Читать книгу In Light of Another's Word - Shirin A. Khanmohamadi - Страница 9

CHAPTER 1

Conquest, Conversion, Crusade, Salvation

The Discourse of Anthropology and Its Uses in the Medieval Period

If ethnography, defined as discourse on observed manners and customs, has a very long history, anthropology, defined not as the academic discipline established in the twentieth century but as the set of ideas and theories attempting to account for cultural diversity or the unity of the “human,” has an equally long history.¹ Anthropological thinking in the medieval period can be divided into two main discourses, each with its own distinctive assumptions and approaches to the other, the discourse of Christianity and the discourse of civility.² The medieval discourse of civility, derived from the Epicurean tradition of writers such as Lucretius and made available to medieval writers primarily through Cicero, posited a universal, linear model of cultural development according to which all cultures progressed through certain stages of development on a continuum from savagery to civility. This secular model was deployed in twelfth-century contexts of colonization or conquest along Europe’s borders as a justification for the subjugation of native peoples. It was applied irrespective of the Christianity of its subject peoples, at once to the pagan Slavs on Europe’s eastern border and the already-Christian Irish and Welsh on Europe’s northwest border.³ The discourse of Christianity, on the other hand, sought the conversion of the other, and so deployed a spatial model that distinguished “humanity,” the realm of all possible converts according to universal Christian thought, from all that lay beyond it, the realm of the inhuman, semihuman, or monstrous. Medieval mappaemundi well demonstrate the spatial logic of the discourse of Christianity. Thirteenth-century European world maps such the Psalter map picture the globe as an orb over which Christ presides, or in the case of the Ebstorf map, as an orb out of which Christ’s very limbs—his head, hands, and feet—may be seen to project. The contemplator of such a map (and they were meant for religious contemplation) would have found Jerusalem at the center, the Garden of Eden circled at the eastern top, and a host of biblical stories drawn in as pictorial lessons before reaching the map’s southern fringe. There medieval viewers would have confronted a series of monsters, figural representations of Pliny’s legendary monstrous races: the Cynocephiles or dog heads, the cubit-sized Pygmies, the cannibal Anthropophages, the doubly sexed Androgynes. While for Pliny the monstrous races may have expressed the curious diversity and plenitude of natural history, for Christian thinkers as early as Augustine they presented very real doctrinal problems: were these races the descendants of Adam, and if not, how did they get there? Augustine devotes book 16, chapter 8, in the City of God to the question of “the origin of recorded monstrosities,” where he writes: “There are accounts in pagan history of certain monstrous races of men.… What am I to say of the Cynocephali, whose dog’s head and actual barking prove them to be animals rather than men? Now we are not bound to believe in the existence of all the types of men which are described. But no faithful Christian should doubt that anyone who is born anywhere a man—that is, a rational and mortal being—derives from that one first-created human being.” He concludes his discussion, by his own admission, tentatively and open-endedly thus: “the accounts of some of these races may be completely worthless, but if such peoples exist, then either they are not human; or, if human, they are descended from Adam.”⁴ The monstrous races may well exist then and may be nonhuman; Augustine left medieval thinkers to grapple with the implications. We see in mappaemundi like the Psalter map one response to the problem: late medieval mapmakers drew in the monstrous races at the outer limits of the inhabited world where they stood, at once, for the limit of their own geographical knowledge and for the final frontier of the Christian message—for as all Christians knew, no pastoral outreach would be possible, required, or desirable toward nonhumans. The discourse of Christianity, then, depended above all on the distinction of the properly human, and hence possibly Christian, from the nonhuman. As such, the discouse of Christianity implicates a host of other discourses, including those of the monstrous races, the wild man, and the barbarian, devoted to the same definitional work.

Figure 1. The Psalter Map. British Library Additional ms 28681, f.9. Courtesy of the British Library.

In what follows I lay out some of the major sources for the discourses of civility and Christianity in the high medieval period. The former found particular application along the borders of Europe during its twelfth-century expansion, the latter, in the dreams of converting the Mongols during the thirteenth-century opening of Asia to Europe via the missions. Innocent IV’s unique and remarkably influential contribution to medieval anthropology, his consideration of the conditional sovereignty rights of non-Christians living abroad, will be considered as an important signpost in the development of the medieval discourse of Christianity. I will then turn to the realm of the Crusades, and consider medieval European attitudes toward the proximate Muslim enemy by examining developments in Latin knowledge of and interest in Muslim religion and Arabic culture. Finally, I consider the medieval discourse of the virtuous pagan, forerunner of the Renaissance noble savage in its primitivist celebration of the uncultured piety and goodness of select non-Christians. This discourse, which dovetailed with the theological and philosophical discourses about the salvation of non-Christians, found a range of applications abroad in the late Middle Ages, from encounters with the Brahmins of India, such as in Mandeville’s rendering, to the depictions of the natives of the Canaries in the fourteenth-century explorations and conquests of those Atlantic isles. Each of these realms of anthropological activity was not only central to the overall development of anthropological thinking in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries but also serves as background to the particular chapters on medieval ethnography that follow.

EVOLUTIONARY ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE TWELFTH CENTURY

Developmental, “progressivist,” or evolutionary anthropology has its roots in the ancient classical tradition, in particular the Epicurean account of cultural development best exemplified by Lucretius. For the Epicureans, “the earliest condition of men resembled that of the beasts, and from this primitive and miserable condition they laboriously reached the existing state of civilization, not by external guidance as a consequence of some initial design, but simply by the exercise of human intelligence throughout a long period.”⁵ It is the notion of man’s independent progress, as opposed to an externally induced kind, that would distinguish ancient progressivism, along with its medieval and modern descendants, from competing theories stressing the role of environmental, external factors in the formation of cultures such as ancient climaticism or modern diffusionism.

Many twelfth-century European writers were intimately familiar with the classical anthropological tradition, with lasting and profound impact on their perceptions and constructions of civilizational norms, achievement, and backwardness in the unfamiliar worlds they recorded around them. William of Malmesbury, who has been credited with being the first to rediscover the classical notion of barbarians and apply it to the Celts of his day, had an extensive knowledge of classical literature,⁶ as did the Paris-schooled Gerald of Wales. Without pursuing the question of specific influence in particular texts, scholars of the Celtic fringe such as John Gillingham, R. R. Davies, and Robert Bartlett each acknowledge a general classical influence on the medieval ethnographers they treat. A consideration of the impact of Cicero on medieval ethnographic writers goes a long way toward closing this critical gap; for here is a classical author whose ideas about savagery “pervaded the medieval concept of barbarism.”⁷ We know, for instance, that Cicero, along with Seneca, another writer with progressivist leanings, is among the most cited of the prose writers in Gerald’s numerous works,⁸ and William of Malmesbury may have had as many as twenty-eight works by Cicero, his most esteemed classical author.⁹ In reading such works as Cicero’s Pro Sestio, Gerald and other medieval observers of “alien” cultural practices gained access to a mode of cultural analysis that converted these practices into signs of cultural primitivism and allowed them to plot cultures on an evolutionary scale that left no doubt as to the more advanced standing of Anglo-Norman culture.

