Two of hundreds of carved gravestones at the Seljuk cemetery at Ahlat (Khilat), looking north toward the hills ringing the Manzikert steppe.
Seljuks, Islamizing Greeks, and irredentist Christians left a profound impression on what would become Turkish Islam. Byzantine monasticism and the extravagant mysticism of its holy men informed the development of ecstatic Muslim brotherhoods. Persian and Turkish traditions met Greek thought and practice, and the resulting orders of dervishes, mevlevi mystics, and other Sufi sects (possibly from suf, the woolen garment they wore) represented a melding of beliefs characteristic of the brighter days around the medieval Mediterranean. The greatest mystic of the Sultanate—revered by Muslim and Christian alike—was the aptly named Jalaluddin Rumi, a Persian in his adoptive homeland of Greek and Turk. "Muslims, Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians should be viewed with the same eye," Rumi declared. This message of tolerance and spirituality, preached to the heterogeneous crowds of thirteenth-century Konya, the capital of the Sultanate, was in the end as revolutionary and humane as that of his Christian contemporary, Francis of Assisi.
At the moment of Manzikert, however, Konya's days of convivencia lay in an unforeseeable future. The ashen taste of defeat was all that the Greeks knew in 1071—and it affected their judgment. In a testament to the self-destructive backstabbing of the court at Constantinople, the terms offered by a conciliatory Alp Arslan were turned down—not by Romanus, who was treated with every courtesy following his ritual abasement, but by the rivals who had betrayed him. Alp proposed to let Romanus return to his capital, in exchange for the surrender of a few border towns and the payment of a whopping annual tribute. He offered peace. Romanus, taking the sultan at his word, attempted to regain Constantinople, defeated but an emperor still.
The Ducas clan would have none of it. Andronicus, the traitor at Manzikert, brought up his armies and negotiated with the homebound Romanus—the basileus would be allowed to abdicate and live out his life, quietly and untouched, on his Cappadocian estates. Once again Romanus miscalculated the younger man's talent for treachery. On surrendering himself to Andronicus, Romanus had his eyes gouged out with such violence that death from infection was a certainty. As he lay a blinded prisoner on Prinkipo Island in the Sea of Marmara, the traditional holding pen for disgraced demigods, the shameless Michael Psellus wrote to him that his infirmity was a blessing, in that he could see only the light of his Lord Savior. Romanus died of his wounds in 1072. The terms offered by Alp Arslan died with him.
The Turkomans poured over the borders. The center of Anatolia slowly collapsed. Although the Ducas schemers had secured the throne, they could not secure the empire. After several catastrophically irreversible years, the purple was finally worn by members of a clan who knew that Byzantine losses had to be cut. The Comnenus family, to whom the chronicler Anna Comnena belonged, eventually restored a modicum of order to the demoralized and shrunken empire. They would rule for over a century, guaranteeing the survival of a rump of Anatolian Byzantium, primarily its coasts, and the entirety of its Balkan possessions. This was no meager accomplishment, given the scope of the debacle.
For the greater Mediterranean world, the accession to power of the Comneni helped spark the most famous Muslim-Christian conflagration of the Middle Ages. When the basileus Alexius I Comnenus (Anna's father) sent a letter to the Latin West in the 1090s, pleading with his estranged Christian cousins to come to the aid of a beleaguered Byzantium, their response far exceeded his expectations. Indeed, he would have reason to rue the success of his mission. In 1095, Pope Urban II preached his fiery call to arms to the assembled nobility at Clermont—and thereby ushered in the age of the Crusades and the intrusion of the Frank into the turf of Byzantine, Seljuk, and Fatimid. The Turkish victory at Manzikert had, ironically, ended in a very Greek notion: the opening of Pandora's box.
CHAPTER FIVE
PALERMO AND TOLEDO
Intellectual and cultural convivencia in the era of the Crusades; Sicily, Castile, and the storming of Jerusalem; eleventh and twelfth centuries
In January 1072, an observer standing on a tall slope in the hinterland of Palermo, Sicily, would have seen a curtain of sails growing ominously large on the northern horizon. By land, off to the east, in a cloud of dust kicked up by mules bringing their loads to the siege engines in place, he could have made out the dull glint of sunlight on armor, as a horde of warriors attacked the city walls. Distracted by the bedlam of shouts and screams reaching him, he most likely would not have had the serenity to realize that lasting change was about to occur. The mountainous amphitheater ringing Palermo, as majestic as a similar stage on the steppe of western Armenia, would now witness a stunning counterpoint to the Battle of Manzikert, which had taken place just six months earlier.
