By Peter Konieczny
What if you could go back to the Middle Ages and ask someone what they thought of other people? What did they think about different religions? One might expect that they might emphasize how their morals and values were so different. However, if you go by the thoughts of one medieval Italian writer, the big differences were in the clothes you wear, the food you ate, and the kind of pet you liked.
A very unique and interesting list exists in a work created by Francesco Suriano entitled Treatise on the Holy Land. In a section he calls The Contrasts, Francesco explains the differences between Christians and Muslims, going over them point by point.
When he wrote this work in 1485, Francesco had already spent a lot of time observing Muslim peoples – at least those in Egypt and Syria. He was a Venetian, and around the age of 12 he began working on his uncle’s ship as it sailed the Mediterranean transporting goods. Francesco’s voyages took him several times to the Near East, enough that he was able to learn the Arabic language.
At 25, Francesco decided to become a Franciscan, hoping to live a strict and religious life. His superiors had other plans though, and by 1481 he was back in the Middle East, serving in Franciscan convents in Jerusalem and other cities. Overall he would spend more than 25 years living in the Middle East.
It would be in 1485 that he wrote Treatise on the Holy Land, when he was back in Italy and visiting his sister, who was a nun in the Poor Clares order. The work is written as if it is a conversation between his sister and himself, with Francesco doing most of the talking. The main part of the book is to explain the various religious sites in the Holy Land, but Francesco adds many firsthand observations much more about what he saw and did while he lived in the Middle East, ranging from climbing to the top of the Great Pyramid to seeing a giraffe (“one feels an incredible pleasure in looking at it”).
Francesco’s account reveals that he had some understanding of Islam, but what he says is also at times incorrect and insulting. Towards the end of this work, he includes a section called The Contrasts, where he sets out to explain what made Muslims different from European Christians. This really is only one person’s views, one that is shaped by his own religious faith and that he was an outsider living in the Middle East. Here is what he writes:
When they pray they turn to the South towards the Tomb of Mohammed while we turn to the East and the Jews to the West.
In reality, Muslims pray toward Mecca, while Jewish people would have prayed in the direction of Jerusalem.
The men do housework and carry water and weave, and the women do the trading.
The women carry burdens on their shoulders and the men on their heads.
The men eat seated, the women standing.
Fathers are bound to feed their daughters but not their sons; and more the bastard than the legitimate.
These four points, and others further on, reveal much about what Francesco really thinks is different and wrong with Arabic people – to him they are too feminine, and women are given roles and rights that should only be reserved for men.
The barbers when at work sit and the clients stand.
They drink all day except when they eat.
They continually wash their hands, and their hands are always dirty.
This seems to be a reference to the Islamic practice of washing one’s face, hands, arms, and feet before prayers.
The women wear only one dress, the men wear three or four.
We take off our headgear in sign of respect, they take off their shoes.
The women wear trousers, and the men go without them.
In Lent we eat during the day and they fast during the day and eat like beasts all night.
This refers to Ramadan, a month-long celebration for Muslims where they fast during the day and will have feasts after sunset.
We address a letter when it is written, they begin with the address.
We urinate standing, they squatting as females.
We like dogs, they cats.
Having pets was common in the medieval world, and while the reputation of dogs and cats vary in different parts of the world, in neither culture it was universally so.
We drink wine, they water.
We are guided by the sun, they by the moon.
This is probably a reference to how the European calendar was solar-based, but the Islamic one is lunar-based.
We eat from on high, they from the ground.
We sleep undressed, they, men and women, dressed.
We value horses, they mares.
We girdle ourselves over the clothes, they under.
They write from right to left, we the reverse.
They wear linen, we wear wool.
Francesco does not take into account the differences in climate between Europe and the Middle East.
They sell chickens by measure, and fruits and vegetables they sell by weight on the balance.
They carry to market birds in a sack and figs in a cage.
We despise imbeciles and they revere them as saints.
Perhaps Francesco is referring to Sufi practitioners, who follow a more mystical path of Islam. Moreover, he seems to be oblivious to how his own Franciscan order was derided by many of his fellow Christians.
Slaves with us are servants, with them lords.
Later on Francesco has to make a detailed explanation of who the Mamluks were, and offers a less-than-accurate history of their rise to power in Egypt and Syria. Many enemies of the Mamluks often disparaged their origins as slaves.
