The House of Wisdom (9 page)

Many years before, on the final day of the year 999, Gerbert d’Aurillac, pioneer of abacus and astrolabe, found himself at the vortex of just such a storm. Now Pope Sylvester II, he was to officiate over midnight mass at St. Peter’s in Rome on the eve of the millennium, a day some believers were certain would let slip the Beast of the Apocalypse. After all, the book of Revelation says, “And he cast him into the abyss, and closed and sealed it over him, that he should deceive the nations no more, until the thousand years should be finished. And after that he must be let loose for a little while” (20:3). Others yearned to be reunited with Christ and hurried to sell their possessions so they might travel to Jerusalem to witness the Last Judgment.
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Sylvester and other senior churchmen did their best to counter these prophecies of doom, but the simple village priests, peasants, and townsfolk were wary of the learned pontiff, with his strange foreign ways and newfangled ideas. Sylvester’s standing was further undermined by another prophecy, namely a coming alliance between a pope and the Antichrist.
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That the end of days had not arrived as expected on New Year’s morning was of little comfort; it was, many suspected, just a matter of time.

Adelard of Bath never succumbed to the apocalyptic fashion of his day. His mind was too subtle, his personality too confident, to take refuge in such talk. Yet
On the Same and the Different
, his first extant work, links him to some of the very philosophical traditions that lay behind the terror of life that dogged Christendom for so long. The title itself comes from Plato’s creation story, Timaeus, which had survived in partial Latin translation and comprised an element of early Christian thought. Such Platonic notions were widely studied at the French cathedral schools, including Adelard’s own in Tours.
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For Plato and his later followers, the Divine One—commonly associated in the Christian mind with God—created the universe and surrounded it with a band of fixed stars. This is the circle of the Same, and it is, by definition, unchanging, uniform, and essentially perfect. Below it sits the circle of the Different, a band around the earth that represents change, diversity, and imperfection.
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In addition to the distinction between divine perfection and earthly change and corruption, Plato and his later interpreters also adopted the notion that these eternal forms or ideas exist only in the mind of “the Divine One,” well apart from any material objects.
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What we perceive as reality is only a pale reflection or shadow, knowable only through the senses. The church fathers and their medieval successors took comfort in what they saw as philosophical support for Christian doctrine, but this forced separation of Creator and Creation—of the god man worshipped and the universe he moved through each day—alienated believers from their surroundings in unpredictable ways, feeding religious manias, stirring apocalyptic visions, and inspiring severe penitential movements. This was, however, a natural outcome of the state of medieval Christian belief. So was the Middle Ages’ deep-set conservatism, in which change was the mortal enemy of man and everyone had his or her place in the rigid social and cosmic order. When observed reality could no longer be ignored, a sort of dual personality emerged. For example, highly accurate navigational charts, for use by actual sailors who had to get safely from one place to another, coexisted for centuries with the idealized but practically useless T-O maps, with Jerusalem as the physical and spiritual center of the earth.
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In the centuries before the crusader era, the West had little interest in Islam, and there was certainly no real effort to paint Muslims as mortal enemies of Christianity. Generally identified in the early accounts as Saracens—that is, as the children of Abraham’s wife, Sarah—the Muslims were just another “barbarian” annoyance to be tolerated and, with God’s aid, defeated. The Venerable Bede’s classic eighth-century
Ecclesiastical History of the English People
notes, “At which time a dreadful plague of Saracens ravaged France with miserable slaughter; but they not long after in that country received the punishment due to their wickedness,” a reference to the Muslim defeat in 732 at Poitiers.
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A chronicle of the Franks from 793 refers to Saracen raids on southern France as one of that year’s two “terrible afflictions.” The other is the revolt of the Saxons.
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Both texts are notable for a general lack of religious animus directed at the Muslim enemy.

