While Paul Alvarus and Eulogius lauded Isaac and the others as saints equal to those who had suffered persecution at the hands of Roman emperors in the third century, other Christians vehemently disagreed. Where the Romans were pagans who had murdered Christian saints in order to prevent the spread of monotheism, the Muslims were believers. In fact, some Christians denied that Isaac and his followers even qualified as martyrs, because they had been killed not by pagans but by “men who worship God and acknowledge heavenly laws.”
At the same time, that made Muslims a greater threat than the pagans ever were. Because they identified themselves as part of the heritage that began with Abraham, they were unlike previous adversaries. As some Syrian Christians had noted in the eighth century, Muslims posed the same challenge to mainstream Christianity that Christian “heretics” did. A Christian who would never be tempted by paganism might see Islam as a viable alternative. Not only did Muhammad place himself within the prophetic traditions that spanned the Old and New Testaments, but he carved out a special sphere for Christians and Jews as People of the Book. While that established a degree of tolerance, it also made it harder for Spanish Christians to resist the relentless pressure to assimilate.
In short, the real fight for Eulogius and the other martyrs of Córdoba wasn’t between Christians and Muslims, but between Christians who were trying to stay true to the church and those who were falling away. It was an archetypal struggle that conquered peoples face: resist or assimilate. With each passing decade of Muslim rule, the pull of assimilation grew stronger. Whether or not they converted, Christians were adapting to a world governed by Muslims. They were learning Arabic, forgetting the scripture, and looking for ways to ingratiate themselves with the ruling class. Eulogius railed against Christians who collected taxes from other Christians on behalf of Muslim lords. Before his martyrdom, Isaac had been a classic case of the Christian who curried favor at the court of the prince. Like nineteenth-century Indians who donned English accents and morning coats in an effort to make themselves more acceptable
to the British ruling class, many Christians took great pains to mimic the Muslim elites.
The martyrs stirred the pot, but their efforts backfired. The bishop of Seville condemned them, and after the death of Eulogius, the movement came to a halt. Spanish Christians were not prepared to rise up en masse, and if they had tried, they would have failed. They had numbers on their side, but no army and no organization. Besides, well into modern times, popular uprisings rarely took place and almost never succeeded. Rather than causing Christians to remain steadfast and resist Muslim rule, the martyrs may have had the opposite effect. By showing the futility of active defiance, they cemented the case for coexistence. Christian rulers in the northwest of Spain continued to fight against the kingdom of Córdoba, but the Christians who lived under Muslim rule became progressively more “Arabized.” There was no repeat of the Córdoba martyrs.
THIS LAST GASP
of defiance on the part of Spanish Christians was followed by a dazzling 150 years. Constructive relations between Muslims, Christians, and Jews was part of Córdoba’s genius. The city grew to nearly a hundred thousand inhabitants, larger than Paris, London, and Rome combined, and nearly the size of Constantinople and Baghdad. The rulers of Córdoba adopted the title of caliph in the tenth century, after the Abbasids in Baghdad came under the domination of Turkish generals who had once served them. The caliphs of Córdoba, like their brethren in Baghdad, turned their city into a capital of commerce, learning, and architectural brilliance. They ruled with the certainty of power and wealth, and with the calm haughtiness that comes with knowing that you are blessed by God.
Córdoba became a cultural jewel, so beautiful and refined that it was dubbed by one Christian visitor “the ornament of the world.” It was filled with wonders, crowned by the Mesquite, the Great Mosque, whose rows of seemingly endless columns—graceful, curved, perfectly geometrical—created a space at once huge and intimate. Drawing on the architectural legacy of Rome and Byzantium, it was in its day as awe-inspiring as any ancient wonder. The marvels extended beyond the metropolis itself. Near Córdoba, the caliph built a retreat of palace complexes, a symbol of wealth and power that crested only for a moment before the caliphate began a rapid decline in the eleventh century. The
complex was constructed on the orders of Abd al-Rahman III; ten thousand laborers and artisans worked for decades crafting the inlaid buildings and courtyards replete with fountains and airy domes.
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With this opulence came arrogance. John of Gorze, the delegate of a German prince, was kept waiting for three years before he was at last ushered into the caliph’s presence. He was awestruck by the rows of soldiers outside the complex, and he had never in his life seen what appeared before his eyes when he was actually admitted to the caliph’s audience chamber. According to a contemporary account, when John “arrived at the dais where the caliph was seated alone—almost like a godhead accessible to none or very few—he saw everything draped with rare covering, and floor-tiles stretched evenly to the walls. The caliph himself reclined upon a most richly ornate couch, and as John came into his presence, the caliph stretched out his hand to be kissed.” The contrast between the world John knew and the one he now witnessed could hardly have been greater. Germany in the tenth century was a jumbled mess of warring fiefdoms, and princelings were fortunate if they had a roof that didn’t leak, a castle at least partly fortified with stone, and enough wood for heat. There was almost as much cultural distance between John and Abd al-Rahman as there was between Marco Polo and the court of Kublai Khan in the thirteenth century and between the tribes of the Amazon and the Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors in the sixteenth.
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John must have imagined that he was in the presence of a kingdom that would last centuries, but it would barely survive the new millennium. In retrospect, the eleventh-century collapse of the caliphate is less surprising than the fact that it endured for more than 250 years. There were sharp divisions among the Muslims who ruled Andalusia. The conquest of Spain had been accomplished by an uneasy alliance between Arabs from Syria and Arabia and Berbers from what is now Morocco. The Arabs treated the Berbers as second-class clients, and for the first centuries of Muslim rule in Spain, the Arab elites were able to control the fertile lands and prosperous cities and relegate the Berbers to less desirable and less profitable areas of the Iberian Peninsula. Although the princes of Córdoba were dominant, smaller cities frequently tried to escape the control of the Umayyads, and they often established alliances with Christian lords. Rarely was there a period without at least one active minor war. For a time, this constant state of war increased the power of the caliphate. The need to maintain a significant army was
a spur for technical innovation and more effective administration. It also made commerce essential. Trade was a vital source of revenue. In essence, low-level warfare was part and parcel of Córdoba’s success, and its undoing.
THE JEWS OF SPAIN
THE RELENTLESS DEMAND
for more revenue benefited both Christians in the countryside and Jews in the cities. The Arabs who settled in Iberia shunned farming, and they needed the Christian peasantry to remain on the land. Agriculture was not only a source of food; it was also a source of income. The best way to maintain production was to cause as few interruptions as possible, and that meant leaving the Christians alone except for collecting taxes. Even here, Christians were often delegated to be the tax collectors on behalf of the Muslims, much to the chagrin of zealots like Eulogius but to the satisfaction of almost everyone else.
But while Christians often saw their relative status decline, Jews tended to benefit, both in Spain and throughout the Mediterranean world. In the towns and cities, Jews found themselves in a unique position as intermediaries between Muslim-dominated Spain and the rest of the world. Having suffered severe discrimination at the hands of the Visigoths, Jewish communities under the Muslims enjoyed more freedom, affluence, and social standing than any Jewish community would until the nineteenth century.
Jewish merchants established international networks. In the ninth and tenth centuries, no one Muslim state controlled the Mediterranean, but though there were pirates and raiders, the region was a much safer place and more open to trade than any part of Europe at the time. Because commerce was in everyone’s interest, and because no ruler had the ability to control it, the Mediterranean evolved into a de facto free trade zone. Spain was its western anchor, and it produced textiles, paper, and leather, as well as spices, olive oil, and countless other products.
Jews acted as agents for Muslim rulers who wanted either to import luxury goods or to export for profit. Because of their close networks and international contacts, they were able to overcome the limitations that faced merchants everywhere: how to ensure that goods were paid for.
Without an international banking system, payment depended on a high level of trust, and such trust was usually a function of personal and family bonds, often cemented by marriage. Jews in Cairo married Jews from Spain; Jews from Spain married Jews from the Levant. The result was that there were Jewish merchants and moneymen in most major commercial centers in the Mediterranean, and they had counterparts throughout the Muslim world whom they trusted and were eager to do business with. While there were also powerful Muslim merchant families, who had their own networks and were more numerous than the Jews, it was easier for a Jew to trade with Christians in Europe than it was for Muslims, and it was far easier for Jews to trade with the independent Christian kingdoms in northern Spain.
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Because of a rare and precious discovery of a trove of documents buried in the basement of a Cairo synagogue, there is an unusual amount of information about the links between Jewish merchant families during these centuries. These merchants ventured well beyond the Mediterranean. They crossed the Turkish steppe and sailed the Indian Ocean. However, in those areas, they were simply one group among many, whereas in the northern Mediterranean and in northern Spain they alone were capable of acting as go-betweens. The independent Spanish Christian kingdoms were locked in constant battle with the Muslims, but Jews lived on both sides of the divide. North of the Pyrenees, Western Europe was an economic and cultural wasteland, with a few centers of commercial activity where Jewish merchants led the way. Graced with their connections to the rich and sophisticated Muslim cities of Spain and of the eastern Mediterranean, Jews were a bridge between the Muslim world and the Christian hamlets of Europe.
Two names stand out in these centuries: Hasdai ibn Shaprut and Samuel the Nagid. Born early in the tenth century, Hasdai served two of the Cordoban caliphs as a physician and counselor. Muslims had long debated whether Jews and Christians could act as doctors for Muslim patients, but in the end, pragmatism trumped theological concerns. The caliph expected the best medical treatment available, and he didn’t particularly care what scripture his doctors read as long as they kept him and his family alive and healthy. Hasdai ibn Shaprut was born into a wealthy family and trained not just in Hebrew but in Latin and Greek. He was given Christian tutors, studied ancient physicians such as Galen and Hippocrates, and learned Arabic. As legend has it, he gained the
notice of the caliph because of his studies of poisons and their antidotes. No ruler was secure enough not to need a skilled physician who might save him from the murderous inclinations of a courtier or rival, and antidotes for poison were coveted.
Having demonstrated his utility, Hasdai was rewarded with a position at the court. He flourished, and he became a patron not just of other Jews, but of anyone who could write an appealing poem or make a compelling argument. As the highest-ranking Jew in the caliph’s court, he was treated as the leader of the Jewish community of Córdoba, and they seem to have embraced him as such. Within a short time, he had cemented both his position as a trusted adviser to the caliph and as the representative of the Jews. The caliph then turned to Hasdai for two delicate and unusual negotiations, one with the Byzantine Empire and the other with a distant tribe of Jews living in the land of the Khazars on the southern reaches of the Russian steppe.
The diplomatic exchanges between the Byzantine emperor and the Cordoban caliph were motivated by the same political calculations that had led Harun al-Rashid to reach out to Charlemagne more than a century before. Córdoba was competing not just with Baghdad, but with a new empire in Egypt that claimed leadership over the Muslim world. Very little of this competition was military, although as the new rulers of Egypt grew in power, they moved across North Africa and approached closer to the center of Cordoban power. But there was a competition over who could legitimately claim to be the successors to Muhammad as true rulers of the Muslim community. For their part, the Byzantines, who were enjoying something of a revival, had never accepted the presence of Muslim kingdoms in the Near East, and they took advantage of the bitter animosity between the Umayyads of Spain and the Abbasids of Iraq. Given that the caliph in Córdoba and the emperor in Constantinople both wanted to eliminate the Abbasids, they had a common cause.
The emperor, Constantine, sent a delegation to the caliph, which included not just the usual pleasantries, gifts, and fulsome words of praise, but also several manuscripts. One of these, by the Greek physician Dioscorides, was an encyclopedia of rare and valuable remedies, ointments, and other treatments for ailments. It had been partially translated in Baghdad, but from a corrupt and fragmentary manuscript. The one sent by the emperor Constantine was much closer to the original. One of the few people in Córdoba capable of translating it was Hasdai.
The manuscript was in Greek, and Hasdai worked closely with a Greek monk to make sense of its more arcane passages and translate them into Latin. Hasdai then used both the Latin and the Greek texts to create a complete version in Arabic.