Sailing from Byzantium

by Colin Wells

  Baghdad's foundation coincides with the low point of Byzantine morale during the Dark Age. Classical learning had all but disappeared, and even religious literature virtually dried up as the empire went onto a permanent war footing. Not an inch less devout but stripped down now for action, the Byzantines went so far as to give up their beloved icons. Leo III, the emperor who successfully brought Constantinople through the Arab siege of 717-18, was the first to impose Iconoclasm on his reluctant subjects, tearing down icons from churches and other public places, and discouraging their use in private worship.

  His son Constantine V, an even more ardent Iconoclast, went further and actually destroyed the religious pictures. As a consequence, nearly all surviving Byzantine icons are from later periods, when the icons were restored, and when Constantine V himself was given the disrespectful epithet Copronymus, “shit-named,” which supposedly arose from an unexpected incident during his baptism. Though he was one of Byzantium's greatest warrior-emperors, Constantine V Copronymus would be reviled by generations of outraged Orthodox icon venerators.

  The Judaic scriptural ban on graven images had always provided ammunition for Christians who objected to religious pictures. Such objections aside, Iconoclasm's real justification was that icons had failed to bring victory against the Muslims, who themselves were known for banning human images in religious art. It seemed God was punishing the empire for having wandered into the error of idolatry in the age before the Arabs, when icons had jumped into public prominence. In place of the discredited icon, Byzantine armies now began marching under the stark, simple cross, an austere symbol for an austere time.

  Iconoclasm was agonizing for the empire, but the problem was that it seemed to work. Throughout the Iconoclast period, with uncanny consistency emperors who supported it (like Constantine V) won battles, while those who temporarily restored the icons immediately started losing.∗ The most impassioned and eloquent defense of icons came not from within the empire but from Umayyad Syria, where John of Damascus, son of a Greek tax collector, wrote tracts justifying icon veneration; his main theological point was to distinguish between venerating the icon for what it represented and actually worshipping the image itself. Later, John of Damascus would himself be venerated as one of Orthodoxy's great hero-saints. But at the time icons had acquired a suspicious air of weakness, softness, femininity. The two rulers who most conspicuously championed the icons during this era were both empresses, neither of whom enjoyed much military success against the Arabs.

  Despite the imbalance in power and wealth between them, the Byzantines remained dug in, always the Arabs’ stubborn opponents and the chief object of their competitive hostility. Almost every year, the Arabs would send out spring and summer raids from Syria or Armenia over the border into Byzantine Asia Minor. Yet, high-level embassies constantly traveled between Baghdad and Constantinople, and for some time a lurching cooperation brought Arabs and Byzantines together in joint rule over the island of Cyprus.

  Constant skirmishing along the frontier bred a tough warrior aristocracy in the borderlands, where Byzantine and Arab culture blended, and where opposing warlords had more in common with each other than with their rulers back in Baghdad or Constantinople. One such was Diogenes, a local Byzantine commander famous for his valor, who perished in battle against the raiding army of the caliph Harun ar-Rashid, al-Mansur's grandson, just north of the Cilician Gates in the year 786.∗ It is thought that this Diogenes inspired oral poets to celebrate his feats, and that the resulting verses gave rise to what has been described as the Byzantine national epic, a long two-part poem called Digenes Akritas.

  In the first part, a dashing Arab emir kidnaps the beautiful daughter of a Byzantine general, then falls in love with her and converts to Christianity. Their son is Basil, a half-Arab, half-Byzantine also known as Digenes Akritas, which means “two-blooded border guard.” His exploits are told in the second part:

  And when the well-born Digenes the fair

  Himself came to the measure of his prime

  And among men was counted a right man;

  Then on a day he sprang to horse and rode,

  Took up the club and spear he had,

  Gathered his company and took them with him.

