Such is the story of the Lombard Duchy, told by Georgius Cedrenus, and romantic as it is, and closely as it recalls the embassy of Regulus to the Carthaginians, we may safely accept it as authentic in the main. To complete the picture, it must be remembered that Italy and the south were now overrun in all directions by hosts of Moslems, that the sea was at their mercy, and that they had stained the waters of the Mediterranean with Christian blood from Gibraltar to the Bosphorus, and from the Adriatic to the mouth of the Nile. We cannot but see them in our imagination as dark-skinned barbarians, black-browed, turbaned to the eyes, lean and fierce, bringing with them the strength and endurance which the desert breeds, and clothing themselves in the purple and gold of a vanquished civilization. We cannot but think of them as more like Huns than Vandals, as more like devils than Huns. Yet this was the age of Harun al Rashid, whose court in Bagdad delighted in every luxury while exploring the secrets of every science; and if Harun eight times invaded the Byzantine empire, it may be remembered that it had become the plaything of the evil empress Irene whose deeds have left upon her the marks of mankind’s execration, while Harun will forever and not undeservedly bear the surname of the Just. Had the Mohammedan Empire been united under such a man, controlled by such a heart, and directed by such an intelligence, and had a worthy successor taken the place of Harun on the throne of the Abbassides, the power of the Moslems might have been consolidated into a despotism of the world, at a time when Christianity was divided against itself. But while the Empire of Constantinople was as yet separated from its final destruction by an interval of six hundred years, the newly risen domination of the Mohammedans was already broken up into small powers, of which the sultans and emirs did not hesitate to make war upon each other almost as readily as upon the Christians. The khalifs ruled indeed in Bagdad, and Harun had destroyed a Byzantine army each time that a Byzantine ruler had refused to pay him tribute; but the khalifate had lost its power in the West, the house of Aghlab and the Fatimites had become independent rulers in Africa, and the Emir of Sicily soon made himself as independent as they. Still farther west the Mohammedans of Spain had founded a kingdom which was to defy the armies of Christianity even longer than Constantinople was destined to withstand the attacks of the Moslems. But the chiefs of these divided kingdoms, though sometimes highly gifted and acquainted with the advantages of civilization, were in reality little more than robbers of tremendous power; depredation and pillage were the business of their lives, and religion was a sufficient excuse for both. Civilization was but an amusement fit for short intervals of unwelcome peace. It was their nature to delight in the discoveries of astronomy, the investigations of medicine, and in the study of the Aristotelian philosophy, and most of the sciences are indebted in some measure to their acuteness and spasmodic industry; but to all such pleasures, to intellectual pastimes of the noblest kind, as well as to the refinements of a sensuous existence which happily is without parallel in modern times — to these things the true Saracen preferred the din of ringing blows exchanged in battle, the hideous carnage of the hard-won field, the heaps of Christian slain, and the confusion of victories that spoiled the world in a day.
They had won the East, they had conquered the West, the central basin of the Mediterranean was theirs, and the time came when they aspired to seize Rome itself. Collecting the squadrons of their pirate vessels into a fleet manned by a host of fighters who had survived a hundred deaths, they appeared at the mouth of the Tiber, and ate up land like locusts. Nevertheless, the worn-out and tottering walls of Rome sufficed to discourage an army that was more warlike than military, and was little accustomed to the orderly operations of a siege. They plundered the basilicas of Saint Peter on the one side and of Saint Paul on the other, but they made no attempt to enter Rome, and presently retired to their congenial south, bearing with them the spoils of the most magnificent temples in Christendom. They might have taken Rome with ease, and could have established the Mohammedan dominion amid the ashes of the Roman Empire, but they neglected an opportunity which they had failed to estimate at its true value; and when another Moslem host came against Rome a few years afterwards, in 849, the energy of Pope Leo the Fourth had built up the ruined defences, and not only were the walls standing throughout their entire circuit, but they were also protected at the most important points by fifteen great towers, one of which, still unshaken, was occupied by Leo the Thirteenth as a summer residence one thousand and fifty years later. To complete the defence, the city was provided with new gates made of the most massive timber. Nor was this all. The wise and untiring pontiff had formed valuable alliances with the states of Naples, Gaeta, and Amalfi, and the pirate squadrons of the Moslems were opposed before the port of Ostia by a well-ordered fleet. They had already been repulsed with loss when a storm arose, such as no man of those times could remember, and the ships of the invaders were driven to destruction upon the dangerous lee shore. The rocks and islands with which Gibbon adorned the coast at that point had no existence except in his imagination, or in some source of information other than those he names; but in their stead there exists a real danger quite as terrible to mariners. The long low shore of the Roman Campagna is accompanied from end to end, at a cable’s length or less, by a bar, over which there is less than •a fathom of water in calms, and upon which, in southwesterly gales, the surf breaks with enormous force; and therein those ‘sons of Satan,’ as Anastasius the Librarian calls the Moslems, utterly perished, both themselves and their vessels.
