The World

Houses of Muhammad and Charlemagne

ARAB CAESAR AND YAZID OF WHORING, YAZID OF MONKEYS

Mo-yi was Muawiya. By the time Gaozong and Wu heard his name, Muawiya had seized the throne of a new empire in a vicious family war. It is a hard thing to run an empire: Caliph Omar travelled the provinces on his mule with a single servant, leaving Muawiya to govern Syria. Muawiya wanted to build a fleet to confront the Romans, but Omar refused. Suspicious of Muawiya’s worldliness, he nicknamed him Arab Caesar.

In 644, Omar was assassinated by a disgruntled slave and the elders again overlooked Ali, Muhammad’s son-in-law, and chose the genial Othman, also married in turn to two elder daughters of the Prophet. He favoured his clan, House Umayya, confirming Muawiya as governor of Syria. So far the caliphate’s subjects were overwhelmingly Christian and Zoroastrian. Inheriting the Roman tax system, Muawiya used Roman officials led by Sergios – Sarjun ibn Mansur in Arabic – to run the bureaucracy. His doctor and court poet were Christian, his first governor of Jerusalem was supposedly Jewish and his favourite wife Maysun was a Christian princess. Amr al-As teased him for being bossed around by his wife. ‘The wives of noble men dominate them,’ replied Muawiya. ‘Low men lord it over their women.’

He prided himself on his sexual virility, but as he got older and fatter he laughed at himself. He slept with a Khorasani slave whom he asked, ‘What is a lion in Persian?’

‘Kaftar,’ she replied.

‘I am a kaftar,’ he boasted as she left, but when he asked a courtier what it meant he replied, ‘A lame hyena.’

‘Well done,’ Muawiya told the girl.

In 655 Muawiya’s new Arab fleet defeated Emperor Constans II (Heraclius’ grandson), marking a new era. But a year later mutineers from Egypt and Iraq assassinated Muawiya’s cousin, Othman the caliph in Medina. Ali, now in his fifties, was chosen as his successor, appointing some of the assassins to his retinue. Muhammed had ordered his wives to keep out of politics after his death, but his favourite surviving wife Aisha (daughter of the first caliph) and respected as Umm al-Mu’minin – Mother of Believers – denounced Ali and the assassins of Othman. She led an army against Ali, pursuing him into Iraq. On the battlefield, she harangued the troops, commanding them from the armoured canopy of a red camel. But Ali won; her famous camel was killed and she was captured.^*

Muawiya, firmly in control of the centre, demanded that Othman’s killers be punished, a challenge that Ali could not satisfy. Channelling Antony’s theatrics with Caesar’s bloodied toga, Muawiya displayed the relics of the caliphal assassination, the sanguine robes of Othman and the severed fingers of his wife Naila.

The two armies met at Siffin near Raqqa (Syria) where, with the intense savagery of fraternal hatreds, 70,000 were killed in hand-to-hand fighting. Finally Muawiya’s troops stuck pages of the Quran on their lances, shaming the other side into stopping. Ali agreed to negotiate. Muawiya’s envoy Amr al-As outmanoeuvred Ali, whom Muhammad had never given an important job. ‘The Messenger of God appointed only capable men,’ said Muawiya, ‘not men strained beyond their capabilities.’ Ali’s army disintegrated. In 660, Muawiya held a conclave on the Temple Mount of Jerusalem where he was acclaimed as Commander, channelling the sanctity of the Holy City.^*

Soon afterwards Ali was assassinated in Iraq, leaving his two sons Hassan and Hussein as his heirs. But while Muawiya and the Umayya dynasty had triumphed, the Party (Shia) of Ali, who believed the succession should descend through Ali, would be a sempiternal schism at the heart of Islam.

In 674, Muawiya, having routed the Roman fleet, attacked Constantinople. The siege, commanded by his son Yazid, lasted four years. The Arabs thought the city would fall, a view probably shared by Emperor Constans, who moved to Sicily where he was murdered in his bath by a slave with a soap dish. But the walls of the Great City and the restored Roman fleet, along with the first use of a new secret weapon, Greek Fire, an early flamethrower that squirted burning naphtha oil through a tube, finally forced Muawiya to recall his fleet.

Caliphs had always been chosen by the elders. Muawiya created a family monarchy, controversially nominating Yazid, son of his Christian wife, a playboy who enjoyed wine and girls and walked around Damascus with a pet monkey. As for any rival, ‘If you seize him,’ advised Muawiya, ‘chop him limb from limb.’ But when Muawiya died aged eighty, Yazid’s debauchery shocked the Medinese, who called him ‘Yazid of the liquors, Yazid of whoring, Yazid of monkeys’. Muhammad’s grandson Hussein declared himself caliph in Iraq but was killed at Karbala, playing into the Shia narrative of martyrdom, still expressed in the lamenting and whipping of the holy day of Ashura. Hussein’s head was sent on tour and Yazid stuck his sceptre in its mouth. When Yazid died unexpectedly, probably of the plague, contenders in Kufa (Iraq) and Medina claimed the throne.

Far to the east, the Arabs were approaching Chinese territory – just as Emperor Gaozung’s extraordinary widow seized control.

POLITICAL JISM: THE TEETH AND CLAWS OF EMPRESS WU

Wu, dowager empress and regent, was sixty. The late emperor’s will specified that ‘great matters of state shall be determined by the Celestial Empress’, but their son Li Zhe – under the influence of his young empress Wei – planned to give power to his wife’s father. When confronted about appointing his father-in-law Wei Xuanzhen as minister, the young emperor shouted, ‘If I wish to give the empire to Wei, what is there to stop me?’ But there was something to stop him: Wu. She rallied the ministers and generals. Facing Turkish and Tibetan advances,^* famines and rebellions, they appreciated her experience and nerve. The boy was deposed. He asked what his crime was.

‘You wished to hand over the empire to Wei,’ snapped Wu. ‘How’s that not a crime?’ While he was sent into well-supervised obscurity,^* Wu appointed her youngest son Li Dan, aged twenty-one, as emperor. Unsurprisingly he was terrified of her, particularly after she forced another of her sons, the exiled Li Xian, to commit suicide.

When her gambits provoked a rebellion by Tang princes, she orchestrated a terror led by a trio of sadistic secret policemen – her ‘teeth and claws’ – led by Lai Junchen, a psychotic former cake salesman who used denunciations to frame princes and officials, even compiling a Manual of Entrapment. Thousands were killed in Wu’s newly opened prison where Lai tortured his victims, devising ingenious atrocities.^* Eighty per cent of Wu’s ministers were removed, many killed. Lai requested promotion to censor. ‘But you can’t read,’ teased Wu. She promoted him anyway, but preferred to consult her capable daughter, the Taiping Princess.

Wu was also a master of public presentation, regularly ‘rectifying names’ – changing regal names both to bring luck and for rebranding – to relaunch her reign, publicizing her views on good government in her Regulations for Ministers and ordering that family members should betray treason committed by their relatives – loyalty to the state was everything.

Wu was recommended a lover by Princess Qianjin, a fifty-something daughter of the founding emperor Gaozu – an example of the uninhibited earthiness of Tang women. The candidate was a strapping and much younger snake-oil salesman from a poor family called Xue Huaiyi whose sexual athleticism and gigantic member had first impressed a maid of the princess, who in turn enjoyed his gifts before raving about them to the empress.

When his regular visits led her ministers to suggest archly that he should be castrated, she ordered instead that Master Xue should be tonsured as a Buddhist monk and promoted him to abbot of the White Horse Monastery.

Brusque, colourful and arrogant, the Master soon wielded immense power, escorted by ten eunuchs and a posse of heavies. Wu’s image as a power-mad ageing nymphomaniac was unfair, given the hundreds of young concubines enjoyed by male emperors, and her well-hung youth did perform a mystical seminal rite: Taoists believed that the life essence – semen – of a young man rejuvenated his older lover. Yet the Master had other talents too, as organizer and architect. He advised Wu on religion, and together they endorsed Buddhism, its otherworldliness and emotional equanimity complementing the dutiful ethics of Confucius and the mystical rites of Tao. She built pagodas, welcomed Buddhist sages and ordered the compilation of sacred text, Great Cloud Sutra, assuming the titles chakravartin (wheel-turning monarch) and bodhisattva (compassionate being close to nirvana). After she had made the Master her commissioner of works, he deployed 30,000 workers to build an exquisite Buddhist Heavenly Hall in the centre of her capital Luoyang: 300 feet up, nine dragons bore a canopy bearing a colossal gilded phoenix.

She sponsored talent wherever she found it, once jokingly upbraiding her ministers for persecuting a critic who had dared to attack her: ‘How could you waste such a gifted person?’ The most surprising of her advisers – and probably the most talented – was her young, beautiful female secretary, Shangguan Wan’er, whose father and grandfather had been executed by Wu for trying to get the empress consort dismissed; the child was then enslaved. But she was a brilliant poet; Wu saw the poems and hired her. Shangguan Wan’er thereafter wrote her decrees, but when she was caught disobeying an order, the empress had her face tattooed. The enslaved, manumitted, branded amanuensis became a potentate in this unusually feminine regime.

