Catherine the Great and Potemkin
Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar
Young Stalin
Sashenka
JERUSALEM
THE BIOGRAPHY
Simon Sebag Montefiore
To my darling daughter
Lily Bathsheba
The view of Jerusalem is the history of the world; it is more; it is the history of heaven and earth.
Benjamin Disraeli, Tancred
The city has been destroyed, rebuilt, destroyed and rebuilt again. Jerusalem is an old nymphomaniac who squeezes lover after lover to death, before shrugging him off her with a yawn, a black widow who devours her mates while they are still penetrating her.
Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness
The Land of Israel is the centre of the world; Jerusalem is the centre of the Land; the Holy Temple is the centre of Jerusalem; the Holy of Holies is the centre of the Holy Temple; the Holy Ark is the centre of the Holy of Holies and the Foundation Stone from which the world was established is before the Holy Ark.
Midrash Tanhuma, Kedoshim 10
The sanctuary of the earth is Syria; the sanctuary of Syria is Palestine; the sanctuary of Palestine is Jerusalem; the sanctuary of Jerusalem is the Mount; the sanctuary of the Mount is the place of worship; the sanctuary of the place of worship is the Dome of the Rock.
Thaur ibn Yazid, Fadail
Jerusalem is the most illustrious of cities. Still Jerusalem has some disadvantages. Thus it is reported ‘Jerusalem is a golden goblet full of scorpions’.
Muqaddasi, Description of Syria including Palestine
CONTENTS
Notes on Names, Transliterations and Titles
13. Jewish Wars: The Death of Jerusalem
16. Sunset of the Byzantines: Persian Invasion
18. The Umayyads: The Temple Restored
19. The Abbasids: Distant Masters
20. The Fatimids: Tolerance and Lunacy
23. The Golden Age of Outremer
27. The Third Crusade: Saladin and Richard
31. The Magnificence of Suleiman
35. The New Romantics: Chateaubriand and Disraeli
43. The Oud-Player Of Jerusalem
45. Arab Revolt, Balfour Declaration
47. The Victors And The Spoils
51. Jewish Independence, Arab Catastrophe
SECTION ONE
Aerial view of the Temple Mount (Albatross/Topfoto)
Tel Dan stele, c. 850 BC (Zev Radovan)
Ivory pomegranate, Israel Museum (AKG)
Section of Hezekiah’s wall (AKG)
The Siloam inscription, c. 700 BC, Istanbul Archaeological Museum (AKG)
Detail of relief from the palace of Sennacherib in Nineveh (AKG)
Detail of relief from the Treasury of the Palace of Persepolis (Bridgeman Art Library)
Coin discovered near Jericho, c. 333 BC (Zev Radovan)
Silver tetradrachm of Ptolemy I Soter, c. 300 BC, Israel Museum (AKG)
Silver tetradrachm of Antiochus IV Epiphanes, c. 175 BC, Israel Museum (AKG)
Judah the Maccabee
Silver denarius of Mark Antony and Cleopatra VII (The Trustees of the British Museum)
Reconstruction of the Second Temple, Israel Museum (AKG)
Ossuary of ‘Simon the builder of the Sanctuary’ (AKG)
Greek inscription from the temple, c.50 BC, Istanbul Archaeological Museum (AKG)
South-eastern corner of Herodian wall encircling the Temple Mount (Zev Radovan)
The Crucifixion, Hubert van Eyck, Ca’ d’Oro, Venice (Bridgeman Art Library)
Coin of Herod Antipas, c. AD 4–39, Israel Museum (AKG)
Coin of Herod Agrippa I, c. AD 43–39, Israel Museum (AKG)
Head of Titus, first century AD, Louvre Museum, Paris (Bridgeman Art Library)
Skeletal arm of young woman, AD 67 (Zev Radovan)
Rocks at the foot of the Wall, Jerusalem (author’s photograph)
Detail from the Arch of Titus, Rome (AKG)
Coin minted to commemorate victory over Judaea, AD 81 (Zev Radovan)
Bronze bust of Hadrian, c. 135, Israel Museum (Bridgeman Art Library)
Silver coin issued by Simon bar Kochba, c. 132–5, Israel Museum (AKG)
Fourth-century pilgrim graffiti, Church of the Holy Sepulchre (AKG)
Colossal head of Constantine the Great, Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome (AKG)
SECTION TWO
Marble statue of Julian the Apostate, 362, Louvre Museum, Paris (AKG)
Justinian I and his retinue, c. 550, San Vitale, Ravenna (Bridgeman Art Library)
Theodora and her retinue, c. 550, San Vitale, Ravenna (Bridgeman Art Library)
Mosaic map of Palestine, Madaba (AKG)
The Golden Gate (author’s photograph)
Ascension of Muhammad, from a manuscript of Nizami’s poem ‘Khamza’, 1539–43, British Library (AKG)
Umayyad dynasty gold dinar showing Abd al-Malik (The Trustees of the British Museum)
The Dome of the Rock (AKG)
Interior of the Dome of the Rock (Garo Nalbandian)
The looting of Jerusalem in 1099, illuminated miniature from a universal chronicle, Jean de Courcy, Bibliotèque Nationale, Paris (Bridgeman Art Library)
Baldwin I crosses the Jordan, illumination from Roman de Godefroi de Bouillon, Bibliotèque Nationale, Paris (AKG)
Medieval map of Jerusalem from Robert the Monk’s Chronicle of the Crusades (Corbis)
Melisende marrying Fulk of Anjou from the Histoire de la conquete de Jerusalem by William of Tyre, Bibliotèque Nationale, Paris (Bridgeman Art Library)
Melisende’s psalter, c. 1131–43, British Library (AKG)
Baldwin IV and William of Tyre, illumination from Histoire de Outremer by William of Tyre, British Library (AKG)
Portrait of Saladin, British Library (Bridgeman Art Library)
Frederick II entering Jerusalem, 1227, Vatican Library (AKG)
The Dome of Ascension (AKG)
Entrance to the Market of the Cotton Merchants
Qaitbay fountain (AKG)
Suleiman I, portrait attributed to school of Titian, c. 1530, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (AKG)
Fountain of the Gate of the Chain (AKG)
Engraving of Sabbatai Zevi (AKG)
Detail from the exterior mosaics of the Dome of the Rock (Corbis)
SECTION THREE
Ibrahim Pasha, Charles-Philippe Larivière, Museum of French History at the Palace of Versailles (RMN)
Greek Church of the Holy Sepulchre, David Roberts, 1839 (AKG)
Sir Moses Montefiore (author’s collection)
Montefiore windmill (Mishkenot Sha’ananim)
Photograph of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Patriarch Yessayi, 1861 (Armenian Partriarchate)
A group of Yemenite Jews (American Colony)
A group of Ashkenazi Jews, 1885, Hulton Archive (Getty)
Crowd of Russian pilgrims at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (American Colony)
King David Street, Granger Collection (Topfoto)
Theodor Herzl and his family, Hulton Archive (Getty)
Kaiser Wilhelm II in Jerusalem, 1889, Hulton Archive (Getty)
The Kaiser at the Tomb of the Kings (American Colony)
Bertha Spafford and other members of the American Colony with Bedouin friends, 1902 (American Colony)
Hussein Selim al-Husseini (American Colony)
Montagu Parker (Morley family archives)
Wasif Jawhariyyeh (Institute for Palestine Studies)
Jemal Pasha, 1915 (American Colony)
Turkish executions in Jerusalem (Mary Evans Picture Library)
Chaim Weizmann, 1918
David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, 1910 (Getty)
T.E. Lawrence on the governor’s balcony, 1920 (Getty)
The Mayor of Jerusalem surrenders the city, 1917 (Getty)
Fourth of July reception at the American Colony (American Colony)
Winston Churchill, T. E. Lawrence and Amir Abdullah in the gardens of Government House, 1921, Matson Photograph Collection (Library of Congress, Washington, DC)
SECTION FOUR
Investiture by the Duke of Connaught in Barracks Square (American Colony)
Group outside Government House, 1924 (Israel State Archive)
King Hussein in Jerusalem, 1923 (Library of Congress, Washington, DC)
King Faisal and Amir Abdullah surrounded by students, 1933, Matson Photograph Collection (Library of Congress, Washington, DC)
David Ben-Gurion, 1924 (Mary Evans Picture Library)
Mufti Amin al-Husseini at the Nabi Musa festival, 1937 (Keystone Press, France)
Holy Fire ceremony, 1941, Matson Photograph Collection (Library of Congress, Washington, DC)
Prayers at the Western Wall, 1944 (Central Zionist Archives)
Asmahan (Getty)
Mufti Amin al-Husseini meets Adolf Hitler, 1941 (AKG)
Abd al-Kadir al-Husseini, 1940s (Associated Press)
Abd al-Kadir al-Husseini’s funeral procession, 1948 (Government Press Office, State of Israel)
Bombing of the King David Hotel
Katy Antonius (Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs)
Jerusalem in smoke during the Arab–Israeli War, 28 May 1948 (Mary Evans Picture Library)
Arab soldiers escorting a Jewish prisoner, 1 June 1948, Time and Life Pictures (Getty)
Jewish girl fleeing from burning buildings, 28 May 1948, Time and Life Pictures (Getty)
Arab troops behind sandbag barricades, 1 June 1948 (AKG)
King Abdullah with crowds in Jerusalem, 1 July 1948 (Getty)
The scene in al-Aqsa mosque after King Abdullah’s assassination, 20 July 1951 (Associated Press)
King Hussein of Jordan, 29 July 1967 (Associated Press)
Yitzhak Rabin and Moshe Dayan during an Israeli cabinet meeting, 1967 (Micha Bar Am/Magnum Photos)
Israeli paratroopers advancing to Lions’ Gate, 7 June 1967 (Avner Offer)
Israeli soldiers praying at the Western Wall, 7 June 1967 (Cornell Capa/Magnum Photos)
The sheikh in charge of the mosques on the Temple Mount, 7 June 1967 (Micha Bar Am/Magnum Photos)
Israeli troops making their way towards al-Aqsa (Micha Bar Am/Magnum Photos)
Israeli paratroopers at the Dome of the Rock (Avner Offer)
The Maccabees: Kings and High Priests, 160–37 BC
The Herods, 37 BC–AD 100
The Prophet Muhammad and the Islamic Caliphs and Dynasties
Crusader Kings of Jerusalem, 1099–1291
The Hashemite (Sherifian) Dynasty, 1916–
The Kingdom of David and Solomon, and the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah, 1000–586 BC
The Empires, 586 BC–AD 1918
Jerusalem in the First Century AD and Jesus’ Passion
The Crusader Kingdoms, 1098–1489
Mamluk and Ottoman Jerusalem, 1260–1917
The Sykes-Picot Plan, 1916
Sherif Hussein’s Imperial Dream, 1916
UN Plan, 1947
Israel since 1948
Jerusalem: The Old City
Jerusalem in the Early Twentieth Century
The history of Jerusalem is the history of the world, but it is also the chronicle of an often penurious provincial town amid the Judaean hills. Jerusalem was once regarded as the centre of the world and today that is more true than ever: the city is the focus of the struggle between the Abrahamic religions, the shrine for increasingly popular Christian, Jewish and Islamic fundamentalism, the strategic battlefield of clashing civilizations, the front line between atheism and faith, the cynosure of secular fascination, the object of giddy conspiracism and internet myth-making, and the illuminated stage for the cameras of the world in the age of twenty-four-hour news. Religious, political and media interest feed on each other to make Jerusalem more intensely scrutinized today than ever before.
Jerusalem is the Holy City, yet it has always been a den of superstition, charlatanism and bigotry; the desire and prize of empires, yet of no strategic value; the cosmopolitan home of many sects, each of which believes the city belongs to them alone; a city of many names – yet each tradition is so sectarian it excludes any other. This is a place of such delicacy that it is described in Jewish sacred literature in the feminine – always a sensual, living woman, always a beauty, but sometimes a shameless harlot, sometimes a wounded princess whose lovers have forsaken her. Jerusalem is the house of the one God, the capital of two peoples, the temple of three religions and she is the only city to exist twice – in heaven and on earth: the peerless grace of the terrestrial is as nothing to the glories of the celestial. The very fact that Jerusalem is both terrestrial and celestial means that the city can exist anywhere: new Jerusalems have been founded all over the world and everyone has their own vision of Jerusalem. Prophets and patriarchs, Abraham, David, Jesus and Muhammad are said to have trodden these stones. The Abrahamic religions were born there and the world will also end there on the Day of Judgement. Jerusalem, sacred to the Peoples of the Book, is the city of the Book: the Bible is, in many ways, Jerusalem’s own chronicle and its readers, from the Jews and early Christians via the Muslim conquerors and the Crusaders to today’s American evangelists, have repeatedly altered her history to fulfil biblical prophecy.
When the Bible was translated into Greek then Latin and English, it became the universal book and it made Jerusalem the universal city. Every great king became a David, every special people were the new Israelites and every noble civilization a new Jerusalem, the city that belongs to no one and exists for everyone in their imagination. And this is the city’s tragedy as well as her magic: every dreamer of Jerusalem, every visitor in all ages from Jesus’ Apostles to Saladin’s soldiers, from Victorian pilgrims to today’s tourists and journalists, arrives with a vision of the authentic Jerusalem and then is bitterly disappointed by what they find, an ever-changing city that has thrived and shrunk, been rebuilt and destroyed many times. But since this is Jerusalem, property of all, only their image is the right one; the tainted, synthetic reality must be changed; everyone has the right to impose their ‘Jerusalem’ on Jerusalem – and, with sword and fire, they often have.
Ibn Khaldun, the fourteenth-century historian who is both participant and source for some of the events related in this book, noted that history is so ‘eagerly sought after. The men in the street aspire to know it. Kings and leaders vie for it.’ This is especially true for Jerusalem. It is impossible to write a history of this city without acknowledging that Jerusalem is also a theme, a fulcrum, a spine even, of world history. At a time when the power of internet mythology means that the hi-tech mouse and the curved sword can both be weapons in the same fundamentalist arsenal, the quest for historical facts is even more important now than it was for Ibn Khaldun.
A history of Jerusalem must be a study of the nature of holiness. The phrase ‘Holy City’ is constantly used to describe the reverence for her shrines, but what it really means is that Jerusalem has become the essential place on earth for communication between God and man.
We must also answer the question: of all the places in the world, why Jerusalem? The site was remote from the trade routes of the Mediterranean coast; it was short of water, baked in the summer sun, chilled by winter winds, its jagged rocks blistered and inhospitable. But the selection of Jerusalem as the Temple city was partly decisive and personal, partly organic and evolutionary: the sanctity became ever more intense because she had been holy for so long. Holiness requires not just spirituality and faith but also legitimacy and tradition. A radical prophet presenting a new vision must explain the centuries that have gone before and justify his own revelation in the accepted language and geography of holiness – the prophecies of earlier revelations and the sites already long revered. Nothing makes a place holier than the competition of another religion.
Many atheistic visitors are repelled by this holiness, seeing it as infectious superstition in a city suffering a pandemic of righteous bigotry. But that is to deny the profound human need for religion without which it is impossible to understand Jerusalem. Religions must explain the fragile joys and perpetual anxieties that mystify and frighten humanity: we need to sense a greater force than ourselves. We respect death and long to find meaning in it. As the meeting-place of God and man, Jerusalem is where these questions are settled at the Apocalypse – the End of Days, when there will be war, a battle between Christ and anti-Christ, when the Kaaba will come from Mecca to Jerusalem, when there will be judgement, resurrection of the dead and the reign of the Messiah and the Kingdom of Heaven, the New Jerusalem. All three Abrahamic religions believe in the Apocalypse, but the details vary by faith and sect. Secularists may regard all this as antique gobbledegook, but, on the contrary, such ideas are all too current. In this age of Jewish, Christian and Muslim fundamentalism, the Apocalypse is a dynamic force in the world’s febrile politics.
Death is our constant companion: pilgrims have long come to Jerusalem to die and be buried around the Temple Mount to be ready to rise again in the Apocalypse, and they continue to come. The city is surrounded by and founded upon cemeteries; the wizened body-parts of ancient saints are revered – the desiccated blackened right hand of Mary Magdalene is still displayed in the Greek Orthodox Superior’s Room in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Many shrines, even many private houses, are built around tombs. The darkness of this city of the dead stems not just from a sort of necrophilia, but also from necromancy: the dead here are almost alive, even as they await resurrection. The unending struggle for Jerusalem – massacres, mayhem, wars, terrorism, sieges and catastrophes – have made this place into a battlefield, in Aldous Huxley’s words the ‘slaughterhouse of the religions’, in Flaubert’s a ‘charnel-house’. Melville called the city a ‘skull’ besieged by ‘armies of the dead’; while Edward Said remembered that his father had hated Jerusalem because it ‘reminded him of death’.
This sanctuary of heaven and earth did not always evolve providentially. Religions begin with a spark revealed to one charismatic prophet – Moses, Jesus, Muhammad. Empires are founded, cities conquered, by the energy and luck of one warlord. The decisions of individuals, starting with King David, made Jerusalem into Jerusalem.
There was surely scant prospect that David’s little citadel, capital of a small kingdom, would become the world’s cynosure. Ironically it was Nebuchadnezzar’s destruction of Jerusalem that created the template for holiness because that catastrophe led the Jews to record and acclaim the glories of Zion. Such cataclysms usually led to the vanishing of peoples. Yet the Jews’ exuberant survival, their obstinate devotion to their God and, above all, their recording of their version of history in the Bible laid the foundation for Jerusalem’s fame and sanctity. The Bible took the place of the Jewish state and the Temple and became, as Heinrich Heine put in, the ‘portable fatherland of the Jews, the portable Jerusalem’. No other city has its own book and no other book has so guided the destiny of a city.
The sanctity of the city grew out of the exceptionalism of the Jews as the Chosen People. Jerusalem became the Chosen City, Palestine the Chosen Land, and this exceptionalism was inherited and embraced by the Christians and the Muslims. The paramount sanctity of Jerusalem and of the land of Israel was reflected in the growing religious obsession with the restoration of the Jews to Israel and the Western enthusiasm for Zionism, its secular equivalent, between the sixteenth-century Reformation in Europe and the 1970s. Since then, the tragic narrative of the Palestinians, with Jerusalem as their lost Holy City, has altered the perception of Israel. Thus Western fixation, this sense of universal ownership, can work both ways – it is a mixed blessing or a double-edged sword. Today it is reflected in the scrutiny of Jerusalem and the Israel–Palestine conflict, more intense, more emotional than any other on earth.
Yet nothing is quite as simple it seems. The history is often presented as a series of brutal changes and violent reversals but I want to show that Jerusalem was a city of continuity and co-existence, a hybrid metropolis of hybrid buildings and hybrid people who defy the narrow categorizations that belong in the separate religious legends and nationalist narratives of later times. That is why, wherever possible, I follow the history through families – the Davidians, Maccabees and Herodians, the Umayyads and the houses of Baldwin and Saladin, up to the Husseinis, Khalidis, Spaffords, Rothschilds and Montefiores – which reveal the organic patterns of life that defy the abrupt incidents and sectarian narratives of conventional history. There are not just two sides in Jerusalem but many interlinked, overlapping cultures and layered loyalties – a multi-faceted, mutating kaleidoscope of Arab Orthodox, Arab Muslims, Sephardic Jews, Ashkenazi Jews, Haredi Jews of legion courts, secular Jews, Armenian Orthodox, Georgians, Serbs, Russians, Copts, Protestants, Ethiopians, Latins and so on. A single individual often had several loyalties to different identities, the human equivalent of Jerusalem’s layers of stone and dust.
In fact, the city’s relevance has ebbed and flowed, never still, always in a state of transformation, like a plant that changes shape, size, even colour, yet always remains rooted in the same place. The latest, glib manifestation – Jerusalem as media ‘Holy City sacred to three religions’ and twenty-four-hour-news show – is relatively recent. There have been centuries when Jerusalem seemed to lose religious and political importance. In many cases, it was political necessity, not divine revelation, that again stimulated and inspired religious devotion.
Whenever Jerusalem has seemed most forgotten and irrelevant, it was often the bibliolatry, the devoted study of biblical truth by people in faraway lands – whether in Mecca, Moscow, Massachusetts – who projected their faith back on to Jerusalem. All cities are windows into foreign mindsets but this one is also a two-way mirror revealing her inner life while reflecting the world outside. Whether it was the epoch of total faith, righteous empire-building, evangelical revelation or secular nationalism, Jerusalem became its symbol, and its prize. But like the mirrors in a circus, the reflections are always distorted, often freakish.
Jerusalem has a way of disappointing and tormenting both conquerors and visitors. The contrast between the real and heavenly cities is so excruciating that a hundred patients a year are committed to the city’s asylum, suffering from the Jerusalem Syndrome, a madness of anticipation, disappointment and delusion. But Jerusalem Syndrome is political too: Jerusalem defies sense, practical politics and strategy, existing in the realm of ravenous passions and invincible emotions, impermeable to reason.
Even victory in this struggle for dominance and truth merely intensifies the city’s holiness for others. The greedier the possessor, the fiercer the competition, the more visceral the reaction. The law of unintended consequences reigns here.
No other place evokes such a desire for exclusive possession. Yet this jealous zeal is ironic since most of Jerusalem’s shrines, and the stories that go with them, have been borrowed or stolen, belonging formerly to another religion. The city’s past is often imaginary. Virtually every stone once stood in the long-forgotten temple of another faith, the victory arch of another empire. Most, but not all, conquests have been accompanied by the instinct to expunge the taint of other faiths while commandeering their traditions, stories, sites. There has been much destruction, but more often the conquerors have not destroyed what came before but reused and added to it. The important sites such as the Temple Mount, the Citadel, the City of David, Mount Zion and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre do not present distinct layers of history but are more like palimpsests, works of embroidery in which the silk threads are so interwoven it is now impossible to separate them.
The competition to possess the infectious holiness of others has led some shrines to become holy to all three of the religions successively then simultaneously; kings have decreed and men died for them – and yet they are now almost forgotten: Mount Zion has been the site of frenzied Jewish, Muslim and Christian reverence but now there are few Muslim or Jewish pilgrims, and it is mainly Christian again.
In Jerusalem, the truth is often much less important than the myth. ‘In Jerusalem, don’t ask me the history of facts,’ says the eminent Palestinian historian Dr Nazmi al-Jubeh. ‘Take away the fiction and there’s nothing left.’ History is so pungently powerful here that it is repeatedly distorted: archaeology is itself a historical force and archaeologists have at times wielded as much power as soldiers, recruited to appropriate the past for the present. A discipline that aims to be objective and scientific can be used to rationalize religious-ethnic prejudice and justify imperial ambitions. Israelis, Palestinians and the evangelical imperialists of the nineteenth century have all been guilty of commandeering the same events and assigning them contradictory meanings and facts. So a history of Jerusalem has to be a history of both truth and legend. But there are facts and this book aims to tell them, however unpalatable to one side or the other.
My aim here is to write the history of Jerusalem in its broadest sense for general readers, whether they are atheists or believers, Christians, Muslims or Jews, without a political agenda, even in today’s strife.
I tell the story chronologically, through the lives of the men and women – soldiers and prophets, poets and kings, peasants and musicians – and the families who made Jerusalem. I think this is the best way to bring the city to life and to show how its complex and unexpected truths are the result of this history. It is only by chronological narrative that one avoids the temptation to see the past through the obsessions of the present. I have tried to avoid teleology – writing history as if every event were inevitable. Since each mutation is a reaction to the one that preceded it, chronology is the best way to make sense of this evolution, answer the question – why Jerusalem? – and show why people acted the way they did. I hope this is also the most entertaining way to tell it. Who am I to ruin a story that – to use a Hollywood cliché that is, in this case, merited – is the greatest ever told? Among thousands of books on Jerusalem, there are very few narrative histories. Four epochs – David, Jesus, the Crusades and the Arab–Israeli conflict – are familiar, thanks to the Bible, movies, novels and the news, but they are still frequently misunderstood. As for the rest, I dearly wish to bring much forgotten history to new readers.
This is a history of Jerusalem as the centre of world history, but it is not intended to be an encyclopaedia of every aspect of Jerusalem, nor a guidebook of every niche, capital and archway in every building. This is not a minute history of the Orthodox, Latins or Armenians, the Islamic Hanafi or Shafii schools of law, the Hasidic or the Karaite Jews, nor is it told from any specific point of view. The life of the Muslim city from Mamluks to the Mandate has been neglected. The Jerusalem Families have been studied by academics of the Palestinian experience, but scarcely covered by popular historians. Their histories have been and remain extremely important: some key sources are not yet available in English, but I have had them translated and I have interviewed the family members of all these clans in order to learn their stories. But they are only part of the mosaic. This is not a history of Judaism, Christianity or Islam, nor a study of the nature of God in Jerusalem: all these have been expertly done by others – most recently in Karen Armstrong’s excellent Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths. Nor is this a detailed history of the Israel–Palestine conflict: no subject today is so obsessively studied. But my daunting challenge is to cover all these things, I hope in proportion.
My task is to pursue the facts, not to adjudicate between the mysteries of different religions. I certainly do not claim the right to judge whether the divine wonders and sacred texts of the three great religions are ‘true’. Anyone who studies the Bible or Jerusalem has to recognize that there are many levels of truth. The beliefs of other religions and other epochs seem strange to us, while the familiar customs of our own time and place always appear eminently reasonable. Even the twenty-first century, which many seem to regard as the very acme of secular reason and common sense, has its own conventional wisdoms and quasi-religious orthodoxies that will appear incomprehensibly absurd to our great-grandchildren. But the effect of the religions and their miracles on the history of Jerusalem is undeniably real, and it is impossible to know Jerusalem without some respect for religion.
There are centuries of Jerusalem’s history when little is known and everything is controversial. Being Jerusalem, the academic and archaeological debates are always venomous and sometimes violent, even leading to riots and fighting. Events in the last half-century are so controversial that there are many versions of them.
