Abstract
By the 11th century, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre not only had survived the onslaught of the Persians in 614 (and the periodic ravages of earthquake and fire to which it was always subject), it had also enjoyed centuries of generally benign treatment under the successive Muslim dynasties-Omayyad, Abbasid and Fatimid-that ruled Jerusalem during the Early Arab period. When the great destruction of the original Byzantine complex finally came, in the year 1009, it was on the orders of a particularly aberrant Fatimid caliph known as al-Hakim, is remembered for his acts of extreme cruelty and religious intolerance, and in the Holy Land, where he unleashed a savage persecution of Christians, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre became a special target of his wrath. (It is said that al-Hakim was aware of a particular annual observance in the church, the ceremony of the "Holy Fire" on the eve of Easter-documented as early as the 9th century and still observed today-and that he intensely hated the rite, considering it to be bogus.)