Sea of Faith

by Stephen O'Shea

  The Almoravids were entreated to cross the strait. In 1086, the year after the Christian capture of Toledo, the Almoravids crushed the heavy cavalry of Alfonso VI at Sagrajas, a village near the western taifa of Badajoz. The Castilians would go no further for a generation, with the reliable exception of the Cid, who captured wealthy Valencia and repulsed Almoravid attacks until his death in 1099. As for the taifas, they too would be gone, swallowed up by saviors turned usurpers, for the Almoravids elected to stay and rule in al-Andalus. In the disorder of collapse and conquest, al-Mu'tamid's widowed daughter-in-law, Zaida, escaped northward, thereby avoiding the deportation of Seville's ruling family to Africa—a removal that reduced al-Mu'tamid to poverty in Morocco, just as he had feared. Zaida, however, did not end up a swineherd: when she arrived in Toledo, Alfonso immediately took her as his mistress and, once she had converted and christened herself Isabel, made her his wife. The king would henceforth consort with the Moor. Out of their union was born Elvira of Castile, princess of Toledo and future queen of Palermo. For a twelfth-century European, few lineages could be more evocative of convivencia.

  The Koutoubia Mosque in Marrakesh, Morocco, begun in 1143 after the capture of the Almoravid capital by the Almohads.

  Centuries of go-it-alone Christianity have obscured the multiconfessional Toledo of Elvira's day. From the steep hillside once occupied by the clepsydra pavilion, the view of the city on the opposite bank of the Tagus looks uncannily like what El Greco painted in the sixteenth century: a stoutly fortified town on a dramatic granite eminence, its slopes a palette of brown brick and terra-cotta rising toward the turbulent sky of La Mancha. The spire of the mosque-turned-cathedral—an enormous Gothic structure from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—pokes upward from one side of the hill; on the summit stand the four gray towers of a once-royal residence, the Alcazar, entirely rebuilt after being leveled in the Spanish Civil War.

  Toledo has been many things in its long history, but only in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries did it rival the other capitals of Europe for learning and match splendid Palermo in polyglot scholarship. The present-day municipal authorities play up this shining moment of their past, billing the city as a monument to tolerance and politely ignoring its later role as exporter of inquisitors. Convivencia, not reconquista, is the memory that modern Spain has chosen to embrace, perhaps in reaction to the centuries of myth-making about the country's Christian heroes. Whatever the reason, a concerted effort has been made to celebrate the vanished communities of medieval Toledo: the Jews and the Muslims—or as the latter would soon be known, the Mudejars, Spanish Muslims under Christian rule.

  What these two communities helped to do, in conjunction with the Mozarabs, was play host to a revolution in thought. Much of the heritage of the mare nostrum had been forgotten by the Christian west, but it had hardly been lost. In the splendid libraries of the Islamic world, from Córdoba, to Baghdad, the philosophical and scientific works of antiquity had been preserved, translated into Arabic and commented upon by such intellectual giants as Avicenna (Ibn Sina), a tenth-century Persian, and Averroes (Ibn Rushd), a twelfth-century Andalusi. The literature was vast, wide-ranging, and intellectually intoxicating. When Alfonso and his Castilians captured Toledo, they unwittingly cracked open a window onto the Mediterranean past, a time before the advent of the one stern god of Christianity and Islam. Far from letting in a stale blast of arcane knowledge, the Toledan window allowed in a gust of fresh air, for the concerns of ancient thinkers were as germane to the Middle Ages as they are to us today. Under twelfth-century Bishop Raymond, Toledans and visiting scholars from all over the Mediterranean and Europe set to work translating the trove of Arabic documents, rendering them into Hebrew, Latin, and the Romance vernaculars that would mature as the languages of modern Europe.

  Aristotle mattered most. Prior to the literary excavations of Toledo, an extremely well-read westerner would have been familiar only with six essays on logic by Aristotle, which had been translated into Latin in the sixth century c.E. Under the supervision of the astonishingly open-minded Bishop Raymond, who saw no reason to censor or edit in the service of Christian orthodoxy, much more of Aristotle's encyclopedic output came into circulation—Physics, Metaphysics, and On the Soul, as well as studies of natural science and essays on politics and ethics, all of which had been admired in Islamic capitals for centuries.

