Entering late antiquity, 540-600. Generations 428-430

Many people alive in this time felt that something was coming to an end. A monk called Gregory, who went on to become pope in 590, wrote that the world ‘was growing old and hoary, hastening to its approaching death’.

He had good reason to say so. These were troubled times.

The latest set of troubles began in the year 536. From Ireland across to China, cold weather and crop failures were reported. It was a year without a summer. The historian Procopius, based in Constantinople, wrote: “during this year a most dread portent took place. For the sun gave forth its light without brightness… and it seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse, for the beams it shed were not clear”.

Evidence from ice cores says that it was caused by a volcano – and more to were to follow in the next five years.

Another source of trouble was the continuing migrations. The changing climate wasn’t a cause of the migrations, but may have exacerbated them. The edges of the Roman Empire – the rivers Danube and Rhine in central Europe, for example, had long been a fragile membrane, with the Empire in the settled agricultural lands surrounding the Mediterranean, and the more mobile alliances of peoples living on the less cultivatable land beyond. The peoples living just beyond the border were traditionally paid to stay put, but that system had already broken down. A couple of centuries previously the groups living beyond the frontier had found out how to work around the Roman policy of divide and rule. They formed alliances, too large for the Roman army to easily defeat, and then either invaded or negotiated a settlement of land within the Empire itself.

And the migrants kept on coming. Around 540 it was the Avars, originating from the Eurasian steppe. They moved into the Hungarian plain in particular, and in so doing displaced the Lombards who were the current occupants. The Lombards then moved south and invaded northern Italy. This region was already suffering from Justinian’s brutal recovery of it from the previous wave of invasions (by the ostrogoths), and so had nothing left to resist the next set of incomers. The Lombards moved in and used it as a base for further expansion. Part of northern Italy is still known as Lombardy.

And it got worse. Like the Mongols seven hundred years later, the Avars brought the bubonic plague. It reached Europe and the Mediterranean in 541, and was devastating. The creaking bureaucracies of the Roman Empire based in Constantinople and the Sasanian Empire based in Ctesiphon had to cope with a reduction in tax revenues resulting from the loss of up to a third of the populations. The revenues that were used to pay the armies were reduced, and consequently so were troop numbers.

The economic basis of the Roman and Persian empires was agricultural surplus. The estates produced more food than the inhabitants could eat, and paid taxes to the central administration in Constantinople or Ctesiphon. The richest agricultural region was in the middle east, between the two empires. So it made sense to concentrate what was left of the armies there. This was a period of continual war between Constantinople and Ctesiphon, to gain control of the near east from Anatolia to Mesopotamia. Sometimes the Persians took control, at others the Romans. The conflict must have been a drain on resources and difficult to sustain with everything else that was going on.

One of the other things that was going on was endless argument among christians. Christianity had been the official religion of the Roman Empire since 313, but that was a mixed blessing to most christians, as there were many versions of their faith. Empires, it would seem, are not good with ambiguity. So the continual arguments about the nature of Jesus (for example, was he a human like the rest of us, or divine and co-eternal with God, or both?) were not welcome. Anyone who strayed from the official view of the Roman church (that Jesus incarnated in a physical body but was also divine) was deemed a heretic.

Pope Gregory adhered to a strand of christianity that had more successfully integrated into the Roman church. The happiest period of his life, he said, was when he could shut all the troubles out and get on with being a monk. He followed in the footsteps of Benedict of Nursia, who died around 545. Benedict had pursued the ascetic strand of christianity and formalised it into a rule, which he applied in his new monastery at Monte Cassino in the south of Italy. His rule book had 73 chapters, covering the varieties of monasticism, the authority of the abbot, how to manage the day-to-day life of the monastery, even down to what the monks should wear in bed. Each monastery was a self-contained unit, answerable to its abbot.

Gregory turned his own family estate into a monastery – which for me is a clue as to what was going on. This was a continuation of the Roman economic model, of an estate providing an agricultural surplus. The estate was no longer the property of one aristocratic family, but was a monastery ruled by an abbot (or abbess). When times grew hard in the territories around Rome as the Lombards ventured further south, Gregory could call on the surplus from the monasteries to feed the displaced people. His success in doing so led to the foundation of the Papal States, a swathe across central Italy ruled directly by the papacy for the next 1400 years.

Gregory is also the source of one of the best-remembered bad puns from late antiquity. The story goes that he saw some blond slaves in the slave market in Rome. On enquiring where they were from, he was told they were Angles. ‘Not Angles but angels’, he is said to have replied. Gregory sent one of his monks, by the name of Augustine, to the land of the Angles to convert the pagans. Augustine set up his first monastery in Canterbury. Perhaps that set the stamp for christianity in England – the monastic system. And maybe that is why, a millennium later, Henry VIII targeted the monasteries. They followed the Roman model, owned large tracts of rich agricultural land across the country and did not answer to the king.

Emperor Justinian also had the basilica of Hagia Sofia built in this period, after its predecessor was burned down in riots. Later it was converted to a mosque, but the original structure is still there.

Generations 453-455, 1040-1100. Constantinople calls for help

(As I said in my last post, I feel that I am travelling without a map. This post is an outline map. If it was in a book it would be in a textbox, next to the main narrative. It gives the background for the story I am interested in, which is not about kings and battles but ideas and perceptions.)

During the eleventh century there was an unstoppable movement of people expanding out from central Asia, and another uncannily similar one in northern Europe. Constantinople was caught between them, and suffered the attentions of both.

Let’s look at the Asian one first. For a long time the caliphs in Baghdad had bought boys in the slave markets on the northern border of their empire, from what is now Turkmenistan. They were mistrustful of local arab or persian vested interests and so chose an imperial guard who would be loyal to them alone.The boys were kept separate and trained to be the caliph’s personal bodyguard. They were known as the mamluks, the slaves. For most people in Baghdad the mamluks were the nearest they got to the caliphate. Eventually the caliph moved them out of Baghdad to Samarra, and then moved there to be with them.

The qualities that made the mamluks so desirable as elite soldiers were there also in the people left behind. They were brave and strong. One clan, the Seljuks, expanded out of Turkmenistan in 1040 and became known as the Seljuk Turks. They soon adopted islam, in a rough-and-ready version that suited them. They had no written language and didn’t bother to learn Arabic, the language in which the Qu’ran was written. In their rapid wave of conquest they left the caliphate alone and adopted the title of sultans, the sword arm of the caliphate.

Khorasan province, over the border from Turkmenistan in northern Persia, was undergoing a cultural renaissance at this time. The Seljuk prince to whom it was assigned appointed a brilliant Persian administrator, Nizam al-Mulk. When the prince became sultan in 1053, he took his accomplished secretary with him. In so doing, he was playing to the strengths of each culture. The Seljuks were the fighters, the sultans, the Persians with their sophisticated culture were the viziers, the administrators. And the Arabs, with their legacy going back to Mohammed four hundred years previously, carried the law.

Nizam al-Mulk (meaning ‘Order of the Realm’) organised tax collection, set up communication systems and a police force. But he is most remembered for the establishment of institutes of higher education. They were named ‘nezamiyah’ after him. They were sponsored by the ruling families and the elites.The brilliant thinker Al-Ghazali, whom we have already met, was appointed to run the nizamiyah in Baghdad in 1091.The nezamiyah inspired the establishment of madrasas across the muslim world, and some say that European universities can also be traced back to them.

