196 FOURTH PERIOD. A.D. 590-1049.
merly a Mohammedan, who justified his conversion, with the aid of the emperor, in four apologies and four orations) J Euthymius Zigabenus, Gennadius, patriarch of Constantinople. Prominent in the Latin church were Peter, Abbot of Clugny (twelfth century), Thomas Aquinas, Alanus ab Insulis, Raimundus Lullus, Nicolaus of Cusa, Ricold or Richard (a Dominican monk who lived long in the East), Savonarola, Joh. de Turrecremata. The mediaeval writers, both Greek and Latin, represent Mo hammed as an impostor and arch-heretic, who wove his false religion chiefly from Jewish (Talmudic) fables and Christian heresies. They find him foretold in the Little Horn of Daniel, and the False Prophet of the Apocalypse. They bring him in connection with a Nestorian monk, Sergius, or according to others, with the Jacobite Bahira, who instructed Mohammed, and might have converted him to the Christian religion, if ma lignant Jews had not interposed with their slanders. Thus he became the shrewd and selfish prophet of a pseudo-gospel, which is a mixture of apostate Judaism and apostate Christianity with a considerable remnant of his native Arabian heathenism. Dante places him, disgustingly torn and mutilated, among the chief heretics and schismatics in the ninth gulf of Hell,
" Where is paid the fee By those who sowing discord win their burden." l
1 Inferno, Canto XXVIII. 22 sqq. (Longfellow's translation) : " A cask by losing centre-piece or cant
Was never shattered so, as I saw one
Rent from the chin to where one breaketh wind. Between his legs were hanging down his entrails ;
His heart was visible, and the dismal sack
That maketh excrement of what is eaten. While I was all absorbed in seeing him,
He looked at me, and opened with his hands
His bosom, saying: 'See now how I rend me; How mutilated, see, is Mahomet ;
In front of me doth Ali weeping go,
Cleft in the face from forelock unto chin ; And all the others whom thou here beh oldest,
Sowers of scandal and of schism have been
While living, and therefore are thus cleft asunder.' n
g 47. CHRISTIAN POLEMICS AGAINST MOHAMMEDANISM. 197
This mediaeval view was based iii part upon an entire igno rance or perversion of facts. It was then believed that Moham medans were pagans and idolaters, and cursed the name of Christ, while it is now known, that they abhor idolatry, and esteem Christ as the highest prophet next to Mohammed.
The Reformers and older Protestant divines took substantially the same view, and condemn the Koran and its author without qualification. AVe must remember that down to the latter part of the seventeenth century the Turks were the most dangerous enemies of the peace of Europe. Luther published, at Witten berg, 1540, a German translation of Richard's Confutatio Alcorani, with racy notes, to show "what a shameful, lying, abomiable book the Alcoran is." He calls Mohammed "a devil and the first-born child of Satan." He goes into the question, whe ther the Pope or Mohammed be worse, and comes to the con clusion, that after all the Pope is worse, and the real Anti-Christ (Endcchnst). " Wohlan" he winds up his epilogue, "God grant us his grace and punish both the Pope and Mohammed, together with their devils. I have done my part as a true prophet and teacher. Those who won't listen may leave it alone." Even the mild and scholarly Melanchthon identifies Mohammed with the Little Horn of Daniel, or rather with the Gog and Magog of the Apocalypse, and charges his sect with being a compound of " blasphemy, robbery, and sensuality." It is not very strange that iii the heat of that polemical age the Romanists charged the Lutherans, and the Lutherans the Calvinists, and both in turn the Romanists, with holding Mohammedan heresies.1
1 Maracci, Vivaldus, and other Roman writers point out thirteen or more heresies in which Mohammedanism and Lutheranism agree, such as iconoclasm, the rejection of the worship of saints, polygamy (in the case of Philip of Hesse), etc. A fanatical Lutheran wrote a book to prove that " the damned Calvinists hold six hundred and sixty-six theses (the apocalyptic number) in common with the Turks!" The Calvinist Roland, on the other hand, finds analogies to Romish errors in the Mohammedan prayers for the dead, visiting the graves of prophets, pilgrimages to Mecca, intercession of angels, fixed fasts, meritorious almsgiving, etc.