The Giralda and its giradillo weathervane should be kept in mind when the temptation beckons to view history as a juggernaut, slowly but surely rolling toward a predetermined destination. Neither the Byzantines at Yarmuk and at Manzikert nor the defenders of Muslim Palermo and Toledo thought they were pitching themselves down the maw of the preordained. What, at a distance of several centuries, seems self-evident—the Christian loss of Jerusalem, for example—had nothing of the inevitable about it. Feared by all generals, the breezes of contingency can yield far-reaching results, all the more so when the outcome of battle ends up touching the most profound beliefs of a people—how they see themselves in this world and, especially, in the next.
For the eastern Mediterranean of the time, one can argue that the Latin defeat at Hattin quashed an experiment that had been doomed at the outset by the sheer force of numbers. In the west, the events of the early thirteenth century are devoid of such calculations—there was no disparity in forces that would guarantee an outcome. The raids and battles that raged up and down the Iberian peninsula in those years, as cruel and calculating as any in the Levant, were just as much a struggle to fashion the spiritual landscape of a people, but, in contrast to Outremer, the combatants were evenly matched. The stake for the Iberians was the culture in which their descendants would live. In both cases, the memory of what was lost in these years—Outremer and al-Andalus—remains a source of resentment or pride to this day.
The Almohad Giralda of Seville, transformed into a bell tower for the reconquista-cathedral, the largest Gothic church in the world.
In Spain, the bias of the victors comes through in referring to the struggle as the reconquest, la reconquista, of the peninsula by the Christians. That label implies they were recovering something that was rightfully theirs in the first place, rather than conquering, plain and simple. Historians of another time, imbued with a certain religiosity, dutifully repeated the term, which was taken up, naturally enough, by pietistic Spanish nationalists who saw the hand of God directing events. The present day is still not immune to the idea of the conquest of al-Andalus as a struggle pitting the native against the foreign: in 1998 one popular historian could write of a twelfth-century Christian effort "to free most of the soil of Spain from its alien invaders." This opinion skirts the awkward fact that by the year 1200 Islam had been installed in Iberia for half a millennium—about the same period of time as it had been present in Syria, and four full centuries longer than it had existed in the Muslim country we now know as Turkey (or, if one prefers, the same length of time Africans and Europeans have been in the Americas). Despite the vicissitudes in its fortunes after the fall of the Umayyads, al-Andalus was a Muslim country of long standing, a venerable constituent of the dar al-Islam. If its leaders in the 1100s and 1200s were, in some ways, "alien" to Spain (Moroccan Almoravids, then Almohads), the bulk of their armies and their subjects were nonetheless Andalusis, as Iberian and indigenous as the Cid himself. A more apt term for the reconquista might be the Medieval Spanish Civil War.
The undercurrent of Iberian convivencia added piquancy to the conflict. Alliances of convenience were often formed between Muslim and Christian chieftains in Spain, many of whom were related through the exertions of their concubines. In Toledo, a remarkable meeting of minds was also taking place. Translators pounced on the works of the philosopher Averroes even as their rulers attacked the cities—Seville, Córdoba,, Granada—that were the font of the new knowledge. An odd state of permanent war and heightened cultural intercourse obtained in Spain, as in nowhere else around the Mediterranean. The language later to mature as Castilian Spanish attests to this promiscuity through its adoption of thousands of Arabic words, a wholesale borrowing—estimated at about ten percent of the lexicon—unique among the Romance languages of the Mediterranean. The absorption of al-Andalus into Christendom still echoes wherever Spanish is spoken.
The years leading up to the watershed of 1212 resemble the long, confused road to successful jihad in Syria and Outremer. Instability and backstabbing prevailed on both sides of the Iberian battle line. Among the Christians the principal divisions were dynastic. In Leon-Castile, Alfonso VI, the victor at Toledo in 1085 and the vanquished at Sagrajas in 1086, forged a union of north and central Spain, but his descendants wasted little time in tearing it apart. In the early twelfth century a French adventurer given Alfonso's daughter in marriage carved out a separate kingdom for himself, thereby ensuring Portugal an existence independent of the rest of Iberia. In a sideshow there to the disastrous Second Crusade, which failed before Damascus, several boatloads of English, Flemish, and German crusaders bound for Outremer in 1147 were induced to disembark on the Atlantic coast and wrest the town of Lisbon from Islam, their success being the only net Christian gain of that whole sorry enterprise. Elsewhere at the same time Alfonso's grandson, Alfonso VII, conducted a series of merciless raids deep into al-Andalus, but those proved only temporary victories: he had the misguided idea of splitting his inheritance between his sons and thus guaranteed a debilitating power struggle between Leon and Castile after his death.
