cannot be induced to civility and virtue by “the regime of any kind of discipline,” discipline being linked, as we’ve seen, to reason. His final depiction of barbarians feeding on raw flesh, drinking blood, and eating out of human skulls resonates with Matthew Paris’s description of Mongol life so closely as to make apparent to what degree each followed the barbarian script—already fully developed in Solinus’s account of the Scythians42—and how much agreement there was among an array of thirteenth-century thinkers on the nature of humanity’s other, the barbarian. When another great scholastic, Thomas Aquinas, depicted barbarians as “for the most part … robust in body and deficient in mind” and as “lacking in reason” in the Commentary on the Politics, he cannot be regarded as original. While Thomas offered some specificity for the causes of barbarian irrationality, his definition of the barbarian will be otherwise familiar:
and so the men who are called barbarians absolutely are the ones who are lacking in reason, either because they happen to live in an exceedingly intemperate region of the sky, so that by the very disposition of the region they are found to be dull for the most part, or else because of some evil custom prevailing in certain lands from which it comes about that men are rendered irrational and almost brutal. Now it is evident that it is from the power of reason that men are ruled by reasonable laws and that they are practiced in writing. Hence barbarism is appropriately manifested by this sign, that men either do not live under laws or live under irrational ones, and likewise that among certain peoples there is no training in writing. (my italics)43
Humans are reasonable, lawful and robust in mind; barbarians are unreasonable, robust in body, lawless or ruled by irrational laws and evil customs, lacking the technology of writing.
Aquinas’s attention to “evil custom” introduces a direct link between the attention to manners and customs—ritus moresque—and the judgment of inhumanity or semihumanity that is “barbarism.” If the study of customs could lead to an assessment of the moral and intellectual worth of a people, the determination of unreasonable or corrupt customs among men could in turn lead to the justification for Christian intervention and even just warfare upon them. Aquinas hints as much when he asserts in a section of the Summa Theologica written between 1265 and 1271 that while non-Christians may not be compelled toward the faith, they may be compelled “ut fidem non impediant vel blasphemiis, vel malis persuasionibus, vel etiam apertis persecutionibus” (not to hinder the faith by blasphemies, evil suasions, or even open persecutions).44 In this, Aquinas’s thinking points to that of Innocent IV: for no thirteenth-century thinker developed the connection between social custom, sovereignty, and just warfare so clearly and so fully as Pope Innocent IV, whose work effectively influenced all thinking on the subject, including Aquinas’s. Innocent’s theory of limited non-Christian or pagan sovereignty provides a final component in our survey of the thirteenth-century anthropological discourse of Christianity, and arguably its most weighty component, as Innocent’s thought was vastly influential in later centuries, when it was reinterpreted and adapted to fit approaches to pagans inconsistent with his own and with the medieval salvational aim.
THE CONDITIONAL RIGHTS OF NON-CHRISTIANS ABROAD: THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF INNOCENT IV AND ITS AFTER LIFE
Innocent IV was intimately involved in the thirteenth-century diplomatic, missionary, and information-gathering expeditions to the Mongolian empire, which together constitute the most significant anthropological activity of the Middle Ages. Immediately upon his election as pope in 1243, Innocent called for a crusade of Germans and Hungarians against the advancing Mongols, the subject of an emergency meeting of the Council of Lyon later that same year; at the same time he began organizing missions to convert and collect information about them.45 Though it is Louis IX and not Innocent IV who sponsored William of Rubruck’s mission, Innocent was responsible for nearly every other significant mission to Asia, including those of Franciscans John of Plano Carpini, Benedict the Pole, and Lawrence of Portugal by way of the Near East, and Dominicans Ascelinus and Andrew of Longjumeau by way of Russia.46 While his missionaries were learning anthropology “in the field,” as it were, Innocent was developing at home a legal basis for papal relations with non-Christians. In his Commentary to Innocent III’s decretal Quod Super His, concerning the vow to go on crusade to the Holy Land, Innocent IV addressed the fundamental question of the legality of invading infidel lands and offered two different answers. Where the land in question is the Holy Land, Innocent argues, invasion is justified for a number of alternative reasons, among them: the Holy Land is Christian by right and unjustly occupied by Saracens; Christ had consecrated this land and his followers were meant to live there; the Donation of Constantine made the pope the heir to the lands of the Roman emperors; and according to the Treaty of Jaffa signed (against heavy papal objections) in 1229 between the sultan of Egypt al-Kamil and the Holy Roman emperor Frederick II, Frederick held the title of king of Jerusalem. These arguments all fell under the already well-examined question of “just war.”47
What is of more interest, and indeed occupied Innocent more, is the less well theorized question of just war upon lands held by non-Christians outside the Holy Land. Here Innocent’s thinking is new and original. Building on the biblical model of Saul’s election as king, Innocent argued that as rational creatures all men had the right to self-government and to private property and that papal interference with these rights was therefore illicit. Rational men also had the right not to be Christian: forcible conversion was unlawful, baptism required consent. But because the pope had a responsibility for the souls of all men, the papal domain did theoretically extend into non-Christian lands, that is, de jure if not de facto. The papal jurisdiction over all souls meant that the pope had a responsibility to send missionaries to non-Christian lands and to protect Christians abroad from persecution. It also meant, Innocent continued, that intervention in non-Christian lands was justified in cases where non-Christian practices violated natural law, as so-called sins contra naturam, and local leaders did nothing to punish or alter these practices.48 While Innocent did not specifically define what he meant by a sin contra naturam, the two examples he did provide—sexual perversion and idolatry or polytheistic belief—represent practices Carpini, William of Rubruck, and others would record as part of Mongol “manners and customs” without regard to their sinfulness according to church norms. And despite the missionaries’ descriptions of widespread practices of polygamy and idolatry among the Mongols, Innocent never addressed the implications of the presence of sins contra naturam within this immediate non-Christian theater.49 The only response we are given to this test of Innocentian theory lies in the realm of practice: no papal crusade was ever called upon Mongol lands on the basis of the Mongols’ polygamy, idolatry, or any other custom. Instead, the missionaries’ records of these and other possibly “unnatural” Mongol cultural practices lay dormant, without provoking military applications throughout the Middle Ages, contributing instead to the storehouse of medieval European knowledge of non-Christian and Asian cultures.
Innocent’s theory of papal relations with non-Christians would have a lasting influence on future canonists of the medieval and the early modern period, by whom it was applied in ways significantly divergent from Innocent’s own context. Specifically, later canonists frequently interpreted Innocent’s thinking to create justifications for wars being launched on non-Christian peoples. Two aspects of Innocent’s theory were particularly significant for future thinkers: his inclusion of non-Christians within the pastoral jurisdiction of the pope on the premise of a common rationality and humanity, and his recognition of limited non-Christian sovereignty, within the albeit ill-defined confines of nature’s law. Many fourteenth- and fifteenth-century canonists accepted Innocent’s assertion of non-Christian humanity and rationality, only to justify intervention or conquest in pagan societies on the basis of Innocent’s “sins contra naturam.” In the fourteenth-century context of the Spanish Reconquista, for instance, the lawyer Oldratus de Ponte (d. 1335) argued that war upon Muslims was appropriate on the basis of their natural sins: as descendants of Ishmael and as a desert people, Arabs had a natural ferocity that led them to violate natural law constantly.50 The fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Portuguese exploration and conquest of the Canary Islands—so named for the belief that they were inhabited
