OF THE EOMAN EMPIRE 257 Palestine. The house of Seljuk reigned about twenty years in Jerusalem ; *^- but the hereditary command of the holy city and territory was entrusted or abandoned to the emir Ortok, the chief of a tribe ^'^^ of Turkmans, whose children, after their ex- pulsion from Palestine, formed two d}Tiasties 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 sti-angers 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 Tui'kish 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 syva- pathy 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 "2 From the expedition of Isar Atsiz (a.h. 469, A.d. 1076) to the expulsion of the Ortokides (a.d. 1096). Yet William of Tyre (1. i. c. 6, p. 633) asserts that Jerusalem was thirty-eight years in the hands of the Turks ; and an Arabic chronicle, quoted by Pagi (torn. iv. p. 202), supposes that the city was reduced by a Carizmian general to the obedience of the caliph of Bagdad, a.h. 463, A.D. 1070. These early dates are not very compatible with the general history of Asia ; and I am sure that, as late as A.D. 1064, the regnum Babylonicum (of Cairo) still prevailed in Palestine (Baronius, A.D. 1064, No. 56). [See Mujir ad-Din, Hist, de Jerusalem, transl. Sauvaire (1876), p. 69-70; who states that Atslz ibn Auk (the Khwarizmian governor of Damascus) took Jerusalem in 1070-1 and the Abbasid caliph was pro- claimed there two years later, and the Ortokids expelled in 1096.] 82a [Family.]
- 3 De Guignes, Hist, des Huns, tom. i. p. 249-252.
- Willerm. Tyr. 1. i. c. 8, p. 634, who strives hard to magnify the Christian
grievances. The Turks exacted an aureus from each pilgrim ! The caphar of the Franks is now fourteen dollars ; and Europe does not complain of this volun- tary tax. VOL. VI. 17
