by Ed West
Dorne’s Oberyn Martel plays on a traditional sort of medieval Muslim archetype, the romantic, well-traveled philosopher-poet famed for his prowess with the sword but also noted for mercy and moderation. Many Moorish rulers did indeed fit this model of the sophisticated, smooth-talking Islamic aristocrat, among them Abd al-Rahman II (822-852), the fourth Emir of Cordoba. He collected books, wrote poetry, and brought over the musician Ziryab from Iraq to live in the Munyat Nasr palace.
Ziryab was a fashion leader who introduced many eastern musical traditions into Europe, adding the fifth string to the lute (another Arabic word), as well as helping to popularize toothpaste and introducing eastern hairstyles. Moorish Spain may well have had an influence on bringing Middle Eastern ideas of courtly love to Europe, perhaps originally from Persia; the ultimate source of Europe’s romantic tradition, which sprung up in southern France, is a mystery.
Just as Oberyn Martell wrote romantic verse, so did many of Moorish Spain’s aristocrats, among them Al-Mu’tadid, King of Seville in the eleventh century, who penned these words:
My heart met hers, knowing that love is contagious,
And that one deeply in love can transmit his desire:
She graciously then offered me her cheek—
Oft a clear spring will gush forth from a rock—
I told her, “Let me now kiss your white teeth,
For I prefer white blossoms to red roses:
Lean your body on mine”—and then she bent
Towards me, granted my wish, again, again,
Embracing, kissing, in mutual fire of desire,
Singly and doubly, like sparks flying from a flint13
His son Mu’tamid also penned some rather corny poems about his youth and the ladies he’d known:
Many a night I spent, enjoying their shadows,
With maidens round-hipped, yet slim of waist:
Their white and brown beauty pierced my heart
Like white blood-spilling swords and points of brown lances!
And those nights playfully spent on the river dam
With a girl whose armband was like the curve of the crescent!
The verse ends with her letting her robe fall and the poet getting to see her “splended form.”
One of al-Mu’tamid’s favorite wives was a Christian from the north. One day he found her crying because, she said, she would never see the winter snows from her native home—and so he rounded up his best gardeners who overnight planted a forest of northern almond trees in blossom outside her apartment. When she awoke he took her to the window and said: “See my love, there is your snow.”14
Mumammad ibn Abbad al-Mu-tamid, the ruler of Seville in the eleventh century, was out walking one day and reciting some verses when a girl washing clothes down by the river Guadalquivir heard him and offered to finish it. She did so, and they were married, the girl remaining his favorite wife, for whom he wrote many more poems. Emir Al-Hakam I, who ruled from 796 to 822, was known to keep fine wines in his cellars and also wrote poetry; when five young beautiful harem women defied him, he “told them of his right” and yet lamented that he was “subdued” by them “like a captive,”—a hard life indeed. Two centuries later the polymath Ibn Hazm wrote his great work of courtly love, The Ring of the Dove (Tawq al-Hamama) in Cordoba. Another emir, the tenth century Al-Hakam II, was bisexual and even supposedly had a male harem, although he eventually produced an heir at forty-six; however, he was more interested in books, amassing an enormous personal library of six hundred works and commissioning one of the largest translation projects of the Middle Ages, turning numerous works from Latin and Greek into Arabic.
More so than romance, a great influential legacy of Moorish Spain in Europe was Arabic numerals, introduced to the Christian world via Cordoba. This revolutionized mathematics in the west, reflected in the fact that so many words to do with the subject are Arabic (although Arabic numerals came from India originally). Before this, attempting multiplication and division using Roman numerals was a maddening process, which is one reason why medieval estimates concerning numbers in battles are often so far off (though exaggeration is the main cause).
Another innovation brought via this part of the world was chess, which had originated in Persia—checkmate comes from shah mat, “the king is helpless”—but taken up in al-Andalus in the 820s. The king had originally been accompanied by the vizier, the Arabic minister of the king, but in Spain, Jews and Christians began to use a queen instead, although she was at first a relatively weak piece, only able to move one square at a time; later the elephant was replaced by a bishop. (The Game of Thrones equivalent of chess, Cyvasse, likewise comes from exotic Volantis.)
