io4 RENAISSANCES

nominal lord and master's behalf; and, though the ensuing conquest of
the Wahhabis' homeland and fastness in the Najd by Egyptian Ottoman
arms proved ephemeral,1 Mehmed 'All's execution of the Sublime Porto's
commands did have the effect of making the Hijaz safe again for Sunn!
Muslim pilgrims by liberating the Islamic Holy Land in A.D. 1812 from
a Wahhabi domination that was not re-established thereafter until A.D.
1924-5.

The intermission of the annual pilgrimage to the Holy Cities of the
Hijaz under threat of Wahhabi attack had been singled out by the
eminent Egyptian Muslim historian JabartI as being, in his estimation,
the most important event of a year A.H. 1213 (A.D. 1798-9) which had
also witnessed the descent on Egypt of a French expeditionary force;*
and neither the eventual reconquest of the Hijaz by a resurgent Wahhabi
Power in A.D. 1924-5 nor the simultaneous triumph of a secularising
movement alia Franca in the Ottoman Empire's republican Turkish,
successor-state availed to dry up a pilgrimage-stream whose convergent
waters were fed from a catchment area extending as far west as the
Senegal and as far east as Indonesia.

The military measures twice taken by an Ottoman Sunni Muslim
Power in order to bring the Hijaz under its aegis, and thereby ensure
due access to Mecca and Medina for Sunni Muslim pilgrims from all
parts of a Sunni Muslim World, had their counterparts in the repeated
attempts of the Safawls and their successor Nadir ShSh to reverse the
military decisions of the years A.D. 1534 and 1546* by reconquering from
their 'Osmanli adversaries an Arab 'Iraq which contained the oldest and
most venerable holy cities of the Shl'ah; and in the present context we
may also remind ourselves that the 'Osmanlis* descent from the Anato-
lian Plateau upon the lowlands to the south of the Taurus in A .n. x 5 x 6-x 7
had been anticipated by the East Romans in and after A.D, <j)a64 in a
repeatedly renewed offensive culminating in A.D. 999 in a raid which
had brought East Roman armies as far south as Tarabulus—-more than
half the length of the road from the Cilician Gates to Jerusalem—a
hundred years before any Western Christian Crusader set foot on Syrian
ground.

This expansion of the East Roman Empire southward into Syria in
the tenth century of the Christian Era, like the expansion of the Ottoman
Empire in the same direction in the sixteenth century, was, no doubt,
partly the almost automatic consequence of a local change in a balance
of military and political power. The decline of the Mamluk polity, which
gave the opening for the 'Osmanlis' sixteenth-century swoop upon Syria
and Egypt, had its counterpart in the tenth century in an enfeeblement
of Islam through the break-up of the ' Abbasid Caliphate. Is there any
evidence that the East Roman aggressors, too, were partly moved, as the
'Osmanli aggressors appear to have been, by an aspiration to bring under
their aegis the holy places of their religion? A longing to wrest the Holy
Land of Christendom out of non-Christian hands had once inspired the

* See V. vi. 333, with n. 5, and IX. viii. 250*

* See IV. iv. 462, n. 2. 9 Sc« I. I 300,

* See IV. iv. 399'4°° and V. v. 34*, 346, »53~4, and 256,