Riccoldo da Monte di Croce
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Riccoldo da Monte di Croce was an Italian Dominican friar, travel writer, missionary, and Christian apologist. He is most famous for his polemical works on Medieval Islam and the account of his missionary travels to Baghdad.
Riccoldo's best known work of this kind was his book Against the Laws of the Saracens, written in Baghdad, which has in previous centuries been very popular among Christians as a polemical source against Islam, and has been often edited (first published in Seville, 1500, under the title Confutatio Alcorani or "Confutation of the Koran"). This work was translated into German by Martin Luther in 1542 as Verlegung des Alcoran. There are translations into English by Thomas C. Pfotenhauer (Islam in the Crucible: Can It Pass the Test?, Lutheran News, Inc., 2002), and Londini Ensis, under the title, "Refutation of the Koran" (Createspace 2010).
Much of this work's contents derive from those sections of the Book of Travels devoted to Muslim beliefs and related topics. One of Riccoldo's major sources, extensively quoted in his own work, is the anonymous Liber Denudationis siue Ostensionis aut Patefaciens. Despite Riccoldo's hostility towards Islam, his work shows specific knowledge of the Qur'an and overcomes one important prejudicial error common to other Medieval criticisms of Islam: the view of Muhammad as an introducer of a Christological heresy.
