Alejandro MORIN

Original title: Cynocephalus in commentario? El carácter monstruoso o salvaje de los infieles como argumento jurídico

Published in The Middle Ages and the Crusades

Keywords: Innocent IV, Islam, Monstrosity, Oldradus de Ponte, Savagery.

For some years a type of historiographical approach has rendered fruits about the relation Christians-Muslims, focused on the perception/construction of alterity. This is evident in different works that analyze the medieval “images” of the unbelievers created in a hostile context. But this approach can ignore the rhetorical-juridical inscription of the description of the unbeliever in teratological or wild terms. What seems an ethnographic reference that says much about the medieval Christian ethnocentrism may in certain context operate as a juridical argument that enables one type or another of justification for the conquest on unchristians. We pose here the convenience of bringing together two subjects that medievalists had developed separately: the history of the Christian stereotypes of Saracen “monstrosity” and the history of medieval law.