Cicero was by no means the only source of classical ideas of culture available to writers like Gerald and William of Malmesbury: fragments of the picture of evolutionary cultural development were available via ethnographic descriptions in other classical sources, descriptions that implied developmental models of culture without, however, overtly stating these assumptions as a theory or generalization regarding human culture. We find such ethnographic descriptions in two of Gerald’s known sources, Caesar’s Bellum Gallicum and Sallust’s Bellum Iugurthinum. Moments in these texts look much like those of Gerald and his contemporaries’ descriptions of Celtic peoples. Caesar’s Bellum Gallicum, for instance, notes the warlike aspect of the Germanic Suebi, their preference for milk and meat rather than corn, and sparsely populated lands (4.1–4); the Germans’ lack of agriculture, and beast-filled forests; and the Gauls’ capricious nature (4.5).¹⁰ Sallust depicts the ancient Gaetulians and Libyans in a familiar language of savagery: a “rude and uncivilized folk [asperi incultique], who fed like beasts [pecoribus] on the flesh of wild animals and the fruit of the earth … governed neither by institutions nor law, nor were they subject to anyone’s rule. A restless, roving people, they had their abodes wherever night compelled a halt.”¹¹

Ethnographers like Caesar provided medieval writers with a glimpse of classical progressivist ideas, but it is through Cicero’s rendering of Lucretius,¹² the earliest Roman exponent of progressivist anthropology and probably its most thorough exponent, that medieval thinkers were able to view a coherent picture of classical ideas of cultural progress, ideas that figure foundationally in the evolutionary anthropology of the nineteenth century and hence in the anthropological discipline at its origins. Lucretius’s De rerum natura, book 5, along with Plato’s Laws, book 3, is widely considered the locus classicus of the developmental anthropological tradition.¹³ Roughly sketched, Lucretius’s account of man’s cultural development proceeds from the earliest phases in human history where man knew no agricultural tools and lived in the woods, forests, and caves, to the beginnings of human society where men made huts and tents, and “woman in mating with man gave herself to one only.”¹⁴ Next came language, the learning of various arts including fire and cooking, weaving, agriculture and the domestication of animals, and the earliest form of government, chiefdoms. Later kings founded cities, fortified them, and divided property between men. Next there came the reign of law, “for mankind, weary of violence, was grown weak from its feuds, so that it was the more ready of its own accord to subject itself to the restraint of laws.”¹⁵ Lucretius’s account is not unmixed with moments of primitivist or antiprogressive nostalgia for times simpler and happier than the present, as when he regrets the invention of private property, or the ravaging advances in techniques of warfare. But his delight in the advancement of human arts and industries in such passages as below is clear: “Navigation and agriculture, fortification and laws, arms, roads, clothing, and all else of this kind, all the prizes of life and its deepest delights also, poetry and pictures and sculpture, these slowly, step by step, were taught by practice and the experience of man’s mind as it progressed [progredientis]. Thus by degrees time draws forth everything before us and reason raises it to the realm of light. For things must be brought to light one after another and in due order in the arts, until they have reached their highest point.”¹⁶ This passage not only provides the first use of the word progredientes, from which “progress” derives, but also on the basis of its content and meaning, “[it] could be inserted aptly into literally dozens of works on the progress of mankind written in the eighteenth and well into the nineteenth century.”¹⁷

We find much the same picture in Cicero, who was “intimately acquainted from the beginning of his literary career with Lucretius’ outline of man’s cultural history,” but who, unlike Lucretius, was well known to twelfth-century medieval authors.¹⁸ In the De Officiis, so frequently drawn from in Gerald’s writings, Cicero praises the arts in a passage much like Lucretius’s above:

Why should I recount the multitude of arts, without which life would be a thing of no value? For how would the sick be healed, what pleasure would there be in health, how should we obtain either the necessaries or the refinements of life, if there were not so many arts to minister to us? In all these respects the civilized life [exculta vita] of men is far removed from the level of subsistence and comfort of the animals. And without the association of men, cities could neither have been built nor peopled, as a result of which laws and customs [leges moresque] were established, and then the equitable determination of rights [iuris], and a settled disciplined life [certaque vivendi disciplina]. When these were assured there followed a more humane spirit [mansuetudo animorum] and the sense of what is morally becoming, so that life is more secure, and that, by giving and receiving, by mutual exchange of goods and services [mutuandisque facultatibus et commodandis], we were able to satisfy all our needs.¹⁹

On the one hand, the arts are the key to the civilized life, provisioning man with necessities and refinements both; on the other, it is the social life of humans that has engendered their cities, the establishment of their laws, the growth of an exchange economy, a more stable, settled existence, and the growth of their civility and morality—the causes of the development of human civilization are multipronged and plentiful according to this optimistic passage. Cicero’s use of mansuetudo for civility is echoed in medieval Latin sources.²⁰ In the Pro Sestio, also available to Gerald, Cicero lays out his clearest expression of the classical developmental model:

For who does not know the condition of nature to have been once such that men, in the days before either natural or civil law had been drawn up, wandered dispersed and scattered about the fields [fusi per agros ac dispersi vagarentur], and that each possessed no more than he could seize or keep by his own strength, through killing or wounding others? But those who first arose endowed with superior virtue and prudence, having recognized a kind of intelligence and teachableness in man, gathered these scattered individuals together in one place and converted them from wildness to justice and gentleness. Establishing first political societies for the common advantage, then the small associations of men which were afterwards named towns, then those groupings of domiciles which we call cities, they fortified all these with law, human and divine, as with walls. And between our present mode of life, refined through humanity, and that wretched one, the principal difference is the difference between law and force.²¹

When writing of the Welsh’s dispersed manner of fighting (“If the Welsh would only … fight in ordered ranks instead of leaping about all over the place”),²² plunder, and rule by force, as he did in the Descriptio, Gerald would have had access not merely to stock “barbarian” ethnographic descriptions such as Caesar’s but to whole developmental models of culture in passages such as this one, which left a lasting imprint, as we shall see in the following chapter, on his seminal ethnographic work. For according to the evolutionary scale presented above, Gerald was free to conclude that the societies of Wales and Ireland had not progressed very far at all, still living as they did in unruly discord rather than “political societies for the common advantage” and in fields and forests rather than towns or fortified cities. And we can be certain of the influence on him of a like developmental model when he turns to the Irish in the following paragraph in the Topography of Ireland:

Est autem gens haec gens silvestris, gens inhospita; gens ex bestiis solum et bestialiter vivens; gens a primo pastoralis vitae vivendi modo non recedens. Cum enim a silvis ad agros, ab agris ad villas, civiumque convictus, humani generis ordo processerit, gens haec, agriculturae labores aspernans, et civiles gazas parum affectans, civiumque jura multum detrectans, in silvis et pascuis vitam quam hactenus assueverat nec desuescere novit nec descire.²³

(They [the Irish] are a wild and inhospitable people. They live on beasts only, and live like beasts. They have not progressed at all from the primitive habits of pastoral living. While man usually progresses from the woods to fields, and from the fields to settlements and communities of citizens, this people despises work on the land, has little use for the money-making of towns, contemns the rights and privileges of citizenship, and desires neither to abandon, nor lose respect for, the life which it has been accustomed to lead in the woods and countryside.)

As we will see in the following chapter, Gerald’s treatment of the Welsh will in fact be more ambivalent and equivocal than evolutionary influences allow, but his description of the Irish is another matter. Cicero’s more subtle progression from pastoral to city life is laid utterly bare here, as Gerald performs the act of interpreting the classical developmental tradition for his reader, according to which city life is the highest expression of civility.

In importing the classical theory of human cultural development into his ethnographic depictions, Gerald has in effect moved beyond ethnography and cultural description into formulating medieval anthropology. Nor is he alone among twelfth-century ethnographers of the Celtic fringe in doing so. For although in the Topography we find an unusually complete medieval formulation of ancient progressivism, Gerald’s contemporaries like William of Malmesbury, William of Newburgh, William of Poitiers, Ralph Glaber, and the author of the Gesta Stephani are so influenced by the same anthropological assumptions as to be unanimous in finding in Celtic lands a manifestation of what the ancients would have considered developmentally backward societies. Classical sources like Cicero shaped not only the twelfth-century ethnographer’s categories of description—native habitat, the rule of law versus that of (seemingly, at least) force alone, agricultural versus hunting economies—but more importantly, his very modes of interpreting such descriptive categories as so many signposts on the road to civility. Thus William of Malmesbury, one of the earliest classically influenced ethnographers, is able to discover in the existence of town life and agricultural arts evidence of his own cultural superiority: “Ita pro peniuria, immo pro inscientia cultorum, ieiunum omnium bonorum solum agrestem et squalidam multitudinem Hibernensium extra urbes producit; Angli uero et Franci cultiori genere uitae urbes nundinarum commertio inhabitant” ([Whereas] the soil [of Ireland] lacks all advantages, and so poor, or rather unskillful, are its cultivators that it can produce only a ragged mob of rustic Irishmen outside the towns, the English and the French, with their more civilized way of life, live in towns, and carry on trade and commerce).²⁴

Such continuity of classical and medieval ideas of progress would surprise some intellectual historians who have argued for the intrinsic incompatibility of models of historical progress with the Middle Ages, whose “history moved not according to natural development but a series of divine revelations and interventions.”²⁵ But as historians of anthropology know, the notion of human progress was not intrinsically compatible with the thinking of later centuries when biblical assumptions regarding human degeneration since the Fall were still conventional, as they were even in the heyday of evolutionary anthropology in the nineteenth century. Most periods in history are fraught with antithetical, countering intellectual forces and, it would appear, the Middle Ages are no exception. Any doubt as to the possibility of a progressivist medieval anthropology is best resolved by the contemporary evidence from the twelfth century. That evidence indicates that a secular view of history had in fact been imported via classical sources into a medieval frame where it irrepressibly influenced the ethnographic writing of those who employed such sources. In fact, the developmental model of culture was very well suited to the arena into which it was imported, for as we have already glimpsed, it functioned in the twelfth century, as it would in the nineteenth century, to justify the secular aim of conquest and control of the native populations.

CONVERSION AND THE BOUNDARIES OF THE “HUMAN” IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY

If the twelfth-century expansion of Europe found developmental anthropology particularly suitable to its aims in nearby borderlands, the thirteenth century, an era of hope for the conversion of Asia to Christianity through missionary activity, was the age of elaborating the discourse of Christianity and defining the “human.” In a range of discourses, both popular and elite, the thirteenth century evinces a heightened interest in establishing the contours of the human. New theorizations of what constituted the human emerged from scholastic thinkers like Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, as did new theorizations of the conditional rights of non-Christians abroad to cultural sovereignty through the papal decrees of Innocent IV.

While the thirteenth century might have witnessed the dream of converting Asia, in particular of bringing the Mongols within the Christian embrace, this by no means meant that the Mongols were universally regarded as particularly good candidates for conversion. On the contrary, the following description of the Mongols from Matthew Paris’s Chronica Majora (c. 1240) is probably closer to the consensus view: “The men are inhuman and of the nature of beasts, rather to be called monsters than men, thirsting after and drinking blood, and tearing and devouring the flesh of dogs and human beings; they clothe themselves in the skins of bulls, and are armed with iron lances; they are short in stature and thickset … and of great strength; invincible in battle, indefatigable in labour; they drink the blood which flows from their flocks.… They have no human laws, know no mercy, are more cruel than lions or bears; they know no other country’s language except that of their own, and of this all other nations are ignorant.”²⁶ Matthew Paris’s description, we will see, accords closely with the scholastic discourse of the barbarian. Missionaries to Mongolia such as Carpini and Rubruck were—indeed, needed to be—rather more generous in their attributions of Mongol humanity. How then was such “humanity” to be identified and distinguished according to the definitions of their day?

