by Ed West
In 476, a German tribe called the Goths had subjugated Italy, but the following century the ambitious Byzantine emperor Justinian was determined to win it back for the empire. The greatest Byzantine general, Belasarius, had already conquered the region around old Carthage in North Africa from the Vandals, and in 535 the Byzantines crossed over to Sicily, which had been Greek-speaking since the eighth century BC and would continue to be until the late medieval ages. (Today there are pockets of southern Italy where a form of Greek with Italian influences, called Griko, is still spoken.) The war would ultimately last decades and became something of a pyrrhic victory for the eastern Romans, who remained in control of half of Italy, but were drained and exhausted. Although they could not know it, a force was emerging in the east that would threaten them far more than any westerners could manage.
Across the Latin-speaking half of the former empire, things had become bleak; between the sixth and seventh century western Europe lost between half and two-thirds of its population. The city of Rome had declined from several hundred thousand to just twenty thousand people in 800 AD; after everything it had previously suffered, the Byzantine-Gothic war had led to the ruin of its aqueducts, which permanently destroyed its ability to supply a large population. A chronicler of the time said: “In the middle of the debris of great cities, only scattered groups of wretched people survive.” Rome “was moribund, a crepuscular near-wasteland of weeds and wolves and a mere twenty thousand dispirited, malarial residents eking out livings among monuments stripped of marble, public buildings cannibalized for their brick and bronze.”5
During his travels, the Byzantine historian Procopius, who had arrived in Italy in 536, had noticed something very strange: “The sun began to be darkened by day and the moon by night, while the ocean was tumultuous with spray from the 24th of March in this year till the 24th of June in the following year . . . And, as the winter was a severe one, so much so that from the large and unwonted quantity of snow the birds perished . . . there was distress . . . among men . . . from the evil things.”6 That year the faraway Annals of Ulster record “a failure of bread,” and food shortages were recorded as far afield as Peru and China. This extreme weather event, which would linger in the historical memory, also occurs in Westeros with “the Long Night,” a season of winter that lasted a generation, when, according to some old wives’ tales, people never saw daylight for years on end.
The real year without sun is thought to have been caused by a volcano in the South Pacific spreading ash around the world and led to famines and possibly the destruction of a city in Central America. It may have also prompted the migration of Mongolian tribes to the west, which brought further misery to Europe.
At the time there were reports of blood-colored rain in Gaul, of a yellow substance “running across the ground like a shower” in western Britain.7 The sun dimmed throughout Europe and the Near East, and Flavius Cassiodorus wrote: “We marvel to see now shadow on our bodies at noon, to feel the mighty vigor of the sun’s heat wasted into feebleness.”
This was the darkest moment in western Europe’s history, but as in Westeros, a new age would emerge.8 In Essos, the Rhoyne is described as the “mightiest river in the world”; there the people, the Rhoynar, built “elegant towns and cities from the headwaters of the Rhoyne down to her mouth, each lovelier than the last.”9 Art and music flourished, and united by blood and culture the people of Rhoyne “were fiercely independent,” while in this part of the world women were regarded as equal to the men. The parallel is clearly with the German statelets that emerged in the medieval period, which were centred on the river Rhine, and which indeed were noted for their elegant, beautiful towns (until many were destroyed in World War II).
At the time of Rome’s collapse, the Rhine was home to a number of tribes, the most dominant of which were the Franks, who had begun to settle heavily in northern Gaul while allied to the Romans. At the end of the fifth century, a warlord called Clovis put all the Franks under his leadership, establishing the founding dynasty that would one day rule all of France.
Clovis was married to Clotilda, who came from another Germanic tribe to the south, the Burgundians, and who tried her utmost to convert him to her Catholicism. After crying out for the Christian God’s help in battle, Clovis gave his thanks on Christmas Day, 496, when he and three thousand of his warriors were baptized at the Cathedral of Rheims in the heart of the Frankish lands north of Paris. And so it was here that the kings of France would be crowned until the nineteenth century.
