Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

VII

EXODUS

632: C

ARTHAGE

In the spring of 632, a ship bearing a letter from Caesar glided into the great harbour at Carthage. So ships had been doing since the time of Augustus. Generations after the disintegration of Roman rule in the West, the shadows of the ancient past still lay deep over Africa. Carthage, like Rome, stood on the periphery of a great agglomeration of provinces that still spanned the eastern Mediterranean, and had as their capital Constantinople, the second Rome. Lost for decades, as Rome had been, to barbarian conquerors, Carthage had been recaptured for the Empire – again, just as Rome had been – almost a century previously. Unlike Italy, though, where imperial rule was moth-eaten and embattled, the province of Africa lay securely under Roman control. The emperor himself, a battle-hardened Cappadocian named Heraclius, had seized the throne after launching a coup from there. By 632, he had been in power for twenty-two years. The commands of such a man were not lightly set aside. The prefect of Africa, opening the imperial missive, certainly had no hesitation in scrabbling to obey them. On 31 May, Heraclius’ command was put into effect. All the Jews in Africa – ‘visitors as well as residents, their wives, their children, their slaves’¹ – were forcibly baptised.

Here was a brutal solution to what had always been a source of frustration. Ever since the time of Paul, Christians had been fretting over the obdurate refusal of God’s original chosen people to accept his Son as the Messiah. Their perplexity was compounded by the fact that the Jews, according to the unimpeachable evidence of the gospels, had willingly accepted responsibility for the death of Christ. ‘Let his blood be on us and on our children!’² Why, then, confronted by this transparent act of deicide, had the Almighty not exacted a terrible vengeance? The response of theologians was to insist that he had. The Temple was no more, after all, and the Jews’ ancient homeland – its name long since changed by the Romans from Judaea to Palestine – reconsecrated as a Christian ‘Holy Land’. Meanwhile, the Jews themselves lived as exiles, ‘witnesses to their own iniquity, and to the truth’.³ Clear and awful were the proofs of divine disapproval; and so the imperial authorities, eager to serve the will of the Almighty, had naturally made sure to add some refinements of their own. The site of the Temple had been converted into a rubbish tip, a dumping-ground for dead pigs and shit; Jews themselves – except for one day a year, when a delegation was permitted to climb Mount Moria, there to lament and weep – were banned from Jerusalem; legal restrictions on their civic status grew ever more oppressive. It was forbidden them to serve in the army; to own Christian slaves; to build new synagogues. In exchange, Jews were granted the right to live according to their own traditions – but only so that they might then better serve the Christian people as a spectacle and a warning. Now, with his abrupt new shift of policy, Heraclius had denied them even that.

Many Christians, it is true, were appalled: some because they feared the damage that reluctant converts might do to the Church, and others because they believed, as Gregory had put it, that ‘humility and kindness, teaching and persuasion, are the means by which to gather in the foes of the Christian faith’.⁴ Yet even before Heraclius’ decree, many had come to dread that it was too late for such an approach. The same consciousness of living in the end days that so haunted Gregory had already prompted a few bishops in Francia to force baptism on the local Jews. In Spain, in 612, the king of the Visigoths had followed suit. Heraclius, too, for the entire length of his reign, had lived with a consciousness that the world was coming apart. ‘The Empire will fall.’⁵ So Theodore, the lettuce-munching ascetic from Galatia, had prophesied in the year of Heraclius’ accession – and so it had almost proved. War had ravaged the Roman Empire. The tides of a great Persian invasion had lapped at the very walls of Constantinople. Syria, Palestine, Egypt: all had fallen. Jerusalem had been stormed. Only a spectacular series of campaigns led by Heraclius himself had succeeded in hauling his empire back from the brink. Reclaiming the provinces lost to the Persians, riding through Syria, entering Jerusalem, he had repeatedly been told stories of Jewish treachery – and even of the occasional Christian, despairing of Christ, who had submitted to circumcision. Not merely accursed of God, then, the Jews were a plain and active menace. Heraclius, weary after his long struggle to save the Christian people from ruin, was in no mood to show them clemency. Now that the Persians were defeated, he aimed as well to eliminate the enemy within. His ambition: to fashion an exclusively, an impregnably Christian realm.