Given the place of Pliny’s monstrous races at the outermost edges of the known world on medieval mappaemundi, medieval thinkers in search of demarcating the human from the barbarous or monstrous might well turn first to the definitions of Pliny the Elder, made available to them through Pliny’s medieval encyclopedic abbreviators. The monstrous races of Pliny’s Natural History, whom he terms gentes monstri and homines or gentes silvestres, appear in book 7 immediately after Pliny considers the innumerable “ritus moresque”—customs and manners—of all the world’s gentes that he could not include in his cosmography. The relation between these monsters and the human becomes clear soon thereafter: the “monstrous” is that which stretches, twists, or turns inside out the norms of the human form, life cycle, and social habits of Pliny’s antique day. The Pandorean Indians, for instance, live two hundred years, while childbearing among the Macrobii, who live only to forty years, is restricted to a single occurrence, and the Antemidorus never get sick. Many of the Plinian monsters display physical anomalies from the human, including giants, dwarf-like Pygmies, dog-headed Cynocephales, and doubly sexed Androgyni. Still others partake in aberrant diet (cannibal Scythians and Anthropophages) and dwellings (cave-dwelling Pygmies), are speechless (Cynocephales), practice religious idolatry (the sun-worshipping Gymnosophists) and unusual marriage customs (the Wife-givers), go naked (Bragmanni), or display skillful hunting (Troglodytes).²⁷

From this list of monstrous attributes, one might glean what factors compose the “measure of man,” to use John Block Friedman’s phrase,²⁸ and distinguish the human from the monstrous: physical form; modes of diet; dwelling and habitat; sexual, marital, and childbearing practices; clothing; spiritual life; speech; and defense, Pliny suggests, are each constitutive of the “human.” Pliny’s ideas would have reached medieval readers through his ancient encyclopedic abbreviators, Solinus and Isidore of Seville, as well as the thirteenth-century encyclopedist Vincent of Beauvais. Solinus’s Collectanea Rerum Memorabilium cites many of the most popular Plinian races, locating them in the farthest East or in Africa.²⁹ Solinus describes the manners and customs of a number of peoples, including the Arabians, the silk-trading Seres, Indians abstaining from meat, the Tabrobanes and their method of king selection.³⁰ He also offers a long ethnographic excursus on the Scythians, whom he describes in ways that will remind one of Matthew Paris’s Tartars: living in caves, Scythians drink out of the skull cups of their enemies, love fighting, suck the blood out of the wounds they inflict, and, of course, delight in drinking one another’s blood.³¹ Isidore lists the Plinian races under his consideration of “Portents,” where, he asserts, just as anomalous monstrous births take place among humans, so are there born whole monstrous races, including Cynocephali, Cyclopes, Blemmyas, Antipodes, Pygmies, and so forth.³²

Isidore’s and Solinus’s treatment of the Plinian races may well have influenced the classifications of culture that John of Plano Carpini or William of Rubruck employed to describe the foreign Mongols before them, including their dwellings, food, clothing, laws, burial rites, marital rites, and religious beliefs—classifications that reinscribe much the same categories that serve as boundaries between the human and the nonhuman in Pliny, Solinus, and Isidore. But other cultural discourses were also available from which Carpini and Rubruck could derive those categories, including the widespread tradition of that internal other of medieval Europe, the wild man. This tradition was made available by way of the work of the great trio of thirteenth-century encyclopedists, Bartholomew Anglicus, Thomas of Cantimpré, and Vincent of Beauvais, as well as through older textual traditions such as the Alexander saga, the St. Jerome Bible, and the apocryphal Letter of Prester John (c. 1165).³³ In a composite sketch of the tradition, an “ethnography of the medieval wild man”³⁴ might look something like the following: the wild man is forest dwelling (thus a literal silvester homo) rather than a city dweller, giant or dwarflike Pygmy in size, hairy, hunting and gathering, eating the raw flesh of animals, without knowledge of agriculture or metallurgy, having great physical strength, warlike, given to sexual carnality, of meager intellect, lacking human speech, incapable of knowing God because irrational, and linked to the semidivine or the semisatanic. Such an ethnography indicates how readily one may treat the discourses of the medieval wild man and the monstrous races as coterminous, invoking as they do many of the same markers for “humanity”—habitat, diet, hunting, sexual practices, speech, religion—and each representing the projection of internal anxieties about the boundaries and norms of “human” behavior on an “other.”

Thirteenth-century intellectual production indicates still further examinations by humans of the contours of the human. Specifically in the schools, Aristotelian scholars like Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, and numerous Aristotelian commentators were openly considering the same question of the boundaries of the human that popular discourses of “wild men” and “monsters” entertained in less conscious ways.³⁵ Indeed we even find leakage of vocabulary between scholastic and popular treatments of the topic: the Pygmy plays a pivotal role in Albertus Magnus’s determination of what sets apart the human from the rest of the animal kingdom. In De Animalibus, a text whose main concern has rightly been identified as man himself, Albertus assigns the Pygmy and the ape intermediary positions between man and beast.³⁶ As manlike creatures, or similitudines hominis,³⁷ the ape and the Pygmy reached closest to the perfection of man in that they were capable of degrees of disciplinabilitas, “the control of mind over body that underlies every purposeful act,”³⁸ and thereby learning. They lacked, however, a final level of disciplinabilitas reserved for humans alone: the power of reason with which to transform these sensory data and memories into universal principles. Without ratio and the ability to grasp universals, the ape and the Pygmy were deprived of civility and its distinguishing elements, enumerated by Albertus as: the experience of shame and the ability to know vice from virtue, the use of language including a facility with rhetorical devices, political systems and laws, and non-forest dwellings.³⁹ In his inclusion of the forest habitat as a marker of incivility, Albertus Magnus participates in the popular ethnographic assumptions of his day. But Albertus Magnus distinguishes himself from other medieval thinkers in his anticipation of the evolutionary assumptions of modern anthropology through his offering of a measure by which the animal kingdom and man himself might be assigned a position on a hierarchical chain of being, and his posing of a theory of man’s kinship with apes.⁴⁰

But what of degrees of humanity within humans themselves? Albertus Magnus’s treatments of the less than human in the De Animalibus closely echo his definitions of “the barbarian” elsewhere. In the Ethics, he writes: “Bestial men, however, are rare, since it is a rare man who has no spark of humanity. It does, however, occur, and usually from two causes: physical handicap and deprivation. For we call those who are not induced to be virtuous either by laws, by civility or by the regime of any kind of discipline ‘barbarous.’ Cicero, in the beginning of the De Inventione, calls them ‘wild men leading the life of animals with the wild beasts’.… Or, in the same way, bestial men eat raw flesh and drink blood, and are delighted to drink and eat from human skulls.”⁴¹ Albertus Magnus’s barbarians are men who lead the life of animals, who cannot be induced to civility and virtue by “the regime of any kind of discipline,” discipline being linked, as we’ve seen, to reason. His final depiction of barbarians feeding on raw flesh, drinking blood, and eating out of human skulls resonates with Matthew Paris’s description of Mongol life so closely as to make apparent to what degree each followed the barbarian script—already fully developed in Solinus’s account of the Scythians⁴²—and how much agreement there was among an array of thirteenth-century thinkers on the nature of humanity’s other, the barbarian. When another great scholastic, Thomas Aquinas, depicted barbarians as “for the most part … robust in body and deficient in mind” and as “lacking in reason” in the Commentary on the Politics, he cannot be regarded as original. While Thomas offered some specificity for the causes of barbarian irrationality, his definition of the barbarian will be otherwise familiar:

and so the men who are called barbarians absolutely are the ones who are lacking in reason, either because they happen to live in an exceedingly intemperate region of the sky, so that by the very disposition of the region they are found to be dull for the most part, or else because of some evil custom prevailing in certain lands from which it comes about that men are rendered irrational and almost brutal. Now it is evident that it is from the power of reason that men are ruled by reasonable laws and that they are practiced in writing. Hence barbarism is appropriately manifested by this sign, that men either do not live under laws or live under irrational ones, and likewise that among certain peoples there is no training in writing. (my italics)⁴³

