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- [00:01]
William Dalrymple
If you want access to bonus episodes, reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat, community discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast ad, free listening and a weekly newsletter. Sign up to empire club@www.empirepoduk.com. tron.
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Peter Sarris
Ares has arrived. I would like you to meet Ares.
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William Dalrymple
The ultimate AI soldier.
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Peter Sarris
He is biblically strong and supremely intelligent. You think you're in control of.
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Anita Anand
You're not.
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Peter Sarris
On October 10th. What are you? My world is coming to destroy yours. But I can help you.
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William Dalrymple
The war for our world begins in IMAX.
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Peter Sarris
Tron Ares, rated PG13. May be inappropriate for children under 13. Only in theaters October 10th. Get tickets now.
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Anita Anand
Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Anand, and me, William Duranpool. And we are joined again, I'm very happy to say, by the professor of late antique, Medieval and Byzantine studies at the University of Cambridge, Peter Sarris. Welcome, Peter. In the last episode, we talked about Christianity and the impact of Christianity and these sort of wild monks who really changed the fabric of what Gaza looks like. Sort of this boom time with monasteries and churches springing up in the Holy Land. In this episode, we're going to talk about the great conquests of Islam because, you know, William left us on a. On a cliffhanger at the last episode in the seventh century and how ideas about this period have, by modern study, been completely overturned in some way. So, I mean, let's start at the very, very basic level. We're talking about a rapid expansion of Islam at this time. We're talking sort of 630s, aren't we? So just tell us what's going on and what is. What is happening here?
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Peter Sarris
Over the course of the 6th and early 7th centuries, cultural, economic, military, religious conditions in the Arabian Peninsula had been revolutionized and transformed by the growing involvement in Arabia of the two great powers of the Eastern Roman Empire and Sasanian Persia. Partly as a result of this growing superpower involvement, you'll see new religious ideas come into circulation in Arabia, new forms of identity emerging. And in the context of these swirling ideas and new identities, in the early 7th century, a prophet has emerged in the settlement of Mecca, a significant trading center known to posterity as Muhammad. Muhammad has preached the imminence of divine judgment, a very strong theme in contemporary Christianity and Judaism as well. In the early 7th century, he's advocating the worship of the God of the Old Testament, who has previously revealed himself to the Christians and Jews, but whose worship of that true God, Muhammad believes, would become corrupted. And through a series of political, religious and Military struggles Muhammad has been able to unite many of the tribes of Arabia under the aegis of his new religion. As will mentioned at the end of the last episode, Muhammad is believed to have died around the year 632. But the leadership of the community of believers, the Ummah that he has established, would then pass to some of his earliest companions, who would reunite the Arabian peninsula after some of the peoples who have joined the Ummah tried to break away. And who then, from the year 633 to 4, would begin to lead forces into the empires of the eastern Roman Empire and Persia to the north, thus initiating the dramatic expansion of Islam over much of the known world, which will then proceed from the 630s down to the 650s in a series of lightning military campaigns.
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Anita Anand
And right at the end of the last episode, William was talking about this sort of flashpoint that takes place in Gaza where a eunuch called Serdios, who's meant to be paying Arabs who have been protecting that frontier for the Emperor, and he says, you know what? We hardly pay our soldiers, we're not going to pay the dogs. It is such an insult. It leads to something that the people of Gaza could not have foreseen. Tell us what happens next.
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Peter Sarris
Well, I think that episode is a later dramatization and sort of almost semi mythologised retelling.
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William Dalrymple
Oh, what a shame. It's a good story.
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Peter Sarris
It is. I think the fine detail of it should be treated with some caution. But it's telling us something that's fundamentally true. I mean, I think. Take a step back for a moment. During the course of the Roman Persian warfare of the preceding century, the Romans have built up their own Arabian or Arab clients along the frontier zone. Dominantly Christian Arabs or Arabians, the Gassanids or the Jaffnids. And the Persians have built up their own clientage network as well. Now, at the height of the Roman Persian struggle, when the Persians think that they've got the Roman Empire beaten just before the Emperor Heraclius reverses the Persian games, the Persians seem to have dismantled these clientage arrangements along the frontier zones of southern Iraq and southern Syria and southern Palestine, they're probably planning to put something else back in their place. They never get round to it. So when the Emperor Heraclius suddenly defeats the Persians at the end of the 620s and nominally restores Roman control to Syria, Palestine, Egypt, you've got a power vacuum along those desert fringes. You've got former client peoples of these empires not receiving the pay that they're expecting and as it were the emergent forces of Islam and the emergent forces of the Ummah are filling that power vacuum.
