Sailing from Byzantium (16 page)

Other aspects of Abd al-Malik's program included the replacement of Greek by Arabic as the language of government, and the minting of coins that, for the first time, broke away from their Byzantine models and took on an Islamic look and feel. Up to then, the Umayyads had struck coins that copied the Byzantine ones right down to the portraits of Christ or the emperor on one side, the only concession to Islam being the removal of the arm of the Christian cross on the other side (leaving just the upright). Now Abd al-Malik replaced such emblems with Koranic inscriptions, though the basic denominations remained the same.

One reason that the earlier coins had had to look Byzantine was so that they would be accepted by the Byzantines themselves, whether in tribute payments or in commercial transactions. As it became clear that the Arab conquests were not going to be reversed, the Byzantines would increasingly be forced to accommodate the Arabs, even copying their coins in turn, while the Arabs would realize that they were the ones who could throw their weight around. Byzantium was entering its Dark Age, shorn of its wealthiest provinces and pushed onto the defensive not just by the Arabs but by other new enemies as well. Its relative poverty would stand in stark contrast to the vigorous prosperity of the rising Arab empire, which now controlled many times more manpower, resources, and land.

In Byzantium, the destabilizing shock of such realities was reflected in a series of coups and countercoups that
rocked the Byzantine empire starting during Abd al-Malik's reign. And at the height of this instability, as the Byzantines fought out a devastating civil war between rival claimants to the throne, the Umayyads once again sought the goal that had so frustratingly eluded the great Muawiyah.

After all, the Prophet himself had predicted that Muslim armies would one day occupy Rum (Rome), as the Arabs called both Constantinople and its empire. Though alarming, the earlier attempt had amounted to little more than an extended series of raids, backed by a naval blockade, during which simultaneous efforts were undertaken against the Byzantines and other enemies in other theaters of war. This time it would be different. This time, the Arabs’ full strength would be brought to bear in a concerted and sustained effort to capture the Byzantines’ capital and put an end to their empire altogether.

The Umayyads’ second siege of Constantinople was planned by Abd al-Malik's son and successor al-Walid, begun in 717 by al-Walid's brother Sulayman, and continued by their cousin Umar II, who succeeded Sulayman after the lat-ter's death that same year. The invading force reportedly comprised 120,000 men and 1,800 ships.

From the start, however, things went badly for the Arabs. By the time the planning was over, so was the Byzantine civil war, and the new emperor who emerged as victor, Leo III, was a gifted, experienced, and resolute commander who had bested the Arabs a number of times in the past. In addition, the winter of 717-18 was unusually cold and harsh, catching the Arabs by surprise and decimating them through illness and exposure. The Arabs were also hampered by the fact that many of the sailors on the ships sent to relieve the besieging forces in the spring of 718 were Christians from Egypt and North Africa. Having tasted Arab rule for nearly a century, they were no longer so well disposed toward the
Arabs as their ancestors had been at the time of the conquests, and many came over to the Byzantine side. Finally, the Byzantines were assisted by their sometime enemies the Bulgars, who swept down upon the Arab forces investing the city by land, killing thousands. In August 718, just over a year after the siege began, Umar called for the Arabs to retreat. Once again, on its homeward voyage the Arab fleet was wrecked in a storm.

The Umayyads’ Syrian power base and its nearness to Byzantium had worked to the advantage of the early Umayyad caliphs such as Muawiyah and Abd al-Malik. Muawiyah had risen to the caliphate in the first place largely because he was governor of the province that was on the front line of the struggle with Byzantium—he himself had conquered the lands he ruled as governor. This early success, however, held the Umayyads hostage with a logic that pointed inexorably to a single outcome. They had to vanquish the Byzantines and replace them as overlords of Constantinople, which was clearly their only real choice of imperial capital.

The failure of the second siege made it clear that this was not going to happen. As a consequence, the Umayyads’ forward momentum ground to a halt. They were left to chill slowly in the long shadow of a great capital city that would never be theirs.

Byzantium's stubborn survival has another set of implications. In the West, too, the Arab advance posed a grave threat. Having occupied North Africa and Spain, invading Muslim armies were turned back only in central France, at the battle of Poitiers in 732.
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But had Byzantium fallen a
decade and half earlier, the Arabs might have been able to mount a simultaneous invasion from the East, catching Europe in a pincer. The outcome might just possibly have been a Muslim Europe. Constantinople's great walls protected more than just a city, more even than just an empire. Although this card can be overplayed, Byzantium was a bulwark for Europe in the East.

By the 740s the Umayyads’ nearness to Byzantium had turned from an advantage to a liability, from a harbinger of victory to a nagging reminder of unfulfilled promise. The failure to take Constantinople helped push the Islamic world's center of gravity eastward, into Persian territory. Paradoxically, however, only after such a move could the Arabs open themselves to a whole new influence from Byzantium: the legacy of ancient Greece.

uring the High Caliphate, Islam claimed a place as the world's most vital, expansive civilization. No longer were the Arab settlers in the conquered lands isolated in their garrisons, an alien presence imposing an alien rule, aloof from the local population and seeking to cultivate Islam apart from the peoples they ruled. Over a vast and prosperous area extending from Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq through Syria, Egypt, North Africa, and Spain, Arabs now began blending with local populations. At the same time, the local people—Christians, Zoroastrians, Jews, pagans—began converting to Islam in greater numbers.

As the weight of the Islamic world shifted eastward, Umayyad leadership was challenged by the Abbasids, a powerful clan in the former Persian territory of Iraq. In February 750, Abbasid and Umayyad forces met in battle at the river Zab, a tributary of the Tigris in northern Iraq, and the Abbasids won decisively. The Umayyad caliph Marwan II fled, dying soon after, and the Abbasid leader al-Saffah—who had
already been proclaimed as caliph by his followers the previous year—was confirmed in power.

Al-Saffah founded the Abbasid state, but he died after ruling only four years. He was succeeded by his younger brother al-Mansur, who immediately faced a rash of rebellions and challengers.

An experienced commander, still vigorous in his forties when he became caliph, al-Mansur had little real difficulty putting down the rebellions as they arose, but he couldn't keep new ones from erupting. He needed a capital, a center of gravity for the turbulent cities of the Abbasid heartland from which he drew his power. As its location, he chose a place on the Tigris River where it approaches close to the Euphrates, not far from the old Persian capital of Ctesiphon. Al-Mansur called his new capital Madinat as-Salam, “city of peace;” it soon became better known by its Persian name of Baghdad.

Al-Mansur chose his site for the same two reasons that had led Constantine to choose Byzantium: it lay at the junction of rich trade routes, and it was, so he thought, highly defensible, nestled as it was between two wide rivers. Unlike Constantine, al-Mansur was only half right.

It certainly was a superb site for trade. Ships came up the Tigris by way of the Persian Gulf from Arabia, East Africa, and India, or downriver from Kurdistan with goods from Azerbaijan and Armenia. The nearby Euphrates brought merchandise and travelers from the west: Syria, Egypt, North Africa, Byzantium. Baghdad also lay athwart the Silk Road to
China, which ran eastward through the Persian heartlands of Isfahan and Khorasan. Declaring his intention to build “the most prosperous city in the world,” al-Mansur predicted that his new capital would long reign supreme as a glittering diadem for the Arabs’ new far-flung dominions.

But rivers can be bridged and crossed. Because of al-Mansur's misjudgment on this score not a trace of his unique original plan remains today: the Round City, a perfect circle over a mile across, circumscribed by thick, high walls that have long since vanished, with a domed central palace complex that was ignored by al-Mansur's successors well before it fell to ruin in the thirteenth century, when the city was sacked by the Mongols. The famous green dome was crowned by a statue of a horseman carrying a spear, which was said to face in the direction of the next threat to the caliph's rule. The legend is a giveaway. For all their fabulous wealth and glorious cultural patronage, the Abbasid caliphs forever faced challenges to their legitimacy and power. The Round City was to be Baghdad's heart, the home of the caliph, his administrators, his slaves, his soldiers. It cannot even be located with confidence within modern Baghdad.

Outside it lay the rest of the city, spreading out on both sides of the winding Tigris, which was spanned by a series of pontoon bridges. At first al-Mansur wanted to put the markets inside the Round City. He was advised against it by a visiting Byzantine ambassador, who warned the caliph that his enemies would use the pretext of commerce to enter the walls and spy out his secrets. No one could know the ins and outs of espionage better than a Byzantine ambassador; the markets were moved. The biggest was in the southern district of Karkh, a bewildering but tightly organized maze of stalls and stands on the west bank of the Tigris, where each specialty was firmly staked out in its own separate domain.

(Al-Mansur ordered the butchers’ market placed farthest from the palace, averring that butchers have dull wits and sharp knives.) Between Karkh and the Round City lay another bustling market district, Karkh's rival Sharqiya, which was said to have had a hundred bookshops.

The Arab histories of Baghdad are full of accounts of overawed Byzantine ambassadors to the caliphal court. Cataloguing the wonders that the Byzantines encountered on their entry into the city and rehearsing their predictable amazement became a standard way of dramatizing Baghdad's splendor. One ambassador in the early tenth century was held up for months as the caliph finished redecorating. He was then conducted between endless ranks of assembled troops and taken through a long underground passage into the palace, where he was paraded in front of the thousands of eunuchs, chamberlains, and African slaves who staffed it. In the treasury he saw the caliph's gold and jewels all arranged specially for display. And several decades before Liudprand of Cremona was awed in Constantinople by the emperor's golden tree and mechanical birds, this Byzantine ambassador to Baghdad had the same experience in the caliph's throne room, right down to the twittering birds. It has been suggested that the unnamed ambassador brought the idea back with him. But similar devices (which are called automata) had been known in the ancient world, and modern historians aren't sure who got the idea from whom.

Baghdad's foundation coincides with the low point of Byzantine morale during the Dark Age. Classical learning had all but disappeared, and even religious literature virtually dried up as the empire went onto a permanent war footing. Not an inch less devout but stripped down now for action, the Byzantines went so far as to give up their beloved icons. Leo III, the emperor who successfully brought Constantinople through
the Arab siege of 717-18, was the first to impose Iconoclasm on his reluctant subjects, tearing down icons from churches and other public places, and discouraging their use in private worship.

His son Constantine V, an even more ardent Iconoclast, went further and actually destroyed the religious pictures. As a consequence, nearly all surviving Byzantine icons are from later periods, when the icons were restored, and when Constantine V himself was given the disrespectful epithet Copronymus, “shit-named,” which supposedly arose from an unexpected incident during his baptism. Though he was one of Byzantium's greatest warrior-emperors, Constantine V Copronymus would be reviled by generations of outraged Orthodox icon venerators.

The Judaic scriptural ban on graven images had always provided ammunition for Christians who objected to religious pictures. Such objections aside, Iconoclasm's real justification was that icons had failed to bring victory against the Muslims, who themselves were known for banning human images in religious art. It seemed God was punishing the empire for having wandered into the error of idolatry in the age before the Arabs, when icons had jumped into public prominence. In place of the discredited icon, Byzantine armies now began marching under the stark, simple cross, an austere symbol for an austere time.

Iconoclasm was agonizing for the empire, but the problem was that it seemed to work. Throughout the Iconoclast period, with uncanny consistency emperors who supported it (like Constantine V) won battles, while those who temporarily restored the icons immediately started losing.
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The most impassioned and eloquent defense of icons came not from within the empire but from Umayyad Syria, where John of Damascus, son of a Greek tax collector, wrote tracts justifying icon veneration; his main theological point was to distinguish between venerating the icon for what it represented and actually worshipping the image itself. Later, John of Damascus would himself be venerated as one of Orthodoxy's great hero-saints. But at the time icons had acquired a suspicious air of weakness, softness, femininity. The two rulers who most conspicuously championed the icons during this era were both empresses, neither of whom enjoyed much military success against the Arabs.

