Sea of Faith

by Stephen O'Shea

  To his Muslim subjects in Palermo, despite the church bells pealing ever more loudly in their city, Roger may have appeared a continuation of what their ancestors had known. True, the slipper was on the other foot: they, not the Christians, were the second-class citizens subject to higher taxation, and their main Friday mosque had been turned into Palermo's cathedral. But many of the symbols and practices of power remained rooted in the Muslim ancien regime. A ceremonial silken cloak presented to Roger around 1133 by the Muslims of the city has survived: on it a pair of ferocious lions can be seen attacking two unfortunate camels, and the central axis shows a stylized palm tree, an iconographic nod to the Arabic tree of life. On its hem a text in Kufic characters reads: "This was made in the royal factory for the good fortune, supreme honor, perfection and power, the betterment, capacity, prosperity, sublimity, glory, beauty, the increase of his security, fulfillment of his hopes, the goodness of his days and nights without end or interruption, for his power and guard, his defence and protection, good fortune, salvation, victory and excellence. In the capital of Sicily, the 528th year [of the hijra]." It was hardly the type of raiment favored by other Christian kings of the time.

  Then again, by most accounts Roger was entirely unlike his fellow Latin monarchs. Supremely intelligent, scrupulous in managing his kingdom's accounts (many of which were handled by Arab civil servants), and fond of the Byzantine tactic of forestalling war through bribery, he was above all else a man of great intellectual curiosity. The superior accomplishments of Islamic arts and sciences fascinated him. "His knowledge of mathematics and applied science was boundless," wrote one admiring Muslim scholar. "He was deeply grounded in every aspect of these two disciplines, studied them comprehensively and himself made new discoveries and wonderful inventions, as no prince before him had."

  On the mainland, it is thought, Roger may have opened the royal purse for the famous medical school of Salerno, founded in the ninth century under the Lombards. Salerno translators brought the treatises on the healing arts practiced by the Muslims and Jews of the dar al Islam to the Christian west. On the island, Roger's court at Palermo shone brightly as a lamplight of the arts and of scientific inquiry, undimmed by any consideration of confessional identity. The Church of Rome was kept at arm's length by an absolutist Roger, and scholars of the Mediterranean basin were drawn to the free-flowing convergence of Arab, Greek, and Latin knowledge.

  Mosaic depicting Roger II of Sicily being crowned by Christ in Palermo s Martorana, a church funded by the kings admiral, George of Antioch.

  The most celebrated arrival in Palermo was Abu Abdallah Muhammad Ibn Muhammad Ibn Abdallah Ibn Idris al-Qurtubi al-Hasani, known usually under the mercifully shortened name of al-Idrisi. Although his origins are disputed, this polymath and personal favorite of Roger is thought to have studied in Cordoba before making his way to Sicily—thereby earning the status of renegade among disapproving Muslim scholars in Islamic lands. Of his many writings, the most astounding for its time is undoubtedly The delight of he who looks to travel throughout the world, better known as The Book of Roger (al-kitab al-rujari) in honor of its patron. The work, fifteen years in the making, is a gazetteer and atlas, containing information on Asia, Africa, and Europe culled, in part, from interviews with the sailors, merchants, and wayfarers passing through the busy ports of Sicily. A remarkable geographical compendium, it constitutes a fitting tribute to the pragmatic and avid king who collaborated with al-Idrisi in its compilation. To accompany the book and its maps, the Muslim scholar also presented Roger with a planisphere, made of solid silver and thus worthy of the regal gaze.

  In one last respect Roger proved an exception among the crowned heads of Europe: he appears to have truly loved his wife. His first marriage stands out for its happiness, in an era when royal unions were sometimes honored only as long as they were useful.* When Roger's queen died, in her thirties, he went into such deep mourning that his courtiers feared for his sanity. Indeed, Roger's seclusion was so prolonged that some of his kinsmen in southern Italy, still rankled by his usurpation of their rights, dared to hope that he too had died. They rose in revolt, calling on the Germanic emperor and the pope to help them.

