Knowing, and Not Knowing, Your Enemy: Changing Attitudes toward Islam during the Crusade Era

Modern historians have generally agreed that Western medieval depictions of Islam, especially during the crusade era, were caricatures bearing little connection to reality.  These caricatures could serve a variety of purposes, ranging from figures of pure fantasy in the Chansons de geste (as Norman Daniel has argued) to justifications for conquest and colonization (as John Tolan has suggested) to figures of prophecy (an presented by Jean Flori).  Whatever the purpose of the caricature, the one thing they do not do is make a genuine effort to understand members of a rival faith.  This essay will sketch out the constantly evolving medieval Christian attitudes towards Muslims, especially during the twelfth century.  Much of the early ignorance about the tenets of Islam seems to have been willful.  Writers like Guibert of Nogent and Raymond of Aguilers possessed authentic knowledge of Muhammad and of the contemporary Muslim political political world, but they preferred to retell and embellish the caricatures.  Their views, however, served not so much to justify conquest as to connect Muslims to Antichrist and to the ongoing apocalyptic drama of the twelfth century.  The very patterns of thought—parody and dramatic inversions—that Christian writers applied to Muslim history and practice (whether in crusade chronicles, historical vitae of Muhammad, or chansons de geste) were the same ones applied by theologians predicting the future activity of Antichrist.  The paper will conclude with a demonstration of how a combination of intellectual endeavor, cultural contact, military failure, and prophetic disillusionment in the later twelfth century moved Muslims from imaginary eschatological types into mundane historical and political actors. In doing so it will suggest that understanding the powerful role of apocalyptic thought in shaping actions and images will be fundamental in achieving a comprehensive understand of Christian-Muslim relations in the Crusade Era.