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

down their inhabitants. The men were slaughtered; the women raped, then tethered together to be sold as whores. Those found to be pregnant had their babies sliced out of their bellies.

Yet the Berbers were not so easily excised from the guts of al- Andalus. By 1010, the vengeful comrades of those who had been massacred the year before were camped around the walls of Cordoba, and for three years they remained there, slowly starving the city to death. The Cordobans, flaunting their refusal to surrender, went so far as to sanction cannibalism rather than submit to the hated foreigners. Most, however, were civilians -- and such gestures were the effective limit of their defiance. The ruin of Cordoba, when it came at last, was total. The Berbers, taking possession of the city in the spring of 1013, mercilessly beslathered the ‘Ornament of the World’ with gore. All its gilded splendours, all its fabulous pretensions, were trampled underfoot. Among the corpses left piled in the smoking streets, almost certainly, was that of Hisham II, the heir of the Umayyads, his pale and perfumed body sharing in his capital’s desecration, his caliphal blood serving to feed the ruined city’s flies.

And yet his death went unremarked. Set against the titanic scale of the ethnic hatreds that had torn the Caliphate to pieces, the doings of its rulers had come to seem a matter almost of insignificance. The Cordobans, during the course of the terrible siege, had thought nothing of executing Mohammed for the horrors he had brought down upon them, and restoring Hisham to his throne; and after Hisham’s disappearance, there were other factions who adopted candidates of their own. Yet few paid these spectral caliphs any attention. The unity of al-Andalus was gone for ever, and across the lands that had once been ruled from Cordoba local warlords were already looking to their own. The Muslims would call these upstarts ‘Taifa’ kings: ‘faction’ kings. The ambition of al-Mansur, that a revived and triumphant Islam would complete the business begun three centuries previously and subdue the whole of Spain, was dead. The goal of the Taifa kings was less aggrandisement than survival. Nothing remained of the Caliphate save a corpse to be scavenged over.

And nothing of its capital save a shell. For those who had known Cordoba in the full radiance of her glory, the agony of what she had become was unbearable. ‘Prosperity has been changed into a sterile desert, society into frightful loneliness, beauty into rubble-strewn plains. Where peace once reigned, great chasms now yawn: the haunt of wolves, of ghosts, of demons.’ So wrote Ibn Hazm, a high-born intellectual and Umayyad loyalist, whose fruitless nostalgia for the decaying Caliphate had led him to endure years of imprisonment and exile. Specifically, he was describing the anguish of a lover parted from the object of his passions: an anguish that he himself had known well. In 1013, amid the horrors of Cordoba’s fall, Ibn Hazm had been forced to flee the city and leave behind him the first great love of his life: a young and exquisitely lovely slave girl, modest, refined and with a voice ‘that could pluck at heart-strings’. Six years on, however, when he met her again, he found her so lined and withered as to be unrecognisable. Feeling that wherever he looked there was nothing but decay, Ibn Hazm had traced in the preternaturally wrinkled face of a slave woman the lineaments of a more universal decay. The rooms of the country estate in which he had grown up, and Cordoba herself, and the once-flourishing lands of al-Andalus — all were ruined too. ‘Those halls inscribed with beauteous scripts, those adorned boudoirs that used to shine like the sun, possessed of a loveliness that had the power to banish all misery from the soul; now they are overwhelmed by desolation, standing like the open jaws of savage beasts. And by doing so, they proclaim the doom that awaits the world.’

A sentiment worthy almost of Cluny. Certainly, Christians were not alone in dreading that the end days might be at hand. During the reign of al-Hakam, indeed, a Muslim philosopher who had thought to deny the coming of the Day of Judgement had been put to death for heresy. Just as the Great Mosque of Cordoba incorporated within its architecture the columns and brickwork and mosaics of superseded empires, so had the infinitely grander edifice of Islam not disdained to cannibalise the revelations of the Christians. Jesus, Muslims were taught, had been a mighty prophet of God, and at the end of time, he would descend from the skies, just as St John had written, and would fight and conquer the hordes of the ‘Dajjal’ – Antichrist. Not alone, however: for at his side would appear an even greater warrior, ‘a descendant of Fatima’, the Prophet Mohammed’s daughter, whose fateful task it would be ‘to fill the earth with justice and equity, just as now it is filled with oppression and tyranny’. This greatest of all caliphs would be termed ‘al-Maftdi’: ‘the Rightly Guided One’. And his rule would serve to put an end to suffering and injustice for ever.

But when? A familiar question. Muslims, tipped offby the Prophet, believed that the moment would come upon the turning of a century. The passage of a hundred years was what haunted their imaginings, not a thousand. Four centuries had gone by since Mohammed, fleeing his native city, had set about establishing the first Muslim state – and the precise anniversary of this epochal event was, according to the Christian calendar, 1009. Small wonder, then, in the troubled decades falling either side of this date, that Muslims too should have anticipated the ending of the world. It was no coincidence, for example, that Muhammed bin Hisham, the Umayyad pretender who had laid claim to the caliphal dignity in the very year 1009, should have presumed to adopt the title of Mahdi. A pathetic and vain expedient – and yet powerfully