Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam

by Andrew Wheatcroft

  47. My translation from M. Antonio Arroyo, Relación del progresso della armada de la Santa Liga (Milan, 1576), cited ibid., vol. I, p. 410. Maxwell translates Hermanos as “Friends,” but “Brothers” makes better sense.

  48. Putti blowing onto the Christian ships to fill the sails were shown in paintings of Lepanto.

  49. Some of the commanders on the wings had already made the decision for themselves and gave the galleasses a wide berth.

  50. Of the 170 Ottoman galleys captured most were so badly damaged as to be useless. See Stirling-Maxwell, Don John, vol. I, pp. 430–31.

  51. Ibid., p. 407, citing Girolomo Diedo, Lettere di principe, vol. III, p. 266.

  52. See Stirling-Maxwell, Don John, vol. I, p. 427.

  53. Ibid., pp. 445–6.

  54. Fray Josef de Sigüenza, Historia del Orden de San Geronimo (1605), cited ibid., p. 448.

  55. As he wrote to Don John six days later, “I thought I should never have arrived but have been made into relics in Italy and France as a man sent by your Highness.” With a studied impassivity, the king asked nothing about the battle at first. “For the first half hour he did nothing but ask ‘Is my brother certainly well?’ and all sorts of conceivable questions that the case admitted. He then ordered me to relate everything that had happened from the beginning, omitting no single particular, and while I spoke, he three times stopped to ask me for further explanations; and when I had ended, he as often called me back to ask for further explanations; about your Highness’s care for the wounded, and how you gave away your share of the prize money to the soldiers, at which he was not a little moved.” See Rosell, Historia, Appendix xiv, p. 208.

  56. See Christopher Tyerman, The Invention of the Crusades, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998, pp. 101–6.

  57. See Rosell, Historia, p. 208, for the report of Don Lope de Figueroa.

  58. I owe this observation to John Brewer.

  59. Reproduced in Göllner, Turcica, vol. I, p. 234.

  60. This was recalled in an etching of the triumphal entry made in the mid–nineteenth century, now in the Museo de Roma, Gabinetto Comunale delle Stampe.

  61. It had been also, of course, the site of the inconclusive battle of Prevesa in 1538.

  62. The traditional puppet theater of Sicily also enacts these stories.

  63. See Musée de la Corse, Moresca.

  64. Cited in Lewis, Discovery, p. 43.

  65. See Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, Histoire de l’empire Ottoman: Depuis son origine jusqu’à nos jours, trans. J.-J. Hellert, 18 vols., Paris: Bellizard, Barthès, Dufour, 1835–43, vol. 6, p. 434.

  66. As in Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes (1721).

  67. The Dungeons of Algiers, act 3.

  68. Muley Malek was modeled on reality, from a Moroccan prince, Muley Maluco, living in Spain.

  69. Alfred, an Epick Poem, “In Twelve Books,” by Sir Richard Blackmore, London, 1723, bk. I, p. 24.

  70. The last early modern Mediterranean “crusade” was not Lepanto, but this Portuguese expedition that ended in disaster on August 4, 1578, not far from Tangier. See Braudel, Mediterranean, pp. 1178–9, and Hess, Forgotten Frontier, pp. 96–8.

  CHAPTER 2: FIRST CONTACT

  1. In 1575, in his dedication (to Howard of Effingham) of his version of Curio’s Notable Historie of the Saracens, Thomas Newton declared that “this Babylonian Nebuchanezzer and Turkish Pharoeh [are] so near under our noses … Now they are even at our doors and ready to come into our Houses … this raging Beast and bloody Tyrant, the common robber of all the world.” See Coelius Augustinus Curio, A Notable Historie of the Saracens, trans. Thomas Newton, London: n.p., 1575, rep. Amsterdam: Walter J. Johnson Inc., 1977.

  2. The first “Mad Mullah” was the Somali leader Mohammed bin Abdullah Hassan, against whom the British fought from 1899. “Mad Mullah” has now become a common insult.

  3. The tenth-century writer Hamza al-Isfahani listed only five great nations, from China in the East to the Berbers in the West, plus the Byzantines. Cited in Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought, pp. 117–18. There was a Muslim polemic against Christianity, and against Western Christians in particular, but before the late eighteenth century it was not accompanied by any strong curiosity about those whom it attacked. Jacques Waardenburg also notes that while the Muslims had “a lingering curiosity for those non-Muslims outside the dar-ul-islam, there was a near-complete absence of interest in the dhimmis [local Christians and Jews] in Muslim lands.” See Jacques Waardenburg, “Muslim Studies of Other Religions: The Medieval Period,” in van Gelder and de Moor, “The Middle East and Europe,” pp. 10–38.

