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The First Crusade and Byzantium
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Page 4
When, in the second half of the tenth century (in 969), Palestine had passed over to the Egyptian dynasty of the Fatimids, the new position of the country seems not to have brought about, at least at the beginning, any substantial change in the life of the eastern Christians, and pilgrims continued to come to Palestine in safety. But in the eleventh century circumstances changed. The insane Fatimid caliph Hakim, the Egyptian Nero, began a violent persecution of Christians and Jews all over his possessions. In 1009 he caused the Temple of the Resurrection and Golgotha in Jerusalem to be destroyed. In his rage for destroying churches he stopped only because he was afraid that a similar fate would befall mosques in Christian regions.
When L. Brehier wrote of the Byzantine protectorate over the Holy Land, he had in view a statement of an Arabian historian of the eleventh century, Yahya of Antioch. The latter says that in 1012 a Bedouin chief who had revolted against the caliph Hakim took possession of Syria, forced the Christians to restore the Church of the Resurrection in Jerusalem, and made a bishop the patriarch of Jerusalem; then the Bedouin helped him to build up the Church of the Resurrection and restore many places in it as much as he could. Interpreting this text the Russian scholar V. Rosen remarked that the Bedouin acted probably in order to win the good will of the Greek Emperor. Brehier ascribed Rosen's hypothesis to Yahya's text. Since this important statement of the Bedouin's motive does not belong to Yahya, one may not affirm Brehier's theory of the Byzantine protectorate over Palestine as positively as he does in his book.
A History of the Byzantine Empire - Table of Contents
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Reference address : https://www.ellopos.net/elpenor/vasilief/first-crusade.asp?pg=4
