by Colin Wells
Tax structure, currency, civic administration—from Egypt to Antioch the rhythms of official life generally kept the same or a similar flavor, except that Arab Muslim commanders replaced the old imperial officials at the top. Numerous Arab loanwords from Greek reflect the wholesale continuation of the old institutions under the new overlords, as the Arabs simply transliterated words from Greek that had no Arabic equivalent. The Byzantine poll tax called the demosia became al-haraj ad-dimusi; taxable farmland or pakton became baqt; the officials who collected the taxes, the grapheis and the meizon, became the garafisis and mazun, respectively; and the currency, the Byzantine denarius, became the dinar. Similar phenomena can be traced in former Persian lands, though again the fact that the Umayyad power center lay in former Byzantine territory weighted things in Byzantium's favor in these early days.
Another sort of impact took place on the levels of folk culture and artistic expression, where oversight gave way to apprenticeship. As nomadic Arab tribesmen arrived to garrison their outposts in the wake of conquest, Ibn Khaldun says, they exchanged settled ways for their old Bedouin life. Though at first they acted as overlords to the former Byzantines and Persians, eventually the Arabs were tutored by their civilized subjects in the skills necessary for the sedentary existence.
As with administrative matters, this process left its traces in Greek loanwords that found their way into Arabic in areas from domestic life (household items, furniture, cooking, clothing, cleaning, jewelry) to agriculture (animals, crops, other plants, containers), commerce (measures, ships, other nautical matters), literature (writing tools and methods), arts and crafts, and religion.
Scholars have also traced Byzantine and Persian influences in Arab music and painting, both of which Ibn Khaldun says the Arabs learned from their new subjects.∗ And Byzantine law was taken up by early Islamic qadis or judges, contributing toward the body of jurisprudence that would become the sharia, or Islamic law. Byzantine continuity and Arab imitation were so pervasive that modern historians have called the Umayyad caliphate of Damascus a “Neo-Byzantine empire.”
Constantinople: The Arabs’ Unfulfilled Dream of Conquest
When Muawiyah was still governor of Syria, having found himself checked in Asia Minor by land, he had begun building up the Arabs’ naval fleet, aggressively challenging Byzantine mastery of the sea. With a fleet in place, and with Byzantine naval dominance a thing of the past by the 670s, the Arabs could raid coastal Asia Minor, establishing garrisons as they went, and work their way closer to the Byzantine capital by that route. By this time, too, Muawiyah was attacking Byzantine forces in North Africa and Sicily by sea. In 674, the Arab fleet entered the Bosporus, blockading Constantinople and raiding right up to the walls. The blockade and the raids lasted four years, with the Byzantine navy penned into the Golden Horn lest it be destroyed by the stronger Arab fleet.
Finally the Byzantines risked battle, sending out ships armed with their secret weapon, a napalm-like substance called Greek Fire, which scorched some Arab ships, probably frightening more than it harmed. But the Arabs were demoralized by now, and they headed for home. The fleet was wrecked in a storm on its way, and most of the ships and men were lost. At the same time, the Byzantines badly defeated the Arabs in several land battles. Forced to negotiate for a truce—according to which the Arabs agreed to pay tribute to the Byzantines, an indignity that must have rankled— Muawiyah died the following year, in 680.
Before his death, Muawiyah had publicly designated his son Yazid as his successor, thus breaking with earlier practice and adopting the principle of dynastic succession. Yazid faced big trouble from the beginning. The Byzantines were counterattacking, backed by Christian guerrillas in Syria, and the Berbers of North Africa soon also rebelled against the governor that Yazid appointed there. The old Muslim families in Medina let it be known that they opposed Yazid, encouraging Ali's son Husayn to rebel in Kufah. Yazid's forces easily crushed Husayn and his small band of supporters, surrounding them in the desert at Karbala and, when they refused to surrender, killing them all.∗
Yazid died unexpectedly in 683. Further chaos ensued, but eventually another branch of the Umayyad family arose under Muawiyah's cousin Marwan, who claimed the caliphate, and Marwan's son Abd al-Malik, who succeeded his father in 685. It took still more bloodshed, but by 692— the year after he completed construction on the Dome of the Rock—Abd al-Malik had vanquished his rivals, subdued the Shiites and other rebels, gone back on the offensive against the Byzantines, and won general recognition as the rightful caliph, restoring the Umayyad dynasty to full glory. If the Dome of the Rock said that Islam was here to stay, it also said the same thing about the Umayyads, and about Abd al-Malik himself, who had fought so hard to reestablish their power.
With Abd al-Malik begins the High Caliphate, a period of some two and a half centuries during which Arab imperial might reached its zenith. Abd al-Malik's assertive Dome of the Rock notwithstanding, the Umayyads would preside only over the first half century or so of this imperial and cultural flowering. The real florescence of Islamic civilization would occur under their successors, the Abbasids, and it would be centered not in Byzantine-flavored Damascus but in the new Arab-built capital of Baghdad, far to the east in former Persian territory. From a Neo-Byzantine empire, the High Caliphate would evolve into a Neo-Sassanid empire, as Persian cultural influences rose to shape the larger outlines of Islamic civilization and the earlier Byzantine framework fell away.
Yet, it was still within the Byzantine context that the first scaffolding was put in place. The Dome of the Rock was not an isolated projection of Islamic and Arab pride but part of a larger, coherent program by which Abd al-Malik proposed to declare Islam's and the Arabs’ arrival, to differentiate Islamic civilization from its Byzantine sources even while continuing to draw on them.
Other aspects of Abd al-Malik's program included the replacement of Greek by Arabic as the language of government, and the minting of coins that, for the first time, broke away from their Byzantine models and took on an Islamic look and feel. Up to then, the Umayyads had struck coins that copied the Byzantine ones right down to the portraits of Christ or the emperor on one side, the only concession to Islam being the removal of the arm of the Christian cross on the other side (leaving just the upright). Now Abd al-Malik replaced such emblems with Koranic inscriptions, though the basic denominations remained the same.
One reason that the earlier coins had had to look Byzantine was so that they would be accepted by the Byzantines themselves, whether in tribute payments or in commercial transactions. As it became clear that the Arab conquests were not going to be reversed, the Byzantines would increasingly be forced to accommodate the Arabs, even copying their coins in turn, while the Arabs would realize that they were the ones who could throw their weight around. Byzantium was entering its Dark Age, shorn of its wealthiest provinces and pushed onto the defensive not just by the Arabs but by other new enemies as well. Its relative poverty would stand in stark contrast to the vigorous prosperity of the rising Arab empire, which now controlled many times more manpower, resources, and land.
In Byzantium, the destabilizing shock of such realities was reflected in a series of coups and countercoups that rocked the Byzantine empire starting during Abd al-Malik's reign. And at the height of this instability, as the Byzantines fought out a devastating civil war between rival claimants to the throne, the Umayyads once again sought the goal that had so frustratingly eluded the great Muawiyah.
After all, the Prophet himself had predicted that Muslim armies would one day occupy Rum (Rome), as the Arabs called both Constantinople and its empire. Though alarming, the earlier attempt had amounted to little more than an extended series of raids, backed by a naval blockade, during which simultaneous efforts were undertaken against the Byzantines and other enemies in other theaters of war. This time it would be different. This time, the Arabs’ full strength would be brought to bear in a concerted and sustained effort to capture the Byzantines�
�� capital and put an end to their empire altogether.
The Umayyads’ second siege of Constantinople was planned by Abd al-Malik's son and successor al-Walid, begun in 717 by al-Walid's brother Sulayman, and continued by their cousin Umar II, who succeeded Sulayman after the lat-ter's death that same year. The invading force reportedly comprised 120,000 men and 1,800 ships.
From the start, however, things went badly for the Arabs. By the time the planning was over, so was the Byzantine civil war, and the new emperor who emerged as victor, Leo III, was a gifted, experienced, and resolute commander who had bested the Arabs a number of times in the past. In addition, the winter of 717-18 was unusually cold and harsh, catching the Arabs by surprise and decimating them through illness and exposure. The Arabs were also hampered by the fact that many of the sailors on the ships sent to relieve the besieging forces in the spring of 718 were Christians from Egypt and North Africa. Having tasted Arab rule for nearly a century, they were no longer so well disposed toward the Arabs as their ancestors had been at the time of the conquests, and many came over to the Byzantine side. Finally, the Byzantines were assisted by their sometime enemies the Bulgars, who swept down upon the Arab forces investing the city by land, killing thousands. In August 718, just over a year after the siege began, Umar called for the Arabs to retreat. Once again, on its homeward voyage the Arab fleet was wrecked in a storm.
The Umayyads’ Syrian power base and its nearness to Byzantium had worked to the advantage of the early Umayyad caliphs such as Muawiyah and Abd al-Malik. Muawiyah had risen to the caliphate in the first place largely because he was governor of the province that was on the front line of the struggle with Byzantium—he himself had conquered the lands he ruled as governor. This early success, however, held the Umayyads hostage with a logic that pointed inexorably to a single outcome. They had to vanquish the Byzantines and replace them as overlords of Constantinople, which was clearly their only real choice of imperial capital.
The failure of the second siege made it clear that this was not going to happen. As a consequence, the Umayyads’ forward momentum ground to a halt. They were left to chill slowly in the long shadow of a great capital city that would never be theirs.
Byzantium's stubborn survival has another set of implications. In the West, too, the Arab advance posed a grave threat. Having occupied North Africa and Spain, invading Muslim armies were turned back only in central France, at the battle of Poitiers in 732.∗ But had Byzantium fallen a decade and half earlier, the Arabs might have been able to mount a simultaneous invasion from the East, catching Europe in a pincer. The outcome might just possibly have been a Muslim Europe. Constantinople's great walls protected more than just a city, more even than just an empire. Although this card can be overplayed, Byzantium was a bulwark for Europe in the East.
By the 740s the Umayyads’ nearness to Byzantium had turned from an advantage to a liability, from a harbinger of victory to a nagging reminder of unfulfilled promise. The failure to take Constantinople helped push the Islamic world's center of gravity eastward, into Persian territory. Paradoxically, however, only after such a move could the Arabs open themselves to a whole new influence from Byzantium: the legacy of ancient Greece.
*The caliph (khalifa, meaning “successor” in Arabic) was the successor of the prophet Muhammad and claimed religious and political leadership of the Muslims.
*The Avars were a group of Turkic nomads who dominated the Balkans in the sixth and early seventh centuries.
*Founded by Cyrus the Great in the sixth century BC, the Achaemenid dynasty ruled the first Persian empire until it was conquered by Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC.
*The Abbasids were the second imperial Arab dynasty, founded in 750 and extinguished by the invading Mongols in 1258.
*According to Ibn Khaldun, before the conquests the Arabs had not known singing, which they now discovered. Pre-Islamic Arabs had cultivated only oral poetry, which was carried over into the Islamic period through recitation of the Koran.
*Even more than the assassination of Ali, Husayn's martyrdom fixed in place the Shiites’ resentment and sense of guilt (Shiites still ritually flog themselves for not having come to Husayn's rescue).
*By the Franks under Charles, called Charles Martel (“Charles the Hammer”) for the victory. Charles, not a king but an official of the crumbling Merovingian dynasty, used the prestige from this victory to found a new dynasty, the Carolingian. His grandson Charlemagne would expand its dominions to rival Byzantium as a “Roman” empire.
Chapter Seven
The House of Wisdom
uring the High Caliphate, Islam claimed a place as the world's most vital, expansive civilization. No longer were the Arab settlers in the conquered lands isolated in their garrisons, an alien presence imposing an alien rule, aloof from the local population and seeking to cultivate Islam apart from the peoples they ruled. Over a vast and prosperous area extending from Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq through Syria, Egypt, North Africa, and Spain, Arabs now began blending with local populations. At the same time, the local people—Christians, Zoroastrians, Jews, pagans—began converting to Islam in greater numbers.
As the weight of the Islamic world shifted eastward, Umayyad leadership was challenged by the Abbasids, a powerful clan in the former Persian territory of Iraq. In February 750, Abbasid and Umayyad forces met in battle at the river Zab, a tributary of the Tigris in northern Iraq, and the Abbasids won decisively. The Umayyad caliph Marwan II fled, dying soon after, and the Abbasid leader al-Saffah—who had already been proclaimed as caliph by his followers the previous year—was confirmed in power.
Al-Saffah founded the Abbasid state, but he died after ruling only four years. He was succeeded by his younger brother al-Mansur, who immediately faced a rash of rebellions and challengers.
An experienced commander, still vigorous in his forties when he became caliph, al-Mansur had little real difficulty putting down the rebellions as they arose, but he couldn't keep new ones from erupting. He needed a capital, a center of gravity for the turbulent cities of the Abbasid heartland from which he drew his power. As its location, he chose a place on the Tigris River where it approaches close to the Euphrates, not far from the old Persian capital of Ctesiphon. Al-Mansur called his new capital Madinat as-Salam, “city of peace;” it soon became better known by its Persian name of Baghdad.
“The Most Prosperous City in the World”
Al-Mansur chose his site for the same two reasons that had led Constantine to choose Byzantium: it lay at the junction of rich trade routes, and it was, so he thought, highly defensible, nestled as it was between two wide rivers. Unlike Constantine, al-Mansur was only half right.
It certainly was a superb site for trade. Ships came up the Tigris by way of the Persian Gulf from Arabia, East Africa, and India, or downriver from Kurdistan with goods from Azerbaijan and Armenia. The nearby Euphrates brought merchandise and travelers from the west: Syria, Egypt, North Africa, Byzantium. Baghdad also lay athwart the Silk Road to China, which ran eastward through the Persian heartlands of Isfahan and Khorasan. Declaring his intention to build “the most prosperous city in the world,” al-Mansur predicted that his new capital would long reign supreme as a glittering diadem for the Arabs’ new far-flung dominions.
But rivers can be bridged and crossed. Because of al-Mansur's misjudgment on this score not a trace of his unique original plan remains today: the Round City, a perfect circle over a mile across, circumscribed by thick, high walls that have long since vanished, with a domed central palace complex that was ignored by al-Mansur's successors well before it fell to ruin in the thirteenth century, when the city was sacked by the Mongols. The famous green dome was crowned by a statue of a horseman carrying a spear, which was said to face in the direction of the next threat to the caliph's rule. The legend is a giveaway. For all their fabulous wealth and glorious cultural patronage, the Abbasid caliphs forever faced challenges to their legitimacy and power. The Round City was to be Baghda
d's heart, the home of the caliph, his administrators, his slaves, his soldiers. It cannot even be located with confidence within modern Baghdad.
Outside it lay the rest of the city, spreading out on both sides of the winding Tigris, which was spanned by a series of pontoon bridges. At first al-Mansur wanted to put the markets inside the Round City. He was advised against it by a visiting Byzantine ambassador, who warned the caliph that his enemies would use the pretext of commerce to enter the walls and spy out his secrets. No one could know the ins and outs of espionage better than a Byzantine ambassador; the markets were moved. The biggest was in the southern district of Karkh, a bewildering but tightly organized maze of stalls and stands on the west bank of the Tigris, where each specialty was firmly staked out in its own separate domain.
(Al-Mansur ordered the butchers’ market placed farthest from the palace, averring that butchers have dull wits and sharp knives.) Between Karkh and the Round City lay another bustling market district, Karkh's rival Sharqiya, which was said to have had a hundred bookshops.
The Arab histories of Baghdad are full of accounts of overawed Byzantine ambassadors to the caliphal court. Cataloguing the wonders that the Byzantines encountered on their entry into the city and rehearsing their predictable amazement became a standard way of dramatizing Baghdad's splendor. One ambassador in the early tenth century was held up for months as the caliph finished redecorating. He was then conducted between endless ranks of assembled troops and taken through a long underground passage into the palace, where he was paraded in front of the thousands of eunuchs, chamberlains, and African slaves who staffed it. In the treasury he saw the caliph's gold and jewels all arranged specially for display. And several decades before Liudprand of Cremona was awed in Constantinople by the emperor's golden tree and mechanical birds, this Byzantine ambassador to Baghdad had the same experience in the caliph's throne room, right down to the twittering birds. It has been suggested that the unnamed ambassador brought the idea back with him. But similar devices (which are called automata) had been known in the ancient world, and modern historians aren't sure who got the idea from whom.
