Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam

by Andrew Wheatcroft

  JUST BEFORE WRITING THESE FINAL PAGES I WAS SENT A BOOK WITH (for me) an irresistible title. The joint authors of An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror—David Frum and Richard Perle—are figures in the shadows of the Bush administration. Now, they have produced “a manual for victory.” At first sight it seemed just one of many hurriedly assembled “tracts for the time.”31 But this one is more interesting than most such productions, because it is written in a kind of Orwellian Newspeak. In his novel 1984, George Orwell analyzed the language of his new society. Here words were divided up into three categories: the A, B, and C vocabularies. A words were those “needed for the business of everyday life—for such things as eating, drinking, working, putting on one’s clothes, going up and down stairs, riding in vehicles, gardening, cooking, and the like.” C words were scientific and technical terms. But Frum and Perle write mostly in B words.

  The B vocabulary consisted of words which had been deliberately constructed for political purposes: words, that is to say, which not only had in every case a political implication, but were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them … The B words were a sort of verbal shorthand, often packing whole ranges of ideas into a few syllables, and at the same time more accurate and forcible than ordinary language.32

  For Frum and Perle, France fulfills the role of the evil and despicable Eastasia (or Eurasia) in Orwell’s parable, while political enemies, and others who engage in “thoughtcrime,” are disposed of on every page. One fine Newspeak rodomontade concludes the first chapter:

  For us, terrorism remains the great evil of our time, and the war against this evil, our generation’s great cause. We do not believe that Americans are fighting this evil to minimize it or to manage it. We believe they are fighting to win—to end this evil before it kills again and on a genocidal scale. There is no middle way for Americans: It is victory or holocaust.33

  The use of “holocaust” (without an initial capital) is pure Newspeak B. Neither author can be unaware of what “holocaust” means to a modern audience.34 In this context they elide the transient horror of terrorism with the unending horror of the Nazi exterminations. Is the alternative really “victory” or the careful, planned, systematic, efficient, and remorseless extermination of an entire culture? If that really is what they mean, there is not a shred of concrete evidence for it in the book. Yet if the language of An End to Evil is a string of neologisms, its structure, intention, and method are very old indeed.

  In 1486 two Dominican monks, Kramer and Sprenger, wrote a tract against the great mortal evil of their day, what they saw as the most dangerous threat to human society. While Frum and Perle abominate the modern threat from terror or terrorists, the two monks in Cologne were obsessed with the more ancient threat posed by witchcraft and witches. Their manual, which they called The Hammer of Witches (Malleus Malleficarum), proved a best seller. Published for the first time in 1486, the Malleus appeared in thirteen editions between 1487 to 1520 and sixteen between 1574 and 1669. It remains one of the most malign texts ever produced, for it provided canonical and biblical backing for the idea of witchcraft and laid down the procedures for destroying the witches themselves. After the Reformation, their work continued to find equal favor with Protestants and Catholics alike.

  A fifteenth-century manual against witchcraft and a twenty-first-century manual against terrorism read rather differently, but their methodology is strikingly similar. First, they both lay out the conditions and causes of evil; second, they detail how evil spread and how it can be defeated; and third, they present the operational necessities of a war on evil. There are other similarities. They castigate all who doubt or frustrate their great work. “Our vocation is to support justice with power. It is a vocation that has earned us terrible enemies” (Frum and Perle).35“There is in them [the enemies] an enormity of crime, exceeding all other” (Kramer and Sprenger).36 However, their similitude lies not so much in style, language, and method as in their ultimate objective, the destruction of an evil enemy. These modern authors’ purpose is not very different from their avatars; like Kramer and Sprenger, they wish to excise those whom they fear from human society, root and branch. This current assault on “evil” may be just a new variant of the witch craze.37

  Killing witches ran its bloody course and eventually subsided. Can we halt a similar modern social panic in its tracks? History provides a suggestive parallel. Even at its apogee, in the seventeenth century, the idea of evil taking over a witch’s body was questioned, and undermined; gradually, the witch craze waned. As Chadwick Hansen succinctly put it: “Western civilisation stopped executing witches when the literate and balanced portion of its members stopped believing in their capacity to do harm.”38 The slow change was engendered through debate and argument, by a war of words, until eventually the very belief in witches became synonymous with a barbarous past.39 But Hansen then continued, ominously: “But new figures have arisen to take the spectral place in popular fears vacated by the witch.”40 That is, I believe, where we are now.

  Malign ideas and utterances, maledicta, lie infectively in books, magazines, newspapers, in the ether, or on the Internet; they cannot effectively be constrained, censored, or controlled. But their virulence can be diminished, as Charles Maier suggests:

  Perpetrators have a history as well as victims, but in what sense do they share a narrative? In fact, their narratives intertwine, just as all adversarial histories must … [These adversaries] will never write the same narrative, but historians … must render them both justice within a single story. This does not mean banally insisting that both have a point, or “splitting the difference” (which is a political strategy). It means listening to, testing and ultimately making public their respective sub-narratives or partial stories. To resort to a musical analogy: written history must be contrapuntal and not harmonic. That is, it must allow the particular histories of national groups to be woven together linearly alongside each other so that the careful listener can follow them distinctly but simultaneously, hearing the whole together with the parts.41

  This is what normally happens over time: monolithic certainties tend to diminish, blur, or fade over the generations. Unless, that is, bitter memories are fostered, or as this book has suggested, deliberately revived.

  Ultimately the real hope for a better future is, in Maier’s words, this process of “hearing the whole together with the parts.” The power of the word might, at first sight, seem much less reliable than relying on overwhelming military power, which Frum and Perle assure us is our best hope. Of course, might is always right on the battlefield. But as every empire has learned, over years and, ultimately, decades, exercising that kind of military effort in the long term carries an insupportable price, in both human and economic terms. Sustaining a long war often demands a reversion to maledicta—to the language of “crusade” and “evil”—and the attitudes that belong to it. But reviving the past comes at a cost: an ideology based on these atavistic responses will fail; and worse, in failing, may even slowly unravel the last two centuries of the West’s social, cultural, and spiritual development.

  Notes on the Text

  Note: Unpublished Spanish sources are referred to as Document, with a number, and are listed in full at the beginning of the Sources and Select Bibliography. For published works cited here in a shortened form only, the complete bibliographic details appear in the Select Bibliography. Other published sources appear here in full, and not in the Select Bibliography.

  PREFACE

  1. And of course, we do not have Urban’s precise words, but only the memory of them through a number of different writers.

  2. This is Ludwig Wittgenstein’s statement in the preface to Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922), that “what can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.” But this translation does not really capture the resonance of the original (“Was sich überhaupt sagen lässt, lässt sic
h klar sagen; und wovon man nicht reden kann, darüber muss man schweigen”).

  3. See Lance St. John Butler, Registering the Difference: Reading Literature Through Register, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999.

  4. Iliad, bk. I, l. 201.

  5. Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, London: Pan Books, 1979, pp. 144–5.

  Part One

  CHAPTER 1: “WE PRAISE THEE, O GOD”: LEPANTO, 1571

  1. Twenty-four feet long by thirteen feet wide.

  2. Cited in Rodgers, Naval Warfare, p. 179.

  3. Although the French were not present, popular emotions in France seem to have been with the forces of the Holy League. In the Protestant states, sentiment likewise seems to have been united with the arms of Catholic Europe.

  4. “Christendom” and “Islam” are both complex terms, which many theorists might (appropriately) term “discourses.” I have certainly used “Christendom” in this way, not just as a term meaning a monolithic Christian society, which never existed after the early days of the faith, but rather to describe cultures derived from a long history of Christian belief. Islam is not exactly a comparator of Christendom in its structures, but we have no single word in English to encompass that discourse either. The phrase Dar ul-Islam has been variously translated as the abode, house, or Domain of Faith, Righteousness, or Peace. The basic point is that for a sincere and committed Muslim all that is good and necessary exists within the world of Islam, while all outside is of a lower order. But what is outside can often be brought inside and rendered good. On these topics see Hentsch, Imagining.

