The Impact of Islam

by Emmet Scott

  “The Black Sea would be notorious for its late medieval slave trade. The large numbers of Byzantine slaves held by the Khazars and freed by Constantine-Cyril and Methodius show that the trade goes back to the ninth century. It was another stream that fed the river of human labor flowing into the Caliphate, for we know that the Khazars exported slaves there. … Constantinople certainly possessed a slave market, though the details are unknown. Whether or not it played any role in supplying the Caliphate has never been asked.

  “In fact, in general terms, we may suspect that, from the southern Mediterranean, the northern shore and its hinterland appeared in the ninth [and tenth] century as a vast arc of slave supply. European slaves certainly reached the Caliphate from Spain, from the Tyrrhenian coast of Italy, and from the Veneto. By 900 they were coming from the northern arc as well. Greece had hitherto been more or less a blank in the map of slave supply. This has occasioned little notice, the more so that slavery is not thought to have been very important inside the Byzantine empire (aside from the salve of captives). Yet Byzantine slaves were not uncommon in the Caliphate: we need look no further than the story of Photius’ creature, Leontius, the former Arab slave and would-be ambassador to the west of the patriarch of Alexandria: ‘I was born a Byzantine,’ as he explained to the 869 Council of Constantinople. We also encounter at Louis the Pious’ court the curious case of a eunuch bearing the Slavic name of Drogus, whom Einhard calls a ‘Greek.’”[17]

  The role of the Vikings in this trade has been well understood for some time, and it has become increasingly evident that the freebooting Scandinavians of the ninth and tenth centuries were first and foremost slave-traders and raiders. Indeed it was the caliphate’s demand for European slaves that called forth the Viking phenomenon in the first place. Historian Hugh Trevor-Roper explains how the enormous wealth accumulated by the caliphate in its expansion across Asia and Africa enabled it to purchase what it wanted from Europe. What the Muslims wanted, above all, was “eunuchs and slaves.” He continues: “It was one of the functions of the Vikings to supply these goods. Half traders, half pirates, they ranged over all northern Europe, and in their ranging, or through the method of piracy, they collected furs and kidnapped human beings. For preference they dealt in heathen Slavs, since Christian States had less compunction in handling a slave-trade in heathen bodies – they could always quote that useful text, Leviticus xxv, 44. So the Vikings fed both Byzantium and the rich new civilization of Islam with the goods which they demanded and for which they could pay. In doing so they penetrated all the coasts and rivers of Europe.”[18] In the above quotation Trevor-Roper repeats the erroneous notion, prevalent until the last decades of the twentieth century, that Byzantium somehow escaped the ravages of the Saracens and that in her territory there continued to flourish an intact and prosperous branch of ancient Rome. Constantinople, he imagines, like Damascus, was a wealthy recipient of Russian slaves. Yet by the end of the seventh century, as I have shown in great detail in Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited, the formerly great power of Eastern Rome was little more than an impoverished rump, cut off, just as surely as the West, from the wealth and learning of Asia. If there was a slave trade in Byzantium, it was only as a link in the chain that brought eunuchs and concubines from Russia and eastern Europe in general to Damascus and Baghdad. What little gold Byzantium possessed in the tenth and eleventh centuries was from the taxes levied on Muslim merchants of human flesh, who apparently frequented the Viking-supplied markets of the ancient capital. The gold derived from this infamous trade was known as aurum arabicum, Arab gold, or, as humane men preferred to call it, aurum infelix, unhappy gold. By the late tenth century large quantities of this Arab gold and silver had found its way to Scandinavia. Viking longboats may even have visited Islamic ports in Iberia, and the occasional Arab traveler returned the compliment by visiting Scandinavia.

