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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Baghdad

Posted on November 24, 2013 by Ruth

As payoff for Persian support, the Abbasid rulers agreed to relocate the administrative capital to Persian territory, instead of Damascus. The old capital of Ctesiphon may have been starting to fall apart, but in any case, they decided to build a brand-new city. It was to rise not far from Ctesiphon, permitting the more powerful Persian families to use their old habits and networks. The name would be “Baghdad,” which is disputed in meaning but most likely means in Persian, “gift of God.” (I hope some IEists out there recognize “da” for “gift.” It’s in Greek, guys, you can see it right? Russian has it too—and I suppose “bagh” is probably where the Russians borrowed their word for god, “bog.”)

The city was designed to be a visual representation of the Koran’s idea of Paradise. By the time it was founded, the Empire was at its peak size and vast sums of tribute flowed into the Caliph’s coffers, so money was no object. Work began in July, 764.

Architects and artists planned the city in detail. The very center was a mosque, near the Palace, which included a tall green dome. The houses of top bureaucrats and nobles were near the Palace (an honor, but also a control feature); so were the administrative buildings, guard headquarters, etc. To make the inner city as like Paradise as possible, it was planned with boulevards, parks, gardens, and walks. The inner city had a high wall, perfectly round; it had four gates. Each gate door was made of iron. The gates were named for the distant cities they faced: Kufa, Khorasan, Damascus and Basra. (Kufa and Basra had been built fresh under the Umayyads and both served as administrative and shipping centers.)

All bricks would be the same size: massive cubes of 18 inches. Where possible, marble blocks would be used. They built a canal from the Tigris to help deliver building materials. 100,000 construction workers came from around the Empire to build Baghdad, and they completed the task in just four years. After the inner city, the planned Paradise, was complete, a new city ring began just outside its wall. It wasn’t planned as carefully, but it still had the advantage of ample funding, so it was also splendid.

Baghdad very soon challenged Constantinople for the title of largest city in the world. It had over 1 million inhabitants at its peak. It was the keystone of the Empire’s arch, standing at the middle between West and East. Most of the transfer of knowledge between East and West went through Baghdad. It had a House of Wisdom, not quite a university but definitely a state-funded scholarly community. That’s where so much translation work went on. More on that later.

Baghdad is best known as the setting of the Arabian Nights stories. The most famous (and third) Abbasid Caliph, Harun (Aaron) al-Rashid, was the legendary ruler in these stories. In the stories, he roamed the city at night in disguise, trying to learn about his people (and probably thwart plots). The stories talk about Bengal and China, suggesting that ambassadors and royalty from the far East came to stay in Baghdad. In addition to a teeming underclass of thieves, legendary Baghdad has many minor palaces for officials and merchants. Pearls and gold seem to roll out of every closet and box.

 

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Abbasid Dynasty

Posted on November 23, 2013 by Ruth

The Umayyad dynasty had been ruling since winning the Battle of Karbala, where they defeated the last of Mohammed’s grandsons. They were of the same tribe as Mohammed, but not from his clan or family. Arabic extended families appear to keep close track of genealogy; a century after Mohammed, there were family members waiting to take back power.

The Abbasid family claimed descent from Abbas, one of Mohammed’s uncles. They had been agitating for power since around the time that Muslim armies entered Europe, but the Umayyad caliphs had been too powerful, too surrounded by loyalists, for them to succeed. Relatives of Mohammed generally claimed the title Imam, leader. (Although the true Shi’ia continued to count their own secret Imams descended from one survivor of the Battle of Karbala, they also supported the Abbasids.) Imam Ibrahim was captured as a rebel in 747 and probably died in prison. His death set off the overthrow of the Umayyads.

The Abbasids appealed to whoever was disaffected: non-Arabs (especially Persians) who felt like 2nd class citizens; Shi’ites; Yemeni and Bedouin Arabs who believed Damacus had grown too soft–and who were no longer getting as many of the perks they felt they were owed. In a battle on one of the tributaries of the Tigris River, a combined rebellion of Persians, Shi’ites and Abbasid true believers defeated Marwan II, the last Umayyad to rule in Damascus.

In exchange for Persian support, the first Abbasid caliphs moved the capital into Persia. Al-Mansur, the second Caliph, personally chose a building site on the Tigris and consulted astrologers to find out the most auspicious time to start building Baghdad. From this time until the Seljuk Turks took over the Muslim Empire, rule became increasingly Persian, not Arab. Arabs still ruled in name, but the bureaucracy was all Persian, and so was the style.

