The Tragedy of the Templars

by Michael Haag

  The third Fatimid caliph to take the throne in Cairo, and the first to be born in Egypt, bore the sonorous name of al-Hakim bi Amr al-Lah, meaning ‘ruler by Allah’s command’. The year was 996, and al-Hakim was only eleven years old. The youthful al-Hakim looked set to continue the Fatimid policy of fostering good relations with dhimmis; his stepmother was a Greek Orthodox Christian, as were her two brothers, one of whom was patriarch of Alexandria, the other patriarch of Jerusalem. Also he seemed to have an open and curious mind. He showed a keen interest in mathematics and the sciences, and endowed Cairo with an astronomical observatory and a great scientific library which attracted such figures as the polymath Ibn al-Haytham, famous for his contributions to optics, ophthalmology, astronomy and physics, and his commentaries on Aristotle, Euclid and Ptolemy. But al-Hakim’s true fascination seems to have been with astrology and mysticism, and he would spend hours walking in the Moqattam Hills overlooking Cairo, where he looked for portents in the stars.

  The dark side of al-Hakim was revealed when he began persecuting Christians and Jews in 1003. It began with the claim that the church of St Mark in Fustat had been built without permission; al-Hakim ordered it to be pulled down and a mosque built in its place and even extended so that the mosque covered Jewish and Christian cemeteries in the area. A continuous series of oppressions followed. A few years later he was throwing scientists into prison, al-Haytham feigning madness to escape what he feared would be his execution. In 1016 al-Hakim had himself publicly proclaimed God at Friday prayers in Cairo, a claim he was obliged by the resultant uproar from his Sunni subjects to retract. Some have said he was insane, others that he was merely eccentric, but his own grandfather the caliph al-Muizz had also declared himself God, though more discreetly. As Ismaili imams, the Fatimid caliphs were absolute and infallible monarchs ruling by hereditary right as determined by divine will. Moreover the imams possessed the key to cosmic salvation, and al-Hakim would have been seen, and would have seen himself, as the redeeming mahdi, who appears on earth before the Day of Judgement and rids the world of evil.

  Among al-Hakim’s redeeming acts, as he would have seen them, was to order that Christians must wear round their necks a wooden cross a foot and a half long and weighing five pounds,6 while Jews had to wear an equally weighty frame of wood with jingling bells. Later he demanded that Christians and Jews convert to Islam, which many did to save their lives, although some Christians were able to escape into Byzantine territory. Conversion meant little under these circumstances, however, as many resorted to what has been called the ‘single-generation conversion ruse’,7 by which a man would shield himself and his family from persecution and discrimination by converting to Islam while ensuring that his wife and children remained Christian or Jewish. By repeating this ruse from generation to generation the appearance was given of a family having converted to Islam when in fact it remained steadfastly rooted in its true faith. Also there were those who after the death of al-Hakim quietly resumed their old religion. In the event there were no mass conversions to Islam among Christians or among Jews.8 Al-Hakim’s further ordinances demanded the confiscation of Christian property, the burning of crosses and the building of small mosques on the roofs of churches. At first these various measures were applied only to Egypt, but soon they were applied throughout the Fatimid empire, including Palestine.

  Al-Hakim’s most infamous act was in 1009, when he gave the order for the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, ‘to destroy, undermine, and remove all traces of the holy Church of the Resurrection’. The work was thoroughly done by Abu Dhahir, the governor at Ramla, who, recorded the Christian chronicler Yahya Ibn Said, ‘did all he could to uproot the Sepulchre and to remove all trace of it, and to this effect he dug away most of it and broke it up’.9 The church was razed to its foundations, its graves were dug up, church property was taken, furnishings and treasures were seized, and the tomb of Jesus was hacked to pieces with pickaxes and hammers and utterly obliterated. Nothing remained but a few portions of the Rotunda, which, according to Ibn Said, ‘proved too difficult to demolish’ and have been incorporated into the church that stands there today.10 Muslim sources saw the destruction as a reaction to the magnificence of the church and to the fact that it drew pilgrims from all over the world, among them many Christians from Egypt. Christianity and its symbols had to be destroyed and its churches too; over the next few years thirty thousand churches throughout Egypt, Palestine and Syria were pillaged or torn down or converted into mosques.11

