CHAPTER 3
In 1260 Vincent of Beauvais produced a revised version of his extraordinary encyclopedia, the Speculum maius (“The Great Mirror”). A vast compendium of all knowledge designed to aid his fellow Dominicans who were unable to attend the University of Paris, it was split into three major sections: natural history (Speculum naturale), theology (Speculum doctrinale), and history (Speculum historiale). The Speculum historiale alone was composed of thirty-one books divided into 3,793 chapters—in the 1473 printed edition, it ran to 1,569 dense pages of double columns over four volumes. Its length is perhaps justified by the fact that it begins with Adam and Eve and concludes with a description of the end of time.
The vast majority of Vincent’s history was based on the work of earlier historians and chroniclers—figures like Eusebius of Caesarea, Jerome, Augustine, Cassiodorus, Orosius, Hugh of Fleury, and many others. History did not just happen; God was directing it toward a particular goal, and the chroniclers of Christian history had kneaded the messy history of Christianity into a narrative that displayed that divine destiny. Vincent has held an important place in the history of the Franciscans (though he himself was a Dominican) because his chronicle preserved some of the accounts of the best-known Franciscan “missions” of the Middle Ages—those to the Mongols. The Speculum historiale told of the extraordinary journey and experiences of the Franciscan Giovanni da Pian del Carpine as well as of the Dominican Simon de Saint Quentin,1 both of whom departed in 1245 as part of a three-pronged diplomatic initiative to the Mongols. Giovanni was sent to the Mongol army operating in the Black Sea region, led by Baku, a grandson of Genghis Khan. Once he had made it to the army camp on the Volga, Baku sent him on to Mongolia to present himself to the newly chosen great khan, his cousin Güyük. Meanwhile, Simon’s mission was less of a success. He was sent to the army of the Mongol general Baiju, then bivouacked in eastern Armenia.2 Simon and his companions failed to understand the culture of the Mongols and were sent back to western Europe with the demand that the pope submit himself personally to the great khan.
Vincent’s blended narrative of the Mongols based on Giovanni and Simon’s accounts was profoundly influential. The Speculum historiale survives in hundreds of manuscripts, and the information that Vincent provided to kings, bishops, and monasteries throughout Latin Europe was the first substantive report about the Mongols, whose sudden appearance and string of stunning victories in eastern Europe and the Middle East had terrified many. At the same time, it also promoted the mendicants as brave adventurers willing to risk death for the sake of Christendom. Giovanni and Simon were in the vanguard of a wave of friars who traveled throughout the Mongol realms for the next century and a half, and their travels and experiences were breathlessly reported throughout western Christendom. The Franciscan chronicler Salimbene di Adam, writing forty years later, vividly recalled the day he met Giovanni, who listened to the brothers read from his book and “interpreted it and explained passages that seemed difficult or hard to believe.”3 The “Mongol mission” was a powerful source of prestige for the two orders.
But this chapter is not about the Mongol mission. While it was by far the most famous Franciscan engagement with non-Christians during the Middle Ages, it was by no means the first or the only one. Franciscan evangelizing outside the bounds of Christendom began decades earlier in North Africa; Francis himself and the five martyrs of Morocco were only the first of a stream of Franciscans who traveled to Morocco in the thirteenth century. Their successors managed to remain and survive in the Maghreb (the Islamic West, or Muslim North Africa), establishing the first mendicant presence in the lands of Islam. Yet those Franciscans did not appear in Vincent’s work, or even in Franciscan chronicles. While extended accounts survive of the initial Franciscan missions to Germany, Spain, and England,4 only non-Franciscan sources alert us to even the existence of Franciscans living among the Muslims in North Africa—never mind supplying a narrative of their travels or achievements. Strikingly, Franciscan evangelists who traveled among the Mongols once they had converted to Islam were also less well known, though today they have been rediscovered. The letters of Giovanni di Montecorvino, first archbishop of Mongol Khan-balik (modern Beijing), were preserved in a single fourteenth-century Franciscan chronicle that probably only ever existed in two manuscripts (see Chapter 5 for more on this chronicle), and Giovanni himself was forgotten until the Irish Franciscan scholar Luke Wadding (1588–1657), living in an age of worldwide evangelization, reprinted them in his monumental collection of Franciscan sources Annales minorum. Just as Franciscans ignored the martyrs in the thirteenth century in favor of friars displaying the virtue of the desire for martyrdom, so too did they ignore their brethren laboring outside the borders of Christendom. In contrast, the popes saw the friars (Franciscan and Dominican) as useful in extending the reach of papal influence, and as evidence of active Christian engagement with the “problem” of Islam. Thus, the majority of records that survive are from papal documentary sources. Modern historians have followed in Vincent’s footsteps; the early journeys of the friars among the Mongols are a staple of undergraduate teaching and have inspired an entire library’s worth of books and articles.5 The scholarship devoted to the mendicant presence in North Africa, on the other hand, would scarcely fill a single shelf.6
In examining the place of martyrdom within the Franciscan order, it is essential to consider these invisible friars—the ones who, like the martyrs, traveled into the Muslim world, but unlike them, did not die there. The discourse of martyrdom and evangelization are two sides of the same coin; only one is visible at a time, but turn the coin over, and the other emerges into the light. The absence of friars working among Muslims from Franciscan sources is further evidence of the order’s lack of interest in engaging with Islamic communities. Whereas the friars who in the thirteenth century traveled among the Mongols (who at that point were neither Christian nor Muslim) were heroes inside the order as well as outside, their brethren in the Maghreb were ignored. Why this discrepancy? There are a number of reasons. The most obvious is that the journeys among the Mongols offered access to an entire world scarcely known to Latin Christians, and that the Mongols themselves were seen as an immediate and existential threat to western Christendom. But the fact that the Mongols did not follow a monotheistic faith also played a role. If the potential threat seemed high, so did the potential for conversion.
The encounter with the Mongols fitted within a long narrative of Latin Christian encounters with threatening non-Christian groups. Christian chronicles retold the stories of pagan barbarians of all stripes, from Visigoths to Norsemen, who threatened Christian lands but eventually were converted to Christianity and became part of Christendom. Such spiritual victories, accompanied by military ones, were all part of God’s plan for the world, which led inexorably toward the expansion of Christianity throughout the world, and then to Christ’s triumphant return and defeat of all evil. The ninth-century hagiographer of Saint Vitus could revel in the triumphs of the saints and martyrs over the British, the English, and the Saxons; perhaps thirteenth-century hagiographers would be able to add the Mongols to this list.7 In contrast, no such narrative existed in regard to Muslims. Christians may have conquered some Muslim territory in Spain, but no one could speak of the conversion of whole groups, from the rulers down to the peasants, as was possible in reference to pagans. But perhaps even more important, the Franciscans were uninterested in depicting Islam and Muslims as susceptible to conversion and inclusion in the corporate Christian body. As a result, friars who ventured among Muslims gained little attention from their brethren.
Just as the evidence for martyrs who actually died in the thirteenth century is quite thin, we also find on closer examination very few “missionaries.” Evangelizing among infidels was an essential part of Franciscan values, enshrined (as we have seen) in the Franciscan Rule itself; yet those activities were routinely ignored by the order and few Franciscans spent long periods of time in Muslim lands. The same was true of the Dominicans; Robin Vose has argued that “in the medieval period, the Dominican order as a whole did little to consciously or explicitly dedicate itself to any external mission of preaching among non-Christians.”8 Working in Muslim lands required compromise and calculation. It required the friars to think about Islam and Muslims, rather than with Islam and Muslims. Compared to the energy mendicants expended on preaching within Christendom, the effort expended in converting Muslims was minimal. Why? Simply put, Muslims themselves did not matter. They were a vehicle through which Franciscans could demonstrate their particular piety, but their conversion did not demonstrate that piety as effectively as the desire for martyrdom.
The popes, on the other hand, did esteem mendicants who worked in Islamic lands, but this does not mean that conversion of Muslims was at the top of their agenda either. The popes sent mendicants to non-Christian territories to fulfill a number of tasks—comfort the enslaved, corral erring merchants, serve as ambassadors, envoys, or spies—and while the work of evangelization was frequently evoked, it was rarely the primary goal. The papacy used the mendicants for diplomatic purposes to control Christians living under Muslim rule, and to continue their struggle against Islam in less militaristic ways. As Brett Whalen has noted, popes sent out the friars as part of “the contemporary papal effort to properly regulate, educate, and indoctrinate members of the Christian laity.”9 In one sense, the popes did not need Mongols or Muslims to convert; it was ideologically sufficient that a pope be able to claim that he enabled the word of God to be preached to all the nations. The burden of ensuring that the infidels recognized the truth they were being offered fell to them—and to God.
Evangelization and Martyrdom in the Early Thirteenth Century
The Franciscan call to evangelization was directed toward all peoples, both Christians and infidels. The early thirteenth century saw evangelists sent to both partes fidelium et infidelium, and martyrdom was seen as a possible outcome in both realms. Jordan, a friar from the small village of Giano in Umbria, was a member of the mission sent to Germany in 1221, and in his old age he wrote an account of how he and other friars had left Italy and gone out to the nations. Surveying the early efforts of the friars, Jordan saw a history of failure. The first mission in 1217 to Theutonia, as Jordan referred to Germany, ended abruptly in failure when the brothers, ignorant of the German language, meekly answered every question, “ja”—including the question, “Are you heretics?” Stripped and imprisoned for heresy, the brothers soon fled back to Italy, giving Germany a reputation as a cruel and inhospitable land. As a result, Jordan remembered that the friars “did not dare to go there, unless inspired by the desire for martyrdom.”10 If there were any such friars, Jordan did not name them. Likewise, the members of the first expedition to Hungary were robbed of all their clothing, repeatedly; one brother resorted to smearing his underpants with cow dung so that at least these might not be stolen, and he be left totally naked. Eventually they too abandoned Hungary and returned to Italy. It was in this context of failed missions that Jordan mentioned the five friars who were martyred in Morocco, having been sent out from Italy at the same time. Their deaths were just another example, perhaps more glorious than that of the half-naked friar smeared with cow dung, of how the early Franciscan missions “came to nothing,” as Jordan put it.11
Jordan himself was part of a second, successful mission to Germany in 1221. About ninety friars volunteered, “inflamed by desire and offering themselves for death.”12 Jordan himself was among the audience, and as he watched the friars volunteer, he was certain that he was watching the next generation of Franciscan martyrs being chosen, so he jumped up to ask them their names and speak to them; he regretted that he had not personally known the friars who died in Morocco. One of them, Palmerius, insisted that Jordan should join the expedition, despite his evident fear of German violence. He, of course, survived the mission, which turned out to be a success. From the perspective of the aged Jordan, writing in Germany around 1260, martyrdom might happen to some, but it was not the standard by which Franciscan identity or success should be measured: Jordan clearly thought the accomplishments of the friars in preaching in Germany and successfully establishing convents there was far more of a triumph than dying as a martyr in Morocco.
Conceptually, Franciscans made little distinction among non-Christians. If we return to the foundational texts of the order, we find that terra Saracenorum (the lands of the Muslims) was used interchangeably with the broader partes infidelium (territories of the infidels). Both the Regula non bullata and the Regula bullata mention “those going among the Saracens or other infidels” without distinguishing between the two; yet both Francis and the martyrs of Morocco chose to travel specifically to Islamic lands. The Franciscans who were sent to North Africa as evangelists were thus following in the footsteps of their revered founder and the martyrs who had proved so inspirational to the likes of Anthony of Padua. Those going among the Mongols, in contrast, were sent to polytheists whose conceptions of religious ritual, authority, and their relationship to secular power was at times baffling to Latin Christians. When contact began, the Mongols adhered to a syncretic and shamanistic tradition of their own, but as the Mongol Empire fragmented, the Ilkhanids (ruling Persia and Iraq) converted to Islam in 1295 as did the Golden Horde (ruling in the northern Black Sea region) in 1313, and historiography has implicitly narrated western evangelization against the eventual “Muslim turn.”13 Nevertheless, the Franciscans in North Africa and the Mongol Empire faced similar challenges and directed their efforts toward similar goals—and converting the ruling elite (whether animist Mongols or Muslim Almohads) was only sporadically considered. Instead, the friars focused on comforting captive Christians, ministering to Christians in service to non-Christian rulers, and serving as papal emissaries.