  4. This was the “persecuting society,” first identified by R. I. Moore, subsequently challenged and modified, but still solid in all its essentials. See Moore, Formation, and Laursen and Nederman, Beyond.

  5. This very quality was condemned by Islam: the term jahillya described the dark ages before Islam brought order and light to the world. But Arab poetry still used the bellicose qualities of the tribe to depict nobility. Robert G. Hoyland notes, “Islam was born among town dwellers and started out with a town dweller’s stereotyped view of nomads … In early Islamic literature nomadic Arabs were often represented as uncouth. All this was soon to change, however, and they would become characterised as ‘the root of the Arabs and a reinforcement for Islam.’ ” See Arabia and the Arabs: From the Bronze Age to the Coming of Islam, London and New York: Routledge, 2001, pp. 243–7. Hoyland’s earlier book, Seeing Islam…, contains a very extensive range of negative statements on early Islam, but also establishes there was not a completely uniform response. However, he notes (pp. 24–5): “In Greek writings the Muslims were never anything but the enemies of God … the image that an average Byzantine had of the Arabs was conditioned by more than a millennium of prejudice … And their Biblical ancestry, as descendents of the slave woman Hagar, tarnished them religiously as ‘the most despised and insignificant of the peoples of the earth.’ ” (This scornful condemnation is contained on the Syriac Chronicle of 1234, based on an eighth-century source.)

  6. For example, at Duma in 634. See Glubb, Conquests, p. 132.

  7. Mark Whittrow has pointed to multiple problems with the sources for the first Islamic conquests. See Whittrow, Making, pp. 82–9.

  8. Cited in Gil, History, p. 41.

  9. Ibid., pp. 38–9.

  10. See Gibbon, Decline and Fall, vol. 5, p. 422. Gibbon uses the often fanciful chronicle of Al Wakidi, and Ockley’s History of the Saracens. But although the details are embellished the essence of the battle seems plausible.

  11. See Gil, History, pp. 42–4.

  12. This was the pass that Alexander the Great and his armies had traversed.

  13. Gil, History, p. 170, asserts the contrary: “One should not assume that the Moslems were in a majority during this period.” However, his Muslims are peninsular Arabs, “tribes who derived their income from taxes from the subdued population,” and so converts do not figure.

  14. See Zernov, Eastern Christendom, p. 84.

  15. This had been miraculously rediscovered by the emperor Constantine’s mother, St. Helena.

  16. Cited in Glubb, Conquests, p. 183.

  17. Matthew 24:15–24.

  18. See Constantelos, “Moslem Conquests,” p. 325.

  19. Cited in Christades, “Arabs,” p. 316.

  20. These monstrous creatures were first described by Pliny the Elder in his Historia naturalis, completed in A.D. 77. See Moser, Ancestral Images, pp. 36–7. See also C. Meredith Jones, “The Conventional Saracen of the Songs of Geste,” Speculum 17 (1942), pp. 201–25.

  21. See Sahas, John of Damascus.

  22. De fide orthodoxa, IV, 11; cited in Khoury, Polémique, p. 11. John’s father had been among those who formally surrendered Damascus to the Muslims.

  23. See Jane I. Smith, “Islam and Christendom: Historical, Cultural and Religious Interaction from the Seventh to the Fifteenth Centuries,” in The Oxford History of Islam, ed. John L. Esposito,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 322. She observes: “Scholastic writings coming out of the eastern part of the empire in the ninth and tenth centuries, especially from Byzantium, tended to be contemptuous and even abusive of the Prophet. In general this polemic was apocalyptic (prophesying the end of the Arabs) and highly uncharitable. The work produced in Spain … provided the first attempt at a comprehensive view of the religion of the Saracens, despite its predilection to see Islam as a preparation for the final appearance of the Antichrist.”

  24. See Khoury, Polémique, pp. 360–61.

  25. See Sherrard, Constantinople, pp. 8–9.

  26. Cited in W. R. Lethaby and Harold Swainson, Sancta Sophia Constantinople: A Study of Byzantine Building, London: Macmillan & Co., 1894.

  27. Revelation 21:2–3.

  28. However, it was difficult to use effectively, except in limited defensive situations. For a balanced view, see Whittrow, Making, pp. 124–5.

