52
Harem Wall-painting Fragments
Fragments of wall-painting, from Samarra, Iraq
800–900 AD
The world of the Arabian Nights – the 1,001 tales supposedly told by the beautiful Scheherazade to stop the king from killing her – transports us to the Middle East of twelve centuries ago:
The girls sat around me, and when night came, five of them rose and set up a banquet with plenty of nuts and fragrant herbs. Then they brought the wine vessels and we sat to drink. With the girls sitting all around me, some singing, some playing the flute, the psalter, the lute, and all other musical instruments, while the bowls and cups went round, I was so happy that I forgot every sorrow in the world, saying to myself, ‘This is the life; alas, that it is fleeting.’ Then they said to me, ‘O our lord, choose from among us whomever you wish to spend this night with you.’
So Scheherazade entertains the king, with tantalizing tales which are always to be continued.
Today, we mostly know the Arabian Nights through the distorting filters of Hollywood and pantomime. They summon up a kaleidoscope of characters – Sinbad, Aladdin and the Thief of Baghdad; caliphs and sorcerers, viziers and merchants; and lots of girls, many of them slaves, but still talented and outspoken. We see all of them within the vast bustling landscapes of the great Muslim cities of the age: Baghdad at its height, of course, but also Cairo and, most importantly for these portraits, Samarra, the city that straddles the River Tigris north of Baghdad in modern Iraq.
Although we regard the Arabian Nights as exotic fiction, they tell us a lot about real life in the court of the Abbasid caliphs, the supreme rulers of the vast Islamic empire which in the eighth to tenth centuries stretched from central Asia to Spain. The historian Dr Robert Irwin has written a companion to the Arabian Nights and has traced its various historical connections:
Some of these stories do reflect the realities of Baghdad in the eighth and ninth centuries. The Abbasid caliphs employed a group of people known as Nudama – professional cup companions, whose job was to sit with the caliph as he ate and drank, and entertain him with edifying information, jokes, discussions of food and stories. So some of the stories in the Arabian Nights are part of the repertoire of these cup companions.
It was a closed society. Few people ventured within its walls, and it’s been said that when a pious Muslim was summoned to see the caliph, he took with him his shroud – ordinary people rather feared what went on within the walls of the caliph’s palaces. I say ‘palaces’ advisedly, since the Abbasid caliphs seem to have had rather a disposable attitude towards them; once they had used one up they went and built another, and then abandoned it. So you get a succession of palaces, one after another in Baghdad, and then they moved to Samarra, where they did the same thing.
Most of the Abbasid palaces, both in Baghdad and in Samarra, are now in ruins. But some elements survive. At the British Museum we have a few fragments of painted plaster from the harem quarters of an Abbasid caliph, which take us back into the heart of the Islamic empire of the ninth century and show us the real counterparts of the girls from the Arabian Nights. For me, these fragments have more magic than any movie. They’re haunting glances across the centuries and could themselves inspire 1,001 stories.
The little portraits are probably all of women, although some may show boys. They are fragments of larger wall-paintings, and they link us directly to medieval Iraq. In Baghdad itself hardly anything architectural survives from this great age of glory around AD 800, because the city was later destroyed by the Mongols. But luckily we can still get quite a good idea of what the Abbasid court looked like, because for almost sixty years its capital was moved seventy miles north to the brand new city of Samarra, and a lot of ancient Samarra survives.
At first sight these pictures are not very much to look at – they are really just scraps of paintings, and the largest is no bigger than a CD disc. They are drawn fairly simply, with black outlines on a yellow ochre background, with just a few sketchy lines to capture the features, but there are flecks of gold in the painting which give us a hint of their earlier opulence. Like random pieces from a jigsaw puzzle, they make it difficult to guess what the bigger picture that they once came from might have been. Indeed, they’re not all portraits – some of the fragments show animals, some show bits of clothing and bodies. But the faces that are caught here have a definite sense of personality – there’s a clear air of melancholy in the eyes, as they look out at us from their enclosed, distant world.
These small pieces of plaster were excavated by archaeologists from the ruins of the Dar al-Khilafa palace, the main residence of the caliph in Samarra and the ceremonial heart of the new purpose-built capital city. Pleasure was built into the very name of the city, which was interpreted at the court as a shortened form of ‘Surra Man Ra’a’ – ‘He who sees it is delighted’. But beneath the frolicking there were ominous undercurrents. The decision in 836 to move the court from Baghdad to Samarra was taken in order to defuse dangerous tensions between the caliph’s armed guards and the inhabitants of Baghdad – tensions that had already ignited a string of riots. Samarra was intended to provide both a haven for the court and a safe base for the caliph’s army.
The new city of Samarra was on a grand scale, with palaces gigantic by the standards of any age, built at great cost; more than 6,000 different buildings have been identified. A contemporary description gives some impression of the spectacular nature of one of palaces of the caliph, al-Mutawakkil, perhaps the greatest builder of all the Abbasids:
He made in it great pictures of gold and silver, and a great basin, whose surfacing outside and inside was plates of silver, and he put on it a tree of gold in which birds twittered and whistled … there was made for him a great throne of gold, on which were two depictions of great lions, and the steps to it had depictions of lions and eagles and other things. The walls of the palace were covered inside and outside with mosaics and gilded marble.
