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.

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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)

 

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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.

 

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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.

 

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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.”

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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.

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Quicksilver diplomacy

Posted on January 19, 2014 by Ruth

In the years of Ziryab’s influence, the Emirs of Andalusia established so much independence from Baghdad that at last, Abd al-Rahman III called himself a Caliph, not an Emir. Emir means something like Prince; it implies high but subordinate rank. Caliph was the top: claiming the status of a companion of Mohammed.

As Andalusia became its own western Caliphate, its rulers received ambassadors and kings at the palace complex outside Cordoba. Medinat al-Zahra was an enclave of luxury. Visitors of the time have left some impression of how it contrasted with the rest of the world in the 9th and 10th centuries.

As we’ve already noted, Cordoba was well-supplied with water from Roman aqueducts, so it was a splash of green in an arid place. Naturally green places are often rainy; if you’ve ever traveled around the Big Island of Hawaii, you know what I mean. The dry side of the island is really desert-like except in the resorts where water has been brought in. There, all of the tropical plants from the rainy side can be maintained, but the rain never falls. It’s always a perfect day for golf on the dry side, as long as imported water keeps the grass green. Medinat al-Zahra made exactly that impression: it was a triumph of engineering over nature, creating an artificial paradise. Fountains large and small channeled the water to public and private gardens.

In the reception hall of the Caliph, visitors saw two astonishing wonders. First, the hallways leading to the hall were carpeted with Persian rugs. The notion of a cloth on the floor, just to walk on, was entirely new to Northern Europe, though I am not sure if Constantinople had ever used carpets. It’s possible that they didn’t; it’s possible that carpeting was one of the genuine innovations of the desert tribes who now ruled. Their tents had long used carpets to distinguish indoor from outdoor; with temporary houses, they had put their effort and money into rich carpeting and cushions, not into stone walls or windows. When they placed their thick, soft, brightly patterned carpets along the floors of a pillared stone hall, two traditions of wealth met.

In the reception hall itself, the Caliph had a large silver or gold basin placed as a fountain, but filled instead with mercury. Both Persia and Spain had natural deposits of cinnabar, the red ore of mercury. Since ancient times, it had been crushed and smelted to separate pure mercury from its red pigment. Vermilion was always in demand for paint and dye. Mercury didn’t have as many practical uses then; they knew that it was highly toxic, but it was a fascinating thing to play with. Its modern chemical symbol, Hg, stands for Greek hydra-gyrum, “silver water.” It’s also been called quicksilver, where “quick” means alive. Mercury moves as if it’s alive; it looks like water but has entirely different properties. A cannonball can float in it.

A basin of mercury was an opulent show of wealth. People from barbarian places had never seen it; if they had ever seen even a little of it in a bottle, they had certainly never imagined a wide basin full of silver water that moved as if it were alive.

The reception hall was luxurious in many ways; it had gold and silver fixtures, it was richly carpeted, and it had a raised platform where the Caliph sat on cushions. When an ambassador or other guest walked in, a servant tapped the basin of mercury so that it began to move. Reflected light danced all over the room, like the effect of a disco ball. In the 9th and 10th centuries, there was nothing like it.

All this display had a practical purpose, as well as being fun for the Caliph to own. In the 9th and 10th centuries, alliances were fluid. They were not based in religion; the Crusades were still unimagined. Constantinople sought to ally with Cordoba against Baghdad, at one point. The descendants of Charlemagne just as often allied with Cordoba as fought against it. The frontiers were filled with ambitious cut-throats who needed to be over-awed by Cordoba’s power. As long as the basin of mercury was backed by the Spanish Caliph’s private mercenary armies of Slavs and Africans, it served to knock a lot of nonsense out the heads of upstart warlords in Barcelona, Marseille and Zaragoza.

 

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The glass of fashion

Posted on January 16, 2014 by Ruth

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.

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Cordoba

Posted on January 15, 2014 by Ruth

Cordoba probably became the capital of Muslim administration because during the conquest years, around 711-715, it did not surrender. It was conquered militarily. When cities surrendered, their current officials could work out a deal to send tribute; when they didn’t, they ended up directly ruled. That’s how it went with Cordoba, a former Roman town. It was centrally located in the southern region, and it required a military force and appointed Muslim governor, so it turned into an administrative center.

Abd al-Rahman found that controlling Cordoba allowed him to control most of the Muslim regions. Coming from the East, he had grander visions of what a capital city should look like. Its Roman arched bridge was a start, and as we know, he built a large new mosque on the site of an old cathedral and monastery. Each of his successors added to the mosque until it was fully four times larger, but still and always in a large square with an orange grove on one side.

Cordoba had been supplied with Roman aqueduct water since the first century. Roman engineers built stone-and-mortar tunnels to bring water from any springs in the region. Roman engineers had built so that the water pressure was kept even; when the water was conducted down a steeper hill, the aqueduct was smaller.

Water pressure coming down from springs in the hills allowed Cordoba to supply fountains. In the Middle Ages, fountains were the highest mark of civilization. Northern Europe had not yet learned how to create them either with natural water pressure or with cisterns. Travelers from Frankia and England were amazed at Cordoba’s Golden Fountain. Engineers under Muslim rule also re-routed the aqueducts to supply the Great Mosque with running water.

With water in apparently endless supply, Cordoba could also keep many parks and gardens. It was an island of green on a relatively arid plateau. It had two more urban features to surprise visitors: paved streets and public lighting. Roman roads of stone stretched all through France and parts of England, but the new Germanic Europeans had not yet learned to build their own. Their cities had only hard-packed dirt streets. Cordoba’s streets were cobbled some time between 800 and 900; Paris didn’t pave some streets until the late Middle Ages.

The al-Rahman dynasty wanted to rival Baghdad in every way, as ongoing revenge for the Abbasid overthrow of Umayyad rulers. So Cordoba had a House of Wisdom too, like Baghdad’s Persian-modeled study center. The two dynasties raced to accumulate the largest book collection; Cordoba also became a center of book copying and publishing. It’s possible that book copying was one of the few trades that a single woman, for example a widow, could fall back on. We know that at later times in medieval Europe, women who had been educated beyond the usual, by scholarly fathers, could make a living that way.

With book copying and libraries came other kinds of learning. Cordoba was the center of European scholarship between 800 and 1000. Muslims traveled freely between Cordoba and Eastern cities like Alexandria and Damascus, which in turn had travelers coming and going to places farther east. That’s how much of the technology and science of China, India and Persia reached Europe. Franks and other northern Germanic types, with names like Lothar, Otto and Conrad, could come to Cordoba or nearby Sicily for a time to acquire a graduate-school education in the latest learning from far off.

Starting in Abd al-Rahman I’s time, the emirs (later caliphs) built a private family residence about four miles away, modeled on the family palace compound of Umayyad Damascus. A town grew up around it, with suburban estates and villages between. It was called al-Zahra and became the capitol of the capitol, the place where Andalusian Caliphs received visiting kings and ambassadors. It was destroyed in the eventual downfall of the dynasty, around 1000.

Note: one of the interesting quirks of researching a topic like this is that a mainstream site, MuslimHeritage.org.uk, tends to attribute everything to the Muslim era. You have to read with a skeptical eye and challenge its assertions to get to the real Roman roots.

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More Mozarabic words in English

Posted on January 9, 2014 by Ruth

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.

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