Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [226]
75. Translated and cited in Throop, Criticism, p. 122.
76. See Kedar, Crusade, p. 189.
77. Dupront, Mythe, vol. 2, p. 976. The more than 2,000 pages of Dupront’s work Le mythe de croisade constitute one of the great works of modern historiography, but Dupront understood (and the book was published after his death) that he was able to explore only part of the vast spider’s web of connections that he uncovered.
CHAPTER 8: CONQUEST AND RECONQUEST
1. See Penny J. Cole, “ ’O God, the heathen have come into your inheritance’ (Ps. 78:1): The Theme of Religious Pollution in Crusade Documents 1095–1188,” in M. Shatzmiller (ed.), Crusaders and Muslims in Twelfth-Century Syria, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1993, pp. 84–111.
2. Cited in Prawer, World, p. 91.
3. Richard G. Salomon, “A Newly Discovered Manuscript of Opicinus de Canistris: A Preliminary Report,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes XVI (1953), 1, pp. 45–57. The full treatment of the Opicinus MSS and his life appeared in Richard G. Salomon, Opicinus de Canistris: Weltbild und Bekenntnisse eines Avignonesischen Klerikers des 14. Jahrhunderts, 2 vols., London: Warburg Institute, 1936. The second volume consists of a set of images of the various elements within the MSS. Opicinus de Canistris was obsessed with impurity, to the degree that Richard Salomon classed him a sexual psychopath. But he also observed, “Of course, not everything in the work of a psychopath is pathological.” The supremely diabolical quality of the carnal connection between Muslim Africa and Christian Europe offended doubly against the law of God. There was no better (or more readily identifiable) means of depicting the corruption of the world than by suggesting a sexual union between a Christian and an infidel. In Opicinus’s day, the loss of Jerusalem to the Muslim enemy was still an open wound. He struggled vainly to present the complexity of the political and theological world that confronted him; inevitably, his sheets remained a work in progress, unfinished and experimental. They were littered with images of God, Jesus Christ, doves with vast embracing wings, the Virgin Mary, strange and mythical beasts; yet in his own mind all were worked back into the themes embodied in his texts and captions.
4. See Jörg-Geerd Arentzen, Imago mundi cartographica: Studien zur Bildlichkeit Mittelalterlicher Welt- und Ökumenkarten unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Zusammenwirkens von Text und Bild, Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1984, p. 315. Chapter 4, “Die Karte als Sinnbild in den Zeichungen des Opicinus de Canistris,” pp. 275–316, is the most thorough recent treatment of Opicinus. Commisceo has the sense of mixing or mingling, in this case perhaps relating to seminal and vaginal emissions.
5. Richard G. Salomon, “A Newly Discovered Manuscript of Opicinus de Canistris: A Preliminary Report,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes XVI (1953), 1, p. 53.
6. Ibid., p. 52.
7. His sexual obsession has caused one scholar to observe that “for Opicinus, earth cartography is tantamount to exposing the fornicating world … a cartographer’s attempt to represent the world as a netherland that embodies—incorporates—corruption and sexual sin.” See Gandelman, Reading Pictures, pp. 84–5. Richard Salomon also noted “his tendency towards prurience” and cited Opicinus’s remark in his text: “While I was working on this, a simple priest from Lombardy came to see me, and I had to cover the abdomen of the woman with a piece of paper in order not to shock him.”
8. H. Hagenmayer, Die Kreuzzugsbriefe aus den Jahren 1088–1100: Eine Quellensammlung zur Geschichte des ersten Kreuzzuges, Innsbruck: Wagner, 1901, p. 147. Cited and translated in Riley Smith, First Crusade, p. 91.
9. Cited and translated in Peters (ed.), Christian Society, p. 141.
10. Cited in Kedar, Crusade, pp. 161–2.
11. See Hillenbrand, Crusades, pp. 141–61, for the growing importance of Jerusalem within Islam.
12. Cited and translated ibid., p. 112.
13. William