5.1 WHAP.pdf

Even as traders and Sufi mystics spread the Islamic faith from Morocco to Indonesia, and Arab intellectuals achieved important breakthroughs in the sciences and arts, by the eleventh and twelfth centuries C.E. the Abbasid dynasty was crumbling from within (Map 5.1). Almost from the outset, the dynas...

Even as traders and Sufi mystics spread the Islamic faith from Morocco to Indonesia, and Arab intellectuals achieved important breakthroughs in the sciences and arts, by the eleventh and twelfth centuries C.E. the Abbasid dynasty was crumbling from within (Map 5.1). Almost from the outset, the dynasty had been plagued by struggles for succession to the throne. These clashes were magnified by the resort to brute force on the part of rival mercenary armies made up of slaves recruited by determined claimants. Not surprisingly, the well-armed slaves soon became a power center in their own right. In the ninth century they murdered a reigning caliph and placed one of his sons on the throne. In the next decades, four more caliphs were assassinated or poisoned by the mercenary forces. From this time onward, the leaders of the slave armies were often the real power behind the Abbasid throne and major players in recurring maneuvers for control of the capital and empire. The mercenaries also became a major force for broader social unrest. They were often the catalyst for the urban food riots that broke out periodically when the price of everyday staples rose too sharply due to crop shortfalls or price gouging. Endemic civil violence drained the treasury and alienated the urban populace in the empire’s heartlands. Attempts on the part of insecure caliphs to escape the turmoil of Baghdad by establishing new capitals near the original one further strained the empire’s dwindling revenues. The construction of palaces, mosques, and public works for each of these new imperial centers added to the already exorbitant costs of maintaining the court and imperial administration. Paying for these elite excesses fell heavily on the already hard-pressed peasantry. Spiraling taxation and outright pillaging on the part of local officials led to the destruction or abandonment of many villages in the richest provinces. The great irrigation works that had for centuries been essential to agricultural production in the fertile Tigris–Euphrates basin fell into disrepair, and in some areas they collapsed entirely. Peasants and even local elite families perished through flood, famine, or violent assault; many fled to wilderness areas or neighboring kingdoms to escape the demands of Abbasid tax collectors. Some formed bandit gangs or joined the crowds of vagabonds that trudged the highways and camped in the towns of the imperial heartland. In many cases, dissident religious groups, such as various Shi’a sects, instigated peasant uprisings. Shi’a participation often meant that these movements sought not only to correct official abuses but to destroy the Sunni Abbasid regime itself. Preoccupied by struggles in the capital and central provinces, the caliphs and their advisors were powerless to prevent further losses of territory in the outer reaches of the empire. In addition, areas as close to the capital as Egypt and Syria broke away from Abbasid rule. More alarmingly, by the mid-tenth century, independent kingdoms that had formed in areas that were once provinces of the empire were moving to supplant the Abbasids as lords of the Islamic world. In 945, the armies of one of these regional splinter dynasties, the Buyids of Persia, invaded the heartlands of the Abbasid empire and captured Baghdad. From this point onward, the caliphs were little more than figureheads controlled by the Buyids and other families. Buyid leaders took the title of sultan (“victorious” in Arabic), which came to designate Muslim rulers, especially in Western languages. The Buyids controlled the caliph and the court, but they could not prevent the further disintegration of the empire. In just over a century, the Buyids’ control over the caliphate was broken, and they were supplanted in 1055 by another group of nomadic invaders from Central Asia via Persia, the Seljuk Turks. For the next two centuries, Turkic military leaders ruled the remaining portions of the Abbasid empire in the name of caliphs, who were usually of Arab or Persian extraction. The Seljuks were staunch Sunnis, and they moved quickly to purge the Shi’a officials who had risen to power under the Buyids and to rid the caliph’s domains of Shi’a influences. For a time, Seljuk military prowess was also able to restore political initiative to the much-reduced caliphate. Seljuk victories ended the threat of conquest by a rival Shi’a dynasty centered in Egypt. They also humbled the Byzantines, who had hoped to take advantage of Muslim divisions to regain some of their territories lost to the Abbasids and Fatimids in Egypt. The Byzantines’ crushing defeat also opened the way to the settlement of Asia Minor, or Anatolia, by other nomadic peoples of Turkic origins, some of whom would soon begin to lay the foundations of the Ottoman Empire. Soon after seizing power in 1055, the Seljuks faced a very different challenge to Islamic civilization. It came from Christian crusaders who were determined to capture the portions of the Islamic world that made up the Holy Land in Biblical times. Muslim political divisions and the element of surprise made the first of the crusaders’ assaults, between 1096 and 1099, by far the most successful. Most of the Holy Land was captured and divided into Christian kingdoms. In June 1099, the main objective of the Crusade, Jerusalem, was taken, and its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants were massacred by the rampaging Christian knights. The Crusades did not become a major factor in Middle Eastern developments more generally, but they did constitute a significant episode and, ultimately, confirmed the importance of Seljuk leadership. For nearly two centuries, the Europeans, who eventually mounted eight Crusades that varied widely in strength and success, maintained their precarious hold on the Eastern Mediterranean region. But they posed little threat to the more powerful Muslim princes, whose disregard for the Christians was demonstrated by the fact that they continued to quarrel among themselves despite the intruders’ aggressions. When united under a strong leader, as they were under Salah-ud-Din (known as Saladin in Christian Europe) in the last decades of the twelfth century, the Muslims rapidly overwhelmed most of the crusaders’ outposts. Saladin’s death in 1193 and the subsequent breakup of his kingdom gave the remaining Christian citadels some respite. But the last of the crusader kingdoms was lost with the fall of Acre in 1291. Without question, the impact of the Crusades was much greater on the Christians who launched them than on the Muslim peoples who had to fend them off. Because there had long been so much contact between Western Europe and the Islamic world through trade and through the Muslim kingdoms in Spain and southern Italy, it is difficult to be sure which influences to attribute specifically to the Crusades. But the crusaders’ firsthand experiences in the Eastern Mediterranean certainly intensified the European borrowing from the Muslim world that had been going on for centuries. Muslim weapons, such as the famous damascene swords (named after the city of Damascus), were highly prized and sometimes copied by the Europeans, who were always eager to improve on their methods of making war. Muslim techniques of building fortifications were adopted by many Christian rulers, as can be seen in the castles built in Normandy and coastal England by William the Conqueror and his successors in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Richard the Lionheart’s legendary preference for Muslim over Christian physicians was but one sign of the Europeans’ avid interest in the superior scientific learning of Muslim peoples. Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), a Muslim historian from Sudanic Africa, developed the concept that dynasties of nomadic conquerors had a cycle of three generations—strong, weak, and dissolute. Although he lived in the century after the Abbasid caliphate was destroyed in 1258, Ibn Khaldun was very much a product of the far-flung Islamic civilization that the Abbasids had consolidated and expanded. He was also one of the greatest historians and social commentators of all time. After extensive travels in the Islamic world, he served as a political advisor at several of the courts of Muslim rulers in North Africa. With the support of a royal patron, Ibn Khaldun wrote a universal history that began with a very long philosophical preface called The Muqaddimah. Among the subjects he treated at length were the causes of the rise and fall of dynasties. The shifting fortunes of the dynasties he knew well in his native North Africa, as well as the fate of the Abbasids and earlier Muslim regimes, informed his attempts to find persistent patterns in the complex political history of the Islamic world. The following passages are from one of the most celebrated sections of The Muqaddimah on the natural life span of political regimes. From Muslims and Jews in Spain, Sicily, Egypt, and the Middle East, the Europeans recovered much of the Greek learning that had been lost to Northern Europe during the waves of nomadic invasions after the fall of Rome. They also mastered Arabic (properly Indian) numerals and the decimal system, and they benefited from the great advances Arab and Persian thinkers had made in mathematics and many of the sciences. The Persian rugs and tapestries that adorn the homes of the European upper classes in Renaissance and early modern paintings demonstrate the demand in the West for Islamic consumer goods. This demand is also reflected in the Europeans adoption of Arab and Persian names for different kinds of cloth, such as fustian, taffeta, muslin, and damask. Muslim influences affected both the elite and popular