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Sociological results of Umayyad policies

Posted on November 21, 2013 by Ruth

I’ve got a draft on the Abbasid dynastic takeover of the Muslim Empire, but I’m waiting to receive in the mail a book that I read back in 2008, because I remember it had some interesting details. So meanwhile, just a meditation on what we have so far. It’s 750 AD, and Islam is a military occupier from Spain to Pakistan. The boundaries of this 8th century Muslim Empire is what defines the modern term “Middle East.” We include Morocco as “Middle East” although geographically it’s as far west as Britain, because the term really isn’t about anything “middle” or “east,” it’s a workaround for “historical Islam.” Modern ME culture is the sociological result of many centuries of the Muslim social structure first being established, then becoming normal, then adapting further.

In 750, there are four social classes. At the top, forever and always at the top, are Muslim natives of the Arabian peninsula. Blood relationship to Mohammed is considered in some ways more important than personal holiness, or perhaps as a second track to holiness. Arabian peninsula society has always been very much about clan ties, so this mindset is made into international law. Taxes from non-Arabs automatically goes to Arabs, at least in this first century. Arabs can get away with nearly anything.

The next social class is the non-Arab Muslims, chiefly Persians at this time. They are treated as second-class citizens, passed over for plum jobs and not given the same subsidies that Arabs get. Since the Persian Empire was an independent and proud country since the time of Cyrus and Darius, they are discontented. Their civilization is much more refined than the desert nomad’s. Persians have been the astronomers, mathematicians and philosophers for a long time; you may recall from the Christian stories that “wise men of the East” saw the natal star and came to seek “the King of the Jews” in Jerusalem.

Non-Arab non-Muslims are the lowest free social class. They bear the burden of pacifying the quarrelsome Arabs by being so visibly low that even a poor Arab can feel superior. This is open and deliberate strategy. From this lowest free class, many slide into slavery, which is not racial. Slavery in the ancient world is caused by failure in commerce and war; it’s the lot of losers. It’s the fourth, lowest class. There is no sentiment that human have inalienable natural rights; that philosophy will grow out of the post-medieval world about 900 years later.

Arab nomads were among the most primitive people of the region, lagging far behind the farming cultures of Egypt, Iraq and Syria. They are still hunter-gatherers; they don’t think ahead about the future in the ways that farm cultures do. Nomadic cultures such as the Plains Indians and the Mongols, have always tended to use force to get whatever they couldn’t make for themselves or get easily by trade. People who accept use of force easily tend to be proud and easily offended. They think of themselves as impoverished but morally superior. They see the adaptations of farm culture as the ways of losers, and they are proven right every time they descend on a farm community to pillage and slaughter. (I’m generalizing here among Sioux, Mongol, Tartar, and Arab cultures.)

When these people are suddenly elevated to the top, socially, they become even more arrogant. While some individuals may dislike seeing so many people living in debased conditions, the average person takes it as normal and fitting. Everyone, including the debased classes, assumes it’s normal. They adapt psychologically by assuming that it’s appropriate, too. Non-Arab non-Muslims want to live this way. It’s how they are. They are craven and dirty. They don’t wash. Their children are brats. They have low morals. They’re trailer trash.

People who converted to Islam in order to get out of the low class wanted to get in on the perks, so they were not reformers. They became arrogant themselves. Essentially, the social system bred a strong sense of entitlement because that’s what it was about: entitlement. A lot of the problems we see in the modern cultures can be traced back to this foundation. You get what you want by demanding it, by rioting in the street, not by quietly working at it yourself over many generations.

Work is for other people, especially dirty work. Local government is always basically about garbage collection (and fixing roads). Anyone who’s pretty sure that they’re entitled to never pick up a piece of litter with their own hands is also quite likely to delegate the actual work of hiring garbage collectors, while retaining the title. So there were generations on generations of people raised to think they were above dirty work but that some lower class was always there to do it.

And what’s really super intolerable is if your garbage-collecting class finds a way to get honored. Let’s say they are given some scruffy, malaria-ridden land and they turn it into a world-class nation. It’s simply intolerable and if you were part of this culture, you wouldn’t even have the words to explain why it’s intolerable. It’s because every action and thought of your culture is based on the idea that humans are not equal, and that your class is entitled by birth. You don’t have to explain why it’s not fair for Jews to get some of your land and get ahead. You don’t have to prove that they got ahead unfairly, probably by some kind of theft. It’s self-evident.

The system that the Umayyads set up kept them on the throne for a century but did far-reaching damage to their own people and set the conditions for riots, graft and injustice for a long time to come.

