‘And they did not trust in God’: claims of atheism and polytheism in Catholic responses to Saladin’s conquest of Jerusalem in 1187

ABSTRACT

The Muslim conquest of Jerusalem in 1187 was profoundly emotional for Catholics, who collectively responded with grief and despair. The loss interrupted easy assumptions of divine goodness and support for Christian occupation of Jerusalem, and therefore required explanation. This article traces several claims of atheism, faithlessness, and polytheism among Christians and Muslims, which was part of the causative dialogue that followed the conquest. We will focus on four claims: that the Christian armies at Hattin did not trust in God; that Saladin was an atheist who paradoxically believed in a God named Muhammad; that Christians had become polytheists; and that the Christian God was dead. Although these claims do not necessarily reflect an underlying reality, they are useful evidence of emotion and mentality. They permitted authors to contemplate the loss of Jerusalem without explicit discussion of the vexed theodical questions that 1187 engendered. They can also be read as allowing authors the opportunity to voice their own cosmological anxieties following the conquest, which may have crossed strong lines of taboo around divine goodness, unicity, or existence.

KEYWORDS:

• Saladin
• Third Crusade
• Holy Land
• atheism

Although it is very difficult to apply the label ‘atheist’ to specific medieval individuals, nevertheless the concept of a godless cosmos was a part of medieval Western European cultural discourse that served a variety of functions, primarily political, psychological, and emotional.¹ Medieval terminological norms homogenised various forms of religious disbelief as ‘unfaithfulness’ or ‘unbelief’ (infidelitas, incredulitas, etc.), and yet various twelfth-century theologians associated this loaded terminology specifically with disbelief in the existence of the Christian God. Expounding Psalm 103, Gerhoh of Reichersberg (1093–1169) claimed that devils ‘are inside unfaithful people’; Peter of Poitiers (d. 1205), echoing Psalm 52(3), wrote that ‘some stupid people might deny that God exists’; and Peter Lombard (c. 1096–1160) repeated Ambrose’s argument that infidelitas—‘namely when the creator is not recognised’—was the highest form of evil, above even the gravest of sins.² Gottfried of Admont (d. 1165) preached similarly: ‘Infidelitas is the worst of all of the sins; for if a person does not place faith in God, this sin exceeds all the other sins’.³ Between 1200 and 1206, Peter of Cornwall, prior of the Holy Trinity in London (1139/40–1221), wrote a lengthy book of visions because ‘there are some who, believing that God does not exist, reckon that the world has always been as it is now and ruled by chance rather than by the providence of God’.⁴ Peter’s fears are made more credible by the presence of individuals (albeit rare) in inquisition registers, historical narratives, and exempla who variously claimed that the soul did not exist, that prayer was ineffective, that the world was permanent and creatorless, that Christian dogma was ridiculous in toto, or that God and Mary were equivalent to the visible world.⁵ The medieval clergy inherited a tradition whose very existence framed itself around the expurgation or suppression of atheism in public discourse, and yet, paradoxically, the concepts of atheism and faithlessness were useful and could be leveraged for various purposes at moments of intense emotion or anxiety, as is the case for the texts which make up the focus of this paper.

The mention of polytheism could equally evoke strong emotions. Peter Abelard (c. 1079–1142) reports that before his first trial for heresy in 1121 residents of Soissons accused him of claiming that there were three gods, and almost stoned him to death.⁶ The number three creates obvious tension in relation to the trinity. Guibert of Nogent (d. 1124) alleges that Jean I, count of Soissons (d. before 1114/15), was a Judaizer, called Christ’s resurrection ‘fable, wind’, said ‘other wicked things’ about Christ, and only attended church to ogle attractive women. At the request of Bernard, dean of Soissons, Guibert wrote a Tractatus de incarnatione contra Judeos in which he repudiates heretical beliefs including that the Trinity was in fact three gods, which Jean may or may not have contemplated.⁷ The idea of three gods is also well known to appear in Muslim repudiations of Christian belief.⁸ Conversely, the Chanson de Roland famously presents three Muslim gods (Teruagan, Apollin, and Mahumet), though if this was intended as an ‘unholy trinity’, the mirroring is not made explicit.⁹ In Catholic discourse, increasing the number of gods beyond three recalled the rhetoric of the late-antique contest between Christianity and the classical paganisms. However, by the twelfth century the rhetoric against paganism and polytheism was broadly leveraged against Muslims, who also sometimes received pejorative labels such as infideles and increduli. The point here is that, to twelfth-century Catholics, any variation from the strictly codified single God in three persons was normatively reprehensible, but atheism and polytheism were also useful rhetorical tools for stirring up strong hatreds of the other among Christians in preparation for war, much as they were for Muslims who sometimes used similar tropes at times of war against Christians.¹⁰