Humans are reasonable, lawful and robust in mind; barbarians are unreasonable, robust in body, lawless or ruled by irrational laws and evil customs, lacking the technology of writing.

Aquinas’s attention to “evil custom” introduces a direct link between the attention to manners and customs—ritus moresque—and the judgment of inhumanity or semihumanity that is “barbarism.” If the study of customs could lead to an assessment of the moral and intellectual worth of a people, the determination of unreasonable or corrupt customs among men could in turn lead to the justification for Christian intervention and even just warfare upon them. Aquinas hints as much when he asserts in a section of the Summa Theologica written between 1265 and 1271 that while non-Christians may not be compelled toward the faith, they may be compelled “ut fidem non impediant vel blasphemiis, vel malis persuasionibus, vel etiam apertis persecutionibus” (not to hinder the faith by blasphemies, evil suasions, or even open persecutions).⁴⁴ In this, Aquinas’s thinking points to that of Innocent IV: for no thirteenth-century thinker developed the connection between social custom, sovereignty, and just warfare so clearly and so fully as Pope Innocent IV, whose work effectively influenced all thinking on the subject, including Aquinas’s. Innocent’s theory of limited non-Christian or pagan sovereignty provides a final component in our survey of the thirteenth-century anthropological discourse of Christianity, and arguably its most weighty component, as Innocent’s thought was vastly influential in later centuries, when it was reinterpreted and adapted to fit approaches to pagans inconsistent with his own and with the medieval salvational aim.

THE CONDITIONAL RIGHTS OF NON-CHRISTIANS ABROAD: THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF INNOCENT IV AND ITS AFTER LIFE

Innocent IV was intimately involved in the thirteenth-century diplomatic, missionary, and information-gathering expeditions to the Mongolian empire, which together constitute the most significant anthropological activity of the Middle Ages. Immediately upon his election as pope in 1243, Innocent called for a crusade of Germans and Hungarians against the advancing Mongols, the subject of an emergency meeting of the Council of Lyon later that same year; at the same time he began organizing missions to convert and collect information about them.⁴⁵ Though it is Louis IX and not Innocent IV who sponsored William of Rubruck’s mission, Innocent was responsible for nearly every other significant mission to Asia, including those of Franciscans John of Plano Carpini, Benedict the Pole, and Lawrence of Portugal by way of the Near East, and Dominicans Ascelinus and Andrew of Longjumeau by way of Russia.⁴⁶ While his missionaries were learning anthropology “in the field,” as it were, Innocent was developing at home a legal basis for papal relations with non-Christians. In his Commentary to Innocent III’s decretal Quod Super His, concerning the vow to go on crusade to the Holy Land, Innocent IV addressed the fundamental question of the legality of invading infidel lands and offered two different answers. Where the land in question is the Holy Land, Innocent argues, invasion is justified for a number of alternative reasons, among them: the Holy Land is Christian by right and unjustly occupied by Saracens; Christ had consecrated this land and his followers were meant to live there; the Donation of Constantine made the pope the heir to the lands of the Roman emperors; and according to the Treaty of Jaffa signed (against heavy papal objections) in 1229 between the sultan of Egypt al-Kamil and the Holy Roman emperor Frederick II, Frederick held the title of king of Jerusalem. These arguments all fell under the already well-examined question of “just war.”⁴⁷

What is of more interest, and indeed occupied Innocent more, is the less well theorized question of just war upon lands held by non-Christians outside the Holy Land. Here Innocent’s thinking is new and original. Building on the biblical model of Saul’s election as king, Innocent argued that as rational creatures all men had the right to self-government and to private property and that papal interference with these rights was therefore illicit. Rational men also had the right not to be Christian: forcible conversion was unlawful, baptism required consent. But because the pope had a responsibility for the souls of all men, the papal domain did theoretically extend into non-Christian lands, that is, de jure if not de facto. The papal jurisdiction over all souls meant that the pope had a responsibility to send missionaries to non-Christian lands and to protect Christians abroad from persecution. It also meant, Innocent continued, that intervention in non-Christian lands was justified in cases where non-Christian practices violated natural law, as so-called sins contra naturam, and local leaders did nothing to punish or alter these practices.⁴⁸ While Innocent did not specifically define what he meant by a sin contra naturam, the two examples he did provide—sexual perversion and idolatry or polytheistic belief—represent practices Carpini, William of Rubruck, and others would record as part of Mongol “manners and customs” without regard to their sinfulness according to church norms. And despite the missionaries’ descriptions of widespread practices of polygamy and idolatry among the Mongols, Innocent never addressed the implications of the presence of sins contra naturam within this immediate non-Christian theater.⁴⁹ The only response we are given to this test of Innocentian theory lies in the realm of practice: no papal crusade was ever called upon Mongol lands on the basis of the Mongols’ polygamy, idolatry, or any other custom. Instead, the missionaries’ records of these and other possibly “unnatural” Mongol cultural practices lay dormant, without provoking military applications throughout the Middle Ages, contributing instead to the storehouse of medieval European knowledge of non-Christian and Asian cultures.

Innocent’s theory of papal relations with non-Christians would have a lasting influence on future canonists of the medieval and the early modern period, by whom it was applied in ways significantly divergent from Innocent’s own context. Specifically, later canonists frequently interpreted Innocent’s thinking to create justifications for wars being launched on non-Christian peoples. Two aspects of Innocent’s theory were particularly significant for future thinkers: his inclusion of non-Christians within the pastoral jurisdiction of the pope on the premise of a common rationality and humanity, and his recognition of limited non-Christian sovereignty, within the albeit ill-defined confines of nature’s law. Many fourteenth- and fifteenth-century canonists accepted Innocent’s assertion of non-Christian humanity and rationality, only to justify intervention or conquest in pagan societies on the basis of Innocent’s “sins contra naturam.” In the fourteenth-century context of the Spanish Reconquista, for instance, the lawyer Oldratus de Ponte (d. 1335) argued that war upon Muslims was appropriate on the basis of their natural sins: as descendants of Ishmael and as a desert people, Arabs had a natural ferocity that led them to violate natural law constantly.⁵⁰ The fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Portuguese exploration and conquest of the Canary Islands—so named for the belief that they were inhabited by large dogs or monstrous peoples—provides a model case study for the application of Innocent’s ideas in the context of colonization. There, Pope Clement VI applied Innocent IV’s ideas rather directly to argue that, as a sin contra naturam, the natives’ idolatry rescinded their sovereignty and justified war upon them. The Bolognese canonists Antonio de Rosellis and Antonio Minucci da Pratovecchio, who treated many of the legal questions concerning Portuguese claims to the Canaries, argued that the Canarians’ refusal to receive missionaries constituted a sin contra naturam revoking their sovereignty.⁵¹ Some canonists did apply Innocent’s theory of sin against nature to argue in favor of Canarian sovereignty and against conquest. Felix Hemmerlin (d. 1457 or 1464) of Zurich, for instance, treated the Canarians’ sharing of their women as an example of their natural innocence and virtue: “They did not have the possession of things in any individual sense but all things were common, as in the state of innocence.… Indeed, they lived according to natural law … and according to divine law.”⁵² But the question of war was the one to which Innocent’s thought was most frequently attached: when in the seventeenth century, Hugo Grotius (d. 1645) turned to writing the De Iure Belli ac Pacis, the West’s first international law text, he too cited Innocent’s sins contra naturam as justification of war, demonstrating the four-hundred-year afterlife of Innocent’s formulation.⁵³

Canonists also justified the new European conquests and reconquests by writing against Innocent’s notion of the humanity and rationality of non-Christian others, which, we recall, he had used to establish papal jurisdiction over non-Christian lands de jure, and arguing rather their semihuman or animal barbarity. Oldratus de Ponte published a consilia in which he termed Spanish Muslims wild animals requiring forcible Christian subjection; layering the bestial metaphors, he notes elsewhere that as descendants of Ishmael, the Arabs came from “a wild ass of a man” (Gen. 16:12).⁵⁴ In 1436, King Duarte of Portugal referred to the animal-like nature of Canarians to justify their conquest, citing as evidence a list that closely recalls medieval descriptions of the barbarian: their lack of writing, metal, or money; their lack of common religion, laws, and social intercourse; and their forest dwelling.⁵⁵ And in 1550, when Juan de Sepulveda famously promoted the conquest of American Indians against Bartolomeo de Las Casas’s case for their peaceful conversion, he did so on the basis of their inhumanity, demonstrated by a number of alternative arguments. The natives are “natural slaves,” he asserted, requiring enslavement and subjection, with the evidence to be found among other things in their sinful sexuality. They are rather monkeys than men, he continued, lacking disciplinabilitas. Their lack of humanity, he argued, is evidenced through a lack of culture, writing, laws, and histories, and through their barbarous customs, their cannibalism, and their lust.⁵⁶ In Sepulveda’s portrait of the American Indian may be located the full arsenal of available medieval discourses of the semihuman or limited human that we have been surveying: the classical barbarian, the “animal” of the new natural sciences, Aristotle’s natural slave, Aquinas’s barbarous customs, and Innocent’s sins contra naturam revoking sovereignty, suggesting significant overlap in medieval and Renaissance vocabularies of otherness, and its converse, humanity.

While this survey indicates much agreement about what made humans human in late medieval and early modern thinking, it also demonstrates that the same markers and categories of civility could be, and were being, deployed toward very different ends and arguments vis-à-vis the real peoples with whom Europeans were coming into contact. It began, we saw, with an approach to the Mongols that placed them beyond the confines of the human, as the quintessential barbarians on the basis of their violent nature, their aberrant diet and dress, lack of human laws, and so on. Similarly, in the late medieval and early modern period, canonists justified European conquests in the Canaries, Spain, and the Americas by arguing for the lack of “civility” among the peoples in these societies—evident in their animal-like ferocity, lack of disciplinabilitas, barbarous or contra naturam customs, diet, lack of religion or laws, and forest (or desert) habitats. For if the discourses of barbarism and the later projects of European colonization and expansion required and assumed pagan irrationality and inhumanity, the discourse of conversion and the project of universal salvation, supported by missionaries and their sponsors such as Innocent IV, generally required and assumed the opposite: pagan rationality, humanity, and even cultural sovereignty. Although Innocent IV developed a mechanism for the revocation of pagan sovereignty on the basis of sins contra naturam, he himself, significantly, never applied the formula. That remained for latter-day canonists writing in the wake of colonization or reconquest efforts, who recast Innocent’s thinking away from the strategic humanism of the salvational aim and toward the rationalizations of new European empires.

Studies of these late medieval and early modern European expansions abroad reveal a decline in Europeans’ interests in converting and saving the pagans with whom they were coming into increasing contact. This trend is already visible in the early colonial case study of the Canaries, where the arguments of humanists and missionaries in favor of the voluntary and peaceful conversion of natives gradually gave way to those of conquerors, colonists, and the canonists who overwhelmingly justified their actions.⁵⁷ With the New World expansions, the questions of spiritual mission and papal jurisdiction that so excited thirteenth-century minds became muted, and indeed the papacy’s role gradually disappeared altogether from the secular adventures of kings, explorers, and conquistadors.⁵⁸ Hopes of conversion and salvation, epitomized in the thirteenth-century missions to Asia, begin to shift toward the aims of the modern civilizing mission, a shift again predicted in the Canarian experiment, where Prince Henry the Navigator (1394–1460) of Portugal petitioned Pope Eugenius for a mission not only to baptize but to civilize the natives with “civil laws and an organized form of government.”⁵⁹ Already in the fourteenth century we see the medieval salvational paradigm, and its investments in the rational non-Christian or “virtuous pagan,” giving way to a more secular and less inclusive paradigm promising civilization, and its remnant, the “savage,” as the new sign of the other. As Columbus wrote Ferdinand and Isabella in the Letter to the Sovereigns, there were no monstrous men to be found in the Americas, only savages.⁶⁰