In 690, Wu secretly orchestrated popular demonstrations and auspicious omens demanding she become empress regnant. Finally she agreed and forced her son Li Dan to retire and, assuming the dynasty name of Zhou, she became the first empress regnant, donning the yellow robes of a Huang-di (emperor) – but this made her even more ferociously vigilant. When two ministers made the mistake of visiting the ex-emperor Dan, she had them sliced in half. In 693, she murdered Dan’s wife and consort.^* When he met his mother, Dan carefully pretended nothing had happened.

In 694, Wu wearied of the Master, taking her doctor as a new lover. The spurned Master burned down the Heavenly Hall, his jealousy flattering her. She promoted him to duke and had him rebuild it, but there is nothing as dead as dead love and his tantrums angered her. So he was beaten to death and incinerated, the ashes stirred into mud.

By now, she had successfully repelled and outmanoeuvred Tibetans, Koreans and Turks, adding a million non-Chinese to her empire, receiving tribute-bearing embassies from Japan, India and central Asia, victories that justified her Mandate of Heaven. She felt confident enough to reduce the terror. Her hated torturer Lai, enriched by bribes and insatiable for sexual favours from terrified families, overreached by denouncing Wu’s daughter the Taiping Princess. As he was about to be publicly sliced, the mob went berserk, tearing out his heart and trampling him to pulp.

Wu was now in her seventies, maintaining her beauty with cosmetics. She also resorted to Taoist charlatans, appointing as chancellor one who claimed to be 400 years old, though she soon forced him to commit suicide.

In 697, the Taiping Princess, who resembled Wu herself, recommended a new lover for her mother. Beautiful, young and a fine singer, Zhang Changzong was one of five ambitious brothers. The empress was enraptured by him, and he introduced his brother Zhang Yizhi as even more adept in bed. Flashy, effeminate and arrogant, ‘the Boys’ – as she called them – wore vermilion robes and held outrageous parties at court. Wu was dazzled by them, creating for them a literary power base known as the Reigning Storks Institution – storks being the traditional conveyance for Taoist fairies – reflecting her new belief that Zhang Changzong was a stork-riding Taoist immortal and she herself Queen Mother of the West who hoped that the Boys’ semen, male yang essence, would rejuvenate her.

With the Boys on the loose, her court was exuberant. Her festivals celebrated her own agelessness or triumph over age including her claim that her teeth were growing back, her eyebrows had realigned in an auspicious 8-shape – leading her in 699 to stage an ‘Anthem of the Sage’s Longevity’ with 900 dancers. Mortality is always a galling liability for any tyrant whose boundless power can only be curtailed by the terminal inconvenience of death. She gorged on Taoist elixirs, as her alchemists developed an ancient mix of heated saltpetre and sulphur – a stage in the long process that would lead to gunpowder.

When she was around eighty, Wu felt she had to consider the succession. She had advanced her own Wu family and renamed the Li princes Wu as well, but the Boys, fearing what would happen after Wu’s death, persuaded her to recall Li Zhe, the deposed emperor, as crown prince. But she was not softening. When the Boys snitched that her granddaughter and husband had criticized their antics, she had them beaten to death and the Boys raised to dukes. But their peculation was so brazen that ministers accused them of theft. She confronted the Boys before her court.

‘Your minister has accumulated merit in state service,’ insisted Zhang Changzong. ‘My offence should not result in dismissal.’

‘What meritorious service’, asked Wu, ‘has Changzong performed?’

‘Changzong’, replied the Boys’ most sycophantic courtier, ‘concocted a divine elixir and when Your Saintliness drank it, the draught proved most efficacious.’ This was surely the only court in history at which corruption was excused by the drinking of semen.

THE FLY KILLER OF DAMASCUS AND THE EMPRESSES OF TANG

Wu forgave Zhang. In late 704, she fell ill in the Longevity Basilica as her children feuded and opposition to the Zhangs whirled around the sickbed. Crown Prince Li Zhe and the Taiping Princess, realizing that the Boys were threatening the succession, recruited the guards. In February 705, Li Zhe and 500 guards broke into the Palace of Welcoming the Immortals, located the Zhang Boys and beheaded them on the spot. Then they burst into the empress’s bedroom, where they encircled her bed.

‘Who’s the cause of this ruckus?’ she demanded.

‘The brothers plotted rebellion,’ explained one of the accompanying ministers. ‘The crown prince ordered us to execute them.’

She spotted her anxious forty-eight-year-old son: ‘And you? Now the Boys have been executed, you may return to the Eastern Palace.’

Li Zhe was about to obey when a minister intervened: ‘We humbly desire Your Majesty transfer the throne to the crown prince.’

Casting a terrifying glance around the chamber, reminding the rebels of how she had promoted them, she sneered, ‘So this is your idea of payback is it?’

Three days later, as the five heads of the Boys were displayed near Heaven’s Ford Bridge, Li Zhe again became emperor, the Tang dynasty restored. On 16 December 705, Wu, honoured but under house arrest, seeming to have aged centuries without her cosmetics, died, buried in the same tomb as her husband.

Yet the age of female power was not over. The emperor’s wife, Wei, had survived Wu’s terror. ‘If we see the light of day again,’ her husband had promised, ‘I won’t stop you from doing anything.’ Wei took power, assisted by her lover Wu Sansi (Empress Wu’s nephew), who was also the lover of the old empress’s face-branded, formerly enslaved secretary Shangguan Wan’er, now in her forties. When this polyamorous foursome sat at a table in the Inner Court to play cards, the empress’s legs would become entangled with Wu Sansi’s under the table. So strong seemed feminine power that the empress persuaded her husband to declare their twenty-one-year-old daughter Princess Anle as crown princess. When the emperor resisted, Anle retorted, ‘If that Wu woman could become the emperor, why can’t the daughter of the emperor become an emperor?’

When the emperor tried to stop his wife’s abuses, Wei poisoned him with his favourite cakes, but she kept his death secret until she had appointed a teenage emperor whom she could dominate. The Taiping Princess now discovered that Wei planned to kill her, her brother (the ex-emperor) Li Dan and his sons. She had to act, recruiting her impressive nephew Li Longji, aged twenty-five, who one night in June 710 visited the Palace Gate, won over the guards and then, entering the palace, hacked down Empress Wei as she ran, stabbed Princess Anle as she put on make-up in the mirror and beheaded the great survivor, the tattooed Shangguan. Li Longji emerged from the showdown as Emperor Xuanzong. The Taiping Princess, very much Wu’s daughter, tried to poison him and launched a coup attempt which ended in the beheading of her sons and her own forced suicide.

Emperor Xuanzong, the soldier, calligrapher and poet who had cut down four powerful women to seize the crown, would deliver the apogee of Tang success – attaining power just as the Tang and the Arab empires came into contact for the first time.

In 689, the Commander of the Believers, Abd al-Malik, had fixed a silver collar around the neck of a captured rebel and led him through the Damascus streets on a leash before straddling his chest and hacking off his head, which he then tossed to the crowd.

Abd al-Malik had long hair, gold teeth, a cleft lip and such vile breath that he was nicknamed the Fly Killer (though this might just be Shiite propaganda), but he was also the monarch who created an Islamic state out of the personal empire of Muawiya – and constructed the most beautiful religious building of his century. His coins show him as a warrior in a brocaded robe drawing a big bejewelled sword and holding a whip, with the inscription Commander of the Believers and Servant of God. ‘The only way I’ll cure this community is with the sword,’ he preached. ‘I won’t be the kind of caliph who’ll be duped or thought weak.’

In the meltdown after Yazid’s death, his family summoned his aged but experienced cousin Marwan to Damascus, where he ensured the succession of his able son, Abd al-Malik. Marrying Atika, widow of Yazid, one of many wives, the new Commander faced rebellions in Iraq and Arabia where Mecca was ruled by a rival caliph. The loss of Mecca was embarrassing. As a young man in that city, Abd al-Malik had been a ‘mosque dove’, learning to recite the entire Quran. But now he possessed the Syrian army, invincible confidence and the ability to choose gifted henchmen: his hatchetman was a schoolmaster turned warlord called al-Hajjaj who spouted exquisitely murderous poetry at Friday prayers in Kufa, Iraq – ‘I see hungry stares and straining necks; I see ripened heads ready to be picked; I am their master … By God, I’ll grind you down to dust’ – before slaughtering its mutinous people. The Commander encouraged Believers to take the pilgrimage to Jerusalem where, over the Foundation Stone of the Jewish Temple, he built the sublime Dome of the Rock, a shrine designed to emulate the Temples of Solomon and Herod but also to rival Mecca and outshine Hagia Sophia. It was completed in 691, Jews and Christians initially joining Muslims to pray on the Temple Mount. It took seven years to subdue his rivals and by the time the Dome was finished, he had retaken Mecca.

After making the hajj – the pilgrimage to Mecca – Abd al-Malik recast the caliphate in terms of faith and family: Islam would be central. He was the first to be widely called caliph instead of the more military commander, and his later coins eschewed the human imagery previously employed, a prohibition that came to be part of Islamic tradition. Arabic became the language of government, a decision that changed the world, imposing the language from Morocco to Iraq, and he relaunched Muawiya’s jihad against Constantinople.

