The Tragedy of the Templars (10 page)

Little had been known about the Turks in the West until 1071, when reports of an extraordinary military victory began to reach Europe. The Turks had defeated the army of the Byzantine Empire at Manzikert, opening the whole of Asia Minor to conquest and threatening Constantinople itself. In that same year the Turks also turned south, taking northern Syria from the Byzantines and Jerusalem from the Fatimids of Egypt
.

The Byzantines had known the Turks for a long time. They had fought Turkish tribesmen when they appeared in the ranks of the Abbasid armies and had even employed them as mercenaries in their own. But these were a new Turkish people, the Seljuks, whom the Byzantines encountered only in the eleventh century, when they announced themselves on the empire's eastern border with the invasion of Armenia and the destruction of Ani
.

A
NI
,
IN THE EXTREME EAST
of present-day Turkey, is not a city many people have visited or even know about. Yet this once famous city of ‘a thousand and one churches' was the capital of a medieval Armenian kingdom and was comparable to Constantinople in the magnificence of its architecture and the size of its population. As though on a promontory, the city stood within the sharp angle of two conjoining river canyons, a two-mile line of walls closing the triangle – an outline rather like that of Constantinople itself. The massive ruins of these walls is all you see today as you approach from Kars across a bleak landscape with a handful of blighted villages of stone-built houses en route. The road goes nowhere now, not since the First World War, when the Turks murdered a million and a half Armenians,
¹
the first great genocide of modern times, or since the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic, now the Republic of Armenia, was established across the river just ahead. But what has long been a no-man's-land was once a major route of east–west trade, and Ani grew wealthy on the flow of caravans.

In 1045 the Armenian kingdom was annexed by the Byzantine Empire, and Ani became a forward position against the new enemy who had erupted from their heartlands in Central Asia. The Seljuks were a clan of the nomadic Orguz Turks who in the early tenth century inhabited the steppes north of Lake Balkhash in present-day Kazakhstan. In about 985 they split off from the Orguz and migrated southwards into a remote region of the Abbasid empire. There on the banks of the Jaxartes river (the present-day Syr Darya), east of the Aral Sea, they converted to Islam. Quick and agile mounted archers, the Seljuks were forged into a devastating strike force under their leader, Tughril. They fought their way westwards across Persia and into Mesopotamia, where Tughril captured Baghdad in 1055, reduced the caliph to his puppet, made himself sultan and replaced the ruling aristocracy with Seljuk Turks. The sultan's court adopted in some degree the Persian language and the trappings of Persian culture, ‘but the body of the Turkish nation, and more especially the pastoral tribes, still breathed the fierceness of the desert'.
²

Nothing stopped the onward rush of the Seljuks, who under Tughril's nephew and successor Alp Arslan overran most of Armenia and in 1064, less than a century after leaving their homeland 3,000 miles away, stood before the walls of Ani. The Arab historian Sibt ibn al-Jawzi quoted an eyewitness to what took place when after a twenty-five-day siege Ani finally surrendered to the Turks:

After the Seljuks sacked the city, earthquakes and Mongol raids would do the rest. Passing through the main double gate into Ani today is like entering a storm-wrecked harbour where broken churches have run aground. The circular Chapel of the Redeemer stands amid flowers and rolling grassland like an upright hull, half of it torn away as though by some dreadful whirlwind and spat on the ground. One of the few structurally intact monuments is the cathedral, begun in 988 and completed twelve years later; its architect was Trdat, who also restored the dome of Constantinople's Haghia Sophia after its partial collapse in 989. As the Seljuks looted Ani, one of them clambered up the conical roof of the great church and tore down its cross; the cathedral was then converted to the Fethiye Cami, the Victory Mosque.

Alp Arslan is portrayed in Muslim sources as a fervent jihadist. His own chief minister, Nizam al-Mulk, called him ‘earnest and fanatical in his beliefs'.
⁴
But for the time being, his policy towards the Byzantine Empire was defensive; his concern was to secure his north-west frontier while he turned his attentions southwards to Egypt. As the military arm of the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad and the champion of Sunni Islam, Alp Arslan's great enemy was the Shia regime in Cairo, and his immediate aim was to make war against the Fatimid caliphate. But in 1071, just as he was moving against Fatimid territory in Syria, he received word that 500 miles to the north-east a large army led by the Byzantine emperor Romanus IV Diogenes was advancing deep into Asia Minor with the intention of reconquering Armenia.

About 100 miles south of Ani and just north of Lake Van, the Byzantine army entered a broad steppe-like plain broken by volcanic outcrops and bounded to the right by the great shoulder of the Suphan Dagi massif, even in summer gleaming with snow, and to the left by the dun bare line of lesser mountains. Nowadays a monument like a huge pair of goalposts rises into the vast sky at the western end of the plain, where it falls off into a cultivated river valley green with orchards. A village stands close by, built round an ancient Armenian fortress tower, black and squat. This is Malazgirt – once Manzikert – where the monument erected by the Turkish government in 1990 commemorates what the Byzantines called that ‘dreadful day' when Asia Minor, Christian and culturally Greek, began the long and violent process of being remade from the East. Here at Manzikert, on 26 August 1071, a Friday, Romanus was surprised by Alp Arslan's fast-moving forces, his army was destroyed, and the emperor himself was taken prisoner – and then at once set free against promise of a tribute. On his return to Constantinople, Romanus was overthrown, blinded and exiled; he died a year later, the same year that Alp Arslan was himself killed by a Turkish rebel.

The catastrophe was greater than the defeat of the imperial army. Asia Minor was left doubly defenceless because the old theme system established by Heraclius had broken down. The security of the frontiers had made land a good investment and led to the emergence of a landed aristocracy that bought out the smallholders, those independent farmer–soldiers on whom the defence of Asia Minor depended. Now after Manzikert the empire lay open before bands of Turkish tribesmen, who looted, murdered and destroyed as they marauded westwards until in 1073 they were standing on the Bosphorus opposite Constantinople. In the words of a Byzantine chronicler, ‘Almost the whole world, on land and sea, occupied by the impious barbarians, has been destroyed and has become empty of population, for all Christians have been slain by them and all houses and settlements with their churches have been devastated by them in the whole East, completely crushed and reduced to nothing.'
⁵
In fact, the Turks were as yet only thinly spread across the newly invaded territory and by no means replaced the existing population, but the dislocation to settled society was ruinous, not least because of the rapacity and strife as one tribe fought against another. The tragedy that had overtaken Armenia had now overtaken Asia Minor, and an Armenian refugee writing in Constantinople struck a note of grim foreboding:

The warfare that had overtaken Palestine after the Fatimid invasion in 970 lasted for generations, and the country continued to suffer from Bedouin depredations throughout the eleventh century. Ramla, which the Arabs founded on the plain as the capital of Jund Filastin, was all but abandoned owing to earthquake damage and continuous Bedouin attacks; instead from the 1160s Jerusalem, lodged in the highlands of Judaea, became the centre of Fatimid rule in Palestine and its walls were strengthened.

Even during these perilous times pilgrims journeyed to Jerusalem, where they made an important contribution to such prosperity as the city enjoyed. Their chief goal was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where al-Hakim's successor had allowed the Byzantine emperor to rebuild the Rotunda at his own expense. But pilgrimages were unpredictable and required considerable courage and faith to pursue. In 1065 a large pilgrimage of seven to twelve thousand Germans, led by Gunther, bishop of Bamberg, travelled across Asia Minor and arrived at Latakia in northern Syria, still within the Byzantine Empire then. But in Latakia, according to a chronicler,

The pilgrims gathered to discuss what to do and quickly decided ‘to put all hope in the Lord. They knew that, living or dying, they belonged to the Lord and so, with all their wits about them, they set out through the pagan territory towards the holy city'. On Good Friday, within a day's walk of Jerusalem, the pilgrims were attacked by Bedouin, ‘who leaped on them like famished wolves on long awaited prey. They slaughtered the first pilgrims pitiably, tearing them to pieces.' Taking refuge in a village, the pilgrims defended themselves as best they could until on Easter Monday they were saved by the Fatimid governor at the head of a large body of men who drove the Bedouin off. The governor, ‘who had heard what the Arabs, like heathen, were doing, had calculated that if these pilgrims were to perish such a miserable death, then no one would come through this territory for religious purposes and thus he and his people would suffer seriously'.
⁷
After thirteen days visiting the holy sites in Jerusalem the pilgrims departed for the coast but again were attacked by Bedouin before boarding ships to Byzantine territory. Only two thousand pilgrims out of the original number survived the journey and returned safely home.
⁸

The experience of the German pilgrims was far from unusual. 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 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 laugh or be merry lest the Muslims thought the Christians' behaviour was directed at them. The oppressions borne by
dhimmis
were forced upon pilgrims too.

Pilgrimage depended on the Muslim authorities maintaining orderly conditions so that the unarmed and defenceless Christian traveller could move about and worship in safety, but the Muslim East was wracked by misgovernment, division, exploitation, fanaticism and aggression, which undermined that guarantee. And now after Manzikert the appearance of the Turks in Palestine made matters even worse.

While Turkish tribesmen were overrunning Asia Minor, other Turkish forces, led by Atsiz bin Uwaq, a freebooting warlord, were swarming over Syria and Palestine, adding to the already chaotic conditions existing there. They captured Ramla and put Jerusalem under siege in 1071, leaving the Fatimids clinging to the coast at Acre. Jerusalem fell in 1073, and when Acre was taken the following year, Fatimid control was reduced to Damascus, which Atsiz conquered in 1075. But when Atsiz carried the war into Egypt he was defeated at Cairo, and, falling back on Palestine, he was met with Muslim uprisings in Gaza, Ramla and Jerusalem, forcing him to retreat to Damascus.

The revolt against the Turks was a revolt against disruptive aliens who had imposed themselves on the Middle East. The Fatimids were alien too, their armies made up mostly of Berbers and Sudanese, but at least they spoke Arabic and employed Arabic-speakers, including the native Jews and Christians of Palestine, in their administration. But the Turks, to the extent that they were civilised at all, inclined towards Persian culture and looked down on the Arabs. If they spoke a language other than Turkish, it was more likely to be Persian than Arabic. The arrival of the Turks in Syria and Palestine marked the end of Arab domination there. Turkish chiefs dispossessed Arab landlords of their estates; Turkish nomads encroached on Bedouin pastures and hunting grounds; Turkish wars and Turkish administration dislocated trade; and everyone complained at the very heavy taxes imposed by the Turks on the entire population.

In 1077 Atsiz began his campaign to reconquer Palestine by attacking Jerusalem, destroying its surrounding vineyards and orchards as he placed it under siege a second time. On his promise of protection if they surrendered, the inhabitants opened the city gates; but reneging on his pledge, Atsiz led his soldiers on a rampage through the city, slaughtering three thousand of its Muslim population, including those who sought sanctuary in the Aqsa mosque atop the Temple Mount.
⁹
The Christians, safe within their walled quarter of the city, escaped harm; the fate of Jerusalem's Jews is less certain; but certainly numbers of both Jews and Christians abandoned Jerusalem, not daring to return, and together with fleeing Muslims they settled in coastal towns like Tyre.