The Last Crusade: The Epic Voyages of Vasco Da Gama Read Free Page A

Jesus’s crucifixion, burial, and resurrection. Now, to Christian anguish bordering on the apocalyptic, the Persians carted away the True Cross on which Jesus was believed to have died, along with the Holy Sponge and Lance and the city’s patriarch, and left the Holy Sepulcher smoldering and hollowed out against a blackened sky.
    On the brink of oblivion, the Romans struggled back and emerged triumphant, and Persia imploded into civil war. But the victors, too, were exhausted. Roman cities had been laid waste and were overwhelmed by refugees, agriculture had been blighted and trade had ground to a halt, and everyone was heartily sick of the crushing taxes that had paid for imperial deliverance. In a time of churning Christian controversy, most damaging of all was Constantinople’s remorseless drive to enforce its orthodox version of Christianity across its lands. Having first fed Christians to the lions, the Romans had turned to persecuting anyone who refused to toe the official line, and across a large swath of the eastern Mediterranean, from Armenia in the north to Egypt in the south, Christian dissidents were far from unhappy at the prospect of a new regime.
    With breathtaking bravado, the Arabs attacked both ancient empires at once.
    In 636, eleven centuries of Persian might ended in a bellowing elephant charge near the future site of Baghdad. “Damn this world, damn this time, damn this fate,” Iran’s national epic would rue, “That uncivilized Arabs have come to make me Muslim.” Islam’s path opened north to Armenia, northeast to the Asian steppes bordering China, southeast to Afghanistan, and onward to India. That same year, an Arab army crushed a vastly larger Roman force at the Battle of Yarmuk and annexed Syria, where Saul of Tarsus had been converted on the road to Damascus and where, in Antioch, he had founded the first organized Christian church. The next year Jerusalem was starved into submission and opened its gates to the new set of conquerors, just eight years after the Romans had triumphantly restored the True Cross to its rightful place. The faith-torn city was holy to Islam as well as to Judaism and Christianity, and centuries of struggles between Romans and Jews over the sacred places gave way to centuries of clashes between Muslims and Christians.
    Four years later, fertile, gilded Egypt, the richest of all Roman provinces, fell to the Arabs. While Constantinople stood impotently by, the truculent desert tribesmen it disparagingly labeledSaracens—“the tent people”—had taken all the lands it had so recently reconquered, at such great cost. As kingdoms and empires were humbled and fell, even bishops began to wonder if Muhammad had been commanded from on high.
    From Egypt, the armies of Islam marched west across the Mediterranean shores of Africa—and there, quite unexpectedly, their seemingly unstoppable onrush stalled.
    The trouble was partly domestic. Muhammad had died without naming an heir, or even leaving clear instructions about how a successor should be chosen. Ancient rivalries soon resurfaced, sharpened by the booty of conquest that snaked in endless caravans across the deserts and invariably ended up in the pockets of the Quraysh, the very tribe whose monopolistic greed Muhammad had so roundly attacked. After some tribal jockeying, the first four caliphs—“successors” to the Prophet—were selected from among Muhammad’s close companions and family, but even that high status failed to protect them. An irate Persian soldier thrust a dagger into the second caliph’s belly, gutted him, and knifed him in the back while he was at prayer. A cabal of Muslim soldiers incensed at the third caliph’s lavish lifestyle and blatant nepotism bludgeoned him to death, and the ummah erupted into civil war. Ali, the fourth caliph—the Prophet’s cousin, son-in-law, and closest confidant—was stabbed with a poisoned sword on the steps of a mosque for being too willing to negotiate with