Crusade and Mission: European Approaches Toward the Muslims
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Crusade and Mission: European Approaches Toward the Muslims
262Hardcover
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Overview
Originally published in 1984.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691635897 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2016 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #725 |
| Pages: | 262 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.10(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Crusade and Mission
European Approaches Toward the Muslims
By Benjamin Z. Kedar
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1984 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-10246-7
CHAPTER 1
The Early Centuries: The Muslims beyond the Bounds of European Mission and Polemics
The history of Europe's relations with Islam begins with an enigma: Did a Roman pontiff attempt, some twenty years after the death of Muhammad, to convert Muslims to Christianity?
The Roman pontiff in question is Martin I (649–53), the fierce opponent of Monothelitism — the Christological formula propounded by the Byzantine emperors of his day — who was eventually abducted to Constantinople, charged with treason, and exiled to the Crimea. In a letter Martin wrote after his abduction, he intimates that his enemies accused him of dispatching to the Saracens letters, money, and "a so-called tomus [instructing them] in what manner they should believe." Martin does not indicate whether the Saracens with whom he purportedly maintained relations were the new Saracen masters of the Levant, or the Saracens who briefly raided Sicily in 652. Whichever may be the case, the letter leaves no doubt that a pope was said to have tried to spread Christianity among Saracens around the year 650 — that is, precisely when the authoritative text of the Koran was being established.
Although Martin categorically denied the charges, they were not necessarily trumped up. It is a fact that Martin endeavored to establish an anti-Monothelitic church in the patriarchates of Jerusalem and Antioch, and that he even appointed a special apostolic vicar, John of Philadelphia, authorizing him to install orthodox bishops, priests, and deacons in those Saracen-ruled areas. Why should Martin not have also contemplated offering the orthodox faith to the Saracen conquerors themselves? It would not have been the papacy's first attempt at evangelizing a distant, barbarous nation; only half a century earlier, Gregory I had initiated the mission to the Anglo-Saxons. Martin, moreover, shared with the Saracens a common enemy: the Monothelitic emperor at Constantinople. (Reasons for attempting to convert the Saracen raiders of Sicily are even more obvious.) The accusation leveled at Martin, therefore, is not inherently improbable. But, in the absence of corroborative evidence, the possibility that a mid-seventh-century pope tried to convert Saracens must remain in the realm of conjecture. The hard fact is that such an attempt was ascribed to Pope Martin — obviously in order to brand him a traitor to the empire — and that he took pains to deny it.
Another hard fact is that more than three centuries will pass before an attempt at Muslim conversion will again be alluded to in a European source, and more than five centuries before Europeans will launch a systematic missionary effort among the Muslims. This is a puzzling fact, since the very centuries in which Catholics abstained from attempts at evangelizing the Muslims abounded in Catholic missionary activities in the European north and east: These were the centuries in which the Christian faith was carried to the Frisians, the Danes and the Swedes, the Slavs, the Prussians and the Hungarians. The discrepancy between the assiduous missionizing in one geographical area and its total absence in another may best be exemplified by the life story of Willibald (ca. 700–787), the Anglo-Saxon monk who played a significant role in the Christianization of the south German tribes. Willibald, who was to traverse "through the uncultivated province of the Bavarians shoving the plough, sowing seeds, reaping the harvest," had gone on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the 720s. Yet in the detailed account of his sojourn in the land of the "Saracen pagans" (pagani Sarracini) there is nothing to suggest that the future cultivator of the Bavarians ever attempted to preach his faith to the Saracens he encountered. The nun Hugeburc, who committed to writing the story of Willibald's pilgrimage, does relate that he came close to being martyred in the East — not because he preached the Christian faith, but for smuggling some balsam through the customhouse of Tyre.
