A History of the Crusades-Vol 1 (4 page)

Egypt was lost for ever. By the year 700 Roman
Africa was in the hands of the Arabs. Eleven years later they occupied Spain. In
the year 717 their empire stretched from the Pyrenees to central India and
their warriors were hammering at the walls of Constantinople.

CHAPTER II

THE REIGN OF
ANTICHRIST

‘In our watching
we have watched for a nation that could not save us.’
LAMENTATIONS
IV, 17

The Christians of the East accepted with a good
grace the dominion of their infidel masters. They could not well do otherwise.
There was small likelihood now that Byzantium would rise again, as in the days
of the Persians, to rescue the holy places. The Arabs, wiser than the Persians,
soon built a fleet, based on Alexandria, that wrested from the Byzantines their
most valuable asset, the command of the seas. On land they were to retain the
offensive for nearly three centuries. It seemed pointless to hope for rescue
from the princes of Christendom.

Nor would such rescue have been welcomed by the
heretic sects. To them the change of rulers had brought relief and pleasure.
The Jacobite Patriarch of Antioch, Michael the Syrian, writing five centuries
later, in the days of the Latin kingdoms, reflected the old tradition of his
people when he told that ‘the God of vengeance, who alone is the Almighty . . .
raised from the south the children of Ishmael to deliver us by them from the
hands of the Romans’. This deliverance, he added, ‘was no light advantage for
us’. The Nestorians echoed these sentiments. ‘The hearts of the Christians’,
wrote an anonymous Nestorian chronicler, ‘rejoiced at the domination of the
Arabs — may God strengthen it and prosper it!’ The Copts of Egypt were a little
more critical; but their animosity was directed more against the cruel
conqueror ‘Amr, and his treachery and exactions, than against his people and
religion. Even the Orthodox, finding themselves spared the persecution that
they had feared and paying taxes that, in spite of the
jizya
demanded
from the Christians, were far lower than in Byzantine times, showed small
inclination to question their destiny. A few mountain tribes, Mardaites of the
Lebanon and the Taurus, still kept up the struggle; but they fought from
lawlessness and pride rather than for the Faith.

The Dhimmis

The effect of
the Arab conquest was to fix the Churches of the East permanently in the
positions in which they then stood. Unlike the Christian Empire, which
attempted to enforce religious uniformity on all its citizens — an ideal never
realized, for the Jews could neither be converted nor expelled — the Arabs,
like the Persians before them, were prepared to accept religious minorities,
provided that they were People of the Book. The Christians, together with the
Zoroastrians and the Jews, became
dhimmis
, or protected peoples, whose
freedom of worship was guaranteed by the payment of the
jizya
, which was
first a capitation tax but soon was transformed into a tax paid in lieu of
military service and to which a new land tax, the
kharaj
, was added.
Each sect was treated as a
milet,
a semi-autonomous community within the
state, each under its religious leader who was responsible for its good
behaviour to the Caliph’s government. Each was to retain those places of
worship that it had possessed at the time of the Conquest, an arrangement that
suited the Orthodox better than the heretic Christians, as Heraclius had
recently restored many churches to their use. The last regulation was not
strictly obeyed. The Moslems took over certain Christian churches, such as the
great cathedral of St John at Damascus, and periodically destroyed many others;
while a considerable number of churches and synagogues were continually built.
Indeed, later Moslem jurists allowed the
dhimmis’
right to erect
buildings, so long as they were no higher than Moslem buildings and the sound
of their bells and services were inaudible to Moslem ears. But there was no
relaxation of the rule that the
dhimmis
should wear distinctive clothes
and never ride on horseback; nor should they ever publicly offend against
Moslem practices, nor attempt to convert Moslems, nor marry their women, nor speak
slightingly of Islam; and they must remain loyal to the state.

