Marauders, Daredevils, and Noble Savages: Perceptions of Arab Nomads in Late Antique Hagiography

Abstract

AbstractThis contribution investigates perceptions of Arab nomads in the hagiography of the Late Antique East. Over the past decades, these texts, mostly saints’ lives and episodes from church histories, have often been used to provide social and cultural historians with information on the ethnography, geography, customs and manners of those labelled “Saracens” or “Ishmaelites” in the texts. However, the historicity of the narratives is difficult to assess, and a closer inspection reveals that most of the motifs used in Late Antiquity revert to older models from Classical Antiquity. The article therefore focuses on specific aspects, such as how the writers depicted the Arabs’ manners and customs as contrasting with their own societies and constructed a dichotomy between the civilisation and the animal-like ferocity of the former. It becomes clear that Christian authors used the depiction of the Arabs’ seemingly deviant lifestyle in order to both reassure their readership and excite its curiosity. The display of God’s omnipotence in a large number of the texts discussed here offered a chance to demonstrate that Christian saints could eventually convert such people, or, when conversion was not possible, could still hope for very potent miracles.