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HE MOMENTOUS EVENTS OF EIGHTH-CENTURY EUROPE WERE

first set in train by the death of Muhammad, the Prophet who bore the Revelation of submission to God that is

Islam. The story of Muhammad's transformation, from ordinary citizen of Mecca to charismatic military leader and radical founder of a religious and civil order, played itself out in a cor- ner of our ancestral world about which we know precious little. The Arabs of the steppes and deserts of the Arabian peninsula were more or less settled in the oases that provided what scant water there was to be had. Some few were traders, serving as connections between one settlement and another. The most powerful were the nomads, the Bedouin. The desert culture of these peoples-who also had historic connections with the adjacent cultures of the Fertile Crescent-was itself strongly marked by two features that gave distinctive shape to the religion

18 ffi THE oRNAMENT oF THE woRLD

that Muhammad's revelations brought into existence. On the one

hand, the pagan and idol-worshiping religions of the desert were the target for this new and utterly uncompromising monothe- ism, which begins with the starkest possible declaration on the matter: "There is no god but God."* On the other hand, not only

conserved but fully appropriated from the culture whose ritual center was Mecca was the loving cultivation-some would say adoration-of language, and of poetry as the best that men did with the gift of language. Muhammad's revelation, preserved in the Quran, embraced the poetry-besotted universe of his ances-

tors and contemporaries, and thus ensured the survival of the pre-Islamic poetic universe, with its many blatant contradictions of what would become normative lslamic belief.

The vexed question at the heart of the story we are follow-

ing, the one that will take us to Europe's remarkable transforma- tions in the medieval period, lies not in Muhammads life but in his death. (The lslamic calendar hinges neither on Muhammad's

birth nor on his death, but on the turning point in the story, in 622,when Muhammad and his followers moved from Mecca to

Medina, a journey known as the hijra, or hegira.) Muhammad had died in Medina in 632 without an obvious successor. He had left behind, first and foremost, a powerful revelation, a combina- tion of tradition and revolution. Islam was nothing less than the return to the pristine monotheism of Abraham-abandoned or misunderstood by Jews and Christians alike, the revelations as-

serted, and unknown altogether to the benighted pagans of the desert. All this came forth not in Muhammad's own words but through his transmission of the direct language of God, his

nOne of the inappropriate and alienating ways we speak about lslam in English is to use the Arabic word Allah, God, as if it were a proper name, creating the false impression- ironlc and horrifying for a Muslim-that this is some different god. i will invariably use the word "God" for the God of the three monotheistic religions, whose different languages

use, of course, different words for the same Being.

uS 19

" ltt'citation"-1hg word Quran means "recitation"-of what (,otl was revealing and dictating to him.

Alongside that relatively straightforward revelation, how- ,'vcr, and inextricably intertwined with the essentially spiritual rt'orientation he urged, Muhammad had also created a commu- I rrity with distinctive social-civil-moral values, one that was al-

Jrr'ucly a military and political empire in the making. But there w('re no clear guidelines for how that empire should be orga- rrizcd or ruled, and Muhammad's death left an inevitable vac- rrtrrn. No question in Islam is more flundamental and shaping tlrrrn this one, a source of political instability and violent dispute llour the beginning, as it remains to this day. Who could, after rrll, succeed a prophet who was also a dominant statesman? In rlrat highly contested succession lie the origins of many of the ruajor shapes and terms of lslam that are mostly unknown or

lruzzling to non-Muslims: Shiites and Sunnis, caliphs and emirs, [)rnayyads and Abbasids, all of these crucial internal divisions. ()ne of the earliest chapters of this struggle within Islam for le- gitimate authority was the one that transpired in750, the bloody nrassacre of the Umayyad royal family that led to the foundation o[ a rival Islamic polity in southern Europe, and the origins of that story lie in the moment directly following the Prophet's rlcath, over a century before.

The simplified version of the succession to the Prophet is that the initial four caliphs-from the Arabichhalifa, or "suc- s's55s1"-y7ere chosen from among Muhammad's contempo- raries, from the community of his companions and close rela- tives. The last of this foursome (called the Rightly Guided by many Muslims) was Ali, a cousin of Muhammad who was mar- ried to the Prophet's daughter Fatima. But AIi ruled for a mere five years before his caliphate came to a bloody end with his as- sassination in 661. This was barely thirty years after the Prophet's death, yet this fateful event began a new act in the drama of the ever-expanding Islamic empire. The Umalyads,

,,() f llr ()RNAMENT oF THE woRLD

llrl rtcw tlyrr;rsty tlrat came to power, were both Arabs and lv1rr.,lrnr.,, rrrrtl thcy symbolized the original fusion of a culture- ;urrl t'spct iirlly a language-with a revelation, a fusion that was llrt' vt'r'y soul of a new religion and civilization. But they moved tlrcil t'apital from the provincial and dangerously factional Meclina to the more open and friendly spaces of Damascus, and in coming out of the isolation of the Arabian desert and making Syria over into the new homeland, and in the conversions of people far removed from Mecca and Medina, the Umalyads, Islam forged a new cukure that added generously to the Arab foundation. Transplanting the heart of the empire out of the Arabian peninsula and into Syria, which had its own mixed cul- tural legacy, was the first significant step in creating the ill- understood, crucial distinction between things Arab and things Islamic, a distinction that is particularly relevant to our story.

The Umayyads presided over rhis expansive period from their central and accessible caliphal seat in Damascus, a cosmo- politan and venerable city, in its previous lives Aramaean, Greek, Roman, and, most recently, Christian. There and elsewhere they began building new defining monuments in places where the re- mains of other cultures were still visible. The Great Mosque of Damascus was not built out of blank clay but with the bits and pieces of a Roman temple and a Christian church. The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem was built on rhe ruins of the Temple Mount and around the natural rock where Abraham's sacrifice of his son was mercifully rejected by Abraham's God. The building was thus erected by the Uma11'ads as a monumental version of the Quranic understanding rhat this is the One God, and that the Muslims are also, and now preeminently, among the Children of Abraham.

