Ein Leben Mohammeds

Abstract

The principal purpose and nucleus of the article is the publication of a Latin text of highly demanding qualities in terms of philological principles which, in connection with its first abundantly annotated translation into German, has hitherto scarcely been noticed by researchers. The only literary collection which bears witness to the existence of the manuscript is a folio edition which presumably came into being in the middle of the 12th century, i. e. during the time of the crusades (conquest of Jerusalem in 1099) and is kept in the municipal library of the city of Treves. The dialogue between the anonymous author and a Greek, who hates the Saracens, forms the content. When, in the centre of the text, the author asks about Mohammed, the ‘monster’ (monstrum), the Greek relates the life of the hater of all Christians in the darkest colours. He begins wit Mohammed’s youth when he was a swineherd, continues with his devil-initiated encounter with the heretic Nestorius and the general development of a new common ‘faith’ as well as its spreading among the desert tribes by means of sorcery and deceipt and the student’s treacherous murder of his teacher. The assassin is then married to a Babylonian royal widow and, finally, meets his contumelious death caused by a pigs’ attack. The repeated comparison of our text with poetical ‘western’ scripts of the 11th and 12th centuries (Embricho of Mayence, Guibert of Nogent, Walter of Compiègne) as regards the subject matter leads us to the conclusion that our manuscript is likely to be of a most Islam critical tendency.