CHAPTER V

Islam

Until the second quarter of the seventh century, the land of Arabia was terra incognita to the Christian world. Remote and inhospitable, productive of nothing to tempt the sophisticated merchants of the west, it had made no contribution to civilisation and seemed unlikely ever to do so. Its people, insofar as anyone knew anything about them, were presumed to be little better than savages, periodically slaughtering each other in violent outbreaks of tribal warfare, falling mercilessly upon any traveller foolhardy enough to venture among them, making not the slightest attempt towards unity or even stable government. Apart from a few scattered Jewish colonies around the coast and in Medina, and a small Christian community in the Yemen, the overwhelming majority practised a sort of primitive polytheism which, in the city of Mecca–their commercial centre–appeared to be somehow focused on the huge black stone, the Kaaba, that stood in their principal temple. Where the outside world was concerned they showed no interest, made no impact and certainly posed no threat.

Then, in the twinkling of an eye, all was changed. In September 622 the Prophet Mohammed had taken flight with a few followers from the hostile city of Mecca to friendly Medina, thus marking the starting point for the whole Muslim era; just five years afterwards, in 633, showing a discipline and singleness of purpose of which they had previously given no sign and which therefore took their victims totally by surprise, his followers suddenly burst out of Arabia. A year later, an Arab army had crossed the desert and defeated the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius on the banks of the Yarmuk river; after three years they had taken Damascus; after five, Jerusalem; after eight, they controlled all Syria, Palestine and Egypt. Within twenty years, the whole Persian Empire as far as the Oxus had fallen to the Arab sword; within thirty, Afghanistan and most of the Punjab. Then, after a brief interval for consolidation, the conquerors turned their attention to the west. The Byzantine Empire having proved too tough a nut to crack–they had made no headway at all in Asia Minor–they took the longer but easier route along the southern shore of the Mediterranean. The conquest of Egypt took just two years, from 639 to 641, after which the pace slowed, owing partly to the fact that the post-conquest Egyptian administration presented so many problems; without the help and experience of the natives–the Copts and the Jews, the Samaritans and the Greeks–the still unsophisticated Arabs would have been quite unable to impose their authority.

Thus it was not before the end of the century that they reached the Atlantic, and not until 711 that they were ready to cross the Straits of Gibraltar into Spain. But by 732, still less than a century after their eruption from their desert homeland, they had made their way over the Pyrenees and, according to tradition, pressed on to Tours–where, only 150 miles from Paris, they were checked at last by the Frankish king Charles Martel in an engagement which inspired Gibbon to one of his most celebrated flights of fancy:

A victorious line of march had been prolonged above a thousand miles from the Rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire; the repetition of an equal space would have carried the Saracens to the confines of Poland and the Highlands of Scotland; the Rhine is not more impassable than the Nile or the Euphrates, and the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pupils might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the Revelation of Mahomet.

Modern historians are quick to point out that the battle of Tours is scarcely mentioned by contemporary or near-contemporary Arab historians, and then only as a comparatively insignificant episode. The evidence of these writers strongly suggests that the Arabs encountered by Charles Martel were simply a raiding party that had ventured perhaps hundreds of miles in advance of the main army, and that the so-called battle was in fact little more than a protracted skirmish. In any case, a glance at the map will show that the real Muslim threat to Europe would come from the east, a far shorter and easier route for an army that had already mopped up the Levant. It was not to Charles and his Franks, but to the stalwart defenders of Constantinople under Constantine IV in 674–78 and Leo III in 717–18, that we owe the preservation of both Eastern and Western Christendom.

History provides, nevertheless, few parallels for so dramatic a saga of conquest, or for the establishment, in the space of less than a hundred years, of an empire stretching from the Himalayas to the Pyrenees. For this phenomenon the usual explanation is that the Arabs were carried forward on a great surge of religious enthusiasm; and so in a way they were. It is worth remembering, however, that this enthusiasm was almost untouched by missionary zeal. The Muslim leaders never saw themselves as having been divinely appointed to conquer the world in the name of Islam. The Koran permitted warfare in self-defence but did not sanctify it for its own sake; moreover, it stated clearly that where Jews and Christians were concerned there should be no coercion in matters of faith. They too were monotheists–‘peoples of the Book’–who had received perfectly valid revelations of their own.