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William Dalrymple
Ummah being the Muslim community.
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Peter Sarris
The Muslim community. And the first time the Romans spot this is when two Arab forces turn up near Gaza. And we have some later Arabic accounts of this which don't mention Sergius. We have a later Byzantine account drawing or a now lost source that does mention him. We have a very, very contemporary account written in Syriac which is the Christian version of the Aramaic language of the region around Gaza which not only gives us a fragmentary but quite chilling so brutal account of the military conflict that ensues but is also one of our earliest sources to survive from anywhere that mentions Muhammad by name really. We have a Syriac source written around the year 640 that describes how a battle occurs about 12 miles to the east of Gaza as a result of which the Romans flee leaving behind their general who is killed.
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William Dalrymple
They sew the general up in a camel or something.
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Peter Sarris
A horrible story according to the later sources but the contemporary Syriac source describes is then the Arabs as it were raiding local villages and killing villagers in order to take control of of the countryside and ravaging the whole region. But I say the Syriac source describes these as the Arabs of Muhammad as one of our very earliest mentions of him. So it's a crucial historical document not just in terms of the miniature history of Gaza but for the history of world religion.
- [07:20]
William Dalrymple
Goodness. And the leader we're always told is Amr IBN Al as famous for later conquering Egypt?
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Peter Sarris
Absolutely, yes.
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William Dalrymple
And there's the mosque he established which you go and see in Cairo.
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Peter Sarris
These Arabian Arabs, soldiers and warriors are not unknown to the populations of Gaza and southern Syria and southern Palestine because the empires have become dependent on such armed Arabs or Arabians for their region's defence for a long time and they've.
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William Dalrymple
Been bringing in frankincense and stuff and.
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Peter Sarris
They'Ve been bringing traitor. Muhammad's family have been merchants but there was some suggestion for example that Amr IBN Al Asi's family may have had estates or lands the fringes of Roman territory as well. So initially quite hard I think for the Romans to work out what's going on here. Not least because the Emperor Heraclius has defeated the Persians in the foothills of the Caucasus with armies made up of Armenians and what have you. The Roman military presence on the ground in Syria, Palestine, Egypt in the year633 4 is going to be pretty nominal. A lot of the so called Roman troops are really going to be local levies, local recruits who don't really want to be serving, who are being press ganged or armed peasants or other Arab tribesmen who are being paid to defend it. And it's quite easy then as it were, for the Arabs being employed by the Romans or the Arabs being employed by the Persians to then defect to these new Arabs emerging from inner Arabia. And clearly a lot of that is happening as well.
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Anita Anand
Well, I mean you can't imagine Heraclius who has only had five minutes, well, not literally, but just a little bit of time to sort of bathe in his own success of taking back the one true cross which we talked about in the last episode. He's seeing all of this. What is his reaction? Is he sort of dispatching armies all over the place to try and quell these little fires everywhere.
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Peter Sarris
What seems to happen after the fall of southern Palestine, the Arab armies will advance very rapidly. I think we'll come on to this shortly. The whole of Palestine will be under Arab control and a series of engagements will then take place along the banks of the Jordan in which the Emperor's own brother leading a Roman force is defeated by the Arabs. And that in a sense breaks the backbone of such Roman resistance as there is. But I think it's partly because there aren't really that many Roman troops there on the ground to start off with. It's interesting with Heraclius, that Heraclius, who's restored the true cross will be very well regarded in the Islamic historical imagination and memory. And as I say, the sort of religious milieu out of which Islam is emerging and the Arabs that are joining the Ummah are emerging is one that is actually in many ways more pro Roman than pro Persian. So there's a verse in the Quran, the verse on the Romans that seems to be alluding to a battle between the Romans and the Persians that had taken place in southern Syria in which the Romans have been defeated, but in which the faithful are reassured that God willing, the Romans will be victorious.
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William Dalrymple
Peter. So this culminates, this Islamic advance culminates in the battle of, of the Yarmouk. Tell us about that.
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Peter Sarris
Yes, so here we have a great difficulty in that. We have a series of much later Arabic sources which are in very fine detail. We have some later Byzantine sources that are a bit more fragmentary and then we have some more contemporary, very fragmentary sources in Syriac. And how we piece these together to make sense of the Arab advance is slightly complicated. So just to take a step back to see how we get to Yarmouk? 633,4. They have taken control of southern Palestine. By the end of that year, most of Palestine seems to be under their control. So By Christmas of 634, the Arabs have got control of Bethlehem. We have a letter from the head of the church in Jerusalem complaining, for example, that the Christian clergy can't make their usual pilgrimage to Bethlehem in the Christmas of 634 between because of the.
