by Joel Kotkin
Ironically, Christianity’s rapid growth could not have taken place without the empire’s expansive urban infrastructure. Paul, the primary architect of the faith, was himself a quintessential product of the Roman urban world. A Hellenized Jew and Roman citizen from Tarsus, a major trade crossroads, Paul traveled the sea-lanes and roads connecting various cities of the empire—Antioch, Ephesus, Corinth, Damascus, Athens, and Rome itself.6
Christianity utilized Roman means for its evangelical ends, but the faith itself rejected many of the city-empire’s core values. Borrowing its theology largely from the Jews, the Christians rejected the old place-based notion of religio for faith in a single, transcendent god. “When they persecute you in one town,” Christ is quoted in Matthew, “flee to the next. . . . You will not have gone through all the towns of Israel, before the Son of Man comes.”7
Such a notion clashed directly with the culture of classical paganism. The concept of civic patriotism so passionately expressed by Cicero meant little to Christians, whose own God, while on earth, wandered homeless and died like a common criminal.8 “Nothing is more foreign to us than the state,” the Christian writer Tertullian insisted. 9
The Christians were further alienated by long periods of Roman persecution. Rome was, as one Christian writer put it, “a city created for corruption of the human race, for the sake of whose rule the entire world has undeservedly been subjugated.” Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage in the third century A.D., celebrated the plagues visiting Rome and other principal cities of the empire as just retributions for its crimes and infidelity.10
This antiurban perspective was most famously expressed by Saint Augustine in his The City of God. Like Cyprian, a Carthaginian, Augustine portrayed Rome as the “earthly city,” or civitas terrena, that “glories in itself ” and whose own wickedness deserved punishment. Rather than propose a program to reform the dying metropolis, Augustine urged Romans to seek entrance into another kind of metropolis, “the City of God,” where “there is no human wisdom, but only godliness.” 11
“ALL IS NEGLECT”
By the fifth century A.D., when Augustine wrote his great treatise, neither the flock of Christians nor the church, now headquartered at Rome, could have prevented the collapse of the empire. Birthrates were falling and cities emptying, particularly in the more exposed cities closer to the frontiers.12 Rome itself was increasingly isolated from the major centers of imperial power.13 Even in Italy, commercial and political focus shifted to other cities, notably Ravenna and Mediolanum (Milan).
Deprived of its imperial role, Rome saw its population plummet. New building stopped and older structures collapsed. In 410, the city was sacked by the Visigoths. The city retained a ragged independence for a bit longer, until it was seized by the German king Odoacer in 476.
Worse indignities were to follow. Racetracks turned to grain fields; aqueducts were abandoned; the baths closed permanently. By the seventh century, Rome was reduced to a city of thirty thousand. “Once the whole world gathered here to climb high,” observed Pope Gregory, surveying the devastation. “Now loneliness, desolation and mourning reign.” 14
Following the fall of Rome, city life in Western Europe began slowly to fade. For centuries there developed what one historian calls a “simplification” of culture, a moving inward, “a time of narrowing horizons, of the strengthening of local roots, and the consolidating of old loyalties.”15
Deurbanization did not happen at once and everywhere. Pockets of Roman city life persisted in some areas for centuries. Sporadic attempts were made to restore the empire. But by the seventh century A.D., the old trade links between the old imperial cities were severed. The great port of Marseilles, thriving for centuries after the empire’s collapse, fell into disrepair.
Western Europe and nearby parts of North Africa now devolved into a mosaic of warring barbarian fiefdoms. Virtually all the West’s great cities, from Carthage to Rome and Milan, experienced deep population declines. 16 In the periphery of the empire, the losses were, if anything, more catastrophic and lasting. Trier, a bustling German provincial capital with a population of roughly sixty thousand in the early fourth century A.D., devolved into a set of rural villages clustered around a cathedral. As late as 1300, after the restoration of walls and an improvement in the economy, the city still was home to barely eight thousand people.17
In most places, the older urban civilization all but evaporated. Less than 5 percent of all the people in Catholic Europe during the seventh and eighth centuries A.D. lived in towns of any size. One French bishop, wandering the increasingly deserted villages of his diocese, noted that “everywhere we find churches whose roofs have fallen in and whose doors are broken and come off their hinges.” Animals wandered the aisles up to the altars. Grass grew through the floors. “All,” the churchman noted, “is neglect.”18
CONSTANTINOPLE: URBAN SURVIVOR
Constantinople, the former Greek Byzantium, now stood as the last great redoubt of classical urbanism. Declared the imperial capital by Constantine around A.D. 326, the city stood astride the Bosporus, separating Europe from Asia. Secure behind its walls and with its magnificent harbor, Constantinople survived the barbarian onslaught. Within a century, its population expanded from roughly fifty thousand residents to over three hundred thousand, easily exceeding that of decaying Rome, Antioch, or Alexandria. 19 At its peak in the sixth century A.D., it stood as Europe’s dominant city, approaching half a million people, and controlled a huge empire ranging from the Adriatic to Mesopotamia and from the Black Sea to the horn of Africa.
Unlike Rome, which cultivated older cities and founded new ones, Constantinople flourished at a time when other cities in Europe and the Near East were in decline. “Oh, to be in the city!” was a refrain heard often by Byzantines when forced, by necessities of business or government, to travel to the far-flung, dispirited, and often depopulated provincial towns. 20
Constantinople proclaimed itself the new Rome, yet it was never to achieve the scale and imperial breadth of its predecessor. In his Chronographica,the eleventh-century historian Michael Psellus compared Constantinople to “a baser metal” devolved from “the golden streams of the past.”21 Cut off from the West, the city experienced, in the words of Henri Pirenne, a “progressive orientalization.” Indeed, visitors from the West noted all the signs: powerful court eunuchs, elaborate court rituals, an increasing despotic centralization of power. 22
Perhaps even worse, Constantinople turned away from the classical world’s cosmopolitan notions, particularly on issues of religion. The imperial regime increasingly persecuted Jews, Christian “heretics,” and pagans. The historian Procopius observed of Emperor Justinian: “He did not think that the slaying of men was murder unless they happened to share his own religious opinions.”23
Many potential allies who might have rallied to the old inclusive empire now turned against the regime. Some groups, including the Jews and even some Christian sects, actively assisted first the Persians and later the Muslims in hacking away pieces of the empire.
Other forces also worked to undermine the city and its dwindling empire. Natural disasters, such as earthquakes, followed by the great plagues of the late sixth century A.D., wiped out one-third to one-half of Constantinople’s population and many of the smaller cities entirely.24 Debilitated from disease and internal dissension, its population in decline, the empire was ill prepared to counter the rise of Islam in the seventh and eighth centuries.
Despite its many problems, the empire persisted—its greatest virtue, noted the historian Jacob Burckhardt, was its “tenacity”—but devolved increasingly into an archipelago of relatively small, perennially threatened armed fortresses. Byzantine defensive prowess, diplomacy, outright bribery, and dissension within the Muslim world all conspired to keep Constantinople safe from final conquest until it fell to the onslaught of Turkish cannons in A.D. 1453.25
PART THREE
THE ORIENTAL EPOCH
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE ISLAMIC ARCHIPELAGO
In 1325, Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Battuta left his native city of Tangier and headed east, to begin his sacred hajj, or pilgrimage, to Mecca. Later, having performed his religious duty in Arabia, he traveled on for almost the next quarter century, sojourning at trading posts along the coast of East Africa, across the caravan towns of the Central Asian steppe, and to the gilded cities of India and the Silk Road.
For most of the journey, covering thousands of miles and scores of cultures, ibn Battuta felt at home almost everywhere. He encountered many different races, languages, and cultures, but most cities lived within the familiar bounds of Dar al-Islam, the house of Islam, a world embracing one God and the revelations of one man, the prophet Muhammad.
