Ramon Llull - Early Life

Early Life

Llull was born into a wealthy family in Palma, the capital of the new Kingdom of Majorca founded by James I of Aragon to integrate politically the recently-conquered territories of the Balearic Islands (nowadays part of Spain) in the Crown of Aragon. His parents had come from Catalonia as part of the colonizing efforts for the formerly-Almohad island. As the island had been conquered militarily, all the Muslim population who had not been able to flee the conquering Europeans had been enslaved; they still constituted a significant portion of the island's population, though.

Llull was well educated, and became the tutor of James II of Aragon. He was conversant in Latin, Catalan, Occitan (both considered the same language at the time as "popular Latin") and Arabic.

By 1257 he had married Blanca Picany and they had two children, Domènec and Magdalena; yet despite his family he lived, as before, a troubadour's life. About this time he became the Seneschal (the administrative head of the royal household) to the future King James II of Majorca, a relative of his wife.

A key event in his early life was his religious conversion. In 1265 he had a religious epiphany which he narrates in the Vita coaetanea ("Daily Life"), an "autobiography" which he dictated circa 1311 to a Carthusian monk at the charterhouse near Paris:

Ramon, while still a young man and Seneschal to the King of Majorca, was very given to composing worthless songs and poems and to doing other licentious things. One night he was sitting beside his bed, about to compose and write in his vulgar tongue a song to a lady whom he loved with a foolish love; and as he began to write this song, he looked to his right and saw our Lord Jesus Christ on the Cross, as if suspended in mid-air.

The vision came to him five times in all. As a consequence of this conversion experience, he took the habit of the Third Order of St. Francis the following year. He left his position and family to live a life of solitude and study for the next nine years. During this time, he learned Arabic from a Muslim slave he purchased.

His first major work Art Abreujada d'Atrobar Veritat (The Abbreviated Art of Finding Truth) was written in Catalan and then translated into Latin. He wrote treatises on alchemy and botany, Ars Magna, and Llibre de meravelles. He wrote the romantic novel Blanquerna, the first major work of literature written in Catalan, and perhaps the first European novel. Llull pressed for the study of Arabic and other than-insufficiently studied languages in Spain for the purpose of converting Muslims to Christianity. He even wrote some books in Arabic.

His mission to convert the Jews of Europe was zealous, his goal to utterly relieve Christendom of any Jews or Jewish religious influence. Some scholars regard Llull's as the first comprehensive articulation, in the Christian West, of an expulsionist policy regarding Jews who refused conversion. To acquire converts, he worked for amicable public debate to foster an intellectual appreciation of a rational Christianity among the Jews of his time. His rabbinic opponents included Rabbi Shlomo ben Aderet of Barcelona and Moshe ben Shlomo of Salerno.