  That these were not simply the acts of a madman is evidenced by the fact that the devastations continued into the early years of al-Hakim’s son and successor the caliph al-Zahir.12 In fact, the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was ‘one of the most popular acts of al-Hakim’s administration’ so far as the Muslims of Palestine and Syria were concerned.13 Also it seems to have been part of a deliberate Fatimid policy to enhance the Islamic sanctity of Jerusalem, a city about which Muslims held ambivalent views, some believing that it was tainted by Christian and Jewish associations and that the true focus for Islamic sanctity should be Mecca and Medina. Obliterating the Holy Sepulchre went some way towards erasing that Christian contamination of Jerusalem. In contrast, enhancing the city’s Islamic sanctity was the purpose of al-Zahir’s act when he rebuilt the mosque at the southern end of the Temple Mount and added a mosaic inscription, the first in Jerusalem to begin with Koranic verse 17:1, about the Night Journey, which Muslims have come to interpret as Mohammed travelling to Jerusalem and ascending from there into heaven: ‘Glory be to Him, who carried His servant by night from the Holy Mosque to the Further Mosque the precincts of which We have blessed that We might show him some of Our signs.’14 From this moment the mosque became known as the Furthest, al-Aqsa, contributing to the story that would further Saladin’s jihad.

  Reports by returning pilgrims of Muslim sacrilege against the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the cruel persecution of Christians in the East travelled rapidly through the Byzantine Empire, throughout the Mediterranean, and into Western Europe, causing astonishment and pain. With the reports also came rumours that Jews in western Europe and Muslims in Spain had been sending secret letters to al-Hakim encouraging him to destroy the Holy Sepulchre.15 But there is no evidence for these claims. Yahya Ibn Said, the Christian chronicler based in Antioch, while making no mention in his history of Jewish involvement in al-Hakim’s outrage in 1009, did write that Jews had been among the mob that attacked the Church of the Holy Sepulchre over forty years earlier in 966, saying ‘The Jews have overtaken the Muslims in their acts of destruction and ruination’.16 Certainly there were severe communal tensions between Jews and Christians in Palestine at that time; as Abbasid Baghdad collapsed, the Jews of Iraq moved westwards, many of them into Palestine, where they found themselves at a disadvantage to the well-established Christian community. But if Jews were among the anti-Christian mobs in 966, there are no accounts, apart from those generated in Western Europe, of Jews having been involved in al-Hakim’s destruction of the Holy Sepulchre in 1009. As for Western Europe, Jews prospered there until well into the eleventh century and were generally free from discrimination.17 But al-Hakim’s outrage changed the situation. Most Western Europeans hardly knew the difference between Muslims and Jews,18 so that the acts of one were readily attributed to the other; but whereas Muslims were far away, Jews lived close at hand, scattered throughout Christian Europe, where the first serious anti-Semitic incidents now broke out.

  The destruction of the Holy Sepulchre also gave new impetus to the belief that the West should move to the aid of the East, and new versions of the story of Charlemagne now appeared, among them that the emperor himself had journeyed to Jerusalem after receiving a letter from the patriarch of Jerusalem telling him that the Muslims were desecrating the very tomb of Christ. But still no armies were raised in the West, not for many decades yet, not until Europe was confronted with the very real and terrifying threat of a Muslim
invasion from the East in the form of the Seljuk Turks.

  PART II

  The Turkish Invasion and the First Crusade

  ‘AS THE MOST of you have heard . . .’: so Pope Urban II introduced the subject of the Turkish menace to a vast crowd at Clermont in central France in 1095, for all the talk in Europe was of the Turks. He recounted to his listeners that the Turks were advancing into the heart of Christian lands, killing and mistreating many of the population and destroying their churches; and he added that the emperor of Byzantium had called for help and it was the duty of the West to respond.1 Urban was rousing his audience to a great cause, the liberation of the lands and churches and peoples of the East, what we now call the First Crusade.

