Johnston R.A. All Things Medieval: An Encyclopedia of the Medieval World

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Muslims

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conquered most of Visigoth Spain in 711. The Visigoth nobles pulled

back into small kingdoms along the Pyrenees mountains and preserved

Christian Spain until their Reconquest drive began in the 11th century.

The Visigoths had been extremely repressive against Jews, so Spain’s Jews

welcomed and helped the Muslim invasion. They became full collaborators,

helping govern the cities for the Arab conquerors.

Muslim armies pushed north. They captured the Spanish coastline and

the southern coast of modern France, which was then the independent

duchy of Aquitaine. They held the cities of Barcelona, Narbonne, and

Marseille. The northern kingdom of the Franks was ruled in name by inef-

fective Merovingian kings and ruled in reality by their stewards, the major-

domos. In 732, the majordomo Charles, later nicknamed “Martel”—the

hammer—met Muslim troops at the northern border of Aquitaine, near

Tours. Tours was only 150 miles from Paris, and it was the farthest north

the Muslims went into Europe. Charles Martel defeated a much larger

army very decisively. His successor, Pepin, began to push the Arabs out of

Provence and Aquitaine.

Most of southern and central Spain, now known as al-Andalus, or An-

dalusia, remained Muslim for most of the Middle Ages. Further political

inﬁ ghting in the Middle East moved Andalusia into greater prominence.

In 750, the Umayyads of Damascus were all killed by the rival Abbasids,

who claimed descent from Mohammed’s uncle Abbas. This violent change

of dynasty drove the only surviving Umayyad prince, Abd al-Rahman, into

exile. He traveled far from Damascus and ended up in Andalusia. Abd al-

Rahman seized control of Cordoba and began expanding and unifying the

Muslim kingdom. In 959, his descendant Abd al-Rahman III proclaimed

himself the true caliph. The family had married many Christian princesses

from the north, and Caliph Abd al-Rahman III had blue eyes.

Abd al-Rahman I and his successors built Cordoba into a great city with

paved streets, a magniﬁ cent mosque made of red and white horseshoe

arches, and a palace, Madinat al-Zahra. Cordoba at its peak may have been

one of the largest cities in Europe. The palace was ﬁ lled with gardens, high

fountains, pools, ﬁ ne buildings, statues, and a zoo. One of the legendary

marvels of the palace was a pool of quicksilver (mercury) that made the

room dance and spin with reﬂ ected beams of sunlight. The al-Rahman rul-

ers imported palm trees and other native plants from the Middle East and

spread Syrian agricultural methods through Spain. Both Jews and Chris-

tians served as advisers and viziers to the Cordoban caliphs.

North African Berber troops of a more fundamentalist Islamic faction

destroyed the palace in 1009 and Cordoba in 1013. Many well-educated

and skilled people moved from the ruined city to other cities such as Seville

and Granada, and the Muslim Andalusian culture became decentralized.

Granada and Seville built gardens and palaces similar to Cordoba’s. The

Muslims

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The style of Arab warfare shocked Christian Europe, which had been accustomed to

ﬁ ghting on foot. The early Muslim armies used both horses and camels to move very

swiftly. (Jupiterimages)

smaller Muslim kingdoms, called taifas, did not equal the wealth of the

earlier capital of Cordoba, but the Alhambra palace in Granada became

the most famous palace. It was built during the 14th century as Muslim

power waned.

The island of Sicily was governed by the Muslim Caliphate from 965 to

1072, when it was captured by invading Normans. Its capital was Palermo,

and it was ruled by a sultan. Under Muslim rule, Middle Eastern plants

such as oranges, lemons, pistachio nuts, and sugar cane were planted. Mid-

dle Eastern irrigation methods modernized farms. Although Sicily was a

Norman kingdom by 1130, Arabic continued to be spoken in many parts of

Muslims

532

Sicily for a long time. The Norman rulers learned Arabic and adopted many

Muslim customs. In nearby Malta, the native language of Maltese evolved

from Arabic. The German emperor Frederick II was born to the queen of

Sicily in 1194 and was educated there. He spoke and wrote ﬂ uent Arabic

and corresponded with sultans and Arabic scholars. When he became king

of Jerusalem in 1229, he reinstituted the Muslim call to prayer.