  An engraving depicting the gorge of the Tagus River as it approaches Toledo. The building on the tallest eminence is the Alcazar.

  These works alighted in western Europe at the best possible time. The reawakening around the year 1000 had been followed by a burst of sustained activity. By the mid—twelfth century towns had grown in number and size, new land had been cleared and diet improved, trade and banking reestablished, pilgrimage routes secured, and massive new cathedrals begun. Among the unlettered, in response to the changed circumstances of life, arose a yearning for a more meaningful, personal god—a sincere and praiseworthy quest that would, however, give rise to persecution and pogrom in its darker hours. For the educated few, those nominally within the embrace of the Church, the impulse was similar: the twelfth century saw students congregating in Paris, Bologna, and Oxford like bees around a honey pot. In those cities, twelfth-century teachers and thinkers were laboring to find a reason behind what they had been told to believe.

  Into this febrile atmosphere the manuscripts from the dar al Islam arrived as a godsend. Within a generation of the first Toledan translations in the 1130s, Aristotelian thought had entered the speculations of the scholastics. Just as Avicenna did in Persia, Averroes, in Seville, and Moses Maimonides, the greatest sephardic thinker, in Cairo, the finest minds of Christendom were forced to reconcile the observations of reason with the adumbrations of revelation. In some sense the Christians were reinventing the wheel, for the other two religions of the sea of faith had already grappled with the ramifications of ancient Greek thought. To Thomas Aquinas, whose thirteenth-century summa was a culmination of this process in Christendom, Aristotle was known, simply, as the Philosopher, and Averroes, whom Aquinas cited several hundred times, as the Commentator. Islamic culture, through Toledo, Palermo, and a half-dozen minor centers of translation, had brought the west an incomparable gift: self-knowledge.

  The Philosopher was far from being the sole Greek to be resurrected in Toledo. Thanks to Gerard of Cremona and Adelard of Bath, the most prolific translators of the time, Euclid's Elements of Geometry at last reappeared in the west, as did the Almagest, Ptolemy's authoritative presentation of mathematical astronomy. (Gerard of Cremona translated it from the Arabic; a Greek-to-Latin translation would later be done in Palermo). That the second-century work of Ptolemy should resurface in medieval Toledo was appropriate, given the city's long-standing connection with astronomy. In the taifa days of al-Ma'mun, celestial observations and star charts had been compiled into a reference work called the Toledan Tables, much of it from the pen of Abu Ishaq Ibrahim ibn Yahya An-Naqqash Az-Zarqali, known in the west as Arzachel. This great astronomer and inventor—the water clock was his doing—also perfected the flat astrolabe, the instrument used to calculate, among other things, the time of day, the altitude of physical features, and the projected location of heavenly bodies. It has been called the slide rule and pocket watch of the Middle Ages. Arzachel's work with the astrolabe did not escape the notice of the translators, who ensured its subsequent fame throughout Europe. When Pierre Abelard, the French champion of Aristotelian syllogism, was given a son by his beloved Heloise, the name they chose for the infant could well have served as an homage to Toledo, the wellspring of their new thinking. The boy was christened Astrolabe.

  The story of the dissemination of Arzachel's work underlines what is often glossed over in accounts of the intellectual recovery of the west, which emphasize the ancients of Greece at the expense of contemporaneous knowledge drawn from Islamic sources. The libraries of the Muslim world that were being translated also contained works on Indian mathematics
and Persian medicine, as well as those produced in the brilliant courts of al-Andalus. In a sense, the Christian kingdoms of Spain had gone from picking taifa pockets through parias to picking their brains through translation. Arabic treatises on astrology and the natural sciences—all left the study rooms by the Tagus to cross the Pyrenees and add such words as algebra, algorithm, and alchemy to the lexicon of the west. And in an eddy of this tide of rationalism, the abundant Arabic catalog of works on necromancy was made available to Europe. Latin practitioners of magic were adept in what was known as ars toledana.