His sons dominated the caliphate – four of them ruled after him and then a nephew, Walid, who converted St John’s of Damascus into today’s Ummayad Mosque and built the al-Aqsa Mosque of Jerusalem. Then he restarted the world conquest on three fronts. He inherited as eastern viceroy the killer pedagogue al-Hajjaj, who encouraged the eastward march, and he offered the governorship of China to anyone who could conquer it.

In 1712, his armies took Samarkand. In 715 and 717, small Arab armies were defeated by Chinese and Turkish troops. Not all the Arab generals were brilliant. One whom the poets mocked was known as the Flirt: ‘You advanced on the enemy at night as if you were playing with your girl; your cock was drawn & your sword sheathed.’ To the west, Walid relaunched the jihad against the Romans, encouraged by the mayhem in Constantinople. In 695 Heraclius’ vindictive great-great-grandson Justinian II was overthrown and mutilated by having his nose sliced off, but he seized back the throne, wearing a golden proboscis and now nicknamed Slitnose. The vengeance he took on his enemies was savage but counter-productive, as it led to his assassination. In 716, Walid sent an army of 120,000 and 1,800 ships against Constantinople, commanded by his half-brother Maslama. The siege seemed perfectly timed as civil strife paralysed the Romans. Maslama negotiated with the strategos of the Anatolian Theme or district, an Isaurian general named Leo who promised to aid him. Instead Leo III seized power himself, rallied resistance and hired pagan auxiliaries from a new arrival in the Balkans, Tervel, khan of the horde of Bulgars, who was rewarded with the coveted title Caesar.

The Arabs did not take the city. The new caliph Umar ordered Maslama to retreat. Natural disasters now dovetailed with existential threats: the volcano beneath the Aegean island of Thera exploded, pumping jets of smoke and launching tsunamis. Just as modern rulers consult scientists, medieval potentates turned to theologians. In Constantinople, the people wondered if their revered religious images – icons – were graven images banned in the Ten Commandments. The caliph had just banned such imagery, and though Constantinople had survived, he was victorious on many fronts. Emperor Leo and many others concluded that their own idolatry explained their disasters. The emperor’s campaign to destroy icons launched ninety years of eikonomachia – a self-destructive battle between iconoclasts and iconophiles, each keen to win salvation after death, that cost thousands of lives and consumed Constantinopolitan politics.

Far to the west, Arab forces advanced along the coast of north Africa, converting Berber tribes, until they reached Tangier (Morocco), whence they could see the coast of Europe.

In 711, Tariq bin Ziyad, a mawla of the governor of Ifriqiya, Musa bin Nusayr, was invited into Spain by a noble dissident, whose daughter had supposedly been raped by Rodrigo, king of the Visigoths who had ruled there since Roman times. Sailing across with 7,000 Berbers, he landed at the rock later named after him – Jibral Tariq, Gibraltar – and then killed Rodrigo and took the capital Toledo. Tariq’s superior Musa arrived to assert official control over the new province, al-Andalus. But the conquistadors were recalled to Damascus by Caliph Walid, suspicious of overmighty freelancers, and both died in prison. The Arabs seized much of Spain, though they never reached the less lush north, which remained under Christian warlords.

Al-Andalus was the ideal launchpad for raids across the Pyrenees into Francia. In 719, the Arabs conquered Septimania (Narbonne); in 721 and 725, they attacked Toulouse.

In 732, the governor of al-Andalus pursued a Berber rebel into western Francia and then galloped northwards towards Paris. But while Spain had fallen easily into their hands, here the Arabs encountered a different breed of enemy, the Franks under their dux, Charles, who was about to win his nickname: the Hammer.

THE HAMMER AND THE PLAYBOY CALIPH: CUNTS ON A LION’S BROW

Charles had something to prove. He was the son of his father Pepin’s concubine, not his chief wife, and they did not choose him as heir.

In the last years of the Roman empire, a Germanic war-band chieftain, Clovis, based in northern Gaul – Neustria – had declared himself king of the Franks, conquering much of Roman France and Germany, naming his Merovingian dynasty after his grandfather Merovec. Roman order gradually vanished: some cities almost emptied; coins were less used; slavery declined; epidemics raged; bishops and lords, ruling from their manors, amassed the best land and controlled the peasantry, who became servi – serfs. Yet the Merovingians – who marked their sanctity by growing their hair very long, a dynasty of Frankish Samsons – feuded among themselves, splintering into smaller realms. In the 620s, a nobleman named Pepin, who owned estates in Brabant, became mayor of the palace for the king of Austrasia – northern Germany and the Low Countries – founding his own dynasty but it was a dangerous game: his son and son-in-law were executed by Merovingians. In 687, his grandson, also Pepin, united the kingdoms with himself as dux et princeps Francorum under the nominal king.

Pepin had sons by Plectrudis, chief wife, but he also had a son by his concubine Alpaida named Charles. But when his legitimate sons died, Plectrudis persuaded Pepin to leave the throne to their grandson. In 714, Pepin died and Plectrudis promoted his grandson and imprisoned Charles – but he managed to escape. By 719 having defeated all contenders he emerged as duke-prince himself, and for the rest of his life he fought a war every summer and never lost one.

In late 732 al-Ghafiqi, the Arab governor of al-Andalus, led 15,000 Arabs into Francia, defeating Odo, duke of Aquitaine, before heading north. But Odo warned Charles, who, mustering around 15,000 Franks, rode out to stop the Arab invaders. For seven days, near Tours, they faced each other. When the fighting started, al-Ghafiqi’s light cavalry disintegrated against the armour of the Frankish knights. When Charles made a feint to threaten their booty, the Arabs broke and al-Ghafiqi was killed. The Arabs withdrew overnight. The encounter was far from decisive – it was just a raid. The Arabs still held Septimania and they were back raiding soon afterwards. But Charles saw himself as Martel, the slayer of the infidels, a latter-day Maccabee – the Hammer – and champion of Christ.

Soon after Charles’s death, the family had a stroke of luck. In 751, Pope Zacharias requested help from Martel’s son Pepin the Short against the Lombard kings who ruled northern Italy. Popes were at the mercy of voracious Lombards and Roman magnates. Pepin had his price: a crown. As a result, the last Merovingian, Childeric III, was tonsured, losing his regal locks. Pepin favoured a new look – short hair and long moustaches – as king of the Franks. In 753, when a new pope, Stephen, travelled north to court King Pepin, he was greeted by his six-year-old son Charles – later known as Charlemagne. Stephen anointed Pepin, Charlemagne and his brother Carloman as kings and patricians of the Romans.

Pepin the Short intervened in Italy, granting Pope Stephen bountiful estates and ordering the payment across Europe of tithes to fund the papacy, gifts that made the popes players for the first time. Then he expelled the Arabs from Septimania. When he was thirteen, Charlemagne accompanied his father to war; when he was fifteen, Pepin gave him his first concubine, Himiltrud, with whom he had a child. Looking out across the world, Pepin and Charlemagne knew nothing of life across the Atlantic; to the north, they enjoyed good relations with the main British kingdom, Mercia; to the east, they clashed with the pagan Saxons of central Europe; further away, the Greek world of Constantinople was strange and distant; and beyond them were the Islamic caliphs whose lands were so vast that they circled round the Mediterranean to Spain in the west. Now, an Islamic rebel, al-Mansur, sent an envoy, probably a Jewish trader, to ask for Pepin’s assistance against the decadent caliphs of Damascus.

In 743, when Abd al-Malik’s grandson Walid II became caliph, his extravagant debauchery seemed to confirm the anti-Islamic rot of the Umayya dynasty. The seed didn’t fall far from the tree: it was the age of the jarya, enslaved singers who were bought for massive sums. Walid’s father, Yazid II, had fallen in love with the enslaved singer Hababah, whom he saw as a youngster in Mecca but could not afford until he became caliph in 720, when he paid 4,000 gold pieces. In Damascus, Hababah starred in spectacular productions with fifty other singers which the caliph found so enrapturing that he thought he was in paradise: ‘I want to fly away.’ After she choked to death on a pomegranate seed, he could not bear to part with her body for three very unMuslim days. When Yazid II died in 724, Walid, then a teenager, was passed over for his uncle Hisham. While Hisham spent twenty years enjoying his harem, Crown Prince Walid, poet, lover, gambler and hunter, flaunted his outrageous pleasure-seeking – ‘in love with love’ – in poetry:

I would that all wine were a dinar a glass

And all cunts on a lion’s brow

Then only the libertine would drink

And only the brave make love.

His paramour was an enslaved singer, Nawar, nicknamed Salma, whom he compared to a lush harvest and whose features he eulogized: ‘Salma my love, an antelope I adore for the dark eyes and flawless neck and throat.’ But Salma was unfaithful, and Walid revelled in this tormented passion.^*

Walid’s rock-star behaviour was so debauched that Hisham decided to disinherit him in favour of his own son Muawiya, but he died – and the playboy inherited the empire. When Walid was too drunk to leave his orgies, he did the unthinkable: Salma, the jarya, dressed up in caliphal vestments and led Friday prayers. Or so his enemies claimed.

