59 who regretted this; but the majority were too busy making money in less strenuous ways to care. The Caliphate may have been politically fractured, but it still offered, to the ambitious merchant, a free-trade area like no other in the world. Far eastwards of al-Andalus it extended, to Persia and beyond, while in the markets of the great cities of Islam were to be found wonders from even further afield: sandalwood from India, paper from China, camphor from Borneo. What was Christian Spain, with her flea-bitten little villages, to compare? Why, unlike their equivalents in Italy, they were not even good for slaves! The Andalusis, whose ancestors, back in the valiant first flush of conquest, had once dispatched thirty thousand prisoners to Damascus in a single train, had long since lost their taste for grubbing around after human prey. Now it was they who were the importers; and a swarm of Christian suppliers, with little else to offer which might serve to tickle Andalusi palates, had competed to corner the market no less eagerly than their Muslim competitors. The fair hair of the Umayyad caliphs, bred of concubines from the distant North, was only one proof of their success. A second was the palace guards who had so alarmed Abbot John; for these were not native Andalusis, but “Saqaliba” – Slavs. In Arabic, as in most European languages, the word was becoming, by the tenth century, increasingly synonymous with human cattle: a reflection of how widely, when demand required it, the tendrils of trade might extend beyond the House of Islam, even to the limits of the House of War.Nothing, indeed, in the fractured Europe of the time, was more authentically multicultural than the business of enslaving Slavs. Wends captured in the wars of the Saxon emperors would be sold by Frankish merchants to Jewish middlemen, who then, under the shocked gaze of Christian bishops, would drive their shackled stock along the high roads of Provence and Catalonia, and across the frontier into the Caliphate. A cosmopolitan perspective was no little help when it came to gauging the likely demands of a sophisticated foreign market such as al-Andalus. Few opportunities were neglected in the struggle to obtain a competitive edge. In the Frankish town of Verdun, for instance, the Jewish merchants who had their headquarters there were renowned for their facility with the gelding knife. A particular specialisation was the supply of “carzimasia”: eunuchs who had been deprived of their penises as well as their testicles. Even for the most practised surgeon, the medical risks attendant on performing a penectomy were considerable – and yet the wastage served only to increase the survivors’ value. Exclusivity, then as now, was the mark of a luxury brand.And luxury, in al-Andalus, could make for truly “fabulous profit.”60 The productivity of the land; the teeming industry of the cities; the influx of precious metals from mines in Africa: all had helped to establish the realm of the Umayyads as Europe’s premier showcase for conspicuous consumption. While it was the Caliph himself, naturally enough, who stood at the apex of the pyramid, and skimmed off most of the taxes, he was certainly not alone in profiting from the orderly conditions of his empire. Five miles west of the great caliphal palace, for instance, there sprawled a city that in its size and sophistication was no less a wonder of the age – and no less dependent for its prosperity on stable governance. Córdoba, like León, had originally been a Roman foundation – but the capital of al-Andalus, as befitted a city so fattened on the fruits of peace, had long since burst its ancient walls. Indeed, so utter had been the transformation of the original Christian town that even its street plan had been obliterated: for Muslims, who had never quite got the hang of carts, had no need of wide streets or squares. Instead, all was labyrinthine, a stupendous agglomeration of winding alleyways and crowded markets, of palaces and gardens, of a hundred mosques and a thousand baths. Just as Otto, emperor though he was, lacked a residence that could rival so much as the gatehouse of the palace of the Caliph, so was there nowhere else in western Europe a settlement that remotely approached the scale and splendour of Córdoba. Indeed, in the whole of Christendom, there was only a single city that could boast of being a more magnificent seat of empire – and that was Constantinople, the Queen of Cities herself.As the caliphs of Córdoba were well aware. Back in the palmiest days of their family’s greatness, when their ancestors had reigned in Damascus, emulation of the New Rome had been as much an Umayyad tradition as attempts to breach her walls; so much so, indeed, that their habit of “Qysariyya” – of “behaving like a Caesar” – had come to shock and perturb the faithful. The Umayyads themselves, befittingly imperious, had scorned all the bleats of the pious. “None would believe in his power,” as the dynasty’s founder had put it, “if he did not behave and look like an emperor.”61 Three centuries on, and the Basileus remained the standard by which the Umayyads measured themselves. Byzantine diplomats, skilled as they were in the art of setting their enemies at one another’s throats, had not failed to recognise opportunity in this. Numerous embassies had been dispatched to al-Andalus. Sedulously, these had fortified the Umayyad Caliphate in its inveterate rivalry with the Fatimids – and had presented, as seasoning to their encouragements, a whole array of splendid gifts. So it was that the Caliph’s palace outside Córdoba had been beautified with treasures from the workshops of Constantinople: here a row of marble columns, there an onyx fountain adorned with sculpted beasts. So it was too that in the very holiest place in al-Andalus, the Great Mosque of Córdoba, the golden mosaics which covered the Caliph’s private prayer room glittered with the unmistakable stamp of the Byzantine; courtesy of a master craftsman sent by Nicephorus, that notorious bane of the Saracens.And yet, to the Caliph himself, the intrusion of Christian fingers upon the most sacred recesses of the mosque had implied no sacrilege. The very opposite, in fact. Turn from the aureate shimmer of the Byzantine mosaics, and fragments of other empires, of other traditions, all of them blended into a regular and awe-inspiring symmetry, could be seen receding towards the daylight that blazed in through the prayer hall’s nineteen doorways. Tent-like in its spareness, the ceiling of the Great Mosque was supported upon a mighty forest of pillars, some salvaged from the ruins of pagan temples, others from the demolished cathedral that had once stood on the site. The arches, which alternated brick with stone, white with red, had been constructed according to Roman methods; the horseshoe style of their curves had originally been Visigothic. No unease was felt by the architects at this wholesale appropriation of infidel traditions. Why should there have been? Just as slaves, uprooted from the House of War, could soon be brought to forget their origins, and learn to think of themselves as Muslims, nothing more, so similarly might the glories of a defeated civilisation, once they had been absorbed and transmuted into something holy, something authentically Islamic, serve to contribute to the greater glory of God. As evidence of this, no more haunting proof existed, and none more majestic, than Córdoba’s mosque.“God desires that if you do something you perfect it.”62 So Mohammed had instructed his followers; and they, raising upon the ruins of toppled empires the dominion of his faith, had fashioned out of the rubble the greatest empire of them all. The centuries had passed, and the House of Islam had fractured; yet still, the devout believed, there could be seen in its architecture a glimpse of that even more profound order, the eternal order of God. Muslim scholar ship, in its attempt to fathom creation’s mysteries, had drawn quite as profitably on the learning of infidels as the bureaucracy of the Caliphate had drawn on their wealth. Both, after all, were legitimate spoils of war. If God, in His mysterious wisdom, had granted insights to pagans, then so also had He granted to Muslims the opportunity to appropriate those insights, to assimilate them and to render them their own. Mathematicians who explored the nature of infinity did so using numerals derived from the idol worshippers of far-off India; mystics who pronounced that salvation might be attained through a mastery of the sciences depended for their philosophy upon the teachings of Pythagoras and Plato, long-dead Greek idolaters who had never heard of Mohammed. Even in al-Andalus, where overexcited scholars and their speculations had traditionally been regarded with frowns of disapproval, a sublime fantasy had begun to flourish: that the wisdom of the entire world might be comprehended. Enthusiasm for this heroic ambition had reached to the very top. Caliph Al-Hakam, in particular, had been celebrated for his obsession with books. Remarkable stories were told of the fruits of his mania. The library in the caliphal palace, it was rumoured, had ended up numbering more than four hundred thousand volumes – of which forty-four “were employed in the mere catalogue.”