Nor did the Muslims of Spain, so close to the heartland of Catholic Europe, become a missionary target. It is true that Archbishop Wilcharius of Sens, after having obtained the permission of Pope Hadrian I, consecrated about the year 790 a certain Egila as bishop, and dispatched him to Spain "for the preaching of the orthodox faith and the Holy Catholic Church." But Hadrian's letters to the bishops of Spain, and to Egila himself — the only sources for this mission — leave no doubt that Spanish Christians, who had adopted a number of unorthodox positions, were to be preached to, not the Saracens. Charlemagne, a supporter of Egila's mission, exhibited a marked concern for the spiritual soundness of the Spanish Christians. In a letter of 794 to Elipand, the Adoptionist bishop of Muslim-ruled Toledo, and to other Spanish bishops, he declares that he is more deeply saddened by the straying of Spanish Christians from orthodoxy than by their oppression under the Saracens. Formerly, he writes, he and his people prayed for them and waited for the opportunity to liberate them from their servitude, but as long as they continue to stray, they deserve neither prayer nor help. Thus it transpires that Charlemagne had played with the idea of liberating the Spanish Christians living under Muslim rule; but there is no hint that the ruler who forced Christianity upon the Saxons ever contemplated the Christianization of Spain's Muslims.
This is not to say that the fundamental Muslim opposition to Christianity went unnoticed. Already Bede (d. 735), who had witnessed from his Northumbrian vantage point first the Arab conquest of Spain and then the invasion of southern Gaul, in one of his Biblical commentaries placed the Saracens among the adversaries of the Church. Later authors repeatedly described the Saracens as "enemies of Christ," "hateful to God," and the like. But it is as enemies of Christianity that the Saracens were presented, not as targets of Christian missionary activity.
Why this long-lasting forbearance from attempts at Christianizing the Muslims? The question — like most questions about potential but unexploited courses of action — has not received much attention, but the following explanatory factors have been occasionally proffered: a) an ecumenical division of labor, which assigned the task of converting the Muslims to the Oriental Christians; b) the view that Muslims were heretics, thus closer to Christianity than were pagans, hence less in need of Christian missionizing; c) a tacit acknowledgment that the Christian duty to spread the Gospel did not extend to the Muslims; d) Europe's cultural inferiority vis-à-vis the realm of Islam, and superiority over the pagans of the north and northeast; and e) the location of Europe's traditional missionary frontier in the north and northeast, not in the south, where the Muslims made their appearance.
These explanations are hardly convincing. The first three are pure conjectures, with no foundation whatever in the sources. As to Europe's cultural inferiority, it is an objective fact that could have accounted for the failure of Catholic missionizing among the Muslims had such missionizing been undertaken; it cannot explain why Christianization was not ventured upon. (An equally objective fact is the indisputable vigor of Islam as a Salvationist, monotheistic religion, a vigor that would have rendered ineffective any missionary effort. But since in early medieval times few, if any, Catholic Europeans had a coherent notion about the beliefs of the Saracens, this fact is also not explanatory. Nor could contemporaries have grasped that peaceful missions from one self-assured high culture to another are necessarily futile.) Finally, Europe's traditional missionary frontier lay indeed to the north and the east, and tradition probably played a role in the launching of subsequent missionary efforts in these directions, especially since missionaries there could have drawn upon experience gained while combating remnants of paganism among adjacent, previously Christianized tribes. But why did not the emergence of the Muslim realm — surely a momentous event — lead to a deflection of at least part of the missionary efforts from the traditional routes, a deflection that was to occur in the High Middle Ages? Of course, the Muslims first appeared on the European scene as a military threat, which called for a military response, and since Christian arms remained on the defensive for centuries, forcible Christianization of the vanquished — as practiced in Saxony and elsewhere — was not feasible either. But why were there no attempts at peaceful conversion, by missionaries individually operating among Muslims?
