The Triumph of Christianity (24 page)

Richard W. Bulliet
²²
has provided superb data on conversion to Islam in the various conquered regions. For whatever reason, from earliest times, Muslims produced large numbers of very extensive biographical dictionaries listing all of the better-known people in a specific area, and new editions appeared for centuries. Eventually Bulliet was able to assemble data on more than a million persons. The value of these data lies in the fact that Bulliet was able to distinguish Muslims from non-Muslims on the basis of their names. Then, by merging many dictionaries for a given area and sorting the tens of thousands of people listed by their year of birth, Bulliet was able to calculate the proportion of Muslims in the population at various dates and thus create curves of the progress of conversion in five major areas. Because only somewhat prominent people were included in the dictionaries, these results overestimate both the extent and the speed of conversions vis-à-vis the general populations in that elites began with a higher proportion of Muslims and Muslims would have continued to dominate. Consequently, Bulliet devised a very convincing procedure to convert these data into conversion curves for whole populations.

Table 12.1 shows the number of years required to convert 50 percent of the population to Islam in five major areas. In Iran it took 200 years from the date of the initial conquest by Muslim forces to the time when half of Iranians were Muslims. In the other four areas it took from 252 years in Syria to 264 years in Egypt and North Africa.

Table 12.1: Estimated Number of Years Required to Convert 50 Percent of the Population to Islam

Source: Calculated from Bulliet,
Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period, (
1979a); and Bulliet, “Conversion to Islam and the Emergence of Muslim Society in Iran” (1979b).

As to why things happened somewhat more rapidly in Iran, two things set it apart from the other areas. Probably the most important is that for more than a century after falling to Islamic invaders, the Iranians frequently revolted again Muslim rule and did so with sufficient success so that many very bloody battles ensued as did brutal repressions. These conflicts would have resulted in substantial declines in the non-Muslim population, having nothing to do with conversion. Secondly, the climate of fear that must have accompanied the defeats of these rebellions likely would have prompted some Iranians to convert for safety’s sake and caused others to flee.

In any event, despite the onerous conditions imposed upon them, the conquered peoples only slowly converted to Islam. Even as late as the thirteenth century, very substantial segments of the populations of the Muslim Empire outside of Arabia (where non-Muslims were not permitted) were Christians or Jews.

Dhimmis
and Muslim “Tolerance”

A
GREAT DEAL OF
nonsense has been written about Muslim tolerance—that, in contrast with Christian brutality against Jews and heretics, Islam showed remarkable tolerance for conquered people, treated them with respect, and allowed them to pursue their faiths without interference. This claim probably began with Voltaire, Gibbon, and other eighteenth-century writers who used it to cast the Catholic Church in the worst possible light. The truth about life under Muslim rule is quite different.

It is true that the Qur’an forbids forced conversions. However, that recedes to an empty legalism given that many subject peoples often were “free to choose” conversion as an alternative to death or enslavement. That was the usual choice presented to pagans, and often Jews and Christians also were faced with that or with an only somewhat less extreme option.
²³
In principle, as “People of the Book,” Jews and Christians were supposed to be tolerated and permitted to follow their faiths, but only under quite repressive conditions—death was (and remains) the fate of any Muslim who converted to either faith. Nor could any new churches or synagogues be built. Jews and Christians also were prohibited from praying or reading their scriptures aloud, not even in their homes or in churches or synagogues, lest Muslims should accidentally hear them. And, as the remarkable historian of Islam Marshall G. S. Hodgson (1922–1968) pointed out, from very early times Muslim authorities often went to great lengths to humiliate and punish
dhimmis
—these being Jews and Christians who refused to convert to Islam. It was official policy that
dhimmis
should “feel inferior and to know ‘their place’... [imposing laws such as] that Christians and Jews should not ride horses, for instance, but at most mules, or even that they should wear certain marks of their religion on their costume when among Muslims.”
²⁴
In some places non-Muslims were prohibited from wearing clothing similar to that of Muslims, nor could they be armed.
²⁵
In addition, non-Muslims were invariably severely taxed compared with Muslims.
²⁶

These were the normal circumstances of Jewish and Christian subjects of Muslim states, but conditions often were far worse, as will be seen. This is
not
to say that the Muslims usually were more brutal or less tolerant than were Christians or Jews, for it was a brutal and intolerant age. It
is
to say that efforts to portray Muslims as enlightened supporters of multiculturalism are at best ignorant.

