Sea of Faith

by Stephen O'Shea

  For the ruler of al-Andalus, on the other hand, such splendor was a necessary trapping of his office. On January 16, 929, at Friday prayers at the Mezquita, Abd al-Rahman III had himself acclaimed Commander of the Faithful—and as such, caliph. This was problematic, as only one successor to the Prophet should have existed at any given time, and everyone was aware that Islam had a caliph, an Abbasid in Baghdad. But by the tenth century Andalusi pretensions were such that the spiritual and temporal inferiority implied by the status of emir could no longer be tolerated. A further prod to this unilateral self-promotion lay in the unsettling developments in Ifriqiya, where an upstart had proclaimed himself caliph nineteen years previously. A messianistic shia faction from Syria—the Ismailis—had wrested power from the ruling families of north Africa and boldly claimed its descent from the Prophet's daughter, Fatima—hence the name of Fatimid for its dynastic footprint. The shia Fatimids believed theirs was the true caliphate because they embodied the occulted line of religious leadership forced, or divinely guided, into hiding after the disastrous events that had given the sunnis primacy. The Fatimid caliphate, a sudden bloom in the desert, threatened the patiently tended Umayyad restoration in Córdoba, and its flourishing trade in gold and cereals in the western Maghrib.

  War was averted between the neighboring caliphates when the Fatimids turned their backs on the west and set out east toward the strife-riven Abbasid province by the Nile. Fustat, the amsar of Amr ibn al As, was to be superseded by a twin city, founded in 973 as al-Qahira (The Triumphant) by the Fatimid caliph. The town, its name rendered by westerners as Cairo, would surpass Córdoba, in size and, long after al-Andalus had vanished, become the principal metropolis of the Arab world, a primacy it retains to this day. For the all-powerful Abd al-Rahman III and his successor, the bookish al-Hakam, such a development would have seemed the stuff of sheer fantasy.

  Yet the Umayyads of al-Andalus did vanish, almost overnight. Within sixty years of its completion as the most luxurious folly in all of Europe, the Madinat az-Zahra was a jumble of rubble to be gawked at by the curious. Walking there today along the cypress-lined gravel pathways laid out by archaeologists who have been painstakingly trying to reconstruct a small fraction of the place, it is nigh on impossible to imagine the palatine city a thousand years ago, its golden fountainheads and whispering date palms, its silk hangings and soft night breezes, its craftsmen's workshops, vaulted kitchens, and spotless stables, its caliphal palace, cushioned women's quarters, and jewel of a mosque—or its twelve thousand loaves of bread baked daily to feed the fish in its ponds. As for Hakam's library, it too would disappear, torn apart by fundamentalist Berber conquerors and, later, consigned to the flames by Christian Inquisitors fearing the contamination of Arabic script. Of the 400,000 volumes, it is said, only one has survived—it was discovered in a library of Fez, Morocco, in 1938.

  If Umayyad al-Andalus can be deemed to have perished in any one place, it is Medinaceli. Although the map shows it as halfway between Toledo and Zaragoza, the village actually seems sited on top of the world. High on the tallest bluff in the desolate uplands separating the basins of the Duero and Ebro, Medinaceli dominates an unforgiving prospect of dun-colored plateaux stretching out all around it. If one squints carefully, a few flocks of sheep can be made out in the distance, bleating faintly as they pick their way along ancient cahadas, the cliff-hugging paths of transhumance that are unseen by the motorists flashing past on the expressway in the gorge far below. More likely to be noticed is Medinaceli's Roman arch of triumph, standing against the sky at the brink of the abyss, its lonely grandeur a classical reproach to the highway engineers who have made this historic threshold nothing more than a drive-by curiosity.

  A view of a ruin at Madinat az-Zahra, the opulent tenth-century palatine city built for Abd al-Rahman III on the outskirts of Córdoba,.

  Less conspicuous than the arch is Medinaceli's fortress castle, padlocked and unvisited. It too stands on the cliff's edge, its two squat towers—one square, the other cylindrical—unrelieved by any decoration. Today they guard the village cemetery, a sad little affair in the grasses of the castle's forecourt. Medinaceli—its name from the Arabic madinat salim (City of Salim)—was a frontier outpost of al-Andalus, from which campaigns were launched with regular springtime cupidity against the Christian kingdoms to the north. Here, after one such campaign against Rioja in 1002, Abu Amir Muhammad ibn Abi Amir al-Ma'afari, the absolute ruler of al-Andalus, died. He is more commonly known in the west as Almanzor (from al-Mansur, his laqab, or official sobriquet, denoting "the Victorious"). The great man's grave cannot be located within the castle, and no sign or plaque in the baked brown height attests to his passing, yet he, in life and especially in death, brought about the undoing of al-Andalus.