What the new religion provided was above all a sense of brotherhood and unity. In the past the various Arab tribes had been constantly at war with one another; now, all fellow-servants of Allah, they were as one. This in turn imbued them with almost limitless self-confidence. They were utterly convinced that their God was with them; even if it were His will that they should fall in battle, they would receive their immediate reward in paradise–and a most agreeably sensual paradise at that, whose promised delights were, it must be admitted, a good deal more alluring than those of its Christian counterpart. In this world, on the other hand, they were only too willing to adopt a disciplined austerity that they had never known before, together with an unquestioning obedience whose outward manifestations were abstinence from wine and strong drink, periodic fasting and the five-times-daily ritual of prayer.

The founder of their religion was himself never to lead them on campaign. Born of humble origins some time around 570, orphaned in early childhood and finally married to a rich widow considerably older than himself, Mohammed was that rare combination of a visionary mystic and an astute, far-sighted statesman. In the former capacity he preached, first, the singleness of God and second, the importance to mankind of total submission (islam) to His will. This was not a particularly original creed–both Jews and Christians, inside Arabia as well as out, had maintained it for centuries–but it seemed so to most of those who now heard it for the first time; it was Mohammed’s skill to present it in a new, homespun form, clothed in proverbs, fragments of desert lore and passages of almost musical eloquence, all of which were combined in the posthumous collection of his revelations which we know as the Koran. He was clever, too, in the way in which–though he almost certainly considered himself a reformer rather than a revolutionary–he managed to identify his own name and person with the doctrine he preached: not by ascribing any divinity to himself, as Jesus Christ had done, but by putting himself forward as the last and greatest of the prophets, among whom all his predecessors–including Jesus–were subsumed.

To be a prophet, however, was not to be a theologian; and perhaps the most striking difference between Mohammed and the Christians whose lands his followers were so soon to overrun was his indifference to theological speculation. It was, he maintained, useless to argue over abstruse dogmas (as the Greeks loved to do), the more so since their truth or falsehood could never be proved. Islam, as E. M. Forster put it, ‘threw them all down as unnecessary lumber that do but distract the true believer from his God’. Far more important was the way one lived in society, upholding justice and compassion for one’s fellow men and maintaining a fair and reasonable distribution of wealth. Spiritual fervour he possessed in abundance, but he was never a fanatic; like Jesus, he had come not to destroy but to fulfil. He perfectly understood the people among whom he lived, and was always careful not to push them further than they would willingly go. He knew, for example, that they would never abandon polygamy; he therefore accepted it, and indeed himself took several more wives after the death of his first. Slavery was another integral part of Arabian life; this too he tolerated. He was even prepared to come to terms with the old animist religion; as early as 624 he decreed that the faithful should turn towards the Kaaba in Mecca when praying, rather than towards Jerusalem as he had previously enjoined. He never ceased to stress, on the other hand, one entirely new and distinctly unpalatable aspect of his creed–the inevitability of divine judgement after death; often, it seemed, he described the torments of hell even more vividly than the joys of paradise. This fear of retribution may well have proved useful when he came to weld his followers into a political state.

Mohammed died of a fever in Mecca–to which he had triumphantly returned–on 8 June 632. The leadership, both religious and political, of his people passed to his oldest friend and most trusted lieutenant, Abu-Bakr, who assumed the title of Caliph–literally, representative–of the Prophet. In the year following, the Muslim armies marched. But Abu-Bakr was already growing old; he in turn died in 634–according to tradition during the month of August, on the very day of the capture of Damascus–and it was under the second Caliph, Omar, that the initial series of historic victories was won. In one respect in particular, luck was on the side of the Arabs; the indigenous Christian peoples of Egypt and North Africa, Syria and Palestine felt no real loyalty towards the Emperor in Constantinople, who represented an alien Graeco-Roman culture and whose lack of sympathy for their several heresies had periodically led to active persecution. To many of them the Muslim tide, composed as it was of Semites like themselves, professing a rigid monotheism not unlike their own and promising toleration for every variety of Christian belief, must have seemed infinitely preferable to the regime it had swept away.

