The Religions of the Book: Co-Existence and Conflict, 1400-1660 (Early Modern Literature in History)

The Religions of the Book Christian Perceptions, 1400–1660

Edited by

Matthew Dimmock and Andrew Hadfield

Early Modern Literature in History General Editors: Cedric C. Brown, Professor of English, University of Reading; Andrew Hadfield, Professor of English, University of Sussex, Brighton. Advisory Board: Sharon Achinstein, University of Oxford; Donna Hamilton, University of Maryland; Jean Howard, University of Columbia; John Kerrigan, University of Cambridge; Richard McCoy, CUNY; Cathy Shrank, University of Sheffield; Adam Smyth, University of Reading; Steven N. Zwicker, Washington University St. Louis. Within the period 1520–1740 this series discusses many kinds of writing, both within and outside the established canon. The volumes may employ different theoretical perspectives, but they share an historical awareness and an interest in seeing their texts in lively negotiation with their own and successive cultures.

Titles include: Andrea Brady ENGLISH FUNERARY ELEGY IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY Laws in Mourning Mark Thornton Burnett CONSTRUCTING ‘MONSTERS’ IN SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA AND EARLY MODERN CULTURE Dermot Cavanagh LANGUAGE AND POLITICS IN THE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY HISTORY PLAY Danielle Clarke and Elizabeth Clarke (editors) ‘THIS DOUBLE VOICE’ Gendered Writing in Early Modern England David Coleman DRAMA AND THE SACRAMENTS IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND Indelible Characters Katharine A. Craik READING SENSATIONS IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND James Daybell (editor) EARLY MODERN WOMEN’S LETTER-WRITING, 1450–1700 Matthew Dimmock and Andrew Hadfield (editors) THE RELIGIONS OF THE BOOK Christian Perceptions, 1400–1660 Tobias Döring PERFORMANCES OF MOURNING IN SHAKESPEAREAN THEATRE AND EARLY MODERN CULTURE Sarah M. Dunnigan EROS AND POETRY AT THE COURTS OF MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS AND JAMES VI Mary Floyd-Wilson and Garrett A. Sullivan Jr (editors) ENVIRONMENT AND EMBODIMENT IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

Teresa Grant and Barbara Ravelhofer ENGLISH HISTORICAL DRAMA, 1500–1660 Forms Outside the Canon Andrew Hadfield SHAKESPEARE, SPENSER AND THE MATTER OF BRITAIN William M. Hamlin TRAGEDY AND SCEPTICISM IN SHAKESPEARE’S ENGLAND Elizabeth Heale AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND AUTHORSHIP IN RENAISSANCE VERSE Chronicles of the Self Constance Jordan and Karen Cunningham (editors) THE LAW IN SHAKESPEARE Claire Jowitt (editor) PIRATES? THE POLITICS OF PLUNDER, 1550–1650 Jean-Christopher Mayer SHAKESPEARE’S HYBRID FAITH History, Religion and the Stage Jennifer Richards (editor) EARLY MODERN CIVIL DISCOURSES Marion Wynne-Davies WOMEN WRITERS AND FAMILIAL DISCOURSE IN THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE

Relative Values The series Early Modern Literature in History is published in association with the Renaissance Texts Research Centre at the University of Reading. Early Modern Literature in History Series Standing Order ISBN 0–333–71472–5 (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

The Religions of the Book Christian Perceptions, 1400–1660 Edited by

Matthew Dimmock Senior Lecturer in English, University of Sussex and

Andrew Hadfield Professor of English, University of Sussex

Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Matthew Dimmock and Andrew Hadfield 2008 Individual chapters © contributors 2008 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978 -0-230-02004-7 ISBN-10: 0-230-02004-6

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This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

In memory of Stephen Medcalf, Sasha Roberts and Egan Welch.

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Contents List of Illustrations

ix

Notes on Contributors

xi

Acknowledgements

xiii

Chronology

xiv

Introduction: The Devil Citing Scripture: Christian Perceptions of the Religions of the Book Matthew Dimmock and Andrew Hadfield

1

1. Christian Anti-Semitism and Intermedial Experience in Late Medieval England Anthony Bale

23

2. The Crusade of Varna, 1443–1445: What Motivated the Crusaders? Colin Imber

45

3. ‘A Human Head to the Neck of a Horse’: Hybridity, Monstrosity and Early Christian Conceptions of Muhammad and Islam Matthew Dimmock 4. ‘Vile Interpretations’ and ‘Devilish Supplements’: Jewish Exegesis and Linguistic Siege in Martin Luther’s ‘On the Jews and Their Lies’ (1543) Raphael Hallett 5. “Turks” and “Christians”: The Iconography of Possession in the Depiction of the Ottoman-Venetian-Hapsburg Frontiers, 1550–1689 Palmira Brummett 6. Confounding Babel: The Language of Religion in the English Revolution Matthew Birchwood

vii

66

89

110

140

viii Contents

7. ‘A Parallel Made with the Jewish Sanhedrin’: Tolerating Jews and Jewish Precedents in the Early Modern Church and State Eliane Glaser

159

8. Milton among the Muslims Gerald MacLean

180

Afterword Jerry Brotton

195

Select Bibliography

203

Index

207

Illustrations Figure 1.1

Figure 5.1

Fifteenth-century ‘Instruments of the Passion’. London, British Library Royal MS 6.E.vi, f. 15r. Image-with-caption strip. By permission of the British Library.

36

Venetian map of “Brazzo de Maina”. Simon Pinargenti, Isole che son da Venetia nella Dalmatia, et per tutto l’Archipelago, fino a Costantinopoli, con le loro Fortezze e con le terre piu notabili di Dalmatia, nuovamente poste in disegno a beneficio de gli Studiosi di Geografia, Simon Pinargenti et compagnia, In Vinegia, M.D.L.XXIII. British Library, Maps C.24.g.10(.24). By permission of the British Library.

117

Figure 5.2

Castel Novo. Giovanni Battista Camocio, Isole famose, porti, fortezze, e terre maritime, sotto poste alla Ser.ma Sig.ria di Venetia, ad altri Principi Christiani, et al Sig.or Turco, novamente poste in luce. In Venetia alla libraria del segno di S. Marco, [1574]. Folger Shakespeare Library, G1015 C3, map 20. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. 119

Figure 5.3

The Arms of Hungary emblazoned across the chest of the Hapsburg eagle. Alexander Maier, “Hungariae Descriptionem,” 1594. British Library, Maps 28195(.27). By permission of the British Library.

121

The Hungarian coat of arms. Theodore de Bry, “Vetutissimi potentissimique Hungariae Regni Transsylvaniaeque principatus, post varias editions, delineato … .” Francof[urti ad Moenum], 1596. British Library, Maps 28195(.91). By permission of the British Library.

122

Figure 5.4

ix

x

Illustrations

Figure 5.5

Figure 5.6

Figure 5.7

Figure 5.8

Hungary, Greece and the Morea. Justinum Dankerum, “Regni Hungariae …” Amstelodami, [1630?] British Library, Maps 28195(.31). By permission of the British Library.

123

Sclavonia, Croatia, Bosnia and Dalamatia, featuring Rudolph II. Johann Bussemecher, “Sclavonia, Croatia, Bosnia et Dalmatiae Pars Maior,” [Coln], [ca. 1600], in Geographische Hantbuch. British Library, Maps C.39.c.1. By permission of the British Library.

125

Ottoman Standard. Giovanni Battista Camocio, Isole famose, porti, fortezze, e terre maritime, sotto poste alla Ser.ma Sig.ria di Venetia, ad altri Principi Christiani, et al Sig.or Turco, novamente poste in luce. In Venetia alla libraria del segno di S. Marco [1574]. Plate 40. Folger Shakespeare Library: G1015 C3. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

126

Captured Ottoman Standard. P. M. Coronelli, An Historical and Geographical Account of the Morea, Negropont, and the Maritime Places, as Far As Thessalonica; Illustrated with 42 Maps of the Countries, Plains, and Draughts of the Cities, Towns and Fortifications. Written in Italian by P. M. Coronelli, Geographer to the Republick of Venice. Englished by R. W. Gent, London, Printed for Matth. Gillyflower at the Spread-Eagle in Westminster-Hall, and W. Canning at his Shop in Vine-Court in the Middle Temple, 1687. Folger Shakespeare Library, Rare Book 152–564q, p. 81. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

128

Notes on Contributors Anthony Bale is Senior Lecturer in Medieval Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. He works on cultures of anti-Semitism in the later Middle Ages and on vernacular poetry. His book, The Jew in the Medieval Book: English Antisemitisms 1350–1500 was published by Cambridge University Press in 2006. Matthew Birchwood is Lecturer in English Literature at Kingston University, London. His interests lie in the role of Islam and the East in literary–political discourses of the seventeenth century. He is co-editor of Cultural Encounters Between East and West, 1453–1699 (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2005) and has published related articles on Davenant’s interregnum drama and the first English biography of Mohammed. His most recent book, Staging Islam in England: Drama and Culture 1640–1685, was published by Boydell and Brewer in 2007. Jerry Brotton is Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author of Trading Territories: Mapping the Early Modern World (Reaktion, 1997); Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East and West, co-written with Lisa Jardine (Reaktion, 2000); The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo (Oxford University Press, 2002); and The Sale of the Late King’s Goods: Charles I and his Art Collection (Pan Macmillan, 2006). Palmira Brummett is Professor of History and Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of Tennessee. Interested in the rhetorics of cross-cultural encounter, she is the author of Image and Imperialism in the Ottoman Revolutionary Press, 1908–1911 (SUNY Press, 2000), and Ottoman Seapower and Levantine Diplomacy in the Age of Discovery (SUNY Press, 1994). She is editing a volume entitled The Book of Travels: Genre, Itinerary, Ethnology and Pilgrimage, 1250–1650, and completing a book manuscript on mapping the Ottomans. Matthew Dimmock is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Sussex. He is the author of New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2005), co-editor of Cultural Encounters Between East and West, 1453–1699 (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2004) and editor of William Percy’s Mahomet and His Heaven: A Critical xi

xii Notes on Contributors

Edition (Ashgate, 2007). He is currently working on a monograph concerning the Prophet Muhammad in Christian thought. Eliane Glaser is an honorary research fellow at Birkbeck College, London, where she completed a Ph.D. on Judaism in Christian political and religious literature. She is the author of Judaism without Jews: Philosemitism and Christian Polemic in Early Modern England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Andrew Hadfield is Professor of English and co-director of the Centre for Early Modern Studies at the University of Sussex. He is the author of Literature, Travel and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance, 1545–1625 (OUP, 1998) and the editor of Amazons, Savages and Machiavels: Travel and Colonial Writing in English, 1550–1630 (OUP, 2001). His most recent book, Shakespeare and Republicanism (CUP, 2005) was awarded the Roland H. Bainton prize for literature by the Sixteenth Century Society of America. Raphael Hallett specialises in sixteenth-century intellectual history, with particular interests in knowledge systems, print culture and European dynamics of religious toleration and persecution. He is a Teaching Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Leeds. He has a chapter in the forthcoming book, Art Reformed: Visual Culture after the Reformation (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008). Colin Imber was until 2005 a Reader in Turkish in the University of Manchester. His work has concentrated on the history of the Ottoman Empire before the mid-seventeenth century. His books include The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1481 (Isis Press, 1990) and The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1650: the Structure of Power (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), which serves as a general textbook of Ottoman history. He also works on Ottoman law, with publications including a study of the 16th century Ottoman jurist Ebu’s-su’ud, Ebu’s-su’ud: the Islamic Legal Tradition (Edinburgh University Press, 1997). His most recent monograph is The Crusade of Varna, 1443–1445 (Ashgate, 2006), a selection of translations of primary material on the crusade, with an introduction. Gerald MacLean is currently Professor of English at the University of Exeter and author of The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580–1720 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004; Turkish translation 2006), Looking East: English Writing and the Ottoman Empire before 1800 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), and editor of Re-Orienting the Renaissance: Cultural Exchanges with the East (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and Writing Turkey: Explorations in Turkish History, Politics and Culture (Middlesex University Press, 2006).

Acknowledgements This book developed from a one-day conference, ‘Religions of the Book’, hosted by the Centre for Early Modern Studies, University of Sussex, on 15 September 2005 and sponsored by The British Academy and the School of Humanities at the University of Sussex. We would like to thank Ellie Rycroft who made sure things worked properly on the day; Keston Sutherland for his help with the catering provision; Miri Rubin for an extremely helpful suggestion at a critical point; and the speakers and participants for making it such an enjoyable and stimulating event. We are very pleased to be able to publish this volume in Palgrave’s series ‘Early Modern Literature in History’, and would like to thank Cedric Brown for his support and encouragement, as well as his perceptive comments on earlier proposals and drafts.

xiii

Chronology 1143 1190

1290 1414 1443–5 1453 1459 1481

1492 1517

1526

1529 1543

1565 1570

The first translation of the Qur’a¯n into Latin, by Robert of Ketton. Richard I’s departure for the Third Crusade in Lent 1190 prompts violence against Jews in the English towns of King’s Lynn, Stamford and York. The expulsion of English Jews by Edward I. Margery Kempe leaves Venice for her pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The Crusade of Varna. The Capture of Constantinople by the Ottomans under Mehmed II, ‘The Conqueror’. Pius II calls the Council of Mantua in order to form a crusading force to respond to the conquest of Constantinople. Ottoman forces capture Otranto in Italy, the only time the Ottomans establish a base on the Italian mainland. The death of Mehmed II in this year, and the succession crisis that followed, prompts a retreat. The expulsion of Spanish Jews. Moorish Granada falls to Ferdinand and Isabella. Columbus sets sail for the East. Luther’s 95 Theses nailed to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral, inaugurating the Reformation. Selim I conquers Egypt and Syria. Pope Leo X calls for a Crusade against the Ottomans. Battle of Mohacs, in which Ottoman forces defeat a Hungarian army and Louis II, the Hungarian king, is killed. Buda is conquered. The first Ottoman siege of Vienna marks the high point of Ottoman power in Europe. The first printed translation of the Qur’a¯n, based on Ketton’s earlier translation, is published in Basle. It is supported by Martin Luther, and edited by Theodorus Bibliander and Philip Melanchton. The Ottoman siege of Malta – reported widely throughout Christian Europe. Pius V’s papal bull Regnans in Excelsis excommunicates Elizabeth I of England. xiv

Chronology xv

1571

1588 1632 1634 1637 1642 1649 1654–7 1656 1660 1683

The Battle of Lepanto, in which the Venetians and a Holy League defeat the Ottoman fleet. A victory widely celebrated throughout Europe. The English defeat the Spanish Armada. Thomas Adams endows the first chair of Arabic at Cambridge – Abraham Wheelocke is appointed. Archbishop Laud endows the first chair of Arabic at Oxford – Edward Pocoke is appointed. The British attack Salé, a result of increased British activity in the Mediterranean. The beginning of the Civil Wars in Britain. The execution of King Charles I. The publication of the first translation of the Qur’a¯n in English – The Alcoran of Mahomet. Production of the Biblia Sacra Polyglotta, the London Polyglot Bible. The readmission of the Jews to England. The Restoration of the English monarchy under Charles II. Ottoman siege of Vienna – defeat marks the beginning of the end of Ottoman domination in Europe.

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Introduction: The Devil Citing Scripture: Christian Perceptions of the Religions of the Book Matthew Dimmock and Andrew Hadfield

Christian authors in early modern Europe knew that, whatever their hostilities, there was common ground between the three religions, or peoples, of the book (from the Arabic Ahl al-Kitab).1 Pope Pius II, dismayed at the advances made by the Ottoman Emperor, Mehmed II, and his triumph in wresting Constantinople from Christian control, wrote to his great rival in 1461, either naively or deviously, asking him if he wished to convert to Christianity.2 The move was a surprise as Pius had expressed nothing but hostile contempt for Islam before this letter, as he was to do after it. He had referred to Mehmed as a ‘cruel and bloody butcher’ and ‘the most repulsive beast’.3 In a recent re-examination of the text and its context, Nancy Bisaha argues that, although the reasons for the letter may never emerge, its purpose may have been ‘a bluff, designed to convince Western readers of either the pope’s despair over their apathy or the imminent danger to Christian rulers if Mehmed ceased to be an enemy of the faith.’4 Certainly, it was not designed to be read by a Muslim audience. Nevertheless, the existence of the letter is significant as it shows how an argument had to be made explaining the connections between the faiths and articulating their common culture. The first few pages refer to Mehmed with respect and show an understanding of the common ground between Christianity and Islam. Pius reminds Mehmed of their shared belief in the truth of the Old Testament, an association prominent in the contemporary, and immensely popular, Travels of the fictional Sir John Mandeville. Mandeville’s source, the anonymous De Statu Sarracenorum (1273), itself based upon William of Tripoli’s Notia de Machometo (1271), foregrounds these shared scriptural traditions specifically in order to facilitate the conversion of the ‘Saracen’, a tactic used by many other Christian writers and clearly utilised here by Pius II. His letter proceeds accurately to 1

2 Introduction

describe how Muslims consider Christ, ‘whom the Mohammedan law in which you [Mehmed] were born calls a holy man, a great prophet, son of a virgin, and famous for his miracles.’ Furthermore, Pius appeals to their common humanity and suggests that the Turks are like the Scythians, here, seen as they are in Homer, as ‘renowned warriors’ who are to be distinguished from the savages who surround them. Pius’s rhetoric reaches a climax when he claims that, if he does convert, Mehmed will be like Constantine, a pagan who became one of the most important of all Christian leaders, establishing the faith throughout the Roman Empire.5 Pius’s willingness to imagine the Ottoman ruler in Constantine’s position of Christian Caesar indicates an indebtedness to classical models of empire and heroism (epitomised perhaps in the position of Holy Roman Emperor) that Mehmed was perfectly placed to inherit following his conquest of Constantinople. It was an inheritance of which Mehmed and his successors were acutely aware. Not only was the very term ‘Caesar’ contested between Ottoman ruler and Holy Roman Emperor, but Mehmed conspicuously styled himself as an idealised universal monarch, both ‘an Eastern/Islamic and Western/Christian Roman sovereign’.6 As a consequence, as Serpil Bag ˘ci and Zeren Tandini have recognised, he sought to embrace ‘the intellectual and artistic culture of the lands that he either already governed or aspired to do so’, incorporating artists, writers, scientists and historians from across the Renaissance world – books ‘in Greek, Latin, Arabic, Persian and Ottoman Turkish on history, geography and literature were written, compiled and translated’ in his palaces, and histories of his reign were produced in Ottoman Turkish, Greek and Persian.7 The circulation of images – in particular on portrait medals – of Mehmed appropriating the iconography of imperial conquest, and particularly of Constantine (but also of the papacy), indicates the development of a culture of competing representations of universal dominion ‘equally recognisable to both East and West’.8 It is in this culture that we must place Pius’s request, whether intended for Mehmed or for an audience closer to home. In terms of concrete results, however, the letter led nowhere. From his election, Pius had attempted to unite the warring factions within Europe in crusade, summoning Christian sovereigns to the Council of Mantua in 1459 for this purpose. Although largely unsuccessful, he remained committed to the cause until the end of his life, and he died in Ancona in 1464 while awaiting the arrival of a Venetian fleet, the main component of a new crusade to the Holy Land. Both the Council of Mantua and his final hours in Ancona are commemorated in Pintoricchio’s frescoes that decorate the Piccolomini Library in the

Matthew Dimmock and Andrew Hadfield 3

Cathedral of Sienna. Painted between 1504 and 1506, the latter of these images features an ailing Pius II, with both the Doge of Venice and Hassan Zaccaria (the deposed prince of Samos), in a white turban and green robes, kneeling before him. To his left stands the similarly attired pretender to the Ottoman throne, Calapin Bajazet, at that point under the control of the papacy. The incorporation of such Islamic figures into papal iconography signals both the legitimacy of the venture and papal supremacy, in implicit opposition to Mehmed. But shortly after the episode reproduced in this image, Pius died, a troubled and frustrated man. Mehmed would continue with his triumphs, taking Otranto on the Italian mainland in 1480, and it is a mark of his success that his death in 1481 was greeted with such enthusiasm by his Christian foes.9 Pius II’s letter to Mehmed is emblematic of the relationship between the two faiths. Within the general context of rivalry, suspicion and hostility, there is a recognition that the religions of the book share the same language and that proper communication can easily exist if terms can be established, even though we should acknowledge that Pius’s overture was hardly a neutral one. The relationship between Christianity and Judaism was more intimate and consequently more fraught, but the same paradigms existed. This is in some part a result of the association of Judaism and Islam in the Christian imagination, a long-established polemical connection that is exemplified in the massacre of Jews in the English towns of King’s Lynn, Stamford and York that accompanied Richard I’s departure for the Third Crusade in Lent 1190.10 As Christopher Tyerman has noted, ‘Jews were bound to be more vulnerable when crusade preachers emphasised the Passion, the Crucifixion, and the Cross. The desire to avenge the Crucifixion was a popularly expressed emotion among crusaders ...’.11 Edward I’s expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290 is similarly associated with his own crusading ambitions.12 This association was to continue well into the early modern period, fuelled by the considerable numbers of Jews migrating from Europe into Ottoman lands – a movement actively encouraged by the Ottoman authorities – and is demonstrated in an English context in the relationship between Barabas and Ithamore at the heart of Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (1592?). Yet within the general context of pogroms, anti-Semitism and prejudice, there existed an acknowledgement of shared roots and culture between Christianity and Judaism. The debate still rages as to whether Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (1596–8) is an anti-Semitic or a philo-Semitic play that exposes the prejudices of its Christian audience.13 There were very few Jews living in England at this time, between the expulsion of 1290 and the readmission by Oliver Cromwell in 1656.14 Nevertheless, in an important

4 Introduction

exchange that is much less celebrated than some of the play’s more obviously dramatic moments, Shakespeare points out the common heritage of Christians and Jews. When Antonio first seeks out Shylock to ask for a loan of three thousand ducats, the two men, despite their obvious antipathy, find a means of debating and understanding the transaction that is about to take place through their understanding of the Old Testament, the one book they have in common: Ant. How much ye would? Shy. Ay, ay, three thousand ducats. Ant. And for three months. Shy. I had forgot, – three months, – [To Bassiano] you told me so. Well then, your bond: and let me see, – but hear you, Me thoughts you said, you neither lend nor borrow Upon advantage. Ant. I do never use it. Shy. When Jacob graz’d his uncle Laban’s sheep, – This Jacob from our holy Abraham was (As his wise mother wrought in his behalf) The third possessor: ay, he was the third. Ant. And what of him? Did he take interest? Shy. No, not take interest, not as you would say Directly int’rest, – mark what Jacob did, – When Laban and himself were compromis’d That all the eanlings which were streak’d and pied Should fall as Jacob’s hire, the ewes being rank In end of autumn turned to the rams, And when the work of generation was Between these woolly breeders in the act, The skilful shepherd pill’d me certain wands, And in the doing of the deed of kind He stuck them up before the fulsome ewes, Who then conceiving, did in eaning time Fall parti-colour’d lambs, and those were Jacob’s. This was a way to thrive, and he was blest: And thrift is blessing if men steal it not. Ant. This was a venture sir that Jacob serv’d for, A thing not in his power to bring to pass, But sway’d and fashion’d by the hand of heaven. Was this inserted to make interest good?

Matthew Dimmock and Andrew Hadfield 5

Or is your gold and silver ewes and rams? Shy. I cannot tell, I make it breed as fast, – But note me signior. Ant. Mark you this Bassiano, The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose, – An evil soul producing holy witness Is like a villain with a smiling cheek, A goodly apple rotten at the heart. O what a goodly outside falsehood hath!15 This is a complex and carefully nuanced exchange that draws the audience/reader into a careful and difficult consideration not simply of the rights and wrongs of usury, but also of the nature of interpretation itself. It is well known that Elizabethans disapproved of charging interest for moneylending on principle – as did most Christians in Europe – but were nevertheless dependent on this practice to make their economy function.16 Here we witness two divergent readings of the same passage in the Bible, the story of Jacob tending his uncle Laban’s sheep (Genesis 30), each used to support diametrically opposed positions. Antonio, hostile to the erudition demonstrated by Shylock, dismisses his arguments as the devil citing Scripture for his own purposes, a comment that balances Shylock’s earlier aside as Antonio enters his house, ‘I hate him for he is a Christian’ (1.3.37). However, what the audience witnesses is two men of different religions using the same story to justify their own desires – Antonio’s that Shylock will not charge interest, and Shylock’s that he has every right to do so – a sign of a shared faith as well as an indication of inevitable opposition and hostility. What no Christian audience could have failed to realise was that Christians themselves were irrevocably divided over exactly the same sort of issues. Protestants and Catholics disagreed not simply over the interpretation of Scripture but whether Scripture should be the basis for the establishment of God’s church on earth.17 William Tyndale (1494?–1536), the most significant translator of the Bible into English, was executed for his belief that the Bible should be available to every reader so that judgement could be made solely on the basis of Scriptural authority. Similar arguments were to result in the first printed edition of the Qur’a– n in Latin, sponsored by Martin Luther, and produced in Basle in 1543.18 In his preface to this controversial text Luther argued directly for an unmediated account of Islamic belief to be available to the public, asking, ‘In this age of ours how many enemies have we already seen? Papist defenders of idolatry, the Jews,

6 Introduction

the multifarious monstrosities of the Anabaptists, Servetus and others. Let us now prepare ourselves against Muhammad.’19 Notice again the connection between Islam and Judaism, further allied with ‘Papisty’ – all marshalled in anti-Christian opposition to a beleaguered Protestantism, and affirmed in Tyndale’s own work advocating reformation of the English Church. Tyndale’s most significant opponent, with whom he argued in print over precisely these principles, Thomas More (1477/ 8–1535), was executed a year earlier for defending the rights of the church to control the word of God. Significantly enough, contemporary biographers are no nearer agreeing on the rights and wrongs of the stances taken than their sixteenth-century subjects.20 Shakespeare was acutely aware of Reformation divisions, having had a hand in the play of More’s life and having co-written King Henry VIII with the younger dramatist, John Fletcher.21 Any dispute between religions would immediately remind the Christian audience of the divisions amongst them, but also of the beliefs they shared, informing a common culture that was widely recognised. In his influential and encyclopaedic exploration of the religions of the known world, Purchas his Pilgrimage (1613), Samuel Purchas devoted substantial sections to a detailed consideration of Judaism and Islam. He recognises Jewish history to be ‘of more importance then any other’ and is explicit on the parallels between Judaism and a reformed Christianity, since ‘For what beleeue we, but for the maine and cheife points of our faith, are as plainly in their Euangelicall Prophets, as in our propheticall Euangelists?’22 He goes further, remarking that ‘Hereunto also may bee added the common grounds, both of Reason, which they hold with vs in Nature: and of Scripture, the auncienter parts whereof, and especially the Law of Moses ...’.23 The notion that ‘Reason’, as well as ‘Scripture’, is part of a shared heritage between Christianity and Judaism suggests an inheritance, assumed by Christianity, of both Judaic theology and classical civilisation (which offers parallels with Pope Benedict XVI’s recent utterances on reason and faith).24 It is, according to Purchas, an inheritance the Jews have squandered. They are instead ‘branded with iudgement’ and ‘wander ouer the world, the contempt of Nations, the skumme of people’, surrounded by ‘the hissing, derision, and indignation of men’ for their denial of Christ.25 Purchas is in no doubt that their conversion is necessary – and will come either by choice or in the latter days – for he wishes that the Jews might become ‘both reall and verball teachers of the Truth, which they let fall, and we take vp; the one in their Oracles of sacred writte, the other in their exemplary iudgement’.26 Again the connection between Christianity and Judaism is explicit, but here as

Matthew Dimmock and Andrew Hadfield 7

elsewhere, Purchas is clear that the two relate to one another in terms of progression and obsolescence. Christianity, and Protestantism specifically, is the culmination of Biblical revelation, and renders all that came before null and void. The position of Islam – and its claim to supersede both Christianity and Judaism – necessitates a different response. Purchas acknowledges Islamic claims to a common Old Testament lineage, noting that some Christian writers recognise the first Muslim to be ‘Ismael’, while ‘others ascribe it to Abraham’.27 Yet he identifies crucial differences in the nature of revelation when discussing the ‘Alcoran’. ‘For the Word of God (sayth Mahomet in that Booke) came not to me all at once, as the Law vnto Moses, the Psalmes to David, and the Gospell to CHRIST.’28 This is, Purchas implies, a fake revelation, a fiction, unlike the authentic and instantaneous examples of Christian and Jewish tradition. Islam does share in this common culture of the religions of the book, but only by design. Thus Islam is an irrational fabrication, drawing upon JudaeoChristian Scripture – as a result it is ‘confused and foolish’ and cannot proceed from any ‘naturall or supernaturall light’.29 In order to explore the intersections of these three religions, Purchas goes into considerable exegetical detail, interrogating each as a primarily textual phenomenon, while throughout giving primacy to the narrative of Christ and the Christian Bible. It is clear, however, that the readership of Purchas his Pilgrimage were expected to come to the text with some sense of the theological interrelation of the three religions of the book. Returning to The Merchant of Venice, the same expectation is implicit, although perhaps with a less clear-cut sense of Christian primacy and hierarchy. The dispute between Shylock and Antonio hinges on the issue of whether charging interest for moneylending is a natural or an unnatural practice, a disagreement that is enshrined in the Biblical story, a text that also needs to be cited at some length. Jacob asks to be released from his contractual service to the older man so that he can return to his own country. Laban asks Jacob to stay because he is sure that he has been blessed by God because of Jacob, and asks Jacob to name his price to stay: 29 And he syade unto him, thou knowest what service I have done thee, & in what taking thy cattle hath bene under me. 30 For the little, that thou haddest before I came, is increased into a multitude: and the Lorde hath blessed thee by my coming: but nowe when shall I travuell [i.e., work] for mine owne house also. 31 Then he sayde, What shall I give thee: And Jaakob answered, Thou shalt give mee nothing at all: if thou wilt doe this thing for me, I will returne, feede, & keepe thy sheepe.

8 Introduction

32 I will passe through all thy flockes this day, & separate from them all the sheepe with little spots and great spots, and all blacke lambes among the sheepe, and the great spotted, and little spotted among the goates: and it shalbe my wages. 33 So shall my righteousness answere for me hereafter, when it shal come for my rewarde before thy face, and every one that hath not little or great spottes among the goates, and blacke among sheepe, the same shalbe left with me.30 This text is used by Shylock to negate the prohibitions on usury found elsewhere in the Bible (Exodus 22, 25–7; Leviticus, 25, 35–7; Deuteronomy 23, 19–20) and the story of Laban’s sheep does indeed force readers to consider whether the prohibition on usury refers to charging interest in any capacity or simply charging excessive interest. Shylock cites the Old Testament to argue that every labourer deserves proper reward and that if he lends money to Antonio then he must expect it to increase, as Jacob does in looking after Laban’s sheep, a principle Laban readily accepts. For Shylock, as for Laban and Jacob, this is a natural process; for Antonio, the devil is quoting Scripture for his own ends. Of course, the process becomes more divisive and dangerous when Shylock demands a pound of flesh as his bond, presumably an idea inspired by the story of the sheep and their growing new flesh, which forms Jacob’s wages. In this way he responds to the taunt that he should not charge interest, making what started as a natural process more perversely unnatural, literalising a metaphorical comparison. The encounter between Christian and Jew begins and ends in destructive acrimony, as each uses Scripture to outwit and defeat the other. But for one brief moment we are reminded of what they actually share and of the common culture of all peoples of the book. From a Christian perspective, this common culture shared by the religions of the book necessitated constant re-evaluation in order to respond to shifting political circumstances and to reaffirm Christianity’s dominance. One consequence of this was to place this common culture at the centre of global affairs. Writing in 1635, Thomas Heywood reminded his readers that, Besides the Sects, the Schismes, and Heresies, Vaine Adorations, and Idolatries; There have been three Religions, ’boue the rest And those ev’n to these later Times exist, The Iew, the Christian, and Mahumetist.31

Matthew Dimmock and Andrew Hadfield 9

Christian authors from Roger Bacon and William of Auvergne had long recognised the prominence of these three revealed religions, and had sought to exhaustively explore their competing claims. In the thirteenth century Bacon listed all the notions of divinity shared between nations and wrote, ‘in this description agree the Tartars and Muslims and Jews and Christians’.32 Heywood adopts a different approach in his attempt to establish which of the three ‘is the onely pure, / And without error’.33 He allows the Jews to speak for themselves: ‘We draw’ they say, ... what we professe, from Moses Law; And ev’n the Christians our cheife Tenents hold. We likewise in this one thing may be bold Aboue all other Nations, That by none God’s truly worship’d, but by Vs alone. Let all th’authentique Chronicles be sought, Neuer haue such great Miracles been wrought, As amongst vs.34 From the start of this passage emphasis is placed upon the recognition of a shared scriptural heritage, used here by Heywood’s ‘Jews’ to assert the authenticity of their faith above others. Yet, as so often in early modern English representations, the ventriloquised Jew is made to damn himself, often in the process confirming Christian assumptions and stereotypes. Thus, ... though our Monarchy be quite transverst, And we as slaues through the wide world disperst; ’Tis not because we put to heauy doome The great Messias, who is yet to come ...35 By focusing upon two supposed characteristics that preoccupied Christian writers – the scattering of the Jews and the consequent lack of any Jewish nation, and Jewish responsibility for, but denial of, the execution of Christ – Heywood uses this supposedly authentic Jewish voice to highlight difference rather than similarity. A similar strategy is used with the ‘Mahumetan’, who ‘cavills with the Christian’, arguing: None like to vs the great Creator praise: We onely vnto One make adoration; When as the Christian Sect build their saluation Vpon a Sonne ...36

10

Introduction

This Muslim voice goes on to argue that this Christian perspective is wrong, ‘For vs to’aduance a Riuall to his Seat, / Were sacrilege’, and then proceeds to ‘boast of great atchieuements done, / And mighty conquests from ... Christians won’.37 Again there is a recognition here of shared scriptural traditions, and on this basis Heywood accords the Muslim – just as earlier writers such as Mandeville and Erasmus had done – a certain respect.38 As in both those writers, however, this respect is a strategy to remind Christians of their own depravity in comparison. For, Fast, Prayers, and Pureness of Diuine ado’ration, They wondrously extol throughout all their Nation; Their zeale unto their Prophet and his Shrine, Their Temperance, and Abstinence from Wine.39 Heywood explicitly compares the proverbial sobriety, piety and antiidolatrous nature of the Muslim with the depravity of the Catholics, reflecting a profound realignment in relations between the religions of the book in the wake of Christian Reformation. His Turk argues that ... The Roman Church doth ill, When they adore with their Churches still, Saints, Images and Pictures, much vnfitting, As thereby great idolatry committing.40 The potential connection here between Muslim and Protestant abhorrence of idols is not explored any further by Heywood, but an attempt to ‘establish a religious identity between Protestantism and Islam’ had been a crucial factor in the establishment of the Anglo-Ottoman commercial Capitulations in 1580 and the correspondence between Elizabeth I and the Ottoman ruler Murad III that followed.41 Hakluyt’s reproduction of these documents in 1589 records Elizabeth characterising herself to Murad as ‘the most mightie defender of the Christian faith against all kinde of idolatries’, and the English, it was consequently suggested by Catholic polemicists, would gladly ‘exchange their Geneua Bible, for the Turkish Alcoran’.42 Thus the interaction between religions of the book becomes a way of generating propagandist connections – Catholic and Muslim, Protestant and Muslim, Jew and Muslim – that are intended to demonise through association. Heywood allows no such leeway, however. Before enthusiastically demonising the Prophet Muhammad at length, using the thirteenth-century work of the Dominican Riccoldo da Montecroce as his primary source, he derides

Matthew Dimmock and Andrew Hadfield 11

Islam as a composite of ‘brain-sicke superstitions’ which, ‘likewise to the Hebrewes vaine Traditions, / Th’infallid testimonie we oppose / Of the most sacred Scriptures’.43 Christians, Jews and Muslims all encountered each other through their common connection to the Mediterranean, where the three religions and cultures lived and interacted in what Fernand Braudel has dubbed the ‘Mediterranean World’. Braudel points out that much Christian literature and culture owes a great deal to the literature of the Islamic world, despite the competition for resources and the almost constant state of war: It is surprising ... that Moslem literature should have provided some of the sources of the Divine Comedy; that to Dante the Arabs were shining examples to be imitated, or that St. John of the Cross had notable Moslem precursors, one of whom, Ibn ‘Abba ˘d, the poet of Ronda, had developed well before him the theme of the ‘Dark Night’.44 While Dante sought to imitate Arabic literary models – although he still chose to place the Prophet Muhammad and Ali ibn abu Taleb in the eighth circle of his inferno – other early Christian writers could imagine common ground between each of the religions of the book. But not simply in terms of medical, philosophical or alchemical authorities. As Robert Schwoebel has recognised, writers from Ramon Lull to John Wyclife and Margery Kemp could envisage a common culture in which, as William Langland in The Vision of Piers Plowman wrote, ‘Sarsens and Jewes’ deserve ‘the heritage of hevene as any man Christian’.45 Such writers did not represent the dominant perspective, however. If anything it was the Christians who, despite their cultural debt to their near neighbours, were the most intolerant of the three peoples of the book: Perhaps unconsciously, the Turks were opening doors just as Christendom was shutting them. Christian intolerance, the consequence of large numbers, did not welcome strangers, it repelled them. And all those expelled from its lands – the Jews of 1492, the Moriscos of the sixteenth century and 1609–1614 – joined the ranks of the voluntary exiles, all moving towards Islam where there was work and money to be had. The surest sign of this is the wave of Jewish emigration, particularly during the second half of the sixteenth century,

12

Introduction

from Italy and the Netherlands towards the Levant: a wave which was strong enough to alert the Spanish agents in Venice, for it was through that city that this curious migration was channelled.46 As Stephen Greenblatt has pointed out, it is one of the curious coincidences of world history that ‘In the year that Moorish Granada fell and that the Jews were driven from Spain, Columbus set sail for the East.’47 Christianity sought to expand in one direction and establish an impermeable boundary firmly in another. But the policy had no chance of working because the peoples of the book were inextricably linked through trade as well as a shared culture. Islamic civilisation did not cease to have a significant impact on the Iberian Peninsula after the expulsion of the Moors.48 A similar judgement might be made of the Battle of Lepanto (1571), when the Venetians finally managed to defeat the Turks in a pitched sea battle. This was widely seen and reported throughout Christian Europe as a sign that God was favouring them and finally punishing the Turkish as upstart infidels.49 The truth was the exact opposite, and the battle actually marked the high point of Christian success as the Ottoman Empire regrouped and launched a series of more vigorous assaults.50 As the Ottoman Empire grew in power more Christians sought to take advantage of all that it had to offer. For all the bilious attacks of travellers such as Fynes Moryson, who expressed outrage at the militaristic heathen society of Turkey, the truth was that more Christians converted to Islam than Muslims who made the opposite journey.51 Islam proved an attractive proposition for many Christians who were either persuaded by its claims, or perhaps, like the renegade pirate, John Ward (Yusuf Reis), were also attracted by the prospect of material gain.52 In direct contrast, Christian nations were invariably officially hostile to other religions of the book, despite their acknowledgement of shared roots, and insisted on conversion. Unlike the thousands that converted in the Mediterranean, when staged conversion did take place, either on the streets of London or on the English stage, it provided an opportunity to celebrate the supremacy of the Christian Protestant faith. This was especially true for conversions from Judaism and Islam, such as those recorded in John Foxe’s A Sermon preached at the Christening of a certaine Iew, at London (1578) and Meredith Hanmer’s The Baptizing of a Turke (1586), which use an individual’s conversion as sure proof of Christian moral authority and of the inevitability of the conversion of all Jews, Muslims and Catholics. Yet even constructed dramatic conversions from Christianity to Islam are manipulated

Matthew Dimmock and Andrew Hadfield 13

to indicate the dangerous fallacy of the decision to convert, which inevitably has dire moral and physical consequences. In Robert Daborne’s A Christian Turn’d Turk, conversion (in dumb show) involves the convert taking on ‘Turkish’ accoutrements, being circumcised and forswearing his name – and it is made clear that ‘black’s the way to hell’ and ‘black deeds will have black ends’.53 Similarly, in Robert Wilson’s Three Ladies of London (1581) the convert must ‘vtterly renounce before all the world, my dutie to my Prince, my honour to my parents, and good wil to my cuntry’.54 A public event, Foxe’s sermon celebrating the conversion of a ‘certaine Iew’ offers the apparent vindication of centuries of anti-Jewish polemic, since while the Jews ‘do beleeue in God’, like ‘the Turkes, Sarracenes, Moores, and Scythians’ they are irrationally proud. Foxe – as Heywood would later do – has his Jews speak for themselves: And whereupon doth the blinde arrogancie of the Iewish Nation magnifie their race? do we not deriue our petigree (say they) lyneally from our most holy father Abraham? Are we not borne, and named Israelites, by the name of our great grandsier Israel, the Patriarch? did not the Lord credite vs only with the safe custodie of the Arke of his couenant?55 After drawing upon this contested history – undoubtedly familiar to his listeners – Foxe draws to the conclusion that the Jews have become dissociated from their history and covenant since they ‘put to the most slaunderous death of the Crosse the deare entierly beloued and onely begotten sonne of God him selfe’.56 Ultimately, Foxe argues, the great challenge facing the true believer is to cleanse the Christian Church of ‘those grosse monuments of manifest idolatrie, those fantasticall deuises and friuolous forgeries of signes and Images’ so that ‘we may open an entry to the Iewes and Turkes, to conceiue an inward desire to be ioyned to the sonne of God’.57 Hanmer’s sermon, although celebrating the conversion of ‘one Chinano a Turke’ is remarkably similar, using reformation divisions within Christendom as a lens through which to appraise and understand the other religions of the book. He argues simply that once all the ‘blemishes’ of the church are cleansed, then God will ‘open the eyes of all Infidels, Iewes, Turkes, and Saracens, bring into the folde all lost and wandering sheepe, make of all nations one sheepefolde, vnder the head shepherd and Bishoppe of oure soules Iesus Christ ...’.58 Conversion – for Christian, Jew or Muslim – thus became an exemplary moment, explicitly, physically and visually confirming a theological status quo. Yet the identity of the convert was always a complex

14

Introduction

one, questioning even while affirming the religion converted to – and certainly the controversies surrounding London’s immigrant population, and Marrano Jews in particular, confirm this, as do the extensive records of the Spanish Inquisition.59 Perhaps the ease with which individuals might convert between the religions of the book indicates a Mediterranean culture in which rigid divisions were cast aside in favour of commonality when necessary – a culture which Christian divines observed with horror and sought to police at a distance. One of the most celebrated converts of this period was Leo Africanus, author of the only serious work on Africa available to Europeans in this period, and a work that represented Africa in the West for well over a century after its publication.60 Al-Hassan al-Wazzan was born in Granada, but grew up in Morocco, his family leaving soon after the Christian reconquest of Spain. In Africa he served as a scholar and diplomat. He was captured in the Mediterranean by Christian pirates in 1518, and sent to Rome, where he was imprisoned by the Pope, then released when he agreed to convert from Islam to Christianity. He became a notable scholar in Christian Europe, his name now changed to Giovanni Leone, John Leo, for an English audience. In Rome he wrote the Libro de la Cosmographia et Geographia de Affrica (The Cosmography and Geography of Africa), which he finished in 1526. It now survives in a single 936-page manuscript, the source for numerous printed versions that circulated throughout early modern Europe.61 In the late 1520s he returned to Africa where he reconverted to Islam, dying in the 1550s. Al-Wazzan’s life and work reveal much about the culture of the ‘peoples of the book’ in the early modern Mediterranean world. The Geography is designed to show that North African Islamic culture was as civilised as that of Christian Europe. In making this point, al-Wazzan deliberately adopts a ‘nonpartisan tone in his general account of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the early religious history of Africa’ and makes careful note of the mixed religious population of North Africa: some of them became Jews and remained so for a long period, while certain kingdoms among the Blacks became Christian [and stayed on] until the coming of the sect of Muhammad. In the year 268 of the Hijra, the people of Libya became Muslim by means of certain preachers. This led the people of Libya to fighting many battles with the Blacks, with the result that the kingdoms of the Blacks bordering Libya became Muslim. At present there are still some kingdoms where there are Christians, but the [kingdoms] of the Jews were destroyed by the Christians and the Muslims.62

Matthew Dimmock and Andrew Hadfield 15

Al-Wazzan is clear that he thinks in terms of religions as separating peoples and not race, arguing that the peoples of Africa lived within nations and cultures with porous boundaries that changed character principally through religious transformations. As Colin Kidd has argued with reference to the British Isles, early modern people did not think so obviously about race as we do, but about ‘ethno-theology’.63 Al-Wazzan represents North Africa as a cultural melting pot, pointing out that Islamic men marry Christian and Jewish women without difficulty, although the children must be brought up in the Islamic faith.64 However, in spite of his valiant attempts to preserve his Geography as a scrupulously impartial account by omitting traditional Islamic invocations of praise of the deity, many Christian translators found his account intolerable and inserted anti-Islamic statements.65 It is interesting to speculate about what al-Wazzan really thought when he was among the Christians, given his re-conversion as soon as he returned to North Africa. Did he think like a ‘Jewish Marrano or a Morisco converso’, forced converts who hid their true faith for reasons of fear and expediency?66 Or were his own conversions genuine attempts to fit into the different societies in which he was forced to live? Whichever way we look at his life, it is clear that his intellectual – if not his physical – journeys were made possible by the common culture of the peoples of the book. Studies of the ‘other’, in the wake of post-colonial theory, have come to dominate our understanding of the relationship between Europe and the rest of the world and the important contributions to this field are almost too well known to mention.67 The principal purpose of The Religions of the Book is to complicate and refine an oppositional conception of ‘self’ and ‘other’ that is too easily applied to earlier periods. Can al-Wazzan be considered simply as an ‘other’? Would he have considered himself (or those he met) to be ‘other’ as he moved through the early modern Mediterranean world? The interaction and interconnection of the religions of the book suggest that this binary model is naïve and reductive, and cannot elucidate the complex exchanges and multiple representations with which this volume is concerned. Examining religious narratives, rituals, texts and images – sermons, maps, drama, biography, exegesis, iconography and so on – reveals surprising and mutually understood connections, as well as a dichotomy between self and other, savage and barbarian, good and evil. Furthermore, as many scholars have been suggesting for a long time, the neglect of the study of religion has seriously distorted our understanding of the early modern period.68 Studies of travel writing, the exotic, colonialism and other forms of cultural interaction need to develop a more nuanced understanding of religious difference.

16

Introduction

The essays in this collection largely explore Christian perceptions of the relationship between Christianity, Islam and Judaism. In the opening essay Anthony Bale explores the representation of Jews and Judaism in late medieval Christian texts, paying particular attention to the relationship between real and imagined Jews. Bale focuses primarily on the importance of the Passion for medieval Christians, showing how this important aspect of worship was conceived as anti-Semitic, exaggerating the role of the Jews in the Crucifixion. Bale examines the media in which such representations took place as well as the images themselves, concluding that medieval English Christians were not inherently anti-Semitic, but were confronted by a plethora of anti-Semitic images because of the ways in which their ‘devotional thought and practice was organised’ (p. 41). The central focus of Bale’s essay is a study of Margery Kempe, whose ‘cultural construction of Jewry’ was based on a series of texts and images, not on the actual experience of meeting and knowing Jews. Colin Imber provides a careful and detailed narrative account of the relatively unknown Crusade of Varna (1443–5), the last important crusade before the fall of Constantinople (1453) which fundamentally altered the balance of power in the Mediterranean world. Attempting to determine what motivated a crusader, Imber argues that a ‘bundle of literary fantasies acted upon the imaginations of a warrior class’ (p. 60). Crusaders were motivated by a cluster of beliefs, a combination of religious zeal and fantasies based on classical history as well as naked self-interest in appropriating the resources of the ‘infidel’. In the final analysis, the ideal of crusading was probably more important than a specific ideology solely determined by religious belief. This ideal provided coherence to an enterprise which otherwise might have appeared inchoate and unimaginable. Matthew Dimmock examines the range of tropes existing within a Christian tradition which constituted a mythology of heresy against which true Christianity could be defined. Heresy was often seen in terms of monstrosity, so that representations of Judaism, Islam and other forms of belief that challenged orthodox Christianity could be represented in interconnected, sometimes interchangeable, ways. Heresy could thus be controlled and circumscribed within a Christian universe, as demonstrated in a reading of late medieval Christian drama. Dimmock argues that Christians constructed two equally powerful stereotypes: the hyper-masculine, aggressive, warlike ‘Turk’, always threatening to assault Christian civilisation, and the sinister

Matthew Dimmock and Andrew Hadfield 17

and sly figure of the Jew, partly assimilated into Christian society but looking for the opportunity to corrode it from within. Raphael Hallett’s reading of Luther’s writing on the Jews complements Dimmock’s analysis. In ‘correcting’ Jewish abuse of the Scriptures, Luther casts the Jews as a stubbornly childish sect that refuses to grow up. Jewish theology, according to Luther, is characterised by ‘a naïve tendency to clutch at literal readings’ and a ‘willful and disobedient’ mode of interpretation (p. 94). At his most extreme, in his later writings, Luther abandons his earlier hope that the Jews will eventually be converted and dismisses Judaism as an insane and poisonous perversion of religious truth. Hallett shows how Luther was particularly obsessed by his fear of Jewish speech and writing. Jewish speech was invariably blasphemous, undermining true Christian prayer, worship and teaching. Jewish ‘babble’ was never innocent, threatening to drown out the Christian message. Jewish writing was equally perverse in its literal and pedantic interpretation of Scripture, obliterating the spiritual nuances of the Bible. Palmira Brummett also explores the contested and difficult boundaries between Christians, Muslims and Jews, paying particular attention to a series of influential early modern maps of Europe and the Mediterranean. Brummett demonstrates the ways in which Turks were represented as ‘intruders into Christian space who must be identified and repulsed’ (p. 114). Christian cartographers emphasised and often exaggerated the threat to their territory and religion from the Ottoman Empire. Even when the Ottomans were in retreat, Christian maps represented the Balkans as ‘Ottomanised’, acculturated to the crescent through an ‘iconography of possession’. Maps both reflected the reality of historical change and ideologically distorted those parts of the world they represented. The final three essays in the volume investigate the role played by the religions of the book in the English Revolution. As Matthew Birchwood points out, theological debates in England in the 1650s continually return to the belief ‘that the fate of all Jews, Christians and Muslims belongs ... to a wider apocalyptic schema which will inevitably discover the truth of the Christian revelation’ (p. 147). Christian toleration of other religions was possible, but only within distinctly defined parameters. Birchwood shows how the magnificent scholarly achievement of the Polyglot Bible emerges out of the urgent debates of the English Revolution, and explores the role of the Anglican Church in the development of the study of Arabic and the Qur’a– n in seventeenth-century England. Eliane Glaser explores a

18

Introduction

parallel Christian relationship with Judaism in the same period. Glaser demonstrates that arguments about the toleration of Judaism in interregnal England have to be seen in the light of ‘broader debates about the relationship between Church and State’ (p. 174). Many sects had used discussions about the readmission of the Jews as a means of defending their own position and asserting their own right to exist. Seventeenth-century debates about toleration were ‘grounded, therefore, in specific constitutional questions’ (p. 160). Jews are discussed in the absence of Jews, a continuity that can be traced back to the Middle Ages, as Anthony Bale’s essay demonstrates. In the final essay in the volume, Gerald MacLean examines Milton’s relationship to Islam and the Qur’a– n. Although Milton wrote very little about Islam and the Muslim world, MacLean shows how Milton conceived of Islam as yet another heresy, threatening the Christian faith alongside the papacy. MacLean argues that although Milton was relatively silent about Islam, Islam played a crucial role in structuring his imaginative engagement with the wider world. Comparing Milton’s world with that of the crusaders at Varna, one might question how much had really changed.

Notes 1. John Reeve, ‘Introduction’, in John Reeve, ed., Sacred: Books of the Three Faiths: Judaism, Christianity, Islam (London: The British Library, 2007), pp. 11–12, p. 11. 2. Nancy Bisaha, ‘Pius II’s Letter to Sultan Mehmed II: A Re-examination’, Crusades, 1 (2002), pp. 183–201; Nancy Bisaha, Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Turks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), Ch. 4; Pius II, Commentaries, Margaret Meserve and Marcello Simonetta, eds and trans., 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), I, Introduction, pp. vi–vii. 3. Bisaha, Creating East and West, p. 148. 4. Bisaha, Creating East and West, p. 152. 5. Bisaha, Creating East and West, pp. 148–9. 6. Serpil Bag ˘ci and Zeren Tandini, ‘Art of the Ottoman Court’, in Turks: A Journey of a Thousand Years, 600–1600, ed. David J. Roxburgh (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2005), pp. 260–375, p. 264. 7. Bag˘ci and Tandini, ‘Art of the Ottoman Court’, p. 265. 8. Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton, Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East and West (London: Reaktion, 2000), p. 42. 9. Elizabeth Hallam, ed., Chronicles of the Crusades: Eye-Witness Accounts of the Wars between Christianity and Islam (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989), p. 325. 10. Christopher Tyerman, England and the Crusades, 1095–1588 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 71.

Matthew Dimmock and Andrew Hadfield 19 11. Tyerman, England and the Crusades, p. 192. 12. Tyerman, England and the Crusades, p. 235. 13. For a recent overview, see Warren Chernaik, The Merchant of Venice (Plymouth: Northcote House, 2005). See also James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 14. Barnett D. Ovrut, ‘Edward I and the Expulsion of the Jews’, The Jewish Quarterly Review, New Ser., 67 (1977), pp. 224–35; David S. Katz, The Jews in the History of England, 1485–1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), Ch. 3. 15. William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, ed. John Russell Brown (London: Methuen, 1979), Act I, scene iii, lines 59–97. All subsequent references to this edition in parentheses in the text. 16. For evidence, see R. H. Tawney and Eileen Power, eds, Tudor Economic Documents, 3 vols (London: Longman, 1924), II, section 3. For the most important analysis of the early modern English economy, which points out that credit was as much a social as a financial phenomenon, see Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998). 17. For a comprehensive recent history of the Reformation and its progress throughout Europe, see Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided, 1490–1700 (London: Allen Lane, 2003). 18. Theodorus Bibliander [and Philip Melancthon], Machvmetis Sarracenorvm Principis Vita Ac Doctrina Omnis, Quae & Ishmahelitarum, & Alcoranvm dicitur ... (Basle, 1543). For a discussion of the controversy surrounding the publication of this document, and Luther’s role, see Harry Clark, ‘The Publication of the Koran in Latin: A Reformation Dilemma’, Sixteenth Century Journal XV, no. 1 (1984), pp. 3–12. 19. Luther’s preface to Bibliander’s edition of the Qur’a– n, translated in Sarah Henrich and James L. Boyce, ‘Martin Luther – Translations of Two Prefaces on Islam: Preface to the Libellus de ritu et moribus Turcorum (1530) and Preface to Bibliander’s Edition of the Qur’a– n (1543)’, Word and World XVI, 2 (Spring 1996), pp. 250–66, p. 266. 20. David Daniell, William Tyndale: A Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), Ch. 10; R. W. Chambers, Thomas More (London: Cape, 1935), pp. 243–4, 251–2; Peter Ackroyd, The Life of Thomas More (London: Chatto and Windus, 1998), pp. 299–304. 21. Anthony Munday and others, Sir Thomas More, eds, Vittorio Gabrieli and Giorgio Melchiori (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990); William Shakespeare, King Henry VIII, ed. Gordon McMullan (London: Thomson, 2000). 22. Samuel Purchas, Purchas his Pilgrimage (London, 1613), p. 89. 23. Purchas, Purchas his Pilgrimage, p. 183. 24. See the edited transcription of Benedict XVI’s controversial speech at the University of Regensburg (12/09/06) ‘Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections’ http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/ speeches/2006/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20060912_universityregensburg_en.html. 25. Purchas, Purchas his Pilgrimage, p. 89. 26. Purchas, Purchas his Pilgrimage, p. 89. 27. Purchas, Purchas his Pilgrimage, p. 199.

20 Introduction 28. Purchas, Purchas his Pilgrimage, p. 206. 29. Purchas, Purchas his Pilgrimage, p. 206. 30. Genesis 30: 29–33, in The Holy Bible, Imprinted at London: By Christopher Barker, 1584. 31. Thomas Heywood, The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels (London, 1635), p. 283. 32. Quoted in Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (Oxford: One World, 2000 [3rd edn]), p. 61. 33. Heywood, The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels, p. 283. 34. Heywood, The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels, p. 284. 35. Heywood, The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels, p. 284. 36. Heywood, The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels, p. 284. 37. Heywood, The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels, p. 285. 38. See Desiderus Erasmus, ‘A Most Useful Discussion Concerning Proposals for War Against the Turks’, in Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 64, ed. Dominic Baker-Smith (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), pp. 201–66. 39. Heywood, The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels, p. 285. 40. Heywood, The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels, p. 285. 41. A. L. Horniker, ‘William Harborne and the Beginning of Anglo-Turkish Diplomatic and Commercial Relations’, Journal of Modern History, xviii (1946), pp. 289–305, p. 305. See also the detailed examination of this correspondence in Susan Skilliter, William Harborne and the Trade with Turkey, 1578–1582 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). 42. Richard Hakluyt, The Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation, made by Sea or ouer Land, to the moste remote and farthest distant Quarters of the earth ... (London, 1589), p. 165. A Declaration of the True Causes of the Great Trovbles, Presvpposed to be Intended Against the Realme of England (Cologne? 1592), p. 49. 43. Heywood, The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels, p. 285. 44. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols, trans. Sian Reynolds (London: Collins, 1972), II, p. 799. 45. Robert Schwoebel, The Shadow of the Crescent: The Renaissance Image of the Turk (1453–1517 ) (Nieuwkoop: B. De Graaf, 1967), p. 222. William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman, a New Translation of the B-text, ed. A. V. C. Schmidt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), passus 10, l.344. See also Matthew Dimmock, New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 14–16. 46. Braudel, Mediterranean, II, p. 800. 47. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 51. 48. Braudel, Mediterranean, II, p. 797. 49. See, for example the reaction of James VI of Scotland in his poem, The Lepanto, discussed in Robert Appelbaum, ‘War and Peace in The Lepanto of James VI and I’, Modern Philology, 97 (2000), pp. 333–63. 50. Braudel, Mediterranean, II, Pt 4. See also the seminal article by Andrew C. Hess, ‘The Battle of Lepanto and its place in Mediterranean History’, Past and Present, 57 (1972), pp. 53–73.

