Cosmopolitanism and the Middle Ages

J. Ganim, S. Legassie, J. Ganim, S. Legassie

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780230337572
• eBook ISBN: 9781137045096
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

This collection of essays uncovers a wide array of medieval writings on cosmopolitan ethics and politics, writings generally ignored or glossed over in contemporary discourse. Medieval literary fictions and travel accounts provide us with rich contextualizations of the complexities and contradictions of cosmopolitan thought.

CHAPTER 1

THE METROPOLIS AND ITS LANGUAGES: BAGHDAD AND VENICE

Karla Mallette

This chapter investigates the interplay between cosmopolitan languages and local vernaculars in the Middle Ages, using Abbasid Baghdad and late medieval Venice as examples.

This essay situates a discussion of two cosmopolitan metropolises at distinct historical moments—Baghdad (ca. 780 CE) and Venice (ca. 1250 CE)—in order to highlight two of the characteristics that distinguish classical Arabic and Latin, the mega-languages of the premodern world, from the national languages of European modernity.¹ First, unlike national languages, Arabic and Latin were languages that were not bounded by territory and, in fact, held a far-ranging, if discontinuous, currency. They were languages of high culture and imperial bureaucracy. Both gave rise to a multitude of other languages and idioms: the mother tongues, local spoken languages, and literary languages of the populace. Second, both cosmopolitan languages—governed by strict, institutionalized laws of grammar—were self-consciously designed to resist historical change, and therefore refused to be shaped by spoken linguistic practice. They were steady-state languages; their capacity to resist change through time allowed them to communicate across the millennia. Immediacy—granted by continuity with current linguistic practice in a given location—is the crowning virtue of the European national languages. But the cosmopolitan languages of the Middle Ages, rather than being keyed to geochronological or cultural specificities, float free of micro-histories and micro-regions. The person who studies and learns a cosmopolitan language leaves the intimate, homely topography of the mother tongue to enter into a much wider and much more populous world.

In the vignettes that follow, we meet cosmopolitan languages in their natural habitat: the metropolises that served as bureaucratic centers of empire or as hubs for extensive mercantile networks. The imperial emporium brought together prodigious quantities of goods: the spoils of empire, like the Hebron peaches and Turkish quinces, the seacoast lemons and Persian pickles, the Aleppo raisins, the Iraqi sugar cane and Ba‘albak figs, the Cairo rolls, Turkish rolls, and Balkan rolls on the shopping list of the Lady of Baghdad who prowls the city’s central market in the tale from the Thousand and One Nights.² And the languages of the conquered were counted among these spolia. The linguistic density of the metropolis reflected the linguistic complexity of empire. And this worked to the advantage of empire when it helped to feed the great premodern translation movements, for instance, or when it served the vast and intricate needs of the imperial bureaucracy. Yet at the same time, linguistic complexity occasionally strained the social, bureaucratic, and literary integrity of empire. Only by describing in some detail (obviously, exhaustive detail is neither possible nor desirable) the negotiations between languages whose distinct histories brought them to the metropolis is it possible to characterize the cosmopolitan language of the Middle Ages, which, in spite of its institutionalized resistance to change, always exists in complex dialogue with more localized languages and cultural practices.

Despite the differences between Baghdad and Venice, two general principles emerge from these case studies with some clarity. First, unlike the European national languages, the cosmopolitan language is not territorialized; yet, at the same time, it maintains its power by responding to geohistorical particularities and developments. Second, the cosmopolitan language presents itself as monolithic and sovereign; yet, at the same time, it links itself to a wide and intricate network of spoken and written languages. These two paradoxes inform the sketches of language in this essay. Redolent of geohistorical particularity (viz. the Lady of Baghdad’s seacoast lemons and Persian pickles), boosted by their connections with a host of mother tongues and competing literary languages, the cosmopolitan languages clambered above the fray, becoming instrumental to the expansion and maintenance of empire in the premodern world. Indeed, thanks in part to their descriptive and exhortative capacity and their power to win over converts, one might argue that these languages themselves drove imperial expansion in the premodern world—that linguistic connectivity rather than economic efficacy should be seen as the crucial driving force of human history. Yet, as will become clear, this is not primarily a tale of conquest. The cosmopolitan languages succeeded not only by vanquishing other languages but also by working in concert and coordination with them.

Baghdad, ca. 780 CE

The historical trajectory of the Arabic language—from its obscure tribal origins through its apotheosis in the Qur’an to its imperial dissemination, from Cordoba and Tlemcen in the west to Baghdad and Basra in the east—is among the most dramatic and unpredictable narratives in premodern literary history. Arabic’s intimate relation to revelation and to empire and its complex negotiations with other languages make it a superb example of the cosmopolitan language. Two episodes in early Arabic literary history illustrate the complex dynamics of the expansion of Arabic: on the one hand the translation movement, and on the other the internecine squabbles between the conquered peoples of Central Asia and their Arab governors known as shu‘ūbiyya. To modern scholars, the Abbasid translation movement is the more familiar of the two, and the discussion that follows will outline it in the barest details in order to set the stage for a somewhat more thorough description of a chapter of Arab-Islamic history less known to nonspecialists.

