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In their capitulation with Omar, the inhabitants had stipulated the assurance of their religion and property; but the articles were interpreted by a master against whom it was dangerous to dispute; and in the four hundred years of the reign of the caliphs, the political climate of Jerusalem was exposed to the vicissitudes of storm and sunshine.
The luxury of the caliphs, so useless to their private happiness, relaxed the nerves, and terminated the progress, of the Arabian empire. Temporal and spiritual conquest had been the sole occupation of the first successors of Mahomet; and after supplying themselves with the necessaries of life, the whole revenue was scrupulously devoted to that salutary work.
I gained it; I confronted the spectre monarchs in their sepulchre; and the same hand that grasped their shadowy rule hath seized the diadem of the mighty caliphs by the broad rushing of their imperial river. 'The world is mine: and shall I yield the prize, the universal and heroic prize, to realise the dull tradition of some dreaming priest, and consecrate a legend?
He rejected positively all traditions but those of the companions of the Prophet, and he denied the claims of any but the first four Caliphs to have been legitimately elected. The Koran was to be the only written law, and Islam was to be again what it had been in the first decade of its existence.
This second period of Islam, though containing her greatest glories and her highest worldly prosperity, is held to be less complete by divines than the first thirty years which had preceded it. Islam was no longer one. To say nothing of the Persian and Arabian schisms, the orthodox world itself was divided, and rival Caliphs had established themselves independently in Spain and Egypt.
Spain soon fell into their hands; only that seven-days' battle of Tours, resplendent with many brilliant feats of arms, resonant with shoutings, and weightier with fate than those dusty combatants knew, saved France. Then until the last year of the Eleventh Century, almost four hundred years, the Caliphs ruled the Spanish Peninsula.
In return for a certain tribute, the earlier caliphs permitted the Christians of Jerusalem to have a patriarch, and to carry on their own form of worship. Of all the caliphs, the celebrated Haroun al-Rashid, best known to us in the stories of the "Arabian Nights," was the most tolerant, and under him the Christians enjoyed perfect peace.
Up to 846 all the successive governors had been Arabs, and many of them were related to the caliphs themselves. With some unfortunate exceptions, they seem to have been men of simple habits the Arabs were never luxurious and usually of strict Mohammedan principles.
The city lies between that and the Nile; then comes a narrow strip of green about ten miles in width, and after that the boundless Libyan Desert. The Pyramids stand upon the very edge of this desert, so that it is sand, sand, sand! everywhere around the city of the Caliphs, save and except this little green border along the Nile.
Clans, numbering many thousand, acknowledge the Sultan as the representative of the Caliphs and the Sovereign Lord of Islam, from whom all the Frank kings receive their crowns; but they are practically independent of him, and pay no taxes but to their own chiefs.
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