The Age of Chivalry

by Hywel Williams

  In the late summer of 778 the rearguard of the Franks’ army was attacked at the mountain pass of Roncesvalles and then massacred by warriors drawn from the local Basque population. Roncesvalles was a major humiliation for Western Europe’s greatest military power, and the capture of Zaragoza by emirate forces in 783 was a further containment of the Frankish Christian threat along the border zone. Major bouts of dissidence among the Arab nobility, lasting for a generation from the end of the eighth century, would nonetheless pose a significant threat to the emirate’s control of the peninsula. There were other dangers, too. Muwallads might have converted to Islam, but they and their descendants had a keen sense of their own native Iberian identity, and many of them rebelled as a group in the second half of the ninth century. Mozarabs protesting against the increasing Arabization of their fellow Christians were a major public order problem in the mid-ninth century. Embracing martyrdom, they embarked on a systematic campaign of reviling the prophet’s name in public—an offense punishable by death from 850 onward. Asturias, with its capital at Oviedo, emerged during this time to become an important Christian frontier state, and especially so after the discovery of St. James’s supposed tomb at Compostella. With its expansion to the south, the territory became known as the kingdom of León from 910 onward, and Mozarabs flocked there in increasing numbers.

  NEW ISLAMIC POWER BASES

  The emergence by 909 of the new and independent caliphate associated with the Fatimid dynasty based in Tunisia changed Islam’s international power alignments. As caliph of the West, ’Abd al-Rahman III established his religious independence of the ’Abbasids, and in 929 he adopted the caliphal title of Al-Nasir li-Din Allah or Victor for the Religion of God. With his authority thereby enhanced, he countered the Fatimids’ naval aggression in the western Mediterranean and subsidized local revolts against their rule in North Africa. Spain itself had seen numerous rebellions during the preceding reign (that of the new caliph’s grandfather ’Abd Allah), and it took some 20 years of campaigning before central authority was restored. Toledo, focus of the last major Muslim resistance to the caliph, fell in 933. León paid homage but retained its ancestral independence despite the prolonged campaign waged against it.

  ’Abd al-Rahman III’s preoccupation with the danger of local dynasties emerging to undermine his rule was therefore understandable enough. That is the reason why he made frequent changes to the personnel of provincial governorships. Moreover, an entire new city, Madinat al-Zahra, was built near Córdoba to house the bureaucracy and royal household, whose expansion showed the caliph’s determination to assert dynastic control. The greatest architectural expression of Andalusian Spain’s Islamic civilization is the Great Mosque at Córdoba, which was finished by 976 after two centuries of almost continuous construction and embellishment. Erected on land bought from Christians, the mosque was intended to show the vitality of an enduring culture, and the cathedral that had stood on the site was demolished. No other building in tenth-century Western Europe came close to offering a comparison with the magnificence of Córdoba’s mosque, whose architectural motifs of the horseshoe arch and ribbed dome announced the arrival of a new stage in the history of Islamic architecture. The roofs of the prayer hall’s 19 aisles were supported by more than 850 columns made of porphyry, jasper and colored marble; a two-tiered system of arches consisting of white stone and red brick linked the aisles and columns; domes were covered with mosaics, floral decorations rose from their base of stucco and alabaster panels were covered with Quranic texts. Only the East could provide a parallel to this assertion of combined cultural glory and political might, and Córdoba’s claim to rival the magnificence of ’Abbasid Baghdad was now well founded.

  PROSPERITY AND COEXISTENCE

  This consolidated Spain prospered economically, with coins of pure gold and silver being struck at the newly established national mint. The governing regime also enjoyed remarkable successes in external policy. The Fatimids had to abandon their Western campaigns and concentrated their ambitions subsequently on Egypt, where they gained dynastic control in 969. Umayyad Spain could therefore expand into the power vacuum that had emerged in the Maghrib of northwest Africa. It was this area that would be transformed into the viceroyalty of Córdoba under the dynamic command of Abu ’Amir al-Mansur who, as the caliphate’s chief minister (978–1002), was Islamic Spain’s effective ruler. He exerted an easy predominance over the Arab aristocracy and controlled a government whose high officialdom contained many slaves personally appointed by al-Mansur. He also had complete command of his own well-trained army, made up largely of Berbers who were fanatically attached to his personality and leadership. His patronage of poets and scholars was in the highest traditions of Islamic and Arabic culture, and al-Mansur’s regime, like that of his immediate predecessors, was a tolerant one by the standards of the age.

