Medieval perceptions Flashcards
Coope
Arabs’ wars were of conquest, not conversion. Arab soldiers in garrison towns, segregated from subject pops. Separate Arab Muslim elite. Conversions prompted by religious, social and economic factors. Dhimmi separate, subordinate social and legal status. Jizyah tax. Distinctive clothing. al-Rahman II making Al-andalus more like Abbasid, more independent. Imported Abbasid style, famous singer and musician Ziryab. Great Muslim-Chr friction. Mid-9th C martyrs mvmnt. Not just monks, nuns clergy but also soldier in amir’s army, former Isl govt civil servants and children of Mus parents. Response = enforce legal restrictions of dhimmi more strictly, may have threatened violence.. Alvarus - Chr of Cordoba converting to islam at alarming rate. Conversion involved shahada - professing belief in the one, Islamic God. Sharia - necessity of being circumsised to exist in high society. Alvarus, Indiculus luminosus - one Chr merchant named John 851 beaten by crowd of Mus merchants for swearing by name of Muhammad. Pretends to be Muslim to people who don’t know he’s Chr. Mixed marriages allowed but child must be raised muslim. Apostasy = capital offense. Eulogius, Apologeticus martyrum - Many Chr argued that both Muslims and Chr worship God and law - Isl, like Chr, is cult of the true God. Islam that Chr saw in Cordoba = Islam of public life, set of cultural and social skills needed 2 be successful. Chr seemed unaware of more private side to Mus piety e.g. Sufi trad. Isl = public life. Why men not women converting. Indicator of status at court = claim to be an Arab (not just Muslim). blood but also cultural. Eulogius, Momoriale Sanctorum - martyr Aurelius pressured by Muslim relatives to begin studying Arabic letters at young age. DIre straights of Latin literary trad. Ibn Antonian - Christian, reached high office bc of fluent Arabic but also Latin so useful envoy. Converted to Isl at height of martyrs’ movment bc Muhammad I indicated cld no longer tolerate dhimmi at court.Ibn Antonian chief administrator, then suspicions on him e.g. from Hashim. Ibn Antonian dismissed on basis of suspicions. Umayyad, Arab supremacy. Abbasid, less - empire of Islam not Arab ethnicity bc core support among converts in Khurasan. Al-andalus = the provinces. The last to learn how to arrange their hair. Confusion, discomfort, anger over cultural and religious identity.
Fierro
Almohads 12th-13th C. Determined for break v previous Almoravids. Jews + Chr forced to convert. Almohad aim to return community to time of Prophet. Idea that Almohad territory is sacred land so only Islam should be allowed in it. Legal differences of opinion rejected, truth should be unique as contained in Qur’an. Almohads called themselves guraba - small num of true believers among many gone astray - legitimising their initially minority point of view.
Fletcher
Idea Chr rulers of Asturian kingdom committed to reconquest ideology. Crónica Albeldense, composed 881 - Saracens take kingdom of Goths, against them Chr do battle day and night.
Copied a century later
Later on interest faded.
No such texts come down to us 1000-1140. Loss of interest in reconquest in this time
1073 alliance Sancho IV of Navarre w ruler of Mus principality al-Muqtadir. Al-Muqtadir agreed to pay Sancho 12 000 gold pieves. In return Sancho wld intercede w king of Aragon
Parias. Fernando I and Alfonso VI of León-Castile = most prominent tribute-takers.
System depended on economic vitality of tribute-payers.
Ibn Ammar, poet in service of ruler of Seville, hired an army from Alfonso VI
Rodrigo Díaz, El Cid, spent 1081-6 in service of Muslim ruler of Zaragoza.
Shift in terms of Chr-Mus relations taking place. Tribute-taking as paramount aim under Fernando’s son Alfonso VI, but now envisaged as means of sapping vitality of Muslim princes preparatory to Christian takeover.
Agents of change = incoming French adventurers 1080-1140. Berber devotees of Muslim fundamentalist sect, Almoravides, who overran Muslim Spain 1090-1120. Led to replacement of policy of exploitation by policy of reconquest. uses Chronicles to chart change. Barbastro crusade 1064 was not such - Pope Alexander II’s indulgence no connection w the campaign.
Although pronouncements of Urban II and Paschal II indicate direction in which Popes feeling their way, not until 1123 that pope Calixtus II made it clear he regarded Spainish wars as crusades. Thickening of Hispano-Papal contacts 1050s-1140s. Second quarter of 12th C = crucial period of change St James associated w warfare vs Islam and Alfonso VII 1140 recorded had conquered Coria w St James’s help. 3rd decade of 12th C Templars began to acquire property and responsibilities in the Iberian peninsula.
Chr expansion = conquest, not reconquest. Demographic pressure, cllimatic change, developing military tech, needs of aristocratic elite, appetites of sheep + cattle.
Wolf
Kedar - more thorough survey of documentation than Southern - for Fr, Ger, Eng ecclesiastics fears about Isl took long time 2 materialize due 2 more pressing political concerns closer to home. Sp counterparts no choice but to engage in apologetics and polemics. Neither Southern nor Kedar has fully appreciated the factors that led to the first Spanish Christian views of Islam. Both assumed that the very presence of Islam forced Spanish Christians to come to terms with it as a potential religious threat and that their perceptions of Islam were necessarily warped
by their fears of cultural absorption. But the evidence does not support this assumption. First of all, there is no indication that any Spanish ecclesiastic considered Islam to be a challenge to Christianity until the very end of the eighth century. Only after a few generations, after the cultural barriers separating Muslims from Christians began to crumble, did the threat of Islam assume significant proportions. Even then the threat was not recognized by all Christians. To the contrary, Eulogius wrote precisely to convince his fellow Christians that Islam was antithetical to Christianity, when many, perhaps even most, of them were content to see Islam as a separate revelation and law that could coexist with their own.
Asbridge
During the first, formative decades of its existence the principality of Antioch established administrative frameworks and patterns of landholding which were influenced by Byzantine precedent and the cannot be found elsewhere in the Latin East and interacted and co-operated with Islam more actively than any of its Latin neighbours in this early period. If we can describe the principality as a ‘crusader’ community, one in which the ideals of Holy War continued to be espoused, then it stands, in comparison to Iberia, Sicily or the wider world of western Christendom, as a significant and distinctive example of the tensions between religious ideology and political reality. Even in the context of the Near East and in the shadow of the crusading movement this frontier community began to partially assimilate and co-operate with the Levantine world within a few years of its presence of a predominantly non-Latin population. It also formed diplomatic links with the neighbouring Muslim powers of Aleppo and Shaizar.
incorporated Byzantine institutions into its local government
By exploiting Muslim weakness and applying direct military pressure Antioch was rapidly able to establish its own system of regular tribute payments from Aleppo and Shaizar.
relationship of interdependence, from which both sides could potentially benefit
instances of Latin/Muslim military co-operation. Thus, we can observe a Latin community which existed not in isolation, but in regular, if generally exploitative, contact with Islam
Combined forces of Mosul and Edessa met an army of 1,5oo Antiochene knights, 600 Aleppan horsemen and an unspecified number of infantry
Christie
Ibn al-Qalhnisi chose to make particular use of the expression
“CCLI 2” (May God forsake them), either as a specific response elicited by the event, or as he felt it was the invocation which was most appropriate to the situation at hand, and which also allowed him to emphasise his hostility to the new enemy.
usage became more widespread, and as time progressed the invocations became less of a genuine response to the Franks and more of a “label” applied to them.
When the Mongols began their invasion of the area, it was also applied to them, since for the Muslims they shared certain similarities with the Franks.
