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

in profiting from the orderly conditions of his empire. Five miles west of the great caliphal palace, for instance, there sprawled a city that in its size and sophistication was no less a wonder of the age – and no less dependent for its prosperity on stable governance. Cordoba, like Leon, had originally been a Roman foundation – but the capital of al-Andalus, as befitted a city so fattened on the fruits of peace, had long since burst its ancient walls. Indeed, so utter had been the transformation of the original Christian town that even its street plan had been obliterated: for Muslims, who had never quite got the hang of carts, had no need of wide streets or squares. Instead, all was labyrinthine, a stupendous agglomeration of winding alleyways and crowded markets, of palaces and gardens, of a hundred mosques and a thousand baths. Just as Otto, emperor though he was, lacked a residence that could rival so much as the gatehouse of the palace of the Caliph, so was there nowhere else in western Europe a settlement that remotely approached the scale and splendour of Cordoba. Indeed, in the whole of Christendom, there was only a single city that could boast of being a more magnificent seat of empire – and that was Constantinople, the Queen of Cities herself.

As the caliphs of Cordoba were well aware. Back in the palmiest days of their family’s greatness, when their ancestors had reigned in Damascus, emulation of the New Rome had been as much an Umayyad tradition as attempts to breach her walls; so much so, indeed, that their habit of ‘Qysariyya’ – of ‘behaving like a Caesar’ – had come to shock and perturb the faithful. The Umayyads themselves, befittingly imperious, had scorned all the bleats of the pious. ‘None would believe in his power,’ as the dynasty’s founder had put it, ‘if he did not behave and look like an emperor.’ Three centuries on, and the Basileus remained the standard by which the Umayyads measured themselves. Byzantine diplomats, skilled as they were in the art of setting their enemies at one another’s throats, had not failed to recognise opportunity in this. Numerous embassies had been dispatched to al- Andalus. Sedulously, these had fortified the Umayyad Caliphate in its inveterate rivalry with the Fatimids - and had presented, as seasoning to their encouragements, a whole array of splendid gifts. So it was that the Caliph’s palace outside Cordoba had been beautified with treasures from the workshops of Constantinople: here a row of marble columns, there an onyx fountain adorned with sculpted beasts. So it was too that in the very holiest place in al-Andalus, the Great Mosque of Cordoba, the golden mosaics which covered the Caliph’s private prayer room glittered with the unmistakable stamp of the Byzantine; courtesy of a master craftsman sent by Nicephorus, that notorious bane of the Saracens.

And yet, to the Caliph himself, the intrusion of Christian fingers upon the most sacred recesses of the mosque had implied no sacrilege. The very opposite, in fact. Turn from the aureate shimmer of the Byzantine mosaics, and fragments of other empires, of other traditions, all of them blended into a regular and awe-inspiring symmetry, could be seen receding towards the daylight that blazed in through the prayer hall’s nineteen doorways. Tent-like in its spareness, the ceiling of the Great Mosque was supported upon a mighty forest of pillars, some salvaged from the ruins of pagan temples, others from the demolished cathedral that had once stood on the site. The arches, which alternated brick with stone, white with red, had been constructed according to Roman methods; the horseshoe style of their curves had originally been Visigothic. No unease was felt by the architects at this wholesale appropriation of infidel traditions. Why should there have been? Just as slaves, uprooted from the House of War, could soon be brought to forget their origins, and learn to think of themselves as Muslims, nothing more, so similarly might the glories of a defeated civilisation, once they had been absorbed and transmuted into something holy, something authentically Islamic, serve to contribute to the greater glory of God. As evidence of this, no more haunting proof existed, and none more majestic, than Cordoba’s mosque.

‘God desires that if you do something you perfect it.’ So Mohammed had instructed his followers; and they, raising upon the ruins of toppled empires the dominion of his faith, had fashioned out of the rubble the greatest empire of them all. The centuries had passed, and the House of Islam had fractured; yet still, the devout believed, there could be seen in its architecture a glimpse of that even more profound order, the eternal order of God. Muslim scholarship, in its attempt to fathom creation’s mysteries, had drawn quite as profitably on the learning of infidels as the bureaucracy of the Caliphate had drawn on their wealth. Both, after all, were legitimate spoils of war. If God, in His mysterious wisdom, had granted insights to pagans, then so also had He granted to Muslims the opportunity to appropriate those insights, to assimilate them and to render them their own. Mathematicians who explored the nature of infinity did so using numerals derived from the idol worshippers of far-off India; mystics who pronounced that salvation might be attained through a mastery of the sciences depended for their philosophy upon the teachings of Pythagoras and Plato, long-dead Greek idolaters who had never heard of Mohammed. Even in al-Andalus, where overexcited scholars and their speculations had traditionally been regarded with frowns of disapproval, a sublime fantasy had begun to flourish: that the wisdom of the entire world might be comprehended. Enthusiasm for this heroic ambition had reached to the very top. Caliph Al-Hakam, in particular, had been celebrated for his obsession with books. Remarkable stories were told of the fruits of his mania. The library in the caliphal palace, it was rumoured, had ended up numbering more than four hundred thousand volumes – of