The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [16]
The Caliph of Cordoba was, technically speaking, suzerain also of northern Spain where, in the kingdoms of Leon and Navarre, the Christians lived in their draughty castles in much the same state of dirt and ignorance as the rest of northern Europe. At regular intervals Arab expeditions would go north to make sure the peace was kept, skirmishing and selectively laying waste to the countryside. This activity was usually carried out to a strict schedule during spring and autumn. In the period of summer truce the Christians would hire Cordoban dentists, hairdressers, surgeons, architects and musicians.
It may have been through the musicians that the Arab style of rhyming poetry and rhythmic music made its way into Europe through Provence in the form of troubadour songs, changing European poetry and music in a decisively modern way. Changed too were styles of dance, now Arab-influenced and more ritualised. Gregorian chant began to give way to harmony and a melodic line which was held in the ‘tenor’ or ‘holding’ voice. At some time before 1050 Guido d’Arezzo gave Arab-style names to musical notes and the lines on which they were written.
A Hebrew manuscript shows a domestic Passover celebrated freely under Spanish Arab rule. The illustration dates from before the Christian Reconquest, when conditions for the Jews became depressingly similar to those elsewhere in Europe.
In 1013 internal rifts in the Arab power structure led to the capture of Cordoba and the end of the Umayyads. The great library was destroyed. True to their Islamic traditions, however, the new rulers permitted the books to be dispersed, together with the Cordoban scholars, to the capital towns of small emirates such as Seville, Zaragoza, Valencia, Badajoz, Granada, Denia and Toledo. There was soon competition between one court and another to provide homes and facilities for the scholars. One Sa’id, writing in Toledo, in the eleventh century, avowed: ‘Conditions in Andalusia are as good as they have ever been.’ In Toledo that was especially true.
In the middle of the eleventh century the three northern Christian kingdoms of Leon, Galicia and Castile, previously split between the warring sons of Ferdinand I, were reunited under Alfonso VI. For the first time the Christians were in a position to attempt to move against the Arabs. Their armies were commanded by the heroic fabled figure of El Cid (from Sidi, Lord), Rodrigo Diaz de Vibar, around whom grew many legends and poems. The myth, encouraged by the Pope who had given blessing to the Reconquest, was that El Cid was the perfect Christian knight, chivalrous, gentle, magnanimous in victory, fighting to destroy the evil, perverted and dissolute Arabs.
Nothing could be further from the truth. According to contemporary accounts, while El Cid may have said his prayers regularly, he was in every other sense a barbarian who raped and pillaged without quarter, teaching the Arabs the art of atrocity for them to use it in return. Ibn Bassam described him as ‘a Galician dog… a man who makes a trade out of chaining prisoners, the flail of the country…. There was no countryside in Spain that he did not pillage.’ El Cid slept by day and terrorised the Arabs by night. Plunder was all.
According to myth it was El Cid who took Toledo in a great and victorious siege. In fact he was elsewhere, fighting as he often did as a mercenary for one Arab ruler against another. Besides, Toledo fell because it wanted to. The resident king had enemies in court who had several times tried to poison him, so he was keen on finding healthier climes. The Christian invader, Alfonso, had previously spent several years in exile at Toledo as a guest of the city. He knew it well, and had friends there. So when he promised the Toledan ruler the kingship of Zaragoza, the gates were