Before the Muslim conquest, North Africa had formed part of the Byzantine Empire and was protected by the Byzantine navy. To the Arabs it was consequently enemy territory, which they were determined to appropriate. Egypt offered little resistance. The Arab leader Amr ibn al-As⁴⁷ had only 4,000 men when he invaded the country in the early spring of 640; two and a half years later, the great city of Alexandria–the most venerable in the entire Mediterranean, founded by Alexander of Macedon and for some six centuries the seat of one of the four patriarchates of Eastern Christendom–was voluntarily surrendered by the Empire. It was never to recover its former glory.⁴⁸ Returning southward from the delta, Amr then founded the garrison city of al-Fustat, the germ of modern Cairo. His other achievement was to clear the canal that ran eastward from the Nile to the former Byzantine port of Klysma, about a mile from the modern Suez, opening the way to the passage of vessels laden with grain from the Nile valley to the Red Sea and Arabia.

During their first advance the Muslims had no fleet–few of them, indeed, had ever seen the sea–but it soon became clear that if they were to maintain their impetus they would have to master the arts of seamanship and navigation. Just as the Romans had whenever possible used Greeks to man their vessels, so the Arabs found experienced shipbuilders and seamen in the Christians of Egypt and Syria; with their help they were gradually able to construct dockyards, and so to build up a formidable fleet both of war galleys and of merchantmen until they were able to challenge the naval supremacy of Byzantium itself. By 655 they had launched raids on Cyprus, Crete, Rhodes and Sicily; after the Muslim annihilation of the main Byzantine fleet, commanded by the Emperor Constans II in person, off the coast of Lycia in that same year, it must have seemed uncertain whether the balance of naval power in the Mediterranean would ever be the same again. Fortunately the Byzantines had already developed their most effective secret weapon, ‘Greek fire’, shot in great tongues of flame from their ships’ prows. It was thanks to this alone that the Empire was able to maintain some degree of control.

There was another reason too for the slowness of the Arab advance after the conquest of Egypt. As anyone who has driven the 600-odd miles between Benghazi and Tripoli knows all too well, the desert terrain is featureless and the road apparently interminable; it certainly offered no chance of booty or plunder to make it remotely attractive to the Arab army. The area was also a hotbed of hostile tribes. Sooner or later the task of pacification and conquest would clearly have to be undertaken, but political crises in Medina delayed the fateful decision; and the foundation of the Umayyad Empire,⁴⁹ with the consequent removal of the seat of government to Damascus in 661, caused still further delays. Not until 667 did the great march begin, and three years later its leader, Okba ibn Nafi, established the great fortress of Kairouan in what is now Tunisia. Further west, however, he encountered heavy resistance from both the Byzantines and the Christian Berber tribesmen; only in 692, after another army of 40,000 had been despatched by Caliph Abdul-Malik, could progress be resumed. In 693 Carthage fell, despite a Berber uprising led by a mysterious queen-priestess named al-Kahina–a figure straight out of Rider Haggard–and an amphibious assault by a Byzantine army. Both were eventually beaten back, though al-Kahina continued to fight a guerrilla war until 701. The Arabs did not make Carthage their capital; its harbour was too vulnerable to attack from the sea. Instead they built a great fortress at Tunis, connecting an inland lake to the coast. Here was a formidable new springboard from which to harass Sardinia, Sicily, Cyprus and the Balearic Islands. Raids on all these–often ending in temporary occupation–continued until around 750, when Byzantine resistance suddenly grew stronger and when, as we shall shortly see, the Muslim world found that it had other things to think about.

From Carthage the westward advance speeded up again until at last, with the entire coast from Egypt to the Atlantic in their hands, the Muslims could think seriously about Spain: a land infinitely richer and more fertile than the vast territories that they had fought so long and hard to conquer, and one that promised huge rewards. At that very moment, too, the old Visigothic kingdom was crumbling. Its monarchy was theoretically elective, always a certain recipe for disputes over the succession and an open invitation for ambitious noblemen. After years of persecution, the large Jewish community was on the point of revolt. The economy was in ruins. The Spanish fruit, in short, was ripe and ready for the plucking. In 710 an Arab officer named Tarif, with a reconnaissance party of 500 men, slipped across the straits and occupied the southernmost tip of the Iberian peninsula, where the city of Tarifa still bears his name. The ships returned laden with spoils, and Muslim minds were made up. The following year a certain Tariq ibn Zaid sailed from Tangier with an army of 9,000 Berbers, landing this time in the shade of an immense rock, by which his name too is now immortalised.⁵⁰

