The Tragedy of the Templars (11 page)

Everywhere in Palestine, Atsiz punished the rebellions with a reign of terror, burning harvests, razing plantations, desecrating cemeteries, raping women and men alike, killing and maiming people – ‘they cut off the ears and even the noses are finished off', reported an eyewitness.
¹⁰
He annihilated Ramla and hastened on to Gaza, where he murdered the entire population. Damascus fared no better in the havoc; its population collapsed to three thousand due to the scarcity and starvation that followed in his wake. From al-Arish on the Egyptian border to Antioch in northern Syria the Turks continued the slaughter, taking people captive, pillaging their homes and setting them on fire, destroying monasteries and churches, and desolating entire villages and towns. Arab nomadic tribes were the allies of the Turks in this chaos and made a kind of living by kidnapping and looting. The Fatimids launched two campaigns against Atsiz in an effort to reclaim Palestine and Syria, but instead his end came at the hands of the Seljuk hierarchy itself when, in 1078, Atsiz was invited to Damascus for consultation with the brother of the Seljuk sultan, where he was arrested and put to death.

The Byzantines were all but helpless against the Seljuks. After Manzikert they lost their regained territories in Syria and, more importantly, lost the manpower and resources of Asia Minor, the richest part of the empire. Making matters worse, the new emperor was the incompetent Michael VII Ducas, who spent lavishly on luxuries while starving the army of money even as the empire was collapsing all about him. But finally, in 1074, with the Turks standing across the Bosphorus within sight of Constantinople, the emperor appealed to the West for aid. In doing so the Byzantines had to overcome their pride, not least in putting aside the Great Schism of 1054, that dramatic rupture between the Eastern and Western parts of the universal Church. A growing estrangement, accentuated by the use of Latin in the West and Greek in the East, had developed between the Churches, and when the Greek patriarch caused offence over matters of custom, rite and theological emphasis during delicate negotiations in Constantinople, the papal legate furiously threw down a bull of excommunication against the patriarch in the great church of Haghia Sophia and was excommunicated in turn. Nevertheless, no fundamental dogmas separated the two Churches, and the dispute remained something of which ordinary Christians in the East and West were largely unaware. But the Greek hierarchy in Constantinople, who counted the schism a great victory as it freed the patriarchate from having to acknowledge the traditional supremacy of the papacy at Rome, now had to endure the sight of Michael VII appealing to Pope Gregory VII for the very survival of their empire.

Gregory VII was heir in name, office and disposition to an earlier bishop of Rome, Pope Gregory I, who after the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West had marshalled resistance against the barbarian invaders and in the process established the papacy as a temporal and military power. When Michael VII's appeal reached Rome, it fell on ready ears, for not only was Gregory eager to heal the rift between the Churches but he also saw a role for the papacy in striking at the new barbarian invasions in the East. Gregory circulated a letter to leading figures throughout the West, explaining that he had just been visited by an emissary who ‘repeated what we had heard from many others, that a pagan race had overcome the Christians and with horrible cruelty had devastated everything almost to the walls of Constantinople, and were now governing the conquered lands with tyrannical violence, and that they had slain many thousands of Christians as if they were but sheep'. Gregory continued that it was not enough to grieve at the misfortunes of the Greek empire and of Christians in the East, but that ‘we should lay down our lives to liberate them'.
¹¹

Gregory's concern with the oppression of fellow Christians had much to do with his hopes for reuniting the Church, which, like his call to help the faltering Byzantine Empire, was practical and strategic. For more than the East was at stake. Europe had slowly reconstructed itself after the disorders of the barbarian invasions in the West and after centuries of Muslim devastation round the Mediterranean; if Byzantium was overwhelmed by the Turks, then Europe would again be plunged into a dark age. Gregory sought to recruit knights to join a fighting force fifty thousand strong, the Militia Sancti Petri, the army of St Peter, which he would lead personally to relieve the East.

