invaded by the Turks. [73] One of the lieutenants of Malek Shah,
Atsiz the Carizmian, marched into Syria at the head of a powerful army,
and reduced Damascus by famine and the sword. Hems, and the 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; [74] 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. [75] 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. [76] 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 fr