  Whilst, as Trevor-Roper says, the majority of European slaves delivered to the Arabs were Slavs, by no means all of them were. Indeed, the Vikings plundered all of western Europe to supply the markets of the Caliphate. Dublin, for example, established by the Vikings in Ireland, was a major slave market, with most of the captives bought and sold coming from Ireland and Britain. Nonetheless, there is no doubt that the majority of slaves sold to the Muslims were heathen Slavs, and there is no doubt also that some of the Christian rulers of western Europe were complicit in the trade. Venice, for example, acted as a depot for the collection and sale of Slavic captives from Dalmatia. Marseilles too, it seems, also was active. In the words of Trevor-Roper: “For if the Vikings were the pioneers, the princes of Europe, or some of them, were the middlemen in the new slave-trade. They licensed it and they profited by it, though they left the direct traffic in it to the Jews, who could move most easily across the frontiers of the two societies. We have plenty of evidence of this trade and its routes … Liutprand of Cremona, the ambassador of the West who, in the tenth century, stood agog before the kaleidoscope pageantry of the Byzantine court, tells us that it was the merchants of Verdun who, for the immense profit of the trade, made boys into eunuchs and sold them through Moorish Spain to the rich Moslem world … The trade has left its mark in the languages of both Christendom and Islam. Sclavi, ‘Slavs’, has formed, in every European language, the word for slaves; and the same word, Sakaliba, has provided the Arabic word for eunuchs.”[19]

  The coming of Islam, it would appear, signaled a wave of banditry and piracy in the Mediterranean such as had not been seen since before the second century BC, when such activities were severely curtailed by Roman naval power. Indeed, it seems that this new Islamic piracy surpassed in scope and destructiveness anything that had come before.

  The fate of captives taken to the caliphate, often passed over without comment in modern studies – which seem to be concerned with little more than economics and wealth creation – was horrific. Generally speaking females were destined for the sex slavery of the harem. Men and young boys, as often as not, were castrated; and in addition were very frequently (if not usually) also the subject of sexual abuse. Several modern authors, to their shame, have spoken approvingly of the “benefits” Europe accrued from this trade. Thus Thomas F. Glick, refuting Pirenne’s argument that Muslim piracy on the Mediterranean had isolated Europe culturally, informs us that, “By the tenth century, when the Muslims had taken control of strategically important islands (Crete, Sicily, the Balearics) Islam effectively controlled the Mediterranean, which did not constitute a barrier to trade, but rather a medium whereby all bordering states could participate in a world economy, fertilized by healthy injections of Sudanese gold.”[20] One wonders if Glick would extol in similar terms the benefits to Africa of the transatlantic slave trade conducted by the Europeans between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Perhaps the Scandinavians were aesthetically uplifted by the gold and eastern trinkets arriving in their homeland in payment for the human misery they exported to the caliphate, but to see this as the mechanism by which Europe revived in the eleventh century is of course utter nonsense. Eastern Europe and Scandinavia were civilized in the late tenth century not by Islam but by Christianity. The latter faith discouraged warfare and encouraged agriculture; it brought literacy and schools, and, by forbidding infanticide, produced a great increase in population and expansion of towns.

  Fig. 4. A statue of the Buddha from Kashmir, found at Helgö in Sweden.

  Such artifacts show the vast extent of Islamic trade and influence during the tenth century.

  Muslim freebooting, which almost certainly commenced with the arrival of Islam in the seventh century, was to become a perennial problem. Never again would travel in the Mediterranean be entirely safe. And we should not imagine, as some authors do, that the revival of Europe during the eleventh century and the advance through the Mediterranean of fleets of Crusaders brought Muslim piracy – at least temporarily – to an end. This was emphatically not the case. Large, heavily armed fleets might move
safely through the Mediterranean, but it was very different for merchant vessels. These, traveling alone, or in small and lightly-defended groups, were never safe. The Middle Sea in fact remained a very dangerous place for all merchant shipping until the early nineteenth century. And all during these centuries pirates based in North Africa and Egypt, as well as occasionally in Syria, continued to scour the coasts of Christendom for victims. So serious had the problem become by the fourteenth century that the French, at the behest of the Genoese, launched a crusade against the North African pirates based in Mahdia, to the south of Tunis.[21] The campaign was unsuccessful, and the French knights raised the siege after only a few months. Piracy continued unabated.

  The long-term effect of this incessant predation, which was the equivalent of the Viking raids in the north lasting a thousand years, was that the Christian populations of southern Europe, especially of Spain and southern Italy, began to take on many of the habits and customs of their Muslim tormentors. These included the keeping and marketing of slaves. It is little surprise then, that the great revival of slave-trading, which marked the European colonization of the Americas, would be driven by freebooters from the Iberian Peninsula, a region whose Christian inhabitants were long familiarized with the customs and practices of Islam. Nor should we forget that, to begin with, the Atlantic slave trade with the Americas was entirely a Spanish and Portuguese enterprise. The nations of northern Europe did not participate. Famously, Queen Elizabeth I of England initially refused to become involved, declaring the trade an outrage against God and humanity. Later however, corrupted no doubt by the example of the Spaniards and Portuguese, she changed tack and began Britain’s involvement in the noxious commerce.

