Have you ever wondered how people in the Middle Ages viewed those of different faiths? You might think they focused on moral and religious differences, but one medieval Italian writer, Francesco Suriano, offers a surprising perspective: the real differences lay in everyday habits like clothing, food, and pets.
Francesco Suriano’s Treatise on the Holy Land, written in 1485, provides a unique look at the contrasts between Christians and Muslims during his time. Francesco, who spent over 25 years in the Middle East, detailed his observations in a conversational style with his sister, a nun. His work reveals much about daily life and cultural practices, sometimes more so than religious beliefs.
The Surprising Contrasts
Francesco’s list of comparisons, found in a section aptly named “The Contrasts,” outlines what he saw as key differences between Christians and Muslims. Here are some highlights:
Prayer Direction: “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.)
Gender Roles: “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 points 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.)
Personal Hygiene: “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.)
Clothing: “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.”
Dining Practices: “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.)
Writing Habits: “We address a letter when it is written, they begin with the address.” “They write from right to left, we the reverse.”
Pet Preferences: “We like dogs, they cats.”
Drinking Habits: “We drink wine, they water.”
Timekeeping: “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.)
Dining Position: “We eat from on high, they from the ground.”
Sleeping Habits: “We sleep undressed, they, men and women, dressed.”
Animal Preference: “We value horses, they mares.”
Clothing Preferences: “We girdle ourselves over the clothes, they under.” “They wear linen, we wear wool.” (Francesco does not take into account the differences in climate between Europe and the Middle East.)
Market Practices: “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.”
Views on Fools: “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.)
Slavery: “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 enslaved peoples.)
Marriage Practices: “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” than 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.”)
Divorce Practices: “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.)
Footwear: “Men go barefooted, the women wear light shoes.”
Appearance: “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.”
Getting Haircuts: “The barbers when at work sit and the clients stand.”
Drinking Habits: “They drink all day except when they eat.”
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 Eugene Hoade as part of the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum series and published in 1949.
Top Image: British Library MS Royal 19 D. I fol. 65
Have you ever wondered how people in the Middle Ages viewed those of different faiths? You might think they focused on moral and religious differences, but one medieval Italian writer, Francesco Suriano, offers a surprising perspective: the real differences lay in everyday habits like clothing, food, and pets.
Francesco Suriano’s Treatise on the Holy Land, written in 1485, provides a unique look at the contrasts between Christians and Muslims during his time. Francesco, who spent over 25 years in the Middle East, detailed his observations in a conversational style with his sister, a nun. His work reveals much about daily life and cultural practices, sometimes more so than religious beliefs.
The Surprising Contrasts
Francesco’s list of comparisons, found in a section aptly named “The Contrasts,” outlines what he saw as key differences between Christians and Muslims. Here are some highlights:
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 Eugene Hoade as part of the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum series and published in 1949.
Top Image: British Library MS Royal 19 D. I fol. 65
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