So it was, in Carthage, that the emperor’s policy was punctiliously applied. Any Jew who landed in the city risked arrest and forcible baptism. All he had to do was cry out in Hebrew when twisting an ankle, or perhaps expose himself at the baths, to risk denunciation. Most Jews, in their hearts, remained resolutely unbaptised; but there were some, persuaded by argument, or on occasion a vision, who did truly come to feel themselves brought to Christ.⁶ It was in consternation, then, in the summer of 634, that such converts listened to startling news brought from Palestine. There, it was reported, the Jews were cheering a fresh insult to Heraclius. The province had been invaded by ‘Saracens’: Arabs. They had killed an eminent official. They were led by a ‘prophet’. Some Jews, it was true, doubted his right to this title, ‘for prophets do not come with a sword and a war-chariot’.⁷ Many more were afire with excitement. They, no less than Christians, could recognise in the convulsions of the age the seeming imminence of the end days. Perhaps, they dared to wonder, the advent of a Saracen prophet portended God’s liberation at last of his Chosen People, the rebuilding of the Temple, and the coming of the Messiah?

What it certainly portended was an upheaval in the affairs of the Near East on a scale not witnessed since the time of Alexander. Palestine, although the initial target of the invaders, was not the last. Provinces of the battle-wearied Roman and Persian empires, like over-cooked meat slipping off the bone, melted into the grasp of Arab warbands. From Mesopotamia to central Asia, the lands ruled by the King of Kings were swallowed whole by the conquerors; those ruled by Caesar reduced to a bloody trunk. Heraclius, so lately triumphant, had barely been able to hold the line in the mountains of his native Cappadocia. The fate of Gaul and Spain – rule by barbarian overlords – was now visited on Syria and Egypt.

Yet the Arabs, despite the hearty contempt for them felt by the peoples of more settled lands, were hardly ignorant of civilisation. The influence of Rome and Persia had reached deep into Arabia. Even those tribes not employed as mercenaries on the borders of the rival empires had come to feel the seductive appeal of the superpowers’ gold – and of their gods. The Arabs had particular reason to feel flattered by Jewish and Christian scripture. Alone among the barbarian peoples who lurked beyond the borders of the Roman Empire, they featured in it. Isaac, so it was recorded in Genesis, had not been Abraham’s only son. The patriarch had also fathered a second, Ishmael, on an Egyptian slave. This meant that the Arabs – whom commentators had long since identified with the descendants of Ishmael – could claim a lineal descent from the first man to reject idolatry. Not only that, they were cousins of the Jews. Christian scholars were not long in waking up to the unsettling implications of this. Paul, warning the Galatians against circumcision, had declared that peoples everywhere – provided only that they accepted Christ as Lord – were the heirs of Abraham. But now, as though in direct repudiation of this, a circumcised people had seized the rule of the world – and done so, what was more, as claimants to an inheritance ‘promised by God to their ancestor’. So, at any rate, it was reported by a Christian writing in Armenia some three decades after the conquest of Palestine by the Saracens. Their mysterious ‘prophet’ – left unnamed in the report sent to the Jews of Carthage – was now identified as a man named Muhammad. ‘No one will be able to resist you in battle,’ he was supposed to have told his followers. ‘For God is with you.’⁸

Here, of course, was nothing that Christians had not heard before. Constantine had offered an identical assurance; so too, in the course of his campaigns against the Persians, had Heraclius. Even in the furthest reaches of the world, in the rain-lashed monasteries and monks’ cells of Ireland, many of the claims made by the Saracens for their prophet would not have seemed strange. That an angel had appeared to him. That he, unlike the Jews, had acknowledged Jesus as the Messiah, and displayed a particular devotion to Mary. That he had revealed to them visions of both heaven and hell, and that the Day of Judgement was terrifyingly near. No less than Columbanus, Muhammad had preached the importance of pilgrimage, and prayer, and charity. ‘What will explain to you what the steep path is? It is to free a slave, to feed at a time of hunger an orphaned relative or a poor person in distress, and to be one of those who believe and urge one another to steadfastness and compassion.’⁹ Here were teachings with which Gregory of Nyssa would readily have concurred.