After Tariq’s landing, one battle near the Guadalete river–even though it is said to have lasted an entire week–was enough to destroy Visigothic resistance. Sending out small detachments to receive the submissions of Malaga, Murcia and Cordoba, Tariq himself set out for the capital, Toledo, which he found abandoned by all but its Jewish population. Here still more plunder awaited him, including–if we are to believe the Arab chronicler Ibn Idhari–the Table of Solomon, set with concentric circles of pearls, sapphires, and chrysolite, the jewels of Alexander the Great, the staff of Moses and the robes of the Gothic kings. Leaving the Jews to administer the territories he had conquered, he then continued northward to Castile, Asturias and Leon. The speed of his advance would have been remarkable were it not for the fact that the Moorish army was generally welcomed, the vast majority of the local Christian populations being only too happy to accept the domination of such tolerant conquerors, whom many of them saw as a considerable improvement on their Visigothic predecessors.

Word of Tariq’s successes soon got back to his superior, one Musa ibn Nusair, who arrived in the peninsula in June or July 712 with some 18,000 men, this time mostly Arabs. Deliberately following a different route from that of his predecessor, he landed at Algeciras and took Huelva and Seville before meeting up with Tariq at Toledo. The following year was largely spent in consolidation; then, in 714, the combined force captured Barcelona and crossed the Pyrenees, advancing into the Rhône valley as far as Avignon and Lyon. There they halted. Musa’s original ambition had been to press eastward to Damascus via Constantinople, but this, he now realised, was out of the question. Resistance was increasing; lines of communication were growing perilously long. There was nothing for it but to return to Spain–and thence, since he was determined to make his personal report to the Caliph, to Africa. That same winter he transferred the responsibility for the conquered territories to his son Abdul-Aziz in Seville, while he and Tariq, accompanied by a huge retinue including a large number of captive Visigoths and countless slaves–to say nothing of vast quantities of gold, silver and precious stones–marched slowly and with great pomp back along the North African coast, through Egypt and Palestine and finally to Damascus. Unfortunately for them, Caliph al-Walid, who had approved of the Spanish expeditions, died almost as soon as they arrived; his successor Süleyman was disappointingly unimpressed.

The Muslim armies invaded France three times–in 716, 721 and 726–but they never took root. Basically, their work was done; and under its Arabic name of al-Andalus, Spain–or much of it–became part of the Umayyad Empire. Never would it be the same again. Henceforth the land would harbour three totally separate peoples: Arabs, Jews and Christians, different in race and in religion, in language and in culture. Inevitably, over the 750-odd years of Muslim occupation, they would influence and cross-fertilise each other in a thousand ways, to the ultimate advantage of all three. For most (though not all) of that time, they coexisted amicably enough–sometimes very amicably indeed.

Such difficulties as did arise came principally from within the Muslim ranks. Musa’s son Abdul-Aziz had made the cardinal mistake of marrying the daughter of Rodrigo, the principal general of the Visigoths, and under her influence had been induced to wear a crown in the Christian manner. This had infuriated his Arab followers to the point where they had murdered him; thereafter confusion reigned, and over the next forty years al-Andalus was ruled by no less than twenty-one successive governors. It might well have disintegrated altogether but for a spectacular coup d’état which no one could possibly have foreseen. In 750 the Umayyad Caliphate was overturned: the last Caliph of the line, Marwan II, was executed; almost his entire family was massacred at a banquet, reminiscent of that at which Theodoric the Ostrogoth had dealt with the family of Odoacer two and a half centuries before; and a new dynasty, the Abbasids, established itself in Baghdad. Only one of the Umayyad princes, the nineteen-year-old Abdul-Rahman, managed to escape. After wandering incognito for five years through Palestine, Egypt and North Africa, in 755 he landed in Spain and, finding the entire country in chaos, had little difficulty in establishing himself as its ruler. In the following year, when still only twenty-six, he was formally proclaimed Emir of al-Andalus. The dynasty that he founded was to rule in Muslim Spain for nearly three hundred years.