Matthew Dimmock and Andrew Hadfield 21 51. For Moryson, see Andrew Hadfield, ed., Amazons, Savages and Machiavels: Travel and Colonial Writing in English, 1550–1630: An Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 166–78. On conversion, see Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), Ch. 1; Daniel J. Vitkus, ed., Piracy, Slavery, and Redemption: Barbary Captivity Narratives from Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). 52. See Claire Jowitt, Voyage Drama and Gender Politics, 1589–1642: Real and Imagined Worlds (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 58–75. 53. Robert Daborne, A Christian Turn’d Turk, in Three Turk Plays From Early Modern England, ed. Daniel J. Vitkus (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), Sc. 8, l.24 and 1.28. 54. Robert Wilson, A right excellent and famous Comoedy called the three Ladies of London. Wherein is notablie declared and set foorth, how by the meanes of Lucar, Loue and conscience is so corrupted, that the one is married to Dissimulation, the other fraught with all abhomination ... as it hath been publiquely played (London, 1584), sig. F. 1v. 55. John Foxe, A Sermon preached at the Christening of a certaine Iew, at London, by Iohn Foxe. Conteining an exposition of the xi. Chapter of S. Paul to the Romanes ... Translated out of Latin into English by Iames Bell (London, 1578), sig. C. 2r. 56. Foxe, A Sermon, sig. E. 4v. 57. Foxe, A Sermon, sig. N. 1v. 58. Meredith Hanmer, The Baptizing of a Turke. A Sermon preached at the Hospitall of Saint Katherine, adioyning vnto her Maiesties Towre the 2. Of October 1586. At the Baptising of one Chinano a Turke, borne at Negropontus (London, 1586), sig. F. 3v. 59. This is exemplified in the individual cases recorded in Richard L. Kagan and Abigail Dyer, Inquisitorial Enquiries: Brief Lives of Secret Jews and Other Heretics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). 60. Natalie Zemon Davis, Trickster Travels: In Search of Leo Africanus, A SixteenthCentury Muslim Between Worlds (London: Faber, 2006). 61. The work was translated into English in 1600 by John Pory: Leo Africanus, The History and Description of Africa (1600), ed. Robert Brown, 3 vols (London: Hakluyt Society, 1896). 62. Cited in Davis, Trickster Travels, p. 154. 63. Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1999). 64. Davis, Trickster Travels, pp. 135–6. 65. Davis, Trickster Travels, p. 155. 66. Davis, Trickster Travels, p. 188. 67. Perhaps most influential are Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978) and Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994) and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s work, particularly ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 271–313. Important work has been also been done in an early modern context, such as Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), Daniel Vitkus,

22

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Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), Jonathan Burton, Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama, 1579–1624 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005) and most recently Jonathan Burton and Ania Loomba, eds, Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 68. See, for example, the introduction to Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

1 Christian Anti-Semitism and Intermedial Experience in Late Medieval England Anthony Bale

The paradox underlying the topic of this essay comes from The Book of Margery Kempe (hereafter BMK), a fifteenth-century English spiritual biography. It is well known that the Jews were comprehensively expelled from England in 1290, but BMK’s protagonist, Margery Kempe (c. 1373–c. 1440) of Lynn (Norfolk), sees Jews all around her; her neighbours are cast as Jews, she is accused of being a Jew, she prays for the Jews, and Christ’s torments at the Jews’ hands are re-enacted both in her mystical visions and in her imitative manner of living. Curiously, on Kempe’s many opportunities to meet Jews, during her trips to Poland, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, Italy and the Levant, she does not. This essay does not critique Kempe for her failure to include Jews in her book; rather, it examines the virtuality of late medieval Judaism through which Kempe’s intimate fantasies of Jewry could be more ‘real’, more true, than actual living Jews. Through such mediated fantasies, this essay, in part, seeks to query the title of the volume in which it is located, The Religions of the Book. Medieval Christians did often imagine their ‘religion of the book’ as configured around the codex (a volume, as a modern book): standard images of the Gospel authors or of St. Anne teaching the Virgin to read or of St. Jerome in his study or of Christ holding the Law, generally valorise these holy figures through their holding of a codex.1 This book, The Book, represents orthodoxy, authority and textual canonicity; indeed, such images of ‘the book’ establish Christianity as a ‘religion of the book’, based on the witness of scripture. However, the practice of medieval Christianity in England was by no means configured thus around ‘the book’: later medieval Christianity was practiced in conversation with aesthetic and emotional cues, unofficial and semi-orthodox narratives and memories and, the topic of this essay, richly intermedial artefacts. ‘Reading’ in the Middle Ages means the intellectual interaction with a 23

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text, but this was not necessarily done through a book, and was often mediated through vision, hearing or memory.2 It is such multimedia and intermedial artefacts, rather than The Book as such, that led to Kempe’s aesthetic construction of Jewry and in doing so ensured that Judaism remained a topic of crucial debate in late medieval English devotion, long after the Jews’ expulsion from England. My sources here are taken from several moments in the medieval Christian depiction of Jews, taken as a point of departure from the authoritative codex-based biblical narrative. I then examine BMK in order to account for the misrecognition or hallucination of Jewry in a devotional context. I ask how medieval English Christians imagined Judaism in the Passional material with which they were surrounded. Through what cultural fashions and technologies were Jews recast, revived, misremembered, traduced? How did people learn to read the Jews in this way? How does the cultural representation of Jewry at once elide Jewry while making it symbolically and emotionally central? It is these questions that this articles addresses. Extrabiblical anti-Semitic stories and topoi, largely developed from the twelfth century, were a staple of the wider devotional lives of late medieval English Christians: the Jewish grotesque appeared in ecclesiastical art, in personal devotional artefacts, in civic drama, in vernacular literature. Such materials sought an emotional, personal response, configured around violence, empathy and affect rather than didactic moral instruction and edification (see Raphael Hallett’s essay below). This essay posits that affective Christianity and in particular late medieval habits of devotio moderna and imitatio Christi depended on an aesthetic representation or imitation of Judaism. Jewry, even if physically absent, as was the case in England, remained ubiquitous in cultural and devotional productions.3 Through the Jews, worshippers considered the meaning and nature of blood, sacrifice, martyrdom, damnation and grief (compare Matthew Dimmock’s comments on methods of excluding outsiders and confirming a shared identity on p. 70). In particular, Jews were represented – indeed over-determined – in texts and images of Christ’s Passion, which was increasingly defined as a specifically ‘Jewish crime’.4 Such an account of the Passion departs from the orthodox biblical text (in which the Jewish mob is only one of many agents involved in the events leading up to the Crucifixion); key moments extrapolated from the biblical account came to be extremely popular devotional subjects. These include the Jews’ buffeting and scourging of Christ (dramatised in agonising detail in the mystery plays for instance) and the Jews’ spitting on Christ. The mode of representation

Anthony Bale 25

of these characters is usually what we might call ‘anti-Semitic’; this is a limited and contentious term but is used here to indicate fantastical, imaginative and largely non-theological aspects of the Christian representation of Jews.5 Examples of anti-Semitic representation might be the grotesque ‘Jewish’ profile with its misshapen nose, or the imputation that Jewry in general has a preference or cultural-religious predilection for violence. Such myths are not ‘anti-Jewish’ for they little attempt to engage with Jewish faith and theology; however, such anti-Semitic tropes do claim derivation from biblical or religious texts, pretending to a kind of theological coherence. Before moving on to a detailed discussion of my sources I will define a few other terms which will reappear throughout this essay. In describing ‘affect’ and affective religious practices I indicate the emotions and feelings attached to ideas and concepts; for instance, Christ’s Passion is an idea, both a narrative and an abstract concept, but has affective practices and motifs, of grief, fear and lament, attached to it. Emotions and ‘feeling’ is taken here to be a private and intimate state of being, although affective responses are learned from and structured by the ideas and concepts to which they relate and the forms in which they are mediated. In particular, the Franciscans encouraged and developed ‘affective piety’ as a way of taking one’s place in the drama of salvation, that is, of personalising one’s religious experience. In describing remediation and intermedial artefacts I seek to describe moving between media, the movement and translation of material between media and ‘the representation of one medium in another’.6 In introducing such terms in this essay I want to hasten a consideration of those locations outside ‘the book’ in which the ‘religions of the book’ were practiced. Finally, in calling attention to extrabiblical and quasi-biblical sources I want to foreground the way in which the Passion in the Gospels was interpreted and, to some extent, rewritten in the Middle Ages. A good example is the popular version of the Passion given in the Legenda Aurea of Jacobus de Voragine (c. 1230–98), a text published in English by William Caxton in 1483 (compare Dimmock’s comments on the use of saint’s lives, p. 74).7 This ubiquitous work of popular devotion presents an account of the Passion full of post-Gospel additions; some of these are patristic and serve to explicate doctrine (of typology and redemption); others are more demotic, adding to the biblical narrative a sense of interpersonal and personalised interaction; hence in Caxton’s Legenda Aurea the oblique account given in Luke (23:42–3) of the repentant thief hanged with Christ is expanded, drawing on the apocryphal twelfth-century Gospel of Nicodemus, to give an account of this figure, named ‘Dysmas’. Finally,

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additions to the Passion story organise the narrative around clear judgement. Principally, the extrabiblical material vitiates the Jews, building up their role in the tortures of Christ and announcing their damnation. In the Legenda Aurea the text draws on Bernard of Clairvaux, the eleventh-century Cistercian advocate of the Crusades, to describe the ‘mocqueries and derisions of the Iewes’ thus: atte hous of anne [i.e. Annas] / where he [i.e. Christ] receyued spyttynges / buffetes and blyndfellyng of the Iewes / werof saynt bernard sayth Ryght swete and good Ihesu / thy desyrous vysage / whiche angellis desyre to see the Iewes / wyth theyr spyttynges haue defoylled / wyth theyr handes haue smeton wyth a veyl for torn they haue couerd / ne they haue not spared to hurte it with byttyr woundes.8 This is a neat example of the way in which the biblical account is translated into vernacular expression: Bernard’s lyric voice, ‘Ryght swete and good Ihesu’, accompanied by the graphic and affective image of the Jews’ spitting.9 None of this is added as such to the biblical account, for the Jews are said to spit on Christ (Matthew 26:67; Mark 10:34, 14:65; Luke 18:13) and beat him with various implements. Rather, this gory emphasis on Christ’s debased humanity is extrapolated from the Gospels and turned into the focus of, in this case, Christ’s interview with Annas.10 In the Gospels, the interview with Annas occurs only in John (18:19–23), according to which ‘one of the servants standing by gave Jesus a blow’.11 The point is that in the Legenda Aurea account, borrowed from Bernard of Clairvaux, violence, empathy and humanity are foregrounded, via the predictable image of the Jewish mob.

Technologies of ‘Cotidiane Mortifiynge’ Christ’s Passion was ubiquitous in late medieval English culture, for both clerical and lay people. Corporate devotions, such as those staged by guilds, certainly played a part, but the message of the Passion – of God’s condescension to humanity – inspired novel literary and visual artefacts attesting to personal, and personalised, devotional intimacy. Most often presented in key scenes celebrating Christ’s physical ordeal, the Passion was the centrepiece of personal sacramental rituals in which divinity and biblical events suffused daily life through the conduit of Christ’s humanity. For instance, a ‘spiritual regimen’ made for a fifteenth-century English gentleman advised him to carry his devotional

Anthony Bale 27

instructions in his purse at all times; he was exhorted to perform contemplation and prayer everywhere and even as few as ‘five bread crumbs’ could be used to make the Sign of the Cross on the dining table to remind the gentleman of the Passion.12 The Passion is, clearly, an insistently and thoroughly teleological narrative, its events leading up to the moment which makes sense of what has gone before. The first English translation (c. 1500) of the Imitatio Christi of Thomas a Kempis (c. 1380–1471) makes this clear: Loo, in þe crosse standeþ alle þinge, and in dyinge lythe [i.e. is submerged] alle, and þer is none oþer weye to lyve and to veri inwarde pees, but þe weie of þe holy crosse and of cotidiane mortifiynge, for if þou be dede with him, þou shalt also lyffe with him.13 ‘Cotidiane mortifiynge’ structured the day and the year, literally becoming part of the practice of everyday life. The Passional crucifix, ‘ever redy ... þou maiste not flee hit’, was therefore not just something to which one turned to a book to encounter, it was ‘cotidiane’, omnipresent, intimate, familiar and levelling: ‘God spekeþ to vs in dyuerse wyses, withoute accepion of persones’ (1:5:8). The rosary and its meditation on Redemption is one well-known example of such pious meditative activity, not dependent on literacy, practised by oneself within one’s daily life; the ‘dyuerse wyses’ of godly communication were certainly not limited to the book. This effective and affective Passional meditation was constructed around an aesthetic of fear, torture and discipline; fear was, in Mary Carruthers’ words ‘the first step in the way of meditation’;14 both learned scholastic mnemonic theory and the practices of devotio moderna sought to turn ‘each memory as much as possible into a personal occasion by imprinting personal associations like desire and fear’.15 Such a construction of fear often involved an equally aesthetic construction or revival of Judaism. A selection of the lyric poems in the commonplace book (Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland Advocates’ MS 18.7.21) of John Grimestone (fl. c. 1372) make a good starting point in considering the conjunction of extra- and quasi-biblical Passion accounts with an affective and intermedial anti-Semitic expression. Grimestone was a Franciscan friar and preacher, probably in Norfolk, in whose commonplace book – a small volume in which material for reference and for memorising was inscribed – is collected a wide range of popular devotions, in English and Latin, mainly in the form of lyrics and verse tags. Grimestone’s book is between ‘official’ and ‘personal’

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modes of textuality and likely reflects much of the content of Grimestone’s sermons. The book opens with an eloquent early vernacular lyric version of the ‘Seven Hours of the Passion’, in which the episodes of the Passion are given an hour, thus; ‘At þe time of matines, Lord, þu were itake’ (f. 2v).16 The origin of the conceit is monastic but, from around Grimestone’s time, it is found in English vernacular poetry.17 In this kind of poetic calendar Passional experience structures and frames everyday time and, in Grimestone’s book, saturates lyric expression. In particular, Grimestone concentrates on ekphrasis, the verbal description of scenes from the Passion, as in the verse tag on the Face of Christ headed ‘Apparet mihi quod facies Christi’: Is wan of beting, Is foul of speting, Is grisly of bolning, An reuli of weping (f. 119r) The verse is, apparently, a description of a vision of Christ but might also be a description of a mural, glass or manuscript image. It is easy to see how such a graphic description would be useful to a preacher in bringing ‘immediacy’ and expression to a sermon on the Passion. The lyric uses a simple element of repetition (‘is’ and the ‘-ing’ endings) but depends on the ability to imagine the description of Christ’s face subjected to the torments. In this way, the lyric assumes a familiarity with an intensely visual account of Christ’s Passion based around physical torment and degradation. The lyric’s potency is partly achieved through its present-tense witnessed appearance of Christ to the narrator. The Jews are not mentioned here but the role of violence against Christ’s body is central to the image. The Jews’ role is greater in similar lyrics in Grimestone’s book; consider, for example, this extract from an extended lyric on the Passion: Euere in his eyne grey䊐e Þe Iewes spatleden, soth to sey䊐e, And ledden fort þat milde. (f. 123r) In this brief example we can see how vision and feeling, concentrating on Christ’s physical attributes, as well as ekphrasis, are central to evoking

Anthony Bale 29

an affective Passional experience. Likewise, we might consider another short lyric: Oculis þe rede stremes renning; Auribus þe Iewes orible cri䊐ing; Gustu of Cristis drink þe bitternesse; Tactu of Cristis wondis þe sarpnesse. (f. 122r) Affect is crucial to the Passion; feeling accompanies, mediates and even eclipses the idea and theology of the Passion. The Latin sense and perception becomes ‘orible cri䊐ing’ and spectacular, vernacular gore. Put simply, the late medieval Passion narrative is a narrative of feelings and moral contrasts. The late medieval Passion is also re-enacted as a distinct episode, a kind of tableau, which foregrounds the special moment of violence against Christ’s body. Grimestone’s lyrics were probably used to punctuate his sermons; using vivid image and vernacular language, such lyrics tap into later medieval debates concerning the spiritual instruction of the uneducated. A few decades after Grimestone was writing in his commonplace book, the Carthusian mystic Nicholas Love (fl. 1409) drew on Pseudo-Bonoventure’s Meditationes Vitae Christi to propose constant meditation on the life of Christ as a substitute, or even replacement, for the reading and explication of the Bible. In his fascinating prologue Love draws attention, using a fittingly material and sacramental vocabulary, to the need to address ‘symples creatures the wheche as childrene haven need to be fedde with mylk of light doctrine, and not with sadde mete of gret clergie and of hye contemplacion’; he goes on to declare ‘therfore to hem is principally to be set in mynde the ymage of Cristes Incarnacion, Passion and Resurrection, so that a simple soule that can not thence bot bodies or bodily thinges mowe have sumwhat acordyng to his affeccion wher with he may fede and stire his devocion’.18 To ‘set in mynde’ the ‘ymage’ of Christ demanded an interplay between verbal and visual forms, a lay devotion which was not simply configured around orthodox Latinity and clerical authority. As I have noted, Grimestone’s lyrics consistently employ ekphrasis, the putting of pictures into words; such lyrics provide a surrogate visual experience, emphasising and inculcating a pictorial scheme by preserving in memory the objects of the Passion. Grimestone’s lyrics on the Passion obviously follow a set and established narrative template and are part of the late medieval fashion for highly sequential visual-verbal schemata. This is what Daniel Baraz has

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recently described as the ‘manipulated images and structured emotions’ of the aesthetics of late medieval religiously inspired violence.19 In particular, Grimestone’s book demonstrates the growing devotion to the topos of the Arma Christi (the ‘arms’ of Christ, a pseudoheraldic design based on the implements used in Christ’s Passion).20 The Arma Christi, an inheritor of the sentiment behind the imago pietatis and the enthusiasm for relics, takes apart the Passion into a series of discrete torturous moments, usually with spitting Jewish grotesques torturing Christ. The Arma Christi is a kind of mental plan or map of the Passion, offering an easy mnemonic scheme which reduces the Passion to a bald dichotomy of the violent ‘Jewish’ machinery Versus Christ’s tortured body. The Arma Christi is certainly cognate with other trends in late medieval European spirituality, with its ‘vivid mental pictures’ and its emphasis on sensory participation (consider ocular and aural host celebration, public and semi-public Dance of Death schemes, the mania for intimate relics, devotion to the Five Wounds, Christ’s tears or drops of blood and St Veronica’s sudarium, and so on). In late medieval England, the Arma Christi sometimes appeared as an image scheme within books of hours; it also appeared with a vernacular poem, ‘O vernacle’, which describes each of the weapons and the sinful reader’s redemption through them.21 Distinctively, the English Arma Christi image-text scheme tended to appear in the format of a roll (that is, a small scroll), a format which suggests an element of public display. It is known that in Germany such rolls were hung as a kind of pious wallpaper.22 The Arma Christi works in a rather opposite, but complementary, way to Grimestone’s lyrics, rendering into visual experience a simplified version of the historical and theological complexities of the Passion.23 Such artefacts call attention to their own medium, seeking a material, physical experience in the revival of the Passion; both Grimestone’s lyrics and the Arma Christi involve the ‘viewer’ in an active engagement with the image, a making familiar and personal of the events of the Passion. These new currents in devotional practice came with new media; in particular, vision as a kind of proof existed alongside the textual proof standing in ‘the book’. Grimestone’s lyrics and the Arma Christi imagetexts have in common a range of standard medieval memory devices: they take the biblical narrative to pieces, using abbreviation, synecdoche and exaggeration. In their portraits of the spitting, violent Jew, visually depicted in profile with a misshapen bulbous nose and gurning mouth, Arma Christi artefacts deploy contrast, making strange, grotesquery, hyperbole. Indeed, medieval mnemotechnical theories held the ‘disgusting’ and the ‘morbid’ to be the best ways of achieving the correct,

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affective memoria passionis.24 Put simply, the development in popular religious media of a bold and uninflected contrast between Christ and the Jews was not a consequence of Christian anti-Judaism but served aesthetic, affective practices and ways of reading. In this way we can see Grimestone’s highly ordered and ekphrastic Passion lyrics and the Arma Christi image-text scrolls to be early, though not the earliest, antecedents of what in English we call cartoon (or ‘comic’) strips.25 In his remarkable book on the history of the comic strip, David Kunzle draws attention to the anti-Semitism and extreme violence inherent in early ‘picture prints’, image-text schemes like the Arma Christi with a heavily schematic and teleological narrative which appeared throughout central and Western Europe in the fifteenth century. While Kunzle does not take account of evidence from manuscripts, instead seeing image-text strips as a new form which accompanied the advent of printing, he does draw attention to schemata such as printed indulgences showing the ‘Symbols of the Passion’. In particular, Kunzle notes how European strip art disseminated anti-Semitic host-desecration narratives at Nürnberg, Passau and Urbino, of which Paolo Uccello’s narrative predella is a distinguished example.26 The emphatic schematization and use of frames in such artefacts sets up contrasts in Jewish and Christian behaviour; it also focuses the viewer’s gaze on the narrative’s key moments of torture and morality. Kunzle sets out four criteria for what constitutes a cartoon strip: a sequence of separate images; a preponderance of text over image; dissemination in a mass medium; a ‘moral’ and ‘topical’ story.27 Kunzle’s definitions are problematic in several ways; he says ‘a mass medium must be mobile; it travels to man, and does not require man to travel to it’; but copying, speech and memory all make the medieval version of this communication rather less easy to define in terms of a ‘mass’ audience. Moreover, the relationship between text and image might more usefully be seen as motile, as medieval thought held words themselves to be a kind of picture while seeing pictures as narratives to be ‘read’.28 That said, the comparison between what we know as ‘cartoon strips’ – violent, full of contrasts, teleological, quasi-demotic, defining good versus evil – and the medieval artefacts considered above remains an instructive one for our purposes because it is through such media that the easily identifiable Jewish stereotype was born, reborn and repeatedly re-presented. This stereotype articulated the ‘disappearance’ of the Jew as a human being and announced the representation of the Jew as a deformed grotesque, a grotesque which could be revived for religious, and aesthetic, purposes. There is no political or social animus to this

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kind of anti-Semitism but, rather, an ardent and empathic need to restage Christ’s Passion within one’s ‘cotidiane mortifiynge’ in correspondingly ‘cotidiane’ media.

Margery Kempe’s cultural construction of Jewry In her impressionistic study of the cultural technologies through which late medieval Jewry was dispossessed, Kathleen Biddick explores two early printed images of the Regensburg synagogue, a ‘graphic double’ in which print culture plays a key role in the ‘inscriptional conflict between Christians and Jews’, a ‘graphic reoccupation’.29 In one image Jews walk through the synagogue; in the next, the synagogue has become empty, a monument, superseded by modernity through, Biddick argues, the linked technologies of print, engraving and Christian historiography. Using psychoanalytic theories and a vocabulary of loss, excision and mistranslation, Biddick’s study argues that late medieval and early modern Christianity fantasised a ‘clean cut’, reminiscent of the trauma of circumcision, by which Jews could be placed entirely in the past; Jews thus becomes a ‘period piece’ always subjected to their Christological role.30 The fifteenth-century East Anglian mystic Margery Kempe (birth c. 1373, death. in or after 1438) was intimately acquainted with ideas of Judaism based in mediated, rather than ‘actual’ or ‘real’, experience. The Book of Margery Kempe was written in the late 1430s, apparently dictated by Kempe to at least two scribes; the extent of these scribes’ editorial input is unclear.31 BMK is a rich and fascinating text; the aspects upon which I shall focus here are Kempe’s discussions (and elisions) of Judaism and the way they fit into the fraught multimedia and intensely mediated account of her life and mystical vision. As presented in BMK, Christianity is not a ‘religion of the book’ in the sense of the primacy of textual orthodoxy. Indeed, canonical biblical authority and ecclesiastical hierarchy are little accepted by Kempe. Kempe is orthodox in her spirituality and she and/or her scribe had an intimate knowledge of founding texts of English and European mysticism: Richard Rolle, The Cloud of Unknowing, Pseudo-Bonaventura, Walter Hilton and in particular Birgitta of Sweden and Nicholas Love. Kempe’s preference, however, is for self-authorised and non-textual performances of faith mediated through registers of vision, pain, weeping, food, commensality, eroticism and blood. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen recently called this Kempe’s ‘becoming-liquid’, a dissolving of the self, based on crying out and sobbing.32 Books themselves, as material and spiritual objects, are unreliable in BMK; this is seen not only in the troubled genesis of BMK itself but also in several mundane ‘miracles’ which demonstrate Kempe’s primacy of

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the non-textual over conventional textuality. A brief example occurs during Kempe’s journey to Jerusalem (a journey discussed in greater detail below): Whan it was tyme to makyn her beddys, thei lokyd up her clothis, and a preste wech was in her company toke awey a schete fro the forseyd creatur and seyd it was hys! Sche toke God to wytnesse that it was hire schete! Than the preste swor a gret othe (and be the boke his hys hand), that sche was as fals as sche mygth be! – and dispysed hir and alto-rebukyd hir. (2167–72)33 A dispute about the ownership of a ‘shete’ is hardly an edifying moment of spiritual transcendence but serves to show the limited authority of the priest and ‘the boke in his hand’, presumably a bible. In BMK it is usually words and objects, rather than books, which have power. In this regard Jacqueline Jenkins has recently examined Kempe’s ‘trope of illiteracy’ and the ambiguities BMK sets up in Kempe’s relationship to textual canonicity and its protagonist’s formal education.34 Yet the bible and scenes extrapolated from it are crucial to Kempe’s daily experience. Spiritual conversations with Christ and the Virgin punctuate Kempe’s travels (and travails); in particular Kempe is repeatedly thanked and reassured and endorsed by Christ. At times, Kempe’s mystical ‘conversations’, ‘visions’ or ‘showings’ (all fraught terms which suggest the primacy of one medium) are extrabiblical and rooted in this world: for instance, Christ tells Kempe how he is a better teacher than her clerks (chapter 64) and how pleased he is with the writing of BMK (chapter 86). At other times, Kempe’s contemplation takes the form of a biblical tableau vivant: for instance, witnessing the key moments of Christ’s Passion (chapter 80), a ‘petows syght’ (6418) which causes her to weep and cry ‘as yyf sche schulde a brostyn for sorwe and peyne’ (6419). Part of this communication with biblical scenes involves an evocation by Kempe of Jewry, usually as exemplary agents of cruelty and pain. Kempe’s Jews are part of her imitatio Christi. When ‘many’ people believe Kempe to be possessed by a tear-inducing devil, Kempe invokes the Jews thus: And al sche toke pacyently for owr Lordys lofe, for sche wist wel that the Jewys seyd meche wers of hys owyn persone than men dede of hir. And therfor sche toke it the mor meekly. (3471–4)

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Kempe, in keeping with her imitatio Christi, presents her patience under trial as a parallel, if lesser, Passion. This reference to Kempe’s fellow Englishmen and Englishwomen as Jews is continued, as she describes how the ‘folke spitted at hir’ (3478), as they think her epileptic as well as diabolical. This spitting recalls the characteristic behaviour of the Jews at the Passion, as seen in John Grimestone’s lyrics and the Arma Christi image-text schemes. Strikingly, at a difficult moment when she is undergoing clerical examination for heresy in York, Kempe, with her disruptive and violent devotional style, is mistaken for a Jew: ‘Sum of the pepil askyd whedyr sche wer a Cristen woman er a Jewe? Sum seyd sche was a good-woman and sum seyd “nay”’ (4146–89). ‘Jewe’ here seems really to mean ‘Loller’ and ‘heretyke’ (4116) for the ecclesiastics seek to determine the extent, if any, of Kempe’s heterodoxy rather than her Judaism.35 ‘Jewe’ does not mean Jewish, but rather that which is disruptive to Christianity and to the Christian establishment; elsewhere Kempe prays for ‘Jewys, Sarazinys and alle fals heretikys’ (4733) and their ‘blyndnes’. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine the Archbishop of York and his ‘many worthy clerkys’ (4142–3), trained in Scripture, really taking Kempe for a Jew; instead, here Kempe characteristically casts herself as a Christ-like figure, tried, like Christ, before an ‘illegitimate’ court.36 As elsewhere in BMK, Kempe performs as a martyr, manipulating martyrological tropes, recreating popular images of Christ tried before the Sanhedrin, Annas and Caiaphas. Throughout BMK Kempe repeatedly places herself in the martyr’s position, as Paul Strohm has argued regarding Kempe’s manipulation of the label of ‘Lollard’ and the threat of burning (or ‘action as symbolism’).37 It is significant that Kempe little attempts to counter the accusation of Lollardy, heresy or Judaism with reason or argument, instead she cries (4154), screams out (4154–6), prays to herself (4138) and takes part in a mystical conversation with Christ (4204–7). Kempe’s most extended and interesting passage on the Jews occurs in the ‘gloriows sight in hir sowle’ (6332), an interaction with Christ’s trial and Passion (chapter 79). This takes the form of a witnessing of several key moments of the Passion. Kempe follows the biblical narrative but her visions are profoundly inflected by popular religion, in particular her emphasis on gory and sensational violence. This section begins with Kempe performing the role of spectator, viewing the Virgin ‘swownyng befor hir sone’ (6287). The dialogue between the Virgin and Christ is given in BMK in reported speech and emphasises Kempe’s passive role. Kempe assumes an active role in her ‘thowt’ – ‘the seyd creatur thowt sche toke our Lord Jhesu Christ be the clothys and fel down at hys

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feet ...’ (6333–7). Christ commands Kempe to stay with the Virgin and comfort her. The account becomes progressively less concerned with communication through speech and more ekphrastic, as Kempe and the Virgin follow Christ through the torments of his Passion. In an extended passage Kempe describes her vision of ‘many armyd men wyth stavys, swedys, and polexis’ (6364–5) who turn out to be the gang of Jews who fall to the ground (as described in John 18:1–19:42). Kempe’s detailed account of the Passion is largely faithful to gospel account while including nonscriptural addition (for instance the Jews’ tearing of Christ’s beard [6389], the description of the whiteness of Christ’s body [6396]). It is, however, remarkable as a kind of omnium gatherum of anti-Semitic Passion topoi in which the tortures of Christ are laboriously compiled: for instance, to give just a few examples, ... the Jewys leyd handys upon hym ful violentlyche (6377) ... the Jewys puttyng a cloth beforn our lordys eyne, betyng him and bofetyng hym in the hevyd, and bobyng hym beforn hys swete mowth (6382–4) Thei sparid not to spittyn in hys face in the most schamful wise that thei cowde. And than owr Lady and sche, hyr unworthy handmaydyn for the tyme, wept and syhyd ful sor, for the Jewys ferd so fowle and so venymowslych wyth hir blissful Lord. And thei wolde not spare to luggen hys blisful erys and drawyn the her of hys berd. And anon aftyr sche saw hem drawyn of hys clothys and makyn hym al nakyd, and sithyn drewyn hym forth aforn hem as it had ben the most malefactowr in al the worlde ... (6385–92) And than sche sey sextene men wyth sextene scorgys, and eche scorge had viii babelys of leed on the ende, and every babyl was ful of scharp prekelys, as it had ben the rowelys of a spor. And tho men wyth the scorgys madyn comenawnt that ich of hem schulde yevyn owr Lord xl strokys. (6413–17) And so it goes on, an exhaustive enumeration which uses parataxis (‘And than ... and anon ... And than ...’) to give the impression of the grim accretion of torture. As Windeatt notes, some of Kempe’s topoi are drawn from other written mystical accounts, in particular, those by Nicholas Love and Bridget of Sweden.38 I do, however, want to draw

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attention to this sequence’s visuality and its visual and intermedial analogues. We might usefully compare Kempe’s account with the fifteenth-century ‘Instruments of the Passion’.

Figure 1.1 Fifteenth-century ‘Instruments of the Passion’. London, British Library Royal MS 6.E.vi, f. 15r. Image-with-caption strip. By permission of the British Library.

Anthony Bale 37

Here, as in BMK, the Passion becomes a busy sequence of intensely visual and material objects, all facilitated through the construction of the Jewish torturer. This torturer is seen in the English illustration in the central column, spitting in Christ’s face (as indicated by the caption) and tearing his hair (the spitting is scriptural, the tearing of the hair is not). This is, in media terms, a kind of ‘hot medium’, full of data and intensely sensual, appealing to vision, touch, memory, pain.39 We organise this jumble via previous experience of the Passion narrative, learned and memorised elsewhere. BMK’s version of the Passion owes a great deal to images such as this, and the Passion cycles, likewise in frames, common in medieval English ecclesiastical wall painting.40 Central to such images is the perceptual passio, recently explored by Suzannah Biernoff, a visual experience of pleasurable pain, an ocular Passional imitatio;41 this is a kind of ‘salubrious’ violence, presented as a series of key moments which build the correct memoria passionis.42 The strip-art format, with its schematization, enumeration and bold contrasts, delineates Christian redemption partly through its easily identifiable villain, the spitting, violent Jewish grotesque. Thus the ‘Jews’ encountered by Kempe in England are fabricated, as if they are spectres drawn from Kempe’s biblical and popular religious experiences (see the discussion of the representation of Muhammad in Dimmock’s essay). BMK is a useful document in this regard because, as a travel or pilgrimage account, it allows us to contrast Kempe’s religious experience in England with that in the Holy Land, where she is likely to have encountered Jews. Kempe sailed from Venice for Jaffa in the spring of 1414, proceeding then to Jerusalem, including Calvary, Mount Zion and the Kidron Valley. She then went by ass to Bethlehem (2382) and on to the Jordan Valley, Jericho and Bethany, in a conventional route which imitates that taken by Christ.43 Kempe then returns to Jaffa via Ramleh. This daunting itinerary and the preceding journey through Europe is described in BMK in some detail but the account given is strangely bare: it is mostly devoid of people, the journey in the Holy Land passes uncharacteristically without a perilous incident, and here, when Kempe’s imitatio of Christ appears to have reached a zenith, the Holy Land is bare and conventional. While it is in Jerusalem that Kempe first finds herself ‘krying and roryng’ (2216) in compassion for ‘owyr Lordys peyn’ (2215), the remainder of the visit appears to have been a standard group tour, organised by Franciscans and led by ‘Sarazyn’ guides, around key biblical sites. Conspicuously absent from BMK’s account of the Holy Land is a sense of Jerusalem as a fifteenth-century Mameluk metropolis; the only indication of this is

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in the Saracen guides who receive Kempe. Naturally Kempe visited Jerusalem as a pilgrim, not a tourist or anthropologist, but her Jerusalem is a paradoxical landscape of Christian fantasy, not least in its being free of Jews. The Mameluk Jerusalem visited by Kempe had a thriving Jewish population, which included an Arabic-speaking Palestinian Jewish community as well as immigrant Jews from all over Europe, North Africa and the Levant. Both Ashkenazi and Sephardic rites were observed. Jews took park in a wide range of trades and industries, both urban and rural, and, in particular, they were involved in the Christian pilgrimage industry, of which Kempe was a part. Examples of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Jewish guides are abundant; an Italian monk, writing in 1335, described how the Jews can ‘explain all the ancient sites, for they are very erudite in their Holy Scriptures and in the locations mentioned in the tales of their forefathers and sages’.44 It is thus striking that, to her mind, Kempe met more Jews in England than in Palestine; was Kempe’s knowledge of Jewry so entirely inflected and mediated by the kinds of Christian material surveyed in this essay – grotesques, chimerae, demonic and spitting scourgers – that the Palestinian Jews did not appear to Kempe as Jews? In any case, the Palestinian Jews were of no interest to Kempe and her self-reflexive or solipsistic experience of the Holy Land. In contrast, the ‘Sarazyn’ Jerusalemites are amenable to Kempe’s pilgrimage experience; by this term (Sarazyn) it is assumed that BMK means a Muslim, although John Lydgate (close to Kempe in location and date) uses ‘Sarseyne’ for the heathen Danes in his Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund.45 Kempe employs a Saracen guide, a ‘welfaryng’ man (2410; i.e. handsome, good-looking) and at Jerusalem the Sarazines mad mych of hir and conveyd hir and leddyn hir abowtyn in the cuntre wher sche wold gon. And sche fond alle pepyl good onto hir and gentyl, saf only hir owyn cuntremen. (2441–4) The tone of BMK is strikingly accommodating here and where Kempe has scope for actual interfaith conflict there is none. Instead it is ‘hir owyn cuntremen’ (2444), in the pilgrimage group, who have turned against her.46 Kempe’s pilgrimage experience is mediated in several important ways. First, the Holy Land is itself a medium, a tabula rasa onto which Kempe, and BMK, maps a landscape and response. Sylvia Schein notes how Kempe’s ‘empty’ Holy Land has an intertext and precedent in

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Bridget of Sweden’s pilgrimage account which is, in Schein’s words, ‘almost entirely devoid of any reference to the physical conditions of her pilgrimage and the realia of Jerusalem’.47 The devotional landscape thus becomes an aesthetic projection of the pilgrim’s own making (rather than a reflection of the pilgrim’s experience). This is explained by Rosalynn Voaden, who attributes Kempe’s ‘blinkers’ to her concern that her travel accounts are fashioned to represent sapientia and scientia (worthy wisdom and knowledge) rather than curiositas (forbidden mental and physical wandering).48 Voaden goes on to suggest that Kempe’s imitatio was to be achieved not through scenery but through her persecution by her fellow pilgrims. Again, Kempe is the medium here, on which the Christological precedent is etched, making herself. The intensely affective and material register of Kempe’s piety required that she experience the world entirely through the lens of religious media encountered elsewhere. For Kempe, Jerusalem is intangible, because, one suspects, it was not as potent in reality as it was as a fiction. This hypermediation of Jerusalem, and of pilgrimage more generally, may help explain the spare accounts of the Holy Land given by Kempe (and also by similar travellers to the Holy Land, like Bridget of Sweden, Sir Richard Guylforde and Richard Torkyngton). Annabel Wharton has recently explored replicas of Calvary constructed in northern Italy in the 1490s; Wharton comments that ‘[t]he sites associated with Jesus’s life and death in fifteenth-century Jerusalem were empty by comparison with those of Varvallo [near Milan]’.49 That is to say, the most potent Calvary for Kempe was not in Jerusalem but in Canterbury, Leicester, Lynn or York, where she underwent spectacular and public trials framed as versions of the Passion. Wharton notes how the Italian recreation of Calvary made ‘real’ or manifest, through a simulacrum, ‘a Jew-free Jerusalem’;50 at the same time, violently anti-Semitic caricatures, gurning in devotional tableaux, could endlessly repeat their Passional crimes. Later medieval plans of Jerusalem make clear the way in which pilgrimage experience was organised, and also return us to artefacts very similar to the Arma Christi image-texts discussed above. Medieval town plans are rare, but surviving evidence suggests that Jerusalem was the exception;51 Jerusalem, always overdetermined and excessively represented, was depicted in a range of forms, from exegetical diagrams of the tabernacle to pilgrimage route-maps. As Catherine Delano-Smith observes, such maps do not seeks to show Jerusalem either as a space or as a contemporary site; instead, they ‘map’ Jerusalem as a series of holy Christian sites, manifesting

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the biblical text and, not unlike a cartoon strip, represent an image-text narrative with an established scheme and telos.52 As Biddick has argued, the development of mapping by Hugh of St Victor (fl. 1130) and the Paris Victorines was part, through graphic drawing (depingere), of ‘a chain of translations that graphically dispossessed medieval Jews of coevalness’.53 Medieval mapping was, in Biddick’s terms, a ‘double-barreled technology, alphabet as territory, cartography as alphabet’.54 Like other medieval maps, plans of Jerusalem were used for navigation and travel, but they arrest the Palestinian landscape at the Passional moment. Indeed, one famous fourteenth-century map, by Pietro Vesconte (now London, British Library Add. MS 27376, f. 189v), directs the pilgrim to Bethany, following Christ’s route and foreshadowing that taken by Kempe. What does this have to do with Christian anti-Semitism? The hypermediation of Jerusalem allowed people like Kempe to experience the city by eliding it, reproducing instead an imitatio which in turn sets the stage for Kempe finding Jews in England rather than Palestine. The presence of the Passion could be as keenly felt in York as on Calvary. On another level, the rigid itinerary and schematization to which the medieval Holy Land was subjected (as seen in pilgrims’ plans) mirrors mnemonic plans of the Passion, like the Arma Christi, in a teleological narrative which always leads to the Passion, its representation and re-performance. In these ways, the Passion was utterly translatable, its elaborated but established form memorialised everywhere.

Conclusions In the foregoing pages I have drawn attention to some of the ways in which Christians represented and conjured Jews. This imagining increasingly took place largely outside ‘The Book’ – the Vulgate bible – in media and formats designed to train memory, to cue affective responses and to transform one’s lived life, through imitation, into a ‘biblical’ (and familiar and intimate) experience. While the work of literary critics such as Sylvia Tomasch and Steven Kruger have added valuable insights into the ways in which the ‘virtual’ or ‘spectral’ Jew was represented in literary texts, I have aimed to augment this work by calling attention to the verbal-visual form, to consider the practices in which Jewry was made virtual or spectral.55 That is to say, the revival and misrecognition of Judaism is not an inevitable consequence of an inherent antiSemitism on the part of medieval English Christians, but rather a part of the fundamental schemata through which devotional thought and

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practice was organised. The desire to witness the Passion, and to be part of the Passion, required the ongoing, aestheticised evocation of Jewish violence. As Mitchell Merback writes, ‘For medieval people, the experience of seeing and imagining a body that was ravaged and bleeding from tortures inflicted upon it lay at the centre of a constellation of religious doctrines, beliefs and devotional practices’;56 the spectacle of redemptive, valorised pain was to be sought everywhere. New formats, new media, were developed which gave medieval people greater access to this pain: it could be gazed on, in both private and corporate settings, and, as for Margery Kempe, repeated to the extent that it structured and suffused one’s life. Christ’s suffering at the hands of the Jews, the fundamental image of compassion, pity and redemption, was not confined to The Book where it originated but repeated, re-presented, reconceived, to bring The Book into everyday life.

Notes 1. Some well-known medieval English examples are the image of St Anne holding a codex open for the Virgin and Child in the ‘Beaufort’ (Beauchamp) Hours (London, British Library Royal MS 2.A.XVIII, f.13v); Jerome at his desk with his books, in the English Great Bible (London, British Library Royal MS 1.E.IX, f.101r); Christ grasping a codex at his interrogation before Caiaphas in the Salvin Hours (London, British Library Add. MS 48985, f.29r). 2. For further reading see Jacqueline Jenkins, ‘Reading in The Book of Margery Kempe’, in John Arnold and Katherine J. Lewis, eds, A Companion to the Book of Margery Kempe (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2004), pp. 113–28, p. 116. 3. On the history and expulsion of the Anglo-Jewish community, see Cecil Roth, A History of the Jews in England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), pp. 18–131; Robin Mundill, England’s Jewish Solution: Experiment and Expulsion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 4. Anthony Bale, The Jew in the Medieval Book: English Antisemitisms, 1350–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), Chap. 5; Anne Derbes, Picturing the Passion in Late Medieval Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 79–93 (in general Derbes’ useful study is concerned with the transformation from Christus triumphans to Christus patiens); Mitchell Merback, The Thief, The Cross and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (London: Reaktion, 1999), especially p. 132, on ‘the desire to convey the murderous hysteria of the Jews’ at the expense of a consideration of redemption or justice. 5. See Milton Shain, Antisemitism (London: Bowerdean, 1998). 6. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), p. 45.

42 Christian Anti-Semitism 7. Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda aurea sanctorum (London: William Caxton, 1483 [⫽STC 24873]). 8. Voragine, Legenda, f.14v. The passage on ‘the passyon of our lord’ is accompanied by a busy Crucifixion scene complete with Jews and soldiers (f.14r). 9. On Bernard’s thought and writing on the Jews see Jeffrey Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 243–5. 10. In other exegeses, the interview with Annas and Caiaphas might be seen to be an indication of the high-priests’ antipathy to Christ and its own part in his Crucifixion. See also Acts 4:6. 11. All biblical quotations are from the Douay-Rheims edition of the bible, via http://www.drbo.org/ (accessed 25 October 2006). 12. John Shinners, Medieval Popular Religion 1000–1500: A Reader (Peterborough: Broadview, 1997), p. 333. The regimen is on pp. 332–4. 13. Brendan Biggs, ed., The First Translation of the Imitatio Christi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 57 (2:12:15). 14. Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 104. 15. Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 60. 16. Quotations from Grimestone’s book are taken from Edward Wilson, ed., A Descriptive Index of the English Lyrics in John of Grimestone’s Preaching Book (Oxford: Medium Ævum, 1973). 17. See Rosemary Woolf, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (London: Oxford University Pres, 1968), pp. 235–6. 18. Love’s prologue is printed and edited alongside other relevant similar material in Jocelyn Wogan-Browne et al. eds, The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory 1280–1520 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999), pp. 252–5. The passages quoted are from p. 253. 19. Daniel Baraz, Medieval Cruelty: Changing Perceptions, Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), chapter 4. Baraz concludes that, in the late medieval West, ‘the issue of cruelty was exploited for purely religious purposes: the attainment of the mystical experience’ (p. 142). 20. On the origins and development of the Arma Christi topos in England, see Bale, Jew in the Medieval Book, pp. 149–61; in Scotland, Charles Carter, ‘The “Arma Christi” in Scotland’, Proceedings of the Scottish Antiquarian Society, 920 (1957), pp. 112–29; more generally as well as in terms of gender see, Lewis, Flora May, ‘The Wound in Christ’s Side and the Instruments of the Passion: Gendered Experience and Response,’ in Lesley Smith and Jane H. M. Taylor, eds, Women and the Book: Assessing the Visual Evidence (London: British Library, 1997), pp. 204–29. 21. The poem has not been adequately edited; it is transcribed in Bale, Jew in the Medieval Book, pp. 177–81. 22. See the examples in R. Berliner, ‘Arma Christi’, Münchener Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst, 6 (1955), pp. 35–152. 23. On the interpretative issues involved in ekphrasis see Murray Krieger’s Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Krieger is interested in the transposition of visual

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24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

37. 38. 39.

and written language in a way which perceives a tension between the two, something of a postmedieval way divide; see also Carruthers, Book of Memory; Suzannah Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). Carruthers, Craft of Thought, p. 144. Cartoon strip is a slightly more accurate term, its etymology referring to a drawing on paper (from the Italian cartone/carta); ‘comic strip’ is a uniquely English attribution of comedy to the form. Strip art is not necessarily comic. See David Kunzle, The Early Comic Strip: Narrative Strips and Pictures Stories in the European Broadsheet from c. 1450 to 1825 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), p. 2, on this terminology. Paolo Uccello, predella to the altarpiece of the Communion of the Apostles, Palazzo Ducale, Urbino; the predella is reproduced in Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews, 2nd edition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), pp. 146–7 and discussed in depth, ibid., pp. 148–50. It was painted between 1465 and 1468; it shows both the Jews’ desecration of the host and the execution of the Jews. Kunzle, The Early Comic Strip, p. 2. See the examples in Carruthers, Craft of Thought. Kathleen Biddick, The Typological Imaginary (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), p. 70. In Biddick’s convoluted argument, ‘period piece’ is the term used for eunuchs, themselves a kind of misread and liminal category of ‘corporeal materialization’. Typological Imaginary, pp. 91–104. See Lynn Staley Johnson, ‘The Trope of the Scribe and the Question of Literary Authority in the Works of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe’, Speculum, 66 (1991), pp. 820–38, for a cogent discussion of the issues involved. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 156. Quotations from BMK are by line number and refer to Barry Windeatt, ed., The Book of Margery Kempe (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2004). Jenkins, ‘Reading’. Lynn Staley notes how Jacques de Vitry, in his life of Marie d’Oignies which was known to Kempe and/or her amanuensis, compared heretics to mad dogs or Jews, ‘since they do not comprehend the nature of the holy within their midst’. See Lynn Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), pp. 44–5. As Scherb notes, Kempe’s rebuking of authority figures is self-authorising, as Kempe sets the parameters of blasphemy. See Victor Scherb, ‘Blasphemy and the Grotesque in the Digby Mary Magdalene’, Studies in Philology, 96 (1999), pp. 225–40, p. 231. Paul Strohm, Theory and the Premodern Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. 27–30. See for example Windeatt’s notes in BMK, p. 344, twice on p. 345. See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 26–7; however, McLuhan argues that ‘hot’ media prevent participation because they require no input from the viewer/reader, which rather goes against the immersive imperatives of medieval image meditation.

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40. See http://www.paintedchurch.org/passcon.htm (accessed 25 October 2006). 41. Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment, p. 138; I have recently explored the aesthetics of this passio in further detail in my article ‘The Jew in Profile’, New Medieval Literatures, 8 (2007). 42. On the ‘salubrious’ and enabling nature of medieval violence see Jody Enders, The Medieval Theater of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence, 2nd edn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002). 43. Mark 11:11 (‘And he entered into Jerusalem, into the temple: and having viewed all things round about, when now the eventide was come, he went out to Bethania with the twelve’); Luke 24:50 (‘And he led them out as far as Bethania ...’). 44. Avraham David, ‘The Jewish Settlement in Palestine in the Mameluke Period (1260–1516)’, in Alex Carmel, Peter Schäfer and Yossi Ben-Artzi, eds, The Jewish Settlement in Palestine 634–1881 (Wiesbaden, 1990), 40–85, p. 66. 45. This example is given, along with other relevant etymological citations, in the Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘Saracen’; see Windeatt, BMK, p. 173. 46. Like the memorable conflict at Constance, where the other pilgrims gang up against Kempe (lines 1991–2021). 47. Sylvia Schein, ‘Bridget of Sweden, Margery Kempe and women’s Jerusalem pilgrimages in the Middle Ages’, Mediterranean Historical Review, 14 (1999), pp. 44–58. 48. Rosalynn Voaden, ‘Travels with Margery: Pilgrimage in Context’, in R. Allen, ed., Eastward Bound: Travel and Travellers 1050–1550 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 177–95, p. 185. The obvious objection to Voaden’s suggestion is that BMK is not shy of describing Kempe’s curiositas elsewhere. 49. Annabel Jane Wharton, Selling Jerusalem: Relics, Replicas, Theme Parks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 101. 50. Wharton, Selling Jerusalem, p. 126. 51. This point is made and the relevant evidence surveyed in Catherine DelanoSmith, ‘The intelligent pilgrim: maps and medieval pilgrimage to the Holy Land’, in Allen, ed., Eastward Bound, pp. 107–30. 52. Delano-Smith, ‘The intelligent pilgrim’, pp. 108–13. 53. Biddick, Typological Imaginary, p. 23. 54. Biddick, Typological Imaginary, p. 44. 55. See Sylvia Tomasch, ‘Postcolonial Chaucer and the Virtual Jew’, in Sheila Delany, ed., Chaucer and the Jews: Sources, Contexts, Meanings (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 69–85; Steven Kruger, ‘The Spectral Jew’, New Medieval Literatures, 2 (1998), pp. 9–35. 56. Merback, Thief, p. 19.

