The Saracens had arrived.
The Full English
In the event, two sieges were required to wrest Carthage from Christian rule. After the city had been captured the second time, and its inhabitants slaughtered or enslaved, its conqueror razed its buildings to the ground. The masonry was then loaded into wagons and carted along the bay. There, on a hill, stood the small town of Tunis. Long in the shadow of Carthage, its time had now come. The building of a new capital from the rubble of the old proclaimed the triumph of Islam in one of the strongholds of the Christian West: the home of Cyprian, of Donatus, of Augustine. Such a thing was not meant to happen. For many centuries, the Christians of Africa had tended the flame of their faith. Just as the Israelites had followed Moses through the desert, so had they, members of the pilgrim Church, been guided through the centuries by the Holy Spirit. But now a new people, warriors who themselves claimed to be on an exodus, had seized the rule of Africa; and the Africans, for the first time in four hundred years, found themselves under the rule of masters who scorned the name of Christian. As in Jerusalem, so in Tunis, the conquerors did not hesitate to proclaim that a new revelation, God-given and uncorrupted, had superseded the old. It was not churches that were built out of the demolished walls and columns of Carthage, but places of worship called by the Arabs masajid: ‘mosques’.
Yet even as the ancient heartlands of Christianity were brought to submit to Saracen rule, new frontiers lay open. Refugees from the muhajirun who settled in Rome did not necessarily stay there. Some three decades before the fall of Carthage, a Greek from Paul’s home town of Tarsus, a celebrated scholar who had studied in both Syria and Constantinople, took ship for Marseille. Theodore brought with him a sense of ancient horizons. He could reminisce about camels laden with watermelons in Mesopotamia, the tableware used by Persians, the cities visited by Paul. The further north he went, travelling under royal permit through Francia, so the more evocative of scripture his memories were liable to seem. Yet Theodore, sent by the pope to take up a distant and arduous posting, was never merely a foreigner. The bonds of the universal Church held true. In Paris, over the winter, Theodore was hosted by the city’s bishop. Then, with the coming of spring, he headed on northwards. Late in his sixties though he was, and feeling the strain of travel, he embarked for his ultimate destination: ‘an island of the ocean far outside the world’.19 Theodore was heading for Britain.
And specifically for the kingdom of Kent. Canterbury, a complex of Roman ruins and thatched halls in the far south-east of the island, might not have seemed the obvious seat for a bishop who claimed a primacy over the whole of Britain. It was, however, conveniently located for Rome; and it was from Rome, back in 597, that a band of monks sent by Pope Gregory had arrived in Kent. Britain, the home of Pelagius and Patrick, boasted ancient Christian roots; but many of these, in the centuries following the collapse of Roman rule, had either withered or been pulled up and trampled underfoot. Germanic-speaking warlords, carving out kingdoms for themselves, had seized control of the richest third of the island. Calling themselves variously Angles, or Saxons, or Jutes, they had been proudly and swaggeringly pagan. Rather than accept the Christianity of the conquered natives, as the Franks had done, they had scorned it. All the same, they had kept a careful eye on the world beyond their shores. They had been alert to the potency of Frankish kingship, and to the allure of Rome. When the pope’s emissary arrived in Britain, he had been given a cautious welcome. The king of Kent, after contemplating the mysteries revealed to him by Augustine, and weighing up the various opportunities that acceptance of them promised, had submitted to baptism. Over the following decades, a succession of other warlords across eastern Britain had done the same. Naturally, it had not been plain sailing. The tide had ebbed as well as flowed: the occasional bishop, caught out by an abrupt reversal of royal policy, had been forced to flee; the occasional king, cut down by a pagan rival, had been ritually dismembered. Nevertheless, by the time of Theodore’s arrival in Canterbury, a majority of the Saxon and Anglian elites had tested the Christian god to their satisfaction. Like a sparrow flying swiftly through a hall and out again, into the storms of winter, so the brief life of man had seemed to these lords. ‘For of what went before it or of what comes after, we know nothing. Therefore, if these new teachings can inform us more fully, it seems only right that we should follow them.’20
The dimensions opened up by this decision were not exclusively those of the afterlife, however. The enthronement as archbishop of Canterbury of a scholar who had studied in Syria provided converts in Britain with the glimpse of a thrillingly exotic world. Travelling with Theodore from Rome had come a second refugee, an African named Hadrian; and together they set up a school at Canterbury that taught both Latin and Greek. ‘Eagerly, people sought the new-found joys of the kingdom of heaven; and all who wished to learn how to read scripture found teachers ready at hand.’21 Such was the tribute that Bede, a young Anglian monk, felt moved to pay them in the wake of their death. Bede himself, a man of prodigious learning, offered living testimony to the sense of possibility that the two exiles had between them done so much to foster. Wistfully, in his commentaries on scripture, he would mourn that Arabia or India, Judaea or Egypt were places that he would never live to see; but then, in the same breath, rejoice that he could read about them instead. Time as well, from its beginning to its end, was his to measure and calibrate. Faced by a confusing multitude of dating systems, Bede saw, more clearly than any Christian scholar before him, that there was only the one fixed point amid the great sweep of the aeons, only the single pivot. Drawing on calendrical tables compiled some two centuries earlier by a monk from the Black Sea, he fixed on the Incarnation, the entry of the divine into the womb of the Virgin Mary, as the moment on which all of history turned. Years, for the first time, were measured according to whether they were before Christ or anno Domini: in the year of the Lord. The feat was as momentous as it was to prove enduring: a rendering of time itself as properly Christian.
No less than the Muslim general who had ransacked Carthage to build the mosques of Tunis, Bede believed himself to be living in an age of divinely ordained transformation. Jarrow, the monastery in which he spent most of his life, stood at what had once been the northernmost limits of Roman power, and had been built by Frankish architects out of the remains of ancient fortifications. Bede could not help but live with an awed sense of the sheer improbability of all that had been achieved. A mere generation had passed since Jarrow’s founding. Now, beside the mud and sand of a great estuary, the chanting of psalms could be heard above the keening of sea birds; now, in a land only lately brought to Christ, a library was to be found as large as any in Rome. The wonder of it never ceased to move Bede. Kings had been known to break up silver dishes and share the fragments out among the poor; noblemen to lavish plunder on touring the great centres of Christian learning. Jarrow’s founder, an Anglian lord named Biscop Baducing, had himself travelled six times to Rome, and brought back ‘a boundless store of books’,22 as well as embroidered silks, the relics of saints, and an Italian singing-master. When Theodore and Hadrian travelled to Canterbury, Biscop had been by their side. The request that he serve the new archbishop as his guide had come from the very top: the pope himself. Even Biscop’s name had been latinised, to Benedict. No one in Britain had been quite so Roman for a very long time indeed.