Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [115]
Yet his confidence in conversion was not widely shared. More typical were scholars who cast doubt on even the desirability of conversion. The Franciscan Alexander of Hales in his Summae universae theologiae of 1256 classed Muslims with heretics irredeemably tainted by their unbelief and who should therefore be killed by any lawful authority. Benoit of Alignan in his Tractatus fidei suggested that the “absurdities of Mahomet” should be extirpated by “fire and sword.”76 But no scholar suggested that the fact of Islam’s existence could ever be ignored. This was the vast “myth of Crusade” that Alphonse Dupront traced through his life’s work, a history on an almost Gibbonian scale. This myth, as he put it, became “an endemic reality, that is a [permanent] condition of the collective spirit.”77 But the medieval Crusades, like the Ottoman expansion into the Balkans and the two great sieges of Vienna (1529 and 1683), had a double impact. They transformed the West, but they also transmogrified the East.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Conquest and Reconquest
THE FIRST CRUSADE WAS BORN OUT OF FEAR. URBAN II BELIEVED THAT the Holy Land was in danger, and Christendom responded to his call. Although later Crusades to the East were to a greater degree a product of political ambitions and territorial aggrandizement, the visceral element never disappeared. The fears grew, through contact with the East and increasing Western preoccupations with Islam. While Muslims saw a source of defilement in Frankish Christians, so too Christians now blamed the existence of Islam for the rising tide of corruption in the Christian world.1 Churchmen complained that the people of the Latin kingdoms were acquiring the lewd ways of the East, wearing un-Christian clothing and disporting themselves with Muslim women. If James of Vitry is to be believed
Among the Poulains [children of the Crusaders born in the Holy Land] there is hardly one in a thousand who takes his marriage seriously. They do not regard fornication to be a deadly sin. From childhood they are pampered and wholly given to carnal pleasures, whereas they are not accustomed to hear God’s word, which they lightly disregard … And the city [Acre] is full of brothels, and as the rent of prostitutes is higher, not only laymen, but even clergymen, nay even monks, rent their houses all over the city to public harlots.2
Nowhere were these ideas of pollution more graphically presented than in Avignon in the spring of 1335. In February, a middle-aged priest called Opicinus de Canistris had suddenly fallen ill. He lay in bed until the end of March, when he suddenly recovered, having, as he said, seen a vision of the world. His illness had left his mind confused and his right arm paralyzed. His official career as a papal secretary in the pontifical palace was ended. Nonetheless, he learned to use his left arm, and began writing and drawing at breakneck speed. Over the next few months he filled more than fifty-two large parchments. At that point he disappears from history—the date of his death is uncertain—and his work vanished into the papal archives, where it lay undiscovered for almost 600 years.
Opicinus had become obsessed with his own sin and desire, and during his illness he began to see the shapes of three huge figures concealed in the outline of the Mediterranean. One was male, another female, and the third was a bearded and monstrous devil. He drew his grotesque figures over the contours of the coastline, believing that God