  The Arabic term dhimmi covered all non-Muslims who were not slaves, and as subjects of Córdoba’s emirate and subsequent caliphate they were tolerated within certain limits. Jews and Christians had to pay a special tax called the jizya and sometimes incurred higher rates on other taxes. They could not carry weapons, marry a Muslim woman, receive an inheritance from a Muslim, or give evidence in an Islamic court of law. Christians outnumbered Muslims in Spain, and that fact alone meant that a program of mass conversion was impractical. Neither Christians nor Jews, were forced to live in ghettoes and they were not actively prevented from following their faith—though they did have to wear a special badge. And successive rulers employed highly educated dhimmi at a high level in government. Jews and Christians had certain advantages as administrators, since they were wholly dependent on their patrons and unattached to any potentially fractious Muslim groupings. The period of comparative toleration was at its height in the late tenth century and lasted until the dissolution of the caliphate from c.1009 onward. Al-Mansur presided over the last great age of Islamic Spain, until its territorial unity fragmented in the 11th century with the advance from the north of the Reconquista, Christian Spain’s campaign of territorial recovery.

  ANDALUSIAN LIFE

  A Muslim-Christian-Jewish coexistence, however unequal, was the matrix for Europe’s most literate society. Córdoba was in conscious intellectual rivalry with Baghdad, and as a result its profusion of libraries, collections of manuscripts and translation centers emulated the ’Abbasid capital’s achievements. Al-Andalus’s astronomers, with their reliance on measurement and observation, played a major role in displacing the Ptolemaic system and its theory-based insistence that the orbit of the planets was circular rather than elliptic.

  The Arabic inscriptions on this planispheric astrolabe—a device used to compute the movements of the planets and stars—states that it was made in Toledo by Ibrahim ibn Said al-Sahli in AD 1067.

  Observational science recorded major advances in medicine, and al-Andalus’s doctors invented surgical techniques such as autopsies and anesthetics—as well as instruments including the bone saw and surgical needle. The amenities of life, in terms of a varied diet and improved hygiene, made daily life a good deal more enjoyable in Islamic Spain than in other regions of medieval Europe. As part of an international Muslim culture, Spain imported from the Middle East crops that were new to Europe, such as rice, apricots, citrus fruits, aubergines and cotton, and improved irrigation systems meant that such produce could now be grown extensively in al-Andalus. Trading networks with the rest of Europe, India and China required accurate maritime navigation, and the maps that guided the merchants and sailors of Córdoba’s caliphate were based on careful geographical observation. The contracts underpinning Islamic Spain’s import and export businesses pioneered the system of buying and selling on commission. Modern banking practices, including checks, can be traced back to the methods used by investors who backed Islamic Spain’s merchants; monies deposited in Baghdad, for example, could then be cashed in Spain. Islamic technology pioneered the windmill, the first examples of which were operating in the Middle Ea
st by the eighth century before their introduction through al-Andalus to the rest of Europe. By the 11th century watermills could be seen at work in Spain, and Islamic culture in general placed a high value on a regular and abundant supply of clean water. The cities of al-Andalus boasted drinking fountains, sanitary sewers and public baths, as well as Europe’s first system of municipal rubbish collection.

  THE KINGDOM OF NAPLES

  1204–1302

  Imperial ambition was a recurring phenomenon in 13th-century Europe. Philip II of France’s successes led contemporaries to dub him “Augustus,” Germany’s ambitious Staufen princes cast themselves in the mold of classical Rome’s emperors, and by the end of the century Edward I’s campaigns of conquest in Wales and Scotland were furthering the Anglicization of Britain. It is therefore unsurprising that the Fourth Crusade’s leaders established a “Latin empire” after they captured Greek imperial territory, including the city of Constantinople; Baldwin IX, count of Flanders, was crowned its ruler on May 16, 1204. Venice’s republic grabbed Crete and Corfu for itself, and three vassal states, imitating imperial precedent, owed Baldwin a feudal allegiance: the duchy of Athens, the kingdom of Thessalonike and the principality of Achaea on the Peloponnese.