In the early period, historians, archaeologists and cranks alike have squeezed, moulded and manhandled the very few sources available to fit every possible theory which they have then advocated with all the confidence of absolute certainty. In all cases, I have reviewed the original sources and the many theories and come to a conclusion. If I covered myself comprehensively in every case, the most common words in this book would be ‘maybe’, ‘probably’, ‘might’ and ‘could’. I have therefore not included them on every appropriate occasion but I ask the reader to understand that behind every sentence is a colossal, ever-changing literature. Each section has been checked and read by an academic specialist. I am fortunate that I have been helped in this by some of the most distinguished professors at work today.
The most fraught of these controversies is that of King David, because its political implications are so charged and so contemporary. Even at its most scientific, this debate has been conducted more dramatically and with greater harshness than one would find in any other place on any other subject, except perhaps the natures of Christ or Muhammad. The source for the story of David is the Bible. His historical life was long taken for granted. In the nineteenth century, the imperialistic-Christian interest in the Holy Land inspired the archaeological quest for David’s Jerusalem. The Christian nature of this investigation was redirected by the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 which gave it passionate religious-political significance because of David’s status as the founder of Jewish Jerusalem. In the absence of much evidence of the tenth century, revisionist Israeli historians downsized David’s city. Some even questioned whether he was a historical character at all, much to the outrage of Jewish traditionalists and to the glee of Palestinian politicians, because it undermined the Jewish claim. But the discovery of the Tel Dan stele in 1993 proved that King David did exist. The Bible, though not written primarily as history, is nonetheless a historical source which I have used to tell the story. The extent of David’s city and the trustworthiness of the Bible are discussed in the text and for the present conflict over the City of David, see the Epilogue.
Much later, it is impossible to write about the nineteenth century without feeling the shadow of Edward Said’s Orientalism. Said, a Palestinian Christian born in Jerusalem who became a literary professor at Columbia University in New York and an original political voice in the world of Palestinian nationalism, argued that the ‘subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture’, particularly among nineteenth-century travellers such as Chateaubriand, Melville and Twain, had diminished Arab culture and justified imperialism. However, Said’s own work inspired some of his acolytes to try to airbrush these Western intruders out of the history: this is absurd. It is true, however, that these visitors saw and understood little of the real life of Arab and Jewish Jerusalem and, as explained above, I have worked hard to show the actual lives of the indigenous population. But this book is not a polemic and the historian of Jerusalem must show the dominating influence of Western romantic-imperial culture towards the city because it explains why the Middle East so mattered to the Great Powers.
Similarly, I have portrayed the progress of British pro-Zionism, secular and evangelical, from Palmerston and Shaftesbury to Lloyd George, Balfour, Churchill and their friend Weizmann for the simple reason that this was the single most decisive influence on the fate of Jerusalem and Palestine in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
I end the main body of the book in 1967 because the Six Day War essentially created the situation today and it provides a decisive stop. The Epilogue cursorily brings the politics up to the present and ends with a detailed portrait of a typical morning in the three Holy Places. But the situation is ever changing. If I were to continue the history in detail up to today, the book would lack any clear ending and have to be updated almost hourly. Instead I have tried to show why Jerusalem continues to be both the essence of and obstacle to a peace deal.
This work is a synthesis based on a wide reading of the primary sources, ancient and modern, on personal seminars with specialists, professors, archaeologists, families and statesmen, and on innumerable visits to Jerusalem, the shrines and archaeological digs. I have been fortunate to uncover some new or rarely used sources. My research has brought three special joys: that of spending much time in Jerusalem; that of reading the wondrous works of writers from Usamah bin Munqidh, Ibn Khaldun, Evliya Celebi and Wasif Jawhariyyeh to William of Tyre, Josephus and T. E. Lawrence; and, thirdly, that of being befriended and helped, with such trust and generosity, amid ferocious political crises, by Jerusalemites of all sects – Palestinians, Israelis and Armenians, Muslims, Jews and Christians.
I feel I have been preparing to write this book all my life. Since childhood, I have been wandering around Jerusalem. Because of a family connection, related in the book, ‘Jerusalem’ is my family motto. Whatever the personal link, I am here to recount the history of what happened and what people believed. To return to where we started, there have always been two Jerusalems, the temporal and the celestial, both ruled more by faith and emotion than by reason and facts. And Jerusalem remains the centre of the world.
Not everyone will like my approach – after all, this is Jerusalem. But in writing the book I always remembered Lloyd George’s advice to his Governor of Jerusalem, Storrs, who was being savagely criticized by both Jews and Arabs: ‘Well, if either one side stops complaining, you’ll be dismissed.’1
I have been helped in this huge project by a wide cast of scholars outstanding in their fields. I am deeply grateful to them for their help, advice and, where stated, reading and correcting of my text.
In the archaeological–biblical period, thank you, above all, to the following for reading and correcting this section: Professor Ronny Reich; Professor Dan Bahat, formerly the Chief Archaeologist of Jerusalem, who also gave me detailed tours of the city; Dr Raphael Greenberg, who likewise treated me to site visits; and Rosemary Eshel. Thanks for help and advice to Irving Finkel, Assistant Keeper of Ancient Iraq and magical-medical texts at the British Museum; and to Dr Eleanor Robson, Reader in Ancient Middle Eastern Science, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge University, for her correction of the sections on Assyria–Babylon–Persia, and Dr Nicola Schreiber for her advice on the pottery implications for the dating of the gateways of Megiddo; to Dr Gideon Avni, Director of Excavations and Surveys Department, IAA; Dr Eli Shukron, for his regular tours of the dig in the City of David; Dr Shimon Gibson; Dr Renee Sivan of the Citadel. And special thanks to Dr Yusuf al-Natsheh, Director of the Department of Islamic Archaeology of the Haram al-Sharif, for his help throughout the project and for arranging access to closed sites on the Haram and tours with Khader al-Shihabi. On the Herodian–Roman–Byzantine period, I am immensely grateful to Professor Martin Goodman of Oxford University and to Dr Adrian Goldsworthy for the reading and correction of my text.
On the early Islamic period, Arabs, Turks and Mamluks, I owe huge thanks for his advice, guidance and detailed correction of my text to Hugh Kennedy, Professor of Arabic at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), and also to Dr Nazmi al-Jubeh, Dr Yusuf al-Natsheh and Khader al-Shihabi. On the Mamilla Cemetery, I thank Taufik De’adel.
On the Crusades: thanks to Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith, Professor of Ecclesiastical History, Cambridge University, and to Professor David Abulafia, Professor of Mediterranean History, Cambridge University, for reading and correcting the text.
On Jewish history from the Fatimids to the Ottomans: thanks to Professor Abulafia who gave me access to manuscript sections of his Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean, to Professor Minna Rozen, Haifa University, and to Sir Martin Gilbert, who let me read the manuscript of In Ishmael’s House.
On the Ottoman period and the Palestinian Jerusalem Families: thanks to Professor Adel Manna, who read and corrected the text of the sixteenth-, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sections.
On the nineteenth-century–imperialist–early-Zionist periods: thanks to Yehoshoa Ben-Arieh; Sir Martin Gilbert; Professor Tudor Parfitt; Caroline Finkel; Dr Abigail Green, who let me read her manuscript Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero; and Bashir Barakat, for his private research on the Jerusalem Families. Kirsten Ellis generously gave me access to unpublished chapters of Star of the Morning. Dr Clare Mouradian gave me much advice and material. Professor Minna Rozen shared her research on Disraeli and other papers. On the Russian connection, thanks to Professor Simon Dixon, and to Galina Babkova in Moscow; and on the Armenians to George Hintlian and Dr Igor Dorfmann-Lazarev.
On the Zionist period, the twentieth century and the Epilogue: I owe the greatest thanks to Dr Nadim Shehadi, Associate Fellow of the Middle East Programme, Chatham House, and to Professor Colin Shindler, SOAS, both of whom read and corrected these entire sections. I am grateful to David and Jackie Landau of the Economist and Haaretz for their corrections. Thanks to Dr Jacques Gautier; to Dr Albert Aghazarian; to Jamal al-Nusseibeh for ideas and contacts; to Huda Imam for her tour of the Security Wall; to Yakov Loupo for his research on the ultra-Orthodox.
I owe much to Dr John Casey of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, who nobly and mercilessly corrected the entire text, as did George Hintlian, historian of the Ottoman period, Secretary of the Armenian Patriarchate 1975–95. Special thanks to Maral Amin Quttieneh for her translation of Arabic materials into English.
Thanks for advice and family history to the following members of the Jerusalem Families interviewed or consulted: Muhammad al-Alami, Nasseredin al-Nashashibi, Jamal al-Nusseibeh, Zaki al-Nusseibeh, Wajeeh al-Nusseibeh, Saida al-Nusseibeh, Mahmoud al-Jarallah, Huda Imam of the Jerusalem Institute, Haifa al-Khalidi, Khader al-Shihabi, Said al-Husseini, Ibrahim al-Husseini, Omar al-Dajani, Aded al-Judeh, Maral Amin Quttieneh, Dr Rajai M. al-Dajani, Ranu al-Dajani, Adeb al-Ansari, Naji Qazaz, Yasser Shuki Toha, owner of my favourite Abu Shukri restaurant; Professor Rashid Khalidi of Columbia University.
Thanks to Shmuel Rabinowitz, Rabbi of the Western Wall and the Holy Sites; to Father Athanasius Macora of the Catholics, Father Samuel Aghoyan, Armenian Superior of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Father Afrayem Elorashamily of the Copts, Syriac Bishop Severius, Syriac Father Malke Morat.
I am grateful to Shimon Peres, the President of the State of Israel, and Lord Weidenfeld, both of whom shared memories and ideas; to Princess Firyal of Jordan for her memories of Jordanian Jerusalem; and to Prince and Princess Talal bin Muhammad of Jordan.
Thanks to HRH the Duke of Edinburgh for his advice and for checking the text on his mother Princess Andrew of Greece and his aunt Grand Duchess Ella; and to HRH the Prince of Wales. I am especially grateful for access to their private family archives to the Earl of Morley and to the Hon. and Mrs Nigel Parker for their charming hospitality.
Yitzhak Yaacovy was the man who introduced me to Jerusalem: survivor of Auschwitz, fighter in the 1948 War of Independence, man of letters, young aide in Ben-Gurion’s office, he was the long-serving Chairman of the East Jerusalem Development Company under Mayor Teddy Kollek.
The envoys of both the State of Israel and the Palestinian Authority were immensely generous in time, ideas, information and conversation: thanks to Ron Prosor, the Israeli Ambassador to London, Rani Gidor, Sharon Hannoy and Ronit Ben Dor at the Israeli Embassy; Professor Manuel Hassassian, the Palestinian Authority Ambassador in London.
William Dalrymple and Charles Glass were both extremely generous throughout this project with ideas, materials and reading-lists. The Jerusalem Foundation was incredibly helpful: thanks to Ruth Chesin, Nurit Gordon, Alan Freeman and Uri Dromi, Director of Mishkenot Shaanim. No one helped as much with academic and other contacts as John Levy of the Friends of Israel Educational Foundation and of the Academic Study Group, and Ray Bruce, veteran television producer.
Thanks to Peter Sebag-Montefiore and his daughter Louise Aspinall for sharing Geoffrey Sebag-Montefiore’s papers; to Kate Sebag-Montefiore for research into William Sebag-Montefiore’s adventures.
Thanks for help, advice, encouragement to: Amos and Nily Oz, Munther Fahmi at the American Colony Bookshop, Philip Windsor-Aubrey, David Hare, David Kroyanker, Hannah Kedar, Fred Iseman, Lea Carpenter Brokaw, Danna Harman, Dorothy and David Harman, Caroline Finkel, Lorenza Smith, Professor Benjamin Kedar, Yaov Farhi, Diala Khlat, Ziyad Clot, Youssef Khlat, Rania Joubran, Rebecca Abram, Sir Rocco and Lady Forte, Kenneth Rose, Dorrit Moussaeff and her father Shlomo Moussaeff, Sir Ronald and Lady Cohen, David Khalili, Richard Foreman, Ryan Prince, Tom Holland, Tarek Abu Zayyad, Professor Israel Finkelstein, Professor Avigdor Shinan, Professor Yair Zakovitch, Jonathan Foreman, Musa Klebnikoff, Arlene Lascona, Ceri Aston, Rev. Robin Griffith-Jones, the Master of the Temple, Hani Abu Diab, Miriam Ovits, Joana Schliemann, Sarah Helm, Professor Simon Goldhill, Dr Dorothy King, Dr Philip Mansel, Sam Kiley, John Micklethwait, editor of the Economist, Gideon Lichfield, Rabbi Mark Winer, Maurice Bitton, the Curator of Bevis Marks Synagogue, Rabbi Abraham Levy, Professor Harry Zeitlin, Professor F. M. al-Eloischari, Melanie Fall, Rabbi David Goldberg, Melanie Gibson, Annabelle Weidenfeld, Adam, Gill, David and Rachel Montefiore, Dr Gabriel Barkey, Marek Tamm, Ethan Bronner of the New York Times, Henry Hemming, William Sieghart. Thanks to Tom Morgan for help with the research.
Thanks to my agent Georgina Capel and my international rights agents Abi Gilbert and Romily Must; to my British publishers Alan Samson, Ion Trewin and Susan Lamb, my brilliant editor Bea Hemming at Weidenfeld; and to Peter James, the master of copy-editors; to my most longstanding publishers: Sonny Mehta at Knopf; in Brazil to Luiz Schwarz and Ana Paula Hisayama at Companhía das Letras; in France, Mireille Paoloni at Calmann Lévy; in Germany, Peter Sillem at Fischer; in Israel, Ziv Lewis at Kinneret; in Holland, Henk van ter Borg, at Nieuw Amsterdam; in Norway, Ida Bernsten and Gerd Johnsen at Cappelens; in Poland, Jolanta Woloszanska at Magnum; in Portugal, Alexandra Louro at Alêtheia Editores; in Spain, Carmen Esteban at Crítica; in Estonia, Krista Kaer of Varrak; and in Sweden, Per Faustino and Stefan Hilding at Norstedts.
My parents Dr Stephen and April Sebag-Montefiore have been superb editors of all my books. Above all I want to thank my wife Santa, who has been the patient, encouraging and loving sultana of this long process. Santa and my children Lily and Sasha have, like me, undoubtedly suffered the full effects of the Jerusalem Syndrome. They may never recover, but they probably know more about the Rock, the Wall and the Sepulchre than many a priest, rabbi or mullah.
NOTES ON NAMES,
TRANSLITERATIONS AND TITLES
This book inevitably contains a challenging diversity of names, languages and questions of transliteration. It is for general readers, so my policy is to use the most accessible and familiar names. I apologize to purists who are offended by these decisions.
In the Judaean period, I generally use the Greek not the Latin or Hebrew names for the Hasmonean kings – Aristobulos, for example. With minor characters such as Herod’s brother-in-law I use his Hebrew name Jonathan instead of his Greek one, Aristobulos, to avoid confusion with the many other Aristobuloses. With household names, I use the familiar – Herod (not Herodes), Pompey, Mark Antony, Tamurlane, Saladin. For Persian names, if well known such as Cyrus, I use that version. The Maccabean family reigned as the Hasmonean dynasty, but I call them Maccabean throughout for the sake of clarity.
In the Arab period, the challenges are greater. I do not pretend to be consistent. I generally use familiar English forms – such as Damascus rather than Dimashq. I have dropped the Arabic article ‘al-’ before persons, groups and towns but kept it on the whole within compound names and for the first mention of names in the text and the notes and not thereafter. I do not use diacritical marks. Most of the Abbasid and Fatamid caliphs and Ayyubid sultans adopted a regnant name, a laqab, such as al-Mansur. Purely to ease reading, I drop in all cases the definite article. I use ‘ibn’ instead of ‘bin’ except in well-known names. In names such as Abu Sufyan, I do not use the Arabic genitive (which would give, for example, Muawiya ibn Abi Sufyan), again for facility. I generally call the Ayyubids the ‘house of Saladin’.
There is no consistency in the Western historical use of Arab names – for example, the Abbasids are known by their ruling names apart from Harun al-Rashid because he is famous thanks to the Arabian Nights stories. All historians use the name Saladin for the twelfth-century sultan yet call his brother al-Adil. Saladin’s birth name was Yusuf ibn Ayyub; his brother was Abu Bakr ibn Ayyub. Both men adopted honorific names Salah al-Din and Saif al-Din; and both later used regnant names al-Nasir (the Victor) for Saladin and al-Adil (the Just) for his brother. For ease, I use Saladin and Safedin respectively, partly to avoid confusion of Ayyubid names such as al-Adil, al-Aziz, al-Afdal, and partly to highlight the connection with Saladin.
During the Mamluk period, historians usually use the name Baibars, rather than using his regnant name al-Zahir, but then employ regnant names for most of the others – except for al-Nasir Muhammad where they use both. I follow this inconsistent tradition.
During the Ottoman period, in less well-known names, I try to use Turkish, not Arabic, spellings. I have simply chosen the most recognizable version: Jemal Pasha is Çemal in Turkish and often transliterated as Djemal. I use Mehmet Ali instead of Muhammad Ali.
In modern times, I call Hussein ibn Ali the Sherif of Mecca or King Hussein of the Hejaz; I call his sons Prince or Amir (until they too become kings) Faisal and Abdullah instead of Faisal and Abdullah ibn Hussein. I call them Sherifians in the early period and Hashemites later. I call the first king of Saudi Arabia Abdul Aziz al-Saud but more often use the Westernized version, Ibn Saud. Bertha Spafford married Frederick Vester: for consistency I call her Spafford throughout.
Canaan, Judah, Judaea, Israel, Palaestina, Bilad al-Shams, Palestine, Greater Syria, Coele Syria, the Holy Land, are just some of the names used to describe the country, with varying borders. There are said to be seventy names for Jerusalem (some are listed in the Appendix). Within the city, the House of God, the Holy House, the Temple, all refer to the Jewish Temple. The Dome, the Qubbet al-Sakhra, Temple of the Lord, Templum Domini refer to the Dome of the Rock; the Aqsa is the Temple of Solomon. Har HaBayit is the Hebrew and Haram al-Sharif is the Arabic for the Temple Mount, which I also call the sacred esplanade. The Sanctuary refers either to the Holy of Holies or later to the Temple Mount, which Muslims call the Noble Sanctuary (Haram); for Muslims, the Two Sanctuaries refer to Jerusalem and Hebron, another Herodian building: the tomb of Abraham and the patriarchs. The Anastasis, the Church, the Sepulchre and Deir Sultan refer to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The Rock is Sakhra in Arabic; the Foundation Stone is Even HaShtiyah in Hebrew; the Holy of Holies is Kodesh haKodeshim. The Wall, the Kotel, the Western and Wailing Wall and al-Buraq wall refer to the Jewish holy site. The Citadel and the Tower of David refer to the Herodian stronghold close to the Jaffa Gate. The Virgin’s Tomb and St Mary of Jehoshaphat are the same place. The Valley of Jehoshaphat is the Kidron Valley. David’s Tomb, Nabi Daoud, the Cenacle and Coenaculum describe the shrine on Mount Zion. Each of the gates has so many names which change so frequently that to list them would be worthless. Every street has at least three names: the Old City’s main street is El Wad in Arabic; Ha-Gai in Hebrew and the Valley in English.
Constantinople and Byzantium refer to Eastern Rome and its empire; after 1453, I refer to the city as Istanbul. Catholics and Latins are used interchangeably; Orthodox and Greeks also. Iran and Persia are used interchangeably. I use Iraq instead of Mesopotamia for accessibility.
On titles: the Roman emperors were the princeps in Latin and later imperator; Byzantine emperors later became basileos in Greek. In early Islam, Muhammad’s successors were variously Commanders of the Faithful and caliph. Sultan, padishah and caliph are all titles of the Ottoman rulers; in Germany, Kaiser and emperor and in Russia, tsar and emperor are used interchangeably.
On 8th of the Jewish month of Ab, in late July AD 70, Titus, the Roman Emperor Vespasian’s son who was in command of the four-month siege of Jerusalem, ordered his entire army to prepare to storm the Temple at dawn. The next day happened to be the very day on which Babylonians had destroyed Jerusalem over 500 years before. Now, Titus commanded an army of four legions – a total of 60,000 Roman legionaries and local auxiliaries who were eager to deliver the final blow to the defiant but broken city. Within the walls, perhaps half a million starving Jews survived in diabolical conditions: some were fanatical religious zealots, some were freebooting bandits, but most were innocent families with no escape from this magnificent death-trap. There were many Jews living outside Judaea – they were to be found throughout the Mediterranean and Near East – and this final desperate struggle would decide not only the fate of the city and her inhabitants, but also the future of Judaism and the small Jewish cult of Christianity – and even, looking forward across six centuries, the shape of Islam.
The Romans had built ramps up against the walls of the Temple. But their assaults had failed. Earlier that day, Titus told his generals that his efforts to preserve this ‘foreign temple’ were costing him too many soldiers and he ordered the Temple gates set alight. The silver of the gates melted and spread the fire to the wooden doorways and windows, thence to the wooden fittings in the passageways of the Temple itself. Titus ordered the fire to be quenched. The Romans, he declared, should ‘not avenge themselves on inanimate objects instead of men’. Then he retired for the night into his headquarters in the half-ruined Tower of Antonia overlooking the resplendent Temple complex.
Around the walls, there were gruesome scenes that must have resembled hell on earth. Thousands of bodies putrefied in the sun. The stench was unbearable. Packs of dogs and jackals feasted on human flesh. In the preceding months, Titus had ordered all prisoners or defectors to be crucified. Five hundred Jews were crucified each day. The Mount of Olives and the craggy hills around the city were so crowded with crucifixes that there was scarcely room for any more, nor trees to make them.1 Titus’ soldiers amused themselves by nailing their victims splayed and spread-eagled in absurd positions. So desperate were many Jerusalemites to escape the city that, as they left, they swallowed their coins, to conceal their treasure, which they hoped to retrieve when they were safely clear of the Romans. They emerged ‘puffed up with famine and swelled like men with dropsy’, but if they ate they ‘burst asunder’. As their bellies exploded, the soldiers discovered their reeking intestinal treasure troves, so they started to gut all prisoners, eviscerating them and searching their intestines while they were still alive. But Titus was appalled and tried to ban these anatomical plunderings. To no avail: Titus’ Syrian auxiliaries, who hated and were hated by the Jews with all the malice of neighbours, relished these macabre games.2 The cruelties inflicted by the Romans and the rebels within the walls compare with some of the worst atrocities of the twentieth century.
The war had begun when the ineptitude and greed of the Roman governors had driven even the Judaean aristocracy, Rome’s own Jewish allies, to make common cause with a popular religious revolt. The rebels were a mixture of religious Jews and opportunistic brigands who had exploited the downfall of the emperor, Nero, and the chaos that followed his suicide, to expel the Romans and re-establish an independent Jewish state, based around the Temple. But the Jewish revolution immediately started to consume itself in bloody purges and gang-warfare.
Three Roman emperors followed Nero in rapid and chaotic succession. By the time Vespasian emerged as emperor and despatched Titus to take Jerusalem, the city was divided between three warlords at war with each other. The Jewish warlords had first fought pitched battles in the Temple courts, which ran with blood, and then plundered the city. Their fighters worked their way through the richer neighbourhoods, ransacking the houses, killing the men and abusing the women – ‘it was sport to them’. Crazed by their power and the thrill of the hunt, probably intoxicated with looted wine, they ‘indulged themselves in feminine wantonness, decked their hair and put on women’s garments and be-smeared themselves with ointments and had paints under their eyes’. These provincial cut-throats, swaggering in ‘finely dyed cloaks’, killed anyone in their path. In their ingenious depravity, they ‘invented unlawful pleasures’. Jerusalem, given over to ‘intolerable uncleanness’, became ‘a brothel’ and torture-chamber – and yet remained a shrine.3
Somehow the Temple continued to function. Back in April, pilgrims had arrived for Passover just before the Romans closed in on the city. The population was usually in the high tens of thousands, but the Romans had now trapped the pilgrims and many refugees from the war, so there were hundreds of thousands of people in the city. Only as Titus encircled the walls did the rebel chieftains halt their in-fighting to unite their 21,000 warriors and face the Romans together.
The city that Titus saw for the first time from Mount Scopus, named after the Greek skopeo meaning ‘look at’, was, in Pliny’s words, ‘by far the most celebrated city of the East’, an opulent, thriving metropolis built around one of the greatest temples of the ancient world, itself an exquisite work of art on an immense scale. Jerusalem had already existed for thousands of years but this many-walled and towered city, astride two mountains amid the barren crags of Judaea, had never been as populous or as awesome as it was in the first century AD: indeed Jerusalem would not be so great again until the twentieth century. This was the achievement of Herod the Great, the brilliant, psychotic Judaean king whose palaces and fortresses were built on so monumental a scale and were so luxurious in their decoration that the Jewish historian Josephus says that they ‘exceed all my ability to describe them’.
The Temple itself overshadowed all else in its numinous glory. ‘At the first rising of the sun’, its gleaming courts and gilded gates ‘reflected back a very fiery splendour and made those who forced themselves to look upon it to turn their eyes away’. When strangers – such as Titus and his legionaries – saw this Temple for the first time, it appeared ‘like a mountain covered with snow’. Pious Jews knew that at the centre of the courts of this city-within-a-city atop Mount Moriah was a tiny room of superlative holiness that contained virtually nothing at all. This space was the focus of Jewish sanctity: the Holy of Holies, the dwelling-place of God Himself.
Herod’s Temple was a shrine but it was also a near-impregnable fortress within the walled city. The Jews, encouraged by Roman weakness in the Year of the Four Emperors and aided by Jerusalem’s precipitous heights, her fortifications and the labyrinthine Temple itself, had confronted Titus with overweening confidence. After all, they had defied Rome for almost five years. However, Titus possessed the authority, the ambition, the resources and the talent necessary for the task. He set about reducing Jerusalem with systematic efficiency and overwhelming force. Ballistae stones, probably fired by Titus, have been found in the tunnels beside the Temple’s western wall, testament to the intensity of Roman bombardment. The Jews fought for every inch with almost suicidal abandon. Yet Titus, commanding the full arsenal of siege engines, catapults and the ingenuity of Roman engineering, overcame the first wall within fifteen days. He led a thousand legionaries into the maze of Jerusalem’s markets and stormed the second wall. But the Jews sortied out and retook it. The wall had to be stormed all over again. Titus next tried to overawe the city with a parade of his army – cuirasses, helmets, blades flashing, flags fluttering, eagles glinting, ‘horses richly caparisoned’. Thousands of Jerusalemites gathered on the battlements to gawp at this show, admiring ‘the beauty of their armour and admirable order of the men’. The Jews remained defiant, or too afraid of their warlords to disobey their orders: no surrender.
Finally, Titus decided to encircle and seal the entire city by building a wall of circumvallation. In late June, the Romans stormed the hulking Antonia Fortress that commanded the Temple itself and then razed it, except for one tower where Titus set up his command-post.
By mid-summer, as the blistered and jagged hills sprouted forests of fly-blown crucified cadavers, the city within was tormented by a sense of impending doom, intransigent fanaticism, whimsical sadism, and searing hunger. Armed gangs prowled for food. Children grabbed the morsels from their fathers’ hands; mothers stole the tidbits of their own babies. Locked doors suggested hidden provisions and the warriors broke in, driving stakes up their victims’ rectums to force them to reveal their caches of grain. If they found nothing, they were even more ‘barbarously cruel’ as if they had been ‘defrauded.’ Even though the fighters themselves still had food, they killed and tortured out of habit ‘to keep their madness in exercise’. Jerusalem was riven by witch-hunts as people denounced each other as hoarders and traitors. No other city, reflected the eyewitness Josephus, ‘did ever allow such miseries, nor did any age ever breed a generation more fruitful in wickedness than this was, since the beginning of the world’.4
The young wandered the streets ‘like shadows, all swollen with famine, and fell down dead, wherever their misery seized them’. People died trying to bury their families while others were buried carelessly, still breathing. Famine devoured whole families in their homes. Jerusalemites saw their loved ones die ‘with dry eyes and open mouths. A deep silence and a kind of deadly night seized the city’ – yet those who perished did so ‘with their eyes fixed on the Temple’. The streets were heaped with dead bodies. Soon, despite Jewish law, no one buried the dead any more in this grandiose charnelhouse. Perhaps Jesus Christ had foreseen this when he predicted the coming Apocalypse, saying ‘Let the dead bury their dead.’ Sometimes the rebels just heaved bodies over the walls. The Romans left them to rot in putrescent piles. Yet the rebels were still fighting.
Titus himself, an unsqueamish Roman soldier, who had killed twelve Jews with his own crossbow in his first skirmish, was horrified and amazed: he could only groan to the gods that this was not his doing. ‘The darling and delight of the human race’, he was known for his generosity. ‘Friends, I’ve lost a day,’ he would say when he had not found time to give presents to his comrades. Sturdy and bluff with a cleft chin, generous mouth and round face, Titus was proving to be a gifted commander and a popular son of the new emperor Vespasian: their unproven dynasty depended on Titus’ victory over the Jewish rebels.
Titus’ entourage was filled with Jewish renegades including three Jerusalemites – a historian, a king and (it seems) a double-queen who was sharing the Caesar’s bed. The historian was Titus’ adviser Josephus, a rebel Jewish commander who had defected to the Romans and who is the sole source for this account. The king was Herod Agrippa II, a very Roman Jew, brought up at the court of the Emperor Claudius; he had been the supervisor of the Jewish Temple, built by his great-grandfather Herod the Great, and often resided in his Jerusalem palace, even though he ruled disparate territories across the north of modern Israel, Syria and Lebanon.
The king was almost certainly accompanied by his sister, Berenice, daughter of a Jewish monarch, and twice a queen by marriage, who had recently become Titus’ mistress. Her Roman enemies later denounced her as ‘the Jewish Cleopatra’. She was around forty but ‘she was in her best years and at the height of her beauty’, noted Josephus. At the start of the rebellion, she and her brother, who lived together (incestuously, claimed their enemies), had attempted to face down the rebels in a last appeal to reason. Now these three Jews helplessly watched the ‘death-agony of a famous city’ – Berenice did so from the bed of its destroyer.
Prisoners and defectors brought news from within the city that especially upset Josephus, whose own parents were trapped inside. Even the fighters started to run out of food, so they too probed and dissected the quick and the dead, for gold, for crumbs, for mere seeds, ‘stumbling and staggering like mad dogs’. They ate cow dung, leather, girdles, shoes and old hay. A rich woman named Mary, having lost all her money and food, became so demented that she killed her own son and roasted him, eating half and keeping the rest for later. The delicious aroma crept across the city. The rebels savoured it, sought it and smashed into the house, but even those practised hatchetmen, on seeing the child’s half-eaten body, ‘went out trembling’.5
Spymania and paranoia ruled Jerusalem the Holy – as the Jewish coins called her. Raving charlatans and preaching hierophants haunted the streets, promising deliverance and salvation. Jerusalem was, Josephus observed, ‘like a wild beast gone mad which, for want of food, fell now upon eating its own flesh’.
That night of the 8th of Ab, when Titus had retired to rest, his legionaries tried to douse the fire spread by the molten silver, as he had ordered. But the rebels attacked the fire-fighting legionaries. The Romans fought back and pushed the Jews into the Temple itself. One legionary, seized ‘with a divine fury’, grabbed some burning materials and, lifted up by another soldier, lit the curtains and frame of ‘a golden window’, which was linked to the rooms around the actual Temple. By morning, the fire had spread to the very heart of holiness. The Jews, seeing the flames licking the Holy of Holies and threatening to destroy it, ‘made a great clamour and ran to prevent it’. But it was too late. They barricaded themselves in the Inner Court then watched with aghast silence.
Just a few yards away, among the ruins of the Antonia Fortress, Titus was awakened; he jumped up and ‘ran towards the Holy House to put a stop to the fire’. His entourage including Josephus, and probably King Agrippa and Berenice, followed, and after them ran thousands of Roman soldiers – all ‘in great astonishment’. The fighting was frenzied. Josephus claims that Titus again ordered the fire extinguished, but this Roman collaborator had good reasons to excuse his patron. Nonetheless, everyone was shouting, the fire was racing and the Roman soldiers knew that, by the laws of warfare, a city that had resisted so obstinately expected to be sacked.
They pretended not to hear Titus and even shouted ahead to their comrades to toss in more firebrands. The legionaries were so impetuous that many were crushed or burned to death in the stampede of their bloodlust and hunger for gold, plundering so much that the price would soon drop across the East. Titus, unable to stop the fire and surely relieved at the prospect of final victory, proceeded through the burning Temple until he came to the Holy of Holies. Even the high priest was allowed to enter there only once a year. No foreigner had tainted its purity since the Roman soldier-statesman Pompey in 63 BC. But Titus looked inside ‘and saw it and its contents which he found to be far superior’, wrote Josephus, indeed ‘not inferior to what we ourselves boasted of it’. Now he ordered the centurions to beat the soldiers spreading the fire, but ‘their passions were too strong.’ As the inferno rose around the Holy of Holies, Titus was pulled to safety by his aides – ‘and no one forbade them to set fire to it’ any more.
The fighting raged among the flames: dazed, starving Jerusalemites wandered lost and distressed through the burning portals. Thousands of civilians and rebels mustered on the steps of the altar, waiting to fight to the last or just die hopelessly. All had their throats cut by the exhilarated Romans as though it were a mass human sacrifice, until ‘around the altar lay dead bodies heaped one upon another’ with the blood running down the steps. Ten thousand Jews died in the burning Temple.
The cracking of vast stones and wooden beams made a sound like thunder. Josephus watched the death of the Temple:
The roar of the flames streaming far and wide mingled with the groans of the falling victims and owing to the height of the hill and the mass of the burning pile, one would have thought the whole city was ablaze. And then the din – nothing more deafening or appalling could be conceived than that. There were the war cries of the Roman legions sweeping onward, the howls of the rebels encircled by fire and swords, the rush of the people who, cut off above, fled panic-stricken only to fall into the arms of the foe, and their shrieks as they met their fate, blended with lamentations and wailing [of those in the city]. Transjordan and the surrounding mountains contributed their echoes, deepening the din. You would have thought the Temple hill was boiling over from its base, being everywhere one mass of flame.
Mount Moriah, one of the two mountains of Jerusalem, where King David had placed the Ark of the Covenant and where his son Solomon had built the first Temple, was ‘seething hot full of fire on every part of it’, while inside, dead bodies covered the floors. But the soldiers trampled on the corpses in their triumph. The priests fought back and some threw themselves into the blaze. Now the rampaging Romans, seeing that the inner Temple was destroyed, grabbed the gold and furniture, carrying out their swag, before they set fire to the rest of the complex.6
As the Inner Courtyard burned, and the next day dawned, the surviving rebels broke out through the Roman lines into the labyrinthine Outer Courtyards, some escaping into the city. The Romans counterattacked with cavalry, clearing the insurgents and then burning the Temple’s treasury chambers, which were filled with riches drawn from the Temple tax paid by all Jews, from Alexandria to Babylon. They found there 6,000 women and children huddled together in apocalyptic expectation. A ‘false prophet’ had earlier proclaimed that they could anticipate the ‘miraculous signs of their deliverance’ in the Temple. The legionaries simply set the passageways alight, burning all these people alive.
The Romans carried their eagles on to the Holy Mountain, sacrificed to their gods, and hailed Titus as their imperator – commander-in-chief. Priests were still hiding out around the Holy of Holies. Two plunged into the flames, and one succeeded in bringing out the treasures of the Temple – the robes of the high priest, the two golden candelabra and heaps of cinnamon and cassia, spices that were burned every day in the Sanctuary. When the rest surrendered, Titus executed them as ‘it was fitting for priests to perish with their Temple’.
Jerusalem was – and still is – a city of tunnels. Now the rebels disappeared underground while retaining control of the Citadel and the Upper City to the west. It took Titus another month to conquer the rest of Jerusalem. When it fell, the Romans and their Syrian and Greek auxiliaries ‘poured into the alleys. Sword in hand; they massacred indiscriminately all whom they met and burned the houses with all who had taken refuge within.’ At night when the killing stopped, ‘the fire gained mastery of the streets’.
Titus parleyed with the two Jewish warlords across the bridge that spanned the valley between the Temple and the city, offering them their lives in return for surrender. But still they refused. He ordered the plundering and burning of the Lower City, in which virtually every house was filled with dead bodies. When the Jerusalemite warlords retreated to Herod’s Palace and Citadel, Titus built ramparts to undermine them and on 7th of Elul, in mid-August, the Romans stormed the fortifications. The insurgents fought on in the tunnels until one of their leaders John of Gishala surrendered (he was spared, though he faced lifelong imprisonment). The other chieftain Simon ben Giora emerged in a white robe out of a tunnel under the Temple, and was assigned a starring role in Titus’ Triumph, the celebration of the victory in Rome.
In the mayhem and the methodical destruction afterwards, a world vanished, leaving a few moments frozen in time. The Romans butchered the old and the infirm: the skeletal hand of a woman found on the doorstep of her burnt house reveals the panic and terror; the ashes of the mansions in the Jewish Quarter tell of the inferno. Two hundred bronze coins have been found in a shop on the street that ran under the monumental staircase into the Temple, a secret stash probably hidden in the last hours of the fall of the city. Soon even the Romans wearied of slaughter. The Jerusalemites were herded into concentration camps set up in the Women’s Court of the Temple itself where they were filtered: fighters were killed; the strong were sent to work in the Egyptian mines; the young and handsome were sold as slaves, chosen to be killed fighting lions in the circus or to be displayed in the Triumph.
Josephus searched through the pitiful prisoners in the Temple courtyards, finding his brother and fifty friends whom Titus allowed him to liberate. His parents had presumably died. But he noticed three of his friends among the crucified. ‘I was cut to the heart and told Titus,’ who ordered them to be taken down and cared for by doctors. Only one survived.
Titus decided, like Nebuchadnezzar, to eradicate Jerusalem, a decision which Josephus blamed on the rebels: ‘The rebellion destroyed the city and the Romans destroyed the rebellion.’ The toppling of Herod the Great’s most awesome monument, the Temple, must have been an engineering challenge. The giant ashlars of the Royal Portico crashed down on to the new pavements below and there they were found nearly 2000 years later in a colossal heap, just as they had fallen, concealed beneath centuries of debris. The wreckage was dumped into the valley next to the Temple where it started to fill up the ravine, now almost invisible, between the Temple Mount and the Upper City. But the holding walls of the Temple Mount, including today’s Western Wall, survived. The spolia, the fallen stones, of Herod’s Temple and city are everywhere in Jerusalem, used and reused by all Jerusalem’s conquerors and builders, from the Romans to the Arabs, from the Crusaders to the Ottomans, for over a thousand years afterwards.7
No one knows how many people died in Jerusalem, and ancient historians are always reckless with numbers. Tacitus says there were 600,000 in the besieged city, while Josephus claims over a million. Whatever the true figure, it was vast, and all of these people died of starvation, were killed or were sold into slavery.
Titus embarked on a macabre victory tour. His mistress Berenice and her brother the king hosted him in their capital Caesarea Philippi, in today’s Golan Heights. There he watched thousands of Jewish prisoners fight each other – and wild animals – to the death. A few days later, he saw another 2,500 killed in the circus at Caesarea Maritima and yet more were playfully slaughtered in Beirut before Titus returned to Rome to celebrate his Triumph.
The legions ‘entirely demolished the rest of the city, and overthrew its walls’. Titus left only the towers of Herod’s Citadel ‘as a monument of his good fortune’. There the Tenth Legion made its headquarters. ‘This was the end which Jerusalem came to’, wrote Josephus, ‘a city otherwise of great magnificence and of mighty fame among all mankind’.
Jerusalem had been totally destroyed five centuries earlier by Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon. Within fifty years of that first destruction, the Temple was rebuilt and the Jews returned. But this time, after AD 70, the Temple was never rebuilt – and, except for a few brief interludes, the Jews would not rule Jerusalem again for nearly 2,000 years. Yet within the ashes of this calamity lay the seeds not only of modern Judaism but also of Jerusalem’s sanctity for Christianity and Islam.
Early during the siege, according to much later rabbinical legend, Yohanan ben Zakkai, a respected rabbi, had ordered his pupils to carry him out of the doomed city in a coffin, a metaphor for the foundation of a new Judaism no longer based on the sacrificial cult in the Temple.8
The Jews, who continued to live in the countryside of Judaea and Galilee, as well as in large communities across the Roman and Persian empires, mourned the loss of Jerusalem and revered the city ever after. The Bible and the oral traditions replaced the Temple, but it was said that Providence waited for three and a half years on the Mount of Olives to see if the Temple would be restored – before rising to heaven. The destruction was also decisive for the Christians.
The small Christian community of Jerusalem, led by Simon, Jesus’ cousin, had escaped from the city before the Romans closed in. Even though there were many non-Jewish Christians living around the Roman world, these Jerusalemites remained a Jewish sect praying at the Temple. But now the Temple had been destroyed, the Christians believed that the Jews had lost the favour of God: the followers of Jesus separated for ever from the mother faith, claiming to be the rightful heirs to the Jewish heritage. The Christians envisaged a new, celestial Jerusalem, not a shattered Jewish city. The earliest Gospels, probably written just after the destruction, recounted how Jesus had foreseen the siege of the city: ‘ye shall see Jerusalem compassed with armies’; and the demolition of the Temple: ‘Not one stone shall remain.’ The ruined Sanctuary and the downfall of the Jews were proof of the new revelation. In the 620s, when Muhammad founded his new religion, he first adopted Jewish traditions, praying towards Jerusalem and revering the Jewish prophets, because for him too the destruction of the Temple proved that God had withdrawn his blessing from Jews and bestowed it on Islam.
It is ironic that the decision of Titus to destroy Jerusalem helped make the city the very template of holiness for the other two Peoples of the Book. From the very beginning, Jerusalem’s sanctity did not just evolve but was promoted by the decisions of a handful of men. Around 1000 BC, a thousand years before Titus, the first of these men captured Jerusalem: King David.
The city of the Lord, the Zion of the Holy One of Israel … Awake, awake; put on thy strength, O Zion; put on thy beautiful garments, O Jerusalem, the holy city.
Isaiah 60.14, 52.1
My native city is Jerusalem, in which is situated the sacred shrine of the most high God. The holy city is the mother city not of one country, Judaea, but of most of the other neighbouring lands, as well as lands far away, most of Asia, [and] similarly Europe, to say nothing of the countries beyond the Euphrates.
Herod Agrippa I, King of Judaea, quoted in Philo, De Specialibus Legibus
He who has not seen Jerusalem in her splendour has never seen a desirable city in his life. He who has not seen the Temple in its full construction has never seen a glorious building in his life.
Babylonian Talmud, Tractate of the Tabernacle
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.
Psalm 137.5–6
Jerusalem is the most famous city of the East.
Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 5.15
THE FIRST KING: CANAANITES
When David captured the citadel of Zion, Jerusalem was already ancient. But it was scarcely a city, just a small mountain stronghold in a land that would have many names – Canaan, Judah, Judaea, Israel, Palestine, the Holy Land to Christians, the Promised Land to Jews. This territory, just 100 by 150 miles, lies between the south-eastern corner of the Mediterranean and the River Jordan. Its lush coastal plain offered the best path for invaders and traders between Egypt and the empires of the east. Yet the isolated and remote town of Jerusalem, 30 miles from the nearest coast, far from any trade routes, stood high amid the golden-rocked desolation of the cliffs, gorges and scree of the Judaean hills, exposed to freezing, sometimes even snowy, winters and to witheringly hot summers. Nonetheless, there was security atop these forbidding hills; and there was a spring in the valley beneath, just enough to support a town.
The romantic image of David’s city is far more vivid than any facts of verifiable history. In the fog of Jerusalem’s pre-history, fragments of pottery, ghostly rock-cut tombs, sections of wall, inscriptions in the palaces of faraway kings and the holy literature of the Bible can provide only fleeting glints of human life in an invincible gloom, separated by hundreds of years. The sporadic clues that emerge cast a flickering light on some random moment of a vanished civilization, followed by centuries of life of which we know nothing – until the next spark illuminates another image. Only the springs, mountains and valleys remain the same, and even they have been redirected, resculpted, refilled by millennia of weather, debris and human endeavour. This much or little is certain: by the time of King David, holiness, security and nature had combined to make Jerusalem an ancient fastness that was regarded as impregnable.
People had lived there as early as 5000 BC. In the early Bronze Age, around 3200 BC, when the mother of cities, Uruk, in what became Iraq, was already home to 40,000 citizens, and nearby Jericho was a fortified town, people buried their dead in tombs in Jerusalem’s hills, and started to build small square houses in what was probably a walled village on a hill above a spring. This village was then abandoned for many years. Jerusalem scarcely existed while the Egyptian pharaohs of the Old Kingdom reached the zenith of their pyramid building and completed the Great Sphinx. Then in the 1900S BC, at a time when Minoan civilization flourished in Crete, King Hammurabi was about to compile his legal code in Babylon and Britons worshipped at Stonehenge, some pottery, sherds of which were discovered near Luxor in Egypt, mentions a town named Ursalim, a version of Salem or Shalem, god of the evening star. The name may mean ‘Salem has founded’.*
Back in Jerusalem, a settlement had developed around the Gihon Spring: the Canaanite inhabitants cut a channel through the rock leading to a pool within the walls of their citadel. A fortified underground passageway protected their access to the water. The latest archaeological digs on the site reveal that they guarded the spring with a tower and a massive wall, 23 feet thick, using stones weighing 3 tons. The tower could also have served as a temple celebrating the cosmic sanctity of the spring. In other parts of Canaan, priestly kings built fortified tower-temples. Further up the hill, remnants of a city wall have been found, the earliest in Jerusalem. The Canaanites turn out to have been builders on a scale more impressive than anyone in Jerusalem until Herod the Great almost 2,000 years later.1
The Jerusalemites became subjects of Egypt which had conquered Palestine in 1458 BC. Egyptian garrisons guarded nearby Jaffa and Gaza. In 1350 BC, the frightened King of Jerusalem begged his overlord, Akhenaten, the pharaoh of the New Kingdom of Egypt, to send him help – even ‘fifty archers’ – to defend his small kingdom from the aggression of neighbouring kings and bands of marauding outlaws. King Abdi-Hepa called his citadel ‘the capital of the Land of Jerusalem of which the name is Beit Shulmani’, the House of Well-being. Perhaps the word Shulman is the origin of the ‘Shalem’ in the name of the city.
Abdi-Hepa was a paltry potentate in a world dominated by the Egyptians to the south, by the Hittites to the north (in today’s Turkey) and to the north-west by the Mycenean Greeks who would fight the Trojan War. The king’s first name is west Semitic – the Semites being the many Middle East peoples and languages, supposedly descended from Shem, son of Noah. Therefore Abdi-Hepa could have hailed from anywhere in the north-eastern Mediterranean. His appeals, found in the pharaoh’s archive, are panic-stricken and sycophantic, the first known words of a Jerusalemite:*
At the feet of the King I have fallen 7 and 7 times. Here is the deed that Milkily and Shuwardatu have done against the land – they have led the troops of Gezer … against the law of the King … The land of the King has gone over to the Habiru [marauding outlaws]. And now a town belonging to Jerusalem has gone over to the men of Qiltu. May the King listen to Abdi-Hepa your servant and send archers.
We hear no more, but whatever happened to this beleaguered king, just over a century later the Jerusalemites built steep terraced structures above the Gihon Spring on the Ophel hill that survive today, the foundation of a citadel or temple of Salem.2 These powerful walls, towers and terraces were part of the Canaanite citadel known as Zion that David would capture. Some time during the thirteenth century BC, a people called the Jebusites occupied Jerusalem. But now the old Mediterranean world was being torn apart by waves of so-called Sea Peoples who came from the Aegean.
In this storm of raids and migrations, the empires receded. The Hittites fell, Mycenae was mysteriously destroyed, Egypt was shaken – and a people called the Hebrews made their first appearance.
ABRAHAM IN JERUSALEM: ISRAELITES
This new ‘Dark Age’, which lasted three centuries, allowed the Hebrews, also known as Israelites, an obscure people who worshipped one God, to settle and build a kingdom in the narrow land of Canaan. Their progress is illuminated by the stories about the creation of the world, their origins and their relationship with their God. They passed down these traditions which were then recorded in sacred Hebrew texts, later collated into the Five Books of Moses, the Pentateuch, the first section of the Jewish scriptures, the Tanakh. The Bible became the book of books, but it is not one document. It is a mystical library of interwoven texts by unknown authors who wrote and edited at different times with widely divergent aims.
This sacred work of so many epochs and so many hands contains some facts of provable history, some stories of unprovable myth, some poetry of soaring beauty, and many passages of unintelligible, perhaps coded, perhaps simply mistranslated, mystery. Most of it is written not to recount events but to promote a higher truth – the relationship of one people and their God. To the believer, the Bible is simply the fruit of divine revelation. To the historian, this is a contradictory, unreliable, repetitive,* yet invaluable source, often the only one available to us – and it is also, effectively, the first and paramount biography of Jerusalem.
The founding patriarch of the Hebrews was, according to Genesis the first book of the Bible, Abram – who is portrayed as travelling from Ur (in today’s Iraq) to settle in Hebron. This was in Canaan, the land promised to him by God, who renamed him the name ‘Father of Peoples’ – Abraham. On his travels, Abraham was welcomed by Melchizedek, the priest-king of Salem in the name of El-Elyon, the Most High God. This, the city’s first mention in the Bible, suggests that Jerusalem was already a Canaanite shrine ruled by priest-kings. Later God tested Abraham by ordering him to sacrifice his son Isaac on a mountain in ‘the land of Moriah’ – identified as Mount Moriah, the Temple Mount of Jerusalem.
Abraham’s roguish grandson Jacob used trickery to clinch his inheritance, but redeemed himself in a wrestling match with a stranger who turned out to be God, hence his new name, Israel – He who Strives with God. This was the appropriate birth of the Jewish people, whose relationship with God was to be so passionate and tormented. Israel was the father of the founders of the twelve tribes who emigrated to Egypt. There are so many contradictions in the stories of these so-called Patriarchs that they are impossible to date historically.
After 430 years, the Book of Exodus portrays the Israelites, repressed as slaves building the pharaoh’s cities, miraculously escaping Egypt with God’s help (still celebrated by Jews in the festival of Passover), led by a Hebrew prince named Moses. As they wandered through Sinai, God granted Moses the Ten Commandments. If the Israelites lived and worshipped according to these rules, God promised them the land of Canaan. When Moses sought the nature of this God, asking ‘What is thy name?’, he received the majestically forbidding reply, ‘I AM THAT I AM,’ a God without a name, rendered in Hebrew as YHWH: Yahweh or, as Christians later misspelt it, Jehovah.*
Many Semites did settle in Egypt; Ramses II the Great was probably the pharaoh who forced the Hebrews to work on his store-cities; Moses’ name was Egyptian, which suggests at least that he originated there; and there is no reason to doubt that the first charismatic leader of the monotheistic religions – Moses or someone like him – did receive this divine revelation for that is how religions begin. The tradition of a Semitic people who escaped repression is plausible but it defies dating.
Moses glimpsed the Promised Land from Mount Nebo but died before he could enter it. It was his successor Joshua who led the Israelites into Canaan. The Bible portrays their journey as both a bloody rampage and a gradual settlement. There is no archaeological evidence of a conquest but pastoral settlers did found many unwalled villages in the Judaean highlands.† A small group of Israelites, who escaped Egypt, were probably among them. They were united by their worship of their God – Yahweh – whom they revered in a moveable temple, a tabernacle that held the sacred wooden chest known as the Ark of the Covenant. They perhaps crafted their identity by telling the stories of their founding Patriarchs. Many of these traditions, from Adam and the Garden of Eden to Abraham, would later be revered not just by Jews but by Christians and Muslims too – and would be located in Jerusalem.
The Israelites were now very close to the city for the first time.
