The World's Greatest Books - Volume 11 Part 24

Governments as well as private persons were under a frequent necessity of borrowing, and for a long time the great money lenders were the Jews.

They, however, were later to a great extent displaced by the merchants of Lombardy, and the fifteenth century witnesses the rise of the great bankers, Italian and German.

The structure and furniture of all buildings for private purposes made exceedingly little provision for comfort, offering an extreme contrast to the dignity of the public buildings and the sublimity of ecclesiastical architecture.

During the last three hundred years of our period it is clear that there was a great diminution of the status of servitude and a great increase in the privileges extended to corporate towns. Private warfare was checked and lawless robbery to a considerable extent restrained. It is tolerably clear that the rise of heretical sects were both the cause and the result of moral dissatisfaction, tending to the adoption of higher moral standards. Some of these sects were cruelly crushed by merciless persecution, as in the case of the Albigenses. The doctrines of Wickliffe, however, were never stamped out in England; and the form which they took in Bohemia among the followers of the martyred John Huss had little about them that was beneficial.

The great moral school of the Middle Ages was the inst.i.tution of chivalry, which existed to animate and cherish the principle of honour.

To this a strong religious flavor was superadded, perhaps by the Crusades. To valour and devotion was added the law of service to womanhood, and chivalry may fairly claim to have developed generally the three virtues essential to it, of loyalty, courtesy, and liberality.

Resting, however, as it did on the personal prowess and skill of the individual in single combat, the whole system of chivalry was destroyed by the introduction on an extensive scale of the use of firearms.

We turn lastly to the intellectual improvement which may be referred to four points: the study of civil laws the inst.i.tution of universities; the application of modern languages to literature, and especially to poetry; and the revival of ancient learning. Education may almost be said to have begun with the establishment of the great schools by Charlemagne out of which sprang the European universities. For a long time of course all studies were dominated by that of theology, and the scholastic philosophy which pertained to it. Barren as these pursuits were, they kept alive an intellectual activity which ultimately found fresh channels. The Romance languages developed a new literature first on the tongues of the troubadours and then in Italy--the Italy which gave birth to Dante and Petrarch. It was about the fourteenth century that a new enthusiasm was born for the study of cla.s.sical authors, though Greek was still unknown. And the final and decisive impulse was given when the invention of printing made the great multiplication of books possible.

STANLEY LANE-POOLE

Egypt in the Middle Ages

Stanley Lane-Poole, born on December 18, 1845, studied Arabic under his great-uncle, Lane, the Orientalist, and, before going up to Oxford for his degree, began his "Catalogue of Oriental Coins in the British Museum," which appeared in fourteen volumes between 1875 and 1892, and founded his reputation as the first living authority on Arabic numismatics. In 1883, 1896, and 1897 he was at Cairo officially employed by the British Government upon the Mohammedan antiquities, and published his treatise on "The Art of the Saracens in Egypt" in 1886, in which year he visited Stockholm, Helsingfors, St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Constantinople to examine their Oriental collections. He has written histories of the "Moors in Spain," "Turkey," "The Barbary Corsairs," and "Mediaeval India," which have run to many editions; and biographies of Saladin, Babar, Aurangzib; of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, and Sir Harry Parkes. He has also published a miniature Koran in the "Golden Treasury"

series, and written "Studies in a Mosque," besides editing three volumes of Lane's "Arabic Lexicon." For five years he held the post of Professor of Arabic at Trinity College, Dublin, of which he is Litt.D. Mohammedan Egypt, his special subject, he has treated in several books on Cairo, the latest being "The Story of Cairo." But his most complete work on this subject is "The History of Egypt in the Middle Ages," here epitomised by the author.

_I.--A Province of the Caliphate_

Ever since the Arab conquest in 641 Egypt has been ruled by Mohammedans, and for more than half the time by men of Turkish race. Though now and again a strong man has gathered all the reins of control into his own hands and been for a time a personal monarch, as a rule the government has been, till recent years, a military bureaucracy.

The people, of course, had no voice in the government. The Egyptians have never been a self-governing race, and such a dream as const.i.tutional democracy was never heard of until a few years ago. By the Arab conquest in the seventh century the people merely changed masters. They were probably not indisposed to welcome the Moslems as their deliverers from the tyranny of the Orthodox Church of the East Roman or Byzantine Empire, invincibly intolerant of the native monophysite heresy; and when the conquest was complete they found themselves, on the whole, better off than before. They paid their taxes to officials with Arabic instead of Greek t.i.tles, but the taxes were lighter and the amount was strictly laid down by law.

The land-tax of about a pound per acre was not excessive on so fertile a soil, and the poll-tax on nonconformity, of the same amount, was a moderate price to pay for entire liberty of conscience and freedom in public worship guaranteed by solemn treaty. The other taxes were comparatively insignificant, and the total revenue in the eighth century was about 7,000,000. The surplus went to the caliph, the head of the vast Mohammedan empire, which then stretched from Seville to Samarkand, whose capital was first Damascus and afterwards Baghdad.

For over 200 years (till 868) Egypt was a mere province of this huge caliphate, and was governed, like other provinces, with a sole view to revenue. "Milk till the udder be dry and let blood to the last drop" was a caliph's instructions to a governor of Egypt. As these governors were constantly changed--there were sixty-seven in 118 years under the Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad--and as a governor's main object was to "make hay while the sun shines," the process of milking the Egyptian cow was often accelerated by illegal extortion, and the governor's harvest was reaped before it was due. Illegality was, however, checked to some extent by the generally wise and just influence of the chief justice, or kadi, whose probity often formed the best feature of the Arab government in Egypt.

Nor did the caliphs extort taxes without giving something in return. The development of irrigation works was always a main consideration with the early Mohammedan rules, from Spain to India, and in Egypt, where irrigation is the country's very life, it was specially cared for, with a corresponding increase in the yield. Moreover, the governors usually held to the agreement that the Christians should have liberty of conscience, and protected them from the Moslem soldiery. As time went on, this toleration abated, partly because the Moslems had gradually become the predominant population. At the beginning the caliphs had taken anxious precautions against the colonising of Egypt; they held it by an army, but they were insistent that the army should not take root, but be always free to join the caliph's standard. But it was inevitable that the Arabs should settle in so fertile and pleasant a land. Each governor brought a small army as his escort, and these Arab troops naturally intermarried with Egyptian women, who were const.i.tutionally inclined to such alliances. A few Arab tribes also settled in Egypt.

This gradual and undesigned Arabising of the country would lead to oppression of the Christians, to the "squeezing" of wealthy natives, and occasionally to the inst.i.tution of humiliating distinctions of dress and other vexations, and even to the spoiling of Coptic churches. Then sometimes the Copts, as the Egyptian Christians are called, would rebel.

Their last and greatest rebellion, which occurred in the Delta in 830-832, was ruthlessly trampled out by Turkish troops under Mamun, the only Abbasid caliph who made a visit to Egypt. Many Copts now apostatised, and from this time dates the predominance of the Moslem population and the settling of Arabs in the villages and on the land, instead of as heretofore only in the two or three large towns.

The coming of the Turkish troops with the caliph Mamun was an ominous event for the country. Up to 846 all the successive governors had been Arabs, and many of them were related to the caliphs themselves. With some unfortunate exceptions, they seem to have been men of simple habits--the Arabs were never luxurious--and usually of strict Mohammedan principles. They made money, honestly if possible, during their brief tenure; but they did not hara.s.s the people much by their personal interference, and left the local officials to manage matters in their own way, as had always been the custom. They lived at the new capital, Fustat, which grew up on the site of the conqueror's camp, and very near the modern Cairo; for Alexandria, the symbol of Roman domination, was dismantled in 645 after the Emperor Manuel's attempt at reconquest. If they did not do much active good, they did little harm, and Egypt pursued her immemorial ways.

The last Arab governor, Anbasa, was a man of fine character, and his term of office was distinguished by the building of the fort of Damietta, as a protection against Roman raids, and by a defeat of the tributary Sudanis near Dongola.