Image courtesy of the Textile Museum, Washington DC, USA

The new sultan was named Alp Arslan, ‘heroic lion’, by his troops. He was over six feet tall. It was said that he grew his moustache so long that when he rode his horse it flew behind him like twin braids. Alp Arslan and his army moved along the southern shores of the Caspian Sea, along the edges of the Empire. By 1068 they had reached the Byzantine Empire in Anatolia.

Well, now we call it the Byzantine Empire. At the time it saw itself as a continuation of the Roman Empire, tracing its lineage back to Emperor Constantine and beyond. This was where the Roman Empire had adopted christianity. The current emperor, Romanos IV Diogenes, decided to take the invaders on.

With a large but ill-equipped, undisciplined army he was able to keep them at bay for three years. Alp Arslan was wary of confronting Romanos head-on, but the two armies eventually met at Manzikert in what is now eastern Turkey in 1071. Romanos was unlucky, lost the battle, was captured and brought to Alp Arslan. Surprisingly, Alp Arslan did not kill him but released him with the promise of a large ransom.

Manzikert is just north of Lake Van, below the ‘E’ of Armenia. Image courtesy of Muslim Heritage. 

Romanos IV did not survive the humiliation on his return to Constantinople. He was deposed, blinded and exiled. He died of his wounds from the blinding, in 1072 at the age of 42. Alp Arslan himself died the same year and at same age, murdered while on campaign in his ancestral homelands of central Asia.

The victors named their new territory the Sultanate of Roum, after the Roman Empire that they had won it from. In time it became known as Turkey.

Now we need to skip across a continent, to north-west Europe. A few centuries earlier a similar group of brave and fierce-looking invaders had moved out from Scandinavia in their beautiful sleek boats. They colonised Greenland and Iceland to the north-west. They travelled Russia through the river systems, making settlements as far south as the Caspian Sea and near Constantinople itself. They also moved down the North Sea and repeatedly raided settlements in the British Isles. In the tenth century one group settled in northern France, where they became known as the men of the north, Norsemen, and eventually Normans. Their land became known as Normandy. They adopted the local language and religion, and then set off on another wave of conquest in the period under discussion. I suspect that 1066, the year of the Norman invasion of England, is engraved on the English national psyche just as strongly as 1789 is in the French or 1776 in the USA.

In the early eleventh century some Normans went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and on the way back found some opportunities to do what they did best: fighting. Sicily was under muslim control and a large part of southern Italy was ruled from Constantinople. In 1047 Robert Guiscard, the sixth son of a minor noble and so with no prospects at home in Normandy, arrived with five horsemen and thirty foot-followers to take his chances. By 1070 he was the ruler of southern Italy and Sicily. A generation later his son was crowned king of Sicily.

The historian Anna Comnena, the daughter of Romanos’ successor Alexius Comnenus, was fascinated and appalled by the Normans. Here is what she had to say about Robert Guiscard:

“This Robert was Norman by birth, of obscure origins, with an overbearing character and a thoroughly villainous mind; he was a brave fighter, very cunning in his assaults on the wealth and power of great men; in achieving his aims absolutely inexorable, diverting criticism by incontrovertible argument. He was a man of immense stature, surpassing even the biggest men; he had a ruddy complexion, fair hair, broad shoulders, eyes that all but shot out sparks of fire. In a well-built man one looks for breadth here and slimness there; in him all was admirably well-proportioned and elegant… Homer remarked of Achilles that when he shouted his hearers had the impression of a multitude in uproar, but Robert’s bellow, so they say, put tens of thousands to flight.” (from the Alexiad of Anna Comnena)

The invasion of Sicily marked the beginning of the slow decline of muslim occupation of Europe. In 1085 the christian rulers of northern Spain captured Toledo from the muslim rulers. Al-Andalus was also in political disarray at this time after the disintegration of the central caliphate in Cordoba in 1031. It was known as the Taifa period, a taifa being a small emirate. From then on, the many states in al-Andalus never became strong enough to resist the christians from the north for long.

Muslim merchants were not permitted to settle in non-muslim countries, but christians and jews were. This period saw the beginning of the Italian trading city-states, first Amalfi, Pisa and Genoa, and later Venice. Another factor leading to the decline of muslim power and the beginning of the end of the muslim golden age?

There was one more destabilising factor in this period, a really strange one. South of the Caspian Sea not far from where Alp Arslan’s army would have marched, a teacher called Hassan-i-Sabbah captured the mountain fortress of El-Alamut, the Eagle’s Nest, in 1090. He was a member of a shia sect (definitely not mainstream shia) and he was going to put a stop to those sunni Seljuks. He didn’t have a large army so he turned to the most effective way he could think of. He trained young men in the art of political murder. They became known as the assassins. They planned each assassination well in advance for maximum impact. Most of them were carried out in public, during Friday prayers. The assassins themselves expected to be killed straight after they had accomplished their mission, as indeed they invariably were. Nizam al-Mulk, Alp Arslan’s secretary, was one of their victims. The assassins continued their activities, adding another layer of fear in an already uncertain world, until the Mongol invaders captured El-Alamut over a century later.

This is the context of the Crusades, which began in 1095. The Seljuk Turks with their robust version of islam were less tolerant of pilgrims to Jerusalem than the shia Fatimid caliphs, based in Cairo, whom they replaced. The news of harsh treatment at the hands of unbelievers began to filter back to Europe. Secondly Romanos’ successor as Emperor of Constantinople, Alexius Comnenus, decided to overcome his dislike of the papacy and ask for help against the Turks. He was concerned that otherwise they might be wiped off the map. He sent a delegation in 1095, to meet the pope at Piacenza.

Alexius Comnenus

The request reached a pope who had difficulties of his own. Pope Urban continued the work of his predecessors, trying to carve out the authority of his church and impose it on rulers such as Robert Guiscard and the equally troublesome German Emperor. Giving them all an external enemy seemed a perfect opportunity. But not to save Constantinople: Jerusalem would be the target. Recover the holy places from the saracens! (even though they had been under saracen control for the last 400 years).

He launched the idea in a speech at Clermont in central France in 1095. As an incentive, he announced that those who agreed to do this from devotion rather than the prospect of honour or gain would be absolved of their sins when they died. In other words, it didn’t matter what dreadful things they did while on crusade because they would be going to heaven anyway. And some dreadful things were done.

The appeal was successful way beyond Urban’s expectations. The main crusader army set off two years later, in 1097. Ironically, the vanguard of the army were Normans, some of whom were related to Robert Guiscard. No wonder Alexius Comnenus didn’t let them in when they arrived at Constantinople.

Note: much of this post is based on chapter 8 of Destiny Disrupted, a history of the world through islamic eyes by Tamim Ansary. Highly recommended.

Going off the edge of the map. 1100 CE

So far in our story there has been a largely agreed-to narrative.

We began in the current generation, generation 500, with its unprecedented level of interconnectedness and availability of information. As we explored back through the twentieth century we saw how technological innovations, initially available only to the rich, eventually empowered so many more of us. Mobile phones, computers, washing machines, air travel, for example.

Then we moved back through the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century. This saw technological breakthroughs and also a change in thinking. Areas previously deemed off-limits to the uninitiated were now open to question. Charles Darwin, a country vicar living in the south of England, wrote ‘The Origin of Species’ and sparked a furore which still continues in some places.

