The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean (13 page)

From Carthage the westward advance speeded up again until at last, with the entire coast from Egypt to the Atlantic in their hands, the Muslims could think seriously about Spain: a land infinitely richer and more fertile than the vast territories that they had fought so long and hard to conquer, and one that promised huge rewards. At that very moment, too, the old Visigothic kingdom was crumbling. Its monarchy was theoretically elective, always a certain recipe for disputes over the succession and an open invitation for ambitious noblemen. After years of persecution, the large Jewish community was on the point of revolt. The economy was in ruins. The Spanish fruit, in short, was ripe and ready for the plucking. In 710 an Arab officer named Tarif, with a reconnaissance party of 500 men, slipped across the straits and occupied the southernmost tip of the Iberian peninsula, where the city of Tarifa still bears his name. The ships returned laden with spoils, and Muslim minds were made up. The following year a certain Tariq ibn Zaid sailed from Tangier with an army of 9,000 Berbers, landing this time in the shade of an immense rock, by which his name too is now immortalised.
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After Tariq’s landing, one battle near the Guadalete river–even though it is said to have lasted an entire week–was enough to destroy Visigothic resistance. Sending out small detachments to receive the submissions of Malaga, Murcia and Cordoba, Tariq himself set out for the capital, Toledo, which he found abandoned by all but its Jewish population. Here still more plunder awaited him, including–if we are to believe the Arab chronicler Ibn Idhari–the Table of Solomon, set with concentric circles of pearls, sapphires, and chrysolite, the jewels of Alexander the Great, the staff of Moses and the robes of the Gothic kings. Leaving the Jews to administer the territories he had conquered, he then continued northward to Castile, Asturias and Leon. The speed of his advance would have been remarkable were it not for the fact that the Moorish army was generally welcomed, the vast majority of the local Christian populations being only too happy to accept the domination of such tolerant conquerors, whom many of them saw as a considerable improvement on their Visigothic predecessors.

Word of Tariq’s successes soon got back to his superior, one Musa ibn Nusair, who arrived in the peninsula in June or July 712 with some 18,000 men, this time mostly Arabs. Deliberately following a different route from that of his predecessor, he landed at Algeciras and took Huelva and Seville before meeting up with Tariq at Toledo. The following year was largely spent in consolidation; then, in 714, the combined force captured Barcelona and crossed the Pyrenees, advancing into the Rhône valley as far as Avignon and Lyon. There they halted. Musa’s original ambition had been to press eastward to Damascus via Constantinople, but this, he now realised, was out of the question. Resistance was increasing; lines of communication were growing perilously long. There was nothing for it but to return to Spain–and thence, since he was determined to make his personal report to the Caliph, to Africa. That same winter he transferred the responsibility for the conquered territories to his son Abdul-Aziz in Seville, while he and Tariq, accompanied by a huge retinue including a large number of captive Visigoths and countless slaves–to say nothing of vast quantities of gold, silver and precious stones–marched slowly and with great pomp back along the North African coast, through Egypt and Palestine and finally to Damascus. Unfortunately for them, Caliph al-Walid, who had approved of the Spanish expeditions, died almost as soon as they arrived; his successor Süleyman was disappointingly unimpressed.

The Muslim armies invaded France three times–in 716, 721 and 726–but they never took root. Basically, their work was done; and under its Arabic name of al-Andalus, Spain–or much of it–became part of the Umayyad Empire. Never would it be the same again. Henceforth the land would harbour three totally separate peoples: Arabs, Jews and Christians, different in race and in religion, in language and in culture. Inevitably, over the 750-odd years of Muslim occupation, they would influence and cross-fertilise each other in a thousand ways, to the ultimate advantage of all three. For most (though not all) of that time, they coexisted amicably enough–sometimes very amicably indeed.

