Book Hotels in Saracens
Population: Unkown
Latitude: 21.952264
Longitude: 40.915856
Source: WikiPedia
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Description:
Saracen is a Greek word that was used to describe various groups of people in ancient and medieval history. Its etymology is unclear; modern scholars do not agree on the term’s origins. Before the birth of Islam, Ancient Romans used the term to refer to many different social groups, including non-Arabs living in the northern Sinai peninsula and Roman province of Arabia. In Europe during the Early Middle Ages, the term began to be used to describe Arab tribes. By the 12th century, "Saracen" had become synonymous with "Muslim" in Medieval literature, just as it had been for Greek and Coptic documents five centuries earlier.
Ptolemy's Geography, from the second century CE, describes "Sarakene" as a region in the northern Sinai peninsula. Ptolemy also mentions a people called the Sarakenoi living in north-western Arabia. Eusebius of Caesarea references Saracens in his Eccelastical history, in which he narrates an account wherein Dionysus the Bishop of Alexandria mentions Saracens in a letter while describing the Roman emperor Decius' persecution: "Many were, in the Arabian mountain, enslaved by the barbarous sarkenoi." The Historia Augusta also refers to an attack by Saraceni on Pescennius Niger's army in Aegyptus, 193 CE but provides little information on who they might be.
Hippolytus, the book of the laws of countries and Uranius mention three distinct peoples in Arabia during the first half of the third century, the Saraceni, Taeni and Arabes. The Taeni, later identified with the Arabic speaking people called Tayy, were located around the Khaybar Oasis all the way up to the eastern Euphrates while the Saracenoi were placed north of them. These Saracens located in the Northern Hejaz appear as people with a certain military ability and opponents of the Roman Empire who are characterized by the Romans as barbaroi. The Saracens are described as forming the equites (heavy cavalry) from Phoenicia and Thamud. In a praeteritio, the defeated enemies of Diocletian's campaign in the Syrian desert are described as Saracens and other 4th century military reports make no mention of Arabs but refer to groups as far east as Mesopotamia (Iraq) involved in battles on both the Persian and Roman sides as Saracens. They are described in the Notitia dignitatum dating from the time of Theodosius, during the 4th century, as comprising distinctive units in the composition of the Roman army distinguishing between Arabs, Iiluturaens and Saracens.
Usage of the term in the Latin West changed as the Middle Ages progressed, but its connotation remained negative and its exact definition continued to be unclear. In an 8th century polemical work, John of Damascus criticized the Saracens as followers of a false prophet and "forerunner[s] to the Antichrist." Two centuries later, Europeans perceived Saracens as poor, uneducated idolaters belonging to a group wholly separate from the Arabs who brought Aristotle to the Latin West and the Moors and Berbers fighting Christians in Spain; someone who got all of his or her information on Islam from medieval sources would not conclude the three groups represented one continuous culture.
By the 12th century, Medieval Europeans had more specific conceptions of Islam and "Saracen" had become a racial and religious marker. In most Medieval literature Saracens—that is, Muslims—are universally black-skinned, while Christians are fair-skinned. In The King of Tars, a medieval English romance, the Sultan of Damascus is a black Saracen ruler whose skin stands in stark contrast to his wife, the white princess of Tars. Heng writes, "Just as the whiteness of the princess of Tars—attesting to her Western Europeanness...—equates with ideal beauty, the Sultan's blackness equates with the foulness and loathliness of racial difference." The Sultan’s skin color is a physical reflection of his cultural and religious otherness. When the Sultan converts to Christianity and is subsequently baptized, his skin miraculously becomes "all white, through God’s grace, and clear without taint." The Song of Roland, an Old French 11th-century heroic poem, takes the association of black skin with Saracens a step further by making it their only exotic feature.
However, there is at least one exception to the medieval literary staple of Saracens as black and Christians as white: in the Medieval Dutch romance Morien, the titular character is a Christian knight who is "black of limb," which causes other Christian knights to initially fear him as a monstrous non-Christian Saracen or Moor.
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