from pagan rome to islam and medieval christendom 235
remained nonetheless numerous and retained considerable influence
even after the Mongol conquest in the mid- thirteenth century. Only
after the conquest of Iraq in 1393 by Tamerlane, who destroyed much
of Baghdad and other towns, was there a considerable exodus, with
Jews not returning until the end of the fifteenth century.^7
Babylonian Jewry was already in the eighth century at the heart of an
Islamic civilization which stretched far to the west. As Arab influence
grew, so too did the influence of the Jews of Baghdad over the comm-
unities in Syria, Palestine, Egypt, North Africa and Spain. Baghdad had
been founded in the eighth century as a distinctively Islamic city along-
side ancient Babylon, but by its heyday in the tenth and eleventh
centuries it had expanded far beyond its original circular fortifications
into a rich urban culture which integrated Christians and Zoroastrians
as well as Jews, with a series of palaces, courtyards, ponds and gardens
watered by the canals linking the Tigris and Euphrates, six great
mosques, a reported 1,500 bath houses and city markets so opulent that
they inspired the stories in One Thousand and One Nights. The Jews
who lived there must have felt they were at the centre of the civilized
world.
In later centuries, other Islamic cities with large Jewish populations
were also to reach similar levels of prosperity and sophistication, not
least Cairo, where the lucrative spice trade between the Indian Ocean
and the Mediterranean added to the income from the crops of the fertile
Nile valley. The locus of Jewish authority shifted to match. By the time
of the Jewish thinker Maimonides in the twelfth century, Cairo eclipsed
Baghdad as a centre of Jewish intellectual life. Cairo’s greatest period
was in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries under the Mamluk sul-
tanate, when sultans and emirs competed in the erection of mosques,
colleges and monasteries, with an ever- growing population, intensive
commerce, gardens and pavilions. R. Meshulam of Volterra, visiting on
Sunday 17 June 1481, swore that ‘if it were possible to put Rome, Ven-
ice, Milan, Padua, Florence and four more cities together, they would
not equal in wealth and population half that of Cairo.’ Further to the
west, many Jews lived also in Kairouan in modern Tunisia, which had
been founded in 670 by Uqba ibn Nafi, the conqueror of North Africa,
and which flourished until the sack of the city in 1057 by Arabs from
Egypt.^8
The decline of Babylonian hegemony over the religious development
of Judaism was linked to the break- up of the Islamic world into in -
dependent caliphates from the eleventh century, and in particular the