_ WESTERN VIEWS

OF ISLAM
IN THE MIDDLE AGES
safest

R. W. Southern

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS |

© Copyright 1962 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved

Third Printing 1980

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 62-13270

ISBN 0-674-95055-0 (cloth)
ISBN 0-674-95065-8 (paper)
Printed in the United States of America
 TO
RICHARD HUNT
BLANK PAGE
 PREFACE
se ales ake ae

T HE invitation to give three lectures at Harvard in April

| of this year encouraged me to put into shape some
thoughts on the problem of Islam as it was viewed in
western Europe in the Middle Ages. I seized the opportunity
with eagerness, and I owe a debt of gratitude to the History
Department, and especially to Professor Robert L. Wolff,
both for the invitation and for many other kindnesses. I
have received much assistance from Islamic students in
Oxford, especially from Dr. R. R. Walzer and Dr. S. M.
Stern; and I should not have ventured on such a vast and
confusing subject if a great deal of it had not recently been
charted by Dr. N. Daniel in his learned volume Islam and
the West: The Making of an Image. I do not pretend to
emulate the learning of these scholars on Islamic matters;
but I have tried to set Islam against the changing Western
scene throughout the Middle Ages, and to revive the hopes
and fears which it inspired. The experience is not irrelevant
to us today.
R. W. S.
Oxford, 5 May 1961
NOTE TO THE SECOND PRINTING
In this reprinting I have taken the opportunity to cor-
rect a few errors and ambiguities in the text and to add at
the end references to recent works on some of the major
topics discussed in these pages.
Oxford
5 January 1978 R. W. S.
 CONTENTS
sk sk ake fea

I. THE AGE OF IGNORANCE 1

Il THE CENTURY
OF REASON AND HOPE 94
Il. THE MOMENT OF VISION 67
INDEX III
BLANK PAGE
 WESTERN VIEWS
OF ISLAM
IN THE MIDDLE AGES
BLANK PAGE
 I

THE AGE OF IGNORANCE

ae afe afe af afe afc afe afc afc afc afc af afe fe afe ake afc afc afc ae afe af

[= subject I have chosen deserves our attention, I think,

for several reasons. In the first place, we have reached
a point in the study of medieval history at which it is
very important that attention should be directed to com-
munities outside western Europe, and especially to those
that exercised an influence on the development of the West.
This, of course, is not a new idea. But it is one that has to :
struggle not only against great intrinsic difficulties but also
against the conservatism of established academic routine.
So far as Islam is concerned, it is only in quite recent years
that its relations with medieval Christendom have been
the subject of serious study. It is true that over a hundred
years ago the French scholar Ernest Renan showed the
way in one of the most perceptive and original works
produced by the new historical movement of his day—I
mean his volume on Averroes and Averroism.’ But his
example was not followed. The great historians of the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries devoted
*E, Renan, Averroés et l’Averroisme, 1852.
2 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM ,
themselves primarily to the social, legal, and political
growth of European countries, and it was not until the
years between the two World Wars that a serious effort
was made to understand the contribution of Islam to the
development of Western thought, and the effect on West-
ern society of the neighborhood of Islam.” Since that time,
and especially since 1945, the work has gone vigorously
forward, and it may be useful to take a general view of the
whole field as it now stands revealed. It will soon become
apparent that there are still many dark corners and some
subjects which have scarcely yet been touched, though it
may well be that some of this darkness is due to my own
ignorance and not to the imperfect state of scholarship.
There is a second reason, and a less academic one, for
directing our attention to this subject at this moment. The
greatest practical problem of our time is the problem of
the juxtaposition of incompatible and largely hostile sys-
tems of thought, morals, and belief embodied in political
powers of impressive, not to say awe-inspiring, size. We
sometimes talk as if this were a new problem, and certainly
it is new to the modern world. The Western sense of
superiority in every sphere of endeavor has scarcely been
challenged for three hundred years. It has become part
of our heritage, most painful to abandon or adjust. But
western Europe went through all this painful experience
*I may mention especially U. Monneret de Villard, Lo studio dell’
Islam in Europa nel XII e nel XIII secola (Studi e Testi, 110), 1944;
G. Théry, Toléde, grande ville de la Renaissance médiévale, 1944; D.
Cabanelas Rodriguez, Juan de Segovia y el problema islamica, 1952; N.
Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image, 1960. The last of
these works contains a full bibliography.
 THE AGE OF IGNORANCE 3
more than a thousand years ago, and lived with it as a more
or less permanent challenge to its complacency throughout
the Middle Ages. The existence of Islam was the most far-
reaching problem in medieval Christendom. It was a prob-
lem at every level of experience. As a practical problem it
called for action and for discrimination between the com-
peting possibilities of Crusade, conversion, coexistence, and
commercial interchange. As a theological problem it called
persistently for some answer to the mystery of its existence:
what was its providential role in history—was it a symptom
of the world’s last days or a stage in the Christian de-
velopment; a heresy, a schism, or a new religion; a work of
man or devil; an obscene parody of Christianity, or a system
of thought that deserved to be treated with respect? It was
dificult to decide among these possibilities. But before de-
ciding it was necessary to know the facts, and these were
not easy to know. So there arose an historical problem that
could not be solved, could scarcely be approached, without
linguistic and literary knowledge difficult to acquire, and
made more difficult by secrecy, prejudice, and the strong
desire not to know for fear of contamination.
In a word, medieval scholars and men of affairs came up
against all the problems with which, in a different context,
we are familiar. They asked many of the same questions
that we ask, and we may learn something from their
failures. The one thing we cannot expect to find in the
Middle Ages is that spirit of detached and academic or
humane inquiry which has characterized much of the in-
quiry about Islam of the last hundred years, whether in the ,
heroic journeys of Doughty or the impassioned prose of
 4 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
Carlyle. This spirit of detachment was a product of superior-
ity and of the conviction that there was nothing to fear.
Hence an easy sympathy and regard. For the medieval
observer there was too much at stake to permit this indul-
gence. | am reminded of a passage in the life of Dr.
Johnson, in which a Mr. Murray praised the ancient philos-
ophers for the candor and good humor of their philo-
sophical differences, and Dr. Johnson retorted:
Sir, they disputed with good humour, because they were not
earnest as to religion .. . when a man has nothing to lose, he
may be in good humour with his opponent. . . . Being angry
with one who controverts an opinion which you value is a
necessary consequence of the uneasiness which you feel. Every
man who attacks my belief diminishes in some degree my con-
fidence in it, and therefore makes me uneasy; and I am angry
with him who makes me uneasy.®
Dr. Johnson always responded with sympathy to the
primitive emotions of mankind, and he accurately ex-
presses the temper of the medieval dispute. The existence
of Islam made the West profoundly uneasy. On the practical
plane it caused permanent unease, not only because it was
a danger but because the danger was unpredictable and
immeasurable: the West had no access to the counsels or
motives of Islam. But this incalculable factor was only an
indication of a deeper incomprehension of the nature of
the thing itself.
In understanding Islam, the West could get no help from
antiquity, and no comfort from the present. For an age
*J. Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill and L. F. Powell,
1934-1940, III, ro—11.
 THE AGE OF IGNORANCE 5
avowedly dependent on the past for its materials, this was a
serious matter. Intellectually the nearest parallel to the
position of Islam was the position of the Jews. They shared
many of the same tenets and brought forward many of the
same objections to Christianity. But Christian thinkers had
at their disposal an embarrassing wealth of material for
answering the Jewish case; and the economic and social
inferiority of the Jews encouraged the view that their case
could be treated with disdain. Nothing is easier than to
brush aside the arguments of the socially unsuccessful, and
‘we can see this verified in the melancholy history of the
Jewish controversy in the Middle Ages. The same mixture
of social superiority and a long tradition of authoritative
refutation was responsible for the confidence with which
the medieval Church faced the many heresies which arose
in Europe from the eleventh century onwards. Even the
Greek schism could be pressed into this mold: worldly
decline and patristic authority combined to lend each other
mutual support.
/But Islam obstinately resisted this treatment. It was im-
mensely successful. Every period of incipient breakdown
was succeeded by a period of astonishing and menacing
growth. Islam resisted both conquest and conversion, and
it refused to wither away. And to complicate this picture
of worldly success there was the puzzling novelty of its
intellectual position. To acknowledge one God, an omnip-
otent creator of the universe, but to deny the Trinity, the
Incarnation, and the divinity of Christ was an intelligible
philosophical position made familiar by many ancient
thinkers. Likewise, to profess the immortality of the soul,
 6 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
the existence of a future state of rewards and punishments,
_ and the need for such good works as almsgiving as a re-
quirement for entry into Paradise was recognizable in this
same context. But what was to be made of a doctrine that
denied the divinity of Christ and the fact of his crucifixion,
but acknowledged his virgin birth and his special privileges
as a prophet of God; that treated the Old and New Testa-
ments as the Word of God, but gave sole authority to a
volume which intermingled confusingly the teachings of
both Testaments; that accepted the philosophically respect-
able doctrine of future rewards and punishments, but
affronted philosophy by suggesting that sexual enjoyment
would form the chief delight of Paradise? A religion with-
out priest or sacrament might be intelligible; but these
characteristics of natural religion were associated with a
holy Book, generally held by the few Westerners who knew
it to be full of absurdities, and a divinely appointed Prophet,
universally held in the West to be a man of impure life and
worldly stratagem.
It was only slowly that this picture of Islam formed itself
in Western minds, but in the course of time all these
features came to be part of the image. Those who received
its imprint may be excused if they found it puzzling. It was
unlike anything else in their experience. There were times
when it seemed plausible to write off the whole scheme as
the fantastical product of an evil imagination. No doubt
this type of explanation would have gained wide currency
if Islam had shown permanent signs of decline. But this
hope was constantly disappointed. Moreover, the Moslem
system of thought had the adherence of men whom the
 THE AGE OF IGNORANCE 4
West learned increasingly, and sometimes extravagantly,
to admire—scholars, philosophers, and scientists like Al-
farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, and chivalric heroes like

sion of such men. |

Saladin. It was hard to believe in the simple-minded delu-

All these complicated considerations affected the Western

reaction to Islam in the Middle Ages. But, as if these were
not enough, there was another complication, scarcely recog-
nized but adding immeasurably to the difficulties of any
intellectual contact. Western Christendom and Islam not
only represented two distinct systems of religion; they were
societies extraordinarily unlike from almost every point of
view. For the greater part of the Middle Ages and over
most of its area, the West formed a society primarily
agrarian, feudal, and monastic, at a time when the strength ~
of Islam lay in its great cities, wealthy courts, and long lines
of communication. To Western ideals essentially celibate, |
_ sacerdotal, and hierarchical, Islam opposed the outlook of a
laity frankly indulgent and sensual, in principle egalitarian,
enjoying a remarkable freedom of speculation, with no
priests and no monasteries built into the basic structure of
society as they were in the West. The development of two
societies based on such contrary principles and opportunities
was naturally wholly dissimilar: the West struggled through
a long period of relative stagnation to achieve in the later
Middle Ages a social and economic momentum which
continued for centuries; Islam achieved power, wealth,
and maturity almost at a bound, and never again equaled
the fecundity of its earliest achievements. It continued its
tradition of military success when it had lost every other
 8 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
symptom of its early vitality; and this early vitality, while
it lasted, had no equal in the medieval West. Within four
hundred years of its foundation, Islam had run through
phases of intellectual growth which the West achieved only
in the course of a much longer development. So much has
been lost that it is impossible to speak with any exactness,
but it is certain that the Islamic countries produced a greater
bulk and variety of learned and scientific works in the
ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries than medieval Christen-
dom produced before the fourteenth century.’
The great difference between the Latin and Moslem
| worlds is the difference between slow growth on the one
hand and precocious maturity on the other. The chief
reason for this lay in the difference between their ways of
life. But besides the difference in social foundation, there
was also an almost complete diversity of intellectual heri-
tage. When the ancient world fell apart into its separate
parts, Islam became the chief inheritor of the science and
philosophy of Greece, while the barbarian West was left
with the literature of Rome. The dramatic contrast has been |
brought out in a remarkable paper by Dr. Richard Walzer,
who has shown how Greek thought was taken over without
a break from the schools of the Hellenic world into the
courts and schools of Islam, and adapted to the not very
exacting requirements of the Moslem religion.’ It is the
“Some idea of the learned resources of Islam in the early twelfth
century may be obtained from A. J. Arberry, 4 Twelfth-Century Reading
List: A Chapter in Arab Bibliography, 1951.
°R. Walzer, “Arabic Transmission of Greek Thought to Medieval
Europe,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, Manchester, XXIX, 1945-
46, 160-83.
 THE AGE OF IGNORANCE 9
most astonishing event in the history of thought, just as
the rise of Islam as a political force is the most astonishing
fact in the history of institutions. Islam luxuriated in abun-
dance, while the West was left with the Church Fathers,
the classical and postclassical poets, the Latin schoolmasters
—works of impressive solidity but not, at least in the early
Middle Ages, wildly exciting. A comparison of the literary
catalogues of the West with the lists of books available to
Moslem scholars makes a painful impression on a Western
mind, and the contrast came as a bombshell to the Latin
scholars of the twelfth century, who first had their eyes
opened to the difference.
In the early period with which I am chiefly concerned in
this chapter, two figures stand out as embodiments of the
two cultures. They are almost exact contemporaries: in the
West, Gerbert, who was born in about 940 and died as Pope
in 1003; in the East, Avicenna, who was born in 980 and
died in 1037. They were both men of affairs, who occupied
high positions in their societies; both men of passionate
intellectual curiosity; and, except for their great talents, not
noticeably superior to their contemporaries in morals or
practical ideals. But there the similarity ends. The courts
Gerbert knew were those of Hugh Capet and Otto III,
rulers living from hand to mouth, with ideas of splendor
rudely contrasting with their practical impotence. The
schools he knew were those of monasteries and cathedrals,
certainly small and ill-equipped with books. And the books
he took most pride in knowing were those that formed the
slender stock of Greek science which the scholars of the
last days of ancient Rome were able to hand on to their
10 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
successors: Porphyry’s Introduction to Aristotle’s logic and
Boethius’ translations and summaries of its more elementary
parts, with his handbooks on arithmetic, music, geometry,
and astronomy; some fragments of Greek medical knowl-
edge. From these scanty sources Gerbert composed his own
jeyjune works—a chart showing the various branches of
rhetoric, a textbook of arithmetic, a small specimen of
dialectic; and on these foundations he built a model of the
planetary system, an abacus, and a complicated clock.° It is
a meager harvest, redeemed from insignificance by the great
efforts that were necessary to raise it and the considerable
advance it marked on any previous efforts of a similar kind.
If Gerbert had been born in Bukhara instead of Aurillac,
and if he had taught in Baghdad or Isfahan instead of at
Rheims, he would have found himself in a society intellec-
tually much more congenial to him than that of the West,
and he would have had all the books he could desire.
Avicenna was born at Bukhara about forty years later than
Gerbert. He lived till 1037 and died at Isfahan.’ In contrast
to Gerbert, the priest, monk, prelate, Pope, and political
intriguer among laymen powerless to fulfill his grandiose
plans, Avicenna was a layman, an official, a physician, and
court philosopher. By the age of sixteen he had studied (as
* For Gerbert it will be sufficient here to refer to the still unsurpassed
edition of his letters by J. Havet, 1889, supplemented by the Chronicle of
Richer, ed. R. Latouche, in Les classiques de l’histoire de France au
Moyen Age, 1930-1937, II, 54-56, and A. Olleris, Oeuvres de Gerbert,
oor Avicenna’s autobiography, see A. J. Arberry, Avicenna on Theol-
ogy, 1951, and for an account of his life and work, S. M. Afnan,
Avicenna: His Life and Works, 1958.
 THE AGE OF IGNORANCE II
he tells us) Porphyry’s Introduction and all the straight-
forward parts of logic, together with Euclid’s Geometry,
Ptolemy’s Almagest, a whole library of Greek medicine,
some Indian arithmetic, and the inevitable and intricate
Moslem jurisprudence. Even if we allow for some element
of exaggeration in the recollections of this youthful prodigy,
the general picture of his resources is certainly not exagger-
ated: the boy had at hand riches undreamt of at this time
in western Europe. By the time he was a young man he had
devoured the logic, natural sciences, mathematics, and
metaphysics of ancient Greece, finishing with a prolonged
and painful study of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. And all this
was not an isolated study, but an integral part of a tradition
of Moslem science already two hundred years old. Avicenna
has left us a description of the library of the Sultan of
Bukhara. It was contained in many rooms, each piled with
chests of books and each devoted to a single subject—lan-
guage and poetry, law, logic, medicine, and so on—with a
catalogue from which it was possible to get a general view
of the ancient writers on each science. There was nothing
similar to this—certainly no layman had anything approach-
ing it—in the West till the end of the Middle Ages.
There is no need to pursue the contrast any further.
Avicenna’s own works were in bulk and importance a
product worthy of the mine from which they were dug.
They were composed in the midst of a busy and unsettled
life, as Avicenna moved about in the courts of present-day
Persia and the Soviet provinces of Turkmenskaya and
Uzbekskaya. We shall meet these works later in the West.
12 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
They were one of the agents in the breaking down of the
intellectual barriers between Islam and Christendom, when
the works of Gerbert were forgotten.
This contrast stands at the very beginning of our subject.
Let us now look to the end.

I end this survey with the end of the Middle Ages. The
problem loses much of its interest and complexity after this
period. This may seem surprising. To judge only from the
map, Islam pressed more menacingly on western Europe
in 1600 than it had done eight hundred years earlier. It
had obliterated Byzantium; it stood on the frontier of
Germany and all along the southern shores of the Mediter-
ranean. But the main problems with which we are con-
cerned had been, if not solved, at least shelved. In the vastly
extended world picture of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, the existence of Islam was no longer the challenge
to the West that it had seemed to be in the Middle Ages.
The divisions of Christendom blurring the contrast with the
outside world, the recognition of other non-Christian
systems besides that of Islam, the growing wealth of Europe,
the slow decline of the great Turkish Empire, the rise of
a more secular outlook on the world, and the discovery of
the New World, were all factors which combined to make
Islam seem less and less formidable, until Gibbon could
recline in the pleasing spectacle of European pre-eminence
and declare that “the reign of independent Barbarism is
now contracted to a narrow span; and the remnant of Cal-
mucks or Uzbucks, whose force may be almost numbered,
cannot seriously excite the apprehensions of the great re-
 | THE AGE OF IGNORANCE 13
public of Europe.” ° For Gibbon the menace of Islam was
only a memory that might serve to warn Europe not to
indulge zoo freely in the prospect of endless security: “This
apparent security should not tempt us to forget that new
enemies, and unknown dangers, may possibly arise from
some obscure people, scarcely visible in the map of the
world. The Arabs or Saracens, who spread their conquests
from India to Spain, had languished in poverty and con-
tempt, till Mahomet breathed into those savage bodies the
soul of enthusiasm.” Despite this cautionary word we can
sense that Mahomet and his savage enthusiasts have been
safely relegated to the realm of legend with Tamburlaine
and the great conquerors of antiquity. Intellectually and
materially Europe felt safe.
_ The Middle Ages were the Golden Age of the Islamic
problem. During the centuries between about 650 and 1570
it rose and fell. But the rise and fall were not a simple
or a single movement. Nothing is more striking on a close
observation than the extremely slow penetration of Islam as
an intellectually identifiable fact in Western minds, fol-
lowed after the year 1100 or thereabouts by a bewildering
rapidity of shifting attitudes, in which the Islamic problem
constantly took on new forms, partly in response to changes
in the practical relations between East and West, but even
more profoundly as a result of the changing interests and
equipment of thought in Europe itself. ,
For the purposes of this study I have distinguished three

“Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,

chapter xxxviii, “General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire
in the West.”
14 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
phases and I have attempted a brief characterization of each
in the title of each chapter. We are concerned first with
what I have called the age of ignorance, and ignorance may
appear to be treated with too much indulgence in being
accorded even what remains of this chapter. But ignorance
is itself a phenomenon of great complexity. Theologians
have identified twenty-four different kinds of ignorance,
and we might learn something from their elaborate and
ingenious distinctions; but for our present purpose we may
adopt a cruder classification, and content ourselves with two
varieties. I shall call them the ignorance of a confined space
and the ignorance of a triumphant imagination. The first
was the predominant note of the Western attitude to Islam
during the four centuries after a.p. 700; the second was the
creation and characteristic attitude of the forty years from
1100 to about 1140. The first of these attitudes was closely
connected with Biblical exegesis, the second with the imagi-
native creativity of the early twelfth century. In what re-
mains of this chapter I shall examine the chief features of
these attitudes and indicate their influence on the future.

