The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000

by Chris Wickham

  This early separation between Arab élites and the conquered majority also meant that Roman society and Persian society persisted, remarkably unchanged, into the late eighth century and often later. Egyptian documents show that the cities of the Nile valley remained governed by their traditional élites until past 700; all that the Arabization of the administration meant initially was that Greek was used less and less; most of the population continued to speak and write Coptic. Nor was this process instantaneous; we have some two hundred administrative letters (mostly about taxation) from the governor of Egypt, Qurra ibn Sharik (709-15), to Basilios, pagarch or city governor of the small middle Nile city of Aphrodito, modern Kom Ishqaw, and these are for the most part still either in Greek or bilingual in Greek and Arabic. From this point on, pagarchs would be Muslims, with Arabic names; any local family which wanted to continue to control its city would by 730 or so have to convert. Villages were less affected, all the same; throughout the eighth century Coptic overwhelmingly dominates in our village archives, and Arabic is not prominent except in governmental texts until the ninth. Mosques do not appear in our documents either; rural religion was essentially Christian throughout this period. It is possible as a result to write Egyptian social history up to 800 almost without reference to the Arabs at all, for they were so much shut away in Fustat. This would be a mistake, but it is a tempting one.

  Syria and Palestine, the other major ex-Roman provinces, show a more nuanced picture, but a similar one. There were always more Arabs in the Levant, from well before Muhammad’s time; some of the most powerful Umayyad-period Arab tribes, notably the Kalb, originated from the Syrian desert fringe. Probably as a result of this long-standing tradition, there were no important amsr in the region; the Arab army of Syria settled in the already existing cities of the Roman empire, less separate from the native population than they were elsewhere. And Damascus became, from Mu‘awiya’s reign onwards, the capital of the caliphate, replacing Medina; Syria was thus the core province of Umayyad government. One might have expected an early Arabization of the Levant as a result of all these factors. But there are remarkably few signs of it. Damascus probably slowly became Arabized once the administrative language changed to Arabic (evidence for the capital is unfortunately not good), but Edessa, at least, certainly did not; its rich Christian written tradition shows a strong and prosperous Syriac-speaking urban élite until well into the ninth century. In the countryside, Nessana in the Negev desert, which has preserved a papyrus archive into the 680s, has hardly any Arabic documents, even though a substantial proportion of its population were ethnic Arabs, and even though one text in Greek seems actually to be a page of a dwn register. (On the other hand, Khirbat al-Mird, in the desert west of the Dead Sea, was already Arabic-speaking in the late seventh century, as a smaller papyrus collection shows.) And the extensive urban and rural archaeology of both Syria and Palestine shows notable continuities; indeed, the Arab conquest is hardly visible in it at all. There were certainly new Arab administrative and religious buildings put up across the region in the next century, but cityscapes were slow to change; and churches were still being built in cities and the countryside into the late eighth century in what is now northern Jordan and elsewhere. The economic implications of this we shall look at in Chapter 15, but the cultural templates of late Roman urban and rural life were as yet unchanged, even in the Umayyad heartland. The ambitious monuments of the Umayyads themselves, which we shall come to shortly, were only an overlay onto these essential continuities. Here, as in Egypt, wider cultural change only began after 750, and maybe later still.

  The trouble with this cultural separation, between Arabs and local populations, was that the age-old patronage links between central and local power were cut, particularly once the administration went Arabic. Local power-brokers could hope to deal with central government in the seventh century, as it still spoke their language; one of the Nessana papyri from the 680s shows a local notable, Lord (kyrios) Samuel, organizing village representatives to go to protest to the governor in Gaza about the provincial tax burden. (The governor was certainly an Arab, but he too wrote in Greek for the most part.) In the eighth century, such power-brokers had to choose: whether to stay Christian with their clients and lose purchase with the administration, or to become Arabized mawl, and thus part of government, but risk losing their local links. In Egypt, the latter choice was rare still, and the eighth century saw tensions rising. Tax revolts began in Egypt in 726, and continued on and off for over a century, with particularly serious uprisings in 750, the year of the Umayyad fall, and 812-32. Arab taxation was not obviously heavier than Roman taxation had been, but Egyptian civil society was too cut off from the Arab military élite, and violent resistance resulted. Arab political power was too entrenched by 750, however, to be structurally threatened by this; and the Arabization of the countryside, which had begun by 832, meant that stronger patronage chains could emerge again.

  The Arab/non-Arab cultural separation was nonetheless incomplete, for one crucial reason: Islam itself had emerged from the world of late Roman (largely Jewish) religiosity, and had little difficulty in relating to many aspects of the religious landscape it found in the conquered provinces. This is clearest in the least formalized aspects of religion, those least tied up in political power and legitimacy; several early Muslim accounts claim that Muhammad was recognized and respected by Christian holy men, for example, most notably the Syrian hermit Bahira, who turns up in some Christian sources too. Muslims also respected both Jewish and Christian holy places, Jerusalem most notably (which they sought to appropriate), but also Mount Sinai, location of both Christian and Muslim pilgrimage. Perhaps the best example of this is the Umayyad interest in the cult-site of St Sergios at Sergiopolis, in Arabic Rusafa, in the east Syrian steppe south of the Euphrates. In the decades around 500 this was the location of some highly ambitious imperial church building for the pilgrimage centre Sergiopolis had become; it was also situated in a Christian Arab area, and the Ghassanids linked themselves in the sixth century to St Sergios in general and to Rusafa in particular. It is therefore significant that Rusafa was also the caliph Hisham’s favourite country residence in the 730s; he built a mosque there right beside, indeed sharing a courtyard with, one of the major churches of the city, and also a set of shops around the precinct (Hisham was a patron of monumental shop complexes elsewhere, too: see Chapter 15). The caliph was clearly reacting to - indeed, respecting - the religious importance of the place, even though that importance was essentially and traditionally Christian. Rusafa was a Muslim political centre for only two decades at the most, but Sarjis, that is, Sergios, turned into a Muslim holy man in at least some parts of the Arab world in centuries to come. In places like Rusafa, both conquerors and conquered could meet as, in religious terms, some kind of equals.

  ‘Umar I’s reign was marked by war, and, apart from the establishment of the dwn system, it was not a period of wider-scale state formation. When the first wave of conquests stopped around 651, ‘Uthman found that one danger was that the new provinces risked drifting apart under their new Arab military élites. It is not clear whether under ‘Umar the provinces sent any of their tax revenue back to Medina, but all sources agree that ‘Uthman laid claim to at least some of them, particularly from the agriculturally rich provinces of Egypt and Iraq. ‘Uthman’s equally controversial patronage of kinsmen and tribal leaders as governors, instead of the early Muslims, often of no particular tribal status, who dominated the garrison towns, can be interpreted as the caliph trying to ensure chains of loyalty to him that would stabilize the new Arab political system. Both of these policies aimed to centralize power, and it is likely enough that it was indeed these policies that led to his death in 656. But it was his kinsman Mu‘awiya who won the First Civil War, and Mu‘awiya certainly continued them; he appointed his adopted brother Ziyad (d. 673) to govern Iraq and Iran, for example, and inside Syria linked himself closely to the tribal confederacy dominated by the Kalb, which was
the main Arab group in the province. (It is less certain how far he managed to divert provincial revenues to Syria, however; his centralizing practices were above all personal.) Mu‘awiya clearly thought dynastically, and ensured that his son (by a Kalbi mother) Yazid I (680-83) would succeed him. This led at his death to a far more serious rerun of 656-61, the Second Civil War of 680-92.

  ‘Ali’s son al-Husayn was the first to revolt against Yazid, in 680; he was killed at Karbala’ in Iraq in a one-sided conflict that has resonated ever since in Shi‘a martyrology. In Medina, ‘Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr, son of another First Civil War leader, also rejected Yazid’s authority, and he established himself as caliph there and in Mecca (683-92), with quite a wide authority for some years. Ibn al-Zubayr was not very militarily active himself, but he had substantial support both in Iraq and in parts of Syria. After Yazid’s death, Kufa, too, revolted under the ‘Alid leader Mukhtar, and was effectively independent in 685-7. And in Syria itself the leading Arab tribes fell out, the Kalb being opposed by the Qays, a coalition of newer settlers from northern Arabia, based in northern Syria and the Jazira, supporters of Ibn al-Zubayr. The Kalb put in a new branch of the Umayyad family as caliphs to confront Ibn al-Zubayr, Marwan I (684-5) and his son ‘Abd al-Malik (685-705), the first Marwanids, and Marwan defeated the Qays at the battle of Marj Rahit north of Damascus in 684. Even then, everything risked breaking up, but ‘Abd al-Malik held on, carried on fighting, and re-established unity with the reconquest of Mecca and the death of Ibn al-Zubayr in 692. What was clear, however, was that he needed a new and more stable political settlement, to avoid renewed chaos leading to the end of Arab rule.

  With ‘Abd al-Malik our historical information begins to be rather more reliable and diversified, and we can be more confident in our reconstructions. One thing he did was return to conquest. Westwards from Egypt, Arab armies had rather desultorily moved into the southern parts of Byzantine Africa in the 640s and then the 670s (founding the garrison city of Kairouan in 670); in the late 690s, however, they defeated the powerful Berber tribes of the Algerian plateau, and conquered Africa definitively, taking Carthage in 698. The Berbers took to Arab rule very fast. In 711, under ‘Abd al-Malik’s son al-Walid I, a Berber and Arab army invaded Spain, and by the end of the 710s it controlled nearly all the Iberian peninsula and was raiding into Francia. To the east, Bukhara and Samarkand fell in 706-12, and the Arabs occupied central Asia, and also parts of north-west India. The scene was set for the greatest conquest of all, Constantinople, with the siege of 717-18 led by Maslama, son of ‘Abd al-Malik, although this failed; it turned out that the caliphate had reached its greatest extent under al-Walid, and border wars would be the norm thereafter. These new conquests did not have the economic and political importance of those of 636-51, but they kept the main provincial armies busy and rich, which was better than civil war.

  ‘Abd al-Malik also ruled the provinces as forcefully as he could. Egypt was entrusted to his brother ‘Abd al-Aziz (d. 704), and shortly after that to the Qaysi governor Qurra, whose surviving letters show him to be very effective in his exactions and his local control. We still cannot see Egyptian wealth going to Syria, and these governors were probably as rich as the caliphs themselves, but they were certainly loyal. Iraq, the most troublesome province for the early Umayyads, was in 694 assigned to the hyper-loyal al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, another Qaysi, who governed it (and, after 697, Khurasan as well) until his death in 714; al-Hajjaj was a very tough, not to say oppressive, ruler who provoked a civil war with the Kufans in 701 and established a Syrian army in the zone after that; Iraqi armies withered, and Iraqi taxes went to Damascus from then on. In Syria, ‘Abd al-Malik maintained a balance between Kalbi and Qaysi patronage networks, as these Qaysi governors already imply. The two opposing networks gained in force, all the same; the Kalb joined with immigrants from Yemen who had settled in central Syria, and the alliance is generally from now on called Yamani in our sources; the two networks, which came to include virtually all Arabs, were fierce rivals for patronage from the caliphs, particularly the highly lucrative position of governor. A Yamani or a Qaysi governor could be relied on to appoint only members of his own faction to subordinate posts, but the caliphs themselves were for a long time fairly neutral between the two major groupings.

  ‘Abd al-Malik established a new public prominence both for Arab culture and for Islam. He Arabized the civil administration, as we have seen. That administration gained ever greater coherence, as is visible, for example, in the highly polished state letters of the senior chancery administrator ‘Abd al-Hamid (dating 725-50), which prefigure the belles-lettrist adab style of the ninth to eleventh centuries, as also the highly literary Byzantine practices of the same period, both discussed later. ‘Abd al-Malik furthermore, for the first time, instituted a coinage that reflected caliphal political power. Previously, Arab coins had imitated Byzantine and Persian models, but in 691-2 new standard-weight coins came in, the gold dnr in the ex-Roman lands and in ex-Persian lands the silver dirham, which had Arabic and Islamic inscriptions, and which after 696 abandoned images for purely verbal decoration. The caliph also, already during the Second Civil War, inaugurated expensive prestige buildings, beginning with the Dome of the Rock, on the spot to which Muhammad reputedly miraculously travelled for a night from Mecca, on top of the old Jewish cult centre of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, finished in 691-2; this was followed under al-Walid by the neighbouring al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem (709-15), the Great Mosque in Medina (706-10), and the huge Great Mosque of Damascus (705-16), which largely survives in its original form, decorated with mosaics, as we have seen. These and other projects were by far the largest-scale buildings in Eurasia west of China in this period, and they all explicitly celebrated a triumphal and rich Islam. They show, it must be added, that some money at least was by now getting to Syria from the provinces. The Umayyads were also giving a Muslim education to their children; one sign is the religious austerity of ‘Umar II ibn ‘Abd al-Aziz (717-20), who alone out of the Umayyad caliphs was regarded as a just ruler by later generations. This austerity was not continued by his successors, but by now the stability of the regime was more assured, as the long and relatively peaceful rule of Hisham, the last son of ‘Abd al-Malik (724-43), shows.

  The Umayyads had a terrible press after their fall in 750. They were seen as dynastic rather than ruling by consensus (though the ‘Abbasids would be just as dynastic as they); and as luxurious degenerates, enjoying themselves in their palaces and ignoring the needs of government. They certainly built luxurious palaces; some of them survive, in the Jordan valley and on the Syrian/Jordanian desert fringe, as ambitious in their own way as al-Walid’s mosques, and in two cases (the stuccoes of Khirbat al-Mafjar outside Jericho, the frescoes of the Qusayr ‘Amra bath-house east of ‘Amman) they show a profusion of human forms (often naked and female) that do not look very ‘Islamic’. This represents a private decorative tradition that would have a long future in Muslim societies, all the same, rather than indicating that its Umayyad sponsors had not read the Qur’an properly. (Actually, the Qur’an only opposes idol-worship, not all figurative representations of humans; but a caution about public representational art was certainly already accepted by the Umayyad caliphs, as we saw in Chapter 10, for the outsides of these palaces, often heavily carved in high relief, were entirely geometric and non-figurative, just as the mosque of Damascus was.) Several of the Umayyads did indeed have imaginative personal lives, too; but so have rulers throughout history - including, once again, the ‘Abbasids - without this impacting very greatly on their conceptions of rule. These accusations are simply a damnatio memoriae, like the later Byzantine attacks on Constantine V, rather than an accurate critique of Umayyad government.

  The critique of the Umayyads which had the strongest resonance was that they were Arab, not Muslim, rulers. It has lasted ever since, too: even Julius Wellhausen, the great late nineteenth-century historian of the Umayyads, called their realm the ‘Arab kingdom’. It is a
particularly false claim. For a start, the Umayyad caliphs took their religious responsibilities very seriously, at least from ‘Abd al-Malik onwards (Mu‘awiya is a rather more shadowy figure). ‘Umar II issued highly religious edicts, and was by no means the only caliph to do so. We have one from al-Walid II (743-4), later considered the dynasty’s most notorious playboy, which is adamant about the religious duties entrusted to him by God. These include the enforcement of religious obedience, the pursuance of ‘that which is most righteous for him in particular and for the Muslims in general’, and, overall, ‘the completion of Islam’; with a few phrases changed, this could be Charlemagne at his most moralizing. Similarly, his cousin and supplanter Yazid III (744) justified his uprising against al-Walid in exclusively Muslim terms. These caliphs indeed felt their religious role more strongly than did the ‘Abbasids, after the fervour of the first ‘Abbasid generation at least, for by the end of the eighth century the task of interpreting religious authority had mostly fallen to a new social group, the ‘ulam’ of scholars (see below, Chapter 14).