This was building mania with a purpose: this city of palaces and barracks was intended to dazzle visitors, to be the unforgettable centre of the huge Islamic empire.
Hidden away in a warren of small rooms in the caliph’s palace were the harem quarters with wall-paintings showing scenes of enjoyment and entertainment, and it’s here that our portrait fragments were found. They show us the faces of the caliph’s slaves and servants, the women and possibly the boys of his intimate world and of his pleasures. The women housed in these rooms were slaves, but slaves who enjoyed considerable privileges. Dr Amira Bennison, who teaches Islamic studies at the University of Cambridge, comments on the portraits that have survived:
They hint at the entertainment the caliphs enjoyed, which would have ranged from having salon sessions with intellectuals and religious scholars, to lighter events where characters such as those depicted in the wall-paintings, dancing or singing girls, would have performed before the rulers. One thing that is important to note is that these kinds of women were very highly trained – a little similar to geishas. To become part of the caliph’s household – a better word than harem – was actually something women could aspire to, and if you were of humble origins but you were good at singing or dancing, and you trained properly, this was very much a career move.
Here, there could be self-indulgence and boisterousness. Caliph al-Mutawakkil’s sense of humour doesn’t seem to have been especially sophisticated, and he repeatedly had a court poet, Abu al-’Ibar, catapulted into one of his ornamental ponds. Less happily, a tale in the Arabian Nights records al-Mutawakkil’s assassination following a night of music performed by his singing girls. After the drunken caliph quarrelled violently with his son, so the story tells us, his Turkish soldiers killed him, while the girls and the courtiers scattered in horror.
That story from the Arabian Nights is true. Al-Mutawakkil was indeed murdered by his Turkish commanders in 861, and his death was the beginning of the end for Samarra as a capital. Within a decade the army had
left the city, and Baghdad resumed its status as capital, leaving the palace at Samarra as a decaying ghost. The court lions were put down and the slave girls and singers of our portraits dispersed. The last coin to be struck in Samarra is dated 892.
Samarra was built at the end of the heroic days of the Abbasids and, in a sense, it is a monument to their political failure. The tensions that led to the assassination of al-Mutawakkil ultimately led to the fragmentation of the empire. A poet, exiled in the now decaying Samarra, mused elegiacally on its decline:
My acquaintance with it, when it was peopled and joyous,
Was heedless of the disasters of Time and its calamities.
There lions of a realm strutted
Around a crowned imam;
Then his Turks turned treacherous – and they were transformed
Into owls, crying of loss and destruction.
Samarra was the capital of a major empire for less than fifty years, but it is still a significant place of pilgrimage in the world of Shi’a Islam, for it is the burial place of two of the great imams. Modern Samarra also has a tragic history: in 2006 the great dome of the famous al-Askari mosque was destroyed by bombs. A year later, the archaelogical ruins of the ancient city, which include the Great Mosque with its famous spiral minaret, were recognized and protected as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.
The anonymous faces of the girls and boys of Samarra were never meant to be viewed by anyone other than the familiars of a caliph. They have survived as a rare record of the people of the Abbasid age, and they now remain to look at us, as we look at them. Ironically, and rather wonderfully, instead of the images of the grand caliphs who built Samarra we see their slaves and their servants – retrieved from Hollywood cartoon caricature to poignant historical reality.
53
Lothair Crystal
Rock crystal depicting Susanna and the Elders, probably made in Germany
AD 855–869
Royal divorces generally mean political trouble. The marital problems of Henry VIII plunged England into decades of religious strife, and when Edward VIII wanted to marry a divorced woman it caused a constitutional crisis that cost him his throne. This object is associated with a king whose protracted attempts to divorce his queen were intended to safeguard the kingdom. His failure to do so probably killed him, and it certainly led to the termination not only of his line but of his kingdom as well. The object, an engraved rock crystal, tells us his name. Written in Latin, the inscription reads: ‘Lothair, king of the Franks, caused me to be made’.
The Lothair Crystal, also known as the Susanna Crystal, is a flat disc of rock crystal about 18 centimetres (7 inches) in diameter, and carved into it is a biblical (or in some traditions an apocryphal) story in eight separate scenes, like a crystal cartoon strip. It is a story based in Babylon, where the beautiful young Susanna is the wife of a rich merchant. While she is bathing in her husband’s orchard, two older men intrude and try to bully her into having sex with them. She calls her servants for help, and the furious elders falsely claim that they saw her in the act of adultery. We then see Susanna being led away to almost certain death by stoning, but at that point the brilliant young prophet Daniel intervenes and challenges the evidence for her conviction. Separating the elders, Daniel asks each of them one searching question in a classic courtroom drama: under what kind of tree did they see Susanna having sex? The men give conflicting answers, their story is exposed as fabricated, and it is they who are stoned to death, for perjury. In the final scene Susanna is declared innocent and gives thanks to God. I asked Lord Bingham, former Lord Chief Justice and Senior Law Lord, to give us a lawyer’s perspective on the story:
Daniel did what Rumpole of the Old Bailey would do if he thought he was cross-examining witnesses who were telling lies. In real life Daniel would have been extremely lucky to have been thought to have demolished the witnesses and to demonstrate their dishonesty by asking them one question each, but the principle is quite clear, and Daniel was clearly a very skilful cross-examiner.
