A History of the Crusades-Vol 1 (2 page)

This was according to the terms of the city’s
surrender. The Prophet himself had ordained that, while the heathen should be
offered the choice of conversion or death, the People of the Book, the
Christians and the Jews (with whom by courtesy he included the Zoroastrians)
should be allowed to retain their places of worship and to use them without hindrance,
but they might not add to their number, nor might they carry arms nor ride on
horseback; and they must pay a special capitation tax, known as the
jizya.
Sophronius
cannot have hoped for better terms when he rode out on his ass under safe
conduct to meet the Caliph on the Mount of Olives, refusing to hand over his
city to anyone of lesser authority. Jerusalem had been beleaguered for over a
year; and the Arabs, inexperienced in siege-warfare and ill equipped for it,
were powerless against the newly repaired fortifications. But within the city
provisions had run low; and there was no longer any hope of relief. The
countryside was in the hands of the Arabs, and one by one the towns of Syria
and Palestine had fallen to them. There was no Christian army left nearer than
Egypt, except for the garrison holding out at Caesarea on the coast, protected
by the imperial navy. All that Sophronius could obtain from the conqueror in
addition to the usual terms was that the imperial officials in the city might
retire in safety with their families and their portable possessions to the
coast at Caesarea.

Survival of the
Empire in the East

This was the Patriarch’s last public
achievement, the tragic climax to a long life spent in labour for the orthodoxy
and unity of Christendom. Ever since the days of his youth, when he had
travelled round the monasteries of the East with his friend, John Moschus,
gathering for their
Spiritual Meadow
sayings and stories of the saints,
to his later years, when the Emperor whose policy he opposed appointed him to
the great see of Jerusalem, he had fought steadfastly against the heresies and
nascent nationalism that he foresaw would dismember the Empire. But the ‘honey-tongued
defender of the Faith’, as he was named, had preached and worked in vain. The
Arab conquest was proof of his failure; and a few weeks later he died of a
broken heart.

Indeed, no human agency could have stopped the
disruptive movements in the eastern provinces of Rome. Throughout the history
of the Roman Empire there had been a latent struggle between East and West. The
West had won at Actium; but the East overcame its conquerors. Egypt and Syria
were the richest and most populous provinces of the Empire. They contained its
main centres of industry; their ships and caravans controlled the trade with
the Orient; their culture, both spiritual and material, was far higher than
that of the West, not only because of their long traditions but also because of
the stimulus given by the proximity of Rome’s only rival in civilization, the
kingdom of Sassanid Persia. Inevitably the influence of the East grew greater;
till at last the Emperor Constantine the Great adopted an eastern religion and
moved his capital eastward, to Byzantium on the Bosphorus. In the next century,
when the Empire, weakened by internal decay, had to face the onrush of the
barbarians, the West perished, but the East survived, thanks largely to
Constantine’s policy. While barbarian kingdoms were established in Gaul, in
Spain, in Africa, in distant Britain, and finally in Italy, the Roman Emperor
ruled the eastern provinces from Constantinople. The government at Rome had
seldom been popular in Syria and Egypt. The government at Constantinople was
soon even more bitterly resented. To a large extent this was due to outside
circumstances. The impoverishment of the West meant the loss of markets for the
Syrian merchant and the Egyptian manufacturer. Constant wars with Persia
interrupted the trade route that went across the desert to Antioch and the
cities of the Lebanon; and a little later the fall of the Abyssinian empire and
chaos in Arabia closed down the Red Sea routes controlled by the sailors of
Egypt and the caravan-owners of Petra, Transjordan and southern Palestine.
Constantinople was becoming the chief market of the Empire; and the far eastern
trade, encouraged by the Emperor’s diplomacy, sought a direct, more northerly
route thither, across the steppes of central Asia. This was bitter to the
citizens of Alexandria and Antioch, jealous already of the upstart city that
threatened to overshadow them. It embittered the Syrians and Egyptians still
more that the new governmental system was based on centralization. Local rights
and autonomies were steadily curtailed; and the tax-collector was stricter and
more exigent than in the old Roman days. Discontent gave new vigour to the
nationalism of the East, which never slumbers for long.

The struggle broke out openly over matters of
religion. The pagan emperors had been tolerant of local cults. Local gods could
so easily be fitted into the Roman pantheon. Only obstinate monotheists, such
as the Christians and the Jews, suffered an occasional bout of persecution. But
the Christian emperors could not be so tolerant. Christianity is an exclusive
religion; and they wished to use it as a unifying force to bind all their
subjects to the government. Constantine, himself a little vague on matters of
theology, had sought to unite the Church then torn by the Arian controversy.
Half a century later Theodosius the Great made conformity part of the imperial
programme. But conformity was not easily obtained. The East had taken avidly to
Christianity. The Greeks had applied to its problems their taste for subtle
disputation; to which the hellenized orientals added a fierce, passionate
intensity that soon bred intolerance and hate. The main subject of their
disputes was the nature of Christ, the central and most difficult question in all
Christian theology. The argument was theological; but in those days even the
man in the street took an interest in theological argument, which ranked in his
eyes as a recreation only surpassed by the games at the circus. But there were
other aspects as well. The average Syrian and Egyptian desired a simpler
ceremonial than that of the Orthodox Church with all its pomp. Its luxury
offended him in his growing poverty. Still more, he regarded its prelates and
priests as the agents of the government at Constantinople. His higher clergy
were from jealousy easily persuaded into a like hostility. The Patriarchs of
the ancient sees of Alexandria and Antioch were furious to find their upstart
brother of Constantinople raised in precedence above them. It. was inevitable
that heresy should arise and should assume the form of a nationalistic and
disruptive movement.

Nestorians and
Monophysites

Arianism soon died out in the East, except in
Abyssinia; but the heresies of the fifth century were more enduring. Early in the
century, Nestorius, the Syrian-born Patriarch of Constantinople, promulgated a
doctrine that overstressed the humanity of Christ. The theologians of the
Antiochene school had always leaned in that direction; and Nestorius found many
followers in northern Syria. His doctrine was denounced as heresy at the
Occumenical Council of Ephesus in 431; whereupon many Syrian congregations
seceded. The Nestorians, proscribed in the Empire, made their headquarters in
the territory of the king of Persia, in Mesopotamia. They soon turned their
main attention to missionary work in the further East, in India, in Turkestan
and even in China; but in the sixth and seventh centuries they still maintained
churches in Syria and in Egypt, chiefly amongst merchants engaged in the far
eastern trade.

The Nestorian controversy gave rise to another,
still more bitter. The theologians of Alexandria, delighted at a double victory
over Antiochene doctrines and a Patriarch of Constantinople, themselves
overstepped the limits of orthodoxy in the opposite direction. They put forward
a doctrine that seemed to imply a denial of Christ’s humanity. This heresy is
sometimes called Eutychianism after an obscure priest, Eutyches, who first
suggested it. It is more usually known as Monophysitism. In 451 it was
denounced by the fourth Oecumenical Council, meeting at Chalcedon; and the
Monophysites in indignation broke off from the main body of Christendom, taking
with them the majority of the Christians of Egypt and a number of congregations
in Syria. The Armenian Church, whose delegates had arrived at Chalcedon too
late for the discussions, refused to accept the Council’s findings and ranged themselves
with the Monophysites. Later Emperors searched unceasingly for some
conciliatory formula that would cover the breach and which, endorsed by an
Oecumenical Council, could be accepted as a further precision of the true
Faith. But two factors worked against them. The heretics did not particularly
want to return to the fold, except on their own unacceptable terms; and the
attitude of Rome and the western Church was steadfastly hostile to compromise.
Pope Leo I, basing himself on the view that it was for the successor of Saint
Peter and not for an Occumenical Council to define the creed, and impatient of
dialectical subtleties that he did not understand, issued a definitive
statement of the correct opinion on the question. This statement, known in
history as the
Tomus of Pope Leo
, though it ignored the delicacies of
the argument, was accepted by the Council authorities at Chalcedon as a basis
for their discussions, and its formula was embodied in their findings. Pope Leo’s
formula was clear-cut and crude, admitting of no gloss nor modification. Any
compromise that would placate the heretics would involve its abandonment and in
consequence a schism with Rome. This no emperor with interests and ambitions in
Italy and the West could afford. Caught in this dilemma, the imperial
government never evolved a consistent policy. It hovered between the
persecution and the appeasement of the heretics; while they grew in strength in
the provinces of the East, backed by the resurgent nationalism of the
orientals.

Disruption in
Syria

Besides the Monophysites and the Nestorians,
there was another community in the eastern provinces that was constantly
opposed to the imperial government, that of the Jews. There were Jews
established in considerable numbers in all the great cities of the East. They
were under certain civil disabilities; and occasionally they and their property
would suffer damage in some riot. In return they seized every opportunity for
doing harm to the Christians. Their financial resources and their widespread
connections made them a potential danger to the government.

During the sixth century the situation worsened.
Justinian’s wars in the West were long and costly. They embarrassed his
religious policy, and they meant higher taxes and no compensating advantages
for his eastern subjects. Syria suffered the worst; for in addition to her
fiscal burden she underwent a series of cruel raids by Persian armies and a
series of disastrous earthquakes. Only the heretics flourished. The
Monophysites of Syria were organized into a powerful force by Jacob Baradaeus
of Edessa, backed by the sympathy of the Empress Theodora. Their Church was
henceforward usually known as the Jacobite. The Monophysites of Egypt, now
called the Copts, included almost the whole native population. The Nestorians,
safely entrenched beyond the Persian frontier and expanding rapidly eastward,
consolidated their position within the Empire. Except in the cities of
Palestine the Orthodox were a minority. They were named contemptuously the
Melkites, the Emperor’s men, with good reason, for their existence depended
upon the power and prestige of the imperial administration.

In 602 the centurion Phocas seized the imperial
throne. His rule was savage and incompetent; and while Constantinople suffered
a reign of terror, the provinces were given over to riots and civil war between
the circus factions of the cities and between the rival religious sects. At
Antioch the Jacobite and Nestorian Patriarchs openly held a joint council to
discuss common action against the Orthodox. Phocas punished them by sending an
army which slaughtered vast numbers of heretics, with the Jews gleefully giving
their aid. Two years later the Jews themselves rose, and tortured and slew the
Orthodox Patriarch of the city.

The Persian War

In 610 Phocas was displaced by a young nobleman
of Armenian descent, Heraclius, son of the governor of Africa. That same year
King Chosroes II of Persia completed his preparations for the invasion and
dismemberment of the Empire. The Persian war lasted for nineteen years. For
twelve years the Empire was on the defensive, while one Persian army occupied
Anatolia and another conquered Syria. Antioch fell in 611, Damascus in 613. In
the spring of 614 the Persian general Shahrbaraz entered Palestine, pillaging
the countryside and burning churches as he went. Only the Church of the
Nativity at Bethlehem was spared, because of the mosaic over the door that
depicted the Wise Men from the East in Persian costume. On 15 April he invested
Jerusalem. The Patriarch Zacharias had been prepared to surrender the city to
avoid bloodshed; but the Christian inhabitants refused to yield so tamely. On 5
May, with the help of Jews within the walls, the Persians forced their way into
the city. There followed scenes of utter horror. With their churches and houses
in flames around them, the Christians were indiscriminately massacred, some by
the Persian soldiery and many more by the Jews. Sixty thousand were said to
have perished and thirty-five thousand more were sold into slavery. The sacred
relics of the city, the Holy Cross and the instruments of the Passion, had been
hidden, but they were unearthed and were sent, together with the Patriarch,
eastward as a gift to the Christian queen of Persia, the Nestorian Meryem. The
devastation in and round the city was so vast that to this day the countryside
has never fully recovered.