The Last Crusade: The Epic Voyages of Vasco Da Gama (3 page)

CHAPTER I

EAST AND WEST

W
HEN
M
UHAMMAD IBN
Abdallah first heard the word of God in or around the year 610, he had no intention of founding a world empire.

He was not even sure he was sane.

“Wrap me up!” the forty-year-old merchant said, shivering miserably as he crawled up to his wife, who threw a cloak around him and held him, stroking his hair as he wept. He had been meditating in his usual cave outside Mecca—a luxury afforded him by marriage to a rich widow fifteen years his senior—when the angel Gabriel appeared, threw him into a painful, ecstatic trance, and spoke to him the words of God. Muhammad was terrified that he was going mad and contemplated throwing himself off the mountain. But the voice kept coming back, and three years later Muhammad began to preach in public. Gradually the message emerged: the faith of Abraham and Jesus was the true faith, but it had become corrupted. There was one God, and He demanded
islam
—complete surrender.

This was bad news for the rulers of Mecca, who had grown fat on religious tourism to the city’s 360 shrines. Mecca had sprung up around a palmy oasis in the Hijaz, the baked barrier of mountains that stretches along the Red Sea coast of the Arabian Peninsula. Its authority radiated from the Kaaba, the square, squat sanctuary at its center that housed the Arabs’ chief idols. Every year hordes of pilgrims emerged from the desert, descended on the holy precinct, and circled the stone cube seven times, straining to kiss each corner before the press of bodies pushed them back into the whirl. Over
time one tribe, the Quraysh, had orchestrated their guardianship of the Kaaba into a stranglehold on Mecca’s commercial lifeblood, and at first Muhammad’s revelations were aimed squarely at them. The greedy Quraysh, he accused, had severed the egalitarian threads of Arab society; they had exploited the weak, enslaved the poor, and neglected their duty to care for the needy and oppressed. God had taken note, and they would all go to hell.

What infuriated the Quraysh was not so much Muhammad’s talk of the one merciful God, or even his claim to be God’s mouthpiece. To the north a kingdom of Christian Arabs had existed for centuries, and in the Kaaba itself the figures of Jesus and Mary stood proud among the idols. Jewish migrants to Arabia had been influential for even longer; the Arabs considered themselves the Jews’ fellow descendants of Abraham, through his firstborn son, Ishmael, and many identified their high god with the god of the Jews. In Muhammad’s time poet-preachers perpetually roamed the deserts, exhorting their tribesmen to renounce idolatry and return to the pure monotheism of their forefathers. Nothing could be less controversial; what was uniquely intolerable was that Muhammad was an insider. His family clan, the Hashemites, was a minor branch of the Quraysh. He was a respected businessman and a small but solid pillar of the community, and he had turned on his own kind.

The Quraysh tried everything from bribes to boycotts to discredit the troublesome preacher, and finally they turned their hand to midnight assassination. Just in time Muhammad slipped out of his house, evaded the blade, and fled to a distant oasis settlement that would become known as Medina, the City of the Prophet. There, as his following grew, he implemented the radically new society he had only dreamed of in Mecca: an
ummah
, or community of equals, united not by birth but by allegiance, bound by laws that gave unprecedented rights to women and redistributed wealth to the neediest. As the revelations continued, he began to believe that God had chosen him not just to deliver a warning to his tribe but to be a Messenger to humanity.

For his message to spread, he first had to reckon with Mecca. Eight years of ferocious wars with the Quraysh bloodied the establishment of Islam. At the darkest hour, his face smashed up and smeared with blood, Muhammad was dragged from the battlefield by one of his warriors, and only the rumor that he was dead saved the remnants of his army. The ummah’s morale was crushed, and it was about then that Muhammad made his fighters a promise that would echo through history. The slain in battle, it was revealed to him, would be swept up to the highest level of Paradise: “They shall be lodged in peace together, amid gardens and fountains, arrayed in rich silks and fine brocade. . . . We shall wed them to dark-eyed houris.”

The Muslims—“those who submit”—clung on, and clinging on against the odds itself seemed a sign of divine favor. The decisive moment was not a battlefield victory but a spectacular public-relations coup. In the year 628 Muhammad unexpectedly appeared before Mecca with a thousand unarmed pilgrims and asserted his lawful right as an Arab to worship at the Kaaba. As he solemnly performed the rituals, while the Quraysh stood sullenly by, the rulers of Mecca suddenly looked more foolish than invincible, and opposition began to crumble. In 630 Muhammad returned with massed ranks of followers. He once again circled the sanctuary seven times, intoning “Allahu akbar!”—“God is great!”—then climbed inside, carried out the idols, and smashed them to pieces on the ground.

By the time he died, two years later, Muhammad had pulled off a feat that no other leader in history had even envisaged: he had founded a flourishing new faith and an expanding new state, the one inseparable from the other. In little more than a year the armies of Islam crushed the Arab tribes that held out against the new order, and for the first time in history the Arabian Peninsula was united under one ruler and one faith. Driven by religious zeal, a newfound common purpose, and the happy alternatives of vast spoils in life or eternal bliss in death, God’s newly chosen people looked outward.

What they saw were two superpowers that had been doing their utmost to obliterate each other from the face of the earth.

For more than a millennium, East and West had faced off across the River Euphrates in Mesopotamia, the fertile land long known as the cradle of civilization and today home to Iraq. On the eastern side was the illustrious Persian Empire, the guardian of an ancient, refined culture and of the world’s first revealed religion, the monotheistic faith of the visionary priest Zarathuster—a faith known after his Latinized name, Zoroaster, as Zoroastrianism—that told of creation, resurrection, salvation, apocalypse, heaven and hell, and a savior born to a young virgin centuries before the birth of Christ. Led by their great
shahanshahs
—“kings of kings”—the Persians had been the inveterate foes of the Greeks until Alexander the Great had smashed their armies. When Persia’s power revived, it had simply transferred its hostility to the Greeks’ successors, the Romans. The ancient struggle was the formative East-West clash, and in 610, just as Muhammad was receiving his first revelations, it had finally exploded into total war.

As waves of barbarians ran riot around western Europe, the emperor Constantine had built a new Rome on Europe’s eastern brink. Glittering Constantinople looked out across the Bosporus, a strategic sliver of water that leads from the Black Sea toward the Mediterranean, at Asia. Ensconced behind the city’s impregnable walls, Constantine’s successors watched helplessly as the Persians swept across their rich eastern provinces and headed toward holy Jerusalem. Long ago the Romans had razed Jewish Jerusalem to the ground, and a new Christian city had risen over the sites identified with Jesus’s passion; Constantine, the first Christian emperor, had himself built the Church of the Holy Sepulcher over the purported places of Jesus’s crucifixion, burial, and resurrection. Now, to Christian anguish bordering on the apocalyptic, the Persians carted away the True Cross on which Jesus was believed to have died, along with the Holy Sponge and Lance and the city’s patriarch, and left the Holy Sepulcher smoldering and hollowed out against a blackened sky.

On the brink of oblivion, the Romans struggled back and emerged triumphant, and Persia imploded into civil war. But the victors, too, were exhausted. Roman cities had been laid waste and were overwhelmed by refugees, agriculture had been blighted and trade had ground to a halt, and everyone was heartily sick of the crushing taxes that had paid for imperial deliverance. In a time of churning Christian controversy, most damaging of all was Constantinople’s remorseless drive to enforce its orthodox version of Christianity across its lands. Having first fed Christians to the lions, the Romans had turned to persecuting anyone who refused to toe the official line, and across a large swath of the eastern Mediterranean, from Armenia in the north to Egypt in the south, Christian dissidents were far from unhappy at the prospect of a new regime.

With breathtaking bravado, the Arabs attacked both ancient empires at once.

