by Tom Holland
In January 982, when the mailed horsemen of East Francia first crossed into Byzantine territory, they too were met by bolted gates, just as the corsairs had been. Infuriated by the refusal of his fellow Christians to join him in the campaign against the Saracens, their common foe, Otto nevertheless bided his time, giving them every opportunity to submit; but by April his patience was exhausted. News had reached him that in Sicily, long a stronghold of the corsairs, a Saracen prince was mustering a massive expeditionary force against him; and Otto, resolved as he was to confront this menace head on, knew that he would need a secure base in his rear. Accordingly, “after a brief but forceful attack,”39 he seized the port of Taranto from its Byzantine garrison, and formally proclaimed himself, in portentous terms, sole Emperor of Rome. With the city echoing to the sound of warhorses being shod, hauberks being prepared and over two thousand reinforcements clattering through the streets, Otto’s self-justification for this step could hardly have been more ringing. Constantinople, through her own cowardice and feebleness, had forfeited all rights to the name of Roman. No longer did she deserve to be ranked as the shield of Christendom. The title was now Otto’s alone.
In July, its standards proudly fluttering, the massive task force assembled for the conquest of southern Italy duly advanced against the Saracens, cornered them south of Cotrone by the sea, engaged them in a great and terrible battle – and was annihilated. Most of Otto’s heavy cavalry, the shock force of the Reich, perished amid the carnage. The cream of the nobility too. Otto himself, obliged to borrow a horse from a passing Jew and ride it out into the sea, barely escaped with his life. To compound his humiliation, the ship that rescued him, “a galley of marvellous length and speed,”40 had been dispatched to Italian waters from Constantinople. “Let us hope,” the mortified Otto found himself muttering to its captain, “that your emperor, my brother, will be a loyal friend to me in my time of need.”41 Not that he had any intention of hanging around to find out. Arriving off the coast where Theophanu was waiting for him, he plunged into the sea and swam frantically ashore, there to be reunited with his wife and his few surviving troops: chastened, mightily relieved still to be alive, and dripping wet.
So ended Otto’s attempts to sweep the Saracens into the sea. Rumour would subsequently have it that Theophanu, furious at her husband for his incompetence, had insisted, with a tactless flare-up of patriotism, that her countrymen would never have blundered into such a catastrophe. If true – and Saxon gossip about the empress was often malicious – then she had only put into words what most people in southern Italy were thinking. Not that Byzantine schadenfreude could reign wholly undiluted. Even though the captain of the Saracens, the “Emir,” as he was termed, had fallen in the very hour of his great victory, everyone knew that the corsairs would be back, and more bloodily than ever. And so it would prove. Far distant from the beleaguered Italian front, however, in the chanceries of Constantinople, news of Otto’s defeat had confirmed the imperial elite powerfully in their vision of the world. It was a vision in which, unchangingly, there could be room only for two great powers, locked, as they had always been, in a globe-spanning embrace of rivalry, arch-antagonists doomed to their mutual hatred until the very end of time: themselves, of course, and the Saracens. A vision, certainly, which left no room for barbarian emperors from the North.
Otto, doubting the courage and the resolve of Constantinople, had been grievously mistaken. Dutiful son of the Church a Basileus might be, and yet still boast that his spear “had never been seen at rest,” that all his life he had “kept vigilant, guarding the children of the New Rome.”42 Nicephorus, so ascetic in the private practice of his faith that he had dreamed of retiring to a monastery, was far from being the only emperor to have stained his weapons with blood. Even as Otto was limping northwards from the toe of Italy, great deeds were being plotted in Constantinople. Against the empire’s enemies in the Balkans, where the frontier remained menacingly unstable, a full-scale strategy of invasion and annexation was being planned, with the goal of permanently securing the northern approaches to the capital, just as Nicephorus had secured the South. Yet imperial policy, even when setting its sights, as ultimately it would, upon the limits of the Danube, never ceased in its essence to be defensive – and fixated on the threat from its deadliest foe of all. Turbulent and dangerous though the northern barbarians – the Bulgars, the Croats and, yes, the Saxons too – were, they appeared, compared with the Saracens, the merest clods, brutish thugs bred of forest, and rock, and mud. Men understood, in Constantinople, a truth as unsettling as it verged on the scandalous: the Saracens, their eternal opposite, were their mirror image too.