  The aristocrats who fled from occupied Constantinople to the Greek territories in Asia Minor (modern Turkey) established two empires that were ruled from Trebizond on the Black Sea and from Nicaea adjacent to the new Latin empire’s eastern borders. These empires’ hatred of the Latin intrusion was shared by another successor state to Byzantium—the despotate of Epirus on the western coast of the Greek mainland. All three powers spent decades quarreling with each other in a shifting pattern of alliances which also involved the Seljuk Turks to the east and the Bulgarian empire to the north. But the empire of Nicaea, under its ruler Michael VIII Palaeologus, eventually took the lead in an offensive that defeated the Latin empire of Constantinople in 1261. Byzantium was restored, with Epirus and Trebizond continuing as independent Greek states.

  However, the notion of a Latin Catholic sitting on the throne in Constantinople, and thereby linking the ancient Roman empire’s Eastern successor with the traditions of the West, was an enduring ambition. During the late 13th century it was Louis IX’s youngest brother, Charles of Anjou, who took up that cause. Once installed in 1266 as king of Sicily—a jurisdiction that included both the island itself and the southern Italian mainland—he, too, looked to the East covetously. The Sicilian Vespers rebellion of 1282 forced Charles to withdraw from the island of Sicily, which was subsequently ruled by Aragon. Although Charles went on to found a dynasty, he and his successors had to content themselves with the Italian Peninsula’s southern half, a territory that became known as the kingdom of Naples.

  RIGHT This statue of Charles of Anjou, by Tommaso Solari (1820–89), stands within the facade of the royal palace, Naples.

  ABOVE The Battle of Benevento on February 26, 1266 was fought between Charles of Anjou and Manfred of Sicily. Manfred’s death resulted in 17 years of French rule over the kingdom of Sicily (from a series of 13th-century frescoes in the Ferrande Tower, Pernes-les-Fontaines, France, that tell the story of the reconquest of Sicily by Charles of Anjou and the Battle of Benevento (1266), where Manfred is killed).

  CHARLES OF ANJOU—FROM COUNT TO KING

  Charles of Anjou’s role as a prince started unpromisingly. He was Louis VIII’s youngest son, and his mother, Blanche of Castile, lavished attention on his eldest brother Louis during the decade or so when she ruled France as regent following her husband’s death in 1226. Charles was initially ignored in the allocation of titles and lands under the apanage system. He only became count of Anjou and of Maine in 1247 because his elder brother, John Tristan, had died, and Louis IX preferred the company of his other younger brothers Robert of Artois and Alphonse of Toulouse. This family indifference may explain Charles’s assertive character. Nevertheless, marriage to Beatrice, the heiress to Raymond Berengar IV of Provence, gave him his own power base as count of Provence from 1246 onward.

  Provence was part of the kingdom of Burgundy and, owing an ultimate allegiance to the Holy Roman Empire, it was accustomed to a fairly relaxed administration. Marseille, Arles and Avignon enjoyed a good deal of autonomy as imperial free cities, and the Provençal nobility enjoyed historic liberties. Charles appointed committees of inquiry into his rights as ruler and these investigations, conducted by obliging lawyers in 1252 and then again in 1278, gave him the answers he wanted. But insistence on his full rights—and the need to pay accompanying fees—had typified Charles’s administrative style as soon as he arrived in Provence. When he went north again in 1247 to be invested as count of Anjou the imperial cities combined to form a defensive league against him. The count’s more prolonged absence on the Seventh Crusade in 1258–60 gave his local enemies a chance to mount a prolonged revolt which he defeated with his accustomed vigor on returning to Provence. Arles and Avignon submitted in the summer of 1251 as did Marseille a year later.

