Islam and Christianity in Medieval Anatolia

A.C.S. Peacock, Bruno De Nicola

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317112686
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

Islam and Christianity in Medieval Anatolia offers a comparative approach to understanding the spread of Islam and Muslim culture in medieval Anatolia. It aims to reassess work in the field since the 1971 classic by Speros Vryonis, The Decline of Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization which treats the process of transformation from a Byzantinist perspective. Since then, research has offered insights into individual aspects of Christian-Muslim relations, but no overview has appeared. Moreover, very few scholars of Islamic studies have examined the problem, meaning evidence in Arabic, Persian and Turkish has been somewhat neglected at the expense of Christian sources, and too little attention has been given to material culture. The essays in this volume examine the interaction between Christianity and Islam in medieval Anatolia through three distinct angles, opening with a substantial introduction by the editors to explain both the research background and the historical problem, making the work accessible to scholars from other fields. The first group of essays examines the Christian experience of living under Muslim rule, comparing their experiences in several of the major Islamic states of Anatolia between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, especially the Seljuks and the Ottomans. The second set of essays examines encounters between Christianity and Islam in art and intellectual life. They highlight the ways in which some traditions were shared across confessional divides, suggesting the existence of a common artistic and hence cultural vocabulary. The final section focusses on the process of Islamisation, above all as seen from the Arabic, Persian and Turkish textual evidence with special attention to the role of Sufism.

PART I
Christian Experiences of Muslim Rule

Chapter 1
Christians in the Middle East, 600–1000: Conquest, Competition and Conversion

Philip Wood

For the Christian communities of the Middle East, the Turkish invasions of the eleventh century were the second time that their political order had been overturned by an alien foe. The seventh century had already seen the complete redrawing of the political map of the region, as the Persian and Roman empires were catastrophically defeated by the forces of the nascent caliphate. When the dust had settled, the Persian realms had been entirely absorbed by the new Arab state, and the Roman empire was reduced to an impoverished rump state in Anatolia and the Balkans. Yet Christians continued to live and prosper in the conquered territories. There was no sudden conversion to Islam that accompanied conquest.¹

In this chapter I would like to set out some of the evidence for the continuation and transformation of Christian social and political life under Muslim rule. This is significant firstly because it sets the scene for later developments in Anatolia after the battle of Manzikert (1071). But the earlier period also merits investigation because the period of early Islamic rule in the Middle East suggests a number of different models for how the processes of conversion, political accommodation and inter-confessional competition might work in different circumstances.

The religious conversion of the Middle East is a vast subject. I can only really scratch the surface here. But I do wish to emphasise the variety of the Christian experience, whether by confession, by region or by institution. I begin by setting out the confessional diversity of the Middle East as a whole, before discussing the aftermath of the Arab conquests and their different effects in Syria and in northern and southern Mesopotamia.² Finally, I turn to the elements of Arab-Islamic culture and jurisprudence that might allow us to explain the gradual conversion of parts of the Middle East to a new religion.³

The Sixth Century: Three Christian Confessions

The Roman Middle East that fell to Arab arms in the seventh century was no homogeneous territory. As well as Jews, polytheists and Samaritans, the region played host to numerous different Christian confessions. The Chalcedonians were the most numerous of these. This group, intellectual ancestors of the modern Greek Orthodox, derived their theology from the formulae of the 451 Council of Chalcedon, in particular their emphasis on the independent human and divine natures of Christ (a Dyophysite Christology). This was the faith of the emperor and of the four great patriarchates of the east in Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem. It was the only Christian group in the east to enjoy relatively close relations with the Pope in Rome and its adherents were scattered across the eastern Mediterranean. The Chalcedonians of the caliphate are often referred to as Melkites, and I shall use this term here.⁴

The second major Christian confession were the Miaphysites, those who asserted a single unified nature of Christ. This group is sometimes referred to as the anti-Chalcedonians, because they rejected the Council of Chalcedon and viewed this as their main point of departure from the Melkites. Here I shall use the term ‘Jacobite’, the name they were most commonly given by Arabic authors after the missionary bishop, Jacob Baradeus. Whereas the Melkites had been the direct recipients of imperial patronage, the Jacobites had been subject to periodic persecution throughout the sixth century at the hands of impatient patriarchs of Constantinople. In reaction to this persecution, and to their exclusion from a great deal of imperial patronage, they retreated into the countryside in their main strongholds of Egypt, Mesopotamia and northern Syria. They retained the structures of the Chalcedonian church, however, even if their councils and synods were convened in rural monasteries rather than in cities, and they continued to celebrate the imperial patronage they had received in recent in earlier eras.⁵

