The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History. Maria Rosa Menocal

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      CHAPTER TWO

       Rethinking the Background

      If we understand by Averroism the use of Averroes’ commentary on Aristotle, then every medieval Aristotelian, including Aquinas, was an Averroist.

      —Paul Oscar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought

      WILLIAM, CIRCA 1100

      A half dozen years before the birth of William IX, duke of Aquitaine, who was to become one of the most powerful men of his time in both political and cultural affairs, there occurred one of the most famous and well-documented examples of the taking of Arabic cultural “booty” by southern French Christians.¹ This was the taking of Barbastro by Guillaume de Montreuil in 1064, during which he is said to have taken a thousand slave girls, captured women, back to Provence. Even if this were an apocryphal and gross exaggeration serving to emphasize the barbarity of the Christians from the Arab chronicler’s point of view, we have little reason to assume that the courts of Provence of the late eleventh century were oblivious to the art of Arabic sung poetry that the captured women would have brought with them.

      The world from which these women were abducted was al-Andalus, and they and other refugees and victims of the wars of reconquest were familiar figures in Christian courts on both sides of the Pyrenees. In the tradition of all those throughout history who have been forced from their homeland, they took with them many of the trappings of the world from which they came, and in some small measure they recreated that world. Thus in Narbonne, Béziers, and Montpellier, Jewish and other Andalusian refugees taught some of the learning that already distinguished al-Andalus as an advanced culture, and in the courts of Aquitaine, Andalusian music and songs provided entertainment. After all, both the learning and the music had been essential features of any measure of civilization in the world from which they had fled or been abducted.

      The political and cultural vicissitudes of al-Andalus had been many since the successful initial conquest in 711. The emirate had introduced a centralizing principle of government in the eighth century but, at that early moment of political consolidation, relatively little cultural activity that we know of. The creation and coming of age of the great Caliphate of Córdoba began in 929, but the building of the great mosque, the symbol of and monument to that enterprise, had been started in the previous century. It was a period in which the Arabization and even Islamization of the conquered peoples was a source of wonder and chagrin. The prestige of a language and culture, Arabic, that was no longer new or foreign had become indisputable. The transforming effects of that cultural prestige were lamented by Alvarus, bishop of Córdoba, in 854:

      Our Christian young men, with their elegant airs and fluent speech, are showy in their dress and carriage, and are famed for the learning of the gentiles; intoxicated with Arab eloquence they greedily handle, eagerly devour and zealously discuss the books of the Chaldeans [i.e., Muhammadans] and make them known by praising them with every flourish of rhetoric, knowing nothing of the beauty of the Church’s literature, and looking with contempt on the streams of the Church that flow forth from Paradise; alas! the Christians are so ignorant of their own law, the Latins pay so little attention to their own language, that in the whole of the Christian flock there is hardly one man in a thousand who can write a letter to inquire after a friend’s health intelligibly, while you may find countless rabble of all kinds of them who can learnedly roll out the grandiloquent periods of the Chaldean tongue. They can even make poems, every line ending with the same letter, which display high flights of beauty and more skill in handling meter than the gentiles themselves possess. (Translation, Watt 1965:56).

      But it was not, in fact, until the subsequent century, the tenth, that the Andalusian Arabic world of belles-lettres and other arts emerged from the shadow of the East, which it had largely emulated, and came into its own, flourishing and nurturing experimentation and a wide range of poetic forms as it did the same in the plastic arts, as it minted gold coins, and as it introduced a sophistication in many spheres that was unknown in Europe for some centuries. Alvarus’s distress had he witnessed, a hundred years later, the cultural prestige and success of the descendants of the Arab invaders and those who had adopted their language and culture would have been even more warranted and more acute. The situation was such that the man who at the millenium was to be Pope Sylvester II, an Aquitainian named Gerbert of Aurillac, had come to Spain in his formative years in quest of knowledge. Gerbert stayed three years in Catalonia studying mathematics and astronomy from the collection at Ripoll, which partook of the riches of Andalusian writings on these subjects, and it is reputed that he managed a visit to the great library of Córdoba itself. A man in many ways far ahead of his compatriots who did not cultivate the knowledge of al-Andalus, Gerbert was the first northern European to see the advantage of the numeral system of the Arabs, one that the Andalusians were still perfecting.

      The prestige and luxury, and the distress of the Alvaros, would continue to grow in the subsequent century. The century into which the captives of Barbastro were born, the eleventh, was one characterized, paradoxically, by considerable political upheaval (the dissolution of the caliphate) and great affluence for the literature, the poetry, of that world. The astonishing wealth and growth of the capital, Córdoba, had spilled over to other areas and cities of al-Andalus and had considerably broadened the base of material and cultural well-being. Thus, when central authority collapsed and was replaced politically by the city-states known as the mulūk aṭ-ṭawā^if, the financial and artistic bases for considerable material and cultural prosperity had already been established. The stage was set for the golden age of Hispano-Arabic literature, whose writers included three of the Andalusians destined to be best remembered by posterity: Ibn Shuhaid, Ibn Ḥazm, and Ibn Zaidūn. The first was the author of a trip to the afterlife; the second, of a treatise on love that combines poetry and prose; and the third was the premiere writer of love poetry of his age. Following on the heels of these renowned litterateurs of the last days of the caliphate came many more poets nurtured by the beneficent climate of the mulūk, cities in which the cultivation and patronage of the arts and all manner of science and philosophy became a high priority for monarchs themselves. The heads of these small but glowing kingdoms were learned or proficient in at least one specialty (philosophy, poetry) and expected no less from those to whom they offered their hospitality. Their courts vied with each other as hospices for the arts, and for poetry in particular.

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