The purpose of this article is to examine several Catholic sources that briefly mention faithlessness and polytheism in relation to the conquest of Jerusalem in 1187 by Saladin (Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn), and to consider the psychological or emotional implications of these claims. Scholars with research interests in medieval European beliefs and disbeliefs (including Dorothea Weltecke, John Arnold, Peter Dinzelbacher, and Olaf Pluta) have discussed atheism at some length.¹¹ However, scholars who focus on crusading or Muslim–Christian relations are yet to closely examine the functions of claims of faithlessness in crusade texts, while the tropes around polytheism are more well-known (for instance in the work of John Tolan).¹² Recently, Megan Cassidy-Welch and Siobhain Bly Calkin have argued that the fall of Jerusalem or the loss of the True Cross can be understood as culturally mediated trauma.¹³ Stephen Spencer’s monograph on crusading emotions is also evidence of an emotionological turn in crusade historiography, which will ground the present analysis.¹⁴ This paper will raise questions about the relationships between trauma, despair, and claims of atheism or polytheism. Given that Jerusalem was so central to the spirituality of twelfth-century Catholics, its loss to Muslims generated profound grief and theological consternation, particularly around the problem of evil: why would a good Christian God permit Muslims to take the Holy City from Christians? Contemplation of this complex question could generate a mixture of sadness and anger, which disturbed the believer’s parasocial relationship with God and in turn threatened to devolve into blasphemy or a deconversion event. Catholic writers responding to 1187 commonly resolved this disturbance by assigning blame to various individuals or groups and then calling for a reinvigoration of faith through increased moral stricture. On the surface, anger at God signals belief in God, and yet—understood through a Catholic framework—it tempts God to punish the believer and thus threatens eternal perdition of the soul. Many biblical stories, such as that of Job, teach believers to maintain emotional control and preserve faith in the face of suffering. While the parasocial relationship with God is usually a source of comfort and social cohesion for believers, in times of crisis putatively generated by God, believers can be left feeling betrayed, threatened, ashamed at losing God’s good favour, or angry at God for his perceived betrayal. These emotions can be mixed, transient, and dynamic, and—as will be seen—various authors after 1187 manifested them in different ways and with varied emotional and psychological implications.

This paper will focus on four examples written soon after 1187 that are—it must be said—brief and obscure: first, a comment in the Libellus de expugnatione terrae sanctae per Saladinum that the Christian armies at Hattin did not trust in God; second, Arnold of Lübeck’s passing claim that Saladin did not believe in God; third, Erbo’s claim that the common people in Christendom had become polytheists; and fourth, Prepositinus of Cremona’s claim that the Christian God was dead. These comments cannot be taken as accurate evidence about the beliefs of the individuals or groups being described. That is, Saladin was not an atheist, nor is it likely that there were atheists in significant numbers in the Christian armies at Hattin, nor did Prepositinus believe that God was literally dead. Rather, the comments are important reflections of each author’s emotions in response to the capture of Jerusalem. For instance, attributing the cause of the fall of Jerusalem to the putative presence of atheists or otherwise ‘faithless’ people among the faithful could reduce contemplation of the possibility that God was permanently revoking his love from orthodox and orthopractic Christians, a belief which would curtail divine goodness and thus be reprehensibly unorthodox. The claim that other Christians were atheists or polytheists could attenuate grief by attributing blame to an external cause rather than an internal one requiring introspection and reflective suffering of the sort encouraged by Audita Tremendi. Arnold of Lübeck’s claim that Saladin did not believe in God is evidently propagandic, but it reveals that the concept of atheism had an emotional role in the discourse of crusading, albeit ostensibly a small one.

‘And they did not trust in God’

The Libellus de expugnatione terrae sanctae per Saladinum is an emotionally rich narrative account of the fall of the kingdom of Jerusalem to Saladin in 1187. The short tract was written soon after the conquest by an educated Catholic clergyman who was present at the siege of Jerusalem and who claims to have been wounded in the nose by an arrow during the siege.¹⁵ The text survives in three parts, only the first of which forms the original narrative account. In the early thirteenth century, monks from the Cistercian abbey of Coggeshall created the extant tract by appending the second and third parts, which constitute respectively an epitome of the Itinerarium peregrinorum et gesta regis Ricardi (IP2) and two letters putatively sent between Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa and Saladin.¹⁶ The narrative in Part 1 is valuable not only for its unique details about the conquest (many of which cohere with details from Muslim sources), but also for its depth of emotion and unique style, which make it a landmark of scriptural exegesis in response to real events. The author writes with a tone of immediacy and frequently jumps between harrowing descriptions of military loss or the destruction of Christian holy sites and highly emotional interpretations of the conquest via scriptural passages and events. The author undertakes significant effort to cast blame on Muslims and certain Christians, while a subset of Christians (particularly martyrs) receive praise.

Underlining the text is a distressed contemplation of a very fundamental question: why would God permit the conquest? One of the author’s answers, which is sometimes explicit and sometimes implicit, is that an insufficiency of Christian faith evoked God’s righteous anger. The text begins with a rhetorical question asking whether anyone can report the conquest ‘without grief and an effusion of tears’, which embeds the normative rhetoric of grief.¹⁷ The author then acknowledges the discord in the kingdom’s succession as a factor in Saladin’s victory: ‘the pitch of mutual love grew weak’.¹⁸ In Latin etymology and medieval self-concept, faith was related to individual and community flourishing, and faithlessness to selfishness and chaotic division. The word infidelitas, ‘faithlessness’, had semantic domains including inconstancy, untrustworthiness, dishonour, and treachery in addition to religious disbelief. While religiosity provided community cohesion and identity to medieval Catholics, divisive egotism could attract accusations of disbelief regardless of the actuality of the accused’s private cosmological views. For example, although the Libellus is generally sympathetic to Count Raymond III of Tripoli, the Latin continuation of William of Tyre’s Chronicon, composed in England in the early thirteenth century, repudiates Raymond as a traitor to Christianity in his attempted allegiance with Saladin, and includes an invented death-bed scene in which Raymond refuses the viaticum.¹⁹ Representations of the putative faithlessness of historical individuals are therefore deeply entangled with the rhetoric of political reprobation, particularly for individuals of high power or visibility, such as aristocrats.