With this fateful decision, Catholic Christianity was established as the religion of western Europe, and it was Franks who created the union of church and state. They became the pre-eminent tribe in the West, claiming a continuity with the fallen empire; this Germanic tribe, although conquerors, even adopted the language of the people they had overrun, which they called, simply, “Romanz” but would take the name of the conquerors, Frankish or Français.
By being crowned by a bishop, representing God, Clovis also raised kingship up beyond something involving mere mortals. King comes from Old German kuningaz, and became cyning in Old English, the closest modern translation being “leader of the people” or “descended from nobility,” although “warlord” would be just as good. However, after Clovis and, especially Charlemagne three centuries later, kings became more than lords; instead they were anointed by God, and this explains the particular horror felt about the killing of a monarch. This majesty was reflected in the pre-eminent game of medieval life, chess, in which the king alone could not be killed. Writing in the thirteenth century, English theologian Alexander Nequam recalled how Louis VI, while running from the army of the English king Henry I, found that one of Henry’s knights had seized his reins and so cried out: “Fie upon you! Don’t you know that a king may not be taken even in chess?”10 Killing a king was the ultimate sin against nature.
Clovis and his successors were called the Merovingians, after his father Merovich, and as they wore long hair as a family privilege, they were sometimes referred to as the “long-haired kings” (Latin reges criniti) by contemporaries. Like with Dothraki, cutting hair off subsequently became a sign of defeat and deposition, after which men could not rule.
Under Clovis, the Franks conquered almost all of northern Gaul, but they also established effective dominance over the south, although in the regions of Aquitaine and Septimania the people maintained their Latin language and culture, and until recently the two parts of France spoke distinct languages. Despite these differences, the Duke of Aquitaine had always recognized the king in Paris as overlord, although their relationship was difficult—and a new crisis was soon to change all that.
As time passed, the kings of the Franks became less powerful and real power passed to a hereditary “Mayor of the Palace,” as these chief ministers were styled. When Pepin of Herstal, mayor of the palace and de facto ruler, died in 714, his widow Plectrude attempted to seize power, exiling Pepin’s illegitimate son, a tall, blond, twenty-five-year-old named Charles. She would not succeed, and the young man would not only take power, sending his stepmother to a convent, but lead the Franks to victory in one of the most influential battles in history.
12
DORNISH SPAIN
Dorne is sand and scorpions, and bleak red mountains baking in the sun.
—REZNAK MO REZNAK
A new threat soon emerged causing terror to both Franks and Latins. To the south of Gaul, the imperial province of Hispania had been conquered in the fifth century by another barbarian tribe, the Visigoths; three hundred years later, they, in turn, were overrun by a new empire that incorporated a third of humanity and stretched from Gibraltar to the Indus—that of Islam. The “Believers,” as they styled themselves, had emerged out of the Arabian desert and with their strong social cohesion, or “group feeling”—asabiyyah—had conquered much of the Byzantine Empire and overrun altogether the world’s other great power, Persia. Converting the conquered with financial as well as heavenly incentives,
they had followed their initial capture of the Near East with a second burst of energy along the coast of North Africa.
Then in 711 AD, a huge army crossed the narrow straits of land separating Roman Hispania from Africa, and the Arabs would stay in Spain for another seven centuries, during which time Moorish Spain was far more advanced than its Christian neighbors.
George R.R. Martin has said that Dorne, the most southerly of the Seven Kingdoms, is based on Moorish Spain. Dorne is far drier and hotter than the rest of Westeros, the people more romantic, their food spicier than those to the north. The Dornish are described as “dark-haired, olive-skinned, hot-blooded and passionate”;1 they mostly look different to people in the other kingdoms, who have a northern European appearance, although they descend from three separate races of people, and so there are three types of Dornishmen—Stony, Sandy, and Salty (Stony Dornish are mountain folk and have fair hair and skin, unlike the others). Uniquely in the Seven Kingdoms, the Dornish partly descend from the Rhoynar of Essos, and so maintain many of their customs; the Rhoynish had been led to Dorne centuries back by Nymeria, who burned their ships so that his followers would not head back.