This was the last attempt made by them to extend their power northwards, and when the Saracens at length entered Rome as conquerors, they came as the soldiers of a Norman ruler, to establish the power of a pope.
Though it is true that the Greek power fell in Sicily when the Mohammedans took Castrogiovanni, the most important date which ocrs for a long time is that of the destruction of Syracuse in 878. That city had been the centre and fountain head of Sicilian life during more than fourteen hundred years; the great struggles in which the fate of the island was concerned had almost all been fought for the possession of its chief jewel and treasure. The Moslems took it, crushed it, and threw away its fragments as though it had been a worthless thing to them, which might easily have been of value to their enemies. When the emir marched westwards with his train of captives, his caravan of plunder, and his load of gold, he left behind him a heap of smoking ruins, among which lay the unburied corpses of a murdered population. Never again should the fair walls of a great city mirror themselves in the still waters of the wonderful harbour; never more should Christian maidens come down with their earthen jars to take the cool water from Arethusa’s spring; not again should the walls below Achradina reëcho the blows of the shipwright’s axe and hammer, or the rasping of the busy saw; nor, on the brink of the deep quarry, wherein handsome Athenians had died of hunger and thirst and sickness, should the holy monks chaunt matins and evensong in the cloisters of Saint John. Men should not go out from the city, so long as history was to last, to cut the great papyrus at the roots and bring it home to make books for the wise man’s pen. No living thing was left amid the universal death, and there was to be no possible renewal of life thereafter. The Mohammedan had made his home far to westward in the Golden Shell, and he meant not to leave behind him any good place wherein his enemy might take refuge. He returned indeed not many years afterwards and brought ships into the harbour of Syracuse and built up the walls of Ortygia, and the sea wall of Achradina; but it was not that the city he had built might live again, it was rather because no power he possessed could destroy the safe port which nature had made, and he found himself obliged to prevent others from taking that which he would not use himself. His heart was in the western city, and he loved it and made it his own, and beautified it with all the skill he could command.
Thenceforward Palermo became what Syracuse had been, the centre of the island’s history and the chief goal of each succeeding invader. Syracuse lived again, and lives to‑day, a military stronghold, a nava
l station, a commercial town; but its life as a source of power and as a fountain of individuality was arrested forever on the fatal day. Much of it that was beautiful fell to the base uses of commerce, and the money-changer’s booth was set up in the ruined corner of the matchless Greek temple; where Agathocles had feasted in tents of fine linen and purple silk rose the rough defences of a castle that was already mediaeval, that was not a glory but a menace, a thing not of beauty but of fear. On the height the great wall of Dionysius still stood in part, because it would have taken human hands a year to destroy what human hands had built in twenty days; and the indestructible fortress of Euryalus still amazes the traveller with its labyrinth of well-hewn passages, its perfectly designed and marvellously preserved embrasures, and its ramparts of solid rock. But the five cities upon which Marcellus looked down with tearful eyes have sunk out of sight, never to rise again, and a small Italian town, crowded together and irregularly cut by quiet little streets, covers the island, and extends over a few hundred yards of the opposite peninsula. That is all there is left of her that rivalled Athens and Alexandria, and that once far outdid Rome in extent, in wealth, and in beauty.
