Sea of Faith

by Stephen O'Shea

  Indeed, the encouragement and study in Córdoba, of such practical arts as medicine, agronomy, and public administration ended up fostering the habit of inquisitiveness necessary to work an intellectual and artistic revolution. Blessed with plenty and learning, al-Andalus reinvented the individual, a person who had for all intents and purposes disappeared in the latter antipagan and communitarian centuries of the mare nostrum. As the bibliophiles of Córdoba, savored the refinements of Baghdad, Andalusi Arabic poets were ringing changes on the classical form they had inherited from Mesopotamia and producing a body of work that, while often less sophisticated and profound than its eastern model, was at times more intimate, robust, and direct. Andalusi poets gravitated especially to the natural world, and sensual descriptions of the cultivated landscape and its objects of desire abounded. New forms were also invented—to some extent inspired by the Romance songs these Iberian Arabs were hearing all around them in the convivencia of al-Andalus. Their achievement represented, in the words of one historian, "the last flowering of an original and personal lyrical poetry before modern times." This was no mean accomplishment, and it would continue to bear fruit in Muslim Spain long after the passing of the Umayyads. Among the non-Muslim communities of the peninsula the taste for innovation was shared. "For the first time since the age of Scripture," noted one translator of the period's poetry, which entered what is almost always referred to as a Golden Age, "Hebrew poets were writing with tremendous power about a wide range of subjects, including wine, war, erotic desire, wisdom, fate, grief, and both metaphysical and religious mystery." Muslim, Christian, and Jew had managed, in the centuries known elsewhere as the Dark Ages, to light a flare that burned true.

  Without doubt, then, by the middle of the tenth century Córdoba, was the greatest city in western Europe. But Camelot it was not. However broad-minded it seems in comparison to its contemporaries, Córdoba, witnessed many scenes of civic violence, both endemic and episodic. Of the latter, revolt was usually the cause—and usually the work of Mozarab converts to Islam who, like the Berbers before them, resented their relegation to inferiority within the umma. In 818 the walls of the city were festooned with dozens of crucified leaders of one such revolt, and the suburb in which their supporters lived—on the left bank of the Guadalquivir, across an old Roman bridge that still stands today—was razed to nothingness. Revolts in the provinces also scarred the face of a unitary al-Andalus, the most successful being a quasi-independent principality that lasted almost fifty years in the mountains north of Malaga, the handiwork of a Muslim chieftain, Umar ibn Hafsun, who opportunistically converted to Christianity.

  The religious undercurrent to Ibn Hafsun's tenth-century revolt, and that of the Cordoban converts three generations earlier, hints at the flip side of convivencia: resentment. A constant in the encounter between Muslim and Christian in the Mediterranean, those who were the most opposed to intelligent coexistence were those who took their religion the most seriously. Refuting the other's faith—a fifteen-hundred-year-old literary cottage industry still thriving—first matured in Iberia, amplified by repeated jeremiads about the dangers of getting along. Many Islamic religious leaders habitually bemoaned as a betrayal of Islamic law the prominent posts awarded to non-Muslims; their Christian counterparts took a similarly dim view, but on the grounds that active cooperation would inevitably end in the Arabization and Islamization of their community. Further, each group thought that the other was a sink of corruption. For the Muslim holy man particularly, the Christian population, its wine flowing and its women bafflingly immodest, represented so many threats to the life of the good outlined in the Quran and enshrined in the sharia, the laws derived from the words and deeds of the Prophet. Indeed, the Umayyads had such a preference for blond slavewomen imported from northern climes that many members of the ruling family were noted by contemporaries for their fair hair and blue eyes. The great tenth-century leader, Abd al-Rahman III, is said to have dyed his hair dark so as to appear more of an Arab and thus a member of the Semitic master race.

