CHAPTER XXX
The Genius of Islam
1258–1520

THE Moslem world had sustained, from 1095 to 1291, a series of assaults as violent and religious as those by which it later subdued the Balkans and changed a thousand churches into mosques. Eight Crusades, inspired by a dozen popes, had hurled the royalty, chivalry, and rabble of Europe against Mohammedan citadels in Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Tunisia; and though these attacks had finally failed, they had gravely weakened the order and resources of the Moslem states. In Spain the Crusades had succeeded; there Islam had been beaten back while its survivors were crowded into a Granada whose doom was leisurely delayed. Sicily had been taken from Islam by the virile Normans. But what were these wounds and amputations compared with the wild and ruinous descent of the Mongols (1219–58) into Transoxiana, Persia, and Iraq? City after city that had been a haven of Moslem civilization was subjected to pillage, massacre, and fire—Bokhara, Samarkand, Balkh, Merv, Nishapur, Rayy, Herat, Baghdad.... . Provincial and municipal governments were shattered; canals, neglected, succumbed to the swirling sand; commerce was put to flight; schools and libraries were destroyed; scholars and scientists were scattered, slaughtered, or enslaved. The spirit of Islam was broken for almost a century. It slowly revived; and then Timur’s Tatars swept across western Asia in a fresh desolation, and the Ottoman Turks cut their way through Asia Minor to the Bosporus. No other civilization in history has known disasters so numerous, so widespread, and so complete.

And yet the Mongols, Tatars, and Turks brought their new blood to replace the human rivers they had shed. Islam had grown luxurious and supine; Baghdad, like Constantinople, had lost the will to live by its own arms; men there were so in love with easeful life that they half invited death; that picturesque civilization, too, as well as the Byzantine, was ripe to die. But so rich had it been that—like ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy—it was able, by its salvaged fragments and memories, to civilize its conquerors. Persia under the Mongol Il-Khans developed an enlightened government, produced good literature and majestic art, and graced history with a noble scholar, Rashidu’d-Din. In Transoxiana Timur built almost as impressively as he had destroyed; and amid his ravages he paused to honor Hafiz. In Anatolia the Turks were already civilized, and poets among them were as plentiful as concubines. In Egypt the Mamluks continued to build like giants; and in West Africa Islam fathered a philosopher-historian beside whom the greatest pundits of contemporary Christendom were midges snared and starved in the cobwebs of Scholasticism. And meanwhile Islam was spreading through India to the farthest reaches of the East.

I. THE IL-KHANS OF PERSIA: 1265—1337

When Marco Polo set out across Persia (1271) to see the China of Kublai Khan, he found himself within the Mongol Empire almost all the way. History had never before recorded so vast a realm. On the west it touched the Dnieper in Russia; in the south it included the Crimea, Iraq, Persia, Tibet, and India to the Ganges; in the east it embraced Indochina, China, and Korea; in the north lay its original home, Mongolia. Throughout these states the Mongol rulers maintained roads, promoted commerce, protected travelers, and permitted freedom of worship to diverse faiths.

Hulagu, grandson of Genghis Khan, after destroying Baghdad (1258), established a new capital at Maragha in northwest Persia. When he died (1265) his son Abaqa became khan or prince of Persia, loosely subject to the distant Kublai Khan; so began the Il-Khan dynasty that ruled Persia and Iraq till 1337. Greatest of the line was Ghazan Khan. He was almost the shortest man among his troops, but his will was stronger than their arms. He broke off allegiance to the Great Khan in Mongolia or China, and made his state an independent kingdom, with its capital at Tabriz. Envoys came to him from China, India, Egypt, England, Spain.... . He reformed administration, stabilized the currency, protected the peasants from landlords and robbers, and promoted such prosperity as recalled Baghdad in its proudest days. At Tabriz he built a mosque, two colleges, a philosophical academy, an observatory, a library, a hospital. He set aside the revenues of certain lands in perpetuity to support these institutions, and secured for them the leading scholars, physicians, and scientists of the age. He was himself a man of wide culture and many languages, apparently including Latin.¹ For himself he raised a mausoleum so majestic and immense that his death (1304) seemed a triumphal entry into a nobler home.

Marco Polo described Tabriz as “a great and glorious city.” Fra Oderic (1320) pronounced it “the finest city in the world for trade. Every article is found here in abundance.... . The Christians here say that the revenue the city pays to its ruler is greater than that which all of France pays to its king.”² Clavijo (1404) called it “a mighty city abounding in riches and goods,” with “many fine buildings,” magnificent mosques, and “the most splendid bathhouses in the world.”³ He calculated the population at a million souls.

Uljaitu continued the enlightened policies of his brother Ghazan. His reign saw some of the noblest architecture and illumination in Persian history. The career of his chancellor, Rashidu’d-Din Fadlu’llah, illustrates the prosperity of education, scholarship, and literature at this time. Rashidu’d-Din was born in 1247 at Hamadan, perhaps of Jewish parentage; so his enemies held, citing his remarkable knowledge of Mosaic Law. He served Abaqa as physician, Ghazan as premier, Uljaitu as treasurer. In an eastern suburb of Tabriz he established the Rab’-i-Rashidi, or Rashidi Foundation, a spacious university center. One of his letters, preserved in the Library of Cambridge University, describes it:

We must marvel at the industry of a man who, while actively sharing in the administration of a kingdom, found time and knowledge to write five books on theology, four on medicine and government, and a voluminous history of the world. Moreover, an admiring Moslem assures us, Rashidu’d-Din could give to his writing only the time between morning prayer and sunrise; however, there are cloudy days even in Azerbaijan. He labored seven years on his Jami’ut-Taivarikh, or Compendium of Histories; he published it in two tremendous volumes, which in English would make seven. Here were substantial accounts of the Mongols from Genghis Khan to Ghazan; of the various Mohammedan states and dynasties in Eastern and Western Islam; of Persia and Judea before and after Mohammed; of China and India, with a full study of Buddha and Buddhism; and a chasteningly brief report on the doings and ideas of European kings, popes, and philosophers. Those who have read these volumes—not yet translated into a European tongue-pronounce them the most valuable and scholarly work in all the prose literature of Persia. Not only did Rashidu’d-Din use the archives of his own government; he engaged Chinese scholars to secure for him Chinese treaties and other documents, and he appears to have read these—and Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, and Mongolian authorities—in their original languages.⁵

To transmit this Compendium to posterity despite time and war, Rashidu’d-Din sent copies to scattered libraries, had it translated and disseminated in Arabic, and assigned revenues for making two copies every year, one in Arabic, one in Persian, to be presented to some city of the Moslem world. Nevertheless much of it has been lost, along with his other works, and perhaps as the result of his political disaster. In 1312 Uljaitu associated with him Ali-Shah as co-chancellor of the exchequer. Under Uljaitu’s successor, Abu Sa’id, Ali-Shah spread divers charges against his colleague, and persuaded the Khan that Rashidu’d-Din and his son Ibrahim had poisoned Uljaitu, The historian was dismissed, and soon thereafter was put to death (1318), at the age of seventy, along with one of his sons. His properties were confiscated, his foundations were deprived of their endowments, and the suburb Rab’-i-Rashidi was plundered and destroyed.

Abu Sa’id made belated amends by appointing another son of the historian his vizier. Ghiyathu’d-Din governed wisely and justly. After Abu Sa’id’s death a period of anarchy brought the dynasty of the Il-Khans to an end, and their realm was divided into petty states ravaged by war and redeemed by poetry.

II. HAFIZ: 1320–89

For in Persia every other man wrote verses, and kings honored poets only next to mistresses, calligraphers, and generals. In Hafiz’s time a score of Persian poets won renown from the Mediterranean to the Ganges and from Yemen to Samarkand. All of them, however, bowed to Shamsu’d-Din Muhammad Hafiz, and assured him that he had surpassed the melodius Sa’di himself. He agreed with this estimate, and addressed himself reverently:

Hafiz means rememberer; it was a title given to anyone who, like our poet, had memorized the whole Koran. Born at Shiraz at a date and of ancestry unknown, he soon fell into verse. His first patron was Abu Ishaq, who had been appointed shah of Fars (southeastern Persia) by Ghazan Khan. Abu Ishaq so loved poetry that he neglected government. When warned that hostile forces were preparing to attack his capital, Shiraz, he remarked what a fool a man must be to waste so fair a spring on war. An insensitive general, Ibn-Muzaffar, captured Shiraz, killed Abu Ishaq (1352), forbade the drinking of wine, and closed every tavern in the town. Hafiz wrote a mournful elegy:

Muzaffar’s successor, finding prohibition impracticable, or having discovered that wine-bibbers can be more easily ruled than puritans, reopened the taverns, and Hafiz gave him immortality.

He followed Persian conventions in spending so many verses on wine; at times he reckoned a glass of wine as “worth more than a virgin’s kiss.”⁸ But even the grape grows dry after a thousand couplets, and soon Hafiz found love, virginal or practiced, indispensable to poetry:

No freedom now seemed so sweet as love’s slavery.

He seems at last to have cooled into marriage; if we interpret his subtle verses rightly, he found a wife, and had several children, before he could quite make up his mind between woman and wine. In some verses he seems to mourn her death:

In any case he became domesticated, cultivated a quiet privacy, and seldom stirred abroad; he would, he said, let his poems travel for him. He was invited to many a royal court, and was moved for a moment to accept Sultan Ahmad’s offer of a home in the royal palace at Baghdad.¹² But his love for Shiraz kept him prisoner; he doubted if paradise itself had streams as lovely, or roses as red. He indited a laud, now and then, to the Persian kinglets of his time, in hopes of a gift to ease his poverty; for there were no publishers in Persia to launch one’s ink upon public seas, and art had to wait, hat in hand, in the antechambers of nobles or kings. Once, indeed, Hafiz almost went abroad: an Indian shah sent him not only an invitation but money for the trip; he set out, and reached Hormuz on the Persian Gulf; he was about to board a ship when a tempest upset his imagination and enamored him of stability. He returned to Shiraz, and sent the shah a poem in lieu of himself.

The divan or collected poetry of Hafiz contains 693 poems. Most are odes, some are quatrains, some are unintelligible fragments. They are more difficult than Dante to translate, for they jingle with multiple rhymes which in English would make doggerel, and they teem with recondite allusions that tickled the wits of the time but now lie heavy on the wings of song. Often he can be better rendered in prose:

Hafiz was one of those blessed and harassed souls who, through art, poetry, imitation, and half-unconscious desire, have become so sensitive to beauty that they wish to worship—with eyes and speech and fingertips—every fair form in stone or paint or flesh or flower, and suffer in stifled silence as beauty passes by; but who find, in each day’s fresh revelation of loveliness or grace, some forgiveness for the brevity of beauty and the sovereignty of death. So Hafiz mingled blasphemies with his adoration, and fell into angry heresies even while praising the Eternal One as the source from which all earthly beauty flows.

Many have sought to make him respectable by interpreting his wine as Spiritual Ecstasy, his taverns as monasteries, his flames as the Divine Fire. It is true that he became a Sufi and a sheik, assumed the dervish robe, and wrote poems of misty mysticism; but his real gods were wine, woman, and song. A movement was begun to try him for unbelief, but he escaped by pleading that the heretical verses were meant to express the views of a Christian, not his own. And yet he wrote:

where infidel, of course, means Christian. Sometimes it seemed to Hafiz that God was but a figment of man’s hope:

When he died his orthodoxy was so doubtful, and his hedonism so voluminous, that some objected to giving him a religious funeral; but his friends saved the day by allegorizing his poetry. A later generation enshrined his bones in a garden—the Hafiziyya—flaming with the roses of Shiraz, and the poet’s prediction was fulfilled—that his grave would become “a place of pilgrimage for the freedom-lovers of all the world.” On the alabaster tombstone was engraved one of the master’s poems, profoundly religious at last:

III. TIMUR: 1336–1405

We first hear of the Tatars as a nomad people of Central Asia, kin and neighbors to the Mongols, and joining these in European raids. A Chinese writer of the thirteenth century describes the common run of them much as Jordanes had pictured the Huns a thousand years before: short of stature, hideous of visage to those unfamiliar with them, innocent of letters, skilled in war, aiming their arrows unerringly from a speeding horse, and continuing their race by an assiduous polygamy. In trek and campaigns they took with them bed and board—wives and children, camels, horses, sheep, and dogs; pastured the animals between battles, fed on their milk and flesh, clothed themselves with their skins. They ate gluttonously when supplies were plentiful, but they could bear hunger and thirst, heat and cold, “more patiently than any people in the world.”¹⁷ Armed with arrows—sometimes tipped with flaming naphtha—and cannon and all the medieval mechanisms of siege, they were a fit and ready instrument for a man who dreamed of empire with his mother’s milk.

When Genghis Khan died (1227) he divided his dominions among his four sons. To Jagatai he gave the region around Samarkand, and the name of this son came to be applied to the Mongol or Tatar tribes under his rule. Timur (i.e., iron) was born at Kesh in Transoxiana to the emir of one such tribe. According to Clavijo the new “Scourge of God” assumed this function precociously: he organized bands of young thieves to steal sheep or cattle from near-by herds.¹⁸ In one of these enterprises he lost the third and fourth fingers of his right hand; in another he was wounded in the heel, and so limped the rest of his life.¹⁹ His enemies called him Timur-i-Lang, Timur the Lame, which careless Occidentals like Marlowe made into Tamburlane or Tamerlane. He found time for a little schooling; he read poetry, and knew the difference between art and degeneration. When he was sixteen his father bequeathed to him the leadership of the tribe and retired to a monastery, for the world, the old man said, is “no better than a golden vase filled with serpents and scorpions.”* The father, we are told, advised his son always to support religion. Timur followed the precept even to turning men into minarets.

In 1361 the khan of Mongolia appointed Khoja Ilias governor of Transoxiana, and made Timur one of Khoja’s councilors. But the energetic youth was not ripe for statesmanship; he quarreled violently with other members of Khoja’s staff, and was forced to flee from Samarkand into the desert. He gathered some youthful warriors about him, and joined his band with that of his brother Amir Husein, who was in like straits. Wandering from one hiding place to another, they were hardened in body and soul by danger, homelessness, and poverty, until they were raised to moderate fortune by being employed to suppress a revolt in Sistan. So ripened, they declared war on Khoja, deposed and slew him, and became joint rulers, at Samarkand, over the Jagatai tribes (1365). Five years later Timur connived at the assassination of Amir Husein, and became sole sultan.

“In 769,” (1367) reads his dubious autobiography, “I entered my thirty-third year; and being of restless disposition, I was much inclined to invade some of the neighboring countries.”²⁰ Resting at Samarkand during the winters, he marched forth almost every spring in a new campaign. He taught the towns and tribes of Transoxiana to accept his rule docilely; he conquered Khurasan and Sistan, and subdued the rich cities of Herat and Kabul; he discouraged resistance and revolt by savage punishments. When the city of Sabzawar surrendered after a costly siege, he took 2,000 captives, “piled them alive one upon another, compacted them with bricks and clay, and erected them into a minaret, so that men, being apprised of the majesty of his wrath, might not be seduced by the demon of arrogance”; so the matter is reported by a contemporary panegyrist.²¹ The town of Zirih missed the point and resisted; the heads of its citizens made more minarets. Timur overran Azerbaijan, took Luristan and Tabriz, and sent their artists to Samarkand. In 1387 Isfahan yielded, and accepted a Tatar garrison, but when Timur had gone the population rose and slew the garrison. He returned with his army, stormed the city, and ordered each of his troops to bring him the head of a Persian. Seventy thousand Isfahan heads, we are told, were set on the walls, or were made into towers to adorn the streets.²² Appeased, Timur reduced the taxes that the city had been paying to its governor. The remaining towns of Persia paid ransom quietly.

At Shiraz in 1387, says a tradition too pretty to be trusted, Timur summoned to his presence the town’s most famous citizen, and angrily quoted to him the lines which had offered all Bokhara and Samarkand for the mole on a lady’s cheek. “With the blows of my lustrous sword,” Timur is said to have complained, “I have subjugated most of the habitable globe... to embellish Samarkand and Bokhara, the seats of my government; and you, miserable wretch, would sell them both for the black mole of a Turk of Shiraz!” Hafiz, we are assured, bowed low and said: “Alas, O Prince, it is this prodigality which is the cause of the misery in which you find me.” Timur so relished the reply that he spared the poet and gave him a handsome gift. It is regrettable that no early biographer of Timur mentions this charming incident.²³

While Timur was in south Persia word was brought to him that Tuqatmish, Khan of the Golden Horde, had taken advantage of his absence to invade Transoxiana, and even to sack that picturesque Bokhara which Hafiz had valued at half a mole. Timur marched a thousand miles north (consider the commissary problems involved in such a march), and drove Tuqatmish back to the Volga. Turning south and west, he raided Iraq, Georgia, and Armenia, slaughtering en route the heretical Sayyids, whom he branded as “misguided communists.”²⁴ He took Baghdad (1393) at the request of its inhabitants, who could no longer put up with the cruelty of their Sultan Ahmed ibn Uways. Finding the old capital in decay, he bade his aides rebuild it; meanwhile he added some choice wives to his harem, and a celebrated musician to his court. Ahmed found asylum in Brusa with the Ottoman Sultan Bajazet I; Timur demanded Ahmed’s extradition; Bajazet replied that this would violate Turkish canons of hospitality.