  29. See Gibbon, Decline and Fall, vol. 6, p. 8: “The winter proved uncommonly rigorous. Above an hundred days the ground was covered with deep snow, and the natives of the sultry climes of Egypt and Arabia lay torpid and almost lifeless in their frozen camp.”

  30. Theodosius Grammatikos, in Spyridonos Lambros, “Le deuxième siège de Constantinople par les Arabes et Théodosius Grammatikos,” Historika Meletemata, Athens, 1884, pp. 129–32, cited in Ducellier, Chrétiens, p. 133.

  31. See Brubaker, Vision, pp. 19–58.

  32. Zernov, Eastern Christendom, p. 86.

  33. See Rotter, Abendland und Sarazenen, pp. 68–9, and Tolan, Saracens, passim.

  34. See History of Heraclius, cited in Ducellier, Chrétiens, p. 28. The best translation is The “Amenian History” Attributed to Sebeos, trans. Robert Thomson, 2 vols., Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.

  35. Revelation 4:7–8.

  36. Ducellier, Chrétiens, p. 28.

  37. Revelation 6:1–17.

  38. In fact, Sebeos’s attitude, although hostile, shifted in register between a historical narrative and making an apocalyptic connection. Thus in chapter 30 of his History he begins by saying, “I shall discuss the [line of the] son of Abraham: not the one [born] of a free [woman], but the one born of a serving maid, about whom the quotation from Scripture was fully and truthfully fulfilled, ‘His hands will be at everyone, and everyone will have their hands at him’ [Genesis 16:12].”

  39. Ibid., chapter 38.

  40. See Michael McCormick, “Diplomacy and the Carolingian Encounter with Byzantium Down to the Accession of Charles the Bald,” in B. McGinn and W. Otten (eds.), Eriugena: East and West, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994. However, the outcome of these connections can be seen in the cluster of chronicles concerning the seventh century of Spain: the Chronicle of 754, the Continuatio Byzantia Arabica or Chronicle of 741, and a lost Historia Arabica. The historiographical connections between them and their relative importance is contested, but it is clear that Christians in Spain were fully aware of events in the eastern Mediterranean during the conquest after 634, and related these to the conquest of Spain. For a good discussion of these issues see Collins, Arab Conquest, pp. 52–65. Dubler, “Sobre la crónica,” is suggestive of a wider range of connections.

  41. Alcuin, Opera, in J. P. Migne, Patrologiae series Latina, Paris: Migne, 1863, vol. 100, letter 164.

  42. This becomes how Lacan in Ecrits described the manner in which concepts and ideas adhere. Jacques Derrida also noted the complexity of these attachments and the way in which the accretions (and their interpretation) grew over time: “The dissimulation of the woven texture [of a text] can in any case take centuries to undo its web: a web that envelops a web, undoing the web for centuries; reconstituting it too as an organism, indefinitely regenerating its own tissue behind the cutting trace, the decision of each reading”; Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson, London: Athlone Press, 1981/1993, p. 63. See also Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: Norton, 1977. I found Lacan extraordinarily difficult to understand, even in translation, although the original French edition (Editions du Seuil, 1966) was a useful point of cross-reference. However, some of the papers in Mark Bracher and Ellie Ragland-Sullivan (eds.), Lacan and the Subject of Language (London: Routledge, 1991), proved helpful.

  43. On Saussure and Lacan, see Martin Francis Murray, “Saussure, Lacan and the Limits of Language,” University of Sussex Ph.D. dissertation, 1995. On Lacan’s approach, see Nancy and Lacoue-Lebarthe, The Title.

  44. Cited in Bat Ye’or, Decline, p. 419, Blunt to Bulwer, July 14, 1860.

  45. See Qustandi Shomali, “Church of the Nativity: History and Structure,” www.unesco.org/archi2000/pdf/shomali.pdf.

  46. There is also a Muslim story of desecration, with the Crusaders stabling their horses in the Al-Aqsa mosque after the capture of Jerusalem in 1099. Are the two stories connected or reciprocal?

  47. Mary Eliza Rogers, Domestic Life in Palestine (1862), London: Kegan Paul International, 1989, pp. 41–2.

  48. Matthew 7:14. “Gate” and “door” are synonymous. See also Luke 13:23–4: “Then said one unto him, ‘Lord, are there few that be saved?’ And he said unto them, ‘Strive to enter in at the strait gate: for many, I say unto you, will seek to enter in and will not be able.’ ”

  49. Lacan said, “Doubling a noun through a mere juxtaposition of two terms … a surprise is produced by the unexpected precipitation of an unexpected meaning: the image of twin doors symbolizing, with the solitary confinement offered Western man for the satisfaction of his natural needs away from home, the imperative which he seems to share with the great majority of primitive communities by which his public life is subjected to the laws of urinary segregation.” See Jacques Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud,” Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: Norton, 1977, p. 151.

