A History of the Muslim World to 1405: The Making of a Civilization

by Vernon O Egger

  The inhabitants of the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea engaged in a flourishing commerce in order to exchange the cash crops of one area for those of another. The Byzantine Empire possessed a remarkably long coastline relative to its land area. This geographical fact was a great benefit to its economy and to its government’s ability to remain in communication with outlying areas. Goods could be shipped much more rapidly and cheaply by ships and boats than by carts and pack animals. Since most of the empire’s hinterlands were within a short overland trip from water routes, travel between the geographic extremities of the empire was remarkably efficient. The huge city of Constantinople could safely outgrow the ability of its own region to produce food and rely instead upon Syria and Egypt to ship much of the grain that fed its people.

  The region’s foodstuffs were also valued commodities in other parts of the world. Grain traveled well without further processing, and it was ground into flour by either the wholesale or retail customer. Olives and grapes, however, spoiled quickly in their natural state and needed to be processed prior to shipment. Olives were pressed for their oil, which was used as food, lamp oil, and a soap substitute; grapes were fermented into wine. The Byzantines traded these products for furs, timber, amber, spices, and other items that they needed. They had access to Russia by way of the great rivers that drain into the Black Sea, and they were able to trade for the gold of Nubia (in the northern part of the modern country of Sudan) by sailing up the Nile.

  The middle half of the sixth century may well have been the period of the empire’s greatest triumph and influence. By that time, the areas that had composed the western Roman Empire were divided into feuding Germanic kingdoms, whereas the Byzantine half witnessed the emperor Justinian’s rise to power (r. 527–565). Justinian aspired to reunite the entire Mediterranean under “Roman” rule (he spoke Latin and regarded himself to be the Roman emperor) and led military campaigns that regained large areas of the Italian Peninsula, the southern Iberian Peninsula, and North Africa. He codified Roman law in the Corpus Juris Civilis, which influenced both canon and civil law in Europe over the next several centuries. Justinian also wanted his city to reflect imperial brilliance, so he embarked on a huge construction program that included the Church of Holy Wisdom, or Hagia Sophia. During his reign, Constantinople became the largest city west of China, and numbered perhaps half a million people.

  The empire remained a formidable presence for many centuries, but already by the sixth century it was clear that the state was having problems retaining the allegiance of all the different peoples of its complex society. Despite the brilliance of its culture and of the achievements of Justinian, the Byzantine Empire experienced several devastating blows during the sixth century. The bubonic plague struck in 541 and recurred frequently over the next several decades; earthquakes caused great damage to several important cities in Lebanon; the Sasanians sacked the great city of Antioch in 540 while Justinian’s armies were engaged in campaigns in the western Mediterranean; the Avars and Slavs devastated the Balkans; and the Lombards seized large areas in Italy that Justinian had won at great cost. Justinian’s successors were forced to raise taxes to pay for the great emperor’s ambitious projects and campaigns, and they revoked the financial and political autonomy of the empire’s cities in order to expropriate their surpluses more effectively.

  Egyptians and Syrians, in particular, resented the these new measures. Egypt and Syria had been Hellenized since the time of Alexander, and the cities of Alexandria and Antioch were awe-inspiring centers of Greek culture centuries before Constantinople’s foundations had been laid. It was precisely their increasingly secondary status that rankled the pride of the Hellenized provincial elites. They were acutely aware of their vulnerability to economic and political exploitation by Constantinople, and they were resentful of the loss of their religious leadership to the rising power of the patriarch in the capital city. Non-Greek-speaking inhabitants of these provinces had even less reason to be loyal to the capital.

  Political opposition to the Byzantine government’s policies often took the form of religious dissent. This is a phenomenon that we shall see replicated many times in the history of Muslim societies in which the government derives much of its legitimacy from its support of, and identification with, an official state religion. Advocating a different religious expression from that of the ruler in effect challenges the legitimacy of the ruler’s religion and thereby indirectly challenges his political legitimacy. Religious dissent in the Byzantine Empire often took the form of arguments over the nature of Christ. From the beginning of the Christian movement, the followers of Jesus had wrestled with the issue of defining his nature as man and divine being. In the fifth and sixth centuries, the question had developed serious political repercussions, and the disputes over the issue later played a role in the spread of Islam into the area. It is useful, therefore, to note the distinctions among the terms Orthodox, Nestorian, and Monophysite.

  The official interpretation of the state (Orthodox) church was defined at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, which stated that Christ had two “natures” (human and divine), perfect and perfectly distinct, which were united in one “person” (or being). Two major dissenting views existed, with special strength in Egypt and Syria. Their differences from the Orthodox position seem quite subtle and innocuous today, but in the fifth century, social and religious tensions were so great that any deviation from the official view was considered a threat to the civil order and to the integrity of Christianity itself. The group the Orthodox persecuted the most were the Nestorians, who derived their name from Nestorius, bishop of Antioch, the greatest city in Syria. Nestorians were accused of holding a heretical view of Christ’s “person.” It is not clear what Nestorius’ actual position was, but his political enemies insisted that he taught that the presence of the divine and human in Christ was such that there were in him two distinct persons, as opposed to the Orthodox doctrine of two natures concurring in one person. To many of us today, that sounds like hairsplitting, but in those days, to hold the Nestorian position was to court imprisonment or even execution.