_II.--Turkish Governors_

The Arabs have neither the ferocity nor the luxuriousness, nor, it should be added, the courage and the genius for administration of the Turkish race. In the arrival of Turkish troops in 830 we see a symptom of what was going on all over the eastern caliphate. Turks were taking the place of Arabs in the army and the provincial governments, just as the Persians were filling up the civil appointments. The caliph's Turkish bodyguard was the beginning of the dismemberment of the caliphate. It became the habit of the caliphs to grant the government of Egypt, as a sort of fief, to a leading Turkish officer, who usually appointed a deputy to do his work and to pay him the surplus revenue.

Such a deputy was Ahmad-ibn-Tulun (868-884), the first of the many Turkish despots of Egypt. Ibn-Tulun was the first ruler to raise Egypt from a mere tax-paying appendage of the caliphate to a kingdom, independent save for the recognition of the caliph on the coinage, and he was the first to found a Moslem dynasty there. A man of fair Mohammedan education, iron will, and ubiquitous personal attention to affairs, he added Syria to his dominions, defeated the East Romans with vast slaughter near Tarsus (883), kept an army of 30,000 Turkish slaves and a fleet of a hundred fighting ships.

He beautified his capital by building a sumptuous palace and his well-known mosque, which still stands in his new royal suburb of Katai; he encouraged the small farmers and reduced the taxation, yet he left five millions in the treasury when he died in 884. His son maintained his power, and more than his luxury and artistic extravagance; but there were no elements of stability in the dynasty, which depended solely upon the character of the ruler. The next generation saw Egypt once more (905) a mere province of the caliphate, but with this difference, that its governors were now Turks, generally under the control of their own soldiery, and much less dependent upon the ever-weakening power of the Caliph of Baghdad. One of them, the Ikhshid, in 935 emulated Ibn-Tulun and united part of Syria to Egypt; but the sons he left were almost children, and the power fell into the hands of the regent Kafur, a black eunuch from the Sudan, bought for 25, who combined a luxurious and cultivated court with some military successes and real administrative capacity.

_III.--The Fatimid Caliphs_

The Mohammedan world is roughly divided into Sunnis and Shia. The Shia are the idealists, the mystics of Islam; the Sunnis are the formalists, the schoolmen. The Shia trace an apostolic succession from Ali, the husband of the prophet Mohammed's daughter Fatima, hold doctrines of immanence and illumination, adopt an allegorical interpretation of scripture, and believe in the coming of a Mahdi or Messiah. The Sunnis adhere to the elective historical caliphate descended from Mohammed's uncle, maintain the eternal uncreated sufficiency of the Koran, literally interpreted, and believe in no Messiah save Mohammed.

The Shia, whatever their racial origin, form the Persian, the Aryan, adaptation of Islam, which is an essentially Semitic creed. In the tenth century they had established a caliph among the Berbers at Kayrawan (908). They had thence invaded Egypt with temporary success in 914 and 919. When the death of Kafur in 968 left the country a prey to rival military factions, the fourth of the caliphs of Kayrawan--called the Fatimid caliphs, because they claimed a very doubtful descent from Fatima--sent his army into Egypt. The people, who had too long been the sport of Turkish mercenaries, received the invaders as deliverers, just as the Copts had welcomed the Arabs three centuries before. Gauhar, the Fatimid general, entered Fustat (or Misr, as it was usually called, a name still applied both to Egypt and to its capital) amid acclamations in 969, and immediately laid the foundations of the fortified palace which he named, astrologically, after the planet Mars (Kahir), El-Kahira, "the Martial," or "the Victorious," which gradually expanded to the city of Cairo. He also founded the great historic university mosque of the Azhar, which, begun by the heretical Shia, became the bulwark of rigid scholasticism and the theological centre of orthodox Islam.

The theological change was abrupt. It was as though Presbyterian Scotland had suddenly been put under the rule of the Jesuits. But, like the Society of Jesus, the Shia were pre-eminently intellectual and recognised the necessity of adapting their teaching to the capacities of their hearers, and the conditions of the time. They did not force extreme Shia doctrine upon the Egyptians. Their esoteric system, with its graduated stages of initiation, permitted a large lat.i.tude, and they were content to add their distinctive formulas to the ordinary Mohammedan ritual, and to set them conspicuously on their coinage, without entering upon a propaganda. The bulk of the Egyptian Moslems apparently preserved their orthodoxy and suffered an heretical caliphate for two centuries with traditional composure. The Christian Copts found the new _regime_ a marked improvement. Mysticism finds kindred elements in many faiths, and the Fatimid caliphs soon struck up relations with the local heads of the Christian religion.

The second Egyptian caliph, Aziz (975-996), was greatly influenced by a Christian wife, who encouraged his natural clemency. Bishop Severus attended his court, and Coptic churches were rebuilt. Throughout the Fatimid period we constantly find Christians and Jews, and especially Armenians, advanced to the highest offices of state. This was partly due, of course, to their special qualifications as scribes and accountants, for Arabs and Turks were no hands at "sums." The land had rest under this wise and tolerant caliph. If he set a dangerous example in his luxury and love of display, he unquestionably maintained law, enforced equity, punished corruption, and valiantly defended his kingdom. He fitted out a fleet of 600 sail at Maks (then the port of Cairo, on the Nile), which kept the Emperor Basil at a distance and a.s.sured the caliph's ascendancy from end to end of the Mediterranean Sea.

After these two great rulers the Fatimid caliphate subsisted for nearly two centuries by no virtue or energy of its own. The caliphs lived secluded, like veiled prophets, in their huge palace at Cairo, given over to sensual delights (Saladin found 12,000 women in the Great Palace when he entered it in 1171), and wholly regardless of their kingdom, which they left to the care of vezirs, who were chiefly bent on making their own fortunes, though there were many able, and a few honest men amongst them. The real power rested with the army, and the only check upon the tyranny and debauchery of the army lay in its own jealous divisions. The fanatical Berber regiments imported from Tunis, the b.l.o.o.d.y blacks recruited in the Sudan, and the mutinous Turkish troops long established in the country, were always at daggers drawn, and their rivalry was the vezirs' opportunity. In such anarchy the country fell from bad to worse.

The reign of Hakim, the frantic son of Aziz and his Christian wife, was a personal despotism of the most eccentric kind, marked by apparently unreasonable regulations, such as keeping the shops open by night instead of by day, and confining all women to the house for seven years, as well as by intermittent persecution of Christians and Jews; and also by enlightened acts, such as the founding of the Hall of Science and the building of mosques, for all the Fatimides were friends to the arts; and ending in the proclamation of Hakim as the incarnation of the Divine Reason, in which capacity he is still adored by the Druses of the Lebanon. This a.s.sumption led to popular tumults and an orgy of carnage, in the midst of which Hakim mysteriously disappeared (1021).

His successors, Zahir (1021-1036), and Mustansir (1036-1096) did nothing to retrieve the anarchic situation, of which the soldiers were the unruly masters. Palace cliques, disastrous famines (one of which lasted seven years, 1066-1072, and even led to the public selling of human joints as butcher's meat), slave, or rather freedmen's, revolts, military tumults, and the occasional temporary ascendancy of a talented vezir, sum up the history of Egypt during most of the eleventh century.

The wisdom and firmness of two great Armenian vezirs, Bedr-el-Gemali (1073-1094) and his son Afdal (1094-1121), brought a large degree of order, but the last years of the Fatimid caliphate were blotted by savage murders both of caliphs and vezirs, and by the loss of their Syrian dominions to Seljuks and Crusaders.

_IV.--The House of Saladin_

It was a question whether Egypt would fall to the Christian king of Jerusalem or the Moslem king of Damascus; but, after several invasions by both, Nur-ed-din settled the problem by sending his Syrian army to Cairo in 1169, when the Crusaders withdrew without offering battle, and the Fatimid caliphate came to an end in 1171.