The other kingdoms of Christian Spain kept their autonomy, although Navarre, in Basque country, was usually beholden in one way or another to its larger neighbors. Around the time the detoured crusaders took Lisbon, a marriage between the ruling families of Aragon and Barcelona brought those two regions under one lordship. The Crown of Aragon (as the heterogeneous union of inland, feudal Aragon and maritime, merchant Catalonia was known) provided a counterweight to the mounting power of Castile. It conducted its own campaigns against the Muslims during the twelfth century. One Aragonese king, yet another Alfonso, was known as the Batallador ("Battler" or "Fighter") for his devotion to warring on the Muslims. Of the twenty-nine battles he won against them—some employing Crusaders returning from Outremer—Alfonso's capture of the great city of Zaragoza in 1118 was the most significant and was rightly seen in al-Andalus as a disaster on the scale of Toledo some thirty years earlier. The Battler subsequently launched a spectacular campaign to the southern extremity of the Iberian peninsula and returned with ten thousand Christians of Granada to settle the valley of the Ebro. The Almoravid emir, urged on by the grandfather of Averroes (who was an official of Cordoba), then took reprisal by expelling many of the remaining Mozarabs to Morocco, to languish in a land that had never known convivencia.
Although the actions undertaken by Christian monarchs against al-Andalus at the time were uncoordinated, the destructive raiding slowly chipped away at the Muslim dominion. The line of the Ebro and the Duero had been breached, the threshold of Medinaceli long since overrun. From their forward position along the Tagus—the river of Toledo and Lisbon—the Christians attacked and repelled attack. Motives, as usual, were mixed. The sophisticated cities of al-Andalus were a mouthwatering prize for the rustic northerners, as were the wide grazing lands of La Mancha and, beyond, the fertile valleys of the Guadiana and the Guadalquivir. Some monarchs managed to combine the earthly and the heavenly better than others. In his will, the childless and quite possibly impotent Alfonso the Battler of Aragon left his entire kingdom to the Templars and other warrior orders, enjoining them to continue his holy fight. Alarmed nobles of the realm weighed in against this bequest, and Aragon narrowly avoided becoming a nation ruled by monks in mail. Instead, Alfonso's brother—an ordinary, pacific monk—was hustled out of his monastery and made a layman and then a monarch in short order.
Still, the Templars and other such orders came to play a greater role in the conduct of the conquest of al-Andalus. Homegrown warrior monasteries sprang up in the twelfth century, the most powerful being the knightly orders of Santiago and Calatrava. The Latin motto of the former, Rubet ensis sanguine Arabum (May the sword be red with Arab blood), gives an idea of what their goals entailed. Ironically, the lands around Calatrava, in the dangerous march between La Mancha and al-Andalus, came into Christian hands as part of the dowry of Zaida, Alfonso VI's Sevillan wife and mother of Elvira of Castile,
queen of Palermo. In endowering Zaida with this necklace of fortresses, her father-in-law (he of the camel-driver/swineherd comment) had unwittingly given militant Christian knights a redoubt—a ribat, in fact—in which to foster their single-minded devotion to aggression. The castle at Calatrava would fall, be recaptured, be rebuilt, then fall again, but it remained a symbol and a rallying cry for those engaged in expanding Christendom, a Krak des Chevaliers on the meseta of Spain. When, as often happened in the struggle for primacy on the peninsula, the Christian monarchs attacked one another rather than the infidel, the friars of Santiago and Calatrava had to defend the marchland alone. Fortunately for them, for much of the twelfth century the Muslims were as divided as the Christians.
The Almoravids, whose empire stretched from the river Niger to La Mancha and from the Algarve to Libya, disappeared from Spain in the middle years of the twelfth century. The hot flame of religious fervor that had animated these Berbers of the ribat had guttered once it came in contact with the refined air of al-Andalus. The Almoravid monarchs, if not their foot soldiers, became as worldly as the latter taifa kings. On doctrinal matters, a literalist, legalistic reading of the Quran—as taught by Almoravid clerics—did not sit well with the native Andalusis; nor did, especially, the ethnic humiliation entailed in being ruled from Marrakesh by Berbers. As early as the 1120s, revolts in the Guadalquivir Valley had become commonplace.
However dangerous such Andalusi irredentism, the fatal blow was delivered in Africa: the Almoravids had to face a rival Berber federation centered on the Masmuda clan of the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. Begun—as had the Almoravid movement—by a holy man returning from an initiatory trip to the east, this new force would eventually crush the Almoravids. Ibn Tumart, the Masmuda visionary, preached such a radical monotheism that his supporters were known as the Unitarians, or al-muwahhidun (whence the western word Almohad'). The Almohads detested the Almoravids, claiming that their pedestrian approach to Revelation had led them into the heresy of ascribing anthropomorphic attributes to the unknowable essence of God. The Quran, the Almohads argued, should be interpreted collectively by the sages leading the community of the faithful. Ibn Tumart, as shrewd and ruthless as the Prophet had been in cementing the umma behind him, allowed himself to be declared a mahdi—an infallible emissary of God sent to purify Islam. Armed with this ferocious certitude, the Almohads roared out of the Atlas to eliminate the Almoravids. By the 1150s the Almohad caliph—Ibn Tumart's successor—was ensconced in the palaces of Marrakesh.
The transfer of power in Spain took rather longer, as Iberia was not central to the concerns of the new Berber dynasts. The Almohads first wanted to consolidate their hold on the Maghrib and Ifriqiya—their armies drove the Norman Sicilians of King Roger from the coastline of Tunisia. As these conquests unfolded, in al-Andalus the decades following the midcentury mark saw a period of confusion, a second era of taifas, as Almohad emissaries and Almoravid loyalists waged war from rival cities, all the while trying to counter Andalusi rebels eager to compose with the Christian northerners, their fellow Iberians.
The rebels' greatest figure was one Ibn Mardanish, called King Lobo (Wolf ) by the Christians, an accomplished juggler of alliances who successfully parried repeated attacks on his eastern kingdom of Valencia and Murcia. On his death in 1172, however, his sons submitted to the Almohads. Although many Andalusis of Lobo's generation were willing to become vassals of either Castile or the Crown of Aragon in exchange for a measure of self-rule, the Almohads eventually turned the situation to their own advantage, relying on the confessional zeal of volunteer mujahadeen and on the hardening of religious atttitudes among the Muslim Andalusis. Allying with the Christians to fight fellow Muslims was no longer conscionable.
Allying with Christians to fight Christians was another matter. Caliph Abu Yusuf Yaqub, the builder of the Giralda, brilliantly exploited the jealousies and ambitions of rival rulers in the north. Coordinating his actions with those of the kings of Navarre and Leon, the Almohad leader slipped across the Despenaperros Pass, the main threshold through the Sierra Morena mountains between Andalusia and La Mancha, and inflicted a severe defeat on the Castilians at the frontier fortress of Alarcos, in 1195. The rout—from which King Alfonso VIII of Castile barely escaped with forty of his knights—horrified Christendom, which was still reeling from the recent disaster of Hattin and the failure of the Third Crusade to recapture Jerusalem. The gains made in Spain by the armies of Christ during a century of intermittent warfare looked to be imperiled; worse yet, the shortsightedness of competing Spanish monarchs was the root cause of the disarray. Excommunications and interdicts flew out of Rome, to little effect. Alone and assailed by its enemies throughout central Spain, Castile barely held on to Toledo in the Almohad onslaught.
