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1. The Abbotâs Gold
In 1142 Petrus Venerabilis (Peter the Venerable), abbot of Cluny, visited Hispania. While in the north, in what he later described as âthe region of the Ebroâ, he organized and paid for the first Latin translation of the Qurâan, along with several documents on Islam. Our interest in his project is quite simple. The abbotâs ostensible aim in having the Qurâan translated was to convert infidels to Christianity. And yet, given this aim, why should he have had the Qurâan rendered into Latin rather than, say, the Bible into Arabic? Whom was the translation really for?
The matter is of some historical importance. This translation of the Qurâan, the first into Latin and by no means the most exact, accrued a strong manuscript tradition that outlasted and overwhelmed some of the later, more careful versions. As has been noted by Bastiaensen (1995), it was read by scholars like Richard Fitzralph, Simon Simeon, Denys le Chartreux, and Nicholaus de Cusa; in 1543 it was printed in Basel or Zurich by Theodor Bibliander and abridged by Johann Albrecht Widmannstetter; in 1547 it was adapted into Italian for the printer Andrea Arrivabene, whose text then became the source for Salomon Schweiggerâs German version of 1616, which was in turn the source for an anonymous Dutch version of 1641. After a slow start, the translation carried out in the north of Hispania in 1142-43 was to inform the European image of Islam for some five centuries. Daniel (1966:6) notes that from the mid sixteenth century, whenever Latinist Christians argued against Islam, usually accusing the prophet of having created a polygamous religion in order to seek power and women, their reasonings were more often than not based on citations from this particular translation.
The Qurâan translation project was also of considerable importance in the context of other twelfth-century translations from Arabic. It was probably a key element for the development of group translation work in Toledo, with major consequences for church patronage in the later twelfth-century work (chapter 2 below). By extension, it indirectly influenced the crown patronage of translations under Alfonso X from the mid thirteenth century (chapter 3). Once the Qurâan translation project is given full due, much else falls into place.
Yet the translation was certainly not carried out for European readers of the Renaissance, nor for other translators working in the Iberian peninsula. So, again, whom was it really for?
Our answer to this question will address two main aspects: first, the role of gold as the bond between patron and translator; second, the format of the disputation as a mode of scholastic discourse. The importance of these factors should become clear as we go along. There are also quite few preliminary stories to tell. We have to describe the religious divide across which the translation took place, some exchanges that breached this line, and the particular interests that an abbot of Cluny might have had in participating in such processes.
Lines between Islam and Christianity
A traditional story of battles tells us that Charles Martel, grandfather of Charlemagne, stopped the Moorish invaders in Poitiers, France, in 732. The following centuries of Islamic rule would then be more or less a Hispanic problem, of little consequence for the rest of Europe. Things passably south of the Pyrenees would be Arabic and Muslim; things more or less north of the mountains would be European and Christian; and some kind of cultural as well as geographical line should presumably separate the two. To translate the Qurâan into Latin would mean passing from one side of that line to the other. If only history were that tidy.
The troublesome fact is that the lines between Christian Europe and Islamic Hispania â variously identified with Al-Andalus â are remarkably difficult to draw. On the one hand, Spanish history insists that the border started to move south even before it reached one of its northern limits at Poitiers in 732, since the Christian reconquista â literally a âreconquestâ â is supposed to have begun from an uprising at Covadonga, in Asturias, in 718. For some five or six hundred years, through to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (although Islamic Granada would not fall until 1492), the mobile border between Christians and non-Christians was formed by battles and treaties, tension and distension, in a process that should probably not be identified with conquest or reconquest, which hardly seem appropriate terms for campaigns that take five or six centuries to complete.
Major parts of the Iberian peninsula were certainly under Islamic rule from the beginnings of the caliphat of CĂłrdoba in 711, with political, economic, and cultural structures that were far from ephemeral. The exact nature of this Islamic culture on the European continent is difficult to assess. There are opinions for all ideologies. Since we shall be meeting a few of the main approaches, it is as well to mention them here. At one extreme, the historian AmĂ©rico Castro (1948) has argued that Islamic rule broke profoundly with the previous Hispanic mentality and, along with Jewish influence, produced a semiticized culture that formed the basis of modern Spain. On this view, the line between Islam and European Christendom would be fairly hard and sharp, with Hispanic specificity actually drawing more on the Islamic side. In reaction to Castro, scholars like Claudio SĂĄnchez Albornoz (1962) have sought greater continuity, insisting that a Hispanic Christian identity existed both before and after Islamic rule: the invaders came, were thrown out, and only then did Hispania get back to the business of being properly Hispanic. A third approach, put forward by Ignacio OlagĂŒe (1969), proposes that the Islamic conquest of the peninsula was militarily impossible, in fact that it was no more than a myth invented to suit the ideological necessities of the Christian attacks on Islam. OlagĂŒe argues the people of the peninsula turned to Islam of their own accord, adopting the rules and religion of the most advanced culture of the day. OlagĂŒeâs Islamic Hispania thus becomes a huge frontier region between the Christian north and the Muslim south of the Mediterranean. It would develop an ideal coexistence in which all borders were somehow internalized, all within the one cultural matrix, prior to the imposition of external lines by Christian invaders from the north. Unfortunately it is also an ideal significantly contradicted by the properly Islamic social structures of Al-Andalus analyzed by Guichard (1976). Whatever happened, there is room for debate.
We need not choose between these various interpretations, which really concern whatever Spaniards want their identity to be. Let us merely note the difficulty of describing the lines. Without clearly defined cultural limits, with no more than moving intercultural networks at least nominally under Islam, we must abandon many of the features of straight linear narrativity, particularly the kind that follows the avatars of just one well-identified culture. For the same reason, it is no simple matter to call things by well-identified names. What words, for instance, should we use for the people of the Islamicized peninsula? Bear in mind that relatively few Arabs and Berbers had come from northern Africa, and they were of various ethnic origins. Many of the people under Islamic rule were Mozarabs (Christians who had adopted Muslim ways) and they could in turn be subcategorized, if need be, as Celt-Iberians, Romanized Iberians, and a Visigothic military caste. Then there were significant groups of European slaves bought from Germanic armies, and the Jews that came and went (on this ethnic diversity, see LĂ©vi-Provençale 1932:18-39). The names became no easier as the Christian border moved southward, creating Mudejars (Muslims under Christian rule), Moriscos (Muslims who were baptized under Christian rule), and Conversos (Jews who had become Christians, at least outwardly). Nor was Christian rule necessarily a negation of the previous mix: in 1150 Alfonso VII of Castile famously proclaimed himself âking of the three religionsâ (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam); a century later the inscriptions on the tomb of Fernando III were in Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, and Castilian.
What collective name should we use for the people on the Islamic side of the lines? The problem curiously resembles the political entity that journalists in recent years resorted to calling âthe Muslim-led Bosnian governmentâ, which is no more than a political name for a similarly complex frontier region between major cultures and religions. If we called everyone in the mix a âSpaniardâ, the name would tend to suggest that postmodern Spain had accepted the entire legacy of its past, which is far from the case. And what then of forgotten Portugal? Faute de mieux, let us deploy the most diffuse term available, the Latin-derived adjective âHispanicâ, as in the title of this book. Although the word conveniently refers to âHispaniaâ, the Roman name for the Iberian peninsula, it also connotes a suitably indistinct cultural attachment. Relatively few shudders result if we call Seneca, born in CĂłrdoba, a Hispanic Roman; Maimonedes, also born in CĂłrdoba, gets by as a Hispanic Jew; a Latin translation of the Qurâan can perhaps be Hispanic merely by virtue of the place it was carried out in; and in a later chapter we shall describe RubĂ©n DarĂo, born in Nicaragua, as a Hispanic poet by virtue of his language. Let the term âHispanicâ thus denote a series of attachments to the history of the Iberian peninsula as a frontier space. No more, no less. The term âSpanishâ is then free to denote attachments to the (multi)national state that, from the mid-fifteenth-century, has occupied much of that space.
A further difficulty concerns the deceptive nature of the Pyrenees as any kind of stable line, and not only because the Basque and Catalan spaces have long refused to be divided by those mountains. One forgets how problematic the extended Islamic presence, alternating trade with incursions, actually was for the development of Christian Europe. Marc Bloch (1939:11-16) tells how from 842, more than a century after their defeat at Poitiers, Hispanic Muslims ventured up the RhĂŽne to the region of Arles; from 890 they had a stronghold at Freinet, close to Saint-Tropez; from 902 all of Sicily was held by their brothers, with whom they controlled navigation in the Mediterranean; in 940 they were carrying out raids in the Alps. These were obviously not the kind of Arabs that belong with camels in the desert. They were Muslims from Hispania, some from Mediterranean ports that made them good seamen, others from mountainous regions that made them very sure-footed in the Alps. Their incursions would continue right through to 1178, when Muslim pirates carried out a raid near Marseilles and took prisoners. Such matters were not really a question of transgressing any single border between Europe and non-Europe. They are more properly seen as extensions and outposts of a very extensive Islamic trade network, with organized commercial practices that were at least a century in advance of those to the north (Lopez 1976:24). At the base of this network were the Sudan and the empire of Mali, giving Islam a monopoly over the circulation of Afican gold (O. Constable 1994:200-201); at the top there were political negotiations and trade with Christendom. Whenever gold appears in our stories, there is a good chance it had passed through Muslim hands. It got through thanks to contacts, exchanges, and translations.
Early Breaches of Lines
For Christian Europe, one way of dealing with the problematic presence of Hispanic Muslims was through exchange and negotiation. We know that Jews were trading between the Franks and Hispania from at least 840, when the Mozarab Agobardus Lugdunensis (Agobard of Lyon) complained about them in his De insolentia JudĂŠorum. In 864 Carolus Calvus (Charles the Bald) sent two ambassadors to the caliph of CĂłrdoba; they returned to CompiĂšgne âcum multis donisâ, including books. In 953 Otto I of the Franks, seeking to unite his kingdom with Lombardy and thus requiring control over the Alps, sent Johannes Gorziensis as an ambassador to CĂłrdoba. Johannes, a monk from Lorraine, was helped in his negotiations by the Jew Hasdeu, interpreter to the caliph and later international ambassador to Constantinople and LeĂłn (LĂ©vi-Provençale 1932:111-112). There is reason to believe Gorziensis made his way back home bearing books (Thompson 1929). One way or another, negotiation and trade brought elements of Islamic knowledge to the monasteries of Europe. Interestingly enough, monks from Lorraine were in favour at the court of England, and it is in England that we find an astrolabe, the prime instrument of Islamic astronomy, in use in 1092 (Haskins 1924:113). And CĂłrdoba and Lorraine need not be the only points of contact. In 967-70 we find Gerbertus Auriliacensis (Gerbert dâAurillac) studying in Vic in Catalonia; in 984 the same Gerbertus asked a Lupilus in Barcelona for a translation of Arabic astronomy; in 999 he became Pope Silvester II. Contrary to the belief that all the translating started in Toledo, the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries provide enough contacts for us to suppose that Christian scholars had a rough idea of the knowledge held by Hispanic Muslims. They knew more or less what they lacked. And that image of lack could give rise to a demand.