Mon semblable, mon frère. Infinitely more than any Christian power, it was the kingdoms of those who most yearned to conquer her, the followers of Mohammed, that offered up to the New Rome the surest reflection of her own splendour and sophistication. Courts bejewelled and silken with luxuries, immense and teeming cities, baths and gushing fountains, bureaucracies and standing armies: the Saracens had them all. The people whom the wretched peasants of Italy knew only as pirates were in truth the possessors of a stupefyingly vast and flourishing dominion, stretching in a mighty crescent from the western ocean to the rising of the sun. “There are two empires,” a Patriarch of Constantinople had written early in the tenth century, “that of the Saracens and of the Romans, which hold between them the entirety of power in this world, shining like twin torches in the celestial firmament.”43 The observation had been made in a letter sent to the fabulous city of Baghdad, where there had sat enthroned in fearful splendour a prince whose claim to the rule of every nation under the sun was made manifest in his very title: that of the “Caliph,” or “Successor,” to Mohammed. Yet ambitions of global conquest, the Patriarch had argued, if permitted to blaze with an equal ferocity in both Constantinople and Baghdad, would surely expose both to the risk of annihilation. Rather than compete to rule the world, might not the truest course of wisdom be to accept its division into two? The Caliph, committed as he was by his rank to work for the propagation of Mohammed’s faith to the outermost limits of the universe, had given this proposal predictably short shrift; but opinion formers in Constantinople, unperturbed by this rebuff, had continued to push for a policy of détente.
Which they had been able to do, as the decades passed, from a position of gathering strength. Increasingly, with the single exception of the Italian front, the Saracen frontier appeared stable, even pacified. Beyond it, meanwhile, in the heartlands of the Caliphate, all was disintegration. True, a caliph still reigned in Baghdad, but he did so only as the cipher of a Persian warlord, one of numerous adventurers who had begun systematically to carve up the Saracen world between them. Nor was he any longer the only ruler who claimed the rank of Mohammed’s successor. In Egypt, which had been lost to Baghdad back in 969, the master of that most ancient and wealthy of kingdoms also wore the title of “Caliph,” claiming as his justification a supposed descent from Mohammed’s daughter, Fatima. Diplomats in Constantinople, well versed in the art of stirring up trouble among their adversaries, had naturally tracked all these developments with relish. To the “Fatimid” Caliph, as an encouragement to him in his ambitions, they had duly sent Zulfiqar, Mohammed’s sword: a splendid gift, to be sure, but a treacherous one as well. After all, with a rival caliph still enthroned in Baghdad, and a host of squabbling emirs beyond their frontiers, it appeared likeliest to be Saracen vertebrae that would end up cleaved by the Fatimids, not the spines of the Romaioi.
The Byzantine Empire
Otto might have doubted the backbone of Constantinople, but the Saracens no longer did. “The field is left open to her,” acknowledged a commentator at the Fatimid court as he mournfully surveyed the spectacle of the splintered Caliphate. “She has been able to seize what was previously closed to her, and to nurture ambitions that until recently would have been unthinkable.”44 No wonder, then, when set against such a drama, the tectonic grinding of two such ancient and mi
ghty powers, each one the opposite and the semblance of the other, that the pretensions of upstarts such as Otto should have appeared a boorish irrelevance. If indeed, as all the signs seemed to indicate, the end of the world was nearing, then it was the rivalry of Caliph and Basileus that would surely pattern it, just as it had patterned the centuries past. “Twin torches”: so the Patriarch had described the Caliphate and the empire of the New Rome. Set against such a blaze, what could Francia be accounted, save a twilit backwater, a doltish wilderness of ignorance and bloodstained shadows?
Eurabia
As Otto stumbled back to Rome with his shattered retinue, he would have found himself passing by ruins familiar to him from his outward journey: looming reminders of the vanished empire whose heir he claimed to be. The menace of these silent temples and amphitheatres would have borne down ominously upon the imperial party. It was not only ghosts that were rumoured to haunt their mouldering stonework. Saracen raiders, always on the lookout for secure strongholds, had long been in the habit of setting up camp within the shells of outsize classical buildings. Well might Italians have come to regard the memorials of their Roman past as things baleful and accursed. Many, abandoning them altogether, had decamped to walled towns up in the hills. Others, rather than endure the dread that the ancient structures inspired, had been known to pull them down. In Naples, for instance, at the start of the tenth century, panic had inspired a veritable frenzy of demolition. Fearful that a Saracen emir of notorious rapacity and sadism might be descending upon their city, the Neapolitans had sought to leave nothing standing for the marauders to occupy. Far along the seafront, celebrated monuments had been sent crashing into the shallows. Most spectacular of all the casualties had been the palace in which the last Roman emperor of the West, some five hundred years previously, had passed his days.
