Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy (18 page)

Fig. 16. Church of Saint John, built by Visigoth king Recceswinth in the seventh century and fashioned entirely of cut stone.

Evidence of the same type has been found in all the cities of Iberia between the fifth and seventh centuries. Quite literally hundreds of Visigothic-period structures are known, and we must bear in mind that these can only represent a small fraction of what once existed. One of the most outstanding examples of architecture from the period, and one often quoted in the literature, is the seventh century church of St John in Baños de Cerrato, Valencia, perhaps the oldest church in Spain. In Visigoth times, this was an important grain-producing region and legend has it that King Recceswinth commissioned the building of a church there when, on returning from a successful campaign against the Basques, he drank from the waters and recovered his health. The original inscription of the king, cut in the stones above the entrance, can still be discerned. Several bronze belt buckles and liturgical objects – as well as a necropolis with 58 tombs – have been discovered in the vicinity.

The impressive Gothic Cathedral at Valencia itself also has a crypt from the Visigoth era.

Again, the elegant Ermita de Santa María de Lara, at Quintanilla de Las Viñas, near Burgos, is a masterpiece of the Visigothic architectural style. Among its outstanding features is an unusual triple frieze of bas reliefs on its outer walls. Other surviving examples of Visigothic architecture are to be found in the La Rioja and Orense regions. The so-called horseshoe arch, which was to become so predominant in Moorish architecture, occurs first in these Visigothic structures, and was evidently an innovation of their architects. Toledo, the capital of Spain during this period, still displays in its architecture the influence of the Visigoths. It should be noted too that, whilst the quality and quantity of new buildings in Spain declined during the last few centuries of Roman rule – as it did everywhere else – it showed a marked improvement under the later Visigoths. Everywhere we look there are signs of renewed prosperity and urban expansion. New cities were founded.
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Reccopolis, for example, established by Leovigild in 578, was to become a major administrative and commercial center, and excavations at the site have dramatically illustrated the sheer wealth and sophistication of Visigoth society at the time. Indeed, all the indications are of an expanding population, something we would expect to have occurred earlier in Spain than in the other western provinces, owing to the region’s extremely large Jewish population and to the very early conversion of the peninsula to Christianity. In Reccopolis and elsewhere we encounter again the use of carefully fashioned stone for entire buildings – a practice that had been abandoned in Spain by the fourth century. From then on cut stone was everywhere replaced by unhewn blocks in churches and palaces, with only the corner-stones – often plundered from earlier monuments – of cut-stone. Yet by the early seventh century Visigoth architects were again using carefully fashioned stone for entire buildings; and we should note, in passing, that these structures are far superior, technically and artistically, to their successors of the tenth century Romanesque.
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During the latter epoch the cut-stone of the Visigoths is replaced by rough, uncut stone, and the churches, generally smaller, are not nearly so richly decorated, with only very small arches and vaulting. There is all round a general impoverishment when compared to the work of the Visigoths, whose standards are only again reached around 1100.

So, we might be justified in concluding that archaeology has only reinforced the impression laid down centuries ago by the chroniclers and biographers of a prosperous and cultured society under the Visigoths. We know that a silk-making industry had taken root in the Peninsula during the sixth century – very shortly after the secret of silk-production was sequestered out of China during the reign of Justinian,
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and we know that well into the seventh century there existed a lively economic intercourse between the Visigothic kingdom and the eastern Mediterranean. Evidence of every kind therefore leads to the conclusion that Spain under the Visigoths, like North Africa under the Vandals, experienced not a decline but a great revival of culture and prosperity. But if such be the case, how is it that Spain fell so easily to the Islamic invaders? The very rapidity and ease with which the Muslims overran the Peninsula has, after all, been – until recently – one of the most important factors in convincing scholars of the decay and decadence of the Visigothic state.

The topic of Islam’s conquests, and their speed, is one that shall be dealt with fully in due course. For the present, it is sufficient to note that the lands conquered by the Muslims during the seventh and early eighth centuries were invariably the most civilized parts of the Roman and Mediterranean worlds. It was only when they reached the more barbarous and least Romanized regions, such as the north of Spain and central Gaul, that the Muslims began to face effective resistance. In short, the evidence would indicate that Visigothic Spain fell (just like Syria, eastern Anatolia, and Egypt), not because it was too barbarous, but because it was too civilized. In the words of Roger Collins, “The relative speed with which most of southern and central Spain fell to the Arab armies (mostly consisting of Berbers recruited in recently conquered North Africa) is testimony more to the sophistication of the Visigothic monarchy than to the decline and decay that historians once thought was its hallmarks.”
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Again, “Once prevalent interpretations of the late Visigothic kingdom as being decadent and demoralized are now discounted.”
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Before leaving the topic of Visigothic Spain, it is important to emphasize a crucial feature: The abundance of archaeology from Visigothic times contrasts sharply with the virtually complete absence of all archaeology from the first two centuries of the Islamic epoch. This is a fact that has only recently come to the attention of the scholarly community, and assuredly constitutes one of the greatest puzzles unearthed by excavation. We have traditionally been told that the first two centuries of the Spanish Emirate, supposedly founded in 756 by Abd’ er Rahman I, constituted a veritable Golden Age of Spanish history. The following description of eighth-tenth century Cordoba, written by English historian H. St. L. B. Moss in 1935, may be regarded as fairly typical of the genre: “In Spain … the foundation of Umayyad power [in 756] ushers in an era of unequalled splendour, which reaches its height in the early part of the tenth century. The great university of Cordova is thronged with students … while the city itself excites the wonder of visitors from Germany and France. The banks of the Guadalquivir are covered with luxurious villas, and born of the ruler’s caprice rises the famous Palace of the Flower, a fantastic city of delights.”
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The picture Moss paints was derived from medieval Arab annalists, who spoke of a city of half a million inhabitants, of three thousand mosques, of one hundred and thirteen thousand houses, and of three hundred public baths – this not even counting the twenty-eight suburbs said to have surrounded the metropolis.
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Over the past sixty years intensive efforts have been made to discover this astonishing civilization – to no avail. Try as they might, archaeologists have found hardly anything, hardly a brick or inscription, for the two centuries prior to the mid-tenth, at which point substantial remains are indeed attested. According to the prestigious
Oxford Archaeological Guide
, Cordoba has revealed, after exhaustive excavations: (a) The south-western portion of the city wall, which is presumed to date from the ninth century; (b) A small bath-complex, of the 9th/10th century; and (c) A part of the Umayyad (8th/9th century) mosque.
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This is all that can be discovered from two centuries of the history of a city of supposedly half a million people. By way of contrast, consider the fact that Roman London, a city not one-tenth the size that eighth and ninth century Cordoba is said to have been, has yielded dozens of first-class archaeological sites. And even the three locations mentioned in the Guide are open to question. The city wall portion is only “presumably” of the ninth century, whilst the part of the mosque attributed to the eighth century is said to have been modeled by Abd’ er Rahman I. However, the latter character sounds suspiciously like his namesake and supposed descendant Abd’ er Rahman III, of the tenth century, who indisputably made alterations to the mosque (which was originally the Cathedral of Saint Vincent).

Even when real archaeology does appear at Cordoba, from the mid-tenth century onwards, the settlement is absolutely nothing like the conurbation described by the Arab writers. Indeed, at its most opulent, from the late tenth to the late eleventh centuries, the ‘metropolis’ had, it would seem, no more than about forty thousand inhabitants; and this settlement was built directly upon the Roman and Visigothic city, which had a comparable population. We know that Roman and Visigothic villas, palaces and baths were simply reoccupied by the Muslims, often with very little alteration to the original plan. And when they did build new edifices, the cut-stones, columns and decorative features were more often than not plundered from earlier Roman/Visigoth remains. A text of the medieval writer Aben Pascual tells us that there were, in his time, to be seen in Cordoba surviving buildings, “Greek and Roman. … Statues of silver and gilded bronze within them poured water into receptacles, whence it flowed into ponds and into marble basins excellently carved.”
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So much for the “vast metropolis” of eighth to tenth century Cordoba. The rest of Spain, which has been investigated with equal vigor, can deliver little else. A couple of settlements here and a few fragments of pottery there, usually of doubtful date and often described as “presumably” ninth century or such like. Altogether, the
Oxford Guide
lists a total of no more than eleven sites and individual buildings in the whole country (three of which are those from Cordoba mentioned above) which are supposed to date from before the first quarter of the tenth century. These are, in addition to the above three:

Balaguer: A fortress whose northern wall, with its square tower, “is almost entirely attributable” to the late-9th century. (p. 73)

Fontanarejo: An early Berber settlement, whose ceramic finds date it to “no later than the 9th century.” (p. 129)

Guardamar: A ribat or fortress mosque, which was completed, according to an inscription, in 944. However, “Elements in its construction have led to its being dated to the 9th cent.” (pp. 143-4)

Huesca: An Arab fortress which “has been dated to the period around 875.” (p. 145)

Madrid: Fortress foundations dating to around 870. (p. 172)

Merida: A fortress attributed to Abd’ er-Rahman II (822-852). (p. 194)

Monte Marinet: A Berber settlement with ceramics within “a possible chronological range” from the 7th to the early 9th century. (p. 202)

Olmos: An Arab fortress with ceramics “dated to the 9th cent.” (pp. 216-7)

