A History of the Crusades-Vol 1 (6 page)

The annexation of Armenia was dictated by
military considerations. Experience had taught that no reliance could be placed
on the Armenian princes. Though they were Christians and had nothing to gain
from a Moslem conquest, they were heretics, and as heretics they hated the
Orthodox more passionately than any Moslem oppressor. In spite of continued
trade and cultural relations, and in spite of the many Armenians who migrated
into the Empire and reached its highest offices, the animosity never died down.
But from the valleys of Armenia it was easy, as past border-warfare had shown,
to penetrate into the heart of Asia Minor. The military authorities would have
been foolish to allow such a danger-spot to remain out of their control.
Politically the annexation was less wise. The Armenians resented Byzantine
rule. Though Byzantine garrisons might man the frontier, within the frontier
there was a large and discontented population whose disloyalty was potentially
dangerous and who now, no longer anchored by allegiance to a local prince,
began to wander about spreading lawlessness within the Empire. Wiser statesmen,
less obsessed than the soldier-emperors of Byzantium by the military point of
view, would have hesitated to create an Armenian question to destroy the
uniformity of the Empire and to add a discordant minority to its subjects.

The Caliph Hakim

Northern Syria had passed to the rule of the
Christians; but the Christians of southern Syria and Palestine found the
dominion of the Fatimids easy to bear. They suffered only one short period of persecution,
when the Caliph Hakim, the son of a Christian mother and brought up largely by
Christians, suddenly reacted against his early influences. For ten years, from
1004 to 1014, despite the remonstrance’s of the Emperor, he passed ordinances
against the Christians; he began to confiscate Church property, then to burn
crosses and to order little mosques to be built on church roofs, and finally to
bum the churches themselves. In 1009 he ordered the destruction of the Church
of the Holy Sepulchre itself, on the ground that the annual miracle of the holy
fire, celebrated there on the eve of Easter, must certainly be an impious
forgery. By 1014 some thirty thousand churches had been burnt or pillaged, and
many Christians had outwardly adopted Islam to save their lives. Similar
measures were taken against the Jews. But it should be noted that the Moslems
were equally liable to arbitrary persecution by the head of their faith; who
continued all the time to employ Christian ministers. In 1013, as a concession to
the Emperor, Christians were allowed to emigrate into Byzantine territory. The
persecution only stopped when Hakim became convinced that he himself was
divine. This divinity was publicly proclaimed in 1016 by his friend Darazi. As
the Moslems were more deeply shocked by this behaviour of their leading
co-religionist than the non-Moslems could be, Hakim began to favour the
Christians and the Jews, while he struck at the Moslems themselves by
forbidding the Ramadan fast and the pilgrimage to Mecca. In 1017 full liberty
of conscience was given to the Christians and the Jews. Soon some six thousand
of the recent apostates returned to the Christian fold. In 1020 the Churches
had their confiscated property restored to them, including the materials taken
from their ruined buildings. At the same time the regulation demanding
distinctive dress was abolished. But by now the fury of the Moslems was aroused
against the Caliph, who had substituted his own name for that of Allah in the
mosque services. Darazi fled to the Lebanon, to found there the sect that is
called the Druzes, after his name. Hakim himself disappeared in 1021. He was
probably murdered by his ambitious sister, Sitt al-Mulk; but his fate remained
and still remains a mystery. The Druzes believe that in due course he will come
again.

After his death Palestine was held for a while
by the Emir of Aleppo, Salih ibn Mirdas; but the Fatimid rule was fully
restored in 1029. In 1027 a treaty had already been signed permitting the
Emperor Constantine VIII to undertake the restoration of the Church of the Holy
Sepulchre, and allowing the remaining apostates to return unpenalized to
Christianity. The treaty was renewed in 1036; but the actual work of rebuilding
the church was only carried out some ten years later, by the Emperor
Constantine IX. To supervise the work imperial officials voyaged freely to
Jerusalem; where to the disgust of Moslem citizens and travellers the
Christians seemed to be in complete control. So many Byzantines were to be seen
in its streets that the rumour arose amongst the Moslems that the Emperor
himself had made the journey. There was a prosperous colony of Amalfitan
merchants protected by the Caliph but also protesting the vassaldom of their
Italian home-city to the Emperor, in order to share in the privileges shown to
his subjects. Fear of Byzantine power kept the Christians safe. The Persian
traveller, Nasir-i-Khusrau, who visited Tripoli in 1047, describes the number
of Greek merchant ships to be seen in the harbour there and the fear of the
inhabitants of an attack by the Byzantine navy.

The Prosperity
of the Christians

In the middle of the eleventh century the lot
of the Christians in Palestine had seldom been so pleasant. The Moslem
authorities were lenient; the Emperor was watchful of their interests. Trade
was prospering and increasing with the Christian countries overseas. And never
before had Jerusalem enjoyed so plentifully the sympathy and the wealth that
were brought to it by pilgrims from the West.

CHAPTER III

THE PILGRIMS OF
CHRIST

‘
Our
feet
shall stand within thy gates, O Jerusalem.’
PSALMS CXXII, 2

The desire to be a pilgrim is deeply rooted in
human nature. To stand where those that we reverence once stood, to see the
very sites where they were born and toiled and died, gives us a feeling of
mystical contact with them and is a practical expression of our homage. And if
the great men of the world have their shrines to which their admirers come from
afar, still more do men flock eagerly to those places where, they believe, the
Divine has sanctified the earth.

In the earliest days of Christianity
pilgrimages were rare. Early Christian thought tended to emphasize the godhead
and the universality of Christ rather than the manhood; and the Roman
authorities did not encourage a voyage to Palestine. Jerusalem itself,
destroyed by Titus, lay in ruins till Hadrian rebuilt it as the Roman city of
Aelia. But the Christians remembered the setting of the drama of Christ’s life.
Their respect for the site of Calvary was such that Hadrian deliberately
erected there a temple to Venus Capitolina. By the third century the cave at
Bethlehem where Christ was born was well known to them; and Christians would
journey thither and to the Mount of Olives, to the Garden of Gethsemane and to
the place of the Ascension. A visit to such holy spots for the purpose of
prayer and of acquiring spiritual merit was already a part of Christian
practice.

The First
Pilgrims

With the triumph of the Cross the practice
grew. The Emperor Constantine was glad to give strength to the religion that he
had chosen. His mother, the Empress Helena, most exalted and most successful of
the world’s great archaeologists, set out to Palestine, to uncover Calvary and
to find all the relics of the Passion. The Emperor endorsed her discovery by
building there a church, which through all its vicissitudes has remained the
chief sanctuary of Christendom, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

At once a stream of pilgrims began to flow to
the scene of Helena’s labours. We cannot tell their numbers; for most of them
left no record of their journey. But already in 333, before her excavations
were finished, a traveller who wrote of his voyage came all the way from
Bordeaux to Palestine. Soon afterwards we find the description of a tour made
by an indefatigable lady known sometimes as Aetheria and sometimes as Saint
Silvia of Aquitaine. Towards the close of the century one of the great Fathers
of Latin Christendom, Saint Jerome, settled in Palestine and drew after him the
circle of rich and fashionable women that had sat at his feet in Italy. In his
cell at Bethlehem he received a constant procession of travellers who came to
pay him their respects after viewing the holy places. Saint Augustine, most
spiritual of the western Fathers, considered pilgrimages to be irrelevant and
even dangerous and the Greek Fathers tended to agree with him; but Saint
Jerome, though he did not maintain that actual residence in Jerusalem was of
any spiritual value, asserted that it was an act of faith to pray where the feet
of Christ had stood. His view was more popular than Augustine’s. Pilgrimages
multiplied, encouraged by the authorities. By the beginning of the next century
there were said to be already two hundred monasteries and hospices in or around
Jerusalem, built to receive pilgrims, and almost all under the patronage of the
Emperor.