The borders of the Islamic empire continued to spread, and by 7LI, armies of recently converted Berbers, led by Umayyads from Syria, moved into Europe. Within and around the Mediterranean basin, from the Taurus Mountains in the north-

)RY oF A FrRST-RATE PLAcE tr 2r

cast (the border with Anatolia) to the Pyrenees in lhe northwest (the border with Gaul), the new empire filled almost exactly the bed left by the old Roman empire: a map of the Mediterranean territories of the nascent Islamic empire- the Umalyad caliphate-in the seventh and eighth centuries corresponds re- markably to the Mediterranean center of a map of the Roman world in the second century In our casual acceptance of the no- tion that there is some critical or intrinsic division between Africa and Europe, we are likely to neglect just how central this southern shore of the Roman world was. But if we reexamine the stretch of North African coastline as it was plotted out geopolit- ically in the second- or third-century Roman world, and then in the eighth, we can see the relative inconsequence of small stretches of water such as the Strait of Gibraltar and the baylike line of blue between Carthage and Sicily, as well as the obvious underlying unities and orders.

The Islamic transflormation began to remake the entire an- cient Near East, including Persia and reaching as far, akeady at the time of the Umayyads, as northwestern India. The virtue of this Arab-Islamic civilization (in this as in other things not so unlike the Roman) lay precisely in its being able to assimilate and even revive the rich gifts of earlier and indigenous cultures, some crumbling, others crumbled, even as it was itself being crafted. The range of cultural yearning and osmosis of the lslamic empire in this expansive moment was as great as its ter- ritorial ambitions: from the Roman spolia that would appear as the distinctive capitals on the columns of countless mosques to the Persian stories that would be known as 7-he Thousand and One (or Arabian) Nights, from the corpus of translated Greek philosophical texts to the spices and silks of the farthest East. Out of their acquisitive confrontation with a universe of lan- guages, cultures, and people, the Umayyads, who had come pris-

tine out of the Arabian desert, defined their version of Islam as one that loved its dialogues with other traditions. This was a

# "rHE oRNAMENT oF THE woRLD A BRrEF HrsroRy oF A FrRsr-RATE pLAcE ff

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(@732) Key battles and year - 2 Northem limit of- - / Cordoban caliphate. ca. 1000

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llrr. ttrrrllyy6ds themselves did not survive to see the pat_ r,,r (,1 Arl)wth and acculturation they had established come to Irrrrriorr, ar least not in their adopted Syrian home. This change rrl lcadership in the Islamic world is the beginning of our narra_ tive of medieval European culture. The Abbasids, who overthrew the Umayyads in Damascus in 750, had different claims to caliphal legitimacy; indeed, they claimed somerhing resembling direct descent from the Prophet, by way of the prophet's uncle Abbas, whose name became their own. But, as with other ruling groups before and since, establishing their own authority seemed to require eliminating rival, and especially previous, claimants, which is why they massacred the Umap'ads at their family estate in Rusafa and abandoned Damascus. The capital of the Abbasid Islamic empire was moved away from the Mediterranean basin to Iraq, which had been rhe center of the Abbasids, support and armies. Baghdad, the circular "City of peace,', resembling noth- ing so much as a fortress, was made the new capital, and the fa_ miliar setting of many of The Arabian Nights. The sole survivor of the massacre at Rusafa, Abd al-Rahman, went west and be- came the first of the tJmayyads in a place we too often relegate to being a "corner" of Europe but which became Europe's verita- ble center for centuries thereafter.

4"

The lberian Peninsula, much like the rest of post-Roman Europe in the eighth century, was a cukurally and materially dreary place. Rome had governed there for nearly six hundred years, be- ginning about 200 n.c.r., when it followed in a long line of Mediterranean settlers and cultures-phoenicians, Carthagin- ians, and Greeks. During the years of both republic and empire, Hispania flourished from the material and cultural benefits of the

A BRrEF HrsroRy oF A FrRsr-RATE pLAcE # 25

Romans and sent native sons to the centers of power and into the annals of Latin letters. But that became a distant memory-or, rather, something like no memory at all-forgotten during the Iong period that in European history is most paradigmatically the age of "barbarians." The cataclysmic upheavals, the pan- European migrations of the Germanic tribes, in the third and fourth centuries c.r., led to the decline and, if not the fall of the Roman empire, at least the loss of both the civil order and the long-term continuity from classical Greece that constituted the heart of our cultural heritage. Rome had replaced Greece in part

by self-consciously absorbing Greek culture and history and by building its own civilization on the foundations of its ennobling predecessor, with whom it had a naturally rivalrous relationship.

The collapse of Rome's northern and eastern frontiers and the assumption of power by various Germanic tribes ruptured Europe's connection with its own cultural past, an event that would shape the West's consciousness of itself. Among the tribes that dismantled and then resettled what had once been the Roman empire, the Visigoths played a notorious role. This tribe, infamous for the sack of Rome in 410, eventually ended as the overlords of the former province of Hispania, although not with- out centuries of destructive battling over the territory with the Vandals and then among themselves. As elsewhere among the ruins of the Roman empire, and among the mobile Germanic tribes, Christianity was rather imperfectly adopted, from the per- spective of the Catholic ("Universal") Church. Not until 589 did the Visigoths join the Roman Church, disavowing their own de- viant version of Christianity. Although there were important Church seats in Visigothic Hispania, Toledo notable among them, paganism was far from unknown throughout the country- side, where the once Romanized rural population had little to do with either Visigoths or Christianity, and where theJewish com- munities that had arrived with the Romans lived in nearly en- slaved squalor.

26 ff rHE oRNAMENT oF rHE woRLD

The bright lights during the long twilight that had begun in the fifth cenrury were few and far between, and a lonely figure like Isidore of Seville stood out conspicuously: a notable church- man, he understood the extent to which some sort of Christian order had to fill the terrible vacuum left by the collapse of Roman civil institutions. His most revealing and influential po_ litical work, In praise of Spain, was an attempt to bring the rul_ ing visigoths inro the fold of the curtural conrinuum that they had ruptured by conceiving their history as a continuation of the Romans'own. Much more famous is Isidore,s still quite readable masterpiece, the Etymologies, an unrivaled intellectual effort during those centuries to preserve and transmit the tattered re- mains of the knowledge of the ancient world to the still uncer_ tain future. Despite Isidore,s brave attempts to make the Visigoths out to be a regime worthy of the Roman succession, they were not remotely up to it. As a result there was very little center to hold when, shortly after the turn of the eighth century the next wave of conqueror-immigrants came knocking force- fully on rhe door.

