Ramon Llull Tree of Science - SC.L9695.482ab, Houghton Library, Harvard University
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Hello and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the podcast that explores medieval history through the stories of its most interesting travellers. And this is the part of the episode where I tell you that the podcast has a Patreon, that you can support both it and myself for $1, $3, or $5 a month, that you can enjoy early, ad-free, and extra listening, and that you can do all of that at patreon.com/humancircus or via my website at humancircuspodcast.com. Today, I want to send out my thanks to my newest Patreon supporter, Jim. Thank you very much!
This is a bit different from the usual episode, not part of a longer run on the story of a medieval traveller. This is the second of my Medieval Lives episodes, shorter episodes where I talk about figures of interest that, for various reasons, I’m not going to cover in a full series format. Generally shorter than this one, I suspect, as this hasn’t ended up being that short at all really. They won’t always be travel related, but this one is.
Today, that figure of interest is someone who was said to have many talents, regularly described as a polymath, a writer of romances and poetry, an all-around man of the court, and known as an important character in the development of literary Catalan for his novel Blanquerna. He was philosopher, a salesman, pushing his ideas to some of the most powerful men of his time. He was a pioneering figure in math and science, an influential theologian writing on topics such as the immaculate conception. He was a traveller and a mystic, something of a convert who devoted himself, one can only say, fiercely to his religion. He was someone who would come to take seriously the passage from Mark, “Go forth to every part of the world, and proclaim the good news to the whole of creation.” Today, that figure is Doctor Illuminatus Ramon Llull or, as English sources sometimes have it, Raymond Lully.
Ramon grew up within the young Kingdom of Majorca, still in its infancy really, even as he was. Within that scattered kingdom, strewn across the Balearic Islands and in pockets of the Spanish mainland, he was born to parents who’d come with the first wave of Catalan settlement, receiving a land grant after James I of Aragon had taken Majorca from its Almohad governor Abu Yahya in 1231. Ramon was born in 1232 or perhaps 33, in Palma, the capital of Majorca. He married there and had a family, a wife named Bianca and two children, Domènec and Magdalena.
There is plenty of writing by Ramon - he was a very productive fellow, writing, according to our source today, 133 books during the period of his life that it covers, in Latin, Arabic, and Catalan, and by other assessments as many as 265 - but I’m interested here in this episode less in that output, more, though it cannot be entirely separated, in his story. The main source here is thus his De Vita Sua, likely recorded in the late summer or early autumn of 1311 from Ramon’s own recollections at the Charterhouse of Vauvert, situated in roughly the present location of the Jardin de Luxembourg. I’m working from the version included in the book Other Middle Ages: Witnesses at the Margins of Medieval Society, edited by Michael Goodich, with frequent reference to that in Doctor Illuminatus: A Ramon Llull Reader, edited by Anthony Bonner.
“For the sake of the honour, praise, and love of the only Lord our God Jesus Christ,” begins this dictated autobiographical work, “Ramon, conquered by the requests of certain monastic friends, told of his penitential conversion and of some of his other accomplishments, and had the following things written down.”
Ramon’s early life, according to him, was one of waste and vanity. He served as steward with the heir to the throne of Majorca, and he wrote. He composed stories, troubadour poems, and songs, worthless poems and songs, he said, and “other licentious things,” though as to those, he would not be more specific. He would write with regret of those early years, but then he also elsewhere wrote that he at times exaggerated, “like the troubadour who boasts of being in love so as to improve his poem.”
It was during an evening of writing that the real turn in his life came. He was up beside his bed one night, writing a song to “a lady whom he loved with a foolish love,” presumably not his wife then. He was really only just getting down to work when, looking to his right, he saw Jesus hovering there on a cross before him. And he was terrified. He promptly set aside what he was doing, and went to bed, hoping, in a very relatable way, to sleep away the problem. By the morning, all was forgotten, and he carried on in his “customary vanities.”
One week later, he tried to continue the song, in the same place next to his bed and again at the same time, but again, Jesus appeared to him, again driving from his writing and back to to fear and sleep. Again, he managed to put it from his mind.
But it happened again, a 3rd and 4th time, a 5th, and in one version of the text, Jesus becomes progressively larger and gorier with each appearance, his wounds worsening. Each time, Ramon would take to bed in horror, but by the 5th time, he was forced also to reflect on what was happening, to consider what it meant and reach the unavoidable conclusion: he was being called on to put aside world and serve Christ with all his heart.