As the winter sun reached its zenith, the ships gliding in from the Tyrrhenian Sea and past the city's imperious headland—soon to be rechristened Monte Pellegrino—distinguished themselves as galleys. Oars pulling in unison, they crashed through the defenses of the harbor and disgorged hundreds of fighters, their halberds and pikes slashing away at the port's terrified garrison. The forces of Robert Guiscard and his youngest brother, Roger, were launching their final assault on this keystone to their conquest of Sicily. At the same time as Christian Anatolia saw the Turks pushing ever closer to the Mediterranean, the metropolis of Sicilian Islam experienced the coming of the Normans. The Hautevilles were to succeed where the Byzantines had failed.
In Sicily all hopes of a Byzantine restoration had been dashed a generation earlier. In the early 1040s an imperial army under a ferocious giant of a man—George Maniakes—had fought its way from the eastern port of Messina into the center of the island. Among his commanders during those heady days was a young Harald Hardrada, the hero of Scandinavian sagas, en route home from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem; also present were the three elder Hauteville brothers—William, Drogo, and Humphrey—and, in the early stages, a youthful Roussel de Bailleul, the future adventurer of Manzikert. Despite such formidable company Maniakes would not achieve his goal, for this was the era of folly on the Bosporus: the great general fell victim to a whispering campaign conducted by his enemies at court and, against all dictates of common sense, was replaced by an incompetent who promptly ran the offensive into the ground. The Byzantines' knack for inflicting defeats on themselves would not be imitated by the Normans.
Their chance had arisen in 1061, after a supremely short-sighted emir of Catania and Syracuse asked Guiscard and Roger to help him in his quarrel with the Muslim leader of Palermo. It was an odd mirror image of the ninth century, when a Byzantine rebel (the fellow enamored of the nun) had invited the Muslims to the island. A decade after the emir's mistake, the Normans were pounding at the gates of Palermo. Just months before, Robert Guiscard had captured the last Greek holdout in Apulia—the fortress city of Bari on the Adriatic—and annihilated Byzantine power in Italy forever. The last survivor of Magna Graecia, an echo of antiquity, had gone silent in the year of Manzikert.
Palermo fell to the Hauteville brothers in that January of 1072. Within twenty years all of Sicily, the bustling entrepot of the Muslim Mediterranean, returned to the overlordship of Christian rulers, albeit with an unexpected result. When the Norman warriors sheathed their swords to admire their prize, they saw a civilization composed of a majority of Muslims (Arab, Berber, Persian), a great number of Greek Christians, and substantial communities of Jews, all living in relative amity.
Palermo was a city of some 300,000 souls and, according to the tenth-century Iraqi traveler Ibn Hawkal (the same merchant who praised al-Andalus), of three hundred mosques. The various springs and brooks in the hinterland conspired to make the city a garden that delighted and astonished visitors, as lush a pleasure dome as any place in the Mediterranean world. In the fields of the Val de Mazara, beyond Palermo's mountainous amphitheater, Arab farmers had imported the same irrigation techniques that had done wonders in Spain, and the Sicilian countryside yielded, among other thing
s, cotton, hemp, papyrus, sugarcane, oranges, lemons, and the durum wheat that would become a staple of the Italian diet as pasta. In twelfth-century Palermo, a pasta-making factory was noted by the Arab geographer al-Idrisi, as was the work of artisans weaving homegrown Sicilian silk for export. The Normans had conquered a people who far outstripped them in sophistication and subtlety. To their everlasting credit, they recognized their shortcomings and set about creating a Christian counterpart in convivencia to the recently vanished Córdoba, of the Umayyads.
Their achievement is all the more remarkable given the tenor of the times, for the Mediterranean during Palermo's ascendancy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries was undergoing, in the long encounter between Muslim and Christian, a moment of fever pitch in both word and deed. The clashes of that crusading era color our view of the relationship between the two faiths in the Middle Ages. Yet however central to any consideration of the interaction of Christianity and Islam, the Crusades should not cloud the memory of the multiconfessional culture fostered at the contemporaneous court of Palermo—and, just as impressively, at its sister-city in convivencia, Toledo, which the Castilian king, Alfonso VI, captured in 1085. In Sicily and Castile, the call to Christian holy war, even at a time when that notion had its greatest currency, was muted by the workings of curiosity and pragmatism.
The scars of the modern era are impossible to miss in Palermo. On the Conca d'Oro, the once-paradisiacal conch-shaped valley lying between the city and its limestone backdrop, a dense forest of shoddy tower blocks now blights the countryside. Some of this development may be put down to the hasty rebuilding of the city following the devastation of the Second World War, but much of it dates from the last third of the twentieth century, when Palermitan civic life was cowed by gangsters and greed. In the old town, nonetheless, some past glories of the city can be discerned, down alleyways and within courtyards, in church, palazzo, and square. Together they form one of the richest urban fabrics in Europe, which, though threadbare in places, gives ample evidence of the many foreigners to have ruled the city. A list of these vanished occupiers, working backward through time, is impressive for its heterogeneity: Spanish, Austrian, Aragonese, French, German, Norman, Ifriqiyan, Byzantine, Roman, Carthaginian, and Greek. There is no shortage of memories connected to this place, which is only now being restored to stem the tide of fatiscente, the exquisite decrepitude so pleasing to visiting aesthetes.
The century of Norman rule over Muslim, Greek, and Jew has left some telling monuments in the city and its environs. In the midst of the nondescript Calatafimi quarter of town stands the Zisa (from al-aziza, "the magnificent" or "marvelous"), a summer pavilion of Norman kings that, even in its much-reduced state, attests to an extraordinary encounter of artistic traditions. The tall central arch of the three-story facade gives onto a gracious central hall that once housed a fountain in the Andalusi fashion; farther within, a warren of discreet rooms and niches is adorned with muqarnas, the stalactite roof vaultings seen throughout the dar al Islam.
The Christian monarchs who disported themselves here with their harems could walk out of the Zisa—or a neighboring pavilion, the Cuba (kaaba, cube)—and stroll through the finest garden of Latin Europe, replete with palm groves, gurgling pools, and parading peacocks. Known by the Normans as the Genoard (a corruption of jah nat al-ard, "terrestial paradise"), this oasis of Islamic refinement gained such fame throughout Christendom that Boccaccio used it as a setting for a tale of star-crossed lovers on the fifth day of his Decameron. The tireless twelfth-century sephardic traveler Benjamin of Tudela, who visited Jewish communities on a journey from his native Navarre to western Asia and back, was moved to digress on seeing the Zisa and the Genoard: "In the park there is also a great palace, the walls of which are painted, and overlaid with gold and silver; the paving of the floors is of marble, picked out in gold and silver in all manner of designs. There is no building like this anywhere."
The Zisa, the Islamic pleasure palace of the Norman kings of Palermo, as it appeared in the nineteenth century.
To recapture what Benjamin saw, the modern-day visitor is reduced to using his mind's eye; fortunately, other remnants of Norman Sicily require no trick of the imagination. One such place stands on a height overlooking Palermo from the south. From this viewpoint, at the village of Balhara, an observer of the siege of 1072 would have had an incomparable view of the fall of the Muslim capital. The hill, renamed Monreale (royal mountain) by the invaders, came to possess a cathedral built by order of a Norman king who hoped, through his munificence, to put the archbishop of Palermo—and his cathedral in the city—to shame. The royal pique was understandable: Palermitan bishops sided with the barons of the island in resisting kingly authority and encouraged successive popes to take a dim view of Norman complaisance with Islam.
Whatever the motive behind its creation, the abbey church of Santa Maria la Nuova at Monreale ranks as one of the most arresting sights bequeathed to us by the medieval Mediterranean, as compelling a structure as the Mezquita and the Ayasofya. Sited squarely in the middle of the inland sea, the twelfth-century complex of church and cloister shows a melding of rival cultures reminiscent of that of the Umayyad mosque in Damascus—and like that building, it escapes the traps of confessional confusion afflicting both Abd al-Rahman's mosque-turned-church in Córdoba, and Justinian's church-turned-mosque in Istanbul. Santa Maria la Nuova is, and always will be, a temple of Christianity.
