Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [116]
Over the African shore he drew a female figure in Moorish dress, who, with her arm pointing toward his midriff, whispered suggestively into Europe’s ear, “Come, let us copulate.”4 The Latin word he used, commiscemini, has the sense of illicit mixing; and Opicinus declared of the Straits of Gibraltar: “Between Spain and Mauritania is the vulva Oceani from which the Mediterranean Sea proceeds.”5 The evil that obsessed him was the sexual conjunction of a seducing Muslim woman and a pure Europe turned from the path of virtue. This was truly the devil’s work. At the other end of the Mediterranean, he saw the head of the evil one, a dark shape that occupied the eastern Mediterranean, with its face covering the Levant and the lands occupied by Islam, and a full beard fringing the Balkans.
Opicinus became preoccupied with these deeper meanings in the landscape. He came to see every event of his own troubled life as depicted on the maps before him. Progressively, he became the Europe Man, struggling with temptation. When he was constipated, he understood his discomfort as an emblem of the political troubles afflicting Lombardy. Examining the patterns of hair on his body, he realized that they “signified” the location of the vineyards throughout Europe.6 His preoccupation with lust and the devil grew ever stronger. Africa Woman became “the symbol of sin, hypocrisy and the like,” while Europe Man represented “purity, salvation or piety.”7 He played with the conjunction of the northern and southern shores: sometimes Africa was a virile male and Europe the frail virgin. But in most of his sketches, Africa wore the clothes of a Muslim woman: Africa Woman was, of course, an infidel. The Christian world was contaminated by its contiguity with Africa and the Levant. This was the meaning of Africa Woman and the shadowy figure of the devil. These were the lands occupied by “Islam.” Jerusalem itself lay under the body of the devil, while Spain was being seduced.
Opicinus expressed (in an extreme fashion) a common association of the Muslim East with danger and corruption. The experience of the Levant over the two centuries of Christian occupation confirmed the beliefs that had stimulated the crusading impetus in the first place. The first Crusaders had dedicated themselves to the salvation of the holy places, which they believed were in danger of destruction. This sense of threat increased once they arrived in the East and this anxiety grew through the whole period of Western presence. They were few and the infidels were many: “Where we have a count the enemy has forty kings; where we have a knight they have a duke … where we have a castle they have a kingdom.”8 This sense of oppression, of a tiny Western Christian minority drowning in a sea of infidels, was both real and fictive. A century before Opicinus de Canistris, the chronicler Roger of Wendover observed in a letter written from the city of Acre in 1221, “We and the other peoples on our side of the water are oppressed by so many and great expenses in carrying on [this Crusade], that we shall be unable to meet our necessary expenses in carrying on … unless by the divine mercy we shortly receive assistance from our fellow Christians.”9 Yet a presence in the East was essential to further the triumph of Christ: for this reason an anonymous poet hailed the Crusade of King Louis IX of France in the mid–thirteenth century as the means to “baptise