Bede and his monastery, though, had been doubly washed by the flood-tide of Christ. Not all of the blessings that watered Jarrow had flowed from the ancient heartlands of Christianity. They had flowed as well from Ireland. The conversion of Northumbria, the great Anglian kingdom in which Jarrow stood, owed at least as much to Irish monks as to bishops from the Mediterranean. The same indomitable spirit of self-abnegation that had so impressed the Franks had moved and awed the Northumbrians as well. Bede, for all that he had devoted his life to scholarship, recorded with love and honour the doings of those monks who, inspired by the Irish example, had lived a sterner life: standing vigil in the icy waters of the sea; braving plague to comfort and heal the sick; communing in the wild with ravens, and eagles, and sea-otters. Although, in the ordering of its calendar and its festivals, the Northumbrian Church had been persuaded to adopt Roman over Irish practice, Bede never doubted that it had been nourished by the traditions of both. The spirit of Columbanus was owed nothing but respect. Theodore, meeting with a bishop who insisted always on travelling humbly on foot, had ordered him to ride whenever he had to make a long journey; but then, giving him a horse, had helped him like a servant up into his saddle. ‘For the archbishop,’ Bede explained, ‘had perfectly recognised his holiness.’23
What, though, might this confluence, this blending of the Roman and Irish, imply about God’s plans for Bede’s own people? This, in the final years of his life, was the question to which the great scholar sought to provide an answer. After a lifetime of studying scripture, he knew exactly where to look. Just as Arab scholars had looked to the life of Moses to help them compose the biography of their prophet, so had Bede, when he sought to make sense of his own people’s history, turned to the Old Testament. Like the Pentateuch, his great work was divided into five books. It cast Britain, an island rich in precious metals, good pasturage and whelks, as a promised land. It told of how the Britons, judged by God and found wanting, had been deprived of their inheritance. It related how the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes, landing in Britain after an exodus across the sea, had served as the rod of divine anger, and thereby come into their own. It described again and again how Northumbrian kings, redeemed from idolatry, had dealt with their pagan enemies much as Moses had dealt with Pharaoh, not merely by inflicting slaughter on them, but by consigning them to a watery grave. ‘More were drowned while trying to escape than perished by the sword.’24 So Bede noted with satisfaction of one particularly decisive Christian victory. If baptism had brought the Angles into membership of the universal Church, then so also, in Bede’s history, had it brought them something else: the hint of a possibility that they might be a chosen people.
Bede could not, of course, as Arab scholars had done, claim a bloodline from Abraham. In Northumbria, there was nothing like the variety of traditions, Jewish, and Samaritan, and Christian, that for so long had been bubbling away together in the great cauldron of the Near East. Bede used, though, what he could. Why had Gregory sent a mission to be the salvation of his people? Because, so Bede reported, he had seen blond-haired boys for sale in Rome’s market and, struck by their beauty, asked from where they came; then, on being told that the slaves were Angles, made a fateful pun. ‘It is fitting,’ he said, ‘for their faces are those of angels – and so they should properly share with the angels an inheritance in heaven.’25 This wordplay, not surprisingly, was much cherished by Northumbrians. When Judgement Day came, they claimed, it was Gregory who would stand by Christ’s side and make plea for them. Bede, though, went further. In his history, he cast the glamour of the angelic over all the kingdoms founded in Britain by those who had made their exodus across the northern sea: Saxon and Jutish as well as Anglian. Not merely a new Israel, they were lit by something of the blaze of the heavenly. Such, at any rate, was Bede’s hope. To many, it would have seemed a vain one. The Angles, let alone the Saxons and the Jutes, did not think of themselves as a single people. Their lands remained, in the wake of their baptism, what they had always been: a patchwork of rival kingdoms, governed by ambitious warlords. Yet the allure of Bede’s vision would prove too bright to be snuffed out. In time, the Saxons and the Jutes would indeed come to think of themselves as sharing a single identity with the Angles – and even to accept their name. Their kingdoms, following their union, would be known as Anglia and, in their own language, Englalonde. Just as the inheritance of scripture had inspired a momentous new configuration of identities in the Near East, so also in Britain. The elements of Exodus, so evident in the stories that Muslims told of their origins, were shaping, at the far end of the world, the cocoon of myth in which another people were being formed: the English.
A Clash of Civilisations
Bede knew nothing of Islam. Its empire was too far distant. Even the Byzantines, as the inhabitants of Constantinople called themselves, cared little for the details of what their Muslim enemies actually believed. Islam, so they assumed, was merely another head sprung from the hydra of heresy. As such, it merited nothing from Christians but disdain and contempt. Bede, though, in his monastery beside the remote northern sea, could not even be certain of that. Vaguely, from his study of scripture and from the reports of pilgrims to the Holy Land, he had a sense of the Saracens as a pagan people, worshippers of the Morning Star; but it was their prowess as conquerors that most concerned him. Their destruction of Carthage, Bede knew, had been only a waypoint. In 725, in the final entry of a chronicle that had begun with the Creation, he recorded further details of their onslaughts. That they had launched an attack on Constantinople itself, and only been foiled after a three-year siege; that Saracen pirates had come to infest the western Mediterranean; that the body of Augustine had been transported to Italy in a desperate attempt to keep it safe from their depredations. Then, four years later, the appearance in the sky of two comets, trailing fire as though to set the whole north alight, seemed to Bede a portent of even worse: that the Saracens were drawing closer. And so it proved.
In 731, the great monastery founded by Columbanus at Luxeuil was raided by Arab horsemen. Those monks who could not escape were put to the sword. A mere two decades had passed since the first landing on Spanish soil of a Muslim warband. In that short space of time, the kingdom of the Visigoths had been brought crashing down. Christian lords across the Iberian peninsula had submitted to Muslim rule. Only in the mountainous wilds of the north had a few maintained their defiance. Meanwhile, beyond the Pyrenees, the wealth of Francia had tempted the Arabs into ever more far-ranging razzias. The daughter of the Duke of Aquitaine had been captured and sent to Syria as a trophy of war. Then, in 732, the Duke himself was defeated in pitched battle. Bordeaux was put to the torch. But the Arabs were not done yet. On the Loire, tantalisingly close, stood the richest prize in Francia. The temptation proved too strong to resist. That October, despite the lateness of the campaigning season, the Arabs took the road northwards. Their target: the shrine of Saint Martin at Tours.
They never made it. Martin was not a saint lightly threatened. The prospect that sacrilegious hands might tear at Martin’s shrine was one fit to appal any Frank. Sure enough, north of Poitiers, the Arabs were confronted by a force of warriors. Motionless the phalanx stood, ‘like a glacier of the frozen north’.26 The Arabs, rather than withdraw and cede victory to a Christian saint, sought to shatter it. They failed. Broken on the Franks’ swords, and with their general among the slain, the survivors fled under cover of night. Burning and looting still as they went, they retreated to al-Andalus, as they called Spain. The great tide of their westwards expansion had reached its fullest flood. Never again would Arab horsemen threaten the resting-place of Saint Martin. Even though their raids across the Pyrenees would continue for decades to come, any hopes they might have nurtured of conquering the Frankish kingdom as they had won al-Andalus were decisively ended. Instead, it was the Franks who went on the attack. The victor at Poitiers had a talent for ravaging the lands of his enemies. Although Charles ‘Martel’ – ‘the Hammer’ – was not of royal stock, he had forged for himself a dominion that left the heirs of Clovis as mere hapless ciphers. North of the Loire, he was the master of a realm that fused two previously distinct Frankish kingdoms, one centred on Paris, the other on the Rhine; now, in the wake of Poitiers, he moved to bring Provence and Aquitaine securely under his rule as well. Arab garrisons were scoured from the great fortresses of Arles and Avignon. An amphibious relief-force sent from al-Andalus was annihilated near Narbonne. The fugitives, desperately trying to swim back to their ships, were pursued by the victorious Franks and speared in the shallows of lagoons. By 741, when Charles Martel died, Frankish armies had the range of lands stretching from the Pyrenees to the Danube.