Within a short time after the death of Mohammed (632) the whole country of Syria, including Palestine, was overrun by the Arabs, and the Holy City of Jerusalem passed out of Christian hands into the control of the infidels. The Arabs, however, shared the veneration of the Christians for the places associated with the life of Christ and did not greatly interfere with the pilgrims who flocked thither from all parts of the Christian world. In the tenth century the strong emperors of the Macedonian dynasty at Constantinople succeeded in winning back all of Syria except the extreme south, and the prospect seemed fair for the permanent possession by a Christian power of all those portions of the Holy Land which were regarded as having associations peculiarly sacred. This prospect might have been realized but for the invasions and conquests of the Seljuk Turks in the latter part of the eleventh century. These Turks came from central Asia and are to be carefully distinguished from the Ottoman Turks of more modern times. They had recently been converted to Mohammedanism and were now the fiercest and most formidable champions of that faith in its conflict with the Christian East. In 1071 Emperor Romanus Diogenes was defeated at Manzikert, in Armenia, and taken prisoner by the sultan Alp Arslan, and as a result not only Asia Minor, but also Syria, was forever lost to the Empire. The Holy City of Jerusalem was definitely occupied in 1076. The invaders established a stronghold at Nicaea, less than a hundred miles across the Sea of Marmora from Constantinople, and even threatened the capital itself, although they did not finally succeed in taking it until 1453.