The Templars (6 page)
Authors: Michael Haag
Islamic Imperialism and Flourishing Christian Heresies
Though the rapidly expanding Muslim empire was first ruled from Medina in Arabia, from 661 it was governed from Damascus in Syria by caliphs of the Umayyad dynasty. But after a violent transfer of power to the Abbasid dynasty in 750, the caliphate was moved to Baghdad in Iraq.
Throughout these changes, however, Arab policy remained the same, namely to extract the maximum revenue from its conquered territories and its subject peoples. Proud and independent in attitude and nomadic by background, the occupying Arabs were disinclined to become farmers; instead the Muslim Arab warrior caste lived off the poll tax (
jizyah
) and the land tax (
kharaj
), which was paid by the conquered peoples in return for the protection of their lives and property and for the right to practise their own religion.
Because the
jizyah
could be imposed only on non-Muslims, there was little interest in making converts to Islam, and for centuries longer Syria, Palestine and Egypt would remain overwhelmingly Christian. Indeed during its first century under Muslim rule Syria gave the world five Popes. Nor did Arabisation come quickly. Only towards the end of the seventh century was Greek replaced by Arabic as the official language of administration in Aramaic-speaking Syria and Coptic-speaking Egypt.
Nevertheless, the Muslim conquerors imposed restrictions on their subjects to keep them firmly in place. The building of new churches and synagogues was prohibited, the ringing of church bells was forbidden, and festivals and public expressions of faith were curtailed. Further, Christians and Jews stood outside the community; they were not allowed to carry weapons, nor bear witness against Muslims in courts of law, nor marry Muslim women. Also Jews and Christians had to distinguish themselves by their clothing from Muslims, they could not ride horses, only asses, and any who attempted to convert Muslims to their own religion paid with the death penalty, as did any Muslim who apostasised.
If the triumph of Islam had been enabled by the Byzantine Empire’s long and exhausting conflict with Persia, it had also been helped by the fierce theological disputes that for hundreds of years had torn apart the unity of the Christian world. And so it is fitting if ironic that an effect of the Muslim conquests was to protect and preserve a considerable variety of Christian heresies. To the Muslims these controversies were of little account; Islam was the revealed and perfected faith, and as for the Christians, and also the Jews, as long as they submitted to Muslim rule and paid their taxes they were permitted to conduct their own affairs according to their own laws, customs and beliefs.
Christian heresy flourished in the Middle East under Muslim rule, or rather what was regarded as heresy by the authorities in Constantinople and by the Popes in Rome. But here in the Middle East all Christian sects were treated alike, so that heterodox and heretic Christians were now freed from persecution by rival Christians or the state. For example, at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 a majority decided that Jesus had two natures, the human and the divine, adding that these were unmixed and unchangeable but at the same time indistinguishable and inseparable.
This is the view of almost all Christian churches to this day, but members of the Syrian Church, known as the Jacobites, and of the Egyptian Church, known as the Copts, while not denying the two natures, put emphasis on their unity at the Incarnation. For this the Syrians and Egyptians were called monophysites (
monophysis
, Greek for single nature), and were charged with the heretical belief that Jesus’ human nature had been entirely absorbed in the divine.
What exactly the parties to these disputes meant when they talked of the nature of Jesus Christ was affected by shades of language and culture, but certainly they had a divisive effect within the Byzantine Empire and helped prepare the way for the coming of Islam. As one figure of the Jacobite Church said of the Muslim conquest: ‘The God of vengeance delivered us out of the hands of the Romans by means of the Arabs. It profited us not a little to be saved from the cruelty of the Romans and their bitter hatred towards us.’
Heretics, the Antichrist and the Last Days
For a long time the Byzantines viewed Islam as a kind of Arianism, the fourth–century Christian heresy which opened the way to regarding the nature of Jesus as being not of the same substance as God’s and even being inferior to God’s. Taken to its extreme extent, Arianism could amount to denying entirely the divinity of Jesus and reducing him to merely a good man. Even someone who saw things from up close, such as John of Damascus (c676–749), a Syrian Christian theologian who lived entirely under Muslim rule and served as counsellor in the court of the Umayyad caliphs, did not regard Islam as a new religion but considered it a deviation from orthodox Christianity similar to other early heresies.
