2Qur’an, trans. Arthur J. Arberry (1955), Victory 48:35, p. 229.
It wasn’t only piety that fused them but the Prophet’s force of character. He was a pitiless fighter but a courteous and humble man. He and his wives — about a dozen of them — lived in simple homes of clay. He liked honey and milk, and could often be seen mending his own clothes. He owed much of his success to the model that he set for his disciples.
When he died in 632, the Arabs badly needed a leader to replace him. He had only lightly glued them together, and after he died many tribes rejected orders from above. To make things worse, the Prophet had not clearly chosen a successor. How does one replace God’s Prophet?
At first, at least, his followers chose their leaders well. They picked as “caliph” (which means successor) one of Muhammad’s advisers and the father of one of his wives. In just two years this leader crushed the rebels and joined the quarreling tribes in one Islamic state. When he died, the Arabs chose as caliph a man who continued to live as simply as a desert sheikh. He owned a cloak and one patched shirt, and slept on palm leaves.
The Arabs now began a dazzling set of conquests. The world has never seen the like. Riding swiftly on their camels, first they struck their two big neighbors: the Eastern Roman Empire to the northwest and Persia to the northeast. In fifteen years (632–49) they conquered Roman Egypt and most of the Persian Empire. (Later, they would take the rest of it.) The Persian king of kings was murdered by a Persian, and his son escaped to China. Meanwhile these desert nomads transformed themselves into sailors, as the Romans had done so long before when they fought the Carthaginians. They built a fleet of ships and seized some islands that gave them nearly total control of the Mediterranean.
After halting half a century they thrust to the east again and conquered some of India’s western coast, and oases on the barren plains of Central Asia. They fought and vanquished Chinese armies, but they didn’t push inside the Middle Kingdom. But under an able general, Musa ibn-Nusayr, they battled west across North Africa, all the way to the Straits of Gibraltar.
How did these provincial Arabs win so much so fast? Perhaps the simple answer is, for once, the right one: Muhammad had brought them union and a goal. Muslims were required by God to bring the world his revelation. But the Arabs weren’t fanatics bent on winning souls; in fact, they rarely forced their faith on those they ruled. Probably they found it easier to tax infidels than converts, and easier to rule a people split by several religions than a people united by one.
Even so, many millions of the people whom the Arabs conquered did convert. They may have reasoned that the God of Muslims must be strong indeed if his people won so many wars. And perhaps they were drawn to a religion that set out so explicitly the duties of the faithful. Islam also promised them an afterlife in which their faces would shine with joy, and they would praise God “in gardens of bliss,” where “immortal youths will serve them with goblets, pitchers, and cups…and they may choose fruit of any kind and whatever fowl they desire and chaste companions with eyes of a beauty like pearls hidden in shells.”
Now that the Muslims held so much of Africa and Asia, the time had come to deal with Europe. Musa, who had conquered all North Africa, chose a general named Tariq to conquer Spain. In 711 he shipped a force of only 7,000 Muslim converts across the narrow strait that separates North Africa from Europe. They won the overwhelming rock that guards the strait and christened it Jabal Tariq (Mount Tariq), a name that later warped into Gibraltar. Then the Muslims routed a defending army, and Tariq and Musa overran Iberia, which now is Spain and Portugal. (Later, the caliph summoned Musa and Tariq to Syria and accused them of stealing funds. The conquerors of North Africa and Iberia died in obscurity.)
In 732, however, the Muslims rode their horses northward from Iberia, across the Pyrenees, and into “France.” At this time France was little but a name, but its ruler somehow raised some fighters dressed, it’s said, in wolf skins. In a daylong battle fought in western France, the Muslim horsemen tried repeatedly to rout the French but failed each time. After night had fallen they withdrew from France. This Muslim failure looks, in hindsight, like a turning point for Europe and Islam. In later generations, Europe grew too strong to overcome, and many centuries later Christians drove the Muslims from Iberia.
While Muslims raided France, an Arab navy, at the other end of Europe, tried to conquer strong-walled Constantinople. Perhaps the Muslims had a plan to conquer all of Europe using pincer movements at the same time on the west (Iberia and France) and in the east. But that appears unlikely since by this time there were several Muslim rulers, and they didn’t always work together. The Arab ships blockaded Constantinople for five years with no success, paused two generations, then attacked again. But the ancient city didn’t fall. Once again it proved to be the bulwark Constantine had wanted when he chose it as his capital four hundred years before. Islam’s armies, blocked in Europe in both west and east, never conquered Europe as they had the Middle East, North Africa, and a giant chunk of Asia.
The day of rapid Muslim victories had passed, but at last Islam had joined Buddhism and Christianity as one of the world’s far-flung religions. Today more than a billion people follow the religion that Muhammad long ago revealed.
HOW OFTEN IT is said; how true it is. The founders of the major faiths were humble people in forgotten places. But it was they who asked the most important questions. They answered them so vividly that they reached the minds of every later generation.
Chapter 8
Europe prepares for its big role.
BACK WHEN ROME was at its peak, most of Europe was merely the northwest corner of the far-flung Roman Empire. And it was not the jewel in the emperor’s crown. Europe held little but forests, marshes, Roman forts, villages, and tribes of semicivilized hunters and cattle herders. No one would have guessed that these backwoodsmen would one day lead the world.
That leading role was still far off in A.D. 500, when it was clear that the western half of the Roman Empire had fallen apart. The next millennium, from 500 to 1500, is the period that Europeans of much later times would name the Middle Ages. The name implied that those thousand years were just a dreary slog between Rome’s golden age and theirs.
The Middle Ages were more than just a long and dismal trek. However, this is true: life in the first half of the millennium, that is, from about 500 down to about 1000, was often violent and wretched. Historians sometimes call that half millennium the Dark Ages. It’s true that even then some kings and emperors tried to maintain order. The greatest of these men was Charlemagne (or Charles the Great), a portly, high-minded warrior-king who conquered much of western and central Europe just before and after 800. He liked to think that he had reassembled what Rome had earlier built, and men of later centuries called his lands the Holy Roman Empire. With many ups and downs his work would last a thousand years in central Europe.
Europe as the Middle Ages Ended
By and large, however, in the Dark Ages any man who owned a fortress and commanded a troop of horsemen ruled the land around him. We know of one such man who owned a two-floor, two-room wooden fort. In the first-floor room he stored his food and weapons, and on the second floor he, his family, his servants, and probably his horsemen ate and slept in just one room. Such a “lord” might shield the nearby folk from robbers and invaders; more likely he would grab their land.
Churchmen at a meeting in France in 909 groaned that “every man does what seems good in his eyes, despising laws human and divine…. Men devour one another like the fishes in the sea.” Many Europeans lost their freedom and became serfs, living miserably in hamlets, forbidden by their lords to leave. A genealogy of a family of French serfs that was prepared for a trial suggests the violence of these times. It ends with “Nive, who had his throat cut by Vial, his lord.”
Order was not the only thing that vanished in the Dark Ages. In earlier times, the western branch of the Christian church, based in Rome, had brought ideals and learnin
g to the Roman Empire. Now, however, many of the bishops, and the abbots who ran monasteries, cared more for gold and grandeur than for souls or schools. Bishops were so involved in politics that they often fought in battles. When they did they carried maces instead of swords, because, as clerics, they were not allowed to spill blood but could freely shatter skulls.
Meanwhile, trade contracted, and the towns declined and shrank. In Rome itself, sheep grazed the grass in ancient forums where emperors and senators once had run an empire. Adding to these many woes, Vikings from northern Europe, Huns and Magyars from Asia, and Muslims from North Africa raided and plundered Europe and conquered chunks of it.
AFTER ABOUT 1000, however, life in Europe markedly improved. Kings, great landowners, and some of the towns began to drive the troublemakers out. A good example is a king of France, Louis VI, who was widely known as Louis the Fat, although he may have preferred his other nickname, Wide Awake. Louis spent a good part of his reign patrolling France, which was then a little princedom surrounding Paris, as if he were a policeman on his beat. His biggest enemy was a robber baron, Thomas of Marle, who made a career of his hatred for the Church, and towns, and kings, and used to hang up captives by their testicles. It took King Louis many years to level Thomas’s castles and finally to catch him when he was mortally wounded.
In England, the story was different. At the end of the Dark Ages, English kings were sometimes even weaker than their counterparts in France. They could barely influence the wealthy lords with private armies, or make the ordinary Englishman obey the law. But all that changed in 1066, when William, duke of Normandy (in northwest France), took a gamble. With a small army, William “the Bastard” sailed across the English Channel, won a bloody battle on the southern coast of England, and proceeded to master all the country.
Now he was no longer William the Bastard, thank you, but William the Conqueror. His victory was so total that he could dominate the English ruling class and shape the country as he wished. English kings from that time onward wielded far more power than rulers in the rest of Europe. They changed the legal system and collected most of the taxes they wanted. They took pains to have an honest coinage. A chronicle tells us that William’s son, Henry I, “bade that all the mint-men [counterfeiters]…should lose each of them the right hand, and their testicles beneath.”
While the monarchies grew stronger, the Catholic Church revived. Its leaders once again promoted learning, raised up soaring churches, and pled with Europeans not to slaughter one another. Popes demanded that even kings obey them, haughtily declaring that “the Roman church has never erred; nor will it err to all eternity.” They also dreamed of sending Christian armies to recover the Holy Land from the Muslim Turks.
Peddlers once again trudged Europe’s rough dirt roads — people called them “dusty feet” — and traders opened shops in little market towns. Among the peddlers was a Scot named Godric. Probably a younger son of peasants, who had left the farm because there wasn’t any land for him, at first Godric made a wretched living searching on the North Sea shore for wreckage thrown up by the waves. In about the year 1100 he found a windfall, goods that had washed up from a shipwreck. He sold them and became a peddler, toting pans and cloth and needles on his back. Later he joined a band of merchants, hauling goods from port to port in a rented ship until he made a fortune. Still later Godric heard the call of God and became a hermit.
As prosperity increased (by inches), merchants in the southern cities such as Genoa, Marseilles, and Venice (see map, page 128) dealt in Asian delicacies that wealthy Europeans paid a lot for. These included pepper, cloves, and sugar; frankincense and myrrh; and sun-dried figs and raisins. They also brought in shop-made goods, among them paper and perfume and costly kinds of cloth that European weavers later on would imitate. These included “damask from Damascus,…muslins from Mosul and gauzes from Gaza.”1
1Henri Pirenne, Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe (n.d.), 145.
We must not forget the legs that Europe stood on. In the Middle Ages nine Europeans out of ten worked the land and made life possible for the one who didn’t. And yet most medieval writers rarely noticed peasants except to ridicule them. “The devil,” they would joke, “didn’t want the clods in Hell because they smelled too bad.” When English peasants rebelled in 1381 against their landlords and the royal tax collectors, they complained, “We are made men in the likeness of Christ, but you treat us like savage beasts.” However, after roughly 1250 serfdom slowly disappeared. Even then the peasants’ lives were hard, but at least they now were free.
THE EUROPE SKETCHED above, still poor and primitive, was the Europe that waged the Crusades, a string of wars against the Muslims in the eastern Mediterranean.
In 1095 Pope Urban II journeyed to a Church meeting in France and urged that Europeans wage a holy war against the Seljuk Turks. They were Muslims and they now held Palestine, which was a Holy Land to Muslims as well as Jews and Christians. It looked as if the Turks might also overcome the Christians in the remnant of the eastern half of the Roman Empire that lay between Europe and Palestine.