Whatever one makes of such visions, it is interesting to see this person caught in such uncertainty and reflection over who he was, what he was capable of, what his God was asking of him. The text does not quite reach Augustinian levels of self-examination, but Ramon does take a good hard look at himself as being unworthy, unable to properly serve, and at what he might possibly accomplish. The conclusion he reached during that sleepless night, and presumably during those that followed, the conclusion that would really determine the direction of the rest of his life, was that the work he should embark on was “for the honour and love of God, to convert[] the Saracens,” the text’s word obviously, not mine.
So this was the work that he chose, and he did so in the year 1263, a date I’ll give a bit of timeline context here. The Franciscan envoy William, covered in one of my earliest series, had been to see the Mongol khan Mongke and come back. Louis IX had been on the first of his crusades, the seventh, the one where he’d been captured in Egypt, and had since been involved in diplomacy with various Mongol rulers. Louis’ more fatal next crusade had not yet occurred. Ayyubid rule had failed and fallen. The Mamluk sultan ruled in Egypt and clashed with the Mongols in Syria.
Closer to home, Ramon lived in a place that was, as I said, only recently conquered and taken from Muslim rule. There was still a large Muslim population, perhaps a third of Majorca’s total or as much as half, much of it forcibly enslaved but not all, some farmers, traders, and artisans. I guess I say this to point out that for Ramon the impetus to go forth and convert the “Saracens” was not driven by vague thoughts of people far away, spoken of but never seen, or of the somewhat distant Holy Land. Though he would indeed take his personal project abroad, those people were all around him there in Palma.
After that moment with the song and the visions, Ramon let himself down a little in the execution. And who can blame him? Sparked by the nighttime visitations by the son of God, he had set himself a startlingly ambitious agenda. He would not merely put aside all that poetry about women and pray a little extra. He would endeavour to, quote, “undergo death for Christ by converting the non-believers to his faith, to produce” what he would elsewhere describe as “one of the best books in the world against the errors of the infidel,” and “to set up monasteries for the instruction of various languages,” in order to more effectively preach to the unbelievers.
It was a lot, and understandably, reassuringly even, Ramon was not immediately able to take it on. He dithered and delayed for three months until a sermon on the story of St Francis, at this point dead less than 40 years, moved him to sell his possessions, put a little aside for his wife and children, though probably not as much as they’d have liked, and commit himself to Christ. And that’s what he did.
I may have just spoken lightheartedly of how Ramon had not been able to at once put his project into action after the impetus of the visions, but he wasn’t long delayed. After that Franciscan moment, he had gone on pilgrimage and then planned to go on to Paris for studies. He’d been talked out of it by family and friends, been talked into returning to his home city on Majorca. But when he did return it was only to take on the coarsest of clothing and to study Arabic under the tutelage of an enslaved Muslim.
For nine years Ramon studied with this same teacher, learning but as we’ll see, clearly not developing much in the way of love or respect between them, unsurprising given that this man was very likely old enough to have experienced invasion and now found himself instructing someone who had purchased his body. Their time together was brought to an ugly end when Ramon heard from others that his teacher had blasphemed and he angrily struck the man “on the mouth, forehead, and face.” The teacher, in turn, arranged for a sword and attempted to kill him, managing to wound him in the stomach before being subdued and tied up. Now Ramon had to decide what to do.
To kill his teacher seemed like it was not the right thing to do - he did have some sense that this man had taught him something valuable and important - but then he was fairly certain that otherwise the man would try again to kill him; he’d shouted as much when that first attempt with the sword had failed. So Ramon decided to do nothing. He pondered and he prayed and he secluded himself in an abbey for three days, thinking it over. When he went to see the prisoner, this man who had instructed him for nine years, he found that his teacher had killed himself. And Ramon celebrated. He actually thanked God for taking the matter out of his hands and allowing him to, as he saw it, keep his own hands clean in the matter of this death. It is, to say the least, one of his more unlikeable moments.
Ramon’s life entered a new chapter now, a new productivity. He was spending months on Puig de Randa in Majorca, praying and writing. He was working on a book. He had recently completed a study of the Muslim philosopher al-Ghazali and a book of contemplation. Now he worked on his Ars Generalis, on the principles and tools for establishing truths, and winning debates, a framework for much of his writing to follow and really intended to be a framework for all knowledge, a universalizing approach. He was, besides, having a hermitage built on the spot where he received the inspiration for that book. He was experiencing signs that all of this was very much to his God’s liking. There was the divine inspiration he claimed to have received for the book. There was the mysterious shepherd boy who came to him at the hermitage, who kissed his books and spoke to him prophecies of all the good they would do the Christian world.
In a more this-worldly way, there was the approval of the King of Majorca, James II, who had apparently heard of Ramon’s writing and summoned him to Montpellier in southern France to have it examined by a Franciscan scholar. Word of Ramon and his project was spreading, and he stayed in there Montpellier for time, writing and giving lectures, and convincing the king to fund the establishment and upkeep of a Franciscan monastery where the friars might study Arabic, the monastery of Miramar, which you can still visit today on the Majorcan coast. In Rome, he was less successful in his efforts, for Pope Honorius IV had only recently died. As it was going to be a nearly 3-year interregnum, it was probably for the best that Ramon did not wait around.
Ramon had put aside the life of this world, but he was very much active within it. His next stop was Paris. He was writing and lecturing there, though it seemed he wasn’t entirely happy with how it was received, and doing the same back in Montpellier, working to simplify or at least streamline the system that he’d found difficult to teach in Paris. He was in Genoa where he translated one of his works into Arabic, and he was in Rome, again trying to find funding for multiple monastic schools of language like that of Miramar - all over the world, he said - but again finding no luck with the Roman Curia and Carmen Sandiego-ing his way back to Genoa. There, he was going to begin yet another phase of the grand project, and there he would be tested.
Genoa, the text tells us, was alive with excitement for his story and his effort, its people apparently abuzz with this man and his God-granted knowledge of conversion. But for all of that anticipation for what he was to do, Ramon himself seems to have been uncertain, anxious now in the face of this next step. As he would report, God sent him temptations, though one might just as easily say terrors. Even as his books and other belongings were taken aboard a ship and made ready for departure, he had second thoughts. What if he were to arrive at his destination only to be imprisoned for the rest of his life? What if they just killed him. That willingness to die for his cause abandoned him, and he was afraid.
In the text, this isn’t a passing misgiving, a hesitation there on the docks. Ramon is paralyzed. He’s stricken there, ashamed of what damage to the faith he might be doing by his hesitation, and unable or unwilling to speak to anyone about it. His health worsened, until he became physically ill. And for just a moment, we’ll leave him there in that unpleasant condition, while we have this quick break.
...
In his misery, Ramon turned first to the Dominicans and then to the Franciscans. He saw a vision of a friar’s cord hung on the wall, heard the voice of his God speak to him from a light like a pale star, but it did little to ease his troubles, instead confronting him with the message that he could only be saved in the Dominican order. Meanwhile, he was certain that if he didn’t join the Franciscans, then his writings and his works would be lost along with all of the good that they might manage. It was quite the dilemma, but Ramon made his choice. He would risk his own damnation and ask for the Franciscans’ habit, though whether this actually meant joining them is unclear.
These scenes in the text are absolutely agonizing ones for Ramon. After reaching his decision, he receives the sacrament from a priest, but as he does so, he feels as if some unseen arm is twisting his face in one direction, while the sacrament is offered to his other side, and he hears the threatening words of God. He is torn. Tested. Tempted. He is presented as having come through this ordeal and proven beyond doubt that he “loved God and others more than himself.”
When word came that a ship was soon to depart for Tunis, Ramon had his weakened body carried aboard. Concerned friends would carry him right back off, but not the next time, not from the next ship, the third he’d boarded here in Genoa. This one, on which he’d miraculously heal after only days at sea, was the one that took him to Tunis and an opportunity to test his powers of argumentation and conversion abroad. What was that going to look like?
For all of Ramon’s uneasiness over jail or execution, at first nothing of the sort awaited him there in Tunis. He said that he’d talked to various experts in Islamic law, told them that once he’d heard from them the rational bases of that law, he’d be ready to retort, or, if he took their reasons to be more convincing than his, to renounce Christianity in favour of Islam. He was there to prove that “in one completely simple Divine Essence and Nature there exists a Trinity of Persons, namely the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
This I will be able to do,” he said, “with the help of God, using clear arguments based on a certain Art divinely revealed … if you would care to discuss these things calmly with me for a few days.”