2 The Crusade of Varna, 1443–1445: What Motivated the Crusaders? Colin Imber

Assessments of what motivated crusades and crusaders are inevitably speculative,1 some commentators seeing crusading as ‘a genuinely popular devotional activity’,2 while others prefer to explain it as a search for economic or other material benefits. All, however, admit – if sometimes unwillingly – that there can be no single explanation for the phenomenon. The Crusade of Varna – a campaign in which the combined forces of the pope, the king of Hungary, the Byzantine Emperor, the duke of Burgundy, Venice, Ragusa and the emir of Karaman confronted the Ottoman sultan, Murad II 3 – provides a good case study of the complexities of crusading. At one level it is easy to understand the events of 1443–5 simply in terms of Realpolitik, with the alliances during the crusade of Christian with Muslim and Muslim with Christian highlighting its secular character. The campaign was, however, still a crusade. It was a military enterprise under the leadership of the pope, undertaken by the church against an infidel enemy and, as such, it satisfies the definition of a crusade formulated in the thirteenth century by the Decretalist Hostiensis (d. 1271).4 Nonetheless, even if the participants in events publicly proclaimed the war to be a crusade, this does not necessarily explain their motives. The idea of a crusade can just as easily serve as a justification for an action undertaken for other reasons, as it can for inspiring the action in the first place, and this complicates the question of motivation. So too does the question of individual motives. The knights and common soldiers who took part in the campaign cannot have shared the secular goals of its leaders, nor would they have understood a crusade in the same terms as canon lawyers or cardinals. In brief, therefore, the motives that inspired the crusade of Varna were tangled and certainly not uniform. 45

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The ideology of crusading was itself a cause of confusion both in defining the aims of the crusade and in determining the motives of the crusaders. Central to the concept of a crusade is the goal of ‘liberating’ the Holy Land from the hands of the infidels, and this was certainly something to which all participants in the crusade of Varna could subscribe. A legal justification for this goal had emerged in the early thirteenth century, when Robert de Courson had argued from Scripture that the Israelites had seized Amorite territory that was rightfully theirs. This land had passed to the church by inheritance, and so any war to recover it for Christendom was justified.5 In a sermon preached at the Council of Ferrara-Florence which assembled in 1438 to bring about the unity of Christendom as a prelude to the crusade of Varna, the abbot of Clarevalle, as legate of the Duke of Burgundy, was to borrow this idea when he urged the re-united Latins and Greeks to ‘seize the Holy Land from the hands of the enemies of Christ ... just as once the victorious sons of Israel proceeded to war.’6 The concept of the Holy Land and its ‘liberation’ was not however a monopoly of clerics, but part of the mental world of even illiterate Christians and could therefore act to motivate all crusaders and to define the enemy for them in terms familiar to everyone from biblical narrative. For the educated, more recent history also provided an additional impetus. In a memorandum delivered to the pope in Florence in 1442, Beltrami de Mignanelli, speaking on behalf of the Jacobite Church, cites the First Crusade, launched when the ‘Church was in schism and the kingdom of Hungary almost occupied by the Turks’ as a precedent for re-uniting Christendom and conquering the Holy Land.7 Beltrami clearly intended the stories of Baldwin and, for the more piously inclined, Peter the Hermit, to inspire the new crusade, to provide role models for the crusaders and to define the enemy. Bible stories and tales of the First Crusade were undoubtedly inspirational and, since they embodied a set of beliefs to which all could subscribe, undoubtedly also provided a shared ideal around which the participants in the crusade could unite (compare and contrast Bale’s analysis of Christian belief and the role of outsiders on p. 24). The problem with them was that they were fantasies, and as such could divert attention from the real goals of the crusade of Varna. To begin with, the aim of the crusade was not to ‘liberate’ the Holy Land, but to end Ottoman rule in the Balkan peninsula. The Ottoman enemy was, it is true, Muslim, but theologians and canon lawyers, while enthusiastically embracing the idea that church could conduct a crusade against heretics, were less certain about crusades against Muslims outside the Holy Land. This probably did not matter, since there were

Colin Imber 47

already precedents for such actions. More important was it to define the undertaking as a crusade under the leadership of the church than it was to divert the attention of participants away from the limited and perfectly practical goal of defeating the Ottomans. When the abbot of Clarevalle presented his vision of the Latins and Greeks uniting to conquer the Holy Land, this was not mere rhetoric, but evidently what he and Philip of Burgundy saw as the real purpose of the crusade for which the Council of Ferrara-Florence was the prelude. In his memorandum to the pope, Beltrami was even more ambitious. The union of the churches without a holy war, he says, was like ‘an ornamented vine without fruit’. While the crusade against the Turks was to be part of this holy war and would result in the restitution – he does not specify to whom – of Gallipoli, Adrianople, Nicopolis and other places, he at the same time urges the pope to undertake a crusade against the Mamluk sultan of Egypt and Syria, who threatened Rhodes and Cyprus. The sultan could, Beltrami believes, be brought down by a trade embargo, and urges the pope in particular to forbid the Genoese in the Crimea from exporting slaves to Egypt. Such fantastic schemes for the conquest of the Holy Land, or for bringing down both the Ottoman and Mamluk sultanates, were the product of a crusading enthusiasm that served merely to cause confusion by diverting effort and resources from the realistically planned anti-Ottoman expedition and so to undermine its prospects for success. The Venetian government saw this danger very clearly. When, in 1444, Venetian galleys left to blockade the Dardanelles to prevent the Ottoman sultan crossing the Straits into Europe, they received firm instructions not to divert to Rhodes to defend the island against Mamluk attack.8 In addition to producing confusion over the aims of the proposed crusade, and perhaps excessive optimism as to its outcome, crusading ideology could also produce unrealistic ideas about the enemy, by identifying the Turks with the Amorites and other biblical figures, or with the Saracens of crusading literature. Even those such as Beltrami, who were more informed, allowed enthusiasm for eradicating Islam to lead them to unrealistic conclusions. While noting realistically that discord between Ottomans and Mamluks provided an opportunity for Christian conquest, he draws a distinction between the Turks and the subjects of the Mamluk sultan: ‘... [the Turks] are a lively, homely and polite people, and they are not such perfidious Mahometans as those of Syria and Egypt.’9 This was perhaps a tacit encouragement to the pope to give a crusade against the Mamluks priority over the anti-Ottoman campaign, and perhaps also the starting point of the fantasy which Nicolas of Cusa

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was to adopt that conversion rather than conquest would remove the Turks as a threat to Christendom.10 In any case, the idea was no more than wishful thinking. Crusade, therefore, was an ideal that was both inspirational but also, when confronted with reality, a source of confusion and misunderstanding as to goals. The reality of the campaign of 1443–5 was that its primary motives were secular, as the historical context makes clear. In the mid-fourteenth century, the first Ottoman raiders and settlers appeared on the European shore of Dardanelles as allies of the Byzantine pretender John [VI] Kantakouzenos.11 By 1395, the extension of Ottoman domains northwards to the Danube, together with the establishment of Ottoman suzerainty over Serbia and Wallachia posed a threat to the Kingdom of Hungary, hitherto the dominant power in the northern part of the Balkan peninsula.12 In Greece and the Aegean, too, Ottoman settlement and raiding began to affect Venetian colonies and trading posts. These were the circumstances that inspired King Sigismund of Hungary to form a coalition of the threatened powers, with the addition of a contingent of Franco-Burgundian knights. The expedition, which the pope declared to be a crusade, ended in defeat at the battle of Nicopolis in 1396. It was the Ottoman defeat by Timur in 1402, and the ensuing 11-year civil war that reprieved the allies of 1396. However, the 30 years that followed the reunification of Ottoman territory in 1413 saw the re-establishment of Ottoman power and renewed Hungarian, Byzantine and Venetian attempts to undermine it. In 1416, the Byzantine emperor sponsored the invasion of Ottoman Rumelia by an Ottoman pretender,13 while simultaneously provoking the emir of Karaman to attack Mehmed in Anatolia. At the same time, negotiations for an alliance between Venice and Hungary continued. Both invasions failed, and the Venetians lost interest in the discussions with Hungary after decisively defeating an Ottoman fleet in the Aegean. In the following decade, however, conflict between the same powers continued. On the accession of Murad II (1421–51), the Byzantine emperor again unleashed an Ottoman civil war by releasing the pretender who, after his defeat in 1416, had fled to his protection. Murad in revenge laid siege to Constantinople and Thessaloniki. The siege of Constantinople failed, but in 1423 lack of resources to defend the city persuaded the emperor to cede Thessaloniki to the Venetians, drawing Venice into a war with the Ottomans which was to last until the Ottoman conquest of the city in 1430. During the course of the war Venice had again unsuccessfully sought an alliance with Hungary. 1427 also saw a renewed

Colin Imber 49

crisis in Ottoman–Hungarian relations, when Stephen Lazarevic´ of Serbia died, bequeathing the Danubian fortress of Belgrade to Hungary. Murad responded by seizing Golubac, on the Danube to the east of Belgrade. To compensate for these losses, Lazarevic´’s successor, George Brankovic´, constructed a third fortress on the river at Smederovo. His possession of Smederovo, however, was short lived. In 1435, Murad’s marriage to Brankovic´’s daughter Mara gave him a claim to her father’s territories. Then, in 1438, following the death of King Sigismund in the previous year, he invaded Serbia, forcing Brankovic´ into exile in Hungary and making the Danube, including the fortress of Smederovo, the frontier between the Kingdom of Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. Murad’s aim at this stage was clearly the conquest of Hungary. At the same time as he sent an embassy to King Vladislav of Poland, offering assistance in his war with Albert, King of Hungary, Ottoman raids over the Danube into Transylvania intensified. In 1440, Murad laid siege, unsuccessfully, to Belgrade. Early in 1437, he had also invaded the territory of the Emir of Karaman in Anatolia, seizing two towns on its western frontier. This short summary of events in the century before the years 1443–5 makes it clear that the underlying motives for the anti-Ottoman crusade were political and secular. Three issues in particular stand out. The first was the continuing rivalry between the Ottomans and the Kingdom of Hungary, which became particularly acute from 1439 when they shared a frontier along the Danube. The second was the long-standing competition between the Ottomans and the Karamanids for supremacy in Anatolia. The third was the continuing search by the Byzantine emperors for allies in their struggle for survival in the face of Ottoman pressure. Venice also shared an interest in destroying Ottoman power, as this would reduce the Ottoman threat to its existing colonies and provide an opportunity for the acquisition of further territories. Venice’s main commercial rivals in the area of the Aegean were, however, not the Ottomans but the Genoese, and these adopted a different approach to Ottoman expansion, forming profitable alliances with the sultans rather than resisting their advance. Ottoman–Genoese friendship dated in fact from 1351, when the Ottoman ruler Orhan had assisted the Genoese of Pera against a Venetian attack. Early in 1422, the Genoese governor of New Phokaia had ferried Murad’s men across the Straits of Gallipoli in pursuit of the pretender, and provided crossbowmen for his army, while in 1425 the Genoese had again provided Murad with three ships from Chios to attack his Muslim enemy, Cüneyd of Aydın. It is unsurprising, therefore, to find the Genoese again siding with Murad in 1444. They

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disliked the Venetians more than they disliked the Ottomans, and their commercial strategy was to foster and exploit Ottoman goodwill. Furthermore, politics in the Levant were largely a matter of personal and family relationships, and Murad, as the antiquarian Ciriaco of Ancona testifies, enjoyed a close friendship with some of the Genoese lords in the Aegean.14 At one level, therefore, the crusade of Varna, during which the Hungarians, Karamanids, Venetians and Byzantines were allied against the Ottomans and Genoese, was no more than one episode in a continuing struggle for domination in the Balkans, the Aegean and Anatolia. Without the Ottoman threat to the political, territorial or commercial interests of these powers, the crusade would not have happened. What turned the campaign into a crusade was the involvement of the pope. This came at the prompting of the Byzantine emperor, John VIII. In their efforts to save Constantinople and their remaining territory in the Peloponnesos from Ottoman conquest, the emperors had necessarily to seek Muslim allies in the east and Catholic allies in the west. In the east their natural confederate was Karaman, while in the west appeals to the pope offered the prospect of forming an anti-Ottoman coalition under the umbrella of a crusade. John VIII’s plea to the pope came at the right moment. Shortly after the election of Eugenius IV in 1431, a church council assembled in Basel under the presidency of Cardinal Julian Cesarini.15 Since the reforms which the council proposed would have involved a decrease in the pope’s income and powers of appointment, Eugenius and the council immediately came into conflict. Another issue that divided them was the location where the proposed negotiations with the emperor for the union of the churches should take place. While a majority on the council voted for Basel, the pope announced the establishment of his own council at Ferrara, and it was to Ferrara that the Greek delegation came, apparently on the advice of the Doge of Venice. If this, together with the defection of Cardinal Cesarini from council to pope, represented a coup for Eugenius, the outcome of the negotiations was a triumph. His condition for organising a crusade to rescue Byzantium was the union of the churches, and in June, 1439, following the removal of the pope’s council to Florence, Cardinal Cesarini publicly pronounced the Decree of Union, according to which the Greeks accepted Roman doctrines and, most importantly, recognised the supreme authority of the pope. Although there is no reason to doubt either the pope’s sincerity of belief in the supremacy of Rome and Roman doctrine, or in the virtues

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of crusading, there is equally no reason to doubt that he used these issues to promote his own authority within the church against the challenge of the conciliarists. In January 1443, the pope issued a bull raising an ecclesiastical tithe to pay for the fleet. In order to stress the urgency of the undertaking, he reminded his audience that the Turks ‘having occupied all of Asia’ had now seized ‘that part of Europe which the Greeks inhabit’ and occupied the lands of the ‘noble man, George Despot of Serbia and his sons whom the Turk holds prisoner’. Borrowing a theme from inherited Christian rhetoric, he explained the success of the Turks as a punishment for the sins of the Christians. His terrifying depiction of the Turks, however, he derived from contemporary realities: ‘Among other unheard of cruelties, when they undertake expeditions into the lands of the Christians and return laden with booty consisting of both animals and humans, they lead a multitude of captives of both sexes tied with a rope, and those who cannot follow, exhausted by infirmity, old age or other misfortunes, collapse in the fields or amidst the Christian land through which they pass, and they leave then there dead, or nearly dead from wounds ... to the shame and disgrace of the Christian religion.’16 The pope is here using reports of Turkish raids across the Danube, such as occurred annually in the mid-fifteenth century, to emphasise the need to raise the tithe for the crusade. The coalition that the pope – or, more particularly, the ambassadors of the Byzantine emperor – had constructed consisted of Karaman, Hungary, Venice, Ragusa and Burgundy. The plan was that, while the Karamanids attacked Murad in Anatolia, drawing his army eastwards, a fleet of papal, Venetian, Burgundian, Ragusan and Byzantine vessels would block the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus, preventing Murad from returning to Europe to meet a Hungarian attack from the west. The campaign began in 1443, but failed through lack of co-ordination. The Karamanid attack came in the spring of that year, before the Hungarians were ready, and before the construction of the fleet, allowing Murad and his son Alaeddin to repel the invasion.17 The Hungarian attack in the autumn of 1443 came closer to success. After defeating the governorgeneral of Rumelia, Kasim Pasha, near Nis in early November, the Hungarian army under the leadership of the king, Hunyadi and Brankovic´ advanced as far as Sofia, which the retreating Ottomans had burned to a cinder.18 The armies met on Christmas Eve, 1443, in the Zlatitsa Pass beyond Sofia. Here a combination of Ottoman resistance and severe winter weather forced the Hungarians to withdraw and to undertake a disastrous retreat. In a dramatic passage, the Polish chronicle of DAugosz describes the return of the starved and frostbitten remnants of the

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The Crusade of Varna, 1443–1445

defeated army to Belgrade.19 On the retreat, however, the Hungarians had ambushed a pursuing Ottoman force in the Dragoman Pass, taking prisoner Mahmud Çelebi, the brother of the Grand Vizier and brotherin-law of the sultan. This episode, together with successes against Ottoman detachments on the outward march, fostered the illusion of victory. The war of the Zlatitsa Pass had ended in horror, but the victories achieved along the way highlighted the different attitudes of Cesarini, Hunyadi and Brankovic´. The anonymous but well-informed author of the Turkish Holy Wars of Sultan Murad20 describes dissensions between Brankovic´ and Hunyadi already during this campaign. Brankovic´, we are told, foresaw disaster and urged retreat before the defeat at the Pass, while it was Hunyadi who drove the expedition forward, accusing Brankovic´, as the sultan’s father-in-law, of fighting on behalf of the Ottomans. That the two men had different personal goals was to become clear during the course of 1444. For his part, Cesarini was a single-minded advocate of the crusade and the problem that he faced after the campaign was how to suppress news of its unhappy outcome. According to the Burgundian chronicler Jehan de Wavrin, after the campaign Cesarini, the king and the Hungarian estates decided that Cesarini should go to Rome and ‘in every place that he passed through ... announce the great victories that the king had won against the Turks. However, he was to keep quiet about the losses that the Christians had suffered in the mountains, contradicting anyone who said anything about them.’21 He was clearly successful. Vladislav received letters from European monarchs, congratulating him on his victory, while the Venetians who, until this point, had been hesitant in their participation, began to press for the rapid completion of the allied fleet. By the end of August, 1444, despite quarrels over payment for the vessels, a fleet of Venetian, papal, Burgundian, Ragusan and Byzantine ships was in place on the Bosphorus. During this period, too, the war aims of some of the participants had become clearer. In the summer of 1444, Byzantine, Ragusan and Venetian envoys were in Buda. Records of their haggling do not survive, beyond a Venetian complaint that the emperor’s envoy had talked about the Byzantine, pontifical and Burgundian galleys but ‘made no mention of our state,’ and that, through a Hungarian intermediary, Venice had received an undertaking that it would receive Gallipoli, Thessaloniki and ‘other Greek lands’.22 The Venetian senate also approved a recommendation from the governor of Corfu to occupy Valona and Kanina in Albania, provided the Turks evacuated them first.

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What the senate did not know was that the Ragusan ambassador also received instructions to request Valona and Kanina – a district ‘copious and abundant in victuals’ – from the King of Hungary.23 The participants in the negotiations of July, 1444, were presumably confident that the war would go ahead since, on 24 April, the king had sworn between Cesarini’s hands to lead a crusade in the summer. This apparent clarity of purpose was deceptive. On the same day as he had made his vow, the triumvirate of the king, Hunyadi and Brankovic´ had also despatched envoys to Edirne to negotiate with Murad.24 The outcome was a treaty dated 12 June, establishing a ten-year truce between Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, the return of his territories in Serbia to George Brankovic´, together with the release of his sons from Ottoman captivity and the continuation of Vlad Drakul of Wallachia’s obligation to pay tribute to Murad. The treaty was to come into effect when the king, Hunyadi and Brankovic´ had sworn to its terms in the presence of an Ottoman envoy.25 The treaty of Edirne raises the questions of the motives of the different parties.26 What little evidence there is suggests that the first steps towards a treaty came from the sultan and George Brankovic´. The late fifteenth-century chronicle of Nes¸ri27 claims that after the Hungarian retreat from the Zlatitsa Pass, Brankovic´ had, through the Ottoman lords of Rumelia, negotiated the return of his lands and the release of his sons ‘in return for money’. His arrangement with Murad was clearly not so simple, but a Ragusan report of March, 1444, concerning the transport of an envoy from Murad’s wife, Mara Brankovic´, to her father does suggest the opening of discussions between the former despot and the sultan. If Mara exerted pressure on the sultan on behalf of her father, so too, according to Nes¸ri, did Murad’s sister on behalf of her husband Mahmud Çelebi whom the Hungarians had captured during the retreat from the Zlatitsa Pass. Mahmud Çelebi returned to Edirne immediately before the arrival of the envoys from Hungary.28 News of the treaty caused confusion among Hungary’s allies. Ciriaco of Ancona, acting as a spy on behalf of the pope,29 wrote to Hunyadi in June, urging him to renounce the peace.30 In August, the king received a letter dated 30 July, which DAugosz attributes to John VIII, but was more probably from his brother Constantine Dragases in the Peloponnesos,31 begging the king to make up his mind on whether he wanted peace or war, but at the same time urging him to war. The letter also shows that once again the allies’ attempt to co-ordinate the campaign had failed. To encourage the king to war, Constantine reminded him that the Karamanids had already launched an invasion of Ottoman

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Anatolia, and that a simultaneous Hungarian attack would force Murad to fight on two fronts.32 The Karamanid attack, which came at the instigation of John VIII, had in fact begun in June, at the time of the negotiations in Edirne, and by August Murad had defeated Karaman and extracted an oath of submission from its emir, Ibrahim.33 The person who, in fact, benefited from this war in Anatolia was not the emperor or the emir, but George Brankovic´. The invasion had forced the sultan to conclude the negotiations at Edirne in a hurry and, in his haste to depart, reluctantly to cede the fortress of Golubac to Serbia. The conclusion of the treaty of Edirne presented a problem to Cesarini who was determined that the crusade should continue. In early July the king, in flat contradiction to the terms of the treaty of Edirne, sent a letter to the senate of Florence, the king of Bosnia and, we may assume, other cities and monarchs, announcing his resolve to leave for Várad on 15 July, there to assemble an army for the crusade.34 He most probably did this at the urging of Cesarini. This did not, however, solve the cardinal’s problem. The king did not leave Buda for Várad as announced and meanwhile, in early August, the Ottoman envoys arrived in Hungary for the king, Hunyadi and Brankovic´ to confirm the treaty on oath. Cesarini had somehow to prevent this happening. He had no chance of dissuading Brankovic´. The despot had too much to gain from the treaty and, furthermore, in pursuit of his own interests, would be urging the king and Hunyadi to ratify. Cesarini’s solution was to work on the king. At Szeged, on 4 August 1444, the king made a solemn declaration – evidently drawn up by Cesarini – that he renounced all treaties with the ‘Emperor of the Turks’, whether already confirmed or being confirmed, and that on 1 September he would cross the Danube to lead the crusade.35 This declaration would allow the king to confirm the treaty in public, while absolving him from his oath to observe its terms. It was a solution that perhaps satisfied his confused state of mind. Hunyadi, however, seems to have regarded the ratification or otherwise of the treaty of Edirne as a way of satisfying personal ambition. On 3 July 1444, Brankovic´ made over to him the lordship of Világosvár in Hungary, and it must have been at the same time, too, that he transferred to him his other estates in Hungary, nominally as security.36 Brankovic´’s motive can only have been to persuade Hunyadi to ratify the treaty since, under its terms, the former despot would regain Serbia and this would compensate for the loss of his Hungarian properties. While Brankovic´ tried to persuade Hunyadi to swear to observe the treaty, the king, during the course of negotiations with the Ottoman envoys, sought to persuade him to abjure his oath, offering to make him king of

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Bulgaria if he did so.37 Hunyadi was clearly happy to satisfy both men. By taking the oath to ratify the treaty, he became the largest landowner in Hungary, while by abjuring it, he had the prospect of the acquiring a kingdom. On 15 August the treaty was ‘ratified’. The king, if Thuróczy is to be believed, had a bad conscience about swearing an oath which he intended to break, and did not swear in person. Instead, Hunyadi, who clearly had no conscience at all, ‘swore a binding oath on behalf of the king himself and all the people of Hungary.’38 On 22 August, the Ottomans evacuated the fortresses in Serbia, and Brankovic´ returned. Murad had no idea that the king and Hunyadi had negotiated the treaty in bad faith. Believing that his treaties with Karaman and Hungary had secured his eastern and western border, he took a step that he had obviously been contemplating for a long time. In June, at the time of the negotiations with the Hungarian envoys, Murad had brought his son, Mehmed II to Edirne, where he had remained.39 It was presumably after receiving Ibrahim of Karaman’s submission, and news of the ratification of the treaty with the Hungarians that Murad announced his abdication in favour of his son. The idea had probably formed in his mind early in the year. The author of the Holy Wars depicts Murad returning from the campaign of the Zlatitsa Pass in a gloomy frame of mind.40 Like his adversaries, he had witnessed the horrors of the winter war and, although he had won the crucial engagement, his army had suffered defeats during the Hungarian advance to the Pass and during its retreat, and the marcher lords of Rumelia had proved unreliable confederates. One of them, Turahan, whom some accounts accuse of co-operating with Brankovic´, he despatched to prison in Tokat. Furthermore, out of sympathy for his suffering subjects, he had bitterly regretted following Turahan’s advice to burn Sofia.41 These events undoubtedly weighed heavily on a man of Murad’s character. The Greek chronicler Doukas, who in his capacity as envoy of the Genoese of Chios, knew Murad personally, describes him as a man ‘without guile or malice’, attributing his attacks on Serbia in the 1430s to the influence of his vizier Hekim Fazlullah.42 The Turkish chronicler, As¸ıkpas¸azade, who knew both men, claims that it was the marcher lord Ishak Pasha of Skopje who persuaded him to start this war.43 Furthermore, the Burgundian Bertrandon de la Broquière reported after his journey through Murad’s realms in 1433 that the sultan ‘was said to be a gentle person ...’ who ‘hates war, which seems to be true.’44 In addition, in 1443 Murad had lost his favourite son, Alaeddin,45 and this too must have been a factor in his decision to retire. In As¸ıkpas¸azade’s account, Ibrahim of Karaman immediately sent an envoy to Hungary, urging the king to profit from the sultan’s abdication

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and to attack.46 Whether this is true or not, the king was already resolved and, on 20 September 1444, departed from Szeged at the head of an army. That he did not do so with a clear conscience is evident from his letter of 22 September to the Polish State Council, seeking to justify his breach of a sworn treaty on the grounds that the Ottomans had not fully complied with its terms.47 The author of the Holy Wars emphasises the king’s forebodings, making him declare: ‘We have broken our oath ... and whoever breaks an oath suffers defeat.’48 The Hungarian army crossed the Danube at Ors¸ova and followed the river to Vidin, where, as the town went up in flames, Vlad Drakul, supposedly a vassal of Murad, joined the king. The march continued to Nicopolis and, from there, turned south, and then east along the northern flank of the Balkan range, to the Black Sea coast at Varna. The allied fleet in position at the straits might already have departed, had it not been for the foresight of Cesarini. The Burgundian captain on the Bosphorus, Waleran de Wavrin, recalls how an Ottoman garrison commander challenged him to explain the presence of the Christian fleet. When Waleran told him, the commander produced a copy of the sultan’s treaty with the Hungarians. The Ottomans at Gallipoli had also shown a copy to the fleet commanders there. Confronted with this news, Waleran left to confer with the Emperor and Cardinal Condulmer, the pope’s nephew and papal legate to the fleet. It was when he was in Constantinople that a messenger arrived from Cesarini to announce that news of the peace was false. So the galleys remained in position to block Murad’s passage into Europe.49 The viziers had recalled the old sultan, who came reluctantly from retirement in Manisa. Part of his army crossed into Europe at the Dardanelles, but out of sight of the blockading fleet. Murad himself arrived and set up his artillery on the Asian shore of the Bosphorus, at its narrowest point, while the grand vizier Halil Pasha camped on the European side with his artillery reinforced with cannon and culverins from the Genoese of Pera. It was also the Genoese who supplied the boats to ferry Murad’s army.50 From the straits, the sultan proceeded via Edirne to Varna, where the battle was fought on 10 November 1444. All accounts agree that, for most of the day, the Christians had the upper hand but that, towards evening, the king broke loose from the army to charge the sultan, who remained alone on a hillside with his janissaries. A janissary pulled him from his horse and executed him, precipitating the dissolution and flight of the Hungarian army. Hunyadi withdrew from the battlefield with his troops apparently in good order. On crossing the Danube into Wallachia, his erstwhile ally, Vlad Drakul took him

Colin Imber 57

prisoner, apparently on the grounds that he had slandered him in the presence of the king. On his release, he returned to Hungary where, in 1446, a Diet elected him regent. Cesarini, in one report, died when a Vlach boatman robbed and drowned him as he crossed the Danube.51 In another, the Turks took him to Edirne to skin him alive.52 While the Varna campaign was the major undertaking of the crusade, it was not the only anti-Ottoman action. In 1444, Constantine Dragases seized Thebes and other towns and territories in southern Greece, as much at the expense of Nerio Acciajuoli, the Christian Duke of Athens, as of Murad.53 George Kastriote re-asserted his independence in his family’s hereditary territory around Krujë, in central Albania, which he had been governing as an Ottoman tributary. In 1446, Murad was to overrun the territory that Dragases had conquered and to harry his lands in the Peloponnesos. George Kastriote, remembered under his Muslim name Iskender Beg or Scanderbeg, resisted until 1466. The crusade did not end with the battle of Varna. The fleet remained in the straits, with two of its commanders, Waleran de Wavrin and Cardinal Condulmer, believing that the Hungarians were preparing to launch a third expedition. After Easter, 1445, the Burgundians departed from Constantinople,54 with one detachment of ships under Geoffroy de Thoisy travelling eastwards around the Black Sea coast, and another under De Wavrin travelling westwards to the Danube delta, from where De Wavrin despatched an envoy to sound out the intentions of the Vlachs and the Hungarians. The two detachments met in the Genoese port of Caffa. Apart from assessing the possibility of continuing the crusade, the purpose of the cruise on the Black Sea was evidently to pay for the expenses of the Burgundian fleet through plunder, with the commanders justifying attacks on Christian ships on the grounds that the Greeks were schismatics. These activities, however, had unforeseen consequences. De Thoisy was captured as he attempted to plunder Poti on the coast of Georgia, while his attacks on vessels subject to the Genoese led to a prolonged dispute between Genoa and Philip of Burgundy. It was presumably this that determined De Thoisy to return home from Caffa. De Wavrin and Cardinal Condulmer, however, having received Hunyadi’s assurance that he would meet them at Nicopolis in September, went back to the Danube to continue the crusade. With a Vlach army on the north bank of the river, the fleet arrived at Silistra. Here, the commanders hoped that the garrison might defect to an Ottoman pretender called Savcı, whom the fleet, at Hungarian insistence, had taken on board. When this plan failed, they continued to Tutrakan which fell to the combined Burgundian and Vlach force. Shortly afterwards, they captured

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Giurgiu and Ruse, like Tutrakan, fortresses on the Danube between Wallachia and Ottoman Bulgaria. From Ruse, the fleet continued to Nicopolis, where in September it met with Hunyadi at the head of a force of Hungarians. After an indecisive skirmish between the Hungarians and the Ottoman troops that had shadowed the Burgundian fleet on the south bank of the Danube, Hunyadi returned to Hungary, and the Burgundians to Constantinople.55 It is clear that, in participating in the crusade, the Burgundians could not have shared the motives of the other allies. They were under no threat from Ottoman expansion and had no territorial or outstanding commercial interests at stake. It is possible that Duke Philip hoped that his participation would persuade the pope to raise his status from duke to king, but there is no evidence for this and it cannot have been his main motivation. Burgundian interest in crusading was in fact longstanding. The Burgundians had participated in the Crusade of Nicopolis in 1396, and it is quite possible that in 1444–5, Philip was seeking vengeance for the capture of his father, John of Nevers, in that battle. However, Philip’s interest went beyond this. In 1430 he had expressed his intention to participate in the Domazlice crusade against the Hussites. In 1432–3, he had despatched Bertrandon de la Broquière to Jerusalem to report on the prospects for a crusade, and he had provided naval support for Rhodes against Mamluk attacks in 1444. What, above all, impelled the Duke and his followers, was clearly crusading as an ideal. This seems not, however, to have been so much a product of ‘popular devotional piety’ as a literary ideal embedded in the chivalric culture of the Burgundian court.56 Nor was crusading the only manifestation of knightly fantasy. De Wavrin, De Thoisy and the other noblemen who accompanied the fleet were members of the chivalric Order of the Golden Fleece and two further actions were obviously manifestations of their cultural milieu. On arriving at the Dardanelles in 1444, De Wavrin enquired where the city of Troy was located and where the Greeks had landed. On being told, he selected a group of men to disembark and do battle with the Ottoman troops guarding the shore. Since this action served no strategic purpose, De Wavrin’s motive must have been to re-enact the landing of the Greeks during the Trojan War, an action which would make sense to a man brought up in a late mediaeval culture that believed the Turks (‘Teucri’) to be descendants of the Trojans (compare Palmira Brummet’s comments on European mapping of the Ottoman empire, p. 114).57 The second classically inspired exploit was De Thoisy’s landing at Poti. Georgia was supposedly the site of Colchis, and it is probable that, in plundering Poti, he was imaginatively re-enacting Jason’s exploits in bringing home the Golden Fleece.

Colin Imber 59

Crusading may indeed have been a chivalric obligation for the Burgundian knights, and the primary motive for their participation in the Varna crusade, but it was clearly only one of a constellation of literary impulses that inspired this aristocratic group of professional warriors to action. Literary culture, in fact, served not only to inspire action, but generally as resource for interpreting the strange surroundings and peoples among which they found themselves. On reaching Mangalia on the western shore of the Black Sea, De Wavrin comments of the harbour wall that ‘people believe that Penthesilia, Queen of the Amazons, had it built after Hercules and Theseus had secretly entered the kingdom ...’. ‘In times gone by,’ he continues, ‘no one could enter the realm of the Amazons – which is today known by a different name, the Kingdom of Scythia – unless they went between the land and the wall ...’.58 Both the Amazons and the Scythians, with whom educated Europeans in the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries came to identify the Turks,59 belong in the realm of classical mythology, but for De Wavrin they were present realities that served as guides to an unfamiliar landscape, in the same way as the Bible served as a guide to western travellers in the Holy Land. The departure of the Burgundians marked the end of the crusade. The enterprise had failed, but nonetheless benefited some of the participants. George Brankovic´ recovered the rulership of Serbia; John Hunyadi survived the defeat with his reputation and estates intact; Vlad Drakul, with Burgundian assistance, recovered the castles of Tutrakan, Giurgiu and Ruse; and George Kastriote re-established his independence on his ancestral lands. The failure of the crusade also perhaps ensured the survival of the Orthodox Church as a wealthy and autonomous institution, independent of Rome. It is clear that the crusade of Varna was not a product of the crusading impulse alone. In essence, it was a response to the re-emergence of the Ottomans as a regional power after 1413, which menaced the emirate of Karaman in Anatolia, revived the competition with Hungary for dominance in south-east Europe, put pressure on Venetian colonies in Greece and Albania, extinguished formerly independent Albanian lordships and threatened to extinguish the last vestiges of Byzantium. The crusade was therefore a military alliance formed to combat a shared enemy. It is clear, too, that the participating states and the individual leaders had differing and sometimes conflicting aims. Whereas the goals of Hungary as a state were clear enough, the motives of its leaders were at odds. The king evidently could not make up his mind between accepting the ten-year truce negotiated at Edirne or continuing the war. Brankovic´

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and a party in Poland urged him to accept and this was probably his personal wish. However, Cesarini, the emperor and his other allies in the undertaking, together with his supporters in Hungary who wished to use the crusade to bolster his legitimacy, were urging him in the opposite direction. Unlike the king, Brankovic´ had the single goal of regaining the rulership of Serbia. When this was achieved, he no longer participated in the crusade. Hunyadi, too, seems to have seen the crusade as a means to fulfil his personal ambitions. Ratifying the treaty on oath in public, while renouncing it in private, clearly affected neither his conscience nor his subsequent reputation. The crusade also satisfied his combative nature. Thuróczy described him as a ‘bellicose man, born to handle arms and to take charge of affairs of war, and just as water is life to a fish, and roaming shady forests is life to stags, so life for him was a military expedition in time of war.’60 The author of the Holy Wars, too, constantly emphasises his role in urging forward the campaigns of 1443 and 1444, against the hesitations of Brankovic´ and the doubts of the king. Of the other allies, John VIII probably had no ambition beyond mere survival. The actions of his brother, however, suggest that Constantine dreamed of a revived Byzantine territorial empire. The Venetian aim in the crusade was to secure existing colonies and commerce and, if possible, to acquire further territory of strategic and commercial importance: Thessaloniki, Gallipoli, Valona and Kanina. For their part, the Ragusans were also seeking Valona and Kanina. George Kastriote aimed, successfully, to re-establish his independence, although his presence in Krujë was later to prove as much a threat to Venetian interests in Albania as the Ottomans had been.61 For Ibrahim of Karaman, the crusade promised to remove his Ottoman enemy from Anatolia. It is Philip of Burgundy who stands out as exceptional in expecting little personal profit from the campaign. What motivated him and his knights seems to have been crusading as an element in a bundle of literary fantasies that acted on the imaginations of a warrior class. Of the clerical leaders of the crusade, the pope had strong political motives for sponsoring the undertaking. In return, he became supreme pontiff of the re-united Latin and Greek churches, an end that was desirable in itself, but, even more so, in that it raised the status of the papacy in its dispute with the council of Basel. It was, it seems, only Cesarini who believed fervently in a crusade for its own sake, with no secular or personal motivation beyond, perhaps, upholding the papacy, to whose cause he was a convert. Although most of the leaders of the crusade had distinctly secular goals, it is, nevertheless, unlikely that the campaigns of 1443–5 would

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have taken place without the addition of crusading as motivating force. Neither the alliance, nor the strategy that it pursued, was new. What was novel was the coherence of the Christian allies in pursuing this strategy, and what kept them together despite their differing and sometimes conflicting aims, was undoubtedly a shared idea that the war was a crusade undertaken on behalf of the Kingdom of Christ. What was equally important was the embodiment of this idea in the forceful and unscrupulous Cesarini, who kept the allies together and saved the enterprise on the occasions when it seemed to be in doubt. The idea of crusading played a similar role for the soldiery. Such evidence as there is from the ranks of the army suggests that it was a bundle of different motives that caused men to volunteer and to keep fighting. Jehan de Wavrin’s distinction, when talking of the Vlachs, between ‘the young who take up arms often and gladly, and the elderly and peaceful who wanted only peace and quiet’62 probably had a universal application. Certainly, Michel Beheim’s ballad on the crusade,63 based on the memoirs of Hans Maugest, a survivor of the battle of Varna, suggests a certain relish in fighting. His description of the Christian advance from Orjahovo is typical: ‘Then they moved off in a body, plundering and burning. They slaughtered men, women and children, killing all the Turks they found there.’64 Maugest had an eye, too, for the more refined aspects of killing. At the Bulgarian castle of Petrez, for example, he describes how the crusaders pushed the defenders into the moat and then, if they observed bubbles in the water, fired arrows at the survivor before he could emerge.65 Most important for the crusaders, however, was plunder. Maugest describes the king’s anger when the Hungarian soldiers, instead of besieging a castle, pillaged a store of fine clothes which they discovered there.66 The Holy Wars describes how, in 1443, the Hungarian troops combed through the ashes of Sofia with metal spikes, digging up anything that they found buried.67 In 1445, De Wavrin describes how the Christians ‘who belonged to several nations’ began to fight over the Turkish prisoners from Tutrakan. Waleran tried to solve the problem by killing the prisoners, but then found his troops fighting over the dead men’s clothes and weapons.68 Crusading, therefore, was scarcely a ‘devotional activity’. Nonetheless, since it was an idea to which all could subscribe, and which could therefore provide a unity between troops from different backgrounds and speaking different languages, it was – perhaps – a factor giving coherence to the crusading troops as it did to their leaders. In sum, the idea of a crusade was not the catalyst for the campaigns of 1443–5. It was the re-emergence of the Ottoman Empire as a regional

62 The Crusade of Varna, 1443–1445

power after the civil war of 1402–13 and, in particular, the threat to Byzantium and Hungary that had precipitated events. As had been the case in earlier attempts to form anti-Ottoman alliances, the motives of the allied leaders were not identical and the coalition was therefore fragile. The difference in 1443–5 was that a shared ideology and the presence of Cesarini, who combined true belief with political skills, prevented the alliance from falling apart. A final question, which may be relevant to the study of crusading in general, concerns the depths of the crusaders’ Christian faith. After his victory, Murad despatched some of the captive Hungarian knights to Ibrahim of Karaman, the Khan of the Crimea, the Timurid ruler in Herat and the Mamluk sultan in Cairo. Mamluk chronicles record not only their arrival and distribution among the households of Mamluk am¹-rs, but also their rapid conversion to Islam.69 Their change of faith is not surprising. Assimilation through conversion was the norm in the western Islamic world, leading George of Hungary, who was a captive in Turkey between 1438 and 1458, to locate the iniquity of the Turks not so much in their destruction of Christian bodies as in their destruction of Christian souls through conversion (see the discussion of conversion in the Introduction, p. 12).70 For the Hungarian knights in Egypt conversion must have been quite unproblematic. In Hungary they had been members of a military caste and, since Mamluk Egypt was under the rule of foreign military elite, in joining the retinue of Mamluk amīrs they would have found a congenial environment and a similar status to that which they had enjoyed in their homeland. The maintenance of rank, it seems, was more important than the choice of religion. Furthermore they would have found life within the Islamic world to be very different from what they had experienced on the Danube border with the Ottoman Empire, and Muslims to be very different from the images filtered through Biblical, classical and crusading literature.

Notes 1. This is equally true of what follows here. 2. Jonathan Riley-Smith, What Were the Crusades, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1992), p. 66. 3. For a narrative of the crusade, see N. P. Zacour and H. W. Hazard, The Impact of the Crusades on Europe, (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), pp. 276–310. See also Colin Imber, The Crusade of Varna, 1443–45 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 1–36. Hereafter, The Crusade. 4. Frederick H. Russell, The Just War in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 204. 5. Frederick H. Russell, The Just War, p. 222.

Colin Imber 63 6. Georgius Hofman (ed.), Acta Camerae Apostolicae et Civitatum Venetiarum, Ferrariae, Florentiae, Ianuae de Concilio Florentino, III Fasc. 2 Rome: Pontificium Institutum Orientalium Studium (1951), p. 69. 7. Georgius Hofman (ed.), Acta Camerae, pp. 82–3. 8. N. Jorga, Notes et Extraits pour Servir à l’Histoire des Croisades au XVe Siècle, II, 2nd series, (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1902) p. 173. 9. Georgius Hofman (ed.) Acta Camerae, pp. 86–7. 10. Nancy Bisaha, Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Turks, (Phildaelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) p. 146. This book provides a lucid account of the views of the Turks in 15th century Italy. 11. For the Ottoman Empire, see Colin Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1481 (Istanbul: Isis Press, 1990). 12. For the Kingdom of Hungary, see Pál Engel, ed. Andrew Ayton, The Realm of St. Stephen (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001). 13. On this prince, see C. J. Heywood, ‘Mustafa C elebi Düzme’, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition, VII, (Leiden: Brill, 1993). 14. Edward W. Bodnar (ed. and trans.), Cyriac of Ancona: Later Travels (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2003) p. 247. 15. For a summary of the dispute between Eugenius IV and the Council of Basel, see Hubert Jedin and John Dolan (eds), History of the Church, vol. IV (London: Burns and Oates, 1980) pp. 474–84. 16. Georgius Hofman (ed.), Epistolae ad Concilium Florentinum Spectantes, I fasc. 3, 69. ˘ihannüma¯. Die altosmanis17. Nes¸rī, Kita¯b-i Ciha¯nnüma¯ (ed. Franz Taeschner), G che Chronik des Mevla¯na¯ Mehemmed Neschr¯ι (Leipzig: Otto Harrassowitz, 1951). Translation in The Crusade, pp. 182–3. · 18. Anonymous (ed. Halil I nalcık and Mevlûd Og ˘uz), Gazavât-i Sultan Murad b. Mehemmed Han, Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu (1989) Translation in The Crusade, p. 55. 19. Jan DAugosz, Ioannis Dlugosii seu Longini Historiae Polonicae, Leipzig (1711), 778. Summary in Maurice Michael, The Annals of Jan DA ugosz (Chichester: IM Publications, 1997), pp. 489–90. 20. English translation in The Crusade, pp. 41–106. 21. Jehan de Wavrin, Anciennes Chroniques d’Angleterre. The excerpt on the crusade is published in N. Jorga (ed.), La Campagne des Croisés sur le Danube(1445) (Paris: J. Gamber, 1927). Translation in The Crusade, p. 121 22. N. Jorga, Notes et Extraits, p. 177. 23. N. Jorga, Notes et Extraits, II 2e Série, Paris: Ernest Leroux (1899) p. 403. 24. Bodnar, Cyriac of Ancona, letter 9A. 25. For the text of the treaty, see Bodnar, Cyriac of Ancona, Letters 9B1, 9B2; Dariusz KoAodziejcyk, Ottoman-Polish Diplomatic Relations (15th–18th Centuries) (Leiden: Brill, 2001) pp. 197–9. KoAodziejcyk, pp. 100–9, provides the most intelligent analysis of the treaty. · 26. On the treaty of Edirne and its subsequent ‘ratification’, see Halil I nalcık, · ‘1444 Buhranı’ in Halil I nalcık, Fatih Devri Üzerinde Tetkikler ve Vesikalar (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1954), pp. 1–53; Pál Engel, ‘János Hunyadi and the peace “of Szeged” (1444)’, Acta Orientalia (Budapest), XLVII (1994), pp. 241–57. Engel’s article solves a number of problems and is particularly illuminating on relations between Brankovic´ and Hunyadi.

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27. Translation in The Crusade, p. 197. 28. The Holy Wars. Translation in The Crusade, p. 69. 29. E. W. Bodnar, ‘Ciriaco of Ancona and the crusade of Varna: a closer look’, Mediaevalia, 14 (1988), pp. 253–80. 30. Bodnar, Cyriac of Ancona, letter 11. 31. A. Hohlweg, ‘Kaiser Johannes VIII. Paleologus und der Kreuzzug des Jahres 1444’, Byzantinische Zeitschrift, 73 (1980), pp. 14–24. 32. Text of letter in Jan DAugosz, Ioannis Dlugosii, pp. 790–93. · 33. Text in Yahya b. Mehmed el-Katib (ed. S¸inasi Tekin), Mena¯hicü’l-I ns¸a¯ (Cambridge, Mass.: Orient Press, 1971), pp. 23–4. Translation in The Crusade, pp. 23–4. 34. N. Jorga, Notes et Extraits (1899), pp. 404–5. Translation in The Crusade, pp. 199–200. 35. DAugosz, Ioannis DAugossii, pp. 794–6. Translation in The Crusade, pp. 201–2 36. Pál Engel, ‘János Hunyadi’. 37. Michael, The Annals, p. 493. 38. János Thuróczy (trans. Frank Mantello), Chronicle of the Hungarians (Bloomington, Indiana: Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, 1991), p. 140. 39. Bodnar, Cyriac of Ancona, letter 11. 40. Translation in The Crusade, pp. 66–7. 41. The Holy Wars. Translation in The Crusade, p. 55. 42. Doukas (trans. H. J. Magoulias), Decline and Fall of Byzantium to the Ottoman Turks (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1975), p. 177. 43. As¸ıkpas¸azade (ed. Ç. Atsız), Tevârih-i Âl-i.Osmân, Istanbul: Türkiye Yayınları (1949), pp. 75–6. 44. Bertrandon de la Broquière (trans. Galen R. Kline), The Voyage d’Outremer of Bertrandon de la Broquière (New York: Peter Lang, 1988), pp. 114–15. · 45. In his will, Murad asks to be buried next to Alaeddin. Halil I nalcık, Fatih Devri, p. 206 (Turkish text); p. 211 (Arabic text). 46. As¸ıkpas¸azade, Tevârîh, p.183.Translation in The Crusade, pp. 183–88. 47. Pál Engel, ‘János Hunyadi’. Translation in The Crusade, p. 204. 48. Translation in The Crusade, p. 95. 49. Jehan de Wavrin. Translation in The Crusade, pp.125–7. 50. Jehan de Wavrin. Translation in The Crusade, p. 127. 51. Michael, The Annals, p. 497. 52. Michel Beheim. ‘Die Türkenschlacht bei Warna’, in Hans Gille and Ingeborg Spiewald, Die Gedichte des Michel (Beheim, Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1968), vol. 1, pp. 328–56.Translation in The Crusade, p. 180. 53. Chalkokondyles (ed. Immanuel Bekker), Laonici Chalcocondylae Atheniensis Libri Decem, Bonn (1843), pp. 318–20. 54. For the Burgundian expedition on the Black Sea, see H. G. Taparel, ‘Une episode de la politique orientale de Philippe le Bon: les Bourguignons en Mer Noire’, Annales de Bourgogne, LV (1983), pp. 5–29. 55. Jehan de Wavrin. Translation in The Crusade, pp. 107–66. 56. The observation of Professor Riley-Smith, What Were the Crusades, p.66: ‘By the fourteenth century ... crusading had become one of the obligations of chivalric culture’ is relevant to the Burgundian crusade. 57. Nancy Bisaha, Creating East and West, pp. 89–92.

Colin Imber 65 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

The Crusade, p. 136. Nancy Bisaha, Creating East and West, pp. 76–7. Thuróczy, Chronicle, p. 111. Imber, The Ottoman Empire, pp. 138–9. Translation in The Crusade, p. 118 Michel Beheim. Translation in The Crusade, pp. 167–80. The Crusade, p. 173. The Crusade, p. 176. The Crusade, pp. 174–5. The Crusade, p. 56. The Crusade, p. 147. Al-Sakha¯wī, Al-Tibr al-Mabsu¯k, Cairo (n.d.), pp. 98–9. Translation in The Crusade, pp. 187–8. On the conversion of the crusaders, al-Sakha¯wī is quoting directly from the contemporary witness, Ibn Hajar al-‘Asqala¯nī. 70. Georgius de Hungaria (ed. and trans. Reinhard Klockow), Tractatus De Moribus, Condicionibus et Nequicia Turcorum (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 1994).

3 ‘A Human Head to the Neck of a Horse’: Hybridity, Monstrosity and Early Christian Conceptions of Muhammad and Islam Matthew Dimmock The early modern interaction of the three Abrahamic religions, termed by the Qur’a¯n the ‘Peoples of the Book’, varies considerably in different geographical contexts. Islamic law provided freedom for Jews and Christians to practice their religion within the Ottoman Empire, a freedom that – although by no means unqualified – was rarely enjoyed by Jews and Muslims in Christian lands. A vast multiethnic and multireligious entity, the Ottoman polity conspicuously welcomed those Sephardic Jews dispossessed in Spain in 1492 and later, and was largely unconcerned with differentiating those ‘Franks’ that sought trading privileges in Istanbul (compare Imber’s comments on p. 61).1 Less well known are those sources that indicate Jewish perspectives upon Christian cultures, particularly reactions to the opprobrious stereotypes forced upon them, and responses to the vigorous strategies with which Christian theologians sought to discredit their holy texts. Certainly there are traditions of Jewish anti-Christian polemic, one prominent example being Isaac ben Abraham’s Hizzuq Emunah, or Faith Strengthened (1593), which seeks to demonstrate the ‘inner contradictions’ of Christianity through careful scriptural analysis.2 Simultaneously, both Catholic and Protestant scholars, still working from translations facilitated by the co-option of converts in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, repeatedly railed against ‘the inveterate stubbornness of the Jews’ and the monstrosity of Islam and its Prophet, Muhammad.3 There can be no single coherent narrative of religious encounter in this period, however, since such encounters were conducted in radically different spheres, ranging from the theological and the textual to the diplomatic and commercial, often – certainly in the former case – occurring at many removes from any initial contact, which itself was often fictionalised.4 66

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Yet in the Christian tradition there are a number of recurring tropes to which a burgeoning mythology adheres and from which certain traditions spring. Early modern Christian thought concerning Judaism has of late received considerable attention (and is a field extended elsewhere in this volume) and yet Christian characterisations of Islam, often connected with similarly ‘monstrous’ Judaism, has only recently come under sustained critical scrutiny.5 The perceived connection between the two alternative Abrahamic religious systems in opposition to Christianity seems crucial to an assertion of orthodox Christian belief and the unity of Christendom from at least the polemical thrust associated with the Third Crusade, if not before.6 This was a curious association: Judaism was fundamentally known, it was the Old Testament foundation for the new covenant of the Gospels, and it had furthermore been rendered obsolete by Christ’s resurrection (as explained in Paul’s Epistles).7 It was a quintessential part of the divine Christian narrative that began with creation and ended with the Second Coming of Christ. Islam, postdating the birth of Christ by over five centuries, was in contrast an interloper, derided as a Christian heresy. The medieval connection between the two thus served a twofold polemical purpose, demonising Judaism through its association with Islam, yet incorporating Islam into a grand Christian history through its connection with Judaism. Their shared monstrosity, repeated in numerous forms, coalesces around two factors: the first, a continuing denial of the divinity of Christ (of which more is discussed below), which transmuted in both cases into a responsibility for the murder of Christ; the second, the associated part both were expected to play in the events of apocalypse and revelation. In certain contexts this dominant Christian perspective displays a marked shift, as the characterisation of these two opposing religions diverges. This is particularly pronounced in the early modern period, following the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, when the relative status of Judaism and Islam began to necessitate different polemical strategies. The perceived military threat of Islam – epitomised in the Ottoman ‘Turk’ – led to the prevalent image of the warlike and bombastic Muslim male, valiant and often noble in the romance tradition, ‘terrible’, ferocious and lustful in popular ballads and drama. This was a very different characterisation to that of the ‘stock’ Jew, who, while almost always male, was often old, often grotesquely distorted, and invariably associated with trade and usury. Thus the ‘scattered nation’ of the Jews came to represent a distinct collection of Christian anxieties. This did not preclude their monstrous association with Islam, however,

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as Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta demonstrates. In that play both Barabas, the Jewish merchant of the title, and his Thracian ‘Turk’ manservant Ithamore revel in their monstrosity. Barabas has killed ‘sick people groaning under walls’ (2.3.180) poisoned wells and slain ‘friend and enemy’ with his ‘stratagems’ (2.3.194), while Ithamore has occupied himself in ‘setting Christian villages on fire, / Chaining of eunuchs, binding galley-slaves’ (2.3.208–9). They are ‘villains both’: both ‘circumcised’, they ‘hate Christians both’ (2.3.219–20). Echoing fifth-columnist accusations routinely levelled at Jewish merchants (and ‘alien’ merchants generally), Barabas goes on to betray Malta to the Turks.8 This association is crucial to an understanding of early Christian notions of Islam, for Islam as imagined by medieval and early modern Christians was no religion but instead a composite patchwork of previously discredited doctrines, tailored to suit the appetites of the Arabians, for whom ‘it was a friend to their theevery and lechery’.9 Monsters, in the influential formulation propounded by Rudolph Wittkower, are inherently ‘compund beings’, and any study of the monstrous caricature of Muhammad (or ‘Mahomet’) formulated from these ideas necessarily needs to consider the interconnected roles played by Judaism and heresy.10 These offer a conceptual model through which Islam could be incorporated within what John Tolan has described as the ‘Christian imagination’.11 The hybrid Muhammad that is produced – a figure considered the epitome and foundation of Islam – leads to some curious amalgams, particularly in the Middle English mystery play cycles. For in these plays, as Michael Paull has recognised, ‘Mahomet is presented as the god of the villains, those who oppose Christ in his attempt to save mankind from damnation’.12 Perhaps the epitome of New Testament villainy in these plays is the figure of King Herod. ‘The Wakefield Pageant of Herod the Great’ begins with the entrance of a messenger, and an exhortation: ‘Most mighty Mahoun meng you with mirth!’ (1).13 Once a respectful silence has been established, the mesenger informs the audience that ‘Herod, the heng king – by grace of Mahoun –/ Of Jewry ... commands you be boun / At his bidding’ (10–13). Later, when describing Herod’s majesty, the same messenger claims, His renown Can no tongue tell, From heaven unto hell; Of him can none spell But his cousin Mahoun. (50–4)

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Against the background of the slaughter of the innocents, the notion that Herod is a devotee of ‘Mahoun’, and that he is furthermore related to this alternative deity enhances his monstrosity and that of his godhead. The extraordinary compression of chronology that allows Herod to worship ‘Mahoun in heaven’ (127) while he is attempting to kill the infant Christ, centuries before Muhammad was born, indicates both a misconception of the role played by the Prophet, and his distorted, yet prominent, presence in the popular medieval imagination. Again, the two alternative ‘Religions of the Book’ coalesce into one threatening, anti-Christian bugbear. This scene is far from anomalous: Herod’s zeal for ‘Mahoun’ is a regular feature of mystery cycles, and in those that remain extant a panoply of other characters’ positions in this Christian narrative are defined by their devotion to this ‘false messiah’.14 Herod’s own monstrosity is prefigured by the Old Testament Egyptian Pharoah, but other worshippers of ‘Mahoun’ – both Jews and Gentiles – include the Roman Emperor Octavius and his servants, Annar and Caiphas, the leaders of the Pharisees; the torturers of Christ; the soldiers guarding Christ’s tomb; Pontius Pilate; and the devils who appear at the Last Judgement.15 The breadth of this list indicates that although it is often associated explicitly with Judaism, Islam is primarily conceived of as a parallel religious system that signals to an audience the evil of its adherents, while their Babel-like heterogeneity confirms its monstrosity. Another prominent example, in which devotees of ‘Machomet’ are bound together in a process of monstrous incorporation, can be found in The Croxton Play of the Sacrament, dated to around 1460.16 A drama preoccupied with the stereotypical stage-Jew and the Jew libel might seem an unlikely place to find reference to the Prophet Muhammad. And yet, as ‘þe Jewe Jonathas’ enters, he intones the following: Now, almyghty Machomet, marke in þi magesté, Whose lawes tendrely I haue to fulfyll, After my dethe bryng me to thy hyhe see, My sowle for to saue yff yt be thy wyll; For myn entent ys for to fulfyll, As my gloryus God the to honer, To do agen thy entent yt shuld grue me yll, Or agen thyn lawe for to reporte. (149–56)

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In a tributary lapidary similar to Barabas’ introductory speech in The Jew of Malta, Jonathas explicitly offers thanks to ‘Machomet’ for his great wealth: For I thanke þe hayly þat hast me sent Gold, syluer, and presyous stonys, And abu[n]ddance of spycys þou hast me lent, A[s] I shall reherse before yow onys ... (157–60) He offers a by-now familiar perspective upon his own profession of faith by proceeding to ridicule ‘Cristen men’ as ‘false’, for they ‘beleue on a cake’ – the communion wafer.17 As this second section of Jonathas’ opening speech takes the form of a prayer of thanks – ‘I thank þe hayly þat hast me sent’ – it becomes clear that the figure of ‘Machomet’, divested of any Islamic context, has been again refigured in the mould of the Christian God. The terminology here belongs almost entirely to a Christian devotional context – ‘Machomet’ is in ‘magesté’ in heaven, he judges souls in the afterlife at his ‘hyhe see’, he is extolled as a ‘gloryus God’ and is offered praise for worldly bounty. Whether this incorporation of the Prophet within a familiar theological framework was originally a deliberate device or the consequence of misunderstanding and a lack of information (or a combination of both), the consequences in this drama are the same. And they are in some sense paradoxical: the ‘stock’ Jew worshipping ‘Machomet’ through Christian devotional invocations is distanced from Christianity. The God of the Jews, this episode seems to suggest, is ‘Machomet’ and not the God of the Christians. Again, as in the mystery cycles, a late medieval audience is offered a spectacle that assumes an exclusive Christian truth, and uses a range of characters – Jews prominent amongst them – and the erroneously deified ‘Machomet’ to confirm that exclusivity (see Anthony Bale’s comments on the truth of the Passion, p. 24). Alternative cultures and religious practices are rendered anti-Christian in opposition, an ‘anti-Christianity’ that is, at this point, unequivocally equated with Islam. Furthermore the apparent similarities indicate that this alternative religious system is in fact no religious system at all, but rather a derivative of Christianity. It is thus merely a heresy. Before addressing the implications of this heretical conception, it is worth, at this point, considering how these associations impacted upon the visualisation of this ‘Machomet’. With virtually no access to Muslim traditions of illustrating the Prophet, Christian polemicists gave their

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imaginative faculties free reign.18 But again a process of incorporation is in evidence, as this figure is often imagined as a kind of distorted idol (a notion that persisted into English drama of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries).19 Perhaps the most intriguing example is probably the first – the ‘portrait’ of ‘Macvmeth’ in the margin of the Toledan Collection manuscript in the Arsenal Library in Paris. This small image involves a dark-browed, forward-looking, bearded face attached to the body of a fish. It accompanies the essay ‘On the birth and nature of Muhammad’ (‘De generatione Mahumet et nutritura eius’, translated by Herman of Dalmatia) and is carefully accommodated within the original scribe’s text. In 1948 Marie-Thérèse d’Alvery connected this image with the introductory remarks of Peter of Cluny, the organisational force behind the whole body of texts concerned with Islam in the twelfth century, known as the Cluniac Corpus, and incorporating this manuscript.20 Reflecting upon the hybrid doctrinal mixture that constitutes Islam, Peter quotes Horace: ‘Suppose a painter wished to couple a horse’s neck with a man’s head, and to lay feathers of every hue on limbs gathered here and there, so that a woman, lovely above, foully ended in an ugly fish below; would you restrain your laughter, my friends, if admitted to a private view?’21 Islam is, according to this rationale, a ridiculous and monstrous heresy – a notion confirmed in the title of Peter’s tract, the Summa totius haeresis Saracenorum. This is undoubtedly a crucial context for this image, linking theological hybridity with its physical manifestation. There are other later examples which correspond to this paradigm – in particular an image from the Duc de Berry’s Livre des Merveilles du Monde (c. 1413) of a child sacrifice to ‘Mahomet’ in which the latter is figured as a hoofed beast (perhaps a stag) with a bearded human head.22 And yet, in a persuasive analysis of the Toledan illustration’s position and typological features, Walter B. Cahn has recently identified it with the siren, ‘the sea creature that most vividly embodied for the Middle Ages the mixture of seductive and deadly deceitfulness that characterized false doctrine’.23 This seems distinctly plausible, and couples the allure and potential ‘infection’ of heresy while simultaneously manifesting its monstrosity and the tenor of Peter of Cluny’s characterisation. Yet there is another possibility, and one that by no means excludes these other contexts. The Dalmation translation that the sketch accompanies exhaustively parallels a life of ‘Mahomet’ with a Christian narrative that culminates in the life and crucifixion of Christ. As Cahn notes, this account even refers to an episode concerning ‘Mahomet’s’ nativity in which ‘three men with

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“faces radiant like the sun” came to him with gifts’.24 Is it not thus possible that this monstrous image is, in part, intended to reference and further parallel the traditional Christian symbol for Christ: the fish?25 In this scenario, ‘Mahomet’s’ misplaced, heretical and perverse attempt to fabricate divinity, and his consequent inversion of Christ, are embodied in this deformed creature. This image (later copied into other manuscripts) typifies a relentless Christian focus upon the Prophet Muhammad that is later confirmed in the mystery cycles discussed above. The intensity of this focus is so great that the term Islam only displaces ‘Mahometanism’ in England in the twentieth century.26 This is manifested repeatedly in the lives of this figure that are produced over and over again in Latin and in almost every European vernacular in the early modern period, and are widely circulated with the advent of print, each version demonstrating a considerable concordance with the others.27 This is epitomised in an early modern English context in a group of narratives concerning ‘Mahometlore’ in the compendium of travel texts first produced by Samuel Purchas in 1613.28 There had been numerous tellings and re-tellings of this particular life in English from the examples in the Travels of John Mandeville (c. 1356) and Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon (1327), the latter certainly based upon texts by Gerald of Wales and Steven of Canterbury.29 A polemical life of ‘Mahomet’ – A Treatise of the Turkes Law called Alcaron (1519?) – had been one of Wynkyn de Worde’s early printed texts, and such lives appear with a monotonous regularity in English texts of the following two centuries.30 Aside from the titillating embellishments associated with re-telling, and the occasional distillation of the narrative into single illustrative episodes, the uniformity of such lives is similarly monotonous. Purchas (although offering some newly translated material elsewhere) gives a taut and typical version of the opening gambit of such lives – the standard Christian narrative of the origin of Islam: Sergius at that time a Nestorian Monke of Constantinople (thence for that Heresie excommunicated) resorting to Mahomet, kindled these sparkes into a great fire, perswading him to countenance his Rebellion, with the pretence of Religion ... Thus some malcontented Iewes, and some hereticall Christians being called to counsell, it was agreed, that he should professe himselfe to be chosen in this turbulent state of the world, to bring vnto the same a New Law, appointed hereunto by Diuine authoritie: to the Iewes affirming himselfe their expected Messias; to the Christians promising amiddest so many

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Heresies the rule of Truth; to the excommunicate Heretikes, restitution of their persons and goods; to seruants, libertie; to subiects, immunitie from tribute. And thus he caused himself of Sergius to be baptised, and to be circumcised also of Abdalla a Iew, hauing before beene a Paynime. After he got himselfe into a Cave two miles from the Towne called Garbe, continuing there two yeares in companie of Sergius and Abdalla, which acquainted him with the Christian and Iewish Principles ...31 Again the connection between ‘Mahomet’ and heresy is made explicit. Sergius is a Nestorian monk – in other versions he is even named Nestorius or Arius – and thus heretically denies the divinity of Jesus Christ.32 Disgruntled by his excommunication, perhaps frustrated in his desire for higher office (as Higden and others suggest), Sergius turns away from the ‘true faith’ and seeks to ‘countenance his Rebellion’ with ‘the pretence of Religion’.33 He bands together with similarly ‘malcontented’ Jewish and Christian renegades – also defined by their opposition to the divinity of Christ – and lures the pagan ‘Mahomet’ into representing a ‘New Law’ by masquerading as a divinely appointed Prophet. This tale has been carefully crafted to undermine Islam in a number of ways – firstly, and most obviously, it is characterised as a Christian heresy, a perversion of the faith orchestrated by an apostate from the rudiments of his own misguided tenets. It is therefore not a new religion but rather a recycled chaos of different belief systems, a heresy (or ‘sect’) to be understood alongside all previous heresies: hence the inclusion of Nestorius. The Protestant divine Thomas Beard, considering ‘Mahomet’ in his chapter ‘Of Heretikes’ agrees. ‘Mahomet ... borrowed something almost of all the heresies that were before his time’. Along with ‘the Sabellians he denied the Trinitie’, with ‘the Maniches he said there was but two persons in the Deity’. He denied ‘the equalitie of the Father with the Sonne, with Eunemius’ and said ‘with Macedone, that the Holy Ghost was a creature’. He ‘approued the community of women, with the Nicholaits: hee borrowed of the Iewes circumcision and of the Gentiles much superstition’. Finally, ‘somewhat he tooke of the Christian verity, besides many deuilish fantasies inuented of his owne braine.’34 Erasmus had identified the ‘sect’ of Islam as ‘a mixture of Judaism, Christianity, paganism and the Arian heresy’ in his ‘De Bello Turcico’ of 1530.35 For Purchas, this strategy is further reinforced by the cynical inclusion of elements of Judaism, represented by the figure of

