Holy land, lost lands, Realpolitik . Imperial Byzantine thinking about Syria and Palestine in the later 10 th and 11 th centuries

This study reviews Byzantine attitudes and state policy towards the region between Antioch and Mount Sinai, stressing the general cautiousness of imperial strategy and, from the late tenth century onwards, the government’s preference for peaceful coexistence and commerce with the Fatimid caliphate. Caliph al-Ḥākim’s destruction of the church of the Holy Sepulchre in 1009 did not overturn this state of affairs, and the main bone of contention between Cairo and Constantinople was the city of Aleppo, not Jerusalem. Even here, the two powers were inclined to leave the initiative to local parties, rather than insisting on direct rule, and communications between Muslim and Byzantine-ruled territories were mostly fairly straightforward. During the relative detente of the first half of the eleventh century, pilgrimages to the Holy Land increased, and it may well have been primarily in order to impress pilgrims – those travelling from Byzantium itself, but especially those from the Christian west – that emperors lavished resources on reconstructing the church of the Holy Sepulchre in the 1030s and 1040s. Militant intervention on behalf of the Christian populations of south ern Syria and Palestine was not on their agenda. These conclusions rest on the collation of miscellaneous evidence, whose components are mostly well-known but have seldom received consideration side by side. The study highlights the value of trade to Fatimids and Byzantines alike, the esteem for ‘the holy places’ among Byzantines besides westerners, and the emperors’ desire to demonstrate concern for the Holy Sepulchre without jeopardising relations with the Fatimids