Sea of Faith Page 2

  The martial canvas stretches across the entire Mediterranean world. The modern locations of these battlefields are, in the chronological order in which they came on the historical stage, Syria, France, Turkey, Israel, Spain, Turkey again, and Malta. Given this geographical range, different peoples came to the fore in different epochs. Over time Turks replaced Arabs, and Franks replaced Greeks as protagonists, while Normans, Berbers, Slavs, Mongols, Italians, and Spaniards all played a role. If the names of some of their leaders have entered universal history and folklore (Saladin, El Cid), other figures, just as colorful or influential, are renowned only in a local setting (Serbia's Prince Lazar, Turkey's Alp Arslan).

  At the same time conflict was not perpetual. Eras of coexistence and commingling—what the Spanish call convivencia—make up another facet of Islamic and Christian contact in the Middle Ages. From Córdoba, to Istanbul, from Cairo to Palermo and Toledo, the course of Muslim-Christian complicity skips around the entire Mediterranean basin, just as scholars, translators, merchants, and clerics wandered that world and contributed to its halcyon moments of cultural exchange. A continuum of cooperation, audible as a kind of ground tone upon which the more martial music of narrative history must be played, convivencia informed the entire medieval millennium, even those epochs that opened or closed with battle. Four great centers of convivencia—Umayyad Córdoba,, Christian Toledo, Norman Palermo, Ottoman Kostantiniyye (Constantinople)—represent the workings of the medieval Mediterranean as accurately as any jihad or crusade. By combining the epochal battles with the eras of convivencia, a clearer picture of the complex encounter of Christianity and Islam emerges, one that combats the selective, agenda-driven amnesia that has settled over the subject among some of the religious chauvinists of our own day.

  To be fair, the obscuring of the Christian-Muslim encounter of the distant past may not be the result solely of cultural tunnel vision—that is, learning only those histories that redound to the benefit of whichever society happens to be setting the curriculum. (One need only think of how little the brilliance of Muslim Spain colors the western view of the Middle Ages.) Much of our un-familiarity arises from not knowing the Muslim sources for the period under study, those voices that lend balance to what was, after all, a two-way relationship. Thanks to the work of professional historians in the last half-century, these sources have been made available in translation, although much of their content has yet to be presented to the nonspecialist reader.

  And finally, no matter how resonant in the present, the shared story of Islam and Christianity in the first centuries of their interaction remains impossibly far away in time. Fortunately, the setting for this history is supremely evocative. Fernand Braudel described the magic of the Mediterranean: "Simply looking at the Mediterranean cannot of course explain everything about a complicated past created by human agents, with varying doses of calculation, caprice and misadventure. But this is a sea that patiently recreates for us scenes from the past, breathing new life into them, locating them under a sky and in a landscape that we can see with our own eyes, a landscape and sky like those of long ago. A moment's concentration or daydreaming, and that past comes back to life."

  The great historian's assessment is correct. Visiting old battle sites and venerable cities of the Mediterranean world, with a view to understanding what happened there long ago, adds a sense of place that can only deepen appreciation of a distant time. Whether a story of long ago is full of death or full of life—clad, as a Cordoban shopkeeper might say, in conquistador garb or flamenco finery—meaning can be gleaned from what is on the ground today and from how the past is represented. Something can even be learned from the way the wind blows through a cypress tree. The mullah and the bishop might balk, but seeing is believing.

  From Mezquita to Ayasofya then, from Andalusia back toward the distant shore, through the Balearic, Tyrrhenian, Ionian, Adriatic, Libyan, and Aegean seas, past the islands of Majorca, Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, Malta, Crete, Rhodes, and Cyprus—the Mediterranean is an irregularly shaped historical stage, punctuated by peninsulas and bounded by three continents, a succession of intimate cove, treacherous current, and terrifying emptiness, wine-red or grand bleu or the White Sea (Akdeniz, in Turkish). When in 260 B.C.E. the sailors of the Roman republic defeated the Carthaginian navy in the battle of Mylae (Milazzo, Sicily), the victorious crews are said to have cried out, "Mare nostrum! Mare nostrum/" And it was "our sea," or rather theirs, for hundreds of years thereafter.

  But the mare nostrum of the Romans meant more than just the sea itself. As its Latinate name announces—medius terra, "middle land"—the Mediterranean includes the territories hemming it in. By the second century c.E., the dominion of the Roman Empire encompassed the entirety of this Mediterranean world, and all of its constituent societies were influenced to some degree by the Graeco-Roman model of thought and societal organization. It was a formidable accomplishment and, were it ever to come undone, a precious legacy to inherit.

  Inevitably, disintegration did occur, and the Mediterranean slipped the traces of Roman control. From the fourth through the sixth centuries, the principal beneficiary was the Eastern Roman Empire. Centered in Constantinople, the new Rome constructed on the site of ancient Byzantium by Emperor Constan-tine in 330, this survivor of antiquity ruled much of the mare nostrum well after its former landlord had fallen. (The year of old Rome's collapse is commonly taken to be 476.)

  Over time the eastern inheritor of the mare nostrum changed the nature of the imperium. The language of its rulers was Greek, not Latin, and the prism through which the world was viewed had radically altered. A monotheistic religion became the guarantor of legitimacy. For most of its imperial centuries old Rome had deified its emperors, but its Mediterranean had nonetheless accommodated many faiths. In the Mediterranean of the Byzantine Empire—as the Eastern Roman Empire came to be called by historians—a potent belief system became the handmaiden of power, and attempts were undertaken to make the peoples of the Mediterranean into a community of like-minded believers.

  The faith was Christianity, a movement of Jewish sectaries that had, over the centuries, established a claim to universality. Its avatar, Jesus of Nazareth, was seen as a divine being by most of his followers, whose proselytizing would transform the spiritual landscape of antiquity. A stepchild of Judaism, Christianity as disseminated through the Greek-speaking world claimed that Jesus had been the Messiah awaited by the Jews and that the sacred books of Judaism—known to Christians as the Old Testament—were precursor texts to his teachings. And whereas the older faith suffered a grievous blow in 70 C.E., when a Jewish revolt in Palestine was ruthlessly crushed by Roman authorities and the main temple of Jerusalem destroyed, Christianity weathered fitful persecution in its earliest days to thrive the length and breadth of the mare nostrum and eventually overtake Judaism in the number of its adherents.* On its adoption as the established religion of the Roman Empire, both east and west, in the fourth century (following the favored status granted it by the same Emperor Constantine who built Constantinople), Christianity had arrived, both as the arbiter of the ontologically correct and, more important, the medium through which authority flowed. A spirit of transcendent legitimacy floated over the affairs of the Mediterranean, which had become, as is often said, "a Christian lake."

  The waters, however, were not placid. The Christians of this new Mediterranean differed noisily on the precise nature of their savior. Christological debates echoed throughout the mare nostrum, causing pogroms to be prosecuted and councils to be convened. At Chalcedon (Kadikoy, Turkey) in 451, orthodox Christian doctrine was spelled out yet again: Jesus, it was decided, had had two natures, human and divine, complementary yet intertwined; moreover, Jesus was part of a trinity of divine personae. Although the emperor placed his stamp of approval on this decision, dissident Christian doctrines—Monophysitism, Arianism, Nestorianism—held sway in Syria, Egypt, Armenia, western Mesopotamia, north Africa, Spain, and much of Italy. The cacophony was such th
at one visitor to Constantinople remarked: "Everywhere, in humble homes, in the streets, in the marketplace, at street corners, one finds people talking about the most unexpected subjects. If I ask for my bill, the reply is a comment about the virgin birth; if I ask the price of bread, I am told that the Father is greater than the Son; when I ask whether my bath is ready, I am told that the Son was created from nothing." Adding to these violent disagreements were the oft-times contentious relations and pecking-order disputes among the early Church's five seats of patriarchy—Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople, Jerusalem, and Rome. As the pagan historian Ammianus Marcellinus noted, "[n]o wild beasts were so hostile to humans as most Christians were in their savagery toward one another."

  For all that, by the middle of the sixth century a certain Christian commonwealth had been realized. The barbarian peoples who toppled old Rome—Vandals, Visigoths, Ostrogoths—had been either put in their place or convinced to help create a fledgling Christian civilization in the west. A Byzantine general of talent, Belisarius, had reconquered Italy and north Africa for his master, Justinian, thereby lengthening Constantinople's reach across the Mediterranean. If a threat to this new world order were to come, it was expected from Mesopotamia and beyond, out of which the armies of the four-century-old Sas-sanid Empire of Persia had long been venturing to skirmish with the Byzantines and their allies. Little did the peoples of the Mediterranean realize that a far greater rival was about to emerge and that their Christological talk-shop would soon come crashing down about their ears.

  A new and equally cogent religious worldview arrived on the shores of the mare nostrum in the first half of the seventh century. It had originated in the Hijaz, the west-central portion of the Arabian peninsula. Its exponent, Muhammad, a merchant of the well-established Quraysh clan of Mecca, claimed to have had serial revelations from the angel Gabriel and from God, revelations destined first for the Arabs and then for humanity as a whole. These visits to Muhammad were seen to be the final in a series of supernatural interventions that had begun with Abraham and continued through the prophets of the Hebrew Bible and Jesus. The resulting religion, Islam (meaning "submission"), with its divinely dictated book (Quran, "recital"), took the revelation granted to the Jews—and later appended by the Christians—and incorporated it into what Muslim believers held to be the perfection of monotheism. In this new view, the two older faiths had corrupted, in some ways, the original revelation. Abraham (Ibrahim), in being the first monotheist, was the first Muslim, and the stories of his exploits and those of his descendants found in the Hebrew Bible were reinterpreted in the light of the Quranic dispensation. Thus, in a fundamental distinction from Christianity, the sacred texts of Judaism were not embraced by Islam. The message given to Muhammad, the last in a long line of prophecy, improved and supplanted all that had come before.

  The Mediterranean would thenceforth witness a formidable encounter between two claimants to universal spiritual legitimacy. Mutual incomprehension marked much of their meeting, at least in its early stages. Byzantine Christians first viewed Islam as yet another heretical variation on a theme, a new voice in the shouting match over the nature of the divine. It is doubtful that the revolutionary import of Muhammad's message was at all evident even to the most sophisticated of Christian thinkers of the time. Muslims had a more nuanced view of the Other: they were specifically enjoined by the Quran to respect Jews and Christians as people to whom valid, if woefully incomplete and partly corrupted, revelations had been given. Despite this injunction, the idea of Christians as pagan idolaters was difficult to suppress. Muhammad had been tireless in stamping out polytheism in Arabia—"There is no god but God" is the preeminent Islamic affirmation of faith. The tenet similarly central to the Christian credo—"I believe in God, the Father Almighty, the Creator of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord: Who was conceived of the Holy Spirit"—suggested to the Muslim, and any other non-Christian for that matter, that these quarrelsome Trinitarians might be worshiping more than one god.

  When incomprehension gave way to hostility, the force of arms often prevailed, despite the message of brotherhood preached by both Jesus and Muhammad. Christianity, at first an outsider, pacifist creed, came to don the martial mantle of empire; as the Middle Ages progressed, it would put on the armor of kingship, hold the pennon of crusader knight, make warriors of its monks and saints of its pirates. Islam, on the other hand, was political from the outset: Muhammad had been very much of this world, fighting battles to unify the Arabian peninsula under his rule. Each of Muhammad's successors (or khalifa, "caliph") was considered a spiritual and temporal leader whose actions in the world of the here-and-now were divinely sanctioned, however transparently political those actions might be. This supposition of supernatural guidance might have translated automatically into rigid despotism if Islam, owing to its electrifying notion of an egalitarian brotherhood of believers, did not implicitly invite questions of legitimacy concerning the person of the caliph. If a bad Muslim, or a bad general, was he a true caliph? Whereas Christological concerns were the Achilles' heel of early Christianity, quarrels over the succession of Muhammad would dog the younger faith, raising and dashing dynasties and creating schisms.