  The lady whose untimely demise caused the commotion—Roger eventually restored order—was Elvira of Castile. By her birthright, she could not have been a better bride for a ruler of Norman Palermo, for Elvira was the daughter of Alfonso VI, the Castilian monarch who had taken Muslim Toledo and made it his capital. The excitements of Palermo would have been familiar to Elvira, as her upbringing in Toledo was no doubt accompanied by an equally voluble babel of convivencia. Unfortunately, not much is known for certain about Roger's beloved queen, aside from her having given him five sons and one daughter in the space of ten years. Yet as a woman of Toledo, then of Palermo, Elvira must have been worldly and educated—and perhaps even a little impatient with the martial bigotry of her fellow Latins. However significant the capture of these cities in rolling back the great Arab conquests of the early Middle Ages, both places came to show that, despite their new masters, people of different faiths could still get along. In Spain, the Christians would follow the trail of tolerance blazed by the Muslims.

  In 1072, the moment of the Norman conquest of Palermo, other epochal stirrings occurred elsewhere in the Mediterranean world. In that same year Alfonso of Leon—the future Alfonso VI—spent nine months as a refugee in Toledo. He was accorded the hospitality of the urbane ruler of that city, al-Mam'un, who thus earned left-handed praise as a caballero aunque mow (a knight although a Moor). Although one later account has a crafty Alfonso inspecting the city's fortifications for weaknesses, in all probability he and his genial host spent their days hunting and supping together and otherwise enjoying the amenities that a pleasure-loving court has to offer. Under al-Mam'un, Toledo was a supremely civilized place, its arts and sciences developed to a degree undreamed of in Christian Spain. Known throughout al-Andalus for a wondrous clepsydra (water clock) constructed by an astronomer in a hillside pavilion opposite the city, Toledo also possessed magnificent royal gardens that were tended by the greatest agronomes of the age.

  Alfonso had been driven into this sophisticated place of exile by his brother, Sancho, who had refused to respect the partitioning of the royal domain drawn up by their late father. In the eleventh century the primitive Christian kingdoms of the north had begun, at last, to coalesce into coherent entities worth squabbling over. An assassin conveniently eliminated Sancho in late 1072 as he was besieging their sister's fortress, enabling Alfonso to leave Toledo and realize the goal that had underlain the sibling rivalry: uniting under one ruler the kingdoms of Leon, Castile, and to the west, Galicia. (Alfonso dispossessed another brother there.) That left Navarre, Aragon, and Catalonia out of his grasp, but still Alfonso's realm encompassed half of the Christian north of the Iberian peninsula.

  According to a chronicle unsympathetic to Alfonso, the king was humiliated on returning from Toledo by a vassal of the murdered Sancho. The event supposedly occurred in a church in Burgos, where the monarch was forced to swear publicly on holy relics that he had had no part in the killing of his brother. Whatever the truth of the story, the vassal in question, and his chastened king, would eventually reconcile and demonstrate in a convincing fashion that a new state of affairs obtained in the countries bordering al-Andalus. No longer were the Christian kingdoms at the mercy of an Almanzor; to the contrary, the northerners were now in a position of force.

  Rodrigo Diaz de Viviar, the vassal to have supposedly needled the king's conscience in public, is better known as El Cid (from sayyid, "chief"). The Cid made a career of bullying local magnates out of land and money in the free-for-all that followed the final collapse of the unitary state governed from Córdoba, in 1031. A minor nobleman from near Burgos, he was a superb warrior and leader of men, seldom bested on the battlefield and adept at political maneuvering. The Cid is usually thought of as personifying the reconquista—that is, the capture of Spain from the Mus
lims and, by extension, the fight for Christian supremacy in the Mediterranean world. However compelling that reputation may be, it is now recognized as fanciful, having been fabricated by latter-day churchmen and historians imbued with an ideology of Iberian Catholic predestination.

  What we know of the historical Cid, primarily from a chronicle and a brilliant epic poem of the twelfth century, gives us a portrait of someone far simpler than an exalted holy warrior or a protonationalist visionary. The Cid, like Robert Guiscard, was an opportunist. A man on the make, he was one of many in eleventh-century Iberia eager to take advantage of a chaotic situation. And the confused circumstances of the time offered splendid openings for freelance employment; when the Cid had one of his frequent disputes with King Alfonso, for example, he simply switched sides, once becoming the military leader of the Muslim kingdom of Zaragoza. That he could occupy this post for five years, then return to the service of a Christian monarch, attests to the fluidity of the arrangements on the peninsula.

