by Andrew Marr
Eventually, even the division of Christendom into those two halves – Latin-Roman-papal in the west and Greek-Byzantine-Orthodox in the east – proved a strength, not a weakness. Byzantium, whose story comes later, stood for centuries against attackers both from the Germanic and Slavic north-west and the Tatar and Muslim east. After Justinian, it was unable to exert real influence in Italy. That left Christian Rome free to develop its own theology and continent-wide system of bishoprics, monasteries and alliances on the rubble of the Roman world. In its religious art and culture, as well as its feudal system of landholding, and its free cities, Western Europe went its own way. When eventually city-states and local rulers were sufficiently wealthy and secure to turn again to the lost learning and techniques of the classical world – learning preserved by both Islam and Byzantium – they would exploit it with a vigour all their own.
At the time, nobody could have foreseen this. While Saxons were chanting their war poems, the sophisticated Japanese Murasaki Shikibu was writing her epic novel, The Tale of Genji. When warlords such as Offa on the Welsh-British border decided to mint coins, he made rough and awkward copies of Muslim dinars. And later, when the first big Sicilian, German and French cathedrals were rising, in other parts of the world equally extraordinary stonework was being crafted by Toltecs and Maya. Before Europeans had seen paper, the Chinese were using it as currency. In the 1100s, while Englishmen were hacking each other to death in the conflict over the rise of the Plantagenets, and Germans and Italians were wading in gore during their wars of succession, Angkor Wat – which would be the world’s largest religious building – was being created, first as a Hindu, later a Buddhist, centre by the Khmer civilization of Cambodia. Europe seemed, in short, nowhere particularly exciting.
Islam’s Golden Age
The year 711 is not much remembered today, but the Muslim invasion of Spain shook Christendom and terrified rulers far to the north. For the best part of seven centuries, castles, mosques and cities ruled by Islamic rulers challenged the idea that ‘Europe’ and ‘Christian’ meant the same thing. The Visigothic kingdom of Spain, which quickly collapsed after Arab armies made the short crossing to Gibraltar, was a not an untypical model of post-Roman Europe. Its Germanic rulers, though frequently feuding amongst themselves and holding to an anti-Catholic version of Christianity, nevertheless managed to run a relatively well organized society, farming and living simply in the grand ruins of the Roman age and speaking a decayed version of Latin. The Visigoths were not so different from the Carolingians in France, the Saxons in England or the Ostrogoths in Italy. Yet within nine years of the first probing Arab advance, the Visigoths had lost almost all of the peninsula. The Arab armies were halted only at Poitiers in France, and then merely because their lines were already so far extended.
These ‘Arabs’ advancing through Spain were in fact a vivid mix of peoples. Some were from today’s Arabia and Yemen, others were Syrians, and others still were Berber people of North Africa, who had only recently converted to Islam. Frightened Europeans called them ‘Moors’, even as they learned from them. (English Morris dancing, for instance, is really ‘Moorish’ dancing, originating with African Muslims.) What the watching Europeans did not know was that this Moorish eruption into Spain had only happened because of a cataclysmic event at the other end of the Mediterranean.
In 750 the Umayyad dynasty, whose empire extended for five thousand miles and who had been the undisputed successors of the Prophet, were toppled, in a bloody revolt, by the Abbasids. The caliphate, that core expression of political Islam, had become hugely important. Many Arabs resented the former Byzantine and Persian officials who seemed to have taken over, and the Syrians who formed a phalanx around the ruler. So they rose up. The new Abbasid caliphate would survive for hundreds of years, moving the capital of the Muslim world from Damascus inland to a new great city, Baghdad – with momentous consequences, since this in itself made Islam more eastern. But the new caliphate would not include al-Andalus. The grandson of one of the defeated Umayyad caliphs escaped to Spain, where he and his successors would rule an independent state, the Mild West of the Muslim world.
