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A Reconfigured Jerusalem in Twelfth-Century Latin Sermons About Islam, Quidditas Volume 32 Article 6 2011 Hostis Antiquus Resurgent: A Reconfigured Jerusalem in Twelfth- Century Latin Sermons about Islam Todd P. Upton Denver, Colorado Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/rmmra Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, History Commons, Philosophy Commons, and the Renaissance Studies Commons Recommended Citation Upton, Todd P. (2011) "Hostis Antiquus Resurgent: A Reconfigured Jerusalem in Twelfth-Century Latin Sermons about Islam," Quidditas: Vol. 32 , Article 6. Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/rmmra/vol32/iss1/6 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at BYU ScholarsArchive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Quidditas by an authorized editor of BYU ScholarsArchive. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. Quidditas 30 Hostis Antiquus Resurgent: A Reconfigured Jerusalem in Twelfth-Century Latin Sermons about Islam Todd P. Upton Denver, Colorado This paper investigates how Christian writers from late antiquity through the twelfth century transformed explanations of encounters with Middle Eastern peo- ples and lands into a complex theological discourse. Examinations of sermons and narrative sources from antiquity through the first century of Crusades (1096- 1192) serve as evidentiary bases because of the polemical way in which Pope Urban II’s 1095 sermon at Clermont defined Muslims. In that sermon, chroniclers recorded that the pope rallied Frankish support for an armed pilgrimage by dis- paraging Muslims who had overrun Jerusalem and the Holy Sites – calling them a “race utterly alienated from God” (gens prorsus a Deo aliena) -- and associating late-eleventh century Arabs with the return of what Richard of St. Victor would later identify as an “ancient enemy” (hostis antiquus). The article also shows that western sermon writers of the High Middle Ages explained issues of alterity and periphery by employing a system of classifications, or discourse, that relied upon biblical typologies, heretical fears, and eschatology instead of referring to direct twelfth-century encounters between Christians and Muslims (e.g., the Cru- sades in the Levant).1 Pope Urban II’s sermon at Clermont on 27 November 1095 launched the First Crusade by rallying the members of his Frankish audience against the “enemies of Christ” (hostes Christi) who had overrun Jerusalem and the Holy Sites.2 Associations for hostes Christi ex- 1 This article presents an expanded and annotated form of a paper presented at the an- nual conference of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association (Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff), April 2-4, 2009. My thanks to the audience participants and the two anonymous Quidditas readers for their helpful questions and critiques. For an introduction to medieval sermon studies, and methodology followed here for identifying topoi within array of sermon evidence and contextualizing historically, see Beverly M. Kienzle and David D’Avray, “Sermons,” in F.A.C. Mantello and A.G. Rigg, eds., Medieval Latin: An Introduction and Bibliographical Guide (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 1996), 659-69; and David D’Avray, “Method in the Study of Medieval Ser- mons,” in Nicole Beriou and D. D’Avray, eds., Modern Questions about Medieval Ser- mons: Essays on Marriage, Death, History, and Sanctity (Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi Sull’Alto Medieoevo, 1994), 1-27. 2 For Muslims as hostes Christi, see Alan V. Murray, “ `Mighty Against the Enemies of Christ’: the Relic of the True Cross in the Armies of the Kingdom of Jerusalem,” in The Crusades and their Sources, J. France and W. G. Zajaz, eds. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 217-238. For chronicles [Robert of Reims, Baudric of Dol, Guibert of Nogent, Peter of Tudebode, and Anonymous of the Gesta Francorum], see D. C. Munro, “The Speech of Pope Urban II at Clermont, 1095,” AHR 11 (1905-06), 231-42; also, Marcus Bull, “Views of Muslims and of Jerusalem in miracle stories, c.1000 – c. 1200: reflections on the study of first crusaders’ motivations,” in The Experience of Crusading: I. Western Approaches, M. Bull and N. Housely, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), 13-38. Quidditas 31 panded in the twelfth century to include a variety of enemies (Jews, heretics, lepers, et al), but this paper gives specific attention to the group understood to be the enemy of the soldiers of Christ (milites Christi), the Muslims in the Holy Land.3 Muslims were presented in chronicle accounts of Pope Urban II’s sermon variously as “Ara- bians” and Persians, and the source of troubles for Christians in the Levant.4 This paper investigates how twelfth-century western Latin sermon writers adopted