Europe, Islam, and the Role of the Church in the Afterlife of a Medieval Polemic, 1301-1543

Abstract

This dissertation, titled “Europe, Islam, and the Role of the Church in the Afterlife of a Medieval Polemic, 1301-1543,” analyzes the circulation of the highly influential anti-Islamic polemic Contra legem Sarracenorum (Against the Law of the Saracens, c. 1301) in Europe from 1350 through 1550. It explore why late medieval and early modern readers circulated Contra legem and how they made use of the text to achieve their own purposes. The history of this text reveals the ways that a high medieval polemical approach to Islam spread within Christendom and impacted Christian-Muslim relations over several centuries. This dissertation also considers the relationships between Europe, the Church, and Islam during a period when religious upheaval within European society leading to the Reformation coincided with the expansion of the Ottoman Empire into previously Christian-held lands. The Italian missionary Riccoldo da Montecroce had composed Contra legem in the popular medieval genre of religious polemics – texts that developed arguments disputing other religions’ claims to legitimacy. In his polemic, Riccoldo provided readers with an analytic guide to the Qur’an through a series of arguments proving why Islam’s holy book was not divinely-inspired. His work became the most widely-read medieval polemic on Islam in later centuries. The text is extant in thirty-one manuscripts in Latin, fourteen in Greek translation, and three in Russian translation. Additionally, the text was printed in Latin, Greek, Spanish, Italian, and German in the sixteenth century. While previous scholars have widely recognized Contra legem’s popularity, my dissertation reconstructs the text’s influence in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In the fifteenth century, the growth of the Ottoman Empire generated a desire within Europe for information on and refutations of Islam. Christian scholars valued Riccoldo’s direct knowledge of Arabic and his experiences in the Near East as authentic. Moreover, the adaptability of Contra legem insured that these readers could appropriate Riccoldo’s knowledge of Islam for their own purposes and in new circumstances. Critical contexts for this reception were the expansion of the Ottoman Empire through the Byzantine Empire and into Europe and a concurring period of religious reforms and attacks on papal supremacy in the western Church. While historians have tended to treat pre-Protestant Church reform and early European reactions to Ottoman growth separately, the reception of Contra legem shows these developments were intimately related to one another. I argue that Contra legem became a tool for Europeans who linked the perceived threat of the Ottoman Empire’s expansion to the problem of determining authority within the Church. Readers used Riccoldo’s descriptions of the dangers of the Qur’an to conflate the Ottoman Empire with a broader Islamic threat to Christian society. Such positioning helped readers to substantiate the divine authority of the Church – and especially the papacy – as a bulwark against this threat. This historical study of knowledge transmission demonstrates the continuing impact that medieval views of Islam had on the religious uncertainties in Europe leading up to the Protestant Reformation. The struggle for authority heightened European fear of Islam, and this Islamophobia fueled the circulation of Riccoldo’s book for centuries, even into the modern day.