Attribution of faithlessness to particular groups allows the author of the Libellus to propose a causation for Christian loss and Muslim victory without questioning divine goodness. Prior to the battle of Cresson, the master of the Temple (Gerard de Ridefort, but here unnamed) delivers a rousing speech in which he alludes to the Maccabees to remind the Christian warriors of the need for constancy in faith, which implies the potential for an (understandable) wavering of faith during battle situations.²⁰ The passage is a reminder that the parasocial relationship with God (or saints, etc.) can change in response to existential circumstances. Faith in divine support augmented self-concept, morale, and military cohesion, and Gerard therefore reminds his audience that the Maccabees were victorious through ‘faith, justice, and observance of God’s commands’.²¹ Moreover, the master says that the Christians prior to Cresson had the support of Jesus, who overcame the four capital vices and ‘will pour out [his] blessing on you so that you may no longer be enslaved by the pleasures of the flesh’.²² This imputes hedonistic decline to the kingdom as a post-hoc explanation for its conquest, a trope that appears in other texts. For example, Ralph Niger (‘the Black’), an Anglo-French theologian writing from Lincoln in late 1187 or early 1188, explicitly accuses the entirety of Outremer of submitting to irreverence and luxuria.²³

The Libellus goes one step further. At the battle of Hattin, the author acknowledges the size and good preparation of the Christian army, but quotes Psalm 77:22 to accuse them of faithlessness and thus foreshadow and explain their imminent defeat:

They had a copious army: 1,200 knights, innumerable turcopoles, 18,000 whinnying horses, in their armour, too, and in their helmets and lances and golden shields, and they did not trust in God, nor did they place hope in the salvation of him who is the protector and saviour of Israel, but they lapsed in their thoughts and became vain.²⁴

Psalm 77 concerns a generation ‘whose spirit was not faithful to God’, which forgets his wonders, speaks ill of him, and whom God therefore punishes wrathfully. The Lyon Eracles includes a similar comment to the Libellus at this point in the narrative, but without the reference to Psalm 77: ‘The king [Guy de Lusignan] trusted more in his own power and in his men than in the virtue of Jesus Christ and the Holy Cross, and because of this things went ill for him later’.²⁵ The Lyon Eracles makes explicit that the comment had a narratological purpose – ‘because of this, things went ill’ – which the Libellus does not make explicit. In both texts, the reprobation of the soldiers’ luxuria and superbia offers a moral cause for the subsequent defeat. Of course, morality was the lens through which Catholic writers frequently determined causation in relation to perceived divine approval or disapproval. What sets the Libellus apart here is the specific accusation of faithlessness and materialism, that is, caring only for the visible world. These accusations are worthy of attention within the complex causative dialogue taking place after 1187.

The Libellus extends its depiction of faithlessness as an explanation for Hattin. The Muslims are ‘that faithless race’, but, in a long and impassioned section describing the night prior to the Christians’ defeat, the author reiterates that the Christian army was also faithless:

Perhaps [the Christians] did not remember the hand of God, with which he redeemed Israel from the power of the one who afflicted them [i.e. Pharaoh]. Certainly, the redemption of captives stood in the middle of the people, namely the salvation-bearing tree, on which hung a bronze serpent so that it might free those looking upon [it] from the bites of the venomous snake. Perhaps they did not look back, but nor did they think carefully, since the dark night of faithlessness had captured their faith, and the blindness of envy had hardened [their] hearts. They were separated and did not repent; they cried out, but there was no one to save them, since, [as] children that are strangers, they lied to God and wavered from his paths. For this reason, he did not listen to them crying out, since praise is not seemly in the mouth of a sinner. Truly, God fed them that night with the bread of tears and gave them wine of sorrow without measure to drink. He also covered them with a cloak of grief and anguish and scourged them with harsh punishment—but they refused correction.²⁶

The passage embeds a variety of allusions and metaphors, as is typical of the Libellus. The literally dark night of 3–4 July 1187 becomes the ‘dark night of faithlessness’ (a phrase used in exegetical traditions), and the literal fires the Muslims lit brought forth smoke that caused the metaphorical ‘blindness of envy’.²⁷ Saladin is the Pharaoh who afflicted Israel prior to the exodus. The Christians at Hattin have allegedly forgotten that divine agency (not the human agency of the Israelites themselves) is what saved Israel from the first Pharaoh, and therefore God will decline to aid the Christians against the second Pharaoh (Saladin). The bronze serpent is an allusion to Numbers 21:4–9, in which God sends fiery serpents to bite the Israelites after they complain about the bitterness of the journey. Moses then repents and builds a bronze serpent at God’s instruction, and looking at the serpent heals the Israelites of their venomous bites.²⁸

In the Libellus, the bronze serpent is equivalent to the True Cross, the ‘salvation-bearing tree’. As Cassidy-Welch and Calkin rightly note, the loss of the True Cross to Muslims at Hattin was a locus of particularly strong emotions, since the relic embodied Catholic patrimony in Israel and was to contemporaries a physical manifestation of Christ’s love.²⁹ Here, the condemnation of the Christian army for putative faithlessness stems directly from their inability to—and, in the author’s mind, lack of desire to—protect the Cross. After the Cross is captured, the author expresses the view that those who abandoned it ‘suffered death deservedly’, and he even goes so far as to lament that his own life no longer had meaning.³⁰ In another lengthy excursus, the author determines that the cause of the Cross’s capture was an insufficiency of faith: ‘And truly I believe that it has been taken, since the faith of the Cross of the Son has vanished—because it is impossible to please God without faith’; and again: ‘It is no wonder they lost the physical substance of the Holy Cross … [since] they had lost it spiritually long before’.³¹ After Jerusalem’s surrender, the author calls the Christian residents of Jerusalem ‘an evil, confused, and impenitent people’, and compares them to Judas and lamias for their monstrous falsehood, citing Isaiah: ‘this people honours me with its lips, but its heart is far from me’.³²

The author of the Libellus thus uses a variety of multifaceted accusations of faithlessness to help him understand the loss of the Cross, the holy places, and Jerusalem to Muslims who paradoxically received divine support despite being putatively faithless and evil on account of being non-Christian. The claim that the Christian soldiers at Hattin gloried in their lavish armour and did not trust in God concatenates faithlessness and hedonism, infidelitas and luxuria, via reference to God punishing irreverent Israelites in Psalm 77.³³ The putative faithlessness of the accused is a part of the author’s grief response; it helps him to explain God’s displeasure at the Christians but also offers a hope (only hinted at in the Libellus) that if Christians could only reinvigorate faith through increased commitment to orthodoxy and orthopraxis, then they could abate God’s anger.