Like the Romans long before and the Germanic tribes more recently, the Muslims were seduced by the fat and,nearly round peninsula that hangs at the western end of the Mediterranean. Hispania was ripe for the picking, since the Visigothic kingdom that the newly minted Muslims from North Africa coveted, and then rather easily overran and settled, was all the things one might expect from hundreds of years of civil discontinuity: po_ litically unstable, religiously and ethnically fragmented, cultur_ ally debilitated. Even the Christian myrhology surrounding the events of 71I, stories elaborated many centuries later to tell how the old Christian Spain had been losr ro rhe Muslims, hinged on the utter political disarray, moral corruption, and decadence of the last of the Visigothic kings. By the time Abd al_Rahman ar_ rived, less than fifty years after the first Muslim armies had ven- tured across the Strait of Gibraltar, nearly all the formerly

A BRIEF HrsroRy oF A FlRsr-RATE pLACE ffi 27

Visigothic territories as far north as Narbonne, in Aquitaine, had

bcen taken over by Muslims. When the Umalyad prince sur-

veyed this place where he was bound to live out his life in polit-

ical exile, he must have known that there would be no returning

to his native land. This land where he had ended up would be

only what he managed to make of it. '/et he could feel sanguine

that it had nowhere to go but up, and that he might well make its barren and ruined landscape thrive and bear new fruit.

&

Over the course of the subsequent three hundred years until roughly the turn of the first millennium as it was calculated in the Christian calendar, the sort of political order and cultural

flourishing that had once graced Roman Hispania returned to

the peninsula. The Muslims never took and held the entire peninsula, however, and Christian outposts clung to the moun-

tainous regions of the northwest Atlantic coast and the Pyrenees.

Yet although the scattered Christian settlements there led to oc-

casional skirmishing along its frontiers, the political history of

the Cordoban state is amazingly even. Its very stability might

well make it boring to anyone other than an enthusiast: one emir

ruling for decades after the next, one addition to the Great Mosque of Cordoba after the next, one damned thing after an- other, as someone once wittily defined history itself. But within the stability of the long reigns and orderly successions of Abd al-

Rahman's sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons, other kinds of

revolutions occurred. There was a vast economic revival: the

population increased, not just in the invigorated and ever more cosmopolitan cities, but even in the once decimated countryside,

where the introduction of new crops and new techniques, in- cluding irrigation, made agriculture a prosperous concern; and

the pan-Mediterranean trade and travel routes that had helped

maintain Roman prosperity, and which were vital for cultural contacts and continuities, were reconfigured and expanded.

28 ff r'HE oRNAMENT oF THE woRLD

Al-Andalus fattened and bloomed with a distinctive iden- tity. The original armies, and the settlers they became or brought with them, had been relatively few compared with the penin- sula's population at the time. The newcomers, with their new languages, new customs, and new religion, constituted perhaps one percent of the overall population in the first generation of conquest and settlement. Like Abd al-Rahman, they were already an ethnic mix, part Arab and mostly Berber. Within a few gener- ations, a vigorous rate of conversion to Islam from among the great variety of older ethnic groups, and from the Christian and pagan populations, rnade the Andalusian Muslim community not only vastly larger, but one of thoroughly intermarried and in- termixed ethnic and cultural origins. Whereas the Visigoths, dis_ tinguished primarily by their ethnicity, had remained a minority of outsiders during their several hundred years of dominance of Hispania, the Muslims were members of several different ethnic groups. As with the Christians before them, the Muslims, dis_ tinctive power and authority resided in a faith to which conver- sion was not only possible but desirable and encouraged, prag- matically coerced by the range of civil advantages to any Muslim, whether he had converted the day before or descended from the most prestigious Bedouin tribe, the euraysh of the prophet him_ self. And convert the population did, in droves.

The convergence of mixed ethnicity and a religion of converts meant that the ancestors of a Muslim from Cordoba in the year 900 (let alone another two hundred or four hundred years later) were as likely to be Hispano-Roman as Berber, or some measure of each, perhaps with smaller dollops of either Syrian-Arab or Visigothic, rhese latter two having always been the smaller but politically dominant groups. It was of course the height of prestige to be able ro claim, as many would over the years, that one was descended from the original small group of desert Arabs who had first trekked out of the Arabian penin- sula or from the Syrians who had led the earliest westward

=

A BRIEF HIsroRy oF A FIRST-RATE pLAcE ffi 29

cxpeditions. Arabness was the most aristocratic feature of ances-

t ry one could want, and Syrian-Arabness was the venerable pa-

tcrnal line of Andalusian culture, both literally and figuratively.

llut even the emirs, and then their children, the caliphs who were direct and linear descendants of Abd al-Rahman-himself half Berber and half Syrian-were nearly all children of once- Christian mothers from the north, and the pale skin and blue

cyes of these Umalyads were regularly remarked on by eastern

visitors.

By the same token, all that was Arab was not necessarily lslamic. The other foundation of Andalusian culture, the Arabic

language, spilled over the banks of its original religious riverbed

and roamed beyond the exclusively religious needs of the Muslim community. This was, after all, the esteemed and pow-

erful language of an empire, and was marked by its vital links to

the rest of civilization. As far as the eye could see, and beyond,

Arabic was the lingua franca of all save the barbarians-if not the native tongue, at least the pidgin of traders and travelers. Throughout most of the invigorated peninsula, Arabic was adopted as the ultimate in classiness and distinction by the com-

munities of the other two faiths. The new Islamic polity not only

allowed Jews and Christians to survive but, following Quranic mandate, by and large protected them, and both the Jewish and

Christian communities in al-Andalus became thoroughly Arabized within relatively few years of Abd al-Rahman's arrival in Cordoba. One of the most famous documents from this period

is the lament of Alvarus of Cordoba in the mid-ninth century de-

tailing the ways in which the young men of the Christian com-

munity couldn't so much as write a simple letter in Latin but wrote (or aspired to write) odes in classical Arabic to rival those

of the Muslims. Of course, one can see this adoption of Arabic by the

dhimmi-the Arabic word for the protected "Peoples of the Book," Jews and Christians, who share Abrahamic monotheism

I

!

