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 difficult to demonize.68 While crusader contact is notorious for its dearth of intellectual results, it did lead to greater everyday knowledge about Muslims as well as to widespread “orientalization” of Latin culture in the Levant, as I explore in Chapter 4. While the dialogic dimensions of Joinville’s chronicle are, as I will argue there, visible only in late crusading narratives, the similarities between Arab and European codes of knighthood and chivalry were appreciated from the very outset of the Crusades. The author of Gesta Francorum, a chronicle of the First Crusade, for example, writes thus of the Turks: “They have a saying that they are of common stock with the Franks, and that no men, except the Franks and themselves, are naturally born to be knights. This is true, and nobody can deny it, that if only they had stood firm for the faith of Christ and holy Christendom … you could not find stronger or braver or more skillful soldiers; and yet by God’s grace they were beaten by our men.”69 And unlike religious proximity, these proximate codes of chivalry did in fact lead to mutual admiration between Arabs and Europeans. Perhaps no figure better exemplifies the international code of chivalry than that of Salahadin, Europe’s “Saladin,” about whose generosity, wisdom, and romantic prowess Europeans were telling stories in their vernaculars even as he threatened their Levantine coastline.70 Stories, too, were told of Salahadin’s being knighted, and perhaps most interestingly, of his deathbed baptism—Dante, who placed Saladin along with the pagan ancients in the relatively blameless space of Limbo within his Inferno, was not alone, then, in his concern for the salvation of this crusading rival. Indeed Dante’s treatment of good Muslims as coterminous with pagan ancients is both telling and typical: the twelfth-century renaissance of the classics initiated not just an interest in the salvation of pre–Lex Christi pagans but, simultaneously, an interest in the salvation of post–Lex Christi virtuous or noble non-Christians, including contemporary Muslims.71 From the twelfth century on, then, Muslims were increasingly assimilated to the virtuous pagan paradigm, as I discuss in the final section below.
DEBATING VIRTUOUS PAGANS: PRIMITIVISM AND THE PATH TO SALVATION
Opposed to the antiprimitivism of Lucretian-Ciceronian developmental anthropology, medieval anthropology also features a strain of cultural primitivism in its celebration of the simple, unacculturated, and natural goodness of some of God’s people, the so-called virtuous pagans, precursors to the noble savages of the early modern period. The medieval descriptions of the Brahmins identified them as the exemplary virtuous pagans of Asia. This tradition dated as far back as the fourth century b.c. to historians of Alexander’s wars with India, and later developed into the letters of Alexander and the Brahmin sage Dandimus, as well as the various Alexander romances that made their way into Mandeville’s sources.72 Distant and unknown lands, too, were associated with a natural goodness and bounty through the tradition of the Earthly Paradise or the Fortunate Isles. These were sometimes located in the East, other times placed in the West, as in the Celtic Voyage of Brendan and the Purgatory of St. Patrick. As the era of Atlantic exploration got under way in the fourteenth century, the Canaries came to be identified as the Fortunate Isles, and their newly found natives described according to the trope of the primitively noble pagan.73 We know one such depiction was penned by Giovanni Boccaccio in Latin in a brief monograph called De Canaria, a translation from no longer extant Florentine merchant letters, likely in the vernacular, and dated December 17, 1341. The description of the Canarians in the De Canaria combined an account of their cultural primitivism, including their nudity, with an account of their good customs and nature, including their natural physical strength, intelligence, mutual trust, and lawfulness.74 And when Columbus explored and conquered the island of Hispaniola, he described the land in the manner of an earthly paradise (“Spanola is a wonder, with its hills and mountains, fine plains, open country, and land rich and fertile for planting and sowing, to bring in profit of all sorts”) and applied the trope of the virtuous pagan to its natives: “The people of all the islands I have discovered and taken, and those whom I have heard, both men and women, go about naked as when they were born, except some of the women cover one part of themselves with a single leaf of grass, or a cotton thing that they make for this purpose. They have no iron, nor steel, nor weapons, nor are they fit for them, because although they are well-made men of commanding stature, they appear extraordinarily timid.”75
In the medieval period, concern with the virtuous pagans intersected closely with, and indeed was inextricably linked to, salvational questions going back all the way to the church fathers, a long elite theological and philosophical debate that only in the late medieval period found application to actual pagans in ethnographic encounters such as those in the Canaries or Hispaniola. While the interest in non-Christian salvation had concerned the church since its inception, the field of interest gradually expanded over the course of the Middle Ages, from, at first, concern only for the salvation of Old Testament patriarchs pre–Lex Christi, to concern for the salvation of pagan philosophers pre–Lex Christi in the twelfth century, to, finally, concern for the possibility of pagan, and Jewish and Muslim, salvation post–Lex Christi in the thirteenth century. The thirteenth-century expansion of the possibility of non-Christian salvation to living, virtuous non-Christians had profound consequences not just for approaches to non-Christian others but for the definition of the Christian community itself, which, by implication, no longer enjoyed exclusive access to salvation. These consequences were further heightened and sharpened in fourteenth-century philosophical, theological, and cultural thought, a turn I examine in detail in my discussion of Mandeville’s Travels in Chapter 5. Here I wish briefly to sketch the earlier history of this concern with virtuous non-Christians, which began with the church fathers.
Many early church fathers, including Justin, Clement, and Origen, believed in the “concurrent value” of philosophy and Christianity, which held that through natural reason, man participated in the eternal reason of God and could thus attain truth. Clement and Origen influentially argued that Christ descended to hell to preach to those who had died before the Incarnation, thus making hell a place where future generations could learn about Christian teaching, and paving the way for universal salvation.
