The Undivided Past Read online

  To be sure, when he came to write The Decline and Fall, violent clashes between Christianity and Islam had been taking place for more than a thousand years, as the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 CE was immediately followed by the initial Arab conquests of Antioch, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Tripoli, and Carthage between 637 and 698, and by two sieges of Constantinople itself in 674–78 and 716–18. Nor was it just the Byzantine Empire that was thus threatened; at the other end of the Mediterranean, the entire Iberian Peninsula was in Arab hands by the early eighth century. Charles Martel’s subsequent victory at the Battle of Poitiers in 732 and Constantinople’s stubborn and successful resistance blunted these Arab attacks for a time, but in the ninth century, Sicily was conquered, Rome itself was raided, and for the next hundred years or so, Christianity was on the defensive throughout the Mediterranean.53 From the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, there was a Christian counterattack: five brutal and bloody Crusades for a time won back the holy places in the eastern Mediterranean, Sicily was reconquered by the Normans, and the Arabs were pushed back on the Iberian Peninsula. But the holy places were soon lost again, and from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries a revived and reinvigorated Islam, espoused by the Ottoman Turks, not only captured Constantinople (the point in time at which Gibbon had ended The Decline and Fall), but subsequently took Belgrade, conquered Crete, and twice besieged Vienna, in 1529 and again in 1683.54 Nor was that the end: the Ottomans’ last major westerly conquest was of Oran in North Africa in 1709, less than thirty years before Gibbon was born; anxieties about the “Islamic threat” to “Christian” Europe thus remained real and vivid, albeit diminishingly so, throughout his lifetime; and the Ottoman Empire would survive long after his death until its defeat and dismemberment at the end of the First World War.

  This confrontation between the collectivities of “Christianity” and “Islam” was more protracted and more warlike than that between pagans and Christians had been, and it also took place across a much greater geographical area. From the seventh to the seventeenth centuries and beyond, and from one end of the Mediterranean to the other, Christians and Muslims (mainly Arabs) were aggressively yet also anxiously made aware of the “other” as the infidel—a wicked, rapacious, and virtually subhuman being, by turns a terrible threat and an inferior creature, to be both feared and loathed.55 Hence the summons of Pope Urban II for Crusader knights to take part in a “holy war” in 1095; hence the many atrocities and acts of aggression that followed, as the Crusaders established their small Latin kingdoms collectively known as Outremer; and hence the Islamic response to such “infidel” encroachment: the proclamation of a “jihad,” justified by the Koranic injunction to “kill the idolators wherever you find them.”56 As contemporary and competing monotheisms, Christianity and Islam were alike intolerant, their respective followers equally convinced that anyone espousing an alternative belief system was evil in this world and damned in the next. There were countless polemics produced on both sides, full of vitriol, hatred, and negative stereotyping, and on the Christian side, which had no injunction against representational art, there were many lurid visual images—paintings, engravings, or caricatures—depicting the hideousness of the irredeemable horde on the other side of the unbridgeable chasm.57 Even after the Ottoman Empire was dismantled, the reciprocal sense (and the fear) of a great, threatening, and unresolved Christian-Muslim divide remained throughout the twentieth century—and still remains in our own time.

  One twentieth-century version of this confrontation, and of an unbridgeable gulf, was vividly outlined by the great Belgian historian Henri Pirenne in Muhammad and Charlemagne, in which he described (and lamented) the shattering of the “Mediterranean unity” of the Roman Empire as a result of the seventh-century Arab conquests. The sea “which had hitherto been the centre of Christianity became its frontier,” as two “different and hostile” faiths now faced and fought each other “on the shores of Mare Nostrum.”58 It cannot be coincidence that Pirenne wrote his essentially Manichean account when the western European powers were again fighting the Turks during the First World War, and in the aftermath of 9/11 this interpretation of the long-term relations between Christianity and Islam as eternally prolonged has been reinvigorated by pundits and historians. Here are two examples that must stand proxy for many more. According to Andrew Wheatcroft, in a book entitled Infidels: The Conflict Between Christendom and Islam, 638–2002, there was a “single thread” of sustained and cumulative “antagonism between the western Christian and the Mediterranean Islamic worlds,” characterized by “atavistic” hatred, fear, loathing, disgust, enmity, antipathy, abomination, and abuse on both sides, which makes it “permanent, natural, inevitable and pre-ordained.”59 In the same way, Anthony Pagden’s Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle Between East and West has recently given extended attention to what he describes as the “perpetual enmity” and the “perpetual hostility” between Christianity and Islam, focusing on such antagonistic and confrontational episodes as the early Arab conquests, the Christian Crusades, and the subsequent expansion of the Ottoman Empire.60

  Both Wheatcroft and Pagden repeatedly insist that “the Christian and Muslim worlds have been religious, geographical, political and economic rivals and competitors since their point of first contact,” and their accounts of successive battles, sieges, massacres, pillaging, and violation add up to a vivid and horrifying story of religious war and confessional vengeance between collective identities in what seems to be preordained and unavoidable conflict.61 But as the two authors coyly concede, in qualifying passages buried deep in their texts, animus was far from being the whole of the picture, for the chasm they depict was often “illusory” or merely “metaphorical.” In practice there was “endless” “ambivalence” and “ambiguity” in the relationships between these ostensibly monolithic and antithetical faiths, so that “statements of enmity may not represent the reality of everyday life.” Indeed, conflict between the two supposedly ever-warring sides “has been neither continuous nor uninterrupted,” as in certain places “Christianity and Islam existed side by side over a long period” when, pace Pirenne, there was a “skein of mutual economic and political interests that dominated the Mediterranean and the Balkans.”62 Such significant qualifications to these faux-Gibbonian depictions of clashing creeds and battling beliefs deserve examination in more detail.

  To begin with, there is as much evidence characterizing both Christianity and Islam as religions of peace and mutual accommodation as there is supporting the view of them both as creeds of confrontation and conquest. It may be, as one historian has argued, that “western Christianity before 1500 must rank as one of the most intolerant religions in world history,” but against this must be set Christ’s exhortations to take in strangers, to love one’s enemies, to turn the other cheek, and to “do unto others as you would wish to be done to you,” and also the views of such Christian critics of the Crusades as Isaac de Étoile, who was against “forcing infidels to accept the faith at the point of the sword.”63 In the same way, the teachings of the Koran had been more pacifically interpreted, based on its injunction that “there is no compulsion in religion.” Indeed, Muhammad had explicitly set himself and his followers against religious wars and forced conversions, and he did not see himself as the founder of a new religion, but as bringing the fullness of divine revelation, granted partially to such earlier prophets as Abraham, Moses, and Jesus, to the Arabs. As a result, Muslim teaching regarded Christians and Jews as slightly errant relatives, who were worshipping the same God, in receipt of similar revelations, and even reading some of the same scriptures. They were categorized and respected as “people of the book,” with whom Muslims were urged to live in some form of tolerant amity. As for the doctrine of “jihad,” this too could be interpreted in varying ways, not just (and not even primarily) as an exhortation to wage collective holy war against the Christian infidel, but rather (and more importantly) as an injunction to strive for individual self-improv
ement in finding and following the demanding path of God.64

  Since neither the Bible nor the Koran existed as a single coherent text with a single uncontested religious message, it follows that neither “Christianity” nor “Islam” embodied a uniform, monolithic, collective religious identity.65 As Gibbon wryly and repeatedly notes, Christians had been prone to schism and division from almost the very beginning, and this remained the case after the fall of Rome. Let three of the most conspicuous examples suffice. In 1054, papal legates entered the basilica of Hagia Sophia and on behalf of the pope excommunicated the patriarch of Constantinople—an interdict that would remain in force until 1965. In 1204, the Latin knights of the fourth Crusade, ostensibly on their way to the Holy Land to reinforce their Christian brethren there, got no farther than the Byzantine capital, which they sacked and pillaged and plundered. And in 1453, the Ottoman Turks were poised to take Constantinople, but the Christian West sent no help to the embattled capital of the Christian East.66 In the same way, and this time pace Gibbon, the greater Muslim world was also rent and divided, between Sunni and Shiite factions, between the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates, between those who looked to Baghdad and those who looked to Cairo, between Arab and Berber, Turk and Persian. So while by the fourteenth century Islam had spread from modern-day Morocco as far as Indonesia, it assumed so many varied, particular, and localized forms that there was no real sense of collective consciousness or unitary religious identity among the millions who espoused it across three continents. As with Christianity, Islam’s initial cohesion soon evaporated, it subsequently splintered into hundreds of rival sects, and it has not been reunified since.67

  So lacking, indeed, was such cohesion that on many occasions when the forces of “Christianity” and “Islam” confronted each other in what was alleged to be another head-on conflict, the reality was often of Christian and Muslim leaders (and followers) allied on one side, against Christian and Muslim leaders (and followers) taking up arms together on the other.68 In eleventh-century Spain, the legendary warrior known as El Cid not only fought alongside the Christian king Alfonso VI of Castile against the Arabs, but also, when circumstances warranted, joined with the Muslim king of Zaragoza against the Spanish; and early in the twelfth century, in Outremer, the Frankish count of Edessa allied with the emir of Mosul to fight the Latin prince of Antioch and the Muslim king of Aleppo.69 Three centuries later, the Turkish sultan Suleyman the Magnificent was willing to join in a military alliance with the Catholic French against the equally Catholic Habsburg emperor, and sometime after, Queen Elizabeth of England was equally prepared to contemplate a similar arrangement with the ruler of Morocco and his Ottoman overlords against Catholic Spain. As the traveler and historian Barnaby Rogerson notes, having surveyed relations between Christendom and Islam during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the notion that the two leading empires, the (Christian) Habsburg and the (Muslim) Ottoman, were “locked in an obsessive war of attrition” that was “real, destructive and bloody” was far from being the whole truth, since this conflict “often took second place to obsessive rivalry with neighbours of their own religious faith”: the Shiite empire of Persia in the case of the (Sunni) Ottomans, and the French monarchy in the case of the Habsburgs.70

  There is also ample evidence of peaceful coexistence between Christians and Muslims extending far beyond the official business of diplomatic alliances and international statecraft. In the immediate aftermath of the first phase of Arab conquests following the death of Muhammad, cooperation with the “people of the book” was both essential and widespread, for otherwise such vast and recently acquired dominions could never have been effectively taxed, governed, and administered. Many centuries later, the Ottoman emperors were also famously accommodating to people of different religions: once Constantinople had been taken, the Orthodox Christian patriarch was restored; professionals, military leaders, and civil servants were recruited from among Christians and Jews; and later Ottoman emperors were often themselves the result of mixed marriages between Muslims and Christian princesses.71 These interconnections in bureaucracy and government reflected the wider contacts that Muslims and Christians (and Jews) forged in business, commerce, and trade across and around the Mediterranean. Pace Pirenne, such activities never died out after the fall of the Western Empire, and the half millennium from 1000 CE witnessed an unprecedented mercantile flowering, as luxury products from the East such as silk and spices were exchanged for raw materials from the West such as skins and wood. Such interactions were also more localized, in places often mistakenly seen as being solely areas of conflict: in the twelfth-century Levant, the inhabitants of the Crusader states and the neighboring Muslim emirates energetically traded and not infrequently intermarried. Thus were people on both sides of the confessional divide “more than willing to consort with their opposite numbers, their religious allegiance less important than the business of life.”72

  The result, according to the French historian Fernand Braudel (with whom we shall be engaging at greater length in the next chapter), was a common experience shared by those many people who lived, traded, did business, and prospered across and around the Mediterranean, their myriad day-to-day contacts and encounters proclaiming a broader human community, rather than the fundamental religious division, of that increasingly interconnected maritime world.73 Moreover, this burgeoning commerce in material goods was paralleled by a growing exchange of culture and ideas, which was equally indifferent to religious barriers, and which further contradicted and undermined the negative stereotypes of each other that Christians and Muslims created, namely of infidel enemies as being scarcely human and thus incapable of any sophisticated interest in the higher concerns of life. During the eighth and ninth centuries, most of the greatest authors of ancient Greece, including Aristotle, Plato, Euclid, Galen, and Hippocrates, were translated into Arabic. But it was not until the eleventh century that these Arab texts were in turn translated into Latin, in which form medieval European scholars first encountered many of the greatest works on medicine, astronomy, chemistry, mathematics, and philosophy that had been produced by their classical forebears. Here was cultural borrowing and intermingling across the boundaries of religion on a spectacular scale, for it transformed Europe’s intellectual landscape and made possible its twelfth-century Renaissance.74

  Even at times of heightened confrontation between Christians and Muslims, these transreligious encounters and cultural interactions continued as a feature of life in many parts of Europe, North Africa, and the Near East. They were often associated with particular places or regimes, characterized by what William Dalrymple has called “a kind of pluralist equilibrium,” which espoused a “culture of tolerance” whereby people of different faiths coexisted and commingled, and to which the epithet “convivencia” has been attached.75 During the ninth century, the Abbasid rulers of Baghdad tolerated Christians and Jews, and presided over a golden age of learning, which drew on the mathematics, philosophy, medicine, theology, and literature of ancient Greece, Persia, and India. At the other end of the Mediterranean, the Umayyad caliphate of Córdoba witnessed an equally remarkable cultural flowering, which found its most significant expression in the city’s libraries, then the greatest in Europe, housing many of the recent Arab translations of ancient Greek texts.76 In twelfth-century Sicily, under the Norman rulers who had recently conquered the island, Muslim scholars were retained at court, and in the city of Palermo Arabs lived in relative amity and harmony with Christians and Jews. It was an arrangement mirrored and even exceeded, from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, in cosmopolitan cities and multifaith communities of the Ottoman Empire, such as Alexandria, Aleppo, Jaffa, Beirut, Smyrna, and Salonika.77

  In the same way, many medieval and early modern Italian cities maintained and expanded a profitable commerce with Muslim traders and merchants, which resulted in (for instance) a profound Islamic influence on Venetian architecture, painting, town planning, jewelry, and speech; this helps explai
n how and why across the whole of Italy there was a serious regard for and knowledge of many aspects of Arabic learning.78 After the Ottoman Turks captured Constantinople in 1453, these contacts widened and deepened far beyond Italy. In 1536, King Francis I of France negotiated a mercantile and military treaty with the sultan Suleyman the Magnificent, giving the French direct access to trade with Ottoman ports, and half a century later Queen Elizabeth of England would sign similar agreements with Suleyman’s successor. And the enthusiasm went both ways: from the late fifteenth century onward, Ottoman sultans were eager to establish links with the great courts of western Europe, concerning such matters as artistic patronage and trade agreements (in addition to political alliances). In 1479 the sultan Mehmed II was painted by the Venetian artist Gentile Bellini, and Suleyman would later welcome to his court printmakers, artists, and jewelers from across Europe. The result was that Ottoman sultans were increasingly portrayed in the “Western” style, and at the same time, highborn Muslim travelers visited Europe in increasing numbers, where they were fascinated by Western science, literature, music, politics, and opera.79

  Across the centuries, and across the Mediterranean, what have been termed the “practices of Christian-Muslim complicity” took place at many levels and in many modes, encompassing rulers and aristocrats, clerics and men of affairs, scholars and translators, merchants and traders, many of whom journeyed far and wide making connections and doing business.80 One such sixteenth-century wanderer was Leo Africanus, who moved easily across the regions and the religions of the Christian-Islamic Mediterranean. Born in Granada of Muslim parents during the late 1480s or early 1490s, he fled to Morocco when the last Islamic outpost in Spain fell to the Christians; he subsequently journeyed across North Africa to the Middle East; he was later captured by pirates before escaping and settling in Rome, where he converted to Christianity and translated the Koran into Latin; and he may thereafter have returned to Africa and to Islam.81 There is much concerning Leo’s life that is unknown (including even his full name), but he moved across the supposedly impermeable boundaries of religious identity with remarkable ease and frequency: from Spain to Morocco, from Europe to Africa, and from Christianity to Islam—and back again. And he was not alone: as it was before and would continue being, the early-sixteenth-century Mediterranean was continually being navigated by merchants, embassies, pirate ships, travelers, scholars, and refugees, to whom it was more a highway than a barrier. In certain quarters and at specific times, there may have been intensified consciousness of religious and cultural differences, but it was balanced by increasing migration, trade, travel, and contact.82