‘There is no God’

Arnold of Lübeck’s passing accusation that Saladin did not believe in God serves an altogether different function. From 1177 until his death in 1212/13, Arnold was abbot of St John’s monastery in Lübeck, the first Benedictine abbey north of the Elbe in an area only recently Christianised.³⁴ He completed his chronicle in 1209–10, but the extensive and highly emotional sections on 1187 may have been written earlier.³⁵ The chronicle’s recent English translator, Graham Loud, calls it ‘the most ambitious and sophisticated’ of early thirteenth-century German chronicles.³⁶ Though Arnold likely never left his region, he had a strong interest in crusading and the Holy Land.³⁷ Arnold had a penchant for inventing speeches—or at least dramatic reconstructions of events relayed to him by informants—which evidences a degree of empathy with others’ perspectives.³⁸ However, as Katherine Allen Smith and Andrew Buck have shown, moments of invented dialogue in crusade texts can take inspiration from the dialogus genre, a well-known tradition of texts featuring inter-faith debate to highlight the alterity of Muslims and Jews or to present them as objects of ridicule.³⁹

The physical and intellectual distance between Arnold and his subject gives scope for religious and cultural misunderstandings, and yet his representation of Muslims remarkably oscillates between vituperation and generosity. His work is not an eyewitness source, but exemplifies how a historical compiler could embellish, explain, obfuscate, or interpret events at a distance through his own cultural lenses.⁴⁰ While on the one hand the crusaders of 1197 were fighting ‘the legions of Satan’, at other moments Arnold compliments Muslims.⁴¹ For example, he depicts Seljuk Sultan Kilij Arslan II (d. 1192) as having received Henry the Lion with beneficence and pomp, and the sultan asserts the truth of the Virgin birth. This view is in accordance with Qu’ran Sura III.47, but, as Loud argues, ‘what is significant here is that Arnold reported it’.⁴² Given that Arnold was educated at the court of Henry the Lion in Braunschweig (Brunswick), there is a question as to whether his association with the court triggered the praise, not his admiration of the Saracens. Arnold’s account of the crusade of 1197/8 has a group of Muslims besieged at Toron stress their unity with Christians: ‘even though we are of different religions, we have one origin and forefather [Abraham]’, and ‘although we are not Christians, however we do not live without religion’.⁴³ Loud argues that Arnold ‘appears to have known that Muslims professed a monotheistic faith’, which makes the comment that Muslims were without religion all the more paradoxical and worthy of close scrutiny.⁴⁴

Irreverence features prominently in Arnold’s explanation for 1187. In opening his section on 1187, Arnold writes that Catholics, after learning of the loss of Jerusalem, ‘were disturbed by unaccustomed fear, internally confused and tremulous at heart’.⁴⁵ Arnold argues that many people had wished to become clergy ‘in law, but not through religion’, and therefore ‘wicked priests’ proliferated, which brought on eschatological fears: ‘now the end of time is at hand, for there is no reverence for the clergy’.⁴⁶ The apocalyptic flavour of these fears is similar to biblical passages such as 2 Timothy 3:1–4, which has the last days prefigured by a rise of sin. Prior to Hattin, Roger des Moulins repudiates Raymond III of Tripoli for ‘pledging your faith to Saladin unlawfully and against the religion of God in heaven’.⁴⁷ Roger advises Raymond to ‘be reconciled to God whom you have denied’, and, the chronicler asserts, ‘the count was terrified by these words’.⁴⁸ Here Arnold relates irreverence normatively to fear, and once again irreligiosity and political reprobation are entangled.

The themes of irreverence and blasphemy reach their culmination at Hattin. The Muslims ‘blaspheme the name of the living God and mock the people of God’, while ‘the son of iniquity [Saladin] prospered on his road, and disappearing into his thoughts, saying in his heart “there is no God”’.⁴⁹ References to Psalm 13:1 (‘the fool says in his heart “there is no God”’) are common to the period and were a consistent feature of Christian theological discourse around a variety of issues including theoretical atheism and Jewish repudiations of Christian divinity.⁵⁰ In this instance, it cannot betoken Arnold’s full comprehension of Saladin’s attitudes to divinity, since after Hattin Saladin says to his Christian captives that they ‘feel my mighty hand by the power of my God, Mohammed’.⁵¹ So Saladin believes in a god named Muhammad, but says in his heart there is no God? To Arnold, the latter simply denotes Saladin’s arrogance, pride, and egotism in fighting against the putatively one true Christian God. Saladin mocks the Christians after Hattin: ‘deluded by vain superstition, you believe [Jesus] to be God’; and the Christians mock him in return: ‘We laugh at Mohammed, the son of perdition, whom you say is God’.⁵² Misunderstandings abound.

For Arnold, the claim that Saladin did not believe in God is an ephemeral reference to Psalm 13:1 and not a major claim about Saladin’s beliefs. Its function, rather, is emotional and political. It is no mistake that a comment denoting one of the highest forms of religious subversion occurs at Hattin, the grand nadir of twelfth-century Catholicism. In moral-causative thinking styles, which Arnold and his contemporaries largely subscribed to, grand catastrophes require grand sins as causes. Arnold uses the false explanation that Saladin was an atheist simply to assuage his own shock and grief.

