ABSTRACT
Throughout most of the Latin Middle Ages, ‘Saracen’ (Saracenus, Sarracenus, Sarrasin etc.) was the standard term used by Latin authors to refer to Muslims. By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, it had clearly religious overtones: Islam was known as ‘lex Sarraceni’ or ‘lex Mahometi’, terms which were used more or less interchangeably. Yet ‘Saracenus’ was originally a term used by Greek and Roman geographical and ethnographical authors to refer to certain peoples of the Arabian peninsula. The medieval image of ‘Saracens’ was in fact a fusion of two traditions: biblical discourse on the ‘Ishmaelites’, descendants of Abraham’s eldest son, and Roman discourse on the marauding ‘scenitae’ or ‘Sarraceni’ of the Arabian peninsula. 1 This fusion emerged well before the rise of Islam in late antique authors such as Jerome. In this chapter, I concentrate on the image of the Saracen/Ishmaelite in three Latin authors: Jerome, Isidore and Bede. We will see that the image of fierce marauding Saracens found in Jerome was still quite operative in Bede and that the rise of Islam had not fundamentally altered it.