The eighteenth century saw the Enlightenment. Some people felt empowered to question established ways of organising society and describing reality. They wrote about it and talked about it in the coffee shops of Paris, London and elsewhere. The Enlightenment also saw the birth of a powerful idea, that no man has the right to own another. (Women were a grey area but the principle was established. It took another century for the same rights to be extended to them.) The same expansive sense sent men around the world. Australia and New Zealand were colonised by Europeans. Clipper ships brought cargoes of tea and spices from the East to London and Rotterdam.

And so we can continue back with a recognisable strand of events, each generation building on the achievements of the previous one. The story has been agreed. Most history books that we read will pick up on a part of this narrative.

But I have reached a break. In the year 1100 the largest city in Europe was Cordoba. I never knew that! This wasn’t covered in any history lesson I remember. In comparison to the Europe we have largely focused on so far, the muslim world of 1100 was vast. A scholar from northern Persia could travel to Baghdad or Damascus (both much bigger cities than Cordoba),  meet someone from Toledo there, and converse in their common language of Arabic to exchange ideas and experiences.

My problem is that I can’t find the map of the world I am about to enter. I have found a lot of sources, but they all tell slightly different stories. The maps don’t quite match each other, and there are a lot of blank spaces. But while the lack of a map makes this world more difficult to explore, it also is much more interesting for me.

I will have to abandon the approach of one generation at a time. Perhaps because the muslim world is so big, ideas and innovations no longer fit into tidy twenty-year slots. So the next entry in the blog will explore the world-changing events that occurred between 1050 and 1100 (or thereabouts).

Generation 457, 1120-1140. Creativity in turbulent times

Stories from this generation illustrate the fragility of the historical record, how some events are remembered, some writings are preserved and others are lost.

Some that did survive were the works of Averroes, or Ibn Rushd, written in al-Andalus a couple of generations later than this one, towards the end of the twelfth century. His older friend the vizier introduced him to the caliph, who invited him to write a summary of the works of Aristotle as they were difficult to understand. These summaries were translated into latin and caused convulsions in northern Europe in the next century.

The vizier who introduced Averroes to the caliph was called Ibn Tufayl and he lived in this generation. Ibn Tufayl was an accomplished man in his own right – but most of his writings are lost and so he is a lesser figure in our story.

One writing of Ibn Tufayl’s that has survived, however, is a story about a baby boy who was abandoned on a desert island. ‘Hayy ibn Yaqzan‘ (‘Alive the son of Awake’) tells how the baby was adopted by a gazelle, grew to adulthood and along the way explored the meaning of life from what he observed around him. The story illustrates the philosophical debates that were flourishing across the muslim world. The theme comes from the writings of Avicenna, a Persian philosopher from a century earlier. However, Ibn Tufayl develops it further. One of the questions explored is reason versus revelation: does learning come from reason, by working it out, or is it divinely inspired, by revelation? Or a combination of the two?

He was not the only creative writer of the time. North of the Almohad caliphate and south of the Pyrenees was the christian kingdom of Navarre, including the town of Tudela. A jewish poet and philosopher called Judah Halevi lived there. Here is one of his poems, a wry look at his greying hair:

One day I observed a grey hair in my head;
I plucked it right out, when it thus to me said:
‘You may smile, if you wish, at your treatment of me,
But a score of my friends soon will make a mockery of you.’

Nine centuries later, I can relate to that.

Further north still, in Paris, a philosophy teacher and his gifted female student had fallen in love.

Pierre Abelard was a prolific and clear-thinking philosopher whose outspoken opinions often got him into trouble. He was a popular teacher – and at this time a teacher earned his living by donations from the students he could attract to his classes. Paris University had not yet been established. An example of his inability to keep his mouth shut happened when he stayed at the abbey of St Denis near Paris for a while. St Denis is the patron saint of France. Abelard discovered that there were two historical St Denis (or St Dionysus) and told the abbot that they had mixed them up. For pointing this out he was expelled from the abbey.

While at St Denis he wrote a textbook entitled ‘Sic et Non‘, (‘Yes and No’ or ‘On one hand and on the other’) in which he listed 158 questions concerning contradictions in the writings of the church fathers and other classical authorities. He provided no answers – only questions. It has been said that his style of thinking would not be out of place in a 21st century university.

His emotional maturity was more questionable, however. When their affair was discovered by Heloise’s uncle, Pierre decided that they should both take holy orders. Heloise agreed, possibly because she had already decided that they should not live as man and wife. How could either of them continue their academic work with a household and children to look after? Pierre asked Heloise to take the vows first, admitting later that he did not want her to have relationships with other men if he was not allowed to.

The letters of Abelard and Heloise were preserved by accident: a century later they were translated from latin into French by Jean de Meung, the author of the Romance of the Rose.

Abelard and Heloise, from the Roman de la Rose

Heloise’s intelligence and maturity shine from the pages of their letters. Here is one extract, in which she contemplates whether she is guilty by loving him still, a decade after she has taken the veil:

“And, though exceedingly guilty, I am, as thou knowest, exceeding innocent. For it is not the deed but the intention that makes the crime. It is not what is done but the spirit in which it is done that equity considers.”

I wonder what else Heloise wrote, that has been lost.

Abelard and Heloise lived at the beginning of the intellectual flowering in Europe that was stimulated by the translations coming north from the muslim world, particularly al-Andalus. Al-Andalus itself was an outpost of a larger world which was undergoing transition. New invaders from central Asia, the Seljuk Turks, had overrun it in the previous century, from Afghanistan through to Anatolia.

But the Turks adopted the new culture they met. They left the caliphate in place in Baghdad, called themselves sultans (rulers) and employed bureaucrats from Persia as viziers to look after the administration, so that the creativity and learning continued uninterrupted.

Architecture too.             

The Kalyan minaret in Bukhara in what is now Uzbekhistan was built in 1127, under the reign of the Seljuk ruler Mohammed Arslan Khan.

A learned man who may have seen the building work in progress has also become a victim of the vagaries of the historical record. Omar Khayyam lived in Bukhara for part of his life. He died in 1131. He is best known in the west for a long poem, most of which he may or may not have written. The Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayyam was (loosely) translated into English by Edward Fitzgerald in the nineteenth century from a fourteenth-century copy and became immensely popular. It is beautiful and lyrical, a tribute to the richnesses, joys and transitory nature of our human lives.

But Omar Khayyam was not known as a poet in his own lifetime. He was an astronomer and a mathematician specialising in algebra. He found a way to solve cubic equations by means of drawing the problems geometrically. He investigated problems with parallels and cube roots. He wrote textbooks.

This page, now in Tehran University Library, was written by Omar Khayyam. It shows a solution to cubic equations.

Earlier in his life the sultan had appointed him to head up a commission to reform the calendar. The Jalali calendar they devised was the most accurate in the world until the Gregorian reforms in Europe several centuries later. He calculated the length of the year to be 365.24219858156 days. Using 21st-century calculations, this is believed to be accurate to six decimal places. What skill, what confidence could lead him to even attempt such detailed calculation.

