Medieval Latin Lives of Muhammad

Throughout the Middle Ages, Christians wrote about Islam and the life of Muhammad. These stories, ranging from the humorous to the vitriolic, both informed and warned audiences about what was regarded as a schismatic form of Christianity. Medieval Latin Lives of Muhammad covers nearly five centuries of Christian writings on the prophet, including accounts from the farthest-flung reaches of medieval Europe, the Iberian Peninsula and the Byzantine Empire. Over time, authors portrayed Muhammad in many guises, among them: Theophanes’s influential ninth-century chronicle describing the prophet as the heretical leader of a Jewish conspiracy; Embrico of Mainz’s eleventhcentury depiction of Muhammad as a former slave who is manipulated by a magician into performing unholy deeds; and Walter of Compiègne’s twelfthcentury presentation of the founder of Islam as a likable but tricky serf ambitiously seeking upward mobility. The prose, verse, and epistolary texts in Medieval Latin Lives of Muhammad help trace the persistence of old clichés as well as the evolution of new attitudes toward Islam and its prophet in Western culture. This volume brings together a highly varied and fascinating set of Latin narratives and polemics never before translated into English.

Character Assassination Throughout the Ages, edited by Martijn Icks (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 2014

Arguably there is no better way to appreciate character assassination as practiced by medieval Christians than to consider early Christian biographies of Muhammad. One might think Muhammad would have rivals for this distinction among the Jews and the heretics, the two religious categories aside from Islam that played the biggest role in shaping early Christian identity. But as common as Christian treatises against the Jews were, their prophets were immune from Christian censure due to their perceived indispensability in corroborating Jesus's identity as the Messiah; Muhammad, whose prophecies postdated the Incarnation, was not afforded the same consideration. And while Christian writers regularly excoriated heresiarchs like Arius and Nestor, the reactions that Muhammad evoked were still more visceral, for, unlike Arius's innovation, Muhammad's never went away, and unlike Nestor's, it was linked to a polity that threatened to swallow Greek and Latin Christendom altogether. These circumstances combined to assure Muhammad the lion's share of attention from medieval Christian character assassins. It took some time after the Muslim conquests before Christian biographies of Muhammad began to appear, but once they did, they never abated, appearing in all parts of the medieval Christian world, including those that ended up under Muslim rule. In fact it is among the lives of Muhammad written and manipulated by Christian dhimmis that we find the widest range of polemical strategies for discounting Islam by denigrating its prophet. In this chapter I will consider and contextualize two Latin portraits of Muhammad from early M. Icks et al. (eds.), Character Assassination throughout the Ages

Journal of Transcultural Medieval Studies, 2014

Der Islam, 2017

Pensamiento medieval hispano: homenaje a Horacio …, 1998

Christiane Gruber & Avinoam Shalem, eds., The Image of the Prophet between Ideal and Ideology: A Scholarly Investigation, 2014

For centuries, Muhammad has been at the center of European discourse on Islam. Medieval polemicists and chroniclers often portrayed him as a shrewd heresiarch who had worked false miracles to seduce the Arabs away from Christianity: as such, the root of Saracen error and an implicit justification of wars of conquest against Saracens. This medieval polemical image proved tenacious; in slightly modified forms, it provided the dominant European discourse on Muhammad the “impostor” in the seventeenth century. In 1697, Humphrey Prideaux, Anglican minister and Oxford-educated doctor of theology, published The True nature of The Imposture Fully Display'd in the Life of Mahomet. Prideaux casts a critical eye on many of the legendary elements concerning the prophet that had been popular in medieval and early modern polemics; he claims to present, in lieu of fables, the "true nature" of Muhammad's "imposture". Yet in fact he relies heavily on the works of medieval polemicists such as Riccoldo da Montecroce. Beginning in the eighteenth century, some European authors present the prophet in a favorable light: as an inspired religious reformer and great legislator. Henri, comte de Boulainvilliers, wrote a Vie de Mahomet which was published posthumously in 1730. He presents the prophet at a divinely-inspired messenger through whom God confounded the bickering oriental Christians, liberated the Orient from the despotic rule of the Romans and Persians, and spread the knowledge of the unity of God from India to Spain. Emmanuel Pastoret has a similar view of the prophet in his Zoroaster, Confucius and Muḥammad (1787), in which he presents the lives of these three "great men", "the greatest legislators of the universe". Napoleon Bonaparte presents the prophet as a model conqueror and legislator. This image of Muḥammad as a "great man", a statesman and conqueror, is a common trope in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe. It allowed a relatively objective and irenic appreciation of the importance of the prophet and of Islam on the stage of world history, avoiding the bitter religious polemics that had so often colored European discourse on Islam. Yet by presenting Muḥammad as first and foremost a political and military leader, his role as an envoy of God and a model for Muslims was willfully avoided.

Michael Gervers and Ramzi Jibran Bikhazi, eds., Conversion and Continuity: Indigenous Christian Comunities in Islamic Lands, Eighth to Eighteenth Centuries, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto, 1990, pp. 89-101.

The Earliest Latin Lives of Muhammad Kenneth B. Wolf The eleventh-century Codex of Roda, rediscovered in 1927 after centuries of obscurity, has received considerable attention as an important early source for the study of the Christian kingdoms in northem Spain.l But the codex also enjoys the less publicized distinction of containing copies of the two earliest Latin lives of Mu0ammad. The longer of the two, found under the rubric, "Istoria de Mahomet," is not unique to the Codex of Roda. There are four known manuscript versions in addition to a printed one based on a manuscript that is no longer extant.2 The other life, curiously titled "Tultusceptru de libro domni Metobii," has no other extant versions. Both of these lives are fascinating from a "history of ideas" perspective, as early examples of the repositories of misconceptions about Islam that would be drawn upon over and over again by Christians trying to explain, or more appropriately, explain away the success of Islam. But both pose problems for the historian of westem views of Islam because they have come down to us with neither the names of their authors nor the dates of their composition. My purpose here will be to attempt to recreate the historical context within which the lives were composed based on their polemical content and what we know about one of the earliest redactors of the Istoria de Mahomet.3 Garcfa Vill. "Roda," pp. 113-130. a Escorial d.I.2 (975); Esairial d.I.l (992); Biblioteca de la Academia de Historia 78 (Codex of Roda, 11th c.); and Biblioteca Nacional 8831 (12th c.). Ambrosio de Morales, a court historian for Philip I[, pubhshed an edition of the writingg of the ninth-caitury priest Eulogiug of Coioba, which also cont ains a version of ffie lost Istoria, but the manuscript was subsequently lost. Ijkewise, the manuscript from which Eulogius himself transcribed the life-in faa, the earliest known version-is no longer extant. See PL, vol. 115, cols. 859-60. For a critical edition see Dfaz, pp. 157-59. ' Dfaz y Dfaz offers some preliminary speculation about the dates and authors of these acoounts and surnniarizes the opinions of others about the better known of the two lives (Dfaz, p. 149). The present study is a response to his call for more research on the matter. Conversion and Continuity: Indigenous Christian Communities in lslamic Lands, Eighth to Eighteenth Cemuries, ed. Michael Gervers and Ramzi Jibran Bikhazi, Papers in Mediaeval Studies 9