In around 634 a group of Jews were arguing in Carthage with Jacob, a fellow-Jew who had recently converted to Christianity. As always in debates between Jews and Christians, the issue was whether the Messiah had come or was yet to come. Jacob was convinced that the Messiah had already come, in the person of Jesus Christ. It was obvious to him, from the events of recent times, that the end of the world was at hand. There was no time left for a future Messiah – only for the coming of Antichrist, to be followed swiftly by the Last Judgment. For the last great empire of world history was passing away:
Up to our times the frontiers of the Roman empire stretched as far as Ireland and Britain … to Persia and the East. The statues of the emperors in bronze and marble appeared everywhere. By the command of God, all nations obeyed the Romans. Now we see that the Roman world is brought low.1
Jacob and his opponents had heard of Muhammad. Only two years after Muhammad’s death, troubling news from Arabia made some Jews think that perhaps he was the “prophet” sent by God to announce the coming of the Messiah. In a letter to Carthage, a Jewish partner reported that the Byzantine general in command of the frontiers of Palestine had been killed in one of the first Arab raids:
When the general was killed by the Arabs, I was at Caesarea … People were saying “the general has been killed,” and we Jews were overjoyed. And they were saying that the prophet had appeared, coming with the Arabs, and that he was proclaiming the arrival of the Anointed One, the Messiah who was to come. I stopped … and paid a visit to a certain old man well versed in the Scriptures, and I said to him: “What can you tell me about the prophet who has appeared among the Arabs?” He replied, groaning deeply: “He is a false prophet, for prophets do not come armed with the sword” … So I inquired and heard from those who met him that there was no truth to be found in the so-called prophet, but only the shedding of men’s blood.”2
The Arab victories of the subsequent years left the inhabitants of the Near East, Jewish, Christian, and Zoroastrian alike, stunned. In 636, the East Roman army was crushed on the steep eastern slopes of the Golan, at the battle of the Yarmuk (in modern Syria). A year later, at Qâdisiyya (in modern Iraq), the Persian army suffered a similar fate. Egypt fell in 642. Crossing the Zagros on to the plateau of Iran, the Arabs routed the last Persian king at Nihâwand, in 642, and soon controlled Central Asia as far as Samarkand. Carthage fell in 698, and the Visigothic kingdom of Spain collapsed in 711. At the same time, far to the east, Arab armies were raiding northern India and had made contact with the western outposts of the Chinese empire. Nothing like this had happened since the days of Alexander the Great. It was the greatest political revolution ever to occur in the history of the ancient world. For the first time in human history, the populations of the archipelago of settled regions which stretched from Morocco and Andalusia to Central Asia and the Punjab found themselves part of a single political system.
Christian contemporaries of this revolution could do justice to so immense a change only by invoking the vision of the succession of great empires in the Book of Daniel. In the succession of empires, Rome had, up till then, been treated as the last empire. As we saw, Cosmas Indicopleustes, and with him the majority of East Roman Christians, Greek and Syrian alike, regarded this as a source of pride and confidence. Their empire was the empire of Christ. It would last for as long as time itself would last. But now, only two generations after the writing of the Christian Topography, time had lurched forward. The age of Rome was over. Its end was in sight. The new “kingdom of the Arabs” had replaced Rome. It was the final, gigantic flare-up of human grandeur, pride, and violence before the return of Christ to earth and the Last Judgment. Christians who witnessed the events of the seventh century felt that they were participating in the last “changing of the kingdoms,” which had been predicted in the Book of Daniel:
This fourth, arising from the south, is the kingdom of the sons of Ishmael [the Arabs] … The fourth beast, the fourth kingdom, shall arise, which shall be greater than all other kingdoms, and it will consume the whole earth. (Daniel 7:23)3
The military and social reasons for the success of the Arab conquests have rightly fascinated historians.4 But there is an aspect of these conquests which needs to be remembered. They took place among intensely religious populations who held deeply felt views on the course of human history and on the manner in which God intervened in the world. It was these pre-existing systems of explanation which were mobilized to cope with the shock of sudden conquest. As a result, we can listen in to the voices of the Christian communities of the Near East, whose diversity we examined in the last chapter, as they tried to make sense of their position in a changed world.
A sense of the approaching end of time was in the air. It is a sign of the openness of Muslim Arabs to the religions around them that many Muslims appear to have shared in the anxieties of their Jewish and Christian subjects. Pious Muslims were by no means always as self-confident as the ideology of their empire encouraged them to be. They felt that they were men in a hurry, working in the twilight of the last days. They constantly feared that the entire enterprise of Islam might fail. In around 700, Hadiths, “Sayings of Muhammad,” were passed around the garrison cities of Syria. They were far from optimistic. The catastrophic defeat of the East Roman armies in Syria had, for the moment, cleared the empire out of the Near East, up to the edge of the Anatolian plateau. But Constantinople and the heartlands of the East Roman empire remained unconquered. They were protected on the sea by a formidable navy and on land by the bleak uplands of Anatolia. The Christian empire of East Rome, the empire of Rûm, might yet strike back. Hadiths circulated in which Muhammad had warned his followers:
Persia is [only a matter of] one or two thrusts and no Persia will be after that. But the Rûm [the East Romans] … are people of sea and rock … Alas, they are your enemies to the end of time.
Nothing could be certain:
Islam has started as a foreigner [to all lands] and may again become a foreigner, folding back [on Mecca and Medina] like a snake folding back into its hole.
To stand watch for one night on the coast of Syria, scanning the horizon for the dread return of the East Roman navy, was deemed a more pious action than to spend all night in prayer in the Ka’ba of Mecca.5
From the Arab point of view, the most surprising development of the seventh century was the survival of their empire, and its eventual transformation from a momentary “kingdom of the Arabs,” whose leaders happened to be Muslim, into a true Islamic empire, built to last. We should not allow hindsight to dull our sense of the extreme unlikelihood, in the 630s, that such an outcome would happen. Nor should we underestimate the doggedness and creativity of the Muslim elites and their collaborators in having created, by the year 700, an unambiguously Arab and Islamic state.
In themselves, the victories of the Arabs along the weakened frontiers of the settled land might have done little more than produce large areas in Mesopotamia and Syria which resembled the Sklaviniai of the Balkans. After the first momentum of the conquests was spent, and the unity generated by success had dissipated, these regions could easily have become lawless frontier zones, withdrawn, if only for a short time, from the immemorial grip of empire. The ancient empires would have returned, after a brief interlude of Arab rule.