‘The common people […] have declared their allegiance to Gods’

Erbo is known only as the composer of a Latin poem titled by its incipit Indue cilicium, which Goswin Spreckelmeyer edited in 1987.⁵³ The 120-line poem responds with great emotion to the fall of Jerusalem and praises Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I. It was, therefore, written after the author had learned of the city’s capture and before he had learned of Frederick’s death on 10 June 1190 in Armenian Cilicia. The poem’s criticism of monks and celebration of Frederick means that Erbo was possibly a German monk. The timing of composition means that one of Erbo’s aims was to incite crusade enthusiasm, and indeed the poem calls upon men to ‘wake up and rise up’ and ‘go, kill the guilty; do not fear them at all’.⁵⁴

The poem is structured as a dialogue between ‘man’, who is highly emotional, and ‘reason’ or ‘God’ (ratio, deus in ratione), who presents the orthodox explanation that Jerusalem fell due to Christian sin. Dialogic texts permit authors to express the doubts of themselves and those around them while minimising potential for authorial criticism. Erbo thus uses the constructed persona of ‘man’ (homo) to raise controversial objections to Christ: ‘if you were subjected to human judgement, King Christ, man would be able to make many objections about you’.⁵⁵ Man uses polytheism as a causative lens for 1187: ‘it is said [that] the common people, relapsed of faith, have rejected you from the citadel, [O] God, [and] have declared their allegiance to gods’.⁵⁶ Man then rebukes God and asks whether he is ignorant or heartless; but ratio-deus assuages man’s doubts at length by making reference to the abundance of sin throughout Christendom as the reason for his temporary punishment of the Holy Land. God’s section shifts from vituperative to inspirational as the theme moves from the execrability of sin to the perceived glory and necessity of crusading.

What most interests us here is the brief comment that Christians had become polytheists. As with mentions of faithlessness and atheism in the Libellus and Arnold of Lübeck, the passing comment cannot be taken literally. This is especially the case since the comment appears in man’s section, bracketed by complaints about God’s cruelty. Erbo’s framing of the text means that the audience is meant to empathise with man but then rebuke him and accept the explanation of ratio-deus in a manner that must have mirrored many a contemporary’s psychomachic inner conversation. It is no mistake that man is highly emotional, and the correct answer is that of ratio, which mirrors what Daniel Kahnemann calls System 1 and System 2 thinking, or in historical terms ‘passion’ and ‘reason’.⁵⁷ Erbo’s claim that Christians had begun worshipping gods was useful for supporting crusading rhetoric and potentially inspiring crusade participation, and it may speak to the doubts about theodicy for which both atheism and polytheism offered expedient mitigation.

‘The God of the Christians is dead’

Prepositinus of Cremona’s claim, in a sermon after 1187, that demons said ‘the God of the Christians is dead’ is comparatively well-known to crusades scholars, having been cited by Sylvia Schein and Penny Cole as a measure of Catholic responses to 1187.⁵⁸ Olaf Pluta investigated a late-medieval mention of divine death and its possible influence on Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous madman who asserts ‘Gott ist todt!’, but Pluta was not aware of Prepositinus’s earlier iteration. While Nietzsche put his claim into the mouth of a madman, Prepositinus puts it into the mouth of demons, both of which constitute protective authorial distancing similar to Erbo’s constructed persona of ‘Man’. Pluta views the dying of religions as ‘a natural process’ sometimes marked by the presence of claims of divinities perishing, and he cites a variety of late-medieval texts which claimed God was dead because he was no longer punishing sin, therefore sin was abundant.⁵⁹

Prepositinus’s sermon includes the following passage of interest to us here:

Demons dance around the Sepulchre. They conduct their choir and pronounce: ‘Where is the God of the Christians? The Muslims have not lost their God. The God of the Jews is asleep. The God of the Christians is completely dead’.⁶⁰

The propagandic intent is clear: anyone who might wonder about God’s existence after 1187 would find themselves in allegiance with demons. To Prepositinus, the demons are evidently Muslims taunting the Catholics for their loss of Jerusalem. He seeks to evoke humiliation and anger to incite crusade fervour, but what is most interesting for us here is the extent to which he is willing to bend Christian orthodoxy to achieve this purpose. Paradoxically, the demons’ claim relates to both atheism and polytheism: putatively the one true Christian God is dead, therefore no gods exist, meanwhile the Jews and Muslims have their own separate gods in different states of present capacity. Prepositinus does not engage in the complexities of ‘God is dead’ theology because the demons’ claim is not meant to be taken as literal or even possible. His variation from Christian orthodoxy as a measure of community identity and safety was intended to evoke the sort of outrage that would inspire crusade participation to reassert the Christian God’s presence and power. It was also an indirect way of giving voice to genuine anxieties triggered by the traumatic rupture that was the loss of Jerusalem.