‘Rubaiyyat’ means ‘quatrains’ in Persian: verses of four lines. Further quatrains may have been added to the poem after Omar’s lifetime. ‘Khayyam’ means tent maker, which may have been his father’s profession. Here is a verse that was probably written by him during a difficult period:

Khayyam, who stitched the tents of science,
Has fallen in grief’s furnace and been suddenly burned,
The shears of Fate have cut the tent ropes of his life,
And the broker of Hope has sold him for nothing!

A modern bust of Omar Khayyam in Nishapur, Iran, where he was born and his body was buried.

Generation 458, 1140-1160. Measuring the world

This generation saw the appearance of a new style of church architecture in northern France.  Nothing like it had been seen before. As with all innovations, it was able to appear because of a combination of circumstances: the opportunity, the motivation, and the people to put it into effect.

First, the opportunity. The latin world in the previous generation had seen a publishing sensation. Adelard of Bath had travelled to the moslem world in search of learning, as had so many others. He was away for seven years, spending most of them in Antioch in present-day Turkey. There he translated books from arabic into latin. His translation of Euclid’s Elements of Geometry was world changing. If you studied geometry at school, a lot of it can be directly traced back to this book, originally written as a textbook by Euclid of Alexandria in the third century BC. A triangle has 180 degrees? Euclid. If you draw a diameter of a circle, then draw a line from each end of the diameter to any point on the circumference, they will meet at right angles. Ditto, Euclid. Pythagoras’ theorem (3 squared plus 4 squared equals 5 squared is the best known example) can be traced to Euclid’s Elements.

As well as the content of the book (which meant that buildings could be designed more effectively than before) Euclid’s method of reasoning was simple, irrefutable and new to the latin world. He set up a series of five axioms, which now seem self-evident. The first axiom, for example, is that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. He went on to introduce problems, and solved them with logical proofs.

Euclid’s work was well known in the islamic world. This arch from Madrid in al-Andalus, from the previous century, would have been impossible to build without an understanding of the principles of geometry. The pointed arch was a regular feature of islamic architecture.

This prayer niche from the Ibn Tulun mosque in Cairo clearly shows the pointed arch. It was built three hundred years previously, in the ninth century. 

But it was new to the latin north. Adelard’s translation went to the cathedral schools, where it encountered a different culture. It was not by accident that the church was called the Roman Catholic church. It continued the Roman Empire’s love of large structures. Large churches were not new, therefore, but what this technology allowed was a new departure in their construction. Now they could let the light in, applying the same skills in a very different expression.

Saint-Denis in Paris, Sens in Burgundy, Laon in Picardy – all were rebuilt in the new style in this generation. The builders treated the stone as a framework for the windows, using rib-vaulting and pointed arches, and filled the windows with coloured glass (another technique learned from the moslem world).

Here is the interior of Sens cathedral, with the soaring columns and huge windows of the new Frankish style, now known as Gothic.

Five centuries later the architect of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, Sir Christopher Wren, came to the same conclusion. In his ‘Parentalia’ or Memoirs, he writes, ” … what we now vulgarly call the Gothic, ought properly and truly to be named the Saracenic architecture refined by the Christians…”

In 1145 Chartres Cathedral burned down, and the opportunity was taken to rebuild it in the new style. The project was not completed until the following century, but this is where it started. There is a statue of Euclid at Chartres, as one of the representatives of the liberal arts. Luckily for us, Chartres became a backwater over the subsequent centuries, overshadowed by Paris. This meant that nobody could afford to modernise the cathedral, and so it can still be seen largely as it was eight centuries ago.

The word ‘geometry’ literally means ‘earth measuring’. The same rigorous enquiry found different expression in the south of Europe during this generation, but applied to geography (‘earth drawing’). The most accurate map and accompanying description of the world, with the unlikely title of the ‘Book of Roger’ was produced in Sicily in 1154. It set the standard until the time of Mercator, three hundred years later.

The population of Sicily was still largely moslem, as it had been reconquered from the arabs less than a century previously. Palermo, the capital, had several hundred mosques. Like his grandson Frederick II whom we have already met, the Norman king Roger II of Sicily embraced arabic culture. He was dissatisfied with the maps available and in the arabic spirit of enquiry he decided to compile a better one. He commissioned a displaced aristocrat from al-Andalus, Muhammad al-Idrisi, to coordinate the project. Over fifteen years al-Idrisi interviewed travellers, compared their stories and finally put together an authoritative description of the known world, from the Canary Islands to Korea.

There was an engraved map on a large silver plate to accompany the book. In the conventions of the time, north is at the bottom of the map and south at the top. So Asia is on the left, Africa at the top and Europe at the bottom. Both the silver plate and the original book were destroyed in riots shortly after they were finished but many copies remain.

A copy of the book is online here, and it is exquisite (even if you don’t read arabic. The maps are over two pages, so each double-page image is a map and the single pages are text.)

There was  a smaller world map in the book, with Africa at the top and Europe at the bottom. It is said that this map inspired the Portuguese explorers to attempt to sail around Africa, as it is shown surrounded by sea.

There were other towering figures in this generation. Abbess Hildegard of Bingen wrote extensively, composed and corresponded. One of her correspondents was Bernard of Clairvaux, another influential person. He  joined the Benedictine order as a boy and wanted to reform the order, advocating a simpler life. He encouraged the establishment of monasteries in remote areas where they could be self-sufficient, living off the land. He was so driven that in his lifetime he was instrumental in the establishment of six hundred Cistercian monasteries (named after the first monastery he joined at Citeaux). He also campaigned to launch the second crusade to the Holy Land in this generation.

But the order Bernard attempted to reform had its own powerful individual. Peter the Venerable was the abbot of Cluny, the mother house of the previous wave of expansion and establishment of monasteries. He was an open-minded man who advocated understanding the saracens rather than trying to annihilate them. Especially as the second crusade turned out to be a disaster for the christians. He travelled to the Cluniac monastery of Santa Maria La Real in Najera, south of the Pyrenees, and from there to Toledo where the translation movement was in full flood. He persuaded two translators, Robert of Ketton (from a village near Rutland in present day England) and his friend Herman of Carinthia (a region in present-day Austria), to give up their attempts to translate Ptolemy’s Almagest and translate the Quran instead. Called the ‘Law of Mohammed the False Prophet’  the title shows his less-than-dispassionate approach to the subject. But at least the intention was there.

By a strange twist of fate, Robert of Ketton ended up as canon in the church at Tudela, not far from Najera. Tudela is the town from which rabbi Benjamin  set off on his travels in the following generation. So the two men almost certainly knew each other.

There was another English Robert participating in the translation movement at this time. Robert of Chester went to Segovia in al-Andalus. He translated the book that introduced Algebra to the latin north: al-Khwarizmi’s Liber algebrae et almucabola, written three centuries previously.

Generation 459, 1160-1180. Stories and songs

In 1160 Benjamin of Tudela, a rabbi from a small town in Navarre, set off on his travels. He made his way to the port of Tarragona and took a boat up the coast to Barcelona. Barcelona was a beautiful, bustling city with wise rabbis and merchants from all over the Mediterranean. From there he took another boat to Montpellier, another flourishing port, and then on to Genoa.

Genoa he found interesting. It was not ruled by a king but by rulers appointed by the people. It was one of the most successful and powerful cities of the time. Citizens were able to buy a part-share in a trading ship. Although most ships did complete their journeys some did not (due to either bad weather or piracy), and the risk could be spread by investing in more than one ship. It made sense for people from other towns to invest in Genoese ships, and so the city prospered.

