1This paper deals with the new spatial conception that permeates the treatises on How to Recover the Holy Land produced from the fall of Acre to the death of John XXII1. The new Crusade theory encompassed lands from both shores of the Mediterranean, form the Iberian Peninsula to Anatolia and the Near East. In addition to this, plans for intervention beyond the Dar al-Islam were raised by authors such as Fidenzio of Padua, Ramon Llull, Hayton of Korikos, Marino Sanudo and William Adam who sought to enlarge tremendously European elite’s geopolitical horizon. However, here I seek to present this vast expansion in geographical awareness not only as the outcome of the economical, political or military dramatic changes occurred in Eurasia during the second half of the thirteenth century, but as a consequence as well of the resulting encounter between two antagonistic views of reality.

2For the first time in the history of the Crusades strategic reasoning was massively applied to the implementation of the holy war. That brought to the first level of the Latin letters an extravagant combination of holistic and fragmentary views of reality; that is, on the one side a way of thinking that tended to erase the boundaries between consciousness and its incarnations and, on the other, an understanding of reality that purposely sought to distinguish causes and effects, to divide time into phases and to differentiate reality into isolated manifestations.

3Traditionally, the strategy that counted was not military but discursive. The Crusade was held to be an expression of God’s will whose result was not of human concern; only the fight was. Professional and technical knowledge was dismissed as superfluous. The proper Crusade had to be carried on by penitent-soldiers who, more than intelligence, required a pure heart and a steadfast purpose. All preparative efforts would be dedicated exclusively to spiritual reformation and appropriate penance2.

4The governing messianic tradition of penance and ordeal provided the logical framework for the understanding of the fight against the enemies of the Christian experience as a whole, for nowhere was to be found a clear line that separated the internal and the external dimension of such experience. This holistic understanding of the holy war not only was endorsed with the legitimacy provided by centuries of uninterrupted continuity. It would survive to the tragic loss of the Holy Land in 1291 and find a place in the Western mind well beyond the Medieval and Modern eras. As late as the nineteenth century, traces of this unitary conception of the human conflict are to be found in the writings of Joseph de Maistre who believed that battles «ne se gagnent ni ne se perdent point physiquement […], c’est l’imagination qui perd les batailles. […] Vaincre, c’est advancer. Mais quel est celui qui avance? C’est celui dont la conscience et la contenance font reculer l’autre»3.

5Nonetheless, by the end of the thirteenth century this sort of cosmic organizing principle was overtly challenged by a more materialistic approach. The new and positivistic reasoning advocated for specialization and the division of time, space and labor as the most effective way to secure the victory against the enemies of the Cross and, thus, the incarnation on Earth of the Kingdom of Heaven. Surprisingly, the first steps in the political sphere of this alternative methodology —what William Adam used to call modus secundus, facilior et melior— followed closely the pontifical call on the whole of Christianity to contribute technical advice in preparing for the new and definitive crusade for the Recovery of the Holy Land.

6In 1274, the Second Council of Lyons officially extended the spiritual privileges bestowed upon the soldiers fighting with the sword —the plenary indulgence— to anybody else who might contribute with written information valuable for the accomplishment of the new crusade. With the definitive loss of Acre in 1291, Pope Nicholas IV renewed his plea for written information on how to recover the now completely lost Holy Land4. Subsequent popes from Boniface VIII to John XXII firmly shared with Gregory X his trust in first hand information as the best possible way to facilitate the decision making.

7The pontifical urge for written information was meant to overcome their limited access to the actual situation in the field of action. Confined knowledge about the state of the ultramarine business was imposed by a society primarily characterized by its stratification along lines of state, rank and guild affiliation. The popes of the post-acconian era keenly searched for an alternative perspective, to see things from a different angle, and thus encouraged others to do the same. It seems that the oppresion d’encerclement that Alphonse Dupront identified in authors such as Pierre Dubois and Ramon Llull was felt earlier and with equal intensity at the highest political circles of the thirteenth and fourteenth-century Latin West5.

8Almost thirty tractates give testimony to the success of the papal call for practical wisdom produced in the field of action. Most of the authors of the Recovery tractates came from places which are generally identified with the so-called periphery of Europe and from regions noticeable for their mixed Muslim and Christian population. Similarly, many of these writers had experienced overseas travels for decades around the Mediterranean and the further East. The most innovative contributions, however, were provided by authors who belonged to the emergent social strata of fourteenth-century Europe. Sylvia Schein has showed the clear anti-feudal character of this documentary body of work6. Taken as a whole, the Recovery tractates gave further visibility to the most dynamic sectors of the Latin West and had a catalyzing effect on emerging practices aimed at the accumulation of practical knowledge. The Recovery tractates conveyed the expertise developed by their authors in an extremely varied assortment of fields. They would give the pope and the king of France access to a wide-ranging spectrum of information and the latest technological innovations such as the advent of portulan maps in cartography, the new cultural trends like the teaching Oriental languages in European universities, the latest discussions concerning juridical culture and regulating techniques for the allocation of power and resources, as well as the activities of pirates, renegades, and enemies of the Latin Church.