Walid partied in his new pleasure palaces in the desert,^* wallowing soused in bathhouses decorated with mosaics that were more Persian and Roman than Islamic. At Qusr al-Amra, he commissioned frescoes that show him lording it over the conquered monarchs of Constantinople, Persia, China, Ethiopia and Spain, while its bathhouse features naked girls, smoking, dancing and banqueting. When a poet visited Walid, he fell dead drunk and then shouted after him, ‘Son of a whore, if so much as a whisper passes your lips, I’ll have your head off.’

‘Wake up, Umayya!’ warned a dissident. ‘Search for the caliph of God among the tambourines and lutes!’ As Walid partied, rumours and revelations swarmed; rebels besieged him in 744 and the caliph, now thirty-eight, was beheaded. Meanwhile not far from his party house, something strange was happening.

THE BLOODSHEDDER AND THE GIANT BABY: RISE OF ABBAS, FALL OF TANG

In a rustic hamlet named Humayma (Jordan) lived a well-connected but obscure squire with his sons. Muhammad ibn Ali was unexceptional, except that he was a great-grandson of Muhammad’s uncle Abbas, and he was disgusted by the effeminate caliphs ‘whose only ambition’, remarked his son Mansur, ‘was the satisfaction of pleasures forbidden by God’. As the Umayya faltered, a perfume seller arrived at the farm on a secret mission from Iraq, where support was growing for a furious revolution far to the east in Khorasan. In June 747, a sacred warrior, a manumitted slave who called himself Ibn Muslim, emerged from nowhere to launch a rebellion of Khorasanis, excluded by the Arab Umayyas, that quickly gathered a militant alliance of black-bannered warriors – Persians and Afghans, dissidents and adventurers, followers of the Ali lineage of Muhammad’s family and sectarians named Kharijites – who took an oath of allegiance to ‘An Acceptable Member of the House of the Prophet’. Knowing that the Ali family offended many in Syria, Ibn Muslim backed Abbas’s descendants and sent the trusted cosmetics salesman with an invitation to destiny.

Muhammad ibn Ali agreed to support the revolution, a cause inherited by his sons, only for the Umayya to hear the rumours and kill the eldest. A younger son, Abbas, went underground as Ibn Muslim galloped out of Khorasan into Iraq. There the two met, united in disgust and outrage at the decline of the House of Islam. Proclaiming himself caliph of House Abbasiya of the Muhammad dynasty, Abbas warned, ‘Hold yourselves ready for I am the pitiless bloodshedder and destroying avenger.’ His regal name was al-Saffah – the Bloodshedder.

At the River Zab in February 750, Ibn Muslim and al-Saffah defeated the army of Marwan II, who was hunted down in Egypt and killed – the last Umayya caliph.^* In April, al-Saffah, his brother al-Mansur and his troops took Damascus. Bloodshedder personally beheaded Umayya princes, dead caliphs were disinterred, ‘scourged with whips then crucified’, skulls smashed. Bloodshedder announced an amnesty for the Umayya family, who were invited to a reconciliatory dinner near Jaffa. But it was a trick: as Bloodshedder watched gleefully, the guests were slaughtered. ‘Never have I eaten a meal’, he said, ‘that did me such good or tasted so delicious.’

Only one prince escaped, but he would eventually found a new paradise kingdom in the west. Prince Abd al-Rahman, grandson of the poetry-lover Hisham and son of his heir Muawiya who had died young, fled from Damascus with his brother and Badr, a Greek slave. Hunted by Bloodshedder’s henchmen, they were trapped at the Euphrates, where the brother was beheaded. But Abd al-Rahman swam for his life, the start of a five-year adventure across Syria and Africa, towards the last place where his family still had friends: Spain.

Bloodshedder moved the capital to Kufa, closer to the Persian homelands of the revolutionaries, Damascus being tainted with Umayya filthiness, and his success was capped by advances towards the borders of China’s Western Region. Arabs, Chinese, Tibetans and Turks fought in ever-changing alliances. The Chinese, backed by Turkic allies, repelled Bloodshedder’s armies until a clash at Talas where the Turks switched sides. The Arabs won, but this was a minor encounter compared with the catastrophe that was enveloping the Tang.

Emperor Xuanzong had ruled conscientiously for decades, but now, beguiled by Taoist alchemy and depressed by traitorous sons, he lost focus. He liquidated three of his sons, leaving power to a minister named Li Linfu who recruited a professional army that included Sogdians from central Asia. Among them was an ostentatious, illiterate and Brobdingnagian soldier, An Lushan. As a boy An Lushan had been arrested for stealing, as a general almost executed for insubordination, yet he proved a master manipulator of his patronizing Tang masters, who fatally underestimated him as he played the fat, coarse, devoted bumpkin. When Emperor Xuanzong asked what was in his belly, he replied, ‘Other than a faithful heart, there is nothing else,’ and at other times he pretended not to know what a crown prince was, insisting, ‘I’m a barbarian! I don’t understand formal ceremony.’ But he had a nose for weakness and understood that the essential person was not the emperor but a certain concubine.

At fourteen Yang Guifei was married to one of the emperor’s sons but spotting her beauty as she bathed at Huaqing springs – ‘the hot water running down her glistening jade-like body’, as a poet put it – the sixty-nine-year-old emperor ordered her enrolment as a Taoist nun so that she could remain in the palace; meanwhile he foisted another wife on his son. Yang had a porcelain complexion and a curvaceous figure which she displayed in a bodice she had designed herself.

Yang was also irrepressible, quick to joy, fast to fury. The rows she and Xuanzong had were tumultuous. Finally the offended emperor sent her away. ‘My offence deserves death, and it is fortunate that His Imperial Majesty did not kill me,’ she wrote to him. ‘I will forever leave the palace. My gold, jade and treasures were all given me by His Imperial Majesty, and it would be inappropriate for me to offer them back to him. Only what my parents gave me I would dare give.’ Typically she was keeping the jewels.

When she cut off some tresses and sent them to the emperor, he could not resist her scent and ordered his eunuch Gao Lishi to summon her back. Of course she returned. Wherever she was, Xuanzong ensured that her beloved lychees were delivered by relays of horses and that Gao served her every wish. He also promoted her cousin to chief minister. This paladin, An Lushan, was so sycophantic that she proposed to adopt him as her son, leading to a comical scene in which Consort Yang dressed the gargantuan, bewhiskered old ruffian in baby clothes and bathed him as he gurgled, a favour which he repaid by always bowing first to her: ‘Barbarians bow to mothers first before fathers.’ Xuanzong found all this charming, and raised An to prince.

Yet as the empire was rocked by floods and rebellions, the emperor failed to control a feud between the chief minister and General An Lushan. In December 755, mustering his army, he rebelled and quickly defeated the Tang armies. The brittle regime collapsed at once. An Lushan took Luoyang, where he declared himself emperor. Emperor Xuanzong, Consort Yang, her cousin the minister and eunuch Gao, guarded by cavalry, fled Chang’an towards Sichuan. The soldiers killed the minister, then seized the emperor, demanding the end of the Yangs and the execution of his mistress. The emperor could not bear the thought, but Gao persuaded him to go ahead. Yang asked to die by silk rather than beheading, so that her looks would remain perfect for the afterlife. Eunuch Gao strangled her and buried her with a sachet of perfumes.

An Lushan occupied the other capital, Chang’an, amid apocalyptic scenes. ‘I remember when we first fled the rebels, / Hurrying north over dangerous roads,’ wrote an eyewitness, Du Fu, a government official and China’s greatest poet, who witnessed and experienced the suffering of millions of refugees:

Night deepened on Pengya Road,

The moon shone over Whitewater Hills.

A whole family endlessly trudging,

Begging without shame from the people we met.

Just months after capturing the two biggest cities on earth, An Lushan, holding court in Luoyang, was going blind, probably from diabetes, and was now so obese that he supposedly crushed a horse to death and it took a team of eunuchs to pull him out of bed. His sons plotted. He executed one of them.

In December 757, another son murdered An and seized the throne. But the Tang generals, now under the former crown prince, Emperor Suzong,^* moved against the An family. Unable to muster large armies to retake Chang’an, Suzong turned to the khagan of the Uighurs, Bayanchur Khan, who had hacked a new empire out of the ruins of the Goturk confederacy, based in his Mongolian capital, Ordu-Baliq, and was ruling eastern Siberia, Mongolia and most of central Asia. Bayanchur’s Uighur troops joined the Tang armies and took Chang’an and Luoyang, which they were allowed to loot for three days. Suzong gave them 20,000 bales of silk and married his own daughter, Princess Xiaoguo, to Bayanchur, the only emperor’s daughter ever married to a barbarian. But Suzong and his son Daizong still struggled to control the empire as the Tibetans, who had already conquered Nepal and Assam as far the Bay of Bengal, seized most of central Asia.

