Titans of History (13 page)

When the Huns invaded Italy in 452, Aetius was powerless to stop them. Mobile and rapacious, Attila's armies sacked and burned yet more towns and cities, including Aquileia, Patavium (Padua), Verona, Brixia (Brescia), Bergomum (Bergamo) and Mediolanum (Milan). Only an outbreak of illness among Attila's troops slowed his campaign, but by the spring he was on the verge of taking Rome itself, in which the western Roman emperor, Valentinian III, had taken refuge. It took a direct appeal from Pope Leo I to dissuade him from sacking the city, Attila agreeing to go no further south.

Attila's death came in 453 after a night of heavy drinking following his marriage to another young bride. He suffocated in a pool of blood after suffering a heavy nosebleed while asleep. The soldiers who buried him were killed afterward, so that none of his enemies would ever be able to find and desecrate his grave.

570–632

I have perfected your religion for you, and I have completed My blessing upon you and I have approved Islam for your religion
.

Koran, sura 5

Muhammad was the founder of the Islamic faith. Muslims believe that he was the messenger of God and the last of his prophets and that he transmitted the word of God to his people in the form of the Koran. For Muslims, the Koran and the Hadith, collections of Muhammad's deeds and sayings, together provide complete guidance on how to live a good and devout life.

While he founded Islam against a background of turbulent tribal feuding, Muhammad encouraged his followers to serve God with decency, humility and piety. But he was also clearly a gifted and ruthless soldier-statesman, founding a successful and expanding state by diplomacy and warfare—as well as a new world religion.

Muhammed ibn Abdullah was born in Mecca in
AD
570. He spent his early years in the Arabian desert in the care of a Bedouin wet-nurse. Both his parents and his grandfather were dead by the time he was eight, and he grew up under the guardianship of his uncle Abu Talib. Muhammad grew into a handsome young man with a generous character and great skill at arbitrating in disputes.

This inspirational visionary was renowned as a devout and spiritual man. He would regularly retreat to the desert to meditate and pray. It was on one such retreat in 610 that he first claimed to
have experienced the presence of the archangel Gabriel, who appeared to him with a command to begin his revelation of the word of God. Terrified, he told his first wife, Khadijah, of his experience. She and her blind Christian cousin Waraqah interpreted Muhammad's experience as a sign that he was God's prophet.

Over the next few years, Muhammad continued to receive the revelations that would become the Koran and which Muslims believe are the direct word of God. Soon he began to preach to the people of Mecca, converting small groups of his friends and family and various prominent Meccans. He taught them that there was one God, deserving of their complete submission (the meaning of the word Islam), and that he, Muhammad, was God's true prophet. This was seen as disruptive by many of the polytheistic tribesmen of Mecca, and Muhammad's supporters were threatened and persecuted. Muhammad sent one group of his followers to Abyssinia (modern-day Ethiopia) to seek refuge.

In 619, the “year of sorrows,” Khadijah and Abu Talib died. It was around this time that Muhammad experienced the most intense religious experience of his life. He felt the angel Gabriel transport him from Mecca to Jerusalem, and from the Temple Mount ascended to heaven. Witnessing the divine throne of God and meeting prophets such as Moses and Jesus, he learned of his own supreme state among them. The form of daily prayer was also revealed to him. This two-part journey is known as
Isra
(Night Journey) and
Mi'raj
(Ascension).

Still persecuted in Mecca, in 622 Muhammad led his supporters out of the city in the Hijra, a great flight to the city of Yathrib, now known as Medina. There he was recognized as the judge and arbiter, and his following grew. There he created a new state of tolerance under a constitution. But the Jewish tribes of Medina resisted his claim to be the last prophet with the final revelation. At first he had made Jerusalem the direction of prayer—
qibla
—
but now he turned it back to Mecca. Nevertheless, tensions remained between Muhammad and the Meccans, and between 624 and 627 there was a series of battles between the two groups. In the first of these, the Battle of Badr, 313 Muslims defeated a force of 1000 Meccans. In 627 a truce was concluded following a great victory for the Muslims at the Battle of the Ditch. Muhammad was both religions visionary and military-political statesman. When some Jewish tribes backed the Meccans, Muhammad broke with them and had them judged. The result was the execution of male Jews. His Koran promised both tolerance to all those who recognized Islamic supremacy and paid a tax of submission, but also jihad, holy war, against those who resisted.