This possibility was always present in the seventh century. The Arab armies were recruited from tribesmen. Their first loyalty was to their own tribes and not to Islam. The commanders of the Arab armies were Muslims; but they knew very well that it was on the energy of the tribes that the success of their armies depended. At the battle of Qâdisiyya, for instance, the Arab armies had been mauled on the first day by a significantly larger and well-trained Persian army. During that night, the Muslim leader, Sa’d ibn Abî Waqqâs, lay on the roof of a house, listening to the troops around the campfires, in an attempt to assess their morale. What he heard reassured him. In every tribal compound, the sound of poets and reciters of genealogies filled the night air, boasting in high Arabic the martial valor of their clan. He knew that they would win next day.6
Such raw material might win battles. But it was unlikely, by itself, to create an empire. The Arab leadership was riven by feuds. In 656–61 and again in 683–92 the Arabs of the western, Syrian territories were pitted against the eastern Arabs of Iraq in fierce civil wars. Yet, despite these strains, a permanent Islamic empire emerged. This was partly due to the skill with which the Arab rulers of Syria enlisted the active collaboration of the surviving members of the provincial elites, both Persian and East Roman. Coming after generations of breakdown, where anything could have happened, the vast new state was not only the result of conquest. It was the result of the ability of its rulers and public servants to turn conquest into law and order. And this ability came from a firm vote on the part of the silent majority of the settled populations of the Near East for the stability of empire – of any empire – over potential anarchy.7
It is interesting to see how Christians in the Near East regarded this development. Writing in Syriac in northern Mesopotamia in 687, John bar Penkâye remembered the Arab conquests of the 630s with horror:
God summoned against us a Barbarian Kingdom – a people that is not open to persuasion (Isaiah 65:2) … whose comfort lies in meaningless bloodshed, whose pleasure is to dominate all nations, whose wish is to take captives and to make deportations.8
But those times now lay in the past. John had nothing but praise for the Arab Calif Mu’awiya (661–680). For Mu’awiya had brought an end to civil war.
He became king, controlling the two kingdoms, the Persians and the Byzantines. Justice flourished in his time and there was great peace in the regions under his control. He allowed everyone to live as they wanted.9
We can appreciate the hopes and fears of a man such as John bar Penkâye if we look at the Near East with the eyes of persons who still remembered the days of Heraclius and of Khusro II Aparwez. Then the Fertile Crescent had been a corridor for conflicting armies (as it remained, in times of civil war, between rival Arab armies). But, once the military frontier between Rome and Persia had been expunged by the Arab conquest of Syria, Iraq, and Iran, the Near East became a more natural unit. Its separate parts fell together after centuries of division. Strong rule which maintained this unity was good for everyone.
The new Islamic empire was associated with the rule of the Ummayads of Syria – the family of Ummaya, members of the clan of the Quraysh, from which the Calif Mu’awiya had come. This empire linked the former subjects of East Rome and Persia in a single political and economic system, whose local administrative underpinning was recognizably continuous with all that had gone before.
We need only go to the monuments created by the Ummayads to appreciate what this could mean. They show that the Near East had become a common market of artistic skills. To take one example: The Ummayad palace of Khirbet al-Mafjar, now known as the Hisham Palace from its supposed connection with the Calif Hisham (724–743), stands a little outside Jericho in modern Palestine. It lies near the road across the Jordan into steppelands which had once marked a military frontier. But, after the establishment of the Islamic empire, the steppes beyond Jericho marked no more than the starting point of routes which continued without a break, within the territories of a single state, as far as Central Asia. The cultural frontier between the world of Persia and the Mediterranean world of Rome had been expunged. Looking at the astonishing stone-carving, mosaic, and stucco-work discovered in the Hisham Palace, we realize that two once separate worlds had come together to create something new.
They are strange to look at. The mosaics of the great private bathhouse are recognizably East Roman in design and layout; and yet there is a sense of color and of tight pattern which makes them look more like woven carpets. The stucco-work has the same exuberance as we find in the palaces and hunting lodges of Persian kings on the Iranian plateau; and yet it includes figures gesturing like Roman rhetors in carefully folded togas. Modern stereotypes of what an Arab, Muslim world should look like are undermined by this art. It is neither recognizably Muslim nor particularly Arab as we now imagine “Muslim” and “Arab” to be, when we think of the Islamic world. This art was new. But it did not come from the desert. Nor did it owe anything to Islam. It was created by the joining of the two sides of the Fertile Crescent. What we call Islamic art began with a mutation of old traditions brought about through the creative splicing of elements taken from the hitherto divided cultures of the western (East Roman) and the eastern (Persian) regions of the Near East.10
At the same time, a profound transformation also took place in the ideology of the elites of the Arab empire itself. This was, in many ways, a reaction to the troubling richness and wide horizons which had been opened up by the Arab conquests. The pressure of civil war led to a need to assert a common and fully public ideology – a mainstream on which all sides of the Arab, Muslim community could agree. There was a real danger that the Muslim community would disintegrate and that Muslims would lose their identity. They would sink back into the rich world revealed by monuments such as the Hisham Palace. A remedy for this danger could be found only in the assertion of a common Islam and in an increased emphasis on a common Arab heritage. In religious and literary circles, both the Muslim and the Arab aspects of the new empire were stressed with a new urgency.
The Qur’ân was written down in 660. In the Qur’ân, the messages of Muhammad seemed to be removed from time and space. Though delivered in Arabic and to Arabs, they were for all places and all peoples. These messages were now rendered intelligible by commentaries and by supplementary narratives which placed Muhammad and his preaching in a hyper-real, strictly local, and Arabian context. The exact circumstances of Muhammad’s utterances and actions in Mecca and Medina were evoked with loving circumstantiality. By this means, the landscape of the Hijâz was fixed forever in the minds of Muslims as far apart as Spain and China. This was where their history began.11
And it was a pan-Arabian history. Muhammad had shown dislike for the “Arabs of the desert.” He regarded them as boastful, feral men, heedless of religion and capable of destroying their newborn daughters by burying them in the sand.12 In the later tradition, however, this dislike was muted. The “Arabs of the desert” and the city dwellers were treated as fellow-Arabs. The nomads were accepted. They were spoken of as “the root of the Arabs and the reinforcement of Islam.”13 Barbarian settlers in western Europe had created histories for themselves in the same way. It helped to make them separate from the populations with whom they had mixed. As we saw in chapter 5, the Saxons of Britain came to speak proudly of their “coming” to the island in ships across the sea. In so doing they turned generations of desultory migration and symbiosis with the local populations into a single, heroic moment of invasion. But nothing which happened in barbarian western Europe equalled the energy with which the Muslims of around 700 mobilized a sense of their own Arabian past. The creation of an Arabic historical tradition was one of the great intellectual achievements of the early Middle Ages.
The sense of the past which was achieved through this creation of tradition tacitly excluded all outsiders to Arabia. Jews and Christians, Persians and East Romans were allotted “walk-on parts,” but little more. The immensely rich but inward-looking Arabic historical tradition virtually ignored the intimacy and the complexity of the relations between the Arabs and the other cultures of the Near East, which we described in the last chapter. This has to be recovered from other, non-Arabic sources.