Timur would have advanced at once upon Brusa, but Tuqatmish had again invaded Transoxiana. The angry Tatar swept across south Russia, and, while Tuqatmish hid in the wilderness, he sacked the Golden Horde’s cities of Sarai and Astrakhan. Unresisted, Timur marched his army westward from the Volga to the Don, and perhaps planned to add all Russia to his realm. Russians of all provinces prayed feverishly, and the Virgin of Vladimir was borne to Moscow between lines of kneeling suppliants who cried out, “Mother of God, save Russia!” The poverty of the steppes helped to save it. Finding little to plunder, Timur turned back at the Don, and led his weary and hungry soldiers back to Samarkand (1395–96).

In India, said all reports, there was wealth enough to buy a hundred Russias. Proclaiming that Moslem rulers in north India were too tolerant of Hindu idolatry, and that all Hindus must be converted to Mohammedanism, Timur, aged sixty-three, set out for India at the head of 92,000 men (1398). Near Delhi he met the army of its Sultan Mahmud, defeated him, slaughtered 100,000 (?) prisoners, pillaged the capital, and brought back to Samarkand all that his troops and beasts could carry of the fabled riches of India.

In 1399, still remembering Ahmed and Bajazet, he marched forth again. He crossed Persia to Azerbaijan, deposed his wastrel son as governor there, hanged the poets and ministers who had seduced the youth into revelry, and redevastated Georgia. Entering Asia Minor, he besieged Sivas, resented its long resistance, and, when it fell, had 4,000 Christian soldiers buried alive—or were such stories war propaganda? Wishing to protect his flank while attacking the Ottomans, he sent an envoy to Egypt proposing a nonaggression pact. The Sultan al-Malik imprisoned the envoy and hired an assassin to kill Timur. The plot failed. After reducing Aleppo, Hims, Baalbek, and Damascus, the Tatar moved on to Baghdad, which had expelled his appointees. He took it at great cost, and ordered each of his 20,000 soldiers to bring him a head. It was done—or so we are told: rich and poor, male and female, old and young, paid this head tax, and their skulls were piled in ghastly pyramids before the city’s gates (1401). Moslem mosques, monasoteries, and nunneries were spared; everything else was sacked and destroyed, so thoroughly that the once brilliant capital recovered only in our time, by the grace of oil.

Feeling now reasonably sure on left and right, Timur sent Bajazet a final invitation to submit. The Turk, made too confident by his triumph at Nicopolis (1396), retorted that he would annihilate the Tatar army, and would make Timur’s chief wife his slave.²⁵ The two ablest generals of the age joined battle at Ankara (1402). Timur’s strategy compelled the Turks to fight when exhausted by a long march. They were routed. Bajazet was taken prisoner, Constantinople rejoiced, Christendom was for half a century saved by the Tatars from the Turks. Timur continued Europeward to Brusa, burned it, and carried away its Byzantine library and silver gates. He marched to the Mediterranean, captured Smyrna from the Knights of Rhodes, butchered the inhabitants, and rested at Ephesus. Christendom trembled again. The Genoese, who still held Chios, Phocaea, and Mitylene, sent in their submission and tribute. The Sultan of Egypt released the Tatar envoy, and entered the distinguished company of Timur’s vassals. The conqueror returned to Samarkand as the most powerful monarch of his time, ruling from Central Asia to the Nile, from the Bosporus to India. Henry IV of England sent him felicitations, France sent him a bishop with gifts, Henry III of Castile dispatched to him a famous embassy under Ruy González de Clavijo.

It is to Clavijo’s detailed memoirs that we owe most of our knowledge of Timur’s court. He left Cádiz on May 22, 1403, traveled via Constantinople, Trebizond, Erzerum, Tabriz, Tehran (here first mentioned by a European), Nishapur, and Mashhad, and reached Samarkand on August 31, 1404. He had with some reason expected to find there only a horde of hideous butchers. He was astonished at the size and prosperity of Timur’s capital, the splendor of the mosques and palaces, the excellent manners of the upper class, the wealth and luxury of the court, the concourse of artists and poets celebrating Timur. The city itself, then over 2,000 years old, had some 150,000 inhabitants, and “most noble and beautiful houses,” and many palaces “embowered among trees”; altogether, and not including the extensive suburbs, Clavijo reckoned Samarkand to be “rather larger than Seville.” Water was piped into the houses from a river that ran by the city, and irrigation canals greened the hinterland. There the air was fragrant with orchards and vineyards; sheep grazed, cattle ranged, lush crops grew. In the town were factories that made artillery, armor, bows, arrows, glass, porcelain, tiles, and textiles of unsurpassed brilliance, including the kirimze or red dye that gave its name to crimson. Working in shops or fields, dwelling in houses of brick or clay or wood, or taking their ease urbanely on the riverside promenade, were Tatars, Turks, Arabs, Persians, Iraoi, Afghans, Georgians, Greeks, Armenians Catholics, Nestorians, Hindus, all freely practicing their rites and preaching their contradictory creeds. The principal streets were bordered with trees, shops, mosques, academies, libraries, and an observatory; a great avenue ran in a straight line from one end of the city to the other, and the main section of this thoroughfare was covered with glass.²⁶

Clavijo was received by the Tatar emperor on September 8. He passed through a spacious park “wherein were pitched many tents of silk,” and pavilions hung with silk embroideries. The tent was the usual abode of the Tatar; Timur himself, in this park, had a tent 300 feet in circumference. But there were palaces there too, with floors of marble or tile, and sturdy furniture inset with precious stones or sometimes altogether made of silver or gold. Clavijo found the monarch seated cross-legged on silken cushions “under the portal of a most beautiful palace,” facing a fountain that threw up a column of water which fell into a basin wherein apples bobbed incessantly. Timur was dressed in a cloak of silk, and wore a high, wide hat studded with rubies and pearls. He had once been tall, vigorous, and alert; now, aged sixty-eight, he was bent, weak, ailing, almost blind; he could barely raise his eyelids to see the ambassador.

He had acquired as much culture as a man of action could bear; he read history, collected art and artists, befriended poets and scholars, and could on occasion assume elegant manners. His vanity equaled his ability, which no one exceeded in that time. Contradicting Caesar, he reckoned cruelty a necessary part of strategy; yet, if we may believe his victims, he seems to have been often guilty of cruelty as mere revenge. Even in civil government he conferred death lavishly—as to a mayor who had oppressed a city, or a butcher who had charged too much for meat.²⁷ He excused his harshness as needed in ruling a people not yet reconciled to law, and he justified his massacres as means of forcing disorderly tribes into the order and security of a united and powerful state. But, like all conquerors, he loved power for its own sake, and spoils for the grandeur they could finance.

In 1405 he set out to conquer Mongolia and China, dreaming of a halfworld state that would wed the Mediterranean to the China Sea. His army was 200,000 strong; but at Otrar, on the northern border of his realm, he died. His last orders were that his troops should march on without him; and for a while his white horse, saddled and riderless, paced the host. But his soldiers well knew that his mind and will had been half their might; soon they turned back, mourning and relieved, to their homes. His children built for him at Samarkand the majestic Gur-i-Mir, or Mausoleum of the Emir, a tower crowned with a massive bulbous dome, and faced with bricks enameled in lovely turquoise blue.

His empire crumbled with his brain. The western provinces almost at once fell away, and his progeny had to content themselves with the Middle East. The wisest of this Timurid line was Shah Rukh, who allowed his son Ulug to govern Transoxiana from Samarkand, while he himself ruled Khurasan from Herat. Under these descendants of Timur the two capitals became rival centers of a Tatar prosperity and culture equal to any in Europe at the time (1405–49). Shah Rukh was a competent general who loved peace, favored letters and art, and founded a famous library at Herat. “Herat,” wrote a Timurid prince, “is the garden of the world.”²⁸ Ulug Beg cherished scientists, and raised at Samarkand the greatest observatory of the age. He was, says a florid Moslem biographer,

This paragon of patronage was murdered in 1449 by his bastard son; but the high culture of the Timurid dynasty continued under the sultans Abu Sa’id and Husein ibn-Baiqaia at Herat till the end of the fifteenth century. In 1501 the Uzbeg Mongols captured Samarkand and Bokhara; in 151c Shah Ismail, of the new Safavid dynasty, took Herat. Babur, last of the Timurid rulers, fled to India, and founded there a Mogul (Mongol) dynasty which made Moslem Delhi as brilliant a capital as Medicean Rome.

