Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam Page 8

  Islam stopped all these excesses. It swept away the exaggerated fear of sex, discarded asceticism, banished the fear of hell for those who failed to reach perfection, quenched theological enquiry … Islam was like the sand of the desert … It created a sense of solidarity and brotherhood which had been lost among the contending Christians.14

  Not surprisingly, from the first days of the Islamic conquest, the Orthodox hierarchy, the spiritual arm of Byzantine political power, saw the Muslims as a unique menace. They had not responded so fiercely to the Persian occupation of Palestine and their capture of Jerusalem in 614, even though the occupiers had carried away with them Jerusalem’s supreme Christian relic, the true cross.15 On the day in the spring of 638 that the leader of the Muslims, Caliph Omar, clad in his old and tattered robe, arrived to take the city under his protection, the Orthodox patriarch of Jerusalem, Sophronius, watched him walk slowly through the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The patriarch remarked quietly in Greek to an acolyte, “Surely this is the abomination of desolation spoken of by Daniel the Prophet standing in the holy place.”16 All those who heard him would have understood not just an allusion to the prophet Daniel, but also to the words of Jesus Christ on the Mount of Olives, when his disciples asked him to prophesy the future.

  When ye shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel, stand in the holy place, let him understand … For there shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be … Then if any man shall say unto you, “Lo here is Christ, or there,” believe it not. For there shall arise false Christs and false prophets, and shall show great signs and wonders; insomuch, that if it were possible, they should deceive the very elect.17

  The patriarch, who had lived through the Persian occupation, saw in this grizzled old man a quality much more dangerous than in all the grand Persian satraps who had preceded him.

  From this point of first contact, there was a profound fear and antipathy among the Orthodox toward Islam. These attitudes proliferated in the written polemic of Byzantine scholars. From these early days themes and tropes began to emerge, which appeared and reappeared in later diatribes.18 Desert Arabs had been seen as barbarian long before the coming of Islam. According to one contemporary, Maximus Confessor, “They behave like beasts of prey though they look like human beings.”19 In later accounts, the Muslim subjects of an Armenian king had been transmogrified into dog-headed men, cynocephali.20 Within two generations of Omar entering Jerusalem, Christian scholars developed a comprehensive attack against Islam. One powerful polemicist was John of Damascus, who served as an official at the caliph’s court before he abandoned public life in 716 and became a monk.21 He put the case against Islam in one sentence: “He who does not believe according to the tradition of the universal church is an infidel.”22 He condemned the Prophet Mohammed as the Antichrist. Yet John, who read Arabic and knew the Qur’an, was thought excessively moderate by his fellow clerics. A synod in 754 condemned him as being “Saracen minded,” and too sympathetic to Islam.23 Nicetas Byzantios was more antagonistic to it. “Above all [he considered that] Islam was a step backwards, a retrogression, ‘a destruction and a ruin.’ It was a ‘bad and noxious’ religion. The Prophet Mohammed himself was ‘the son of the father of lies’ and he [Nicetas] triumphantly concluded, ‘Thus I do not hesitate to pronounce [my judgment] on Mohammed: he is the very Antichrist.’ ”24

  IN THE BYZANTINE SYSTEM, THE ORTHODOX CHURCH SERVED GOD through serving the state. Over the centuries since Constantine’s conversion to Christianity in 312, his new city of Constantinople had become an arsenal of the faith. More and more holy relics had been accumulated in the city’s churches. At the dedication of Constantinople on May 1, 330, a great statue of the emperor had been placed atop a huge column of porphyry, which was more than 100 feet tall, and glowed a pale red in the setting sun. Holy relics were carried in procession to the foot of the shaft and then placed in a hidden chamber. There were crumbs from the bread with which Christ had fed the five thousand in the wilderness; the crosses on which the two thieves had been crucified on either side of Jesus of Nazareth at Golgotha; the alabaster box that had contained the ointment with which Mary Magdalene had anointed Jesus’ feet; the adze with which Noah had built the ark; the rock that Moses had touched with his wand and from which had gushed forth water in the wilderness; and the garment of the Virgin Mary, the Palladium, which Aeneas had carried from Troy to Rome. And cast into the bronze statue itself was a fragment of the true cross.25

  The great Church of the Holy Wisdom, Hagia Sophia, was filled with relics, most notably the true cross itself, recaptured by the emperor Heraclius from the Persians shortly before the Muslims occupied Palestine. It was by then in fragments, kept in a chest on a golden altar. There, too, were other relics of the passion: the crown of thorns, the sponge, and slabs from the tomb. The emperor Alexis Comnenus was supposed to have written to Robert, count of Flanders, in 1095 of the rich spiritual treasure of the city: “You will find more of it at Constantinople than in the whole world, for the treasures of its basilicas alone would be sufficient to furnish all the Churches of Christendom and all their treasures cannot together amount to those of St Sophia, whose riches have never been equalled even in the Temple of Solomon.”26

  All these were touchstones of the true faith, and over the centuries, Constantinople had become one vast reliquary. The Holy Land and the Christian sites were ransacked for sacred memorabilia, and increasingly Constantinople was identified with the “holy city” predicted in the Revelation of St. John the Divine: “And I, John, saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, ‘Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God.’ ”27 Indeed, as a city prepared for this sacred purpose, New Jerusalem was better than Old Jerusalem, which was filled with shadows of Christ’s betrayal and suffering as well as with divine light. The passion of Christ had combined both pain and transcendence, but Jerusalem was not a city fit for the pure risen Christ, as Constantinople could be. The sheer wealth of Constantinople, with its innumerable churches, its daily processions of relics, or the celebration of saints’ days, made it possible to build a city worthy of its purpose. Jerusalem was the past. New Jerusalem was the future.

  What prompted Byzantine polemics against Islam was attacks on the city of the Mother of God, Constantinople, New Jerusalem. In the spring of 670, to the surprise and terror of the people of Constantinople, a huge fleet of small vessels crammed with armed Muslims appeared in the Hellespont. The ships sailed down toward the Bosphorus and beached on the northern shore about seven miles from the city, close to the deserted sea palace of the Hebdomon. There they discharged their human cargo, and withdrew back into the Sea of Marmara. The long column of infantry advanced until it extended in a huge arc before the triple land walls built under the emperor Theodosius in the fourth century, which protected the heart of the city against attack from the north. Recovering from their shock, the Byzantine forces were at first successful. They marched from the city and almost wiped out the Arab army. At sea, they attacked the Arab fleet and destroyed many of the vessels. A new weapon, “Greek fire,” which could not be put out with water, proved a devastating weapon against the Arabs, both on land and sea.28 But the Arab losses were quickly made up. A new fleet and a new army arrived from the south. The Byzantines had lost control of the sea around the city and now could not move beyond the walls, for they were both outnumbered and out-fought by the Arabs. The Arabs were prepared to stay for as long as it took to reduce Constantinople.

  From their fortified camp close to the city the Arabs mounted a new assault each spring from 671 to 676. The costs in human life were enormous. In one assault 30,000 were killed. Gradually, the Byzantine defenders adapted the tactics they had learned to use against the Muslim col
umns on land, and harried them mercilessly at sea. At Syllaeum, off Asia Minor, a Byzantine squadron caught the Arab supply ships heading north, and destroyed them. Deprived of reinforcements, in the seventh year of the siege, the Arabs finally abandoned their attack and returned to the Levant. They realized that they had too few men and not enough of the large siege engines needed to breach the Theodosian walls. Moreover, depending solely on the sea route for their supplies and reinforcements had imperiled the entire venture.

  For a generation the Arabs made no new assault on the city. But early in 716, the Byzantine ambassador in Damascus returned to Constantinople with news that the Arabs were preparing an army and a fleet larger than any that had been seen before. The emperor issued orders that all the public granaries and cisterns were to be filled to capacity, the walls were to be repaired and extended, and all ships were to be put on a war footing. He anticipated a long investment of possibly three years.

