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Fidentius da Padua (before 1226-after 1291/94)(Travellers | Cities | Routes | Trade Goods | Themes) Fidentius da Padua (alternative names) was born before 1226 in or near Padua. He was a Franciscan friar who became vicar of the Franciscan province of the Holy Land in 1266. One had to be over 40 years old to receive this title. In the same year, at the request of the grand master of the Temple, he sent two friars to Safed Castle in Galilee, which was under siege by the Saracens. After the fall of Antioch (in today’s Turkey) on 18 May 1268, he went to the encampment of Baibars (Sultan of Egypt) to administer spiritual relief to the Latin prisoners. Two years later he went to Tripoli, where he read the book Liber Clementis, an ancient book of prophecy containing discussions between Jesus and Peter. Fidentius cited a passage from this book in his Liber which, in his interpretation, predicted the fall of Antioch to the Mamluks, slave warriors who ruled Egypt and Syria from 1250 to 1517. In 1274, Fidentius participated in the Second Ecumenical Council in Lyon. Pope Gregory X asked Fidentius to write a report on the recovery of the Holy Land. Fidentius finished his report, Liber Recuperationis Terre Sancte, in 1291 and handed it to Pope Nicholas IV just a few months before the fall of Acre. This was the first treatise discussing strategies for launching a crusade to recapture the Holy Land. His appeal for a crusade was never taken seriously by the Latin world, however, not because his writing lacked passion or persuasion, but because of European politics: the Europeans lacked the will and ability to form a united army. His book, Liber Recuperationis Terre Sancte, consists of 94 chapters and can be divided into two parts. It was written after the Holy Land was recaptured by the Muslims in 1291. The first part of the book recounts the history of the Holy Land until the period of the Crusades and analyses the Islamic faith. The second part of the book, which forms most of the tract (the final 72 chapters), is a strategy for planning, executing and recapturing the Holy Land. Fidentius’ work is a polemic tract arguing for the necessity and urgency of a new crusade. In the first part of the book, Fidentius traced the history of Palestine, Syria and Egypt with the aim of justifying and inspiring a crusade to retake the Holy Land. By tracing this history, he demonstrated the fundamental nature of this sanctified region. He argued that Christ acquired the Holy Land with his own blood and that the sanctity of the region is related to Christ’s past physical presence. He describes the Christian citizens of Acre as "bad Christians" who sold the Saracens (Muslims) war supplies like timber and iron. In his opinion the inhabitants lacked leaders to obey and follow. This was linked to the fact that the Venetians, Genoese, Pisans, and the Templars and Hospitallers did not obey the king of Jerusalem. For Fidentius, the Saracens were an army of infidels. However, Fidentius acknowledged that they praised God and prayed to him regularly. In accordance, Fidentius’ views are sometimes seen as tolerant. Ancient tolerance towards Muslims did not see Islam as an alternative way to honour God, but saw Muslims as trapped in misbelief, while also respecting their faithful practices of prayer. He also speaks positively about Baibars, mentioning an incident in which, after the fall of Jaffa, a Christian girl was raped by an emir. The girl’s mother accused the emir in front of the sultan, who then killed the emir for his atrocity. In the second book, Fidentius denigrated the Saracens in order to show that a crusade was the only viable option. Fidentius argued that the Saracens were inimical to Christianity and must be attacked. He did that by giving a vituperative biography of the Prophet Muhammed in which he was portrayed as “not only false and lying, but a most atrocious plunderer, the worst spiller of human blood, and even most stinking in the sins of lust”. (Liber Recuperationis Terre Sancte, p 18) He also provided a series of chapters on the Saracens’ faults including their infidelity, lechery, cruelty, greed, cunning, stupidity and instability. The fact that the Saracens possessed the holy place in which Christ was born, lived and died, was for Fidentius a mark of shame for all Christians. The recapture of the Holy Land was for Fidentius inevitable and predicted in many prophecies. He cites a passage from the book Liber Clementis, which he read in Tripoli in 1268:
John V. Tolan argued that the "sons of the wolf" were the Saracens to Fidentius. Fidentius’s interpretation of the prophecy was that forty Christian kings will rule in peace and tranquility, but before they come to power, Christian sins will bring on the reign of the Antichrist (the Saracens). Fidentius saw an alteration between peaceful rule by God’s people and upheaval caused by their sins. To substantiate these predictions, Fidentius provided a series of passages from the Old and New Testaments that also prophesied, he claimed, God’s plan to give the Holy Land back to the crusaders. (Tolan, Saracens, p. 212) Hence, recapturing the Holy Land was, for Fidentius, God’s plan. Fidentius’s central argument is that the Holy Land was lost fundamentally because of the sins of the people. He lists seven reasons why the Christians lost Jerusalem, which in addition to their sins, included their ethnic diversity, effeminacy, indiscretion, infighting, defection and dereliction of duty. His ideas on recapturing the Holy Land were not just theoretical. He described concretely, in a few chapters, the topography of cities and places that needed to be recaptured and protected. An example of his suggested measures is a trade embargo against Egypt to prevent the sale of war materials and slaves to the Mamluks. Fidentius recommended a naval blockade because it would disrupt all shipping from the so-called "bad Christians", who sold war material to the Saracens, as well as shipping from Saracen allies.
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