The World полностью

Soon after Charles’s death, the family had a stroke of luck. In 751, Pope Zacharias requested help from Martel’s son Pepin the Short against the Lombard kings who ruled northern Italy. Popes were at the mercy of voracious Lombards and Roman magnates. Pepin had his price: a crown. As a result, the last Merovingian, Childeric III, was tonsured, losing his regal locks. Pepin favoured a new look – short hair and long moustaches – as king of the Franks. In 753, when a new pope, Stephen, travelled north to court King Pepin, he was greeted by his six-year-old son Charles – later known as Charlemagne. Stephen anointed Pepin, Charlemagne and his brother Carloman as kings and patricians of the Romans.

Pepin the Short intervened in Italy, granting Pope Stephen bountiful estates and ordering the payment across Europe of tithes to fund the papacy, gifts that made the popes players for the first time. Then he expelled the Arabs from Septimania. When he was thirteen, Charlemagne accompanied his father to war; when he was fifteen, Pepin gave him his first concubine, Himiltrud, with whom he had a child. Looking out across the world, Pepin and Charlemagne knew nothing of life across the Atlantic; to the north, they enjoyed good relations with the main British kingdom, Mercia; to the east, they clashed with the pagan Saxons of central Europe; further away, the Greek world of Constantinople was strange and distant; and beyond them were the Islamic caliphs whose lands were so vast that they circled round the Mediterranean to Spain in the west. Now, an Islamic rebel, al-Mansur, sent an envoy, probably a Jewish trader, to ask for Pepin’s assistance against the decadent caliphs of Damascus.

In 743, when Abd al-Malik’s grandson Walid II became caliph, his extravagant debauchery seemed to confirm the anti-Islamic rot of the Umayya dynasty. The seed didn’t fall far from the tree: it was the age of the jarya, enslaved singers who were bought for massive sums. Walid’s father, Yazid II, had fallen in love with the enslaved singer Hababah, whom he saw as a youngster in Mecca but could not afford until he became caliph in 720, when he paid 4,000 gold pieces. In Damascus, Hababah starred in spectacular productions with fifty other singers which the caliph found so enrapturing that he thought he was in paradise: ‘I want to fly away.’ After she choked to death on a pomegranate seed, he could not bear to part with her body for three very unMuslim days. When Yazid II died in 724, Walid, then a teenager, was passed over for his uncle Hisham. While Hisham spent twenty years enjoying his harem, Crown Prince Walid, poet, lover, gambler and hunter, flaunted his outrageous pleasure-seeking – ‘in love with love’ – in poetry:

I would that all wine were a dinar a glass

And all cunts on a lion’s brow

Then only the libertine would drink

And only the brave make love.

His paramour was an enslaved singer, Nawar, nicknamed Salma, whom he compared to a lush harvest and whose features he eulogized: ‘Salma my love, an antelope I adore for the dark eyes and flawless neck and throat.’ But Salma was unfaithful, and Walid revelled in this tormented passion.^*

Walid’s rock-star behaviour was so debauched that Hisham decided to disinherit him in favour of his own son Muawiya, but he died – and the playboy inherited the empire. When Walid was too drunk to leave his orgies, he did the unthinkable: Salma, the jarya, dressed up in caliphal vestments and led Friday prayers. Or so his enemies claimed.

Walid partied in his new pleasure palaces in the desert,^* wallowing soused in bathhouses decorated with mosaics that were more Persian and Roman than Islamic. At Qusr al-Amra, he commissioned frescoes that show him lording it over the conquered monarchs of Constantinople, Persia, China, Ethiopia and Spain, while its bathhouse features naked girls, smoking, dancing and banqueting. When a poet visited Walid, he fell dead drunk and then shouted after him, ‘Son of a whore, if so much as a whisper passes your lips, I’ll have your head off.’

‘Wake up, Umayya!’ warned a dissident. ‘Search for the caliph of God among the tambourines and lutes!’ As Walid partied, rumours and revelations swarmed; rebels besieged him in 744 and the caliph, now thirty-eight, was beheaded. Meanwhile not far from his party house, something strange was happening.

THE BLOODSHEDDER AND THE GIANT BABY: RISE OF ABBAS, FALL OF TANG