Drink (12 page)

Virgin wines were thought to improve with age. When praising one such spinster, still “preserved for the day she is pierced,” Abu Nuwas dwelt on the traditional Arab association of age with wisdom:

Finally, discrimination in the classical style was apparent in Islamic wine writing: Specific vintages were eulogized in the vivid language of a classical oenophile:

A pre-Islamic convention of
khamriyya
was the expression by the poet of a longing to die drinking, and this was the death rumored to have overtaken Abu Nuwas. Although he spent time in prison and in exile, Abu Nuwas was not just tolerated but accepted as a good Muslim during his life. He passed most of his years around the court of the caliphs in the new city of Baghdad (founded AD 762) and produced a number of panegyrics in praise of his rulers. These, combined with his habit of satirizing anyone who crossed him in perfect, memorable verse, probably saved him from execution. Moreover, his poetry is not devoid of repentance, and Islam is a forgiving religion to its adherents. According to legend, Abu Nuwas’s epitaph, which was embroidered on his shroud, was “My excuse, Lord, will be to admit that I have no excuse.”

In addition to contributing to the philosophy of drinking, the Islamic world introduced a practical innovation to the pastime that was to have a far greater impact than the concept that wine on earth was a sin. While Christian Europe trundled through the Dark Ages, Muslim scientists picked up where the Greeks had left off and made substantial contributions to medicine, physics, mathematics, astronomy, and chemistry. The process of distillation was among their many discoveries. While Aristotle had worked it out in principle and succeeded in turning wine into water, it was Muslims who perfected its practice and who managed to extract alcohol from wine. The pioneer was Jabir Ibn Hayyan (721-815), known as Geber
⁶
in the West, who is acknowledged to be the father of the science of chemistry. He established the principle of classifying substances by their properties and invented equipment and techniques for isolating them. His technical innovations included the alembic still, whose principles still govern the production of alcoholic spirits. Geber tried his still on various fluids, including wine, which he found released a flammable vapor that he described as “of little use but of great importance to science.” It is possible that the condensed vapor was put to good use by Abu Nuwas, who listed, among his other forms of liquid inspiration, a wine that “has the color of rainwater but is as hot inside the ribs as a burning firebrand.” Further research on the vapor was carried out by Al Razi (865-925), a Persian polymath who specialized in medicine. He described the process of distilling in his book
Al Asrar
(“The Secret”), and the isolation of a substance he called “al-koh’l of wine,” which translates literally as “mascara of wine”—koh’l was the powdered antimony Arab women used to blacken their eyelids. It was also slang for substances isolated by distillation, and it is in this sense—as the chemical soul of strong drinks—that it passed into use outside the Arabic-speaking world.

Muslim advances in science also contributed to mankind’s understanding of the effects of alcohol on the human frame. Al Zahrawi, Islam’s greatest surgeon (936-1013), despite working in a society where alcohol was prohibited, nonetheless had sufficient patients who were heavy users to identify its detrimental effects: It could be a cause of convulsions, apoplexy, dementia, partial and total paralysis, difficulties in articulation, gout, and “disturbances of the liver.” Notwithstanding such glum news, some scientific Muslims attempted to soften, or to qualify, the Koranic ban on drinking. Avicenna (980-1039), a Persian philosopher whose commentaries on Plato and Aristotle were the sources for the reintroduction of their thinking to western Europe, confessed to using wine as an aid to study: “When sleep overcame me or I became conscious of weakening, I would turn aside to drink a cup of wine, so that my strength would return to me.” He promoted Platonic views on alcohol and believed them to be as valid for Muslims as for Athenians: “To give wine to youths is like adding fire to a fire already prepared with matchwood. Young adults should take it in moderation. But elderly persons may take as much as they can tolerate.” The concept that old and responsible Muslims might enjoy unlimited access to wine was extended by Averroës (d. 1198), who attempted to reconcile Aristotle with Islam. Averroës claimed that the Koranic ban did not apply to him: “Wine is forbidden because it excites wickedness and quarrels; but I am preserved from those excesses by wisdom. I take it only to sharpen my wits.” By extension, any intelligent and reasonable Muslim should feel free to drink.