Even attacks on Rome and the sack of St. Peter’s by Arab forces in 846 failed to generate the kind of aggressive anti-Muslim hysteria that began to take shape in the eleventh century. As late as 1010, feuding Arab and Berber armies in southern Spain each called on Christian allies for support.
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Similar alliances of convenience followed, presaging the arrangements that would later characterize the Latin East after the early success of the First Crusade. The initial transformation of the Saracens from a simple affliction to a matter of spiritual life or death for all Christendom can be traced in some measure to the destruction of Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher by the Muslims in 1009. This act, which recalled some of the dire prophecies associated with the end of days, appeared to reignite millennial fears after the near miss of the year 1000, and it linked the Muslims to the Apocalypse in the popular Christian imagination. It also unleashed a wave of pilgrimage to the Holy Land and identified the far-off Muslim caliph with the Antichrist.
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But events in the Near East were not the decisive factors in the early formulation of anti-Muslim propaganda. Like the division between thought and experience that characterized the age in general, the reality of the Muslims’ beliefs, lives, and practices had nothing to do with their emerging image in the West. Instead, the view of the Saracen as hated Other was a function of Europe’s own theological and political needs at the time—a phenomenon not unfamiliar today as the West wages its “war on terrorism.” Under the direction of men like Gregory VII and Urban II, the eleventh century was dominated by the rise of centralized papal power at the expense of the fragmented and unstable political realm of kings and princes. The language of Christian holy war against the Muslim infidel was the perfect vehicle to consolidate church control.
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Here are the roots of the mental contortions that still lie at the root of many of today’s abiding views of Islam, presented as the reverse image of Western goodness: Where Christianity stands for love, Islam is a religion of cruelty; where Christ stands for truth, Muhammad and the Koran stand for deception; where Christians are chaste, Muslims are sexual deviants.
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In other words, theology begat history; the views and behavior of Muslims, about which the West was almost wholly ignorant at the time, were beside the point.

Church ideology, even one powerful enough to mobilize tens of thousands for the hardships of holy war in far-off lands, was by no means the only force defining medieval Europe’s early views of the Muslims and the Muslim world. There was also money to be made, whether wartime spoils for armed adventurers like the Norman conquerors of Muslim Sicily or profits from trade for the intrepid merchants of Pisa, Amalfi, and Venice. Among the more ambitious, opportunities for territorial conquest beckoned men like Baldwin, the future Count of Edessa, and Bohemond, Prince of Antioch.

Adelard, of course, had ambitions of his own. Well versed in the French cathedral tradition, the author of
On the Same and the Different
nonetheless displays a rather shallow level of learning. He gives no hint of the theoretical geometry that lies at the heart of astronomy, and his own observations rely on a primitive measuring stick, with no references to either the astrolabe or its simpler cousin, the quadrant. Likewise, his knowledge of philosophy, music, and mathematics is wholly conventional, heavily reliant on the sixth-century works of Boethius and the other texts prevalent in the cathedral schools.
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Rededicating himself to his studies after his vision on the banks of the Loire, he declares that only complete devotion to his beloved philosophy can lead the way out of darkness. Already, his tentative explorations in southern Italy and Sicily had convinced him that he had to break free physically from the intellectual confinement of medieval Europe and explore firsthand the mysteries of the
studia Arabum
.

Entrusting his students to the cathedral school at Laon, the young Englishman set off alone in 1109 for the rumored intellectual wonders waiting in the Arab East. Adelard later recalls his farewell in
On the Same and the Different
, addressing the familiar figure of his unnamed kinsman and including a parting shot at the shortcomings of French learning: “You remember, dear nephew, that, seven years ago, when I dismissed you (still almost a boy) with my other students in French studies at Laon, we agreed amongst ourselves that I would investigate the studies of the Arabs according to my ability, but you would become no less proficient in the insecurity of French opinions.”
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Adelard’s precise route to the East remains something of a puzzle, but there is no mystery about the rich intellectual tradition that had already been brewing there for centuries.