  5. They escaped, by this papal decree, 200 years of purgatory.

  6. The banner, which was long kept as a trophy in Spain, was destroyed by fire in the nineteenth century.

  7. Ali had formerly been second in command to Piali Pasha.

  8. Genesis 4:14. The traditional explanation, that the Arabs descended from Ishmael, the elder son of Abraham, and his concubine Hagar, elided with the legend of Cain, also the elder son and also cast out. For the instability and mutability of these legends of origin, see Freedman, Images, pp. 89–96.

  9. The leader of the poor warriors of the First Crusade, the king of the Tafurs, called Muslims “sons of whores and of the race of Cain”; see Cohn, Pursuit, p. 67. The people of the West, it was believed, were descended from Adam’s third son, Seth, via Noah and his lineage.

  10. See, for example, Christian Augustus Pfaltz von Osteritz, Abominatio desolationis Turcicae, Prague: Carl-Ferdinand Druckerei, 1672, pp. 81–3.

  11. France adopted the alternative approach of seeking alliance with the Ottomans, and Spain also sought an accommodation after 1580.

  12. The paradox and ambiguity between Islam as part of God’s intended plan—to bring his people to self-awareness—and Islam as pure evil was never properly resolved. Many writers embody both attitudes.

  13. Some, like the grand vizier Sokullu, preferred to use diplomatic means.

  14. So called from the three banks of oars on each side.

  15. Increasingly, also in the artillery carried aboard. This proved to be a decisive advantage for the Christian ships in battle. But the guns could only sink or disable an enemy ship. Like infantry ashore, a galley battle usually depended on hand-to-hand fighting.

  16. This numbered about sixty-five soldiers in the Spanish galleys of the 1530s, but this had risen markedly by the 1570s. See Guilmartin, Gunpowder and Galleys, p. 227.

  17. Ibid., p. 221.

  18. This practice was especially common among the Maltese captains.

  19. See Guilmartin, Gunpowder and Galleys, p. 63.

  20. See I. A. A. Thompson, “A Map of Crime in Sixteenth-Century Spain,” EHR second series, XXI, no. 2 (August 1968), pp. 244–67.

  21. Often false “debts” were created to allow them to be kept at the oar.

  22. See Ruth Pike, Penal Servitude in Early Modern Spain, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983.

  23. See Bracewell, Uskoks.

  24. See Guilmartin, Gunpowder and Galleys, p. 99.

  25. This was the case with Ulch Ali, or Kulic (“the Sword”) Ali; a Calabrian kidnapped from his village, he became the Kapudan Pasha after Lepanto.

  26. This was a form of inflammable liquid (like napalm) devised by the Byzantines that would burn even under water. Its exact formula remains unknown to this day.

  27. The first forms were Venetian merchant galleys adapted to carry cannon. Later forms evolved toward becoming longer and broader in beam.

  28. See Guilmartin, Gunpowder and Galleys, p. 234.

  29. Strictly speaking, he lost the use of his arm.

  30. For example, the sixteenth-century French jurist and philosopher Jean Bodin (now best remembered for his writings on political sovereignty) denied that it was a sufficient cause for a just war.

  31. Qur’an, Surah 61:4.

  32. See Renard, Islam, pp. 43–65.

  33. The Patent Number 418 of May 15, 1718, for Puckle’s machine gun, however, shows that it was designed to fire round bullets at Christians and square bullets at Muslims. This was perhaps the last effort at this kind of control on sectarian grounds. See W. H. B. Smith, Small Arms of the World, Harrisburg, PA: Stacpole Publishing Company, 1957, p. 92.

  34. Artillery was used in innovative fashions, as, for example, Mehmed the Conqueror employing siege artillery to destroy the walls of Constantinople, but it was manufactured by renegade Hungarian Christians.