The walls of Santa Maria's nave and apse are blanketed in gold tesserae, nearly two acres of glittering background for the scores of biblical and devotional scenes that Greek mosaic makers executed for their Latin taskmasters. The mix of Latin, Byzantine and, in its grace notes, Islamic influences delights the eye even as it is drawn to the Judeo-Christian narrative so exuberantly depicted on the walls. In the adjoining cloister, notable for more than two hundred deftly sculpted columns and capitals framing dozens of arches of Islamic inspiration, a fountain in the southwest corner plashes quietly, although its presence fairly shouts out the heterodoxy of Norman Sicily. This fountain, surrounded by its own colonnade, contains a swirling central pillar and water basin that, in design and function, seem wholly transported from the forecourt of an Umayyad or Fatimid mosque. The Benedictine monks who haunted the near-perfect enclosure of the cloister used the fountain as a lavabo, perfoming their ablutions as devoutly as Muslims do before prayer.
Some claim that the liturgy in many Norman Sicilian churches was performed in the vernacular of the island: that is, Arabic. Less contestable is the written evidence of the mores of the conquered influencing the conduct of the conquerors. Ibn Jubayr, a Spanish Muslim who visited Palermo a decade or so after his Jewish countryman, Benjamin of Tudela, remarked that the Christian women there were "dressed in robes of gold-embroidered silk, wrapped in elegant cloaks, concealed by coloured veils, and shod with gilt slippers. Thus they parade to their churches . . . bearing all the adornments of Muslim women, including jewellry, henna on the fingers, and perfumes." As more and more Latin immigrants arrived in Sicily from Normandy, Norman England, and the Italian peninsula, they must first have found themselves disoriented—or perhaps oriented—by what they found there.
Presiding over this interplay of faiths and customs were the Norman kings. The first, and greatest, to reign in the twelfth century was Roger II, the son of the Roger who had conquered the island and thus the nephew of Robert Guiscard. Raised to rule cosmopolitan Palermo, conversant in Greek and Arabic, Roger II strove to make his capital a rival to Constantinople and Cairo in its splendor and learning. Muslim scholars were invited to stay on the island, or to return; bilingual, sometimes trilingual, coinage was struck extolling "King Roger, powerful through the grace of Allah"; and an Arabized Greek of Syria, George of Antioch, became the king's trusted amir al-umara (whence our admiral), or emir of emirs. George would alternately contract alliances or go to war with the kingdom's Ifriqiyan neighbors, defend Roger's domain from Byzantine and Germanic encroachments, and conduct dip
lomacy with Amalfi, Pisa, and Genoa, the Tyrrhenian maritime republics intent on keeping the shipping lanes of the Strait of Messina open for their commerce. Whoever controlled that narrow and treacherous stretch of water, where Scylla and Charybdis had given grief to Homer's Ulysses, controlled a choke point between the eastern and western Mediterranean.
Roger, his feet firmly planted on the island and the mainland, had surpassed the Muslim emirs of Sicily in reaping the benefits of a strategic position. He would even outdo his fellow Normans. Early in his rule, he had finessed the papacy (by backing a rival contender to the throne of St. Peter) into officially making his possession a kingdom—although neither a historical precedent nor even a flimsy genealogical pretext existed for this promotion. No matter—in typical Hauteville fashion, Roger felt no constraint on his pretensions and had himself crowned king in 1130. He ruled as "king of Sicily, of the duchy of Apulia and of the principality of Capua." The lucrative addition of all of southern Italy to his domain had been effected by crushing his cousins' claims to that region. The wily Robert Guiscard, dead for forty-odd years and thus spared seeing his lineage so cleverly dispossessed by Roger, would have been outraged.
The fountain, of clear Islamic inspiration, in the cloister of the abbey church of Santa Maria la Nuova at Monreale, Sicily.
The palace chapel Roger II commissioned for his residence at Palermo attests to the wealth of the new Norman kingdom—and, as at Monreale and the Zisa, to the playful syncretism at work in this hothouse of Mediterranean cultures. In Roger's Palatine Chapel, Byzantine mosaics shimmer above the colorful marbling of Latin pillars, which themselves stretch up to a thicket of muqarna stalactites, painted with distinctly unorthodox Islamic figurative scenes of the hunt and other pleasures. This sanctuary, as splendid a jewel box as the Sainte Chapelle in Paris, made manifest not only the fullness of the king's faith (and, not incidentally, his treasury) but also his most un-Parisian appreciation of other traditions.
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