The Tragedy of the Templars (4 page)

The Arab invasion began in February 634, Thomas the Presbyter recording ‘a battle between the Romans and the Arabs of Mohammad in Palestine twelve miles east of Gaza. The Romans fled, leaving behind the patrician Bryrdn, whom the Arabs killed. Some 4000 poor villagers of Palestine were killed there, Christians, Jews and Samaritans. The Arabs ravaged the whole region.'
⁴
Then in July that year an Arab army 20,000-strong overwhelmed a Byzantine force half that size at the battle of Ajnadayn, 16 miles west of Jerusalem, leaving Palestine and Syria vulnerable to further advances.

Damascus was the first major Byzantine city to face the Arab onslaught. In March 635 a Muslim army arrived at the walls of the city, fell to its knees in prayer, then put the population under siege. After months of growing desperation within the city, the commander of its garrison, Thomas, the son-in-law of the emperor Heraclius, launched a counterattack. As he led his men out to battle, Thomas placed his hand on the Bible and called to God: ‘If our faith be true, aid us, and deliver us not into the hands of its enemies.' The Muslim chroniclers to whom this account is owed recorded great feats of heroism on both sides. Many Muslim commanders were killed, but Thomas was shot through the eye with an arrow, the Christians were forced back within the walls, and Damascus fell a few days later (in 635 or 636, the sources giving various durations for the siege, from six months to over a year). Those Christians who wanted to leave the city were given three days' safe passage, and among these were Thomas and his wife, the emperor's daughter. The refugees made for the mountains of Lebanon, but after the third day they were hunted down and were slaughtered in the meadows. Thomas was struck to the ground, and his head was cut off and raised on the cross of a captured Byzantine standard. Only one Christian escaped to carry the news of the disaster to Constantinople, while Thomas' wife, after being offered up to one of her captors, was instead released to a deputation from her father.
⁵

These events were followed anxiously in Jerusalem, which by the summer of 636 was itself under siege. The Arabs began with an ultimatum:

But the ultimatum was refused.

The defence of Jerusalem was in the hands of a Byzantine garrison supported by armed units of local inhabitants and was organised by Sophronius, the city's eighty-six-year-old Greek Orthodox patriarch. After sending the True Cross to Constantinople for safety, Sophronius did what he could to prevent Jerusalem suffering the same fate as Damascus, the city of his birth. But any hopes of relief were dashed when the Arabs, thanks largely to the agility of their fast-moving cavalry, won a decisive victory over the Byzantines in August 636 at the Yarmuk river, a tributary of the Jordan east of the Sea of Galilee; from that moment Jerusalem was entirely cut off from the outside world, while the Arabs ‘plunder cities, devastate fields, burn down villages, set on fire the holy churches, overturn the sacred monasteries', as Sophronius told his congregation.
⁷
Although sometimes described as ‘bloodless', the Arab siege necessarily meant great suffering for Jerusalem's inhabitants, some dying of starvation, others killed in defending the walls or making sorties against the encircling enemy. Finally, in the spring of 638, after Jerusalem had endured the siege for nearly two years, Sophronius was forced to surrender.
⁸

There are several accounts of the fall of Jerusalem by Muslim writers, short on detail and contradictory, and all written at least a century after the event. But generally they speak of Jerusalem refusing to surrender to anyone other than the caliph, and so Umar rode up from the Muslim capital at Medina and received its capitulation on terms agreed with Sophronius. Provided the inhabitants paid the
jizya
, a tax imposed on non-Muslims, they were free to remain within the city, and the security of their lives, their property and their churches would be assured. Then Umar entered the city, not on horseback but more humbly on a camel, or according to another version he dismounted from his camel and entered on foot.

The caliph asked to be taken to the Temple Mount, the site of Solomon's Temple and powerful for its associations with the Jewish prophets, claimed by the Koran as forerunners of Islam.
⁹
Since the destruction of Herod's Temple by the Romans the Mount had been left ruinous and abandoned and, according to some sources, had become a rubbish dump. The site meant little to the Christians, and to build a mosque there would avoid Umar's undertaking not to interfere with Christian places of worship. Summoning his men to clear a space amidst the debris, Umar ordered the construction of a mosque, later described by the Gallic pilgrim Arculf, who visited Jerusalem in about 670: ‘In that renowned place where once the Temple had been magnificently constructed [. . .] the Saracens now frequent a four-sided house of prayer, which they have built rudely, constructing it by raising boards and great beams on some remains of ruins'
¹⁰
– probably the remains of Herod's Royal Stoa along the south retaining wall of the Temple area. The mosque was large enough, Arculf was told, to house three thousand men at once.

Umar's greatest concern when building his mosque was that there should be no mistaking its direction of prayer. In this he was recalling that Mohammed had first prayed towards Jerusalem but had received a revelation that he should turn his back upon the city and pray instead to Mecca. This change of
qibla
, the direction of prayer, is mentioned in the Koran, where, after saying that fools will taunt believers for their sudden turnabout, the instruction is given to ‘Turn your face towards the Holy Mosque; wherever you be, turn your faces towards it', the Holy Mosque being the mosque built round the Kaaba at Mecca.
¹¹
Umar followed this admonition on the Temple Mount, where he was emphatic about the position for his mosque: ‘We are not directed about the Rock', he said, referring to the outcrop that was believed to mark the Holy of Holies of the Jewish Temple ‘but about the Kaaba', speaking of Islam's most sacred site in Mecca.
¹²
Instead of placing his mosque somewhere at the northern part of the Temple Mount, where the
qibla
would point towards both the rock and the Kaaba, he built his mosque at the southern end of the Mount so that it turned its back on Jerusalem and the site of Solomon's Temple but had an unimpeded line of prayer to Mecca. For all the respect Umar paid to Jerusalem and its prophets, there was nothing in his acts which signified that the city or the Temple Mount or its rocky outcrop was holy to Muslims.

But Muslim attitudes would begin to change after a new dynasty of caliphs, the Umayyads, redeveloped the Temple Mount, building the Dome of the Rock and replacing Umar's nameless mosque with the one that stands there to this day and is known as the Aqsa mosque –
aqsa
meaning ‘the furthest', a name that would link the Temple Mount to the Night Journey of the Prophet Mohammed and would eventually transform Jerusalem into a Muslim holy place.

Meanwhile Palestine was organised into military districts,
junds
, which more or less followed the Byzantine provinces of Palestina Prima and Palestina Secunda. Jund Filastin (Palestine) extended from the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea; at first its capital was at Ludd (Lod), later at Ramla, both cities inland from the Byzantine capital of Caesarea on the coast but on the overland trade route between Egypt and Damascus. Jund Urdunn (Jordan), centred on Galilee, extended eastwards beyond the Jordan river, and had its capital at Tiberias.

F
OR ALL THAT ISLAM
was meant to transcend the ancient tribal loyalties of the Arabs, the tribes still survived, and with them tribal jealousies and feuds. Moreover, rivalry between the tribes and their component clans and families went right to the very heart of the caliphate. In 656 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 – Mohammed's favourite wife and the daughter of Abu Bakr, the first caliph – along with many of Mohammed's surviving companions, the very people who had stirred up the murderous rebellion against Uthman. Ali took to arms and won his first battle, but opposition against him only hardened when he dismissed many of those whom Uthman had appointed. Among these was Muawiya, Uthman's nephew and governor of Syria, who demanded vengeance for his uncle's murder. In 657 Ali and Muawiya met in battle at Siffin, near Raqqa, on the Euphrates, which ended in negotiations that weakened Ali's position and ultimately led to his assassination by a disaffected follower in 661. Muawiya's brother had commanded the Arab tribes that conquered much of Palestine and Syria; they subsequently gave their loyalty to Muawiya as governor of Syria and received many rewards from him, and now they were his power base when Muawiya was acclaimed caliph in Jerusalem, made Damascus his capital and established the Umayyad dynasty as masters of the growing Arab empire.

After consolidating his authority, Muawiya turned his attention to new wars of territorial expansion with their rewards of plunder, expropriation and taxation, and which also had the benefit of diverting tribal frictions into struggles for the faith. Attacks against the Byzantine Empire were resumed. Arab armies ravaged Asia Minor nearly every summer, Cyprus and the Aegean islands were laid waste, and in 670 an Umayyad fleet landed at Cyzicus, on the Sea of Marmara, from where the Arabs launched annual summer sieges of Constantinople for seven years. Under the energetic resistance of the emperor Constantine IV the city repelled the Arab attacks. The most potent weapon in the Byzantine armoury was Greek Fire, a secret compound of sulphur, naphtha and quicklime which burst into flames on impact with enemy ships and could burn even under water, the invention of a Christian Syrian refugee. Eventually the Byzantines drove the Arab army out of Asia Minor and forced Muawiya into paying a tribute in return for a negotiated peace. Not for the last time a Byzantine victory saved not only themselves but all Europe from Muslim domination.

But elsewhere the Umayyads had greater success. In North Africa the last outpost of Byzantine rule in the region of Carthage was destroyed by the Arabs in 667. The resistance of the Berbers, who were Christians, to the Arab armies was repaid with terrible raids and devastation. Those who eventually submitted to Islam became part of the further expansion of the Muslim armies towards the Atlantic, while the more Latinised population of North Africa, heirs of a classical and Christian civilisation that had produced such figures as the theologian Augustine of Hippo, author of
The Confessions
and
The City of God
, and himself of Berber origin,
¹
emigrated to Italy and Gaul.

The wave of Muslim expansion was checked by the outbreak of prolonged and savage warfare between the Arab tribes. In 684 Ibn al-Zubayr, the nephew of Aisha and the grandson through his mother of the first caliph, Abu Bakr, rejected the Umayyad claim to the caliphate and declared himself caliph at Mecca, winning the support of tribes in Arabia and those occupying Egypt and Mesopotamia and, most worrying of all, even some in Palestine and Syria. A battle at Marj Rahit, east of Damascus, secured Syria for the Umayyads in that same year, but the wider struggle was inherited by Abd al-Malik, who succeeded to the Umayyad caliphate in 685, and was decided only in 692 with the defeat of al-Zubayr at Mecca.

Abd al-Malik countered these disorders not only on the battlefield but also with a variety of administrative measures aimed at asserting the unity of the empire, the authority of his caliphate and the supremacy of Islam. In the years following their conquests the Arabs could not have administered Syria, Palestine, Mesopotamia or Egypt, and most importantly could not have collected taxes, without the services of experienced officials drawn from the local populations, which meant leaving Christian officials at their posts, just as Zoroastrians were left in place in Persia. In Syria and Palestine the language of administration had been Greek, while the everyday language of the population was Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic, the lingua franca of the Middle East for over a thousand years. The administration of Egypt was carried on in Greek by its native Christian population, the Copts (from ‘Aegyptos', the Greek for Egypt), whose demotic language, Coptic, had evolved from ancient Egyptian; they also continued to manage the country's vital irrigation system. But now Abd al-Malik made Arabic the mandatory language of government affairs throughout his empire. Likewise the coinage, which had continued to bear Christian and Zoroastrian symbols, was replaced by redesigned pieces inscribed in Arabic with the Profession of Faith (‘There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his Prophet'). The message of Muslim domination was perfectly suited to the system, for the economy was predominantly monetary and depended on exactions from the conquered people who paid their taxes in coin. Very few Arabs were productive settlers on the land, an activity they despised; a few were great landlords who used native tenants to cultivate their estates; but generally they were nomadic tribesmen, soldiers or officials, all of whom lived off the
jizya
(or poll tax) and the
kharaj
(or land tax) paid by the occupied peoples in return for the protection of their lives and property and for the right to practise their own religion. Because the
jizya
and the
kharaj
could be imposed only on non-Muslims, the Arabs had little interest in making converts to Islam, a contributory reason why Syria, Palestine and Egypt would remain overwhelmingly Christian for centuries to come.