  Despite their internal divisions, both faiths thrived and profoundly influenced the thoughts and actions of kings and emperors and sultans. One historian, writing confidently in the heyday of twentieth-century skepticism, stated that "when modern man ceased to accord first place to religion in his own concerns, he also ceased to believe that other men, in other times, could ever truly have done so, and so he began to re-examine the great religious movements of the past in search of interest and motives acceptable to modern minds." Such a breezy claim about the triumph of the secular is not as easy to make in the present day, but the idea of inquiring into the materiality of faith-based historical moments remains valid. Certainly, in the event, the encounter between Christian and Islamic societies was not exclusively of a religious nature. Sparks flew for many reasons, the greatest of which was the belief in war as the ultimate arbiter of politics and policy. Greed, geopolitical rivalry, imperial or familial ambition, individual megalomania and sociopathy—all played their customary roles as well. Internecine warfare among Christians, and among Muslims, did not cease until the questions raised by the Islamic-Christian encounter were decided. Muslim dynasties had at each other with at least as much gusto as they would reserve for wars against the infidels. In Christendom the same was true—in 1204, to return to the Ayasofya, the crusading Latin Christians, not the Muslims, sacked Greek Constantinople.

  That warfare was such a central fact of life everywhere at the time should not obscure the fundamental importance of belief in the meeting between Christian and Islamic societies. From what can be gathered across the chasm of so many centuries about the character and outlook of individual historical actors, varying levels of spiritual conviction were at play. Saladin, for example, the Kurdish hero of Hattin and vanquisher of Jerusalem's crusaders, appears to have been a genuinely religious man, deeply offended at the Frankish interlopers in what he thought should be a Muslim-controlled Palestine. Charles Martel, on the other hand, long celebrated for saving Europe for Christianity through his victory at Poitiers, seems to have had about as much religious feeling as the average war-horse. These inferences, even those that extend to societies at large, do not diminish the very real spiritual consequences of the actions of the powerful, however earthbound their motives. We take for granted the confessional geography of the Mediterranean, that is, which countries are, in their majority, Muslim or Christian. Yet there was nothing inevitable about Turkey being overwhelmingly Muslim, or Spain being overwhelmingly Christian. This geography of belief was decided in the millennium of the Middle Ages, through the contingencies of battle and the actions of men.

  The ramifications of this confessional geography are difficult to overstate. Law, language, art, the role of women, the tolerance of minorities, education, the very organizin
g principles of a society—all were influenced by the dominant religion, whether Christianity or Islam. In that light, Judaism cannot enter this story of the Middle Ages but peripherally, since it did not rise to the imperial prominence of the other two monotheistic faiths. Jews, although important actors in the various societies informed and controlled by Islam and Christianity, played a vital but nonetheless secondary role in the unfolding of the drama and appear more in descriptions of convivencia than in accounts of conflict. Their relegation to the periphery is in a sense paradoxical, since Judaism is central to the genesis of the other creeds. If any faith may lay claim to paternal authority, it is Judaism—consequently, the competition between Islam and Christianity can well be viewed as a sibling rivalry writ very large. Although this may not sit well with acolytes of the two junior revelations, one metaphor for the great encounter is inescapable: that of two sons struggling over an inheritance. That this inheritance—the mare nostrum—far exceeded the actual grasp of the father matters little, for the monotheism first expressed in Judaism is as much a legacy of Mediterranean antiquity as the writings of Plato and Aristotle. From the seventh century on, as the two brothers quarreled and composed and quarreled again, a world, an inheritance—and a god—were at stake.

  *Judaism is thought to have had millions of adherents outside Palestine in the first century C.E.

  CHAPTER ONE

  YARMUK 636

  The rise of Islam; the fall of Christian

  Syria and Palestine

  In contrast to the refinements of rivalry on display at the Mezquita and the Ayasofya, the place that ushered in the era of confessional competition for the medieval Mediterranean seems decidedly raw. The upland bordering the Yarmuk River, a scarified terrain of black basalt boulders, looks in many spots less world-historical than lunar-historical. The battlefield, from the year 636, is no killing field turned picnic ground, as at Agincourt or Waterloo, for contemporary politics have combined with natural infelicities to make the area particularly inhospitable. To the north of the canyon carved by the Yarmuk stands the Golan, a sun-bleached highland bristling with the instruments of war.