My previous post mentioned a number of things that I thought readers might want a more detailed account of, hence this post.
Medieval Islamic Law and Econ Stories
The poet Ibn Harma performed before al Mansur; so delighted was the Prince of the Muslims that he asked the poet to name his reward.
"The reward that I want from the Prince of the Muslims is that he send instructions to his officials in the city of Medina commanding that when I am found dead drunk upon the pavement and brought in by the city guard, I be released from the penalty prescribed for that offense."
"That is God's law, not mine," the Caliph replied. "I cannot change it. Name another reward."
"There is nothing else I desire from the Prince of the Muslims."
The Caliph thought a moment, then sent instructions to his officials in Medina commanding that if Ibn Harma was found drunk and brought in for punishment, he should receive sixty strokes of the lash as the law commanded. But whoever brought him in should receive eighty. (Mohammed’s People)
For a modern equivalent, consider Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). Obama could not unilaterally revise immigration law to legalize “Dreamers,” illegal immigrants who had come to the US as children. He could, and did, instruct the Federal immigration authorities not to deport them.
The President, like the Caliph, could not change the law, could arrange for it not to be enforced.
Another:
A woman stood waiting on the road for the Vizier Hamid ibn 'Abbas and complained to him of poverty, asking alms. When he had taken his seat, he gave her an order for two hundred dinars. The paymaster, unwilling to pay such a sum to a woman of her class, consulted the vizier, who said that he had only meant to give her two hundred dirhems. But as God had caused him to write dinar for dirhem, gold for silver, so the sum should be paid out as it was written.
Some days later, a man put a petition into his hand, wherein he said that the vizier had given his wife two hundred dinars, in consequence whereof she was giving herself airs and trying to force him to divorce her. Would the vizier be so good as to give orders to someone to restrain her? Hamid laughed and ordered the man to be given two hundred dinars. (The Tabletalk of a Mesopotamian Judge)
Under Islamic law a husband could divorce his wife but a wife could not divorce her husband. She could, apparently, make being married to her sufficiently unpleasant to force him to divorce her. Keeping her from doing so was difficult enough that the vizier did not think it worth trying.
That constraint is relevant to modern marriage law as well; so far as I know no wife has ever been divorced on the grounds that she chose to cook, or make love, badly, so a wife had a way of forcing her husband to agree to a divorce even in a legal regime without unilateral no-fault divorce.1 It is relevant to contract law more generally: Contract terms are enforceable only if it is possible for a court to tell whether they are being violated.
Snorri Sturluson On Historical Sources
…we have mostly used as evidence what is said in those poems that were recited before the rulers themselves or their sons. We regard as true everything that is found in those poems about their expeditions and battles. It is indeed the habit of poets to praise most highly the one in whose presence they are at the time, but no one would dare to tell him to his face about deeds of his which all who listened, as well as the man himself, knew were falsehoods and fictions. That would be mockery and not praise.
… As to the poems, I consider them to be least corrupted if they are correctly composed and meaningfully interpreted. (Prologue, Heimskringla)
An Experiment on the Location of Consciousness
A group of captives from a group famous for their courage are being executed, each first asked how he feels about dying:
Then the seventh one was led forward and Porkell asked him as usual.
'I'm very content to die. But deal me out a speedy blow. I have here a dagger. We Jomsvikings have often discussed whether a man knew anything after he had lost his head if it was cut off speedily. Let us make the following arrangement that I shall hold the dagger up if I know anything, otherwise it will fall down.' Porkell struck him and his head flew off, but the dagger fell down. (Jomsviking saga, 13th c.)
The Trembling Minaret: A Controlled Experiment
This mosque has seven minarets, one of them the minaret which shakes, or so they say, when the name of 'Ali ibn Abu Talib (God be pleased with him) is mentioned. I climbed up to this minaret from the top of the roof of the mosque, accompanied by one of the inhabitants of al-Basra, and I found in one angle of it a wooden hand-grip nailed into it, resembling the handle of a builder's trowel. The man who was with me placed his hand on that hand-grip and said 'By right of the head of the Commander of the Faithful 'Ali (God be pleased with him), shake,' and he shook the hand-grip, where- upon the whole minaret quivered. I in my turn placed my hand on the hand-grip and said to him 'And I say "By right of the head of Abu Bakr, the successor of the Apostle of God (God give him blessing and peace), shake,' and I shook the hand-grip and the whole minaret quivered. They were astonished at this. (The Rehla of Ibn Battuta, 14th century, H.A.R. Gibb translator)
Keep everything else the same and change the caliph.
Abu Bakr was the first caliph; the Shia believe that ‘Ali should have been. Ibn Battuta comments that Basra, where this happened, was a safely Sunni city but that in a Shia city it would have gotten him killed.
More On Medieval Spicing
I mentioned two pieces of evidence that medieval dishes were not overspiced. Another is our experience with mastic, is a resin that occasionally shows up in medieval recipes; I like to describe it as dehydrated turpentine. The first time we tried a recipe using it we found the flavor overwhelming, ended up reducing the amount from what we first tried to one sixteenth of a teaspoon to a pound and a half of meat. That raised the question of whether people in period had different tastes than we did, used mastic in quantities more typical for spices. That question was answered when we came across a recipe for mastajhiya soup in Soup for the Qan, a Mongol/Chinese cookbook — with quantities. The ratio of mastic to meat was about the same as ours.
More general evidence comes from recipes in medieval Arabic cookbooks which, unlike contemporary European recipes, often contain quantities of ingredients, including spices, by weight.
We follow the recipes and usually like the result.
A Better Rope Bed
If you are inventing a rope bed, the obvious design is a rectangular frame with holes for the rope mesh, something like this:
Rope stretches, so over time the mesh sags. To tighten it you have to pull it through about fifty holes.
The design I got off an early medieval ivory carving has the mesh at 45° to the frame, anchored to the head and sides of the frame and, at the foot, to a free dowel linked to the foot of the frame by a tension rope, a rope passed multiple times around both, functioning as a pulley. To tighten the mesh you pull the tension rope, moving the free dowel towards the foot with a substantial mechanical advantage.
When you want to take the bed apart for transport you remove the tension rope, slide the free dowel up towards the head of the bed, tie the mesh to the side rails, the head, and the free dowel, and disassemble the frame. To put the bed back together you reverse the process.
Past posts, sorted by topic
My web page, with the full text of multiple books and articles and much else
A search bar for text in past posts and much of my other writing
Although traditional Jewish and Islamic law do penalize a wife for refusing to make love to her husband at all.
Here's another pretty story, and more illustrative:
Although the destruction of written material by the Islamic forces is well known, a letter survives from 640 AD from the Caliph to General Amr, the leader of the Muslim armies in Egypt, who had asked the Caliph what should he do with the thousands of manuscripts he found in the library at Alexandria.
The Caliph's answer: If their content is in accordance with the revelations of Allah, they are superfluous, since the revelations of Allah more than suffice. If, on the other hand, they contain matter not in accordance with the revelations of Allah, they are abominable. Proceed then and destroy them all.
The Muslim writer Ibn al-Qifti, tells us that the books were distributed to the public baths of Alexandria where they were used to feed the stoves that kept the baths warm. It took six months to burn them all.
Anyone who cherry-picks the charming stories to the exclusion of the barbaric literature of the murderous cult of Islam is being mendacious.
You will, I think, be pleased to hear that the next generation of college freshmen is fairly amenable to being introduced to the Tabletalk of a Mesopotamian Judge, and to the Icelandic sagas. Or so my eldest, to whom I believe you were the one to tell him about the Tabletalk, says about the reaction of his fellow college students.