It had been nearly a millennium since Rome, and its vast urban network had suffered its final agonies of decline. The Eternal City’s successor, Constantinople, still survived behind its walls but was fatally weakened and surrounded by enemies. It now stood as the only European city among the twenty largest in the world; almost all the rest were part of the Oriental world, either in China or within Dar al-Islam.1
Muslim primacy had contributed much to the weakening of European urbanism. By taking control of both the Mediterranean and the trade routes to the East, Muslims had cut off European commerce from critical sources of both wealth and knowledge.2 “The Christians,” observed the Arab historian ibn Khaldun, “could no longer float a plank on the sea.”3 Products like papyrus disappeared from European monasteries; wine long purchased from the Mediterranean now had to be grown locally. Only a trickle of luxury products, usually sold by Syrian and Jewish traders, appeared in Europe’s marketplaces and aristocratic courts.4
In contrast, such goods crowded the bazaars in the often dazzling Muslim cities, from Toledo and Córdoba in Spain to Delhi in distant India. Muslim traders and missionaries now extended their influence to the islands of Southeast Asia and established colonies in the thriving coastal cities of China itself.
MUHAMMAD’S URBAN VISION
Islamic civilization rested upon a powerful vision of human purpose. Like the classical civilization it supplanted, it was at its core a profoundly urban faith. The need to gather the community of believers was a critical aspect of Islam. Muhammad did not want his people to return to the desert and its clan-oriented value system; Islam virtually demanded cities to serve as “the places where men pray together.”5
The history of early Islam is one of urban dwellers. Muhammad was a successful merchant in Mecca, a long-established trading and religious center on the barren Arabian peninsula. This city long had been influenced by first Hellenistic and then Roman rulers; its varied population included pagans, Jews, and, after the second century, Christians.6
Mecca and the other trading cities of the Hijaz, in the northwest corner of the peninsula, lacked the strong agricultural roots common to many early cities. Its dry, unforgiving climate—one tenth-century Arab topographer described the city as being afflicted with “suffocating heat, a pestilential wind, and clouds of flies”7—left only commerce as the basis for its economy.
Most Meccans were descended from bedouins, who wandered the vast expanse of the Hijaz in search of grazing land and water for their flocks. Organized into clans, bedouins supplemented their meager incomes by protecting or raiding caravans. These clans were frequently contentious, respecting only basic family-based loyalties. Ibn Khaldun noted that such strong links were natural outgrowths given the harsh environment of bedouin life. “Only tribes held together by a group feeling,” he observed, “can live in the desert.”8
By the early decades of the new millennium, some of these clans settled in cities such as Mecca and started their own caravans, profiting from the growth in trade between the Levant and Yemen. Mecca slowly grew into a settlement of as many as five thousand.
The old clan loyalties of the desert culture posed a distinct threat to this nascent urban community. Meccans lacked the common ethos and rule of law applicable to unrelated people that had held cities together since Mesopotamian times.
Muhammad, a member of the Qurayshi, one of the more powerful clans at Mecca, grasped the need for such an order, a higher purpose that would replace the chaos of the blood feuds inherent in the old clan society. His system of belief, Islam, was both a religious program and a call for social justice and order.
Muhammad’s ideas, revealed in the Koran, concerned themselves with the traditionally weaker members of society. He demanded that women, long subject to abuse of all kinds, be protected from harsh treatment. Men were limited to four wives, unlike in the past, where wealth was the only limiting factor, and commanded to treat them with proper respect.
