Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-lnqnp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T13:04:15.691Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Islam in the History of Early Europe1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2010

Extract

Virtually every account of European history after the fall of the Roman Empire identifies ‘Europe’ with Christian civilisation, echoing, consciously or otherwise, the universalist claims of the Byzantine emperors, the popes and the western Roman emperors. Yet it is also the case that Islam possessed a European presence from the eighth century onwards, first of all in Spain and the Mediterranean islands, and later, from the mid-fourteenth century, in the Balkans, where the Turks were able rapidly to establish an empire which directly threatened Hungary and Austria. The lands ruled by Islam on the European land mass have tended to be treated by historians as European only in geographical identity, but in human terms part of a victorious and alien ‘oriental’ civilisation, of which they were provincial dependencies, and from which medieval Spanish Christians or modern Greeks and Slavs had to liberate themselves. Yet this view is fallacious for several reasons. In the first place, there is a valid question about our use of the term ‘civilisation’, which Fred Halliday has expressed as follows:

‘Civilisations’ are like nations, traditions, communities – terms that claim a reality and authority which is itself open to question, and appeal to a tradition that turns out, on closer inspection, to be a contemporary creation.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Research Institute for History, Leiden University 1996

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

2 Halliday, F., Islam and the Myth of Confrontation (London 1996) 3.Google Scholar

3 Herrin, J., The Formation of Christendom (Oxford 1987)Google Scholar; Brown, P., The World of Late Antiquity (London 1971)Google Scholar.

4 Pirenne, H., Mohammed and Charlemagne (London 1939).Google Scholar

5 A point made with some apology, since the author of this article is a member of the editorial board that set up the entire project; his own volume, on the thirteenth century, will contain chapters on the Mamluks, the Maghrib and other relevant Islamic topics. See however MacKitterick, R. ed., The New Cambridge Medieval History II, c. 700–C.900 (Cambridge 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The article in it by Hugh Kennedy on ‘The Muslims in Europe’, 249–271, is, nonetheless, an excellent piece of work as far as it goes.

6 See Fletcher, R., Moorish Spain (London 1992) 6769Google Scholar.

7 Dodds, J.D. ed., Al-Andalus: The Art of Islamic Spain (New York 1992)Google Scholar, for the surviving textiles and ample discussion.

8 Barrucand, M. and Bednorz, A., Moorish Architecture in Andalusia (Cologne 1992) 22.Google Scholar

9 Beckwith, J., Caskets from Cordoba (London 1960).Google Scholar

10 Millet-Gérard, D., Chrétiens mozarabes et culture islamique dans l'Espagne des VIIIe-IXe siècles (Paris 1984).Google Scholar

11 Ashtor, E., History of the fews in Moslem Spain I (Philadelphia 1973) 155227, though this was not Ashtor's best work.Google Scholar

12 Barrucand and Bednorz, Moorish Architecture, 84.

13 Watson, A., Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World (Cambridge 1983).Google Scholar

14 Lewis, B., The Jews of Islam (Princeton 1984) 62.Google Scholar

15 Bulliet, R.W., Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: An Essay in Quantitative History (Cambridge 1979).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 Schippers, A., Spanish Hebrew Poetry and the Arabic Literary Tradition: Arabic Themes in Hebrew Andalusian Poetry (Leiden 1994).Google Scholar

17 Wasserstein, D., The Rise and Fall of the Party-Kings: Politics and Society in Islamic Spain, 1002–1086 (Princeton 1985) 190223.Google Scholar

18 Wolf, K.B., Christian Martyrs in Muslim Spain (Cambridge 1988)Google Scholar; Coope, J.A., The Martyrs of Córdoba: Community and Family Conflict in an Age of Mass Conversion (Lincoln 1995).Google Scholar

19 Linehan, P., History and the Historians of Medieval Spain (Oxford 1993).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 Abulafia, David, A Mediterranean Emporium: The Catalan Kingdom of Majorca (Cambridge 1994) xvxvi.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 Dozy, R., Spanish Islam: A History of the Moslems in Spain (London 1913)Google Scholar, reprinted as Moslims in Spain (London 1988), with a useful biography of Dozy by F.G. Stokes, xv-xxxii; also S. Lane Poole, The Moors in Spain (London 1897), for particularly vivid remarks about the contrast between Umayyad glories and Bourbon decay.

22 Castro, A., The Structure of Spanish History (Princeton 1954)Google Scholar; Albornoz, C. Sánchez, España: Un Enigma Histórico (Buenos Aires 1956)Google Scholar. Linehan, History and the Historians, offers some telling criticisms of Sanchez Albornoz's approach.