traditional notions of a hostis antiquus to transform biblical typologies of eastern lands and peoples into a complex theological discourse.5 That discourse is revealed first by qualifying how “Arabi- ans” were understood in Christian polemics from antiquity, with particular attention to pre- and post-Muhammadan condemnatory expressions. Second, examination of epistolary and chronicle evi- dence from the First Crusade provides a historical context for topoi (rhetorical commonplaces) employed by twelfth-century sermon authors about peoples sermon authors termed Arabiae or Saracens. Lastly, I assess selected sermons by Absalon of Springiersbach (d. 1203) and Richard of St. Victor (d. 1173) to show how a polemi- 3 For Christian-Muslim dynamics in Levant, see Christopher MacEvitt, The Crusades and the Christian World of the East: Rough Tolerance (Philadelphia: University of Penn- sylvania, 2008), 1-12. For ostracized hostes Christi in period, see: R. I. Moore, The For- mation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe, 950-1250, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007); Michael Frassetto, ed., Heresy and the Persecuting Society in Middle Ages: Essays on Work of R.I. Moore (Leiden: Brill, 2006). 4 Robert of Rheims emphasized Muslims’ destruction of holy sites in Jerusalem and cruelty to Christians (Robert the Monk, Historia Hierosolymitana, Recueil des Historiens des Croisades. Historiens Occidentaux, 5 vols. (Paris: 1844-1895), IV: 727-8 [Hereinafter RHC Occ.]. Guibert of Nogent wrote that Urban II described the horrors Muslims visited upon the Christians in Jerusalem, including mutilation, rape of women, cutting open of bowels—and he associated Muslims with eschatological western expectations of the Anti- christ. (Guibert of Nogent, Gesta dei per Francos, RHC. Occ. IV: 139-40.) For Muslims as “enemies,” see Orderic Vitalis, The Ecclesiastical History, Marjorie Chibnall, ed., 6 vols. (Oxford: UP, 1968-180) V: 18-19. 5 For qualifications to how “discourse” should be understood here in medieval context (using elements of Edward Said’s Orientalism and Michel Foucualt’s The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Order of Things), see Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100-1450 (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2009), 6-19: “…by a discourse we mean a system of classification that establishes hierarchies, delimits one category from another, and exercises power through that system of classifica- tion….” (p. 7) Quidditas 32 cal discourse against Muslims contributed to a transformation of western perceptions about Muslims and Jerusalem by end of the twelfth century. In assessing sermons from the high-medieval pe- riod, the essay fills lacunae in recent works on discourses of alterity and periphery whose emphases rely primarily on different kinds of narrative evidence (chronicles, religious tracts) from the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries.6 The Transformed Meaning of Arabiyē from Antiquity to the Twelfth Century Preaching at Clermont, Urban II’s descriptions of events in the Holy Land were the latest expressions of a centuries-long polemic (doc- trinal criticism), against hostes Christi. Christian theologians since antiquity had used the Bible as a template for understanding east- ern Mediterranean peoples and regions, beginning with the Gospels and epistolary literature of the late-first century when the Principate and Pax Romana were the defining principles of the Mediterranean world.7 Over the centuries, there arose a tradition of Christian think- ers whose biblical exegeses created polemical discourses to offset the variety of intellectual and physical challenges to the develop- ing religion.8 For Christians, part of that process began shortly af- 6 For an introductory assessment (and extensive bibliography), see David R. Blanks, “Western Views of Islam in the Premodern Period: A Brief History of Past Approaches,” in Frassetto and Blanks, Western Views of Islam, 11-54. For focus on 12th through 15th centu- ries, see Akbari, Idols in the East, 155-199; Dominique Iogna-Prat, Order and Exclusion: Cluny and Christendom Face Heresy, Judaism, and Islam (1000-1150), tr. Graham Robert Edwards (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2002), 338-57; Patrick Geary, “Reflections on Historiog- raphy and the Holy: Center and Periphery,” in Lars Boje Mortensen, ed., The Making of Christian Myths in the Periphery of Latin Christendom, c. 1000-1300 (Copenhagen: Mu- seum Tusculanum Press, 2006), 323-9; Tomaž Mastnak, Crusading Peace: Christendom, the Muslim World, and Western Political Order (Berkeley: University of California, 2002); and, finally, John V. Tolan, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York: Columbia UP, 2002), xiii-xxiii. 7 For relevant works of milieus and major debates in biblical exegesis
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