The Mad Caliph al-Hakim, 996-1021

Posted on July 4, 2022 by Ruth

Caliph al-Aziz died of sudden serious illness in Bilbeis as he traveled toward Palestine and Syria. His 11 year old son was also on the trip, and he was summoned to his dying father’s side. Al-Aziz put his turban on his son’s head and hailed as the Commander of the Faithful. The child took the regnal name of al-Hakim. In contrast to the half-Sudanese Twelver Imams whose line had gone into hiding, Imam-Caliph al-Hakim had bright blue eyes. Just as today a child who looks different from his family might be teased that he’s a bastard, al-Hakim was sometimes mocked as a closet Christian born to a Christian mother.

A Mamluk eunuch who acted as tutor to al-Hakim became the de facto regent until the boy grew up. There was constant fighting during al-Hakim’s years. First the Berbers rebelled, then the Qarmatians in Arabia attacked, and of course, the Abbasids in Baghdad (and their Turkish viziers and generals) constantly tried to put down the Shi’ite threat. In 1011, the Abbasid Caliph issued a proclamation declaring that the Fatimid Caliph was a fraud, not descended from Fatima at all.

Caliph al-Hakim is the most famous of the Fatimids for two reasons. First, he probably had bipolar disorder and so he had periods when his ruling style is best described as crazy. Second, a group of Ismailis in Egypt and Syria became particularly attached to him, and this was the foundation of the Druze religion.

By al-Hakim’s time, the Fatimids controlled not only Palestine and parts of Syria, but also the holy cities in Arabia. With the Ismailis in charge of Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem, pilgrim policy tipped in favor of Shi’ites.

Al-Hakim’s first act on coming into his majority seems to have been a purge of older Fatimid nobles. His second was the public posting of curses against Aisha, Mohammed’s wife, and the first 3 Caliphs for how they treated Fatima’s and Ali’s family. As an Ismaili Shi’ite, he was deeply hostile to the Sunnis. In retaliation, Baghdad commanded a group of scholars to issue the Baghdad Manifesto. They also accused al-Hakim of favoring Christians and Jews over (Sunni) Muslims.

Now began the Caliph’s crazy period. He may have been trying to prove he wasn’t that nice to Christians and Jews, but his actions went well past that. Legends of his insane decisions vary; Sunni historians credit him with much worse things than Shi’ite ones. Of course he did some good things, like founding a second large mosque, Dar al-Hikma (i.e. Hakim, his name) that became the city’s second university. But he did crazy pretty thoroughly:

Al-Hakim banned various vegetables, shellfish, and chess. He ordered all dogs killed because their barking was intolerable. He outlawed wine and the Christian holidays of Easter and Christmas. He ordered Christians to wear a large iron cross around their necks, and Jews to wear a wooden calf (or a bell!). Their women had to wear non-matching shoes, red and black. He sacked a town near Cairo, perhaps due to its large Jewish population (Fustat is where Maimonides later lived).

From 1007 to 1012, he ordered the wholesale destruction of churches, monasteries and synagogues across his realm, which included the Holy Land. Constantine’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher was dismantled stone by stone (1009). By 1012, Arab historians say that no churches or synagogues remained in Palestine.

After that, he backed off considerably on the Christians and Jews, and instead began to persecute Sunni Muslims and people in general. In 1014, he ordered women to stay indoors so to enforce this, he forbade the making of women’s shoes. He executed countless people, including close friends and complete strangers. Sometimes, they say, he did the killing personally.

His zeal for the Ismaili faith began to win him significant support among the most fanatical Shi’ites. One Persian preacher, Hamza, declared that al-Hakim was the Incarnation of God, 1000 years after Christ (more about Hamza next). This was perhaps the only attention Muslims paid to the Millennium, since they counted years since the Prophet. Christians, by contrast, were swept with Millennial zeal and some expected the end of the world. (Lucky for them, they didn’t need to worry about digital dates that used only two digits for the year.)

Al-Hakim grew a little more mellow and ascetic with age. His reign wasn’t bad for the Fatimid dynasty in some ways; but in others it was a disaster. In 1021, he went into the desert to meditate, and he never came back. History assumes that his older sister had him assassinated; she became regent for his young son.

The Church of the Holy Sepulcher was rebuilt later by the Byzantine Emperor, with the Caliph’s permission. The church that Crusaders later prayed in was this recently-built basilica, begun in 1042. But the stories of Christian persecution and martyrdom remained in circulation, even if the church had been rebuilt, its previous destruction was constantly talked about. Al-Hakim’s mad ideological rampage was the first step toward the international war we call the Crusades.

A Short History of the Ismailis by Farhad Daftary
The Lost History of Christianity by Philip Jenkins
The Coptic Christian Heritage by Lois M. Farag

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Gerbert as Pope Sylvester, 999-1003

Posted on June 10, 2022 by Ruth

Gerbert’s first royal pupil, Otto II, was married to a Greek princess and fully in control of his kingdoms by age 18. He continued his father’s project of campaigns against the Slavs; the Poles and Bohemians were converting to Christianity—and choosing to ally with Rome, not Constantinople, by using the Latin Rite.

The Byzantine princess, now Queen Theophanu, must have been delighted to find that her husband was well educated. She shocked the German court by taking a bath every day and eating with a golden fork instead of her fingers. Her education was so good that she was often involved with diplomacy; of course, she also spoke Greek, which in the Frankish lands was an exotic foreign language, not yet one of its standard school subjects. Theophanu had three girls before producing an heir, Otto III. But in 983, the Holy Roman Emperor Otto II died, probably of malaria. He was only 28.

It took Theophanu about two years to gain control of her young son and the regency, and then it was clear that no expense could be spared in educating the young King of the Germans. So Theophanu sent for Gerbert of Aurillac to come from Reims and teach her six-year old, who already spoke both German and Greek. Otto III learned Latin, which he may have spoken a little already, since his grandmother had been born Queen of Italy in Rome. He may have learned basic Arabic reading skills; he certainly learned the mathematics/astronomy curriculum that was Gerbert’s specialty. He was probably the best-educated non-scholar of his era.

Otto III assumed full control of Germany at age 14, and by 16, he rode into Rome to claim his birthright there, too. Poland was brought fully under Germany’s overlordship, with parts of Bohemia. Otto III acted as baptism sponsor to the first Christian King Stephen I of Hungary. He began building a palace in Rome, and he made a contract to marry a Princess Zoe of Constantinople. It was Otto III who also had the colorful experience of entering Charlemagne’s tomb to get relics, only to find his great-great-grandfather seated in a chair, mummified by the dry air, with gold teeth shining in the lantern-light.

Otto III’s attitude to the Papacy was full-on assault. First he appointed his 24 year old cousin as Pope Gregory V. A few years later, in 999, he appointed his best friend and tutor, Gerbert of Aurillac. At this time, it was unclear how Popes should be chosen. If a strong Holy Roman Emperor appointed one, who could say no? If Otto III could appoint a Pope, why couldn’t his distant cousin Hugh Capet, now King of France? Medieval Europe’s history is shaped by the struggles of the Pope to remain separate while French and German kings tried to co-opt his power. This subject will come up many more times.

In 1002, Otto III suddenly died. He was in Italy on campaign at age 21, with his Byzantine princess bride Zoe just arriving in Apulia for their wedding. The very ambitious Ottos came to an end without a next heir. His legacy was in doubt and disarray, left to his cousins in Bavaria. Only Gerbert remained, as Pope Sylvester II.

Gerbert of Aurillac ruled the church as Pope Sylvester II for only four years, 999 to 1003. His appointment was almost certainly meant as a stick in the eye of the Roman and Italian hierarchy, who had opposed Otto III. Gerbert was a Frenchman from Aquitaine, appointed by a Greek-speaking German. Rome rebelled against both the king and his Pope. It is said that Italians threw mud at Otto’s coffin as it processed back to Germany.

Although Gerbert had served as the Archbishop of Ravenna (another Otto appointment), he had never been much involved with church politics, and when he was, the results were poor. He was just not interested in theology and church governance. He really wanted to study math.  He had written Latin books on Arabic mathematics, with an emphasis on simple trigonometry for figuring out surveying problems: heights of mountains, areas of fields. Shortly before he became the Pope, his personal letter to a Frankish friend discussed the proper way of figuring the area of an equilateral triangle.

Gerbert’s career problem was that universities had not yet been founded, so he could not chair a math department. The only career track in which lifelong study was funded was the church; influence in the church entailed promotion in its governing structure. He was always a bit lost. As Pope Sylvester II, he did his best to govern the church, but his time was short since he died only a year after Otto III.

One might think Sylvester II would be soon forgotten if he was Pope for such a short time, but instead, he became legendary in fantastical stories.

The root problem seems to have been that he could speak Arabic. Europe was not even close to ready to accept a new mathematics system emerging from Christendom’s enemy Islam. The numbers probably struck them as magic symbols (as opposed to the honest old Roman tally marks and C’s). Although Gerbert of Aurillac had learned math in Barcelona and perhaps Cordoba, rumors spread that he had gone all the way to Morocco to learn magic. All the way to Morocco! Imagine! And if not, well Cordoba was almost as bad.

How had such a wicked priest become Pope? The only possible answer was that he had made a deal with the Devil. (Common folk may literally not have known that he had been the tutor for two generations of Ottos.) According to later legend, he had a long relationship with a succubus; this was an embodied she-demon named Meridiana who favored him with success and wealth as long as he was true to her. According to another legend, if he went to Jerusalem and said Mass as Pope, he would instantly be struck dead when the Devil came to take his soul. Some rumors reported that he indeed died that way.

In our terms, Pope Sylvester II’s only great failure was that his understanding of Arabic numerals never really included the power of zero. He taught place value with an abacus, but he used only places 1 through 9. The word “zero” came into Latin two centuries later, borrowed from Mozarabic cero. Without zero, the system is interesting but not compelling. In fact, without zero, the place-value method is a “cipher,” borrowed from the Arabic word for zero, tsifr. Cipher came into English with various meanings of mystery: a code, a puzzle we can’t figure out, a character that stands for something mysterious. And so both Andalusian zeros made their way into English.

When Pope Sylvester II and his star pupil Otto III were both gone, the school at Rheims carried on his curriculum, but Arabic numbers remained an arcane academic subject. There was no celebrity pushing for their adoption, no king ordering their use. Until Italian merchants began to feel the need for the new numbers a few centuries later, Europe just lumbered on with additive numbers like CVIII.

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Gerbert of Aurillac and Numbers, 960-83

Posted on June 9, 2022 by Ruth

In the 960s, a French monk named Gerbert of Aurillac came to Barcelona under the protection of its Count. The Count met him while traveling, stopping in the Benedictine monastery of Aurillac, and was so impressed with the young man’s intellect that he got permission to carry him south for further advanced study. Gerbert lived for a number of years in a Benedictine monastery in the Pyrenees, studying the Islamic scholarship that was then at its height in Spain under Caliph al-Hakam II and Almanzor, the regent for al-Hakam’s son.

Gerbert studied philosophy, a new field that was opened up by Arabic scholars (such as al-Farabi) reading and commenting on Aristotle, and theology. But he also mastered the quadrivium, a set of four academic disciplines that the Greeks had seen as closely related. Mathematics was the foundation, although in Greek mathematics, arithmetic was the junior partner. Mathematics meant the measured relationship of things (such as lines) to each other. It began with Euclid’s geometry, but it continued into studies of 3-dimensional figures like cones. The other related fields were music and astronomy.

Music was seen as a mathematical field because tones could be measured relative to each other, like lines or angles. Although they did not yet measure pitch by hertz, they knew that the 8-note scale represented something real in physics. We can now say that a violin is tuned to A = 440 hz, while the A one octave lower is tuned to 220. Medieval music knew this as a proportion, without the modern Herz numbers attached. Similarly, astronomy was about the relationship of measurements between stars and planets over time.

By the late 900s, Mozarabic culture in Cordoba was at its height. Christian bishops spoke Arabic and dressed in Arab fashions; Christians and Jews wrote Arabic treatises and poetry. We aren’t sure if Gerbert traveled to Cordoba or beyond; some legends place him as far south as Morocco. At the very least, he used his perch in the Pyrenees to obtain Arabic language skills to read their books.

Gerbert accompanied the Count of Barcelona on pilgrimage to Rome in 969 (the same year the Fatimids took over Egypt). In Rome, he met the new German Emperor, Otto I. Otto was looking for a tutor for his son, the future Otto II, so he hired Gerbert on the spot. This brought Gerbert north to Aachen.

Otto I, a descendant of Charlemagne, had ambitions to pull Germany out of the shadows. He himself had married an Anglo-Saxon princess and then a widowed Queen of Italy, the boy Otto’s mother. Italy was the crown jewel of the German empire, and it was always in danger of slipping away. That’s why Otto II needed a world-class education; eventually he married a Byzantine princess, which also made peace with Byzantine claims to Italy.

After Otto II grew up, Gerbert became the head teacher at the cathedral school in Reims, France. This was before the establishment of any of Europe’s universities; the school of Bishop Hincmar was one of the first ambitious, modern schools. Gerbert brought its curriculum up to date and began teaching Arabic mathematics. He also introduced a new kind of abacus that, in simplified form, became the “counting board” of European merchants. (Hence our term “counter” for the place next to the cash register.)

