The reforms initiated by the Cluniac monasteries spread quickly and reached Rome when Emperor Henry III started a papal reform at the Synod of Sutri, in 1046. The actual church administration reform began under Pope Leo IX in 1049 and was continued by Gregory VII, called Hildebrand, one of the strongest pontifs in history who, himself, had been a monk of Cluny. His reforms included attacks on simony (the sale of ecclesiastical offices) and lay investiture (the right of kings to appoint bishops, etc.). He tried to give spiritual unity to the western church without interfering in secular rule, but his doctrines led to a life and death struggle with the empire and in the end he too turned to militarism via alliances with the Normans, who had conquered southern Italy and Sicily. The Great Schism (the final splitting of the Greek Orthodox and Latin Catholic churches) occurred in 1054 over a point of theology.

In previous years Christian pilgrims had traveled to the holy places in the Middle East unmolested by the Arabs, but at the beginning of this 11th century the "Mad Caliph" Hakim began to prey upon these travelers and profane the Holy Sepulchre. At the end of the century Emperor Alexius I of Byzantine appealed to the western princes for help when he was again threatened by the Moslems. Thus, in 1095 the 1st Crusade was summoned by Pope Urban. The first ill-organized wave of crusaders sacked Hungary and the Balkans en route to the east and were, in turn, massacred by the Turks when they did arrive in Asia Minor. Antioch did fall to Bohemund of Otranto after a 9 month siege but he lost 5,000 of his 7,000 horses to hunger and disease and so many men died so quickly that it was not possible to bury all of them and the bodies contaminated cisterns and aqueducts, aggravating the epidemic. In 1099 a final wave of crusaders finally did reach Jerusalem where the Moslems remaining in the city were slaughtered, but the particular Turks that they had come to fight had already been run out by the Fatimids of Egypt a year previously. (Ref. 8, 49, 42, 222) (See map on page 603)

A conflict between religion and science developed within Islam, with three separate groups of thinkers deviating from the orthodox concepts. These were:

Al-Ghazali, the greatest Moslem theologian, fought against all these concepts and all orthodoxy took comfort from him. Even some Christian theologians were glad to find such an exposition of piety. He was so dominant that after this, with very few exceptions, philosophy was hidden, the pursuit of science waned and the mind of Islam more and more buried itself in the Hadith and the Koran. Al-Ghazali became a Sufi, a mystic, and with a radical distrust of human reason he changed the course of Islam to a more personal religion. (Ref. 49)

Jewry flowered in Moslem Spain in the first half of the century but persecution returned later. About the same situation occurred in France, with Jews killed and/or confined to ghettos late in the century.

Forward to A.D. 1101 to 1200

In Ethiopia there was a revival of power under the Cushitic-speaking Zagwe Dynasty. Old documents link King Yimrha-Kristos to the Egyptian Coptic patriarchs Cyril II (1,077-1,092) and Michael (1,092-1102). Meanwhile the Semitic component of the country spread westward from Addis Ababa to include Lake Tana by 1,100. (Ref. 270) Nubia, in the region between the 1st and 4th cataracts of the Nile, continued to have two separate kingdoms, one the Kingdom of Nubia and the other, farther south, the Kingdom of Alwa. (Ref. 83)

Egypt remained an Arab, Moslem state under the Fatimid Dynasty throughout this century. As noted in the last chapter, these Shi'ite rulers had invaded from the west, having first had a base in Tunisia and an army of Berber tribesmen. They developed Cairo as their capital.

Morocco and Tunisia had a continuing change of emirates and the situation was complicated by the return of hordes of Spanish Moors, who were being run out of Spain. When the Berber Zirid Dynasty tried to become independent of Cairo, the Fatimids sent armies of Bedouin Arabs against them and they succeeded in devastating the region and its economy. At about that same time, on an island just off the Moroccan coast, Ibn Yasin, with some Sahara desert followers, formed a dedicated band and with thousands of camel men, launched a "jihad"^[160], driving eastward, overrunning all western, north Africa (the Mahgrib), some of Ghana and even part of Spain, establishing the Almoravid Dynasty^[161]. A concept of Moroccan unity was born and Marakesh was developed as the capital of this new ruling group in 1062.

The acme of the Ghana Empire may have occurred in the first half of this century. The inhabitants were the Negroid Soninke (Sarakole) branch of Mande-speakers. They dominated well over 100,000 square miles of territory with an efficient administration and an army of 200,000, including 40,000 bowmen. Their horses had gold trappings and their guard dogs had gold collars. Al Bakri, writing in 1067, said that the houses were of two stories, with warehouses on the ground floor and living quarters above. The Soninke had their own pagan religion, but they allowed Muslims in their territory. In the second half of the century drought, famine and pillage of the capital city by the Almoravids (1076) started the empire into decline. The invading Moslems were helped by non-Moslem Berbers who needed the salt mines of Ankar. It is probable that the city of Jennejeno, whose development we have followed in previous chapters, participated in this decline as it known that its population decreased, despite new commerce with North Africa. (Ref. 268) As Ghana fell, successor states included Diara, Soso, two Mossi states and Manding, or Mali, formed by the Malinke Mande. The ruler of the latter was a Moslem living in the rapidly growing city of Timbuktu. Subject to Mali was an adjacent empire in the middle Niger called Songhoy and at about this same time a people called the "Telem" took over the old abandoned granaries in the caves of the Bandiagara cliff in Mali and used this as a burial place for their dead. (See page 234, volume 1). One cave alone has been found to have 3,000 skeletons. (Ref. 251)

By this time most of the desert nomads had been converted to Islam, which had spread south from the Maghrib into the states of the Sudan with Muslim merchants as they crossed the Sahara. This dangerous trans-Sahara trade carried luxury goods, eventually fire-arms and salt, a vital element in the diet of tropical countries. On the reverse, north trek went gold, leather work and slaves. (Ref. 8, 45, 211, 83) This was the era when the one-humped camel (dromedary) really became of greatest importance in the desert. These hot, dry-country animals could carry 700 to 800 "light pounds". A caravan of 6,000 camels could carry 2,400 to 3,000 tons or the load of 4 to 6 medium sized sailing ships of that period. (Ref. 260)

Farther east there was the country of Kanem, which had no gold but did a brisk business of exporting slaves. In this century Kanem accepted Islam and under Mai Dunama I, the borders of the state were extended northward across the desert to Fezzan and westward into Hausaland. Dunama is said to have had 30,000 horsemen, cultural and commercial links with the Middle East and to have maintained a rest house in Cairo for pilgrims going from Kanem to Mecca. (Ref. 175, 83)

In the dense rain forest of central Africa, Pygmoid and Bushmanoid hunters continued to be present and the Bantu-speaking Negroids had already been migrating down the rivers from the Sudanic belt to that area and were gradually spreading east and south. The Luba people may have been well established in the Lake Kisale region of northern Katanga for three centuries. The Kenya highlands and adjoining northern Tanzania were also already well populated. The original inhabitants, as previously noted, were Caucasoids called "Azanians" and by tradition were tall, bearded and red-skinned. Gradually through the centuries, however, these had been gradually absorbed by the Nilo-Hamites and the Bantu-speaking Negroids. The latter were also filtering into the south into the territory of the Bushmen. Some buildings were erected at Zimbabwe in this century, beginning the development of another great empire which would flower some centuries hence. (Ref. 83, 175)

In the last chapter we witnessed the fragmentation of the once great Abbasid Empire. Its breakdown paved the way for the takeover late in this 11th century by a new Turkish power coming out of the east - a new wave of Seljuqs, a clan of mercenary Ghuzz who had revolted from Ghaznavid employ in 1037 and then soon took over entire control of the area, even of the parent tribe. The remaining Ghuzz, as we shall see later, crossed on west, north of the Caspian and were there known as "Cumans". The Buwayhid Emirate was already breaking up as these new Seljuqs arrived. The latter were orthodox Sunnites and they defeated the Shi'ite rulers, established themselves as the protectors of the Baghdad caliph and then went on to the Mediterranean coast. By the time the surviving stragglers of the 1st Christian Crusade reached the area of Jerusalem, intending to drive out those invading Turks, they had already been pushed back temporarily by the Fatimids of Egypt. Nevertheless, the good Christians slaughtered all the Moslems they could reach and did establish a number of small states, including the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (A.D. 1099), none of which lasted much more than a century. It was at this time that a group of Italian merchants from Amalfi established an hostel to care for the pilgrims visiting the shrines in Jerusalem, calling themselves "Knights Templar and the Hospitallers", which was to become the most powerful military order west of the Jordan River. (Ref. 86) Antioch was captured by Crusaders in 1098 and was ruled by them for nearly two centuries. The Christians called all this land from northern Syria to the Red Sea "outremer", meaning "beyond the sea". The Druze Muslim sect, descendants of ancient nomads, settled in the mountains by the Jordanian border. Some were tall, fair and blue-eyed, perhaps the remnants of intermarriage with Alexander's Greeks^[162] (Ref. 118)

Actually the primary interest of the Seljuqs was not the West but the control of Baghdad and the rich lands of northern Syria, as well as the destruction of the Fatimid Caliphate of Egypt, whose power threatened and whose heretic Shi'ite beliefs were an abomination to the rigidly orthodox Turks. (Ref. 137, 8, 68) Merchants in Iraq and adjacent regions had attained greater wealth and social prestige in the 10th century and the first part of the 11th than ever before but this was not to last long. (Ref. 279)

At the beginning of this century Mahmud the Turk, leader of a remnant of the Kirghiz from Tuirkistan, who had ruled from Ghazni, Afghanistan for a century or so, took all of Persia and the Punjab in India, becoming the greatest of the Afghan rulers. His realm was short-lived, however, as a rival Turkish power, the Seljuq branch of the Ghuzz came out of Turkistan and Transoxiana and moving west, took the dynasties of Asiatic Islam one by one. The greatest Seljuq sultan was Malik-Shah. By 1055 the Ghaznavids had been expelled from Persia and the Buwayhids conquered. The conquest of southwestern Asia and even Asia Minor had been completed by 1090, although by the following year the sultanate had again broken up into a dozen warring factions. In the northern mountains of Persia (also in northern Syria), one branch of Shi'ites, the Ismailis, doped up on hashish, reigned with terror, murdering generals, viziers and even caliphs. They were called hashshashin (Hashish eaters) and thus our word "assassins". (Ref. 2)

Omar Khayyam, a Persian living in the last half of this century, was one of the greatest mathematicians of medieval times, developing a partial solution of cubic equations.- He was also without equal in astronomy and philosophy, an atheist, or advanced "free-thinker" and rejected all theology. It is ironical that he is known chiefly to us as a composer of quatrains, such as the Rubaiyah (from rubai - composed of 4), but all Persians in those days were poets and this was only a diversionary activity of the great Khayyam. Avicenna ^[163], about whom we made mention in the last century, continued to work until his death in 1037. He was a Persian boy prodigy who is said to have mastered the Koran by age 10. At age 21 he wrote a scientific encyclopedia but his chief renown is as a physician, compiler, commentator and writer. Some of his texts were used as the basis for medical teaching, even in the British Isles, until the middle of the 17th century. It is said that he mentioned coffee in his writings and the word is definitely of Arabic origin, although the drink possibly originated in Ethiopia. Kahwah, originally meaning "wine", was used also to mean "coffee" and the later became kihwah. (Ref. 125, 211)