Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam

by Andrew Wheatcroft

  This Rabelaisian burlesque, like Usāmah’s tale, related directly to the perceived filthiness (in a physical sense) of the Westerners but it also suggested their deeper offense to Muslim sensibilities. For them, the concept of Christ on the cross transgressed a wide range of taboos. God made flesh was unthinkable, and even more so a God who experienced a physical birth. In Islam God was transcendent, while the Western Christians proclaimed his materiality. The Crusaders’ capacity to pollute seemed limitless. They had, unwittingly or deliberately, defiled the holy site in Jerusalem (the Haram al-Sharif) from the first moments of their occupation. They had killed thousands within the holy precinct. They had briefly stabled their horses by the Mosque of Al-Aqsa, while one later visitor recorded that “as for the Dome of the Rock, the Franks had built upon it a church and an altar. They had adorned it with pictures and statues.” The same writer saw “pictures of grazing animals fixed in marble and I saw amongst those depictions of the likenesses of pigs.”69 Whether or not pigs were depicted is perhaps less significant than the certainty that for Muslims it seemed entirely plausible. Another Muslim traveler was shocked when he climbed up to the holy sites. “I entered Jerusalem and I saw monks and priests in charge of the Sacred Rock … I saw upon it bottles of wine for the ceremony of the mass. I entered the Aqsa mosque and in it a bell was suspended.”70 The most manifest evidence of this desecration to Muslim eyes was the large gold cross that had been placed on the highest point of the Dome of the Rock.

  The cross soon became an emblem of every type of pollution associated with the Franks. In part at least, this Muslim revulsion was based upon the day-to-day reality of life in the Crusader kingdoms, where (unsurprisingly) Christian images supplanted Islamic aniconism. It was this public display that was so disturbing for Muslims. Many practices, such as the reverence for the cross, holy pictures, statues, and the like, were common among local Christians living under Islamic rule both before and after the Crusader occupation of Palestine. However, Christians living under Islam were normally prevented from displaying aural and visual manifestations of Christianity: no bells summoning the believers, no crosses upon their churches, no public processions. Nothing, in short, to offend the majority’s sensibilities, so Muslims normally were not confronted with Christian worship, which was largely invisible. The public triumph of Christianity, especially in the plethora of new churches and shrines that were built throughout Palestine, came as a visual and psychological shock.71 There had been numerous churches and shrines before 1099, but now the pace of new building was inexorable and barely slackened over six or seven decades. The Holy Sepulchre was extended to become a huge Romanesque pilgrimage church, guarding the greatest shrine in Christendom. The mosque called the Haram al-Sharif (Dome of the Rock) was left physically intact but was covered with frescoes outside and sacred objects inside: transformed into the Church of the Holy of Holies (Templum Domini), it was dedicated at Easter 1141. The physical “Christianization” of the city was accompanied by a shift in population. Muslims and Jews were mostly precluded from living within the walls, so that Jerusalem was now a Christian city, with even the old Muslim and Jewish quarters thronged with Western migrants and pilgrims.72

  For centuries, except on a few rare occasions and regardless of who ruled the city, Jerusalem had been a neutral space. Jews, Christians, and Muslims had operated a Peace of God. Pilgrims could worship at their sacred places, scholars could come closer to God through study. Sometimes a kind of informal academy developed, where the different faiths could debate issues of belief. The First Crusade and the near-century of the Latin Kingdom interrupted that long tradition. But it also created a new sense of anger and anxiety in both the Western Christian and the Mediterranean Islamic worlds. Its roots lay earlier, in the seventh century, and a shadowy negative image of the infidel must already have existed within Western society in the eleventh century. Nothing else can explain the extraordinary response to Urban’s summons. But it was not a dominant discourse. After the First Crusade it was, both in the East and the West. During the period of Christian occupation of Jerusalem, from 1099 to 1187, the trope of defilement and the consequent need for purification grew more dominant among Muslim writers. In tone, if not in content, it was similar to the Western reactions to the Muslim occupation of Jerusalem in the years just before the conquest of 1099, and again in the centuries after the loss of the city in 1187.