Abbasid Baghdad (as synecdoche for the Abbasid East) has attracted the attention of intellectual historians in recent years, thanks largely to the translation movement promoted by the Abbasid caliphs. Following the Abbasid revolution in 132 AH/750 CE, the second Abbasid caliph, known as al-Manṣūr (Abū Ja‘far ‘Abd Allāh ibn Muḥammad ibn ‘Alī, r. 754–775 CE), established the imperial capital at Baghdad—then just a collection of small villages. As part of his program of cultural innovation and imperial expansion, al-Manṣūr promoted the acquisition of philosophical manuscripts and the study and translation of the philosophical treatises they contained. Despite the upheavals that rocked the Abbasid world during the ensuing centuries, the work of translation continued under the rule of al-Manṣūr’s son, al-Mahdī (Abū ‘Abd Allāh Muḥammad, r. 775–785), his grandson Hārūn al-Rashīd (r. 785–809), and his great-grandson al-Ma’mūn (Abū al-Abbās ‘Abd Allāh, who succeeded to the throne in 813 after a fratricidal war and reigned until his death in 833). Indeed, the translation movement blended seamlessly into the activities of commentators, and the careers of Arab-Islamic philosophers both contemporaneous with and subsequent to the Abbasid heyday—like al-Fārābī (ca. 872–950/51), Ibn Sīnā (ca. 980–1037), and Ibn Rushd (1126–1198)—should be seen in continuity with it.

The Abbasid translation movement is often sketched as a simple, triumphalist act of acquisition—a translatio studii—as if the treatises of Greek antiquity lay waiting to be plucked out of moldering manuscripts and recast in the Arabic language. In fact, this watershed in the history of the Arabic language was substantially more complex. First, philosophical treatises were seldom translated directly from Greek into Arabic. Rather, translators often worked through an intermediary Syriac or Pahlavi (i.e. Middle Persian) version, bringing the works out of the language of the ancients and into one geographically and historically more proximate by stages. Second, the works translated had, in the millennium and more since they were written, acquired accretions of commentary reflecting the insights and changing sensibilities of the generations of scholars who studied them—both the pagan readers of antiquity and the Christian communities of the Near East. The new Arabic versions integrated these commentaries, accepting the modernizations of the texts as an integral part of the textual tradition. Finally, it would be an oversimplification to state that the movement lasted as long as there remained Greek philosophy to be translated. Treatises were translated not once but several times. Each subsequent translation both modernized the language and terminology—refining scientific vocabulary in the light of subsequent scholarship—and integrated new developments in the commentary tradition. Thus the ancient Greek philosophical tradition provided a touchstone for centuries of translation, elaboration, commentary, and innovation, as generations of Islamic scholars returned to the treatises for inspiration.³

The translation movement was one expression of the complex stages by means of which the Islamic sciences and the Arabic language advanced during the early centuries of Abbasid rule. The shadow of this victorious narrative of conquest—its doppelganger, a more bitter battle over language and legitimacy—is found in the shu‘ūbiyya movement that took place in the Abbasid east during the same years. In order to tease out the history and significance of shu‘ūbiyya, it is necessary to retrace our steps: to move out again with the earliest armies of the Islamic expansion from the Arabian peninsula, to encounter new populations with distinct languages and cultural traditions (Greeks, Persians, Nabataeans), and to create a polity that might unite them. The Umayyad caliphs—in power during the years 41–132 AH/661–750 CE—carried the message of Islam through conquest from their base in Damascus toward Central Asia in the east and toward the Maghrib and the Iberian peninsula in the west. To them fell the task of creating an imperial government able to rule a vast range of territory and of administering communities who, at the time they were conquered, had no knowledge of the precepts of Islam or of the Arabic language. That they should encounter resistance was inevitable; the Abbasid revolution that toppled the Umayyads—fomented in the province of Khurasan, the heartland of the Sasanid state that once dominated Central Asia—was the culmination of the simmering resentment inspired by the Umayyads’ heavy-handed promotion of an Arab elite. The Abbasids, more than their predecessors, would prove receptive to the influence of other languages and other cultures, elevating a Persian elite to positions of prominence in their administration and supporting (as we have see...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Metropolis and Its Languages: Baghdad and Venice
• 2. Reorientations: The Worlding of Marco Polo
• 3. Between Islam and Christendom: Ibn Battuta’s Travels in Asia Minor and the North
• 4. Medieval Religious Cosmopolitanisms: Truth and Inclusivity in the Literature of Muslim Spain
• 5. Worldly Unease in Late Medieval European Travel Reports
• 6. The One Kingdom Solution?: Diplomacy, Marriage, and Sovereignty in the Third Crusade
• 7. Inventing Social Conscience: Cosmopolitanism in Piers Plowman
• 8. Cosmopolitan Imaginaries
• 9. Among Other Possible Things: The Cosmopolitanisms of Chaucer’s “Man of Law’s Tale”
• 10. The Cosmopolitanism of The Adages: The Classical and Christian Legacies of Erasmus’ Hermeneutics of Accommodation
• List of Contributors
• Index