Constantinople was besieged by the Persians and Avars on either side of the Bosphorus, but the shah was jealous of the Royal Boar. The overweening arrogance and creative cruelties of the Master of the Whole Earth were already alienating his own noblemen. The shah sent a letter to the Royal Boar’s deputy ordering him to kill the general and take command. Heraclius intercepted it. Inviting the Boar to a meeting, he showed him the letter; they made a secret alliance. Constantinople was saved.
The Royal Boar withdrew to Alexandria to rule Syria, Palestine and Egypt. Heraclius sailed his army to the Caucasus via the Black Sea, and with his Khazar horsemen invaded Persia. He outmanoeuvred the Persian forces, challenged and killed three Persian champions in duels, then defeated their main army, stopping just outside the shah’s capital. Khusrau’s deluded intransigence destroyed him. He was arrested and placed in the dungeon, the House of Darkness, where his favourite son was butchered in front of him before he was himself tortured to death. The Persians agreed to restore the status quo ante bellum. The Royal Boar agreed to marry Heraclius’ niece and revealed the hiding-place of the True Cross. After tortuous intrigues, the Royal Boar seized the Persian throne—but was soon assassinated.
In 629, Heraclius set out from Constantinople with his wife (also his niece) to return the True Cross to Jerusalem. He pardoned the Jews of Tiberias, where he stayed in the mansion of a rich Jew, Benjamin, who accompanied him to Jerusalem, converting to Christianity on the way. The Jews were promised that there would be no vengeance and that they could reside in Jerusalem.
On 21 March 630, Heraclius, now fifty-five, exhausted and grey, rode up to the Golden Gate, which he had built for this special occasion. This exquisite gate became, for all three Abrahamic religions, Jerusalem’s most potently mystical gateway for the arrival of the Messiah on the Day of Judgement.f There the emperor dismounted to carry the True Cross into Jerusalem. It was said that when Heraclius tried to enter in his Byzantine robes the gate became a solid wall, but when he humbled himself it opened for his imperial procession. Carpets and aromatic herbs were spread as Heraclius delivered the True Cross to the Holy Sepulchre, now cleaned up by the patriarch Modestos. The catastrophe that had befallen the empire and the emperor’s return played into a new variant of the ever-malleable vision of the Apocalypse in which a messianic Last Emperor would smash the enemies of Christianity and then hand power to Jesus who would rule until Judgement Day.
The Christians demanded vengeance on the Jews, but Heraclius refused until the monks took the sin of his broken oath to the Jews upon themselves as a fast of atonement. Heraclius then expelled any remaining Jews; many were massacred; he later ordered the forcible conversion of all Jews.
Far away to the south, the Arabians had noticed not so much Heraclius’ victory as his weakness. “The Romans have been defeated,” declared Muhammad, the leader who had just united the Arabian tribes, in what became the sacred text of his new revelation, the Koran. While Heraclius was in Jerusalem, Muhammad despatched a raid up the King’s Highway to probe Byzantine defences. The Arabs encountered a Byzantine detachment—but they would soon return.
Heraclius would not have been too alarmed: the divided Arab tribes had been raiding Palaestina for centuries. The Byzantines and Persians had both hired Arab tribes as buffer states between the empires, and Heraclius had fielded large squadrons of Arab cavalry in his armies.
The next year, Muhammad sent another small detachment to attack Byzantine territory. But he was now old and his spectacular life was near its end. Heraclius left Jerusalem and headed back to Constantinople.
There seemed little to fear.8
a One of Justinian’s earliest decisions in his uncle’s reign was to destroy the Arabian Jewish kingdom of Yemen. In the early fifth century, the Kings of Yemen (Himyara) had converted to Judaism. In 523, in response to Byzantine threats, the Jewish king Joseph—Dhu Nuwas Zurah Yusuf—massacred Christians in Yemen and forced neighbouring principalities to convert to Judaism. Justinian ordered the Christian king Kaleb of Axum (Ethiopia) to invade Yemen. King Joseph was defeated in 525 and committed suicide by riding into the sea on horseback. Yet many Jews remained in Yemen and Judaism did not disappear in Arabia: many of its tribes remained Jewish in Muhammad’s day; Yemenite Jews would start to settle in Jerusalem in the nineteenth century and emigrate to Israel after 1948. Only one village of Jews remains in Yemen in 2010.
b For years this immense complex was lost, but its foundations, stretching from the Jewish Quarter under the present walls to outside the Old City, were discovered in excavations by the archaeologist Nahman Avigad in 1973. Justinian built on a series of vaults constructed along the slope to support its weight. This inscription was found among them: “And this is the work carried out by the generosity of our most gracious Emperor Flavius Justinianus.”
c In 1884, a colourful mosaic was found on the floor of a Byzantine church in Madaba (in Jordan), inscribed “The Holy City of Jerusalem,” the first Jerusalem map to show the Byzantine view of the city with its six main gates, churches and the Temple Mount scarcely worth showing at all. Yet the Temple Mount was not completely empty. It has never been excavated by archaeologists, but in the 1940s British engineers, restoring the Islamic holy sites, made shallow probes and found Byzantine traces. Optimists hoped these might be the foundations of Emperor Julian’s (unbuilt) Jewish Temple. But these may be traces of the only Byzantine shrine on this site—the small Church of the Pinnacle marking Jesus’ temptation by the devil.
d Christian accounts make the exaggerated claim that 10,000 to 90,000 Christians were murdered by the Jews and buried by Thomas the Gravedigger. Christian legend claims the victims were buried in the Mamilla cemetery of the Lions’ Cave, so named because survivors hid in the cave until they were saved by a lion. The Jews claim that it was Jewish victims of a Christian massacre who were saved by the lion.
e Some traces of a building at the Temple Mount’s south-west corner seem to show a menorah painted over a cross, possibly a Christian shrine inherited for a short time by Jews. But this may date from the early Islamic period.
f The Golden Gate, actually two gates, is directly and precisely aligned with the Tomb itself in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the place to which Heraclius took the Cross. The place had further symbolism, as we have seen, because the Byzantines mistakenly believed it also marked the Beautiful Gate where Jesus entered on Palm Sunday and where his apostles performed a miracle after his death. Nonetheless some scholars believe the gate was actually built by the Ummayad caliphs. The gate soon assumed mystical significance for the Jews who called it the Gate of Mercy.
PART FOUR
Islam
Glory to Him who made His servant travel by night from the sacred place of worship to the furthest place of worship.
—THE KORAN, 17.1
The Apostle of Allah, accompanied by Gabriel, was transported to Jerusalem where he found Abraham and Moses and the other Prophets.
—IBN ISHAQ, Sirat Rasul Allah
A ruler was not considered a caliph unless he reigned over both the Holy Mosque [Mecca] and the Jerusalem Mosque.
—SIBANI, Fadail
One day in Jerusalem is like a thousand days, one month like a thousand months, and one year like a thousand years. Dying there is like dying in the first sphere of heaven.
—KAAB AL-AHBAR, Fadail
A sin committed [in Jerusalem] is equal to a thousand sins and a good deed there to a thousand good deeds.
—KHALID BIN MADAN AL-KALAI, Fadail
Allah, may he be praised, said of Jerusalem. You are my Garden of Eden, my hallowed and chosen land.
—KAAB AL-AHBAR, Fadail
O Jerusalem, I shall send you my servant Abd al-Malik to rebuild and adorn you.
—KAAB AL-AHBAR, Fadail
CHAPTER 17
The Arab Conquest
630–660
MUHAMMAD: THE NIGHT JOURNEY
Muhammad’s father died before he was born and his mother died w
hen he was just six. But he was adopted by his uncle, who took him on trading trips to Bosra in Syria. There he was taught about Christianity by a monk, studied the Jewish and Christian scriptures, coming to venerate Jerusalem as one of the noblest of sanctuaries. In his twenties, a wealthy widow named Khadija, much older than he, employed him to manage her caravan trading and then married him. They lived in Mecca, the home of the Kaaba and its black stone, the sanctuary of a pagan god. The city thrived on the pilgrims attracted by this cult and by caravan trading. Muhammad was a member of the Quraysh tribe, who provided its leading merchants and custodians of the Sanctuary, but his Hashemite clan was not one of the more powerful.
Muhammad, described as handsome with curly hair and beard, possessed both an all-conquering geniality—it was said that when he shook someone’s hand he never liked to be the one to let go first—and a charismatic spirituality. He was admired for his integrity and intelligence—as his warriors later put it, “He was the best among us”—and he was known as al-Amin, the Reliable.
As with Moses, David or Jesus, it is impossible now for us to divine the personal essence of his success, but like them, he came at the time he was needed. In the Jahiliya, the Time of Ignorance before his revelation, “there was nobody more destitute than we were,” wrote one of his soldiers later. “Our religion was to kill one another and raid. There were those among us who would bury their daughters alive not wanting them to eat our food. Then God sent us a well-known man.”
Outside Mecca was the Cave of Hira where Muhammad liked to meditate. In 610, according to tradition, the Archangel Gabriel visited him there with his first revelation from the one God who had chosen him to be his Messenger and Prophet. When the Prophet received God’s revelations, his face was said to become flushed, he fell silent, his body lying limp on the ground, sweat poured down his face; he was engulfed by humming sounds and visions—and then he would recite his poetical, divine revelations. Initially he was terrified by this, but Khadija believed in his vocation and he started to preach.
In this rough military society where every boy and man bore arms, the literary tradition was not written but consisted of a rich spoken poetry that celebrated the deeds of honourable warriors, passionate lovers, fearless hunters. The Prophet was to harness this poetical tradition: his 114 sura—chapters—were initially recited before they were collated into the Koran, “The Recitation,” a compendium of exquisite poetry, sacred obscurity, clear instruction and bewildering contradiction.
Muhammad was an inspirational visionary who preached submission—Islam—to the one God in return for universal salvation, the values of equality and justice, and the virtues of pure living, with easily learned rituals and rules for life and death. He welcomed converts. He revered the Bible, and regarded David and Solomon, Moses and Jesus as prophets, but his revelation superseded the earlier ones. Importantly for the fate of Jerusalem, the Prophet stressed the coming of the Apocalypse that he called the Judgement, the Last Day or just the Hour, and this urgency inspired the dynamism of early Islam. “The knowledge of it is only with God,” says the Koran, “but what will make you realize the Hour is near?” All the Judaeo-Christian scriptures stressed that this could take place only in Jerusalem.
One night, his followers believed that, as he slept beside the Kaaba, Muhammad had a vision. The Archangel Gabriel awoke him and together they embarked on a Night Journey mounted on Buraq, a winged steed with a human face, to the unnamed “Furthest Sanctuary.” There Muhammad met his “fathers” (Adam and Abraham) and his “brothers” (Moses, Joseph and Jesus), before ascending by a ladder to heaven. Unlike Jesus, he just called himself the Messenger or Apostle of God, claiming no magical powers. Indeed the Isra—Night Journey—and the Miraj—Ascension—were his only miraculous exploits. Jerusalem and the Temple are never actually mentioned but Muslims came to believe that the Furthest Sanctuary was the Temple Mount.
When his wife and uncle died, Muhammad was exposed to the disapproval of the richer families of Mecca, who depended on the Kaaba stone for their livelihoods. The Meccans tried to kill him. But he was contacted by a group from Yathrib, a date-palm oasis to the north founded by Jewish tribes but also the home of pagan artisans and farmers. They asked him to make peace between its feuding clans. He and his inner circle of believers departed on the Migration—Hijra—to Yathrib, which became Madinat un-Nabi, the city of the Prophet—Medina. There he fused his first devotees, the Emigrants, and new followers, the Helpers, and their Jewish allies, into a new community, the umma. It was 622, the beginning of the Islamic calendar.
Muhammad was a skilled conciliator of men and co-opter of ideas. Now in Medina, with its Jewish clans, he created the first mosque,a adopting the Jerusalem Temple as the first qibla, the direction of prayer. He prayed at Friday sundown—the Jewish Sabbath—fasted on the Day of Atonement, banned pork and practised circumcision. The oneness of Muhammad’s God rejected the Christian Trinity but other rituals—the prostration on prayer mats—owed much to Christian monasteries; his minarets were perhaps inspired by the pillars of the stylites; the festival of Ramadan resembled Lent. Yet Islam was very much his own.
