All Things Medieval

In 1055, Seljuk Turks took over governance of Baghdad. The Abbasid Caliph was still technically alive but powerless. Seljuk rulers spoke Turkish, Persian and sometimes Arabic, and often they used Islamic names like Muhammad. However, the old Arabic titles of office shifted to Persian and Turkish. From this point, we hear of Sultans, Shahs, Beys and Atabegs, in addition to the old Emirs and Caliphs.

The first Seljuk Sultan was named Toghril Bey, who was a colorful guy. His foster brother seized power until Toghril not only defeated his army, but also strangled him personally with a bowstring. Then Toghril settled the legality of rule by marrying an Abbasid princess. After his death, his sons and nephews began to murder each other until Alp Arslan (which means Heroic Lion) became Sultan in 1063.

Alp Arslan went to war against the Byzantine Emperor; both men led their own armies into Armenia, to the Battle of Manzikert (1071). In this battle, the Turks used the tactic of constantly falling back to draw the Byzantine Army into a long ragged line in a valley, then encircling it and attacking. The Byzantine Army was thoroughly defeated.

The Greek Emperor became a personal captive of Sultan Arslan. The story goes that the Sultan asked, “What would you do to me if I were your captive,” and the Emperor replied truthfully, “I’d kill you, or parade you through the streets.” Sultan Arslan humiliated the Emperor by promptly freeing him without harm. From this time, Seljuk Turks owned more and more of Anatolia: it *began* to become “Turkey.” It wasn’t their homeland yet, though; Alp Arslan was buried in Turkmenistan, and Anatolian farmers still spoke Greek.

Alp’s son became Sultan Malik Shah I; at this time, the Turkish Muslims consolidated power over all of the eastern and northern Muslim lands, pushing out some Egyptian rulers from the Holy Land. Malik’s brother Tutush ruled in Damascus; a warlord named Artuk became governor of Jerusalem. The Turkish Beys appointed to govern Aleppo, Jerusalem, Antioch and Damascus fought against each other. Chiefs with names like Radwan, Daquq, Ilghazi and Sokmen staged internecine battles in farm fields around these cities.

When a little boy, Malik’s baby son, became Sultan in Baghdad in 1092, there was a free-for-all power grab. A second Arslan declared independence for Turkish Anatolia, while Tutush (the baby’s uncle) did the same in Damascus.

During this period, pilgrims from Europe continued to attempt to visit and venerate holy relics in Jerusalem. At times, the city was besieged or sacked by some Turkish warlord; in 1096, a Fatimid Sultan swung north to conquer it. It was extremely dangerous to live in, or travel to, Jerusalem.

By the beginning of the Middle Ages (6th cent.), Christians had a general understanding that all theological disputes should be solved by representatives of the five major Christian regions: Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, Constantinople and Rome. After the fall of the Roman Empire, Constantinople considered itself the Roman government in exile. When Roman Popes began crowning Carolingians as Holy Roman Emperors in the west, it was a direct assault on Constantinople’s claims. Around the same time three of the five Patriarchates fell under Islam’s rule: Alexandria, Jerusalem and Antioch no longer had secular power, though they could still send theologians to a council. The power struggle between Rome and Constantinople had no mediating parties: it really came down to Eastern “Rome” vs. a resurgent Rome.

When the Franks and other Europeans converted to Latin Christianity, they learned a form of the official creed that included a word not used in Byzantine churches. Rome didn’t officially adopt this version until 1014, when it was sung at the coronation of Henry “the Fowler” as Holy Roman Emperor. During the 800s and 900s, it was a football to kick around, a negotiating point while Rome and Constantinople bickered over other forms of power.

At one point, the Byzantines politely informed the Latins that they had deposed their Patriarch. Rome responded by sending an inquiry team as if Constantinople needed Rome’s approval. At missions frontiers, Greek and Latin missionaries clashed. Russia went Greek; Poland went Latin. Hungary went Latin. Bulgaria was a battleground with both kinds of missionaries, but by 1020, Byzantium was in military and theological control of Bulgaria and Serbia.

When Normans began to take over southern Italy, they appointed Latin bishops who used the Western creed form. Italy shared the peninsula with Rome, but southern Italy (mostly Mediterranean coast with shipping ties to the east) had always answered to Constantinople. Southern Italians were confused. Who was in control? Was it a collegiate matter for a church council, or had there been conquest? Was Rome now higher than a sibling? Yes: the “Bishop of Rome” now claimed to have theological hierarchy over all other regions.

The Patriarch of Constantinople retaliated against Rome’s abuse of power by closing Latin churches still operating in his city in 1052. In 1054, a legate from the Pope walked into Hagia Sophia Basilica and laid on the altar an order of Excommunication against the Patriarch. For a few decades, Patriarchs had often “forgotten” to list Popes in their official church hierarchy list; on their side, the Popes often “forgot” to notify Constantinople of their ordination. Now they were openly declaring each other powerless and illegitimate. The excommunicated Patriarch ignored the Papal Bull and issued his own edict denouncing the heretical Latin creed formula.

So what happened next? Not much. In a way, the Great Schism mattered less in its own time than it does now. At the time, Greek-speaking Anne of Kiev was queen of France and then regent over her son Philip. The Holy Roman Emperor didn’t come around arresting Byzantine relatives at the Parisian court just because Rome had issued an edict. And one generation later, in 1081, the western (German) Holy Roman Emperor was himself besieging Rome in a dispute with the Pope. It wasn’t even clear if the Pope was his own man.

What we can learn from it, coming up to the Crusades, was the fluidity and uncertainty of relationship between Rome and Constantinople. We all know as a point of general information that the First Crusade happened because the Pope sent help at request of the Byzantine Emperor. We’ll get there shortly, as the 11th century closes. But think about the geopolitical significance of what amounted to a Latin military invasion of Byzantine territory. At the same time that Normans were oppressing Greek monks in Italy, the Greek Emperor was forced to invite more Normans right into Jerusalem to do the same. Imagine the delight of the Pope, after two centuries of power plays against Byzantium: now, he had the ability to summon a chain-mailed horde to the rescue.

We tend to look back in history and assume that Rome was always dictating to Europe; but instead, we see here that a process of elimination (Islam taking over competitors) and long rivalry led to that point. Until that point, it wasn’t clear that Rome was really going to become All That. The Bishop of Rome was just a church official in a city among others. But the First Crusade was a master stroke of sibling domination. It was the first reply to Stalin’s much later question: How many divisions does the Pope have? 11th century answer: more than the Patriarch, anyway.

Before the year 1000, there’s no clear evidence of anti-Jewish actions. A small community of Jews had settled along the Rhine River in Roman days; there were some other small historic communities in parts of Roman France. Most of Europe’s Jews before the turn of the millenium were merchants, though some were farmers and wine-makers.

A particular group of merchants is known to history as the Radhanites. Their home base in Europe was in the Rhone Valley; they traveled back and forth to China, at times by way of the Jewish-convert Khazar kingdom on the Black Sea. (It’s possible that contact with Jewish traders encouraged the Khazar king to learn more and then convert.) Some of their routes used the sea, but going to China invariably entailed a long overland journey. The Radhanites were remarkable for being able to speak most of the languages along the way, including Slavic and Persian. They carried European furs and slaves eastward, returning with spices. Before 1000, they were the main spice suppliers to the Carolingian kings.

As we’ve seen, the region of Europe and Asia was destabilized in the late 900s. The Abbasid Caliphate was nearly gone: North Africa became Sunni fundamentalist; Egypt became Shi’ite evangelical; Persia was filled with Turkic nomads. China was not stable after the Tang dynasty fell. And just before the Kievans converted to Orthodox Christianity, they sacked the (probably) Jewish kingdom of Khazaria. For a while, even skilled Jewish merchants could not work the Silk Road. During the 11th century, the price of spices shot up. French and German kings had no good reason to protect Jews now that they weren’t spice sellers.

When (1009) the Fatimid Sultan al-Hakim of Egypt tore down the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, the Christian world was shocked. Al-Hakim ordered all non-Muslim places, both monastery and synagogue, torn down. But somehow, as word spread, Jews became connected with the destruction. Rumors spread saying that the Jews had incited Fatimid demolitions. “Anti-semitism” is a modern word, and it’s clumsy at times because Arabs are “Semites” but are not included in it. Back at that time, they were: Jews and Arabs were viewed as very similar. They were all “Levantine” and Saracens.

The Norman worldview was deeply anti-Jewish. The Jews had cultivated scholarship, diplomacy, languages and merchant skills to survive in the post-Roman world. Norman lords despised all of these skills.  They didn’t value literacy, as Charlemagne and Alfred the Great had done. They were culturally allergic to Jews.

King Robert II in Paris and Duke Richard II of Normandy began formal oppressions of their Jewish populations. They began by insisting on conversion, but of course when conversion was refused, they started killing (many despairing Jews killed themselves, often by drowning). A Jewish scholar in Normandy was able, with difficulty, to journey to Rome and appeal directly to the Pope for relief, which the Pope provided as possible. But it was never safe to be Jewish in France again. In Spain, as the kingdom of Andalusia splintered into taifas, the Christian kings who sacked frontier towns did not distinguish between Jew and Muslim. Jews were seen as collaborators, spies, and foreign. Popes never supported Jewish persecution, but it continued.

During this same century, R. Shlomo Yitzhaki, one of the greatest Talmud scholars ever, lived in Troyes, France. Troyes was the site of large international trading fairs several times a year. Perhaps it was a safer place since Jews had an economic role in the fairs, or perhaps Rashi just managed to squeeze his lifetime in between persecutions. It helped that Troyes was well outside Normandy.

You’ll remember that one of the early steps to pacifying the North was the deal the Franks made with Rollo the Dane to have land in exchange for peace. The Northmen who settled in Normandy were probably warriors who took local wives, because their descendants were speaking French within one generation. Their names, especially for boys, remained North Germanic; their version of French had a Danish accent. But their identity as Normans was more French than Danish.

A hundred years later, the Normans were still distinctly different; they were in my opinion the most aggressive ethnic group in Europe. They seem to have had the worst case of military-themed Christianity, although the Anglo-Saxons shared this theology and may have helped spread it among the Normans. In their minds, Jesus was the leader of a war band. He came to earth as an act of aggression against Satan, the rival (and rebel) king. They didn’t find it strange that he died on a cross as an act of war, since Northern mythology was full of mysticism about death. In the Anglo-Saxon poem “The Dream of the Rood,” the cross reminisces about how frightening it was when the young, strong warrior leaped onto it to give his life. Being a Christian meant loyalty to Jesus as warrior-king, which easily included acts of aggression against Christ’s enemies.

Norse culture did not value literacy, scholarship, or peaceful negotiation. The Norman aristocrats could be extremely pious and ignorant at the same time. They cared deeply about their faith, but simply did not (could not) read the parts of the Gospels that might disabuse them of their militant notions. Faith was about rituals, vows, and loyalty to God’s heavenly Hall. Wanton killing might be murder, therefore a sin; but much killing was lawful, and it was generally justified if the warrior was as careless of his own life as he was of others’.

Normandy became the backbone of the Frankish feudal system, and at the same time a great exporter of arrogant, pious, callous knights. Younger sons had to seek their fortune through conquest.

Normans on pilgrimage to Rome and Jerusalem discovered that southern Italy was often attacked by Saracens. Nobody was firmly in control of southern Italy; it was nominally Byzantine, but often at civil war with Lombards. Sometimes there were joint Byzantine-Roman attempts to defend the coast or take back Sicily, but the overall effect was a power vacuum that the Normans happily filled. First as pilgrims, then as mercenaries, then invaders, they began to control the region. Ironically, the most violent Normans were most likely to be on pilgrimage doing penance for the sin of murder. And as devout Catholics, they had the Pope’s blessing to begin dominating Arab and Byzantine parts of Italy and Sicily.

Norman lords became Counts in southern Italy beginning in 1038. In 1061, the Pope appointed Robert Guiscard to be “Duke of Sicily.” It was an empty title, but Robert and his brother Roger set out to make it real. The brothers spent the rest of their lives conquering Arab Sicily town by town. By 1091, Roger was Count of all Sicily for real; in the same year he reconquered the island of Malta. The language of Malta remained Arabic at the core, with borrowed Norman words. Eventually Sicily became a Norman kingdom, often including parts of southern Italy. Normans set up new titles for themselves, including Robert’s son Bohemond as Prince of Taranto. (Bohemund became a Crusader.)

The Byzantine Emperor was not pleased to have Sicily and Italy under Norman control, even if they were nominally Christians. They had no historic fondness for Constantinople (as Charlemagne did) and they were loyal only to the Pope, the Emperor’s rival. Norman dominance in the Mediterranean did not contribute to regional peace; if anything, it was another early step toward the Crusades. The most aggressive strain of Christianity was now at home in the heart of the Mediterranean world, directly challenging Byzantine and Arab power.

After about 950, the nature of the Muslim world began to change profoundly. Each region had its own type of change. In Persia, there were nomadic Turks moving in, converting, ruling various regions, and often moving on toward the Middle East. In Egypt, formerly pragmatic rulers were replaced with the very ideological Ismaili Fatimid dynasty. As the Shi’ites spread their theology through Arabia and Iran, the powerless Caliphs in Baghdad responded by focusing more on their “successor to the Prophet” role. The line between Shi’ite and Sunni became clearer. Until this time, we can call the majority Sunnis, but they weren’t self-consciously anything other than just Muslim. During the 11th century, this started changing.

In Muslim Spain (Andalusia), Islamic rule had been perhaps the most pragmatic and least ideological. Under the central rule of Cordoba, there had been a high degree of co-existence of non-Muslims and Muslim factions. After 1009, its cultural leadership stopped when its elite scholars fled civil war. The taifa city-states were disunified and warred against each other, trying to regain central power. Some of them were dominated by Arabs, others by Berbers, others by native Iberians who had converted to Islam.

The Christian kingdoms of Northern Spain took the opportunity to pick them off one by one during the middle of the 11th century. The Reconquista might have taken just a generation or two, instead of several centuries, if nothing more had changed.

But to the south, in Africa, fundamentalist Islam was stronger than ever, conquering more and more regions of black Africa. Some of the more powerful taifa kings sent invitations to Marrakesh in Morocco, asking for military help against the Christians. The Almoravid fighters, wearing blue Tuareg face veils as a uniform, crossed over in 1086.

It’s easy to take this alliance for granted, since we live in a world with sharp ideological distinctions. But this is not how Spain had been during the 9th and 10th centuries. There had often been alliances between Muslim Emirs and Christian kings; Charlemagne’s one sally into Spain had been at the invitation of a rebellious Muslim. There had been a great deal of intermarriage, too; records suggest that Abd al-Rahman III had blue eyes from a Christian-born mother or grandmother. Badr, last powerful vizier of Cordoba, named his son Abd al-Rahman, but history knows him as Abd al-Rahman Sanchuelo: “little Sancho”, nicknamed for his Christian grandfather. It seems possible, in hindsight, that Spain’s 11th century civil war could have resolved some other way with regional cross-religious alliances.

If that had been a possibility, it was no longer possible after the fundamentalist Almoravid fighters crossed into Spain. Religion began to matter much more. First, the alliance was made on specifically religious grounds. As Almoravid generals took over Spanish cities, they instituted a stricter interpretation of Sharia. They evicted many of the non-Muslims who had achieved positions of wealth and status.

Second, the Almoravids were Berber nomads, infamously hostile to city life. They didn’t care about the Houses of Wisdom, book-copying scribes, musical instruments, three-course meals, white tablecloths, deodorant, fashions or fountains of Cordoba and its satellites. When they didn’t outright destroy these things, they neglected them. Many of the new Taifa kings were illiterate; they didn’t value Hebrew or Latin scholarship, they only valued Quran memorization and their own school of Sharia interpretation.

One of the most famous Jews of the period was Samuel, known as haNagid (“the prince”). He was one of the Cordoban scholars who fled civil war; he started a shop in Malaga, a coastal town. Even before the main Almoravid invasion, Malaga’s taifa had a Berber king who was illiterate. When the king heard that one of his servants had found a man from Cordoba who could write letters, he directly hired Samuel as his chief scribe. Samuel’s education quickly elevated him above all other staff, and he became the Grand Vizier. He even led armies against other taifas.

When Samuel haNagid died in 1056, his son took his place. His son was only in his 20s, and although he too was educated, he was not canny enough to maneuver in Berber politics. In 1066, a fundamentalist mob rioted against Jews, particularly against the young Jewish vizier. After killing him, they went on to kill about 1500 others, most of Granada’s Jewish community. This was the first anti-Jewish violence in a land where Jews had welcomed and helped the Muslim conquerors.

• A Vanished World by Chris Lowney

The first ruler to have the title “Sultan” was Mahmoud of Ghazni, who followed his Mamluk father to power in 998. Their kingdom was in Afghanistan, so they were perched right on the threshold of India. At this point, Islam’s main period of expansion and conquest was over. India was the last frontier that was still open. Islam was established only in the area of Sind, around modern Karachi.

Mahmoud began a series of military expeditions south, attacking first a small Ismaili state at Multan in the territory of modern Pakistan. At the Battle of Peshawar in 1001, he defeated a Hindu Raj. A few years later, the defeated Raj’s son got neighboring rulers to band together in a powerful confederacy to push back against Mahmoud’s incursions. His elephant failed him at a crucial moment in a battle at Lahore, and the Indian confederacy was defeated.

Every year, he launched another invasion and each time got farther into India. He started with crossing the Hindu Kush in Kashmir and began picking off northern kingdoms. He appointed governors for each city he conquered, and often they were not Muslim. He drafted men from each city into his army. But he also destroyed Hindu and Jain temples and monuments.

By 1025, Mahmoud had conquered Hindu, Buddhist and Jain kingdoms all over northern India, as far east as Uttar Pradesh. He moved south into Gujarat, on India’s western coast. As he conquered, he destroyed. Gujarat had a famous and ancient temple to Shiva, called the Somnath Temple. Mahmoud sacked it and destroyed the image to Shiva.

The amount of wealth that Mahmoud al-Ghazni brought back was unimaginable. Using this treasure, the Ghaznavid family continued to be a powerhouse in the region until 1186. When they struck out at other eastern Muslim lands, they were the first Muslim army to use elephants.