Hamilton
The crusade movement marked the first major shift in medieval Western religious thinking away from an ideal of world renunciation to one of world affirmation for lay people
Of course, there are lax clergy in any age: complaints had been made about the scandalous lives of some Catholic churchmen in Jerusalem before 1187.5 But between that date and 1229, people in the Frankish East, and for that matter in the Catholic West as well, had radically changed their attitudes towards the role of religious communities in the Holy Land. In the First Kingdom, it was considered that the regular clergy fulfilled an essential function on behalf of community, and in some sense on behalf of the whole Catholic world, by performing the liturgy in the holy places, the protection of which was the kingdom’s raison d’etre. By 1229, people no longer thought about the work of those communities in the same way; although there were practical reasons why the monks and canons might have found it difficult to return to Jerusalem, these were not insuperable, and it is clear that no pressure was put on them to do so. How are we to explain this change in religious attitudes?
Dominican and Franciscan friars. The friars were monks, but their vocation was to a life of active ministry rather than to one of contemplative prayer. And they taught that lay people might strive for perfection not by renouncing the world, but by seeking to consecrate their daily lives to the service of God. They tried, in accordance with the legislation of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, to encourage lay people to take a more active part in the worshipping life of the church by regular attendance at mass and by receiving the sacraments. As a result, lay piety became far more eucharist-centred than it had been for centuries.
The Franks living in the crusader states were influenced by the new orders almost from the start. The Franciscans established a province there in 1217 with its headquarters at Acre
though the crusade was becoming increasingly diversified in the thirteenth century, there was still a very strong response in western Europe to appeals for the Holy Land. When Frederick II’s ten-year truce with the sultan of Egypt expired in 1239, a new crusade came to
the East led by Theobald of Navarre,
Hamilton
Kedar - good deal of info about Islam available in the West b4 the crusades, in written and oral sources, but general lack of interest so no attempt made to co-ordinate knowledge
When crusading was at its height some Western theologians sought to become better informed about the faith of Islam. Although they obtained a good deal of high quality information, understanding of the faith eluded them by that route. However, the greater degree of contact with Muslims and their civilization which the crusades produced resulted in a growth of respect for some individual Muslims and a widespread admiration for some aspects of their culture. An attempt was made to accommodate good Muslims in the thought-world of western Christendom as honorary knights in this world or as honorary antique pagans in the next. In a few cases a real respect for the religion in which the civilization of Islam was grounded also developed among Western observers. Ricoldo of Monte Croce, the Dominican missionary who lived for several years in Baghdad under the Mongol Il-Kh?ns in the late thirteenth century, was unstinting in his praise of devout Muslims and the society that produced them:
Who will not be astounded if he carefully considers how great is the concern of these very Muslims for study, their devotion in prayer, their pity for the poor, their reverence for the name of God and the prophets and the holy places, their sobriety in manners, their hospitality to strangers, their harmony and love for each other?
When all these factors are considered, one can see that the West’s experience of Islam during the crusading period was far from negative
Lewis
Ahmad, Qadi of Toledo, wrote a book in Arabic on the categories of nations: wrote of Christians contemptuously as the northern and southern barbarians, of Frankish Europe and negro Africa
Rashid al-Din, brief account of Europe and outline history of Emperors and Popes in universal history for Mongol Il-Khan of Persia. No successor to this venture in ‘occidentalism’
The great debate of the Crusades, so significant in Western history, stirred hardly a ripple of curiosity in the lands of Islam
is general lack of interest in the West is in sharp contrast with the earlier response of Islamic civilization to influences from Greece, from Persia, even from India
After the initial impact of Eastern Christianity on Islam in its earliest period, Christian influences, even from the high civilization of Byzantium, were reduced to a minimum. Later, by the time that the advance of Christendom and the decline of Islam created a new relationship, Islam was crystallized in its ways of thought and behaviour, and had become impervious to external stimuli-especially from the millennial adversary in the West
Powell
Despite numerous examples of European lordships in the East, Western settlements in the Levant remained small. Those directly related to the crusades never lost their military character:
commercial developments were either independent of or subsidiary to the crusades, though they certainly benefited from them. Issues such as these, whatever their relative importance to the picture of the crusade movement, do serve to illustrate the important role of the crusades in transforming not only western European society, but also the Mediterranean world
By the middle of the twelfth century, the papacy was able to produce an historical interpretation of the crusade that integrated its military aspects with the papal programme of reform, thus linking it closely with the idea of societal renewal. Essentially, the crusade was the instrument for the restoration of Christian unity between East and West and for the reconstruction of the church in lands that had been under Muslim rule; a programme tuned to the echoes of a Constantinean golden age
Holy War diff from Just war - direct result of Chr commitment to peace. To be consistent ideologically, warfare had 2 proceed from a sacred cause. This was the guarantee of its justice
From the beginning, the crusades had forced Westerners to look beyond their frontiers. The course of the thirteenth century would amply demonstrate, in such activities as the missions to China and to the Mongols, the manner in which the crusades helped to transform Europe’s place in the world. The religious orders, particularly the Franciscans and the Dominicans, took the lead, but, as Hamilton shows, the way was paved by habits of support built in the West for the new foundations in the East in the course of the twelfth century. Can we go so far as to say that the example of the hospitallers and the military orders helped to reshape the role of religious orders in the church?
New forms of knightly piety 13th C = deeply indebted to positive role assigned 2 military class in crusades. Martial spirit
Although there were certainly religious fanatics in the West - and this was true within the Islamic world as well - the continued broad-based support for the crusades depended far more on the self-image of a society that commanded the loyalties of people than on fanatical zeal. The crusades were, as we sometimes recognize ourselves, a creative force that, for better or worse, held up a vision of a new and better world
Schildgen
Whereas much of the crusade and pilgrimage literature, informed by a literal exegesis of the Bible, undertook a religious-political mission that sought to pacify the biblical lands and foster hatred of the people who lived there, Dante has assumed the language of the crusades.
However, taking on the role of prophet, he transforms their goals into a poetic ethical-political mission aimed against Latin structural and individual corruption. As in Roland and Aliscans, he points to the law as the solution to the crisis created by Latin squabbling and treachery and to the West as the site for future conversion.
Dante registers little interest in Holy Land crusades, but rather focuses on the corruptions rife in his own Latin lands, demonstrating that at least in the early fourteenth century, an Italian poet who is absorbed by the political issues of his times has turned away from the crusade polemic of previous centuries
Hamilton
directs us towards the place of institution building, in this case monastic institutions, in the process of transformation. The development of various forms of lay spirituality that accompanied the reform movement of the eleventh century found expression in the crusade movement, beginning with the sermons preached by Urban II in 1095. This spirituality had its roots in monasticism. Conversely, the crusades further helped to shape lay spirituality along monastic lines, and to provide, in the hospitaller and military orders founded in the twelfth century, models for new monastic forms. The crusades witnessed the transport of religious houses and forms of religious life that were developing in the West not only to the Holy Land but also to Cyprus, Rhodes, Lebanon, Asia Minor, and, for a time in the thirteenth century, to the Latin Empire of Constantinople
Colin
from whole 8 centuries of Muslim Spain only one document come down to us indicating any sort of interest in Western language outside the peninsula.
Brundage
details the confrontation between morality and violence in the writings of canonists and theologians, to show how deep were the conflicts over issues fundamental to the crusades. We must keep in mind that his sources do not provide a coherent and unified view of just war or holy war. As he makes clear, it is possible to speak of a consensus on these topics only if we ignore the reservations and disagreements of some writers. The tension between acceptance and rejection of war as a means of settling disputes, present in much Christian writing of the period, must be taken seriously
Pidal
Spain didn’t give up and become denationalized and Arabized - instead Spain fused into one ideal recovery of Gothic states for fatherland and redemption of enslaved churches for glory of Christianity.
Idea Chr rulers of Asturian kingdom committed to reconquest ideology.