  Little had been known about the Turks in the West until 1071, when reports of an extraordinary military victory began to reach Europe. The Turks had defeated the army of the Byzantine Empire at Manzikert, opening the whole of Asia Minor to conquest and threatening Constantinople itself. In that same year the Turks also turned south, taking northern Syria from the Byzantines and Jerusalem from the Fatimids of Egypt.

  The Byzantines had known the Turks for a long time. They had fought Turkish tribesmen when they appeared in the ranks of the Abbasid armies and had even employed them as mercenaries in their own. But these were a new Turkish people, the Seljuks, whom the Byzantines encountered only in the eleventh century, when they announced themselves on the empire’s eastern border with the invasion of Armenia and the destruction of Ani.

  7

  The Turkish Invasion

  ANI, IN THE EXTREME EAST of present-day Turkey, is not a city many people have visited or even know about. Yet this once famous city of ‘a thousand and one churches’ was the capital of a medieval Armenian kingdom and was comparable to Constantinople in the magnificence of its architecture and the size of its population. As though on a promontory, the city stood within the sharp angle of two conjoining river canyons, a two-mile line of walls closing the triangle – an outline rather like that of Constantinople itself. The massive ruins of these walls is all you see today as you approach from Kars across a bleak landscape with a handful of blighted villages of stone-built houses en route. The road goes nowhere now, not since the First World War, when the Turks murdered a million and a half Armenians,1 the first great genocide of modern times, or since the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic, now the Republic of Armenia, was established across the river just ahead. But what has long been a no-man’s-land was once a major route of east–west trade, and Ani grew wealthy on the flow of caravans.

  In 1045 the Armenian kingdom was annexed by the Byzantine Empire, and Ani became a forward position against the new enemy who had erupted from their heartlands in Central Asia. The Seljuks were a clan of the nomadic Orguz Turks who in the early tenth century inhabited the steppes north of Lake Balkhash in present-day Kazakhstan. In about 985 they split off from the Orguz and migrated southwards into a remote region of the Abbasid empire. There on the banks of the Jaxartes river (the present-day Syr Darya), east of the Aral Sea, they converted to Islam. Quick and agile mounted archers, the Seljuks were forged into a devastating strike force under their leader, Tughril. They fought their way westwards across Persia and into Mesopotamia, where Tughril captured Baghdad in 1055, reduced the caliph to his puppet, made himself sultan and replaced the ruling aristocracy with Seljuk Turks. The sultan’s court adopted in some degree the Persian language and the trappings of Persian culture, ‘but the body of the Turkish nation, and more especially the pastoral tribes, still breathed the fierceness of the desert’.2

  Nothing stopped the onward rush of the Seljuks, who under Tughril’s nephew and successor Alp Arslan overran most of Armenia and in 1064, less than a century after leaving their homeland 3,000 miles away, stood before the walls of Ani. The Arab historian Sibt ibn al-Jawzi quoted an eyewitness to what took place when after a twenty-five-day siege Ani finally surrendered to the Turks:

  The army entered the city, massacred its inhabitants, pillaged and burned it, leaving it in ruins and taking prisoner all those who remained alive. The dead bodies were so many that they blocked all the streets; one could not go anywhere without stepping over them. And the number of prisoners was not less than fifty thousand souls. I was determined to enter the city and see the destruction with my own eyes. I tried to find a street in which I would not have to walk over the corpses; but that was impossible.3

  After the Seljuks sacked the city, earthquakes and Mongol raids would do the rest. Passing through the main double gate into Ani today is like entering a storm-wrecked harbour where broken churches have run aground. The circular Chapel of the Redeemer stands amid flowers and rolling grassland like an upright hull, half of it torn away as though by some dreadful whirlwind and spat on the ground. One of the few structurally intact monuments is the cathedral, begun in 988 and completed twelve years later; its architect was Trdat, who also restored the dome of Constantinople’s Haghia Sophia after its partial collapse in 989. As the Seljuks looted Ani, one of them clambered up the conical roof of the great church and tore down its cross; the cathedral was then converted to the Fethiye Cami, the Victory Mosque.

