All Things Medieval

The court at Baghdad was doubtless much more urbane than upstart Cordoba’s. Baghdad was based in ancient Persian culture: its customs, food, musical instruments, poetry, and textiles. Even Abd al-Rahman, coming from Damascus, wasn’t as steeped in Persian luxuries as the Abbasids became. But help was not long in arriving, though too late for Abd I. Eventually, insider pushing and shoving in Baghdad sent one court musician flying: and he went straight to Cordoba.

His name was Ziryab. We have multiple accounts of who he was: Persian? Arab? Kurd? Other? He was a polymath with an outstanding education; he knew music, astronomy, languages, poetry, and mathematics. When he arrived in Cordoba in 822, he caused a sensation and, in many ways, left a permanent mark on European fashion. He was hired as the chief court musician, but his influence went beyond music.

Ziryab was the most fashionable thing anyone in Cordoba had ever seen. His haircut was copied by everyone, leading to the first fad for “bangs.” His clothing, speech, and all of his habits were copied. Cordoba had many newly-rich families who were looking for ways to compete with each other.

Ziryab brought the latest in dining fads from Persia; for several centuries, Ziryab’s innovations stayed only in Spain, but eventually the Spanish-Ziryabian style caught on all over. First, the use of white tablecloths as an ostentatious display of textile wealth. We know that by the High Middle Ages, all of Northern Europe’s aristocracy used white tablecloths, but in 850, they probably didn’t yet. Second, Ziryab brought in the idea of drinking from glass utensils. (Before this, the aristocratic cup of choice was silver or gold). Glassmaking industry in Spain grew to keep up with demand; it took Northern Europe a very long time to move from pottery cups to glass, even among the upper classes.

Third, Ziryab served food in set courses: soup, main course, dessert. Not only had Arabs never served food this way, nobody in Northern Europe had ever imagined it. Grand castle feasts required courses, just to serve enough food to a large crowd; but each “course” had the same kinds of things. The idea of differentiated courses became standard in Andalusia but did not move north until a number of Spanish princesses had married into England and France, bringing the fashion with them.

Ziryab also changed clothing fashions. Until his time, people tended to have robes, cloaks or tunics without regard to season. Ziryab brought the idea of having a lightweight outfit for summer and a heavier, warmer one for winter. Now I’m not going to claim that the Byzantines hadn’t thought of this first, and once again we run into the problem of biased sources: anyone paying attention to Ziryab at all is probably biased toward puffing his resume. However, that’s among the claims. They also say he influenced the weaving industry toward stripes.

It seems more certain that Ziryab influenced Cordobans toward not stinking. “Talc” is another of those Mozarabic words; Ziryab tried to get people to use deodorant. If their clothes were lighter weight in the summer, perhaps they sweated less, but he wanted them to try powders and perfumes.

Ziryab’s formal influence on Spanish music was considerable, of course. We’ve already done a general review of how many Eastern musical instruments came to Europe via Andalusia; Ziryab is often given personal credit for the oud, which came into English as the lute.

Overall, his influence made Cordoba into a cosmopolitan place, not a regional administrative center. This makes a difference, even if it seems like merely a cosmetic change. Once a city becomes known for its culture, it draws more cultured people. Ziryab’s fashions contributed much to making Cordoba into a center for mathematics and science in the 9th and 10th centuries.

• God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215, David Levering Lewis
• Early Medieval Spain: Unity in Diversity 400-1000, Roger Collins
• A Vanished World: Muslims, Christians and Jews in Medieval Spain. Chris Lowney

The Arabic way of life in Spain introduced some traditional musical instruments that hadn’t been part of Europe before. Names of musical instruments were far from standardized in the Middle Ages, perhaps because they were rarely enough seen. Whatever a particular minstrel called his thing, that’s what everyone called it. The ones who had learned to play in Spain or southern France often used Arabic-based words. (During the Cordoba period especially, Arabs contended with Franks to control the southern French coast.)

