The Crusades and the Near East

by Kostick, Conor

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  and corrupted Greek makes his appearance in crusader propaganda in parallel with the textual invention of Muhammad in the west.

  The theme of pollution is especially pronounced in the western vitae. After Machomet had strengthened his rule among his people, he condemned the sacred laws of Christianity and forced his followers to resort to bestiality. After his death, Saracens invaded Christian lands, turned churches into stables and filled sanctuaries with their filthy practices.98 To strengthen their ranks, they even recruited inhuman barbarians, the horrible Agulani.99

  Heresy becomes an acute problem in Christian writings during the twelfth century, with the appearance of several heretical movements in various parts of Catholic Christendom. It was not a crucial theme in crusader chronicles written between 1100 and 1110; by the middle of the century, the situation had altered considerably. When we look at the themes discussed in detail in the western lives of Machomet – false prophecy, denial of sacraments, spiritual laxness and pollution, envy of true believers, moral opportunism, loose sexual morals, perversion –

  it is evident that exactly the same accusations are directed towards sectarians and Saracens alike.100 Furthermore, the four vitae refer to Machomet’s refusal to observe the doctrines of the Church, his resistance against legal and moral authorities, cerebral disease and unprivileged status, all features that Moore includes in his classical definition of a medieval heretic in the Formation of a Persecuting Society.101

  The communities described are attacked by their own members, often bitter clerics, whose ecclesiastical careers have failed and whose following essentially consists of young adults. The primus motor of the ideology in all four lives was not Machomet, but a fellow Christian acting as a mentor of heresy. In Guibert’s account, Islam was the invention of an enraged hermit who wanted to avenge himself, while Embricon portrays an apostate mage using a simpleton as his vessel.

  In this case, the mage takes his revenge through Mammutius after a ploy intended to make him the pontifex of Jerusalem has come to nothing and he has been repudiated by the Christian community. Adelphus tells a similar story, although in his case the hermit has been exiled from Alexandria. Gautier’s version is exceptional, because the hermit seeks to protect Christendom by assisting Machomet.

  The events take place in rural peripheries and in half-mythical cities that are geographically remote from the European heartlands. Ishmael, the ancestor of the Saracen people, was within the Christian tradition conventionally described as a countryman, rusticus homo.102 Although medieval heresies stemmed from both urban and rural networks, the most persistent of them, Catharism, found its major following in the rural communities of southern France. With the intensification of the Cathar question, crusade ideology was gradually extended to include the fight against Christian dissidents, which eventually developed into expansive warfare during the Albigensian crusades (1209–29).

  At the beginning of this chapter, the western lives of Machomet were described as semi-fictive connectives between various crusade-related genres. To be more 149

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  specific, they represent a phase in which crusading was turning inward, towards societies which themselves claimed to be piously Christian. Their adversary is the traditional arch-enemy of the warriors of Christ, but the context transcends the conventional themes treated in crusader chronicles: sacred warfare, blood vengeance for God, and redemptive acts of violence. The travesties of Machomet are intentional crusade propaganda, but they are primarily targeted against erroneous fellow Christians, and were meant to be read as examplae, warning examples about what could happen to a Christian community when a heretic is given free rein.

  The founder of Islam was a logical choice. Western writers had traditionally attributed heresy to alien infection,103 and at the peak of crusading fervour Saracens were regarded as a common threat in the medieval west. They made an ideal target for religious propaganda, because they were safely distanced from people’s everyday lives and appeared in the exotic east, where the impossible could become possible, and from where heretical influences were known to have originated in earlier years. Although non-Christians, they nevertheless mentioned biblical characters in their holy texts, which could be criticized in a manner that any Christian audience would be able to grasp. Finally, they were part of sacred history through Hagar and Ishmael, and this history had traditionally been discussed in the works of Christian theological authorities.

  From the medieval western point of view, Muhammad’s gravest error had been the denial of the hegemony of Christians. Peter the Venerable was especially shocked by the fact that after having studied the tenets of Christianity, which can be seen in reworked biblical quotations in the Koran, Muhammad rejected the Christian faith.104 For Peter, he represented the most successful of the ‘false prophets’ and the western masses had to be warned against diabolical plots, which had led to suppression of the true faith in vast areas.

