1 There is an interesting parallel here with Franco’s army in the Spanish Civil War. Landing from Morocco on the Spanish mainland in 1936, his troops – many of whom were Muslim Berber warriors – were encouraged to perform acts of barbarism on captured civilians, including women, tales of which then caused panic among the defending Republican forces.
A SONG FROM THE EAST
One figure more than any other captures the movement of ideas from East to West which helped to turn Al-Andalus into the most advanced country in Europe, and its capital, Cordoba, into ‘the ornament of the world’. That man was a ninth-century musician, astronomer, and perhaps the single most important trendsetter in history: Ziryab, the ‘Blackbird’. He is a second Man from the East during the Moorish period, a cultural ambassador cementing the political work begun by the Umayyad Emir Abd al-Rahman.
Ziryab was born Abu al-Hassan Ali bin Nafi in 789, although exactly where is not known. Some sources say he was Persian, others that he was Kurdish, while others again claim that he was African, his nickname – ‘blackbird’ – referring not only to his beautiful singing voice but to the colour of his skin.
What is known was that he was a freed slave who spent the first period of his life in Baghdad, the capital of the Abbasid caliphate. There he studied music under Ishaq al-Mawsili, court musician to the Caliph Harun al-Rashid. Ziryab was more talented than his master, however, a fact he kept secret until the day the caliph himself asked Ziryab to perform for him.
‘I can sing what the other singers know,’ said Ziryab when he appeared at court, ‘but my own repertory is made up of songs suitable only to be performed before a caliph like Your Majesty. The other singers don’t know those pieces. If Your Majesty would allow, I shall sing for you what human ears have never heard before.’
Ziryab went on to perform his own elaborate and novel compositions, making his master, Ishaq, look a fool in the process. Ishaq vowed revenge, and Ziryab had to flee Baghdad with his family in fear for his life.
He headed west, soon arriving in Kairouan. From there he wrote to the Emir of Al-Andalus, offering his services to the royal court in Cordoba. At the time the Moorish leader, Al-Hakam, was trying to introduce a level of sophistication to what was still, at that point, a distant and rather backward outpost of the Islamic Empire. He leapt at the chance to have a musician from Baghdad at his court.
Ziryab crossed the Strait to Al-Andalus, landing at the port of Algeciras in the Bay of Gibraltar. The year was 822. Just over a hundred years before, Tariq had made the same crossing, marking the start of the military invasion of Iberia. Now, as Ziryab sailed the few miles from south to north, the cultural conquest of the Peninsula could begin.
Al-Hakam had died during the interim, but Ziryab was warmly welcomed by his son, Abd al-Rahman II, great-grandson of the Abd al-Rahman who established the Umayyad dynasty in Al-Andalus. The musician was given a large salary and lands around Cordoba, and very quickly established himself as a leading light at court and confidant of the emir, discussing poetry, music, history and the arts and sciences.
Before long, Ziryab was acting like a ‘minister of culture’ in the Andalusi capital. He set up a music school, where his compositions were handed down and experimentalism was encouraged. He introduced the innovations he had made with the lute: while the normal instrument had four pairs of strings – said to represent Aristotle’s four humours: bile, blood, phlegm and melancholy – he had added a fifth to represent the soul.
Ziryab knew as many as ten thousand songs by heart, and his radical musical style was very influential, spreading not only through Moorish Spain, but centuries later inspiring the songs of the European Troubadours. Today the music of northern Morocco is a direct descendant of his repertoire.
Yet his cultural significance went far beyond music. Everything in Moorish Spain from food to clothes to pastimes and fashion was revolutionised by the new man from Baghdad.
Before Ziryab, meals in Al-Andalus were eaten from bare wooden tables, with the dishes served all at once. Now the concept of tablecloths was introduced, and the food was presented in a series of courses, starting with the soup, moving on to meat and fish, and finishing with fruit, desserts and nuts. The American expression ‘from soup to nuts’ – from beginning to end – echoes this ninth-century novelty even today.
Then there were new foods to be enjoyed. Asparagus had previously been considered nothing more than a weed. Now it became a delicacy. Other new dishes included a plate of meatballs with pieces of dough fried in coriander oil, sweets made of honey and walnuts – still made today in Saragossa – and spiral pastries soaked in saffron syrup. Meanwhile, replacing heavy metal goblets for wine (Andalusi Muslims were not strict when it came to religious injunctions against alcohol), came fine crystal glasses.
Beyond the dinner table, Ziryab’s influence was felt in personal grooming and fashion. He stressed the need for personal hygiene and frequent bathing, introducing deodorants and toothpaste. Men and women alike were encouraged to wear bright colours in the spring, white clothes in summer, and long cloaks trimmed with fur in the winter. Short hairstyles, leaving the neck, ears and eyebrows free, were also introduced. Previously everyone at court had worn their hair long, parted in the middle.
Ziryab had Jewish doctors brought to Al-Andalus from North Africa and Iraq, and astrologers from India. These men introduced the game of chess to the royal court, which quickly spread and centuries later reached the Christian world. Around the same time, certain superstitions also entered Andalusian culture, including a nervousness over the number 13, or broken mirrors.
In almost every aspect of life, this one man had a tremendous impact, transforming the Cordoban court, and beyond it the rest of Al-Andalus, creating cultural gold in the crucible of Moorish Spain. And in time, his innovations spread into Christian Europe. Subsequently they became so engrained in Western culture that today we are mostly ignorant of their Eastern origins.
DEATH IN CORDOBA
Much of the political history of Arabian Spain centres around the Umayyad’s bloody suppression of rebellions by disgruntled Berbers, local governors, and rival power groups. But one much smaller episode stands out, if only because the violence was willingly brought upon the victims themselves. It went on to become an important and celebrated incident within Christian Spain.
The name ‘Cordoba Martyrs’ is used to describe a group of around fifty Christians living in the Moorish capital in the mid-ninth century. All of them died at the hands of the Muslim authorities for deliberately committing crimes which they knew would bring the death penalty, including blasphemy and apostasy.
The conquest of the Peninsula had brought many native non-Muslim communities under the control of the Islamic authorities. Once peace had been established, these groups were generally allowed to live normal lives, as long as they were either Christian or Jewish – which most of them were. These religions were officially tolerated because, like Islam, they were based on holy scripture, on a book. The only concerted hardship they faced was having to pay a special tax, called a jizya. Barriers to social mobility were more to do with not being of Arab descent (the Berbers’ constant gripe) than with religion.
Life for a Christian in ninth-century Al-Andalus, in fact, was quite good, as the early biography of one of the first Cordoba ‘Martyrs’ shows. His name was Isaac. He spoke fluent Arabic and had risen fairly high in the city administration, probably reaching the position of katib, or secretary. Interestingly, his biographer – Eulogius, a fellow Christian writing at the time who would later go on to be martyred himself – mentions this in a matter-of-fact way: speaking Arabic and working in the Muslim administration was clearly quite normal by this point, less than one hundred and fifty years after the Moorish invasion. What happened next, however, was different.
Isaac left his post and retired to a monastery not far from Cordoba (again, the fact that this monastery continued to exist at all is further testament to a relatively tolerant attitude to non-Mu
slims at this time). Three years later he returned to the capital, apparently having undergone something of a character change. He went to the office of the qadi – the chief religious judge – and asked to convert to Islam. But when the qadi appeared, Isaac launched into an attack on Islam and the Prophet, and called on the judge to convert to Christianity instead. Somewhat taken aback, the qadi assumed the poor man was drunk, or out of his mind. But Isaac insisted, continuing his verbal attack and making it clear that he was prepared to die for his beliefs. The judge became inflamed, struck him and had him arrested.
And so, after a brief spell in prison (during which time he was well treated), on 3 June 851 Isaac was executed. In the words of Eulogius:
This servant of God bent his head under sentence of death: he was hanged head downwards on the gallows . . . His body was cremated after a few days and the ashes were scattered in the river.