YOUNG DAVID
Joshua set up his headquarters north of Jerusalem, at Shechem, where he built a shrine to Yahweh. Jerusalem was the home of the Jebusites, ruled by King Adonizedek, a name that suggests a priest-king. Adonizedek resisted Joshua but was defeated. Yet ‘the sons of Judah could not drive out the Jebusites’, who ‘lived in Jerusalem side by side with the sons of Judah as they do today’. Around 1200 BC, Merneptah, the son of Ramses the Great and perhaps the pharaoh who was forced to release Moses’ Israelites, faced attacks from the Sea Peoples – throwing the old empires of the Near East into flux. The pharaoh raided Canaan to restore order. When he returned home, he inscribed his triumph on the walls of his Theban temple, declaring that he had defeated the Sea Peoples, recaptured Ashkelon – and massacred a people who now appear in history for the first time: ‘Israel is laid waste and his seed is not.’
Israel was not yet a kingdom; rather, the Book of Judges recounts, it was a confederation of tribes ruled by elders who were now challenged by a new enemy: the Philistines, part of the Sea Peoples, who originated in the Aegean. They conquered the coast of Canaan, building five rich cities where they wove clothes, crafted red and black pottery, and worshipped their many gods. The Israelites, hill shepherds from little villages, were no match for these sophisticated Philistines whose infantry wore Greek-style breastplates, greaves (leg armour) and helmets, and deployed close-combat weapons that challenged the cumbersome chariotry of the Egyptians.
The Israelites elected charismatic warlords – the Judges – to fight Philistines and Canaanites. At one point, a much neglected verse of the Book of Judges claims the Israelites took and burned Jerusalem; if so, they did not manage to keep the stronghold.
At the Battle of Ebenezer in about 1050 BC, the Philistines crushed the Israelites, destroyed their shrine at Shiloh, captured the Ark of the Covenant, the sacred symbol of Yahweh, and advanced into the hill country around Jerusalem. Faced with annihilation and wishing to be ‘like other nations’, the Israelites decided to elect a king, chosen by God.3 They turned to their ageing prophet, Samuel. Prophets were not predictors of the future but analysts of the present –propheteia in Greek means the interpreting of the will of the gods. The Israelites needed a military commander: Samuel chose a young warrior, Saul, whom he anointed with holy oil. Ruling from a hilltop citadel at Gibeon (Tell al-Ful), just three miles north of Jerusalem, this ‘captain over my people Israel’ justified his selection by defeating the Moabites, Edomites and Philistines. But Saul was not suited to the throne: ‘an evil spirit from the Lord troubled him.’
Samuel, faced with a mentally unstable king, secretly looked elsewhere. He sensed the blessing of genius among the eight sons of Jesse of Bethlehem: David, the youngest, ‘was ruddy, and withal of a beautiful countenance, and goodly to look to. And the Lord said, Arise, anoint him: for this is he.’ David was also ‘cunning in playing, a mighty valiant man, and a man of war, and prudent in matters’. He grew up to be the most remarkable yet rounded character in the Old Testament. The creator of sacred Jerusalem was a poet, conqueror, murderer, adulterer, the essence of the holy king and the flawed adventurer.
Samuel brought young David to court where King Saul appointed him as one of his armour-bearers. When the king was haunted by madness, David showed his first god-given gift: he played the harp ‘so Saul was refreshed’. David’s musical talents are an important part of his charisma: some of the Psalms ascribed to him may even be his.
The Philistines advanced to the valley of Elah. Saul and his army faced them. The Philistines produced a brobdingnagian champion, Goliath from Gath,* whose full armour contrasted with the flimsy gear of the Israelites. Saul feared a pitched battle so he must have been relieved, if sceptical, when David demanded a shot at beating Goliath. David chose ‘five smooth stones out of the brook’ and, wielding his sling, he ‘slang it and smote the Philistine in his forehead, that the stone sunk into his forehead’.† He beheaded the fallen champion and the Israelites pursued the Philistines all the way to their city of Ekron. Whatever its truth, the story signifies that as a boy David made his name as a warrior.*
Saul promoted David but the women in the streets sang ‘Saul hath slain his thousands; David, his ten thousands.’ Saul’s son Jonathan befriended David and his daughter Michal loved him. Saul allowed them to marry but was tormented by jealousy: he twice tried to kill his son-in-law with a javelin. Princess Michal saved David’s life by letting him down from a palace window, and he was later granted asylum by the priests of Nob. The king pursued him, killing all the priests except one, but David escaped again, living on the run as the leader of 600 brigands. Twice he crept up on the sleeping king but spared his life, leading Saul to weep: ‘Thou art more righteous than I.’
Finally David defected to the Philistine King of Gath who granted him his own city domain, Ziklag. The Philistines again invaded Judah and defeated Saul on Mount Gilboa. His son Jonathan was killed and the king himself fell on his sword.
DAVID: THE ROYAL CITY
A young man appeared at David’s camp claiming to have killed Saul: ‘I have slain the Lord’s anointed.’ David killed the messenger and then lamented Saul and Jonathan in timeless poetry:
The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places: how are the mighty fallen! Ye daughters of Israel, weepover Saul who clothed you in scarlet, with other delights, who put on ornaments of gold upon your apparel … Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their lives and in their death they were not divided: they were swifter than eagles, they were stronger than lions … How are the mighty fallen and the weapons of war perished!4
At this dark hour, the southern tribes of Judah anointed David as king with Hebron as his capital, while Saul’s surviving son, Ishbosheth, succeeded Saul to rule the northern tribes of Israel. After a seven-year war, Ishbosheth was murdered and the northern tribes too anointed David as king. The monarchy was united yet the split between Israel and Judah was a schism healed only by David’s charisma.
Jerusalem, known as Jebus after its Jebusite inhabitants, stood just south of Saul’s stronghold, Gibeon. David and his army advanced on the citadel of Zion, facing the formidable fortifications which have been recently uncovered around the Gihon Spring.* Zion was said to be impregnable and how David captured it is a mystery. The Bible portrays the Jebusites lining the walls with the blind and the lame, a warning to any attacker of what would befall him. But the king somehow penetrated the city – through what the Hebrew Bible calls a zinnor. This may be a water-tunnel, one of the network now being excavated on the Ophel hill, or it may be the name of some magical spell. Either way, ‘David took the stronghold of Zion: the same is the city of David.’
This capture may just have been a palace coup. David did not slaughter the Jebusites; instead he co-opted them into his cosmopolitan court and army. He renamed Zion the City of David, repaired the walls and summoned the Ark of the Covenant (recaptured in battle) to Jerusalem. Its awesome sanctity killed one of those moving it, so David placed it with a trusted Git until it was safe to bear. ‘David and all the house of Israel brought up the ark of the Lord with shouting and the sound of the trumpet.’ Donning the sacerdotal loincloth, ‘David danced before the Lord with all his might.’ In return, God promised David, ‘thine house and thy kingdom shall be established for ever’. After the centuries of struggle, David was declaring that Yahweh had found a permanent home in a holy city.5
Michal, Saul’s daughter, mocked her husband’s half-naked submission to God as a display of vulgar vanity.6 While the earlier books of the Bible are a mixture of ancient texts and backdated stories written much later, the rounded, unheroic portrait of David, buried within the second Book of Samuel and the first Book of Kings, reads so vividly that it may have been based on the memoir of a courtier.
David chose this stronghold for his capital because it belonged neither to the northern tribes nor to his own southern Judah. He brought the golden shields of his conquered enemies to Jerusalem, where he built himself a palace, importing cedarwood from his Phoenician allies in Tyre. David is said to have conquered a kingdom that stretched from Lebanon to the borders of Egypt, and eastwards into today’s Jordan and Syria, even placing a garrison in Damascus. Our only source for David is the Bible: between 1200 and 850 BC, the empires of Egypt and Iraq were in eclipse and left meagre royal records, but they also left a power vacuum. David certainly existed: an inscription found in 1993 at Tel Dan in northern Israel dating from the ninth century BC shows that the kings of Judah were known as the House of David, proving that David was the kingdom’s founder.
Yet David’s Jerusalem was tiny. At this time, the city of Babylon, in today’s Iraq, covered 2,500 acres; even the nearby town of Hazor covered 200. Jerusalem was probably no more than 15 acres, just enough to house about 1,200 people around the citadel. But the recent discoveries of fortifications above the Gihon Spring prove that David’s Zion was much more substantial than previously thought, even if it was very far from an imperial capital.* David’s kingdom, conquered with his Cretan, Philistine and Hittite mercenaries, is plausible too, however exaggerated by the Bible, and was only a tribal federation held together by his personality. The Maccabees would, much later, show how dynamic warlords could quickly conquer a Jewish empire during an imperial power vacuum.
One evening, David was relaxing on the roof of his palace: ‘he saw a woman washing herself and the woman was very beautiful to look upon. And David sent and enquired after the woman. And one said, Is this not Bathsheba?’ The woman was married to one of his non-Israelite mercenary captains, Uriah the Hittite. David summoned her and ‘she came in unto him and he lay with her’, making her pregnant. The king ordered his commander Joab to send him her husband back from the wars in present-day Jordan. When Uriah arrived, David ordered him to go home to ‘wash thy feet’ though he really intended that Uriah should sleep with Bathsheba to cover up her pregnancy. But Uriah refused so David ordered him to take this letter back to Joab: ‘Set ye Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle … that he may be smitten.’ Uriah was killed.
Bathsheba became David’s favourite wife, but the prophet Nathan told the king the story of a rich man who had everything but still stole a poor man’s only lamb. David was appalled by the injustice: ‘the man that hath done this thing shall surely die!’ ‘Thou art that man,’ replied Nathan. The king realized that he had committed a terrible crime. He and Bathsheba lost their first child born of this sin – but their second son, Solomon, survived.7
Far from being some ideal court of a holy king, David presided over a bearpit that rings true in its details. Like many an empire built around one strongman, when he ailed, the cracks started to show: his sons struggled for the succession. His eldest, Amnon, may have expected to succeed David but the king’s favourite was Amnon’s half-brother, the spoiled and ambitious Absalom, with his lustrous head of hair and a physique without blemish: ‘in all Israel there was none to be so much praised as Absalom for his beauty’.
ABSALOM: RISE AND FALL OF A PRINCE
After Amnon lured Absalom’s sister Tamar to his house and raped her, Absalom had Amnon murdered outside Jerusalem. As David mourned, Absalom fled the capital and returned only after three years. The king and his favourite were reconciled: Absalom bowed to the ground before the throne and David kissed him. But Prince Absalom could not rein in his ambition. He paraded through Jerusalem in his chariot and horses with fifty men running before him. He undermined his father’s government – ‘Absalom stole the heart of Israel’ – and set up his own rebel court at Hebron.
The people flocked to the rising sun, Absalom. But now David regained some of his old spirit: he seized the Ark of the Covenant, the emblem of God’s favour, and then abandoned Jerusalem. While Absalom established himself in Jerusalem, the old king rallied his forces. ‘Deal gently for my sake with the young man,’ David told his general, Joab. When David’s forces massacred the rebels in the forest of Ephraim, Absalom fled on a mule. His gorgeous hair was his undoing: ‘and the mule went under the thick boughs of a great oak, and his head caught hold of the oak and he was taken up between the heaven and the earth; and the mule that was under him went away.’ When the dangling Absalom was spotted, Joab killed him and buried the body in a pit instead of beneath the pillar the rebel prince had built for himself.* ‘Is the young man Absalom safe?’ the king asked pathetically. When David heard that the prince was dead, he lamented: ‘Oh my son, Absalom, my son, my son Absalom, would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!’8 As famine and plague spread across the kingdom, David stood on Mount Moriah and saw the angel of death threaten Jerusalem. He experienced a theophany, a divine revelation, in which he was ordered to build an altar there. There may already have been a shrine in Jerusalem whose rulers are described as priest-kings. One of the original inhabitants of the city, Araunah the Jebusite, owned land on Moriah which suggests that the city had expanded from the Ophel onto the neighbouring mountain. ‘So David bought the threshing floor and the oxen for fifty shekels of silver. And David built there an altar unto the Lord and offered burnt offerings and peace offerings.’ David planned a temple there and ordered cedarwood from Abibaal, the Phoenician King of Tyre. It was the crowning moment in his career, the bringing together of God and his people, the union of Israel and Judah, and the anointment of Jerusalem herself as the holy capital. But it was not to be. God told David: ‘Thou shalt not build an house for my name, because thou hast been a man of war and hast shed blood.’
Now that David was ‘old and stricken’, his courtiers and sons intrigued for the succession. Another son Adonijah made a bid for the throne, while a lissom concubine, Abishag, was brought in to distract David. But the plotters underestimated Bathsheba.9
SOLOMON: THE TEMPLE
Bathsheba claimed the throne for her son Solomon. David called in Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet, who escorted Solomon on the king’s own mule down to the sacred Gihon Spring. There he was anointed king. The trumpet was blown and the people celebrated. Adonijah, hearing the celebrations, sought refuge in the sanctuary of the altar, and Solomon guaranteed his life.10
After an extraordinary career that united the Israelites and cast Jerusalem as God’s city, David died, having ordered Solomon to build the Temple on Mount Moriah. It was the authors of the Bible, writing four centuries afterwards to instruct their own times, who made the imperfect David into the essence of the sacred king. He was buried in the City of David.* His son was very different. Solomon would finish that sacred mission – but he started his reign, in about 970 BC, with a bloody settling of scores.
Bathsheba, the queen mother, asked Solomon to allow his elder half-brother, Adonijah, to marry King David’s last concubine, Abishag. ‘Ask for him the kingdom too?’ replied Solomon sarcastically, ordering the murder of Adonijah and a purge of his father’s old guard. This story is the last from the court historian of David but it is also really the first and only glimpse of Solomon as a man, for he becomes the inscrutably wise and splendid stereotype of a fabulous emperor. Everything Solomon had was bigger and better than any ordinary king: his wisdom generated 3,000 proverbs and 1,005 songs, his harem contained 700 wives and 300 concubines, and his army boasted 12,000 cavalry and 1,400 chariots. Those expensive showpieces of military technology were housed in his fortified towns, Megiddo, Gezer and Hazor, while his fleet was anchored at Ezion-Geber on the Gulf of Aqaba.11
Solomon traded with Egypt and Cilicia in spices and gold, chariots and horses. He shared trading expeditions to Sudan and Somalia with his Phoenician ally King Hiram of Tyre. He hosted the Queen of Sheba (probably Saba, today’s Yemen), who came to Jerusalem ‘with a very great train with camels that bore spices and very much gold and precious stones’. The gold came from Ophir, probably India; the bronze from his own mines. His wealth embellished Jerusalem: ‘The king made silver to be in Jerusalem as stones and cedars made he to be as the sycamore trees that are in the vale, for abundance.’ The most telling mark of his international prestige was his marriage to a pharaoh’s daughter. Pharaohs almost never married their daughters to foreign princes – especially not parvenu Judaeans only recently graduated from hill shepherd chieftains. Yet once-haughty Egypt was in such shameful chaos that Pharaoh Siamun raided Gezer not far from Jerusalem and, perhaps finding himself exposed far from home, offered the spoils to Solomon along with his daughter, an unthinkable honour at any other time. But the Temple of Jerusalem, planned by his father, was his masterpiece.
The ‘house of God’ was to stand right next to Solomon’s royal palace in an imperial-sacred acropolis, described in the Bible, that boasted halls and palaces of astonishing grandeur covered in gold and cedarwood, including the House of the Forest of Lebanon and the Hall of Pillars where the king adjudicated.
This was not just an Israelite achievement. The Phoenicians, who lived in independent city states along the Lebanese coast, were the most sophisticated artisans and seafaring traders of the Mediterranean, famed for their Tyrian purple from which they derived their name (phoinix, meaning purple) and for creating the alphabet. King Hiram of Tyre provided not only the cypress and cedarwood but also the craftsmen who carved the silver and gold ornamentation. Everything was ‘pure gold’.
The Temple was not just a shrine, it was the home of God himself, a complex made up of three parts, standing about 33 by 115 feet, in a walled enclosure. First there was a gateway with two bronze pillars, Yachin and Boaz, 33 feet high, decorated with pomegranates and lilies, that led into a huge pillared courtyard open to the skies and surrounded on three sides with two-storey chambers that may have contained the royal archives or treasury. The portico opened into a sacred hall: ten golden lamps stood along walls. A golden table for shewbread was placed in front of an incense altar for sacrifices, a water pool and wheeled lavers with bowls on top for purification, and a bronze pool known as the Sea. Steps led up towards the Holy of Holies,* a small chamber guarded by two winged cherubim, 17 feet high, made of olive wood covered with gold foil.
Yet Solomon’s own magnificence came first. He took seven years to finish the Temple, and thirteen to build his own palace, which was larger. There had to be silence in God’s house, so ‘there was neither hammer nor axe nor any tool of iron heard in the house’: his Phoenician craftsmen dressed the stones, carved the cedar and cypress, and crafted the silver, bronze and gold decorations in Tyre before shipping them to Jerusalem. King Solomon fortified Mount Moriah by expanding the old walls: henceforth the name ‘Zion’ described both the original citadel and the new Temple Mount.
When all was finished, Solomon assembled the people to watch the priests bear the acacia wood chest of the Ark of the Covenant from its tent on the citadel of Zion, the City of David, to the Temple on Mount Moriah. Solomon sacrificed at the altar and then the priests took the Ark into the Holy of Holies and placed it beneath the wings of the two immense gold cherubim. There was nothing in the Holy of Holies except the cherubim, and the Ark, and nothing within the Ark – just 4 by 2
feet – except the tablets of Moses’ law. Its holiness was such that it was not designed for public worship: In this emptiness resided the austere, imageless divinity of Yahweh, an idea unique to the Israelites.
As the priest came out, the ‘cloud’ of the Divine Presence, ‘the glory of the Lord, filled the house of the Lord.’ Solomon consecrated the Temple before his people, declaring to God: ‘I have surely built thee a house to dwell in, a settled place for thee to abide for ever,’ God replied to Solomon, ‘I will establish the throne of thy kingdom upon Israel for ever, as I promised to David thy father.’ This became the first of the festivals that developed into the great pilgrimages of the Jewish calendar: ‘three times a year did Solomon offer burnt offerings upon the altar’. At that moment, the concept of sanctity in the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic world found its eternal home. Jews and the other Peoples of the Book believe that the Divine Presence has never left the Temple Mount. Jerusalem would become the superlative place for divine-human communication on earth.
SOLOMON: THE DECLINE
All the ideal Jerusalems, new and old, celestial and temporal, were based on the Bible’s description of Solomon’s city. But there is no other source to confirm it, and nothing has been found of his Temple.
This is less surprising than it sounds. It is impossible to excavate the Temple Mount for political and religious reasons, but even if such excavations were allowed we would probably find no traces of Solomon’s Temple because it was obliterated at least twice, cut down to bedrock at least once and remodelled countless times. Yet the Temple is plausible in size and design even if the biblical writers exaggerated its splendour. Solomon’s Temple was a classic shrine of its time. The Phoenician temples, on which Solomon’s was partly based, were thriving corporations run by hundreds of officials, temple prostitutes whose fees contributed to corporate income, and even in-house barbers for those who dedicated their hair to their gods. The layout of Syrian temples, discovered all over the region, along with their sacred paraphernalia such as their lavers, were very similar to the biblical descriptions of Solomon’s Sanctuary.
Its bounty of gold and ivory is completely credible. A century later, the kings of Israel reigned from sumptuous palaces in nearby Samaria where their ivory has been found by archaeologists. The Bible says Solomon dedicated 500 gold shields to the Temple in an era when other sources prove that gold was plentiful – imported from Ophir, the Egyptians also mined it in Nubia. Just after Solomon’s death, the pharaoh Sheshonq was paid off with the Temple’s treasury of gold when he threatened Jerusalem. King Solomon’s mines were long thought to be mythical, but copper mines have been found in Jordan that were working during his reign. The size of his army, too, was feasible given that we know a king of Israel would field 2,000 chariots just over a century later.*12
Solomon’s magnificence may be exaggerated, but his decline rings only too true: the king of wisdom became an unpopular tyrant who funded his monumental extravagances through high taxes and the ‘chastisement of whips’. To the disgust of the monotheistic biblical authors, writing two centuries later, Solomon prayed to Yahweh and other local gods, and furthermore he ‘loved many strange women’.
Solomon faced rebellions from Edom in the south and Damascus in the north, while his general, Jeroboam, started to plan a revolt among the northern tribes. Solomon ordered Jeroboam’s assassination but the general fled to Egypt where he was backed by Sheshonq, the Libyan pharaoh of a resurgent empire. The Israelite kingdom was tottering.
REHOBOAM VERSUS JEROBOAM: THE SPLIT
When Solomon died in 930 BC after a reign of forty years, his son Rehoboam summoned the tribes to Shechem. The northerners chose the general, Jeroboam, to tell the young king that they would no longer tolerate Solomon’s taxes, ‘I will add to your yoke: my father hath chastised you with whips,’ replied the brash Rehoboam, ‘I will chastise you with scorpions.’ The ten northern tribes rebelled, anointing Jeroboam as king of a new breakaway kingdom of Israel.
Rehoboam remained king of Judah; he was David’s grandson and he possessed the Temple of Jerusalem, the home of Yahweh. But the more experienced Jeroboam, who made his capital at Shechem, faced up to this: ‘If this people go up to do sacrifice in the house of the Lord at Jerusalem, then shall the heart of this people turn again unto Rehoboam King of Judah and they shall kill me.’ So he built two mini-temples at Bethel and Dan, traditional Canaanite shrines. Jeroboam’s reign was long and successful, but he could never match Rehoboam’s Jerusalem.
The two Israelite kingdoms were sometimes at war with each other, sometimes close allies. For around four centuries after 900 BC, the Davidic dynasty ruled Judah, the small rump around the royal Temple city of Jerusalem, while the much richer Israel became a local military power in the north, usually dominated by charioteer generals who seized the throne in bloody coups. One of these usurpers killed so many of the ruling family that ‘he left him not one that pisseth against a wall’. The authors of the Books of Kings and Chronicles, writing two centuries later, were not concerned with personal detail or strict chronology but judged the rulers by their loyalty to the one God of Israel. Fortunately, however, the Dark Age was over: the inscriptions of the empires of Egypt and Iraq now illuminate – and often confirm – the furiously righteous pontifications of the Bible.
Nine years after Solomon’s death, Egypt and history returned to Jerusalem. The pharaoh Sheshonq, who had encouraged the breakup of the Israelite united monarchy, marched up the coast, swerving inland towards Jerusalem. The Temple was rich enough to make such a detour lucrative. King Rehoboam had to buy off Sheshonq with the Temple treasury – Solomon’s gold. Attacking both Israelite kingdoms, the pharaoh devastated Megiddo on the coast where he left an inscription on a stele boasting of his conquests: a tantalizing fragment survives. On his return, he advertised his successful raid at his Temple of Amun in Karnak. A hieroglyphic text at Bubastis, then the pharaoh’s capital, shows that soon afterwards Sheshonq’s heir Osorkon dedicated 383 tons of gold to his temples, probably the loot from Jerusalem. Sheshonq’s invasion is the first biblical event confirmed by archaeology.
After fifty years of fighting, the two Israelite kingdoms made peace. King Ahab of Israel had made a prestigious marriage to a Phoenician princess, who became the Bible’s arch-monstress, a corrupt tyrant and worshipper of Baal and other idols. Her name was Jezebel and she and her family came to rule Israel – and Jerusalem. They brought butchery and disaster to both.13
JEZEBEL AND DAUGHTER, QUEEN OF JERUSALEM
Jezebel and Ahab had a daughter named Athaliah whom they married to king Jehorah of Judah: she arrived in a Jerusalem that was thriving – Syrian merchants traded in their quarter, a Judaean fleet sailed the Red Sea and the Canaanite idols had been expelled from the Temple. But Jezebel’s daughter did not bring luck or happiness.
The Israelites had flourished only while the great powers were in abeyance. Now in 854, Assyria, based around Nineveh in modern Iraq, rose again. When the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III started the conquest of the Syrian kingdoms, Judah, Israel and Syria formed a coalition to resist him. At the Battle of Karkar, King Ahab, fielding 2,000 chariots and 10,000 infantry and backed by the Judaeans and the various Syrian kings, halted the Assyrians. But afterwards, the coalition fell apart. The Judaeans and Israelites fought with the Syrians; their subject peoples rebelled.* King Ahab of Israel was killed by an arrow – ‘dogs licked up his blood’. A general named Jehu rebelled in Israel, slaughtered the royal family – stacking the heads of Ahab’s seventy sons in a heap at the gate of Samaria, and assassinated not only the new king of Israel but the visiting king of Judah too. As for Queen Jezebel, she was tossed out of her palace window, to be pulverized under chariot-wheels.*
Jezebel’s carcass was fed to the dogs in Israel but in about 841 BC, Jezebel’s daughter, Queen Athaliah, seized power in Jerusalem, killing all the Davidian princes (her own grandchildren) that she could find. Only one baby prince, Jehoash, was saved. The second Book of Kings – and some new archaeological finds – here deliver the first glimpse of life in Jerusalem.14
The princeling was hidden in the Temple complex while Jezebel’s half-Phoenician, half-Israelite daughter attracted cosmopolitan trade and Baalist worship to her small mountain capital. An exquisite ivory dove perched atop a pomegranate, less than an inch high, was found in Jerusalem, it was probably used to decorate a piece of furniture in a grand Jerusalem house. Phoenician clay seals – known as bullae, the headed notepaper of the day – have been found around the rock pool below the City of David with images of their ships and holy totems such as a winged sun over a throne, along with 10,000 fishbones, probably imported from the Mediterranean by these ocean-going traders. But Athaliah was soon as hated as Jezebel. Her idolatrous priests set up Baal and other gods in the Temple. After six years, the Temple’s priest called Jerusalem’s grandees to a secret meeting and revealed the existence of the little prince, Jehoash – to whom they immediately swore loyalty. The priest armed the guards with the spears and shields of King David, still stored in the Temple, and then publicly anointed the child, crying ‘God save the king’ and blowing trumpets.
The Queen heard ‘the noise of the guard and the people’ and rushed through the acropolis from the palace into the neighbouring Temple, now packed with people. ‘Treason! Treason!’ she cried, but the guards seized her, dragged her off the holy mountain and killed her outside the gates. The priests of Baal were lynched, their idols smashed.
King Jehoash ruled for forty years until about 801 when he was defeated in battle by the Syrian king, who marched on Jerusalem and forced him to pay out ‘all the gold in the treasures’ of the Temple. He was murdered. Thirty years later, a king of Israel raided Jerusalem and plundered the Temple. From now on the growing wealth of the Temple made it a tempting prize.15
Yet Jerusalem’s remote prosperity was no match for Assyria, energized under a new king: that carnivorous empire was again on the march. The kings of Israel and of Aram-Damascus tried to put together a coalition to resist the Assyrians. When King Ahaz of Judah refused, the Israelites and Syrians besieged Jerusalem. They could not break through the newly fortified walls, but King Ahaz despatched the Temple treasury and an appeal for help to Tiglath-Pileser III of Assyria. In 732, the Assyrians annexed Syria and ravaged Israel. In Jerusalem, King Ahaz agonized over whether to submit to Assyria or fight.
ISAIAH: JERUSALEM AS BEAUTY AND HARLOT
The king was advised by Isaiah, prince, priest and political consigliere, to wait: Yahweh would protect Jerusalem. The king, said Isaiah, would have a son named Emmanuel – meaning ‘God with us’ – ‘For unto us a child is born’ who would be ‘the Mighty God, the everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace’, bringing ‘peace without end’.
There were at least two authors of the Book of Isaiah – one of them wrote over 200 years later – but this first Isaiah was not just a prophet but a visionary poet who, in an age of voracious Assyrian aggression, was the first to imagine life beyond the destruction of the Temple, in a mystical Jerusalem. ‘I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne high and lifted upand his train filled the temple … and the house was filled with smoke.’
Isaiah loved the ‘holy mountain’, which he saw as a beautiful woman, ‘the mount of the daughter of Zion, the hill of Jerusalem’, sometimes righteous, sometimes a harlot. The possession of Jerusalem was nothing without godliness and decency. But if all was lost and ‘Jerusalem is ruined’, there would be a new mystical Jerusalem for everyone ‘upon every dwelling-place’, preaching loving-kindness: ‘Learn to do well; seek judgement; relieve the oppressed; judge the fatherless; plead for the widow.’ Isaiah foresaw an extraordinary phenomenon: ‘the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established in the topof the mountains … and all nations shall flow to it’. The laws, values and stories of this remote and perhaps vanquished mountain city would rise again: ‘And many people shall go and say, Come ye and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the House of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways … Out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. And he shall judge among the nations.’ Isaiah predicted a mystical Day of Judgement when an anointed king – the Messiah – would come: ‘they shall beat their swords into ploughshares and spears into pruning-hooks … and neither shall they learn war any more.’ The dead would rise again. ‘The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb and the leopard shall lie down with the kid.’
This incandescent poetry first expressed the apocalyptic yearnings that would run throughout Jerusalem’s history until today. Isaiah would help shape not only Judaism but Christianity. Jesus Christ studied Isaiah, and his teachings – from the destruction of the Temple and the idea of a universal spiritual Jerusalem to the championing of the underdog – derive from this poetical vision. Jesus himself would be seen as Isaiah’s Emmanuel.
King Ahaz travelled to Damascus to make obeisance to Tiglath-Pileser, returning with an Assyrian-style altar for the Temple. When the conqueror died in 727 BC, Israel rebelled, but the new Assyrian king Sargon II besieged Samaria the capital for three years and then swallowed Israel, deporting 27,000 of its people to Assyria. Ten of the Twelve Tribes, who had lived in the northern kingdom, almost vanish from history.* The modern Jews are descended from the last two tribes who survived as the Kingdom of Judah.16 The baby whom Isaiah had hailed as Emmanuel was King Hezekiah, who was no Messiah but nonetheless possessed the most priceless of all political qualities, luck. And traces of his Jerusalem survive today.
SENNACHERIB: THE WOLF ON THE FOLD
Hezekiah waited twenty years for a chance to revolt against Assyria: first he purged the idols, shattering the bronze snake that stood in the Temple, and summoned his people to celebrate an early version of Passover in a Jerusalem which was expanding for the first time on to the western hill.* The city filled with refugees from the fallen northern kingdom, and they probably brought with them some of their ancient scrolls of early Israelite history and legend. Jerusalem’s scholars started to fuse together the Judaean traditions with those of the northern tribes: ultimately these scrolls, written just as the Greeks were recording Homer’s epic poem the Iliad, would become the Bible.
When Sargon II was killed in battle in 705, the Jerusalemites, even Isaiah, hoped it marked the fall of the evil empire. Egypt promised support; the city of Babylon rebelled and sent ambassadors to Hezekiah, who felt his moment had come: he joined a new coalition against Assyria and prepared for war. But, unfortunately for the Judaeans, the new Great King of Assyria was a warlord of apparently endless confidence and energy: his name was Sennacherib.
He called himself ‘King of the World, King of Assyria’ at a time when the titles were synonymous. Assyria ruled from the Persian Gulf to Cyprus. Its landlocked heartland in today’s Iraq was defended by mountains to the north and the Euphrates in the west but was vulnerable to attack from south and east. The empire resembled a shark that could survive only by constant consumption. For the Assyrians, conquest was a religious duty. Each new king swore at his accession to expand what they called ‘the land of God Ashur’ – the country was named after its patron god. The kings were both high priests and commanders who led their 200,000-strong armies in person, and like the tyrants of modern times, they cowed their subjects using not just terror but vast deportations of peoples from one end of the empire to another.
The body of Sennacherib’s father was never recovered from the battlefield, a terrible sign of divine displeasure, and the empire started to break up. But Sennacherib smashed all the rebellions and when he recaptured Babylon, he destroyed the entire city. But once order was restored, he tried to consolidate, extravagantly rebuilding his capital Nineveh, city of Ishtar, goddess of war and passion, with canals irrigating its gardens and his massive Palace Without Rival. The Assyrian kings were avid propagandists, whose triumphalist decorations on the walls of their palaces advertised Assyrian victories and the gruesome deaths of their enemies – mass-impalings, flayings and beheadings. The courtiers of conquered cities paraded through Nineveh wearing the heads of their kings on ghoulish necklaces around their necks. But their depredations were probably no more vicious than other conquerors: the Egyptians, for example, collected the hands and penises of their enemies. Ironically Assyria’s most brutal era was over; Sennacherib preferred to negotiate if possible.
Sennacherib buried records of his achievements in the foundations of his palaces. In Iraq, archaeologists have found the remains of his city, revealing Assyria at its apogee, made rich by conquest and agriculture, administered by scribes whose records were preserved in royal archives. Their libraries contained collections of omens to aid royal decision-making, and of incantations, rituals and hymns to maintain divine support, but also tablets of literary classics such as the Epic of Gilgamesh. Worshipping many gods, revering magical figurines and spirits and calling upon the power of divination, the Assyrians studied medicine, writing prescriptions on tablets that read: ‘If the man is suffering from the following symptoms, the problem is …Take the following drugs …’
Israelite prisoners, toiling far from home in the resplendently gaudy cities of Assyria with their Babel-like ziggurat towers and painted palaces, saw them as metropolises ‘of blood, full of lies, full of plunder, never without victims!’ The prophet Nahum described ‘the crack of whips, the clatter of wheels, galloping horses and jolting chariots!’ Now those eight-spoked chariots, those vast armies and Sennacherib himself were marching on Jerusalem, swooping down, says Deuteronomy, ‘like a vulture in flight’.
HEZEKIAH’S TUNNEL
Hezekiah knew what horrors had befallen Babylon; he frantically built fortifications around Jerusalem’s new quarters. Sections of his ‘broad wall’, 25 feet wide, survive today in several places but most impressively in the Jewish Quarter. He prepared for a siege by ordering two groups craftsmen to hack a tunnel 1,700 feet through the rock to link the Gihon Spring outside the city to the Siloam Pool, south of the Temple Mount below the City of David, which now, thanks to his new fortifications, lay inside the walls. When the two teams met up deep in the rock, they celebrated by carving an inscription to record their amazing achievement:
[When the tunnel] was driven through. And this was the way in which it was cut through. While [they were] still [excavating with their] axes, each man toward his fellow, and while there were still three cubits to cut through, [they heard] the voice of a man calling to his fellows, for there was a fissure in the rock on the right [and the left]. And when the tunnel was driven through, the quarrymen hewed [the rock], each man toward his fellow, axe against axe; and the water flowed from the spring toward the reservoir for 1,200 cubits and the height of the rock above the heads of the quarrymen was 100 cubits.*
North of the Temple Mount, Hezekiah dammed a valley to create one of the Bethesda Pools to deliver more water into the city, and he seems to have distributed food – oil, wine, grain – to his forces, ready for siege and war. Jar handles have been found at sites across Judah marked lmlk – ‘for the king’ – stamped with his emblem, the four-winged scarab.
‘The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,’ wrote Byron. Sennacherib and his vast armies were now very close to Jerusalem. The Great King would have travelled, like most Assyrian kings, in a hulking three-horse chariot, shaded under the royal parasol, horses splendidly caparisoned with shimmering headcrests while he himself would have worn a long embroidered robe, a flat hat with a pointed peak, a square-cut, long, braided beard and rosette bracelets, and often carried a bow in his hands and a sword at his belt in a scabbard decorated with lions. He saw himself more as a lion than a biblical vulture or Byronic wolf – Assyrian kings wore lionskins to celebrate their victories in the Temple of Ishtar, decorated their palaces with lion sphinxes and avidly hunted lions as the sport of great kings.
He bypassed Jerusalem to besiege Hezekiah’s second city, fortified Lachish, to the south. We know from the bas-reliefs at his Nineveh palace what his troops (and the Judaeans) looked like: the Assyrians, a polyglot imperial army, wore their hair braided, and dressed in tunics and chainmail, with plumed and pointed helmets, arrayed in contingents of charioteers, spearmen, archers and slingers. They built siege-ramps; sappers undermined the walls, a fearsomely spiked siege-engine shattered the fortifications. Archers and slingers laid down withering fire as Sennacherib’s infantry stormed upscaling ladders to take the city. Archaeologists have excavated a mass grave of 1,500 men, women and children, some impaled or skinned, just as the bas-relief shows; throngs of refugees fled the mayhem. Jerusalem knew what to expect.17
Sennacherib swiftly defeated an Egyptian army that had come to aid Hezekiah, ravaged Judah and then closed on Jerusalem, camping to the north, the same place chosen by Titus over five hundred years later.
Hezekiah poisoned any wells outside Jerusalem. His troops, manning his new walls, wore turbans fastened with headbands and long earflaps, short kilts, leg armour and boots. As the siege set in, there must have been panic in the city. Sennacherib sent his generals to parley – resistance was hopeless. The prophet Micah foresaw the destruction of Zion. However, old Isaiah counselled patience: Yahweh would provide.
Hezekiah prayed in the Temple. Sennacherib bragged that he had surrounded Jerusalem ‘like a bird in a cage’. But Isaiah was right: God intervened.
MANASSEH: CHILD SACRIFICE IN THE VALLEY OF HELL
‘The angel of the Lord went out and smote in the camp of the Assyrians … and when they arose in the morning, they were all dead corpses.’ The Assyrians suddenly packed up their camp, probably to suppress a rebellion in the east. ‘So Sennacherib king of Assyria departed.’ Yahweh told Sennacherib that ‘The daughter of Jerusalem hath shaken her head at thee.’ This was the Jerusalem version, but Sennacherib’s annals describe Hezekiah’s crushing tribute, including 30 talents of gold and 800 of silver: he seems to have paid them to leave. Sennacherib reduced Judah to a rump not much larger than the district of Jerusalem and boasted that he had deported 200,150 people.18
When Hezekiah died soon after the siege, his son Manasseh became a loyal Syrian vassal. He brutally crushed any opposition in Jerusalem, married an Arabian princess, overturned his father’s reforms and installed ritual male prostitutes and the idols Baal and Asherah in the Temple. Most dreadful of all, he encouraged the sacrifice of children at the roaster – the tophet – in the Valley of Hinnom,* south of the city. Indeed ‘he made his own son pass through the fire …’ Children were said to be taken there as priests beat drums to hide the shrieks of the victims from their parents.
Thanks to Manasseh, the Valley of Hinnom became not just the place of death, but Gehenna, ‘hell’ in Jewish and later Christian and Islamic mythology. If the Temple Mount was Jerusalem’s own heaven, Gehenna was her own Hades.
Then in 626, Nabopolassar, a Chaldean general, seized control of Babylon and started to destroy the Assyrian empire, recording his exploits in the Babylonian Chronicles. In 612, Nineveh fell to an alliance of Babylonians and Medes. In 609, the succession of Manasseh’s eight-year-old grandson, Josiah, seemed to herald a golden age ruled by a Messiah.19
JOSIAH: THE REVOLUTIONARY SAVIOUR
It was a miracle: the evil empire of Assyria had fallen apart and the kingdom of Judah was free. King Josiah may have extended his kingdom northwards into the former lands of Israel, southwards towards the Red Sea and eastwards towards the Mediterranean, and then, in the eighteenth year of his reign, Hilkiah the chief priest found a forgotten scroll stored in the chambers of the Temple.
Josiah recognized the power of this document, an early version of the Book of Deuteronomy (‘Second Law’ in Greek), probably one of the scrolls brought southwards from Israel after its fall and hidden in the Temple during Manasseh’s persecutions. Having assembled the Judaeans in the Temple, Josiah stood by that totemic symbol, the royal pillar, and announced his covenant with the one God to keep the Law. The king set his scholars to retell the ancient history of the Judaeans, linking the mythical Patriarchs, the sacred kings David and Solomon and the story of Jerusalem into a single past, to illuminate the present. This was another step towards the creation of the Bible. Indeed these laws were backdated and attributed to Moses, but the biblical portrait of the Temple of Solomon surely reflected the real but later Jerusalem of Josiah, the new David. Henceforth the holy mountain became nothing less than ha-Makom in Hebrew: the Place.
The king had the idols burned in the Kidron Valley, and expelled the male prostitutes from the Temple; he smashed the child-roasters of the Valley of Hell and killed the idolatrous priests, grinding their bones into their altars.* Josiah’s revolution sounds violent, frenzied and puritanical. He then held a Passover festival to celebrate. ‘And like unto him was there no king before him.’ Yet he was playing a dangerous game. When Necho, the Egyptian pharaoh, marched up the coast, Josiah, fearing he was about to swap Assyrian for Egyptian dominion, rushed to stop him. In 609 BC, the pharaoh crushed the Judaeans and killed Josiah at Megiddo. Josiah had failed, but his optimistic, revelatory reign was more influential than any other between David and Jesus. The dream of independence, however, ended at Megiddo, which became the very definition of catastrophe: Armageddon.20
The pharaoh advanced on Jerusalem and placed Josiah’s brother Jehoiakim on the throne of Judah. But Egypt failed to stop the rise of a new Near Eastern empire. In 605, the Babylonian king’s son, Nebuchadnezzar, routed the Egyptians at Carchemish. Assyria vanished; Babylon inherited Judah. But in 597, King Jehoiakim saw his chance in the midst of this instability to liberate Judah and called a national fast to win God’s protection. His adviser and prophet Jeremiah warned, in the first jeremiad, that God would destroy Jerusalem. King Jehoiakim publicly burned Jeremiah’s writings.* He allied Judah with Egypt, but no Egyptian help came as a new conqueror descended on Jerusalem.
NEBUCHADNEZZAR
‘In the seventh month of Kislev,’ declared Nebuchadnezzar’s chronicle, preserved on a clay inscription, ‘the Babylonian king marched to the land of Hatti [Syria], besieged the City of Judah [Jerusalem] and on the second day of the month of Adar [16 March 697] took the city and captured the king.’ Nebuchadnezzar plundered the Temple and deported the king and 10,000 nobles, artisans and young men to Babylon. There, Jehoiakim joined his vanquisher’s court.
Nebuchadnezzar was the son of a usurper but he was a dynamic empire-builder, who regarded himself as the viceroy on earth of Babylon’s patron god Bel-Marduk. Inheriting the Assyrian style of ferocious imperial repression, he promoted himself as a paragon of piety and virtue. At home ‘the strong used to plunder the weak’, but Nebuchadnezzar ‘did not rest night or day but with counsel and deliberation he persisted’ in giving justice. His Judaean victims might not have recognized the soi-disant ‘King of Justice’.
The exiles from Judah found themselves in a city that made Zion look like a village. While a few thousand lived in Jerusalem, Babylon boasted a quarter of a million in a metropolis so majestic and hedonistic that the goddess of love and war Ishtar was said to tiptoe through the streets, kissing her favourites in the inns and alleyways.
Nebuchadnezzar stamped Babylon with his own aesthetic flair: grandiose gigantism tinted in his favourite colour, divine sky-blue, reflected in the canals of the mighty Euphrates. The four towers of the Ishtar Gate were faced with blue-glazed bricks, illustrated with bulls and dragons in yellow and ochre, leading into the city’s triumphal boulevard, the Processional Way. His palace, in his words an ‘edifice to be admired, a gleaming sanctuary, my royal abode’, was decorated with towering lions. Hanging Gardens embellished his summer palace. Honouring Babylon’s patron god Marduk, Nebuchadnezzar raised a ziggurat, an immense seven-storey, stepped tower with a flat top: his Foundation Platform of Heaven and Earth was the real Tower of Babel, its many languages reflecting the cosmopolitan capital of the entire Near East.
In Jerusalem, Nebuchadnezzar placed the exiled king’s uncle, Zedekiah, on the throne. In 594, Zedekiah visited Babylon to make obeisance to Nebuchadnezzar, but on his return he launched a rebellion, haunted by the prophet Jeremiah, who warned that the Babylonians would destroy the city. Nebuchadnezzar marched southwards. Zedekiah appealed to the Egyptians, who sent meagre forces that were soon defeated. Inside Jerusalem, Jeremiah, observing the panic and paranoia, tried to escape but was arrested at the gates. The king, torn between asking his advice and executing him for treason, imprisoned him in the dungeons under the royal palace. For eighteen months, Nebuchadnezzar ravaged Judah,* leaving Jerusalem until last.
In 587, Nebuchadnezzar encircled Jerusalem with forts and a siege wall. ‘The famine’, wrote Jeremiah, ‘was sore in the city’. Young children ‘faint for hunger at the topof every street’, and there were hints of cannibalism: ‘the daughter of my people is become cruel … The hands of the pitiful women have sodden their own children: they were their meat in the destruction’. Even the rich were soon desperate, wrote the author of Lamentations: ‘they that were brought up in scarlet embrace dunghills’, searching for food. People wandered the streets, dazed, ‘like blind men’. Archaeologists have found a sewer pipe that dated from the siege: the Judaeans usually lived on lentils, wheat and barley, but the pipe’s contents showed that people were living on plants and herbs, diseased with whipworm and tapeworm.
On the 9th of the Jewish month of Ab, August 586, after eighteen months, Nebuchadnezzar broke into the city, which was set on fire, probably with flamed torches and burning arrows (arrowheads were discovered in today’s Jewish Quarter in a layer of soot, ashes and charred wood). Yet the fire that consumed the houses also baked the clay bullae, the seals of the bureaucracy, so hard that they have survived to this day among the burned houses. Jerusalem suffered the infernal depredations of fallen cities. Those that were killed were luckier than those who starved: ‘Our skin was black like the oven because of the famine. They ravished the women in Zion; princes were hanged up by their hand.’ Edomites from the south poured into the city to loot, party and gloat in the wreckage: ‘Rejoice and be glad, O daughter of Edom … thou shalt be drunken and shalt make thyself naked.’ The Edomites, according to Psalm 137, encouraged the Babylonians to ‘rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof … Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.’ The Babylonians ravaged Jerusalem while, beneath the royal palace, Jeremiah survived in his dungeon.
NEBUCHADNEZZAR: THE ABOMINATION OF DESOLATION
Zedekiah broke out through the gate close to the Siloam Pool, heading for Jericho, but the Babylonians captured the king and brought him before Nebuchadnezzar ‘where sentence was pronounced on him. They killed the sons of Zedekiah before his eyes. Then they put out his eyes, bound him with bronze shackles and took him to Babylon.’ The Babylonians must have found Jeremiah in the king’s prison for they brought him to Nebuchadnezzar, who apparently interviewed him and gave him to the commander of the imperial guard, Nebuzaradan, who was in charge of Jerusalem. Nebuchadnezzar deported 20,000 Judaeans to Babylon, though Jeremiah says he left many of the poor behind.
A month later Nebuchadnezzar ordered his general to obliterate the city. Nebuzaradan ‘burned the House of the Lord, the king’s palace and all the houses of Jerusalem’ and ‘brake down the walls’. The Temple was destroyed, its gold and silver vessels plundered, and the Ark of the Covenant vanished for ever. ‘They have cast fire into thy Sanctuary,’ recounted Psalm 74. The priests were killed before Nebuchadnezzar. As with Titus in AD 70, Temple and palace must have been toppled into the valley beneath: ‘How is the gold become dim! How is the most fine gold changed! The stones of the Sanctuary are poured in the top of every street.’*
The streets were empty: ‘How doth the city sit solitary that was full of people.’ The well-off were impoverished: ‘they that did feed delicately are desolate in the streets’. Foxes loped across the barren mountain of Zion. The Lamentations of the Judaeans mourned their bleeding ‘Jerusalem … as a menstruous woman’: ‘She weepeth sore in the night and her tears are on her cheeks: among her lovers, she hath none to comfort her.’
The destruction of the Temple must have seemed to be the death not just of a city but of an entire nation. ‘The ways of Zion do mourn because none come to the solemn feasts: all her gates are desolate: her priests sigh … And from the daughter of Zion all her beauty is departed. The crown is fallen from our head.’ This seemed to be the end of the world, or, as the Book of Daniel explained it, ‘the abomination that maketh desolate’. The Judaeans would surely vanish like other peoples whose gods had failed them. But the Jews somehow transformed this catastrophe into the formative experience that redoubled the sanctity of Jerusalem and created a prototype for the Day of Judgement. For all three religions, this inferno made Jerusalem the venue of the Last Days and the coming of the divine kingdom. This was the Apocalypse – based on the Greek word for ‘revelation’ – that Jesus would prophesy. For Christians it became a defining and perennial expectation, while Muhammad would see Nebuchadnezzar’s destruction as the withdrawal of divine favour from the Jews, making way for his Islamic revelation.
In Babylonian exile, some of the Judaeans kept their commitment to God and Zion. At the same time as Homer’s poems were becoming the national epic of the Greeks, the Judaeans started to define themselves by their own biblical texts and their faraway city: ‘By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.’ Yet even the Babylonians, according to Psalm 137, appreciated the Judaean songs: ‘For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’
Yet it was there that the Bible began to take shape. While young Jerusalemites such as Daniel were educated in the royal household and the more worldly exiles became Babylonians, Judaeans developed new laws to emphasize that they were still distinct and special – they respected the Sabbath, circumcised their children, adhered to dietary laws, adopted Jewish names – because the fall of Jerusalem had demonstrated what happened when they did not respect God’s laws. Away from Judah, the Judaeans were becoming Jews.*
The Exiles immortalized Babylon as ‘the mother of prostitutes and the abominations of the earth’, yet the empire prospered and their nemesis, Nebuchadnezzar, ruled for over forty years. However, Daniel claims the king went insane: he was ‘driven away from the people and ate grass like cattle, his nails growing like claws of a bird’ – a suitable punishment for his crimes (and wonderful inspiration for William Blake’s paintings). If vengeance was not complete, the exiles could at least wonder at the ironies of life in Babylon: Nebuchadnezzar’s son Amel-Marduk was such a disappointment that his father threw him in prison, where he became acquainted with Jehoiachin, King of Judah.
BELSHAZZAR’S FEAST
When Amel-Marduk became king of Babylon, he freed his royal Judaean friend from prison. But in 556 the dynasty was overthrown: the new king, Nabonidus, rejected Bel-Marduk, god of Babylon, in favour of Sin the moon-god and eccentrically left the city to live at Teima, far away in the Arabian desert. Nabonidus was struck by a mysterious disease, and it was surely he (not Nebuchadnezzar, as Daniel claimed) who went mad and ‘ate grass like cattle’.
In the king’s absence, the regent, his son Belshazzar, according to the Bible, held the depraved feast at which he used the ‘gold and silver goblets that Nebuchadnezzar had taken from the Temple in Jerusalem’ and suddenly saw on the wall God’s words: ‘MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN’. Decoded, these were measurements warning that the days of the empire were numbered. Belshazzar trembled. For the Whore of Babylon, ‘the writing was on the wall’.
In 539 BC, the Persians marched on Babylon. Jewish history is filled with miraculous deliverances. This was one of the most dramatic. After forty-seven years ‘by the rivers of Babylon’, the decision of one man, in its way as seminal as that of David, restored Zion.21
CYRUS THE GREAT
Astyges, King of Media in western Persia, dreamed that his daughter was urinating a golden stream which squirted out the whole of his kingdom. His magi, the Persian priests, interpreted this to mean that his grandsons would threaten his rule. Astyges married his daughter to a weak, unthreatening neighbour to the east, the King of Anshan. This marriage spawned an heir, Kourosh, who became Cyrus the Great. Astyges dreamed again that a vine was growing from between his daughter’s fecund thighs until it overshadowed him – a sexual-political version of Jack and the Beanstalk. Astyges ordered his commander Harpagus to murder little Cyrus, but the boy was hidden with a shepherd. When Astyges discovered that Cyrus was not dead, he butchered and cooked Harpagus’ son and served him to his father as a stew. It was not a meal that Harpagus would easily forget or forgive.
On the death of his father in about 559 BC, Cyrus returned and seized his kingdom. Astyges’ pungent dreams, as recounted by the Greek historian Herodotus, who liked to believe all Persian business was decided with the help of sexual or urinary auguries, came true: Cyrus, backed by Harpagus, defeated his grandfather, uniting the Medes and Persians. Leaving Belshazzar’s Babylon to the south, Cyrus confronted another potentate, Croesus, wealthy King of Lydia in western Turkey. Cyrus force-marched his cameleer army to surprise Croesus in his capital. The Lydian horses bolted when they detected the smell of charging camels. Then Cyrus turned on Babylon.