“Oh, how shameful,” cried Urban, “if a people so despised, degenerate, and enslaved by demons [he meant the Turks] should thus overcome a people [Christians] favored with the trust of almighty God, and shining in the name of Christ! Oh, how many evils will be imputed to you by the Lord Himself if you do not help those who, like you, profess Christianity!…Now, let those who until recently lived as plunderers be soldiers in Christ; now, let those who once fought their brothers and relations rightly fight barbarians; now, let those who recently were hired for a few pieces of silver win their eternal reward!”
“It is the will of God!” his hearers roared.
Almost immediately, a fiery Frenchman known as Peter the Hermit, barefoot and unkempt but a hypnotizing speaker, raised a mob of fervent French and German peasants. This wild and holy army swarmed from western Germany through central Europe like a plague of locusts, stealing food and burning houses. A remnant of them got to Asia Minor, where the Turks destroyed them.
After Peter’s tragicomedy, Europeans waged more orderly crusades. (But of their eight crusades we shall sketch only the first four.) On the first one, wealthy noblemen led corps of horsemen, wearing armor made of ringlets sewn on leather coats. In Palestine they conquered several little kingdoms, and in 1099 they stormed Jerusalem. “And if you desire to know what was done with the enemy who were found there,” they wrote the pope, “know that in Solomon’s Porch and in his Temple our men rode in the blood of the Saracens [Turks] up to the knees of their horses.”
Later, when it looked as if the Turks and other Muslims might retake the Holy Land, a king of France and a Holy Roman (that is, central European) Emperor led a second crusade. Many of their men were killed en route, however, and the monarchs squabbled with each other. Their siege of Damascus, north of Jerusalem, was a failure, and a Turkish ruler soon retook the Holy Land. Almost fifty years later, therefore, the kings of France and England and the Holy Roman Emperor all brought armies on a third crusade. The results were trivial.
The fourth crusade produced a stunning outcome. Venetian merchants who transported the crusaders on their ships (for a price) managed to detour this holy war. In 1204 the crusaders shocked all Europe when they conquered not Jerusalem but wealthy, Christian Constantinople. (Daring troops had stormed across the up-till-then impregnable wall.) They ruled the city and the land around it for a generation, till a local army won them back.
The other four crusades were small and even less important. All in all, crusades were just a foolish, costly failure. They make the point that Europeans weren’t yet capable of dominating others, especially a fighting people like the Turks. But they also show a culture that was greedy, bold, and sure that God was on its side. One day such a people might attempt to dominate the world.
THREE ITALIANS HAD a great adventure that would help to introduce the Europeans to the lands that lay beyond their corner of th
e earth. It began when brothers Niccolò and Maffeo Polo, merchants of Venice, rode on horseback into southern Russia. They planned to sell some jewels to the region’s Mongol ruler. (This was in the heyday of the Mongols.) When they learned that a local war was blocking their return route to the Black Sea, they journeyed 1,500 miles southeast to the oasis town of Bukhara, in what is now Uzbekistan. They were now well inside Asia.
In Bukhara they met a Mongol who invited them to join his caravan, which was headed to China. So they rode 3,000 miles to the east, around or over the lofty Pamir Mountains and along the edges of the largest deserts in the world, until they reached Peking. Few Europeans had ever been there. Kublai, Great Khan of China and the grandson of Genghis Khan, received them well. He suggested that they return to Europe and come back again to China with a hundred learned men.
The Polos did go home, and then, in 1271, set out again for China. Instead of the one hundred men that Kublai had asked for they brought along a mere two priests, and even these took fright and soon went home. They also brought along young Marco Polo, Niccolò’s twenty-year-old son. After they arrived in China, the Polo brothers no doubt did some trading. But Marco caught the khan’s attention, and he actually entered the service of the Mongols. He spent sixteen or seventeen years traveling back and forth across the country gathering information for the khan. But finally the Polos left for home, this time traveling by sea. En route they stopped in Persia to deliver a seventeen-year-old Mongol princess to the prince she was to marry. After they had entered what today is Turkey robbers seized nearly all their goods.
The Human Story Page 14