9But among the most significant implications of the accumulation of a kind of practical knowledge was the enlargement of the geographical area subjected to the intervention of the crusaders. The many perspectives of the Recovery authors converged in some key points. One of them was the overwhelming power of the adversary, the Sultan of Cairo, which, indeed, made the chances of success through direct confrontation very unlikely. Hence it was better to look for alternative fronts of intervention and potential allies. In addition to this, the contribution of consummate travelers like Fidenzio of Padua, Hayton of Armenia, Marino Sanudo, Ramon Llull or William Adam was instrumental in identifying trade with the Indian Ocean as the basis of the Sultan’s power7. The distribution through the Mediterranean of spices and other Indian commodities was the exclusive privilege of the Mamluks. If this monopoly ended, it would equally be for the benefit of the crusaders as well as the port-cities and mercantile republics spread all over the catholic Mediterranean.

10This sort of exploratores —as Fidenzio called them— gave the most peculiar taste to their reports by providing information about communities of European emigrants in Persia and India. Latin navigators and ship builders were said to be working directly for the Tartar khans. Some authors saw here the opportunity for a coalition between the pope, those Europeans in Asia, and the Mongols to introduce armed galleys in the Indian Ocean to place them against the Egyptian trade. However, given the unpredictability of the Mongols, their military support could have been done without and the support of the Hindu kings of the Malabar Coast suffering with the rapid expansion of the Sultan of Delhi could have been enlisted. On the western coast of India too, Latin expatriates were reported to be sailing the seas of the Indies. They could also be engaged, through appropriate reward, in the crusade against the Mamluks.

11Significantly, the idea of direct military intervention in the rear of the Mamluks —envisioned by the Dominican friar William Adam and afterwards borrowed by Marino Sanudo8— relied more heavily on the role of Latin emigrants than on the intervention of the Mongol khans, the Hindu princes, or the Ethiopian emperors. Latin expatriates would build the galleys, would pilot them and would fight against the Mamluks in the Arabian Sea since the local inhabitants were totally unaware of naval war practices in the open sea.

12Nonetheless, this was a difficult issue since most of these emigrants were indifferent to the fate of the pontifical policy when not overtly opposed to its expansionistic agenda. Many of the Recovery tractates agreed that these Latin expatriates were one of the main obstacles to the restoration of the pontifical rule over the Eastern Mediterranean. Latin emigrants were selling war material to the enemy, working as mercenaries and providing advice to khans and sultans. Thousands of them were renegades, outlaws and pirates who did not hesitate to go against Christian commercial and military interests.

13The authors of these tractates were particularly aware of the many dangers posed by these mali chrisitiani as well as its humiliating effects for the entire Christianity9. But it is precisely this realization that makes the incorporation of their interests to the plans for the recovery of the Holy Land more astonishing. While the moral condition of the cruce signati was the central issue for previous generations of crusade planners, the Recovery tractates preferred the technical knowledge gained by Latin expatriates despite their low credibility and social recognition.

14William Adam wrote in his De Modo Sarracenos Extirpandi of the thousands of Europeans scattered over Alexandria, Red Sea, Persia, the Western coast of India and even Ethiopia. Though crucial to the Recovery agenda, few of these expatriates could be relied upon for accurate information as the pope did not have much to offer to them in return10. The gathering of this sort of alternative information about the lands at the rear of the Mamluks had to be done relying on the very few men loyal to the pope among the many Latin emigrants in Asia11.

15In this respect, the words of William Adam in chapter V of his De Modo Sarracenos Extirpandi might have been loaded with further meaning. Following William Adam’s professional career, his distrust towards Latin emigrants in Asia appears to be primarily directed to his fellow mendicant friars. Along with his advice to the pope on how to recover the Holy Land, William Adam delivered in person additional information intended to secure the pontifical interests in Asia and the Indian Ocean. According to the chronicles of the Dominican Order and the pontifical letters, William Adam played a leading role in the creation of the archbishopric of Sultania12. The archiepiscopal see founded at the new capital of the Il-Khanate in 1318 was reserved exclusively for Dominican bishops of the recently founded Societas Fratrum Peregrinantum propter Christum and had jurisdiction over the whole of Asia and the Indian Ocean, except China. Dominican friars decided where to create new bishoprics and how to proceed with the many mendicant friars already spread all over Asia and the Indies. In return for the protection and assistance assured by the Il-Khan to William Adam, Pope John XXII rewarded the Society of the Pilgrim Friars with what Raymond Loenertz regarded as the biggest concession of power ever known in the History of the Church13. Meanwhile in Europe, Thomas of Aquinas was being canonized in what several other scholars consider an additional gesture of the strong anti-Franciscan policy launched by John XXII14.