Nebuchadnezzar’s blue-glazed metropolis opened its gates to Cyrus, who shrewdly paid homage to Bel-Marduk, the neglected Babylonian god. The fall of Babylon elated the Jewish exiles: ‘For the Lord hath done it; shout … break forth into singing, ye mountains, O forest, and every tree therein; for the Lord hath redeemed Jacob, and glorified himself in Israel.’ Cyrus inherited the Babylonian empire, including Jerusalem: ‘every king on earth’, he said, ‘brought me heavy tribute and kissed my feet when I sat in Babylon’.
Cyrus had a fresh vision of empire. While the Assyrians and Babylonians built empires on slaughter and deportation, Cyrus offered religious tolerance in return for political dominance to ‘unite peoples into one empire’.*
Soon after, the King of Persia issued a decree that must have astonished the Jews: The Lord God hath given me all the kingdoms of the earth and he hath charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem. Who is there among you of all his people? Let him go up to Jerusalem and build the house of the Lord God of Israel.’
Not only was he sending the Judaean exiles home, and guaranteeing their rights and laws – the first ruler ever to do so – but he returned Jerusalem to them and offered to rebuild the Temple. Cyrus appointed Sheshbazzar, son of the last king, to govern Jerusalem, returning to him the Temple vessels. No wonder a Judaean prophet hailed Cyrus as the Messiah. ‘He is my shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure: even saying to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be built; and to the temple, Thy foundation shall be laid.’
Sheshbazzar led 42,360 exiles back to Jerusalem in the province of Yehud – Judah.† The city was a wasteland after the magnificence of Babylon, but ‘Awake, awake, put on thy strength, O Zion.’ wrote Isaiah, ‘put on thy beautiful garments, O Jerusalem, the holy city … Shake thyself from the dust … O captive daughter of Zion.’ However, the plans of Cyrus and the returning exiles were obstructed by the locals who had remained in Judaea and particularly Samaria.
Just nine years after the return from exile, Cyrus, still in his prime, was killed in battle in Central Asia. It was said that his victorious enemy dropped his head into a blood-filled wineskin to satiate his greedy thirst for the lands of others. His heir redeemed his body and buried him in a golden sarcophagus at Pasargadae (in southern Iran) where his tomb still stands. ‘He eclipsed all other monarchs, before him and since,’ wrote the Greek soldier Xenophon. Jerusalem had lost her protector.22
DARIUS AND ZERUBBABEL: THE NEW TEMPLE
The fate of Cyrus’ empire, already larger than anything that had gone before, was decided close to Jerusalem. Cyrus’ son Cambyses II – Kambujiya – succeeded to the throne and in 525 marched through Gaza and across Sinai to conquer Egypt. Far away in Persia, his brother rebelled. On his way home to save his throne, Cambyses died mysteriously near Gaza; there, seven noble conspirators met on horseback to plan the seizure of the empire. They had not decided who would be their candidate, so they agreed that ‘the one whose horse was first to neigh after dawn should have the throne’. The horse of Darius, a young scion of one of the noble clans and Cambyses’ lance-bearer, was the first to neigh. Herodotus claimed that Darius cheated by ordering his groom to dip his fingers into a mare’s vulva: he then gave Darius’ horse a thrilling whiff at the vital moment. Thus Herodotus gleefully attributed the rise of an eastern despot to a venereal sleight of hand.
Aided by his six co-conspirators, Darius galloped eastwards, and succeeded in reconquering the entire Persian empire, suppressing rebellions in virtually every province. But the civil war ‘ceased the work of the house of God in Jerusalem unto the second year of the reign of Darius’. In about 520, Prince Zerubbabel, grandson of the last king of Judah, and his priest, Joshua, son of the last priest of the old Temple, set off from Babylonia to rescue Jerusalem.
Zerubbabel rededicated the altar on the Temple Mount, hiring artisans and buying Phoenician cedarwood to rebuild the Temple. Excited by the rising edifice, encouraged by the disorder in the empire, the Jews could not help but entertain messianic dreams of a new kingdom. ‘In that day, saith the Lord of hosts, I will take thee, O Zerubbabel, my servant … and make thee as a signet’, wrote the prophet Haggai, citing the Davidic signet-ring lost by Zerubbabel’s grandfather. Jewish leaders arrived from Babylon with gold and silver, hailing Zerubbabel (which means ‘Seed of Babylon’) as the ‘Shoot’ that ‘shall assume majesty and rule upon his throne’.
The local people, who lived around the city and to the north in Samaria, now wanted to join in with this sacred task and offered Zerubbabel their help, but the returning Exiles practised a new Judaism. They regarded these locals as half-heathens, disdaining them as the Am Ha-Aretz, ‘the people of the land’. Alarmed by the revival in Jerusalem or bribed by the locals, the Persian governor stopped the building.
Within three years, Darius had defeated all challenges and emerged as one of the most accomplished rulers of the ancient world, establishing a tolerant world empire that stretched from Thrace and Egypt to the Hindu Kush – the first to extend across three continents.* The new Great King turned out to be a rare combination of conqueror and administrator. From his image carved in rock to commemorate his victory, we know that this Darius – Darayavaush – presented himself as a classic Aryan with high brow and straight nose, shown as 5 feet 10 inches tall, wearing a war crown of gold studded with oval jewels, his fringe frizzed, his drooping moustache twirled, his hair tied in a bun and his square beard arranged in four rows of curls alternating with straight strands. In his majesty, he wore a long robe over trousers and shoes, and carried a duck-headed bow.
This was the awesome ruler to whom Zerubbabel appealed, citing the decree of Cyrus. Darius ordered a check of the imperial rolls and found the decree, commanding, ‘Let the governor of the Jews build this house of God. I, Darius, have a decree. Let it be done with speed.’ In 518, he marched westwards to restore order in Egypt, probably passing through Judaea to settle the over-excited Jews of Jerusalem: he may have executed Zerubbabel, who now disappeared without explanation – the last of the Davidians.
In March 515, the Second Temple was dedicated joyfully by the priests with the sacrifice of 100 bullocks, 200 rams, 400 lambs and twelve goats (to expiate the sins of the Twelve Tribes). The Judaeans thus celebrated the first Passover since the Exile. But when the old men who remembered Solomon’s Temple saw this modest building, they burst into tears. The city remained tiny and deserted.23
Over fifty years later, the cup-bearer of Darius’ grandson, King Artaxerxes I, was a Jew named Nehemiah. The Jerusalemites appealed to him for help: ‘The remnant are in great affliction. The wall of Jerusalem is broken down.’ Nehemiah was heartbroken: ‘I sat down and wept and mourned.’ When he was next serving at court in Susa, the Persian capital, King Artaxerxes asked, ‘Why is thy countenance sad?’ ‘Let the king live for ever,’ replied this Jewish courtier, ‘why should not my countenance be sad, when the city, the place of my father’s sepulchres, lieth waste? … If it please the king … send me unto Judah … that I may build it.’ Nehemiah was ‘sore afraid’ as he awaited the answer.
NEHEMIAH: THE DECLINE OF THE PERSIANS
The Great King appointed Nehemiah governor and granted him funds and a military escort. But the Samaritans, north of Jerusalem, were ruled by their own hereditary governor, Sanballat, who distrusted this secretive courtier from faraway Susa and the schemes of the returning Exiles. By night Nehemiah, who feared assassination, inspected Jerusalem’s broken walls and burned gates. His memoir, the only political autobiography in the Bible, tells how Sanballat ‘laughed us to scorn’ when he heard the plans to rebuild the walls until Nehemiah revealed his appointment as governor. Landowners and priests were each given sections of the wall to rebuild. When they were attacked by Sanballat’s ruffians, Nehemiah set guards ‘so the wall was finished in fifty and two days’, enclosing just the City of David and the Temple Mount, with a small fortress north of the Temple.
Now Jerusalem ‘was large and great’, Nehemiah said, but ‘the people were few therein’. Nehemiah persuaded the Jews outside the city to draw lots: one out of every ten would settle in Jerusalem. After twelve years Nehemiah travelled to Persia to report to the king, but when he returned to Jerusalem he found that Sanballat’s cronies were lucratively running the Temple while the Jews were marrying with the locals. Nehemiah expelled these interlopers, discouraged intermarriage and imposed his new pure Judaism.
As the Persian kings lost control over their provinces, the Jews developed their own semi-independent statelet of Yehud. Based around the Temple, and funded by growing numbers of pilgrims, Yehud was ruled by the Torah and governed by a dynasty of high priests supposedly descended from King David’s priest Zadok. Once again, the Temple treasury became a coveted prize. One of the high priests was murdered inside the Temple by his own avaricious brother, Jesus (the Aramaic for Joshua), a sacrilege that gave the Persian governor the pretext to march on Jerusalem and loot its gold.24
While the Persian courtiers were distracted by their own homicidal intrigues, King Philip II of Macedon trained a formidable army, conquered the Greek city-states and prepared to launch a sacred war against Persia to avenge the invasions of Darius and his son Xerxes. When Philip was assassinated, his twenty-year-old son Alexander seized the throne and launched the attack on Persia that would bring Greece to Jerusalem.
ALEXANDER THE GREAT
Within three years of his father’s murder in 336 BC, Alexander had twice defeated the Persian king Darius III, who decided to withdraw eastwards. Alexander did not pursue him at first, but instead marched along the coast towards Egypt, and ordered Jerusalem to contribute provisions for his army. The high priest initially refused. But not for long: when Tyre resisted him, Alexander besieged the city and when it fell, he crucified all its survivors.
Alexander ‘hurried to go up to Jerusalem’, wrote the Jewish historian Josephus much later, claiming that the conqueror was welcomed at the gates by the high priest in his purple and scarlet robes and all the Jerusalemites in white. They led him into the Temple where he sacrificed to the Jewish God. This story was probably wishful thinking: it is more likely that the high priest, along with the leaders of the semi-Jewish Samaritans, paid court to Alexander on the coast at Rosh Ha Ayim and that, emulating Cyrus, he recognized their right to live by their own laws.* He then pushed on to conquer Egypt, where he founded the city of Alexandria before heading east, never to return.
After finishing off the Persian empire and expanding his hegemony as far as Pakistan, Alexander began his great project, the fusing of the Persians and Macedonians into a single elite to rule his world. If he did not quite succeed, he changed the world more than any other conqueror in history by spreading his version of Hellenikon – Greek culture, language, poetry, religion, sport and Homeric kingship – from the deserts of Libya to the foothills of Afghanistan. The Greek way of life became as universal as the British during the nineteenth century or the American today. From now on, even the monotheistic Jewish enemies of this philosophical and polytheistic culture could not help but see the world through the lens of Hellenism.
On 13 June 323, eight years after conquering the known world, Alexander lay in Babylon dying either of fever or of poison, aged just thirty-three. His devoted soldiers filed past his bed with tears pouring down their faces. When they asked him to whom he had left his kingdom, he replied: ‘To the strongest.’25
PTOLEMY: THE SABBATH SACKING
The tournament to find the strongest was a twenty-year war between Alexander’s generals. Jerusalem was tossed between these Macedonian warlords who ‘multiplied the evils in the earth’. In the duel between the two leading contenders, Jerusalem changed hands six times. She was ruled for fifteen years by One-Eyed Antigonos, until in 301 he was killed in battle and the victor, Ptolemy, arrived outside the walls to claim Jerusalem.
Ptolemy was Alexander’s cousin, a veteran general who had fought his way from Greece to Pakistan, where he had commanded the Macedonian fleet on the Indus. Just after Alexander’s death, he was granted Egypt. When he heard that Alexander the Great’s cortège was on its way back to Greece, he rushed up through Palestine to seize it and carried it back to rest in his capital, Alexandria. The guardian of the ultimate Greek talisman, Alexander’s body, became the keeper of his flame. Ptolemy was not just a warlord: the soldier’s strong chin and blunt nose on his coins belied his subtlety and common sense.
Now Ptolemy told the Jerusalemites that he wished to enter the city on the Sabbath to sacrifice to the Jewish God. The resting Jews believed this ruse and Ptolemy seized the city, thus revealing the fanaticism of Jewish observance. But when the sun set on the Sabbath, the Jews fought back. Ptolemy’s troops then rampaged through Jerusalem – ‘the houses rifled, the women ravished; and half the city go forth into captivity’. Ptolemy probably posted Macedonian garrisons in the Baris Fortress, built by Nehemiah just north of the Temple, and he deported thousands of Jews to Egypt. These founded the Greek-speaking Jewish community in Ptolemy’s splendid capital Alexandria. In Egypt, Ptolemy and his successors became pharaohs; in Alexandria and the Mediterranean they were Greek kings. Ptolemy Soter – the ‘Saviour’ as he was known – adopted the local gods, Isis and Osiris, and Egyptian traditions of kingship, promoting his dynasty as both Egyptian god-kings and semi-divine Greek monarchs. He and his sons conquered Cyprus, Cyrenaica and then swathes of Anatolia and the Greek Islands. He understood that not just magnificence but also culture would give him legitimacy and greatness. So he made Alexandria the world’s paramount Greek city, opulent and sophisticated, founding its Museum and the Library, recruiting Greek scholars and commissioning the Pharos lighthouse, one of the Wonders of the World. His empire endured for three centuries down to the last of his family – Cleopatra.
Ptolemy lived into his eighties, and wrote a history of Alexander.26 Ptolemy II Philadelphos favoured the Jews, freeing 120,000 Jewish slaves and sending gold to embellish the Temple. He understood the power of pageantry and spectacle. In 275 he held a parade for a small number of special guests in the name of Dionysus, god of wine and abundance, in which a vast wineskin made of leopard pelts held 200,000 gallons of wine and a phallos 180 feet long and 9 feet wide was paraded along with elephants and subjects from every corner of his empire. He was also an avid book collector. When the high priest sent the twenty or so books of the Jewish Tanakh* to Alexandria, the king ordered it to be translated into Greek. He respected the scholarship of his Alexandrian Jews and invited them to a dinner to discuss the translation: ‘everything’, promised the king, ‘will be served in compliance with your habits and for me also.’ It was said that in seventy days the seventy scholars each produced an identical translation. The Septuagint Bible changed the history of Jerusalem and later made possible the spread of Christianity. Thanks to Alexander, Greek was the international language; now, for the first time, the Bible could be read by virtually everyone.27
JOSEPH THE TOBIAD
Jerusalem remained a semi-independent statelet within Ptolemy’s empire, and Judah issued its own coins, inscribed ‘Yehud’. She was not just a political entity but God’s own city ruled by the high priests. These scions of the Oniad family, claiming descent from the biblical priest Zadok, enjoyed the opportunity to amass fortunes and power, provided they paid tribute to the Ptolemies. In the 240s, High Priest Onias II tried to hold back the 20 silver talents he owed Ptolemy III Euergetes. This created an opportunity for a well-connected young Jew who decided to outbid the high priest not just for Jerusalem but for the entire land.
This adventurer was the high priest’s own nephew, Joseph,* who set off for Alexandria where the king was holding an auction: bidders promised the highest tribute in return for the power to rule and tax their territories. The Syrian grandees mocked young Joseph but he outplayed them with outrageous chutzpah. He managed to see the king first and charmed him. When Ptolemy III asked for offers, the bumptious Joseph outbid his rivals for all of Coele-Syria, Phoenicia, Judah and Samaria. The king asked Joseph for the usual hostages to guarantee his promised tribute. ‘I give you no other persons, O King,’ replied the cocky Jerusalemite, ‘than yourself and your wife.’ Joseph could have been executed for this impertinence but Ptolemy laughed and agreed.
Joseph returned to Jerusalem with 2,000 Egyptian infantry. He had much to prove. When Ashkelon refused to pay its taxes, he murdered its twenty leading citizens. Ashkelon paid.
Joseph, like his namesake in Genesis, had played at the highest level in Egypt and won. In Alexandria, where he hobnobbed with the king, he fell in love with an actress. When he set up the seduction, his brother replaced her with his own daughter. During the night, Joseph was too drunk to notice and when he was sober, he fell in love with his niece and their marriage strengthened the dynasty. However, their son Hyrcanus grew up to be as much of a rogue as Joseph himself. Living grandly, ruling severely and taxing exorbitantly, Joseph was nonetheless ‘a good man of great magnanimity’, according to Josephus, admired for his ‘gravity, wisdom and justice. He brought the Jews out of a state of poverty and meanness to one that was more splendid.’
Joseph the Tobiad was important to the kings of Egypt because they were now continuously fighting a rival Macedonian dynasty, the Seleucids, for control of the Middle East. In about 241, Ptolemy III showed his gratitude, after a victory over his enemies, by visiting Jerusalem and there sacrificing respectfully in the Temple, hosted no doubt by Joseph. When the king died, however, the Egyptians found themselves challenged by a teenaged Seleucid king of irrepressible ambition.
ANTIOCHUS THE GREAT: CLASH OF THE ELEPHANTS
The challenger was the Macedonian king of Asia, Antiochus III. In 223, this peripatetic eighteen-year-old inherited a grandiose title and a disintegrating empire,* but he possessed the gifts to reverse this decay. Antiochus regarded himself as the heir to Alexander and, like all the Macedonian kings, he associated himself with Apollo, Hercules, Achilles and, above all, Zeus. In a dizzying succession of campaigns, Antiochus reconquered Alexander’s eastern empire as far as India, earning the soubriquet ‘the Great’. He repeatedly attacked Palestine but the Ptolemies repelled his invasions and the ageing Joseph the Tobiad continued to rule Jerusalem. But his son Hyrcanus betrayed him and attacked the city. Shortly before his death, Joseph defeated his son, who went on to carve out his own principality in today’s Jordan.
In 201, Antiochus the Great, now in his forties, returned from his triumphs in the east. Jerusalem was ‘tossed like a ship in a storm between both sides’. Finally, Antiochus routed the Egyptians, and Jerusalem welcomed a new master. ‘The Jews, when we came into their city,’ declared Antiochus, ‘gave us a splendid reception and met us with their senate, and also helped us expel the Egyptian garrison.’ A Seleucid king and army were an impressive sight. Antiochus would have worn a diadem of royalty, laced boots of crimson embroidered with gold, a broad-brimmed hat and a dark-blue cloak spangled with gold stars, brooched at the throat in crimson. The Jerusalemites provisioned his multinational army that included Macedonian phalanxes bearing their sarissa lances, Cretan mountain fighters, Cilician light infantry, Thracian slingers, Mysian bowmen, Lydian javelineers, Persian bowmen, Kurdish infantry, Iranian heavy-armoured cataphracts on war horses and, most prestigious of all, elephants – probably a first for Jerusalem.†
Antiochus promised to repair the Temple and the walls, repopulate the city and confirmed the Jews’ right to rule themselves ‘in accordance with the laws of their fathers’. He even banned foreigners from entering the Temple or bringing ‘into the city the flesh of horses or mules or wild or tame asses or leopards, foxes or hares’. Simon, the high priest, had certainly backed the right side: never had Jerusalem enjoyed such an indulgent conqueror. Jerusalemites looked back at this time as a golden age ruled by the ideal high priest who, they said, resembled ‘the morning star in the midst of a cloud’.28
SIMON THE JUST: THE MORNING STAR
When Simon* emerged from the Holy of Holies on the Day of Atonement, the High Priest ‘was clothed in the perfection of glory, when he went up to the holy altar’. He was the paragon of the high priests who ruled Judah as anointed princes, a combination of monarch, pope and ayatollah: he wore gilded robes, a gleaming breastplate and a crown-like turban on which he sported the nezer, a golden flower, the symbol of life and salvation, a relic of the headdress of the kings of Judah. Jesus Ben Sira, the author of Ecclesiasticus and the first writer to capture the sacred drama of the flourishing city, described Simon as ‘a cypress tree which groweth up to the clouds’.
Jerusalem had become a theocracy – the very word was invented by the historian Josephus to describe this statelet with its ‘entire sovereignty and all authority in the hands of God’. Harsh rules regulated every detail of life, for there was no distinction between politics and religion. In Jerusalem there were no statues nor graven images. The observance of the Sabbath was an obsession. All crimes against religion were punished with death. There were four forms of execution – stoning, burning, beheading and strangling. Adulterers were stoned, a punishment inflicted by the whole community (though the condemned were first thrown down a cliff so that they were usually unconscious by the time of the stoning). A son who struck his father was garrotted. A man who fornicated with both a mother and her daughter was burned.
The Temple was the centre of Jewish life: the high priest and his council, the Sanhedrin, met there. Every morning, the trumpets announced the first prayer, like the muezzin of Islam. Four times a day, the blaring of the seven silver trumpets called the worshippers to prostrate themselves in the Temple. The two daily sacrifices of a male sheep, cow or dove without blemish at the Temple altar, morning and evening, always accompanied by an offering of incense on the altar of perfumes, were the chief rituals of Jewish worship. The word ‘holocaust’, derived from the Hebrew olah meaning to ‘go up’, refers to the burning of the whole animal whose smoke ‘goes up’ to God. The city must have smelt of the Temple altar, the censers with their delicious cinnamon and cassia mixing with the reek of burning flesh. Small wonder the people wore much myrrh, nard and balm as perfumes.
Pilgrims poured into Jerusalem for the festivals. At the Sheep Gate to the north of the Temple, sheep and cattle were herded and wrangled, ready for sacrifice. At Passover, 200,000 lambs were slaughtered. But Tabernacles was the holiest and most exuberant week of the Jerusalem year, when men and girls in white costumes danced in the Temple courtyards, singing, waving lighted torches and feasting. They gathered palms and branches to build huts on the rooftops of their houses or in the Temple courts.*
Yet even under the pure Simon, there were many worldly Jews who probably looked like rich Greeks, living in their new Grecian palaces on the western hillside known as the Upper City. What the fanatical Jewish conservatives regarded as heathen pollution, these cosmopolitans saw as civilization. This was the start of a new pattern in Jerusalem: the more sacred she became, the more divided. Two ways of life existed in the closest proximity with the intimate loathing of a family feud. Now the city – and the very existence of the Jews – was threatened by the most infamous monster since Nebuchadnezzar.29
ANTIOCHUS EPIPHANES: THE MAD GOD
Jerusalem’s benefactor, Antiochus the Great, could not rest: he now turned to the conquest of Asia Minor and Greece. But the over-confident King of Asia underestimated the rising power of the Republic of Rome, which had just defeated Hannibal and Carthage to dominate the western Mediterranean. Rome repelled Antiochus’ bid for Greece, forcing the Great King to surrender his fleet and elephant corps and send his son to Rome as a hostage. Antiochus headed east to replenish his treasury but, while looting a Persian temple, he was assassinated.
Jews, from Babylon to Alexandria, now paid an annual tithe to the Temple, and Jerusalem was so rich that her treasures intensified power struggles among the Jewish leaders and started to attract the cash-strapped Macedonian kings. The new king of Asia, named Antiochus like his father, rushed to the capital at Antioch and seized the throne, killing any other family claimants. Brought up in Rome and Athens, Antiochus IV inherited the irrepressible, glittering talents of his father but his cackling menace and manic flamboyance more resembled the demented exhibitionism of Caligula or Nero.
As the son of a Great King laid low, he had too much to prove. As beautiful as he was unhinged, Antiochus relished the pageantry of court ritual yet was bored by its constraints, priding himself on his absolute right to surprise. In Antioch, the young king got drunk in the main square and bathed and was massaged in public with expensive unguents, befriending grooms and porters in the baths. When a spectator complained about his extravagant use of myrrh, Antiochus ordered the pot smashed over the man’s head, causing a riot as the mob tried to salvage this priceless lotion while the king just laughed hysterically. He enjoyed dressing up, appearing in the streets in a crown of roses with a golden cloak, but when his subjects stared he threw stones at them. At night, he plunged in disguise into the stews of Antioch’s backstreets. Spontaneously friendly to strangers, his caresses were panther-like for he could suddenly turn nasty, as pitiless as he was genial.
The potentates of the Hellenic age usually claimed descent from Hercules and other gods, but Antiochus took it a step further. He called himself Epiphanes – the God-manifest – though his subjects nicknamed him Epumanes – the Madman. But there was method in his madness for he hoped to bind his empire together around the worship of one king, one religion. He fully expected his subjects to worship their local gods and merge them into the Greek pantheon and his own cult. But it was different for the Jews, who had a love–hate relationship with Greek culture. They craved its civilization but resented its dominance. Josephus says they regarded Greeks as feckless, promiscuous, modernizing lightweights, yet many Jerusalemites were already living the fashionable lifestyle, using Greek and Jewish names to show they could be both. Jewish conservatives disagreed; for them, the Greeks were simply idolators, whose nude athletics disgusted them.
The first instinct of the Jewish grandees was to race each other to Antioch to bid for power in Jerusalem. The crisis started with a family feud about money and influence. When High Priest Onias III made his bid to the king, his brother Jason offered an extra eighty talents and returned as high priest with a programme to rebrand Jerusalem as a Greek polis: he renamed her Antioch-Hierosolyma (Antioch-in-Jerusalem) in honour of the king, downgraded the Torah and built a Greek gymnasium probably on the western hill facing the Temple. Jason’s reforms were quite popular. Young Jews were painfully keen to appear fashionable at the gymnasium, where they exercised naked except for a Greek hat. Somehow they managed to reverse their circumcisions, the mark of the covenant with God, giving the appearance of restoring their foreskins, surely a triumph of fashion over comfort. But Jason himself was outbid for Jerusalem: he sent his henchman Menelaos to Antioch to deliver his tribute. But instead the thuggish Menelaos stole the Temple funds, outbid Jason and bought the high priesthood, even though he lacked the required Zadokite lineage. Menelaos seized Jerusalem. When the Jerusalemites sent delegates to the king to protest, he executed them, and he even allowed Menelaos to arrange the murder of the ex-High Priest Onias.