No such melancholy reflections assail the traveller who ascends the heights of Monreale and pauses, where the road sweeps up the last turn, to look back upon the distant splendour of Palermo. The scene is indeed full of associations that bring back the past, and evoke the grave and terrible memories of an elder time. But that past is not dead beneath a funeral pall of ruin through which the eye guesses only at the outline of the fallen limbs. It is alive still, clothed in royal robes of beauty, and calmly resting in a dignified repose. From the height a keen-eyed man can descry the lofty fortress by the Porta Nuova, wherein Roger the Norman held his court, as the Saracen emirs had held theirs before him; and the vast cathedral that holds the tombs of emperors and kings; the bastions of the great walls are gone, but in their stead there are the graceful outlines of a hundred churches against the broad sea beyond, soft against the softer sky. Between the city and the hill on which the beholder stands, and round by his right and up the valley, the Golden Shell is bright with flower and yellow fruit, and rich with the deep foliage of the lemon and the orange; here and there, among the taller cypresses and spreading pines, the white walls of a half-shaded villa speak of that cool retirement and peace which every Italian loves, and as the glow of evening fades, the sweet and melancholy note of distant bells is borne up on the scented air.
Palermo is not dead, like Syracuse: its ruins do not stretch far and wide beyond its shrunk walls like those of Girgenti, cropping up in vineyards and olive groves and in scattered farmhouses, each a mile from the other; it is there still, as it was there a thousand years ago, in the third century of the Hejira, when Ibn Haukal came thither about a hundred years after the captivity of Theodosius, the monk.
This Ibn Haukal was a merchant of Bagdad, who left that city in the year 943, and travelled through many Mohammedan countries, during more than thirty years. At that time, the first great Mussulman Empire had begun to fall to pieces, from lack of uniform organization, while Mohammedan energy was still as active as ever, and the Saracens in Sicily fought to become independent of the African domination, under which they had got possession of the island; but the turbulent Sicilians had long been fighting with each other, and the rivalry of the principal cities had led to endless bloodshed; and it was not until Palermo and Girgenti made up their differences, and united to make common cause against the African emir, that the latter conceded to the island the freedom it desired, retaining a more or less empty suzerainty over it. Soon after this event Ibn Haukal visited Palermo. He came on the morrow of a great struggle, before all the damage done by the civil war had been repaired, when the people were still suffering from past evils, and when the aristocracy, which had been chiefly responsible for the internal trouble so Sicily, still kept aloof from the people, in scornful isolation; for of all races, the Arabs were always the most aristocratic. He describes a city surrounded by most formidable walls, around which were built four suburbs, each of which had a strongly individual character that distinguished it from the others; and the walled portion occupied what is the middle of Palermo to‑day, and was called the Kasr, the fort, and Sicilians still call the main street the ‘Cassaro,’ though it was named the ‘Toledo,’ by one of the Spanish viceroys, and has of course been officially christened ‘Corso Vittorio Emmanuele,’ since the annexation of Sicily. But it is safe to say that its old name will remain in common use, no matter how often the island changes hands. The Saracen’s seal is upon it, and the impression is indelible.
In the days of the Bagdad merchant there was ‘a great Friday mosque’ in this quarter ‘which was formerly a church of the Christians,’ which had been first built by Saint Gregory, and stood on the site of the Norman cathedral: and Ibn Haukal was told that it contained the body of Aristotle, who had been held in the highest veneration by the Christians, and was always ready to answer their prayers for rain, for recovery from sickness, and for every ill that causes man to offer prayers to Allah, whose name be praised. The body, it was said, was in a coffin suspended between heaven and earth, and Ibn Haukal says that he saw a large chest which might perhaps have contained it.
