Tim Wallace-Murphy, What Islam Did for Us: Understanding Islam’s Contribution to Western Civilization, Watkins Publishing, London, 2006.
In April 711, the Islamic general Tariq ibn Zihad led his army across the strait from Morocco to Gibraltar and then on into Spain. Within months the invaders occupied the royal capital of Toledo along with the important cities of Seville and Merida. Over the next decades, Islamic armies extended their northward advance. During the 9th and 10th centuries, Islamic Spain would take its place at the pinnacle of European culture. This new society was characterized by free intermingling among its Moslems, Christians, and Jews who flourished together as neighbors.
Al-Andalus, as Islamic Spain was called, became the most populous country in Europe. Cordova, its capital, was compared favorably to Constantinople. The state of learning, according to Wallace-Murphy, was likely even more advanced in Al-Andalus. Caliph Al-Hakkam created a library there of 400,000 books. After the library in Baghdad, it was the second-largest collection in the world. Each year, Cordova produced an additional 70,000–80,000 bound volumes. Al-Andalus, Wallace-Murphy writes, was a society with an “almost insatiable passion for learning.” The sciences were actively fostered as was the study of ancient Greek mathematics, philosophy, and science.
The Christians of Al-Andalus were free to practice their own religion and tended to be “extremely proud to belong to a highly advanced and sophisticated culture that was light years ahead of the rest of Europe.” In Islamic Spain, Jews experienced their own cultural renaissance. Numerous important works, including books on philosophy, mathematics, geometry, physics, astronomy, astrology, medicine, and magic, were translated by Jewish scholars from Greek into Arabic and from Arabic into Latin. As these texts were imported into France, the sophisticated knowledge of the ancient world and the Middle East became available there for the first time since the Roman Empire. The School of Chartres was one of the first places in Northern Europe where such new translations of the Greek Platonists and Roman neo-Platonists were closely studied. It was in recognition of the magnitude of this heritage that Bernard of Chartres declared, “We are like dwarves mounted on the shoulders of giants.”
By the 12th century, Christian armies from the north had conquered much of Islamic Spain. Under its new Christian rulers, Toledo became an important center for further translations from Greek and Arabic into Latin. This new wealth of knowledge flowing north from Spain provided a crucial foundation for the dawning cultural and intellectual renaissance in Northern Europe. In southwestern France, Jewish communities with ties to Spain contributed to the development of a distinctive new culture. Narbonne, Beziers, and Carcassonne became important centers of Jewish religious studies, including of kabbalah.
Heretical Christians called Cathars were soon growing in number there as well and gradually began to supplant the Catholic Church in the region. The Cathars and their leaders called “perfecti”, lived in egalitarian communities where they strove to follow the example of the early Christians. They were vegetarians, abstained from all sexual relations, and believed the Catholic Church had plummeted far from the ideals of Jesus. In 1145, Bernard of Clairvaux journeyed south to inspect the Cathar phenomenon for himself. He reported that Cathars were people of simple and devout spirituality led by a gifted priesthood, declaring them among the most “Godly” people he had ever met. The Cathar preachers, however, appear to have come from Byzantine lands in the east and refused to recognize the authority of the Pope.
In response, in 1209 Pope Innocent III ordered a religious war against the Cathars, who were also known as Albigensians. In July 1209, a crusading army advanced from the north into southwestern France. Over the next thirty years, knights from northern France carried out a vicious war against the Cathar perfecti and their followers which left thousands dead. Captured perfecti were burned alive. The final Cathar stronghold, the castle on the pinnacle at Montsegur, fell in 1244 and the 225 perfecti inside were all burned alive together. What had been the largest, strongest, and boldest heretical movement in Europe was brutally and thoroughly suppressed. The influences of Islamic and Christian Spain and of the knowledge preserved and fostered there, continued to be reflected, however, in the wondrous flowering and surviving achievements of gothic art and architecture.
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