  For the devout Christian, assimilation was the bogeyman. In the mid—ninth century, Paul Alvarus, an Andalusi Jew who converted to Christianity, thundered against Christian youth aping the fashions introduced into Córdoba, by Ziryab, the Baghdadi arbiter of taste. Alvarus complained that good old Visigothic Christian culture was being forgotten:

  My fellow Christians love to read the poems and romances of the Arabs; they study the Arab theologians and philosophers, not to refute them, but to form a correct and elegant Arabic. Where is the layman who now reads the Latin commentaries on the Holy Scriptures, or who studies the Gospels, prophets, or Apostles? Alas! All talented young Christians read and study with enthusiasm the Arab books; they gather immense libraries at great expense; they despise the Christian literature as unworthy of attention. They have forgotten their language. For every one who can write a letter in Latin to a friend, there are a thousand who can express themselves in Arabic with elegance, and write better poems in this language than the Arabs themselves.

  Although this may sound like the usual reactionary cant about traditional values, events proved that Alvarus was not alone in his concerns about Christians going soft in the embrace of Muslim rhetoricians. In the 850s the city's inter-confessional cease-fire was shattered by a succession of fervent Christians who publicly insulted the teachings of Islam and the sincerity of the Prophet—in the hope, quickly realized, of a martyr's death. Although the Christian bishop of Córdoba,, at pains not to rock the boat, tried to discourage this sort of self-seeking martyrdom, the pious provocation continued throughout the decade, culminating in the case of Eulogius, a scholar and poet much admired by his Muslim counterparts. After showing him clemency on several occasions for his repeated sallies against Islam, the qadi finally summoned Eulogius before him. One of his councilors pleaded with the obstinate fellow, "What madness drove you to commit yourself to this fatal ruin, forgetting the natural love of life? Please listen to me, and do not rush into this headlong destruction, I beg you. Say only a word in this hour of your need, and afterward practise your faith where you will. We promise not to search for you anywhere." The old Christian disobligingly repeated his insults and was reluctantly beheaded. The bones of these "martyrs of Córdoba," were allowed by the Andalusi authorities to be moved to the Christian kingdoms of northern Iberia, where they quickly became objects of devotion at monasteries then grimly busy, given the prevailing mood, illuminating commentaries on the Apocalypse. Convivencia had its limits.

  In those days a thousand years ago the Mediterranean stretched out blameless under the sun, as inviting and deadly as it had been in Homer's day. Great schools of tuna came swimming in by the thousands through the Strait of Gibraltar every spring, to be corralled and slaughtered with pagan glee by the inhabitants of the islands dotting the inland sea. The many seasonal winds of the irregular expanse—tramontane, mistral, bora, gregale, meltemi, sirocco—governed the livelihoods of the millions of souls who ventured out onto its waters and whose story will always remain untold. Their fortified mountain villages and watchtowers, however, bespeak a time when those who wanted to live well did not live down by the water's edge. If the peoples in the Mediterranean hinterland had, for the moment, settled on who would be their masters, the peoples closer to its shores would know, in the ninth and tenth centuries, an era of upheaval.

  The lateen sail appeared on the horizon. Although its name is a corruption of the word Latin, the triangular sail—ideal for tacking in near-tideless seas with capricious winds—is thought to have originated among the sailors of the Indian Ocean. Sighting it on the Mediterranean meant that Muslim mariners were nearing, if not to trade, then to pillage. Times had changed since Muawiya first coaxed the men of the desert onto the planks. What had been called al-bahr al-lulumat (the Sea of Darkness) and al-bahr al-rum (the Sea of the Rumi) had lost its terrors for the Arabs. Together with the Berbers, they now ranged through the sea, looking for slaves, riches, and colonies. The men
of al-Andalus were in the vanguard: the century of conquest had been checked on land, but it would continue on water.

  The islands fell like so many dominoes in a cold warrior's fantasy. In the western basin, the Muslims of al-Andalus conquered the Balearic Islands and Sardinia, opening the way to operations in the Tyrrhenian and Ligurian seas. The Island of Beauty, Corsica, suffered raids but seems to have resisted lengthy occupation—or so the folklore of that singularly pugnacious place insists. In the eastern basin, defended by the Byzantine fleet, the island peoples put up a strong fight, but the determination of the invaders was not long stymied. Indeed, that determination had some desperation to it—the adventurers who took Crete in 825 were the same mawali converts to Islam whose suburb on the Guadalquivir had been destroyed and whose ringleaders had been so theatrically crucified on the walls of Córdoba,. These troublesome Iberian exiles, after being made unwelcome in Muslim Alexandria, needed a new home—to Byzantine chagrin, their eyes fell on the rich prize of Crete. The story goes that their leader, on disembarking, gave his men twelve full days to fan out and plunder at will.. When they returned to the beach, their appetites sated and their swag bags bulging, they saw that their boats had been torched. Only then did their Cordoban admiral tell them they were not raiders but settlers.

  In the central Mediterranean, at the choke point between Tunisia and Italy, the lateen sails scudded northward. The first en route had been Homer's Island of the Lotus Eaters, Jerba, an oasis of greenery just off the harsh shores of western Libya. The fishermen's archipelago of Kerkennah did not resist long either, nor did Pantelleria and Malta. The latter is only a day's passage before a strong sirocco to the most desirable isle of them all, Sicily.

  Crisscrossed by Roman roads, embellished by Greek temples put to use as churches, blanketed in olive groves and vineyards and possessed of sprawling estates, fortified ports, mother lodes of minerals, and game-filled forests—even in its dilapidated ninth-century condition, Sicily was scarcely the type of prize to be just given to an enemy. Yet it was. One of the most coveted territories of the medieval Mediterranean world, rivaled only by the Orontes Valley of Syria, the Nile Delta, and the new huerta of Valencia, Sicily was betrayed by a Byzantine usurper. The agent of treachery was a naval commander who, fearing punishment for having had his dastardly way with a nun, killed the governor of the island and declared himself basileus of the entire empire. Backing up this preposterous claim required muscular allies, so, like Julian of Ceuta—who supposedly helped Tariq cross the strait that would bear his name—this desperate adventurer traveled to Kairouan to invite the Muslims on an excursion across the water. Delighted, the Ifriqiyans made landfall at Mazara del Vallo in mid-June 827. Although many years passed before the entire island was subdued—Palermo surrendered in 831; Syracuse, amid exuberant slaughter, in 878—the loss of Sicily spelled an end to the grandest territory of Magna Graecia. Although it would after several centuries revert to Christianity, Sicily would never again be Byzantine.

  The islands safely in Muslim hands, the continent came next. To retell all the raids conducted by the Andalusis and the Ifriqiyans in these years would be numbing in the extreme, even if their frequency and ferociousness kept generations of coast dwellers on constant alert. The Muslims made progress in Calabria and Apulia (respectively, the toe and the heel of the Italian peninsula), going so far as to set up an independent emirate for a couple of generations in the Adriatic port of Bari. As much of southern Italy was the scene of endemic feuding among local Lombard lords, the Muslim intrusion added just another element of fear to the tenor of the life there. At least the newcomers' warrior prowess was appreciated—in one clash between ninth-century Lombards, each side hastened to hire Muslim mercenaries, one baron choosing Ifriqiyan Sicilians, the other Andalusi Cretans.

  The one event that provoked the most consternation among the Christians was a raid on Rome, in 846. Although the Eternal City by then looked fairly mortal, its fortunes at their nadir, its once-glorious buildings overgrown, its aqueducts shattered, its old stones cannibalized for higgledy-piggledy constructions, the city's status as the see of Latin Christianity was universally recognized. Recognition, though, did not necessarily entail respect, as any given successor to St. Peter might be deemed incompetent or corrupt, or both. The pope at the time of the Muslim attack was the aging Roman aristocrat Sergius II, a sufferer of gout and practitioner, along with his brother, of simony—the buying and selling of ecclesiastical offices. The brothers seemed to have done precisely nothing to prepare the city for an assault that everyone assumed was coming after the fall of Palermo. In August raiders landed near Ostia and proceeded unopposed to the city. The citizenry retreated smartly behind the stout Aurelian Wall—so called for its construction by Emperor Aurelian six centuries earlier. However practical for defense then, these fortifications had the signal disadvantage of not englobing what had become the locus of Rome's newfound role as a capital of Christendom: the Vatican. The Ifriqiyans patiently stripped the shrine of St. Peter (as well as other extramural buildings) of all its trappings, emptied its treasury, and then hauled their glittering take back to the ships. The next pope, Leo IV, closed the barn door behind them by building a string of fortifications on the right bank of the Tiber that gave some measure of protection to the Vatican and the Janiculum Hill. Cold comfort lay in knowing that the raiders had lost all their loot in a storm at sea.

