Muslim rulers were reluctant to execute provocative Christian preachers

Evidence

It was accepted that it was not licit to induce certain death unnecessarily; Livin, subtly quibbling, and ‘adducing the example of martyrs and saints’ also pointed out that ‘many of our brothers entered mosques from the zeal of faith, and preached, confessing the Christian faith’, and still were not killed. … In any case he followed his own recommendation, bursting into the Friday prayer in the presence of the sultan, and crying out in French against the mortiferam sectam: interpreters and renegades present alone understood what he said. It was explained to the sultan, and the rumour ran round the mosque that the intruder had ‘presumed to vilify religion and the holy Prophet’; but still the sultan was reluctant to act, and he quietened the people by saying that the friar was obviously unbalanced by too much poverty and fasting. In the course of a few days’ imprisonment the would-be martyr made himself so objectionable that the sultan was no longer able to resist the pressure put on him to secure to Livin the end he desired. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 689

Categorization

• XREF: Directly complicates the vault’s picture of Islam as violent persecutor — medieval Muslim rulers resisted executing Christian provocateurs until goaded, and the mob pressure for execution came from inside the mosque.
• CANDY: Mendicant friars in mamluk Cairo staged their own martyrdom by screaming insults in French no one in the mosque understood, then had to be naughty enough in prison to force the reluctant sultan’s hand.