Sea of Faith Read online

  SEA of FAITH

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Back to the Front

  The Perfect Heresy

  SEA of FAITH

  Islam and Christianity

  in the Medieval Mediterranean World

  STEPHEN O'SHEA

  Copyright © 2006 by Stephen O'Shea

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Walker & Company, 104 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10011.

  Maps by Tom Cross

  Published by Walker Publishing Company, Inc., New York

  Distributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck Publishers

  All papers used by Walker & Company are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in well-managed forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

  O'Shea, Stephen.

  Sea of faith : the shared story of Christianity and Islam in the medieval Mediterranean world / Stephen O'Shea.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

  eISBN: 978-0-802-71842-6

  1. Mediterranean Region—History, Military. 2. Islamic Empire—History, Military. 3. Europe—History, Military. 4. Battles—Mediterranean Region—History. 5. East and West. I. Title.

  DE84.O84 2006

  909'.09822—dc22

  2005033290

  First published in the United States by Walker & Company in 2006

  This paperback edition published in 2007

  Visit Walker & Company's Web site at www.walkerbooks.com

  3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Typeset by Westchester Book Group

  Printed in the United States of America by Quebecor World Fairfield

  To

  my father

  &

  the memory of my mother

  CONTENTS

  Notes on Usage

  Introduction

  1. Yarmuk 636

  2. Poitiers 732

  3. Córdoba,

  4. Manzikert 1071

  5. Palermo and Toledo

  6. Hattin 1187

  7. Las Navas de Tolosa 1212

  8. The Sea of Faith

  9. Constantinople 1453 and Kostantiniyye

  10. Malta 1565

  Epilogue

  Glossary

  People of the Sea of Faith

  Select Timeline

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  NOTES ON USAGE

  The goal of reducing obstacles in the reader's path sometimes leads to inconsistency, which, to my mind, is a benign vice when compared to the mischief inflicted on prose by an excess of scruples. As this narrative touches on different peoples, places, and eras, a few decisions had to be made to smooth the journey.

  All dates are given in the western manner, with reference to the Common Era and, as tact dictates, not to Anno Domini, the Year of our Lord. Dual dates—one western, one Islamic—for every event would make eyes glaze over. Similarly, the period covered in the book is called the Middle Ages, or the medieval era, for the sake of convenience and familiarity, even if in al-Andalus and Mesopotamia a classical period or golden age existed at some point within the millennium.

  Geographical areas are at times referred to by their present-day nation-state names (e.g., France, Iraq) solely as a means of speeding comprehension and avoiding digressions. Similarly, readability—not consistency—has been the guideline in the choice of names of people. The simpler versions of nonwestern names have been retained. Where western versions of names exist (e.g., Almanzor, Avicenna), they have been used. As for the Europeans, not all of their names are anglicized: I simply couldn't call the bad boy of Outremer, as some authors do, Reginald of Chatillon. And if a non-English name is perfectly serviceable—Pedro and not Peter, for example—it has been let stand.

  As for the vexed problem of transliteration, I have opted for the simplest form possible. Arabists and Turkophones may despair, but many of the macrons, dots, and apostrophes of scholarly and present-day transliteration have been abandoned. As someone whose surname is no stranger to punctuation, I may be accused of chutzpah in this decision, but, again, the intent is to clear the path of obstacles. I do, however, employ several terms that might at the outset be unfamiliar—convivencia, umma, and the like. I trust that the reader, as she or he progresses through the narrative, will have been made familiar with these terms. If the writing or the memory fails in this respect, a glossary can be flipped to at the back of the book.

  SEA of FAITH

  INTRODUCTION

  Mezquita and Ayasofya

  Córdoba's white warren of cobbled streets and courtyards stretches out alongside the dull bleached banks of the Guadalquivir River. The old town is a capital of traditional Spanish culture, and its many merchants obligingly peddle the customary flamencoparty finery and plastic conquistador gear. Yet in the heart of its historic center, Córdoba, defies shopworn narrative through its proud possession of an unusual architectural marvel. The city's magnificent Mezquita—Spanish for "mosque"—bespeaks another heritage, another memory, another story altogether. To those attuned to the historic struggle over Mediterranean identity, this remarkable building offers two encounters—two moments of realization that shape this present work.

  The first encounter occurs quickly. Once past the patio of orange trees and through the main portal, the eye and ear are forced to adjust. Intermittent blizzards of flashbulbs lance the dimness, accompanied by the voices of tour leaders shepherding their charges through the sanctuary. But these distractions fade in their turn as the interior takes shape. Row upon row of slender marble columns, twice the height of a man, march across a cool stone floor. For all the regimentation, the effect is not one of parade-ground monotony. Quite the contrary—the exquisite paradox of the Mezquita lies in its creation of dreamlike, shifting expanses along what is essentially a grid.

