What a frightful decline! Read all and you shall greatly lament…. Fifty-one metropolitanates, eighteen archbishoprics and 478 bishoprics are desolate…. And not only were those metropolitanates, archbishoprics, bishoprics, the monasteries and churches desolate; but also the provinces of the three patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem. Neither will you find a single metropolitan there, nor other Christian, layman or clergy. But on the thrones of those patriarchates you will find barely a few priests, monks and laymen. Because the churches of their provinces have been obliterated completely and Christ’s people, that is the Christians, have been utterly destroyed.
—anonymous Greek churchman, c. 1480
Although Egypt’s Christians had often been subject to outbreaks of persecution, the events of 1354 reached an alarming new intensity. Mobs demanded that Christians and Jews recite the Muslim profession of faith upon threat of being burned alive. The government struck at churches and confiscated the estates of monasteries, destroying the financial basis of the Coptic Church. And unlike in previous conflicts, the persecution now reached the whole country, rather than being confined just to Cairo. Under increasingly violent conditions, many Christians accepted Islam, in a massive wave of conversions. Muslim historian Al-Maqrizi reports the unprecedented scale of the change:
Many reports came from both Upper and Lower Egypt of Copts being converted to Islam, frequenting mosques and memorizing the Quran…. In all the provinces of Egypt, both north and south, no church remained that had not been razed; on many of those sites, mosques were constructed. For when the Christians’ affliction grew great and their incomes small, they decided to embrace Islam. Thus Islam spread among the Christians of Egypt and in the town of Qalyub alone 450 persons were converted to Islam in a single day…. this was a momentous event in Egyptian history.1
Not just in Egypt, this was a catastrophic time for the Christians of the Middle East, and it is ironic that such events should have occurred so very soon after Bar Sauma’s predictions. So disastrous, in fact, were the cumulative blows against the churches in these years that we can properly see the fourteenth century as marking the decisive collapse of Christianity in the Middle East, across Asia, and in much of Africa.
The story of Christianity’s collapse outside Europe runs contrary to many assumptions about the shape of religious history. Though everyone knows that Christianity emerges in the Middle East, and that that area subsequently becomes Muslim, the chronology of that change remains hazy. Popular depictions of that history—for example, in the maps presented by television documentaries—usually show Islam spreading rapidly over the formerly Christian Middle East and North Africa, and the implication is that conversion to Islam was a swift and painless process. Presumably, infidels rapidly came to acknowledge the superior virtues of Islam. Yet the Egyptian persecutions came several centuries afterward, during and after the age of Dante, as western Europe was entering the early Renaissance.
Shaping our views of the religious change are the many recent books that stress the tolerant nature of Islam and its reluctance to impose its beliefs by force. Karen Armstrong regularly contrasts Muslim tolerance with the bigotry so evident in Christian history. Writing of Islamic Spain in the ninth century, for instance, she remarks: “Like the Jews, Christians were allowed full religious liberty within the Islamic empire and most Spaniards were proud to belong to such an advanced culture, light years ahead of the rest of Europe…. As was customary in the Muslim world, Jews, Christians and Muslims had coexisted there for centuries in relative harmony.”2 The persecutions would also surprise the many Americans who derive their view of Muslim tolerance from the widely seen PBS documentary Empires of Faith, or the film Kingdom of Heaven, about the First Crusade. In reality, the story of religious change involves far more active persecution and massacre at the hands of Muslim authorities than would be suggested by modern believers in Islamic tolerance. Even in the most optimistic view, Armstrong’s reference to Christians possessing “full religious liberty” in Muslim Spain or elsewhere beggars belief.
To make that point does not necessarily mean shifting to the opposite extreme: if Muslim rulers were not all saints, neither were they the spawn of Satan. We need not subscribe to the account of unrelieved Islamic violence proposed by modern authors for whom every war or conquest involving Muslims automatically becomes a manifestation of religiously motivated jihad. Such accounts err in portraying extreme brutality to noncombatants as a distinctive mark of Islamic fanaticism, when it was in fact the common currency of medieval or early modern warfare, whatever the religious coloring of the participants. Christian Byzantines and Franks committed acts of massacre and ethnic cleansing when they had the opportunity, and were as willing to justify their actions in religious terms.3
Nor, by the standards of the time, were Muslims unusual in the discriminatory laws they imposed upon conquered peoples. At the time, it seemed quite natural for the victors to institutionalize their higher status—demanding, for instance, that a higher compensation be paid when one of their own was killed than one of the subject peoples. Germanic tribes in the West set higher man-prices for their own peoples than for Romans or Celts, and Arabs likewise valued their own people at double the rate of Copts or Syrian Christians. As occupiers, early Muslim regimes at least were seldom as oppressive or destructive as many European Christian states: they were much more easygoing than, say, the Normans who conquered England in 1066, the Germans who subjugated Prussia, or the English occupiers of Ireland.
Another problem with focusing on Muslim evils, with the endless accounts of religious warfare and persecution, is that it is impossible to reconcile with the long periods of good interfaith relations that prevailed in many areas. Nor, more important, can it account for the very long survival of Christian communities under Muslim regimes. In contrast, some Christian states did not even permit such minorities to exist on their soil. Legally, Jews were prohibited entry into England from 1290 until the 1650s, and Christian Spain expelled both its Muslims and its Jews.
Oppression and persecution were not integral to Islamic rule; but such conditions could and did develop at particular times, and when they did, they could be devastating. At their worst, we can legitimately compare the conditions of Christians under Islam with that of Jews in contemporary Christian Europe, and the Egyptian campaigns of the fourteenth century look almost identical to contemporary European anti-Semitism. Though Muslim regimes could tolerate other faiths for long periods, that willingness to live and let live did fail at various times, and at some critical points it collapsed utterly. The deeply rooted Christianity of Africa and Asia did not simply fade away through lack of zeal, or theological confusion: it was crushed, in a welter of warfare and persecution.
New Masters
Reading sympathetic accounts of the spread of Islam, we can forget that this was a movement of armed conquest and imperial expansion, which on occasion involved ferocious violence. The battle of Yarmuk in 636, which gave the Muslims control of Syria, was one of the great military massacres of antiquity, costing the lives of perhaps fifty thousand soldiers of the Christian Byzantine Empire. And while cities were generally spared, the invaders showed little mercy to surrounding villages and settlements.4
In most cases, however, conquest was not quickly followed by Islamization, or the destruction of church institutions. Partly, this resulted from the speed of the conquest, as Arab forces struck at the two empires, Byzantine and Persian, which had exhausted each other in a century of struggle. A fast conquest meant that cities largely survived intact, and so did their social and ecclesiastical structures.
TABLE 4.1.