A seldom-noted source reveals that the Muslim refusal to convert to Christianity was observed at a very early state. In a poem written in about 826 in honor of Louis the Pious, Ermold the Black lets Louis deliver the following speech before launching his assault on Muslim Barcelona in 801:
"Had this people [ = the Saracens] worshiped God, pleased Christ, and received holy baptism," — so Louis tells the leaders of his camp — "we should have made peace with them, and kept that peace, in order to bind them to God through religion. But this people remains detestable; it spurns the salvation [which we offer] and follows the commandments of the demons. Therefore, God's compassionate justice prevails on us to subject it to servitude. Let's hurry now to the walls and the towers, O Franks, so that your former valor should revive!"
The Carolingian poet is obviously aware of the Saracen unwillingness to convert to Christianity; moreover, he presents the Saracens' refusal as justification for waging war on them. (A similar justification will be adduced in the age of the crusades, just as Ermold's description of cleaning the sites of demon worship in conquered Barcelona will be paralleled in the Song of Roland and sundry crusader chronicles.) It is also noteworthy that Ermold's acceptance of the unlikelihood of Saracen conversion contrasts sharply with his confidence in the prospects of preaching Christianity to the pagan Danes.
About a generation later, John Scotus Erigena (d. ca. 877), the outstanding Irish scholar active at the court of Charles the Bald, writes in one of his short poems that the Agarens (= Saracens) of the south and the pagans of the north "will bend their necks in subjection; Christ will reign everywhere; all submit to both King and God." Here Saracens and Norsemen are on a par; both are expected to accept the rule of Christ. This expectation could, but may not necessarily, have been merely eschatological, for in Erigena's lifetime some Saracens did convert to Catholicism. The fact is mentioned in passing in a southern Italian treaty of 849, when Radelchi of Benevento promises to Siconolfo of Salerno not to admit any Saracens to his lands "excepting those who were [ = became] Christian in the time of Lord Sicone and Sicardo, unless they have fallen into apostasy." Thus in the days of the Beneventan rulers Sicone (817–33) and his son Sicardo (833–39), a number of Saracens — at least on two different occasions, if the text is taken literally — converted to Christianity in that Lombard duchy, under circumstances that remain unknown. Their Catholic steadfastness must have been rather questionable, as Radelchi takes into account the possibility of their apostasy, that is, of their return to Islam. The significant fact is that Saracen conversion did occur, and therefore, at least in some regions of southern Italy, the Christianization of Saracens could not have been regarded as entirely impracticable. Equally important is that this conversion took place in a Christian-ruled country.
If there was a precedent of Saracens accepting Christianity, and they were not universally regarded as a people who could not be converted, then the absence of attempts at missionizing among them becomes even more puzzling. Or had some attempts taken place and their failure discouraged further efforts? The sources are mute on this point, although it is possible that Ermold's statement about the Saracens' unwillingness to convert reflects some such experience. The sources, however, contain other relevant references, which point to a more specific answer.
An Effective Deterrent: The Interdiction of Attacks against Islam
Most Catholic Europeans knew little or nothing about Muslim internal affairs. And yet the sources suggest that one facet of Islam must have been surprisingly well known: the absolute prohibition of attacks against the Muslim creed. The ban is first mentioned in a little-known version of the Passion of George, Aurelius, and Nathalia. The three belonged to a group of Spanish Christians who sought martyrdom in the 850s by publicly attacking the religion of their Muslim rulers, and whose deeds were described by Eulogius of Cordova, one of the last of that group to be executed. In 858, two monks of St. Germain-des-Prés, Usuard and Odilard, brought to France some relics of George, Aurelius, and Nathalia, as well as a variant version of the chapter of Eulogius's work that tells their story. This version, most probably prepared for the Frankish monks by Eulogius himself, contains a remark absent from the work as it survives in Spain: 'The Saracens think that only those who leave their sect and turn to the Christian faith, and those who utter blasphemies against their Legislator, deserve death." This clear-cut statement, undoubtedly meant for an audience unfamiliar with life under Muslim rule, must have reached a number of trans-Pyrenean readers, for the variant version is extant in seven manuscripts, most of which originate from Parisian monasteries; one is from the ninth, two from the tenth, one from the eleventh, and three from the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries.
