The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean (14 page)

Fortunately for all concerned, the Almoravids’ rule was short. They suffered from one great weakness: as a small Berber minority at the head of a now considerable Spanish–African empire, they could inspire no real loyalty. They tried to hold Spain with their own troops and North Africa with a guard composed very largely of Christians, but after the fall of Saragossa to King Alfonso I of Aragon in 1118 the tide began to turn, and only seven years later a fiercer and still more bigoted fundamentalist sect, the Almohads, had arisen in the Atlas Mountains and broke out in open rebellion. The civil war that followed lasted for nearly a quarter of a century; it ended only with the fall of Marrakesh in 1147, after which Almoravid authority quickly crumbled.

The victorious Almohads crossed the straits, and by the end of the twelfth century their grip on the country from their capital at Seville was just as firm as that of their predecessors. Before long, however, they too found their power waning to the point where they were forced into retreat; this time the enemy was not an Islamic religious sect but an alliance of the three main Christian kingdoms of the Iberian peninsula: Castile, Aragon and Portugal. In 1212 King Alfonso VIII of Castile won a major victory at Las Navas de Tolosa, which effectively secured the preponderance of the Christian cause in Spain; his grandson Ferdinand III continued his work, in his thirty-five-year reign regaining much of Andalusia, including the port of Cartagena, and on occasion–as at Seville in 1248–actually expelling entire Muslim populations.
⁵⁴
By mid-century Muslim Spain had been reduced to a single emirate: that of Granada. The Reconquista was well under way.

The intolerance of the Almohads had had one beneficial effect: many Jewish and Mozarabic communities, finding life under them intolerable, had fled into Christian Castile and Aragon where they had received a warm welcome. They included philosophers and physicians like Maimonides and Averroes, whose influence was to spread through the whole western world, together with any number of lesser intellectuals who set themselves up as professional translators from the Arabic, making available a considerable corpus of Arab scholarship hitherto unknown in the west. Many of these settled in Toledo–reconquered in 1085 amid scenes of great rejoicing–where they enjoyed the personal patronage and encouragement of the king.

The Emirate of Granada was to survive for well over two centuries, until 1492, but this seems an appropriate moment to try to assess the effects, first of Islam on Spain and, second, of Muslim Spain on the rest of western Europe. Culturally, there is no doubt that the country was immeasurably enriched. Close contact with Islam could not have failed to broaden the Spanish mind. It also brought European intellectuals to Spain; Gerbert of Aurillac–the future Pope Sylvester II–was not the only medieval scholar to be drawn across the Pyrenees by thirst for a knowledge that could be obtained nowhere else on the continent. Mathematics and medicine, geography and astronomy and the physical sciences were still deeply mistrusted in the Christian world; in that of Islam, they had been developed to a point unequalled since the days of ancient Greece. Any serious student in these disciplines would feel the attraction of al-Andalus; once there, since translations of the seminal scientific works were few and inaccurate, he might even set himself the formidable task of learning Arabic. One who succeeded in doing so was the great English scholar Adelard of Bath, who was in Spain at the beginning of the twelfth century disguised as a Muslim student, and who in 1120 or thereabouts produced the first Latin version of Euclid, which he had translated from an Arabic version of the original Greek.

In other ways, however, the coexistence of three radically different faiths in the same land was a source of continued suffering. Much unnecessary bloodshed had been involved in the original Arab conquest, and more still in the long, painful struggle of the Reconquista. Moreover, though they all got on well enough on a daily basis, in neither the Christian nor the Muslim states were the subject peoples invariably treated with due consideration. The Prophet’s injunction that Christians and Jews, as ‘peoples of the Book’, were to be treated by all good Muslims as their brothers was by no means always observed in practice. In 1066 there was a massacre of Jews in Granada, in 1126 a mass deportation of Christians to slavery in Morocco. The Christian communities were never (so far as we know) guilty of atrocities on quite the level of these, but there can be no doubt that both the Jews and the mudejars–the name given to Muslims living under Christian rule–were looked down upon as second-class citizens and were regularly the objects, if not of persecution, then at least of discrimination.

