One of the problems with looking at history is that although we always have specific dates and events to point to, when we're talking about characters and empires, it's sometimes quite hard to judge when time periods begin and end. I've talked before about the difficulty in pinpointing when the renaissance started and ended, and today, I'm going to talk about the end of the classical world and the birth of the medieval age, through the lens of the rise and expansion of Islam.
Now before you rage out at me in the comments, I'll say right now that this video is primarily about history and culture, not religion. If you want a nice look into the origins and details of Islam as a religion, I invite you to watch this episode of Crash Course. I, for my part, will be focusing on the history and culture of the caliphates and the Arab world. With that futile disclaimer out of the way, let's start some history.
Our story begins when Muhammad was born in 570 CE, in western Arabia. Which at that point, was completely unaffiliated. A total melting pot of religions. Unlike everything outside of the peninsula, Arabia never really came under the control of Rome or the Byzantines. So they were happily living their own lives, within their tribes and cities. One day, our buddy Muhammad goes out mountain climbing, and just like that, bada bing, bada one true god, we have a shiny new religion.
The people in Mecca didn't much care for Muhammad's shiny new religion (which he called Islam). So they kicked him out in 622, and he went to Medina. This marks the year 0 on the Muslim calendar. Muhammad united the tribes of Medina into one alliance, so when Mecca started picking on them, fighting ensued. Now Muhammad happens to be a fantastic general, so this was no problem for them. Soon enough, Muhammad and his mates had taken the west Arabian coast, and we have ourselves the making of what will become one of the world's most efficient religions ever.
To illustrate that, consider that it took Christianity about 300 or so years to sort out the fan fiction from the canon and get what we now call the new testament. The Quran was codified within twenty years of Muhammad's death. 20 years! That's only a little bit longer than SpongeBob's been on the air. That is efficiency number one. Number two is how staggeringly quick the caliphate spread. For context,
Arabia was sandwiched between the Sassanid Persians and the Byzantines who were always fighting each other. So Arabia was often handed the short end of the proverbial stick. It's like when two of your siblings decide to come into your room to start arguing for some reason. That is most definitely no fun for Arabia.
So our newly formed religion decided to give itself some good breathing room. While the Quran was being codified, four of Muhammad's closest friends and family members led what we now call the Rashidun caliphate, as it expanded and conquered outside the Arabian peninsula. Most famously the battles of Yarmouk with the Byzantines, and Qadisiyah with the Persians. So screw you, and you piss off. The Rashidun caliphate continued to expand, stretching into the Levant, Egypt, and Persia.
The Muslim armies were effective for a couple reasons. First, they had great generals. Second, they integrated archers and heavy cavalry into their battle lines to great effect. And third, unlike everyone else, who would just do some fighting and then make a five or ten year peace treaty and go home, these guys just kept going. The one thing the Muslim armies never did was stop. Now, let's see how replacing the brake pedal with the second accelerator worked out for them.
Answer: very well. When the caliphate took Damascus, a single artful tear rolled down the Byzantine Empire's cheek at the loss of one of their major cities. However, there's no time to mourn that, because the Rashidun caliphate kept charging along until it was replaced with the Umayyad caliphate, who moved the capital from Medina to Damascus in 661. As we'll see, this move sets up the next century's big westward push.
Namely between 661 and 750, the Muslim armies sieged Constantinople twice, yoinked all of Northern Africa, swiped Spain, and pushed eastward to the Indus River for good measure. That deserves some props. Now, historically, when you take control of large masses of land, you need to find a way to, you know, govern it. The caliphate did well, by taking a page out of the Byzantine Empire's playbook and setting up a network of provinces controlled by governors who are appointed by the ruling Caliph.
It worked for Rome, and it worked here. Similarly, when you start an empire from one geographical region and expand well outside of your ethnic boundaries, you have to consider how you impose yourself on ethnically different populace. Rome did this by what's called syncretism: Where you try to culturally unify yourself with who you're conquering by pointing to analogous traits between your deities and combining them into one new god.
Islam took a different approach here, instead giving the people of conquered provinces relative religious freedom to practice Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism with the understood cap that they cannot gain any position of power in the Islamic government. For the most part, all parties involved were pretty cool about it. But the one exception was the difference between native Arabic Muslims and non Arabic converts. In theory, all Muslims were equal regardless of ethnicity.
But in practice, the higher offices regularly went to Arabic Muslims, which led to some understandable grievances and political disunity. And speaking of disunity, the Mediterranean. Even when the western Roman Empire fell in the mid 400s to the Goths and friends, Europe and the Northern Mediterranean and Africa and the Southern Mediterranean still remained mostly unified. Sure, there wasn't a government linking them all, but the same trade routes from North to South and West to East remained open and active.
That changed when the aforementioned Islamic Caliphate ganked the aforementioned Levant and North African coasts. Now that this had happened, there was no real reason for anyone in Europe to bother sailing across the sea to Africa or the east, and no real reason for anyone in the caliphate to sail over to Europe. So the Mediterranean was split in half and, with that, with the end of the aquatic backbone that nursed the classical world, that world order fizzled and two new ones replaced it: the Middle Ages in Europe and the Islamic Golden Age in the caliphate.
Now when I say Golden Age, I mean *Golden Age*. In the time of the Abbasid Caliphate, which reigned from 750 to about 1258, the Islamic world experienced a whirlwind of new scientific and mathematical developments, as well as a surge of both classical and contemporary culture. This was brought on by a big mix of factors namely a religious motivation to search for knowledge, a cultural desire to assimilate knowledge from other conquered cultures, substantial government sponsorship of scholarly research and the discovery of paper at the risk of making this segment its own video Let's do a quick rundown of just how much was accomplished in these 500 years. 1: Almost all of the aristotelian philosophy we have is because muslims loved translating him into arabic and writing commentaries on him.
This is super important because the European monks did nearly nothing to preserve any classical knowledge that wasn't related to Christianity. 2: Algebra sine waves and Arabic numerals were all Islamic innovations in case the "Arabic" part didn't give that away, as well as the hugely iconic Geometry and Arabesque architecture in case the "Arabesque" part didn't give that away.
A prime example of this is what you'll find all along the walls and the palaces of Alhambra in Spain which if you're unfamiliar with it ask anyone who teaches Geometry and they're likely to rave to you about Alhambra for hours. 3: Early iterations of the scientific method came out of a few medical Scientists from the era, so you're welcome for that one...the enlightenment. And no I didn't accidentally skip that line when I originally recorded this three days ago and now have to hastily go back and record this in the middle of editing you're crazy. 4: Muslim scientists had a decent handle on why evolution was definitely a thing and how the heart and the nervous system worked and they both Rediscovered classical medical knowledge and made new breakthroughs that remained viable through the 18th century. 5: Islamic world gave us some of the first proper hospitals as we know them today as well as the first universities.
Freedom of expression and belief so long as it did not infringe on the rights of others was a huge pillar of public and scholarly thought in the era so if you think that Islam is a religion that Constricts freedom of speech let me point out this counter example to you and also remind you that religion is, among many other things, a tool by which you organize and coordinate a society. Whether it's used for good or bad is often solely in the hands of the current religious leader who, with time and effort, passes his or her personal beliefs about the religion down to those who practice it.
It's why Catholicism and the crusades is totally different from Catholicism now. And it's why Islam during the Golden Age of scholarship is different from what's going on in Islam now too in what I'd say amounts to its personal equivalent of the Protestant Reformation Wars. So don't go around being all judgy about Islam when whatever religious or national identity you most closely identify with has had its share of questionable history too.
And I'm not saying you need to sing its praises or anything like that, you just should simply respect it for what it is: an accomplished civilization with a complex history, just like everyone else. *ahem* Moving on. 6: (damn right there's more) The poet Rumi created beautiful Persian poetry while Islamic art was at the top of its game. Some of the finest glasswork, metalwork, woodwork, textiles, manuscripts and lusterware was coming out of islamic Persia. Finally, 7: We have islamic architecture and the mosque Islamic or Arabesque architecture is amazingly distinct and undeniably beautiful I cannot even begin to describe how breathtaking these buildings are so I'll just let this slideshow do the talking for me So that's the expedited look at the islamic world's astounding list of accomplishments over 500 short years But why doesn't anyone really know about it?
Well that's for a couple of reasons. First off, even though you the viewer and myself likely had somewhat different educational backgrounds we both probably didn't hear a lot about Islam and the Muslim world. We just weren't taught it. Stop me If this next little summary of the history of the world sounds a little bit familiar at all. Everything that was ever invented that was useful or smart came from the Greeks, Rome had the largest empire ever then everyone who lived in the Middle Ages was either a plague riddled peasant or Christian monk named Sebastian and everything else was sword fighting for a thousand years something something something Leonardo Davinci invents the renaissance, *bla-bla-bla*, age of reason,
America's Born, Civil War, World War 1 and 2, skip a few 99-100, and we're in the modern day. That sound familiar? At all? Well, if it does that's really unfortunate because that is a grossly Eurocentric view of history with almost no basis in fact at that The Greeks got a lot of things wrong to start with, and then rome is 24th on the world's biggest Empires list and so on and so forth and I could go on for hours about how much of the perspective on history we get as kids is either misleading or dead wrong, and I'm guilty of this too. I'm a damned classicist so my purpose in life is to make everything in the world relate back to Greece and Rome.