Conclusion

Claims of atheism and polytheism were a part of the economy of emotions circulating after the fall of Jerusalem in 1187 and during the subsequent crusade. They helped Catholics come to terms with a profoundly ructious event that interrupted the easy assumptions of divine goodness and support for Christian ownership of the Holy Land. Variation from Christian orthodoxy via mention of an atheist or polytheist cosmos in the minds or mouths of others could be intended to evoke anger in audiences, either specifically to compel crusading in the immediate aftermath of 1187, or more broadly to firm up boundaries between an orthodox ‘us’ and an unorthodox ‘them’. Claims of atheism and polytheism also allowed authors to explain unfortunate events without explicit discussion of the difficult theodical questions that 1187 engendered, or to express their own cosmological anxieties following the conquest, which may have crossed strong lines of taboo around divine existence, goodness, or unicity. If the conquest was peccatis nostris exigentibus, then God still loved Catholics and Catholics had to introspect, alter behaviour, and further subordinate themselves to contemporary religio-moral power structures to regain God’s favour. The identification of the particular sins that caused 1187 varied among Catholic authors, but what is remarkable is that among the entangled sins of luxuria, pride, and irreverence, we can sometimes find specific accusations of atheism or polytheism among Christians or Muslims. The strong emotions of Christian authors after 1187 affected the way they represented real events, therefore each writer’s parasocial relationship with God deserves close attention even for those historians whose primary aim is to identify ‘what really happened’. The cases on display in this article are a reminder to historians of crusading that claims of an insufficiency or absence of Christian faith served varied emotional purposes in crusade rhetoric. How the themes of faithlessness manifested at other important moments of crusading—particularly moments of crisis or defeat—remains a worthy object for future investigation.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Macquarie University.

Notes

1 On the conceptual problems associated with the terms atheism, irreligion, unbelief, faithlessness, and nonreligion for historical discourse, see Nathan Alexander, ‘Rethinking Histories of Atheism, Unbelief, and Nonreligion: An Interdisciplinary Perspective’, Global Intellectual History 6, no. 1 (2021): 95–104.

2 Gerhoh of Reichersberg, Expositiones in Psalmos, in PL, 194: 628: ‘Cum sol occidit, luna deficit, quia, cum Christus gratiam suam subtrahit, ecclesia in virtutibus deficit. Et tunc fient tenebrae, id est errores et haereses, et facta est nox, id est infidelitas. In ipsa pertransibunt omnes bestiae silvae, id est omnes diaboli, qui sunt in infidelibus, ut silva in occultis, percurrunt omnes tentationes, ut decipiant’; Peter of Poitiers, Sententiarum Libri Quinque 1.2, in PL, 211: 794: ‘Item licet aliqui stulti negarent Deum esse’; Peter the Lombard, Commentarium in Pauli Epistolas [here Romans 4:1–8], in PL, 191: 1370: ‘Vel aliter, tres gradus delictorum fecit. Videtur enim tripertita ratio in his dictis propter delictorum varietatem. Primus gradus iniquitas, vel impietas est, scilicet cum Creator non agnoscitur, id est infidelitas. Primus gradus iniquitas, vel impietas est, scilicet cum Creator non agnoscitur, id est infidelitas. Secundus gradus est in operibus gravium peccatorum. Tertius vero, levium’.

3 Gottfried of Admont, Homilia, in PL, 174: 342: ‘Summa omnium peccatorum est infidelitas; nam quod homo in Deum non credit, hoc peccatum cuncta peccata excedit’.

4 Peter of Cornwall, ‘Liber reuelationum’, in Peter of Cornwall’s Book of Revelations, ed. and trans. Robert Easting and Richard Sharpe (Toronto, 2013), 74–5: ‘nonnulli sunt qui Deum non esse putantes mundum semper fuisse sicut nunc est et casu potius quam prouidentia Dei regi estimant’.

5 Dorothea Weltecke, ‘Der Narr spricht: Es ist kein Gott’: Atheismus, Unglauben und Glaubenszweifel vom 12. Jahrhundert bis zur Neuzeit (Frankfurt, 2010); Dorothea Weltecke, ‘Doubts and the Absence of Faith’, in The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Christianity, ed. John H. Arnold (Oxford, 2014), 357–74; Dorothea Weltecke, ‘The Medieval Period’, in The Oxford Handbook of Atheism, ed. Stephen Bullivant and Michael Ruse (Oxford, 2013), 164–78; John Arnold, Belief and Unbelief in Medieval Europe (London, 2005); Vincent Briens, ‘La place du doute religieux dans l’Occident médiéval (XIII–XVe siècles)’ (master’s thesis, University of Caen, 2017).

6 Robert I. Moore, The War on Heresy: Faith and Power in Medieval Europe (London, 2012), 31.

7 Guibert of Nogent, Monodiae 3.16, in Autobiographie, ed. and French trans. Edmond-René Labande (Paris, 1981), 424–9, quoting 426: ‘“ecce fabula, ecce ventus!”’. See also A Monk’s Confession: The Memoirs of Guibert of Nogent, trans. Paul J. Archambault (University Park, 1995), 194 n. 160; 113 n. 31. For the Tractatus de incarnatione contra Judeos of c. 1111, see PL, 156: 489–528, at 525.

8 Hava Lazarus-Yafeh, ‘Some Neglected Aspects of Medieval Muslim Polemic against Christianity’, Harvard Theological Review 89, no. 1 (1996): 61–84, at 67–8; Susanna Throop, ‘Combat and Conversion: Interfaith Dialogue in Twelfth-century Crusading Narratives’, Medieval Encounters 13 (2007): 310–25, at 321; James Waltz, ‘Muhammad and the Muslims in St Thomas Aquinas’, in Travellers, Intellectuals, and the World beyond Medieval Europe, ed. James Muldoon (London, 2010), 100.

9 Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ms Digby 23, Part 2, fol. 63r, ll. 3490–1.

10 Saladin, for example, calls Christians ‘godless ones’ and ‘polytheists’ in a letter addressed to ʿamīr Nasir al-Dīn ibn Bahrām, written after Saladin’s conquest of Ascalon. The History of the Patriarchs of the Egyptian Church, trans. Antoine Khater and O.H.E. KHS-Burmester, vol. 3, pt 2 (Cairo, 1970), 129. The sultan was, of course, drawing on a long-standing tradition in representing Christians in this way.