What is true is that many Muslim rulers depended almost entirely on
dhimmis
to provide them with literate bureaucrats. Indeed, as late as the middle of the eleventh century, the Muslim writer Nasir-i Khrusau reported “Truly, the scribes here in Syria, as is the case of Egypt, are all Christians... [and] it is most usual for the physicians... to be Christians.”
²⁷
In Palestine under Muslim rule, according to the monumental history by Moshe Gil, “the Christians had immense influence and positions of power, chiefly because of the gifted administrators among them who occupied government posts despite the ban in Muslim law against employing Christians [in such positions] or who were part of the intelligentsia of the period owing to the fact that they were outstanding scientists, mathematicians, physicians and so on.”
²⁸
The prominence of Christian officials was also acknowledged by Abd al-Jabbār, who wrote in about 995 that “kings in Egypt, al-Shām, Iraq, Jazīra, Fāris, and in all their surroundings, rely on Christians in matters of officialdom, the central administration and the handling of funds.”
²⁹
The many riots against Christians in Cairo and other Egyptian cities and towns during the fourteenth century were prompted by the extraordinary wealth of Copts who dominated the Sultan’s bureaucracy and who, despite repeated purges, always returned to power because Muslim replacements could not be found.
³⁰

Stamping Out the “Unbelievers”

J
UST AS LITTLE IS
known about the spread of Christianity in the East, the final destruction of the
dhimmi
communities of Eastern Christians is lacking in detail. It was not prompted by the Crusades. As will be seen in chapter 13, at the time Muslims paid little attention to the Crusades, and current anger about them originated in the twentieth century. Apparently, sustained attacks on the
dhimmis
began in Cairo in 1321, when Muslim mobs began destroying Coptic churches. These anti-Christian riots “were carefully orchestrated throughout Egypt”
³¹
until large numbers of churches and monasteries were destroyed. Although the mobs eventually were put down by Mamlūk authorities, small-scale anti-Christian attacks, arson, looting, and murder became chronic and widespread. Then, in 1354 once again mobs “ran amok, destroying churches... and attacking Christians and Jews in the streets, and throwing them into bonfires if they refused to pronounce the
shadādatayn
”
³²
(to acknowledge Allah as the One True God). Soon, according to Al-Maqrizi’s (1364 –1442) account, in “all the provinces of Egypt, both north and south, no church remained that had not been razed.... Thus did Islam spread among the Christians of Egypt.”
³³

The massacres of Christians and the destruction of churches and monasteries were not limited to Egypt. Having converted to Islam, the Mongol rulers of Mesopotamia, Armenia, and Syria took even more draconian measures than did the Mamlūks. When Ghāzān took the Mongol throne of Iran in 1295, in pursuit of increased public support he converted to Islam (he had been raised a Christian and then became a Buddhist), and yielded to “popular pressure which compelled him to... persecute Christians.”
³⁴
According to an account written by Mar Yabballaha III (1245–1317), the Nestorian patriarch, in keeping with his aim of forcing all Christians and Jews to become Muslims, Ghāzān issued this edict:

The churches shall be uprooted, and the altars overturned, and the celebrations of the Eucharist shall cease, and the hymns of praise, and the sounds of calls to prayer shall be abolished; and the heads of the Christians, and the heads of the congregations of the Jews, and the great men among them, shall be killed.
³⁵

Within a year Ghāzān changed his mind and attempted to end the persecutions of Christians, but by now the mobs were out of control and it was widely accepted “that everyone who did not abandon Christianity and deny his faith should be killed.”
³⁶

Meanwhile, similar events were taking place in Mongol Armenia. In an effort to force Christians into Islam, church services were forbidden and a crushing tax was imposed on each. In addition, local authorities were ordered to seize each Christian man, to pluck out his beard and to tattoo a black mark on his shoulder. When few Christians defected in response to these measures, the Khān then ordered that all Christian men be castrated and have one eye put out—which caused many deaths in this era before antibiotics, but did lead to many conversions.
³⁷

In 1310 there was “a terrible massacre in Arbil” in Mesopotamia.
³⁸
Things were no better in Syria. In 1317 the city of Aūmid was the scene of an anti-Christian attack. The bishop was beaten to death, then churches were all burned, the Christian men were all murdered, and twelve thousand women and children were sold into slavery.
³⁹
Similar events occurred all across the East and North Africa.
⁴⁰
Then came Tamerlane.