As a result of these pressures, the state set in order by the successors of Mu’awiya, notably by the Califs ‘Abd al-Malik (685–705) and al-Walid (705–715), was a defiantly Islamic, Arabic state.
On the ground level, administrative practice continued as before. East Roman families continued to collect the taxes in Syria and Egypt, Persians did the same in Mesopotamia and Iran. Seen from below, little had changed. But this was not the case at the top. At the governmental level, the empire took on a firm, public face. After 699, Arabic became the sole official language of the bureauracy. At the time, the change affected only those involved in the business of administration. But the Califs also used the same, overwhelmingly visual means for making their presence felt in the world at large as had been used by the East Roman emperors. They used coins which everyone saw. After many experiments, a new gold and silver coinage was issued in 693 to replace the coins of East Rome, which had previously circulated as legal tender, or had been copied, with adaptations, in the Calif’s mints. Now the coins were cleared of all representations of the human figure. Only passages from the Qur’ân, in a firm Arabic script, could be seen on them.14 Even the milestones came to bear Arabic inscriptions, including the Muslim confession of faith, the shahâda: “I confess that there is no God but the One God, and that Muhammad is his prophet.”15
By the year 700, the public spaces of Syria, Egypt, and Iraq had begun to look distinctively Muslim and Arabic. Arabic could be seen on coins, inscriptions, and textiles. A little later, under the Calif Yazid II (720–724) the Cross (which had been the sign par excellence – almost the “national flag” – of the East Roman Christian empire founded by Constantine) was removed from public places.16
Above all, Muslims seized on the traditions of public building which had led, in East Rome, to stupendous monuments such as Constantine’s church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem and Justinian’s Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, as we saw in chapters 3 and 7. They were fully conscious of the need to compete with Christians. It was in this spirit that the Calif al-Walid built the Great Mosque in Damascus:
For he beheld Syria to be a country that had long been occupied by Christians and he noted the beautiful churches still belonging to them, so enchantingly fair and so renowned for their splendor [such as the church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem] … So he sought to build for the Muslims a mosque that should prevent them from looking with admiration at the Christian churches, and that should be unique and a wonder to the world.17
The Great Mosque of Damascus, which al-Walid began in 705, revealed very clearly what the Muslim rulers of the empire wished. They followed, in a new idiom, a thoroughly Roman ideal. They created public spaces in which to make stunning visual statements of the prosperity and innate superiority of their empire. Mosques were perfect for this purpose. The word mosque comes from masjid. The word has survived virtually unchanged in Spanish as mezquita – a testimony to centuries of Arabic-speaking Muslim rule. It meant “place of worship.” The mosque was a place for fully public worship. The entire Muslim community was expected to assemble in their mosques at regular times, and especially on Fridays. Unlike the Christian churches, even the greatest of which still maintained a sense of secluded mystery, the mosque – in the largely rainless climate of Syria, Egypt, and Iraq – was an open-air meeting place. Used for prayer, but also for preaching, for announcements of important news and for discussions, the open courtyard of the mosque served both as the forum and as the parade-ground of a religious “nation in arms.”
Al-Walid created his mosque by the simple and drastic device of enclosing the former religious heart of the city. He included in this enclosure both the gigantic temple of Jupiter and the Christian shrine dedicated to John the Baptist, later known to Muslims as Yahya. Before 705, the Christian church had been shared as a place of prayer by Christians and Muslims. This was a normal practice in the early years of Muslim rule.18
The mosque was a statement of imperial grandeur and a monument to victory. It was resplendent with marbles and columns known to have been taken from conquered royal palaces. It was sheathed with mosaic work which was said to have been provided, by way of tribute, by humbled East Roman emperors.
Yet this very ancient message of victory also carried with it a strong and distinctively Muslim religious charge. As we saw in the case of Gregory of Tours, in chapter 6, Christians had always believed in Paradise as a garden of delights. Muslims shared this belief. But, in Christian churches, this was an otherworldly Paradise, conjured up in the depths of great, enclosed shrines. In the Great Mosque believers did not enter into a building. Rather, they stood in the open air. Their Paradise was all around them. The courtyard of the mosque was a vast pleasure-garden, surrounded by scenes in glittering mosaic of palaces set in vivid greens, among streams of sparkling water. It was full of light, bright color and water. Such a mosque was an image on earth of the Paradise promised to true believers in the Qur’ân.19
A little earlier, the Calif ‘Abd al-Malik had made an even more aggressive statement of the superiority of Muslims to all other religions. In 692, he began to build the Dome of the Rock on top of the deserted site of the former Jewish Temple at Jerusalem. The new dome towered above the dome of Constantine’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Inside, the mosaics around the base of the dome bore inscriptions from the Qur’ân. These are the first evidences that we have of the Qur’ân as a written document (for no early copies of the Qur’ân have survived). And they were put there with a purpose. They showed that the Calif wished to make plain to visiting Muslim pilgrims that, in God’s definitive judgment, the entire past of Christianity had been weighed and found wanting. The inscriptions were taken from verses of the Qur’ân in which Christians were rebuked:
Oh People of the Book [that is, Christians, defined by their possession of Holy Scriptures], do not go beyond the bounds of your religion … Jesus, the son of Mary, was [only] God’s Messenger … It is not for God to take a son … The true religion with God is Islam. (Qur’ân iv:171 and iii:19)
There was even a strong belief at that time that, at the Last Judgment, God himself would set up his throne upon the Temple Mount, and would judge the Christians according to these clear messages contained in the Qur’ân.20
There was no doubt about it: the founders of the Islamic empire believed, as unthinkingly as did their Christian contemporaries, that there was a direct relationship between the favor of God and the foundation of great empires. The foundation of their own, Islamic empire proved that Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians had been wrong and that they themselves were right. As one Arab Muslim told a local Christian hermit: “It is a sign of God’s love for us and His pleasure with our faith, that He has given us dominion over all peoples and faiths.”21
Such was the public face of the Islamic empire in around the year 700. But it is important to remember that in the seventh and eighth centuries the Near East was utterly unlike the predominantly Muslim and totally Arabic-speaking world that it is today. Islam was the religion of only a tiny minority of the overall population of the region. Massive conversions to Islam did not begin until the Middle Ages, at a time after the period covered in this book. The Arabs were scattered widely throughout the Near East. They soon became dominant in areas which abutted the steppes, such as Syria. Elsewhere, they were a distant presence. They were dwarfed by the civilian populations among whom they lived, much as the barbarian settlers in the Mediterranean regions of the western empire in the fifth century had been dwarfed by the Roman provincials.
Compared with the barbarian settlements in the West, however, the Muslims lived a strangely segregated existence. Muslims thought of themselves as soldiers on campaign, and not as farmers or landowners. They received handsome rewards in cash and food in exchange for being permanently available for war. They were known to each other and to the outside world as muhâjirûn, as persons in a state of unceasing hijra. They were permanent emigrants. They followed the example of Muhammad when he had led his Companions to Medina. They were armed men, settled in temporary residences, always prepared to move on.22 Islam was the religion of military camps. These camps soon grew into great cities. Basra and Kufa were founded within a few decades of the first conquests along the edge of southern Iraq. They served as great “ports of entry” for the populations of the Arabian desert. The tribes of the desert would be gathered in them and would then be sent out for further campaigns. Garrison cities of this sort sprang up all over the Islamic empire.
Such settlements were called amsâr (the plural of misr), “cities.” They were like the great legionary camps of Roman times. One such city, ‘Anjar, was founded in around 714 on the route which joined Damascus to Beirut. It was surrounded by a rectangular wall, 370 by 310 meters, with 40 towers. Inside, the spaces were laid out within a perfect grid pattern, with wide avenues radiating from a central column. Nothing so purely “Roman” had been built in the Near East for centuries. Yet new elements were placed in the ancient framework. One quadrant was devoted to the governor’s palace flanked by a large mosque. The residential area was made up of large, walled compounds, each looking in on itself around a central courtyard. There was no forum.23
Like the great cities of the New World in the first centuries of the Spanish empire, the new Muslim cities of the Near East were vivid but encapsulated centers where the culture and religion of the conquerors were everywhere. But they were perched against a landscape where little had changed. In the cities, the Muslim community was largely self-perpetuating. Massive influxes of slaves took place on a scale which had not been seen since the Roman conquest of the Greek East. There was room for such slaves in the great houses of the Arab leaders. Through the practice of concubinage and polygamy, the descendants of slave-women came to grow up in a totally Arab and Muslim environment. Many of the greatest Arabic poets, grammarians, lawyers, and theologians of the Muslim world were the descendants of a generation of slaves brought to Iraq from Iran and Central Asia. Supremely confident in their ability to reproduce themselves, physically and culturally, Arab Muslims felt no need to reach out to make converts among the subject religions of their empire.
Protected in this way by a sort of religious and social apartheid, the Christians of the Near East settled down to live with their new masters in a state of perpetual ambivalence. Their position within the Islamic state was far better than the status of non-Christians, Jews and pagans, in the Christian empire. Under the Christian empire of Justinian, as we saw in chapter 7, pagans and other religious minorities were subject to constant pressure to convert. After his triumphal return to Jerusalem, the emperor Heraclius had extended the policies of Justinian to include the forcible baptism of the Jews.24
Nothing like this happened in the first centuries of Muslim rule. Jews and Christians were treated as “Peoples of the Book.” According to the messages of Muhammad, they had received from God their own prophets and their own valid Scriptures. They may not have lived up to their original saving message. They were, as it were, failed Muslims. But they still deserved respect on the strength of their possession of holy books.
Christians paid a special poll-tax – the jizya – in return for the “benefaction” of being allowed to continue to practice their religion undisturbed. The jizya tax was intended to make plain their subordination. It was paid by individuals and not (as the land-tax was paid) by communities. Its administration required an elaborate and vexatious system of registration, such as only a strong empire, backed by a professional bureaucracy, could have imposed. Even the moment of payment was supposed to emphasize the subordinate position of “people of the book” over against Muslims. Lawyers insisted that those who offered the jizya must be careful to present the money on their upraised palms, in such a way that their hands should never be seen to rise above those of the Muslim recipient! In return for this mark of inferiority, Christians and Jews were left free to carry on their lives under the protection of an Islamic empire. They could continue their religious practices, under their traditional leaders, as long as they supported the Muslim armies with their wealth, through taxes. For Muslims, the massive presence of two superannuated religious dispensations merely highlighted the triumphant novelty of Islam. Individual converts to Islam were, of course, welcome. But forced conversions were not favored. At that time, they would have broken down the carefully constructed compartments into which the populations of the Near East were organized, so as to bear the weight of the last and greatest empire of all times.25
As a result of this situation, Islam rested as lightly as a mist along the contours of what had remained a largely Christian landscape. In provinces which were distant from the centers of Muslim power, in upper Egypt and in northern Iraq, local Christian elites remained firmly in control for centuries. They administered the taxes and proudly maintained the churches and great monasteries of their region. A Christian holy man in the foothills of the Zagros gained privileges for his convent through curing the favorite horse of the local Muslim emir.26
Indeed, there was always far more contact between Christians and Muslims than the official ideology of both sides would allow us to suspect. Muslims frequently consulted Christian hermits and even joined in Christian ceremonies. It was the Christian clergy and the Muslim lawyers who had to draw firm boundaries: the laity often did not see why they should not mix with fellow-monotheists.27 As a result of generations of barely noticeable symbiosis Christian and Jewish legends and ideals poured into the traditions of Islam. Within two centuries of the Arab conquests, the image of Jesus, in Islamic legend, had come to be modelled on vivid memories of the great monks of Egypt and Syria. Always spoken of by Muslims with the greatest reverence, Jesus – the Isa’ of the Qur’ân – was imagined as a great ascetic, dwelling in desert places, praying and weeping abundantly.28
All over the Syriac-speaking territories of northern Mesopotamia, pious Christian notables continued to endow schools and monasteries in which cultural activities which had changed little since the days of Justinian continued up to the days of the Crusades and the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century. Altogether, Near Eastern Christianity settled down for the long haul. How the different Christian communities would fare in coming centuries depended very much on their geographical position, their relation to Muslim centers of power and, even more decisively, on the traditions and view of their own history of the individual churches.
Near to the centers of power, in Palestine and Jordan, the Muslim armies had passed swiftly northward, leaving behind them villages where churches were still being built in the very year that Roman rule collapsed in Syria. Jerash, for instance, was a city still dominated by its ancient pagan temple. One small mosque only appeared in Jerash, alongside 15 fully functioning Christian churches. The local manufacturers of terracotta lamps at Jerash solved the problem of the emergence of yet another world religion by inscribing them, on one side, in Greek, with “The Light of the Christians is the Resurrection,” and, on the other, in Arabic, with “In the Name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate.”29
At the court of Damascus, Christian civil servants continued to play a crucial role. Long before the Arab conquests, Damascus had a large population of settled Arabs. A leading Arab Christian, Mansûr, had been responsible for the taxes of the region under the emperor Heraclius. Mansûr’s son, Sarjûn (Sergius: like so many Arabs, he was named from the great saint of Resafa), served the Ummayad Califs. He supervised the taxes of the entire Middle East. Only in A.D. 700 did Sergius’ son – Mansûr bar Sarjûn – leave court. A typical member of a pious East Roman family devoted to public service who had turned to religion, Mansûr, like Gregory the Great in Rome, abandoned the “cares” of office to become a learned monk. He is known under his monastic name, John: John of Damascus – John Damascene – a prolific writer in Greek and a founding father of the medieval Orthodox tradition.30
The case of John of Damascus showed that it was possible for an Arab to be many things in seventh-century Damascus. A fragment of a book of the Psalms intended for public reading in church shows how complex the situation must have been on the ground. It is written in Greek letters; but the language is Arabic!31 Plainly, a clergy accustomed to using Greek as the language of learning (and unable or unwilling to use the written Arabic associated with the Qur’ân) would conduct the services in Arabic for what had long been a largely Arabic-speaking population. These were settled Arabs. Yet, at the same time, an Arab Christian, al-Akhtal, emerged as one of the greatest poets at the Ummayad court. Proud of wearing the Cross and loyal to his saint, Sergius, al-Akhtal was particularly valued by his Muslim patrons. He brought to a court of nouveaux riches from the Hijâz memories of the good old days of “pure” Arab poetry, associated with the Lakhmid Christian court of Hira. These two Arab Christians were near contemporaries. But they took two different roads. John, son of Sarjûn, ended his life as the last great Father of the Greek Church. Al-Akhtal, by contrast, though equally a Christian, led his hearers back to the golden days of Arabic verse, as it had been practiced, before Islam, among the Arabs of the Persian frontier.32
In a complex city such as Damascus, individuals were free to take many roads. The Christian communities as a whole, however, found themselves burdened by their own distinctive pasts. Each Church reacted very differently to the new situation. They did so in terms of their previous history. The Chalcedonians had been the state Church of the Near East. They came to be known, quite simply, as “Melkites” – as “the Emperor’s People.” The collapse of the East Roman empire was a cruel blow for them. The extensive toleration of Christians under Muslim rule is rightly appreciated as a sympathetic feature of the first centuries of the Islamic empire. But seventh-century “Melkite” Christians, used to the East Roman empire, were in no mood to be thankful. They did not greatly value tolerance. What they had been used to was an official Church which dominated public space, in the manner which we described in chapter 7. To be stripped of this public persona was an unforgivable humiliation.
Yet all was not lost. Prolonged controversy with Monophysites, and more recently, under Heraclius, with Jews, had taught local Chalcedonians how to look after themselves. A characteristic genre developed at this time. It consisted of Questions and Answers which included vigorous imaginary debates with religious enemies. In the under-governed empire of Heraclius (where whole provinces lived for decades under Persian rule) state orthodoxy could no longer be imposed by force from on top. Hostile groups lived cheek by jowl. They argued with each other incessantly. Texts such as the genre of Questions and Answers enabled the “orthodox” Chalcedonian believer to meet any challenge, delivered anywhere and on any topic, with a brisk return of fire.33 By treating Jews and all Christian groups with even-handed indifference, the Islamic empire merely declared a permanent open season for religious disputes between Jews and Christians, Chalcedonians and Monophysites. Unlike in the days of Justinian, no group could use state power to silence the other.
Anastasius of Sinai was a learned Chalcedonian. He had worked among “Roman” captives from Cyprus, set by their Arab masters to work in the lethal asphalt deposits of the Dead Sea. He wrote an encyclopedic catalogue of answers for every kind of religious doubt. He also recorded a series of Stories to Strengthen the Faith. Anastasius knew his Muslims at close hand. He knew that they believed that a man predestined to die fighting in the holy war would bear on his face unmistakable signs of his impending “martyrdom.” He also knew that some Christians had become Muslims and that many others treated Islam as no more than an innocuous variant of their own religion. He wrote to warn such people. When ʾAbd al-Malik began to construct the Dome of the Rock, Anastasius was told by pious Christians in Jerusalem that they had actually heard at night the cries of the demons, as they helped the Muslims to clear the debris from the Temple Mount. The demons were helping “their allies, the Saracens [the Arabs],” to make the site ready for the supreme blasphemy of ʾAbd al-Malik’s shrine. Anastasius also told the story of two Christian sailors who had visited Mecca. At night they saw a hideous form arise from the earth to devour the meat of the camels and goats offered, in sacrifice, around the Kaʾba. This proved, Anastasius insisted, that the sacrifice at the Kaʾba was no “true sacrifice,” instituted by Abraham. Muslim sacrifices were ghoulish rites, which would never ascend to Heaven as pleasing to God.34
By contrast to Chalcedonian “Melkites,” the Syrian and Egyptian Monophysites of the “Jacobite” church were no great lovers of the Arab nomads. But they arrived at less dramatic conclusions than did the humiliated Chalcedonians. God had “nodded his assent” to the Arab conquests. They were a punishment on the East Roman emperors for having persecuted the true – that is, the Monophysite – Church:
When He saw that the measure of the sins of the Romans was full to overflowing … He stirred up the sons of Ishmael and enticed them hither from their southern land … Yet it was by striking a bargain with them that we secured our deliverance. This was no small gain, to be delivered from the tyrannical kingdom of the Romans.35
In order to justify their claim to be the true Church, the Monophysites became the remembrancers of the Near East. Monophysite historians of the Church constantly turned back to the fateful decisions of the Council of Chalcedon, the “Great Prevarication,” and to the persecutions which the upholders of the true Monophysite faith had suffered from successive East Roman emperors in the fifth and sixth centuries. As late as the 760 s, Chalcedonians and Monophysites presented the Muslim governor of Alexandria with rival petitions:
The Chalcedonians sent him a letter [only] a few spans long … and when he read it he laughed and shook his head.
The Monophysites, however, knew their late Roman history. They recounted in detail, from contemporary sources, the disastrous consequences in Alexandria of the Council of Chalcedon – persecutions, lynchings, punitive massacres.
When the judge heard that, he clapped his hands together and said to those around him: “Oh, what a tyrannical deed was that!”36
For Middle Eastern contemporaries of the young Charlemagne, events which had happened three centuries earlier, in the 450s, and which had taken place in the now-distant East Roman empire, were still contemporary history.
Hence the tenacity of the grip upon the past exercised, especially, by the Syriac-speaking (and largely Monophysite) Christians of northern Mesopotamia. Far from marking the end of an age in northern Mesopotamia, the Arab conquest may even have fostered intellectual developments which had begun in pre-Islamic times. The seventh and eighth centuries saw the creation of an “eastern Hellenism” – the flowering of elite culture in a Syriac which was permeated by Greek forms.
It is revealing to see how this happened. The great monasteries of the region were central to the emergence of this last Syriac transformation of ancient Greek traditions. These monasteries were not the well-disciplined and somewhat monochrome “powerhouses of prayer” which had emerged in western Europe. They were large settlements, ringed by walls. The monks practiced many forms of asceticism, some of them highly individualistic. Most major monasteries boasted their own “stylite” hermits, set on columns near the monastery, and many hermits, settled in the neighboring caves. But there was room also in such places for an educated elite. Like Cassiodorus, monks would often bring with them into the monastery an entire “worldly” culture. As abbots, bishops, and teachers, they would continue high standards of literacy and of intellectual inquiry.
