone beyond sibling rivalry to become acrimonious and accommodating all at once. This was the fullest sense of convivencia, where strife and friction went hand in hand with acceptance of the other. In a time of crusade and reconquista, it was not, however, a synonym for conviviality. The stalemate of the thirteenth century around much of the Mediterranean would lead to the drama of the fourteenth, when a powerful new force emerged in the east that would soon rock all the boats on the sea of faith.

  There are two types of people:

  Those with brains and no religion,

  And those with religion and no brains.

  This observation by an eleventh-century Syrian poet, pithy and perhaps unfair, points to a truth about degrees of piety. The same thirteenth-century Mediterranean that bred a Francis of Assisi, whose life was devoted to imitating Jesus's apostles, could also give rise to a merchant of Genoa, or Venice, who was as at home in the great Islamic entrepots of Alexandria or Cairo as any of his Muslim hosts. On both sides of the confessional divide were those more than willing to consort with their opposite numbers, their religious allegiance less important than the business of life—and those who despaired of such promiscuity.

  For the devout of Islam, the blows of Las Navas de Tolosa and other successes of the Spanish Christians had landed hard. In some regions taken by the Crown of Aragon, Jews and Mudejar Muslims were herded into churches for compulsory lectures on the superiority of Christianity. God had previously beamed on the Muslims—in the wake of the Arab conquests a worthy of Syria had remarked to a Christian monk, "It is a sign of God's love for us and pleasure with our faith that he has given us dominion over all regions and all peoples." Now events in Spain and elsewhere seemed to be proving the opposite.

  In 1258 Baghdad was overrun by a ferocious invader from easternmost Asia: the armies of the Mongol khan. The great city on the Tigris was long past its heyday, but its sack profoundly shocked the Muslim world—just as the fifth-century Visigothic capture of Rome had shocked the Christians of the mare nostrum. The last Abbasid caliph of Baghdad, the symbol of Qurayshi continuity, was rolled up in a carpet and then stomped to death by Mongol warhorses. It is believed that the victorious general, Hulegu, influenced by two of his Nestorian Christian wives, ordered only Muslims and Jews to be killed in the ensuing massacre. The Christians of the city were spared. If true, the catastrophe smacked uncomfortably of divine retribution.

  To explain Islam's reversal of fortune, people of the time had no shortage of culprits at which to point fingers. The umma had become a fractured family of warring dynasts, its divisiveness at odds with the message of brotherhood preached by the Prophet. If its leaders would but adhere to the tenets of Islam, the message came thundering from the minbars, then the faith would not suffer such devastating losses. Even Saladin's lineage, the Ayyubids, broke his kingdom up into squabbling principalities immediately after his death. As a result, the weakened Ayyubids lasted no longer than three generations in power—their Turkish slave soldiers, the Mamluks, took over from them. In Anatolia, the descendants of the Seljuks engaged in incessant internecine wars. North Africa presented a similarly dismal spectacle.

  Some went beyond simply lamenting the chronic instability of Islam and praying for a change in men's hearts. In the fourteenth century, a historian of genius, Ibn Khaldun, looked for a reason behind the fratricide that characterized much of Muslim past, taking as his subjects the Almoravids and Almohads of his native Morocco. For Ibn Khaldun, religious faith may have been an important impetus behind empire-building, but also present were the virtues and vices of asabiyya—that is, the ties of loyalty that bind kinship groups and extended clans and that aid in the capture and maintenance of power. A sympathetic observer of the misfortunes to have befallen Islam, Ibn Khaldun saw asabiyya seconding religion as a source of the success of the faith. This partly sociological view of events, revolutionary in a time when the hand of the divine was a palpable presence in men's affairs, held that the ties of kinship inevitably weakened once an empire was established and that the ruling elite separated itself from its fellows. This disintegration of asabiyya guaranteed decline, which was thus not entirely the result of wrongdoing or of God's displeasure—or, indeed, of external enemies. Laying Muslim woes at the doorstep of Christianity would not have occurred to Ibn Khaldun.

  In this, he was joined by most other apologists of Islam, which is important to underscore, given attitudes on the other side. The knights invading al-Andalus and the Near East were certainly the enemy of Islam, but their religion was less so—an ambivalence that lies at the heart of Islam's relationship with Christianity in the Middle Ages, and even today. To a pious Muslim, the Christians had somehow deviated from the true message of Jesus, and it was only through the Prophet's teachings that a correct reading of Jesus' life was possible. The holiness of the Virgin Mary, the overarching influence of Jesus—all of this was undisputed in Muslim doctrine. What was disputed were his divinity, the triune nature of God, the idea that God could have a son-God born of a woman, and that this God could die. Jesus was a great man, in this view, but his rising from the dead had to be nothing more than a mere fable. In the Dome of the Rock, commissioned in the infancy of Islam, the inscription on its southeast wall could not be plainer: "O you People of the Book, overstep not bounds in your religion, and of God speak only the truth. The Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, is only an apostle of God, and his Word which he conveyed unto Mary, and a Spirit proceeding from him. Believe therefore in God and his apostles, and say not Three. It will be better for you. God is only one God. Far be it from his glory that he should have a son." More offensive, for polemicists, was the symbolic cannibalism at the heart of the Christian Eucharist, as well as the elements of pagan idolatry in the reverence lavished on icons, crucifixes, and the like. Christendom's warriors might give the dar al Islam many sorrows, but their faith, though a corruption of Quranic teachings about Jesus, merited a measure of respect.

  For many in the other camp during this period around the Mediterranean, respect could not possibly play a role in acceptance of the status quo. Despite the successes in Spain and in the islands of the western Mediterranean, where the Catalans and the Genoese swept all before them, the failure of the crusades to Palestine, as well as other expeditions throughout the Mediterranean, still rankled. As the thirteenth and fourteenth cenmries progressed, successive misadventures in north Africa and the Holy Land took their toll on crusader zeal, and the string of ports that constituted the reduced Outremer coastline became subject to bickering and bloodshed among merchants, noblemen, and warrior-monks. For Christians, then, the period looked bleak as well, but—in an important distinction—the continuing existence of Islam represented a slap in the face.

  Unlike Muslim ambivalence toward Christianity, the pious Christian could not countenance the other faith, as it constituted an outright denial of revealed truth. Christianity held that Jesus had no successor in the line of prophets, as Islam outrageously posited. The Messiah had come. Thus, for Christian thinkers, the Quran was not so much a corrupted scripture as a corrupt fraud. The two landmark translations of the Quran done in To
ledo in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—the first for the head of Cluny, the second for Archbishop Rodrigo Jimenez de Rada—were undertaken not to study or understand Islam but to ridicule and denigrate it.

  This fundamental hostility accounts for the lush forest of medieval Christian polemic concerning Islam. The first dhimmis, in conquered Syria and Spain, had shrugged off the newcomers as passing irritants attached to a Christological curiosity. Once Islam's staying power sank in and the faith won over millions of theretofore fervent Christians, the invective from a defensive Church flowed freely. Muslims were idolaters, their shrine at Mecca the scene of bloodthirsty orgy and incestuous filth. The standard calumnies about religious deviants from classical times—much of it originally aimed at Christians—were repeated and embroidered upon, to paint a repulsive portrait of Arabian paganism.

  As familiarity with Islam grew through centuries of commingling around the inner sea, the charge of paganism could no longer be sustained. In its place came the widely accepted notion of Islam as a virulent heresy, akin in noxiousness to the creed preached by the Cathars. The heresiarch, Muhammad, received especial attention, the purveyors of polemic rising to new heights of inventiveness in producing hostile biographies of him as early as the tenth century. Not only was Muhammad a false prophet, he was a charlatan who faked miracles and passed off his epileptic fits as moments of divine inspiration. He concocted his postseizure revelations on the advice of Jews and the supposedly heretical Christian monk who had recognized his potential in Bosra, Syria. On Muhammad's death, the Prophet's body was left outside in the expectation of his resurrection; dogs—or pigs—feasted on the unusually foul-stinking corpse until nothing was left but his feet. Chagrined, his followers had his few remains placed in a metal box, which they suspended in midair through the use of concealed magnets so as to fool the credulous. Such was the content of the Kaaba, the boxlike building draped in black, of Mecca.

