Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam

by Andrew Wheatcroft

  The judge’s fears were justified. Muslims were becoming roused against Christians, whom they saw as deliberately mocking the Prophet Mohammed. In John’s case this was not true. But among those who deliberately sought martyrdom their denunciations of Islam were now carefully and deliberately contrived to be unpardonable. Christians desiring martyrdom now made a point of coming into the capital to denounce Islam and to achieve salvation. The next was a monk, Isaac, from a wealthy family, and a scholar in Arabic who had been appointed as a government secretary. He came to the qadi in open court and said that he wished to make the Muslim profession of faith. But as the judge was instructing him, Isaac suddenly shouted out, “Your Prophet has lied, he has deceived you; may he be accursed, wretch that he is, who has dragged so many wretches down with him to hell. Why do you not, as a man of sense, abjure these pestilent doctrines?” Infuriated, the qadi struck him across the face, but he was restrained by his advisers, who told him that even a condemned criminal should not be insulted.

  Recovering his self-control, the qadi suggested to Isaac that he might be either drunk or mad, since he could not be ignorant that death was the only punishment for blasphemy. “Qadi,” the monk replied quietly, “I am in my right mind, and I have never tasted wine. Burning with the love of truth, I have dared to speak out to you and the others here present. Condemn me to death: far from dreading the sentence, I yearn for it; hath not the Lord said, ‘Blessed are they which are persecuted for the truth’s sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’ ”

  The qadi tried to avoid imposing the inevitable sentence, but under the law he had no option. Isaac duly met his desired end, on June 3, 851. Thereafter the headsman was kept busy. Two days after Isaac, a man named Sancho blasphemed and lost his head. Two days after that, six monks, among them Isaac’s uncle, came before the qadi and declared, “We also echo the words of our holy brothers Isaac and Sancho.” More followed, until eleven had died as martyrs in less than two months. Many Christians opposed these sacrifices, fearing that they would provoke Muslim anger against the whole Christian minority.

  The interests of the Muslim authorities and the wider Christian community in preventing these suicidal confrontations were identical. A church council was summoned to prevent further martyrdoms, but it seemed only to rouse the staunchest Christians to ever more ecstatic zeal. Two monks entered the Great Mosque of Cordoba at Friday prayers, and shouted, “The kingdom of heaven is at hand for the faithful, but for you infidels, hell yawns, and it will shortly open and swallow you up.” They narrowly escaped lynching by the faithful at prayer, and were swiftly judged and decapitated in the marketplace.

  The final victims of their own zeal were Bishop Eulogius and a young woman, Leocritia. Eulogius had written a powerful account of the martyrdom movement and sent it north for safekeeping beyond the frontier of Muslim Spain. He was arrested and accused of seeking to convert Leocritia, who had been born of Muslim parents. The qadi was reluctant to condemn so senior a Christian, and ordered him to be whipped for a more minor offense. Then Eulogius denounced the Prophet Mohammed in the most vitriolic terms. But still the magistrate refused formally to condemn him and simply committed him to the court of the vizier, the senior official of Cordoba. One of the court members came to Eulogius and said,

  I am not surprised, Eulogius, when madmen and imbeciles offer their heads without cause to the executioner; but how is it that a learned man like yourself, and one who enjoys general esteem, follows their example? What frenzy impels you? Why have you thus plotted against your own life? I pray you heed my words. Bow to the necessity; utter but a single word retracting what you have said before the Qadi, and in that case I will answer for my colleagues and myself that you will have nothing to fear.

  But Eulogius refused to recant, and set out to secure a truly memorable martyr’s death. He was formally condemned and sent for execution. A court eunuch abused him and struck him across the face on the way to the killing ground. In accordance with Christian precepts, Eulogius presented the other, unbruised, side of his face, and said, “Smite that also.” The eunuch obliged, and a few minutes later, at a little after nine in the morning on March 1, 859, the bishop lost his head. His body was exposed to be gnawed by scavenging dogs, cats, and rats, until the Christians gained permission to recover it. Leocritia was executed four days later and her body thrown into the river, “to be eaten by fishes.” The demise of so senior a figure as Eulogius made a much greater impact than the deaths of all the more humble martyrs, and when the king of Leon made a treaty with the sultan Mohammed in 883, one of the terms was that the bones of the holy martyrs Eulogius and Leocritia were to be ceded to him.57

  THE MOTIVES THAT IMPELLED THE MARTYRS HAVE NEVER BEEN SATISFACTORILY explained.58 Many of them came from mixed families, with both Islamic and Christian beliefs in their background. Many came from the small monastic communities clustered around Cordoba, notably from one foundation at Tabanos that produced no fewer than ten martyrs. As the number of martyrdoms mounted, the Muslim authorities responded with collective punishments. Significantly, the traditional limitations on the minorities were for the first time rigidly enforced. Christians were dismissed from their government posts and forced to wear the distinctive dress prescribed by law. Churches were examined to see if any were newly built and therefore subject to destruction. Even minor repairs or improvements could lead to their demolition. Many Christians turned against the enthusiasts. Eulogius recorded that at first Christians may have been impressed by the martyrdoms, but

  when the divine fire inflamed many and led crowds of the faithful to go down to the square and denounce the enemy of the church with the same confession of faith that Isaac made, soon everyone, frightened by the rage of the savage tyrant, with amazing fickleness changed their minds; they disparaged and cursed the martyrs, and declared that both the martyrs and their supporters were the authors of a great crime.59

  Eventually, around 854, the martyrs were formally denounced as heretics before the qadi by a group of leading Christians—bishops, abbots, priests, and nobles—in an attempt to prevent further pressure on the Christian community.

  The blood of martyrs had sustained the early church, and eventually brought down pagan rule. “The prototype of the Christian saint was the martyr; and as in due course holy men and women who had not died for Christ came to take their place alongside the martyrs, the figure of the martyr still remained the paradigm of the saint. The cult of the saints … had its undisputed origins in the cult of the martyrs.”60 With the conversion of the emperor Constantine, martyrs were no longer needed: but in the face of the infidel (and seemingly unconquerable) power of Islam, this most powerful weapon in the church’s armory was used again. If the precise causes of the martyrs movement lie within the heart of each of them who decided to lay down his or her life, its intention was clear. All the stories of the martyrs under Roman tyranny were a kind of miracle of the faith that would in some way, known only to God, bring about the triumph of the church.

  One author, al-Kushani, contrasted Christian zealotry with Islamic reason. He retold the story of a Christian who came before the qadi some sixty years after the martyrs, in 920. The story’s narrator explains that Christians believed this sort of suicide to be a pious act, although Jesus never encouraged any such thing. The qadi reprimanded the Christian for trying to commit suicide; the Christian replied that it would not be he who was killed, but only his image (shabhi), “while I myself will go to heaven.” The qadi had him whipped, then asked on whose back the whip had fallen. “On mine,” the Christian replied. “Just as the sword will fall on your neck,” said the qadi.61 So, although the occasional self-martyr and fanatic was still to be found, by the tenth century something of the old stability had been restored. The envoy of the emperor Otto I, John of Gorze, to the court of Abd al-Rahman III at Cordoba had been brought up on tales of the Cordoban martyrs. He cheerfully expected the same glorious end. Instead, he found Christian clergy who warned him against antagonizing
the Muslim authorities and firmly discouraged any provocative acts. The caliph refused to accept the letters sent by the emperor, because he found their tone demeaning and insulting, and instead sent back a Christian civil servant called Recemundus, appointed bishop of Granada, to ask the emperor to withdraw the letters, which he did. Dignity was satisfied, and John of Gorze returned home after a parade in his honor.

  Recemundus exemplified the larger numbers among Christians who were determined to function effectively within an Islamic society. He compiled an elaborate Calendar of Cordoba, which combined astronomical, agricultural, and Christian liturgical details. He presented a copy to Abd al-Rahman’s successor, Hakam II. In fact he prepared two versions. The longer contained details of all the martyrs of Cordoba and their feast days and was used by Christians. On the copy presented to the caliph, these details were tactfully (and prudently) omitted. In essence,

  the realities of Islamic rule ultimately favoured this kind of compromise … a radical Church appealed to some Christians, but such a Church could only become a focus of more violence. It could not maintain the stable relationship between government and subject population that would allow Christians to go about their daily lives in peace.62

  The martyrs movement, attempting to promote a violent reaction among Muslims, used arguments that had already been developed in the Levant. One of the martyrs had come to Spain from the Syrian monastery where John of Damascus had written his polemic against Islam. Many of the same themes were introduced into the Cordoban diatribe against Islam. The Prophet Mohammed was accused of being sexually promiscuous, and ensnared by a preoccupation with the body. Paul Alvarus, who wrote the life of Eulogius, contrasted Christ, who preached peace, with Mohammed, who taught men to fight; while Christ promoted chastity, Mohammed, the glutton for all forms of pleasure, practiced incest.63 All the long catalog of by now traditional insults was offered up:

  Muslims are puffed up with pride, languid in the enjoyments of fleshly acts, extravagant in eating, greedy usurpers in the acquisition of possessions … without honour, without truth, unfamiliar with kindness or compassion … fickle, crafty, cunning and indeed not halfway but completely befouled in the dregs of every impurity, deriding humility as insanity, rejecting chastity as though it were filth, disparaging virginity as though it were the uncleanness of harlotry, putting the vices of the body before the virtues of the soul.64

  This led naturally to the assertion that Mohammed was a precursor of the Antichrist; in later polemics he became the Antichrist himself.

  This wild rhetoric echoed the assaults that Christians had made against the pagan emperors of Rome. These had reminded their own adherents of the evil against which they were struggling. More important, they concealed a weakness in the case for godly martyrdom. For Islam did not demand that Christians worship false idols. Many Muslim scholars were even reluctant to accept converts from Christianity, arguing that they polluted Islam. One scholar, Ibn Haddah, wrote, “They say that temptations will come with the People of the Book [Christians and Jews] and they will be due to them.”65 Although marriage between a Muslim man and a non-Muslim woman was not forbidden, it was seen as fraught with spiritual danger. A Christian or Jewish wife would be a source of instability and corruption in a Muslim household, for she would inevitably be tempted to lead her children from the true path of Islam.66 In this some Islamic jurists and the Christian Alvarus were in agreement: separation was better than any form of contact.

  However, in Cordoba the martyrs were quickly forgotten and the apogee of the Caliphate of Cordoba in the last half of the tenth century was remembered as a golden age. The nineteenth-century historian of Islamic Spain Reinhart Dozy echoed the praise heaped upon the city by contemporary historians, poets, and foreign envoys alike.

  The state of the country harmonized with the prosperity of the public treasury. Agriculture, manufactures, commerce, the arts, sciences, all flourished. The traveller’s eyes were gladdened on all sides by the well-cultivated fields, irrigated upon scientific principles, so that what seemed the most sterile soil was rendered fertile … Cordova [sic], with its half million inhabitants, its three thousand mosques, its splendid palaces, its hundred and thirteen thousand houses, its three hundred public baths, and its twenty-eight suburbs, yielded in size and magnificence only to Baghdad … The fame of Cordova penetrated even distant Germany: the Saxon nun Hroswitha, famous in the last half of the tenth century for her Latin poems and dramas, called it the Jewel of the World.67

  In the courts of Christian Europe, Cordoba’s products—ivories, silks, bronze vases fancifully shaped as peacocks, stags, and imaginary beasts, chests of gold dinars—all became emblems of a world of incomparable civilization and luxury. Heathen Al-Andalus may have been an enemy of Christ. Nonetheless, it was alluring.68

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “The Jewel of the World”

  AT THE HEART OF THE JEWEL-LIKE CITY OF CORDOBA WAS THE GREAT Mosque. It was built by Abd al-Rahman I from 785 to 787, and extended and embellished by his successors. Its architectural origins were complex, with suggestions of Byzantine forms as well as strong echoes of Syria. The Ummayad caliphs had ruled in Damascus from 641 to 750, when they were overthrown by their rivals the Abbasids, and all except one of the Ummayad family were hunted down and killed. The survivor—Abd al-Rahman—fled west to the remotest portion of the Mediterranean Islamic world. In Spain he found loyal supporters. Under his rule, Al-Andalus declared itself independent from the new Abbasid Caliphate, based in Baghdad. Abd al-Rahman I created a powerful state centered on Cordoba that eventually became the Ummayad Caliphate of Cordoba in 929.

