For Lust of Knowing

by Robert Irwin

  The most popular account of the marvels of Asia was provided in 1356 or 1357 by an author who called himself Sir John Mandeville. Mandeville presented his work as a reliable guide to pilgrims going to the Holy Land and claimed that he wrote it to satisfy the intellectual curiosity of those who wished to go on pilgrimage, but who could not because of a papal ban then in force. In fact, his book ranges much more widely throughout the lands of Asia and is largely a compilation of entertaining marvels including the vegetable lamb, the fountain of youth and anthills of gold dust. Whether there really was an English knight called Sir John Mandeville is debatable and, indeed, the issue is still being debated. (M. C. Seymour conjectured that the book may have been written by a French clergyman.) The important thing about the author, whoever he was, is that he had many readers over a long period of time and approximately three hundred manuscripts of his work in various languages survive from the medieval period.64

  Although his account of the marvels of the East is full of the most amazing nonsense, there is no reason to believe that his readership was seriously misled by his fabrications. Mandeville wrote to entertain and his audience read to be entertained. This was an age when travel writers were not required to stick rigorously to the facts. Other travel writers, such as Marco Polo and Ludovico Varthema, produced travel narratives that, though they were less richly fantastical than Mandeville’s, still had plenty of fantasy in them. Indeed, Mandeville, who probably never set foot in Asia and who drew instead on the libraries of Europe, was merely recycling older travellers’ tales. He claimed in his prologue to have fought for the Mamluk Sultan of Egypt in his wars against the Bedouins and he claimed to have enjoyed a high status with the Sultan. Although this was not the case and although much of Mandeville was wild fantasy, the information on the Middle East was relatively accurate.

  He described an audience that he pretended to have had with the Sultan. The Sultan spoke first: ‘He asked how Christians governed themselves in our countries. And I said, “Lord, well enough – thanks be to God.” And he answered and said, “Truly no. It is not so. For your priests do not serve God properly by righteous living, as they should do. For they ought to give less learned men an example of how to live well and they do the opposite, giving examples of all manner of wickedness. And as a result, on holy days, when people should go to church to serve God, they go to the tavern and spend all the day – and perhaps all the night – in drinking and gluttony, like beasts without reason which do not know when they have had enough. And afterwards through drunkenness they fall to proud speeches, fighting and quarrelling, till someone kills somebody. Christian men commonly deceive one another, and swear the most important oaths falsely…”’65 More follows in the same vein, as Mandeville uses the Sultan as his homiletic mouthpiece to denounce Christian pride, extravagant dressing, lechery, covetousness and so forth.

  By contrast, the Muslims are described by Mandeville as ‘very devout and honest in their law, keeping well the commandments of the Koran, which God sent them by his messenger Muhammad, to whom, so they say, the angel Gabriel spoke often, telling him the will of God’. Mandeville subscribed to the old idea that the Christians had lost their lands in the East to the Muslims as a punishment for sin. Mandeville’s praise of Muslim virtues in order to instil a sense of shame in his Christian readers followed earlier exercises in the same vein by Ricoldo da Monte Croce and others. More specifically, Mandeville’s dialogue seems to have been modelled on a similar reported conversation that was alleged to have taken place between Canon William of Utrecht and a Saracen nobleman, after Saladin’s capture of Jerusalem, as reported in the thirteenth-century Dialogus Miraculorum of Caesarius of Heisterbach.66 For his account of Muslim doctrine and practice, Mandeville again drew heavily on William of Tripoli’s Tractatus de Statu Saracenorum (c. 1273) and Vincent of Beauvais’s thirteenth-century encyclopedia, the Speculum Historiale.67 Like William of Tripoli, Mandeville stressed how much Islam had in common with Christianity and he professed optimism that the Muslims might be converted to Christianity. Even so, it is important to note that Mandeville was not exclusively concerned with Muslim matters and, if anything, he was even more interested in the doctrines and affairs of the Eastern Christians.