  The four lives share a view of Machomet as a diabolical trickster, but unlike later treatises, they do not speak of him as antichrist. He is not a giant, not black as a devil, does not wear horns or bark like a dog; there is nothing in the description to relate him to the monstrous races of the chansons de geste. However, because he is indistinguishable from the mass of landless poor, he is even more dangerous, a heretical insider who despoils the flock.

  The eschatological interpretation of history incorporating the beginning of the era of antichrist, the persecution of the pious and the final battle is absent from the western descriptions of Machomet’s life, even Guibert’s account, which is famous for its apocalyptical framing of the First Crusade. Nor is mission among the Saracens discussed. Because heretics had traditionally been associated with antichrist, it would have been possible to interpret the rise of Islam as a sign of antichrist’s coming,105 as is typical of eighth-century Syrian Christian and Byzantine writings. This idea had only very limited impact in the early western lives of Machomet.106 Not that the authors would have been unaware of earlier Christian tradition. The early twelfth-century vitae represent a genre with a genuine basis in the international textual tradition of the Middle Ages. The works of Guibert, Embricon, Gautier and Adelphus include references not only to earlier 150

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  Byzantine and Iberian texts on Islam, but to the Hadith texts on the Prophet through eastern Christian writings. More often than not, their fantastical interpretation was based upon facts, however distorted from the original context. The writers were correct in claiming that Muhammad did not come from the highest circle of society, that he had contacts with Christians, that he married his former employer, and that he gave a sacred law to his followers. The major Islamic sources on Muhammad, the Koran, Hadith, Sira, the sayings attributed to Muhammad prior to the ninth century, as well as the popular stories of his life and miracles,107

  include elements familiar from his parodic western lives. The biography of the Prophet by Ibn Hisham (d. 828/833) mentions Muhammad’s background, the Christian hermit Bahira as the first person to acknowledge Muhammad’s sacred vocation, Muhammad’s marriage to Khadidja, the writing of the Koran, and its main premises. The fundamental difference resides in interpretation, not in the basic content. Although derogatory and offensive, the tradition of the Prophet in western texts would have been recognizable to any Muslim reader.108

  Two of the four parodists, Guibert and Adelphus, viewed Islam as a monotheistic religion.109 The other two did not dispute monotheism, but rather showed Machomet as a man of no inborn religion. It is worth stressing that throughout the crusading era the learned writers were able to depict Saracens as monotheists, as well as to understand Muhammad’s role as the Prophet of Islam correctly. The sub-plots of cows and pigs are similarly relevant. Peculiar as these remarks are, they nevertheless show that their writers had some idea of the special image of the cow110 (the second sura of Koran is called the ‘cow
’s sura’) and the pig111 (not to be eaten because of its filthiness) in Islamic tradition. The four parodies discussed here are by no means idle chit-chat: they did not invent the details, but rather extracted them from the original context and turned them into venomous propaganda.

  Conclusions

  Crusading had a deeply unifying effect on the developing idea of western Christendom. Recording an essentially European phenomenon, crusade sources reflect the inner tides and tensions of western religiosity rather than a genuine clash of civilizations. For the crusading ideology, the existence of an integral Christendom was the crucial aim. This aim was supported by military struggle against non-believers, but whereas campaigning was a useful method for achieving the innermost objective, it could not be an objective in itself.

  What really bothered medieval Christians, in respect to both Jews and Muslims, was the idea that they had deliberately chosen not to be Christians. The ambiguous rabbinical inheritance of Ishmael’s idolatry would never have developed into a mature theory of Saracen heresy in medieval Christian writings had Islam as a religion never emerged. Suspicion principally stemmed from the fact that they had decided to leave the common stock, the stock that should have formed an undivided Christendom. Societal peace could be seriously fractured by 151

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  pogroms, and Jews were to convert by the end of time in any case, according to the Bible and the medieval view, but what was to become of Muslims?

