Vasilief, A History of the Byzantine Empire

Byzantium and the Crusades

The First Crusade and Byzantium 

Page 5

But in any event, that was only the beginning of the restoration of the Holy Land. After Hakim's death in 1021, a time of tolerance for the Christians ensued. A peace was made between Byzantium and the Fatimids, and the Byzantine emperors were able to take up the real restoration of the Temple of the Resurrection. The restoration of the Temple was completed in the middle of the eleventh century under Emperor Constantine Monomachus. The Christian quarter was surrounded by a strong wall. Pilgrims again could go to the Holy Land, and among the other pilgrims mentioned in the sources is a most celebrated man, Robert the Devil, Duke of Normandy, who died at Nicaea in 1035, on his way back from Jerusalem. Perhaps at the same time, in the fourth decade of the eleventh century, the famous Varangian of that epoch, Harald Haardraade, supported by a body of Scandinavians who arrived with him from the north, came to Jerusalem and fought against the Muslims in Syria and Asia Minor. Vexations against the Christians soon recommenced. In 1056 the Holy Sepulchre was closed, and more than three hundred Christians were exiled from Jerusalem.

The destroyed Temple of the Resurrection was evidently restored with magnificence. A Russian pilgrim, the abbot (igumen) Daniel, who visited Palestine in the first years of the twelfth century, soon after the foundation of the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1099, enumerated the columns of the Temple, described its marble decorated floor and the six doors, and gave interesting information on the mosaics. He also described many churches, relics, and places of Palestine mentioned in the New Testament. Daniel and an Anglo-Saxon pilgrim, Saewulf, his contemporary, told how the pagan Saracens (i.e. Arabs), hiding themselves in the mountains and caves, sometimes attacked the traveling pilgrims and robbed them. The Saracens, always laying snares for the Christians, lie hidden in the hollow places of the mountains and the caves of the rocks, watching day and night, and always on the lookout for those whom they can attack.

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