by Holland, Tom
Yet always, no matter how widely the mantle was cast, there remained the leaden possibility that it might not prove enough: that the dark lord might still manifest himself, lit by flaring shadows, and enthroned in awful splendour, amid the wreckage of a Christian shrine. ‘You see all these, do you not?’ Christ Himself had asked His disciples, pointing to the buildings of the Temple. ‘Truly, I say to you, there will not be left here one stone upon another, that will not be thrown down.’ And so it had happened; and so, no doubt, before the Day of Judgement, it was fated that the ruin of the Temple would be mirrored by no less monstrous desecrations. In 991, for instance – a perilously close thing – fire had threatened the shrine of St Peter in Rome; and all the Romans and assembled pilgrims ‘as one man had given out a terrible scream and turned to rush to confess the Prince of the Apostles, for a long while crying that if he did not watchfully protect his church at this time then many men would fall away from the faith’. Sure enough, the flames had at once miraculously retreated and vanished; but the whole scare had nevertheless served as a salutary reminder to the faithful everywhere of the potential vulnerability of even their holiest shrines. Indeed, to an alarming degree, the holier the shrine, the more vulnerable it tended to be. Fire was not the only threat to Christendom’s capital. In 1004, for instance, a fleet of pirates had sailed up the River Arno, sacking Pisa, and temporarily cutting off Rome from the north. The Saracens, unlike the Vikings, still held fast to their defiance of the Christian faith – and to their habit of tracing the frontiers of Christendom with blood.
Nor was St Peter the only apostle they were able to menace. In the north-west corner of Spain, set amid the mountain-ringed realm of Galicia, there stood the tomb of a second: St James. Here was a fabulous claim, it might have been thought: for Santiago, as the Christians of Spain called him, had been executed, on the certain authority of Scripture itself, in the Holy Land. Yet the story that his disciples had sailed with his corpse to the rocky Galician coast, that they had buried him forty miles inland, and that his final resting place had lain forgotten for some 800 years, until at last it had been discovered by an enterprising bishop, appeared proved beyond all shadow of a doubt by the spectacular miracles performed upon his relics. The kings of Leon certainly presumed so: delighted to find themselves with a genuine apostle on their hands, they had duly begun to promote his cult for all they were worth, hailing him as their celestial patron, and raising a splendid basilica over his tomb. Already, by the middle of the tenth century, its fame had spread far beyond the limits of Spain, so that pilgrims from the furthest reaches of Francia, including even counts and bishops, were to be found making the gruelling journey to the distant shrine, ‘to beg mercy and help from God and Santiago’. Increasingly, of all those holy places in Christendom where the earth was held to be touched by heaven, only Rome was illumined by a greater renown.
And then, catastrophe. On 10 August 997, amid the fearsome cacophony of trumpets and pipes that invariably heralded an assault by Saracens, a great army had descended upon the shrine. For a week, the invaders pillaged and burned everything that they could. The cathedral itself they razed to the ground. Its bells, brought crashing down, were loaded on to the shoulders of Christian captives. When the Saracens, content with their work of destruction, withdrew at last, their human pack-animals were compelled to accompany them, sweating and stumbling, all the way to Cordoba. Christian chroniclers, in horror at the humiliation visited upon Santiago, would subsequently claim that the invaders had been struck down by diarrhoea, a godly punishment indeed, and had perished amid the effluvia of their own bowels — but this was mere wishful thinking. Entering Cordoba, the warriors of the Caliphate did so unperturbed by stomach upsets.
Proofs of their triumph were indisputable and manifold. Unloaded into the Great Mosque, the bells from the despoiled cathedral were suspended from the ceiling, to serve the Muslim faithful as lamps, lighting their way to prayers. Of the prisoners of war, some were kept in their chains, and set to labouring on a great extension to the mosque. Others, led to the esplanade that ran beside the River Guadalquivir, were publicly decapitated, and their severed heads paraded through the market place, before being hung from the main gates of the citadel.
