In Merv, Nizam introduced Malikshah to the Persian polymath Omar Khayyam, deviser of algebraic formulae, observer of stars, poet of wine-sipping girls and transient life. Khayyam worked in the Seljuks’ observatories, the jewel of their court, at a time when Merv itself became Mother of the World, home to 500,000, endowed with a library and observatory, the world’s biggest city outside China.
The sultan adored Nizam, calling him ‘father’, and with his assistance stabilized his vast empire, reflecting on the paradox of earthly supremacy: ‘I can cope with hunger,’ Malikshah used to say, ‘but save me from the curse of abundance.’ Yet as his confidence grew he came to resent Nizam, who lectured him: ‘Remind the sultan, I’m his partner. Doesn’t he remember when his father was killed, and I crushed the rebels? If ever I close this vizieral inkstand, the sultanate will topple.’ The indispensable are soon dispensed with. Nizam moved against the Assassins, Shiite sectarians,* who had just set up a little theocracy at Alamut in the Iranian mountains and had started a terrorist campaign against Sunnis. Nizam besieged Alamut, but failed to take it. The Assassins ordered Nizam’s assassination, but there were rumours that Malikshah had encouraged them.
In October 1092, the vizier, seventy-four years old, was stabbed to death in his litter, but a month later Malikshah was poisoned by the caliph – and the Seljuks shattered into baronial fiefdoms, leaving the House of Islam in the east as vulnerable as it was in the west.
In 1091, in Cordoba, a libertine Arab poet-princess died as a new force of Berber invaders from Morocco galloped into the city. The story of this caliph’s daughter shows how the richest kingdom in the Europe, the caliphate of Abd al-Rahman, fell to an African invasion.
She was Wallada, a caliph’s daughter. The caliphs had lost power to a brilliant warlord who had ravaged the Christian north but hollowed out the caliphate. In 1025, her father Muhammad III was poisoned, and al-Andalus broke up into little kingdoms ruled by warring kinglets – the
Blonde and blue-eyed with ‘flowing hair and white shoulders’, Wallada enjoyed a rare life for an Islamic woman in Corboda, now ruled by noble clans. No longer secluded in the Umayya harem, independently wealthy, she appeared in public, wearing silks that showed off her beauty and her figure, recited her poetry in public, competing against men in poetry contests, and set up a school for female poets. She flaunted her lovers. When the religious authorities grumbled, she had lines of poems defiantly written on her dresses: ‘I allow my lover to touch my cheek and bestow my kiss on him who craves it.’ Around 1031, she fell in love with an aristocratic vizier, Ibn Zaydun, who naturally proposed in poetry:
Between you and me (if you wished) there could exist
What cannot be lost: a secret undivulged.
She relished her sensuality – ‘When night falls, anticipate me visiting you; / For I believe night is the best keeper of secrets’ – but she was tormented by jealousy, particularly when Ibn Zaydun slept with one of her black slaves:
You know that I am the clear, shining moon of the heavens,
But to my sorrow, you chose, instead, a dark and shadowy planet.
Ibn Zaydun claimed, ‘You compelled me to commit the sin … You were right, but pardon me, O sinner!’ She paid him back with her most talented female protégée, the poetess Muhja bint al-Tayyani, and a male vizier. Ibn Zaydun turned nasty, writing to Wallada, ‘You were for me nothing but a sweetmeat that I took a bite of and then tossed away the crust, leaving it to be gnawed on by a rat.’ Wallada got her revenge by exposing his affairs with slave boys:
Because of his love for rods in trousers, Ibn Zaydun,
In spite of his excellence,
If he would see a penis in a palm tree,
He would turn into a woodpecker.
*
Exiled to Seville, Ibn Zaydun regretted losing Wallada: ‘I remember you with passion … Delicious were those days we spent while Fate slept. There was peace, I mean, and we were thieves of pleasure.’ As for Wallada, this proto-feminist leaves history in her own words – of course: ‘Respected I am, by God of the highest, and proudly I walk with head held high.’
The sybaritic life of the small Muslim kingdom was short-lived. In 1091, on the day Wallada, last of the Umayya, died at the age of ninety-one, blue-veiled Berber horsemen of the Atlas mountains rode with their elephants and camels into Cordoba – masters of a new Euro-African empire that stretched from the Senegal River to the Pyrenees mountains.
