by Cliff, Nigel
In recent years, in fact, Ceuta has received more attention than it has seen for centuries. In 2006 Ayman al-Zawahiri, the former leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad who has been dubbed the brains of al-Qaeda, called for Ceuta’s “liberation” from Christian occupation; two years later, he labeled the United Nations an enemy of Islam because it considered Ceuta an inseparable part of Crusader Spain. Ceuta is no longer the strategic prize it once was, but thirteen hundred years after an Islamic army departed there for Europe, and nearly six centuries after a Portuguese army arrived there at the beginning of its odyssey around Africa, for some it still symbolizes a hoped-for Muslim countermove into the West.
A similar message was behind Zawahiri’s 2001 declaration that the fall of al-Andalus was a “tragedy.” To many Muslims al-Andalus was an ideal society, a paradise of learning and culture, and its loss marked the beginning of Islam’s long retreat. Extremists do not mourn the tolerance that made al-Andalus thrive; in their view Spain and Portugal occupy Islamic territory that needs to be reclaimed. Three years after Zawahiri’s paean to the past, a jihadist group claimed responsibility for the Madrid bombings that ripped apart four commuter trains. “We have succeeded in infiltrating the heart of crusader Europe and struck one of the bases of the crusader alliance,” it boasted, adding that it was intent on settling ancient scores. “Crusade” is another word that has been heard a lot recently, both in the invective of terrorists and, in the wake of the September 11 attacks, from the lips of President George W. Bush. In one statement, Islamist leaders proclaimed that it was the duty of every Muslim to kill the Americans and their allies in the “Crusader-Zionist alliance” in order to liberate Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa Mosque.
It hardly needs saying—and yet it needs saying—that the actions of terrorists are an affront to mainstream Islam. What is painfully clear is that many of these proclamations are essentially a mirror image of Christian polemic in the decades leading up to the Age of Discovery. Even more striking is al-Qaeda’s preferred means of hitting back at the West: to disrupt its commerce by blowing up planes and causing “a haemmorhage in the aviation industry, an industry that is so vital for trade and transportation between the U.S. and Europe.” Substitute ships for planes and the Indian Ocean for the Atlantic, and we are back five hundred years. The terrorists’ trap, tragically, has been sprung. As we commit vast resources to the so-called war on terror and our armies are yet again bogged down in the Middle East, the Islamist case that a new Crusade is under way wins a wider hearing, especially when linked to the West’s support of Israel. Many Westerners, meanwhile, begin to fear their Muslim neighbors as the enemy within, and all sides flirt with the old, raw language that caricatures the others as medieval fanatics or degenerate devils.
From what until recently was our securely modern viewpoint, and after all the obituaries historians have written of history, it can be hard to understand why an age-old conflict has come back to haunt us. The explanation lies in our mutual past, if we take the longer perspective needed to see it.
Nearly fourteen hundred years ago, two great religions crashed into each other and competed for the wealth and the soul of the world. Both grew from the same roots, and both were nourished by the same soil. They were neighbors with a common heritage, and they were rivals for the same lands. They each claimed to possess the ultimate truth, and they each aimed to deliver God’s final revelation to all mankind. Both celebrated victory and removed the sting from death, and for all the glories they unfolded and all the succor they gave, militarism became their shared dark side. Faith, to Muslims and Christians alike, was not merely a personal matter, an inner striving toward an impossible ideal. It was a public trust, given by God to His people, to forge His society on earth, and few saw anything strange about doing God’s work with swords and guns.
More than eight centuries later, Christians were still fighting a seemingly losing battle with Muslims over the same old ground when a handful of men sheared free and opened up a new front. They were headed for Islam’s heartlands, with the aid of the allies and wealth they believed they would find in the East. Driven by an ironclad certainty that they were destined to spread the true faith, the Portuguese changed the course of history. In 1552 the Spanish chronicler Francisco López de Gómara declared the discovery of the sea routes to the East and West Indies “the greatest event since the creation of the world, apart from the incarnation and death of Him who created it.” Two centuries later, humanists were still putting the same case in a more secular way. “The discovery of America, and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind,” wrote Adam Smith in 1776. Both events sprang from Portugal’s quest, and to most minds both had equal weight. Even when the magnitude of Christopher Columbus’s discovery became clear, it was long apparent that for the West to be won, the East first had to be overcome.