  That sampler of vituperation pales in comparison to the stories circulated about the Prophet's personal life. Scholars of the subject underline that much of the slandering of Muhammad revolved around his supposedly insatiable carnal desires. This line of thought was perhaps inevitable, for the study of a happy polygamist by celibate, misogynist clerics could hardly fail to bear strange fruit. The incorrigibly lascivious Muhammad was said to have partaken of all of his warriors' comely wives, to have forced himself on the young of both sexes, and even to have boasted that he would, on entering Paradise, deflower the Virgin Mary. These, and other stories of this nature, gained currency in many quarters of Christendom, which by the thirteenth century was prepared to be titillated by similarly unedifying tales of heretics and Jews. As the Church grew more repressive—these years saw the founding of papal inquisitions—the faintest whiff of subversiveness toward the prevailing view of Christian superiority became suspect. A thirteenth-century chronicler of Leon, aware of the attainments of the Andalusi civilization that his Christian lords were conquering, claimed that Islam's impressive catalog of speculative philosophy arose from a theft of Christian thinking hundreds of years earlier. A great cache of stolen Visigothic treatises had eventually made its way to none other than Avicenna, who hauled it off to Baghdad for translation into Arabic. The translations made, the Christian originals were then consigned to the flames by the Muslim copycats. We can only guess at whether this tall tale betrays ambivalence or embarrassment about the transmission of knowledge still under way in Toledo and Palermo.

  There were many other strains of polemic regarding Islam, one of the most important seeing Muhammad as the Antichrist—or, alternately, the six-hundred-year perdurance of Islam as prelude to the End Days prophesied in the Book of Revelation. Ingenious calculations about the age of the earth and the corresponding eras of mankind were commonplace in medieval millenarian writing. Pope Innocent III had crunched the numbers when he evoked the approaching apocalypse as justification for calling a Fifth Crusade—the one on which Francis of Assisi had taken ship. Some of Innocent's successors would see the sudden advent of the Mongols, who devastated not only the dar al Islam but also parts of Russia and eastern Europe, as the coming of the armies of Gog and Magog, yet another event foretold by John of Patmos in his New Testament apocalypse. In this grand view, the Muslims became lumped in with the Jews—instruments for the fulfillment of Christian prophecy.

  That still left the problem of what to do with them. For the supremely assertive Church of the thirteenth century, passivity in the face of the unfolding eschatological plan was unacceptable—action was necessary, which would help bring about the realization of the divine design. As Christendom bore down on its own dissidents and minorities through persecution and inquisition, many of its most militant believers quit Europe to travel through the dar al Islam on proselytizing missions. Francis of Assisi may have met with no success, but his followers soon hit upon the tactic practiced hundreds of years earlier by the martyrs of Córdoba,: goad Islamic authorities into killing them. Thus martyred, the missionaries' sanctified remains would work miracles and thereby effect wholescale conversion of the infidel.

  Armed with this logic, Franciscan friars took to the streets of north Africa and, to the acute discomfort of local Christian minorities, loudly insulted the Prophet and all his works. Unlike the martyrs of Córdoba,, these Franciscans were not working at home—they had crossed the sea to give offense in an alien culture. Like their predecessors, however, many of the Franciscans suffered the indignity of leniency from the qadis who wanted no communal trouble in their cities. Eventually, the more persistent got their wish: five friars were executed in Marrakesh (1220); six, in Ceuta (1227); two, in Valencia (1228); five, again in Marrakesh (1232); one, in Fez (1246); and seven, in Tripoli (1289). St. Bonaventure, the scholar leading the Franciscan order from 1250 to 1274, wrote that "to long for death for Christ, to expose oneself to death for Christ, and to delight in the agony of death is an act of perfect love." This danse macabre of the Franciscans was one extreme of Christian reaction to Islam.