  The Great Mosque he built was the first evidence of this self-governing status. In structure and function it resembled the mosques of the East; but its forest of columns, crowned with polychrome double arches whose wedge-shaped stones (voussoirs) radiated from the arch’s center, were found in no building in the East. This was a characteristic of Visigothic buildings, and was adapted and extended by Mozarabic craftsmen.1 At each stage of its elaboration, the mosque became more Hispanized, and less like the great religious buildings of the Muslim East.2 There was also a direct connection with the Christian East, for in 965 Caliph Al-Hakam wrote to Constantinople asking for the services of a skilled mosaicist for the mosque. Not only did the caliph’s envoys return with a craftsman, but with 320 quintales of mosaic squares that “the King of the Rumi sent as a gift.”3

  The same Hispanized cultural fusion—part Arab, part Mozarabe—was found in the palace of Madinat al-Zahra built outside Cordoba by Abd al-Rahman III, who had in 929 declared himself caliph, commander of the faithful, and defender of the religion of God. The new palace was a testimony to his exalted status. There marvels were to be seen: the same arches characteristic of the mosque, but more massive and emphatic; stone tracery like a forest of vegetation spreading over walls and columns; little water fountains gushing from the beaks of bronze birds or the mouths of sturdy horses; and ivory and alabaster boxes intricately carved with scenes of the court. These are almost all that now remains of life within this palace, which once rivaled the great palace of Constantine in Constantinople.4 Madinat al-Zahra had some of the elements to be found in the Ummayad palaces of Syria and Jordan, but many more that originated in Al-Andalus. The palace was named, it was said, in honor of Abd al-Rahman’s favorite wife, and called the City of the Flower. Building began in 936, and for twenty-five years up to 12,000 workmen were at work on the site. Its scale was vast, with the outer wall more than one and a half kilometers long while, in the great hall, a huge pool of mercury shimmered and reflected the arches and tracery.

  The impact that the palace and the caliph made upon foreign visitors, accustomed to the cruder life of the north, was recorded on several occasions. One story tells how the caliph wished to impress them with his magnificence, so within the palace

  he placed dignitaries, whom they took for kings, for they were seated on splendid chairs and arrayed in brocades and silks. Each time
the ambassadors saw one of these dignitaries they prostrated themselves before him imagining him to be the caliph, whereupon they were told, “Raise your heads! This is but a slave of his slaves!”

  At last they entered a courtyard strewn with sand. At the centre was the caliph. His clothes were coarse and short: what he was wearing was worth no more than four dirhems. He was seated on the ground, his head bent; in front of him was a Koran, a sword and fire. “Behold, the ruler,” the ambassadors were told.

  This conspicuous modesty echoes the entry of the caliph Omar into Jerusalem in 638, with his darned and well-worn clothes and his broken-down mule.5 Symbolically, the Cordoban caliph showed himself as the humble servant of God, who would carry the holy word, with fire and sword, against the enemies of Islam. For although the city and the palace were architectural and human evidence of cultural fusion, the context in which the caliph presented himself also emphasized the oppositional purpose of Cordoba, its wealth, and its military power. Dozy wrote of Abd al-Rahman III, who “in his wide tolerance calls to his councils men of another religion … a pattern ruler of modern times, rather than a medieval Khalif.”6 But this claims too much. It is true that many of the early rulers of Cordoba were more open to non-Muslim influences than their Almoravid or Almohad successors from the deserts and mountains of North Africa. But for all the achievements in art, science, and learning, Cordoba was built around the theory, if not always the practice, of war with the Christian north. The true temper of the Cordoban caliphate was embodied in another symbolic moment. Abd al-Rahman III died in 961; in 997, the military strongman of Al-Andalus, Al-Mansur, led back his victorious army from destroying the great Christian shrine of Santiago de Compostela.