Chased by al-Mansur’s hitmen, Abd al-Rahman with his Greek slave Badr moved westwards in a series of escapades. On one occasion he had to hide under the fragrant skirts of a beautiful female cousin, an experience that he happily remembered in old age: ‘I recall your earthy aroma to this day!’ Finally he reached Morocco and, after sending his freedman to test support, he arrived in Gibraltar in 755, winning his nickname the Arriver (al-Dakhil), gathering followers: in 756, he declared himself amir of al-Andalus. Al-Mansur sent an army to crush him but the Arriver routed it, pickling the heads of the generals and despatched them in giftboxes all the way to the caliph who was on
‘You, O Caliph,’ replied his courtiers.
He shook his head. ‘The Falcon is Abd al-Rahman.’
Abd al-Rahman, then aged twenty-six, spent his life fighting to keep the title, but he also started to beautify his capital Cordoba, crafting a mosque out of a Visigothic church that would become a wonder of the west with its forest of columns borrowed from Roman ruins across Spain and perhaps designed to recall the palm trees of Syria. He never ceased to miss Syria, comparing himself to a palm tree who was also ‘a stranger in the west / Far from your oriental home, like me unblessed … / You would weep if you had tears to pour / For my companions on Euphrates’ shore’. Yet the Falcon could not rest on his laurels. His enemies invited Charlemagne, king of Francia, to cross the Pyrenees and destroy him.
Bathing in his pool at the hot springs of Aix (Aachen), at the centre of his court of paladins, scholars, concubines and sons, Charlemagne, suffering gout and aching after weeks in the saddle, would swim a few lengths then question his Anglo-Saxon scribe – ‘Master Alcuin, allow me to ask you a few questions’ – on the planets or Pliny, while his mischievous daughters flirted with his courtiers.
From the moment he ascended the throne in 768 at the age of twenty, Charlemagne, blond, giant and irrepressibly energetic, galloped, broadsword in hand, from one end of Europe to the other, dominating the continent more than anyone else until Napoleon and Hitler, with the difference that he ruled for forty years – and virtually every monarch in Europe down to 1918 was descended from him. He outmanoeuvred his brother, along with anyone else who threatened his power, conquered Aquitaine and married Princess Desiderata, daughter of the Lombard king of Italy, Desiderius, who almost immediately moved to take over Rome. Pope Hadrian appealed to Charlemagne, who switched sides, routed Desiderius and seized the crown of Italy, in the process rejecting his Lombard wife and marrying a German princess, Hildegard.
Charlemagne loved women, marrying five times. Hildegard bore him nine children before dying at twenty-six, but he had many more – eighteen in all – with a host of concubines. This royal brood naturally revolved around the strapping king, six foot five, usually clad in simple Frankish garb, with silk-trimmed tunic, fur coats, linen trousers and gold-hilted sword, but his extraordinary confidence and ambition were not effortless: he often suffered insomnia, getting up five times a night and then holding court in bed the next day.