In 636, eleven centuries of Persian might ended in a bellowing elephant charge near the future site of Baghdad. “Damn this world, damn this time, damn this fate,” Iran’s national epic would rue, “That uncivilized Arabs have come to make me Muslim.” Islam’s path opened north to Armenia, northeast to the Asian steppes bordering China, southeast to Afghanistan, and onward to India. That same year, an Arab army crushed a vastly larger Roman force at the Battle of Yarmuk and annexed Syria, where Saul of Tarsus had been converted on the road to Damascus and where, in Antioch, he had founded the first organized Christian church. The next year Jerusalem was starved into submission and opened its gates to the new set of conquerors, just eight years after the Romans had triumphantly restored the True Cross to its rightful place. The faith-torn city was holy to Islam as well as to Judaism and Christianity, and centuries of struggles between Romans and Jews over the sacred places gave way to centuries of clashes between Muslims and Christians.

Four years later, fertile, gilded Egypt, the richest of all Roman provinces, fell to the Arabs. While Constantinople stood impotently by, the truculent desert tribesmen it disparagingly labeled
Saracens—“the tent people”—had taken all the lands it had so recently reconquered, at such great cost. As kingdoms and empires were humbled and fell, even bishops began to wonder if Muhammad had been commanded from on high.

From Egypt, the armies of Islam marched west across the Mediterranean shores of Africa—and there, quite unexpectedly, their seemingly unstoppable onrush stalled.

The trouble was partly domestic. Muhammad had died without naming an heir, or even leaving clear instructions about how a successor should be chosen. Ancient rivalries soon resurfaced, sharpened by the booty of conquest that snaked in endless caravans across the deserts and invariably ended up in the pockets of the Quraysh, the very tribe whose monopolistic greed Muhammad had so roundly attacked. After some tribal jockeying, the first four caliphs—“successors” to the Prophet—were selected from among Muhammad’s close companions and family, but even that high status failed to protect them. An irate Persian soldier thrust a dagger into the second caliph’s belly, gutted him, and knifed him in the back while he was at prayer. A cabal of Muslim soldiers incensed at the third caliph’s lavish lifestyle and blatant nepotism bludgeoned him to death, and the ummah erupted into civil war. Ali, the fourth caliph—the Prophet’s cousin, son-in-law, and closest confidant—was stabbed with a poisoned sword on the steps of a mosque for being too willing to negotiate with his fellow Muslims. His followers, who had always maintained that Ali was Muhammad’s divinely anointed successor, eventually came together as the Shiatu Ali—“the party of Ali”—or Shia for short, and split irrevocably from the pragmatist majority, who became known, after the term for the path shown by the Prophet, as Sunnis.

Out of the turmoil the first caliphal dynasty emerged in the form of the Umayyads, who moved the capital away from the snake pit of Arabia and ruled for nearly a century from ancient, cosmopolitan Damascus. Yet opposition continued to plague the young empire, this time from outside. In North Africa the Arab armies
were bogged down for decades by ragged hordes of blue-eyed Berbers, the ancient indigenous peoples of the region. The Berbers had rampaged down from their mountain redoubts every time previous waves of conquerors had paid them a visit, and they were not inclined to adapt their behavior merely because they professed themselves converts to the new faith. At the head of the Berber charge was a fearsome Jewish warrior-queen known to the Arabs as Kahina, or “the Prophetess,” who galloped into battle with her fiery red curls streaming out behind and drove the invaders far back east, until she was finally hunted down by a vast Arab army and died fighting, sword in hand.

As the eighth century dawned the Berbers’ revolts petered out, and many swelled the ranks of their vanquishers. In little more than the span of a single lifetime, the armies unloosed by Muhammad had swept an unbroken crescent around the Mediterranean basin all the way to the shores of the Atlantic Ocean.

From there they gazed on Europe.

With staggering speed, the world had turned full circle. A religion that had erupted in the deserts of the East was about to burst into a stunned Europe from the west. But for the obstreperous Berbers, it might well have stormed straight across the continent before Europe’s warring tribes had roused themselves to respond.