A History of the Crusades-Vol 1 (5 page)

The Abbasid
Caliphate

Nevertheless, the lot of the Christians under
the Abbasids was not unhappy. Moslem writers, such as al-Jahiz in the ninth
century, might make violent attacks on them; but that was because they were too
prosperous and were growing arrogant and heedless of the regulations made
against them. The Patriarch of Jerusalem, writing about the same time to his
colleague of Constantinople, says of the Moslem authorities that ‘they are just
and do us no wrong nor show us any violence’. Their justice and restraint were often
remarkable. When in the tenth century things were going badly for the Arabs in
their wars against Byzantium and Arab mobs attacked the Christians in anger at
their known sympathy with the enemy, the Caliph always made restitution for the
damage done. His motive may have been fear of the renascent power of the
Emperor, who by then had Moslems within his dominions whom he could persecute
in revenge. The Orthodox Churches, with foreign powers backing them, had always
maintained a favoured position. In the early tenth century the Nestorian
Catholicus, Abraham III, during a dispute with the Orthodox Patriarch of
Antioch, told the Grand Vizier that ‘we Nestorians are the friends of the Arabs
and pray for their victories’, adding: ‘Far be it from you to regard the
Nestorians, who have no other king but the Arabs’, in the same light as the
Greeks, whose kings never cease to make war against the Arabs’. But it was the
gift of two thousand golden coins rather than his argument that enabled him to
win his case. The only group of Christians against whom continual animosity was
shown were the Christians of pure Arab descent, such as the Banu Ghassan or the
Banu Tanukh. Such of these tribesmen as refused to be forcibly converted to
Islam were obliged to cross the frontier and seek refuge in Byzantium.

The emigration of Christians into the Emperor’s
territory was continuous; nor did the Moslems take steps against it. There
seems never to have been a sustained attempt to prevent the Christians within
and without the Caliphate from keeping up close relations, even in times of
war. During the greater part of the Abbasid period the Byzantine Emperor was
not strong enough to do much for his co-religionists. The Arab failure before
Constantinople in 718 had guaranteed the continuance of the Empire; but two
centuries elapsed before Byzantium could seriously take the offensive against
the Arabs. In the meantime the Orthodox of the East had discovered a new
foreign friend. The growth of the Carolingian empire in the eighth century did
not pass unnoticed in the East. When at the close of the century Charles the
Great, soon to be crowned emperor at Rome, showed a particular interest in the
welfare of the holy places, his attentions were very welcome. The Caliph Harun
al-Rashid, glad to find an ally against Byzantium, gave him every encouragement
to make foundations at Jerusalem and to send alms to its church. For a while
Charles replaced the Byzantine Emperor as the monarch whose power was the
safeguard of the Orthodox in Palestine; and they repaid his charity by sending
him honorific marks of their esteem. But the collapse of his empire under his
descendants and the rebirth of Byzantium made this Frankish intervention short-lived
and soon barely remembered, except for the hostels that Charles had built and
the Latin services held in the Church of St Mary of the Latins, and the Latin
nuns serving in the Holy Sepulchre. But in the West the episode was never
forgotten. Legend and tradition exaggerated it. Charles was soon thought to have
established a legal protectorate over the holy places, and even, in time,
himself to have made the pilgrimage thither. To the Franks of later generations
their right to rule in Jerusalem had been acknowledged and endorsed.

Charlemagne and
Palestine

The eastern Christians were more nearly
interested in the renascence of Byzantine power. In the early ninth century the
Empire had still been on the defensive. Sicily and Crete were lost to the
Moslems; and almost every year saw some great Arab raid into the heart of Asia
Minor. In the middle of the century, largely owing to the prudent economies of
the Empress-Regent Theodora, the Byzantine navy was reorganized and
re-equipped. Thanks to its strength, Byzantine dominion over southern Italy and
Dalmatia was soon reaffirmed. Early in the tenth century the Abbasid Caliphate
began rapidly to decline. Local dynasties arose, of which the chief were the
Hamdanids of Mosul and Aleppo and the Ikshids of Egypt. The former were fine
fighters and fervent Moslems, and for a time formed a bulwark against Byzantine
aggression. But they could not stop the decay of Moslem power. Rather, they
added to it by encouraging civil wars. In the course of these civil wars the
Ikshids won control of Palestine and southern Syria. The Byzantines were quick
to take advantage of the situation. Their offensive was cautious at first; but
by 945, in spite of the prowess of the Hamdanid prince, Saif ad-Daula, their
general, John Curcuas, had won for the Empire towns and districts in upper
Mesopotamia that had not seen a Christian army for three centuries. After 960,
when the great soldier, Nicephorus Phocas, took command of the imperial army,
things moved faster. In 961 Nicephorus recaptured Crete. In 962 he campaigned
on the Cilician frontier and took Anazarbus and Marash (Germanicia) thus
isolating Moslem Cilicia. In 963 Nicephorus was engaged at home, planning the
coup
d’etat
that brought him, with the help of the army and the Empress-Regent,
to the throne. In 964 he returned to the East. In 965 he completed the conquest
of Cilicia; and an expedition sent to Cyprus re-established absolute Byzantine
control of the island. In 966 he campaigned on the middle Euphrates, to cut
communications between Aleppo and Mosul. The whole Christian East was aroused
and saw deliverance at hand. The Patriarch John of Jerusalem wrote to him,
urging him to hasten down to Palestine. But such treason proved for once too
much for the patience of the Moslems. John was arrested and burnt at the stake
by the furious population.

John’s hopes were premature. In 967 and 968
Nicephorus was busy on his northern frontier. But in 969 he led his army
southward again, right into the heart of Syria. He marched up the Orontes
valley, capturing and sacking, one after the other, the great towns of Shaizar,
Hama and Homs, and crossing to the coast to the suburbs of Tripoli. He then
returned northward, leaving Tortosa, Jabala and Lattakieh in flames behind him,
while his lieutenants besieged Antioch and Aleppo. The ancient metropolis of
Antioch was taken in October. Aleppo surrendered at the end of the year.

Antioch, where the Christians probably
outnumbered the Moslems, was absorbed into the Empire; and it seems that the
Moslems were obliged to emigrate from its territory. Aleppo, which was almost
entirely a Moslem city, became a vassal state. The treaty made with its ruler
carefully delineated the frontier between the new imperial province and the
tributary towns. The ruler of Aleppo was to be nominated by the Emperor. The
vassal state was to pay heavy taxes, from which the Christians were to be
exempt, directly to the imperial treasury. Special privileges and protection
was to be given to imperial merchants and caravans. These humiliating terms
seemed to foreshadow the end of Moslem power in Syria.

The Emperor John
Tzimisces

Before Aleppo had fallen the Emperor was
murdered in Constantinople by his Empress and her lover, his cousin John
Tzimisces. Nicephorus was a grim, unlovable man. Despite his victories, he had
been hated at Constantinople for his financial exactions and corruption and his
bitter quarrel with the Church. John, who was already known as a brilliant
general, succeeded without difficulty to the throne, and made his peace with
the Church by throwing over his imperial paramour. But a war with Bulgaria kept
him busy in Europe for the next four years. Meanwhile there was a revival in
Islam, led by the Fatimid dynasty, which established itself in Egypt and
southern Syria, and in 971 even attempted the recapture of Antioch. In 974 John
could turn his attention to the East. That autumn he descended into eastern
Mesopotamia, capturing Nisibin and reducing Mosul to vassalage, and even
contemplating a sudden march on Baghdad. But he realized that the Fatimites
were more dangerous enemies than their Abbasid rivals, and next spring he
advanced into Syria. Following the route of Nicephorus, six years before, he
swept up the Orontes valley, past Homs, which submitted without a blow, and
Baalbek, which he took by force, right into Damascus, which promised him
tribute and a humble alliance. Thence he went on into Galilee, to Tiberias and
to Nazareth, and down to the coast at Caesarea. Envoys from Jerusalem came to
him to beg him to spare them the horrors of a sack. But he did not feel able to
advance to the Holy City itself with the towns of the Phoenician coast untaken
behind him. He retired northward, overpowering them one by one, with the
exception of the fortress-port of Tripoli. Winter was coming on, and the
Emperor was obliged to postpone his efforts for a season. On his way back to
Antioch he captured and garrisoned the two great castles of the Nosairi
Mountains, Barzuya and Sahyun. Then he returned to Constantinople. But his
campaign was never resumed. Quite suddenly, in January 976, he died.

These wars had made the Christian Empire once
more the great power in the East. With the prospect of the deliverance of the
Christians of the East in sight, they had, moreover, reached the status of
religious wars. Hitherto, wars against the Moslem had been wars regularly waged
for the defence of the Empire and had been, so to speak, taken for granted as a
part of daily life. Though now and then Christian captives might be given the
choice of apostasy or death by some fanatical Moslem victor and their martyrdom
would be duly remembered and honoured, such cases were rare. To public opinion
in Byzantium there was no greater merit in dying in battle for the protection
of the Empire against the infidel Arab than against the Christian Bulgar; nor
did the Church make any distinction. But both Nicephorus and John declared that
the struggle was now for the glory of Christendom, for the rescue of the holy
places and for the destruction of Islam. Already when an Emperor celebrated a
triumph over the Saracens the choirs sang: ‘Glory be to God, Who has conquered
the Saracens.’ Nicephorus emphasized that his wars were Christian wars, partly,
perhaps, in an attempt to counteract his bad relations with the Church. He
failed to induce the Patriarch to support a decree announcing that soldiers
dying on the eastern front died as martyrs; for to the eastern Church even the
exigencies of war did not entirely excuse the act of murder. But in his
insulting manifesto to the Caliph that he sent before starting on his campaign
of 964, he saw himself as the Christian champion, and even threatened to march
on Mecca, to establish there the throne of Christ. John Tzimisces used the same
language. In his letter describing his campaign of 974, written to the king of
Armenia, ‘our desire’, he says, ‘was to free the Holy Sepulchre from the
outrages of the Moslems’. He tells how he spared the cities of Galilee from
being pillaged, because of their part in the history of the Christian faith;
and mentioning his check before Tripoli he adds that but for it he would have
gone to the Holy City of Jerusalem and prayed in the sacred places.

Peace Between
Byzantium and Egypt

The Arabs had always been readier to envisage
war as a religious matter; but even they had grown slack. Now, frightened by
the Christians, they tried to revive their fervour. In 974 riots in Baghdad
forced the Caliph, who personally had not been sorry to see the Fatimids
defeated, to proclaim a holy war, a
jihad.

It had seemed that at last the Holy Land would
be restored to Christian rule. But the Orthodox of Palestine waited in vain.
John’s successor, the legitimate Basil II, great warrior though he became, was
never given the opportunity to continue the southern advance. Civil wars
followed by a long war against the Bulgarians demanded all his attention. Only
twice could he visit Syria, to restore Byzantine suzerainty over Aleppo in 995,
and to march down the coast as far as Tripoli in 999. In 1001 he decided that
it would be useless to make further conquest. A ten years’ truce was made with
the Fatimid Caliph; and the peace thus inaugurated was not seriously broken for
more than half a century. The frontier between the empires was fixed to run
from the coast between Banyas and Tortosa to the Orontes just south of
Caesarea-Shaizar. Aleppo officially remained within the Byzantine sphere of influence;
but the Mirdasite dynasty established there in 1023 soon obtained independence
in fact. In 1030 its Emir severely defeated a Byzantine army. But the loss of
Aleppo was counterbalanced next year by the incorporation of Edessa into the
Byzantine Empire.

The peace suited both the Empire and the
Fatimids; for both were disquieted by the revival of the Baghdad Caliphate
under Turkish adventurers from central Asia. The Fatimid monarch, accepted by
the Shia Moslems as the true Caliph, could not afford any strengthening of
Abbasid claims; while Byzantium considered her eastern frontier more vulnerable
than her southern. Fear of the Turks led Basil II first to annex the provinces
of Armenia that lay nearest to the Empire and then to take over the
south-easternmost district of the country, the principality of Vaspurakan. His successors
continued his policy. In 1045 the king of Ani, the chief ruler in Armenia,
ceded his lands to the Emperor. In 1064 the last independent Armenian state,
the principality of Kars, was absorbed into imperial territory.