16The unusual jurisdictional and disciplinary power left under the exclusive control of the Pilgrim Friars unleashed lamentable fights between the Dominicans loyal to the pope and the Franciscans of the Spiritual kin. These fraticelli were suffering prosecution in Europe since the Second Council of Lyons and for the time being had found shelter in Asia. In Tabriz in 1333, it was heard that these refugees constituted three quarters of the whole Franciscan Order and that they were giving shape to a dangerous heresy that could threaten the very existence of the Roman Church15. All the authority bestowed by the pope upon the Dominican bishops was used to curb these threats to the spiritual monopoly of the Roman Curia.

17But the central task assumed by the Society of the Pilgrim Friars was none other than the foundation of new bishop sees all over Asia. However, some of these sees were not qualified at all for the episcopal title, for they did not have the required amount of Christians nor the material conditions that could guarantee its continuity16. The pontifical bullae, besides the usual pious exhortations, pointed to aliis rationabilibus causis as the main drive for such apparently inconsequent decisions making17. That point was made obvious in 1329 by the pontifical appointment of Quilon as the first Latin Episcopal see in the Indian Ocean and Jordan Catala as its first bishop. The port-city was renowned for its strategic location in the middle of the Malabar Coast, its splendid teak woods, and the favorable predisposition of the local ruler against the Sultan of Delhi. Long before Jordan Catala could have informed the pope about the wonders of the Western Coast of India18, William Adam pointed at Quilon as the best possible place to build and equip the pontifical galleys meant to fight the Mamluk trade in the Arabian Sea.

18The connection between the exploits in Asia of the Society of the Pilgrim Friars and the Recovery agenda is also supported by the production of empirical descriptions of the lands, seas, peoples, maritime, commercial and war practices in Asia and the Indies by the newly appointed Dominican bishops. The reports produced by John of Galifontibus and especially by Jordan Catala suggest several possible understandings. However, they contained a good deal of practical information that would contribute efficiently to William Adam’s appeal to terram mari Indico contiguam et aliquas insula prelustrare.

19Similarly, the descriptions of the tangible Indies wrote by Franciscan friars during the first decades of the fourteenth century might have been also closely connected to the Recovery dream. Paolo Evangelisti has shown that the Descriptions of the Indies by John of Montecorvino, Odorico of Pordenone and John of Marignolli along with the De Recuperatione tractate of Fidenzio of Padua shared a common discursive strategy overtly directed to assert their privileged position at the main Asiatic court and their capacity to influence the Khans’ decisions19.

20On the eve of an imminent new crusade to recover the Holy Land, the prospects of Mongol aid to overthrow the Mamluks from the Eastern Mediterranean was one of the main issues discussed between Clement V and Phillip the Fair. In 1307, the pope received in Poitiers the tractates of Jacques of Molay, Fulk of Villaret and Hayton of Korikos along with one of the Il-khan ambassador and the letters wrote in China by John of Montecorvino20. In this context, the promising news about the Great Khan brought by the Franciscans encouraged the pope to declare Beijing the first Latin Episcopal see in the Far East and John of Montecorvino its first bishop.

21Conversely, Odorico of Pordenone and John of Marignolli’s allegations in favor of the Franciscan presence in Asia leave no doubt about their endorsement to the Recovery plea for more stable and successful relations with the main courts at the rear of the Mamluks21.

22But without leaving the Recovery framework of analysis there’s plenty of evidence that attest how the most varied and even bizarre interests were given pre-eminence by associating them to the prospects of the new Crusade. In fact this can be considered one of the most prominent features of almost every Recovery tractate. Take Pierre Dubois’ardent support of the pouvoir royal, Marino Sanudo’s eloquent defense of the commercial Republics interests, Ramon Llull’s ambitious ideas about a world-wide conversion to the Catholic faith, Hayton of Korikos praising of the oriental Christians’fidelity to the Roman cause, etc. In all these cases the Recovery ideal seems to have worked as pretext to hide the real intentions of their authors22. But beyond the varying degrees of proficiency of each author in promoting their own privative agendas, the new Crusade theory was based on the very idea of multiplicity of perspectives, originality of approaches, and the need for a synergetic confluence of these fragmentary vantage points.

