Colomiez quotes this, page 28 of his “Historical Miscellanies;” but he adds that there are some blunders—that it was not Frederick I. (Barbarossa,) on whom they intended to fix the authorship, but Frederick II. his grandson. This he says, is apparent from the letters of Pierre des Vignes, the secretary and chancellor of the second Frederick, and from Matthew Paris; inasmuch as they record, that this monarch was blamed for having said that the world had been led aside by “Three Impostors;” but by no means that he had written a book having such a title. The Emperor denied in the strongest terms, that he ever made use of any expression to that effect. He detested the blasphemy with which they charged him, and declared that it was an atrocious calumny; more shame to Lipsius and other writers who have condemned him without sufficiently looking into the evidences.
Averroes, nearly a century previous, had jeered at the three religions, saying[3]; that “the Jewish religion was a law for children; the Christian religion a law which it was impossible to follow; and the Mahometan religion a law in favor of swine.”[4]
Since then, many people have written with great freedom on this same subject.
We read in the works of Thomas de Catimpre, that M. Simon de Tournay had said that “Three Seducers”—Moses, Jesus Christ, and Mahomet, had “mystified mankind with their doctrines.” This is evidently the M. Simon de Churnay, of whom Matthew Paris relates some other improprieties, and the same individual whom Polydore Virgil styles de Turwai, the orthography in both instances having been mismanaged.
Amongst the manuscripts of the Abbe Colbert’s library, obtained possession of by our sovereign in 1732, there is one numbered 2071, written by Alvaro Pelagius, a Spaniard of the Cordelian order, bishop of Salves and Algarve, and well known on account of his work, “The Lamentation of the Church.” He states that an individual named Scotus, of the same order as himself and a Jacobin, was at that time a prisoner at Lisbon on a charge of blasphemy. Scotus, it would appear, had said that he considered Moses, Jesus Christ and Mahomet as “Three Impostors;” for that, the first had deceived the Jews; the second the Christians; and the third the Saracens.[5]
Gabriel Barlette, in his sermon upon St. Andrew, alludes to Porphyry in this way; “and therefore the notion of Porphyry is absurd, when he says that there had existed three individuals who had turned over the world to their own opinions; the first being Moses amongst the Jewish people—the second Mahomet, and the third Christ.”[6] A strange chronologist to stamp the era of Christ and Porphyry after that of Mahomet!
The Manuscripts of the Vatican, quoted by Odomir Rainoldo in the nineteenth volume of his Ecclesiastical Annals, mention one Jeannin de Solcia, a canon at Bergame, a doctor of civil and canon law, known from a decree of Pope Pius II., as Javinus de Solcia. He was condemned on the 14th November 1459 for having maintained this impiety—that Moses, Jesus Christ, and Mahomet had ruled the world at their pleasure. “Mundum pro suarem libito voluntatum rexisse.”
John Louis Vivaldo de Mondovi, who wrote in 1506, and amongst whose works there is a treatise on “The Twelve persecutions of the Church of God,” says, in his chapter upon the sixth persecution, that there were people who dared to dispute, which of the three law-givers had been most followed, Jesus Christ, Moses, or Mahomet.[7]
Herman Ristwyk, a Dutchman, burned at the Hague in 1512, sneered at the Jewish and Christian religions. He does not speak of the Mahometan creed; but a man who could regard Moses and Jesus Christ as impostors, could entertain no better opinion of Mahomet.
Now we must turn to an author, name unknown, but accused of blasphemy against Jesus Christ. The charge was founded upon some papers discovered at Geneva in 1547, amongst the documents belonging to M. Gruet. An Italian, named Fausto da Longiano, had begun a work which he entitled “The Temple of Truth,” in which he undertakes no less than to overturn all religions. “I have,” he says, “begun another work entitled ‘The Temple of Truth.’ It is probable that I may divide it into thirty books. In this work will be found the extinction of all sects—Jews, Christian, Mahometan, and other superstitions; and matters will be brought back to their first principles.”