Despite the imbalance in power and wealth between them, the Byzantines remained dug in, always the Arabs’ stubborn opponents and the chief object of their competitive hostility. Almost every year, the Arabs would send out spring and summer raids from Syria or Armenia over the border into Byzantine Asia Minor. Yet, high-level embassies constantly traveled between Baghdad and Constantinople, and for some time a lurching cooperation brought Arabs and Byzantines together in joint rule over the island of Cyprus.

Constant skirmishing along the frontier bred a tough warrior aristocracy in the borderlands, where Byzantine and Arab culture blended, and where opposing warlords had more in common with each other than with their rulers back in Baghdad or Constantinople. One such was Diogenes, a local Byzantine commander famous for his valor, who perished in battle against the raiding army of the caliph Harun ar-Rashid, al-Mansur's grandson, just north of the Cilician Gates in the year 786.
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It is thought that this Diogenes inspired
oral poets to celebrate his feats, and that the resulting verses gave rise to what has been described as the Byzantine national epic, a long two-part poem called
Digenes Akritas.

In the first part, a dashing Arab emir kidnaps the beautiful daughter of a Byzantine general, then falls in love with her and converts to Christianity. Their son is Basil, a half-Arab, half-Byzantine also known as Digenes Akritas, which means “two-blooded border guard.” His exploits are told in the second part:

And when the well-born Digenes the fair
Himself came to the measure of his prime
And among men was counted a right man;
Then on a day he sprang to horse and rode,
Took up the club and spear he had,
Gathered his company and took them with him.

Later Digenes meets the emperor himself in the borderlands near the northern Euphrates. The emperor praises the young man's prowess and offers him whatever he would like as a reward. The pious hero replies, as all such do, that the emperor's love is enough for him, and besides, he knows that the emperor has an expensive army to maintain:

So I beseech your glorious majesty:
Love him who is obedient, pity the poor,
Deliver the oppressed from malefactors,
Forgive those who unwittingly make blunders,
And heed no slanders, nor accept injustice,
Sweep heretics out, confirm the orthodox.

At almost exactly the same time on the other side of the Arab empire, skirmishing between Arabs and Franks resulted
in a very similar poem, the
Song of Roland,
about a faithful knight of Charlemagne's who dies saving the army from the Arabs.

Such rugged but pious chivalry contrasts sharply with the dangerous, decadent sensuality of Harun's Baghdad, at least as described so memorably in works such as the
Arabian Nights,
which is actually thought to give a fairly accurate picture. By about 800, when the celebrated Harun was nearing the end of his life, Baghdad had grown into a thriving metropolis of around one million people. It gave every indication of having fulfilled al-Mansur's highest expectations.

Meanwhile, in monochrome, iconless Constantinople, the only major construction that had occurred in the past century was the repair of buildings and churches after a severe earthquake in 740. As for classical scholarship, we have little evidence but one or two shadowy names—dry skeletons that cannot be fleshed out with any confidence. Jerusalem had paled and Athens, to all appearances, had given up the ghost entirely.

According to tradition, the Arabs’ interest in ancient Greek learning began in the early ninth century, when the caliph al-Mamun, the son of Harun ar-Rashid, dreamed that he met a ruddy, handsome, blue-eyed man who identified himself as Aristotle. In his dream, the story goes, al-Mamun asked the famous philosopher to answer a question: “What is good?”

“Whatever is good according to reason,” Aristotle replied.

“What else?” asked the caliph.

“Whatever is good according to religious law,” came the answer.

“And what else?”

“Nothing else,” said Aristotle.

The tenth-century Baghdad bookseller and author Ibn an-Nadim describes the dream in his
Fihrist,
or “Index,” a compilation of Arab literature up to that point. An-Nadim goes on to say that the dream prompted al-Mamun to write to the Byzantine emperor, whom he had just defeated in battle but whom he now asked for help. The caliph wondered if he might “send people to select books on the ancient sciences from those preserved in the libraries of Byzantine territory.” At first the emperor refused the request, but then he consented. The caliph immediately sent a group of learned scholars to Byzantium, who “made their choice among the material which they found there and took it along to al-Mamun. He ordered them to translate it, and this was done.”