The House of Wisdom (2 page)

The West’s willful forgetting of the Arab legacy began centuries ago, as anti-Muslim propaganda crafted in the shadow of the Crusades began to obscure any recognition of Arab culture’s profound role in the development of modern science. This message comprised four central themes, a number of which still resonate today: Islam distorts the word of God; it is spread solely by violence; it perverts human sexuality, either by encouraging the practice of polygamy, as in the famed harems of the sultans, or through repressive or excessively prudish attitudes; and its prophet, Muhammad, was a charlatan, a tool of the Devil, or even the Antichrist.

The thirteenth-century philosopher Roger Bacon, one of the earliest Western proponents of the scientific method, praised the Muslims for their intellectual innovations, a subject he knew well: “Philosophy is drawn from the Muslims.”
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Yet the same Roger Bacon was just as enthusiastic in denouncing aspects of Muslim life of which he had no real knowledge or experience: The Arabs, he asserted confidently, “are absorbed in sensual pleasures because of their polygamy.”
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Soon such fanciful notions completely displaced all others in the popular imagination.

These views gained further currency in the Renaissance, when the West increasingly looked for inspiration to an idealized notion of classical Greece.
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Eager to claim direct descent from the likes of Aristotle, Pythagoras, and Archimedes, Western thinkers deliberately marginalized the role of Arab learning. “I shall scarcely be persuaded that anything good can come from Arabia,” wrote Petrarch, the most prominent of the early humanists, in the fourteenth century.
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Western historians of science have largely carried on in this vein; many cast the Arabs as benign but effectively neutral caretakers of Greek knowledge who did little or nothing to advance the work of the ancients.

Such accounts are grounded in the persistent notion of the West’s “recovery” of classical learning, with the clear implication that this knowledge was somehow the natural birthright of Christian Europe and was merely misplaced during the Middle Ages. They are also profoundly colored by a Western consensus, often invoked to explain the state of the Muslim world today, that Islam is inherently hostile to innovation and became all the more so from the early twelfth century onward.
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PART I

Al-Isha/Nightfall

Chapter One

THE WARRIORS OF GOD

T
HEY COULDN’T EVEN
tell the time—this uncountable army of believers.

The warriors of God pushed on to the gates of the imperial city of Constantinople, their arrival heralded by a plague of locusts that destroyed the vines but left the wheat untouched. Their leader, an implacable cleric who had appeared from nowhere to great popular acclaim, exhorted his charges to holy war against the infidel with promises of a home in paradise. Disease and malnutrition were rife. Medical care often involved exorcism or the amputation of injured limbs. Torture and other ordeals settled criminal cases.

Few had any learning at all. What education there was back home consisted of memorizing outdated texts under the watchful eyes of hidebound doctors of religion. They had no understanding of basic technology, science, or mathematics. They could not date their most important holy days, nor chart the regular movements of the sun, the moon, and the planets. They knew nothing of papermaking or the use of lenses and mirrors, and they had no inkling of the prince of contemporary scientific instruments—the astrolabe. Natural phenomena, such as an eclipse of the moon or a sudden change in weather, terrified them. They thought it was black magic.

The arrival of this fanatical army horrified the locals. Who were these pale-skinned, blue-eyed barbarians, marching under the sign of the cross, and what did they want on Arab shores at the dawn of the twelfth Christian century?

“The whole West, and much of the land of barbarian peoples as lies beyond the Adriatic Sea up to the Pillars of Hercules—all this … was bursting forth into Asia in a solid mass, with all its belongings, taking its march through the intervening portion of Europe,” records Princess Anna Comnena, daughter of the Byzantine emperor, in Constantinople, the empire’s capital.
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Among their ranks were true believers and righteous folk, notes the chronicler Albert of Aix, but also “adulterers, homicides, thieves, perjurers, and robbers.”
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Their leader, Peter the Hermit, rode a white mule and promised the remission of sins for all who joined the cause.