  The idea of adversary rivalism is keenly related to heresy in Christian thought from the early centuries AD onwards. The revival of heretical groups in western Christendom during the twelfth century stimulated written attacks against heterodoxy; renouncing heresy is also the crucial moral convention behind the travesties of Machomet.112 The description of Saracens in twelfth-century western sources has particular, genre-specific forms, but more often than not they are depicted in terms of mirroring and imitation. Whereas the geste portrays them as superficially exotic reflections of the Christian knight, the travesties set them in the framework of familiar heresy. Otherness is based on religion in the source material. Saracens are mentioned by chroniclers as the enemies of Christendom, but their hatred is not directed against an individual Christian, but rather against Christianity as a concept. Conflict ends in conversion.

  The present academic discussion habitually divides treatises into those discussing medieval heresy and those concerning Christian–Muslim relations. Having written this chapter, I am not convinced that the medieval mind would have seen this division as clear-cut. One of the main functions of the western parodies of Machomet’s life was to be a warning against heresy. The authors seem to be afraid not of unknown foreign invaders attacking the Christian heartlands from Khorasan, but of the idea of dissident heretics looming within the religious community. In this sense the Islamic world indeed represents for them a perverse Christendom, a realm which was once truly Christian, but which became corrupted by Machomet, the wicked arch-heretic. The religious zeal of the early crusaders becomes more nuanced if they can be perceived as attacking treasonous ex-Christians rather than non-Christians, about whom no reliable information was available in public. Such notions would also have facilitated the ideological extension of crusading against Catholic heretics by the thirteenth century.

  An important question is how Embricon of Mainz, Guibert of Nogent, Gautier of Compiègne and Adelphus were able to attack the key Islamic doctrines of the Prophet Muhammad: his revelation and prophecy, the transmission of the Koran and the divine law given by Gabriel, his resurrection, as well as his social origin and marriages. Their accusations are not simply a continuation of the timeless vituperation against various enemies – loose morals, perverse sexuality, false doctrine – but specifically based upon Islamic tradition.

  The writing of these historical travesties of Machomet coincided with the preaching of the crusades and the rise of popular heresy, which further boosted their composition. Many researchers, myself among them, have claimed that the great transmontane masses of Europe had no direct connection with Muslims before the First Crusade. This is probably true, but whether medieval westerners had been and remained without reliable sources of information on Islam is another matter. The contents of the four lives of Machomet considered here simply do not support the notion of the absence of historical source material. They polemicize historical events and most often revert them, but the fact is still discernible.

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  Jean Flori has argued that the medieval western audience was genuinely interested in Muslims, whereas Norman Daniel has denied the existence of intercultural inquisitiveness.113 I can agree with both. The fact that imagined Muhammad and his followers occur frequently in a great number of western historical sources from the early twelfth century onward indicates widespread awareness of Islam and the continuing popularity of the subject. These sources are not limited to purely crusade-related topics, but include canon law, historiography, education, diplomacy and so on. At the same time, the western interest was primarily directed inwards, and Muslims continued to be discussed in terms of inclusively Christian terminology. No serious treatise of Islam as an authentic faith was produced in the medieval west.

  We know very little of the reception of the early western lives of Muhammad, and it is impossible to tell whether the audience regarded the texts as entertain-ment, moral tales, the historical truth, a mixture of all these, or something else.

  The key message – the preference for one faith and an integral and uniform Christian Church – was believed and commonly accepted.

  Notes

  1 The historical person is hereafter referred to as ‘Muhammad’, whereas the fictional character, discussed here in medieval western context, will be described according to the texts under discussion, most often as ‘Machomet’.

  2 With the exception of Chanson de Roland, which survives in a late eleventh- or early tweflth-century version. Among the works discussed, La Chanson d’Antioche and Les Chétifs of the early Crusade Cycle survive in Graindor of Douai’s reworked edition from the 1180s. La Chanson d’Antioche, Suzanne Duparc-Quioc (ed.), Documents relatifs a l’histoire des croisades, 2, Paris: L’Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, 1976–8; Les Chétifs, G.M. Myers (ed.), The Old French Crusade Cycle 5, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1981.