With this magnificence and romance came great brutality. Al-Andalus was the last place to practice crucifixion in Europe; Christians, because of Jesus’s death, found the practice to be in bad taste, although this was hardly on any human rights grounds, as they were perfectly happy to inflict various other cruelties on people. So in 805, after a conspiracy in Cordoba against the Amir al-Haken I, seventy-two people were crucified as punishment; while in 888 the unfortunate leader of the rebellious garrison at Archidona in Andalusia was crucified between a dog and a pig.15 When Yemeni soldiers took over Seville, the emir Al-Rahman led a slave army to break them, and personally presided over the hands and feet of his enemies being chopped off. Afterward, all the heads were put into brine, labelled, and sent off to Mecca as proof of their defeat so that when Caliph al-Mansur saw the gory details he said of his own subordinate: “God be praised for placing a sea between us!” 16
Moorish Spain never had a good relationship with its Christian neighbors to the north, which is partly why al-Andalus had a standing army of sixty thousand. Between the Muslims and Franks was the tierras despobladas, the unsettled frontier zone, with Islamic Spain guarded by an army of soldiers known as “the silent ones” because they could not speak Arabic.
And yet Spain was itself divided, between Arabs, Moors, and its largely eastern European slave population; eventually the caliphate of Cordoba collapsed in 1031, eighteen years after the city had been destroyed in a civil war; most of the library was burned down, and the emir’s old residence was destroyed, although the mosque survived.
After this, al-Andalus was partitioned into a number of small emirates, whose rulers became known as “the party kings,” not because they could be found by the barbecue wearing a Hawaiian shirt, but due to the literal Arab phrase muluk al-tawa’if referring to “partisan” or factional. There were even smaller taifa states, independent principalities, among them pirate states such as Denia on Spain’s east coast, run by an outlaw of slave origin called Mujahid al-Amirii. Much of eastern Spain came to be ruled by Slavs originally from eastern Europe; so widespread was the subjection of Slavs that the word came to denote an unfree person in many European languages, esclavo in Spanish, esclave in French, and slave in English.
Slavery was ubiquitous, the trade dominated by Sicilian Arabs, middle men between the Christian and Muslims words who helped bring Lombard and Greek slaves east. At al-Rahman’s death in 961 there were an astonishing 3,750 slaves living in the royal palace.17 By the tenth century, Jewish traders from Verdun in what is now north-east France were running slaves from eastern Europe down to Spain. Irish and English slaves were also found in ninth century al-Andalus, victims of the Vikings. The region was connected to a wider world economy, the trans-Saharan caravan routes that went all the way from Spain to Sijilmasa in southern Morocco and on to the Niger valley near Timbuktu, 1,400 miles away, a route along which gold and men passed.
Moorish Spain also had different religious factions, often with confusingly similar names, so that the tolerant Almoravids were challenged by the Almohads, who were fundamentalists. Often, as with North Africa, relatively obscure but united tribes would seize power and install themselves as rulers before inevitably becoming prone to faction-fighting and decadence. The fourteenth century North African philosopher Ibn Khaldun, who spent
much time in Granada, was influenced by the history of al-Andalus in the formulation of the asabiyyah cycle; the theory of history that explains the rise and fall of empires, from barbarism to decadence. The early rulers of Moorish Spain were a good example, a desert people who had overrun a whole province and in turn become rich and complacent. Yet so ferocious and brave were their ancestors that they even looked like they would go further and conquer Gaul, and perhaps make all of Europe Islamic.
THE IRON CROWN
In 721, the Arabs had first crossed over the Pyrenees mountain range separating Spain from France when at Toulouse they were defeated by a largely Latin army. A decade later a far larger host crossed the mountains and the Arabs this time reached the Loire river in northern France. There they were stopped near the city of Poitiers by the Frankish duke Charles, who had overcome his stepmother after his father’s death to rule the kingdom. His cavalry drove the Muslim invaders back, putting an end to any further Islamic influence in Francia; later chroniclers called him Charles Martel, literally the “hammer.”
With their dominance of western Europe, the Franks also wedded church and state in a way similar to that of the Seven; in 752, Charles’s son Pepin the Short removed the last of the long-haired Merovingian kings, having his head shaved and sent to a monastery; two years later at the Basilica of St Denis outside Paris, Pope Stephen II anointed Pepin with holy oil, representing God’s approval of the monarch, a symbolism that made removal of the king without papal approval an extreme taboo.
