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

by Chris Wickham

  The great families of Byzantium thus seem to me for the most part less locally preponderant than they were in the West; and also more reliant on office-holding for real political protagonism than they were in the West. There were also, probably, more areas of Byzantium than in the West by the tenth century that were not dominated by ‘the powerful’; this seems a reasonable conclusion to draw, even though Byzantine evidence tells us so little about peasant society. Even in the West, as we shall see in Part IV, aristocratic élites were closely connected to the state in Carolingian Francia, Ottonian East Francia (the future Germany), late Anglo-Saxon England; they owed their identity and status to royal patronage, and they did not seek to establish autonomous local power, or to undermine royal power, unless the crisis of a kingdom forced them to go it alone, as in tenth-century West Francia (the future France). In tenth-century Byzantium, where the state - based on taxation as it was - was far stronger, where office-holding commanded huge salaries, where public position was tied up with army commands and regular presence in the capital, autonomous local power did not stand a chance. The fragmentary evidence we have for provincial judicial procedures, too - mostly court cases from Athos, where the monasteries spent a strikingly large amount of time squabbling with each other - shows effective and systematic official interventions, with judges regularly sent from the capital and interacting with a network of local officials as well; this network of public power, again without parallel in the early medieval West, would not easily give way to private autonomies. In any case, Basil II, who is often held to have been particularly hostile to the dangers of the great families, did not fear them so much as to make any provision for the survival of his own dynasty. Not only did he never marry, but he never even tried to persuade his colourless brother Constantine VIII (who succeeded him, 1025-8) to marry off his two daughters while they could still bear children, and perpetuate the line that way. Basil knew that other families would soon take over the imperial office, and this clearly did not bother him. Nor, given the continuing power and stability of the Byzantine empire for another half century, can he be said to have been wrong.

  14

  From ‘Abbasid Baghdad to Umayyad Córdoba, 750-1000

  The Arab geographer Ibn Hawqal (d. c. 990) hated Palermo and the Sicilians. Palermo itself, conquered by the Arabs from the Byzantines in 831, was rich and impressive, and Ibn Hawqal spends many pages on its amenities: the large mosque (the ex-cathedral) which could contain 7,000 people; more than 300 other mosques, in an unparalleled density, sometimes actually adjoining each other; the very numerous and varied markets; the specialized papyrus production, the only one existing outside Egypt; the richly irrigated gardens surrounding. But the Palermitans wasted this latter fertility on cultivating onions, which they ate raw; the consequence was that ‘one does not find in this town any intelligent person, or skilful, or really competent in any scientific discipline, or animated by noble or religious feeling’. No one was qualified to be (judge) there; they were all too unreliable. Schoolmasters were very numerous, but all idiots: they did the job in order to avoid military service; nevertheless, the Sicilians as a whole considered them to be brilliant. They pronounced Arabic wrong; they could not hold down a logical argument (Ibn Hawqal provides examples); they had no idea of what Iraqi legal and theological schools really believed, ‘even though their doctrinal position is very well known’. Nor did the Sicilians know Islamic law properly, particularly in the countryside. Ibn Hawqal was so incensed about all this that he actually wrote a whole book about Sicilian idiocy, unfortunately lost; but he tells us quite enough in his huge geographical survey, The Book of the Depiction of the Earth. He ends amazed that the Sicilians could be so poor, at least these days (in the 970s), when their land was so rich. The only thing they made really well was linen.

