by Morris, Ian;
Figure 7.8. Coming in from the cold: the migrations of the Seljuk Turks (solid arrows) and Vikings/Normans (broken arrows) into the Western core in the eleventh century
We would know precious little about these traders had the Jewish community in Cairo not decided in 1890 to remodel its nine-hundred-year-old synagogue. Like many synagogues, this had a storeroom where worshippers could deposit unwanted documents to avoid risking blasphemy by destroying papers that might have God’s name written on them. Normally storerooms were cleared out periodically, but this one had been allowed to fill up with centuries’ worth of wastepaper. As the remodeling began, old documents started showing up in Cairo’s antiquities markets, and in spring 1896 two English sisters carried a bundle back to Cambridge. There they showed two texts to Solomon Schechter, the University Reader in Talmudics. Initially skeptical, Schechter then had an “Oh my God” moment: one was a Hebrew fragment of the biblical book of Ecclesiasticus, previously known only from Greek translations. The learned doctor descended on Cairo that December and carried off 140,000 documents.
Among them were hundreds of letters to Cairo trading houses, mailed between 1025 and about 1250 from as far afield as Spain and India. The ideological divisions that had formed in the wake of the Arab conquests were crumbling as population growth expanded markets and profits, and clearly meant little to these correspondents, who worried more about the weather, their families, and getting rich than about religion and politics. In this they may have been typical of Mediterranean merchants; though less well documented, commerce was apparently just as international and profitable in Ifriqiya and Sicily, where Muslim Palermo became a boomtown trading with Christian northern Italy.
Even Monte Polizzo, the backcountry Sicilian village where I have been excavating for the last few years, got into the act. As I mentioned in Chapter 5, I went there to study the effects of Phoenician and Greek colonization in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, but when we started digging in 2000 we found a second village above the ancient houses. This second village had been established around 1000 CE, probably by Muslim immigrants from Ifriqiya, and burned down around 1125. When our botanist sifted through the carbonized seeds excavated in its ruins, he discovered—to everyone’s surprise—that one building had been a storeroom full of carefully threshed wheat, with scarcely a weed in it.* This formed a sharp contrast with the seeds we found in the sixth-century-BCE contexts, which were always mixed with plenty of weeds and chaff. That would have made for rather coarse bread, which is what we might expect in a simple farming village where people grew crops for their own tables and did not worry about the occasional unpleasant mouthful. The compulsive winnowing that rid the twelfth-century-CE wheat of all impurities, though, is exactly what we might expect from commercial farmers producing for picky city folk.
The Mediterranean economy was booming indeed if little Monte Polizzo was tied into international networks. But the oldest part of the Muslim core, in southwest Asia, was not doing so well. It was bad enough that since the 860s the Turkic slaves whom Iraqi caliphs had bought for their armies had been launching coups and making themselves sultans, but worse was to come. Since the seventh century Muslim merchants and missionaries had been preaching Muhammad’s good news to the Turkic tribes in the steppes, and in 960 the Karluk clan in what is now Uzbekistan—reputedly some 200,000 families—converted to Islam en masse. It was a triumph for the faith but rapidly turned into a nightmare for the politicians. The Karluks founded their own Karakhanid Empire and another Turkic tribe, the Seljuks, followed their conversion with migration, plundering their way across Iran and taking Baghdad in 1055.* By 1079 they had driven the Byzantines out of most of Anatolia and the Fatimids out of Syria.
Muslim southwest Asia diverged rapidly from the flourishing Islamic Mediterranean. The Seljuk Turks assembled a large empire, but it was even more dysfunctional than the caliphate had been. When its fierce first ruler died in 1092 his sons followed steppe traditions by splitting the empire into nine parts and fighting one another. The decisive arm in their wars was cavalry, so the Seljuk kings gave great estates to warlords who could provide mounted followers. These nomad chiefs, predictably, let administration and trade decay and even stopped minting coins. Cities shrank, irrigation canals silted up, and marginal villages were abandoned. In the hot, dry weather of the Medieval Warm Period farmers had to struggle constantly just to keep their precious fields from reverting to steppe and desert, but Seljuk policies made their job harder still. Many of the conquerors, preferring nomadic to urban lifestyles, welcomed the decline of agriculture, and as the twelfth century wore on, more and more Arabs left their fields and joined the Turks in herding flocks.