  Almanzor was the usurper who doubled the size of the Mezquita and changed the bells of Santiago de Compostela into so many ironic lampholders. He was an arriviste of the first order, the Napoleon of al-Andalus. At the outset of his career a humble scribe who nonetheless claimed descent from an old Arab family of Algeciras, he won favor and promotion in the caliph's court in Córdoba, through his natural brilliance, iron self-discipline, and Machiavellian cultivation of friendships. Many of those who aided him on the way up would come to sudden and brutal ends, with the exception of Subh, the beautiful Christian concubine of the caliph al-Hakam II, who at his death in 976 became the queen mother of the eleven-year-old heir, al-Hisham II. Almanzor, who was almost certainly Subh's lover, made sure that the boy was sequestered—permanently—while his late father's councilors attended to affairs of state. Thus began al-Hisham's descent into a long, sad life as a sodden wreck, a caliph in name only, lost in a sensual fog behind the high walls of the Madinat az-Zahra.

  The Roman Arch of Triumph at Medinaceli, overlooking an important route of passage between northern and central Iberia.

  Within a few years of the old caliph's death, Almanzor had eliminated all his rivals for the regency, masking his naked power grab behind the fig leaf of dynastic continuity represented by the captive boy caliph. He ruled through a terrifying apparatus of spies, informers, and torturers. In just one instance of his Olympian cruelty, Almanzor condemned an unwisely irreverent poet of Cordoba to a life sentence of being shunned—no one in the city was allowed to speak a word to him, ever, on pain of death. For twenty years, until his demise as an insane, lonely old coot, the unfortunate poet lived as a ghost in the capital in which he had once been admired and feted. To have had him executed at the outset would have been more humane—which is no doubt why Almanzor let the poor wretch live. He was known in town as "the dead man."

  Almanzor's exercise of absolute power was not confined to such finely tuned malevolence. Under his rule Córdoba, saw a flurry of new construction. Not to be outdone by the works of the great Abd al-Rahman III, he decided to erect his own extravagant palace complex in the Cordoban hinterland. Named, confus-ingly, Madinat al-Zahira (the Glittering City), it rivaled the slightly older Madinat az-Zahra in stupefying excess. We will never know for certain, however; so thoroughly was Almanzor's creation sacked in the civic turbulence following his death that not a stone remains to be picked over by the curious.

  Almanzor imitated Abd al-Rahman III in other ways. The scholarly al-Hakam had shown no taste for the raids against the Christians of the north at which his father had excelled; Almanzor revived the tradition with a vengeance, changing what had been a seasonal rite of skirmishing and slave rustling into a near-permanent campaign of rapine and massacre. Athough not trained in the command of armies, he proved himself a natural. The protokingdoms that were taking shape in the north—Leon, Navarre, Castile, Aragon-Catalonia—would know no peace during his time, and because of his actions against them his name has come down to us, via vituperative Christian chronicles, in a Romance-language form. Almanzor undertook, at one count, fifty-two campaigns of devastation against his northern neighbors, never once suffering a serious setback and utterly destroying, at one time or another
, Coimbra, Leon, Barcelona, and Vallodolid, as well as scores of other lesser towns, castles, and monasteries. His laqab, al-Mansur the Victorious, is well deserved. During his assault on Santiago de Compostela, the holiest Christian pilgrimage destination west of Rome, Almanzor thoroughly leveled the place and stripped it of its treasures, leaving untouched only the gravesite of the apostle James (Santiago), the raison d'etre of the sanctuary. Showing such ecumenical scruples might seem odd, until one realizes that the armies of Almanzor numbered many Christians—and that Jesus and his apostles are, in any event, revered by Muslims.

  The composition of his victorious armies eventually alienated the Cordobans from their already-unloved despot. The Umayyads had long had Christian contingents as a praetorian guard—not native Mozarabs but mercenaries from the north. Immune to inter-Arab rivalries and ignorant of civic factions, these ax-men were thought to be dependably loyal to their caliphal paymaster—as non-Arabic speakers and therefore as effectively shunned as the lonely old poet, they were commonly known by Cordobans as the "silent ones."* Under Almanzor, the door to his campaigns swung wide open to all manner of European freelance adventurer, scandalizing the religious authorities for whom these wars were necessarily an exercise in jihad—a divinely sanctioned aggression against infidels. Even if Almanzor occasionally played to the bigotry of the devout—he organized several public book-burnings of volumes from al-Hakam's great library—the regiments of infidels taking part in what was billed as a Muslim holy war could scarcely escape notice. It is thought that his Christian troops were so numerous that Almanzor made Sunday the day of rest for his armies.

