In spite of the subtitle, Lewis' history of Muslim Spain (al Andalus) and Catholic Frankland (later Francia and still later France) is about an epic clash of civilizations—or, better, the clash of Islamic civilization with European barbarism. It is an old-fahioned history that chronicles the rise and fall of dynasties and kingdoms and the many battles and wars that liter the history of both Islam and Europe. Only in passing does Lewis point to the profound influence that Andalusian Islamic culture had on the development of Western Europe, and the reader who wants to discover what Europe learned from the Muslim East through Spain should look elsewhere.
In fact, God's Crucible is two histories, Islamic Spain and Christian Europe, that are united only by the immense episodic dislocations caused by their rubbing against each other like two gigantic, restless tectonic plates. The Muslim East, including a variety of tribes from West Asia and North Africa, and Catholic Europe, also including a variety of peoples, pushed and shoved against each other from the invasion of Spain in 711 until the final eviction of Islam from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492. Lewis concentrates on the first three centuries or so of the struggle, and makes a number of important observations in the midst of his chronicle. He makes it clear, for example, that the Jews were a third presence in this history and, although much smaller in numbers, important actors in their own right.
God's Crucible is also an old-fashioned book in the attitudes it contains about Europe in the era after the fall of Rome. While revisionist historians have discovered in early medieval Europe a dynamic world that made many advances in learning and technology, for Lewis post-Roman Europe was what previous generations of commentators believed it to be: a barbaric world trapped in the Dark Ages. He emphasizes repeatedly that in comparison with Andalusian civilization with its great wealth and grand urban centers, Europe east of the Pyrenees was a cultural wasteland, ignorant and violent. Almost never in this book do the Europeans come out looking good by comparison to the Arabs and other Islamic peoples on the western side of the mountains. Most notable is the contrast between the way in which Andalusian Muslims and Catholic Europeans treated people of other faiths. By-and-large, the Muslims were relatively tolerant of at least Judaism and Christianity and left Jews and Catholics to their faith so long as they paid their taxes and remained loyal to their rulers. Euorpean Catholics behaved in the opposite manner with respect to Islam. More largely, the Christians contributed little to Andalusia other than their skills at and penchant for war while Muslim Spain made important contributions to the development of Catholic Europe. Whether or not one wants to go so far as to charge Lewis with harboring a bias that distorts the realities of the past, he certainly leans strongly in the direction of Islamic Spain and away from Catholic Frankland.
Given his pro-Andalusian perspective, Lewis argues that the Christian victory at the famous Battle of Poitiers (732), in fact, did not save Europe from Islam. Rather it was developments in the Islamic world that conspired to halt the Arab advance into Europe. He agrees, that is, with Muslim historians of the time who he says rightly blamed "their own internecine preoccupations as the real reason for Christian Europe's survival." (p. 178) He also speculates that Europe was actually worse off for its victories over its Muslim invaders and their failure to conquer the continent. Lewis writes, for example, "An ironic intelligence from another planet might have observed that if Carolingian Europeans believed that Charles the Hammer's victory at Poitiers made their world possible, then it was a fair question to ask whether or not defeat might have been preferable." He continues, "The European shape of things to come was set for dismal centuries following one upon the other until the Commercial Revolution and the Enlightenment molded new contours." (p. 286)
That being said, for the general reader who exercises a healthy caution concerning Lewis' interpretation of past events, God's Crucible is still a helpful book—never mind all of the names, which can become a jumble at times. He captures the complexity of the events he recounts and shows how various factions on both sides of the Pyrenees played off of each other. The Muslim invaders of Spain, in particular, turned out to be a patchwork of ethnicities and social groups. To a degree, he makes the case that Islamic rule of Spain was generally enlightened by the standards of the day, more humane than that later imposed on it after the reconquista by Christian forces. Charlemagne also comes across well in Lewis' account of events. But he seems to have been more of an anomaly than anything else, a brief interlude in the darkness as it were.
If not a great book, this is certainly not a "bad" book either. There are a few nuggets scattered through it as well. Lewis, for example, describes the work historians as that of being "prophets in reverse" (p. 314) by which he means that historians are able to see the budding of the future in events that the participants in those events simply did not see. Thus, what was a period of prosperity still contained the seeds of future calamity, a fact clear only with the hindsight of a "reverse prophet." The point here is that historians benefit from hindsight only to the extent that they carry out their research with due diligence and insightfully. What they discover is often not obvious even to others in their own time, let alone to those in the era under study. The true prophet is inspired to see what others do not see, which is not a bad description of the historian's craft at all.
As old-fashioned political and military chronicles of the past go, in sum, God's Crucible is a reasonably good read. It contains some interesting insights. It does the historian's task of revising previous accounts. It exposes the main contours of the past. And to the degree it is a one-sided account, its bias is reasonably clear and consistent. It also contributes to an understanding of the history of European learning and science by placing post-Roman Empire cultural developments into their larger regional history. In that context, the Byzantine Empire lurks on the fringes appearing from time to time as events unfold and trends develop. This is not a great book, but it is also not a bad one.
