The Age of Faith

by Will Durant

  Despite the philosophers, gleaming cupolas and gilded minarets marked the thousand cities or towns that made Moslem Spain in the tenth century the most urban country in Europe, probably in the world. Cordova under al-Mansur was a civilized city, second only to Baghdad and Constantinople. Here, says al-Maqqari, were 200,077 houses, 60,300 palaces, 600 mosques, and 700 public baths;62 the statistics are slightly Oriental. Visitors marveled at the wealth of the upper classes, and at what seemed to them an extraordinary general prosperity; every family could afford a donkey; only beggars could not ride. Streets were paved, had raised sidewalks, and were lighted at night; one could travel for ten miles by the light of street lamps, and along an uninterrupted series of buildings.63 Over the quiet Guadalquivir Arab engineers threw a great stone bridge of seventeen arches, each fifty spans in width. One of the earliest undertakings of Abd-er-Rahman I was an aqueduct that brought to Cordova an abundance of fresh water for homes, gardens, fountains, and baths. The city was famous for its pleasure gardens and promenades.

  Abd-er-Rahman I, lonesome for his boyhood haunts, planted in Cordova a great garden like that of the villa in which he had spent his boyhood near Damascus, and built in it his “Palace of the Rissafah.” Later caliphs added other structures, to which Moslem fancy gave florid names: Palace of the Flowers … of the Lovers … of Contentment… of the Diadem. Cordova, like later Seville, had its Alcazar (al-qasr, castle, from the Latin castrum), a combination of palace and fortress. Moslem historians describe these mansions as equaling in luxury and beauty those of Nero’s Rome: majestic portals, marble columns, mosaic floors, gilded ceilings, and such refined decoration as only Moslem art could give. The palaces of the royal family, the lords and magnates of land and trade, lined for miles the banks of the stately stream. A concubine of Abd-er-Rahman III left him a large fortune; he proposed to spend it ransoming such of his soldiers as had been captured in war; proud searchers claimed they could find none; whereupon the Caliph’s favorite wife, Zahra, proposed that he build a suburb and palace to commemorate her name. For twenty-five years (936–61) 10,000 workmen and 1500 beasts toiled to realize her dream. The royal palace of al-Zahra that rose three miles southwest of Cordova was lavishly designed and equipped; 1200 marble columns sustained it; its harem could accommodate 6000 women; its hall of audience had ceiling and walls of marble and gold, eight doors inlaid with ebony, ivory, and precious stones, and a basin of quicksilver whose undulating surface reflected the dancing rays of the sun. Al-Zahra became the residential center of an aristocracy renowned for the grace and polish of its manners, the refinement of its tastes, and the breadth of its intellectual interests. At the opposite end of the city al-Mansur constructed (978) a rival palace, al-Zahira, which also gathered about it a suburb of lords, servants, minstrels, poets, and courtesans. Both suburbs were burned to the ground in the revolution of 1010.

  Normally the people forgave the luxury of their princes if these would raise to Allah shrines exceeding their palaces in splendor and scope. The Romans had built in Cordova a temple to Janus; the Christians had replaced it with a cathedral; Abd-er-Rahman I paid the Christians for the site, demolished the church, and replaced it with the Blue Mosque; in 1238 the reconquista would turn the mosque into a cathedral; so the good, the true, and the beautiful fluctuate with the fortunes of war. The project became the consolation of Abd-er-Rahman’s troubled years; he left his suburban for his city home to superintend the operations, and hoped that he might before his death lead the congregation in grateful prayer in this new and majestic mosque. He died in 788, two years after laying the foundation; his son al-Hisham continued the work; each caliph, for two centuries, added a part, till in al-Mansur’s time it covered an area 742 by 472 feet. The exterior showed a battlemented wall of brick and stone, with irregular towers, and a massive minaret that surpassed in size and beauty all the minarets of the time, so that it too was numbered among the innumerable “wonders of the world.”64 Nineteen portals, surmounted by horseshoe arches elegantly carved with floral and geometrical decoration in stone, led into the Court of Ablutions, now the Patio de los Naranjos, or Court of Oranges. In this rectangle, paved with colored tiles, stood four fountains, each cut from a block of solid marble so large that seventy oxen had been needed to haul it from the quarry to the site. The mosque proper was a forest of 1290 columns, dividing the interior into eleven naves and twenty-one aisles. From the column capitals sprang a variety of arches—some semicircular, some pointed, some in horseshoe form, most of them with voussoirs, or wedge stones, alternately red or white. The columns of jasper, porphyry, alabaster, or marble, snatched from the ruins of Roman or Visigothic Spain, gave by their number the impression of limitless and bewildering space: The wooden ceiling was carved into cartouches bearing Koranic and other inscriptions. From it hung 200 chandeliers holding 7000 cups of scented oil, fed from reservoirs of oil in inverted Christian bells also suspended from the roof. Floor and walls were adorned with mosaics; some of these were of enameled glass, baked in rich colors, and often containing silver or gold; after a thousand years of wear these dados still sparkle like jewels in the cathedral walls. One section was marked off as a sanctuary; it was paved with silver and enameled tiles, guarded with ornate doors, decorated with mosaics, roofed with three domes, and marked off with a wooden screen of exquisite design. Within this sanctuary were built the mihrab and minbar, upon which the artists lavished their maturest skill. The mihrab itself was an heptagonal recess walled with gold; brilliantly ornamented with enameled mosaics, marble tracery, and gold inscriptions on a ground of crimson and blue; and crowned by a tier of slender columns and trefoil arches as lovely as anything in Gothic art. The pulpit was considered the finest of its kind; it consisted of 37,000 little panels of ivory and precious woods—ebony, citron, aloe, red and yellow sandal, all joined by gold or silver nails, and inlaid with gems. On this minbar, in a jeweled box covered with gold-threaded crimson silk, rested a copy of the Koran written by the Caliph Othman and stained with his dying blood. To us, who prefer to adorn our theaters with gilt and brass rather than clothe our cathedrals in jewelry and gold, the decoration of the Blue Mosque seems extravagant; the walls encrusted with the blood of exploited generations, the columns confusingly numerous, the horseshoe arch as structurally weak and aesthetically offensive as obesity on bow legs. Others, however, have judged differently: al-Maqqari (1591–1632) thought this mosque “unequaled in size, or beauty of design, or tasteful arrangement of its ornaments, or boldness of execution”;65 and even its diminished Christian form is ranked as “by universal consent the most beautiful Moslem temple in the world.”66

  It was a common saying in Moorish Spain that “when a musician dies at Cordova, and his instruments are to be sold, they are sent to Seville; when a rich man dies at Seville, and his library is to be sold, it is sent to Cordova.”67 For Cordova in the tenth century was the focus and summit of Spanish intellectual life, though Toledo, Granada, and Seville shared actively in the mental exhilaration of the time. Moslem historians picture the Moorish cities as beehives of poets, scholars, jurists, physicians, and scientists; al-Maqqari fills sixty pages with their names.68 Primary schools were numerous, but charged tuition; Hakam II added twenty-seven schools for the free instruction of the poor. Girls as well as boys went to school; several Moorish ladies became prominent in literature or art.69 Higher education was provided by independent lecturers in the mosques; their courses constituted the loosely organized University of Cordova, which in the tenth and eleventh centuries was second in renown only to similar institutions in Cairo and Baghdad. Colleges were established also at Granada, Toledo, Seville, Murcia, Almeria, Valencia, Cadiz.70 The technique of paper making was brought in from Baghdad, and books increased and multiplied. Moslem Spain had seventy libraries; rich men displayed their Morocco bindings, and bibliophiles collected rare or beautifully illuminated books. The scholar al-Hadram, at an auction in Cordova, found himself persistently outbid for a book he desired, until the price offered far
exceeded the value of the volume. The successful bidder explained that there was a vacant place in his library, into which this book would precisely fit. “I was so vexed,” adds al-Hadram, “that I could not help saying to him, ‘He gets the nut who has no teeth.’”71

  Scholars were held in awesome repute in Moslem Spain, and were consulted in simple faith that learning and wisdom are one. Theologians and grammarians could be had by the hundred; rhetoricians, philologists, lexicographers, anthologists, historians, biographers, were legion. Abu Muhammad Ali ibn Hazm (994–1064), besides serving as vizier to the last Umayyads, was a theologian and historian of great erudition. His Book of Religions and Sects, discussing Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and the principal varieties of Mohammedanism, is one of the world’s earliest essays in comparative religion. If we wish to know what an educated Moslem thought of medieval Christianity we need only read one of his paragraphs:

  Human superstition need never excite our astonishment. The most numerous and civilized nations are thralls to it…. So great is the multitude of Christians that God alone can number them, and they can boast of sagacious princes and illustrious philosophers. Nevertheless they believe that one is three and three are one; that one of the three is the Father, the other the Son, and the third the Spirit; that the Father is the Son and is not the Son; that a man is God and not God; that the Messiah has existed from all eternity, and yet was created. A sect of theirs, the Monophysites, numbered by hundreds of thousands, believes that the Creator was scourged, buffeted, crucified, and that for three days the universe was without a ruler.72

  Ibn Hazm, for his part, believed that every word of the Koran was literally true.73

  Science and philosophy, in Moslem Spain, were largely frustrated by the fear that they would damage the people’s faith. Maslama ibn Ahmad (d. 1007), of Madrid and Cordova, adapted the astronomic tables of al-Khwarizmi to Spain. A work doubtfully attributed to him describes one of the many experiments by which alchemy was transmuted into chemistry—the production of mercuric oxide from mercury. Ibrahim al-Zarqali (c. 1029–87) of Toledo made an international name by improving astronomical instruments; Copernicus quoted his treatise on the astrolabe; his astronomical observations were the best of his age, and enabled him to prove for the first time the motion of the solar apogee with reference to the stars; his “Toledan Tables” of planetary movements were used throughout Europe. Abul Qasim al-Zahrawi (936–1013), physician to Abd-er-Rahman III, was honored in Christendom as Abulcasis; he stands at the top of Moslem surgeons; his medical encyclopedia, al-Tasrif, included three books on surgery which, translated into Latin, became the standard text of surgery for many centuries. Cordova was in this period the favorite resort of Europeans for surgical operations. Like every civilized city, it had its quota of quacks and moneymad physicians. One Harrani announced a secret specific against intestinal troubles, and sold it at fifty dinars ($237.50) a phial to moneyed fools.74

  “We forbear,” says al-Maqqari, “to mention the poets who flourished under Hisham II and al-Mansur, for they were as numerous as the sands of the ocean.”75 Among them was the princess Wallada (d. 1087); her home at Cordova was a veritable salon of the French Enlightenment; wits, scholars, and poets gathered round her; she made love to a score of them, and wrote about her amours with a freedom that would have shocked Mme. Récamier. Her friend Mugha outdid her in beauty of person and licentiousness of verse. Almost everyone in Andalusia was a poet in those days, and exchanged improvised rhymes at any provocation. The caliphs joined in the sport; and there was seldom a Moorish prince who did not have at his court a poet not only honored but paid. This royal patronge did some injury as well as good; the poetry that has reached us from this age is too often artificial, flowery, lame with laborious similes, and clogged with petty conceits. The theme was love, carnal or Platonic; in Spain, as in the East, the Moslem singers anticipated the methods, moods, and philosophy of the troubadours.76

  From this dancing galaxy we take one star: Said ibn Judi, son of the prefect of Cordova; an excellent warrior, a constant lover in the plural sense, a master of all the qualities that in Moslem judgment made a perfect gentleman: liberality, courage, skillful horsemanship, good looks, eloquence, poetic talent, strength, and the arts of fencing, wielding the spear, and bending the bow.77 He was never sure which he loved the more—love or war. Sensitive to the slightest touch of a woman, he suffered a series of infatuations, each of which had every promise of perpetuity. Like a good troubadour, he loved most ardently where he had seen least; his warmest ode was to Jehane, of whom he had seen only a lily hand. He was a candid epicurean, and felt that the burden of proof was always on the moralist. “The sweetest morsel in life,” he said, “is when the wine cup goes around; when, after a quarrel, the lovers are reconciled, embrace, and are at peace. I traverse the circle of pleasures as a frenzied war horse that has taken the bit in its teeth. I leave no desire unsatisfied! Steadfast when the angel of death hovers over my head in the day of battle, a pair of bright eyes can sway me as they will.”78 His fellow warriors sometimes resented his seduction of their wives; one officer caught him in situ, and killed him (897).

  A more heroic end came to a greater poet, al-Mutamid, Emir of Seville. Like other kinglets of disintegrating Spain, he had for several years paid tribute to Alfonso VI of Castile as a bribe to Christian peace. But a bribe always leaves a balance to be paid on demand. With the sinews of war provided by his prey, Alfonso pounced upon Toledo in 1085; and al-Mutamid perceived that Seville might be next. The city-states of Moslem Spain were now too weakened by class and internecine war to offer any adequate resistance. But across the Mediterranean there had arisen a new Moslem dynasty; it was called Almoravid from the marabout or patron saint of northwestern Africa; founded on religious fanaticism, it had turned almost every man into a soldier of Allah, and its armies had easily conquered all Morocco. At this juncture the Almoravid king Yusuf ibn Tashfin, a man of courage and cunning, received from the princes of Spain an invitation to rescue them from the Christian dragon of Castile. Yusuf transported his army across the Strait, received reinforcements from Malaga, Granada, and Seville, and met the forces of Alfonso at Zallaka, near Badajoz (1086). Alfonso sent a courtly message to Yusuf: “Tomorrow [Friday] is your holyday, and Sunday is ours; I propose, therefore, that we join battle on Saturday.” Yusuf agreed; Alfonso attacked on Friday; al-Mutamid and Yusuf fought well, the Moslems celebrated their holyday with victorious slaughter, and Alfonso barely escaped with 500 men. Yusuf astonished Spain by returning bootyless to Africa.

  Four years later he came back. Al-Mutamid had urged him to destroy the power of Alfonso, who was rearming for a fresh assault. Yusuf fought the Christians indecisively, and assumed sovereign power over Moslem Spain. The poor welcomed him, always preferring new masters to old; the intellectual classes opposed him as representing religious reaction; the theologians embraced him. He took Granada without a blow, and delighted the people by abolishing all taxes not prescribed in the Koran (1090). Al-Mutamid and other emirs joined in a league against him, and formed a holy alliance with Alfonso. Yusuf besieged Cordova; its populace delivered it to him. He surrounded Seville; al-Mutamid fought heroically, saw his son killed, broke down in grief, and surrendered. By 1091 all Andalusia except Saragossa was in Yusuf’s hands, and Moslem Spain, ruled from Morocco, was again a province of Africa.

  Al-Mutamid was sent as a prisoner to Tangier. While there he received from a local poet, Husri, some verses praising him and asking for a gift. The ruined emir had now only thirty-five ducats ($87) in all the world; he sent them to Husri with apologies for the smallness of the gift. Al-Mutamid was transferred to Aghmat, near Morocco, and lived there for some time in chains, always in destitution, still writing poetry, till his death (1095).

  One of his poems might have served as his epitaph:

  Woo not the world too rashly, for behold,

  Beneath the painted silk and broidering,

  It is a faithless and inconstant t
hing.

  Listen to me, Mutamid, growing old.

  And we—that dreamed youth’s blade would never rust,

  Hoped wells from the mirage, roses from the sand—

  The riddle of the world shall understand

  And put on wisdom with the robe of dust.79

  CHAPTER XIV

  The Grandeur and Decline of Islam

  1058–1258

  I. THE ISLAMIC EAST: 1058–1250

  WHEN Tughril Beg died (1063) he was succeeded as Seljuq sultan by his nephew Alp Arslan, then twenty-six years of age. A well-disposed Moslem historian describes him as

  tall, with mustaches so long that he used to tie up their ends when he wished to shoot; and never did his arrows miss the mark. He wore so lofty a turban that men were wont to say that from its top to the end of his mustaches was a distance of two yards. He was a strong and just ruler, generally magnanimous, swift to punish tyranny or extortion among his officials, and extremely charitable to the poor. He was also devoted to the study of history, listening with great pleasure and interest to chronicles of former kings, and to works that threw light on their characters, institutions, and methods of administration.1

  Despite these scholarly inclinations, Alp Arslan lived up to his name—“the lion-hearted hero”—by conquering Herat, Armenia, Georgia, and Syria. The Greek Emperor Romanus IV collected 100,000 varied and ill-disciplined troops to meet Arslan’s 15,000 experienced warriors. The Seljuq leader offered a reasonable peace; Romanus rejected it scornfully, gave battle at Manzikert in Armenia (1071), fought bravely amid his cowardly troops, was defeated and captured, and was led before the Sultan. “What would have been your behavior,” asked Arslan, “had fortune smiled upon your arms?” “I would have inflicted upon thy body many a stripe,” answered Romanus. Arslan treated him with all courtesy, released him on the promise of a royal ransom, and dismissed him with rich gifts.2 A year later Arslan died by an assassin’s knife.