Peace (21 page)

Baghdad, known as the City of Peace (
madinat al-salam
) in its early days, became the capital of the succeeding Abbasid Dynasty (749–1258) with its second Caliph. Although they took power by overthrowing the Umayyad with a coalition of Shiites, mawali and non-Muslims, the cooperative spirit between them remained long thereafter, and gave rise to what is considered an Islamic golden age. Pax Islamica, defined as “lands under the rule of a Muslim government in which the laws of Islam are the laws of the land,” took on its full meaning with the Abbasid, not least because Islamic law (
Sharia
) began to be codified.
⁵²
The Caliph's court became a center not only of Islamic studies, but also of cosmopolitan luxury and inter-cultural learning to which no Christian city of the times came close. In 780 the Caliph al-Mahdi invited Christian patriarch Timothy I, who translated Aristotle's works into Arabic on his request, to his dinner table for a theological debate – an event unthinkable in contemporary Europe, where even theological debates among Christians were turning into bloody battles.

Under Harun al-Rashid (r. 786–809), the most famous Abbasid Caliph for his prominence in the
Arabian Nights
, violent punishment against dhimmis who failed to pay taxes was outlawed. “Rather,” in the words of his judge, “they should be treated with leniency.”
⁵³
As a controversy over icons in Christian churches brought Constantinople to civil war, Empress Irene paid Harun for peace. When she was deposed, Harun sent envoys to the Franks' newly christened king by the Pope in Rome, Charlemagne (see the next chapter), seeking a strategic peace against Byzantium and the remaining Umayyad Caliphate in Spain, and Charlemagne ultimately agreed. The Islamic Sufi sect, borrowing from Buddhists and Christian monks in Khurasan, began seeking a mystical inner Salam in silent prayer or physical frenzies. Jews, persecuted in Christendom, often held high administrative posts in the Caliphates. Participation in each others' religious festivals was common, displaying what a modern historian of medieval Egypt refers to as “mutual respect and brotherhood between the religions.”
⁵⁴

Harun's son, al-Ma'mum, funded a multicultural group of scholars and scientists who worked in a library called the House of Wisdom, amongst whom was the renowned Al-Kindi. Although at war, he sent envoys to Byzantium requesting Greek manuscripts. Christians began writing theology in Arabic and found common ground with Muslims in the theological utility of Ancient Greek logic. His state-sponsored translation program aimed at accessing intellectual tools ended up being one of the primary vehicles of the retransmission of classical learning into Western
Europe. The Byzantine Emperor Theophilus pleaded with him: “I have written to you to make a peace agreement. . . so that you may remove the burdens of war from upon us and so that we may be to each other friends and a band of associates, in addition to accruing the benefits of widened scope for trading through commercial outlets,” but ended with a threat: “If you reject this offer I shall penetrate into the innermost recesses of your land.” Al-Ma'mum rejected it, and battles between the Abbasids and Byzantium continued for centuries. Through the fifth century, each would fall to the other, Mamluk mercenaries, Mongols and then Turks.

After the Abbasid coup, the last living Umayyad re-established himself in Al-Andalus, or Muslim Spain, which had been taken from the Visigoth. As early as 713, treaties of peaceful capitulation on terms similar to those at Damascus earlier secured the cities of Murcia, Toledo and Cordoba. The latter became the Caliphate's capital, and soon was more populous than Rome, London and Paris of the times combined. As the Arab and Berber Muslim conquerors shunned farming, they hired Christians as laborers, who were better treated than those in feudal Europe. Jews acted as intermediaries not only between Muslims and Christian in the Iberian Peninsula, but thanks to their vast networks around the Mediterranean that transcended existing conflicts, as Muslim agents throughout the region. A tenth-century Jewish physician named Hasdai ibn Shaprut earned a position in the Cordoba Caliph's court. He was asked by the Caliph to negotiate a strategic peace deal with the Byzantine Emperor against the Baghdad Caliphate, and although several convoys were exchanged the deal never went through.

