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CHAPTER TWO

Rethinking the Background

If we understand by Averroism the use of Averroes’ commentary on Aristotle, then every medieval Aristotelian, including Aquinas, was an Averroist.

—Paul Oscar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought

WILLIAM, CIRCA 1100

A half dozen years before the birth of William IX, duke of Aquitaine, who was to become one of the most powerful men of his time in both political and cultural affairs, there occurred one of the most famous and well-documented examples of the taking of Arabic cultural “booty” by southern French Christians.¹ This was the taking of Barbastro by Guillaume de Montreuil in 1064, during which he is said to have taken a thousand slave girls, captured women, back to Provence. Even if this were an apocryphal and gross exaggeration serving to emphasize the barbarity of the Christians from the Arab chronicler’s point of view, we have little reason to assume that the courts of Provence of the late eleventh century were oblivious to the art of Arabic sung poetry that the captured women would have brought with them.

The world from which these women were abducted was al-Andalus, and they and other refugees and victims of the wars of reconquest were familiar figures in Christian courts on both sides of the Pyrenees. In the tradition of all those throughout history who have been forced from their homeland, they took with them many of the trappings of the world from which they came, and in some small measure they recreated that world. Thus in Narbonne, Béziers, and Montpellier, Jewish and other Andalusian refugees taught some of the learning that already distinguished al-Andalus as an advanced culture, and in the courts of Aquitaine, Andalusian music and songs provided entertainment. After all, both the learning and the music had been essential features of any measure of civilization in the world from which they had fled or been abducted.

The political and cultural vicissitudes of al-Andalus had been many since the successful initial conquest in 711. The emirate had introduced a centralizing principle of government in the eighth century but, at that early moment of political consolidation, relatively little cultural activity that we know of. The creation and coming of age of the great Caliphate of Córdoba began in 929, but the building of the great mosque, the symbol of and monument to that enterprise, had been started in the previous century. It was a period in which the Arabization and even Islamization of the conquered peoples was a source of wonder and chagrin. The prestige of a language and culture, Arabic, that was no longer new or foreign had become indisputable. The transforming effects of that cultural prestige were lamented by Alvarus, bishop of Córdoba, in 854:

Our Christian young men, with their elegant airs and fluent speech, are showy in their dress and carriage, and are famed for the learning of the gentiles; intoxicated with Arab eloquence they greedily handle, eagerly devour and zealously discuss the books of the Chaldeans [i.e., Muhammadans] and make them known by praising them with every flourish of rhetoric, knowing nothing of the beauty of the Church’s literature, and looking with contempt on the streams of the Church that flow forth from Paradise; alas! the Christians are so ignorant of their own law, the Latins pay so little attention to their own language, that in the whole of the Christian flock there is hardly one man in a thousand who can write a letter to inquire after a friend’s health intelligibly, while you may find countless rabble of all kinds of them who can learnedly roll out the grandiloquent periods of the Chaldean tongue. They can even make poems, every line ending with the same letter, which display high flights of beauty and more skill in handling meter than the gentiles themselves possess. (Translation, Watt 1965:56).

But it was not, in fact, until the subsequent century, the tenth, that the Andalusian Arabic world of belles-lettres and other arts emerged from the shadow of the East, which it had largely emulated, and came into its own, flourishing and nurturing experimentation and a wide range of poetic forms as it did the same in the plastic arts, as it minted gold coins, and as it introduced a sophistication in many spheres that was unknown in Europe for some centuries. Alvarus’s distress had he witnessed, a hundred years later, the cultural prestige and success of the descendants of the Arab invaders and those who had adopted their language and culture would have been even more warranted and more acute. The situation was such that the man who at the millenium was to be Pope Sylvester II, an Aquitainian named Gerbert of Aurillac, had come to Spain in his formative years in quest of knowledge. Gerbert stayed three years in Catalonia studying mathematics and astronomy from the collection at Ripoll, which partook of the riches of Andalusian writings on these subjects, and it is reputed that he managed a visit to the great library of Córdoba itself. A man in many ways far ahead of his compatriots who did not cultivate the knowledge of al-Andalus, Gerbert was the first northern European to see the advantage of the numeral system of the Arabs, one that the Andalusians were still perfecting.

The prestige and luxury, and the distress of the Alvaros, would continue to grow in the subsequent century. The century into which the captives of Barbastro were born, the eleventh, was one characterized, paradoxically, by considerable political upheaval (the dissolution of the caliphate) and great affluence for the literature, the poetry, of that world. The astonishing wealth and growth of the capital, Córdoba, had spilled over to other areas and cities of al-Andalus and had considerably broadened the base of material and cultural well-being. Thus, when central authority collapsed and was replaced politically by the city-states known as the mulūk aṭ-ṭawāif, the financial and artistic bases for considerable material and cultural prosperity had already been established. The stage was set for the golden age of Hispano-Arabic literature, whose writers included three of the Andalusians destined to be best remembered by posterity: Ibn Shuhaid, Ibn Ḥazm, and Ibn Zaidūn. The first was the author of a trip to the afterlife; the second, of a treatise on love that combines poetry and prose; and the third was the premiere writer of love poetry of his age. Following on the heels of these renowned litterateurs of the last days of the caliphate came many more poets nurtured by the beneficent climate of the mulūk, cities in which the cultivation and patronage of the arts and all manner of science and philosophy became a high priority for monarchs themselves. The heads of these small but glowing kingdoms were learned or proficient in at least one specialty (philosophy, poetry) and expected no less from those to whom they offered their hospitality. Their courts vied with each other as hospices for the arts, and for poetry in particular.