  Yet worse than the Christians, in the minds of the Umayyad sophisticates, were the Berbers. Al-Andalus had been born amid bad feelings between Arab and Berber—and it would die in the same bath of ethnic hatred. Almanzor, whose refined and pleasure-loving subjects no longer had the stuff of wild-eyed belligerence needed for his wars, took to importing entire tribes of Berbers from north Africa—the more barbarian, the better. These were not the Berbers of the conquest, who had long since adapted to the softer mores of convivencia, but illiterate, barely Islamized irregulars, who remained in their tribal units rather than integrating a regular army. The Arab aristocracy, the Mozarabs, the citizenry of Córdoba,—all were appalled at what they viewed as a growing horde of unwashed at the city gates. The Berber newcomers no doubt repaid the disdain in kind—some surely thought that these perfumed and pampered Arabs were somehow more despicable than the tough Christian barons against whom they fought in the north. It was clear to all that the loyalty of the Berbers was neither to Córdoba, nor to the Umayyads but to Almanzor alone.

  All of this was an admirable arrangement for the usurper so long as he, or someone with a similar surfeit of ruthlessness, was around to control them. The Berbers had proved useful in quelling rebellions—one revolt ended in the beheading of his eldest son; another, quite mildly, in the banishment of Subh to a nunnery. (She had tried to rouse her son, al-Hisham, from his torpor.) And the Berbers were indeed as ferocious as their legendary forebear, Kahina, unblinking in atrocity and uncomplaining when ordered to load their saddlebags with the heads of Almanzor's many victims. But in 1002, at the age of sixty-three, gout-ridden and cantankerous to the last, he came to his rendezvous at Medinaceli—" he died in Medinaceli," says one lapidary Christian chronicle, "and was buried in hell"—and thereafter left al-Andalus in a parlous state. Overrun by rudderless mercenaries, rife with long-suppressed rivalries, and coarsened by constant war, the Córdoba, of convivencia could not survive his passing. The first minister's quarter-century-long trajectory from Algeciras to Medinaceli brought about the ruin of al-Andalus, principally by devaluing the Umayyad coin of legitimacy. The notables of the great cities of al-Andalus took note—long cowed by an Umayyad caliph and a brilliant vizier, their ambitions could finally be unleashed.

  The sad pageant of bloodshed in the years after Almanzor is an unedifying spectacle. Claimants to the throne sprang up like mushrooms, mercenary armies clashed throughout the Iberian peninsula, and what can only be called a revolution by the people of Córdoba, occurred in 1009. The following year was named the Year of the Catalans, after the presence of a large contingent of Christians from Catalonia selling their services to rival pretenders. Another year, 1013, saw the restive Berbers go utterly berserk, spending two months in Córdoba, looting, raping, and killing comprehensively. By 1031 the Umayyad caliphate was gone, forever. The Madina az-Zahra and Madina al-Zahira lay in ruins. By midcentury three dozen or so independent statelets existed in al-Andalus, of which once-proud Córdoba, was but a frail and diminished sibling. A death at forlorn Medinaceli had brought the whole magnificent edifice crashing down with finality.

  As can be imagined, a great deal of eulogizing ensued, for a moment of grace had passed. Any place where the good life was so ardently and sensually pursued, alongside its plashing fountains and beneath its spreading palm fronds, could not fail to inspire delicious melancholy among the sensitive. No longer was distant Damascus mourned, as in the days of Abd al-Rahman the immigrant, but rather what he had created on the banks of the Guadalquivir. One Cordoban, Ibn Hazm, author of more than four hundred works of prose, wrote a memoir on heartbreak that can still touch the reader across a millennium. In The Ring of the Dove he recalls falling in love with a beautiful slave girl in his household during the days of Córdoba,'s glory. Forced into exile, he eventually returned to the city and glimpsed his beloved after their long separation. Is it the girl or Córdoba, he describes?