  The disappearance of the Umayyads had created these opportunites. When the fragile edifice of the Andalusi caliphate finally came crashing down in 1031, the pieces were not put back together. Instead, a patchwork of competing city-states throughout al-Andalus came into being, each with its own ruling family vying for dynastic permanence. Known as the taifas (from muluk al-tawa'if or "rulers of the factions"), these three dozen or so statelets were, much like the cities of the Italian Renaissance, keen rivals in art, commerce, and war. In the arts, remnants of which are now scattered like glittering confetti in the museums of Europe and America, the eleventh-century taifas showed considerable creative brio, the surviving examples of their ivory carving, sculpture in wood and marble, ceramics, metalwork, and textiles attesting to a high tide of refinement. Just as impressive was the work of taifa poets, who continued the Cordoban celebration of fine feeling and the good life. Seville, especially, had a court led and peopled by sybarites, its successive kings of the Abbadid dynasty proving themselves to be accomplished poets. In all of the higher pursuits, the taifas strove to outdo their neighbors, and in the process they created a golden age of art and learning.

  The stupendously bewhiskered monument to El Cid in Burgos, Spain.

  Yet these cities, as the Cid and his fellow Christian adventurers well knew, were also locked in a permanent life-or-death struggle. The perilousness of their situation ensured that few impediments were put in the way of exceptional and useful men, whatever their provenance. Hence the career of Grenada's powerful Jewish grand vizier, general, poet, and rabbi, Shmuel HaNagid, and that of a later figure, Abu al-Fadl Hasday ibn Hasday, the Jewish grand vizier of Zaragoza at the time of the Cid's employment there. Gold from trade with Africa flowed into the six biggest city-states—Granada, Seville, Badajoz, Valencia, Toledo, and Zaragoza—to pay the mercenary armies that marched out to conduct a succession of bloody campaigns for preeminence. However gossamer the sensibilities of the taifa courts, barbarity was never far away. In 1053, to cite one instance, the poet-king of Seville invited the neighboring rulers of Arcos, Jerez, Moron, and Ronda for a peace conference: as they enjoyed his hammam prior to the negotiations, their host slipped out of the building and instructed his men to lock the doors and stop up the air vents so that his guests died, suffocated and scorched, in a cloud of steam. He later celebrated the exploit in a poem, part of which reads: "How many rivals did I kill, / Steadily, one after another: / Of their heads I made a garland / Adorning the edge of the side wall!"

  Such viciousness played into the hands of the Christian northerners. Although not without their own divisions, the emerging kingdoms beyond the Ebro and Duero exploited for their own profit the far greater disunity of the Muslim south. Hired initially as mercenaries by the taifas, as the eleventh century progressed the Castilians, Aragonese, and Catalans came to be enforcers of what can only be called a protection racket. In exchange for not being attacked by the Christians, the taifas paid punishing annual tributes, known asparias, to whoever proved the most menacing. At one point near midcentury Leon received protection money from Toledo, Seville, Zaragoza, and Granada, often on the order of twenty to thirty thousand gold coins per annum (from each client, no less). This torrent of Muslim gold flowed northward for the enrichment of kings, courtiers, and warriors, the construction of churches, and the endowment of monasteries as far afield as Cluny, in Burgundy—all of it extorted under threat of violence. As extra taxes had to be levied in the taifas to meet these payments—and some taxes violated long-standing Islamic practice—the Muslim, Mozarab, and Jewish inhabitants of the cities grew restive, thereby making unstable al-Andalus even more volatile. Such was the world in which Alfonso VI and the Cid operated.

  The fall of Toledo came about in 1085, at the culmination of a long series of depredations in the Toledan countryside, ruinous annual payments to Leon, wars with Muslim Valencia, and a siege that had brought on famine. Also, Alfonso had been propping up a remarkably ineffectual and unpopular leader, the grandson of his host of 1072, as part of what appears to have been a deliberate policy to weaken the great taifa from within. Eventually the bickering town fathers bowed to the inexorable and the Christian monarch was invited in, not as a refugee but as a conqueror, after having promised to respect the different communities of the city and allow, in particular, the Muslims to keep their main Friday mosque. On May 25, 1085, the same day that the theocratic Pope Gregory VII died in Salerno, Alfonso VI entered what, almost four centuries earlier, had been the capital of Visigothic Spain. His successors, conscious of this connection to the time of the mare nostrum yet aware of the changed circumstances of the present day, each styled himself as "emperor of the three religions."

