other cities
of the province, acknowledged the caliph of Bagdad and the sultan of
Persia; and the victorious emir advanced without resistance to the banks
of the Nile: the Fatimite was preparing to fly into the heart of
Africa; but the negroes of his guard and the inhabitants of Cairo made
a desperate sally, and repulsed the Turk from the confines of Egypt. In
his retreat he indulged the license of slaughter and rapine: the judge
and notaries of Jerusalem were invited to his camp; and their execution
was followed by the massacre of three thousand citizens. The cruelty or
the defeat of Atsiz was soon punished by the sultan Toucush, the brother
of Malek Shah, who, with a higher title and more formidable powers,
asserted the dominion of Syria and Palestine. The house of Seljuk
reigned about twenty years in Jerusalem; but the hereditary command
of the holy city and territory was intrusted or abandoned to the emir
Ortok, the chief of a tribe of Turkmans, whose children, after their
expulsion from Palestine, formed two dynasties on the borders of Armenia
and Assyria. The Oriental Christians and the Latin pilgrims deplored a
revolution, which, instead of the regular government and old alliance
of the caliphs, imposed on their necks the iron yoke of the strangers
of the North. In his court and camp the great sultan had adopted in
some degree the arts and manners of Persia; but the body of the Turkish
nation, and more especially the pastoral tribes, still breathed the
fierceness of the desert. From Nice to Jerusalem, the western countries
of Asia were a scene of foreign and domestic hostility; and the
shepherds of Palestine, who held a precarious sway on a doubtful
frontier, had neither leisure nor capacity to await the slow profits of
commercial and religious freedom. The pilgrims, who, through innumerable
perils, had reached the gates of Jerusalem, were the victims of private
rapine or public oppression, and often sunk under the pressure of famine
and disease, before they were permitted to salute the holy sepulchre.
A spirit of native barbarism, or recent zeal, prompted the Turkmans to
insult the clergy of every sect: the patriarch was dragged by the hair
along the pavement, and cast into a dungeon, to extort a ransom from
the sympathy of his flock; and the divine worship in the church of the
Resurrection was often disturbed by the savage rudeness of its masters.
The pathetic tale excited the millions of the West to march under