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

by Chris Wickham

  Ninth-century Baghdad, huge, wealthy and politically central as it was, became a real cultural focus. The startlingly large number of surviving works in Arabic from the ninth and tenth centuries, mostly (particularly before the 930s or so) written in or near the capital, themselves attest to it. They are only a portion of what was actually written, too, as is shown by the Fihrist or Index of al-Nadim (d. c. 990), which lists over 6,000 book titles, nearly all written in the last 250 years (this far outweighs the 279 Greek books in Photios’ Bibliothk, though Photios had at least read them all), or by an anecdote in the Fihrist itself about the 600 cases of books allegedly possessed by the historian al-Waqidi (d. 823) - an impossible figure for such an early date, but significant as a tenth-century image. Theology, philosophy, law, poetry, administration, history, medicine, science and geography all had their experts in this hyperactive cultural world.

  These branches of knowledge increasingly developed their own microcultures, with lawyers above all reading other lawyers, historians reading other historians, poets reading other poets. They were tied together, all the same, by two main networks, one cultural-religious, one literary. The intellectual strata as a whole were seen as a community of scholars, the ‘ulam’ (from ‘ilm, ‘religious knowledge’). The community was defined initially and principally in terms of religious expertise, but came soon to extend out to the more specialized disciplines; its identity is most visible in biographical dictionaries of scholars, which were already being written in the early ninth century. It was this community, led by Qur’anic scholars and jurists, which was increasingly seen, in a religion with no formal priesthood or ecclesiastical hierarchy, as the determin- ators of what Islam was and how it should be understood, and indeed, in the twenty-first century, it still is.

  The community did not, of course, always agree. We have already encountered the fault-line between Sunni and Shi‘a, which crystallized as alternative political-religious systems in the ninth century. Each of these systems, however, also had their own sub-systems, rival schools of thought about how religion, political practice and law ought to be conducted. Inside what would be called the Sunni tradition, for instance, there was from early in the eighth century considerable debate about the degree to which Islamic legal practice (shar‘a) should be based on legislation (presumably by caliphs), or else reasoning from basic ethical principles derived from the Qur’an, or else on the increasingly elaborate sets of ‘tradition’ (adth), obiter dicta attributed to Muhammad the Prophet on almost every legal or moral issue imaginable. (These pronouncements in reality gave a religious legitimacy to local custom, although custom on its own was never regarded as a legitimate fount of law.) The ‘traditionists’ essentially won out, but the four main law schools of medieval Sunni Islam, looking respectively to Abu Hanifa (d. 767), Malik (d. 795), al-Shafi‘i (d. 820) - the most intellectually influential - and Ibn Hanbal (d. 855), varied considerably in their commitment to adth, with Hanafis most receptive to legal reasoning and Hanbalis most rigidly attached to literal readings of adth. These schools, and other less long-lasting ones, achieved a mutual toleration all the same, as each constitutive of Sunni ‘ulam’ opinion, and by 900 or so they had developed what has been called the ‘closing of the gate of independent reasoning’: no new law or legal opinion, including by a caliph or other political leader, would, in theory, any longer be acceptable. Islamic law thus became increasingly fixed (even if legal practice did not). This served further to define the ‘ulam’ as a cultural grouping, although other disciplines continued to develop for centuries, much as the doctrinal rules of eastern and western Christendom bounded the developing thought-worlds of Europe throughout the Middle Ages as well.

  The other way in which the realms of written culture were linked was through adab, roughly translatable as ‘polite education’, or ‘literary etiquette’. This became the foundation of Arab written culture by around 800, and remained so throughout our period and beyond. It linked learning with stylistic elegance, and required of its practitioners a general knowledge of most of the intellectual disciplines of the period, but particularly language, poetry, stories, administrative practice and adth. The administrative practice is the give-away: adab was above all a qualification for careers in government. It was the exact equivalent of the senatorial literary education of the Roman empire and of the classical and theological training necessary for administrators in Byzantium after 900, except that the knowledge it required was mostly of a much more recent vintage. And indeed the scope of intellectual activity in Baghdad and other centres showed the range of skills that were acceptable in government; intellectuals from the geographer Ibn Khurradadhbih (d. c. 885) to the seriously influential and original philosopher-physician Ibn Sina (Avicenna, d. 1037) held governmental and administrative offices. This range marks one of the particularities of adab. So also, however, does storytelling. Literary culture gave considerable space to narratives; ‘Abbasid histories are composed of thousands of short exemplary accounts, with plenty of direct quotations, supposedly taken from the lips of caliphs and their advisers. Rhetorical skill required remarkably recondite knowledge as part of such storytelling; hence the existence of several encyclopedias of ‘curiosities’, such as that of al-Tha‘alibi (d. 1038), which contains such information as the name of the first Arab to wear dark silks, the first caliph to build a hospital, the vizir with the longest unbroken chain of ancestors who were also vizirs, the most generous female pilgrim, the two caliphs who each killed three political rivals whose names began with the same letter, and the alarming (but untrue) fact that every sixth caliph was ‘inevitably’ deposed. This knowledge, these days restricted to adolescent boys, was in this period a requirement for statecraft, along with knowing how to write a letter properly and memorizing the Qur’an.

  The strata of professional administrators, from vizirs and other senior secretaries down to the clerks in provincial tax offices, were complex, and generated their own cultural traditions. There are collections of administrative exemplary stories, just as there are political ones in histories; accounts of how and why individuals got promoted and demoted, and of the clever things they said to heads of dwns and vizirs. Nishwr al-muara, Desultory Conversations, another adab text, by the Basra judge al-Tanukhi (d. 994), shows how dense this specifically administrative historical memory could be, and how it extended, even in the late tenth century, without a break back to the caliphates of the mid-ninth, and even of al-Rashid and al-Mahdi. Among other things, one is struck by how accidental promotions could be in this world, as ordinary officials came to the eye of the powerful. Al-Fadl ibn Marwan (d. c. 845), a kitchen steward to an aristocrat and then a minor clerk in al-Rashid’s time, made enough money to buy land and live in the country during the siege of Baghdad, where he reputedly gave hospitality unknowingly to the future caliph al-Mu‘tasim; thanks to this chance, he rose steadily in the administration, and became vizir at his patron’s accession in 833 - though, conversely, he was soon dismissed (in 836), and had to pay huge sums in fines, because he tried to prevent the caliph from spending public money. The chance of fate was linked to a good deal of administrative competence; al-Fadl was an able administrator who brought in considerable revenues to at least two caliphs. It is also clear that plenty of these revenues stuck to his own fingers, given his wealth in the 830s. Much paperwork was indeed expended to try to cut down peculation, but al-Tanukhi’s stories show that this could easily be subverted, with misleading papers put in the records, until or unless rivals uncovered the fraud.

  One gains a picture of a tight but very jealous administrative community, in which a common profession counted as a tie of kinship (as al-Fadl said, quoting a retired clerk whom he met as a youth), but in which promotion often depended on the destruction of others. At least al-Fadl kept his life in 836; plenty of others, including in particular many vizirs, did not. To say that administrative and court politics was cut-throat is indeed an understatement; unlucky ‘Abbasid politicians could die by tortures as inventi
ve as those of the Merovingians, or indeed more so, as ‘Abbasid science was more developed - al-Fadl’s successor as vizir, Ibn al-Zayyat (836-47), died in a torture machine of his own devising. But Ibn al-Zayyat had also supposedly kept his position as vizir at the accession of al-Wathiq in 842, even though the new caliph loathed him and had sworn to kill him, because he was the only senior official who could compose a formal letter to the satisfaction of the ruler. This mixture of ambition, greed, violence and genuine professionalism marked the administrative class as a whole, or at least its upper echelons.

  The complex and dangerous world of the administration was mirrored in the other two arenas of caliphal politics, the army and the caliphal household. The civil administration and the army are often seen as rivals in ‘Abbasid historiography, much as in middle Byzantine historiography, and probably as wrongly; as in Byzantium, the same person could do both, as with the Barmakid al-Fadl and the Tahirid ‘Abd Allah ibn Tahir (d. 845), and even the occasional Turkish general, such as Utamish (d. 863), who held the vizirate for a year before his death. Factions in reality crossed both areas of government without difficulty, even when the Turks, disliked and distinct, came to dominate the army. The numerous large palaces of the ‘Abbasids also had their own staff, not least the even more numerous slave mistresses of the caliphs, whose head was either a queen, or, if the caliph did not formally marry - which was the norm after the early ninth century - a queen-mother; the factions crossed into this arena too.

  As with the Merovingians, equally dynastically minded and polygamous, political influence for women in the ‘Abbasid period tended to be restricted to the mothers of caliphs or designated future caliphs. The most famous examples of this were Khayzuran (d. 789), the mother of Harun al-Rashid, and Zubayda (d. 831), al-Rashid’s wife and mother of al-Amin. Zubayda even kept some of her influence after al-Ma’mun overthrew al-Amin - she brokered, for example, the reconciliation of the anti-caliph Ibrahim in 825. But it has to be said that ‘Abbasid political practice gave less scope to female protagonism than either the Frankish or the Byzantine tradition. The complicated and ever-developing ceremonial of the ‘Abbasid caliphate, which must have matched that of the tenth-century Byzantines, had rather less space for women as public players; but it is above all the case that succession rules focused on choosing appropriate candidates for caliph meant that child caliphs, for whom mothers could act as regents, were less common than royal minors were in Byzantium or Francia. The first was not until al-Muqtadir (908-32), whose reign was indeed dominated by his formidable mother, a Byzantine ex-slave called Shaghab (‘troublesome’), or, simply, al-Sayyida (‘the lady’). Shaghab (d. 933) is not handled in a consistently hostile way by the sources, despite their general suspicion of female power, magnified by the disasters of her son’s reign; she followed Zubayda in making public displays of charity on a large scale, a recognizable ‘Abbasid gendered female role, thanks to her vast wealth, and this allowed at least some chroniclers to depict her neutrally. Shaghab established a parallel bureaucratic hierarchy of male secretaries and female stewardesses which exercised direct power in these decades. It is important, however, to recognize that such offices were already normal in the female areas of the palaces. Queens, chief mistresses and caliphal mothers had long been wealthy, and needed administrators to run their affairs; if, on rare occasions, such as under Shaghab, these took over caliphal politics too, they had all the qualifications to do so.

  Caliphs are portrayed in the sources in conventional ways, al-Mansur as eloquent and ascetic, al-Mahdi as generous and poetry-loving, al-Mu‘tasim as martial, and so on. Al-Ma’mun (who conventionally had a sense of humour and a gift for poetry) is perhaps the one who most established his own identity through his actions. His attraction to Shi‘ism is one such, which did not end when he backed down over his ‘Alid heir in 818-19. So is his patronage of scientists, who engaged in a programme of translations of Greek scientific works, Ptolemy, Galen, Euclid and so on, and the determination (among other things) of an accurate calculation of the circumference of the earth: this came to be carried out from a library and scientific research centre known as the Bayt al-Hikma, ‘House of Wisdom’, founded by the caliph in Baghdad in 830. Al-Ma’mun was also a doctrinal protagonist, sympathetic to a rationalist school of Islam known as Mu‘tazilism. The role of the caliph as a religious authority, which was seen as normal in the Umayyad period, and which was urged on al-Mansur by his Persian secretary and adviser Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ (d. c. 757) at the start of the ‘Abbasid caliphate, was being undermined by the growth of the authority of the ‘ulam’, but al-Ma’mun had a sufficient confidence in his mission to put doctrine into the heart of politics. In 833 he decided that one element of Mu‘tazil- ist thought, the doctrine of the createdness of the Qur’an (that is, that God had created the book within time; it had not pre-existed the world), was sufficiently important that all judges and ‘ulam’ should be forced to subscribe to it, particularly the ‘traditionists’, who were bitterly opposed to it. Almost alone, Ibn Hanbal defied him, and went to prison. The created Qur’an remained a tenet of the next two caliphs as well, and was only abandoned in 847, at the accession of al-Wathiq’s brother al-Mutawakkil (847-61). This period, of the so-called mina or ‘inqui- sition’, is the only one in which a doctrinal issue mattered politically in medieval Islam, as opposed to the permanent debates about the legitimacy of early caliphs. The apparent obscurity of the religious issue at stake is one element that reminds us of the Christological schisms of the later Roman empire. The sense one has of a political regime using such an issue to kick religious extremists into line is also a reminder of the near-contemporary Second Iconoclasm in Byzantium, and indeed al-Ma’mun recalls his younger contemporary Theophilos in his interest in religious-philosophical debate as well. Why al-Ma’mun chose the created Qur’an as the issue to make a stand on is, however, even less clear than the reasons for the Iconoclast controversy. It may be that any issue would have done, to re-establish caliphal religious authority, especially in the face of the ‘traditionists’. But the mina failed; Ibn Hanbal returned; after 849 doctrine was fully in the hands of the ‘ulam’, and caliphs - and, still more, their tenth-century supplanters in Iraq and Iran, who did not have their formal religious role as ‘commanders of the believers’ - became essentially secular powers. They would be patrons of intellectuals, jurists, ‘ulam’, but not intellectuals themselves.