Likewise medieval Western Europe conceived of Islam in the same way, as a version of Arianism, and mistook it for just one more aberrant Christian sect. If Islam was still evolving at this time, as some modern scholars believe, then this may have been a reasonable enough estimation of the situation. Or it may be that observers in both the Byzantine Empire and the West could see Islam only through the lens of Christian history and were unable to recognise it as something completely new. Certainly it is remarkable that even in the late Middle Ages Dante (1265–1321) in his
Inferno
(XXVIII, 31–36) should have considered Mohammed as a heretic and placed him in the ninth circle of hell for being ‘a sower of schism and discord’.
But the coming of Islam also found its way into Christian prophetic literature, which after the Bible and the works of the Church Fathers was the most influential body of writing circulating in Europe during the Middle Ages. Uncanonical, unorthodox and infinitely adaptable to the preoccupations of the moment, these concoctions followed a common theme derived from the New Testament’s
Book of Revelation
–that of the divine warrior who will come and save the world. An early candidate for this role was the Emperor Constantine, who had legalised Christianity and was then expected to bring about the Second Coming. In prophecy after prophecy that role passed from one emperor or king or prince to another while the story took on fantastical dimensions in relating the final triumph of Christianity.
One famous example that would reverberate throughout the Middle Ages was the
Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius
. It was written in the seventh century but made to look as though it had been written in the fourth century as a prediction of the Muslim invasion of the Middle East by Bishop Methodius of Patara, who was martyred in 311 at Tyre in Lebanon during the Roman persecutions. It relates how the Ishmaelites, that is the Arabs, emerge from the desert and ravage the land from the Nile to the Euphrates. The Christians are punished for their sins by being subjected for a time to the Ishmaelites, who kill Christian priests, desecrate the holy places, take the Christians’ land and force or seduce many Christians from the true faith.
But just when all seems lost a mighty emperor, whom many had thought long dead, rises up and defeats the Ishmaelites, lays waste their lands with fire and sword, and rages against those Christians who had denied Jesus as their lord. Now under this great emperor a golden age begins, a time of peace and joy, when the world flourishes as never before.
This is shattered, however, when fearsome peoples known collectively as Gog and Magog, whom Alexander the Great had imprisoned in the far north, break out and bring universal terror and destruction until God sends a captain of the heavenly host who destroys them in a flash.
The emperor journeys to Jerusalem where he hands over Christendom to the care of God by going to Golgotha and placing his crown upon the Cross, which soars up to heaven. But the emperor dies and the Antichrist appears, installing himself in the Temple in Jerusalem where he inaugurates a reign of trials and tribulations, deceiving people with his miracles and persecuting those he cannot deceive. However, before long the Cross reappears in the heavens and Jesus Christ himself comes on clouds in power and glory to kill the Antichrist with the breath of his mouth and to carry out the Last Judgement.
For medieval people, especially the poor, the oppressed, the disoriented and the unbalanced, the tremendous drama of the Last Days was not a fantasy about some remote and indefinite future but a prophecy which was infallible and which at almost any given moment was felt to be on the point of fulfilment. The coming of the Last Emperor followed by the reign of the Antichrist were tensely awaited, as the lawless chaos of the age was seen as the expected prelude to the universal salvation of the Second Coming.
Counterstrokes in the West and the East
Though the First Crusade was proclaimed in 1095, Muslim historians think of the Crusades as beginning ten years earlier with the fall of Toledo in Spain. In fact the reaction against Arab imperialism had begun long before that; just as Muslim armies had occupied the Middle East, North Africa and Europe, so the Christian counterattack was on several fronts.
