Sailing from Byzantium (14 page)

Another key figure was John Lascaris, a Byzantine who worked as Lorenzo de Medici's librarian, traveled widely in Ottoman lands to locate ancient Greek texts, and made his way to France, where he was appointed French ambassador
to Venice in 1503. In Venice, he helped Aldus prepare an important edition of the Greek orators. John Lascaris is credited with bringing the Renaissance to France, where he befriended the early French humanists Guillaume Budé and Lefèvre d’Etaples, who had also studied with Argyropoulos in Rome in the 1480s. Even after 1453, Byzantine tides surged onto new shores in Western Europe.

ear the end of the seventh century, the caliph Abd al-Malik decided to build a great monument to the Arab conquests of the previous half century, and to the new monotheistic faith of Islam that had powered those conquests. Abd al-Malik was the ninth caliph to rule after the prophet Muhammad, and the fifth in the Umayyad dynasty
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He had just succeded to the caliphate, during a time of troubles in which numerous rebel Arab commanders had raised armies against the Umayyads. He was determined to restore Umayyad power, which was based not in Arabia but far to the north, in the Syrian city of Damascus.

Dark-complected and stocky, Abd al-Malik was known to his subjects as “Dew of the Stone” for his legendary stinginess. This latter trait, however, would be in marked abeyance when it came to the project he had in mind now, a magnificent
marble octagon crowned by a gleaming golden dome some sixty feet across.

As the site for his memorial, Abd al-Malik chose not Mecca or Medina, Islam's holiest cities, but the ancient city of Jerusalem, long holy to Jews and Christians, formerly the religious centerpiece of the Byzantine empire and one of the first objects of the Arab conquests. Known to the world as the Dome of the Rock, Abd al-Malik's monument is Islam's oldest surviving public building, and to many observers its most splendid. From the top of Mount Moriah, the Temple Mount so central to Jewish history, the Dome of the Rock still dominates the old city's skyline, its swollen, shining cupola lording it over the comparatively drab remains of Jewish and Christian sites. Below it lie two of those sites, the Western or Wailing Wall, which represents the last remains of the Second Temple, and a bit farther west the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, originally built by Constantine the Great, though destroyed and rebuilt many times since. Next to it is the smaller al-Aqsa Mosque, built by Abd al-Malik's son and successor al-Walid.

Like Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, which the Gothic king Theoderic had finished about a century and a half earlier, the Dome of the Rock loudly and conspicuously proclaims the arrival of a new power to challenge the old. Also like Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, with which its lush interior decorative motifs have been compared, the Dome of the Rock asserts that arrival in the aesthetic idiom of the old power, which in both cases was Byzantium.

The Dome of the Rock perfectly symbolizes Byzantium's influence on the emerging civilization of Islam. Based on Byzantine Christian building traditions—the structure copied the nearby Church of the Anastasis—Islam's first public monument was not imitated by later Muslim builders.

It made no lasting impact on Islamic architecture, which went in other directions. In much the same way, Islamic civilization took the Byzantine imprint in its early stages, but ever since has seemingly struggled to erase all traces of it.

Where Sant’Apollinare Nuovo brashly pleads the Gothic case for assimilation, the Dome of the Rock takes Byzantine art and flings it in the empire's face. The Gothic decorations feel merely saucy; the Arab ones convey a sense of energized superiority. Elaborate Byzantine-inspired mosaics ring the heart of the structure, its interior colonnade. Their patterns incorporate repeated emblems of Byzantine (and to a lesser extent Persian) power that would have been immediately recognizable to all: crowns, bracelets, earrings, necklaces, breastplates. Persia by this time had been completely conquered by the victorious Arabs, but the Byzantines still held out, though much of their former territory was now in Arab hands. The Holy Land had fallen, and even as the Dome went up Abd al-Malik was wresting North Africa from Byzantine control. By displaying their imperial symbols this way, the Dome flouted Islam's older enemies. One of those enemies the Arabs had vanquished. The other, they believed, they were in the process of vanquishing.

The Dome of the Rock also has a number of Koranic inscriptions that drive the same point home in religious terms. These are clearly directed at Christians and (less so) at Jews, the Muslims’ monotheistic forebears, both of whom the Koran honors as
ahl al-kitab,
People of the Book.