Antiochus was most concerned to raise funds to reconquer his empire – and he was about to pull off an astonishing coup: the uniting of the Ptolemaic and Seleucid empires. In 170 BC Antiochus conquered Egypt, but the Jerusalemites undermined his triumph, rebelling under the deposed Jason. The Madman marched back across Sinai, and stormed Jerusalem deporting 10,000 Jews.* Accompanied by his henchman Menelaos, he entered the Holy of Holies, an unforgivable sacrilege, and stole its priceless artefacts – the golden altar, the candlestick of light and the shewbread table. Worse, Antiochus ordered the Jews to sacrifice to him as God-manifest, testing the loyalty of the many Jews who were probably attracted to Greek culture – and then, his coffers filled with Temple gold, he rushed back to Egypt to crush any resistance.
Antiochus liked to play the Roman, sporting a toga and holding mock elections in Antioch, while he secretly rebuilt his banned fleet and elephant corps. But Rome, determined to dominate the eastern Mediterranean, would not tolerate Antiochus’ new empire. When the Roman envoy Popillius Laenas met the king in Alexandria, he brashly drew a circle in the sand around Antiochus, demanding he agree to withdraw from Egypt before stepping out of it – the origin of the phrase ‘draw a line in the sand’. Antiochus, ‘groaning and in bitterness of heart’, bowed before Roman power.
Meanwhile the Jews refused to sacrifice to Antiochus the God. To ensure that Jerusalem would not rebel a third time, the Madman decided to eradicate the Jewish religion itself.
ANTIOCHUS EPIPHANES:
ANOTHER ABOMINATION OF DESOLATION
In 167, Antiochus captured Jerusalem by a ruse on the Sabbath, slaughtered thousands, destroyed her walls and built a new citadel, the Acra. He handed the city over to a Greek governor and the collaborator Menelaos.
Then Antiochus forbade any sacrifices or services in the Temple, banned the Sabbath, the Law and circumcision on pain of death, and ordered the Temple to be soiled with pigs’ flesh. On 6 December, the Temple was consecrated as a shrine to the state god, Olympian Zeus – the very abomination of desolation. A sacrifice was made to Antiochus the God-King, probably in his presence, at the altar outside the Holy of Holies. ‘The Temple was filled with riot and revelling by Gentiles who dallied with harlots,’ fornicating ‘in the holy places’. Menelaos acquiesced in this, people processed through the Temple wearing ivy crowns, and, after prayers, even many of the priests descended to watch the naked games at the gymnasium.
Those practising the Sabbath were burned alive or suffered a gruesome Greek import: crucifixion. An old man perished rather than eat pork; women who circumcised their children were thrown with their babies off the walls of Jerusalem. The Torah was torn to shreds and burned publicly: everyone found with a copy was put to death. Yet the Torah, like the Temple, was worth more than life. These deaths created a new cult of martyrdom and stimulated expectation of the Apocalypse. ‘Many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake and come to everlasting life’ in Jerusalem, evil would fail, and goodness triumph with the arrival of a Messiah – and a Son of Man, invested with eternal glory.*
Antiochus progressed back to Antioch, where he celebrated his flawed victories with a festival. Gold-armoured Scythian horsemen, Indian elephants, gladiators and Nisaean horses with gold bridles paraded through the capital, followed by young athletes with gilded crowns, a thousand oxen for sacrifice, floats bearing statues, and women spraying perfume on to the crowds. Gladiators fought in the circuses and fountains ran red with wine while the king entertained a thousand guests at his palace. The Madman supervised everything, riding up and down the procession, ushering in guests, joking with his comedians. At the end of the banquet, the comedians carried in a figure swaddled in cloth. They laid it on the ground where, at the first notes of a symphonia, it suddenly threw off its coverings and out burst the king naked and dancing.
Far to the south of this delirious debauch, Antiochus’ generals were enforcing his persecutions. In the village of Modin, near Jerusalem, an old priest called Mattathias, father of five sons, was ordered to make the sacrifice to Antiochus to prove he was no longer a Jew, but he replied: ‘If all the nations of the King’s dominion hearken unto him yet will I and my sons walk in the Covenant of our fathers.’ When another Jew stepped forward to make the sacrifice, Mattathias’ ‘zeal was kindled, his veins trembled’, and, drawing his sword, he killed first the traitor, then Antiochus’ general, and pulled down the altar. ‘Whoever maintaineth the Covenant,’ he said, ‘let him come forth after me.’ The old man and his five sons fled into the mountains, joined by extremely pious Jews known as the Righteous – Hasidim. Initially they were so pious that they observed the Sabbath even (disastrously) in battle: the Greeks presumably tried to fight all their battles on Saturdays.
Mattathias died soon afterwards, but his third son Judah, assuming command in the hills around Jerusalem, defeated three Syrian armies in a row. Antiochus initially did not take the Jewish revolt seriously for he marched east to conquer Iraq and Persia, ordering his viceroy Lysias to crush the rebels. But Judah defeated him too.
Even Antiochus, campaigning in faraway Persia, realized that Judah’s victories threatened his empire, and cancelled the terror. The Jews, he wrote to the pro-Greek members of the Sanhedrin, could ‘use their own proper meats and observe their own laws’. But he was too late, and soon afterwards Antiochus Epiphanes suffered an epileptic fit and fell dead from his chariot.30 Judah had already earned the heroic moniker that would give its name to a dynasty: the Hammer.
JUDAH THE HAMMER
In the winter of 164 BC, Judah the Hammer conquered all of Judaea and Jerusalem apart from Antiochus’ newly built Acra Fortress. When Judah saw the Temple overgrown and deserted, he lamented. He burned incense, rededicated the Holy of Holies, and on 14 December presided as sacrifices resumed. In the ravaged city, there was a shortage of oil to light the candelabra in the Temple, but somehow the candles never went out. The liberation and resanctification of the Temple are still celebrated in the Jewish festival of Hanukkah – the Dedication.
The Hammer – Maccabeus* in Latin – campaigned across the Jordan and sent his brother Simon to rescue the Jews in Galilee. In Judah’s absence, the Jews were defeated. The Maccabee struck back, captured Hebron and Edom and smashed the pagan shrine in Ashdod before besieging the Acra in Jerusalem. But the Seleucid regent defeated the Maccabees at Beth-Zacharia, south of Bethlehem, then besieged Jerusalem, until he had to withdraw to face a revolt in Antioch. He therefore granted the Jews the right to live ‘after their own laws’ and worship in their Temple. Four centuries after Nebuchadnezzar, Jewish independence was restored.
But the Jews were not yet safe. The Seleucids, beset by civil wars, diminished but still formidable, were determined to crush the Jews and retain Palestine. This vicious, complicated war lasted twenty years. There is no need to recount every detail, with its many similarly named Seleucid pretenders, but there were moments when the Maccabees were close to annihilation. Yet this endlessly resourceful, gifted family always managed to recover and strike back.
The Acra Fortress, overlooking the Temple, remained to torment the divided Jerusalem. As the trumpets blew and the priests again performed the sacrifices, Acra’s pagan mercenaries and renegade Jews sometimes ‘rushed out suddenly’, says Josephus, ‘and destroyed those going up to the Temple’. The Jerusalemites executed the high priest, Menelaos, ‘the cause of all evils’, and elected a new one.* But the Seleucids rallied again. Their general Nicanor recaptured Jerusalem. Pointing at the altar, the Greek issued a threat: ‘unless Judah and his host be now delivered in my hands, I will burn upthis House.’
Judah, fighting for his life, appealed to Rome, that enemy of the Greek kingdoms, and Rome effectively recognized Jewish sovereignty. In 161, the Hammer routed Nicanor, ordering his head and his arm to be cut off and brought to Jerusalem. At the Temple, he presented these ghoulish trophies – the hand and the excised tongue that had threatened the Temple were shredded and hung out for the birds while the head lolled atop the fortress. Jerusalemites celebrated Nicanor Day as a festival of deliverance. The Seleucids then defeated and killed the Maccabee himself; Jerusalem fell. Judah was buried in Modin. All seemed lost. But he was survived by his brothers.31
SIMON THE GREAT: TRIUMPH OF THE MACCABEES
After two years on the run, Jonathan, Judah’s brother, emerged from the deserts to rout the Seleucids again, setting up his court at Michmas, north of Greek-held Jerusalem. Jonathan, known as the Diplomat, played off the rival kings of Syria and Egypt to regain Jerusalem. He then restored the walls, resanctified the Temple and, in 153, persuaded the Seleucid king to appoint him to the gold-clasped rank of ‘king’s friend’ – and High Priest. The Maccabee was anointed with the oil and bedecked with the royal flower and the priestly robes at the most raucous of festivals, Tabernacles. Yet Jonathan was descended from a provincial priest with no connection to Zadok. At least one Jewish sect saw him as the ‘Wicked Priest’.
First Jonathan was backed by the Egyptian king Ptolemy VI Philometer, who marched up the coast to Joppa (Jerusalem’s nearest port, Jaffa), to meet Jonathan, in their respective pharaonic and priestly magnificence. At Ptolemais (now Acre), Philometer achieved the dream of every Greek king since Alexander the Great: he was crowned king of Egypt and Asia. But at the very moment of his triumph, his horse reared at the sight of the Seleucid elephants, and he was killed.*
As rival Seleucids fought for power, Jonathan the Diplomat repeatedly switched sides. One of the Seleucid pretenders, besieged in his Antioch palace, appealed for Jonathan’s help in return for full Jewish independence. Jonathan marched his 2,000 men all the way from Jerusalem, through what is now Israel, Lebanon and Syria, to Antioch. The Jewish soldiers, firing arrows from the palace then leaping from roof to roof across the burning city, rescued and restored the king. Returning to Judaea, Jonathan conquered Ashkelon, Gaza, and Beth-Zur – and started to besiege the Acra Fortress in Jerusalem. But he was lured to Ptolemais without his bodyguards to meet his latest Greek ally who seized him and marched on Jerusalem.
The Maccabee family was not yet exhausted: there was still one more brother.32 This was Simon, who refortified Jerusalem and rallied his army. Along with a sudden snowstorm, this forced the Greek to retreat, but he had his revenge: he executed Simon’s captive brother, Jonathan. In spring 141, Simon stormed and demolished the Acra,† razing the very hill on which it stood before celebrating in Jerusalem ‘with praise, palm branches, harps, cymbals, viols and hymns.’ The ‘yoke of the heathen was taken away from Israel’ and a Great Assembly hailed Simon as hereditary ruler, clothing him in royal purple buckled with gold, king in all but name. ‘The people began to write in their contracts: “In the first year of Simon the Great, High Priest, Commander-in-Chief and Leader of the Jews”.’
JOHN HYRCANUS: EMPIRE-BUILDER
Simon the Great was at the height of his popularity when, in 134 BC, he was invited to dinner by his son-in-law. There, the last of the first generation of Maccabees was assassinated, and the son-in-law then seized Simon’s wife and two of his sons. Assassins tried to catch his other son John – Yehohanan in Hebrew – but he made it to Jerusalem and held the city.
John faced disaster on every side. When he pursued the conspirators to their stronghold, his mother and brothers were torn to pieces before him. As the third son, John had not expected to reign but he possessed all the family talents to become the ideal Jewish ruler, with ‘charismatic-Messianic traits’. Indeed, wrote Josephus, God granted John ‘three of the greatest privileges – the rule of the nation, the office of High Priest and the gift of prophecy’.
The Seleucid king, Antiochus VII Sidetes, exploited this Jewish civil war to regain Palestine and besiege Jerusalem. The Jerusalemites were starting to starve, when King Sidetes signalled his willingness to negotiate by sending in ‘a magnificent sacrifice’ of bulls with gilded horns for the Feast of Tabernacles. John sued for peace, agreeing to surrender Maccabee conquests outside Judaea, to pay 500 silver talents and to demolish the walls.
John had to support his new master on campaign against the rising power in Iran and Iraq, the Parthians. The expedition proved a disaster for the Greeks but a blessing for the Jews. John may have secretly negotiated with the Parthian king, who had many Jewish subjects. The Greek king was killed and somehow John escaped from this quagmire, returning with his independence restored.*
The great powers were distracted by their own internecine intrigues, so John was free to embark on conquests on a scale unseen since David, who ironically helped fund his wars: John plundered his rich tomb, presumably in the old City of David. He conquered Madaba across the Jordan, forced the conversion of the Edomites (who became known as the Idumeans) to the south, and destroyed Samaria before taking Galilee. In Jerusalem, John built the so-called First Wall around the growing city.* His kingdom was a regional power, and its Temple was the centre of Jewish life, though the growing communities around the Mediterranean conducted their daily prayers in local synagogues. It was probably in this newly confident time that the twenty-four books became the agreed text of the Jewish Old Testament.
After John’s death, his son Aristobulos declared himself king of Judaea, the first monarch in Jerusalem since 586, and conquered Iturea in today’s northern Israel and southern Lebanon. But the Maccabeans were now almost as Greek as their enemies, using both Greek and Hebrew names. They started to behave with all the ferocity of Greek tyrants. Aristobulos threw his mother into jail and murdered his more popular brother, a crime that drove him mad with guilt. Yet as he died vomiting blood, he feared that his arrogant surviving brother, Alexander Jannaeus, was a monster who would destroy the Maccabees.33
ALEXANDER THE THRACIAN: THE FURIOUS YOUNG LION
As soon as he had secured Jerusalem, King Alexander (Jannaeus was the Greek version of his Hebrew name Yehonatan) married his brother’s widow and set about conquering a Jewish empire. Alexander was spoilt and heartless – soon the Jews loathed him for his debauched sadism. But Alexander enjoyed his freedom to wage war on his neighbours – the Greek kingdoms were collapsing, the Romans had not yet arrived. Alexander always managed to survive his frequent defeats thanks to the luck of the devil* and tenacious savagery: the Jews nicknamed him the Thracian for his barbarism and his army of Greek mercenaries.
Alexander conquered Gaza and Raphia on the borders of Egypt and the Gaulanitis (Golan) in the north. Ambushed by the Nabataean Arabs in Moab, Alexander fled back to Jerusalem. When he officiated as high priest at the Feast of Tabernacles, the people bombarded him with fruit. Encouraged by the more religious Pharisees (who followed oral traditions as well as the written Torah), they taunted him with the claim that, since his mother had been a prisoner, he was unfit to be high priest. Alexander responded by unleashing his Greek mercenaries, who massacred 6,000 people in the streets. The Seleucids exploited the rebellion to attack Judaea. Alexander fled to the hills.
He bided his time, planning his revenge. When the king re-entered Jerusalem, he slaughtered 50,000 of his own people. He celebrated his victory by cavorting with his concubines at a feast while he watched 800 rebels being crucified around the hills. The throats of their wives and children were slit before their eyes. ‘The furious young lion’, as his enemies called him, died of alcoholism, leaving his wife Salome Alexandra a Jewish empire that included parts of today’s Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. He advised her to conceal his death from the soldiers until she had secured Jerusalem, then to govern with the Pharisees.
The new queen was the first woman to rule Jerusalem since Jezebel’s daughter. But the genius of the dynasty was exhausted. Salome Alexandra (Salome being the Greek version of Shalomzion – Peace in Zion), shrewd widow of two kings, ruled her little empire into her sixties with the help of the Pharisees, but she struggled to control her two sons: the elder, the high priest John Hyrcanus II, was not energetic enough, while the younger Aristobulos was too energetic by far.
To the north, Rome advanced relentlessly around the Mediterranean, swallowing first Greece then today’s Turkey, where Roman power was resisted by Mithridates, the Greek King of Pontus. In 66 BC, the Roman general Pompey defeated Mithridates, and moved south to fill the vacuum. Rome was coming to Jerusalem.
POMPEY IN THE HOLY OF HOLIES
When Queen Salome died, her sons fought. Hyrcanus II was defeated near Jericho by his brother Aristobulos II. The brothers were reconciled, embracing before the Jerusalemites in the Temple, and Aristobulos became king. Hyrcanus retired, but he was advised and controlled by a cunning outsider, Antipater. This Idumean potentate* was the future. His son would become King Herod. Their talented and depraved family would dominate Jerusalem for over a century and essentially create the Temple Mount and Western Wall as they are today.
Antipater helped Hyrcanus flee to Petra, the ‘rose red city half as old as time’, the Nabataean Arab capital. King Aretas (Harith in Arabic), fabulously rich from the Indian spice trade and related to Antipater’s Arab wife, helped them defeat King Aristobulos, who fled back to Jerusalem. The Arab king gave chase, besieging Aristobulos in the fortified Temple Mount. But all this sound and fury signified nothing, because to the north Pompey was setting up headquarters in Damascus. Gnaeus Pompeius, the most powerful man in Rome, was a maverick commander who without official position had led his private army to victory in the Roman civil wars in Italy, Sicily and North Africa. He had celebrated two Triumphs and won vast wealth. He was a cautious general with a cherubic face – ‘nothing was more delicate than Pompey’s cheeks’ – but this was deceptive: Pompey was, wrote the historian Sallust, ‘honest in face, shameless in heart’, and his early sadism and greed in the civil wars had earned him the nickname ‘the young butcher’. Now he had established himself in Rome but the laurels of a Roman strongman required constant refreshment. His nickname ‘Magnus’ – the Great – was at least partly sarcastic. As a boy he had worshipped Alexander the Great, and his Homeric, heroic kingship, along with the unconquered provinces and prizes of the East, would henceforth prove irresistible to every Roman oligarch on the make.
In 64 BC, Pompey terminated the Seleucid kingdom, annexed Syria and was happy to mediate between the warring Jews. Delegations arrived from Jerusalem representing not only both the feuding brothers but also the Pharisees, who begged Pompey to rid them of Maccabeans. Pompey ordered both princes to await his judgement, but Aristobulos, who had not quite grasped the steely power of Rome, rashly double-crossed him.
Pompey swooped on Jerusalem. He captured Aristobulos, but the Maccabean’s retainers occupied the fortified Temple Mount, breaking down the bridge that linked it to the Upper City. Pompey, encamped north of the Bethesda Pool, besieged the Temple for three months, using catapults to bombard it. Once again taking advantage of Jewish piety – it was the Sabbath and a fast – the Romans stormed the Temple from the north, cutting the throats of the priests who guarded the altar. Jews set alight their own houses; others threw themselves from the battlements. Twelve thousand were killed. Pompey destroyed fortifications, abolished the monarchy, confiscated most of the Maccabean kingdom and appointed Hyrcanus as high priest, ruling just Judaea with his minister Antipater.
Pompey could not resist the opportunity of seeing inside the famous Holy of Holies. The Romans were intrigued by Eastern rites yet proud of their many gods and disdainful of the primitive superstition of Jewish monotheism. The Greeks sneered that the Jews in secret worshipped a golden ass’s head or fattened up a human sacrifice to cannibalize later. Pompey and his entourage entered the Holy of Holies, an unspeakable sacrilege given that even the high priest visited it only once a year. The Roman was probably only the second gentile (after Antiochus IV) ever to penetrate the Sanctuary. Yet he respectfully examined the golden table and the holy candelabra – and realized that there was nothing else there, no godhead, just an intense sanctity. He stole nothing.
Pompey hurried back to Rome to enjoy the Triumph celebrating his Asian conquests. Hyrcanus meanwhile was tormented by the rebellions of Aristobulos and his sons, but the real ruler, his minister Antipater, possessed a genius for winning support in Rome which was now the source of all power. However, even that most serpentine of politicians was challenged by the twists of Roman politics. Pompey was forced to share power in a triumvirate with two other leaders, Crassus and Caesar, the latter soon to make his name conquering Gaul. In 55 BC, Crassus, the next Roman oligarch looking for glory in the east, arrived in Syria, keen to equal the conquests of his rivals.34
CAESAR AND CLEOPATRA
Crassus, known in Rome as Dives, the Rich Man, was notorious for his avarice and cruelty. He had added victims to the Roman dictator Sulla’s death-lists purely to seize their money, while he had celebrated his suppression of the Spartacus rebellion by crucifying 6,000 slaves along the Appian Way. Now he planned an expedition to throw back the new Parthian kingdom that had replaced the Persians and Seleucids in today’s Iraq and Iran.
Crassus funded his invasion by raiding the Temple in Jerusalem, whence he stole 2,000 talents untouched by Pompey and the ‘beam of solid gold’ in the Holy of Holies. But the Parthians annihilated Crassus and his army. The Parthian king Orad II was watching a Greek play when Crassus’ head was tossed on stage. Orad had molten gold poured into Crassus’ mouth, saying, ‘Be satisfied now with thy life’s desire.’35
Now Rome’s two strongmen, Caesar and Pompey, competed for supremacy. In 49 BC, Caesar crossed the Rubicon from Gaul and invaded Italy, defeating Pompey eighteen months later. Pompey fled to Egypt. Elected dictator of Rome, Caesar gave chase, arriving in Egypt two days after the Egyptians had murdered Pompey. He was horrified yet relieved to receive Pompey’s pickled head as a welcoming gift. He had campaigned in the East thirty years earlier. Now he found Egypt divided in a vicious struggle between King Ptolemy XIII and his sister-wife Cleopatra VII to secure for Rome the richest prize of the East: Egypt. But he could not have foreseen how this young queen, deposed from the throne and in desperate straits, would shape his will to her own ends.
Cleopatra demanded a secret audience with the master of the Roman empire. This accomplished impresario of sexual-political pantomime had herself carried into Caesar’s palace wrapped in a laundry bag (not a carpet) – perhaps divining that he was susceptible to such theatrical excitement. Gaius Julius Caesar, battleworn and grizzled, was fifty-two and self-conscious about his balding pate. But this astounding if somewhat chilling life-force, possessed of all the talents of war, letters and politics, and the remorseless energy of a younger man, was also a sexual adventurer who had slept with the wives of both Crassus and Pompey. Cleopatra was twenty-one: ‘her beauty was absolutely not without parallel but her physical attractions, combined with her persuasive charm and the aura she projected’ exerted a powerful fascination, even if, as coins and statues suggest, she possessed the aquiline nose and pointed chin of her forebears. She had a kingdom to reclaim and a peerless lineage to live up to. Both Caesar and Cleopatra were keen practitioners of the adventurous school of politics. They embarked on an affair – she soon bore him a child, Caesarion – but, more importantly, he was now committed to back her.
Caesar soon found himself trapped in Alexandria as the Egyptians rose against Cleopatra and her Roman patron. Meanwhile in Jerusalem, Antipater, Pompey’s ally, saw a chance of redeeming himself with Caesar. He marched on Egypt with 3,000 Jewish troops, persuaded the Egyptian Jews to back him, and attacked Caesar’s opponents. Caesar triumphed and restored Cleopatra. Before returning to Rome, the grateful Caesar reappointed Hyrcanus as high priest and ethnarch – ruler – of the Jews and let him repair Jerusalem’s walls, but he granted all the power to Antipater as procurator of Judaea with his sons as the local tetrarchs: the elder one, Phasael, ran Jerusalem; the younger, Herod, got Galilee.
Herod, aged just fifteen, immediately showed his mettle when he hunted down and killed a band of fanatical religious Jews. In Jerusalem, the Sanhedrin were incensed by young Herod’s unauthorized killings and summoned him for trial. However, the Romans appreciated that Antipater and his sons were the sort of allies required to govern this turbulent people. The Roman governor of Syria ordered Herod’s acquittal and awarded him greater powers.
Herod was already exceptional. He was, wrote Josephus, ‘blessed with every gift of looks, body and mind’. Named to be a hero, he was sophisticated enough to charm and impress the pre-eminent Romans of the era. He was sexually voracious – or, as Josephus put it, ‘slave to his passions’ – yet he was not crude. He had taste in architecture, was highly educated in Greek, Latin and Jewish culture and, when not busy with politics and pleasure, he enjoyed debates on history and philosophy. Yet power always came first and this craving would poison every relationship he had. Son of a second-generation Idumean convert to Judaism and an Arab mother (hence his brother was called Phasael – Faisal), Herod was a cosmopolitan who could play the Roman and the Greek and the Jew. But the Jews never quite forgave his mongrel origins. Raised in a rich but vigilant and ruthless household, he would see the destruction of his closest family and sense the fragility of power and the facility of terror. He grew up using death as a political tool: paranoid, over-sensitive, almost hysterical, this tough teenager, a ‘man of great barbarity’ as well as sensitivity, played to survive and dominate at all costs.
After Caesar was assassinated in 44, Cassius (who was one of his killers) arrived to govern Syria. Herod’s father Antipater switched sides. But the somersaults of intrigue finally caught up with him, and he was poisoned by a rival, who managed to occupy Jerusalem – until Herod had him murdered. Soon afterwards, Cassius and his fellow assassin Brutus were defeated at Philippi. The victors were Caesar’s great-nephew and adopted son Octavian, twenty-two years old, and the swashbuckling general Mark Antony. They split the empire, Antony receiving the East. As Antony processed towards Syria, two young potentates, with radically opposite interests, rushed to meet the Roman strongman. One wanted to restore the Jewish kingdom, the other to swallow it into her ancestral empire.36
ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA
Cleopatra came to Antony, as a queen at the height of her charisma, scion of the Ptolemies, the most prestigious dynasty in the known world, and, as Isis-Aphrodite to meet her Dionysus, who could grant her the provinces of her forefathers.
Their meeting was fateful for both. Antony was fourteen years older than her but in his prime: he was hard-drinking, thick-necked, barrel-chested, lantern-jawed and prided himself on his muscular legs. He was dazzled by Cleopatra and keen to embrace the Greek culture and sybaritic splendour of the East, seeing himself as the heir of Alexander, descendant of Hercules – and Dionysus of course. But he also required Egyptian money and provisions for his planned Parthian invasion. Thus they needed each other, and necessity is so often the mother of romance. Antony and Cleopatra celebrated their alliance and affair by murdering Cleopatra’s sister (she had already murdered her brother).
Herod, too, had ridden hastily to Antony. As a young cavalry commander in Egypt, the general had been cultivated by Herod’s father. He therefore appointed Herod and his brother as the real rulers of Judaea with High Priest Hyrcanus as the figurehead. Herod celebrated his rising power with a royal engagement. His fiancée was Mariamme, a Maccabean princess who, by family intermarriage, was the granddaughter of two kings. Her body, wrote Josephus, was as beautiful as her face. This relationship, played out in Jerusalem, would be passionately destructive.