CHRONOLOGY OF EARLY ISLAM
610 | First revelation to the Prophet Muhammad |
|
622 | Hijra: Muhammad migrates from Mecca to Medina |
|
632 | Muhammad dies |
|
635 | Conquest of Damascus |
|
636 | Battle of Yarmuk gives Muslims control over Syria |
|
636 | Muslims defeat Persians in battle of Qadisiya |
|
637 | Muslims enter Jerusalem |
|
642 | Capture of Alexandria |
|
643 | Conquest of Azerbaijan |
|
647 | First Arab invasion of North Africa |
|
651 | Muslims complete conquest of Persia |
|
661 | Creation of Umayyad Caliphate, based in Damascus |
|
674–77 | Unsuccessful Muslim siege of Constantinople |
|
685–705 | Abd al-Malik caliph |
|
692 | Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem completed |
|
698 | Muslims take Carthage |
|
706–15 | Caliph Walid builds Great Mosque of Damascus |
|
709 | Arabs conquer Ceuta |
|
711 | Conquest of Spain |
|
717 | Second siege of Constantinople |
|
722 | Caliph Yazid II orders destruction of Christian images |
|
732 | Charles Martel defeats Muslims at Tours |
|
750 | Creation of Abbasid Caliphate |
|
751 | Battle of Talas River: Muslims defeat Chinese |
|
762 | Foundation of Baghdad |
The great exception to this statement was in North Africa, the modern lands of Tunisia and Algeria, a puzzling case to which I shall return later. In short, the North African church based in Carthage had at its height been one of the most powerful and influential in the whole of Christianity, yet very soon after the Muslims took Carthage in 698, that church vanished almost totally. This, however, was an extreme and atypical case, and it is not clear just how Muslim persecution or interference contributed to the Christian collapse here. Probably, most African Christians simply fled, rather than being killed or expelled.5
Elsewhere, the Muslims were received surprisingly well. The occupiers distinguished themselves by their contrast to earlier Persian invaders, who had been notorious both for the extensive destruction they caused and for their deep animus against Byzantine clergy and monks. The Persian sack of Jerusalem in 614 had provoked a ferocious Jewish rising against Christians: tens of thousands perished. In comparison, the Arab occupiers of Jerusalem and Alexandria were thoroughly restrained. When the caliphs established themselves at Damascus in 661, they looked like a civilized Byzantine successor state, employing Christian and Jewish civil servants.6
Also making the transition easier, it was far from obvious at the time that the Muslim conquest would mark a permanent transformation: countries like Syria and Egypt were well used to passing empires. History suggested that the Roman Empire tended to strike back very successfully against intruders, even though retaliation might take centuries. Of all the barbarian invaders who had seized portions of the Western empire in the fifth century, the Byzantines conquered or expelled some, while the others all accepted Catholic Christianity by the eighth century. After seeing the Persians overrun their whole eastern empire by 616, the Romans had staged a stunning comeback in which they in turn destroyed Persian power. Even when Roman armies were not obviously in the neighborhood, the empire had an impressive ability to project its power through allies and proxy states, using diplomacy and intelligence. The Muslims suffered a traumatic setback in 717–18, when the Byzantines threw them back from the approaches to Constantinople. Adding to the shock, the Romans owed their victory to their secret weapon, which they called “Greek fire”—a kind of napalm that wrought havoc with enemy ships and must have had a daunting effect on Muslims with an apocalyptic mind-set. Hadith (reputed sayings of Muhammad) composed about this time suggest real concerns that a revived Byzantine and Christian power might be able to roll back Islam to Mecca and Medina. As late as the tenth century, these prophecies seemed to be fulfilled when the Byzantines reoccupied most of Syria and northern Mesopotamia, threatening Jerusalem and Baghdad. By the end of the tenth century, the Byzantines had high hopes for ultimate victory in the new millennium.7
Nor did the Muslims’ religious identity make them unwelcome. As we will see, Muslims were slow to identify themselves as a distinct religion wholly separate from Jews and Christians. Matters were seen rather in ethnic terms, and early chronicles speak not of Muslims and Christians but of Arabs and Syrians.8 This lack of religious conflict made Arab rule attractive to those Christians who had previously been subjects of the Persian Empire, and who found more in common with the Muslims than they had with the old regime, dominated as it was by Zoroastrians—dualists whose worship focused on the sacred fire. Both Persian and Roman empires had mixed attitudes toward tolerating religious minorities, and sporadically launched persecutions. In contrast, through most of their conquered territories, the new Muslim rulers had little interest in forcing conversions, and in the early stages did not even encourage them. Non-Muslims after all survived as conquered tributary peoples, paying special taxes, so that it literally paid to keep these people in their infidel state.9
Christians were treated rather better than other groups, who did not qualify as approved and tolerated People of the Book. In theory, we might expect the Zoroastrian religion to have been persecuted from the beginning, as the Quran condemned fire worshippers as pagan. In fact, Muslim attitudes were initially more favorable, and only gradually were harsher standards applied. Increasingly, Muslims destroyed the fire temples and built mosques on the sites; churches, in contrast, operated publicly. Ordinary Zoroastrian believers made the best accommodation they could. The few modern followers of the old Persian religion are found among India’s Parsis, descendants of those who emigrated in the ninth or tenth century. Muslim regimes were much harsher toward Manichaeans, whom they hunted and killed.10
Moreover, many Eastern Christians—Nestorians, Jacobites, and others—were not sorry to witness the fall of the Byzantine authorities who had so persecuted them over the decades, and the followers of the Arab prophet would not necessarily be more heavy-handed as rulers. In the 650s, the Nestorian patriarch Isho’yahb wrote: “The Arabs to whom God has granted at this time the government of the world…do not persecute the Christian religion; on the contrary they favor it, honor our priests and the saints of the Lord and confer benefits on churches and monasteries.” Many similar comments can be found from senior clergy over the following centuries. Later in that century, a Mesopotamian monk praised the caliph Mu'awiya lavishly: “Justice flourished in his time and there was great peace in the regions under his control. He allowed everyone to live as they wanted.” One ninth-century Nestorian chronicle was lyrical: “The hearts of Christians rejoiced at the ascendancy of the Arabs. May God affirm and make it triumphant!” Whatever the faults of the Arabs, at least they were not Christian Byzantines.11
Beyond simple relief at the withdrawal of Byzantine power—however temporary it might be—many Christians saw the Arab victory as a sign of divine judgment. A later Coptic history offers this interpretation: “And the Lord abandoned the army of the Romans before him, as a punishment for their corrupt faith, and because of the anathemas uttered against them, on account of the council of Chalcedon, by the ancient Fathers.” As late as the twelfth century, after long experience of Muslim rule, Michael the Syrian (a Jacobite) had a simple explanation for the Muslim triumph:
The God of vengeance…seeing the wickedness of the Romans who, wherever they ruled, cruelly robbed our churches and monasteries and condemned us without pity, raised from the region of the south the children of Ishmael to deliver us by them from the hands of the Romans…it was no light advantage for us to be delivered from the cruelty of the Romans.
(In fairness, it should be said that the Monophysites had certainly persecuted the Orthodox when they had the opportunity.) Despite all their defeats at Muslim hands, the Byzantines rarely attempted to see all Christians as allies in a common religious struggle. In the eleventh century, a Byzantine Empire desperate to keep out invading Turks often showed contempt for its Monophysite Armenian allies, although these were militarily crucial. On the other side, once the Turks captured Jerusalem, they actually “employed for the administration of the country a Christian man, a Jacobite, a lover of Christ, known as Mansur al-Balbayi…and he was of assistance to every one who arrived in Jerusalem from among the Christians of Egypt and of the countries besides it.”12
Even Orthodox clergy had mixed feelings about the rise of Muslim power. Church Father Saint John Damascene could write freely against the theological errors of the Byzantine emperors because he was safely ensconced at the court of the caliph, who did not interfere in such intra-Christian bickering. The Byzantines called him Sarakenophron, “Saracen-minded.” In 869, the Melkite (Orthodox) patriarch of Jerusalem wrote of the Muslims, “They are just, and do us no wrong or violence of any kind.”13
Dhimmis
Matters would change over time, as Muslim self-identity grew and tolerant attitudes weakened. In the 690s, the regime imposed the poll tax on Syria’s non-Muslims, “and all the calamities began to emerge against the Christian people.” Rivalry between the two faiths intensified after the failed Muslim assault on Constantinople in 717–18, and in 722 the caliph Yazid II prohibited the display of religious images, destroying the public displays in many churches. A rigorous fanatic, Yazid ordered the extermination of unclean animals across his realm.14
In Egypt especially, this crisis provoked a real persecution of Christian monks and clergy, who were targeted because of their overwhelming prestige within Egyptian society. At least for the first two centuries after the conquest, Egypt was still effectively a Christian society under a Muslim military elite. Laws reduced the number of churches while introducing a ferocious regime for monks. In 718, Muslim authorities
commanded the monks not to make monks of those who came to them. Then [the governor] mutilated the monks, and branded each one of them on his left hand, with a branding iron in the form of a ring, that he might be known; adding the name of his church and his monastery, without a cross, and with the date according to the era of Islam…. If they discovered a fugitive or one that had not been marked, they brought him to the Amir, who ordered that one of his limbs should be cut off, so that he was lame for life.
However, this extraordinary situation soon passed, and the official history of the Coptic patriarchs records the relief that later caliphs granted to Christians. One, Hisham, was praised as “a God-fearing man, according to the method of Islam…the deliverer of the orthodox.”15 Thereafter, the history carries on to record monastic life proceeding much as it had ever done, with the customary range of apparitions and healings. The ban on images proved equally short-lived. For much of the eighth century, Christian icons and paintings were much safer under Arab rule than they were in Byzantine territory, then dominated by the Iconoclastic movement.
Before the eleventh century, incidents of persecution were local and sporadic, and usually ran counter to official wishes. Some, however, were traumatic. One of the worst disasters suffered by the Egyptian church was the sacking of the beloved monasteries of Wadi el-Natrun. Over the centuries, nomads occasionally attacked these houses, and matters grew worse after the Arab conquest, when raiders saw monasteries and churches as easy targets for plunder. The “holy desert” was devastated around 818, when the Alexandrian patriarch Mark was appalled to see
what they suffered at the hands of the miscreant Arabs, through their having taken possession of them and driven out our holy fathers who dwelt there, and killed many, and burnt the churches and the…cells, with fire. In consequence of this slaughter, the monks were dispersed among the cities and villages and monasteries, in the various provinces of Egypt and the two Thebaids.
Most of these houses never recovered. Although a disaster for the Egyptian church, the incident reflected the lower standards of law and order now prevailing in the countryside, rather than persecution specifically targeted against Christians. Nor could monasteries now count on the aura of sanctity that might have deterred earlier freebooters, who notionally held Christian loyalties.16
Nor can we see explicit systematic persecution in other instances of violence around this time. Riots destroyed churches in tenth-century Palestine and Syria, though in most cases Muslim rulers helped rebuild the destroyed structures. Describing these incidents, Christian accounts were as likely to denounce Jews as Muslims: according to these reports, Jews led and joined in these persecutions, urging Muslim rulers to suppress icons and other visual depictions of the holy. Christian complaints about tyranny and extortionate taxation often prove to be describing injustices imposed on all religions alike, as part of the standard procedure of early medieval governments. After cataloging the horrors of Abbasid taxation, an eighth-century Christian chronicler says that if Christians alone were affected, he would have been quick to write of martyrdom. In the event, the disasters affected “Arabs and Syrians…poor and wealthy, all mixed together.” At such moments, oppression knew neither creed nor color. Significantly, the first few centuries of Muslim rule did not produce any substantial number of martyrs commemorated by the churches, although Christians at the time were profoundly sensitive to issues of sacrifice and sanctity, and would have been on the lookout for new spiritual heroes and role models. Most of the known martyrs were isolated individuals who had converted to Islam and then tried to reconvert to Christianity. The chief lapse into public violence came in the mid–ninth century, when an aggressive Christian campaign within Muslim Spain led to a number of martyrdoms in Córdoba, but again, these incidents stand out because they were so atypical. Christians had to go out of their way to provoke martyrdom, usually by aggressive public denunciations of Islam.17
The glaring exception to official toleration came at the end of the tenth century, when the Egyptian-based caliph Hakim launched an unprecedented systematic persecution of Christians and Jews, and three thousand churches were destroyed or converted into mosques—an important move in a country where village churches were still at least as common as Muslim sites. Sensationally, in 1009 he destroyed Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher, and Christians were forbidden to visit the site for forty years. He demanded that all non-Muslims constantly wear a mark of their religions, a large wooden cross for Christians or a symbolic golden calf for Jews. Only at the end of his rule did he relent, restoring the churches and allowing those who had been forcibly converted to return to their original faiths. Yet however burdensome Hakim’s rule was, his decisions can be traced to the extreme mental instability of a man who eventually proclaimed his own divinity, speaking of himself as Allah: he was duly assassinated. His policies grew from insanity, not Islam.
Other forms of discrimination were more enduring. Accounts of early Muslim history record the establishment of the dhimma, the pact of security, which governed the status of non-Muslims within Islamic society, and over time these regulations became more specific, and harsher. By the ninth century, governments were ordering Jews and Christians to wear distinctive badges or clothing, and it was probably around this time that scholars retroactively invented the terms of subjection supposedly imposed on Christians during the initial conquests, the codes associated with the caliph Umar. Often, these laws were adapted from late Roman regulations imposed on Jews, who were required to avoid any ostentatious acts that could offend Christians. In practice, though, this dhimmi legislation—including the dress code—was not enforced consistently. New churches continued to be built throughout the first centuries of Muslim rule, although dhimmis were specifically forbidden to undertake such new construction.18
Moreover, the “protected” status of subject peoples meant something very different from the kind of protection offered by modern-day crime syndicates. Although offering nothing like equality, the arrangement had a firm contractual basis that gave people real, enforceable rights: it really was a pact, not just a euphemism. In the late twelfth century, the great king Saladin proclaimed relatively tight restraints on unbelievers. However, he added a stern proviso:
When we ordered the dhimmis to wear the distinctive clothing which distinguishes them from Muslims…we heard that gangs of thugs inflamed by hatred attacked the dhimmis with words and detestable actions in contravention of their rights under the dhimmi pact. We strongly disapprove of this and we forbid either fomenting or executing such things.19
As all sane people knew, Saladin’s orders were not lightly ignored.
Survival
At least before the twelfth century, the Eastern churches found little difficulty in maintaining their organizations, in operating their churches and monasteries, or in launching new mission ventures beyond the borders of Muslim political authority. Ancient empires had regularly granted minority communities a large degree of self-government, extending to issues of personal law, and even their own courts, and this had usually been the situation of Christians within the Persian Empire. The Muslims took over this situation quite seamlessly. In fact, Christian legal autonomy might actually have increased under Muslim rule, as Christians formally codified their civil laws to match the Quranic law of the occupiers. As Peter Brown remarks, in the early Muslim centuries, “Islam rested as lightly as a mist along the contours of what had remained a largely Christian landscape.” In remoter areas like Upper Egypt and northern Iraq, “local Christian elites remained firmly in control for centuries. They administered the taxes and proudly maintained the churches and great monasteries of the region.” Bishops continued to rule their flocks, with extensive civil powers over religious matters, broadly defined: when Mesopotamians followed a man who claimed to be Christ returned, his bishop simply threw him into prison, without appeal. Why would any Muslim ruler trouble himself with such a purely internal matter?20
Not only did church hierarchies remain in place, but new bishoprics and metropolitans were created, even in Arabia itself. Church leaders became important figures at the different Muslim courts, so that Christian primates “were often used as ambassadors, consulted for political advice, or even solicited for prayer.” From the eighth century, the patriarchs usually lived at the new Muslim capital of Fustat, and about 1080 they formally moved their seat to the rising center of Cairo. Church-state connections remained startlingly favorable. One thirteenth-century Coptic patriarch prayed, “May God—praised be He—make victorious their sultan, and he is our sultan, and their imam, and he is our shepherd.”21
The Nestorian catholicos was just as much a fixture at the court of Baghdad, where some incumbents of the office became favorites of the caliphs of the day. In a characteristic document from 1138, a caliph recognized a new catholicos, giving him authority over the various Christian sects: “thou art empowered to act as their head, and the head also of those Greeks, Jacobites and Melkites, whether represented here or not, who might oppose them in any country.” Senior clergy also became adept at the art of bribing Muslim officials, but such gift giving was a standard political practice.22
The caliphs were surrounded by Christian or crypto-Christian courtiers, including many doctors, scribes, and scholars. The scribes are an interesting group, as both in Egypt and the East these were members of a hereditary profession: these medieval Christian scribes may well have been distant descendants of the ancient servants of pharaohs and Babylonian kings. Christians represented sizable minorities in such great Muslim cities as Baghdad, Damascus, and Cairo. In Baghdad, they were so numerous that their demands for fish during fasting season had an inordinate impact on the price. Strictly orthodox Muslims complained about the conspicuous wealth and power of Christians. When Muslim activist al-Jahiz denounced Christians in the ninth century, his main complaint was that they were too rich and that the people respected them too much for their business dealings. Furthermore, his complaints about aggressive Christian rhetoric suggest a real openness in religious debate that is difficult to reconcile with images of grinding Muslim oppression. Christians, he complained,
hunt down what is contradictory in our traditions, our reports with a suspect line of transmission and the ambiguous verses of our scripture. Then they single out the weak-minded among us and question our common people concerning these things…and they will often address themselves to the learned and powerful among us, causing dissension among the mighty and confusing the weak.23
Below the level of the leadership, it is not easy to assess the continuing appeal of the churches, and historians of Islam differ widely in their estimates of how rapidly the populations of Muslim-ruled countries converted to the new dominant faith. Undoubtedly, Islam attracted followers in what had been Christian lands. In the first century or so, conversion was difficult, and new Muslims had to be fitted into the Arab tribal system through a kind of fictitious adoption. Matters changed when the Abbasid Caliphate took power in 750. Around 775, a monkish chronicler from Tur Abdin commented sadly on the fickleness of his Christian neighbors, even in Edessa the Blessed:
Without blows or tortures, people slipped towards apostasy with great eagerness, in groups of twenty, thirty, one hundred, two hundred or three hundred without any compulsion…. They used to come down to Harran, to governors, and aposta-size to Islam. They would boast and look down on us saying to us “You are godless and you are holding, as it were, onto a spider’s web”…. [Satan formed] a great crowd from the regions of Edessa, Harran, Resaina…. Dara, Nisibis, Sinjar and Callinicum.
