* Charlemagne educated his daughters as well as his sons. He believed it was his mission to halt the decline in education during recent centuries and to preside over a restoration of faith, order and culture. Inviting scholars to his capital at Aix, he sponsored the
* Marriages to sisters-in-law and mothers-in-law were banned as incestuous – hence these phrases, which are still in use.
* Haroun allowed the Patriarch of Jerusalem to send Charlemagne a key to the Holy Sepulchre, the start of a new west European interest in the Holy City, where Christians enjoyed tolerance – for the moment. Charlemagne’s relations with Haroun in Baghdad worked in both east and west. To the east, Constantinople was defeated by the caliph, encouraging the emperors to appease the Franks; Charlemagne got Rome and Ravenna; Constantinople got Venice, Dalmatia and southern Italy. In the west, Haroun was also the enemy of the Umayya of al-Andalus. In 797, Hisham, Abd al-Rahman’s son, ordered a successful invasion of Aquitaine (sixty years after the supposedly decisive victory of Charles Martel).
* Baghdad’s luxuries arrived in huge dhows eastwards from Egypt and Africa and westwards from China on round trips of 12,600 miles. Around 828, a ship, built in Persia out of African mahogany and Indian teak, held together by Malay twine, sailed from Guangzhou with silks, spices and 60,000 tiles, 18 silver ingots, gold ornaments, 55,000 glazed bowls from Changsha, 763 inkpots (for the poets of Baghdad), 915 spice jars and 1,635 ewers decorated with lotuses for Buddhist customers in Indo-China and geometric designs for Muslims, along with jars and utensils from Vietnam and Thailand. It sank near the island of Belitung, off Java, and the wreck was not discovered until 1998.
* In rare cases, these showgirls could become free and rich: Arib, later the favourite poet-singer of Haroun’s son al-Mamun, was a superstar who sang for five caliphs. When she died at ninety-six, she was a wealthy landowner.
* ‘The caliph’s sodomy is amazing,’ went a satirical poem of the time. ‘While the vizier’s passive homosexuality is even more so. One of them buggers and the other is buggered; that’s the only difference between them. If only the two managed to use each other … but Amin plunged into the eunuch Kawthar; while being fucked by donkeys didn’t satisfy the other …’
* Arab society was highly sophisticated but the House of Wisdom did not singlehandedly rescue Greek learning for benighted, primitive, medieval Europe. Its importance was exaggerated by western historians after 9/11 to demonstrate US–European ignorance of Arab culture. Those accounts have somehow forgotten the existence of Constantinople: all Greek literature was available in Constantinople for another 500 years. Charlemagne’s scholars were also translating Greek works into Latin, and other works were translated at the Umayya court in Cordoba.
* Al-Mamun commissioned the Banu Musa brothers to calculate the world’s circumference and the Persian polymath al-Khwarizmi to write his mathematical treatise
* Jahiz quotes a grand dame of Medina who was asked by young girls if sex was enjoyable. She recalled a pilgrimage with Caliph Othman: ‘On the way back, my husband looked at me and I looked at him. He fancied me and I fancied him, and he leaped on me just as Othman’s camels were passing. I cried out loud as there came to me what comes to the daughters of Adam. And all five hundred camels scattered. It took two hours to collect them all.’
* After a long career in Baghdad, Jahiz’s patrons were executed and he retired to Basra. There, literary to the last, he was crushed and killed by a heap of books, the ideal death of any bibliophile. Abu Nawus had died soon after his patron Caliph al-Amin.
Rurikovichi and the House of Basil
THE MAGIC: RURIK AND THE VIKINGS – BERSERK WAR, GROUP SEX AND HUMAN SACRIFICE
Abd al-Rahman II built a fleet to repel the Vikings, using Greek Fire, but al-Andalus was not the only region suffering. The Vikings attacked north Africa too, yet the most intense raids were already hitting the Frankish and British coasts.