In his telling, he’d just begun the process of giving these proofs and making some headway, when a man who’d witnessed what he was up to had called on the king and his council to have Ramon beheaded, a judgement which would be downgraded to banishment under threat of being stoned to death and would be followed by an unpleasant exit scene. There was a brief attempt to switch boats and sneak into the city again, but Ramon would eventually sail for Naples, disappointed at the work he’d been forced to leave unfinished.
Narratively speaking though, it had all gone very well. He’d been, had spoken to the people, had given his system and himself a live trial run, been unpleasantly tested, and weathered some fairly serious misfortune, the threats of death and so on. He’d been on the cusp of success, he’d said, before being forced out.
After lecturing in Naples for a time, word came of the election of Pope Celestine V, and Ramon again went to Rome for support. He stayed there in the city, writing - he was always writing - and was there when Pope Boniface VIII was elected as Celestine’s immediate successor, rather more immediate than might initially have been expected. Celestine had actually quit. He’d stepped down as pope in favour of a return to his previous life as a hermit, but in the rather sad conclusion to his story, he’d been deemed too dangerous out there in the world, no matter what his inclinations toward a hermit’s ways. At Boniface’s orders, he’d lived out the last of his life in captivity.
As for Ramon, he realized that he would find no help in Rome. He was briefly in Barcelona, where he dedicated a book to the son he had left behind. He was back in Genoa for more writing, back to Paris for lecturing and a meeting with King Philip IV of France, though he’d bemoan the lack of progress there, back to Majorca where he worked to convert the Muslim population, though without saying much as to whether he’d met with any success. “He also,” as the text reminds us, “wrote some books there.” He was indeed a very productive writer.
Ramon was on Majorca when he heard that Cassianus, aka Ghazan Khan of the Ilkhanate, had invaded Syria with intentions of conquest. The news gave him the impetus to get back on a boat and head for Cyprus, though it would, disappointingly, prove not entirely true. Ghazan had not, as had been reported, seized Jerusalem from the Mamluks, the adversaries of the day, and had not stayed in Syria, needing instead to withdraw to face challenges on other borders. Still, Ramon resolved not to waste his time now that he was there.
It’s a reminder that he was neither timid nor lacking in social standing - accrued in his writing but also inherited and learned in Majorca - that Ramon went straight to the king of Cyprus with what he wanted, to Henry II, also the last King of Jerusalem. And what he wanted was for Henry to encourage the Jacobites, Nestorians, Monophysites, and Muslims, the “unbelievers and schismatics,” to come hear his sermons and disputation, and after he’d done that, to, quote, “send him to the sultan, who is a Saracen, and to the king of Egypt and Syria, in order to inform them of the holy Catholic faith.” You don’t get want if you don’t ask, and sometimes you ask and you still don’t get it. So it was here.
Ramon was carrying on, “with only God’s help,” but also with the assistance of a cleric and a servant, at least until those two turned first to extorting and then, he suspected, to poisoning him. After that, he really was on his own.
The final Latin Christian king of Jerusalem was not supportive of the project. Neither, it would seem, was the final grandmaster of the Knights Templar, Jacques de Molay. In just over a decade, that grandmaster was going to be tortured and then burnt to death with his order disbanded by command of the French king, but for now he had time to kindly host Ramon and let him recover his health. Ramon rested there with the doomed leader of the Templars and then headed back to Genoa. He always wound up back there eventually.
Ramon was in Paris, lecturing and writing. He was travelling to Lyon where he tried unsuccessfully to lobby the pope. He still wanted monasteries established where skillful men would study language with an eye to evangelization, but then he’d never had much luck with popes or cardinals, and he wouldn’t now. He was in Majorca, getting ready to set sail, getting ready to try again, preparing to go back to North Africa. He was in Bejaïa in present-day Algeria. That’s where we’ll see exactly what kind of “debate me” guy Ramon might remind us of in person.