Dorne has “vast deserts of red and white sand, forbidding mountains . . . sweltering heat, sandstorms, scorpions, fiery food, poison, castles made of mud, dates and figs and blood oranges.”2 It has semi-arid hills, deserts, mountains, and coastal areas with large populations, and because it is geographically hard to unite, Dorne has had the largest number of petty kings.
The southern kingdom is different in many ways—tolerant of homosexuality, for example—just as southern Europe has traditionally been more relaxed than the north; France and Italy decriminalised same-sex activity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, long before Britain and Germany. Indeed, until the twentieth century the Islamic world was more kindly disposed towards homosexuality than the West: Islamic poetry often features a beautiful boy as the object of love, while Morocco and Egypt have long had a tradition of same-sex relationships.3
Like Dorne, Iberia is hot, and except in its far north receives the most sunshine in Europe, with only pockets of southern Italy, southern Greece, and Provence matching it. It is also large—at 229,000 square miles, around the size of France—and mountainous. After Switzerland and Norway, Spain and Portugal are the most elevated countries in Europe, with five systems over the peninsula, from the Cantabrian in the north-west to the Sierra Nevada in the south. This makes it hard for one central power to control the area.
The Visigoths had ruled Iberia as a separate caste, largely refusing to integrate with the native Ibero-Romans and remaining aloof; so when the Muslims arrived there was little desire to fight for the rulers, and many towns welcomed them. For cities that put up resistance there followed the summary execution of adult males and enslavement of women and children, a fate that befell Cordoba and Zaragoza. Those that surrendered, such as Pamplona, were spared.
Like Dorne, Spain has been invaded by numerous different people, ranging from olive-skinned Arabs to blue-eyed Germans. The invaders of 711 brought a variety of settlers from across the Middle East and North Africa; Tariq ibn Ziyad, the conqueror of Iberia who, upon their landing, ordered for all his army’s ships to be burned so that they might not turn back, was Persian or maybe a Berber.
Indeed, most of the invaders were not Arabs but Berber, the native people of northwest Africa. Berber comes from the Greek word barbarian, although why it stuck with just one group is a mystery, and they called themselves “free men,” or Amazighen. Centralized authorities always saw this freedom in a different light and later rulers of Morocco referred to tribal areas outside of their control as “the lands of insolence.”4
Some hundred thousand Arabs and Berbers settled in the region, from Syria, Palestine, Yemen, and elsewhere, and left their mark; Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan all have hundreds of words derived from Arabic, often to do with agriculture and administration, as well as food—sugar, oranges, aubergines, and rice are all Arabic in origin, among the new crops introduced by the conquerors, as well as cotton, lemons, limes, bananas, spinach, and watermelons.
It became a remarkable society; while Christian Europe slept, a magnificent civilization flourished to the south in al-Andalus, as Moorish Spain was now called. Theirs was a culture rich with beauty, and the crown jewel was the city of Cordoba, which at the turn of the millennium was the largest in Europe, home to 450,000 people, ten times more than Venice or Rome and over twenty times that of Paris; the largest Christian city in western Europe, Salerno, had just 50,000. As late as 1330 Islamic Granada, home to perhaps 150,000 people, was possibly the largest on the continent.5 Ibn Hawqal, the tenth century Arab geographer, wrote that “it has no equal in the Maghreb, and hardly in Egypt, Syria or Mesopotamia, for the size of its population, its extent, the space occupied by its markets, the cleanliness of its streets, the architecture of its mosques, the number of its baths and caravanserais.” Islamic Cordoba was centered on the Roman city of Corduba.