The quest for knowledge was often a commercial affair. One should not forget that, especially prior to the generalized use of paper, manuscripts were valuable commodities. They were exchanged for money or merchandise. Moses of Bergamo, a twelfth-century translator and interpreter in the Venetian quarter of Constantinople, lost his Greek manuscripts when a fire burnt down his house; he did not lament the loss of the house as much as the loss of the manuscripts, and more particularly the three pounds of gold he had paid for them (Haskins 1924:150). Three pounds of gold was and remains a considerable sum. In Hispania we find traces of this economy in the words of a Muslim describing the Sevilla of the early twelfth century, advising the faithful not to sell manuscripts across cultural lines: âExcept for books that concern the law [sharia], scientific works should not be sold to Jews or Christians, because they translate them and attribute them to their own and to their bishops, even though they are Arabic worksâ (Ibn Adbun 1948:173).1 The prohibition of sales indicates the existence of the activity: Islamic manuscripts were sold to Christians. This means that whoever was going to translate had to have enough gold to purchase the texts. And if this gold came from translators, they presumably had to get it from someone interested in possessing translations. Our citation points toward one source of this gold: bishops could presumably exchange their wealth not only for translations but also for the privilege of having their name put on them.
Negotiation and trade involve strategies that work both ways. Our Muslims in the Alps made at least one mistake, since they dealt in rather more than manuscripts. In 972, in the valley of the Dranse, they captured someone called Majolus Cluniacensis, who was returning to Burgundy from Rome. Majolus was at that time the abbot of Cluny, some 150 years before the moment when Petrus Venerabilis, another abbot of Cluny, would have the Qurâan translated into Latin. There is a possible connection between the capture and the translation.
The Role of Cluny
To appreciate this connection, we have to understand why Cluny was such a major element in the development of links between Islam and Christianity. Cluny is nowadays a town in east-central France, with few claims to fame apart from the traditional making of lace and a local cattle market. In the Middle Ages, though, it was the seat of the reformed Benedictine order founded by Guillaume duc dâAquitaine in 910. The order of Cluny was directly responsible to the pope, which might explain why Majolus was travelling to and from the Italian peninsula. The direct line to the papacy also explains how this order was able to wield an authority that transcended the legitimacy of princes, kings, and emperors. Through the work of Majolus and his successors Odilo and Hugo, Cluny placed its members in positions of extreme power in church politics and international diplomacy. The order had popes, pope-makers, and highly influential ideologues. It also developed its own international network to the point where, in 1109, it had established 1,184 abbeys or priories, many of them in the northeast of christianized Hispania (two Clunaic monks, Dalmatius and Diego Gelmirez, actually created the Saint James saga, stringing conquered sites along the pilgrimage route that is still followed to Santiago de Compostela). At the centre of the order, the abbey itself, begun in 1088, was the biggest church in medieval Europe and cost several fortunes to build (it stood through to 1790; some ruins remain today). Cluny obviously managed to get its hands on quite a lot of gold.
The mistake of the alpine Muslims was not so much the capture of Clunyâs early head as it was his release upon payment of a ransom. Majolus was exchanged for gold. This would have been fine commerce were it not for the fact that the abbot was a powerful man, with influence among the Burgundian warrior class. Majolus consequently organized a successful attack on the Muslim stronghold at Freinet, putting an end to the incursions up the RhĂŽne. His successor and biographer Odilo Cluniacensis actually saw his capture and release as an act of divine intervention, since it provided Cluny with its first contact with Muslims, giving the order good reason to bring about the defeat of these âmost ferocious Saracensâ (cit. Cantarino 1980:91). Such were the early beginnings of what were to be known as the French-based âHispanic Crusadesâ, promoted by the order of Cluny. Such, too, were the ideological elements needed to justify the invasion as a bellum justum, a just war, motivated not only by revenge for the abbot but also, through a related narrative structure, by the apparent need to liberate the captured church of Visigothic Hispania. Just as Majolus had been captured, so had the Hispanic church. Of little import that the Clunaic order, once in Hispanic lands, would set about undoing the Visigothic liturgy. The main point was that the opposition to Islamic invasion had been set in march: capture and release, conquista and reconquista (as if the pairs matched). In 1064, Guillaume duc dâAquitaine acted in consequence, attacking and taking Barbastro in the north of Hispania, bringing French forces into what might otherwise have been a long civil war. In 1095 Pope Urbanus II â not by chance a Cluniac â applied the same ideology in proclaiming the first Palestinian crusade. The impetus was to continue for abou...