There were many such people in the Near East of the sixth and seventh centuries. The Syrians were not members of a warrior elite, as were the aristocrats of Francia and Visigothic Spain, for whom the “subtlety of words,” associated with Latin literature, meant less and less. Rather, they were civilians who were used to careers as highly literate public servants. In the East Roman empire, they had to be bilingual. In the days of Justinian and Heraclius, Greek was as much part of their cultural world as was Syriac. The mother of one future monk and bishop (John of Tella, a city in eastern Turkey) sent him to serve in the office of the local military governor. To qualify for the job, he went to a Greek school “to learn the letters and wisdom of the Greeks.” It was only as a result of his religious vocation that John began to read and to memorize the Psalms in his native Syriac. Yet he went on to a monastery which specialized in the study of the greatest and most Greek of theologians, Gregory Nazianzen. John was typical of the biculturalism which was taken for granted in the Syrian churches of the period before the Arab conquests.
Far from breaking this tradition, the Arab conquests merely hastened the absorption into Syriac of the Greek elements in the bilingual culture of Syria. As with the translations of Boethius in Rome, translations of Greek works met the needs of a learned class which had ceased to be bilingual, but which still valued contact with “the letters and wisdom of the Greeks.” They still wished to read Greek works, even if only in translation. The Iliad of Homer was translated into Syriac by Theophilus of Edessa (695–785) in around 750.37
If literature can be defined as “language transfigured by the play of form,” then much of later Syriac literature is language transfigured by Greek form.38 It was a literature based on intensive schooling in Syriac monasteries. This schooling maintained, in Syriac, educational traditions which reached back for a millennium to the schools of the Hellenistic age. Students were taught to analyze grammar and to adhere to strict rules of composition. The handbook produced by Anthony of Tagrit (a monastery on the Tigris in modern Iraq) proclaimed, in Syriac, that ancient rhetoric was alive and well in Mesopotamia. Other nations might use words. But they did so
as a peasant uses a table, not knowing how it was put together. An Arab may praise, blame or incite to battle, yet may never have learned the fair art of Demosthenes.39
Anthony knew no Greek. But he knew what it was to write well, like a Greek. It is a statement of classical values which we do not expect to hear from an inhabitant of Mesopotamia in the age of Charlemagne.
From Antioch to China, Syriac remained one of the great languages of culture of medieval Asia. And, with Syriac, time stood still. In the West and in Constantinople, drastic changes in book production led to the adoption of a new, more compact script, known as “minuscule.” After the ninth century, the flowing script of Greek and Latin manuscripts of classical and late antique times became unreadable to the average clergyman. Books which were not recopied into “minuscule” script at that time were as good as lost to future ages. A crevasse of this nature, between the present and the past, did not open up in the well-stocked monastic libraries of Syria and northern Iraq. Up to this century, any learned Syriac-speaker could take up and read a manuscript written in the age of Justinian.
The Histories produced by the Syrians of northern Mesopotamia were world chronicles. Each began with Adam and followed with attention the fate of the Christian Church throughout the Near East. They described the vicissitudes of their own region against a majestic background. The sequence of events was slotted into a chronological system which counted the years all the way back to Adam. What they described were God’s eternal dealings with the human race. All the vicissitudes of human life, from the rise of great new empires (such as the kingdom of the Arabs) to the incursions of locusts, brigands, and tax-collectors, were written about as if they happened according to one basic rhythm: sin and repentance. Sin brought affliction, repentance brought peace and prosperity. There was a strong sense of déjà vu about such chronicles. The world of the Hebrew prophets, who had foretold the extinction of Israel, was little different from the world of eighth-century northern Mesopotamia as it faced the stresses and strains of Muslim rule:
Here Jeremiah was of great use to us … He should now come and cry out not over one nation and city, Jerusalem, but over all nations.40
Such chronicles highlighted the afflictions of their own times and region. These were God’s response to the sins of its inhabitants. But the very repetitiveness of the story was a subliminal source of comfort. There was nothing new or necessarily irreversible about the Arab conquests. It had happened before. The empires of Rome and Persia had passed away. Throughout these afflictions, God was always present to protect his Church. As in the days of the people of Israel, the times would change again.
The chronicle tradition was one of the most carefully nurtured and long-lasting forms of culture in the Christian Near East. It was the product of a remarkably stable culture, living at peace behind the frontiers of a great empire. In the course of the seventh century, the culture of the East Roman empire almost foundered completely under the hammer-blows of Muslim invasions. Entire tracts of the history of the seventh century were not recorded by Greek chroniclers. In Edessa, many miles from the war zone of eastern Anatolia, Syrians kept the record straight. They plotted the events of the seventh century year by year. When, in the ninth century, Byzantines attempted to revive their own chronicle tradition and to fill in the lacuna in historical memory inflicted by the crisis of the seventh century, it was to Syriac chroniclers that they turned.41
And the tradition continued. The great Histories of the Monophysite Church, compiled from earlier writers by Michael the Syrian (1166–1199) and by Gregory Abu al-Farâj, known as Barhebraeus (d.1286), look back without a break to the fifth century A.D. To read them is to catch an unmistakable echo of the world of late antiquity in contemporaries of Richard Coeur de Lion, Saint Louis, and Marco Polo. The Mongol Laws of Chingiz Khan, wrote Barhebraeus, have gnomic elements: they reminded him of the Gnomai of Gregory Nazianzen. As for their shamanist belief in the journey of the soul, this, of course, says the learned Syrian, with over a thousand years of unbroken culture behind him, can be found in the writings of Aflatûn – of Plato – when he discusses the doctrine of the transmigration of souls!42
For the eastern Christians of the former Persian territories, Muslim rulers were, if anything, a marked improvement on the erratic patronage of a pagan King of Kings. It was the Zoroastrian state religion of Persia which was well and truly humbled by the Arab conquests. The loss of the monarchy and the impoverishment of the Iranian aristocracy broke the back of the “Good Religion.” Zoroastrians were appalled by the Arab conquest:
The Good Religion was ruined and the King of Kings was slain like a dog. They eat the bread of the land. They have taken away the sovereignty from the emperors.43
But not so the Christians. The Eastern Christians of Iraq positively welcomed the establishment of a strong, frankly monotheist empire.
