Abstract
Paradigmatic Eurocentrism teaches that the Age of Discovery commenced around 1492 when Christopher Columbus set sail. In fact, the actual age of discovery began on November 27, 1095, when Pope Urban II summoned the First Crusade. The fabled Crusades marked the boldest expansion undertaken to that point by Catholic Christendom (and helped pave the way to subsequent European imperialism2). Targeting lands far beyond those contiguous with Europe, the purported campaigns for Christ represented nothing less than the attempt to colonize the core region of the known world in the Mediterranean zone—the perceived locus of universal civilization.3 The first four centuries of the age of distant colonization are not celebrated (by paradigmatic Eurocentrism) as ones of great discovery because they did not prove as successful as those launched in later centuries in peripheral areas like the Americas. But discover the Europeans surely did in those first 400 years. What they discovered was their own unequivocal inferiority vis-à-vis the “more advanced civilization”4 of Islam.
The existence of Islam was the most far-reaching problem in medieval Christendom … [It] made the West profoundly uneasy.1
R.W. Southern
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Notes
R.W. Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1962), pp. 3–4.
Christopher Tyerman, God’s War: A New History of the Crusades (Cambridge: Belknap, 2006), pp. 912–14.
John France, The Crusades and the Expansion of Catholic Christendom, 1000–1714 (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 21–25 and 39; Tyerman, God’s War, pp. 62–78 makes a similar argument about Urban II’s grandiose ambitions.
Thomas Goldstein, Dawn of Modern Science: From the Arabs to Leonardo da Vinci (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980), pp. 113–14.
Bertold Spuler, The Mongol Period, trans. F.R.C. Bagley (Princeton: Marcus Wiener, 1994).
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Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
Elizabeth Fowden, “Sharing Holy Places” Common Knowledge 8 (2002): 124–46.
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Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity AD 200–1000 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 184.
Garth Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 6 and 10.
Quoted in Andrew Wheatcroft, Infidels: A History of the Conflict between Christendom and Islam (New York: Random House, 2004), p. 161.
See J.A. Brundage, The Crusades: Motives and Achievements (Boston: Heath, 1964).
Jonathan Phillips, The Second Crusade: Extending the Frontiers of Christendom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).
See M.C. Lyons and D.E.P. Jackson, Saladin: The Politics of Holy War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
See Donald Queller and Thomas Madden, The Fourth Crusade: The Conquest of Constantinople1201–4 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997).
Carol Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 26.
Sir Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951–54), vol. 3.
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Quoted in Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Europe, trans. Janet Lloyd (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), p. 188.
Quoted in Palmira Brummett, Ottoman Seapower and Levantine Diplomacy in the Age of Discovery (New York: SUNY Press, 1994), p. 26.
Quoted in George Holmes, Europe: Hierarchy and Revolt 1320–1450 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 180.
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See Ronald Findlay and Kevin H. O’Rourke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 101–08.
See also Fernand Braudel, The Perspective of the World, Vol. III of Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, trans. Sian Reynolds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 93.
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Quoted in Jacques Le Goff, Intellectuals in the Middle Ages, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 19.
R.W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), p. 188.
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James Spedding, Robert Ellis, and Douglas Heath (eds.), The Works of Francis Bacon, (St. Clair Shores, MI: Scholarly Press, 1976), vol. XI, p. 312. Paracelsus did turn out in the end to be superior to Galen.
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George Makdisi, The Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning in Islam and the West (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981).
The first presentation of this highly controversial thesis came from Miguel AsínPalacios, Islam and the Divine Comedy, trans. Harold Sunderland (London: J. Murray, 1926).
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Quoted in Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1948), p. 487.
See Hichem Djait, Europe and Islam, trans. Peter Heinegg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 107–30.
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For analysis of other factors see Huff, Rise, and Alister McGrath, The Intellectual Origins of the European Reformation (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).
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Quoted in Keith Thomson, Before Darwin: Reconciling God and Nature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 1.
Quoted in Tina Stiefel, The Intellectual Revolution in Twelfth-Century Europe (London: Croom Helm, 1985), pp. 78 and 80.
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Quoted in Tina Stiefel, “Science, Reason and Faith in the Twelfth Century: The Cosmologists’ Attack on Tradition” Journal of European Studies 6 (1976): 7.
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Quoted in John Randall, The Making of the Modern Mind (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1940), p. 96.
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See Walter G. Andrews and Mehmet Kalpakli, The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early-Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).
Quoted in John R. Hale, Renaissance Europe 1480–1520 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 227.
Quoted in Giorgio de Santillana (ed.), The Age of Adventure: The Renaissance Philosophers (New York: Mentor Books, 1956), p. 17.
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© 2009 Peter O’Brien
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O’Brien, P. (2009). The Discovery of Islamic Superiority (1095–1453). In: European Perceptions of Islam and America from Saladin to George W. Bush. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230617803_3
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