Men give dowry to the wives, and we do the opposite.
Francesco also offers more details on this, finding this way more “just, reasonable and proper’ then the Italian practice where the parents of the bride had to offer a dowry to obtain a marriage. He explains why: “First, it would be a means whereby many poor girls could marry, who through poverty cannot marry, and so remain single in danger of sin and cause sin to others.”
We repudiate the wife, they the husband.
His sister also wanted to know about how wives can repudiate their husbands, by which he means they divorce their husbands, and Francesco responds by explaining this can happen in cases of abuse, neglect or abandonment. Divorce was actually fairly common in medieval Egypt, and both men and women could initiate it.
Men go barefooted, the women wear light shoes.
The men are beautiful; the women are most ugly and small.
The men wear clothes cut low, the women cut close to the neck.
The men wear a veil on the head, the women a cap.
The men never spit, the women do.
The men like cats, the women dogs.
Francesco sums it up by concluding “if they could they would walk backwards just to be different from us.”
Francesco’s list is very surprising – one would expect that this Franciscan friar would write about religious differences – instead, it is often just about daily life and trivial topics. However, there is often an underlying view that traditional gender roles were not being followed by medieval Muslims. More than a dozen of his contrasts involve women doing or wearing something that goes against what he thinks should be the proper way as found in Francesco’s homeland.
Not everything that Francesco finds to be different is to him a bad thing, and his view of Muslims isn’t always negative (at times he is far more critical of other Christian sects that lived in the region). But it is telling that he views the differences as somehow being in opposition to his own culture, as if it was somehow planned to be that way. One wonders how perplexed Francesco would have been if his travels took him to more distant lands and cultures.
This list is perhaps even more revealing in how much it shows the differences between medieval people and us. Francesco Suriano would see our modern-day lifestyles and habits as being very much ‘the other’, critiquing the way we dressed, ate, and slept. Who knows how upset he might become to learn that some people had pet fish!
Treatise on the Holy Land was translated by Theophilus Bellorini and Euguene Hoade as part of the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum series and published in 1949.
Top Image: British Library MS Additional 19587 fol. 8r and BNF MS Arabic 5847 fol. 130r
By Peter Konieczny
What if you could go back to the Middle Ages and ask someone what they thought of other people? What did they think about different religions? One might expect that they might emphasize how their morals and values were so different. However, if you go by the thoughts of one medieval Italian writer, the big differences were in the clothes you wear, the food you ate, and the kind of pet you liked.
A very unique and interesting list exists in a work created by Francesco Suriano entitled Treatise on the Holy Land. In a section he calls The Contrasts, Francesco explains the differences between Christians and Muslims, going over them point by point.
When he wrote this work in 1485, Francesco had already spent a lot of time observing Muslim peoples – at least those in Egypt and Syria. He was a Venetian, and around the age of 12 he began working on his uncle’s ship as it sailed the Mediterranean transporting goods. Francesco’s voyages took him several times to the Near East, enough that he was able to learn the Arabic language.
At 25, Francesco decided to become a Franciscan, hoping to live a strict and religious life. His superiors had other plans though, and by 1481 he was back in the Middle East, serving in Franciscan convents in Jerusalem and other cities. Overall he would spend more than 25 years living in the Middle East.
It would be in 1485 that he wrote Treatise on the Holy Land, when he was back in Italy and visiting his sister, who was a nun in the Poor Clares order. The work is written as if it is a conversation between his sister and himself, with Francesco doing most of the talking. The main part of the book is to explain the various religious sites in the Holy Land, but Francesco adds many firsthand observations much more about what he saw and did while he lived in the Middle East, ranging from climbing to the top of the Great Pyramid to seeing a giraffe (“one feels an incredible pleasure in looking at it”).
Francesco’s account reveals that he had some understanding of Islam, but what he says is also at times incorrect and insulting. Towards the end of this work, he includes a section called The Contrasts, where he sets out to explain what made Muslims different from European Christians. This really is only one person’s views, one that is shaped by his own religious faith and that he was an outsider living in the Middle East. Here is what he writes:
When they pray they turn to the South towards the Tomb of Mohammed while we turn to the East and the Jews to the West.
In reality, Muslims pray toward Mecca, while Jewish people would have prayed in the direction of Jerusalem.
The men do housework and carry water and weave, and the women do the trading.