The mid-fifth century saw the height of this
early taste for Jerusalem. The Empress Eudocia, born the daughter of a pagan
philosopher at Athens, settled there after an unhappy life at court; and many
pious members of the Byzantine aristocracy came in her train. In the intervals
of writing hymns she patronized the growing fashion for collecting relics; and
she laid the foundation of the great collection at Constantinople by sending there
the portrait of Our Lady painted by Saint Luke.

The Value of
Relics

Her example was followed by pilgrims from the
West as well as from Constantinople. From immemorial ages the material luxuries
of the world came from the East. Now religious luxuries too went westward.
Christianity was at first an eastern religion. The majority of the early
Christian saints and martyrs had been easterners. There was a spreading
tendency to venerate the saints. Authorities such as Prudentius and Ennodius
taught that divine succour could be found at their graves and that their bodies
should be able to work miracles. Men and women would now travel far to see a
holy relic. Still more, they would try to acquire one, to take it home and to
set it in their local sanctuary. The chief relics remained in the East, those
of Christ at Jerusalem till they were moved to Constantinople, and those of the
saints for the most part at their native places. But minor relics began to
penetrate to the West, brought by some lucky pilgrim or some enterprising
merchant, or sent as a gift to some potentate. Soon there followed small
portions of major relics, then major relics in their entirety. All this helped
to draw the attention of the West to the East. The citizens of Langres, proud
possessors of a finger of Saint Mamas, would inevitably wish to visit Caesarea
in Cappadocia where the saint had lived. The nuns of Chamalieres, with the
bones of Thecla in their chapel, would take a personal interest in her
birthplace at Isaurian Seleucia. When a lady of Maurienne brought back from her
travels the thumb of Saint John the Baptist, her friends were all inspired to
journey out to see his body at Samaria and his head at Damascus. Whole
embassies would be sent in the hope of securing some such treasure, maybe even
a phial of the Holy Blood or a fragment of the true Cross itself. Churches were
built in the West called after eastern saints or after the Holy Sepulchre; and
often a portion of their revenues was set aside to be sent to the holy places
from which they took their names.

This interconnection was helped by the commerce
that was still kept up round the coasts of the Mediterranean. It was slowly declining,
owing to the growing impoverishment of the West; and at times it was
interrupted, as when the Vandal pirates in the mid-fifth century made the seas
no longer safe for unarmed traders; and discontent and heresy in the East added
further difficulties. But there are many itineraries written in the sixth
century by western pilgrims who had travelled eastward in Greek or Syrian
merchant ships; and the merchants themselves carried religious news and gossip
as well as passengers and merchandise. Thanks to the travellers and the
traders, the historian Gregory of Tours was well informed on Oriental affairs.
There exists the record of a conversation between Saint Symeon Stylites and a
Syrian merchant who saw him on his pillar near Aleppo, in which Saint Symeon
asked for news of Saint Genevieve of Paris and sent her a personal message. In
spite of the religious and political quarrels of the higher authorities, the
relations between eastern and western Christians remained very cordial and
close.

With the Arab conquests this era came to an
end. Syrian merchants no longer came to the coasts of France and Italy, bringing
their wares and their news. There were pirates again in the Mediterranean. The
Moslem rulers of Palestine were suspicious of Christian travellers from abroad.
The journey was expensive and difficult; and there was little wealth left in
western Christendom. But intercourse was not entirely broken off. Western
Christians still thought of the eastern holy places with sympathy and longing.
When, in 682, Pope Martin I was accused of friendly dealings with the Moslems,
he explained that his motive was to seek permission to send alms to Jerusalem.
In 670 the Frankish bishop Arculf set out for the East and managed to make a
complete tour of Egypt, Syria and Palestine, and to return through
Constantinople; but the journey took several years, and he met with many hardships.
We know the names of other pilgrims of the time, such as Vulphy of Rue in
Picardy, or Bercaire of Montier-en-Der in Burgundy and his friend Waimer. But
their stories showed that only rough and enterprising men could hope to reach
Jerusalem. No women seem to have ventured on the pilgrimage.