by Will Durant
The most striking of all effects produced by the Arab conquest of North Africa was the gradual but almost complete disappearance of Christianity. The Berbers not only accepted Mohammedanism, they became its most fanatical defenders. Doubtless economic considerations entered: non-Moslems paid a head tax, and converts were for a time freed from it. When in 744 the Arab governor of Egypt offered this exemption, 24,000 Christians went over to Islam.22 Occasional but severe persecutions of Christians may have influenced many to conform to the ruling faith. In Egypt a Coptic minority held out bravely, built their churches like fortresses, maintained their worship in secret, and survive to this day. But the once crowded churches of Alexandria, Cyrene, Carthage, and Hippo were emptied and decayed; the memory of Athanasius, Cyril, and Augustine faded out; and the disputes of Arians, Donatists, and Monophysites gave way to the quarrels of Sunni and Ismaili Mohammedanism. The Fatimids propped up their power by gathering the Ismailites into a Grand Lodge of complex initiations and hierarchical degrees; the members were used for political espionage and intrigue; the forms of the order were transmitted to Jerusalem and Europe, and strongly influenced the organization, ritual, and garb of the Templars, the Illuminati, and the other secret fraternities of the Western world. The American businessman is periodically a zealous Mohammedan, proud of his secret doctrine, his Moroccan fez, and his Moslem shrine.
III. ISLAM IN THE MEDITERRANEAN: 649–1071
Having conquered Syria and Egypt, the Moslem leaders realized that they could not hold the coast without a fleet. Soon their men-of-war seized Cyprus and Rhodes, and defeated the Byzantine navy (652, 655). Corsica was occupied in 809, Sardinia in 810, Crete in 823, Malta in 870. In 827 the old struggle between Greece and Carthage for Sicily was resumed; the Aghlabid caliphs of Qairwan sent expedition after expedition, and the conquest proceeded with leisurely bloodshed and rapine. Palermo fell in 831, Messina in 843, Syracuse in 878, Taormina in 902. When the Fatimid caliphs succeeded to the Aghlabid power (909) they inherited Sicily as part of their domain. When the Fatimids removed their seat to Cairo their governor of Sicily, Husein al-Kalbi, made himself emir with nearly sovereign authority, and established that Kalbite dynasty under which Moslem civilization in Sicily reached its height.
Fortified by mastery of the Mediterranean, the Saracens now looked appreciatively on the cities of southern Italy. As piracy was quite within the bounds of honored custom at this time, and Christians and Moslems raided Moslem or Christian shores to capture infidels for sale as slaves, Saracen fleets, mostly from Tunisia or Sicily, began in the ninth century to attack Italian ports. In 841 the Moslems took Bari, the main Byzantine base in southeastern Italy. A year later, invited by the Lombard Duke of Benevento to help him against Salerno, they swept across Italy and back, despoiling fields and monasteries as they went. In 846 eleven hundred Moslems landed at Ostia, marched up to the walls of Rome, freely plundered the suburbs and the churches of St. Peter and St. Paul, and leisurely returned to their ships. Seeing that no civil authority could organize Italian defense, Pope Leo IV took charge, bound Amalfi, Naples, Gaeta, and Rome in alliance, and had a chain stretched across the Tiber to halt any enemy. In 849 the Saracens made another attempt to seize the citadel of Western Christianity. The united Italian fleet, blessed by the Pope, gave them battle, and routed them—a scene pictured by Raphael in the Stanze of the Vatican. In 866 the Emperor Louis II came down from Germany, and drove the marauding Moslems of south Italy back upon Bari and Taranto. By 884 they were expelled from the peninsula.
But their raids continued, and central Italy lived through a generation of daily fear. In 876 they pillaged the Campagna; Rome was so endangered that the pope paid the Saracens a yearly bribe of 25,000 mancusi (c. $25,000) to keep the peace.23 In 884 they burned the great monastery of Monte Cassino to the ground; in sporadic attacks they ravaged the valley of the Anio; finally the combined forces of the pope, the Greek and German emperors, and the cities of southern and central Italy defeated them on the Garigliano (916), and a tragic century of invasion came to an end. Italy, perhaps Christianity, had had a narrow escape; had Rome fallen, the Saracens would have advanced upon Venice; and Venice taken, Constantinople would have been wedged in between two concentrations of Moslem power. On such chances of battle hung the theology of billions of men.
