FICTION, IDEOLOGY, AND IDENTITY:MEDIEvAL CHRISTIAN DEPICTIONS OF THEMuSLIM EAST

Elizabeth Matsushita

CC OR many men desire to hear of unfamiliar things and takepleasure in them.” So wrote John Mandeville, an English knight

and traveler in the fourteenth century who wove his way through theMiddle East, visiting lands as distant as China and India. His Travels waspopular and widely read, perhaps confirming the truth ofhis statement;clearly, Europeans thirsted for knowledge of the outside world. To thisday little is known about the man. Historians debate whether he visitedall of the places he wrote about, whether he left his home country at all,and some question his very existence—perhaps he was only a fabrication,created for the public’s entertainment. Nevertheless, this widely-circulated piece of literature, along with many other popular writings ofboth fictional and factual nature, provides historians today with vitalinsight into the medieval European worldview, particularly pertaining tothe Muslim lands to the East.

In the late medieval and early Renaissance periods, Europe was experiencing many changes. Its increasing uniformity was manifested notonly in culture and religion, but also in the centralization of nation-states like France and England. This unification allowed for, or evennecessitated, a kind ofdistinct European identity, informed by Christianity and, often, set firmly opposite the non-Christian world outside.Europeans had experienced a gradually increasing awareness of theMuslim world for several centuries, spurred on by large-scale movementssuch as the Crusades and the Mongol invasions. Not all of these East-West interactions were hostile; however the strengthening of tradeacross the Eurasian land mass and the subsequent exchange of ideas alsocontributed to Western knowledge of the East. By the time of the

‘John Mandeville, The Travels ofSirJohn Mandeville, trans. C. W. R. D. Moseley (London:Penguin, 1983), 52.

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Ottoman Turkish siege of Constantinople in 1453, widely considered tobe a landmark event in the East-West balance of power, there was averitable wealth of information, and misinformation, regarding Muslimculture, and the Christian world found these societies simultaneouslyfascinating and abhorrent. Thus, Western depictions of Muslims and theMuslim world in a variety of literature could be counted on to reflectthese conflicting attitudes towards the East; indeed, such depictionscontained biases, embellishments, fantasies, and outright judgments thatbelie Western moral values and the Christian world-view. Europeanportrayals ofMuslims and the East were persistently placed in a moralistic, theological, and Christian context. Through these portrayals, theChristian world was able to alternately criticize and empathize with theforeign East, and to ultimately construct ideas of its own identity andmorality.

To Europeans, particularly those who were unable to travel, the Eastappeared to be an exotic, unintelligible place. Stories of fantastic wonders trickled in through word ofmouth or in written travelers’ accounts.The amazing nature of these stories is an indicator of the extent to whichEuropeans had no clear understanding of the Muslim world and Asia.They were not seen as similar to European societies; they were seen asotherworldly places where virtually anything could, and did, happen.Travelers like John Mandeville and Marco Polo described many wondrous things: stories of the Amazons (a society of women warriors whokilled or banished all of their men), dwarves and pygmies, giant ants thathoarded gold, trees that grew meat, and much, much more.2 Clearly, theEast was a place that filled Europeans with both fear and intrigue. It wasa source of entertainment at the same time that it was a place of unmistakable inscrutability.

Travelogues like those ofJohn Mandeville and Marco Polo also perpetuated the idea ofmagic that Europeans associated with Eastern lands.As scholar Paul Zumthor noted, the travel narrative as a genre possessedan “unavoidable kinship with fiction.”3 In a way, travelogues served tocement the dichotomous worldview that persisted in the Westernintellect. An example of the theological notion of the medieval landscapeis revealed in Birgitta of Sweden’s writings about her pilgrimage to theHoly Land. When visiting the site of the Virgin Mary’s Assumption intoheaven, she had a vision of the Virgin speaking to her and her companions:

Ibid., u.3Paul Zumthor and Catherine Peebles, ‘The Medieval Travel Narrative,” New Literary

History 25 (19): 813.

