Walter of Compiègne: Otia de Machomete

The Otia de Machomete (“Leisure Pieces on Muhammad”) is a Latin poem in elegiac couplets by Walter of Compiègne, a twelfth-century French monk. It tells a legendary and hostile life of the Prophet Muhammad. In the opening lines the poet invites anyone who wishes to know Muhammad’s homeland and deeds to read his “leisure”, and explains his source: the abbot Warnerius told him the story, having heard it from a cleric of Sens named Paganus, who in turn had it from a convert from paganism who had read what was written about Muhammad. A later passage has Muhammad explain his seizures as the effect of the angel Gabriel’s visits.

The poem belongs to the body of medieval Latin polemic in which Western Christians, knowing little of Islam at first hand, retold distorted stories about its founder. Its value today lies less in any information about Muhammad than in what it shows of how such legends were passed along and shaped in twelfth-century France, at the time of the crusades. The chain of witnesses named at the start, and Walter’s playful warning to pluck the grape and avoid the thorn, give a glimpse of how a monastic poet framed hearsay as history.