“A Sterile Church Made Fertile”: Or, How to Build a Church among the Muslims
In 1237 Pope Gregory IX called upon all the Christians of Morocco to rejoice, for their church, once sterile, was now fertile again; Gregory likened it to Israel returning from Babylonian captivity.14 Mendicants had been hard at work in North Africa for over a decade, and their tilling was bearing fruit. Yet behind the exultant language, Gregory sounded anxious. His rhetoric of renewal implied that the Christian community of Morocco was regaining its ancient size and vitality, an image that was at odds with the reality of a community that was made up entirely of Latin mendicants, merchants, captives, and mercenaries. In the bull, the pope commended his unnamed Franciscan bishop to the Christian community in Morocco, but he clearly suspected that they were not fully in support of the bishop’s efforts. The rhetorical language of the bull makes it difficult for us to know who or what was causing the pope’s concern. Who were these other Christians? Were they merchants, or perhaps the priests who accompanied them from their native cities? Was Gregory thinking of mercenaries who served in the army and associated with powerful Almohad officials, even the caliph himself? Or were they Christians who were obstructing the bishop’s mission within Christendom? Perhaps the bishop of the newly fertile church was not even in Morocco himself. The papal bull raises a number of questions about the Franciscans’ presence in Morocco and their goals and achievements. What were they doing there? What did the “fertile” church look like? And why did the popes care so much and the Franciscans so little?
The third-century North African theologian Tertullian famously claimed that “blood was the seed of Christians.”15 Those who hoped to build up a church with all its institutions in the later Middle Ages were a bit more hardheaded about the process than Tertullian was, believing that living priests and bishops were much more useful than dead ones, even if they died as martyrs. The mendicant experiment in North Africa was the first attempt by the papacy to build an ecclesiastical institution in infidel lands, and the successes and failures of that endeavor shaped the later efforts to do the same in the Mongol Empire. The mendicants were the principal agents of the papacy in both areas, but this was a novelty. The combination of an international religious order working at the behest of a pope who claimed universal dominion made the mendicant evangelization of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries entirely different from the evangelizing efforts of earlier generations. Before the appearance of the mendicant orders, evangelization was largely a local affair. With the exception of a few unusual cases, such as Augustine’s mission to the Anglo-Saxons in the seventh century, most evangelists were sent out by bishops and monasteries that neighbored non-Christian communities, not by the pope. Their efforts were sometimes encouraged by Rome, and the creation of new dioceses by the papacy gave institutional support to successful evangelists, but the papacy was not the driving force behind their efforts. For recently conquered areas that had a large proportion of non-Christians, the Cistercians had often been favored in the twelfth century, particularly in the Baltic region.16 In the thirteenth century, the papacy favored the mendicants for this task. To some extent, they succeeded in both North Africa and in the Mongol domains, but those successes were temporary. Nor was their success tied to any large-scale conversions; they were established in places where Latin Christian merchants were most active, and thus the friars served as nodes of papal power, where they might enforce papal policy. New dioceses were constructed on mendicant foundations, and there was no attempt to build institutions on the model of a bishopric within Christendom. While certain aspects of that model would be difficult to transpose, the utter reliance on the mendicants makes clear that the spread of Latin Christian institutions should not be conflated with the establishment of the underlying social components that they would imply within Christendom—a parish community, local forms of financial support, and a clergy drawn from the local population.
The Almohad World
Franciscan engagement with non-Christians began in North Africa. As we have seen, Francis’s first attempt to achieve martyrdom led him toward Morocco “to preach the gospel of Christ to the Miramolin and his retinue.”17 “The Miramolin,” as the Almohad caliph was called in western Christendom, was a title that resounded with the frightening power of a threatening foreign lord.18 The word was an attempt to transcribe the title “Amir al-Mu’minīn” (the leader of the faithful), which was commonly held by caliphs in both al-Maghreb (western Islamic lands) and al-Mashriq (eastern lands); it is still used by the kings of Morocco today. The Almohad caliphate had emerged out of a religious movement begun by Muhammad ibn ‘Abd Allah ibn Tūmart (c. 1082–c. 1130) in the southern reaches of what is now Morocco, eventually centering on Tinmallal (today Tinmal) in the Atlas mountains. Ibn Tūmart encouraged the pious avoidance of alcohol, dancing, and music and emphasized the importance of the oneness of God; he also taught a form of Qur’ānic interpretation that conflicted with the Mālik school of interpretation, then dominant in the Maghreb. He even went so far as to declare himself to be an infallible interpreter of the Qur’ān; his followers in 1121 identified him as the Mahdī, the messianic figure who would come to establish a kingdom of peace and justice.19 His theological teachings had a political impact, and his followers, the Al-Muwahhidūn (those devoted to the oneness of God, anglicized as Almohads), soon came into conflict with the ruling Almoravids (Al-Murābitūn, those who fight at the ribat, a frontier fortification). ‘Abd al-Mu’min, the first Almohad caliph, captured the capital Marrakesh in 1147, and most of the Maghreb and al-Andalus fell under Almohad sway in the decades that followed.
For Castilians in particular, the Almohad domains in al-Andalus were uncomfortably close to their own lands and cities. Toledo, conquered by Alfonso VI in 1085, still lay close to Almohad territories throughout the second half of the twelfth century; raids riding up the Tagus River valley could easily reach the city within a day, and indeed, as late as 1196 the Almohad army ravaged the hinterlands of Toledo for over a week.20 At the Battle of Alarcos in 1195, Abū Yūsuf Ya’qūb al-Manṣūr, the “Miramolin,” had crushed the Castilian army. Killed in the battle were the bishops of Avila, Segovia, and Siguenza, as well as the leaders of both the orders of Calatrava and Evora. It seemed that in Spain just as in the Holy Land, the ephemeral rule of Christians over an Islamic land could pass away.
But the great power of the Almohads was beginning to crumble around the time of Francis’s attempted visit. The Castilian king Alfonso VIII, who had fled the battlefield at Alarcos in fear of his life, again faced his Almohad foe on the battlefield in 1212. This time, Alfonso marched alongside his fellow Spanish monarchs, the kings of Aragon and Navarre, as well as Occitan nobles and others responding to a crusade proclaimed against the Almohads.21 The Christian armies routed the forces commanded by Muḥammad al-Nāṣir, the son of the great al-Manṣūr, the victor at Alarcos. The defeat of the Almohads at Las Navas de Tolosa weakened the control of the dynasty over their empire, and emboldened the Spanish monarchs to seize the greater part of the Almohad possessions in al-Andalus over the coming decades. By 1248 Granada remained the only Muslim principality in Iberia, and by 1269 the Almohads had lost power entirely. The succeeding Marinid dynasty dominated Morocco for the following two centuries, and though they attempted to reconstitute the Almohad domains, they never succeeded in regaining the lands lost on the Iberian peninsula, with the exception of occasional toeholds in places like Tarifa, near Gibraltar.
Francis of Assisi set out on his first attempt at martyrdom for the “lands of the Miramolin” not long after the great battle of Las Navas. Did the rumors of the coming crusade against the mighty Almohads spark his desire to court martyrdom and preach to the Miramolin? Alberic of Trois-Fontaine testified that litanies and prayers were recited in the churches of Rome prior to the battle; Francis might well have heard about the coming crusade in such a way.22 Or had he already heard of the great victory before he left, and sought to take advantage of the possibility of entering the lands of a defeated Muslim monarch, now all the more vulnerable to triumphalist Christian preaching? In either case, he displayed remarkably similar timing years later when he traveled to Egypt, again to confront a Muslim ruler in the midst of a crusade.
Though Francis was prevented from reaching his destination, six friars followed quickly in his footsteps: Vitale, Beraldo, Otto, Accursio, Adiuto, and Pietro set out for the lands of the Miramolin in 1219. Vitale had to remain in Christian lands due to illness, but the others continued on to be the first mendicants to reach Morocco, and their deaths inspired the likes of Anthony of Padua, who himself tried to evangelize in Morocco in the early 1220s. We know little of their reasons for going, or what happened during their time in the Almohad lands, but Francis’s own journey must have been a powerful incentive. Their mission ended with their deaths; it was another five years before other friars ventured to the Almohad Empire—and when they came, they were sent by the papacy, the first papally directed effort to evangelize Muslims of the thirteenth century.
The friars left Christendom and traveled among the infidels generally for one reason: they were sent, usually by the pope.23 We cannot be certain how much choice individual friars themselves were given in the matter; they may have been willing volunteers, or they may have been given their assignment without much consultation. The popes articulated their intentions through letters directed to the friars themselves and to the non-Christian rulers to whom they were sent, as well as to Christian rulers and bishops who might serve as sources of support for the papal envoys. The letters (sometimes referred to as bulls, for the lead seals [in Latin, bulla] affixed to them) were not private communications, but public performances, meant to evoke a virtual papal presence. Mendicants thus became papal avatars in Islamic lands. Papal bulls were certainly of little use in converting Muslims, but quite helpful in the exercise of the various pastoral responsibilities the friars were given over Christians in infidel lands. Others sought the same authority by different means: when the Crown of Aragon attempted to establish an Almohad scion as ruler in Tunis in 1289, part of the treaty with him mandated that the Aragonese king be given authority over the Latin Christian mercenaries and merchants of the city.24
The mendicant presence in the Maghreb represented a first for the papacy as well, though the popes had been writing to the Muslim rulers of the Maghreb for centuries; Gregory VII (1073–85) had written to al-Naṣir, the ruler of Bougie in Tunisia in 1076 in a letter that has endeared itself to the modern reader by its seemingly pacific ecumenicism.25 Celestine III (1191–98) had sent a priest to Marrakesh and Seville in 1192, but his task was limited to pastoral care of Christians; he was not a papal representative (the pope asked the archbishop of Toledo to send him) nor was he vested with the powers of excommunication as later mendicants were.26 The first surviving letter to an Almohad ruler came from Innocent III in 1199, written to facilitate the work of the Trinitarians, a new order devoted to the redemption of Christian captives. In his letter, the pope emphasized not only the charitable nature of the work, but also the shared benefit it brought to Christians and Muslims alike, for the Trinitarians often traded Muslim captives from Europe for Christian ones in the Maghreb.27
Papal interest in the Almohad domain had intensified in the 1220s as part of a broader effort to exert papal influence on the peripheries of Latin Christendom.28 In 1221 Honorius III (1216–27) issued a call for clerics to participate in a broad campaign of evangelization. The letter, sent across Latin Christendom, did not specify where the evangelists were to be sent, naming only “other provinces” and “the desert of various peoples.”29 Honorius suggested that the bishops to whom the letter was addressed might send Cistercians or other religious, but did not mention either Dominicans or Franciscans explicitly. The letter was sent at the height of the Fifth Crusade; crusader armies had captured the city of Damietta the previous year, and were planning on marching to Cairo. The pope hoped that the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II would soon fulfill his vow and lead the crusade to a victorious end. The summons to evangelization was thus a triumphal call to continue the expansion of Christendom; it was not a replacement or alternative to crusade, but its corollary. The bull was issued a year after Francis had traveled to Egypt and the five friars had died in Marrakesh. The absence of the mendicants is puzzling. Was it a reaction to the death of the Moroccan martyrs, or even to Francis’s own journey to Egypt? It is a reminder that, at the very minimum, the mendicants did not yet have a monopoly on evangelization, at least in papal eyes.
The friars who came to North Africa encountered many other western Christians. Primary among them were mercenaries in the employ of the Almohads. The predecessors of the Almohads, the Almoravids, had often employed Christian mercenaries as well. Soldiers became mercenaries through a variety of means. Some were captives and were forcibly drafted; others joined freely, often because they were unwelcome in their Christian homelands.30 The Portuguese infante Pedro, one of the central figures in the story of the Moroccan martyrs, was such a mercenary. The brother of King Afonso II, he fled Portugal over disagreements about the royal patrimony and took service with the Almohad caliph. Perhaps the best-documented Christian to serve under the authority of Moroccan emirs was the Catalan lord Reverter (d. 1145), who had been the viscount of Barcelona and lord of La Guardia de Monserrat before he was taken captive in an raid on the Catalan coast around 1120.31 He participated in Almoravid campaigns against the Almohads, and in several Muslim sources he appeared as the “qā’id al-Rūm” (commander of the Christians), a figure of some repute and importance. The title probably referred to his authority over his fellow Christian mercenaries. His son converted to Islam, taking the name of Abū’l-Ḥasan ‘Alī, and served in turn under the Almohads. When he died fighting in Ifrikiya in 1187, the chronicler Ibn ‘Iḏārī suggested that he should be considered a martyr.32 Many other Christians served under both Almoravid and Almohad sultans, though garnering less fame for themselves. Some converted, as did Reverter’s son, but others remained Christian even as they served the caliphs.33
Christian soldiers offered their Muslim employers a number of advantages: they were dependent entirely on the sovereign (as were their Muslim counterparts in Christian courts), and they were trained with distinctive military skills. Their lack of kin and other social connections made them ideal protectors of the royal person. Ibn Khaldūn, writing in the fourteenth century, commented that the sultan needed soldiers trained “to fight with firm footing”; their ability to form and hold a solid line in battle was widely admired.34
But mercenaries were not the only Christians to be found in North Africa; Latin merchants were also a significant presence in Maghrebi cities. While mercenaries and captives were immersed in the Maghrebi world, merchants often lived apart in a peculiar institution of the medieval world, the funduk. The funduk was a type of mercantile colony, a small section of a city that was set aside for foreign merchants. Merchants of various origins would often have their own funduks, each with all the institutions necessary for its functioning, such as bakehouses, churches, and monasteries.35 Many Mediterranean mercantile cities would thus have contained within them miniature replicas of others: tiny Genoas and Venices jostled inside cities such as Alexandria, Acre, and Tunis.
The Mendicant Maghreb
The first mendicants to arrive—and survive—in North Africa came five years after the martyrs’ execution. On 10 June 1225, Honorius sent two Dominicans, Dominic and Martin, to the Miramolin.36 A great deal had changed in those five years. The Fifth Crusade had ended in disastrous defeat, and Honorius had been disappointed in his expectations of Emperor Frederick II’s commitment to crusade; he was still hoping that the emperor would depart on crusade that very month, but it was becoming increasingly clear that the emperor was not going. The papal decision to focus on Muslim North Africa may have been an expression of continued resistance to Islam, in contrast to the triumphalism inherent in Honorius’s earlier call for evangelization. Dominic and Martin were instructed to “convert the incredulous, raise up the lapsed, sustain the frail, console the faint-hearted, and also comfort the strong.” The friars were also encouraged to engage in generic evangelization: the bull gave the friars permission “to preach, to baptize Saracens newly coming to the faith,” as well as to “absolve those excommunicated who cannot access the Apostolic Seat conveniently.”37 The same bull was issued to the Franciscans four months later.
But it is clear that it was Christians about whom Honorius worried the most. A bull issued two years earlier to “Christians dispersed in Morocco” reveals some of the context that stoked Honorius’s concern. The pope was responding to reports that “when the king of Morocco triumphs over his enemies … he compels five Christians, great in religion and in fame, who live under his power to dine with him and eat meat, whether on Fridays or during Lent.”38 The petitioning Christians sought dispensation to attend the feasts and eat meat, which the pope granted. The conundrum of the five anonymous Christians reveals the complexity of living under the caliph’s rule. The five were evidently not captives, but not entirely free either. Their participation at the feasts of the caliph demonstrate both their high status and their importance to him. The five Christians were most likely mercenaries; one could imagine the infante Pedro as their former colleague. The danger of apostasy in such a setting was obvious; the Christians were feasting with Muslims on a regular basis in an atmosphere that would be conducive to establishing bonds of friendship; it is precisely such bonds that were most likely to lead someone to convert from one religion to another. The plight of the five Christians must have been particularly troubling to the pope given the context in which they were led to break their fast: at celebrations of the caliph’s victory and prosperity. Thus, they were not only being led to unchristian behavior, but they were doing so in order to celebrate the triumph of one of Christendom’s greatest enemies.
The bulls that followed gave the friars guidance on how to function outside the borders of Christendom. Honorius issued a bull in 1226 on behalf of Dominicans and Franciscans working in Morocco which dispensed them from the requirements of their rule that they neither receive nor spend money. Furthermore, the bull acknowledged that the friars had to compromise in other ways as well, needing to change their clothes, hair, and beards in order to be inconspicuous.39 Notably, these bulls did not encourage the mendicants to think of themselves as potential martyrs, unlike other papal letters about evangelization. Honorius had previously offered martyrdom as one of the possible rewards to the evangelists he sought in 1221.40 In North Africa, in contrast, the pope was clearly more concerned that the friars continue to serve as effective ambassadors rather than risk being killed and alienating the Almohad leadership by openly evangelizing. The friars were directed to behave as the five beleaguered Christians did at the caliph’s court: compromise and blend in.41
Twenty days after he issued his first bull to Dominic and Martin, Honorius reissued it to Dominic as bishop.42 Yet the pope seemed uncertain about this role: in a subsequent bull, Dominic (presumably the same one) was referred to as “rector,” rather than “bishop.”43 Part of the confusion was because of a tussle over ecclesiastical oversight. Robin Vose has suggested that Dominic had been made bishop by Rodrigo Ximenez de Rada, the ambitious archbishop of Toledo, in an attempt to claim the Maghreb as part of the Hispanic church. By the following year, Honorius seems to have acceded to Rodrigo’s demands; he issued another bull in February 1226, which placed the clerics in Almohad lands under the authority of Archbishop Rodrigo. The pope urged the archbishop to support the friars caring for the numerous Christian captives in the lands of the Miramolin, and perhaps more importantly, to consecrate another bishop for Morocco, as well as other clerics: one bishop and a few friars could not adequately care for Christians scattered over such great distances.44 Although the bull contained a pro forma reference to the “conversion of infidels,” it is clear that the populations he was concerned for were Latin Christians living temporarily under Almohad rule, either voluntarily or not. The bull notably forbade other Christians from helping to expel the friars from Morocco—the pope recognized that caliphal orders might be carried out by Christian hands.
For the popes, the Almohads were both a threat and an opportunity. They feared their military power and proximity to Christian lands, but also hoped that the lands of al-Andalus and the Maghreb could be returned to Christian dominion—by military force or by conversion, and so were eager to engage with the Almohads. The letters and bulls concerning the mendicant orders in the Maghreb, however, were not solely devoted to diplomatic exchange; they were intended to build up an ecclesiastical institution within the caliphate, and the friars were the tools to achieve that goal. Honorius’s concerns in the Almohad domains had a double focus: he sought diplomatic access to and leverage over the Almohad caliph, and he sought to extend papal authority over Christians living in the Miramolin’s domains, Christians who were perceived as being vulnerable to conversion to Islam, by force or by more subtle pressures.
The defeat of the Almohads at the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in some ways did not make the Almohad regime more hostile to the Christian world that had defeated it; instead, the Almohads’ diminishing power made them more dependent on Christians, particularly mercenaries.45 Caliph Muḥammad al-Nāaṣir died not long after his defeat at Las Navas, and his successor was his teenage son, Yūsuf b. Abī ‘Abd Allāh al-Mustanṣir, the executioner of the Moroccan martyrs.46 He died as a young man without direct heirs in 1224, and with his death the Almohad Empire entered an age of conflict between competing members of the Almohad dynasty. Idrīs Al-Ma’mūn (1227–32), an uncle of Yūsuf and one of the competing caliphs, strategically expanded the use of Christian mercenaries as a way to reduce reliance on the Berber lords who had been the traditional backbone of Almohad support. He also renounced the traditional Almohad teaching claiming that Ibn Tūmart was the Mahdī, declaring, “There is no other Mahdī than Jesus, the son of Mary.”47 He had been proclaimed caliph in Seville in 1227 as a successor to his brother al-’Ādil, who had seized power in al-Andalus in the chaos that followed the death of Al-Mustanṣir.48 The fourteenth-century chronicler Ibn Abī Zar’ alleged that Al-Ma’mūn had concluded an alliance with Ferdinand III of Castile and thereby acquired twelve thousand soldiers for the price of several border fortresses and the construction of a church in Marrakesh.49 It is unlikely that this alliance existed, at least under these terms50—but the allegation that Al-Ma’mūn promoted Christian interests reflected his reliance on Christian mercenaries.
It was in this context that Pope Gregory IX issued his bull celebrating the fertility of the Christian church in Morocco. The pope urged Al-Ma’mūn’s son and successor ‘Abd al-Wāhid al-Rashīd (1232–42)in 1233 to convert to Christianity,51 and to listen particularly to the Franciscan bishop of Fez, Agnellus.52 Gregory even threatened the caliph; he warned that should he continue to remain a Muslim, Gregory would forbid Christians to work alongside him. While this was a threat that Gregory could not make good on, it was a reminder to the caliph of how important Christian mercenaries and merchants were to his authority. Agnellus was the first prelate mentioned with a seat specifically located in North Africa, and indeed, was the first Franciscan to be elevated to an episcopal seat. Notably, his see was the city of Fez, as the traditional Almohad capital of Marrakesh was occupied by ‘Abd al-Wāḥid’s rival, Yahya.
Workers in the Vineyard
The papal bulls concerning the mission in North Africa employed a rich vocabulary of biblical imagery to praise and encourage the friars in their endeavor. They are the first evangelizing bulls of the papacy targeted at a specific Muslim region. The first bull, Vinee domini, issued initially to the Dominicans and then to the Franciscans, began with an evocation of the friars as “custodians” and “workers in the vineyard of the Lord,” language which had long been applied to the apostles and to evangelists generally.53
The language of the Lord’s vineyard and “workers” is broad, stretching across several different parables in the synoptic gospels. But the vocabulary of the bull does not quote any specific text; the opening line of the bull, “vinee domini” (the “vineyard of the Lord), does not appear in any of the parables, nor are the laborers called “custodies” in any of them. The parable in Mark of the subtenants who kill the emissaries of the owner of the vineyard does refer to “dominus vineae” (Mark 12:1–11), but this reverses the grammar—“the lord of the vineyard,” rather than the “vineyard of the Lord.”54 Matthew’s parable about the owner of the vineyard who hires workers also includes a “dominus vineae” (Matt. 20:8), as well as “operariis” (Matt. 20:2), instead of “custodies.” Rather than a specific biblical reference, the vineyard imagery here evoked a general image of the Lord’s vineyard as the cultivated land that symbolized the church, and those who were sanctified by baptism. Outside the vineyard was the desert (solitudo), the uncultivated land of the infidels which might through the efforts of the Lord’s workers be made fertile and fruitful.55
In a bull of 1233, Cum messis multa, the citation of the Gospels is direct; in its opening line, the bull quotes the words of Jesus: “The harvest is great, but the workers [operarii] are few” (Matt. 9:37, Luke 10:2).56 In both Matthew and Luke, this declaration was followed by the sending out of the apostles by Jesus, who, in a passage dear to the hearts of Franciscans, admonished them: “Take no gold, or silver, or copper in your belts, no bag for your journey, or two tunics, or sandals, or a staff” (Matt. 10:9–10). This was one of the passages that Thomas of Celano reported had led Francis to adopt his life of poverty and preaching.57 Here, the source and meaning are clear: the mendicants are the new apostles, being sent out to bring in the harvest of souls before the coming of the kingdom of God. Jesus did not refer to a vineyard here; indeed, this is not a parable but a metaphor. Despite the resonant clarity of its evangelical message, the pope immediately muddles the bull’s meaning by evoking the other vineyard parable (Matt. 20:1–16), in which the lord of the vineyard hired workers throughout the day and paid them all the same wage, even those hired “in the eleventh hour.” The workers in this parable signify something different from the “few workers” of the metaphor; they represent those who are brought into salvation, rather than those working to save souls. In the context of thirteenth-century North Africa, the “few workers” are the Franciscans, but the workers of the parable hired throughout the day are Muslims. The bull thus conflates evangelist and infidel under the same figure of “the worker.”
What makes these semantic choices all the more interesting is that the meaning of the metaphor and the parable of the Lord’s vineyard is opposite to the way they were generally interpreted in other monastic and papal contexts in the early thirteenth century. Beverly Mayne Kienzle has shown how the image of the vineyard, popularized by Bernard of Clairvaux, was used for and by Cistercians as part of their preaching campaigns against nonconformist Christians in southern France in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.58 Central to the image was the sense of threat, embodied in the verse “the little foxes that are destroying the vineyard,” from the Song of Songs (2:15). In 1229, just four years before Cum messis multa, the Cistercian Hélinand of Froidmont (c. 1150–c. 1237) gave a sermon at the opening of a council in Toulouse that described the papal legate in the language of the vineyard. But unlike the workers in North Africa, the legate was not working to harvest the waiting crops, but to protect them against snakes and thorns that would harm the Lord’s vineyard.59 Thus, the dominant image of the Lord’s vineyard emphasized that it was the domain of the saved, “planted by the Lord’s hand, redeemed by his blood, watered by his word, increased by grace and fertilized by the Spirit.”60 Even the Fourth Lateran Council, the great ecumenical council that was one of the crowning achievements of Innocent III’s papacy, was opened with a sermon that used the image of the vineyard under threat.61 A century later, Dante used the vineyard metaphor in the Paradiso to accuse Pope John XXII of “laying waste to the vineyard” (canto XVIII), while John himself used it against rigorist Franciscans, whom he called “little foxes” ravaging the vineyard with “their poisonous gnawings.”62
Whereas the Cistercians and Innocent (who called for reform of the church and a new crusade to recover the Holy Land) used the image of the Lord’s vineyard to describe Christendom as beset by both heretics and Muslims, the bulls to the mendicants in North Africa, in contrast, presented the Muslims as belonging to the vineyard, either as the harvest or as the workers who were (hopefully) about to be hired. Medieval theologians and preachers routinely conflated those outside of Christendom into one malicious identity: Jews, Muslims, and heretics were all one, particularly in terms of the threat they posed. We would thus expect that the imagery applied to the heretics of southern France would be easily transposed onto the Muslims of North Africa without hesitation, particularly given the concerns that the papacy had about the possibility of Christians converting to Islam. But, instead, the bull presents the Muslims as within the vineyard and semantically linked to the evangelists themselves.
While the language of the “workers in the vineyard” was inclusive, it also represented the optimistic triumphalism of the papacy. Despite the fact that indigenous Christianity had largely been extinguished in North Africa, the popes still saw it as part of the “vineyard of the Lord,” confidently assuming that the church would again blossom there. Such use of the parable and metaphor also ran counter to a later Franciscan inclination to separate and distinguish Christians from Muslims, and most crucially, Christian space from Muslim space. These bulls to the mendicants not only created a scriptural understanding for the inclusion of Muslims in North Africa, but the reissuing of them for other evangelizing efforts also made them a standard element in papal rhetoric about all non-Christians, heretics, and schismatics. Cum messis multa, for example, was sent out fifteen days later to Franciscans in “the lands of the Georgians, the Saracens, and other infidels.”63
The language of evangelization developed in papal bulls in North Africa also began to incorporate an apocalyptic tone, which became more explicit when they were deployed for evangelists in the Mongol world. First issued in 1235 to a Dominican in Syria, the bull Cum hora undecima was reissued four years later to the Franciscans working among the “Saracens, pagans, Greeks, Bulgarians, Cumans, and other infidels.”64 The bull became “the standard bull of mission privilege”65 for the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and it elaborated the eschatological importance of the mendicant mission to convert infidels, drawing upon a rhetoric of mission that had been developed in the context of North Africa. The famous first line of the bull referred back to the same parable in the Gospel of Matthew that ran through the North African bulls; the “eleventh hour” (Matt. 6:20) was the last hour of work of the day, when the last workers to be hired were brought to the vineyard. They were “the last who will be first.” The bull Cum messis multa from 1233 had already employed the phrase “the eleventh hour,” but Cum hora undecima took the implicit eschatological themes of that bull and further developed them in relation to mendicant missions among the infidels. As Brett Whalen has pointed out, “When Christians thought about mission, eschatological expectations were not far behind.”66 The mendicants were evangelists completing the work the apostles had begun, and their presence in so many parts of the world was the culmination of the divine mission of the church, given by the resurrected Jesus.67
Like its predecessor, the bull gave greater weight to dealing with excommunicated and lapsed Christians than to converting infidels. While its apocalyptic urgency was new, Cum hora undecima simply extended the same privileges to evangelists working throughout the world that Honorius had first offered to the mendicants working in North Africa in the 1220s. The bull as reissued in 1245 for the expeditions sent to the Mongols added a long list of peoples outside of Latin Christendom to whom the bull was extended—almost all of whom were schismatic Christians, not infidels. Of the nineteen groups mentioned, only three were clearly non-Christians (the Saracens, the pagans, and the Gazarians, who were Goths of the Crimea). The Mongols themselves were not explicitly included until a bull of 1253.68 Perhaps most significantly, Cum hora undecima extended a plenary indulgence to evangelists working in infidel lands, equating their work with that of the crusades. As Benjamin Z. Kedar has argued, crusade and mission had been tied ever closer together since the Second Crusade.69 The extension of the indulgence to evangelizing mendicants was thus a logical result of a century of papal policy and crusading rhetoric. The consequence, however, was to invert the dynamic of salvation. The goal of the evangelist was to save the souls of the unbaptized, those who had never had the proper opportunity to hear the words of the Gospel and gain eternal salvation. The recipient of an indulgence, on the other hand, was a sinner who himself needed the saving balm of redemption. However strange this inversion may seem, it was one that was already familiar to Franciscans. In the Regula non bullata, Francis had told those preaching among the infidels that “whoever acknowledges me before others I will acknowledge before my heavenly Father (Mt. 10:32).”70 The salvation of the friar was assured by the work of evangelization, even if the non-Christians’ salvation was not. It was a small step from this to an indulgence.
Crusades in Defense of Caliphs?
The last bishop who might have been resident in Morocco during the thirteenth century was the Franciscan Lope, appointed in 1246.71 By this time, the popes had grown accustomed to a quasi-alliance with the Almohads; now fighting for them was not a sin but a battle for “the Catholic faith and Church.”72 Conversion, even rhetorically speaking, was not the priority. As Michael Lower has pointed out, Innocent IV’s appointment of Lope “bore all the hallmarks of crusade promotion”73—but a proxy crusade intended to bolster Almohad stability, not destroy it. The pope appealed broadly to kings and bishops to support Lope, offering a crusade indulgence to those in the friar’s entourage. Another bull was issued in 1247 concerning a certain Friar Bernard, whose reputation had apparently been impugned by the accusation that he was a bastard. The pope dispensed him from any liabilities if the rumors were true, so that he “be worthy to be advanced to the episcopal dignity in African lands.”74 We have no evidence that Bernard ever did become a bishop. The pope probably intended for Bernard to join Lope, so the growth of the Moroccan church was still on the pope’s mind.
As an ambassador, Fr. Lope was not a success, in part due to a change in Almohad leadership. The caliph al-Sa’īd, who had benefited from the alliance with the papacy and Christian mercenaries, was killed in battle in 1248, along with his son and heir.75 Lope failed to establish the same relationship with his successor, Caliph Murtaḍā, as the papal letters of 1251 show.76 This was not entirely Lope’s fault; Murtaḍā seems to have chosen to reject the strategy of his immediate successors in relying on Christian mercenaries, and instead returned to an alliance with the Berber lords who had long been the foundation of Almohad power. By 1252 Innocent IV had abandoned hope of renewing the alliance and was urging a crusade against Morocco by Castile,77 and Lope himself was participating in preaching for the crusade in 1255—clearly he had left Morocco.78 Now the Moroccan church was not envisioned as flourishing under the Almohads, but only able to be constructed in the wake of their demise; the pope called upon Lope to establish bishoprics in any areas liberated from the Muslims by the Castilians,79 but Lope probably never returned to Morocco, the crusade never took place, and no new bishops were appointed.80 By the time of Clement V (1305–14), it was clear that no proper chapter had ever, or would ever, exist in Morocco; the Moroccan church, inasmuch as it ever existed, was once again sterile.81
The Moroccan church of the early thirteenth century could claim a number of achievements: the first mendicant elevated to the episcopacy, the first Latin bishop established under an Islamic ruler, the development of an entirely new strategy of evangelization, and the spread of papal authority beyond the boundaries of Christendom itself. The benefit to the papacy is obvious; but what was the motivation for the friars to participate? This is a little more difficult to discern. The friars must have had both Francis and the martyrs in Morocco in mind as they worked in the Maghreb. But we cannot be certain whether they saw them as models for their own efforts, or they represented a path to be avoided. Certainly, they did not directly emulate either. The larger Franciscan order did not consider their efforts as linked to their predecessors’, at least in prestige. None of the friars who worked in North Africa were commemorated or even mentioned, even as hundreds of other friars were praised for their piety in various chronicles and lists of the holy dead.
