Mahomet the Cardinal: on the History of an Image of Muhammad in Medieval Europe

The story of the monk Bahira who revealed in young Muhammad the future prophet and the champagne ballad about Mahomet the Cardinal. These two texts are separated by five centuries. However, the latter would have been impossible without the former. The article attempts to trace how young Muhammad of the Muslim legend about a monk-visionary turned into Mahomet the Cardinal in the “Latin West”. Study of the history of formation of the legend about Mahomet the Cardinal allows us to raise the question of what was actually known about Islam in medieval Europe. Was this knowledge really limited only to an insignificant set of polemical stereotypes, as is often commonly believed today? Or we can speak of a system of quite well-ordered images of Mahomet, each of which performed a well-defined task.