In the West the Arabs had overrun Spain and struck deep into France, to within a hundred and fifty miles of the English Channel, before they were beaten back by Charles Martel between Poitiers and Tours in 732, though that did not prevent the Muslims from holding positions on the coasts of Languedoc and Provence for several decades to come. Throughout the eleventh century Pisa, Genoa and Catalonia fought campaigns in the Western Mediterranean to free Sicily, Sardinia and Majorca from Arab rule. In 1063 Pope Alexander II gave his Papal blessing to Iberian Christians in their wars against the Muslims, granting a remission of sins to those who were killed in battle. The recovery
of Toledo from the Arabs in 1085 was a major victory; the northern third of Spain was now back in Christian hands, though not until the fall of Granada in 1492 would the Reconquista succeed in driving the Muslims out of the Iberian peninsula altogether.
In the East the Byzantines were scoring victories in the Eastern Mediterranean already in the tenth century, recapturing Crete from the Muslims in 961 and Cyprus four years later. The Byzantines also recovered great swathes of territory in the Middle East. In 969 they captured Antioch, and shortly afterwards they took Aleppo and Latakia along with a coastal strip extending clear down through Syria nearly to Tripoli in northern Lebanon. The Muslim inhabitants were
left undisturbed and the local Muslim leaders were made vassals of the Byzantine Empire, but now they were made to pay taxes from which the Christians were exempted, while destroyed churches were rebuilt and the freedom to convert from Islam to Christianity or vice versa was guaranteed.
In 975, under the Emperor John Tzimiskes, the Byzantines launched a crusade with the intention of recovering Jerusalem, which was still an overwhelmingly Christian city. Marching out with his army from Antioch, Tzimiskes took Damascus, then advanced into Palestine where Nazareth and Caesarea opened their gates to him and the Muslim authorities at Jerusalem pleaded for terms. But first the Emperor turned towards the Mediterranean to clear the enemy from coastal castles–only to die suddenly in 976 before he could return his attention to Jerusalem. For the next century the Byzantines remained in control of northern Syria but got no closer to the Holy Land.
Until the middle of the eighth century Damascus, the seat of the Umayyad dynasty, had been the capital of a vast and complex empire which stretched from the Atlantic to Central Asia. It was an empire largely administered by Syrians, Christians as well as Muslims. The Arabs were the ruling class, but in turn the Umayyads were deeply influenced by the Graeco-Aramaic civilisation they found in Syria with its many links, intellectual, cultural and mercantile, to the Mediterranean world. The replacement of the Umayyad by the Abbasid caliphs and the shift from Damascus to Baghdad marked a rejection of these influences.
The advance of Christian forces against the Muslim empire from both the West and the East came as evidence of the decay and division in the Arab world. The empire had become a rapacious tax-gathering machine run by provincial governors who paid kickbacks to Baghdad but otherwise offered the caliph no more than the barest homage and granted their subjects even less than that. With the triumph of an authoritarian and incurious religious dogma, with the failure to develop
resources or technological advances, and with civil administrations replaced by local military autocrats, the empire of the Arabs fell into intellectual, political and economic decline.
There were uprisings against the Arabs throughout their empire. In Egypt, where the population had been three million at the time of the Arab conquest, the mismanagement of the country’s resources was so appalling that there were not many more than one and a half million Egyptians by AD 1000. Muslim discrimination and oppressive taxation stoked up resentment among the Copts, that is the native Egyptians. Their national pride was already wounded by the coming of the Arabs and the continuing infiltration of Egypt by nomadic tribes and led to repeated Coptic revolts, which were only suppressed with much bloodshed. Many Copts converted to Islam after the ferocious repression of 832; being unable to meet taxation demands, partly because the irrigation system was falling into further disrepair, they migrated into the towns, leaving large areas of land uncultivated. Even so, not until the eleventh century, four hundred years after the Arab occupation, did the majority of Egyptians finally adopt Islam.
Similarly the prosperity of Syria declined along with its population. Marginalised and oppressed by their new rulers in Baghdad the Syrians more than once rose up in revolt. Yet under the Abbasids the Arabic language became virtually universal in Syria, and Islam became the religion of the majority of its inhabitants–partly because of fresh immigration from Arabia, and partly from persecutions, pressures and inducements. Many Christians moved to the safety of the Lebanese mountains, among them the Maronites, who established themselves there in the ninth century.