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Early co-existence within the Caliphate

Posted on November 18, 2013 by Ruth

The theme of this series is the relationship between East and West through the Middle Ages, including attitudes and precedents. Although the Christians and Jews within the East were not, by definition, Westerners, their shared beliefs with the old Roman Empire makes them part of the relationship.

Much is made these days of tolerance within the Muslim Empire, as compared to the intolerance of Christian Europe (toward Jews). As with everything, it’s true and not true at the same time. It’s worth looking at the social and financial price paid to be a minority within the Umayyad dynasty’s Syria or Egypt.

The tax structure and legal standing of minorities was openly unfair, as previously addressed. Anyone who did not admit that Mohammed was God’s Prophet was already a liar. Minorities purchased justice with bribes that amounted to ransom when commercial injustice was used to seize people as slaves. Poor minority communities could only sometimes buy back their captives.

Slavery was endemic. Non-Muslim citizens were not automatically slaves, but they were legally unprotected and might become slaves. In general, any time a city was defeated by the Muslim forces, its surviving citizens were sold at the slave market, often very cheaply for the lowest kinds of labor. Cities were repopulated with Arabic-speakers. Many Christian and Jewish children were requisitioned, after the age of 6, for training in military or civil service. In early years, there was no pretense at law about the matter; the later Empire made it legal for the government to seize 1/5 of the children every few years. We are aware that “slave” comes from “Slav,” and it wasn’t only Muslims who enslaved the Yugoslav and Bulgarian people; Venetians traded them too. But they were the rural poor of the Byzantine region; the choice of Slavs as the default slaves was part of the original Islamic conquest attitude: “You had your good times, living in houses while we were in tents, now suck it up and deal with being slaves.”

For those who remained free, by law their houses and churches had to be smaller and poorer than Muslim houses. Remember that the Empire’s chief concern was not revolt by Christians and Jews, but revolt by Muslims. One way to buy their complacence cheaply was to make sure that in every town, Muslims could see that they were literally superior to others. It cost the Caliph or Emir nothing, and it worked.

It began simply as a prohibition against rebuilding any non-Muslim houses of worship. Whatever had not been constructed in Roman or Byzantine times was illegal. Every decade, the church or synagogue chipped and cracked a bit more. By later periods, laws made certain that residential houses were smaller, and eventually the law stipulated that doorways had to be very low, forcing non-Muslims to stoop in order to enter their houses. In some places, non-Muslim shops had to be sunk lower in the ground so that they always seemed smaller.

In the first century of the Muslim Empire, high taxes that transferred wealth systematically from non-Muslims to Muslims made sure that non-Muslims were dressed poorly. Eventually, the non-Muslim economies began to adapt and recover. By the 9th century, which is beyond the Umayyad period we’re currently wrapping up, distinctive clothing was required: certain color belts, hats or badges. Non-Muslims also carried on their persons at all times a proof that they had paid their taxes. It was a certificate or a metal tag worn on a string.

Intermarriage was forbidden, except that a Muslim man could marry a non-Muslim woman. Unfortunately, this encourages not freedom of association but predation on women and dilution of the minority community’s ethnic identity.

Last, one of the key features of local government was that tax collection was left to the minority community itself. It had a higher quality of life if its leadership was willing to overlook injustices and poverty and just keep the tax money flowing in. When their own Christian or Jewish communities enforced Muslim law, they might experience some benefits of state prosperity. Cooperation and submission might bring about a relative Golden Age when the minority community could flourish artistically or academically. Grumbling and failure to pay taxes brought the forces of the state down hard on all “extras”—and additionally, probably, another “quint” levy of children.

It was possible, but not easy, to live as a minority in the Muslim Empire. They were tolerated, in fact they were needed as farmers and garbage-collectors. But their legal rights were subject to whim and bribe. They never complained, but instead made the best of the situation in order to stay safer. Ironically, this makes it harder to see their segregation than in Europe, where some minorities could be safe for a long time before persecution came along.

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Arab-ization

Posted on November 17, 2013 by Ruth

Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Iraq and Iran were primarily agricultural societies. The landscape of these places was typical of farming societies: small towns scattered among farms. By the 7th century, they were mostly Christian, though not all Catholic or Orthodox. The Armenians and Nestorians had their own churches, perhaps based in very early conversions centuries earlier.

When the first Companions of Mohammed conquered the Holy Land, their chief concern was to keep their own tribesmen from rebelling. They encouraged the tribes to migrate freely into the conquered lands and take what they wanted, as a way of pacifying them. Their early legal precedents were few, mostly based in whatever Mohammed had done in particular situations. Taxes were very high, and they took not just cash-based taxes but many provisions and goods of all kinds. The conquered people were property; the Arab tribes received stipends out of the revenue, in addition to migrating into the land.

