Middle East and North Africa. In the 8th century John of Damascus, a Syrian monk, Christian theologian, and apologist that lived under the Umayyad Caliphate, reported in his heresiological treatise De Haeresibus ("Concerning Heresy") the Islamic denial of Jesus' crucifixion and his alleged substitution on the cross, attributing the origin of these doctrines to Muhammad himself: Later, the Latin translation of De Haeresibus, where he explicitly used the phrase "false prophet" in referring to Muhammad, became known in the Christian West. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, Christian knowledge of Muhammad's life "was nearly always used abusively". Another influential source was the Epistolae Saraceni ("Letters of a Saracen") written by an Oriental Christian and translated into Latin from Arabic. From the 9th century onwards, highly negative biographies of Muhammad were written in Latin. The first two were produced in Spain, the Storia de Mahometh in the 8th or 9th century and the Tultusceptru in the 9th or 10th century. In the latter, Muhammad is presented as a young Christian monk duped by a demon into spreading a false religion. Another Spaniard, Álvaro of Córdoba, proclaimed Muhammad to be the Antichrist in one of his works. Christendom also gained some knowledge of Muhammad through the Mozarabs of Spain, such as the 9th-century Eulogius of Córdoba. High Middle Ages In the 11th century Petrus Alphonsi, a Jew who had converted to Christianity, was another Mozarab source of information on Muhammad. Later during the 12th century Peter the Venerable, who saw Muhammad as the precursor to the Antichrist and the successor of Arius, ordered the translation of the Quran into Latin (Lex Mahumet pseudoprophete) and the collection of information on Muhammad so that Islamic teachings could be refuted by Christian scholars. Muhammad is characterized as "pseudo-prophet" in Byzantine and post-Byzantine religious and historic texts, as for example by Niketas Choniates (12th-13th c.). Medieval lives of Muhammad During the 13th century, European biographers completed their work on the life of Muhammad in a series of works by scholars such as Peter Pascual, Riccoldo da Monte di Croce, and Ramon Llull in which Muhammad was depicted as an Antichrist while Islam was shown to be a Christian heresy. The fact that Muhammad was unlettered, that he married a wealthy widow, that in his later life he had several wives, that he was involved in several wars, and that he died like an ordinary person in contrast