They “turned to paganism [i.e., Islam] faster than sheep rushing to water.” In the ninth century, one of the most active Muslim controversialists against rival faiths was the Persian Ibn Rabban, whose name indicates that he was the son of a Nestorian clergyman.24
But how rapidly did the churches decline? The most systematic calculation is that of historian Richard Bulliet, who used a large biographical sample to track the rate of conversion through Islamic history, and based on this, he proposed a “conversion curve.” According to this view, Islam made little impact on populations outside Arabia before the mid–eighth century, but then grew steadily. Within the regions ruled by Islamic governments, Muslims reached 40 percent of the population by about 850, and close to 100 percent by 1100. In Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, “the primary conversion process was essentially complete by 1010.” Bulliet’s daring attempt was based on the best available evidence, but the use of biographies is dubious because of the many biases that would have led early compilers to underplay non-Muslims and social outsiders. The evidence is also patchy for territories removed from official gaze, where minorities tended to hang on. His sources thus tell us too much about the behavior of Muslim elites, and his theory works best for Persia, where Zoroastrians were at a real disadvantage in the new order. Nor can we rely too heavily on naming practices, as non-Muslims certainly did adopt Muslim-sounding names.25
The “conversion curve” ignores the substantial minorities who clearly survived into the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. If only from the later accounts of their destruction, we know that thousands of churches were still operating in Egypt in the eleventh century, many more in Mesopotamia and Syria, and all these lands still possessed their diocesan networks as well as many functioning monasteries. If Egypt and Iraq in 1300 had large Muslim mobs to riot against Christians, there were still plenty of Christians to be rioted against. When we read about sheep rushing to water, we should also realize that in the early years, it was far from obvious that conversion to Islam—or any other faith—need be a one-way process, a commitment for the span of one’s whole life, let alone one’s whole family. We hear of people converting to Islam to secure a particular legal benefit, and then returning to their customary faith. A few years after the “sheep” reference, the caliph al-Mahdi commanded that apostates and turncoats from Islam be subjected to the death penalty, suggesting a need to prevent convenience conversions.
Putting the evidence together, a neat conversion curve seems unlikely, and the evidence is better suited to what evolutionary theorists call punctuated equilibrium. Instead of moving at a steady gradual pace, conversions to Islam would have moved in surges that coincided especially with social upheavals, such as revolutions and changes of dynasty: one boom occurred in the late eighth century, another in the early eleventh. Once Muslim numbers reached a new plateau, religious loyalties would remain fairly steady for decades or even centuries before another sudden upward movement. The process of conversion would also be rather later than sometimes argued, and we should probably date the rise of a solid Muslim majority in Egypt to the late ninth or tenth century, and a hundred years later in Syria and Mesopotamia. Even so, large minorities persisted into the thirteenth century, when we see a decisive movement toward absolute Muslim hegemony.
The Collapse Begins
Apart from its continuing strength in the Muslim-ruled realms, Christianity still flourished as the dominant religion in those regions still under the control of the Byzantine Empire. Within the empire and beyond, Asian and African Christianity were still powerful forces in 1200, yet within at most two centuries that presence had crumbled. In this brief time, some of the most ancient Christian communities were all but annihilated.
Different factors explain the collapse of the churches in different regions, and initially at least we see little evidence of religiously motivated persecution. This was true even in Asia Minor, which between the eleventh century and the fifteenth suffered a radical and near-total destruction of church institutions, and the massive destruction of Christian populations. As the perpetrators were Muslims, from the central Asian people of the Seljuk Turks, it would be tempting, but misleading, to see this as a clear manifestation of Muslim holy warfare, of an exterminationist jihad. Rather, the Seljuks followed the same pattern of aggressive expansion followed by many Eurasian tribes before and since, and their main military activities were directed against the Byzantine Empire, which happened to be Christian. In contrast to the earlier Arab invasions, however, the Seljuk conquests were a very long, drawn-out process, lasting for centuries rather than a few years, and the ensuing wars devastated Christian society.26
Asia Minor remained thoroughly Christian through the Byzantine era, but matters changed rapidly after 1050. The Seljuks subjugated the Armenian kingdom in 1064, forcing survivors to create a new Armenian state in Cilicia. And in 1071, the Turks won an epochal victory over the Byzantines at the Battle of Manzikert. Throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, war raged across Asia Minor and the Levant, largely due to the pressure of incoming Turkish forces on the Byzantine Empire, and only incidentally because of Western crusader attempts to reverse their victories. The collapse of Byzantine power in the thirteenth century left a power vacuum filled by warring Muslim states, and the Mongols added a new and vastly destructive element to the mixture.27
Though the Western sack of Jerusalem in 1099 is rightly notorious—forty thousand people may have perished—such massacres were far from rare, and Turks were at least as guilty as crusaders. Michael the Syrian recorded the destruction of his hometown, the Christian bastion of Melitene, in 1057. The Turks “began to massacre without pity” and “to torture the men that they might show them hidden things; and many died in torment…. The Turks stayed at Melitene for ten days, devastating, and pillaging. Then they burnt the wretched city, devastating the surrounding area…and burning the whole country.” Cities were raided and sacked, often repeatedly, and society came close to collapse. By 1080, we hear that
[e]verywhere the Christians had been delivered to the sword or into bondage interrupting thus the cultivation of the fields so that bread was lacking. The farmers and workers had been massacred or led off into slavery and famine extended its rigors to all places. Many provinces were depopulated.
The border regions between warring sides became “deserts.” Populations fell steeply, and any families who could flee to safer parts of the world did so. Asia Minor, which probably had 12 million people in the early Byzantine period, had barely half that by the thirteenth century.28
These changes naturally had religious consequences, as ancient Christian centers were devastated. In the 1140s, the Turks took Edessa the Blessed, killing or enslaving virtually its entire population, then estimated at forty-seven thousand. Even some decades later, Michael the Syrian lamented that
Edessa remained a desert: a moving sight covered with a black garment, drunk with blood, infested by the very corpses of its sons and daughters! Vampires and other savage beasts ran and entered the city at night to feast on the flesh of the massacred, and it became the abode of jackals; for none entered there except those who dug to discover treasures.
Decades later, most of the city remained in ruins, including some seventeen unrestored churches, and travelers noted that the city had been without a priest for years. Reading such accounts, we can only speculate about the books and manuscripts that must have been lost in the catastrophe that overwhelmed cities like Edessa and Ephesus, which must once have contained treasure troves of records of the earliest Christian communities.29
Such destruction—and Edessa represents only an extreme example of what occurred to most cities in the region at some point in this era—meant the crippling or elimination of the structure of dioceses, each of which had been based in a city and had controlled rural life through a network of subordinate parishes. In 1283, Bar-Hebraeus mocked the charge that he might have ambitions to be Jacobite patriarch. Why would anyone want such a thing, he asked, when “the dioceses of the West are laid waste”? Antioch was “in a state of lamentation and tears.” Was he supposed to covet Aleppo, Edessa, or Harran, “all of which are laid waste”? Or “the seven dioceses which are round about Melitene, in none of which doth a single house remain”? Or other once-flourishing towns that now had not even a wall to piss against?30 Meanwhile, the spiritual life of the Eastern churches had depended on the once-thriving network of monasteries, which provided wonderfully lucrative targets for Turkish raiders.
No less profitable for raiders were pilgrimage centers, where grateful visitors had often donated precious gifts. From the eleventh century onward, the Christian landscape of Asia Minor was destroyed piecemeal: gone was the church of Saint Basil of Caesarea, the shrine of Saint Nicholas of Myra (the legendary original Santa Claus), while the Turks desecrated the churches of Antioch when they captured the city in 1085. The church of Saint John at Ephesus survived as long as it did only because it was fortified and walled.31 The situation recalls the Viking raids on the churches and monasteries of western Europe, where the raiders chose targets for economic motives rather than out of any specific malice against Christianity as a religion.