But this was not the moment when Gregory could call on the secular powers of Europe to march eastwards under his command, for within a year he became embroiled with many of those same secular authorities in the Investiture Controversy, over whether it was they or the Church who had the right to appoint high church officials and thereby control the great wealth and powers such officials could command. The Holy Roman emperors in particular, now represented by the incumbent Henry IV, claimed to rule by divine right, by which they justified exercising authority over Church appointments and sacraments, including penances and pardons. The reformers, led by Gregory, rejected lay interference in Church affairs, saying it led to severe abuses such as simony, the buying and selling of those same offices and sacraments, which they declared a heresy. But Gregory went further; not only did the Church have the right to appoint bishops, but also, he argued, spiritual authority was superior to temporal authority, and it was for the Church to dominate kings. But even this was only an aspect of a far greater revolution. Devout men and women who strongly felt the call to immerse themselves in the religious life had withdrawn from the world and had become monks and nuns within the growing Benedictine order. But for a century the Benedictines were swept with a great reform which redirected their spiritual energies outwards, transforming their monastic concern for liturgy and prayer into help for the poor, into artistic creation, into the sacralisation of everyday life. As society became increasingly pious, so every faithful Christian was a microcosm of the whole. As one of the reformers, the onetime Benedictine monk Cardinal Peter Damiani, remarked, ‘Each of the faithful seems to be, as it were, a lesser church'.
¹²
Although the Investiture Controversy deflected Gregory from pursuing a military campaign in the East, his assertion of a unified and spiritualised world view under the authority of the papacy would dominate medieval Europe for the next two centuries and would provide an underpinning for the crusades.

Anxiety about Islam had long ago worked its way into Christian prophetic literature, which after the Bible and the works of the Church Fathers was the most influential body of writing circulating in Europe during the Middle Ages. Uncanonical, unorthodox and infinitely adaptable to the preoccupations of the moment, these concoctions followed a common theme derived from the New Testament's Book of Revelation – that of the divine warrior who will come and save the world. An early candidate for this role was the Emperor Constantine, who had legalised Christianity and was then expected to bring about the Second Coming. Another was Charlemagne, who by the second half of the eleventh century was almost universally believed to have led a crusade to Jerusalem, where he reinstated the Christians whom the Muslims had driven out. In prophecy after prophecy the role of holy warrior passed from one emperor or king or prince to another while the story took on fantastical dimensions in relating the final triumph of Christianity.

One famous example that would reverberate throughout the Middle Ages was the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius. Written in the seventh century, it was made to look as though it had been written in the fourth century as a prediction of the Muslim invasion of the Middle East, its author supposedly Bishop Methodius of Patara, who was martyred in 311 at Tyre in Lebanon during the Roman persecutions. Its original purpose was to console the Christians of Palestine and Syria for suffering under Muslim domination, but it was soon translated from Syriac into Greek and Latin and became known throughout the Christian world. It relates how the Ishmaelites – that is, the Arabs – emerge from the desert and ravage the land from the Nile to the Euphrates. The Christians are punished for their sins by being subjected for a time to the Ishmaelites, who kill Christian priests, desecrate the holy places, take the Christians' land and force or seduce many Christians from their faith.

But just when all seems lost, a mighty emperor, whom many had thought long dead, rises up and defeats the Ishmaelites, lays waste their lands with fire and sword, and rages against those Christians who had denied Jesus as their lord. Now under this great emperor a golden age begins, a time of peace and joy, when the world flourishes as never before. This is shattered, however, when fearsome peoples known collectively as Gog and Magog, whom Alexander the Great had imprisoned in the far north, break out and bring universal terror and destruction until God sends a captain of the heavenly host who destroys them in a flash. The emperor journeys to Jerusalem, where he hands over Christendom to the care of God by going to Golgotha and placing his crown on the Cross, which soars up to heaven. But the emperor dies and the Antichrist appears, installing himself in the Temple in Jerusalem, where he inaugurates a reign of trials and tribulations, deceiving people with his miracles and persecuting those he cannot deceive. Before long, however, the Cross reappears in the heavens and Jesus Christ himself comes on clouds in power and glory to kill the Antichrist with the breath of his mouth and to carry out the Last Judgement.

In the event the story was reinforced by the reality. The persecutions of al-Hakim and the barbarities of the Seljuk Turks were all too real and gave an intensity and immediacy to the cosmic drama. The Last Days were not a fantasy about some remote and indefinite future but an infallible prophecy which at almost any given moment was felt to be on the point of fulfilment. The lawless chaos experienced by Christians in the East and the threat of Turkish attack directed against Christians in the West could be seen as the expected prelude to the universal salvation of the Second Coming.

After the execution of Atsiz in 1078 Palestine was put under direct Seljuk rule, but conditions hardly improved. An atmosphere of the Last Days flourished amid the devastation and havoc caused by the endless wars between the Seljuks and the Fatimids, and there were rumours that the world would come to an end in 1092 or 1093. Jerusalem suffered from depopulation as Christians, Muslims and Jews continued to leave the city. Significantly, the Aqsa mosque, which had been damaged by an earthquake in 1033, was restored to only half its size, the original fourteen aisles reduced to seven, demonstrating a considerable fall in the Muslim population that was never made good. In 1086 a new and additional use was found for the Temple Mount; the Seljuks established their garrison there.

Yet throughout these unsettled times the pilgrim traffic never entirely ceased, although the journey was now far more difficult than it had been before. Asia Minor, which had offered secure passage when it was in Byzantine hands, could no longer be traversed without an armed escort owing to marauding Turkish tribesmen, and even then it was not safe. In Syria and Palestine pilgrims chanced brigands on the roads, and at small towns along the way petty headman tried to extort money from passers-by. Then, arriving at the holy city, there were more sufferings to endure, as described by Edward Gibbon:

The pilgrims who succeeded in overcoming all these harassments and dangers returned impoverished and weary to the West with tales to tell of the appalling conditions in the East. The consequences of such reports are set out by the Syrian Muslim chronicler Ibn al-Azimi, who gave an account of the very last pilgrimage we know about before the crusades. In 1093, al-Azimi wrote, Christian pilgrims, both Byzantines and ‘al-Franj' as he called them – that is, Franks, a term that included anyone from Western Europe – were prevented by people living on the coast from going to Jerusalem, and ‘those who survived' – implying there had been a massacre – spread the news of what had happened in their own countries. This, wrote al-Azimi, and he was the only Muslim chronicler to make such a connection, was why the Christians began their preparations for the campaign that was to become the First Crusade.
¹⁴

Almost the last glimpse we have of Palestine before the crusades comes from Ibn al-Arabi, a young Islamic scholar from Seville, not yet twenty, who along with his father was forced to leave Andalusia when almost all of Muslim Spain was overrun by the Almoravids, puritanical fundamentalist Berbers whose aim was ‘a return to the doctrines of primitive Islam'.
¹⁵
From 1093 to 1096 al-Arabi stayed at Jerusalem, mainly in the neighbourhood of the Temple Mount, where he remarked on the lively activities at the madrasas and conversed with Muslim, Jewish and Christian religious figures. The imposition of Shia beliefs and teachings under the Fatimids had meant something of a spiritual drought for Sunni Muslims and others, who found themselves pressed to the margins, but in the few years since the Seljuk re-occupation of the city in 1073 there was something of an effervescence. Jerusalem was an idyll for al-Arabi. ‘We entered the Holy Land', he wrote, ‘and reached the Aqsa mosque. The full moon of knowledge shone for me and I was illuminated by it for more than three years.' Yet al-Arabi could not ignore that, even four and a half centuries after the Muslim conquest, Jerusalem was still a predominantly Christian city and that the same was true of Palestine generally.
¹⁶
‘The country is theirs', al-Arabi observed about the Christians, ‘because it is they who work its soil, nurture its monasteries and maintain its churches.'
¹⁷