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William Dalrymple
Arabs and for those that don't know the geography, Bethlehem is just, you know, what, five miles to the south of modern Jerusalem now?
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Peter Sarris
Yeah. Now, in the later Arabic sources, Jerusalem doesn't fall till 639, but that's actually quite unlikely. There's a good case to be made that Jerusalem probably falls by the end of 635, and that then, with Jerusalem having fallen by the end of 635, the battle line that advances to the west bank of the Jordan, with the Arabs then advancing into Roman Syria. And a series of engagements then take place along the northern fringe of the volcanic Harram Plain near the River Yarmouk. And these series of engagements then get, I think, tidied up by the later Arabic historical tradition into one big engagement we call the Battle of Yarmouk. But it's probably a series of struggles taking place as the Arab armies are advancing and out from Jerusalem onwards into Syria.
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William Dalrymple
So, Peter, quite soon after the Battle of Yarmouk or that series of engagements that you described, you get the establishment of a centralized Umayyad caliphate. Tell us quickly about that.
- [12:19]
Peter Sarris
After the rapid expansion of Islam from the 630s into the 650s, the Islamic world is suddenly rent by a bitter civil war over the succession to authority and leadership of within the community. It's out of this civil war that the subsequent division between Shia and Sunni Muslims will emerge. We needn't go into that. But the crucial point is that the first major civil war is brought to a conclusion around the year661, with the rise to power of a dynasty that draws its support primarily from the armies of the Ummah that are operating in Syria, a dynasty we know as the Umayyads, who will dominate the Islamic Empire and establish a more centralized caliphal system ruling from Damascus, which will rule over this world from the 660s until the mid 8th century.
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William Dalrymple
This is a vast empire, isn't it? It's what, from the Indus to Gibraltar or right into Spain?
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Peter Sarris
Yes. By 7 11, Spain has been conquered. So this is now an empire by the early 8th century, stretching from The Atlantic eating into Central Asia.
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William Dalrymple
And Peter, one of my all time favourite historical passages is my great idol. I'm not sure what you think of Sir Stephen Runcim. And he opens his famous history of the Crusades in the first volume with this description of the Patriarch Sophronius taking the Caliph into Jerusalem. The caliph arrives on a white camel. Tell us all that scene, is that true or is that now not thought to be?
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Peter Sarris
I think a white camel may have been Stephen being a bit euphemistic. By this point the leadership of the Ummah has passed this character, Umar, known as Umar Al Farouk, the Redeemer, who makes the formal entry into Jerusalem when it's conquered. Early Islam is a very apocalyptic movement and this entry into Jerusalem has enormous cosmological significance for the Muslims but also for the Christians. And we have. Our Byzantine account describes how the patriarch of Jerusalem, Sophronius, negotiated a treaty for the securing of all Palestine. So here he is negotiating Roman surrender. Umar entered the holy city clad in filthy camel hair garments. He's probably wearing something like a monk's robes. Yeah, but it's being depicted negatively by the Byzantines. But he's adopted, adopting a humble demeanor, conveying an ascetic appearance.
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William Dalrymple
Peter, when this is sometimes presented, the Islamic conquest of Palestine, it's sometimes made to look as if this is an apocalyptic event. You know, the old world is wiped out, that a bunch of Arabs from the Hejaz come and replace the population. The beginning of Arab history in Palestine begins at this point. But historians today have a very different understanding, don't they? They say that the conquest actually is almost invisible. You can't see it archaeologically, that there's just a new ruling class turning up, but that the administration continues for a while in Greek, that the same sort of Christian families are running the bureaucracies. I mean, I've got a book on my shelf here called the Invisible Conquest which describes this as something that happens very gradually and is not one of the kind of great juncture points of history.
