Ramon Llull
Majorcan philosopher, theologian, writer and missionary (c. 1232–1316), born in Palma shortly after the Christian conquest of the island, a courtier and troubadour leading a worldly life until the age of thirty, when, as he himself relates, he experienced a series of visions of the crucified Christ that led him to a radical conversion: he abandoned wife, children and possessions to devote the rest of his life to a project he considered of absolute urgency — the peaceful conversion of Muslims and Jews to Christianity through rational argument rather than force — for which he spent nine years learning Arabic from a Muslim slave and studying philosophy and theology. A prolific author in three languages — Catalan, Latin and Arabic, being the first great European philosopher to write serious philosophical work in a vernacular language rather than solely in Latin — his most original and famous contribution is the Ars Magna (the 'Great Art'), a revolutionary logical-combinatorial system that aimed to demonstrate the truths of the Christian faith through the mechanical combination of a reduced set of basic, universal divine attributes, represented by letters and arranged in geometric figures and rotating concentric circles — an attempt to universalise reasoning that, rediscovered centuries later, has been regarded as a distant precursor of symbolic logic and, for some historians of computing, even of the earliest calculating machines and artificial intelligence. His most influential literary work, the Book of Evast and Blaquerna, a novel including the celebrated Book of the Lover and the Beloved, one hundred and sixty-five brief mystical metaphors of extraordinary lyrical intensity on the love between the soul and God, makes him the father of the novel and of mysticism in the Catalan language. He made several missionary voyages to North Africa to preach directly to Muslims, on one of them, in Tunis or Bejaïa, being stoned by an enraged mob, wounds from which he probably died shortly afterward, though hagiographic tradition exaggerates his martyrdom.