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Abdalla. What is created in this episode is thus a fabricated creed based not on spirituality, but is designed specifically to appeal to the broadest constituency – to accommodate the desires of the Jews, the Christians, the Heretics, the servants and the subjects. To the monstrosity of the resulting ‘law’, which combines abhorrent Christian heresy with elements of the supposedly redundant theology of the Jews, is added the potential for catastrophic social disorder. Promising servants and subjects their freedom is in this context an irresponsible and manipulative ploy to gain yet more adherents. What is brought into being is, by implication, an inversion of proper law and of Christian truth. So far ‘Mahomet’ has had only a peripheral part to play in the creation of this nameless ‘law’. Yet with his simultaneous baptism and circumcision his body becomes the physical symbol of this deformed coalescence – literally manifested in the medieval illustrations of the Prophet discussed earlier.36 This only confirms the supposed irrationality of this new doctrine, since from a Christian perspective combining baptism and circumcision would be palpably absurd, the latter ‘long since abolished and antiquated’, having been replaced by the former in the new covenant of Christ.37 Here, as elsewhere, in this polemical biography and the wider opprobrious mythology of which it is a part, Mahomet is erroneously figured as an inversion of Jesus. False miracles, fake divinity and a gratuitous death complete the life. In this narrative, finessed over centuries, creating ‘Mahomet’ again becomes a means of defining Christianity apart from the other religions of the book, neither of which are allowed the status of religion. To do so would undermine Christian claims to universality and the assumption that Christianity had superseded Judaism. The prominence of things heretical in these episodes reflects the preoccupations of Peter of Cluny and the authors and translators of the twelfth-century Cluniac Corpus, a body of work – including the Toledan manuscript discussed earlier – in which unorthodox Christian belief, Judaism and Islam are often all incorporated within Christian conceptions of heresy.38 The place of ‘Mahomet’ in the pantheon of heretics and schismatics was assured by his continual association with Arius and/or Nestorius, and in the very contours of his constructed Christian biography – particularly in the manner of his death. The mould for such biographies was undoubtedly the hagiographical vita of the saints so common in medieval Christendom, offering an exemplary life as a means for readerly contemplation and emulation (see Bale’s comments on the importance of the Legenda Aurea, p. 25). They, in turn, owe a great deal to the Biblical narrative of the life of

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Christ and its use in various rituals of Christian devotion. Yet while the lives of the great heretics – from Judas onward – are similarly episodic and didactic, instead of divinity they focus insistently upon evil and deception. The determined destruction of the cult of the saints following the Reformation in England wiped away much of this devotional apparatus, but curiously did not eradicate the traditions of the ‘antivita’. The lives of these ‘brochers and vpholders of falshood’ seem instead to have gained in popularity in a Protestant print culture, perhaps as a means of invoking Christ and the saints while avoiding the taint of idolatry.39 These lives are grossly exaggerated and refined portrayals of falsity in practice, constructed in such a way that the reader must continually contrast each episode of false preaching, of deceit, betrayal and of fabricated divinity with ‘true’ examples from scripture. Nowhere is this more apparent than in descriptions of death. In Christian tradition prophets, disciples and saints have a propensity to either ascend to heaven in spectacular fashion, or to gain beatitude through suffering. For heretics, the end must offer a graphic and ignoble culmination to a life of ‘most incredible Blasphemies, and enthusiastical Dotages’ – a demonstration of divine truth, indicated by ‘the speciall iudgements of God sent downe vpon the most part of them’.40 This affirmation of monstrosity is a crucial part of the Christian mythology of ‘Mahomet’, and it follows the end allotted to his supposed predecessors. For Arius, described as ‘Mahomet’s brother’, a gruesomely physical and grimly appropriate death: But when hee thought himselfe neerest to the attainement of his purpose, and braued it most with his supporters and companions, euen then the Lord stroke him with a soddaine feare in the open street, and with such horrible panges in his guts, and vehement desire of disburdening nature, that hee was faine to come vnto the publike houses appointed for that purpose, taking them which were next at hand for a shift: but he neuer shifted from them againe, for his breath went out of his mouth , and his guts ran out of his fundament, and there lay hee dead vpon his owne excrements.41 For Nestorius, regularly associated with ‘Mahomet’, a similarly apposite end. He who had ‘so turned vpside downe the whole groundworke of our saluation’ was first ‘banished into a farre countrey, and there tormented with a strange disease: the very wormes did gnaw in pieces his blasphemous tongue, and at length the earth opened her mouth and swallowed him vp’.42 These ‘speciall iudgements’ thus have an exemplary

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purpose intended for a reader to recognise and reflect upon. In Arius’ narrative, his excrement is clearly equivalent to his erroneous doctrine, whereas the worms gnawing on Nestorius’ tongue attack the very implement of his false teaching. The multiple descriptions of ‘Mahomet’s’ end (and subsequent events) are recognisably part of the same tradition. As retold in numerous English texts, including John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes and Higden’s Polychronicon, the events unfold as follows: ‘Machomete made drunke thro wyne in a tyme, and lyenge in the strete, was devourede and gnaven allemoste of swyne, whom he iuggede unclene bestes’.43 Thus ‘this was the ende of thys fals mathomete’.44 This episode not only confirms the legends affirming the lasciviousness and drunkenness of the Prophet, but also inventively explains the prohibition concerning pork in Muslim cultures. Following his death, according to Christian tradition, his followers expected him to rise again, as he had apparently promised. But, as Alexander Ross reports, his corpse, ... after his death lay putrifying on the ground, which his disciples permitted for many days together, hoping he would have been as good as his word, who made them a promise he would rise again the third day; but finding he had forgot himself ... they were forced to bury it, or otherwise the Dogs that were beginning to bury him in their guts, had saved them a labour.45 Again, the brutal physicality of his demise and of the resultant corpse is an emphatic affirmation of a lack of divinity, and thus of the fabrication of his ‘law’. His own willingness to emulate the example of Christ and rise on the third day is an explicit reminder of the location of true divinity. Even this is not the end for ‘Mahomet’s’ corpse, however. Christian polemicists required further narrative in order to explain the continuing devotion of the multitude, and indeed for its expansion (a powerful factor driving the circulation and reproduction of these narratives). Relating a widely known myth concerning ‘Mahomet’s’ tomb, Gautier de Compiègne’s twelfth century text, De otia Machometi states, ... without any support it hangs in the air, And without any chains holding it from above. And if you ask them by what artifice it does not fall, They erroneously repute it to Machomus’ powers. But in fact it is covered in iron, Placed in the centre of a square building

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Made out of magnetic rock, on all four sides The measurements are the same inside and out. By nature it attracts the iron to itself equally So that it is unable to fall in any direction.46 This tale, elsewhere a means of affirming ‘Mahomet’s’ monstrously diabolical powers, is further debunked later by both George Sandys and by Purchas, who offers a rational explanation for the ‘floating’ myth. For him, this same tomb is in fact, ... built vpon foure pillars with a Vault, exceeding in height the Mosquita; being covered with leade, and the top all inameld with gold, and an halfe Moone vpon the top, wrought very Artificially with gold. Below there are round about great iron staires ascending vp to the middest of the pillars, and in the middest lyeth buried the body of Mahumet (not in an yron Chest attracted by Adamant at Mecca, as some affirme).47 In divesting the Christian mythology of ‘Mahomet’ of any supernatural power, whether divine or magical, Purchas, Sandys and other seventeenthcentury writers sought to portray him as simply another kind of heretic, a manipulative deceiver and false prophet. This strategy of humanising in order to diminish is further reflected in Mahomet’s seventeenth century European portraiture.48 His monstrosity stemmed from the nature of his heretical faith and the willingness of his followers to be seduced by it, in which ‘they acquiesce as a miracle’.49 This was a conscious shift away from other modes of representation that persisted into the early seventeenth century, which characterised Mahomet as either an idol, as a god, or as the antichrist (and occasionally as all three).50 Certainly each of these categories indicate a need to incorporate this threatening figure within a conceptual framework that already existed – either in terms of idolatrous paganism, Judaism or within the eschatological projection of Biblical revelation. Each and all of these are, as I have suggested, connected through heresy by the thirteenth century. In any of these scenarios then (including that of Purchas), Mahomet is ‘hybridised’: he is created from anterior Christian materials, moulded from a potent compound of legend and devotional practice already rendered obsolete by Christianity. For despite its origins in the work of converts from Islam, this was a discourse that was to develop and circulate largely distinct from Muslim sources, while purporting to be based upon them. As John Tolan has

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commented, ‘the intellectual weapons forged in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were reused, anthologized, translated [and] published’ with undiminished enthusiasm for at least four centuries, and among the most potent of those weapons were polemical translations of, and commentaries upon, lives of Mahomet from Riccoldo da Montecroce, Anastasius Bibliothecarius and particularly the Risâlat al Kindî.51 In a few remarkable instances of caricature confronting reality, some Christians sought to use this material in their theological disputations with Muslims. A captive named William Okeley attempted to prove to his Algerian captor that the heretical monk Sergius had schooled Muhammad in false religion. He was beaten for his presumption.52 Later, at the triumphalist conversion of three Muslims in London in May 1658, the converts are recorded asserting that the heretic Mahomet was ‘stupid’ for he could not ‘apprehend that God hath a son’ and that, unlike Christ, he had not died for others.53 One prominent and controversial source used to demonstrate the monstrosity and hybridity of Islam and its Prophet was the ‘diabolical’ Qur’a¯n.54 First translated into Latin by Robert of Ketton in 1143, with accompanying notes and commentary, this version was produced in print (and sponsored by Martin Luther) by the Protestant reformers Theodorus Bibliander and Philip Melancthon in 1543 and through three editions appears to have circulated widely.55 Just as ‘Mahomet’ is insistently paralleled with the figure of Christ, the ‘Alcoran’ is comprehended and attacked as a kind of infernal Bible, that is, like ‘Mahomet’s’ body, imagined as a chaotic and nonsensical mixture of doctrines. Purchas notes that ‘in divers places of the Alcoran, the better to colour his filthiness, he hath dispersed good sentences, like Roses scattered on a dung-hill, and flowers in a puddle ...’.56 Invariably the ‘good sentences’ are those that confirm the truth of Christianity, their presence indicative of the composite nature of ‘Mahomet’s ‘Law’. Yet it would not be until the momentous year of 1649 that the English would be able to encounter the full ‘Alcoran’, a ‘Brat as deformed as the Parent, and as full of Heresies, as his scald head was of scurf’, in their own language.57 This anonymously translated edition, based upon the French translation (from the Arabic) of 1647 by André du Ryer, was a controversial political document, as Matthew Birchwood has recently demonstrated (see the comments on this translation by Matthew Birchwood p. 151, and Gerald MacLean, p. 185).58 But this text also stands firmly in the anti-Muslim polemical tradition enshrined by earlier Latin translations, the Qur’a¯nic text preceded by a ‘Life of Mahomet’ and a ‘Caveat’ written

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by Alexander Ross. Both ensure the reader can be in no doubt regarding the monstrosity of this text, of ‘Mahomet’ and of Islam. It furthmore appears to have sold in vast numbers and to have travelled as far as British settlements in America.59 Ross begins by reflecting on the travels of ‘the great Arabian Imposter’ who ‘now at last after a thousand years, is by way of France arrived in England, and his Alcoran ... hath learned to speak English’.60 Both ‘Mahomet’, in his seventeenth century guise as ‘imposter’, and his ‘Alcoran’ – imagined as parent and child – have thus become English. This dramatic opening prepares the ground for Ross’ assertion that this event is a product of the uncensored, licentious times: later he ponders how evil this ‘Alcoran’ can be when placed alongside the ‘damnable Heresies of the modern Familists’, of ‘the Socinians, Anti-trinitarians, Adamites, Servetians, Antisabbatarians, and many others exposed to the view of all that will read them’.61 So, should this translation be a cause for alarm? Probably not, because this text has been, ... exposed by the Translator to the publick view, no otherwise than some Monster brought out of Africa, for people to gaze, not to dote upon; and as the sight of a Monster or mishapen creature should induce the beholder to praise God, who hath not made him such; so should the reading of this Alcoran excite us both to bless God’s goodness towards us in this Land, who enjoy the glorious light of the Gospel, and behold the truth in the beauty of holiness; as also to admire God’s Judgements, who suffers so many Countreys to be blinded and inslaved with this mishapen issue of Mahomet’s brain, being brought forth by the help of no other Midwifry than of a Iew and a Nestorian.62 Accentuating the Christian benefits of this absolute contrast, Ross draws specifically upon an early modern topos of monstrosity in two different ways: initially he connects this exotic arrival with the ‘unassimilable alterity’ of those New World and African ‘monsters’ regularly displayed for profit at contemporary English fairs.63 This is then grafted onto the notion of the ‘monstrous birth’, which was variously imagined as the product of ‘bestiality, copulation during menstuation, devilry, incest, sectarianism, sodomy, unions between men and women of different religious persuasions and unlawful lust’.64 For Ross, drawing upon the body of medieval polemic discussed earlier, it is a further admixture, the ‘issue’ of ‘Mahomet’s brain’, an unholy birth faciliated by the midwifery of a Jew and a heretic.

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Ross echoes Luther’s advocacy of the earlier printed Latin translation of the Qur’a¯n, in support of which the reformer noted, It has stuck me that one is able to do nothing more grievous to Mohammad or the Turks, nor more to bring them to harm (more than with all weaponry) than to bring their Koran to Christians in the light of day, that they may see therein, how entirely cursed, abominable, and desperate a book it is, full of lies, fables and all abominations ...65 In response to the controversy generated in Basle by this publication, Luther’s stated wish was that ‘to honour Christ, to do good for Christians, to harm the Turks, to vex the devil, set this book free and don’t withhold it’.66 Ross’ argument is the same – that readers can only gain a greater love for their own scripture through contact with something so corrupt. After all, ‘if there were any loveliness, beauty, excellency’ in the ‘Alcoran’, Ross would ‘hold the reading of it dangerous’. But since it is ‘such a mishapen and deformed piece’, a reading can only ‘confirm us in the truth’.67 This envisions the Qur’a¯n and ‘Mahomet’ once again as a freak show in which the comprehension of a foreign ‘monster’ and the reduction of it ‘to the level of a fairground curiosity was to push back the boundaries of the “known” and to domesticate an otherwise alien environment’.68 The potential threat of Islam is thus further diminished. For it is obvious, argues Ross, that ‘as a beautiful body is never more lovely than when she is placed near a Black-More, neither is truth more amiable than when it is beset with Errors’, and ‘Who is so mad as to prefer the embracements of a filthy Baboon, to his beautiful Mistress, or the braying of an Ass to a Consort of Musick?’.69 The prominence of ‘error’ is crucial here, and in earlier texts, and is part of a well-established vocabulary (including terms like misshapen, deformed, absurd, blind, monstrous, infectious) used to signal Islam’s apparently heretical status. Ross instructs his readers that, if they would know ‘what be the damnable errors to be avoided by Christians’, they should ‘read the Alcoran’ for there they ‘shall find in it the sink of all, or most part of ancient Heresies’.70 But error has a more literal application in this context too: for the Qur’a¯nic text is ‘without head or tail’, since it is ‘immethodical and confused, contradictory in many things, written in a rude Language, the Author himself being no Linguist or Scholar, nay, not able to read or write, though also it consist of lyes and sensless follies’.71 Again we see the notion of Islamic monstrosity, embodied in the life of the Prophet, similarly expressed in the very structure of the

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Qur’a¯n. Yet this monstrosity always has an implicit corrollary: Ross may lament that ‘so many millions of people’ are ‘deluded, blinded, abused and inslaved by that false Prophet’, but he is quick to point out that the whole purpose of ‘Mahomet’ is to ‘overthrow Christ’s Divinity with Arius and the Iews his ghostly fathers’.72 In searching for epithets with which to describe Islam, Ross turns to oxymoron to express its ‘perversion’ – this is an ‘irreligious religion’.73 Conversely, however, this monstrosity has a potentially constructive dimension. At the start of his text Ross had sought to highten the contrast between the ‘Alcoran’ and Christian scripture (and betwen ‘Mahomet’ and Christ) in order to literally blacken and bestialise the former. Just as Erasmus, and Mandeville before him, had sought to use the infidel ‘Turk’ to chastise Christianity, Ross suggests that ‘if we observe their Justice, Temperance, and other moral Vertues, we may truly blush at our own coldness, both in devotion and charity, at our injustice, intemperance, and oppression’. Furthermore, ‘is it not a shame that they should read over their Alcoran once every month, and we scarse read over the Bible in all our life?’.74 In 1530 Erasmus had cast his eye across a Christendom riven with schism and threatened by Ottoman incursions, and had lambasted those Christians who ‘have conducted themselves like Turks’, whose ‘Turkish vices: avarice, ambition, power-lust’ prompt them to become ‘more ruthless to their own people than the enemy’.75 He imagined this map of a divided Christendom as a transposition of the mind of each Christian, itself split in conflict between Christian and ‘Turkish’ vices. Unlike Ross, however, Erasmus allows the ‘Turk’ no agency, asking, Can we attribute the Turks’ success to their piety? Of course not! To their valour? They are a race debilitated by debauchery and fearsome only as brigands. What, then, is the answer? They owe their victories to our sins ... 76 In this way ‘Turkish’ monstrosity, embodied in their ‘race’ and inherent in their religion, becomes merely a facet of a Christian self-image, a manifestation of sin within a Christian moral universe. Perhaps a consequence of an unprecedented increase in information, shifts in diplomacy and the development of a considerable English presence in the Meditteranean, Ross’ conception of Islam is less abstract. For him, the ‘Turks are our neighbours’.77 Yet his argument remains locked in a Christian apocalyptic geography – he argues that Saint John anticipates ‘Mahomet’ the ‘great destroyer’ – and, like Erasmus, he argues vociferously

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for conversion: ‘we are bound to pray, and indeavour heartily for their conversion, from darkness to light, from error to truth’.78 Having argued throughout this ‘Caveat’ for the availiablity of the ‘Alcoran’, in his final paragraph Ross attempts to impose certain restrictions. Although his purpose has been ‘that the Reader might be better armed to encounter with any rub or difficulty he shall meet with in the reading thereof’, he has a particular kind of reader, and a particular kind of reading in mind. It is absolutely not his meaning ‘all should have the liberty to read the Alcoran promiscuously’.79 In a revealing section he argues that, ... if all Men were Bees, to suck Hony even out of Henbane, there might be no danger in reading the Alcoran, but most Men are like Spiders, suck securely Poyson even out of the sweetest Roses; therefore they only may securely and without danger read the Alcoran, who are intelligent, judicious, learned, and throughly grounded in Piety, and principles of Christianity; but weak, ignorant, inconstant, and disaffected minds to the Truth, must not venture to meddle with this unhallowed piece, lest they be polluted with the touch thereof, as they were who came near a leprous Body; and if we will not venture to go into an infected House without preservatives, much less should any dare to read the Alcoran, that is not sufficiently armed with Grace, Strength, and Knowledge, against all temptations.80 The association with leprosy, a physical condition long considered to reflect moral or religious degredation, again connects Ross to the monstrous assumptions of the earliest writers about, and illustrators of, ‘Mahomet’. But here the potential for infection – regularly associated with heresy – is paramount. Not only might the ‘Alcoran’ represent a rich repository for the inherent wickedness of some readers, but it is itself a potentially polluting artefact. Thomas More, in his Dialogue Concerning Heresies (1529), had feared the ‘infeccion of our olde faythe’ by heresy, and in associating it with the ‘Turk’, described Lutheranism as a ‘pestilent sect’.81 Similarly, in the following year Erasmus described ‘Machumet’ as a ‘pestilent and wicked man’.82 Pestilence had been associated with Islam in English from Higden’s Polychronicon (if not earlier) and is characterised in that text as ‘the pestilente errour of the Saracenys’ which after ‘alle Affrike infecte’ it then ‘infecte a grete parte of Speyne’.83 Furthermore in one of only two examples in which the celebrated convert Leo Africanus castigates Islam, he writes of ‘the coming of the pestilence [pestilencia] of Muhammad’.84 This is a common trope,

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and is perhaps a different kind of monstrosity, but it can again be accomodated within Christian theology – Erasmus for one associates Ottoman depredations with a Biblical plague, and Ross links Islam to the Egyptian plague of locusts, for ‘Mahomet’ by his ‘pestilent doctrine hath destroyed so many Souls, and by the sword of his Locusts hath destroyed so many bodies and ruinated so many goodly Countries’.85 As a whole, Ross’ ‘Caveat’ offers a crystallisation of mid-seventeenth century anti-Muslim polemic, in which recently assimilated information and political intervention easily co-exist with a complex constructed life of ‘Mahomet’ that is centuries old. Their seamless assimilation is, in the most part, a consequence of the new being filtered through the old in a process of augmentation and re-affirmation that maintains the popular currency of this near-ubiquitous antihagiography. One key element of this Christian imagining of Islam and the Prophet Muhammad is, as Ross and my other examples have repeatedly demonstrated, a recourse to the monstrous, and specifically to notions of unnatural hybridity. While it is a notoriously slippery conceptual category, and varies widely depending upon historical context, the monstrous has a significant theological function that is, in turn, based upon classical foundations.86 Christian writers repeatedly return to the monstrous when characterising Islam and its Prophet because, I want to argue, it performs both an explicatory and an incorporatory function – it indicates danger and theological divergence, while simultaneously recognising Islam as a manifestation of the will of a Christian God: as a sign or portent. Monsters had been construed as ‘portenta’ as early as Solinus and the use of his ideas by Isidore in the seventh century.87 The humanist community greatly extended this notion, the Basle-based Lycostenes writing in 1557, About the unfathomable wonders of God, which he has created with a particular significance ... since the beginning of the world in the form of peculiar creatures, monsters, phenomena in the sky, on the earth and in the sea as an admonition and a horror for mankind.88 This was to become yet more prominent in Protestant circles, beginning with Luther’s interpretations of such signs and culminating in antipapal predictions and Johannes Wolf’s vast Lectiones Memorabiles (1600–08).89 Islam and the Prophet Muhammad clearly fit into this vision of divine intervention, whether as a monstrous birth, as scourge of God, as an infectious plague or as a beast of Revelation. While specific monstrous

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charactersitics indicate the particular character of the divergence, often in this case heretical, whether physical or moral (or both), monstrosity indicates a disruption in the ‘natural’ order that can only be considered a manifestation of God’s will and a sign of his displeasure. It is – as Mandeville, Erasmus and Luther all suggest from different perspectives – Christian vices that have prompted divine retribution, and ‘God inflicts the Turks upon us so often to reform our own lives’.90 This is therefore not really about the ‘Turks’ at all – in this formulation they have no agency whatsoever, but are rather tools of a Christian God and projections of Christian immorality. Making Muslims monstrous allows them to be perceived and controlled wholly in Christian terms and thus making monstrous is always, paradoxically, about making familiar.

Notes 1. Avigdor Levy, The Jews of the Ottoman Empire (Princeton NJ.: Darwin Press, 1992) pp. 1–12. 2. Gordon Weiner, ‘Jewish Anti-Christianism from the Crusades to the Reformation’, pp. 281—94, in Marc Anthony Meyer ed., The Culture of Christendom: Essays in Medieval History in Commemoration of Denis L. T. Bethell (London and Rio Grande: The Hambledon Press, 1993) pp. 288–9. 3. Peter of Cluny – ‘the Venerable’ – wrote a text, Against the Inveterate Stubbornness of the Jews. This text is discussed alongside an excellent mapping of this corpus in John Tolan, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002) pp. 135–69. 4. For a discussion of the nature of travel to the east and ‘eastern’ travel texts in this period, see Gerald MacLean, The Rise of Oriental Travel (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 5. For instance in Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), Daniel Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theater in the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), Richmond Barbour, Before Orientalism: London’s Theatre of the East, 1576–1626 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), Jonathan Burton, Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama, 1579–1624 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005) and Matthew Dimmock, New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). 6. This argument is made persuasively in R. I. Moore’s The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Medieval Europe, 950–1250 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) and is reinforced in Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Reformation: Europe’s House Divided, 1490–1700 (London: Allen Lane, 2003). 7. Most relevant here is probably Paul’s Epistle to the Romans particularly 9–11, although Paul’s position regarding the Jews is not necessarily consistent; see, for example, the first Epistle to the Thessalonians, 2:14–16.

Matthew Dimmock 85 8. The document that emphatically makes the connection between merchants and Jews (and Marlowe) is the ‘Dutch Church Libel’ of 1593. It is reproduced in Arthur Freeman, ‘Marlowe, Kyd and the Dutch Church Libel’, in English Literary Renaissance, 3 (1973) pp. 44–52. See also Laura Hunt Yungblut, Strangers Setttled Here Amongst Us: Policies, Perceptions and the Presence of Aliens in Elizabethan England (London and New York: Routledge, 1996). 9. Alexander Ross, ‘A needful Caveat, or Admonition, for them who desire to know what use may be made of, or if there be danger in reading the Alcoran’ [unpaginated: p. 6], preface to the anonymous translation, The Alcoran of Mahomet, translated out of Arabick into French, by the Sieur Du Ryer, Lord of Malezair, and resident for the French king, at Alexandria. And newly Englished, for the satisfaction of all that desire to look into the Turkish vanities (London: 1649). 10. Rudolph Wittkower, ‘Marvels of the East: A Study in the History of Monsters’, in The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 5 (1942) pp. 159–97, p.159. 11. See Tolan’s introduction, pp. xiii–xxiii. 12. Michael R. Paull, ‘The Figure of Mahomet in Middle English Literature’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of North Carolina, 1969) p. 197. 13. All quotations from ‘The Wakefield Pageant of Herod the Great’ comes from A. C. Cawley, ed., Everyman and Medieval Miracle Plays (London: Everyman [ J. M. Dent], 1993 edition) pp. 105–24. 14. Paull, p. 210. 15. Ibid., pp. 196–252. 16. Osborn Waterhouse, The Non-Cycle Mystery Plays, together with the Croxton Play of the Sacrament and the Pride of Life (London: Early English Text Society, 1909). 17. An extended discussion of the components and history of this ‘Jew Libel’ can be found in James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996) pp. 43–112. 18. Relatively few works focus upon visual representations by Christians of the Prophet Muhammad. Two useful examples are Michael Camille’s The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) and Debra Higgs Strickland, Saracens, Demons & Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (Princeton NJ.: Princeton University Press, 2003). 19. In The Comicall Historie of Alphonsus, King of Aragon (1591?), often attributed to Robert Greene, ‘Mahomet’ speaks to his acolytes through a ‘brazen head’ that exhales ‘flakes of fire’ (4.1.29). Similarly in scene 8 of Robert Daborne’s A Christian Turned Turk (1612) a conversion ceremony is facilitated by the use of ‘a Mahomet’s Head’. 20. Marie-Thérèse D’Alverny, ‘Deux traductions latines du Coran au moyen âge’, in Archives d’histoire doctrinale et litéraire du moyen âge, 16 (1947–8) pp. 69–131. For a detailed discussion of Peter of Cluny and his influence, see James Kritzeck, Peter the Venerable and Islam (Princeton NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1964). 21. Horace, De Arte Poetica, trans. H. R. Fairclough (London: Harvard University Press, 1926) p. 451. This passage is quoted by Peter of Cluny in his Summa Totius Haeresis Saracenorum (for more on this text see John Tolan, pp. 155–65).

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22. ‘Child sacrifice to Muhammad’, from the Duc de Berry’s Livre des Merveilles du Monde c. 1413. Reproduced in Camille, p. 159. 23. Walter B. Cahn, ‘The “Portrait” of Muhammad in the Toledan Collection’, pp. 51–60 in Elizabeth Sears and Thelma K. Thomas, eds, Reading Medieval Images: The Art Historian and the Object (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2002) p. 57. 24. Ibid., p. 54. 25. The fish as Christian symbol for Christ is discussed in the relevant entries in G. Schiller, The Iconography of Christian Art, vol. 1 (London: Lund Humphries, 1966) and in F. Klingender, Animals in Art and Thought to the End of the Middle Ages (London: Routledge, 1972). 26. The Oxford English Dictionary indicates that ‘Mahometism’ is now only rarely used, and records its most recent usage as a noun in Scribner’s Magazine (April 1910) and as an adjective in Eugene O’Neill’s Marco Millions (1927) 1.3.364. 27. For example the life of ‘Machamet’ in Here begynneth a lytell treatyse of the turkes lawe called Alcaron. And also it speketh of Machamet the Nygromancer (London: De Worde, 1515?/1519?), reproduced in part in Andrew Boorde, The fyrst boke of the introduction of knowledge (London, 1562?) sig. N.1v, and developed in the ‘Life of Mahomet’ that precedes the The English Alchoran (London, 1649) – the latter is unpaginated. 28. Samuel Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimage (London, 1613). 29. Ranulph Higden, Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden Monachi Cestrensis, ed. Joseph Rawson Lumby, Vol. VI (Kraus Reprint (1964) of Her Majesty’s Stationary Office edition: 1876) p. 15. 30. Here begynneth a lytell treatyse of the turkes lawe called Alcaron. And also it speketh of Machamet the Nygromancer (London: De Worde, 1515?/1519?). 31. Purchas, pp. 243–4. 32. Both Nestorius and Arius, and their polemical association with Islam, are discussed in detail in Tolan, pp. 135–69. 33. The figure of Sergius is considered in Tolan, p. 150: see also the relevant chapters in Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image, revised edition (London: One World, 1993). 34. Thomas Beard, The Theatre of God’s Judgements (London, 1597), p. 103. 35. Desiderius Erasmus, ‘De Bello Turcico: A Most Useful Discussion Concerning Proposals for War Against the Turks’, pp. 201–66, in Dominic Baker-Smith, ed., Collected Works of Erasmus, vol 64 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005) p. 258. 36. See also the examples reproduced by Strickland and Camille, note 17 above. 37. APOCALYPSIS: OR THE REVELATION OF Certain notorious Advancers of HERESIE: Wherein their Visions and private Revelations by Dreams, are Discovered to be most incredible Blasphemies, and enthusiastical Dotages (London, 1664) p. 59. 38. See Tolan, pp. 160–9. 39. In this context the continuing popularity of Henrik van Haesten’s Apocalypsis, or the Revelation of Certain Notorious Advancers of Heresie (first published in English in 1658) is important. It exists in various forms but was widely disseminated as an appendage to Alexander Ross’ Pancebeia (London, 1658). 40. Thomas Beard, p. 95. 41. Ibid., p. 98. Christopher Marlowe’s death is similarly lingered over in Beard’s text.

Matthew Dimmock 87 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

Beard, p. 99. Higden, p. 39. Lydgate, f.224v. B. L. Harley, 1766. Ross, p. 7. Gautier, ll. 1059–74 quoted and translated in Tolan, p. 143. Purchas his Pilgrimage, 1614 edition, pp. 270–1. See, for instance, the naturalistic portrait of ‘Mahomet’ in Apocalypsis, or the Revelation of Certain Notorious Advancers of Heresie, p. 58. He follows the section concerning Arius. Apocalypsis, p. 59. Consider the images reproduced in Strickland, pp. 190–1. Tolan, p. 275. Nabil Matar, ‘The Anglo-Muslim Disputation in the Early Modern Period’, in Matthew Birchwood and Matthew Dimmock, eds, Cultural Encounters Between East and West, 1453–1699 (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2005) pp. 29–42, p. 37. Quoted in Matar, ‘The Anglo-Muslim Disputation in the Early Modern Period’, p. 38. Peter of Cluny quoted in Tolan, p. 156. Harry Clark, ‘The Publication of the Koran in Latin: A Reformation Dilemma’, Sixteenth Century Journal, XV, No. 1 (1984) pp. 3–12. I have managed to identify 140 copies still extant of these three editions. Purchas, p. 255. Ross, p. 1. Andre du Ryer, L’Alcoran de Mahomet. Translaté d’Arabe en François, par le sieur Du Ryer, sieur de la Garde Malezair (À Paris : Chez Antoine de Sommaville, 1647). See also Matthew Birchwood, ‘Dramatic Representations of Islam in England 1640–1685’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of London, 2002). Of the first edition alone I have been able to identify more than 90 extant copies, over half of which are in North American libraries. Ross, p. 1. Ibid., p. 4. Ibid., pp. 1–2. Mark Thornton Burnett, Constructing ‘Monsters’ in Shakespearean Drama and Early Modern Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002) p. 133, pp. 8–32. Ibid., p. 25. Luther an den Rat zu Basel, 27 October 1542 as quoted in Harry Clark, ‘The Publication of the Koran in Latin: A Reformation Dilemma’, pp. 3–12 in Sixteenth Century Journal, XV, No. 1 (1984) pp. 10–11. Ibid., p. 11. Ross, p. 4. Burnett, p. 12. Ross, p. 5. Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., p. 9. Ibid., p. 12. Ibid., p. 16. Ibid., p. 13.

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75. Erasmus, p. 242. See also Matthew Dimmock, ‘“Machomet dyd before as Luther doth nowe”: Islam, the Ottomans and the English Reformation’, pp. 99–130 in Reformation, vol. 9 (2004) pp. 99–101. 76. Erasmus, p. 231. 77. Ross, p. 14. 78. Ibid., pp. 16–17. 79. Ibid., p. 22. 80. Ibid., pp. 23–4. 81. The Yale Edition of the Complete Works of Thomas More, vol. 6 A Dialogue Concerning Heresies (Pt 1), ed. Thomas M. C. Lawler, Germain Marc’hadour and Richard C. Marius (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981) p. 3. 82. Erasmus, p. 259. 83. Higden, p. 17. 84. Quoted and translated from the Libro de la Cosmogrophia et Geographia de Affrica [MS V. E. 953 Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Rome] in Natalie Zemon Davis, Tickster Travels: In Search of Leo Africanus, a Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds (London: Faber, 2007) p. 160. 85. Ross, p. 18. 86. Wittkower, pp. 159–64. 87. Ibid., p. 168. 88. Lycosthenes (pseudonym of Conrad Wolffhart), Prodigiorum ac ostentorum chronicon (Basle, 1557) quoted in Wittkower, p. 185. 89. Wittkower, p. 186. 90. Erasmus, p. 237.

4 ‘Vile Interpretations’ and ‘Devilish Supplements’: Jewish Exegesis and Linguistic Siege in Martin Luther’s ‘On the Jews and Their Lies’ (1543) Raphael Hallett As Martin Luther’s ‘On the Jews and their Lies’1 moves towards its conclusion, it repeatedly accuses the Jewish community of slandering and cursing their neighbouring Christians, their speech spilling out of the synagogues, where the Jews ‘freely slander, blaspheme, vilify and curse our Lord Jesus Christ’, into the social domain, to ‘wish us every misfortune, namely that we might all be stabbed to death’.2 This translation of Jewish speech from blasphemy to social slander is part of a rhetorical shift in Luther’s essay which arguably marks a different form of anti-Semitism from that we have encountered so far in the essay; a characterisation of Jewish menace that now includes a threat to the physical well-being of the Christian community (see Bale’s discussion of Margery Kempe, p. 34). The Christian body, individual and communal, is vulnerable to imminent penetration and destruction because of Jewish plots, and the language of Jewish blasphemy is now imagined, simultaneously, as a language of secular cursing where the speech of Jews acts as a malign incantation fostering physical harm. Luther lists a sequence of harmful activities attributable to Jews, mixing malign speech-acts with behavioural malice: ‘they can lie, curse, blaspheme, defame, murder, steal, rob, practice usury, mock and indulge in all those infamous abominations which they practice among us’.3 In between the linguistic threats of defamation and mockery, speech acts which damage social reputation, we find activities that rupture the economic and physical fabric of the community. From here on, Luther lets loose fully with vitriolic accusations that, while sustaining the theological siege against Jewish blasphemy, incorporate anti-Semitic stereotypes so far largely suppressed in the text – the spreading of plague, the kidnapping and ritualistic murder of Christian children, the poisoning of wells and the systematic ‘robbery’ of usury.4 These accusations of 89

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physical and social corruption, in turn, set the scene for his infamous political ultimatum against the Jews, where he advises, amongst other measures, the burning of synagogues, the abolition of safe passage and the forced enslavement or expulsion of the Jewish population.5 While it is important to recognise that this rhetorical development, (a late turn within a late essay in Luther’s career), reveals Luther’s anti-Semitism in a changed form, it should not be viewed as a transformative moment, textually, psychologically or ideologically. As Henrik Oberman has pointed out, the danger of caricaturing this text as the product of vituperative ‘Old Luther’ as opposed to the relative tolerance and measure of ‘Young Luther’ is that it covers up the profound continuities in his thought, such as his consistent theological antagonism towards Judaism and his particular fear of defamation as a diabolical sin.6 Neither does it seem sufficient to offer a psychological explanation for Luther’s sudden vitriol, as some biographers have done, since these tend to privilege the discreet workings of a troubled mind. Such accounts identify moments of mental exasperation or implosion, falsely divorcing Luther’s rhetoric from a previous or dominant ‘state of mind’ (and therefore from a more coherent and reasoned ideology), and separate our reading of his comments from the theological discourses that shape Luther’s writing. While changes of tone, emotion and imagined audience clearly accompany the rhetorical turn, such approaches trivialise these passages as emotive outbursts rather than constructed polemic. More problematically, they work to excuse Luther’s ‘exceptional’ rhetoric from integrated analysis both in terms of this particular text, and in terms of Luther’s corpus of work on Jews and Judaism. Roland Bainton, in his biography, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther, remarks regretfully that ‘one could wish that Luther had died before ever this tract was written’, apologising for the ‘vulgar blast’ as a text written in a mood of aged paranoia and one whose anti-Semitism ‘was wholly religious and in no respect racial’.7 Such comment discounts both the seriousness and continuity of the text’s themes in relation to Luther’s theology. A more intriguing example is Richard Marius’s 1974 biography, Luther, where he argues against treating ‘On the Jews and their Lies’ as an exceptional work, stating that ‘it takes a real wrenching of the evidence to say that his hatred of the Jews as an eccentricity, an aberration, a fault of the hardening of his arteries in old age’.8 However, after a lengthy paraphrase of its content, he concludes that ‘this is clearly a headstrong book, foolish, wicked, filled with inner contradictions and thoughtless violence’.9 While many of these adjectives might be justified, he reduces the text to the criteria of emotive, psychological

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and structural aberration that, implicitly, sets it apart from a Lutheran canon of greater coherence and historical value. The approach I have chosen is to follow the rhetorical progress of two texts, the 1543 essay ‘On the Jews and their Lies’ and the 1523 essay ‘That Jesus Christ was born a Jew’ and suggest ways in which Luther’s conceptions of malign Jewish speech, imminently physical in its threat, derives from a much more consistent anxiety about Judaism and theological exegesis. There is far more to note in the 1543 essay than ‘dozens of pages of tedious vehemence’10 against the Jews, since this vehemence grows not just from crude prejudice but from a particular anxiety about the effect of Jewish scholarship on scriptural integrity and linguistic purity. The essay helps us understand not only Lutheran anti-Semitism but dominant strands of anti-Judaism in Christian theology and western secular history. Luther’s fear of socially abusive Jewish speech – defamation, cursing, lying and mocking – is, as we have indicated, explicitly linked to the theological assault directed at the Word of God by Jewish worship and prayer. As Luther warns in Chapter 14, ‘Although these terrible slanderous, blasphemous lies are directed particularly against the person of our Lord and his dear mother, they are also intended for our own persons … all Christians are also involved. They are thinking also of us’.11 We need, therefore, to explore this continuity between theological and communal slander, particularly because it insists on a shared logic concerning the Jewish abuse of the scriptural Word and their violent misuse of the shared ‘word’ of social exchange. Luther’s fear of Jewish speech, repeatedly signalled in his descriptions of active, Jewish blasphemy in prayer, worship and teaching, is only a part of the explanation. Before this fear is fully formed in his writing, Luther is far more preoccupied by the destructive power of Jewish exegesis, where acts of reading and interpretation place the Word under continuous assault. The Jews, he argues in Chapter 12, ‘have done nothing these fourteen hundred years but take any verse which we Christians apply to our Messiah and violate it, tear it to bits, crucify it, and twist it in order to give it a different nose and mask’.12 It is this textual violence, this hermeneutic attack on the scriptural body of Christianity, which dominates Luther’s writing about Jews and Judaism. Our aim, then, is to understand the ways that Luther characterises the activity of Jewish reading and interpretation – these are the practices that draw him into continuous anxiety, competition and confrontation with Jews and Judaism. Luther’s anti-Semitism, I argue, emerges from a scene of hermeneutic rivalry, where the context of competition, violence

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and siege is the scriptural page and where strategies of reading, explication and commentary are the most potent weapons. While Oberman is right to suggest that Luther’s scriptural rivalry and siege should be understood in relation to the threat posed by multiple, diabolic legions of heretical readers, ‘Romans, heretics, Turks and Jews’,13 the threat of Jewish scriptural scholarship needs to be understood distinctly in its challenge to the reformed Word of Lutheran theology. We hear, from Luther, of the infantilism, stubbornness, perversity, excess and malice of Jewish scriptural exegesis, and need to pinpoint how each of these hermeneutic habits works, for Luther, to corrupt the Word. Just as importantly, however, Jewish scriptural reading also seems to menace Luther because of its privileged history, its systematic (if stubbornly perverse) rigour and its textual and etymological closeness to Luther’s own reading practices. For Luther, meticulous scriptural engagement with the intractable Jews is more urgent and necessary than with the deluded Catholics, ‘our fools, the popes, bishops and monks’ who have replaced the scriptures with an unrecognisably corrupt surrogate, ‘a mere babble without reliance on Scripture’.14 The Jews are also prone to ‘babble’,15 according to Luther, but they do so, historically and contemporaneously, through continuous and rigorous reference to the Hebrew scriptures. While the heresies of the Turks emanate from a relatively alien textual tradition and the Catholics have constructed a whole edifice of corrupt signs to obscure scripture, Talmudic and rabbinical commentary is, Luther admits, inseparable from the evolution of the scriptures and their current predicament. As Luther’s writing on Judaism develops, the correction or control of Jewish scriptural reading becomes a crucial way to articulate the power of reformed Christianity. In effect, Jewish scriptural commentary becomes the negative textual foundation for the pure exegesis of the Word. In the opening pages of the 1523 essay, ‘That Jesus Christ was Born a Jew’,16 we find notable passages of respect and empathy directed at the Jewish scriptural tradition. Focusing his attack on the crude treatment of Jews by the Catholic Church, and their abject failure to convert or educate them, he reminds his readers of the provenance of the scriptures, stating that ‘although the gospel has been proclaimed to all the world, yet he [God] committed the Holy Scriptures, that is, the law and the prophets, to no nation except the Jews’. He also registers the centrality of Judaism to scriptural content, reporting that ‘the Jews see that Judaism has such strong support in scripture’,17 and suggests that rigorous engagement with the scriptures would sooner foster an allegiance to Judaism than one to Catholicism.18

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Luther moves beyond sympathy at points, to guarded celebration, arguing a parallel textual and biological lineage that connects the Jewish people to Christ and to the Word. As part of a self-debasement of the current state of Christianity, he declares that the Jews are ‘blood relatives, cousins and brothers of our Lord’ and, in contrast to the ‘alien’ Gentiles, legitimately boast a genealogy of ‘patriarchs’, ‘prophets’ and ‘apostles’ who held possession of the gospel19 and anticipated, constructed and disseminated the scriptures.20 It is this privileged link, this problematic ‘possession’ and proximity to the scriptural text, which haunts Luther throughout his writing on Judaism. Long before we hear the multiple accusations of the Jews’ ‘devilish pride’ ‘boasting’ and ‘vanity’ resonating in the 1543 essay, Luther’s writing betrays, in its meticulous antagonism to Jewish scriptural interpretation, a protracted attempt to wrench this textual ‘possession’ away and claim hermeneutic mastery over the scriptures. These early concessions to the genealogical and scriptural privilege of the Jews should not be read simply as signs of a positive or even tolerant attitude towards Jewish theological scholarship.21 The remarks are made strategically to energise a polemic against ‘lying’ and corrupt Catholics who have accused Luther of sharing with the Jews scriptural misinterpretations concerning the virginity of Mary and the birth of Christ. There is more than an ironic twist in the way he aligns himself with the Jews in terms of scriptural focus, inviting the ‘papists’ to ‘denounce me as a Jew’22 and arguing that whereas the Jews only need to be nurtured back, through guided scriptural learning, to their ‘true faith’, the Catholics have burned their bridges with the Word and are therefore more profoundly deluded and damned. Though Luther’s continuous engagement with the Hebrew Bible and rabbinical commentary shows a textual proximity to the Jewish tradition, the invitation to Jews to return to the scriptures is, it is made clear, an offer of instruction, not of scholarly dialogue, and the aim is corrective teaching and conversion rather than theological debate: ... [W]e would also like to do a service to the Jews on the chance that we might bring some of them back to their own true faith, the one which their fathers held. To this end we will deal with them further and suggest for the benefit of those who want to work with them a method and some passages from Scripture which they should employ in dealing with them.23 Luther spends most of the essay condemning and correcting Jewish misreadings, outlining his orthodox views on Mary’s virginity, Jesus’

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birth and the truth of his messianic significance. His arguments are bolstered by regular, drumming scriptural citation and an obsessive desire to map the chronology of messianic prophecy and arrival. As part of this corrective, almost pedagogic procedure, Luther reveals more nuanced and negative portraits of Jewish reading and interpretation. Their exegetical tradition, we are told, is a fallen one, their proximity to the scriptures now an infectious menace rather than a blessing. As the quote above suggests, Luther’s initial conception of the Jewish mind is one that is childishly undeveloped or wayward, needing the training of Christian scriptural teaching. This impression is furthered as he comments on specific misreadings of Hebrew sources, concluding that the Jews’ exegetical focus is wavering and misplaced: ‘It is of no help for the Jews to try and evade the issue here and come up with this way of avoiding it … Such an interpretation is disgraceful and childish’.24 The ‘childish’ habits of Jewish reading are connected to what Luther regards as a naive tendency to clutch at literal readings and a wilful or disobedient streak in their interpretation, as they query the references to Mary’s virginity: ‘Now since they are such literalists and like to argue about semantics, we will concede that bethulah is not the same word as almah ... [but] it is childish and disgraceful to take recourse to words when the meaning is the same’.25 For Luther, there is something perverse in the Jews’ literal interpretations and pedantic semantics, as though they fasten onto words and nuances that complicate clear meanings. This comes up again in his exasperated comments on the Jews’ literalist readings of Genesis 49:11: ‘What is the point of an ass at the vine and clothes in the wine? The whole thing is sheer nonsense. Wine ruins clothes and an ass is better of with thistles than a vine … This seemingly ridiculous talk therefore forcibly compels a spiritual interpretation’.26 Their failure to see beyond the literal surface of the text to the ‘spiritual’ meanings proves the Jews’ lack of access to the essence or spirit of the Word – they are ensnared in the pedantry and external texture of words27 and miss ‘the clear words of God’.28 An infantile revelry in words, Luther suggests, leads them to interpret like ‘simpletons’,29 and their childishness shows up as a form of stupidity or incomprehension, so that they fail to understand Luther’s reasoning: ‘such sweet speech is still too exalted and difficult for the Jews’.30 The intellectual failing attributed to the Jews is not merely a mental incapacity or flawed strategy. It has a clear theological basis in Luther: a prophesied state of mental obfuscation and scriptural ‘loss’,31 visited

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on the Jews by God after their wilful rejection of the Messiah, the originary and catastrophic misinterpretation32 that will be repeated, synecdochically, in all the misreadings that Luther draws our attention to. In his 1543 essay, Luther returns to the topic of the Jews ‘possession’ of God’s commandment, and, commenting on their failure to interpret and obey the Word, inverts this privilege into a curse: But what good does it do them to know and to possess God’s commandment? Let them boast that this makes them God’s own special, dear angels, in comparison with whom other angels are nothing! How much better off they would be if they did not have God’s commandment or if they were ignorant of it. For if they did not have it, they would not be condemned. The very reason for their condemnation is that they possess his commandment and yet do not keep it, but violate it constantly.33 It is in this idea of the Word’s ‘violation’ by Jews that we move away from the notion of merely childlike, passive or ignorant reading to a more active and deliberately blasphemous corruption of scripture. One catalyst for this violation is the perceived stubbornness and inertia of Jewish exegesis – a refusal to be converted from misguided doctrinal positions, and the repeated inscription or expression of false readings. In his accusations of sterile and intractable Jewish exegesis, Luther draws on New Testament condemnations of the Pharisaic and Scribal activity in Jesus’ time, by now shaping the caricature of ‘disobedient’ rabbinical scholarship more broadly. Drawing regularly on the repeated declarations of Matthew 23, Luther plays on the ‘proud’, ‘hypocritical’ Pharisees and Scribes as a model for present Jews,34 who, similarly blinded by self-exaltation and in thrall to their flawed scriptural commentaries, remain deaf to the persuasion and evidence offered by Luther and his fellow Christian teachers: ‘But after having been hounded a long time, they still persisted in their obstinacy and now set to erring consciously, and would not depart from their rabbis.’35 Just as the Pharisees and Scribes failed to recognise Jesus’ teachings and obstructed the Jewish people’s uptake of his revelatory doctrine, present-day Jews are blind to the clarity of Christian exegesis and stubbornly hold on to their own, the rabbis ensnaring their servile audience in continued error.36 Despite the thousands of words of exegetical instruction to be found in the essay, this ‘obstinacy’ leads Luther to affect moments of discursive fatalism. It no longer seems proper for him to carry on debate with readers whose refusal to remedy readings verges on the behaviour

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of the madman hopelessly marooned in scriptural debate37 or the ravings of a scold repeatedly contradicting a husband she knows to be correct.38 Exegetical stubbornness, a theological commonplace in Christian anti-Judaism, is given a new twist by Luther as he relates it to the more social threats of a madman’s prattle and a scold’s vitriol, but it remains an exasperating, rather than threatening, practice, frustrating Luther’s earlier hopes of Jewish conversion and denting the confidence of missionary zeal within the Lutheran church. Dogmatically false readings are damaging as a kind of barren suppression of the Word within Jewish communities, but this is reading as a form of doctrinal inertia, an obstacle to fertile reform and conversion. It does not, it seems, directly effect the condition of the scriptures as ‘possessed’ and elucidated by true Christians. Increasingly, however, Luther’s suspicion of Jewish reading reveals a more explicitly threatening strategy. Over and beyond their sterile dogmatism, the Jews are accused of having always practiced a hermeneutic excess, of producing ‘mendacious glosses’ and ‘arbitrary interpretations’, cluttering the integrity of the Word with hybrid, secular and blasphemous readings. We know that ‘On the Jews and their Lies’ was stimulated, at least in part, by a direct challenge from a rabbi to engage in rival scriptural exegesis,39 and what we can see in Luther’s response is an attack on the layered heritage of Jewish scriptural commentary, as well as on the specific ‘blasphemies’ he hears being circulated: Let him who is endowed with reason, to say nothing of Christian understanding, note how arbitrarily they pervert and twist the prophets’ books with their confounded glosses, in violation of their own conscience.40 Dressed up in their familiar colours of outrage and denigration, Luther’s comments register something crucial here. The ‘confounded glosses’ he rejects are the products of the biblical, legal and creative traditions of Jewish scriptural commentary, which we can cautiously label midrash, halakhot and haggadot. I inherit these labels from Judah Goldin, whose account explains the tensions and overlaps between these modes of exegesis within the Judaic tradition.41 His initial and ‘standard inventory’ defines: ... midrash being what is legitimately derivative from study and interpretation of the Scriptures, and also analysis and exposition of

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teachings; halakhot, those handed down halakhic rulings formulated and assembled independently, ... unaccompanied by the biblical interpretation to which they may be related; and finally haggadot, which is still best defined as non-halakhic discourse and instruction.42 While we cannot be sure in distinguishing the particular types of Jewish exegesis so threatening to Luther (his own characterisation and identification of rabbinical commentary is too broad for that), we can see from the two essays in question that Halakhic codes, rulings or laws do not feature strongly as objects of critique or anger. The two forms of Jewish commentary most threatening to the Word, for Luther, are the close, ‘midrashic’ scriptural (mis)readings, which we have already encountered in Luther’s 1523 essay, infiltrating the scriptural text and abusing the integrity of the Virgin Mary and Messiah, and the Haggadic excesses of the Jewish sages and the rabbis, which Luther (much more frequently in the 1543 essay) identifies as monstrous accretions on the surface of a clear and pure text. Goldin, while speaking of overlaps and dialectic between traditions of Talmudic rule-making and Haggadic discourse, argues that the latter is ‘not restricted by ancient legacy of practice, public or private, theoretical or applicable … one is at liberty to draw cheerfully on his own intellect or imagination, on popular narratives and folk sayings, on anything congenial to his own spirit, to interpret a biblical verse or create a homily or amplify a scriptural anecdote or solicit parables … and so on’.43 Heinemann, in a companion essay, explains not only the creative interpretative freedom but contextual contingency of Haggadah: The Jewish people sought, successfully, to continue living according to the dictates of the Torah. To achieve this it was necessary that the Torah remain dynamic and open to varying interpretation in order to meet the challenge of drastically varying circumstances. By developing a method of ‘creative exegesis’ the aggadists were able to find in Scripture ... the new answers and values which made it possible to grapple with the shifts and changes of reality.44 The period of Haggadic exegesis is marked, by Heinemann, as lasting between the time of the second temple (515 BC) and the Arab conquest of Palestine in the 6th century AD, but for other writers, such as Goldin and Fishbane, it is less defined, instead filtering into midrashic contexts of Scribal and Pharisaic commentary and forward through a tradition of rabbinical commentary to Luther’s time and beyond. They characterise

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haggadah more broadly as a Judaic discourse that feeds from, but goes beyond direct or legalistic reference to the Hebrew Bible.45 This Haggadic tradition, inflecting and, for Luther, infecting rabbinical exegesis in his time, is perhaps what he refers to with such disdain, especially in protesting that ‘We do not give a fig for their crazy glosses, which they have spun out of their own heads. We have the clear text’46 and in defending the Word from oral and written siege: ‘No barking, interpreting, or glossing will change this. The text is too authoritative and too clear. If the Jews refuse to admit it, we do not care.’47 Luther is appalled not just by the falsity or stubbornness of Jewish reading, but by its dangerous excess, the clamouring voices and incremented glosses despoiling what Luther repeatedly defends as the ‘clear’ text that lies, maybe more precariously than he admits, in his possession. The most sustained and striking example of Luther’s outrage at hermeneutic excess comes relatively early in the essay in Chapter 3. Here, Luther attacks the Jews’ belief in, and practice of, circumcision as a sign of their deluded sense of divine election: Thus they cause extraordinary pain to the child, without and against the command of God, so that the father, who should really be happy over the circumcision, stands there and weeps as his child’s cries pierce his heart. We answer roundly that such an addendum is their own invention, yes, it was inspired by the accursed devil, and is in contradiction to God’s command, since Moses says in Deuteronomy 4:2 and 12:32: ‘You shall not add to the word which I command you, nor take from it’. With such a devilish supplement they ruin their circumcision, so that in the sight of God no other nation practices circumcision less than they, since with such wanton disobedience they append and practice this damnable supplement.48 [my italics] In this multifaceted attack, the Jews’ distorted interpretation of God’s commandment, and its abusive display as a mark of election, is played out in a performance of theological, linguistic and bodily violence. The cries of the child respond to the simultaneous abuse of body and divine instruction. The weeping father acknowledges, in Luther’s dramatised exegetical scene, both his secular cruelty against the child and his abuse of Moses’ law. He is guilty of violating the body of his offspring, the integrity of his conscience and the instruction of Moses, wilfully rebelling, finally and most catastrophically, against the divine paternity of God and his Word.

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Though Luther seems unconcerned with defining exactly which tradition of corrupt exegesis is being practiced here, it seems as if Midrash (the close interpretation of scripture), Halakhot (the formation of codes/laws from scripture) and Haggadah (supplementary discourse and commentary) are being placed in a kind of blasphemous alignment. Claiming doctrinal rigour, the Jews perversely misinterpret God’s commandment and transform it, abusively, into a law that is both excessive and alien; an invented ‘addendum’ that is not only dragged from outside of the scriptural body but malignly appended to it. Inspired not by God but the Devil, their misreading is significantly characterised as a ‘damnable’ and ‘devilish supplement’, and it is here, in the idea of the demonic overdetermination of the text, that Luther reveals his fear of Jewish exegesis as monstrous excess. Jewish commentary emerges from a tradition of scriptural elaboration and supplementarity that, if not checked, will see the divine Word invaded and overwritten by the demonic anti-Word. As the attack on circumcision continues, Luther plays (with skilful brutality – this is not just a text that rants and raves) on the parallel abuse of body, word and conscience that we have identified as his tripartite warning against Jewish exegesis. The Jews layer their misreadings, repeat their boasts and harden their consciences against the blasphemies and cruelties they commit. All the time they do this, Luther suggests, the Jews are reversing their physical circumcision through spiritual and hermeneutic accretions that buffer them further and further from feeling or perceiving the divine: They go their way like fools, making the foreskins of their heart steadily thicker with such haughty boasts before God and their contempt for all other people. By virtue of such futile, arrogant circumcision in the flesh they presume to be God’s only people, until the foreskin of their heart has become thicker than an iron mountain and they can no longer hear, see, or feel their own clear Scripture, which they read daily with blind eyes overgrown with a pelt thicker than the bark of an oak tree.49 The Jewish reader interprets the body of the scripture to cut away his physical body, Luther argues; excess meanings and demonic supplements are grafted onto the textual body of the Word. These excesses manifest themselves on the receptive surfaces of the Jew, symbolically fettering both the heart and eyes with layers of insensibility.