The Kasr was the abode of merchants; the great suburb, called the Khalessah, now the Kalsa, or Gausa, contained the sultan’s palace, and the habitations of his courtiers; there were also baths there, a mosque of average dimensions, the sultan’s prison — he appears to have kept one for his own purposes — the arsenal, and the government offices. The Khalessah had walls of its own, and it lay between the Kasr and the sea, to the east of the present harbour. It is not easy to define the other ancient quarters, owing to the great changes in the topography of Palermo caused by the gradual filling of the two inlets that once extended far into the city, divided by a tongue of land of which the extremity still projects into the modern harbour. Ibn Haukal tells us, however, that the great markets, and the shops of the oil sellers, were all situated southeast of the Kasr, between the Saracen Norman castle at Porta Nuova and the mosque of Ibn Saklab which stood in the place that was called, until recently, Piazza della Moschitta. Here, also, and outside the walls, were the stalls of the money-changers, and the shops of the drug sellers, tailors, armourers, and braziers. The cornº market was also beyond the circuit of the walls. The merchant of Bagdad observed that there were a hundred and fifty butchers’ shops in the city, and on visiting the butchers’ mosque, — for they had one of their own, — he calculated that more than seven thousand persons connected with the trade were assembled at prayers, for he counted thirty-six ranks, in each of which there were two hundred people. Those who have been present in the mosque of Saint Sophia, in Constantinople, during the great prayer meetings that terminate the month of Ramadhan, will doubtless remember the extraordinarily precise order maintained by the ranks of worshippers, which makes it an easy matter to calculate their numbers. It has been estimated, by those who have commented the merchant’s accounts of the city, that the population amounted at that time to three hundred thousand souls. It exceeds that figure at the present time.
Ibn Haukal was much struck by the great number of mosques he saw in all parts of the city, and he observes that the greater part of them were ‘standing with their roofs, their walls, and their doors, and were actually in use’; a statement which shows that even a thousand years ago the Mohammedans were accustomed to allow their old mosques to fall to ruins when new ones were built, just as they continue to do in our own times; but he adds that the mosques of Palermo were places of meeting for ‘all the wise men and the students of the city, who gather in them to exchange and increase their information.’ In vivid contrast with these resorts of the learned, were the so‑called ‘rabats,’ built by the water’s edge, outside the city, and which were the quarters of the wild militia that alternately begged and fought for a living, ‘a band composed of cutthroats and ruffians, of men who know no law, and have grown old in
a disorderly life, and of corrupt youths who have learned to pretend piety in order to extort charity from the faithful, and to insult honest women, — wretches who live in the rabat because they are so vile and universally despised that they could find no refuge elsewhere.’ The commentator on this unpleasant picture remarks that the number of these irregular fighters was large at the time of Ibn Haukal’s visit, because the new government of the Kalibites was actively pushing the war of extermination against Christians. The passage throws some light on the nature of the atrocities described by the monk, Theodosius, and on the composition of the Mohammedan armies in those times. The ruffians seen in the rabats by Ibn Haukal were, doubtless, the lineal descendants of those who had sacked Syracuse a hundred years earlier.
He dwells at great length on the nine gates by which the city was entered, but of most of which it is now impossible to determine the situation. The most famous, he says, was the sea gate, and of this one we know that it was somewhere in the lower part of the modern Cassaro, or Toledo, that it was destroyed in 1564, in order to widen and straighten that thoroughfare, and that it was ornamented with long Arabic inscriptions in the Cufic character which gave rise to much controversy. For centuries the letters were believed to be Chaldean, and the writing was interpreted to mean that the tower of the gate was built by Sapho, the son of Eliphaz, the son of Esau, the brother of Jacob, the son of Isaac, the son of Abraham. Consequently it was believed even by learned men, that Palermo had been founded by the great-great‑grandson of Abraham, a supposition which, for its absurdity, quite equals the story of the veneration of Aristotle’s body by the Christians, which was told to Ibn Haukal. He, however, does not even mention the supposed origin of the gate in question, but merely calls it ‘the most famous.’
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 1436
