Tennessee WordSmith: A Liberal Dose, July 4, 2024 "A History of Israel and Palestine, Part 5"

July 4, 2024

Troy D. Smith

“A History of Israel and Palestine, Part 5”

We are slowly making our way, a few centuries at a time, to the situation in modern Palestine. I am going to start this week’s installment by quoting the final paragraph from last time, as a summary:

“In the eleventh century, the region was invaded by the Seljuk Turks -who were also Muslim -and they took Jerusalem in 1073. The Turks ruled tyrannically for a quarter-century, crushing any attempts at resistance and at different times killing most of the inhabitants of Jerusalem and Gaza. They were finally driven out in 1098 by the Fatimid Caliphate.”

As we discussed earlier, the Byzantine Empire -that is, the eastern half of what had once been the Roman Empire -had been fighting against the Persian Empire for control of the Levant, finally winning that long series of wars and retaking Jerusalem. Then came the Seljuk Turks and took Jerusalem away from them, and by 1098 the Fatimid Caliphate took it away from THEM… just as the Byzantine Empire was making THEIR move to get it back.

In 1094 the Byzantine Emperor appealed to Pope Urban II in Rome for aid in retaking Jerusalem, at that time still controlled by Seljuk Turks, in the name of their shared Christianity. A Crusade was declared to “retake the Holy Land”. Armies from various Western European lands marched to the Levant to join the Orthodox Christian Byzantines in their fight against the Turks. By the time the forces fought their way to Jerusalem -many of them killing Jews they encountered along the way in pogroms -the Fatimids had taken control of the city, so the Crusaders attacked them in a siege in 1099. It was during this siege that the Crusaders truly earned their reputation for cruelty and barbarity. They eventually took all of the Levant, as well as parts of what are now Syria and Turkey, dividing it all into four “Crusader Kingdoms”: the Principality of Antioch, the Counties of Edessa and Tripoli (in northern Lebanon, not the one in Libya)… and the Kingdom of Jerusalem, which would be controlled by (mostly French) Crusaders for the next 200 years. Those two centuries were marked by waves of invasions and counter-invasions of the region, not only by the European Crusaders but by the two principal Muslim powers in the area, the Fatimids (Shiite Muslim) and the Seljuk Turks (Sunni Muslim).

About halfway through that period, in the 12th century, a Kurdish-born Sunni Muslim named Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub rose through the Seljuk ranks. He is usually called Salah ad-Din, or Saladin. He eventually rose to power in his own right, unifying the Muslims in the region and establishing his own dynasty headquartered in Egypt. Saladin then led the forces under his command against the Crusaders, winning a huge victory over them in 1187 that restored most of the Levant -and the city of Jerusalem -to Muslim rule (though the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem held on for another century, confined to a tiny strip of land, before finally falling as well.) There were very few Jews left in Palestine, but they fought on the side of the Muslims against the Crusaders.

Saladin’s Ayyubid Dynasty was short-lived in Egypt, being overthrown in 1250 by mamluks (enslaved soldiers) who set up their own Mamluk Dynasty in Egypt… just in time to defend Palestine from invasion by Mongols, who -in an effort begun by Ghengis (or Jingis) Khan, had already conquered much of the known world. The Mamluks eventually succeeded in repelling the Mongols, but -as had so often been the case -the people of Palestine suffered heavily during the conflict. With both the Mongols and the Crusaders chased out, though, Palestine would have a couple of centuries of relative peace and rebuilding. The region was taken away from the Mamluks by the Empire of the Ottoman Turks in 1516, but -compared to the Crusaders and the Mongols -it was a relatively quick process with much less death and destruction.

The Ottoman Empire would control Palestine for 400 years, until World War I. Most of the region’s inhabitants were Arab Muslims, with some Christians, Druze, and a small number of Jews. Most of the world’s Jews were living in Central and Eastern Europe.

Near the end of that period, in the nineteenth century, two movements arose that would set into motion -along with WWI -events leading to our current situation: Arab nationalism and Zionism.

To be continued.

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech and serves on the executive committee of the Tennessee Democratic Party. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE