Franciscan missionaries deliberately provoked Muslim authorities to secure martyrdom

Evidence

St Francis, before his own journey to Egypt, had already despatched a party to Africa who successfully forced a reluctant Muslim government to martyr them. Before they left Christian territory they announced that God had chosen them to be numbered in the glorious army, Deus nos vult in numero suorum martyrum computare. In Seville they tried to break into the Friday mosque, and, when they were driven away by the crowd, as ‘ambassadors of the King of Kings’ they went and abused Muhammad and Islam outside the royal palace instead. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 686

Francis and his followers, the Friars Minor, or Franciscans, sought to rekindle the “apostolic life,” a life of poverty, ascesis, and preaching modeled on that of the apostles. Mission to the infidel (in particular, to Muslims) played a significant role in this apostolic life; Francis himself preached to the Egyptian Sultan al-Kâmil in 1219, and in the following centuries many Franciscan missionaries followed in his footsteps. Their goal (the topic of chapter 9) was not merely to live the apostolic life but to die the apostolic death: the apostles, after all, found martyrdom at the hands of infidels, and thirteenth-century Franciscans found that when sufficiently provoked (through public insults to Muhammad and the Koran, for example), many Muslim rulers obligingly conferred the crown of martyrdom upon them. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 74

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly extends the martyrdom-as-grief/love logic in ‘On Sacrifice’ — missionaries forced a reluctant government to kill them.
• SHARE: For someone into late-medieval mission history: the detail that they announced their own martyrdom before leaving Christian territory.
• QUESTION: How systemic was this martyrdom-seeking provocation, and did Muslim rulers deliberately manage it (e.g., exile instead of execution) to deny them the crown?
• SEED: Angle: ‘the martyrdom economy’ — how religious orders turned execution into a supply-and-demand system as Muslim rulers became reluctant to supply it.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 686; John V. Tolan, Saracens, 74
• XREF: connects to: Missionaries sought martyrdom through provoking Muslim violence when war was unavailable; Christian missionaries deliberately provoked Muslim rulers into martyring them; The urge to seek martyrdom through provoking Islam was widespread, not isolated