Christmas in a castle

Posted on December 21, 2013 by Ruth

As you remember from the castle series, there were no true castles in Charlemagne’s time. As soon as you’re in a stone castle with a keep, maybe a round tower, and a gatehouse, the year is at least 1100 and probably more like 1225. So we’ll check out Christmas at the height of the Middle Ages, in one of Edward II’s grand castles.

Advent is still a fast time, but now St. Nicholas’ Day, December 6, has added a few traditions. At the feast, families give their children little gifts, in memory of Nicholas’ love of children. And in the cathedral school (the earliest boarding schools), the boys have elected the class clown, Conrad, to be the Boy Bishop. The real bishop looks on tolerantly and allows the boys to dress Conrad up in their best imitation of him; Conrad knows how to do a good send-up of the kindly old man’s mannerisms.

The boys show up at all the principal houses in town to do an episcopal (that is, “of a bishop”) “visitation.” Conrad plays up his part, giving a mock scolding sermon about their lifestyle, and recommends that they mend their ways by giving all of the boys in his retinue a silver penny and a cup of ale.

Christmas Mass has expanded. In the monasteries and cathedrals, they have the Angels’ Mass at midnight on the night before, the Shepherds’ Mass at dawn in the morning, and another Mass at mid-day, which is probably when the aristocracy attends.

Christmas is primarily a season of feast, parties, games, and dancing. Bishop Conrad continues to attend parties with his friends and they’re obviously getting a bit sloshed (boys drinking ale is nothing to stare at, everyone drinks ale). The special drink of the season is Wassail: hot ale, apples and spices.

There are some other special foods and the team of cooks (now trained professionals who did apprenticeships in the city) are busy well in advance and all through. They make meat pies: large pastry dishes filled with meat stew spiced with cinnamon, ginger and pepper. Some of them are specifically mince pie, in which the meat has been chopped very fine and spiced heavily. Pies can be served at room temperature, so they’re among the dishes baked a few days early and kept in a cold place. The pies served at the head table after Christmas Mass are topped with a pie-crust Baby Jesus in his manger, glossy in baked egg yolk.

There’s a new fashionable food now, and the cooks have to prepare well in advance to make it, since it entirely depends on imported fruit. We’re skipping ahead in time from the essay series that left Spanish Andalusia in 800; it’s now 1225 and Spain is exporting dried plums. The cook has stashed a large sack of them since a ship brought it last month. (A few of the dried plums went into the mince pies this year.) Every table, during this season, will have its own plum pudding. This is made with bread crumbs, plums, meat broth, wine and spices (of course–always spices!). It’s boiled till thick, the placed into a bladder or cheesecloth and hung to steam into a solid.

Christmas dinner serves roast boar, of course. With an apple in its mouth, yes. The cooks also send in a dozen roast geese, and one of them has been disguised in a swan’s skin with outspread wings. It will be carried all around the room to show off before it’s served at the governor’s table. The rest of the many-course menu has meat jellies dyed red and blue, venison stew in a yellow ginger sauce, and fancy breads. Additionally, of course, each diner has a thick, coarse bread slab for plate. Nobody will eat them; the servants will collect them and divide them between the castle’s kennel and the line of beggars shivering at the almsman’s door.

Plum pudding is the lead dessert, but they also carry around a tray of candied ginger to go with the hot spiced dessert wine. When the feast is over, the servants will quickly disappear all of the food remains so that tables can be pushed back to clear space for games and dancing.

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Christmas with Charlemagne

Posted on December 20, 2013 by Ruth

When Pope Gregory first sent Latin missionaries to the outer northern wilds of Europe, he instructed them to make it easy for converts. If they were used to gathering on a hilltop somewhere on a certain day, find a saint’s day that might be celebrated by gathering on a hilltop. If they have a spring festival, tell them to do the same things in honor of a saint or of Jesus’s resurrection. Build wooden or stone churches near where their pagan shrines were, since that’s where they are used to going. Try to adapt, not buck, the culture. It’s somewhat syncretistic, but Gregory seems to have meant not to keep pagan customs alive but to be gentle with the process of conversion. Today we might frame it in terms of not forcing people to give up their culture; it’s embarrassing to think that at one time, “becoming a Christian” in Africa entailed changing your name and dressing like a Victorian.

Germanic people had a long tradition of burning a Yule log for 12 days in midwinter. They kept a feast in the darkness after the solstice; they often roasted a whole boar. The boar may have been on the menu because it was a big, tasty animal that could be more easily hunted with spears in the snow, or it could have had some religious significance, since each of the gods had a totem animal. Yule was a celebration of life in the time when winter seemed dark and cold, so they always went out to collect evergreen branches as home decoration. Pines, holly and ivy were seen as symbols of defying the cold, remaining green and alive.

Around the time Latin missionaries went north, Dionysius Exiguus (also known as Dennis, like the Monty Python peasant) drew up an authoritative calendar for calculating Easter. The calculation of Easter was hugely controversial in the early centuries and still splits Orthodox from Catholic tradition; in those days it split Ireland from England and one monastery from another. Dennis also marked the day of Jesus’ birth into the calendar: December 25, according to tradition and his calculations.

Christmas—the Mass of the Birth of Christ—overlapped and somewhat fused with Yule in Northern Europe.
Christmas is not a pagan holiday, either Roman or Germanic. Dennis firmed up the date of Christmas, but there was a long tradition already; Christians around the Mediterranean had always noted the day with fasting and feasting. What Christmas gained in Northern Europe was a collection of customs that didn’t bear on Jesus’ birth, rather on the whole theme of mid-winter.

The four weeks before December 25 were proclaimed a holy fast, the Fast of Advent. During fast days, they were supposed to avoid all animal products, though sweets (if they existed) and alcohol were okay. December 6 arrived about one week into the Advent fast; it was St. Nicholas’ Day, a feast amid the fast. Not surprisingly, it was played up. Cooks had saved up just enough meat and eggs to keep for a week, and they were ready to cook up a big feast to use them up. This is one way that Jolly St. Nick became prominent in the December calendar.

In Charlemagne’s time, Christmas meant a huge feast that lasted several days. Leading up to the feast, they fasted and prepared. Since it was cold, cooks were able to save up meat, milk and eggs. Men went boar hunting as they had always done, and they found a huge, thick log for Yule. Women and children gathered evergreens to decorate the house. The Latin church calendar had a series of Advent readings and customs to remind everyone of what it was all about. But churches also accepted decoration with greens.

On Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, the king and his nobles attended the bishop’s Mass. That was the religious celebration.

Charlemagne would have had a really sumptuous feast. Germanic chiefs had always thrown feasts for their men; drinking the horn cup as it was passed around was a constant renewal of the vow to be loyal to the chief who gave the feast. So Charlemagne, as a Christian, just invited to his feast everyone who needed a loyalty booster shot. His estates provided bread, fruit, honey, wine, ale, cheese, eggs and roasted fowl. Hunters brought in deer and boar; the knights themselves may have gone boar-hunting with the professionals. It’s likely that several sheep and oxen were also roasted. Cooks had probably spent a week doing advance preparation, such as brewing ale, while woodcutters had been bringing firewood for weeks.

Halls were still heated by a central fire in a pit, with the smoke making its way out a smoke hole in the rooftop, in 800. Tables and benches crowded around the pit where the Yule log, perhaps soaked in alcohol to burn longer, smoldered for twelve days.

In 800 AD, Charlemagne’s Christmas had a special event. The Pope crowned him as Holy Roman Emperor on that day. The title was invented specially for him, but it also projected a vision that the Pope and the King shared: of a new, united, civilized, literate Europe, ready to imitate the glory that once was Rome.

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Roland: the facts

Posted on December 19, 2013 by Ruth

In the “Song of Roland,” the first premise is that Charlemagne has spent seven years campaigning across Spanish Andalusia, taking back territory from the perfidious Saracens. The famous battle in which Roland loses his life takes place in the mountain pass between Spain and France, near the city of Pamplona. In the legend, the attack happens because Roland’s stepfather wants to get rid of him, so makes a deal with the Muslim ruler of Zaragoza to attack when only Roland and a rear guard are exposed at the end of a long, thin line over the pass.

First, the premise: completely false. We know that it took several more centuries for the Christian kingdoms of the north to take back Spain; it’s called the Reconquista and wasn’t finished until Ferdinand and Isabella took Granada in 1492. In 778, when Roland’s battle took place, Muslim Spain was still expanding under Abd al-Rahman I.

Additionally, Charlemagne’s major war effort was against the pagan Saxons bordering his northern territory. Slaughtering–I mean “pacifying”–the Saxons was his chief occupation. He had a campaign against the Lombards, like his father Pippin–and became King of the Lombards. While it’s true that at one point he attacked Muslim Spain, it was not a long, sustained war as depicted in the epic. It certainly didn’t take back acres of territory, nor did Roland’s death provoke a second victorious battle. This was all pure fiction. In a time that was only beginning to use written history, a minstrel could count on most of his audience being pretty credulous about the past. They were willing to believe anything that sounded good, so the bard only had to figure out what they wanted to hear.