  What the Sicilians had done to make Ibn Hawqal so cross (geographers often criticized the inhabitants of regions, but this is extreme) is not easy to see. But it is fair to say that he knew what he was talking about. He was born in Nisibis in the upper Tigris valley and was brought up in Baghdad; he left the latter city in 943 for thirty years of travel, to North Africa, Spain, Armenia, Fars and Khurasan in what is now Iran, back to Mesopotamia and Syria, Egypt, and finally to Sicily. He may by now simply have been tired and grumpy, but he had traversed the whole Islamic world. He saw it as a whole, and constantly compared its parts; the great city of Fustat in Egypt, for example, had a third of the surface area of Baghdad, whereas Córdoba in Spain had almost half; the nougat of Manbij in northern Syria was the best he knew except for that of Bukhara in central Asia; the merchants of Sijilmasa in the Moroccan desert were so rich that people in Iraq or Khurasan hardly believed Ibn Hawqal when he told them how much they were worth. Ibn Hawqal made these journeys, however, when the Islamic world was divided into between ten and fifteen separate polities. This hardly poses him a problem; rulers appear casually in his account, some good, most bad, some sufficiently threatening that he had to leave quickly, but all of them simply controlling sections of a single Muslim community. Ibn Hawqal’s geography transcended politics; he, and other geographers like him, saw the Islamic world as essentially a whole.

  This cultural and religious unity was first established by the military conquests of the Umayyads. It was made permanent, however, in the century and a half of the ‘Abbasid caliphate, which was politically hegemonic as a centralized state between 750 and 861, and still powerful until around 920; the disunity of Ibn Hawqal’s time (and ever after) was hardly a generation old when he set out from Baghdad. In this chapter, we shall look at the ‘Abbasid achievement, in the decades of their most effective political centralization, and in the creation of a dense religious and scientific written culture in Baghdad, which was strong enough to survive tenth-century fragmentation. We shall then follow the history of two of the successor states, those closest to the European focus of this book, the Fatimids of North Africa and Egypt, and, in particular, the Umayyads of Spain. The Spanish Umayyads were autonomous under ‘Abbasid power already in the 750s, but they too looked to Baghdad for a long time. Baghdad, although by no means part of a history of Europe, or even of the former Roman world, had an economic and cultural importance in the last third of our period that outclassed anywhere in the world, and that certainly impacted on Europe: on Spain, on Constantinople, and even on far-off Aachen, where Charlemagne’s court paid attention to that of Harun al-Rashid, even if the reverse was probably not the case.

  In Chapter 12, we left al-Mansur, the second ‘Abbasid caliph (754-75), in control of the whole of the Muslim lands from North Africa to what is now Pakistan. This control was not simply the result of the ‘Abbasid ‘revolution’ of 747-50; the political system was not yet stable in 754, and al-Mansur, in order to feel secure, had to defeat rivals from inside his immediate family and also a serious ‘Alid revolt in 762-3, as well as establishing a balance of power between the Khurasani army which had brought the ‘Abbasids victory and the Iraqi and Syrian factions they displaced. This political settlement was a success, however, the product of al-Mansur’s brilliance as an operator, buttressed by his famed religious austerity and financial caution. It was crystallized in the foundation of a new capital at Baghdad in 762, focused on a monumental round city (no longer surviving), which was the political and ceremonial centre of the caliphate: Baghdad was to be the home of the Khurasani army, the abn’ or ‘sons’, and also of the administrative elite, who came from everywhere in the caliphate, but particularly from Iraq, the ‘Abbasid heartland.

  Baghdad seems to have expanded enormously fast; 500,000 inhabitants or upwards seems to me a plausible guess for the ninth century. This was made possible by the water-supply of the Tigris, which runs through it (Damascus has much less water, and had never been anything like so large), as well as by the great agricultural resources of the Jazira between Iraq and Syria and (above all) southern Iraq, the ‘black land’ or Sawad, which were further developed through irrigation projects by the early ‘A
bbasids to outstrip the productive wealth even of Egypt. But it was also made possible by ‘Abbasid control, mostly by conquest, of every part of the Islamic world except Spain: al-Mansur had a clean slate, and, after his execution of his great Khurasani general Abu Muslim in 755, owed nothing to anyone. In particular, he could begin the reorganization of the fiscal system that the Umayyads had never managed. The Arabs living in the provinces steadily lost their rights to live off provincial taxation, and it began to flow more consistently to the military and political focus that was Baghdad, a secure resource for the city’s population, whether the soldiers and administrators who were paid by it, or else the mass of shopkeepers, merchants and artisans, and public and private servants, who supplied and depended on them.

  That process of fiscal centralization could not be established overnight, of course, given the size and complexity of the caliphate. As we shall see, the 780s-790s and the 830s saw further developments in that direction. But it started with al-Mansur, who already had more resources at his disposal than any previous caliph, or than any Roman emperor since, probably, the fourth century. Al-Mansur can as a result also be seen developing an administrative network that might become capable of organizing and distributing these resources. The Umayyads already had secretaries (kuttb) who had a considerable administrative import- ance, but it is under the early ‘Abbasids that we begin to find them more clearly responsible for separate branches of government or dwns and it is in particular under al-Mansur that we see an executive head of the whole central administrative system appear, the wazr or vizir; the first seems to have been Abu Ayyub (d. 771), who ran al-Mansur’s government for around fifteen years (c. 755-70). The powers of the vizir continued to expand across the ‘Abbasid period, although they were never complete; vizirs did not normally control provincial governors, for that was a caliphal responsibility (although they did control provincial tax officials), and there were always autonomous offices inside Baghdad itself, not least the chamberlain (hjib), who ran the caliph’s large household and often had the caliph’s ear, and who could thus be a serious rival to any vizir. But for the first time we see a clear structure of government in the Arab world, one with its own complex internal politics, as we shall see, made all the more cut-throat by the huge amount of money it had to direct.

  Al-Mansur had no doubt as to the dynastic nature of his rule, and, thanks to his removal of rivals, a continuous line of caliphs, all descended from him, held office up to 1517. His son al-Mahdi (775-85) and grandson al-Rashid (786-809) continued his political practices, in a period of general peace and prosperity which aided the trend to centralization. ‘Peace’ is perhaps too bland a term; there were always frontier wars with the Byzantines, and provincial rebellion was far from unknown, particularly in Egypt and in eastern Khurasan, and including a peasant revolt in the Jazira, west of Mosul, in the 770s. But none of them threatened the structure of the state, which continued to develop. Al-Rashid, also known by his birth name of Harun (all ‘Abbasid caliphs had both a birth name and a ruling name, though historians otherwise tend to use only the latter), is by far the best-known ‘Abbasid, and perhaps the best-known medieval Muslim ruler in absolute along with Saladin, thanks to his starring role in the Thousand and One Nights, in its present form a mostly late medieval collection of stories. In his lifetime, however, although an active general, he was a relatively retiring figure in internal politics, devoted largely to ceremonial. Between 786 and 803 the state was dominated by his vizir Yahya ibn Khalid ibn Barmak (d. 805), son of one of al-Mansur’s leading officials, and Harun’s old tutor. Yahya ran the government together with his sons Ja‘far (Harun’s closest friend and associate, both in life and in the Thousand and One Nights) and al-Fadl, who distributed most of the offices of state between them and also a succession of provincial governorships; together they are known as the Barmakids. The Barmakids ever after had a high reputation for being skilled and honest administrators, and they seem indeed to have been so; they were the principal architects of the mature ‘Abbasid fiscal system, bypassing provincial governors (except when they themselves held such offices), and directing ever higher proportions of tax revenue to Baghdad. Their memory was also enhanced by their abrupt fall, when in 803, almost out of the blue, al-Rashid had Ja‘far beheaded and his relatives imprisoned, for no obvious reason except, presumably, his growing resentment of the family’s power. Arab writers pondered for centuries the tragedy of the ideal administrator, Yahya, brought down by an almost-as-ideal caliph - especially as it was only a few years before al-Rashid’s own death ushered in a serious civil war.