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Therefore go now, all of you, back to the lands of the Christians; everamend your lives for the better; and in future, live with the greatest ofcare and attention now that you have visited these holy places, wheremy Son and I lived in the body and died and were buried.4

The so-called “lands of the Christians” were clearly distinct from the“holy places” where most of the biblical stories took place, which werenow largely ruled by Muslims. In this, one can detect a geographicalparadox that first manifested itself in the Crusades, and undoubtedlycontinued to color European views of the Muslim world into the Renaissance: the Holy Land and almost all of the most important sites in theChristian religion were located in the foreign, sometimes hostile, andlargely non-Christian East. Thus, regardless of the relations between thetwo religious communities, the Christian West could not help but comeinto repeated contact with the East, which they viewed as the center ofthe world because of its religious significance, and yet they also paradoxically conceived of it as their geographic opposite. As a mysterious,foreign land, set firmly across from the realm of Christendom, anyfantastic idea or quality could be ascribed to the East. Europeans couldconstruct the Muslim world to fit the image that they desired with littleconcern for the reality of the place. This idea carried over into creatingthe East as an “other” and imagining it in a way that would establish it asan opposite to Christendom, while simultaneously reinforcing theWestern identity.

Along similar lines, European popular thought produced an imagined figure of the East known as Prester John. The origins of thePrester John myth are believed to be grounded in the early Mongols andcentral Asiatic peoples who converted to Nestorian Christianity; rumorsof these conversions may have sparked the legend of a Christian king inthe East who would be an ally in the coming war with the Muslims, astory that flared up during conflicts such as the Crusades. Numeroustravelers claimed to have found Prester John, including John Mandeville,who placed him in India. By imagining a mythical Christian kingdom juston the other side of the Muslim world, Europeans could be said to havebeen constructing a “counter-other,” a projection of the European selfinto a foreign land to join the Europeans in opposing the Islamic peoples.Though Christian kingdoms, albeit following different sects, may havefactually existed in these areas, their culture and religion were likely justas foreign to Europeans as their Muslim counterparts. The idea ofPresterJohn allowed Christendom to draw connections between itself and the

‘ Elizabeth Ruth Obbard, ed., Medieval Women Mystics (Hyde Park: New City Press,2002), 111.

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East and imagine that European culture and influence extended fartherinto Asia than Islam did.

Besides its reputation as a place where the unbelievable happened,the Islamic world was also pegged with more down-to-earth, though notnecessarily more accurate, stereotypes. Two of the most persistent ofthese stereotypes were the character of the despotic Oriental ruler andthe idea of the lasciviousness and sexual immorality of Eastern customs.The archetypal Muslim king was embodied in the Turkish sultan orPersian shah of European art and literature: autocratic, cruel, andrepressive. As Charles Beckingham pointed out, to the medieval European: “Muslim governments seemed arbitrary and unstable, and alwaysto have been so, despotisms in which the whim of the ruler was totallyunrestrained.”5 In The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli claimed that theTurkish Empire “is ruled by one man; all the others are his servants.”6

Sexual immorality was also a charge frequently levied against theMuslim world by Europeans; lurid depictions ofpolygamous families andpalace harems loomed large in Western images of the East. The factremains that simpLe differences in cultural practices, ranging from dressto manners to marriage, could appear immoral to an outside observer.Likewise, the image of a despotic Eastern ruler only became insidiouswhen set opposite an image of a ruler with less totalitarian tendencies,such as the French king with his untamable court of nobles. Europeanstook these differences for granted, but by condemning Eastern societiesto immorality they established a moral precedent for themselves, clearlydelineating what they thought to be proper and improper behavior for aruler or a society.

In the European, Christian mind, perhaps the most important rolethat the Islamic East played in their conception of the world was atheological one. The Church had experienced a sharp decline in power inthe fourteenth century, reducing it to a shadow ofits former self. Thoughthe Church’s position in society undoubtedly affected ideas ofreligion inmany ways, the European worldview was continually placed in thecontext of a strong Christian faith. It could even be argued that this lossof the Church as a resolute moral authority drove Christians to popularpiety and, subsequently, to attempts to establish their own moralidentity in the absence of a strong central institution to do it for them.Also, as Europe came into more frequent contact with the Muslim Eastand began to grasp the extent of the power of this newest member of themonotheistic world religions, there arose a necessity to understand its

CF. Beckingham, “Misconceptions of Islam: Medieval and Modern” in Between Islamand Christendom (London: Variorum Reprints, 1983), 609.

6 Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. George Bull (London: Penguin Books, 1961), i6.