  In the late spring of 717 an Arab army of 80,000 men advanced from the south. Five years before, the Muslims had pushed aside the Byzantine field troops at the Cilician Gates and then occupied the land between the Taurus Mountains and the Mediterranean coast. Now as they advanced north the Muslims took each well-fortified Byzantine-occupied city on their route without much difficulty, showing that their skills in siegecraft had improved markedly since their earlier assaults on Constantinople. They reached the Mediterranean coast at Pergamum and followed it north to the shores of the Hellespont in early June. At Abydos they met a flotilla of small ships from Syria which ferried the troops, their horses, and camels across the mile of water to the northern shore. It was a historic spot, for here the Persian King of Kings, Xerxes, had, more than a thousand years before, made a long bridge of boats so that his armies could cross into Europe.

  By the end of July 717 the Muslim general Maslama and his soldiers were encamped in a long curved line before the Theodosian walls. Each day he sent parties to probe the defenses, noting where the walls were lightly manned, before launching an all-out assault in mid-August. The emperor, Leo, who had concentrated the best of his troops in mobile squadrons behind the defenses, managed to throw back the Arab attack. The weapon that did most to defeat the Arab assault on the walls was a recently improved form of Greek fire. A Greek refugee from Syria had developed a new compound of quicklime, sulfur, and bitumen tar, known as “sea fire.” Mixed with water, the quicklime began to burn with an intense heat, igniting the mixture. Many of the warships in the Byzantine fleet were armed with special projectors for Greek fire, but Leo had stripped some of the ships and placed their projectors at intervals along the highest ramparts. Special detachments were equipped with mobile versions of these flamethrowers. Once it was burning, the liquid fire was almost impossible to extinguish, and the advancing Arab columns were simply incinerated, and by dusk a thick gray smoke hung over the city, filling it with the acrid smell of charred flesh.

  In the following month, the balance of advantage shifted back to the Muslims. A fleet of some 1,800 small boats full of soldiers with twenty larger warships from Egypt sailed into the Sea of Marmara. Their commander, Suleiman, landed most of his troops to reinforce Maslama’s besieging army, but then the whole armada sailed down toward the Bosphorus to attack the city from the seaward side. However, the Byzantine war galleys at anchor in the Golden Horn rowed out to shower the closely packed Arab vessels with sea fire, and loosed burning fireships upon them. Soon the narrow gap between the Asian and European shores was “a moving forest” filled with blazing ships, each one setting the sails or cordage of its neighbors alight. Suleiman managed to rally a few of his undamaged vessels and sailed back down into the Sea of Marmara. Over the following winter, which was exceptionally cold, large numbers of the Arabs and other Easterners died of exposure, and the Arab commanders sent urgent requests to Damascus for fresh reinforcements.29

  In the following spring the blockade tightened. More ships arrived from Alexandria and the ports of Africa. Meanwhile many of the ships damaged the previous autumn were salvaged and repaired. One night, under cover of darkness, a Muslim fleet slipped past the watching Byzantines and landed thousands of soldiers on the eastern flank of the city. But now the besiegers were themselves attacked on both sides. The Byzantines paid the Bulgar tribes in the Balkans to attack the Arabs and a horde of tribesmen suddenly massed around the Muslim camp. In a ferocious battle, the Bulgars overwhelmed the Arabs. Twenty thousand Muslims were left dead or wounded in sight of the great walls of Constantinople. Many more died from disease. On August 15, 718, Maslama reluctantly struck camp and marched back toward the Hellespont.

  THE TWO ARAB SIEGES OF 668–75 AND 717–18, AND THE SIMULTANEOUS loss to Muslim arms of the remaining Byzantine territories in North Africa, established the “Saracens,” “Agarenes,” or “Ishmaelites” as the most determined and diabolical enemy the Byzantines had ever faced. Byzantine scholars began to talk of the “arrogant soul of the enemy, the sons of Ishmael,” a “race born of a slave.” The failure of the sieges, they suggested, stemmed from God’s determination to save his people from “the insatiable and utterly perverse Arabs.”30 However, there was a long delay in mounting a full assault by Byzantine scholars on the Muslims because the second attack on the city was almost immediately followed by a civil war within Orthodox Christianity. Those who revered the holy images—icons—and those who thought them blasphemous (iconoclasts) persecuted and murdered each other for more than a century after the defender of Constantinople, Leo III, proscribed images in 726.31 For most of that period the image breakers were in power, and the iconoclast cause was strongly supported by the army. The effective end of the attack on images and the renewal of sustained conflict with the Muslims came more or less simultaneously. In March 843, under the leadership of Empress Theodora, who was regent for her two-year-old son, all the decrees against images were withdrawn, and long-dead iconoclasts were posthumously excommunicated.

