A History of the Crusades-Vol 1 Read Online Free PDF Page B

Moslem Rule
    The heretic Churches had no such lay protector.
They were entirely dependent on the goodwill of the Caliph; and their influence
and their prestige suffered accordingly. Moreover their heresies had in origin
been largely due to the desire of the orientals to simplify Christian creeds
and practices. Islam, which was near enough to Christianity to be considered by
many to be merely an advanced form of Christianity, and which now had the vast
social advantage of being the faith of the new ruling class, was easily
acceptable to many of them. There is no evidence to tell us how many converts
were made from Christianity to Islam; but it is certain that the vast majority
of these converts were drawn from the heretics and not from the Orthodox.
Within a century of the Conquest, Syria, whose population had been
predominantly heretic Christian, was a mainly Moslem country; but the numbers
of the Orthodox had been very little reduced. In Egypt the Copts, owing to
their wealth, lost ground less rapidly; but theirs was a losing battle. On the
other hand, the continued existence of the heretics was ensured by the milet system, which by stabilizing their position made impossible any reunion of the
Churches.
    The growth of Islam in Syria and Palestine was
not due to a sudden influx of Arabs from the desert. The conquerors’ armies had
not been very large. They had not provided much more than a military caste
superimposed on the existing population. The racial composition of the
inhabitants of the country was hardly changed. The townsmen and villagers,
whether they accepted Islam or remained Christian, soon adopted the Arabic
tongue for all general purposes; and we now loosely call their descendants Arabs;
but they were formed of a blend of many races, of the tribes that had dwelt in
the land before ever Israel came out of Egypt, Amalekites or Jebusites or
Moabites or Phoenicians, and of tribes like the Philistines that had been there
almost as long, and of the Aramaeans that throughout recorded history had
slowly and almost imperceptibly penetrated into the cultivated country, and of
those Jews that, like the first apostles, had joined the Church of Christ. Only
the practising Jews remained ethnologically distinct; and even their racial
purity was slightly impaired. In Egypt the Hamitic stock was less mixed; but it
had been swollen by intermarriage with immigrants from Syria and the deserts
and the upper Nile and the coasts of the whole Mediterranean basin.
    Arab immigration was inevitably at its thickest
in the districts bordering on the desert and in the cities on the caravan
routes that ran along its edge. The decline in the sea-trade of the
Mediterranean, which followed on the Conquest, gave these cities, with their
preponderantly Moslem population, a greater importance than that of the
Hellenistic cities nearer to the coast. Alexandria was the only large port
maintained by Arabs on the Mediterranean. There, and in the Hellenistic cities
of Syria, Christians remained plentiful, probably outnumbering the Moslems.
There was roughly the same difference in the Syrian countryside. The inland
plains and valleys became increasingly Moslem; but between the Lebanon and the
sea Christians of various sects prevailed. In Egypt the distinction was more
between town and country. The fellahin were gradually converted to
Islam, but the towns were largely Christian. In Palestine there was a more
arbitrary division. While much of the countryside became Moslem, many villages
clung to the older faith. Towns of special import to the Christians, such as Nazareth
or Bethlehem, were almost exclusively Christian; and in Jerusalem itself,
despite the Moslems’ regard for it, the Christians remained in the majority.
The Palestinian Christians were almost all of the Orthodox milet. In
addition, there were important colonies of jews at Jerusalem, and at several
lesser towns, such as Safed and Tiberias. The chief Moslem city was the new
administrative