I brought the video about Islam back to Rome at least FOUR times! My point is this: I've done a lot on Greece and Rome, just because I'm already familiar with them. Much to the detriment of other equally fascinating societies that have completely ignored on the logic of "Why should I talk about anything other than the stuff I can already relate to and I know best?" Europe is only one half of one of the six inhabited continents on this Earth and our education system, and I myself need to bloody act like it. Okay with that out of the way.
Let's speed run some notable islamic history in the following century. 3 2 1 go! So at its peak the islamic world stretched pretty dang far and that meant the muslim armies were flirting with western Europe in the same way that Russia flirts with Ukraine. To address this issue and get rid of some of those pesky minorities the Spanish decided to build a wall and *Make España Bueno Again* at what they called the Reconquista This was, admittedly, a several hundred year long process and, with time, muslim rule was fought off and the remaining population of jews and muslims were accepted as part of Spanish society, albiet as the somewhat disenfranchised minority.
At the turn of the sixteenth century Spain launched a final push to kick out Judaism in Islam and restore full Catholicism to the land. Which leads us to the fact that nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! Even more surprising historians have recently unearthed shocking video footage of the inquisition itself. [Music] The Inquisition (wanna show). The Inquisition (here we go). We know you're wishing (that we go away) [Music] But the Inquisition is here and it's here to staaay (oh boy!) History is weird man.
If you've seen my videos on the Byzantine Empire and the Venetian Republic, you'll have a pretty good idea of my opinion on the crusades *ahem* *ahem* assholes *hmm* excuse me But let's now take a look at the actual history behind it. Now the crusades really really REALLY aren't about religion at all. If it was really a simple matter of Christianity vs. Islam for control of the holy land, like it's often taught, this would have happened three minutes ago in video time when the Byzantine Empire lost control the Holy Land in the Seventh Century Shortly after the Battle of Yarmouk.
Christians were happily making pilgrimages to and from the Muslim held Holy Land for centuries, to the economic benefit of everyone involved. No, the actual reason the crusades started was because that lovely tourism business was stomped on by the Seljuk Turks. We haven't heard about these guys before and it's because they rose from a bit of an ethnic splintering of the Abbasid Caliphate.
When they conquered Anatolia they thoroughly rustled the collective jimmies of the Byzantine Empire who then ran crying straight to the Pope for help. The Pope was totally on board with helping them retake their land for two reasons. 1: he could unite the constantly squabbling European powers together against a common muslim enemy and 2: the Pope was really hoping that doing the Orthodox Byzantines such a solid would make them see how totally legit and awesome the Catholic Pope was.
Which is something they had refused to do for several centuries Jerusalem was a footnote in this giant plan, not so much "We're rescuing the holy land" and more along the lines of "Well, we are already here so might as well" While the motivations for the First Crusade, as we've seen, were territorial and political in nature, the vast majority of Europeans and the crusaders themselves saw it as a fully religious quest. That is what good PR will get you.
It's because of this that we end up with a series of Gung-ho wars in the east instead of anything in which the crusades can be remotely construed as righteous or just in any inherent way The last thing on our agenda here is the Mongol invasion and how it constitutes a pretty solid end to the Islamic Golden Age in 1258. I'll skip getting into the Mongols themselves because holy crap where would I start? But I will say that the farthest west part of their conquest stretched into the Indo-Persian parts of the Muslim world and into the former Abbasid capital of Baghdad Hot damn, that's far.
Given a sizable chunk of all that Golden Age goodness came right out of the Indo-Persian more eastern parts of the caliphate the whole being invaded thing was a pretty substantial inconvenience for them. With those three notable incursions against Islam and/or their territory and/or their people we come to the end of the Golden Age and are now on the brink of the birth, growth and conquests of the soon to be dominant Muslim Ottomans. Which we've discussed here, here, here and here The Moral of the story is twofold.
One, great things come from where you least expect them I mean honestly who would have thought that the most dominant power in the world for several centuries would come out of middle of nowhere Arabia. Two, we all have to learn to look farther beyond what we're taught because it is a really big world out there, and we're doing ourselves one hell of a disservice if we willfully ignore its wonders Not Christian or Jew or MuslimNot Hindu, Buddhist,
Sufi or ZenNot any religion or cultural system I am not from the East or the West Not out of the ocean or up from the ground not natural or ethereal not composed of elements at all I do not exist Am not an entity in this world or in the nextDid not descend from Adam and Eve or any origin story My place is placeless, a trace of the traceless. Neither body, or soul. I belong to the beloved, have seen the two worlds as one and that one call to and know, first, last, outer, inner, only that breath breathing human being.
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