A Short History of the World (8 page)

Legend has it that the Muslims learned how to make paper from a Chinese artisan captured in battle in the mid-8th century. Whether or not this is true, paper was clearly in use in Muslim lands by the 8th century and this only served to aid the rapid spread of ideas and knowledge. They even had a book trade while many Europeans were still writing on animal skins or even bark.

The commands of the Qur’an helped fuel many inventions. For example, Muslims were required to pray to Mecca five times a day. In order to do this they needed to know the time and the direction in which to pray – information that could only be understood through scientific enquiry. Improvements in map-making and navigation were just two of the many outcomes fuelled by the demands of the Qur’an.
 

As Jonathan Lyons explains in his book, ‘The House of Wisdom’, ‘
Koranic injunction to heal the sick spurred developments in medicine and the creation of advanced hospitals
.’
³⁰
Christians viewed illness and disease such as the plague as divine punishment to be cured by such acts as persecuting Jews and scourging the body, while the Muslims looked for physical causes that could be treated. Lyons further explains that ‘
western notions of medicine were based largely on superstition and exorcism in contrast to the Arab’s advanced clinical training and understanding of surgery, pharmacology and epidemiology. Westerners had no knowledge of ‘hygiene’ and sanitation’.
³¹
As a result, the first hospitals were established in Baghdad, and their learnings subsequently transmitted to Europe, rather than vice-versa.
 

In the 11th century Ibn Sina, a Persian writer known in the West as ‘Avicenna’ wrote a vast treatise on medicine, bringing together all the medical knowledge of the ancient Greeks and the Islamic world available at that time. This was referred to widely in medical facilities of Christian Europe right up until the 17th century.

The Islamic culture that developed over in Al-Andalus was dramatically different from that which grew around the Abbasid Caliphate. Not to be outdone, after AD 900, the Umayyad emirate attracted scholars from the East in a deliberate attempt to compete with the Abbasids, thereby creating their own golden age in Cordoba. ‘
At its prime, the Muslim Emirate of Al-Andalus with its capital at Cordoba, became the most prosperous, stable, wealthiest and most cultured state in Europe.’
³²
Indeed, much of the knowledge from the Muslim world passed to the rest of Europe through present-day Spain.
 

Charlemagne (AD 742–814)

Meanwhile, in western Europe, the Frankish kingdom reached its apogee under the grandson of Charles Martel, Carolus Magnus, better known by his Gallic name, Charlemagne. Crowned sole king of the Franks in AD 771 at the age of 29, he is often recognised as the greatest king of the European Early Middle Ages, and with good reason: he united the Frankish tribes and kingdoms in the West into the largest European empire since Rome, an empire which included much of present-day France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium Switzerland, Austria, Poland and Italy.
 

Charlemagne was rewarded for being on good terms with the Pope, whom the Franks had helped on more than one occasion, by being crowned Roman emperor in Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome on Christmas Day in AD 800. Although Charlemagne reigned for 46 years his empire was short lived; his son split the empire into three parts – one for each of his own sons – and the result was an empire divided into numerous feudal states and threatened by enemies on its frontiers – Muslims to the south, Slavs to the east and Vikings to the north.

One of Charlemagne’s accomplishments was to bring back to public consciousness the idea of a renewed and reinvigorated Roman Empire. While his immediate successors failed to do justice to the title, the coronation of the German king, Otto I, by Pope John XII in AD 962, marks the beginning of an unbroken line of emperors that lasted for the next eight centuries, nominally ruling a territory encompassing most of present-day Germany and parts of Italy. In 1157, Frederick I added the word ‘Holy’ to ‘Roman Empire’ in recognition of his role as defender of the faith.

German sovereigns who ruled over a confederation of hundreds of independent entities, large and small, held this title at all times. The largest of these ruling families was the Austrian House of Habsburg, with which the title stayed from 1452 until 1806. Looking back on the Empire in the 18th century, the Enlightenment philosopher, Voltaire, rightly commented that it was ‘neither Holy, nor Roman nor an Empire’.
 

Viking and Norman Invasions (AD 793–1066)

In AD 793, while Charlemagne was doing his best to rule his vast kingdom in Europe and while the Abbasid Caliphate was blossoming in the East, a group of sea warriors – or Vikings – from Scandinavia landed on the small island of Lindisfarne off the east coast of England. After summarily butchering the local population and robbing the monastery of its treasures, they departed. This marked the beginning of a large number of raids throughout Europe, raids that gradually grew in both magnitude and frequency.
 

The key advantage the Vikings had was the element of surprise; their boats had shallow keels, allowing them to penetrate farther up rivers than other boats of the time. Not only were they skilled sailors, but also ruthless warriors.

The Vikings were also explorers, traders and settlers, and in their wanderlust they travelled farther afield than any other Europeans, discovering Greenland and Iceland and even establishing a short-lived settlement on the northeast coast of America around AD 1000. This made the Vikings, not Columbus and his men, the first Europeans to land in America. In general, those travelling west – from present-day Denmark and Norway – were driven by the search for loot and conquest, while those travelling south – generally from present-day Sweden – were driven predominantly by trade, venturing south along the great rivers that conveniently flowed in a north-south direction and linked the Baltic to the Caspian and Black Seas.

