Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam

by Andrew Wheatcroft

  In the Balkans, because of the “Turkish yoke,” folklore had a powerfully political meaning. Stories of ancient victories and killings, as in Njegoš’s Mountain Wreath, had a direct symbolic relevance:

  The Serbian name has perished everywhere.

  Mighty lions have become meek peasants.

  Rash and greedy converted to Islam—

  may their Serb milk make them all sick with plague!

  Those who escaped before the Turkish sword,

  those who did not blaspheme at the True Faith,

  those who refused to be thrown into chains,

  took refuge here in these lofty mountains

  to shed their blood together and to die,

  heroically to keep the sacred

  oath, their lovely name, and their holy freedom.

  Our heads withstood the hard test in battles!

  Our brave lads have shone like the radiant stars.

  Those who were born in these lofty mountains

  fell day by day in the past’s bloody wars

  and gave their life for honour, name, and freedom.

  All of our tears were always wiped away

  by the deft sounds of the lovely gusle.

  Sacrifices have not been made in vain

  since our hard land has now truly become

  of Turkish might the insatiable tomb.51

  This relevance to the present is missing in the tales recorded by the brothers Grimm, and in English ballads. Only in English-ruled Ireland did the folkloric past provide the language and models for contemporary political action. A stanza of one ancient poem reprinted by Constanza, Lady Wilde, read:

  When the Fenian wrath was kindled,

  And the heroes in thousands rode to war.52

  Irish revolutionaries proudly described themselves as “Fenians” waging war on their English oppressors. In Ireland as in the Balkans, the scholarly work of recording and disseminating the nation’s past provided a coded message against oppression.

  Memories of oppression are probably inexplicable to anyone who has not been brought up with them from infancy. These feelings and prejudices are not genetic. They have to be learned. For more than a century the source of most stories has not just been an oral tradition handed down by word of mouth from generation to generation, but also the medium of the printed word and the visual image. In many old homes, I guess, there is the equivalent of that back room in my grandfather’s house. Now we can also learn how to hate in new ways: through film, the television screen, and the Internet. Yet the process remains the same. Malediction is mobile: it can shift its target, but it still carries with it all the weight of past opprobrium. In the Balkans after 1922 there were Ottomans no more. They had departed. They had been the enemy in the Slav national epics, and now they were no longer present. But the Muslim Albanians and, to a lesser degree, the Bosnian Muslims took their place as the alien antagonist. For a considerable time the Albanians had acted as the enforcers for the Ottoman authorities in distant Constantinople. The last autocratic sultan, Abdul Hamid II, used Albanians as guards within his fortified palace at Yildiz, trusting his life only to them. When the Balkan Wars ended in 1913, the Turks even insisted that the Albanians should be granted their own state; however, as noted earlier, many were already settled outside its new boundaries.

  The Albanians in Kosovo became an object of particular hatred for the government of Serbia. For ultranationalists, the presence of Muslims in the sacred land that Serbs had been forced to abandon in 1690 was insupportable. In the 1980s a series of sensational misdeeds were attributed to Kosovar Albanians, and were considered by many Serbs to illustrate the threat posed by these “aliens.”53 One in particular connected directly to the ancient rhetoric against the Ottomans. On May 1, 1985, according to Yugoslav newspaper reports, a Serbian peasant called Djordje Martinović was attacked by two unidentified Albanian men, who “mistreated him, and forced a bottle into his rectum.”54 The bottle’s neck broke in his anus, causing great pain and physical damage. There were suggestions that the motives might be something to do with land, but no satisfactory causes ever emerged. Then it was suggested that it was in fact an act of sexual self-gratification. Martinović, it was said, had put the bottle on a wooden stick and then sat upon it. But that too went against the medical evidence. At least four different (and mutually contradictory) explanations were eventually advanced.