The women carry burdens on their shoulders and the men on their heads.
The men eat seated, the women standing.
Fathers are bound to feed their daughters but not their sons; and more the bastard than the legitimate.
These four points, and others further on, reveal much about what Francesco really thinks is different and wrong with Arabic people – to him they are too feminine, and women are given roles and rights that should only be reserved for men.
The barbers when at work sit and the clients stand.
They drink all day except when they eat.
They continually wash their hands, and their hands are always dirty.
This seems to be a reference to the Islamic practice of washing one’s face, hands, arms, and feet before prayers.
The women wear only one dress, the men wear three or four.
We take off our headgear in sign of respect, they take off their shoes.
The women wear trousers, and the men go without them.
In Lent we eat during the day and they fast during the day and eat like beasts all night.
This refers to Ramadan, a month-long celebration for Muslims where they fast during the day and will have feasts after sunset.
We address a letter when it is written, they begin with the address.
We urinate standing, they squatting as females.
We like dogs, they cats.
Having pets was common in the medieval world, and while the reputation of dogs and cats vary in different parts of the world, in neither culture it was universally so.
We drink wine, they water.
We are guided by the sun, they by the moon.
This is probably a reference to how the European calendar was solar-based, but the Islamic one is lunar-based.
We eat from on high, they from the ground.
We sleep undressed, they, men and women, dressed.
We value horses, they mares.
We girdle ourselves over the clothes, they under.
They write from right to left, we the reverse.
They wear linen, we wear wool.
Francesco does not take into account the differences in climate between Europe and the Middle East.
They sell chickens by measure, and fruits and vegetables they sell by weight on the balance.
They carry to market birds in a sack and figs in a cage.
We despise imbeciles and they revere them as saints.
Perhaps Francesco is referring to Sufi practitioners, who follow a more mystical path of Islam. Moreover, he seems to be oblivious to how his own Franciscan order was derided by many of his fellow Christians.
Slaves with us are servants, with them lords.
Later on Francesco has to make a detailed explanation of who the Mamluks were, and offers a less-than-accurate history of their rise to power in Egypt and Syria. Many enemies of the Mamluks often disparaged their origins as slaves.
Men give dowry to the wives, and we do the opposite.
Francesco also offers more details on this, finding this way more “just, reasonable and proper’ then the Italian practice where the parents of the bride had to offer a dowry to obtain a marriage. He explains why: “First, it would be a means whereby many poor girls could marry, who through poverty cannot marry, and so remain single in danger of sin and cause sin to others.”
We repudiate the wife, they the husband.
His sister also wanted to know about how wives can repudiate their husbands, by which he means they divorce their husbands, and Francesco responds by explaining this can happen in cases of abuse, neglect or abandonment. Divorce was actually fairly common in medieval Egypt, and both men and women could initiate it.
Men go barefooted, the women wear light shoes.
The men are beautiful; the women are most ugly and small.
The men wear clothes cut low, the women cut close to the neck.
The men wear a veil on the head, the women a cap.
The men never spit, the women do.
The men like cats, the women dogs.
Francesco sums it up by concluding “if they could they would walk backwards just to be different from us.”
Francesco’s list is very surprising – one would expect that this Franciscan friar would write about religious differences – instead, it is often just about daily life and trivial topics. However, there is often an underlying view that traditional gender roles were not being followed by medieval Muslims. More than a dozen of his contrasts involve women doing or wearing something that goes against what he thinks should be the proper way as found in Francesco’s homeland.
Not everything that Francesco finds to be different is to him a bad thing, and his view of Muslims isn’t always negative (at times he is far more critical of other Christian sects that lived in the region). But it is telling that he views the differences as somehow being in opposition to his own culture, as if it was somehow planned to be that way. One wonders how perplexed Francesco would have been if his travels took him to more distant lands and cultures.
This list is perhaps even more revealing in how much it shows the differences between medieval people and us. Francesco Suriano would see our modern-day lifestyles and habits as being very much ‘the other’, critiquing the way we dressed, ate, and slept. Who knows how upset he might become to learn that some people had pet fish!
Treatise on the Holy Land was translated by Theophilus Bellorini and Euguene Hoade as part of the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum series and published in 1949.
Top Image: British Library MS Additional 19587 fol. 8r and BNF MS Arabic 5847 fol. 130r
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