Unexpectedly, the Almoravids came to the rescue. Although chased from the Iberian mainland, they had hung on to power on the Balearic Islands. Quick to adopt the piratical mores for which those islands are admirably suited, the Almoravids of Majorca did not limit themselves to spreading seaborne misery—their hatred of the Almohad usurpers ran much deeper. As Caliph Abu Yusuf Yaqub warred in the middle of Spain, the Almoravids harassed his empire. Ten years earlier they had fanned the discontent of subject peoples in Ifriqiya, and their continued campaigns were judged a threat to the Almohad commonwealth. When the caliph died in 1199, his successor—Muhammad al-Nasir—directed his attentions away from Iberia to the conquest of the Balearics. Also, most of the Almohad armies retired across the Strait of Gibraltar to deal with various rebellions, allowing the battered Castile of Alfonso VIII to get back on its feet. However devastating the defeat at Alarcos, the Almohads did not exploit it. A truce was signed between Muslim and Christian in Iberia, giving the northern kingdoms of Spain the opportunity to regroup and, with the passage of time, to resolve their differences. What was needed for a great offensive against Islam was a spirit of collective crusade. It was at this juncture that the most powerful pope of the Middle Ages ascended the throne of St. Peter.
In 1198, Lotario dei Conti di Segni, a thirty-seven-year-old Roman nobleman, became the pontiff of Latin Christendom. He took the name Innocent III. Not since Gregory VII, the man who had launched the eleventh-century reform of the Church and freed it from subservience to secular rulers, had such a brilliant and energetic leader worn the papal tiara. To Innocent's mind, he had been awarded "not only the universal church but the whole world to govern." Not surprisingly, given this view, his pontificate proved dangerous to anyone who disagreed with him.
Like many of his predecessors, Innocent wanted to make over the world through crusade; unlike them, he possessed the intellectual, diplomatic, and organizational strengths to give it a try. His reign, from 1198 to 1216, sparked off a series of tumultuous events around the Mediterranean, many of them yielding unwonted results—what today is termed collateral damage. The most resounding, in the encounter between Christianity and Islam, was the fatal weakening of the Byzantine Empire. Innocent's Fourth Crusade, preached enthusiastically at the outset of his pontificate, achieved what for cenmries Muslim, Norman, and barbarian armies had not once succeeded in doing: taking and sacking Constantinople. Even for an age of impulsive, often harebrained violence, the event defied all norms.
The catastrophe came about when the northern Europeans of Innocent's Fourth Crusade, faced with extortionate fees demanded by Venetian mariners for the voyage to Outremer, reluctantly agreed to a novel barter arrangement: in exchange for eventual sea passage, they would do the bidding of Enrico Dandolo, the doge of Venice. After Dandolo—wily, blind, and well into his eighties—had them besiege and destroy a Christian city on the Dalmatian coast that was a rival to Venice, he spirited the Crusaders to the Bosporus, home to his city's other main competitor for maritime traffic in the eastern Mediterranean. Intrigues with a pretender to the mantle of the basileus, long-standing Latin hostility to the Greeks, and a frustrating wait outside the walls of Constantinople, a wealthy city the like of which did not exist in
the west—all of these eventually coalesced into a toxic medieval soup of greed and warrior fury.
When the Latins burst through the gates on April 12,1204, mayhem ensued. It lasted three days, as a world capital uncaptured since its founding in antiquity was stripped of its treasures. Amid scenes of mass murder, whores cavorted on the altar of the Hagia Sophia; monasteries, churches, palaces, and libraries were looted; and the statuary of classical times, gathered by Constantine for his new capital in the fourth century, was either melted down or carted off as swag. Notoriously, the Hippodrome's bronze equestrian group believed to have been fashioned by Lysippos, the court sculptor of Alexander the Great, made its way to Venice, to become the Horses of St. Mark in that city's cathedral. The crusading Latin bishops particularly prized the holy relics contained in Constantinople, as their transferral to distant European monasteries and churches ensured a steady stream of visitors, blessings—and revenues. A partial inventory of the haul: the Crown of Thorns, a finger of the Apostle Thomas, parts of the True Cross, Jesus' funeral shroud, a vial of Jesus' blood, a vial of the Virgin Mary's milk, and the heads of St. Stephen, the Apostle Thomas, St. John the Baptist, and James (Jesus' brother). The relics contained in Constantinople were so coveted that forty years later the Sainte Chapelle in Paris was constructed to house some of the sacred objects stolen from the Byzantine capital and subsequently bought by King Louis IX of France. The relics were said to cost more than the building.
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