The
milet
system established a somewhat
different conception of what was understood by nationality. Nationalism in the
East had for many centuries past been based not on race, except in the case of
the Jews, whose religious exclusiveness had kept their blood comparatively
pure, but on cultural tradition and geographical position and economic
interest. Now loyalty to a religion became the substitute for national
loyalties. An Egyptian, for instance, would not regard himself as a citizen of
Egypt but as a Moslem or as a Copt or as an Orthodox, as the case might be. It
was his religion or his
milet
that commanded his allegiance. This gave
to the Orthodox an advantage over the heretic sects. They were still known as
the Melkites, the Emperor’s men; and they considered themselves the Emperor’s
men. Cruel necessity might place them under the domination of the infidel,
whose laws they were obliged to obey; but the Emperor was God’s viceroy on
earth and their true sovereign. Saint John Damascene, himself a civil servant
at the Caliph’s court, always addressed the Emperor, strongly though he
disagreed with him on theology, as his lord and master, and referred to his
employer merely as the Emir. The eastern Patriarchs, writing in the ninth
century to the Emperor Theophilus to protest against his religious policy, used
similar terms. The emperors accepted the responsibility. In all their wars and
diplomatic dealings with the Caliphs, they kept in mind the welfare of the
Orthodox beyond their frontiers. It was not a matter of administration. They could
not interfere with the day-to-day government in Moslem lands; nor did the
Patriarch of Constantinople have any jurisdiction over his eastern colleagues.
It was an expression, sentimental but none the less powerful, of the
continuance of the idea that Christendom was one and indivisible, and that the
Emperor was the symbol of its unity.

The Orthodox
under Moslem Rule

The heretic Churches had no such lay protector.
They were entirely dependent on the goodwill of the Caliph; and their influence
and their prestige suffered accordingly. Moreover their heresies had in origin
been largely due to the desire of the orientals to simplify Christian creeds
and practices. Islam, which was near enough to Christianity to be considered by
many to be merely an advanced form of Christianity, and which now had the vast
social advantage of being the faith of the new ruling class, was easily
acceptable to many of them. There is no evidence to tell us how many converts
were made from Christianity to Islam; but it is certain that the vast majority
of these converts were drawn from the heretics and not from the Orthodox.
Within a century of the Conquest, Syria, whose population had been
predominantly heretic Christian, was a mainly Moslem country; but the numbers
of the Orthodox had been very little reduced. In Egypt the Copts, owing to
their wealth, lost ground less rapidly; but theirs was a losing battle. On the
other hand, the continued existence of the heretics was ensured by the
milet
system, which by stabilizing their position made impossible any reunion of the
Churches.

The growth of Islam in Syria and Palestine was
not due to a sudden influx of Arabs from the desert. The conquerors’ armies had
not been very large. They had not provided much more than a military caste
superimposed on the existing population. The racial composition of the
inhabitants of the country was hardly changed. The townsmen and villagers,
whether they accepted Islam or remained Christian, soon adopted the Arabic
tongue for all general purposes; and we now loosely call their descendants Arabs;
but they were formed of a blend of many races, of the tribes that had dwelt in
the land before ever Israel came out of Egypt, Amalekites or Jebusites or
Moabites or Phoenicians, and of tribes like the Philistines that had been there
almost as long, and of the Aramaeans that throughout recorded history had
slowly and almost imperceptibly penetrated into the cultivated country, and of
those Jews that, like the first apostles, had joined the Church of Christ. Only
the practising Jews remained ethnologically distinct; and even their racial
purity was slightly impaired. In Egypt the Hamitic stock was less mixed; but it
had been swollen by intermarriage with immigrants from Syria and the deserts
and the upper Nile and the coasts of the whole Mediterranean basin.

Arab immigration was inevitably at its thickest
in the districts bordering on the desert and in the cities on the caravan
routes that ran along its edge. The decline in the sea-trade of the
Mediterranean, which followed on the Conquest, gave these cities, with their
preponderantly Moslem population, a greater importance than that of the
Hellenistic cities nearer to the coast. Alexandria was the only large port
maintained by Arabs on the Mediterranean. There, and in the Hellenistic cities
of Syria, Christians remained plentiful, probably outnumbering the Moslems.
There was roughly the same difference in the Syrian countryside. The inland
plains and valleys became increasingly Moslem; but between the Lebanon and the
sea Christians of various sects prevailed. In Egypt the distinction was more
between town and country. The
fellahin
were gradually converted to
Islam, but the towns were largely Christian. In Palestine there was a more
arbitrary division. While much of the countryside became Moslem, many villages
clung to the older faith. Towns of special import to the Christians, such as Nazareth
or Bethlehem, were almost exclusively Christian; and in Jerusalem itself,
despite the Moslems’ regard for it, the Christians remained in the majority.
The Palestinian Christians were almost all of the Orthodox
milet.
In
addition, there were important colonies of jews at Jerusalem, and at several
lesser towns, such as Safed and Tiberias. The chief Moslem city was the new
administrative capital at Ramleh. The population of Syria, Palestine and Egypt
remained grouped in this rough pattern for the next four centuries.