30 ff rHE oRNAMENT oF rHE woRLD

and scripture-throughout the resr of the Islamic world. In principle, all Islamic polities were (and are) required by euranic injunction not to harm the dhimmi, to rolerate the christians andJews living in their midst. But beyond that fundamental pre_ scribed posture, al-Andalus was, from these beginnings, the site of memorable and distinctive interfaith relations. Here the Jewish community rose from the ashes of an abysmal existence under the Visigoths to rhe point that the emir who proclaimed

* fimself caliph in the tenrh cenrury had aJew as his [oreign min-

t /-{ster. Fruitful inrermarriage among the various cultures and the

S/quality of cultural relations with the dhimmi were viral aspecrs of Andalusian identity as it was cultivated over these first cen- turies. It was, in fact, part and parcel of the Umalyad particular_ ity vis-i-vis the resr of the Islamic world. ln 929, what had been understood or believed by many since 756 was said aloud: from every mosque in al-Andalus there was read the declaration that Abd al,Rahman III was rhe rrue Defender of the Faith, the legit- imate caliph of the whole Islamic world, and the religious leader of all Muslims.

This full-fledged declaration of sovereignty on rhe part of the Andalusians-involving a great deal more rhan political in- dependence, since it entailed the public declaration of legitimate stewardship of all Muslims, not just those of al-Andalus-re- vealed the fatal weaknesses of the Abbasid empire in this first half of the tenth century. No civilization anywhere had been more splendid during the previous two cenruries than t66 Abbasids'. One of the most tenable clich€s surrounding the his- tory of Islamic civilization is that this was the very zenith of its accomplishment and influence, these few hundred years follow- ing the moment when the Abbasids deposed the Umalyads and settled into their new home in Baghdad. The effects of this ad.- * venturous and energetic culture-which, among other things, undertook the project of translating the Greek philosophical cor- pus into Arabic nearly in its entirety-did reach from Baghdad

A BRIEF HrsroRy oF A FTRST-RATE PLAcE S 3I

to Cordoba, as well as to other places within its wide orbit'

l)espite their move inland, away from the old Roman sea to an

ancient spot on the Tigris near where it meets the Euphrates, the

Abbasids were the beneficent force of revival in the Mediterranean during these centuries, and quite directly respon-

sible for rhe return of both material prosperity and intellectual

vitality throughout that inland sea.

Chaos in the Abbasid capital had led directly to the decla-

ration of independence and superiority by the Andalusians, who

until then had been reasonably content to live with the half-

fi.ction that they were a mere province, no matter how luminous,

of the caliphate centered in Baghdad. ln 909, the center lost its

hold and the almost unthinkable happened: a breakaway group

of Shiites, who saw themselves as descendants of the murdered

AIi, the Prophet's son-in-law, succeeded in taking control of the

empire's western provinces. In Tunis-not so flar from al- Andalus-these pretenders, led by an imam who claimed direct

descent from Fatima, the Prophet's daughter and Ali's wife, pro-

claimed their breakaway Islamic state to be the legitimate caliphate. From the Andalusian perspective' it had been one thing for the quite reasonably independent Umayyads to pay lip

service to the authority of the far-off Abbasids. There had been

considerable profit all around from that comfortable arrange-

ment, and free and easy travel back and forth between the rival

cities of Cordoba and Baghdad had helped feed the Andalusians'

insatiable appetites for every latest fashion from the eastern me-

tropolis. But by the turn of the tenth century, Cordoba, which

from the outset had a distinct sense of its own legitimacy, scarcely imagined itself a provincial capital at all'

Unlike lraq, however, where the Abbasids lived, Tunis

was practically around the corner, and the Fatimids, as they

were called, thus represented a dangerous rival for the Andalusians. lt was quite another thing, then, when the Fatimids

proclaimed not just independence but rival authority, a rival

32 ffi rHE oRNAMENT oF rHE woRLD

claim to represent what an Islamic state was and should be. The Umalyad counterclaim, that the authentic leadership and very center of the Islamic world resided in Cordoba, was thus made very loudly and very publicly that day in 929 by the young Abd al-Rahman III, a fitting heir to his ancestor and namesake. Cordoba, and not just from the obviously prejudiced view of the Cordobans, was probably justified at that moment in believing it was the center of the known universe. But that public declara- tion, as satisfying as it may have been, helped trigger particularly hostile and rivalrous reactions, from both the Christian north and the Islamic south. Resentful rivalries would come to haunt the golden city on the Guadalquivir. But let us not go quite yet to the undoing of the great caliphal capital of Europe, not until we have lingered a bit in the short century of its deserved celebrity.

Cordoba, by the beginning of the tenth century was an aston- ishing place, and descriptions by both contemporaries and later historians suffer from the burden of cataloguing the wonders, much like the counting off of Don Juan's conquesrs by the dozens and hundreds: fi.rst the astounding wealth of the caliph himself and of his capital, then the nine hundred baths and tens of thousands of shops, then the hundreds or perhaps thousands of mosques, then the running water from aqueducts, and the paved and well-lit streers. . . The cultivated nun Hroswitha of Gandersheim was involved enough in the diplomatic and social circles of the court of Otto I that she wrote a glowing account of the Muslim city based on her conversations with one of the emissaries to Otto's courr sent by the caliph Abd al-Rahman in 955. "The brilliant ornamenr of the world shone in the west, a noble city newly known for the military prowess that its Hispanic colonizers had brought, Cordoba was its name and ir

4.

e

was wealthy and famous and known for its pleasures and re-

RY oF A FrRsr-RArE PLAcE ffi 33

..lrlcndent in all things, and especially for its seven streams of wisdom [the trivium and quadriviuml and as much for its con- stirnt victories."

But Cordoba was luminous not just by virtue of a necessar-

ily invidious comparison with those lands to the north, barely progressed, materially or culturally beyond where they had been in the eighth century. Renowned Arab chroniclers and historiog-

raphers were also responsible for Cordoba's image throughout the rest of the Islamic world-where running water and libraries were part of the familiar landscape-and they left a powerful vi- sion and memory of that city as "the highest of the high, the far-

thest of the far, the place of the standard." Not just Cordoba shone, of course, but the whole of al-Andalus over which its caliph presided. In the end, it would be al-Andalus's vast intel- lectual wealth, inseparable from its prosperity in the material realm, that made it the "ornament of the world."