  Gone was her radiant beauty, vanished her wondrous loveliness, faded now was that lustrous complexion which once gleamed like a polished sword or an Indian mirror; withered was the bloom on which the eye once gazed transfixed seeking avidly to feast upon its dazzling splendour only to turn away bewildered. Only a fragment of the whole remained, to tell the tale and testify to what the complete picture had been.

  *John's story has an Islamic element: his head, as delivered to Salome, is supposed to be underneath the foundations of the Mosque of Abraham in the citadel of Aleppo or in a shrine of the Umayyad Mosque of Damascus.

  * The palace complex eventually incorporated 4,313 columns.

  *The phenomenon was not confined to al-Andalus: the basileus of Constantinople was protected by feral longhairs from Britain and Scandinavia called the Varangian Guard.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  MANZIKERT 1071

  The fall of Christian Anatolia; the rise of the Normans and the Turks; the Great Schism

  Some time in the early morning of an August day in 1071, a Greek nobleman by the name of Romanus sensed the tickle of a leather slipper on the back of his neck. He was lying facedown on the ground, a posture he had often seen in others but had never dreamed of assuming himself. Romanus IV Diogenes was no ordinary aristocrat. As the Equal of the Apostles, Co-Gerent of the Earth, the half-man half-god who had inherited the mantle once worn by Augustus and Justinian, he ruled the most venerable empire in the Mediterranean world—yet here he was, as abject as the meanest of petitioners ever to have groveled before him. The moment was a belittlement of incalculable magnitude.

  The felt walls of the nomad's tent in which the basileus prostrated himself kept out the rays of the sun, but the Greek's shame—and that of a thousand years of imperial dignity—was bright and blinding all the same. The theatrics of his abasement made plain what had happened: amid the golden summer grasses of the high Armenian plateau, Anatolia had been lost. The Asia Minor of the Graeco-Roman world since the days the Athenians faced down the Persians, the sacred province of the ancients won over, in the earliest years of the Common Era, to a strange new faith that would mature as Christianity, and latterly the rich and rugged heartland of the Byzantine Empire, Anatolia had slipped, permanently, from the grasp of the Greeks. Romanus lay stretched out on the ground, humiliated, his world in pieces.

  A question was addressed to him: what would you do if our positions were reversed, if I were on the ground instead
of you? "I would have you flogged to death," Romanus answered. The honesty pleased. The foot was removed from his neck and he was told to rise.

  We will never know the expression on the face of Romanus' tormentor as the basileus got to his feet, but he would have held a switch in his right hand as a symbol of his authority, its hardened leather handle enclosing a luxuriant wand of horsetail hair. This foe of the Byzantine was the leader of a people on horseback, who had ridden in from the steppes of Asia and conquered all who had stood in the way. Prior to Romanus, the Abbasids of Baghdad had acquiesced in their authority, to be followed by a succession of provincial governors who surrendered power to these bowmen from the east. Converts to Islam, but more at home in the saddle than in the mosque, these newcomers would henceforth occupy center stage in the encounter with Christianity. Much of the continuum of Islam, from the Oxus River to the eastern marches of the Mediterranean basin, was now controlled by the Turks. Their chief, Alp Arslan, allowed the chastened Romanus to stand up. Without too much exaggeration, one can say that Turkey was born on this day. More straightforward is the proposition that a new era had begun around the sea of faith. Strangers no more, Christian and Muslim would, over the next two centuries, engage in an intense series of clashes for primacy in the Mediterranean.

  The opening contest of this heightened period of conflict took place, appropriately, at a crossroads. The garrison town of Manzikert (present-day Malaz-girt) in eastern Turkey guards the easiest route in from the mountains of the Caucasus and northern Iran to Asia Minor. It stands on a meander of the Murat Su, the river that is the southern branch of the upper Euphrates. The mile-high steppe surrounding Manzikert has been a theater of changing fortunes since the dawn of civilization. Ancient kingdoms—Assyrian, Hittite, Urartan—did battle on this volcanic upland, the snow-tipped height of Mount Ararat looming beyond its eastern horizon and the blue expanse of Lake Van closing it off to the south. In 400 B.C.E. Xenophon and his ten thousand Spartan mercenaries, fleeing homeward from a bungled adventure in Mesopotamia, had crossed this treacherous threshold in midwinter, the account of that ordeal, the Anabasis, immortalizing the inhabitants as a rough and unforgiving lot. As a stage for human hardship, the plain around Manzikert has few rivals, its position as a buffer between Europe and Asia consigning it to continual conflict and its seismic caprices making it a scene of recurring misery.