11 Weltecke, ‘Der Narr spricht’; Weltecke, ‘Doubts and the Absence of Faith’; Weltecke, ‘The Medieval Period’; Arnold, Belief and Unbelief; Olaf Pluta, ‘Atheism’, in Mots médiévaux offerts à Ruedi Imbach, ed. Iñigo Atucha, Dragos Calma, Catherine König-Pralong, and Irene Zavattero (Porto, 2011), 119–28; Peter Dinzelbacher, Unglaube im ‘Zeitalter des Glaubens’. Atheismus und Skeptizismus im Mittelalter (Badenweiler, 2009); Paolo Golinelli, Il Medioevo degli increduli: Miscredenti, beffatori, anticlericali (Milan, 2009); Olaf Pluta, ‘Atheismus im Mittelalter’, in Umbrüche. Historische Wendepunkte der Philosophie von der Antike bis zur Neuzeit. Festschrift für Kurt Flasch zu seinem 70. Geburtstag, ed. Klaus Kahnert and Burkhard Mojsisch (Amsterdam, 2001), 117–30; Friedrich Niewöhner and Olaf Pluta, eds., Atheismus im Mittelalter und in der Renaissance (Wiesbaden, 1999).

12 John Tolan, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York, 2002), 105–34.

13 Megan Cassidy-Welch, ‘Before Trauma: The Crusades, Medieval Memory and Violence’, Continuum 31, no. 5 (2017): 619–27; Siobhain Bly Calkin, ‘Narrating Trauma? Captured Cross Relics in Chronicles and Chansons de geste’, Exemplaria 33, no. 1 (2021): 19–43, citing at p. 20 others who use the word trauma, including Nicholas Paul, Marianne Ailes, Malcolm Barber, and Alan Murray.

14 Stephen Spencer, Emotions in a Crusading Context: 1095–1291 (Oxford, 2019).

15 Keagan Brewer and James H. Kane, The Conquest of the Holy Land by Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn: A Critical Edition and Translation of the Anonymous Libellus de expugnatione terrae sanctae per Saladinum (London and New York, 2019), 200–1.

16 Ibid., 63–7.

17 Ibid., 109: ‘sine dolore et effusione lacrimarum’.

18 Ibid., 111: ‘bitumine caritatis deficiente’.

19 Marianne Salloch, Die lateinische Fortsetzung Wilhelms von Tyrus (PhD diss., Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin, 1934), 112: ‘Sive enim ex conscientie scrupulo sive ex mentis alienatione viaticum salutis, cum ei offeratur in extremis nec ex more veneratus est nec percepit’. On this text, see James H. Kane, ‘Between Parson and Poet: A Re-examination of the Latin Continuation of William of Tyre’, Journal of Medieval History 44, no. 1 (2017): 56–82. James Kane and I are currently preparing an edition and translation of the text for publication in Routledge’s Crusade Texts in Translation series: The Latin Continuation of William of Tyre, ed. and trans. James H. Kane and Keagan Brewer (London, forthcoming).

20 There is now a well-developed literature on the place of the Maccabees in crusading discourse. See, for instance, Julian Yolles, ‘The Maccabees in the Lord’s Temple: Biblical Imagery and Latin Poetry in Frankish Jerusalem’, in The Uses of the Bible in Crusader Sources, ed. Elizabeth Lapina and Nicholas Morton (Leiden, 2017), 421–39; Elizabeth Lapina, ‘The Maccabees and the Battle of Antioch’, in Dying for the Faith, Killing for the Faith: Old Testament Faith Warriors (1 and 2 Maccabees) in Historical Perspective, ed. Gabriela Signori (Leiden, 2012), 147–59; Nicholas Morton, ‘The Defence of the Holy Land and the Memory of the Maccabees’, Journal of Medieval History 36, no. 3 (2010): 275–93.

21 Brewer and Kane, The Conquest of the Holy Land, 114–5: ‘fide et iusticia, et obseruatione mandatorum dei’.

22 Ibid., 117: ‘Iesus Christus […] benedictionem infundit, ut amodo uoluptatibus carnis non seruiatis’.

23 Ralph Niger, De re militari et triplici via peregrinationis Ierosolimitane, ed. Ludwig Schmugge (Berlin, 1977), 186–7: ‘this land was more dissolute than others: indeed there had been no reverence for God in it, and, of all the lands, its excesses overflowed in luxury and in every self-indulgence’ (‘dissolutior erat illa terra quam alia: nulla enim dei reverentia habita et in luxuria et in omni castrimargia omnium terrarum superfluitates superabant’); cited in Keagan Brewer, ‘God’s Devils: Pragmatic Theodicy in Christian Responses to Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn’s Conquest of Jerusalem in 1187’, Medieval Encounters 27 (2021): 125–64, at 154 n. 128.

24 Brewer and Kane, The Conquest of the Holy Land, 134–5: ‘Habebant autem exercitum copiosum, milites mille .CC., turcopulos innumerabiles, pedites decem et .VIII. milia uel eo amplius. Et gloriati sunt in multitudine hominum et equorum hynnientium, in loricis quoque et galeis et lanceis et clipeis aureis, et non crediderunt in deo, nec sperauerunt in salutari eius, qui est protector et saluator Israel, sed euanuerunt in cogitationibus suis, et uani facti sunt’.

25 Lyon Eracles, in Margaret Ruth Morgan, ed., La continuation de Guillaume de Tyr (1184–1197) (Paris, 1982), 44; Peter Edbury, trans., The Conquest of Jerusalem and the Third Crusade: Sources in Translation (Aldershot, 1996), 37.

26 Brewer and Kane, The Conquest of the Holy Land, 148–9: ‘Forte non sunt recordati manus dei qua redemit Israel de potestate tribulantis. Certe stabat redemptio captiuorum in medio populi, arbor scilicet salutifera, in qua suspensus est serpens eneus, ut a morsibus uenenati serpentis respicientes liberaret. Forsitan non respiciebant, sed neque considerabant, quoniam obscura nox infidelitatis eorum captiuauerat fidem, et cecitas inuidie obdurauerat mentem. Dissipati sunt nec compuncti, clamauerunt nec erat qui saluos faceret, quoniam filii alieni mentiti sunt domino, et claudicauerunt a semitis eius. Ideo clamantes non exaudiuit, quia non est speciosa laus in ore peccatoris. Enimuero cibauit eos deus nocte illa pane lacrimarum, et uino compunctionis sine mensura potauit, pallio quoque meroris et angustie cooperuit, atque castigatione dura flagellauit, et renuerunt accipere disciplinam’.

27 Ibid., 149, 55–8. For the ‘night of unfaithfulness’ in exegetical traditions, see for example Gerhoh of Reichersberg, above at note 2.

28 Brewer and Kane, The Conquest of the Holy Land, 56.

29 Cassidy-Welch, ‘Before Trauma’; Calkin, ‘Narrating Trauma?’.

30 Brewer and Kane, The Conquest of the Holy Land, 154–5: ‘Et hii quidem digne talem mortem sustinuerunt’.

31 Ibid., 156–7: ‘Et uere credo sublatum esse, quoniam fides filii crucis euanuit, quia impossibile est sine fide placere deo […] Nec mirum si corporalem sancte crucis substantiam fortitudine uisibilium inimicorum amiserunt, quam iam dudum spiritualiter bonis operibus iusticie deficientibus mente et spiritu perdiderant’.

32 Ibid., 209: ‘populo iniquo et tumultuante, et non penitente, populo graui iniquitate. De quo Ysaias: “Populus hic labiis me honorat, cor autem eorum longe est a me”’. The comparison to Judas (‘that wicked merchant who burst asunder […]’) can be found at ibid., 211, and the comparison to lamias (‘sea cows’) is at ibid., 210–3.

33 This link is also made in references to Epicureanism, a term that is not used in the Libellus. See Alexander Murray, ‘The Epicureans’, in Intellectuals and Writers in Fourteenth-Century Europe, ed. Piero Boitani and Anna Torti (Tübingen, 1986), 138–63; Friedrich Niewöhner, ‘Epikureer sind Atheisten. Zur Geschichte des Wortes apikuros in der jüdischen Philosophie’, in Atheismus im Mittelalter und in der Renaissance (see above, note 11), 11–22.

34 Graham A. Loud, trans., The Chronicle of Arnold of Lübeck (Abingdon, 2019), 4.

35 Ibid., 5–6.

36 Ibid., 1.

37 Ibid., 18.

38 Ibid., 25.

39 Katherine Allen Smith, The Bible in Crusade Narrative in the Twelfth Century (London, 2020), 137–45; Andrew Buck, ‘Remembering Outremer in the West: The Secunda pars historiae Iherosolimitane and the Crisis of Crusading in Mid-Twelfth-Century France’, Speculum 97, no. 2 (2022): 377–414, at 400–1.

40 Loud, The Chronicle of Arnold of Lübeck, 21.

41 Ibid., 24, 208.

42 Ibid., 30 n. 143.

43 Ibid., 32, 217–18.

44 Ibid., 32.

45 Ibid., 132.

46 Ibid., 133–4.

47 Ibid., 138.

48 Ibid.

49 Ibid., 141.

50 Weltecke, ‘Derr Narr spricht’.

51 Loud, The Chronicle of Arnold of Lübeck, 142.

52 Ibid., 141–2.

53 Goswin Spreckelmeyer, ed., Mittellateinische Kreuzzugslieder: Texte und Melodien (Göppingen, 1987), 27–9.

54 Ibid., 28, l. 81: ‘evigilate, viri, consurgite’; ibid., 29, l. 116: ‘ite, ferite reos, nil metuatis eos’.

55 Ibid., 27, ll. 17–18: ‘humanum si iudicium, rex Christe, subires, / causari de te plurima posset homo’.

56 Ibid., 27, ll. 25–6: ‘fertur enim fidei prolapsum vulgus ab arce / te repulisse Deum, conciliasse deos’.

57 Daniel Kahnemann, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York, 2011); Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge, 2009).

58 Sylvia Schein, Gateway to the Heavenly Jerusalem: Crusader Jerusalem and the Catholic West (1099–1187) (Aldershot, 2005), 164; Penny Cole, ‘“O God, the Heathen Have Come into Your Inheritance” (Ps. 78.1): The Theme of Religious Pollution in Crusade Documents, 1095–1188’, in Crusaders and Muslims in Twelfth-Century Syria, ed. Maya Shatzmiller (Leiden, 1993), 84–111, here 107; and Penny Cole, ‘Christian Perceptions of the Battle of Hattin (583/1187)’, Al-Masāq: Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean 6, no. 1 (1993): 9–39, here 37 n. 61.

59 Olaf Pluta, ‘“Deus est mortuus”: Roots of Nietzsche’s “Gott ist todt!” in the Later Middle Ages’, Bochumer Philosophisches Jahrbuch für Antike und Mittelalter 5 (2000): 129–46, at 132, 136, 143–4.

60 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Lat. 14859, fol. 215v: ‘Saltant demonia circa sepulchrum. C[h]oros ducentia et dicentia: “Ubi est deus christianorum? Sarraceni non amiserunt deum suum; deus iudeorum dormit; deus christianorum omnino mortuus est”’. See also Georges Lacombe, La vie et les œuvres de Prévostin (Kain, 1927), 184.