  Whether Alfonso VI would have taken the title seriously is unclear—the promise about the main mosque, for one, was immediately broken. At the behest of the city's new Latin bishop, a Cluniac monk from north of the Pyrenees ill disposed to both Mozarabs and Muslims, Alfonso permitted the mosque to be transformed into a cathedral. Another monk from Cluny, Odo of Chatillon, as Pope Urban II, quickly moved to make the uncompromising bishop of Toledo the primate of the entire Iberian peninsula, charged with imposing a Latin, Catholic orthodoxy on the indigenous Christian community, many of whom had worshiped under an old Visigothic rite for centuries. The beginnings of the new convivencia, for Mozarabs much less Muslims, did not look rosy.

  Paradoxically, developments in al-Andalus would foster a measure of broad-mindedness in Christian Spain. The borders of the latter had been moved significantly to the south, and the no-man's-land around such outposts as Medinaceli resettled in the wake of the successes of Alfonso. But despite his desire to extend his dominion over all of Iberia, the great king would push barely beyond the Tagus, the river that winds around the rocky eminence on which Toledo is built. The reason for this scaled-back ambition was simple: in the once-anarchic south emerged a force that could not be intimidated into paying parias or ceding territory through battle. Shortly after the fall of Toledo, the rest of al-Andalus would come under the control of a group of religious enthusiasts from Africa called the Almoravids. These desert-hardened men halted the advance of Leon-Castile in its tracks and put an end to the practice of systematic extortion. Alfonso could only watch, from his new citadel in Toledo, as al-Andalus became united again.

  The mysterious Almoravids had risen to prominence far away from Iberia, on the southwestern fringes of the Sahara. Sometime in the 1030s, a local chieftain of the area, newly invigorated in the faith as he returned home from a pilgrimage to Mecca, had met a charismatic missionary named Abd Allah ibn Yasin. The holy man was invited to come and proselytize several tribes of heretofore diffident Muslim Berbers of the Sanhaja tribe, in what is now Mauretania. Ibn Yasin made little headway against the rough and ready Sanhaja; in the face of their hostility he was forced to flee to the Atlantic coast, where he established a fortified religious outpost, or rib at, somewhere near the mouth of the river Senegal. Here his luck changed, and Ibn Yasin's austere and
disciplined message drew thousands of recruits to the sanctuary, so that the new force came to be known as the "people of the ribat" (al-murabitun, whence almoravid). To the south they advanced to destroy the great sub-Saharan kingdom of Ghana and establish their dominion as far as the lower reaches of the river Niger. To the north, as Andalusi influence had waned in the Maghrib in the troubled taifa times, the Almoravids moved to fill the power vacuum, conquering all of Saha-ran west Africa before crossing the Atlas Mountains to the fertile lands near the Strait of Gibraltar. There, they looked across the waters to Europe and were aghast at what they saw: lazy drunken voluptuaries, in their view, in thrall to the Christians and in bed with the Jews. As revivalists, they abhorred their lax coreligionists in al-Andalus and contemplated waging a holy war against them.

  All of which left the taifas in a delicate position. The Christians from the north had heretofore been a nuisance, little more than organized gangs of quasi-civilized fellow Iberians to be chased away with bags of coins. But the fall of Toledo changed all that. The disappearance of that great taifa, wrote the Muslim king of Granada in his memoirs, "sent a great tremor through all al-Andalus and filled the inhabitants with fear and despair." With al-Andalus in danger of being overrun by uncouth unbelievers, the taifa rulers debated whether to call on fellow Muslims to protect it. The Christians were the devil they knew, but then again, so too were the Almoravids. To the Andalusi sophisticates, these desert fanatics were just Berber tribesmen, the age-old enemy of the landed Arab classes since the time of the immigrant Abd al-Rahman. To their north and south, then, the taifas had decidedly unsavory neighbors: with whom should they cast their lot? A decision was made, which was famously summed up by the king of Seville, al-Mu'tamid, the son of the man who had suffocated his guests in a bathhouse: "I have no desire to be branded by my descendants as the man who delivered al-Andalus as prey to the infidels . . . I would rather be a camel-driver in Morocco than a swineherd in Castile."