When we consider how much Muslim Spain had to offer, it is surprising that it did not have a greater impact on the Christian west. There would seem to be several reasons. The first is confessional: medieval Christendom loathed all manifestations of what it considered to be paganism. It accepted the Jews–up to a point–largely because they had always been there and they came in useful, and also because, lacking a nation of their own, they normally spoke the language of those around them. The Muslims of al-Andalus were different. They were little known and even less understood; their language, both written and spoken, was incomprehensible; and they inhabited the remotest corner of Europe–remoter far, in those days, than the lands of the eastern Mediterranean, where Byzantium acted as a huge cultural and commercial magnet, attracting not only scholars from one continent, but merchants, statesmen and diplomatists from three. After those early days when men feared that Islam was on course to conquer the world, and once the Muslims had withdrawn behind their relatively modest frontier, it seemed wiser and more prudent to leave them to their own peaceable and unthreatening devices. They were after all steeped in error and so, to the contemporary Christian mind, of no real interest anyway.

CHAPTER VI

Medieval Italy

Justinian’s war with the Goths had ushered in a dark age. His local governors–to whom he gave the title of exarch–did their best to restore prosperity, but they had little success. Italy was a desolation; Milan in the north and Rome in the south lay in ruins. And now, within a few years of the Goths’ departure, a new Germanic horde appeared on the scene: the Lombards, crossing the Alps in 568, spreading relentlessly over northern Italy and the great plain that still bears their name, finally establishing their capital at Pavia. Within five years they had captured Milan, Verona and Florence; Byzantine rule over North Italy, won at such a cost by Justinian, Belisarius and Narses, was ended almost as soon as it had begun. The Lombards’ line of advance was finally checked by Rome and the Exarchate of Ravenna, but two spearheads pressed through to set up the great southern duchies of Spoleto and Benevento. From here they might have gone on to conquer the rest of the south, but they never managed to unite quite firmly enough to do so. Apulia, Calabria and Sicily remained under Byzantine control–as, surprisingly, did much of the Italian coastline. Unlike the Vandals, the Lombards showed little interest in the sea; they never really became a Mediterranean people.

That Rome itself did not succumb to the Lombard tide was a miracle hardly less extraordinary than that which had saved her from Attila in the preceding century. Once again it was wrought by a Pope–this time one of Rome’s most outstanding medieval statesmen, Gregory the Great, who succeeded to the throne of St Peter in 590 and occupied it for the next fourteen years. Finding that the Exarch of Ravenna had insufficient forces to give him the support he needed, he assumed personal control of the militia, repaired the walls and aqueducts and fed the starving populace from the granaries of the Church. Having first bought off the Lombard King Agilulf, in 598 he concluded an independent peace with him; he was then able to set to work to make the Papacy a formidable political and social power. (It was he, incidentally, who sent Augustine, prior of the Benedictine abbey which he himself had founded on the Coelian hill in Rome, to convert the heathen English.) Gregory was no intellectual–like most churchmen of his day, he cherished a deep suspicion of secular learning–but he was autocratic and utterly fearless, and through these troubled times it was he alone who preserved the prestige of the city.

Yet even Gregory recognised the Emperor at Constantinople–where he had once served as papal ambassador–as his temporal overlord, and Rome under his successors became steadily more Byzantinized as the seventh century took its course. Greek refugees from the Middle East and Africa poured into Italy as first the Persians and then the Arabs overran their lands. In 663 there was an unusually distinguished Byzantine immigrant: the Emperor Constans II, determined to shift his capital back again to the west. Rome he found as uncongenial as Constantinople, but hellenistic Sicily proved more to his taste and he reigned for five years in Syracuse until one day a dissatisfied chamberlain, in an access of nostalgia, surprised him in his bath and felled him with the soapdish.

The court returned to the Bosphorus and Italy to her own problems. Of these the most serious remained the Lombards, who, as they increased in numbers and strength, were casting ever more covetous eyes over neighbouring territory. Their actual progress was slow, the Exarchate constituting a moderately effective bulwark, but pressure on the frontiers was never relaxed. This uneasy equilibrium lasted over the turn of the century; then, in 726, came crisis, when the Emperor Leo III
⁵⁵
ordered the destruction of all icons and holy images throughout his dominions on the grounds that they were idolatrous.

The Emperor was being puritanical, but in no sense revolutionary. Neither Judaism nor Islam permitted the use of pictures or images, and in more recent centuries England alone has seen two serious outbreaks of iconoclasm, under Edward VI in the sixteenth century and again during the Commonwealth. Nonetheless, the effect of his decree was immediate and shattering. Men rose everywhere in wrath; the monasteries, in particular, were outraged. In the eastern provinces, where the cult of icons had reached such proportions that they were worshipped in their own right and frequently served as godparents at baptisms, Leo found some measure of support; but in the more moderate west, which had done nothing to deserve them, the new laws could not be tolerated. Italy, under energetic papal leadership, refused absolutely to comply, Pope Gregory III going so far as to excommunicate all iconoclasts. Paul, Exarch of Ravenna, was assassinated, his provincial governors put to flight. Throughout the Exarchate the rebellious garrisons–all of which had been recruited locally–chose their own commanders and asserted their independence. In the communities gathered around the Venetian lagoon, their choice fell on a certain Ursus, or Orso, from Heraclea, who was given the title of
dux.
There was nothing especially remarkable about this; the same thing was happening almost simultaneously in many other insurgent towns. What distinguishes Venice from the rest is that Orso’s appointment inaugurated a tradition which was to continue unbroken for more than a thousand years; his title, transformed by the rough Venetian dialect into ‘doge’, was to pass down through 117 successors until the end of the Venetian Republic in 1797.

The main beneficiaries of the iconoclast dispute in Italy were the Lombards. Playing Rome and Byzantium off against each other, they steadily gained ground until at last, in 751, they captured Ravenna. It was the end of the Exarchate. Such Byzantine lands as remained in Italy were cut off by the Lombard duchies of the south and were thus powerless to help. Rome was left naked to her enemies.

Not, however, for long. Before the end of the year, beyond the Alps to the west, the Frankish leader Pepin the Short had obtained papal approval for the deposition of the Merovingian
⁵⁶
figurehead King Childeric III and his own coronation. He could not now ignore the Church’s appeal. In 754 Pope Stephen II travelled to St Denis, where he confirmed and anointed Pepin, with his two sons Charles and Carloman, as Kings of the Franks; two years later, in response to a letter said to have been miraculously penned by St Peter himself, Frankish troops swept into Italy and brought the Lombards to their knees. Pepin now established the Pope as the head of an independent state, snaking across central Italy to embrace Rome, Perugia and Ravenna–roughly the lands of the defunct Exarchate. He may have been basing his action on the so-called Donation of Constantine, by which Constantine the Great was supposed to have granted to the Papacy temporal rule over ‘Italy and all the western regions’; if so, he was seriously misled. The Donation was later shown to be a forgery, shamelessly concocted in the curia; but the Papal States which it brought into being, however shaky their legal foundations, were to last for over a thousand years, until 1870.

Rome was saved; but warfare continued, and for the next forty years Pepin and his son Charles found themselves the chief protectors of the Papacy against all its foes. Although Charles–better known to us as Charlemagne–has already made one appearance in these pages, he cannot conceivably be considered a Mediterranean figure. His impact, however, was felt all the way across Christian Europe. He became sole ruler of the Franks in 771; three years later, he captured Pavia and proclaimed himself King of the Lombards. This was effectively the end of Lombard power north of Rome. To the south, however, the great Lombard duchy of Benevento, while technically now under Frankish suzerainty, remained effectively an independent state with its capital at Salerno.

Returning to Germany, Charles next subdued the heathen Saxons and converted them en masse to Christianity before going on to annex the already Christian Bavaria. His invasion of Spain was, as we know, less successful, but his subsequent campaign against the Avars in Hungary and Upper Austria resulted in the destruction of their kingdom as an independent state and its incorporation within his own dominions. Thus, in little more than a single generation, he raised the Kingdom of the Franks from being just one of the many semi-tribal European states to a single political unit of vast extent, unparalleled since the days of imperial Rome.

When Charles returned to Italy a quarter of a century later–towards the end of the year 800–there was serious business to be done. Pope Leo III, ever since his accession four years before, had been the victim of incessant intrigue on the part of a body of young Roman noblemen who were determined to remove him. On 25 April he had actually been set upon in the street and beaten unconscious; only by the greatest good fortune had he been rescued by friends and removed for safety to Charles’s court at Paderborn. Under the protection of Frankish agents he had ventured back to Rome a few months later, only to find himself facing a number of serious charges fabricated by his enemies, including simony, perjury and adultery.

By whom, however, could he be tried? Who was qualified to pass judgement on the Vicar of Christ? In normal circumstances, the only possible answer to that question would have been the Emperor at Constantinople, but the imperial throne at that time was occupied by a woman, the Empress Irene. The fact that she was notorious for having blinded and murdered her own son was, in the minds of both Leo and Charles, almost immaterial; it was enough that she was female. By the old Salic Law, women were debarred from ruling; thus, as far as western Europe was concerned, the throne of the Emperors was vacant. Now Charles was fully aware, when he arrived in Rome, that he had no more authority than Irene to sit in judgement at St Peter’s; but he also knew that while the accusations remained unrefuted Christendom lacked not only an Emperor but effectively a Pope as well, and he was determined to do all he could to clear Leo’s name. As to the precise nature of his testimony we can only guess, but on 23 December, at the high altar, the Pope swore a solemn oath on the Gospels that he was innocent of all the charges levelled against him–and the assembled synod accepted his word. Two days later, as Charles rose from his knees at the conclusion of the Christmas Mass, Leo laid the imperial crown upon his head while the congregation cheered him to the echo. He had received, as his enemies were quick to point out, only a title; the crown brought with it not a single new subject or soldier, nor an acre of new territory. But that title was of more lasting significance than any number of conquests; it meant that the Holy Roman Empire was born and, after more than three hundred years, there was once again an Emperor in western Europe.

If Leo conferred a great honour on Charles that Christmas morning, he bestowed a still greater one on himself: the right to appoint, and to invest with crown and sceptre, the Emperor of the Romans. Here was something new, perhaps even revolutionary. No pontiff had ever before claimed for himself such a privilege: not only establishing the imperial crown as his own personal gift but simultaneously granting himself implicit superiority over the Emperor whom he had created. Meanwhile, the reaction in Constantinople to the news of Charles’s coronation can easily be imagined. To any right-thinking Byzantine, it was an act not only of quite breathtaking arrogance, but also of sacrilege. The Empire, as everyone knew, was built on a dual foundation: on the one hand the Roman power, on the other the Christian faith. The two had first come together in the person of Constantine the Great, Emperor of Rome and Equal of the Apostles, and this mystical union had continued through all his legitimate successors. It followed inevitably that, just as there was only one God in heaven, so there could be but one supreme ruler on earth; all other claimants to such a title were impostors, and blasphemers as well.

Despite Irene’s reputation, it was not perhaps altogether surprising that Charles’s thoughts should have turned to the possibility of marriage. Here, after all, was an opportunity that would never be repeated: if he could persuade the Empress to become his wife, all the imperial territories of east and west would be reunited under a single crown–his own. When, in 802, his ambassadors arrived in Constantinople with their proposal, they found Irene disposed to accept. Loathed and despised by her subjects, her exchequer exhausted, she was well aware that a
coup
would not be long in coming, in which event her life would be in danger. It mattered little to her that her suitor was a rival Emperor, an adventurer and effectively a heretic, nor that he was to all intents and purposes illiterate. (Charles could in fact read a bit, but made no secret of his inability to write.) Her chief consideration was that by marrying him she would preserve the unity of the Empire and–far more important–save her own skin.

But it was not to be. Her subjects had no intention of allowing the throne to be taken over by this boorish Frank, with his outlandish linen tunic and his ridiculously cross-gartered scarlet leggings, speaking an incomprehensible language and unable even to sign his own name. On the last day of October 802 a group of high-ranking officials summoned an assembly in the Hippodrome and declared their empress deposed. She escaped, however, the fate that she had so greatly feared. She was sent into exile, first to the Princes’ Islands in the Marmara and afterwards–not very appropriately–to Lesbos. A year later she was dead.

Charlemagne always maintained, probably truthfully, that his imperial coronation had taken him by surprise; according to his friend and first biographer, Einhard, he was so angry that he left St Peter’s at once. Not only did he deeply resent the suggestion that as Emperor he was the creation of the Pope; he knew that Leo’s action was devoid of any legal basis. On the other hand, the old order was becoming more and more of a contradiction. Constantinople may have been the theoretical repository of Roman law, civilisation and imperial traditions, but in spirit it was now entirely Greek. Rome, shattered by the barbarians, demoralised by centuries of near-anarchy, was still the focal point of Latin culture, and it was Charlemagne, not his Byzantine counterparts, who upheld the
Pax Romana
in the west. For the chaotic Europe of the middle ages, one Emperor was no longer enough. Perhaps, subconsciously, the Byzantines suspected as much, for it took Charlemagne only twelve years to obtain their official recognition. The price he paid was Venice.