It is probable that while at the monastery Isaac had been inspired by tales of the early Christians martyred by the Romans. Living himself as a subject of a non-Christian authority, he may have felt a need to follow in their footsteps. But there was a problem: how could he be persecuted in a largely non-persecuting society? Christians were generally left in peace in mid-ninth-century Al-Andalus. In fact, the qadi who struck Isaac was restrained and chastised by other Muslim officials for his actions; Isaac’s biographer virtually lamented the fact that Isaac and those who followed his path were not tortured while in jail. The answer, of course, was deliberately to commit an act which would guarantee execution and the much desired ‘martyrdom’: blasphemy.
Isaac’s example caught the imagination of a small number of his fellow Christians, and over the next five years around fifty more committed similar acts of deliberate offence to the authorities in order to be judicially killed. It is likely, however, that most Christians in Al-Andalus at the time were scandalised by this curious, extremist movement. The Bishop of Seville was very vocal in his condemnation of the ‘Martyrs’. Maintaining a generally harmonious status quo was almost certainly uppermost in his mind. Most Christians preferred a low-key approach in order to carry on with their lives.
So why did Isaac and the others choose to bring this violence upon themselves? The answer may lie in the increasing numbers of Christians who by this point were converting to Islam. What is known of the Cordoba Martyrs reflects something of the mixed racial make-up of Andalusi society: most of them were of indigenous stock, but Arabs, Berbers, Syrians, perhaps even a Greek numbered among them as well. After almost one hundred and fifty years of Muslim domination, Islamic culture was in the ascendency. And, as occurs in any part of the world at any time, people were attracted to the ways of the most powerful and advanced culture of their period. Christians and Jews who adopted Muslim dress and customs were known as ‘Mozarabs’, from the Arabic musta’rib, meaning ‘one who adopts Arab ways’. In fact, Paul Alvarus, a close friend of Eulogius, complained that young Christians in Cordoba were speaking Arabic so much that they could barely remember their own native tongue and traditions:
The Christians love to read the poems and romances of the Arabs. They study Arab theologians and philosophers, not to refute them but to form an elegant and correct Arabic . . . They have forgotten their own language. For every one who can write a letter in Latin to a friend, there are a thousand who can express themselves in Arabic with elegance and write better poems in this language than the Arabs themselves.
With a growing economy and a fiscal incentive to conform with the ruling class, the ninth century was a time of increasing assimilation by Spaniards into Islamic culture. Christian, pre-Islamic Spanish identity was therefore coming under threat. And Isaac’s response was to resort to the one tool that has been used extensively throughout Spanish history in such circumstances: extreme violence. Not against the ruling authorities. As one individual there was little he could do. Instead he brought the violence upon himself. And just as tales of early Christian martyrs inspired later believers, so his sacrifice would become a rallying cry for his co-religionists.
The martyr movement itself was short-lived and limited to a small number of people, but word of it soon spread to the northern parts of the Peninsula, where tiny Christian statelets had managed to establish themselves after the Moorish conquest. Taking advantage of the natural fortifications provided by the landscape, and often walled in by mountain ranges, centuries later these tiny warrior nations would go on to form the founding kingdoms of modern Spain. For the time being, however, they were cowed and subdued, still licking their wounds and living at a far remove from the rest of Christian Europe. News from Cordoba in the mid-ninth century, however, had a galvanising effect. The executed Christians of Cordoba were immediately hailed as heroes. Within thirty years, the king of Asturias had bought the remains of one – Eulogius, Isaac’s biographer – from the ruler of Al-Andalus and set up a cult of worship centred on them at Oviedo.
With time, these men and women would become cornerstones of the mythology which fired the ‘Reconquest’, Spain’s cultural and military expunging of its Moorish self. Meanwhile, back in Cordoba, the Muslim rulers responded to the increasing numbers of Christians seeking martyrdom by reinforcing long-lapsed restrictions against their community, for example by banning them from administrative posts. In a complex environment, with many racial and religious textures and variations, stories of the Martyrs and the violence surrounding them helped to boil things down to simple terms of ‘us’ and ‘them’.
Isaac’s plan eventually worked, perhaps to an even greater extent than he had ever imagined. His legacy resonates to this day: at the time of writing a dozen Catalan independence activists are on trial in Madrid on charges of rebellion. They will be hoping that their own ‘martyrdom’ will have as powerful a boost for their cause as Isaac’s did for his.
