The Ornament of the WorldMuslim armies had first crossed from Africa into Europe long previously, back in 711. Beyond the straits of what would ultimately, after the general who had led the invasion, be known as “Tariq’s Mountain,” or “Jabal Tariq” – “Gibraltar” – there had lain the kingdom of a people named the Visigoths. These, like the Franks, had originally been invaders from beyond the frontiers of the Roman Empire: fiercely, even violently Christian, their kings had ruled from the craggy heights of Toledo, in the very heart of the peninsula, which they had adorned with splendid churches, and termed with soaring pride a “new Jerusalem.” Indeed, believing themselves, to a degree exceptional even by the standards of the times, a chosen people, and aiming to overawe their native subjects, it was the Visigoths, long before Pepin, who had first presumed to anoint their kings with holy oil. All to no avail. For reasons that would later be much debated – an epidemic of sodomy being the favoured explanation – the Visigoths had been abandoned by God. Their armies had been shattered upon the Muslim advance. Their kingdom had been delivered up into the hands of the invaders. Only in the bleakest wilds of the peninsula, in the poverty-stricken mountains of Galicia, in the farthest north-west, had there been left so much as the rump of a Christian state. Secure in their remote fastnesses, the men of this tiny kingdom had succeeded not only in keeping the Muslims at bay, but even, with a painful effort, at clawing back lost territory. Two and a half centuries after it had seemed as though the whole of the peninsula might fall to the invaders, upwards of a third of it had been redeemed for Christendom. The nerve centre of Christian resistance was no longer to be found in the mountains, but further south, on an open plain, within the walls of the ancient Roman fortress of León. Toledo, its crags now as adorned with minarets as they had once been with bell-towers, stood almost on the front line.Yet the Caliph and his advisers, though hardly complacent in the face of this Christian resurgence, felt no great cause for alarm. The men of León, long confined to mountains and desolate plains as they had been, appeared to the Muslims like wolves: dangerous certainly, but only if permitted to intrude from the wilderness that was properly their home. So it was that everywhere along the frontier, raised to stand bristling proof against Christian predators, there loomed battlements and mighty watchtowers: fortifications that the Muslims termed “
husun.” North of these, drear and savage, the House of War; south of them, as blooming a garden as any in the House of Islam, rich with crops, studded with great cities, and adorned with the arts of peace, a “paradise” hailed even by her Christian enemies as “the ornament of the world,”56 the land known to its inhabitants as “al-Andalus.”*Indeed, such was the flourishing condition of Spain’s Muslims that they had long since ceased to depend for their prosperity upon the exploitation of infidels. This was just as well; for increasingly, under the lengthy rule of Abd al-Rahman and of his able and sophisticated son al-Hakam, al-Andalus had come to lose its character as a frontier society. Conversions to Islam, once a trickle, had become a flood. At the start of the tenth century, it has been estimated, the population of al-Andalus was only one-fifth Muslim; by the time al-Hakam died, in 976, that percentage had been reversed.57 The status of Christians in Islamic Spain had always been a second-class one; and certainly, burdened as they were by extra taxes, banned from employment in the state bureaucracy, and saddle-sore, no doubt, from perpetually riding mules, they had hardly lacked for incentives to abandon their ancestral faith. Yet while to be a dhimmi in the House of Islam had always been both expensive and a source of petty humiliations, so also, by the tenth century, had it become something even more debilitating: unfashionable. The Church in al-Andalus had long been thundering against the passion of its flock for Saracen chic; but increasingly, whether translating the scriptures into Arabic, or adopting Muslim names for themselves, or dancing attendance on the Caliph at his court, even bishops were succumbing to its allure.Only in the countryside, far removed from the wealth and glamour of city life, did sizeable numbers of Christians still endure; and they, in the opinion of Muslim sophisticates, were little better than wild beasts. “For when they cast off the yoke of obedience,” so one complained, “it is hard to make them return to it, unless they are exterminated – and that is a difficult, prolonged process.”58 In al-Andalus, the days of living off the fruits of extortion, whether plunder or taxes, were gone for good.There were many Muslims, nostalgic for the time when their ancestors “were admirable and excellent, determined in jihad and eager for God’s rewards, throwing themselves on the Christians in warfare and siege,”