  The Muslim reconquest evoked a plethora of different responses in the West. By the 1340s the noted Dominican scholar and preacher Robert Holkot could argue that “it is not possible to teach the life of Christ unless by destroying and condemning [destruendo et reprobando] the law of Machomet.”73 He further asserted that Islam should be eradicated both by preaching, “the spiritual sword,” and if necessary by conquest and extermination. Nor was Holkot an insignificant figure. His reputation grew after his death in 1349 and his Study on the Book of Wisdom, in which this condemnation was contained, went through twenty printed editions between 1480 and 1520.74 But there were others, like William of Tripoli, writing in Acre, who believed firmly in the possibility of converting Muslims by peaceful means to the Christian life. He concluded his De statu Saracenorum with this confident assertion: “Solely by the word of God, without philosophical argument and without military weapons, they will like simple sheep seek the baptism of Christ and will enter into the flock of God. He says and writes this who by God’s will has baptised more than a thousand.”75

  Yet his confidence in conversion was not widely shared. More typical were scholars who cast doubt on even the desirability of conversion. The Franciscan Alexander of Hales in his Summae universae theologiae of 1256 classed Muslims with heretics irredeemably tainted by their unbelief and who should therefore be killed by any lawful authority. Benoit of Alignan in his Tractatus fidei suggested that the “absurdities of Mahomet” should be extirpated by “fire and sword.”76 But no scholar suggested that the fact of Islam’s existence could ever be ignored. This was the vast “myth of Crusade” that Alphonse Dupront traced through his life’s work, a history on an almost Gibbonian scale. This myth, as he put it, became “an endemic reality, that is a [permanent] condition of the collective spirit.”77 But the medieval Crusades, like the Ottoman expansion into the Balkans and the two great sieges of Vienna (1529 and 1683), had a double impact. They transformed the West, but they also transmogrified the East.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Conquest and Reconquest

  THE FIRST CRUSADE WAS BORN OUT OF FEAR. URBAN II BELIEVED THAT the Holy Land was in danger, and Christendom responded to his call. Although later Crusades to the East were to a greater degree a product of political ambitions and territorial aggrandizement, the visceral element never disappeared. The fears grew, through contact with the East and increasing Western preoccupations with Islam. While Muslims saw a source of defilement in Frankish Christians, so too Christians now blamed the existence of Islam for the rising tide of corruption in the Christian world.1 Churchmen complained that the people of the Latin kingdoms were acquiring the lewd ways of the East, wearing un-Christian clothing and disporting themselves with Muslim women. If James of Vitry is to be believed

  Among the Poulains [children of the Crusaders born in the Holy Land] there is hardly one in a thousand who takes his marriage seriously. They do not regard fornication to be a deadly sin. From childhood they are pampered and wholly given to carnal pleasures, whereas they are not accustomed to hear God’s word, which they lightly disregard … And the city [Acre] is full of brothels, and as the rent of prostitutes is higher, not only laymen, but even clergymen, nay even monks, rent their houses all over the city to public harlots.2

  Nowhere were these ideas of pollution more graphically presented than in Avignon in the spring of 1335. In February, a middle-aged priest called Opicinus de Canistris had suddenly fallen ill. He lay in bed until the end of March, when he suddenly recovered, having, as he said, seen a vision of the world. His illness had left his mind confused and his right arm
paralyzed. His official career as a papal secretary in the pontifical palace was ended. Nonetheless, he learned to use his left arm, and began writing and drawing at breakneck speed. Over the next few months he filled more than fifty-two large parchments. At that point he disappears from history—the date of his death is uncertain—and his work vanished into the papal archives, where it lay undiscovered for almost 600 years.

  Opicinus had become obsessed with his own sin and desire, and during his illness he began to see the shapes of three huge figures concealed in the outline of the Mediterranean. One was male, another female, and the third was a bearded and monstrous devil. He drew his grotesque figures over the contours of the coastline, believing that God had carved out the land for a purpose and his message was unmistakable. So Opicinus presented the Mediterranean as a Sea of Sin. Over the northern (European) and southern (African) shorelines he inked in the heads of twin figures, one male and one female, and gave them faces, clothes, arms, and legs. The lower extremities fitted the topography less exactly. Italy made a convenient right leg and boot for the Europe figure; but the left leg ended clumsily in the heart of Greece. However, the apex, where the two heads almost touched, was his focal point. Opicinus made it plain that this was no chance proximity. They were deep in carnal conversation.3

