A History of the Muslim World to 1405: The Making of a Civilization by Egger Vernon O

Author:Egger, Vernon O [Egger, Vernon O]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781315507675
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2016-06-22T21:00:00+00:00

The Muslim West

The Muslim lands bordering the western Mediterranean enjoyed a halcyon period during the second half of the tenth century. The eleventh century, on the other hand, witnessed a profound change in the fortunes of the region. A combination of internal conflicts and foreign invaders threatened the very existence of the western wing of the Dar al-Islam and led to the permanent loss of Sicily and parts of Andalus.

Norman Invasions of Muslim Territory

A major theme in the history of the western Mediterranean basin in the eleventh century was the irruption into the area of a people known as the Normans. The Normans, more famous for William the Conqueror’s exploits of 1066 at Hastings, had made a name for themselves years earlier in the warmer climes of the Mediterranean. It would have taken a keen eye at the time to discern in the bloody conquests of those brutal and avaricious knights the first inklings of a newly empowered Europe. In fact, however, they were the vanguard of an expansive Europe that was undergoing an economic revival and a “baby boom.” Abundant food, commerce, cities, and education were finally coming to western Europe. The wealth and power of that society expressed itself in the military expeditions of the eleventh century by the knights of the Norman conquests, the Reconquista, and the Crusades. The earliest triumphs were by the Normans, and they inflicted territorial losses on the Muslims that have lasted to the present.

Beginning in the early eleventh century, small groups of Norman adventurers began entering southern Italy in search of their fortune. In that welter of small, feuding states they had been able to sell their services to local lords and then to take over from their erstwhile masters. Confounding their contemporaries, who assumed that, as cavalrymen, they were strictly land based, some of them took advantage of Zirid weakness as early as 1034 and began occupying port cities in Ifriqiya. Of much greater interest to them, however, was Sicily, which had the appeal both of proximity to the Italian peninsula and of prosperity.

Sicily had been under Muslim control for two centuries. The Aghlabids had slowly conquered the island from the Byzantines during the period 827–878. During that period, Sicily served as a base for Muslim raids into Italy, the most famous of which was the sack of the basilicas of St. Peter and St. Paul in 848. In 909–910, the Fatimids conquered the Aghlabids and thereby became the masters of Sicily. By mid-century, when the great Fatimid general Jawhar was preoccupied with reestablishing control over the Berbers of Ifriqiya and with planning the conquest of Egypt, the island had become in effect an autonomous province under a local Muslim dynasty.

Throughout its two centuries as a Muslim-controlled island, Sicily played an important political and cultural role. Like every other Mediterranean state of the period, its relations with its neighbors, Christian and Muslim alike, included piracy, wars, trade agreements, and cultural exchanges. The island’s agriculture, like that of Andalus, achieved unprecedented prosperity

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