A small, ugly man, Peter effortlessly touched the hearts of the common people, who snatched hairs from his lowly mount to preserve as holy relics as he preached the Crusade across northern France. Many sold what meager possessions they had and set out behind him for the ends of the earth. Some brought their entire families; others simply abandoned wives, children, and aging parents. Crops were left untended and chores unfinished in the haste to follow Peter’s call. The hermit kept his arms and feet bare, and he wore a rough wool shirt, covered by a mantle that reached to his ankles. “He lived on wine and fish; he hardly ever, never, ate bread,” reports Guibert of Nogent, in one of the earliest accounts of the Crusades.
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The diminutive monk appeared suddenly, voicing a populist echo of the great call to arms by Pope Urban II, who appealed to the princes of Christendom on November 27, 1095, in the French town of Clermont to end their ceaseless warring and turn their murderous energies on the unbelievers of the East. “Let those who have been accustomed unjustly to wage private warfare against the faithful now go against the infidels and end with victory. Let those who have been fighting against their brothers and relatives now fight in a proper way against the barbarians,” the pope told an overflowing crowd gathered to hear his sermon. “Let those who have been serving as mercenaries for small pay now obtain the eternal reward.”
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Within months of Urban’s summons, as many as eighty thousand people, city residents and country dwellers alike, left for the East.
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A combustible mixture of church politics, theological dispute, domestic concerns, and world affairs fueled Urban’s call to crusade. In recent decades the church had struggled with Europe’s secular rulers over rights and privileges, most notably the power to invest new bishops and outfit them with the symbols of office, the ring and staff. Urban and his supporters within the church saw the Crusade as a way to restore the authority of Rome at the head of the Christian world, without reliance on unruly monarchs.

For some time now, a number of religious thinkers had been arguing that religious violence was both permissible and justified. Pope Gregory VII—Urban the Crusader’s mentor—had had a long-standing interest in warfare on behalf of the church, and he had even proposed the creation of a Militia of St. Peter composed of European knights, the need for which was made all the more pressing by the emerging struggle between secular kings and the papacy. Bishop Anselm II of Lucca, a loyal partisan of the pope, had collated the writings of St. Augustine on theories of just war in support of Gregory’s endeavors.
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These reformers were also influenced by the notion that the church had to bring itself closer to the people; this in turn supported the phenomenon of papal armies that could provide believers with the chance to defend the faith in return for the remission of sins.
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Global events played their part, too. In 1074, Gregory wrote a series of letters calling for the liberation of the Eastern Orthodox Christians, who had suffered a major military defeat three years before at the hands of the Muslim Turks at Manzikert, in eastern Asia Minor. Establishing a clear link between fighting for the church and the practice of indulgence, Gregory promised “eternal reward” for those who took part.
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The West’s anxieties were further heightened by reports—largely untrue but widely accepted as fact—that the modest but steady flow of Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem was being systematically impeded, or worse, by the strict Seljuk Turks, who had taken control of the holy city in 1070 from the more relaxed Fatimids of Egypt.

Peter the Hermit himself may have been manhandled by the local Muslims as he attempted without success to reach Jerusalem on a personal pilgrimage some years before the Crusades. Anna Comnena, the Byzantine princess, says Peter “suffered much at the hands of the Turks and Saracens,” before making his way back to Europe only “with difficulty.”
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In some versions of the story, Jesus appears to Peter in a dream and commands him to return home, gather an army of believers, and liberate the Church of the Holy Sepulcher from Muslim control; in others, the patriarch of Jerusalem deputizes Peter to make his way to Europe to summon help for embattled eastern Christians. The late twelfth-century
Song of Antioch
depicts Peter, “whom God made messenger,” as the sole survivor of an earlier campaign who then returns to Europe to raise a great army and lead the Crusade.
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Peter’s exact role in launching the Crusade remains uncertain, although later medieval chronicles are notable for the increasing prominence they give the hermit as inspiration and even prime mover behind the entire enterprise. Popular accounts celebrate Peter for aiding the poor and providing dowries for prostitutes so that they might marry. One twelfth-century text,
The Rosenfeld Annals
, says the hermit’s arrival on the scene was foreshadowed by an impressive celestial display: “One evening … with not a cloud in the air, balls of fire, as it seemed, shone forth in different places and reconstituted themselves in another part of the sky. It was observed that this was no fire but angelic powers which, by their migration, were signifying the movement and foreshadowing the departure of people from their places, which later seized nearly all the Western world.”
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With Urban II, protégé of the bellicose Gregory VII, on the throne of St. Peter, there was no more holding back the disparate forces pulling the church toward war. Reformers grouped around the pope were locked in battle for influence and power with both internal and secular rivals. A long and varied history of Christian teachings on permissible war in defense of the faith and the growing popularity of martial metaphors in religious writings eased the way. As those around the pontiff recognized, the call to Christian arms would allow the pope to exercise enormous personal authority and help unite his fractious flock in a sacred mission; it seemed like the answer to their prayers. The result was Christian holy war on a massive scale, an attempt by an atavistic West to remake a changing world in its own image. Although they would ultimately end in failure, the Crusades nonetheless paid significant dividends by bringing the Latin world face-to-face with the scientific and technological prowess of the Arab East. They also fired the imagination regarding things Eastern among many in Europe, including Adelard, who was in his teens at the time of Urban’s momentous appeal.

