by Tom Holland
For Córdoba, after all, was not the only capital of a caliphate – to the east, in Cairo, there ruled a family that had never ceased to imagine itself the gatekeeper of the end days. The Fatimids – the descendants of Fatima – had always sought to draw deep from the wellsprings of the mysterious. The founder of the dynasty, back in 909, had actually believed that he was the Mahdi himself, and although time – and his death – had proved him mistaken, his successors had shrugged aside any resultant sense of let-down. Instead, with a vaunting and unabashed conceit, they had continued to insist that they were supremely touched by the supernatural. The Caliph who swayed Egypt at the dawning of the fifth Muslim century was no exception. Indeed, to an unprecedented degree, al-Hakim bin-Amr Allah claimed directly to be an incarnation of God. His subjects, far from laughing this pretension to scorn, were almost universally awestruck by it. Tall, broad-shouldered and with a stare that was reported to glitter like fiery gold, al-Hakim had only to look at his subjects as he toured the streets of Cairo to send them grovelling in the dust. When he shouted, it was claimed, men had been known to drop dead of terror on the spot. Sober in his tastes, puritanical in his instincts and unstintingly imperious in all his moods, al-Hakim was not a man readily crossed. When he claimed to have penetrated the veiled secrets of God, there were few who openly disputed it; and when he sought to shoulder the responsibilities of the Mahdi, there were even fewer who cared to obstruct him.
So it was that while the Caliphate of the Umayyads, far distant in the West, collapsed into terminal anarchy, the reign of al-Hakim was marked by titanic efforts to reorder the world and prepare it for the end days. True, some of the Caliph’s strategies, even to the most committed of his followers, could not help but appear a trifle eccentric. The selling of watercress, for instance, was solemnly banned; so too the playing of chess. Other policies, however, were more readily explicable. What objection, for instance, could a pious Muslim raise against al-Hakim’s command that all the dogs in Cairo be put to the sword and their corpses dumped out in the desert, when everyone knew the creatures to be unclean? Or indeed against his campaign to check the potentially even filthier appetites of women? A conviction that these merited regular chastisement had often been a caliphal trait: of Abd al-Rahman, for instance, it was said that he had never visited his harem without a sword and an executioner’s leather mat. Even when set against such precedents, however, al-Hakim’s terrors of where female promiscuity might lead the faithful were extreme. So too his plans to counter them. First he ordered women everywhere to be veiled when out in public; then he banned them from leaving their homes; finally he forbade them even so much as to peer out of windows or doors. Cobblers were instructed to stop making them shoes. Those whose voices disturbed the Caliph as he walked through the streets might expect to be walled up and left to starve.
These were robust measures, certainly – and yet justified, al-Hakim would no doubt have insisted, by the troubled character of the times. If it were true, as the Caliph himself appears devoutly to have believed, that a mighty convulsion in the affairs of the world was looming, then clearly there could be no excuse for delaying the purification of the House of Islam. Dogs and women, however, were the least of the Caliph’s problems. Other menaces festered infinitely more worrisome. Egypt, even in comparison with al-Andalus, still teemed with Christians and Jews. The Fatimids, not content with extorting taxes from them, as the Prophet had prescribed, had also, over the years, profited handsomely from the tribute of their expertise. Dhimmis, as a result, had come to throng the caliphal ministries – and the caliphal bedrooms. Even al-Hakim’s own mother was a Christian. What could this appear, to the pious Muslims of Egypt, but a scandal and a blasphemy? Indeed, only a year before al-Hakim’s accession, in 995, a bloody marker of their resentments had been served to the future Caliph when a mob had gone on the rampage and massacred over a hundred Christians in a single pogrom. A marker that al-Hakim, as time would prove, had noted well.
He may have been a son of a Christian, but even as a young boy of eleven, inheriting the throne while out on campaign against the infidels of Constantinople, he had believed himself implacably fated to prove the doom of his mother’s faith. As his reign progressed, dhimmis who had once basked in the radiance of caliphal favour found themselves increasingly subjected to humiliations and harassments. Christians and Jews alike were forbidden to appear in public unless wearing distinctive turbans of black. As a further refinement, Christians were obliged to hang crosses around their necks, and Jews heavy blocks of wood. They were also banned from employing Muslims – a measure which immediately served to plunge most dhimmi businesses into bankruptcy. There were some, however, who lost more than their income. In 1009, the dawning of the fifth Islamic century, numerous non-Muslim officials in the imperial bureaucracy were scourged to death and their corpses fed to Cairo’s few remaining dogs. Others, under threat of torture, were obliged to convert to Islam. Yet even these outrages, in the view of the Caliph’s horrified Christians, were not the most shocking of their master’s crimes. Worse then murder or oppression, after all, was sacrilege – and al-Hakim just happened to have within his power the very holiest of their shrines.
Jerusalem, where Jesus had died and been buried, remained, under the Fatimids, a predominantly dhimmi town. True, back in the first century of the Islamic Empire, when the Umayyads had ruled as the masters of a unified Caliphate, a mosque and a mighty dome had both been built on the site of the obliterated Jewish Temple: imperious symbols of Muslim dominance. Nevertheless, as a native of the city who frequented them grumbled, “Everywhere the Jews and Christians have the upper hand, and the mosques are void of either congregation or assembly of learned men.”19 One unhappy consequence of this, so Muslims liked to believe, was the appalling standard of hygiene in the public baths: “Nowhere will you find any filthier.”20 Another, even more distressing, was the sheer ostentation in Jerusalem of dhimmi rituals. The Jews, for instance, deprived of their ancient sanctuary on the Temple Mount, had relocated their place of public prayer to the Mount of Olives, directly across the valley from the city’s most famous mosque; but even the Jews were less offensively in Muslim faces than were the Christians. Almost seven centuries had passed since the Emperor Constantine, arriving in Jerusalem, had ordered the building of a great basilica over the site of Christ’s tomb; and still it stood there, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, a place of such awesome and refulgent sacredness that there was nowhere in all Christendom, not even in Rome, that could possibly rival it. To Christians “from across the entire face of the world,”21 in the West as well as the East, it was, quite simply, beyond compare: “the heart of the earth.”22
But to al-Hakim, it was a standing provocation. Plans for its destruction were first drawn up at the end of 100723 – one year after a star of exceptional brightness, blazing suddenly in the constellation of Scorpio, had served to reassure the Caliph that he was indeed touched by the divine. Nevertheless, even with his workmen primed, al-Hakim had no intention of hurrying. Naturally, as befitted a would-be guardian of the end days, he knew that timing was everything. Not until 1009 itself – the Muslim year 400 – were the demolition teams finally set to work. “The Church of the Dungheap,” *as Muslims derisively termed Constantine’s great basilica, was first stripped of all its treasures and furnishings, and then, right the way down to the bedrock, dismantled brick by brick. The very tomb of Christ was hacked about and “assaulted by a prodigious fire.”24 All the church’s magnificence was methodically demolished and left as dust.
In mosques everywhere, it is said, lengthy prayers of joy were raised, and the praises of the Caliph were of an unparalleled extravagance.25
Meanwhile, as reports of what had been done spread beyond the frontiers of the Caliphate, and into the heartlands of Christendom, so the rumours that swept the appalled Christians of the West grew ever more confused and terrifying. Some claimed, rather farfetchedly, that the entire outrage had been plotted by the Jews of Orléans, w
ho had sent letters to al-Hakim, encouraging him in his act of desecration. Others named the Caliph the King of Babylon, who in ancient times had destroyed King Solomon’s Temple. Others noted how the heavens had broadcast their revulsion at the sacrilege, frowning upon the world, and inflicting upon mankind “severe dry spells, very much rain, many plagues, severe famines and numerous failures of the sun and moon”26 – and drew their own conclusions.
And as they looked to the skies they hugged their souls and wondered what, in an age marked by such prodigies, sinful humanity should do.
Jesus Wept
By 1010, reports of the destruction of the Holy Sepulchre had reached as far as Aquitaine. As southern France was racked by widespread violence and upheaval, the shock wave broke across the duchy with an especial force. In one town in particular, the news served to induce an almost personal sense of horror: for Limoges, an ancient and flourishing settlement in the heart of France, was the proud possessor of a holy sepulchre all of its own. St. Martial, while hardly on a par with apostles such as Peter and James, was nevertheless much cherished by the locals: for, back in the third Christian century, he had first brought the Gospel to Aquitaine. His tomb, deep in the crypt of a monastery that bore his name, was widely reverenced as the reservoir of an awful power. Back in 994, on the occasion of a trail-blazing peace council, the mere process of transporting the saint’s earthly remains to a nearby hill had been sufficient to prompt an earthquake. As an immense crowd moaned and shuddered at the sight of the relics, a terrible pestilence of “invisible fire” had been lifted from Limoges, and the duke and all his lords had together sworn “a pact of peace and justice.”27 Over the succeeding years, miracles had continued to be performed upon St. Martial’s tomb. Pilgrims had flocked to it in prodigious numbers. As the new millennium dawned, and the weather turned increasingly freakish, afflicting the region with heatwaves, and violent rainstorms, and strange wonders written in the sky, so the inhabitants of Limoges had begun to imagine themselves a chosen people, appointed by God to serve as witnesses to the fracturing of the times. Indeed – in an excitable display of immodesty – the town had dared to conceive of itself almost as a new Jerusalem. And then had come the baleful tidings from the Holy Land.
Nightmarish news, to be sure – and there must have been many in Limoges, during the course of that strange and menacing summer, who suffered sleepless nights as a consequence. We know for certain, however, of only one: a monk by the name of Adémar, a twenty-year-old of good family who had recently journeyed from his own monastery to study at St. Martial. Proud and sensitive, the young scholar appears to have been a natural loner, one who combined a restless intellect with emotional depths so turbulent that he sought, by and large, to conceal their existence. We do not know the extent of his nightmares in 1010; but Adémar did record how one night, unable to sleep and looking out at the sky, he was granted a vision infinitely more disturbing than any dream. Indeed, so shattering was the spectacle of what he found confronting him that night, rising over Limoges and framed against a blaze of brilliant stars, that he would end up keeping it to himself for almost twenty years. High against the southern sky, planted as if in the heavens, he saw a giant crucifix – and nailed to it was Christ Himself. “And the figure of the Lord, hanging on the cross, was weeping forth a great river of tears.” Adémar, struck dumb with fear, could do nothing as he gazed at this harrowing apparition but fall to weeping himself. “In all, he saw this cross and the image of the Crucified One, the colour of fire and deep blood, for half a full night hour, until the sky closed itself. And what he saw he sealed in his heart.”28
As well he might have done. The implications of the Saviour’s tears, shed in rivers over Limoges, could hardly but have appeared overwhelming to the shaken monk. Almost a thousand years had passed since Christ wept over Jerusalem; and now, with His own tomb desecrated, He had appeared in the heavens to weep again. What, then, could this portend, if not the fatal moment of which St. Paul had warned, when Antichrist would emerge upon his throne and lay claim to the rule of the world? Indeed, who was to say that he had not already done so? Was it not by trampling down the Temple in Jerusalem, and putting the faithful to the sword, and proclaiming his own divinity, that Antichrist was destined to announce himself? Had not the Prince of the Saracens fulfilled every last term of the prophecy?
No wonder, then, with strange eclipses shimmering above Limoges, and her streets broiling in murderous heat, and her rivers drying up as though scorched by celestial fire, that a sense of terror began to sweep through the town. It needed no vision of a weeping Christ to panic the citizens – nor to set them looking for scapegoats. The same gusts of rumour that had brought the news from the Holy Land had also served to broadcast to them the shocking charges against the Jews of Orléans. The Christians of Limoges – fearful, it appears, that the reign of Antichrist was come indeed, and that his cohorts might be lurking in their very midst – had begun to fix their suspicions upon the Jews of their own town. The local bishop, sensitive to the mood of rising paranoia, duly summoned a council. Adémar, writing some fifteen years later, described what happened next. For a month, the wretched Jews of Limoges were bullied and hectored in what was laughably termed a “debate.”29 At the end of the proceedings, they were ordered to convert to the Christian faith. Only three or four could bring themselves to do so. The remainder, so Adémar recorded, were then driven from the town.
This, as a breakdown in community relations, was certainly ground-breaking – indeed, a bolt from the blue. Bishops in the West were not in the habit of harassing Jews, still less of deporting them. Better by far to affect a lofty blend of contempt and indifference: such had been the judgement of St. Augustine, an authority not readily brooked. For the Jews, the great doctor of the Church had ruled, despite undoubtedly having the blood of Christ on their hands, had not known, when they dispatched Him to crucifixion, that they were killing the Son of God; an extenuation that Christian kings and bishops had been more than content to accept. As in the lands of the Saracens, so in Christendom: tolerance was firmly rooted in self-interest. Jews would be offered protection, and even special privileges, so that their talents might then all the more readily be exploited. And sure enough, whether as court officials, or as physicians, or as linchpins of the slave trade, they had long provided their sponsors with an excellent return. No wonder, then, over the years, that the Jewish communities of Francia had grown increasingly prosperous – and increasingly well integrated too.30 Not only did they live cheek by jowl with their gentile neighbours, but they tended to wear the same clothes, speak the same language and even give their children the same names. There was nothing, in short, in centuries of peaceful co-existence with the Franks, that could have prepared them for the sudden ethnic cleansing of Limoges.
And it is possible – indeed probable – that the persecutions of 1010 were even more brutal than Adémar could bring himself readily to acknowledge.31 Later in his career, when he came to emend his account of the treatment of the Jews of Limoges, he let slip a telling indiscretion. “And some,” he wrote, “preferred slitting their own throats to avoid baptism.”32 This, it appears, had been the true climax of the “debate” staged in the town by the bishop. Nor, necessarily, had the atrocities been confined to Limoges. Rudolf Glaber, recording the paroxysms of that feverish year in the more heated terms that came naturally to him, described the whole of Christendom as gripped by a blood lust. “For once it had become quite clear that it was the wickedness of the Jews which had brought about the Temple’s destruction,” he explained, “they became the objects of universal hatred: they were driven from the cities, some were put to the sword, others were drowned in rivers, and many found other deaths; some even took their own lives in diverse ways.” A grotesque exaggeration, it might be thought – and not least because Glaber concluded with a palpable falsehood, a smug assertion that “after this very proper vengeance had been taken, very few Jews were to be found left in the Roman world.”
> In truth, whatever the precise details of the persecution that was launched against the Jews in 1010, it could hardly have been on the scale of the pogroms that were simultaneously tearing al-Andalus apart – for “the fury of the Christian people,” as even Glaber admitted, in a tone of some disappointment, “did not take long to cool.”33 The sudden eruption of Jew-killing, as unprecedented as it had been savage, subsided quickly. As well it might have done – for it carried a penalty, according to a papal mandate that had been issued only two years previously, of excommunication. With the mobs laying down their weapons, so the dust began to settle. Communities everywhere set to picking up the pieces. Across France, the Christian authorities resumed gracing the Jews with their customary disdainful tolerance. On both sides, it appears, there was a determination to regard the violence as an aberration – or indeed as something that had never happened in the first place.
This attitude was dictated for the persecuted by simple common sense – and for the persecutors by something like embarrassment. All well and good, no doubt, to turn on the enemies of Christ during the reign of Antichrist, that time of terrible and cosmic danger when, as Adso had pointed out, “the Jews will flock to him, in the belief that they are receiving God – but rather they will be receiving the Evil One.” As it proved, however, the desecration of the Holy Sepulchre had not served to usher in the end days – just as al-Hakim had not turned out to be Antichrist. Indeed, far from persisting in his persecution of the Christians, strange rumours began to spread in the West that he had become a Christian himself. By 1021 he was dead, lost in the Egyptian desert, and in such mysterious circumstances that there were some, both Muslim and Christian, who claimed he had been taken up to heaven by an angel. *Meanwhile, in Jerusalem, work had soon begun on rebuilding the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, so that within two decades of its destruction services were once again being celebrated before its altar, and pilgrims, entering the shrine, could gawp at all its beauties, at “its coloured marbles, its ornamentation and sculptures, its Byzantine brocade with pictures spun in gold.”34 No wonder, then, back in the lands of the West, that the hysteria that had followed its original destruction was a source of some mortification, and one that most people preferred to forget.
