To plant the Crescent o’er the Cross,
the misrepresentations of Mohammed and his followers have continued without intermission from the days of the Crusaders to the present time. And the strangest thing is that the most extravagant tales about Mohammedans and their religion were put in circulation when their originators must have known that they had no foundation in fact.
Many of the stories—as false as they were ridiculous—that were long current respecting the Arabian Prophet and the religion which he founded were due to the Trouvères and the Troubadours. A great majority of the Chansons de Geste exhibit a pitiful ignorance of the tenets of the Saracens, and not a few of them contributed to give vogue to the most revolting fables respecting Mohammed and Islam. Although neither Leo the Isaurian nor Oliver Cromwell, both the sworn enemies of images, were more opposed to idolatry or to the worship of images than Mohammed, nevertheless, in La Chanson de Roland,[230] the Franks are represented under the walls of Saragossa as avenging their defeat at Roncesvelles by mutilating and destroying the idols of their enemies.
In the Chanson d’Antioche—declared to be “a very beautiful chanson which does not contain any fables but only the unadulterated truth”—the author, Richard le Pelerin, in the beginning of his poem, asks God to put to dire confusion the followers of Mohammed—especially those
Qui croient et adorent la figure Mahom.
In the Roman de Beaudouin de Sebourc, the author goes to still greater lengths. By a strange aberration he makes the idol of Mohammed the emblem of Islam, as the Cross is the emblem of Christianity. For, in this chanson the Comtesse de Porthieu is represented as wishing to abjure her faith before the Sultan Saladin and expressing her readiness to adore the effigy of the Prophet:
Mahom voel aourer; aportez-le-moi-cha.
And Saladin, on his part, is pictured as ordering the idol to be brought for the adoration of the newly made convert to Mohammedanism:
Qu’ on aportast Mahom, et celle l’aoura.
When it is remembered that Mohammed was all his life the relentless enemy of images of all kinds and that he absolutely proscribed the representation of animated creatures; when it is recalled that images of all kinds have been studiously excluded from every mosque in the world from the time of the Prophet until the present, one would think that such misrepresentations as those spread broadcast by the trouvères would have found little acceptance, or have been as short-lived as they were false. Had the object of the trouvères been to perpetuate animosity among Christians toward Moslems they could not have devised a more effective method of achieving their purpose.