THE SCENE: We hear so many stories of how magical thinking dominates the medieval mind, it’s refreshing to hear an anecdote like this one, in which a superstition about crows is roundly and thoroughly ridiculed by a hard-minded Spanish king.
THE TEXT: When the king of Castille mustered an army to go against the Saracens, a flock of tiny crows met the army. Some of the king’s knights advised him to go back, saying that evil would arise, they would be defeated by the enemy if they went on. They claimed to have learned this from the prattle of the crows and the way they were flying around. The king answered them with some mockery: “These crows are hardly four years old, while I have campaigned against the Saracens for more than twenty years and know the science and means of warfare better than them. Maybe they have come from another region where they were born and brought up. So they will not know how to tell us much about the Saracen problem, which I have known and lived through. You ought better to put your trust in me than them.” And despising their advice, he went on to defeat the Saracens.
– De Supersticione, Stephen de Bourbon, 13th Century AD
