Emperors and Caliphs: The Tape Recorder Trilogy - S3E07

(710 – ~775 CE · Constantinople, Syria, The Holy Land, North Africa, & Spain) 

The Narrator continues his lecture on world events with terrible updates from the Greek-speaking Roman Empire ruled from Constantinople that eventually led to the Iconomachy, the struggle over religious images that would torment Orthodox Christianity for generations. He also explains the rise and fall of the Umayyad Caliphate, the Abbasid Revolution, and the flight of Abd al-Rahman to Al-Andalus.

Based on Chapter 7 of End by Geoff Micks.

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Credits: 

Voice Acting - Geoff Micks

Editing - Geoff Micks

Music - Dimitri Kovalchuk (MokuseiNoMaguro) through Pixabay

Additional Music - Aleksey Voronin (Amaksi) through Pixabay 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

In 2015, a man who has been alive since the last ice age bought a tape recorder, and over the course of three days he dictated his life story as fast as he could while waiting for a woman to visit who he believes will finally be the death of him. Hello again, everyone. My name is Jeff Mix, and you are listening to season three, episode seven of the Tape Recorder Trilogy Podcast. Enjoy. Oh, the rulers of the eastern half of the Roman Empire could rise to an occasion when pressed. When Muawea and his successors made war on the holy capital, someone always stepped up and saved the great city in its hour of need. As soon as matters calmed down, though, the Greeks who called themselves Romans turned on each other again, over God, over power, over settling scores. Sometimes I think they did it just to be remembered. It occurs to me I have not talked about myself for a while, and I still do not want to do that. I want to talk about what was happening in the world while I drink this rye and enjoy my fire. If it helps you to imagine me scurrying from place to place trying to avoid all this chaos I am about to describe to you, you would not be far wrong. I made my living mostly by transporting small valuables that I could keep on my person while travelling long distances books, spices, jewels, official documents, that sort of thing. For every terrible thing I am about to mention, imagine me hastily finding a good reason to do business on the opposite side of the known world. Let us begin with Justinian II, the emperor in Constantinople about the time I was converting Berbers in the wastelands of the Al Maghreb. Justinian was lucky enough to take the throne after his father had fought the Arabs to a temporary standstill, so he took his army north against the Bulgars and Slavs, winning much needed victories in Europe. With relative calm on both fronts, he held a meeting of church leaders to dictate some reforms that included ordering the arrest of a particularly insolent bishop in Rome, but Justinian soldiers in Italy preferred the Pope to the Emperor. Meanwhile, while trying to improve conditions for the peasantry, he made enough enemies among the Empire's wealthy landlords that they organized a palace coup. The ringleaders cut off his nose. There was a belief at the time that an emperor had to be physically whole, so this was a way to strip him of the throne forevermore, and then they banished him to a fly speck of a town on the north shore of the Black Sea to quietly die a lonely death. This is where it gets interesting. Pay attention. Justinian does not see the lack of a nose as an impediment to regaining his throne. He has a fat purse of gold coins with his face stamped on them, and he decides he might as well stamp them on his face. He has the coins melted down and cast into a prosthetic nose that shines in the sun, dazzling the townfolk. He then marries the daughter of the local horse lord, and starts gathering supporters for a march on Rome. The new emperor hears of Justinian's new nose and big dreams, so he pays Justinian's father in law to murder him. Well, the man with the golden nose smells that trouble coming a mile away. He strangles two of the horse lord's hired killers to death with his bare hands, steals a ship, and sails away into the teeth of a terrible gale, while his family and his most loyal friends and supporters cowered amidship, staring up at him on the poop deck as he screamed terrible oaths of vengeance at the raging heavens. I met the navigator of this ship once when he was a very old man. I swear to you I am repeating this next bit to you exactly as it was told to me. One of Justinian's most loyal lieutenants plucks up his courage and approaches the raving emperor in the stern, holding his Bible in front of him like a shield. Majesty, he begs, promise God you will show your enemies mercy when you don the purple again, and he will surely spare us all. Justinian pulls off his golden nose so everyone can see his disfigurement, and he roars out over the wind and waves If I spare a single one of them, may God drown me now. They survived the storm, and Justinian takes this as a sign of divine approval for his revenge. He lands in Bulgaria, which was Thrace and Thracia when I talked about it yesterday and the day before. That was before the Bulgars poured down out of the steppe and made it their own. Anyway, Justinian marries his daughter to the Bulgar's Khan, promising to make his new son in law the second most powerful man in the empire in exchange for the loan of fifteen thousand horsemen for a few months. Now with an army at his back, Justinian rides to Constantinople, lets his new Bulgar friends scare the garrison on the walls, while he sneaks into the city using an unused water conduit, seizes the palace in a midnight assault, and the city awakes the next morning to the herald summoning everyone to appear in the great hippodrome to see justice done. Justinian begins his vengeance by having his deposers stretched out in the sand at his feet. He walks on their necks while wearing hobnailed sandals to show his dominance of them, and then he has them beheaded. Next he has their son's testicles removed before banishing them to the same fly speck where their late fathers had sent him to die. After that, he has the eyes gouged out of the patriarch of Constantinople who dared to betray him and serve the new masters after he was gone. Those were the public spectacle purges. Justinian has also drawn up an enemy's list while he was in exile, and no one who ever wronged him or helped his foes escaped his wrath. God had not drowned him, and therefore God wanted all of them to suffer for their crimes. The second reign of Justinian was worse than the first. His only true victory was forcing the appointment of a new puppet bishop in Rome. The fellow even took the papal name of Constantine to acknowledge his loyalty to Constantinople's way of thinking. Justinian ordered this lapdog of a pope to come to his capital and swear holy oaths to agree with Justinian in all things. That was in seven hundred ten, the same year the Berbers first crossed into Spain. The next pope to visit Constantinople would not do so until nineteen sixty seven, by which time Muslim Turks had been ruling it under the name Istanbul for five centuries. So how did Justinian II, remembered by his many enemies as the slit nosed for the injury they did to him, finally meet his end? Just a month after his pet pope left Constantinople, the man with the golden nose rode out to fight the Umayads, only to have the imperial city revolt behind him. His army saw which way the wind was blowing, and they beheaded him before he could plot a new campaign of vengeance. His wife and young son sought sanctuary in a church, but they were dragged away from the altar and beaten to death in the square just outside the doors, ending the dynasty that had seen the last of the Sassanids and the first of the Muslims. People rejoiced that Justinian the Slitnose was dead, but they did not know what was coming. The leader of the rebellion was made emperor. With Arabs to the south and Bulgars to the north, he decided the first and most important thing he must do as emperor was try to walk back all religious reforms of the last three decades and return Christianity to what it had been in his boyhood. This did not inspire the populace. The first time he marched out to war, his soldiers arrested him, blinded him, exiled him, and appointed his chief of staff as their new emperor. That sensible fellow had enough brains to stop the religious talk, strengthen Constantinople's walls, and insist that three years worth of grain be stored up in preparation for a lengthy siege before the army got bored with him and shoved him into a monastery. At least they allowed him to keep his eyes. The rebellious soldiers next selected a prominent tax collector to rule the empire, figuring he would be good with money and thus able to pay them well. The trouble was he did not want to be emperor. No, he ran like a frightened rabbit and tried to hide in the woods, but a regiment of cavalry scoured the countryside until they found him, draped him in the purple, and brought him back to the Imperial Palace at Lancepoint. It was only as a hundred and twenty thousand soldiers and eighteen hundred ships from the Umayyad Caliphate started moving towards Constantinople that the army finally accepted that their pet emperor was just not the man for the job. They let him step down to become a bishop to pray for this success. Again, they let him keep his eyes, the better to read his hymnal, and one of their officers stepped up to rule an empire on the brink of total collapse. For all the terrible things that had happened to it, Constantinople really should have been called the city of good fortune. The number of times it struck at lucky in its darkest hours is staggering, and this is a great example. The officer I just mentioned took the imperial name of Leo III. Within two months of donning the purple, Constantinople was completely besieged by land and water, by the largest army and navy in the world. But Leo did not blink. Hopelessly outnumbered, Leo made a point of acting as if everything was normal. He set an example of fortitude, and the city was calm in the face of calamity. Oh, you can't go fishing because of the Arabs? I'll take care of it, Leo said. Out go the city's fast attack craft, armed with Greek fire, a secret chemical concoction that could be sprayed out towards an enemy ship and, when ignited, was impossible to extinguish with water. The Arab sailors learned to give the Roman ships a wide berth, and Constantinople's fish market remained well stocked. Meanwhile, the walls were in good condition and well manned, the granaries were bursting, all open city land was planted with community gardens, and the churches were all praying night and day for victory against the Muslims. What was there to worry about? From the Muslims' perspective, there was much to worry about. The walls of Constantinople were impenetrable to the siege weapons of the time, and far too formidable to take by storm or by stealth. The vulnerable unused water conduit of Justinian the slit nosed had been filled in several coups ago. There was nothing to do but try to starve out a city with three years worth of food stored up, plus farmland inside the walls and all the fish the populace could eat. Speaking of starving, what about the besiegers? Have you ever tried to feed hundreds of thousands of hungry mouths day in and day out, many months' journey from their homes? It is not like the invaders could forage far and wide while maintaining effective siege lines when the hinterland of Constantinople was full of Bulgarian horsemen who preferred Christians to Muslims. When winter set in, the Muslims were desperately uncomfortable. They did not have the camp discipline of a Roman army, they did not have the camp sanitation of a Roman army, they did not have the logistics or creature comforts of a Roman army. They spent months on end eating very little, drinking bad water, and shivering under canvas in the snow and the cold wet. Hunger and disease killed tens of thousands. The next spring, reinforcements arrived from all over the Islamic world in eight hundred more ships, as if a lack of manpower had been the problem. Meanwhile, the sea was still a new and strange element to Muslims, and most of the few who were sailors had already manned the first eighteen hundred ships. The spring's reinforcements arrived on a fleet crewed almost exclusively by good Orthodox Christians, and as soon as the Ghazis were off loaded into the starving camps of the emaciated siege lines, the ships defected in their dozens and hundreds to Leo III in Constantinople. A sickly and demoralized Muslim army gave up on the siege after thirteen months. Those who were able to sail home suffered still further loss of life thanks to a new eruption from the volcano under the island of Thera, the same one I told you about two days ago. The great waves kicked off by the explosion swamped vessels and destroyed harbors all over the Aegean. As for the Muslim soldiers who were ferried over to the Asian side of the Bosporus and needed to walk home, marching to Syria in defeat is even less pleasant than it sounds. They were harried and harassed by Roman partisans in Calvary the whole time. Leo III had won, but he was frustrated that things had ever gotten so bad in the first place. Why was Christianity back on its heels? Had Constantinople somehow lost God's favor? That is when some idiot put the thought in Leo's head that maybe when people worshipped an image of Christ, or of Mary, or of God or the saints or angels, maybe Christ and Mary and God and the saints and angels were offended. The divine powers that be were not trapped in that drawing, that painting, that mosaic, that tapestry, that sculpture, that glasswork, that jewelry. You cannot draw God. You cannot circumscribe Christ. You cannot capture Mary in a thing. Exodus says Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth below, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them, for I, the Lord thy God am a jealous god, visiting the inequity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me. The argument went that even the Muslims knew to encourage people to worship an idol is to suggest an object man can put his hands upon has power over heaven, and not the other way around. Perhaps that was why God had allowed Islam to grow so strong so fast. Leo slurped up that explanation for his empire's misfortunes like a baby at his mother's breast. God the Greeks were insufferable when they decided to split hairs over theology, and this was no mere splitting of hairs. To stretch a metaphor, this was deciding whether hair was good or evil, and anyone pro hair had to be the enemy of anyone pro hairless and vice versa. Leo began his campaign against the worship of graven images by ordering a sculpture of Christ to be taken down off the main gate to his imperial palace. A mob of devout Christians lynched the soldiers who removed the effigy of their Savior. Leo had the ringleader of that mob crucified. The patriarch of Constantinople objected. Leo forced the Holy Father to retire to a monastery and replaced him with someone who would agree with him. Meanwhile, a Roman Empire desperate for treasure discovered many of those icons and idols were made of precious things, and the people willing to protect those icons and idols tended to be the people rich enough to own other precious things. Where they were willing to put their lives on the line to fight for their beliefs, forfeiting their lives also forfeited their fortunes. Confiscated wealth poured into the imperial coffers, coffers that yawned bottomless and insatiable after the ceaseless wars to the north and south. Not that there was a financial reason for the iconomachie, the struggle over images, of course. Put that thought out of your minds, dear listeners. The icona class, the breakers of images, really did think they were doing God's work. The money was just a bonus. Maybe it was even God's way of rewarding them for their diligence as they stripped churches and cemeteries and private homes, and even people's wardrobes to scrape away any public display of holiness. Yes, the fact that some people became rich and others desperately poor or dead was entirely beside the point. Holy things needed to go. Do you know who had no interest in destroying images of Jesus, Mary, God, and the saints and angels? Christians who did not live under the direct control of the emperor in Constantinople. Christians like the Franks. Centuries had gone into teaching German barbarians the meaning of a crucifix. To put it mildly, they were not interested in throwing their sacred icons and holy relics into a fire. The Pope in Rome howled his full throated opposition to the iconoclass, and half of Christendom loved him for it openly, while much of the other half at least agreed privately among themselves that the Pope had the right of it. To further exacerbate matters, Leo began to find success against the Umaids again once he embraced iconoclasm, and where he faced setbacks he attributed it to not being as rigorous in his persecutions of icons as God wanted. It was a self sustaining downward spiral that only accelerated after the emperor's death. Leo III died peacefully in his bed, the first Roman ruler in six decades to be so lucky, and people attributed his happy passing at least in part to doing God's will. His son Constantine V was riding to war against the Muslims when he was betrayed by some of his army who wanted to roll back Christianity to before Leo became an iconoclast. Constantine beat the usurper and the usurper's son in a series of battles, and when he was safely back on his throne again in Constantinople, he credited his triumph to God's favor. The fifth Constantine now took iconoclasm to an absurd extreme. Knowing he could never persuade all the monasteries and nunneries of the rightness of his cause, Constantine ordered every monk and nun in his empire to appear on the racetrack of the Hippodrome before the eyes of Constantinople's citizenry in the stands. From his imperial box, Constantine ordered every man of the cloth below him to find a woman in a habit to hold hands with, and his soldiers made sure he was obeyed. When all the monks and nuns were paired off, Constantine V, in his capacity as God's anointed and head of the church, married them all en masse, in total disregard of their oaths to holy orders. Anyone who protested too loudly was killed by the waiting soldiers, iconoclasts all. Of course, now that the monasteries and nunneries were officially abandoned by their owners who had chosen instead to renounce their vows and wed, those institutions and their properties were ceded back to the throne. The idols and icons within were destroyed, and the rest of the assets were liquidated by the Imperial Treasury. The Pope in Rome watched all this happen in horror. Every small piece of temporal power his Roman Catholic Church had in Western Europe was attached to religious institutions like the ones Constantine V had just liquidated for the crime of holding their sacred items sacred. To give you a quick sense of just how much religious people hated the emperor in Constantinople, history at this time was almost always written by clergy, and Constantine V is today remembered as Constantine Caproninus, Constantine whose name means shit. I know I promise to get back to Charlemagne. I am not there yet. Forgive me. Liquor on an empty stomach has me babbling a little bit, and I am trying to paint a picture of just how insane the world was becoming in the century after I gave up on Islam bringing about world peace. So now let me talk just a little bit about the Umayads. I am not going to do the same kind of blow by blow I just did with Constantinople. I already said Muawiya was an able ruler. I did not say that upon his death, a great civil war swept through Islam over the issue of whether his son could succeed him or not. I was in the deep desert preaching to Berbers at the time, and it was not important to my story. So what happened? Briefly, there were always those who had looked at Muawiyah's caliphate as an unfortunate aftermath of the selection of Uthman over Ali following the murder of Caliph Umar al Katab. Why then should the next caliph be a son of the current caliph? Why should the prince of the faithful, the successor to the apostle of God, ever be a hereditary position? That is not what Muhammad, peace be upon him, had commanded, nor did it follow the example of the first two caliphs set. If all of Islam's troubles began with the third caliphate, should not the Uma look to the time before Uthman to move forward in peace and prosperity? In fact, one of the specific terms of Muawiyah's elevation to the Caliphate in the first place was a sacred vow that none of his sons would follow him. Of course, by the time Muaweh was dead, his clan, the Umayyads, did not give a fig for the oath of a dead man. They had benefited enormously from being the most powerful people in an empire stretching from the Atlantic to India. They were not prepared for a council of religious leaders to pick a new caliph at random. As the governors and generals of that empire, they were able to fight to preserve what was theirs, and so a whirlwind of blood and destruction swept through the heart of Islam. So careless and vicious was that struggle that by the time it was done, somehow the house of Umaya had badly damaged both the Great Mosque in Medina and the Kaba in Mecca itself. Every Muslim in the world is right to ask how the caliphate, the government of Islam, could allow its holiest places to be desecrated in a battle over who should protect them. Still, it seemed there was nothing to be done. The Umayyads emerged victorious, and the rest of us all had to pretend to accept the sermons we heard at Friday prayers. What was torn down could be built back up, what was burned could be restored. In the meantime, the Umayyads were building the Dome of the Rock and great mosques in Damascus and Kufa and Karawan to expand the number of holy sites and bring important Muslim structures into new Muslim cities. Of course, that is not true either. Those were not Muslim cities. The populace was mostly Christians and Jews paying jizya. The only majority Muslim neighborhoods were army camps full of Arabs built outside the cities proper, and Muslim converts were not allowed to live there among the Arabs for fear of diluting the bloodlines. Oh yes, the house of Umayyah cared a lot about bloodlines. Who your Arab ancestors were two and three generations before the birth of Muhammad, peace be upon him, could make all the difference between whether you got to be a governor, or a general, or a tax collector, or a court functionary, or a mere errand boy. You note I say Arab ancestor. No non Arab need apply for any government job of any kind under the Umayyads. Still, for a time, things were good. The Arab only government and Arabs Arab only officer corps of the army at least had a lot of motivation to go out and build up the Arab Empire, they knew how the spoils would be divided when they succeeded. Meanwhile, people like my Berber converts who were fighting and dying for Islam in Spain, or the Persian converts east of the Euphrates who were pulling up Zoroastrianism root and branch at great personal risk and sacrifice to themselves and their communities, these people understood that they were doing it for rewards in the next life, not this one. Or that at least is what they could tell themselves in the first heady days of their conversion. Let us return to the Umayyads' failures. Those hundreds of thousands of men and thousands of ships sent against Constantinople ended up being a terrible waste of resources. Also, there was only so far Islam could be pushed into India and China and the never ending steppe before the Gazis were checked by enemies as powerful as the Romans and the Franks. Now the Umayyads could not even take credit for successfully spreading the word of God. Martial failures against unbelievers were not the Umayyad's only sins. They also had moral failures that marred the reputation of how a prince of the faithful and his family should comport themselves. They grew soft and happy and decadent in their power. They built high walled pleasure palaces for themselves out in the desert around Damascus, where they enjoyed wine and women and song in ways far too rowdy for an empire built on humble submission to the will of God. What Uthman's excesses were to Umar's holy poverty, that was how much further the House of Umayah's extravagances exceeded anything Uthman could have imagined. Tales of their secret and not so secret debaucheries scandalized good Muslims everywhere. Soon enough it seemed the only people who actually liked the Umayyads were Umayyads themselves, and even that was not universal. There were rivalries within the family for both secular and spiritual reasons. Every one of these rivalries bred winners and losers. The losers lived on as bitter enemies of the ruling Umayyads, or they died and became martyrs to those who craved reform. It became a popular game after prayers across the empire to try to say something nice about the House of Umayya, something that everyone could agree they did well. There are few more scathing jokes than damning your rulers with faint praise like their Arabic is really very good, considering or no one picks a better carpet for a prayer hall. Well, no one else that I can think of right now. Such universal disdain was destined to boil over into revolts. Do you remember the outsiders, dear listeners? The people who tried to kill Amar ibn al As, Muawiyah, and Ali eighty years earlier? Imams who shared that breakaway faith took to preaching in mosques all over the Al Maghreb to the Berbers gathered there. Why does Islam need a caliph when God's will is written in the Holy Quran? Why are you ruled by Arabs in Damascus whose only claim to power is winning a series of civil wars in which you had no part? What is the house of Umayyad to you? They were powerful questions for which the distant Umayyad overlords did not have powerful answers. The Berbers rose up in righteous rebellion against the incompetent princes of the faithful in Damascus. The Umayyads sent a great army to reconquer North Africa between the Nile and the Atlantic Ocean, but the Berbers smashed it in a way that would have made Dia proud if only she were still alive and her people were still Christian. Meanwhile, the success of their brothers to the south inspired the Berbers of Spain to seek redress for the wrongs done to them. They too took up arms against the Arabs living among them in Al Andalus in a vicious civil war that offered no quarter and expected none in return. As a Muslim who was neither an Arab nor a Berber, I found myself alone and friendless in a country where Muslims were murdering Muslims on sight, and non Moslems were welcome to get in on the slaughter without fear that a Muslim lord would take it as a slight. That is when I became a Christian again for the first time in more than a hundred and thirty years. I converted as many of my assets as I could into portable wealth, and I made my way towards the Frankish royal court. That was about ten years before Peppen the Short would make his puppet king a monk, a period of relative peace despite the Frank's rough and tumble world, and so it seemed the safest place for me to build a new life. That is how bad things were in Al Andalus. But I'm not going back to the Franks just yet. Let me go on with the Umayyads. While Al Maghreb and Al Andalus were seething with rebellion as Berbers killed Arabs and Arabs killed Berbers, far to the east beyond the Tigris and the Euphrates, more preachers, not outsiders this time, wandered through the furthest reaches of the Muslim world saying, If bloodlines are so important in deciding who shall be caliph, would it not be wonderful to find an ancient and honorable Arab clan with close ties to the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him? There must be an Arab living today who can stand up and say, My family is also Meccan since the time of ignorance, but we are closer to the creation of Islam than the house of Umayyah. These preachers found a warm reception, for the peoples of the East were as hungry for a change in leadership as the Berbers of the West. The preachers went on to suggest that under a righteous new caliphate, Islam would belong to all Muslims, Arab and non Arab alike. Prosperity would not