  The other major dissenting group, the Monophysites, clashed with the Orthodox position over the subject of Christ’s “nature” rather than over his “person.” They rejected the Orthodox doctrine that Christ’s divine and human natures were separate. In practice, they usually even went further and stated that Christ had a single, divine nature. Monophysitism became the doctrine of the Coptic Church in Egypt, which made up the vast majority of Egyptians. Monophysitism was also widespread in Syria, where its adherents formed the Syrian Orthodox Church, whose members are commonly known as Jacobites. A third group, the Armenian Church, formally adopted Monophysitism in 506, and by doing so, planted Monophysitism strongly in eastern Anatolia. Both Monophysites and Nestorians suffered persecution from the Orthodox Church, and Nestorians suffered persecution even from the Monophysite group in Syria. In the late fifth century, thousands of Nestorians migrated to the east, taking refuge in the Sasanian Empire. Although subject to periodic persecution from the Sasanian religious establishment, in general, Nestorians found a welcome refuge among the Sasanians. Intensely evangelistic as well as involved in international commerce, they spread as far as India and China and were present in considerable numbers along the Eurasian trade routes until the late fourteenth century.

  Language was another factor that played a role in shaping social identities in the Byzantine Empire. Like any major society, it was multilingual. Latin remained the language of administration until the early seventh century, while Greek was the dominant spoken and written language in the basin of the Aegean Sea and was employed by elites in the large cities throughout the empire. The most widely used spoken languages in the Byzantine provinces of the eastern Mediterranean, however, belonged to the Afroasiatic language family: Coptic, Aramaic, and Arabic. Coptic was the primary spoken and written language in Egypt. Aramaic had been the lingua franca of southwestern Asia and the ea
stern Mediterranean since at least the fourth century B.C.E. It had displaced Hebrew as the language of the Jews. It was the language of Jesus and the apostles in the first century, and Jewish rabbis had used it to write the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds. Aramaic was the language of commerce between the Mediterranean and the Indus River and was the majority language in both Byzantine Syria and in Sasanian Iraq. One of its dialects, Syriac, became the most prestigious written form of Aramaic from the third through the seventh centuries. It was used for Christian liturgies as well as for philosophical and scientific treatises.

  Substantial minorities in Syrian cities spoke Arabic, as did nomads and peasants in the frontier areas of eastern and southern Syria. Arabs had been a significant presence in the eastern Roman-Byzantine provinces for centuries, particularly in the semiarid central region and the desert region of the east and south. In northern Syria, the predominantly Arab city of Palmyra had arisen by the first century B.C.E. as a trading center between Rome and the Parthian kingdom that lay to the east. Over the years, it came under increasing Roman influence. A major caravan center, Palmyra reached its zenith of wealth and cultural development between 130 and 270 C.E., becoming the seat of Roman control over Asia Minor, Egypt, and Syria. It was during Palmyra’s golden age that Philip the Arab became the Roman emperor (244–249). Important economically and politically, Palmyra was remembered in the popular imagination most for the “Arab queen” Zenobia who rose in revolt against Rome when her husband, Odenathus, was assassinated in 266. Rome regained control only with great difficulty in 272.

  As the sixth century came to a close, the population of Arabs was increasing in Damascus, Aleppo, and other cities in Syria. The reasons for this demographic surge are not clear, but much of the increase in numbers may have been the result of migration from the northern Arabian Peninsula, where a sustained drought had led to a palpable “desertification” of the area. Arabs were not regarded as aliens within Byzantine society. Like the majority of the population in the area, they spoke Aramaic as well as their native tongue, and many knew Greek. Most of the Arabs of the Byzantine Empire, even the nomads of eastern Syria, seem to have been Monophysite Christians.

  The Ghassanids are the most well-known Arab tribal confederation of the eastern section of the Byzantine Empire during the sixth and early seventh centuries. Based between Palmyra and Damascus, they had begun serving the Byzantines as a buffer against the nomads from the Arabian Peninsula and the Sasanians to the east. Their performance against the Sasanians in the sixth century was so valuable that Justinian rewarded their chief with the titles of patrician, phylarch, and king—the highest honors that he could bestow on anyone. Their service was important, since the regular Byzantine units were concentrated on the northern borders of the empire.

  By the beginning of the seventh century, however, the Ghassanids and the Byzantine court were suspicious of each other. Despite their service to the Orthodox emperor, the Ghassanids had been Monophysites since at least 540. By 584, they had become so ardent in their faith that the Byzantines stopped paying regular subsidies to them. Since the government did not send additional regular army units to the frontier in order to compensate for the loss of dependable service by its Arab clients, the security of the area was henceforth in jeopardy.