Each scene on the crystal is a masterpiece of miniature carving, and in every scene the artist has also found space for a small text in Latin, explaining what is going on. In the final scene is the ringing phrase Et salvatus est sanguis innoxius in die illa – ‘And that day, innocent blood was saved’. It’s around this scene that we find the text naming King Lothair.
The king who commissioned the Susanna Crystal was descended from one of the great figures of medieval Europe – Charlemagne. Around the year 800, Charlemagne, King of the Franks, had created an empire that covered most of western Europe, including northern Italy, western Germany and modern France. It was the largest state western Europe had seen since the fall of Rome, and the stability and prosperity of Charlemagne’s empire allowed a great flourishing of the arts in the years that followed. Our crystal is a magnificent example of this so-called ‘Carolingian Renaissance’.
It is a jewel that has almost always been valued. For most of its existence it was in the abbey of Waulsort, in modern Belgium, in the centre of Charlemagne’s empire. It was certainly there in the twelfth century, when the abbey’s chronicle clearly describes it:
This desirable treasure was made … at the request of the famed Lothair, King of the Franks. A beryl stone placed in the middle contains a depiction of how in Daniel, Susanna was evilly condemned by the old judges. [The stone] shows the skill of its art by the variety of its work.
It probably remained at Waulsort until French revolutionary troops looted the abbey in the 1790s. Perhaps it was they who threw the crystal – clearly made for royalty, which they despised – into the nearby River Meuse. When it was found it was cracked, but otherwise completely undamaged, because rock crystal is astonishingly tough. It is very hard and cannot be chiselled, but must be ground with abrasive powders. The whole thing would have taken an immense amount of time and great skill to work, which is why crystals like this one were such luxury objects. We don’t know what the original purpose of our Susanna Crystal was – possibly an offering to a shrine – but it was in every sense an object fit for a king.
By the time the crystal was made, Charlemagne’s empire had broken down, and the whole of north-west Europe was divided among three members of his squabbling and profoundly dysfunctional family. The squabbles ultimately resulted in the empire splitting into three parts: an eastern kingdom that would later become Germany, a western kingdom that would become France, and Lothair’s ‘Middle Kingdom’, called Lotharingia, which ran from modern Belgium down through Provence into Italy. This Middle Kingdom was always the weakest of the three, forever threatened by wicked uncles on either side. Lotharingia needed to be able to defend itself: it needed a strong king.
Rosamond McKitterick, Professor of Medieval History at Cambridge University, sets the scene:
We know almost nothing about the court of Lothair the Second, simply because most of our sources devoted to him are in two particular categories. One is made up of narrative sources describing the vulnerability of his own little kingdom in the middle of the west and the east Frankish kingdoms, where his uncles, Charles the Bald in the west and Louis the German in the east, were casting their greedy eyes upon his kingdom. The other category is much more pertinent to this crystal, because it concerns the attempts Lothair made to get rid of his wife, Theutberga. He seems to have married her very soon after he inherited the throne, even though he had a long-standing mistress called Waldrada, from whom he had a son and a daughter. When he married Theutberga, she had no children and she continued to bear no children. Lothair seems to have decided Waldrada would be a better bet. So he recruited his two bishops, of Cologne and Trier, to have the marriage annulled on the grounds of Theutberga’s incest with her brother.
Lothair’s bid to divorce his wife and marry his mistress was no self-indulgent whim: he needed to have a legitimate heir, which was his only chance to preserve his inheritance and his kingdom. But royal divorce, then as now, was political dynamite.
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nbsp; The final scenes of the crystal show the elders being stoned to death and Susannah declared innocent
The bishops of Cologne and Trier had actually obtained confessions from the queen, possibly through torture, that she had committed incest with her brother. But Theutberga appealed to the Pope, who investigated the case and declared her innocent. This was a huge dynastic setback for Lothair, but he seems to have accepted the Pope’s decision. Although he continued to try to find another way of divorcing her, he seems to have acknowledged publicly that the claims against Theutberga were groundless and that the slandered woman was entirely innocent.
Because of the strong parallels with the Susanna story, it’s always been tempting to see the crystal as connected to this royal drama. Perhaps it was made as a present for Theutberga to show Lothair’s sincerity in accepting that she was blameless – if so, it’s a kind of private statement marking a temporary truce in their marital hostilities. But aspects of the way in which the final scene is treated hint that it is almost certainly something much more significant. In the last scene, the artist deviates from the biblical text and shows Susanna being declared innocent by a king sitting in judgement, and the inscription specifically names Lothair. The message is clear: one of the key duties of the king is to ensure that justice is done – in short, the king must secure and respect the rule of law, even at great personal cost to himself. Justice is almost the defining royal virtue.
A History of the World in 100 Objects Page 30