The Muslim culture of Spain permitted polygamy as a normal family in-

stitution; the caliphs and emirs had harems of Muslim and Christian slave

girls, in addition to several wives. Muslim girls were kept secluded and

rarely attended school. Many were raised in harems, and they usually mar-

ried into polygamous families. They had few legal rights. However, there

were some educated women, and several hundred women were paid book

copyists at the height of Cordoba’s wealth.

Muslim Inﬂ uence on Europe

Trade and scholarship were Islam’s biggest inﬂ uences on medieval Eu-

rope. As the power of the Byzantine Empire lessened, Arab trading cities

The dynasty founded by Abd al-Rahman built their capital, Cordoba, into one of the

greatest cities in the world. The grandest building was the mosque, modeled after the

medieval mosque in Damascus. Its striped horseshoe arches on onyx pillars were

constructed partially using stones and pillars from ruined Roman buildings.

The conquering Christian kings preserved the beautiful building, although they

remodeled it into a cathedral. (Corel)

Muslims

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were the source of exotic luxury goods. Spanish Andalusia, in particu-

lar, spread Middle Eastern technology. Arabic culture was viewed as more

complex, reﬁ ned and fashionable than Latin culture. Arabic science and

poetry were admired and copied; both Jews and Christians in Arab regions

spoke ﬂ uent Arabic and wrote poetry. Poetry and science both had longer

traditions and higher social esteem in Muslim culture.

Damascus was a major center for raising silkworms and weaving silk,

and the art came to Spain by the ninth century. Spanish silk brocade was

a major export to Northern Europe. Baghdad, the new Abbasid capital of

the Islamic Caliphate, became the most innovative center for pottery. Its

tin-glazed white wares were exported until the method of glazing with tin

caught on in Europe, ﬁ rst in Andalusia and in Italy and then in Northern

Europe. White pottery with colored decorations became known as maiol-

ica, named ﬁ rst for the Spanish island of Majorca, which served as a large

trading port. Arab traders, often from Andalusia but sometimes from Sicily

or the Middle East, attended the fairs of Champagne and other large fairs.

They traded ﬁ ne leather from Cordoba, kermes red dye, silk, and pistachio

nuts for northern furs and wool.

Middle Eastern foods also came into Northern Europe through Andalu-

sia. Oranges, dates, ﬁ gs, and sugar came from Majorca and Barcelona. The

word candy came from the Arabic word qandi, for crystallized sugar. There

was a large sugar-processing plant on the island of Crete. Caramel and

nougat were sweets invented in Andalusia and other Muslim places. Other

Middle Eastern dishes came into Spain’s customary diet and then into me-

dieval recipe books.

Islamic scholarship was a great boost to European learning. Every region

the Muslims conquered had its greatest works translated into Arabic, and

Arabic became the language of the global library. Christian scholars stud-

ied Arabic texts in Cordoba and Barcelona, and they partnered with Arab

scholars to translate many of these works into Latin. The medical texts of

Avicenna and Averroes became standard works in medieval European med-

ical schools. Arab-trained physicians, some of them Jews, were employed

by European royalty. One, known as Petrus Alfonsi (“Piers Alphonse” in

Chaucer), became a physician to William the Conqueror and wrote Latin

works on Arabic concepts of astronomy.

The ﬁ rst translation of the Koran into Latin began around 1142, when

Peter the Venerable, an abbot from Cluny, came to Toledo, then the capi-

tal of Christian Spain. He hired an Englishman who lived in Toledo to set

aside his translation of al-Khwarismi’s work on algebra and create a Latin

Koran for him.

