- The Epistula Leonis imperatoris ad Umar regem Saracenorum directa is a thus far unnoticed work that should be added to the corpus of ninth-century Latin works written in al-Andalus. It is a Latin translation of a (so far unknown) Arabic version of the letter that the Byzantine Emperor, Leo III, purportedly sent to the Caliph Umar II, in an attempt to persuade him to become a Christian (other versions of this letter survive in Armenian and Arabic, and versions of a letter purportedly sent by that caliph to Leo are likewise extant in more than one language). It survives in four manuscripts, the earliest of them (Paris, BnF MS 2826), being a copy in Carolingian minuscule of a work surely translated in al-Andalus. This essay places its three quotations of the Qur’an in Latin alongside the only other known quotation of that holy book in this period, in the Istoria de Mahometh, analyzing in detail how each passage was translated from Arabic into Latin, and arguing that in general, while they are all modestly close to the original Arabic, in most cases the translators have subtly or not-so-subtly distorted the verses to make them more amenable to the Christian argument against Islam.
- While the Qur’an would not be translated entirely into Latin (or any western European language) until the well-known effort of Robert of Ketton in the twelfth century, two sources from the late eighth or first half of the ninth century preserve fairly close translations and/or paraphrases of four separate passages of Islam’s holy book making them the oldest translations of any part of the Qur’an into Latin. One of these sources is well known to scholars, an anonymous polemical life of the prophet Muhammad called Istoria de Mahometh, written sometime between 750 and 850, and surviving in four manuscripts in addition to being quoted in extenso in Liber apologeticus martyrum of Eulogius of Córdoba (d. 857). But the other has escaped the attention both of scholars of Christian-Muslim relations in general, and of historians of ninth-century Andalusi Christianity in particular. Entitled Epistula Leonis imperatoris ad Umar regem Saracenorum directa, this text was thought until quite recently to exist only in an early sixteenth-century printing, and its date and provenance were a complete mystery. Miguel C. Vi – vancos, however, has not only drawn our attention to a late-eleventh/early twelfth-century Visigothic manuscript of this text – which he transcribed in full in 2013 – but pointed out that it exists in a Carolingian manuscript (Paris, BnF MS 2826) that, as we will see, is dated to the first of the ninth century, meaning that the Latin text itself must be dated to the late eighth or first half of the ninth century.1
- Vivancos also suggested, moreover, that this work, a translation from an Arabic original, was very likely made in al-Andalus because its versions of the Psalms correspond to the Mozarabic psalter.2 This places the work precisely in the circles of the Andalusi Christians in the decades leading up to the notorious Martyrs Movement of the 850s, and makes it more or less contemporary with the well-known works of Eulogius and Paulus Alvarus (c. 800–861). After discussing the Epistula Leonis and the precious Carolingian codex that preserves it in its earliest surviving form, I will set forth Istoria de Mahometh’s single Qur’an quotation alongside the three Qur’an quotations from Epistula Leonis, examining them closely in the light of the Arabic original. We will see that, while the Latin versions of these verses are generally relatively close to the Qur’an’s Arabic, in most cases the translators, or in the case of the Epistula Leonis perhaps the author of the Arabic original of the letter, found it difficult to resist the temptation to distort these texts in ways that served Christian apologetic or polemical purposes.
- Epistula Leonis and Paris, BnF MS lat. 2826
Deleted User — 12/20/2023 2:23 PMFrom the late eighth century through to the early sixteenth, a series of letters survive in a handful of Mediterranean languages – Armenian, Arabic, Aljamiado, and Latin – that purport to be either a letter of Byzantine Emperor Leo III (717–41) to his contemporary Caliph, Umar II (717–20). The oldest version, dating to the last quarter of the eighth century, is the Armenian, which is the only case in which both letters appear side by side, and it is clearly a translation from the Greek. As it happens, however, the oldest manuscript copy of any of the versions is the Carolingian Latin manuscript mentioned above (the Armenian text, while older, survives only in manuscripts from the thirteenth century on). Dated by Bernard Bischoff to the first half of the ninth century, BnF lat. 2826 contains a miscellaneous range of works, some by late-antique Iberian authors such as Isidore of Seville and Julian of Toledo, but also works by Venantius Fortunatus and Augustine of Hippo. The Epistula Leonis is tucked into this manuscript just after Isidore’s De fide Catholica contra Judeos, as a sort of updating addendum to it, exactly where we find it in the three other extant manuscripts, all of Iberian origin.
- While the Carolingian manuscript is considerably older than all three of the other manuscripts that preserve this text, the version of the later manuscripts is, from one point of view, superior to the Carolingian text: the Latin in them conforms much more closely to classical grammar, the Carolingian text being marred especially by problems of gender, agreement, and case. A close look at the evidence suggests strongly that it is the Carolingian text, despite its problematic Latin. For thing, if the text of BnF MS lat. 2826 is often marred by bad grammar, it is at some key points superior in content, as can be seen by examining a few of its quotations of other texts. Like countless Christian apologists in antiquity and the Middle Ages, the Leo of the Latin text quotes Gn 49:10.
Four Oldest Latin Quotations of the Qu’ran (Burman)
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