Grisly trophies such as these had long adorned Cordoba. No duty was more incumbent upon a commander of the faithful than that of waging jihad, and Abd al-Rahman, by laying claim to the title of Caliph, had pledged himself and his successors to at least the occasional expedition against the infidel. The heads of slaughtered Christians, dispatched from the front line, could serve not only as proof to an admiring people of their master’s victories but as stirring evidence of his piety. ‘Give firmness to the Believers,’ God had instructed His Prophet. ‘I will instil terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers: smite ye above their necks.’ Just as Mohammed himself, in the wake of his first great victory on the battlefield, had been presented by a servant with the severed head of his deadliest enemy, so had the caliphs harvested the heads of Christians – and by doing so proclaimed to the world their fitness to serve as the heirs of the Prophet.
Yet the commander who had led the raid on Santiago was not a caliph. For all that an Umayyad still ruled as the nominal lord of al- Andalus, true power had slipped the dynasty’s grasp. Hisham II, son of the shrewd and cultivated al-Hakam, had shown himself pitifully unworthy of his famous lineage. Succeeding to the throne in 976, at the tender age of fourteen, he had passed the entire span of his reign within the gilded cage of Cordoba’s citadel, the anonymous and indolent victim of his own general uselessness. Effective mastery of the Caliphate had been seized instead by his regent, a celebrated warrior and religious scholar by the name of Ibn Abi Amir, a man as stern and masterful as Hisham was dissipated, and who had adopted, in 981, the richly merited title of ‘al-Mansur’ – ‘the Victorious One’. Indeed, not since the time of the first coming of the Muslims to Spain had the Christians faced such a dangerous foe. Whereas in the time of Abd al-Rahman they had found it no great challenge to rebuff most of the assaults launched against them, and had even, on one noted occasion, succeeded in capturing the Caliph’s personal Qur’an, it seemed, by the time of the Millennium, that there was no resisting the Saracen firestorm. Santiago was far from the only target of al-Mansur’s fury. Barcelona too had been burned, and the lands of Christian lordships everywhere laid to waste. Even the kingdom of Leon, the most flourishing and formidable of them all, had been set to totter. As year followed year, and victory for the Saracens followed victory, so many Christians had come to dread whether their faith had a future in Spain at all.
Al-Mansur himself was certainly committed to its overthrow. Jihad was in his blood. Granted, his campaigns were not wholly lacking in expediency: for as an effective usurper, the pressure on him to legitimise his regime was greater even than it had been on the caliphs. Nevertheless, although he undoubtedly was a ruthless and calculating political operator, al-Mansur was also something much more: a man who devoutly believed himself the sword and shield of God. The infidels to the north were not the only objects of his righteous scorn. Indeed, even though he claimed descent from an Arab who had participated in the original conquest of Spain, he appears to have viewed the entire character of al-Andalus with a disdain that bordered on contempt. No less than the worthless Caliph immured in his palace, his compatriots struck him as dissipated and lacking in due piety. A man who felt himself called to scour the infidel from Spain could hardly remain oblivious to the canker of moral laxity among his co-religionists. Even in what should have been the great bastions of right thinking in al-Andalus, in the schools where the Qur’an was taught, and in the famous libraries that were the glory of Cordoba, the austere verities of Islam appeared, to him, under constant and insidious threat. So it was that al-Mansur had scholars suspected of heresy publicly crucified; and so it was too that he did not hesitate to winnow even the celebrated library of al-Hakam of offending volumes, and consign the chaff to a bonfire. By 1002, when he d
ied in the midst of his fifty- second campaign of jihad, it appeared that his life’s mission to impose God’s order upon the world had reaped a truly spectacular harvest — in the House of Islam itself no less than in the bloodied House of War.