IV. THE MAMLUKS: 1340-1517

While Islam in Asia suffered repeated invasions and revolutions, Egypt was exploited with relative stability by the Mamluk sultans (1250–1517). The Black Death destroyed Egyptian prosperity for a time, but through such vicissitudes the Mamluks continued to reconcile competent administration and artistic interests with embezzlement and atrocity. In 1381, however, with Sultan Malik al-Nasir Barquq, the Burji Mamluks began a dynasty of luxury, intrigue, violence, and social decay. They debased the coinage even beyond the custom of governments, taxed the necessaries of life, abused the state monopoly of sugar and pepper, and laid such heavy dues at Alexandria on European trade with India that Occidental merchants were provoked into finding a route to India around Africa. Within a generation after Vasco da Gama’s voyage (1498) Egypt lost much of its once rich share of the commerce between East and West; and this economic disaster reduced the country to such destitution that it offered only feeble resistance when Selim I ended the Mamluk rule and made Egypt a province of the Ottoman Empire.

Cairo remained from 1258 to 1453 the richest, fairest, and most populous city in Islam. Ibn-Batuta described it glowingly in 1326; and Ibn-Khaldun, visiting it in 1383, called it “the metropolis of the universe, the garden of the world, the ant heap of the human species, the throne of royalty; a city adorned with palaces and châteaux, convents, monasteries, and colleges, and illumined by the stars of erudition; a paradise so bounteously watered by the Nile that the earth seems here to offer its fruits to men as gifts and salutations” ³⁰—to which the toilsome fellaheen might have demurred.

The Egyptian mosques of this age reflected the severity of the government rather than the colors of the sky. Here were no “ivans” or portals of glazed brick and tinted tile as in Islamic Asia, but massive stone walls that made the mosque a fortress rather than a house of prayer. The mosque (1356–63) of Sultan Hassan was the wonder of its age, and is still the stateliest monument of Mamluk art. The historian al-Maqrizi thought that “it surpassed all other mosques ever built,” ³¹ but he was a Cairene patriot. An uncertain tradition tells how the Sultan collected renowned architects from many lands, asked them to name the tallest edifice on earth, and bade them erect a loftier one. They named the palace of Khosru I at Ctesiphon, whose surviving arch rises 105 feet from the ground. Stealing stones from crumbling pyramids, their workmen built the walls of the new mosque up to 100 feet, added a cornice for thirteen feet more, and raised at one corner a minaret to 280 feet. The gloomy towering mass impresses, but hardly pleases, the Western eye; the Cairotes, however, were so proud of it that they invented or borrowed a legend in which the Sultan cut off the right hand of the architect lest he should ever design an equal masterpiece—as if an architect designed with his hand. More attractive, despite their function, were the funerary mosques that the Mamluk sultans built outside Cairo’s walls to embalm their bones. Sultan Barquq al-Zahir, who began life as a Circassian slave, ended in mute glory in the most splendid of these tombs.

The greatest builder among the Burji Mamluks was Qa’it Bey. Though harassed by war with the Turks, he managed to finance costly edifices in Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem; restored in Cairo the Citadel of Saladin and the university mosque of el-Azhar; built a hotel famous for its arabesques of stone; raised within the capital a mosque with ornate ornament; and crowned his demise with a memorial mosque, in granite and marble, whose superb decoration, lofty balconied minaret, and geometrically carved dome make it one of the lesser victories of Moslem art.

All the minor arts flourished under the Mamluks. Carvers in ivory, bone, and wood made a thousand handsome products, from pen boxes to pulpits, conceived with taste and executed with unremitting industry and skill; witness the pulpit from Qa’it Bey’s extramural mosque, in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Gold and silver inlay reached its peak during these bloody dynasties. And Egyptian pottery, which had invented a thousand novelties in its immemorial millenniums, now gave the world enameled glass: mosque lamps, beakers, vases. painted with figures or formal ornament in colored enamel, sometimes enhanced with gold. In these and numberless other ways the Moslem artists, giving beauty a lasting form, atoned for the barbarities of their kings.

V. THE OTTOMANS: 1288-1517

History begins after origins have disappeared. No one knows where the “Turks” arose; some have guessed that they were a Finno-Ugric tribe of the Huns, and that their name meant a helmet, which is durko in one Turkish dialect. They formed their languages from Mongolian and Chinese, and later imported Persian or Arabic words; these “Turkish” dialects are the sole means of classifying their speakers as Turks. One such clan took its name from its leader Seljuq; it grew from victory to victory, until its multiplied descendants, in the thirteenth century, ruled Persia, Iraq, Syria, and Asia Minor. A kindred clan under Ortoghrul fled in that century from Khurasan to avoid drowning in the Mongol inundation. It found military employment with the Seljuq emir of Konya (Iconium) in Asia Minor, and received a tract of land to pasture its herds.

When Ortoghrul died (1288?) his son Othman or Osman, then thirty years old, was chosen to succeed him; from him the Ottomans or Osmanlis received their name. They did not, before the nineteenth century, call themselves Turks; they applied that name to semi-barbarous peoples in Turkestan and Khurasan. In 1290, seeing that the Seljuqs were too weak to prevent him, Othman made himself the independent emir of a little state in northwestern Asia Minor; and in 1299 he advanced his headquarters westward to Yeni-Sheir. He was not a great general, but he was patiently persistent; his army was small, but it was composed of men more at home on horse than on foot, and willing to risk a weary life or limb for land, gold, women, or power. Between them and the Sea of Marmora lay drowsy Byzantine cities ill governed and poorly defended. Othman laid siege to one such town, Brusa; failing at first, he returned again and again to the attempt; finally it surrendered to his son Orkhan, while Othman himself lay dying at Yeni-Sheir (1326).

Orkhan made Brusa, sanctified with his father’s bones, the new capital of the Ottomans. “Manifest destiny”—i.e., desire plus power—drew Orkhan toward the Mediterranean, ancient circlet of commerce, wealth, and civilization. In the very year of Brusa’s fall he seized Nicomedia, which became Izmid; in 1330 Nicaea, which became Iznik; in 1336 Pergamum, which became Bergama. These cities, reeking with history, were centers of crafts and trade; they depended for food and markets upon environing agricultural communities already held by the Ottomans; they had to live with this hinterland or die. They did not resist long; they had been oppressed by their Byzantine governors, and heard that Orkhan taxed lightly and allowed religious liberty; and many of these Near Eastern Christians were harassed heretics—Nestorians or Monophysites. Soon a large part of the conquered terrain accepted the Moslem creed; so war solves theological problems before which reason stands in hesitant impotence. Having thus extended his realm, Orkhan took the title Sultan of the Ottomans. The Byzantine emperors made their peace with him, hired his soldiers, and allowed his son Suleiman to establish Ottoman strongholds on European soil. Orkhan died in 1359, aged seventy-one, firmly placed in the memory of his people.

His successors formed a dynasty hardly equaled in history for a merger of martial vigor and skill, administrative ability, barbarous cruelty, and cultured devotion to letters, science, and art. Murad (Amurath) I was the least attractive of the line. Illiterate, he signed his name by pressing his inked fingers upon documents, in the fashion of less distinguished homicides. When his son Saondji led a criminally unsuccessful revolt against him Murad tore out the youth’s eyes, cut off his head, and compelled the fathers of the rebels to behead their sons.³² He trained an almost invincible army, conquered most of the Balkans, and eased their submission by giving them a more efficient government than they had known under Christian domination.

Bajazet I inherited his father’s crown on the field of Kosova (1389). After leading the army to victory, he ordered the execution of his brother Yakub, who had fought valiantly throughout that crucial day. Such fratricide became a regular aftermath of an Ottoman accession, on the principle that sedition against the government is so disruptive that all potential claimants to the throne should be disposed of at the earliest convenience. Bajazet earned the title of Yilderim—the Thunderbolt—by the speed of his military strategy, but he lacked the statesmanship of his father, and wasted some of his wild energy in sexual enterprise. Stephen Lazarevitch, vassal ruler of Serbia, contributed a sister to Bajazet’s harem; this Lady Despoina became his favorite wife, taught him to love wine and sumptuous banquets, and perhaps unwittingly weakened him as a man. His pride flourished till his fall. After deflowering Europe’s chivalry at Nicopolis he released the Count of Nevers with a characteristic challenge, as reported or improved by Froissart:

When Timur captured Bajazet at Ankara he treated him with all respect despite the year of insulting correspondence that had passed between them. He ordered the Sultan’s bonds removed, seated him at his side, assured him that his life would be spared, and directed that three splendid tents should be fitted out for his suite. But when Bajazet tried to escape he was confined to a room with barred windows, which legend magnified into an iron cage. Bajazet fell ill; Timur summoned the best physicians to treat him, and sent the Lady Despoina to attend and console him. These ministrations failed to revive the vital forces of the broken Sultan, and Bajazet died a prisoner, a year after his defeat.

His son Mohammed I reorganized the Ottoman government and power. Though he blinded one pretender and killed another, he acquired the cognomen “Gentleman” by his courtly manners, his just rule, and the ten years of peace that he allowed to Christendom. Murad II had like tastes, and preferred poetry to war; but when Constantinople set up a rival to depose him, and Hungary violated its pledge of peace, he proved himself, at Varna (1444), as good a general as any. Then he retired to Magnesia in Asia Minor, where twice a week he held reunions of poets and pundits, read verse, and talked science and philosophy. A revolt at Adrianople called him back to Europe; he suppressed it, and overcame Hunyadi János in a second battle of Kosovo. When he died (1451), after thirty years of rule, Christian historians ranked him among the greatest monarchs of his time. His will directed that he should be buried at Brusa in a modest chapel without a roof, “so that the mercy and blessing of God might come unto him with the shining of the sun and moon, and the falling of the rain and dew upon his grave.” ³⁴

Mohammed II equaled his father in culture and conquests, political acumen, and length of reign, but not in justice or nobility. Bettering Christian instruction, he broke solemn treaties, and tarnished his victories with superfluous slaughter. He was Orientally subtle in negotiation and strategy. Asked what his plans were, he answered, “If a hair in my beard knew, I would pluck it out.” ³⁵ He spoke five languages, was well read in several literatures, excelled in mathematics and engineering, cultivated the arts, gave pensions to thirty Ottoman poets, and sent royal gifts to poets in Persia and India. His grand vizier, Mahmud Pasha, seconded him as a patron of letters and art; he and his master supported so many colleges and pious foundations that the Sultan received the name “Father of Good Works.” Mohammed was also “Sire of Victory”; to him and his cannon Constantinople fell; under the guns of his navy the Black Sea became a Turkish pond; before his legions and diplomacy the Balkans crumbled into servitude. But this irresistible conqueror could not conquer himself. By the age of fifty he had worn himself out by every form of sexual excess; aphrodisiacs failed to implement his lust; finally his harem classed him with his eunuchs. He died (1481), aged fifty-one, just when his army seemed on the verge of conquering Italy for Islam.

A contest among his sons gave the throne to Bajazet II. The new sultan was not inclined to war, but when Venice took Cyprus, and challenged Turkish control of the eastern Mediterranean, he roused himself, deceived his deceivers with a pledge of peace, built an armada of 270 vessels, and destroyed a Venetian fleet off the coasts of Greece. A Turkish army raided northern Italy as far west as Vicenza (1502); Venice sued for peace; Bajazet gave her lenient terms, and retired to poetry and philosophy. His son Selim deposed him, and mounted the throne (1512); presently—some said of poison—Bajazet died.

History is in some aspects an alternation of contrasting themes: the moods and forms of one age are repudiated by the next, which tires of tradition and lusts for novelty; classicism begets romanticism, which begets realism, which begets impressionism; a period of war calls for a decade of peace, and peace prolonged invites aggressive war. Selim I despised his father’s pacific policy. Vigorous in frame and will, indifferent to pleasures and amenities, loving the chase and the camp, he won the nickname of “the Grim” by having nine relatives strangled to contracept revolt, and waging war after war of conquest. It did not displease him that Shah Isma’il of Persia raided the Turkish frontier. He registered a vow that if Allah would grant him victory over the Persians, he would build three mighty mosques—in Jerusalem, Buda, and Rome.³⁶ Having heated the religious predilections of his people to the fighting point, he marched against Isma’il, captured Tabriz, and made northern Mesopotamia an Ottoman province. In 1515 he turned his artillery and Janissaries against the Mamluks, and added Syria, Arabia, and Egypt to his realm (1517). He carried to Constantinople, as an honored captive, the Cairene “caliph”—rather the high priest—of orthodox Mohammedanism; and thereafter the Ottoman sultans, like Henry VIII, became the masters of the church as well as of the state.

In the full glory of his powers Selim prepared to conquer Rhodes and Christendom. When all his preparations were complete he caught the plague and died (1520). Leo X, who had trembled more at Selim’s advance than at Luther’s rebellion, ordered all Christian churches to chant a litany of gratitude to God.

VI. ISLAMIC LITERATURE: 1400–1520

Even Selim the Grim threaded verses on rhyme, and bequeathed to Suleiman the Magnificent a royal divan of his collected poems as well as an empire ranging from the Euphrates to the Danube and the Nile. Twelve sultans and many princes—including that Prince Djem whom his brother Bajazet II paid Christian kings and popes to keep in refined confinement—appear among the 2,200 Ottoman poets who have won fame in the last six centuries.³⁷ Most of these bards took their forms and ideas, sometimes the language, of their verse from the Persians; they continued to celebrate, in endless rivulets of rhyme, the greatness of Allah, the wisdom of the shah or sultan, and the trembling envy of the cypress trees seeing the white slenderness of the beloved’s legs. We of the West are now too familiar with these charms to thrill to such lofty similes; but the “terrible Turks,” whose women were alluringly robed from nose to toes, were stirred to the roots by these poetic revelations; and the poetry that in its denatured translation leaves us unmoved could inspire them to piety, polygamy, and war.

From a thousand dead immortals we cull with untutored fancy three names still unfamiliar to the provincial Occident. Ahmedi of Sives (d. 1413), taking his cue from the Persian master Nizami, wrote an Iskander-nama, or Book of Alexander, an immense epic in strong, crude style, which gave not only the story of Alexander’s conquest by Persia, but as well the history, religion, science, and philosophy of the Near East from the earliest times to Bajazet I. We must forgo quotation, for the English version is such stuff as nightmares are made of. The poetry of Ahmad Pasha (d. 1496) so delighted Mohammed II that the Sultan made him vizier; the poet fell in love with a pretty page in the conqueror’s retinue; Mohammed, having the same predilection, ordered the poet’s death; Ahmad sent his master so melting a lyric that Mohammed gave him the boy, but banished both to Brusa.³⁸ There Ahmad took into his home a younger poet, soon destined to surpass him. Nejati (d. 1508), whose real name was Isa (Jesus), wrote an ode in praise of Mohammed II, and fastened it to the turban of the Sultan’s favorite partner in chess. Mohammed’s curiosity fell for the lure; he read the scroll, sent for the author, and made him an official of the royal palace. Bajazet II kept him in favor and affluence, and Nejati, triumphing heroically over prosperity, wrote in those two reigns some of the most lauded lyrics in Ottoman literature.

Even so the great masters of Moslem poetry were still the Persians. The court of Husein Baiqara at Herat so teemed with nightingales that his vizier, Mir Ali Shir Nawa’i, complained, “If you stretch out your feet you kick the backside of a poet”; to which a bard replied, “And so do you if you pull up yours.” ³⁹ For Mir Ali Shir (d. 1501), besides helping to rule Khurasan, supporting literature and art, and winning renown as a miniaturist and a composer, was also a major poet—at once the Maecenas and Horace of his time. It was his enlightened patronage that gave aid and comfort to the painters Bihzad and Shah Muzaffar, and the musicians Qul-Muhammad, Shayki Na’i, and Husein Udi, and the supreme Moslem poet of the fifteenth century—Mulla Nuru’d-Din Abd-er-Rahman Jami (d. 1492).

In a long and uneventful life Jami found time to achieve fame as a scholar and mystic as well as a poet. As a Sufi he expounded in graceful prose the old mystic theme, that the joyous union of the soul with the Beloved—i.e., God—comes only when the soul realizes that self is a delusion, and that the things of this world are a maya of transitory phantoms melting in a mist of mortality. Most of Jami’s poetry is mysticism in verse, spiced with some attractive sensuality. Salaman wa Absal tells a pretty tale to point the superiority of divine to earthly love. Salaman is the son of the shah of Yun (i.e., Ionia); born without a mother (which is much more difficult than parthenogenesis), he is brought up by the fair princess Absal, who becomes enamored of him when he reaches fourteen. She conquers him with cosmetics:

of the heir-apparent Prince. He yields without effort to these lures, and for a time boy and lady enjoy a lyric love. The King reproaches the youth for such dalliance, and bids him steel himself for war and government. Instead Salaman elopes with Absal on a camel, “like sweet twin almonds in a single shell.” Reaching the sea, they make a boat, sail it “for a moon,” and come to a verdant isle rich in fragrant flowers, singing birds, and fruit falling profusely at their feet. But in this Eden conscience stabs the Prince with thoughts of the royal tasks he has shunned. He persuades Absal to return with him to Yun; he tries to train himself for kingship, but is so torn between duty and beauty that at last, half mad, he joins Absal in suicide: they build a pyre and leap hand in hand into its flames. Absal is consumed, but Salaman emerges incombustible. Now, his soul cleansed, he inherits and graces the throne—It is all an allegory, Jami explains: the King is God, Salaman is the soul of man, Absal is sensual delight; the happy isle is a Satanic Eden in which the soul is seduced from its divine destiny; the pyre is the fire of life’s experience, in which sensual desire is burned away; the throne that the purified soul attains is that of God Himself. It is hard to believe that a poet who could so sensitively picture a woman’s charms would seriously ask us to shun them, except occasionally.

