If the Arab general Amr ibn al-As had been looking for a blood-stirring battle, his latest conquest was a disappointment. In AD 642, he reported back to his leader, "I have taken a city of which I can only say that it contains 4,000 palaces, 4,000 baths, 400 theaters, 1,200 fruit and vegetable vendors, and 40,000 Jews." The great Egyptian port of Alexandria, erstwhile pride of the classical world and jewel of the eastern Roman Empire, had surrendered without a fight.
All around the eastern and southern fringes of the Mediterranean Sea, the same thing was occurring. In a steady succession, the outposts of imperial Rome were falling—with greater or lesser degrees of bloodshed—to invading Arab armies from the desert peninsula of Hejaz. The demise of the western half of the Roman Empire had begun in the fifth century with invasions by the barbarian tribes of Europe. Now, two centuries later, the Arabs were finishing off classical civilization in the East. But whereas in Europe the Fall of Rome had led to the decline of urban life, the cities of the Middle East and Asia continued to flourish. Under the banner of Islam, the old classical settlements were transformed into thriving centers of trade, learning, and commerce, distinctively modeled according to the demands of their new masters.
Farther east the ancient civilization of China, virtually untouched by the world beyond its western boundaries, was to encompass some of the largest and grandest cities the globe had ever seen. It would be many centuries before a resurgent West caught up with the achievements of its eastern neighbors.
By the time Amr's forces marched into Alexandria, the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire—centered in Constantinople—was already threatened. Costly wars with neighboring Sasanian Persia had severely damaged the economy of the eastern Mediterranean, and in the provinces of Syria and Egypt, citizens became estranged from an imperial government that offered them ever less in the way of military protection or economic benefits. As outlying cities drifted away from the influence of Constantinople, they came to be run by local notables rather than by imperial edict.
Crammed between the mosque at far left and the mausoleum of the sixteenth-century sultan Qansuh al-Churl (near left), Cairo's silk merchants ply a relaxed trade in an 1849 lithograph by David Roberts. The rents that the shopkeepers paid for their stalls—little more than narrow wooden booths fronted by stone slabs that doubled as benches and display counters—went to suppmrt the great religious foundations in whose shadow they traded. By day, the market was shaded by a lofty wooden roof; by night it was lighted by lamps, suspended from the mosque and mausoleum portals, which also illuminated the crowds of homeless poor who slept on the steps of the buildings.
Bereft of central control, some imperial outposts decayed, and many were abandoned altogether. Great Levantine cities such as Caesarea, Petra, and Palmyra dwindled into ghost towns. Brigandage and raiding by local tribes were potent agents of depopulation, while plague was a regular and debilitating scourge: Few who had lived through it were likely to forget the epidemic of AD 541 to 544, at the peak of which there were 10,000 deaths a day in Constantinople alone.
Even in those cities that continued to flourish—such as Damascus, Aleppo, and Antioch—the demise of classical civilization was becoming visible. No longer kept clear by civic regulations, the wide thoroughfares, flanked by monumental public buildings, turned into warrenlike jumbles of houses pierced by twisting, narrow
Cattered throughout Asia, North Africa, Spain, and the Middle East, Islamic cities grew up as secretive honeycombs of the faith. Although the seat of urban government was a walled citadel, the lifeblood of any town pulsed mostly through its mosques, hammams, or bathhouses, and covered markets called suks. Around these communal centers swarmed an Intricate maze of narrow streets within which were concealed myriad quarters, segregated not by walls but by race, craft, and religion.
In this stylized view of sixteenth-century Aleppo in northern Syria, a heavily fortified citadel dominates the densely packed surrounding buildings, which are themselves enclosed by a wall. Almost a town within a town, the citadel contained a palace, a mosque, a barracks, an arsenal, and large cisterns for collecting water.
By the time this illustration first appeared in a manuscript describing a Turkish sultan's campaigns, Aleppo's sturdy outer walls enclosed a population of more than 100,000. Mosques and suks proliferated throughout the city, their minarets and domes rising amid the citizens' one-story, flat-roofed houses. With every need catered to locally, it was possible for inhabitants of Aleppo (or any other great Middle Eastern city) to live and die in their own quarter without ever leaving it.
Houses were built back to back, separated by streets that were sometimes little more than three feet wide. And, apart from a military parade ground in front of the citadel, there were few open spaces within the city walls. But outside, there were orchards, gardens, and racetracks for the citizens' pleasure.
World History