Alarmed at the spread of radical Shiite theories in these troubled years, scholars in eastern Iran set up schools to develop and teach a coherent Sunni response, which Seljuk lords promoted vigorously in the twelfth century. Its monuments of scholarship—such as al-Ghazali’s Revivification of the Sciences of Religion, which drew on Greek logic to reconcile Islamic jurisprudence, Sufi mysticism, and Muhammad’s revelation—remain foundations of Sunni thought to this day. So successful was the Sunni Revival, in fact, that some Shiites decided that murdering Sunni leaders was the only practical response. Retreating to the mountains of Iran, they formed a secret society known to its enemies as the Assassins (according to legend, so called because its agents smoked hashish to put them in the right frame of mind for murder).
Assassination could not roll back the Sunni Revival, but neither could an intellectual movement—despite its success—hold together a Seljuk state, and without the kind of political organization that the Fatimid kingdoms provided in North Africa, the Seljuk lands buckled under the pressures of the Medieval Warm Period. The timing was unfortunate, because the same weather that posed such challenges in southwest Asia created opportunities for the unruly raiders, traders, and invaders on the Muslim core’s European fringe. Equally important, warmer weather brought northern Europe longer growing seasons and higher yields, making previously marginal lands potentially profitable. By the time the Medieval Warm Period wound down, farmers had plowed up vast tracts of what had once been forest, felling perhaps half the trees in western Europe.
Like all episodes of expansion since the spread of farming from the Hilly Flanks, two processes combined to bring advanced agricultural techniques from western into eastern Europe. The first was colonization, often led by the church, normally the only well-organized institution on the frontier. “Give these monks a naked moor or a wild wood,” Gerald of Wales wrote, “then let a few years pass and you will find not only beautiful churches, but dwellings of men built around them.” Expansion was the Lord’s work: according to a recruiting drive in 1108, “pagans are the worst of men but their land is the best, with meat, honey, and flour … here you will be able both to save your souls [by forcing heathens to convert] and, if you will, to acquire very good land to settle.”
Sometimes the pagans fled; sometimes they submitted, oftentimes ending up little better than slaves. But like hunter-gatherers confronting farmers or Sicilians confronting Greek colonists thousands of years earlier, sometimes they organized and stood their ground. As Frankish and Germanic farmers moved east, cutting down trees and plowing up pastures, some villagers in Bohemia, Poland, Hungary, and even distant Russia copied their techniques, exploiting the better weather to farm their own lands more intensively. Their chiefs, turning Christian, persuaded or forced them to become tax-paying subjects and fight the colonists (and one another).
The spread of states, churches, and intensive farming across Europe had much in common with the agricultural frontier that had developed south of the Yangzi since the fifth century, but differed in one crucial respect: it did not create major trade flows between the new rural frontier and an older urban core. In the absence of a central European equivalent of China’s Grand Canal there was simply no cheap way to get Polish grain to great cities such as Palermo and Cairo. Western Europe’s towns were clos
er to the frontiers and were growing, but remained too few and too small to provide adequate markets. Rather than importing food from eastern Europe, these western European towns generally grew by intensifying local production and exploiting new energy sources.
Watermills, already common in the Muslim core, now spread across the Christian fringe. The number of mills in France’s Robec Valley, for instance, quintupled between the tenth century and the thirteenth, and the Domesday Book, a census compiled in 1086, says that England had a remarkable 5,624 mills. Farmers also learned the virtues of horses, which eat more than oxen but can pull plows faster and work longer. The balance slowly tipped in horses’ favor after 1000, when—for reasons I will return to in Chapter 8—Europeans adopted from Muslims metal horseshoes, which reduced friction, and replaced their clumsy, choking, throat-and-girth harnesses with collar harnesses that quadrupled horses’ pulling power. In 1086 just one draft animal in twenty on English barons’ lands was a horse; by 1300 one in five was. With this extra horsepower (not to mention extra manure) farmers could reduce the land they left fallow each year, squeezing more from their properties.
Europe’s farms remained less productive than Egypt’s or China’s but they increasingly had surpluses to sell to towns, and the growing towns took on new roles. Many northwest Europeans were serfs, legally bound to work the land of lords who protected them from raiders (and from other lords). In theory, at least, the lords held their own positions as vassals of kings, repaying the kings by fighting as armored cavalry, and kings owed their positions to the church, which dispensed God’s approval. But lords, kings, and the church all wanted access to the wealth now accumulating in towns, and townsfolk could often negotiate freedom from feudal obligations in return for surrendering a cut of it.
Like low-end rulers going all the way back to Assyria and the Zhou, European kings were effectively running a protection racket, but their version was even messier than those of most of their predecessors. Towns, nobles, monarchs, and churchmen constantly interfered in one another’s affairs, and in the absence of real central authorities, conflict was virtually guaranteed. In 1075, for instance, Pope Gregory VII claimed the right to appoint all bishops in Germany. His goal was to reform the morality of church leaders, but since bishoprics controlled vast slices of Germany’s land, the move also had the pleasing side effect of giving Gregory control over much of Germany’s resource base. The German emperor Henry IV was horrified, and responded by claiming that as defender of the faith he had the right to depose Gregory—“now not pope,” Henry insisted, “but false monk … I, Henry, by the grace of God, together with all our bishops, say to you: Descend! Descend!”
Instead of descending, Gregory excommunicated Henry, casting the German emperor outside the Christian faith. In practical terms, that meant Germany’s feudal lords could legally ignore their ruler. Now unable to get anything done in his own land, within a year Henry was reduced to kneeling barefoot in the snow for three days outside an Alpine monastery, begging the pope’s forgiveness. This he got, then went to war with the pope anyway. No one won. Pope Gregory lost everyone’s support after his own mercenaries sacked Rome because he had not paid them; the emperor ended his life on the run from his own son; and the theological dispute was never really resolved.
Eleventh-century Europe was full of such tangled struggles, but little by little, their resolutions gradually made institutions stronger and their spheres of responsibility clearer. Kings increasingly managed to organize, mobilize, and tax people in their territories. One historian has called this process “the formation of a persecuting society”: royal officials persuaded people to see themselves as part of a nation (the English, the French, and so on) defined against what they were not—pariahs such as Jews, homosexuals, lepers, and heretics, who, for the first time, were systematically stripped of protection and terrorized. Increasingly effective states emerged from this unpleasant process.
Other historians speak more happily of an “age of cathedrals,” as awe-inspiring monuments sprouted all over Europe. In France alone, eighty cathedrals, five hundred abbeys, and tens of thousands of parish churches were built between 1180 and 1270. Over 40 million cubic feet of stone were quarried, more than for Egypt’s Great Pyramid.
Scholarship had declined in western Europe along with the Roman Empire and only partially recovered in Charlemagne’s France, but after 1000, teachers began clustering around the new cathedrals, setting up schools rather like those of the independent muftis in the Islamic world. Christians who went to study in Muslim Spain brought home with them translations of Aristotle’s treatises on logic, preserved for centuries by Arab court scholars. All this strengthened Christian intellectual life, helping theologians think about God in the same sophisticated ways as al-Ma’mun’s theorists in ninth-century Baghdad, but it also created new conflicts within the educated elite.