In 763, the Tibetan emperor Trisong Detsen dispatched 200,000 troops into China, storming Chang’an. The Tang soon pushed the Tibetans back with Uighur help. Tang gratitude was short-lived: the Uighurs were massacred and driven out, though their khagans ruled their vast empire into the ninth century.^* The Tang had been fatally damaged: the rebellion and its sequels were among the most catastrophic wars in human history, with thirty-six million killed or displaced. ‘Weeping in the wilderness, how many families know of war and loss,’ wrote Du Fu. ‘All word of events in the human world lost in those vast silent spaces.’^*

At the height of his crisis, Emperor Suzong, bearing no grudge after the modest Arab victory at Talas, asked al-Mansur for help, and the caliph may have sent a small Arab contingent to China. It is said that enslaved Chinese prisoners brought the Chinese invention of paper to the Arab world, whence it ultimately reached Europe.

Without al-Mansur, the Abbasiya caliphate might have been a passing moment; instead he became founder of the most powerful state in the world, ruled by the Muhammad family for the next two centuries. It was when Caliph Bloodshedder died of smallpox at the age of thirty-two that his remarkable elder brother took the title al-Mansur – the Victorious.

Tall, thin, leathery-skinned, yellow-bearded, saffron-dyed, al-Mansur sensed that the greatest threat to him came from his enforcer, Ibn Muslim. Inviting Ibn Muslim to visit him in his tent, even while his soldiers were in the camp, al-Mansur clapped his hands, the sign for his bodyguard to slit the Khorasani’s throat. The body was wrapped in a carpet and left in a corner of the tent. When al-Mansur’s adviser asked where the warlord was, the caliph replied, ‘Rolled up over there.’ The remains were dumped in the Tigris. When Muhammad the Pure Soul, leader of the Ali family, senior line of House Muhammad, rebelled, al-Mansur had him killed and displayed his head on a silver platter.

After moving between Kufa and armed camps, al-Mansur decided to build his own capital and, rising at dawn every day, he supervised every detail, earning himself the nickname Abul Dawanik, Father of Pennies. Choosing a location on the Tigris, surrounded by fertile land, twenty miles north of Ctesiphon–Seleucia, whose bricks he purloined for its walls, he built a round city Medinat al-Mansur, soon known as Baghdad, setting up court in a vast Palace of the Golden Gate on the west bank of the river topped with a 130-foot gold dome. He himself often lived in a small tent. Then he moved into ‘a tiny apartment of one room’ with ‘a felt mat and nothing else except his quilt, pillow and blanket’.

Pious and austere, tempered by his obscure beginnings and violent rise, al-Mansur did not drink or party. He also respected his wife Arwa, descended from Yemenite kings, but he did prize a Christian concubine with the evocative name Restless Butterfly.

The wealth of the caliphate was based on an efficient tax system and on trade not just between east and west but also with east Africa. Arab merchants were starting to trade with the African coast, conveying to Iraq not just ivory and spices but humans: thousands of black slaves, the zanj, were sold to work the plantations of Iraq – the start of the east African slave trade.

Al-Mansur controlled the government through a wazir or vizier, premier of the empire, but it was a dangerous job. After eight years, al-Mansur’s first vizier and his family were executed, but by the mid-760s al-Mansur had found a sophisticated minister. This was Khalid, aristocratic Persian son of Barmak, a Buddhist priest from Balkh (Afghanistan) who had been respected as a doctor, treating Abd al-Malik’s sons Maslama and Hisham, before converting to Islam and joining the bureaucracy. Now as vizier Khalid became a munificent patron – the second family of the empire. Al-Mansur kept a wizened eye on his courtiers, once suddenly demanding a payment from Khalid al-Barmaki, who managed to pay it by borrowing from all the grandees that he had helped.

In 758, al-Mansur sent his crown prince al-Mahdi to govern Khorasan, where the boy was joined by Khalid’s son Yahya. When al-Mahdi’s favourite concubine, Khayzuran, gave birth to a son, Haroun, Yahya’s wife was given the honour of breastfeeding the baby prince while Khayzuran did the same for the Barmaki baby, Fadl. These milk-sharing arrangements gave the Barmaki a special intimacy.

Holding court in his iwan, with a mace by his side, al-Mansur was guarded by 4,000 mace-wielding palace guards, who doubled as executioners, and was attended by 700 courtiers in black, standing in ranks. He created a network of spies around the barid, the imperial mail. ‘I always need four people at my door,’ he said, ‘the judge, the police chief and the tax collector – and the chief of the barid to give me reliable intelligence on the first three.’ Al-Mansur relished the liquidation of his enemies, and was said to keep a secret cellar where he stored the heads of the Ali family, each meticulously labelled.

Only one enemy had escaped him: the boy prince of the Umayya, Abd al-Rahman.

THE FALCON OF AL -ANDALUS AND THE CROWNED DOVES OF AIX: ABD AL-RAHMAN AND CHARLEMAGNE

Chased by al-Mansur’s hitmen, Abd al-Rahman with his Greek slave Badr moved westwards in a series of escapades. On one occasion he had to hide under the fragrant skirts of a beautiful female cousin, an experience that he happily remembered in old age: ‘I recall your earthy aroma to this day!’ Finally he reached Morocco and, after sending his freedman to test support, he arrived in Gibraltar in 755, winning his nickname the Arriver (al-Dakhil), gathering followers: in 756, he declared himself amir of al-Andalus. Al-Mansur sent an army to crush him but the Arriver routed it, pickling the heads of the generals and despatched them in giftboxes all the way to the caliph who was on hajj in Mecca. ‘God be praised for placing a sea between us and this devil!’ al-Mansur exclaimed. ‘Who deserves the title Falcon of Quraysh?’

‘You, O Caliph,’ replied his courtiers.

He shook his head. ‘The Falcon is Abd al-Rahman.’

Abd al-Rahman, then aged twenty-six, spent his life fighting to keep the title, but he also started to beautify his capital Cordoba, crafting a mosque out of a Visigothic church that would become a wonder of the west with its forest of columns borrowed from Roman ruins across Spain and perhaps designed to recall the palm trees of Syria. He never ceased to miss Syria, comparing himself to a palm tree who was also ‘a stranger in the west / Far from your oriental home, like me unblessed … / You would weep if you had tears to pour / For my companions on Euphrates’ shore’. Yet the Falcon could not rest on his laurels. His enemies invited Charlemagne, king of Francia, to cross the Pyrenees and destroy him.

Bathing in his pool at the hot springs of Aix (Aachen), at the centre of his court of paladins, scholars, concubines and sons, Charlemagne, suffering gout and aching after weeks in the saddle, would swim a few lengths then question his Anglo-Saxon scribe – ‘Master Alcuin, allow me to ask you a few questions’ – on the planets or Pliny, while his mischievous daughters flirted with his courtiers.

From the moment he ascended the throne in 768 at the age of twenty, Charlemagne, blond, giant and irrepressibly energetic, galloped, broadsword in hand, from one end of Europe to the other, dominating the continent more than anyone else until Napoleon and Hitler, with the difference that he ruled for forty years – and virtually every monarch in Europe down to 1918 was descended from him. He outmanoeuvred his brother, along with anyone else who threatened his power, conquered Aquitaine and married Princess Desiderata, daughter of the Lombard king of Italy, Desiderius, who almost immediately moved to take over Rome. Pope Hadrian appealed to Charlemagne, who switched sides, routed Desiderius and seized the crown of Italy, in the process rejecting his Lombard wife and marrying a German princess, Hildegard.

Charlemagne loved women, marrying five times. Hildegard bore him nine children before dying at twenty-six, but he had many more – eighteen in all – with a host of concubines. This royal brood naturally revolved around the strapping king, six foot five, usually clad in simple Frankish garb, with silk-trimmed tunic, fur coats, linen trousers and gold-hilted sword, but his extraordinary confidence and ambition were not effortless: he often suffered insomnia, getting up five times a night and then holding court in bed the next day.

He initially considered marrying his seven daughters to foreign princes, but he could not bear to be parted from them – and there are hints of incestuous liaisons.^* Notorious for their games, teasing and sexual adventures, the girls were like ‘little crowned doves’, wrote the Anglo-Saxon courtier Alcuin, that ‘flit around the chambers of the palace, come to your windows’ and then ‘like wild horses, break in at the door of your chamber’. The ‘crowned doves’ were hard to restrain, being young, alluring and fearless, each of them made pregnant out of wedlock by young courtiers, one by an abbot. So brutal at war, Charlemagne’s court was cultured^* and easy-going, tolerating this erotic atmosphere while also supporting the papal campaign to promote single sacred marriages, discouraging annulments, concubinage and cousin marriages.^* At the same time the popes encouraged the inheritance of property only by legitimate sons. The Church claimed the right to inherit lands that lacked legitimate heirs, and by 900 it owned a third of western farmland. Charlemagne, who linked his own power to that of the papacy, backed this European version of marriage, fixated on legitimacy and sex (not having much) that was peculiarly Christian. European families developed differently from those of Asia and Africa, where people still remain loyal to wider clans. Increasingly Europeans married once, loyal to their nuclear families; they married later and had fewer children; some women never married since they could no longer become junior wives; property was inherited by legitimate eldest sons; and moralistic people could signal their virtue by living according to Church rules. Sex for procreation was God’s work, for pleasure a delicious taboo. This changed Europe, but it didn’t change Charlemagne, who enjoyed concubines unabashed. It did affect his sons, however, as they jostled for power.