Meanwhile the polyglot culture of Sicily, yielding with the grace of habit to new conquerors, took on a Moslem veneer. Sicilians, Greeks, Lombards, Jews, Berbers, and Arabs mingled in the streets of the Moslem capital—ancient Panormus, Arabic Balerm, Italian Palermo; all hating one another religiously, but living together with no more than a Sicilian average of passion, poetry, and crime. Here Ibn Hawqal, about 970, found some 300 mosques, and 300 schoolteachers who were highly regarded by the inhabitants “in spite of the fact,” says the geographer, “that schoolteachers are notorious for their mental deficiency and light brains.”24 With sunshine and rain co-operating to make a lush vegetation, Sicily was an agricultural paradise; and the clever Arabs reaped the fruits of a well-managed economy. Palermo became a port of exchange between Christian Europe and Moslem Africa; soon it was one of the richest cities in Islam. The Moslem flair for fine dress, brilliant jewelry, and the arts of decoration made for a life of otium cum dignitate—leisure without vulgarity. The Sicilian poet Ibn Hamdis (c. 1055–1132) describes the vivacious hours of Palermitan youth: the midnight revels, the jolly raid on a convent to buy wine from a surprised but genial nun, the gay mingling of men and women in festival, “when the King of the Revels has outlawed care,” and singing girls tease the lute with slender fingers, and dance “like resplendent moons on the stems of willowy trees.”25
There were thousands of poets in the island, for the Moors loved wit and rhyme, and Sicilian love offered rich themes. There were scholars, for Palermo boasted a university; and great physicians, for Sicilian Moslem medicine influenced the medical school at Salerno.26 Half the brilliance of Norman Sicily was an Arab echo, an Oriental legacy of crafts and craftsmen to a young culture willing to learn from any race or creed. The Norman conquest of Sicily (1060–91) helped time to efface the vestiges of Islam in the island; Count Roger was proud that he had leveled “Saracen cities, castles, and palaces built with marvelous art.”27 But Moslem style left its mark on the Palace of La Ziza, and on the ceiling of the Capella Palatina; in this chapel of the palace of the Norman kings Moorish ornament serves the shrine of Christ.
IV. SPANISH ISLAM: 711–1086
1. Caliphs and Emirs
It was at first the Moors, not the Arabs, who conquered Spain. Tariq was a Berber, and his army had 7000 Berbers to 300 Arabs. His name is embedded in the rock at whose foot his forces landed; the Moors came to call it Gebel al-Tariq, the Mountain of Tariq, which Europe compressed into Gibraltar. Tariq had been sent to Spain by Musa ibn Nusayr, Arab governor of North Africa. In 712 Musa crossed with 10,000 Arabs and 8000 Moors; besieged and captured Seville and Merida; rebuked Tariq for exceeding orders, struck him with a whip, and cast him into prison. The Caliph Walid recalled Musa and freed Tariq, who resumed his conquests. Musa had appointed his son Abd al-Aziz governor of Seville; Suleiman, Walid’s brother, suspected Abd al-Aziz of plotting to make himself independent sovereign of Spain, and despatched assassins to kill him. The head was brought to Suleiman, now caliph, at Damascus; he sent for Musa, who asked: “Grant me his head, that I may close his eyes.” Within a year Musa died of grief.28 We may believe that the story is only a bloody legend.
The victors treated the conquered leniently, confiscated the lands only of those who had actively resisted, exacted no greater tax than had been levied by the Visigothic kings, and gave to religious worship a freedom rare in Spain. Having established their position in the peninsula, the Moslems scaled the Pyrenees and entered Gaul, intent upon making Europe a province of Damascus. Between Tours and Poitiers, a thousand miles north of Gibraltar, they were met by the united forces of Eudes, Duke of Aquitaine, and Charles, Duke of Austrasia. After seven days of fightin
g, the Moslems were defeated in one of the most crucial battles of history (732); again the faith of countless millions was determined by the chances of war. Thenceforth Charles was Carolus Martellus, or Martel, Charles the Hammer. In 735 the Moslems tried again, and captured Arles; in 737 they took Avignon, and ravaged the valley of the Rhone to Lyons. In 759 Pepin the Short finally expelled them from the south of France; but their forty years of circulation there may have influenced Languedoc’s unusual tolerance of diverse faiths, its colorful gaiety, its flair for songs of unpermitted love.