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Peter Sarris
The conquest of Jerusalem is apocalyptic in one absolutely crucial sense in that I think it has great sort of apocalyptic symbolism within early Islam itself. And what we will see over the course of the seventh century, particularly in the so called era of the Umayyad Caliphs in the second half of the seventh century is very major investment in Jerusalem. The building of the Al Aqsa mosque on the temple mound. There's a very interesting argument made that Jerusalem is being prepared for God to come and sit in judgment. So the intensity of apocalyptic expectation in early Islam is very important, I think, to how the early Muslim elite are viewing what they're doing in Jerusalem. Now, you're right that beyond that, partly by virtue of the rapidity of conquest and the way in which the conquerors initially concentrate on taking control of the countryside and then negotiating with civic elites, offering those civic elites continuity of property ownership and rights to worship if they agree to pay tribute to the Arab conquerors, you see very little disruption on the ground, Although what is going on is a fundamentally military process. So that's why archaeologically, you don't see much by way of destruction. The Arabs aren't turning up and doing what Mongols do of sort of razing cities to the ground. Controlling the countryside is the first military priority. And that tends to leave very little by way of archaeological evidence behind. But it's also true that it's also crucial that their primary goal is to establish control over a region and extract tribute from the local population, with the Arabs or Arabians establishing themselves as a separately cantoned, almost warrior caste, initially living off the tributes collected from the local population.
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William Dalrymple
And they build a new city camp, Ramli, which is just kind of inland from Gaza.
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Peter Sarris
And that's a very common phenomenon we will see throughout the areas conquered by the Arabs. And this allows for an enormous amount of economic, administrative, and cultural continuity on the ground. So, in fact, the area of greatest continuity of literary culture from the ancient into the early medieval world, in terms of writing in Greek, for example, is Palestine as it passes into Arab rule, because both the Persians and the Arabs have conquered Palestine rapidly and have been very happy to leave the existing infrastructure intact. And in Palestine, as in Egypt, as in Syria, what you largely have are the same elites administering and dominating the same regions, collecting essentially the same taxes, but then handing those taxes over to Arab masters instead of sending them off to the Roman authorities in Constantinople or the Sasanian authorities in Sirtesiphon. And they're doing so until the end of the 7th century in the same languages. And it's only at the end of the seventh century that the caliph, Abd al Malik, who's one of the great caliphs of early Islamic history and who consolidates an imperial system, introduces Arabic as an imperial language and a language of administration. And it's at that point that local elites throughout this nascent caliphal world, whether they're adopting Islam or not, whether they're Christians or not or Muslims or not, have to start learning Arabic in order to maintain their positions in local society. So the linguistic Arabization of Communities in the near east shouldn't be read to indicate that old populations have been swept away and replaced by huge numbers of settlers as it were, coming in from inner Arabia.
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William Dalrymple
And in terms of religion, again, we think of Islam as a completely different religion to Christianity or Judaism, albeit that they have Abrahamic roots. But it's not at all clear to the people on the ground that this is not just another Christian heresy, is it? Islam looks quite like the sort of prayer that they're used to. And the way that Muslims pray prostrating themselves is what the Greek Orthodox monks did at the time.
- [19:22]
Peter Sarris
This is further complicated by the fact that it is quite clear, and this comes across from a close reading of both the Arabic and non Arabic sources, that the armies of conquest, although the leadership is made up of Arabians or Arabs who have been called to monotheism in what we might call a sort of proto Quranic or proto Islamic form. There are also individuals and groups fighting in those armies of conquest who are still thinking of themselves as Christians or think themselves as Jews. They're also Jews taking part in the conquest. And indeed we're told that when Sergius or whoever the Roman commander is, is killed by the Arabs, we're told by another 7th century source that the Jewish community near Gaza celebrates because they regard the Romans as persecutors and these Arabs as liberating them from Roman control. To some Roman onlookers they say, well, what are these people preaching? They're preaching the worship of the God of the Old Testament, but they seem to deny the divinity of Christ. They sound like Jews. So some people are assuming they're Jews. Made more complicated by the fact that there are clearly Jews in the armies of conquest and the first governor of Jerusalem appointed by the authorities is Jewish. Others look at the same claims and say these are claims made by Christian heretical groups. They must be Christian heretics. And Islam itself is acquiring greater definition and form over the course of the 7th century in the same way that Christianity adopted greater definition and form over the course of the 4th century, as each of these religions had become imperial religion, Islam acquires greater theological definition that people come to understand it as a separate and rival religion rather than something derivative of one of the existing religions.
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William Dalrymple
Peter When I was writing my book from the Holy Mountain and reading about this period and hanging around Jerusalem talking to archaeologists, I met this Franciscan called Michele Piccirillo, who dug up a lot of the churches from this period. And his view was that there was a great wave of church building after the conquest, particularly around the Jordan and in the desert. And that far from being a period when Christianity goes into decline, that the new conquerors have lighter taxes, less money is being sent off to Constantinople and that many of the particularly the non orthodox Christian groups are actually flourishing. At this point I think the level.
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Peter Sarris
Of taxation issue is more complicated, but the point is that the taxes are being collected still by Christian elites and as is always the case, the people collecting the taxes take a cut. Yeah. So it's a good time for Christian elites and they're investing a lot of that in church building, a magnificent wave of church building, particularly in what is now Jordan. Particularly for those Christian communities who had been regarded as heterodox or non conformed reformist by the increasingly persecutory imperial authorities in Constantinople. The period of Arab rule is something of a golden age and changes the way we think about this, particularly because early Islam isn't terribly interested in conversion. If we're looking at the Mediterranean world in the near east around the year 700 AD, the majority of Christians are subject of the Caliph of Damascus.
- [22:33]
Anita Anand
Well, look, let's take a break there. And after the break, we're going to introduce you to an unexpected perhaps figure from this period of history. He's a saint. He's Saint John of Damascus, who lives just a few miles away from Gaza. Join us then.
- [22:52]
Peter Sarris
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- [23:48]
Anita Anand
A runner.
- [23:53]
Peter Sarris
However you choose to do it. Because when you're not worried about doing things the right way, you're free to discover your way. And that's what running is all about.
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Anita Anand
Run your way@newbalance.com running welcome back, Peter. Just tell us St. John of Damascus. First of all, where does he stand in the pantheon of saints in Christian belief? And who was he?
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Peter Sarris
He's regarded as one of the greatest theologians in the Eastern Orthodox tradition and is a fascinating figure who really embodies and epitomizes how, despite the Arab conquest, the establishment of caliphal rule, the Christian communities of the near east still remain part of a broader Christian universe and cosmos and world that still embraces Syria, Palestine and Constantinople. John belongs to a family of Syrian Christians who have probably been serving as the bureaucratic class, who probably for centuries were serving as bureaucrats under Roman emperors in Syria, and who then simply continue their bureaucratic lifestyle under Arab rule, operating as bureaucrats, ultimately at the court of the Umayyad caliphs, ruling over this new empire from Damascus. He then retires, as many civil servants did in this period, Christian civil servants did in this period, to a monastic cell. He becomes a monk and theologian at Massaba.
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William Dalrymple
The monastery is still there, isn't it?
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Peter Sarris
Exactly, still there, and is particularly important for two aspects of his thought. First of all, I say by this point at the end of the 7th century, it's now become apparent to Christians and others that Islam is a rival religion. It is acquiring much greater definition at the court of the Umayyads at Damascus, where the caliphs are presiding over formal disputations between Christian, Jewish and Muslim scholars over theological issues, which is making it clearer what the differences between these religions are, what they have in common, but crucially, where they stand apart. And John writes one of our first detailed critiques of Islam from a Christian perspective, from an Orthodox perspective, where he emphasizes what it has in common with earlier Christian heresies, but he is treating it as a separate religion. He clearly knows Islam as religion in detail. Up close, he is referring to verses of the Quran, including, interestingly, some verses that seem to have been lost since then, which is an interesting historical feature. But John's critique of Islam is particularly important because it's so close to events and he knows Islam so intimately up close that actually his critique then provides a sort of intellectual scaffold around which subsequent generations of Muslim scholars will then compose and draft their own justifications of Islamic. So in that sense, he makes a very important contribution to the emergence of Muslim theology. At the same time, the end of the seventh century, one of the major points of division that emerges between Muslims and Christians, and particularly Christians of the Roman Empire, is the place of religious images in worship. Images or icons, such as those that survive from St. Catherine's in Sinai, are best preserved 6th century icons of Mary and the saints have come to play a central role in Christian worship. At the end of the seventh century, the Caliph Abd al Malik denounces the Christian use of images as idolatrous and affirms that Islamic opposition to the veneration of images is a cornerstone of the Islamic faith. This will then spark off a nervous reaction in the Byzantine Empire, which finds itself on a back foot militarily. And in the 730s and 740s, the Byzantine authorities were or themselves crack down on the use of images in Christian worship. And John of Damascus, writing in Syria and in Palestine, having probably engaged in this dispute with the Arabs earlier, writes our most detailed and influential justification of the veneration of icons in the place of Orthodox worship. Again, he's ready for this debate because he's already probably engaged in it with the Arabs.
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William Dalrymple
And just again, to clarify this, John of Damascus, in his youth, there was a story in I think one of those Runciman books that he was a drinking companion of the future caliph Al Yazid. He's right there in the court.
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Peter Sarris
Yeah, absolutely. No, he knows this world intimately up close.
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Anita Anand
But if you've got John of Damascus or John Damascene as he's sometimes known, who's saying, you know what, this religion, Islam, it's heretical, let's say that, but it doesn't feel so different. One would assume then that it would be easy and, you know, just a smooth transition to convert. But conversions don't happen in great numbers, do they, Peter? Why not?