Yet Charlemagne lived for war, sacred war. Every summer he went to war on one of eight different fronts where his heavy cavalry on towering destrier warhorses seemed to give his armies a superiority over all other forces. He granted property and titles to his magnates in return for the supply of cavalry, a feudal relationship between king and vassal that came to militarize and shape society in hierarchies that were regarded as natural and sacred. ‘It’s our role’, he told Pope Leo III, ‘to defend by force of arms the Holy Church of Christ everywhere from the attacks of pagans and the devastations of infidels.’ He was preparing for the imminent End of Days, his respect for the Church a means of promoting eternal life as well as his own dynasty – partners in power and salvation. To the west were the Muslims, and it is easy to forget that at this time eastern and northern Europe – eastern Germany, Poland, Scandinavia, Baltics, Russia – were pagan. Charlemagne’s mission in life was to convert these monsters – or kill them all.

KILLING THE DEMONS: THE SWORD OF CHARLEMAGNE

‘Baptism or death!’ was Charlemagne’s offer. Mass killing was the solution. In 772, Charlemagne attacked the Saxons, who worshipped the gods Thor, Wotan and Saxnot, and burned down their sacred World Tree, the shrine of the Irminsul, believed to support the sky. It was the start of a thirty-year mission to eliminate the ‘cult of demons’. In 782, Charlemagne slaughtered 4,500 Saxons to make the point: they must embrace Christianity or be ‘entirely eliminated’.

In 778, an Arab rebel from Zaragoza arrived at this court and invited Charlemagne to attack the Falcon, Abd al-Rahman. The king crossed the Pyrenees and took Girona, north of Barcelona, but Zaragoza closed its gates, and after a terrifying retreat across the Pyrenees, retold in the chivalric Song of Roland, Charlemagne just made it back to Aquitaine.

Undaunted, he switched eastwards to swallow Bavaria, a move which brought him into contact with the Avars, once nomadic pagans who ruled Pannonia (Hungary/Romania), which now also fell to Charlemagne. He started to see himself as a Christian Augustus, a project made possible by some shocking atrocities in Constantinople, seat of the only real Roman emperor. But now a murderous filicidal woman was on the throne.

CHARLEMAGNE’S CORONATION, HAROUN’S WEDDING

Irene of Athens, now fifty years old, an emperor’s widow who was guiding Constantinople out of its frenzy of icon smashing, was keen to appease Charlemagne, who could threaten her southern Italian holdings. In 781, Irene as regent negotiated marriage between her young son, Emperor Constantine VI, and Charlemagne’s daughter Rotrude, but both Irene and Charlemagne delayed the wedding. Constantine was both inept and vicious: he was defeated in battle by the Muslims, and when an uncle rebelled he not only blinded him but tore out the tongues of his other four uncles. His mother was convinced she would do better. In 797, she deposed her twenty-seven-year-old son and blinded him. This demonstration of female misrule convinced Charlemagne and the Franks that the Roman throne was vacant. It helped that Pope Leo III was so terrorized by the grandees fighting for control of central Italy that he would agree to anything to win Charlemagne’s protection. Indeed, as he was negotiating the Frank’s new title, assassins attacked Leo and tried to blind him. In Rome on Christmas Day 800, Charlemagne and his sons donned Roman togas as the pope crowned him ‘Emperor of the Romans’. Charlemagne’s first act was to try and execute 300 of the conspirators who had just tried to assassinate Leo.

His new title would need Constantinople’s recognition. Irene considered marrying Charlemagne herself, but she was then deposed and exiled to spin wool on Lesbos. Charlemagne extended the hand of friendship to the caliph, Haroun al-Rashid. This was a way of putting pressure on Constantinople, which had just blundered into a war with Baghdad. Charlemagne sent gifts of Frisian cloaks, Spanish horses and hunting dogs to the caliph in Baghdad. The caliph sent him an array of gifts – an ivory chess set, a caliphal tent, an elephant named Abul-Abbas (walked all the way from Baghdad to Aix by his Jewish envoy) and an astonishing work of Arab sophistication, a water clock in which knights appeared out of little doors every hour.^* Charlemagne could not help but be impressed by the splendours of Haroun al-Rashid.

In 1782, Haroun’s wedding to his double first cousin Zubaida was said to have been the greatest party of all time. Held at the Eternity Palace in Baghdad, the wedding was hosted by the groom’s father Caliph al-Mahdi and his mother Khayzuran, and every guest received ‘goody-bags’ of jewels, scents and handfuls of gold dinars. The groom was eighteen, the young bride was presented with the bejewelled sleeveless badana, seized from the Umayya and handed down through the family. Both were grandchildren of Caliph al-Mansur. It was he who had given the bride the nickname Butterpat – Zubaida.

Haroun’s mother was his champion. The slim and beautiful Khayzuran had been kidnapped and sold into slavery, until spotted by Crown Prince al-Mahdi, who fell in love with her and then freed and married her, giving her the name Reed – Khayzuran. Refusing to remain in the harem, she revelled in her prominence.

The diffident and shy Haroun was not the heir, but like so many royal scions dreamed of retiring with his lovely Zubaida to an estate away from what he called the ‘boiler room’ of Baghdad. Yet he had already shown his acumen: he had led an army that raided all the way to the Bosphoros before Empress Irene bought off the caliphate with golden tribute; the caliph then awarded him the title al-Rashid – the Righteous.

Haroun’s elder brother al-Hadi succeeded as caliph, but, beset by rebellions, abandoned Baghdad and clashed with their mother Khayzuran, whom he tried to kill. In September 786, al-Hadi, lying sick, was suffocated by the girls of the harem and Khayzuran took control, advised by Yahya the Barmaki. Granting the troops a bonus, they organized Haroun’s acclamation. Caliph Haroun then appointed his mentor, Yahya the Barmaki, as vizier: ‘I’ve invested you with the rule of my flock. Govern as you think is right.’ The Barmaki were almost family. Haroun had been brought up with Yahya’s playboy son Jafar, and his first mistress was probably one of Yahya’s concubines, Hailana, who begged the prince to rescue her from the old minister. When Haroun voiced his desires, Yahya gave him Hailana.

Haroun, often wearing disguise, partied with Jafar, as portrayed in The Thousand and One Nights. In ‘The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad’, a girl shops sensuously for delicious foods and scents – Omani peaches, Egyptian cucumbers, Damascene nenuphars (water lilies), ambergris and musk – before returning to a party house where a procuress warned them that discretion was essential. They were then joined by Haroun and Jafar for an orgy in the world’s greatest metropolis, obsessed with music and poetry, food and sex.^*

THE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS: THE CALIPH AND THE SINGER -STARS OF BAGHDAD

Star poets and enslaved singers, trained in Medina, were bid for by the caliph or the Barmaki for vast sums ‘like football transfers’, writes Hugh Kennedy. ‘Girls would be traded up gaining in value in each transaction.’ These enslaved superstars, part courtesan, part artiste, played men off against each other, wrote poetry and often enjoyed the sex in ways that would be unthinkable in today’s Islamic world.^*

Haroun was devoted to his mother Khayzuran and happy with his wife Zubaida, who behaved and dressed like an empress, wearing bejewelled boots and slippers, travelling with an escort of eunuchs and concubines. Khayzuran ruled the hurram – the sanctuary or harem – where Haroun kept his wives, 2,000 female slaves and his children.

Boredom must have played a large part in the life within the harem, boredom vying with desire: there are tales of Haroun’s girls keen to party even if they were risking their lives, and there are hints of lesbian consolations in the niches of the hurram: during the reign of Haroun’s brother al-Hadi, one of his courtiers recalled how a eunuch carried in a tray covered in a cloth.

‘Lift the cover!” said Caliph al-Hadi.

And there were the heads of two slaves. And by God I have never seen more beautiful faces or lovelier hair. Jewels were entwined and the air was fragrant with their perfumes.

‘Do you know what they had done?’ asked the caliph. ‘They fell in love with each other, meeting for immoral purposes. I sent a eunuch to watch them. He told me they were together. I caught them under a quilt making love and killed them.’ Then he said, ‘Take away the heads, boy,’ and carried on the conversation as if nothing had happened.

Zubaida, the definition of virtuous Arab beauty, was sometimes alarmed by Haroun’s love affairs, once giving him ten new girls to distract him. Haroun and Zubaida had one son together, al-Amin, who was thus a double member of House Abbas. He had other children by twenty-four of the girls. When the concubine Marajil died young, Zubaida adopted her son, the future caliph al-Mamun.

Haroun had to have the best slave singers, paying a colossal 70,000 dirhams for ‘the Girl with the Mole’. But he then insisted on her telling him if she had slept with her former master. When she admitted ‘just once’, he gave her away to a governor. Sometimes even he could not get every singer he wanted. The star of the day was the gifted Inan. Haroun sent his African eunuch Musr to pay 100,000 gold dinars for her, but the owner would not sell, driving the caliph to such distraction that his mother intervened. He claimed he only wanted Inan for her poetry, in which case, it was pointed out to him, why not sleep with a male poet? Haroun laughed.

