The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000

by Chris Wickham

  It has also been proposed that Umayyad Islam was more ‘Arabic’ than later, universalist, Islam would be. Was Muhammad a prophet only for the Arabs, or for everyone? It has been argued that the early Arab caution about conversion implied the former, and that only the ‘Abbasids really opened their religion to all comers. This, too, is largely an overstated reading. The Arabs undoubtedly believed in their own ethnic superiority, and were at best edgy, at worst hostile, to non-Arabs, including converts. Qusayr ‘Amra also includes a famous fresco of six kings, of the Roman empire, Sassanian Persia, Ethiopia, Visigothic Spain, and two unidentified countries, apparently gesturing to an adjoining fresco of ethnic Arab victory. But conversion was nonetheless seen as normal, and plenty of mawl reached high positions under the Umayyads, notably Musa ibn Nusayr (d. 716), one of the conquerors of Spain, and several later governors of Africa. Al-Hajjaj, the emblematic Umayyad devotee, himself appointed a black African, Sa‘id ibn Jubayr (d. 713), to the post of q (judge) of Kufa, even if he had to rescind the appointment because the Kufans protested against a mawl holding the role. There was, of course, a contradiction between Arab exclusive-ness and Muslim inclusiveness, but it was felt by every Arab, from caliph to foot soldier, until conversion became widespread, for different reasons, in the ninth century; it was also not just a matter of Arab vs. non-Arab, but settled Arab vs. bedouin Arab (each claimed to be the better Muslims), and of course tribe vs. tribe. Arab tribalism had by now little of the desert about it, it can be added; the huge majority of Arabs by 700 lived settled lives and were just competing for military and civilian positions. Their desire to secure such positions for themselves and their families and allies, rather than their rivals, led to tribal-and ethnic-exclusivist actions and rhetoric, but this is true of any society, and would not cease in 750.

  An example of this mixture of positions in a single person is the poet al-Farazdaq (d. c. 729); he may have had bedouin origins, but he lived most of his long life in Basra. His poetic palette of camels, gazelles, tents and cavalry warfare was more the standard rhetoric of any Arab poet than nostalgia for the desert. So were his attacks on the honour and sexual morality of people (usually poets) from rival tribes, and his complex love poetry. Al-Farazdaq was Arab through and through; he loathed having to go to ‘an odious land, the country of the blond-haired Greeks of ‘Amman’. But when he wrote eulogies to the caliphs (some fifteen survive, for every caliph from ‘Abd al-Malik to Hisham) his imagery turns Muslim: ‘Run to Islam, justice has returned to us, the scourge which desolated Iraq is dead, there are no more poor on the earth, Sulayman [caliph 715-17] is the treasure of the universe.’ This is not in the least surprising, and indeed precisely recalls the mixed values that any early medieval Christian writer had, western or eastern, as with the glorification of Frankish ethnic and military superiority in Gregory of Tours or Einhard, Christian inclusivism notwithstanding, or indeed the ferocious hostility to Goths of their fellow-Christian Synesios at the start of the fifth century. It is not religious and moral inconsistency that made the Arabs different in our period.

  Hisham was the first caliph to face the problems of a no longer expanding frontier. Instead, Khazars and Turks themselves invaded from the north, and were beaten back with some difficulty in the 730s (in the case of the Khazars, by Marwan ibn Muhammad, an able general from the Umayyad family, who became governor of the Jazira). In the far west, too, there was a major Berber revolt in 740-43 which cut off Umayyad access to Spain and even Africa. But these only look like signs of Umayyad collapse in retrospect; they were all dealt with before Hisham’s death. More serious was his famous tight-fistedness with money, for this is a sign that the caliphs had not solved the problem of tax money staying in the provinces it had been collected from. Not only Iraqis but also Egyptian Arabs had lost their military role by now, and the late Umayyad army was overwhelmingly Syrian except in the Berber lands of the far west and in Khurasan in the far east, but this did not lead to any further organizational centralization. Yazid III, indeed, promised not to move tax money outside provinces in his 744 rebel manifesto. At Hisham’s death, furthermore, serious problems did appear, for the Syrian army broke up into Yamani and Qaysi factions. Al-Walid II was not necessarily pro-Qaysi, but Yazid III’s revolt certainly had essentially Yamani support; Marwan in the Jazira, who sought to avenge the murdered al-Walid, ruled the Qaysi province par excellence and recruited a Qaysi army. Yazid died suddenly after a few months, and Marwan replaced him as Marwan II (744-50), but the latter had to spend two years reducing Yamani resistance in Syria, the first time the core caliphal province had ever been under attack.

  The years 744-6 are seen as the Third Civil War; this time, unlike the seventh-century fitnas, overall Arab rule was too established to be in danger. But Umayyad rule was another matter. There were Shi‘ite and even Kharijite revolts, with Yamani support, in Iraq in 744-8 too; these were easy enough to confront, as Iraq no longer had an army of its own, but their appearance is a sign of a loss of confidence in the ruling dynasty. And events in Khurasan, where the main eastern army was situated, were even more serious. It emerged that Shi‘ite groups had been quietly preaching revolution there for three decades in favour of the Hashimiyya, the branch of Quraysh that was Muhammad’s immediate family. The Hashimiyya included the descendants of ‘Ali, of course; but they also included the descendants of ‘Abbas, the Prophet’s uncle. In 747 one of the sectarians, Abu Muslim, urged open revolt outside Merv in eastern Khurasan, and very quickly this revolt snowballed to include almost the whole of the Khurasani army. Abu Muslim and his associates chose ‘Abbasids, not ‘Alids, as their religious figureheads, and Abu al-‘Abbas was proclaimed caliph as al-Saffah in 749. The Khurasanis moved westward and defeated Marwan in northern Iraq in 750, then took over Syria and Egypt in the same year, where Marwan was killed. The ‘Abbasid caliphate began here; and when al-Saffah died in 754, his brother Abu Ja‘far, al-Mansur (754-75), soon executed Abu Muslim and took full power for himself. The new regime ended (or at least marginalized) the Qays-Yaman feud, largely because it mattered less in a Khurasani army which was substantially non-Arab; although the ‘Abbasids certainly made full use of Yamani support, they made peace with the Qaysis as soon as they could. The fact that they conquered all the provinces and could thus begin from scratch also allowed them to end the fiscal exclusivity of each provincial dwn. They did not base themselves in Khurasan, however, even though it was their main military support. They chose Iraq, which became the new caliphal province. It was central; it was also the archetypal non-Syrian province. Syria, laid waste by Marwan in 744-6 and again by Abu Muslim in 750 - as well as by a severe earthquake, probably in 749 - became a province like any other, and politically suspect as well. Al-Mansur’s new capital of Baghdad, founded in 762, soon surpassed anything Damascus had ever been, and the style of the caliphate decisively changed.

  The Umayyads largely fell because the dominant Syrian army split, losing them both military superiority and hegemony, the sense that their rule was inevitable. This allowed the sort of millenarian Shi‘ism that had fuelled Mukhtar in Kufa in the 680s, and also lesser rebels in subsequent decades, to gain more support than ever before, in the heartland of Islam’s second major army, that of Khurasan. (The third army, that of the Berbers, went its own way.) Abu Muslim was himself a mawl, and he had considerable ethnic Persian support in the Khurasani army. As a result, it was then, and has been since, possible to see the Hashimiyya rising as the rejection of particularist Arab rule by a new Muslim community, based on a rate of conversion to Islam that was higher in Khurasan than anywhere else. But the other elements of the rising were entirely Arab, and they drew their support from the opposite source, the resentment of Yamani Arab soldiers, and of Arab settlers in the east who had been subjected to the local rule - and taxation - of Islamized Persian élites. It is at least clear that the breakdown of Umayyad consensus in Khurasan was the result of an interaction, much greater than elsewhere, and highly tense as well, between Arab settlers an
d the indigenous majority. This might have broken down into local civil war; but the Shi‘ites managed to convert this tension into a salvation-based unity that overturned the political system. The salvationism was an illusion, and religious revolts (all by now ‘Alid) dotted the ‘Abbasid caliphate, as it had that of the Umayyads before them. But the political direction of a caliphate now rooted in Iraq would be quite different all the same.

  13

  Byzantine Revival, 850-1000

  In the Book of Ceremonies, traditionally ascribed to the emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogennitos (913-20, 945-59), probably compiled during his second reign and updated later, the emperor is expected to take part in a great number of religious processions in Constantinople: one on every day in the week after Easter, Ascension, Pentecost, 1 May (the date of the dedication of the Nea church in 880 by Basil I, 867-86), feast-days for Elijah, St Demetrios, the Elevation of the Cross, and so on, all across the year. So are a long list of secular officials and religious leaders, tens or often hundreds of people, the wives of officials sometimes, and also the leaders of the circus factions of the city, whose task it is to deliver formal acclamations, as the emperor proceeds through the different halls, chapels and chambers of the Great Palace, out of the Bronze (Chalk) Gate of the Palace (this is where the faction leaders meet him), across the road to Hagia Sophia, the Great Church of the Byzantine empire, and, after a church service, back again. The Book lays down rules for which clothing goes with which feast-day, the text of the different acclamations (some are still in Latin, four hundred years after that language was dying out as a spoken tongue in the city), and the locations of the tables for the post-ceremony dinners. The variability in the ritual could be complex. At Pentecost, for example, the description for which is particularly detailed - it goes on for twelve pages of the modern edition - the officials do not prostrate themselves in proskynsis in front of the emperor in the Great Church, because the feast celebrates the Resurrection; it is the Pentecost service which also sees the empress appearing in church with a particularly elaborate set of official wives, twenty-one separate offices entering in seven separate groups.

  Can all this really have taken place, for every feast in every year, with all these people? Who could even have kept all its variations in their head? Constantine certainly took it very seriously; he tells us in the Book’s preface, which he probably wrote himself, that he wanted to re-establish imperial ceremonial, whose neglect left the Byzantine empire ‘without finery and without beauty’, and whose celebration would be a ‘limpid and perfectly clean mirror’ of imperial splendour, allowing ‘the reins of power to be held with order and dignity’. It is clear from this that Constantine did think ceremony had been less elaborate before his time, and many of the descriptions commissioned by him were really reconstructions of long-lost activity, some of them successfully revived, some probably not. But Constantine was not unique in his interest in ceremonial. As we have seen, the capital was used to frequent processions of different types, triumphs for example, even in the difficult centuries before 850. Ceremonial was a living and changing process, with new elements invented all the time (as with Basil’s Nea church commemoration). Even military emperors might relish triumphal entries, and, when they were in the city, they too respected the regular church processions: one of the most military emperors of all, Nikephoros II Phokas (963-9), interrupted a formal ambassadorial hearing in 968 with the envoy of the western emperor Otto I, Bishop Liutprand of Cremona, to do the Pentecost procession. Liutprand’s embassy went badly, so he sought to depict it in his report to Otto as negatively as he could: the dignitaries wore old clothes, only the emperor wore gold and jewels, the city crowd which lined the way from the palace to Hagia Sophia was a barefoot rabble, the acclamations were lies, the food at dinner was horrible. Unwillingly, however, Liutprand confirms the formality of the event, and he adds something to the account in the Book of Ceremonies, for the latter had said little about a crowd; this ceremony was not just amazingly elaborate, but was important to at least some of the inhabitants of the city as a whole. They respected the logic of imperial ‘order and dignity’, too.

  The high point of Byzantine success and prosperity was the two hundred years after 850 or so. It was marked in the capital by a very elaborate court culture at all levels. The ninth century saw the generalization of élite education; this was already visible for some people under the Second Iconoclasm (see above, Chapter 11), but by the end of the century no secular official in the capital could easily deal politically without it. The cusp figure here was Photios (d. c. 893), who moved up the secular official hierarchy in the 840s and 850s, reaching the post of prtaskrtis, the senior chancery post, before being abruptly promoted sideways to the office of patriarch of Constantinople (858-67, 877- 86). Photios, himself from an élite family (he was a relative of Eirene’s patriarch, Tarasios), was a real intellectual, author of several books, a large letter collection, and a set of sermons of a considerable conceptual sophistication. He can be seen as the main creator of the cultural template and intellectual assumptions of the post-Iconoclast Orthodox church. But he also made it normal for major secular and ecclesiastical figures to be educated. Ecclesiastical rigorists saw Photios’ great learning as spiritual pride, and criticized him for it, but from now on they would be more politically marginal than under Eirene. And there was much to be learned. Photios’ best-known work is the Bibliothk or Library, drafted initially in (perhaps) 845, which discusses 279 separate books in Greek, by both pagan and late Roman Christian authors, in considerable detail, often quoting from them at length (some of these works only survive in Photios’ excerpts), and analysing them critically. This was not the whole of Photios’ reading - he left out poetry, for example - but, even with omissions, it shows the range of books that were available in Constantinople to a rich, determined, and politically powerful reader. The Bibliothk was popular already in the tenth century, presumably as an encyclopedia (it was one of several in circulation - the Book of Ceremonies is in effect another); Arethas, archbishop of Caesarea, modern Kayseri (d. after 932), in the next generation had a copy, and may have helped to edit it. Arethas was, in a different way, as determined a bibliophile as Photios; we have two dozen of the manuscripts made under his supervision, which collect a notable array of writings from Plato up to his own day, and include annotations which are often Arethas’ own work (indeed, they are often in his handwriting). This manuscript collection is certainly very atypical. But the learning Arethas had, and which he displayed in other works in a highly elaborate style, was by 900 or so much more normal.

  There are many different signs of the complexity of this élite culture. One is that it included several emperors as authors. Basil I, a hardly literate usurper, made sure his son Leo VI (886-912) was educated, by Photios in fact; Leo wrote a military manual, the Taktika (Tactics), poems, a monastic advice manual, numerous laws (written in a recognizable personal style), and a set of homilies. Leo’s son Constantine VII wrote much of a detailed (if often inaccurate) account of the neighbours of Byzantium, unhelpfully entitled by early modern editors On the Administration of the Empire, as well as commissioning the Book of Ceremonies and several other works. Even Nikephoros Phokas wrote at least notes on the military tactics he was particularly proud of, which were worked up under his supervision as two books, including On Skirmishing Warfare, one of the best of the tenth century’s many military manuals. These were not dilettante writers; for these men, writing connected prose was an essential element of statecraft.

  Secondly, this learning soon became quite difficult in itself. Constantine VII largely wrote in a fairly direct style; most of his contemporaries, however, wrote in more elaborate ways, rather more like Arethas. Take Leo Choirosphaktes (d. after 920) for example: he was author of several showpiece poems for events in Leo VI’s reign, including a lyric panegyric on a palace bath-house rebuilt by the emperor, and also of a long poem called the Thousand-line Theology, which sets out an erudite and philosophicall
y complex theology in a verse form itself structured by an acrostic with his own name and titles. Arethas, who was a good hater, and educated enough to know the philosophical allusions, accused Leo of paganism; this was obviously false, but Leo’s Neoplatonism led him to argue that only the educated (particularly experts in astrology, as Leo also was) could understand God at all. Leo Choirosphaktes was mystikos, or private secretary, to Basil I, and under Leo VI was an ambassador to the Bulgarians in 895-904; we have a set of his letters to and from the Bulgar khagan Symeon (893-927) which show the same literariness. Symeon, who had been educated in the capital, could respond in kind, which was a good thing, for in the 910s and 920s other literary figures acting for the emperors, the patriarch and former mystikos Nicholas I (d. 925) and the prtaskrtis Theodore Daphnopates (d. after 961), also sought to impress the Bulgarian ruler with Platonic or Homeric allusions. Theodore much later wrote a prose panegyric with notably complex symbolism to the emperor Romanos II (959-63); Homer, Heliodoros and Herodotos all find their place here. The letters of Leo, bishop of Synnada (d. c. 1005), cite even more classical authors, adding Plutarch, Hesiod, Sophokles; this Leo at least had a sense of humour, and admitted in his will that he read too much lay literature, but he wore his learning as much on his sleeve as any of his predecessors.