Alfonso X: Poetry of Miracles and Domination

Chapter three shifts the Crusades analysis from the Middle East to Gibraltar, studying the contentious political and literary career of Alfonso X in Spain. His extraordinary academic projects and intricate relations with Islamic communities have led scholars to minimize his combative lyric persona. A severely tested leader, Alfonso constructed two main targets for his attacks in song, the Muslims of the Mediterranean and his own knights for their failures against the fierce “Moor.” I counter the conventional treatment of this lyric poetry as light verse. This chapter shows how Alfonso used the specter of the enemy to provoke his own chivalric subjects into responding at court. Critics have portrayed Alfonso mostly entertaining his audiences with profane lyric while he completed more substantive religious and legislative manuscripts, but I argue that his aggressive troubadour persona allowed him to rework the imperial narrative. His image as Iberia’s intellectual, pious, combative, and at times slanderous leader expanded the definition of court and king.

The Sovereign and the Foreign: Creating Saladin in Arabic Literature of the Counter-Crusade

Continues the book’s examination of Arabic poetry as a means for ascent in the court and as a tool for exerting control over the empire. The focus here is the sultan Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn al-Ayyub, often called Saladin. During his transition from vizier to sultan during the twelfth-century Crusades, Saladin oversaw writers and political administrators vying with one another to construct his identity as Islam’s protector. The collapse of the Fatimid caliphate in Egypt and the threat of crusading armies gave the new regime a key opportunity. The Ayyubid system consolidated a previously scattered community of littérateurs. Whereas the Fatimids were seen as incapable eradicating “the Franks” from the Levant and Egypt, now writers challenged each other to poeticize a successful counter-crusade. Modern studies portray the Crusaders as a nagging anxiety of Saladin’s court but, I argue, the presence of a foreign enemy proved extraordinarily useful to him. Writers re-imagined Islamic history as having always included a mysterious threat to pious Muslim people, fully realized in the Franks’ arrival. At the cathartic endpoint of that narrative they placed Saladin and, more subtly, themselves as the chroniclers of Islam’s restoration.

Saladino Rinato: Spanish and Italian Courtly Fictions of Crusade

Completes the historical arc of the book, exploring the last generations of medieval writers, ushering in the Renaissance. Juan Manuel, Dante Alighieri, and Giovanni Boccaccio, created a new identity for Saladin after two centuries of European writing about the sultan. The refashioned Saladin challenged fellow knights on matters of chivalry, religion, and political history. Spanish and Italian literature used him in order to perform an allegorical, critical review of Christian identity. As these three European authors contemplated the fractious political spaces that their kingdoms were becoming, they found in Saladin a persona both chivalric and unsettling to chivalry as an institution. The Renaissance is known as the age in which Europe rediscovered Antiquity for the sake of intellectual progress, but that work was initiated through medieval reflections upon courtly life.

Conclusion: The Ministry of Culture

Considers the book’s findings on medieval literary culture by considering modern re-enactments of the Middle Ages. The conclusion inspects Baathist Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and the medieval nostalgia the Iraqi government ministries tried to promote. The book surveys the political uses for nostalgia, especially statements of longing for a functional, competitive court. From Dante’s anguished praise of past kings to modern military dictatorships’ cultural festivals, the spectacle of medieval performance animates our ideas and institutions.

Introduction: Courtly Gifts, Imperial Rewards

The book begins by exploring how we conceive of literature in the broader context of medieval history. I argue for the centrality of political crisis in cultural developments throughout the late Middle Ages. From that historical and theoretical framework, I give an overview of medieval imperial culture and the court’s techniques of representing the empire through literature. Competition, as a spectacle and an organizing principle of artistic creation, allowed members of the court to establish and exploit the parameters of culture. Just as importantly, it provided the rituals with which empires affirmed their identity during conflict, whether internal or foreign. The book’s argument opens with the image of political upheaval in the late Middle Ages and the way medieval conflicts have haunted our modern notions of culture, religion, and history.

‘Baghdad is to Cities What the Master is to Mankind’: The Rise of Vizier Culture

Examines the phenomenon of vizier-poets in medieval Baghdad and the ‘Abbasid provinces. Argues that Persian viziers used literary, administrative skill to overshadow royals and the caliph. These viziers in the imperial provinces supported Arabic literature with great enthusiasm, but also revised the rules of courtly membership and poets’ ritual jousts. Not content to simply patronize authors, they composed their own works. With poetic statements of self-praise, religious dogma, and satire aimed at insufficiently loyal courtiers, they altered the relationship between patron and poet, each of whom was now able to slander the other in verse. Their exchanges of inflammatory compositions became some of the most closely followed events of Abbasid life, drawing the attention of imperial citizens and stationing the viziers themselves as the central, intimidating arbiters of taste. In effect, the vizierial class began to legislate with literature.