Yet Muhammad had not been a Christian. In 689, on Mount Moria, work began on a building that broadcast this in the most public manner possible. The Dome of the Rock, as it would come to be known, occupied the very spot where the Holy of Holies was supposed to have stood, and was a deliberate rubbing of Jewish noses in the failure, yet again, of all their hopes: of their messiah to appear; of the Temple to be rebuilt. Even more forthright, though, was the lesson taught to Christians: that they clung to a corrupted and superseded faith. Running along both sides of the building’s arcade, a series of verses disparaged the doctrine of the Trinity. ‘The Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, was only a messenger of God.’¹⁰ This was not merely to reopen theological debates that Christians had thought settled centuries before, but to condemn the entire New Testament, gospels and all, as a fabrication. Squabbles among those who had written it, so the Dome of the Rock sternly declared, had polluted the original teachings of Jesus. These, like the revelations granted prophets before him, Abraham, and Moses, and David, had originally been identical to those proclaimed by Muhammad. There was only the one true deen, the one true expression of allegiance to God, and that was submission to him: in Arabic, islam.¹¹

Here was a doctrine with which ‘Muslims’ – those who practised islam – were already well familiar. It was not only to be found emblazoned on buildings. Most of the verses on the Dome of the Rock derived from a series of revelations that Muhammad’s followers believed had been given to him by none other than the angel Gabriel. These, assembled after his death to form a single ‘recitation’, or qur’an, constituted for his followers what Jesus represented to Christians: an intrusion into the mortal world, into the sublunar, into the diurnal, of the divine. Muhammad had not written this miraculous text. He had merely served as its mouthpiece. Instead, every word, every last letter of the Qur’an derived from a single author: God. This gave to its pronouncements on Christians, as on everything else, an awful and irrevocable force. Unlike pagans, but like Jews, they were owed the respect due a people who had their own scriptures, as a ‘People of the Book’. Self-evidently, though, the errors in these same scriptures ensured that God had no choice but to ordain their perpetual subjugation. The very deal that the Roman authorities had prescribed for the Jews was now, to Christians’ dismay, imposed on them as well. Tolerance, so it was written in the Qur’an, should be granted both Peoples of the Book; but only in exchange for the payment of a tax, the jizya, and humble acknowledgement of their own inferiority. Stubbornness could not be allowed to go unpunished. Why, for instance, when it had been revealed conclusively in the Qur’an that Jesus, rather than suffering execution, had only appeared to be crucified, did Christians persist in glorifying the cross? Paul, and the writers of the canonical gospels, and Irenaeus, and Origen, and the drafters of the Nicaean Creed, and Augustine had all been wrong; Basilides had been right. ‘Those who disagree on this know nothing, but merely follow conjecture.’¹²

Even more threatening to Christian assumptions than the Qur’an’s flat denial that Jesus had been crucified, however, was the imperious, not to say terrifying, tone of authority with which it did so. Very little in either the Old or the New Testament could compare. For all the reverence with which Christians regarded their scripture, and for all that they believed it illumined by the flame of the Holy Spirit, they perfectly accepted that most of it, including the gospels themselves, had been authored by mortals. Only the covenant on the tablets of stone, given to Moses amid fire and smoke on the summit of Sinai, ‘and written with the finger of God’,¹³ owed nothing to human mediation. Perhaps it was no surprise, then, that Moses, of all the figures in the Old and New Testaments, should have featured most prominently in the Qur’an. He was mentioned 137 times in all. Many of the words attributed to him had served as a direct inspiration to Muhammad’s own followers. ‘My people! Enter the Holy Land which God has prescribed for you!’¹⁴ The Arab conquerors, in the first decades of their empire, had pointedly referred to themselves as muhajirun: ‘those who have undertaken an exodus’. A hundred years on from Muhammad’s death, when the first attempts were made by Muslim scholars to write his biography, the model that they instinctively reached for was that of Moses. The age at which the Prophet had received his first revelation from God; the flight of his followers from a land of idols; the way in which – directly contradicting the news brought to Carthage in 634 – he was said to have died before entering the Holy Land: all these elements echoed the life of the Jews’ most God-favoured prophet.¹⁵ So brilliantly, indeed, did Muslim biographers paint from the palette of traditions told about Moses that the fading outlines of the historical Muhammad were quite lost beneath their brush-strokes. Last and most blessed of the prophets sent by God to set humanity on the straight path, there was only the one predecessor to whom he could properly be compared. ‘There has come to him the greatest Law that came to Moses; surely he is the prophet of this people.’¹⁶