Such sentiments were shared by Omar Khayyam (d. 1122), the great Persian mathematician, astronomer, and poet. Renowned in his lifetime for his scientific work, Khayyam’s poetry, which he wrote in the
Rubaiyat,
or quatrain, form, is responsible for his posthumous fame. Much of it is in praise of wine and the pleasures of intoxication. His ethos, however, was very different from that of Abu Nuwas. He was not interested in portraying himself as a sinner or degenerate; indeed, he was entirely dismissive of faith. Drinking was the only truth:

Khayyam also ruled out the repentance Abu Nuwas had flirted with. Forget paradise and hell, heaven is here and now:

Finally, medical, rational, and poetical protests against the Koranic ban on alcohol were joined by theological objections. Islam had been riven by sectarianism since the death of its prophet, who had left no son and heir to guide his converts. Disputes as to who should succeed to the command of the faithful quickly resulted in the division of the Muslim world into Shias and Sunnis, the former of whom believed that spiritual authority devolved from the blood of the Prophet, in the shape of his daughter Fatima and her descendants, and that therefore only the fourth caliph, Ali, grandson of the Prophet, had been authentic, whereas the Sunnis held that the first three caliphs had been legitimate rulers. The once-united Arab lands fractured into smaller kingdoms, often at war with one another. In the midst of this turbulence, the Carmathian sect appeared. They were an offshoot of the Shiites and flourished between the ninth and eleventh centuries. They believed that spiritual leadership of the Islamic world should have gone to Ismail, the eldest son of the sixth iman, who had been passed over in the succession as a punishment for drinking wine. Since, in Carmathian eyes, Ismail could do no wrong, wine drinking could not be a sin, so they positively encouraged it. The Carmathians caused considerable disorder within Muslim domains, besieging Baghdad, sacking Mecca, and stealing the Kaaba. However, for reasons unknown, by AD 1050 they had melted away. The sacred stone was restored to the holy city, and wine to the list of sins.

At the same time as the ban on drinking was causing strife in the heartlands of Islam, it was denting its reputation abroad. In AD 988 Prince Vladimir of Kiev, whose kingdom formed the nucleus of modern Russia, decided that his subjects should be united under a single religion. He sent to the Jews, the Christians, and the Muslims, requesting details of their faiths. The Muslims told him that they believed in one God, were circumcised, ate no pork, drank no wine, and would enjoy the carnal embraces of over seventy women each in paradise. According to the
Russian Primary Chronicle,
“Vladimir listened to them, for he was fond of women and indulgence, regarding which he heard with pleasure. But circumcision and abstinence from pork and wine were disagreeable to him. ‘Drinking,’ said he ‘is the joy of the [Russians]. We cannot exist without that pleasure.’”

Vladimir chose Christianity, and Islam lost a potentially useful ally. The Dark Ages in Europe were over, and Europeans started to push Islam out of their continent. Battles raged across central and eastern Spain, and El Cid Campeador, astride his horse Babieca, put Muslims and their Christian allies to the sword from Barcelona to Valencia. In 1085, the Normans took Sicily, and with it the great still at the Medical School of Syracuse. Hitherto, the Christian world had been free of spirits. Thereafter, the secrets of their preparation spread gradually through Europe. Geber was translated into Latin by Robert of Chester in 1144. Al Razi was translated into the same language for Charles of Anjou in 1279. Although it took another century for spirits to escape the laboratories of alchemists and to reach to the public at large, the genie was out of the bottle.

7 BREWS FOR BREAKFAST

Christian Europe emerged from the Dark Ages as a heavy-drinking culture. Alcohol had the reputation of a saint. No medical prescription was complete without it, nor, indeed, was any meal. Mothers brewed ale for their children; alchemists used spirits in their search for the secrets of how to turn other substances into gold; priests held wine aloft in chalices and declared it to be the blood of Christ; and drunkenness, especially during the barbarian festivals that had been adopted by Mother Church, was regarded as a natural, indeed blameless, condition.

The difference between Christian and Islamic attitudes toward alcohol was a matter of mutual criticism when the two faiths collided in the course of the Crusades. Their official launch took place in AD 1095, at the Council of Clermont in France, when Pope Urban II called on all good Christians to venture forth against the
Saracens,
as those Muslims in present possession of the terrain where Christ had lived and died were known. Anyone who answered the call was offered a complete remission of all his sins and encouraged to distinguish himself by decorating his garments or shield with a cross. Hundreds of thousands responded, many of whom set off at once for the Holy Land, under the leadership of a hermit named Peter the Simple, and guided by a duck, a goose, and a goat. After massacring the Jews in various German cities, they themselves were slaughtered in Hungary and the survivors were finished off in Nicea. The First Crusade proper set off the following year and in 1099 achieved its objective with the capture of Jerusalem. There followed a further half dozen or so venturesover the following two hundred years, during which the Saracens gradually clawed back the Middle East from the infidel, culminating in 1291 with the fall of Acre and the withdrawal of the remaining Christians to Cyprus.

This prolonged contact enabled both sides to observe and remark on the drinking habits of the other. The crusaders were perceived by the merchants of the Levant who provisioned them to have prodigious, indeed unnatural, appetites for alcohol. Thirstiest of all were the knights who accompanied the English king, Richard the Lionheart, on the Third Crusade, whose suppliers “could scarce believe even what they saw to be true, that one people, and that small in number, consumed threefold the bread and a hundredfold the wine more than that whereon many nations of [Muslims] had been sustained.” On the other side of the coin, Muslim abstinence was considered to be proof of their fundamental immorality. John Mandeville, for instance, an English knight who traveled to the Holy Land in the thirteenth century, argued that the Koranic prohibition would inevitably lead to the collapse of Islam and confusion to its sober pagans, for “as holy writ saith, ET IN VIRTICEM IPSIUS INIQUITAS EJUS DESCEN-DET, that is for to say, ‘his wickedness shall turn and fall on his own head.’”

The cultural differences between crusader and foe were also explored in medieval literature. Alcohol had its own bibulous Romantic hero in the person of Huoun, Duke of Bordeaux, who marched against the Saracens equipped with a magic goblet he had been given by a dwarf named Oberon.
⁷
The goblet filled with excellent Bordeaux wine whenever a true Christian raised it to his lips but remained empty in the hands of Muslims. It accompanied Sir Huoun on many quests and may be seen as a device to introduce a substance the crusaders considered indispensable to a region where it was rare and bad. Many of them died of thirst in the deserts of the Holy Land, and those who survived brought the memory of it home with them.

Once they had returned to Europe and had hung up their spurs, the knights who had ventured forth in the service of the cross never again needed to pass as much as a morning without access to some form of alcoholic beverage. As has been noted, they had a plethora of cultural reasons to justify drinking, and they further possessed limitless opportunities to indulge them. Everyone in Europe, young and old, rich and poor, drank every day, and usually several times each day. What they consumed was determined by their status. The population of much of the continent was divided by the feudal system into three castes, or
estates
—the clergy, the nobility, and the commoners, each of which had different levels of access to various types of drinks.

Of the three estates, the clergy drank the least. Most belonged to some or other monastic order, whose rules limited the quantity of liquid sustenance in their diet. They were all, however, required by their occupation to drink wine every day in memory of their Savior, and in order to ensure security of supply, they cultivated the grape wherever the climate permitted. These two parameters, rationing and compulsion, caused the
religious,
as members of the clergy were known, to concentrate on the quality of the wine they made to be sipped at the altar, or swallowed in prescribed measures over meals in their refectories. In an age of ignorance and superstition they alone applied science, such as it was, to the manufacture of wine. The Cistercians, a new order of monks formed in AD 1112 by St. Bernard of Citeaux, led the field. His followers carried out their initial experiments with quality in the Burgundy region of France. Over the course of the twelfth century, they bought up, or were rewarded for their prayers (in the form of gifts from pious Catholics) with, many of the best vineyards in the region, which they turned into a vast laboratory. They studied in detail the vintages that each of these produced, and rediscovered the ancient Egyptian concept that a particular patch of earth might impart the same unique character to the wine that it grew, year in year out. Thereafter they paid especial attention to the
terroir
—the soil in which each vine was rooted.