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For Luther, false interpretation inspires the demonic overgrowth of the reading and believing subject – this is the epitome of Jewish scriptural exegesis. The apparent privilege of ‘hearing’ and ‘possessing’ the Word, if we recall the admissions of the 1523 essay, mutates over time into proud, blown-up and excessive exegesis. This leads, conversely, to deafness (In Jeremiah 6:10 we read, further, ‘Their ears are uncircumcised, they cannot listen’50), blindness and insensibility to the Word of God, the hermeneutic afflictions which the Jews, according to Luther, carry wherever they go. As a result of this portrait, it might seem possible to understand the hermeneutic failure and impotence of the Jews, as described by Luther – they are deaf, blind and insensible to truth – but what about the hermeneutic threat they unquestionably carry in this text? Condemned to blindness, the Jews still, somehow, present a continuing and increasing menace to the Christian community of readers and believers. In Luther’s mind, the Jews manage to be both passive and active in their production of false meanings and blasphemies, at once a cursed people, destined and divinely ordained to misread, and a perverse people, wilfully misreading and disseminating ‘lies’ about Jesus, God and, we shall hear increasingly, the Christian community as a whole. Luther’s conception of a community of Jewish thinkers and readers moves from something relatively nuanced in his 1523 essay to a series of crude generalisations in his later writing. We have heard how he talks about a ‘pre-lapsarian’ Jewish community of prophets, fathers and apostles in ‘That Jesus Christ was born a Jew’,51 and how he gestures, temporarily and strategically at least, at reacquainting the current Jewish community with that lineage, through instruction and conversion, even though the current cohort are afflicted with infantilism, stubbornness and perversity. Indeed, even in ‘On the Jews and their Lies’, there are hints that Luther gives this community the chance of reform as he lists their shared corruption: ‘If God is to give ear to their prayers and praises and accept them, they must surely first purge their synagogues, mouths and hearts of such blasphemous, shameful, false, and deceitful boasting and arrogance. Otherwise they will only go from bad to worse and arouse God’s anger evermore against themselves.’52 This bleak condemnation of the Jewish religion and its communal pride nonetheless implies the possibility of purification and redemption through missionary instruction, as does the double-edged statement in Chapter 8 that, ‘though the Jews be as hard or harder than a diamond, the lightning and thunder of such clear and manifest truth should smash, or at least soften, them’.53 [my italics]

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The 1543 text, however, largely departs from the suggestion of a malleable or convertible community, and a fatalism (entirely logical in relation to the idea of their divinely ordained blindness) sets in about the Jews’ intractable doctrine, beliefs and exegetical error. While we sometimes see Luther gesture towards disassociation and indifference towards an irrevocably ‘lost’ community of blasphemers54, the dominant tone signals a vigilance towards their historical and continuing threat. ‘They are real liars and bloodhounds who have not only continually perverted and falsified all of Scripture with their mendacious glosses from the beginning until the present day’55, Luther declares, adding a little later that ‘One can readily perceive that the Jews are not simply erring and misled but that they are maliciously and wilfully denying and blaspheming the recognized truth in violation of their conscience’.56 This is a significant shift in Luther’s rhetoric, clearing the way for a series of statements about the deliberate menace of Jewish exegesis. The rabbis ‘bark and prattle against the text and its true meaning’,57 ‘pervert the scriptural passages which we cite in testimony to our faith’58 and ‘mock Scripture, God, and all the world with their impudent glosses’.59 As Luther’s mood of linguistic and textual siege grows, his attitude towards the legacy of Jewish biblical scholarship becomes increasingly intolerant, and the notion of a historical, textual conspiracy grows apace: Since they were beaten into defenceless impotence by the Romans, from that time on they have turned against Scripture, and have boldly tried to take it from us and to pervert it with strange and different interpretations. They have digressed from the understanding of all their forefathers and prophets, and furthermore from their own reason.60 Luther’s fear is not now concerned with clusters of rabbis sporadically disseminating misguided or excessive interpretations, but an organised and conspiratorial tradition of reading, glossing and blasphemy directed at the integrity of the Christian Bible. What’s more, there is nothing reasoned or controlled about this rival textual tradition, since the Jews, according to Luther, have always known their error and, with redoubled perversity, declare interpretations merely to undermine the true culture of Christian scriptural exegesis and dissemination: ... that is the way the Jews tear apart the text wherever they can, solely for the purpose of spoiling the words of Scripture for us Christians, although it serves no purpose for them either. For it teaches them

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nothing, it does not comfort them, it gives them nothing; it results in nothing but meaningless words.61 This conception of the Jews’ hypocritical, perverse and ‘empty’ hermeneutic malice serves a number of purposes for Luther. First, it plays on the ingrained idea of the hypocritical Pharisaic and Scribal tradition, summoned largely from New Testament portraits,62 where external piety and doctrinal rigour are displayed but disguise internal vanity and corruption. Secondly, the idea of merely malicious rather than authentic exegesis deprives Jewish scholarship, and therefore Judaism, of any internal coherence, belief or integrity, effectively reducing the religious identity of Jews to that of anti-Christians. This displaces, for Luther, the threat of a profound textual and theological rivalry between Christianity and Judaism to a story of wilful and self-destructive misunderstanding on the part of the Jews. Finally, it excuses what might be haunting Luther most of all, that the power of his reformed Christianity has failed to convert this community and tradition of belief. If their beliefs are only wilful fabrications flying in the face of their conscience (which remains ‘Christian’ in a strange sense), then there is either nothing substantial to convert or no real possibility of conversion. Indeed, Luther’s idea of the Jews’ ‘demonic’ and ‘devilish’ supplements makes sense within a broader sense of the Jews as a people who, constituting part of Christianity yet rejecting it, are, like the Devil, immune from true conversion: They are like the devil, who knows very well that God’s Word is the truth and yet with deliberate malice contradicts and blasphemes it. The Jews feel distinctly that these verses are solid rock and their interpretation nothing but straw or spiderweb. But with wilful and malicious resolve they will not admit this.63 Operating through and within the Word, Jewish exegesis, therefore, has the greatest power to corrupt it through its abusive misreading and malicious ‘glossing’. The textual, linguistic and bodily abuse we saw in Luther’s circumcision narrative emerges within a broader understanding of the Word as a physical entity that, despite its analogy to ‘solid rock’ in the above quote, is continuously vulnerable to erosion by Jewish exegesis.64 Both the preciousness of the Word and the brutality of its misreading are expressed through a sequence of metaphors linking it either to the body of the ancient prophets or the body of Christ. ‘For now they can no longer stone or kill the prophets’, Luther argues, ‘they

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torment them spiritually and mutilate, strangle and maltreat their beautiful verses so that the human heart is vexed and pained’,65 and as rabbinical commentary ‘subjects almost every single word … to severe and violent misinterpretation’,66 it is simultaneously the body of Christ and the entity of the divine that is being tortured; ‘they have scourged, crucified, spat upon, blasphemed, and cursed God in his word’.67 Such regular and fluid analogy between the Word, the messianic body and the idea of the divine is explicable in terms of Luther’s theological fetishisation of the scriptural Word as the primary sign of God, something neatly evinced in one of his early sermons, ‘On the Word Became Flesh’ (1514): Just as the Word of God became flesh, it is also certainly necessary to say that the flesh became Word. For the Word became flesh in order that the flesh might become Word. That is, God becomes man in order that man might become God. Likewise strength becomes weakness in order that weakness might become strength.68 As the Jews ‘test it, twist it, interpret and distort almost every word’, they are endlessly protracting the crucifixion of Christ, deepening their communal guilt and refreshing their collective blasphemy as they abuse the fabric of the scriptural and messianic body, working to ‘tear it to bits, crucify it, and twist it … They deal with it as their fathers dealt with our Lord on Good Friday’.69 In a rare moment of confident defiance, Luther’s crusade to save the Word feeds from the final line of the sermon passage quoted above. Fallen from ‘strength’ to ‘weakness’, corrupted, fragmented and diluted by centuries of Jewish exegesis, the Word now lies, in Luther’s purgative and curative theology, immunised from further invasion and on the cusp of strength once again: We are certain, sure, and cheerful about this, as we snap our fingers at all the gates of hell and defy them, together with all the gates of the world and everything that wants to be or might be exalted, smart, and wise against us. I, a plain insignificant saint in Christ, venture to oppose all of them.70 [my italics] This is Luther at his most apocalyptic and heroic, fully anticipating both demonic and secular attacks on the integrity of Christian doctrine and yet standing, singularly saintly, against all the ostensibly exalted, scholarly and learned groups that battle over the Word (see Matthew Birchwood’s discussion of apocalyptic thinking on p. 147).

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For the greater part of the polemic, however, Luther places himself, and the Christian community, in a much more vulnerable state. Not only are the Jews deliberately abusing the fabric of the Word and the Divine entities it carries, but, he argues, their blasphemy is bleeding into the social fabric, and threatening the personal well-being of Christians, We want to look at their lies about the person of our Lord, as well as those about his dear mother and about ourselves and all Christians. These lies are such as the devil resorts to when he cannot assail the doctrine. Then he turns against the person, lying, maligning, cursing, and ranting against him.71 The linguistic threat spreads from the historical tradition of Jewish exegesis, through the devilish excesses of current rabbinical scholarship, to the daily violence of malign speech. It is now explicitly the Christian persona, as well as the Christian text, under threat. In part, Luther is amplifying his own experience into a communal anxiety, as he mentions how ‘three learned Jews came to me, hoping to discover a new Jew in me because we were beginning to read Hebrew here in Wittenberg’,72 speculating on how the Jews now manipulate Christian interest in biblical sources as an opportunity for conversion. Significantly, the textual common ground of the Christian and Jewish religion has become a platform not for nurturing wayward Jews back to their ancient faith, but for the propagation of Judaism within a Christian community – Christians are in a state, Luther suggests, of social and theological siege: Therefore, dear Christian, be on your guard against the Jews, who, as you discover here, are consigned by the wrath of God to the devil, who has not only robbed them of a proper understanding of Scripture, but also of ordinary human reason, shame, and sense, and only works mischief with Holy Scripture through them. Therefore, wherever you see a genuine Jew, you may with a good conscience cross yourself and bluntly say: ‘There goes a devil incarnate’.73 Luther’s rhetoric, quite deliberately and with a violent logic of persecution, switches the context of linguistic rivalry and threat from the historical legacy of competing exegesis, from the pages of scriptural scholarship and the rarefied sites of theological debate, to the immediate and visceral domain of the social.

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Jews have already populated the narrative as ‘scolds’ and ‘madmen’, but the monstrous caricatures of Jewish identity multiply within the concluding chapters of ‘On the Jews and their Lies’, so that loitering rabbis, ‘untutored asses’,74 ‘drunkards’,75 ‘blood thirsty bloodhounds and murderers of all Christendom’76 and multitudinous groups are presented, not only uttering abusive exegesis but ‘ranting’, ‘cursing’, ‘spewing forth’ and ‘assigning us our special share of slander’77 as they walk by. For Luther, malicious language is now fully embodied in the demonic, adjacent Jew, tempting Christians towards conversion78, mangling the Word of God in their mouths and, more mundanely, spitting forth curses and slander in the street, under the cover of greetings; ‘while we suppose that they are speaking kindly to us, they are calling down hellfire and every misfortune on our heads’.79 As their corrupting language gathers in strength, proximity and volume, so the Christian body – textual, divine and social – must, for Luther, aspire to heightened vigilance and, ultimately, retaliation: We Christians must not tolerate that they practice this in their public synagogues, in their books, and in their behaviour, openly under our noses, and within our hearing in our own country, houses, and regimes. If we do, we together with the Jews and on their account will lose God the Father and his dear Son, who purchased us at such cost with his holy blood, and we will be eternally lost, which God forbid!80 The final passages of Luther’s essay are written, it is clear, in a heightened and translated state of linguistic siege. The devil is no longer merely in the textual detail, the ‘demonic supplement’ or the exegetical excess. He is walking down the street, incarnate, as the cursing, slandering and lying Jew. No longer is Luther just afraid of the Midrashic gloss, the rival scriptural compendium or the prayers that spill out of the synagogue – Christian discourse itself seems vulnerable to immersion, submersion, perhaps even conversion, by the power of Jewish language. Certainly, in its latter stages, Luther’s vitriol against the Jews collapses at times into chaotic references to myths of murder, poisoning and infection, anti-Semitic stereotypes chosen to nurture fear and energise brutal persecution in his readers. The later emphasis we find on social anti-Semitism, however, so brutally discordant and psychologically aberrant for many commentators, must be regarded as consistent with Luther’s broader theological anxiety about the threat of Judaism. What

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occurs is a translation, not a transformation. The ‘Jews’ vile interpretations’81 and ‘devilish supplements’, which have forever haunted Luther as manifestations of scriptural rivalry, perversity, blasphemy and confrontation, are translated into the living and proximate threat of Jewish slander. For Luther’s besieged theology, the curses of the Jews carry the residue of centuries of exegetical and interpretative attack. Self-styled protector of the Word, the scriptural body and the integrity of the Messiah carried within it, Luther ultimately portrays himself policing the streets of his hometown and protecting the social body of Christianity against the menace of Jewish speech, demonically incarnate. Indeed, just as we suspect he has given up the thought of theological engagement or scriptural competition with the Jews, choosing instead to lurch into the brutal logic of physical persecution, Luther is drawn back to a fantastical scene of exegetical competition, into claustrophobic proximity with Jewish scholarship, interpreters and texts once again. His postscript, I think, epitomises not only the mixture of hermeneutic confidence and crisis found in Luther’s writing on Judaism, but the tendency for Luther’s preoccupation with theological, textual and linguistic purity to inhabit the domain of social and bodily confrontation: If I had power over them, I would assemble their scholars and their leaders and order them, on pain of losing their tongues down to the root, to convince us Christians within eight days of the truth of their assertions and to prove this blasphemous lie against us, to the effect that we worship more than the one true God. If they succeeded, we would all on the self-same day become Jews and be circumcised. If they failed, they should stand ready to receive the punishment they deserve for such shameful, malicious, pernicious, and venomous lies.82

Notes 1. Martin Luther, ‘On the Jews and Their Lies’ (1543) , Trans. Martin H. Bertram, in Luther’s Works (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971). I consulted this essay as an electronic text at http://www.awitness.org/books/luther/ (accessed 12/12/06 – 14/02/07) and take the chapter divisions from this source. 2. Luther, 1543, Ch. 15. 3. Luther, 1543, Ch. 15. 4. Luther, 1543, Ch. 15–16.

Raphael Hallett 107 5. Luther, 1543, Ch. 15–16. 6. H. Oberman, The Impact of the Reformation (Michigan: Eerdmans, 1994), Part II: ‘The Impact of Luther’, pp. 56–64 in particular. 7. Roland Bainton, Here I Stand – A Life of Martin Luther (New York: Abingdon Press, 1950), p. 379. 8. Marius, Luther, p. 237. 9. Marius, Luther, p. 241. 10. Richard Marius, Martin Luther: The Christian Between God and Death (London: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 378. 11. Luther, 1543, Ch. 14. 12. Luther, 1543, Ch. 12. 13. H. Oberman, The Roots of Anti-Semitism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983), Ch. 14, ‘The Jews as Signposts to the Reformation’, pp. 101–07. 14. Martin Luther, ‘That Jesus Christ was born a Jew’ (1523) in Luther’s Works. Volume 45, (Philadelphia, 1962), p. 200. 15. In Chapter 6 of ‘The Jews and their Lies’, Luther reputedly refers to groups of ‘babbling’ Rabbis, who ‘twist and turn’ with ‘arbitrary glosses’ and shape ‘clear words of God’ into interpretations that ‘the language does not permit’. 16. Martin Luther, 1523, pp. 197–229. 17. Luther, 1523, p. 200. 18. Luther, 1523, p. 200. 19. ‘The fathers preached and inculcated this gospel … and so they were sustained through faith in Christ just as we are. In their day, this gospel was not proclaimed publicly throughout the world … but remained solely in the possession of the Holy fathers and their descendants down to the time of Abraham’, Luther, 1523, p. 203. 20. Luther, 1523, p. 200. 21. Writing in 1514 to George Spalatin, he declares that ‘I have come to the conclusion that the Jews will always curse and blaspheme God and his King Christ, as all the prophets have predicted. He who neither reads nor understands this, as yet knows no theology, in my opinion.’ J. Pelikan and H. T. Lehmann, eds, Luther’s Works, v. 48 (Philadelphia: Fortress press, 1963), ‘Letters’, – v. 1. 22. Luther, 1523, p. 201. 23. Luther, 1523, p. 213. 24. Luther, 1523, p. 206. 25. Luther, 1523, p. 209. 26. Luther, 1523, p. 218. 27. Charlotte Klein discusses the way this anti-Semitic trope derives from early Christian theology and, in particular, the characterisation of the Pharisees as a group of scriptural scholars and leaders revelling in legalistic doctrine and external shows of piety which disguise internal corruption. See Klein, C. Anti-Judaism in Christian Theology (London: SPCK, 1978), pp. 68–72 in particular. 28. Luther, 1543, Ch. 6. 29. Luther, 1523, p. 218. 30. Luther, 1523, p. 217. 31. ‘They have neither Messiah nor Scripture, just as Isaiah 28 prophesied of them’, Luther, 1543, Ch. 7.

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32. This period of scriptural loss and divine rejection is described well in Dan Cohen-Sherbock’s The Crucified Jew (London: Harper Collins, 1992), Chs 2 and 3 in particular. 33. Luther, 1543, Ch. 6. 34. In particular, Matthew, 23: 13, ‘But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.’; 23: 27 ‘Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.’; and 23: 28: ‘Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity’. 35. Luther, 1543, Ch. 6. 36. For discussion of the way Christian and secular histories of Judaism perpetuate this negative image of the Pharisees and Scribes and extend it to the broader tradition of Jewish Scriptural scholarship, see the Charlotte Klein, ‘Pharisees and Scribes’, in Anti-Judaism in Christian Theology (London: SPCK, 1978). 37. ‘What do you hope to accomplish by engaging an obstinate Jew in a long dispute on this? It is just as though you were to talk to an insane person and prove to him that God created heaven and earth, according to Genesis 1, pointing out heaven and earth to him with your hands, and he would nevertheless prattle that these are not the heaven and earth mentioned in Genesis 1.’, Luther, 1543, Ch. 6. 38. ‘Their glosses remind me very much of an evil, stubborn shrew who clamorously contradicts her husband and insists on having the last word although she knows she is in the wrong’, Luther, 1543, Ch. 6. 39. ‘I have received a treatise in which a Jew engages in dialog with a Christian. He dares to pervert the scriptural passages which we cite in testimony to our faith, concerning our Lord Christ and Mary his mother, and to interpret them quite differently. With this argument he thinks he can destroy the basis of our faith.’, Luther, 1543, Ch. 1. 40. Luther, 1543, Ch. 3. 41. Judah Goldin, ‘Freedom and Restraint of Haggadah’ in G. Hartman and S. Budick, eds, Midrash and Literature, pp. 57–76. 42. Goldin, Judah, ‘Freedom and Restraint of Haggadah’, pp. 57–58. 43. Goldin, Judah, ‘Freedom and Restraint of Haggadah’, p. 63. 44. Joseph Heinemann, ‘Nature of the Aggadah’, in G. Hartman and S. Budick, eds, Midrash and Literature, p. 43. 45. See in particular M. Fishbane, ‘Inner Biblical Exegesis: Types and Strategies of Interpretation in Ancient Israel’, in G. Hartman and S. Budick, eds, Midrash and Literature, pp. 19–40. 46. Luther, 1543, Ch. 7. 47. Luther, 1543, Ch. 7. 48. Luther, 1543, Ch. 3. 49. Luther, 1543, Ch. 3. 50. Luther, 1543, Ch. 3. 51. Luther also refers briefly to this pre-lapsarian Jewish identity in ‘On the Jews and their Lies’: ‘The ancient, true Jews understood this verse correctly, as we Christians do’, Ch. 6.

Raphael Hallett 109 52. Luther, 1543, Ch. 2. 53. Luther, 1543, Ch. 8. 54. ‘Thus we must let them go their way and ignore their malicious blasphemy and lying’, Luther, 1543, Ch. 7. 55. Luther, 1543, Ch. 3. 56. Luther, 1543, Ch. 6. 57. Luther, 1543, Ch. 6. 58. Luther, 1543, Ch. 1. 59. Luther, 1543, Ch. 16. 60. Luther, 1543, Ch. 12. 61. Luther, 1543, Ch. 12. 62. See Charlotte Klein, Anti-Judaism in Christian Theology (London, 1978), Charles Glock and Randy Shark, Christian Beliefs and Anti-Semitism (Harper, London, 1966), Daniel Cohen-Sherbock, The Crucified Jew (Fount, 1993). 63. Luther, 1543, Ch. 7. 64. For insight into the Lutheran conception of the Word as physical entity, see S. Coleman, (1996) ‘Words as Things: Language Aesthetics and the Objectification of Protestant Evangelicalism’, in Journal of Material Culture, 1996. 65. Luther, 1543, Ch. 3. 66. Luther, 1543, Ch. 6. 67. Luther, 1543, Ch. 3. 68. ‘Sermo Lutheri in natali Christi’, [December 25, 1514], in Martin Luthers Werke. Kritische Gesammtausgabe (Weimar: Hermann Boehlau, 1883) vol. 1, 28. 69. Luther, 1543, Ch. 12. 70. Luther, 1543, Ch. 12. 71. Luther, 1543, Ch. 13. 72. Luther, 1543, Ch. 7. 73. Luther, 1543, Ch. 9. 74. Luther, 1543, Ch. 12. 75. Luther, 1543, Ch. 16. 76. Luther, 1543, Ch. 13. 77. Luther, 1543, Ch. 13. 78. ‘Our people, however, must be on their guard against them, lest they be misled by this impenitent, accursed people who give God the lie and haughtily despise all the world. For the Jews would like to entice us Christians to their faith, and they do this wherever they can’, Luther, 1543, Ch. 3. 79. Luther, 1543, Ch. 13. 80. Luther, 1543, Ch. 17. 81. Luther, 1543, Ch. 1. 82. Luther, 1543, Ch. 18.

5 “Turks” and “Christians”: The Iconography of Possession in the Depiction of the Ottoman-VenetianHapsburg Frontiers, 1550–1689 Palmira Brummett In 1689, Bernard Randolph, in an English work entitled, The Present State of the Morea, wrote of the long and intermittent Ottoman siege of Candia on Crete, which culminated in Candia’s surrender in September of 1669: “All Europe has heard of this great Siege, how many thousand Bombs were cast into the City; How many Mines, and Fornellos were blown up; and how many bold assaults the Turks made ...”1 Randolph’s quote suggests a certain level of familiarity, a European audience attuned to the activities and advances of “the Turk.”2 While his claim is certainly overstated, if “all Europe” was not familiar with the details of the Ottoman wars in the Mediterranean, then at least certain members of the English literate classes were; and many others had learned to fear the Turk from broadsheets and the sermons of their clergymen. Just how familiar Europeans were with the nature or scope of the Ottoman Empire in the early modern era is, of course, the subject of considerable scholarly debate. The era itself has been called a: “... three centurieslong Christian-Muslim jihad that began around 1500.”3 Nabil Matar, in Turks, Moors, and Englishmen, has argued for seventeenth-century English familiarity with the Turk, juxtaposing the image of the familiar Turk to that of the novel American Indian, both peoples who required civilizing-conquest. One possessed the old Jerusalem, one inhabited the site of the new.4 Certainly images of “the Turk,” crafted in early modern European narratives as ferocious conquerors and barbarous infidels are familiar to contemporary historiography. They suggest self-evident boundaries, crafted by religious and cultural difference, which make clear the line where Europe ends and the Ottoman Empire begins. But the rhetorics and imagery of early modern Europe, though suffused with religious language, present a much more complicated vision of the space occupied 110

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by Ottomans and their rivals, and of the lines dividing (or not dividing) the polities of Europe and Asia. Mustafa Soykut in a periodization for European treatment of the Ottomans suggests that, at least in Italian literature, the “Turks” were viewed as invincible after 1453, vincible after Lepanto in 1571, and finally, after the failed Ottoman conquest of Vienna in 1683, they were viewed as the “innocuous Turk.”5 After that point, he proposes, interest in the manners and day-to-day activities of “the Turks” supplanted fear of their advances. Vienna and Lepanto have both been used as markers (temporal and spatial) of the limits of Ottoman reach; but what then is the status of the territories in between those two widely disparate points? Soykut has argued that after Lepanto, the Turk “was digested” in “the European mind.”6 From another perspective, John Michael Archer, assessing the relations (in European constructions) among Ottoman space, European space, and New World space, suggests that the “Old World,” of Europe, Asia, and Africa: “remained a vital, and even novel and unsettling space throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, its prestige strengthened rather than diminished by the renewal of antiquity that the New World promised.”7 Certainly the Ottomans were a primary factor in that making of the “Old World” vital and unsettling. Between the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and that of Cairo in 1517, the Ottomans had moved from regional state to empire, from a relatively unknown entity, to an expansionist, multicontinental power that threatened Rome and Vienna. The “Turks” were placed into Western historical narratives and given a past which linked the Ottomans to Troy, the Scythians, the Crusades, and the “heretical” teachings of the Prophet Muhammad. The Ottomans, that is, had been historicized, such that European narratives of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries could place them in a succession of militaristic opponents and kings whose antecedents, battles, and religious ideologies had an assigned place in the great scheme of history since the Flood. They stood at the end of a lineage of “unbelief,” occupying land and sea spaces that had once been “Christian,” including Jerusalem, Constantinople, and much of the Balkans. In this essay I propose to examine some of the ways in which the Ottomans were mapped onto those land and sea spaces (and onto the imaginations of early modern consumers), focusing particularly on the iconography of “Christian” and “Turk” along the Ottoman-HapsburgVenetian frontiers. While these polarizing labels did not reflect ground level realities of religion and ethnicity, they were a standard convention of late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European Christian

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representations. Maps, fortresses, ports, cities, and regions were marked with cross or crescent symbols to indicate the “side” that possessed them. Composite armies were homogenized into those of “Christians” and “Turks.” Banners, turbans, and tughs were used to mark territory, and to highlight victories, and defeats. Meanwhile, narratives and images celebrated the seizing of battle standards, their transport home, and their incorporation into sacred home space as emblematic of possession.

Between “Christian” and “Turk” The capital of the Ottoman Empire sat astride the continents of Europe and Asia; and the heart of the empire lay in Europe, in Rumelia which had become Ottoman space even before Constantinople fell. Yet the historiography of the early modern Eurasian world tends to insist on a dichotomy based on the opposition of the empire and “Europe” or Christendom and Islam. There are good reasons for such designations, at least if one takes the rhetorics of early modern Christendom into account. Its histories, sermons, and maps claimed Europe (not to mention Constantinople and Jerusalem) as indelibly Christian space, part of which had, “temporarily,” been conquered by the “infidels.” In many such narratives the divide between Christendom and Islam was not so much a spatial one as a divide between those chosen by heaven and those serving the interests of the devil. The frontiers of “infidelity” could thus be shifting and unclear. In other conceptualizations, the borderlines between Christian and Turk were made coincident with the sovereign territories of the doge, the emperor, and the sultan, or with the continental divisions of Europe and Asia. In such constructions, the Turks, as the Ottomans were called, were associated with Asia. In the 1620 English version of Andre Favyn’s, The Theater of Honor and Knight-Hood, or A Compendious Chronicle and Historie of the whole Christian World, the author has the following to say about “the first knowledge of the cruell and barbarous Turkes:” ... For in the yeare of Grace, One thousand and twelve; under the Reigne of Hugh Capet, an accursed race of people, wilde salvage, and cruell, knowne by the name of Turkes, issued from forth the deepes of Scythia, after they had embraced the doctrine of impious Mahomet, making their fury and barbarous nature felt in Aegypt, Syria, Palestine, and other places of Asia, where they put all to fire and Sword, not meeting with any one, that dared to make head

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against them: until such time as the Sarrazins ... expulsed thence these upstart new commers, and made them retire into a corner of Asia, as it is recorded by Haitonius the Armenian, in his description of Tartaria.8 Favyn assigns the “Turks” a place (Asia) and a time (AD 1012) in this passage. Although these “Turks” do not play a major role in his extensive work on orders, honors, insignia, and ceremonies of knighthood, they do emerge again in the text as the Ottomans of his own day. Grouped with (east) Indians and Jews, they are sulliers of Christianity (see Hallett’s comments on Luther’s hostility to Jewish Biblical exegesis, pp. 101–103). Writing of the pure, white, female dove as an embodiment of the Christian Church, Favyn characterizes that dove as swooning, surrounded by malignant forces. He imagines her. ... afflicted with torments and Martyrdomes, this dove behelde her selfe as dead and entranced, ... among the Scullionly potts, spits, and dripping panns, of Indian and Turkish Infidels, soyled in the Furnaces of persecutions, in the Synagogues of Heretiques, smoaked and darkened with infernall doctrine.9 Favyn’s vision of the Church as a cooked dove, sullied by the foul oils of infidelity, is an impressionistic, but not unusual, image of the Christian-Muslim divide. Such characterizations, standard in the repertoire of the early modern age, connected the Ottomans to their “wild” and “barbarous,” medieval, Turco-Mongol antecedents as enemies of Christendom and occupiers of Jerusalem. By 1620, the Ottomans had become the quintessence of infidelity, their enmity directed not so much against Europe as against the church itself, and its members. Even when early modern rhetorics of difference were directly spatial, the primary divide in European Christian “mapping” of the Ottomans in the two centuries separating the late fifteenth from the late seventeenth centuries was not so much a division between Europe and Asia or a division between the empires of Ottoman, Venetian, and Hapsburg, but rather a division between “Christians” and “Turks.” While these two designations suggest religion and ethnicity respectively, they meant, instead, protagonists from the realms headed by Christian monarchs on one “side” and those governed by opposing Muslim monarchs on the other, with a broad, noncontiguous zone of border territories in between, inhabited and governed by those whose religious allegiance might be ambiguous or changeable. Those representing, or fighting for,

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each “side” constituted “Christians” and “Turks,” respectively, each one spanning a wide array of ethnicities and devotional beliefs and practices. For those narrating the division of space, historical claims and imagined possession were just as valid as actual occupation in determining whose space was whose. Hence boundaries were absent, mutable, contested, or applicable only to certain “layers” of territory or population. The Turks, wherever (and whomever) they were, served as intruders into Christian space who must be identified and repulsed.

The iconography of possession Maps are one avenue for addressing the question posed by Randolph: How exactly did “Europe,” imagine the Ottomans in space in the early modern era? They illustrate the ways in which “Christians” and “Turks” were placed onto Balkan territory. Maps provide insight for apprehending the ways in which the limits of empire (and of culture) were conceived. Early modern maps often crafted space in terms of military encounter. They help illustrate whether the Ottoman Empire was viewed simply as a single block of infidel space or whether its territories were imagined as more diffuse, less clearly “owned,” more subject to designation and redesignation. Despite assumptions about the increasingly scientific nature of early modern European mapping, contemporary maps tend to provide a kaleidoscopic vision of history and memory.10 They collapse time to show Ottomans coexisting historically with Romans and Greeks (compare Colin Imber’s comments on the coexistence of the Ottomans with classical history, p. 58). They collapse space to place the journey from Vienna to Constantinople on an almost horizontal plane. “Turks” on sixteenth and seventeenth century European maps were not just a present-day threat, they were squatters on classical and Biblical space. They were heretics, converts, warriors, traders, takers of captives, and takers of heads. Their race was often indeterminate; and their costume was “oriental,” “classical,” or a hodgepodge drawn from the engravings and costume manuals of the day.11 The borders between “Turk” and “Christian” identity, like the borders between “Turk” and “Christian” space, were thus not necessarily clear, although they could be clarified within the map frame. By 1696 most, though not all, European maps named the Ottomans and designated their sovereign space through the indication of some type of border. For example, in 1696, N. De Fer, geographer of the French court, produced a wonderful illustrated map for the Dauphin entitled: “L’Asie, Ou tous les points Principaux ...,” a large and beautiful colored map surrounded by a series of ethnographic vignettes.12 De Fer clearly

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marked out the sovereign Ottoman state in the lands Ptolemy had labeled “the first part of Asia.” Dotted lines separated the sultan’s domain from Muscovy and from the lands of the Safavid shah in Iran. The border between Europe and Asia, however, was not clear. A large, red designation, “Frontières de l’Europe” is slashed from south-west to north-east across a contrasting and empty white space in eastern Europe, along a line reaching from northwest of Ragusa to northwest of Cracow. This inscription, apparently, is the cartographer’s conceptualization of the dramatic division between the Ottoman Empire (divided here into “Turquie en Europe,” and “Turquie en Asia”) and Europe (or whatever else he imagined the spaces to the north and west of this frontier to be). But the borders of Europe and of Christendom were not coincident. De Fer’s map suggests both the familiarity with the Ottomans posited by Randolph near the end of the seventeenth century and a certain ambiguity regarding the formal delimitation of Ottoman space. Indeed, if one sets up an array of early modern European maps there is no clear and consistent dividing line between Europe and Asia, even though the transition seemed to take place somewhere within Ottoman territory. If there was one line that clearly divided a space of “us” and “them,” “Christian” and “Turk” in European maps and geographic literature, it was probably the Danube, the long and formidable river which served as a primary line of defense against the Ottomans and a primary route of travel across the Balkans. The Danube provided a horizontal, physical marker which both divided and linked Ottoman and Christian space, with Vienna at one end and access to Istanbul at the other. The space between Vienna (by land) or Venice (by sea) and Istanbul was conflicted. It marked the stages of progress from the land of the “Christians” to the land of the “Turks.” When Ottoman space was recognized on European maps it was generally militarized. Ottoman space was the “abode of war” in the landscapes of the Balkans and the seascapes of the Aegean and Adriatic. Maps portrayed these two sites of conflict, focusing on the military ferocity of the Ottomans, but also focusing on the points in space (ports and fortresses) where the “Christian warrior” encountered the “Turk.” Ottoman armies and fleets were shown besieging or defending these bases which stood, in maps, for imperial, regional, and religious sovereignty. Fortresses and ports then, became the critical spaces, those whose loss signified the triumph of the Ottomans and a diminution of Christendom, as well as the power and wealth of its lords. The division between “Christian” and “Turk” when applied to a map, was made manifest in textual claims and in an iconography of possession which included flags, battle standards, military units, turbans,

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knights, janissaries, and the names of commanders or nations. The simplest indicators of Turk space and Christian space for European mapmakers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were the cross and the crescent. The crescent was an emblem that predated the Ottomans in the iconography of the Eurasian world, but the Ottomans did not adopt it as a symbol of their state until the eighteenth century.13 Instead, in the era under consideration here, the crescent was an iconic counterpart to the cross, employed by the mapmakers of “Christendom” to mark Ottoman identity and possession.14 Such is the case, for example, in a map appearing in Simon Pinargenti’s 1573 atlas, published in Venice. This atlas, comprised of maps by several mapmakers, is entitled: The islands found between Venice and Dalmatia and throughout the Archipelago as far as Constantinople, with their Fortresses and with the most notable lands of Dalmatia, newly designed for the benefit of Scholars of Geography. The map depicted here is by Nicolo N. (presumably Nelli) and dates to 1570. It is one of the multiple “news maps” produced in Venice at the time, depicting contemporary land and sea-based conflicts.15 The legend of Nelli’s map tells the tale; it reads, “Brazzo de Maina, a fortress of the Grand Turk in the Morea which was taken by the Illustrious Captain of the Gulf, the Magnificent Marco Querini with the armada of Candia (Fig. 5.1).”16 Neither the fortresses nor the ships in this battle image are clearly identified as they are in other, similar maps. But the large white flag, emblazoned with a cross, carried by the besiegers makes clear that it is a Christian force which is winning the day. A small flag, with a barely visible crescent, broken and hanging askew, also decorates the highest tower of the defeated fortress, indicating that it is the Turks who have lost possession of this small segment of Mediterranean space. Such coastal fortresses and cities changed hands periodically in the long struggle between Venice and the Ottoman Empire for control of sea lanes, port bases, and hinterlands in the Adriatic and the Archipelago. Venetian mapmakers depicted that struggle for hegemony by labeling the often iconic or generic cartographic images of city space with flags and emblems of possession. It was not so much the possession of regions that drew the attention of these mapmakers but the conquest of cities and fortresses, symbols of the broader surrounding territories from which taxes could be collected and trade routes dominated. In 1574 Giovanni Camocio, a printer in Venice, produced an atlas which assembled new and stock maps to celebrate the Christian naval victory over the Ottomans at Lepanto. It was entitled: Newly brought to

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Figure 5.1 Venetian map of “Brazzo de Maina”. Simon Pinargenti, Isole che son da Venetia nella Dalmatia, et per tutto l’Archipelago, fino a Costantinopoli, con le loro Fortezze e con le terre piu notabili di Dalmatia, nuovamente poste in disegno a beneficio de gli Studiosi di Geografia, Simon Pinargenti et compagnia, In Vinegia, M.D.L.XXIII. British Library, Maps C.24.g.10(.24). By permission of the British Library.

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light. Famous islands, ports, fortresses, and maritime territories, under the Illustrious Signoria of Venice and other Christian princes, and under the Signor Turco. This isolario, with 81 images in all, consists (in part) of news-maps, showing sieges or battles at specific ports.17 Taken together, the maps suggest some of the visual and textual modes by which the space of Christians and Turks was measured, marked, imagined, and linked to past and future. The title of Camocio’s atlas itself divides space, which belongs either to “Christian princes” including the republic of Venice, or the “Signor Turco.” The maps are relatively simple, but their iconography designates possession through flags, fortresses, boundary lines, legends, and ships and armies occupying or moving through space. The city of Castel Novo, for example, on the eastern side of the Adriatic is clearly labeled as Ottoman space (with a crescent flag and crescent top piece decorating its towers). That possession, however, is shown as contested, with the “galere grosse” of Venice and the batteries of Venetian forces besieging the city from land and sea. Borders, or “confini” are not marked (with legends or dotted lines) in this particular frame, as they are in some of Camocio’s maps. When they are marked, however, such “lines” of possession are finite. They suggest that the space just “over the hill,” beyond the fortress or just on the other side of the fleet in the harbor, “belongs” to the enemy. But in general, coastal fortresses are shown detached from their regional contexts, as is Castel Novo in this frame (Fig. 5.2). The atlas itself provides the context and the arrangement of space. Such images, often widely circulated in single sheets and reprinted in multiple copies in atlases like those of Camocio and Pinargenti, brought the successes, and the failures, of Christian armies before the eyes of urban publics in Italy, Germany, Hungary, and further afield. Despite the fact that the Ottomans had conquered the bulk of the Balkan peninsula by the time these images were circulated, maps preserved the notion that the Ottoman conquest was incomplete, intermittent (at least along the Dalmatian coast), and insecure.18 The Ottomans had seized Christian space but if the armies of Christendom were virtuous and vigilant, that space could be retaken. The vision of the Ottomans as heretical marauders rather than legitimate rulers also suggests a notion of the empire as transitory, an imposition on Christian space that would not be permitted to stand. That message is conveyed even more forcefully in the iconography of cartouches and medallions inscribed onto Ottoman sovereign space in European maps. Thus, for example, the large 1594 map Hungariae

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Figure 5.2 Castel Novo. Giovanni Battista Camocio, Isole famose, porti, fortezze, e terre maritime, sotto poste alla Ser.ma Sig.ria di Venetia, ad altri Principi Christiani, et al Sig.or Turco, novamente poste in luce. In Venetia alla libraria del segno di S. Marco, [1574]. Folger Shakespeare Library, G1015 C3, map 20. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

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Descriptionem, by Alexander Maier, spanning the territory from Vienna to Belgrade, indicates the extent of Ottoman conquest through the crescent markers attached to cities strewn across its landscape. Figures of Ottoman armies with crescent flags also dot the landscape. Small legends on the body of the map note the dates when key towns were conquered, reminding the viewer of the history of those places and of the ongoing threat of the “Turk.” But the center of the map, next to the conquered cities of Buda and Pest, is inscribed with a large medallion showing the arms of Hungary emblazoned across the chest of the Hapsburg eagle.19 This emblem suggests the Hapsburg claim of entitlement to what had become Ottoman lands (Buda was conquered in 1529 and most of Hungary incorporated into the Ottoman provincial system in 1541). Maier’s map expresses both the threat of the Muslim Turks overwhelming what was left of Hungary and the hope that Kaiser Rudolph II (Holy Roman Emperor, 1576–1612) would restore the lost territories to a rule that was indelibly Christian. Even though the Ottomans governed the Balkans through the intermediacy of Christian notables, that condition of mixed communal authority was not reflected on contemporary maps.20 Buda was thus “Turk” space with its history as “Christian” space preserved and the time of its return to Christian rule anticipated (Fig. 5.3). The Hungarian coat of arms is repeated as a device, emblematic of victory, in a map published by Theodore de Bry (1528–98) in Frankfurt in 1596. Like Maier’s map, this one surveys the territory of “Hungary and Transylvania” from Vienna to Belgrade, marking Ottoman space with cities decked with crescents. Its cartouche, nonetheless, shows Christian knights vanquishing turbaned Turks; these figures are posed on either side of the crown and coat of arms of Hungary, with its characteristic cross. Beneath this image of fallen Turks, the inscription in Latin suggests Christian unity (Fig. 5.4). It reads: Oh Hungary, why do you fear the invasion of the wavering Turks, While the German and Italian soil succors you; And the Transylvanian hero bears pious aid: And while victory in all things belongs to Christ Jesus.21 The cartouche of a later seventeenth-century map, by the Dutch mapmaker Justus Danckerts, combines this same message of sadness over lost territory with one of encouragement and aggression. The legend identifies the subject of the map as “Hungary, Greece, and the Morea,” and “regions that once were Christian.”22 Perched on top of the legend “stone,” however is an eagle clutching a sword and mounting the globe, an image suggesting

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Figure 5.3 The Arms of Hungary emblazoned across the chest of the Hapsburg eagle. Alexander Maier, “Hungariae Descriptionem,” 1594. British Library, Maps 28195(.27). By permission of the British Library.

the “world conquering” emperor. Next to the legend an adolescent, Christlike figure, a halo surrounding his head, extends his cross before the names of the Balkan provinces. The message of this juxtaposition of symbols of faith and militarism seems clear; the spaces once Christian must be Christian again, redeemed by force of arms. And indeed, at the feet of this holy figure appears a scene of battle with turbaned figures engaged in ferocious combat with their foes (Fig. 5.5). This map is centered on the Danube with Italy, the Adriatic, Greece, and the Archipelago occupying roughly the lower half of the map. The sovereignty of the Ottomans is nowhere in evidence on the body of the map. What appears of the western part of Anatolia is marked, “Asiae Pars Quae Natolia” and the territory across the straits in Europe is marked “Romania,” evoking thereby a vision of historical space not subject to the Turks.

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Figure 5.4 The Hungarian coat of arms. Theodore de Bry, “Vetutissimi potentissimique Hungariae Regni Transsylvaniaeque principatus, post varias editions, delineato ... .” Francof[urti ad Moenum], 1596. British Library, Maps 28195(.91). By permission of the British Library.

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Figure 5.5 Hungary, Greece and the Morea. Justinum Dankerum, “Regni Hungariae ...” Amstelodami, [1630?] British Library, Maps 28195(.31). By permission of the British Library.

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While the Hapsburg “Caesar” and his allies were represented symbolically in the cartographic representations of De Bry and Dankerum, another mapmaker placed the image of the emperor himself on the body of the map. Johann Bussemecher, working in Cologne around 1600, “claimed” Balkan space by inscribing a portrait of Emperor Rudolph II in the northeastern corner of his map of “Sclavonia, Croatia, Bosnia et Dalmatiae Pars Maior.”23 Rudolph’s portrait, circled by a litany of his titles and lands, sits just above the city of Belgrade and the directional inscription for the “Orient” marking the eastern edge of the map. His gaze is directed westward over the territories shown. This map was gathered into an atlas of 82 maps, prepared in Cologne, which includes another map by Bussemecher of “Thracia et Bulgaria Cum Vicinis.” That map, dated 1596, apparently a counterpart to the map shown here, positions a medallion of the Ottoman Sultan, Mehmet III (r. 1595–1603) in the southwest corner of the map, his eyes directed eastwards towards Anatolia. These maps bear no crescents, crosses, or boundary markers. The gaze of rulers, instead, suggests which lands belong to whom (Fig. 5.6).

Ottoman battle standards Maps thus commemorated the struggle for sovereignty with images of dominance and submission: fallen foes, chained captives, and triumphant commanders. Both generic images (cannons, swords, horses) or those specific to a people or faith (flags, headgear, standards, and houses of worship) were used to embody those who occupied mapped space. Such emblems might fix possession in and on a certain territory, or they might serve as trophies signifying the conquest of a distant and unseen space. In Camocio’s atlas (a collection of images assembled to embody stages of sea travel, celebrate Christian victories, and educate the Venetian consumer about the ways in which the “Turk” represented himself) there is a single, stand-alone representation of an Ottoman battle standard (Fig. 5.7). The legend reads: The form and true image of the finial of the standard of the Pasha General of the Turkish navy, all of gold filigree and inscribed on both sides with Turkish letters, which finial was presented to the Signoria by the Honorable Gentlemen Paulo and Bernardino, lance brothers, at the sign of the Madonna in the Rialto; it is three times larger than shown here.24

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Figure 5.6 Sclavonia, Croatia, Bosnia and Dalamatia, featuring Rudolph II. Johann Bussemecher, “Sclavonia, Croatia, Bosnia et Dalmatiae Pars Maior,” [Coln], [ca. 1600], in Geographische Hantbuch. British Library, Maps C.39.c.1. By permission of the British Library.

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Figure 5.7 Ottoman Standard. Giovanni Battista Camocio, Isole famose, porti, fortezze, e terre maritime, sotto poste alla Ser.ma Sig.ria di Venetia, ad altri Principi Christiani, et al Sig.or Turco, novamente poste in luce. In Venetia alla libraria del segno di S. Marco [1574]. Plate 40. Folger Shakespeare Library: G1015 C3. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

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With this particular frame, Camocio incorporated a vision of the trophies of war into his assembly of maps depicting contested Adriatic and Aegean space. Here, the Ottoman standard was a symbol of the transfer of possession and authority from the Ottomans, defeated at Lepanto in 1571, to the Venetians and their allies in the Holy League.25 Never mind that by the time the atlas (a combination of old and new plates) was published the Ottomans had rebuilt their fleet, the Holy League had collapsed, and Venice (in 1573) had concluded a peace agreement with the sultan.26 The “Pasha General’s” own standard had passed into the hands of Venetian soldiers; hence the sultan’s forces had been subordinated to Venice. This image converted the “Turks” into captives, their emblems erected as memorials in Venetian space and their words captured, translated, and made known in Christian works.27 The Ottomans too took trophies and incorporated images of captivity and submission into the campaign miniatures that celebrated and mapped their conquests.28 Such miniatures might mark Christian fortresses with flags emblazoned with the cross or coats of arms, but they did not mark Muslim ones with the crescent.29 Over a century after Camocio published his atlas, another Venetian author made a point of highlighting the capture, transport, and glorification of an Ottoman battle standard as a memento of victory. In 1686, P. M. Coronelli (1650–1718), the Venetian Republic’s official geographer, produced a work entitled (in its English translation): An Historical and Geographical Account of the Morea, Negropont, and the Maritime Places, as Far As Thessalonica; Illustrated with 42 Maps of the Countries, Plains, and Drafts of the Cities, Towns and Fortifications.30 The fact that this work was swiftly translated into French, then into English, and reproduced in another Italian edition in 1688, suggests that Randolph may have been partly right when he suggested that “all Europe” knew about Ottoman sieges, bombs, and mines. In this work, Coronelli included a description of the 1685 siege of Coron (on the southwest tip of the Morea).31 It was entitled: “The Relation of the Battel before Coron, by the Venetian Forces against the Ottomans, the 7th of August 1685. With the Description and Draft of the Standard and Horses Tails, taken from the Turks.”32 This description collapses the events of several weeks into a summary history. But what is most interesting is the author’s attempt to present his audience with a visual image of the battle, highlighting the trophies of war and the diminution of Ottoman power and authority. The account includes five images: three maps of the fortress and its surroundings, an engraving of an Ottoman battle flag, and another of two tughs (horsetail standards) that were captured along with the flag (Fig. 5.8).

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Figure 5.8 Captured Ottoman Standard. P. M. Coronelli, An Historical and Geographical Account of the Morea, Negropont, and the Maritime Places, as Far As Thessalonica; Illustrated with 42 Maps of the Countries, Plains, and Draughts of the Cities, Towns and Fortifications. Written in Italian by P. M. Coronelli, Geographer to the Republick of Venice. Englished by R. W. Gent, London, Printed for Matth. Gillyflower at the Spread-Eagle in Westminster-Hall, and W. Canning at his Shop in Vine-Court in the Middle Temple, 1687. Folger Shakespeare Library, Rare Book 152–564q, p. 81. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

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The illustrations which accompany Coronelli’s account of the taking of the Ottoman standards are glossed to educate the Christian reader about those standards’ meaning and importance: The Figure which we have given represents the Magnificence of the Standard, and form of the Batons and Tails; the whole was designed and graved with so much care and exactness, that one who has the Skill of Blazonry, will easily comprehend not only its Grandeur, but likewise the Colours of this Standard; wherefore ‘tis needless to particularise it here: It was thought best to oblige the Curious with the interpretation of the Turkish Characters that make the Moon, and the Faces of the Lance on the end of the Standard.33 This page is filled with the image of a battle flag, its pole to the left topped by a fan shaped “plaque” with lines of “script” approximating Arabic letters. At the upper right, there is a single, stand-alone plaque also with an approximation of Arabic script, which does not, however, truly represent letters as does that in Camocio’s atlas. The banner itself has a strip of lettering toward the left side running from top to bottom reading (twice) “La illahi illallah Muhammad rasul allah” (There is no God but God and Muhammad is his messenger). Also noted is an “echelle de cinq piés geometriques” at the top of the page which suggests the size of the fringed banner and which demonstrates that the images were transferred directly from the French edition without benefit of translation. Explaining the action during which this booty was obtained, Coronelli writes that, in the course of a ferocious encounter, the Venetian general: ... poured upon them [the Ottomans] a Body of Foot and Dragoons, and ... in the end ... there were left 400 of them dead upon the place, and as many wounded: Our [men] got by this Action several worthy Spoils, amongst the rest seventeen Standards; and at their return into their Trenches, they exposed to the view of the Besieged 130 Turks Heads, as a frightful dismaying Spectacle.”34 The 130 Turks’ heads, like the broken lines on other maps, became indicators of a boundary, a newly defined one, a warning that Coron was now Venetian space. For Coronelli and his audience the Ottoman standards, as well as the Ottoman heads, symbolized a triumph of Christendom over the

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“Turks,” the same “victory” of reconquest anticipated by the emblems and cartouches of early modern maps. This victory, Coronelli notes, was secured by a “furious Christian charge.”35 He juxtaposes military to religious imagery in order to reinforce the sense that conquest derives from determination fired by faith. ... The Event was such, that the Victory which the Venetians gained in a very short time, was accompanied with the entire Defeat of their Enemies, and the Ground was all covered with dead and dying Men, and Streams of the unbelieving Blood ran down; in this Action, but few of the Christians were lost or wounded. Once past the displaying of heads and the streams of blood, however, Coronelli moves to describing the more enduring trophies, including both those that are immediately useful and those that can be taken home and displayed in perpetuity, to the greater glory of Christendom. A very rich Booty was found in the Turks Camp of Artillery, Arms, Ammunition, and Provision, with above 300 Horses, Tents, Standard[s], six Brass Guns, three whereof were marked with St. Mark of Venice, besides these the Imperial Standard adorned with Horse Tails, the mark of a general Command and a numerous Army. Munitions, horses, and tents were always very welcome spoils of war, some of which, like the three Venetian cannons, might change hands multiple times. Such items were often put to use fairly swiftly on other battlefronts. The “imperial standards,” however, tended to serve a different purpose. They were incorporated into Venetian ritual: By the order of the Senate this Monument of their Victory was designed for the Church of the Tolentini of Venice, to be there for ever exposed to the Eyes of the People, over the altar of St. Gaetan, as an Eternal Memorial that this Saints Festival was the day whereon the Venetians had so Glorious a Success against the Infidels; and at the same time it was Decreed that every year on the same day, this Festival should be kept with all the Solemnity possible, conformable to what was then done. The most Serene Doge, with the whole Senate and a general concourse of all the City, went on Wednesday the Twelfth of September, carrying the Standard with the Tails to that church, where they sung a Te Deum, and a solemn Mass was Celebrated in thanks to God, to the great Comfort and Edification of the People.36

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Thus the battle standards originally carried in procession by Ottoman troops departing the capital were reincarnated as evidence of Ottoman vulnerability.37 This seventeenth-century ritual incorporating Ottoman emblems into solemn Christian processions and edifices is reminiscent of the sixteenth-century celebrations surrounding the return of the victorious fleet to Venice in the aftermath of the battle of Lepanto in 1571. There, captured Ottoman flags were dragged through the sea, then used as centerpieces of the victor’s triumph, while the Te Deum and high mass solemnized more extensive and more secular festivities. “From 1572 until the fall of the Republic that day [of battle] was annually celebrated with a procession of the Doge and Signoria to the church of that same fortunate patron [St. Justina], outside which the captured Turkish standards were displayed to the populace.”38 And to this day churches and museums from Vienna to Pisa are decked with such trophies of war, Ottoman banners, tughs, and images of chained or defeated “Turks.”39 Coronelli’s text explains the home context for the Ottoman tughs, including an origin story and a commentary that compares Ottoman aggression to that of the “Sabins” who were doomed to be subordinated by the Romans. The Turks shew these Tails as a sign of their Resolution, to make new Levies [the Ottoman devs¸irme system], and that a great Army will march; and afterwards they give them to him that is to be the Commander in chief as a sign of good Augury. This Custom took its rise amongst them, from an Adventure that happened to them, when they first began to establish their Tyrannick Rule out of their own Country ... wanting Standards to range themselves under, they thought upon and made use of some Horses Tails ... calculating the future by their first Success, and think themselves, under these Colours, able to deal with the most Couragious of their Enemies, and resist their most furious Onsets. But as once the Sabins, a proud and fierce People, planted their Standard in the Face of the Romans to affront them, with these words; Sabinis Populis Quis Resistet; Who dares resist the Sabine People. The Romans answered them with an equal fierceness, in words beginning with the same Letters. Senatus Populus Que Romanus, The Senate and Roman People. So the Perfidious Ottomans will find their vain and ridiculous Sign opposed by the Sign that is revered in Paradise, which will one day procure their final Ruine, when we shall have made our selves worthy of this Favour from Heaven by our constant Prayers.40

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Thus Coronelli’s history became a sermon, reaching back to the glorious classical past of Rome to find an appropriate example of what happened to the prideful and arrogant. Prayer might set the stage for victory, but “fierceness” would secure it. The captured Ottoman standard thus became a sign, among various other material and heavenly signs recounted in this era, that the Ottomans were destined to be defeated, subordinated, and thrown out of Europe.41 The cross would triumph over the crescent. Other contemporary authors were not so sanguine about the possibilities for expelling the “Turks.” Like Coronelli, Edward Brown, an English physician and scholar, used the Romans as a reference point for remarking on the nature of empires, and looked to god for intervention against the “Turks.” But unlike Coronelli, Brown, in his 1673 narrative of travels through Balkan lands, suggested that the Ottomans might well extend their borders even further to the west. ... Though Augustus thought it a point of wisdom, to put some limit unto the Roman Empire, yet I do not find the Turks are of his judgment, but still endeavour to enlarge their Dominions, and when I consider that people, their hardy education, sober course of life, and obedience to their Superiours; that no Bassa can easily intend a revolt, but some others will discover him, in hope to obtain his place, or some great preferment; and that they so punctually observe the duty of their Charges; I am apt to think or fear, if he, who putteth bounds to the Sea, and saith hither thou shalt come and no further, doth not, out of his great mercy, put a stop to their further incursions they may probably obtain and conserve a far larger Empire, and even all Europe, unto the Western Ocean. Certain it is that they are unsatisfied with their present bounds and look beyond Hungaria, and I have heard them say, we must in due time come to Beatch, for so they call Vienna, and try our fortunes again. For Brown, only a merciful God could stay the expansion of the welltrained and willful “Turks.” As witness to his prediction regarding the ambitions and influence of the “Turk,” Brown, like the sixteenth-century Venetian mapmakers, again invokes the symbols of crescent and cross. At this day the Star and Half-moon are above the Cross, upon the Steeple of the Cathedral Church of St. Stephen, in the Emperour of Germany his Imperial City of Vienna; and it grieved me to see in all the Confines a sort of Cross which our heralds do not dream of, which

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is a cross Lunated after this manner, whereby the Inhabitants as they testify their Christianity, so they acknowledge the Turkish power.42 Here Brown inserts into his narrative a drawing of two crosses, one with crescents at the end of each arm and the other with a star and crescent at its top. He labels these: “A Cross with Half-moons set over the Churches in the Country which payeth contribution to the Turks in Hungary,” and “The Star and Half-moon upon the Steeple of St. Stephen’s Church of Vienna.”43 These emblems, the author suggests, send a message. Even though the Ottomans have failed to conquer Vienna, Christendom whether located in the Hapsburg capital, the broad frontier zone, or Ottoman lands is becoming acculturated to the “crescent.” And so the Balkan lands were indeed Islamized, even though the “Turks” were destined to fail in the 1683 siege of Vienna, and to lose Buda in 1686. As Edward Brown suggests, and as the markings on early modern maps demonstrate, possession of the frontier zone was not a simple question of conquest and loss. It involved layers of identity that changed over time and that were embodied in history and in sovereign claims, as well as in the physical occupation of space. Emblems such as battle standards and crescents juxtaposed to crosses on maps in early modern historical, geographic, and travel literatures constituted an iconography of possession that served to craft those layers of identity. Such emblems tell us more about conflict and the rhetorical claims of adherents of religions of the book than they tell us about coexistence. But the coexistence was there, beneath the surface of the maps, complicating the marking of territory, the borders of Europe, and the limits of Christendom.