Heraclius, two years before the Arab invasion of Palestine, had commanded that Jews be forcibly baptised out of dread for the security of the Christian empire. Not even in his darkest nightmares could he have anticipated the calamities that had then rapidly followed, and left Constantinople shorn of her richest provinces. Yet the threat presented by the Saracens to Christian rule was not merely a military one. The challenge was much greater than that. It was the same, in its essentials, as had prompted Paul, centuries previously, to write in desperate terms to the Galatians. The principle that Paul had fought for, and which had come to render Christianity irrevocably distinctive from Judaism, was clearer, perhaps, to Jewish converts than to Christians – most of whom had never met with, still less talked to, a Jew. To accept Christ was to accept that God could write his commandments on the heart. Again and again, among those Jews in Carthage whose compulsory baptism had been followed by an authentic conversion, this was the reflection, this the change in assumptions, that they had found the most overwhelming. ‘It is not by means of the Law of Moses that creation has been saved, but because a new and different Law has risen up.’¹⁷ The death of Christ upon the cross had offered humanity a universal salvation. There was no longer any need for Jews – or for anyone else – to submit to circumcision, or to avoid pork, or to follow detailed rules of sacrifice. The only laws that mattered were those inscribed by God on the conscience of a Christian. ‘Love, and do as you want.’¹⁸

So Augustine had declared. Nowhere in the Latin West had the implications of Christian teaching been more brilliantly elucidated than in Africa – or to such influential effect. That there were Jews in Carthage who had been brought to accept them was, perhaps, due reflection of the distinctive quality of the city’s Christianity: austere and passionate, autocratic and turbulent. Its self-confidence was that of a Church assured that it had indeed fathomed the laws of God.

But now a new understanding of the laws of God had emerged – and those who proclaimed it enjoyed, unlike the Jews, the muscle of a mighty and expanding empire. In 670, terrified reports reached Carthage of a raid on Africa that had carried away thousands of Christians into slavery. Over the succeeding decades, ever more incursions were recorded. Fortresses, towns, entire swathes of the province: all fell to permanent occupation. Finally, in the autumn of 695, sentries on the walls of Carthage spotted a smudge of dust on the horizon – and that it was growing larger. Then the glint of weapons catching the sun. Then, emerging from the dust, men, horses, siege-engines.

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.

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.

It was the victory at Poitiers, though, that would most enduringly gild the Hammer’s fame. He was not, it was true, universally popular in Francia. Some, suspicious of his lust for power, claimed that his corpse had been snatched from its tomb by a dragon, and hauled away to the underworld. This, however, was a minority view. Most Franks saw in the sheer scale of Charles’ achievements evidence for that favourite conceit of the age: that God had anointed them as a chosen people. In 751, when Charles’ son Pepin deposed the line of Clovis for good, his coup drew its sustenance from the prowess of his father. ‘The name of your people has been raised up above all the other nations.’²⁷ So the pope himself reassured the king. That Charles Martel had been a second Joshua, conquering a promised land, was a staple of Frankish self-congratulation. The Saracens had been as stubble to his sword. Ever more startling estimates of how many had fallen at Poitiers came to be bruited. Within only a few decades of the battle, the total was already nudging four hundred thousand.

There was much, then, that the Franks had in common with their most formidable adversaries. Both believed themselves possessed of a licence from God to subdue other peoples, and both drew on the inheritance of Jewish scripture to substantiate this militant calling. Certainly, a pagan traveller from beyond the eastern frontiers of the Frankish empire, a Saxon or a Dane, would have found it hard to distinguish between the rival combatants on the battlefield of Poitiers. Christians and Muslims alike worshipped a single, omnipotent deity; claimed to fight beneath the watchful protection of angels; believed that they stood in a line of inheritance from Abraham.

Yet the very similarities between them served only to sharpen the differences. More had hung in the balance at Poitiers than the Franks could possibly have realised. Far distant from their kingdom, in the great cities of the Near East, Muslim scholars were in the process of shaping a momentous new legitimacy for Islam, and its claim to a global rule. The Arabs, after their conquest of what for millennia had been the world’s greatest concentration of imperial and legal traditions, had been faced with an inevitable challenge. How were they to forge a functioning state? Not every answer to the running of a great empire was to be found in the Qur’an. Similarly absent was guidance on some of the most basic aspects of daily life: whether it was acceptable for the faithful to urinate behind a bush, for instance, or to wear silk, or to keep a dog, or for men to shave, or for women to dye their hair black, or how best to brush one’s teeth. For the Arabs simply to have adopted the laws and customs of the peoples they had subdued would have risked the exclusive character of their rule. Worse, it would have seen their claim to a divinely sanctioned authority fatally compromised. Accordingly, when they adopted legislation from the peoples they had conquered, they did not acknowledge their borrowing, as the Franks or the Visigoths had readily done, but derived it instead from that most respected, that most authentically Muslim of sources: the Prophet himself. Even as Poitiers was being fought, collections of sayings attributed to Muhammad were being compiled that, in due course, would come to constitute an entire corpus of law: Sunna. Any detail of Roman or Persian legislation, any fragment of Syrian or Mesopotamian custom, might be incorporated within it. The only requirement was convincingly to represent it as having been spoken by the Prophet – for anything spoken by Muhammad could be assumed to have the stamp of divine approval.

Here, then, for Christians was a fateful challenge. Their time-honoured conviction that the true law of God was to be found written on the heart could not have been more decisively repudiated. No longer was it the prerogative of Jews alone to believe in a great corpus of divine legislation that touched upon every facet of human existence, and prescribed in exacting detail how God desired men and women to live. The Talmud, an immense body of law compiled by Jewish scholars – rabbis – in the centuries prior to the Arab conquest of the Near East, had never threatened the inheritance of Paul’s teachings as the Sunna did. Muslims were not a beleaguered minority, prey to the bullying of Christian emperors and kings. They had conquered a vast and wealthy empire, and aspired to conquer yet more. Had Francia gone the way of Africa, and been lost for good to Christian rule, then the Franks too would doubtless have eventually been brought to the Muslim understanding of God and his law. The fundamental assumptions that governed Latin Christendom would thereby have been radically and momentously transformed. Few, if any, who fought at Poitiers would have realised it, but at stake in the battle had been nothing less than the legacy of Saint Paul.

‘For you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God.’²⁸ The pope, when he quoted this line of scripture in a letter to Pepin, was not merely flattering the Franks, but acknowledging a brute reality. Increasingly, it was the empire ruled by the heirs of Charles Martel – the Carolingians – that defined for the papacy the very character of Christian rule. Paul I, unlike his predecessors, had failed to notify the emperor in Constantinople of his election. Instead, he had written to Pepin. The Byzantines, struggling for survival as they were against relentless Muslim onslaughts, appeared to Christians in Rome – let alone in Francia or Northumbria – an ever more alien and distant people. Even more spectral were the lands that for centuries had constituted the great wellsprings of the Christian faith: Syria and Palestine, Egypt and Africa. The days when a man like Theodore might freely travel from Tarsus to Canterbury were over. The Mediterranean was now a Saracen sea. Its waters were perilous for Christians to sail. The world was cut in half. An age was at an end.