From Genoa he continued down the coast, across Italy and by either sea or land through the Byzantine Empire and all the way to Jerusalem, where he visited the holy places. He came back via a different route, visiting Alexandria in Egypt and Sicily, then a powerful kingdom. On his travels he met merchants from as far away as England and India. It was an interconnected world, in which the connections were dominated by the Genoese, Pisan and Venetian traders. Benjamin wrote a book about it, effectively a twelfth-century travel guide.

Books were widely available in the world where Benjamin lived. Books in the christian north were written on vellum (calfskin) or parchment (sheepskin),  materials so valuable that they were often scraped for re-use. The moslem world used paper, a technology they had picked up from the Chinese. Paper was cheaper to produce and widely available. Purchases in the markets were wrapped in paper, just as they are today. No wonder libraries in the arabic-speaking world could contain thousands of books while it was rare for a library in the north to have even a few hundred.

The technology of paper making gradually spread north from al-Andalus, as there were extensive contacts between the two worlds. And this generation saw the flowering of another influence from al-Andalus that made its way across the Pyrenees.

The themes of the love songs of the troubadours can be traced back to arabic love poetry. Music, song and composition were a major ingredient of court life, and visitors from Provence and Aquitaine took some of the richness back home with them. Back home others took up the baton, and started composing and performing.

Troubadours came from all backgrounds. Many were from noble families, but not all. Take Bernart de Ventadorn, for example. He was probably the son of a baker, who became attached to the court of the count of Ventadorn in central France. He composed poems of unrequited love dedicated to the countess, Marguerite de Turenne.

One of them begins:

‘When I see the lark moving

His wings with joy towards the light,

then forget and let himself fall

From the sweetness that enters his heart

Oh! What great envy I feel

Toward whomever I see who’s glad!’

The poem continues with laments at the hard-hearted rejection of his love by the lady. So perhaps it is not surprising, after many poems on this theme,  that he had to leave Ventadorn.

He joined the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine, who had married Henry II of England, and travelled with her entourage. Eleanor had grown up in the rich world of cultural exchange with al-Andalus, and she took that richness with her to England. The troubadours in her court, including Bernart, there encountered the stories of King Arthur and adapted and embellished them. Chretien de Troyes, another troubadour at the court, added Lancelot to those stories.The stories of King Arthur and his court were immensely popular over the following generations. And so the whole genre of courtly love began, with its themes of knights and ladies, of quests and trials, and unattainable love.

Between them, Henry and Eleanor controlled large parts of eastern France as well as England: from Aquitaine in the south through the Limousin and Anjou, up to Normandy and Brittany. During this period Eleanor sided with her sons against her husband in a war for control of these huge territories. When Henry eventually defeated them, Eleanor was imprisoned for sixteen years until Henry died in 1189.

The king of France sided with Eleanor and her sons, for obvious reasons. Such a powerful vassal as Henry was clearly to be resisted. This had another consequence for our story. Henry recalled all the English students from Paris University. In 1167 the students set up the University of Oxford, a place where there was already a tradition of learning. Oxford thus became the third European university after Bologna and Paris.

And there was plenty to study. The liberal arts (from ‘liber’, meaning book, not liberalism) was expanding with the steady flow of translations of greek and arabic texts from Toledo in particular, brought back by intrepid young men like Gerard of Cremona, whom we have already met.

Generation 461, 1200-1220. Blood ties (and learning loosens)

The world of 40 generations ago was so different from the one we live in now, that I would like to recap a little, starting with the catholic north of Europe. Society was divided into three groups: those who work, those who pray and those who fight. Those who fought were defined by blood: either the connections through family bloodlines or in the spilling of blood in honourable combat. When not fighting each other in actual battles, they fought in tournaments, often to the death. Dying was to be feared only when it was dishonourable or when there was no heir to continue the bloodline, it seems. The focus was on continuity through the generations, on perpetuation of family honour. Because of the importance of bloodlines and inheritance, members of this group tended to marry each other. So the lords and their vassals from christian Spain through France to the Rhineland and England were often cousins to some degree or another.

A hereditary king was overlord of a region. His vassals swore allegiance to him, as their vassals did to them. And so the pyramid structure went down to the level of those who work, the lowest of whom were effectively the property of their lord and tied to a particular piece of land.

This led to some anomalies. The king of France was lord of a small area around Paris, but overlord of a much larger area, approximating to modern France. The king of England was wealthier than him and lord of a much larger area, but was vassal to the French king. He  owed him subservience for the lands of Anjou, Normandy and Aquitaine that he had inherited from his parents.

This viewpoint also offers an explanation as to why the crusades were so successful at recruiting soldiers. A crusade was a military venture, a request from those who pray to those who fight. The reward for participation or financial support was absolution from sins. So the fighter did not have any worries about honour. He knew that if he died, he would not besmirch his family’s reputation.

This was the context of the Albigensian crusade, which started its bloodiest phase in this generation. Count Raymond of Toulouse was vassal to king John of England, who was in turn a vassal of king Louis of France. The catholic church was hardly established at all in Occitania, so the people had their own understandings of christianity. As they were just over the Pyrenees from Al-Andalus, the Bible was probably more widely available there. A priest who did not practise what he preached was unlikely to be respected. It was not sufficient that he had been appointed by the church to the cure of their souls. But pope Innocent III was clever and ambitious. A papal legate visiting the region was murdered. This was considered to be Raymond’s responsibility. Carnage followed.

The nobility could not think beyond the importance of blood and the honour associated with its connection or shedding. When the fourth crusade to recover the holy places from the muslims was initially successful, the sultan of Egypt offered the holy land to the crusaders without a fight if they would leave Egypt. The crusaders refused. It would not have been honourable because no blood had been shed. So they stayed at Damietta in the Nile delta, were trapped by the Nile floods and were forced to return home without winning anything. That some of them would have the chance to die well was evidently more important than the ostensible aim of the crusade. One wonders if they would have seen it as a failure in the way that we do now.

Even when a king or emperor was elected, the candidates were from a narrow group defined by blood. And so it was that when it came to selecting the next Emperor of the Germans, the electors (also a hereditary group) chose a young man from Sicily who had never set foot there. This was Frederick II whom we have already met, who also became Holy Roman Emperor.

Frederick spoke Arabic and was immersed in muslim culture. Many of the population of Sicily spoke Arabic and were muslim. Frederick and this island were a bridge between two worlds.

Frederick loved learning, and he was not the only one. Young men with inquiring minds from all over the christian north had made their way south and east, to Al-Andalus in particular, to escape from the rigid society defined by blood. One such was a man called Michael, from Scotland, who probably paid his way by busking. Michael Scot ended up in Toledo and participated in the translation movement there. Frederick employed Michael as his court astrologer, so Michael moved to Palermo.

In Palermo, Michael worked on the translation of a commentary on Aristotle by Ibn Rushd, one of the towering figures of Al-Andalus  known in the west as Averroes, who had died in 1198. Frederick arranged for copies of this translation to be sent to each of the European universities.