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place in the Christian world, and how it could be accounted for in God’splan for all men. The precise position on Islam and the Islamic peoplesvaried from time to time, place to place, and source to source: sometimesIslam was seen as an evil challenge to Christian sovereignty, sometimes itwas seen as a close but imperfect relative ofChristianity whose followersneeded to be converted, and sometimes it was simply placed as a foil, anopposite, or an “other” to the Christian world, not entirely good or evil,but in a way necessary. The shifting opinions about Islam could sometimes trace their origins to the political situations they arose from, butthe mercurial nature of Christian views on Islam often makes theirreasoning difficult to pin down and is undoubtedly worth exploring. Assuch, this paper will not focus on any specific time or place in medievalEurope, but rather on the consistency with which the Muslim East wasimagined in a way that fit Christian needs, firmly placing such depictionsin the realm of fantasy.

While historians like Richard Southern have referred to Islam as medieval Christendom’s greatest problem, others have taken a morecomplex view of the issue.7 Many agree that although opinions on Islamwere constantly moving in different directions, there was an overall arctowards greater understanding as the centuries passed; by the end oftheRenaissance, the extent to which the two worlds interacted in manydifferent capacities lent itself to more knowledge and on occasion moreaccepting views of the Muslim world.8 If this was true in the latermedieval period, it was certainly not the case earlier on. Some Christiantheologians, such as the thirteenth-century Franciscan friars who wroteexegeses, strongly identified Islam with the coming of the Antichrist.9Enumerating the many threats to Christendom that existed or hadexisted, men like Joachim of Fiore and Peter Olivi counted the Islamicone as the greatest and possibly the last before the Day of Judgment.Olivi went so far as to count the years between Muslim conquests toprove that they consistently added up to 666, “the number of thebeast.”° These ideas were at least in part corroborated by other medievalChristian beliefs. In his travels, John Mandeville made note of a legendthat the Antichrist would be born in either Chorozin or Babylon; “and soHoly Writ says of them ... ‘Woe unto you, Chorozin! Woe to you,

R.W. Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press, 1978), 3—4.

8 David R. Blanks and Michael Frassetto, eds., Western Views of Islam in Medieval andEarly Modern Europe: Perception ofOther (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 2.

David Burr, “Antichrist and Islam in Medieval Franciscan Exegesis,” in Medieval Christian Perceptions ofIslam, ed. John Victor Tolan (New York: Garland Publishing, 1996), 131.

° Ibid., 137.

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Bethsaida! Woe to you, Capernaum!” The message of these writings isclear: the East was a challenge, an enemy to the West. By ascribing theMuslim world the Antichrist, Christians associated their most evil, moststraightforwardly opposing concept with the East, fitting it into the roleof enemy of Christendom.

Christian writers also displayed their animosity towards Islam byattacking the very foundations of the religion in an attempt to undermine its legitimacy. Unquestionably, simple misinformation did existregarding the Muslim world. Errors in translating Arabic sources couldhave contributed to this flow of misinformation. As Beckingham pointsout, one of the Quran’s most important verses was mistranslated by aleading Byzantine scholar, causing the passage to read that humans werecreated from a leech or lamprey rather than from clots of blood.’2Reliance on these early European interpretations no doubt served toperpetuate misconceptions regarding Islam. However, it was simply alack of concern over accuracy that seems to have plagued most Europeans, sometimes because of apathy but more often because of a desireto debase the Muslim religion and fuel Christian polemics. Muslims wereoften portrayed as pagan idolaters; this was especially common duringthe First Crusade, when numerous chroniclers framed the entire movement in the context of Christians marching against the paganism of theEast.’3 This kind ofdiscourse served to make the Crusaders’ mission morerighteous. Clearly, it was far more honorable to depict the enemy aspagans worshipping false gods than as fellow monotheists who sharedseveral tenets with Christianity.

Another common method of rhetorical attack was to decry Muhammad as a false prophet. He was alternately accused of being a power-hungry temporal ruler, a trickster, and a version of the Antichrist; hewas, needless to say, rarely presented in a positive light. In Piers Plowman, a story was recounted which displayed Muhammad’s deceptiveways. It told of how Muhammad trained a dove to come to him on cue,leading people to believe he had been divinely ordained as a messenger.t4The Prophet of Islam was clearly portrayed as being a duplicitous figure,basically tricking people into converting by putting on a false display forthem. John Mandeville also pointed to Muhammad’s falseness as areason for the mass conversion of the Islamic world. He described

Mandevile, The Travels,Beckingham, ‘Misconceptions of Islam,” 607.