  Although Mandeville presented a fairly favourable account of the Muslims of his own time, his account of the origins of Islam was marred by the customary nonsense about Muhammad’s dealings with hermits and his fits of epilepsy passed off as visits from Gabriel. He also presented an array of what purported to be Arabic letters, as well as a specimen Arabic vocabulary, though it is clear that Mandeville knew no Arabic and the supposed Arabic letters are no such thing. On the other hand his account of the Holy Land is fairly reliable, if only because it plagiarized earlier, more sober narratives of pilgrimage, in particular the Itinerarium of Wilhelm von Bodensele (c. 1336). Mandeville followed the convention of pilgrim literature by calling for holy war, but he suggested that it had to be fought by holy men.

  For reasons that are not clear, Ziauddin Sardar has referred to Mandeville as ‘the doyen and model of all travel writers, patron and archetype of all Orientalists’.68 But this would be to confer on Mandeville a serious, academic status that the writer did not aspire to. As we have seen, he neither travelled, nor did he know any Arabic. Samuel Johnson more appropriately praised Mandeville for ‘force of thought and beauty of expression’ and Mary B. Campbell has argued that one should regard him as the first serious writer of prose fiction since Petronius.69 In the long run, as we shall see, Mandeville’s celebratory enthusiasm for Asia’s marvels would find its echo in the writings of Europe’s first great Orientalist, Guillaume Postel (a scholar who did travel and who knew Arabic very well). Moreover, Mandeville’s enthusiastic cataloguing of exotic marvels would find a further echo in another mode, in the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century cabinets of curiosities, in those collections of rare artefacts, antiquities and taxidermically faked monsters.

  This has been a chapter about medieval European studies of Islam and polemics against it and, therefore, Islam and all sorts of Muslim matters have been at the centre of it. However, more generally, Islam did not feature largely in medieval European thought. It played, at best, a minor role in forming the self-image of Christendom. Moreover, we find no sense in medieval European writing that the Middle East was technologically, economically or militarily backward and there were some, like Adelard of Bath, who recognized that Arab culture was in some respects more advanced. The Arabs and Turks were not regarded as barbarians, nor were they consciously regarded as non-European, for there was little or no sense of any kind of European identity in this period. Clearly, a great deal of misinformation about Islam circulated throughout medieval Christendom. Equally obviously, this was because those who touched on Islamic matters did not trouble to get their facts right and polemical fantasy better answered their needs. Getting things right was what the Orientalists did from the sixteenth century onwards.

  3

  Renaissance Orientalism

  THE FLIGHT FROM ARAB LEARNING

  The word ‘Renaissance’ is likely to conjure up associations with new inventions, explorations of uncharted territories, freethinking, breaking away from old artistic conventions, freshness, cultural springtime and so on. But the European Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was above all inspired and driven by the close textual study of old manuscripts, for the Renaissance, or ‘rebirth’, was essentially a rediscovery of the literature of antiquity and its humanist culture. In the context of the Renaissance, humanism meant the return to classical sources and the application of techniques of textual criticism to those sources, as well as the adoption of classical models for behaviour. As humanist scholars sought to recover the original texts of such writers as Thucydides, Herodotus, Cicero and Juvenal and to model their own style upon classical masters, there was a corresponding decline in interest in Arabic. The Arabs were now often denounced for having perverted the sense or style of the classical tex
ts they transmitted and, indeed, additional problems had frequently arisen because the Arabic translations themselves had then been badly translated into Latin.1 Already, in the thirteenth century, the Franciscan philosopher Roger Bacon had expressed his contempt for the hacks who translated from Arabic into Latin, but who ‘understand neither the subject matter, nor the languages – not even Latin’.2 Moreover, as more scholars acquired direct access to Greek texts, it was coming to be realized how misleading the Arabic versions of Greek originals could be. The style-conscious humanist despised the painfully conscientious medieval word-for-word cribtranslations and the former enthusiasm for Arabic (in, admittedly, restricted scholarly circles) now often shaded into outright hostility.