Unlike the Baghdad-centred caliphate, this one was wedged, provocatively, deep into what had been Christian territory. Al-Andalus would alter Christendom irrevocably, mainly because of the remarkable intellectual and trading achievements of its Baghdad rival, with whom it kept closely in touch. The Abbasids saw themselves as inheritors of the learning of the ancient Greeks, but also of the Persians and the Hindu Indians. Part of their claim against the Christians of Byzantium was that they had forgotten, or had shunned, the great classical heritage. They were right; and in Western Christendom too there had been a deliberate turning-away from the knowledge of the classical age in favour of a fervent, God-soaked, symbol-drenched view of the world.
This made the Franks, Germans, English and others quite spiritual, but not very well informed about the material world around them. They could not accurately tell the time of day, and struggled along with a defective, slipping calendar. Their maths was primary-school primitive and their geography little better. The shape of the world outside Europe and the Near East was a mystery; but it was probably flat, and if you travelled too far, you would fall off. The Abbasids, by contrast, prided themselves on their curiosity and hard science, in a world that they mapped and whose circumference they measured. This was an almost perfect mirror image of the Mediterranean of the 1700s, by which time the Christians had fallen in love with science and technology and the Muslim world had become conservatively God-soaked and hostile to intellectual enquiry.
This must have something to do with territorial ambition. Just as the later saltwater Europeans were touching other continents and labouring to understand the Indian and Chinese civilizations, so the Abbasids stretched on land for some four thousand miles, from the Atlantic to the edges of India. Europeans needed new instruments to find their way across the oceans; Abbasid Muslims needed them to chart their way across deserts and mountain ranges, as well as across the sea. Europeans found new landscapes, plants and animals, which tested (and later overthrew) their ideas about how the world was made. Much earlier, Muslim thinkers had been confronted by ideas from many different sources, in an empire brimming with Jews, Greeks, Zoroastrian Persians and unorthodox Christians, and had struggled to make those ideas cohere.
They had nothing but contempt for the Christian Europeans. The geographer al-Masudi explained that because of their cold, dark climate ‘their bodies are large; their natures gross, their manners harsh, their understandings dull, and their tongues heavy’.5 Mathematics is the most obvious example of these Muslim thinkers’ success. In 762 Caliph al-Mansur had laid out his new capital at Baghdad in a perfect circle, his gracious compliment to the Greek mathematician Euclid. Al-Mansur was a ruler with the self-confidence to encourage a revival of Persian learning, and to reach out to help the Chinese, sending thousands of mercenaries to help in their local wars. At Baghdad, the House of Wisdom, which was something like a combined research centre, library and college, fizzed with arguments about law, astrology, medicine, geography and many other subjects. There, mathematics was particularly prized.
Why was this? One underlying reason was to do with astrology, the reading of the stars, which Muslims, like Christians, believed could foretell the future, but which required ‘the utmost precision in instrumentation and timekeeping, preparing star tables accurate not just to minutes of degrees but to seconds and beyond’.6 Another was that with accurate measurements they could produce proper maps of their vast domains. Furthermore, by understanding the rotation and curvature of the earth they could calculate Mecca’s exact direction when praying. Add to these mystical, imperial and religious concerns a love of numbers and patterns for their own sake, and the Abbasid fascination with maths makes perfect sense.
Trying to establish accurate figures for the circumference of the Earth, Caliph al-Mamun sent his surveyors into the desert to take readings of the sun
’s altitude, dividing the men into two groups marching in opposite directions, measuring as they went, until their sun calculations showed they had travelled one degree on the meridian. In the 820s Europeans would not have understood what he was doing, never mind why – any more than South American natives understood sextants and telescopes when Captain Cook arrived. But Muslim mathematicians were not working in isolation. Some years before, in 771, a group of Hindu scholars had arrived at Baghdad from India with scientific texts, including an explanation of the sine function, which, developed by Islamic thinkers, would produce modern algebra.