  Alp Arslan is portrayed in Muslim sources as a fervent jihadist. His own chief minister, Nizam al-Mulk, called him ‘earnest and fanatical in his beliefs’.4 But for the time being, his policy towards the Byzantine Empire was defensive; his concern was to secure his north-west frontier while he turned his attentions southwards to Egypt. As the military arm of the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad and the champion of Sunni Islam, Alp Arslan’s great enemy was the Shia regime in Cairo, and his immediate aim was to make war against the Fatimid caliphate. But in 1071, just as he was moving against Fatimid territory in Syria, he received word that 500 miles to the north-east a large army led by the Byzantine emperor Romanus IV Diogenes was advancing deep into Asia Minor with the intention of reconquering Armenia.

  About 100 miles south of Ani and just north of Lake Van, the Byzantine army entered a broad steppe-like plain broken by volcanic outcrops and bounded to the right by the great shoulder of the Suphan Dagi massif, even in summer gleaming with snow, and to the left by the dun bare line of lesser mountains. Nowadays a monument like a huge pair of goalposts rises into the vast sky at the western end of the plain, where it falls off into a cultivated river valley green with orchards. A village stands close by, built round an ancient Armenian fortress tower, black and squat. This is Malazgirt – once Manzikert – where the monument erected by the Turkish government in 1990 commemorates what the Byzantines called that ‘dreadful day’ when Asia Minor, Christian and culturally Greek, began the long and violent process of being remade from the East. Here at Manzikert, on 26 August 1071, a Friday, Romanus was surprised by Alp Arslan’s fast-moving forces, his army was destroyed, and the emperor himself was taken prisoner – and then at once set free against promise of a tribute. On his return to Constantinople, Romanus was overthrown, blinded and exiled; he died a year later, the same year that Alp Arslan was himself killed by a Turkish rebel.

  The catastrophe was greater than the defeat of the imperial army. Asia Minor was left doubly defenceless because the old theme system established by Heraclius had broken down. The security of the frontiers had made land a good investment and led to the emergence of a landed aristocracy that bought out the smallholders, those independent farmer–soldiers on whom the defence of Asia Minor depended. Now after Manzikert the empire lay open before bands of Turkish tribesmen, who looted, murdered and destroyed as they marauded westwards until in 1073 they were standing on the Bosphorus opposite Constantinople. In the words of a Byzantine chronicler, ‘Almost the whole world, on land and sea, occupied by the impious barbarians, has been destroyed and has become empty of population, for all Christians have been slain by them and all houses and settlements with their churches have been devastated by them in the whole East, completely crushed and reduced to nothing.’5 In fact, the Turks were as yet only thinly spread across the newly invaded territory an
d by no means replaced the existing population, but the dislocation to settled society was ruinous, not least because of the rapacity and strife as one tribe fought against another. The tragedy that had overtaken Armenia had now overtaken Asia Minor, and an Armenian refugee writing in Constantinople struck a note of grim foreboding:

  The voices and the sermons of the priests are silent now. The chandeliers are extinguished now and the lamps dimmed, the sweet fragrance of incense is gone, the altar of Our Lord is covered with dust and ashes. [. . .] Tell heaven and all that abide in it, tell the mountains and the hills, the trees of the dense woodlands, that they too may weep over our destruction.6

  The warfare that had overtaken Palestine after the Fatimid invasion in 970 lasted for generations, and the country continued to suffer from Bedouin depredations throughout the eleventh century. Ramla, which the Arabs founded on the plain as the capital of Jund Filastin, was all but abandoned owing to earthquake damage and continuous Bedouin attacks; instead from the 1160s Jerusalem, lodged in the highlands of Judaea, became the centre of Fatimid rule in Palestine and its walls were strengthened.

  Even during these perilous times pilgrims journeyed to Jerusalem, where they made an important contribution to such prosperity as the city enjoyed. Their chief goal was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where al-Hakim’s successor had allowed the Byzantine emperor to rebuild the Rotunda at his own expense. But pilgrimages were unpredictable and required considerable courage and faith to pursue. In 1065 a large pilgrimage of seven to twelve thousand Germans, led by Gunther, bishop of Bamberg, travelled across Asia Minor and arrived at Latakia in northern Syria, still within the Byzantine Empire then. But in Latakia, according to a chronicler,