He was in the square, calling out that, quote, “The law of the Christians is true, holy, and given by God. The law of the Saracens is false and erroneous, and I am prepared to prove this.” His was something of an antagonistic approach, and you should picture it here being received with hostility. There was aggression and violence, and he was summoned in by a local official, perhaps a qadi. Ramon’s talents in debate were to be tested, and in his own telling at least, they were going to be proven exemplary.
As the text tells it, Ramon was going to be called to answer for his rash public statements and threatened with death. But he’d be unmoved. Would challenge his interrogator to discussion of a common issue, and at least according to the text, dumbfound that official with his skills at reasoning. Given the nature of his goals, this was something of a peak moment in his career, the sort of moment at which his life since the visions had been aimed. It might have been cause for celebration, except that it resulted in Ramon being put in chains and led away to prison, protected only by that official’s order that no one should kill him specifically because he was to be exposed to a “well-deserved death.” That kind order kept him alive but didn’t save him from sticks, fists, or being dragged off by the beard to the thieves’ prison’s latrine where he was locked up.
There was talk of examining Ramon and deciding whether he was an ignorant fool who might be released or a learned man who would be killed. There was talk, in Ramon’s telling, that he was simply too clever in mounting arguments to be safely allowed before such a tribunal. Eventually, at the urging of certain Catalans and Genoese, he was shuffled off to a more “suitable place” to spend his imprisonment, presumably a more comfortable one than the toilets of the thieves’ prison.
In that at least slightly better place, Ramon would endure half a year of just the kind of trials you might expect in a hagiography, the story of a saint, though this wasn’t quite that. He would by turns be assaulted and then tempted, offered honours, women, and wealth, if only he’d convert. He’d also be given just one more chance to write a book in which he’d argue his side. Naturally, his book would be shown to be so effective that he’d promptly be expelled from the city, with orders given to the outgoing ship’s captain that on no account was this man Ramon to be allowed to return to its shores. He very nearly never had the chance.
Ramon’s voyage back across the Mediterranean was beset by storms severe enough to batter the vessel and sink it. Books, goods, and some of the people aboard were lost in the waters. Other passengers, like Ramon himself, made it to land only by “clinging half-naked” to a rowboat in whatever shape it was in and in whatever shape they were in.
Ramon was no longer a young man, was in his 70s and described at this point in his story as being “old and decrepit,” but he would not rest. In this Italian city and that, he was raising funds for a holy order of crusading knights. He was back in Montpellier. He was in Poitiers. He was in Avignon, as ever attempting to secure the pope’s support, seeming never to tire, never, at least in that respect, to succeed. He was labouring against Parisian Averroism, the influences of the Córdoban polymath ibn Rushd. He was lecturing again in Paris, speaking to assemblies of masters and students of “philosophical arguments to strengthen the faith” and “advanc[ing] the highest principles of the Christian faith in a clever and convincing way.” He was, as ever, making use of “demonstrative and scientific means,” for if the Christian “faith is unprovable by the intellect, then it is impossible for it to be true.” That idea, along with the importance of learning the languages of others in order to convert them, really encapsulates his life and what he came to care about.
In the closing passages of the narrative, Ramon looked with hope to the Church’s 1311 Council of Vienne, seeking, quote, “first, to establish a suitable place to house religious and learned men, who would study various languages in order to preach the Gospel to all creatures; second, to create one order out of all the other military orders in order to wage a continuous war abroad against the Saracens to recover the Holy Land; and third, ... opposition to the views of Averroes, who perverts the truth on so many subjects… .”
Ramon had been pushing unified military orders for almost 30 years, and as for language, that had been an interest he’d held since he’d first experienced those visions and conceived of how he could respond to them.
It’s outside the scope of our source, occurring after he related his life’s story there in Paris, but Ramon would go back to Tunis one more time before the end and under much more conducive circumstances. He’d been expelled back in 1293, but now, in 1314, an accord between the King of Aragon and the new caliph had allowed him to return, to write and no doubt to dispute matters of faith and philosophy with those around him.
That’s where he’d die, there or on the ship back to Majorca, or on Majorca itself. It’s unclear. There is a tradition of a martyrdom in Tunis, but it appears to have developed after the fact. His body would eventually be placed in a chapel in the church of San Francisco in Palma. That’s where you can find him, and that’s where we’ll leave Ramon Llull and his story.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode. If you are listening on the Patreon, then expect me back soon with a little bonus listening. Either way, expect me back soon with the start of a new series.