- [28:59]
Peter Sarris
Islam isn't interested in conversion at this formative phase. What is it interested in doing, really is extracting tribute from the subjugated populations which can then be shared out amongst the Muslims. If anything, that then provides the Islamic leadership, the Khalifal leadership, with a disincentive to see widespread conversion. Because widespread conversion would lead to a diminution in your tax revenues, Right? Yeah. So when you do start getting large scale conversion, it actually causes political crisis. The Christian communities of Palestine, Syria, Egypt, will remain probably in a majority in each of those areas, down to the period of the First Crusade and beyond.
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William Dalrymple
Really, it's a majority Christian till the 11th, 12th century.
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Peter Sarris
That's the position I would take. Yes.
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William Dalrymple
That's so different from conventional views. So Palestine remains majority Christian right through this period, and yet there are important things going on. And you mentioned the building of the Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. Take us there for a minute. Because these are substantial projects and really the first mosques of Islam in the 4th century.
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Peter Sarris
If we go back to the age of the Empress Helena and Constantine with the adoption of Christianity, we've seen, as it were, the monumental reappropriation of the Holy Land and Jerusalem by the Christian Roman authorities with the building of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre or the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem. Christians imagine themselves the new Israel, reappropriating the Holy Land on behalf of God's new chosen people. In a sense, what we're seeing in the second half of the seventh century with the Umayyad Caliphs and the investment in Jerusalem, the Ummah with their new revelation, doing the same. The great centerpiece of this is the construction of the Al Aqsa Mosque. The Great Mosque on the Temple Mound, which is at the time it's built, is regarded by some of the Caliphate's Jewish subjects, many of the Christian subjects, and possibly even by some of the Muslims themselves as an actual restoration of the ancient Solomonic Temple. So, for example, I was recently in Turkey. If you look at the frescoes at the Summal Monastery, one of the finest Byzantine monasteries in Pontus, it has a depiction of Jesus in Jerusalem. And if you look at the depiction of the temple on the temple site, and it's actually a depiction of the Al Aqsa Mosque. Crusaders visiting Jerusalem centuries ahead will regard the Al Aqsa Mosque as actually being the Temple. And hence that's why the Knight Templars partly end up there. Now the Al Aqsa Mosque, however, is very, very interesting. And there's something about it. There's a mystery there which hasn't quite been resolved, because what we see in these great urban centers in Jerusalem or Damascus is the Umayyad Caliphs conveying the majesty of their new religion and the majesty of their new empire by appropriating key aspects of Roman and Greco Roman monumental architecture to convey their authority to their former Roman subjects in terms they understand. The Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem seems to be modelled upon an earlier Byzantine church, the Church of the Kakisma, a much smaller structure that was located between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, where the Virgin Mary supposedly rested on her way to Bethlehem to give birth to Jesus.
- [32:19]
William Dalrymple
But it's one of a tradition, isn't it, Peter? Of these octagonal Byzantine churches in your own town of Thessaloniki, there's, there's one there.
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Peter Sarris
But the similarity in structure between the Church of the Kafisma and the Al Aqsa is particularly striking. And this is important because the verse in the Quran on the Virgin Mary bears very close resemblance to the liturgy that was celebrated at the Church of the Kathisma in the pre Islamic period. So there's some sort of fascinating connection between early Islam Al Aqsa and the Church of the Kathismah and the Virgin Mary.
- [32:53]
William Dalrymple
And people may not know that there's more mentions of Mary in the Quran than there is in the Bible.
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Peter Sarris
This is one of those aspects of, as it were, popular piety that late anti Christianity and early Islam very much have in common is very high regard for the Virgin Mary.
- [33:06]
William Dalrymple
And what we see in the Dome of the Rock is the first sort of public presentation of Islam, isn't it? And of the Islamic conquest. So you've got the diadems of the Byzantine emperors and the Persian emperors up on the wall as sort of trophies.
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Peter Sarris
What you have is the declaration now of the faith in a public space, as it were, denouncing Christian Trinitarian doctrine, saying, do not say three, do not say three. God is only one.
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William Dalrymple
The idea of the Trinity, three gods in one.
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Peter Sarris
At the same time, we're getting the Islamic declaration of the faith, the declaration that Muhammad is a prophet of God on the coinage being minted by the Caliphate. At the same time, this is now becoming clear to people that the holy of a living in a new empire is an empire dominated by a new faith. And this is being conveyed to them by the great monuments and the cities they're passing through, but also in the coins in their pocket.
