A Spiritual Reaction to Islamic Prosperity: The Power of Sorrow in Riccoldo da Monte di Croce’s "Letters to the Triumphant Church"

This chapter tackles the argumentative strategies behind Riccoldo da Monte di Croce's "Epistole ad Ecclesiam Triumphantem" written in the aftermath of the Mamluk conquest of Saint John of Acre (1291), the last outpost of the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem. I will linger on how the threatening presence of Muslims in the East allowed Riccoldo to develop a creative meditation on faith, a refined theological and rhetorical manifesto providing the author and his Christian readers with a spiritual shelter from the dramatic events taking place on earth. I am going to examine in particular Riccoldo’s experience of "sorrow"—one of the possible translations of the Latin word "tristicia"— by looking specifically at the ways in which he describes his faith in God. I will show how, on a rhetorical level, Riccoldo’s exegesis of the Book of Job through Gregory the Great turns out to be the exhortative backbone of the whole collection of his imaginary letters. Referring to Job, it has been claimed that the "Epistole" bear witness to the author’s spiritual crisis, particularly to his crisis of faith, as well as to his loss of certainty and hope in God’s plan—this implies an interpretation of the Book of Job in a deterministic, literalist and pessimistic fashion. I aim to challenge this interpretation of the "Epistole" as a desperate lament conceived by an author who finds himself incapable of escaping a fatalistic view of the present, realistically confused regarding God’s salvation plan and even suffering from agnosticism. I will demonstrate that by means of careful exegetical and rhetorical strategies, the "Epistole" instead provide substantial evidence of Riccoldo’s very faith vis-à-vis the general crisis surrounding him, shedding light on his expectations about the reaction of the Dominican Order—and the Western Church on a broader level—to the last stage of Islamic expansion.