The moment when Vasco da Gama arrived in the Indian Ocean was the moment when Europe could begin to believe that the global balance of power had shifted its way. As centuries of cribbed fantasies gave way to clearly charted facts, new mental as well as geographical horizons opened up. Colonies were founded, churches sprang up in unheard-of places, and Islam’s supremacy no longer seemed unassailable. Vast wealth in natural resources—bullion, manpower, and of course spices—fell under Christian control, and at long last the West had the means to hold off and eventually repel the Ottoman challenge at its gates. But for that, the fate of much of Europe, the settlement of America, and the discovery of new worlds then unknown might have taken a very different path.
It was Vasco da Gama who fired the starting gun on the long, fraught centuries of Western imperialism in Asia, and it was the success of the global Crusade known as the Age of Discovery that allowed the Christian West to dismiss its old rivalry with Islam as a relic of darker times. Yet that rivalry remained a powerful undercurrent of history even as Christians fought Christians, Muslims fought Muslims, and—occasionally—both joined forces to fight a common enemy. To Islamists who dream of a reborn caliphate ruling a restored empire it is unfinished business, and the world order founded in the wake of colonialism—including the United Nations and the very concept of democracy—is an ongoing Western plot to impose an alien way of life, the Crusades in a subtler guise. Meanwhile a new era begins in which China and India retake their traditional places as the engines of the world’s economy—and yet just when we should be competing for global markets and minds, we find ourselves drawn back into the old religious conflict.
It is easy to be fatalistic. Christians and Muslims, it can seem, barricaded themselves into hostile camps so long ago that nothing can be done. No one has a monopoly on right and everyone has an interest in understanding, yet our mutual distrust is too deep-seated to dislodge. Cooperation sometimes thrives, but holy wars never end.
There is another way—a way shown by the many men and women who instinctively rejected the division of the globe into rival religious blocs. There were the Muslims of Córdoba and Baghdad, the alchemists of wild explosions of cultural interaction. There were the Christians of Toledo and Sicily, who carried on that progressive tradition. There was Frederick II, who sat down with a sultan and negotiated a lease on Jerusalem. There was Mehmet the Conqueror, the cultivated tyrant who turned Istanbul into an international melting pot. There was Leonardo da Vinci, who sought enlightened patrons wherever his mind took him. There were even the kings and queens of France and England and their allies, the Ottoman sultans. Like the early Crusaders, there were also countless Europeans who were captivated by the ancient cultures of Asia and went native, to the horror of their compatriots back home.
The clash between East and West has consistently been as creative as it has been destructive. The one thing it has never been is stilled, and dogmatists and diehards of all stripes have soon enough found themselves left behind. Among those were the pathfinders, the Portuguese themselves. In the end, the religious certainty that drove Vasco
da Gama and his fellow explorers halfway around the world was also their undoing. For all their astonishing achievements, the idea of a Last Crusade—a holy war to end all holy wars—was always a crazy dream.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
WRITING THIS BOOK has been an education and an adventure. During my research, I delved into the past in Lisbon and Rome, sailed the Swahili Coast in search of ruined cities, and was buffeted by the monsoon in Kerala and Goa. As I journeyed from Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Morocco to Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya, and India, I was privileged to enjoy the unstinting advice, help, and friendship of numerous people. Most were previously strangers, like Karisa Keah, who went especially out of his way to steer me through the remote backwaters of East African history. My obligations to all are too many to mention, but their conversation and companionship are unfading memories.
A book of this scope would have been impossible to conceive without the scholarly work of generations of historians. In particular, the translators and editors of the Hakluyt Society’s editions of rare travel accounts have made an invaluable trove of primary sources available in English. My great debts to other scholars past and present are recorded in the notes. The congenial atmosphere and ever-helpful staff of the London Library made the process of tracking down elusive material a pleasure. My thanks, too, to the librarians and curators of the British Library and National Maritime Museum in London, the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, and Sociedade de Geografia in Lisbon, the Biblioteca Estense in Modena, the Heidelberg University Library, the library of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Massimiliano Durante and Francisco Vilhena patiently helped me to unravel the knottier clauses of medieval Italian and Portuguese. Angelica von Hase read the manuscript and made many cogent suggestions. Julia Kaltschmidt was always ready with advice during the long and sometimes winding journey that brought me to this subject.