  But in time the facts became less important than the symbolism. Newspapers began to call it “impalement” and linked it to atrocities committed “in the time of the Turks.” This was widely taken as a reference to Andrić’s description of such an incident in The Bridge over the Drina.55 The Serbian Academy of Sciences issued a long memorandum that referred to the Martinović case, and said it was “reminiscent of the darkest days of Turkish impalement.” A writer who had researched the case put it more bluntly: “Here we are dealing with the remains of the Ottoman empire … [Albanians] stuck him to a stake, this time just wrapped in a bottle. In the time of the Turks, Serbians were being impaled too, though even the Turks were not the ones who did it, but rather their servants—Arnauts [the old term for Albanians].”56

  Albanians in general were implicated in a crime that was at best uncertain. In the end the evidence against them came down to the fact that this was how the Turks had behaved, and the Albanians were their surrogates. Ten years after the event, Julie Mertus observed that “the power of the Martinović case lay in its ability to invoke the primary imagery of Serbian oppression: the Turkish barbarity of impaling.”57

  The case illustrates the extraordinary invasiveness of maledicta, which can defy all truth and logic. Indeed, they rewrite and redefine the truth. In 1992 the Bosnian Serbs elected a psychiatrist from Montenegro, Radovan Karadžić, as their leader. Marko Vešović, a school friend of Karadžić, spoke about how his former classmate had become an author of genocide. Vešović blamed Karadžić’s malign deeds on the fact that he was born a Montenegrin. “Serbs are not a mythological people or nation. In this war we have to understand that the Montenegrins are a mythological people. You can say that in this war the Serbs were infected by Montenegrin mythology … The main expressive tool of Montenegrins is hyperbole. In one minute they go to extremity.” Then he mentioned the “greatest words” of the Montenegrin poet Njegoš: “Let the possible be. Let that happen which is not possible.” Radovan Karadžić fancied himself as a poet, in the manner of his heroic namesake. There is unmistakably an echo of this poetic theme in the doctor’s own verse: “When I am in a kind of mad fire / I could do anything.”

  Vešović described how it was “an experience par excellence to sit in the winter nights in Montenegro and listen to the stories that were so rich in fantasies … so detached from reality.”58 As a political leader Dr. Karadžić showed how with a lie here and a half-truth there, he could and would do anything. All his stories and maledictions against the Muslims of Bosnia were, in the end, narratives without boundaries. Dr. Karadžić linked old texts to new fears, talked to his audience in terms they knew from their childhood. He made killing seem natural, normal, even predestined.59 Calling up dark memories of an imagined past, he was like some demented Pied Piper:

  By means of a secret charm, to draw

  All creatures living beneath the sun,

  That creep or swim or fly or run,

  After me so as you never saw!

  And I chiefly use my charm

  On creatures that do people harm.60

  Part Five

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “Turban’d and Scimitar’d”

  THERE IS A DARK LITTLE LITHOGRAPH BY NICOLAS-TOUSSAINT Charlet that shows how Parisians learned of the destruction of the Egyptian-Ottoman fleet at Navarino in 1827. Charlet takes us inside a very humble house, where the neighbors have come to hear the news. A child stands on a table with the newspaper and reads to the gathering of adults. Other children play and dogs roll around on the floor in a typically domestic scene. This picture tells us quite a
lot about who was literate and who was not, and shows the process by which the written and printed word was spread far beyond the limits of those who could read for themselves. But since the first days of printing in the 1450s even the unlettered had been able to “read” some things for themselves: pictures.

  Images usually have a surface message, but for those who had learned the key, the pictures were charged with deeper meanings.1 Even the illiterate were used to reading images. Not every household in England that owned a copy of John Foxe’s History of the Acts and Monuments of the Church (1563), better known as his Book of Martyrs, was able to follow the text of its more than a thousand pages.2 Nor would they necessarily have been interested in the early persecutions of Christians under long-forgotten Roman emperors. But they could understand the powerful woodcuts and would painstakingly decipher the short captions that described the torments suffered in their own day. For English Protestants these images and the stories were reminders of Catholic oppression and tyranny. Foxe’s book was so enduringly popular that new editions were still being reprinted three centuries after its first publication.