In 629 Muhammad carried out the first
haj
(pilgrimage) to Mecca, a tradition still followed by hundreds of thousands of Muslims each year. In 630, when the Meccans broke the truce, Muhammad led a force of 10,000 of his followers to the city, capturing it and destroying the idols of the polytheistic tribes. By the following year he had extended his influence to most of Arabia, so bringing to an end what he called the “age of ignorance.” After preaching his final sermon to 200,000 pilgrims in 632, Muhammad died, leaving Arabia stronger and united under the banner of Islam.

Muhammad's promulgation and interpretation of God's word were based on the virtues of humility, magnanimity, justice, meritocracy, nobility, dignity and sincerity. The concept of internal jihad—the inner struggle to live a better, more pious life—was as important to him as taking up arms against enemies—the jihad of holy war. Both ideas are powerful components of Islam. He enhanced the rights of women—compulsion to wear the veil did not arise until well after his death—and slaves. He condemned Arab practices such as female infanticide; reformed tribal custom in favor of a unifying divine law; and denounced corrupt
hierarchies and privilege. His name is the inspiration for countless beautiful calligraphic works and much exquisite Islamic poetry. Christian contemporaries confirm that he existed but most of the details of his biography derive from histories written in Iraq and Iran, one or two centuries later. His life and words are indispensable to the Muslim world. Despite the excesses carried out in his name by extremists, he continues to provide spiritual direction to millions of ordinary people. On the basis of Muhammad's achievements, it is little wonder that Muslims believe that he was the “perfect man”—not divine but “a ruby among stones.”

The Caliphs and the Great Arab Conquests

Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan is one of the greatest Arab and Muslim Caliphs. He followed in the footsteps of Umar ibn al-Khattab, the Commander of the Believers, in regulating state affairs
.

Ibn Khaldun, 14th century

After the death of the Prophet Muhammad, his new theocratic realm almost fell apart, but his successors, known as the Caliphs or the Commanders of the Believers, not only restored Islamic rule in Arabia but then embarked on an astonishing military campaign that, in a matter of a few decades, conquered a new empire that stretched from Spain in the west to the borders of India in the east. The first four of the successors were known as the Righteous Caliphs, but this epoch of triumphant success ended
in two bursts of civil war, fought for political control of the new empire and religion. These wars remain relevant today because they created the schism in Islam between the Sunni and Shia. But in each case, the scars were healed by two remarkable rulers from the Ummayad dynasty.

After the Prophet's death, he was succeeded by his old supporter Abu Bakr, who sent probing expeditions into the Byzantine provinces of the Middle East. But on Abu Bakr's death, the next Caliph Omar the Just—an austere and severe giant—dispatched Arab armies that conquered the great cities of Damascus and Jerusalem and ultimately Syria, Palestine, Iraq and Egypt. Then the Arabs conquered Persia—and this was only the beginning.

In 644 Omar was assassinated, succeeded by Othman, who continued the conquests but whose nepotism and bad management led to his murder. For those who believed the succession should lie with the family of Muhammad, the ideal successor was his first cousin Ali, married to his daughter Fatima—but others felt Ali was implicated somehow in the murder of Othman and so they named as their leader Muawiya, who became one of the greatest Arab rulers.

Muawiya was a Meccan aristocrat, son of Abu Sufyan, who had led the opposition to Muhammad. When Mecca surrendered to Islam, Muhammad welcomed the family into the fold, Muawiya became his secretary, and he married his sister. Caliph Omar appointed Muawiya as governor of Syria, describing him as the “Arab Caesar”—a backhanded compliment that has some truth in it. Muawiya ruled Syria and Palestine for twenty years for his cousin Caliph Othman but on his assassination he defied the new Caliph Ali. In the civil war ensuing in Iraq, Ali was killed—the last of the Righteous Caliphs—and in 661 Muawiya became the Caliph of the vast empire that included Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Iraq, Persia and Arabia.

