GARLAND MEDIEVAL CASEBOOKS
Joyce E. Salisbury, Series Editor
1. Sagas of the Icelanders: A Book of Essays
John Tucker
2. Discovering New Worlds: Essays on Medieval
Exploration and Imagination
Scott D. Westrem
DISCOVERING NEW WORLDS
Essays on Medieval
Exploration and Imagination
edited by
Scott D. Westrem
GARLANDPUBLISHING, INC. • NEW YORK& LONDON
1991
J It imagining L^nristenoom: Asia in Mandeville's Travels
27. In a comment on the manuscript version of this essay, Scott
Westrem notes that "all this is in the context of what soimds very
like an appeal for missionaries because the attention turns to what
these people don't know, but could—if only a crusade of priests
would move East" (his emphasis). A knowledge of God through
"natural reason" was commonly ascribed by medieval thinkers to the
peoples of distant Asia; see Thomas Hahn, "The Indian Tradition in
Western Medieval Intellectual History," Viator 9 (1978): 213-34,
and his "Indians East and West" (above, n. 9), both of which deal in
passing with Mandeville's Travels and therefore nicely supplement
the present essay.
Arguing that humanity uses time, as "a carrier of significance," to
define the relations between self and other, Johannes Fabian distinguishes
the medieval. Christian "vision of Time"—the "inclusive or
incorporative" 'Time of Salvation"—from the Enlightenment vision
of "temporal relations as exclusive and expansive," a distinction
that has obvious consequences: whereas "the pagan was always
already marked for salvation, the savage is not yet ready for civilization":
Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object
(New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1983), pp. ix, 26 (his emphasis).
Though perhaps overschematic, Fabian's distinction does seem to be
borne out in the "other" worlds represented both on the encylopedic
mappaemundi and in Mandeville's Travels: in them time is almost
always a matter of space and even the most distant creatures are
capable of salvation.
28. The Vision of Piers Plowman: A Critical Edition of the B-Text, ed.
A. V. C. Schmidt (London: Dent; New York: Dutton, 1978), Prol.,
lines 48-49.
29. On Menocchio generally, see Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the
Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John and
Anne Tedeschi (1980; repr. Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1982);
"new world" (pp. 13, 77, 81); "causes of my errors"—from a letter to
his judges, quoted in full by Ginzburg—(p. 88); "majesty of God"
(p. 51).
The Nature of the Infidel:
The Anthropology of the Canon Lawyers
James Muldoon
An historian who should have known better, Henry Steele Commager,
once observed that "sixteenth-cfentury Europeans had no compunction
about killing Indians because the Indians had no souls."' Such an
opinion is not, unfortunately, restricted to American historians. It has
something of the popular modem myth about it. The massive population
decline among the inhabitants of the Americas, which the conquistadores
observed and modem scholars have analyzed in great detail,
suggests that the Spanish invaders had no interest in the people they
encountered because they did not see them as human in the first place.^
The view that Europeans judged non-European peoples as
non-human or, at the very least, sub-human, seems to rest largely on
analysis of literary and polemical texts. We often see European attitudes
toward non-Europeans illustrated in chronicles that were composed
hundreds of miles from any border by monks who never saw a Mongol
or a Saracen.^ These chroniclers were anxious to record contemporary
responses to the horrifying tales of conquest and death associated with
the terrifying invaders of Christendom. A related purpose of such discussions
was to inspire Europeans to meet the dangers that would soon
approach from the most distant comers of Europe unless men roused
themselves from their lethargy and confronted the enemy. Other
expressions of late-medieval European attitudes toward non-Europeans
James Muldoon is Professor of History at Rutgers University, Camden
College of Arts and Sciences (see Notes on Contributors, p. 222).
116 The Anthropology of the Canon Lawyers
conjured up literary images of Wild Men (and Women), creatures such
as werewolves, and other forms of beings who, at the very least, were
incompletely human."* Here the medieval writers' goal was titillation,
and so the strange folk were described in the most grotesque terms.
In all of these cases, accurate, informed descriptions of the
peoples beyond Europe had no place. The purpose of describing the
non-European in terrifying or grotesque terms was to appeal to the
emotions—not the minds—of readers or hearers. Furthermore, such
descriptions did not reflect first-hand experience of the non-European
world, but rather second- or third-hand observations at best. They even
echoed not contemporary experience but ancient experience as medieval
writers drew upon a narrative tradition that ran back to Herodotus.^ As a
result, any serious discussion of medieval attitudes toward real nonEuropean
peoples as opposed to the inhabitants of a worid of fantasy
and imagination must begin elsewhere, away from the literary and the
artistic representations of the non-European. Such discussions must
also keep away from the moralists, the grotesqueness of whose descriptions
of the non-European was in inverse proportion to their experience
of them and to the willingness of the European warrior aristocracy to
fight them.
One way to determine what medieval men really thought of
non-Europeans is to examine the writings of those who actually dealt
with such peoples. It might be pointed out that, while there were indeed
medieval Europeans who did have a realistic view of the non-Europeans,
there were too few of them and their information reached too few people
to be of any significance. Margaret Hodgen argues similarly in her
important book, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries. Discussing the works of Marco Polo and two nearly
contemporary Franciscan missionaries, Hodgen concludes:
Strange to say, and significant as were the reports of the three
intrepid travelers for the history of European thought, they
were all but forgotten in the West during the centuries that
followed. The relatively truthful account written by Marco
Polo attracted less attention in the later Middle Ages than the
mendacious romance which appeared under the name of Sir
John Mandeville.^
While it is true that more copies of Mandeville's Travels have
survived than have copies of Marco Polo's book, this does not
James Muldoon 117
necessarily prove that Mandeville's fanciful work was more important
in shaping European attitudes toward the non-European than was Marco
Polo's realistic one.'' A more important question is: who held realistic
as opposed to fanciful conceptions of non-European peoples and what
were the implications, if any, of that knowledge? I wish to suggest that
realistic evaluations of the humanity and the rationality of nonEuropeans
were more common than the circulation of Mandeville's
work suggests and that these realistic appraisals were of more long-term
significance than were the opinions of Mandeville and similar writers.
To illustrate this argument, I wish to examine a few well-known
documents from the mid-thirteenth century, materials connected with
the Mongol Mission of Pope Innocent IV (1243-1254). The most
important of these materials are a legal commentary, written by
Innocent IV in his capacity as a canon lawyer, and two letters that as
pope he addressed to the Mongol khan. The final piece of evidence is
John of Piano Carpini's report of his journey to the Mongols, in the
course of which he delivered the pope's letters and received in turn a
response from the khan. What makes these materials important is that
they contain the views, implicit and explicit, of men who actually had
dealings with non-Europeans. Furthermore, the views of Innocent IV
shaped ecclesiastical and legal responses to the non-European world
long after his death, enjoying an important revival in the early sixteenth
century as Europeans began to wrestle with the implications of the
discovery of the New World and its inhabitants.^
Innocent IV dealt with the nature of the non-European, nonChristian
in his commentary on a letter of his predecessor. Innocent III
(1198-1216). The letter. Quod super his (X.3.34.8), was included in the
second collection of canon law, theDecretales, in a chapter on vows. In
the original letter. Innocent III dealt with what must have been a
common problem, the inability of an individual who had taken an oath
to go on a crusade to fulfill his vow because he was too old, too ill, or
too constrained by circumstances beyond his conu-ol to travel to the
Holy Land. What was to be done? Innocent III resolved the matter
expeditiously, outlining a procedtu-e for allowing the would-be crusader
to compound for his vow so that a suitable warrior could replace him.