  Depictions of the Turk were similarly replete with symbolism. Swords, bows, and spears took the place of the pyres on which the Protestant martyrs suffered, but were just as much perpetual reminders of violence, threat, and danger. And sometimes sexual excess and perversity were suggested instead of savagery. In some images all these elements were present. Many Europeans were convinced that Muslims were pederasts and sodomites. The Turks were held to be devotees of impalement, one of the few forms of cruel punishment not practiced in the West. The depictions of this implied both unnatural sex and excessive cruelty.3

  But not all pictures were of this type. Many showed the solemnity of Ottoman life, the Turks’ sumptuous apparel, and their dramatic townscapes full of fine buildings. The Renaissance image of the Turk had multiple facets, some admiring and curious, some fearful. But just as it was difficult for a seventeenth-century Englishman to see a picture of Rome and not recall the Protestant martyrs burnt at Smithfield, the image of the East was tainted with dark or salacious overtones. Every depiction, as Lacan suggested, has been supercharged by the ways in which it has been used before.

  Specific images developed slowly. At first few European artists had any notion of how to draw a “Saracen,” so they made them look like Westerners, wearing the same armor, riding the same horses, and often carrying the same arms. So in a picture of the battle of Mansourah in 1250 (during the Seventh Crusade), Louis IX of France is distinguishable from his Muslim opponents only by the crown on his head.4 Gradually, identifying marks appeared. In the windows of the Habsburg chapel at Königsfelden in Switzerland, Saracens were differentiated from Christians by the stylized scorpion emblems on their shields.5 But they still wore European-style armor. It was in Spain, unsurprisingly, that more realistic images were first painted showing infidels as being very different from their Christian adversaries.6 An altarpiece in Valencia showed King James I of Aragon aided by a saint in a battle with the Moors. His adversaries, with their dark features, flowing robes, and heart-shaped shields, could never be mistaken for Christian knights.

  THE VIEW OF THE ISLAMIC WORLD IN THE WEST WAS LARGELY imprinted during the two centuries after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. This period coincided with the development and spread of the printed word and image in the West. By the late seventeenth century, what the infidel looked like, and how he behaved, had become common knowledge. Hostility to the Islamic world, as I have suggested earlier, had very distant antecedents.7 But printed images, painted works of art, sculpture, and objets d’art gave that hostility a visual identity, which to some extent changed and shifted over time, as new elements were introduced. But the very basics that constituted the infidel enemy remained more or less the same, although their ordering and arrangement altered over the centuries. The process of identification was both visual and textual. Quite often images and words were not in harmony. Sometimes the pictures invoked older and more visceral responses than the written texts that accompanied them. The gap between image and text grew during the eighteenth century, narrowed during the nineteenth, and narrowed further in the twentieth century.

  The actors also changed. Until the nineteenth century, the infidel was “the Turk,” but during the first half of that century, Europe also rediscovered what the travel writer A. W. Kinglake called in his book Eothen (1847) “the True Bedouin.”8 The desert dweller was imbued by many Europeans with the qualities of the noble savage that could never be applied to the Ottomans. Forty years after Eothen, Charles Montagu Doughty published his Travels in Arabia Deserta in two substantial volumes. He made heroes both of the desert and of those who lived in it. The French conquest of North Africa also threw up distinctively Arab heroes, such as the Algerian Abd el Kader, who became a latter-day Saladin and noble enemy. The change in the role of images in nineteenth-century publications meant a much greater diversity in what was depicted and how it was presented. Printed images became games that an increasingly educated market could read and decipher. As a consequence of that cultural shift, it is a mistake to search for a single stereotypical perception, the sense of unmitigated hostility of the Middle Ages. Images and texts in the nineteenth century and later are both more complex and more allusive, for they assume a literate audience. The Punch cartoons that I discussed in chapter 10 have to be read in context: not for nothing was Punch’s secondary title “The London Charivari,” a colloquialism for a cacophony or hubbub. It took some skill to make sense of the discordance.

