THE SARACENS IN ITALY.[1]
It is a curious, though perhaps idle speculation, to follow out in thought an imaginary change in the history of the world, and try to fancy what would have been the effect on Western civilization — to what extent the current of modern thought would have been deflected, and the tide of modern progress stayed — had Italy, as for a time seemed not improbable, been overrun and occupied like Sicily, by the victorious Saracen hordes.
What manner of renaissance should we have had if Mahometanism, not Christianity, had been its informing spirit — if the Arab, instead of the Latin race, had guided its earliest footsteps — if the subtler but narrower genius of the East had supplanted the broader, more genial, and more universal Italian intellect, in presiding over that new birth of human thought? Would Christian art have been stifled ere it struggled into life, or would the germ from which it grew, taking root elsewhere, have given us perhaps a German Raphael, or a Scandinavian Michael Angelo? How would have fared the buried relics of pagan art, disinterred by a people whose religion enjoined their destruction? Where would the ancient manuscripts brought to light by the agents of the Italian courts, in every remote corner of Europe, have found their eager commentators and jealous guardians, with a Saracen emir ruling Florence instead of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and an African sultan installed at Rome in the chair of Leo the Tenth?
The answer to these, and many similar questions, may perhaps be sought in the history of a country analogous to Italy in position, in climate, and in race. Spain shook off the yoke, and trampled out the religion of her Arab conquerors, but failed to rid herself of the effects of their dominion; nor could all the culture of her Castilian kings, or all the wealth and prestige of her Western conquests ever raise her inhabitants to the level of adjacent peoples. The dark taint of Berb, or Moorish, blood long lingered, and lingers even yet among the Iberian Celts, as it does among the Italian Greeks of Sicily, and the island and the peninsula which lie nearest to the great equatorial continent, still form a connecting link between African barbarism and European civilization.
The land below the Alps seems to our modern eyes an inalienable appanage of the Caucasian race, but in the earlier centuries of Christianity its ultimate fate was still in the balance; and there was no visible reason why the successive surges of white conquest, which had swept over it, might not in their turn have been submerged and overwhelmed by one final surge of black conquest. At one time, indeed, two such dark waves flowing from opposite directions, had nearly met and closed over the cradle of European civilization; and a very slight further impulse, on one side or the other, would have enabled the two great Mussulman dynasties of the West to join hands over the trampled soil of Italy, and make the Mediterranean an African lake. The Moors of Spain, established at Frassineto, had then thrown themselves across the south of France into the mountains of Savoy, whence, for nearly a century — from 889 to 955 — they desolated the valleys of Piedmont and commanded the passes of the Alps, while the Moors of Africa were able during the same epoch, in 934 and 935, to attack Genoa, pillage the Riviera di Levante, and return home laden with booty and prisoners increased by a successful raid on Sardinia. But these chance and aimless currents of invasion, guided by no common purpose, and wanting the master influence of a single will to bind together their scattered forces, ebbed as they had flowed, leaving indeed a temporary track of devastation, but no permanent change in the landmarks of history.
The hordes of fanatics launched from the heart of Arabia like volcanic matter from a vast crater, only retained their conquering power during the first white-hot fervor of their new faith. When that pristine energy subsided they remained like the spent lava torrent, an inert mass of decomposing elements, unless where secondary eruptions of religious excitement
- ↑ Storia dei Musulmani in Sicilia. Per Michele Amari. Florence: 1858