No one illustrates these better than Peter Abelard. A bright young man steeped in the new learning, Abelard showed up in Paris around 1100. Wandering from school to school, he publicly humiliated his pedantic teachers by tripping them up with his Aristotelian logic. Honest but plodding professors saw their careers collapse when twenty-somethings like Abelard used their razor-sharp debating skills to throw convention (and potentially the fates of everyone’s souls) into confusion. Inordinately pleased with himself, Abelard set up his own school and promptly seduced and impregnated one of his pupils, the teenage Héloïse. Her family, dishonored, struck back: “One night when I was sound asleep,” Abelard coyly put it, “they cut off the organs by which I had committed the deed which they abhorred.”
Héloïse and Abelard each withdrew in shame to houses of God, and for twenty years kept up a correspondence, self-justifying on his part, searingly personal on hers. In this enforced retirement Abelard wrote the Sic et Non, “Thus and Not-Thus,” a kind of handbook for applying logic to Christianity’s contradictions; and if Abelard’s name became a byword for the dangers of the new learning, he nonetheless forced Christian theorists to reconcile the authority of scripture with Aristotelian rationalism. By 1270, when Thomas Aquinas perfected this in his On Christian Theology, Christian learning was quite as sophisticated as that of the Sunni Revival.
Other Europeans did the opposite of Abelard: instead of bringing ideas and institutions from the Muslim core to the Christian fringe, they moved themselves into the Muslim core. Merchants of Venice, Genoa, and Pisa competed with those of Cairo and Palermo for the lucrative Mediterranean trade, buying and selling or stealing and fighting. In Spain, migrants from increasingly crowded northwest Europe helped local Christians push the Muslims back, and all around the Mediterranean Normans (or Norsemen) unleashed a storm of pillage and conquest.
The Normans were descendants of Scandinavia’s pagan Vikings, who had flourished as raiders on Europe’s far northwest fringe in the ninth century but in the tenth progressed to grander forms of theft. As the Medieval Warm Period opened up the waters of the North Atlantic they took their longboats to Iceland, Greenland, and even Vinland in North America. They settled heavily in Ireland and Britain, and in northern France their chief, Rollo, turned himself into a proper king (of what is now Normandy) by adopting Christianity in 912.
The Normans remained vague on the faith’s details, sacrificing a hundred captives at Rollo’s funeral in 931, but their violence made them desirable as mercenaries as far away as Constantinople. Hired in 1016 to fight on both sides in the endless wars over southern Italy, Norman bands proceeded to carve out their own state, and pressing on to Sicily in 1061, they pursued an almost genocidal war against its Muslim occupants. If you visit Sicily today you will be hard-pressed to find a single monument from the two centuries of Islamic rule, during which the island was the wonder of the Mediterranean.
The Normans had no particular animus against Islam; they treated fellow Christians just as badly. One Italian writer called them “a savage, barbarous and horrible race of inhuman disposition,” and Anna Comnena, a Byzantine princess,
was even more appalled. “Whenever battle and war occur,” she wrote, “there is a baying in [the Normans’] hearts and they cannot be held back. Not only the soldiers but also their leaders fling themselves irresistibly into the enemy ranks.”
Byzantium learned about Normans the hard way. In the ninth and tenth centuries Byzantine strength had revived somewhat as Muslims turned to fighting one another, and in 975 a Byzantine army even came within sight of Jerusalem (it failed to take the holy city but did liberate Jesus’ sandals and John the Baptist’s hair). But within a century the Byzantines became dangerously dependent on Norman mercenaries, whose unreliability (for all their ferocity, they regularly ran away) contributed to a catastrophic defeat at Turkish hands in 1071. Twenty years later, with Constantinople under Turkish siege, the Byzantine emperor wrote to the pope in Rome, apparently hoping for help in hiring more mercenaries. The pope, though, had other ideas. Seeking to strengthen his own position in his struggles with Europe’s kings, he called a summit in 1095 and pitched the idea of an expedition—a crusade—to throw the Turks out of Jerusalem.
There was wild enthusiasm; rather more, in fact, than either the pope or the Byzantines wanted. Tens of thousands of villagers started walking east, plundering central Europe and massacring Jews as they went. Only a few reached Anatolia, where the Turks slaughtered them. None made it to the Holy Land, except as slaves.