After all, there was nothing to be gained by sending an old or sick man
to fight.9
When Innocent IV came to write his commentary on the
Decretales, he paid little attention to the actual circumstances that
118 The Anthropology of the Canon Lawyers
generated the letter and raised instead the question of the right of
Christians to wage war against infidels at all.*^ He began by accepting
the legitimacy of wars to regain possession of the Holy Land. This was
simply an exercise of defence and recuperation, in which the Christian
inhabitants of the Holy Land were legally permitted to fight Muslims
who had unjustly attacked them and unjustly dispossessed them of
their lands.''
Of greater interest was the question of whether Christians had the
right to invade, conquer, and govern any and all lands that infidels held.
Innocent IV's answer was that God, who made the world and everyone
in it, has so ordered matters that all men, believers and infidels alike,
can legitimately possess land and property and can select their own
rulers. Such "things were made for every rational creature" and so "it is
not lawful for the pope or for the faithful to take sovereignty or
jurisdiction from infidels, because they hold without sin "
According to Innocent IV, it was the very rationality of all
mankind that meant that every human being was subject to papal jurisdiction
and thus possibly subject to invasion by Christians acting under
papal warrant. If, according to Innocent IV, "a gentile, who has no law
except the law of nature [to guide him], does something contrary to the
law of nature, the pope can lawfully punish him. . . ." For example,
according to this line of argument, "if they [infidels] worship idols [the
pope can judge and punish them] for it is natural for a man to worship
the one and only God, not creatures." The pope cannot command the
forced baptism of legitimately conquered infidels, but he "can order infidels
to admit preachers of the Gospel in the lands that they administer,
for every rational creature is made for the worship of God...."
The emphasis upon the rationality of the infidels is important,
not only because, paradoxically, it provides ajustification for the legitimate
conquest of the infidels, but also because it means that believer
and non-believer possess the same human nature. The believer alone has
the Gospel to guide him in the ways of righteousness, but both believer
and non-believer possess the capacity to know the natural law through
the operation of human reason alone and so are subject to its terms.
The theme of the rationality that all men share appeared fully
developed in the two letters Innocent IV addressed to the leader of the
Mongols. Parenthetically, let me note here that we do not know when
Innocent IV wrote specific sections of his commentary on the
Decretales. It does not matter for the purposes of this discussion.
James Muldoon 119
however, whether he wrote the legal commentary on the common
rationality of mankind before or after he sent these two letters. What is
important is that the documents, taken together, demonstrate that
Innocent IV thought seriously about and acted purposefully on the view
that mankind shared a common rationality.
The letters that John of Piano Carpini brought to the Great Khan
had different themes. The first provided an introduction to Christian
doctrine, while the second focused on the pope's desire to stop the Mongol
conquests of Christian lands. They shared, however, an emphasis
upon the rationality of all men.
The first letter opens with a discussion of human experience that
presumably should bring the khan to consider the truth of the Christian
faith. The human condition is described as "the unhappy lot of the
human race," a situation created by the fall of the first man. As a consequence,
God became Man and "showed Himself in a form visible to
all men." According to Innocent IV, the Incarnation took place because
human nature, being endowed with reason, was meet to be
nourished on eternal truth as its choicest food, but, held in
mortal chains as a pimishment for sin, its powers were thus
far reduced that it had to strive to understand the invisible
things of reason's food by means of inferences drawn from
visible things.
Christ became incarnate
in order that, having become visible. He might call back to
Himself, the Invisible, those pursuing after visible things,
moulding men by His salutary instructions and pointing out
to them by means of His teaching the way of perfection. . . .'^
The goal of the Incarnation was to replace the penalty of sin, which is
death, with eternal life.
The point of this summary of the fundamental Christian mystery
as Innocent IV presented it was thateveryday experience demonstrates to
any rational human being the melancholy state of human existence. He
began, in other words, with an appeal to the khan's own experience.
Clearly men, endowed as they were with reason, could see that they
were meant for more than a short, painful life on earth. That the life
men experienced was less happy than what they could imagine was due
to the fall of Adam and the consequences of original sin.