The caliphs of Damascus undervalued Spain; till 756 it was merely “the district of Andalusia,” and was governed from Qairwan. But in 755 a romantic figure landed in Spain, armed only with royal blood, and destined to establish a dynasty that would rival in wealth and glory the caliphs of Baghdad. When, in 750, the triumphant Abbasids ordered all princes of the Umayyad family slain, Abd-er-Rahman, grandson of the Caliph Hisham, was the only Umayyad who escaped. Hunted from village to village, he swam the broad Euphrates, crossed into Palestine, Egypt and Africa, and finally reached Morocco. News of the Abbasid revolution had intensified the factional rivalry of Arabs, Syrians, Persians, and Moors in Spain; an Arab group loyal to the Umayyads, fearing that the Abbasid caliph might question their titles to lands given them by Umayyad governors, invited Abd-er-Rahman to join and lead them. He came, and was made emir of Cordova (756). He defeated an army commissioned by the Caliph al-Mansur to unseat him, and sent the head of its general to be hung before a palace in Mecca.
Perhaps it was these events that saved Europe from worshiping Mohammed: Moslem Spain, weakened with civil war and deprived of external aid, ceased to conquer, and withdrew even from northern Spain. From the ninth to the eleventh century the peninsula was divided into Moslem and Christian by a line running from Coimbra through Saragossa and along the Ebro River. The Moslem south, finally pacified by Abd-er-Rahman I and his successors, blossomed into riches, poetry, and art. Abd-er-Rahman II (822–52) enjoyed the fruits of this prosperity. Amid border wars with the Christians, rebellions among his subjects, and Norman raids on his coasts, he found time to beautify Cordova with palaces and mosques, rewarded poets handsomely, and forgave offenders with an amiable lenience that may have shared in producing the social disorder that followed his reign.
Abd-er-Rahman III (912–61) is the culminating figure of this Umayyad dynasty in Spain. Coming to power at twenty-one, he found “Andaluz” torn by racial faction, religious animosity, sporadic brigandage, and the efforts of Seville and Toledo to establish their independence of Cordova. Though a man of refinement, famous for generosity and courtesy, he laid a firm hand upon the situation, quelled the rebellious cities, and subdued the Arab aristocrats who wished, like their French contemporaries, to enjoy a feudal sovereignty on their rich estates. He invited to his councils men of diverse faiths, adjusted his alliances to maintain a balance of power among his neighbors and his enemies, and administered the government with Napoleonic industry and attention to detail. He planned the campaigns of his generals, often took the field in person, repulsed the invasions of Sancho of Navarre, captured and destroyed Sancho’s capital, and discouraged further Christian forays during his reign. In 929, knowing himself as powerful as any ruler of his time, and realizing that the caliph of Baghdad had become a puppet of Turkish guards, he assumed the caliphal title—Commander of the Faithful and Defender of the Faith. When he died he left behind him, in his own handwriting, a modest estimate of human life:
I have now reigned above fifty [Mohammedan] years in victory or peace…. Riches and honors, powers and pleasures, have waited on my call; nor does any earthly blessing appear to have been wanting to my felicity. In this situation I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot. They amount to fourteen. O man! place not thy confidence in this present world!29
His son Hakam II (961–76) profited wisely from this half century of unhappy competence. Secure from external danger and internal revolt, he gave himself to the adornment of Cordova and other cities; built mosques, colleges, hospitals, markets, public baths, and asylums for the poor;30 made the University of Cordova the greatest educational institution of his time; and helped hundreds of poets, artists, and savants. The Moslem historian al-Maqqari writes:
The Caliph Hakam surpassed every one of his predecessors in love of literature and the sciences, which he himself cultivated and fostered … he converted Andaluz into a great market whereto the literary productions of every clime were immediately brought for sale. He employed agents to collect books for him in distant countries, and remitted to them large sums of money, until the number of books thus conveyed to Andaluz exceeded all calculation. He would likewise send gifts of money to celebrated authors in the East, to encourage the publication of works, or to obtain the first copies of them. In this way, knowing that Abu’l Faraj of Isfahan had written a work entitled Kitab ul-Aghani, he sent him 1000 dinars of pure gold ($4750), upon which the author forwarded him a copy of this work, even before it had appeared in Iraq.31
