Origins: Jerusalem, Byzantium, and the Path to Crusade

Jerusalem had been under Muslim rule since its conquest by the caliph Omar in 638, and for long stretches that rule was marked by relative tolerance toward the city's Christian and Jewish inhabitants. By the eleventh century the city and southern Syria lay in the hands of the Shiite Fatimid caliphate, ruled from Cairo, which stood in constant rivalry with the Sunni Abbasid caliphate of Baghdad. In 1009 the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim ordered the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, an act that left a deep scar on European Christian memory even though, for most of the rest of the eleventh century, Fatimid policy toward Christian pilgrims remained generally tolerant. The Byzantine Empire, under the Macedonian dynasty, had meanwhile held a comparatively strong position in Anatolia and the Levant throughout the tenth century.