The greatest mathematician of the age, Muhammad al-Khwarizmi, who was probably an Uzbek, perfected mathematical tables to show the exact positions of the sun, moon and five major planets and thus to show the precise time. Indian number systems, today’s ‘Arabic numerals’, the use of zero and decimal fractions, were all crucial to al-Khwarizmi’s new world. His work on algebra, called The Book of Restoring and Balancing, uses his tables for proofs in the older science of geometry. His particular specialities included quadratic equations, essential to modern computer science.
Add to al-Khwarizmi’s maths the comprehensive translation and study of Greek and Sanskrit sources, discoveries in astronomy, medicine, the natural sciences, engineering, water management and map-making, and you start to get a sense of how far ahead the Abbasid empire was. This was young Islam, open-eyed Islam, out and exploring new worlds, devout but fiercely practical and intellectually ambitious. Its perspective included sub-Saharan Africa, the coasts of India and the Red Sea, and even Russia. As the Abbasid achievement grew and matured a few Westerners, such as the Norman King of Sicily Roger II, were ready to learn from it. But the rising power of the papacy, casting around for a unifying cause, saw the Muslim caliphate as unspeakable polygamist heathens. It is hard to crusade against someone and learn from them at the same time. Had the rival Muslim world of al-Andalus not existed, much of this precious knowledge might not have arrived in Europe for centuries to come.
Though the overthrow of Spain’s Visigothic noblemen was lightning-fast, leaving Christian rulers penned into a tiny, wet, mountainous corner of the north of the peninsula, the Muslim conquerors had never felt completely secure. The political history of al-Andalus, from the 700s through to the final defeat of Granada, the last toehold of Moorish Spain, in 1492, is as riven by dynastic quarrels, rebellions, invasions and spectacular overthrowings as any other part of Europe. From early on, threats from religious zealots from North Africa and from Viking raiders were often more serious than the challenges from the Christians in the north. And the tough Berber tribesmen who had made up much of the Arab-led army of conquest periodically rebelled, with some success.
The escapee Umayyad prince who founded the kingdom of al-Andalus, Abd al-Rahman, had arrived from North Africa with a small army to seize power. At Córdoba in 756 he declared himself ‘Amir’, or civil ruler. He dealt with rebel Abbasids by pickling their heads in salt and sending them back to Baghdad, which was apparently an effective declaration of independence. Abd al-Rahman I would rule for thirty-three years, dividing up the peninsula into manageable portions, forging a formidable army composed of slaves, many of them Christian, and establishing a gloriously beautiful capital at Córdoba. There his great mosque can still be seen, albeit with a Catholic wedding-cake-Gothic cathedral painfully inserted through its middle. Its world-famous forest of slim, cream- and pink-striped arches is a perfect stone metaphor for al-Andalus itself. The double arches mimic Roman building, particularly the aqueducts found all over Spain, but the effect is a memory of palm trees shimmering in a distant desert; oasis-classical. The mosque was built on top of a church, but Christians were given other sites for churches. And though the architecture is obviously ‘Muslim’ the mosaic decorations are by Byzantine craftsmen. A complicated conversation between rival faiths had begun.
For this exotic kingdom was the reverse of pure-bred. Much of the population remained Christian – though, because they had to pay a special poll-tax unless they converted, many did. Christians living peaceably under Muslim rule were called ‘Mozarabs’; those who converted, ‘Muwallads’. Some of the latter, feeling themselves disdainfully treated by Arabs, were prone to rebel, and there was a ferocious and very long-running Muwallad revolt under the charismatic bandit-king Ibn Marwan, who later converted back to Christianity. Jews were generally far better treated than in any Christian kingdom. Slaves could rise through the grand royal bureaucracy of Córdoba and female Christians were taken as concubines so that, to make things more complicated still, some of the most powerful amirs looked more European than Arab, with reddish-fair hair and blue eyes.
This was a land of mingle and double-cross. Christian kingdoms would seek support from Muslim rulers in their own local feuds; and Muslims would ally with Christians. Even El Cid, the great Christian warrior-hero, fought for Muslim rulers from time to time, if the pay was good enough. The landscape of central and southern Spain, littered with Christian and Moorish castles, fortified walls and ruined keeps, demonstrates just what a wild frontier country this was; but it was a lot more complicated than just Catholics fighting against Islam.