  Provence’s agricultural wealth and the commercial prosperity of its towns produced the revenues that enriched Charles, but ruling the county could not satisfy all his ambitions. Then came a proposal that he should be king of Sicily, a territory regarded as its fiefdom by the papacy. The notion was first mooted in 1252 by Innocent IV and resulted from the usual papal neurosis about the Staufer. However, Louis IX vetoed the proposal that Charles should usurp Conrad IV, Frederick II’s son, as ruler of the Sicilian kingdom.

  During the next decade Charles settled down to being a highly successful, if somewhat frustrated, ruler of Provence, and the county’s political élite grew accustomed to his brisk but efficient government. However, the seizure of power in Sicily by Manfred, Frederick II’s illegitimate son, in 1258 changed the dynamics of power in the central Mediterranean. The papacy was once again confronted by a vigorous and resourceful Staufer on its southern frontier and Manfred’s maneuvering in central and northern Italy aroused its traditional fear of encirclement. An alarmed papacy therefore renewed its offer of the kingdom of Sicily to Charles. In July 1263, with Louis IX’s support, Charles signed a treaty with Urban IV granting him the Sicilian throne.

  In the years following his victory at the Battle of Benevento (February 26, 1266) Charles ruled the Italian south with an exactitude already familiar to his Provençal subjects. He was also now planning a major offensive against the Byzantines, and he persuaded Louis IX that a campaign to restore the Latin empire of Constantinople could form part of a wider crusade. In 1267 he signed a treaty with the exiled emperor Baldwin II, who transferred to Charles the overlordship of Achaea, the Latin empire’s vassal state that had survived the re-establishment of the Greek empire. The Villehardouin family, who were princes of Achaea, therefore became Charles’s vassals, and he supplied them with the men and materials necessary to continue an anti-Byzantine struggle within the Peloponnese. Charles had already seized Corfu, as well as most of the Aegean islands, and he was therefore well placed for a full frontal attack on Michael VIII Palaeologus.

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  THE KINGDOM OF NAPLES

  1204 A “Latin empire of Constantinople” is established by the Fourth Crusade’s leaders following the capture of Greek imperial territory.

  1246 Louis IX’s youngest brother, Charles, becomes count of Provence on marrying Beatrice, heiress to the county, and is invested (1247) as count of Anjou and of Maine.

  1261 Michael VIII Palaeologus defeats the Latin empire and restores Byzantium.

  1263 Urban IV grants Charles of Anjou the throne of Sicily, a papal fiefdom that includes the island of Sicily and the southern Italian mainland.

  1266 After defeating Manfred of Sicily at the Battle of Benevento, Charles starts to rule as king of Sicily.

  1281–82 Charles prepares for a military offensive against the Byzantium empire.

  1282 Rebellion spreads from Palermo to the rest of Sicily. King Peter III of Aragon becomes King Peter I of Sicily.

  1302 F
rederick III is recognized as ruler of the island kingdom of Sicily, and the rule of the House of Anjou-Naples is restricted to the southern Italian kingdom.

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  PREPARING TO ATTACK BYZANTIUM

  Byzantium’s emperor nevertheless had one card to play in his defense. Michael wrote to Louis IX, and suggested a rapprochement between the Latin and Greek Churches. Besides which, he argued, would not an attack on Constantinople by the king’s brother interfere with Louis’s eagerness to launch a crusade defending the crusader states against Baybars, the Mamluk sultan of Syria and Egypt? Charles went through the motions of postponing his conquest plans, but his alternative strategy was typically adroit in its self-interest. The caliph of Tunis had been Manfred’s vassal, and Charles wished to re-establish the Sicilian kingdom’s suzerainty over Muhammad I al-Mustansir. The fact that the caliph was rumored to be contemplating conversion to Christianity lent weight to Charles’s suggestion that the Eighth Crusade be directed initially against Tunis as an easy target. Louis IX accordingly sailed for Tunis and, following the king’s death almost immediately after landing there, Charles conducted the siege of the town which ended in al-Mustansir’s renewal of his vassalage to the kingdom of Sicily.