He was handsome, shrewd, well bred and prided himself on his prowess both as a general and a lover of women. He built an Islamic fleet that conquered Rhodes and Cyprus and almost took Constantinople in his annual attacks on the Byzantines. He treated Jerusalem as his spiritual capital but ruled from Damascus, creating a new ideal of imperial monarchy, the Islamic-Arab king-ruler, that has lasted to the present era. He ruled through Christian bureaucrats and tolerated Christians and Jews alike, seeing himself as something between Arab sheikh, Islamic caliph and Roman emperor. He was tolerant and pragmatic, following an early, looser version of Islam, happy to worship at Christian and Jewish sites, and share their shrines. Later he expanded the empire into eastern Persia, central Asia, the Sahara and into today's Libya and Algeria.

Muawiya was famed for his good sense and witty decency at a time when he was probably the most powerful ruler on earth. He prided himself on his patience and forbearance: no one has ever so cleverly stated the essence of politics as Muawiya, who said: “I apply not my sword when my lash suffices nor my lash when my tongue suffices. And even if but one hair is binding me to my fellow men, I don't let it break. When they pull, I loosen, if they loosen, I pull.”

On his death in 680, his son Yazid failed to grasp the succession, facing rebellions in Arabia and Iraq. Muhammad's grandson Hussein rebelled to avenge his father Ali's death but was brutally murdered at Karbala in Iraq, his martyrdom creating the Shia, “the party,” a division that still splits Islam today. However, after Yazid's early death, Muawiya's old kinsman Marwan started to reconquer the empire, dying in 685 and leaving this troubled inheritance to his son Abd al-Malik, the second of the titanic Ummayad Caliphs. Abd al-Malik was less humane and flexible but more ruthless and visionary than Muawiya. He first mercilessly crushed the rebellions, retaking Iraq and Arabia; in Jerusalem
he built the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount, a triumph of religious expression and imperial grandeur, the oldest Islamic shrine, and ordered the building of the Aqsa Mosque.

Abd al-Malik was severe, thin, hook-nosed, curly-haired and, his enemies claimed, in what can probably be dismissed as hostile propaganda, that he had breath so noxious he was nicknamed the Flykiller. Abd al-Malik saw himself as God's shadow on earth: if Muawiya was Caesar of the Arabs, he was a mixture of St. Paul and Constantine the Great—he believed in the marriage of empire, state and god. As such it was Abd al-Malik who collated the book of Islam—the Koran—into its final form (the inscriptions in Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock are the first examples of the final Koran text), who defined Islamic rituals and who unified Islam into a single religion recognizable today with the emphasis on Koran and Muhammad, expressed in the double
shahada
: “There is no God but God and Muhammad is the apostle of God.” Abd al-Malik and his son Caliph Walid expanded their empire to the borders of India and the coasts of Spain. Yet their dynasty remained part Islamic theocrats, part Roman emperors, often living in a distinctly un-Islamic decadence. This led to the family's downfall in the revolution of 750, when they were replaced by the Abbasid caliphs who ruled from Iraq and blackened the reputation of the Ummayads. To the Shia, they remained heretics and sinners because the Shia believed the real Caliphs were the twelve descendants from Ali and Fatima: indeed the Shia of Iran still await the return of the Twelfth.

625–705

Wu is a treacherous monster! May it be that I be reincarnated as a cat and she be reincarnated as a mouse, so that I can, forever and ever, grab her throat
.

Consort Xiao, one of Empress Wu's many victims

The only woman in Chinese history to rule in her own right, the empress Wu was both depraved megalomaniac and intelligent puppeteer. Beginning life as the emperor's concubine, she dominated the imperial court for over half a century, eventually achieving absolute power as the self-styled “Heavenly Empress.”

Wu Zhao, as she was then known, was only thirteen when in 638 she entered the imperial palace as a concubine of the emperor Taizong. From an early age she was aware of the power that flowed from her good looks and intelligence, and by the time Taizong died a decade or so later, she had already ingratiated herself with his son and heir, Gaozong.

As was customary for concubines following the death of their master, Wu Zhao spent a brief period in retreat at a Buddhist convent. But within a couple of years she was back at the center of imperial court life, her return being partly driven by the empress Wang, Gaozong's wife: jealous of one of her husband's other concubines, Consort Xiao, Wang had hoped that Wu might divert his attention. It was to be a fatal move.