The rich web of attitudes about culture, and the intellectual

opulence that it symbolized, is perhaps only suggested by the caliphal library of (by one count) some four hundred thousand

volumes, and this at a time when the largest library in Christian Europe probably held no more than four hundred manuscripts.

Cordoba's caliphal library was itself one of seventy libraries in a city that apparently so adored books that a report of the time in-

dicated that there were seventy copyists in the book market who

worked exclusively on copying Qurans. In one of the dozens of pages he devotes to Cordoba, the historian Edward Gibbon de-

scribes the book worship of the Islamic polity he so admired (and found incomparably superior to what he saw as the anti- book culture of medieval Christianity) using a somewhat differ-

ent measure: the catalogues alone of the Cordoba library ran to

forty-four volumes, and these contained the librarians' informa-

tion on some six hundred thousand volumes. Islam was indeed

a clerisy: its privileged elites were the religious lawyers who studied the sacred texts and the scribes and bureaucrats who

34 S rHE oRNAMENT oF THE woRLD

staffed the royal chanceries. But beyond that considerable seg- ment of the population, these libraries were the monuments of a culture that treasured the Word, built by rulers who had the re- sources to enshrine it. Many of the volumes they housed, it is safe to assume, were on subjects of little concern to visitors who were not Muslims or Arabophiles: works on religion and on lan- guage played a dominant role in the Islamic library. But there was a great deal more, and there were books that would have as- tonished any Christian visitor, with his necessarily vague knowl- edge of the classical world. The Andalusians, thanks ro their regular intercourse with Baghdad, which had made translation of the Greeks a prized project, also housed the libraries of crucial traditions long lost to those in the rest of the Latin West, and un- known to them still, in the tenth century. Hroswitha's inlormant about the marvels of Cordoba (including, centrally in her de- scription, the knowledge of the trivium and quadrivium) was, tellingly, not a Muslim but a Christian, and none orher than Racemundo, the bishop of Elvira, the metropolitan see of all of Andalus. Hroswitha's description of Cordoba also speaks to the sensation no doubt created by the Latin- and Arabic-speaking Christian who came from a place where they not only knew the long-forgotten Greeks but where the bishop was an esteemed member of the caliph's diplomatic corps.

Cordoba's libraries were a significant benchmark of overall social (not just schoiarly) well-being, since they represented a near-perfect crossroads of the material and the intellectual. The sort of libraries built in Cordoba-unseen and unimagined for hundreds of years amid the intellectual spolia of the Roman empire-ultimately depended on a vigorous trading economy throughout the Mediterranean. This in turn encouraged ener- getic technological innovation, so that at some fundamental level what allowed those libraries to exist, and on such a previously unimaginable scale, was a paper factory inJativa, a town near the prosperous coastal city of Valencia. Paper was dramatically

A BRIEF HrsroRy oF A FrRsr-RATE pLAcE # 35

t:heaper and thus more plentiful than old-fashioned parchment, which was still being used in less developed places. Just as es- sential to the social and cultural project embodied in those li- braries was a series of attitudes about learning of every sort, about the duty to transmit knowledge from one generation to an- other, and about the interplay between the very different modes o[ learning that were known to exist-modes that might con- tradict each other, as faith and reason did, and do now. These sat happily in those libraries, side by side, unafraid of the contra- dictions, first-rate.

In the eyes of the Christians who lived in the territories of Galicia and Asturias in the northwest, and in the uplands north of the Ebro River valley in the northeast, it was unambiguously the lberian Peninsula that had most successfully recovered, well before the turn of the millennium, from the economic and cul- tural depressions that had followed the full collapse of Rome. The glorious city of Cordoba, and the polity of al-Andalus of which it was the capital, had filled the black hole of cultural, ma- terial, and intellectual well-being in the West. Within the first century after the year 1000, all sorts of b1'ways would open up, and notice would start to reach the outer corners of the lands on its far northern outskirts about what life could be and what a culture could achieve. Intellectual as well as material traffic be- tween the hungry markets of the north and the prosperous mer- chants of the south would begin in earnest and eventually ex- pand everyone's horizons. But in the meantime, there sat fat, complacent, and conceited al-Andalus, sure of itself and its own superiority vis-d-vis not just the northern Christians but all other Muslims. After the Abbasid hiatus of nearly two hundred years, the Cordobans, the Andalusians, were unembarrassed to reclaim the Umalyads' rightful place on the center of the world's stage.

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36 ffi THE oRNAMENT oF THE woRLD

In some ways the caliphate of Cordoba was a victim of its own prosperity and its own successes, and what came with them. Despite every clich€, this story is far from that of a simple con, flict between infidels and believers. Provocative and damaging raids against Christian strongholds in the north had been under- taken during the late 900s by a notorious vizier named al- Mansur, who had become more powerful than the young and feeble caliph whose protector he was supposed to be. But at the turn of the millennium these raids and tauntings of the northern kingdoms were not the cause for the collapse of central caliphal power.

Bitter civil wars among the rival Muslim factions of al- Andalus began in earnest in 1009, and for the subsequent two decades they tore apart the "ornament of the world." Appalled contemporary observers rather poignantly called those self, destructive years the ftna, "the time of strife." A culture that not long before had been at the peak of its powers was being brought low not so much by barbarians at the gate as by all manner of barbarians within-within its own borders and within the House of Islam. On the one hand, internal arrogance and the ex- cesses that came from extraordinary wealth began to color the caliphate in the late tenth century. At the same time, the cock- sureness of Abd al-Rahman III in declaring the Andalusian caliphate had incited other pretenders to authority, and at pre- cisely the moment when other powerful Islamic polities, hostile to the idiosyncratic Umayyads on both ideological and political grounds, were on the rise in North Africa.

The violent destruction of Madinat al-Zahra, the Versailles of Cordoba, in 1009, just after the beginning of the civil wars, is as good a marker as any of the end of the political well-being of an Islamic polity in medieval Europe. That lavish palatine city on Cordoba's outskirts was one of the most fabled architectural and urbanistic achievements of the Islamic world. Although to this day the lost city is only partially excavated, what is now visible,

A BRrEF HrsroRy oF A FrRsr-RATE pLAcE tr 37

t'ombined with the written accounts of what there once was, re- vcals breathtaking levels of architectural sophistication. Madinat i-Zahra had been built in the early renrh cenrury by Abd al- l{ahman lII, and this architectural complex was part of the dec- laration of worthy rivalry to rhe Abbasids. But when this monu- rrrental Urnayyad site was sacked, less than a century later, it was rrot by the Christians with whom the caliphate had been sparring on its frontiers. Rather, the destruction was perpetrated by other Muslims, marauding and rampaging Berbers ferociously venting ;rll manner of resentments. These soldiers were part of the mer- cenary armies brought into al-Andalus by the last desperate rulers of the caliphate to help keep the peace. That devastation of 1009, not at all unlike the Goths' sack of Rome of 410 in its symbolic freight, was the sign of a civil society that had lost con- trol of itself and whose erstwhile order had been left to foreign irrmies. The ruins of the palaces and gardens of Madinat aI-Zahra became the touchstones in Andalusian memorv for human grandeur-and its ultimate fragility.

In part, too, the destruction of Madinat al-Zahra reveals the dramatic divisions among the various communities of Muslims that were part of the struggle to carve out both political and re- ligious legitimacy, and that had been visible a hundred years be- [ore, when the Andalusians had declared themselves the true caliphs. Particularly ferocious were the divisions between Berber Muslims from North Africa, traditionally far more conservarive, even fundamentalist, and the Andalusians. Many Andalusians were, of course, descendants of Berbers who had first settled the peninsula in the eighth century when there were already de, structive ideological and political rivalries between the Arab- Syrian leadership and the Berber hoi polloi. Bur in the end, their Andalusian identity had been decisively shaped during those subsequent 250 years as a quasi-mythical Umalyad polity in exile; and the citizens of al,Andalus, even rhose descended from the original Berber settlers, were in many ways at cross-purposes

38 ffi rHE oRNAMENT oF TAE woRLD

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with the Berbers across rhe Strair of Gibraltar. As a viable politi cal entity, al-Andalus ended under conditions not unlike those under which it began, as one more chapter in the bloody strug- gle within Islam for legitimate authority, the intense and often rancorous competition for the succession to Muhammad.

The full and official dissolution of the Cordoban caliphate came in 1031, slightly more than a century after its optimistic and triumphant proclamation. And although Madinat al-Zahra would never recover, a phoenix of sorts did rise from the ashes of the caliphate in the taifa, or party, kingdoms. In Arabic taiJa nleans "party" or "faction," and in this case it means a splinter party, a breakaway from the mainstream. In the aftermath of the lragmentation of the caliphate of Cordoba, individual cities and their hinterlands became independent or quasi-independent states and began years of struggle among themselves to acquire the prestige and authority that had once belonged to the now ru- ined Andalusian caliphal capital. In the early years there were some sixty states of differing sizes and differing political prove- nances. Some of these were dominated by tJmayyad loyalists, others by the old tribal groups who saw themselves as the rrue Arab aristocracy, others still by Berbers, or even disgruntled mil- itary adventurers. As time went by, incessant warfare among these rival cities winnowed the survivors down to a power- lul few.

A vital part of this cultural landscape in full bloom at this time was the Jewish community. As was the case with many other well-off Cordobans, whole sectors of the prosperous and well-educated Jewish populace left the ruined and dangerous lormer capital. Emigrating to newly formed taifas, manyJews re- sumed the influential roles they had enjoyed in Cordoba. The taifa of Granada, to take but one conspicuous example, recruited a gifted young man whose family had fled Cordoba and settled in nearby Malaga. Samuel ibn Nagrila succeeded, as his employ- crs had hoped, in bringing his Umayyad-Cordoban refinements

40 # THE oRNAMENT oF THE woRLD

to this backwater, and he quickly became vizier, or prime minis-

ter. At the same time, he became the first nagid, or head, of the

Jewish community-and, as one of the most accomplished of the new Hebrew poets of the Golden Age, is remembered by his

Jewish honorific, Samuel the Nagid.

Precisely at this point also, the northern Christian territo- ries began to consolidate as unified and increasingly powerful kingdoms. Expanding slowly southward throughout the eleventh century the Christian-controlled cities were in the same

general melee of competition for territories and widespread leadership and cultural prowess as the Muslim cities. The Cid, an ambitious military adventurer (who would enjoy a long ca- reer in Spanish myth and legend), lived and led his various armies into all manner of battles at this time, when religious ri-

valry was more an ideological conceit than any kind of deter- mining reality. Rodrigo Diaz, known by his Arabic epithet-El Cid comes directly from al-sayyid, meaning "the lord" in Arabic-had military successes chronicled admiringly by Muslim as well as Christian writers, just as he fought in the ser- vice of Muslim and Christian monarchs alike. Likewise, Muslim

cities at times paid tribute to more powerful Christian neighbors, just as Christian kings at times found their most loyal allies among Muslim princes or emirs.

The rivalry for ascendancy among the various taifa cities of the peninsula, militarily and socially destructive as it was, is often likened to the jockeying for power, coupled with cultural exuberance, that was so distinctive among the Italian city-states

during the Renaissance. Many of the most characteristic and in- fluential Andalusian cultural forms came into their own in one or another of the many independent city-states that dotted the landscape, and many of them came as part and parcel of the rampant mixtures of people produced by the splintering of the caliphate. During the eleventh century the fallout from the crash of a centralized and powerful state meant the constant

)RY oF A FrRSr-RArE pLAcE ffi 4r

rt'shifting of political borders and considerable resettlement of rrurny who had once been subjects of the Cordoban caliph. Mtrslims now found themselves living in Christian cities-these wcre the Mudejars, as their Christian sovereigns called them- rrlong with Arabized Jews and yet another hybrid group, rhe Mozarabs. The Mozarabs were those Arabized Christians who, rluring the three hundred years they had lived in an Islamic polity, had become a community dramatically distinct from their t oreligionists in the rest of the Latin West. There was movement in the other direction as well, of course, and Romance-speaking (.hristians from the north were also suddenly traveling in and 1)Llt sf-sygn settling In-41s4s that were perhaps just beyond their own borders geographically. These new and previously un- seen places may as well have been different planets culturally. llut only for a short while: the pell-mell fraternizations soon cnough produced familiarity with the sounds, smells, and colors o[ every kind of neighbor.