The above meager list contrasts sharply with the hundreds of sites and structures from the Visigothic epoch – a comparable time-span – mentioned in the same place. (It is impossible to be precise about the Visigothic period, since many sites, such as Reccopolis, contain literally hundreds of individual structures. If we were to enumerate the Visigoth structures by the same criteria as we did the Islamic remains above, then the Visigoth period would reveal not hundreds, but thousands of finds). And we stress again that most of the above Islamic finds suffer from a problem highlighted by Hodges and Whitehouse in other parts of Europe: an almost unconscious attempt to backdate material of the tenth century into the ninth and eighth in order to have
something
to assign to the latter epoch.
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Look for example at the fortress of Guardamar. Although an inscription dates the completion of the edifice to 944, we are told that “elements” in its construction have led to it being dated to the ninth century. What these elements are is not clear; yet we should note that such defended mosques, being essentially fortresses, must have been raised very quickly – certainly in no more than a decade. Why then are we told that this one took fifty or perhaps seventy-five years to complete? Bearing this in mind, we can say that there is scarcely a single undisputed archaeological site attributable to the first two centuries of Islamic rule; whilst there are, to date, hundreds of rich and undisputed sites linked to the Visigothic epoch! The first real Islamic archaeology in Spain occurs during the time of Abd’ er Rahman III, in the third or fourth decade of the tenth century (when the Guardamar fortress was completed); and it should be noted that the life and career of the latter character sounds suspiciously like that of his namesake and ancestor Abd’ er Rahman I, who is supposed to have lived two centuries earlier, at the beginning of the Islamic epoch in Iberia.

What could all this mean? There is no question that the Muslim invaders wrought great destruction in the Iberian Peninsula. Roger Collins mentions numerous settlements destroyed at the time, many of which were never reoccupied. And it is true, as we shall see, that the Arab doctrine of jihad, or perpetual war against the Infidel, led to the permanent devastation of huge areas of Spain and the destruction of the agricultural base of the region. In Chapter 11 we shall find how it was this custom of incessant and unremitting raiding which led to the formation of the subsoil layer mentioned by Glick. Yet even taking such factors into account, we have to admit that the absence of all archaeology for two centuries is not adequately explained. Not even the most destructive invaders could remove all trace of life and habitation from a territory for that period of time.

And the suspicion that some other factor is involved is reinforced by the knowledge that Spain is not the only region to experience this phenomenon. Indeed, the same thing is encountered throughout Europe and the Middle East. So complete is the disappearance of archaeology that we might suspect a complete and total depopulation of everything from the British Isles to eastern Persia. And the attempts of Hodges and Whitehouse to suggest a declining population throughout the territories of the classical world during the fifth and sixth centuries is at least partly explained by the subsequent apparent wipe-out of all settlement by the late seventh and early eighth centuries. As the authors themselves note, repeated attempts to discover any trace of urban life for these years have resulted in complete failure: “… all these efforts,” they remark, “provide us with an invaluable body of negative evidence against the continuity of towns after 600, and the case for discontinuity of urban life is very strong indeed.”
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They even note the somewhat desperate attempts of archaeologists to backdate material of the tenth century into the ninth, simply to have something from that century. “For two decades,” they write, “urban archaeologists have doggedly searched for traces of seventh- to ninth-century occupation above Roman levels, simply to verify isolated historical references to the existence of an
urbs
or a
municipium
. Thwarted by the absence of early medieval deposits, there is the constant temptation to attribute tenth-century layers to the ninth century and so to recover at least something in the bid to prove urban continuity.”
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The authors concede that, “the excavated areas are tiny percentages of the Roman or later medieval settlements,” and leave open the possibility that something more substantial might be found in the future. That was in 1982; yet we can state that in the almost thirty intervening years nothing more substantial has been found. Indeed, the progress of excavation has only powerfully reinforced the negative evidence mentioned above, and as every new site is examined, it becomes increasingly less likely that we will ever find much from these truly “dark” centuries. And even the pitifully few monuments or artifacts hitherto assigned to the “dark centuries,” such as Charlemagne’s chapel at Aachen – supposedly built around 800 – have, upon closer inspection, been shown to date from other ages entirely. Thus dozens of architectural and stylistic features show that the Aachen chapel could not have been built before the eleventh century.
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The same can be said for settlements. Until recently, for example, Professor Ferdinanrd Opll, of Vienna, held that in Vienna a small community had continued to exist throughout the seventh to tenth centuries, but in August 2010 he finally admitted: “For more than 300 years, old Vindobona [Vienna] was deserted … Wolves were searching the ruins for prey.”
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Professor Karl Brunner of the same department has for years insisted that the entire Danube valley between Linz and Vienna was uninhabitable for three centuries.