Six

Institutionalizing Aspirations (c.1150–c.1250)

THE LIVELY DEVELOPMENTS of early twelfth-century Europe were

institutionalized in the next decades. Fluid associations became corporations. Rulers

hired salaried officials to staff their administrations. Churchmen defined the nature

and limits of religious practice. While the Islamic world largely went its own way,

only minimally affected by European developments, Byzantium was carved up by its

Christian neighbors.

The Islamic and Byzantine Worlds in Flux

Nothing could be more different than the fates of the Islamic world and of Byzantium

at the beginning of the thirteenth century. The Muslims remained strong; the

Byzantine Empire nearly came to an end.

ISLAM ON THE MOVE

Like grains of sand in an oyster’s shell—irritating but also generative—the Christian

states of the Levant and Spain helped spark new Islamic principalities, one based in

the Maghreb, the other in Syria and Egypt. In the Maghreb, the Almohads, a Berber

group espousing a militant Sunni Islam, combined conquest with a program to

“purify” the morals of their fellow Muslims. In al-Andalus their appearance in 1147

induced some Islamic rulers to seek alliances with the Christian rulers to the north.

But other Andalusian rulers joined forces with the Almohads, who replaced the

Almoravids as rulers of the whole Islamic far west by 1172. (See Map 6.1.) At war

continuously with Christian Spanish rulers, in 1212 they suffered a terrible defeat.

For the Christian victors, the battle was known simply by its place name, Las Navas

de Tolosa; but for the Almohads, it was known as “The Punishment.” It was the

beginning of the end of al-Andalus.