Saracen

Saracen is term for a Muslim that is primarily used historically to refer to Muslims during the medieval period and especially in reference to the crusades. But it dates to antiquity, long before Islam arose as a religion, and its original sense was much more circumscribed. Its correct etymology isn’t all that interesting, but it does have a fascinating false etymology that circulated widely in Europe during the medieval period.

Saracen was used by medieval Christians in ways that enforced social and power hierarchies and contributed to prejudices and Islamophobia. Care should be taken when using the term today, only using it in ways that limit its application to the medieval meanings and contexts. When referring generally to Muslims in the medieval period, one should use a more neutral term, such as Muslim itself or a more specific regional or sectarian name.

Saracen enters English from the Latin saracenus, which got it from the Greek σαρακηνός (sarakenos). The Greek probably comes from the Arabic root sharq, meaning east, and the word originally referred to a people dwelling in the Sinai peninsula and what is now northwestern Saudi Arabia.

The word is first recorded in Greek as an adjective describing a species of rush growing in the Sinai in Dioscorides’s On Medical Material, a pharmacology written c. 50 C.E. But it is Claudius Ptolemy’s second century Geographia that first mentions Saracens as a distinct group of people. He uses sarakēnē to refer to a region in the northern Sinai peninsula and sarakēnoí as a name for a people in northwestern Arabia. Eusebius takes the word into Latin in his fourth century Historia Ecclesiastica, where he quotes a letter from Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria, that refers to the sarakēnoí of Arabia as existing c. 250 C.E.

The use of Saracen in English dates to the Old English period. For example, there is this from the Old English translation of Orosius’s History Against the Pagans:

Sio Egyptus ðe us near is, be norðan hyre is þæt land Palastine, and be eastan hyre Sarracene ðæt land, & be westan hire Libia þæt land, and be suþan hyre se beorh ðe Climax hatte.

(The part of Egypt that is nearer us has to its north the land of Palestine, and to its east is the land of the Saracens, and to the west is the land of Libya, and to its south is the mountain called Climax [i.e., Mount Catherine].)

In the medieval era, it was common for European writers to claim that the word Saracen derived from a claim by Arab peoples that that they descended from Sarah and her son Isaac, rather than the slave Hagar and her son Ishmael, and in so doing, so the allegation claims, the Arabs were claiming a false genealogical legitimacy. Jerome gives this false etymology in his early fifth century commentary of the biblical book of Ezekiel. And Isidore, in his early seventh century Etymologiae, writes:

Saraceni dicti, vel quia ex Sarra genitos se praedicent, vel sicut gentiles aiunt, quod ex origine Syrorum sint, quasi Syriginae. Hi peramplam habitant solitudinem. Ipsi sunt et Ismaelitae, ut liber Geneseos docet, quod sint ex Ismaele. Ipsi Cedar a filio Ismaelis. Ipsi Agareni ab Agar; qui, ut diximus, perverso nomine Saraceni vocantur, quia ex Sarra se genitos gloriantur.

(The Saracens are so called either because they claim to be descendents of Sarah or, as the pagans say, because they are of Syrian origin, as if the word were Syriginae. They live in a very large deserted region. They are also Ishmaelites, as the Book of Genesis teaches us, because they sprang from Ishmael, and Agarines, from the name Agar (i.e., Hagar). As we have said, they are called Saracens from an alteration of their name, because they are proud to be descendents of Sarah.)

Isidore’s Etymologiae impute theological significance to the etymologies of words and are, by modern standards, laughably wrong, but they were widely copied and read and do provide historical insight into the beliefs of medieval Europeans.

Isidore is using Saracen in the original, narrow sense, of a particular group of people, but the meaning of the word would later be expanded to refer to all Muslims or even more broadly to those non-Christians in lands to the east. Saracen was not used to refer to Christian Arabs. An early example of this broader sense is a list of the final resting places of Christ’s apostles found in the Rituale ecclesiæ Dunelmensis (Rite of the Church of Durham), an early ninth-century collection of Latin liturgical texts and with an interlinear Old English gloss:

Beatus thomas apostolus requiesat Emina, in India Saracenorum.
se ead’ thom’ ap’ gerestað | gireste æt frvmma in ðæm byrig on india saracena.

(The blessed apostle Thomas dwells in Emina, in India of the Saracens.)

So the word Saracen in medieval writing is a nonspecific term, referring generally to non-Christians of the east, and in particular to Muslims, and to medieval Europeans carried negative connotations because it supposedly characterized them as making a false claim of being descended from a more favored line of descent.

Sources:

American Heritage Dictionary, fifth edition, 2019, s. v. Saracen, n.

Orosius. The Old English History of the World. Malcolm R. Godden, ed. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 44. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2016, 1.1, 30–31.

Heng, Geraldine, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, Cambridge University Press, 2018, 110–12.

Isidore. Etymologiarvm sive originvm libri XX. Wallace Martin Lindsay, ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911, 9.2.57, 351. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Isidore. The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, trans. and ed. by Stephen A. Barney, et al. Cambridge University Press, 2006, 195/1.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, 1909, s.v. Saracen, n. and adj.

Retsö, Jan, The Arabs in Antiquity: Their History from the Assyrians to the Umayyads, RoutledgeCurzon, 2003.

Rituale ecclesiæ Dunelmensis. Publications of the Surtees Society. London: J. B. Nichols and Son, 1840, 196. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Image credit: Loyset Liédet, c. 1465, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Arsenal, Ms. 5072 Rés., fol. 349v. Wikimedia Commons. Bibliothèque nationale de France. Public domain image.