Notes 1. Bernard Randolph (b. 1643), The Present State of the Morea, called anciently Peloponnesus: Together with a Description of the City of Athens, Islands of Zant, Strafades, and Serrigo. With the Maps of Morea and Greece, and several Cities. Also a true Prospect of the Grand Serraglio, or Imperial Palace of Constantinople, as it appears from Galata: Curiously Engraved on Copper Plates, Third Edition, London, Printed for Will. Notts, at the Queens-Arms in Pell Mall, Tho. Basset in Fleetstreet; and Thomas Bennet, at the Half-moon in St. Paul’s Church-yard, 1689, p. 70. This work occupies pp. 1–26 in, Folger Shakespeare Library, Rare Book, 135607q. Note that this is a third edition; the first seems to have appeared in 1686. See also, on the transition from Venetian to Ottoman Crete, Molly Greene, A Shared World: Christians and Muslims in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

134 “Turks” and “Christians” 2. It also suggests what Deborah Howard, Venice and the East: The Impact of the Islamic World on Venetian Architecture 1100–1500 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 45, has called “the mirror of the familiar,” a means of traveler-writers to allow their audiences to see the “Eastern” worlds described. 3. Robert Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast and Italy 1500–1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 140. Although Davis characterizes this “jihad” as both Christian and Muslim, the primary emphasis is on Christian victims. See also Daniel Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570-1630 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 9, 13–14, 153–64, 197. Vitkus provides a different frame for understanding the relationships of “Europe” and the “Turk.” That is, the fear of “turning Turk,” which for the English seems to mean both the (negative) fear of “becoming like the “other,” — Islamized or Turkified — and the (positive) — a movement into a more open and desirable commercial space and trans-cultural zone. See also Matthew Dimmock, New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern England (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate: 2005), pp. 20–86, 162–97. 4. Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). 5. Mustafa Soykut, Image of the “Turk” in Italy: A History of the “Other in Early Modern Europe: 1453–1683 (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz, 2001). See also, Lucette Valensi, The Birth of the Despot: Venice and the Sublime Porte, trans. Arthur Denner (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). 6. Soykut, p. 127. 7. John Michael Archer, in Old Worlds: Egypt, Southwest Asia, India, and Russia in early modern English Writing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 2, 9–10. Archer, pp. 1–2, calls the “Old World” a “European fiction,” juxtaposing it to the “theater of classical antiquity” which was the “three-part world of Asia, Africa, and Europe.” This latter designation works well for early modern European mapping of Ottoman space, although the boundaries of the first two parts do not remain fixed. Archer posits that Asia and Africa were associated with luxury and degeneration, with the “gendered, sexualized, and racially marked landscape of the “East” (p. 9). 8. Andre Favyn, The Theater of Honor and Knight-Hood or A Compendious Chronicle and Historie of the whole Christian World Containing The originall of all Monarchies, Kingdomes, and Estates, with their Empreours, Kings, Princes, and Governours, Their Beginnings, Continuance, and Successions, to this present Time. The First Institution of Armes, Emblazons, Kings, Heralds, and Pursuivants of Armes: With all the Ancient and Moderne Military Orders of Knight-hood in every Kingdome. Of Duelloes or Single Combates, with the Origianll, Lawes, and Observations. Likewise of Ioustes, Tourneys, and Tournaments, and Orders belonging to them. Lastly of Funerall Pompe, for Emperours, Kings, Princes, and meaner Persons, with all the rites and Ceremonies fitting for them. Written in French, by Andrew Favine, Parisian: and Advocate in the High Court of parliament M.DC. XX. London, Printed by William Iaggard, dwelling in Barbican, and are there to be sold, 1623, p. 366. Folger Shakespeare Library, Rare Book, 10717, copy 1. This excerpt is in a section on the history of the Holy Land and the “Voyages of French Princes.”

Palmira Brummett 135 9. Favyn, p. 342. 10. This observation reinforces Archer’s point about the “vitality” of Asia and Africa in the European imagination coincident with the revival of antiquity. An interesting discussion of the nature of the map as a “clear manifestation of the intellectual appropriation of territory,” in text and image, is found in Emanuela Casti, Reality as Representation: The Semiotics of Cartography and the Generation of Meaning (Bergamo: Bergamo University Press, Edizioni Sesante, 1998), pp. 9–10, 141–3, 148–50. Casti addresses the self-referential nature of maps and their conveying of meaning through what she calls “written text” and “cartographical text,” a useful designation, I think, for breaking down the apparent boundary between words and images on the map. 11. For example, Abraham de Bruyn (1540–87), Omnium Pene Europae, Asiae, Aphricae atque Americae Gentium Habitus (Antwerp: Michel Colijn, [1581]). For ethnographic renderings and costume, see Rachel Doggett, ed. New World of Wonders: European Images of the Americas 1492–1700 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1992), pp. 89–90; Julian Raby, Venice, Dürer, and the Oriental Mode (Totawa, NJ: Islamic Art Publications, 1982); Leslie Luebbers, “Documenting the Invisible: European Images of Ottoman Women, 1567–1867,” The Print Collector’s Newsletter, 24, no. 1 (March–April 1993), pp. 2–7; Amanda Wunder, “Western Travelers, Eastern Antiquities, and the Image of the Turk in Early Modern Europe,” Journal of Early Modern History, v. 7, no. 1–2 (2003), pp. 90–119; and Diane S. Butler, “Eyewitnessing Africa, A Blaeu Map and the Look of the Book,” paper delivered to the International Conference on the History of Cartography, Cape Town, South Africa, August 4–5, 2003. 12. N. De Fer, “L’Asie, Ou tous les points Principaux ...,” Newberry Library, Novacco 8F 9. 13. Maria Pia Pedani Fabris, “The Ottoman Venetian Frontier (15th–18th Centuries),” pp. 171–7, in The Great Ottoman Turkish Civilization, v. 1, ed. Kemal Çiçek (Ankara: Semih, 2000), see p. 176. 14. For an extended (if somewhat dated) analysis of that dichotomy in England, see Samuel Chew, The Crescent and the Rose: Islam and England During the Renaissance (New York: Octagon Books, 1965). 15. On news maps, see for example, Brendan Dooley, “The wages of war: battles, prints and entrepreneurs in late seventeenth-century Venice,” Word and Image, v. 17, nos. 1–2 (Jan.–Jun. 2001): 7–24; and Mario Infelice, “The war, the news, and the curious: Military gazettes in Italy,” pp. 216–35 in Brendan Dooley and Sabrina Baron, eds., The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 2001). Infelice notes the establishment of a regular network of dissemination by the second half of the sixteenth century (pp. 216–17). See also on map consumption, David Woodward, Maps as Prints in the Italian Renaissance: Makers, Distributors, and Consumers, The Panizzi Lectures, 1995 (London: The British Library, 1996), pp. 75–125. 16. Simon Pinargenti, Isole che son da Venetia nella Dalmatia, et per tutto l’Archipelago, fino a Costantinopoli, con le loro Fortezze e con le terre piu notabili di Dalmatia, nuovamente poste in disegno a beneficio de gli Studiosi di Geografia, Simon Pinargenti et compagnia, In Vinegia, M.D.L.XXIII. British Library, Maps C.24.g.10(.24). On Nelli, see Woodward, pp. 93–9.

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17. Camocio’s atlas was printed in multiple versions. Giovanni Battista Camocio, Isole famose, porti, fortezze, e terre maritime, sotto poste alla Ser.ma Sig.ria di Venetia, ad altri Principi Christiani, et al Sig.or Turco, novamente poste in luce. In Venetia alla libraria del segno di S. Marco, [1574], Folger Shakespeare Library, G1015 C3, map 20. See on Camocio, Rodolfo Gallo, “Gioan Francesco Camocio and his Large Map of Europe,” Imago Mundi, v. 7 (1950): 93–102, esp. pp. 96–100; and David Woodward, “‘The Four Parts of the World’ Giovanni Francesco Camocio’s Wall Maps,” The James Ford Bell Lectures, no. 34, Associates of the James Ford Bell Library, 1997 (University of Minnesota Libraries, Electronic Resources). 18. For detailed maps of the Ottoman empire in the late medieval and early modern eras, see Donald Pitcher, An Historical Geography of the Ottoman Empire from Earliest Times to the End of the Sixteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 1972); and Paul Magocsi, Historical Atlas of Central Europe, 2nd edition (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002). 19. Alexander Maier, “Hungariae Descriptionem,” 1594. British Library, Maps 28195(.27). 20. See Halil Inalck, The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age 1300–1600 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1973), pp. 35–42; Peter Sugar, Southeastern Europe under Ottoman Rule, 1354–1804 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1977); Ferenc Szakály, “The Early Ottoman Period, Including Royal Hungary 1526–1606,” in Peter Sugar, Peter Hanák, and Tibor Frank, eds., A History of Hungary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 83–99; and Géza Dávid and Pál Fodor, Ottomans, Hungarians, and Habsburgs in Central Europe: the Military Confines in the Era of Ottoman Conquest (Leiden: Brill, 2000). See also Gabor Ágoston, “A Flexible Empire: Authority and its Limits on the Ottoman Frontiers,” in Kemal Karpat and Robert Zens, eds., Ottoman Borderlands: Issues, Personalities, and Political Changes (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), pp. 15–32, on the nature of the “Hungaro–Ottoman condominium” of flexible and joint rule in frontier territories; and Catherine Bracewell, The Uskoks of Senj: Piracy, Banditry, and Holy War in the Sixteenth Century Adriatic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 36–45, on the Ottoman–Christian border arrangements supporting “a permanent, institutionalized system of raiding” (p. 36). 21. Theod. de Bry, “Vetutissimi potentissimique Hungariae Regni Transsylvaniaeque principatus, post varias editions, delineato ... .” Francof[urti ad Moenum], 1596. British Library Maps 28195(.91). On Hungary and Transylvania during this period see, Sugar, Southeastern Europe, pp. 157–8; Gunther Rothenberg, The Austrian Military Border in Croatia, 1522–1747 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1960); and Caroline Finkel, The Administration of Warfare: The Ottoman Campaigns in Hungary, 1593–1606 (Wien: VWGÖ, 1988), pp. 7–20. The Ottomans launched a campaign in Hungary in 1596, ultimately taking Mezökeresztes in a decisive victory for Sultan Mehmed III (r. 1595–1603). 22. Justinum Dankerum, “Regni Hungariae ...” Amstelodami, [1630?] British Library, Maps 28195(.31). 23. Johann Bussemecher, “Sclavonia, Croatia, Bosnia et Dalmatiae Pars Maior,” [Coln], [ca. 1600], in Geographische Hantbuch. British Library, Maps C.39.c.1. See also, Robert Donia and John Fine, Bosnia and Herzegovina: A Tradition Betrayed (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 49.

Palmira Brummett 137 24. “Forma et vero ritratto del pomo over Cimiero del Stendardo principale del Bassa Generale dell’Armata turchesca, il qual era tutto d’Argento dorato et da tutte due le parti vi erano intagliato lettere turchesche, il qual cimiero fu presentato all [Signoria ?] di Venetia; Per Mx. Paulo [?] et Mx. Bernardino lancia fratelli orefici, alla insegna della madonna in Rialto; la sua grandezza era tre volte magior ch questo disegno.” Audiences in European cities were also consuming images of other Ottoman emblems, for example, the tughra or imperial signature. Such an image was incorporated, for example, in Samuel Purchas, Purchas his pilgrims [and] Purchas his pilgrimage, published in London in 1626 which reproduced the tughra on a “letter patent: from the sultan;” see Alastair Hamilton, Arab Culture and Ottoman Magnificence in Antwerp’s Golden Age (Oxford: The Arcadian Library and Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 96–7. 25. On Lepanto, see, for example, Andrew Hess, “The Battle of Lepanto and its Place in Mediterranean History,” Past and Present, no. 57 (November, 1972), pp. 53–73. See also, Halil Inalck, “Lepanto in the Ottoman Documents,” pp. 185–92, in Il Mediterraneo nella seconda metà del ‘500 alla luce di Lepanto (Firenze: 1974); John Guilmartin, Gunpowder and Galleys: Changing Technology and Mediterranean Warfare at Sea in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 221–52; John Julius Norwich, Venice: The Greatness and the Fall (London: Allen Lane, 1981), 222–32; and Maria Pia Pedani, “Some Remarks upon the Ottoman Geo-Political Vision of the Mediterranean in the Period of the Cyprus War (1570–1573),” pp. 23–35, in Colin Imber, Keiko Kiyotaki and Rhoads Murphey, eds., Frontiers of Ottoman Studies: State, Province, and the West, v. II (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005). 26. See Hans Theunissen, “Ottoman-Venetian Diplomatics: The ‘Ahd-Names: The Historical Background and the Development of a Category of PoliticalCommercial Instruments together with an Annotated Edition of a Corpus of Relevant Documents,” Electronic Journal of Oriental Studies, I (1998), no. 2, pp. 1–698, esp. p. 174 (University of Utrecht); and Maria Pia Pedani Fabris, “The Ottoman Venetian Frontier.” 27. The legend for the standard which is shown in mirror image reads: “Interpretation of the Turkish letters that are on the above noted finial: On the part which one sees: God—Have no Other God—Muhammad is his nuncio. On the other part: To the faithful, divine, auspicious, and ornamented; in worthy military endeavors God favors Muhammad.” Interpretatione delle lettere Turchesche che sono nel soprascritto pomo: et prima. dalla parte che si vede Iddio Non A’ Altro Dio: Maumetho Nuncio De Dio. Da l’altra parte Alli fideli divino Auspitio et ornamento: nelle degni imprese Dio favorische Maumetho. 28. See Palmira Brummett, “A Kiss is Just a Kiss: Rituals of Submission Along the East-West Divide,” pp. 107–31, in Matthew Birchwood and Matthew Dimmock, eds., Cultural Encounters Between East and West, 1453–1699 (Newcastle-upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2005). 29. There may be exceptions. We do not have many Ottoman maps accessible for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries although we know that the Ottomans produced boundary maps and that there were multiple-map ateliers in Istanbul in the seventeenth century. Ottoman miniatures did display tughs and flags carried by Ottoman forces, but often the banners

138

30.

31.

32. 33.

34. 35. 36.

“Turks” and “Christians” were plain. See, for example, the range of Ottoman miniatures depicting campaigns in the Balkans by Géza Fehér, Türkische Miniaturen aus den Chroniken der ungarischen Feldzüge (Budapest: Corvina Magyar Helikon, 1976). See also, Ahmet Karamustafa, “Introduction to Ottoman Cartography,” and “Military, Administrative, and Scholarly Maps and Plans,” pp. 206–27; J. M. Rogers, “Itineraries and Town Views in Ottoman Histories,” pp. 228–55; and Svat Soucek, “Islamic Charting in the Mediterranean,” pp. 263–92; all in J. B. Harley and David Woodward, eds., The History of Cartography, v. 2, book 1, Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian Societies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). I am using here the English translation, P. M. Coronelli, An Historical and Geographical Account of the Morea, Negropont, and the Maritime Places, as Far As Thessalonica; Illustrated with 42 Maps of the Countries, Plains, and Draughts of the Cities, Towns and Fortifications. Written in Italian by P. M. Coronelli, Geographer to the Republick of Venice. Englished by R. W. Gent, London, Printed for Matth. Gillyflower at the Spread-Eagle in Westminster-Hall, and W. Canning at his Shop in Vine-Court in the Middle Temple, 1687, Folger Shakespeare Library, Rare Book 152–564q. On Coronelli, see the introduction to Vincenzo Coronelli, Ships and other sort of Craft used by the Various Nations of the World, Venice 1690, Mario M. Witt, ed. and trans. (London: Francis Edwards, 1970), pp. v–xiii; and Denis Cosgrove, “Global illumination and enlightenment in the geographies of Vincenzo Coronelli and Athanasius Kircher, in David Livingstone and Charles Withers, eds., Geography and Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 33–66. Coron was taken in August 1685 by Francesco Morosini, beginning a successful set of campaigns to retake the Morea by Venice and its allies (German, papal, Tuscan, and the Knights of St. John). Coronelli, An Historical and Geographical account of the Morea, pp. 74–84 (description of the standards). Two images of standards taken from the Ottomans appear on unnumbered pages after page 74: first, “Etendart pris Sur les Turcs par l’armeé des Venetiens à la Bataille donneé devant Coron, 1685”; second, a large cartouche with a tugh on either side. The cartouche reads: “Dessin des Queues Prises avec L’ETENDARD par les Venetiens Sur les Turcs a la Battaille Devant Coron l’an 1685.” The tughs each have 4 braided strands hanging from near their tops down along the horsetails. Coronelli, p. 74. Coronelli, p. 81. See, for a similar Venetian representation (dating from 1687) of an Ottoman banner and tughs (which are juxtaposed to a cross), Alberto Tenenti, “Profilo di un conflitto secolare,” in Venezia e i Turchi: Scontri e confronti di due civiltà, ed. Carlo Pirovano (Milan: Electa Editrice, 1985), figure 28, p. 32. ZdzisAaw Z˙ gulski, Jr., Ottoman Art in the Service of Empire, (New York: New York University Press, 1992), pp. 18, 34, 47, provides some images of Ottoman standards, and in the surrounding texts, pp. 1–60, addresses the symbols, fabrics, and meanings of Ottoman flags and some of their antecedents. Coronelli, pp. 75–6. Coronelli, pp. 79–81. Coronelli, pp. 80–1. “Tolentins” is the church of St. Nicolo di Tolentini where several of the doges were buried, including Giovanni Corner in 1722 and Paolo Venier in 1789.

Palmira Brummett 139 37. On Ottoman military ceremonial practice, see Rhoads Murphey, Ottoman Warfare 1500–1800 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), pp. 152–60; and Nicolas Vatin and Gilles Veinstein, Le Sérail ébranlé: Essai sur les morts, depositions et avènements des sultans ottomans XIVe–XIXe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2003) which addresses accession ceremonies among others. 38. Norwich, Venice: The Greatness and the Fall, pp. 227–8. See also pp. 207–21 on Venetian rituals and banners. Also on the role of the Ottomans in shaping Venetian myth and ritual, see Edward Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 28, 238. For an anonymous image of a celebratory procession in St. Mark’s Square, see Robert Mantran, “Venezia e i Turchi,” pp. 250–67, in Venezia e i Turchi, ed. Pirovano, figure 304, p. 260. For other contemporary rituals and their trappings of material culture, see Barbara Wisch and Susan Munshower, Art and Pageantry in the Renaissance and Baroque, Part 1, Triumphal Celebrations and the Rituals of Statecraft, Papers in Art History from the Pennsylvania State University, v. VI (University Park, PA.: Pennsylvania State University, 1990). Triumphs, of course, were standard in both Europe and Asia long before the Serenissima confronted the Porte. 39. The Church of the Cavaliers of St. Stephen in Pisa displays captured Ottomans banners, wood engravings showing the return of vessels from Lepanto, and captive Turks with crescent banners and tughs, see: http://www.stilepisano.it/immagini/Pisa_chiesa_dei_Cavalieri_di_Danto_Ste fano.htm. 40. Coronelli, pp. 83–4. On the Ottoman levy of non-Muslim boys, the devs¸irme, see Colin Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1481 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 131–42. 41. For examples of such signs, see Kenneth Setton, “Western Hostility to Islam and Prophecies of Turkish Doom,” Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society, v. 201 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1992); and Franco Cardini, Europe and Islam (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), p. 160. 42. Edward Brown, M. D. (1644–1708), A brief account of some travels in Hungaria, Servia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Thessaly, Austria, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, and Friuli ... by Edward Brown, M.D. of the College of London, Fellow of the R. Society, and physician in ordinary to his Majesty (London: Printed by T. R. for Benj. Tooke, 1673), pp. 82–3, Folger Shakespeare Library, Rare book, 145249q. 43. Brown, p. 83.

6 Confounding Babel: The Language of Religion in the English Revolution Matthew Birchwood

In 1641 a number of the parishioners of St Martin’s Orgars in Cannon Street took advantage of the prevailing opinion against Archbishop Laud and his ‘popish’ innovations in order to campaign for the deprivation of their minister. Dr Walton had, they complained, ‘in despight and malice towards divers of his Parishioners, whom he knew well would be troubled at it ... commanded [the Churchwarden] in the King’s name, & in the name of the Lord Archbishops grace of Canterbury, forthwith to take the Communion Table, which then stood in the midst of the Chancell compassed in on all sides with a very faire raile, and to set it, and mount it up under the East window is forme of an Altar’.1 Meddling with the church architecture was only the first of numerous charges levelled at Walton which included the telling complaint that ‘the said Doctor not content with the usuall Tythes of the Parish ... to gaine an Augmentation ... according to the very valew of mens houses ... [had] commence[d] severall suites in the Ecclesiasticall Courts’.2 Whatever the real motivation behind the petition, Walton did find himself ejected by Parliament from his living in London and, in common with many displaced churchmen, sought refuge in the king’s encampment at Oxford. It seems likely that during these years it was here that Walton conceived of the monumental project upon which his reputation now rests: the Biblia Sacra Polyglotta or London Polyglot Bible produced between 1654 and 1657. Before the war, Oxford had emerged as an important centre for the study of ‘Eastern’ languages, particularly Arabic, thanks largely to the patronage of Archbishop Laud. In 1634, as chancellor of the university, Laud had endowed Oxford with its first chair of Arabic and appointed Edward Pococke to the position. Pococke, then chaplain to the merchants at the Aleppo factory of the Levant Company, had studied under 140

Matthew Birchwood 141

William Bedwell and used his time there to further his studies in Arabic as well as Hebrew, Syriac and Ethiopic. Unlike virtually all of the Arabist scholars before him, including Bedwell, Pococke was not content to confine his study of Arabic language and culture to the library. Instead, the thriving business of English merchants would provide the means for acquiring and examining new manuscripts in furtherance of these intellectual goals. Having been established in the Levant for almost 50 years by this point, the activity of the English merchants provided both the means and, for some, possibly the motivation for Arabic studies. A letter in the State Papers for February 1634 entitled ‘The King to the Turkey Company’ illustrates Archbishop Laud’s willingness to commandeer the resources of state and private enterprise in order to augment the collection of eastern manuscripts in the Bodleian library: The King has also considered that there is a great deal of learning fit to be known written in Arabic, and great scarcity of Arabic and Persian books in this country, wherefore he requires that every ship of that company at every voyage shall bring home one Arabic or Persian manuscript book, to be delivered to the master of the company, and by him to the Archbishop of Canterbury, who shall dispose of them as the King shall think fit, provided that the books so to be brought be any other than Alkarons, because there is a great choice of them here already.3 In this way, the industry of the Levant Company became central to the circulation of the texts required to feed the new intellectual industry at home and set Arabic studies in England on a powerful trajectory. Up until the 1630s, England had lagged behind its continental counterparts. As recounted by Russell and Toomer, the first centres for the study of oriental languages grew up in Catholic Europe.4 In Paris, Hebrew and Arabic had been taught at the University since at least 1517 when the Italian scholar Agostino Giustiniani was invited to lecture there; by 1538, Arabic studies were firmly established with the installation of Guillaume Postel as Professor of Mathematics and Oriental Languages at the College Royal, in effect the first Arabic chair in Europe. In Rome, a substantial collection of eastern manuscripts was already being accumulated and the foundation of the first Arabic printing press, under the patronage of Cardinal Ferdinand de Medici in 1584, signalled the Vatican’s commitment to the study of Arabic texts. In fairly short order, representatives of Protestant Europe followed suit. Franciscus Raphelengius set up a second press in Leiden in the early 1590s and held

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the professorship there. In the early years of the seventeenth century, with the appointment of the celebrated Oriental scholar Thomas Erpenius in 1613, Leiden became quickly established as the most prestigious centre for Arabic learning in Western Europe. It was not until 1612 that an English writer made the first published contribution to Arabic scholarship. Significantly, this took the form of a translation of the Epistles of John by William Bedwell. Lacking the logistical and institutional support of his European rivals, however, Bedwell was forced to make the journey to Leiden in order to publish both the Arabic original and his Latin translation. At the same time Bedwell attempted to procure an intact set of second-hand Arabic types from sets considered worn out by the printers at Leiden. Despite Bedwell’s best efforts however, the facilities to produce Arabic type would not exist in England for another 35 years or more and Bedwell’s life work, an expansive Arabic dictionary, remained unpublished at his death in 1632.5 Again, it was Archbishop Laud who would be responsible for obtaining the first set of types, sending a London bookseller, Samuel Brown, to Leiden to buy equipment. In January 1637, Brown purchased a set of punches and matrices from the estate of a deceased typefounder capable of reproducing two sorts of Arabic although, according to Geoffrey Roper ‘it is generally reckoned, by printing historians, that Oxford University did not get good value for the 2300 guilders which it paid’.6 In 1615, however, Bedwell had published a curious treatise that, in typical English fashion, was poised somewhere between an attack on Islam and a call for a greater understanding of its language and religion. Entitled Mohammedis Imposturae: That is, A Discovery of the Manifold Forgeries, Falshoods, and horrible impieties of the blasphemous seducer MOHAMMED [etc.], the main body of the work consists of a translation of an ancient Arabic text reporting a conference purportedly ‘had between two Mohametans, in their return from Mecha’. Naturally enough, their conversation turns to a refutation of the Prophet and the Qu’ran. Also typical of English treatments in the period is the impulse to compare the ‘Falshoods’ of Islam with other examples of professed wisdom, both political and religious. In his preface ‘To the Christian Reader’, Bedwell adopts a rhetorical positioning that would recur throughout the century: For in the Alkoran, saith a learned Divine, there is no one opinion so impious & wicked, which may not be found in the bookes of those writers which I have before spoken of; to wit, Irenaeus, Tertullian,

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The Ecclesiastical historians, Epiphanius, Philastrius, and Augustine; whose bookes do breed well nere as oft as conies: And the printers do thereby reape no small gaines, and withal do deserve very well of all good students. Some things also, in the discoveries of old heresies, are met withal, more absurd and grosse, then the Alkoran doth afford any.7 Thus, alongside the conventional condemnation of the heretical ‘Alkoran’ is a defiant justification for its study (see the similar arguments discussed by Dimmock on p. 82). Appended to the dialogue are two more treatises, The Arabian Trudgman and an Index of the Chapters of the Alkoran, making Bedwell’s publication a seminal point in the history of English Qur’¯anic studies. The former simply constitutes a glossary of offices held in Islamic society. His Index, however, with its translation and occasional annotation of each ‘Assurat’ of the Qur’¯an, might be considered the first step towards the organised study of the Islamic holy text in England. Although Pococke in Oxford had secured a powerful patron in Laud, the very first Arabic chair in England had been appointed two years earlier at Cambridge in 1632. Another former pupil of Bedwell’s, Abraham Wheelocke, was granted the professorship which was inaugurated by Thomas Adams, a prominent London merchant. From the outset, the professed motivation for promoting the study of Arabic was both businesslike and evangelical. To some extent, the stated goal of the Arabists had always been partly missionary. Earlier in the century Bedwell’s translation of the gospels of St. John and his Mohammedis Imposturae had been conceived in this vein. In May 1936, writing to Adams, the Vice Chancellor of the University reinstituted the purpose of the newly founded lecture: The worke itself was conceived to tend not onely to the advancement of good Literature by bringing to light much knowledge which yet is lockt up in that learned tongue; but also to the good service of the King and State in our commerce with those Eastern nations and in God’s good time to the enlarging of the borders of the Church, and propagation of Christian religion to them who now sitt in darkeness.8 The hope that knowledge of eastern languages could not only illuminate the true message of the Gospels, but actually bring that message to those ‘who now sitt in darkeness’ was a potent fantasy for churchmen pontificating from the rarefied environs of Oxford and Cambridge. This two-fold justification – to facilitate ‘commerce’ with the Ottoman

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Empire while promoting an expectation of their ultimate conversion to Anglicanism – might be made to sound faintly plausible in the 1630s when ‘King and State’ were still considered part of the same entity. The events of the civil war though would very shortly explode the selfconfidence of the academic and ecclesiastical establishment. Just as the study of Arabic was beginning to establish roots in England it looked set to be destroyed by the war between King and Parliament. In Oxford, Laud’s patronage was fast becoming a liability. In 1641, the Archbishop had extended his endowment in perpetuity, stipulating that an annual stipend be paid to fund the chair from income from his lands. In only a matter of months those lands would be threatened with sequestration and in December of that year Laud was impeached for treason, subsequently imprisoned in the Tower and finally executed in 1644. Following Edgehill and the King’s retreat to Oxford, the rarefied environs of the colleges had been transformed into virtual garrisons. The college where Pococke had probably delivered his first lecture, Christ Church, was designated as the royal residence and while the great hall hosted meetings of the king’s counsel, the college quadrangle was converted into a cattle pen.9 Disruption of scholarly pursuits of all kinds was inevitable and, with his fortune so closely tied to that of his disgraced patron, Pococke’s position looked increasingly precarious. Nevertheless, as Toomer has demonstrated, while the revolution heralded a series of ‘personal difficulties and persecutions’ for the Orientalist, these years must also have been a time of great scholarly productivity. In 1642, Pococke had been granted the living of Childrey, Berkshire but was constantly harassed there for his perceived royalism and Laudian associations. In 1644, following the sequestration of Laud’s estates, he lost the stipend from his Arabic chair, the payment of which was only restored three years later thanks to the intervention of Selden, a prominent parliamentarian and himself an oriental scholar. Oxford fell to parliamentary troops in 1647 and, following the execution of the king, Pococke, having avoided the mandatory ‘engagement’ or oath of allegiance, was again threatened with the loss of his ecclesiastical and academic positions. However, while the canonry of Christ Church was given over to Peter French, Cromwell’s brother-in-law, Pococke hung on to the Hebrew and Arabic chairs following a petition that was widely supported at the university. In the midst of these vicissitudes, however, Pococke succeeded in publishing his groundbreaking Specimen historae Arabum (1650), a densely annotated edition of Abu ‘l Faraj’s thirteenthcentury history, and the culmination of his diligent study of Arabic manuscript sources.

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Outside the aegis of the two universities, there is also evidence for a lively interest in Arabic studies in the 1640s. Preserved in the Thomason Tracts and dated June 1648, a fulsome petition addressed to the Commons, and submitted by ‘about 40 Ministers, and 60 Citizens of quality’ evokes a picture of academic life in London: That in August last, in London House a Lecture was happily begun for the propagation of piety, and learning, in the discovery of the oriental Languages (to this nation remaining but yet obscure) which hitherto hath been elaborately performed twice a week, since that time neer foure score Lectures in Latine, and highly approved by those of greatest parts and learning that frequent the same ... And forasmuch as an estimate hath been taken of the necessary charge which is requisite for the maintenance of Professors, and Students, as also for the erection of a Presse, for those Languages for the more effectual prosecution of the desired ends ... Therefore your Petitioners bold to make this humble addresse to your Honours, That if to your wisdomes this kind of learning, on which the clearer knowledge of the sacred Scriptures, and our usefulnesse for the propagation of the Gospel, to such as understand those languages, and their usefulnesse to us so much dependeth, and is therefore in the present age so much esteemed by other reformed Churches, shall also be judged usefull for this kingdome.10 The same twofold ‘usefulnesse’ of Oriental scholarship – to propagate the Gospel abroad and facilitate its understanding at home – clearly chimed with equivalent rationales proffered at the universities. The lecture to which the petition refers was given by the German orientalist Christian Ravis (also Ravius) who had recently arrived in London having travelled extensively in the east, collecting manuscripts under the patronage of Archbishop Ussher, himself a key figure in Oriental scholarship of the interregnum. According to Toomer, the Oriental lecture in London was short-lived having run into financial difficulties.11 Nevertheless, the Londoner’s petition, together with a series of tracts advocating the inclusion of ‘Oriental languages’ in the educational curriculum of schools, suggest a growing interest on the part of the City.12 In the spring of 1648, Parliamentary power, although in the ascendancy, was not fully consolidated and a series of Royalist uprisings erupted in Kent and Essex, which further destabilised the country. Dated May 29 of that year, and signed off ‘From my Study in Tr. Coll. In Cambridge’, Thomas Hill, the master of Trinity, wrote to Sir John

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Wollaston, the Lord Mayor of London. The immediate occasion for writing the letter was in gratitude for the recently bestowed chair in Mathematics although Hill took the opportunity to include a sermon preached ‘On a Day of Humiliation, appointed on purpose to seek the Lord for the repairing of Breaches, and the preventing of further Differences growing in the City’. Printed as An Olive Branch of Peace and Accommodation, the document gives a clear indication of the precarious political position in which the universities found themselves. How greatly indebted in the University of Cambridge to the City of London, That two of their Alderman should contribute so liberally to maintain such necessary Lectures? Alderman Adams (to whom the university is much obliged for publike, and I for personal favors) hath bestowed means to support a Reader of the Arabick Tongue, and the other Oriental Languages: The mercy of God raising his heart thereunto, is the sweeter to us, because we hope it may in time, by Gods gracious dispensation, be a means of communicating the Gospel, instead of the Soul-deceiving Alcaron, and recover many from under Mahomets Impostures, and other poor seduced souls from under the power of darkness, and hardness of heart.13 Clearly anxious to align the university with the City, Hill’s letter maintains that there is now an established relationship of patronage between Cambridge and the alderman and also serves as a reminder of more peaceable times – Adams’s inauguration of the Arabic chair had been in place for 16 years by the time of writing. Here too is a seasonable defence of the moral worth of Arabic studies framed in explicitly Christian and missionary terms. In common with many sermons delivered upon the dangers of the ‘Soul-deceiving Alcaron’ in this period, the language of scholarship slips easily into eschatological dogma. Hill’s epistolary preface continues: Confusion of Languages was a curse, whereby one could not understand another how to build their Babel: But such a multiplying of Languages, that the Apostles might communicate Gospel-secrets to various Nations, was a great Blessing, and much advanced the building of Jerusalem, and pulling down of Babylon.14 Here is a rather neat pre-empting of the charge of presumptive vanity entailed in the study of languages or translation in general, namely that such pursuits defy the divine prohibitions of Babel. Instead, proliferation

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of language becomes not the impediment, but the very means by which the encoded messages of the Apostles might be ultimately deciphered and disseminated. Implicit within this construction is a wider belief that the fate of all Jews, Christians and Muslims belongs to a wider apocalyptic schema, which will inevitably discover the truth of the Christian revelation (see Hallett’s discussion of Luther on the apocalypse, p. 103): And without doubt there is much of God in it, that now there should be a more then ordinary instinct, both in yong Students to minde such Studies, and Benefactors to encourage them; and especially when both meet with staggerings amongst some of the learned Doctors of the Jews, who begin to publish their doubts and fears, that all this while they have been deluded, and used their wits and learning to cloud those Scriptures, whose light now begins to shine into their mindes, and I trust in Gods time will into their hearts.15 Tapping in to the powerful millenarianist thinking of the mid-century, that God’s preordained scheme for the triumph of his elected people (English puritans) would unfold via the conversion of the Jews, Hill rehearses a theological formula which allows for both consanguinity between Judaism and Christianity (and by implication Islam) while averring the self-evident superiority of Christian doctrine (see Eliane Glaser’s essay, below). In typical fashion, and reminiscent of the strategy of Bedwell’s earlier Mohammedis Imposturae, Hill makes claim to an authentic report: I have it related from very good hands, That a Citizen of London being in Aleppo, heard a very learned Jewish Rabbi, being sick, call his people together, who wished them very seriously to consider the divers former Captivities they had undergone for the hardness of their hearts, and now one for above One thousand six hundred years, the cause of which is doubtless our unbelief and hardness of heart. We have long looked for the Messiah, and the Christians have believed in one JESUS of our Nation, who was of the seed of Abraham and David, and born in Bethlehem, and (for ought we know) may be the true Messiah; and that we have suffered this long Captivity, because we have not believed, but rejected him: Therefore my advice is, as my last words, That if the Messiah which we expect, do not come at or about the year 1650. accompting from the birth of their Christ, then you may know and believe, That this Jesus is the Christ,

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and you shall have no other: And within a little time after this old Doctor dyed.16 Hill was by no means a fringe thinker and prognostications of this kind might be considered commonplace in the heady religious uncertainty of the mid-century. Before his appointment to Trinity, Hill had regularly preached at Westminster Abbey and before Parliament, with several of his sermons making it into print. For all such rhetorical claims to divine sanction, however, it is clear that ongoing convulsions within the Christian polity were never far from consideration. Thus, having eulogised the preeminence of the Protestant nation, Hill’s letter paradoxically bewails the current divisions between Protestant ‘Brethren’ over the Scottish uprising. Hill proceeds with a call for restraint, striking a distinctly contemporary note, since ‘were reconciling Sermons ever more seasonable than now, when there are so many Incendaries in Our Countrey, yea, such as would blow the coal, and put both the Kingdoms into a new flame?’17 Here is a direct appeal to Wollaston and his fellow aldermen to exert their influence over Parliament in order to avert the threatened clash with the Scottish covenanters. In the event, following the Scottish invasion feared by Hill, ‘both the Kingdoms’ were plunged into a further phase of the wars, culminating in Cromwell’s defeat of the Scots at Preston in August of that year. In the turbulent months to follow, the nascent scholarship of ‘Eastern’ languages and history became increasingly bound up with fantastical notions of national and biblical pre-destiny. Indeed, the subjugation of former religious allies in Scotland seems to have given particular impetus to the millenarianist enthusiasms of English commentators. Published in 1650, a work by the notorious and prolific pamphleteer William Prynne, entitled Sad and serious politicall considerations touching the invasive war against our Presbyterian Protestant brethren in Scotland squarely situates domestic controversy in the pattern of history ‘observable in Scripture’. In the thirteenth chapter of his exposition, Prynne turns to ‘A brief DESCRIPTION Of the future History of Europe, from Anno 1650 to An. 1710’: As Aegypt was broken before the first Tabernacle was set up by Moses: as Edom was harrowed by David before the first Temple was erected by Solomon: and thirdly, as Babel was Brought to nothing by Cyrus before the second Temple was built by Zorubbabel and Ihoshuah: so shall both Edom and Babel, Turk, Pope and all Monarchies in the Earth be brought to dust, before the third Temple be built by the converted Jews in their native Land of Iudea and Ierusalem.18

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Apocalyptic prophecies of this kind, linking the presaged conversion of the Jews and their Restoration in Palestine with the destruction of ‘Turks and hereticall Christians’ so that ‘Ierusalem ... shall at that time be purged from filth, and be the only Receptacle of the children of God’, were clearly energised by profound religious uncertainties, offering as they did, not merely consolation but providential meaning for the national calamity. One significant variation even held that the very existence of Islam might be accounted the consequence of degenerate Christianity: ‘that both the Jewes, and also the Christians have walked in blindnesse, even till this last time, and so also the Turkes, who by reason of the blindnesse, contention and ungodlinesse of the Christians, have turned themselves unto Reason and nature’.19 Allied with ‘Reason and nature’ (as opposed to revelation) the ‘Turkes’ are nevertheless subsumed in the same universal schema: Thus they have been exercised in contention, and persecution, in that they have persecuted one another; yet so, as that God’s children have sprung forth, in the Crosse; and Christ hath been inwardly manifest to them, but outwardly Babel hath yet stood both among Jewes, Christians, and Turkes; the Antichrist is onely the same among all.20 Once again, Babel is figured as both the historical and ongoing manifestation of dissension between the religions of ‘covenant’, but also the focal point for their reformation and the means to bring providential events to a head. As these examples show, religious controversy stimulated a trend towards comparative theology which, albeit inflected through doctrinal dogmatisms of all kinds, is discernable throughout a range of English responses, in the politic platitudes of the master of Trinity as well as the visionary zeal of Prynne and Bohme. Earlier in the century John Donne had articulated a standard refutation of the challenge posed by the rival doctrine of Islam: the selfevident authenticity and harmony of the Christian Gospels. If then his Reason confessing all this, aske farther proofe, how he shall know that these Scriptures accepted by the Christian Church, are the true Scriptures, let him bring any other Booke which pretendeth to be the Word of God, into comparison with these; It is true, we have not a Demonstration; not such an Evidence as that one and two, are three, to prove these to be Scriptures of God; God hath not proceeded in that manner, to drive our Reason into a pound, and to force it by a peremptory necessitie to accept these for Scriptures, for

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then, here had been no exercise of our Will, and our assent, if we could not have resisted. But yet these Scriptures have so orderly, so sweet, and so powerfull a working upon the reason, and the understanding, as if any third man, who were utterly discharged of all preconceptions and anticipations in matter of Religion, one who were altogether neutrall, disinteressed, unconcerned in either party, nothing towards a Turke, and as little toward a Christian, should heare a Christian pleade for his Bible, and a Turke for his Alcoran, and should weigh the evidence of both; the Majesty of the Style, the punctuall accomplishment of the Prophecies, the harmony and concurrence of the foure Evangelists, the consent and unanimity of the Christian Church ever since, and many other such reasons, he would be drawne to such an Historicall, such a Grammaticall, such a Logicall beliefe of our Bible, as to preferre it before any other, that could be pretended to be the Word of God.21 Reprinted as one of Fifty sermons: preached by that learned and reverend divine, John Donne in 1649, the original occasion for the sermon is recorded as the marriage of the daughter of the Earl of Bridgewater in 1627. What must have inevitably struck the reader in the year of the judicial execution of the monarch, is the degree to which so many of the assumptions underpinning the sermon’s composition had been exploded by the time of its reprinting. Quite simply, the social and political order represented by figures like Bridgewater, a favourite of King Charles, had been swept away. By the same token, Anglican orthodoxies confidently maintaining the free ‘exercise of our Will’ and ‘consent and unanimity of the Christian Church’ had been subject to radical challenge if not downright contradiction by the eruption of nonconformity engendered by civil war. In this context, perhaps, those rival books which ‘pretendeth to be the Word of God’ might not be so easily dismissed. One response to the profound dislocation felt by Royalist and Anglican supporters in the wake of the king’s execution is to be found in the writings of Alexander Ross, prolific controversialist and former chaplain to King Charles I. First published in 1653, his epic ⑀⑀␫; or, a View of all Religions in the world represents a characteristic foray into comparative religion which seeks refuge in long-standing myths and misapprehensions concerning the ‘Mahometan’ religion. Thus Christianity is commended above all other religions which have been ‘delivered by men onely ... as Moses, Lycurgus, Minos, Solon, Numa, and Mahomet’. Again, the historical manner of its propagation is explained in terms of

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a miraculous victory over the linguistic confusion of Babel since ‘Never was there any Religion propagated through the world, in that wonderful manner, as this was, if we consider either the authors that spread it, who were illiterate fishermen, and yet could on a sudden speak all languages’.22 By contrast, ‘Mahumetanisme’ is characteristically described as being forced ‘upon men by the Sword’. Indeed, in every facet, Islam provides the foil for Ross’s version of Christian orthodoxy: Lastly, how far Iesus in respect of his humane nature exceedeth Mahomet; the one being conceived of the holy Ghost, and born of a Virgin; the other being conceived and born, after the manner of other men; the one being without sin, the other a thief and robber: the one teaching love, peace and patience; the other hatred, war and revenge: the one curing mens lust, by Monogamy; the other letting loose the reins to uncleanness by Polygamy ... The one commanding all men to search the Scriptures; the other prohibiting the vulgar to read the Alcoran, or to translate it into other tongues out of the Arabick.23 In fact, Ross’ name was by this point already associated with that very thing: a translation of the Qur’¯an, if not directly from the ‘Arabick’, then via a French translation into English. According to the date of the copy collected by George Thomason, the translation appeared in May 1649, barely four months after the execution of the king (see the discussion of the Alcoran by Dimmock on pp. 78–82 and MacLean, pp. 184–5). It now seems clear that a separate and hitherto unidentified figure was responsible for the translation itself, although Ross’ name does appear in relation to the appended treatise entitled ‘A needful Caveat or Admonition for them who desire to know what use may be made of, or if there be any danger in reading the Alcoran’. Contemporary records also show that Ross was called upon to justify the appearance of the translation before the Council of State. Perhaps unsurprisingly in these circumstances, both the anonymous preface and ‘A needful Caveat’ attributable to Ross, take great pains to condemn the heresy of Islamic doctrine while, ironically, justifying its exposure to the right-thinking ‘Christian reader’. In strident tones, the translator explicitly places The Alcoran of Mahomet in the context of a ruinous nonconformity in English religion: There being so many Sects and Heresies banded together against the Truth, finding that of Mahomet wanting to the Muster, I thought

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good to bring it to their Colours, that so viewing thine enemies in their full body, thou mayst the better prepare to encounter, and I hope overcome them. It may happily startle thee, to finde him so to speak English, as if he had made some Conquest of the Nation, but thou wilt soon reject that fear, if thou consider that this is his Alcoran (the Ground-work of the Turkish Religion) hath been already translated into almost all Languages in Christendom.24 And yet, despite the ebullience, there is a clear sense of English religious identity under siege here. In performing that startling act of ventriloquism – as though ‘Mahomet’ and his ‘Turkes’ had made some conquest of the nation – this first full English translation of the Qur’a¯n bespeaks a new anxiety revolving around divine revelation and its subsequent translation, with profound implications for the foundation of the Christian revelation itself. If the exponential growth in print culture had made the conflict of the 1640s seem more than ever a matter of competing interpretations then the authority of Holy Scripture, the ultimate arbiter, might not be considered sacrosanct. Whereas 20 years earlier, Donne might have airily considered the truth of the Gospel selfevident, for writers and thinkers confronted by a new Babel, deafened by a cacophony of religious voices all professing a new version of ‘the Truth’, the need to authorise the Word and its transmission must have seemed more pressing than ever. The civil war had inevitably disrupted scholarly work at both universities, particularly at Oxford where the deposed Archbishop Laud had staunchly supported the pursuit of Arabic and Oriental Studies. During the early years of the Protectorate, however, the scholarly energies of both universities and from both sides of the ideological divide, were devoted to the great theological and linguistic project of the midcentury – the London Polyglot Bible. The polarisation of political opinion in the universities and troubled allegiances of so many of those now finding themselves at odds with the Protectorate regime make the feat of the London Polyglot Bible all the more astonishing. Proposed by Dr. Brian Walton, former Laudian and royalist supporter whose deprivation was described at the outset, the publication would require the collaborative efforts of a host of theologians and linguists and was in many ways testament to the extent to which English studies of the Oriental languages had progressed in short order, despite the disruptions of civil conflict. In its entirety, the Biblia Sacra Polyglotta would consume six volumes and reproduce parallel versions of the Bible in nine ancient languages, taking three years to incrementally appear.

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As outlined in Walton’s prospectus, Propositions concerning the Printing of the Bible in the Original and other Learned Languages, the project would call for an innovative system of subscription to fund its production and the cooperation of nine primary contributors with ten others (literally) pencilled in to act as reserve in case of difficulties. In this document, essentially an advertisement for the proposed edition, Walton fixes the price at ten pounds per volume, payable by instalments, ‘And if 50 li. shall be raised by several persons, the sixth Copy shall be to him that procures subscriptions’.25 Clearly a prestigious and expensive item, nevertheless, at the very outset, Walton’s prospectus emphasises his unique vision for the work and with it, the radical democratisation of the Word: Whereas the former Editions though lesse perfect, and not so fit for use, have been Printed at the publick Charge of Princes and great Persons, and the Charge of this Work will exceed the Ability of an ordinary person: Whereupon divers Persons of Worth have expressed their readiness to joyn in the Charge of the Impression, and it is hoped that others who wish well to Learning and Religion will assist in a Work so much tending to the publick good, and Honour of the Church and Nation, and so free from Interest of all parties, especially considering, that as the Edition will be much better then any formerly made, so the price will be much lesse.26 Walton’s hope that the project be free from the ‘Interest of all parties’ points towards the precariousness of Walton’s own position in the early 1650s and underlines the extraordinarily ambitious scope of the undertaking.27 Those charged with overseeing the work or ‘otherwise furthering the Edition’ were David Stokes, Abraham Wheelocke, Herbert Thorndike, Edward Pococke, Thomas Greaves, John Viccars and Thomas Smith. This eminent roll call includes both the Arabic chairs at Oxford and Cambridge as well as several former Anglican ministers who had remained recalcitrant in the face of the so-called ‘engagement’. Of those listed in the proposal, all but Wheelocke had been deprived of their livings by Parliament at some time in the 1640s – indeed Viccars had fallen foul of both Laudian and Parliamentary courts in his time.28 However, Walton also attracted the support of figures influential with the new regime. Archbishop James Ussher, although no longer the powerbroker of the 1640s, was frequently consulted on the project. His correspondence, published posthumously in 1686 by Richard Parr, reveals a dense network of academic patronage and manuscript circulation which

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clearly made Ussher a lynchpin for the endeavour. Amongst the letters are communications from Walton himself and several of the scholars associated with the production of the London Polyglot Bible in which both the Archbishop’s library and influence are called upon. One example, from the pen of Wheelocke, chair of Arabic at Cambridge suggests that the professed anti-Islamic enthusiasm of the post there had persisted into the Commonwealth. What had changed, perhaps, was the inclination of the intellectual elite to espouse controversies of this kind. Wheelocke complains that he has, two Years since, to send Mr. Hartlib a Specimen of my Intentions, and beginnings of a Confutation of the Alcoran: It was according to my poor skill, a discovery of Mahomet’s, and his Chaplains devilish Policy, to raze out of the Faith of the Eastern People, the memory of the Three Persons, by substituting in the stead thereof three words ... Had I Skill, and Means, and Encouragement from your Grace, I would endeavour to make some progress in the same Work: not but that I know many in this Kingdom far more able than my self, but that I fear none of them will attempt it, but rather smile at the Design. The Language of the Alchoran, to write in that stile, may be attained; the matter of Confutation may be easy to any that will attend to the wicked Plots of Apostates, then, and ever, practised in the World. But Mr. Hartlib returned my Papers, and told me they were not, or else my Intention, was not approved.29 In many ways, Wheelocke’s thwarted pet project is directly contrary to the spirit in which the Biblia Sacra Polyglotta had been conceived. As an eirenic, rather than doctrinaire attempt to shed light on the relationship between the legacies of the East, the London Polyglot Bible represented a genuine attempt to dispassionately appraise the history of linguistic development in the name of biblical exegesis and on a scale which had not been hitherto attempted. No doubt acutely aware of the potential for controversy, Walton prefaces his 1653 prospectus with a deceptively straightforward justification for the Bible’s production: Whereas the ground of Faith is the Word of God, contained in the Scriptures, it must needs be a work of highest consequence to preserve those Sacred Oracles in their original purity, freed (as much as may be) from all possibility of Error, that may arise either by the negligence of Scribes, and injury if Times, or by the wilful corruption of

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Sectaries and Hereticks, which (as was foretold) abound in these latter times, and so to transmit them to Posterity. To this end, nothing can more conduce then the publishing of the Original Text, according to the best Copies and Editions, with the most ancient Translations, which have been of greatest Authority in the Church, especially those of the Eastern Languages.30 Walton’s explanatory notes here, and in subsequent defence of his magnum opus, repeatedly refer to the obligation to counter the distortions of ‘Sectaries and Hereticks’. Clearly, for some contemporaries, however, sectarianism and heresy were not confined to history, or to the East. The most powerful censure of the London Polyglot Bible, which clearly stung Walton as evidenced in his reply, The Considerator Considered, came from the Independent minister and controversialist John Owen. In contrast to Walton’s contributors, Owen’s republican credentials were unimpeachable, having attended to parliamentary troops at the siege of Colchester and delivered a sermon of endorsement to Parliament on the day following the execution of the king, amongst many other high profile offices in service of the Cromwellian regime. In his treatise ‘Of the Integrity and Purity of the Hebrew and Greek Texts’ (1659), appended to a larger work in defence of the inviolability of Scripture, despite admitting his ignorance of Arabic learning and unfamiliarity with the author, Owen confutes the edition on a series of technical grounds including the authenticity of the vowel points of the Hebrew text. The root of Owen’s objection, however, was not academic but doctrinaire: simply that the seeming multiplicity of London Polyglot Bible, a text apparently speaking with several dissonant voices, was an encouragement to doubt and dissent: What use hath been made, and is as yet made in the world, of this supposition, that corruptions have befallen the Originalls of the scripture, which those various sections at first view seeme to intimate; I need not declare. It is in breife, the foundation of Mahumetisme, Alcor. Azoar. 5. The chiefest and principall prop of Popery, the only pretence of Fanaticall Anti Scripturists, & the root of much hidden Atheisme in the world.31 In the myriad religious controversies of the period, imputations of ‘Mahumetisme’ were frequently levelled at heterodoxy of any kind. In the same section, Owen cites a recent ‘Treatise in English, with the

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Latin Title of fides Divina’ as an example of the seditious literature enkindled by the relativism of London Polyglot Bible, ‘wherein it’s namelesse Author, on this very foundation labours to avert and utterly render uselesse the whole scripture’.32 In fact, the anonymous author was Clement Writer whose writings of the interregnum questioned many of the tenets of received wisdom of established church. Significantly, the London Polyglot Bible is not mentioned at all in Writer’s pamphlet; rather than evincing any direct connection as feared by Owen, the appearance of these two texts indicates the aptness of discursive conditions in the mid 1650s to foster a new spirit of questioning. Whether by scholarly or spiritual means, Englishmen of the period were increasingly compelled to address the destabilised meaning of Scripture. Although Owen’s charge of ‘Mahumetisme’ as used here was a ready shorthand for heterodoxy in general, its seems in this instance that it is the specifically eastern source of the Scriptural variants which fuels the author’s condemnation, damning the texts, as it were, by geo-cultural association with the rival doctrine of Islam. This was certainly the interpretation given in Walton’s indignant rebuttal of these charges in The Considerator Considered (1659). Again, Walton restates his desire to ‘represent the true sense and meaning of them [the Scriptures] to succeeding ages ... against the corruptions and false glosses, wherewith Sectaries and Heretikes would adulterate and imbase it’ before turning to specific ‘calumnies’: Lastly, for Mahumetanisme; It is true, Mahomet accuseth the Jews of corrupting the Old Testament, and the Christians for corrupting the New, and saith, that he was sent of God to reform all, Surat. 4.5.11 ... But doth our Author believe that any various Readings gathered out of any MSS. Or Printed Copies, or ancient Translations do intimate any such thing of Mahomet, or favour any part of his impious doctrine?33 Articulated in these exchanges of accusation and rebuttal are two opposing interpretations of the role of history in the formulation of Christian theology, encapsulating a period of momentous transition for the English church. As Walton’s exasperated rejoinder suggests, for many, unquestioning faith in the old church dogmas and polemic was no longer adequate to the challenge posed by a new world order where, as Walton puts it, ‘some congregations at this day, whose Harmony in expounding the Scripture, is little better than that of the builders of Babel, when their tongues were divided’.34 The London Polyglot Bible was a pioneering feat of collaborative scholarship, setting new standards in

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textual and biblical scholarship, and yet, as the reams of print generated in the mid century show, mediation with the language and history of the East was ineluctably bound up with political and religious controversy at home. In their very attempt to standardise meaning, the compositors of the London Polyglot Bible had acknowledged, even invited, a new proliferation of possible meanings and competing interpretations. As both answer and provocation to the radical challenge to authorised Church and Scripture precipitated by the Revolution, their work might be properly understood as the direct product of the intellectual fervour generated in mid-century England and part of a wider and urgent desire to re-evaluate those ‘peoples of the book’.

Notes 1. The Articles and Charges Proved in Parliament Against Doctor Walton, Minister of St. Martin’s Orgars in Cannonstreet (London, 1641), p. 2. 2. The Articles and Charges, p. 9. 3. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, Charles I. 1633–4, ed., Mary Anne Everett Greeen (London: H.M.S.O., 1878), pp. 476–7. 4. See both G.A. Russell, ed., The ‘Arabick’ Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England (Leiden: Brill, 1994) and G. J. Toomer, Eastern Wisedome and Learning: The Study of Arabic in Seventeenth Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 5. Alistair Hamilton, William Bedwell the Arabist, 1563–1632 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1985), p. 43. 6. Geoffrey Roper, ‘Arabic Printing and Publishing in England Before 1820’, in The Bulletin of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (vol. 12, no. 1, 1985), p. 12. 7. William Bedwell, Mohammedis Imposturae (London, 1615) A.3r-A.3v. 8. Quoted in Russell, The ‘Arabick’ Interest, p. 78. 9. Frederick JohnVarley, The Siege of Oxford: An account of Oxford during the Civil War, 1642–1646 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932). 10. To the Hon. The Commons of England ... the humble petition on ministers and other inhabitants in and about London, praying for assistance in the establishment of a lecture in Oriental languages (London, 1648). 11. Eastern Wisedome and Learning, p. 187 ff. 12. For example, in a tract entitled Academiarum examen, or The examination of academies wherein is discussed and examined the matter, method and customes of academick and scholastick learning, John Webster posits that ‘Schools teach the knowledge of tongues, without which the Scriptures (being originally written in the Hebrew and the Greek) cannot be truly and rightly translated, expounded, nor interpreted’. Academiarum examen (London, 1653), p. 6. 13. An Olive Branch of Peace and Accommodation (London, 1648), A3. 14. An Olive Branch, A4. 15. An Olive Branch, A4. 16. An Olive Branch, A4.

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17. An Olive Branch, A6. 18. Prynne, A brief DESCRIPTION Of the future History of Europe (London, 1650), p. 28. 19. Jacob Behm (Jakob Bohme), Mysterium magnum, or An exposition of the first book of Moses called Genesis (London, 1656), p. 289. 20. Mysterium Magnum, p. 289. 21. John Donne, Fifty sermons: preached by that learned and reverend divine, John Donne (London, 1649), p. 325. 22. Alexander Ross, ⌸⑀⑀␫, or, a View of all Religions in the world (London, 1653), p. 541. 23. ⌸⑀⑀␫, p. 542. 24. The Alcoran of Mahomet, A2. 25. Propositions concerning the Printing of the Bible in the Original and other Learned Languages (London, 1653), p. 1. 26. Propositions, p. 1. 27. The undertaking did receive official sanction in the form of a dispensation to waive the duty on the paper required for its printing. The Calendar of State Papers records ‘The readiness of the Protector and Council to favour this design of printing the Bible, in the original and other learned languages, encourages the undertakers to beg a warrant for 3,000 reams of paper, custom free, for printing an introduction and guide to the 9 languages’. C. S. P. 1655, p. 234. 28. Viccars’ entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography states that he was tried before ‘Laud and others at the high commission in November 1631. He was convicted of keeping conventicles and of heresy and was sentenced to be removed from office, defrocked, and fined £100. Viccars spent several years in prison after, and possibly before, this trial, but in November 1635, after submitting and recanting, he was through the good graces of Laud restored to the ministry’. Although Viccars is listed in the Propositions, it is likely that he died before being able to make contribution. 29. Richard Parr, The life of the Most Reverend Father in God, James Usher (London, 1686), p. 546. 30. A Brief Description of an Edition of the Bible, in the Original Hebr. Samar. And Greek, with the most ancient Translations of the Jewish and Christian Churches, viz. The Sept. Greek, Chaldee, Syriack, AEthiopick, Arabick, Perisn, &c, and the Latine versions of them all, A new Apparatus, &c. (London, 1653), p. 1. 31. John Owen, Of the divine originall, authority, self-evidencing light, and power of the Scriptures (London, 1659), p. 147. 32. Of the divine originall, p. 148. 33. Brian Walton, The Considerator Considered (London, 1659), pp. 168–9. 34. The Considerator Considered, p. 215.

