{"id":15717,"date":"2016-03-24T22:39:34","date_gmt":"2016-03-24T22:39:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/?p=15717"},"modified":"2016-03-24T22:39:34","modified_gmt":"2016-03-24T22:39:34","slug":"the-annals-of-eutychius-of-alexandria-10th-c-ad-chapter-18-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/2016\/03\/24\/the-annals-of-eutychius-of-alexandria-10th-c-ad-chapter-18-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"The Annals of Eutychius of Alexandria (10th c. AD) \u2013 chapter 18 (part 2)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Heraclius arrives at Jerusalem, and massacres the Jews.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

6. When he entered the city and saw that\u00a0everything had been destroyed and burned by the Persians, he felt a deep sadness;\u00a0then when he saw that Modestus had\u00a0[re]constructed the Church of the Resurrection, of the Skull and the church of Mar Constantine,\u00a0he felt great joy and thanked Modestus for what he had done.\u00a0 The monks and the inhabitants of Jerusalem said to him:\u00a0“The Jews living around Jerusalem, together with those from Galilee,\u00a0took the side of\u00a0the Persians, and they helped them when they invaded the country.\u00a0 They\u00a0went to the trouble of killing more Christians than did the Persians:\u00a0they destroyed the churches and\u00a0set fire to them”.\u00a0 Then\u00a0they let him\u00a0see the dead who had been cast in the Mamilla, and\u00a0made him aware of how many Christians they murdered, how many churches had been destroyed at Tyre by the Jews.<\/p>\n

Heraclius said to them:\u00a0“What do you want, then?”<\/p>\n

“That you give us satisfaction,” they replied. “Kill every Jew\u00a0who is found\u00a0around Jerusalem and in Galilee, because\u00a0if another\u00a0hostile people come to us, we don’t want them to help them again against us, just as they have helped the Persians.”<\/p>\n

Heraclius said to them:\u00a0“How could I kill them, having already given them my protection and having put in writing my promise to them?\u00a0You yourselves know what\u00a0happens to those who violate a treaty.\u00a0 If\u00a0I violated\u00a0the\u00a0treaty and the oath,\u00a0it would be\u00a0shameful for me,\u00a0and a reprehensible action on my part.\u00a0 And I do not think that, if I were to give in writing a\u00a0treaty to others who were not Jews, that they\u00a0would accept it from me.\u00a0 No, if I do not keep faith with the\u00a0treaty signed with them, I would be a perjurer, a traitor, I would no longer be trusted by the people, not to mention the severe guilt and shame that I would\u00a0receive in the presence of Christ our Lord, for the extermination of a people\u00a0to whom\u00a0I had given my protection, leaving\u00a0my promise\u00a0in writing.”<\/p>\n

They answered:\u00a0“Christ our Lord, he knows that killing them by your hand\u00a0would be\u00a0a cause of forgiveness for your sins and purification for your sins. Men, for their part, will justify you, because when you\u00a0gave your protection to the Jews you did not know, or had not learned, how many Christians they had killed nor how many churches had been destroyed.\u00a0 They have come to meet you and have they received you with gifts with the sole purpose\u00a0of deceiving you, to avoid the punishment for what they have perpetrated.\u00a0 If you kill them,\u00a0it would be a worthy sacrifice that you offer to God.\u00a0 We\u00a0would not assign\u00a0this guilt to you, or cause it to be imputed to you.\u00a0 So also we will ask our Lord Jesus Christ to pardon it.\u00a0 We will do for you, in the week that precedes the great fast and in it which is allowed to eat eggs and cheese, a [period] of\u00a0absolute fasting:\u00a0for the whole of the great fasting period we will fast for you and will abstain, in that time, from eating eggs and cheese,\u00a0to last\u00a0as long as\u00a0Christianity”.\u00a0 The Melkites, in fact, in that week abstained from meat and lived on eggs, cheese and fish, as is demonstrated by the Typicon of saint Mar Saba. “We will fast for you,”\u00a0they said, “and\u00a0we will abstain from eating all kinds of fat things.\u00a0 We will make it a rule, a prohibition and a curse so that this can never be changed, and will send written in every part of the world, as we ask forgiveness for what will be done.”<\/p>\n

Heraclius appeased them, and he killed an uncountable number of Jews who lived around Jerusalem and in Galilee.\u00a0 Others managed to hide, and the rest fled into the wilderness, and into the valleys, the mountains and into Egypt.\u00a0 So it was decided that the first week of fasting, in which the Melkites\u00a0abstained only from flesh,\u00a0should become a period of\u00a0absolute fasting.\u00a0 They fasted\u00a0for King Heraclius,\u00a0to beg pardon,\u00a0because he had violated the\u00a0treaty and killed the Jews:\u00a0in this period they refrained from eating eggs, cheese and fish.\u00a0 They sent written\u00a0statements in this regard into all corners of the earth.\u00a0 The Copts of Egypt still fast like this today,\u00a0although not those of Syria, nor the Greek Melkites, because after the death of Heraclius they resumed eating eggs, cheese and fish in this week.\u00a0 In the same week they abstain on Wednesdays and Fridays until the ninth hour, then they eat eggs, cheese and fish according to the Rule of St Nicephorus, patriarch of Constantinople, martyr and confessor, according to the Typicon of the church, allowing the Orthodox to eat in this week eggs and cheese also on Wednesdays and Fridays, although only after the ninth hour.\u00a0 This rule is in sharp contrast with the behavior of those who fast for the Maronite king Heraclius, and\u00a0may God will preserve us from their evil behaviour, because it is not permissible to fast for a man born of a woman and, even worse, for a king who\u00a0has left this world and died a Maronite!<\/p>\n

7. But\u00a0let us return\u00a0to [our] story.\u00a0 Heraclius\u00a0made\u00a0as\u00a0Patriarch of Jerusalem\u00a0the monk Modestus, superior of the monastery of ad-Dukas, and ordered him to go with him to Damascus in order to hand over part of the money raised in Damascus and the Palestinian money, so that he could [re]construct in Jerusalem all the churches that the Persians had destroyed there.\u00a0 Heraclius then came back from Jerusalem to Damascus, and he stopped and took the money\u00a0from Mansur.\u00a0 Modestus was patriarch for nine months and died.\u00a0 After his death the\u00a0see of Jerusalem had no patriarch\u00a0for six years.<\/p>\n

8.\u00a0 In the sixteenth\u00a0year of the reign of Heraclius there died Muhammad, son of \u2018Abd Allah, prophet of the Muslims, on the second Monday of the month of rabi` al-awwal<\/em> in the eleventh year of the Hegira.\u00a0 He was buried in his own house, where he died, that is in the house of Aishah, after thirteen days of illness.\u00a0 He died at the age of sixty-three, leaving no [other] children other than Fatimah, who died forty days after him (Others say “seventy days later”),\u00a0in the time of the caliphate of Abu Bakr.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Heraclius arrives at Jerusalem, and massacres the Jews.\u00a0 6. When he entered the city and saw that\u00a0everything had been destroyed and burned by the Persians, he felt a deep sadness;\u00a0then when he saw that Modestus had\u00a0[re]constructed the Church of the Resurrection, of the Skull and the church of Mar Constantine,\u00a0he felt great joy and thanked […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[19],"tags":[672,674],"class_list":["post-15717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-from-my-diary-announcements","tag-eutychius","tag-eutychius-chapter-18"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15717","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15717"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15717\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}