The significance of this chain of events cannot be underestimated. It and others like it led to the world we are in now. The works of Aristotle had been incorporated into christian thought from the earliest times, and the inconsistencies between the works of this polytheistic, inquiring Greek and the revealed, devout christian worldview had been quietly ignored. This was no longer possible, especially as Averroes brought the rigorous muslim spirit of inquiry into his commentaries. After all, the Quran encouraged humans to use their faculty of enquiry to better understand the works of God around them:

“If anyone travels on a road in search of knowledge, Allah will cause him to travel on one of the roads of Paradise.”

One such difficulty was: is the world eternal, as Aristotle said, or was it created at a particular point in time, as clearly stated in the Bible? And if the latter, what was God doing beforehand? Which then poses the question of  why  it was appropriate to create the world at one moment and not another. These questions quite simply had not occurred to christians before.  It had been sufficient for them to know that the events described in the Bible had happened. I wonder if exposure to them activated human mental circuitries that had previously been latent or underused in the christian north. No wonder the church tried to ban such discussions with its lists of prohibited subjects.

The collaboration between Frederick and Michael Scot led to another signifiant transfer of knowledge to the north from the muslim world. Leonardo of Pisa, known today as Fibonacci, was sponsored by them. When he was a boy Leonardo lived in Bugia in what is now Algeria where his father worked at the Pisan trading outpost. While in Bugia Leonardo studied Arabic mathematics and as an adult he wrote a textbook of what he had learned, called the Liber Abaci, ‘The Book of Calculation’. This book introduced hindu-arabic numerals to the north instead of the cumbersome roman ones. For example, how do we write fourteen divided by two equals seven? 14 / 2 = 7 or XIV / II = VII? The hindu-arabic numerals are much more economical and versatile. It took a long time, but the new numbering system eventually took on. ( The Fibonacci sequence  of 1,1,2, 3, 5, 8, 13 … for which he is most remembered nowadays was just one example in this book, by the way.). Michael Scot encouraged Leonardo, and the second edition of the Liber Abaci was dedicated to him.

I find it strange that even though I knew that Leonardo of Pisa introduced rather than discovered the new numbering system, I know nothing of the people he learned it from. It is as if they have been airbrushed out of history. I hope to correct this as we go further back in our story, if only to give credit where it is due.

But the muslim world also had an achilles heel in blood ties. Mohammed had replaced tribal bloodlinks with Ummah, the community of believers. After he died the first caliphs were chosen on the basis of merit. But then the blood kicked in, and within a few generations of his death the caliphate became hereditary, but with no agreed line of succession. Brothers and uncles fought among each other, often to the death. Stable transition of government was a perennial problem in the muslim world from then on.

A corner of the christian north explored an alternative way of working together. In 1215 in a field outside Oxford in England an agreement was made between the barons, the church and the king, setting out the rights and responsibilities of each. The norman system of trial by ordeal was replaced by one of trial by jury. One of the clauses of the Magna Carta that is still part of English law says:

“NO Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will We not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the land. We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either Justice or Right.”

Pope Innocent III hated it and repudiated it as soon as he heard of it. But the idea never went away. It was read in the towns every year, renewed by successive kings (initially with great reluctance) and became the basis of the English parliament.

Generation 462, 1220-1240. Turbulent times

So much happened in this generation. In order to even start to make sense of it all, I feel the need for a list. It includes

– the christian reconquest of Spain,

– the Albigensian Crusade in southwest France,

– the emergence of the Franciscan and Dominican friars (both Francis of Assisi and Dominic Guzman died in this generation),

– the flourishing of the troubadours initially in Occitania but  spreading further afield,

– the great gothic cathedrals of northern France, England and across to the Rhineland,

– the founding of more European universities after Paris, Bologna and Oxford a century earlier,

– a papal PR disaster. The pope excommunicated the Holy Roman Emperor, who then went on to recover Jerusalem by negotiation, without any fighting apart from when he was attacked by the christians deprived of a fight.

– Genghis Khan died after destroying so much of central Asian culture that much of it never recovered.

Starting in the west, in the Iberian peninsula. The previous generation had seen the first battle along religious lines between Christians and Moors, at Las Navas de Tolosa. Previously the muslim and christian principalities and dukedoms had formed alliances amongst each other. Remember the name El Cid? That was the name given by the Moors to Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar a century previously. He was one of the many christian lords who fought for the Moors.

But  Las Navas de Tolosa was a turning point, It was christian against muslim for the first time, and the christians won, decisively. The Reconquista gained momentum, as the christian kings pushed the Moors back towards the south of the peninsula. Cordoba, once the greatest city in Europe and capital of the Moorish sultanate of al-Andalus, fell to the christians in this generation. Over the following centuries it declined, its population falling from nearly a million inhabitants to a few thousand by the eighteenth century. The glory days were over. ‘The ornament of the world’ became a backwater. By the following generation the only muslim sultanate left on the Iberian peninsula was Granada, which survived for a couple of hundred years more only by paying a heavy tribute to its christian overlords.

Here is part of the mosque at Cordoba, converted into a cathedral after the reconquest.

The pope had named the christian Reconquista a crusade. ‘Crusade’ meant that anyone who contributed financially or fought in it would be absolved from their sins. A dangerous precedent, which led to abuses over the following generations and was one of the grievances that led to the protestant reformation three centuries later.

Moving to the north of Spain, the troubadours of Occitania travelled south of the Pyrenees to visit the different dukedoms and kingdoms that made up the region. Catalan is now the nearest language to Occitan and is also spoken on both sides of the mountain chain. There were two classes of troubadours – the composers and the players or jongleurs. Although they came from all classes, many of the famous troubadours came from noble families. They represented a whole culture and exchange of ideas. They sang about love, usually an ideal love, and about current events. Their influence spread east to Sicily and north to the Rhine, where they were known as minnesingers (literally, love singers).

But the Occitan language, the language of this rich poetic culture, was a casualty of a tragedy unfolding just north of the Pyrenees. The Albigensian Crusade reached its official end in this generation. It was championed by the king in the north of France, and by 1229 it ended without achieving its primary objective of eradicating heresy. However, after 1229 this region was now firmly part of France and the Occitan language was demoted to a dialect.

Continuing northwards, something extraordinary was happening in northern France, across to England in the west and the Rhineland in the east. This was the time of the gothic cathedrals, soaring structures that used innovations in architecture to create a space that is suffused with light. An architect of the twentieth century memorably said that a house is a machine for living. Walking into one of these cathedrals, it feels like a machine to activate the human connection to the rest of the Creation. The pointed gothic arch was already known in the muslim world, as was the art of coloured glass making. But the cathedral builders of northern Europe created something quite other with these new ideas.

Here is the interior of Reims Cathedral, (image courtesy of Eric Pouhier) completed just before this generation.

How to make sense of all of these events? Where is the narrative, the common thread?

Here is my first attempt.

I think it is to do with the cultural mixing that was going on between the christian and muslim worlds. They carried very different approaches to religion, very different worldviews. For the christians, the yearning was to live a righteous life. There is a timeless quality when you listen to christian devotional music. It soars, just like one of those magnificent cathedrals. The monks, nuns and other practitioners of the religion didn’t care about the ‘how’ or the ‘when’. They felt it and responded to the timeless truths, giving expression to them as best they could.

The muslims had a very different drive.They were given permission to explore the works of God, to understand them and make sense of them and put it all together. Towards this end they had an insatiable thirst for knowledge. They explored the works of the ancient Greeks, the Persians, Indians and Chinese. They translated texts and wrote commentaries, looked for patterns, built devices.