The pope had envisioned a long, careful buildup to a proper military campaign under the command of his appointed lieutenant, the papal legate, and backed by the ruling families of the West. But the tide of humanity that quickly fell in behind Peter the Hermit and a handful of other populist leaders had no interest in the prelate’s cautious timetable, or the church’s broader political, social, and theological goals. This People’s Crusade, a prelude to the main military effort, would wait for no man.
“Deus vult!
” the crowds had chanted in Clermont in response to the pope’s fighting words. “God wills it!” The faithful, eager to escape lives of degradation, violence, and disease, soon set off by the tens of thousands without waiting for their betters. “Therefore, while the princes, who felt in the need of many expenses and great services from their attendants, made their preparations slowly and carefully, the common people who had little property, but were very numerous, joined … Peter the Hermit, and obeyed him as a master while these affairs were going on among us,” says the account of Guibert of Nogent.
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The majority comprised simple peasants, but there were townspeople, too, and even some impoverished knights, renegades, debtors, and outright criminals. For many, the quest for the Holy Land was guided more by superstition and popular frenzy than by any true understanding of the faith or the goals of church leaders. “They asserted that a certain goose was inspired by the Holy Spirit, and that a she-goat was not less filled by this same Spirit,” records Albert of Aix, clearly mortified by the very words he is writing. “These they made their guides on this holy journey to Jerusalem; these they worshipped excessively; and most of the people following them, like beasts, believed with their whole minds that this was the true course.”
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Sexual license also ran rampant among the crusaders. “These people … joined up in one force, but did not abstain at all from illicit unions and the pleasures of the flesh; they gave themselves up to gluttonous excess without interruption and amused themselves without interruption with women and young girls who had also emigrated from their homes to give themselves to the same follies.”
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By the spring of 1096, the ill-disciplined mobs that constituted this People’s Crusade were sweeping through the unfamiliar lands of Central and Eastern Europe with predictably disastrous results. The Jews of the Rhineland, forewarned by their brethren in France who had successfully bribed Peter and other leaders to leave them alone, braced for the worst. “At this time arrogant people, a people of strange speech, a nation bitter and impetuous, Frenchmen and Germans, set out for the holy city, which had been desecrated by barbaric nations, there to seek their house of idolatry and banish the Ishmaelites [the Muslims] and other denizens of the land and conquer the land for themselves,” recounts
The Chronicle of Solomon bar Simson
, left behind by a little-known Jewish writer. “Their ranks swelled until the numbers of men, women and children exceeded a locust horde covering the earth.”
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Another account, written by an anonymous Jewish author from Mainz, then a center of learning, was recorded shortly after the events. It tells us that Jews all along the Rhine began to fast, to repent their sins, and to beseech God for help. Some sought the protection of the local Catholic bishops, while others tried to emulate their French brethren and pay the crusaders to go away. Their appeals, sacred and profane, went unheeded.