Tamerlane, also known as Timur, was born near the Persian city of Samarkand in 1336 and died while campaigning in China in 1405. Although he made Samarkand his capital, Tamerlane never spent more than a few days there at a time, remaining a nomadic conqueror his entire life. A Muslim of Turkic-Mongol origins, Tamerlane is remembered mainly for his barbarity, earning the sobriquet the “Scourge of God,” as Christopher Marlowe put it in his great play (1587). Again and again Tamerlane perpetrated huge massacres—perhaps as many as two hundred thousand captives (men, women, and children) were slaughtered during his march on Delhi
⁴¹
—and had towering pyramids built from the heads of his victims. And while he killed huge numbers of Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists, he virtually wiped out the Christians and Jews in the East. In Georgia alone, Tamerlane “destroyed seven hundred large villages, wiped out the inhabitants, and reduced all the Christian churches... to rubble.”
⁴²
Any Christian communities that survived Tamerlane were destroyed by his grandson, Ulugh Beg.
⁴³

Conclusion

B
Y THE END OF
the fourteenth century only tiny remnants of Christianity remained here and there in the East and North Africa, having been almost completely wiped out by Muslim persecution. Thus, as Philip Jenkins put it, Christianity became a European faith because Europe was the only “continent where it was not destroyed.”
⁴⁴

Chapter Thirteen
Europe Responds

T
HE
C
ASE FOR THE
C
RUSADES
¹

I
N THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH OF
the destruction of the World Trade Center by Muslim terrorists, frequent mention was made of the Crusades as a basis for Islamic fury. It was argued that Muslim bitterness over their mistreatment by the Christian West can be dated back to 1096 when the First Crusade set out for the Holy Land. Far from being motivated by piety or by concern for the safety of pilgrims and the holy places in Jerusalem, it is widely believed that the Crusades were but the first extremely bloody chapter in a long history of brutal European colonialism.
²
More specifically: that the crusaders marched east, not out of idealism, but in pursuit of lands and loot; that the Crusades were promoted “by power-mad popes” seeking to greatly expand Christianity through conversion of the Muslim masses
³
and thus the Crusades constitute “a black stain on the history of the Catholic Church”; that the knights of Europe were barbarians who brutalized everyone in their path, leaving “the enlightened Muslim culture... in ruins.”
⁴
As Akbar Ahmed, chair of Islamic studies at American University in Washington, DC, suggests: “the Crusades created a historical memory which is with us today—the memory of a long European onslaught.”
⁵

Two months after the attack on New York City, former president Bill Clinton informed an audience at Georgetown University that “Those of us who come from various European lineages are not blameless” vis-à-vis the Crusades as a crime against Islam, and then summarized a medieval account about all the blood that was shed when Godfrey of Bouillon and his forces conquered Jerusalem in 1099. That the Crusades were a crime in great need of atonement was a popular theme even before the Islamic terrorists crashed their hijacked airliners. In 1999, the
New York Times
had solemnly proposed that the Crusades were comparable to Hitler’s atrocities or to the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.
⁶
Also in 1999, to mark the nine hundredth anniversary of the crusader conquest of Jerusalem, hundreds of devout Protestants took part in a “Reconciliation Walk” that began in Germany and ended in the Holy Land. Along the way the walkers wore T-shirts bearing the message “I apologize” in Arabic. Their official statement explained the need for a Christian apology:

Nine hundred years ago, our forefathers carried the name of Jesus Christ in battle across the Middle East. Fueled by fear, greed, and hatred... the Crusaders lifted the banner of the Cross above your people.... On the anniversary of the First Crusade... we wish to retrace the footsteps of the Crusaders in apology for their deeds.... We deeply regret the atrocities committed in the name of Christ by our predecessors. We renounce greed, hatred and fear, and condemn all violence done in the name of Jesus Christ.
⁷