‘ Victor Tolan, “Muslims as Pagan Idolaters in Chronicles of the First Crusade,” inWestern Views ofIslam, 98.

4William Langland, Piers Plowman, trans. George Economou, (Philadelphia: Universityof Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 158.

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Muhammad as having had epilepsy, and that fits would cause him tofaint or fall; subsequently, he led his wife Cadrige, or Khadija, to believethat these fits were actually moments in which the angel Gabriel wascoming to him and blinding him with his divinity: “And therefore theSaracens say that the angel Gabriel often spoke to him.”5

Mandeville also used an anecdote to explain the religion’s aversion towine. According to Mandeville’s Travels, Muhammad was close friendswith a hermit, with whom he would often visit. One night, Muhammad’sservants, upset that Muhammad left them to wait outside all night whilehe visited his friend, stole into the hermit’s home and murdered himwhile Muhammad was passed out from drinking wine. When he awoke,the servants convinced him he had killed the man while under theinfluence; thus Muhammad, disgusted with himself, “cursed wine and allthose who drink it.”6 Earlier in his book, however, Mandeville alluded tothis same story with a significant change: he simply said Muhammadkilled the hermit in a drunken stupor, not that he was tricked intobelieving he did. This seems to be an important point that Mandevilledid little to impress accuracy upon. Regardless, such tales of Muhammad’s life in Christian writings often tended to be denigrating; beyonddenying his status as a prophet of God, they strove to undermineMuhammad’s very character by portraying him as a trickster, a liar, andeven a murderer. His laws, in the Christian point of view, were notdivinely ordained but were products of petty events and chance occurrences in Muhammad’s life. By painting such a negative picture of themost important man in Islam, Christian Europe was able to denounce astrong, threatening rival faith while simultaneously bulking up thecredibility of their own.

A few sources also referred to the fact that Muhammad was originally a Christian who may or may not have started out on the path ofChrist,and then veered off of it to initiate a new religion. In Le Couronnement deLouis, we learn that Muhammad “was a prophet of our Lord Jesus. Hecrossed the mountains preaching the truth and came to Mecca where heabused our faith.”7 This claim that Muhammad was essentially a lapsedChristian introduced a new approach to debasing his legacy. It ascribedto Islam the notion of Christian heresy and portrayed the IslamicProphet’s life as one astray from the proper religion. It also placed theIslamic world squarely against the Christian one, and showed that it wasmerely a shadow of Christendom. This complicated relationship between

‘ MandeviJle, The Travels, iog.,6 Ibid.‘ Ann Hoeppner Moran Cruz, “Popular Attitudes toward Islam in Medieval Europe,”

in Western Views ofIslam, 5$.

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the two largest monotheistic traditions manifested itself in other ways aswell.

Another aspect of Islam that was sometimes the subject of Christianwritings was its relative closeness to Christianity. In taking this view,there can be found a degree ofcomprehension of the Islamic faith that isnot visible in the aforementioned polemical writings. Admittedly, someEuropeans who shared this empathetic idea of Islam often went so far asto ascribe similarities where there were none, equating institutions in thetwo faiths that may not have been quite comparable, further demonstrating Western writers’ frequent dissociation from facts. However, one ofthe implicit goals in framing Islam in this context seems to have been theeventual conversion of the Muslim world; the efforts towards betterunderstanding Islam “were not rooted in a desire for internationalbrotherhood but rather to render conversion more efficient.”8 Manyassumed that the relative closeness of the two religions would make thisprocess very easy, and eventually ensure Christian dominion over a fargreater area than just Europe. In Piers Plowman, one sees this sentimentexpressed: “For since these Saracens. . . / Have a piece of our belief themore easily it seems to me / They should convert, if someone would takeon the work of teaching them about the Trinity.”9 Conversion was aviable and noble option for Muslims, then: “For so may Saracens be savedif they so believed / At the letting-go of their lives to believe in HolyChurch.”2° Thus, though the Muslims were the enemies of the Christians,they could still be accommodated into Christendom; this idea alsohelped to explain their existence just outside the lands of the Christians,and indicated that perhaps God’s plan for the Muslims involved theireventual mass conversion by the Christians, bringing them into the foldof the West.