  The capitals of adjacent columns in each row are joined by tall semicircular arches, their building blocks—called voussoirs—distinctive for their alternating bands of red brick and white stone. To this shock of color comes an even greater surprise of volume: surmounting each arch is a sister arch, similarly striped, creating a crescent of emptiness between the paired curves of stone that is endlessly reproduced throughout the mosque. The peekaboo succession of spaces enlivens perspective no matter which way the visitor turns, the candy-cane interior seeming to shift repeatedly, all at once, like a Muslim congregation at prayer.

  Abd al-Rahman, the Cordoban grandee who commissioned this astonishing mosque in the eighth century C.E., had firsthand knowledge of sudden changes and dramatic new perspectives. As an Umayyad, a descendant of the caliphs who had ruled the early Muslim world from their capital of Damascus, he had been forced to flee his native Syria in 750 when a rival clan, the Abbasids, seized power under the leadership of Abu al-Abbas as-Saffah. The sobriquet as-Saffah means "shedder of blood"—the Umayyads were slaughtered to a man. Only Abd al-Rahman escaped the carnage, riding the length of the Mediterranean until reaching distant Spain and making it his kingdom.

  Interior of the Mezquita of Córdoba,, famed for its striped,

  superimposed arches and arresting perspectives.

  Abd al-Rahman and his successors in Córdoba, built and expanded the Mezquita for the next two centuries, the last and largest of these additions occurring under the rule of Almanzor, a ruthless vizier who wielded the real power behind a puppet Umayyad prince. Aside from doubling the size of the Mezquita, all the
while maintaining its striped double-horseshoe colonnades, Almanzor added metal lamps that were fashioned from the bells he had stolen in his sack of Compostela, in the northwestern extremity of Spain. That event, in 997, had entailed desecrating the shrine of a saint who would inspire a devotional frenzy in the Middle Ages. The bells of Santiago Matamoros—St. James the Moor-Slayer—hung harmless in Almanzor's Mezquita, illuminating the pointedly unslain Moors as they thanked God for their vizier's victory.

  The story of the waylaid bells hints at the second, spectacular encounter on offer in the Mezquita. By the time a visitor reaches Almanzor's extension, it becomes obvious that the Mezquita is and is not a mosque. Squarely in the center of the airy grove of pillars stands a Christian sanctuary, a towering Baroque cathedral that shoots through the roof of its surroundings. An aesthetic gatecrasher, the church displays a riot of figurative ornamentation that could hardly be more impolite to its Islamic host. The Christians wrested Córdoba, from the Muslims in 1236, but only in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was this dizzying addition undertaken—and then, over the objections of the town fathers. When the monarch who authorized the church viewed it, he remarked ruefully: "You have built here what you, or anyone else, might have built anywhere; to do so you have destroyed what was unique in the world."

  Religious palimpsest: the figurative devotional art of the Santa Maria Mayor Cathedral within the Mezquita.

  Whatever the merits of the Mezquita's Santa Maria Mayor cathedral—one recent detractor called it "a great blister of tiresomeness"—its existence is a tangible testament to a rivalry between faiths that went far beyond the artistic fashions of this city on the Guadalquivir. Just as Abd al-Rahman had, in his flight, crossed the entire length of the Mediterranean, so too did this rivalry, this encounter, encompass that sea and the many lands that surround it.

  At the opposite corner of the Mediterranean world stands the Mezquita's only peer in dual identity. Rising high above the Hippodrome in Istanbul, its corpulent domes and fading pomegranate-red walls resembling an unruly fruit bowl, the Hagia Sophia represents the last hurrah of classical Christian hegemony. This Church of Holy Wisdom was Emperor Justinian's bid to awe the world and outdo the ancients. "Solomon, I have surpassed thee," he is supposed to have whispered on December 27, 537, as he first walked under the immense dome of his just-completed church. In his enthusiasm, he might also have added that his dome had dwarfed that of the Pantheon in Rome and, by extension, the gods that it sheltered.

  Justinian's Hagia Sophia, transformed into the Ottoman Ayasofya Mosque and graced by four minarets. The structure is now a museum.

  Today the Hagia Sophia, like the Mezquita, is an echo chamber of indistinct murmur. Slightly intimidated groups proceed through its luminous gray-gold interior listening to explanations given in a babel of tongues. On the verge of its millennium-and-a-half mark despite earthquake, sack, and the occasional structural collapse (diverse calamities occurred in 553,558, 989,1204,1346), the sanctuary encloses as impressive a volume of space as any bequeathed to us by the builder's art. The crown of the dome floats some fifteen stories above the marbled pavement, held up by four massive piers and two elephantine half-domes to the north and south. Galleries line three sides of the cavernous nave; two of these are supported by graceful marble columns, their capitals a sculpted thicket of acanthus and palm displaying the monograms of Justinian and his empress, Theodora.

  For all its magnificence, the Hagia Sophia houses a relative dearth of artistic treasure—a few fragmentary mosaics in the galleries hint at the glory that is gone. Some of this absence can be traced to the great iconoclast controversy of the ninth and tenth centuries, when holy images were deemed heretical and thus worthy of destruction. The opponents of the iconoclasts—the iconodules—eventually won the day, but much of their subsequent legacy disappeared just as definitively. To understand this latter spoliation, one need only note an inscription in the southern gallery of the church. At knee height, a solitary gravestone in one wall displays the name of Henricus Dandolo, the doge of Venice who, although blind and in his eighties, led an army of crusaders in a devastating pillage of the church and its city in 1204.

  Aside from this unholy irony tucked away in a gallery upstairs, the main reason for the absence of Christian iconography concerns the same rivalry so arrestingly on view at the Mezquita. Immediately on entering the sanctuary the visitor sees that the Hagia Sophia is no longer dedicated to Christ. As with the Cordoban monument, the great building accommodates a monotheistic intruder, but here the roles are reversed. Justinian's great cathedral of 537 was transformed into Mehmet the Conqueror's great mosque of 1453, the Year m which Constantinople, as Istanbul was then known, fell to the Ottoman Turks. The Hagia Sophia became the Ayasofya.

  Graced outside by four soaring minarets constructed by successive sultans, the Ayasofya remained a lodestar of Islam until 1932, when the republican government of Kemal Ataturk converted the building into a museum—an act of secularization that has not been considered in Córdoba,. The building's 479 years as a mosque left their imprint but did not deform the space within. A few elegant additions—the loge for the sultan, the minbar (the pulpit for Friday prayers), the mihrab (the niche indicating the qibla, or the orientation toward Mecca)—are hardly noticeable under the eye-catching flourish of bold Kufic script that covers the dome. It reads: "In the name of God the Merciful and Pitiful; God is the light of Heaven and Earth. His light is Himself, not that which shines through glass or gleams in the morning star or glows in the firebrand." Somewhat less successful, if equally hallowed in their time, are the six levhas, giant shieldlike wooden wall hangings painted with six sacred names: God, Muhammad, and the first four caliphs of Islam. The monograms of Justinian and Theodora look decidedly small in comparison.

  Ayasofya: Byzantine engineering of the sixth century and Ottoman piety of the nineteenth. The round wall hangings are the levhas.

  Still, the architectonic marvel created by Justinian's engineers undermined any attempt at religious palimpsest. The master builders of the Ottoman sultans used their talents on other constructions, Istanbul's greatest Islamic temples—Suleymaniye, Sultanahmet (the "Blue Mosque")—paying imitative flattery to the great dome of the Ayasofya. One present-day Byzantinist has compared these giant mosques of the Ottomans, of which Ayasofya was the first, to "clouds pinned down by the enormous needles of their minarets." Yet to reach this peaceful state, these buildings first had to displace and usurp, just as the Christianity of Constantinople replaced the gods of old Byzantium and, not incidentally, just as the Mezquita of Abd al-Rahman took elements of the Visigothic church that had stood on the spot—and which, in its day, had used as its pillars the columns and capitals of the pagan temple of Roman Córdoba,. The Mediterranean world, already rich in the strata of overlaid faiths and cultures, would become immensely richer from the meeting between Christianity and Islam.

  Emperor Justinian the Great died on November 14, 565. Five or six years later, according to tradition, the Prophet Muhammad was born. For a millennium thereafter, from the seventh to the sixteenth century, Islam and Christianity would contend for primacy in the Mediterranean world, a competition on dramatic and permanent display at the Mezquita and the Ayasofya. At times acrimonious, at other times harmonious, the encounter between the two creeds in the Middle Ages provides a backdrop to much of what informs, and misinforms, public opinion on present-day conflicts. Although remote in time, the principal events and locales are worth recalling—or at the very least, ordering accurately in one's mind. A shared history should be familiar to all, especially in a day when the idea of an inevitable civilizational clash has once again gained currency. And as in the admirable Mezquita, the two protagonists must be seen in shifting perspectives, in order to do justice to a long history that combined both conflict and coexistence.

  War, of course, forms a large part of the story. The two faiths were brandished as battle standards by the civilizations that rose and fell around the Medi
terranean. The two moved men to action, inspired feats of bravery, brought God into the affairs of siege engineer and swordsman. They gave respectable cover to the workings of age-old cupidity, by making the mundane violence of a feral time seem supernatural and sublime and by extending a blessing to even the most wanton instances of warrior atrocity.

  Seven battles, selected from a much larger pageant of violence, exemplify the military aspect of the encounter between Christianity and Islam, either epochal turning points in the view of scholarly consensus or events celebrated or deplored in popular historical traditions. The first two, Yarmuk and Poitiers, represent the beginnings of the encounter, a time of mutual ignorance, when the Muslim armies seemed to have arrived out of nowhere to change forever the culture of the Mediterranean. The middle three—Manzikert, Hattin, Las Navas de Tolosa—are the high-water mark of conflict, when many of the combatants saw themselves as fighting for their faith against the infidel. Religion would never play a greater role in the conduct of warfare around the inland sea than it did from the eleventh to the thirteenth century. Constantinople and Malta, the final two, occurred at the cusp of the early modern period, as the old religious justifications were slowly being eroded by the dawn of the Atlantic era and the workings of hard-headed commercial interest. By the close of the sixteenth century, the Mediterranean could no longer be called a sea of faith—a sea of trade or piracy, perhaps, but certainly not faith.