  The convivencia of Toledo—its role as a clearinghouse of ideas lasted two hundred years—also entailed the far less lofty business of simple people, living together. Aside from the exceptional scholar translating alongside his Mozarab or Jewish colleague, the Mudejar community is thought to have been composed chiefly of laborers and craftsmen—as well as a great number of slaves. The decorative arts of medieval Iberia attest to Mudejar influence, as does the brickwork architecture of the churches that sprang up in lands formerly under Muslim control. For as a cosmopolitan cadre of linguists pored over manuscripts in Toledo, the descendants of Alfonso VI eventually resumed the push south from the city, the drying-up of extorted Andalusi gold having given rise to an ethic of conquest. In the twelfth century, a confraternity of monk-warriors, the Knights of Calatrava, was founded with the express purpose of extending the reach of Christian hegemony in Iberia.

  Toledo's historical moment combines the two strands of the medieval Spanish experience that compete for primacy in the national memory: tolerance and conquest. The former was not of the modern, multicultural variety, however sweet that might be to imagine. The Mudejars (and the Jews) possessed fewer rights and paid higher taxes than the Christians, and the communities had separate residential areas, the market square, Plaza Zocodover (from Arabic siik ed-dawabb, "horse market"), serving as the principal place for mundane social intermingling. Still, for Latin Europe (Sicily excluded), this interconfessional civility was remarkable, a rare Christian mirror of what had long been the practice in the more tolerant lands of Islam. An odd coincidence had the Christians adopting the enlightened convivencia of Islam at the same time as the Almoravids were abandoning it by chasing out many of the Christians and Jews from al-Andalus. The western end of the Mediterranean world had been turned upside down, just as its eastern shore was on the verge of an even greater upheaval.

  Manzikert: 1071. Palermo: 1072. Toledo: 1085. The changes had come in quick succession. In less than a generation, epochal events had occurred that would alter the confessional geography of the Mediterranean. If convivencia emerged in Palermo, Toledo, and, later, Konya (the capital of the Sultanate of Rum), the working of subsequent centuries of discrimination—and episodes of malign leadership—gradually ground down the culture of tolerance, and entire regions became militantly monoconfessional. The changes set in motion in the 1070s and 1080s are still with us: Anatolia is overwhelmingly Muslim; Sicily and Castile, Christian.

  Despite the importance of these three events in the hectic close of the eleventh century, one other occurrence overshadows all others in the shared story of Islam and Christianity. In 1095, less than a decade after the fall of Toledo, the Cluniac monk Odo of Chatillon, as Pope Urban II, preached to several hundred expectant noblemen in a clearing in Clermont, France. Although the text of his sermon has been lost, later chroniclers set down its gist. Jerusalem, the pope declared, had to be taken. A scarcely human enemy—the Muslims—had for too long controlled the Holy Sepulchre, the place where the crucified Christ had been laid to rest and come back to life. Pilgrims to Jerusalem from Europe, Urban claimed, were beset by scandalous extortions and inhumane vexations, and their brothers in the faith, the Christians of the east, faced persecution and invasion from the Turks. The time had come for a new sort of pilgrimage, one that combined the martial bravery of the Christian knight with the purity of purpose of the Roman Church. All pilgrims to Jerusalem who took up arms in the service of this holy cause would be granted a remission of their sins. A war must be waged to recover Palestine: God wills it.

  A week after the Cid closed his eyes for the last time in Valencia, an army of pilgrims carried out God's will. On July 15, 1099, crusading knights broke through St. Stephen's Gate of Jerusalem and went utterly berserk. On the Temple Mount, around which Caliph Umar had been escorted by Patriarch Sophronius some 450 years earlier, the exultant westerners herded people into mosque and synagogue for wholesale slaughter. "The defenders fled along the walls and through the city," wrote one eyewitness. "Our men followed them, killing and slaying even to the Temple of Solomon, where the slaughter was so great that our men waded in blood up to their ankles." The Jews of the city were herded into the main synagogue, which was then torched. A similar fate awaited those who did not subscribe to the Latin faith of the conquerors. "After a very great and cruel slaughter of Saracens, of whom 10,000 fell in that same place, they put to the sword great numbers of gentiles who were running about the quarters of the city, fleeing in all directions on account of their fear of death: they were stabbing women who had fled into palaces and dwellings; seizing infants by the soles of their feet from their mothers' laps or their cradles and dashing them against the walls and breaking their necks; they were slaughtering some with weapons, or striking them down with stones; they were sparing absolutely no gentile of any place or kind." Few natives of Jerusalem survived their city's liberation. In the following days, as the stench of victory grew unbearable, the thousands who had been butchered were carted outside the fortifications, thrown in heaps two or three stories tall, then burned. Such was the culmination of what is now known as the First Crusade.