23 Guichard, P., Structures sociales ‘orientales’ et ‘occidentales’ dans l'Espagne musulmane (Paris/The Hague 1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Constable, G., ‘The Second Crusade as Seen by Contemporaries’, Traditio 9 (1953).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25 Rosenthal, F., The Classical Heritage in Islam (London 1975).Google Scholar

26 Burman, T., Religious Polemic and the Intellectual History of the Mozarabs, c. 1050–1200 (Leiden 1994)Google Scholar, for intellectual life in reconquered Toledo.

27 Kritzeck, J., Peter the Venerable and Islam (Princeton 1964).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28 Llull, Ramón, The Booh of the Lover and the Beloved (edited and translated by Johnston, M.D., Warminster 1995)Google Scholar; A., and Bonner, E., Doctor Illuminatus: A Ramon Llull Reader (Princeton 1993) 173237Google Scholar; also Urvoy, D., Penser l'Islam: Les présupposés islamiques de ‘l'art’ de Lull (Paris 1980)Google Scholar.

29 Bonner, A., Select Works of Ramón Llull I (Princeton 1985) 110304.Google Scholar

30 Udovitch, A.L., ‘At the Origins of the Western “Commenda”: Islam, Israel, Byzantium’, Speculum 37 (1962) 198207CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Udovitch, A.L., Partnership and Profit in Medieval Islam (Princeton 1970).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31 On this problem, see Abulafia, David, ‘Asia, Africa and the Trade of Medieval Europe’ in: Miller, E., Postan, M.M. and Postan, C. eds, The Cambridge Economic History of Europe II: Trade and Industry in the Middle Ages (Cambridge 1987) 402473.Google Scholar

32 Ashtor, E., Social and Economic History of the Near East in the Middle Ages (London 1976)Google Scholar; Ashtor, E., Levant Trade in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton 1983).Google Scholar

33 Prawer, J., The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem: European Colonialism in the Middle Ages (London 1972)Google Scholar; also ‘The Crusading Kingdom of Jerusalem – the First European Colonial Society? A Symposium’ in: B.Z. Kedar ed., The Horns of Hattin (Jerusalem/Aldershot 1992) 341–366, reporting a debate at a conference organised by the Van Leer Foundation in 1984.

34 Runciman, S., The Families of Outremer: The Feudal Nobility of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, 1099–1291 (London 1960) 1, Creighton lecture in History for 1959.Google Scholar

35 Abulafia, David, ‘The End of Muslim Sicily’ in: Powell, J.M. ed., Muslims Under Latin Rule, 1100–1300 (Princeton 1990) 103133Google Scholar, reprinted in David Abulafia, Commerce and Conquest in the Mediterranean, 1100–1500 (Aldershot 1993).

36 Abulafia, David, Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor (London 1988) 254258.Google Scholar

37 Abulafia, Frederick II, 335–336.

38 Click, T., From Muslim Fortress to Christian Castle: Social and Cultural Change in Medieval Spain (Manchester 1995) 120122.Google Scholar

39 Harvey, L.P., Islamic Spain, 1250–1500 (Chicago 1991) 34.Google Scholar

40 Abulafia, David, ‘Monarchs and Minorities in the Christian Western Mediterranean around 1300: Lucera and its Analogues’ in: Waugh, S.L. and Diehl, P. eds, Christendom and its Discontents: Exclusion, Persecution and Rebellion, 1000–1500 (Cambridge 1996), 234263Google Scholar; Abulafia, Mediterranean Emporium 65–72.

41 There is a sizeable literature on the Muslims in conquered Valencia; one could not do better than to start with the essay by Robert Burns, ‘Muslims in the Thirteenth-Century Realms of Aragon: Interaction and Reaction’ in: Powell ed., Muslims under Latin Rule, 57–102, which is rich in further references to work by Burns himself, by Boswell, Meyerson, Ferrer i Mallol and many other scholars in Spain and North America.

42 Harvey, Islamic Spain, 52–63; al-Wansharishi should himself be placed in a long tradition of discussion of this issue, e.g. at the time of the Norman Sicilian conquests in north Africa in the mid-twelfth century.

43 Constable, O.R., Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain: The Commercial Relignment of the Iberian Peninsula, 900–1500 (Cambridge 1994) 212Google Scholar; Heers, J., ‘Le royaume de Granade et la politique marchande de Gênes en Occident, XVe siècle’, Le Moyen Age 63 (1957) 87121.Google Scholar

44 Meyerson, M., The Muslims of Valencia in the Age of Fernando and Isabel (Berkeley/Los Angeles 1991).Google Scholar

45 Ortiz, A. Dominguez and Vincent, B., Historia de los Moriscos (Madrid 1978)Google Scholar.