Muhammad created a small state with its own laws, but he faced resistance from Medina and his old home Mecca. His new state needed to defend itself and to conquer: jihad—struggle—was both internal mastery of self and holy war of conquest. The Koran promoted not only the destruction of infidels but also tolerance if they submitted. This was relevant because the Jewish tribes resisted Muhammad’s revelations and his control. Hence he changed the qibla to Mecca and rejected the Jewish way: God had destroyed the Jewish Temple because the Jews had sinned so “they will not follow your qibla, Jerusalem.”
When he fought the Meccans, he could not afford disloyalty in Medina so he expelled the Jews and made an example of one Jewish clan: its 700 men were beheaded, its women and children enslaved. In 630, Muhammad finally took Mecca, spreading his monotheism across Arabia by conversion and force. Muhammad’s followers became ever more militant as they strove to live righteously to prepare for the Last Judgement. Now, having conquered Arabia, they encountered the sinful empires beyond. The Prophet’s early followers, the Emigrants and Helpers, formed his entourage—but he also welcomed former enemies and talented opportunists with equal enthusiasm. Meanwhile Muslim tradition recounts his personal life: he had many wives—Aisha, daughter of his ally Abu Bakr was his favourite—and took numerous concubines, including beautiful Jewesses and Christians; and he had children, most importantly a daughter named Fatima.1
In 632 Muhammad, aged about sixty-two, died and was succeeded by his father-in-law, Abu Bakr, who was acclaimed Amir al-Muminin, Commander of the Believers.b Muhammad’s realm tottered after his death, but Abu Bakr managed to pacify Arabia. Then he turned to the Byzantine and Persian empires, which the Muslims regarded as evanescent, sinful and corrupt. The Commander despatched contingents of warriors on camels to raid Iraq and Palestine.
KHALID IBN WALID: SWORD OF ISLAM
Somewhere near Gaza, “there was a battle between the Romans and the nomads of Muhammad,” writes Thomas the Presbyter, a Christian who in 640 was the first independent historian to mention the Prophet.c “The Romans fled.” The Emperor Heraclius, still in Syria, prepared to smash these Arab armies who in turn asked Abu Bakr for reinforcements. He called for his best general, Khalid bin Walid, who was raiding Iraq. Riding six days across the waterless desert, Khalid arrived in Palestine just in time.
Khalid was one of the Meccan aristocrats who had fought against Muhammad but when he finally converted, the Prophet welcomed this dynamic commander and called him the Sword of Islam. Khalid was one of those swaggering generals who pay little attention to the orders of their political masters. The sequence of events is unclear but he joined up with the other Arab warlords, assumed command and then defeated a Byzantine detachment south-west of Jerusalem before storming Damascus. Far to the south in Mecca, Abu Bakr died and was succeeded by Omar, one of the Prophet’s first
converts and closest confidants. The new Commander of the Believers distrusted Khalid, who was amassing a fortune, and a legend, and recalled him to Mecca: “Khalid,” he said, “take your property out of our arse.”
Heraclius despatched an army to stop the Arabs. Omar appointed a new commander, Abu Ubayda, and Khalid rejoined the armies as his subordinate. After months of skirmishing, the Arabs finally lured the Byzantines to battle amidst the impenetrable gorges of the Yarmuk river between today’s Jordan, Syria and Israeli Golan. “This is one of God’s battles,” Khalid told his men—and on 20 August 636, God delivered a duststorm that blinded the Christians who panicked and bolted helter-skelter over the cliffs of the Yarmuk. Khalid cut off their retreat and by the end of the battle, the Christians were so exhausted that the Arabs found them lying down in their cloaks, ripe for the slaughter. Even the emperor’s brother was killed and Heraclius himself never recovered from this defeat, one of the decisive battles of history, that lost Syria and Palestine. Byzantine rule, weakened by the Persian war, seems to have collapsed like a house of cards and it is unclear whether the Arab conquest was more a triumphant series of raids. However intense the conquest really was, it was an astonishing achievement that these tiny contingents of Arabian cameleers, some of them as small as 1,000 men, had smashed the legions of Eastern Rome. But the Commander of the Believers did not rest; he sent another army northwards to conquer Persia which also fell to the Arabs.2
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