In the United States, my agent, Henry Dunow, has been the best possible friend to a writer feeling his way into his second book, and a guru when sage advice was needed. My sincere thanks to Terry Karten, my editor at Harper, for her ready support and advocacy. Thanks, too, to Harper’s David Koral, Sarah Odell, Bill Ruoto, and copy editor Tom Pitoniak, and also to Nancy Miller. In the UK, many thanks to Ravi Mirchandani, my editor, and to Elizabeth Sheinkman, who represented the book.
While working on this book I met and married my wife. Wedding planning wreaks havoc with deadlines, and splendors of the heart sit strangely with often dark and invariably male material. I could wish the subject at hand was more romantic, but the dedication is for life, not for now.
NOTES
Prologue
1 The light was fading: For my sources for Vasco da Gama’s first voyage, see the notes to chapter 7.
4 Spanish and Italian: Specifically, the Tunisian merchants spoke Castilian and Genoese; the former evolved into modern Spanish, while the latter is still spoken in the Genoa region today.
6 the medieval and the modern ages: Historians have offered a variety of dates for the end of the Middle Ages; two leading contenders are 1453, the year of the fall of Constantinople, and 1492, the year of Columbus’s first voyage. If the overriding theme of the medieval age is Europe’s decline and the rise of Islam, the dominant theme of the modern age is the Christian West’s global surge to power. From that perspective, it makes little sense to start the latter with the fall of the final bastion of the classical world to the Ottomans. Columbus did not reach the mainland of the Americas until August 1498, and it was decades before the impact of his discoveries became clear. Vasco da Gama arrived in India in May 1498, and it was his achievement, I argue, that allowed Europe to believe the historical tide had finally turned.
Chapter 1: East and West
12 god of the Jews: Jews traced their ancestry to Isaac, Abraham’s son by his wife Sarah; Muslims to Ishmael, Abraham’s son by Sarah’s Egyptian slave girl Hagar. Arab tradition holds that Abraham restored the Kaaba, which was founded by Adam and rebuilt by Noah, while he was visiting Hagar and Ishmael, whom his jealous wife had forced him to send into exile.
13 “dark-eyed houris”: N. J. Dawood, trans., The Koran: With a Parallel Arabic Text (London: Penguin, 2000), 497.
14 Church of the Holy Sepulcher: The site was uncovered by Constantine’s mother Helena, who set out in 325 on a relic-hunting trip to the Holy Land and miraculously unearthed parts of the True Cross on which Jesus was believed to have died, the nails that pierced his hands and feet, and, according to some accounts, the Holy Tunic and the rope with which he was tied to the cross. Some of the finds accompanied her home, including two of the nails, one of which ended up in Constantine’s helmet and the other on his bridle; others stayed to be housed in the new church. Since tradition held that Jesus was crucified over the exact spot where Adam’s skull was buried, the church was also believed to enclose the tomb of the first man. See Colin Morris, The Sepulchre of Christ and the Medieval West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
14 a blackened sky: The Persians sacked Jerusalem in 614 CE. In 70 CE the Romans had put down a mass Jewish uprising by burning down the Second Temple, razing the city, and massacring or carting away the entire population; never since had Jews been permitted to live in the city of David. The Jews allied with the Persians to wreak 544 years of revenge, only to be massacred again when the Romans marched back in; they would soon ally more successfully with the Arabs.
15 churning Christian controversy: The main bone of contention was the precise degree of Christ’s divinity. The orthodox position, hammered out at a series of great councils, was that Jesus was both fully divine and fully human, two distinct states united in one perfect being. Many of the empire’s subjects begged to differ. Arians denied Jesus’s divinity, Monophysites denied his humanity, Nestorians declared he was two beings, one divine and one human, and other groups fixed on a variety of intermediate states. Successive emperors decreed that a united empire required a unified faith and charged the dissenters with heresy. Heraclius, the victor over Persia, had reopened the fraught question in search of a compromise, but the resulting creed of Monothelitism, which declared that Jesus had two natures but only one will, satisfied no one and was rejected as heretical within five decades.
15 a new regime: Centuries later, leaders of the independent Eastern churches that survived under Islam still saw the Arabs as saviors. “The God of vengeance,” wrote a twelfth-century patriarch of the Syriac Orthodox Church, “having observed the malice of the Greeks, who cruelly pillaged our churches and monasteries wherever they had dominion and condemned us mercilessly, brought the sons of Ishmael from the south to deliver us.” Michael the Syrian, quoted in Stephen O’Shea, Sea of Faith: Islam and Christianity in the Medieval Mediterranean World (London: Profile, 2006), 52.
15 “Damn this world”: The quotation is from the great epic poem Shahnameh, or Book of Kings, by Ferdowsi, which was written at the turn of the first millennium CE. The best translation is by Dick Davis (New York: Viking, 2006). The Persian aristocracy, though it quickly adopted Islam, long nursed an animosity to Arab culture and an attachment to the splendors of pre-Islamic Persia.
15 Jerusalem was starved into submission: The city fell in April 637. According to tradition, Muhammad’s successor Umar arrived dressed in rags and rode through the Gate of Repentance astride a white ass (or camel). He asked the patriarch where King David had prayed and was led to the Temple Mount, which he found had long been used as a rubbish dump. Umar rounded up some Christians and put them to work clearing the refuse, then erected a simple wooden house of worship that would later be replaced by the al-Aqsa Mosque (see chapter 2).
16 Saracens: The term sarakenoi or saraceni originally referred to the non-Arab peoples of northern Arabia, but it was subsequently applied to Arabs and then to all Muslims. Its etymology is unclear, but by the fourth century the historian Ammianus Marcellinus noted that it was used to refer to the regio
n’s desert nomads.
16 commanded from on high: So feared the Armenian bishop Sebeos; see Alfred J. Butler, The Arab Conquest of Egypt—and the Last Thirty Years of the Roman Dominion (Oxford: Clarendon, 1902), 152. Of the five great patriarchates of the Church, three—Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria—now operated under the sufferance of Islamic rulers.
16 stabbed with a poisoned sword: Ali’s assassin was fanatically certain that piety, not genealogy, should be the sole qualification for Islam’s leader. His simple, puritanical version of Islam would become known as Kharijism and would take root most firmly in North Africa. Pockets survive today in Arabia and Africa.
16 the Umayyads: Muawiya, the founder of the dynasty, was the son of Abu Sufyan Ibn Harb, a prominent Meccan who led the attack on Medina that nearly annihilated Islam. At the end of the same battle Muawiya’s mother, Hind, ripped out and dined on the liver of Muhammad’s uncle Hamza. The civil war also left Muhammad’s grandson murdered and the Kaaba itself in flames; pragmatic power politics had dramatically won out over pious purity.
17 blue-eyed Berbers: The Berbers, whose lands stretched from the Nile to the Atlantic, called themselves Imazighen, or “Free Men.” They were masters of survival, and their tribes were an eclectic mix of pagans, Jews, and Christians. The legend of the Prophetess has been the focus of much arcane dispute; see Abdelmajid Hannoum, Post-Colonial Memories: The Legend of the Kahina, a North African Heroine (Westport, CT: Heinemann, 2001).
17 smashed a mountain in two: Geryon was said to live on the island of Erytheia, near modern Cadíz. In Apollodorus’s version, Hercules threw up the two mountains to commemorate his journey; Diodorus Siculus says he narrowed the existing strait to keep out the monsters of the Ocean Sea. Pliny the Elder, in the “Introduction” to Book 3 of his Natural History, records that the first-century inhabitants of the coasts believed the mountain was “dug through by [Hercules]; upon which the sea, which was before excluded, gained admission, and so changed the face of nature.” The Pillars of Hercules still stand proud on Spain’s coat of arms; the motto Plus ultra—“further beyond”—wreathes around them, suggesting they mark an entrance, not a closure.