Before calling them, [God] had prepared them beforehand to hold Christians in honor … How otherwise could naked men, riding without armor and shield, have … brought down the proud spirit of the Persians?44
The hierarchy of the Church of the East benefited from an empire whose horizons were even larger than those of the Sasanians. In the 780s, at a time when Harûn al-Rashid was launching his last great expeditions into East Roman Anatolia and when the armies of Charlemagne fought their bitter campaigns in the woods of pagan Saxony, eastern Christian bishops were at work on the edge of the world, in regions “destitute even of Arabs and Jews, who confess One God, the Creator of Heaven and Earth.”45 They hacked down the holy trees of the pagan mountain tribes of the Caspian highlands. They revived the Christian mission in Hsian-fu. Timothy I (780–823), the Katholikos of the “Church of the East,” took full advantage of the new situation. He reminded a bishop, who had asked for a pension with which to spend a comfortable retirement in Baghdad, that Christian monks who possessed nothing but their staff and satchel were walking the roads that led to India and China. He even planned a new bishopric “for the peoples of Tibet.”46
As we have seen, these very different Christian communities had all been able to maintain their identity under Muslim rule. To a large extent, they were even able to carry on with the cultural and religious agendas which they had inherited from late antiquity. They gave way very slowly to the pressure of Islam. In northern Mesopotamia, however, we can see, through the shocked pages of the Chronicle of Zuqnîn (a world chronicle that came to be preserved in the Monophysite monastery of Zuqnîn, near Diyarbekir in eastern Turkey), how the Islamization of the Near East began.
As with most miseries associated with this zone of great empires, it began with taxes. The world of the Christian villages, whose resilience we described in chapter 12, finally gave way when the economy gave way under the pressure of taxes and of the demands of passing armies in times of civil war. For, as in the Roman empire, it was civil war, and not barbarian invasion, which caused most disruption to the inhabitants. The collapse of the Ummayads, in 750, and their replacement by Arab armies from eastern Iran turned northern Mesopotamia into a corridor through which conflicting armies passed, as they had done in the sixth century. An age of prosperity came to an end. It was bankruptcy and bad government, and not direct pressure to convert brought to bear by an Islamic state, which opened the way for conversion.
The situation also affected the Muslims of the area. They had changed. They were no longer a distant, dominating class. The greater degree of professionalization of the Arab armies rendered the services of many Muslims unnecessary. They left the great garrison towns and settled among the surrounding populations. In so doing, they brought Islam to Christian towns and villages for which the new faith had previously been a distant matter.
An entire underclass of “demobilized” Muslims developed. They suffered as severely from misgovernment and from the effects of civil war as did their Christian neighbors. Often they shared the afflictions of the Christians. They contributed to collections of money made by local Christians for the ransom of captives taken from their neighborhood. But, because they faced impoverishment and loss of status, they competed all the more fiercely with Christians for the one insurance against disaster which a Near Eastern society could offer – land in the villages. The Chronicle of Zuqnîn describes how, in around 770, the Muslims took advantage of a period of warfare and crippling taxation “to wriggle among the poor villagers like worms in wood.” Only then did mass conversions begin in earnest. Impoverished villagers
turned to Islam faster than sheep rushing to water … They would boast and look down on us, saying … “you are godless, and holding as it were on to spiders’ webs.”
These converts became outcasts among their own people. Even “the color of their face, their body odor, and the look of their eyes” showed that they had abandoned the “sweet smell” of Christian baptism. But they were not particularly welcome to the Muslims. Drawn from Syriac-speaking villages, their Arabic was minimal. The Muslims called them “The ‘These-There’ ”: for they only knew enough Arabic to point to things!47
Ultimately, it was the victory of Arabic which opened the doors to Islamization. The spread of Arabic eroded the elaborate compartmentalization of Near Eastern society on which the earlier centuries of tolerance had been based. Religious and linguistic segregation had protected the Christians. The spread of Arabic removed this protective barrier. Yet the religious effects of the spread of Arabic were delayed. The elites of the different Christian groups soon came to share in the widespread enthusiasm for the new language of the Arabs. The Arabs thought of their language as the tongue of the “clear-spoken ones.” It was a Semitic language akin to Syriac. But, as we saw in our last chapter, Arabic had already developed, in the harsh conditions of Arabia, an overwhelming richness and precision. It was as sharp and flexible “as the blade of a rapier.” Arabic soon emerged in the Near East as something more than the official language of an empire. It was increasingly seen by Christians and non-Arabs as the one language in which every human thought and every human feeling – from love, war, and the desert hunt to the most elevated of metaphysical abstractions – could be expressed.48
By A.D. 800, it was the allure of an entire profane culture, expressed in Arabic, and not Islam itself, which caused the Christians of the Islamic empire to forget their own rich heritage. As a Christian wrote in Cordoba, in 852/4:
Many of my fellow-Christians read verses and fairy-tales of the Arabs, not in order to refute them, but to express themselves in Arabic ever more correctly and elegantly … Alas! All talented Christians know only the language and the literature of the Arabs … They express themselves … with more beauty and more art than do the Arabs themselves.49
If the clergy were to remain in control of their own laity, they had to learn Arabic and to participate in the new Arabic culture. To take one example: the Chalcedonian Christian, Theodore abu Qurrah (ca.740–ca.825), wrote most of his works in Arabic. He kept pace with Muslim theological debates. When he defended the worship of icons, passages from the Qur’ân and sayings ascribed to Muhammad were what engaged his attention. The debates on the same issue which raged at Constantinople at the same time meant nothing to him. An Arabic-speaking Christianity had come to look to Islam for its vocabulary and for its theological agenda, and not to the Greek West.50
The transfer of the center of the Islamic empire from Damascus to Baghdad, which was founded in 762, completed the triumph of Arabic among the Christians of the Near East. Baghdad lay close to the imposing ruins of Sasanian Ctesiphon. Eastern Christian administrators and doctors were as much in evidence in the court of Harûn al-Rashid (786–809) and his successors as they had been, two centuries before, in the reign of Khusro II Aparwez. The legal restrictions imposed on the “Peoples of the Book” weighed lightly on this extensive class of non-Muslim technocrats. Arab littérateurs complained of this. The large Christian community in Baghdad even forced up the price of fish, through buying so much on the days of their fasts!
The Christians now have costly mounts and thoroughbred horses. They have packs of hounds and play polo, wrap themselves in costly fabrics and affect [pure Arab] patronymics.51
Learned Christians were essential to the new Muslim ruling class as doctors and as astrologers. Altogether, they were human artesian wells. Only learned Christians who had retained knowledge of Syriac, and who enjoyed intermittent contacts with Greek-speaking fellow-Christians, could tap the vast subterranean reservoir of medical, scientific, and philosophical knowledge which had slowly seeped into the Syriac churches which were now subject to the Islamic empire. Men whose culture reached back to the days of the foundation of the School of Nisibis now became transmitters of Greek learning to the Arabic-speaking elites of Baghdad.
