Millennium by Holland, Tom (any book recommendations txt) 📕

themselves not as ‘Saracens’, a word that meant nothing to them, but as ‘Muslims’: ‘those who submit’. In the prayer halls of their places of worship, the ‘masajid’, as they were termed, or ‘mosques’, it was not merely the slaves who abased themselves before their divine master, kneeling, bowing, pressing their foreheads to the dust, but the entire community of believers. Expressed through this surging and mighty wave of prostrations was the great paradox of Mohammed’s faith: that servitude, to the slaves of God, was the wellspring of their greatness. In their facelessness lay their identity; in their surrender, their victory. As one body, free and unfree, in lands that embraced the limits of the horizon, across all the vast and peerless extent of the Caliphate, that incomparable empire won by the dauntless swords of the faithful, they acknowledged their submission – what they called, in Arabic, ‘islam’.

One day, when all the world was Muslim, there would be no more wars, and no more slavery. In the meantime, however, the merchant who shipped his human cargo to Tunis or Alexandria could be regarded as performing a deed that was meritorious as well as lucrative; just as the captives transported in all their stupefying numbers from Europe to Africa were something more than merely the tribute of flesh and blood that the weak had timelessly paid the strong. God was great. Not a fragment of masonry shaken loose from the House of War but it could be put to use in the walls of the House of Islam. Cannibalisation, indeed, had long been the fate ordained for Christendom. Slaves garnered from frontier wars had only ever been conceived of as a beginning. Conquest, outright conquest, promised the richest opportunities. Mohammed, as shrewd and innovative an empire-builder as there had ever been, had carefully prescribed for his followers how best to make their victories pay. Christians, once brought to acknowledge their own subjugation, were not to be slaughtered or obliged to convert, but carefully husbanded, as befitted a valuable resource. It was more profitable in the long run to fleece a flock of sheep than to put them all to the sword. ‘Otherwise,’ as one of the Prophet’s earliest followers had put it, ‘what would be left for the Muslims who will come after us?’ Jesus, eyes fixed on the Kingdom of Heaven, might have disdained to elaborate a fiscal policy-but not Mohammed. Tolerance had been set carefully at a price. The extortion of protection money from both Christians and Jews had been laid down by the Prophet as a most solemn duty of the faithful. All those who paid it – ‘Minimis’, as they were termed by their Muslim conquerors – were to be made to ‘feel themselves subdued’. Travelling to pay their tax, they were forbidden to ride a horse, a privilege reserved for the faithful; if on a mule, they had to sit side-saddle, like women; as they handed over their money, they were obliged to keep their hands below those of the official collecting it. In the House of Islam, it was the ledger book no less than the sword that imposed subordination.

Indeed, without dhimmi taxes, it might prove hard to pay for an army at all. This was why, in a seeming paradox, it was those states with the largest number of Christians that could most readily afford jihad. In Sicily, for instance, which had finally been secured for Islam only in 902, the emirs regarded their vast population of infidel subjects with a cagey ambivalence. Devout Muslims that they were, and naturally mistrustful of those who did not share their faith, they were regular sponsors of new mosques and mass circumcisions across the Christian heartlands; but they also had to reckon with the need to husband their tax base. By the time of the expedition against Otto II, the Muslim population of Sicily was nudging perhaps a third of the island’s total, and it appeared that the perfect balance of manpower and revenue had been attained. Bureaucracy had fused with banditry to forge a state that was lethally primed for war. The corpses left on the beach by Cotrone had borne sufficient witness to that.

Yet the notion that tax collectors might present quite as grave a threat to Christendom as corsairs was profoundly alien to the Saxons. Otto, master of a far-spreading dominion though he was, had no great reservoir of bureaucrats on which to call, no elaborate system for keeping track of his subjects, not even a capital. Indeed, to those Muslim leaders who deigned so much as to note its existence, the Reich appeared barely to qualify as a functioning state at all. One of them, addressing an envoy sent to his court by Otto I, had been open in his scorn. ‘Why does your king not concentrate power in his own hands?’ the ambassador had been asked in withering tones. ‘Why does he allow his subjects to have such a share of it? He doles out the various regions of his empire among them, expecting in that way to win their loyalty and submission, but he is deluding himself. For all he fosters is rebellion and pride!’

Here had spoken a man whose own sense of what was due to him had never needed the slightest boosting. Abd al-Rahman bin Mohammed bin Abd Allah, not content with the rank of emir that he had inherited from his grandfather, had even laid claim to that very ultimate in honorifics, the title of Caliph. No less than his peers in Baghdad and Egypt, Abd al-Rahman had made sure to justify his pretensions to global dominion with a truly spectacular display of wealth and power. Otto’s ambassador, an abbot from the Rhineland by the name of John, had certainly never seen anything to compare. The Caliph’s palace, he reported years later in still breathless tones, stretched for miles. Everywhere he had looked, there were soldiers standing to menacing attention, or riding on horseback, staging intimidating manoeuvres, ‘filling