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An Islamic Version of the Vademecum in Tribulatione1

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An Islamic Version of the Vademecum in Tribulatione1 JEAN DE ROQUETAILLADE’S PROPHECIES AMONG THE MUSLIM MINORITIES OF MEDIEVAL AND EARLY-MODERN CHRISTIAN SPAIN: AN ISLAMIC VERSION OF THE VADEMECUM IN TRIBULATIONE1 Gerard Wiegers Introduction That the worlds of Muslims and Christians in medieval Europe were less apart than is often thought has been demonstrated on several occasions. With regard to the field of study I will be engaged with in the present contribution, the religious ideas of Muslims living as minorities in the Medieval Iberian Peninsula, Gregorio Fonseca Antuña, for example, discovered this in his study on the enigmatic Muslim author from the Castilian city of Arévalo, who is known as El Mancebo de Arévalo, i.e. the young man of Arévalo. In his mystical work written in Spanish with Arabic script (Aljamiado), El Mancebo de Arévalo offers numerous quotations from Islamic authorities with well known but also more obscure names, such as for example “Umar Baí”. It remained for a long time impossible to trace the sources of these quotations. However, Fonseca was able to show that in spite of the apparent diverse nature of the sources most of them originated from one particular unexpected source, viz. Thomas à Kempis’sDe imitatione Christi!2 The present contribution deals with a similar case, a prophetic text attributed to a certain friar Juan de Rokasia.3 The prophecy of “friar 1 Only after the completion of this article, my colleague Dr. Juan Carolos Villaverde Amieva (University of Oviedo) drew my attention to the unpublished M.A. thesis of Maria Luz Menéndez Arias, La Porofecya de faray Juwan de Rokasya, Oviedo, 1980. The transcription in the present article is my own, and it differs in some respects from hers. In some places, however, I have benefited from her reading of the manuscript. 2 G. Fonseca Antuña (ed.), Sumario de la relación y ejercicio espiritual sacado y declarado por el Mancebo de Arévalo en nuestra lengua castellana, Madrid, 2002, 34ff. 3 On Muslim prophecies (Spanish jofores, from Arabic jafr, offering eschatological visions of the world on a cosmic scale, and Spanish alguacías, from Arabic al-wasiyyạ ) among the Moriscos, see J. N. Lincoln, “Aljamiado prophecies”, Publications of the Modern 230 gerard wiegers Juan de Rokasia” for the year 1485 is extant in one manuscript only, preserved in the Spanish National Library in Madrid. This manuscript is a majmūʿa of religious texts written in Aljamiado (Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España, MS 5305).4 The manuscript contains no datings, but can on the basis of the paper probably be dated to the 16th cen- tury. According to L. P. Harvey, fray Juan might be identified as Juan de Rocacelsa, a figure who is discussed by the chronicler Prudencio de Sandoval (c. 1560–1620) in his History of the life of Charles the Fifth, with reference to the year 1520.5 According to Sandoval, the situation in which the Muslims found themselves in Charles’ Imperial Spain was grave and people were so confused that some started to invent prophe- cies, ascribing them to figures such as Merlin, St. Isidore of Seville and to “friar Juan de Rocacelsa”.6 Harvey was right. Rocacelsa is another Spanish version of the more current Rocatallada, the Spanish version of Roquetaillade. As I have shown elsewhere, the prophecy in question can indeed not only be associated with this well-known 14th-century French Franciscan friar, but the Aljamiado text appears to be based on his well-known and widely spread prophetical text Vademecum in Tribulatione.7 We may conclude therefore, that Sandoval was wrong in suggesting that the prophecies circulating among the Moriscos were forgeries. However, the Aljamiado version appears to be drastically edited by an anonymous Muslim reader. Below, I will elaborate on the main characterics of this prophecy. I will start with a short discussion of the original prophecy, then the Aljamiado text, and finally I will Language Association of America, vol. 52, 1937; P. Dressendörfer, Islam unter der Inqui- sition: Die Morisco-Prozesse in Toledo (1575–1610), Wiesbaden, 1971; L. J. Carmelo, La représentation du réel dans des textes prophétiques de la littérature aljamiado-morisque, Ph.D. thesis, University of Utrecht, 1995, who surprisingly does not discuss the text we are dealing with here at all. On Islamic Messianism in the Western Islamic World and Iberia in general see, most recently, M. García-Arenal, Messianism and puritanical reform: Mahdis of the Muslim West, Leiden, 2006, on the Moriscos especially 296–324. 4 Description of the manuscript in E. Saavedra y Moragas, “Discurso que el Ecsmo. Sr. D. Eduardo Saavedra leyó en Junta Pública de la Real Academia Española, el dia 29 de diciembre de 1878, al tomar posesión de su plaza de Académico de número”, in: Memo- rias de la Real Academia Española, vol. 6, Madrid, 1889, apéndice 1, no. 45. 5 Prudencio de Sandoval, Historia de Vida y Hechos del Emperador Carlos V, Pam- plona, 1634. 6 Quoted in Lincoln, “Aljamiado prophecies”, 631; L. P. Harvey, The literary culture of the Moriscos 1492–1609: A study based on the extant manuscripts in Arabic and Aljamía, D. Phil. Dissertation, Oxford, 1958, 120. 7 G. A. Wiegers, Islamic literature in Spanish and Aljamiado: Yça of Segovia ( fl. 1450), his antecedents and successors, Leiden, 1994, 90ff..
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