Papal Rhetoric: Heretics, Muslims, and Jews 259
It shows that although the crusaders of your district and dioceses should have pre
pared heart and body to fight the battles of the lord, and to liberate the heritage of
Christ from the hands of the pagans who, because of the enormous sins of the
Christian people, hold and defile the Temple of God... yet (despite all this) these
very ones, along with others who have taken the Cross, plot impious designs against
the Jews...here Gregory was deliberately recalling the earlier comparison made by Alexander
II in ‘Placuit nobis’ which was influential enough to be recorded by Gratian in his
Decretum.79
Yet at times comparisons between Muslims and Jews might be much more nega
tive towards the latter. In a letter of 1205 Innocent III noted that Muslims living
in Spain had not only expelled Jews from their territory but rebuked Christians for
tolerating them:
... even the Saracens who persecute the Catholic faith and do not believe in the Christ
whom the Jews crucified, cannot tolerate the Jews and have even expelled them from
their territory, vehemently rebuking us for tolerating those by whom, as we openly
acknowledge, our redeemer was condemned to the suffering of the Cross... 80
nevertheless, even here, mindful of Christian theology, Innocent was careful to
stress that God’s Grace would eventually save the Jews as in his letter ‘Evangelica
docente scriptura’ of 1205:
For ‘fish’, since they live in water, stand for Christians who have a second birth by
means of water and the Spirit, while ‘men’, since they live upon the earth, stand for
Jews and pagans who breathe and cling to things terrestrial. But, after all Christians
shall have returned completely in obedience to the Apostolic Throne, then will
the multitude of Gentiles also be drawn to the Faith, and so ‘will Israel dwell in
safety’... 81So eventually—after all Christians had returned obediently to the Apostolic Faith—
Jews and even Muslims would also convert and be saved.82
for example, Innocent III referred to Muslims as ‘pagans’ in the full text of Innocent III, ‘Graves
orientalis terrae’ (31 december 1199), ed. o. hageneder, W. Maleczek, A. Strnad, Die Register
Innocenz III, Publikationen des Österreichischen Kulturinstituts in Rom, 2 (Graz, Vienna, Cologne,
1979), p.492.
79 Alexander II, ‘Placuit nobis’, Simonsohn, pp.35–6; Gratian, C.23.q.8.c.11, col. 955. See Gilbert
dahan, Les Intéllectuels chrétiens et les juifs au moyen âge (Paris, 1990), p.115.
80 Innocent III, ‘Etsi Judeos quos’, Grayzel, Vol. 1, p.114; Simonsohn, p. 86: ‘Saraceni, qui fidem
Catholicam persequuntur, nec credunt in crucifixum ab illis, sustinere non possunt, sed potius a suis
finibus expulerunt, in nos vehementius exclamantes, eo quod sustineantur a nobis, qui ab ipsis crucis
patibulo condemnatum redemptorem nostrum veraciter confitemur... ’.
81 Innocent III, ‘Evangelica docente scriptura’, Grayzel, Vol. 1, p. 110: ‘Pisces enim, qui vivunt in
aqua, Christianos designant, qui ex aqua et spiritu renascuntur; hominess autem, qui vivunt in terra,
Judeos et paganos significant, qui terrenis inhiant et inherent. Sed postquam ad obedientiam aposto
lice sedis omnes omnino reversi fuerint Christiani, tunc multitudo gentium intrabit ad fidem, et sic
omnis Israel salvus fiet ...’.
82 Innocent III, ‘Evangelica docente scriptura’, Grayzel, Vol. 1, p.110.