Despite this limited recognition, the inscriptions’ main religious point is that in worshiping Jesus, and in further
introducing the idea of the Trinity, Christians have corrupted the original monotheistic message of God's unity:

Say: He is God, the One, God the eternal; He has not begotten nor was He begotten; and there is none comparable to Him…. Believe therefore in God and his apostles, and say not “Three.” It will be better for you. God is only one God. Far be it from His glory that He should have a son.

Later Islamic buildings would use many of the same inscriptions, though the Dome of the Rock is unusual in the high number of them that it features.

The Dome of the Rock is not a mosque. Instead, it is a
mashhad,
a shrine for pilgrims, as its location might suggest. According to Jewish tradition, it was here, on the rock over which the dome is suspended, that God commanded Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. Later Umayyad propaganda would build on this association, linking Jerusalem with Muhammad's famous Night Journey and his miraculous ascent to heaven, which would be located at Moriah as well. Like Abd al-Malik's construction of the Dome, all this was meant to buttress the importance of Jerusalem for Muslims. But for Abd al-Malik, the connection with Abraham was the one that mattered; the historically spurious connection with Muhammad lay in the future. Claiming common descent with the Jews from Abraham (through Hagar and Ishmael), the Arabs in Abd al-Malik's day saw their new faith as the culmination of the Abrahamic tradition.

Islam, Abd al-Malik was telling the world, was here to stay.

Up to then the world had good reason to wonder. The Arab empire had been split almost from its inception by
dissension, factional strife, and assassination. One of Abd al-Malik's main reasons for wishing to enhance Jerusalem's religious prestige was that Mecca and Medina were at that time outside of his control. Jerusalem, by contrast, was close to the Umayyad capital, Damascus.

It was under the Umayyads, who ruled from 661 to 750, that the center of Muslim power had moved from Arabia to Syria, territory the Umayyads had conquered from Byzantium. In making the transfer they had not gone unchallenged. It was also under the Umayyads, and under Abd al-Malik especially, that Islam took the first steps toward becoming a civilization as well as a faith.

Islamic civilization had two parents, and they were the same two older civilizations from which Abd al-Malik took such pains to distinguish his own in the decorations of the Dome of the Rock: Byzantium and Persia. But Byzantium and Persia also influenced Islam
before
it became a civilization, starting with the rise of the new faith during the disparate yet oddly intertwined lives of Islam's founder, the prophet Muhammad, and his near exact contemporary, the Byzantine emperor Heraclius.

For centuries, Byzantium and Persia had fought each other. The border between them oscillated back and forth within a relatively narrow band that divided the Fertile Crescent in two. Neither could get the upper hand for long, though both enjoyed periods of brief dominance over the other. By the early seventh century, however, this long war was changing its shape. At that point Heraclius and Muhammad both were
around forty, and both were about to embark on the ventures that would determine the rest of their lives.

On the Byzantine side, Christianity had soaked into society in a way that had not been the case earlier, as the religious sponge that was Byzantine civilization reached its saturation point. The traumas that attended Justinian's over-ambitious adventurism pushed this process forward: plague, riots, wars, earthquakes, oppressive taxation, and the empire's many looming enemies. Slavs had burst into Greece from the north, and in the Balkans they had allied themselves with the fearsome Avars;
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most of Italy was lost to the Lombards; Persia was resurgent against Byzantine armies in the east. People needed reassurance.

They found it in the form of icons, which took on a new importance in public and private worship, and Constanti-nopolitans found it especially in the image of the Virgin Mary, who now emerged as the city's special patron and protector. In 566, the year after Justinian's death, the poet Corippus first described Constantinople as a city guarded by God. The idea would last as long as Byzantium itself, and the Virgin Mary's powers of intercession were the key to ensuring that divine protection. Byzantine armies began taking the field behind large icons. By the time Heraclius came to the throne in 610, Byzantines commonly compared their threatened nation with that of the ancient Israelites.