Such difficulties as did arise came principally from within the Muslim ranks. Musa’s son Abdul-Aziz had made the cardinal mistake of marrying the daughter of Rodrigo, the principal general of the Visigoths, and under her influence had been induced to wear a crown in the Christian manner. This had infuriated his Arab followers to the point where they had murdered him; thereafter confusion reigned, and over the next forty years al-Andalus was ruled by no less than twenty-one successive governors. It might well have disintegrated altogether but for a spectacular
coup d’état
which no one could possibly have foreseen. In 750 the Umayyad Caliphate was overturned: the last Caliph of the line, Marwan II, was executed; almost his entire family was massacred at a banquet, reminiscent of that at which Theodoric the Ostrogoth had dealt with the family of Odoacer two and a half centuries before; and a new dynasty, the Abbasids, established itself in Baghdad. Only one of the Umayyad princes, the nineteen-year-old Abdul-Rahman, managed to escape. After wandering incognito for five years through Palestine, Egypt and North Africa, in 755 he landed in Spain and, finding the entire country in chaos, had little difficulty in establishing himself as its ruler. In the following year, when still only twenty-six, he was formally proclaimed Emir of al-Andalus. The dynasty that he founded was to rule in Muslim Spain for nearly three hundred years.

Abdul-Rahman was not, however, universally welcomed. There were several revolts in Spain, and one still more serious crisis when in 778 the Frankish King Charles the Great–Charlemagne–was persuaded by a group of Spanish rebels to march against him. Charles quickly occupied Pamplona and had just begun a siege of Saragossa when–fortunately for the Emir–he changed his mind. For some reason he seems to have decided that the game was not after all worth the candle and, on the pretext of pressing problems at home, gave the order to return. It was on 15 August, on his way back across the Pyrenees, that his rearguard, commanded by Roland, Marquis of Brittany, was surprised by a combined force of Muslims and Basques in the narrow pass of Roncesvalles. Not a man escaped. Only the name of Roland has survived, as the hero of one of the first epic poems of western European literature.

Abdul-Rahman’s later years were a good deal more tranquil. He never succeeded in imposing political unity on Spain, but he was a wise and merciful ruler and a deeply cultivated man. His capital city of Cordoba he transformed, endowing it with a magnificent palace, a famously beautiful garden and–most important of all–with the Mezquita, its great mosque, begun in 785 on the site of the early Christian cathedral, which when completed was the most sumptuous mosque in the world and still stands today.
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He was also a celebrated poet, who wrote sensitively and nostalgically about the Syrian homeland that he would never see again. His love of culture was fully inherited by his great-grandson and third successor, Abdul-Rahman II, who–reigning for nearly half a century from 912 to 961–filled his court with poets, musicians and scholars, as well as enlarging his great-grandfather’s mosque and building others in Jaén and Seville. He also imported vast quantities of luxury goods from the east, together with numbers of foreign artists and craftsmen; he is said to have introduced the art of embroidery into the country, and was the first Emir to strike his own coins. During his reign, Cordoba was probably the most cultivated city in Europe. In 940 came the final accolade: a diplomatic mission from Constantinople, bearing gifts of great price and proposing an alliance against their common enemy, the Abbasids.

But the Abbasids were far away. In transferring their capital and court from Damascus to Baghdad, they had radically changed the nature of the Caliphate. No longer was it essentially a Mediterranean empire; with its centre now in the heartland of Asia, it took little or no interest in the affairs of Europe or of the Middle Sea. For the next seven centuries–until the capture of Constantinople in 1453–it was to have relatively little impact in the west, where the Muslims of North Africa and Spain were left largely to their own devices. The former in particular steadily developed their navy until, by the first half of the ninth century, they were probably the leading sea power in the Mediterranean–even though the Byzantines maintained a stout opposition, and certainly did not let them have things all their own way. Indeed, after the accession of the Emperor Basil I in 867, the tables were conclusively turned: the forces of Islam were once again very much on the defensive.

In 929 Abdul-Rahman II adopted the title of caliph. Thenceforth Muslim Spain, with a perfectly good caliphate of its own, no longer paid even lip service to Abbasid Baghdad. Politically this caliphate was called upon to face more than its fair share of problems; artistically and culturally, on the other hand, it shone, and its surviving monuments continue to dazzle us today. The first Abdul-Rahman’s great mosque of Cordoba was enlarged and beautified by successive rulers in the ninth and tenth centuries; in 950 Abdul-Rahman III endowed it with a new minaret 240 feet high. In Seville there is the Alcazar, the lovely twelfth-century building which in 1353 was to become the palace of Pedro the Cruel, and the 300-foot-high Giralda, built between 1172 and 1195 both as a minaret and an observatory. And in Granada that astounding complex of palaces known as the Alhambra, with the summer palace and glorious gardens of the Generalife on the hill above it, still has the power to catch the breath. Here, surely–with the Cordoba mosque–is the ultimate tour de force of all Spanish Islam.
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Perhaps it was to some extent the splendour of the architecture that gave rise to the countless recorded conversions. The Jews, of course, hardly ever renounced their ancient heritage, and rare indeed was the Muslim who sought Christian baptism; but throughout the Arab occupation–and particularly in the cities and towns between about the middle of the ninth and the beginning of the eleventh century–tens of thousands of Christians voluntarily embraced the faith of their conquerors. Still more of them, while retaining their religion, adopted Arabic as the language of their daily life. To this day modern Spanish has retained a remarkable number of Arabic words, and visitors to Spain cannot fail to be struck by the quantity of Arabic place names which still abound. Islamic culture, too, spread widely across the land. Al-Andalus maintained a vast commercial network with North Africa and the Near East, and even as far as India and Persia; to it came not only silks and spices (particularly pepper and ginger), rice and sugarcane, citrus fruits and figs, aubergines and bananas, but works on architecture, ceramics, calligraphy, music, mathematics, astronomy and medicine.

This extensive new knowledge did not by any means confine itself to the Muslim world. Many Christians, superficially Islamicised as they might be, sooner or later found their way to the Christian lands to the north and northeast–to Galicia and Asturias, Catalonia and Navarre–bringing their culture with them. These Mozarabs, as they were called, had a lasting impact on the Christian north on both sides of the Pyrenees–above all in the field of mathematics, of which early medieval Christendom was still lamentably ignorant. It was they who are believed to have introduced Arabic numerals into northern Europe, together with the abacus, a device which had an impact on commercial life comparable to that of the computer in our own day.

Politically, relations between the Christians of the north and the Muslims of the south were somewhat less clear-cut. The caliphate came to an end in 1031 and was succeeded by a number of small states known as
taifas
, normally consisting of a central town with the countryside immediately surrounding it, not altogether unlike the city-states growing up in northern Italy at much the same time. Like the Italians they too tended to squabble among themselves, allowing the larger and stronger Christian kingdoms of Aragon and Castile either to play them off one against another or to institute what were in effect glorified protection rackets, offering military support in return for substantial tribute. Here was fertile ground for the many soldiers of fortune, freelance mercenaries similar to the Italian
condottieri
, who cheerfully sold their swords to the highest bidder regardless of his faith. By far the most celebrated of these was the eleventh-century Castilian aristocrat actually named Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar but better known by his Spanish sobriquet of El Cid, literally ‘the boss’. Later legend has turned him into the supreme Spanish patriot, who devoted his life to driving the infidel from his native land and indeed continued to do so after his death, when his corpse was propped upright on his horse, Babieca, to lead his army into battle. The same authority
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maintains that the corpse remained so perfectly preserved that it sat for ten years immediately to the right of the altar in the church of the monastery of San Pedro de Cardena near Burgos. The truth, alas, is somewhat less romantic. Rodrigo was in fact a military adventurer like many another, who after an outstandingly successful and profitable career, ended up as ruling prince of the state of Valencia on the shores of the Mediterranean.

Had El Cid been born fifty years later than he was–in 1190 rather than about 1140–such a career would have been impossible. Some time around the middle of the eleventh century in what is now southern Morocco, what had begun as a loose confederation of Berbers developed, in the space of a very few years, into a fundamentalist movement preaching the strictest Islamic doctrines. Calling themselves
al-Murabitun
–to us, the Almoravids–they founded the great city of Marrakesh, conquered northern Morocco and much of western Algeria and then turned their attention to Spain. In 1086 they crossed the straits, defeated King Alfonso VI of Leon-Castile at Sagrajas near Badajoz and quickly mopped up all the Muslim
taifas
, together with many towns reconquered by the Christians only a few years previously. Before the end of the century al-Andalus was once again reunited, but now for the first time linked with North Africa under a regime both deeply uncivilised and fanatically intolerant.