There was a basic legal precedent from the beginning that the oath of a non-Muslim in court was worthless against the word of a Muslim. No Muslim could be condemned to death for murder or theft on the word of a non-Muslim, either. Muslims could take land, animals, and other property without any penalty. At sea, they could hold anyone for ransom. The only way that a non-Muslim could get justice was to pay heavy bribes to judges. The judges, of course, used the income to increase their own power.

At the time of conquest, half of the churches had been ceded as mosques. As the Christian inhabitants grew poorer or went into hiding, most of the other churches were abandoned or seized. Egyptian and Syrian monasteries were abandoned.

In the early years, taxes were often so crushing that native Syrian, Egyptian and Nestorian farmers abandoned their land and went into hiding. They hid in the hills and caves. In some cases, Bedouins moved in with flocks and grazed on the land.

Gradually, the landscape began to change; if you’ve ever seen goats at work, you’ll know what I mean. The plants that they like are soon gone, and the plants they don’t like are the only ones that grow. Desertification resulted (we don’t often stop to think that perhaps the landscape we see around flocks of goats was created by the goats themselves). By 700 or so, tax revenue had massively fallen. Some of the same changes happened in Spain, too, as a result of the Berber-backed conquest. Nomads were poor stewards of land.

The Muslim governors of these provinces tried to reverse the Arabization by evicting nomads and hunting down the original farmers, forcing them back to their fields. They began to see a need to give the natives some legal protection, so at least they tied some taxes to the land, not just to the people. But there had been a real reason to pay off the Bedouins with such privileges. As the Umayyad Caliphs began to set things into better balance, reducing nomad stipends and restricting immigration, the original Arab tribes gathered energy to rebel. By no longer favoring the nomads and trying to restore agriculture, the Umayyads brought their dynasty to an end.

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Muslim invasion of France

Posted on November 17, 2013 by Ruth

In 730, the Land of the Franks appeared to be wide open for conquest. The Franks were the most primitive people the Muslims had yet fought, and their Merovingian kings had become increasingly powerless. The border areas were especially decentralized; until the late Middle Ages, Toulouse was independent and often allied against Paris. Even the Duke of Aquitaine who had driven the Muslims from Toulouse chose alliance with them against the Franks. France should have been a reprise of the Spanish conquest.

However, after 50 years, the Muslim invasion was no longer a surprise attack. Frankia was a real homeland with loyal Frankish farmers, not a place like Iberia where the aristocrats were hated. For the Franks, imagine people like Vikings; they were named for a kind of axe. And although the King in Paris was powerless, just like in Tolkien’s Gondor, the Steward was growing stronger. Charles began drilling an army as soon as Muslim invaders settled in Marseille.

In 732, a local Muslim rebellion brought the main force of the Arab fighting men into the north. They killed the rebel emir and attacked his ally Aquitaine, devastating the heartland of Celtic Gaul. The defeated Duke of Aquitaine now sent word to the Franks, agreeing to their overlordship in return for help.

For the first time, the Muslim invaders met a defensive army that was large, well-trained, and not caught by surprise. In fact, the Muslim army was surprised to find defenders at all. Heading north to sack the city of Tours before heading back to Spain for the winter, they found a Frankish shield wall across the top of a wooded hill near Poitiers.

For a week, the Muslim raiding parties gathered their main force until they felt strong enough to attack, but Charles Martel had chosen his position carefully. The Muslim cavalry had to charge uphill and through trees, which diminished the shock of their attack. They were not able to break the shield wall. They had never met the ferocity of Frankish feudalism, either. In these battles, if either side could kill the general or king, it meant victory. Charles’s men stood thickly around him, heavily armed, and kept him safe.

Frankish victory came when some Franks ran down to the Arab camp in the valley and began freeing their captives. When a party of cavalry rode back to deal with this threat, the rest of the Muslims thought a retreat had been called. In the confusion, their general was killed. As night fell, the Muslim raiders abandoned their camp and fled.

Muslim armies never came that far north again (until they besieged Vienna from another direction). Charles Martel, his son Pippin and grandson Charlemagne built up Frankish military power so that the Muslims were trapped into a Cold War. There were flashpoints around Toulouse and Narbonne, but the Franks were always on hand to aid allies. Modern France began as a military alliance against Muslim invasion. By the time Charlemagne’s descendants had begun infighting and splitting up the alliance, the Visigothic nobles had launched their Reconquista.

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