  Al-Mu‘tasim’s Turkish army got on particularly badly with the Bagh- dadis, who were after all the heirs of the previous paid army, the abn’, so the caliph built a new capital at Samarra, further up the Tigris, and moved both himself and his army there in 836. The establishment of new capitals was a standard part of early ‘Abbasid political affirmation; Baghdad itself was the key exemplar, and al-Rashid’s period in Raqqa (796-808) and al-Ma’mun’s in Merv (811-18) were others. Samarra was the most serious foundation after Baghdad, and was, as usual with the ‘Abbasids, built on a huge scale: its ruins extend along the Tigris for 40 kilometres. All the same, like Raqqa earlier, it was not intended to rival Baghdad as a population centre, and it remained largely a military and administrative centre during its period as the capital, 836-92. The problem was that the caliph was thus isolated together with his army. Both the Umayyads and the early ‘Abbasids used armies paid out of general taxation, which were separated from their areas of origin, the early Arab settlers in their amr, the Khurasani abn’ in Baghdad. In this respect, the Turks were not unusual, except that they came from beyond the frontiers, and they would have plenty of successors in the more fragmented tenth century too. There was always a tension between the paid military and the rest of tax-paying society in the medieval Arab world as a result of this pattern. Furthermore, because provincial élites converted to Islam, above all in the ninth century, and were matched by Arab settler families acquiring land - in the early eighth century in Khurasan, the late eighth in the boom-town hinterland of Baghdad, the late ninth in Egypt - there therefore came to be Muslim prov
incial aristocracies who could be very resentful of the political power and the financial weight of the army. This was particularly so in Khurasan, where the pre-Islamic Persian ruling class largely remained, with highly aristocratic and military values, however Islamized by now. Some of this Persian ruling class did indeed join al-Ma’mun’s and al-Mu‘tasim’s army, like al-Afshin of Ushrusana (d. 841), a hardly Muslim prince from central Asia, although he, significantly, perished because he was thought to have plotted against the Turks.

  The caliphs could not, however, simply leave military affairs to local aristocracies; they would have instantly lost their tax revenues, and the caliphate would have broken up very fast. Given that, they might as well pay men from outside the caliphate, who had no aristocratic pretensions and were at least good at their job. But there were dangers too. In an anecdote laden with hindsight, the historian al-Tabari has the Tahirid Ishaq ibn Ibrahim tell al-Mu‘tasim: ‘your brother considered the roots and made use of them, and their branches flourished exceedingly; whereas the commander of the believers has utilized only branches, which have not flourished because they lacked roots.’ Which is to say: al-Ma’mun used Tahirids like myself, and other people rooted in the community, and that worked; but you use the Turks, who do not have such roots, and this is a real problem. Al-Mu‘tasim is supposed to have sadly recognized the truth of this. However this may be, the deracination of the Turks ceased to be an advantage when al-Mutawakkil turned against them in the 850s and sought to bring down their leaders, for they had nowhere to go. In the end, they responded by assassinating him in 861. This unleashed a decade of crisis in Samarra, 861-70, in which Turkish factions set up five caliphs in turn and killed three of them; the crisis extended back to Baghdad when one of them, al-Musta‘in (862-6), fled to the old capital and its Tahirid governor, with a section of the Turks, and Baghdad was besieged and captured again in 865-6. Stability only returned in 870 when the ‘Abbasid family developed its own military strongman, Abu Ahmad al-Muwaffaq (d. 891), who had in fact led the siege of Baghdad and was very close to the surviving Turkish leadership; he was put in charge of the army by his brother al-Mu‘tamid, who was caliph by now (870-92), and left the latter in Samarra while he gradually transferred himself to Baghdad. When al-Muwaffaq’s son and heir al-Mu‘tadid became caliph (892- 902), he formally re-established Baghdad as the capital, and the Samarra interlude ended.