These are not new charges. Western condemnations of the Crusades originated in the “Enlightenment,” that utterly misnamed era during which French and British intellectuals invented the “Dark Ages” in order to glorify themselves and vilify the church (see chapter 14). Voltaire (1694–1778) calls the Crusades an “epidemic of fury which lasted for two hundred years and which was always marked by every cruelty, every perfidy, every debauchery, and every folly of which human nature is capable.”
⁸
According to David Hume (1711–1776) the Crusades were “the most signal and most durable monument to human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation.”
⁹
Denis Diderot (1713–1784) characterized the Crusades as “a time of the deepest darkness and of the greatest folly... to drag a significant part of the world into an unhappy little country in order to cut the inhabitants’ throats and seize a rocky peak which was not worth one drop of blood.”
¹⁰
These attacks reinforced the widespread “Protestant conviction that crusading was yet another expression of Catholic bigotry and cruelty.”
¹¹
But the notion that the crusaders were early Western imperialists who used a religious excuse to seek land and loot probably was originated by Edward Gibbon (1737–1794), who claims that the crusaders really went in pursuit of “mines of treasures, of gold and diamonds, of palaces of marble and jasper, and of odoriferous groves of cinnamon and frankincense.”
¹²

During the twentieth century, Gibbon’s thesis was developed into a quite elaborate “materialist” account of why the Crusades took place.
¹³
As summed up by Hans Mayer, the Crusades alleviated a severe financial squeeze on Europe’s “knightly class.” According to Mayer and others who share his views, at this time there was a substantial and rapidly growing number of “surplus” sons, members of noble families who would not inherit and whom the heirs found it increasingly difficult to provide with even modest incomes. Hence, as Mayer put it, “the Crusade acted as a kind of safety valve for the knightly class... a class which looked upon the Crusade as a way of solving its material problems.”
¹⁴
Indeed, a group of American economists recently proposed that the crusaders hoped to get rich from the flow of pilgrims (comparing the shrines in Jerusalem to modern amusement parks) and that the pope sent the crusaders east in pursuit of “new markets” for the church, presumably to be gained by converting people away from Islam.
¹⁵
The prolific Geoffrey Barraclough wrote: “our verdict on the Crusades [is that the knightly settlements established in the East were] centers of colonial exploitation.”
¹⁶
It is thus no surprise that a leading college textbook on Western Civilization informs students that “From the perspective of the pope and European monarchs, the crusades offered a way to rid Europe of contentious young nobles... [who] saw an opportunity to gain territory, riches, status, possibly a title, and even salvation.”
¹⁷
Or, as the popular writer Karen Armstrong confided, these “were our first colonies.”
¹⁸

Thus, it is the accepted myth that during the Crusades
an expansionist, imperialistic Christendom brutalized, looted, and colonized a tolerant and peaceful Islam.
These claims have been utterly refuted by a group of distinguished contemporary historians.
¹⁹
They propose that the Crusades were precipitated by Islamic provocations, by many centuries of bloody attempts to colonize the West, and by sudden new attacks on Christian pilgrims and holy places. Although the Crusades were initiated by a plea from the pope, this had nothing to do with hopes of converting Islam. Nor were the Crusades organized and led by surplus sons, but by the heads of great families who were fully aware that the costs of crusading would far exceed the very modest material rewards that could be expected. Most went at immense personal cost, some of them knowingly bankrupting themselves to go. For example, Godfrey of Bouillon sold the entire province of Verdun and also heavily mortgaged his province of Bouillon to finance his participation. Moreover, the crusader kingdoms that the knights established in the Holy Land, and which stood for two centuries, were not sustained by local exactions, but required immense subsidies from Europe. In addition, it is utterly unreasonable to impose modern notions about proper military conduct on medieval warfare—both Christians and Muslims observed quite different rules of war. Even so, the crusaders were not nearly as brutal or bloodthirsty as they have been portrayed. Finally, claims that Muslims have been harboring bitter resentments about the Crusades for a millennium are nonsense: Muslim antagonism about the Crusades did not appear until about 1900 in reaction against the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the onset of actual European colonialism in the Middle East.

Now for the details.

Provocations

A
S DESCRIBED IN CHAPTER
12, Muslims began raiding Christian areas in the lifetime of Muhammad. Then, a year after his death, Muslim invasions began in earnest when their forces entered Syria, then a Christian province of the Eastern Roman Empire. Muslim forces soon won a series of battles, taking Damascus and some other cities in 635, and by 636 the Byzantine army was forced to abandon Syria. Next the Arabs marched into the Holy Land: Jerusalem was taken in 638, Caesarea Maritima in 640. From there Muslim armies invaded Christian Egypt, taking Cairo; Alexandria fell to them in 642. A major Muslim empire now ruled most of the Middle East and was spreading along the North African Coast—then a major Christian region. Thirty years later the empire stretched past Tangier and reached the Atlantic. By 714 much of Spain was occupied. Soon major thrusts were made into France before the Franks managed to repel the Muslim forces at Tours (or Poitiers) in 732. In 831 Muslim forces invaded Sicily and held it until 1072, and in 846 they sacked Rome and then withdrew to rule over southern Italy for the next two centuries. Thus, by the time of the First Crusade, Christendom had been fighting a defensive war with Islam for more than 450 years!