- [33:57]
William Dalrymple
How interesting. Now, as well as the Dome of the Rock and as well as the Al Aqsa Mosque, the. There's also another great Umayyad building in Palestine, further into the desert, away from Gaza, which is the Khirbat al Mafjar. Is that how it's pronounced? Khirbat al Mafjar, Hisham's palace, the hunting lodge outside Jericho. And there you have images that look not unlike the images of Justinian and Theodora at Ravenna. They're now in an Islamic context.
- [34:27]
Peter Sarris
These desert palaces are fascinating. My favourite one is a place called Qasr Amr in Jordan. First of all, it's very interesting that a lot of these desert palaces have figurative images in them. That's because, as it were, the hostility to images of living things that would be associated with some strands of Islam has not yet been consolidated or set in stone. Hence some of which may have religious significance as well. But when you see the quality of art in these desert palaces, what you're seeing is a sense of both the way in which this Ernazan elite is comfortable with naturalistic art. But you're also seeing its extraordinary wealth because these people are buying up the best quality art, the best quality artists that are available anywhere in western Eurasia at this time. So if you want to see the best quality art you can get anywhere around the year 700, you go to these desert palaces. They're not just there for people to sort of chillax in. These are serving a very important political function in the great urban centers like Damascus or Jerusalem. That's where the caliphal authorities negotiate with the former Roman urban elites. You go to these desert palaces to maintain contact on the fringes of the desert with the existing surviving Bedouin tribal leadership there. That's where you negotiate with them. That's where you have your parties drinking wine. The one in Khaz Al Amr has a. A hammam attached to it with a large depiction of a female nude at the entrance of the hammam.
- [35:54]
William Dalrymple
A hammam, just in case people don't know. The word is of course, a Turkish bath. It's a steam bath, and everyone's naked in there, and there's pictures of naked women.
- [36:02]
Peter Sarris
Some people interpret this large female nude as a being of political significance. I think it's something a bit more.
- [36:08]
William Dalrymple
Loose than that in Indian Muslim history. Hammams, Turkish baths, are places where negotiations take place partly because everyone is naked and they can't bring arms in. So it's this place where everyone's sort of, you know, stripped down to their essentials and what goes on in her mom's, you know, stays in her mom's.
- [36:26]
Peter Sarris
Exactly.
- [36:26]
Anita Anand
Okay, got it. So, Peter, I mean, this all seems to be thriving. This all seems to be a template for, you know, harmony. What about the economy? I mean, is Gaza still this exporting hub that it used to be?
- [36:40]
Peter Sarris
I think by the time we're dealing with the golden age of the caliphate, as it were, Gaza is still extremely prosperous. The countryside is prosperous. The wine production is continuing. A lot of the wine being consumed, of course, by the local Christian and monastic population and monasteries are still there.
- [36:58]
William Dalrymple
How amazing.
- [36:59]
Peter Sarris
There's no stopping of that. Indeed, we even know. We have documentary sources from Egypt showing that wine estates owned by the Caliph ascending wine to Damascus. The wine culture isn't quite. One might necessarily imagine pictures of naked.
- [37:10]
William Dalrymple
Women in the Sauda and wine exports to Damascus. That's not you imagine.
- [37:14]
Peter Sarris
No, but I think that the circulation of these goods is diminishing. For example, we look at the evidence from Constantinople. Constantinople is no longer sucking in goods from these areas on a large scale in the way they did before it's much more dependent on trade with the Aegean and much more interested in the Adriatic. I think, as it were, the Gazan trade has become more locally concentrated, but it's still very prosperous. By the 8th century, population levels are rising again. In the 6th century, there'd been a major impact on the region of bubonic plague. So from the mid 6th century to the mid 8th, population levels have been down. By the mid 8th century, the plague has burnt itself out and population levels are rising again.
- [37:52]
William Dalrymple
PETER during the Roman Empire, it was always the east that was the richest half. The luxury and the really fancy lifestyles were taking place in cities like Antioch and Constantinople and Alexandria as well as Gaza after the Islamic takeover of the eastern Mediterranean. Do both sides of the Mediterranean remain out of contact with each other? I mean, would you still have traders going from Gaza and delivering wine to Marseille or to the Aegean? Or do you get the impression of a cut off, you know, sort of Mohammed and Charlemagne idea, that train is cut in half.