  It is not surprising that the very similar views of Islam and of the now defeated iconoclasts toward the depiction of God in human form were seen to be connected. “Iconoclasm,” as Nicolas Zernov put it, was “the last Oriental protest within Christianity against Hellenism, which was interwoven with the tradition of the Byzantine Church. It was part of that movement towards Monotheism and simplified theology, the most powerful expression of which was Islam itself.” He also pointed out that the army supported its leaders in their campaign against images, and that most of the soldiers were recruited “amongst Armenians, Mardaites, Isaurians and other Asiatic peoples.”32 Muslims were simultaneously the external and the internal enemy, with their doctrines and ideology challenging what had become the key tenet of Orthodox belief. For some Orthodox scholars Muslims were simply heretics, to be classed with the Jacobites, Nestorians, Copts, and other dissenters. For others, they were the prophesied apocalyptic beast, the flail of God and a hellish instrument of divine vengeance on a failing Christendom. Sometimes they would be equated with the old enemies of Byzantium, and were called “Persians” and their ruler named “Chosroes.” At other times they would be called “Ishmaelites,” to mark their descent from the illegitimate son of Abraham, or “Agarenes,” descended from his mother, Hagar, the concubine of the patriarch. There is no clear answer why they should more generally have been called “Saracens,” that is descendants of Sarah, wife of Abraham, but the word was used to describe the inhabitants of desert Arabia, and then by extension the Muslims.33 One theory propagated by St. Isidore of Seville was that these were Syringae—Syrians—and Saraceni was a simple misreading. Another was that the word first related to one Arab Bedouin tribe, the Bani Sara, and later was applied to all Arabs.

  Whatever the etymology, some common factors quickly attached themselves to the Saraceni after the invasions of 634 in the Levant. The first Christian sources stress the apocalyptic quality of the invasion, that this was the symbolic vengeance of God on his sinful people at a time when Christ’s second coming was still confidently anticipat
ed. The Armenian bishop Sebeos, in his History of Heraclius, the only contemporary account of the conquest from a Christian source, said that he feared to tell the full horror of the invasion by the Ishmaelites. He called it a hot poisonous wind (simoom) “burning and lethal, which blew upon us, setting alight the tall and beautiful trees of the garden, the young and burgeoning (leafy) plants of the garden.”34 He also cited the other horrors committed, and suggested that this could be nothing other than the fourth beast of the Apocalypse, “like a flying eagle,” which, unlike the other beasts, never rested day or night, “saying ‘Holy, holy, holy Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come.’ ”35

  Sebeos elaborated his description of the beast. It was

  terrible, wondrous, with teeth of iron, talons of copper, which devoured and crushed and trampled … It came from great and limitless desert where once Moses and the Children of Israel lived, according to the word of the prophet, that is to say from a vast and terrible desert, whence the tempest of the nations arose and filled the earth, conquered the earth and trampled it down. And thus it was accomplished: the fourth beast will be the fourth kingdom on the earth, that will be most disastrous of all kingdoms, that will transform the entire earth into a desert.36

  However, the beast was doing the work of God although it was itself an instrument of evil. In the vision of St. John the Divine, the fourth beast was Death: “I looked and beheld a pale horse, and his name that sat upon him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto him over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death.” What followed from the coming of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, on horses white, red, black, and the last pale as Death, was the fulfillment of God’s prophecy: “For the great day of his wrath is come, and who shall be able to stand it?”37 The inevitable killings and destruction that accompanied the conquest were attested by many sources. In the written record they fulfilled a prophetic vision of Christianity. This instrument of devastation was the bastard line of Abraham: protected by God and yet at an infinite distance from the love of Christ. The metaphoric vocabulary of violence and horror created from those initial contacts carried through into many accounts. Yet as with so much prophetic utterance, the terms were unstable. Sebeos was interpreting events in terms of what needed to take place so as to fulfill the word and will of God. The Muslims were a necessary evil.38