Apart from the tensions between the Arab elite and their eventually Arabised subjects, Islam itself was split between the orthodox Sunni, who controlled the Baghdad caliphate, and the Shia, that is the partisans of Ali, so that religious dissensions added to the original cultural, ethnic and political differences. The Fatimids, who were Arabs originally from Syria but had settled in North Africa, returned eastwards to Egypt where they established a Shiite caliphate in 969, and by the end of the century they had extended their empire over Palestine and southern Syria.
Islam Divided: Shia versus Sunni
In 656 after insurgent Arab troops murdered Uthman, the third caliph, who was a member of the powerful Umayyad family of Mecca, Ali put himself forward as the natural inheritor of the caliphate, basing his claim on his marriage to Mohammed’s daughter Fatima, as well as on his considerable religious learning. But Ali was opposed by Aisha, who had been Mohammed’s favourite wife, along with her Umayyad family and many of Mohammed’s surviving companions. He took to arms and won his first battle, but later saw his authority dissolve when rebels advanced on his army with copies of the Koran fixed to the points of their spears and his troops refused to fight.
Ali was assassinated and the Umayyads were installed once again in the caliphate. But the real wound to Islam occurred when Hussein, Ali’s son by Fatima, and therefore of Mohammed’s blood, led a revolt against the Umayyads and after a fanatical struggle was killed with all his men. In a sense the Prophet’s own blood had been shed, so that for the partisans, or Shia, of Ali, Hussein’s death was a martyrdom and also a stain on the Sunni, that is on orthodox Muslims who then as now constituted the greater part of Islam.
From then on the Shia refused to accept as caliph any but Ali’s descendants, while the Sunni barred the caliphate to the Prophet’s descendants for all time. Shiism took hold in Persia and in much of Iraq, but also, almost three centuries after the death of Ali, his followers in the form of the Fatimids would invade Egypt with the intention of using it as a base from where to oppose the Sunni Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad and to impose Shia dominance throughout the entire Islamic world.
Initially the Muslim presence in Syria and Palestine interfered little with pilgrimage to Christian holy sites, nor did it affect the security of monasteries and Christian communities there. The Muslims were no strangers to the concept of pilgrimage, for they themselves had made the pilgrimage to Mecca one of the pillars of their faith; moreover the
Christian pilgrims were a considerable source of revenue to Muslims at Jerusalem and other holy sites. For Christians, the Holy Land was unique in providing a tangible link with the life and death of Jesus, and throughout the Muslim occupation the numbers of pilgrims continued to grow.
To reach the river Jordan was a special aim of pilgrims, for there they could re-enact the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist (
Matthew 3:16–17
). The afflicted were particularly attracted, for they recalled that one of Jesus’ grievances against the Temple priests in Jerusalem was their rejection of the lame, blind, deformed and sick as imperfect and unworthy, for the belief was that outer illness signified a corruption of the soul. Reacting against the Temple priests, Jesus performed baptisms at which everyone was welcome, for the core of his preaching was that salvation was for all. Pilgrims to the Holy Land sought baptism in the waters of the Jordan in order to undergo a spiritual cleansing, and among them were many afflicted people for whom the purification of their souls might also bring about a physical cure.
But the most popular object of pilgrimage was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, built on the traditional sites of the crucifixion, burial and resurrection of Jesus. The Gospels place the hill of Calvary, or Golgotha, and the tomb offered for the burial of Jesus by Joseph of Arimathea, outside the walls of Jerusalem, yet the Church of the Holy Sepulchre stands within the very heart of the city. In fact the city was enlarged and rebuilt by the Emperor Hadrian, and in 135 he had a temple of Venus built upon the spot where the tomb was said to be.
Still, the old tradition remained strong enough to justify the Emperor Constantine in pulling down the temple in 326 in order to search for the tomb reputed to be beneath it. A rock-cut tomb was duly found and pronounced to be that of Jesus, and the outcrop of Golgotha was identified nearby. Constantine immediately ordered the construction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, in fact a vast complex consisting of two elements, the Basilica or Martyrium at the site of Golgotha, which was dedicated in 335, and the Church of the Anastasis, meaning ‘resurrection’, built in the form of a rotunda and surmounted by a great dome over the tomb of Jesus and dedicated in 340. Circulating within
the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which enclosed the most sacred sites in Christendom, pilgrims vividly relived the drama of that first Easter when Jesus died upon the Cross and rose again on the third day.
Following the Arab conquest of Jerusalem in 638 the city’s largely Christian population enjoyed a long period of good relations with the Muslims. But by the tenth century the Muslims had become more aggressive, and in 938 they attacked Jerusalem’s Christians during the Palm Sunday procession, set fire to the Martyrium and badly damaged
the Anastasis church. In 966 a Muslim mob again attacked the Anastasis and set alight the roof of the Martyrium. The Patriarch who had hidden in a vat of oil was set alight and burnt alive. The Muslims set their seal on these acts by seizing part of the east entrance to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre where they constructed a new mosque.
Worse was to come. Starting in 1004 the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim, who ruled over Egypt, North Africa, Palestine and southern Syria, launched a campaign of anti-Christian fanaticism. Christians suffered persecution and had ordinances passed against them; church property was confiscated, crosses were seized and burnt, little mosques were built on church roofs, and finally the churches themselves were set ablaze. By 1014 over thirty thousand churches had been destroyed, and many Christians had been forced to convert to Islam, at least outwardly, to save their lives, while others fled into Byzantine territory. But the critical turning point in Western attitudes towards the Muslim East came in 1009, for in that year al-Hakim ordered the complete destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which was carried out with such violence that even the tomb of Jesus, though cut deep into the bedrock, was demolished with pickaxes and all but obliterated.
After the death of al-Hakim in 1021 his successor permitted the Byzantine emperor, under stringent conditions and at his own expense, to rebuild the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Pilgrimage, too, was again permitted, though sojourns in the Holy Land proved unpredictable and often dangerous. For a while during 1056 the Muslims forbade pilgrims entry to Jerusalem and expelled three hundred from the city. In 1064 a large German pilgrimage led by Gunther, bishop of Bamberg, came under Muslim attack; the party was plundered and hundreds were massacred within sight of Jerusalem. Muslim pirates operated against pilgrims at sea, either attacking them outright or exacting charges, bargains and gifts. Pilgrims were obliged to pay protection money, known as
khafara
, along the roads. Also the sensibilities and prejudices of the Muslims had to be borne in mind: pilgrims could not enter mosques, they could not enter towns or cities except on foot, they could not dress in certain ways, they should not look at Muslim women, and they should not
make merry or laugh lest the Muslims thought the Christians’ behaviour was directed at them.
Pilgrimage depended on the Muslim authorities maintaining orderly conditions so that the defenceless Christian traveller could move about and worship in safety, but the Middle East was wracked by misgovernment, division, exploitation, fanaticism and aggression, which undermined that guarantee. And now in the last third of the eleventh century a new threat arose–not only to pilgrims but to Byzantium and the Arabs–in the form of a Turkish invasion from the East.
The Turkish Invasion: Byzantium Appeals to the West
Migrating tribes of Turks known as Seljuks began arriving from the East in the territories of the Abbasid caliphate in about 970. They were soon converted to Sunni Islam and became invaluable to the Arabs for their martial qualities, especially for their mounted bowmen and the nomadic speed of their cavalry. But the caliphate was no longer a unified entity. Spain, Africa and Egypt had long since led a political life independent of the caliph in Baghdad. Indeed the enfeebled state of Arab rule stood as an open invitation, and in 1055 the Seljuks took Baghdad and established their hegemony over the caliphate. Under the Seljuks there was an immediate resurgence in the fortunes of Sunni Islam in Iran, Iraq and Syria. In 1071 the Seljuks defeated the Byzantine army at Manzikert in eastern Anatolia, opening the whole of Asia Minor to conquest by the Turks and threatening Constantinople itself. In that same year the Seljuks also turned south, taking northern Syria from the Byzantines and Jerusalem from the Fatimids.
