Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain by Joseph F. O’Callaghan (review)

REVIEWS 257 “Mandelli and Petrarch, Military and Court Life”) might more naturally be incorporated into the Introduction, where the topics are only touched on, and footnotes could accommodate the more tangential comments. This is a minor quibble, but might have made for a slightly smoother reading experience as well as a psychologically less daunting presentation of learnedness in advance of the slight, but intriguing, text. Petrarch composed the Itinerarium in three days in the spring of 1358, as a present for his friend Giovanni Mandelli, meaning it to take his physical place on Mandelli’s pilgrimage. Petrarch begged off the trip, claiming fear of seasickness , and, interestingly, it appears that Mandelli did not make it to Jerusalem either. So, in the tradition of medieval imaginative travelogues, Petrarch’s text is not an eyewitness account but is pieced together from diverse sources, often focusing on the historical and the legendary. Unlike most Holy Land pilgrimage guides, however, the text is an epistle to a friend, and its tone is conversational and personal. As Cachey’s Introduction points out, we learn much more about Petrarch and Italy than we do about Jesus and Palestine. In fact, the Holy Land is treated in less than one-fourth of the total text, and what is recorded owes a strong debt to lay meditative manuals such as the Meditationes Vitae Christi that encouraged active visualization and even participation in biblical scenes. A lengthy and persuasive footnote on the scene in Bethlehem suggests that Petrarch modeled his words on those that Jerome used to describe Paula’s visionary Holy Land experiences. (196, n. 158, referring to para. 17). Roughly two-thirds of the text, and the best part of it, concerns itself with Italy , as Petrarch evocatively details the journey from Genoa through Italy and into Asia Minor. With the notable exception of the Holy Grail in Genoa, and perhaps a Christian saint’s tomb here and there, the Italian itinerary is predominately classical and pantheistic. At Inarima (Ischia) one may see where “the giant Typhoeus was buried by the will of Jupiter.” (9.1). Cachey’s footnotes are all one might hope; thorough and not without the occasional flash of wit: “Petrarch ’s eye for the attractive tourist spot is noteworthy.” (171). Also unlike the standard pilgrimage account, Petrarch does not end his guide in Jerusalem, but at the Tomb of Alexander in Egypt. The Christian pilgrim may have been encouraged to imaginatively follow the Holy Family in their flight into Egypt, but surely making Alexander’s tomb the professed goal is beyond the strict bounds of Christian pilgrimage, bespeaking instead the proud role of classical culture in Petrarch’s Italy. The full title of this work may be a misnomer, but certainly it is an Itinerarium of interest, and Cachey does a fine job of making this provocative and surprising pilgrimage guide available and accessible to an English-speaking audience. CHRISTINA HANDELMAN, English, UCLA Joseph F. O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain (Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press 2003) xvi + 322 pp., maps, ill. Historians have generally divided the centuries-long conflict between Christianity and Islam that occupied the lives and imaginations of medieval Europe into two areas: the crusades (the struggle for control of the Holy Land) and the reconquest (the struggle for control of the Iberian Peninsula). According to REVIEWS 258 Joseph F. O’Callaghan, Professor Emeritus at Fordham University and one of the most noted scholars of Medieval Iberia in the English-speaking world, such a division is mistaken; his book Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain is an effort to correct the error. For O’Callaghan, “if one wishes to study the history of the crusades one has to take a broader view of the entire Mediterranean to include medieval Spain” (xi). In his view, the reason this had not been done in the past is twofold. First, Francophone and Anglophone historians of the crusades tended to focus exclusively on French and English crusading to the Holy Land, leaving aside Spain and Portugal. Second, Spanish historians had too often neglected the existence of papal decrees granting remission of sins for participating in combat against Muslim armies in Iberia, decrees...