The commingling of languages, religions, and styles of every sort-food, clothes, songs, buildings-took place not only within the lberian Peninsula, although certainly most vig- orously there, but with increasing intensity far beyond the Pyrenees. The much more promiscuous and transformative in- teraction between Andalusian culture and the rest of Europe still lay ahead, in the twelfth and thirteenrh cenruries, although its beginnings became obvious during the last half of the eleventh century and were enhanced by the mobile culture of the vigor, ously competitive city-states, Muslim and Christian alike. But another crucial turning point reshaped the cultural and political iandscapes of Europe in the first century after the millennium: the expansion and invasions of the Normans.

The outcome of the encounter between the Norman Christians and the Muslims of Sicily-Sicily, too, had been an Islamic polity since the eighth-century expansion that had cre, ated al-Andalus-is in its own way a parable for the complex

42 ffi THE oRNAMENT oF rHE woRLD

shift of power and the cultural absorption of the times. ln 1072, after thirty-four years of effort, Palermo, the capital of Islamic Sicily, fell to the invaders and became the center of the Norman

kingdom of Sicily. Yet over the course of the subsequent century

and a half, the Arabized Normans ended by becoming near-

captives of the culture they had conquered. This case speaks vol-

umes about the complicated and often paradoxical relationship

between politics, ideology, and military history on the one hand

and culture on the other. Though the Church had maintained a

hostile attitude toward Islam from the beginning-the entire Eastern patrimony was swept under Muslim sovereignty in the seventh and eighth centuries-it was never in a position to call for a taking-up of arms against that ideological enemy. But in 1095 at Clermont, in France, Pope Urban II summoned Western Christendom to a Crusade to win the Holy Land back from the

infidel Muslims; and from our perspective the times often seem

stamped principally by this act of aggressive religious intoler- ance. Yet, these were also the times during which some of the vast holdings of Cordoba's spectacular libraries came to be read,

translated, and in effect canonized as part of the Western tradi- tion, as often as not by men who were part of the hierarchy of the

same Church promoting the Crusades.

Within the Iberian Peninsula, the tumultuous period of the

independent Muslim cities of al-Andalus came to an end with an

event characteristic of the times. Alfonso VI of Castile, a politi- cally astute and highly ambitious Christian monarch and long-

time protector of the critically important Islamic taifa of Toledo,

consolidated his power and took overt and official control of that

ancient city in 1085. Victor over Christian and Muslim adver- saries alike in his bid for leadership over broad territories, Alfonso made Toledo his new capital. He also made it the heir apparent to some of the lost glories of Cordoba and al-Andalus.

Alfonso and his line of influential successors became the patrons

and proselytizers of much of Arabic culture, and of the vast

TE

A BRIEF HrsroRy oF A FIRsr-RATE pLAcE ffi 43

range of intellectual goods that were subsequently made accessi- ble to the Latin West. Toledo was made over as the European capital of translations and thus of intellectual, especially scien- tific and philosophical, excitemenr.

But to the south, Toledo's takeover by a powerful Christian rnonarch who was a real contender, not just another strongman of some minor city, provoked a historically fateful military reac- tion. Alfonso's defeated and dismayed rival for control over Toledo, the equally ambitious and accomplished Mutamid, based in Seville, asked for military help from rhe Almoravids, the fun- damentalist Muslim regime that had recently taken control of Marrakech and established the polity we know as Morocco. The Almoravids were Berber tribesmen who had been building a con, siderable empire in North Africa. These fanatics considered the Andalusian Muslims intolerably weak, with their diplomatic re- lations with Christian states, not to mention their promotion of Jews in virtually every corner of their government and society. But the somewhat deluded Mutamid of Seville cared little about their politics, and imagined he could bring them in to help him out militarily and then send them packing. The Almoravids thus arrived ostensibly as allies of the weak taifas and quickly suc- ceeded, in 1086, in defeating Alfonso VI. These would-be pro- tectors, however, stayed on as the new tyrants of al-Andalus.

By 1090, the Almoravids had fully annexed the taifa rem- nants of the venerable al-Andalus into their own dour and intol- erant kingdom. For the next 150 years, Andalusian Muslims would be governed by foreigners, first these same Almoravids, and later the Almohads, or "Unitarians," an even more fanatic group of North African Berber Muslims likewise strangers to al- Andalus and its ways. Thus did the Andalusians become often rambunctious colonial subjects in an always troublesome and in- comprehensible province. They had irretrievably lost their polit- ical freedom, but the story of Andalusian culture was far from over: although bloodied, the Andalusians were unbowed, and

44 ffi THE oRNAMENT oF THE woRLD

their culture remained their glory-viewed with suspicion, yet often coveted by all their neighbors, both north and south.

s The twelfth century in Europe opened with a series of ironic jux- tapositions and then ran with them. While Latin Europe began to reap the material and intellectual rewards of contact with Andalusian progressiveness, what had once been al-Andalus was

itself an increasingly repressive place. The Crusades, a term un- derstood to mean the religiously motivated warfare between Christians and Muslims, have come to symbolize the political history of that moment. But at the same time, destructive in- trareligious disputes within both the Christian and the Muslim communities were shaping broad social and cultural develop- ments at least as much. Perhaps the most transforming of these was the great rebellion of the new vernacular languages against Latin, which marks the beginning of the road leading, through many twists and turns, to Dante and Cervantes and Shakespeare

and all the others who would use the individual vernaculars of Europe instead of the older, unchanging, and universal language

of the Church and of the long-vanished Roman empire. This period is also the beginning of the end of hundreds of

years of open lslamic and Jewish participation in medieval European culture. The years of colonial status, from the Almoravids' 1090 annexation on, were unhappy ones for the Spanish Muslims. The Almoravid attempts to impose a consid- erably different view of Islamic society on the Andalusians pro- voked relentless civil unrest: in I109, not even twenty years after these newcomers had been invited in as allies, anti-Almoravid riots broke out in Cordoba following the public book-burning of a work by al-Ghazali, a legendary theologian whose humane approach to lslam, despite its orthodoxy, was too liberal for the fanatical Almoravids. Such violent disagreements about the na- ture of Islam were far from unique. Equally striking was the

)RY oF A FIRST-RATE pLAcE ffi 45

lcsistance against various Almoravid government attempts to control and even persecute the Sufis, mystics deemed far too Ircterodox by the Almoravids but much admired by the Andalusians.

The generally turbulent religious climate in al-Andalus tlrastically changed the composition of Muslim cities. A signifi- t'ant flight of the dhimmi, theJews and Christians who had been rr vital part of the vivid and productive cultural mix, now began. Itegrettable as all this was, still worse was to follow: an even rnore repressive Muslim Berber regime overthrew the Almor- avids in North Africa, and kept al-Andalus as its own colony. 'fhe Almohads' brand of antisecular and religiously intolerant lslam was at irreconcilable odds with many Andalusian tradi- tions, and they ultimately failed in their attempts to "reform" their colonized Muslim brethren. Nor were they able to achieve anything like the sort of ideologically based political unity they demanded among Muslims, a failure with grave political consequences.

This severe and often violent internal discord within the tattered remains of al-Andalus coincided with the power and in- fluence of Pope Innocent III, who ran roughshod over much of Europe during his years as pontiff, I I98 to 1216. Al-Andalus was only one of Innocent's many targets of crusade, both within and beyond Europe, and within and without Christianity Christian civil wars had been going full force throughout the twelfth cen- tury and into the beginning of the thirteenth; the Crusade against the so-called Albigensians, a starkly puritanical heresy, also decimated the social and political structures of the once flourishing courts of Provence, the same courts, with intimate ties to those of northern Spain and al-Andalus, where the trou- badours had wrought the first canonical secular literature of the modern Western tradition. Sung in defiance of the previously omnipotent Latin written tradition and often performed on a range of new instruments that challenged the traditional sounds

46 S rHE oRNAMENT oF Tr-rE woRLD

of religious music, their songs of impossible love flourished throughout the twelfth century as the cultural chic of the times. So it is yet another paradox that this first full flower of modernity-arriving, as it did, at the very height of the medieval period-should come to an end by the mid-thirteenth century with the destruction, during the Crusade against the Albigen- sians, of the ProvenEal courts that had supported and encour- aged these revivals of secular culture.

Once again, in a parallel to the events within al-Andalus that led to the destruction of the once vibrant Islamic society, the enemies here were as often within as without. With his grandiose visions of universal dominance over political enemies (Christian

heretics and Muslim infidels alike), lnnocent was a pope o[ un- rivaled political reach who provoked wide-ranging changes in Europe's cultural and ideological landscape. Innocent's iron fist was also directed at what seemed to him a motley crew indeed, the Christians of the various and sundry kingdoms south of the Pyrenees. Here was a collection of disunited and all too hetero- dox Christians so lackadaisical in their faith that they permitted

Jews to live indistinguishable from them in their midst, eventu- ally even ignoring the I2I5 decree of the Fourth Lateran Council, over which Innocent presided, that stipulated thatJews wear distinctive clothes or other external markers of difference. These were Christians who, most of the time, would just as soon fight each other as wage crusade against their Muslim enemies next door.

But one exceptional moment made all the difference. In l2I2 the disunited Spanish Christians took full advantage of the offers of northern European military help against the Almohads, and this led to the second crucial turning point in the history of al-Andalus, much as the first, in 1086, had been the outside mil- itary help sought by the then disunited Muslim city-states. A piv- otal military moment but also a rarity, the battle at Las Navas de Tolosa was about ideology as a fairly abstract thing, and one of

A BRrEF HlsroRy oF A FIRST-RATE pLAcE tr 47

tlrc lew real incidents of "Reconquest," fought with crosses and prrpal banners on one side and nothing but Muslims on the other. The resounding Christian victory was the clear beginning ol'the end; virtually nothing but further Muslim losses and re- tlcats followed this disasrrous Almohad defeat. Like dominoes, tlrc grand old cities fell to the Christians one by one: Cordoba in I 236, Valencia in 1238, and finally Seville, the lovely orange- tre e-filled city the Almohads had made their capital. Seville was taken in 1248by Ferdinand III of Castile, the first of many gen, t'rations of Castilian monarchs who would prefer Seville above :rll other cities. When Ferdinand died a few years later, his son Allonso-who would be called "the Learned" and be the great l)utron of translations and thus of the transfer of the Arabo- lslamic fortune into the treasury of Christendom-built for his llther a tomb to sit in the Great Mosque of Seville, which had lrcen reconsecrated as the splendid cathedral of the new (.astilian capital. Alflonso had the tomb inscribed, in the spirit of the age, in the three venerable languages of the realm-Arabic, Ilebrew, and Latin-as well as in the upstart Castilian that only poets and other revolutionaries were writing in just yet.

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Itut the world within which Ferdinand's tomb made sense, that lirst-rate world in which all those languages sat comfortably next to each other carved on the tomb of a Christian saint, was even- tually destroyed, along with the mosque that originally housed it, and inside which not only Ferdinand but his successors ;rrayed until well into the fifteenth cenruDl The fitful disman, tling of that universe, the hows and whys of the disappearance ol this first-rate European culture is really a different history lnrm the one that concerns this book, and it is a long and often trcacherous road that winds from Ferdinand III's Seville in 1248 to Ferdinand V's Granada rn 1492. Ferdinand III had, in effect, cleated Granada as the last Islamic polity on the Iberian

+8 ffi rHE oRNAMENT oF THE woRLD A BRrEF HrsroRy oF A FrRST-RATE pLAcE ff 49

I'eninsula: it had been the reward given to one Ibn Ahmar, of the Nasr family, in return for much-needed military assistance in the battle for Cordoba that the Castilian had waged against the Almohads in 1236. The Nasrids, the descendants of Ibn Ahmar, survived the lliad-llke 250-year siege that followed, not as Andalusians proper but rather as keepers of the memory of al- Andalus and, increasingly as the builders of its final sepulchral rnonument, called the Alhambra. On a spot already inlaid with layers of memories, the Alhambra ultimately became the setting for the highly charged scenes that set the stage for the true end of the Middle Ages in 1492: Muhammad XII, the last of the Nasrids, known as Boabdil, handed the keys of his family's royal house to the descendant of Ferdinand III and Alfonso the Learned, Queen Isabella of Castile, and her husband, Ferdinand of Aragon. Some recountings of that story say that the Catholic Kings were dressed in Moorish clothes for the occasion, and per- haps they were also dressed that way just a few months later, when they signed the decree expelling the Jews.