Those travelling south were known to the Arabs as the ‘Rus’, and were instrumental in establishing the principalities of Kiev in present-day Ukraine and Great Novgorod in present-day Russia. The development of trade around these cities laid the foundation for the Russian nation. The city of Kiev dominated the state of Kievan Rus for the next two centuries, and its trade links with Constantinople played a significant role in bringing the Eastern Orthodox religion to the area in AD 988.
 

Vikings from Norway established a Norse kingdom in Ireland and a few decades later Danish conquerors settled in eastern England. Such were the attacks on France that, in AD 911, a Viking leader named Rollo, who had previously conquered parts of northern France, was bribed with even more land to protect the Franks against further Viking incursions. This land eventually became Normandy and served as the launch pad for the invasion of England by Rollo’s great-great-great grandson, William the Conqueror, in 1066.
 

Despite the valiant efforts of King Alfred
³³
of England to defend the island in the 9th century, the Anglo-Saxons were so weak that the Danish king, Canute, was able to combine the crowns of Denmark, Norway and England and create a large northern empire during the early part of the 11th century; however, as with most over-extended empires, that of Canute became too large to manage. When a Viking invasion force tried to invade northern England after the death of King Edward in 1066, it was defeated at the Battle of Stamford Bridge and expelled.
 

The problem for the English was that the Battle of Stamford Bridge against invading Vikings in the north took place in the same month as the attack on England by the Normans in the south. William, the Duke of Normandy, had come to claim his right to the English throne. After defeating the Danes, Edward’s successor, King Harold, had to rush 200 miles south in order to defend the island against the Normans at the Battle of Hastings. Had the two invasions not occurred within one month of each other, the English may well have had a stronger and less exhausted army, thereby increasing their chances of repelling the Normans. But they didn’t. Harold was struck in the eye by an arrow, the English were defeated and a battle which involved only a few thousand men changed the course of English history, earning William of Normandy the epithet ‘William the Conqueror’. Importantly, 1066 was the last time the English fought a battle on their own soil against a European enemy.

England became ruled by the Normans, who built a network of castles across the country from which to rule. They were not popular; after all, they spoke French, followed Frankish and Viking customs, and set aside huge tracts of useful land for hunting. On the mainland, however, their renowned fighting skills endeared them to any ruler looking for hired help. In one instance they were engaged by the Pope to free Sicily and Southern Italy from Islamic domination and ended up ruling Sicily as a Norman kingdom for several generations.
 

IV

The Late Middle Ages

AD 1000 - 1450

Challenges to the Caliphate

The golden age of the Abbasid Caliphate did not last long. Its extravagant court and the embracing of Sunni Islam caused many rifts; the Abbasids had, after all, come to power with the support of many Shiite Muslims. This alienated many of whom should have been loyal followers and led to the emergence of several regional centres of Islamic power that ended up challenging the central authority of the Caliphate.

The Umayyad prince who had fled to Spain after the massacre of his family represented only one disenchanted party. Many Shiites, believing that the Abbasids were usurpers, left for northern Africa where they established rival kingdoms. The most renowned of these was that of the Fatimids, who claimed descent from Muhammad’s daughter, Fatima. Proclaiming a rival caliphate in AD 910, they conquered Egypt in AD 969 and founded the city of Cairo as their capital, from which they ruled most of northern Africa.
 

By the 11th century the Fatimids were already more powerful than the Abbasids in Baghdad, but their gradual encroachment on Palestine and Syria brought them into direct conflict with both the Seljuk Turks and the invading European crusaders, and this ultimately led to their downfall.
 

The Seljuk Turks had migrated to Persia from the Central Asian Steppe in the 11th century and proceeded to settle in Abbasid lands and convert to Sunni Islam. Sensing the weaknesses of the Abbasids, they gained control of Baghdad in 1055 and within 20 years had captured most of Asia Minor from the Byzantines, naming it the Independent Sultanate of Rum,
³⁴
after the Arabic word for Rome. This became the first permanent settlement of Turks in Asia Minor and is generally understood to be the beginning of Islam in Turkey – the land of the Turks.
³⁵
 

Europe’s Religious Schism (AD 1054)

While the Seljuks were conquering Asia Minor, Europe was suffering from its own religious fracture. For much of the early Middle Ages there had been reduced contact between the Papacy in Rome and the Patriarchy in Constantinople, both of which were administered separately. A number of minor differences, such as the seemingly unimportant discord over whether priests should have beards, had arisen over the years and alienated the churches somewhat, but two issues drove a more formidable wedge between them. One was the supremacy of the Pope in Rome over all other bishops of the Catholic Church, which was challenged by the Orthodox Church in the East; the other related to the importance and position of the Holy Spirit within the Christian Trinity of God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit.