The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (13 page)

the conventional sense of the term. Instead, it was a dominant but

decaying continental oligarchy whose downfall was due at least in part

to its inability to maintain the high tribute levels of the imperial era.

In this sense the stability associated with the Pax Romana is deceiving, for the decline in subject revolts and slave uprisings in the later

principate may well have been a mark of weakness that refl ected the

Romans’ diminished ability to place demands on rural populations.

Rome’s grandeur understandably captured imaginations for centuries to come, and the dearth of reliable information about daily life

in the provinces allowed imperial enthusiasts to ignore these realities.

In their idealized top-down view, the Roman Empire was long-lived,

coherent, cultured, and transformative. Rome’s common subjects

were largely missing apart from passing references to barbarians,

tribes, revolting slaves, and the urban mob in Rome. Grittier popular

perspectives on lower-class life have appeared in contemporary narratives such as Steven Saylor’s Roma Sub Rosa books and Michael

Apted’s
Rome
series for cable television, but for the most part it was

more romantic and entertaining to identify with a cultured Roman

gentleman. Consequently, scholars, military strategists, and public

intellectuals have found the temptation to invoke idealized stereo-Roman

Britain 63

types of Roman imperial greatness in contemporary policy debates

irresistible. In point of fact, the Roman Empire was by defi nition an

antiquarian product of its times, and as such it was by no means as

omnipotent, durable, or uplifting as they imagine.

The Umayyad Caliphate, which succeeded Roman rule in much

of the Mediterranean world, suffered from the same limitations in

the medieval era. While its religiously inspired Arab founders denied

that secular ambition drove their conquests, they produced a Muslim

transcontinental state that was clearly an empire. Forced by necessity to adopt Roman governing practices, they inevitably also had to

recruit local allies to rule and extract treasure. This was particularly

true in Spain, where a branch line of the Umayyad dynasty solidifi ed

its hold on power by allowing Visigothic nobles to convert to Islam.

While modern historians nostalgically recall the resulting imperial

state of Al-Andalus as a paragon of learning, culture, and religious

toleration during the darkest medieval centuries, it too rested on the

exploitation of common subjects.

As in Rome, a conquering power built a viable imperial state by

allowing a local elite to share in the spoils of empire. Although Islam

provided a powerful moral justifi cation for imperial expansion, it also

complicated imperial rule by requiring pious Muslim sovereigns to

convert the conquered populations. Even more than the Romans, the

Andalusi Umayyads struggled to maintain a suffi ciently clear boundary between citizen and subject, a failure that would allow Muslim

converts from the once romanized Iberian aristocracy to eventually

take over their empire.

Poitiers

FRANCE

OF BURGUNDY

K. OF NAVARRE

N

K

León .

O

OF LEÓN

F

Pamplona

C

Zamora A

Marseilles

S

Narbonne

Nice

Due

T

E

ro R.

I

b

L

r

E

o R.

Tagus R.

Barcelona

Toledo

AL-ANDALUS

Valencia

Cordóba

Seville

uadalquivir R.

G

Cartagena

Gibraltar

F

A

T

I

M

I

T

E

S

0

100

200 mi

0

100 200

300 km

Iberia, 910

2

Blurring Subjecthood in

Imperial Al-Andalus

According to myth, a looming tower built by Hercules lay on the outskirts of the Spanish capital of Toledo. It contained a powerful secret

that kept the kingdom safe from invasion, and upon taking power

each succeeding ruler added a lock to its gate. Twenty-six monarchs

kept the tower secure until curiosity got the better of Roderic, the last

Christian Visigothic ruler of Spain. Ignoring the pleas and warnings

of his ministers, the king broke into the tower to fi nd a bejeweled

table belonging to Solomon sitting in a room decorated with paintings of Arab horsemen armed with swords and bows. A parchment on

the table read: “Whenever this asylum is violated and the spell . . . broken, the people shown in the picture shall invade the land and overturn the throne of its kings. The rule of the Goths shall end and the

whole country fall into the hands of . . . strangers.” Symbolically, the

violation of the tower thus led to the invasion of Spain by a mighty

Arab army that later Christian sources described as “more cruel and

hurtful than the wolf that comes at night to the fl ock of sheep.”1

Roderic was in fact the fi nal Visigothic Spanish king, but the

tower’s millenarian prophecy was an invention that helped succeeding generations of Christians explain the sudden trauma of imperial conquest. Indeed, the rapid annexation of the Iberian Peninsula

by the Umayyad Caliphate must have seemed like the end of the

world. Conversely, the story of Roderic’s rash actions gave the victorious Muslims, who had their own version of the myth, an excuse for

empire building. The parchment on Solomon’s table suggested divine

sanction for the conquest of Spain and the creation of Al-Andalus.

65

66 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

The name Iberia came from ancient Greek sources, and the Romans

referred to the peninsula as Hispania. Muslim sources interpreted

this as Isbania, while medieval Christians used Espania. The name

Al-Andalus was an Arabic allusion to the Vandals and referred to the

regions of the peninsula under Muslim rule. Contemporary Spain

arose from the union of the medieval Christian kingdoms of Aragón

and Castile. Although modern Portugal is a separate sovereign nation,

for the purposes of this chapter the name Iberia refers to the entire

peninsula south of the Pyrenees mountain range.

The fi rst Muslim expedition to Iberia was a relatively small,

speculative, and haphazard enterprise. Moreover, it was not really

even Arab. Consisting primarily of approximately twelve thousand

Muslim Berbers and sub-Saharan Africans under the command of

Tariq ibn Ziyad, the Berber governor of Umayyad Tangier, the invading army most likely sought plunder rather than empire. Tariq had

probably noticed the impotent Visigothic response to earlier, smaller

raids on the Spanish coast and was almost certainly acting on his own

initiative. Although devout Muslims had an obligation to work for

the political and cultural supremacy of Islam, the Berber governor

also knew that expanding the Umayyad imperial frontiers paid direct

dividends in treasure and prestige.

Interestingly, the ramshackle Visigothic state was much more

vulnerable than the decentralized “tribal” Britons. Roderic had ruled

Spain for only a single year at the time of invasion. He came to power

by elbowing aside a more legitimate rival named Witiza, and it is

possible that, like Verica’s appeal to Claudius, Witiza’s partisans may

have asked Tariq for aid in reclaiming the Spanish throne. Landing

on a rocky promontory that is now called Jabal Tariq (the Mountain of Tariq, or Gibraltar) in a.d. 711, Tariq found little opposition

and pushed easily into the heart of the Iberian Peninsula. His forces

defeated Roderic in a small but decisive battle in the Guadalquivir

River valley that wiped out the knights of the royal household and

court. Muslim accounts credit the victory in part to the defection of

Witiza’s sons, who changed sides to reclaim their father’s estates. Roderic apparently died in the fi ghting, and the swift capture of Toledo

prevented the Visigoths from selecting a replacement king.

Tariq was too successful for his own good. His lightning conquest

of southern Iberia attracted the attention of his superior Musa ibn

Muslim

Spain 67

Nusayr, the Umayyad viceroy of western North Africa. Suspicious of

his subordinate’s achievements and coveting a share of the spoils, he

directed Tariq to wait in Toledo until he arrived to take command of

the operations. The Berber general nonetheless continued his northern advance. When Musa landed with a rival Arab army the following year, the invasion degenerated into a race between the Berbers

and Arabs to sack wealthy Iberian cities. Urban populations that surrendered were treated relatively well, but those who resisted faced

massacre and wholesale enslavement.

By the end of 712, Muslim forces had overrun the most productive

and fertile areas of lowland Iberia. Musa and Tariq became wealthy and

powerful, but they had little chance to enjoy the fruits of their victory.

Successful imperial generals can easily become Caesars, and Caliph

al-Walid I prudently recalled his adventurous vassals to Damascus

two years later. The anonymous Christian author of the
Chronicle

of 754
recorded that they returned with “some [Visigothic] noblemen who escaped the sword; gold and silver, assayed with zeal by the

bankers; a large quantity of valuable ornaments, precious stones, and

pearls; ointments to kindle a woman’s desire.” Yet these treasures did

not appease the Umayyads, and Sulayman, who succeeded his brother

as caliph in 715, convicted Musa of embezzling the state’s share of the

spoils and “paraded [him] with a rope around his neck.”2 Musa and

Tariq apparently died in disgrace and poverty, but Visigothic Spain

became the westernmost possession of the Umayyad Caliphate.

Like Roman Britain, Iberia was not a typical Umayyad possession and cannot be taken as a representative example of early Islamic

imperial rule. Nevertheless, the Muslim conquerors’ attempts to make

sense of its diverse Roman and Visigothic heritage refl ected the larger

problem of defi ning subjecthood in the caliphate. Moreover, like the

Romans in Britain, the Umayyads gave the ancestors of the Spanish

people, who became a global imperial power in the early modern era,

a profound lesson in what it meant to be an imperial subject.

As with the republican Romans, the Umayyads never set out to

build an empire, nor did they admit to being a secular imperial power.

The title
caliph
comes from
khalifah
, the Arabic word for successor. The Umayyad caliphs were a ruling dynasty that claimed to be

the legitimate successors of the Prophet Muhammad. But they were

temporal sovereigns rather than theocrats. They governed the caliph-68 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

ate, a vast Muslim state stretching from Iberia to India, as the secular

protectors of the faith.

Yet there is no denying that the caliphate had all the essential

qualities of an empire. Beginning as a community of believers in the

Arabian entrepôt of Mecca, it grew into a diverse multiethnic imperial state through conquest. In theory, all believers were equal under

Islamic law, but non-Arabs who embraced Islam under the Umayyads faced discrimination and exploitation. Those who did not convert were, by defi nition, subordinate, imperial subjects. The caliphate

thus continued the traditions of the ancient empires of the Middle

East and Mediterranean. Lacking experience governing large settled

populations, the Arab Muslims used Byzantine and Persian imperial

systems to manage their conquered territories. Additionally, their

conquest of the settled Middle East also had a strong colonial element. Drawn by the spoils of empire building, entire communities

followed the victorious Muslim armies and settled in new cities that

grew around their fortifi ed camps. Almost overnight, these pastoral

nomads and merchants became a privileged imperial elite.

Despite this, the Arabs were ambivalent empire builders. Initially,

Muhammad’s followers fought to protect the infant Muslim community from the hostile pagan elite of Mecca; they did not set out to

create the caliphate. Whereas the Roman Empire grew steadily, almost

organically, over centuries of warfare, the imperial Arab caliphate

exploded in a few short decades. The religious obligation to protect

Islam and struggle against unbelief legitimized its conquests. The faith

required Muslims to push the frontiers of Islam into the unbelieving

lands of the “house of war” (
dar al-harb
) until the “house of Islam”

(
dar al-Islam
) encompassed the known world. The divine obligation

to create a pious universal political realm provided a moral excuse for

imperial expansion, but the customs of the Muslim armies, which took

time to develop into a formal doctrine of jihad, also allowed victorious soldiers to take plunder and tribute from conquered populations.

Many of the early Islamic soldiers were motivated by piety, but their