At its finest, al-Andalus was a glittering rebuke to the meagre, muddy kingdoms of northern Europe. Córdoba became one of the largest cities in the world, with a vast library of more than four hundred thousand books at a time when even substantial Christian monasteries could boast only a few score. Under its greatest ruler, Abd al-Rahman III, it had hundreds of public bathhouses and excellent running-water facilities, while even the grandest Christians kings still stank. Under al-Hakam II it openly proposed itself as an intellectual rival to Abbasid Baghdad, importing experts, particularly in the use of the astrolabe, that beautiful and ingenious device used to read the angle of the sun, moon and visible stars and thus determine one’s position in longtitude. Invented by the Greeks, the astrolabe became a kind of simple universal computer for the Muslims, deployed for everything from astrology to architecture. When Muslim learning reached northern Europe, the astrolabe also became a symbol for the new natural science: Chaucer was among those who celebrated it in print.
Although al-Andalus was an independent kingdom, Muslim duties of Hajj and the eternal business of trade kept the two ends of the Mediterranean closely connected, and ensured Córdoba’s fame. Al-Rahman’s huge palaces and fortresses brought awed sightseeing embassies both from the Christian world – Paris, Rome and Constantinople – and from Cairo, Baghdad and Damascus. Córdoba’s streets were clean, stone-paved and lit at night, and its libraries contained some of the sharpest minds known at the time, there honing their mathematics, astrology, grammar and astronomy.
Later, when the caliphate fell and Muslim Spain broke into many rival mini-states, or taifas, the learning and the expertise remained. Though the most obvious remains today are the fortified walls and spectacular castle ruins which testify to centuries of shifting frontier and religious warfare, the greatest Arab imports included a proper understanding of aquaculture, drainage and waterwheels; and new crops from the Near East and India that made southern Spain bloom with aubergines, peaches, apricots, oranges, lemons, melons, pears, cotton, rice and even vineyards. Later still, at the time of the more austere Almohad dynasty which ended the chaotic taifa period after invading from the mountains of Berber Spain, al-Andalus could still boast some of the greatest thinkers in Europe. They included Ibn Rushd, or Averroës as the Christians called him, who was a judge and lawyer at Córdoba, the most important of the Muslim thinkers, and a specialist in Aristotle; and Moses Maimonides, a Jewish physician and philosopher and author of Guide for the Perplexed.
The great philosophical debate of the time, which shook the Muslim world, pitted radical thinkers against the religiously orthodox. It was spearheaded by the Persian Avicenna, who tried to reconcile faith with the rationalist Greek philosophy of Aristotle. Writing from the 1020s onward, he distinguished between a remote, eternal Creator on the one hand and a c
omplex day-to-day world of cause and effect, which he felt could be investigated and understood on its own terms. He suggested that God had simply set up the world, then had largely left it to follow its course, under rules that mankind could discover.
This was an invitation to the curious and determined, but it depended upon a passive and remote version of God which was not that of orthodox Muslim thinkers: their God was deeply and busily engaged in the world. The most famous of these orthodox thinkers, al-Ghazali, writing in the later part of the eleventh century, lashed Avicenna in a book splendidly titled The Incoherence of the Philosophers. But he in turn was attacked by Averroës, who also distinguished between the world of eternity, outside time, which was where God existed, and the week-by-week, colourful, smelly world of cause and effect explained by Aristotle. Like Avicenna, he was creating a space for human reason and investigation – a bubble in which enlightenment could thrive inside a universe made by God. There could hardly be a more all-encompassing proposition for the world of the time. Only by doing so could the probing, philosophizing inheritance of the Greeks, from that first age of reason, be revived in the Asia and Europe of Jewish, Christian and Muslim faiths. It was an invitation to think again, a battle-cry against passively leaving everything to God’s will. Averroës felt this as a personal challenge. It was a hot argument. One of his key works, hitting back at al-Ghazali, has an even better title: The Incoherence of Incoherence.