THE PROXIMATE ENEMY:KNOWLEDGE ABOUT MUSLIMS IN THE LATER MIDDLE AGES

As with the medieval approach to pagans, the best attempts toward understanding Muslims ultimately derived from the missionary impulse. Early twelfth-century knowledge of Islam and its prophet were not promising: chroniclers like Guibert of Nogent, Walter of Compiègne, and others wrote of the life of Muhammad in ways that combined inaccuracy with insult, typical of the “life of Muhammad” genre. As Norman Daniel has shown, scores of medieval polemic writings on Islam turned to the life of Muhammad itself to delegitimize the validity of Islam.⁶¹ In Alexandre du Pont’s Roman de Mahomet, for instance, Muhammad is “the wisest and most learned of cardinals” in Rome, who is encouraged to do missionary work among Saracens in the East, and who agrees but only after being promised that upon his return he shall be appointed pope. When the cardinals fail to appoint him to the papacy, Muhammad takes revenge by preaching against Christian truth.⁶²

But there was a significant shift in 1142 with the visit by the abbot of Cluny, Peter the Venerable, to Spain and his subsequent interest in converting Spanish Muslims. This interest led him to commission a collection of works about Islam, including the first translation of the Qur’an by Robert of Ketton. Peter the Venerable used these works to compose his own Book Against the Sect or Heresy of the Saracens, aimed at converts.⁶³ In the 1220s and 1230s the mendicant orders directed their characteristic missionary outreach to Muslims in the Levant, which also marked a significant shift. The Dominican William of Tripoli learned Arabic, as was required by his order, lived in Acre, and eventually was able to compose the De Statu Saracenorum [On the state of the Saracens] in 1273, a text that argued for easy conversion of Muslims on the basis of the proximity between the Muslim and Christian faiths; it serves as an important source for Mandeville’s Travels. For the first time, there began to emerge accounts of the various branches of Islam and explanations of its fundamental schism, such as that by the first native historian of the Latin Kingdom, William of Tyre. Postcrusade commingling between Franks and Muslims in the Levant led to a local appreciation of the reverence by Muslims for Christian figures like Jesus and Mary, a fact reflected in Frederick II’s negotiated treaty during the Sixth Crusade for the return of Jerusalem to Christian rule in 1229, which specified that “no Saracen shall be forbidden freely to make the pilgrimage to Bethlehem.”⁶⁴

On the whole, however, proximity of belief between Christians and Muslims seems to have impeded rather than enhanced Christian understanding, leading “Christian theologians to measure Islam by Christian standards instead of viewing it … as a different religion which had elements in common with their own.”⁶⁵ As scholars have remarked, the polemical tilt to writings about Muslim religion impeded the pace of ethnographic knowledge about Muslims in the medieval period.⁶⁶ This meant that perhaps the most extensive medieval European description of the East before the mid-thirteenth century, the Historia Orientalis, probably by Jacques de Vitry, was filled will errors and shortcomings. These included information from crusader states that amounted to hearsay, a prejudiced account of Muhammad and the Muslim religion, and the measure and judgment of local Muslims (as well as oriental Christians and Jews) from a strictly Latin Christian perspective rather than on their own terms.⁶⁷ If knowledge about the tenets of Islam did improve with exposure, it did so only slowly: still in Joinville’s early fourteenth-century crusading account, as we will see in Chapter 4, one finds Latin Christian surprise at shared revered figures in Islam and Judeo-Christianity.

If religious similarity did not readily lead to admiration or acceptance, increased interaction with Muslims in the multiconfessional spaces of the Levant, Spain, and Italy did work to increase knowledge and appreciation of Muslim secular culture. Translation movements in Toledo and Sicily delivered Aristotle and Plato clothed in Muslim commentaries to the Latin Christian world, making the scientific and philosophical renaissance of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries difficult to separate from Islamic culture. Newly translated Middle Eastern story collections, including the Spanish Jewish convert Petrus Alfonsi’s Arabian Nights–like stories, told of an appealing Islamic world difficult to demonize.⁶⁸ While crusader contact is notorious for its dearth of intellectual results, it did lead to greater everyday knowledge about Muslims as well as to widespread “orientalization” of Latin culture in the Levant, as I explore in Chapter 4. While the dialogic dimensions of Joinville’s chronicle are, as I will argue there, visible only in late crusading narratives, the similarities between Arab and European codes of knighthood and chivalry were appreciated from the very outset of the Crusades. The author of Gesta Francorum, a chronicle of the First Crusade, for example, writes thus of the Turks: “They have a saying that they are of common stock with the Franks, and that no men, except the Franks and themselves, are naturally born to be knights. This is true, and nobody can deny it, that if only they had stood firm for the faith of Christ and holy Christendom … you could not find stronger or braver or more skillful soldiers; and yet by God’s grace they were beaten by our men.”⁶⁹ And unlike religious proximity, these proximate codes of chivalry did in fact lead to mutual admiration between Arabs and Europeans. Perhaps no figure better exemplifies the international code of chivalry than that of Salahadin, Europe’s “Saladin,” about whose generosity, wisdom, and romantic prowess Europeans were telling stories in their vernaculars even as he threatened their Levantine coastline.⁷⁰ Stories, too, were told of Salahadin’s being knighted, and perhaps most interestingly, of his deathbed baptism—Dante, who placed Saladin along with the pagan ancients in the relatively blameless space of Limbo within his Inferno, was not alone, then, in his concern for the salvation of this crusading rival. Indeed Dante’s treatment of good Muslims as coterminous with pagan ancients is both telling and typical: the twelfth-century renaissance of the classics initiated not just an interest in the salvation of pre–Lex Christi pagans but, simultaneously, an interest in the salvation of post–Lex Christi virtuous or noble non-Christians, including contemporary Muslims.⁷¹ From the twelfth century on, then, Muslims were increasingly assimilated to the virtuous pagan paradigm, as I discuss in the final section below.