At least before the later thirteenth century, Turkish forces did not target Christian churches or sects consistently or systematically, and they treated different bodies selectively. The Syrian and Armenian churches were more likely to be left alone, while the Greeks suffered as representatives of the Byzantine Empire, a hostile power. Worst treated of all were the Latin Catholic clergy, who were seen as interlopers and who were massacred wholesale when opportunity arose. But although we cannot talk of direct persecution, the effects of war were cataclysmic enough. Whatever their intentions, the Turks shredded Christian ecclesiastical institutions beyond repair. And an impoverished church could not offer poor Christians the kind of material aid they had been accustomed to receiving during times of famine and crisis. This dereliction of duty disappointed believers while opening the way to Muslim organizations that could offer such charity. Muslim rulers speeded the process of assimilation by favoring dervishes from Sufi orders, who began aggressive evangelization of the remaining unbelievers in the countryside.32
Meanwhile, at least some of the conquerors did directly force Christians to accept Islam. This kind of compulsion was not uniquely Muslim, as the successful Byzantine emperors of the ninth and tenth centuries had succeeded in bringing Muslim cities and leaders over to Christianity. For later generations, though, most of the spiritual traffic lay in the other direction. One later source reports that when the city of Comana was taken, its people were forced to accept Islam, and the new governor acted forcefully to ensure that the conversions were not merely feigned: “He compelled the inhabitants to perform the five daily prayers and all those who refused to go to the mosque were brought there by threat of physical violence. Those who continued to drink wine were flogged, and other violations of Islamic law similarly treated.” When Christian forces approached, the inhabitants revolted against their occupiers, and replaced the mosques with monasteries. Other evidence of forced conversion is strictly contemporary. A twelfth-century canonist reports how “many others who were forcibly circumcised by the Hagarenes [Muslims] and done other things or suffered impieties were received by the church after sincere confession and suitable penance.”33
False Dawn
As time went by, religious hostility became acute, so that Muslims increasingly targeted Christian sites and populations as a matter of systematic policy: persecution and massacre became an issue of faith. One recurring factor driving persecution was warfare, and the sense that Muslim nations faced a genuine threat to their existence from unbelievers. Several such dangers appeared from the eleventh century onward. In response, Muslim states penalized or expelled Christians as potential subversives.
The best-known of these new assaults on Islam grew from the crusading movement, originally launched by the pope in 1095 with the goal of recapturing the Holy Land from the Turks. Over the next two centuries, a series of ventures mobilized many thousands of European Christians to military adventures in the Levant, and at their height, crusader statelets occupied much of Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria. Western hopes in the region ended only with the Muslim capture of the city of Antioch in 1268, and of Acre in 1291. What made the crusading movement particularly painful for Middle Eastern Christians was the constant pressure it involved, and the repeated provocations to Muslim authorities. Instead of one main incursion, which might have been forgotten in time, new surges followed every few decades: in the 1090s, the 1140s, the 1190s, and so on. The effects were obvious in the domestic politics of Egypt and other states, which tightened and strictly enforced the old dhimmi laws, closed churches, and sometimes forced conversions. Repeatedly, only state intervention held off mobs trying to close churches or persecute Christians. The already strong pressure to convert intensified.34
In Spain, too, crusading Christian powers made steady gains in reconquering the peninsula, building on their capture in 1085 of Toledo, the old Visigothic capital. As warfare escalated, both sides were strengthened by an influx of harder-line believers from neighboring countries, motivated by new waves of religious zeal. In the Muslim case, these militantly pious outsiders were the Almoravids of the late eleventh century, and the Almohads of the mid-twelfth. Both showed much less tolerance for non-Muslim subjects, but their attitudes were not altogether new in Moorish Spain, however much we may romanticize that society as a haven of interfaith tolerance. In 1066, an anti-Jewish pogrom in Granada reportedly killed five thousand, a massacre on a scale equal to anything in the Christian lands, and Córdoba’s Jews suffered a notorious massacre in 1148. Once the Reconquista began in earnest, authorities began mass deportations of Christians and Jews. The worst instance came in 1126, when a threatened invasion from Christian Aragon provoked reprisals against the native Christians of Andalusia. Ten thousand of these Mozarabs fled to the Christian north, while thousands more were deported to Morocco, where they remained for decades. A second wave of deportations followed in 1137, reportedly leaving very few Mozarabs in Andalusia. Although later Christian Spain became notorious for its expulsion of religious minorities, that regime was doing nothing different from what its Moorish predecessors had done in earlier centuries.35
The story of the Crusades is well known, but less celebrated is the much more acute challenge to Muslim power caused by Christian attempts to create an Eastern Front against Islam. During the thirteenth century, the Muslim states suddenly found themselves under attack from a lethal enemy whose activities made the Western Crusades look like fleabites. The Mongol assault on the Islamic world began in 1219 when the forces of Genghis Khan attacked the Khwarezmid Empire of central Asia, taking such great cities as Bukhara and Samarkand. Over the next forty years, Mongol power extended over most of western Asia, through a series of campaigns in which they devastated ancient cities. When Merv fell in 1221, the Mongols slaughtered virtually every man, woman, and child in the city, not to mention many thousands of refugees from surrounding areas. Contemporary accounts claim that the dead ran into the hundreds of thousands, or even millions. Ani in Armenia never recovered from the sack of 1236, while Mongol devastation ended the golden age of the Christian kingdom of Georgia. In 1258, the Mongols under Hulegu, Genghis’s grandson, perpetrated a historic massacre in Baghdad itself, ending the caliphate and conceivably killing eight hundred thousand residents. Over the next century, Hulegu’s successors ruled the Ilkhanate, one of the Mongol successor states, a vast empire stretching from the boundaries of India to western Anatolia. When modern-day Iraqis denounce American occupiers as the New Mongols, they are invoking memories of the direst moment of their history. The Mongol threat remained acute until 1303, when Egyptian forces decisively defeated them in Syria.36
The Mongol Faith
The Mongol invasions posed what was unquestionably the greatest threat ever to the existence of Islam. The Mongols were not Christianized, but they knew both Christianity and Buddhism as mainstream central Asian faiths, and their coalition included such Christianized peoples as the Keraits, Ongguds, and Uygurs. In his youth, Genghis Khan was under the patronage and protection of the Kerait chieftain Toghrul. After Genghis overthrew Toghrul, he used the Christian nieces of his defeated enemy as marriage partners for his own family. He married one sister himself, and gave the others to his own sons. The most important of the Kerait sisters was Sorghaghtani-beki, whose son Hulegu may have identified himself as a Christian. Sorghaghtani’s other children included the Chinese ruler Kublai Khan, whom Bar-Hebraeus lauded as “the just and wise king, and lover [or friend] of the Christians.” Hulegu’s Christian wife ensured that the invaders single out Baghdad’s mosques for destruction, while churches were protected. Reportedly, she wanted “to put the Saracens into such slavery that they dared not show themselves any more.” The Mongols actually turned one of the caliph’s old palaces into an official residence for the catholicos, and it became the site of a new church. In this ambience at court, it is not surprising that some Mongol leaders converted, while others had Christians in their immediate family, which meant that they usually had priests or monks in attendance.37
Noting this religious context, Asian Christians hoped for a glorious future. In the 1220s, at the height of Genghis’s conquests, Solomon of Basra wrote an apocalyptic tract prophesying the fall of Islam. He imagines “Ishmaelite” (Muslim) tyranny growing ever worse, until they proclaim, arrogantly, that
“[t]he Christians have neither a God nor a deliverer”; then all of a sudden there shall be raised up against them pains like those of a woman in childbirth; and the king of the Greeks shall go forth against them in great wrath, and he shall rouse himself like a man who has shaken off his wine. He shall go forth against them from the sea of the Cushites, and shall cast the sword and destruction into the wilderness of Yathrib [Medina] and into the dwelling-place of their fathers…. All the wrath and anger of the king of the Greeks shall have full course upon those who have denied Christ.
Bar-Hebraeus later eulogized the genocidal Hulegu and his wife as “great luminaries and zealous combatants of the Christian religion.” Beleaguered Western crusaders were delighted to hear of such potential allies approaching from the East, and some tried to ally with the Mongols. Though the popes forbade a formal pact, the surviving crusader states were sympathetic to Mongol schemes to conquer Mamluk Egypt in 1260, and they agreed neither to hinder the invasion nor to warn the Egyptians. The Mongol general Kitbuqa was himself a Kerait Christian. The decisive Egyptian victory at Ain Jalut was a devastating reversal of Christian hopes.38
Still, Mongol rulers continued to cultivated Christian ties. Hulegu’s own son married a Byzantine princess, and he favored Christianity and Buddhism over Islam. Over the following decades, while the Mongols did not actually persecute Muslims, they did impose upon them what was seen as a grievously oppressive burden—namely, that they would no longer be able to treat Christians as subject peoples. Partly, this policy reflected Mongol favor to the Christians, but it was also a straightforward political decision: as long as subject peoples paid their taxes, their religious attitudes were irrelevant. Christians across the Middle East took advantage of the newfound liberty and the prospect that the situation would survive indefinitely under sympathetic Mongol rule. With Hulegu and his heirs in power, Christians publicly did the things that had been forbidden under Islam, including carrying the cross in public processions, drinking wine, and erecting churches in towns where none had been permitted. In 1268, in Baghdad itself, the catholicos ordered a man publicly drowned for converting from Christianity to Islam. Scandalized Muslims responded with mob attacks where possible, but the Mongol regime strictly limited such outbreaks. This was the political environment at the time of Bar Sauma’s visit to the West, and the reason for his optimism.39
Continued toleration depended entirely on the attitudes of the Mongol rulers, whose religious attitudes drifted increasingly toward favoring Islam. Although there was no one moment when the ruling family converted to Islam—some rulers were solidly Muslim, others not—the overall trend was clear. In 1295 the new khan, Mahmud Ghazan, persecuted Christianity and Buddhism, and his successors followed his policies. Particularly severe was Ghazan’s brother and heir, Oljeitu (1304–16); originally baptized a Christian under the name Nicholas, he now became a fervent Muslim, taking the name Muhammad. After an interlude of a few decades, the Christians found themselves under the control of a Muslim superstate, but with their position radically changed. In contrast to the generally easygoing policies of the Arab caliphate, Christians were now subjected to intense persecution.
