History of the Moorish Empire in Europe, Vol. 1 (of 3)

by S. P. Scott

It must be remembered that at that time there was no established, centralized, sacerdotal authority. Nevertheless, for more than a century, imperial officials, designated for that purpose, had determined the degrees and inflicted the punishment of heresy. Confiscation, banishment, torture, and death threatened all who refused to subscribe to the doctrines which, varying with different reigns, were promulgated as the momentary and uncertain standards of orthodoxy. The incomprehensibility of a dogma was considered an infallible indication of its truth. The philosopher was then, as now, stigmatized as the implacable enemy of religion. A reign of terror overspread the empire. Every scholar became an object of suspicious aversion. His neighbors shunned his company. The clergy anathematized him from the pulpit. Informers dogged his footsteps and intruded upon his privacy. Indifference to religious duties, or an unguarded statement frequently distorted by malice, was a sufficient cause for imprisonment. The discovery of an heretical passage in a volume of his library rarely failed to provoke a sentence of death. Such measures, equivalent to a proscription of knowledge, produced the most lamentable consequences. Literary occupations became to all intents and purposes criminal. Everywhere valuable collections of books were hastily consigned to the flames by their owners, apprehensive of being compromised by their contents. Oratory, except that of the pulpit, could not survive such restrictions. Public sentiment, controlled by ecclesiastical prejudice, became inimical to the maintenance of even ordinary institutions of learning. A blind reverence for the Church, and a disposition to enforce obedience to its mandates by the merciless employment of the secular arm, were popularly regarded as the duties of every member of society. It was the ominous inauguration of that fearful power which afterwards culminated in the irresponsible despotism of the Vatican.

The Roman Pontiff had not yet stretched forth his mighty hand from the seat of ancient empire to allay dissension, and to enforce obedience to the edicts of the greatest hierarchy that has ever arisen to enchain the intelligence and repress the independent aspirations of mankind. The final decisions of councils had not been formulated upon controverted points of doctrine. The Patriarch of Constantinople—first in ecclesiastical precedence, yet almost rivalled in pomp and prestige by the great episcopal dignitaries of Antioch, Alexandria, and Carthage—exacted with difficulty the reverence of the giddy and scoffing mob of the capital, and could not always maintain the dignity of his office, even in the presence of his sovereign, who was sometimes a skeptic and often a tyrant. Nor was the civil power, to which the ecclesiastical system was still jealously subordinated, in a less degraded condition. The authority of the Emperor was persistently defied in the precincts of his own palace, which, with the Cathedral of Saint Sophia, had become the theatre of the treasonable plots and licentious intrigues of infamous combinations of every class and nationality, and where a portentous union of monks, eunuchs, and women reigned unquestioned and supreme. A cumbrous and pompous etiquette; a theatrical display of costumes and devices; a court swarming with buffoons and parasites; an atmosphere of cowardice, duplicity, effeminacy, and corruption had supplanted the high sense of national honor, the austere dignity, the proud consciousness of superior manhood which, in the early days of republican simplicity and imperial grandeur, marked the exercise of Roman power. The incursions of pirates, which the diminished naval power of the emperors was inadequate to check, had driven commerce from the sea.

Intestine broils, and the lawless conduct of the barbarian soldiery who chafed at the restraints of discipline, and whose incessant and exorbitant demands upon the imperial treasury had aided not a little to impoverish the country, rendered agricultural operations unsafe and unprofitable, and land was no longer tilled except in the immediate vicinity of large cities. Whole provinces, which, under the Romans, had flourished like a succession of gardens, now abandoned and uninhabited, were growing up with forests and relapsing into the wilderness of primeval times. The dire effects of barbarian warfare were conspicuous in every province of the Empire. The fruits of centuries of civilization had disappeared with the conditions which had been favorable to their maturity and to the political corruption and moral degeneracy which, more than the fortunes of war, had contributed to their annihilation. The proud title of Roman citizen, once coveted alike by foreign princes and aspiring plebeians, had been erased from the tables whereon were inscribed the most exalted distinctions of nations. Society no longer wore the alluring aspect which it had exhibited under the luxurious dominion of the Cæsars. The patrician, deprived of property and freedom, reluctantly swelled the train of barbaric pomp in the city which had been the scene of his extravagance, his tyranny, and his vices. The slave who had fled to the camp of Alaric or Attila now ruled in the palace which had formerly witnessed his humiliation, and was served by the children of those who but a few months before had made him the victim of their cruelty and caprice.

