Most Christian writers distorted Islamic marriage law, with some believing polygamy unlimited

Evidence

The staple of sound information about Islamic marriage law was that stated by Pedro de Alfonso: he said that there might be four wives, who might be divorced and replaced so long as the number four was not exceeded at any one time; with a divorced wife remarriage was allowed up to the third time, and relations were permitted with any number of slaves, both such as were bought, and such as were taken in war, with freedom to buy and sell again, so long as there was no pregnancy. If this is as much as most writers knew, Pedro was unrepresentative in being noncommittal in tone. Very many writers spoke of polygamy, of whom some were less knowledgeable. Guibert, with no source of authentic information, believed that polygamy was unlimited and unregulated. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 754

Categorization

• CANDY: The tidy factual summary of Islamic marriage law (four wives, remarriage three times, unlimited slaves) is a compact, interesting nugget.
• XREF: connects to: One medieval writer read polygamy as Islamic law’s cure for covetousness