The 1291 fall of Acre shook Latin Christian theological confidence

Evidence

The Latins had been unable to believe that God would allow ‘Akka to fall. Women wept in vain before the crucifix for sons or husbands killed or carried off into slavery. As the Muslims said that Christ could not help, so ‘the sophists’ said that He could, but would not; and while Ricoldo himself could not accept this, many Christians were converted to Islam. If Christ went on as He had begun, complained Ricoldo, it looked as though He were really going to become a Muslim, as Islamic eschatology claimed He would, at His return at the end of the world. It seemed as if the age of miracles had returned, in favour of Islam, not of Christendom: “Thou hast strengthened him by temporal power … and what is worse, his power … begins to be confirmed by miracles.’ It was one of the ‘absurdities’ of the Qur’an to speak of God’s ‘praying for’ Muhammad; now it seemed as though just that were really happening. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 738

Categorization

• XREF: Complicates the vault’s picture of a self-assured medieval Christian hegemony over Islam; connects to how ‘Islam’ as the West’s threatening mirror was constructed from an actual crisis-of-confidence standpoint.