Haroun wasn’t the only one in love with Inan. Abu Nuwas (Son of the Dangling Locks) was an outrageous bisexual literary rock star who craved Inan: ‘Find pity for a man yearning for just a small drop from you?’ Inan replied:

Is it

you

that you mean by this?

Be off with you! Go and masturbate!

And he answered:

If I do that, I fear,

You’ll be jealous of my hand.

Abu Nuwas celebrated the seduction of girls and boys with verses depicting sexual antics and impotent failures. The wantonness of Baghdad women intimidated him. ‘I found myself in the middle of large sea,’ he wrote, unable to cope with this lubricious enthusiasm. ‘I cried out to a young man “Save me.” If he hadn’t thrown me a rope, I’d have fallen to the bottom of that sea. After this I swore … I’d only travel on backsides.’ He was happier with male lovers: ‘He prized open the boy’s arse with the edge of his sword … Show pity and compassion only where fitting. Squeeze his balls gently.’ He relished male beauty: ‘How lucky is the one who can land a kiss on him, and garner what his trousers hold!’ He recounted nights of drinking and gay sex, favouring court eunuchs and Christian monks:

Auspicious stars had risen on the night

When drunkard assaulted drunkard

We passed the time kowtowing to the Devil

Until monks sounded the bells at dawn

And the youth left, donning delightful robes

Stained with my iniquitous behaviour.

He loved the company of showgirls, recalling four of them discussing sex: ‘My vagina is like a split pomegranate,’ said one, ‘and smells of ground amber. Lucky the one who gets me when I’m shaven.’

Haroun refused to be the poet’s patron. Instead Abu Nuwas became the lover of al-Amin, the heir, who was less interested in concubines than in boy eunuchs, leading his mother Zubaida to dress her young servant girls in turban, male tunics and sashes with hair done up in bangs and sidecurls. This sparked a fashion for gamine page girls known as ghulamiyyat.

Yet pleasure had its limits. Haroun made the hajj ten times; Zabaida’s palace resembled a ‘beehive’ with so many girls reciting the Quran; and in 803 the caliph managed both a hajj and a successful jihad, defeating the Roman emperor, who had ended payment of Irene’s tribute. Haroun was less playful than his reputation implied. When he turned, he was deadly.

BRING ME THE HEAD OF JAFAR, MOTHERFUCKER

One night in early 803, Haroun partied into the night as usual with Jafar al-Barmaki. But when they went their separate ways the caliph established himself on a boat in the Euphrates and ordered his African eunuch Musr to take his trusted guards and bring back the head of Jafar.

The Barmaki, vizier Yahya and son Jafar, had overreached. Jafar sometimes entered Haroun’s rooms without being announced. Haroun had executed the head of House Ali, yet may have discovered that the Barmaki were in contact with the rival dynasty. Their taxes had provoked revolts; their grandeur alienated the army. Distrusting many of his courtiers Haroun prepared their destruction.

Jafar tried to play for time. ‘He only ordered this while drunk,’ he told Musr. ‘Don’t do anything till morning, or at least discuss it with him again.’ Musr double-checked the order. Haroun’s reply? ‘Bring me Jafar’s head, motherfucker!’

Simultaneously he summoned Sindi, a devoted freedman, who was sent with guards to arrest all the other Barmaki. Yahya died in prison. Jafar’s head was brought to Haroun, who spat at it and sent it to Sindi: the head was then displayed on the bridges of Baghdad. The Barmakis’ downfall astonished everyone.

In February 808, Haroun left Baghdad with his favourite son al-Mamun to put down unrest in Khorasan where the boy was governor. Haroun agonized over the succession. ‘If I choose Amin, my people will be unhappy, if Mamun, my family will be.’ The caliph compromised: al-Amin, son of Zubaida, was to be senior monarch while al-Mamun would rule the east. In March Haroun, then forty-seven, suddenly died; al-Amin succeeded, supported by Zubaida. Al-Mamun respected the arrangement, basing himself in Merv (Turkmenistan).

One of the few who were happy with this was Abu Nuwas, al-Amin’s lover, though even the poet was careful what he wrote about this friend: ‘I am in love but can’t say with whom; I fear him who fears no one; I feel for my head and wonder if it is still attached to my body!’ Yet al-Amin’s feckless incompetence and homosexual preferences destroyed him.^*

By 810, the caliphal brothers were estranged; both raised armies. Al-Mamun’s Khorasani army defeated al-Amin and laid siege to Baghdad, where a tragedy began to unfold. Street youths known as Naked Ones fought the invaders in the streets; mangonels (stone-throwing artillery) bombarded the city: ‘Here lies a stranger far from home; headless in the midst of the road; caught in the middle of the fighting; and no one knows which side he was on.’

Al-Amin tried to escape, but his boat capsized and he was captured: ‘Zubaida’s brat’ was thrown into prison, where he found himself with a former courtier. ‘Come closer and hold me tight in your arms,’ said al-Amin shaking. ‘What will my brother do? Kill me or forgive me?’

After midnight, armed Persians erupted into the cell. Al-Amin stood up: ‘We are from God and to Him we return.’ The Persians beheaded him and sent the head to al-Mamun, who wept, then told his advisers: ‘What’s done is done. So start thinking how to explain it.’ Facing Shiite revolts, al-Mamun appeased the House of Ali, promising to make Ali al-Rida his heir. But once the danger had passed, he ordered the poisoning of Imam Ali (known later as Ali Reza, a saint of Shiite Iran). In 819 he arrived in devastated Baghdad and started to restore the city.

Good-looking, talented and curious, al-Mamun was an original. He was kind to al-Amin’s mother Zubaida, calling her the ‘best of mothers’ – and she forgave him. The court was different, more Persian than Arab, but al-Mamun commissioned translations of Greek and Indian works, which were stored in his House of Wisdom, an old institution – library-cum-academy – dating from the Sasanians.^* Meanwhile he oversaw a flowering of science, medicine, astronomy and geography, all of which fascinated the poetry-writing caliph: ‘If I flew up to the starry vault; / And joined heaven’s westward flow,’ he wrote, ‘I’d learn as I traversed the sky, / The fate of all things below.’^*

Mumun was the ultimate patron of adab, refined and urbane literature. The author al-Tahiri celebrated food and sex in his books Adultery and its Enjoyment, Stories about Slave Boys and, bracingly, Masturbation. Writers could even celebrate female sexual pleasure in a way that sounds very modern. Al-Jahiz (the Bug-Eyed), born in Basra and descended from an enslaved zanj African, won al-Mamun’s patronage with essays on the Quran, translations of Aristotle and worthy polemics but preferred to write about the superiority of black men over white (a subject close to his heart). His Pleasures of Girls and Boys Compared was a compendium of interviews with both sexes about sexual pleasure.^* Al-Mamun hired Jahiz as tutor to his sons, but they were frightened by the writer’s bulging eyes.^*

As ruler and imam, sympathetic to the Shia approach and suspicious of literal-minded following of the Hadith, al-Mamun insisted that the Quran was created from God’s word, not literally written by God, and forced his scholars to agree. Jihad was a duty, security a necessity: in 830, al-Mamun, along with his much younger brother al-Mutasim, attacked the Romans. Al-Mutasim persuaded the caliph to buy Turkish slaves – ghilman, tough horse archers with Asiatic faces. In 836, as caliph, al-Mutasim moved from Baghdad to a new capital at Samara where he hoped to be protected by his Turkic praetorians. Instead they took over. In 861, the ghilman murdered a caliph. Discontent among enslaved zanj on the sugar-cane plantations and irrigation works of southern Iraq exploded in 869 into a rebellion of Marsh Arabs and free and enslaved Africans that lasted for fourteen years. It led to the fall of Basra, and the slaughter of all its inhabitants; in 879 the rebels even came close to Baghdad. Some 500,000 people, even a million, were killed in the mayhem, which discouraged Arab rulers in the future from using African slave labour. The revolt fatally weakened the caliphate, just as its Spanish rival was thriving.

THE BLACKBIRD OF CORDOBA

The grandson of the Falcon, Abd al-Rahman II, personified the new ideal of Andalusian machismo and cultured adab, writing poetry and promoting new fashions while fighting Charlemagne’s son Charles the Pious, one of the three who inherited the empire.

While Charlemagne’s heirs – known after his Latin name Carolus as the Carolingians – fought each other, Abd al-Rahman II held court in Cordoba, which now outstripped Baghdad in its sophistication, a culture personified by a person of colour who called himself the Blackbird and was patronized by the amir. Ziryab, child of zanj sold to Baghdad, was a connoisseur of civilized living who was invited to Cordoba by a Jewish musician. Ziryab not only introduced Persian and Iraqi cuisine, poetry and wit to al-Andalus but also developed the guitar when he added strings to his oud, and founded a music school for girls as well as boys. He invented the concept of the meal that started with soup or salad, moved on to savouries and finished with sweets, served on different plates; fostered the idea of different fashions for the seasons; devised early versions of toothpaste and deodorant (litharge, a lead monoxide compound) and a new hairstyle, a Mohican mullet, with bangs at the front, long at the back and short at the sides, favoured by zanj in Baghdad.

Yet the amir, not just an aficionado of fashionistas and singing girls, was constantly fighting northern Christians and internal challengers, aided by his enslaved corps of ghilman, and a vizier, Nasr, a Christian nobleman captured and castrated by the Muslims. When the amir fell ill, the eunuch tried to fix the succession by bribing a doctor to finish him off with poison. The doctor’s wife informed the amir, who waited until Nasr brought his ‘medicine’ then made him drink it himself.

Then in 844 the era of refined adab was interrupted by a terrifying visitation: a fleet of fifty-four longships appeared out of nowhere bearing a race of shaggy axe-wielding pagans who attacked Seville while another fleet stormed al-Ushbana (Lisbon) and Cadiz. The Vikings had arrived.

* Ali reprimanded her but spared her – and she lived on in Medina for forty years.

* Muawiya’s philosophy was the perfect expression of statesmanship: ‘If there is but a single thread between me and my subjects I will never let it go slack without tugging on it and I never let them pull it tight without loosening it.’ He added, ‘I don’t use my tongue where money will suffice; I don’t use my whip where my tongue will suffice; I don’t use my sword where my whip will suffice. But when there’s no choice I will use my sword.’ He was the personification of hilm, the measured cunning of the traditional Arab sheikh. He was even tolerant of criticism: ‘I don’t insert myself between the people and their tongue so long as they don’t insert themselves between us and our kingship.’

* To control the Tibetans, she turned to the Indian Pallava raja, Narasimhavarman II, known as Rajasimha, whom the Chinese granted the title General of South China. But Rajasimha’s greatest influence was cultural – he was both a playwright and builder of temples that still stand, the Kailasanatha at his capital Kanchipuram and the Shore Temple at his port Mahabalipuram, whence Pallava influence, Brahminism and Sanskrit were exported to the Indosphere of south-east Asia.

* Living in exile with his wife ex-Empress Wei, he feared every messenger from the capital would bring terrible punishments, and was always ready to commit suicide. But his wife always restrained him: ‘There is no set pattern to bad and good fortune. Since we will die one day, why hasten it?’

* The tortures enjoyed picturesque names: ‘Dying Swine’s Melancholy’, ‘Piercing a Hundred Veins’ and ‘Begging for the Slaughter of my Entire Family’. In ‘Phoenix Suns his Wings’, the victim was lashed to a wheel in the sun; in ‘Uprooting a Stubborn Foal’, the prisoner was collared; and in ‘Offering Fruit to the Immortals’, tiles were piled on the victim’s back. In one episode, more than 300 dissidents were massacred.

* All the family must have been thoroughly traumatized. Li Dan tried to live obscurely far from the capital with his sons including Li Longji, the future Emperor Xuanzong, avoiding politics, yet being carefully watched and often persecuted.

* They told me on a Friday Salma had gone to prayers.

Just then upon a branch a pretty bird sat preening.

I said, ‘Who here knows Salma?’

‘Ha!’ said he; then flew away.

I said, ‘Come back, birdy,

Have you seen Salma?’

‘Ha!’ said he; and struck a secret wound in my heart …

* The Umayya caliphs ruled from their palace complex in Damascus, spending summers in pleasure castles in Golan, the Bekaa valley and the Jordanian desert. Many of these ‘castles’ survive.

* Marwan’s sons fled southwards to Makuria (Sudan), which had converted to Coptic Christianity in the time of Justinian. During the Arab conquest, Makuria faced Arab attacks until its kings signed a mercantile treaty in which their chief export, slaves, were traded for Egyptian grain and cloth. In 747, exploiting the Arab civil war, King Kyriakos of Makuria raided Egypt. But when he saw the Abbasiya were winning, he won favour by killing the Umayya princes. Speaking Coptic, Greek and Arabic, Makurian kings ruled from a Constantinopolitan gold-encrusted palace in Dongola, a city where wealthy homes boasted ceramic lavatories, which did not appear in Europe for centuries. Their cathedral at Faris featured exquisite frescoes. When the Abbasiya caliphs demanded arrears of 5,000 slaves, King Zakarios sent his son Georgios to Baghdad to negotiate. The kingdom flourished until the thirteenth century.

* Xuanzong had agreed to hand power to his son Suzong. As retired emperor, he sent Gao to retrieve Consort Yang’s body, but it had decayed: the eunuch just brought back the bag of scents.

* In 779, meeting some Manichaean priests as he looted the Chinese capital, the Uighur khagan Bogu converted his empire to Manichaeanism. Though he was then murdered by his Tengrist chief minister, the Uighurs remained Manichaean until they later converted first to Buddhism and then to Islam.

* The Tang ruled a rump empire until 879, when they finally fell in an apocalyptic dystopia as armies of starving peasants harvested 1,000 humans a day for food at a time when ‘human flesh was more plentiful than dogmeat’. Chang’an was destroyed; after a thousand years, a world vanished.

* Charlemagne planned to marry his son Charles to Aelfflaed, the daughter of King Offa of Mercia, but when the Anglo-Saxon demanded Charlemagne’s daughter Bertha, he cancelled the marriage. The minor Britannic king had overreached.

* Charlemagne educated his daughters as well as his sons. He believed it was his mission to halt the decline in education during recent centuries and to preside over a restoration of faith, order and culture. Inviting scholars to his capital at Aix, he sponsored the scriptoria of monasteries which produced around 10,000 exquisite illuminated manuscripts: the Dagulf Psalter was produced for Pope Hadrian, others for wider distribution. Aristotle and Plato were translated into Latin. Ovid, Pliny and other Latin masters were copied on to vellum.

* Marriages to sisters-in-law and mothers-in-law were banned as incestuous – hence these phrases, which are still in use.

* Haroun allowed the Patriarch of Jerusalem to send Charlemagne a key to the Holy Sepulchre, the start of a new west European interest in the Holy City, where Christians enjoyed tolerance – for the moment. Charlemagne’s relations with Haroun in Baghdad worked in both east and west. To the east, Constantinople was defeated by the caliph, encouraging the emperors to appease the Franks; Charlemagne got Rome and Ravenna; Constantinople got Venice, Dalmatia and southern Italy. In the west, Haroun was also the enemy of the Umayya of al-Andalus. In 797, Hisham, Abd al-Rahman’s son, ordered a successful invasion of Aquitaine (sixty years after the supposedly decisive victory of Charles Martel).

* Baghdad’s luxuries arrived in huge dhows eastwards from Egypt and Africa and westwards from China on round trips of 12,600 miles. Around 828, a ship, built in Persia out of African mahogany and Indian teak, held together by Malay twine, sailed from Guangzhou with silks, spices and 60,000 tiles, 18 silver ingots, gold ornaments, 55,000 glazed bowls from Changsha, 763 inkpots (for the poets of Baghdad), 915 spice jars and 1,635 ewers decorated with lotuses for Buddhist customers in Indo-China and geometric designs for Muslims, along with jars and utensils from Vietnam and Thailand. It sank near the island of Belitung, off Java, and the wreck was not discovered until 1998.

* In rare cases, these showgirls could become free and rich: Arib, later the favourite poet-singer of Haroun’s son al-Mamun, was a superstar who sang for five caliphs. When she died at ninety-six, she was a wealthy landowner.

* ‘The caliph’s sodomy is amazing,’ went a satirical poem of the time. ‘While the vizier’s passive homosexuality is even more so. One of them buggers and the other is buggered; that’s the only difference between them. If only the two managed to use each other … but Amin plunged into the eunuch Kawthar; while being fucked by donkeys didn’t satisfy the other …’

* Arab society was highly sophisticated but the House of Wisdom did not singlehandedly rescue Greek learning for benighted, primitive, medieval Europe. Its importance was exaggerated by western historians after 9/11 to demonstrate US–European ignorance of Arab culture. Those accounts have somehow forgotten the existence of Constantinople: all Greek literature was available in Constantinople for another 500 years. Charlemagne’s scholars were also translating Greek works into Latin, and other works were translated at the Umayya court in Cordoba.

* Al-Mamun commissioned the Banu Musa brothers to calculate the world’s circumference and the Persian polymath al-Khwarizmi to write his mathematical treatise Al-Jabr (the origin of algebra) that helped introduce modern figures and decimal points, importing the zero from India. His name also inspired a constant of modern life – the algorithm. For those of us who do not understand mathematics, Abu Musa Jabir ibn Hayyan – known as Geber in Europe – inspired another word: gibberish.

* Jahiz quotes a grand dame of Medina who was asked by young girls if sex was enjoyable. She recalled a pilgrimage with Caliph Othman: ‘On the way back, my husband looked at me and I looked at him. He fancied me and I fancied him, and he leaped on me just as Othman’s camels were passing. I cried out loud as there came to me what comes to the daughters of Adam. And all five hundred camels scattered. It took two hours to collect them all.’

* After a long career in Baghdad, Jahiz’s patrons were executed and he retired to Basra. There, literary to the last, he was crushed and killed by a heap of books, the ideal death of any bibliophile. Abu Nawus had died soon after his patron Caliph al-Amin.