SPANISH MEDICINE
In the tenth century, medical knowledge and practice in Moorish Cordoba was so advanced that kings of northern Christian lands travelled to the enemy capital in search of cures for their ailments. Muslim Spaniards of the Middle Ages were carrying out pioneering work, establishing a tradition of medical innovation which is alive to this day.
The most outstanding physician of the Moorish period is a man called Al-Zahrawi. Known in the Latin-speaking world as Abulcasis, al-Zahrawi is renowned as the ‘father of surgery’, a branch of medicine which he considered the highest form of his art and which he developed almost single-handedly. The last volume of his magnum opus – Kitab al-Tasrif – is an illustrated guide to surgical techniques and was the very first such book ever to be written. A hundred and fifty years after his death (1031) it was translated into Latin in Toledo and became the standard textbook on the subject in Western universities and hospitals for five centuries. Even today modern surgeons still use the instruments which al-Zahrawi invented, among them the scalpel, the forceps, the surgical needle and retractor, and the speculum. In all he designed some two hundred surgical tools, each described in detail in his book.
Many of al-Zahrawi’s breakthroughs came from observation of nature. One day his pet monkey ate some spare strings for his master’s oud, made out of cat gut. When al-Zahrawi noticed that the strings appeared to cause the animal no harm and were in fact absorbed into his body, he started to think how he could use his discovery for medical purposes. His answer was to employ cat gut for sutures in operations on humans, a technique which is still used today.
Another advancement came when he was called to treat a slave girl who had tried to commit suicide by stabbing herself in the throat. Al-Zahrawi noticed that she hadn’t managed to sever any arteries and that in fact the bleeding was quite mild. In addition, air was passing in and out of the wound while she breathed. This observation later formed the basis of tracheotomies.
Al-Zahrawi was a master of his art: he developed neurosurgical methods to cure head injuries and migraines, he was an accomplished dentist, and made important advancements in childbirth techniques. He was also the first person to
recognise haemophilia as a hereditary disease. A thousand years later, the Spanish royal family still hadn’t learned this important lesson, with two of Alfonso XIII’s sons suffering from the disease as a result.
A hundred and fifty years after Al-Zahrawi died, another giant of medicine was working in Cordoba: Abu Marwan ibn Zuhr, who insisted on a purely rational approach to medicine, and who also wrote books on his art which were later translated into Latin and had a huge influence on Western medicinal thinking. Ibn Zuhr was a pioneer of dissection, using animals to learn about internal organs. Dissection of humans was forbidden under Islamic law, but it is possible, given the accuracy of some of his observations, that Ibn Zuhr secretly performed this procedure, possibly introducing into the corpse a substance made of cinnabar and vegetable oils, a rich red liquid which helped to identify blood vessels. The oldest known example of a dissected human body dates from the thirteenth century, just a hundred years after Ibn Zuhr’s death, and shows signs of this technique being used in Europe at the time.
Ibn Zuhr also developed Al-Zahrawi’s ideas about the tracheotomy, carrying out the procedure on goats before putting it into practice on his patients.
With the translation movement in Toledo of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,1 Moorish medicinal knowledge started to seep into Christian Spain, establishing a tradition which thrives to this day. In Valencia a number of medicinal herbal gardens were set up in the Middle Ages, later being absorbed into the Jardí Botànic, which was created in the 1500s. Around a hundred years before, the same city had seen the establishment of the first psychiatric hospital in Christian Europe, setting a trend which was quickly followed in other Spanish cities.
Fast-forward to the early nineteenth century and it was the Spanish who set up the world’s first international healthcare programme. The Englishman Jenner invented vaccination in 1797, but it was a Spanish doctor, Francisco Javier de Balmís, who decided to use the technique to carry out the first vaccination mission, travelling to Latin America and Asia. The plan was given royal approval, and in 1803 Balmís set sail on a three-year voyage around the globe, accompanied by twenty-two orphans as live carriers of the virus, which could then be passed on to others in the ports and cities they visited along the way. Jenner himself wrote of the Balmís expedition:
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