  The Italian poet and humanist scholar Francesco Petrarch (1304–74) was an early and articulate critic of Arabic texts and culture. He loathed Arabscience. In a letter to a medical friend, he faintly praised but mostly damned Arab medicine and literature: ‘Nobody has such winning ways; nobody also is more tender and more lacking in vigour, and, to use the right words, meaner and more perverted. The minds of men are inclined to act differently; but as you used to say, every man radiates his own peculiar mental discipline. To sum up: I will not be persuaded that any good can come from Arabia…’3 Petrarch strove to write flawless Ciceronian Latin and, steeped in Latinity and Latin canons of what constituted good verse, he was confident in his condemnation of the literature of the Arabs and especially their poetry (though there is no evidence that he had actually bothered to read any). Petrarch, a stern Christian moralist who had made a close study of the writings of St Augustine, was also hostile to Averroism, for, among other pernicious notions, the Averroist idea of the double truth and the doctrine of the eternity of the world seemed to threaten the Christian faith. He cherished his Latinate culture as a shield against sin. In a letter to Boccaccio, he described being visited by an Averroist, who ‘belonged to that sect of men who practise philosophy after the modern fashion and think they are not efficient enough if they do not bark at Christ and His heavenly doctrine’.4 The visitor infuriated Petrarch by proclaiming the superiority of the writings of Averroes to those of St Paul and St Augustine. Petrarch went on to urge another friend, Luigi Marsili, to write ‘contra canem illum rabidum Averroim’ (against that rabid dog Averroes).5

  Averroes was not the only target of Petrarch and those who thought like him. They were more generally hostile to late medieval scholasticism and its heavy, uncritical dependence on Aristotle. Petrarch declared that Aristotle’s ‘brilliance has stunned many bleary and weak eyes and made many a man fall into the ditches of error’.6 In the previous century, the Oxford philosopher Roger Bacon, shocked by the appalling quality of the Latin translations of Aristotle’s works, declared that, if he could, he would have had them all burned.7 The great Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla (1405–57) attacked Avicenna and Averroes for their blind reverence towards Aristotle.8 ‘Arabism’ became a pejorative term, as Arabic became associated fairly narrowly with Averroism and outmoded scholastic ways of thought.

  Petrarch, having failed to learn Greek, exalted Latin writers against Greek ones. However, those who did know Greek very well were just as likely to be hostile to reliance on Arabic translations and commentaries. For a while, ‘Arabist’ came to mean someone who was not familiar with the original Greek, but who relied on a Latin translation of Arabic. Renaissance humanists, no longer content to rely on clumsily written and inaccurately translated Arabic versions of Greek texts, instead hunted for manuscripts of the Greek originals in monastic libraries and elsewhere. Some humanist scholars set out for the Near East to look for manuscripts, copy inscriptions and make records of the classical ruins. The Arabs who lived in the shadows of those ruins were more or less invisible to these scholars. Cyriac of Ancona (1391–1456) travelled through Turkey, Greece and Egypt noting down inscriptions and collecting antiquities. He proclaimed that the goal of archaeology was to ‘wake the dead’, in other words to revive the glorious culture of classical antiquity.9 Bernardo Michelozzi and Bonsignore Bonsignori, who toured the Levant in 1497–8, were primarily looking for Greek and Latin manuscripts, rather than Arabic ones, and Byzantine scholars provided much of what they were looking for.10 Several fifteenth-century manuscript prospectors went off on a doomed quest for the lost books of Livy’s history, preferably in the original Latin, but, failing that, in some Arabic rendering. In truth, there was not so very much classical learning that was preserved only in Arabic and which still awaited translation. Books five, six and seven of Apollonius’s Conics were discovered in an Arabic version in the early seventeenth century and these three supplemented the first four books that had survived in the original Greek. (The Conics, by one of the greatest of Greek mathematicians, Apollonius of Perga, in the third century BC, dealt with the properties of conic sections: circle, ellipse, parabola and hyperbola. The poet and mathematician Umar Khayyam had been familiar with the Conics and elaborated on some of its propositions.)11 But the rediscovery of parts of Apollonius’s work in Arabic was an exceptional case and manuscript hunters quested in vain for such chimeras as an Arabic version of the lost books of Livy.

  Despite the widespread reaction against Arablearning, Averroism still had its champions and the University of Padua, in particular, remained a centre of Averroist studies and of Aristotelian scholarship more generally. The German Nicholas of Cusa (1401–64), who studied at Padua and who was influenced by Paduan Averroism, was a man of broad interests, including research into squaring the circle – an enterprise in which he believed he had succeeded. (Not until 1882 was it proved to be impossible.) He also developed a heliocentric model of the planetary system and he calculated that the end of the world was due in 1734. In 1448he became a cardinal and he played an important part in the negotiations to bring the Greek Orthodox Church into union with Rome. None of this concerns us here. In 1460 Nicholas of Cusa wrote Cribratio Alcoran (‘The Sieving of the Qur’an’) in which he took a critical approach to the text of the Qur’an (or rather the inadequate Latin version that was available to him). He concluded that the Qur’an showed clear signs of having been influenced by Nestorian Christianity. Nestorians hold that the divinity and humanity of Christ were not united in a single self-conscious personality. However, the Jewish role in shaping the Qur’an was even more obvious to him. This influence came in two ways. First, Muhammad was guided by a hypothetical Jewish adviser and, secondly, after Muhammad’s death, other Jews inserted anti-Christian polemic into the text of the Qur’an. Nicholas of Cusa’s thesis can be considered as an early example of the application of critical techniques to the text of the Qur’an, albeit in a primitive and bungled fashion. His speculations about Christian and Jewish influence on the Qur’an would be picked up again in the nineteenth century. He had fastened on what he perceived to be the Christian elements in Islam, not in order to belittle the latter faith, but rather to demonstrate its compatibility with Christianity. If he could succeed in this, then he thought he might persuade the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II to convert to Christianity. Though his views found favour with his friend, Pope Pius II, they found no favour whatsoever with the Ottoman Sultan.12

  HERMETIC WISDOM

  The mystically minded and conciliatory Nicholas of Cusa sought to expound a common spiritual ground on which the Catholics, Greek Orthodox and Hussites could agree with one another and with the Muslims: ‘Religion and the worship of God, in all men endowed with the spirit, are fundamentally, in all the diversity of rites, one and the same.’ The Italian nobleman Pico della Mirandola (1463–94), called ‘the phoenix of his age’, was a more combative character. Pico studied first Hebrew and then Aramaic and Arabic. He was taught by Flavius Mithridates, a Jewish convert to Christianity, and by Elias de Medigo, another Jew, who also introduced Pico to Averroist thought. (Many of the Jews in fifteenth-century Italy had arrived there fleeing from Spanish persecution.) In the last quarter of the fifteenth century Christian cabalism, the Christian reinterpretation of certain es
oteric rabbinic texts, started to become fashionable in intellectual circles in Italy and elsewhere. Pico, one of the founders of this movement, took up the study of Hebrew in order to master cabalism and then use the Cabala to demonstrate the truths of the Christian version of the Bible. He studied the text of the Bible for the hidden meanings that he thought it contained. ‘There is no knowledge which makes us more certain of the divinity of Christ than magic and Cabala.’ He believed in the application of gematria (a cabalistic method of interpreting the Hebrew Scriptures by interchanging words whose letters have the same numerical value when added) in order to tease out the hidden meaning of the biblical text. As the primal language, the one spoken by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the Hebrew language contained magical properties found in none of its successor languages.