Modern historians have occasionally represented the Syrian Jacobites as a fifth column, eager to welcome the Arab invaders and expel their Chalcedonian persecutors.⁶ However, these interpretations place rather too much weight on sources written or compiled long after the invasions themselves.⁷ Sixth-century sources offer a much more nuanced view, in which the Jacobites represent themselves as servants of the emperor and as an ‘orthodoxy in waiting’, until such time as he would restore their exiled bishops to their rightful place.⁸

The third major confession that I will discuss here is the Church of the East, often referred to as the Nestorian church. This was the Christian church of the Sasanian empire, which adopted a heavily Dyophysite Christology that could occasionally be reconciled with the Council of Chalcedon. Christians in the Sasanian world endured periodic persecution at the hands of the state authorities, but this was interspersed by various experiments by the Sasanian state to give authority to the bishop of Ctesiphon and to try to influence Christian behaviour through institutional structures.⁹

Relations between all three groups varied substantially across the sixth century. All three could look to important moments of rapprochement or points of conflict in their shared histories, and the sixth century would offer a crucial phase that later historians would look back on, in order to chart contemporary identities. It is, perhaps, ironic, that the closest they came to reconciliation was with the aftermath of the reign of the emperor Heraklios (d. 641). His defeat of the Persian empire in 628 and his representation of the Sasanians as pagan enemies of God offered the possibility of Christian unity.¹⁰ Supported by his allies from the Christian Caucasus, the emperor returned the True Cross to Jerusalem after its capture by the Persians and received communion with the Nestorian patriarch Isho

yahb II.¹¹ Where theologians had long failed to get different confessions to cooperate, the field of battle may have offered a more direct indication of God’s will.

Of course, with the hindsight of subsequent events, we know that Heraklios’ plans came to nothing with the Arab invasions of Syria and Iraq. God, it seemed, had other human agents in mind and other theologies to favour. But the fact that Heraklios came so close to establishing compromise should remind us of two things. Firstly, that any theologian conscious of his history would be aware of the real possibility of the union of the churches. And, secondly, that relations between different Christian confessions were also deeply intertwined with secular affairs, and that God’s hand was seen in the deeds of emperors as much as in the internal workings of the church.¹²

The Effects of the Conquest

Large parts of the Roman Middle East fell to the Arabs very quickly indeed. This was not the long, drawn out struggle that characterised the fall of parts of the Roman West.¹³ Al-Balādhurī reports that the Greeks fled cities like Homs and Damascus for the safety of Roman Cyprus, and that the Arab conquerors were permitted to live in their houses.¹⁴ But the levels of population displacement and the destruction of property during the conquests appear to have been low. The archaeologist Alan Walmsley observes how rare it is to find signs of destruction in the cities of Syria and Palestine.¹⁵ The conquest seems to have been swift and relatively tightly controlled.¹⁶

For several of the Christian confessions of the Middle East, the seventh century may have represented something of an ‘Indian Summer’, to use Chase Robinson’s term.¹⁷ Probably because they simply lacked the administrative manpower to closely monitor the conquered population, the caliphate seems to have allowed many local aristocrats, bishops and monasteries substantial powers to provide justice for their co-religionists¹⁸ and relied on them to raise taxes on behalf of the state.¹⁹ Numismatists have also suggested that similar groups took on the responsibility of minting imitations of Roman coins, when sufficient coin stock was no longer being imported from elsewhere or being produced by the state.²⁰ In Egypt we see Christian elites exploiting the absence of central government to raise much higher taxes on the agricultural population than had occurred under Roman rule.²¹ In other words, the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Transliteration and Place Names
• Abbreviations
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Christian Experiences of Muslim Rule
• Part II Artistic and Intellectual Encounters between Islam and Christianity
• Part III The Formation of Islamic Society in Anatolia
• Bibliography
• Index