The question as to whether the heathen Saracens could be savedthrough conversion and baptism was sometimes a thorny one, however.Some writers even tended to contradict themselves on the issue. Amongthese was Wolfram von Eschenbach in his version of the William ofOrange epic. In it, he condemned the Saracens and appeared to implythat they could not be saved, but he also said, “The heathens are not alldestined for damnation. We know it to be true that all children born ofmothers since the time of Eve were born incontestably heathens. . . We

,8 Donald J. Kagay, “The Essential Enemy: The Image of the Muslim as Adversary andVassal in the Law and Literature of the Medieval Crown ofAragon,” in Western Views ofIslam, 127.

‘ Langland, Piers Plowman, i6o.lbid.,i56.

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are all formerly heathens.”2’ There was at least a shred of hope for theMuslims, then; von Eschenbach used a theological argument to point outthat all people are at some point converted and baptized, and that thesame could be true of Muslims. In Dante’s Divine Comedy, Dante showedthat no non-Christians had escaped Hell, and that Muhammad and Auhad been confined to one of its deepest circles; however, three Muslimswere notably placed in Limbo, the highest placement a non-Christiancould hope for, and this included Old Testament figures. The threeDante assigned to Limbo were Saladin, Avicenna, and Averroes, allcomparatively contemporary Islamic figures who held relative positionsof respect in medieval society. That they were regarded highly enough byDante to be put in Limbo is intriguing, and shows that not all Muslimswere necessarily viewed alike, and some even had the potential to besaved.

Furthermore, it may have even been possible for Muslims and pagans to earn God’s approval without conversion. Piers Plowman presented the reader with the historical character of Trajan, a “Saracen”(here used to indicate a pagan, not a Muslim) emperor who despite beingan “unchristian creature” was saved by “love without true faith in myrightful law.”22 Both Birgitta of Sweden and Julian of Norwich, notablefemale mystics, claimed that Christians could never fuiiy grasp God’s willand could thus not presume to know if Saracens and other non-Christians are damned. Birgitta actually seemed “quite sure that virtuouspagans are saved.”23 Most interesting, perhaps, is a passage in Mandeville’s Travels in which he pondered whether it was possible to be inGod’s favor regardless of one’s religion, a question that arose when hesaw the goodness of many non-Christian peoples in Asia:

And even if these people do not have the articles ofour faith, nevertheless I believe that because of their good faith that they have by nature,and their good intent, God loves them well and is welt pleased by theirmanner of life, as He was with Job, who was a pagan, yet neverthelesshis deeds were as acceptable to God as those of His loyal servants.

Not only are these words remarkable for their tolerance of other religions, but they also help to answer the question as to whether Christiansbelieved that Muslims and pagans could be saved. Mandeville, like manyothers, framed it into a theological argument, pointing to Job in the Bibleas an example of a good pagan. He went so far as to say that men should

Cruz, ‘Popular Attitudes Toward Islam,” 6o.Langland, Piers Plowman, iii.

Cruz, “Popular Attitudes toward Islam,” 62.Mandeville, The Travels, i8o.

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not despise each other for the difference of their laws, “for we know notwhom God loves or whom he hates.”25 Such a view may not have beentypical in medieval Europe, but obviously philosophical threads existedthat allowed non-Christians, including Muslims, an unambiguous placein the Christian universe, even without conversion. However, these non-Christians were undoubtedly judged in the context of the Christian faith;any strong deviations from Western notions of goodness and virtuewould continue to deserve condemnation in the eyes of Christians.

Beyond the denunciations, the conciliations, and the attempts tounderstand the religion, Islam occupied a deceptively straightforwardposition in relation to Christianity in the European mind: it was essentially Europe’s “other.” Squarely set opposite the realm ofChristendom, itwas an imagined political, cultural, military, and theological antithesis,concrete differences and similarities aside. This role was not an entirelynegative one; often, by claiming the Muslim world to be a kind of foil toChristendom, it was implicitly placed on equal ground and subsequentlyimbued with many of the qualities that Europeans most valued. This ideacan best be illustrated by the figure of Salah al-Din, or Saladin as he wasknown to Europeans, the Sultan of Egypt in the late twelfth century andprominent Muslim leader during the Third Crusade. Despite the fact thatSaladin was a Muslim and actually fought against the Christian Crusaders, capturing Jerusalem from them in 1187, he was almost withoutexception portrayed favorably and even heroically in Christian texts. Thismaybe partially explained by his status as a foil to Richard the Lionheart,leader of the European Crusaders, with whom it was said he shared achivalrous, respectful rivalry. The importance of this pairing in theEuropean imagination is illustrated perfectly by a scene which Jeanfroissart, a chronicler during the Hundred Years’ War, described. A greatstreet ceremony was being held for Queen Isabella’s entry into Paris, anda dramatic reenactment of a battle between Richard and Saladin wasplayed out for the Queen and her litter. The actor portraying Richardeven approached the litter and “asked permission to attack the Saracens,”before acting out the battle which “delighted the spectators.26 SinceRichard and Saladin never met face to face, the battle was historicallyinaccurate; yet the very fact that they were placed opposite each other inthis capacity shows to what extent their rivalry was etched into Europe’sconsciousness. Thus, the two men were essentially seen as equals; asRichard’s mirror-image in the Muslim world, much of the respect andadmiration for the English king was conferred on to Saladin as well.