II
To turn first to the ignorance of confined space. This is
the kind of ignorance of a man in prison who hear rumors
of outside events and attempts to give a shape to what he
hears, with the help of his preconceived ideas. Western
writers before 1100 were in this situation with regard to
Islam. They knew virtually nothing of Islam as a religion.
For them Islam was only one of a large number of enemies
threatening Christendom from every direction, and they
 THE AGE OF IGNORANCE 15
had no interest in distinguishing the primitive idolatries of
Northmen, Slavs, and Magyars from the monotheism of
Islam, or the Manichaean heresy from that of Mahomet.
There is no sign that anyone in northern Europe had even
heard the name of Mahomet. Yet, despite their ignorance,
Latin writers were not left entirely without a clue to the
place of the Saracens in the general scheme of world history.
This clue was provided by the Bible.
In the interpreting of present events it is clear that the
Bible can do two things. It can explain their origins or
their ultimate fate, their beginning or their end. In the main
scholarly tradition of the period from 700 to 1100 the role
of the Bible was confined to its use in discovering the
distant origins of the Saracens in Old Testament history,
and establishing their general relationship to the peoples
and religions of the world. For a few scholars, however, it
pointed to the future and displayed the place of the Saracens
in the impending end of all things. Searching the Scriptures
was not in the end very helpful in explaining the phenom-
enon of Islam, but a short consideration of this method of
inquiry is necessary if we are to understand the manner in
which Islam first became a familiar object to Western
minds: whether right or wrong it had a great influence on
later thought and action. Nor is this surprising. The Bible
was the one effective intellectual tool of the early Middle
Ages. It would have been absurd to ignore its statements
about either the past or the future, however puzzling these
might be; and it was an essential part of the education of
the Western world to learn, often by bitter experience, what
the Bible could and could not tell men about the world they
 16 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
lived in. Biblical scholars could make no more important
contribution to the future than in examining this problem.
Bede
We must start with Bede, the great Biblical master of the
_ early Middle Ages.” He commanded the whole Biblical
scholarship of his day, and what he wrote was the founda-
tion of this branch of learning until the twelfth century.
Moreover, the Saracens first became a matter of European
concern during his lifetime, and before he died they had
reached the limit of their westward expansion. It is there-
fore somewhat surprising to note that the Saracens of his
day made no specially forcible impact on him. He saw
them as unbelievers of not more than ordinary ferocity, and
in his History (where of course they were not part of his
main theme) a single sentence sufficed to relate their ravages
and the due reward for them which they received at
Poitiers. In his Biblical commentaries Bede was rather more
expansive: here he had something of interest to relate. At
various points he explains that the Saracens were descend-
ants of Hagar, the Egyptian wife of Abraham, of whom we __
read in the Book of Genesis.*° You will remember that

- ° Most of Bede’s references to the Saracens have been collected by C.

Plummer in his edition of the Historia Ecclestastica, 1896, II, 339. In
addition, see M. L. W. Laistner, Bedae Venerabilis Expositio Actuum
A postolorum et Retractatio, 1939, pp. 34, 149, 152, 157.
*® The identification had been made by Eusebius at the beginning of
the fourth century, and even earlier by Josephus. Bede’s immediate source
was Isidore of Seville; but it is noticeable that Isidore said nothing about
the Saracens in his comments on Genesis, chapters viii and xvii (P.L.
LXXXIII, 242, 248-49): here he confined himself to the traditional
identification of the children of Hagar with the Jews.
 THE AGE OF IGNORANCE 17
Abraham had two wives, Sarah and Hagar, whose sons
were respectively Isaac and Ishmael. In Christian symbolism
Isaac, the son of the freewoman, prefigured Christ, and his
descendants the Church. Similarly Ishmael and his descend-
ants represented the Jews. That was the allegorical meaning
of the events described in Genesis. But /:terally the actual
descendants of Ishmael were held to be the Saracens. There
was much in the known facts about their life to justify this
identification. Ishmael had been driven into the desert:
they came from the desert. Ishmael was a wild man whose
hand was against every man’s: could any better description
of the Saracens be found than this? Ishmael was outside
the Covenant: so were the Saracens. There were several
other ways in which the character of the Saracens could be
understood in the light of this identification with the chil-
dren of Ishmael, and Bede was not the first to make it. But
it was he who introduced it into the medieval tradition of
Biblical exegesis, and after his day it was a commonplace
of Western scholarship. It helped to soften the harsh
dichotomy between Christendom and those unpredictable
enemies. It gave them a niche in Christian history.
The problems raised by this identification gave a certain
amount of trouble to Bede and his successors, but they were
problems of a cloistered learning. Why, for example, were
these people called Saracens if they were descended not
from Sarah but from Hagar? This is the kind of question
that scholarly writers liked to investigate, and it is unneces-
sary for us to follow them in their abstruse speculations.”
* Greek writers attributed the name to a pun: ris Zappis févovs = @
Sarra vacuos, following the words of Hagar “Sarra vacuam me dimisit”
18 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM |
They added nothing to the main picture of events. What
surprises us most in Bede and his Carolingian successors is
the lack of rancor in their account of the Saracens. They
were ravaging or threatening half Europe, but they aroused
less bitter hostility than they did later. There were no doubt
many reasons for this. The writers of northern Europe were
fairly remote from the Saracens and the danger they pre-
sented. There were nearer enemies, many of them not on
the frontiers of Christendom but at the walls of the monas-
tery; and in the cosmic struggle of Good and Evil the
Saracens had a relatively humble role. Having identified
them and placed them in their Old Testament context the
Carolingian scholars had done all they could. They could
turn to the literary problems, in which they showed an
inordinate interest. They were happier discussing the spell-
ing of “Sarah,” whether it should have one or two 7’s, than
in discussing the nature of the Saracens.*“ Of course they
were much better equipped for discussing the first than for
the second, and they turned to such problems with en-
thusiasm.
But though this might be the prevailing outlook of

(see John of Damascus, De Haerisibus, P.G. XCIV, 763). This interpreta-

tion, however, was not open to the Latins, who had to seek another
explanation. The possible explanations are given by Isidore: either the
Saracens claimed (wrongly) to be descended from Sarah, a Sarra geniti,
or they were so called from their Syrian origin, guasi Syrigenae (P.L.
LXXXII, 329, 333).
“* There is a long discussion of this point in the Commentary on
Genesis of Angelomus of Luxeuil, an author of the mid-ninth century
who felt himself to be in the direct tradition of Alcuin and to be main-
taining the highest standards of Carolingian scholarship (P.L. CXV,
170ff.).
 THE AGE OF IGNORANCE 19
scholars in northern Europe, there were others who rejected
this attitude of learned detachment and who turned from
Biblical history to Biblical prophecy in their attempt to
understand Islam. The men who did this lived in Spain and
wrote in the middle of the ninth century.

Spanish Apocalyptic Thought |

It is a remarkable fact that every single important novelty
we shall touch upon can be traced back in its origin to
Spain. Even Bede’s identification of the Saracens with the
sons of Hagar came immediately from Isidore of Seville.
This is the pattern throughout the Middle Ages. The large
constructions, the great systems and elaborations of ideas,
were produced elsewhere, but the seminal ideas, whether
apocalyptic or scientific or synoptic, came out of Spain.
Spain was the country which suffered most from, and
therefore thought most about, Islam. We generally imagine
Spanish thought about Islam to have been violent, un-
compromising, and fanatical. But this image, which has
impressed itself as normal, represents only a short phase, or
rather two short phases, almost at the beginning and at the
very end of the Middle Ages. Between these two extremes,
between the ninth and the sixteenth centuries, there is a
long period in which Spanish influence was very varied but
almost wholly rational and beneficent. And even at the
beginning and end, when Spain was the spearhead of
violence and intolerance, the reaction is thoroughly intel-
ligible in the circumstances of the time.
This can be illustrated at once by returning to Spain in
the middle of the ninth century. The situation of the Chris-
 20 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
tian community in the greater part of Spain at this time was
identical with that of many Christian communities through-
out the Islamic world.** In accordance with the teaching
of the Koran they were given protection on condition of
paying tribute. They had their own bishops, priests,
churches, and monasteries, and many of their number were
in responsible positions in the service of the Emirs of
Cordova. So far, so good. But it was also laid down in the
Koran that the Christians, though tolerated and protected,
should nevertheless be “brought low.” ** In effect this meant
no publicity of worship, no ringing of bells, no proces-
sions, and of course no blaspheming of the Prophet or Book
of Islam. Further, they were in a position of extreme isola-
tion from the rest of Christendom, and of ignorance of the
sources of Latin learning, both secular and ecclesiastical.
The relations between Cordova and northern Europe do not
yet appear to have been rejuvenated by the slave trade,
which began to be brisk with the German conquests of
Slavonic lands in the tenth century. The only account we
have of a journey of Northern monks to Cordova at this
time records that there had been no caravan from the
frontier town of Saragossa to Cordova for eight years.”
** For the general situation, see E. Lévi-Provencal, Histoire de l’ Espagne
musulmane, 2nd ed., 1950, I, 225-39, and for a lively but one-sided account
of the events of this period, R. Dozy, Histoire des Musulmans d’Espagne,
new ed., 1932, I, 317ff.
, *“ Koran, ix (ed. G. Sale, p. 137).
*® Two monks of S. Germain-des-Prés in search of the relics of St.
Vincent in 858 finally found their way to Cordova and returned to
northern Europe with the bodies of three of the recently martyred Spanish
, saints. They have left a valuable account of their travels, and it was
through them that knowledge of the Spanish movement reached the
North. The Emperor Charles the Bald took an interest in the affair and
| later sent for more information. On all this, see (besides the general
 | THE AGE OF IGNORANCE 21
This was in 858, at the height of the events I am about to
relate. As for the profound isolation of the Cordovan
Christians, it cannot be more clearly illustrated than by the
experience of their leading scholar, who visited Navarre in
848 and brought back books at that time unobtainable in
Cordova, among them, Augustine’s City of God, Virgil,
Horace, Juvenal.*® If such works as these were unobtain-
able, what hold can the Christians of Cordova have had on
the civilization of Rome?
In the midst of a brilliant and flourishing civilization,
with its Arabic literature and its genial virtues, it was —
inevitable that the temper of the Christian population
should become relaxed. This had happened in the end
wherever Islam was established, and it was happening in
Spain:
The Christians love to read the poems and romances of the
Arabs; they study the Arab theologians and philosophers, not
to refute them but to form a correct and elegant Arabic. Where
is the layman who now reads the Latin commentaries on the
Holy Scriptures, or who studies the Gospels, prophets or
apostles? Alas! all talented young Christians read and study
with enthusiasm the Arab books; they gather immense libraries
at great expense; they despise the Christian literature as un-
worthy of attention. They have forgotten their language. For
every one who can write a letter in Latin to a friend, there are
a thousand who can express themselves in Arabic with elegance,
and write better poems in this language than the Arabs them-
selves.*"

works already mentioned) B. de Gaifhier, “Les notices hispaniques dans

le Martyrologe d’Usuard,” Analecta Bollandiana, LV, 1937, 268-83.
** Paul Alvarus, Vita Eulogit, cap. iti (P.L. CXV, 712).
*7Paul Alvarus, Indiculus Luminosus, P.L. CXXI, 555-56, quoted in
Dozy, Musulmans d’Espagne, 1, 317.
22 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
The situation was a familiar one in Islam. The West was
to have plenty of opportunity to observe the corrosive effect
of Moslem virtues when placed side by side with Christian
virtues, and there was probably no way short of conquest or
conversion by which the process could be arrested. But for
a few years between 850 and 860, the sense of being gradual-
ly suffocated provoked a reaction among a handful of
Christians, and led to protests—not so much against Islam
as against the complacency of their fellow Christians—and
to martyrdoms.
The men who led this reaction were a priest, Eulogius,
and a layman, Paul Alvarus.’* Eulogius became titular
bishop of ‘Toledo, and died a martyr in 859. He wrote an
account of the movement from which we derive most of
our information about it. Paul Alvarus wrote a polemical
work, the Indiculus Luminosus, attacking those Christians
—and they were the majority—who counseled moderation.
He also wrote the Life of Eulogius, and the ideas of the two
men are so similar that they may for our purposes be treated
as one. Briefly, they were both inspired by the idea that the
rule of Islam was a preparation for the final appearance of
Antichrist, and they found in the Bible the evidences they
needed. Such evidences were not difficult to find. If they had
been skeptical men, the very ease with which the search was
successful might have warned them that it was futile. But
they were not skeptical men, and they have had a long line
of successors who were not skeptical men. When Alvarus
** For their works, see P.L. CXV, 705-870; CXXI, 397-566; and for
recent studies and editions see C. M. Sage, Paul Albar of Cordoba: Studies
on his Life and Writings, 1943, and J. Madoz, Epistolario de Alvaro de
Cordoba, 1947.
 THE AGE OF IGNORANCE 23
read the following words in the Book of Daniel, he knew
what they meant, and he saw how they illuminated the
situation of his own day:””
The fourth beast shall .be the fourth kingdom upon earth, which
shall be different from all kingdoms, and shall devour the whole
earth, and shall tread it down, and break it in pteces.
In traditional Christian thought this was the Roman Em-
pire, the fourth world power following the Empires of the -
Assyrians, Persians, and Greeks.”
And the ten horns of the kingdom are the ten kings that shall
arise.

Here were the barbarian invaders who had destroyed the

Roman Empire.
And another shall arise after them and he shall be different
from the first; and he shall subdue three Rings.
Here were the followers of Mahomet with their vast empire
triumphing over Greeks, Franks, and Goths. |
And he shall speak great words against the Most High, and
shall wear out the saints of the Most High, and think to change
times and laws.
Did not Mahomet, the Moslem calendar, and the Koran do
these very things?
and they shall be given into his hand for three and a half periods
of time.

*°In the following paragraph I have summarized the comments on

Daniel vii, 23-25, in the Indiculus Luminosus, P.L. CXXI, 535-36.
7° For the theory of the four empires in early Christian literature, see
J. W. Swain in Classical Philology, XXXV, 1940, 18-21.
24 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
Here was the crux of the matter. I have taken a liberty with
the text,”* but it was a liberty taken by our author. Paul
Alvarus interpreted this obscure phrase to mean that Islam
would flourish for three and a half periods of seventy years
each; that is, for 245 years in all. Now since he was writing
in 854, and the beginning of the Moslem era was in 622
(or, as he probably believed, 618), it is evident that the end
of the world was very close. By a curious coincidence—since
everything conspires to support a hypothesis we desire to
believe—the Emir of Cordova Abd ar-Rahman III died in
852 and he was succeeded by Mahomet I, “the man of
damnation of our time.” The congruity of name with that
of the great deceiver himself might have emboldened
a more cautious scholar than Paul Alvarus to proclaim that
the end of all things was at hand.
I shall not pursue into the Books of Job and the Apoca-
lypse the intricate calculations of these persecuted men.
Their distress of mind and the urgent duty they felt to rouse
their fellows to a sense of their danger and mission gives
dignity to a system which intellectually has nothing to
recommend it. And this is more than can be said of many
of those who have followed in their footsteps. It was not
difficult for them to find in Islam and its founder the signs
of a sinister conspiracy against Christianity. They thought
they saw in all its details—and they knew very few—that
total negation of Christianity which would mark the con-
trivances of Antichrist. They had in their possession a brief
*“ The Vulgate reads: “et tradentur in manu eius usque ad tempus, et
tempora, et dimidium temporis.”
 THE AGE OF IGNORANCE 25
life of Mahomet, a product of Spanish ingenuity working
on Byzantine tradition, and this taught them that he had
died in the year 666 of the Era of Spain.*” They cannot have
been surprised to find that this was the number of the Beast
of Revelation, who is the figure of Antichrist. Nor can they
have been surprised to find that the life of Mahomet was a
parody of the life of Christ.
Whatever else may be said of all this, it was the first
rigidly coherent and comprehensive view of Islam, related
to contemporary circumstances, to be developed in the West.
It was a product of ignorance, but ignorance of a peculiarly
complex kind. The men who developed this view were men
writing of what they had deeply experienced, and they
related their experience to the one firm foundation avail- ,
able to them—the Bible. They were ignorant of Islam, not
because they were far removed from it like the Carolingian
scholars, but for the contrary reason that they were in the
middle of it. If they saw and understood little of what went
on round them, and if they knew nothing of Islam as a
religion, it was because they wished to know nothing. The
situation of an oppressed and unpopular minority within a
minority is not a suitable one for scientific inquiry into the
true position of the oppressor. Significantly they preferred
to know about Mahomet from the meager Latin source
“* This life of Mahomet appears in several slightly different forms.
Eulogius, Liber Apologeticus Martyrum, cap. 15, says that he found it in
Navarre at the monastery of Leyre near Pampelona (P.L. CXV, 859).
It was clearly a Spanish product because its symbolism depends on the
use of the chronological Era of Spain, which was 38 years in advance of
the normal reckoning.
26 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
which Eulogius found in Christian Navarre, rather then
from the fountainhead of the Koran or the great biographi-
cal compilations of their Moslem contemporaries. They
were fleeing from the embrace of Islam: it is not likely that
they would turn to Islam to understand what it was they
were fleeing from.

The Carolingian Tradition |

Although views similar to those of Eulogius and Paul
Alvarus reappear spasmodically in the West, it is surprising
—considering the ease with which these views could be
maintained and the evidence that could be brought in their
favor—that they never gained general assent. The Carolin-
gian contemporaries of these Spanish writers showed no
inclination to follow their line of thought. Some faint
knowledge of the lives of the Spanish martyrs penetrated
to the North, and a knowledge of their ideas may have
inspired discussions about Antichrist and the end of the
world. But in discussing this theme, the Northern scholars
ignored the role of the Saracens.**
There is one exception to this rule which may be men-
tioned because it illustrates the very great difference of
temper between the scholars of Northern Europe and Chris-
tian Spain at this time. An exact contemporary of Eulogius

8-The most influential of the Northern accounts of the end of the

world was the De Ortu et tempore Antichristi of Adso, abbot of St.
Benigne of Dijon. This work (ed. Sackur, Szbyllinische Texte u.
Forschungen) set a fashion in ignoring the role of the Saracens. Two
hundred years after its composition, the advisers of Richard I appealed
to its teaching in order to contradict the novelties of Joachim of Fiore
(see below, page 40).
 THE AGE OF IGNORANCE 2
and Paul Alvarus, Paschasius Radbertus, the most learned
man of his day in the North, discussed the signs of the last
days in his vast commentary on Matthew. Here he men-
tioned the Saracens, not to prove that they were the embodi-
ment of Antichrist, but to demonstrate the mild and
academic thesis that the existence of Islam outside the
Church did not prove that the last days were necessarily still
far distant.“* On this great and awe-inspiring subject the
Carolingians were in the best tradition of medieval thought
—they counseled caution and sobriety. It was counsel easy
to give in a Northern monastery with the Saracens far
away and other evils near at hand. But we shall find that
whenever the situation became really menacing, and par-
ticularly when the menace of complacency within was
matched by the menace of danger without, the apocalyptic
interpretation of Islam had a new lease of life.

III
The relationship between Christendom and Islam
changed abruptly with the First Crusade. This event did
not bring knowledge. Quite the contrary. The first Crusad-
ers and those who immediately followed them to Palestine
saw and understood extraordinarily little of the Eastern
scene. The early success discouraged any immediate re-
“* P.L. CXX, 804ff. Matthew xxiv, 14, states that “the gospel of the
kingdom shall be preached in all the world .. . and then the end shall
come.” Paschasius argues that this state of affairs has almost, if not quite,
been reached: preachers have reached the Scandinavian peoples and the
western islands, and, as for the Saracens, it cannot be said that they have
not heard the Gospel, though they have rejected it. However, even though
the Gospel may have been preached in all the world, we still cannot tell
how long an interval must elapse before the end of the world.
28 | WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
actions other than those of triumph and contempt. But they
also made the religion and founder of Islam for the first
time familiar concepts in the West. Before 1100 I have found
only one mention of the name of Mahomet in medieval
literature outside Spain and Southern Italy.*° But from
about the year 1120 everyone in the West had some picture
of what Islam meant, and who Mahomet was. The picture
was brilliantly clear, but it was not knowledge, and its
details were only accidentally true. Its authors luxuriated in
the ignorance of triumphant imagination.
The picture of the Prophet and nature of Islam formed
in Europe during the first forty years or so of the twelfth
century was born in triumph. It was pieced together in
northern France, stimulated perhaps by the fireside stories
of returning warriors and clerks far behind the line of
battle; in schools and monasteries it was given a form
congenial to Western minds. The result was a popular
image of astonishing tenacity which outlived the rise and
fall of many better systems.
In order to understand the tenacity of the fictions of this
°° Ralph Glaber in his History (ed. M. Prou, 1886, pp. 11-12) recalls
an incident in the life of Abbot Majolus of Cluny in 972. The abbot had
been captured by the Saracens of La Garde—Fresnet. He dropped his Bible
and one of the Saracens put his foot on it. But he was reproved by some
of the milder spirits among the Saracens for this insult to the Prophets.
Ralph Glaber adds that the Saracens believe that the Old Testament
prophecies were fulfilled in Mahomet, and that they have genealogies
tracing the descent of Mahomet from Ishmael, similar to the genealogy
of Christ at the beginning of St. Matthew’s Gospel. This passage is
interesting, not only for its mention of Mahomet, but as the first account
of the Moslem religion in northern Europe; and the first evidence of the
contact between Cluny and Islam, which bore fruit in the translation of
the Koran under Peter the Venerable.
 THE AGE OF IGNORANCE 29
period we must notice that they were formed at a moment
of great imaginative development in western Europe. The
romances of Charlemagne and soon those of Arthur; the
Miracles of the Virgin; the wonders of Rome and the
legends of Virgil; the legendary history of Britatn—they are
all products of approximately the same period and of pre-
cisely the same point of view as that which produced the
legends of Mahomet and the fantastic descriptions of
Moslem practices. There can be little doubt that at the
moment of their formation these legends and fantasies were
taken to represent a more or less truthful account of what
they purported to describe. But as soon as they were pro-
duced they took on a literary life of their own. At the level
of popular poetry, the picture of Mahomet and his Saracens
changed very little from generation to generation. Like
well-loved characters of fiction, they were expected to dis-
play certain characteristics, and authors faithfully repro-
duced them for hundreds of years. It would be hard to say
when these characters came to be recognized as mere
figments with which to frighten naughty children; but this
was certainly not their original status.
It would not help our inquiry to analyze the productions
of this time in detail. They belong less to the history of
Western thought about Islam than to the history of the
Western imagination. But a word is necessary about the
sources on which the writers of this period drew.
So far as the life of Mahomet is concerned, Western
writers had a few facts derived ultimately from Byzantine
writers.’° These facts concerned his marriage to a rich
°° The picture of Mahomet and his followers which became current in
30 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
widow, his fits, his Christian background, and his plan of
general sexual license as an instrument for the destruction
of Christendom. But on this meager framework, to which
no chronology could be attached, a great edifice was erected.
When Latin writers first asked what kind of man Mahomet