122 The Anthropology of the Canon Lawyers
weaknesses and internal divisions that separated the Christians and so
upon their return to the khan would encourage an attack upon Europe.'^
One final issue still requires some discussion. Even if the
thirteenth-century papacy appreciated the rational nature of the infidel,
of what significance was this perception since the descriptions of wild
men, half-men, and other fantastic creatures dominated the European
image of the infidel? As has been noted, more copies of Mandeville's
fantastic voyage survive, and presumably circulated, than do copies of
the more realistic papal materials.
The answer lies in the effect of these various perceptions of the
infidel on those who went to seek him from the end of the fifteenth
century. From the very beginning of the overseas expansion that began
with Columbus's first voyage, missionary activity was an important
aspect of the endeavor. Columbus himself emphasized the importance
of missionary work, and on his second voyage he brought missionaries
with him to begin the work of converting the inhabitants of the Caribbean
islands. If these people were not human, such efforts would have
been useless. Indeed, they would be unnecessary. Likewise, the letters
of Pope Alexander VI that divided the newly discovered lands between
the Castilians and the Portuguese in 1493 by means of the famous line
of demarcation would have been pointless because the papal right to
draw such a line was rooted in the papal responsibility for the souls of
the infidel inhabitants of the newly-found lands.'^ If these people had no
souls and thus could not accept the salvation that Christ's sacrifice promised,
then the papacy would not have expended so much intellectual
effort on achieving a solution to the Portugese/Castilian conflict.
In fact, papal and other ecclesiastical interest in the New World
was rooted in the perception of the infidels as rational human beings,
just like Europeans. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when
ecclesiastics considered the infidel, they saw not the fantastic creatures
described by Mandeville and others but rather rational creatures like
themselves, for whom Christ had suffered and died. They perceived the
infidel this way not from personal experience but from the line of
argument that began with Innocent IV and John of Piano Carpini. It is
worth noting that while Piano Carpini's manuscript may not have
circulated widely, the commentary of Innocent IV on the Decretales
most certainly did. Canon lawyers from the thirteenth- to the sixteenthcentury
continuously cited his discussion of the rights of infidels and
with it his defense of their essential humanity.''' In the sixteenth
James Muldoon 123
century, the entire Spanish debate about the legitimacy of the conquest
of the Americas was carried on in the terms of Innocent IV's
commentary. In the 1500s, as in the 1200s, there was no doubt about
the humanity or the rationality of the inhabitants of what to the West
was a new world. The issue was not that they were somehow morally
or intellectually deficient but rather that they did have souls, which it
was the responsibility of Christians to save.
NOTES
1. Henry Steele Commager, "Should the Historian Make Moral
Judgments?" American Heritage 17[2] (Feb. 1966): 27, 87-93 at 91.
2. On the debate about the biological effects of the discoveries, see
Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural
Consequences of 1492 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1972), and
Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-
1900 (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986).
3. See, for example, Charles W. Connell, "Western Views of the Origins
of the Tartars': an Example of the Influence of Myth in the Second
Half of the Thirteenth Century," Journal of Medieval and Renaissance
Studies 3 (1973): 115-37.
4. See Richard Bemheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1952); Edward Dudley and Maximillian E.
Novak, eds.. The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought
from the Renaissance to Romanticism (Pittsburgh: Univ. of
PiUsburgh Press, 1972); and John Block Friedman, The Monstrous
Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ.
Press, 1981).
5. "If antiquity confers respectability, some of Mandeville's stories
came from the most impeccable sources, the cream of the flamboyant
anthropogeography of Pliny, Solinus, Mela, and Isidore. . . . There
are the Albanians, who made iheir first bow to the European reading
public in the pages of Herodotus." See Margaret Hodgen, Early
Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1964;
repr. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), p. 70.