On the Syrian general's death, two months after the conquest, his nephew, Salah-ed-din ibn-Ayyub (Saladin), succeeded to the vezirate, and after Nur-ed-din's death, in 1174, he made himself independent sultan, not only of Egypt but of Syria and Mesopotamia. Saladin was a Kurd from the Tigris districts; but his training and his following were purely Turkish, moulded on the Seljuk model, and recruited largely from the Seljuk lands. His fame was won outside Egypt, and only eight of the twenty-four years of his reign were spent in Cairo; the rest was pa.s.sed in waging wars in Syria, Mesopotamia, and Palestine, culminating in the catastrophic defeat of the Crusaders near Tiberias in 1187, and the conquest of Jerusalem and all of the Holy Land.

The famous crusade of Richard I., though it resulted only in recovering a strip of coast from Acre to Jaffa, and did not rescue Jerusalem, wore out Saladin's strength, and in 1193 the chivalrous and magnanimous "Soldan" died. In Egypt his chief work, after repressing revolts of black troops and Shia conspiracies, and repelling successive naval attacks on Damietta and Alexandria by the Eastern emperor and the kings of Jerusalem and Sicily, was the building of the Citadel of Cairo after the model of Norman fortresses in Syria, and the encouragement of Sunni orthodoxy by the founding and endowment of medresas, or theological colleges. The people, who had never been really converted to the Fatimid creed, accepted the latest reformation with their habitual nonchalance.

This was really the greatest achievement of Saladin and his house. Cairo succeeded to Baghdad and Cordova as the true metropolis of Islam, and Egypt has remained true to the most narrow school of orthodoxy ever since.

Saladin's kinsmen, known as the Ayyubid dynasty, ruled Egypt for over half a century after the death of their great leader. First his politic brother, Adil Seyf-ed-din ("Saphadin") carried on his fine tradition for a quarter of a century, and then from 1218 to 1238 Seyf-ed-din's able son Kamil, who had long been the ruler of Egypt during his father's frequent absences, followed in his steps. The futile efforts of the discredited Crusaders disturbed their peace. John of Brienne's seizure of Damietta was a serious menace, and it took all Kamil's energy to defeat the "Franks" at Mansura (1219) and drive them out of the country.

On the other hand, he cultivated very friendly relations with the Emperor Frederic II., who concluded a singular defensive alliance with him in 1229, to the indignation of the Pope. He was tolerant to Christians, and listened to the preaching of St. Francis of a.s.sisi; he granted trading concessions to the Venetians and Pisans, who established a consulate at Alexandria. At the same time he notably encouraged Moslem learning, built colleges, and developed the resources of the kingdom in every way. What had happened to the dynasties of Tulun, Ikhshid, and the Fatimides, was repeated on the death of Kamil. Two sons kept the throne successively till 1249, and then, in the midst of Louis IX's crusade, the salvation of Egypt devolved on the famous Mamluks, or white slaves, who had formed the _corps d'elite_ of Saladin's army.

_V.--The Mamluks_

Political women have played a great role in Egypt from Hatshepsut and Cleopatra to the Christian wife of Aziz, the princess royal who engineered the downfall of Hakim, and the black mother who dominated Mustansir; and it was a woman who was the first queen of the Mamluks.

Sheger-ed-durr ("Tree of Pearls"), widow of Salih, the last reigning Ayyubid of Egypt, was the brain of the army which broke the chivalry of France.

At the second battle of Mansura in 1249, she took Louis prisoner. Then she married a leading Mamluk emir, to conciliate Moslem prejudice against a woman's rule, and thenceforth for more than two centuries and a half one Mamluk after another seized the throne, held it as long as he could, and sometimes transmitted it to his son. When it is noted that forty-eight sultans (twenty-five Bahri Mamluks, or "white slaves of the river," so called from the barracks on an island in the Nile, and twenty-three Burgis, named after the burg, or citadel, where their quarters originally were), succeeded one another from 1250 to 1517, it will be seen that their average reign was but three and a half years.

The throne, in fact, belonged to the man with the longest sword.