The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade (39 page)

The plot took some time to lay. In 645, the year Isshi, on the twelfth day of the sixth month, it came to fruition. Soga no Iruka had come to court wearing his sword, as usual (he was, says the Japanese chronicle
Nihongi
, “of a very suspicious nature”), but Nakatomi no Kamatari had hired actors to put on an elaborate performance that would convince him to disarm. Soga no Iruka’s suspicious nature deserted him when he most needed it; he laughed at the actors, took off the sword, and went into the empress’s presence. The nineteen-year-old Naka no Oe quietly ordered the Guards of the Gates to lock all twelve entrances to the palace. He had given the task of carrying out the assassination of Soga no Iruka to three other members of the conspiracy, but as they stood in the throne room listening to the business of the day being read out, it became increasingly clear that the three swordsmen had lost their nerve.
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When none of them made a move towards their victim, Naka no Oe leaped forward and struck the first blow against Soga no Iruka. Wounded, the statesman staggered to the empress and begged for mercy; but Saimei stood and left the throne room, going farther into the palace so that she could not longer hear or see what was happening. The prince’s three allies, spurred into action, finished the injured man off. When his father Emishi heard the news, he took his own life.
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The conspiracy, the “Isshi Incident,” broke the back of the Soga clan. In the resulting power vacuum, a puzzling shuffle took place. Saimei, who had turned her back, stepped down from the throne, but Naka no Oe did not rise to replace her. Instead his uncle, the empress’s younger brother, took the throne as Heavenly Sovereign Kotoku and ruled for nine years. When he died, Saimei returned from her retirement and again governed as heavenly sovereign from 655 until 661.

Even at her death, Naka no Oe did not rise to be heavenly sovereign. During the reigns of both his uncle and his mother, he exercised plenty of power at the Yamato court; in fact, when the Baekje survivors first appealed for help, Saimei was still on the throne, but Naka no Oe was the one who answered the call, the man who agreed to send Japanese ships to join the fight against the Sillan occupiers.

Before war could begin, Saimei died. Naka no Oe was now the ruler of Japan, but once again he did not take the title of heavenly sovereign. He governed, but he did not reign. It finally became clear that he believed himself to be defiled by the murder in the throne room. The blood shed in front of the heavenly sovereign had polluted the man who spilled it; Naka no Oe had gathered his three accomplices for just this purpose, so that his hand would not be the one stained with the curse. Their failure of nerve had forced him to draw it upon himself.
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But even without the sacred title, Naka no Oe acted as commander in chief of Japan’s force. The Japanese fleet sailed towards Baekje, proclaiming that the Baekje prince Buyeo Pung, now brought from his exile as hostage and promoted to figurehead, was the rightful king of Baekje.

Just before the Japanese fleet arrived on Baekje’s shores, King Muyeol of Silla died. His heir, King Munmu, took the throne and found himself facing invasion. He was particularly well fitted to fight back, though; in the war against Baekje, he had commanded a naval force for his father. In 663, the combined Baekje-Japan alliance, led by Prince Naka no Oe of Japan and Buyeo Pung of Baekje, met the combined Tang-Silla forces in the Battle of Baekgang, fought in the same place as the Battle of Hwang San Beol three years before. The Tang-Silla alliance was triumphant; Prince Naka no Oe returned to Japan to shore up the defenses against invasion. Buyeo Pung escaped into Goguryeo. And Baekje was, effectively, no more.

Still reinforced by the Tang, the Silla armies now invaded Goguryeo, which fell under the assault in 668. Buyeo Pung was captured and, like Uija before him, was taken off to Tang China, where he disappeared from the historical record.

King Munmu now ruled over the entire peninsula. With Tang help, Silla had triumphed. The Three Kingdoms period had given way to the Unified Silla period, which would last until 935.

But almost at once, the alliance with the Chinese dragon turned against the Sillan king. Wu Zetian had intended to extend Tang rule all the way into the peninsula, not hand it over to one of the three kings. Now, she and her husband Tang Gaozong, who had made a partial recovery (although he would suffer attacks for the rest of his life), organized the peninsula into a set of administrative districts under Tang control. They declared King Munmu of Silla the governor-general of the Tang rulership, euphoniously named the “Protectorate General to Pacify the East.”
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This did not please Munmu, who suddenly found himself subordinate to the force that had made his victory possible. Searching for a solution to his dilemma, he settled on an appeal to Goguryeo’s freedom fighters—the same men who had fought against him, just months earlier, and who now were the last surviving resistance against Tang domination. Together, Munmu’s army and the Goguryeo rebels formed a new alliance, this one against the Tang.

For five years, the rebels fought against Tang troops in all three of the former Three Kingdoms. In 676, after a series of losses in the Han river basin, Wu Zetian and Tang Gaozong decided to yield a good chunk of the Tang-controlled land to Munmu’s rule, and moved the Office of the Protectorate General northwest to the city of Liaodung Cheng, outside the peninsula.
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The ways of the Tang had spread into the lands of the Turks and into the high plains of Tibet, but the Yamato remained outside of Tang power. And Munmu’s resistance meant that, for a time, the Unified Silla kingdom would shake itself loose from the Tang and live in freedom.