  Later Digenes meets the emperor himself in the borderlands near the northern Euphrates. The emperor praises the young man's prowess and offers him whatever he would like as a reward. The pious hero replies, as all such do, that the emperor's love is enough for him, and besides, he knows that the emperor has an expensive army to maintain:

  So I beseech your glorious majesty:

  Love him who is obedient, pity the poor,

  Deliver the oppressed from malefactors,

  Forgive those who unwittingly make blunders,

  And heed no slanders, nor accept injustice,

  Sweep heretics out, confirm the orthodox.

  At almost exactly the same time on the other side of the Arab empire, skirmishing between Arabs and Franks resulted in a very similar poem, the Song of Roland, about a faithful knight of Charlemagne's who dies saving the army from the Arabs.

  Such rugged but pious chivalry contrasts sharply with the dangerous, decadent sensuality of Harun's Baghdad, at least as described so memorably in works such as the Arabian Nights, which is actually thought to give a fairly accurate picture. By about 800, when the celebrated Harun was nearing the end of his life, Baghdad had grown into a thriving metropolis of around one million people. It gave every indication of having fulfilled al-Mansur's highest expectations.

  Meanwhile, in monochrome, iconless Constantinople, the only major construction that had occurred in the past century was the repair of buildings and churches after a severe earthquake in 740. As for classical scholarship, we have little evidence but one or two shadowy names—dry skeletons that cannot be fleshed out with any confidence. Jerusalem had paled and Athens, to all appearances, had given up the ghost entirely.

  The Caliph's Dream of Reason

  According to tradition, the Arabs’ interest in ancient Greek learning began in the early ninth century, when the caliph al-Mamun, the son of Harun ar-Rashid, dreamed that he met a ruddy, handsome, blue-eyed man who identified himself as Aristotle. In his dream, the story goes, al-Mamun asked the famous philosopher to answer a question: “What is good?”

  “Whatever is good according to reason,” Aristotle replied.

  “What else?” asked the caliph.

  “Whatever is good according to religious law,” came the answer.

  “And what else?”

  “Nothing else,” said Aristotle.

  The tenth-century Baghdad bookseller and author Ibn an-Nadim describes the dream in his Fihrist, or “Index,” a compilation of Arab literature up to that point. An-Nadim goes on to say that the dream prompted al-Mamun to write to the Byzantine emperor, whom he had just defeated in battle but whom he now asked for help. The caliph wondered if he might “send people to select books on the ancient sciences from those preserved in the libraries of Byzantine territory.” At first the emperor refused the request, but then he consented. The caliph immediately sent a group of learned scholars to Byzantium, who “made their choice among the material which they found there and took it along to al-Mamun. He ordered them to translate it, and this was done.”

  The scholars, an-Nadim tells us, belonged to the “House of Wisdom,” which modern historians have long taken as an organized research institution that al-Mamun established especially for the task of translating Greek texts into Arabic. Recent research has cast some doubt on this picture—the fabled “House of Wisdom” may have been conjured up by later writers such as an-Nadim as they tried to explain a translation movement that went back much further than al-Mamun. Al-Mamun traditionally gets the lion's share of the credit, but this research suggests that it was al-Mansur who inaugurated the first systematic attempts to make ancient Greek learning available to the Arabs. And the translators themselves were part of a movement to translate Greek literature
that was already well established under the Sas-sanid Persians, long before the Arabs arrived.∗

  An-Nadim's and other similar accounts probably tell us more about how later generations looked back on the origins of the translation movement, which played a central role in early Abbasid society, than they do about those origins themselves. One thing that stands out in them is the idea of Byzantium as the repository of reason's ancient secrets. Whether or not these accounts are historically accurate in their portrayal of the House of Wisdom, in a larger sense they idealized Byzantium itself as a House of Wisdom for the questing and curious civilization that had, by their own era, clearly emerged in Islamic lands.

  The Syrian Schools and Hunayn ibn Ishaq

  The translators who did this work were not Byzantines, but they came from a culture whose roots went back to Byzantium. They were Syrians, members of Christian traditions that had been excluded or suppressed by the Byzantines’ increasingly narrow, intolerant piety. The schools in which these translators learned Greek also owed their origins to Byzantium, since most of them were based on the school of Alexandria in Egypt, which before the Arab conquest was the capital of secular learning in the Roman and Byzantine world. Much of the translation work took place in Baghdad, but the translators received their training in this network of schools.

  The greatest of them was Hunayn ibn Ishaq, born near Baghdad in 808 and known to the West as Johannitius. His name would become linked in the Fihrist and other later sources with the House of Wisdom, and most modern accounts follow these sources in portraying Hunayn as taking daring field trips to Byzantium from the House of Wisdom in order to acquire precious Greek manuscripts.

  But in fact he himself never mentions going to any specific Byzantine territory by name, though later sources have him going at one point “to the land of the Greeks.” This could mean Byzantium, or it could mean a city such as Alexandria. He does write about wide-ranging journeys to lands the Arabs had conquered from the Byzantines, such as a trip he took in order to find a good manuscript of Galen's On Demonstration: “I traveled in its search in northern Mesopotamia, all of Syria, Palestine and Egypt until I reached Alexandria. I found nothing except about half of it, in disorder and incomplete, in Damascus.”∗ Nor does he ever mention the House of Wisdom, as he almost surely would have done had he worked there.

  Hunayn's family were Nestorians, Christians whose distinctive religious outlook had originated in Byzantium with a fifth-century bishop named Nestorius. Nestorius had been embroiled in the controversies over the nature of Christ that were raging through the church at the time, and had settled on a position that, like that of the Arians, emphasized Christ's humanity, and that was eventually rejected by the Orthodox as heretical. It stood in distinction to the position of the Monophysites, who emphasized Christ's divinity. Nestorian beliefs, like Monophysite ones, were popular in eastern parts of the empire, especially among Syrians and Egyptians. Orthodox authorities persecuted Nestorians along with Monophysites in Syria, as well as in Egypt and elsewhere.

  Most of the Nestorian Syrians ended up leaving Byzantium for Persia. There these religious refugees found a warm welcome from the Sassanids, who were happy to have an alternative and rival version of Christianity to throw up against the Byzantines. In time Nestorian missionaries spread their version of Christianity far into Central Asia and even China, where Nestorian communities existed into the eleventh century. In contrast to the Nestorians, most Syrian Monophysites stayed within Byzantine borders, though their homelands, too, eventually fell to the Arab conquest.

  The Nestorians, then, were descended from Byzantine Syrians who had settled in Persian Iraq before it was conquered by the Arabs. Up to the conquest, the Syrians had been one of Byzantium's dominant ethnic groups, and they remained important after it, though the bulk of the Syrian population now lived in the conquered areas. By Hunayn's day most spoke Persian as a first language, but like Hunayn many would have grown up comfortable also in Syriac and perhaps also Greek, both of which were used in liturgy, and in Arabic, the language of the governing class with which they were so closely associated.

  In Hunayn's time, learned Syrians—and there were many of them—considered themselves descended from the ancient Babylonians or, alternatively, from the Assyrians, both of whose empires had contested over the Fertile Crescent before the rise of Persia. But Syrians were related to the Arabs, and their native language, Syriac, was a Semitic language (like Arabic and Hebrew) that had evolved from Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Syriac's similarity to Arabic would play a key role in the translations, since it meant that relatively little effort was needed to render into Arabic a Greek work that already existed in Syriac. It took much more effort to sit down and make an original translation directly from Greek into Arabic, with the result that the majority of Greek works that made it into Arabic went through the middle stage of Syriac.

  Starting in the fifth and sixth centuries, the religious controversies and later the missions to the East spurred demand among Syrians for religious texts in their own language. The early translators focused mostly on biblical and patristic writings. Long before the Arab conquests, as they developed a stronger tradition of translation from Greek into Syriac, they branched into secular learning as well, and Greek literary forms deeply shaped their own emerging literature.

  Hunayn may have been the star translator, but he was certainly not alone. Moving back in time, a sampling of his illustrious predecessors might include the eighth-century Nestorian patriarch Timothy I, a learned bibliophile who translated Aristotle's Topics and other works for the Ab-basids, reinvigorated the Nestorian clergy, and brought the missionary effort to its high point; Jacob of Edessa, a seventh-century Nestorian bishop who (like many of these figures) studied Greek in Alexandria; and Jacob's teacher Severus of Nisibis, the leading Syrian intellectual of the seventh century, another polymath Nestorian bishop, translator, astronomer, and logician, fluent in Greek and Persian but proud of his Syrian culture to the point of chauvinism.

  The Syrians had an abiding sense of their own place at the center of the universe. In late antiquity the stereotypical holy man was a Syrian, such as the fifth-century Symeon the Stylite, who lived in contemplative seclusion outside the Syrian city of Antioch—first in a dry cistern, then chained to a rock in a little cell, and finally on a tiny platform at the top of a fifty-foot-high column or stylos. This famous Christian ascetic attracted pilgrims from as far away as Britain, Gaul, and Spain in the West to Armenia and Persia in the East.

  They wanted to touch him, which was partly why he kept adding to the height of the column, which had originally been much shorter, erected to remove him first from the world of sin and only later from his fans as well. Symeon set a fashion in asceticism. Monk-capped columns began popping up like toadstools, which they resembled.

  This was the world of the Hellenized Syrians—brilliant, polyglot, devout, and assuming more than its share of cosmic entitlement. For the Abbasids, the Syrians made up a preexisting, accessible pool of talent and knowledge in Greek studies. They would always constitute the core group of translators in the translation movement.

  By the time of the Arab conquests, the Hellenized Syrians enjoyed an extensive network of monasteries and schools in the conquered areas, and these schools would make up the most important institutional framework for the transmission of secular Greek learning to the Arabs. In contrast with broke and battered Byzantium, the Fertile Crescent under the Arabs was dotted with prosperous, well-established Syrian schools that offered Greek studies. The heirs of Alexandria itself, they constituted the leading centers of Hellenism in the world. Each had its own specialties and traditions, from Antioch, Edessa, and Qinnasrin in the west, to Nisibis and Mosul in Iraq, to the famous school at Jundi-Shapur to the east, deep in Iran. Though ultimately originating in the Byzantine cultural milieu, by the time of the conquest these schools were much more sophisticated than anything Constantinople could offer.

  Most were Nestorian, and they ha
d been strongly supported by the Sassanids. Nisibis, which had inherited leadership from Edessa in the fifth century, was the largest, and was considered the center of Nestorian culture. While theology took pride of place in all of them, the Nestorians also gravitated to science and medicine, and it was these areas that drew the Sassanids’ and later the Abbasids’ support.

  Under both regimes, the Nestorians held what amounted to a near monopoly on medicine. Hunayn's father, Ishaq, was a pharmacist, and Hunayn himself is reported to have studied medicine as a young man at Baghdad and Jundi-Shapur, where a renowned practicing hospital supplemented the coursework. Like Hunayn, whose own son Ishaq ibn Hunayn∗ also became a famous translator, many of the leading translators belonged to families whose activities were passed on through generations. The leading Nestorian medical dynasty was that of the Bukhtishu, but others included the Masawayh, the al-Tayfuri, and the Serapion, tightly knit clans that were prominently associated with the school at Jundi-Shapur.

  Since all the important medical writings were Greek, there was a logical connection between medicine and translation. But the same held true for other areas. In addition to medicine, students at the Nestorian schools could also take up philosophy, music, mathematics, geography, zoology, botany, meteorology, and astronomy, as well as basic grammar and rhetoric.

  Hunayn's teacher in Baghdad was none other than al-Mamun's personal physician, a severe and sharp-tongued Nestorian named Yuhanna ibn Masawayh, scion of one of the leading dynasties. Yuhanna, who possessed what one can only hope was an unusually macabre and ironic sense of humor, glowers from the sources with the bedside manner of a peckish condor. He not only protested against the caliphal ban on dissection for medical purposes, but nominated his own son, whose intellectual prowess apparently fell short of Yuhanna's desires, as a candidate for vivisection: