Read Bible and Sword for Free Online Page B

take advantage of its prestige. With the shrewd opportunism that characterized the founder, they were eager to adopt as much of Jewish and Christian beliefs and practices as could be fitted in between the pages of the Koran. Omar, the conqueror of Jerusalem, paid a visit of respect to the Holy Rock where Abraham had prepared to sacrifice Isaac and where the Temple of Solomon had once stood. Having cleaned it of the filth with which the Christians of that time had defiled it to show their resentment of the Jews, he adopted the site as a Mohammedan place of worship. There the Mosque of Omar was built, and thenceforward Mahomet was supreme where David had reigned and Jesus preached.
    Yet the connection between Europe and Palestine was kept alive by the continued flow of pilgrims. Omar established the principle of tolerance for Christians and Jews, whom he respected as fellow monotheists, allowing them to remain as residents of Palestine subject to certain disabilities and permitting them to continue visits to their various shrines on payment of a levy from which he derived a comfortable income. But these privileges depended solely on the personal policy of the reigning sovereign. Pilgrims suffered little danger during the reign of friendly or tolerant caliphs such as Harun al-Rashid, who in 801 signalized his famous long-distance friendship with Charlemagne by sending the Emperor the keys to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and acknowledging him as Protector of the Christians in the East. But some were rabid anti-Christians like the mad Caliph El-Hakim, a sort of Arab Nero, who in 996 burned down the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and slaughtered thousands of unbelievers. Others, preferringthe income to the glory, permitted the Christians’ residence and restored the pilgrims’ privileges.
    From all parts of Europe they took the long road to the Holy Land, drawn partly by devotion, but also by curiosity to visit, to touch, to secure souvenirs of the places and the relics associated with the celebrities of the age. These were of course the saints and churchmen. Religion and its exponents ruled the life of the time. The hardest task today for a person who endeavors to understand the medieval world is to realize the extent to which the doctrines, dogmas, and controversies of the Christian Church enveloped and absorbed all mental activity. Although the Old Testament was known in the imperfect version of the Latin Vulgate, it was predominantly the Gospels and the writings of the early Christian Fathers that established the confines of medieval knowledge. As a result Palestine had almost exclusively Gentile connotations in men’s minds. No one thought of Jesus as one of a long line of Hebrew prophets, nor did the earlier prophets or the Mosaic law have the influence that they were to exert later, after the Reformation. To medieval Europeans Palestine meant the soil that their Saviour had trodden, not the land of the Chosen People. Jews of the Middle Ages were exclusively objects of hostility as Christ-killers and usurers. To the earliest Christians, when Christianity was still a sect struggling to establish itself as a Church, the Jews had been the Bourbons of an
ancien régime
. Caiaphas, high priest of the Temple, was to the disciples what George III was to the American colonies. But by the time the Christian Church had become official under Constantine, the Temple had become a ruin and the Jews a homeless sect who, as aliens everywhere, were the more easily contemned. Their thousand years’ possession of Palestine hardly entered the mind of the pilgrim, certainly not the pilgrim of the early Middle Ages.
    The earliest Briton known to us by name to have reached Palestine was not strictly a pilgrim. He was the British monk Pelagius, expounder of the celebrated heresy namedafter him, who came to the Holy Land about the year 413. He had been living in Rome until the sack of that city by Alaric the Goth forced him with many other