A Criminal History of Mankind (42 page)

The Arab navies continued returning for five years, but they never learned the secret of Greek fire. And so long as Constantinople could obtain its supplies by sea, it was impregnable. It would be several more centuries before the invention of gunpowder and cannons made the city wall obsolete.

So the Arabs retired from the fray, and in 677 A.D., the Byzantine navy destroyed the Arab fleet at Syllaeum. All Europe heaved a sigh of relief; for it had seemed by this time that the Arabs were unconquerable, and tales of their massacres had terrified everybody. (These were mostly exaggerated; when the Arabs conquered, they usually showed themselves to be tolerant rulers.) After the defeat at Syllaeum, the myth of Arab invincibility was at an end.

Unfortunately, the Arab conquests did nothing to heal the splits within Islam. The Caliph Omar was assassinated in 644; his successor, Othman, twelve years later, by followers of Ali. Muawiyah, the governor of Syria, swore to revenge Othman and led an army against Ali, who was now the Caliph. They eventually made peace, but Ali was assassinated in 661 by a dissident. Muawiyah became Caliph, and it was he who besieged Constantinople. When he died in 680, his son Yazid succeeded him, but the Shi’a - followers of Ali - felt he had no right to the position. Ali’s eldest son Hasan had died some years before under mysterious circumstances, believed poisoned by Muawiyah. Now his second son, Hussein, was invited to become Caliph by dissidents in Iraq. Yazid’s army defeated him in battle and his head was sent to Yazid in a basket. In 680, most of Ali’s family was assassinated, including Fatima, the prophet’s daughter. But the murderers missed one sickly child, who lived to continue the dynasty.

So Islam itself was torn by the same violent internal dissensions as ancient Rome, and the average life expectancy of a ruler or pretender seemed much the same as under the Caesars. Muawiyah and his son Yazid were the founders of a dynasty - the Ummayads - but this also led to further divisions and slaughter. Yazid died after only two years, and his son shortly after this. The Ummayads chose Marwan, a cousin of Muawiyah, while another candidate was favoured in Syria, Egypt and Iraq. There was a battle in 684, with tremendous slaughter of the rival candidate’s forces. Marwan became Caliph, but it was the beginning of a disastrous feud which would eventually cause the downfall of the Ummayads. The Shi’a continued to hold the Ummayads in contempt, regarding them as worldly and corrupt - which, on the whole, was true. Meanwhile, Arab expansion went on slowly - rather more slowly than before the siege of Constantinople, but surely nevertheless. In 711 they invaded Spain, and others reached India - in 713 there was even an incursion into China. By 715, the Arabs were masters of Spain. Their expansion north continued until the fateful year 732, when they were finally halted at Tours by Charles the Hammer - Charles Martel. The Muslims retreated back over the Pyrenees and never reappeared in Europe. The battle of Tours was as decisive for Europe as the battle of Chalons, where Attila the Hun had been defeated in 451.

Understandably, the Christian world loathed and feared the Arabs; Mahomet’s name was corrupted to Mahound and became a synonym for the Devil. And we might well raise our eyebrows at the notion that a great religious movement, whose central belief was that man should surrender himself totally to the will of God, should lead its devotees to impose their beliefs with fire and sword. This would be naive. Man is a creature with a thorn in his side, with a perpetual will to ‘go somewhere’. At least, he must have the
feeling
that he is ‘getting somewhere’. This is why human beings sweat and struggle and strive, instead of browsing peacefully like cows in a field. This is why all human children seem to have a perpetual craving for toys, and why human adults continue to need their own grown-up toys: colour televisions, video-recorders, fast cars etc. And when masses of men are united - particularly when these men are ‘have-nots’ - they instantly begin to look around for something to conquer. Expansion is a basic law of history. It is very regrettable, but it is so. It means, in effect, that man is a natural burglar. When a nation takes to the sea and invades another country, it is committing burglary just as surely as the thief who forces open your back window with a jemmy. The Arabs did not even have the excuse that they were converting pagans. The Persians and the Spaniards believed in God as much as they did themselves, and some small disagreement about prophets – Zoroaster, Mani or Jesus - was neither here nor there, since Mahomet himself always acknowledged these prophets as genuine. The truth is that religion only provided the cement that gave the Arabs unity; the laws of history did the rest. An Arab poet admitted as much in a poem addressed to a young Bedouin: ‘No, not for paradise did you forsake the nomad life. Rather, I think, it was your yearning after bread and dates.’

So the Arabs, like the Romans and Persians before them, committed burglary all over the Mediterranean. And then, as with these earlier civilisations, the laws of history began to operate in favour of the conquered peoples - or at least, to offer them some compensation. When a ‘have not’ becomes a ‘have’, the need to commit burglary begins to evaporate and is replaced by a desire for interesting acquisitions. To begin with, the Arabs were as destructive as the Vandals; when they conquered Alexandria in 640, the general pointed to the library and said: ‘If these books agree with the Koran, they are useless; if not, they are infidel. Burn them.’ And the library was set on fire. When they captured Rhodes in 654, they sold the famous Colossus to a Jewish merchant. But a century later, the Ummayads were replaced by the family of the Abbasids. As usual, it was a vicious and treacherous business. Some of the Abbasids - a family who belonged to the same Koreish tribe as Mahomet - were descendants of the murdered Ali, and they gained the support of the Shi’ites by promising that, if they came to power, they would appoint a Shi’ite Caliph. From 747 until 749 there was a murderous civil war; but the rebels finally triumphed. An Abbasid named Abu-al-Abbas proclaimed himself Caliph, although he was no descendant of Ali. In 750, he invited eighty prominent Ummayads to a banquet and, while his guests were eating, signalled his men to kill them. Then the corpses were covered over and the remainder of the terrified guests instructed to go on with their meal. In his first speech as Caliph, Abu proudly referred to himself as al Saffah, the Shedder of Blood. But under the Abbasids, the Arab state entered its equivalent of the golden age.

Its Augustus was the Bloodshedder’s brother, al-Mansur, who came to power on the death of the Bloodshedder five years later. He built himself a new capital, Baghdad, in Iraq, the city of the Arabian Nights. It became the Rome of the Dark Ages, a city of silks and porcelains, linens and furs, ivory, gold and jewels, honey and dates and sherbets. And it also came to replace Alexandria as the world’s centre of learning. One day in 765, al-Mansur fell ill with a stomach complaint, and was cured by a Christian monk from a monastery a hundred and fifty miles away. He was asked by the Caliph to set up a hospital in Baghdad, which he did. He also brought to Baghdad many of the books from the monastery of Jundi Shapur, Greek classics on astronomy, philosophy and ancient science. The Arabs had a practical reason for being interested in astronomy: they wanted to know in which direction Mecca lay, since all mosques had to look towards Mecca and believers had to prostrate themselves in that direction five times a day. The compass was unknown, but the Greek astronomer Ptolemy had invented an instrument called the astrolabe, for measuring the position of the stars on a rotating dial. Now al-Mansur recognised the value of this infidel science and had the Greek books translated into Arabic. Then, eight years later, a traveller from India arrived, bringing more astronomical texts, and with a new way of writing figures that was far more convenient than the Latin method. It was our modern system of placing the units in one column, the tens in the next, and so on. We still speak of ‘Arabic numerals’ although it would be more correct to say Indian numerals; but the Arabs brought the method to Europe.

The Arabs did far more than reawaken interest in astronomy and mathematics; they stimulated the European intellect to new labours. The ancient Greeks had been the last intellectual adventurers of Europe; the Romans had added little but their genius for engineering. And when Rome fell to Alaric in 410 A.D., Bishop Augustine of Hippo - later St Augustine - made it the occasion for a lengthy sermon on the vanity of human achievement called
The City of God
. Earthly cities are bound to fall, said St Augustine, but the aim of the Christian is to build the city of God. And he warned Christians to shun science and intellectual enquiry: ‘a certain vain desire and curiosity... to make experiments... cloaked under the name of learning and knowledge.’
The City of God
became the most popular of all Christian books next to the Bible, the great bestseller of the Middle Ages, and the Christian church agreed wholeheartedly with its distrust of science. Five centuries after al-Mansur, the unfortunate Roger Bacon, a scientist of remarkable originality, was condemned to prison for daring to introduce ‘certain novelties’ (i.e. new ideas) into his work. The Church believed that Aristotle was the last word in scientific and philosophical knowledge.

But for these men of the desert, the works on astronomy, science, medicine, philosophy, astrology were an exciting new experience; they fell on them and devoured them ravenously. Arab mathematicians delighted in problem-solving. And although the Church was suspicious of ‘novelty’, it had to admit that Ptolemy’s great work on astronomy, the
Almagest
, seemed to be a landmark in human knowledge. (In fact, it was basically nonsense, since Ptolemy was convinced that the earth is the centre of the universe and had to make all his calculations fit that mistaken assumption; however, it started Europe thinking about astronomy again.) So the Arabs who had burned the library of Alexandria made amends by re-awakening the European appetite for learning.

After al-Mansur died in 775 A.D., his son al-Mahdi continued his policy of encouraging the arts and sciences, and of building schools. He reigned for ten years; then came Haroun al-Raschid of Arabian Nights fame, whose reign was mostly taken up with a lengthy war with the Byzantines, who were forced to retire, licking their wounds. And Arab history in the Middle Ages reached its climax with the twenty-year reign of Haroun’s son, al-Mamun the Great, in whom the Arab desire for conquest turned into a passion for knowledge. He built two observatories and a ‘House of Knowledge’ containing a vast library. He also became curious about that mysterious monument, the Great Pyramid, particularly when he heard a legend that it contained star maps of the ancients. His workmen hacked their way in and discovered the pyramid’s various passages, and the King and Queen’s Chambers; but they found no secret room with star maps. Nevertheless, al-Mansur’s scholars constructed the first complete map of the heavens and another of the earth. (Both have, unfortunately, disappeared.)

The general chaos of the Dark Ages can by no means be laid at the door of the Arabs. It came about, quite simply, by the fall of Rome, which left Europe to the barbarians. Apart from the Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Huns and Vandals, there were the Slavs, the Burgundians, the Franks, the Lombards and the Saxons. Many of these barbarians were basically nomads, who disliked settling in towns even when they had conquered them, and preferred to move around restlessly from area to area, exacting their taxes in food and other goods. This hardly made for stable administration. The first of the great Prankish kings (the Franks were a German tribe), Clovis, became leader of his tribe in 481 A.D. at the age of fifteen, invaded Gaul and became converted to orthodox Catholicism. Having defeated Burgundians, Visigoths, Alamanni and the Romans occupying Gaul, he set up his capital in Paris. His dynasty became known as the Merovingians, after his grandfather Merowech. But his successors soon found that it was hard work being a king if you had no real power or wealth. Without the magnificent Roman civil service, it was practically impossible to run the country and collect taxes. The next best thing was to hand over various estates to local magnates, ‘counts’, making them promise to supply a small army if it was needed. But this meant that the counts, in effect, became little local kings and the central king had to live off his own estate and eat his own produce. ‘Taxes’ were impractical, even if the counts had been willing to pay them, for there was little money in circulation; the counts would have had to pay in eggs and cabbages. When the king went for a drive, it was in an ox-cart driven by his ploughman. So in the Dark Ages, the whole of Europe was rather like Ireland in the seventeenth century: poor, barren and very provincial.

In fact, Ireland in the seventh century A.D. was a great deal ahead of most of the rest of Europe. In the fifth century, a Briton named Patrick had been captured by Irish pirates and learned their strange tongue; he went to Ireland and converted the country. The Irish, who were Celts, took to learning as avidly as the Arabs would a few centuries later, and their monasteries became miniature universities. All over Europe, it was the monasteries that preserved books and kept learning alive. Now that the Roman emperor was in Constantinople, the pope had virtually become emperor of the west; he enthusiastically encouraged rulers such as Clovis (later Latinised to Louis), who conquered in the name of the Church. The various bishops and abbots were naturally granted land; so the monks and churchmen of the Dark Ages were among the few who could count on eating a square meal every day and drinking a glass of wine. Otherwise, life in the Dark Ages was as harsh and difficult as it had been since human beings began to build cities in Mesopotamia. Most people were chronically undernourished - as disinterred skeletons show - and an enormous percentage of babies died at birth or soon after. Robber bands roamed what was left of the roads. If anyone could have remembered the good old days of Roman occupation, they would have sighed with nostalgia.