be established by ancestors, but by deeds. The Uma would prosper, and there would be peace between all Muslims who live as good Muslims. Even those living in the empire who were not Muslim would still find opportunities in the future once a better, more ancient, holier Arab family appeared to lead the world. It was a very seductive list of promises, and of course the preachers already had a family in mind. Dear listeners, I hope you appreciate that I have spared you most of the intricacies of Arab family history and politics. I do need to dip my toe into those waters for just a moment now. While the House of Umaya was a grand old family from Mecca, they were not particularly well represented in the stories of Muhammad, peace be upon him. If Uthman had not become the third caliphate, and if Muawiyah had not seized ultimate power at the end of the First Civil War between Muslims, no one would ever think of the House of Umaya as closely connected to Muhammad, peace be upon him. There was another clan, though, who descended from a man named Abbas Ibn Abdul Mutalib. Abbas had been an uncle of Muhammad, peace be upon him, but he was only three years older than his blessed nephew, and so was much more of a contemporary than an avuncular figure. Abbas had been a spice merchant of Mecca who protected Muslims in the city during the time of ignorance. His wife was one of the earliest converts of Muhammad, peace be upon him. When Abbas himself converted, the apostle of God gave his uncle holy responsibility over the Zamzam well in Mecca. Abbas lived to be eighty five years old, and to his dying day he was still giving pilgrims water from the well beside the Kaba. A hundred years later, Abbas's great grandchildren were prepared to call themselves Abbasids, a holier and purer Arab clan than the decadent Umayyads. They raised the Black Standard, a plain black flag that took its inspiration from one of Muhammad's own battle standards. It was a genius bit of branding. Everyone already had black cloth. To wear black was to swear your allegiance to the Abbasid Revolution, to freedom and equality in the Uma, and to the total destruction of the House of Umaya. May they all burn in hellfire forever for what they had done to Islam on Shaitan's behalf. Yes, the Abbasids went so far as to claim that the Umayyads worked for Shaitan. Satan, the devil. That boiled the blood of every Muslim, of course, but it also shrewdly played to the sympathies of the Zoroastrians of the fallen Sasanian Empire. Those fire worshippers believed their god was locked in an eternal struggle with the forces of darkness, and who among them could deny the house of Umaya was aligned with those dark forces? This was to be a revolution open to men of all faiths, provided they were willing to kill the evildoers. I called the movement a revolution, and I did so deliberately. Passionate people screaming for change were swept up in it, and they were driven into a frenzy beyond what anyone imagined in the movement's beginnings. Dear listeners, when you think of the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution, you think of common people rising up and killing the people in power, yes? That is what is happening here too. The people of the East, Arabs and Persians and anyone else willing to wear black, formed a mighty army intent on killing every Umayyad in the world. An Abbasid would become caliph when all the Umayyads were dead, and he would rule for all the people. How could that not be God's will? Of course it was God's will. How could anyone doubt it? Armed with true belief that they were the instruments of God's will, the Abbasids marched westward on their holy mission. The evil Umayyads met them with a great army in Iraq, but they were smashed on the battlefield because God willed it. The Abbasids chased the fleeing Umayyads all the way back to Syria, which had been the beating heart of Umayyad power since the days when Muawiyah was its governor. Braced for a savage struggle with new armies drawn from the house of Umayyad's most loyal subjects, the Abbasids discovered instead that the whole region was paralyzed and unable to support the retreating caliph because of a devastating earthquake. How could the Abbasids not take that earthquake as even more proof that they were doing God's will? God had killed tens of thousands of Syrians who might otherwise have rallied to support their Umayyad masters. God must want the total destruction of the house of Umayyad. When the Abbasids arrived in Damascus, they went from palace to palace in a holy fury of righteous indignation, cutting down every Umayyad they could find. When they ran out of living Umayyads, they dug up Umayyad graves and desecrated the bodies. Black clad soldiers captured a famous Umayyad cavalry officer and brought him to Damascus. They cut off his hand and foot, tied him onto the saddle of his horse, and then paraded the dying man up and down the street shouting, Behold, the greatest Umayyad horseman, encouraging the Syrians to applaud their one time hero as he died in front of them. When the ever retreating Umayyad Caliph was captured and killed by Abbasid forces in Egypt, the Abbasids announced a general amnesty and invited all the Umayyads still alive to come to a great banquet in the spirit of peace and reconciliation. More than eighty Umayyad nobles emerged from hiding to attend the dinner, eager to hear where they were supposed to fit into the new Abbasid Empire. When everyone was well tucked into the feast, the Abbasid hosts admitted a black clad mob armed with cudgels who beat the Umayyads to death between the second and third courses. The Abbasids were so committed to the total destruction of the house of