6. Hodgen, Early Anthropology, p. 103.
7. Scholars differ on the number of manuscripts involved. A recent editor
of Mandeville's work declares that "some three hundred" manuscripts
124 The Anthropology of the Canon Lawyers
of the work have survived while "only about seventy" of Polo's work
have survived. See The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, trans.
C. W. R. D. Moseley (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1983), p. 10.
Other writers indicate that as many as 138 copies of Polo's manuscript
survive; see Boies Penrose, Travel and Discovery in the Early
Renaissance (Cambridge, Mass., 1955; repr. New York: Atheneimi,
1962), p. 22.
8. On the later use of Innocent IV's legal opinion, see James Muldoon,
Popes, Lawyers, and Irrfidels: The Church and the Non-Christian
World 1250-1550. (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press,
1979), esp. ch. 7; and Kenneth J. Pennington, "Bartolome de Las
Casas and the Tradition of Medieval Law," Church History 39 (1970):
149-61.
9. James A. Brundage, Medieval Canon Law and the Crusader (Madison:
Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1969), p. 77.
10. Innocent IV, Conunentaria Doctissima in Quinque Libros Decretalium
(Turin: apud haeredes Nicolai Beuilaque, 1581), fols.
11. For a fuller discussion of Iimocent IV's commentary, see Muldoon,
Popes, Lawyers, and Infidels, ch. 2. The most important discussion of
the just war tradition is Frederick H. Russell, The Just War in the
Middle Ages (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1975).
12. Mission to Asia, ed. Christopher Dawson, Medieval Academy
Reprints for Teaching 8 (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1980),
p. 73; this work was originally published as The Mongol Mission
(London: Sheed and Ward, 1955), and was reprinted for the first time
in 1966 as Mission to Asia (New York: Harper and Row). The original
texts are in: Epistolae saeculi XIII e registis pontificum romanorum,
ed. G. H. Pertz and C. Rodenberg, MGH, Epistolae, 3 vols. (Berlin:
Weidmann, 1883-94), 2:72-3 (nu. 102) and 2:74-5 (nu. 105).
13. Pertz and Rodenberg, 2:75.
14. Pertz and Rodenberg, Epistolae, 2:75, 76.
15. Pertz and Rodenberg, £pw/o/ae, 2:68.
16. See James Muldoon, "Papal Responsibility for the Infidel: Another
Look at Alexander VI's Inter Caetera," Catholic Historical Review 64
(1978): 168-84.
17. Muldoon, Popes. Lawyers, and Infidels, pp. 141-45.
Ptolemaic Influence on Medieval Arab
Geography:
The Case Study of East Africa
Marina Tolmacheva
Claudius Ptolemy made a profound impression on the development of
Arabic geographic science which goes far beyond mere translations of
his Geography. From as early as the ninth century to as late as the fifteenth
century, most Arabic authors writing in the genres of descriptive
and mathematical geography echoed Ptolemy as a source for systematic
description of the habitable earth. The major areas in which Ptolemaic
influence made an impact on Islamic scholars include geographic data
(description of continents and seas, as well as the coordinates of settlements
and of topographic features), geographic theory, and cartography.
(Ptolemaic mathematics and astronomy are not discussed here.)
This paper reexamines the nature and extent of the Greek
influence traditionally ascribed to Ptolemy on early medieval Arabic
works which demonstrate a recognized familiarity with Ptolemy on each
of these levels, including writings by the early mathematician, astronomer,
and geographer Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khorezmi (d. c. A.H.
232/A.D. 846-847), and his less well-known editor Suhrab (first half of
the tenth century A.D.), and the Kitab al-zij al-Sabi' by the astronomer
al-Battani (d. A.H. 317/A.D. 929). Data relevant to the historical
geography of East Africa will be explored below. In addition, questions
of general methodology of interpreting data derived from Arabic
manuscript sources will be considered.
Marina Tolmacheva is Associate Professor of History at Washington State
University (see Notes on Contributors, p. 223). Research for.this paper was
supported by grants from the American Philosophical Society and the
Washington State University Graduate School.
125