  Over the African shore he drew a female figure in Moorish dress, who, with her arm pointing toward his midriff, whispered suggestively into Europe’s ear, “Come, let us copulate.”4 The Latin word he used, commiscemini, has the sense of illicit mixing; and Opicinus declared of the Straits of Gibraltar: “Between Spain and Mauritania is the vulva Oceani from which the Mediterranean Sea proceeds.”5 The evil that obsessed him was the sexual conjunction of a seducing Muslim woman and a pure Europe turned from the path of virtue. This was truly the devil’s work. At the other end of the Mediterranean, he saw the head of the evil one, a dark shape that occupied the eastern Mediterranean, with its face covering the Levant and the lands occupied by Islam, and a full beard fringing the Balkans.

  Opicinus became preoccupied with these deeper meanings in the landscape. He came to see every event of his own troubled life as depicted on the maps before him. Progressively, he became the Europe Man, struggling with temptation. When he was constipated, he understood his discomfort as an emblem of the political troubles afflicting Lombardy. Examining the patterns of hair on his body, he realized that they “signified” the location of the vineyards throughout Europe.6 His preoccupation with lust and the devil grew ever stronger. Africa Woman became “the symbol of sin, hypocrisy and the like,” while Europe Man represented “purity, salvation or piety.”7 He played with the conjunction of the northern and southern shores: sometimes Africa was a virile male and Europe the frail virgin. But in most of his sketches, Africa wore the clothes of a Muslim woman: Africa Woman was, of course, an infidel. The Christian world was contaminated by its contiguity with Africa and the Levant. This was the meaning of Africa Woman and the shadowy figure of the devil. These were the lands occupied by “Islam.” Jerusalem itself lay under the body of the devil, while Spain was being seduced.

  Opicinus expressed (in an extreme fashion) a common association of the Muslim East with danger and corruption. The experience of the Levant over the two centuries of Christian occupation confirmed the beliefs that had stimulated the crusading impetus in the first place. The first Crusaders had dedicated themselves to the salvation of the holy places, which they believed were in danger of destruction. This sense of threat increased once they arrived in the East and this anxiety grew through the whole period of Western presence. They were few and the infidels were many: “Where we have a count the enemy has forty kings; where we have a knight they have a duke … where we have a castle they have a kingdom.”8 This sense of oppression, of a tiny Western Christian minority drowning in a sea of infidels, was both real and fictive. A century before Opicinus de Canistris, the chronicler Roger of Wendover observed in a letter written from the city of Acre in 1221, “We and the other peoples on our side of the water are oppressed by so many and great expenses in carrying on [this Crusade], that we shall be unable to meet our necessary expenses in carrying on … unless by the divine mercy we shortly receive assistance from our fellow Christians.”9 Yet a presence in the East was essential to further the triumph of Christ: for this reason an anonymous poet hailed the Crusade of King Louis IX of France in the mid–thirteenth century as the means to “baptise the sultan of the Turks, and thereby free the world.”10

  In Palestine as in Spain, Islam and Christianity were in contest for the same terrain. Yet there was a subtle difference. Al-Andalus lay on the outer perimeter of Islam, and did not have the special significance for Muslims of the “far distant place of worship” in Jerusalem, whither the Prophet Mohammed came miraculously by night and was thence taken up into heaven.11 Christian Spaniards claimed Spain as their own holy land by prior right, in which the Moors were temporary intruders. By contrast in Palestine, Muslims, Jews, and Christians all claimed full rights to a territory revered by all three communities. Moreover, in each case, the process of losing and later redeeming this land became a dominant religious and literary motif. The loss of the Muslim holy places in Jerusalem—Al Quds—from 1099 to 1187 generated an intense preoccupation with the infidel Christian enemy.