The pope gave his support to Pepin’s usurping of the throne because Rome was menaced by a Scandinavian tribe who had overrun northern Italy, the Longobards, or Lombards, who came to give their name to a region of the country. The king of the Lombards wore “the Iron Crown,” supposedly given to the Emperor Constantine by his mother and made from the nails used on Jesus. Headwear of various sorts had been used by rulers in various cultures, among them ancient Egypt, Greece, and various Asian and European cultures; these were mostly diadems, small headbands worn around the front of the head, or laurels as used in Rome. However, the Iron Crown was the first of its kind, as a modern audience would recognize the concept.
Although the Lombards were ferocious, they were no match for the Franks. Having destroyed them in battle, in 800 Pepin’s son Charlemagne—Charles the Great—would be declared Emperor of the West in Rome, the pope placing the Iron Crown on his head.
Charlemagne’s family was celebrated in the epic poems La Chanson de Roland and Le Couronnement de Louis, which alongside the Arthurian sagas were the most influential of the Middle Ages and celebrated the martial qualities of the time. As with Arthur, Roland’s sword has a name, Durendal, while his enemy’s is called Précieux (Precious) just as in real life Charlemagne’s weapon was called Joyeuse. Indeed, lots of people named their swords, as Arya tells the Hound; the Spanish Christian leader El Cid had Tizona, still in a Madrid museum; Magnus Barelegs, a Viking king killed in Ireland in 1103, had Legbiter. Then there was Skofnung, sword of the legendary Danish king Hrolf Kraki, which was supposed to be possessed of supernatural sharpness and contained the spirits of his twelve-strong bodyguard of Viking berserker warriors. This blade also came with lots of superstitions, such as that it should never be drawn in front of a woman.
The coronation of the English king featured the Sword of Mercy, or Curtana, a ceremonial object which had its point blunted to illustrate the monarch’s clemency, and which featured an emblem of a running wolf down the side. It was of huge ceremonial importance, which is why when Piers Gaveston took it upon himself to carry it in 1308 it caused outrage.18 The Curtana, or at least a seventeenth century replica, is still used at the coronations of British monarchs.
After their conquest, the Moors had left a tiny sliver of land along the north coast of Spain where a Christian kingdom, Asturias, hung on. Over the coming centuries, a number of Catholic statelets would grow in the north: Castile, Aragon, Navarre, Leon, and Catalonia. Castile had emerged in the ninth century on the frontier, its name literally meaning “castle,” and by the twelfth century the Christians had regained control of most of the north of the country. Portugal, formerly a county, had gained recognition as a kingdom from the pope in 1143 and its new capital, Lisbon, had been captured by passing English sailors on their way to the crusades in 1147.
A measure of stability in Moorish Spain ended after the caliph Yusuf II died in 1224, in Marrakesh, after being gored to death by a cow. Authority collapsed and the Christians took advantage, capturing all but a tiny section of southern Spain around Granada. As the poet Ibn Abbad al-Rundi wrote on the fall of Seville to the Christians in 1248: “Oh heedless one, this is Fate’s warning to you, If you slumber, Fate always stays awake.”19
13
SILK RIBBONS TIED ROUND THE SWORD
Loyal sellswords are as rare as virgin whores.
—CERSEI LANNISTER
West of London stood the tree of Tyburn, at the junction of two Roman roads, and close to the river Westbourne, once a tributary of the Thames that is now mostly underground. Tyburn was the location of an ancient monolith pre-dating the Romans and which stood on the site until 1869 when, shortly after an archaeological magazine published an article about it, it disappeared, never to be seen again. For some reason the ancients believed the spot to have had some significance, but in medieval England it had a different meaning, for it was here that men were taken to be hanged from a tree.
From the thirteenth century the condemned were hauled from Newgate prison to the place of execution, a three-mile journey in a cart where along the way he would be given strong liquor to ease his anxiety. Huge crowds would gather to watch these spectacles and on November 29, 1330 an exceptionally large one turned out to witness the demise of Roger Mortimer.
