VIEWPOINTS AROUND 1000 | 217Mahdīya, the Saracen emporium on the Tunisian coast.^72 Commercial com-
petition and holy war were henceforth powerful mutually reinforcing mo-
tives, culminating in the First Crusade and ensuring a Latin presence
throughout the Mediterranean for the first time since the fall of the Western
Roman Empire. The foundations for the revival of Europe were being laid,
and a first step had been taken toward the wider thirteenth- century Eurasian
integration mentioned above.
Among other mementos of the East to be seen in Pisa was the famous mid-
sixth- century codex of Justinian’s Digest, plundered from Amalfi perhaps not
long after the Pisan conquest in the mid- 1130s, and now known after its pres-
ent home as the Littera Florentina. This manuscript was to play a major part
in the revival of Roman law in the West.^73 On the city’s lesser churches—not
the marble- clad cathedral—we can still admire numerous colorful glazed ba-
cini (bowls) of Islamic origin, glinting in the sunlight and proclaiming rather
more, perhaps, than just the Pisans’ success in strong- arming themselves into
the profitable North African and Levantine markets.^74
As for the eleventh- century copper- alloy griffin that once adorned the
apex of the cathedral’s eastern pediment, and is now exhibited in the Museo
dell’Opera del Duomo,^75 it not only is a very superior relation of the bacini,
conveying the same message, but may also serve as an emblem for both the
wider context and the distinctive character of our First Millennium. As a
motif the griffin, half eagle half lion, goes back to the ancient Near East,
whence it entered Greek art in the Orientalizing period. The Umayyads es-
tablished an early vogue for metal animal sculptures in the Islamic world.
The monumental Pisan specimen is probably a product of the eleventh cen-
tury, and perhaps came from Mahdīya as booty when the Pisans captured it
in 1087, or from Spain or the Balearic Islands. For all its ancient roots, the
extreme stylization of the Pisa griffin makes its Islamic origin unmistakable,
even without the Arabic benediction inscribed on it. The great mythical
beast has fascinated art historians. They have assigned it every provenance
from Khurāsān via North Africa to Spain (just as Ibn Sīnā’s philosophical
legacy was developed as much in Andalusia as in Iran). That in itself speaks
volumes about the cultural coherence of the Islamic Commonwealth at the
end of the First Millennium.
72 Abulafia, Great Sea [4:15] 280.
73 G. Cavallo and F. Magistrale, “Libri e scritture del diritto nell’età di Giustiniano,” in G. G. Archi
(ed.), Il mondo del diritto nell’epoca giustinianea (Ravenna 1985) 54–58 (arguing, though, that this par-
ticular manuscript may have been produced in sixth- century Italy).
74 D. Abulafia, Italy, Sicily and the Mediterranean 1100–1400 (London 1987) XIII.
75 J. Sourdel- Thomine and B. Spuler, Die Kunst des Islam (Berlin 1973) 263 and plate 194; R. Et-
tinghausen and others, Islamic art and architecture 650–1250 (New Haven 2001) 210; A. Contadini,
“Translocation and transformation: Some Middle Eastern objects in Europe,” in L. E. Saurma- Jeltsch and
A. Eisenbeiss (eds), The power of things and the flow of cultural transformations (Berlin 2010) 50–57.