And so it had — but not in the way that al-Mansur himself had intended. Appearances could be deceptive. In truth, it was not the kingdom of Le6n, nor any of the other Christian lordships left mangled by the long decades of jihad, that faced implosion. Rather, it was the Caliphate itself, which had seemed, under the leadership of al-Mansur, raised to such intimidating heights of glory as to put even the furthest reaches of infidel Spain in its shadow, that was teetering on the edge of ruin. Few, in the immediate wake of the great warlord’s death, would have suspected as much; but there were some, even back in the glory days of the Umayyads, who had sensed a rottenness in al-Andalus, and feared where it might end. One of them, ironically enough, had been al-Mansur himself. As a youthful and talented player in the often deadly game of harem politics, he had been granted plentiful opportunities to study at close hand the functioning of al-Hakam’s regime - and to mark just how dependent it had become for its muscle on foreigners. As in the days of Abbot John’s visit to Cordoba, most of these were slaves, transported to al-Andalus from the far-off lands of the Slavs - but some were mercenaries, Muslim Berbers from Morocco. Al- Mansur had come to know the quality of these men well: for early in his career he had served among them in North Africa. Stern in the practice of their religion, and ‘famed for their exploits, qualities and valour in the face of the Christians’,” the Berbers had seemed to the young officer everything that his compatriots were not: warriors ideally suited to keeping an ambitious jihadi in power. And so it had proved. Al-Mansur’s reign had witnessed a prodigious influx of Berber war bands into al-Andalus. By the time of his death, they were to be found billeted across the Caliphate, loathed and feared in equal measure by the natives. Naturally enough, as the tax rate spiralled ever upwards, so the resentment of the Andalusis at being obliged to fund the promotion of immigrants – of savages! – over their own heads had grown increasingly sulphurous. In Cordoba especially, the great maze of streets had begun to seethe with ethnic hatreds. The capital had been transformed into a kindling box.
This was an alarming inheritance, certainly, for any ruler to come into. For six years, however, al-Mansur’s eldest son, a jihad-seasoned alcoholic by the name of Abd al-Malik, succeeded, despite his most un-Islamic enthusiasm for the bottle, in maintaining his dynasty’s grip on both Cordoba and al-Andalus. Rather than flaunt his power, he did as his father had done, and paid dutiful lip service to Hisham II; rather than parade his dependence on the Berbers, he sought to veil it. When he too died, however, and was succeeded by his brother, the son of a Christian concubine known to the Cordobans by the derisive nickname of ‘Sanchuelo’, both policies were flung out of the window. Subtlety was not the new regent’s forte. First, he leaned on the wretched Hisham to appoint him the formal heir to the throne of the Caliphate; then, just for good measure, he ordered everyone at court to start wearing a Berber style of turban. As Sanchuclo set off northwards on the obligatory campaign of jihad, he left behind him a capital that was smouldering. At the news that he had crossed the frontier, it exploded into flames.
The spark that lit the conflagration had been struck by an Umayyad fugitive, Muhammed bin Hisham. Sneaking back into Cordoba, he had succeeded in rallying the disinherited members of his clan to his cause – and now, with Sanchuelo far distant in the lands of the infidel, he deposed the feeble Hisham II and took his place upon the throne. News of the coup was greeted ecstatically by the Cordobans, who set about celebrating it with a delirious orgy of theft and violence. The slums emptied as the palaces built by al-Mansur and his two sons were systematically trashed. ‘Such was the sacking,’ one historian recorded, ‘that even the doors and beams disappeared.’ The new Caliph, far from attempting to restrain the rioters, encouraged them all he could. This was the measure of his authority: it depended on a lynch mob. As did his justice. Staking out Sanchuelo’s harem, the new Commander of the Faithful cherry-picked the most beautiful women, raped some of the others and shared out the remainder among his henchmen. Learning that Sanchuelo himself had been abandoned by his army and assassinated, he ordered the corpse brought back to Cordoba and stuck up on a gibbet. Seeking to raze the principal buttress of the toppled regime, and ingratiate himself with the anti-immigrant Cordobans, he placed a bounty on the head of every Berber.
‘And slay them wherever ye catch them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out; for tumult and oppression are worse than slaughter.’ The Cordobans, who had long felt that the ‘tumult and oppression’ of the hated Berbers more than qualified them to be slaughtered, now set to obeying the Prophet’s injunction with a sanguinary literalness. As black smoke rose above the immense city, so mobs began to gather once again, pillaging Berber barracks and homes, and hunting down their inhabitants. The men were slaughtered; the women raped, then tethered together to be sold as whores. Those found to be pregnant had their babies sliced out of their bellies.