Umayyad, they even rewrote history, stripping all but one of the Umayyad Caliphates of their title as prince of the faithful, calling them instead merely kings of an Arabic kingdom that was now thankfully destroyed. From this time forward the Islamic world belonged to all Muslims, as ruled by descendants of Abbas, beloved uncle and devout keeper of the Zamzamwel, as appointed by his nephew the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. In all this turmoil, the time has come to mention one man in particular. Abdal Rahman was a minor prince in the house of Umaya. His grandfather had been a middling caliph, but there was nothing in particular to mark the twenty year old prince out for a special place in his family's history. When the Abbasids stormed Damascus, most of Abdel Raman's kin fled west or south, but he took some of his closest family east towards the heart of Abbasid power, hoping to evade the bulk of their cavalry patrols searching for fugitive Umayyads. While a novel strategy, Abdel Rahman was still almost caught several times, breaking his fleeing family into smaller and smaller parties. At one point he and his four year old brother dove into the Euphrates to escape a team of horsemen in black clothes. The horsemen cried out that it was crazy to swim for it, that no harm would come to them if they returned to the riverbank. Abdel Rahman watched in horror as his little brother took the men at their word. He begged the boy to swim to him, but the boy chose the safety of the shore instead. He was beheaded as he climbed out of the water. The horsemen kept the child's head to claim a bounty, they left the rest of the body in the mud to rot. It is said when Abdel Raman got to the far side of the river, he ran all day and all night in horror at what he had seen. Down to a single servant, Abdul Rahman travelled in secret across an empire undergoing a revolution fueled by spilling his family's blood. He hoped to find refuge among the Berbers of Al Maghreb, for his mother had been a Berber. The people of the near and middle west were at first receptive to the idea of him living there, but as the Abbasid Revolution established a new world order, his host began to fear the young Umayyad noble would be more trouble than he was worth. Abdul Rahman next reached out to the different factions of Arabs who had shakily held on to Al Andalus after the terrible Berber revolts there. Would he be welcome among them? They were only in Spain at all because the Umayyad Caliphate had sent them and their fathers there in the first place. He was the last Umayyad prince in the world. Did they feel they owed him any allegiance? Response was muted, but poor prospects were better than none at all. Abdul Raman prepared to sail for Al Andalus. When his reluctant hosts among the Al Maghreb Berbers learned of his plans, they demanded a ransom to let him go, which he paid with the last of the silver he had hoarded through all of his travels. When a new party of Berbers rode to the beach to demand a second payment for themselves at the very moment of his departure, Abdul Raman had nothing left to offer them. He pushed his boat out into the water and cut off the Berber hands clinging to the gunnels. He knew after that there could be no going back. He arrived in Malaga about fifteen years after I had quit the city for Francia, not so long that I cannot imagine every detail of it. I am sure men I knew were among the three hundred Arabs who greeted him there. After all the Muslim blood spilled before and after I abandoned them, I can see why some might see their best chance lay with an Umayyad who was not part of any of their ongoing blood feuds. As a matter of fact, Abdul Raman was the first Umayyad ever to step foot in Spain. I wonder what Al Andalus would be like, what Christendom would be like, if the House of Umayyad had applied itself there from the beginning with all of its power and might, instead of treating it as a sideshow of a sideshow. Instead, Abdul Raman started with nothing. He did not even have a flag. He wrapped a green turban around a spear to mark himself on the battlefield. Starting with just a handful of supporters rejected by the more powerful factions, he played the Syrians off against the Yemenis and vice versa, played all the Arabs off against the Berbers and vice versa, and soon had oaths of allegiance from Muslim warlords of all types, but he trusted none of them. They had been fighting each other for decades, they would not hesitate to bury a dagger in his back if it would give them the slightest advantage over their fellows. As soon as he had the wealth to do so he bought slaves, black men from south of the Sahara Desert, and white men from the forests and plains of eastern Europe, and he made those slaves his personal bodyguard. He won their absolute loyalty with this promise. Fight for me, and you will live together as honored and respected men. I will take care of you, and you will enjoy happy lives. If I die, no my enemies will murder you all without mercy. The slaves only had to look around at the Arab and Berber and Spanish forces staring back at them, allies and enemies and allies prepared to become enemies at a moment's notice, to know the truth of Abdul Rahman's words. They fought like lions for him, and he treated them as the elite and valued fighting men he so desperately needed. In all this talk of North Africa and Spain, let us not forget who Abdul Rahman was running from in the first place the Abbasids. True believers in God's mission to destroy the House of Umaya, the Abbasids were deeply unhappy to hear Abdul Rahman had survived and found a home far away where he was now carving out a new empire for himself. The Abbasid