The poor, too, were to be protected. Alms giving became a necessary expression of faith. Among the wealthy, instructed the Koran, “there is a recognized right for the beggar and deprived.”9
Perhaps the most far-reaching aspect of Muhammad’s message was his notion of greater ummah, or community, bound by a single faith. This concept overturned both traditional pagan worship and the ancient primacy of clan affiliations. The traditional leaders of the clans seem to have understood this. In 622, they forced the Prophet and a handful of followers to flight, or hijira, to the rival city of Medina, two hundred miles to the north. That city, with its large Jewish colony, proved more receptive to the Prophet’s monotheistic message.10
Swelled with new converts, Muhammad’s forces occupied Mecca in 630. Soon the ummah was spreading rapidly across Arabia. The Arabs, once a feuding group of clans, now became a single, highly motivated people. “Had you given them away all the riches of the earth,” the Koran says, “you could not have so united them. But God has united them.”11
THE NATURE OF THE ISLAMIC CITY
After Muhammad’s death in 632, his successors, the caliphs, determined to implement the Prophet’s vision. The Muslim epoch represented a new beginning in urban history. Spreading through the Near East and North Africa and into Spain with remarkable energy between the seventh and ninth centuries, Islam broke dramatically with the long-standing traditions of classical urbanism, which, as Socrates saw it, found “people in the city” as a primary source of knowledge.12 Islam would foster a sophisticated urban culture but did not worship the city for its own sake; religious concerns, the integration of the daily lives of men with a transcendent God, overshadowed those of municipal affairs.
The primacy of faith was evident in the layout of Islamic cities. Instead of the classical emphasis on public buildings and spaces, mosques now arose at the center of urban life.13
This religious orientation, and the attendant laws governing day to day, differentiated the Muslim conquest from those of the other nomadic invaders who also preyed on the decaying classical civilization. When the Germans, Huns, and others seized the great cities of Rome, Persia, and Byzantium, they generally left little more than ruins and ashes. The Muslims, in contrast, sought to incorporate newly acquired cities— Damascus, Jerusalem, and Carthage—into what they believed to be a spiritually superior, urban civilization.
DAMASCUS: PARADISE ON EARTH
In 661, the caliphate abandoned Medina as their political capital and moved to Damascus, a city more suited to handling the administration, communication, and commercial needs of the expanding empire. In contrast with Mecca or Medina, Damascus lay in a fertile region, nourished by the Baradá River, which flows from the mountains of Lebanon. As the Arab poet ibn Jubayr wrote:
If Paradise be on earth, Damascus must be it; if it is in heaven, Damascus can parallel and match it.14
Damascus broadened the exposure of the Arabs to other cultures. Damascus was a great cosmopolitan city, home to various Christian sects and Jews. Under Islam, these “peoples of the book” were allowed to practice their faiths, often far more freely than under the former Byzantine rulers. The Koran suggested that the dhimmis (protected persons) be made “tributaries” to the new regime and thus “humbled,” but otherwise their rights were assu
red. This relative toleration led the Jews and even some Christians to welcome, and even assist, in the Muslim takeover of their cities.15
The cosmopolitan character of Islamic urban life also spurred the growth of trade, the elevation of the arts and sciences.16 In the newly conquered cities, the Arab souk often improved on the Greco-Roman agora. Rulers developed elaborate commercial districts, with large buildings shaded from the hot desert sun, with storerooms and hostels for visiting merchants. The new rulers built large libraries, universities, and hospitals at a pace not seen since Roman times.17
The new urban spirit extended well beyond the walls of Damascus. Basra in Iraq, Fez and Marrakesh in North Africa, Shiraz in Iran, and Córdoba in Spain all testified to the civic imagination of the new order.18 Córdoba, wrote one German nun, was “the jewel of the world, young and exquisite, proud in its might.” So great was the cultural pull that in Córdoba, complained one ninth-century Christian scholar, few of his brethren could write Latin adequately but many could “express themselves in Arabic with elegance and write better poems in this language than the Arabs themselves.”19
BAGHDAD: “CROSSROADS OF THE WORLD”
Baghdad, the new capital founded by the Abbasid caliphate in the late eighth century, emerged as the greatest of these early Muslim cities. Located between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, close to the site of both ancient Babylon and Ctesiphon, the former capital of the Sassanid Persian Empire, the city was described by one contemporary observer, Abu Yousuf Yaqub ibn Ishaq, as the “crossroads of the world.”