  The long-term impact of Christian-Islamic coexistence in Spain is a topic I shall return to at a later stage. Suffice for the moment to note that it was immense; and one of the consequences was the continued existence of a substantial slave trade in Christian Spain right throughout the Middle Ages. In the words of Louis Bertrand:

  “... it was not without contagion that the Spaniards lived for centuries in contact with a race of men who crucified their enemies and gloried in piling up thousands of severed heads by way of trophies. The cruelty of the Arabs and the Berbers also founded a school in the Peninsula. The ferocity of the emirs and the caliphs who killed their brothers or their sons with their own hands was to be handed on to Pedro the Cruel and Henry of Trastamare, those stranglers under canvas, no better than common assassins.”

  “For several centuries slavery maintained itself in Christian Spain, as in the Islamic lands. Very certainly, also, it was to the Arabs that the Spaniards owed the intransigence of their fanaticism, the pretension to be, if not the chosen of God, at least the most Catholic nation of Christendom. Philip II, like Abd er Rahman or Al-Mansour, was Defender of the Faith.”[22]

  [1] H. F. Stewart, “Thoughts and Ideas of the Period,” in The Cambridge Medieval History: The Christian Empire, Vol. 1 (2nd ed. 1936), p. 592.

  [2]Ibid.

  [3]Ibid., p. 593.

  [4] www.newadvent.org/cathen/14036a.htm

  [5]Ibid.

  [6] Stark, op cit., p. 28.

  [7] See e.g. Richard Hodges and David Whitehouse, Mohammed, Charlemagne and the Origins of Europe (Cornell University Press, New York, 1983), p. 167.

  [8] Michael McCormick, Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce, AD 300-900 (Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 170-1.

  [9] Matthias Schulz, “Schwindel im Skriptorium. Reliquienkult, erfundene Märtyrer, gefälschte Kaiserurkunden - phantasievolle Kleriker haben im Mittelalter ein gigantisches Betrugswerk in Szene gesetzt. Neuester Forschungsstand: Über 60 Prozent aller Königsdokumente aus der Merowingerzeit wurden von Mönchen getürkt,” Der Spiegel, 29 (1998).

  [10] Hodges and Whitehouse, op cit., pp. 45-6.

  [11] Claudio Vita-Finzi, The Mediterranean Valleys (Cambridge University Press, 1969).

  [12] See H. Clarke and B. Ambrosiani, Towns in the Viking Age (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1995).

  [13] See Henri Pirenne, Mohammed and Charlemagne (London, 1939), pp. 239-40. More recently, in 1999 a hoard found at Gotland in Sweden included “Arabic coins from the Sassanidian dynasty from the mid-7th century …” Ola Korpås, Per Wideström and Jonas Ström, “The recently found hoards from Spillings farm on Gotland, Sweden,” Viking Heritage Magazine, 4 (2000).

  [14] Trevor-Roper, op cit., pp. 90-2.

  [15] Pirenne, op cit., p. 159.

  [16]Ibid., p. 184.

  [17] McCormick, op cit., pp. 760-1.

  [18] Trevor-Roper, op cit., pp. 90-1.

  [19]Ibid., p. 92.

  [20] Thomas F. Glick, Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages (Brill Publishers, New York, 2005), pp. 20-1.

  [21] Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (Penguin Books, 1978), pp. 458-477.

  [22] Bertrand op cit., p. 160.