23Such strategic compromises were at the core of the Recovery theory and reached greater visibility as time passed. For instance, Sylvia Schein pointed at the deliberations of the Council of Vienne as particularly cautious, circumspect, and almost entirely concerned with the preliminaries for the new Crusade. The uncontested power of the Sultan of Cairo suggested that the best course of action was to postpone the deadlines established for the final combat. The Grand Masters of the Military Orders, as well as William Durant and William of Nogaret recommended the suspension of all military action during ten, twenty years and even longer periods in order to implement new taxes, collect money and other material resources. In his last tractate Ramon Llull suggested a new and ambitious training program for soldiers and leaders of the new expedition that would take years to put into practice. He also advised the postponement of the ultramarine Crusade in order to allow time to reinforce the Iberian Crusade, the reconquista23.

24Franco Cardini has suggested that this sort of dilazione programatica might have worked as a de facto renouncement to the final objective of the Recovery of the Holy Land24. But we may add that it also worked the other way round. By treating the Recovery as something imminent and definitive —hence a thing of the past—, positive thinkers such as Pierre Dubois managed to skip their many flaws in military intelligence and thus to advertise their meritorious theories on allocation of power, jurisprudence and colonialism25. New and original ways of conceptualizing time, space, knowledge and power allowed the Recovery theoreticians to look distinctively at initial and subsequent phases of the Crusade, to reallocate fix and movable targets, and to redefine what could be changed and what could not.

25Nowhere else the sharp differentiation between ends and means is clearer than in the last work under consideration here: the Directorium ad passagium facendum26. The foremost aim of the Directorium was to provide military instructions for the Latin conquest of the Balkans. That issue not only consumed most of the narrative economy of the Directorium, it was also the only subject discussed —and eventually discarded— by Philip VI’s Royal Council27. The author left aside any consideration on matters which otherwise he seemed to know pretty well like the possibility of Mongol support, the intervention in the rear of the Mamluks, or the deviation of the Asiatic commercial routes. Actually, there is not mention to the subject advanced in the title of the tractate: the passagium generale. It seems that the four decades of fruitless results encouraged our author to narrow still more the scope of his analysis.

26However, he kept tightly attached to the Recovery rhetoric supported by extensive disquisitions about the geographical disposition of all the inhabited lands and the unfavorable place occupied by the Latin West. More significantly, the high degree of separateness between the foundational principle and the practical means for its accomplishment allowed our author to break the territorial limits of the Recovery mobilizing principle. Echoing Ramon Llull’s and Pierre Dubois’tentative ideas about the identification of the Catholic heritage with the Roman Empire, the author of the Directorium declared the Byzantine Empire, the Dar al Islam and, plus ultra, the three Indies as the legitimate objective of the Recovery ideology28.

27In their attempt to project over the whole World an idea of domination that initially was confined to the Holy Land of the venerable penitent-soldier tradition, the Recovery authors had to struggle as well to adapt allegorical conceptions of the East to the urgencies of now. At times, new knowledge about the East was, so to say, embedded in classical patterns. Thus, the Euphrates is sometimes called one of the Paradise rivers and India the source of heavenly riches. The Antipodes are mentioned here and there although increasingly set aside in the mental map. Actually, wonders, monsters, mythical figures, or ideas about the Indies as the land next to Paradise played an insignificant role in these tractates29.

28Similarly, none of these tractates used the traditional T-O allegorical figurations that incorporated history, legend, image, and text, but was not based on empirical observation. Conversely, some authors did use the new cartographic devices —the portulan charts— which were strictly concerned with the representation of the volumetric space and the detailed position of ports and geophysical features in relation to one another30. More astonishing perhaps, there’s not a single mention to the Prester John in the whole of the Recovery literature. None of its authors dared neither to affirm nor to deny his existence. Indeed, these tractates constitute an unique and exceptional parenthesis of quietness in the seven centuries-long tradition of the most legendary Oriental ally that the Latin West has had in the fight against Islam.

29Significantly enough, authors like Adam or Sanudo opted for new allegories that made the twofold endeavour of providing new information about the Indies without challenging the legitimate tradition easier to accomplish. Images of the human body —where the Arabian Sea, the Red Sea and the Mediterranean were depicted as the stomach, the throat and the limbs of the Mamluk empire— or of the tree —where roots, trunk and branches played an equivalent role— demonstrated the huge display of empirical observation and narrative imagination that was required in order to convey to the audience the new territorial version of the Indies.