I
N
M
EDINA
, M
UHAMMAD
, leader of the
umma
, took on the job of judging the disputes of those outside the faith. Although he never claimed the titles, he found himself acting as both prophet and king in his adopted city; and soon he was forced to deal with the multiple practical difficulties pressing in upon the ideal community he had created.

For one thing, unity based on belief was not easy to maintain among people who were accustomed to thinking of themselves, first and foremost, as members of particular clans and tribes. Muhammad himself had recognized distinctions among his followers: he had given the name
Ansar
, “Helpers,” to the Arabs of Medina, while the Arabs who had followed him from Mecca were known as the
Muhajirun,
the “Emigrants.” He had taken steps toward creating traditional bonds of kinship between himself and his close supporters; after Khadija’s death, he had become betrothed to the six-year-old daughter of Abu Bakr (although the marriage was not celebrated until the little girl grew older). His “new tribe,” the one based on faith, was still central to his plans for the future, but ties of blood and family were still woven through his thinking.
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And in other ways, the new tribe was not quite what he had expected. Muhammad’s vision for Medina had been to enfold the whole city into the
umma.
His careful protection of the rights of non-Muslims had been sincere and good-hearted, but it was always meant to be temporary, lasting only until they inevitably saw the light and became followers of Allah. However, it was becoming increasingly clear that the Jews of Medina were always going to hold themselves apart.

Muhammad, frustrated, was given the revelation that appears as Surah 2 in the Qu’ran. Allah, the Surah repeats again and again, is the same God that Abraham worshipped, the same God that the Christians worship: it was Allah who “gave Moses the Book and followed him up with a succession of Messengers; [who] gave Jesus the son of Mary clear signs and strengthened him with the Holy Spirit.” Jews and Christians were wrong to insist that “[n]one shall enter Paradise unless he be a Jew or a Christian;
both
shall enter Paradise, along with the
umma
, if they submit to Allah and do good.” For Muhammad, Jews and Christians were practically already inside the
umma
, and he could not understand why they continued to hold themselves apart.
²

Nor was he pleased with all of the Arabs who were converting. The
umma
was now the most powerful “tribe” in Medina; the city’s schedule had been reorganized around the five daily prayers that Muhammad prescribed for faithful believers, fasting and the giving of alms to the poor had been written into city law, the place of worship (the mosque) Muhammad had built was the city’s center. It was now politically advantageous to be Muslim, and some of the Arabs were joining the faith to get ahead.
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But the biggest difficulty of all was posed by Mecca. “Then the apostle prepared for war,” his biographer Ishaq says, matter-of-factly, “in pursuance of God’s command to fight his enemies…whom God commanded him to fight.” The revelation given in Mecca, allowing the Muslims to fight against those who had expelled them from their homes, was still in force even though the Meccan enemies were now distant; and beginning in 623, the year after the Hijra, Muhammad began to send both Helpers and Emigrants out from Medina on exploratory, prefighting missions. His first target was not Mecca itself, but rather the caravans that went between Mecca and destinations to the north, passing Medina on the way.
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Raiding caravans was not exactly an act of war. For centuries, Arabs had considered the caravans of other tribes to be fair game. Getting valuable food and water from passing caravans would certainly make life in Medina easier, but in preparing to raid the caravans from Mecca, which were almost all Quraysh, Muhammad was also sending a message. Loyalty to the
umma
had replaced the old tribal loyalties, and the ties of birth had been broken and supplanted with ties of faith.
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For several months, the exploratory missions from Medina simply involved spying, reporting, and occasionally negotiating with the caravan leaders. No one was injured until a party from Medina, spying on an enormous and rich Quraysh caravan, decided to attack and take its goods. In the scuffle, one of the Quraysh merchants was killed by an arrow shot from a Medina bow.

When the expedition returned to Medina with its booty, Muhammad was furious—not because of the killing, but because it had happened during the sacred month in which fighting was forbidden. It was just this sort of disregard for ancient religious traditions that had led to the corruption and decadence of Meccan society, and he did not intend for Medina to go the same way.
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His anger threatened to pull the new community apart. The other members of the
umma
began to whisper that the raiding party was damned; outside of Medina, the Quraysh spread the word that Muhammad himself had committed sacrilege. Peace was not restored until Muhammad received another revelation: breaking the sacred month was bad, but the sins of the Meccans were much worse. “Fighting in the Prohibited Month is a grave offence,” says Surah 2, “but it is graver in the sight of Allah to deny him and to drive out his followers. Tumult and oppression are worse than slaughter. Nor will they cease fighting you until they turn you back from your faith, if they can.”
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This relieved the tension in Medina, and the raiding party went back to their homes in relief. But the ripple effect of this revelation was much wider. The scope of the original permission—to fight back when wronged—had, almost invisibly, expanded. It was now permissible to fight back against those who would
continue
to wrong you, given a chance.

The revelation gave Muhammad and his followers the justification they needed to launch a full-scale attack on a Meccan caravan. In 624, a large caravan loaded with goods from Syria passed Medina. It was led by an old enemy of Muhammad’s, a man named Abu Sufian. The path he was on led past the Wells of Badr, an oasis and watering-place south of Medina; Muhammad assembled three hundred men (a huge force to overwhelm a single caravan) and set out for the wells, to intercept the caravan there.

Abu Sufian had been expecting trouble. His scouts went out ahead of him, asking for news of any large parties on the move, and brought back intelligence of the planned Medina raid. Abu Sufian sent a message to Mecca asking for reinforcements, and a huge army turned out: a thousand men, with representatives from every Quraysh clan. The conflict between Muhammad’s religious revolution and the old order had finally come to a head.
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The Quraysh army from Mecca met the smaller force from Medina at the Wells of Badr on March 17, 624. Rallying his outnumbered forces, Muhammad called out that any man who was killed fighting with steadfast courage would certainly enter Paradise. Driven by loyalty to Muhammad, by religious fervor, by hatred for their enemies, and by the fear of losing everything they had gained, the men from Medina turned away the larger army. Only fifty or so of the Quraysh died, but the rest were driven back. Muhammad and his men took the goods recovered from the caravan (Abu Sufian had escaped and taken part of it back to Mecca with him) and returned to Medina in triumph.

It was the first battle of Islam, a turning point in the life of the
umma.
Between 624 and 630, the fighting escalated. The
umma
in Medina drove out, by force, two of the Jewish tribes that refused to recognize Muhammad’s authority. Major battles between the armies of Mecca and Medina took place in 625 and 627; after this second battle, the Battle of the Trench (named because the people at Medina dug a moat in front of their city to protect it from invasion), the final tribe of Jews was also exiled from the city. They had refused to take part in the battle, which was a violation of Muhammad’s declaration that Jews and Arabs support each other both in peace and in war. The Battle of the Trench had itself been a draw—cold weather had forced the attackers from Mecca to withdraw—and the Jews’ nonparticipation probably did not alter the outcome. But the Muslims in the city were indignant over this breach of trust.

The Jews were besieged in their homes and finally forced to surrender. They were given a choice—conversion to Islam, or death and slavery—and chose the latter: “We will never abandon the laws of the Torah and never change it for another,” Ishaq records them as saying. Muhammad appointed a judge to pronounce the sentence, a man named S’ad who was himself a Jewish convert to Islam. S’ad decreed that the men be executed and the women and children made slaves. Ishaq’s account is stark:

The new community was under attack from the outside, and the conditions of its existence had altered. There was no longer any place in Medina for neutrals.

By 630, the
umma
at Medina had grown so large and powerful that Muhammad was able to assemble an army of ten thousand: Helpers, Emigrants, and numerous soldiers from outlying tribes who either had accepted Islam or were willing to make common cause with it. At the head of this army, he marched against Mecca for the final time. Once again he was able to offer a justification for the attack. Nomadic allies of the Quraysh had attacked nomadic allies of the Muslims: this was a hostile act against the people of the faith, and the Muslims were simply fighting back.
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As Muslim power had grown, the people of Mecca had begun to lean more and more towards making peace with the powerful neighbor to the north (in fact, two treaties in the previous decade had allowed Muslims to enter the city on occasion and worship at the Ka’aba). Even Abu Sufian, owner of the caravan that had been attacked at the Wells of Badr, now favored a truce. When Muhammad arrived on the horizon with his army, it became perfectly clear that the truce would involve surrender.

39.1: The Conquests of Muhammad and Abu Bakr

Abu Sufian, standing on the walls, extracted a promise that the Muslims would enter the city without bloodshed. Muhammad agreed, and the gates were opened. The promise was kept. The only violence done was to the idols of various deities around the city, which were smashed and thrown down. Muhammad himself worshipped Allah at the Ka’aba. He was joined by Abu Sufian, who had agreed to convert to Islam.

From this point on, Mecca was the core of Islam, the place of greatest devotion for any Muslim. Muhammad centered himself in the city, and for the next two years he directed various campaigns from his Meccan headquarters. More Arab tribes began to convert. His conquests reached so far down into the south that Himyar fell under his sway. The
umma
was becoming a kingdom.

But Muhammad was not a king. He had given the Arabs a collective identity; what he had done for them was not unlike what Alaric had given to the Goths, or what Clovis had done for the Franks. He had taken an assortment of competing tribes and provided them with a way to think of themselves as a group. The Arab hatred for kingship meant that Alaric’s role as warrior-king and Clovis’s role as Christian king were closed to him; instead, he was the Prophet, the creator of a new people.

In 632, just before his death, he preached a farewell sermon that laid out the mixture of religious and civil regulations that shaped this new people.