  Yet despite these new styles and modes of presentation, older attitudes toward the infidel East still remained. Quite how this shadow first developed is not at all clear. Early (fifteenth- and sixteenth-century) images alone could not, I suggest, root the idea of the infidel particularly deeply. For one thing they did not exist in any great number.9 About “Turks” there was nothing like the plethora of mordantly abusive (and highly memorable) Lutheran images of the pope and his cardinals. Here images usually made visible and specific what had already been named. But with the “Turk” the visual form sometimes anticipated the words. Take the deeply curved saber, often with an absurdly broad tip that made it look like some kind of meat cleaver: we call it a scimitar. The first recorded usage of the word “scimitar” in English to refer to a curved Turkish sword came in 1548, long after the image had become a visual signifier of the fierce and dangerous Turk. Quite where the word had originated no one knows. It was not a Turkish term, and has no obvious etymology.10 Yet it became emblematic of the infidel. In, for example, Molière’s comedy Le bourgeois gentilhomme, first performed in 1670, a strange “Turkish Ceremony,” delivered in an outlandish “lingua franca,” was used to ennoble the gullible Bourgeois, Monsieur Jourdain.11 The objects that transform him into a noble Turk are a turban and a scimitar. The Bourgeois first appears “dressed in the Turkish style, but without a turban [turbanta] or scimitar [scarcina].” Then, ceremoniously, “the Mufti” bestows these on him and, lo, he becomes a Turk. “Scimitar” and “turban” remained symbols of the Turk well into the twentieth century. Dr. George Horton, American consul general in Smyrna, in his Turcophobe book The Blight of Asia, published in 1922, described how “the Turk, wherever his scimitar reached—degraded, defiled and defamed—blasting with eternal decay Roman, Latin civilization, until when all had gone he sat down satisfied with savagery to doze into hopeless decrepitude.”12

  A “scimitar” featured in the first printed images of the outlandish Turks that had been based on observation.13 These appeared in The Pilgrimage to Jerusalem (Peregrinatio in terram sanctam) written by a secular official of the cathedral of Mainz, Bernard von Breydenbach. In April 1483, he began a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the company of the artist Erhard Reuwich and a number of aristocratic travelers. Breydenbach always intended an account printed with wood engravings since he made Reuwich sketch the places they visited, as well as a set of images of the people in the Holy Land. The most dram
atic features of the book were the panoramic views of the ports the party passed through, especially the pullout view of Venice, more than six feet in length, and one of the earliest depictions of the Queen of the Adriatic.

  Reuwich, even in his panoramas, had a wonderful eye for social detail. He sometimes took a high-angle perspective, looking down on an urban scene, but also incorporating the surrounding countryside. Here we can see robbers holding up travelers and other crimes, women washing clothes, and punishments being executed. Breydenbach’s writing was competent, but it was Erhard Reuwich’s woodcuts that made the work stand out. Other images were embedded in the text, such as a group of Turks riding, Saracens with their women, a Jew with bags of coin, travelers settling down to a meal. The image of the Jew struck an uncertain note, but the rest showed only curiosity and no obvious hostility.14

  Breydenbach’s book was first printed by Reuwich in Mainz in 1486, and subsequently appeared in some twelve editions, in Latin, Dutch, German, Spanish, and French.15 It became a staple ingredient in later compilations such as Samuel Purchas’s famous compendium, or history of the world, Purchas His Pilgrimes, first published in 1625.16 In the dedication of the first part to Charles, Prince of Wales (soon to be King Charles I), Purchas wrote that he had “out of this chaos of confused intelligences framed this historical world by a new way of Eye Evidence.” “Eye Evidence” was very different from the fantasies of Sir John Mandeville, and wrong or grotesquely opinionated though some of Purchas’s witnesses may have been, they had indeed seen with their own eyes what they described.17