Saint Francis and the Sultan: The Curious History of a Christian-Muslim Encounter (review)

John Tolan presents his readers with a flickering movie reel of images of the meeting of St. Francis of Assisi and Malik al-Kamil, the Ayyubid sultan of Egypt. The two met at Damietta in the midst of the Fifth Crusade, and Tolan's book covers the visual and textual descriptions of the encounter from the first, written just six months later, to the most recent, referenced in op-ed pieces commenting on contemporary Christian-Muslim relations. Tolan deftly shows how each author or artist shifts the figures in the tableau, portraying and shaping European attitudes about sanctity, Islam, the crusades, and inter-religious dialogue. In many ways, these authors and artists are the real subjects of Tolan's book; they often emerge as far more solid figures than either Francis or al-Kamil.

Tolan covers the eight centuries of images in two parts. The first covers the 200 years following the meeting of the saint and the sultan, and each chapter focuses on a specific author or artist such as Bishop Jacques de Vitry, Angelo Clareno da Cingoli, or the artist of the Bardi Dossal. It is in this section that Tolan is at his strongest. The discussion of de Vitry, for example, is a superb mini-portrait of both the man and his age. In most cases, the primary concern here is Francis as the founder of a religious order and as a new model of Christian sanctity. The second part covers the remaining eight centuries, and Tolan discusses those crafting the image of the encounter in broader terms: Christians' reaction to the challenge of the Ottomans, Catholic apologists confronting Protestant criticism, Enlightenment philosophes decrying the corruption of religious orders. Here, the concerns have broadened beyond the Franciscan Order and Francis's sanctity to Francis as a symbol of Roman Catholicism.

The reader thus receives a learned and thoughtful tour through eight centuries. But a tour of what? As Tolan recognizes, discussions of the saint and the sultan are never really about the encounter itself, but are ciphers for other concerns. Tolan, for example, shows that for de Vitry, the first narrator of the encounter, Francis was emblematic of the larger reform movement that de Vitry championed. At other moments, it is not as clear what is at stake. When discussing Bonaventure, minister general of the Franciscan Order, Tolan comments that "he invokes Francis as a model for a specific purpose: to show that it is impossible to convert the Saracens through rational or scriptural arguments" (p. 134). True. But why is Bonaventure so interested in using the founder of his order to show this? To show the Saracens to be irrational, or to show the inadequacy of rational argument to convert anyone to true faith? Given Tolan's previous work on European imagination about Muslims, one might expect that a larger point of the book would concern the ways in which the depictions of the sultan reveal Europe's propensity to see the failures and temptations of the world represented in Islam. Yet Tolan makes no such claim or any other about the larger significance of the encounter's enduring fascination. His book provides a welcome and useful survey of the changing European perspectives on Francis and al-Kamil, and will be a welcome addition for scholars and readers interested in Francis, his changing image, and European perspective on Islam.