Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (47 page)

It was becoming clear that the Mongols were not going to fulfil the hopes which Christian strategists placed in them - that might have been obvious from the beginning, if their ghastly toll of millions of people and even animals massacred on an industrial scale had been taken into account. The Mongols were unimpressed by their increasing acquaintance with Christian rivalries, which had not previously been apparent in Mongol homelands in Dyophysite Central Asia, and, as always, they had their own priorities. William of Rubruck commented with rueful humour after his meeting with the Great Khan Mongke on the chances of converting the great man: 'If I had possessed the power to work miracles, as Moses did, he might perhaps have humbled himself.'
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Already a train of events in the 1250s had begun the downfall of Christianity in Central Asia, signalling the end of any possibility of a tame Christian Mongol empire. First was the conversion to Islam of Berke, one of the royal family of the Mongol grouping known as the Kipchak Khanate or Golden Horde, in what is now southern Russia (see pp. 510-11). In 1256 Berke murdered his Christian nephew in order to take power as Kipchak Khan, and although the Mongol Il-Khans of Iran were still apparently riding high on military conquest, Berke allied with the enemies of the Il-Khans, the Islamic rulers (Mamluks) of Egypt. It was a dangerous split in Mongol solidarity, which was fatally prolonged by an accident: the death of the Great Khan Mongke far away in Mongolia. Mongol leaders returned to their heartland to choose his successor, leaving their forces in a weakened state, and the Mamluks were able to inflict a crushing defeat at 'Ayn Jalut in the Holy Land in 1260.
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This was the first check on Mongol power, and the beginning of steady decline for the Il-Khans of Iran, who themselves turned away from their alliance with Christianity when they realized that Christian Europe had more important priorities than giving them support, and that Christian Europe was in any case less impressive in military terms than it liked to think. The future lay with those Mongol rulers increasingly committed to Islam. The fortunes of the Church of the East plummeted still further with the rise to power from the mid-fourteenth century of the Mongol warlord Timur or Tamerlane, intent on restoring the glory of Mongol power from its fractured state. Timur's conquests extended from the Black Sea to Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf. His systematic cruelty and will to destruction made the Mongol khans' massacres in previous centuries look half-hearted. His mountainous piles of skulls are no picturesque myth. While Timur had no compunction in attacking other Muslim rulers, including eliminating the Il-Khans, Muslims generally fared better in his conquests, and it was Christianity in vast swathes of its former eastern strongholds which chiefly suffered.
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8. Asia in 1260

Timur's orgies of destruction hit Christian populations in Central Asia which had already been terribly reduced by the advance of the plague which western Europe would come to know in 1348-9 as the Black Death. From now on, outside the comparative safety of India, the story of the Church of the East recedes to the efforts by disparate enclaves to cling on to existence in the face of Islamic dominance, usually in remote upland areas out of sight of the authorities. Even when Timur found no successors in his cruelty and the Mongol threat receded, the growing power of the Ottoman Turks (see p. 483) continued the pressure on non-Muslims. In an increasingly hostile Islamic world, embittered at the memory of the alien outrage of the Western Crusades, the ancient privileged place of Christians at the Courts of monarchs disappeared.

The Miaphysite Church of Armenia suffered like the Dyophysites from the calamities of the fourteenth century. The last independent Armenian kingdom, in Cilicia in south-west Turkey, fell to Mamluk forces in 1375 and more than two centuries of struggle for Christian survival followed. The Armenians had centuries of experience in being buffeted by neighbouring great powers and they were long used to migrating away from disaster. These desperate years sent more of them travelling through eastern Europe as far away as Poland, let alone whatever refuge they could find in Asia - but as with the Jews in diaspora, their sufferings sharpened their skills in commerce and negotiation, skills which they were ready to apply to their religious troubles. From the fourteenth century, at odds theologically with both their Byzantine neighbours and the Church of the East, they showed an enterprising interest in alliance with the Church of Rome, despite the problems caused by memories of Chalcedon, and this produced some lasting results, despite the intense divisions which it also created among Armenian Christians.

Pope John XXII, an energetic though not uncontroversial pontiff (reigned 1316-34), showed particular interest in the plight of the Armenians and the prospect of bringing them into the Catholic fold. He sustained the missions of friars (both Franciscans and Dominicans) into Central Asia which had begun in the thirteenth century. Some of the warmest contacts which the friars made were with migrant Armenian communities in Iran and on the steppes; the earliest translations of recent Latin theologians like the Dominican Thomas Aquinas (see pp. 412-15) into any other language were into Armenian. One group of Armenian monks in Asia actually remodelled their monastic life on Dominican lines and accepted Roman obedience, taking a Latin name which also proclaimed their pride in their Armenian heritage as the Fratres Unitores of the congregation of St Gregory the Illuminator (see pp. 186-7). Similar Church unions took place in eastern Europe in the fifteenth century, in which Armenian congregations kept their liturgy and distinctive devotional practices, while acknowledging papal primacy as 'Uniates'. These unions provided the model for later similar arrangements which Rome made with many other groups in the Counter-Reformation (see pp. 533-5). Not everyone was delighted by these moves to unity on Rome's terms: the Armenian hierarchy clinging on in the Armenian heartland furiously opposed union with the papacy and the word 'Uniate' has often carried an abusive flavour. A Miaphysite Catholicate continued in very difficult circumstances to sustain the independent life of the Church from the cathedral in the former Armenian capital city of Ejmiacin or Valarsapat.
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In the same period, the Dyophysite Church of the East developed its own strategies for survival. In a move of pragmatic desperation, it diverged from the universal tradition of Eastern Christianity and increasingly abandoned artistic representations of sacred subjects, especially in paintings or statues; they were likely to attract vandalism from Muslims. The Dyophysites had in any case always rejected crucifixes, which suggested to them a confusion of the natures of Jesus making God suffer on the Cross; so their crosses were bare to symbolize the resurrected Christ (ironically, the Miaphysite Armenians favoured the same bare cross, for their own opposite theological reasons). Friar William of Rubruck had been scandalized in the 1250s when a Dyophysite Christian in Central Asia saw a silver crucifix 'in the French style' and wrenched the figure of Christ off it.
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When Protestant missionaries arrived in the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century, they were surprised and delighted by the Nestorians' lack of images and declared the Church of the East 'the Protestants of Asia'. By then the Dyophysites were only too pleased to cooperate with the blithe misapprehensions of new potential allies, for the medieval and early modern periods had proved by no means to be the nadir of the Church's fortunes. They were experiencing fresh disasters which, in the last century and a half, have afflicted both the Church of the East and the Church of Armenia with some of the worst stories of martyrdom in Christian history (see pp. 854-5 and 923-4).
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ISLAM AND THE AFRICAN CHURCHES

The story of Christianity in Africa into the early modern period is likewise one of defensiveness and decline nearly everywhere, leading inexorably to its complete extinction along the North African coast and in Nubia. The North African Church, the first stronghold of Latin Christianity, the home of Tertullian, Cyprian and Augustine of Hippo, should be given credit for surviving the Arab conquest of the 690s for some five centuries in certain areas, but it never recovered its unity after the bitterness of fourth- and fifth-century divisions between the Donatists and the Catholic elite which was in communion with the wider Mediterranean Church (see pp. 303-5). Eventually in the twelfth century the rigidly intolerant Almohad dynasty insisted on mass conversion of both Jews and Christians. It is probably significant that the Church seems to have remained at least formally Latin-speaking: gravestones have been discovered south of Tripoli which as late as the eleventh century do their best to use Latin, though '
vixit
' ('lived') has become '
bixit
', and '
vitam
' ('life') '
bitam
'.
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This use of speech which represented a vanished governing class rather than the Berber language contrasts with the Copts' maintenance of their vernacular in Egypt, but also with the fact that the Copts were sufficiently numerous and part of mainstream Egyptian society that in the end they adopted Arabic as their devotional and liturgical language as well as for everyday conversation.

In similar circumstances to the Church of the East, the Coptic patriarchs were made to live in the newly founded Arab capitals in Egypt: first at Fustat and then nearby Cairo, after the Fatimid dynasty of caliphs created it in the late tenth century. The Miaphysite faith of the Copts meant that their Muslim overlords did not identify them with the Byzantine Empire and generally treated them with tolerance. Wholly exceptional was an episode of persecution under Caliph al-Hakim from 1004 to 1013, which included the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem - one of the sparks of the eleventh-century impulse of Latin Christians to reconquer the Holy Land (see pp. 381-9). Hakim's atypical actions should not be attributed to Islam as much as to insanity, which eventually led him to proclaim himself as Allah, whereupon he was murdered by outraged fellow Muslims.
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Greater and irreversible troubles came when the Latin Crusades began and were followed by Mongol advances. The Mamluks, who seized power in Egypt in 1250, were a caste of men captured for military service, so they drew their identity from their defence of Islam against its enemies. Even though Coptic Christians had little sympathy either with crusading Western Christians, who regarded them as heretics, or with Mongols, who favoured Nestorians heretical in Miaphysite eyes, it was now easy for Egyptian Muslims and their rulers to regard any Christian as a fifth columnist, especially when Crusaders and Mongols turned to actual invasion of Egypt during the thirteenth century. Just as in Central Asia, the fourteenth century proved the turning point into decline for the Coptic cause in Egypt, though not here into extinction. There was a particularly terrifying sequence of anti-Christian pogroms in 1354, when churches were torn down and both Jews and Christians were forced by mobs to recite the Islamic profession of faith, or be burned to death; unlike previous outbreaks there was little refuge, since the terror extended throughout the land, not just to Cairo.
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Christians were forced out of most of the best land in Egypt, 'exiles in their own country'.
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In a desperate and temporary move in the fifteenth century, the Church agreed to a union with the Latin Western Church, at a time when the Byzantine emperor was trying to arrange a similar deal with Rome for Greek Orthodoxy at the Council of Florence, but the Copts soon realized that they would gain little benefit from it.
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Their survival over the next three centuries was through their own efforts and the stubborn maintenance of ancient traditions in their monasteries, most of which could survive only in the most remote or poverty-stricken locations.

While Christianity throughout North Africa, Egypt and Asia succumbed almost universally to Islamic rule, Ethiopia stood out as still a Christian monarchy, protected by its rugged geography and distance from the Muslim heartlands, but now rarely a major player in the politics of the Red Sea and Arabia, and never wholly secure. In the tenth century, Ethiopia faced a devastating revolt by a chieftainess, Gudit or Judith, who is said to have made it the business of her rebels to cause as much destruction as possible to the churches and Christian life of the kingdom. Certainly only the most remote buildings survive from an earlier date, most spectacularly the ancient cliff-top monastery of Dabra Damo in the Aksum region; this was one of the earliest foundations of Ethiopian monasticism, whose church, perched on a cliff top above a high hill, is still only accessible by scaling the cliff face clinging to a cable. Such troubles, and the near-obliteration of Ethiopia's historical record from the time of Gudit and before, make any attempt to reconstruct Ethiopian Christian history speculative, and a junk heap of romantic misconceptions demands a degree of critical ruthlessness in dealing with what evidence we have. The fragmentary truth looks remarkable enough.