30Certainly, the Recovery theory was constructed upon a non-elite language trained to analyze, to mark differences, and to fix the quality of a particular experience as such. Particularly obvious, the geographical enlargement underwent by the Crusade theory after the loss of Acre was predicted upon the assertion of the primacy of the individual experience. Its value as truth was assessed as a function of its immediacy, for it was assumed that the less mediated the contact with matter is in time and space, the more effective it is.

31However it is quite interesting to observe how the Recovery mobilizing principle derived all its force from a synoptic view of reality. That synoptic vision was absolute and complete. There was nothing gradual or indeterminate on it as there was not distance between knowledge and its object. This concept discounts the importance of observation and emphasizes divine inspiration or —as Gregory the Great put it— self-knowledge as the source of superior knowledge. Both, the allegorical East and the penitent-soldier messianic traditions worked as frames of reference that organized everything around a high center. Its legitimacy was intrinsic and therefore undermined the prestige of eyewitnesses by arguing that senses could mislead and, more important, that observation did not necessarily entail understanding31.

32The old messianic tradition of the crucesignati kept on providing the rhetorical framework for the understanding of the Recovery tractates. But it was rather innovation projecting itself as tradition what managed to preserve the appearance of continuity. The Recovery literature made use of a kind of language that was able to comply with traditional legacy and simultaneously mark a departure from it. Such language might have been strategically used to avoid direct confrontation with an inefficient yet still governing tradition by privileging those aspects of innovation that enhanced the idea of continuity.

33The encounter between these two competing views of reality in the Recovery tractates might be an indicator of the effective reduction of legitimacy and power experienced by the promoters of such tractates. The critical situation of the Church and her allies in the Eastern Mediterranean called for practical and imminent solutions that seem responsible for the bottom-up movement of ideas and attitudes that introduced division of time, space and labor in the Crusade discourse. Most probably such mode of apprehending the world has its origins in the sphere of technical work. Nowhere else this empirical approach was more effective than in the manipulation of matter. The ability of practical professionals to divide and apportion things allowed to reduce his problems to manageable proportions and to go beyond the immediately given limits of nature. The astonishing success attained in the last decades of the thirteenth century in the professional fields of medicine, navigation, astronomy, cartography, accounting, urban planning, and so on seems to have drawn the attention of those having problems in other domains of the public life32.

34One might expect this fragmentary epistemology to have worked against the essence of the Crusadistic ideal which submitted all divisions to unitary-universal principles. And to a certain extent this happened. But a still more far-reaching consequence of this encounter was the greater ascendency and further meaning gained by this materialistic approach through its association to the divinely-ordained hierarchical realm of the Crusades33.

35That association became one of the main ideological sources of the European expansionistic agenda of the following centuries. Both the Iberian discoveries of the maritime routes to the East and the West Indies was predicted upon a large amount of mental arithmetic, empirical observation, and the anticipation of results. However these ventures were persistently nourished by an eschatological understanding of the war against Islam for the possession of the Holy Land. Either the introduction of Portuguese ships in the Indian Ocean, the drainage of American gold or the total expulsion of Jews and Muslim from an almost unified Iberian peninsula followed closely the discursive strategy devised by the Recovery tractates two centuries earlier.

36However, it must be observed that the Recovery agenda was better pursued when competing national versions of culture and language were already firmly rooted in European soil. Seemingly, the old pan-European dream was better achieved by a fragmented Europe. The beginnings of the Modern expansion ought as much to the geographical discoveries of the fifteenth century as to the division of the Earth accorded in Tordesillas and the division of the Church consummated in Wittenberg. Ever since then, the European expansionistic model relies as much on universal-organizing principles on monarchy, religion and civilization as well as upon a fragmentary epistemology that initially was intended to allow parties to synchronize activities without truly achieving complete agreement. It is therefore an expansionistic enterprise of high cost in social terms, not only because of the suppression of the newly encountered Others but, more significantly, because of the high rate of internal conflicts inside those national versions of language and culture and also between one another.

37The roots of this ‘paradox model’ lie in its imperative necessity to absorb ‘order’ from a force which also contained an antithesis. That allowed old supremacy feelings to survive and adapt to new situations. But it also conferred upon the provisional knowledge of a fragmentary epistemology the power to address universal categories of thought and the reasoning of the internal relationship among the multiple components of reality.

38This sort of ontological incongruence manifested itself vividly through the raising of the mundane lore of subaltern groups as well as through the vast enlargement of the geopolitical horizons of the European elites. As I have try to prove in this paper, both foundational constituents of the Modern Era were fully delineated in the tractates on How to Recover the Holy Land of the last decade of the thirteenth century and firsts of the fourteenth.