Worse, Christians could no longer hope to counter their loss of influence in the Middle East by missionary expansion into central Asia, as the Mongol invasions had so devastated the traditional urban centers. Moreover, all the Mongol successor states soon fell under heavy Muslim influence. By the mid–fourteenth century, Islamized Mongol princes ruled not just the Ilkhanate but also most of the other states. These included the Chaghadai Khanate that dominated the lands between Persia and China, and the Golden Horde of the steppes. Even after accepting Islam, the Chaghadai rulers continued to tolerate a Christian presence at their capital of Almaliq until 1338, when all Christians in the city were killed. Traces of Christianity among the Keraits and Uygurs did not last long into the fifteenth century.40
After half a millennium in which any of three great religions could reasonably hope to win the religious loyalties of the central Asian peoples, that contest was now firmly resolved in the cause of Islam. Arguably, that victory was even more critical for the longterm relationship between Islam and Christianity than the original Arab conquests of the seventh century. And the historic Christian association with the central Asian peoples now came back to haunt them.
The Great Persecutions
Egyptian Christians initially bore the brunt of the new intolerance. From the start of the thirteenth century, Egypt had been the primary target of Western Crusades, and governments occasionally retaliated against the Copts. By 1250, Egypt was ruled by the Mamluk dynasty, which from its earliest history was in armed conflict with Christians and their allies. The first sultan came to power through a war with French crusading invaders, and the greatest Mamluk leader was the general Baybars, the scourge of both crusaders and Mongols. Baybars hated Christians generally, but his loathing knew no bounds where Latin Europeans were concerned. When he captured Antioch in 1268, he wrote to the city’s crusader ruler that, had he not escaped,
[y]ou would have seen the crosses in your churches smashed, the pages of false Testaments scattered, the patriarchs’ tombs overturned. You would have seen your Muslim enemy trampling over the place where you celebrate Mass, cutting the throats of monks, priests and deacons upon the altars, bringing sudden death to the patriarchs and slavery to the royal princes.41
This brutal attitude—so radically different from the tone of earlier Muslim-Christian wars—partly reflected his fury at the Christian alliance with the Mongols. After the sack of Baghdad, it was not farfetched to imagine a world in which Egypt would stand alone as the last remaining Muslim great power, in a Middle East dominated by Christian Mongols. And the more explicitly Islamic the Mamluk campaigns became, the more tempting it was for local Christians to act as a fifth column for Mongol forces, which in turn called forth worse displays of Muslim revenge.
This intolerance was increasingly evident in Egyptian policies toward their still substantial Christian minority. Persecution was not new in Egypt, but matters deteriorated sharply after the Mamluk-Mongol wars. Between 1293 and 1354, the government launched four separate campaigns intended to enforce the submission of Christians and Jews, and to drive them to accept Islam. Each wave of violence became more intense and better organized. In 1293, an initial persecution fizzled when the sultan’s officials realized that the Christians they were on the point of executing largely ran and controlled the country’s finances, not to mention being the most competent scribes; but later movements were more successful. In 1301, a vizier arriving from Morocco was appalled at the obvious wealth and status of the Egyptian dhimmis, both Christians and Jews. Unlike in his own country, where the dhimmis were firmly repressed, in Egypt they held high public offices, they wore sumptuous clothes, and they rode the most elegant mules and mares. The vizier’s views impressed local officials, who came to believe that putting the subject peoples in their place would advance the cause of Islam.42
A wave of repressive laws followed, and one ordinance in 1301 tried to close all the churches and synagogues outside Cairo. Though this was not permanently enforced, some ancient churches were demolished and the relics of their saints publicly burned. Dhimmis were dismissed from public employment and were forced to wear distinctive clothing—blue turbans for Christians, yellow for Jews. In a powerful statement of their symbolic inferiority, dhimmis were forced to ride donkeys rather than mares or mules, and even then they had to dismount when a Muslim approached. Travelers still commented on the enforcement of these rules into the nineteenth century.
The effects of this crisis linger to the present day, as the rigorous Muslim legalism that emerged in just these years has largely shaped modern fundamentalist movements. From the 1290s, Muslim jurists produced ever-harsher interpretations of the laws governing minorities, particularly through the work of militant and puritanical scholars like Ibn Taymiyyah. Ibn Taymiyyah’s life was shaped by the disasters of the Mongol wars, which forced him into exile in Egypt, and he saw his goal as the militant restoration of Islam in the face of its enemies at home and abroad. His work has had a long afterlife. Ibn Taymiyyah is regarded as the spiritual godfather of the Wahhabi movement, and of most modern extremist and jihadi groups. Among many others, Osama bin Laden cites him as a special hero.
The new Muslim hostility was reflected in outbreaks of extreme anti-Christian violence. In 1321, Muslim mobs began looting and destroying Cairo’s Coptic churches. Commonly, a holy man would give the signal for the attacks by mobilizing crowds in the mosques under the cry “Down with the churches.” Muslim historian Al-Maqrizi recorded:
Then they destroyed the Church of St. Mennas in the Hamra, which had from ancient times been much revered by the Christians…the people climbed the walls, opened the gates and took money, vessels and wine jars out of the church; it was a terrible occurrence. Thereupon they went from the church in the Hamra after they had destroyed it to the two churches near the Seven Wells, one of which was called the Church of the Maidens, and was inhabited by a number of Christian girls, and by monks.
Though the sultan initially tried to keep order, killing many rioters, the general hatred of Christians was too powerful to contain. Shortly afterward, Christians were blamed for setting fires across Cairo, allegedly aided by Byzantine monks armed with ingenious incendiary bombs. When some of the accused confessed under torture, the authorities were forced to support the popular movement. At one point, the sultan faced a mob some twenty thousand strong, all calling for the suppression of Christians. In order to safeguard his rule, the sultan permitted a purge. Al-Maqrizi went on to catalog the churches wrecked in the ensuing violence: “six churches in the province of Al-Bahnasa; at Suyut, Manfalut and Munyat Ibn al-Khasib eight churches; at Kus and Aswan eleven churches…. A great number of monasteries were also destroyed.” The government further proclaimed that anyone who found a Christian was permitted to beat him and take his goods.43
By midcentury, Muslim writers had access to a whole catalog of anti-Christian charges that bear close resemblance to scabrous anti-Jewish tracts like the later Protocols of the Elders of Zion. According to writers like al-Asnawi, Christians were spies ever on the lookout for opportunities to betray the Muslim cause; and cases in both Egypt and Syria proved they were serial arsonists: “They display great cunning in their schemes to burn down mosques, many of which have been destroyed in this way, and many men, women and children burnt to death.” Some Christians were even reported to have planned to bomb the great mosque of Medina. Given modern-day stereotypes of Islam in the West, it is ironic that Christian minorities were then so feared because they were allegedly plotting terror bombings against prestigious symbols of Muslim power. On a lesser scale, it was said, Christian agents in government systematically tried to plunder Muslim property, to ruin mosques, and to transfer property to churches. Such stories reinforced demands for tight restrictions upon dhimmis.44
In a society so founded upon honor and family pride, the cumulative humiliations of the new policy were too much to bear for the many wealthy urban Christians who now converted to Islam. Other, poorer Christians proved firmer, particularly if they were located in rural areas where government policies were slower to penetrate, but subsequent waves of intimidation wore down this resistance. The violence of the 1320s reduced Christian numbers and prepared the way for the disasters of 1354. From the end of the fourteenth century, Egypt’s Coptic Christians were reduced to the minority status that they would retain until the present century, constituting perhaps 10 percent of the Egyptian people. The Coptic Church entered a period of “hibernation” that lasted until the mid-nineteenth century.45
When Al-Maqrizi surveyed Egypt’s monasteries in the early fifteenth century, he was recording a blasted landscape, particularly on the Nile’s eastern bank. The entries become monotonous: “now deserted”; “fallen into decay”; “no one lives there”; “now likewise destroyed.” “In the district of Al-Bahnasa there were many monasteries now destroyed.” These elegiac sketches offer a bitter taste of what had once been. Near Suyut, “on both the dams there are said to have been 360 monasteries and the traveler went from Al-Badraishin to Asfun, continually in the shade of the gardens. Now this part is laid waste, and deserted by the inhabitants.” The houses near Asfun “are all destroyed and forgotten, though in former times they were so populous and their monks so numerous, their estates so large, and the offerings made to them so valuable.” What were once the thousand monks of Bu Fana were now reduced to two.46
Once their Mongol rulers converted to Islam, conditions became equally difficult for the Christians of Mesopotamia and Syria. Between 1290 and 1330, the story of Christianity in these parts, like that in Egypt, becomes a litany of disasters and ever-more draconian penal laws. One edict commanded that
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 chiefs of the Christians and the heads of the synagogues of the Jews and the great men among them shall be killed.