  Of the people the Syrian poet called "those with brains and no religion," there is no better exemplar than Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor in the first half of the twelfth century. Known in his day as Stupor Mundi—the Wonder of the World—Frederick was a polyglot artist and autocrat who, through a latticework of royal marriages, had inherited the Norman kingdom of Sicily as his birthright. He lies today with King Roger in the Palermo cathedral, both larger-than-life monarchs ensconced in fittingly oversize porphyry sarcophagi. Their chapel, also fittingly, is the farthest from the altar.

  Frederick represented convivencia in all its contradictions. A brutal tyrant in the Byzantine mold, he so alienated Muslim peasants and barons of Sicily that repeated revolts against his rule occurred—leading him to deport the majority of them from the island and extinguish the presence of Islam there. Yet at the same time Frederick showed himself an adept at oriental panache, traveling to overawe his vassals on the Italian mainland in the company of a menagerie of exotic birds; an escort of elephants, camels, and tigers; and a personal bodyguard composed of Muslim swordsmen. His contribution to literature—a manual on falconry, the Islamic princely pastime par excellence—remained unsurpassed in accuracy and erudition for centuries.

  Frederick cared little for the pretensions of the papacy—he was a multiple excommunicate—yet his own were quite breathtaking. A student of the history of the mare nostrum, Frederick saw himself as a philosopher-emperor, in the model of a Marcus Aurelius; others, always on the lookout for the End Time, saw in him the Antichrist, or a new form of demon. His intellectual curiosity left him open for such invidious accusations. The so-called "Sicilian Questions" formulated by Frederick—on the eternity of matter and the immortality of the soul, among other things—were circulated widely, especially in the lands he thought most likely to come up with a satisfactory answer to them: the dar al Islam. Among the enemies of Islam, there was dismay when the Ayyubid sultan of Egypt, Malik al-Kamil—the interlocutor of
Francis of Assisi—sent to Frederick's court scholars and theologians to discuss his questions at length.

  When the time came for Frederick to go on crusade, a promise he had vouchsafed to his childhood guardian, Innocent III, the result was predictably eccentric. In 1229 Frederick, excommunicated for delaying his expedition to Outremer, and his friend al-Kamil, threatened by rivals in Syria and marauders from Iraq, struck a deal: on the promise of nonbelligerence, the payment of a large sum, and an undertaking not to repair Jerusalem's defensive walls, Frederick II could crown himself king of the holy city. The Christians would, in effect, be tenants of the Ayyubids in Jerusalem, allowed a renewable lease of ten years. Bethlehem and Nazareth were thrown in for good measure.

  The sarcophagus of Frederick II, Stupor Mundi, in Palermo's cathedral. To the rear is the canopy above a similar tomb for Roger II.

  Religious authorities in the Islamic world were horrified by this amiable horse trading between sultan and emperor over the holy city. Christian opinion was no less scandalized by the excommunicate's bizarre crusade. Not only had no infidel blood been spilled, but Frederick's comportment on his pilgrimage to Jerusalem verged on the incomprehensible. Much of his time had been spent on the Temple Mount—the al-Haram al-Sharif—chatting away in Arabic with Islamic scholars there. He had even chided them for silencing the muezzins on the mistaken assumption that his royal ears would be offended by the call to prayer—Frederick complained that he had been looking forward to waking in Jerusalem to the sonorous chants of Islam. Although this tourist-crusader did not stay long in the Levant—the pope used his absence to encourage attacks on Frederick's Italian possessions—his behavior hinted at a new nonideological approach to the dar al Islam.