With an audacity redeemed by the result, Jami dared to rhyme again the favorite themes of a dozen poets before him: Yusuf u Zulaikha, and Laila wa Majnun. In an eloquent exordium he restates the Sufi theory of heavenly and earthly beauty:

From these celestial heights Jami descends to describe the Princess Zulaikha’s loveliness with fervent repetition and detail, even to her “chaste fortress and forbidden place.”

She sees Joseph in a dream, and falls in love with him at first seeming; but her father marries her to Potiphar, his vizier. Then she sees Joseph in the flesh, exposed in the market as a slave. She buys him, tempts him, he refuses her advances, she wastes away. The vizier dies; Joseph displaces him and marries Zulaikha; soon both waste away, at last to death. Only the love of God is truth and life.—It is an old tale; but who could sleep over such sermons?

VII. ART IN ASIATIC ISLAM

Through all the reach of Islam, from Granada to Delhi and Samarkand, kings and nobles used geniuses and slaves to raise mosques and mausoleums, to paint and fire tiles, to weave and dye silks and rugs, to beat metal and carve wood and ivory, to illuminate manuscripts with liquid color and line. The Il-Khans, the Timurids, the Ottomans, the Mamluks, even the petty dynasties that ruled the frailer fragments of Islam, maintained the Oriental tradition of tempering pillage with poetry, and assassination with art. In rural villages and urban palaces wealth graduated into beauty, and a fortunate few enjoyed the nearness of things tempting to the touch or fair to see.

The mosque was still the collective shrine of Moslem arts. There brick and tile composed the lyric of the minaret; portals of faïence broke into flashing colors the ardor of the sun; the pulpit displayed the carved contours or inlaid intricacies of its wood; the splendor of the mihrab pointed the worshiper to Mecca; grilles and chandeliers offered their metal lacery as homage to Allah; rugs softened tiled floors and cushioned praying knees; precious silks enveloped illuminated Korans. At Tabriz Clavijo marveled at “beautiful mosques adorned with tiles in blue and gold”;⁴³ and at Isfahan one of Uljaitu’s viziers set up in the Friday Mosque a mihrab in which prosaic stucco became a lure of arabesques and lettering. Uljaitu himself raised at Sultaniya a sumptuous mausoleum (1313), planning to bring to it the remains of Ali and Husein, the founder saints of the Shi’a sect; the plan miscarried graciously, and the Khan’s own bones were housed in this imposing cenotaph. Immense and majestic are the ruins of the mosque at Varamin (1326).

Timur loved to build, and stole architectural ideas, as well as silver and gold, from the victims of his arms. Like a conqueror, he favored mass, as symbolizing his empire and his will; like a nouveau riche he loved color, and carried decoration to extravagance. Charmed by the glazed blue tiles of Herat, he drew Persian potters to Samarkand to face with gleaming slabs the mosques and palaces of his capital; soon the city shone and sparkled with glorified clay. At Damascus he noted a bulbous dome swelling out above the base and then tapering upward to a point; he bade his engineers take its plan and measurements before it fell in the general conflagration; he topped Samarkand with such domes, and spread the style between India and Russia, so that it ranges now from the Taj Mahal to the Red Square. When he returned from India he brought back so many artists and artisans that they raised for him in three months a gigantic mosque—the “Church of the King”—with a portal 100 feet high and a ceiling upheld by 480 pillars of stone. For his sister Tchouchouk Bika he built the funerary mosque that became the architectural masterpiece of his reign.⁴⁴ When he ordered a mosque to honor the memory of his chief wife, Bibi Khanun, he supervised the construction himself, threw meat to the workers in the excavations and coins to assiduous artisans, and inspired or compelled all to work con furia until winter halted building and cooled his architectural fire.

His descendants achieved a maturer art. At Mashhad, on the way from Tehran to Samarkand, Shah Rukh’s enterprising wife, Gawhar Shad, engaged the architect Qavam ad-Din to build the mosque that bears her name (1418). It is the most gorgeous and colorful production of Moslem Persian architecture.⁴⁵ Minarets carrying exquisite “lanterns” guard the shrine. Four lordly arches lead into a central court, each faced with faïence tiles “never equaled before or since”⁴⁶—a splendor of time-defying color in a hundred forms of arabesque and geometrical patterns and floral motives and stately Kufic script, all made more brilliant by the Persian sun. Over the southwest “Portico of the Sanctuary” a dome of blue tiles rivals the sky; and on the portal, in large white letters on a blue ground, is the proud and pious dedication of the Queen:

The mosque of Gawhar Shad was but one of a complex of buildings that made Mashhad the Rome of the Shi’a sect. There the worshipers of Imam Riza, in the course of thirty generations, have accumulated an architectural ensemble of arresting splendor: graceful minarets, dominating domes, archways faced with luminous tiles or with plates of silver or gold, spacious courts whose blue and white mosaic or faïence return the greeting of the sun: here, in an overwhelming panorama of color and form, Persian art has wielded all its magic to honor a saint and awe the pilgrim into piety.

From Azerbaijan to Afghanistan a thousand mosques rose in this age out of the soil of Islam, for the poetry of faith is as precious to man as the fruits of the earth. To us of the West, imprisoned in the provinces of the mind, these shrines are but empty names, and even to honor them with these curt obeisances may weary us. What does it mean to us that Gawhar Shad received for her chaste bones a lovely mausoleum at Herat; that Shiraz rebuilt its Masjid-i-Jami in the fourteenth century; that Yazd and Isfahan added resplendent mihrabs to their Friday Mosques? We are too far away in space and years and thought to feel these grandeurs, and those who worship in them have little taste for our Gothic audacities or the sensual images of our Renaissance. Yet even we must be moved when, standing before the ruins of the Blue Mosque at Tabriz (1437–67), we recall its once famed glory of blue faïence and golden arabesques; and we are not unmindful that Mohammed II and Bajazet II raised at Constantinople (1463, 1497) mosques almost rivaling St. Sophia’s majesty. The Ottomans took Byzantine plans, Persian portals, Armenian domes, and Chinese decorative themes to form their mosques at Brusa, Nicaea, Nicomedia, and Konia. In architecture, at least, Moslem art was still in apogee.

Only one art—a David before Goliath—dared stand up to architecture in Islam. Perhaps even more honored than the makers of mosques were the masters of calligraphy and the patient miniaturists who illuminated books with the infinitesimal calculus of the brush or pen. Murals were painted, but from this period none survives. Portraits were painted, and a few remain. The Ottomans publicly obeyed the Biblical and Koranic prohibition of graven images, but Mohammed II imported Gentile Bellini from Venice to Constantinople (1480) to make the likeness of him that now hangs in the London National Gallery. Copies exist of alleged portraits of Timur. In general the Mongol converts to Islam preferred the traditions of Chinese art to the taboos of the Mohammedan faith. From China they brought into Persian illumination dragons, phoenixes, cloud forms, saintly halos, and moonlike faces, and mated them creatively with Persian styles of limpid color and pure line. The mingling modes were closely kin. Chinese and Persian miniaturists alike painted for aristocrats of perhaps too refined a taste, and sought rather to please the imagination and the sense than to represent objective forms.

The great centers of Islamic illumination in this age were Tabriz, Shiraz, and Herat. Probably from the Tabriz of the Il-Khans come the fifty-five leaves of the “De Motte” Shah-nama—Firdausi’s Book of Kings—painted by divers artists in the fourteenth century. But it was at Herat, under the Timurid rulers, that Persian miniature painting touched its zenith. Shah Rukh engaged a large staff of artists, and his son Baisunkur Mirza founded an academy devoted to calligraphy and illumination. From this school of Herat came the Shah-nama (1429)—a miracle of glowing color and flowing gracenow so carefully hidden and religiously handled in the Gulistan Palace Library at Tehran. To view it for the first time is like discovering the odes of Keats.