In the early eleventh century, the Christian Prince of Navarre signed a treaty with the Muslim ruler of Toledo to split spoils after jointly defeating the Muslim city of Guadalajara. The rulers of the latter then made a deal with the King of Leon-Castile and sacked Toledo. The King then agreed to switch sides and back Toledo for a large sum. These events exemplify how warfare based on internal divisions between Berber and Arab rulers drained the Cordoban Caliphate's resources and led to its collapse in 1031, and that warfare was rarely religiously motivated even if done under its banner. But the last Iberian Muslim stronghold only fell in the fateful year of 1492. The idea that Islam was spread and Muslims ruled solely by the sword, a fuel of today's fear and fierceness, is an inaccurate reduction of history, also unfortunate because it obscures the message of peaceful unity based on tolerance and benevolence put forth by Mohammed in the Qur'an and practiced by him and the vast majority of his followers, then as now.

5

Medieval, Renaissance and Reformation Peaces

A Tale of Two Cities: Medieval Peace and Peacemaking

This chapter's coverage of extended periods in European history, from the fall of Rome to the Renaissance rise of Italian city-states and the Reformation, is intended first to dispel the myth that there was nothing peaceful about medieval times. Contrary to popular and even some academic beliefs, it may be the Middle Ages more than any other single period that has shaped modern peace principles and practices, notably by innovations in treaty-making and through the
modus vivendi
of monasticism, but in other ways as well. Saint Augustine's (354–430) emphasis on peace through individual and social order in the following prescription, for instance, was probably a reaction to chaos stemming from the sack of Rome by Germanic tribes in 410, who eventually seized much of the Western Roman Empire:

The peace of the body is an ordered proportioning of its components; the peace of the irrational soul is an ordered repose of the passions; the peace of the rational soul is the ordered agreement of knowledge and action. The peace of body and soul is the ordered life and health of a living creature; peace between mortal men and God is an ordered obedience in the faith under an everlasting law; peace between men is an ordered agreement of mind; domestic peace is an ordered agreement among those who dwell together concerning command and obedience; the peace of the heavenly city is a perfectly ordered and fully concordant fellowship in the enjoyment of God and in mutual enjoyment by union with God; the peace of all things is a tranquility of order. Order is the classification of things equal and unequal that assigns to each its proper position.
¹

Augustine, a well-educated and well-traveled bishop, perceived that a paradigm shift was underway that could transform the Roman way of life. So the questions he raised in the
City of God
, written soon after the sack and in which this passage appears, were how and by whom.

Two kinds of cities, he claimed, could be “created by two kinds of love: the earthly city by a love of self carried even to the point of contempt for God, the heavenly city by a love for God carried even to the point of contempt for self.”
²
In earthly cities, “waging war and extending their dominion is in the eyes of the wicked a gift of fortune, but in the eyes of the good it is a necessary evil.”
³
Just wars, then, are those that establish or sustain heavenly cities, in which the “voice of God is an invitation to peace. It says: ‘If you be not in peace, love peace; what can you hope to receive from me more useful for you than peace?' What is peace? The condition from which war has been excluded; where dissension, resistance and adversity no longer exist.”
⁴
Augustine's near totalitarian, dualist definition of peace as the absence of war, also Platonically absolutist and idealist in its incontestable perfection, reflects the hierarchical universality and internality of his prescription for peace. Together, the metaphors of the two cities prove to be highly predictive of the limits and possibilities of peace in the Middle Ages, which flowed from the fusion of Roman and Germanic peace traditions once considered antithetical by both sides.

Rome's ongoing difficulties in maintaining internal peace through external wars and effective socio-political structures became impossibilities as its resources depleted, its armies weakened, and Church institutions gained power. Terminal conflict with “barbarian” Germanic tribes, once considered the only solution to their threat, lost ground to compromises, bringing about a fusion of Roman and Germanic peace traditions. As in the heyday of Romanization, such compromises included offering land, enculturation and citizenship for pacts of non-aggression, taxes and military service – except they were now used for remilitarization, not pacification. Overdependence on Germanic mercenaries, as Edward Gibbon points out in the best-read history on the period of
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
(1776–88), ultimately put them in a better position to make or break the peace they were paid to protect than as adversaries. To be sure, many chose to break it, and their invasions were brutal affairs. But as Gibbon also points out, the invaders had their own peace traditions, as when during their annual festival “the sound of war was hushed, quarrels were suspended, arms laid aside, and the restless Germans had an opportunity of tasting the blessings of peace.”
⁵
Building on these traditions, some newcomers chose to make and maintain peace with locals after they arrived, and recent scholarship holds that modern Western culture derives from such collaborative efforts.

One example is Ostrogoth King Theodoric the Great (454–526), who continued Roman traditions after he invaded Italy. Two of his administrators, Boethius and Cassiodorus, greatly influenced medieval thought and education. While not all Germanic tribes found it necessary or desirable to fully Romanize, all eventually converted to Christianity. As a diplomatic instrument, conversion was of tremendous use because it conferred spiritual benefits at no cost and a unitive impetus regardless of language or race, bringing together peoples Romans had been unable or unwilling to, as in the case of the first king of a united France, Clovis I (466–511). Intermarriages created or made official socio-political, economic and emotional ties between Romans and their tribal arch enemies; without such mingling, the shedding of blood alone could not have permitted foci of power and prestige to swing from longstanding urban centers to previously remote rural areas. An apogee of this mixed system was the ninth-century Carolingians, whose celebrated leader Charlemagne (742–814) was crowned by the chief bishop in Rome, now called the Pope, enhancing the Church's temporal powers with land and military might, and evolving peace and peacemaking into feudal and religious forms with strong parallels to Augustine's earthly and heavenly cities. Gradually, the Western Roman Empire was thus transformed into a labyrinth of regional kingdoms based on reciprocal obligations and mutual recognition, including the Lombards and Ostrogoths in the Italian Peninsula, Visigoths in the Iberian, Burgundians and Franks in Gaul and Germany, and Anglo-Saxons in England. Romanticizing of medieval warfare has regrettably taken the spotlight away from the realism of the period's peace practices. They came as close as possible to actualizing peace in embodying Augustine's earthly city.

In the tenth century, a clergy-led peace movement called the Pax Dei (“Peace of God”) tried to curb the feudal system's pervasive violence by prohibiting attacks on Church grounds, unarmed churchmen and peasants, their properties and families. Traders and merchants, a class also greatly reduced in size and importance since Roman times by unsafe land and sea travel, were also eventually protected by the Peace of God. By the eleventh, a Treuga Dei (“Truce of God”) was added, prohibiting all violence during certain holy days and periods, signaled by church bells. As in contemporaneous Japan, a distinction was increasingly made between private wars fought between individuals and their supporters, and public wars fought between kingdoms and theirs. The Peace and Truce of God aimed to limit both private and public wars, but despite kings' nominal support in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, after the Carolingian collapse heightened both kinds of warfare, the Peace and Truce of God were on the whole ineffective. One reason was that violators could “buy” their way back into the Church's good graces by its increasingly used
indulgences, decreasing their motivation to comply. In the late twelfth century, England's King Richard I, Lionheart, began commissioning knights to ensure that his kingly obligation to keep the peace in his realm was met. At first stationed in unruly regions, by the fourteenth century these Justices of the Peace, as they were now called, were present in every corner of his kingdom. They were charged with mediating disputes, preventing crimes as best they could, and rendering summary judgments and punishments in the tradition Greek and Roman Irenarchs. Positions of Justice of the Peace still exist today in England, also in some of its former colonies from Canada and Jamaica to Hong Kong. However, in general no longer active peacekeepers, they tend to be honorary or bureaucratic posts with no power.