Roland was a knight from Brittany, the region where refugee Celtic Britons had settled after the Anglo-Saxon invasion of the 600s. We don’t know anything about him, otherwise. Bretagne mother and Frankish father? Very likely.

Abd al-Rahman’s power grab is central to the story of the real Roland. In 778, he was still al-Dakhil, the Carpetbagger, to the “established” Muslim oligarchy of Sevilla, Barcelona, and so on. His power was centered in the south, where he had entered at Gibraltar. He was inviting surviving Umayyad cousins to join him in Spain and appointing them as city governors to help consolidate his power. In cities closer to the Christian kingdoms, some Muslim rulers wanted to block his takeover. They made a plan of rebellion which began with alliances with Christians. Charlemagne, the growing power to the north, was invited to take part.

Charlemagne led an army across the pass at Roncesvalles to join the rebels. However, once he was there, he found that the rebellion had scattered. Abd al-Rahman was moving quickly to snuff out such things; some of the plotters may already have lost their heads. There was nothing to do, and Charlemagne heard that the Saxons were taking advantage of his absence to rebel. He turned toward home, but he needed provisions.

The Christian Basque city of Pamplona was asked to open its gates and provide for the Franks, and it refused. So Charlemagne besieged and took the city, plundering it. That’s the “baggage train” that Roland was guarding: plunder from Basque Pamplona. The main army was well to the north, going as quickly as possible through the pass toward home. Roland’s rear guard, with wagons full of Pamplona plunger, was an inviting revenge target.

The attackers were Basques, possibly still allied with some local Muslims. Along the frontier, alliances were based on power advantage, not on religion, and intermarriage was common. So a force of Basques and Muslims fell on Roland and took back the wagonloads of plunder. On hearing of it, Charlemagne cursed in Old French and kept going. The Saxons were much more important than this southern distraction.

Why was this obscure Bretagne Count made into a hero for the ages? By 950, Muslim power in Spain was secure and the Umayyad dynasty still firmly in power. But it had been 80 years since the last Carolingian had ruled a united Aquitaine-France-Germany-Lombard Empire. Each time an Emperor had died, his kingdoms had been divided among his sons, but in each generation, one of the sons had managed to reunite it all, until at last his great-grandson Charles the Fat had only an illegitimate son and no unified support. Aquitaine, West Francia, East Francia and Lombardia/Italy broke apart into smaller kingdoms. In 911, Viking attacks on Paris had become so severe that Charles III offered land for peace, creating Normandy.

Charles III’s son was forced to grow up in England because rebellious nobles deposed the Carolingians for a time. This son, Louis IV, was probably king in Paris around the time when the “Song of Roland” was composed by Turoldus (or somebody). The new legend depicted a time when the Franks had been truly unified and so strong that they could have driven out Abd al-Rahman except that they just didn’t bother—they went home based on a promise of conversion. The only reason the Muslims were still in control of Spain, according to the legend, was that they were deceitful and treacherous. The House of Charlemagne, on the other hand, had once been invincible. The Song was popular among Normans; they were joining the winning team, obviously. Newly Catholic and half Frankish, they wanted to believe that “they” had once held all of Spain in their grasp. Of course, once the Crusades got rolling in the next centuries, Roland was more popular than ever. He turned out to have been the first Crusader martyr, the one who was cool before it went mainstream.

We can snicker at the bards of Louis IV inventing all this history to help unify a desperately disunited people. But if you look at the history of film remaking, you’ll see that of course we still do this. We borrow some skeleton facts from the past and invent stories based on what we want to hear in our time. Why are pirates now heroic figures played by Johnny Depp? If they remade “Casablanca” now, does anyone doubt it would have some kind of Wikileaks twist? Every story-telling art about the past is really about the present, then as now.

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The Song of Roland

Posted on December 18, 2013 by Ruth

The “Song of Roland” was the most popular epic of its time. Composed by a Frankish minstrel named Turoldus, the poem first appeared in written form around 950. Its subject matter was Charlemagne’s invasion into Muslim Spain in 778. The oral version may have been in circulation for years before it was written, but it was probably not composed close to the time of the events.

In the song, Roland is the Count of Brittany and Charlemagne’s nephew. He is guarding the rear of a triumphant departure from Spain, after a military campaign of seven years in which the Christian Franks conquered almost all of Muslim Spain. The narrow pass over the Pyrenees mountains, from Spain into France, forces the huge army to travel slowly, and the baggage train at the back is miles behind.

But Roland’s wicked stepfather Ganelon has conspired with the Saracen ruler Marsile to attack Roland when he is isolated. Roland compounds this disaster by ignoring his friend Oliver’s pleas to blow an ivory horn called the “Oliphant,” which would summon help. When he finally blows it, help cannot arrive in time, and they are all slaughtered.

While this is the most famous incident in the long epic, the story goes on to tell of Charlemagne’s vengeance against Marsile, the burial of Roland and his companions, and an enormous battle between Muslims and Christians. The Frankish Christians win, and their Muslim enemies either die or convert.

None of this is factual, except that there was a Roland (Spanish, Orlando) who died in a pass in the Pyrenees, protecting the baggage train. Tomorrow, what really happened.

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Balance of power in the north

Posted on December 13, 2013 by Ruth

While Abd al-Rahman was a fugitive in North Africa, power shifted decisively in Europe. The last major Germanic barbarian invasion came from the east and had settled in the Italian Alps with a capital at Pavia. The Langobards, or Lombards, did not quickly blend in with natives as some Germanic invasions had done. They were not Catholics, either; they were Arians who rejected and challenged the Pope. They were also recklessly fey fighters and deeply feared. Charles Martel had worked at allying with them to keep things quiet on his east.

But in the time of Charles’ son and grandson, the Popes began positioning the Franks as their shield wall against the Lombard threat. The first step came in 751: Pope Stephen deposed the last Merovingian king, Childeric III, and pronounced King Pippin I and Queen Bertrada. (He also, apparently, pronounced them properly married, a step they had missed.) Pippin was not the oldest son of Charles Martel, but his brother had chosen monastic contemplation, while Pippin was secular, crafty, and aggressive. In exchange for being allowed to set aside pretense that he was merely a Steward, King Pippin agreed to set aside Frankish alliances with Lombards. He led an army to defeat them, stopping their advances on the Pope’s heartland.

So in the same few years, three new dynasties came to power: the Abbasids in Baghdad, the line of Abd al-Rahman (Umayyad-Berbers) in Cordoba, and the Pippinid line of Charles’s in Aachen. Dynasties are usually most powerful in their first three generations, since they depend on the physical and mental prowess of the founder, and the genetic blessing often lasts into his grandsons. All three dynasties were on the same timing: between 750 and 850, three huge regions of the Mediterranean world were ruled by the first four generations of these dynasties. At least some of what we remember as the Golden Age of the Dark Ages came about because power was so perfectly balanced.

At the same time, Popes in Rome broke away from the Patriarchs of Constantinople decisively. The Pope didn’t need an overlord as long as he could call on the Franks. And here began a long process of turning the Franks into good Catholics. Until this time, they were nominal Catholics, but their kings saw no problem with incest and polygamy. The Pope needed a virtuous shield wall, not a semi-barbarian one.

Frankish tradition at that time left lands divided among heirs, which often led to fraternal wars to re-unite estates and kingdoms. The system may have been good for the dynasty, since it allowed the strongest son to prevail. For several generations, the kingdom had been divided into inheritances roughly along the modern French/German border. When Pippin I died in 768, Carolus inherited Austrasia (Germany) and Carloman inherited Neustria (France). Neustria was the richer territory, but Carloman began a contest of power with his older brother that ultimately led to his downfall.

Unlike Pippin, Carolus (later Charlemagne) was tall: 6′ 3″. He was not nearly as well-educated as the dynastic founders in Baghdad and Cordoba, but he was interested in books and could speak and read Latin. He had a good understanding of the political changes around him, too. Like Abd al-Rahman, he had the gift of political and military genius. His brother Carloman seems not to have been quite as able at playing the game.

Both of them named their oldest sons “Pippin,” implying a greater right to the dynastic founder’s name. But Carloman refused to help defend against a rebellious Duke of Aquitaine although Aquitaine was directly part of Neustria. Instead, he began to form secret alliances with the Lombards. Carolus put down the Aquitainian rebellion alone, and came out of it stronger. Then he allowed his mother to set up a marriage alliance of his own with the Lombards. In the pragmatic manner of the early Franks, he set aside his wife and married a Lombard princess who was half his age. When his brother Carloman died in 771, civil war preparations stopped. The King of Austrasia moved swiftly: he declared himself King of Neustria, leaving his brother’s widow and infant sons to flee. He divorced the Lombard princess, since he no longer needed the alliance. We don’t know anything about her personal history or even her name.

Now king of united Frankia, Carolus allied himself firmly to the Pope. The Pope rewarded him by discarding the rights of his baby nephews, while Charlemagne (we can now use his modern moniker) declared the Franks ready to stand by Catholic rules. He didn’t take back his first wife, but when he remarried a third time, he stayed with this one until she died. He began to enforce monogamy and no-incest among his nobles. In fact, for a long time they went too far, since Roman tradition counted degrees of relationship differently and nobody explained to the Franks that the rules weren’t really intended to bar truly distant cousins. (Divorce was strictly prohibited, but ambiguity about cousins provided one possible out for the determined.)

The new lines of power were drawn: Baghdad, Rome, Aachen/Paris, and Cordoba. For a century, this balance was basically stable. In fact, a look at the map suggests where the next dynastic crack might occur: Egypt, the place in the Mediterranean circle that was farthest from any of these centers. But for now, we’ll focus on Cordoba, Baghdad, and Aachen as the new dynasties interacted.

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The Half-Berber Prince

Posted on December 13, 2013 by Ruth

We now go back to the overthrow of the Umayyad dynasty in Damascus, to pick up the first thread of the Andalusian Golden Age. There were three main factions united behind the descendants of Abbas, Mohammed’s uncle: Shi’ites who wanted a closer relative of Mohammed in power, Persians who were tired of second-class status, and egalitarian nomads, both Bedouin and Berber.

The Berbers had been problematic for some time. Their preferred strain of Islam was the earliest kind of fundamentalism, Kharijism. “Kharij” means “one who walks out,” that is, a dissident against the mainstream rule. Kharijites believed that all other forms of Islam were corrupt and worthy of death. We could sum up their view as, “Give me pious justice or give me (or preferably you) death!” They were also fiercely egalitarian and believed that the elites of Damascus had deviated from the true way.

A Berber uprising in the Mahgreb (literally, the place of the setting sun) in 740 led to a massive Syrian defeat in Morocco. Berbers had formed the shock troops for invading Spain; now they were a restive, rebellious pestilence. The emirs resorted to segregating different strains of Muslims from each other in various Spanish cities, to keep peace.

The last great Umayyad Caliph, Hisham I, chose to marry his son Muawiya to a Berber woman from an influential family. So his grandsons in that line grew up speaking Berber fluently. The oldest was Abd al-Rahman, who was himself  given a wife at the young age of 15. By the time he was 19, he had a four-year-old son named Sulayman.

They lived in a palace complex northeast of Damascus. It was called Rusafa and has vanished from the record; perhaps its cut stones were re-used in Syrian villages. Unlike Abbasid Baghdad, which displayed its luxury openly, Damascus kept its “soft” sins out of public view in Rusafa. It was a place of wine, palm trees, and gardens.

As soon as the Abbasid army had conquered Marwan II near the Tigris River, accomplices raced to Rusafa to execute the rest of Marwan’s relatives. Seeing the black flag, the families at Rusafa scrambled to save themselves. Abd al-Rahman grabbed some money and ran with a brother and his son. They were pursued hotly, but only al-Rahman (with a faithful servant) completed his escape. His brother was cut down when he could not swim a river, and his little son had to be left behind. Rahman was hunted all over the Ummah but succeeded in escaping pursuit and arrest through Egypt and into North Africa.

Finding his way to his mother’s Nafza tribe, he was welcomed. This prince, half Arab and half Berber, changed the focus of Berber rebellion. Al-Rahman settled in Morocco for a while, studying the situation. When he was 25, he decided to use Berber support to take over the disorganized territory across Gibraltar. Taking advantage of factional hatred among Muslim factions in Spain, he gathered an army and by 756, “al-Dakhil” (the Immigrant, or perhaps we might say, the Carpetbagger) controlled most of Andalusia.

Abd al-Rahman did not declare himself a Caliph, though his great-great-grandson did. For now, he was an Emir, just a governor under the Abbasid Caliph of Baghdad, al-Mansur. But he was an upstart Emir, not an appointed one, and he ruled a land that was still very dangerous. Abbasid agents must be defeated, and all warring factions brought under control. Abd al-Rahman I created a non-tribal modern state, rewarding anyone who supported him.

In 759, the Franks successfully besieged Muslim Narbonne; Abd al-Rahman was not yet powerful enough to protect a place so far to the north. And in 763, al-Mansur sent an appointed Emir to Sevilla to take back central power. Now there had to be a final military showdown. al-Rahman trained a slave army, perhaps the first Muslim ruler to create such a thing. He chose imported Slavs, blond and blue-eyed, to be his shock troops; he also had a personal bodyguard of Africans. The slave army had no tribal ties to Yemenis, Berbers, Syrians, or anyone; they would live or die only as they helped him win.

At the fortress of Carmona, near Sevilla, the slave army defeated the Abbasid envoy’s army. Abd al-Rahman took no prisoners; all were executed. He had a special fate for the top officials. Cutting off their hands first, then their heads, he pickled all of these in brine and mailed them to Mecca. Caliph al-Mansur, hearing of it, said, “Praise Allah, He placed a sea between me and him!” Later, when asked who he considered to be the bravest (the falcon) of Mohammed’s clan, he named Abd al-Rahman “the Falcon of the Quraysh.” Because, he said, he rose to power without any support, against all odds, by his cleverness and ferocity.

 

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Paper

Posted on December 4, 2013 by Ruth

Around 750, just before the Umayyads were overthrown in Damascus, there was a battle at the far eastern front. It was like any other battle, but it was so close to the Chinese border that the Muslim victors captured craftsmen who knew a secret of the Chinese. (Of course, not for the last time; it became a pattern.)

This secret had to do with boiling rags and pressing the ground pulp into sheets that dried stiff and smooth. Paper.

Shortly after the Abbasid capital moved farther east, some paper craftsmen came to Baghdad from the now-Muslim Turkestan region. It didn’t take long for the city’s industrial shops to realize its potential, since the grand translation project was beginning to ramp up already in the early Abbasid years. By the time Harun al-Rashid and his son Al-Mamoun were ordering mass translations, the paper industry was well-established.

Without paper, it would have been very difficult to keep up with their demands. Writing surfaces had been of three types until now: clay tablets, papyrus sheets, and parchment. Parchment was the most satisfactory: it was smooth and stiff, but it turned easily. It didn’t grow brittle within a short time like papyrus. It could be rubbed out or even whited over to re-use.

But making parchment was a messy process. It was a side industry to butchering, competing with tanning to process the skins. Like tanners, parchment makers had to soak, stretch, and scrape skins, throwing away most of the substance until all that was left was the integument itself and not much more. Parchment could be scraped too thin and suddenly break through in holes. It couldn’t be mass produced, since every piece had to be worked by hand.

Paper, on the other hand, needed drying time and only minimal (compared to parchment) hand processing. A Baghdad or Kufa merchant could spend a few years investing in wool felt, wooden frames, and wire screens, and at the end of it, he could turn out large amounts of paper with minimal human labor. Paper was as durable as parchment and soon became as popular or more popular for books. It certainly fed the House of Wisdom’s massive library expansion.

Paper remained an Eastern technology for a long time. It entered Europe via Spain, the other outpost of the Muslim empire. The town of Jativa in Valencia became a paper-making center some time between 800 and 1200. Eventually, the Reconquista brought Valencia back into Christian control. After 1260, paper-making spread to Italy and into the north.

Paper was quickly adopted by universities in Europe; book copyists made a decent living in those areas by copying the most in-demand portions of Aristotle and so on into informal books with wide margins for taking notes. Fine art books adopted paper more slowly, but the financial hub of Italy saw another advantage in it. Paper could be erased, but not as easily as parchment. Especially after the digit number system was adopted around the same time (13th and 14th centuries), paper financial records kept people honest. Official documents resisted the change, seeing paper as the cheapo, ephemeral alternative. Perhaps that’s why we still expect official documents like diplomas to be written on heavy paper, which we elevate by the name of “parchment.”

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House of Wisdom: Baghdad

Posted on December 3, 2013 by Ruth

Baghdad’s Round City featured a large building that was called, at first, The Bookstore. It was modeled after the Persian Empire’s library in Ctesiphon, but its chief purpose was to transfer civilization into the Arabic script of the recently-literate nomads. It was a translation hub, and soon it was called simply the House of Wisdom.

There were four caliphs, the founders of the Abbasid dynasty, who built, funded and enlarged the library. This is particularly interesting because in three places, at the same time, there were young, vigorous, cultured dynasties still in their prime. We will look next at the two other dynasties, in Europe, which ran parallel to the Abbasids: the Umayyads in Spain and the Carolingians in Aachen, Germany.

The Abbasids in Baghdad started with al-Mansour, then his son al-Mahdi, and his son Harun al-Rashid, then the great-grandson al-Mamoun. Al-Mansour began the book collection, expanded by his son. Harun al-Rashid created the first building and established scholars to begin translating, while al-Mamoun expanded it into a multi-wing institution and increased its funding and scope. These four caliphs spanned from 754 to 833. Baghdad’s Golden Age continued after, but the real glory years were these early ones centered around the year 800.

The first task of translation scholars was to put Persian books into Arabic, to make them accessible to the new dynasty. By this time, many Arabic nobles had married Persian heiresses, so there were multi-lingual children to step into translation roles. (Caliph al-Mamoun was among them; his mother had been Persian, so he was naturally bilingual.) Coming from Damascus, other scholars translated the Aramaic and Syriac books of the Levant into Arabic. They also recruited some Sanskrit scholars to import the works of captured northern India into Arabic. Every Muslim government included Jewish scholars and officials, so they had ready ability to translate Hebrew as well.

During the time of Caliph al-Mamoun, there were two huge book importation projects. By this time, the mission of the House of Wisdom had shifted from translating conquered literature to translating all literature. Greek literature resided primarily in Constantinople, but there was also a good library in Sicily. Sicily agreed to sell the contents of its library to Baghdad. According to Islamic tradition, the books were imported in mass quantity by ship and camel caravan. Then the Caliph arranged for some of his officials to enter Constantinople as visiting scholars to translate Greek and Latin works stored there. It was at this time that the original building was massively expanded to include many wings and courtyards, each dedicated to a branch of learning.

There was a particular focus on astronomy and mathematics. Sanskrit mathematical treatises, often from the Jain sect of northern India, were now available in Arabic and Persian. There was no original plan to make the House of Wisdom into a university, but of course, by making the works available, Baghdad spurred further study. Al-Mamoun funded an observatory to continue the study of astronomy, and during this time, the first astrolabe was invented in Baghdad. The principles of algebra, too, were worked out in Baghdad by Arab-Persian scientists.

The words beginning with “al” come from this time: alchemy, algebra, algorithm, almanac, alcohol, alkali. Greek Ptolemy’s astronomical calculation tables have come to us with the title “Almagest,”also from their passage through Arabic. Even more words entered through Spanish, but more of that later.

To skip far ahead in time, eventually the Mongol conquest of Baghdad ended the House of Wisdom. The integration of Mongols and Turks into Islam created another shock of the city vs. nomad type. By then, North African and Arabian nomads had made some degree of peace with the existence of cities and libraries. Baghdad was conquered by Genghis Khan’s grandson, and their nomadic disdain for civilization was still running very, very strong. The library went into the Tigris River, to bleed ink until the water ran black, soon after the last Caliph’s entire family was executed.

But that wasn’t until 1258, so for about 400 years, the Abbasid-founded library center served its purpose of transferring scientific knowledge from one part of the empire to another, and from one language to another.

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Arabic writing

Posted on November 26, 2013 by Ruth

The Abbasid dynasty hosted a very important reform that made possible a lot of the literary and scientific advances of the next two centuries: they reformed the writing system.

The Semitic language family has been around as long as written history, in various forms: Aramaic, Hebrew, Assyrian, Phoenician, Ugaritic, Amharic and Arabic. The early books of Bible history make more sense when you realize that the Moabites, Amorites, Edomites, Canaanites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Akkadians, Chaldeans, Arameans and even Ethiopians could understand each other if they really needed to. (The language of Sumer was not related.) The Akkadian language developed cuneiform, which became the universal writing system of the ancient world. At the same time, Phoenicians developed their crude alphabet, which influenced both Hebrew and Greek. The early system of Semitic writing only noted consonants, since grammar stipulated the vowels.

The Southern desert branch of the language family wasn’t written down until last. There are only a few pre-Islamic documents to indicate that Arabic had borrowed an Aramaic script. Literacy was just not an issue, another reason to think that Mohammed did not read or write. When his Companions assembled the Koran and hadiths, they were still using a cobbled-together script that worked only reasonably well for Arabic. It was hard to learn and hard to read, another reason why Koran memorization became an early tradition.

During the Abbasid Caliphate’s Golden Age, the Arabic script was reformed. The Abbasids moved their capital from Damascus, a Semitic (Aramaic) center, to Baghdad in Persia. This meant that Arabic was, for the first time, formally studied as a second language by people with a completely different (Indo-European) background. In Baghdad, a linguist known as al-Farahidi began to update and reform Arabic writing. His goal was to standardize writing for poetry, and he also wrote a dictionary.

The chief reform was to use a simpler vowel marking system. There had been experiments with using dots over and under the flowing consonants, sometimes with different color. Al-Farahidi worked out a simpler way, and he also added an extra consonant.

Al-Farahidi’s patches on the system made it possible to actually read Arabic without being a Bedouin. The enormous effort put into translation in Baghdad was only possible because they now had a workable writing system. Eventually, the Koran was rewritten with the new system. Persian, before written with cuneiform, moved to the Arabic script. When the Turks began to invade and gradually got converted to Islam, their languages were first written in it, too. Eventually, all eminent scholars had to know the Arabic script.

 

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Baghdad of legend

Posted on November 25, 2013 by Ruth

The Abbasid dynasty endowed a scholars’ center in Baghdad; its first work was to collect and translate the Iranian books sitting in local libraries. We don’t know at what point they began to translate the Persian storybook that became the most successful Islamic cultural ambassador ever sent to Europe.

The Persian story was about a Shah who, angry at all women because his wife was unfaithful, married and then beheaded one virgin per day. In this Persian kingdom, his chief minister was called the Dapir, the Scribe. The Dapir’s daughter had studied history intensely; she decided to volunteer as the next bride, confident that she could tell stories long enough to save her life. Within this frame story, she tells a core of stories that originated in Persian. The girl herself seems to be modeled on several legendary Persian queens.

In Arabic, the king’s chief minister was now the Wazir, an Arabic word. Religious references were altered to be consciously Muslim, and during the 9th century, stories about Harun al-Rashid were added. The culture presented in the new blended stories was that of Baghdad: Arabicized Persian. The book’s title was usually Alf Layla: One Thousand Nights.

Harun al-Rashid was the 5th Abbasid caliph, presiding over the new city at the height of its early glory. His mother had been a slave who rose to influence with her intelligence. Praising the Caliph’s mother could have been one reason for the way the stories multiplied. The Caliph appears in the stories as a daring, clever hero; he likes to go out disguised at night to learn the truth about affairs in the city.

When Islam is presented, it’s usually in the Sufi form with devout dervishes, sometimes whirling in ecstatic worship. I wonder if lingering Zoroastrian mysticism helped create Sufi Islam.

The stories first entered Europe’s consciousness in a French collection. Noticing that the stories did not live up to their name (there were not even close to one thousand of them), Antoine Galland added many more stories that he said were taken from storytellers in Syria. Galland’s version, published in 1717, set the spelling of names that we’ve come to expect: Scheherazade, the Vizier, Aladdin, Sindbad, and Ali Baba first come to us in Galland’s Mille Nuits. By this time, the stories were from all over the Silk Road, over several centuries.

Galland’s stories are set in Harun al-Rashid’s Baghdad, but some of the sub-stories are set in China, Bengal, or out in the Indian Ocean. Some stories have muskets, while some are very primitive; some are more Muslim than others. Some are science fiction (the flying horse) and some are detective stories; a second recurring character, with the caliph, is the Cadi, the sharia judge of Baghdad.

One core story that has been in the collection from the first Persian versions is about a fisherman and a Jinn. The fisherman finds a large vase, sealed with lead, in his nets. He opens it and out comes the Jinn, who offers him his choice of deaths. The Jinn explains that for the first century he was trapped, he promised to give his savior a choice of riches; the second century, riches and a choice of kingdoms; the third century, riches, a kingdom and a choice of everlasting life. But in the fourth century, he gave up and angrily vowed only to give his rescuer death for taking so long. The fisherman gets out of his predicament by tricking the Jinn back into the vase, and in some versions he has a lot more improbable adventures and fortunes. I’ve always loved that story for what it says about human psychology. Don’t we just do that?

If you haven’t read The Arabian Nights, as they’re commonly called, you really should try a few stories. C. S. Lewis borrowed his “Calormene” culture in Narnia straight from the 1000 Nights, and many other writers have used the stories as models. Victor Hugo wrote a poem about “Les Djinns,” inspired by Galland’s stories.

Here is a recent film cover, in which the Sultan is mentally ill with paranoia and has to be saved from himself by Scheherazade’s stories. Victor Hugo wrote a poem about “Les Djinns,” inspired by Galland’s stories. Here is a link to the poem in French and with translation.

 

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