Why would the activities of the friars be so systematically ignored, and why would brothers like Lope—working on papally sanctioned projects of evangelization and crusade—not be praised and esteemed within the order? Several reasons come to mind. The friars were engaging in papal business rather than the affairs of the order. They thus left little trace within the institutional character and memory of the order itself, and whatever convents were established in North Africa did not survive to commemorate them. Secondly, the friars failed in their mission. They did not establish a renewed institutional church, nor did they convert Muslims. This in particular explains why in retrospect they were ignored, but does not explain the ignorance or deliberate blindness of their contemporaries. But the most important reason may have been that the order could not present someone like Lope as an example of Franciscan values. As we have seen in Chapter 2, the hagiography being produced in the mid-thirteenth century ran in the opposite direction of his career—toward withdrawal rather than engagement, toward mysticism rather than preaching, toward prayer rather than diplomacy. The thirteenth-century catalogues and lists of holy Franciscans were a deliberate attempt to ignore the work in which the order actually engaged: to craft a different image of the order than the one the activities of engaged friars such as Lope and Agnellus suggested. Furthermore, the papal rhetoric and ideology behind the Moroccan church acknowledged Christians and Muslims as living together in a commingled world, where Christian soldiers attended Muslim feasts on Christian feast days, where friars compromised their strict rules about handling money in order to function within a Muslim society, and where Muslims were imagined as part of the Lord’s vineyard, not as part of the forces endangering it. This perspective ran counter to the emerging Franciscan attitude on Islam, which sought to separate Christian from Muslim, not to blur boundaries.
Where Are the Martyrs?
What, then, are we to make of our two competing sets of Franciscan rhetoric about Muslims? On the one hand, we have Francis, Anthony of Padua, and Clare of Assisi all eager to humble themselves by dying under a Muslim sword, and thus reap the glory of martyrdom. Yet they failed to achieve martyrdom, and spent little to no time in situations that might have allowed for the completion of their desire (though arguably Clare never had the freedom to make that choice). The Franciscans who lived among the Almohads and the Mongols, on the other hand, did spend considerable time in infidel territory, and were at risk of death. We do not have firsthand accounts from mendicants in Morocco,82 but those from the friars among the Mongols provide some sense of how the possibility of martyrdom was perceived by those who were not seeking it.
Giovanni da Pian del Carpine did not cast his mission as one of evangelization, but rather as one most akin to espionage; he wanted to go to learn information that would help Latin Christians protect themselves against a Mongol attack.83 He emphasized the possibility of death he faced, evoking the language of martyrdom: “We feared we might be killed by the Tartars or other peoples, or imprisoned for life, or afflicted with hunger, thirst, cold, heat, injuries and exceeding great trials almost beyond our power of endurance”—and, indeed, Giovanni assured his readers, this was the case, “in a much greater way than we had conceived beforehand.”84 But Giovanni clearly did not desire death, and did all he could to avoid it. While Giovanni recounted the death of Michael of Chernigov, a Russian prince, who had refused to bow before an image of “the first emperor,” in the language of martyrdom,85 Giovanni himself diplomatically avoided such issues that might lead to death. Though he was reluctant to participate in a purification ritual that required him to pass between two fires, he acquiesced “as not to be suspected of [harmful] things.”86 Likewise, Giovanni and his companion “were instructed to genuflect three times on the left knee before the door of the [chief’s] dwelling”;87 earlier, Giovanni had informed his reader that they have “idols of felt made in the image of man, and these they place on each side of the door of the dwelling.”88 Giovanni was thus willing to perform the rituals that Michael of Chernigov refused. It would seem that the Franciscan felt that his duties as an ambassador overrode whatever religious scruples he might have had about idolatry. We do not have the same sort of first-person accounts from North Africa, but there, too, compromise was a necessity. Friars like Agnellus and Lope needed to keep their opinions on Muhammad and Islam to themselves and to loosen the strictures of the rule concerning handling money and wearing a habit in order to fit in and be effective at the Almohad court.
Later Franciscan chroniclers suggested that a number of Franciscans were martyred as part of the establishment of the network of convents and bishoprics in both the Maghreb and among the Mongols. But thirteenth-century sources (largely papal) do not mention martyrs, and rarely even acknowledge the possibility of martyrdom. It is only in the fourteenth century that Franciscans dying under the Muslims gained the attention of their contemporaries, and drew them to search for martyrs in earlier generations, real or fictionalized. For example, the Franciscan Anthony of Armenia is reported to have died in Selmas in 1284 under the rule of the Muslim Mongol Tegüder Ahmad, in an account that only appeared in a sixteenth-century chronicle.89 This is not evidence that no friars died as a result of their activities in non-Christian lands. It simply shows that neither the papacy nor fellow Franciscans found such deaths (if they happened) noteworthy or evidence of any particular qualities that should be associated with either evangelization or the friars.
Conclusion
The thirteenth century saw the establishment of mendicant communities in infidel lands from Marrakesh to Mongol Khan-balik. These communities engaged in a number of activities, the foremost of which was ministering to Latin Christian merchants, mercenaries, captives, and slaves. The Franciscan presence in both the Maghreb and the Mongol lands reveals the sidle with which the friars approached Islam and the possibility of evangelization of Muslims. In both areas, Muslims were sometimes allies in the construction of Christian institutions—whether through alliance with the Almohad caliphs or through a shared belief in one God and opposition to polytheist competitors in Mongol lands.90 In both cases, however, the example of Francis as evangelist to the Saracens was curiously absent. The hidden history of the Franciscans in the Maghreb puts the lie to the claim that the centrality of martyrdom for Franciscans was grounded in the ideology of “mission.” Quite the opposite—the martyrs represented the impossibility of conversion, the intransigence of the Muslims, and the impenetrability of the border separating Christians and Muslims.