  35. As, notably, at the battle of Dettingen in 1743.

  36. See Stirling-Maxwell, Don John, vol. I, p. 385, citing Don John to Don Garcia de Toledo, September 16, 1571.

  37. Ibid., pp. 384–5.

  38. The 100,000 men included new contingents that arrived in early spring. See Beeching, Galleys, p. 175.

  39. Ibid., p. 176.

  40. However, Suleiman the Lawgiver had allowed the Knights of St. John to evacuate Rhodes after a five-month siege that cost between 50,000 and 100,000 Turkish lives. But on that occasion hostages were exchanged and both parties fulfilled the stipulations of the agreement to the letter.

  41. See Bohnstedt, “The Infidel Scourge,” p. 19. One German Reformation pamphleteer, Veit Dietrich, described the Turks thus: “Of such merciless, wild murdering there is no example in history, not even in that of the pagans, except for the doings of the Scythians and other barbarians at times when they are exceptionally angry. But the Turk does such things all the time, for no other reason than that the devil drives him against the Christians.”

  42. Some sources suggest that he was whipped every day. My account is based on Stirling-Maxwell, who in turn bases his reconstruction on Paolo Paruta, Storia della guerra di Cipro, part of his contemporary Historia Venetiana, published in 1605, and on Nestor Martinengo, taken prisoner at Famagusta, and whose Relazione di tutto il suceso di Famagusta was published in Venice in 1572. All these sources reflect viewpoints acceptable to Venice, but there is no reason to doubt their accuracy. I have not been able to find an Ottoman source that covered these events in any detail. See Stirling-Maxwell, Don John, vol. I, p. 370.

  43. C. D. Cobham (ed.), The Sieges of Nicosia and Famagusta: With a Sketch of the Earlier History of Cyprus, edited from Midgley’s translation of Bishop Graziani’s History of the War of Cyprus (1624), London: St. Vincent’s Press, 1899, p. 17; and The Sieges of Nicosia and Famagusta in Cyprus Related by Uberto Foglietta, trans. Claude Delaval Cobham, London: Waterlow and Sons, 1903.

  44. Flaying was seen to be the ultimate degradation, partly for its cruelty but also for its slow stripping of identity. It was rare among the Ottomans, where other cruel punishments were more common. It was no doubt for the shock effect that Lala Mustafa ordered this frightful form of lingering death. The point of reference here is the story in Ovid’s Metamorphoses of Apollo ordering the flaying of his rival Marsyas. The scene was depicted most graphically by Titian in c. 1575, and also by Raphael, Giulio Romano, Melchior Meier, and in numerous engravings. The h
orror felt at the flaying process was evident in Arthur Golding’s 1567 translation of the Metamorphoses:

  For all his crying ore his earses quite pulled was his skin

  Nought else was he then but one whole wounde. The grisly bloud did spin

  From every part, his sinewes lay discovered to the eye, The quivering veynes without a skin lay beating nakedly. The panting bowels in his bulke ye might have numbred well, and in his brest the shere small strings a man might tell.

  See Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture, London: Routledge, 1995, pp. 186–7. It was noted that Bragadino did not cry out but murmured the words of faith until he fell silent.

  45. See the dispatch from Don John to Philip II, describing the taking of Galera, reprinted as Appendix I in Stirling-Maxwell, Don John, vol. 2, pp. 364–71: “In the place itself the defence was so obstinate that it was necessary to take it house by house and the taking of it lasted from nine in the morning, fighting going on the whole while in the houses, in the streets and on the roofs, the women fighting as well and bravely as their husbands.”

  46. This was Stirling-Maxwell’s conclusion about the battle: “Although in numbers, both of men and vessels, the Sultan’s fleet was superior to the fleet of the league, this superiority was more than counterbalanced by other important advantages possessed by the Christians. The artillery of the West was of greater power and far better served than the ordnance of the East.” See ibid., vol. I, p. 423.