  In short, a remarkable chasm existed between the power of Córdoba, during these years and the threadbare dignity of its Christian neighbors. The maritime republics of the Italian peninsula—Genoa, Pisa, Amalfi, Venice—were still nascent entities in the ninth and tenth centuries, short work for the organized raiding parties of al-Andalus and Ifriqiya. In 933 every woman and child of Genoa was ensnared in an Andalusi slaving dragnet that descended on the Ligurian port while its able-bodied men were away at war. (The story then has the menfolk rescuing their loved ones in a counterraid on an island off Sardinia.) Even the great were not immune from outrage. The prominent churchman Mayeul, head of the vigorous Burgundian monastic movement centered at Cluny, was waylaid in 972 by Muslim brigands when crossing the Alps en route to Rome. The kidnapped abbot was freed only after the payment of a ruinous ransom. This exploit in criminality was just another in a long series of depredations, many of them carried out by an Andalusi gang that had made its base on the coast of Provence, near what is now La Garde-Freinet. Also called Fraxinetum, it survived for many years as a bridgehead of chaos thanks to its inhabitants' shrewd use of spiky Mediterranean vegetation as a wall to repel any would-be liberators from landward. Only a solitary track, as wide as a man's shoulders and always guarded, led from this haven of banditry into the interior. La Garde-Freinet was, literally, a thorn in the side of Mediterranean Christendom.

  In an attempt to ward off further humiliation, the lords and merchants of Europe took to sending embassies to the heathen pleasure dome on the Guadalquivir. The northerners traded with al-Andalus—primarily lumber, minerals, wool, and slaves, a few of the last being made into eunuchs in Verdun and Valencia—and therefore wanted relief from the dangers of piracy. Tact was essential in these diplomatic missions. One delegation from Otto the Great, the Germanic monarch who established the Holy Roman Empire in 962, bore letters that were found to contain disrespectful references to the Prophet. The German monk-ambassadors were placed under house arrest for three full years—until the letters had been returned to sender (Otto's brother Bruno, archbishop of Cologne), revised to eliminate their backwoods Christian earnestness, then resubmitted to the captive embassy in Córdoba, for presentation to Abd al-Rahman III. Given the mores of the day, they were lucky to get out of al-Andalus alive.

  Most ambassadors were sensible enough not to come carrying in their satchels such potential death sentences. For Abd al-Rahman III, whose lifework consisted of building Madinat az-Zahra, a palatine city to the northwest of Córdoba,, a Byzantine delegation thoughtfully brought over scores of classical columns from the empire
's limitless supply of spolia from antiquity, to supplement the hundreds more the Umayyads were stripping from monuments throughout Iberia.* At Madinat az-Zahra the art and artifice of al-Andalus went over the top: Abd al-Rahman's audience chamber, the place in which he received many of the cowering delegations from the north, was constructed of translucent marble, its inlaid tiled floor spreading out in geometric arabesques from a large reflecting pool filled with quicksilver. At a discreet signal from the sovereign, a slave would steal in to roil the surface of the mercury, and the room would suddenly become alive as dozens of darting flashes of light refracted onto the already-dazzling walls—an illusion worthy of the Wizard of Oz, perhaps, but one that could not fail to overawe European emissaries for whom the acme of luxury would have been a spitted boar roasting in a rough-hewn fireplace.