  The slaughter in Jerusalem had its precursors, and not only in the Middle East. It had taken the crusaders almost three years to reach their goal, during which time they endured unspeakable hardship and indulged in hair-raising savagery. The whole enterprise had initially been launched following a plea by the basileus Alexius Comnenus, father of the chronicler Anna and leader of the capable dynasty that guided Constantinople after the debacle of Manzikert. Alexius sent a letter to Pope Urban asking for reinforcements in his struggle against the Turks, which was read out at a clerical conclave in Piacenza, Italy, in the spring of 1095. The Byzantine got in return far more than he had requested: on learning of the pope's appeal at Clermont later in the year and being prodded to action by such charismatic preachers as Peter the Hermit, tens of thousands of ordinary men and women, enthusiasts of a holy, purifying journey to Jerusalem, streamed east across Europe, warming up for their muscular pilgrimage, as it were, by massacring Jews they encountered en route. In May 1096, whole communities of Jews were killed in such places as Mainz and Worms, inaugurating a sinister western tradition that would reach its ghastly apotheosis in the Shoah of the twentieth century. Alexius, appalled when this uninvited mass of exalted peasants and monks arrived at his doorstep, had them quickly spirited across the Bosporus and into Bithynia, the region south of the Sea of Marmara. There the eighteen-year-old sultan of Rum, Kilij Arslan, a great-nephew of Alp, annihilated these first crusaders—some twenty thousand people, it is thought—at a place called Civetot, on the Marmara's Gulf of Nicomedia.

  Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem.

  When the armored and mounted men of war—the toughened knights from northern France, Provence, Flanders, Germany, and Norman Italy—arrived in Constantinople in the wake of this debacle, they clearly constituted a force far more formidable than the lost souls of the so-called People's Crusade. Alexius was aware of their abilities—he had barely managed to turn back Robert Guiscard in the Balkans only a decade earlier. As a canny diplomat with a network of spies, the basileus also kept abreast of the rivalries that were sapping the Muslim world of its capacity to resist effectively. Beyond the central Anatolia of the Turks, who themselves excelled at civil war, lay a fractured Seljuk empire in Syria and Mesopotamia, where local atabegs and dynasts of such centers as Aleppo, Antioch, M
osul, and Damascus cordially detested each other. Syria and the al-Jazeera had, in short, their version of the taifas. In Palestine, the situation was not much better, as the allies of the Fatimids fell victim to court intrigues. Alexius, sensing strength in his unpredictable Christian allies and weakness in his familiar Muslim enemies, had the leaders of the crusade swear oaths to refrain from appropriating for themselves any Byzantine land that they might reconquer on their way to Jerusalem.

  The basileus was too shrewd a man not to realize that these oaths were, in all likelihood, worthless. Religious fervor, which the crusaders had in spades, did not preclude or even hinder their worldly ambition. Faith may even have stoked it, the certainty of divine approval making the business of enriching oneself while eviscerating one's enemy a saintly enterprise. In this, these rough newcomers from the west were no different from Alp Arslan, or Caliph Muawiya, or any of a number of Mediterranean conquerors who reconciled belief with cupidity. The first proof of crusader acquisitiveness came in Edessa (Urfa, Turkey), the upper Mesopotamian town that had long sat on the border between the Seljuk and Byzantine empires.

  A knight named Baldwin of Boulogne, on hearing of the difficulties of Edessa's king, an Armenian potentate with no heir, quit the main southward advance of the crusading Franks and headed inland. Baldwin offered to help the city if the king adopted him as a son. Doing so would ensure Baldwin's accession to the throne in the lamentable event of the monarch's demise. That last occurrence wasn't long in coming: shortly after a strange adoption ceremony that had the principals stripped to the waist in a public embrace, the king was hacked to death in his citadel by a mob let in by his faithless new son. Baldwin of Boulogne became count of Edessa, the ruler of the first crusader state. The commitment to return lands to Byzantine control had been forgotten.