The Persians, too, had a state monotheism, Zoroastrianism, that had gradually been assuming a more and more central role over the past few centuries. The Sassanid dynasty, which had come to power in the early third century,
portrayed itself as reviving the glory days of Achaemenid rule, and the promulgation of state Zoroastrianism was part of this effort.
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As in Byzantium, church and state grew closely linked under Sassanid rule, with increasing centralization, intolerance, and persecution of heresies marking the alliance of religion and government.

Struck over centuries, the sparks from these two increasingly flinty monotheisms eventually ignited holy war. In 614, the Persian sack of Jerusalem brought the war's new religious aspect into sharp relief. Since the time of Constantine, the holy city had been growing in importance as a destination for Christian pilgrims. Jews there had been expelled or persecuted as part of a general rise in state-supported anti-Semitism since the time of Justinian. Now, in addition to slaughtering untold numbers of Jerusalem's defenders, the Persians destroyed churches and exultantly seized or destroyed precious Christian relics. Adding insult to injury, the Persians opened the city to Jewish settlers and left them in charge of it. By the end of the decade, Byzantium had lost nearly half its territory to the Persian onslaught, and it was the wealthier half. Byzantium was broken, finished, and everyone knew it.

Except Heraclius, who marched with his army deep into Persia, gambling that his capital would hold out. He was right, but only just. In 626, the Persians allied themselves with the Avars and the Slavs to lay siege to Constantinople by both land and sea, which was the only hope an attacker had of taking the city. At Byzantium's moment of maximum peril, the Byzantine navy saved the day, breaking the siege by
defeating the Avars and Slavs at sea and preventing the Persians from crossing the Bosporus.

From the Byzantine point of view, the real work was done by the Virgin Mary, and by the staunch patriarch Sergius, whom Heraclius had left in command. At the worst moments, Sergius could be seen parading along the city walls holding up the famous icon of the Blessed Virgin. It was clear to all that victory was owed to her intercession. Hadn't she herself appeared sword in hand over the waters of the Golden Horn—close by her church at Blachernai—encouraging her people to slay the enemy? Hadn't even the Avar Khan glimpsed her stalking the battlements?

It was Byzantium's finest hour, and the turning point of the war. Heraclius went on to win a series of battles in the East. Soon enough, the Persian king was overthrown and a Byzantine puppet installed in his place. In 630, Heraclius celebrated with a magnificent ceremony in which he restored the fragments of the True Cross to their place at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.

With Heraclius as his instrument, and through the Virgin Mary's intercession, God had miraculously saved the Byzantine empire and His chosen people. Everyone breathed a big sigh of relief. But like a horror flick in which the monster keeps coming back to life, the show wasn't over yet.

In 622, just when Byzantine morale had reached its lowest ebb, far to the south another chosen people had also come under threat of extinction. This was the
hijra,
the sojourn that Muhammad and his small band of followers spent in nearby Medina after being driven out of Mecca by the hostile Meccans.

At that point Islam was about a decade old. The newfound religious vibrancy of the two great clashing monotheistic empires to the north had set off resonating vibrations
among the disorganized and feuding Arabs. Muhammad brilliantly focused these chaotic impulses. His basic message was one of religious and political unity under his personal leadership, unity along the lines aspired to, if never achieved, by the Byzantines and the Persians. Looking at the failed unity especially of the Christians, Muhammad thought he could get it right by dwelling on God's unity, which both reflected and would be reflected in the oneness of the Muslim community, the
ummah.

Over the next several years in Medina, Muhammad's unity movement steadily gained in force. In 630, the same year that Heraclius returned the fragments of the True Cross to Jerusalem, Muhammad led an army of ten thousand against Mecca. The city surrendered peacefully, and many Meccans now embraced Islam, “submission” to the will of the one God. A flood of new warriors bolstered Muhammad's growing army. Now the strongest leader in Arabia, Muhammad imposed the condition of conversion to Islam upon those seeking his protection. Muslim (“one who submits”) could not attack Muslim, so conversion meant security. Once a certain threshold was reached, it also meant that the Muslims had to go farther and farther a field to find conquests. “Believers, make war on the infidels who dwell around you,” the Koran orders Muslims. “Deal firmly with them. Know that Allah is with the righteous.”