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A bloody persecution of the Christians was the result, and the churches of the East were once more exposed to the assaults of iconoclastic fanaticism. Jerusalem suffered severely in the reaction; the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was destroyed; and the patriarch, suspected of treasonous intercourse with the Greeks, was taken prisoner and burnt alive.

The establishment of independent dynasties in various parts of the empire, by the revolts of the provincial governors, had been for some time a source of danger to the Abbasside power, and ultimately accomplished the downfall of the dynasty.

The Aglabites in Africa, the Taherites in Khorassan, the house of Bowíyeh in Persia, had, one by one, fallen off from their allegiance, and the authority of the caliphs extended scarcely beyond the walls of Baghdád; and even in the capital itself they lingered on with fluctuating fortune, alternately the tools or victims of rival factions.

The alienation of Egypt—involving, as it nearly always did, that of Syria as well—more immediately affected the fortunes of Jerusalem, and therefore merits a rather more circumstantial account.