The Golden Step by Christopher Somerville

(Ierapetra) in the east. Crete’s city states warred and co-operated, feuded and forgave, made alliances and broke them, and traded as widely as they could across the Mediterranean. Pirates based themselves in the island, too, battening on merchant shipping out in the Cretan and Libyan Seas. During this last millennium BC Athens grew to dominate the Greek mainland, while Egypt remained the power in North Africa. Caught geographically between the two, Crete absorbed classical modes of architecture and sculpture from one, a starchy and formal Archaic style from the other. The fluid self-expression, the natural forms and individualistic styles of High Minoan art and society seemed a very long way off.
    Enter the Romans in 67 BC , ruling from Gortyn and ushering in a period (as in Britain) of nearly 400 years of peace, prosperity and social stability, of temple-building, of theatres and forums, of villas and bathrooms, aqueducts and flush lavatories. As a captive on his way by sea to Rome, St Paul the Apostle made a brief stopover in the wild winter of AD 59, and a couple of years later his disciple Titus arrived to bring Christianity to the island. Roman rule began to run out of steam with the general decay of the Roman Empire in the 4th century, and it was the turn of the vigorous young Byzantine empire, spreading west like wildfire from its capital in Constantinople, to take over in Crete. By now the city up on the twin peaks and the high saddle of Lato had been abandoned; the humble port of Lato pros Kamara, formerly simply the commercial conduit of mighty Lato, had swollen to become a trading centre far better situated and more important than the old place back in the hills.
    Unknowing
    Shadowy, those Saracens, bequeathing
    scarce footprints, light but cruel;
    curved swords loosed from ships,
    eagle noses savouring fresh blood,
    scorched rafters.
    Why did they not
    build, paint, sculpt in marble?
    Pain and destruction: could these have sustained
    a century of gold-ringed nobles?
    Basilicas toppled, towns melted, a thousand
    private or public Golgothas. Sum total
    a blank; negative time.
    Then this grotesque
    curtain call, the sky over Rabdh-el-Khandak
    raining heads. Clipped beards catapulted,
    eagle beaks broken on Byzantine stone;
    what the modern mind grasps, barbarism
    dealt to barbarians.
    Expunged, a slate
    wiped clean. Folk devils fallen
    out of retrieval into that desert of
    dry dusty hearts we allot them,
    unseeing, unknowing.
    With one significant but obscurity-shrouded break, the Byzantines ruled Crete for almost a thousand years. They started by running the island’s affairs with a business-like efficiency insisted upon by Constantinople. Crete became a big agricultural producer and a far-and-wide trader. Christianity flourished in the round-apsidal basilica churches that sprang up all across the island. The rule of Byzantium seemed as assured as ever did that of Rome; but it could not withstand the great northward impulse of militant Islam when that phenomenon began to swell through North Africa and the Middle East during the 7th and 8th centuries. Arab Saracens invaded Crete from Alexandria around AD 824, driving out the Byzantine overlords and establishing an emirate in the island. And what then? According to tradition the newcomers slew thousands and pulled down the basilicas, including the great Church of Agios Titos at Gortyn after they had murdered its bishop Cyril. But modern historians are doubtful. The only fact everyone agrees on is that the invaders made their capital at the port of Knossos and named it Rabdh-el-Khandak, City of the Ditch – the city we know today as Iraklion. The Saracens used it as a slave market, and as a base for attacking shipping far out into the Aegean Sea.
    The following century and a half lies cloaked in mystery. Looking back now, from a post-2001 perspective, the period of Islamic rule in the island assumes a resonance it did not carry when I walked through Crete.