But the great poetic form of the period was at first disdained by many of the most renowned poets. It reached its peak of popularity as the Cid Campeador was menacing many of the mulūk and while other cities, such as Barbastro, were plagued by incursions from the north. The song was called muwashshaḥa. The reasons for its lack of respect among the paragons of haute culture, men such as Ibn Ḥazm, were also the reasons for its success and popularity among those less protective of the canon of Arabic literature. The song embodied the symbiotic culture of al-Andalus rather than its classical Arabic heritage, and it vaunted its uniqueness with something revolutionary: a final verse in Mozarabic, the Romance vernacular of this world. The formal and musical alternations between strophes and refrain in these songs were reiterated and enhanced by the oscillation between classical and vernacular, between the language and poetry of the courts and that of the streets.

Some of the purists may not have liked it, but their disapproval, like the disapproval of many guardians of the old classical ways in every culture and period of history, did little to prevent its spreading popularity. The innovation, in fact, proved widely appealing for numerous generations of Andalusians, and for none more than for those of the eleventh century, whose cultural decadence in the eyes of stricter Muslims was to invite (or at least to serve to justify) the invasion of the fundamentalist Almoravids. It was a fateful invasion for the history of Europe and its culture, one that would provoke the alliance between the Cid and some of the mulūk and that would precipitate a long period of orthodox retrenchment that would eventually exile two of the greatest Andalusian philosophers, Maimonides and Averroes.

But in 1064 that period of defense and austerity was still in the unimaginable future, and the status quo in Spain was still one of prolific cultural production, luxurious court life, and the heyday of the revolutionary new song, the muwashshaḥa. Contacts between the men of Provence and those whose sphere of influence was still mainly limited to south of the Pyrenees were far from infrequent, and they were varied. Already in the time of William the Great, grandfather of William IX, the export of Andalusian scholarship to other parts of Europe was noteworthy: An astrolabe had been built at Lièges in 1025, and several books on the subject, clearly dependent on the works of the Arabic predecessors who had developed the instrument, were available by the midpoint of the century and were instrumental in the revolution in navigation that followed. The material, intellectual, and artistic riches that escaped al-Andalus in bits and pieces such as these graced the ancestral home of the man who was to be known as the first troubadour. Even as a young man he could hardly have avoided knowing the songs of the women of Barbastro, because the Arabic singing-slaves taken by Guillaume de Montreuil were dutifully presented by that William to his commander in chief, William VI of Poitiers, father of the man whose own songs would for many centuries be known as the first songs of Europe.

Whether or not William of Aquitaine, in his childhood or adolescence, heard the entertainments of the Barbastrian women then serving, through the vicissitudes of history and the Reconquest, in Provence, it is most unlikely that during his lifetime he could have remained ignorant of the salient features of life as it was lived in the Ṭaifa kingdoms of Spain or of the many amenities that world provided for its inhabitants.

In fact, even aside from the particular incident at Barbastro and its ramifications in the life of William, everything we know about the geographic and political ties of what are now southern France and northern Spain (the latter far from completely reconquered or Christianized) shows clearly the extent to which the citizens of the area of Languedoc were in intimate contact with and tied to the fronterizo and the still strongly Arabized world of the late eleventh century. During the lifetime of William of Aquitaine the two societies were contiguous, and the interrelations between the two worlds, which we are scarcely justified in seeing as fundamentally separate, were remarkable. A rough sketch of their political history alone tells a story that reveals much. The county of Barcelona, which remained largely in Arab hands until well after the period of the first troubadours, spanned the western Pyrenees to include areas that in modern times separate France from Spain. Saragossa, for example, was not captured until 1118. The kingdom of Aragon was nominally Christian at the turn of the twelfth century, but many of its cities remained Muslim for some time. Even those that were in Christian hands had been so only for a very short period of time. Huesca, for example, had only been recaptured in 1096.

William was thus born and raised in Christian territory more than just randomly or sporadically involved with its Andalusian and semi-Andalusian neighbors. And the record of William’s direct ties with the culture of the muwashshaḥas and of his own society’s life in the limelight of al-Andalus leaves little or no doubt that the birth of Provençal troubadour poetry occurred at a time and place when the Arabic world and its culture were of immediate fascination and importance. Toledo, already an important seat of learning and translation, was conquered in 1085, and what followed in the wake of that Christian military victory was a victory of far greater proportions for Arabic learning, the virtual explosion of cultural material from al-Andalus to all points north.