  It was standard ‘Abbasid practice for rulers to seek to control the succession by naming first and then second heirs; this frequently did not work out, as political alignments changed, but it at least helped to ensure that the initial heir would succeed without opposition from his presumed successor. Al-Rashid went one further: he designated one of his sons, al-Amin, as the next caliph (809-13), and another, al-Ma’mun, as his successor, but he also assigned al-Ma’mun an apanage, Khurasan, in which he was to be effectively autonomous during his brother’s reign. This was probably because Khurasan had become a tense province again, with local aristocracies unwilling to accept the right of Baghdad to take their tax (ironically, to pay the ex-Khurasani abn’ army, in the capital and on the Byzantine frontier); that would cease, at least temporarily, once al-Rashid died, and Khurasanis could feel that they had a future caliph who would safeguard their interests. The tensions did not stop with the division of 809, however, and now each side had an ‘Abbasid at its head. Al-Amin at once tried to undermine his brother’s rule, and the Khurasanis persuaded al-Ma’mun to declare independence in 810. Unexpectedly, his general Tahir ibn al-Husayn defeated al-Amin’s large invading abn’ army in 811, and al-Ma’mun, now claiming the caliphate (811-33), sent Tahir against Baghdad.

  Tahir besieged the capital for a year, until he managed to break down local resistance in 813; al-Amin was caught and killed. Al-Ma’mun however stayed in Khurasan, making Merv (now in Turkmenistan) his capital; furthermore, he showed in this period a Shi‘ite commitment, above all through his unique decision to make an ‘Alid his heir in 817, ‘Ali ibn Musa, whose ruling name was to be al-Rida, ‘the chosen one’. This secured the loyalty of parts of Khurasan and Iraq, but alienated the rest of the caliphate. Baghdad revolted again, choosing a brother of al-Rashid, Ibrahim, as the caliph al-Mubarak; Egypt, too, which had had its own civil war between supporters of the rival brothers since 812, fell into chaos in 819 with the most serious tax revolt of the Christian population since 750. Al-Ma’mun had to backtrack, and moved to Baghdad, and definitively away from ‘Alid imagery, in 819. Iraq fell into line straight away and Ibrahim fled (he survived this debacle and was reconciled in 825; he died at court in 839). Egypt, however, took much longer to subdue; al-Ma’mun had to lead an army there himself in 832 to subjugate it properly. Only then, just before the caliph’s death, did he have full control over his father’s domains, with the exception of North Africa, an always rather marginal province, which never returned to ‘Abbasid rule.

  The civil war of 811-13 thus unleashed trouble. The resentment of the provinces over taxation was perennial; the more the ‘Abbasids ensured taxes were sent to Iraq, the more acute local resistance would be. In the Umayyad period, this resistance could be posed in terms of loyalty to the person of the caliph (it was just that local Arab armies should have the right to keep provincial taxation); but, if that right was no longer recognized, the risk was that the province would throw off caliphal authority altogether, as first with al-Ma’mun himself in Khurasan. This would indeed eventually lead to the break-up of caliphal power. But it is necessary to stress that it did not do so yet. Al-Ma’mun kept the loyalty and cooperation - and the taxation - of Khurasan, largely thanks to the family of his general Tahir, who provided four generations of Tahirid governors there from 821 to 873, but who were simultaneously rulers of the city of Baghdad, which depended on provincial revenue. Egypt, at th
e other end of the caliphate, was finally quiet after 832. Al-Ma’mun’s army, no longer based on the early ‘Abbasid abn’, was initially a rather uncertain collection of east Iranian aristo cratic levies, who had trouble taking Baghdad against informal gangs of civilians (‘ayyrn) even though the defending regular army disinte- grated; but he, and especially his military-minded brother and successor al-Mu‘tasim (833-42), built up an army of mercenaries, particularly from Turkic central Asia, many of whom were former slaves, whom our sources generically refer to as Turks. This was an effective fighting force, not sufficiently Islamized to have its own political programme, not associated with any particular province of the caliphate, and very loyal, at least to al-Mu‘tasim. They provided the muscle behind the last really big ‘Abbasid attack on the Byzantine empire, which took Amorion in 838, and Turkish leaders were increasingly used as provincial governors. With the provinces quiescent, a model army, and an increasingly elaborate and extensive fiscal and administrative machine, the 830s and 840s under al-Mu‘tasim and his more colourless son al-Wathiq (842-7) represented a new high point for the centralized ‘Abbasid state, one that could have real staying power: or so one might have thought.