Of al-Andalus and Gandersheim
While ?lfred’s descendants were considering the idea of unifying the peoples of Anglo-Saxon England, of expanding its few small towns and reviving a monastic culture devastated by secularism and the effects of 150 years of Viking raids and conquest, far to the south a cultural Golden Age was in full swing.
Cordoba in Andalusia, or al-Andalus as its Islamic caliphs knew it, was a thriving city of perhaps a hundred thousand people during its heyday in the tenth century. A succession of powerful rulers had created a minor super-power on the Iberian Peninsula from very modest beginnings in the eighth century, holding fast against Charlemagne’s aggressive southern expansion of Francia and Berber incursions from North Africa.Al-Andalus was connected across the known world: with Constantinople, with Damascus and the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad, the greatest city of its day; news of its glories spread as far north as Germany. Cordoba had concentrated huge wealth from success in war, from the fruits of trade and the natural fertility of Spain’s many plains, irrigated with networks of canals driven by cunning waterwheels and aqueducts. Trade with the Atlantic states, across the Strait of Gibraltar and along the length of the Mediterranean and beyond, brought paper (and the technology to make it), rice, wheat, silk, figs and other exotica. An immense palace stood aloof from the city on the north side of the Guadalquivir River, on the slopes of the Sierra Morena. It hosted, among other glories, a zoo, an aviary, fishponds and a large bowl of pure liquid mercury, which reflected the sun’s light against its brilliantly vibrant mosaic walls. At the heart of the city stood a great mosque, which survives today along with a magnificent Roman bridge of sixteen arches.
The caliphate of al-Andalus was broadly tolerant of Christians and Jews, both long settled in Spain: they, too, were ‘Peoples of the Book’, to whom God’s truths had been revealed in writing.
In such a hybrid culture, scholarship, poetry, art and language thrived. Cordoba’s most valuable treasure, certainly its most enduring legacy, was the fruit of its caliphs’ enthusiastic, not to say obsessive, collecting of scholarship from the ancient world. It was said that the libraries of the city housed 400,000 volumes – an exaggeration, surely, but even so… Of these, a substantial number were Arabic translations of the Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle; of physicians and botanists like Dioscorides; of mathematicians and scientists of the calibre of Euclid and Archimedes. Such works were otherwise unknown in Western Europe and, without their curation and reintroduction through Arabic Spain at the beginning of the second millennium, there would – there could – have been no Renaissance.Into this dazzling, polyphonic world of restless intellectual and aesthetic energy, Caliph al Hakam II (ruled 961–76) recruited a woman called Lubna as either a scribe or librarian, perhaps both. The novelist and broadcaster Kamila Shamsie has assembled what little evidence there is for her life.§ She tells us that a twelfth-century biographical dictionary says this of Lubna:
An intelligent writer, grammarian, poet, knowledgeable in arithmetic, comprehensive in her learning; none in the palace was as noble as she.2
But this is a frustratingly thin biography. That she was remembered in the twelfth century tells us that her fame lasted. There is little more direct evidence of her life, but various references indicate that she was a slave or a freed slave; that she was perhaps responsible for the acquisition of books for the library. Slaves might come from anywhere, as captives of war or despoliation; as gifts from other rulers; as hostages. They might be base-born, or noble. In the reign of al-Hakam II’s predecessor, Abd al-Rahman III, almost four thousand slaves could be found toiling in the royal palace. Evidently, women of intellect and accomplishment, slave or free, were valued in Cordoba: 120 of them are recorded as having worked at copying the Qur’an; and the skills of the copyist, in an age before printing, should not be underestimated: it is best to think of the scribe in the same way as we do a concert pianist, trusted absolutely with bringing to life a distant, even sacred voice from the past.
That women could achieve such accomplishments, in a highly patriarchal society in which they have been very much written out of history, is significant of an educational milieu otherwise difficult to visualise. It seems likely, from what we know of textile production elsewhere in Europe, that women were also intimately involved in the creation of Andalusia’s renowned silks.In al-Andalus, as in the Germanic societies of the north, women might own and inherit property. Shamsie’s research also celebrates the life and work of a famous and long-lived poet, Wallada Bint al-Mustakfi (994–1091), daughter of a minor caliph, who held literary court at her home in the manner of an eighteenth-century salonière. Like several of the royal princesses of Anglo-Saxon England, she was sufficiently independent to be able to refuse marriage; nor would she consent to wear the prescribed veil. She openly conducted affairs with men and women. In response to accusations of harlotry, she embroidered one side of her robe with the words:
Forsooth, I allow my lover to touch my cheek and bestow my kiss on him who craves it.
While on the other side it read:
I am, by God, fit for high positions… and am going my way, with pride.3
Quite apart from its elegance of expression and the sly, brightly tipped barb against her critics, I find this compelling evidence for the idea that women understood textiles, the principal medium in which female control and agency seems to have been dominant, as canvases on which to inscribe their own stories and identities. Al-Andalus is said to have employed 13,000 weavers, many of them producing tiraz, cloth containing the sort of woven text that Wallada wore with such disdain for her accusers.
Wallada is known to have conducted an affair with an equally famous poet, Ibn Zaydun, whom she would subsequently describe as a sodomite, cuckold, adulterer and pimp, while several of his verses in praise of her also survive. A hundred years later, Abu al-Hasan Ibn Bassam, a writer from a then much-reduced Andalusian state, wrote that Wallada was:
…the first of the women of her time.
Her free manners and disdain of her veil indicated an ardent nature… Her house at Cordova was the area in which poets and prose writers were vying with each other. The literary men were attracted toward the light of this brilliant new moon, as if it were a lighthouse in a dark night.4Cordoba’s fame spread not just through the Islamic and Byzantine worlds but across Europe. In the elite royal abbey of Gandersheim, in what is now Lower Saxony (halfway between Berlin and Düsseldorf), a canoness named Hrotsvitha (c.935–73) had heard much of Cordoba’s greatness, and called it the ‘ornament of the world’. In Hrotsvitha’s time, Gandersheim’s abbess was a niece of the Holy Roman Emperor Otto I, under whose patronage something of an early cultural renaissance was fostered in Saxony. She was familiar with a number of classical Latin poets including Horace, Ovid and Virgil; and a large volume of her work survives, much of it in the form of dramatised hagiography. Her writings were ‘rediscovered’ by the German humanist scholar Conrad Celtes in the late fifteenth century and a twentieth-century English translation of much of her work allows Anglophone historians and dramatists access to it: the first secular drama written in the northern medieval world. Her style is colloquial, her Latin ‘decadent’, according to the translator Christopher St John (who compared some of Hrotsvitha’s characterisations to those of her own contemporary, a ‘Mr. Bernard Shaw’).
Hrotsvitha had a cultivated, dry wit, as the preface to her dramas reveals:
I have been compelled through the nature of this work to apply my mind and my pen to depicting the dreadful frenzy of those possessed by unlawful love, and the insidious sweetness of passion – things which should not even be named among us. Yet if from modesty I had refrained from treating these subjects I should not have been able to attain my object – to glorify the innocent to the best of my ability. For the more seductive the blandishments of lovers the more wonderful the divine succour and the greater the merit of those who resist, especially when it is fragile woman who is victorious and strong man who is routed with confusion.5
This sort of self-deprecation on the part of elite women of talent is surely ironic. Hrotsvitha would have been amused to know of posthumous memorials to her: since 1973, the city of Bad Gandersheim has awarded an annual Roswitha prize to female writers.#