At Reims, Gerbert improved and innovated to create a hydraulic pipe organ. It was certainly part of his music curriculum, since a pipe organ is clearly based on mathematics. He also created an armillary sphere, a sort of globe of the skies. This was part of bringing in the latest in astronomy from Arabic treatises.

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Duke Rollo and the First Normans, 918-42

Posted on June 9, 2022 by Ruth

In addition to the attacks of Saracens in the south and Slavs in the east, the Franks now suffered attacks of Danes in the north. Although they had similar cultures, the Franks had become the fat, soft-bodied targets of their lean, hungry northern relatives. At one point, the Danes sailed up the Seine River and burned Paris.

Charles the Simple, King of West Frankia and Lotharingia (Lorraine), solved the Danish problem in his locale. In 911, he made a treaty with Rollo (Danish Rolf or Hrolfr), leader of the most threatening band of Danes. Rollo and his men were given a large territory along the Atlantic coast, north of Aquitaine. In exchange, they became part of the homeland defense against other Danes. The “Land of the Northmen” was shortened to Normandy. It was not at first known as a duchy, but its early rulers were Counts.

I think that the Normans came mostly as single males and married local wives, who raised the children as Frankish-Latin speakers, because their Danish language remained only in names (especially men’s names). Within two generations, Normans all spoke French. In some ways, they stayed culturally distinct, like the Gauls of Provence. They were even more lightly converted to their new Christian religion than the Franks, and they remained much more warlike for centuries. They also kept their Norse inheritance law of primogeniture: total inheritance by the oldest son.

Normandy was not empty. Its inhabitants were Bretons, who continued to fight to gain back their land until they were finally pushed into Brittany, a rump of the old Celtic kingdom. In 942, the Bretons and Normans signed a peace treaty. During the same period, the Frankish lord Fulk was fighting both Bretons and Normans to create his own county of Anjou. Over time, Anjou’s lords intermarried with Normans, as did Blois, Champagne, and Brittany itself. The Norse-tinged Christian lords remained highly militarized for generations. This “Norman” culture powered the Crusades.

In 927, an aging Rollo was succeeded by his son William (in Norse, Vilhjalmr), who ruled until 942. William had dived right into the dynastic divisions of the Franks, supporting some factions against others. The Normans were thus quickly an indispensable part of Frankish politics. But they were not entirely Christianized by this time.

Rollo’s grandson Richard inherited power as a child. King Louis IV took the boy count to Paris, but a popular Norse uprising returned him to Normandy at age 14, where Count Richard chose to ally with the pagan Count of Bayeux and Norse King Harald Bluetooth. Count Hugh of Paris sought an alliance with Richard, betrothing him to his daughter Emma. In 955, even before he married Emma, Richard became the guardian of Hugh’s son Hugh. This second Hugh is known to history as Hugh Capet, the Count of Paris who was elected King of France.

Richard and Emma had no children, but Richard was now tightly allied to the King of France and determinedly Christian. His second marriage reached out to a rival tribe of pagan Norse around Cherbourg. Beautiful and intelligent, Gunnor gave Richard many children before he finally married her so that their second son could become an Archbishop. Oldest son Richard II became Duke of Normandy, while his sister Emma married the King of England, then as a widow, remarried Cnut, the Dane who also became King of England. It’s through her that the Normans formed a claim on England.

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Feudalism in France

Posted on June 9, 2022 by Ruth

During the 10th century, two major changes came to the land of the Franks. They were unconnected, but each contributed in its own way to the establishment of medieval feudalism. The first was a set of inheritance reforms, the second…the Normans.

The first monastery in France was in Tours, established by St. Martin in the 5th century. Monasticism was not a widespread movement at first, but by the time of the Carolingians, the kings were donating land to build some early Benedictine houses. Although there were other monastic traditions in Syria and Egypt, the Order of St. Benedict was the only option in Rome’s region of influence. The Rule of St. Benedict gave rules for how to live in this new lifestyle. They were to live in poverty under the authority of an abbot (from Aramaic “father”) in obedience, humility and prayer.

By the 900s, there were many more Benedictine monasteries. This was all well and good, but it created an inheritance problem. In the Frankish Salic Law, the landowner could divide as he chose, in theory among his sons, but actually among anyone. Many landowners willed away large sections of their land to the local monastery in exchange for perpetual prayers. They left much land to their sons, but it was diminished in size overall. Each son received an estate that was far inferior to his father’s. Each often repeated the process when he grew old, leaving even smaller estates to the grandsons.

However, these pious dying Franks had been part of a Military-Agricultural Complex. The Carolingian dynasty depended on each subdivision of land to support horses and armed men. It was how the army was raised; each lord was responsible for mustering (and training) a certain number of both. He then sent a required number of mounted knights to the regional lord, who led them against the king’s enemies. But now, estates were being whittled away from within by non-taxable church ownership. After a few generations of piety, there might be barely enough land left to support the barony’s required horse-breeding, iron-smelting, and weapons-training. The monasteries had no obligation to send fighting men or raise horses, though they could certainly raise and sell them for income.

By the 11th century, the French kings forced inheritance reform: a man’s land had to pass to his oldest male heir in one piece. It was unfair to the younger sons, but it was much better for the people who lived under them. The law also put a top limit on how much land could be donated to monasteries.

Alliances became more stable and boundaries stopped changing with every generation. Primogeniture became the first line of defense in the ongoing war against Eastern invaders. In later times, social reformers pointed out how primogeniture kept all the wealth in the hands of a few. The Carolingian kings might rejoin: “You say that like it’s a bad thing.” Primogeniture created the feudal system as we see it in the Middle Ages, when younger sons went out as landless knights to win their own manors while the older brothers ruled in a pyramid of power.

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The Christian Prince of Kyiv, 988

Posted on June 9, 2022 by Ruth

The Rus territory of Eastern Europe stretched from Odessa on the coast to the borders of Finland in the north. The Norse in Sweden and the Slavs of the forests along the Volga River had made marriage alliances for several generations, and the rulers in Kyiv (or Kiev) typically had Norse names like Igor (Ingvar) and Oleg (Helgr). The Norse had their pantheon with Odin and Thor, the Slavs had a similar set with Dazhbog and Perun.

As Kyiv grew from a frontier trading post to have aspirations of joining the local power structure, the rulers had to consider allying by means of not only marriage but religion. Prince Igor’s widow Olga ruled for her son, and during her regency years, she was baptized a Christian in Constantinople. While her son Svyatoslav (the first Slavic ruling name) didn’t adopt her ways, one of the grandsons did. This was Vladimir, who was made prince of Novgorod and, with Swedish help, became Prince of Kyiv in 980.

Vladimir chose to ally with his grandmother’s choice, Christian Constantinople. He is said to have rejected Islam because it prohibited alcohol, and Judaism because the loss of their capital city marked them as losers in his eyes. He chose Eastern/Greek Christianity over Latin because his emissaries reported little beauty in German churches, while Hagia Sophia Cathedral impressed them greatly.

Vladimir then asked for the hand of the Emperor’s sister Anna. In 988, he was baptized a Christian (with the name Basil, like the Emperor) in the city of Kherson, Ukraine, which was originally Greek Chersonesos, then married Anna. Back in Kyiv, he tore down pagan rite centers and proclaimed the city Christian, with a new Cathedral of St. Basil. Then he sent 9000 troops to aid the Emperor in his wars.

Vladimir was not monogamous. Before Anna, he already had five wives, and after Anna’s death, he married a granddaughter of the Frankish king Otto. His marriage ties strengthened alliances and gave him a small tribe of sons to disperse into his growing kingdom.

He founded the city of Belgorod and sponsored the baptism of many of the local Turkish rulers. From his time forward, Kyiv became more Slavic and less Norse, generally more powerful, and a strong Christian force. Through his connections to Sweden, Eastern Christian missionaries went north to Norway. It’s ironic that the balance of power owed his landing on the Christian side to his love of vodka, still the controlling passion of Russia.

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Fatimid Takeover of Egypt, 969

Posted on June 9, 2022 by Ruth

In 920, the Imam-Caliph moved into a new capital city, Al-Mahdiyah, on the Tunisian coast. At this time, Turks in Bulgaria were in a power struggle with Constantinople. Both sides quickly enriched this Fatimid Caliph in a bidding war of alliance gifts. The Fatimids took control of Sicily, then moved along the African coast into Libya.

The Fatimid towns stopped paying Abbasid taxes to Baghdad, but its psychological effect on the Caliph there was minimal. Egypt was the jewel in the Caliph’s crown, and Ibn Tulun’s dynasty had been cut off. Wealth from Egypt was again flowing north.

But in 969, the Abbasid-appointed Emir of Egypt was defeated by Fatimid forces. Egypt had been almost single-handedly feeding imperial armies for a long time. Losing Egypt meant famine among the troops; it meant sickness, desertion, and general military weakness. It wasn’t so long ago that Constantinople had lost Egypt, and now it was Baghdad’s turn.

The Fatimids captured Alexandria and pressed into the Nile Delta heartland. They set up their new government in the Islamic city of Fustat, but then began to build a city on the ruins of Rome’s old Fort Babylon. One legend suggests that the name “Cairo” was based on the planet Mars, which was high in the sky as they started construction. Astrology was cutting-edge science in 970, of course. In their new city, the Fatimids laid out a large new mosque called al-Azhar. The Imam-Caliph would preach on Fridays, just as the early Caliphs had done.

Cairo became the capital city of Shi’ite Ismaili fervor, as well as the ruling city of the Fatimids. (Fustat, left behind, gradually became a Jewish neighborhood, home to Maimonides.) Ismailis had been a minority among Shi’ites, who were a minority among Muslims, but under the Fatimids, Egypt began to send out agents to spread Ismaili theology. They organized the effort by outlining different regions that they called “islands” (jazira), like Rum (Europe), Sin (Far East), and Zanj (Southeast African coast).

They had the most lasting success in places like Yemen and Iran, where there were already many Shi’ites—and, ironically, where Eastern Christianity had been strong. They had almost no success among Turks, who as a group tended to be anti-intellectual and pragmatic. Shi’ite theology is esoteric, intellectual, and idealistic, so in those senses it is closer to the Christian model.

Of course, it was dangerous to become an Ismaili if you lived in Abbasid territory or in the city-states of pragmatic Turkic Mamluk rulers in the east. The belief system was devoutly religious and esoteric, but it necessarily implied the illegitimacy of these other rulers, too. Even so, the underlying Shi’ite feeling of many Iranian and Yemenite believers welcomed the Ismaili da’is. In order for their theology to survive life under hostile rulers, the Ismailis embraced the concept of taqqiyah, that is, that it’s acceptable to pretend to have mainstream views, pray for the Abbasid Caliph in public at the mosque, and even deny that you are an Ismaili.

The Fatimid dynasty ruled Egypt and Syria as a very small minority among the native Christian populations, and even as a minority among Muslims. During the 900s, Egyptians were still mostly Christian. If there are numbers to estimate how many had converted to Islam, I can’t find them, but definitely the following century had some really big waves of conversion that hadn’t happened yet. Let’s guess that 20% were Muslims, 5% Jews, and 75% Christians. In rural Egypt, over 90% were still Christians.

The Fatimids had conquered the Abbasid emir’s army, but they still needed some popular support for their rule. They couldn’t rock the boat with harsh or large changes, and they also had to court the favor of all intellectuals and landowners. This meant that they had to show fairness and even favoritism toward Jews and Christians. For this reason, the Fatimid period was a great time for rebuilding synagogues and churches, and for taking a rest period from persecution. Many Christians and Jews worked in the government.

Imam-Caliph al-Aziz (975-996) liked to sponsor three-way interfaith debates. He called this gathering a majlis, the word now used for a parliament. A famous Coptic legendary miracle came out of one of the majlis debates. A rabbi challenged the Caliph to make the Christians prove Jesus’ saying that “if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you can move a mountain.” The Caliph, perhaps amused, but more likely sincerely interested, gave the Patriarch three days to come up with a mountain-moving solution. If the Christian scriptures were proven false, they would be demoted and persecuted.

The Coptic Patriarch, who was a Syrian monk named Afraham, called for a universal fast. The Patriarch had a vision that told him a one-eyed tanner would move the mountain. This man was called Simon, and he was indeed very pious. As Jews, Christians and Muslims gathered around one of Cairo’s nearby hills to watch, the Christians led by Simon prayed, and then Mt. Moqattam moved. The Caliph rewarded them with permission to rebuild more churches. During the reign of Caliph al-Aziz, the Coptic Church began to write books in Arabic and to translate older Greek and Coptic books. From this point on, Coptic and Greek stayed in the liturgy, but they wrote books and treatises only in Arabic.

Fatimid armies pushed into Palestine and Syria, intent on taking over the entire empire if they could (and thus restoring a member of Muhammad’s immediate family to universal leadership). Abbasid Baghdad was controlled by a Shi’ite family, the Buyids, for a while. It must have seemed like Shi’ite theology was finally having the comeback it deserved. This raises the question: why isn’t Shi’ite theology the majority opinion now? Why didn’t Fatimids succeed in their project? Basically, in addition to the ordinary vagaries of empires, Shi’ites have a tendency to split over which son of an Imam is the heir. One son may rule, while another is revered by a splinter group. Shi’ites are united by an idea — that the Prophet’s immediate family had special access to Allah — but they fracture into hostile factions.

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Mamluks and Seljuks

Posted on June 9, 2022 by Ruth

During the Abbasid years, rulers began building up private slave armies. From this practice, the Arabic word for a person owned as a possession has come to us as Mamluk. It has come to mean specifically the type of slave who is a soldier.

Mamluk soldiers were drawn from both western and eastern margins of the empire. Best results came from taking boys who were between 9 and 11, then putting them into Spartan training conditions. They were always taken from non-Muslim peoples, such as Greek Christians or African animists (some Slavs were Christians by this time, some were still pagans). The boys adopted their new Islamic identity fairly easily because their training units had high morale. Most of them had already faced a life of hard work and poverty. Now they trained hard, but they had plenty to eat and could earn rank and rewards. They knew that commanders and governors had risen out of Mamluk ranks, and that if they succeeded, they could marry. Mamluk armies became the backbone of the Muslim empire right into modern times.

The Abbasid Caliphs still drew most of their Mamluks from among the Turks. There were many Turkic ethnic groups in the region at this time. The Pechenegs and Bulgars had been living around Bulgaria, Ukraine and Anatolia since the 7th century. A large group called the Oghuz had settled between the Caspian and Aral Seas, roughly Kazakhstan. Nearby was the Kimak Khanate of the Kipchaks, and roughly in modern Ukraine was the Jewish-convert Khazar Khanate. There were also Uyghurs along the Silk Road. Most of these people shared enough vocabulary to communicate basic words: at for “horse,” beg for “ruler,” yok for “no.”

A group of Oghuz Turks rebelled, and after a few battles, they left Oghuz territory in the east and started moving westward by stages. Their leader, Seljuk Bey (beg > bey), converted to Islam in the late 900s. His followers began using Arabic Muslim names, so they are hard for us English to spot in a cursory glance at history. We see Mahmuds and Ahmeds and assume Arabic ancestry, but not so.

It was the beginning of a long, slow, but unstoppable cultural shift within Islam. At the start, the Seljuk Turks were starkly different from their Persian neighbors. However, they learned Persian and borrowed many of its words, and they adapted to its culture. Some of them settled where they were, while others kept the nomadic life and kept drifting.

Ibn Tulun’s independent Egypt and Yaqub ibn Layth’s independent Iran showed the other Mamluks what was possible. All the Mamluk general Alp Tigin had to do was walk away from the command structure with his troops, take his own city (Ghazna), and begin ruling. Within two generations, the Ghaznavids were Persian-speaking Muslim Sultans who ruled a vast area for about three centuries, challenging the Saffarids. Any Mamluk could do it, and soon many were trying.

By the end of the 10th century, Baghdad’s eastern provinces were increasingly Turkish with little interest in imperial obedience. The Round City itself had Seljuk nomads camped not that many miles away. They weren’t hostile invaders, but they definitely put pressure on the Abbasid status quo. More importantly, they still thought like nomads. There were norms of culture and war that the Persians had shared with Greeks and Romans, and the Arabs had adapted to these ways. The Turks — and later the Mongols — came from a different environment. Their ascent in the Middle East changed the status quo in important ways. Arabs had understood and loved pilgrims, but Turks viewed them as spies and pests.

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Andalusian Pottery

Posted on May 24, 2022 by Ruth

If you traveled in 10th or 11th century Spain, you’d see a sharp contrast in its regional pottery. During this high-water point in Muslim Andalusia’s power, the map had stabilized into a large southern Muslim nation and a strip of small kingdoms backed by the Pyrenees and the Atlantic.

Over the next few centuries, the two cultures blended, but at this point, they were about as distinctly different as they’d ever be. The northern Christian kingdoms were dominated by Visigothic aristocracy, the people who had fled the invaders leaving native tenant farmers behind. They were keenly aware of their aristocratic bloodlines, but the culture was still in the Dark Ages while southern Spain was fully Middle Eastern and medieval.

Northern pottery was simple, probably mostly made of coil technique. Unglazed pottery was the color of its clay; pottery glazed with the Roman lead process was yellow or green. This pottery was very functional: pitchers and bowls.

In the Muslim south, they were importing pottery from Alexandria. The court at Cordoba used pottery such as the northern kingdoms had never seen, using Iraqi methods of tin glazing, slip painting and double-firing. In fact, a new method had improved on even tin glazing for making fine white dishes. By the 11th century, they were mixing ground quartz with clay. The ground quartz is called “frit,” so we know this faux porcelain as fritware. The addition of frit lowered the temperature needed in a kiln, while fusing crystals in the clay and quartz into glass throughout the dish.

(Much later, during the Reconquista centuries, the two traditions began to fuse. An older art, that of painting/firing enamel onto pottery or glass, came into vogue. By the time northern kings were in control of central cities like Toledo and Madrid, Andalusian potters were ready to enamel heraldic coats of arms onto their dishes.)

The Islamic world, including Spain, was also developing pottery into perhaps the most useful form of all: tiles. Cordoba’s Great Mosque kept expanding as the Umayyad dynasty grew powerful, rich and secure. Its floor, ceiling and walls used many painted tiles. The full potential of plain-colored but geometrically-designed tiles was not yet part of Spanish, even Andalusian, architecture. It’s not clear that it was even developed yet in Persian-influenced Baghdad. The earliest eastern math-based tiles aren’t dated sooner than the 13th century; the Alhambra wasn’t built yet, either. (We’re only slowly sneaking up to the establishment of Cairo, after all.)

The use of tiled floor spread north much more rapidly than the Iraqi-pioneered techniques used in fine china. The floors in medieval French and English churches, monasteries and castle kitchens were often made of unglazed, natural-colored tile. Here, the tiles usually were natural-colored but simply shaped: squares, diamonds, triangles, hexagons. Much like the bathroom tile tradition we still see today.

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10th Century Pottery

Posted on May 24, 2022 by Ruth

Having never been a potter myself, I could never understand why archeologists seemed to assume that some tribe or region made the same kind of pottery over and over. They name prehistoric cultures that way: the Grey Ware culture, the Black Stripe Ware culture, etc. When the pottery is found in a more recent time, in a different place, they assume the people moved (well—they used to assume that, but that’s a different topic). I always wondered why they ruled out that maybe people got tired of making round pots with black stripes and felt like making something different.

Then I learned a bit about the history of pottery. It’s not at all like what I imagined, in which the clay pot is decorated with colored paint and then baked. Making and firing pottery is a chemistry experiment and if it’s not done right, it fails. Worse, what it looks like before it’s fired in a kiln is often very different from how it looks after. The intensity of the kiln’s heat (which is based on the furnace design, another engineering experiment) interacts with minerals in the clay and in whatever glaze and paint have been applied. What’s applied clear may turn blue or red. Kiln chemistry is not at all an obvious art. So it really is plausible that for centuries, potters in one place had no way to innovate without creating useless items.

Every now and then, there’s a breakthrough discovery. In Abbasid Iraq, in the 9th and 10th centuries, they had one of those periods.

Invaders and merchants going to China had brought back kaolin pottery that was pure white. It was painted in mysterious blue and other colors, on top of white. Kaolin’s mineral composition was a Chinese local secret, so they had a monopoly and kept prices high. If potters in Basra and Baghdad could figure out how to make white pottery, they could secure the profits and ruin the Chinese. The only known glaze at the time was made of powdered lead; it was widely used in Roman-settlement lands, and it turned yellow or green.

Now Persian/Arabic potters experimented with glaze made from ground tin. Fired in a medium-hot kiln, it turned white. Further experiments into the 11th century gave them a way to decorate it. When the pottery was unglazed and unfired, it could be painted with cobalt or copper; then when it was tin-glazed and fired, it came out with blue or green designs. It still wasn’t Chinese porcelain, but it was a pretty good substitute.

Baghdad’s methods with tin, cobalt and copper spread to other points in the Muslim empire: Damascus, Alexandria, Tunis and points east like Samarkand. Further experimentation in the medieval Muslim world showed how to fire tin-glazed pottery a second time, this time with silver and copper oxides. It came out with a high gloss and is often called lusterware.

They also found that some mineral-rich clays could be mixed with water (the mud was called slip) and painted onto unglazed pottery, which then received a clear glaze. In firing, the minerals turned red, brown and black. Later, they sometimes used a blue glaze over slip painting.

Although there was a Koranic prohibition against depicting the human form, this was not always enforced. The absolute safest decoration was to paint slip, with a fine brush, in elaborate Koranic inscriptions around the dish. The second safest was to stick with geometric designs, and then 3rd, leaves and flowers. But there’s pottery from medieval Iraq and Egypt with animals and human figures shown in scenes that tell stories. The painting can be crude in an abstract/modern way, but it can also be very detailed.

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