In 1094, two years before the Aragonese city of Huesca was captured, William had married Philippa of Aragon, and his fascination with the most distinctly Arabized, polyglot and culturally polymorphous society of the reconquered territories was well noted at home—and little to be wondered at, given the tastes and proclivities nurtured earlier in life. It was not the first, nor would it be the last, occasion on which he would enjoy the considerable benefits of the rich court life, the learning, the music and singing that had already made Córdoba a byword for an unimaginable abundance of such wealth and were soon to make Toledo the best-known gateway to at least certain parts of that wealth. William, like his fellow Aquitainian Gerbert before him, had many advantages and previews of what was to come, since his personal ties with the fronterizo world were already intimately established when he married the Aragonese princess. One of his sisters had married Pedro I of Aragon, and yet another had married none other than Alfonso VI of Castile, the same Alfonso who had not only captured Toledo but had proclaimed himself “Emperor of Spain and the Two Faiths.”

In 1095, the year after his marriage, the First Crusade began. William followed it to the Holy Land in 1100, when Jerusalem had already fallen. He remained there for several years (the years for which there is the clearest documentation of the virtually complete acculturation of the crusaders to Arab ways, though few of them, of course, had the advantages William had had). Back in Europe, a William who is described by his contemporaries as both restless and bored with traditional Christian society, who was twice excommunicated by the Church for ambiguous departures from orthodox Christian behavior, who was reviled by contemporary Christian chroniclers as an enemy of “modesty and goodness,” and who was by now as familiar with the prodigious cultural wealth of both Palestinian and Andalusian court life as any Christian monarch of his lifetime could hope to be, this same William began to write the courtly lyric poetry that was to make him the father of the courtly vernacular lyric of Europe.

William interspersed this period of cultural fertility and innovation with a number of crusading excursions to Spain, including one, in 1119, as part of a broad-based alliance that attempted to turn back the fundamentalist Almoravids, who had invaded al-Andalus in 1091. While that campaign was successful (William himself was apparently present in 1120 at the defeat of the Almoravids at Cutanda), the war was ultimately lost and the magnificent library of Córdoba burned.

Such circumstances witnessed the birth, or at least the definitive molding, of the Provençal lyric that was to become the focal point, from a Europeanist’s perspective, of the courtly and lyric culture of medieval Europe. And for the next several generations of troubadours, the cultural ambience would be far from removed from the kind of knowledge of Andalusian culture William had had. The courts of Barcelona, Aragon, and Castile maintained their wealth of Andalusian trappings, reinforced by refugees seeking havens from the fundamentalist reforms taking place in al-Andalus, and these same courts were the often-visited havens of some of the best-remembered troubadours: Guiraut de Borneil, Arnaut Daniel, Peire Vidal, Marcabru, Raimbaut d’Orange, and Peire d’Auvergne. Perhaps, in part, they appealed so to these men for the same reasons that such a world of cultural symbiosis and richness, of artistic diversity and promise, had appealed to the first of their school, William. It was a world described succinctly and affectionately by Raimon Vidal:

Totas genz, Cristians, Jusievas e Sarasinas, meton totz jorns lor entendiment en trobar et en chantar. (Frank 1955:186)

One of the first and most basic problems encountered in an attempt to reimagine the cultural texture of this period is that many of the terms we must and do use can often be quite misleading. Foremost among these is the term “Islam” when it is used to denote the cultural entity that flourished principally in Spain and Sicily but that was also a significant force far beyond the geographical and temporal limits of its political boundaries. The term Islam has most commonly been used to denote that entity because it is the name of the religion under whose impetus military expansion initially brought it from the Middle East to Europe. It is also used in opposition to the term “Christian,” which in Robertsonian and neo- or pre-Robertsonian views of the Middle Ages is assumed to be the cultural and intellectual force that strictly dictated and delineated the parameters and texture of both intellectual and artistic activities. As such, both terms are part of the general terminological apparatus that denotes an insurmountable separation between the two entities and that relegates to the category of non-European most of what is Islamic.

Such a perspective can be seriously misleading, however, because among other things it implies an identity between the religion and the cultural entity that, in terms of the way al-Andalus interacted with the Latin-Romance culture of the rest of Europe, was very often not perceived or was not the primary identification made. Its analogy would be of failing to distinguish, when dealing with the Middle Ages, between what is Latin (or Romance) and what is Christian, with the resulting misapprehension of the non-Christian cultural and intellectual strains and texts that are written in Latin (or in a Romance language).

But the problem is neither merely terminological nor due exclusively to the relative lack of sophisticated knowledge we tend to have about Islam and the Arabs in medieval Europe. It is also the case that there is much debate among scholars who are specialists (as well as among Arabs and Muslims who may not be scholars) on the question of the relationship between what is Arabic and what is Islamic. In any area of research where the distinction is potentially relevant, conflicting opinions on the nature of the relationship between these two terms almost invariably surface. All that one can say without much fear of contradiction is that Islam and Arabic culture are not necessarily identical and that at different times and in different places, the nature of the relationship has varied. At least this much can and should be said about their relationship in the Middle Ages in Europe: On the one hand, many different racial and ethnic groups were and became Spanish Muslims; on the other, the Arabic language became the prestige language for many who were not.