Just eight months earlier people had watched in silence as the late king’s half-brother was beheaded. Edmund, Earl of Kent, had been entrapped into taking part in an uprising against the country’s new ruler, but so unpopular was his execution that he had to wait five hours on the scaffold until they could find someone to kill him. A condemned criminal did the job, the man a “gonge-fermer” or “shit-scavenger,” someone who removed waste from latrines, who in return escaped his own punishment. The earl’s assets went to Mortimer, as people had come to expect after three years of the rapacious marcher lord’s rule.
The Earl of March, as Mortimer had declared himself after Edward II’s death, had alienated almost all the leading men of the kingdom, frivolously spending the crown’s reserves with the help of his lover, the queen. And then, in 1330 at Nottingham castle, the de facto ruler of England had gone so far as to accuse the puppet boy-king Edward of complicity in his father’s death before a Great Council which Mortimer had rigged with his supporters. He sat wearing lavishly expensive clothes and had become “so ful of pride and wrecchednesse” that he had started holding a Round Table in Wales where he copied “the maner and doyng of Kyng Arthure.”1 The queen, meanwhile, just like Cersei, had grown jealous that her young son’s wife would use her feminine charm to bewitch and dominate him and so had delayed her coronation for over two years.
Mortimer had become suspicious of Edward’s young friend William Montague, repeatedly asking him about his presence at the castle; Mortimer had every gate and door locked and barred at night, while the queen looked after the keys, and she forbade her son from entering. Yet Mortimer’s suspicions were well-judged, for the young Montague’s secret mission was to help Edward arrest the earl and his entourage and seize control. As Montague told a friend: “Better eat the dog than let the dog eat you.”2
On the night of October 19, Edward entered the castle with twenty-five men, killing three courtiers before Mortimer was caught putting on armor behind a curtain. The queen begged her son to “spare gentle Mortimer,” but the man responsible for the death of the king’s father and uncle was now tried at Westminster while forced to wear a cloak with the phrase quid gloriaris emblazed on it—“where’s your glory now?” Inev
itably he was sentenced to hang, and though spared disembowelment, his body was left for two days at Tyburn. As the Latin chronicle Vita Edwardi Secundi put it in 1326: “It is not wise to set yourself in opposition to the King. The outcome is apt to be unfortunate.”
The queen was banished to Norfolk, where she spent the rest of her life, well-treated by her son, although history has since judged her harshly, when in truth she was pushed into an impossible position by a weak husband and his sadistic lover.
NO FIGHT IS HOPELESS TILL IT HAS BEEN FOUGHT.
The Prophecy of the Six Kings, appearing soon after the birth of Edward III and supposedly written by Merlin, tells of six monarchs to follow King John, the reign of the last being marked by disaster: “A dragon shall rise up in the north which shall be full fierce and shall move war” and “this dragon shall gather again into his company a wolf that shall come out of the west” and joined by a lion, “and the land shall be partitioned in three parts; to the wolf to the dragon and to the lion, and so it shall be for evermore.” The fourth king, it said, would sharpen its teeth at the gates of Paris and win back the land of its ancestors.
King John had ruled an empire that spanned the Atlantic and North Seas, stretching from Scotland to Spain and encompassing all of western France, until he disastrously lost everything but Gascony in 1204. The young Edward was the fourth king to follow him.
On February 1, 1328, the last of the Iron King’s sons died, fulfilling the Templar’s curse. Charles, cuckholded by his wife Blanche, had refused to take her back and she was sent to a convent; his subsequent marriages produced no surviving sons, and so as the noblemen of France had agreed that the throne could only pass through the male line, it was awarded to Charles’s cousin Philippe of Valois.
The following year Edward brought a group of barons with him to France, including Henry Percy, the second Baron Percy who had inherited the title in 1314 at the age of sixteen. The House of Percy continued their rise under the new king, and in 1331 Henry was put in charge of the East March, a position the family would control until 1550.3 Also with the king was Henry Grosmont, Thomas of Lancaster’s nephew, just two years older than Edward but already a champion fighter. A number of aristocrats had turned up at Amiens for this gathering, among them the kings of Navarre, Bohemia, and Mallorca as well as various dukes. Edward departed without saying goodbye to King Philippe, which angered him; already there were signs of tension between Valois, a proud and dominant figure, and the much younger King of England.