While the scholar-caliph attended to the amenities of life, he left the administration of the government, even the guidance of national policy, to his able Jewish prime minister Hasdai ibn Shaprut, and the leadership of his armies to a brilliant and unscrupulous general who, under the name of Almanzor, was to provide material for many a Christian drama or romance. His real name was Muhammad ibn Abi Amir. He came of an old Arab family with more genealogy than means; he earned a living by writing petitions for persons who wished to address the caliph; became a clerk in the office of the chief qadi or attorney general; and in 967, at the age of twenty-six, was appointed to manage the property of al-Hakam’s eldest son, another Abd-er-Rahman. He ingratiated himself with the lad’s mother, Queen Subh, charmed her with courtesies and compliments, and impressed her with his tireless ability; soon he was managing her property as well as her son’s; and within a year he was named master of the mint. He now became so generous to his friends that rivals accused him of malversation. Al-Hakam summoned him to clear his account; knowing that he could not, Ibn Abi Amir asked a rich friend to advance him the deficit; so armed, he went to the palace, faced his accusers, and carried the matter off so triumphantly that the Caliph appointed him concurrently to several lucrative posts. When Hakam died, Ibn Abi Amir secured the succession to Hakam’s son Hisham II (976–1009;—1010–13) by personally directing the murder of a rival claimant. A week later he was made vizier.32
Hisham II was a weakling, altogether incapable of rule; from 978 to 1002 Ibn Ali was caliph in all but name. His enemies charged him, quite rightly, with loving philosophy more than the Moslem faith; to silence them he invited the orthodox theologians to weed out from al-Hakam’s great library, and burn, all volumes that in any way impugned the Sunni creed; and by this act of dastardly vandalism he earned a useful reputation for piety. At the same time he drew the intellectual classes to his support by secretly protecting the philosophers, welcoming men of letters at his court, and housing there a bevy of poets who drew stipends from the treasury, followed his campaigns, and sang his victories. He built a new town, Zahira, cast of Cordova, for his palace and administrative offices, while the young Caliph, carefully trained to absorption in theology, remained almost a neglected prisoner in the ancient royal residence. To consolidate his position, Ibn Abi Amir reorganized the army mainly with Berber and Christian mercenaries, who, hostile to the Arabs, felt no obligations to the state, but rewarded with personal loyalty his liberality and tact. When the Christian state of Leon aided a domestic rebellion against him, he destroyed the rebels, severely defeated the Leonese, and returned in triumph to his capital; thereafter he assumed the surname of al-Mansur, “the victorious.” Plots against him were numerous, but he circumvented them with pervasive espionage and judicious assassination. His son Abdallah joined one of the conspiracies, was detected, and was beheaded. Like Sulla, al-Mansur never left a favor unrewarded, nor an injury unavenged.
/> The people forgave his crimes because he effectively suppressed other criminals, and secured an impartial provision of justice for rich and poor; never had life or property been so safe in Cordova. Men could not help admire his persistence, intelligence, and courage. One day, while holding court, he felt a pain in his leg; he sent for a physician, who advised cautery; with no interruption to the session, al-Mansur allowed his flesh to be burned without giving any sign of discomfort; “the assembly,” says al-Maqqari, “perceived nothing until they smelled the burnt flesh.”33 As a further aid to popularity, he enlarged the mosque of Cordova with the labor of Christian captives, and himself wielded pick and shovel, trowel and saw. Having learned that statesmen who organize successful wars, just or unjust, are exalted by both contemporaries and posterity, he renewed the war with Leon, captured and razed its capital, and massacred the population. Nearly every spring he sallied forth on a new campaign against the infidel north, and never returned without victory. In 997 he took and destroyed the city of Santiago de Compostela, leveled to the ground its famous shrine to St. James, and made Christian captives carry the gates and bells of the church on their shoulders in his triumphal entry into Cordova.34 (In later years the bells would be returned to Compostela on the backs of Moslem prisoners of war.)