A 10th-century Monk in the Caliph's Court

Researching my book The Abacus and the Cross, I discovered several facets of the Viking Age that I hadn't been aware of. One was the intersection of faith and science in Islamic Spain: as I mentioned in last week's blog post, al-Andalus in the 9th and 10th centuries was an amazingly tolerant culture in which learning was prized.

The story of John of Gorze shows just how tolerant it could be.

The story begins with an embassy sent north by the Caliph Abd al-Rahmann III. The Holy Roman Emperor was pleased with the caliph's exotic gifts, but the caliph's letter confounded Otto the Great. Like his peers, the Holy Roman Emperor found Islam incomprehensible. Muslims worshipped the One God. They revered the patriarchs, the Virgin Mary—even Jesus, though they denied he was the Son of God. They “read the Hebrew prophets (or rather, those of the Christians),” noted the 11th-century chronicler Ralph the Bald, “claiming that what they foretold concerning Jesus Christ, Lord of all, is now fulfilled in the person of Muhammad, one of their people.” What could it be, the emperor and his rather narrow-minded counselors asked, but a Christian heresy?

Complicating the emperor’s response even further was the fact that Abd al-Rahman’s ambassador had died. Otto needed a messenger who was tough and expendable. John of Gorze volunteered.

The Life of John, Abbot of Gorze was written between 974 and 984 by a monk to whom he had told his stories. John’s toughness is amply illustrated, as is his narrow-mindedness. John's rich father, nearing ninety, married a young noblewoman; he begat three sons before he died. John was raised to be his father's heir and, as an adolescent, found himself in charge of vast estates.

He managed them well until one day, visiting a nunnery from which he rented a manor, he saw a beautiful girl. Her rosy skin was revealed by the fine garment she wore, but just at her bosom was an ugly tangle of something. Curious (and used to getting his own way), John slipped his hand down her dress. Touching that awful roughness, he began trembling with horror. It was a hair shirt. The girl, blushing, said, “Do you not know that we do not live for this world?”

From then on, John wanted to be a monk, the more ascetic the better. Finding a sufficiently rigorous monastery at Gorze, he donated all his wealth—beggaring his two brothers, who had to become monks as well. He outdid the other monks in depriving himself of food, clothing, baths, soft beds, or comfort of any sort. Finding he enjoyed the study of logic, he vowed to read nothing thenceforth but scripture.

As the emperor’s ambassador, John traveled to Barcelona in 953 with French slave-traders who were ferrying Slavic captives to Cordoba to be sold as eunuchs. He stayed two weeks with Count Borrell, a Christian ally of the caliph’s, who sent a warning south.

Reaching Cordoba, John was stopped two miles from the palace and escorted to a house. There he stayed as a pampered guest for three years—for the contents of Emperor Otto’s letter were known to the caliph, thanks to the count of Barcelona. Though we can only guess at what the emperor said about Islam, it was clearly offensive: According to the laws of al-Andalus, anyone repeating such things about the Prophet Muhammad must be put to death.

Rather than bring things to that extreme, the caliph sent his Jewish vizier, Hasdai ibn Shaprut, to explain the problem to John of Gorze. “Our people attest that they have never met nor heard of a wiser man,” says The Life of John. Why not destroy the letter, Hasdai suggested, and just present the emperor's gifts? John refused to disobey the emperor, but suggested that perhaps he should send to Otto asking for new instructions.

The caliph’s Christian vizier, Bishop Racemundo, volunteered to go north. He was “a good catholic,” says The Life of John, with “an important function at court.” He was “perfectly instructed in our culture as well as in that of the Arab language.” He arrived at Gorze in six weeks and rested there until after Christmas, when he was presented to Emperor Otto at Frankfurt.

In Frankfurt, Racemundo met the nun Hrosvit of Gandersheim, then only 15 or 20 years old. She would become well known for her comedies, written in the style of Terence, in which self-confident little Christian girls make fun of the pagan fools who martyr them.

Hrosvit recorded her conversation with Racemundo in a poem about a young Christian killed for blaspheming against the Prophet Muhammad. Though her understanding of Islam was warped and her depiction of Abd al-Rahman not complimentary, she does accurately convey Cordoba’s religious tolerance. The caliph issued a pronouncement, she writes, that said: “Whoever so desired to serve the Eternal King,” meaning Christ, “and desired to honor the customs of his sires, might do so without fear of any retribution. Only a single condition he set to be observed, namely that no dweller of the aforesaid city should presume to blaspheme” the prophet Mohammed's name. This was the problem Racemundo had come to Otto’s court to solve.

Racemundo returned to Cordoba in June, bringing a “less severe” letter and instructions from Emperor Otto the Great for John of Gorze to negotiate peace. After three years of waiting, John was brought to the caliph’s palace. The Life of John describes the armed guards along the route: the knights on their fine horses, the scary-looking black soldiers. It notes the precious rugs and tapestries in the palace and, in the throne room, the “extraordinary curtains, which made the walls look sunlit.” As an Arabic writer explains, the walls were paneled with gold and in the middle of the room was a pool of quicksilver—mercury—off which the sunlight bounced. At a sign from the caliph, his slaves would vigorously stir it, setting off lightning flashes that induced vertigo in his terrified petitioners.

Abd al-Rahman, lounging on a divan, offered John a chair and apologized for not seeing him sooner. John praised the caliph for his “constant heart” and “measured wisdom.” They discussed kingship. The caliph said he thought Emperor Otto was imprudent: He gave his underlings too much power—and at that point The Life of John, Abbot of Gorze breaks off.

John returned to Gorze and conveyed these carefully reasoned descriptions of the Jewish vizier Hasdai, the Christian vizier Racemundo, and the Muslim caliph Abd al-Rahman to his biographer. John became abbot in 967 and died in 973.

To learn more about medieval al-Andalus, I recommend The Ornament of the World by Maria Menocal. The title of her book comes from Hrosvit of Gandersheim’s poem about Cordoba.

Join me again next Wednesday at nancymariebrown.blogspot.com for another writing adventure in Iceland or the medieval world.

The Ornament of the World

Spain doesn't figure much in tales of the Vikings. In The Viking Age: A Reader, which I wrote about in an earlier post (here), you can see why. As one medieval chronicler explains, the Vikings, whom the Moors called "Madjus," "arrived in about 80 ships. One might say they had, as it were, filled the ocean with dark red birds, in the same way as they had filled the hearts of men with fear and trembling. After landing at Lisbon, they sailed to Cadiz, then to Sidona, then to Seville. They besieged this city, and took it by storm…" But their success didn't last.

"When war engines were used against them, and reinforcements had arrived from Cordoba, Madjus [the Vikings] were put to flight. They [the Moors] killed about 500 of their men, and took four of their ships with all their cargoes. Ibn-Wazim had these burnt, after selling all that was found in them. Then they [Madjus] were defeated at Talyata on the 25 Safar of this year [11 Nov 844]. Many were killed, others hanged at Seville, others hanged in the palm trees of Talyata, and 30 of their ships were burnt. Those who escaped from the bloodshed embarked. … and were no more heard of."

It's not surprising the Moors repulsed the Vikings so efficiently, for the Muslim caliphate of al-Andalus was the most technologically advanced civilization in Europe at the time. Arabic numerals, the efficient 1-2-3 that replaced the clumsy i-ii-iii, came to the West from Baghdad through al-Andalus during the Viking Age, along with many other advances in mathematics, astronomy, agriculture--even paper-making.

I learned this when writing The Abacus and the Cross, my biography of the pope who reigned when Iceland was converted to Christianity in the year 1000. Pope Sylvester II may even have corresponded with King Olaf Tryggvason, who is credited with christianizing Norway; early historians write of a letter (now lost) in which the pope told the king to quit using runes.

Born Gerbert of Aurillac in about 950, Pope Sylvester II studied mathematics and astronomy near Christian Barcelona from 967-970. (I think of them as his college years.) He learned about Arabic numerals and used them to create a new kind of abacus, or counting board, with which he later taught arithmetic in the cathedral school at Reims, France.

Curious to know more about what Spain was like when young Gerbert arrived, I turned to a book by Maria Menocal of Yale University: The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (Little, Brown 2002). Inspired by what I read, I contacted Menocal and requested an interview. She was then in Spain—I wish I had joined her! Instead, I waited until she returned to Yale University and met her there in January of 2008. I attended a lecture she presented and accompanied her and her graduate students to dinner; the next morning I interviewed her about her work.

A year ago, Maria Menocal died of melanoma [http://news.yale.edu/2012/10/15/memoriam-mar-rosa-menocal]. Remembering her insight and her generosity, I want to share a bit of what she taught me about al-Andalus.

 “Cordoba, by the beginning of the tenth century, was an astonishing place, and descriptions by both contemporaries and later historians suffer from the burden of cataloguing the wonders,” she wrote in The Ornament of the World. It was nearly half as big as Baghdad, the largest city of its day. It held hundreds—maybe thousands—of mosques. Running water from aqueducts supplied nine hundred public baths. The goldfish in the palace ponds ate 12,000 loaves of bread. The paved streets were lit all night. The postal service used carrier pigeons. The munitions factory made 20,000 arrows a month. The market held tens of thousands of shops, including bookshops: Seventy scribes worked exclusively on producing Qurans. The Royal Library in Cordoba, just west of the Great Mosque, was said to contain 400,000 books in 976. (By comparison the greatest Christian library of the time, at Bobbio, Italy, held 690 books.)

Menocal took the title of her book from a poem by the nun Hrosvit of Gandersheim, who met an ambassador from Cordoba in 955 at the German court of Otto the Great. “The brilliant ornament of the world shone in the west,” Hrosvit wrote. “Cordoba was its name and it was wealthy and famous and known for its pleasures and resplendent in all things, and especially for its seven streams of wisdom.”

Significantly, only about 50 percent of Cordoba’s 100,000 residents were Muslim. Among the caliph’s viziers, or advisors, was Hasdai ibn Shaprut, who was Jewish, and Bishop Racemundo (the ambassador Hrosvit met), who was Christian. The Quran teaches that, since Moses and Jesus had both been given books by God, Jews and Christians were fellow “Peoples of the Book,” and thus to be tolerated. In al-Andalus, Menocal explained, they “were dealt with under the special terms of a dhimma, a ‘pact’ or ‘covenant’ between the ruling Muslims and the other book communities living in their territories.” They were not forced to convert, but could practice their religions—as long as they did so quietly and didn’t proselytize. Other than having to pay taxes—which Muslims did not—they were not excluded from the city’s social or economic life. They could, and did, fight in the army. Depending on the ruler’s interpretation of the law, they could advance to the highest political posts, as Hasdai and Racemundo did.

Lecturing on her work in the faux-Gothic humanities center at Yale University, Menocal marveled at the fact that medieval Spain has suddenly become relevant. “We now inhabit a previously inconceivable universe, a universe in which the study of the history of medieval Spain can shed light on modern political problems. What does al-Andalus mean? It’s either about 'conviviencia' or 'reconquista,' either about how the three Abrahamic religions could coexist or how they could not.”

“The issue that’s interesting in this period,” Menocal told me the next morning, as she bustled about her office grabbing up papers to take to a departmental meeting, “is how one carves out the wherewithal to have the coexistence of three monotheistic religions that are by definition intolerant.

“Islam arises under conditions where they’re a priori already dealing with these two other monotheistic religions,” she continued. “Medina had a huge population of Jews. For whatever reasons—and they are real political reasons—Islam created the dhimma. I think it does translate into something we could call tolerance. It’s discriminatory, but pretty good, especially in comparison with the other possibilities.

“In Spain it was applied generously, and it provided the basis for much more complex forms of cultural interaction.” Arabic was the lingua franca, not just the language of religion. “To Christians, it was fascinating and very attractive to have this language that was flexible enough to write erotic poetry with and to speak to God with. There’s this whole unimaginable universe that being Arabophone gave you access to: poetry, all the scientific translations coming from Baghdad…”

Or, as she wrote in The Ornament of the World, “This was the chapter of Europe’s culture when Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived side by side and, despite their intractable differences and enduring hostilities, nourished a complex culture of tolerance.” In al-Andalus, “men of unshakable faith saw no contradiction in pursuing the truth, whether philosophical or scientific or religious, across confessional lines.”

It was a powerful combination and produced a civilization to whom an attack of the Vikings was like the descent of a flock of red birds--a flock easily chased away.

Join me again next Wednesday at nancymariebrown.blogspot.com for another writing adventure in Iceland or the medieval world.