Arabic numbers, borrowed from Hindu mathematics treatises, came

into use in medieval Europe very gradually and were established by 1500.

Muslims

534

The astrolabe was introduced to European sailors and astronomers from

Andalusia in the 11th century. It was made of brass, and it usually had Ara-

bic letters and numbers on its face. Astrology and astronomy both came

into Europe through Arabic, most often through the Spanish centers of

learning.

See also: Astrolabe, Cloth, Food, Horses, Jews, Medicine, Numbers,

Pottery.

Further Reading

Fletcher, R. A. Moorish Spain. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

Lewis, David Levering. God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570 –1215.

New York: W. W. Norton, 2008.

Lindsay, James E. Daily Life in the Medieval Islamic World. Westport, CT: Green-

wood Press, 2008.

Matthew, Donald. The Norman Kingdom of Sicily. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-

versity Press, 1992.

Menocal, Maria Rosa. The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Chris-

tians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain. New York: Little,

Brown, 2002.

O’Shea, Stephen. The Sea of Faith: Islam and Christianity in the Medieval Mediter-

ranean World. New York: Walker and Co., 2006.

N N

Numbers

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Navigation. See Compass and Navigation

Numbers

During Europe’s Middle Ages, the reigning numeric system was the Roman

one. Although Greece had used alphabetic letters for counting, the Ro-

mans pioneered a system of tally marks and letter symbols. I, II, and III

were just tally marks, and V was a symbol for 5. By putting a tally mark be-

fore or after V, the counter could make 4 or 6. VII and VIII were 7 and 8.

X was a symbol for 10, and tally marks before or after added and subtracted.

IX was 9, while XII was 12. XV was 15, and IXX was one short of 20—that

is, 19. With the addition of the symbols L for 50, C for 100, and M for

1,000, the Romans could designate any number with accuracy.

There was no convenient way to do arithmetic, since every number was

a sum of its parts and symbols. The only way to calculate “C minus XXIV”

was to work it in one’s head or on an abacus and then write down the sym-

bol for the answer. However, the Roman system was a good way to register

numbers in a marketplace; it was a very concrete number system.

By 500, the scholars of India had developed a decimal number system

in which place value determined the real value of the digit. They used only

nine symbols that resemble modern numbers. Some scholars of the Jain

sect pioneered early algebra equations and solutions methods. They called

solving an equation “pulverizing” it, as though grinding it down to see

what number was left.

One of the intellectual projects of the Muslim empire was to translate

the classics of other languages into Arabic. This was the ﬁ rst ambitious ef-

fort to bring all human knowledge into one library. Arabic-speakers trans-

lated works from Chinese, Hindi, Egyptian, Babylonian, Latin, and Greek.

Among the other scientiﬁ c concepts Muslims brought into the Mediterra-

nean world, the Indian number system made its entrance. A signiﬁ cant part

of India was under Muslim rule, so it was an easy transfer of knowledge

within the empire.

Al-Khwarizmi was probably a Persian living under Muslim rule in the

eighth century. He wrote books on arithmetic and algebra that explained

the methods developed in India. His name in Latin was written Algorith-

mus, which is where we got the word for a mathematical method. He ex-

plained many algorithms for using the new Indian number system to add,

subtract, multiply, and divide. He showed how to ﬁ nd square roots and do

operations with fractions. The word algebra comes from a Latin form of

Al-Khwarizmi’s Arabic word al-Jabr, which meant “transformations.” In

this work, the basics of balancing equations and dividing by coefﬁ cients are

Numbers

538

explained. He also explained how to solve quadratic equations, but he did

not make use of negative numbers.

Omar Khayyam, an 11th-century Persian, is best known for his poetry,

but he was a professional astronomer and mathematician to the sultan.

He wrote a book about algebra that expanded on Al-Khwarizmi’s older

work. He deﬁ ned algebra—separate from arithmetic—as the use of equa-

tions to ﬁ nd unknown numbers with polynomials. He recognized the va-

lidity of irrational numbers and further developed the mathematics of conic

sections.

