In the history of Muslim-Christian contacts, the Crusades were an important stage. It was at this time that Western Europe opened up opportunities for direct communication with the Muslim world. Did a closer acquaintance with the Muslim East engender new Christian attitudes towards Islam, did this acquaintance expand knowledge about Muslims and overcome past stereotypes? It is possible to judge what ideas about Islam were formed at this time only on the basis of chronicles of the Crusades, in which, as it is possible to assume, the real information of the crusaders about the events is also reflected. Is it possible to find a direct echo of real events in these works, in any case in chronicles written by eyewitnesses; Are personal observations of chroniclers at odds with ideological principles, do their statements about Muslims contradict stereotypes? Trying to reconstruct the image of Islam from the chronicles, we will focus primarily on the characterization by the chroniclers of the moral qualities of “Saracens”,
(Saracens - the ancient Greeks called the Arabian Arabs (the Greek σαραxηνός comes, apparently, from the Arabic word shark - East); in the Middle Ages, along with the Ishmaels and Hagarites, the name of Muslims became common among Christians), their behavior in everyday life and their ideas about moral standards.
It is necessary to immediately make a reservation: military conflicts clearly did not favor mutual understanding. But the need to comprehend the Other, to evaluate his moral and combat qualities, to expand his knowledge of the enemy, even for purely practical purposes, undoubtedly existed from the very beginning. And therefore, in the chronicles you can find not only descriptions of battles and battles, but also statements about the behavior and actions of Muslims in everyday life. Of course, the judgments of the chroniclers about Islam in many respects distort reality, and sometimes they are pure fantasy, but it is in these fantastic stories about a foreign culture that Christian ideas about the moral qualities of Muslims are reflected.
In an effort to reconstruct the concept of Muslims, we will first of all study the methods of depicting Gentiles inherent in medieval historiography. We will try to investigate the narrative discourse of the chroniclers, their statements and presentation style. From our point of view, it is precisely in the analysis of discourse that one should see the key to the study of representations, because there is an undoubted connection between the style of narration, the manner of speaking and a certain vision of what is happening. One or another idea of the subject of the story ultimately determines the nature of the constitution of the text. It should be borne in mind that the text is not something immutable, self-sufficient, it seems to play the role of an intermediary between the author and his intended reader, between the addressee and the addressee. The medieval author and his reader are connected by common ideas, symbolic knowledge of the world, a set of norms and values accepted in society.
The author of the text proceeds from this worldview system and interprets what is happening in the categories of his own culture. On the basis of this implicit knowledge, he builds his story and in the same way, based on these ideas and values accepted by society, the addressee can decipher the various statements addressed to him. The interaction of the addressee and the addressee determines the structure of the text. “Every statement,” wrote M. M. Bakhtin, “always has an addressee ... the reciprocal understanding of which the author of the speech work seeks and anticipates ...”; “An event of the life of the text, i.e. its true essence always develops at the boundary of two consciousnesses ”, representing a dialogue between the addressee and the addressee, and this attitude is reflected “ in the structure of the utterance itself ”.
In particular, in the very structure of the speech of the chroniclers, their statements addressed to an imaginary readership, information that characterizes Christian ideas about Muslims is hidden. So, we will be interested in the question of how the narrative of the Other is constructed (the story of Muslims, their mores and morals) and what is the discourse of otherness inherent in chroniclers. To this end, we will not, in order to extract information, compare the image of Muslims created in the chronicles with real information known from other sources, but we will try to study the internal logic of the text and recreate the manner in which chroniclers describe Muslims.
In the chronicles of the Crusades, one can identify a number of fantastic stories in which Muslims are given a moral assessment. Chronists most often paint small scenes in which the characters are Muslim emirs, rank-and-file warriors, members of their families, as well as Christian captives or crusader knights. In order to create an effect of the reality of the events described, chroniclers often included direct speech in their stories — sometimes these are imaginary monologues, supposedly delivered by Muslim emirs, or dialogues between Muslims and Christians invented by chroniclers.
To be continued.