Churches suffered mass closure or destruction, even at such ancient centers as Tabriz and Arbela, Mosul and Baghdad. Bishops and clergy were tortured and imprisoned. Mobs attacked and tortured the patriarch Yaballaha III.47
Some laws struck directly at ordinary believers, rather than just the institutions or the hierarchy. Some of these edicts came from the khans themselves, while others came from the initiative of local governors, but the effects were just as damaging. Even when the khans tried to limit persecution, they could hardly stem the zeal of local officers. In some cities, local laws ordered forcible conversion to Islam and prohibited the exercise of Christianity, upon pain of death. One Muslim ruler in Armenia began by inflicting ruinous taxes, and finally ordered that any man who refused to convert to Islam should suffer branding, blinding in one eye, and castration.48
Yet even the more limited sanctions were severe enough, especially when they were reinforced by mob action. Christians, like Jews, were to be instantly recognizable. As one new law commanded, “No Christian henceforth should go out without a waist-belt and…all Jews should wear a conspicuous mark on their heads.” In this atmosphere, “a Christian man [in Baghdad] dared not appear in the market but the women went forth in public and bought and sold since they could not be distinguished from Saracen women; and if they were recognized they were burdened at once with trials and contumely and even received blows and beating.” In the words of one contemporary, “The persecutions and disgrace and mockings and ignominy which the Christians suffered at this time, especially in Baghdad, words cannot describe.” The persecution reached its height with wholesale massacres, at Arbela in 1310 and at Amida in 1317. At Amida, where twelve thousand were carried into slavery, the destruction of churches and monasteries was so thorough that the fires reputedly burned for a month.49
These persecutions had a greater effect on the churches of the Middle East than any other event since the conversion of the Roman Empire. The succession to the ancient hierarchies fell into disarray, interrupting sequences that had remained unbroken since the time of the apostles. The office of Nestorian catholicos remained vacant from 1369 to 1378, and possibly longer, and the Jacobites remained without a head from 1379 to 1404. Whole Christian communities were annihilated across central Asia, and surviving communities shrank to tiny fractions of their former size. As late as 1340, Merv was still the setting for a Christian training school for Tatars, but by this stage the city was finding it difficult to maintain even the shreds of its former glories. Christianity now disappears in Persia, and across southern and central Iraq. The patriarchs “of Babylon” now literally headed for the hills, taking up their residence on the safer soil of northern Mesopotamia. In later centuries, patriarchs made their home at the Rabban Hormizd monastery in the mountains near Mosul.50
Becoming Turkey
In Asia Minor, meanwhile, the growing centrality of religious motivations made the endemic cycle of violence still more bitter, as Turkish forces became even harsher to Christian enemies of all sects and denominations. In 1304, Turkish forces obliterated the city of Ephesus, where Paul once confronted a mob chanting the glories of Artemis: all Christians were either killed or deported. When a metropolitan arrived in 1340—the first to enter the city in thirty-five years—he operated not from the historic cathedral but from cheap lodgings in the house of an old Turkish woman. Most of his flock consisted of thousands of Christian prisoners and slaves, among whom were many priests and monks. By 1387, the few remaining believers were too poor to maintain a priest. When Ibn Battuta visited Ephesus about 1330, his travel diary recorded that “[t]he cathedral mosque, which was formerly a church greatly venerated by the Greeks, is one of the most beautiful in the world. I bought a Greek slave girl here for forty dinars.”51
Large areas of Asia Minor were now effectively dechristianized. As we have seen, this area was once under a well-organized hierarchy of metropolitans and bishops, but by the twelfth century, many bishops appointed to serve sees in the Anatolian war zone found it all but impossible to leave Constantinople to visit their dioceses. Local church administration and supervision lapsed. Many cities remained without bishops, while some bishops served areas that were cities only in name, glorified villages. In many sees, sequences of bishops and metropolitans that began in Roman times dried up suddenly in the fourteenth century. Over the decades, metropolitan after metropolitan, diocese after diocese, vanishes from the Notitia, the roster of church leaders. By the late fifteenth century, the number of bishoprics in Anatolia contracted from three hundred seventy-three to just three, compared with one hundred fifteen in the empire’s European provinces. Though metropolitans were still listed, many of these names were honorary titles, preserved only because nobody in the church of Constantinople could bring himself to record that a center as prestigious as Ephesus had actually ceased to exist as a Christian community.52
By the fifteenth century, then, when the Ottoman Turks completed the conquest, Christians were already a small minority outside Constantinople and perhaps a couple of other major cities, and the rural areas were ripe for Islamization. By the early sixteenth century, tax records suggest, Christians made up just 8 percent of the population of Anatolia, although that figure is an underestimate, as it does not include slaves, and many of those were certainly Christian. Two-thirds of the recorded Christians lived in just one of the five Anatolian provinces.53
Spreading Ruin
The new Muslim militancy had dreadful consequences for the network of smaller Christian states that had existed on the fringes of the Muslim world—Armenia and Georgia, Ethiopia and Nubia. After 1250, the Mamluks pursued their jihad not only against European crusaders, but against neighboring Christian regimes. After 1260, the Mamluks expanded into Syria and began pressing on the Armenian state. In 1293, the Mamluks again raided Armenia, de-stroying the seat of the Armenian catholicos. Like other Christians, the Armenians still found the Mongols preferable to their old Muslim enemies, and Armenian forces joined the Mongols in their great invasion of Syria in 1303. The Mamluks, however, decisively defeated both. In 1375, the Mamluk conquest of Cilicia ended the last independent Armenian kingdom and demolished the beloved ecclesiastical capital of Sis. As one historian writes, “After 1375, Armenia as an autonomous political entity ceased…. The Armenian church, deprived of its traditional upper-class support, and divided by dissension, accommodated itself to Islamic tutelage in order to endure intact beyond this destructive era.” Armenians recall the following two hundred years as a dark age for their nation, the beginning of their great diaspora. Very little Armenian historical writing survives from the years between 1450 and 1650.54
The newly Muslim regime of the Ilkhanate became just as intolerant of Christian neighbors. In 1307, the khan Oljeitu ordered the Georgians to give up Christianity upon pain of destruction, and a savage war ensued.55 The campaigns of Timur after 1380 destroyed much of Georgia, especially the churches and monasteries, and one king allegedly accepted Islam. What had once been a great regional kingdom fell apart in the fifteenth century, succumbing to Turkmen and Persian raids. By the sixteenth century, both Georgia and Armenia were partitioned between the Ottoman and Persian empires. Otherwise, only two Christian states remained in Asia. One was the Byzantine Empire itself, although by 1400 this magnificent label applied only to a tiny region around Constantinople proper, together with some small fragments of Greece. The Black Sea kingdom of Trebizond, “the last Greek empire,” limped on until 1461.