  3 John Tolan, Saracens, New York: Columbia University Press, 2002, p. 171.

  4 Ademar of Chabannes, Chronicon, Pascale Bourgain et al. (eds), CCCM 129, Turnhout: Brepols, 1999, III.49, p. 170.

  5 Tolan, Saracens, p. xix; Dana Munro, ‘The Western Attitude towards Islam during the Period of the Crusades’, Speculum 6, 1931, 329–43; Bernard Lewis, The Muslim Discovery of Europe (2nd edn), London: Phoenix, 2000 [1982], p. 91; Sini Kangas,

  ‘Militia Christi Meets the Prince of Babylon: The Crusader Conception of Encountering the Enemy’, in Outi Merisalo and Päivi Pahta (eds), Frontiers in the Middle Ages, Proceedings of the 3rd Medieval Congress, Jyväskylä, 10–14 June 2003, Louvain-la-Neuve: Fédération Internationale des Instituts d’Études Médiévales, 2006, pp. 107–20.

  6 For instance, in the ninth century the monastery of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris purchased relics of three so-called Cordoban martyrs. These saints had been executed between 850 and 859 for publicly renouncing the tenets of Islam, and seem to have been venerated outside Spain relatively early. Tolan, Saracens, p. 100.

  7 GN 94.

  8 Alain of Lille, De fide Catholica contra haereticos sui temporis, praesertim Albigenses, PL

  210, Col. 0421B, Lib. 4. Cap. 1: ‘Contra paganos seu Mahometanos. Nunc contra Mahometi, discipulos styli vestigium vertamus. Cujus Mahometi monstruosa vita, monstruosior secta, monstruosissimus finis, in gestis ejus manifeste reperitur; qui 153

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  maligno spiritu inspiratus, sectam abominabilem invenit, carnalibus voluptatibus consonam; et ideo, multi carnales ejus secta illecti, et pe
r errorum varia principia dejecti, miserabiliter perierunt, et pereunt; quos communi, vulgo, vocabulo, Saracenos vel paganos nuncupant.’

  9 See, e.g., GF 20, 49, listing Saracens along with Turks, Arabs, Persians, Paulicians, Agulans, Azymites and Kurds.

  10 For the etymology of Muslim (Mussulman/musulman) and Islam, see the Oxford English Dictionary, http://dictionary.oed.com/entrance.dtl; Trésor de la Langue Française informatisé, http://atilf.atilf.fr/tlf.htm, accessed 30 December 2008.

  11 Among these, the major work was the so-called Cluniac collection commissioned by Peter the Venerable (c. 1092/1094–1156), and completed by 1143. The collection included the first Latin translation of the Koran by Robert Ketton.

  12 GN; Embricon de Mayence, Vita Mahumeti, Guy Cambier (ed.), Collection Latomus 52, Brussels: Latomus, Revue d’études Latines, 1962; Gautier of Compiègne, Otia de Machomete, R.B.C. Huygens (ed.), in Alexandre du Pont, Roman de Mahomet, Y.G.

  Lepage (ed.), Paris: Kliensieck, 1977, pp. 96–208; Adelphus, Vita Machometi as Ein Leben Mohammeds (Adelphus?), Bernhard Bischoff (ed.), Anecdota novissima. Texte des vierten bis sechzehnten Jahrhunderts, Quellen und Untersuchungen zur Lateinischen Philologie des Mittelalters 7, Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann Verlag, 1984, pp. 106–22.

  13 Lepage has claimed that Alexandre du Pont’s Roman de Mahon from 1258 is a translation of Gautier’s Latin original, which could indicate the continued circulation and repute of the text in medieval France. Lepage, Roman de Mahomet, p. 15.

  14 Sini Kangas, ‘The Genesis of a Crusade Chronicle in the Early Twelfth Century’, in Marko Lamberg, Jesse Keskiaho, Elina Räsänen and Olga Timofeeva (eds), Methods and the Medievalist: Current Approaches in Medieval Studies, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008, pp. 103–22.