DEBATING VIRTUOUS PAGANS: PRIMITIVISM AND THE PATH TO SALVATION

Opposed to the antiprimitivism of Lucretian-Ciceronian developmental anthropology, medieval anthropology also features a strain of cultural primitivism in its celebration of the simple, unacculturated, and natural goodness of some of God’s people, the so-called virtuous pagans, precursors to the noble savages of the early modern period. The medieval descriptions of the Brahmins identified them as the exemplary virtuous pagans of Asia. This tradition dated as far back as the fourth century b.c. to historians of Alexander’s wars with India, and later developed into the letters of Alexander and the Brahmin sage Dandimus, as well as the various Alexander romances that made their way into Mandeville’s sources.⁷² Distant and unknown lands, too, were associated with a natural goodness and bounty through the tradition of the Earthly Paradise or the Fortunate Isles. These were sometimes located in the East, other times placed in the West, as in the Celtic Voyage of Brendan and the Purgatory of St. Patrick. As the era of Atlantic exploration got under way in the fourteenth century, the Canaries came to be identified as the Fortunate Isles, and their newly found natives described according to the trope of the primitively noble pagan.⁷³ We know one such depiction was penned by Giovanni Boccaccio in Latin in a brief monograph called De Canaria, a translation from no longer extant Florentine merchant letters, likely in the vernacular, and dated December 17, 1341. The description of the Canarians in the De Canaria combined an account of their cultural primitivism, including their nudity, with an account of their good customs and nature, including their natural physical strength, intelligence, mutual trust, and lawfulness.⁷⁴ And when Columbus explored and conquered the island of Hispaniola, he described the land in the manner of an earthly paradise (“Spanola is a wonder, with its hills and mountains, fine plains, open country, and land rich and fertile for planting and sowing, to bring in profit of all sorts”) and applied the trope of the virtuous pagan to its natives: “The people of all the islands I have discovered and taken, and those whom I have heard, both men and women, go about naked as when they were born, except some of the women cover one part of themselves with a single leaf of grass, or a cotton thing that they make for this purpose. They have no iron, nor steel, nor weapons, nor are they fit for them, because although they are well-made men of commanding stature, they appear extraordinarily timid.”⁷⁵

In the medieval period, concern with the virtuous pagans intersected closely with, and indeed was inextricably linked to, salvational questions going back all the way to the church fathers, a long elite theological and philosophical debate that only in the late medieval period found application to actual pagans in ethnographic encounters such as those in the Canaries or Hispaniola. While the interest in non-Christian salvation had concerned the church since its inception, the field of interest gradually expanded over the course of the Middle Ages, from, at first, concern only for the salvation of Old Testament patriarchs pre–Lex Christi, to concern for the salvation of pagan philosophers pre–Lex Christi in the twelfth century, to, finally, concern for the possibility of pagan, and Jewish and Muslim, salvation post–Lex Christi in the thirteenth century. The thirteenth-century expansion of the possibility of non-Christian salvation to living, virtuous non-Christians had profound consequences not just for approaches to non-Christian others but for the definition of the Christian community itself, which, by implication, no longer enjoyed exclusive access to salvation. These consequences were further heightened and sharpened in fourteenth-century philosophical, theological, and cultural thought, a turn I examine in detail in my discussion of Mandeville’s Travels in Chapter 5. Here I wish briefly to sketch the earlier history of this concern with virtuous non-Christians, which began with the church fathers.

Many early church fathers, including Justin, Clement, and Origen, believed in the “concurrent value” of philosophy and Christianity, which held that through natural reason, man participated in the eternal reason of God and could thus attain truth. Clement and Origen influentially argued that Christ descended to hell to preach to those who had died before the Incarnation, thus making hell a place where future generations could learn about Christian teaching, and paving the way for universal salvation. In the late fourth and early fifth centuries, however, Augustine reversed the notion of Christ’s preaching in hell, limiting the saved to those patriarchs awaiting the Savior alone and salvation to pre-Resurrection times alone, a position later adopted by the church.⁷⁶ In the sixth century, Gregory the Great became famous for the saying, “nec fides habet meritum, cui humana ratio praebet experimentum” (faith for which human reason gives proof has no merit), so apparently denying the value of philosophy for salvation.⁷⁷

Twelfth- and thirteenth-century thinkers evinced a renewed interest in the matter of the salvation of virtuous non-Christians, particularly of pagan philosophers themselves revived by the reflowering of classical interest known as the “renaissance of the twelfth century.” Twelfth- and thirteenth-century thought on the question was split into two camps. The majority of thinkers, including Bernard of Clairvaux, Peter Lombard, Hugh of Saint Victor, and Alain of Lille, occupied the more conservative “sola fides” position, which held that faith alone, and not reason or philosophical understanding, was sufficient for salvation.⁷⁸ But an influential minority, best represented by Peter Abelard in the twelfth century and Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth, occupied a far more liberal position on the question of salvation. Abelard argued, for instance, that reason was that which made man comparable to God’s image, and should be used to investigate God, although post–Lex Christi, it was not enough.⁷⁹ Aquinas opened the way to non-Christian salvation much further, arguing that even after the Incarnation and Lex Christi, faith was available to men without the benefit of Christian teaching: the first principles of Christian faith were implanted in men by God, who made faith available to the virtuous through direct revelation. These latter prepared to receive his grace simply by—according to what would become the resounding formula of fourteenth-century thought on the issue—facere quod in se est (doing what was in them).⁸⁰ Virtuous pagans, according to Aquinas’s formulation, need not do anything other than what was already in them in order for their virtue to be recognized by God and to be thus granted salvation. Conversion was unnecessary; virtue could reside naturally in God’s people, without recourse or access to revealed law. Neither was this view treated as peripheral or heterodox: the main commentators of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—Duns Scotus, Durandus, Denis the Carthusian, Thomas of Strasbourg—all accepted the formulation without any alteration.⁸¹ The implications of Aquinas’s formulation—which amounts to a theorized acceptance of the other and a questioning of the distinctiveness of the Latin Christian self’s relation to God—are profound for the fourteenth century’s theorizations of what defined Christians against non-Christians, and are decisive, I show, in the striking approaches to non-Christians displayed in Mandeville’s Travels.

As this brief survey suggests, the late medieval period was a robust one for the development of anthropological ideas that would continue well past the Middle Ages proper. While these ideas are meant to provide background to the ethnographic practice and writing of the chapters that follow, what will also emerge in those chapters is the gap between such theory and actual practice once a writer is faced with framing a particular ethnographic encounter. Thus Gerald of Wales aggressively applies classical developmental anthropology to the Welsh and Irish, but unexpectedly applies another, discordant discourse in a kind of resistant dialogue with developmental ideas. William of Rubruck goes out of his way not to apply ideas of inhumanity or incivility available to him in his day to the Mongols to whom he would preach. Joinville applies developmental anthropology to describe the incivility of nomadic Bedouins and Mongols, but when he comes to his main ethnographic focus, the Muslims of the Levant and the Holy Land, his desire for dialogue with them moves him toward new and unscripted terrain. Finally, Mandeville’s text not only applies virtuous pagan theory to the Brahmins and others but exposes the crisis implicit in the challenge posed by non-Christian salvation to the exclusivity, distinctiveness, and integrity of the Christian community in the fourteenth century. Each of these writers, moreover, wrote ethnography in a particular way, and in the chapters that follow, the dialogic form of their medieval ethnographies will be as much the focus of discussion as is their content.