Within the old walled town, by the river Guadalquivir to the south, was the governmental quarter that featured the palace of the caliphs, the chancery, barracks, prison, and the homes of the leading officials, as well as the Great Mosque. Beyond that the walled city, which could be entered through seven gateways, was surrounded by dense residential areas, markets, gardens, cemeteries, and bathhouses and further out the munyas, the large palatial country retreats of the city’s elite, nestling on the southern edges of the Sierra de Cordoba.6 By the Great Mosque of Cordoba were the public baths, as well as the central market, where one might buy bread, fruit, oil, or lamb, but also “Persian carpets, Damascus metalware, China silks, fine leather and jewellery, slaves, and much else supplied on demand by the Muslim world economy.”7
The Moors had rebuilt the bridge over the river in the eighth century, replacing a Roman structure; it is also recognizable as the Long Bridge of Volantis over which Tyrion and Varys walk, although at the time it also featured homes, taverns, brothels, and a market.8
Then there was the palace of Madinat az-Zahra, commissioned in 936 by Emir Abd al-Rahman III. It took ten thousand workmen toiling away for years to create the magnificent building—marble was imported from North Africa, while a bishop was sent to Constantinople to collect art as well as craftsmen. The emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus may have sent 140 columns to help with its construction.
The throne rooms were magnificent, but the most splendid was the Hall of the Caliphs:
Its roof and walls were constructed out of sheets of variously tinted marble so fine as to be translucent. In the center of the room stood a large shallow bowl containing mercury: it stood on a base which could be rocked, and it was so placed as to receive sunlight from a number of surrounding apertures. When the caliph wished to impress or alarm anyone who had been granted an audience he would sign to a slave to rock the bowl and the sunbeams reflected from the surface of the mercury would flash and whizz round the room like lightning.9
The palace of Zahra, which means “blossom” or “flower” was, according to legend, named after the emir’s favorite wife, Madinet al-Zahra. When foreign ambassadors went to see the monarch, there was a three-mile-long rank of soldiers two-deep flanking the sides, “their naked swords, both broad and long, meeting at the tips like rafters of a roof . . . The fear that this inspired was indescribable.”10 Inside, the palace contained “colonnaded great halls, geometric gardens, and cascading fountains [that] humbled generations of ambassadors and awed subjects.”11
There were seventy libraries in Cordoba, and the city’s main bibliotheca had something like four hundred thousand manuscripts, mostly paper. In contrast, St Gall in Switzerland, the biggest in the Christian north, had just six hundred, all of inferior calfskin or sheepskin. To a visitor from Christendom the city would have appeared majestic; Hrowswitha of Gandersheim, a Saxon nun, called Abd al-Rahman III’s Cordoba “the brilliant ornament of the world.”
The city’s only rival at the
time was Seville, which featured the sumptuous Alcazar Palace. Meaning “Room of the Princes” in the Arabic-Spanish hybrid language of the time, Alcazar was the seat of the Abbadí kingdom, and one of three capitals of the Almohad empire after it was built in the eleventh century. Later it would be used by the Castilian monarchs after the Christians conquered the city, and it is now recognizable as the Dornish royal palace.12
Spain was a diverse place in a way France or Britain were not. Abd al-Rahman had a personal bodyguard that consisted of Caucasian infantry from the southern mountains of Russia, complemented by the prince’s personal bodyguard of black Africans. Al-Andalus is, in particular, associated with the idea of convivencia, the spirit of coexistence, a country in which Muslims, Christians, and Jews managed to live together, although this tolerance was all relative; converting from Islam to Christianity was punishable by death, and the slow but steady trickle of converts the other way reflected the financial penalties for being a non-Muslim.
And yet Jews and Christians were routinely employed at the court. Al-Mu’tamid of Seville used a rabbi as his official astrologer, one Al-Mu’tamin of Zaragoza, who was so skilled he apparently accurately predicted the actual day of his own death, an impressive if admittedly useless trick.
This mixture produced a wide variation of racial appearances still found today in Spain; Abd Rahman III was honorifically referred to as al-Nasir li-dini ‘llah, “he who fights victoriously for the faith of Allah,” but as his father and grandfather had both married captured Christian girls, he was only one-quarter Arab and so had blue eyes, reddish hair and pale skin. He dyed his hair black so he could look more like a Muslim prince was supposed to look.