cultures of much of Western Europe in this period. These included Persian and Arabic words, games such as chess, chivalric ideals and troubadour ballads, as well as foods such as dates, coffee, and yogurt. Europe’s consumer culture, though largely confined to the upper classes, gained new tastes. Some of the cultural imports, namely the songs of the troubadours, can be traced directly to the contacts the crusaders made in the Holy Land. But most were part of a process of exchange that extended over centuries, and was one-way. Although Arab traders imported some manufactures, such as glass and cloth, and raw materials from Europe, Muslim peoples in this era showed little interest in the learning or institutions of the West. Nevertheless, the Italian merchant communities, which remained after the political and military power of the crusaders had been extinguished in the Middle East, contributed a good deal more to these ongoing interchanges than all the forays of Christian knights. Again, for the Middle East itself, the crusades constituted a fairly minor episode—the ongoing political and social dynamic of the later Abbasid dynasty was far more important. The harem and the veil became the twin emblems of women’s increasing subjugation to men and confinement to the home in the Abbasid era. Although some Middle Eastern peoples had practiced the seclusion of women since ancient times, the harem was a creation of the Abbasid court. The wives and the concubines of the Abbasid caliphs were restricted to the forbidden quarters of the imperial palace. Many of the concubines were slaves, who could win their freedom and gain power by bearing healthy sons for the rulers. The growing wealth of the Abbasid elite created a great demand for female and male slaves, who were found by the tens of thousands in Baghdad and other large cities. Most of these urban slaves continued to perform domestic services in the homes of the wealthy. One of the tenth-century caliphs is reputed to have had 11,000 eunuchs among his slave corps; another is said to have kept 4,000 slave concubines. Most of the slaves had been captured or purchased in the non-Muslim regions surrounding the empire, including the Balkans, Central Asia, and Sudanic Africa. They were sold in the slave markets found in all of the larger towns of the Abbasid realm. Female and male slaves were prized for both their beauty and their intelligence. Some of the best-educated men and women in the empire were slaves. Consequently, caliphs and high officials often spent more time with their clever and talented slave concubines than with their less-educated wives. Slave concubines and servants often had more personal liberty than freeborn wives. Slave women could go to the market, and they did not have to wear the veils and robes that were required for free women in public places. Although women from the lower classes farmed, wove clothing and rugs, or raised silkworms to help support their families, rich women were allowed almost no career outlets beyond the home. Often married at puberty (legally set at age 9), women were raised to devote their lives to running a household and serving their husbands. But at the highest levels of society, wives and concubines cajoled their husbands and plotted with eunuchs and royal advisors to advance the interests of their sons and win for them the ruler’s backing for succession to the throne. Despite these brief incursions into power politics, by the end of the Abbasid era, the freedom and influence—both within the family and in the wider world—that women had enjoyed in the first centuries of Islamic expansion had been severely curtailed. As we have seen, in the tenth and eleventh centuries the Abbasid domains were divided by ever-growing numbers of rival successor states. In the early thirteenth century, a new threat arose at the eastern edge of the original Abbasid domains, and it was at this point that key parts of the Middle East were directly introduced to the surging power of the Mongols (See Chapter 3). Mongol forces raided in the 1220s and then smashed the Turkic-Persian kingdoms that had developed in the regions to the east of Baghdad. Chinggis Khan died before the heartlands of the Muslim world were invaded, but his grandson, Hulegu, renewed the Mongol assault on the rich centers of Islamic civilization in the 1250s. In 1258, the Mongols captured the Abbasid capital at Baghdad, and much of it was sacked. The 37th and final Abbasid caliph was put to death. The Mongol invaders continued westward until they were finally defeated by the Mamluks, Turkic-speaking slaves, who then ruled Egypt themselves. Baghdad never recovered from the Mongol attacks. In 1401, it suffered a second capture and another round of pillaging by the even fiercer forces of Timur or Tamerlane, another Turkic conqueror from Central Asia. Baghdad shrank for centuries from the status of one of the great cities of the world to a provincial backwater. It was gradually supplanted by Cairo to the west and then Istanbul to the north.