INTERIOR OF THE DOME OF THE CHAIN, LOOKING NORTH.
Athlit is unmentioned in Scripture, and only the eye of seafaring soldiers could have discovered how its little crease in the long straight line of coast might be utilised for defence. Acre is “the Key to Syria”; but it was left for the Crusaders to discover that fact.
Yet with all this might and purpose and strategic instinct manifest in every mile of Syria, failure is written broad across the land in these ruins. At two points the sense of it becomes especially acute. One is the battlefield below the very mountain which tradition has assigned to the preaching of the Sermon on the Mount. The horrors of that field were such that even yet it is impossible to look without shuddering upon the flattened top of Hattin, where the black basalt stands out from the green slopes below. The Crusaders were rushed into the open plain, near which Saladin’s cavalry were waiting for them, and they met his assault unfed, unrested, and without even water to quench their thirst. Throughout a long hot day they perished round the banner of the Cross, a final element of horror being added when the Saracens set fire to the scrub, and unhorsed knights were roasted alive in their armour. That was the decisive battle of the Crusades, and Saladin marched after it straight upon Jerusalem.
The other point at which the failure of the Crusades has set up its monument is at their own Athlit. The creation of their genius, and for solidity and massive strength perhaps the most characteristic ruin in Syria, it is also the saddest thing of all they have left for a memorial. Near its rocks King Louis IX. of France—most unfortunate and yet most saintly of all crusading kings—was shipwrecked. Here, too, at the end of the thirteenth century, the Knights Templars made their last retreat after the fall of Acre, and it was from its castle that they departed—the last to abandon the last Crusade. Seen from the sea, the compact and rounded promontory of Athlit presents the appearance of a clenched fist menacing and defiant. Its history grimly corroborates the imagination that here through centuries of decay the land as it were gathers itself together, and thrusts out this grim headland in perpetual defiance of the Western world.
The Crusades stand for more in Palestine than it is easy to realise. The comprehensiveness of their historical significance is by no means exhausted when we have stated it in such paradoxes as those with which our chapter began. They were indeed the greatest sham and at the same time the greatest reality of Syrian history, but they were far more than that. They were heirs to all the past of the country, and they did much to perpetuate that past and to carry it on into the time to come. Even from the Moslem life they wrestled with, they borrowed something. They, and the chivalry which they fostered, are the most spectacular part of Western history, and give a dash of brilliant colour to the grey life of the Middle Ages. That brilliance is in part the splendour of the East. The Crusader has borrowed from the Saracen at least a scarf for his sword.
It is chiefly as builders that the Crusaders remain in Syria exposed to modern eyes, and in their building they have perpetuated and utilised the other three invasions. From the first Christians they took over their churches and rebuilt them, retaining something and adding more. From the older Jewish architects they had almost as great an inheritance. There seems no incongruity in the heavy stone mangers and far-driven iron rings which they fixed in the walls of those tremendous vaults on which the Temple area rests; and it is by a not unnatural transference that tradition has given to these the name of Solomon’s Stables. Solomon’s vaults they may have been, but as stables they were of crusading origin. Their own building is a rough imitation of the drafted stones of the Jews. The rustic work is much the same, only rougher, but the plain chiselling is very far from the minute fineness of the older workmanship. Altogether, they were fighters first and builders second. Like the men of Nehemiah’s time, “every one with one of his hands wrought in the work, and with the other hand held a weapon.... Every one had his sword girded by his side, and so builded.” Nor did they fail to utilise the work of Roman builders. At Cæsarea there is the most striking instance of this, and one of the most suggestive facts in the whole story of the Crusaders. Cæsarea was the most Roman of all Syrian towns. Built as the seaport for Sebaste by Herod, it was the part of Syria which travellers and governors sailing from Italy first sighted, and it was designed to give them the impression of a land Romanised. Herod’s delight in pillars is attested by the colonnades of Sebaste, and the wealth of shaft and capital which marks the ruins of all his cities. But in Cæsarea he seems to have excelled himself. The Roman mole which forms the northern side of the harbour “is composed of some sixty or seventy prostrate columns lying side by side in the water like rows of stranded logs.”[31] On the long promontory south of the mole stands the Crusader Castle, notable for the circumstance that the Crusaders built hundreds of lighter and shorter columns into their walls to thorough-bind them, so that, in Oliphant’s exact and graphic words, “the butts project like rows of cannon from the side of a man-of-war.” Which thing is for an allegory; and one of the most eloquent of all sermons in stone it is. Rome did more for Christianity than all its friends, while she was as yet its enemy. Without her courts of justice Paul would have had short shrift from his countrymen. Her roads and her citizenship gave to the first missionaries of the Cross their exit upon the world and their opportunity. Her laws gave them not protection only, but a groundwork for much that entered into that theology which conquered the thought of the world. Paul appealed unto Cæsar, and he wrote to the Romans his gospel expressed in the forms with which they were most familiar. And it was at Cæsarea that he made his appeal, doing in flesh and blood what his disciples a thousand years later did in stone—thorough-binding the walls of the building of Christian faith with Roman columns.
PART III
THE SPIRIT OF SYRIA
In the first and second parts of this book we have been collecting impressions of the Land and its Invaders. It remains for us in the third part to gather these together into something which may enable us to realise more clearly the general meaning and quality of the spirit of Syria. In the main two things must be noted, and the first of them is religious. Whatever else Palestine may be, she is certainly a land with a God. The meaning of Syria is disclosed in her Israelite and Christian periods, whose great fact and characteristic process is the revelation of God to men on earth. All her other invasions have to reckon with that fact. Some of them were bitterly hostile to it, but they were powerless to efface it. Others were indifferent, entering Syria for ends of their own; but history shews them bent over to God’s purposes and unconsciously made the instruments of working out His will. That will brought Israel to her land, isolated her there, hemmed her in, bore her and carried her in everlasting arms on through her centuries, finally was incarnate in her life. For Jesus Christ was a Syrian, and we must orientalise our thoughts of Him before we can rightly understand the Christian revelation.