“ Ibid.6Jean Froissart, Chronicles, trans. Geoffrey Brereton (London: Penguin, 1968), 353.

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As noted earlier, Saladin was one of the three Muslims that Danteplaced in Limbo, displaying his unusually honored position in popularChristian theology. Saladin also appeared in a few of the stories inGiovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, in which he was shown to be anautocratic but noble king. In one story in particular, Saladin was disguised as a merchant while in Italy, and was shown great hospitality byMesser Torello, a local nobleman.27 Saladin was extremely taken by hisgraciousness, and later, when Torello was captured by the Muslims in theCrusades, Saladin recognized him and immediately set about thankingthe man for his earlier hospitality by returning the favor. The innategoodness attributed to Saladin in these stories is notable. However, itshould not be ignored that stereotypes of the East were still in play: forone thing, Saladin went to Italy in the first place in order to spy on theChristians in preparation for the coming war. It was not forgotten that hewas the enemy. Furthermore, at the end of the story Saladin had Torellosent home using a magician, who miraculously transported the nobleman to his home in Italy in a single night, a textbook example of Christian belief in a “wondrous” East. Stories about Saladin, which werenumerous in medieval Europe, were hardly grounded in reality; however,they provide an interesting look into the positive ways in which Muslimfigures could play into the Christian imagination, and how, in theiridealized forms, they tended to reflect the model Christian man. Jo Cruznoted that as stories about Saladin became popular in France, hischaracter became “progressively more French” and that tales eventually“foist a French noble mother upon him.2S Apparently, the literarycharacter of Saladin became so popular that Europeans wanted to claimhim for themselves.

Another example of a Muslim “other” being embodied in legendaryfigures can be found in the classic French chanson de geste, the Song ofRoland. Based loosely on the Battle of Ronceveaux Pass in ‘8, the poemtold of Charlemagne and his heroic knight Roland fighting valiantlyagainst a Muslim army. In reality, the situation was more complicated:Charlemagne’s kingdom had entered into an alliance with some of theMuslim and Christian Basque leaders of al-Andalus, but ended updisputing an earlier land agreement with them. Thus, the ChristianBasques, with the aid of Muslim armies, joined together to chaseCharlemagne’s army out of the Iberian Peninsula and killed Roland in

7Giovannj Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. C. H. McWilliam (London: Penguin, 1972),

764.8 Cruz, ‘Popular Attitudes toward Islam,” 6o.

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the process.29 In the epic poem, however, we see the Christian Basquesleft completely out of the story, with only the Muslims as the enemy:clearly, a simplified version ofhistory that allowed the story to take on aCrusading aspect and dispense with the complexity of shifting medievalalliances not based on religious difference. Although the Muslims wererecast as the sole enemy in the battle, implying negativity towards them,many historians have noted that this role allowed them to be portrayedas worthy opponents to the Christian army. The Muslim foe was shownas “a valiant opponent as well versed in the ways of chivalry as anyChristian knight.”3° In this way the Muslims were bestowed with Christian values, making them the perfect foils to Charlemagne and Roland,the Christian heroes. Though the author often described them negatively, he ultimately portrayed them as worthy adversaries. It should benoted, as well, that by empowering the enemy with flattering depictionsin battle literature, the European side also empowered itself for if theenemy was weak than a Christian victory would not be as noteworthy,and a Christian defeat would be far more shameful.