northern Europe in the first half of the twelfth century can best be studied
in the following accounts of Mahomet’s life:
(1) Embrico of Mainz, Vita Mahumeti (ed. F. Hubner, Historische
Vierteljahrschrift, N.F. XX1X, 1935, 441-90), a poem of 1142 lines in
rhymed elegiac couplets. The poem is ascribed to Hildebert of Tours in
some MSS, but this ascription cannot be accepted. We know, however,
nothing about Embrico, He is often identified with the dean of Mainz
of this name who became bishop of Augsburg in 1064 and died in 1077.
But there are objections to this view which have not been dispelled by
its latest defender, G. Cambier in Latomus, XVI, 1957, 468-79: in the
first place, the panegyrical poem on the author written apparently after
his death does not mention that he became a bishop; and secondly, the
matter and style of the work are more consistent with a twelfth than
with an eleventh century date. G. Cambier has answers to these objections,
but they do not seem to me convincing. For a better suggestion, viz.
Embrico, treasurer of Mainz 1ogo—1112, see W. Wattenbach, Deutschlands
Geschichtsquellen im Mittelalter, ed. R. Holtzmann, I, 1948, 450. In any
case the MSS are all of the twelfth century or later. Ten of the fourteen
existing MSS come from the twelfth or early thirteenth century, and they
sufficiently show the date at which the work was popular.
(2) Walter of Compiégne, Otia de Machomete (ed. R. B. C. Huygens,
Sacris Erudirt, VIII, 1956, 286-328), a poem of 1ogo lines, written between
1137 and 1155, and probably early in this period.
(3) Guibert of Nogent, Gesta Dei per Francos, i, 3 (P.L. CLVI, 679-
838). In his account of the First Crusade, completed before 1112, Guibert
devoted a chapter to the life of Mahomet.
These accounts differ in detail but they represent the same state of
knowledge and show the same attitude toward the subject. They are all
based on oral testimony, Walter of Compiégne giving an elaborate account
of the steps by which his information was derived from a converted
Moslem. Except for Embrico, who is wildly wrong, they are all quite
vague about the date at which Mahomet lived. They are all embellished
with extravagant detail of more or less the same kind, and only in the
faintest degree historical.
 THE AGE OF IGNORANCE 31
was and why he was successful, they replied that he was a
magician who had destroyed the Church in Africa and the
East by magic and cunning, and had clinched his success by
authorizing promiscuity. Some of the details—such as the
role of the white bull which terrorized the population and
finally carried the new Law between its horns, or the
account of the suspension of Mahomet’s tomb in mid-air by
means of magnets—belong to folklore; others—such as
Mahomet’s death and destruction by pigs during one of his
fits—are a hateful elaboration of some details in the Byzan-
tine tradition. Some details may have a tenuous connection
with the vast mass of legends about the Prophet current in
Islam; others are pure invention.” The spirit of this
literature is well expressed by the most learned of the
authors responsible for it. Guibert of Nogent’s brief account
of Mahomet is one of the earliest biographies of the Prophet
produced in the West outside Spain. He had more scruples
about his sources than many of his contemporaries in
northern France, and he frankly admitted that he had no
written source for his account of Mahomet.** What he gives
is the plebeia opinio. Whether it is true or false he cannot
say; but this he can say: “it is safe to speak evil of one whose
malignity exceeds whatever ill can be spoken.” In a variety
of forms, whether for praise or blame, this rule inspired a

*™ Mr. R. W. Hunt has drawn my attention to the first of a series of

articles by G. Cambier, “Les sources de la Vita Mahumeti d’Embricon
de Mayence,” Latomus, XX, 1961, 100-15, in which the echoes of Byzan-
tine, Arabic, and classical legends in this work are discussed.
*° He was unaware of the Prophet’s real name and calls him Mathomus,
and he thought he must belong to a date not far removed from his own
time.
 32 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
great deal of writing in the first half of the twelfth century.
The following of it gave a large freedom to the imagination.
The same freedom formed the picture of the Moslem
faith, which became current in all the epic poems of the
West, frorn the Song of Roland onwards.” In these works
the Saracens were uniformly idolaters. In the Song of
Roland they worshiped three gods, Tervagan, Mahomet,
and Apollo; but later, by a natural process of development,
they had many more. Over thirty of their gods have been
counted in this literature: they form a picturesque team,
including Lucifer, Jupiter, Diana, Plato, and Antichrist.
But this is only the abundance of popular fantasy: very soon
anyone who cared to know about Islam knew that it was
the most rigidly monotheistic of religions. At first, however,
it is likely that the Latins, who had no experience of reli-
| gions other than their own, could only imagine error taking
the form of extravagance along familiar lines. If Christians
worshiped a Trinity, so (they imagined) must Moslems,
but an absurd one; if Christians worshiped their Founder,
so (they imagined) must Moslems, but with depraved rites
suitable to a depraved man and a depraved people.

~ Men inevitably shape the world they do not know in the

likeness of the world they do know. Nowhere is this more
clear than in the early Latin literature about Islam. In this
chapter we have examined interpretations of Islam based
on different kinds of ignorance. It is not pleasant, and it

°° The character of the Saracens in this literature has been analyzed by

W. W. Comfort, “The Saracens in the French Epic,” Publications of the
Modern Language Association of America, LV, 1940, 628-509.
 THE AGE OF IGNORANCE 33
may be thought profitless, to dwell on ignorance in what-
ever form. But these attempts at interpreting Islam had a
profound influence on future thought. They gave Islam a |
place in three of the great traditions of European thought
and sentiment, those of Biblical history, apocalyptic vision,
and popular imagination. It is impossible not to feel a strong
sympathy with the sobriety with which Bede and the
Carolingian scholars used their exiguous sources. And the
sufferings of the Spaniards gives a certain dignity to their
wilder efforts. For the imaginative reconstructions of the
early twelfth century it is difficult to say much that is favor-
able. The wanton errors of successful strength are less
excusable than the errors forced out of ignorance by suffer-
ing. But the fantasies of the early twelfth century were, as
we shall see, closely related to the beginning of a new and
more critical spirit of inquiry. And it is this spirit, certainly
more congenial to our modern ways of thought than those
we have examined thus far, which I shall attempt to illus-
trate in the next chapter. |
 II

THE CENTURY
OF REASON AND HOPE
fe afe ae afe af afc afc afe afc afc afe afc ae afe afe afe afo af afe afc afo afc

A THE end of the last chapter I said that the fantasies

of the early twelfth century could to some extent be
justified as a vehicle for a more critical appraisal of Islam
than we have previously met with. It is certainly a striking
fact that just as science and magic are in their origins indis-
tinguishable, so imagination and observation seem to have
some hidden affinity which makes the former promote the
growth of the latter. Hence it is perhaps not surprising that
the first accurate observations in the West about Islam as a
religion were made by men who contributed largely to the
imaginative literature of the period. I think at once of
William of Malmesbury, whose histories display so avid an
interest in marvels and magic, but who was also the first,
so far as I know, to distinguish clearly between the idolatry
and pagan superstitions of the Slavs and the monotheism of
Islam, and to emphasize against all current popular thought
 CENTURY OF REASON AND HOPE 35
that Islam held Mahomet not as God but as His prophet.’
William wrote these words in about the year 1120, when the
flood of misrepresentation on this subject was at its height.
Or again, there is the very remarkable man, Petrus Alfonsi,
a Spanish Jew who was converted to Christianity in 1106
and later made his home in England as physician to King
Henry I. Besides being the first transmitter of Eastern
legends in Latin, and the first exponent of Arabic science
in the West, he has also left the earliest account of Mahomet
and his religion which has any objective value.” Although
hostile, he at least presents Islam as a possible choice for an
uncommitted man to make. Or again, in one of the least
likely of sources, in the History of Charlemagne of the
Pseudo-Turpin, which probably belongs to a period shortly
before 1150, there is a mixture which is characteristic of the
- time.’ In this work there is all the usual detail about the
* Gesta Regum, ed. W. Stubbs (Rolls Series), p. 230, where William
remarks that the Wends and the Letts are almost the only pagans still
left in the world, nam Saracent et Turchi Deum Creatorem colunt,
Mahomet non Deum sed eius prophetam aestimantes.
* The account and criticism of the Moslem faith in Petrus Alfonsi’s
Dialogue of a Christian and a Jew (P.L. CLVII, 535-672) is by far the best
informed and most rational statement of the case in the twelfth century,
and one of the best in the whole Middle Ages. But the circumstances of
the author’s life were so unusual that, though his work was fairly well
known and quoted in the Middle Ages, especially in England, it did not
exercise any influence on the general development of the controversy.
* There is great uncertainty about both the date and place of composi-
tion of the Ps-Turpin, but it can scarcely be later than 1150 and it
probably comes from France—most likely, in my view, from Vienne. But
on this subject there is no agreement. See the editions of H. M. Smyser,
1937, and W. M. Whitehill, Lider Sancti Jacobi: Codex Calixtinus, 1944;
and the study by P. David, Le Ps-Turpin (Etudes sur le livre de S.
Jacques, III), 1948.
 36 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
idolatrous Saracens with which the romances of Charle-
magne abound; but in the middle of it there is a theological
debate between Roland and the Saracen giant Ferracutus,
which shows a good grasp of the main points at issue be-
tween Christians and Moslems, and recognizes the strength
of the Moslem insistence on the unity of God. This may
of course be an interpolation; but if so it is a very early one,
and its presence in this romantic work of fiction illustrates
the way in which the two streams of fantasy and observation
could go happily side by side.
A similar appreciation of Moslem beliefs is found in
another source of about the same date. Otto of Freising, in
a part of his Chronicle written between 1143 and 1146,
criticized the current account of the martyrdom of Thiemo,
Archbishop of Salzburg in 1101." The archbishop was re-
ported to have been martyred because he destroyed the
Moslem idols in Cairo; but, Otto observed, this was highly
improbable because “it is known that the whole body of
Saracens worship one God and receive the Old Testament
law and the rite of circumcision. Nor do they attack Christ
or the Apostles. In this one thing alone they are far from _
salvation—in denying that Jesus Christ is God or the Son
of God, and in venerating the seducer Mahomet as a great
prophet of the supreme God.” By the middle of the twelfth
century, therefore, rational views of the nature of Islam
were beginning to be fairly widespread, since we can find
them casually and independently expressed by authors in
England, France, Germany, and Spain.
: * Chronicon, ed, A. Hofmeister (Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in
usum scholarum), 1912, p. 317.
 CENTURY OF REASON AND HOPE 37
It often happens that the first step in a new direction,
though long delayed, is taken in the end with surprising
ease, but the second and third steps come up against un-
expected difficulties. So it was in this case. A habit of
independent inquiry became established in western Europe '
in the early twelfth century, and showed itself in these
traces of candid appraisal of Islam. But then there was a
check. It was one thing to base a reasonable judgment on
facts which lay ready at hand; it was quite another to seek
new information for its own sake or for the sake of some
future synthesis. It is very clear to us that when matters had
been brought to the point at which we have seen them in
the authors I have quoted, the next step must be to obtain
authoritative texts for enlarging the gap in the curtain. It
must always be a matter for honorable mention in the
history of Cluny that this step was in fact taken on the
initiative of the Abbot of Cluny, Peter the Venerable, with
remarkable promptitude. The translation of the Koran
undertaken at his expense by the English scholar Robert
of Ketton, and completed in July 1143, is a landmark in
Islamic studies.” With this translation, the West had for
the first time an instrument for the serious study of Islam.
Its appearance brought the first short period of objective
appraisal to a fitting end. But it is an end rather than a
beginning. The serious study of Islam was not an object
© The epoch-making study on this subject is by Mlle. M. T. d’Alverny,
“Deux traductions latines du Coran au Moyen Age,” Archives d’histoire
doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Age, XVI, 1948, 69-131. All recent work
stems from this article. For a review of the results, see J. Kritzeck,
‘Robert of Ketton’s Translation of the Qu’an,” Islamic Quarterly, VI,
1955, 309-12.
 38 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM |
that commended itself to the contemporaries or immediate
successors of Peter the Venerable. .
| It is not difficult to understand why this should have
been so. In the second half of the twelfth century, Europe
was riddled with heresies at home, and abroad the situation
with regard to Islam took a decided turn for the worse. By
the end of the century the high expectations of the First
Crusade had been obliterated by a long succession of mili-
tary reverses. These circumstances did not provide a hopeful
background for the study of Islam.
Peter the Venerable had been conscious that his work of
promoting a translation of the Koran and investigating the
religious tenets of Islam was not likely to meet with approval.
He tried to enlist the support of Bernard of Clairvaux, and
failed. He tried to justify his initiative in the context of the
long-term interests of Christendom, but he had little re-
| sponse. Like his great Greek predecessor John of Damascus,
whose work was coming to be known in the West at this
time, he saw Islam as a Christian heresy, the last and great-
est of the heresies, and the only one that had not been
answered. Hence, in a time so full of heresies, it was (he
claimed) essential that this “sink of all heresies” should be
answered, if not because of its immediate danger, at least
because of its ultimate threat:
If this work seem superfluous, since the enemy is not vulnerable
to such weapons as these, I answer that in the Republic of the
great King some things are for defense, others for decoration,
and some for both. Solomon the Peaceful made arms for de-
fense, which were not necessary in his own time. David made
ornaments for the Temple, though there was no means of using
them in his day... . So it is with this work. If the Moslems
 CENTURY OF REASON AND HOPE 39
cannot be converted by it, at least it is right for the learned to
support the weaker brethren in the Church, who are so easily
scandalized by small things.®
This was Abbot Peter’s excuse to his fellow Christians.
He was forging weapons against heresy. To a man who
considered the ravages of Manichaeism in the Western
Church, the idea that the Islamic heresy might make its
way in the Church was not as far-fetched as it now appears.
But in fact the heresy of Mahomet—if it was a heresy—
never made the slightest appeal in Europe. In the border-
lands where the two religions met there were always some
conversions in both directions, but never enough to inspire
a sense of danger to the orthodoxy of Latin Christendom.
Hence the Abbot of Cluny’s suggestion that Islam required
serious study in order to support the weaker brethren in the
Church fell flat. If Islam was to be studied at all, it would
have to be for other reasons than this.
Equally his hope that he might convert the Moslems by
exposing the weaknesses of the Koran was vain, for his
exposure remained buried in the obscurity of the Latin
language. Islam never heard the charitable voice of the :
abbot of Cluny explaining, “I attack you, not as some of us
often do by arms, but by words; not by force, but by reason;
~ not in hatred, but in love. I love you; loving you, I write —
to you; writing to you, I invite you to salvation.” ‘

Attempts to give a new direction to the discussion of

problems of real difficulty never succeed unless they are
° P.L. CLXXXIX, 651-52.
"PLL. CLXXXIX, 674.
 40 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
helped forward by events. The effort to place Islam in a
more generously conceived intellectual framework lan-
guished after the time of Peter the Venerable, because there
were many more pressing dangers than those to which he
drew attention. The danger which impressed most Western
observers of Islam in the late twelfth century was military,
and the simple answer to it was an increased military effort.
There were many eloquent exponents of this point of view.
The most impressive among them was Abbot Joachim of
Fiore. Joachim was not a very sensible man, but he was one
of the few genuinely prophetic figures of the Middle Ages,
who claimed with some authority to see below the surface
of events to their inner meaning. When King Richard I
was on his way to the Holy Land in 1191 he met Joachim at
Messina, and Joachim outlined to him a view of history
which brought the apocalyptic visions of the ninth century
Spanish martyrs up to date.” For him, as for them, the end
° A full account of the interview between Joachim and Richard I has
been preserved by an eye-witness, the great English historian Roger of
Howden. The authenticity of his account has long been a subject of
controversy, partly because biographers of Joachim were unwilling to
believe that he held the views here ascribed to him, and partly because
there are two widely differing accounts of the meeting. The first of these
objections has been met by the discovery and publication of the Liber
- Figurarum: this exactly coincides with the views attributed to Joachim by
the English writer, and has been shown to portray correctly the main
lines of Joachim’s thought. (See especially M. E. Reeves, “The Liber
Figurarum of Joachim of Fiore,” Medieval and Renaissance Studies, I,
1950, 57-81). The second objection has been met by the discovery that
Roger of Howden was the author of both the accounts of the interview
with Richard I (see D. M. Stenton, “Roger of Howden and Benedict,”
English Historical Review, LXVIII, 1953, 574-82). As soon as this has
been pointed out, it is clear that Roger of Howden later altered his
original and contemporary account of the meeting to make it conform to
later events. For the original account, see Gesta regis Henrici secundi
 CENTURY OF REASON AND HOPE 41
of the world was at hand, and for him also the chief instru-
ments of Antichrist were the Saracens. On the two flanks
of Christendom, in Spain and the Holy Land, he saw the
strength of Islam renewed under the Almohads in Spain
and Saladin in Palestine. But with regard to the future, he
hesitated. Like all who foretell the future, he had to feel
his way with care. He seems to have assured King Richard
that he would defeat Saladin, and in this he was certainly
wrong. But the most interesting addition he made to the
apocalyptic picture was his assurance that the final Anti-
_ christ was already alive and in Rome, and that he was
destined to obtain the papal see.
Looking back we can see that this vision, disclosed to an
incredulous band of Northern Crusaders, represents a very
significant shift of emphasis in the expectations of the last
days. In the last blows which were to undermine the founda-
tions of Christendom, Joachim both elevated and depressed
the role of the Saracens. He elevated them by making them
the last three scourges of the Church before the final blow.
He depressed them by making them only a preparation for a
greater internal enemy of Christ at the heart of Christen-
dom.’
This scheme of things in which Christendom was held in

Benedicti Abbatis, ed. W. Stubbs (Rolls Series), II, 151-55; for the
revised account, Chronica magistri Rogeri de Houdene, ed. W. Stubbs
(Rolls Series), III, 75-709.
° There is a pictorial representation of this sequence of events in the
Liber Figurarum in L. Tondelli, 7 Libro deile Figure dell’abate Gioachino
da Fiore, tavola xiv. The same picture is in Corpus Christi College,
Oxford, MS. 255A. I am greatly indebted to Miss Marjorie Reeves for
her help on this whole subject.
 42 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
a vice formed by a resurgent Islam and a faithless Pope
reappears in many later medieval visions. These visions
belong to the realm of popular speculation. When they
come to the surface as expressions of informed opinion they
sometimes have the patronage (as we shall see) of great _
names, but in the thirteenth century—with one surprising
exception in Pope Innocent III’°—the apocalyptic role of
Islam had no influence on the main current of responsible
thought.

II
The event which did more than anything else to change
the whole aspect of the Islamic problem came from a very
unexpected quarter. It was the appearance of the Mongols
on the scene of history. The effects of this on the outlook
for Western Christendom were many and various. In the
first place, and from the moment of their appearance, the
Mongols greatly enlarged the geographical horizon and
increased many times the number of people known to exist
in the world. There is no reason to think that anyone of
importance in the West between Bede and Peter the Vener-
, able saw beyond Islam. After centuries of neighborhood the
picture had so far been enlarged that Peter the Venerable
was able to estimate that Islam contained a third, or possibly

"In a Crusading appeal of April 1213, addressed to every part of

Europe except Spain, Innocent III expressly identifies Mahomet with the
Beast of the Apocalypse, “whose number is concluded in 666.” He argues
that since almost 600 years of this number have already passed (presum-
ably since the Hegira of 622, or perhaps Mahomet’s death in 632), his
end is at hand (P.L. CCXVI, 817-22). It would be interesting to know the
inspiration of this letter.
 | CENTURY OF REASON AND HOPE 42
even a half, of the people of the world.** This was a step
toward the truth. Christendom was shrinking in relation to
the rest of the world, but Islam was still essentially a fringe
phenomenon. By the middle of the thirteenth century,
however, it was seen that this picture, like the estimate of
numbers which accompanied it, was quite misleading. It
was far too optimistic. There were ten, or possibly a hun-
dred, unbelievers for every Christian. Nobody knew; and
the estimate grew with each access of knowledge.
One consequence of this was to make the Crusade seem
either quite impossible, or in need of a drastic reassessment
of its aims and methods. For the rest of. the Middle Ages
the Western world was divided into one or other of these
two camps: either no Crusading was called for, or very
much more and better Crusading. The only thing that could
have no place was the cheerful improvisation and short-
sighted planning of the past.
Further, even the most fanatical supporters of the Crusade
had to turn their minds to the intellectual content of the
Moslem faith and its refutation, either to reduce the enemy’s
will to resist and possibly to enlist his help, or to brace the
weakening sinews of the West by instilling a greater
conviction into its military effort. Still more, of course,
those who did not sympathize with the Crusade were
committed to the task of comprehension and refutation.
To Western minds the number of unbelievers grew
alarmingly in the course of the thirteenth century, but in
** Peter the Venerable’s estimate varies: “eius lethali peste dimidius
pene orbis infectus agnoscitur” (P.L. CLXXXIX, 650); “pene dimidia
pars mundi” (did., 656); but “pene tertiam humani generis partem”
(ibid., 652).
44 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
some ways the gains outweighed the losses. In the first :
place, even though most of the newcomers on the scene ©
might be unbelievers, they were at least not Moslems; and”
however formidable the Mongols were militarily, intel-
lectually they were soon seen to be negligible. Indeed, a
very complex situation soon arose. The Mongols were very
frightening. But from their geographical position their first
enemy was almost bound to be not Christendom but Islam;
and with a certain amount of management this geographical
factor could, it was hoped, be turned into a major asset for
the West.
At this point two other factors became evident. One of
the first results of this contact between Europe and Asia was
to bring out an unsuspected measure of agreement between
Christianity and Islam. Of course, as we have seen, this had
been realized by a few people quite early in the twelfth
century. But in the circumstances of the twelfth century,
the points of agreement had not been thought to be specially
significant. The second great result of contact with the
Mongols was to disclose the existence of large numbers of
primitive Christians about whom the West had previously
had no knowledge at all. In the thirteenth century facts
and fictions about these people became very widely known,
and they influenced the thought of the West about the
outside world in a remarkable way.
The situation therefore as it developed in the course of
the thirteenth century presented a bewildering number of
causes both for hopes and fears of a quite new kind. And
the way in which these worked out in practice will occupy
us for the rest of this chapter.
 CENTURY OF REASON AND HOPE 45
_ Since our concern is not primarily with events but with
the impact of these events on what we may briefly call the
world picture of Western observers, it seems permissible to
treat the situation I have just outlined in an episodic fashion
and to single out a few moments at which clear mental
images can be observed. I shall space out these moments
along the chronological line 1221, 1254, 1268, and 1233, and
by the time we get to 1283 we shall almost have reached
the end of the period of hope.

The Fifth Crusade |

My first date is the date of the Fifth Crusade and the
place is Damietta, at the mouth of the main easterly branch
of the Nile. This Crusade is a comparatively neglected one
because it had no practical result of any kind. But intellec-
tually and emotionally it was important for many reasons.
It was the only Crusade ever to be effectively directed by
the Papacy with a papal legate ruthlessly driving it on to
a great foreordained end. It was almost a turning point in
European history. Then quite suddenly it was one of the
greatest flops in history. But in the spring of 1221 all was
hope. The legate reported the situation to his master, and
on 13 March the Pope communicated the gist of this report
to the Archbishop of Trier. Here is an extract from the
Papal letter:

The Lord has manifestly begun to judge his cause, mindful of

the injuries suffered by his people every day, and of the cries of
those who call upon him. For behold, as our venerable brother
Pelagius, Bishop of Albano, Legate of the Apostolic See, has
informed us, King David, vulgarly called Prester John, a Catholic
 46 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
and god-fearing man, has entered Persia with a powerful army,
has defeated the Sultan of Persia in a pitched battle, has pene-
trated twenty days’ march into his kingdom and occupied it. He
holds therein many cities and castles. His army is only ten days’
march from Baghdad, a great and famous city, and special seat
of the Caliph, whom the Saracens call their chief priest and
bishop. The fear of these events has caused the Sultan of Aleppo,
_ brother of the Sultans of Damascus and Cairo, to turn his arms,
with which he was preparing to attack the Christian army at
| Damietta, against this king. Our legate, moreover, has sent
messengers to the Georgians, themselves Catholic men and
powerful in arms, asking and beseeching them to make war on
the Saracens on their side. Whence we hope that, if our army
at Damietta has the help which it hopes for this summer, it will
with God’s help easily occupy the land of Egypt, while the forces
of the Saracens, which had been gathered from all parts to
defend it, are dispersed to defend the frontiers of their land.**
Here, then, we have the first impact of the Mongols on
the central mind in Christendom, and the earliest hopes
raised by the appearance of large numbers of Christians
outside the limits of the Greco-Roman world. The Pope
was only reporting what most of the Crusaders were think-
ing and some were writing home. One of these letters
home has survived, and it repeats with further details the
Pope’s account: “King David . . . nearly 400,000 men, in-
cluding 132,000 Christian knights ... Persia overrun...
capture of Baghdad immediately expected.” In short, the
West was about to be released from the fear of Islam by a
great Christian army advancing from the Far East. The

612-14. |
™ This letter and the letter from Damietta mentioned below are printed
by F. Zarncke, “Zur Sage von Prester Johannes,” Neues Archiv, I, 1887,
 CENTURY OF REASON AND HOPE 47
time had come for concerted action between the long-
divided Oriental and Western Christians to crush their
common enemy.
Much of this was fantasy, but not all. It is true that King
David turned out to be Jenghis Khan, and that he died
without having captured Baghdad, and that his Christian
knights were a figment of the imagination, and that the
Mongols were to send shivers down the spines of quiet men
in Western monasteries for many years to come. But the
main elements in the fantasy were in the end to identify
themselves as historical facts with quite astonishing accu-
racy. Baghdad did ultimately fall to the Mongols, the eastern
Christians if not knights were at least numerous, and the
Christians of Georgia, if not reliable or Catholic, at least
were real.

William of Rubroek
Before Baghdad finally fell in 1258 we come to the second
of our chronological landmarks. It is a much more sub-
stantial one than the dreams of 1221. The date is 30 May
1254, and the place the now lost town of Karakorum, in ,
present-day Mongolia, not far from the frontier of the
U.S.S.R. This time and place provided the scene of the first
world debate in modern history between representatives of
East and West. It was a notable occasion, and the back-
ground to it requires a brief sketch. Nine years before this
date the Genoese pope Innocent IV had dispatched John
of Piano Carpini, an Italian Franciscan, to bring back a
report on the state of the Mongols, on whose attitude
toward the West so much depended. This was in 1245.
 48 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
Four years later the first of Louis IX’s lamentable Crusades
foundered in the Nile waters that had destroyed the
Crusades in 1221. In the shadow of this defeat, Louis dis-
patched the Flemish Franciscan, William of Rubroek, on
another mission of inquiry among the Mongols.’* He
reached the Mongol capital in May 1254, and here the great
Khan staged the debate to which I have referred. In this
debate, four groups of people took part: William of Rub-
rock spoke for the Latins, and he was faced with represen-
tatives of the three religions of Asia—the Nestorian Chris-
tians, the Buddhists, and the Moslems. The debate lasted
the whole day. I shall give you a brief summary of its
development and then attempt to point out the lessons
which could be drawn from it so far as these affected the
relations of Islam and Christendom.
The first question was the order in which the debate was
to be conducted. William of Rubroek was in one way in a
' weak position since he could only speak through an inter-
preter; but in another way he had an advantage, as a new-
comer and the chief center of interest. Apart from the
difficulty of language, he had two problems: first to make
sure that he grappled with the right enemies in the right
order; second to arrange that the right questions—that is,
the ones on which he was on the strongest ground—were
raised first. He dealt with both these problems in a masterly
way. He began by making common cause with the Nes-
torians. This was an elementary tactical move. But it was
* William of Rubroek’s account of his travels is printed in A. van den
Wyngaert, Sznica Franciscana, 1, 1929; see pp. 289-97 for the debate at
Karakorum.
 | CENTURY OF REASON AND HOPE 49
also important that it should be he and not his allies who
conducted the argument, for, as he noted, the Nestorians
had no idea how to prove anything. Their one notion of
argument was to quote the Scriptures, and, as William
rightly told them, this was useless, for “if you recite one
Scripture our enemies will reply with another.” He finally
convinced his allies that he should be their spokesman,
arguing that his linguistic weakness made this necessary:
“If Iam beaten you can take up the discussion: but if you
are beaten, there is no chance that I shall be listened to.”
So he won his first point.
The next question was to decide whether to take on the
Buddhists or the Moslems in the first instance. The Nes-
torians strongly favored an immediate attack on the Mos-
lems; but here again they showed their dialectical simplicity.
As William pointed out, the Christians and Moslems agreed
on the fundamental points of the nature and existence of
one God; so, as against the Buddhists, they would start as
_ allies; but in a dispute with the Moslems the Christians
would have no allies at all.
With some difficulty William got his way on this point |
also, and then the debate began. The Buddhists wanted to
start by discussing whether the world was created and what
happened to souls after death. But here the prudent William
replied: “Friend, this is not the proper beginning. All things
are from God. He is the fount and head of all. Therefore we
should speak first about God, concerning whom you differ
from us.”
This question of procedure was referred to the Arbiters
appointed by the Khan to conduct the debate, and they ,
50 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
agreed that William’s point was reasonable. So he got his
way here also; and a large part of the day was spent in
discussing the rival views of God, in which the Latins,
Nestorians, and Moslems were all in agreement against the
Buddhists.
You will scarcely want to hear the arguments that can be
adduced in favor of monotheism on the one hand and
polytheism on the other, and I need scarcely say that in
William’s account at least the monotheistic arguments had
decidedly the better day. Nor is this unlikely. William could
speak with the authority and precision of a long philo-
sophical tradition; his enemies were tied up in complicated
genealogies of Gods in heaven and Gods on earth, and
they were unable to give a clear answer to the question of
God’s omnipotence. Finally they committed themselves to
the view that no God is omnipotent, and at this William
won the sweet triumph of a loud laugh from the Moslems
among the spectators.
By this time the Nestorians were getting impatient. They
wanted to have their bout with the Moslems, and William
stood down to allow them to speak. Here a fresh triumph
awaited him and his friends, for the Moslems declined to
argue: “We concede,” they said, “that your law is true and
that the Gospel is true: we have no wish to dispute with
you.” And they confessed that in their prayers they prayed
for a Christian death. So the dispute came to an end, Chris-
tians and Moslems joining together in common triumph
over the Buddhists, and all drinking copiously.
We cannot of course guarantee that William of Rubroek
has left an impartial account of this debate, but its main
 CENTURY OF REASON AND HOPE 51
outlines seem reasonably trustworthy. And, what is more

it make now?
important, this is the account that came back to the West.
What impression did it then make? What impression does

_ In the first place it demonstrated the dialectical superior-

ity of the Latins. That long logical preparation through
which the schools of the West had been grinding their way
for a hundred years and more was at last bearing fruit.
William of Rubroek knew how to argue on theological
matters, and his opponents did not. The debate encouraged
the view that dialectical victory could be fairly easily
achieved. But it also showed that dialectic must be sup-
ported by a knowledge of languages if it was to be effective
at the level of world affairs. Then again, it threw a great
deal of light on the friends and enemies of Christendom:
it helped to create a picture of the Nestorians as simple men
without guile, inexperienced in argument, who needed to
be taken by the hand and led along; of the Buddhists as __
men with very little to say for themselves that could not be
easily answered; and of the Moslems as men near to Chris-
tianity, potential allies intellectually if not militarily.
William of Rubroek’s diary of his experiences was not
widely read. Indeed, to judge from the existing manu-
scripts, it seems to have been read only in England,” and it:
is not fanciful to connect its fairly wide diffusion in England
with the one Englishman who is known to have met and
discussed the affairs of the outside world with its author.
““ There are five medieval manuscripts of the work: Corpus Christi
College, Cambridge, MSS. 66, 181, and 407; British Museum Royal MS. |
14.C.xili; and Leyden Univ. MS. 104. The last, however, is a copy of
C.C.C.C, 181. ,
 52 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
That Englishman is Roger Bacon, and he brings us to the
third episode in our series and to the treatises which he
wrote for Pope Clement IV in the years 1266-1268.

Roger Bacon
Roger Bacon, despite his great fame, is a man whose life
is very obscure. His known and published works are now
voluminous, but they have not yet been fully studied, and
on the question of their value there will probably never be
any general agreement. He is a man who has been equally
overpraised and undervalued, overpraised for what he did
not do, undervalued for what he did. In displaying one
small corner of his thought, I shall display a sensible man
of statesmanlike views, better informed than most of his
contemporaries, but sharing their hopes and fears, and
working within the framework of the inherited methods
of the great schools of Paris and Oxford.
His contact with Islam was primarily philosophical. He
had grown to maturity at the moment when the philo-
sophical impact of Moslem writers on Western theologians
| was making itself felt for the first time in a really powerful
way. It would take us too far from our main theme to dwell
at length on this fascinating subject, in which such a
dramatic change is to be observed in comparison with the
situation I described in the age of Gerbert and Avicenna.
But since the possession of a common philosophical method
was the great new bond between Islam and the West in the
thirteenth century—we have seen how it affected the course
of the debate far away at Karakorum—it is necessary to say
a few words about the way in which this reversal of the
 CENTURY OF REASON AND HOPE 53
earlier philosophical isolation of the West had come about.
The change was very largely the result of the work of a
small body of devoted translators at work in Toledo in the
third quarter of the twelfth century.** These men intro-
duced the works of the great Moslem philosophers Al-
Kindi, Al-Farabi, Avicenna, and others to the West, and
to a great extent they put the West for the first time in
possession of the tradition of the Greek philosophical and
scientific thought which had been the formative influence
in the first centuries of Islam. A large body of this work
was accessible in Latin by the end of the twelfth century;
but it was not until about the year 1230—when Roger Bacon
was of an age to begin his university career—that the ideas
and terminology of these writings made their way into Latin
theology, necessarily the most difficult conquest in their
victorious career. It would have startled the theologians of
an earlier generation to see the name of Avicenna quoted
beside that of Augustine; but this is what happened with
astonishing rapidity, and modern scholars are still finding
increasingly extensive traces of the influence of Moslem
writers in thirteenth century theology. It has been known
since the time of Renan’s great work that Latin Averroism,
so called from the last great Aristotelian among the Mos-
lems, was an extensive and highly suspect school of thought

*® There is an excellent summary of this activity in G. Théry, Toléde,

grande ville de la Renaissance médiévale, 1944, in which references are
given to the main works of earlier scholars. For later work, see A. Alonso
in al-Andalus, XII, 1947, 295-338, and XXIII, 1958, 371-80; M. T.
d’Alverney in Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Age,
XIX, 1952, 337-58, and in Accademia naztonale det Linzet, XL, 1957,
71-87,
 54 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
in the later thirteenth century; but more recently an earlier
phase of what has been called Latin Avicennism has come
to light; and it is probable that an early and orthodox
phase of Averroism still awaits a full study.
It would be difficult to exaggerate the extent to which
these influences changed the outlook of learned Europeans
in the half century after 1230. It is as if modern economists
in the tradition of Alfred Marshall and Keynes were sud-
denly to start using the language of Karl Marx, or liberal
statesmen to express themselves in the idiom of Lenin. Let
me give you one example of what it meant in practice.
It is one of the common tenets of Christian theology that
the souls of the blessed will enjoy the direct vision of God
| in Paradise. When, therefore, the University of Paris in
January 1241 found it necessary to condemn the contrary
opinion and to reassert the traditional view, we can be sure
| that something had taken place to disturb the concord of
theologians on this subject. The exact nature and extent of
the disturbance has for some time been a matter for debate,
and it is only recently that the probable source of the dis-
turbance has been located in the influence of Avicenna,
which had been making rapid strides in the West during
the decade before 1241.*° It was a view of Avicenna’s that
*® See P. M. de Contenson, “S. Thomas et l’Avicennisme latin,” Revue des
sciences philosophique et théologique, XLII, 1959, 3-31. For the earlier
literature on the subject it may suffice to refer to the same author’s
‘“Avicennisme latin et vision de Dieu au début du XIII siécle,” Archives
@hist. doct. et litt. du M.A., XXXIV, 1959, 29-97, and H. F. Dondaine,
“L’objet et le médium de la vision béatifique chez des théologiens du XIII
siecle,” Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale, XIX, 1952, 60—-
130. The relevant decree of the University of Paris will be found in the
Chartularium Universitatis Paristensis, ed. Denifle and Chatelain, I, no.
128.
 CENTURY OF REASON AND HOPE 55
the Creator could never be known directly by any created
being. This emphasis on the separation between God and
Man is one of the points at which Islamic conceptions
diverge most clearly from those of Christianity; but here
under the patronage of Avicenna it appears to have made
some progress in academic circles in the West. The new
view called forth many replies; one of the weightiest was
that of Thomas Aquinas, contained in a long discussion
written in about the year 1250. Aquinas, as we should
expect, supported the earlier, orthodox view that the souls
of the blessed enjoy the direct vision of God; but in answer-
ing this Moslem-inspired error he used the language and
formulae of another Moslem philosopher, Averroes. If,
then, the error was that of Avicenna, the language of the
defense was that of Averroes. On a central theological issue
Western theologians of all shades of opinion in the mid-
thirteenth century did not scruple to re-examine traditional
views in the light of Islamic philosophy, or at least to _
restate traditional views in the language of these philos-
ophers.
‘It is tempting to linger over this fascinating prospect of
Christian theology being influenced in its views and lan-
- guage by Islamic philosophy. And this scholastic influence
was only one aspect of a wider penetration. It seems now,
for example, quite certain that a work translated into
French and Latin from Arabic at about this time, giving an
account of Mahomet’s journey through the heavens, had an
influence—perhaps a profound influence—on the plan of
Dante’s Divine Comedy.’ When Dante placed the Islamic
*T For recent summaries of the long-standing controversy about the
influence of Islam on Dante’s Divine Comedy, see E. Cerulli, “Dante e
 56 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
philosophers Avicenna and Averroes, and the Islamic war-
rior Saladin, in Limbo as the only moderns among the
_ sages and heroes of antiquity, he was acknowledging a
debt of Christendom to Islam which went far beyond any-
thing he could have expressed in words.** But this leads us
from our theme, and we must return to Roger Bacon and
see how he expressed the intellectual and geographical en-
largement of his lifetime.
In the years 1266-1268, Bacon achieved his long-cherished
ambition of being able to address directly to the Pope his
own uninhibited views on what was wrong with the state
of Christendom. He was a man with an itch for self-
expression, and he worked furiously, pouring out his ideas
in a series of works of varying lengths, but all covering more
or less the same ground—that is to say, all the ground there
was—with much repetition, unwise abuse of his contem-
poraries, and self-confident suggestions for the future. These
works are among the most famous—they are certainly
among the most readable—works of the Middle Ages.*®
But it is only fairly recently that the actual manuscript sent
by Bacon, with his last-minute afterthoughts and special
signs to draw attention to important points, has come to
light, and much more recently that the final section of the

Islam,” al-Andalus, XXI, 1956, 229-53, and G. Levi della Vida, “Nuova
luce sulle fonti islamiche della Divina Commedia,” al-Andalus, XIV,
1949, 337-407. ,
*® Inferno, iv, 129, 143-44.
*® The three works of 1266-1268 in which he expounded his ideas on
the intellectual strategy of Christendom are the Opus Maius (ed. J. H.
Bridges, 3 vols., 1900) and the Opus Minus and the Opus Tertium (ed. |
J. S. Brewer, Rolls Series, 1859).
 CENTURY OF REASON AND HOPE 57
Opus Maius, on Moral Philosophy, has been printed from
this original manuscript.*° It is from this that we can get
our fullest idea of the impact of Islam on Roger Bacon.
We see that Bacon has now got, as he could scarcely have
had at any earlier time, a true measure of the place of
Christendom in the world: “there are few Christians; the
whole breadth of the world is occupied by unbelievers, and
there is no one to show them the truth.” ** If we ask why
there is no one to show them the truth, the answer is partly
that the aims of Christendom have been wrong, and partly
that its equipment has been inadequate. Its aims have been
wrong because they have been perverted by the desire for
domination which frustrated the work of conversion. The
wars have been unsuccessful; but even had they been suc-
cessful they would have been useless: first because it would
have been impossible to occupy so much territory, and
second because the survivors would have been inflamed
against their conquerors, dangerous to live with, and im-
possible to convert—as, he alleges, we can see in many parts
of the Islamic world today. Preaching is therefore the only
way in which Christendom can be enlarged.” But for this
there is a lack of equipment in three respects: no one knows
the necessary languages; the types of unbelief have not been
studied and distinguished; and there has been no study of
the arguments by which each can be refuted. ,
A large part of Bacon’s work was taken up with pre-
liminary sketches, suggestions, assertions, and some fully
°° Baconis Operis Matus Pars Septima seu Moralis Philosophia, ed. E.
Massa, 1953.

** [bid., pp. 121-22. :

Opus Maius, iii, 122.
 58 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
worked-out arguments indicating the ways in which these
deficiencies could be made good. In retrospect we can see
that he was far too optimistic, and even without the advan-
tages of hindsight the Pope may have been skeptical of
Bacon’s offer to teach him or anyone else Hebrew in three
days.** But we must not exaggerate Bacon’s optimism. He
only means he could teach the meaning of the Hebrew
words used by the Latin Fathers; and, as for his general
optimism, it was shared by many contemporaries and en-
couraged by contemporary events.
On the teaching of languages Bacon is boringly repetitive.
But in his attempt to analyze the various forms of unbelief,
to discover the causes which brought about their rise and the
influences which maintained them in being, he was stretch-
ing out toward the founding of a new science. It is true that
his system of classification now seems extremely bizarre. He
thought that all possible ways of life could be classified into
six types according to their final end—pleasure, riches,
honor, power, fame, or the felicity of a future life—and that
nations could be classified according to their following one
or other of these ends—the Saracens, pleasure; the Tartars,
power; and so on. Further, that they could be classified
_ according to the organization and tendency of their wor-
ship, whether they had one, or many, or no gods, or any
or no priesthood. And then again classified with reference
to the planetary influences under which they best throve.”*
In making these classifications Bacon was greatly influenced
by Aristotle’s Polztics: Aristotle had classified states into six
*° Opus Tertium, p. 65.
“* Moralis Philosophia, pp. 189-92. :
 CENTURY OF REASON AND HOPE 59
types with reference to their constitution and final end, so
he had good authority for his procedure, however strange
the final result might be. And we must certainly concede
that he had the right idea in attempting a general survey of
all the possible enemies of Christendom.
But such a survey would have little value unless accom-
panied by a program for meeting intellectually the enemies
disclosed by investigation. It is at this point that the role of
Islam in the economy of world history emerges in a quite
new way. Bacon begins by asserting that there are only two
ways in which the various sects he has analyzed can be
persuaded of the truth: either by miracles, or by philosophy.
He places no reliance on the availability of miracles. He has
already excluded war; he now excludes miracles. It follows
that only philosophy is left. But it is here precisely that
Christendom is weak. “Philosophy,” he says, “is the special
province of the unbelievers: we have it all from them.” *°
This, then, is the role of the unbelievers—and he must be
thinking in the first place of the Greeks, and after them
of the Arabs—to provide Christianity with the philosophy |
it needs to understand itself, so that philosophy can return
to them enriched by revelation.*® There is thus a reciprocal
action in history between Christendom and the outside
world, each providing the other with what it lacks. Philos-
ophy is the preparatio evangelica for the outside world, for
“the power of philosophy agrees with the wisdom of God;

25 Tbid., p. 195.
*° For Bacon’s assessment of the importance of philosophy to the Chris-
tian faith see especially Metaphysica fratris Rogeris, ed. R. Steele (Opera
hactenus inedita, I), pp. 6-7, 36-30.
 60 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
it is the outline of the divine wisdom given by God to man,
so that he may be raised up to the divine verities.” *”
Philosophy, of course, can only have this exalted role if it
can convince unbelievers of their errors. Bacon takes the
) religions of the world one by one and gives examples of the
kind of argument he thinks effective against them. He
attempts to give arguments which will convince intelligent
men and not simply the crowd, “for in every nation there
are some able and industrious men capable of rational
persuasion”; and he recognizes the need for arguing from
a common ground, and for varying this ground with the
enemy whom he is facing. He works through the various
religions until he comes to Islam, which he recognizes as
the most difficult case of all. Against Islam, he gives a long
series of arguments capable, as he thinks, of refuting it.
These are all cast in the form of syllogisms in which the
premises are either taken from or suggested by Islamic
writers.”* I do not think they would be likely to win many
converts, though to a Western mind they are certainly not
without some force. Bacon made the mistake of drawing
premises indiscriminately from the Koran and from Islamic
philosophers who were not as representative of Islam as he,
with the example of the Latin scholastic theologians before
his eyes, imagined. They could be, and in fact largely were,
jettisoned by orthodox Moslems at this very time. And he
argued altogether too glibly in administering his blows,
designed to reduce Islam to dust in a succession of rapid
"7 Moralis Philosophia, p. 1096.
*° Ibid., pp. 218-23.
 CENTURY OF REASON AND HOPE 61
assaults. But we must not be too harsh in judging sugges-
tions thrown out at the end of nearly a thousand pages of
argument and expostulation, written in haste, with no en-
couragement, at his own expense, and for the good of
Christendom. The work was a notable example of the
combination of opportunity and zeal. In its completeness
and system, its confidence in argument, and its recognition
of the philosophical strength of Islam, it marks the peak in
the coincidence of hope and reason.
Let me pause for a minute to point out the great differ-
ence between this world picture of Bacon and those of the
writers we have already discussed. The first and most im-
portant difference is that, whereas earlier thinkers had seen
Islam as a religion with only a negative role.in history as a
falling away from the truth, a preparation for the final
holocaust of Antichrist, part of a downward movement,
Bacon (and he is not the only man of his time to see this)
had some conception of an upward movement toward unity
and articulateness in which Islam had an essential role to
play before it withered away. He entirely abandoned the
Bible as an instrument for understanding the role of Islam
in the world, and relied exclusively on philosophy. For his
knowledge of Islam he relied on Moslem philosophers and
the experience of travelers, and not on the meager and
casual fragments of information which characterized the
earlier writers. The philosophers and travelers were less
reliable guides than he supposed. He did not know a great
deal, and perhaps he did not know the right things, but he
tried to know, and he tried to organize his knowledge.
62 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
The Hopeful Decades
Although Bacon disappears from view after 1268, or only
fittully appears in disgrace or prison, the mood in which he
wrote appeared for some time to be consistent with the
facts. The reports of travelers in the East during the next
twenty years maintained the same mood of optimism. For
instance, William of Tripoli, a Dominican friar at Acre,
wrote an account of Islam for the archdeacon of Liége in
1273, in which he reported that “though their beliefs are
wrapped up in many lies and decorated with fictions, yet
it now manifestly appears that they are near to the Christian
faith and not far from the path of salvation.” *°
Besides, he reported a common conception in the hearts
of all Moslems, that the faith and doctrine of Mahomet, like
that of the Jews, is soon to come to an end, leaving only
the faith of Christ stable and enduring as long as the world
shall last.°° Bacon had known of this belief from literary
sources; and we know that there was a saying popularly
attributed to Mahomet that his religion would last only as
long as the dynasty of the Abbassids.** This dynasty had
been destroyed in the sack of Baghdad in 1258, so if there
was anything in the prophecy the end of Islam was at hand.
*° William of Tripoli, Tractatus de Statu Saracenorum, printed in
H. Prutz, Kulturgeschichte der Kreuzzige, 1883, 573-98. The passage
quoted is on p. 595.
*° Ibid., p. 596.
** This tradition is preserved in various forms: e.g., “The Caliphate shall
abide among the children of my paternal uncle (‘Abbas) and of the race

pp. 52-53). ,
of my father until they deliver it unto the Messiah”; “The government
shall not cease to abide with them until they resign it into the hands of
Jesus, the Son of Mary” (quoted by T. W. Arnold, The Caliphate, 1924,
 CENTURY OF REASON AND HOPE 63
William of Tripoli also reported criticism of the Prophet,
and detected a consciousness among Moslems that they had
no articulate theology.** He had himself, he said, baptized
more than a thousand Moslems.** Anyone reading this
report would have concluded that the field was ripe for the
harvest.
While William of Tripoli reported that Islam was on the
point of dissolution, there were equally hopeful signs that
the Christians of the East were ready for union with their
Western brethren. In 1283 a German traveler, Burchard of
Mount Syon, wrote a report of his experiences. He had seen
a great deal of the Latin cities which still flourished along
the coast of Syria, and he had observed the varieties of
Christian communities in the interior. He wrote of them
with enthusiasm:
It is to be noted, and it is the simple truth, though some who
speak of things they have never seen say the opposite, that the
whole of the East, from the Mediterranean to India and
Ethiopia, confesses and proclaims the name of Christ, except
only the Saracens, and certain Turks, who live in Cappadocia.
I state definitely, from what I have myself seen and heard from
others who know the facts, that in every place and kingdom,
except in Egypt and in Arabia, where many Saracens and other
followers of Mahomet live, you will always find thirty or more
Christians for one Saracen. All these overseas Christians, how-
ever, belong to oriental nations who have little skill in arms.
Thus, when attacked by Saracens, Tartars, and others, they
become subject to them, and buy their peace and quiet by
paying tribute; and the Saracens or others who rule over them
place bailiffs and tax-collectors in their lands. Hence it happens
”* De Statu Saracenorum, p. 5096.
** Tbid., p. 598.
 64 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
that the kingdom is called after the Saracens, though the greater
part of the population are Christians, except the bailiffs and tax-
collectors and their followers. I myself have seen this in Cilicia
and lesser Armenia, which is subject to the lordship of the
Tartars. For I was with the king of Armenia and Cilicia for
three weeks. There were with him some Tartars, but all the
others who belonged to the household were Christians to the
number of about two hundred. I saw them flock to church, hear
mass, kneel in devout prayer. Moreover, wherever they went
they showed me great honor, pulling off their caps, and devoutly
bowing, saluting us, and rising to us.
Many people are terrified when they hear that these countries
overseas are inhabited by Nestorians, Jacobites, Maronites,
Georgians, and others, who take their name from heretics
whom the Church has condemned. These people believe that
their followers also are heretics and follow the errors from which
they take their name. But this is absolutely untrue. God forbid
that it should be. They are simple men of devout behavior. I
don’t deny that there are some fools among them, just as the
Roman Church does not lack its fools. But all the above nations,
and others too many to list, have their archbishops, bishops,
abbots, and other prelates, just like us, and they are called by the
same names, except that among the Nestorians their chief
prelate is called Iaselick, and I have learnt that his jurisdiction
is of much wider extent in the East than that of the whole
Western Church.*4

Here indeed is a cheerful picture of the great world of ,

Asia: the Christians numerous, simple-hearted men, almost
Catholics; Islam weak and thinly spread, its work accom-
plished, awaiting in deep discouragement its expected end.
As for the Mongols, for fifty years they had caused the West

** Descriptio Terrae Sanctae, printed in J. C. M. Laurent, Peregrina-

tiones medit aevi quatuor, 1864, pp. 91-93. ,
 CENTURY OF REASON AND HOPE 65
alternating fits of terror and of hope, but now their place
was becoming clear: they were at once the sustaining ele-
ment in which the distant Christians had their being, and
the instrument for the final destruction of Islam. We have
seen the testimony of men of several different races of west-
ern Europe—Bacon an Englishman, William of Rubroek a
Fleming, William of Tripoli a Syrian, Burchard of Mount
Syon a German—all concurring in this general view. The
short period of about thirty years, from 1260 to 1290, when
this picture of the world could seem reasonably convincing
to rational men, was the most hopeful period of the Middle
Ages. It had its culmination in a series of Mongol embassies
to the West between 1285 and 1290, which came for the
express purpose of preparing for a joint attack on Islam.
_ These embassies were led by Nestorian Christians, and in
1287 there was the unexampled spectacle of the leader of
the Mongol embassy attending Mass in St. Peter’s, in the
presence of the Pope.*® What a vista of endless and universal
peace and unity was opened up by this picture: Islam, either
destroyed or, better still, converted by philosophy; the Mon-
gol empire stretching to the confines of China, a Christian
state; and Christendom itself enriched by the philosophical |
tradition handed down from Greece through Moslem
philosophers, to provide the one thing necessary for the
fullness of Christian truth. It was a noble prospect, and one
which, if only a fraction of it had come true, would radically
have altered the history of the world.

** For this mission, see W. Budge, The Monks of Kublai Khan, pp.
164-97; and for the background R. Grousset, Histoire des Croisades, Il,
707ff., and S. Runciman, History of the Crusades, II, 397-401.
66 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
Why it did not come true, and what the results of its
failure to come true were on the intellectual outlook of
Europe in the later Middle Ages, will be the subject of the
next chapter.
 Ill

THE MOMENT OF VISION

se aa ae ae fe ae eae eae ae ae ae ae ae ae safe ae sf ak

|* THE first two chapters, I have examined the main views

of Islam which were developed in western Europe up to
the end of the thirteenth century. The first Biblical and
unhopeful, the second imaginative and untruthful, the third
philosophical and, at least for a short period, extravagantly
optimistic about the near approach of world unity and the
settlement of the outstanding differences between Christen-
dom and Islam.
In this chapter I want to discuss the situation which arose
when these hopes proved to be illusory. It is a long stretch
to cover and a confused one, and perhaps it will simplify
the structure of what I have to say if I begin by explaining
that the central place in this chapter will be taken by a
literary correspondence between four men of different
nationalities, all writing in the ten years between about 1450
and 1460. But in order to put this debate in its correct
setting, I must spend some time explaining the situation as
it developed between about 1290 and the beginning of this
correspondence, and finally I shall say something about the
68 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
situation after 1460. Very soon after 1290 there were signs of
a revulsion of feeling against the extravagant hopes of the
previous thirty years. The turning point may conveniently
be placed at the fall of Acre in May 1291. When the news of
its fall reached Italy, Raymund Lull wrote some prophetic
words which accurately summed up the hopes of the pre-
vious decades and foreshadowed the end of these hopes.
“If the schismatics [the Nestorians] are brought into the
fold and the Tartars converted, all the Saracens can easily
be destroyed.” These were the hopes that Europe had come
to entertain, though we may notice that the grim Majorcan
speaks now of destruction and not of conversion. But he
continues, “It is much to be feared lest the Tartars receive
the Law of Mahomet, for if they do this, either by their own
volition or because the Saracens induce them to do so, the
whole of Christendom will be in great danger.” *
This danger was on the point of realization. The last
really important and well-informed medieval traveler to
Islam, writing in the last years of the thirteenth century, the
Florentine Ricoldo da Montecroce, shows admirably how
the tide was beginning to flow in the direction that Lull had
foreseen.” Ricoldo was in Baghdad in 1291 when the news of
the fall of Acre arrived, so he was well placed to form a
judgment. The first thing that strikes us in his account of
his experiences is his lack of faith in the Mongols. He saw
* Raymundus Lullus, Opera Latina, ed. schola Lullistica, 1954, fasc. iii,
Quomodo Terra Sancta recuperari potest, p. 96.
* The text of Ricoldo’s Liber Peregrinationis, on which the account
which follows is based, together with a survey of his life, will be found
in U. Monneret de Villard, I] libro della Peregrinazione nelle Parti
d’Ortente, 1948.
| THE MOMENT OF VISION 69
clearly that they were beginning to turn not to Christen-
dom, as the earlier generation had hoped and believed, but
to Islam, because, as he explains, they found it easier to
practice and easier to believe.* The Kurds of Turkestan had
even renounced their newly acquired Christianity in favor
of Islam, because of its greater laxity.“ As for the Nestorians,
that large and scattered body of Eastern Christians, on
whom such high hopes had been based in the middle of the
century, he speaks of them, not as those simple men of
essentially orthodox faith we have learnt to know from the
time of the early travelers, but as men who, on the central
point of Christianity, that is to say the doctrine of the
Incarnation, were no better than Moslems.° And as for the
Moslems themselves, while he had a high regard for their
social virtues, and especially for their gravity of deportment,
he ignores their philosophers, and violently attacks their
doctrine as lax, confused, mendacious, irrational, violent,
obscure, and so on.° Nothing is said about their supposed
*Ricoldo notes that the Tartars, who had at first killed the Saracens
without mercy and spared the Christians, had become Moslems cum
invenissent legem largtssimam, quae quast nullam difficultatem tenet nec
in credulitate nec in operatione. He still found traces of the earlier inclina-
tion toward Christianity, but he had no illusions about its prospects of
success: videtur eis quod lex Christianorum sit valde difficilis. He also
noted that the present Khan of Persia, Argkun (1284-1291), though a
friend to the Christians, was homo pessimus in omni scelere, unlike his
father and grandfather (idid., p. 121).
*Ibid., p. 123.
*“Positio eorum de Christo si subtiliter inspiciatur, totum misterium
Incarnationis evacuat, et de Christo fere idem sentiunt quod Sarraceni”
(p. 128).
° The most surprising feature of Ricoldo’s eulogy of Saracen virtues is
the absence of any reference to sexual license, a stock theme of most
Western writers. On the contrary, he asserts that during all the time he
70 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
closeness to Christianity, and equally nothing about their
impending end. Despite his conviction that the doctrine of
Islam could be fairly easily refuted, he expresses no belief in
any easy or immediate concord between the two systems of
faith.
This unhopeful attitude of the learned Florentine was
expressed with increasing rancor and decreasing learning.
by all later travelers to the Islamic countries during the next
hundred years or so. The Irish Franciscan, Simon Semeonis,
for example, who traveled to Palestine in 1323, was an acute
observer; he had with him a copy of the Koran, and he quite
often quotes it; but he cannot mention either Mahomet or
the Moslems without opprobrious epithets—pigs, beasts,
sons of Belial, sodomites, and so on.’ Ten years later, an
Italian, James of Verona, wrote an extensive account of his
travels over much of the same ground.° He made many
interesting observations on both the Moslem and Christian
communities he met with on his travels. But the feature
which must strike any reader coming to him from the thir-
teenth century is that his observations have no background

was in Persia he never heard a light song (cantum vanitatis) but only
songs in praise of God, the law, and the Prophet (cantum de laude Dei
et de commendatione suae legis et sui prophetae). All these virtues,
however—sollicittudo ad studium, devotio in oratione, misericordia ad
pauperes, reverentia ad nomen Dei et prophetas et loca sancta, gravitas in
mortbus, affabilitas ad extraneos, concordia et amor ad suos—existed in
spite of the follies of their faith: obstupuimus quomodo in lege tantae
perfidiae poterant opera tantae perfectionis inveniri, There seemed to be
nothing to be done about it (pp. 131ff.).
"See the Itinerarium Symeonts ab Hybernia ad Terram Sanctam, ed.
M. Esposito (Scriptores Latini Hiberniae, IV), 1960.
° Liber Peregrinationis di Jacopo da Verone, ed. U. Monneret de Villard,
1950.
 THE MOMENT OF VISION a1
of coherent thought. They are entirely empirical, except that
he held the view of writers of a much earlier period that
the Law of Mahomet was constructed as a colossal parody of
Christianity.” There was therefore no hope of any integra-
tion of the basic tenets of Islam into Christendom, and all
prospect of finding a common intellectual basis for discus-
sion had disappeared. As James of Verona walked through
the ruins of the lately flourishing Christian cities of Acre,
Tyre, Sidon, and Tripoli, and observed that the once
populous palaces and commercial quarters were now un-
inhabited, except for a few wild nomads, he was filled with
gloom.*® Military reconquest was a prospect as distant as
intellectual rapprochement. Yet, hopeless as it seemed, mili-
tary measures appeared the only possible course of action.
He wrote, he said, to stir up Western Christians at least to
visit the Holy Places, if not to reconquer them and restore
them to the Faith. He called on God to hasten the moment
of reconquest.** But if this were to happen, it would (it
seemed.) have to be God who did it, for despite the fears of
a new Crusade which he found prevalent in the East, no one
in the West seemed seriously interested.
"See pp. 101-6, ibid., for an account of the Lex Mahomet with its
many curious details, all unfavorable, as the introductory sentence pre- -
dicts: Nunc dicamus de scelerata lege Mahomet, et pauca cum sit omnino
abominabilts.
*® The description of Acre may serve as an example: Dolens et gemens
ipsam ingressus sum rememorans ipsam fuisse portum et utile habitaculum
Christianorum, nunc autem dirupta et dejecta et sola habitatio serpentium
et ferarum. The towers and palaces remained, but they were uninhabited
except for a few Saracens, pessimi et crudeles contra Christianos (pp.
142ff.). The extent of the commercial ruin can be more vividly appreciated
in these pages than in any other account I know.
™ [bid., p. 145.
72 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
The external reasons for a change of attitude toward Islam
were strong indeed. But, as if these were not enough, they
were quickly reinforced by equally important internal
reasons. It is one of the frequent ironies of history that great
intellectual movements so often succeed in getting official
recognition and institutional backing at the very moment
when they cease to have any weight in the counsels of the
world. So it happened now. The schools of modern lan-
guages, for which Bacon and several other friars had been
clamoring since about the year 1250 with very limited suc-
cess, suddenly in 1312 were written into the oficial policy
of the Western Church at the Council of Vienne. They were
to be established in Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac at
Paris, Oxford, Bologna, Avignon, and Salamanca.”” This
** The chief inspiration behind this move was Raymund Lull, the great
Majorcan (c. 1235-1316) and one of the most commanding figures in the
medieval study of Islam. On almost every score he deserves a much
greater place in these pages than I have given him. I have refrained,
partly because, with his vast output of more than 200 works, he is a special
subject in himself, and partly because in all this torrential energy there
seems to me a streak of madness to which I cannot do justice. He does,
however, illustrate the change from the earlier period of rational system-
atization and hope, discussed in the last chapter, to the disillusionment of
the period from 1290 onwards. Lull was a firm believer in the possibility
of the rational demonstration of the Christian faith to unbelievers, and
hence of the need to study the languages and habits of the countries
surrounding Europe, and to maintain missions in them. In all this his
attitude is similar to that of Roger Bacon. But whereas Bacon is virtually
silent after 1268, Lull has expressed in poignant terms the disappointments
of his later years. His efforts become increasingly frantic, his estimate of
the size of the problem increasingly somber, and the official response to
his appeals (with the exception of the single success at Vienne) remained
frigid. He lived to see realized his fears that the Tartars would be con-
verted to Islam, and he died in all probability a martyr. He also expressed
with extreme vehemence the reaction of the late thirteenth and early
fourteenth century against Averroes, whom he looked on as the personifi-
 THE MOMENT OF VISION 73
act was the last salute to a dying ideal: neither the men nor
the money was at hand to give substance to the dream, and
it faded away without anybody’s noticing.
In many ways the years after the Council of Vienne are
an ominous period in the history of Europe. For the first
time in the Middle Ages we see a really distinct breach
between tradition and innovation. The condemnations, fol-
lowing each other in rapid succession, of the views of
Marsilius of Padua, of William of Ockham, of Eckhart,
of the Spiritual Franciscans, of Dante’s Monarchia, were
indications of the breakdown of the unity of Western
thought, which—with whatever qualifications we may care
to make—was the chief feature of the previous century. In
the confusion which followed this breakdown, there was no
energy left to attempt to determine the place of Islam in
the providential order of world history. Still less was there
any desire to learn from Islam. The hospitable reception of
Islamic philosophy which had marked the middle years of
the thirteenth century gave way increasingly to suspicion
and xenophobia. The name of Averroes became for many
synonymous with infidelity, and the followers of St.
Thomas saw it as his glory, not that he had learned from
Averroes, but that he had humbled him.** This was a half-

cation of Islam in philosophy. For the immediate question of Lull’s

influence at the Council of Vienne, see B. Altaner, “Raymundus Lullus
und der Sprachenkanon (can. 11) des Konzils von Vienne (1312),”
Historisches Jahrbuch, Ll, 1933, 190-219; and for an account of Lull’s
life and works, see Histoire littéraire de la France, XXVX, 1885, 1-386;
M. C. Diaz y Diaz, Index Scriptorum Latinorum medi aevi Hispanorum,
1959, pp. 348-84.
** The theme of the overthrow of Averroes by St. Thomas is illustrated
in several fourteenth century pictures, of which the most famous is the
74 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
truth which accurately reflected the mood of the time.
These were the marks of the new age: disbelief in the
existence of allies outside Europe, deep-seated dissensions
within Europe, and a comparative indifference to external
enemies, especially the great enemy Islam. This last feature
might seem difficult to explain, for Islam was expanding
very rapidly in the early fourteenth century. But it was
expanding in directions which gave Europe little immediate
concern, deep into Asia and India. Once belief in the
Mongols and Nestorian Christians as potential allies had
been destroyed, it seemed to matter little that the Nestorians
were disappearing, and that the Mongols among whom
William of Rubroek had traveled were turning to Islam.
The West was no longer safe, but it could afford to be
indifferent.
Hence indifference and fantasy flourished once more. The
Western lives of Mahomet took on a new lease of life. From
having been a magician, he now became a cardinal, and his
pique at not being elected to the papacy turned him into the
avowed enemy of Christianity." With regard to the outside
world, the collecting of information gave way to the more

“Glorification of St. Thomas Aquinas” in St. Catherine’s, Pisa, c. 1365,

reproduced in R. Klibansky, The Continuity of the Platonic Tradition
during the Middle Ages, 1939, and elsewhere. It was one of the remark-
able achievements of Renan that as long ago as 1852 he saw the signifi-
cance of artistic representations for the history of Averroes’ reputation,
and made a search for this material (Averroés et l’Averroisme, pp. 238-
49).
““ This subject is discussed in an essay which I have not been able to
see: E. Doutté, Mahomet Cardinal, 1899. See also G. Paris, La Littérature
francaise au moyen age, 3rd ed., 1905, pp. 243, 317; and Romania,
XXXVI, 1908, 262.
 THE MOMENT OF VISION "5
congenial task of elaborating fictions, such as those which
went under the name of Sir John Mandeville and provided
fourteenth century readers with their picture of Asia and
India.*°
Indifference is of course more difficult to detect than
fantasy. But we may see one example of it in the progress
made by the bon mot, or rather mauvais mot, first spoken
in the West by the Emperor Frederick IJ, that the world had
seen three great imposters, Moses, Christ, and Mahomet.*®
Spoken in the kingdom of Sicily, the traditional home of
indifference and cynicism, this saying might cause us no
surprise. But in 1340 it was reported in Lisbon, and in the ©
1380s in Aragon.” A mere straw in the wind, but a
significant one.
At a much more respectable level, this ambiguity about
the exclusive claim of Christianity to confer the gift of
*® See M. Letts, Sir John Mandeville: The Man and his Book, 19,9. It
may be noted that the groundwork of fantasy and marvels had already
been well prepared by Marco Polo. The gasp of astonishment and the
mark of exclamation are never long absent from Le Livre ... ou sont
décrites les Merveilles du Monde.
*° For the early history of this saying in the West, see M. Esposito,
“Una manifestazione d’incredulita religiosa nel medioevo,” Archivio
storico italiano, ser. 7, XVI, 1931, 3-38. It can be traced back in Islam as
far as the tenth century. The evidence for the attribution of this saying
to Frederick II is very strong, but he derived it no doubt from a Moslem
source. The most interesting testimony to the state of mind expressed in
this saying is in Matthew de Acquasparta’s Quaestiones Dtsputatae,
quoted by Esposito: “Erraverunt aliqui dicentes quod nulla est lex, nulla
est fides firma aut stabilis, sed in omni secta quicquid credatur, quomo-
documque vivatur, potest obtineri salus, dummodo non abhorreat a
consuetudine. ... Istius erroris fuisse Fridericus, qui fuit imperator, qui
omnes legislatores reputabat truffatores.”
77M. Esposito, “Les hérésies de Thomas Scotus,” Revue d’histoire
eccléstastique, XXXIII, 1937, 56-69.
 76 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
eternal blessedness can be found at the Universities. If this
ambiguity were found only in writers noted for their
violence of language and eccentricity of thought, we might
think no more about it. But Professor Knowles has recently
drawn attention to a view maintained by a Benedictine
monk, Uthred of Boldon, in the University of Oxford in the
1360s, that at the moment of death all human beings,
whether Christian or Moslem, or of whatever faith, enjoyed
the direct vision of God and received their everlasting judg-
ment in the light of their response to this experience.** Here
was a man who belonged to the most conservative of the
religious orders, a doctor of divinity whose ways of thought
were orthodox, laborious, and unoriginal, putting forward
a view which admitted unbelievers outside Christendom to
the privileges hitherto, in traditional Christian thought,
exclusively reserved for Christian believers. The proposition
was condemned and withdrawn, but it was significant. The
growing concern about the eternal fate of unbelievers—I do
not mean simply a desire to convert them, but a desire to
find some means, if it were possible, of including them in
the scheme of salvation—is one of the most attractive
features of the period. The earlier Middle Ages had been
| very little, if at all, troubled by the thought that the flames
of hell awaited those outside the fold. The harsh separation
of the sheep from the goats was an axiom of its religious
“*M. D. Knowles, “The Censured Opinions of Uthred of Boldon,”
Proceedings of the British Academy, XXXVIII, 1953. Dom Knowles, p.
315, writes: “So far as can be ascertained, this opinion was an original

of dogma.”
proposition of Uthred, and as such it entitles him to a place in the history
 THE MOMENT OF VISION 77
life, and discountenanced all attempts to enlarge the area of
Redemption. The contrary tendency appeals to every human
instinct, but it also marks, for better or worse, a loosening of
the cohesion of the Western world, an obscuring of its sense
of separateness, and a blurring of the clear-cut line between
the West and its neighbors.

John Wycliffe
The gains and losses of the fourteenth century, so far
as they illustrate Western thought about Islam, may be
measured by a consideration of the views of John Wycliffe.
Like Roger Bacon, and for many of the same reasons,
Wycliffe is a man who has been extravagantly overpraised
and equally unreasonably underrated, and the latter tend-
ency at the moment seems to be uppermost. I shall not
attempt to rehabilitate him, but I think he deserves much
more respect than he has recently been getting. No one can
read even a little of his works without recognizing that he
is a far more interesting writer than any of his academic
contemporaries whose works have so far come to light.
We must not allow the eccentricity and violence of some of
his views to obscure the extent to which he expressed, only
more fearlessly and sharply than others, the things which
many people thought. His scholarship and range of knowl-
edge, and most of his opinions, were those of his time; and
for several years, until it became too dangerous to agree
with him, probably a majority of that not notably revolu-
tionary body, the University of Oxford, would have gone
with him most of the way in most of what he said.
 8 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
In nearly all his later writings, and especially from about
1378 to 1384, he has something to say about Islam.*” His
knowledge of Islam, like that of all his contemporaries, was
slight in comparison with the knowledge of writers a hun-
dred years earlier. He was especially weak in practical
knowledge: there is no sign that he knew any of the
accounts of Islam writer by the great thirteenth century
travelers. Equally the Moslem philosophers were not strong-
| ly represented in his works. It was not even clear to him
that Averroes was a Moslem, though he thought he had
once been a follower of Mahomet.*® Most of his knowl-
edge came from encyclopedias—from Vincent of Beauvais,
Ranulf Higden, and what he calls “another old chronicle
which I lately saw.” ** But it is significant that he had read
the Koran, and in this he shows his desire to become
acquainted with fundamental texts.
Although he used the works of contemporaries, ex-
pressed many of their views, and suffered from many of
their limitations, there was a strain of original vision in
Wycliffe which forbade him to think quite as other men

*° The main works in which he has something to say about Islam are
the following: c. 1375, De Civili Dominio; 1378, De Ecclesia, De Veritate
Sacrae Scripturae; 1379, De Officio Regis, De Potestate Papae, de Eucha-
ristia, De Apostasia; 1381, De Blasphemia; 1382, Dialogus; 1384, Opus
Evangelicum. In addition, see among his undated Polemical Works the
following: De Fundatione Sectarum; Cruciata; De Christo et suo Adver-
sario Antichristo; and among the Opera Minora: De Fide Catholica; De
Vaticinatione seu Prophetia; Ad Argumenta emuli Veritatis. All these
works are in the publications of the Wyclif Society, and the references
which follow are to the volumes of the Society. _
*° In quoting Averroes he says of him “qui dicitur aliquando fuisse de
secta Machometi” (De Veritate Sacrae Scripturae, p. 259).
*" [bid., pp. 250-51.
 THE MOMENT OF VISION 79
did. All the accounts of Islam we have so far studied,
whether they derived their inspiration from the Bible, or
from philosophy, or simply from the imagination, whether
they thought of the existence of Islam as a symptom of the _
approaching end of the world, or as a channel for the
philosophical education of Christendom, or simply as a
falling away from the true Church, were agreed on this
one point of the utter separation between Christendom
and Islam. It was here that Wycliffe was wholly different
from his predecessors. He was different, but Uthred of
Boldon’s proposition, which I have just quoted, shows
that Wycliffe was developing along a line suggested by
a much less revolutionary contemporary. Wycliffe, how-
ever, went much further. For him the main characteristics
of Islam were also the main characteristics of the Western
Church of his own day. This does not mean that he was
favorably disposed toward Islam. On the contrary. The
leading characteristics of both Islam and the Western
Church, as he saw them, were pride, cupidity, the desire
for power, the lust for possession, the gospel of violence,
and the preference for human ingenuity to the word of
God. These features in the West were the main cause
both of the divisions within Christendom and of the divi-
sion of the West from its neighbors—the division of
Avignon from Rome, of Greek from Latin, of Western
Christendom from the Nestorians and from the other
Christian communities of Asia and India, and finally of
Islam from Christianity.“ “We Western Mahomets,” he
*? Some of the main passages in which these views are expressed are:
De Civili Dominio, iii, 74; De Blasphemia, 48; De Christo et suo Adver-
sario Antichristo (Polemical Works), ii, 672.
80 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
says, referring to the Western Church as a whole, “though
we are only a few among the whole body of the Church,
think that the whole world will be regulated by our
judgment and tremble at our command.” ** From such
a view, he felt, no good could come.
These vices in the Church were, in a mysterious way,
the cause of the rise of Islam, which only began with the
growth of pride and avarice and the possessions of the
Church.** And just as worldliness in the Church produced
the religion of worldliness in Islam, so Islam would wither
away with the reversal of this tendency within the Church,
and in no other way. “I am bold to say,” Wycliffe wrote on
the vigil of the Annunciation, 1378, “that this antireligion
will grow until the clergy returns to the poverty of Jesus
Christ, and to its original state. For opposites, as Aristotle
says in the fourth book of his Meteorology, are dissolved
by their opposites, and the hill of the Lord is built by
persecution and patience.” *°
Once he had got the idea of a universal Islam, a religion
of worldly power, secular dominion, and self-will, opposed
to the religion of suffering and poverty, both within the
Church and outside it, he was able to see many ways in
which this parallel was illustrated. It was the distinguish-
ing feature of Mahomet’s law that he selected from the
Old and New Testaments those features which suited
his purpose and rejected the rest. But then, this was pre-
*® Dialogus, ol.
** De Christo et suo Adversario Antichristo (Polemical Works), ii, 672;
Ad Argumenta emuli Veritatis (Opera Minora), 2090.
. *’ De Veritate Sacrae Scripturae, 266-67. See also Opus Evangelicum,
i, 119.
 THE MOMENT OF VISION SI
cisely what the Possessioners within the Church had
done.*® Again, Mahomet added his own inventions to the
Law: but the religious orders of the West had done the
same.’” To crown all—and this was the secret of his suc-
cess—Mahomet, conscious that reason was against him,
had forbidden discussion of his Law.”° It was to be re-
ceived without question. But was this not also the rule of
Canon Law with regard to papal power? And later, with
regard to the Eucharist, his enemies took refuge in ig-
norance with the followers of Mahomet, saying “you can
believe with safety, but you cannot safely investigate.” *°
So, at bottom, the main struggle in the world was be-
tween Evangelical Christianity on the one hand and the
spirit of Islam on the other, and the latter was found in
prelates at home as much as in Moslems abroad. From
this there followed several consequences of great impor-
tance for the placing of Islam in a universal setting. It
was a heresy, as many earlier writers had suggested; but
a heresy not only or even chiefly at a doctrinal level, but
rather at the level of morals and practice; and at this
level the Western Church was more culpable even than
Islam.*° Moreover, since Islam was only curable by curing

Minora), 184. .
*° De Ecclesia, 517; De Officio Regis, 63; De Fide Catholica (Opera

*" De Blasphemia, 84; De Potestate Papae, 110; De Fundatione Sectarum

(Polemical Works), i, 30.
°° De Veritate Sacrae Scripturae, 261. At this date (1378) Wycliffe still
contrasted the Moslem stifling of discussion with the Christian liberty
of discussion among “prudent and grave philosophers.” But later the
actual practice of the Church appeared to him no better than that of Islam.
*° De Eucharistia, 118, 157, 286.
*° De Blasphemia, 275; De Apostasia, 67, where Wycliffe asserts that
82, WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
the diseases of Christendom, not only was war useless—
this was self-evident, since the impulses of war were the
very impulses which lay at the source of the disease “*—
but even preaching and argument directed at Islam were
subordinate to the reform of the Church from within.
And finally, as a further consequence of breaking down
the rigid distinction between Christendom and Islam,
salvation was not the prerogative of Christians alone. At
this point Wycliffe repeats and develops the condemned
doctrine of Uthred of Boldon:
Just as some who are in the Church are damned, so others out-
side the Church are saved. If you object that, if this is so, we
cannot call the Jews unbelievers, the Saracens heretics, the
Greeks schismatics, and so on, I reply, “Man can be saved from
any sect, even from among the Saracens, if he places no obstacle
in the way of salvation. From Islam and from other sects, those
who at the moment of death believe in the Lord Jesus Christ
will be judged to be faithful Christians.” °°
We generally see Wycliffe as one of the great destructive
forces within the medieval Church, and this, as seen after
the event, is no doubt right. But Wycliffe, in his view of
Islam, summed up the results of a century in which re-
sponsible men in the West had become critical of their
society as never before, and had found it less clearly dis-
tinguished from the outside world than had previously

Moslems are not so regulariter heretici as the irreligious prelates of his

own day; Opus Evangelicum, 1, 417-18.
** Wycliffe puts the wars of kingdom against kingdom in the West on
the same level as the wars of so-called Christians against Saracens (Opus
Evangelicum, i, 114).
** De Fide Catholica (Opera Minora), 112.
 THE MOMENT OF VISION 82
been hoped and believed. Wycliffe’s major conclusions
about Islam did not have much, or perhaps any, general
influence, because the system of thought in which they
_ cohered was rigorously repressed. But the moral and in-
tellectual atmosphere which made his conclusions seem
plausible continued, either by repulsion or attraction, to __
affect the whole future of medieval thought about Islam.
To take only one quite trifling example. That gossipy old
man, Thomas Gascoigne, an Oxford character of the
middle of the fifteenth century who certainly loathed
Wycliffe and all his works, is found writing in his com-
monplace book: “I have heard a certain man, who is
worthy of credence, say that he heard among the pagans
and Saracens that there were three causes for their not
wishing to be converted to the faith of Jesus Christ: firstly,
the diversity and contradiction of opinion among Chris-
tians in various sects and on various subjects; secondly,
the evil lives of the Christians; and thirdly, the ill-faith
of the Christians, and especially of the Venetians and
Genoese.” °°
This explanation, which points inwards at Christians
themselves and their own deficiencies as the explanation for
their lack of success, and for the persistent deviation of
Islam from the truth, is the mark of the new age.

I
One thing, however, which became clear in the fifteenth

°° Thomas Gascoigne, Loci e Libro Veritatum, ed. J. E. Thorold Rogers,

1881, p. 102-3. This extract probably dates from a period shortly after
1450.
34 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
century was that something would have to be done about
Islam. When Wycliffe was writing, it was still possible,
but only just possible, to treat Islam as a moral but not
a physical danger. He could write as he did, as if there
was little to choose between prelates and Moslems, because
neither prelates nor Moslems, whatever their vices, were
threatening the country with the sword. The growth of
Islam was a fact, but it was a distant prospect. Now it
grew ominously nearer. Five years after Wycliffe’s death
the Serbs collapsed before the Turkish attack; by the end
of the fourteenth century the Turks were masters of the
Balkans, except for Bosnia and Albania. Then, as often
happens, the danger failed to develop. There was time to
indulge in false hopes. But, in the end, under massive
blows Constantinople fell; the Turks stood on the Adriatic;
Hungary was threatened with destruction. By 1460, the
outposts of western Europe, of Latin Christendom, had
been reached and breached.
The reaction to these long-expected events was a mixture
of fear and hope. There was little reason for the latter,
but the fall of Constantinople had at least solved the
obstinate Greek problem that had so long eluded the
efforts of statesmen. There was a hope—illusory, as the
event showed—that the elimination of this domestic enemy
might have beneficial results, and that the direct con-
frontation of the West with Islam might also revive the
ancient Crusading spirit. These were the possibilities be-
fore statesmen in the mid-fifteenth century. They prepared
for a Crusade, and hoped that a Crusade would not be
necessary, perhaps because at bottom they knew it would
 THE MOMENT OF VISION 85
not be possible. This was the situation which confronted
the four statesmen with whom we shall now be concerned.
They were men of about the same age, all bishops, three
of them cardinals or about to become cardinals; one was
a Franciscan, one was to become pope.** By the middle
of the fifteenth century they had all had their full share
of troubles. The most obvious difference between them
was their nationality: John of Segovia was a Spaniard,
Nicholas of Cusa a German, Jean Germain a Frenchman,
and Aeneas Silvius an Italian. But they had one thing in
common: they had all been through the chastening ex-
perience of the Council of Basel. The Council had forced
men—able, academic men, not prone to decisive action—
to take sides, and one way or another they had all suf-
fered in the process. Two of them had suffered in going
through the unpleasant experience of changing sides; the
third in the even more unpleasant experience of not
changing sides; only the Frenchman had been untroubled
by doubts. This experience was extraordinarily formative
in their lives. They had all (except the Frenchman) been
strong supporters of Conciliar views, and even those who
abandoned them did not abandon their sympathy with
**John of Segovia was born about 1400; created a cardinal by the
anti-pope Felix V in 1440; titular archbishop of Caesarea in 1453; retired
to the priory of Aiton in Savoy in 1453; died in May 1458. Nicholas of
Cusa was born in 1401; created a cardinal by Nicholas V in 1448; died
in 1464. Jean Germain was born about 1400; bishop of Nevers and first
chancellor of the Order of the Golden Fleece in 1430; bishop of Chalon-
sur-Sadne, 1436; died in 1461. Aeneas Silvius was born in 1405; Secretary
to the Council of Basel, 1436-1440, and to the anti-pope Felix V, 1440-
1442; Bishop of Trieste, 1447, and of Siena, 1450; Cardinal, 1456; Pope,
1458; died, 1464.
 86 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
the other side. They had learnt a habit of conciliation; and
conciliation had already achieved more inside Europe than
could have been achieved by any other method. It had
prepared the way for the re-establishment of Papal unity,
it had brought the Hussite movement to an end, it had
briefly brought about the union of the Greek and Latin
churches. These were the results of interminable weari-
some negotiations. Only the problem of Islam remained
as a major physical and intellectual challenge to Europe’s
peace of mind and body. In what ways could the experi-
ence of the last few decades be applied to the solution of
this age-old problem? This was the question foremost in
the minds of all four statesmen in the decade from 1450
to 1460, and their answers are what we must now examine.

John of Segoua
We shall begin with John of Segovia. He had started
as a professor at Salamanca, and from there he went to
the Council of Basel in 1433.°° He was a strong supporter
of the authority of the Council and wrote its history—a
vast work which occupies 2500 folio pages in the printed
edition.** In the end he found himself on the wrong side
as an adherent of the anti-Pope, and his last years were
spent in retirement at a small monastery in Savoy, a
°° The main incidents of his life, especially so far as our subject is
concerned, are sketched in D. Cabanelas Rodriguez, Juan de Segovia y ed
problema tslamica, 1952. For his relations with Nicholas of Cusa, and the
Jatter’s reply to his proposals for meeting the Islamic danger, see R.
Klibansky and H. Bascour, Nicolai de Cusa De Pace Fidei (Mediaeval
, and Renatssance Studies, II, Supplement), 1956.
°° Historia gestorum generalis synodi Basiliensis, in Monumenta Con-
ciliorum generalium saec. XV, vols. I-IV.
 THE MOMENT OF VISION 8
useless and, in a worldly sense, a defeated man. Here he
devoted himself to the study of the Islamic question, and
during the last five years before his death in 1458 he did
two things: he made a new translation of the Koran, and
he tried to interest his distinguished friends in his plans
for solving the whole problem. Both these projects require
a brief consideration, and first of all the translation of the
Koran, which was the foundation of his larger plans.*’
There are three questions to be asked here: Why did
he think a new translation was necessary? What difficulties
did he come up against, and why are these significant?
How did he propose to use his work when it was finished ?
On the first question, it must be recognized that all
translations are more or less unsatisfactory, but the special
criticism that John of Segovia made of the old translation
of the Koran of Peter the Venerable was that it introduced
into the text the ideas of the Latins, and used words and
notions proper to the Christian world but not to that of
Islam. John of Segovia may not have been quite realistic
in thinking that a translation could be made without this
kind of contamination. He seems to have thought that by
keeping to the order of words and sections, and by form-
ing his style on that of the Koran, he could avoid the
weaknesses of which he was conscious in the older work.
In this he was perhaps wrong; but there are degrees of
contamination, and he was at least seriously concerned,
as previously controversialists had seldom been, not to
°’ The translation is lost, but the Prologue to it setting out John of
Segovia’s aims and difficulties is preserved, and printed by D. Cabanelas,
Juan de Segovia, pp. 279-302.
 88 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
misrepresent, however slightly, the thought of the rival
religion. We shall soon see why this was so important
to him.
But before looking further, we may take a brief look
at his difficulties. Even if his intentions did not command
respect, the difficulties which he faced and overcame would
do so. Nothing brings more clearly before our eyes the
decline in the serious interest in Islam during the previous
century and a half than the great difficulty he had in
finding anyone in Europe in 1453 who knew Arabic. The
Spanish Moslems were now in the same position as the
Spanish Christians six hundred years earlier: they had
largely abandoned their language and culture for that of
their conquerors. It took John of Segovia two years to
secure both an Arabic text of the Koran and a Moslem
jurist from Salamanca who was willing to come to Savoy
to help in the translation. They toiled together for several
months, and then the Moslem insisted on going back to
Spain to his newly married wife. The main work was
finished, but John of Segovia still hoped to make im-
provements. He asked the Minister-General of his own
Order, the Franciscans, to find an Arabic scholar. He him-
self looked far and wide. But he never succeeded in getting
a replacement ; and so far as we know, the work never
received its final revision. Despite all the projects of the
thirteenth century, and the decree of the Council of
Vienne in 1312, there was not a single Christian Arabic
scholar to be found in Europe.
What purpose was to be served by all this elaborate
labor? John of Segovia’s purpose differed in some im-
 THE MOMENT OF VISION 89
portant ways from that of earlier controversialists. In the
first place he wanted to bring the discussion down to
fundamental issues. He thought that earlier writers had
been bothered by too many inessential problems—the
morals of Mahomet, the logical refutation of his claim to
be a prophet, and so on. But the only really important
question was this: Is the Koran the word of God or not?
If, by a simple examination of the text, it can be shown
to contain contradictions, confusions, errors, traces of
composite authorship, these should—so he thought—con-
vince anyone that it was not what it claimed to be. Now
of course this could not be done if texts were quoted which
turned out to be mistranslations, or which themselves in-
troduced the confusions alleged to be found: in the Koran.

requirement. |
A completely accurate text was therefore the very first

In this program of textual accuracy and criticism we

can recognize a symptom of the Renaissance, in contrast
to Roger Bacon’s program of philosophical discussion.
The brisk syllogisms of Bacon were to be replaced by-
facts; critical scholarship was to take the place of logical
gymnastics. But all this work would be quite useless un-
less it could be brought to the notice of those for whom
it was intended. John of Segovia had a new idea also
about how this should be done, and he wrote to his in-
fluential friends to enlist their support. We must now
examine the plan which he outlined and the response he
elicited.
Much the longest of these letters to his friends is the
one he wrote to Nicholas of Cusa, the friend of earlier
 go WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
days. To him he poured forth his ideas in a copious
stream—so copious that no one has yet found the courage
to print them.** He started with the same basic thesis as
that of Bacon, a fellow Franciscan; and in many ways
we may look on him as Bacon’s successor. This thesis was
that war could never solve the issue between Christendom
and Islam. Bacon had pointed to the evil effects of war
on the conquered, and to the unlikelihood of success. John
of Segovia had a different reason, which shows a certain
affinity to that of Wycliffe. War was the natural mode of
expression of Islam, which was founded on a doctrine of
conquest. But this was contrary to the essence of Chris-
tianity; therefore Christendom must always be at a dis-
advantage in this kind of struggle. It was therefore only
by peaceful means that Christendom could win, because
only then was it true to itself.
But what were these peaceful means? Bacon, in common
with all his Franciscan contemporaries, seems to have
thought that when once the arguments against Islam had
been formulated they would require no real discussion:
they were self-evident, and it could be left to missionaries
and preachers to spread their influence. John of Segovia
saw that this was mistaken. Preaching would never be
allowed except in territory already reconquered from
°°T am indebted to Dom Bascour, Dr. Klibansky, and Mlle. M. T.
d’Alverny for their kindness in procuring for me microfilms of the four
existing manuscripts of John of Segovia’s letter: Salamanca University
' MSS. 19, pars ix, foll. 1-17, and 55, foll. 126-56; Vatican MS. Lat. 2923,
foll. 4-35; Paris, Bibl. Nat. MS. Lat. 3650, foll. 1-37. The list of contents
and conclusion of the letter are printed by D. Cabanelas, pp. 303-10.
 THE MOMENT OF VISION gI
Islam, and since he had excluded war he had excluded the
possibility of reconquest on a large scale. He was, I think,
the first man of peace to grasp that missions to convert
Islam were doomed to failure. The first problem to be
faced was therefore the problem of a new kind of com-
munication. The main purpose of his letters was to suggest
a new approach. To describe this he used an old word
in a new form, and with a new sense. It is a word which
has come in our own day to be heavy with meaning—
the word “conference” or, as John of Segovia accurately,
if pedantically, put it, contraferentia.”
With regard to this new method of persuasion, he made
one far-sighted observation: the conference (he said)
would have served a useful purpose even if it did not
achieve the end for which it was proposed—that is to say,
the conversion of the Moslems. In his rather long-winded
way, he listed thirty advantages which might be expected
even if it failed in its main object. Now this again was
quite a new conception. The traditional view was that
discussion with the infidel could only be justified by con-
version. But John of Segovia saw many partial and prac-
tical advantages, apart from this desirable end: he saw
the conference as an instrument with a political as well
as a strictly religious function, and in words which will
88This word contraferentia does not appear to be found in any other
author, and it was probably coined by John of Segovia to distinguish the
projected meeting of hostile parties from the friendly, and originally mo-
nastic, meetings associated with the words ‘conferentia’ and ‘collatio.’ The
history of the word ‘conferentia’ deserves a more extended enquiry.
 92 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
strike a chord in modern breasts he exclaimed that even
if it were to last ten years it would be less expensive and
less damaging than war.
Nicholas of Cusa
John of Segovia judged his man well in writing at such
length to Nicholas of Cusa. He could not have found a
more sympathetic listener. Nicholas was in philosophy a
Platonist, in temperament pacific and moderate, in pur-
pose deeply committed to the search for unity. In earlier
years he had been one of the chief negotiators with the
Hussites and the Greeks, and for many years he had been
collecting all he could find on the Islamic controversy.*°
He had recently written a work, his De Pace Fidei, a
dialogue between representatives of the leading religions
, of the world, in which he tried to embrace what was good
in the religions of all peoples and to see through the details
to the inner core of truth and unity. Moreover—and this
for the present purpose was of special importance—he
was a textual critic of outstanding power. He was one of
the earliest men of his time to treat historical documents
in a way that would win the approval of a modern scholar.
He already had several notable successes to his credit in
this field—much the most important being the demon-
stration that the Donation of Constantine was a forgery
of a later age.** His cautious spirit renounced the victory
_ ® For Nicholas’ account of his interest in the subject since about 1435,
see his Cribratio Alchoran, in the edition of his works, Basel, 1565, pp.
879-80.
*“This admirable example of historical argument is in his De Con-
cordantia Catholica, ili, 2, ed. G. Keller, 1959, pp. 328-37, where further
references will be found.
 THE MOMENT OF VISION 93
of declaring the demonstration complete, but it convinced
his contemporaries, and it puts most of the arguments that
still convince us today. So as a philosopher, as a man, as
a negotiator, and as a historian, Nicholas of Cusa was
very much the man whom John of Segovia was looking
for. He took up John of Segovia’s plans in a vigorous and
practical fashion. For instance, he suggested preparations
for the Conference. He wanted to have merchants sum-
moned from Cairo, Alexandria, Armenia, and Greece,
who would describe at first hand the ideas and practices
of Islam. And when materials had been collected, he
wanted to have intermediaries sent from the West to
Islamic countries, preferably, he says, temporal princes,
whom the Turks prefer to priests.** In this way the prep-
arations tor the great conference could take place. |
Above all this, in the years after he had received John
of Segovia’s plan, he read the main works of the earlier
controversy; and finally, in 1460, he wrote one of his most
typical productions: the Crzbratzo Alchoran. In this Sieving
of the Koran, he carried out in detail that plan of sys-
tematic literary, historical, and philological examination
which John of Segovia had desired.
He treated the Koran essentially as he had treated the
Donation of Constantine, but at much greater length.”
He tried to break it up into its various elements, and he
discovered, or thought he had discovered, that there were
three strands in the Koran. The first, a basic Nestorian
Christianity; second, anti-Christian sentiments introduced

“ Epistula ad Joannem de Segovia, in Klibansky and Bascour (above,

N. 35), P. 97-
“In the Basel edition of 1565 it occupies pp. 879-932.
94 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
by the Jewish adviser of Mahomet; and third, corruptions
introduced by Jewish “correctors” after Mahomet’s death.
I do not suppose that this analysis of the text of the Koran
has any value now, though it correctly identifies some of
the main intellectual influences in it. But Nicholas of
Cusa’s method for limiting the area of dispute and defin-
ing the issues is important. Like John of Segovia, he
abandoned the philosophical ground, and he tried to carry
further the plan of discovering in the Koran itself the
issues which separated Islam and Christendom, treating
it as a document written in good faith, with a character
and virtues of its own. In this way he hoped that he had
defined and limited the area of dispute. He reduced it
essentially to a dispute between Western Christianity and
Nestorian Christianity, a heresy which erred in the rela-
tively minor matter of the mode of the union of God with
the human nature of Christ. The work is immensely la-
borious to read, and unlike Nicholas’ discussion of the
Donation of Constantine it will not convince a modern
reader. But it was a first attempt to provide a scientific
basis for that fundamental criticism of the text which was
to be the first step toward the great conference envisaged
by John of Segovia.

Jean Germain
Not all of John of Segovia’s friends accorded his plan
the same friendly reception that Nicholas of Cusa did.
But they differed about it in different ways.
The least sympathetic of his correspondents was Jean
Germain, bishop of Chalon, Chancellor of the Order of
 THE MOMENT OF VISION 95
the Golden Fleece.** In addressing his project in this di-
rection John of Segovia showed his determination to per-
sist, however unlikely success might be. Jean Germain had
devoted his life to a purpose precisely the opposite of that
of the Salamancan doctor. He too deplored the indiffer-
ence of Christendom to the Islamic peril. But his remedy
was not to investigate afresh the way of peace. He preached
a return to more warlike and spirited virtues, as depicted
in the epics of the early Crusades. He had recently ad-
dressed the king of France in this vein:
Let us revive the spirit of Godfrey of Bouillon, of Philip the
Conqueror King of France, of St. Louis. If you do this, the
whole world will shout “Honor, glory, and victory to Charles
King of France, the Victorious, the new David, the new Con-
stantine, the new Charlemagne, who after all the conquests
granted him by God has used them for the relief of the Holy
Catholic Faith, and to his own honor and glory and everlasting
good name.” Amen.*°
His plan was to revive the primitive virtues of these
epic heroes, to stop the rot in Christendom through
chivalry and discipline and by the suppression of heresy
and error. It was not a bad plan, if only there was the
faintest chance of its being carried out. The worst that
can be said of Jean Germain is that he demanded virtues
more easily expressed in ceremonial and symbolism than
in deeds, and more flattering to the inclinations of a
44For Jean Germain, see G. Doutrepont, La Littérature francaise a
la cour des Ducs de Bourgogne, 1909, where his works are discussed; also,
Ch. Schefer, “Le discours du voyage d’oultremer au trés victorieux: roi
Charles VII prononcé en 1452 par Jean Germain, évéque de Chalon,”
Revue de (Ontent latin, Ill, 1895, pp. 303-42.
49] bid., 342.
 96 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
wealthy court than to the world at large. The one prac-
tical object to which he was deeply committed was the
Crusade, and most of his considerable energies were de-
voted to preparing the minds of rulers and people for
this longed-for event.
He can scarcely therefore have been pleased when he
received a few days before Christmas 1455 an enormous
budget of letters and treatises from John of Segovia, in-
tended to inculcate the futility of war and the necessity
for finding a peaceful solution to the problem of Islam.**
He replied on 26 December that the Christmas festivities
had prevented his reading the whole packet. Still in the
glow of the holiday season, he encouraged John of
Segovia’s researches, but he felt bound to point out that
the Turk was continuing his advance and that the whole
world would be in suspense until he was resisted. In an-
other letter he developed this argument in a more bellicose
spirit.’ The Holy War, he asserted, had long been con-
secrated by the decisions of popes and the practice of kings;
the Roman Church had given its authority and its indul-
gences to those who took part in it; it was supported by
the Old Testament, and by a long line of Christian heroes;
a new Crusade was in course of preparation; nothing
must be done to weaken the military purpose of western
Furope. As against this practical policy, what did John
“© John of Segovia’s letter, dated 18 December 1455, is printed in D.
Cabanelas (above, n. 35), pp. 325-28; the reply of 26 December is on
Pp. 329-30.
*? This letter does not appear to be preserved, but there is a mammoth
reply to it by John of Segovia in Vatican MS. Lat. 2923, foll. 40-136,
analyzed by D. Cabanelas, pp. 197-223.
 THE MOMENT OF VISION 97
of Segovia offer? A way of peace. But before this could be :
tried, the consent of the Moslem princes must be obtained. |
And how was this to be done? The Prophet of Islam had
forbidden all discussion of doctrine, and the history of
earlier attempts at discussion had shown that they were
bound to fail. A course of action so repugnant to Christian
sentiment would only be justified by a sure hope of success.
But, whereas the fruits would be small or nonexistent, the
damage to be expected was certain.
So Jean Germain wrote, as a straightforward prelate
chiefly concerned with the correct ordering of Christendom
and not with the subtleties of debate. It must be recognized
that much of what he says is unanswerable. And we may
also recognize that under the surface of the argument there
were two points where he and John of Segovia were in
fundamental disagreement. First of all, Jean Germain was
only interested in Christendom and in attempting to rally
it to a sense of its own identity: above all, he hated those
Christians—merchants and others, in increasing numbers—
who traveled in Islam and came back with scruples and
criticisms of the Christian faith.“ Unlike John of Segovia,
he feared the contamination of discussion. And unlike John
of Segovia, he placed no confidence in that consensus of
reasonable and well-informed men which had been the basis
of Conciliar thought. He looked rather to the prince,
fortified by the teaching of bishops like himself.*” Long
** Jean Germain had made this point in the Preface to his Dialogue of
a Christian and a Saracen, written in 1450 (Schefer, p. 303, and Doutre-
pont, p. 247).
“° See especially his Deux pans de la Taptsserie Chrétienne, 1457,
portraying “la conduyte et maniere comme les loyaulx chrestiens militans,
 98 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
ago, when he first became Chancellor of the Order of the
Golden Fleece, he had changed, or tried to change, the hero
of the Order from Jason, the pagan hero of legend, to
Gideon, the Jewish leader in the wars with the Philistines. __
He saw in the Fleece not that Golden Fleece of romance
but the fleece of Gideon which symbolized the Christian
mystery. If Europe could once again have warlike and
religious rulers, all would yet be well.
Aeneas Silvius
There is one last correspondent of John of Segovia who
also placed his reliance on the ruler, though he expressed
this reliance in quite a different way. In the last month of
his life John of Segovia took up his pen to address the rising
star of the Papal curia, an Italian this time, and the most
famous humanist of his day, Aeneas Silvius.’” This letter
was John of Segovia’s final effort. He was ill; he could
scarcely hold his pen; he was near to death. But it was
| important that this effort should be made. John of Segovia
exerted himself to please his correspondent. He praised the
speeches at those now distant German Diets in which
Aeneas had attempted to inspire Europe to resist the Mos-
lem. But he reminded him of the Evangelical warning
against meeting twenty thousand men with only ten thou-
sand. Let him not forget that there are generally more
Saracens than Christians. And at a deeper level, let him
pelerins et chevalereux conquerans doivent tendre a triumpher.” For a
description of this work, see Doutrepont, p. 252.
** For John of Segovia’s letter to Aeneas Silvius, see D. Cabanelas, pp.
343-49. Vatican MS, Lat. 2923 is probably the manuscript of treatises
which accompanied this letter (sbid., p. 232n).
 THE MOMENT OF VISION 99
remember that the gift of Christ to the Church was peace,
not war.
This is the general content of the letter, and we can
imagine that it made some impression on Aeneas. Some of
the points no doubt appealed to him as a humanist, inter-
ested in literary criticism. But the letter made no appeal to
him at all as a man of action and a statesman. He could not
reply to the dying John of Segovia. But his effective reply |
to his ideas was a letter sent in 1460 to the conqueror of
Constantinople, Mahomet II.°* This letter is a magnificent
composition. In its splendor of language, in its worldly
wisdom, in the skill with which the arguments are directed
to the ruling passion of the Ottoman for power, in its
concentration on essentials, and in the effective marshaling
of the rational defenses of Christianity, it is a masterpiece.
There was nothing in it to offend the susceptibilities of a
barbarian or a gentleman. The whole work is compounded
of clarity, vigor, and good sense, expressed with great
urbanity of manner, and incisiveness of argument. The one
thing which it lacks is any depth of sincerity. He wrote
rather as a lawyer with a brief than as a man speaking from
the heart. But from the point of view of a European states-
man it is hard to say that the attempt at persuasion in this
letter was not worth making.
The letter begins with a magnificent account of the
- strength of the kingdoms of Western Christendom, which
has no parallel that I can think of before Gibbon’s great
*? Besides the old editions, there is a new edition of the letter by G.
Toffanin, Pio Il: Lettera a Maometto II, 1953. The references which
follow are made to this edition.
100 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
eulogy of the West in his Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire. I have already cited this passage, which embodies
superbly the pride of Europe at the height of its supremacy
in the world. The situation was far different in 1460 with
the Turk roaring into Europe. Yet in the face of all disaster
Pius II managed to express the pride and confidence of
superior civilization. “You are not” he says, “so ignorant of
our affairs that you do not know the power of the Christian
people—of Spain so steadfast, Gaul so warlike, Germany so
populous, Britain so strong, Poland so daring, Hungary so
active, and Italy so rich, high-spirited, and experienced in
the art of war.” °* Let the Turk not suppose, from the easy
successes of the last few years, that he can hope to overcome
the nations of Europe. He has not yet begun his real task.
Then Pius goes on:
It is a small thing, however, that can make you the greatest
and most powerful and most famous man of your time. You ask
what it is. It is not difficult to find. Nor have you far to seek.
It is to be found all over the world—a little water with which
you may be baptized, and turn to the Christian sacraments and
believe the gospel. Do this, and there is no prince in the world
who will exceed you in glory, or equal you in power. We will call
you emperor of the Greeks and of the East. The land which you
now occupy by force you will then hold by right, and all Chris-
tians will reverence you and make you their judge. It is impos-
sible for you to succeed while you follow the Moslem law. But
only turn to Christianity and you will be the greatest man of
of your time by universal consent.°®
“Perhaps,” the argument continues, “you do not wish
to give up your religion and become a Christian. But con-
* Toffanin, p. 110.
°° Ibid., pp. 113-14.
 THE MOMENT OF VISION 101
sider. There are many points of agreement between Chris-
tians and Moslems: one God, the creator of the world; a
belief in the necessity for faith; a future life of rewards and
punishments; the immortality of soul; the common use of
the Old and New Testaments; all this is common ground.
We only differ about the nature of God.” °* And here he
gives an explanation in rational and unemotional terms of
the points of difference between the two faiths. Having
done this with noble felicity of phrase, he goes on to some
of the charges made against the Christians. In the first place
there is the charge of corrupting the Bible. On the basis
of textual history he easily shows how unlikely a charge
this is, and he follows up his explanation by setting
Mahomet II a small problem in textual criticism to em-
phasize its unlikelihood. Are the old texts of the Old
Testament likely to be more corrupt than those newer texts
known to Mahomet and his followers? And if the texts
of the Greeks, Jews, and Gentiles agree against those of the
Saracens, which is likely to be right?°? By scholarly stand-
ards his arguments here are irreproachable.

*“T summarize the argument of pp. 125-29. The transition from

political to religious arguments is made with very great skill, using the
example of ancient rulers and philosophers to bridge the formidable gap
between the splendor of the world and the poverty of the Gospels. No
summary can do justice to this forensic skill.
°° *Quaerimus ex te, magne princeps, si te iudice duo rationum codices
afferantur, quorum alter ex altero transcriptus existat, et in eo de quo est
facta transcriptio ‘Sempronius mille debere talenta’ scriptus est; in
exemplari ‘duo millia’, Cui potius fidem dabis? Aut non exemplo potius
quam examplari? . .. Rursus ex te quaerimus: quatuor inveniuntur
rationum libri apud quatuor negotiatores, Se1um, Gaium, Titium et
Sempronium. In quo quem Sempronius producit ‘creditor ipse Lucii in
centum talentis’ scriptus invenitur; in aliis ‘debitor’, Cui credes? Quid
respondebis? An non tres libros uni praeferres?” (pp. 158-59).
 102 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
Then finally: “if there were nothing else against your
law, this alone would be sufficient to condemn it, that your
legislator forbade it to be discussed.” He was, he allows, a
wise and ingenious man; he knew that his position could
not be defended by reason, and he rightly calculated the
assets which he had. But it is only by a misuse of language
that we can give to his system the proud name of Law.
“Does this shock you? Then hear the true nature of Law.
Law is reason in action. What is against reason is against
law. But your legislator forbids reasoning, therefore what
he says cannot be reasonable, neither can it be a law.” °°
Thus, in concluding his argument with an appeal to reason,
Pius II turned against Islam that feature in its law which
~ Wycliffe also had selected as the crucial point of identity
between the Prophet of Islam and the Mahomets of the
Western Church. But he expressed the self-confidence of
the West in the superiority of its classical and Christian
heritage, in contrast to Wycliffe, who had made articulate
the disillusion that lay beneath the surface. In the circum-
stances of the time, the confidence must have appeared
foolhardy; in the light of later events it was half-prophetic.
I cannot withhold my admiration from this production.
It is the work of a statesman, a humanist, and a man of the
world, going back to earlier and more primitive arguments
| than any we have so far encountered, to the kind of argu-
ments of political prudence which convinced Constantine
and Clovis. But in his arrogant and intellectual way, instead
of the promise of miraculous intervention which accom-
panied the political prudence of Constantine and Clovis,
°° [bid., pp. 165-66. |
 THE MOMENT OF VISION 103
Aeneas Silvius made his appeal only to reason and practical
good sense, set off in all the splendor of Renaissance
rhetoric. Yet it was, of course, unsuccessful, and perhaps it
deserved to be so.