- [38:27]
Peter Sarris
People wouldn't argue anymore that Mediterranean trade is brought to an end in the way that was once argued, but that it is operating at a much lower ebb, I think, is the, is the crucial point. If anything, the developmental differences between east and west are exacerbated because Syria, Palestine, Egypt are conquered so rapidly that that's where you find, as it were, ancient levels of economic sophistication and complexity, surviving in their healthiest and most fully formed manner into the medieval period.
- [39:02]
William Dalrymple
That is wonderful, Peter So we're coming to an end of this period of stability and prosperity. Now in this series on Gaza, after the invisible conquest and the prosperity of the Umayyad period, which had come after the prosperity of the Byzantine period, the whole of Palestine sees a century of instability from really from the kind of 9th, 10th century onwards. And you get different Muslim powers, Tulunids, Fatimids, Bedouin and Turkoman coming in. The towns begin to go into a bit of a decline. Gaza changes hands again several times, as it had done in the earlier centuries. And the instability is only beginning because in the 11th century, a whole new movement comes out of Europe that's going to change the history of Palestine very significantly for two or three centuries. And that is the rise of the Crusaders. And in the next episode, we're going to talk about Saladin, about Richard the Lionheart, and about what happens when the Crusades land in the Holy Land.
- [40:06]
Anita Anand
That's next time, but for this time. Thank you so much, Peter Cyrus that was, you know, extraordinary and so interesting, comprehensive, very Very, very good. Till the next time we meet, it is goodbye from me, Anita Anand, and.
- [40:18]
William Dalrymple
Goodbye from me, William Dalrymple.
- [40:30]
Peter Sarris
Hey, it's Anthony Scaramucci, and I want to tell you about my podcast, Open Book, which just joined the Goal Hanger network, which we're all very proud of. In my latest episode, I interviewed Goal Hanger's very own James Holland. We spoke about World War II and what World War II changes teaches us about today. Here's a clip. Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Well, I think he was a great man. I think he was a man of vision. He was a man of enormous geopolitical understanding, and he was a man who offered possibilities. When you're on a life and death struggle, you need people that can persuade you, you need people that can bind you. You need men of vision, of charisma. That's the problem with the moment, is we haven't got those guys. I mean, he's flawed, of course, all the great men are, but thank goodness for the. And the democratic world. But he was political leader of Great Britain in 1940 and throughout the whole of World War II. He literally, in so many different ways, man of the century. I think, because Roosevelt was a charmer. Roosevelt was a great strategist. He pulled the Americans through the Depression and helped him manage the war. But without Churchill holding ground in May and June of 1940, it would have been a much darker, much worse world. There would have been not a lot that the Americans could have done without Churchill's steadfastness and his inspiration to his fellow citizens. If you want to hear the full episode, just search open book, wherever you get your podcast. You are not luminous, Watson, but you are a conductor of light. Here they are. Dr. Mortimer, I presume? Yes. Hi, John.
- [42:09]
William Dalrymple
Dr. John Watson.
- [42:14]
Peter Sarris
Who is your client? He was my client, Sir Charles Baskerville. Keep reading. A local shepherd.
- [42:26]
William Dalrymple
Noted. I saw first that of the maid. Hugo Baskerville passed me thence on his black mare and there behind him, running mute upon his track, such a hound of hell that God forbid should ever.
- [42:39]
Peter Sarris
Be at my heels. I wish I felt better in my mind about it. It's an ugly business once, an ugly, dangerous business. And the more I see of it, the less I like it. I shall be very glad to have you back safe and sound in Baker street once more. Hello, Gohan Sense.
- [43:05]
William Dalrymple
You're not Sherlock Holmes. I'm Henry Baskerville from one of the.
- [43:09]
Peter Sarris
Biggest audio dramas of all time.
- [43:11]
William Dalrymple
Does it bother you?
- [43:12]
Peter Sarris
Like in a creepy kind of way? Like in there's an evil giant hound.
- [43:17]
William Dalrymple
That likes the taste of Baskerville kind of way.
- [43:19]
Peter Sarris
The seminal gothic novel by Arthur Conan Doyle.
- [43:23]
William Dalrymple
They're watching.
- [43:24]
Peter Sarris
Who?
- [43:24]
William Dalrymple
Who?
- [43:24]
Peter Sarris
We're watching. It's not safe. I could just make out its pitch black forefront. Welcome to deepest everything, a hellish void, darkest for this piercing yellow glow of eyes. Dartmoor. What do you want of giant fangs? No. Sherlock and co. The hound of the Baskervilles. Listen now. Five stars, says the Eyebrows Paper. Hugely popular, says the Guardian. A successful reinvention of homes for a younger generation, says the Times. Search Sherlock & Co. Wherever you get your podcasts.