African Christianity also suffered. In 1275, Baybars conquered Nubia, capturing the capital, Dongola. His forces sacked churches and forced the king, David, into exile. Repeated attacks weakened the state, while the growing crisis of the Egyptian church prevented Coptic authorities from supplying the bishops and priests essential to maintaining church life. By 1350, the royal church in Dongola had become a mosque, and around 1372, we hear of the ordination of the last Christian bishop. Within a few decades, Nubia was both dechristianized and Arabized in language and culture, although a tiny Christian statelet lingered on until the late fifteenth century. Sixteenth-century travelers were told that Nubia’s Christians “had received everything from Rome [i.e., Constantinople] and that it is a very long time since a bishop died whom they had received from Rome. Because of the wars of the Moors, they could not get another one, and they lost all their clergy and their Christianity and thus the Christian faith was forgotten.”56
Only Ethiopia remained as a bastion of African Christianity, and that came under increasing military pressure. Christian kings generally expanded the hold of the religion during the fourteenth century, but calamity was to follow. A long series of defeats and disasters culminated in the early sixteenth century, when the mighty jihad of Ahmed Gran threatened to annihilate the nation. The Muslim invaders proclaimed a sultanate of Habasha (Abyssinia), and many Christians defected to Islam. The nation’s monasteries were sacked, its art and manuscripts destroyed or plundered, so that much of our knowledge of earlier Christian Ethiopia perished forever. One modern historian of African Christianity has aptly termed this “a systematic campaign of cultural and national genocide.” Ethiopia barely survived the crisis, scraping through with Portuguese assistance. Although Christianity survived, it did so in vastly impoverished form.57
The destruction of Christian states like Nubia and Armenia meant that surviving minorities living under Muslim rule no longer had even the faint hope that outside forces might someday come to their aid. During the persecutions of the early fourteenth century, the only external power that the Egyptian government seriously needed to conciliate was the Spanish kingdom of Aragon, which meant that churches near the coast were less likely to be suppressed. For the first time, Middle Eastern Christians looked to European powers for protection, a linkage that would often prove treacherous.58
Farther afield, too, the contraction of Mongol power withdrew the friendly tolerance to which Christians had become accustomed. In 1368, the nationalist Ming dynasty overthrew the Mongol regime. The new authorities cracked down on foreign religious bodies, especially those associated with the defeated Mongols. As had occurred in the ninth century, the Nestorian mission was largely destroyed, and the much thinner Catholic missions disappeared: most of the Catholic clergy present at the time simply vanished without a trace. For almost two centuries, China lacked an obvious Christian presence.
A Colder World
We can identify specific political reasons for the new harshness to Christians. A reaction against Western crusading zeal played some role, but that is not of itself an adequate explanation. Looking at other parts of the world suggests that intolerance was becoming a marked feature of widely separated cultures around the world and not just in Asia. The chronology of Christian sufferings under Islam closely mirrors that of Jews in Christian states. It was in 1290 that England expelled all its Jews, followed by France in 1306, and pogroms reached appalling heights across western Europe during the 1330s and 1340s. Other groups likewise suffered from growing paranoia, and this was the era in which the great European witch persecutions began. The papacy formally listed witchcraft as a heresy—that is, as an evil alternative religion—in 1320, and women were soon being accused of the familiar package of crimes, including devil worship, poisoning, and black magic. In 1307, the French king arrested the members of the Knights Templar on trumped-up charges of devil worship, heresy, and conspiracy, destroying what had been the greatest crusading order. In 1320–21, southern France and Aragon suffered two outbreaks of hysterical violence, the Shepherds’ Crusade and the Lepers’ Plot. Around 1300, the world was changing, and definitely for the worse.59
If we seek a common factor that might explain this simultaneous scapegoating of vulnerable minorities, by far the best candidate is climate change, which was responsible for many economic changes in these years, and which increased poverty and desperation across the globe. Populations had swelled during the warming period between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. Europe’s population more than doubled during these prosperous times, forcing settlers to swarm onto marginal lands. In the late thirteenth century, however, Europe and the Middle East entered what has been described as the Little Ice Age, as pack ice grew in the oceans, and trade routes became more difficult both by land and by sea. Summers became cooler and wetter, and as harvests deteriorated, people starved. The world could no longer sustain the population it had gained during the boom years. Europe suffered its horrific Great Famine between 1315 and 1317, with reports of widespread cannibalism in 1318–20. Populations contracted sharply across Eurasia, and grossly weakened societies lingered on to face the horrors of the Black Death in the 1340s.
Aggravating matters was the environmental collapse in large sections of the Middle East. From Carthage to Persia, societies had waged a constant battle between “the desert and the sown,” with irrigation as the critical weapon. Incessant wars and massacres, social and governmental breakdown all took their toll, making it impossible to maintain irrigation, and thus to defend the arable lands won a thousand years earlier. Some argue that the Mongols deliberately destroyed irrigation works as a kind of environmental warfare, leading to the spread of desert conditions. The main victims of the transformation were settled farmers and city dwellers, while nomads inherited much of the region: Bedouin cultures spread over what had been fertile lowlands. When Ibn Battuta traveled across the Middle East in the 1320s, he listed all the once-great cities now characterized as only “a total ruin” or “totally uninhabited.” Seeing a fine mosque at Basra, he is told that
Basra was in former times a city so vast that this mosque stood in the centre of the town, whereas now it is two miles outside it. Two miles beyond it again is the old wall that encircled the town, so that it stands midway between the old wall and the present city.60
Against this social background, states foundered, kings were murdered, and popular revolts and uprisings became commonplace. (This age of crisis is the backdrop to the Scottish national revolution portrayed in the film Braveheart.) Whatever the religious coloring of particular societies, this was a world that directly attributed changes in weather or harvest to the divine will, and it seemed natural to blame catastrophes on the misdeeds of deviant minorities who angered God. Bitter experience taught governments of all faiths not to try to stem the rage of mobs against hated minority groups. The anti-Christian persecutions in Egypt in 1354 followed shortly after the visitation of the Black Death, which killed a third of the residents of Cairo.61
As persecutions grew, it became ever more difficult for religious minorities to survive. In some cases, minorities were thoroughly uprooted. We think of the Jews of England, or the survivors of the western European pogroms of the 1340s. After the Black Death, many Jews migrated to the less-developed, eastern regions of the continent. By the end of the fourteenth century, Europe’s Jewish population was largely concentrated in the united kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, which included much of what later ages would know as Belorussia and the Ukraine. In Muslim societies, too, Christian areas chiefly maintained themselves in remote or marginal communities where they could escape the attention of the suspicious majority. Both Christian and Jewish minorities were forced to exercise ever-greater discretion in their daily lives, seeking to avoid any possible acts of provocation, and living in constant fear of violence. In such a world, religions could hope to flourish only in the context of a state that identified fully with that faith, and supported its cause. Except possibly in India, after 1300 it became difficult to practice Christianity outside the protections of a Christian state.
It was a Muslim ruler who administered the coup de grâce to the Christian Middle East. In the 1360s, the warlord Timur began a career that would make him khan over most of Asia, and his homicidal policies toward captured cities followed closely those of his Mongol predecessors. His distinctive custom, his trademark, was to exterminate the population of any city that resisted him, and to erect a giant pyramid built from the skulls of his victims—men, women, and children. Considering the much smaller population of the world at that time, Timur’s depredations probably inflicted greater slaughter, in relative terms, than would either Hitler or Stalin in their day. His career marks the end of the urban Middle Eastern society that had flourished since Hellenistic times. Only in Timur’s time, for instance, did the ancient Silk Road finally cease to function.62
The once-Christian lands of Asia fared no better. About 1400, Timur’s forces massacred the city dwellers of Syria and Mesopotamia. Disaster overcame such venerable Christian areas as Damascus, Amida, Ani, Tikrit, Arbela, Mosul, and Tur Abdin. In 1402, Smyrna’s population was transformed into yet another pyramid of skulls. Even in remote areas like northern Mesopotamia, Timur’s forces sought out refugees who hid in caves, setting fires and thus killing them by asphyxiation. Although by this point the Christian element of the population must have been quite small, Timur did consciously target non-Muslims, boasting of “washing the sword of Islam in the blood of the infidels.” Any Christian remnants in Samarkand and central Asia were finally destroyed by Timur’s grandson, Ulugh Beg. The Asian churches—Nestorian, Jacobite, and others—barely survived even in name.63
On May 29, 1453, Ottoman Turkish forces stormed and captured the city of Constantinople, destroying the last remnants of the Roman Empire. Hagia Sophia, the Church of the Holy Wisdom, lost its status as the world’s largest church, becoming instead a mosque. The traumatic religious implications can be suggested if we imagine a world in which Christians or Jews annexed and converted the cities of Mecca and Medina, demolishing the Ka’ba and turning the Great Mosque into a splendid cathedral or synagogue. The very thought would be blasphemy for pious Muslims; and for Christians throughout eastern Europe and the Middle East, likewise, the fall of Constantinople was “the day the world ended.” Yet for all its symbolic weight, this event was of little practical importance in a world in which the Ottomans had already absorbed virtually all the old Byzantine lands. And at least as a majority faith, Christianity had long since lost its importance. From the fourteenth century, Islam had gained a decisive role as the dominant faith in the Middle East, and the only remaining question was how long Christians could retain any presence whatever.