POLITICS AND RELIGION IN THE ERA OF RAMON LLULLhad a solid commercial background, and who in Majorca
became part of a new knightly elite. As a young man, Ramon
Llull lived in a society where there were still many Mus-
lims, and where the Jewish population enjoyed handsome
privileges from the crown. As a courtier of Prince James of
Majorca, he had ready access to the royal court, and, accord-
ing to his own perhaps exaggerated account, he led a dissol-
ute life; he certainly married and had two children. While
writing licentious poems in the troubadour tradition he
began to have visions of the crucifixion, and became aware
that in order to serve God he must abandon his life of
luxury and devote himself to the conversion of the infidel.^25
His great ambition was to write the best book ever against the
errors of unbelievers, but he could hardly hope to achieve
this until he learned Arabic (which he did, with the help of
a Muslim slave), and until he studied the key texts of Judaism,
Islam and Greek philosophy; he had direct contact with lead-
ing Catalan rabbis, and he also paid attention to the surviv-
ing works of the Mozarabic Christians which attacked Islam
with the help of a vast array of eastern Christian sources
little known in western Europe.~^6 This ambitious learning pro-
gramme not surprisingly kept him busy throughout the late
1260s and early 1270s, for nine years. However he was what
Isaiah Berlin would call a Fox: his aim was to know a great
many things in no great depth (as opposed to the Hedgehog
who knows only one thing, but something extremely import-
ant).^27 As well as sacred texts and philosophy, he studied law
and medicine, no doubt making use of the resources of the
great university at Montpellier in the lands of the Crown of
Aragon.
condensed version: Doctor illuminatus. A Ramon Llull reader, Princeton,
N], 1993). See also M.D. Johnston, The spiritual logic of Ramon Llull
(Oxford, 1987), and M.D. Johnston, The evangelical rhetoric of Ramon
Llull (New York/Oxford, 1995).- See Llull's autobiography in Bonner, Select Works, vol. 1, pp. 13-48.
- D. Urvoy, Penser l'Islam. Les presupposes islamiques de l' "art" de Lull
(Paris, 1980); T. Burman, Religious polemic and the intellectual history of
the Mozarabs, c.I050-1200 (Leiden, 1994), pp. 201-10; T. Burman,
The influence of the Apology of al-Kindi and Contrarietas alfolica on
Ramon Llull's late religious polemics, 1305-1313', Mediaeval Studies,
53 (1991), pp. 197-228. - I. Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox. An essay on Tolstoy's view of history
(London, 1953).