Abdul-Rahman was not, however, universally welcomed. There were several revolts in Spain, and one still more serious crisis when in 778 the Frankish King Charles the Great–Charlemagne–was persuaded by a group of Spanish rebels to march against him. Charles quickly occupied Pamplona and had just begun a siege of Saragossa when–fortunately for the Emir–he changed his mind. For some reason he seems to have decided that the game was not after all worth the candle and, on the pretext of pressing problems at home, gave the order to return. It was on 15 August, on his way back across the Pyrenees, that his rearguard, commanded by Roland, Marquis of Brittany, was surprised by a combined force of Muslims and Basques in the narrow pass of Roncesvalles. Not a man escaped. Only the name of Roland has survived, as the hero of one of the first epic poems of western European literature.

Abdul-Rahman’s later years were a good deal more tranquil. He never succeeded in imposing political unity on Spain, but he was a wise and merciful ruler and a deeply cultivated man. His capital city of Cordoba he transformed, endowing it with a magnificent palace, a famously beautiful garden and–most important of all–with the Mezquita, its great mosque, begun in 785 on the site of the early Christian cathedral, which when completed was the most sumptuous mosque in the world and still stands today.⁵¹ He was also a celebrated poet, who wrote sensitively and nostalgically about the Syrian homeland that he would never see again. His love of culture was fully inherited by his great-grandson and third successor, Abdul-Rahman II, who–reigning for nearly half a century from 912 to 961–filled his court with poets, musicians and scholars, as well as enlarging his great-grandfather’s mosque and building others in Jaén and Seville. He also imported vast quantities of luxury goods from the east, together with numbers of foreign artists and craftsmen; he is said to have introduced the art of embroidery into the country, and was the first Emir to strike his own coins. During his reign, Cordoba was probably the most cultivated city in Europe. In 940 came the final accolade: a diplomatic mission from Constantinople, bearing gifts of great price and proposing an alliance against their common enemy, the Abbasids.

But the Abbasids were far away. In transferring their capital and court from Damascus to Baghdad, they had radically changed the nature of the Caliphate. No longer was it essentially a Mediterranean empire; with its centre now in the heartland of Asia, it took little or no interest in the affairs of Europe or of the Middle Sea. For the next seven centuries–until the capture of Constantinople in 1453–it was to have relatively little impact in the west, where the Muslims of North Africa and Spain were left largely to their own devices. The former in particular steadily developed their navy until, by the first half of the ninth century, they were probably the leading sea power in the Mediterranean–even though the Byzantines maintained a stout opposition, and certainly did not let them have things all their own way. Indeed, after the accession of the Emperor Basil I in 867, the tables were conclusively turned: the forces of Islam were once again very much on the defensive.

In 929 Abdul-Rahman II adopted the title of caliph. Thenceforth Muslim Spain, with a perfectly good caliphate of its own, no longer paid even lip service to Abbasid Baghdad. Politically this caliphate was called upon to face more than its fair share of problems; artistically and culturally, on the other hand, it shone, and its surviving monuments continue to dazzle us today. The first Abdul-Rahman’s great mosque of Cordoba was enlarged and beautified by successive rulers in the ninth and tenth centuries; in 950 Abdul-Rahman III endowed it with a new minaret 240 feet high. In Seville there is the Alcazar, the lovely twelfth-century building which in 1353 was to become the palace of Pedro the Cruel, and the 300-foot-high Giralda, built between 1172 and 1195 both as a minaret and an observatory. And in Granada that astounding complex of palaces known as the Alhambra, with the summer palace and glorious gardens of the Generalife on the hill above it, still has the power to catch the breath. Here, surely–with the Cordoba mosque–is the ultimate tour de force of all Spanish Islam.⁵²

Perhaps it was to some extent the splendour of the architecture that gave rise to the countless recorded conversions. The Jews, of course, hardly ever renounced their ancient heritage, and rare indeed was the Muslim who sought Christian baptism; but throughout the Arab occupation–and particularly in the cities and towns between about the middle of the ninth and the beginning of the eleventh century–tens of thousands of Christians voluntarily embraced the faith of their conquerors. Still more of them, while retaining their religion, adopted Arabic as the language of their daily life. To this day modern Spanish has retained a remarkable number of Arabic words, and visitors to Spain cannot fail to be struck by the quantity of Arabic place names which still abound. Islamic culture, too, spread widely across the land. Al-Andalus maintained a vast commercial network with North Africa and the Near East, and even as far as India and Persia; to it came not only silks and spices (particularly pepper and ginger), rice and sugarcane, citrus fruits and figs, aubergines and bananas, but works on architecture, ceramics, calligraphy, music, mathematics, astronomy and medicine.

This extensive new knowledge did not by any means confine itself to the Muslim world. Many Christians, superficially Islamicised as they might be, sooner or later found their way to the Christian lands to the north and northeast–to Galicia and Asturias, Catalonia and Navarre–bringing their culture with them. These Mozarabs, as they were called, had a lasting impact on the Christian north on both sides of the Pyrenees–above all in the field of mathematics, of which early medieval Christendom was still lamentably ignorant. It was they who are believed to have introduced Arabic numerals into northern Europe, together with the abacus, a device which had an impact on commercial life comparable to that of the computer in our own day.

Politically, relations between the Christians of the north and the Muslims of the south were somewhat less clear-cut. The caliphate came to an end in 1031 and was succeeded by a number of small states known as taifas, normally consisting of a central town with the countryside immediately surrounding it, not altogether unlike the city-states growing up in northern Italy at much the same time. Like the Italians they too tended to squabble among themselves, allowing the larger and stronger Christian kingdoms of Aragon and Castile either to play them off one against another or to institute what were in effect glorified protection rackets, offering military support in return for substantial tribute. Here was fertile ground for the many soldiers of fortune, freelance mercenaries similar to the Italian condottieri, who cheerfully sold their swords to the highest bidder regardless of his faith. By far the most celebrated of these was the eleventh-century Castilian aristocrat actually named Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar but better known by his Spanish sobriquet of El Cid, literally ‘the boss’. Later legend has turned him into the supreme Spanish patriot, who devoted his life to driving the infidel from his native land and indeed continued to do so after his death, when his corpse was propped upright on his horse, Babieca, to lead his army into battle. The same authority⁵³ maintains that the corpse remained so perfectly preserved that it sat for ten years immediately to the right of the altar in the church of the monastery of San Pedro de Cardena near Burgos. The truth, alas, is somewhat less romantic. Rodrigo was in fact a military adventurer like many another, who after an outstandingly successful and profitable career, ended up as ruling prince of the state of Valencia on the shores of the Mediterranean.

Had El Cid been born fifty years later than he was–in 1190 rather than about 1140–such a career would have been impossible. Some time around the middle of the eleventh century in what is now southern Morocco, what had begun as a loose confederation of Berbers developed, in the space of a very few years, into a fundamentalist movement preaching the strictest Islamic doctrines. Calling themselves al-Murabitun–to us, the Almoravids–they founded the great city of Marrakesh, conquered northern Morocco and much of western Algeria and then turned their attention to Spain. In 1086 they crossed the straits, defeated King Alfonso VI of Leon-Castile at Sagrajas near Badajoz and quickly mopped up all the Muslim taifas, together with many towns reconquered by the Christians only a few years previously. Before the end of the century al-Andalus was once again reunited, but now for the first time linked with North Africa under a regime both deeply uncivilised and fanatically intolerant.

Fortunately for all concerned, the Almoravids’ rule was short. They suffered from one great weakness: as a small Berber minority at the head of a now considerable Spanish–African empire, they could inspire no real loyalty. They tried to hold Spain with their own troops and North Africa with a guard composed very largely of Christians, but after the fall of Saragossa to King Alfonso I of Aragon in 1118 the tide began to turn, and only seven years later a fiercer and still more bigoted fundamentalist sect, the Almohads, had arisen in the Atlas Mountains and broke out in open rebellion. The civil war that followed lasted for nearly a quarter of a century; it ended only with the fall of Marrakesh in 1147, after which Almoravid authority quickly crumbled.

The victorious Almohads crossed the straits, and by the end of the twelfth century their grip on the country from their capital at Seville was just as firm as that of their predecessors. Before long, however, they too found their power waning to the point where they were forced into retreat; this time the enemy was not an Islamic religious sect but an alliance of the three main Christian kingdoms of the Iberian peninsula: Castile, Aragon and Portugal. In 1212 King Alfonso VIII of Castile won a major victory at Las Navas de Tolosa, which effectively secured the preponderance of the Christian cause in Spain; his grandson Ferdinand III continued his work, in his thirty-five-year reign regaining much of Andalusia, including the port of Cartagena, and on occasion–as at Seville in 1248–actually expelling entire Muslim populations.⁵⁴ By mid-century Muslim Spain had been reduced to a single emirate: that of Granada. The Reconquista was well under way.

The intolerance of the Almohads had had one beneficial effect: many Jewish and Mozarabic communities, finding life under them intolerable, had fled into Christian Castile and Aragon where they had received a warm welcome. They included philosophers and physicians like Maimonides and Averroes, whose influence was to spread through the whole western world, together with any number of lesser intellectuals who set themselves up as professional translators from the Arabic, making available a considerable corpus of Arab scholarship hitherto unknown in the west. Many of these settled in Toledo–reconquered in 1085 amid scenes of great rejoicing–where they enjoyed the personal patronage and encouragement of the king.

The Emirate of Granada was to survive for well over two centuries, until 1492, but this seems an appropriate moment to try to assess the effects, first of Islam on Spain and, second, of Muslim Spain on the rest of western Europe. Culturally, there is no doubt that the country was immeasurably enriched. Close contact with Islam could not have failed to broaden the Spanish mind. It also brought European intellectuals to Spain; Gerbert of Aurillac–the future Pope Sylvester II–was not the only medieval scholar to be drawn across the Pyrenees by thirst for a knowledge that could be obtained nowhere else on the continent. Mathematics and medicine, geography and astronomy and the physical sciences were still deeply mistrusted in the Christian world; in that of Islam, they had been developed to a point unequalled since the days of ancient Greece. Any serious student in these disciplines would feel the attraction of al-Andalus; once there, since translations of the seminal scientific works were few and inaccurate, he might even set himself the formidable task of learning Arabic. One who succeeded in doing so was the great English scholar Adelard of Bath, who was in Spain at the beginning of the twelfth century disguised as a Muslim student, and who in 1120 or thereabouts produced the first Latin version of Euclid, which he had translated from an Arabic version of the original Greek.

In other ways, however, the coexistence of three radically different faiths in the same land was a source of continued suffering. Much unnecessary bloodshed had been involved in the original Arab conquest, and more still in the long, painful struggle of the Reconquista. Moreover, though they all got on well enough on a daily basis, in neither the Christian nor the Muslim states were the subject peoples invariably treated with due consideration. The Prophet’s injunction that Christians and Jews, as ‘peoples of the Book’, were to be treated by all good Muslims as their brothers was by no means always observed in practice. In 1066 there was a massacre of Jews in Granada, in 1126 a mass deportation of Christians to slavery in Morocco. The Christian communities were never (so far as we know) guilty of atrocities on quite the level of these, but there can be no doubt that both the Jews and the mudejars–the name given to Muslims living under Christian rule–were looked down upon as second-class citizens and were regularly the objects, if not of persecution, then at least of discrimination.

When we consider how much Muslim Spain had to offer, it is surprising that it did not have a greater impact on the Christian west. There would seem to be several reasons. The first is confessional: medieval Christendom loathed all manifestations of what it considered to be paganism. It accepted the Jews–up to a point–largely because they had always been there and they came in useful, and also because, lacking a nation of their own, they normally spoke the language of those around them. The Muslims of al-Andalus were different. They were little known and even less understood; their language, both written and spoken, was incomprehensible; and they inhabited the remotest corner of Europe–remoter far, in those days, than the lands of the eastern Mediterranean, where Byzantium acted as a huge cultural and commercial magnet, attracting not only scholars from one continent, but merchants, statesmen and diplomatists from three. After those early days when men feared that Islam was on course to conquer the world, and once the Muslims had withdrawn behind their relatively modest frontier, it seemed wiser and more prudent to leave them to their own peaceable and unthreatening devices. They were after all steeped in error and so, to the contemporary Christian mind, of no real interest anyway.