The christian north could not resist this drive to make sense of the Creation that came out of Spain, Sicily and the middle East. The troubadours put it into song. The cathedral builders built structures that had not been seen in the muslim world. And the politicians – kings, popes and barons, tried to put the lid on such dangerous independence of thinking. Those who questioned the authority of the church hierarchy and its sometimes less-than-holy priests were declared to be heretics. The two new mendicant orders, the Franciscans and the Dominicans, escaped the label of heresy because although espousing poverty they never questioned the church itself. They gave their allegiance to the pope. The universities tried to control the dangerous new ideas too. We have seen how the bishop of Paris published a list of forbidden subjects. The fact that these lists were so frequently re-issued suggests that not many people paid attention to them.

So my first understanding of the many different events from this time is that there was an attempt to assimilate a new frequency.

I’ll finish the story of this generation with the papal PR disaster.

One of the largest characters of this time was the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II Hohenstaufen. Despite his German name, he lived in Sicily and was the grandson of  the Norman Roger II. He was known variously as the antichrist, stupor mundi (the wonder of the world) and al-Emberor. Sicily was still largely muslim, and Frederick embraced islamic culture. He learned Arabic. He was an expert on falconry and wrote a book about it, introducing the practice of hooding falcons. It was said that when the muezzin’s call for prayers was heard his court came to a stop, as most of the staff were muslim. He brought a giraffe to northern Italy as part of his retinue, a gift from the Sultan of Cairo. The pope was profoundly suspicious of him, especially as Frederick’s territories bordered the papal states both to the north and the south.

For some reason, Frederick agreed to lead a Crusade to the Holy Land, to attempt to recover Jerusalem which had been retaken by the muslims. As a lever, the pope threatened excommunication if he did not leave by a certain date. The armies gathered in south-west Italy in the summer of 1227 in readiness for the sea crossing. In the summer heat an epidemic took hold in the camp. Frederick attempted to leave but was too ill. As he had failed to meet the deadline, the pope excommunicated him.

Frederick recovered, and despite being excommunicated continued with the crusade. Not only that, by long and patient negotiation he managed to win Jerusalem for the christians, on condition that muslims could still pray there. Because he was excommunicated he was not allowed in any of the churches, but he went in anyway. The patriarch of Jerusalem was furious and refused to meet him. The Knights Templar and Hospitaller weren’t pleased either. They’d been deprived of a fight – and how would they hold on to these territories after Frederick had gone back home? He was pelted with rotten food as he approached their citadel at Acre. He went back to Sicily, only to find that the pope had excommunicated him again and launched a crusade against him. He was popular with the people of southern Italy, however, and defeated the pope’s army.

And so it was that an excommunicated Holy Roman Emperor achieved the aim of the crusade, that nobody else had been able to do, and received no thanks at all for it.

Generation 463, 1240-1260. A man who nearly changed the world

This generation began with one of the moments when the world could have taken a completely different turn – and then didn’t. This backwards history of the human race began with generation 500, now, with the western technology that allows me to write this blog and you to read it. In generation 463 the few who could read and write were from the privileged classes, or came to their attention. Now, in generation 500 I am one of the millions of people who have learned to read and write, and who thanks to the internet can explore huge banks of information that were unimaginable even a couple of generations ago. Who knows how different our story would have been if one man in east Asia hadn’t died after a heavy drinking session.

It is a mystery to me what motivated the Mongols. Genghis Khan had died in the previous generation and at the beginning of this one his successor, his son Ogedei, had been Great Khan for over ten years. He built the city of Karakorum in central Mongolia as a base from which to oversee his enormous empire, which was still expanding. He introduced a currency, tribute, tax collections, and an ambitious communications network. The armies were huge and carried what they needed. Each soldier had a string of horses. They brought their tents, their gers, which could be dismantled and reassembled. What was it that enabled the leaders of these armies to persuade hundreds of thousands of people to leave their homeland, probably never to see it again,  and travel to China, Korea, Vietnam, Burma, central Asia, Persia, Russia, Poland and Hungary? It can’t have been plunder. They were nomads, used to finding what they needed from the land, and moving for new pasture for their herds. Loot would slow them down, an encumbrance of the settled peoples they clearly despised. Whatever it was that drove them, it was a powerful incentive.

As each of the armies moved out they set up a way station every twenty-five miles, where horses would be kept ready if a message had to be carried. A rider arrived, changed horses and continued on to the next station and the next until he was exhausted. Then the message was transferred to another rider who would continue across the vast distances. One such message was carried in 1241 from Karakorum to the armies in Hungary, a distance of about 4000 miles. At an average of 100 miles a day, it probably took just over a month to arrive.

These armies were led by Genghis Khan’s grandson Batu and the most successful single general in history in terms of territory conquered, a man called Subutai. The armies were versatile, disciplined and fast. They used siege engines and gunpowder, learnt from the Chinese, and on their small fast ponies the riders could manoeuvre around the lumbering knights who confronted them, to aim their arrows at the weak points in their armour. They are the only army I know of that won a winter campaign in Russia. They were hard people, used to the cold and seemingly unafraid of dying. They were cruel to those who did not submit immediately, but were willing to work with those who did. A Russian hero from this time is Alexander Nevsky, who cooperated with them and saved many of his people as a consequence, to the disgust of some of the Russian nobility.

Batu Khan and Subutai’s armies destroyed a string of cities in Russia, Poland and the Caucasus, had just overrun Hungary and were poised to move on into the Holy Roman Empire, with the aim of stopping only when they reached the sea. Then the rider came with the message from Karakorum. The Great Khan Ogedei, who was fond of alcohol, had died after a drinking session. A new khan would have to be elected. General Subutai wanted to continue west but was overruled by Batu and the other members of Genghis Khan’s family. The entire army packed up and went back home. It took a few years for a successor to be agreed upon and in the following years the armies concentrated on moving south into Persia and east into China. Europe, despite the inability of its rulers to work together and present a united front against the horsemen, escaped that fate. Who knows what Europe would now be like if Ogedei hadn’t died at that point, leading to the withdrawal of the armies.

The Mongols were pragmatic rulers. As long as the tribute came in, they didn’t mind what belief system the subject peoples adhered to. In Karakorum there were christians, moslems and buddhists, all tolerated. This inspired the pope in Rome to see an opportunity for converts or collaboration against the moslems, as the crusades to the holy land were not going too well. It also led to opportunities for misunderstanding.

The pope sent an emissary, a franciscan friar called Giovanni da Pian del Carpini (known in English as John of Plano Carpini) with a message of peace. He wasn’t to know that the Mongol language had no word for ‘peace’. The nearest translation was ‘submission’. Ogedei’s successor Guyuk Khan sent a reply, which has been preserved in the Vatican Library.

Here it is, written in Persian, Turkish and Arabic. Guyuk Khan refuses to leave the territories the armies have conquered, refuses to convert to christianity and demands tribute from the pope and the other christian princes. Not likely to lead to a meeting of minds.