It seems very odd that those who are so vociferous about the misery and injustice imposed by Europeans on their former colonial empires fail to admit any such consequences of Muslim imperialism. But as was clarified in chapter 12, Muslims were brutal and intolerant colonialists. Thus the fact remains that the Crusades were fundamentally defensive, and it is against this general background of chronic and long-standing Western grievances that the very specific provocations for the Crusades must be considered. These involved the destruction of, and threat to, holy places in Jerusalem and the murder, torture, enslavement, robbery, and general harassment of Christian pilgrims.

In 1009, at the direction of Fatimid Caliph al-Hakim, Muslims destroyed the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem—the splendid basilica that Constantine had erected over what was believed to be the site of the tomb where Christ lay before the Resurrection. Worse yet, the Muslims attempted to destroy the tomb itself, leaving only traces of the hollow in the rocks. As word of the desecration of the holiest of all Christian shrines reached Europe, it prompted considerable anger and concern among the informed elites. But the crisis soon passed because al-Hakim was assassinated and some semblance of religious tolerance was restored in Jerusalem, thus permitting resumption of the substantial flow of Christian pilgrims. Indeed, the value of the pilgrim traffic probably was the primary factor in the very liberal policies that had prevailed in Muslim-controlled Jerusalem through the centuries. Despite the great distances involved and the limited means of transportation, pilgrimages to Jerusalem were surprisingly common. In the first of his famous three volumes on the Crusades, Sir Steven Runciman (1903–2000) reported that “an unending stream of travellers poured eastward, sometimes travelling in parties numbering thousands, men and women of every age and every class, ready... to spend a year or more on the [journey].”
²⁰
A major reason for going to the Holy Land was the belief that a pilgrimage would absolve even the most terrible sins. Thus, many pilgrims came all the way from Scandinavia—some even from Iceland. As Runciman explained, the Norse “were violent men, frequently guilty of murder and frequently in need of an act of penance.”
²¹

But then, later in the eleventh century, everything changed again. The Seljuk Turks, recent converts to Islam, became the new rulers of Asia Minor, pushing to within a hundred miles of Constantinople. Perhaps because they were new to Islam, or perhaps because they were still seminomadic tribesmen untainted by city dwelling, the Turks were unflinchingly intolerant. There was only One True God and his name was Allah, not Yahweh or Jehovah. Not that the Turks officially prohibited Christian pilgrimages, but they made it clear that Christians were fair game. Hence, every Anatolian village along the route to Jerusalem began to exact a toll on Christian travelers. Far worse, many pilgrims were seized and sold into slavery while others were tortured, often seemingly for entertainment. Those who survived these perils “returned to the West weary and impoverished, with a dreadful tale to tell.”
²²

Anger and anxiety about the Holy Land continued to grow. It is important to understand just how vivid was the image of the Holy Land to sincere medieval Christians (if not to the barely Christian masses). It was where Christ and the disciples had lived, and to an almost palpable degree still did. In the words of Robert Payne (1911–1983), in Palestine Christians “expected to find holiness in a concrete form, something that could be seen, touched, kissed, worshipped, and even carried away. Holiness was in the pathways trodden by Christ, in the mountains and valleys seen by Christ, in the streets of Jerusalem where Christ had wandered.”
²³
In Jerusalem, a Christian could even climb the hill on which the cross had borne the Son of God. But no longer.

It was in this climate of opinion that Alexius Comnenus, Emperor of Byzantium, wrote from his embattled capital to the Count of Flanders requesting that he and his fellow Christians in the West come to the rescue. In his letter, the emperor detailed gruesome tortures of pilgrims and vile desecrations of churches, altars, and baptismal fonts. Should Constantinople fall to the Turks, not only would thousands more Christians be murdered, tortured, and raped, but “the most holy relics of the Saviour,” gathered over the centuries, would be lost. “Therefore in the name of God... we implore you to bring this city all the faithful soldiers of Christ... in your coming you will find your reward in heaven, and if you do not come, God will condemn you.”
²⁴