  50. Dr. Dane Kusic suggests an essential difference between the fundamental paradigms of Christendom and Islam: “Rather than functioning in a way of Western dichotomies and strict definitions of mutually exclusive antipodes, Muslim religious and other terminologies often function in a way of synecdoches, where pars pro toto can be supplanted by the totum pro parte and vice versa.” He has developed his model in part from Pierre Bourdieu’s outline of the multiple and overlapping uses of the Kabyle home in Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge Studies in Social Anthropology 16, trans. Richard Nice, London: Cambridge University Press, 1977, pp. 96 sqq. See Dane Kusic, “Discourse on Three Teravih Namazi-s in Istanbul: An Invitation to Reflexive Ethnomusicology,” chapter 7, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Maryland, 1996, http://research.umbc.edu/~dkusic1/chapter7.html.

  Part Two

  CHAPTER 3: AL-ANDALUS

  1. In his Handbook for Travellers in Spain (1845), reprinted in Richard Ford, Granada: Escritos con dibujos inéditos del autor, Granada: Patronato de la Alhambra, 1955.

  2. But he also recognized the essence of the unforgiving terrain: “But where Spaine has water and Valleis there she is extraordinarily fruitfull”; James Howell, Instructions for Foreign Travell, 1650.

  3. Cited in Glubb, Conquests, p. 355.

  4. See W. Montgomery Watt and Pierre Cachia, A History of Islamic Spain, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996, pp. 9–10, on the alternative possibilities of expansion.

  5. The Christian Mozarabic Chronicle and the Continuationes Byzantia-Arabica date from a few decades after the conquest. The first Arabic sources are later. See Collins, Arab Conquest, pp. 710–97. Ron Barkai makes the valid point that Byzantia-Arabica is less negative toward the Muslims in its language, and many of the more positive passages do not appear or have been altered in the Mozarabic Chronicle. See Barkai, Cristianos y Musulmanes, pp. 24–5.

  6. Tarif gave his name to the first Muslim town in Spain, built close to the former Roman citadel of Julia Traduce.

  7. See the Continuatio Isidoriana Hispania ad annum 754, commonly called the Mozarabic C
hronicle, trans. Colin Smith, in Smith, Christians, vol. I, pp. 12–13. This chronicle is the first version of the story.

  8. See the Chronicle of Alfonso III of the Asturias, written in 883: “Because they had abandoned the Lord, and had not served him in righteousness and truth, they were abandoned by the Lord and were not allowed to dwell in the promised land [terram desideratam]”; ibid., pp. 24–9.

  9. See the Historia pseudo-Isidoriana; ibid., pp. 14–16. This twelfth-century text introduced the trope of illicit sexuality into the foundation myth of Spain. In the Mozarabic Chronicle (754), the moral flaw of the king (Roderick) was that he “violently usurped” the crown; ibid., pp. 10–11.

  10. The two connected in a confused and uncertain fashion in what, since Julia Kristeva, we have called “intertextuality.” My suggestion here is that Roderick’s story is depicted, by a succession of clerical authors, in markedly Davidic terms.

  11. The Estoria de España was written in the last quarter of the thirteenth century, when this mythic description of the conquest reached an extraordinary efflorescence. Moreover, this was written not in scholar’s Latin but in Romance (Castilian). See Smith, Christians, vol. I, pp. 21–2.

  12. Ibid.

  13. Américo Castro recognized the significance of these stories: “Because Castile for centuries bore the brunt of the struggle against a people judged to be lascivious, a people that spoke of love and orgies in their literature, she imagined that violation of a maiden and the polygamy of the clergy were the determinants of a triumphant Saracen invasion.” See Castro, Structure, p. 328.

  14. This image of Muslim lust became paradigmatic. Thus Juan Manuel in the Libro de los estados noted, “Long after Christ was crucified there arose a certain false man named Muhammad … As part of his teaching he offered them wholesale indulgences in order that they could gratify their whims lustfully and to an altogether unreasonable extent.” Cited in Smith, Christians, vol. 2, pp. 94–5.