Ornament of the World

A few random notes from my recent reading of David Levering Lewis's God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215:

• The famous 732 Battle of Poitiers, in which a Christian coalition halted an Islamic force in what is now France, may have been retrospectively elevated and mythologised as a turning point by Western historians but it was a minor, temporary setback in a skirmish at the periphery of the empire as far as the Islamic rulers in Damacus were concerned.


• Before Baghdad of the One Thousand and One Nights fame, Damascus was the Caliphal seat of the Islamic empire. Caliph Abu Ja'far al-Mansur (754 - 74) ordered the construction of Baghdad beside the Tigris "with the point of his sword". It was finished in four years. Madinat al-Salam or "The City of Peace" was rivalled only by Constantinople in grandeur.


• In the battle of Poitiers, the Christian coalition was led by Charles the Bastard, whose political and battlefield exploits would earn him the sobriquet Hammer (Martel in Latin). Martel's grandson, Charlemagne, would be crowned the first Holy Roman Emperor.


• In his role as Palace Mayor (Prime Minister), Charles Martel virtually brought down the curtain on the Merovingian line, which is now regarded as the first French royal dynasty. Charles's line was officially formalised and divinely sanctioned when his son and heir Pippin the Short successfully sought papal blessing for a palace coup, signalling the ascendancy of the Carolingian dynasty.


• Charlemagne once executed forty-five hundred defeated Saxons in a single morning after they refused to recant their pagan beliefs in favour of Christianity.


• A fierce Germanic tribe with long beards challenged the temporal power of papacy. Eventually pacified by Franks under Charlemagne, the tribe settled in a part of the continent that came to be known as Lombardy, the home of the long beards.


• The celebrated deeds of the eponymous hero of the Song of Rolland was inspired by a disastrous chapter from one of Charlemagne's military expeditions into al-Andalus. However, it was not Muslim treachery or cowardice but the opportunistic attack of independent-minded Basque partisans that trapped and martyred the archetypal Christian knight in a narrow mountain pass.


• Cordoba attained its exalted status as the "ornament of the world" under the Umayyad rule transplanted by Abd al-Rahman I from Damascus to the Iberian peninsula. Prince Abd al-Rahman I fled Damascus after losing his Caliphal inheritance in a bloody power struggle against an Abbasid usurper. His enlightened policy encouraged the famous convivencia, the civic collaboration of Muslims, Jews and Christians that resulted in an unprecedented efflorescence of arts, culture, science and commerce. Al-Andalus would turn out to be the conduit of the flow of ancient Greek knowledge preserved and enhanced by Islamic scholars to then backward Christian dominions.


• Abd al-Rahman's architectural masterpiece, La Mezquita or the Friday Mosque, had the following self-referential inscription: It embodied what came before. Illuminated what came after. The inscription could have been the motto of the Umayyad Cordoba itself.