The Ommayad
Caliphate

The fifth of the Caliphs, Moawiya the Ommayad,
had been governor of Syria; and after his accession in A.D. 660 he established
his capital at Damascus. His descendants reigned there for nearly a century. It
was a period of prosperity for Syria and Palestine. The Ommayad Caliphs were
with few exceptions men of unusual ability and a broad-minded tolerance. The
presence of their court in the province ensured its good government and a
lively commercial activity; and they encouraged the culture that they found
there. This was a Hellenistic-Christian culture, influenced by tastes and ideas
that we associate with the name of Byzantium. Greek-speaking Christians were
employed in the civil service. For many decades the state accounts were kept in
Greek. Christian artists and craftsmen worked for the Caliphs. The Dome of the
Rock at Jerusalem, completed for the Caliph Abdul-Malik in 691, is the supreme
example of the rotunda-style of building in Byzantine architecture. Its mosaics,
and the even lovelier mosaics set up in the courtyard of the Great Mosque of
Damascus for his son, Walid I, are amongst the finest products of Byzantine
art. How far they were the work of native artisans and how far they were helped
by the technicians and material that Walid certainly imported from Byzantium is
a matter of dispute. These mosaics carefully respected the Prophet’s ban on the
depiction of living creatures. But in their country palaces, discreetly removed
from the eyes of disapproving
mullahs
— for instance, at the hunting-box
of Kasr al-Amra, in the steppes beyond the Jordan — the Ommayads freely
permitted frescoes depicting the human form, even in the nude. Their rule,
indeed, brought no interruption to the development of the Hellenistic culture
of the near Orient; which now achieved its finest, but its final, flowering.

The Christians had therefore no cause to regret
the triumph of Islam. Despite an occasional brief bout of persecution and
despite a few humiliating regulations, they were better off than they had been
under the Christian Emperors. Order was better kept. Trade was good; and the
taxes were far lower. Moreover, during the greater part of the eighth century
the Christian Emperor was a heretic, an iconoclast, an oppressor of all the Orthodox
that paid respect to holy images. Good Christians were happier under infidel
rule.

But this happy period did not endure. The
decline of the Ommayads and the civil wars that led to the establishment of the
Abbasid Caliphs at Baghdad in 750 brought chaos to Syria and Palestine.
Unscrupulous and uncontrolled local governors raised money by confiscating
Christian churches which the Christians had then to redeem. There were waves of
fanaticism, with persecutions and forced conversions. The victory of the
Abbasids restored order; but there was a difference. Baghdad was far away.
There was less supervision of the provincial administration. Trade was still
active along the caravan routes; but there was no great market to stimulate it
locally. The Abbasids were stricter Moslems than the Ommayads. They were less
tolerant of the Christians. Though they too were dependent on an older culture,
it was not Hellenistic but Persian. Baghdad lay within the ancient territory of
the Sassanid kingdom. Persians acquired the chief places in the government.
Persian ideals in art and Persian habits of daily life were adopted. As with
the Ommayads, Christian officials were employed. But these Christians were with
few exceptions Nestorians, whose outlook was towards the East and not the West.
The Abbasid court had on the whole a greater interest in intellectual matters
than the Ommayad. The Nestorians were freely used to translate philosophical
and technical works from the ancient Greek; and scientists and mathematicians
were encouraged to come, even from Byzantium, to teach at the schools of
Baghdad. But this interest was superficial. Abbasid civilization was
fundamentally unaffected by Greek thought, but followed, rather, the traditions
handed down from the kingdoms of Mesopotamia and Iran. It was only in Spain, to
which the Ommayads had fled for refuge, that Hellenistic life lingered on in
the Moslem world.