The real Keats of illumination—the “Raphael of the East”—was Kamal al-Dim Bihzad. He knew in life, and reflected in art, the terrors and vicissitudes of war. Born at Herat about 1440, he studied at Tabriz, then returned to Herat to paint for Sultan Husein ibn-Baiqara and his versatile vizier Mir Ali Shir Nawa’i. When Herat became the center of Uzbeg and Safavid campaigns Bihzad moved again to Tabriz. He was among the first Persian painters to sign their works, yet his art remains are literally few and far between. Two miniatures in the Royal Egyptian Library at Cairo, illustrating Sa’di’s Bustan, show some theologians debating their mysteries in a mosque; the manuscript bears the date 1489, and the colophon reads: “Painted by the slave, the sinner, Bihzad.” The Freer Gallery in Washington has a Portrait of a Young Man Painting, copied from Gentile Bellini and signed “Bihzad”; the fine hands reveal the two artists—portrayer and portrayed. Less certainly his are the miniatures in a British Museum copy of Nizami’s Khamza, and in the same treasury a manuscript of a Zafar-nama, or Book of the Victories of Timur.

These relics hardly explain Bihzad’s unrivaled reputation. They reveal a sensitive perception of persons and things, an ardor and range of color, a vivacity of action caught in a delicate accuracy of line; but they can hardly compare with the miniatures painted for the Duke of Berry almost a century before. Yet Bihzad’s contemporaries felt that he had revolutionized illumination by his original patterns of composition, his vivid landscapes, his carefully individualized figures almost leaping into life. The Persian historian Khwandamir, who was near fifty when Bihzad died (c. 1523), said of him, perhaps with the prejudice of friendship: “His draughtsmanship has caused the memory of all other painters in the world to be obliterated; his fingers, endowed with miraculous qualities, have erased the pictures of all other artists among the sons of Adam.”⁴⁸ It should chasten our certitudes to reflect that this was written after Leonardo had painted The Last Supper, Michelangelo the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and Raphael the Stanze of the Vatican, and that Khwandamir had probably never heard their names.

The art of the potter declined in this epoch from its finesse in Seljuq Rayy and Kashan. Rayy had been laid in ruins by earthquakes and Mongol raids, and Kashan devoted most of its kilns to tiles. New ceramic centers, however, rose at Sultaniya, Yazd, Tabriz, Herat, Isfahan, Shiraz, and Samarkand. Mosaic faïence was now a favored product: small slabs of earthenware, each painted in one metallic color, and glazed to a brilliance that only needed care for permanence. When patrons were opulent, Persian builders used such faïence not only for mihrabs and decoration, but even to cover large surfaces of mosque portals or walls; there is an arresting example in a mihrab—from the mosque of Baba Kasin (c. 1354)—in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The metalworkers of Islam maintained their skill. They made bronze doors and chandeliers for mosques from Bokhara to Marraqesh, though none quite matched Ghiberti’s “gates to paradise” (1401–52) in the Baptistery of Florence. They forged the best armor of the age—helmets conically shaped to deflect descending blows, shields of shining iron encrusted with silver or gold, swords inlaid with golden lettering or flowers. They made handsome coins, and such medallions as that which preserves the pudgy profile of Mohammed the Conqueror, and great brass candlesticks engraved with stately Kufic script or delicate floral forms; they cast and adorned incense burners, writing cases, mirrors, caskets, braziers, flasks, ewers, basins, trays; even scissors and compasses were artistically chased. A like superiority was conceded to the Moslem artist-artisans who cut gems, or worked with precious metals, or carved or inlaid ivory or wood. The textile remains are fragmentary, but the miniatures of the time picture a vast variety of beautiful fabrics, from the fine linens of Cairo to the silken tents of Samarkand; indeed it was the illuminators who designed the complex yet logical patterns for Mongol and Timurid brocades, velvets, and silks, and even for those Persian and Turkish rugs that were soon to be the envy of Europe. In the so-called minor arts Islam still led the world.

VIII. ISLAMIC THOUGHT

In science and philosophy the glory had gone. Religion had won its war against them, just when it was giving ground in the adolescent West. The highest honors now went to theologians, dervishes, fakirs, saints; and scientists aimed rather to absorb the findings of their predecessors than to look nature freshly in the face. At Samarkand Moslem astronomy had its last fling when the stargazers in the observatory of Uleg Beg formulated (1437) astronomic tables that enjoyed high esteem in Europe till the eighteenth century. Armed with tables and an Arab map, an Arab navigator piloted Vasco da Gama from Africa to India on the historic voyage that ended the economic ascendancy of Islam.⁴⁹

In geography the Moslems produced a major figure in this age. Born at Tangier in 1304, Muhammad Abu Abdallah ibn-Batuta wandered through Daru’l-Islam—the Mohammedan world—for twenty-four years, and returned to Morocco to die in Fez. His itinerary suggests the immense spread of Mohammed’s creed: he claims to have traveled 75,000 miles (more than any other man before the age of steam); to have seen Granada, North Africa, Timbuktu, Egypt, the Near and Middle East, Russia, India, Ceylon, and China, and to have visited every Moslem ruler of the time. In each city he paid his respects first to the scholars and divines, only then to the potentates. We see our own provincialism mirrored in him when he lists “the seven mighty kings of the world,” all Moslems except one Chinese.⁵⁰ He describes not only persons and places, but the fauna, flora, minerals, food, drinks, and prices in the various countries, the climate and physiography, the manners and morals, the religious rituals and beliefs. He speaks reverently of Jesus and Mary, but takes some satisfaction in noting that “every pilgrim who visits the church [of the Resurrection in Jerusalem] pays a fee to Moslems.” ⁵¹ When he returned to Fez and related his experiences, most of his hearers put him down as a romancer, but the vizier ordered a secretary to record Batata’s dictated memoirs. The book was lost and almost forgotten until it was discovered in the modem French occupation of Algiers.

Between 1250 and 1350 the most prolific writers on “natural history” were Moslems. Mohammed ad-Damiri of Cairo wrote a 1,500-page book on zoology. Medicine was still a Semitic forte; hospitals were numerous in Islam; a physician of Damascus, Ala’al-din ibn-al-Nafis, expounded the pulmonary circulation of the blood 270 years (c. 1260) before Servetus;⁵² and a Granada physician, Ibnal-Khatib, ascribed the Black Death to contagion—and advised quarantine for the infected—in the face of a theology that attributed it to divine vengeance on man’s sins. His treatise On Plague (c. 1360) contained a notable heresy: “It must be a principle that a proof taken from the Traditions” of the companions of Mohammed “has to undergo modification when in manifest contradiction with the evidence of the senses.” ⁵³

Scholars and historians were as numerous as poets. Always they wrote in Arabic, the Esperanto of Islam; and in many cases they combined study and writing with political activitv and administration. Abu-l-Fida of Damascus took part in a dozen military campaigns, served al-Nasir as minister at Cairo, returned to Syria as governor of Hamah, collected an extensive library, and wrote some books that in their day stood at the head of their class. His treatise on geography (Taqwin al-Buldan) outranged in scope any European work of the kind and time; it calculated that three quarters of the globe were covered with water, and noted that a traveler gained or lost a day in going westward or eastward around the world. His famous Abridgement of the History of the Human Race was the chief Moslem history known to the West.

But the great name in the historiography of the fourteenth century is Abd-er-Rahman ibn-Khaldun. Here is a man of substance, even to Western eyes: solid with experience, travel, and practical statesmanship, yet familiar with the art and literature, science and philosophy of his age, and embracing almost every Moslem phase of it in a Universal History. That such a man was born in Tunis (1332) and raised there suggests that the culture of North Africa was no mere echo of Asiatic Islam, but had a character and vitality of its own. “From my childhood,” says Ibn-Khaldun’s autobiography, “I showed myself avid of knowledge, and devoted myself with great zeal to schools and their courses of instruction.” The Black Death took his parents and many teachers, but he continued his studies until “I found at last that I knew something”⁵⁴—a characteristic delusion of youth. At twenty he was secretary to the sultan at Tunis; at twenty-four, to the sultan at Fez; at twenty-five he was in jail. He moved to Granada, and was sent as its ambassador to Peter the Cruel at Seville. Returning to Africa, he became chief minister to Prince Abu Abdallah at Bougie; but he had to flee for his life when his master was deposed and slain. In 1370 he was sent by the city of Tlemcen as envoy to Granada; he was arrested on the way by a Moorish prince, served him four years, and then retired to a castle near Oran. There (1377) he wrote the Muqaddama al-Alamat, literally Introduction to the Universe. Needing more books than Oran could supply, he returned to Tunis, but he made influential enemies there, and removed to Cairo (1384). His fame as a scholar was already international; when he lectured in the mosque of el-Azhar students crowded around him, and Sultan Barquq gave him a pension, “as was his wont with savants.”⁵⁵ He was appointed qadi malekite, or royal judge; took the laws too seriously, closed the cabarets, was lampooned out of office, again retired to private life. Restored as chief qadi, he accompanied Sultan Nasir ad-Din Faraj in a campaign against Timur; the Egyptian forces were defeated; Ibn-Khaldun sought refuge in Damascus; Timur besieged it; the historian, now an old man, led a delegation to ask lenient terms of the invincible Tatar. Like any other author, he brought a manuscript of his history with him; he read to Timur the section on Timur, and invited corrections; perhaps he had revised the pages ad hoc.

The plan worked; Timur freed him; soon he was once more chief judge at Cairo; and he died in office at the age of seventy-four (1406).

Amid this hectic career he composed an epitome of Averroes’ philosophy, treatises on logic and mathematics, the Muqaddama, a History of the Berbers, and The Peoples of the East. Only the last three survive; together they constitute the Universal History. The Muqaddama or Prolegomena is one of the high lights in Islamic literature and in the philosophy of history, an amazingly “modern” product for a medieval mind. Ibn-Khaldun conceives history as “an important branch of philosophy,” ⁵⁶ and takes a broad view of the historian’s task:

Believing himself the first to write history in this fashion, he asks pardon for inevitable errors:

He hopes that his work will help in the dark days that he foresees:

He devotes some proud pages to pointing out the errors of some historians. They lost themselves, he feels, in the mere chronicling of events, and rarely rose to the elucidation of causes and effects. They accepted fable almost as readily as fact, gave exaggerated statistics, and explained too many things by supernatural agency. As for himself, he proposes to rely entirely on natural factors in explaining events. He will judge the statements of historians by the present experience of mankind, and will reject any alleged occurrence that would now be accounted impossible. Experience must judge tradition.⁶⁰ His own method, in the Muqaddama, is first to deal with the philosophy of history; then with professions, occupations, and crafts; then with the history of science and art. In succeeding volumes he gives the political history of the various nations, taking them one by one, deliberately sacrificing the unity of time to that of place. The true subject of history, says Ibn-Khaldun, is civilization: how it arises, how it is maintained, how it develops letters, sciences, and arts, and why it decays.⁶¹ Empires, like individuals, have a life and trajectory which are their own. They grow, they mature, they decline.⁶² What are the causes of this sequence?

The basic conditions of the sequence are geographical. Climate exercises a general but basic influence. The cold north eventually produces, even in peoples of southern origin, a white skin, light hair, blue eyes, and a serious disposition; the tropics produce in time a dark skin, black hair, “dilatation of the animal spirits,” lightness of mind, gaiety, quick transports of pleasure, leading to song and dance.⁶³ Food affects character: a heavy diet of meats, condiments, and grains begets heaviness of body and mind, and quick succumbing to famine or infection; a light diet, such as desert peoples eat, makes for agile and healthy bodies, clearness of mind, and resistance to disease.⁶⁴ There is no inherent inequality of potential ability among the peoples of the earth; their advancement or retardation is determined by geographical conditions, and can be altered by a change in those conditions, or by migration to a different habitat.⁶⁵

Economic conditions are only less powerful than the geographical. Ibn-Khaldun divides all societies into nomad or sedentary according to their means of getting food, and ascribes most wars to the desire for a better food supply. Nomad tribes sooner or later conquer settled communities because nomads are compelled by the conditions of their life to maintain the martial qualities of courage, endurance, and solidarity. Nomads may destroy a civilization, but they never make one; they are absorbed, in blood and culture, by the conquered, and the nomad Arabs are no exception. Since a people is never long content with its food supply, war is natural. It is war that generates and renews political authority. Hence monarchy is the usual form of government, and has prevailed through nearly all history.⁶⁶ The fiscal policy of a government may make or break a society; excessive taxation, or the entry of a government into production and distribution, can stifle incentive, enterprise, and competition, and kill the goose that lays the revenues.⁶⁷ On the other hand, an excessive concentration of wealth may tear a society to pieces by promoting revolution.⁶⁸

There are moral forces in history. Empires are sustained by the solidarity of the people, and this can be best secured through the inculcation and practice of the same religion; Ibn-Khaldun agrees with the popes, the Inquisition, and the Protestant Reformers on the value of unanimity in faith.

Religion is not only an aid in war, it is likewise a boon to order in a society and to peace of mind in the individual. These can be secured only by a religious faith adopted without questioning. The philosophers concoct a hundred systems, but none has found a substitute for religion as a guide and inspiration for human life. “Since men can never understand the world, it is better to accept the faith transmitted by an inspired legislator, who knows better than we do what is better for us, and has prescribed for us what we should believe and do.”⁷⁰ After this orthodox prelude our philosopher-historian proceeds to a naturalistic interpretation of history.

Every empire passes through successive phases. (1) A victorious nomad tribe settles down to enjoy its conquest of a terrain or state. “The least civilized peoples make the most extensive conquests.”⁷¹ (2) As social relations become more complex, a more concentrated authority is required for the maintenance of order; the tribal chieftain becomes king. (3) In this settled order wealth grows, cities multiply, education and literature develop, the arts find patrons, science and philosophy lift their heads. Advanced urbanization and comfortable wealth mark the beginning of decay. (4) The enriched society comes to prefer pleasure, luxury, and ease to enterprise, risk, or war; religion loses its hold on human imagination or belief; morals deteriorate, pederasty grows; the martial virtues and pursuits decline; mercenaries are hired to defend the society; these lack the ardor of patriotism or religious faith; the poorly defended wealth invites attack by the hungry, seething millions beyond the frontiers. (5) External attack, or internal intrigue, or both together, overthrow the state.⁷² Such was the cycle of Rome, of the Almoravids and Almohads in Spain, of Islam in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Persia; and “it is always so.” ⁷³

These are a few of the thousands of ideas that make the Muqaddama the most remarkable philosophical product of its century, Ibn-Khaldun has his own notions on almost everything but theology, where he thinks it unwise to be original. While writing a major work of philosophy he pronounces philosophy dangerous, and advises his readers to let it alone;⁷⁴ probably he meant metaphysics and theology rather than philosophy in its wider sense as an attempt to see human affairs in a large perspective. At times he talks like the simplest old woman in the market place; he accepts miracles, magic, the “evil eye,” the occult properties of the alphabet, divination through dreams, entrails, or the flight of birds.⁷⁵ Yet he admires science, admits the superiority of the Greeks to the Moslems in that field, and mourns the decline of scientific studies in Islam.⁷⁶ He rejects alchemy, but acknowledges some faith in astrology.⁷⁷

Certain other discounts must be made. Though Ibn-Khaldun is as broad as Islam, he shares many of its limitations. In the three volumes of the Muqaddama he finds room for but seven pages on Christianity. He makes only casual mention of Greece, Rome, and medieval Europe. When he has written the history of North Africa, Moslem Egypt, and the Near and Middle East, he believes that he has narrated “the history of all peoples.”⁷⁸ Sometimes he is culpably ignorant: he thinks Aristotle taught from a porch, and Socrates from a tub.⁷⁹ His actual writing of history falls far short of his theoretical introduction; the volumes on the Berbers and the Orient are a dreary record of dynastic genealogies, palace intrigues, and petty wars. Apparently he intended these volumes to be political history only, and offered the Muqaddama as a history—though it is rather a general consideration—of culture.

To recover our respect for Ibn-Khaldun we need only ask what Christian work of philosophy in the fourteenth century can stand beside the Prolegomena. Perhaps some ancient authors had covered part of the ground that he charted; and among his own people al-Masudi (d. 956), in a work now lost, had discussed the influence of religion, economics, morals, and environment on the character and laws of a people, and the causes of political decline.⁸⁰ Ibn-Khaldun, however, felt, and with some reason, that he had created the science of sociology. Nowhere in literature before the eighteenth century can we find a philosophy of history, or a system of sociology, comparable in power, scope, and keen analysis with Ibn-Khaldun’s. Our leading contemporary philosopher of history has judged the Muqaddama to be “undoubtedly the greatest work of its kind that has ever yet been created by any mind in any time or place.”⁸¹ Herbert Spencer’s Principles of Sociology (1876–96) may compare favorably with it, but Spencer had many aides. In any case we may agree with a distinguished historian of science, that “the most important historical work of the Middle Ages”⁸² was the Muqaddama of Ibn-Khaldun.