Here, in the pile of rubble left where such a haughty villa had once stood, was dramatic illustration of how profoundly Italy had slumped from her one-time greatness into impotence and poverty. That Saracen war bands preferred to occupy ancient ruins rather than monuments raised in more recent times was sombre evidence of how shrunken the resources available to most Italians had become. It was certainly not in the hope of plundering any great treasure that the corsairs kept returning to their old haunts. For a long while now, across vast swaths of the Italian countryside, the bones had been picked almost clean. Yet what did remain was self-evidently more than lure enough. “Behold,” a pope had mourned, back in the ninth century, “the towns, castles and estates perish – stripped of inhabitants.”45 An exaggeration? Not if stunned reports of the near-industrial scale of the slave trade were true: one traveller, witnessing a great flotilla of ships in Taranto, then in Saracen hands, claimed to have seen some twelve thousand captives being loaded ready for transport to the markets of Africa.46
System as much as savagery was what underpinned this trafficking. The duties of slavers were carefully divided up. Some would guard the ships, others prepare the irons, others bring in the captives. Some even specialised in the rounding up of children. The natives too – those with the determination to profit from the slavers rather than to end up as their victims – had their roles to play. Italians at every level of society were profoundly implicated in the hunting down of their fellow Christians. Even a pope, it was rumoured, feeling the pinch, had once dabbled in it on the quiet. There were others who positively flaunted their collaboration. Amalfi, a city perched on the edge of a rocky peninsula south of Naples, was particularly notorious for her partisanship of the Saracens. So too, indeed – the occasional panic notwithstanding – was Naples herself. These two cities, by offering support and supplies to the slave trade, and by systematically frustrating all attempts to combat it, had begun gradually to pull themselves free of the general impoverishment of the times. Only the cost to their souls, perhaps, had to be put on the debit side. Already, in the ninth century, the markets of Naples had grown so bustling that visitors commented on how they appeared almost African in their prosperity. The Amalfitans, meanwhile, defying the barrenness of their native rock, had profited even more shrewdly from their links to the slavers, and transformed their cliff-top city, somewhat implausibly, into a hub of international trade. While other Italians huddled together for refuge on bleak hilltops, the merchants of Amalfi were to be found in harbours across the entire Mediterranean, from Tunisia to Egypt to Constantinople, flush with Saracen gold.
And all the while, the attentions of the Saracens themselves had been growing ever more predacious. No longer, by the late tenth century, were most slavers operating as freebooters: instead, they had begun to receive official backing in their activities from the rulers of Sicily. The brother of one emir, indeed, had been known to lead slaving expeditions in person. This was an ominous development indeed. No wonder that some Christian leaders, marking the sweep of corsairs across entire provinces of Italy, the winnowing of cities for human booty and the sustained harrowing of the countryside, had begun to wonder whether the depredations might not be motivated by something more sinister than simply greed. Christendom, it appeared to them, was being systematically drained of her lifeblood: her reservoir of human souls. Worse – the more she was emptied, the more those who fed on her were sustained. “For it is the fate of prisoners of our own race,” as one despairing monk observed, “both male and female, to end up adding to the resources of the lands beyond the sea.”47
Such paranoia was not unjustified. True, the main concern of the slavers remained, as it had always been, the harvesting of profit; and their ignorance of their own faith – to say nothing of their appalling Arabic and their fondness for raw onions – were things of scandal across the Saracen world. Nevertheless, state sponsorship of the corsairs had increasingly, throughout the tenth century, served to grace their marauding with a sheen of religiosity: for it was the practice of the rulers of Sicily, even as they creamed off their own percentage, to cast their subjects’ brigandage as a spiritual discipline. “Jihad,” they termed it: a word of rare and suggestive potency, signifying as it did the eternal struggle, incumbent upon all followers of Mohammed, to spread his faith to the utmost limits of the world. Corsairs, even as they glided in through the gates of an unsuspecting Italian town, could do so in the certainty that they were following in the footsteps of the divine. “How many cities have We destroyed?” So God Himself, according to Mohammed, had demanded. “Our punishment took them on a sudden by night or while they slept for their afternoon rest.”48
Well might jurists in the Caliphate have termed the world beyond their frontiers “the House of War.” Its strife-torn poverty and backwardness appeared to those who preyed upon it merely the natural state of things: irrefutable proof that God had indeed abandoned the “infidel,” and transferred dominion into their own hands. Mohammed himself, the very first of his faith to have assaulted and despoiled a foe, had been graced with a firm assurance of this by the archangel Gabriel, no less. So, at any rate, it was recorded in the Qur’an: the holy book of his revelations. To the Prophet, and to all who followed him, had been granted the “spoils of war”49 – and a constituent part of this plunder, divinely gifted, had been human livestock. *All loot, if diverted to the proper charitable causes – “to near relatives, orphans, the needy, and the wayfarer”50 – might be reckoned to serve God’s purpose; but prisoners, perhaps, most of all. Slavery did not have to be for life. Mohammed, who had prescribed that only infidels be sold as chattels, had also declared the freeing of converts a blessed act. Even a priest abducted from his church, as he toiled in a foreign field, or a nun, stolen to serve in a master’s bed, might find food for thought in that.
To be sure, there were many Christian slaves, putting their trust in the life to come, who did stay true to their native faith; but there were many more who did not. Conversion to their masters’ religion, for such renegades, brought not only the prospect of freedom, but a measure of dignity. All men, Mohammed had taught, were equal before God – for all men, even the very gre
atest, were His slaves. So it was that the Prophet’s followers referred to themselves not as “Saracens,” a word that meant nothing to them, but as “Muslims”: “those who submit.” In the prayer halls of their places of worship, the “masajid,” as they were termed, or “mosques,” it was not merely the slaves who abased themselves before their divine master, kneeling, bowing, pressing their foreheads to the dust, but the entire community of believers. Expressed through this surging and mighty wave of prostrations was the great paradox of Mohammed’s faith: that servitude, to the slaves of God, was the wellspring of their greatness. In their facelessness lay their identity; in their surrender, their victory. As one body, free and unfree, in lands that embraced the limits of the horizon, across all the vast and peerless extent of the Caliphate, that incomparable empire won by the dauntless swords of the faithful, they acknowledged their submission – what they called, in Arabic, “islam.”
One day, when all the world was Muslim, there would be no more wars, and no more slavery. In the meantime, however, the merchant who shipped his human cargo to Tunis or Alexandria could be regarded as performing a deed that was meritorious as well as lucrative; just as the captives transported in all their stupefying numbers from Europe to Africa were something more than merely the tribute of flesh and blood that the weak had timelessly paid the strong. God was great. Not a fragment of masonry shaken loose from the House of War but it could be put to use in the walls of the House of Islam. Cannibalisation, indeed, had long been the fate ordained for Christendom. Slaves garnered from frontier wars had only ever been conceived of as a beginning. Conquest, outright conquest, promised the richest opportunities. Mohammed, as shrewd and innovative an empire-builder as there had ever been, had carefully prescribed for his followers how best to make their victories pay. Christians, once brought to acknowledge their own subjugation, were not to be slaughtered or obliged to convert, but carefully husbanded, as befitted a valuable resource. It was more profitable in the long run to fleece a flock of sheep than to put them all to the sword. “Otherwise,” as one of the Prophet’s earliest followers had put it, “what would be left for the Muslims who will come after us?”51 Jesus, eyes fixed on the Kingdom of Heaven, might have disdained to elaborate a fiscal policy – but not Mohammed. Tolerance had been set carefully at a price. The extortion of protection money from both Christians and Jews had been laid down by the Prophet as a most solemn duty of the faithful. All those who paid it – “dhimmis,” as they were termed by their Muslim conquerors – were to be made to “feel themselves subdued.”52 Travelling to pay their tax, they were forbidden to ride a horse, a privilege reserved for the faithful; if on a mule, they had to sit side-saddle, like women; as they handed over their money, they were obliged to keep their hands below those of the official collecting it. In the House of Islam, it was the ledger book no less than the sword that imposed subordination.