The monastic scholar Gerbert of Aurillac, who later became Pope Syl-

vester II in 999, was educated in or near Barcelona. He learned the Indian-

Arabic system of numbers and then became the tutor to the future German

emperors Otto II and Otto III. As he rose in the hierarchy of the church,

he wrote about and applied the mathematics and science he had learned in

Spain. As bishop of Reims, he designed a hydraulic organ and wrote trea-

tises on astronomy. He reintroduced the use of the abacus for calculations,

but in the Arabic form, which was more sophisticated than the Roman. He

explained the abacus with Arabic numerals, not Roman ones. He intro-

duced a counting board with square counters to explain the method. The

counting board became a standard part of commercial banking. As they

began to use the new numerals, the counters got turned around, and some

Indian-Arabic number symbols came into European use turned to the side

or upside down from the way they were originally oriented.

Gerbert’s counting board dealt only in the simplest arithmetic with

whole numbers, but it was Europe’s ﬁ rst introduction to place value. Ger-

bert called the ﬁ rst column of numbers 1 through 9 “digits,” a comparison

to the numbers we can count on our ﬁ ngers. The word digits, of course,

later came into general usage and has remained current. He was not as suc-

cessful in explaining the larger place-value columns. They were not ﬁ ngers;

they were joints—“articuli”—but the idea of elbow or shoulder numbers

did not resonate with Europeans. The concept of place value did not catch

on except with a few scholars who continued to explore it.

One of the simplest concepts invented in India and developed in the

Arab empire was the idea of zero. In a system dependent on place value,

noting a zero is very important. The Arabic word for “nothing,” tsifr, came

into Latin as both zephirum and cifra. The forms zero and cipher, as well as

French chiffre, meaning “a ﬁ gure,” all stem from these words. The English

use of cipher to mean a code also recalls the mysterious nature of the new

system. Gerbert of Aurillac may have understood the use of zero, but he did

not attempt to explain it in 1000.

Europe’s conversion to the Arabic system took several centuries. Dur-

ing the 12th century, there were increased efforts to translate Arabic math-

ematical treatises into Latin. Adelard of Bath translated an Arabic copy of

Numbers

539

Euclid’s Greek treatise on geometry and then an Arabic work on trigonom-

etry. Plato of Tivoli translated more works and demonstrated how to solve

a quadratic equation in Latin. Robert of Chester translated Al-Khwarizmi’s

algebra treatises. These works were not widely available but could be stud-

ied at some universities.

Leonardo of Pisa, usually known by the surname Fibonacci (son of

Bonacci), grew up in the commercial and university city of Pisa. As a teenager,

he joined his father in the city of Bugia, North Africa, to help with a com-

mercial warehouse. He learned the Indian-Arabic system thoroughly for

bookkeeping, and he may have studied with Arabic scholars in his travels

around the Mediterranean. Back in Pisa around 1200, he wrote a book,

Liber Abaci, that carefully explained the Arabic system and its advantages

to a European audience. He introduced the words multiplication, factor,

numerator, and denominator .

The German emperor Frederick II, a famous scholar himself, read the

book and drew Fibonacci into an algebra competition. His court math-

ematician wrote three algebra problems and sent them to Fibonacci and

two scholars of the Latin numeral system. In a public demonstration be-

fore Frederick in Pisa, Fibonacci solved all three problems, while the Latin

numeral scholars could not. He went on to write Practica Geometriae and

Liber Quadratorum, which explained trigonometry and quadratic equa-

tions in Latin with Arabic numerals.

Fibonacci’s book, Liber Abacus,

provided the ﬁ rst major introduction

of Arabic numbers to medieval

Europe. Although he was not at ﬁ rst a

scholar, his private studies with Arabic

mathematicians in North Africa and

around the Mediterranean rim brought

him to the attention of Emperor

Frederick II. (iStockPhoto)