  4

  Islamic Spain

  We have traditionally been told that the first two centuries of the Spanish Emirate, supposedly founded in 756 by Abd’ er Rahman I, constituted a veritable Golden Age of Spanish history. And indeed the opulence and prosperity of Spain during these years is contrasted very favorably with the poverty and ignorance of Christian Europe in the same period. The following description of eighth-tenth century Cordoba, written by English historian H. St. L. B. Moss in 1935, may be regarded as fairly typical of the genre: “In Spain … the foundation of Umayyad power [in 756] ushers in an era of unequalled splendour, which reaches its height in the early part of the tenth century. The great university of Cordova is thronged with students … while the city itself excites the wonder of visitors from Germany and France. The banks of the Guadalquivir are covered with luxurious villas, and born of the ruler’s caprice rises the famous Palace of the Flower, a fantastic city of delights.”[1]

  The picture Moss paints was derived from medieval Arab chroniclers, who spoke of a city of half a million inhabitants, of three thousand mosques, of one hundred and thirteen thousand houses, and of three hundred public baths - this not even counting the twenty-eight suburbs said to have surrounded the metropolis.

  Over the past sixty years intensive efforts have been made to discover this astonishing civilization - to no avail. Try as they might, archaeologists have found hardly anything, hardly a brick or inscription, for the first two centuries of Arab rule in Spain. Between 711 and 911 there is almost nothing, with substantial remains only beginning to appear around 925 or 930. According to the prestigious Oxford Archaeological Guide, the first two centuries of Arab control at Cordoba has revealed, after exhaustive excavations: (a) The south-western portion of the city wall, which is presumed to date from the ninth century; (b) A small bath-complex, of the 9th/10th century; and (c) A part of the Umayyad (8th/9th century) mosque. This is all that can be discovered from two centuries of the history of a city of supposedly half a million people. By way of contrast, consider the fact that Roman London, a city not one-tenth the size that eighth and ninth century Cordoba is said to have been, has yielded dozens of first-class archaeological sites. And even the three locations mentioned in the Guide are open to question. The city wall portion is only “presumably” of the ninth century, whilst the part of the mosque attributed to the eighth century is said to have been modeled by Abd’ er Rahman I. However, the latter character sounds suspiciously like his namesake and supposed descendant Abd’ er Rahman III, of the mid-tenth century, who indisputably made alterations to the mosque (which was originally the Cathedral of Saint Vincent).

  Even when real archaeology does appear at Cordoba, from the second quarter of the tenth century onwards, the settlement is absolutely nothing like the conurbation described by the Arab writers. Indeed, at its most o
pulent, from the late tenth to the late eleventh centuries, the ‘metropolis’ had, it would seem, no more than about forty thousand inhabitants; and this settlement was built directly upon the Roman and Visigothic city, which had a comparable population.[2] We know that Roman and Visigothic villas, palaces and baths were simply reoccupied by the Muslims, often with very little alteration to the original plan. And when they did build new edifices, the cut-stones, columns and decorative features were more often than not simply plundered from earlier Roman/Visigoth remains. A text of the medieval writer Aben Pascual tells us that there were, in his time, to be seen in Cordoba surviving buildings, “Greek and Roman. … Statues of silver and gilded bronze within them poured water into receptacles, whence it flowed into ponds and into marble basins excellently carved.”

  So much for the “vast metropolis” of eighth to tenth century Cordoba. The rest of Spain, which has been investigated with equal vigor, can deliver little else. A couple of settlements here and a few fragments of pottery there, usually of doubtful date and often described as “presumably” ninth century or such like. Altogether, the Oxford Guide lists a total of no more than eleven sites and individual buildings in the whole country (three of which are those from Cordoba mentioned above) which are supposed to date from before the first quarter of the tenth century. These are, in addition to the above three: (a) Balaguer: A fortress whose northern wall, with its square tower, “is almost entirely attributable” to the late-9th century. (p. 73); (b) Fontanarejo: An early Berber settlement, whose ceramic finds date it to “no later than the 9th century.” (p. 129); (c) Guardamar: A ribat or fortress mosque, which was completed, according to an inscription, in 944. However, “Elements in its construction have led to its being dated to the 9th cent.” (pp. 143-4); (d) Huesca: An Arab fortress which “has been dated to the period around 875.” (p. 145); (e) Madrid: Fortress foundations dating to around 870. (p. 172); (f) Merida: A fortress attributed to Abd’ er-Rahman II (822-852). (p. 194); (g) Monte Marinet: A Berber settlement with ceramics within “a possible chronological range” from the 7th to the early 9th century. (p. 202); (h) Olmos: An Arab fortress with ceramics “dated to the 9th century” (pp. 216-7).