  The encounter between Western Christendom and Islam after 1099 created a malign heritage for both communities. Each battle, siege, despoliation, or defilement fueled opposing narratives. Thus the conquest of the Christian County of Edessa in 1144 by Imd al-Din Zengi, the Turkish ruler of Mosul, seemed a divine intervention to the chronicler Ibn al-Athir:

  When Almighty God saw the princes of the Islamic lands and … how unable they were to support the [true] religion and their inability to defend those who believe in the One God and He saw their subjugation by their enemy and the severity of their despotism … He then wished to set over the Franks someone who could requite the evil of their deeds and send to the devils of the crosses [Western Christians] stones from Him to destroy and annihilate them.12

  For the Christian bishop William of Tyre, the city was lost through Christian failures—the petty squabbles among Christian princes and a negligence in Christendom for the sacred patrimony in the East:

  Thus while the Prince of Antioch, overcome by foolish hatred, delayed rendering the help he owed to his brothers and while the count awaited help from abroad, the ancient city of Edessa, devoted to Christianity since the time of the Apostles and delivered from the superstitions of the infidels through the words and preaching of the Apostle Thaddeus, passed into an undeserved servitude.13

  The loss of Edessa roused the West to launch the Second Crusade, led by the emperor Conrad III and King Louis VII of France. Steven Runciman charted the rise and ignominious fall of the enterprise:

  No medieval enterprise started with more splendid hopes. Planned by the Pope, preached and inspired by the golden eloquence of St Bernard, and led by the two chief potentates of Western Europe it had promised so much for the glory and salvation of Christendom … in fact the Crusade was brought to nothing by its leaders, with their truculence, their ignorance, and their ineffectual folly.14

  No subsequent Crusade met the high expectations created by the first “pilgrimage.” During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries a succession of failed ventures caused a number of writers to ask whether these journeys were indeed God’s will. Would he have allowed them to fail so ignominiously if they were? Many ingenious solutions were found to this conundrum. Failure stemmed from the moral imperfections of the Crusaders themselves and of the wicked society that had produced them. They were unworthy to recover the holy city. Others explained the Muslim infidels’ victories as the instrument by which Christ chastened his sinful people and called them to reform. But gradually a more comprehensive explanation emerged, which seemed to fit all the circumstances and also corralled Islam within Christian doctrine.

  For many scholars the success of Islam could only be rationally
explained if the Prophet Mohammed and his followers represented the Antichrist, whose appearance foreshadowed the final triumph of Christ in his second coming. Saint Paul had given this ancient idea a succinct Christian definition: “That day [the second coming] shall not come except there is a falling away first and that man of sin be revealed, the sin of perdition. Who exalteth himself above all that is called God or that is worshiped.”15 For many Christians, the self-evident man of sin was the Prophet Mohammed. Yoking Muslims with the Antichrist made them implacably hostile to Christians, but it also assured their ultimate defeat. It is risky to be too definite in matters of perception. A single event, text, or image should not be read outside its original context, and we can never be sure that the few written documents are not chance (and thus misleading) survivals from the distant past. But from the late medieval period onward, there was a shift in the image that the communities, Christian and Muslim, had of each other. Both were hostile and suspicious, but while the Western image of the East seemed to be in a constant state of flux and mutation, the Islamic attitude stabilized. The closest we can get to popular attitudes were the tales of folk heroes who vanquished their opponents, sometimes Christian Crusaders, sometimes Byzantines. In addition to traditional folk heroes like Abu Zayd and Rustam, there were new and historical heroes like the ruler of Egypt, the Mamluk (Turkish) sultan Baybars, who finally expelled the Franks from their last foothold in the land where the sun rises, the al-mashreq.16

  The tradition of these tales is entertaining fantasy, which is what the people wanted. Narratives that were full of drama, excitement, and colorful characters were the stock-in-trade of professional traveling storytellers. So the Sirat al-Zahir Baybars is a long succession of wildly improbable adventures. The sultan defended the poor and righted wrongs. He was transported magically to England and had many thrilling encounters there. Nonetheless his experience of Christians was typified by the “treachery” of “Juwan”—John—who eventually received his just deserts at the sultan’s hands. In another folk epic, the Dhat al-Himma, even the bravest of the Franks was described as “a very wicked and guileful man.”17 These were all stock villains, just as Baybars was a one-dimensional hero figure. But like the Western characterization of the men (and women) of the East, these were images of the infidel readily recognizable to Muslims, who already knew that Western Christians were essentially wicked. They had heard that the Franks were dangerous, treacherous, and vicious, both physically and spiritually corrupt. Ultimately, not much survived of the admiration for the Crusaders’ courage which had appeared in the writings of Usāmah ibn Munqidh.