Caliph appointed veteran battle commanders from the revolution to govern his African territories and organize the most formidable fighting force possible for an immediate attack on the opposite side of the Mediterranean. Assuming the matter safely dealt with, the Abbasid Caliph returned his attention to his greatest project. He was building the new capital city of Baghdad in Iraq, closer to the Abbasid power base in the east at the expense of the one time Umayyad capital of Damascus in their Syrian stronghold. The Abbasid army landed in Al Andalus, and every Muslim in Spain who thought Abdul Rahman was done for raised the black standard in sympathy with the invaders. Even those who did not support the new outsiders against the old outsiders stayed home when Abdul Raman summoned his barons to help him. The Abbasids besieged Abdul Rahman and his elite slave army inside a fortress for two months. With food and water running low, the last Umayyad summoned his seven hundred best men to form up by the gates. He had a great bonfire lit, and before the eyes of his warriors he threw his scabbard into the flames. I now have no way to sheath my sword, he explained. Then Abdal Raman said it was better to die fighting than starving. If death was coming either way, better to die trying to win. Abdul Raman opened the gates, and his army stormed out and massacred the black clad besiegers, even though they were outnumbered more than ten to one. When news of the victory spread across Al Andalus, the black standards came down and were replaced by green cloths wrapped around spears in tribute to their victorious lord. The last Umayyad had come out of his darkest hour, stronger than ever. Meanwhile, remembering his little brother's beheading, Abdal Raman took the head of the Abbasid commanders, packed the grisly trophies in salt, and had them delivered to the Abbasid Caliph. When presented with the heads of his generals and governors, the Abbasid Caliph gasped, God be praised for placing a sea between us. The Abbasids left Abdel Raman alone after that, beyond some intrigue with the Franks from time to time. I could say much more about Abdal Rahman. I could tell you he wrote poetry longing for lost Syria and about his love for newfound Al Andalus. I could tell you he built up his emirate into a place powerful enough that his descendants could declare themselves caliphs in their own right, so that there were impossibly two caliphs in the world, an Umayyad Caliph in Cordoba and an Abbasid Caliph in Baghdad. I could talk about his music, his laws, his architecture, but I will not. Let me say this as a final thing about Abdal Rahman before I move on. I had to abandon Spain before his coming, and for most of his reign Al Andalus was far too dangerous a place for me to consider returning to while he established and secured his rule, but he transformed it into a place of wonders, where I was very comfortable for many, many years after he was gone. I will also say of all the peoples Charlemagne ever marched against, he only invaded Muslim Spain once. He still won all summer long before returning to Francia. Charlemagne never lost, but he took the measure of Abdal Raman and decided he did not want to spend the rest of his life trying to conquer one man. The Abbasid Caliph thanked God for putting a sea between him and Abdalrahman because he was in awe of what the last Umayyad had achieved from out of nothing. I think Abdalraman and Charlemagne were not in awe of each other, but I suspect both thanked God for putting the pyrenees between them. Two men like that needed mountains or oceans as an excuse to avoid the contest that would consume them both. Alright, enough tap dancing around it. Time at last for me to talk about Charlemagne. I only met him twice, and that was more than enough for me. He was impressive both times, of course, and also more than a little frightening. I will also bring the Empress Irene into this story too, eventually. She is another impressive and slightly frightening character I met a couple of times, and she becomes more important to history than anyone would have ever guessed. The world really was full of giants and monsters during this time. First, if you are enjoying it, please tell someone about it. Audio dramas live and die on word of mouth, so please help spread the word. This may be the third and final season, but I plan to leave the series up as long as people continue to take an interest in it. Second, please like it, review it, and subscribe to it wherever you find your podcasts. We want to teach the algorithm that this show is worth people's time. Third, this podcast is based on the novels Beginning, Middle, and End by Jeff Mix, available on Amazon. If you want a copy of the story for yourselves, that would be so appreciated. Fourth, I have a link to a typeform survey in the show notes for each episode. Tell me a little about yourself and feel free to ask me questions. I have already done a QA mailbag episode during the run of this series, and I probably will do another one in a little while once people have had a chance to find it and enjoy the show after the final episode airs. Fifth, while this may be the final season of the Tape Recorder trilogy podcast, I already have plans for two more shows, so please remain subscribed to this channel for updates on those when they are ready to be shared. Finally, while I don't want to break up the episode with ads, I do have a Patreon account with extra content for those of you who are willing to support this channel with a donation. A link to that is also in the show notes. With that said, thank you so much for your time and attention, and I look forward to you enjoying the next episode soon.