The face of the country, repeatedly overrun by swarms of ruthless savages, presented a picture of hopeless desolation. The trail of the Gothic or Lombard marauder could be traced by heaps of whitened bones, by dismantled cities, by ravaged fields and fire-swept hamlets. The beautiful temples of antiquity, which had survived the decay of Paganism and the assaults of Christianity, were defaced or ruined. The exquisite memorials of classic art, the triumphs of the Grecian sculptor, were broken and scattered. Vases, whose elegance and symmetry had called forth the admiration of all who beheld them, had been melted for the sake of the bronze and silver of which they were composed. The gardens which had been the pride of the capital had been trampled under the hoofs of the Gothic cavalry. Here and there, amidst a heap of blackened ruins, arose a crumbling wall or a group of tottering columns, which alone remained to mark the site of a once magnificent shrine of Venus or Apollo. The repression of general intelligence and individual ambition among the masses had always been a leading maxim of imperial policy. No system of education was provided. All exertion was discouraged. The populace was for generations provided with food and amusement by the government. There was no inducement to mental or physical activity. The natural march of human destiny, the improvement of man’s physical and social condition, was arrested. Enjoyment of the comforts of life rendered labor unnecessary. The paternal supervision and generosity of the sovereign made the criticism, or even the discussion, of public affairs irksome, ungrateful, dangerous. There being no longer any incentive to progress, society, in obedience to the organic law of its existence, began to rapidly retrograde towards barbarism; a condition to which the division of the people into castes—noble, plebeian, mercantile, military, and sacerdotal—greatly contributed. Through ideas of mistaken piety, and allured by the prospect of idleness and comparative ease, a multitude of able-bodied men had withdrawn from the occupations of active life to the seclusion of the cloister, whence they issued at intervals, when summoned to raze some Pagan temple; to influence, by the terror of their presence, the vacillating spirit of an ecclesiastical assembly; or to wreak the pitiless vengeance of their superiors upon some virtuous philosopher whose intelligence was not profound enough to grasp the meaning of a theological mystery. The enterprising general who had raised himself from a subordinate command in Britain to the imperial throne, and who, for reasons of state policy, had adopted and made compulsory the ceremonial of a religion whose benign precepts the base profligacy of his whole life insulted, possessed at least the stern and rugged virtues of a soldier. His effeminate descendants, however, both ignorant and careless of the arts of war and government, and devoted to the practice of every vice, had abandoned the administration to the perfidious and venal instincts of their retainers and slaves. Through the incompetency of the rulers, the insatiable ambition of the priests, and the unbridled license of the mercenaries who composed the bulk of the army, all desire of the majority of the people—in which was, of course, included the useful classes of farmer and artisan—for the improvement of their circumstances had yielded to a sluggish indifference to their fate. In a few generations social isolation became so thorough that the community of thought and interest indispensable to national prosperity ceased to exist; and this seclusion of caste, increasing in a direct ratio with rank, finally fastened upon the most noble families the stigma of exceptional ignorance. Indeed, in the palace itself, whence ecclesiastical bigotry had expelled all valuable knowledge, the education of princes was entrusted to nurses and domestic servants, whose pernicious influence was speedily exhibited in the superstitious fears and arrogant behavior of their pupils, the future masters of the Roman Empire. The fusion of races had produced mongrel types, in whose characters were developed the most objectionable and vicious traits of their depraved progenitors. Constant intercourse with barbarians had transformed the polished language of Homer and Plato into an uncouth dialect, where the gutturals of the Danube, mingling with the scarcely less discordant accents of the Nile and the Rhone, had overwhelmed the copious and elegant idiom of the Greek poets and historians. The fanaticism of an intolerant sect and the weakness of a succession of impotent sovereigns had extinguished the spirit of Pagan philosophy and ancient learning.

Since the erection of the famous church of Saint Sophia—the final effort of the genius of Byzantine architecture—that art had fallen into desuetude, and such of the famous structures of the ancients as survived were used as quarries, whence were derived the materials for the basilica and the palaces of the wealthy and luxurious patriarch and bishop. But this, unhappily, was not the worst of the prevalent evils of the time. An organized conspiracy against learning existed, and was most active in those quarters where education, however imperfect, should at least have suggested the importance of preserving the priceless remains of antiquity. The art of making parchment had, with many other useful inventions, been lost, and, in consequence, writing materials had become rare and expensive. The monk, too idle to invent, but ever ready to destroy, soon devised means for supplying this deficiency. Invading the public libraries, he diligently collected all the available manuscripts upon which were inscribed the thoughts of classic writers—of whom many are now only known to us by name—and, erasing the characters, used their pages to record the legends of his spurious saints and apocryphal martyrs. It is not beyond the range of probability that the original books of the New Testament, falling during these evil days into the hands of persons ignorant of Greek, may have undergone a similar fate; which hypothesis may also account for the thirty thousand different readings of which learned divines admit that the Gospels and Epistles are susceptible. The manifold and prodigious achievements of Roman civilization—its palaces, its temples, its amphitheatres, its aqueducts, its triumphal arches; its majestic forums, with their colonnades of snowy marble adorned with the statues of the heroes, the philosophers, the legislators of antiquity; its military roads; its marvels of mechanical engineering; its magnificent works of art; its eternal monuments of literature; the graceful legends of its mythology, perpetuated by the genius of the sculptor in creations of unrivalled excellence; the glowing words of its orators which stir the blood after the lapse of twenty centuries; the prestige of its conquests; the wise principles of its civil polity, generally enlightened, often audacious, always successful—were but trifles in the eyes of the debased Byzantine when compared with a fragment of the true cross, or a homily preached by some unclean and fanatic anchorite upon the metaphysical subtleties of the Trinity or the theological value of a diphthong.

Such, then, was the condition of the Christian Church and the Byzantine Empire at the close of the sixth century; to such a deplorable extent had barbarian encroachment, social corruption, and sectarian controversy undermined the foundation of both Church and State. In spite of its degradation, the latter represented the highest embodiment of mental culture and political organization which had survived the incessant depredations of barbarian armies and the demoralizing effects of generations of misrule; where the character of the monarch, both before and after his elevation to the throne, was dominated by the passions and infected with the vices of the most wicked and infamous of mankind. Throughout Europe the state of affairs was even more deplorable. The Goths were masters of the continent, and the Vandals, traversing the Spanish Peninsula and planting their victorious standards upon the northern coast of Africa, had, after the commission of atrocities which have made their name proverbial, driven the descendants of Hannibal and Hamilcar into the desert and the sea. The schools of Athens—that sole remaining seat of philosophical discussion and free inquiry in the world—had been suppressed, a hundred and fifty years before, by Justinian. The descendants of the Cæsars, stripped of their splendid inheritance and reduced to degrading vassalage, cowered beneath the scowling glances of the skin-clad savages who had issued in countless numbers from the forests of Germany and the shores of the Baltic. The effigies of the gods, the masterpieces of the skill of the Augustan age, had been tumbled from their pedestals, and the fetichism introduced by the strangers had been superseded by a corrupt form of Christianity scarcely less contemptible and fully as idolatrous. Rome had twice been sacked; Milan had been razed to the ground; prosperous seaports had fallen into decay; the fairest fields of Italy had been made desolate, her highways were overgrown with grass, her aqueducts were broken, her fertile Campagna, once the paradise of the capital, had become a pestilential marsh, whose vapors were freighted with disease and death. Among the miserable, half-famished, and turbulent population of the cities, riot and sedition were frequent, but were hardly noticed by the haughty barbarian ruler, so long as the outbreak did not seriously menace his life or his dignity. Civil war, relentless in atrocity, completed the devastation begun by barbaric conquest and servile tyranny. The army, filled with traitors, offered no warrant for the stability of government. Informers, that pest of a decadent state, swarmed in the Byzantine capital. Oppressive taxation, enforced by torture, impoverished the opulent. Promiscuous massacre, instituted upon the most frivolous pretexts, intimidated the poor. There was no loyalty, no sense of national honor, no appreciation of the mutual obligations of prince and people. The martial spirit which had been the distinguishing characteristic of ancient Rome was extinct. The proverbial discipline of the legions had been supplanted by license and disorder. Immunity from foreign incursion was secured by the ignominious and obnoxious expedient of tribute. Yet, in the midst of this accumulation of horrors which threatened the total destruction of a society already thoroughly disorganized, numbers of resolute men existed in every community who, while despoiled and oppressed, had not entirely abandoned themselves to despair, and in the minds of many of these, imperceptibly to the masses, and, indeed, scarcely discernible save by the most acute and sagacious observer, a great moral revolution was passing. The misfortunes which had befallen in succession the Pagan and the Christian religions had weakened the hold of both upon the reverence and affections of the multitude. Persons familiar with the Gospels, and with whom the Apocrypha claimed as much respect as the remaining portions of the Scriptures, looked forward to the coming of a reformer, known as the Paraclete, or Comforter, repeatedly promised in the Bible, whose mission was to restore to mankind, in its pristine purity, the truth as expounded by Christ. The material advantages which might accrue from the realization of this prediction were fully appreciated by the heads of a considerable number of contemporary sects—among them the Gnostics, the Cerintheans, the Montanists, and the Manicheans, each of whom confidently asserted that he was the heavenly messenger referred to and that all others were impostors. The Gospel of St. Barnabas is said, upon very respectable authority, to have originally contained the word Περικλῦτὸς, “Illustrious,” instead of Παράκλητος, “Comforter;” and to have been subsequently altered, with a view to checking the increasing number of claimants to divine inspiration, whose pretensions were becoming troublesome and dangerous. Moslem ingenuity has shrewdly availed itself of this prophecy, which popular credulity accepted as a direct announcement of the coming Mohammed, whose name, “The Illustrious,” is the Arabic equivalent of Περικλῦτὸς. It is also stated in the most ancient chronicles that a prophet called Ahmed, or Mohammed, had for centuries been expected in Arabia, where the Gospels were widely distributed; and it is therefore possible that a word written in an unknown tongue, a thousand miles from Mecca, may have had no inconsiderable share in determining the political and religious destinies of a large portion of the human race.

All things considered, perhaps no more auspicious time could have been selected for the announcement of a system of belief which based its claims to public attention upon the specious plea that it was not an innovation, but a reform, the purification of a mode of worship which had been practised for ages. It is usually far easier, because more consonant with the prejudices of human nature, to introduce an entirely new religion than to engraft changes, no matter how beneficial, upon the old. Mankind regards with eager curiosity a recent communication from Heaven, yet instinctively shrinks from serious interference with the time-honored ceremonial and revered traditions of a popular and long-established faith. But in Arabia, as has already been remarked, while there were innumerable shrines and temples and a host of idols, there was in reality no deep-seated religious feeling. The prevalent worship was maintained through the influence of long association rather than by any general belief in its truth, its wisdom, or its benefits. The claims of kindred, the maintenance of tribal honor, and the inexorable obligation of revenge had far greater weight with the Bedouin than the respect he owed to the factitious observances of his creed or the doubtful veneration he professed for the innumerable deities of his pantheon. The absurdity of their attributes, the inability of their gods to change or to resist the operations of nature, had long been tacitly recognized by the Arabs. Their idols partook of the character of the fetich, whose favor was propitiated with gifts, whose obstinacy was punished by violence. Long familiarity had lessened or entirely abrogated the awe with which they had once been regarded. The system which they represented had fallen behind the intelligence of the age, limited though that might be amidst the prejudices and superstitions of the Desert. A wide-spread and silent, but none the less vehement, protest against polytheism had arisen. At no time in the history of the Peninsula had been evinced such a disposition for reconciliation and compromise. In Arabia, therefore, as well as in the other countries of Asia, the season was eminently propitious to the promulgation of a new religion.

The ignorance of the natural talents, general characteristics, and daily habits of the Prophet of Arabia almost universally prevalent, even among persons of education and of more than ordinary intellectual attainments, is extraordinary; especially when the abundant facilities for information upon these points are considered. No name in history has been subjected to such fierce assaults by sectarian bigotry and theological rancor as his. The popular idea of Mohammed is that he was a vulgar impostor, licentious, cunning, brutal, and unscrupulous; periodically insane from repeated attacks of epilepsy; given to the practice of fraudulent miracles; a monster, who hesitated at no crime that would further his ends; who wrote a book called the Koran, which is full of sensual images, and describes heaven as a place especially set apart for the unrestricted indulgence of the animal passions. In former times public credulity went still farther, and Christian writers of the eleventh century, and even later, were in the habit of representing the greatest of iconoclasts—who excepted from the clemency of the victor only the adorers of fire and of idols—as a false god; a conception which, indicated by the familiar word “mummery,” has been incorporated into our language. Afterwards he was considered merely as a propagator of heresy, and, punished as such, he figures in the immortal work of Dante:

“Poi che l’un pié per girsene sospese,

Maometto;”