Mamluks and Seljuks

Posted on February 6, 2014 by Ruth

During the years of white ceramics, mathematics, and water clocks, the Abbasid dynasty was fairly stable. But no dynasty is ever easily stable; the Abbasid ruler had to move east to Samarra once, as power see-sawed. The Central Asia territory was too large to rule centrally; it kept breaking off at the edges into separatist sultanates. Meanwhile there began a new long-term migration wave of Turks, coming from the east in wagons carrying yurts.

The Abbasid caliphs saw the first Turks as a wonderful resource for building up a private army, the way Abd al-Rahman had done. The families could be offered a bit of land on condition that most of the men join the army; or they could be hired directly; or they could be taken as slaves. The Arabic word for a person owned as a possession has come to us as Mamluk.

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. The boys adopted the new Arabic 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 had plenty to eat and could earn rank and rewards.

Mamluk armies became the backbone of the Muslim empire, even until modern times. During the Abbasid period, they were Slavs (often blue-eyed and blond) and Turks (black-haired, with slanted Asian eyes). With a tax-supported Mamluk army, the Abbasid dynasty could resist most of the rebellions.

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.

A group of Oghuz Turks rebelled, and after a few battles, they left Oghuz territory and started moving westward by stages. Their leader, Seljuk Bey, converted to Islam in the late 900s. His followers began using Arabic Muslim names, so they become hard for us to spot in a cursory glance at history. We see Mahmuds and Ahmeds and assume Arabic ancestry.

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.

The first real trouble began in the far east, when a Turkish Mamluk slave took over the territory of modern Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran. This coup didn’t directly challenge Baghdad, because the Khorasan region had broken away from its rule already. However, it showed the other Mamluks what was possible. All the Mamluk general Alp Tigin had to do was walk away from his 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. Any Mamluk could do it.

By the year 1003, when the mathematical Pope Sylvester II died, 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. And they thought like nomads.

 

 

Posted in Muslim Empire (old series) | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Gerbert as Pope Sylvester

Posted on February 5, 2014 by Ruth

I had trouble writing this entry because writerly discipline suggests I should stick with my main subject: the early Pope who attempted to introduce Arabic numbers, but failed. However, he was appointed Pope by his pupil, whom he was apparently still tutoring between military campaigns. And Otto III is pretty interesting.

His first 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, thus joining the Christendom UN-like club. (His French cousins were busy baptizing and integrating the Danes as Normans.)

The Byzantine princess, 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 to Germany was an exotic foreign language, not yet one of its standard school subjects. Theophanu had three girls before producing an heir, Otto III. But not long after, 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 tiny son and the regency, and then it was clear that no expense could be spared in educating the young King of the Germans. He would inherit his family’s internal family wars, as well as their battles to subdue/baptize the Slavs and Huns and (incidentally) pack the church with relatives and thus dominate the Pope, too.

So Theophanu sent for Gerbert of Aurillac to start teaching 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; a few short years later, 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? 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.

At 21, with his princess bride disembarking in an Italian port, Otto III suddenly died. His legacy was in doubt and disarray, left to his greedy cousins in Bavaria. Only Gerbert remained, as Pope Sylvester II.

Gerbert of Aurillac ruled 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. He was a Frenchman from Aquitaine, appointed by a Greek-speaking German. Although he was the Archbishop of Ravenna at that point, 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 discusses the right way of figuring the area of an equilateral triangle. His 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. Church politics made faculty meetings look like play groups.

Rome rebelled against Otto III, in spite of (or because of) his plans for an imperial palace there. It rejected his Pope, too. Gerbert/Sylvester II did his best to govern the church, but his time was short since he died only a year after Otto III. One might think he was soon forgotten, but instead, he became legendary in fantastical stories.

The root problem seems to have been that he could read 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.

How had such a wicked priest become Pope? The only possible answer was a deal with the Devil. 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 1 through 9. 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.

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.

Posted in Muslim Empire (old series) | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Gerbert of Aurillac: early years

Posted on February 3, 2014 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 scholarship that was now at its height in the Muslim Golden Age (which was ending during his lifetime).

Gerbert studied philosophy, a new field that was opened up by Arabic scholars 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, without the 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 even in Morocco. At the very least, he used his perch in the Pyrenees to obtain Arabic language skills and books.

Gerbert accompanied the Count of Barcelona on pilgrimage to Rome in 969. (That’s a significant year that we’ll loop back to shortly, but its events did not affect Gerbert in Rome.) 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.

 

Posted in Muslim Empire (old series) | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Mechanical engineering

Posted on February 2, 2014 by Ruth

Baghdad’s House of Wisdom also produced a collection of all of the mechanical engineering devices known at that time. It’s certainly a collection from China, India, Persia and Greece, like the other scientific works. We aren’t sure if the pictures in “The Book of Tricks” (or “Book of Ingenious Devices”) show us common devices, or rare ones, or even just theoretical ones.

The book was compiled by three brothers who were a major force in Baghdad’s scholarly community for many years. Their father was from Khorasan, an area of western Persia that was at first only lightly Islamicized. He was some kind of robber on the Silk Road, but the governor of Khorasan befriended him and took his three sons Ahmed, Mohammed and Hasan into guardianship. They were given the finest Persian and Arabic education and are credited with writing twenty scholarly books, mostly now lost. Some of the books were written by only one of them, while others are credited generally to the brothers, the “Banu Musa.”

Kitab al-Hiyal, the book of mechanical tricks, may have survived due to its popularity and many copies. The devices are basically elaborate toys, not productive machinery, but they show the array of possibilities to automate with merely mechanical methods. While the book collects the mechanical tricks invented by the Greeks, some of them appear to have been improvements or original inventions by the Musa brothers.

They were interested in how physical forces could automate processes, often using air and water pressure. They described different kinds of valves: plug, float, tap, and conical (presumably the last was their invention). They explained how to automate a fountain so that it alternated in the jet’s shape and type.

Some basic mechanical devices make a first appearance, although in primitive form. There is a very simple crankshaft, although not complete in its design. One device has a simple worm-and-pinion gear. The Banu Musa describe, for the first time, the action of a clamshell bucket for reaching to the bottom of a lake or river and dredging mud or removing lost objects.

They have a few automated musical instruments. We’ve all seen the mechanism inside a music-box: a cylinder with pins to trigger different-toned bars in a tune as the cylinder turns. Their water-powered organ seems to have used this idea. It’s one of the few devices we still know today, in a time when so few things need mechanical “programming.” They also had a steam-powered automated flute.

Steam, the power of the future, was only noted in passing in the book. It’s used only for toys that build up pressure, then suddenly let off a whistle or blow something into the air, to surprise and amuse a rich man’s dinner guests.

The High Middle Ages in Europe was a time of rapid industrial invention and change. It’s hard to know how much influence this book had on Europe’s blue-collar inventors. It was certainly valuable for collecting and preserving the inventions of Greece and adding some from China. Later books on mechanical devices used the Banu Musa book as a first reference; eventually some of these drawings may have come into the hands of practical, ambitious men who wanted something more than toys.

 

 

Posted in Literature, Muslim Empire (old series) | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Astronomy

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Ruth

There was always a very strong link between mathematics and astronomy in the ancient world. In Baghdad’s scholarly library, they collected astronomical calculations and theories from Greek literature (bought from Constantinople) that was based on earlier Babylonian work. They also brought in Sanskrit astronomy books from India. The Indian mathematical system may have come first from these astronomy books. Arabic and Persian translators absorbed them, and as they came to understand the numerical system, they wrote explanatory texts.

Ancient people focused on understanding and predicting the movement of the stars and planets so that they could mark days and hours of religious observance. Although beliefs varied, the general sense that God was looking down through the stars, and could only be known by studying them, seems universal. Astrology was part of astronomy; when it eventually came into Europe via Arabic science, it was taken to be as factual as the movements of the planets.

Greek scientists invented the astrolabe to use the stars to locate exactly where one stood on earth. Knowledge of the astrolabe persisted as the culture shifted to Byzantine dominance, and at least one work about it appeared in Syriac. Of course, these books came to Baghdad. Muslims had an additional religious belief to accommodate; they wanted to face the Kaaba in Mecca when they prayed.

The later “mariner’s astrolabe” for use at sea was not yet invented, and the general type seems to have been round, not a quarter-circle as later adopted in Europe. (I only wish I could explain these to you for real, but I don’t understand what an astrolabe does.)

The basic instrument was the round, flat mater, shaped like a shallow dish, with interchangeable plates called tympans. Each was made for a specific latitude and engraved with circles for altitude and azimuth. “Azimuth” is an Arabic word, a Muslim/Persian improvement. The top plate, the rete, was curiously cut so as to turn freely and point out significant stars. The mater’s edge had markings for hours and degrees; there was often a rotating straight-edge rule, too. A device on the back, the alidade, was used to sight stars; the back was also engraved with tables for calculation.

Baghdad’s scholarly library became the new center for astronomical research. Persian science (cf. “the Magi of the East”) had already been advanced. Now they translated Euclid and Ptolemy, updating the more ancient works with commentaries. (They thought Ptolemy was a Pharaoh.) They also resurrected a Greek idea for a celestial globe and created a spherical astrolabe.

Making the astrolabe in bronze or brass, not wood, was another significant improvement. Made of metal, it didn’t warp; it was more accurate, not to mention longer-lasting. The earliest extant metal astrolabe was found in Spain and dated to the Umayyad era when Cordoba was the capital.

Umayyad Spain was, of course, the entry point for the new wave of astronomical science to enter Europe. In cities like Barcelona, the new Arabic treatises could be translated into Latin. That’s why we sometimes note that Greek texts were preserved only through Arabic; the great Library of Alexandria held originals, but it burnt down; while later the House of Wisdom in Baghdad was destroyed by Mongols. The Latin translations of the Arabic translations are sometimes all we have left, preserved at cathedral schools and monastic libraries.

Posted in Muslim Empire (old series) | Tagged | Leave a comment

Arabic numerals

Posted on January 31, 2014 by Ruth

Our digital numeral system came first from India, but spent a long time as the dominant system in the Arabic kingdoms before entering Latin and Europe. The numbers aren’t really Arabic in the way a keffiyeh is; but they became Arabic by adoption.

The Jain sect in India believed that numbers were divine; I don’t know much about their work, which may have been going on since BC years. We know that by the time Arab invaders took Sanskrit mathematics books to Baghdad for translation, the concepts of place value and equations were established and explored. Most writing systems of the time used their alphabetic letters to stand for numbers, or else they used some form of a tally-mark system. The Indian system used only 10 symbols and, significantly, included zero. I wonder sometimes if kids in first and second grade would find their work more interesting if it was presented as it came in history: a stunning breakthrough that had taken mankind several millenia to produce, and changed the world ever after.

The figures in early Sanskrit books are similar to our numbers, but not the same. They’re similar in that they aren’t letters and they aren’t based on tally marks. You can see a table of their evolution here.

Sanskrit books referred to solving equations as “pulverizing” them: you started with a lot of stuff that had to be ground down by processes, like crushing grain or sanding wood. At the end, the finished product stood alone: a number, instead of a sculpture or an iron nugget. When these books were translated into Arabic at the Baghdad House of Wisdom (late 700s), Persian astronomers picked up the system quickly. Al-Khwarizmi is the most famous mathematician of the new, early system. He mastered the Indian ideas and wrote treatises to explain how to use them. When his name was translated into Latin much later, it came out as Algorithmus. His treatise was titled Al-Jabr, The Transformations. This title went into Latin as algebra. But nobody translated Al-Jabr into Latin for a long time.

Persian and Arabic scholars worked with the ideas for a long time in isolation. The next major treatise was by Omar Khayyam in the 11th century. His work defined arithmetic and algebra as separate mathematical skills. Algebra, he wrote, was the use of equations to find unknown numbers with polynomials. Further, he wrote about irrational numbers and explained the mathematics of conic sections.

It’s not clear at what point negative numbers were recognized. They’re not in Al-Khwarizmi’s book, and I’m not sure about Khayyam’s. At any rate, a great deal of complex mathematics was in experimental stages in Baghdad and Alexandria, insulated from Europe by the Arabic language. Arabic merchants were now using the digit system for everyday calculation. There were two key points when Europeans entered the Arabic world, learned the number system, and brought it back into Latin. Muslim Spain was the first point of contact, in the 900s. (more later)

 

Posted in Muslim Empire (old series), Uncategorized | Tagged | Leave a comment

Pottery in Spain

Posted on January 28, 2014 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.

 

Posted in Muslim Empire (old series), Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

10th century Pottery

Posted on January 28, 2014 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.

 

Posted in Muslim Empire (old series), Uncategorized | Tagged , | Leave a comment

The origins of feudalism

Posted on January 23, 2014 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 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, the Order of St. Benedict was the only option in Rome’s region of influence.

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 some land to their sons, but it was diminished in size overall; and each son received an estate that was far inferior to his father’s.

Unfortunately, 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. 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.

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 burnt Paris.

Charles the Simple, King of West Frankia and Lotharingia (Lorraine), solved the Danish problem. In 911, he made a treaty with Rollo (Danish Rolf), 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.

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.

By the 11th century, the French kings forced inheritance reform. And as among the Normans, the rest of 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.”

Posted in Muslim Empire (old series) | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Battle for the North Mediterranean

Posted on January 23, 2014 by Ruth

Frankish law always had a problem with inheritance; there’s really no ideal way to manage the inheritance of land. As tribesmen who found themselves ruling a nation, at first they continued their tradition of dividing possessions among a man’s sons. The father had great latitude in who got what; he could design the division afresh in each generation, and he could leave portions of it to the Church. It was obviously fair, unless someone chose to leave his youngest son nothing but a cat (it happens).

However, the 9th and 10th centuries exposed the greatest weakness in this “fair” system. Large estates and kingdoms generally have an advantage; like large schools, they can put together more powerful teams and spend more money. Every time inheritance divided estates, the nation was weakened. At the death of Charlemagne, Frankia was a small empire. It included not only all of modern Germany and France, but also Austria, Switzerland, and most of Italy.

Charlemagne’s successor, Louis the Pious, tried to divide the empire among four sons from two wives, and it was a disaster. In 843, after a civil war,the three survivors signed the first Treaty of Verdun. Lothair was already king of Italy, Louis of Bavaria and Charles of Aquitaine (Atlantic coast). The treaty split up the remaining area in the middle, so that each was now king of either East Frankia, Middle Frankia, or West Frankia. Lothair was the Emperor, and his (not his brothers’) sons inherited the kingdoms. Lothair left his mark on the European map: “Lotharingia,” they called one of his territories, and it came into modern French as “Lorraine.” Still in dispute between France and Germany into the 20th century!

Through the next two centuries, this process happened repeatedly. The empire re-divided into kingdoms and duchies of Aquitaine, Frankia (Neustria), Austria, Bavaria, and Italy, with Lorraine and Provence also in the mix. Sometimes the rulers were brothers, and other times they were cousins. On the plus side, the dynasty stayed personally strong, because it was a never-ending selection process. The king who came out on top in each generation was tall, strong, intelligent and healthy, with good military sense. He was generally very able at driving out invaders. However, each one inherited a slightly different territory with shifting loyalties.

During this period, the Carolingians secured the Mediterranean region that the Romans called “Septimania” away from the Muslims. Septimania had been a “disputed territory” for a few centuries and by the time it was finally in the Frankish column for sure, many of its inhabitants were living in caves, afraid to till their burnt fields. They had to rebuild their civilization to some extent.  Septimania was always culturally different; it was more Celtic than the north, and it kept more pre-Christian Roman customs. During the Middle Ages, it became known as Provence and was ruled by a Count, with overlordship by the King of France.

Sicily was under chronic attack from the sea by Muslim invaders all through the 9th century. First they captured Palermo and set it up as a Muslim stronghold. Sicily had been a Byzantine/Greek colony with Syracuse as its capital. The Muslims made great progress at one point when a Byzantine ruler turned on his overlords and allied with Muslim Tunisia (Ifriqiya). In 902, the last Byzantine fortress fell. During the 10th century, Sicily became a Muslim-majority, Arabic-speaking island.  Malta went with Sicily; an Arabic-based language is still the mother tongue of the Maltese. Both islands began to cultivate sugar and adopt other Middle Eastern habits.

Around this time, it becomes historically proper to call the Muslims of the Mediterranean islands “Saracens,” while the Muslims of Andalusia gradually became known as the “Moors.”

The Holy Roman Emperor’s responsibility included the coast of southern Italy, although parts of it were nominally controlled by Byzantium. Lothair’s son Louis II inherited Italy and the Holy Roman Emperorship, but somehow the division in this generation cut him out of other continental property. Louis had to split his time between fighting off Saracens along the Italian coast and battling his cousins and brothers. While Louis was fighting Saracens, his family redivided Middle Frankia without dealing him in. While Louis was fighting his family to get Provence, the Saracens took more of southern Italy.

The first Saracen foothold was at Bari, located exactly at the heel of the boot. Local dukes often called in Saracen allies against each other, giving the Muslims town after town. By the middle of the 800s, they were all over southern Italy and attacking Rome itself. Louis II finally turned the tide in 871 by retaking the town of Bari from the Muslims. After this, each generation of Carolingians made progress and by 915, one last huge alliance pushed out the last Muslims from the boot of Italy.

In the final tally, the Franks edged out the Saracens by holding Provence and Italy. The Saracens had firm control of Sicily (and Malta), allowing them a base from which to attack (and trade) anywhere at any time.

The Franks eventually had to face that equal inheritance sounded very fair but was a disaster when the inheritance had to do with military rule, not just property. By the mid 900s, it was clear that something had to give.

Posted in Muslim Empire (old series) | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Battle for the North Mediterranean