Both the guitar and the lute came from Arabic. Al-oud became “a lute;” the oud is still an Arabic form of stringed instrument. Another, played with a bow and perhaps borrowed from Byzantine or Persian culture, was the rebec. The Arabic word for drum is “tabl,” which came into medieval Europe as something like “tabor” or “taber.” It became the word for a particular type of drum; another type was the naker, from Arabic nakara, which hung as a pair of small drums at the player’s belt. Trumpets came to Europe from Asia, via Arabic travelers; the earliest trumpet name was Arabic al-nafir, in Spanish añafil. They were straight and long, like the brass instruments in paintings of heralds. The earliest oboe/clarinet type of instrument, at the time called the shawm, also came to Europe via Andalusia.

A favorite type of book during the Middle Ages was an encyclopedia of exotic animals, typically called a bestiary. It’s amusing to see how badly artists drew foreign animals or what types of nonsense they believed about them. For example, when the Doge of Venice kept lions for public viewing and the lioness actually gave birth in captivity, it was the first proof the reading public had that bestiaries were wrong in claiming that lion cubs are born dead and then licked into life.

Of course, both India and Africa were rich fields for bestiary writers. Many of the animals they reported were imaginary or compiled, but they included some real ones. Some African animals came to Europe through Arabic reports. The name “giraffe” is probably a native name borrowed into Arabic as “zarafa.” Gazelle came from Arabic “ghazal.” (Most of the other major animals had already entered Latin bestiaries via Greek or some other channel.)

One of our favorite fish is named from Arabic, but not in a way that’s immediately visible because it came to us from Spanish. In the Atlantic, they caught al-tun, and especially the really fat kind that looked like a milk cow, al-bakora. In Spanish, al-tun became atun, and then albacore tuna in English.

The sirocco wind, blowing up from Libya across the Mediterranean toward Europe, was named in Italian after Arabic shoruq, the east wind. The wind also carried sea birds, al-qatraz, whose name came into Spanish as alcatraz, the cormorant. Of course, that’s the name of our former prison island. But the word came into English in another form, too. Adjusted to match Latin “alba” (white), it became the sailors’ favorite sea bird the albatross.

Spanish Andalusia got involved in Europe’s international markets in completely new ways. In the early Middle Ages, trade operated mostly through fairs. Near to major highways, rivers and harbors, certain places had a traditional time during the year when people could expect to find international merchants set up. Fairs generally lasted three days, but could last up to three weeks. An international trader just needed to know which Catholic saints’ days were reserved by which fairgrounds in order to plan an itinerary. The big fairs were wholesale markets; local traders bought in bulk and sold locally, perhaps reselling at smaller fairs or taking things by donkey pack into the rural areas.

Andalusia shipped a lot of dried fruit such as plums, figs, and dates. As possible without spoilage, they also shipped citrus fruit: lemons, limes, and oranges. They also traded preserved olives and oil, probably in jars: as noted before, the simple English word “jar” is actually the clay pot al-jarrah.

But the first major Arabic influence on international markets was with the exportation of al-qutun: cotton. The cotton plant itself was from northern India, but it grew well in Egypt and other parts of the Islamic empire, including Spain. Cotton was first exported in raw form, unspun.

Its early use was in quilting, but not usually blankets as we may imagine. Cotton quilting was for winter coats and for armor. It was especially important in the time of mail armor, or chain mail as we usually call it. Plate armor was late medieval; for most of the period, armor meant mail. A mail shirt minimized sword and spear cuts in battle, but it was heavy and it chafed the skin badly. Wool or linen cloth with cotton padding helped a lot. Early horse armor, too, was mainly quilted cloth.

Our word “mattress” seems to come from Arabic al-matrah, a sleeping mat. This suggests the next use of cotton: stuffing sleeping mats. Arabic culture generally used mats and carpets more than northern Europeans did, perhaps from Bedouin tent culture in which carpets covered sand and rock. Cotton was an expensive import at first, and it’s not likely that many mattresses were stuffed with it when straw would do just as well. Carpets, as covering for floors, didn’t make it to England until the 1200s when King Edward I married a Spanish princess who brought her own set of carpets to cover wood and tile floors, astonishing the court. (Carpets didn’t become normal until much later, after the Middle Ages.)

Arabic traders mostly carried fabric and things related to it: leather, dyes, decorations. Sometimes the names tell us the history: Cordovan leather was from Cordoba; muslin was woven cotton from Mosul; thickly woven silk from Damascus was known as damask. A woven-stripe cloth called tabby also took its name from Arabic, as did taffeta (Persian originally) and mohair; and it’s possible that “gauze” was a French adaptation of al-qazz, Arabic for silk. The words “sequin” and “sash” are also Arabic.

English got a few color words from the Mozarabic dye trade. Arab conquerors of Persia traded lapis lazuli, the bright blue stone found only in Iran. Its place of origin became its name in Arabic: lazaward. Coming to fairs in France, its name eventually became the color of bright blue, but the L was treated like a definite article in French. So the word became l’azure and then azure in English. The best red dye came from insects that fed on the kermes oak tree in Spain, and from this came the English word crimson.

Eventually, by the late Middle Ages, Spain traded in merino wool too. Northern Europe had plenty of wool, but Spanish breeders had created a very hardy sheep that needed little water and could walk long distances. The merino’s skin and wool were distinctly different, providing an extremely fine, soft yarn.

Spanish natives who converted to Islam were known as Muladi; those who remained Christians or Jews but just dressed and talked in an Arabic manner were Mozarabs. Mozarabic culture left a huge imprint on Spain; it was the majority culture for about 500 years.

In the last entry, I talked about irrigation and imported plants, like artichokes, spinach, and oranges. Arabic words were in everyday use for all of these things; their word for a water-mill is still at root an Arabic word: Noria. (The noria is particularly a wheel that lifts and moves water, instead of using water for power.) Many more Arabic words were adopted for plants, and some have come into English: jasmine, sandalwood, and camphor.

Many Spanish words for parts of government and the legal system are also Arabic. This isn’t surprising; the same thing happened in English when the Normans ruled as foreign invaders. A lot of our words relating to law and prison are of not only Latin, but specifically French origin. (“Prison” refers to being “taken,” from the French verb prendre.) So the same thing happened in Spanish: words for notary, will, invoice, judge and jailor were all Arabic. One of the words, tariff, came into English. They also kept some terms of abuse and insult, and a few of these came into English via Spanish: loco, mulatto and marrano. (There are lots more, mostly curses shouted at lazy workers.) It’s possible that the famous cry of “Olé!” came from Arabic “Wallah!” If a Spaniard says, “oh, I wish!” with the term “Ojalá,” it may be a relic of Inshallah.

Arabic gave Spanish most of its words for horses. Spain had some Latin words, but the Arabic rulers were horse specialists who needed particular words for parts of horse anatomy, gear, and stabling. Two Spanish color words, used only for horses and cows, came from Arabic.

The Arabic rulers were ambitious builders. Spain until this time had been more of a farming society with fishing and shipping towns on the coast. The Umayyad line established by Abd al-Rahman was intent on creating an Andalusia that was not only independent of Damascus and Baghdad, but just as splendid or better. Nearly all Spanish words for construction methods, architecture and urban planning (neighborhood, sewer) are from Arabic.

A few of these words came into English, for example “alcove,” which came from Arabic al-qubba, an arch. Spanish “adobe” is not only from Arabic, it’s an adaptation of a Coptic word (to-ome, the clay). Al-makhzan, a storage area, came to us as French magasin (a store) and English magazine (first storage of weapons, then a collection of literary items). Arsenal meant in Arabic a factory; its name came into European use first as the name of the shipbuilding yard in Venice.

Most of the Arabic borrowings start with “a,” because their word for “the” was “al,” and it often got blended into the word itself when borrowed. But some of the city and building words don’t start with A. We have both divan and sofa from Arabic, although divan came later, via Turkish. It’s actually a Persian word for a book, because the divans made in Turkey were modeled after the padded benches used in Baghdad’s reading rooms.

Some other ordinary daily words came from Mozarab culture. Lacquer is from al-lacca, a resin they imported from India. Kohl, a word for early eyeshadow, is Arabic. So is talc, and the rook in chess. Most surprising to me was Jar. Yes, the ordinary jar. Most of our stubby little words are from Anglo-Saxon or Danish, but this one was borrowed from al-jarrah, a clay container. Spanish also used al-tazzah, a cup, which we see (via French) in the word “demitasse.”