  By the end of the sixth century, the Byzantine Empire was the preeminent power of the Mediterranean and the worthy heir of both Alexander and Augustus. As the seventh century dawned, its leaders could be sanguine about the future. There were, in fact, serious disputes within the royal family and sporadic attacks on its frontiers, but because feuds among the ruling elite and war with neighboring states were the norm rather than the exception in the empire’s history, no leading figure saw reason for alarm.

  The Sasanian Empire

  To the east, the Byzantine Empire faced its only major rival in the Sasanian Empire. The Sasanians were Iranians who seized power in 226 C.E. Iranians of various dynasties had dominated the Iranian plateau for most of the period after Cyrus the Great (ca. 550 B.C.E.). Their Persian culture and dialects had become the standard for a huge area whose eastern frontiers extended to the Syr Darya River in the northeast, the cities of Ghazna (modern Ghazni) and Qandahar in the east, and the Indus River in the southeast. After quickly conquering all of that area, the Sasanians soon lost the area between the Amu Darya River and the Syr Darya to outside invaders, but the region would remain culturally Persian for centuries. Because the Greek name for the Amu Darya was the Oxus River, Europeans have usually referred to the region between it and the Syr Darya as Transoxiana (or Transoxania), “that which lies beyond the Oxus.” It was the area known later by the Arabs as ma wara’ al-nahr, or “that which lies beyond the river.”

  By contrast with the Byzantine Empire, the Sasanian realm was a great interior land mass that relied more on transport by land than by water. The great majority of the region was in a desert setting. The Iranian plateau itself is ringed by mountains. In the west, the Zagros range extends from modern Azerbaijan in the northwest to the Persian Gulf, and then eastward toward modern Pakistan. The Elburz chain runs along the south shore of the Caspian Sea to meet the border ranges of Khorasan to the east. The arid interior plateau is distinguished by the remarkable Dasht-e Kavir, an impenetrable, salt-encrusted, muddy waste covering 20,000 square miles. Even the inhabitable areas of the plateau average less than ten inches of rainfall annually (comparable to Phoenix, Arizona). Cities of any size on the plateau had to be located within a short distance of the mountains in order to benefit from the spring runoff from melting snow. Otherwise, only small settlements could survive, relying on springs or a remarkable system of underground irrigation canals. These canals, or qanats, brought water to villages from highland water sources. They were usually one-half mile to three miles long, but could extend as far as thirty miles, and were often inter-meshed in networks of astonishing complexity.

  Transoxiana was also a desert region, but it was bounded by the rich agricultural valleys of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya and was dotted with many large and small oases. The cities of Samarqand and Bukhara were the largest and wealthiest in Trans-oxiana. Both were situated on the Zeravshan River, which rises in the mountains that border China and flows west until it disappears in the desert west of Bukhara, well short of the Amu Darya.

  The region south of the Caspian Sea is little known outside Iran, but merits attention here. The southwestern coastal plain of the sea is known as Gilan, and to the east is Mazandaran. In the period covered by this book, the coastal plains and the mountains south of them were usually referred to as Daylam. Some areas of Gilan receive up to seventy-eight inches of rainfall per year, with Mazandaran receiving somewhat less than half of that amount. (By comparison, New Orleans, Louisiana, receives an average annual rainfall of sixty-two inches.) Unlike most of the arid regions of southwestern Asia, rainfall here falls throughout the year, rather than only in the short winter. Gilan and Mazandaran were, consequently, the most densely populated regions of Iran and grew a wide variety of crops. They were distinguished by a reliance upon rice rather than wheat or barley for their principal grain.

  While Gilan and Mazandaran were the most densely populated areas of the empire, the region with the largest total population was Iraq. Iraq contained the two largest rivers in the empire, the Euphrates and the Tigris. Like the Nile, they had given birth to civilization in a desert environment as early as the fourth millennium B.C.E., when local farmers began constructing ground-level canals to bring water to their parched fields. Both rivers were also navigable for hundreds of miles of their length and thus encouraged commerce. Iraq was the empire’s wealthiest province, generating forty percent of the imperial revenues. Of all the regions of the empire, Iraq was the most alien to the ruling elite. It lay west of the rugged Zagros range and was not culturally Iranian. Nevertheless, its wealth was essential to the imperial economy, and as a result, the Sasanians placed a priority on protecting it from Byzantine encroachment.

  Thu
s, despite its extensive desert regions, the Sasanian Empire enjoyed an adequate supply of agricultural production, and it was strategically located for longdistance commerce. Its position allowed it to control both the land route to China and India and the approaches to Persian Gulf ports. Because of the activity of its merchants, Iranian culture became influential along the central Eurasian trade routes for centuries to come. Overland transport was slow: Large caravans or armies could expect to travel only fifteen miles per day. The government made great efforts to provide security for major routes, to maintain roads and bridges, and to provide hostels and caravanserais.