In Light of Another's Word. Shirin A. Khanmohamadi
recalls medieval descriptions of the barbarian: their lack of writing, metal, or money; their lack of common religion, laws, and social intercourse; and their forest dwelling.55 And in 1550, when Juan de Sepulveda famously promoted the conquest of American Indians against Bartolomeo de Las Casas’s case for their peaceful conversion, he did so on the basis of their inhumanity, demonstrated by a number of alternative arguments. The natives are “natural slaves,” he asserted, requiring enslavement and subjection, with the evidence to be found among other things in their sinful sexuality. They are rather monkeys than men, he continued, lacking disciplinabilitas. Their lack of humanity, he argued, is evidenced through a lack of culture, writing, laws, and histories, and through their barbarous customs, their cannibalism, and their lust.56 In Sepulveda’s portrait of the American Indian may be located the full arsenal of available medieval discourses of the semihuman or limited human that we have been surveying: the classical barbarian, the “animal” of the new natural sciences, Aristotle’s natural slave, Aquinas’s barbarous customs, and Innocent’s sins contra naturam revoking sovereignty, suggesting significant overlap in medieval and Renaissance vocabularies of otherness, and its converse, humanity.
While this survey indicates much agreement about what made humans human in late medieval and early modern thinking, it also demonstrates that the same markers and categories of civility could be, and were being, deployed toward very different ends and arguments vis-à-vis the real peoples with whom Europeans were coming into contact. It began, we saw, with an approach to the Mongols that placed them beyond the confines of the human, as the quintessential barbarians on the basis of their violent nature, their aberrant diet and dress, lack of human laws, and so on. Similarly, in the late medieval and early modern period, canonists justified European conquests in the Canaries, Spain, and the Americas by arguing for the lack of “civility” among the peoples in these societies—evident in their animal-like ferocity, lack of disciplinabilitas, barbarous or contra naturam customs, diet, lack of religion or laws, and forest (or desert) habitats. For if the discourses of barbarism and the later projects of European colonization and expansion required and assumed pagan irrationality and inhumanity, the discourse of conversion and the project of universal salvation, supported by missionaries and their sponsors such as Innocent IV, generally required and assumed the opposite: pagan rationality, humanity, and even cultural sovereignty. Although Innocent IV developed a mechanism for the revocation of pagan sovereignty on the basis of sins contra naturam, he himself, significantly, never applied the formula. That remained for latter-day canonists writing in the wake of colonization or reconquest efforts, who recast Innocent’s thinking away from the strategic humanism of the salvational aim and toward the rationalizations of new European empires.
Studies of these late medieval and early modern European expansions abroad reveal a decline in Europeans’ interests in converting and saving the pagans with whom they were coming into increasing contact. This trend is already visible in the early colonial case study of the Canaries, where the arguments of humanists and missionaries in favor of the voluntary and peaceful conversion of natives gradually gave way to those of conquerors, colonists, and the canonists who overwhelmingly justified their actions.57 With the New World expansions, the questions of spiritual mission and papal jurisdiction that so excited thirteenth-century minds became muted, and indeed the papacy’s role gradually disappeared altogether from the secular adventures of kings, explorers, and conquistadors.58 Hopes of conversion and salvation, epitomized in the thirteenth-century missions to Asia, begin to shift toward the aims of the modern civilizing mission, a shift again predicted in the Canarian experiment, where Prince Henry the Navigator (1394–1460) of Portugal petitioned Pope Eugenius for a mission not only to baptize but to civilize the natives with “civil laws and an organized form of government.”59 Already in the fourteenth century we see the medieval salvational paradigm, and its investments in the rational non-Christian or “virtuous pagan,” giving way to a more secular and less inclusive paradigm promising civilization, and its remnant, the “savage,” as the new sign of the other. As Columbus wrote Ferdinand and Isabella in the Letter to the Sovereigns, there were no monstrous men to be found in the Americas, only savages.60
THE PROXIMATE ENEMY:KNOWLEDGE ABOUT MUSLIMS IN THE LATER MIDDLE AGES
As with the medieval approach to pagans, the best attempts toward understanding Muslims ultimately derived from the missionary impulse. Early twelfth-century knowledge of Islam and its prophet were not promising: chroniclers like Guibert of Nogent, Walter of Compiègne, and others wrote of the life of Muhammad in ways that combined inaccuracy with insult, typical of the “life of Muhammad” genre. As Norman Daniel has shown, scores of medieval polemic writings on Islam turned to the life of Muhammad itself to delegitimize the validity of Islam.61 In Alexandre du Pont’s Roman de Mahomet, for instance, Muhammad is “the wisest and most learned of cardinals” in Rome, who is encouraged to do missionary work among Saracens in the East, and who agrees but only after being promised that upon his return he shall be appointed pope. When the cardinals fail to appoint him to the papacy, Muhammad takes revenge by preaching against Christian truth.62
But there was a significant shift in 1142 with the visit by the abbot of Cluny, Peter the Venerable, to Spain and his subsequent interest in converting Spanish Muslims. This interest led him to commission a collection of works about Islam, including the first translation of the Qur’an by Robert of Ketton. Peter the Venerable used these works to compose his own Book Against the Sect or Heresy of the Saracens, aimed at converts.63 In the 1220s and 1230s the mendicant orders directed their characteristic missionary outreach to Muslims in the Levant, which also marked a significant shift. The Dominican William of Tripoli learned Arabic, as was required by his order, lived in Acre, and eventually was able to compose the De Statu Saracenorum [On the state of the Saracens] in 1273, a text that argued for easy conversion of Muslims on the basis of the proximity between the Muslim and Christian faiths; it serves as an important source for Mandeville’s Travels. For the first time, there began to emerge accounts of the various branches of Islam and explanations of its fundamental schism, such as that by the first native historian of the Latin Kingdom, William of Tyre. Postcrusade commingling between Franks and Muslims in the Levant led to a local appreciation of the reverence by Muslims for Christian figures like Jesus and Mary, a fact reflected in Frederick II’s negotiated treaty during the Sixth Crusade for the return of Jerusalem to Christian rule in 1229, which specified that “no Saracen shall be forbidden freely to make the pilgrimage to Bethlehem.”64
On the whole, however, proximity of belief between Christians and Muslims seems to have impeded rather than enhanced Christian understanding, leading “Christian theologians to measure Islam by Christian standards instead of viewing it … as a different religion which had elements in common with their own.”65 As scholars have remarked, the polemical tilt to writings about Muslim religion impeded the pace of ethnographic knowledge about Muslims in the medieval period.66 This meant that perhaps the most extensive medieval European description of the East before the mid-thirteenth century, the Historia Orientalis, probably by Jacques de Vitry, was filled will errors and shortcomings. These included information from crusader states that amounted to hearsay, a prejudiced account of Muhammad and the Muslim religion, and the measure and judgment of local Muslims (as well as oriental Christians and Jews) from a strictly Latin Christian perspective rather than on their own terms.67 If knowledge about the tenets of Islam did improve with exposure, it did so only slowly: still in Joinville’s early fourteenth-century crusading account, as we will see in Chapter 4, one finds Latin Christian surprise at shared revered figures in Islam and Judeo-Christianity.
If religious similarity did not readily lead to admiration or acceptance, increased interaction with Muslims in the multiconfessional spaces of the Levant, Spain, and Italy did work to increase knowledge and appreciation of Muslim secular culture. Translation movements in Toledo and Sicily delivered Aristotle and Plato clothed in Muslim commentaries to the Latin Christian world, making the scientific and philosophical renaissance of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries difficult to separate from Islamic culture. Newly translated Middle Eastern story collections, including the Spanish Jewish convert Petrus Alfonsi’s Arabian Nights–like stories, told of an appealing Islamic world