7 ‘A parallel made with the Jewish Sanhedrin’1: Tolerating Jews and Jewish Precedents in the Early Modern Church and State Eliane Glaser The birth of religious toleration in the mid seventeenth century was institutionalised as a foundational event by patriotic historians writing during the Puritan revival of the Victorian era.2 At the same time, as tens of thousands of East European Jews flooded into England, prompting a rise in anti-Semitism, Anglo-Jewish historians began to celebrate Oliver Cromwell’s readmission of the Jews to England in 1656. The Jews had been expelled by Edward I in 1290, and according to the tradition of Anglo-Jewish history established in the late nineteenth century, the readmission was a watershed moment, the culmination of a growing interest in Judaism on the part of seventeenth-century Puritans; and it represented the transformation of medieval Judeophobia into Renaissance philo-semitism. Puritans focussed their attention on the Old Testament, learned Hebrew, and even began to practise Jewish customs; and they extended their belief in the principle of religious toleration, it was argued, to Jews.3 Both toleration and philo-semitism were conceptualised, therefore, as the expression of novel and benevolent ideals, and the roots of both were located in the Civil War period.4 Revisionist historians have since pointed out that, in the early modern period at least, religious toleration was more often considered to be a vice than a virtue, and there were limits to freedom of conscience imposed by both religious and political circumstances. Puritans were often highly intolerant of other religious groups, and the liberalism of Cromwell has been overstated.5 However, echoes of a more teleological approach to the history of toleration can still be found; and the desire to follow a trajectory from the first emergence of Nonconformist tolerationism to secular liberty and modern tolerance has, even in modern historiography, proven hard to resist.6 As far as the study of the toleration of Jews is concerned, the revisionist approach has hardly made any 159

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impact at all. If tolerationist statements towards other Christian groups have been interpreted, by revisionists, within the political and religious context of the time, statements in favour of the toleration of Jews tend to be read at face value; as straightforwardly benign.7 This essay locates a series of seventeenth-century tolerationist texts in the context of long-standing debates about the religious and political constitution of early modern England, and argues that tolerationist statements are best understood not only as a form of progressive innovation, but also as part of an unresolved attempt to address the question of whether the inclusion of diverse religious groups could be accommodated politically, by separating church from state, or whether this move was inherently subversive and heretical. Seventeenth-century tolerationism was grounded, therefore, in specific constitutional questions. Ironically, these debates frequently included references to precedents drawn from Jewish history, in particular the composition of the Sanhedrin, the ancient Jewish court; but although tolerationist writers made great use of Jewish ideas, they did not necessarily associate this with the practical toleration – or indeed readmission – of the Jewish people.

Toleration in the seventeenth century The upheavals of the early to mid seventeenth century – religious, political and military – did create a climate in which diverse opinions began to be expressed, and dissident groups began to make their presence felt. It is no accident that historians of toleration have tended to locate the first flourishings of religious liberty in the 1640s; it was at this moment that Nonconformist Christians began, it seems, to resist religious uniformity more vocally than ever before. Roger Williams was one of the most well-known advocates of toleration in the period; and in addition to Williams, there were many others who wrote in defence of religious minorities in the 1640s and 1650s. John Goodwin was a popular London preacher, political and religious controversialist and, eventually, a supporter of the regicide; he opposed the persecutory tendencies of Presbyterianism and publicly defended religious liberty and freedom of conscience, as did the Levellers Richard Overton and William Walwyn. Calls for religious toleration echoed on the Continent in the works of Sebastian Castellio and Hugo Grotius. Radical dissenters of the period sometimes went as far as announcing an intention to extend religious toleration towards Jews: the merchant and writer, Henry Robinson, for example, argued that the Jews should ‘be suddenly recalled, and encouraged to continue by a Liberty of Conscience’,8 and

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the heresiographer Thomas Edwards was moved to complain in his 1646 edition of Gangraeana that The sectaries being now hot upon the getting of a Toleration, there were some meetings lately in the City, wherein some persons of the severall sects, some Seekers, some Anabaptists, some Antimonians, some Brownists, some Independents met; some Presbyterians also met with them, ... some professing at one of the meetings, it was the sin of this Kingdom that the Jews were not allowed the open profession and exercise of their religion amongst us; only the Presbyterians dissented and opposed it.9 There is evidence, moreover, of increasing contact between Christians and Jews during this period: the number of Jews in England was increasing, and Christians met with Jews during their travels on the Continent; there was also more indirect contact, too; the Hebraist John Lightfoot and the travel writer Thomas Coryat corresponded, for example, with the Venetian rabbi Leon Modena.10 Roger Williams became disaffected with the Anglican church and fled England in 1630 on grounds of religious persecution, first to Massachusetts and then, after being expelled by the government there for his separatist views, to Rhode Island, where he founded the settlement of Providence. Throughout the 1640s and 50s, Williams continued to engage in controversies about toleration and the religious constitution of both England and New England, and his 1644 tract, The Bloudy Tenent, of Persecution, which argued that churches should be voluntary associations, was burned by order of the Long Parliament.11 In 1652 Roger Williams produced a commentary on a paper submitted to the parliamentary Committee for the Propagation of the Gospel, which considered the question of ‘whether it be not the duty of the Magistrate to permit the Jews, whose conversion we look for, to live freely and peaceably amongst us?’12 Williams answers, ‘I humbly conceive it to be the Duty of the Civil Magistrate to break down that superstitious wall of separation (as to Civil things) between us Gentiles and the Jews, and freely (without their asking) to make way for their free and peaceable Habitation amongst us’.13 In The Bloudy Tenent, of Persecution, Williams writes that, since the coming of Christ, the most ‘Paganish, Jewish, Turkish or Antichristian consciences and worships’ should be allowed, and only challenged with the Word.14 These are indeed extraordinary statements, but their meaning is not self-evident; elsewhere in The Bloudy Tenent, Williams uses the word ‘gentile’ in a different context: he argues

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for ‘the permission of divers and contrary consciences, either of Iew or Gentile’.15 In the quotation from the 1652 commentary, ‘Gentile’ means ‘Christian’; here it could mean ‘heathen’, but it has a biblical resonance, suggesting that the word ‘Jew’ also carries a timeless, metaphorical significance. Furthermore, Williams’ desire that ‘the most ‘Paganish, Jewish, Turkish or Antichristian consciences and worships’ should be allowed, closely resembles similar utterances which can be found in religious texts throughout the early modern period. They appear, for example, in The Book of Common Prayer: Mercifull God, who hast made all men, and hatest nothing that thou hast made, nor wouldest the death of a sinner, but rather that he should be converted and live, have mercie upon all Jewes, Turkes, Infidels, and Heretikes, and take from them all ignorance, hardnesse of heart, and contempt of thy worde: and so fetch them home, blessed Lord, to thy flocke, that they may bee saved among the remnant of the true Israelites, and bee made one fold under one shepheard, Jesus Christ our Lord.16 The formula of ‘Jewes, Turkes, Infidels’ and so on was employed, furthermore, by a variety of Christian writers protesting against religious persecution, even in a much earlier period (see Dimmock above, pp. 67–70). In 1612, the Baptist leader Thomas Helwys stated in his Short declaration of the mistery of iniquity that ‘mens religion to God, is betwixt God and themselves; the King shall not answere for it, neither may the King be iugd betwene God and man. Let them be heretickes, Turks, Jewes, or what soever it apperteynes not to the earthly power to punish them in the least measure’.17 Furthermore, these lists of epithets (‘heretickes, Turks, Jewes, or what soever’) also frequently appeared in inverted form throughout the period. In 1593, Richard Hooker, setting out his plans for the Anglican church, reluctantly admitted that only those who are ‘signed with this marke, One Lord, one faith, one baptisme’ can be counted a Christian; ‘for want of these it is that Saracens, Iewes, and Infidels are excluded out of the bounds of the church’.18 Likewise, Thomas Morton declared in his 1596 treatise on the ideal English church that The nation of the Iewes having reiected Christ, is by that meanes reiected of God from being his people: neyther are they to be accounted members of the Church, although they serve God with never so great zeale Rom. II. The same account we are to make of the Turkes, Saracens, Moores, and all those nations which professe the religion of Mahomet.19

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The easy reversal of the formula serves as a reminder that statements in favour of toleration should not be taken entirely at face value; that they are, to some extent, part of a long tradition of listing categories of various ‘others’ in rhetorics of inclusion or exclusion. During debates about the evolving religious and political structure of early modern England, moreover, these ‘others’ were invoked as part of identifiable argumentative strategies.

The Sanhedrin in Westminster Throughout the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a variety of Christian groups set about redefining the relationship between the church and state; and they regularly invoked the Sanhedrin as a useful precedent. The idea that the church was a department of the state, supported by evidence from Jewish history, was in circulation from the Reformation onwards, but it was articulated most famously by the sixteenth-century Swiss theological and medical scholar, Thomas Erastus (see Birchwood’s discussion of the importance of Anglicanism in the reception of Islam into England).20 The idea became known as Erastianism, and was propagated throughout Europe: Erastus’s Latin Theses on excommunication were published in London in 1589, and translated into English as The Nullity of Church-Censures in 1659.21 Similar texts by the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius and the Hebraists Joseph Justus Scaliger and Johannes Buxtorf circulated in Geneva, Frankfurt and Basle, filtering across the Channel via the interest of scholars such as John Selden.22 Selden’s tract on the Sanhedrin, for example, his De Synedriis (1653) cites a range of continental and Jewish sources.23 James Harrington’s utopian The Common-wealth of Oceana (1656), as well as Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1656), contain references to the Jewish polity, and were both influenced by Selden.24 In 1653, the Fifth Monarchist John Rogers suggested a plan to model the new Parliament on the Sanhedrin, with its 70 members, and the idea appeared in the manifesto of the Fifth Monarchy rebels in 1657.25 As well as debating whether or not Jewish precedents were applicable to the Christian commonwealth, the commentators used the precedent of the Sanhedrin to argue over how the English constitution should be formulated. Since the structure of the Sanhedrin was already subject to debate within Talmudic and early Christian writing, it was an especially fertile topic for controversy, as different factions offered rival interpretations.26 During the 1640s and 1650s, discussions proliferated about the relationship between the king – or, after Charles I’s execution, the Lord

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Protector – and Parliament, and the relationship between church and state: whether there should be a national church, in which the religious and the political spheres were combined, or whether the church should be entirely separate from the state.27 These issues were debated by the Westminster Assembly of Divines, an advisory council set up by the Puritan Long Parliament in order to draw up proposals for the reform of the Church of England, based on the Root and Branch petition of 1640, which had called for the abolition of episcopacy.28 The Assembly met between 1643 and 1648 in Westminster Abbey, and although the Scottish Kirk and other Presbyterian Churches north of the border adopted the Assembly’s recommendations, they made little impact on the English church. The sessions were important, however, because they were the occasion for a great deal of debate about England’s religious and political future.29 At first, there were two main factions in the Westminster Assembly: Erastians and Presbyterians. The Presbyterian party wanted to institute in the English church a hierarchical system of strict Scottish church discipline, whereas the Erastian party feared that this would remove Parliamentary control over religious affairs.30 In the first years of the debates, Erastians such as the controversialist pamphleteer William Prynne and John Lightfoot, the Cambridge Hebraist, were pitched against Presbyterians George Gillespie, the Scottish minister, and Robert Baillie, also a Scottish minister and scholar.31 Throughout the early 1640s the Presbyterians steadily rose in power, until in 1645 when the Assembly decided in favour of adopting the Scottish system of church government. The MPs in the Assembly responded negatively, but Parliament was offered the consolation that although a system of Presbyterian church government would be put in place, Parliament would be granted control over religion, a situation which the Presbyterian Robert Baillie labelled ‘a lame Erastian Presbytery’.32 In the later years of the Westminster Assembly debates, a radical Christian affiliation known as the Independents became dominant; they took the place of the Erastians in their opposition to the Presbyterian party. In these later debates, it was the Independents who were now arguing for the separation of church and state, so that they could practise their dissident form of religion unhindered by state powers. Presbyterians, on the other hand, were arguing for the conjunction of church and state, because by this time Presbyterianism had effectively become the national religion. In this second phase, Independents Roger Williams, Richard Overton and Thomas Goodwin were pitched against

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supporters of the national church including Robert Baillie and the New England Presbyterian John Cotton. Presbyterians in the Assembly argued that their church should be the national church, continuous with the state, and were unwilling to countenance the existence of smaller, more radical churches, regarding them as subversive institutions. The representatives of those churches in the Assembly, the loose association of Baptists, Congregationalists, Levellers and other groups who made up the constituency of the Independents, had a shared agenda: opposition to the idea of a national church. The Independents wanted to share only a civic identity with members of other churches, and they particularly objected to the potential power of the national church, reinforced by the authority of the magistrate, to excommunicate dissenters – especially since those dissenters potentially included themselves. It was in response to the factional debates in and around the Westminster Assembly that many statements in favour of toleration were uttered, and it is this context – the network of tracts and pamphlets which were produced as a written accompaniment to the Westminster debates – which sheds a rather different light on the development of religious toleration in the seventeenth century. William Prynne describes toleration, indeed, as a negative polemical strategy when he denounces ‘these New furious Sectaries: who to engage all sorts of people in their Quarrell, proclaim a free Toleration and Liberty of Conscience, to all Sects, all Religions whatsoever, be it Judaisme, Turcisme, Arianisme, Popery; (as all their Pamphlets manifest)’.33 In the complex and intricate religious politics of the Civil War period, factions frequently changed sides. For example, although William Prynne argued from an Erastian standpoint in the Presbyterian–Erastian debate, prompting the complaint from Robert Baillie that ‘Mr. Prynne and the Erastian lawyers are now our remora [obstacle]’,34 in the later Presbyterian–Independent debate he changed sides, throwing his weight behind the institution of a Presbyterian national church. Commentators also changed their minds about the use of Jewish precedents. As long as they supported the Presbyterian cause, George Gillespie and Robert Baillie were opposed to the idea of an Erastian state church, and opposed to the use of Jewish precedents such as the Sanhedrin as a model for Christian church government. Their Parliamentary Erastian opponents, John Selden and John Lightfoot, were in favour of using Jewish precedents such as the Sanhedrin. But as the Presbyterians gained power, Baillie and Gillespie became Presbyterian Erastians, and were now in favour of applying the Jewish precedent of the Sanhedrin.

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Toleration, church and state If Roger Williams’s The Bloudy Tenent remains one of the most lauded tolerationist manifestos, it also exemplifies the bitter arguments between Presbyterians and Independents. The Bloudy Tenent was widely condemned in its own time;35 George Gillespie answered it in 1645 with Wholesome severity reconciled, and a printed exchange developed between Williams and the Presbyterian John Cotton.36 An additional reply to The Bloudy Tenent appeared anonymously in 1646 under the title Hell broke loose: or, a catalogue of many of the spreading errors, heresies and blasphemies of these times.37 If The Bloudy Tenent was the subject of controversy because of its tolerationism, it was also opposed on the grounds of its position on the relationship between church and state. As an Independent, Williams was concerned to prove that church and state should remain distinct, an argument which recurs frequently throughout his account. For example, drawing on metaphors from the Song of Songs, he writes: As the Lilie is amongst the Thornes, so is Christs Love among the Daughters: and as the Apple-tree among the Trees of the Forrest, so is her Beloved among the Sons: so great a difference is there between the Church in a Citie or Country, and the Civill state, City or Country in which it is. No lesse [far] then ... are they that are truly Christs (that is, anointed truly with the Spirit of Christ) from many thousands who love not the Lord Iesus Christ. and yet are and must be permitted in the World or Civill State, although they have no right to enter into the gates of Jerusalem the Church of God.38 If church and state are separate, Williams’s argument goes, diverse religions can exist in the state, without polluting the church (see Brummet, p. 112. and Hallett pp. 101–105).39 Williams includes in his tract a lengthy analysis of Matthew 13:24–30, the parable of the wheat and the tares, which is often employed in debates about toleration: ‘Christ commandeth to let alone the Tares to grow up together with the Wheat, until the Harvest’.40 The parable was modified in these debates by presenting tares, or weeds, as a metaphor for sinners or non-Christians, and wheat as a metaphor for the godly. Controversialists then argued over whether the field represented the church or the state. The notion that the field represented the state provided tolerationists such as Roger Williams with a way of demarcating a sphere in which

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heathens could exist without affecting the church: ‘the field in which these Tares are sowne, is not the Church. Again affirmatively: First, the Field is properly the World, the Civill State or Common-wealth’.41 In order to emphasise that faith is entirely separate from civil society, Williams appeals to the most exotic and extreme scenarios, in which true Christians would be allowed to exist under the civil jurisdiction of authorities who were members of very different faiths: ‘Who doubts but Gods people may appeale to the Romane Caesar, an Egyptian Pharaoh, a Philistinian Abimelecke, an Assyrian Nabuchadnezzar, the great Mogol, Prester Iohn, the great Turke, or an Indian Sachim?’ The printed marginal note reads: ‘Lawfull appeales in civill things to Civill Magistrates’.42 Williams is deliberately referring to those who are furthest from Christianity in order to make his structural point. John Cotton disputes the existence of a civil sphere distinct from the spiritual one, qualifying Williams’s argument by writing that ‘it is true, Christ expoundeth the Field to be the world ... but he meant not the wide world, but (by an usuall Trope) the Church scattered throughout the world’.43 Cotton believes, furthermore, that state rulers should have jurisdiction in religious affairs: ‘the Magistrate need not to feare, that he should exceede the bounds of his Office, if he should meddle with the spirituall affairs of the Church in Gods way’.44 Williams’s Bloudy Tenent was just one of a network of tolerationist texts precipitated by the debates of the Westminster Assembly. Another was a tract jointly written by several Independent members of the Assembly: Thomas Goodwin, Philip Nye, Sidrach Simpson, Jeremiah Burroughs and William Bridge. These men were dissenters from the Laudian era who had been living in exile in the Low Countries, and, returning to England, found that they had a new enemy: the centralised authority of the Presbyterian majority. Their Apologeticall Narration was published in 1644, prompting a flood of responses, including two tracts by William Prynne: Twelve Considerable Serious Questions (September 16) and Independency Examined (September 26).45 Like Roger Williams, the authors of An Apologeticall Narration proposed the toleration of nonChristians, but only as long as they existed in a separate civil state.

Tolerating Jewish precedents During the debates in and around the Westminster Assembly, it was the Erastians who most commonly invoked the example of the Sanhedrin to advance their vision of church government. The Presbyterians responded either by disputing the Erastian interpretation of the

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Sanhedrin’s composition and jurisdiction, or by disallowing the use of Jewish precedents altogether. Before the Presbyterians adopted the role of the national church, George Gillespie wrote in opposition to the Erastians. In a tract entitled A late dialogue betwixt a Civilian and a Divine (1644), he refutes the Erastian claim that the Sanhedrin had control over spiritual affairs by claiming that his opponents simply confuse civil and religious institutions. Gillespie employs in this tract a dialogue format in which a curious citizen is progressively enlightened by a (Presbyterian) divine. The uninformed civilian tells his interlocutor that ‘I have heard it asserted by some learned men, that among the Jewes ... there was no such distinction as Church and State, but that the Jewish Church was the Jewish State, and the Jewish State the Jewish Church’ and he goes on to wonder ‘if it was so among them (whose formes you take in many particulars for patterns) I would fain know why it may not be so among us’. The divine enlightens the citizen by differentiating between the roles of church and state under the Law: Though the Iewish Church and Common wealth were for the most part not different materially, the same men being members of both, even as in all Christian republikes, yet they were formally different one from another, in regard of distinct Acts, Lawes, Courts, Officers, Censures, and Administrators. For, 1. The Ceremoniall law given was given to them as a Church, the Judicial law given to them as a State. 2. They did not worship, doe sacrifice, pray, praise, &c. as a State; nor did they kill malefactors with the sword as a Church.46 Gillespie is here employing his idea of the Jewish commonwealth as evidence that Parliament should not interfere in religious affairs. This leads him to portray, for effect, the extreme scenario which he imagines would result from the adoption of the Jewish combination of civil and religious government: Must Ministers have vote in Parliament? Must they be civill Lawyers? Must all criminal and capitall Judgements be according to the Judiciall Law of Moses, and none otherwise? Must there be no civill punishments, without previous admonition of the offender? Must Parliaments sit, as it were in the Temple of God, and interpret Scripture, which sence is true, and which false, and determine controversies of faith and cases of conscience, and judge of all false doctrines? Yet all this must be, if there be a parallel made with the Jewish Sanhedrin.47

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Although Gillespie displays his knowledge of Jewish precedents, he disavows them by invoking the absurd and ‘Judaicall’ state of affairs which, he believes, will be the consequence of drawing ‘a parallel ... with the Jewish Sanhedrin’. Gillespie is uncomfortable with the invocation of Jewish ideas in general: Now, if our opposites could prove that the Jewish Church was nothing but the Jewish State, and that the Jewish Church-government, was nothing but the Jewish State-government, and that the Jewes had never any supreame Sanhedrin but one onely, and that civil, and such as had the temporall coercive power of Magistracy (which they will never be able to prove) yet there are divers considerable reasons, for which that could be no president to us.48 Gillespie provides, as his sole reason for addressing these Jewish examples at all, the fact that they are mentioned by the other side. Gillespie must follow the rules of pamphlet controversy, which demanded that participants answer each point made by the opponent in turn: Observing that very much of Erastus his strength, and much of his followers their confidence, lieth in the Old Testament, and Jewish Church, which (as they averre) knew no such distinction, as Civill Government, and Church Government; Civill Justice, and Church Discipline; I have thought good, first of all, to remove that great stumbling-block, that our way afterward lie fair and plain before us.49 Gillespie’s evident failure to transcend the Jewish subject matter of his opponents is transformed, positively, into an opportunity to label Erastians as Judaizers. Robert Baillie writes in a similar vein in 1645: The most of the house of Commons are downright Erastians: they are lyke to create us much more woe than all the sectaries of England ... L’Emperour promised to write against Selden, for the Jewish ecclesiastick Sanhedrim, and their excommunication. This man is the head of the Erastians: his glory is most in the Jewish learning; he avows every where, that the Jewish State and Church was all one, and that so in England it must be, that the Parliament is the Church.50 Another tract by George Gillespie, Aarons Rod Blossoming (1646), received an answer later the same year in the form of an anonymous Erastian tract entitled Nil Probas. The author, who refers to Gillespie as

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‘our Presbyter’, recommends that civil leaders take responsibility for the spiritual guardianship of their citizens.51 He asks ‘were not Priests and Levites Ministers of their State too? And their Judges Church Officers also? When they officiated in matters criminall, and these judged matters of the Lord?’52 The author takes his examples not only from the Sanhedrin, but also from the Old Testament kings: ‘those Levites did judge also IN THE SERVICE OF THE KING, I Chron. 26.30, 32. And was not this judging, of the same kind, in the same manner, or for the same ends, with the Civill Rulers?’53 Nil Probas concludes with a final answer to Gillespie: ‘I doubt not but you already are convinc’t of the unsatisfactorinesse of our Author his Arguments toward the proofe of an Ecclesiasticall Jewish Sanhedrin’, in other words, a Sanhedrin with religious jurisdiction alone.54 The Erastian Hebraist John Lightfoot was also in favour of using Jewish precedents to prove the conjunction between church and state. During a discussion about whether or not it was possible to distinguish between different administrators in the Sanhedrin, in which he marshals quotations from both John Selden and Talmudic discussions of the Sanhedrin, Lightfoot writes that ‘I grant, indeed, that there were elders in the Sanhedrin that were not priests or Levites, but withal they were civil magistrates, as our Parliament’.55 As these sources suggest, the association between Erastianism and Judaism was strong during this period; indeed, Parliament was associated with the Hebrew language during the Civil War . In 1647–8, the Commons ordered the purchase of a large quantity of Hebrew books, and the transaction was arranged by John Lightfoot and John Selden.56 Lightfoot, and another Erastian member of the Assembly, Thomas Coleman, apparently knew so much Hebrew that they were known as ‘Rabbi’.57 Erastianism, Judaism, Parliament and the work of continental scholars such as Hugo Grotius, Joseph Justus Scaliger and Jean Bodin were, therefore, connected themes in this period; and writers like Selden were their English proponents. Selden’s De Synedriis described the constitution of Jewish administrative bodies such as the Sanhedrin, and argued that they had both religious and secular functions.58 Presbyterians in the Assembly disapproved of this Erastian Hebraism. In Gillespie’s A late dialogue, which argues against Selden’s denial of ecclesiastical excommunication in the Jewish commonwealth, Gillespie couples Selden with the Hebraist Hugh Broughton, denouncing their acquaintance with Jewish history and literature: they are both ‘most exquisitely acquainted with those studies’.59 During the debates between Presbyterians and Erastians in the early to mid-1640s, therefore, it was apparent that Erastians were enthusiastic

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consumers of Hebrew, Jewish history and rabbinic scholarship, and Presbyterians denied the relevance of this Jewish knowledge to the English Christian commonwealth. But with the consolidation of Presbyterianism as the national church, those, like George Gillespie and William Prynne, who had previously denied the application of Jewish precedents, were now strongly in favour of them, because they provided justification for the extension of the Presbyterian Church’s remit into the civil sphere. The Independents, who opposed the rise of the Presbyterian national church, were therefore now against the use of Jewish precedents, even while they advocated the toleration, in principle, of religious minorities such as Jews. This resulted, unexpectedly, in a situation in which those commentators who were in favour of the application of Jewish precedents were against the toleration of Jews. For example, in spite of the tolerant stance adopted by Roger Williams on the treatment of dissident Christians and Jews, he was against the application of Jewish precedents to seventeenth-century England. This is because he reluctantly accepted that the religious and the political functions of the Sanhedrin had been combined, and this contradicted his belief in their ideal separation. Both sides, therefore, tended at times to agree that the Sanhedrin included within it both religious and political functions. But commentators such as Roger Williams rejected such Jewish precedents as appropriate ones for Christians to follow, declaring that the Sanhedrin, like other Jewish institutions, had been abrogated by the coming of Christ. Referring to the early church habit of retaining some Jewish practices for a period of time as a sign of respect to the Jews, Williams argues that this should not be used as a justification for tolerating corruption in the seventeenth-century church. Since he is advocating the separation of church and state, however, he is not so concerned if such corruption surfaces in civil society. A printed marginal note in his Bloudy Tenent draws a parallel between ancient Jewish practices and contemporary Popery: ‘Toleration of Jewish ceremonies for a time upon some grounds in the Jewish Church, proves not toleration of Popish and Antichristian Ceremonies in the Christian Church, although in the State’. Williams elaborates this theme in the main body of the text: Can we thinke that because the tender Consciences of the Iewes were to be tendred in their differences of meats, that therefore persons must now bee tolerated in the Church (for I speake not of the Civill State) and that to the worlds end, in superstitious forbearing and forbidding of flesh in Popish Lents, and superstitious Fridays ... in the observation of Popish Christmas, Easter, Whitsontide, and other superstitious Popish Festivals?60

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For Williams, the precedent of ancient Israel is ‘figurative and ceremoniall’ and no pattern for England to follow,61 and the use of the word ‘ceremoniall’ here indicates Williams’s disapproval of Jewish legalism; it is associated with Roman Catholic ceremonialism. If Williams is reluctant to draw inspiration from an institution which combined, as he is forced grudgingly to concede, both religious and political powers, he is also unwilling to employ the precedent of ancient Israel because of its Popish overtones. Williams’s opponents, by contrast, were in favour of applying the precedent of the Sanhedrin, even though they were against the toleration of Jews. As Williams observes, ‘Persecutors seldom plead Christ but Moses for their author’.62 With the rise of the Presbyterian national church, George Gillespie came to believe that the Sanhedrin was in fact an Erastian body, and that the power of the Jewish leader in the Sanhedrin should be retained by the head of the Christian state. This led Gillespie to argue, therefore, for the continuation of Jewish laws into Christianity: ‘If God would have the Morall law transmitted from the Jewish people to the Christian people; then he would also have the Judiciall law transmitted from the Jewish Magistrate to the Christian Magistrate’.63 This position was in marked contrast to the one he had held during his earlier debates with Erastians such as Prynne and Lightfoot. Despite calling for the retention of Jewish laws in Christian England, however, Gillespie opposed the toleration of Jewish people: he stridently refutes Williams’s belief in religious liberty. It was not only Gillespie who disputed the interpretation of biblical Israel with Roger Williams. A similar exchange occurred when Prynne replied to Williams in his Twelve Considerable Serious Questions (which was also a reply to An Apologeticall Narration). Prynne was answered in turn by John Goodwin and his associates in Certaine briefe observations and antiquaeries: On Master Prin’s twelve questions about church-government (4 October 1644). Prynne countered with his Full reply (19 October 1644), and so on.64 Prynne’s eighth and ninth questions, in his Twelve Considerable Serious Questions concern ‘whether the concession of one Catholike Church throughout the world, denied by none: the ... Nationall Assemblie, and Church of the Israelites under the Law ... be not an infallible proofe and Justification of Nationall Churches; of a common Presbyterian, Classical government, to which particular Congregations persons ought to be subordinate, & an apparent subversion of the Novell Independent Invention?’65 John Goodwin replied to Prynne, attacking his Presbyterian Erastianism, and complaining that ‘you thinke Church-government must be ordered according to civill State,

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and be cast into that mould’.66 Prynne, quoting his opponent correctly, objects to the fact that Goodwin disallows the Jewish precedent: To the eighth Quere he gives a negative Answer, First in generall, next in particular to some instances. First he grants, that there was a Nationall Church (yea Nationall assemblies, Parliaments, determining church-affaires,) of the Jewes, but these (saith he) cannot be a pattern for us now, because the covenant of the Gospell is not made with any one particular Nation, as with the Jewes, but to all Nations that embrace the Gospel, and beleeve in Christ; you have no promise nor prophesie of any Nation to be holy to God but the Jewes Nation, when they shall bee called againe.67 In other words, Prynne is pointing out that Goodwin himself admits there was a national church under the Jews, even if, according to Prynne, he mistakenly believes that this precedent cannot apply to the Christian world. Here, it is Prynne who is in favour of using Jewish ideas. In these debates, references to the Sanhedrin were passed back and forth between Presbyterians, Erastians and Independents without, it seems, much awareness that such ideas may have been related to the toleration of contemporary Jews. Christians did not even appear to regard biblical Judaism as part of the same coherent genealogy as ‘real’ Jews. A text such as Williams’s The Bloudy Tenent is full of references to the ‘Old and New Israel’, by which he means biblical Israelites and contemporary Christians respectively. In his typological discourse, Old Testament Israel is sublimated time and again into Christianity, leaving little room for contemporary Jews. Invoking the great wars of the Old Testament for his own troubled times, Williams writes: What State, what Kingdome, what warres and combats, victories and deliverances can parallel this people, but the Spirituall and mysticall Israel of God in every Nation and Country of the World, typed out by that small typicall handful, in that little spot of ground the land of Canaan? The Israel of God now, men and women, fight under the Great Lord Generall, the Lord Iesus Christ ... they are Spirituall conquerours68 In other words, contemporary Christians are spiritual, rather than legalistic or material warriors, as the biblical Jews were, and the ‘small typicall handful’ no longer exists for Williams.

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This essay has regarded tolerationism in the light of broader debates about the relationship between church and state in mid-seventeenthcentury England. Presbyterians, Erastians and Independents fought over the interpretation of the ancient Jewish commonwealth in an attempt to articulate their favoured religious constitution. Although Independents such as Roger Williams were in favour of toleration, at times extending the idea, at least on paper, to Jews, such statements were often more figurative than they appear; and these commentators were against the application of Jewish precedents to Christian England. Their Presbyterian opponents, on the other hand, were in favour of invoking Jewish sources, but they opposed the toleration of dissident Christians or Jews. The fact that different commentators employed Jewish ideas to suit their shifting factional allegiances demonstrates the instrumentality of those ideas for early modern Christians. Those who promoted toleration in the seventeenth century did so for a reason: they were in favour of a particular arrangement of church and state which would allow their own denomination to worship undisturbed. Tolerationists posited the most extreme examples of religious inclusion as limit cases: church and state should be so separate, they argued, that even Jews could live amongst us.

Notes 1. George Gillespie, Aarons Rod Blossoming. Or, The Divine Ordinance of ChurchGovernment Vindicated, So as the present Erastian Controversie concerning the distinction of Civill and Ecclesiastical Government, Excommunication, and Suspension, is fully debated and discussed, from the holy Scripture, from the Jewish and Christian Antiquities, from the consent of latter Writers, from the true nature and rights of Magistracy, and from the groundlesnesse of the chiefe Objections made against the Presbyteriall Government in point of a domineering arbitrary unlimited power (London: E. G. for Richard Whitaker, 1646) B2r. 2. Later on, the tolerationism of the mid-seventeenth century was recovered by historians seeking to recover a tolerant past as fascism swept across Europe: W. K. Jordan’s The Development of Religious Toleration in England; From the Beginning of the English Reformation to the Death of Queen Elizabeth (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1932) was published between 1932 and 1940, at the same time as the American historian William Haller’s Tracts on Liberty in the Puritan Revolution 1638–1647 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934), and A. S. P. Woodhouse’s Puritanism and Liberty (London, 1938). 3. See for example David Katz, ‘The Phenomenon of Philo-Semitism’, Studies in Church History, xxix (1992), pp. 327–61 at 334, Cecil Roth, ed., Catalogue of an Exhibition of Anglo-Jewish Art and History: In Commemoration of the Tercentenary of the Resettlement of the Jews in the British Isles (London, Hertford and Harlow: Published by the East and West Library for the Tercentenary Council), 3 and Vivian Lipman, ed., Three Hundred Years: A Volume to

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4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

Commemorate the Tercentenary of the Re-settlement of the Jews in Great Britain 1656–1956 (London, Vallentine, Mitchell & Co., 1956), pp. 27–33. For the history of toleration in the early modern period, see for example Perez Zagorin, How Religious Toleration came to the West (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), John Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558–1689 (Harlow, Essex: Pearson, 2000), Ole Peter Grell, Jonathan I. Israel and Nicholas Tyacke, eds, From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) and W. J. Sheils, ed., Persecution and Toleration: Papers read at the Twenty-Second Summer Meeting and the Twenty-Third Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society (Oxford: The Ecclesiastical History Society, 1984). For revisionist approaches to the history of toleration, see for example Blair Worden, ‘Toleration and the Cromwellian Protectorate’, in Sheils, ed., Persecution and Toleration, pp. 199–235, Nicholas Tyacke, ‘The “Rise of Puritanism” and the Legalizing of Dissent, 1571–1719’, in Grell, et al., eds, From Persecution to Toleration, pp. 17–51 at 17; and Cary J. Nederman and John Christian Laursen, eds, Difference and Dissent: Theories of Toleration in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), Introduction. See for example Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), p. 18 and pp. 300–1, and Zagorin, How Religious Toleration came to the West, which, despite its historiographical awareness, is nevertheless a genealogy of tolerationist pioneers. In his book on toleration, for example, John Coffey includes a section on ‘The Readmission of the Jews’, suggesting that ‘the relative openness of the Cromwellian regime is illustrated by the informal readmission of the Jews to England in the mid-1650s’. Coffey, Persecution and Toleration, p. 155. Anon [Henry Robinson], Liberty of Conscience: Or the Sole means to obtaine Peace and Truth (n.p., 1643), 7; see also David Katz, Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England, 1603–1655 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 172. Thomas Edwards, Gangraeana: Or a Catalogue and Discovery of many of the Errours, Heresies, Blasphemies and pernicious Practices of the Sectaries of this time, vented and acted in England in these four last years (London: Ralph Smith, 1645), pp. 14–15. See Cecil Roth, ‘Leon da Modena and England’, Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England, 11 (1928), pp. 206–25, Cecil Roth, ‘Leone da Modena and his English Correspondents’, Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England, 17 (1953), pp. 39–43 and Claire Jowitt, ‘“The Consolation of Israel”: The Representation of Jewishness in the Writings of Gerrard Winstanley and William Everard’, Prose Studies, 22 (1999), pp. 83–99. The title of Williams’s tract refers to the blood of souls whose religious belief is threatened by the civil interference of the Presbyterian national church; ‘tenent’ is an obsolete form of ‘tenet’. See Grell et al., eds, From Persecution to Toleration, ‘Introduction’, p. 6. The Fourth Paper, Presented by Maior Butler, To the Honourable Committee of Parliament, for the Propagating the Gospel of Christ Jesus (London: Giles Calvert, 1652), A2r; see Katz, Philo-semitism, pp. 186–8. Williams, commentary on The Fourth Paper, C2r.

176 ‘A parallel made with the Jewish Sanhedrin’ 14. Williams, The Bloudy Tenent, A2v. 15. Williams, The Bloudy Tenent, Aii (v). 16. The Book of Common Prayer, and the Administration of the Sacraments, And other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church of England (London: Robert Barker, 1604), H4r. 17. Thomas Helwys, A short declaration of the mistery of iniquity ([Amsterdam]: 1612), Fiijr. 18. Richard Hooker, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie. Eyght Bookes (London: John Windet, 1593), III, L4r-v. 19. Thomas Morton, Salomon, or A treatise declaring the state of the kingdome of Israel, as it was in the daies of Salomon (London: Robert Robinson for Robert Dexter, 1596), Dr-v. 20. For Christian references to the Sanhedrin, see Hugo Mantel, Studies in The History of the Sanhedrin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), pp. 268–90 and Solomon Zeitlin, ‘The Political Synedrion and the Religious Sanhedrin’, The Jewish Quarterly Review, 36 (1945), pp. 109–40. For the application of Jewish constitutional models to early modern church government more generally, see Reid Barbour, John Selden: Measures of the Holy Commonwealth in Seventeenth-Century England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 173–5; Frank E. Manuel, The Broken Staff: Judaism through Christian Eyes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 115–128, Jonathan R. Ziskind, John Selden on Jewish Marriage Law: The Uxor Hebraica (London: E. J. Brill, 1991), p. 10; J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), Chapters 5 and 6; and Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), Chapter 5. 21. See Thomas Erastus, Explicatio grauissimae quaestionis utrum excommunicatio, mandato nitatur diuino, an excogitata sit ab hominibus. Opus nunc recens editum. Adiectae sunt aliquot theologorum epistolae ([London: J. Wolfe], 1589); Anon, The Nullity of Church-Censures: Or A Dispute Written by that Illustrious Philosopher, Expert Physician, and Pious Divine Dr Thomas Erastus, Publik Professor in the University of Heidelberge, and Basil (London: Printed for G. L., 1659). For Erastus, see for example J. Neville Figgis, ‘Erastus and Erastianism’, The Journal of Theological Studies, 2 (1901), pp. 66–101. 22. See Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews, 277 and S. B. Liljegren, Harrington and the Jews (Lund: C. W. K. Gleerups Forlag, 1932). 23. John Selden, De Synedriis et Praefecturis Juridicis Veterum Ebraorum (London: Jacob Flesher, 1653). He refers to the Talmudic Tractate Sanhedrin (Yy2v), Maimonedes (e4r), Petrus Cunæus’s De Republica Hebreorum (Hhh2r), Hugo Grotius (Dd2v), Josephus and Scaliger (r4R). See Tuck, Philosophy and Government, pp. 218–9. 24. See Richard Tuck, Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 31–2; Tuck, Philosophy and Government, Chapter 7; Cedric C. Brown, ‘Great Senates and Godly Education: Politics and Cultural Renewal in some Pre- and PostRevolutionary Texts of Milton’, in David Armitage, Armand Himy and Quentin Skinner, eds, Milton and Republicanism, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 43–60 at pp. 47–9 and p. 53. For Harrington’s

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25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32. 33.

34. 35. 36.

views on the Sanhedrin, see S. B. Liljegren, James Harrington’s Oceana (Lund: C. W. K. Gleerups Forlag, 1924), pp. 81–5 and J. G. A. Pocock, ed., The Commonwealth of Oceana and A System of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), Introduction. See David Katz, Sabbath and Sectarianism in Seventeenth-century England (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1988), 2, and Bernard Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men: A Study in Seventeenth Century English Millenarianism (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), pp. 63, pp. 117–8. In the writings of the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, the Sanhedrin had a political and judicial role, and was administered by the high priest in his joint capacity as civil ruler. According to the Talmud, however, it was primarily a religious legislative body, but – to add further confusion – with some political functions. For more on the relationship between church and state in early modern Christian debate, see Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker, eds, The Politics of Discourse: the Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 5–7, Weldon S. Crowley, ‘Erastianism in the Westminster Assembly’, The Journal of Church and State, 15 (1973) I, pp. 49–65 at pp. 56–58 and Robert S. Paul, The Assembly of the Lord: Politics and Religion in the Westminster Assembly and ‘the grand debate’ (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1985). See Nicholas Tyacke, ‘Puritanism, Arminianism and Counter-revolution’, in Richard Cust and Ann Hughes, eds, The English Civil War (London: Hodder Headline, 1997), pp. 136–159 at 156. On the significance of the Westminster Assembly debates, see Reid Barbour, John Selden: Measures of the Holy Commonwealth in Seventeenth-Century England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), Chapter 5, and Barry Coward, The Stuart Age: A history of England 1603–1714 (London: Longman, 1994), p. 179. For the Erastian–Presbyterian debate in the Westminster Assembly, see Crowley, ‘Erastianism in the Westminster Assembly’, 56–8, Robert S. Paul, The Assembly of the Lord, William Lamont, Marginal Prynne 1600–1669 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), Chapter 7 and Jonathan R. Ziskind, trans. and ed., John Selden on Jewish Marriage Law: The Uxor Hebraica (London: E. J. Brill, 1991), pp. 13–14. Robert Baillie complains in his Journal about ‘the Erastian heresy, which in this land is very strong, especially among the lawyers, unhappy members of this Parliament’. See The Letters and Journals of Robert Baillie, ed. David Laing, 3 vols (Edinburgh: Alex Lawrie & Co., 1841), II, pp. 315–60. See Coward, The Stuart Age, p. 194, Tyacke, ‘The “Rise of Puritanism”, 28–9 and Haller, Tracts on Liberty, I, p. 5. Prynne, A Fresh Discovery of some Prodigious New Wandering-Blasing-Stars, & Firebrands, Stiling themselves New-Lights. Firing our Church and State into New Combustions (London: John Macock, for Michael Spark, 1646), A2r. See The Letters and Journals of Robert Baillie, II, pp. 315–60. As William Haller, editor of Tracts on Liberty notes, ‘Baillie, Gillespie, Pagitt, Prynne and Edwards, all called anathema upon it’ (I, p. 59). Williams’s The Bloudy Tenent (1644) was answered by Cotton’s The Bloudy Tenent, Washed (1647) which was in turn answered by Williams’s The Bloody Tenent Yet More Bloody (1652).

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37. Anon, Hell broke loose: or, a catalogue of many of the spreading errors, heresies and blasphemies of these times, for which we are to be humbled (London: Tho. Underhil, 1646). 38. Williams, The Bloudy Tenent, F3v–F4r. See Song of Songs, 2:2–3. 39. There is a rich ambiguity in this formulation: it is not clear if the church in question is the national church, in which case dissenting Christians can exist, as it were, in the state, or whether in fact the church here is the ‘true’ church. 40. Williams, The Bloudy Tenent, F4v. George Gillespie argues against Williams’s interpretation of the parable of the tares in Gillespie, Wholsome Severity reconciled with Christian Liberty. Or, The true Resolution of a present Controversie concerning Liberty of Conscience (London: Christopher Meredith, 1644), C4r. 41. Williams, The Bloudy Tenent, H2v. 42. Williams, The Bloudy Tenent, L3v–L4r. 43. Cotton, The Bloudy Tenent, Washed, Gr. 44. Cotton, The Bloudy Tenent, Washed, Yv. 45. William Prynne, Twelve Considerable Serious Questions touching Church Government: Sadly propounded (out of a Reall Desire of Unitie, and Tranquillity in Church and State) to all Sober-minded Christians (London: F. L. for Michael Sparke Senior, 1644); Prynne, Independency Examined, unmasked, refuted, by twelve new particular interrogatories (London: F. L., for Michael Sparke Senior, 1644). For the other replies, see Haller, ed., Tracts on Liberty, I, pp. 51–2. 46. George Gillespie, A late dialogue betwixt a Civilian and a Divine, concerning the present condition of the Church of England (London: Robert Bostock, 1644), C2v. Gillespie is replying to the Royalist John Maxwell’s An answer by letter to a worthy gentleman Who desired of a Divine some reasons by which it might appeare how Inconsistent Presbyteriall government is with monarchy ([Oxford: L. Lichfield], 1644). 47. Gillespie, Aarons Rod, B2r. 48. Gillespie, Aarons Rod, Br-v. 49. Gillespie, Aarons Rod, Br-v. 50. See The Letters and Journals of Robert Baillie, 2:265–6; see also Jason P. Rosenblatt, Torah and Law in Paradise Lost (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 119. 51. Anon, Nil Probas: or a Discovery of the Extreame Unsatisfactorinesse, in a piece of Mr Gilespie’s, one of the Scotch Commissioners, lately published; called, Aarons Rod Budding (London: Giles Calvert, 1646), A3v. 52. Anon, Nil Probas, Av. 53. Anon, Nil Probas, A3r. 54. Anon, Nil Probas, D2r. 55. John Lightfoot, Elias Redivivus: A Sermon preached Before the Honourable House of Commons, In the Parish of Satin Margarets Westminster, at the publike Fast, March 29, 1643 (London: R. Cotes, for Andrew Crooke, 1643), A3r. 56. See Katz, Philo-Semitism, p. 175. 57. See Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews, 243 n. 132 and Katz, Philo-semitism, 87. See also Crowley, who writes in ‘Erastianism in the Westminster Assembly’: ‘It appears that Erastian success in the Assembly was closely tied to Hebrew proficiency’ (pp. 56–8).

Eliane Glaser 179 58. (London: Jacob Flesher, 1650, 1653, 1655). See Rosenblatt, Torah and Law, pp. 90–1. 59. Gillespie, A late dialogue, C3v–C4r. For Selden’s views on excommunication, see Rosenblatt, Renaissance England’s Chief Rabbi: John Selden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), chapter 11. 60. Williams, The Bloudy Tenent, Gv. 61. Williams, The Bloudy Tenent, A2v. 62. Williams, The Bloudy Tenent. See also Zagorin, How Religious Toleration came to the West, p. 201. 63. Gillespie, Wholsome Severity reconciled, Biv(r). Gillespie is upholding the power of the magistrate to excommunicate sinners from the church. In other words, if church and state are combined, the ruler has the power to excommunicate those who do not subscribe to the national church. 64. See Haller, ed., Tracts on Liberty, I, pp. 53–5. 65. Prynne, Twelve Considerable Serious Questions, A2v. 66. [ John Goodwin], Certaine briefe observations and antiquaeries: On Master Prin’s twelve questions about church-government ([London], 1644), B2r. 67. Prynne, A Full Reply To certaine briefe Observations and Anti-Queries on Master Prynnes twelve Questions about Church-Government: Wherein the Frivolousnesse, Falsenesse, and grosse Mistakes of this Anonymous Answerer (ashamed of his Name) and his weak grounds for Independency, and Separation, are modestly discovered, reselled (London: Michael Sparke Senior, 1644), Bv. 68. Williams, The Bloudy Tenent, Dd4v.

8 Milton among the Muslims Gerald MacLean

Writers from the Muslim world have shown greater interest in Milton, his poetry, and his views than he displayed in any aspect of Islam. In the only scholarly study of Milton and Islam to be published, John Milton and the Arab-Islamic Culture (1987), Professor Eid Abdallah Dahiyat has usefully catalogued the numerous and varied critical responses that Milton’s writings have provoked from Arab-Islamic writers, poets and scholars. Since 1886, at least, Arab critics and literary historians have made strenuous efforts to make Milton their own, arguing that Milton ‘drew on’ Abu al-Ala al-Ma’arri’s tenth-century prose tale, Risalatu-al-qhufran, or ‘Epistle of Forgiveness’ when composing Paradise Lost.1 Al-Ma’arri describes a journey to paradise, a place of sensuous beauty and bodily delights, sufficiently resembling Milton’s to have generated lively discussions about poetic universality and influence. In 1939 an Egyptian essayist, Ahmed Khaki, took a novel approach and declared that ‘Milton’s handling of the fair sex is paradoxical ... The reason is that Milton was a sexual maniac restrained by religious and ethical standards.’2 Further, Milton’s Satan has continually fascinated and inspired Arab-Islamic writers and critics because he so closely resembles Iblis, the rebel angel and shape-shifter who regularly employs humankind to wage his war against God and Islam. In 1969, Abbas Mahmud al-’Aqqad published a detailed study on this theme, suitably entitled Iblis.3 Arab-Islamic responses to Milton display a persistent and keen interest in finding close analogues between Milton’s views and key tenets of Islam. In 1967 Luwis ’Awad, professor of English literature at the University of Cairo, claimed Milton for Islam: When we read Paradise Lost, we feel that Milton is a devout Muslim. This is reflected in his rejection of Prelates and their mediation between God and His creatures. You also find Milton as a lover of life 180

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on earth. He interprets the Bible in practical and personal ways. He advocates divorce and considers man superior to woman. He also hates the rituals of the church and the icons. He draws on the Old Testament, not the New Testament. For these reasons, I have already said that Milton was not Christian, but rather a pious Muslim.4 Although Milton himself would doubtless have found this claim upon his devotional life and character bizarre, there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of ’Awad’s attempt to show how the English poet’s religious beliefs were in conformity with Islam. Nor has the effort to assimilate Milton been restricted to the Arab-Islamic world. In 1909 Muhammad Iqbal, the Indian poet and philosopher, who is often credited with originating the idea of an independent state for Indian Muslims, took inspiration from Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained when composing his Shikwa (Complaint) and Jawab-i-Shikwah (Answer to the Complaint).5 For Milton himself, the East comes into focus at a number of different sites: Biblical geography, history and languages; classical Greek and Roman history; Eastern Christianity; Judaism and Jewish history; the contemporary empires of the Mughals, Safavids and Ottomans; and the lands and histories of peoples living further east. But of Islam and its founder, the Prophet Muhammad, Milton remained almost entirely silent; while of the Ottomans we find only casual and surprisingly commonplace references of a vague and general political rather than religious kind. Nonetheless, I want to ponder what Milton might have known about Islam and the Ottomans, and how that knowledge may have helped give shape to his sense of history, more particularly his sense of empires in history, and how it may have influenced his imaginative re-telling of biblical myth when creating the figure of Satan in Paradise Lost. My argument involves noticing how Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost serves as a paradigmatic Eastern despot driven by imperial envy to seek new worlds that he and his desperate, but loyal, hordes can colonise and waste in diabolical perversion of divine plenitude. I will further suggest that this structure of imperial envy also informs Milton’s critique of the imperial ambitions of his fellow countrymen. Although Milton seldom referred directly to Islam, to the Prophet Muhammad or to the Ottomans, we should not conclude that he was either ignorant of, or entirely indifferent to, the crucial place that they had come to occupy in the debates of his times concerning religious toleration, political freedom and national identities. After considering some dominant attitudes towards Muslims in Milton’s era, I shall argue that, by treating Satan as an imperial eastern tyrant driven by envy, Paradise Lost offers a

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commonplace indictment of the Ottoman Empire for peculiar forms of tyranny while also insinuating that English imperial ambitions also derive their origins and motives from envy, and accordingly were accompanied by diabolic fantasies of New World freedoms. In Milton’s view, as Paul Stevens recently observed: ‘The colonists of the New World are not, then, the chosen ones but ... are to be pitied as “our poore expulsed Brethren of New England.”’6 My argument pursues two broad questions: first, what might Milton have known and thought of Islam, and secondly, how might that understanding have influenced his sense of history, more particularly his sense of empires in history?

What did ‘Turk’ mean when Milton was writing? Since Milton only occasionally referred to the Turks or Ottomans directly, what other words might he have used instead that conveyed some of the contemporary meanings and implications of these terms? Christian culture in England had for so long defined itself in contrast to Islam that the words ‘Turk’ and ‘Turkish’ were not only synonymous with Muslim and Islamic but had also come to refer to a generalised range of personal qualities and meanings that could be applied to anyone, regardless of ethnicity or religion, including the English themselves if they behaved in certain ways. Clearly then, we should think twice before using the word ‘Turk’ in the early modern context unless referring to the complex figure constructed in and by the language of the time. Like ‘Saracen’ before it, the term ‘Turk’ homogenised a great variety of different peoples from several different regions and historical periods— mostly Muslims—into a militarised and often hostile threat from the East. All Muslims in early modern England regardless of origin were called ‘Turks’, Islam was known as ‘the Turkish Religion’,7 and, by extension, anyone who behaved haughtily or proud, alla Turchesca, was liable to be labelled a ‘Turk’. What gave formal unity to the most persistent of those qualities was a principle of inner-contradiction, of inconstancy. This sense of inconsistent behaviour was entirely in keeping with the familiar notion of ‘turning Turk’ and converting to Islam. It was widely known that Muslims were very often something other than native Anatolians, or Turks, to begin with. The principle of inconsistency underlies many influential catalogues of qualities that defined Muslims for European readers during the Renaissance and the way so-called ‘Turks’ were represented on the stage. Abraham Ortelius’s map of the

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Ottoman Empire, for instance, appeared with the following gloss that illuminates this contradictory quality: The Turkes are of nature greate observatours of theyr false lawes, slaves unto theyr lorde, good souldieurs, boathe on foote and on horsebacke, patiente in labour, sparinge in theyre foode, and for the reste very inconstante.8 On the one hand, Turks were pious, manly, abstemious, and ascetic, and on the other they were like women in much Renaissance male thinking— self-divided and inconstant. In other words, they managed to represent for European men both a self-denying virility that was appealing, and yet also everything they imagined themselves not to be. Such descriptions of the inconsistent ‘nature’ of the Turks, meant that the term ‘Turk’ could refer anyone who portrayed contradictory or violent or tyrannically patriarchal characteristics. Shakespeare’s use of the term in Othello offers several illuminating examples,9 and these connotations were evidently still in use by the mid-eighteenth century when Dr Johnson wrote of Milton: What we know of Milton’s character in domestick relations is, that he was severe and arbitrary. His family consisted of women; and there appears in his books something like a Turkish contempt of females, as subordinate and inferior beings. That his own daughters might not break the ranks, he suffered them to be depressed by a mean and penurious education. He thought women made only for obedience, and man only for rebellion.10 In The English Parnassus (1654)—a rhyming dictionary for use in schools that came complete with lists of approved epithets—Joshua Poole assembled the following list of suitable synonyms and epithets for ‘Turke’ from out of the best authors—among his sources Poole lists Milton’s Poems of 1645: Unbelieving, misbelieving, thrifty, abstemious, cruel, unpitying, mercilesse, unrelenting, inexorable, warlick, circumcized, superstitious, bloody, wine-forbearing, turban’d, avaritious, covetous, erring.11 Great observers but of false laws, unbelieving, misbelieving and erring all at once, ‘and for the reste very inconstante’, the Turk was by ‘nature’ a whole series of self-contradictions. To be any of these, in Poole’s analysis of early seventeenth-century poetic usage, was to be a ‘Turk.’

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Could it be that whenever any of these notions appear in Milton’s poetry the word ‘Turk’ is lurking about in the subtext? While Paradise Lost says little or nothing directly about Islam, everything it does say about Satan and his infernal empire makes him—in these definitions—a ‘Turk’, and his followers a Turkish horde. Like the fallen angels generally, Satan is at once unbelieving, misbelieving, cruel, unpitying, mercilesse, unrelenting, inexorable, warlick, superstitious, bloody, turban’d, avaritious, covetous, erring; ‘and for the reste very inconstante.’

What did Milton have to say about Islam and the Ottoman Empire? Western scholars have paid very little attention to Milton’s treatment of Islam and the East because he refers so seldom to Islam or the Ottomans. In the 1930s, Samuel Chew’s study of English Renaissance literature and Islam had very little to say about Milton beyond noticing how, in Paradise Lost, Milton used poetic commonplaces about the exotic East with imagination and wit. Chew particularly admired a heroic parallel between a battle in heaven and the defeat in 1533 of the Persians by the ‘crescent’ army of the Ottomans. For Chew, Paradise Lost showed that Milton was only interested in the East as a repository of poetic names and tales, exotic metaphors and images, many of them with strong Biblical associations.12 I think he was largely right, but I am less sure that the enquiry ends here. Such references as Milton does make to Islam and the Ottomans tend to be oblique, learned, illustrative, polemical, incidental and surprisingly stereotypical. Allusions to the East in his poetry are of the exoticizing kind which, by the century in which he lived, had began replacing the expressions of fear and loathing characteristic of the medieval period when Christian recognition of ‘the obvious material superiority of the Muslim ruling peoples’ had created ‘an inferiority complex towards the Muslim world’.13 Although Arabic was taught in his day at Cambridge, and an English version of the Qur’a ¯n appeared in the pivotal year of 1649, Milton’s writings suggest that he was not greatly interested in Arabic, Islam or the Ottomans. Since the late 1990s, the resurgence of interest in England’s intellectual and cultural relations with the Muslim world during the early modern period has continued to pass Milton by. Focussed instead on Shakespeare and the largely imaginative theatrical representations of Turks, Moors and Jews, recent studies have demonstrated that Renaissance England—and Europe generally—was far more deeply preoccupied and influenced by Islamic and eastern cultures than previous generations

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cared to admit. But they have so far had little to say about Milton. Can it be that Milton, perhaps the most learned, engaged and copious writer of his generation on topics political and religious, really had nothing of interest to say about Islam and the Muslim world? Throughout the 1640s, Milton was very much a public figure who was paid to be in the know. In March of 1649, the year The Alcoran of Mahomet appeared, he was appointed Secretary for the Foreign Tongues by the Council of State only some weeks after publishing The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates in February (see the discussion of the Alcoran in Dimmock, pp. 70–82, and Birchwood, pp. 151–152 ). Spending much of the rest of that year writing Eikonoclastes—a work that revisits the issue of idolatry which had been so crucial for establishing the trade agreements between Elizabeth’s loyal merchants and the Ottomans—can Milton have been unaware of the furore throughout the spring and summer following plans to publish an English Qur’a ¯n? What are we to make of Milton’s seeming silence? Was he not at all concerned or interested by the controversial publication of an English translation of the Qur’a ¯n in that signal year of 1649?14 Eid Abdallah Dahiyat writes: ‘there is no concrete evidence that Milton read the Qur’a¯n.’15 Nonetheless, Dahiyat reminds us, Milton might well have learned a great deal about Islam and the culture of Muslim peoples from reading works such as Richard Knolles’ General History of the Turks (1603), George Sandys’ Relation of a Journey (1615) and Andrew Moore’s Compendius History of the Turks (1660) as well as Samuel Purchas’s Hakluytus Posthumous. Dahiyat’s point is well taken: Milton must have been reasonably well informed about the history and current state of the Ottoman Empire. When ‘Turks’ do show up in his English prose, Milton shows himself familiarly knowledgeable. We know that Milton drew on the great compilations of both Hakluyt and Purchas while composing his Briefe History of Moscovia (1682), and that Samuel Hartlib noted how Milton was planning ‘an Epitome of all Purchas’s Volumes’.16 In the narratives making up these compendious volumes of English travels overseas, he would have found numerous accounts of Islam and life inside the Muslim world. So what did Milton have to say about Islam and the Ottomans on the few occasions when he does mention them? Based on the 27 instances of ‘Sultan’, ‘Mahomet’, and cognates of ‘Turk’ that occur in Milton’s English prose, some clear inferences can be drawn.17 And it might well be that the appearance of the English Alcoran in 1649 did, after all, have some influence on his thinking since no fewer than 11 of these 27 instances appear in works published that very year: these include two from a total of three references to Muhammad, both of

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them in Eikonoclastes (composed March to October) which also contains five references to cognates of ‘Turk’.18 Perhaps not surprisingly, these, as well as one reference in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (February 1649),19 and three in Observations on the Articles of Peace (May 1649),20 are polemical bids to associate King Charles with tyranny and absolute monarchy. The curious irony that an English Qur’a ¯n appeared in the very year of the king’s execution may not entirely have passed Milton by. Milton did not, however, join other anti-Catholic and anti-Prelatical writers in seeking to smear his religious foes with the taint of Islam: except perhaps in the one remaining reference to the Prophet, which occurs in The Likliest Means (1659), where he expresses outrage at those guilty of ‘levelling or rather undervaluing Christ beneath Mahomet’.21 The other reference in that work treats Islam as a mechanism of social control rather than a system of religious belief: ‘how can any Christian object it to a Turk, that his religion stands by force alone; and not justly fear from him this reply, yours both by force and monie in the judgment of your own preachers’.22 What this suggests is that for Milton, Islam was not so much a religion as a political ideology, a pretext for despotic rule and a means of maintaining it over a subservient people. Thirteen other instances of these terms scattered throughout Of Reformation (1641), Animadversions (1641), A Declaration, or Letters Patent (1674), and A History of Muscovia,23 add further support to this idea since they all refer to matters historical or military. As for the Qur’a ¯n, Milton refers to it only once; when in Areopagitica (1644) he observes that ‘the Turk upholds his Alchoran, by the prohibition of printing’,24 further indication that for him, Islam was less a religion than a political strategy for asserting absolute control. For Milton, it would seem, Islam and the Ottoman Empire were extreme examples of how false belief enabled, justified and supported imperial tyranny. The view that Islam was not a religion but a weapon of social control was clearly central to Milton’s attitude in his earliest and most extensive account of the Ottomans, written during his final years at Cambridge. In Prolusion 7 (c. 1632?), his Latin oration in defence of learning, the youthful Milton showed himself familiar with the notion that the Ottomans were uncivilised thugs unlike the supposedly pre-Islamic Saracens. How are we to answer the objection that the Turks of to-day have acquired an extensive dominion over the wealthy kingdoms of Asia in spite of being entirely devoid of culture? for my part, I have certainly never heard of anything in that state which deserves to be regarded as an example to us—if indeed one should dignify with the name of ‘state’ the power which a horde of utter barbarians united by complicity in crime has seized by violence and murder. The provision of the

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necessaries of life, and their maintanance when acquired, we owe not to Art but to Nature; greedy attacks on the property of others, mutual assistance for purposes of plunder, and criminal conspiracy are the outcome of the perversion of Nature. Some kind of justice indeed is exercised in such states, as might be expected; for while the other virtues are easily put to flight, Justice from her throne compels homage, for without her even the most unjust states would soon fall into decay. I must not, however, omit to mention that the Saracens, to whom the Turks are indebted most for their existence, enlarged their empire as much by the study of liberal culture as by force of arms.25 Milton’s position—which treats the ‘Saracens’ as pre-Islamic and civilised— was common among Protestant commentators who sought to explain how the undeniable glories of early Arab civilization were annulled and destroyed by the advent of Islam and its military incursions throughout the Middle East, culminating in the rapid expansion of the Ottoman Empire into southeastern Europe.26 It was a position from which he seems not to have departed. Two decades later, in 1656, Milton ordered a new atlas to be sent from Amsterdam. Admitting that ‘to me at least, because of my blindness, painted maps can hardly be of use’, Milton nevertheless knew that he wanted whichever atlas ‘is the larger and more correct’.27 In his shrewd study of Milton and China, Robert Markley ponders the moment in Paradise Lost, Book 11 when Michael, providing Adam with a prospect view of human history, comes to display how the origins and progress of imperialism are to be found in the East: Of mightiest empire, from the destined walls Of Cambalu, seat of Cathaian khan And Samarchand by Oxus, Temir’s throne, To Paquin of Sinaean kings, and thence To Agra and Lahor of great mogul Down to the golden Cheronese, or where The Persian in Ecbatan sat, or since In Hisphahan, or where the Russian czar In Mosco, or the sultan in Bizance, Turchestan-born ... (PL, 11: 387–96) Whichever atlas he eventually consulted, Milton was intent on precise locations while making the most of the exotic sound patterns and compressing thousands of years of human history into a brief and

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geographically concise westward progress of empire from and through Asia and beyond. Concerned specifically with trade to China in Milton’s day, Markley loses interest in the passage before reaching ‘The Persian in Ecbatan’, but Milton’s geo-historical sweep from ancient China to Ottoman ‘Bizance’ clearly marks a very precise geo-rhetorical moment in the poem’s history of imperialism. It tells of how imperialism originated in Asia and, moving westward in a series of great empires and emperors, has culminated in the ‘Turchestan-born’ Ottoman sultan who ousted the Byzantines. Having brought the history of Asian empires up-to-date with the Ottomans, Milton swiftly and surprisingly continues by ignoring the Ottoman Turks entirely by cutting out the very lands over which they rule from his subsequent geographical survey. Clearly understanding the strategic importance of Istanbul’s central position between continents, Milton re-positions the historical and geographical co-ordinates of the poem’s point of view from here, keeping Istanbul as the vantage point while turning southwards to survey empires and kingdoms in northern and central Africa. Milton is inviting us to imagine ourselves looking, not only with Adam from a hill in Paradise but also from an imaginary sultan’s point of view in Istanbul, looking south and scanning the frontiers of his empire in Africa from its eastern boundaries to its westward limit in Tlemcen (Tremisen). And what Milton thus achieves is to deprive, as it were, his imaginary sultan of any pleasure from his imperial gaze by focussing beyond the frontiers of the Ottoman Empire to areas that never came under Ottoman control: ... or the sultan in Bizance, Turchestan-born; nor could his eye not ken The empire of negus to his utmost port Ercoco and the less maritime kings Mombaza, and Quiloa, and Melind, And Sofala thought Ophir, to the realm Of Congo, and Angola farthest south; Or thence from Niger flood to Atlas mount The kingdoms of Almanzor, Fez and Sus, Morocco and Algiers, and Tremisen; On Europe thence, and where Rome was to sway The world: in spirit perhaps he also saw Rich Mexico ... (PL, 11: 395–407)

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What is most remarkable about this passage is that, even as he directs our attention to the new world where England, Spain and France were contesting for imperial control, Milton explicitly leaves out all the lands comprising the Ottoman Empire. Our attention is drawn to the way that both Adam and the imaginary sultan face south into Africa, from where they look into the past beyond Ottoman Egypt to their ‘utmost port’ where the ancient Abyssinian empire ‘of negus’ still marked the limits of Ottoman authority in Milton’s day. After listing several southern Red Sea ports never taken by the Ottomans, Milton cuts straight across the continent from ‘Sofala thought Ophir’ in Mozambique to the west coast and ‘to the realm of Congo, and Angola farthest south’. Finally, North African kingdoms outside of Ottoman control, from Niger to Morocco, bring the imperial survey back northwards as far as Tlemcen, a city that had, since the early sixteenth century, marked the western edge of the Ottoman regencies in North Africa. Those, like Chew, who are keen on finding elaborate and baroque structures among Milton’s poetic effects will appreciate how this catalogue of African kingdoms carefully describes a crescent-shaped swathe running east to west across the continent, starting with the horn of the Red Sea and ending with the upward curve along the west coast and back into the Mediterranean. Algeria perhaps should not be where it is, but otherwise Milton clearly invites readers to share the Ottoman sultan’s point of view and sees only realms lying just beyond the frontiers of Ottoman claims upon Africa. Of the lands actually comprising the Ottoman Empire, not a word. What Milton achieves in this historical survey of imperialism moving transcontinentally—first across Asia, then through Africa and into Europe before arriving in the Americas—is to acknowledge the existence of the Muslim Ottoman Empire only to ignore its territorial reach and thus dismiss it from further account. By describing only what is beyond its borders, Milton cuts the lands of the currently existing Ottoman Empire right out of the cartographical picture. Elsewhere in the poem, Milton describes these lands at other historical moments, treating Egypt and the Levant as ancient sites of the Old Testament past. But for Michael’s purposes in presenting human history to Adam, the areas of Islam, Ottoman Anatolia and the lands of the ancient Eastern Christian communities, were irrelevant, while the Ottoman Empire itself was merely the last in a series of westward movements of Asiatic empires. The history of Islam simply disappears in keeping with the poem’s emphasis on human history only to the time of Christ and, thereafter, its focus on a selective history of Christian churches.

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Nevertheless, the Ottoman army does show up once in Paradise Lost when the defeated Persian army fleeing from the ‘Turkish crescent’ is compared with the rebel angels abandoning Hell: As when the Tartar from his Russian foe By Astracan over the snowy plains Retires, or Bactrian sophy from the horns Of Turkish crescent, leaves all waste beyond The realm of Aladule, in his retreat To Tauris or Casbeen. So these the late Heaven-banished host, left desert utmost hell Many a dark league ... (PL, 10: 431–7) Chew liked these ‘most memorable’ lines and found allusion to 1534 when the youthful Shah Tahmasp abandoned Baghdad to flee before the forces of the great Ottoman general Ibrahim Pasha.28 On occasion, it seems, Milton held details from Ottoman history ready in mind and expected readers to catch the reference. Here, most notably, the simile emphasises the waste left behind by the fallen angels indicating how imperial expansion, like Satan’s followers, devastates and destroys wherever it comes.

By way of conclusion: Milton’s Satan and imperial envy For Milton, ‘Turkish’ was a common epithet for tyrant, and Satan is explicitly cast from Book 1 as a ‘great sultan’ commanding a horde of cruel, warlike and obedient followers. Like the Ottoman sultan of popular belief whose armies bring devastation wherever they come, Satan’s imperial project involves settling and colonizing Hell into a presidio for laying waste to the newly created world, the Earth. But beyond such associations, however, in Milton’s poem Islam and the Ottoman Empire entirely disappear, as such, into a much larger geo-historical pattern of westward imperial movement that has been in place since, well, Satan’s followers settled into Hell while awaiting their leader’s return. Milton’s characterization of Satan as an eastern despot driven by imperial envy invites us to discover a critique of the colonial mentality of English settlers to the New World—those ‘poore expulsed Brethren’—as of imperial projects in general. In terms of human history, Milton maps the success of Satan’s plan onto the progressive westward movement of empires originating in the Far East across Asia, Northern Africa, Europe and the Americas.

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An inventory of the traces of the East in Paradise Lost quickly reveals the epic to be well seasoned with commonplace eastern themes and associations, images and scenes. In Satan, these Eastern traces turn ‘Turkish tyranny’ into a critique of imperial ambition more generally by exposing its origins to be in envy and pride (PL, 4: 110–15) and its product to be destruction and waste. Both ‘Turkish’ tyrant and imperial impostor in Milton’s portrait, Satan appears from the start very much a force from the East, seeking to establish despotic rule over a parodic empire in desert spaces. From the moment of Satan’s initial envy, his imperial project gathers loyal but slavish followers and unfolds a westward itinerary designed to bring and celebrate destruction and waste as the very means by which he hopes to thwart divine intentions: Satan’s empire seeks to oppose providence and plenitude, and it comes from the East. Milton associates Satan’s initial pride and resultant envy with the unfolding of an imperial project—to settle Hell and then maliciously to waste the created world, God’s empire. It is Satan’s envy that animates imperialism in this primary instance, and Milton’s poem invites us to see it operating in all subsequent imperial ambitions and ventures. Suffering the pride of self-sufficiency, Satan’s envy characteristically attributes envy to ‘the almighty’. ‘Here at least’, he observes to Beelzebub of the burning lake, ‘We shall be free, the almighty hath not build / Here for his envy’ (PL, 1: 258–60). Aroused by ‘the uplifted spear / Of their great sultan’ (PL, 1: 347–8), the hordes of fallen angels resemble an oriental rabble, ‘a pitchy cloud / Of locusts, warping on the eastern wind’ (PL, 1: 340–1), and are unlike anything produced by ‘the populous north’ (PL, 1: 351). In cataloguing them, Milton takes us on a tour of those Ottoman-controlled Near Eastern lands that he omits from Book 11—Lebanon and Palestine, Greater Syria, Iraq and Egypt—as he describes the locations where the fallen angels would eventually establish their cults and temples (PL, 1: 396–505). When Satan addresses them, his arguments recall contemporary senses of ‘Turkish’ duplicity as he flatters them that, ‘Self-raised’ they might ‘repossess their native seat’ by means of ‘fraud or guile’, and his very next suggestion is that the ‘new worlds’ might prove to be the best site for their ‘first eruption’ (PL, 1: 634, 646, 650, 656). The oriental character of the wastes of Hell culminates at the end of Book 1 with the creation of Pandemonium, a mosque-like structure that outdoes the great mosques of Babylon and Cairo, where Satan will be enthroned at the start of Book 2. Here, during the debates, Milton exposes the oriental links between rebellion and envy, pride and cowardice, delusions of self-sufficiency and imperial ambition. Mammon articulates the colonial spirit of god-less self-reliance, of pioneering and exploring,

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a settler mentality that seeks liberty at all costs and imagines itself capable of creating greatness from nothing. ‘Let us not then pursue’, Mammon argues ‘By force impossible ... but rather seek Our own good from ourselves, and from our own Live to ourselves, though in this vast recess Free, and to none accountable. (PL, 2: 249–50, 252–5) His plan meets general approval, not only because ‘fear / Of thunder and the sword of Michael’ rendered further battle unappealing, but also because all were moved with the ‘desire / To found this nether empire, which might rise ... In emulation opposite to heaven’ (PL, 2: 293–4, 295–8). Beelzebub quickly steps in to advance Satan’s real plan, which is not to ‘build up here / A growing Empire’ but rather to seek out ‘the happy seat / Of some new race called Man’ and there By sudden onset, either with hell fire To waste his whole creation, or possess All as our own, and drive as we were driven. (PL, 2: 314–15, 347–8, 364–6) Enviously seeking to expand his empire in despite of the heaven he has lost, Satan aims to lay waste to what he cannot control. While Milton wrote nearly nothing about Islam and very little about the Muslim world, this should not encourage us to imagine that he was un-informed or even entirely un-interested. Indeed, Milton’s relative silence on topics that many in England considered urgent suggests a tactical negligence rather than indifference. Milton evidently found nothing in Islam that needed disputing or even deserving of attention since it could all be accounted for in the more general history of imperialism that followed the expulsion of Satan from Heaven, as told in pre-Qur’a ¯nic sources. For Milton, Islam did not require refutation, much less toleration. Yet he could not help but recognise how the Ottomans represented a very real political threat to Christendom: not simply territorial expansion, but more importantly, a paradigm of imperial desire itself, an ignoble desire born of pride and envy that was bound to produce nothing and to waste everything, including ‘this new world’ of ‘poore expulsed’ colonial settlers. For Milton, imperialism was a form of eastern tyranny that generated delusions of new world freedoms but was locked into an entirely different logic, that of waste.

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Notes Thanks to Mat Dimmock and Andrew Hadfield, Sarah Hutton, Jason Scott-Warren, John Kerrigan, Gordon Campbell and David Loewenstein for encouraging this project, and to audiences at Sussex, Cambridge, Middlesex, Reading and York for questioning early versions. 1. Eid Abdallah Dahiyat, John Milton and the Arab-Islamic Culture (Amman: Shukayr and Akasheh, 1987), pp. 71–5. 2. Ahmed Khaki, ‘John Milton and His Poetry in Light of Recent Psychological Research,’ Ath-Thaqafah, (21 November, 1939), p. 17, cited by Dahiyat, Milton, p. 67. 3. Abbas Mahmud al-’Aqqad, Iblis (Beirut: Dar al-Kitab al ‘Arabi, 1969). See my ‘Milton, Islam and the Ottomans’, in Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer, eds, Milton and Toleration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 284–98, for further discussion of the Qur’¯anic Iblis in the contexts of Milton’s treatment of the double fall. 4. Luwis Awad, ‘Al-Adab al-Inglizi adab ‘alami,’ (English Literature is an International literature) Al-Hilal (1 December 1967), pp. 219–22, cited by Dahiyat, Milton, p. 68. 5. See Sir Muhammad Iqbal, Shikwa and Jawab-I-Shikwa. Complaint and Answer: Iqbal’s Dialogue with Allah, trans. Khushwant Singh (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981). 6. Paul Stevens, ‘Milton and the New World: Custom, Relativism, and the Discipline of Shame,’ in Balachandra Rajan and Elizabeth Sauer, eds, Milton and the Imperial Vision (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1999), pp. 90–111, this passage on p. 92 citing Milton, Animadversions, from Douglas Bush, et al. eds, The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–82), 1: 668. Contrast Bruce McLeod’s ‘The “Lordly eye”: Milton and the Strategic Geography of Empire,’ in the same volume, pp. 48–66, which treats Milton as an advocate of English imperialism. 7. The Alcoran of Mahomet ... newly Englished, for the satisfaction of all that desire to look into the Turkish vanities (1649), preface to reader, sig A2. 8. Cited by Daniel J. Vitkus, ‘Turning Turk in Othello: The Conversion and Damnation of the Moor,’ Shakespeare Quarterly, 48 (Summer 1997), 145–76; this passage, p. 148. 9. See Daniel J. Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theatre and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (New York: Palgrave, 2003), and Gerald MacLean, ‘On Turning Turk, or Trying to: National Identity in Robert Daborne’s A Christian Turn’d Turke’, Explorations in Renaissance Culture, 29: 2 (Winter 2003): 225–52. 10. Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1905), 1: 157. 11. Joshua Poole, The English Parnassus: Or, A Helpe to English Poesie (1654), p. 213. 12. Samuel Chew, The Crescent and the Rose: Islam and England During the Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1937), pp. 149, 253. 13. Clifford Edmund Bosworth, ‘The Prophet Vindicated: A Restoration Treatise on Islam and Muhammad,’ Religion: A Journal of Religions and Religions, 6: 1 (Spring 1976): 1–12, these passages, pp. 1, 2. 14. On the contemporary controversy, see Gerald Maclean, ‘Before Orientalism? Islam, Ottomans, and Moors in the English Renaissance’, Review, 22 (2000): 229–47.

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15. Dahiyat, Milton, p. 70. 16. On the dating of Muscovia and Milton’s plans to summarize Purchas, see Robert Markley, ‘“The destin’d Walls / Of Cambalu”’, in Rajan and Sauer, eds, Milton, pp. 191–213; these matters on p. 203 and note 22. 17. I have drawn this material from Laurence Sterne and Harold Kollmeier, eds, A Concordance to the English Prose of John Milton (Binghampton, NY: MRTS, 1985) and followed their citation system in subsequent references to Bush, et al. eds, Complete Prose, hereafter CP. 18. From Eikonoclastes: K 3.448.9 bought the Turk out of Morea, and set free all the Greeks. K 3.453.14 like the Tombe of Mahomet. K 3.453.15 he was prophesying the death and burial of a Turkish Tyranny. K 3.574.7 what Privilege is that, above what the Turks. K 3.574.7 under the Turkish Monarchy? for without that kind of justice. K 3.575.12 enjoy as much liberty under Mahomet and the Grand Signor; the other we neither yet have enjoyed under him. K 3.575.12 and so farr Turkish vassals enjoy as much. 19. From The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates: TE 3.215.10 he is no better then a Turk, a Sarasin, a Heathen. 20. From Observations on Articles of Peace: O 3.312.18 and after that a perfet Turkish tyranny. O 3.313.7 to endeavour the introducing of a plain Turkish tyranny. O 3.314.4 and least noyse the Turkish Tyranny might be set up in France. 21. Likliest Means: LM 7.318.31. 22. Likliest Means: LM 7:318.32. 23. From Of Reformation: R 1.570.15 the Turkish, and Jewish rigor against whoring, and drinking. R 1.579.15 and Turkes, unlesse when they humour’d him. From Animadversions: A 1.726.8 Turke lately, that the Remonstrant is so afraid of Ascalon. From Letters Patent: LP 8.446.28 of Victory over the Turks, and blood spilt in the war. LP 8.448.6 of the Turk, might be broken and routed at one stroke. LP 8.448.37 He slew three Sultans of the Crim-Tartars. LP 8.449.2 by above forty thousand Turks, in which three and forty years. LP 8.449.15 while the desperation of the Turks whetted their valour. LP 8.450.11 made peace and Covenants with Cimanus the Turkish General. LP 8.450.18 in which by the Turkish rage in the year 1620 he died. From History of Muscovia: HM 8.490.4 and ride with a short Stirrup after the Turkish. HM 8.492.3 and Turky Horses in great state: before him 5000 Harquebusiers. HM 8.517.6 Turk, the Persian, Georgian, and other Tartar Princes. 24. Areopagitica: 2.548.25. 25. Prolusion 7, CP, 1: 298–9. 26. See Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 153–5. 27. Cited by Markley, ‘“The destin’d Walls”’, p. 213. 28. See Chew, Crescent, pp. 149, 253, and on Ibrahim Pasha’s campaign against Tahmasp, see Caroline Finkel, Osman’s Dream. The Story of the Ottoman Empire, 1300–1923 (London: Murray, 2005), pp. 125–6.

Afterword Jerry Brotton

Ever since the publication of Jacob Burckhardt’s defining study The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy in 1860, the Renaissance has been regarded as defining itself as emanating from Graeco-Roman classical antiquity.1 Beginning with Burckhardt, and developed through the studies of thinkers as diverse as Paul Oscar Kristeller, Hans Baron and Erwin Panofsky, runs an assumption that the shaping aspects of Renaissance culture – from the rise of the fifteenth-century Italian city states to the humanist studies that ultimately fostered the Lutheran Reformation in northern Europe – were defined by the achievements of the Graeco-Roman world.2 According to this argument, European Christianity shaped itself in direct response to the intellectual and territorial parameters of Greece and Rome, and it was this fusion which was primarily responsible for the ‘flowering’ of the Renaissance from the early fifteenth century. Such arguments have remained immensely powerful even within revisionist accounts of the development of the Renaissance, which have used different terminology (the early modern), but remained faithful to the intellectual, religious and geographical parameters laid down by nineteenth-century thinkers like Burckhardt. From the early 1980s the response of American New Historicism, led by Stephen Greenblatt, was to critique the celebration of the Renaissance as a triumph of individuality emerging from this fusion of Christianity and classical antiquity. In Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), Greenblatt, interestingly, both drew on and distanced himself from Burckhardt’s legacy in developing a new understanding of subjectivity and the will in Renaissance culture. In revising the nineteenth-century formulations

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of Renaissance individuality as developed by Burckhardt and Jules Michelet, Greenblatt argued: If we say there is a new stress on the executive power of the will, we must say that there is the most sustained and relentless assault upon the will; if we say that there is a new social mobility, we must say that there is a new assertion of power by both family and state to determine all movement within the society; if we say that there is a heightened awareness of the existence of alternative modes of social, theological, and psychological organization, we must say there is a new dedication to the imposition of control upon those modes and ultimately to the destruction of alternatives.3 Greenblatt’s dialectical formulation allowed him to offer what have since become defining interpretations of a range of key English Renaissance literary texts, including Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and its representation of the figure of the Jew. Unfortunately, with a few admirable exceptions, Greenblatt’s suggestion of pursuing alternative theological models and their impact on selfhood was not taken up by subsequent scholars working through the insights of New Historicism in any sustained way. Within literary studies James Shapiro’s Shakespeare and the Jews (1997) was an honourable exception, developing Greenblatt’s exploration of the Jew in Marlowe and extending it to an exemplary historical and literary study of the Jewish presence in Elizabethan England. Jeffrey Knapp’s study Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation and Theatre in Renaissance England (2002), convincingly argued that ‘English theology and ecclesiology shaped the drama at a fundamental level’, but with only passing attention to the theatre’s dramatisation of different theologies.4 With few other exceptions, the hold of New Historicism on early modern textual studies tended to focus its critical energies on the impact of the discovery of the New World and related questions of colonisation, slavery and definitions of civility and savagery (and both Greenblatt and Knapp have written detailed studies of this phenomenon), to the exclusion of any consideration of the imperial and religious dramas being played out between the religions of the book across the Mediterranean world and to the east of Renaissance Europe. The essays in The Religions of the Book therefore fill an urgent and timely gap in our understanding of one particularly crucial dimension of what drove the European Renaissance. Both the critical exhaustion of the methodology and geographical focus of New Historicism and recent global events since the terrorist attacks on the USA on 9/11 make this

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a particularly important volume. By focussing on the diverse interactions between the religions of the book – namely, Christianity, Islam and Judaism – this collection reorients our understanding of what drove many theological debates of the period, while also acknowledging that the seamless recovery of Graeco-Roman antiquity was not limited to a confident, resurgent Christianity. The essays also take an important step forward in offering a fascinating new perspective on the push and pull of the ways in which religious authority across the religions of the book placed both limits on the selfhood of its believers, be they Christian, Muslim or Jewish, but also opened up alternative personal responses to and psychological understanding of the role of comparative religion. More recently critical attention has focussed on the artistic and intellectual interactions between Ottoman, Persian and North African Muslim cultures and European Christianity, which have questioned the assumption that Europe was the political and intellectual superior in such transactions.5 In following this approach many of the essays above suggest that Christianity was dealing with a resurgent and imperially superior Islam, and a worryingly protean, cosmopolitan Judaism, both of which appeared to have little concern for either Catholicism or Protestantism. So as much as an increasingly divided Christianity defined itself in vociferous opposition to competing religions of the book, it also came up against the limits of its own theology (although in most cases such limits were quietly occluded). The collection reveals that much ambitious critical and archival work is still needed if we are to truly understand the significance of the collision between religious faiths for Renaissance culture. In what follows I would like to outline some of the problems as well as opportunities that such scholarship still faces, and to make some suggestions about how to move forward in tackling this particular area of study. Thinking about the significance of the volume’s essays, while also returning to Greenblatt’s formulation on the dialectical change in the experience of individuality within the Renaissance, I am struck by how the collection offers some noticeably different perspectives on the development of particular aspects of Renaissance culture. From Michelet and Burckhardt to Greenblatt and much of twentieth-century writing on the Renaissance, what has been repeatedly stressed is the idea of achievement. How does the rebirth of classical ideas, ask these scholars, lead to the great artistic, literary and philosophical achievements that we regard as quintessentially Renaissance? By examining the collision between the religions of the book, the essays here suggest that

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the shaping of religious selfhood, particularly from a Christian perspective, was shaped by adversarial confrontation and competitive exchange rather than simple theological justification. This offers a more nuanced understanding of the development of selfhood than Greenblatt’s stress on the productivity of anxiety in the emergence of early modern individuality. This might lead in subsequent scholarly work to an exploration of the broader ways in which the different religions of the book modified their particular theology in line with their encounters with each other. Another significant aspect of this collection is the way in which it reorients an understanding of the geographical and intellectual limits of the Renaissance. As Palmira Brummett points out in her essay on the depiction of geographical frontiers in Ottoman–Venetian–Hapsburg maps, the divisions between ‘East’ and ‘West’ were far more complex, shifting and multivalent than today’s geographical and psychological divisions would suggest. It might be easier to see a division between ‘Christian’ and ‘Turk’, rather than Europe and Asia, or Hapsburg and Ottoman. But, as Daniel Vitkus and other literary scholars have recently argued, the conceptual and geographical frontiers of religious fidelity and infidelity, or ‘turning Turk’, were also constantly shifting and subject to revision.6 Prior to the imposition of national boundaries, the period under study is defined by porous and often overlapping lines of division, along religious, but also imperial, linguistic and ethnic boundaries, but we now need to recognise the complexity of these boundaries, while also broadening them to include religious encounters which have previously been neglected. As North Africa and the Ottoman territories have come under increased study, it remains to see how Christian encounters with, for instance, Persia affect our understanding of religion within the period. If we broaden the geographical parameters of our field of enquiry, we would also need to finesse our understanding of the tone of exchange and encounter between the different religions of the book. This could lead to further work of identifying points at which coexistence and amicable exchange defined relations between the different religions, and when conflict and prejudice were the defining motors of encounter. The editors have already noted the importance of Natalie Zemon Davis’s Trickster Travels, the ground-breaking study of al-Hassan al-Wazzan, also known as Leo Africanus, the Muslim diplomat captured by Christian pirates in 1518 who spent over ten years in Rome, first converting, then studying, translating different aspects of Islam, Judaism and Christianity, before returning to North Africa and reverting to Islam. As a bridge

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between the different religions, al-Wazzan is an exemplary figure, particularly for our current times. But his story of conversion and intellectual concord is probably specific to his political and geographical conditions. The southern Mediterranean world of North Africa and islands like the Balearics and Sicily had a long tradition of exchange and interaction between the religions of the book.7 Similarly, the Balkans held very different traditions around cultural exchange and religious conversion to Iberia, while northern European cultures such as England were largely insulated from such phenomenon. So when Luther launches a theological attack on Judaism or Islam, he speaks from a very different position to al-Wazzan, Jewish scholars of the period or earlier Italian humanist scholars like George of Trebizond, whose work has tended to stress genuine or strategic exchange or accommodations between the religions of the book. We should therefore take care in celebrating moments that appear to stress religious tolerance and accommodation, when many of these moments may be limited to their specific contexts or situations, and perhaps address more complicated fears and anxieties, as Eliane Glaser convincingly argues in her essay on mid seventeenthcentury Commonwealth England. The collection also acknowledges some of the limits involved in undertaking sustained comparative research. It implicitly identifies the rigidity of disciplinary boundaries within the humanities that still limit the ability to speak across cultures. To understand comprehensively the religions of the book identified here, we need to cross a series of intellectual disciplines, and it is telling that the essays in Religions of the Book range from book history and ecclesiastical history, to international relations, anthropology, literary studies and traditional history. Contributors include those working in university departments of history, area studies and literary studies, while also addressing sub-disciplines as diverse as Turkish Studies and Medieval Studies. Such diversity is commendable, but can also produce its own problems. At a recent conference on the Ottoman impact on the European Renaissance, I realized a tendency on the part of English and American scholars to uncritically praise what they regarded as the Ottoman contribution to the Renaissance, with little sense of the problems of Ottoman Studies as a subject area that praised an imperial theocracy, or its place within the intellectual politics of modern-day republican Turkey. As scholars learn from each other’s research, they may also need to understand, and perhaps question, the very assumptions that underpin other fields of research. As well as learning from different intellectual practices, this collection will hopefully encourage further scholarship into the importance of

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material culture in shaping religious conversations. Anthony Bale’s essay on perceived Christian anti-Semitism in late Medieval England cleverly questions the focus on books (such as the codex, the autobiographical manuscript, the printed book, the conduct manual) in terms of defining different religions. Bale shows that the apprehension of Judaism in late Medieval England is not predicated exclusively on reading practices but on memory and the imagination that might appear alien to us as twenty-first century readers. In a similar vein recent work on cultural exchange between Renaissance Italy and the Ottoman Empire has shown that we can trace the extent of transactions between faiths through the exchange of objects that do not ‘speak’ in the same way as a text enshrined in the pages of a manuscript or a printed book.8 As such, the public rhetoric of religious intolerance can give way to a more nuanced account of exchange between religions that often operates outside or regardless of religious prescriptions. As well as addressing the ways in which material–cultural artefacts can illuminate interactions between the religions of the book, scholars like Bale and Birchwood also offer striking new responses to the turn in early modern studies to the history of the book and reading practices.9 This work has yielded fascinating insights into exploring how and why reading took place in the Renaissance. But what the research in this collection suggests is that we are only at the early stages of exploring how the production, circulation and reception of texts (and in particular religious texts) move between faiths and cultures. Such work would offer a different perspective on how people read, as well as how and where their reading shaped their religious faith in relation to other religions. This is also an important step that would avoid the relative separation between research into such cross-cultural topics that can sometimes appear distinct, or even distant, from the rest of Renaissance Studies. All these issues raise the basic but crucial question of how to pursue such ambitious comparative religious research, and incorporate it within the wider frame of Renaissance Studies. A basic problem is that of linguistics. If it was once the case that scholars of the Renaissance required mastery of Greek and Latin, not to mention at least some vernacular European languages to undertake their area of study, it now appears that mastery of Hebrew and Arabic are necessary to speak with confidence of the religions of the book. Furthermore access to archival material outside the traditional European context will be essential to broaden the field and undoubtedly yield even more exciting information on how the religions of the book corresponded. Although the

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over-weaning identity politics of the 1990s might have passed, it is still noticeable that very few scholars from North Africa or the Middle East are part of the intellectual conversation that is now transforming the field. Ottoman Studies have already made some impact in this area, including the distinguished work of Gülru Necipoglu, but most of this work has addressed questions of artistic exchange or imperial rivalry, with little attention being paid to religious difference.10 Within today’s politically and religiously polarised situation, it is hardly surprising that scholars from these areas are reluctant to address such issues, but if the kind of research espoused in this collection is to prosper, then it is imperative to foster an intellectual and collaborative conversation across such cultures and disciplines. Finally, this collection shows the limits of traditional chronology and periodisation. Where, for instance, do we define the end of the European Renaissance? The end of the sixteenth century? The contributions of Birchwood and MacLean would suggest that a certain collision between Christianity and Islam comes to an end only as late as the end of the seventeenth century, when the Ottomans turn their attentions back towards their eastern fronts, rather than focussing on its confrontation with Western Europe. Does this exploration of the interaction of the religions of the book therefore suggest that we stretch our definition of the Renaissance? Or perhaps it suggests that the very idea of the Renaissance is no longer helpful in understanding the changes that took place in Europe and Asia from the late fifteenth century to the beginning of the seventeenth century. If this is the case, then is it possible to argue that Islam or Judaism had a ‘Renaissance’? Presumably scholars would wish to avoid imposing such a Eurocentric term on different religious cultures, but if so it still leaves unresolved the question of whether or not international humanities scholarship wants to hold on to a belief that some radical and abiding cultural change took place somewhere between 1400 and 1700.

Notes 1 Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore (London: Penguin, 1990), Part Three, ‘The Revival of Antiquity’. 2 See Warren Boutcher, ‘The making of the humane philosopher: Paul Oscar Kristeller and twentieth-century intellectual history’, in John Monfasani (ed.), Kristeller Reconsidered (New York: Italica, 2005) pp. 37–67. 3 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) pp. 1–2.

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4 Jeffrey Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation and Theatre in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002) p. 9. 5 See for instance Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton, Global Interests: Renaissance Arts between East and West (London: Reaktion, 2000). 6 Daniel Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theatre and the Multicultural Mediterranean (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 7 Steven O’Shea, Sea of Faith: Islam and Christianity in the Medieval Mediterranean World (London: Walker & Co, 2006). 8 See for instance Deborah Howard, Venice and the East: The Impact of the Islamic World on Venetian Architecture 1100–1500 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). 9 One of the most recent examples of this approach to reading is Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 10 See Gülru Necipoglu, ‘Süleyman the Magnificent and the representation of power in the context of Ottoman-Hapsburg-Papal rivalry’, Art Bulletin, 71 (1989), pp. 401–27.

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Luther, Martin, ‘On the Jews and Their Lies’ (1543), Trans. Martin H. Bertram, in Luther’s Works (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971) Morton, Thomas, Salomon, or A treatise declaring the state of the kingdome of Israel, as it was in the daies of Salomon (London: Robert Robinson for Robert Dexter, 1596) Percy, William, Mahomet and His Heaven: A Critical Edition ed. Matthew Dimmock (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) Prynne, William, Twelve Considerable Serious Questions touching Church Government: Sadly propounded (out of a Reall Desire of Unitie, and Tranquillity in Church and State) to all Sober-minded Christians (London: F. L. for Michael Sparke Senior, 1644) Purchas, Samuel, Purchas his Pilgrimage (London, 1613) Ross, Alexander, ι, or, a View of all Religions in the world (London, 1653) Selden, John, De Synedriis et Praefecturis Juridicis Veterum Ebraorum (London: Jacob Flesher, 1653) The Alcoran of Mahomet ... newly Englished, for the satisfaction of all that desire to look into the Turkish vanities (London, 1649) To the Hon. The Commons of England ... the humble petition on ministers and other inhabitants in and about London, praying for assistance in the establishment of a lecture in Oriental languages (London, 1648) Vitkus, Daniel J. ed., Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000) Walton, Brian, A Brief Description of an Edition of the Bible, in the Original Hebr. Samar. And Greek, with the most ancient Translations of the Jewish and Christian Churches, viz. The Sept. Greek, Chaldee, Syriack, AEthiopick, Arabick, Perisn, &c, and the Latine versions of them all, A new Apparatus, &c. (London, 1653) Waterhouse, Osborn, The Non-Cycle Mystery Plays, together with the Croxton Play of the Sacrament and the Pride of Life (London: Early English Text Society, 1909) Webbe, Edward, The Rare and most wonderfull things Edw. Webbe an Englishman borne, hath seene and passed in his troublesome trauiles, in the Cities of Ierusalem, Damasko, Bethlehem and Galely: and in the landes of Iewrie ... newly enlarged and corrected by the Author (London, 1590)

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Robinson, Benedict, Islam and Early Modern Literature: The Politics of Romance from Spenser to Milton (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) Roth, Cecil, A History of the Jews in England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941) Rubin, Miri, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews, 2nd edition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) Schwoebel, Robert, The Shadow of the Crescent: The Renaissance Image of the Turk (1453–1517) (Nieuwkoop: B. De Graaf, 1967) Shapiro, James, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996) Soykut, Mustafa, Image of the “Turk” in Italy: A History of the “Other” in Early Modern Europe: 1453–1683 (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz, 2001) Tolan, John, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002) Toomer, G. J., Eastern Wisedome and Learning: The Study of Arabic in Seventeenth Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) Tyerman, Christopher, England and the Crusades, 1095–1588 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988) Vitkus, Daniel, Turning Turk: English Theater in the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) Zagorin, Perez, How Religious Toleration came to the West (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004)

Index Abbad, Ibn 11 Abraham 66 Abraham, Isaac ben 66 Abu ‘l Faraj 144 Adams, Thomas 143, 146 Adrianople 47 Africa 14–15, 38, 79, 82, 111, 189, 197, 198 Africanus, Leo see Al-Hassan al-Wassan Al-Aqqad, Abbas Mahomed 180 Al-Hassan al-Wassan (Leo Africanus) 14–15, 82, 198–9 Al-Ma’arri, Abu al-Ala 180 Alaeddin 51, 55 Albania 52, 57, 59, 60 Ali ibn abu Taleb 11 altar 140 Amazons 59 Amorite 46, 47 Anabaptists 6 Anastasius Bibliotecarius 78 Anatolia 48, 49, 50, 51, 59 Ancona 2 Anglican Church 17, 144, 150, 153, 162 Anti-Semitism 3, 16, 23–44, 89–109, 200 Arabs/Arabic 11, 17, 38, 78, 97, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 146, 152, 153, 154, 180, 184, 187, 200 Archer, John Michael 111, 134 n.7, 135 n.10 Arius 73, 74–6, 81 Arma Christi 30–1, 34, 39, 40 Asikpasazade 55 ’Awad, Leuis 180–1 Bacon, Roger 9 Baillie, Robert 164, 165, 169, 177 n.31 Bainton, Roland 90 Bajazet, Callapine 3 Bagci, Serpil 2 Baldwin 46

Bale, Anthony 16, 18, 46, 70, 89, 200 Balkans 17, 46, 48, 50, 56, 111, 115, 121, 124, 132, 199 Baptists 162, 165 Baraz, Daniel 29 Baron, Hans 195 Basle 5, 50, 60, 83, 163 Beard, Thomas 73 Bedwell, William 141, 142–3, 147 Beheim, Michel 61 Belgrade 49, 52, 120, 124 Beltrami de Mignanelli 46–7 Benedict XVI, Pope 6 Bernard of Clarivaux 26 Bernard, Randulph 110 Berry, Duc de 71 Bethany 37, 40 Bethlehem 37 Bible 5, 17, 23–4, 24–5, 30, 34, 37, 38, 59, 74–5, 78 Geneva Bible 7–8, 10 Gospels 25–6, 67, 107 n.19, 108 n.34, 152, 161 Hebrew Bible 93, 98 New Testament 25–6, 69, 83, 95, 102, 142, 166 Old Testament 1, 4, 5, 7–8, 67, 68, 94, 99, 159, 166, 170, 173 Polyglot Bible 17, 140, 152–7 Vulgate Bible 40 Bibliander, Theodorus 78 Biddick, Kathleen 32, 40 Biernoff, Suzannah 37 Birchwood, Matthew 17, 78, 103, 163, 185, 200, 201 Birgitta of Sweden 32, 35, 39 Bisaha, Nancy 1 Black Sea 56, 57, 59 blasphemy 17, 43 n.36, 89, 96, 100–1, 103–4, 107 n.21 Bodin, Jean 170 Bodleian Library 141 Bohme, Jacob 149

207

208

Index

Book of Common Prayer 162 Bosnia 54 Bosphorus 51, 52, 56 Brankovic´, George 49, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 59, 60 Brankovic´, Mara 49, 53 Braudel, Fernand 11 Bridge, William 167 Bridgewater, Earl of 150 Broughton, Hugh 170 Brown, Edward 132–3 Brown, Samuel 142 Brummett, Palmira 17, 58, 166, 198 Bry, Theodore de 120, 122, 124 Buda 52, 54, 120, 133 Bulgaria/Bulgarians 55, 58, 61 Burgundy, Duke of 45–6, 47, 51, 52, 60 Burgundians 56–8, 59 Burkhardt, Jacob 195, 196, 197 Burroughs, Jeremiah 167 Bussemecher, Johann 124, 125 Buxtorf, Johan 163 Byzantine Empire/Emperor 45–65 John VIII 50, 53–4, 60 Cahn, Walter B. 71 Cairo 111 Canterbury 39 Calvary 37, 39, 40 Cambridge University 143, 153, 154, 184, 186 Camocio, Giovanni 116–18, 119, 124, 126, 127, 129, 136 n.17 Canterbury, Archbishop of 141 Carruthers, Mary 27 cartoons 31–2, 43 n.25 Castellio, Sebastian 160 Casti, Emanuela 135 n.10 Catholicism/Catholics 5, 10, 66, 92, 93, 141, 171–2, 186, 197 Caxton, William 25 Celebi, Mahmud 52, 53 Cesarini, Cardinal Julian 50, 52, 54, 56, 57, 60, 62 Charles I, King of England 144, 150, 163, 186 Chew, Samuel 184, 189–90 China 187–8

Christendom 46, 67, 112, 114, 130, 133 Christianity/Christians 1, 3–5, 6–7, 9–11, 11–12, 14–15, 60–1, 113–14, 120, 124, 129, 195, 197 circumcision 99 Ciriaco of Ancona 50, 53 Cistercians 26 Clareville, Abbot of 46, 47 Cloud of Unknowing 32 Cohen, Jeffery Jerome 32 Coleman, Thomas 170 Cologne 124 colonialism 15, 191–2, 196 Columbus, Christopher 12 commonplace books 29 Congregationalists 165 Constantinople 1–2, 16, 47, 48, 56, 57, 58, 67, 111, 112, 114 conversion 14–15, 62, 78, 85 n.19, 105 Corfu 52 Coron 127, 138 n.31 Coronelli, P. M. 127, 128, 129–32 Coryat, Thomas 161 Cotton, John 165, 166, 167 Courson, Robert de 46 Crete 110 Crimea 47, 62 Cromwell, Oliver 3, 148, 159 Croxton Play of the Sacrament 69–70 Crucifixion 3, 16, 42 n.8, 42 n.10 Crusades 3, 16, 18, 26, 45–65, 67, 111 Cuneyd of Aydin 49 Cyprus 47 Daborne, Robert 13 D’alvery, Marie Therese 71 Dahiyat, Eid Abdallah 180, 185 Danckerts, Justus 120, 123, 124 Dante 11 Danube 48, 49, 54, 56, 57, 62, 115, 121 Dardanelles 47, 48, 51, 58 Davis, Natalie Zemon 198 Davis, Robert 134 n.3 De Fer, N. 114–15 De Statu Sarracenorum 1 Delano-Smith, Catherine 39 Denmark/Danes 38

Index 209 Devil/devils 33, 102, 112 devotio moderna 24, 27 Dimmock, Matthew 16, 24, 25, 37, 151, 162, 185 Diugosz 53 Donne, John 149–50 Doukas 55 Dragases, Constantine 53, 57, 60 Drakul, Vlad 53, 56–7, 59 drama 24, 68–70, 196 Dutch see Netherlands Edgehill, Battle of 144 Edirne, Treaty of 53, 54, 59, 63 n.26 Edward I, King of England 3, 159 Edwards, Thomas 161 Egypt 47, 62, 189 ekphrasis 28–9, 31 Elizabeth I, Queen of England 10 emblems 124, 133, 137 n.24, 138 n.33 England 10, 30, 37, 40, 75, 79, 81, 141, 152 Church of 164 English Civil War 152, 159, 165, 170 English economy 19 n.16 English Revolution 17–18, 157 Erasmus 10, 73, 81, 82–3, 84 Erastus, Thomas 163 Erastianism 165, 170, 172, 174, 178 n.57 Erpenius, Thomas 142 eschatology 77 Ethiopia/Ethiopic 141 Eugenius IV, Pope 50–1 Europe 17, 31, 37, 38, 47, 51, 56, 59, 114–15, 121, 132, 133, 141, 195 excommunication 163, 179 n.63 exegesis 95, 97, 101, 106 Favyn, Andre 112–3 Ferrara 50 Ferrara-Florence, Council of 46, 47 Fifth Monarchists 163 Fishbane, Michael 97 Fletcher, John 6 Florence 46, 50, 54 Foxe, John 12–13 France/French 78–9, 114–15

Franciscans 25, 37 Frankfurt 120, 163 French, Peter 144 Gallipoli 47, 49, 52, 56, 60 Gautier de Compiegne 76 Gehan de Wavrin 52 Geneva 163 Genoa, Genoese 47, 49–50, 56–7 George of Trebizond 199 Gerald of Wales 72 Germany 23, 30, 118 Gillespie, George 164, 165, 166, 168–70, 171, 172 Giustiniani, Agostino 141 Glaser, Eliane 17–18, 147, 199 Golden Legend see Jacobus de Voragine Goldin, Judah 96, 97 Golubac 49 Goodwin, John 160, 172–3 Goodwin, Thomas 164, 167 Granada 12, 14 Greaves, Thomas 153 Greece/Greeks 46, 48, 50, 51, 57, 58, 59, 114, 121, 155, 195, 200 Greenblatt, Stephen 12, 195–6, 197, 198 Grimestone, John 27–31, 34 Grotius, Hugo 160, 163, 170 Guylforde, Sir Richard 39 Haggadic exegesis 97–8, 99 Hakluyt, Richard 10, 185 Halakhic Code 97 Halakhot 99 Hallett, Raphael 17, 24, 147, 166 Hanmer, Meredith 12–14 Hapsburgs 124, 133 Harrington, James 163 Hartlieb, Samuel 185 Hebrew 92, 104, 141, 144, 155, 159, 170, 171, 200 Heinemann, Joseph 97 Helwys, Thomas 162 heresy/heretics 16, 34, 43 n.35, 70, 74, 75, 77, 79, 80, 111, 149, 155, 162 Herman of Dalmatia 71

210

Index

Herod see Wakefield Pageant of Herod the Great Heywood, Thomas The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels 8–11 Higden, Ranulf 72, 73, 76 Hill, Thomas 145–8 Hilton, Walter 32 Hobbes, Thomas 163 Holland see Netherlands Holy Land 2, 37, 39, 40, 45–65 Holy Roman Empire 2 Holy War 47 Holy Wars of Sultan Murad 52, 55–6, 60, 61 Homer 2 Hooker, Richard 162 Horace 71 Hostiensis 45 Howard, Deborah 134 n.2 humanism/humanists 83, 199 Hunyadi 51, 52, 53, 54–5, 56–7, 58, 59, 60 Hugh of St. Victor 40 Hungary/Hungarians 45–9, 51, 52, 53–6, 58–9, 61–2, 118, 120, 133 Ibrahim, Pasha 190 idols/idolatry 75, 77 Imber, Colin 16 imitatio Christi 24, 33–4, 37, 39 Independents 164, 171, 174 Infelici, Mario 135 n.15 infidels 16, 162 Iqbal, Muhammad 180–1 Islam 1, 5, 7, 9–11, 12–13, 14–15, 45–65, 180–94, 197 Italy 12, 23, 38, 39, 118, 121 Jacobite Church 46 Jacobus de Voragine Legenda Aurea 25–6, 74 Jaffa 37 Jehan de Wavrin 61 Jenkins, Jacqueline 33 Jericho 37 Jerusalem 37–9, 40, 58, 110, 111, 112, 113

Jews/Judaism 3, 6–7, 8, 9–11, 13, 14–15, 16, 17–18, 23–44, 66–7, 69–70, 73–4, 77, 79, 89–109, 147, 159–79, 181, 184, 196, 197, 200, 201 Ashkenazi Jews 38 Marrano Jews 14, 15 Sephardic Jews 38, 66 John [VI] Kantakouzenos 48 Johnson, Samuel 183 Jordan Valley 37 Karaman, Ibrahim Emir of 45, 48, 49, 50, 51, 53–4, 55, 59, 60, 62 Kastriote, George 57, 59, 60 Kemp, Margery 11, 16, 23–4, 32–41, 89 Kempis, Thomas a 27 Khaki, Ahmed 180 Kidd, Colin 14 Kidron Valley 37 Kings Lynn 3, 23, 39 Klein, Charlotte 107 n.27 Knapp, Jeffrey 196 Knolles, Richard 185 Kristeller, Paul Oscar 195 Kruger, Steven 40 Kunzle, David 31 Langland, William 11 Latin 27, 29, 72, 78, 80, 142, 156, 163, 200 Laud, William, Archbishop 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 152 Laudians 153 Lazarevic, Steven 49 law 23, 66, 78, 92, 98, 168, 172 Leicester 39 Leiden 141, 142 Leo, John see Al-Hassan al-Wassan Lepanto, Battle of 12, 111, 116, 127, 131, 137 n.25 Levant 12, 23, 38, 50 Levant Company 140, 141 Levellers 160, 165 Libya 14 Lightfoot, John 161, 164, 165, 170, 172 literature 24, 27–31, 62, 196

Index 211 Lollards/Lollardy 34 London 12, 14, 140, 142, 146, 160 Love, Nicholas 29, 32, 35 Lull, Ramon 11 Luther, Martin 5–6, 17, 78, 80, 82, 83, 84, 89–109, 147, 199 Lutheran Church 96 Lycostenes 83 Lydgate, John 38, 76 MacLean, Gerald 18, 78, 151, 201 McLuhan, Marshall 43 n.39 Maier, Alexander 120, 121 Mamelukes 37–8, 47, 62 Mandeville, Sir John 1, 10, 72, 81, 84 Mantua, Council of (1549) 2 maps 110–38, 198 Marius, Richard 90 Markley, Robert 187–8 Marlowe, Christopher The Jew of Malta 3, 68, 70, 196 martyrdom 24 Matar, Nabil 110 Maugest, Hans 61 Medici, Ferdinand de, Cardinal 141 Mediterranean 11–12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 110, 116, 189, 196, 199 Mehmed II, Ottoman Sultan 1–2, 48, 55 Mehmed III, Ottoman Sultan 124 Melancthon, Philip 78 Merback, Mitchell 41 Michelet, Jules 196, 197 Midrash 99, 105 Milan 39 Milton, John 18, 180–94 Modena, Leon 161 Moore, Andrew 185 Moors 12, 13, 184 monsters/monstrosity 66–88 More, Thomas 6, 82 Moriscos 11, 15 Morocco 14 Morton, Thomas 162 Moryson, Fynes 12 Moses 98 Muhammad 6, 10, 11, 37, 66–88, 111, 137 n.27, 181, 185–6

Murad II, Ottoman Sultan 45, 47–50, 52–5, 62 Murad III, Ottoman Sultan 10 Muslim see Islam Necipoglu, Gulru 201 Nelli, Nicolo 116 Nesri, Chronicle of 53 Nestorius/Nestorians 73, 74, 75–6, 78 Netherlands 12, 120 New Historicism 195–6 New World 79, 182, 190 Nicholas of Cusa 47–8 Nicopolis 47, 56 Battle of 48 nonconformism 159–60 Norfolk 27 Nurnberg 31 Nye, Philip 167 Oberman, Henrich 90, 92 Okeley, William 78 Order of the Golden Fleece 58 Orhan 49 Oriental studies/orientalism 140–58 Ortelius, Abraham 182 Orthodox Church 59 Ottomans 1–3, 10, 12, 17, 45–65, 66–7, 110–139, 181, 182, 184–90, 191, 197, 198 Ottoman Studies 199, 200–1 Otranto 3 Overton, Richard 160, 164 Owen, John 155, 156 Oxford 140, 144 Oxford University 142, 143, 153 Palestine 38, 40, 97, 149 Panovsky, Irwin 195 Paris 141 Paris Victorines 40 Parliament 148, 153, 155, 164, 170 Parr, Richard 153 Passau 31 Passion, The 3, 16, 23–44 Paull, Michael 68 Persia 2, 197 Peter of Cluny 71, 74 Peter the Hermit 46

212

Index

Pharasiac traditions 102 Philosemitism 159 Piccolomini Library, Sienna 2–3 pilgrims/pilgrimage 38, 40 Pinargenti, Simon 116, 117 Pintoricchio 2–3 pirates 14 Pisa 131, 139 n.39 Pius II, Pope 1–3 Pococke, Edward 140–1, 143, 144, 153 Poland 23, 51, 56, 60 Poole, Joshua 183 Postel, Guillame 141 Presbyterianism 160, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 170, 171, 172, 174 printing/print culture 31–2, 75, 152 Protestantism/Protestants 5, 12, 66, 73, 75, 78, 83, 141, 148, 197 Prynne, William 148–9, 164, 165, 167, 171, 172–3 Pseudo-Bonoventura 29, 32 Ptolomy 115 Purchas, Samuel 72–4, 77, 78, 185 Purchas His Pilgrimage 6–7 Puritanism 159–79 Qur’an 5, 7, 10, 17, 18, 66, 78–82, 141, 142–3, 151–2, 184, 185, 186 Rabbinical exegesis 98, 107 n.15 Ragusa 45, 51, 52, 53 Ramleh 37 Randolph 127 Raphelengius, Franciscus 141 Reformation 6, 10, 75, 165, 195 Resurrection 29 revisionism 159 Rhode Island 161 Rhodes 47, 58 Riccoldo da Montecroce 10, 78 Richard I 3 Rislat al-Kindi 78 ritual 15 Robert of Ketton 78 Robinson, Henry 160 Rogers, John 163 Rolle, Richard 32 Roman Empire 2, 114, 131, 132 Romania 121

Rome 14, 50, 59, 141, 195, 198 Roper, Geoffrey 142 Ross, Alexander 76, 78–83, 151 Royalists/Royalism 145, 150, 152 Rudolph II, Holy Roman Emperor 120, 124 Rumelia 48, 51, 55, 112 Russell, G. A. 141 Ryer, André du 78 St. Anne 23 St. Jerome 23 St. John of the Cross 11 St. Veronica 30 Sandys, George 77, 185 Sanhedrin 160, 163–5, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 177 n.26 Saracens 1, 11, 13, 34, 37, 38, 82, 162, 182, 186–7 Scaliger, Joseph Justus 163, 170 Schein, Sylvia 38–9 Schwoebel, Robert 11 Scottish Covenanters 148 Scottish Kirk 164 Scribal tradition 102 Scythia/Scythians 2, 13, 59, 111 Selden, John 144, 163, 165, 170 Serbia and Wallachia 48, 49, 54, 55, 56, 58, 59, 60 George, Despot of 51 Sergius 73, 78 Servetus 6 Shapiro, James 196 Shakespeare, William 183 King Henry VIII 6 The Merchant of Venice 3–5, 7–8 Sienna 3 Sigismund, King of Hungary 48, 49 Simpson, Sidrach 167 Smith, Thomas 153 Sofia 51, 55, 61 Solinus 83 Soykut, Mustafa 111 Spain/Spanish 12, 14, 23, 66 Spanish Inquisition 14 speech 91–2, 106 Stamford 3 Steven of Canterbury 72 Stevens, Paul 182

Index 213 Stokes, David 153 Strohm, Paul 34 Switzerland 23 Syria 47 Syriac 141 Tahmasp, Shah 190 Talmud 92, 97, 163 Tandini, Zeren 2 Tartars 9 theology 17, 83, 103, 104, 106, 196, 198 Thessaloniki 48, 52, 60 Thomason Tracts 145, 151 Thorndike, Herbert 153 Thuroczy 55, 60 Timur 48 Tolan, John 68, 77 Toledan Collection 71, 74 toleration 17, 159–79, 199 Tomasch, Sylvia 40 Toomer, G. J. 141, 144, 145 Torah 97 Torkington, Richard 39 Transylvania 49 Travel Writing 15 Treatise of the Turkes Law Called Alcaron 72–3 Troy 58–9, 111 Turks 13, 16–17, 47, 51, 58–9, 61, 67–8, 80, 81, 84, 92, 110–4, 124, 132–3, 149, 182–4, 191, 198 Tyerman, Christopher 3 Tyndale, William 5–6 Uccello, Paolo 31 Urbino 31 Usher, James, Archbishop 145, 153–4 Varad 54 Varna 16, 45–65 Vatican 141

Venice/Venetian 2, 3, 12, 37, 45, 47, 48, 49–50, 51, 52, 59, 60, 115, 116, 118, 127, 129–32, 139 n.38, 161 Vesconti, Pietro 40 Vickers, John 153, 158 n.28 Vienna 111, 114, 115, 120, 131, 133 Virgin, Mary 23, 34–5, 93–4 Vitkus, Daniel 134 n.3, 198 Vladislav, King of Poland 49, 52 Voaden, Rosalynn 39 Wakefield Pageant of Herod the Great 68–9 Waleran de Wavrin 57–9, 61 Wallachia see Serbia and Wallachia Walton, Dr Brian 140, 152–3, 155, 156 Walwyn, William 160 Ward, John (Yusuf Reis) 12 Westminster Abbey 148, 164 Westminster Assembly 164–5, 167 Wharton, Annabel 39 Wheelocke, Abraham 143, 153–4 William of Auvergn 9 William of Tripoli 1 Williams, Roger 160, 161–2, 164, 166–7, 171–3, 174 Wilson, Robert 13 Windeatt, Barry 35 Wittenberg 104 Wittkower, Rudolph 68 Wolf, Johan 83 Woolaston, Sir John 145–6, 148 Writer, Clement 156 Wycliffe, John 11 Wynkyn de Worde 72 York 3, 34, 39, 40 Archbishop of 34 Zaccaria, Hassan 3 Zion, Mount 37