To take only one example: the eastern Christian court doctor, Hunayn ibn Ishaq (d.873) worked carefully as a translator. He would compare old Syriac translations (made in the days of Justinian) with Greek texts which had become available in Baghdad through diplomatic missions to Constantinople. As a result of his activities and those of his colleagues, more works of Galen came to circulate in Arabic than were ever available in the Greek-speaking world of East Rome – not to mention translations of Euclid, Ptolemy, and much of the logical and metaphysical tradition of late classical philosophy.52
For Christian translators and their Muslim readers alike there was something reassuringly neutral about such subjects. As far back as the fifth century, Syrian Christians had tended to value a philosophical and technological culture which was soundproof to confessional differences. Now, at the Muslim court of Baghdad, a perennial “Greek” wisdom was patiently put together, in Arabic, part by part, like the reconstruction of a great dinosaur – an awesome antediluvian creature, untouched by the bitter religious confrontations of modern times. It was as fellow-philosophers, falasifa, bound by the value-free rules of kalâm, of logical argument, and not as religious adversaries, that Jews, Christians, and Muslims could meet with courtesy, “to bargain with each other … as brothers who share in the goods that they inherit from a single father.”53
Events such as these took place at the fulcrum of a very ancient world, at Damascus, Edessa, and Baghdad. They were far away from that northwestern tip of Eurasia which had begun to call itself, a little self-consciously, “Europe.” To Muslim observers, East Rome, Rûm, was the only Christian region which really mattered. Constantinople was the capital of the last, proud empire to resist the call of the Prophet. It was the “hard-necked” state par excellence.54 The East Romans replied in kind. Their image of Islam became the basis of all later Western images of the Muslim world. It had none of the nuances which we find among the Christians of the Near East. Greek and Latin sources never spoke of “Muslims.” They regarded Islam as a purely ethnic religion. Muslims were “Saracens,” “Ishmaelites,” or “Hagarenes” – that is, descendants of Ishmael, Abraham’s bastard son by his servant Hagar. Islam, for them, was no more than “a new, deceptive heresy.” It was not even a very interesting heresy. They saw it as an incompetently plagiarized form of Christianity, thought up by Muhammad so as to give a cloak of religious respectability to the ravages of his bloodthirsty nation.55
Constantinople, the heart of the East Roman empire, remained the goal which Muslim armies strove to reach. It is a measure of the resilience of the Christian empire of East Rome that it took them 800 years to do so. Constantinople finally fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. Had it done so at the height of the Arab invasions, the entire history of western Europe would have been very different. East Rome was the only state which offered prolonged resistance to the Arab armies. Naval expeditions were sent against Constantinople in 672 and 717. The last, elaborately orchestrated campaign to take Constantinople ended in disaster. In 717, the emperor Leo III used “Greek fire” to destroy the Muslim fleet. This was an explosive combination of naphtha and potassium which detonated into a gigantic, burning oil-slick on the water. The secret of “Greek fire” had recently been brought to Constantinople by Syrian refugees from the oil-rich areas of northern Iraq.56
Many other calamities befell [the Muslims] at that time, and made them learn by experience that God and the all-holy Virgin, the Mother of God, protect this City and the Christian Empire, and that those who call upon God are not entirely forsaken, even if we are chastised for a short time on account of our sins.57
The empire of Rûm was always present to the Muslims. By contrast, the West was a distant place. It was viewed by Muslims much as it had been viewed by previous civilized Near Easterners, Greeks and Syrians. It was a vast, indeterminate land, inhabited by unkempt and warlike peoples. It was marginal to the great “changing of the kingdoms” which had taken place in the ancient heartlands of civilization.58
Seen from the West, it was the East Roman empire which had absorbed the shattering impact of the Arab advance. To Christian countries further north, these great events were still distant matters. They apparently caused little anxiety. In around 680, Arculf, a Frankish bishop, made his way to the Holy Land. He travelled without apparent molestation in a land very different from his native Gaul. He observed that no wagons were to be seen: camels, and camels only, carried all loads.59 The Holy Places were as they had always been. The Arab conquest had made no difference. The great Church of the Ascension on the Mount of Olives still glowed like a beacon above Jerusalem:
under the terrible and wondrous gleaming of these [lights], pouring out copiously through the glass shutters of the windows, all mount Olivet seems on fire, and the whole city, situated on the lower ground nearby, seems to be lit up.60
Arculf did note that “the unbelieving Saracens” had built themselves “a church” in Damascus. But that is all. He returned peacefully to Constantinople to see “the Emperor of the World” – appropriately called Constantine IV – bending to kiss the fragment of the relic of the Holy Cross, which Heraclius had saved from Jerusalem as Syria collapsed before the Arabs.61
Even after the Arab conquest of Spain, in 711, no one in the north was certain that the invaders who had reached the western Mediterranean had come to stay. In conquering Spain, the Arabs took over a loosely connected kingdom, where the state had been weak in comparison with Near Eastern empires. Former Visigothic Spain did not provide for the Arabs of the West the same springboard for further conquest as the former, heavily administered East Roman provinces of Syria and Egypt had done for the Ummayads of Damascus. The Ummayads controlled territories which enabled them to launch near-annual attacks on Rûm. The Arab conquerors of Visigothic Spain did not inherit such resources. They could never penetrate into the far north. When one Muslim raiding party reached as far as the Loire, in 733, it was easily crushed by Charles Martel, the nephew of Gertrude, abbess of Nivelles, and the grandfather of Charlemagne, at the famous battle of Poitiers. But Poitiers was no Constantinople. The Muslim threat to the rest of western Europe was largely confined to the Mediterranean regions of Gaul. For the kingdoms of the north, the Arab invasions were basically a matter for the “Romans” to worry about. In around 730, a Saxon lady from southern Britain was warned not to travel south to the Mediterranean. She was told that she should wait “until the attacks and threats of the Saracens, which have lately manifested themselves in the lands of the Romans, should have quieted down.”62
In 724, a party of Saxons from Britain actually reached Syria as Christian pilgrims. Their strange clothes caused a stir. A local Muslim dignitary declared that they meant no harm. He had seen such men: “they wish only to fulfill their religious law.” They came from “the Western shores, where the sun sets … and we know of no land beyond their islands, but only water.”63
Their leader, Willibald, returned to Europe – but not before being arrested by the authorities for attempting to smuggle precious balsam out of Palestine in the hollow of his pilgrim’s staff! – to become, eventually, an abbot in southern Germany.64
Northern Europe had changed greatly since the 630s. The pious Saxon pilgrims came from a region that had barely been touched by Christianity in 630. Between 630 and 730, with the conversion of the British Isles, an entire new, northern dimension was added to the Christianity of the West. Arculf’s account of the Holy Places was written down, complete with careful illustrations, not in Gaul, but at Iona, a great Celtic monastery perched off the western coast of Scotland. Unimaginably far away from the “changing of the kingdoms” which would prove decisive for the future history of Asia and of Africa, a northern European world had come into its own. It is to the “western shores” – to the Irish and to the Saxons in Britain – that we must now return.