PART II

Al-Fajr/Dawn

Chapter Three

THE HOUSE OF WISDOM

A
BU JAFAR AL-MANSUR
was taking no chances with his new imperial capital, for this was to be a city like no other. The second Abbasid caliph of the Muslims turned for guidance to his trusted royal astrologers, the former Zoroastrian Nawbakht and Mashallah, a Jew turned Muslim from Basra and now “the leading person for the science of judgments of the stars.”
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The pair consulted the heavens and declared that July 30, 762, would certainly be the most auspicious day for work to begin. Still, al-Mansur hesitated. He ordered his architects to mark the layout of the walls of his proposed city—a perfect circle, in keeping with the geometric teachings of the caliph’s beloved Euclid—on the ground, first in ashes and then again with cotton seeds soaked in naphtha. This was set ablaze to create a fiery outline of the so-called Round City, the geometric center of al-Mansur’s future metropolis.
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At last, the caliph was satisfied. “By God!… I shall live in it my entire life, and it shall become the home of my descendants; and without a doubt, it will become the most prosperous city in the world,” declared al-Mansur, Arabic for “the victorious.”
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Abbasid coins and other official usage celebrated al-Mansur’s capital as the Madinat al-Salam, or “the city of peace,” but among the people it always retained the name of the old Persian settlement that had been on the same spot—Baghdad.

Twelve years before work began on the capital, al-Mansur’s brother Saffah completed the overthrow of the Umayyad dynasty, which had risen to power in the Muslim world three decades after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632. In the revolutionary retribution that followed, Saffah—“shedder of blood”—sent his forces under the Abbasids’ distinctive black banners to hunt down the remaining members of the House of the Umayyads. The only significant figure to escape alive was Prince Abd al-Rahman, who fled to North Africa before going on to establish the future Western Caliphate in southern Spain. But the victory of the rebels, who found it politically expedient to assert their direct lineage to the Prophet through his paternal uncle Abbas, was less a blood feud between an aging dynasty and an ambitious pretender than it was a wholesale cultural revolution throughout the Islamic lands.

Well before the Abbasid victory in 750, the armies of Islam had successfully retraced the path of Alexander the Great, one thousand years earlier, pushing across the Oxus River into Afghanistan and reaching India and western China. The conquest of Persia, to the east of the Umayyad capital, was complete by 651, and soon Muslim power was extending westward as well, through North Africa and into Spain. As a result of this rapid territorial expansion, Muslim Arabs no longer enjoyed a majority in the empire under their control. Now they had to contend with a daunting patchwork of ethnic and religious communities: large urban populations of Persians, both recent Muslim converts and traditional Zoroastrians; Aramaic speakers, Christians and Jews alike; Arab Christians of various stripes, including the many “dualist” sects that had broken with Eastern Orthodox Byzantium; and other groups.
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Many of the empire’s newest Muslims, especially those in traditionally Persian lands, were openly skeptical of the Umayyad claims of political and religious legitimacy. The early Umayyad caliphs were descended from members of the Prophet Muhammad’s inner circle but were not his blood relatives, something that did not always sit well with the Persian converts and other newcomers to the faith. They responded enthusiastically to rebel propaganda that asserted direct family links between the Abbasids and the Prophet and demanded “an acceptable ruler” from the family of Muhammad. With the final collapse of the old order at the hands of the Abbasids, the way was open to a range of newcomers—notably Persians, but also Sabeans, Jews, and many others—to assume an increasingly influential role in the intellectual and political affairs of the empire.

Territory seized from the Byzantines created an inviting haven for Syrian Jacobites, Nestorians, and other Christians, who in the seventh and eighth centuries began to flee Constantinople’s enforced religious orthodoxy and increasing animosity toward ancient learning. Christian scholars were suddenly free to explore and develop classical teachings under the protection of the Muslims, who traditionally imposed a poll tax on those “People of the Book”—generally Jews and Christians but also Zoroastrians—who chose not to convert to Islam but otherwise left them alone. Important intellectual centers thrived across the region, from Edessa to the Iranian city of Jundishapur, from Harran, in present-day Turkey, to the Central Asian oasis town of Marv, offering the Abbasids a formidable body of indigenous linguistic skills, scientific talent, and cultural knowledge.
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