Reading List Flashcards
Fletcher, The Cross and the Crescent, Ch1
Christians hostile towards Arabs - the Other. Didn’t view Islam as a separate religion, as there existed no concept of plurality of religion. Just seen as heretics. Arabs aloof towards Christians. Needed their service for their new states, as lacked the expertise. Institutional continuity between Roman Empire and territories after Arab conquests. Christians collaborated, though often condemned their new masters.
Fletcher, The Cross and the Crescent, Ch2
During the Abbasid period Christendom and the Dar al Islam became less intelligible to one another even as they continued to interact. Movement of Arab capital from Damascus to purpose-built Baghdad signalled new orientations and horizons.
Abbasids were more culturally inclusive than predecessors. More Christians were welcomed into the Islamic fold, resulting in an increased number of conversions.
During early Abbasid period momentum of conversion to Islam among subject peoples gained pace.
Converts to Islam had been called mawali (‘clients’), and been treated as second-class citizens. The coming of the Abbasids gave the mawali what they wanted: equality of treatment in a society now defined by religion and culture rather than by ethnicity; an Islamic society rather than an Arab society.
Significance of spread of Arabic language and Arab free-trade zone.
Christian cooperation. Acted as civil servants. Introduced Islamic elite to intellectual culture of Hellenistic and Persian antiquity.
Christian Churches under Islamic rule have often been referred to as ‘captive’ Churches. No label could be more misleading. Released from the bondage of Constantinopolitan persecution they flourished as never before, generating a rich spiritual literature in hymns, prayers, sermons and devotional works.
Throughout the Mediterranean world, Christendom was on the defensive. Threat = military and spiritual.
Variety of pressures to convert to Islam - neighbourhood, marriage, need for patronage or employment, the peer pressure of youth.
Christian anxiety - Christianity weakened by desertion, diluted by hypocrisy.
Agriculture-based Christian states in old Roman West. Frankish state under Charlemagne (768-814) was both extensive and powerful; but in comparison to the Abbasid Empire governed by his contemporary Harun ar-Rashid it was as a minnow to a whale. Worked in a fundamentally different way. Royal power rested upon loyalty and cooperation of an unruly military aristocracy. Literacy did not extend much beyond the clergy; reading and writing were not skills highly regarded as they were in the Islamic world. Scientific and philosophical learning of classical antiquity had been almost entirely forgotten, as had the Greek language in which it had been transmitted.
Thus, it is no wonder Muslims of Abbasid age evinced so little interest in western or Latin Christendom.
Much exchange between Arabs and Christendom however: Cultural diffusion - Caliph al-Walid (705-15) asked emperor in Constantinople to send him 12 000 craftsmen to work on the mosque of Damascus (number may be exaggerated).
Sandal to Islam. Abacus and paper to Christendom.
Cultural diffusion within Islamic world, from Middle Eastern heartlands to North African and Iberian west, e.g. Fez quickly gained a reputation for learning, as did Cordoba.
Pirenne thesis:
Roman order had rested upon an infrastructure of cities and commerce in the Mediterranean which was little if at all disrupted by the Germanic invasions of the 5th Century. Dislocation and change came later, in the seventh, and their agent was Islam. By taking over the Mediterranean and excluding others from participation in its economic life the Muslims drove western Christendom back upon itself. Denied access to the urbanised economy of the south, a Western European culture typified by the kingdom of the Franks took shape which was ‘underdeveloped’, rural and feudal. In his most famous aphorism Pirenne put it thus: ‘It is therefore strictly correct to say that without Mohammed Charlemagne would have been inconceivable.’
Much of the detail of this argument is unconvincing
Archaeological evidence, for example from the city of Marseilles, now suggests that severe economic dislocation was starting to occur in the Mediterranean world well before the coming of Islam.
Piraña’s use of material derived from hagiographical texts now appears crudely mechanistic in the light of the subtleties of purpose and structure revealed by recent study of these works.
Piraña’s own assumptions and preoccupations may have misled him. A member of the haute bourgeoisie which had prospered from Belgium’s industrial revolution, Pirenne had no interest whatsoever in agriculture and rural society, a temperamental handicap which led to misapprehensions about the economic life of the overwhelmingly agrarian societies of the ancient and early medieval worlds. Economic and social history of early Middle Ages appears more complicated and nuanced and diverse than the grand simplicities proposed by Pirenne.
As far as northern Europe is concerned, Pirenne’s thesis has to be turned upside down. Pull of Islamic demands for goods, exchanged for Islamic dinars and dirhams. Thousands and thousands of such coins have been found deposited in Russian and Scandinavian coin hoards - numismatic evd.
Some of this wealth of silver bullion, flowing most abundantly northwards in the ninth and tenth centuries, would be invested in other enterprises, notably trading with the peoples of Western Europe. It is no coincidence that the most marked urban growth to occur in the West since the Roman period took place at the centres to which Scandanavian traders resorted and in which they settled: Rouen, Lincoln, York, Dublin. Thus, indirectly, the economic pull of Middle Eastern Islam fostered the growth of a Western European bourgeoisie.
Pre-Islamic economic dislocation goes against Pirenne’s theory of displacement. Possibly owed its origin to demographic decline caused by the plague.
By 10th and 11th Centuries, there were lively commercial interchanges between Christian and Muslim businessmen. Amalfi and Venice were significant channels for inflow of goods from the Islamic world.
Neither Christians nor Muslims were remotely interested in the religion of the other.
Christians maintained sullen hostility to the heretical Ishmaelites. Muslims found in Christendom a convenient source of scientific expertise or human commodity but were otherwise distainful.
Mutual religious aversion. In these circumstances, if religious passions were to be stirred up, confrontation likely to be violent.
Fletcher, Cross and Crescent, Ch 3 (Crossing Frontiers):
Tolerance of Muslims in Byzantine capital contrasted with intolerance at camp - burning of copies of the Koran.
Fluid cultural loyalties on the borderlands. People changed faith for love. Primary enemy was not the infidel but the marauder and the brigand.
Overview of volatile situation in al-Andalus. Unitary Hispano-Muslim state governed from Cordoba had had its place taken by petty principalities, known as the taifa kingdoms. Endemic rivalry rendered them vulnerable - Christian rulers exploited these rivalries.
El Cid - 11th C Castilian nobleman. Mercenary - fought for both sides. Made out later to be great Christian hero.
Almoravid invasion and reunification of Islamic Spain.
Arrival of Seljuk Turks. Shi’ite founding of rival Fatimid caliphate in Egypt in 969.
Abbasid political strife, weakened rule over Western lands e.g. Syria.
Byzantine reconquests - Antioch etc.
Significance of 1071 Turk victory at Manzikert - this facilitated Turkish penetration of Asia Minor, thus sparking off the Crusades and ultimately leading the the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453.
Byzantine Emperor expected from Western Christendom orderly units that could be deployed to assist the Byzantines in recapturing land. Actually ended up with zealous rabble.
Notions about pilgrimage, holy warfare, the threat to Christendom and the numinous sanctity of Jerusalem were not new: what the Pope did was to tie them all together in such a fashion as to make them irresistible to the unsophisticated piety of Western European knighthood.
Reaction to Pope Urban II’s words was conditioned in important ways by the fact the most enthusiastic response came from the warrior aristocracy of northern Francia.
Crusaders viewed Muslims as untrustworthy, treacherous, cruel pagans. To fight them is to do meritorious penitential work and to die in battle with them is to win the crown of martyrdom.
1099 capture of Jerusalem was a fluke success which came about because the crusaders happened to invade Syria at a time of extreme disarray in that corner of the Islamic world.
Formation of Latin kingdoms, crippled from the start by a shortage of manpower and of the economic resources requisite for effective government.
Outline of crusades.
Loss of Latin Kingdoms. Failure of new strategy to approach Jerusalem from the south landing in Egypt. Sacking of Constantinople 1204.
Spanish Reconquista. Decisive victory at Las Navas de Tolosa by Alfonso VIII of Castile in 1212 exposed southern Spain to Christian conquest.
Large European historiography of the Crusades. Fascination with them at the time and ever since. Seen by Medieval Christendom as a subject for serious and sustained attention in their own right, a topic which had moral weight and dignity.
Interesting contrast with medieval Islam. For Islam, Crusades were just border skirmishes - pinpricks upon the fringes of the Islamic world. Only Saladin captured historians’ attention, then and since. This was because he was the prop of Sunni Islam, the restorer of the holy city of Jerusalem to Muslim hands, a leader of great personal qualities and a master of self-presentation. It was not primarily because of his military engagement with the crusading armies.
Liberal critics today frequently denounce the Crusades. However, rebuking the past from the different moral standpoint of the present doesn’t advance historical understanding. During the crusading era no orthodox Christian writer ever criticised the Crusades as such.
Crusading doctrine was accepted uncritically by millions of people of both sexes, from every walk in life and every rank of society, over several centuries.
Between 1050 and 1300, Christian dominion came and went in Syria and Palestine, returned to Sicily, and reabsorbed nearly all the Iberian Peninsula.
The period had been one of permanent hostility.
Religious zeal causing intolerance, between Christians and Muslims but also within Christianity.
However, hostility is in itself a relationship.
Necessity of diplomacy with religious enemies, especially for Latin Kingdoms.
Side-swapping for personal gain, e.g. Portuguese prince Dom Pedro.
Respect of each side for the other’s military prowess.
Crusades’ vital role in opening up Christendom’s awareness of a larger world.
Westerners regarded eastern Christians with hauteur, as remote and unappealing kinsfolk whose peculiar customs and traditions it was best to keep at arm’s length.
Greater respect for more distant and exotic Christian communities - legend of Prester John. In 1177 Pope Alexander III despatched an embassy.
Mongol conquests. Christian hopes of conversion. Some converted to Nestorian Christianity, but no chance of general conversion. Indeed, Mongols soon turned away from the West.
However, significance of the contacts initiated in the 1240s for increasing European awareness of exotic foreign realities.
Travels of Marco Polo.
Awareness of the bigness and strangeness of the world as evidenced in the writings of Rubric, Joinville and Marco Polo was an important development in the growth of the European mind.
Mental horizons of 11th C warriors were narrow and ignorant. By early 14th C considerable numbers of westerners were aware that the world also contained mountains and seas, animals and peoples, customs and beliefs, that were almost unimaginably different from what was familiar at home.
This period left us evidence of the first faint dawnings of the notion that there was a plurality of religions in the world. This was a critically important moment in the maturing of the mind of European Christendom.