The same Muslim prohibition is also mentioned by two northern writers of the second half of the tenth century. The first, John of Metz, some time after 974 wrote the Life of John of Gorze, the abbot whom Otto I sent in 953 on a mission to Muslim Cordova. While describing the vicissitudes of the mission, John of Metz remarks that the very first law of the Saracens forbids, upon pain of death, any attack whatsoever against their religion. A similar statement appears in Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim's Life of Pelagius, the Galician youth whom the Muslims executed in Cordova in 925. Hrotsvitha (d. ca. 1000), the astonishing canoness who assumed the unlikely task of extolling the chastity of holy virgins in a fashion modeled on Terence, knew less than nothing about Islam: She is the first Catholic European to depict the Saracens as veritable polytheists who adore idols made of gold and marble. (About a century later Saracen idolatry will reappear in the Song of Roland, and then become a stock motif of the chansons de geste.) But even in her northern-German Gandersheim Hrotsvitha knows that the Christians of Spain are forbidden, on pain of death, "to blaspheme the gods made of gold which the [Saracen] ruler adores."
It is possible to assume that the Catholic abstention from efforts to convert the Muslims resulted to a considerable extent from an awareness of the Muslim prohibition of attacks against their religion, attacks that were bound to be intrinsic to Catholic missionary efforts of that age. True, work among the pagans of the north and the east could sometimes also lead to the missionary's death — it is enough to mention Adalbert of Prague or Brun of Querfurt — but capital punishment was not an omnipresent threat as it was in the realm of Islam. Even so, candidates for missionizing among the pagans were not always easy to recruit: The days of the enthusiastic Irish and Anglo-Saxon missionaries of the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries had passed. Thus, when Louis the Pious looked in 826 for a missionary willing to go to heathen Denmark, he was told by the prelates of the realm that "in no wise do they know a man so devoted as to assume a voyage so dangerous." This was so although the mission in question — ultimately undertaken by Ansgar, the "Apostle of the North," — was planned by Louis as a supplementary step to a Frankish-engineered restoration of a baptized Danish ruler to his possessions in Denmark.
If that was the case under relatively favorable conditions, one should not be surprised that missionaries did not leave for the lands of the Saracens. Indeed, the Norman chronicler Orderic Vitalis, albeit of the twelfth century, explicitly states that fear deterred Christian teachers from entering the Saracen realm. In 1125, he relates, the Spanish Christians who had lived under Saracen rule told King Alfonso I of Aragon that their knowledge of Christianity was wanting because, while subjected to the infidels, they had not dared ask Roman or French teachers to come to them, "and those did not come to us [of their own accord] because of the barbarity of the pagans to whom we had been subservient." If "Romans" and "Frenchmen" were indeed afraid to teach Christianity to their brethren living under Muslim rule, they must have been all the more frightened to preach Christianity to the Muslims themselves. In fact, a thirteenth-century pioneer of missionizing among the Muslims explicitly maintains that the past unwillingness to confront the Saracen religion resulted from the Saracen refusal to grant access to preachers intent on assailing their creed.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Crusade and Mission by Benjamin Z. Kedar. Copyright © 1984 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- Contents, pg. vii
- Some Introductory Remarks, pg. ix
- One. The Early Centuries: The Muslims Beyond the Bounds of European Mission and Polemics, pg. 1
- Two. Christian Reconquest and Muslim Conversion, pg. 42
- Three. The Espousal of Mission: A Criticism of the Crusade?, pg. 97
- Four. The Mendicants: Preaching the Gospel to Saracens, Preaching the Cross to Christians, pg. 136
- Five. A Contested Linkage: Crusading for the Advancement of Missions, pg. 159
- Appendixes, pg. 205
- Main Secondary Literature, pg. 229
- Index, pg. 241