Muslims in Christian literature were ultimately not Muslims at all,but imagined, projected Western archetypes who often served asmouthpieces for Western thought. One of the most interesting usages ofthis device occurred when Europeans used their writings on Muslims tocriticize Christian Europe, either by implicit comparison to the East or byoutright condemnation voiced by the writer or his characters. JohnMandeville happened to utilize both methods in his Travels. He frequently extolled the virtues of Christian peoples he met in the East,regardless of their particular sect; while traveling in Abkhasia and LesserArmenia, he noted that the Christians there confessed and receivedabsolution every week while Europeans sometimes only went once ayear, and that “in this they show more devotion than we do.”3’ Moreexplicitly, he recounted an instance in which he was talking to the Sultanof Egypt, for whom he was employed at the time. The Sultan engagedhim in a lengthy discussion concerning the hypocrisy of the Christianworld:

You ought to be simple, meek and truthful, and ready to give charityand alms, as Christ was, in whom you say you believe. But it is quiteotherwise. For Christians are so proud, so envious, such great gluttons,

Mahmoud Makki, ‘The Political History ofAl-Andalus” in The Legacy ofMuslim Spain,ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi (New York: E. J. Brill, 1992), 2o—z1.

° Kagay, “The Essential Enemy,” 121.‘ Mandevile, The Travels, 163.

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so lecherous, and moreover so full of covetousness, . . you so wickedlyand evilly despite and break the law that Christ gave you.32

The Sultan went on to postulate that were the Christians not so sinful,they would not have lost all of their lands to the Muslims. John Mandeville was shamed by this indictment, lamenting the fact that the Saracensfollowed their imperfect faith ‘better than we do that of Jesus Christ.”33He later echoed the Sultan’s sentiment in saying that were it not for thewickedness and sin of Christian men “they would be sovereign lords ofthis world.”34

John Mandeville was not the only one using literature to criticize theChristian world. It was a common theme in late medieval and earlyRenaissance writings, as evidenced by Piers Plowman’s quest to lead agood Christian life and Boccaccio’s relentless lampooning of the Churchand its clergy. from the fourteenth century onward, anti-clericalism wasquite a popular notion amongst Europeans following numerous Churchscandals, and it is only natural that people would begin to look outwardfor inspiration and context in an increasingly connected world. Withgeneral distrust of the Christian Church widespread and contact with theEast more frequent, comparisons were inevitable, even those centered onthe most mundane observations. Margery Kempe took very little noticeof the local Muslims on her pilgrimage to the Holy Land, but when shedid mention them she was impressed by their hospitality, noting thatthey “made much of her, and conveyed and escorted her about thecountry wherever she wanted to go. And she found all people good andgentle to her, except her own countrymen.”35 for one thing, it was typicalfor pilgrims in the Holy Land to have Muslim escorts; Margery seems tobe oblivious to this, belying her lack of knowledge of the local customs.More importantly, however, Margery made the point of juxtaposing thehospitality of the Muslims with the rudeness of her fellow Christians,namely the pilgrims she traveled with who ostracized her throughout thejourney. She used a simple observation about Muslims to criticizeChristian behavior; ultimately this observation may have been framedmore by her own personal prejudices than by any realistic comparisonbetween East and West, and in this her statement can be seen as a kindof microcosm for the wider Christian literature on the Muslim world.

The role that Muslims and the Muslim world played in Europeanliterature and, accordingly, the European worldview in the medieval and

‘ Ibid., 107—108.

ibid., io8.Ibid., 163.

35Margery Kempe, The Book ofMargery Kempe, trans. B. A. Windeatt (London: Penguin,1985), lii.

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Renaissance periods was a very complex one. Representations ofthe Eastwere not uniformly positive or negative, nor did they consistently pointto a specific perspective on the non-Christian world. Rather, the variousways in which they were depicted and viewed all came to represent theChristian, European conception of morality, proper society, and ultimately Christian and European identity. Writings on Muslim societiessimply allowed Europeans to construct fantasies and parables that firmlyestablished Christendom as opposed to the world outside. Throughdiscussions of theology, politics, and culture, Western peoples soughtways in which they could define their own moral viewpoints, and theEast readily filled the role of a foreign “other” that could subsequentlygive emphasis to the values of the West. Hence, the medieval Christianliterary representation of the Muslim was no more than a fabrication, acomposite ofopposing ideologies and abstract stereotypes that reflectedthe medieval Christian mind.

Elizabeth Matsushita graduated with a BAfrom U.C. Davis in 2007. Sheis currently working towards her MA in Modern World History at SanFrancisco State and expects to graduate in May2011. Her research interests include identity, colonialism, East-West cultural exchanges, andmodern Middle Eastern history.

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