IT]
We are coming to the end of our course, and there is little
now to do but to draw together the threads in the contro-
versy we have just examined, and to take a final look
forward and backward. I have called the period of about
ten years, from about 1450 to 1460, when our four scholars
and statesmen were at work on the problem of Islam, the
moment of vision. The vision was contradictory and evi-
dently in many ways deceptive, but I think it can be claimed
that it was larger, clearer, and more lifelike than at any
previous moment, or any later one for several centuries at
least. The writers of this period, by a great effort, had made
themselves masters of the knowledge of the thirteenth cen-
tury; and to this they added the wider experience and
capacity for self-criticism of the fourteenth. They saw the
full complexity of the problem, and they saw it as an urgent
reality that required an answer. They eschewed grandiose
attempts to give Islam a distinct role in world history. But,
at the other end of the scale, they were all determined to cut
through trivialities and unnecessary detail, and get to the
central issues. They differed widely about the goal to be
reached and the way to reach it, but they tried to be simple,
comprehensive, and effective. In the mere fact that they
differed they show an advance on their predecessors; and
despite their differences they agree in this: they appealed to
 104 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
practical reason and common sense rather than to refined
and unsubstantial speculations. |
They got to grips with each other, but they failed to get
to grips with Islam. Neither the conference desired by John
of Segovia and Nicholas of Cusa, nor the Crusade desired
by Jean Germain and Aeneas Silvius, still less the latter’s
appeal to the Sultan Mahomet II, had any future. The ad-
vance of Islam on the Eastern frontier continued and was
not halted till the middle of the sixteenth century; Islamic
power continued to grow in the Mediterranean, and the
danger that Moslems in Syria would join hands with Moors
in Spain persisted for many years. Crusade and argument,
| preaching and persuasion, alike faded into the background.
As the Turkish danger reached its height and Islam
threatened to engulf Europe, there was one last outburst
of the medieval apocalyptic prophesying, similar to that of
Eulogius and Paul Alvarus in ninth century Spain and
Joachim of Fiore in Italy in the late twelfth century. In
1542 the Turks had overrun Hungary, the first great king-
dom of western Europe to be destroyed by external attack
since the Moslem invasion of Visigothic Spain in 711.
This was the first reversal of the expansive movement which
had added new kingdoms on the eastern frontier of Europe
in the tenth century. The reaction of the King of France
had been to ally himself with the Turk. At any moment it
seemed that Germany also might succumb.

Luther
It was at this point that the aging Luther, now an angry
old man, made as a tract for the times a translation in his
 THE MOMENT OF VISION 105
own vigorous German of one of the great anti-Islamic works
of the thirteenth century, Ricoldo da Montecroce’s Con-
futatio Alchoran.°" To this translation he added a preface
and appendix in which—probably without knowing it—he
gave powerful expression to one well-established medieval
tradition of thought, that of despair about the possibility of
any political or intellectual solution for the problem of
Islam. Luther was persuaded that the Moslems could not be
converted: their hearts were hardened, they despised the
Scriptures, they rejected argument, they clung to the tissue
of lies of the Koran.’* This was only what Jean Germain
had said in advocating the renewal of the Crusade. But, in
Luther’s view, war was useless against Islam sc long as the
West remained in its sins: “God will never give us victory
when such people as those we have fight for us.” In rejecting
war as a solution he was with Roger Bacon, Wycliffe, John
_ . of Segovia, and probably the majority of men of intellect
since the thirteenth century. But unlike them, and unlike
anyone in the West since the ninth century, he looked

°' Verlegung des Alcoran, Bruder Richardi Prediger Ordens, ver-

deudscht, durch D. Mar. Lu., Wittemberg, 1542. Luther’s Preface contains
several curious illustrations of the low state of Islamic studies and the
short-lived effect of the work of the previous century. He says that he had
long ago read Ricoldo’s book but that he did not credit its assertions that
men could believe such follies. He thought it simply another example of ,
the fantasies of papal superstition. He wanted to read the Koran but he
could find no Latin translation. Then, on Shrove Tuesday 1542, a transla-
tion came into his hands and he saw at once that Ricoldo had been
speaking the truth. Thereupon he translated Ricoldo’s work into German.
°* “Denn es bezeuget auch dieser Richard, das die Mahometischen nicht
zu bekeren sint, aus der Ursache, sie sind so hart verstockt, das sie fast
alle unsers Glaubens Artickel spotten und hénisch verlachen, als werens
Nerrische, von unmiiglichen dingen gewesche” (fol. B). |
 106 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
forward to the probability that Christendom would be en-
gulfed in Islam. He wrote to strengthen the faith of those
Christians who might find themselves in this condition.
The success of Turks and Saracens over so many hundreds
of years did not show that they enjoyed the favor of God: —
they were only fulfilling the prophecy that the blood of
Christ must be shed from the beginning of the world to the
end. So (he says) we must let the Turks and Saracens work
their will, as men on whom the wrath of God has come,
provided we stay in God’s grace and observe His word and
sacraments.”
Luther wrote as if he were a man in the twilight of
Christendom before the long night, and, as he looked into
the future, he asked whether Mahomet and his followers
were the final Antichrist. Like Joachim of Fiore, he
answered No. Islam was too gross and irrational for this
mighty role: the true and final, subtle and insidious Anti-
christ must come from within the Church; he was none
other than the Pope himself.°® This had been the picture
~ also of Joachim and of much late medieval apocalyptic,
though Luther added thereto his own theological hostility.
For him and them, Christendom was caught in the grip of
an external and an even more formidable internal enemy.
°° “Also mtissen wir die Turcken Sarracenen mit irem Mahomet lassen
faren, als uber die der zorn Gottes, bis ans ende komen ist (wie S.
Paulus von den Iiiden sagt). Und dencken wie wir erhalten werden und
bey Gottes gnaden bleiben miigen, damit wir nicht mit dem Mahmet
verdampt werden” (fol. Aiiii’).
*° “Und ich halt der Mahmet nicht fur den Endechrist. Er machts zu
grob ... Aber der Bapst bey uns ist der rechte Endechrist, der hat den
hohen, subtilem, schénen gleissenden Teuffel. Der sitzt inwendig in der
Christenheit” (fol. X). |
 ‘THE MOMENT OF VISION 107
To succeed against the external enemy, it must first re-
nounce the internal enemy.” Till this time there could be
no counsel but to suffer. So Wycliffe too had said.”
Here then we reach intellectually the final dissolution of
the idea of Christendom as an organic unity overcoming
its external enemies by argument or force. What actually
happened of course was neither the dissolution foreseen by
Luther nor the triumph which so many others had planned
and striven for. So far as Islam was concerned, their plans
came to nothing, but the habits of mind acquired in the
long struggle for comprehension had an outlet elsewhere,
and nowhere more fruitfully than in the Salamancan doc-
tors, of whom John of Segovia had been one of the earliest
luminaries. They turned their thoughts from Islam to the
Indies, and attempted in the same spirit of rational modera-
tion to discover the principles to be followed in solving the
problems of the new age as westward the course of empire
took its way. So far as the Islamic problem was ever solved,
it was solved by events and not by thoughts or projects,
however noble. The practical result of so much intellectual
effort was meager in the extreme. But as a chapter in the
** “Sollen wir nu gluck haben wider den Mahmet, den eusserlichen
Feind der Christenheit, so werden wir zuvor miissen dem inwendigen
Feinde, den Endechrist, mit seinem Teuffel absagen, durch rechtschaffene
Busse .. .” (fol. Xiii).
°° Like Wycliffe, Luther also saw the Islamization of the West in the
typical products of the Middle Ages: “Und zwar ists nicht viel besser bey
uns Christen auch gangen. Denn da sind so viel Lugen in unsern
Alcoranen, Descretalen, Lugenden, Summen und unzelichen Buchern, da
doch niemand weis woher sie komen, wenn sie angefangen, wer die
Meister seien” (fol. V). Likewise in the refusal to investigate on the plea
that “non potest omnium ratio reddi” (fol. VY) the medieval church had
shown its affinity to Islam.
108 WESTERN VIEWS OF ISLAM
history of European experience it has a notable place. It has
taken us from the Biblical exegesis of Bede and the Carolin-
gian scholars to the irrepressible imaginative creations of
the early twelfth century. We have risen to the bold and
hopeful speculations of the thirteenth century and descend-
ed to the solid ground of textual criticism in the fifteenth.
We have observed the varying effects of the Bible in turn-
ing men’s minds now to historical reconstructions, and
intermittently to powerful and awe-inspiring apocalyptic
visions. We have seen how the unpredictable movements of
peoples on a vast scale, and the inconspicuous efforts of
translators in Toledo and elsewhere, have changed the whole
aspect of the Islamic problem. And then we have seen great
systems of thought suddenly eclipsed and forgotten under
the impact of a new turn in world events.
Most conspicuous to us is the inability of any of these
systems of thought to provide a finally satisfying explana-
tion of the phenomenon they had set out to explain—still
less to influence the course of practical events in a decisive
way. At a practical level, events never turned out either so
well or so ill as the most intelligent observers predicted;
and it is perhaps worth noticing that they never turned out
better than when the worst was confidently predicted, or
worse than when the best judges confidently expected a
happy ending. Was there any progress? I must express my
conviction that there was. Even if the solution of the prob-
lem remained obstinately hidden from sight, the statement
of the problem became more complex, more rational, and
more related to experience in each of the three stages of
controversy which we have examined. The scholars who
 THE MOMENT OF VISION 109

success.
labored at the problem of Islam in the Middle Ages failed
to find the solution they sought and desired; but they
developed habits of mind and powers of comprehension
which, in other men and in other fields, may yet deserve
 ADDITIONS TO NOTES

Page 2, note 2, Several of the documents discussed in the first chapter

have been commented on by M. T. d’Alverny, “La connaissance de l’Islam
en occident du IX° au milieu du XIII° siécle,” L’Occidente e l'Islam nell
Valto medioevo: Setttmane dt studio del centro italiano di stud: sull alto
medtoevo, VII 1964 (1965), 577-602.
For a recent treatment of the subject as a whole, see also N. Daniel, The
Arabs and Medieval Europe, London, 1975. W. Montgomery Watt, The
Influence of Islam on Medieval Europe (Islamic Surveys 9, Edinburgh,
1972) is a useful guide to the influence of Islam, as contrasted with views
about Islam, in the medieval West.
Page 10, note 6. Havet’s edition of Gerbert’s letters has now been
superseded by F. Weigle, Die Briefsammlung Gerberts von Reims, Mon.
Germ. Hist. Briefe d. deutschen Kaiserzeit, ii, 1966.
Page 20, note 13. For the events of the mid-ninth century, see E. P.
Colbert, The Martyrs of Cordoba (850-859): A Study of the Sources,
Catholic University of America: Studies in Medieval History, XVII, 1962.
Page 31, note 27. The second and last of C. Cambier’s articles on the
Vita Mahumett of Embricon of Mayence is in Latomus, XX, 1961, 364-380.
Page 37, note 5. For an account of Peter the Venerable’s work in this
field, see J. Kritzeck, Peter the Venerable and Islam, Princeton, 1964.
Page 41, note g. See now Dr. Marjorie Reeves’s two important studies
of Joachim of Fiore and his influence: The Influence of Prophecy in the
Later Middle Ages, Oxford, 1969; and (with B. Hirsch-Reich) The ‘Fig-
urae’ of Joachim of Fiore, Oxford-Warburg Studies, 1972.
Page 53, note 15. A forthcoming study of Translations and Translators
by M. T. d’Alverny will provide evidence that the production of transla-
- tions in Spain at this period was less closely associated with Toledo than has
been thought. Meanwhile, for the general picture, see C. H. Haskins,
“Translators from the Arabic in Spain,” Studies in the History of Medieval
Science, 1924, 3-10.
Page 55, note 17. 1 am now much less convinced than I was that the
translation of Mahomet’s journey through Heaven and Hell known as
Liber de Scala Machomett, influenced Dante in any way, certainly not in
any important way. See my essay “Dante and Islam,” in Relations between
East and West in the Middle Ages. ed. Derek Baker, Edinburgh, 1973,
pp. 133-145, with the literature quoted there. |
Page 73, note 12. Raymond Lull’s life, works and influence may now
be studied in several recent books, notably in J. N. Hillgarth, Ramon Lull
and Lulltsm in Fourteenth Century France (Oxford-Warburg Studies, Ox-
ford, 1971), where there are many interesting references to Islamic
influences.
Abbassids, 62 cation of religions, 58-59; opin-
Abd ar-Rahman III, emir of Cor- ions, on Crusades, 57, on preach-
dova, 24 ing, 57-58; optimism of, 58;
Acre, 68, 71 refutation of Islam, 60
Adso, De ortu et tempore Anti- Baghdad, 46-47, 62, 68
christi, 26n Basel, Council of, 85-86:
Aeneas Silvius, see Pius II Beatific Vision, doctrine of, 54-55
Alcuin, 18n Bede, the Venerable, 16-18, 42;
Alfarabi, 7 Saracens in his biblical exegesis,
Almohads, 41 16; sources, 16n
Alvarus, Paul, 21-26; Indiculus Bernard, St. 38
luminosus, 23-24; Liber apolo- Bible, the: its use in interpreting
geticus martyrum, 25; Lafe of Islam, 15, 23-24, 61, 67; textual
Eulogius, 22; on Book of Daniel, criticism of, ror
23-24; on Mahomet I, 24; on Boethtus, ro
Prophet Mahomet, 25 Buddhists, 48-50
Angelomus of Luxeuil, 18n Bukhara, 10-11
Antichrist, 24-25, 42n, 106 Burchard of Mount Syon, 63-64
Arabic, study of, 58, 72, 88
Aristotle: logic, 10; Metaphysics, II; Carlyle, Thomas, 4
Meteorology, 80; Polztics, 58 Carolingian scholars, 18
Averr 0¢s, 7) 73> 78 Charles the Bald, Emperor, 20n
Averroism, in West, 53-55 Christians: Georgian, 47; Nestorian,
Avicenna, 7, 9, 10-11; influence in 48, 68, 69, 74, 79, 93; Oriental,
the West, 53-55 44, 46, 63-64
Clement IV, Pope, 52
Bacon, Roger, 52-61, 90; Opus Contraferentia, 91
Maius, 56-60; Opus Minus, 56n; Cordova, 20; Christians in, 21
Opus Tertium, 56n, 58n; classifi- Crusades: 1st, 27; 5th, 45-47; 7th,
112 INDEX
48; in 14th century, 71; Innocent _ Iaselick, chief prelate of Nestorians,
IIl’s appeal for, 42n; Jean Ger- 64
main on, 95; opinions on, 43-44, Ignorance, types of, 14
57, 84, 105 Impostors, the three, 75
Innocent III, Pope, 42
Damietta, 45 Innocent IV, Pope, 47
Daniel, Book of, 23-24 : Isfahan, 10 ,
Dante, Moslem influence on, 55-56 Ishmael: supposed progenitor of
David, King, 46-47 Saracens, 17; symbol of Jewish
Dialectic, 51 race, 17
Doughty, C. M., 3 Isidore of Seville, 16n
Islam: and Byzantium, 12; and
Embrico of Mainz, Vita Mahumett, Christianity, 58-61, 78-82, r01;
3on conversions to, 69, 74; eclecticism
Eulogius, 22-26 : of, 80; Greek thought in, 8—9, 11;
Eusebius, 16n a heresy of Christianity, 38, 81,
94; intellectual development, 8;
Frederick II, Emperor, 75 parody of Christianity, 25, 32, 71;
philosophy in, 59-60; political
Gascoigne, Thomas, 83 development, 7; refutations of, 60,
Genghis Khan, see Jenghis Khan 93-94, IOI-102; relations with
Gerbert (Pope Sylvester IT), 9-10 Europe, 12, 84, 100, 104; supposed
Germain, Jean, 85, 94—98; chancellor beliefs of, 32; theology of, 5-6,
of Order of Golden Fleece, 95; 34-36, 48-50, 54-55; worldliness
and Crusade, 95-97; views on of, 58, 80
conference with Moslems, 97—98
Gibbon, Edward, views on Islam James of Verona, 70~71
and the West, 12-13, 100 Jenghis Khan, 47
Glaber, Ralph, 28n Jews, contrast with Islam in West-
Godfrey of Bouillon, 95 ern thought, 5
Guibert of Nogent, Gesta Dei per Joachim of Fiore: his apocalyptic
Francos, 30n, 31 visions, 40-41; Liber Figurarum,
40n, 41n; views on Antichrist, 41,
Hagar, wife of Abraham, 16-17 106 7
Hellenism, 8 John of Damascus, 18n
Henry I, king of England, 35 John of Piano Carpini, 47
Higden, Ranulf, 78 John of Segovia, 85, 86-92; his
Hildebert of Tours, pseudo-, Vita project of a conference, 91—93;
Mahumett, 30n correspondence, with Aeneas Sil-
Honorius III, Pope, letter on 5th vius, 98-99; with Jean Germain,
Crusade, 45-46 96-97, with Nicholas of Cusa,
Hugh Capet, king of France, 9 92-93
 INDEX 113
Johnson, Samuel, on the ancient Otto III, Emperor, 9
philosophers, 4 Otto of Freising, Chronicon, 36
Karakorum, debate at, 47-51 Paris, University of, 54
Knowles, Professor D., 76 Paschasius Radbertus, Commentary
Koran, the, 26, 70, 78, 89, 105; on St. Matthew, 27
Nicholas of Cusa on, 93-94; Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny,
Ricoldo da Montecroce on, 105; 37-390, 42
translation of, by John of Segovia, Petrus Alfonsi, 35

Kurds, 69 95
87, by Robert of Ketton, 37-39, 87. Philip II, Augustus, king of France,

. Pius II, 85, 98-103; letter from John

Louis IX, king of France, 48 of Segovia, 98-99; letter to
Lull, Raymond, 68, 72n Mahomet II, gg—102
Luther, Martin, 104-107; translation Polo, Marco, 75n
of Ricoldo da Montecroce, 105; Preaching to Moslems: in Roger
views, on Antichrist, 106, on Cru- Bacon, 57-58; in John of Segovia,
sade, 105, on Koran, 105 QO-91
Prester John, 46n
Mahomet: as Antichrist, 24-25, 42n, Porphyry, Introduction to Aristotle’s
106; authorship of Koran, 93-94; logic, 10
“cardinal,” 74; condemnation of Pseudo-Turpin, Historia Caroli, 35—
reason by, 81, 102; Gibbon on, 13; 36
journey through heavens, 55; Law
of, 68, 71, 80; life of, in northern Reeves, Miss M. E., 41n
Europe, 29-32, 74, in Spain, 25; Renan, Ernest, Averroés et Tl’ Aver-
unknown in West, 15 roisme, I
Mahomet I, emir of Cordova, 24 Richard I, king of England, 40-41
Majolus, abbot of Cluny, 28n Ricoldo da Montecroce, Confutatio
Mandeville, Sir John, 75 Alchoran, 105; Liber peregrina-
Matthew de Acquasparta, 75n tionis, 68—69
Mongols, 44, 47, 64-65, 68, 69n, 74; Robert of Ketton, translator of
embassies to West, 65 Koran, 37
Moslems: conversion to Christianity, | Roger of Howden, 4on

of, 69-70 36
| 63, 83; salvation of, 82; virtues Roland, debate of, with Ferracutus,
Romance, the rise of, 29
Navarre, 25n, 26
Nicholas of Cusa, 85, 89, 92-94; St. Germain-des-Prés, 20n
Cribratio Alchoran, 93-04; De Saladin, 41; in Dante’s Divine
Pace Fidei, 86n, 92; on Donation Comedy, 56
of Constantine, 92 Salamanca, 107
114 INDEX
Saracens: in Chanson de Roland, Uthred of Boldon, 76, 79, 82
32; descent from Hagar, 17;
etymology, 17m; supposed char- Vienne, Council of, 72, 88 |
acteristics of, 29, 32; supposed Vincent, St., 2on
origins in Old Testament, 15; Vincent of Beauvais, 78
supposed numbers of, 42-43
Sarah, wife of Abraham, 17, 18 Walter of Compiégne, Otia de
Simon Semeonis, 70 Machomete, 30n, 31n
Spain: Era of, 25n; importance in Walzer, Dr. R., 8
medieval thought, 19, 53, 88; William of Malmesbury, 34-35
Moslems in, 20~21, 104; trans- William of Rubroek, 47-52; account
lators in, 53, 87-88 of his journey to Karakorum, 51;
MSS of, 51n
Tartars, see Mongols William of Tripoli, 62-63
Thomas Aquinas, St., 55, 73 Wycliffe, John, 77-83; and Islamiza-
Toledo, 53 tion of the West, 79-82