The focus of attention in this generation seems to have been about power. In the far west of Europe, away from the attentions of the Mongols, a different debate was taking place. A couple of generations previously the English barons had negotiated an agreement with king John. Known as the Magna Carta, it updated and codified the relationship between the three holders of power in England: the monarch, the church and the barons. The concept of separation of powers, which existed before the Norman conquest but had since lapsed, was revived and written down. In this generation king John’s son Henry had tried to evade the obligations of the Magna Carta and a new document was drawn up: the Provisions of Oxford. This was the birth of the English parliament. The Provisions of Oxford even included the idea of elected representatives. Further battles, sometimes physical, between the king and the barons continued over the following generation, but it was as if the idea once expressed would not go away.

Something was being born in the British Isles. Maybe because it was an island, there was even a sense of the nation state long before it emerged elsewhere. Here is a map of Britain from this period, drawn by the chronicler Matthew Paris.

The battle between the three power groups in the British Isles can be traced over the following centuries, through the Reformation three centuries later in which the power of the church was curbed, to the civil war in which the monarchy was restrained, on to the nineteenth century in which the franchise was extended.

Another power struggle was going on in mainland Europe. The church was attempting to stamp its authority. Anyone who did not submit to its structures was designated a heretic. The Albigensian Crusade in southwest France came to an end in this generation, with the siege of the last heretic stronghold at Montsegur in the Pyrenees. However the crusade had not achieved its stated objective of stamping out heresy. During this generation the entire adult population of the Lauragais, the area southwest of Toulouse, was summoned for interrogation by the inquisition. Also during this generation the pope sanctioned the use of torture by the inquisitors for the first time. It would seem that the Dominican friars who were entrusted with the interrogations felt that they needed more powers to achieve their objective. Clearly heresy had not been eradicated.

But maybe the Albigensian Crusade was successful in other ways. The king of France was nominally ruler of this region, but below the level of his overlordship it was a messy picture. The Count of Toulouse was subject to the king of England, and the kings of Aragon had claim to parts of  the east of the Languedoc. After the Albigensian Crusade this region was decisively part of France. I can’t help wondering if in fact this is what the whole venture was mainly about.

Generation 464, 1260-1280. Destruction and brilliance

So much that still resonates with us now can be traced back to this generation.

Let’s start in the oases of central Asia. Earlier in the century the Mongols had devastated a swathe of cities that saw the flowering of Persian culture. Balkh, Bokhara, Gurganj, Merv, Samarkand … They separated out the craftsmen and others with useful skills and sent them to other parts of the empire, to work for them. The women and children were sold as slaves. The able-bodied men were divided into groups, each assigned to a soldier who then killed them. No  mention is made of what happened to the old people. We can imagine they were probably left to die. The cities themselves were destroyed, by breaching dams and flooding them or otherwise breaking the irrigation systems on which they depended. If it was still on a trade route the city might be rebuilt, such as Samarkand. Otherwise the sands blew over them and they existed only in memory, to be rediscovered by archaeologists centuries later.

One family fled from Balkh in what is now northern Afghanistan, ahead of the Tartar tide. By the time we are in now their son was  in Konya in eastern Anatolia, modern-day Turkey. His books of poetry are still read and loved. His name was Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi.

Rumi wrote so many beautiful and wise things. Here are a couple, both of which feel timeless to me:

‘The lion who breaks the enemy’s ranks is a minor hero compared to the lion who overcomes himself.’

‘Little by little, wean yourself. This is the gist of what I have to say. From an embryo, whose nourishment comes in the blood, move to an infant drinking milk, to a child on solid food, to a searcher after wisdom, to a hunter of more invisible game.’

But the Mongol advance continued. Genghis Khan’s grandson Hulagu was given the task of completing his grandfather’s work of conquering the moslem world, and was even more ruthless than Genghis. In 1257 the caliph of Baghdad believed his city was inviolable and refused to surrender to the infidel invaders. Because he had resisted, Hulagu had every non-christian in the city killed. Hundreds of thousands of people were massacred. He spared the christians because his mother, wife and general of his army were all Nestorian christians.

Hulagu sent some of his army to complete what his grandfather had not been able to do, to defeat the small Shia sect known as the Assassins at their mountain stronghold of Alamut south of the Caspian Sea, in modern-day Iran. And here we meet the next brilliant man from this generation.

Nasir al-din al-Tusi was a survivor. He had lived and worked at Alamut for thirty years. The Assassins had a fierce reputation, so it would not have been most people’s choice of residence. When the Mongols arrived, he persuaded Hulagu to sponsor the establishment of an astronomical observatory at Maragha, three hundred miles to the west of Alamut, possibly with the incentive of offering astrological predictions.  However, as we have seen, Maragha then became a centre of learning, attracting scholars from Europe to China.

As well as making contributions to astronomy, al-Tusi invented trigonometry as a separate mathematical discipline. He was interested in evolution, too. And remember Einstein’s famous quote: that energy cannot be destroyed, it can only change its form? Here is al-Tusi’s statement of the same principle, six and a half centuries earlier:

“A body of matter cannot disappear completely. It only changes its form, condition, composition, colour and other properties and turns into a different complex or elementary matter.”

Al-Tusi also made contributions to a debate that was polarising catholic Europe. A new institution had appeared a century earlier, first in Bologna, then in Paris, Oxford and other European cities. The universities were independent of  both emperor and church. Their common language was latin. Scholars grouped around a particular master, who themselves were grouped into faculties: of law, arts, medicine, philosophy and theology, among others.

The faculty of theology grew increasingly alarmed that the other faculties were encroaching on to its territory. In 1270 the bishop of Paris issued a list of thirteen subjects that were out of bounds for discussion by the philosophers. To do so was to engage in heresy. This was one of many lists that were issued during the century – meaning that not much attention was being paid to the prohibitions.

The banned subjects highlight tensions in the world view.  Is everything governed by God, or can a human make their own mind up? How can God possibly even know everything that is going on? Do we learn about God by studying the creation, or by studying christian doctrine? And if by studying the works of God for ourselves, what is the role of the church?

Into this debate came another brilliant thinker. Originally from the province of Aquino in southern Italy, Thomas of Aquino, known now as St Thomas Aquinas came from a noble family. He was sent to Monte Cassino as a child, to train as a priest. There he met the new mendicant order of Dominicans, and joined them. This was not the career path his family had in mind for him. They kidnapped him, took him back home and tried to tempt him away from this ascetic lifestyle choice. However, Thomas was rigorous in his thinking, independent-minded and not likely to be swayed by anything other than more powerful arguments than the ones he put forward. His family eventually gave up the struggle and let him go.

He went on to study at Naples and Paris Universities. He was  meticulous, painstaking and dogged in his researches into the questions that were convulsing Paris, so in the period under discussion the Dominican order sent him back there to try to calm things down. He wrote voluminously. His masterwork, the Summa Theologica, is the most thorough exploration of what it means to be human that I have ever read. He asks, what is happiness, what is joy, what is good and hundreds of other questions. With each question he goes on to ask where do these qualities reside, what are the arguments against, what are those for, what is his conclusion, on and on for three volumes.

In other words, he used the very God-given power of independent thought that the bishop was fulminating against, and so found many of his own ideas condemned by the church.  He probably incorporated enough of the new ideas that were coming from the moslem world that could be safely absorbed by the christian north without causing major ruptures. He steered a middle path. Within a couple of generations his contribution was recognised and he was canonised.

There were other brilliant thinkers in this generation: Roger Bacon in Oxford, Gregory Bar Hebraeus from Ebra in modern Turkey (also now a saint) to name two. But those three remarkable men give a flavour of what a lively time this was.