Yet the Berbers were not so easily excised from the guts of al- Andalus. By 1010, the vengeful comrades of those who had been massacred the year before were camped around the walls of Cordoba, and for three years they remained there, slowly starving the city to death. The Cordobans, flaunting their refusal to surrender, went so far as to sanction cannibalism rather than submit to the hated foreigners. Most, however, were civilians -- and such gestures were the effective limit of their defiance. The ruin of Cordoba, when it came at last, was total. The Berbers, taking possession of the city in the spring of 1013, mercilessly beslathered the ‘Ornament of the World’ with gore. All its gilded splendours, all its fabulous pretensions, were trampled underfoot. Among the corpses left piled in the smoking streets, almost certainly, was that of Hisham II, the heir of the Umayyads, his pale and perfumed body sharing in his capital’s desecration, his caliphal blood serving to feed the ruined city’s flies.
And yet his death went unremarked. Set against the titanic scale of the ethnic hatreds that had torn the Caliphate to pieces, the doings of its rulers had come to seem a matter almost of insignificance. The Cordobans, during the course of the terrible siege, had thought nothing of executing Mohammed for the horrors he had brought down upon them, and restoring Hisham to his throne; and after Hisham’s disappearance, there were other factions who adopted candidates of their own. Yet few paid these spectral caliphs any attention. The unity of al-Andalus was gone for ever, and across the lands that had once been ruled from Cordoba local warlords were already looking to their own. The Muslims would call these upstarts ‘Taifa’ kings: ‘faction’ kings. The ambition of al-Mansur, that a revived and triumphant Islam would complete the business begun three centuries previously and subdue the whole of Spain, was dead. The goal of the Taifa kings was less aggrandisement than survival. Nothing remained of the Caliphate save a corpse to be scavenged over.
And nothing of its capital save a shell. For those who had known Cordoba in the full radiance of her glory, the agony of what she had become was unbearable. ‘Prosperity has been changed into a sterile desert, society into frightful loneliness, beauty into rubble-strewn plains. Where peace once reigned, great chasms now yawn: the haunt of wolves, of ghosts, of demons.’ So wrote Ibn Hazm, a high-born intellectual and Umayyad loyalist, whose fruitless nostalgia for the decaying Caliphate had led him to endure years of imprisonment and exile. Specifically, he was describing the anguish of a lover parted from the object of his passions: an anguish that he himself had known well. In 1013, amid the horrors of Cordoba’s fall, Ibn Hazm had been forced to flee the city and leave behind him the first great love of his life: a young and exquisitely lovely slave girl, modest, refined and with a voice ‘that could pluck at heart-strings’. Six years on, however, when he met her again, he found her so lined and withered as to be unrecognisable. Feeling that wherever he looked there was no
thing but decay, Ibn Hazm had traced in the preternaturally wrinkled face of a slave woman the lineaments of a more universal decay. The rooms of the country estate in which he had grown up, and Cordoba herself, and the once-flourishing lands of al-Andalus — all were ruined too. ‘Those halls inscribed with beauteous scripts, those adorned boudoirs that used to shine like the sun, possessed of a loveliness that had the power to banish all misery from the soul; now they are overwhelmed by desolation, standing like the open jaws of savage beasts. And by doing so, they proclaim the doom that awaits the world.’
A sentiment worthy almost of Cluny. Certainly, Christians were not alone in dreading that the end days might be at hand. During the reign of al-Hakam, indeed, a Muslim philosopher who had thought to deny the coming of the Day of Judgement had been put to death for heresy. Just as the Great Mosque of Cordoba incorporated within its architecture the columns and brickwork and mosaics of superseded empires, so had the infinitely grander edifice of Islam not disdained to cannibalise the revelations of the Christians. Jesus, Muslims were taught, had been a mighty prophet of God, and at the end of time, he would descend from the skies, just as St John had written, and would fight and conquer the hordes of the ‘Dajjal’ – Antichrist. Not alone, however: for at his side would appear an even greater warrior, ‘a descendant of Fatima’, the Prophet Mohammed’s daughter, whose fateful task it would be ‘to fill the earth with justice and equity, just as now it is filled with oppression and tyranny’. This greatest of all caliphs would be termed ‘al-Maftdi’: ‘the Rightly Guided One’. And his rule would serve to put an end to suffering and injustice for ever.