Antony followed Cleopatra, now pregnant with his twins, to her capital, Alexandria. But, just as it appeared that Herod’s rise was assured, the Parthians invaded Syria. Antigonos, a Maccabean prince who was Hyrcanus’ nephew, offered the Parthians 1,000 talents and a harem of 500 girls in exchange for Jerusalem.
PACORUS: PARTHIAN SHOT
The Jewish city rose against the Roman puppets Herod and his brother Phasael. Besieged in the royal palace opposite the Temple, the brothers defeated the rebellion – but the Parthians were a different matter. Jerusalem was crowded with pilgrims – it was the Feast of Weeks – as Maccabean supporters opened the gates for the Parthian prince Pacorus* and his protégé Antigonos. Jerusalem celebrated the return of the Maccabees.
The Parthians pretended to play the honest broker between Herod and Antigonos. Instead they lured Herod’s brother Phasael into a trap. Herod faced elimination as the Parthians looted the city and then handed power to Antigonos as king of Judaea and high priest.† He mutilated his uncle Hyrcanus, cutting off his ears, to disqualify him from the high priesthood. As for Herod’s brother Phasael, he was either murdered or dashed out his own brains.
Herod had lost Jerusalem and his brother. He had backed the Romans, but it was the Parthians who had conquered the Middle East. A mercurial man, he was surely cyclothymic, if not a manic depressive. But his will to power, pungent intelligence, greed for life and instinct for survival were ferocious. He almost cracked up, but he overcame his nerves. By night, he gathered his entourage for a desperate escape, and a bid for power.
HEROD: ESCAPE TO CLEOPATRA
Herod, accompanied by his retinue – 500 concubines, his mother, sister, and, most importantly, his fiancée, the Maccabee princess Mariamme – galloped out of Jerusalem into the barren Judaean hills. King Antigonos, furious that Herod had escaped with his concubines (clearly the harem offered as payment to the Parthians) sent his cavalry in pursuit. As he fled through the hills, Herod again broke down and tried to commit suicide, but his guards snatched his raised sword. Soon afterwards Antigonos’ horsemen caught up with his caravan. Herod recovered his confidence and defeated them. Leaving his entourage in the impregnable mountain fortress of Masada, he himself escaped to Egypt.
Antony had already left for Rome, but Herod was welcomed by Queen Cleopatra, who offered him employment in a bid to keep him in Alexandria. Instead Herod sailed for Rome, accompanied by his fiancée’s little brother, Jonathan, a Maccabean prince who was his candidate for the Judaean throne. But Antony, who was now planning a war to expel the Parthians, realized that this was no job for a child; it would require Herod’s ruthless competence.
Antony and Octavian, his partner in ruling the empire, escorted Herod to the Senate where he was declared king of Judaea and Roman ally: rex socius et amicus populi Romani. The newly minted King Herod walked out of the Senate flanked by Octavian and Antony, the two pillars of the world, quite a moment for a half-Jew half-Arab from the mountains of Edom. His relationship with these two men would be the foundation of his forty-year reign of terror and magnificence. However, he was a long way from ruling a kingdom: the Parthians still occupied the east; Antigonos reigned in Jerusalem. To the Jews, Herod was a Roman stooge and Idumean mongrel. He would have to fight for every inch of his kingdom, and then Jerusalem.37
THE FALL OF ANTIGONOS: LAST OF THE MACCABEANS
Herod sailed to Ptolemais, mustered an army and started to conquer his kingdom. When rebels held out in impregnable caves in Galilee, he lowered his troops in chests held by chains and, armed with hooks, these soldiers fished out his opponents and sent them hurtling into the canyons below. But Herod needed Antony’s support to take Jerusalem.
The Romans were driving back the Parthians. In 38 BC, Antony himself was besieging a Parthian fortress at Samosata (south-eastern Turkey) when Herod marched north to offer, and ask for, help. The Parthians had ambushed Antony when Herod counter-attacked and saved the baggage-train. The bluff Antony welcomed Herod like an old comrade, affectionately hugging him in front of his army, paraded in honour of the young king of Judaea. The grateful Antony despatched 30,000 infantry and 6,000 cavalry to besiege Jerusalem in Herod’s name. As the Romans pitched camp just north of the Temple, Herod married the seventeen-year-old Mariamme. After a forty-day siege, the Romans stormed the outer wall. Two weeks later, they burst into the Temple, ravaging the city ‘like a company of madmen’, cutting down the Jerusalemites in the narrow streets. Herod had to bribe the Romans to stop the slaughter – and then sent the captured Antigonos to Antony who solicitously beheaded the last Maccabean king. The Roman strongman then set off to invade Parthia with 100,000 troops. His military prowess was much exaggerated; his expedition was a near-disaster, and he lost a third of his army. The survivors were saved by Cleopatra’s delivery of provisions. Antony’s reputation in Rome never quite recovered.
King Herod celebrated his conquest of Jerusalem by liquidating forty-five of the seventy-one members of the Sanhedrin. Demolishing the Baris Fortress north of the Temple, he built a square fortified tower with four turrets, the Antonia, named after his patron, and colossal enough to dominate the city. Nothing is left of the Antonia except traces of its stone-cut base, but we know what it must have been like because many of Herod’s fortresses survive: each of his mountain strongholds was designed to combine impregnable security with peerless luxury.* Yet he never felt secure, and now he had to defend his kingdom from the intrigues of two queens, his own wife Mariamme – and Cleopatra.38
HEROD AND CLEOPATRA
Herod may have been feared but he himself was wary of the Maccabeans, and the most dangerous of them was in his own bed. The king, now aged thirty-six, had fallen in love with Mariamme, who was cultured, chaste and haughty. But her mother, Alexandra, a real-life version of the stereotype of the mother-in-law from hell, immediately started to conspire with Cleopatra to destroy Herod. The Maccabean women were proud of their lineage and she resented her daughter having married into the mongrel Herodians. Yet Alexandra did not realize that, even by the feral standards of first-century politics, the psychotic Herod was more than a match for her.
Since the mutilated old Hyrcanus could no longer officiate in the Temple, Alexandra wanted her teenaged son Jonathan, Mariamme’s younger brother, to become high priest, an eminence to which Herod, the half-Arab Idumean parvenu, could not aspire. Jonathan happened to be not only the rightful king but also of arresting beauty in an age when appearances were believed to reflect divine favour. He was mobbed wherever he went. Herod feared the teenager and solved this problem by raising an obscure Babylonian Jew to the high priesthood. Alexandra secretly appealed to Cleopatra. Antony had increased Cleopatra’s kingdom with lands in Lebanon, Crete and north Africa and also gave her one of Herod’s most valuable possessions – the balsam and date groves of Jericho.† Herod rented them back from her but it was obvious that she coveted Judaea, the territory of her forefathers.
Dangling the pretty Jonathan like a tasty morsel, Mariamme and her mother Alexandra sent a painting of the boy to Antony who, like most men of his era, appreciated male as much as female beauty. Cleopatra promised to support his claim to be king. So when Antony summoned the boy, Herod was thoroughly alarmed and refused to let him go. Herod placed his mother-in-law under close surveillance in Jerusalem, while Cleopatra offered asylum to her and her son. Alexandra had two coffins made to smuggle them out of the palace.
At last Herod, unable to resist Maccabean popularity and the entreaties of his wife, appointed Jonathan as high priest at the Feast of Tabernacles. When Jonathan went up to the altar in his gorgeous robes and royal-priestly headdress, the Jerusalemites loudly praised him. Herod solved his problem in Herodian style: he invited the high priest to join him at his sumptuous palace in Jericho. Herod was alarmingly kind; the night was steamy; Jonathan was encouraged to swim. In the pleasure pools, Herod’s henchmen held him under water, and his body was found floating there in the morning. Mariamme and her mother were heart-broken and outraged; Jerusalem grieved. At Jonathan’s funeral, Herod himself broke down in tears.
Alexandra reported the murder to Cleopatra, whose sympathy was purely political: she had killed at least two and probably three of her own siblings. She persuaded Antony to summon Herod to Syria. If Cleopatra got her way, he would not return. Herod prepared for this risky encounter – and showed his love for Mariamme in his own sinister way: he placed her under the guardianship of his uncle Joseph, viceroy in his absence, but ordered that if he was executed by Antony, Mariamme must be instantly put to death. When Herod was gone, Joseph repeatedly told Mariamme how much the king loved her, so much, he added, that he would rather kill her than let her live without him. Mariamme was shocked. Jerusalem seethed with rumours that Herod was dead. In Herod’s absence, Mariamme lorded it over the king’s sister, Salome, one of the most vicious players in a viperous court.
In Laodicea, Herod, that expert at handling Roman potentates, charmed Antony who forgave him; the two banqueted together day and night. On Herod’s return Salome told her brother how their uncle Joseph had seduced Mariamme while his mother-in-law was planning rebellion. Somehow Herod and Mariamme were reconciled. He now declared his love for her. ‘They both fell into tears and embraced’ – until she let on that she knew about his plan to execute her. Herod, tormented with jealousy, placed Mariamme under house arrest and executed his uncle Joseph.
In 34 BC, Antony reasserted Roman power, after his early bungled expedition, by successfully invading Parthian Armenia. Cleopatra accompanied him to the Euphrates and, on the way home, visited Herod. These two beguiling monsters spent days together, flirting and considering how to kill one another. Herod claimed that Cleopatra tried to seduce him: this was probably her usual manner with any man who could do something for her. It was also a deadly snare. Herod resisted and decided to kill the serpent of old Nile, but his counsellors advised strongly against it.
The Egyptian queen progressed home to Alexandria. There Antony, in a spectacular ceremony, raised Cleopatra to ‘Queen of Kings’. Caesarion, her son by Caesar, now thirteen years old, became her co-pharaoh, while her three children by Antony became kings of Armenia, Phoenicia and Cyrene. In Rome, this Oriental posing appeared unRoman, unmanly and unwise. Antony tried to justify his Eastern wassails by writing his only known work of literature entitled ‘On His Drinking’ – and he wrote to Octavian, ‘Why have you changed? Is it because I’m screwing the queen? Does it really matter where or in whom you dip your wick?’ But it did matter. Cleopatra was seen as a fatale monstrum. Octavian was becoming ever stronger as their partnership fell apart. In 32 BC, the Senate revoked Antony’s imperium. Next Octavian declared war on Cleopatra. The two sides met in Greece: Antony and Cleopatra mustered his army and her Egyptian-Phoenician fleet. It was a war for the world.39
AUGUSTUS AND HEROD
Herod had to back the winner. He offered to join Antony in Greece but instead he was ordered to attack the Arab Nabataeans in today’s Jordan. By the time Herod returned, Octavian and Antony were facing each other at Actium. Antony was no match for Octavian’s commander, Marcus Agrippa. The sea battle was a debacle. Antony and Cleopatra fled back to Egypt. Would Octavian also destroy Antony’s Judaean king?
Herod again prepared for death, leaving his brother Pheroras in charge and, just to be safe, having old Hyrcanus strangled. He placed his mother and sister in Masada while Mariamme and Alexandra were kept in Alexandrium, another mountain fortress. If anything happened to him, he again ordered that Mariamme was to die. Then he sailed for the most important meeting of his life.
Octavian received him in Rhodes. Herod handled the meeting shrewdly and frankly. He humbly laid his diadem crown at Octavian’s feet. Then instead of disowning Antony, he asked Octavian not to consider whose friend he had been but ‘what sort of friend I am’. Octavian restored his crown. Herod returned to Jerusalem in triumph, then followed Octavian down to Egypt, arriving in Alexandria just after Antony and Cleopatra had committed suicide, he by blade, she by asp.
Octavian now emerged as the first Roman emperor, adopting the name Augustus. Still only thirty-three, this punctilious manager, delicate, unemotional and censorious, became Herod’s most loyal patron. Indeed the emperor and his deputy, almost his partner-in-power, the plain-spoken Marcus Agrippa, became so close to Herod that, in Josephus’ expression, ‘Caesar preferred no one to Herod besides Agrippa and Agrippa made no one his greater friend than Herod besides Caesar.’
Augustus increased Herod’s kingdom to include swathes of modern Israel, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Like Augustus, Herod was an icily competent manager: when famine struck, he sold his own gold and bought Egyptian grain to import, saving the Judaeans from starvation. He presided over a half-Greek, half-Jewish court, serviced by pretty eunuchs and concubines. Many of his entourage were inherited from Cleopatra. His secretary Nikolaus of Damascus had been the tutor to her children,* and his bodyguard of 400 Galatians had been her personal bodyguard: Augustus gave them to Herod as a present and they joined his own Germans and Thracians. These blond barbarians handled torture and murder for this most cosmopolitan king: ‘Herod was Phoenician by descent, Hellenized by culture, Idumean by place of birth, Jewish by religion, Jerusalemite by residence and Roman by citizenship.’
In Jerusalem, he and Mariamme resided at the Antonia Fortress. There he was a Jewish king, reading Deuteronomy every seven years in the Temple and appointing the high priest, whose robes he kept in the Antonia. But outside Jerusalem he was a munificent Greek monarch whose new pagan cities – chiefly Caesarea on the coast and Sebaste (being the Greek for Augustus) on the site of Samaria – were opulent complexes of temples, hippodromes, and palaces. Even in Jerusalem, he built a Greek-style theatre and hippodrome where he presented his Actian Games to celebrate Augustus’ victory. When this pagan spectacle provoked a Jewish conspiracy, the plotters were executed. But his beloved wife did not celebrate his success. The court was poisoned by the struggle between the Maccabean and Herodian princesses.40
MARIAMME: HEROD IN LOVE AND HATRED
While Herod had been away, Mariamme had once again charmed her guardian into revealing her husband’s plans for her if he did not return. Herod found her personally irresistible yet politically toxic: she openly accused him of killing her brother. Sometimes she made it humiliatingly obvious to the entire court that she was denying him sex; at other times they were passionately reconciled. She was the mother of two of his sons, yet she was also planning his destruction. She taunted Salome, Herod’s sister, with her commonness. Herod was ‘entangled between hatred and love’, his obsession all the more intense because it was mixed up with his other reigning passion: power.
His sister Salome ascribed Mariamme’s hold on him to magic. She brought him evidence that the Maccabean had beguiled him with a love-potion. Mariamme’s eunuchs were tortured until they revealed her guilt. The guardian who had watched Mariamme in his absence was killed. Mariamme herself was imprisoned in the Antonia then put on trial. Salome kept up the momentum of revelations, determined that the Maccabean queen should die.
Mariamme was sentenced to death, whereupon her mother Alexandra denounced her, hoping to save her own skin. In response, the crowd booed her. As Mariamme was led to execution, she behaved with astonishing ‘greatness of soul’, saying that it was a shame her mother should expose herself in that way. Probably strangled, Mariamme died like a real Maccabean ‘without changing the colour of her face’, displaying a grace that ‘revealed the nobility of her descent to the spectators’. Herod went berserk with grief, believing that his love for Mariamme was a divine vengeance designed to destroy him. He shrieked for her around the palaces, ordered his servants to find her, and tried to distract himself with banquets. But his parties ended with him weeping for Mariamme. He fell ill and erupted in boils, at which Alexandra made a last bid for power. Herod had her killed, and then murdered four of his most intimate friends who perhaps had been close to the charming queen. He never quite recovered from Mariamme, a curse that was to return to destroy another generation. The Talmud later claimed that Herod preserved Mariamme’s body in honey, and this may have been true – for it was fittingly sweet, suitably macabre.
Soon after her death, Herod started to work on his masterpiece: Jerusalem. The Maccabean Palace opposite the Temple was not grand enough for him. The Antonia must have been haunted by the ghost of Mariamme. In 23 BC, he expanded his western fortifications by building a new towered citadel and palace complex, a Jerusalem-within-Jerusalem. Surrounded by a wall 45 feet high, the Citadel boasted three sentimentally named towers, the highest, the Hippicus (after a youthful friend killed in battle), 128 feet high, its base 45 feet square, the Phasael (after his dead brother) and the Mariamme.* While the Antonia dominated the Temple, this fortress ruled the city.
To the south of the Citadel, Herod built his Palace, a pleasure dome containing two sumptuous apartments named after his patrons, Augustus and Agrippa, with walls of marble, cedarwood beams, elaborate mosaics, gold and silver decorations. Around the palace were constructed courtyards, colonnades and porticoes complete with green lawns, lush groves and cool pools and canals set off by cascades, above which perched dovecotes (Herod probably communicated with his provinces by pigeon post). All this was funded by Herod’s Croesian wealth: he was, after the emperor, the richest man in the Mediterranean † The bustle of the palace, with the trumpets of the Temple and the rumble of the city in the distance, must have been pacified by the cooing of birds and tinkle of fountains.
But his court was anything but tranquil. His brothers were pitiless intriguers: his sister Salome ranks as a peerless monstress and his own harem of women were all apparently as ambitious and as paranoid as the king himself. Herod’s priapic tastes complicated the politics – he was, wrote Josephus, ‘a man of appetites’. He had married one wife, Doris, before Mariamme; and, after her, he married at least another eight, choosing beauties for love or lust, never again for their pedigree. As well as his 500-strong harem, his Greek tastes extended to the pages and eunuchs of his household. But his burgeoning family of half-spoiled, half-neglected sons, each backed by a power-hungry mother, became a devil’s brood. Even the masterful puppeteer himself struggled to manage all this hatred and jealousy. Yet the court did not distract him from his most cherished project. Knowing that the prestige of Jerusalem was linked to his own, Herod decided to equal Solomon.41
HEROD: THE TEMPLE
Herod pulled down the existing Second Temple and built a wonder of the world in its place. The Jews were afraid he would destroy the old Temple and never finish the new one, so he called a city meeting to persuade them, preparing every detail. A thousand priests were trained as builders. Lebanese cedar forests were felled, the beams floated down the coast. At quarries around Jerusalem, the massive ashlar stones, gleaming yellow and almost white limestone, were marked and cut out. A thousand wagons were amassed, but the stones were gargantuan. In the tunnels alongside the Temple Mount, there is one stone, 44.6 feet long, 11 feet high, that weighs 600 tons.* No din, no hammering had polluted the building of Solomon’s Temple, so Herod ensured that everything was readied offsite and silently slotted into place. The Holy of Holies was ready in two years, but the entire complex was not completed for eighty.
Herod dug down to the foundation rock and built from there, so he would have destroyed any remnants of Solomon’s and Zerubbabel’s Temples. Though limited to the east by the steepness of the Kidron Valley, he expanded the esplanade of the Temple Mount to the south, filling the space with a substructure held up by eighty-eight pillars and twelve vaulted arches, now called Solomon’s Stables, to create a 3-acre platform, twice as large as the Roman Forum. Today, it is easy to see the seam in the eastern wall, visible 105 feet from the south-western corner of the city, with Herodian ashlars to the left and smaller Maccabean stones to the right.
The courts of the Temple led in diminishing size to ever-increasing sanctity. Gentiles and Jews alike could enter the huge Court of Gentiles, but a wall encircled the Court of Women with this warning inscription:
FOREIGNER! DO NOT ENTER WITHIN THE GRILLE
AND PARTITION SURROUNDING THE TEMPLE
HE WHO IS CAUGHT
WILL HAVE ONLY HIMSELF TO BLAME
FOR HIS DEATH WHICH WILL FOLLOW
Fifty steps led up to a gate that opened into the Court of Israel, open to any male Jew, which led to the exclusive Court of Priests. Within that stood the Sanctuary, the Hekhal itself, containing the Holy of Holies. This rested upon the rock where Abraham was said to have almost sacrificed Isaac, and where David built his altar. Here the sacrifices were conducted on the Altar of Burnt Offering, which faced the Court of Women and the Mount of Olives.
Herod’s Antonia Fortress guarded the Temple Mount in the north. There, Herod constructed his own secret tunnel into the Temple. In the south the Temple was reached by monumental stairs passing through the Double and Triple Gates, to underground passages decorated with doves and flowers that led into the Temple. On the west, a monumental bridge, doubling as an aqueduct bringing water into huge hidden cisterns, stretched across the valley into the Temple. In its sheer eastern wall stood the Shushan Gate, used exclusively by the high priest to progress to the Mount of Olives to sanctify the full moon, or to sacrifice that rarest, holiest of victims, the unblemished red heifer.*
There were pillared porticoes on all four sides but the greatest of these was the Royal Portico, a vast basilica which dominated the whole mountain. About 70,000 people lived in Herod’s city but during the festivals hundreds of thousands arrived on pilgrimage. Like any bustling shrine, even today, the Temple needed a gathering place for friends to meet and for rituals to be arranged. This was the Royal Portico. When visitors arrived, they could shop on the busy shopping street that ran beneath the monumental arches along the western walls. When it was time to visit the Temple, pilgrims took purifying baths in the many mikvahs – ritual pools – that have been found around the southern entrances. They would climb one of the monumental staircases that led into the Royal Portico where they saw all the sights of the city, before it was time to pray.
At the south-eastern corner, the towering walls and cliff of the Kidron Valley created a precipitous peak, the Pinnacle, where the Gospels say the Devil tempted Jesus. At the south-western corner, facing the wealthy Upper City, priests announced the start of festivals and Sabbaths on Friday nights with trumpet blasts that must have echoed across the desolate gorges. A stone, thrown down by Titus in AD 70, proclaims ‘The Trumpeting Place’.
The design of the Temple, supervised by the king and his anonymous architects (an ossuary has been found inscribed ‘Simon builder of the Temple’), showed a brilliant understanding of space and theatre. Dazzling and awe-inspiring, Herod’s Temple was ‘covered all over with plates of gold and at the first rising of the sun reflected back a fiery splendour’ so bright that visitors had to look away. Arriving in Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives, it reared up‘like a mountain covered with snow’. This was the Temple that Jesus knew and that Titus destroyed. Herod’s esplanade survives as the Islamic Haram al-Sharif supported on three sides by Herodian stones that still gleam today, particularly in the Western Wall revered by the Jews.
Once the Sanctuary and the esplanade were complete – it was said there was no rain in the daytime, so that work was never delayed – Herod, who could not enter the Holy of Holies since he was not a priest, celebrated by sacrificing 300 oxen.42 He had reached his apogee. But his undeniable greatness was to be challenged by his own children when the crimes of the past returned to haunt the heirs of the future.
HEROD’S PRINCES: THE FAMILY TRAGEDY
Herod now had at least twelve children by his ten wives. He seemed to ignore most of them except for his two sons by Mariamme, Alexander and Aristobulos. They were half-Maccabee, half-Herodian and they would be his successors. He sent them to Rome where Augustus himself supervised their education. After five years, Herod brought the two teenage princes home to marry: Alexander wed the daughter of the King of Cappadocia while Aristobulos married Herod’s niece.*
In 15 BC, Marcus Agrippa arrived to inspect Herod’s Jerusalem, accompanied by his new wife, Julia, Augustus’ nymphomaniacal daughter. Agrippa, Augustus’ partner and victor of Actium, was already friends with Herod, who proudly showed him Jerusalem. He stayed in his eponymous apartments in the Citadel and there gave banquets in Herod’s honour. Augustus already paid for a daily sacrifice to Yahweh in the Temple, but now Agrippa sacrificed a hundred oxen. He managed to behave with such tact that even the prickly Jews gave him the accolade of laying palms in his path and the Herodians named their children after him. Afterwards, the pair toured Greece with their fleets. When local Jews appealed against Greek repression, Agrippa backed Jewish rights, Herod thanked him and the two embraced as equals.43 But on his return from hobnobbing with the Roman potentate, Herod was challenged by his own children.
Princes Alexander and Aristobulos, polished by a Roman education, inheriting the looks and arrogance of both parents, soon blamed their father for their mother’s fate and, like her, disdained the half-breed Herodians. Alexander, being married to a king’s daughter, was particularly snobbish; both boys mocked Aristobulos’ Herodian wife, thus insulting her mother, their dangerous aunt Salome. They boasted that when they were kings they would put Herod’s wives to labour with the slaves and use Herod’s other sons as clerks.
Salome reported all this to Herod, who was infuriated by the ingratitude and alarmed by the betrayal of these spoilt princelings. He had long ignored Antipater, his eldest son, by his first wife Doris. But now in 13 BC, Herod recalled Antipater and asked Agrippa to take him to Rome with a sealed document for the emperor: it was his will, disinheriting the two boys and instead bequeathing the kingdom to Antipater. But his new heir, probably in his mid-twenties, was embittered by paternal neglect and fraternal envy. He and his mother conspired to destroy the disinherited princes, whom they accused of treason.
Herod asked Augustus, staying at Aquileia on the Adriatic, to judge the three princes. Augustus reconciled father and sons, with the result that Herod sailed home, called a meeting in the court of the Temple and announced that his three sons would share the kingdom. Doris, Antipater and Salome set about reversing this reconciliation for their own purposes, but they were helped by the arrogance of the boys: Prince Alexander told everyone that Herod dyed his hair to look younger and confided that he deliberately missed his targets out hunting to make his father feel better. He also seduced three of the king’s own eunuchs, giving him access to his father’s secrets. Herod arrested and tortured Alexander’s servants until one confessed that his master planned to assassinate him out hunting. Alexander’s father-in-law, the King of Cappadocia, who was visiting his daughter, managed to reconcile father and sons again. Herod expressed his gratitude by presenting the Cappadocian with a very Herodian gift: a courtesan who gloried in the name Pannychis – All-Night-Long.
The peace did not last long: the torture of servants now revealed a letter from Alexander to the commander of the Alexandrium Fortress that said: ‘When we have achieved all we set out to do, we’ll come to you.’ Herod dreamed that Alexander was raising a dagger over him, a nightmare so vivid that he arrested both boys, who admitted they were planning to escape. Herod had to consult Augustus, by now tiring of his old friend’s excesses – though the emperor himself was no stranger to naughty children and tangled successions. Augustus ruled that, if the boys had plotted against Herod, he had every right to punish them.
Herod held the trial in Berytus (Beirut), outside his formal jurisdiction – and therefore supposedly a fair place for the trial. The boys were sentenced to death as Herod wished, which was hardly surprising since he had generously embellished the city. Herod’s counsellors advised mercy – but when one hinted that the boys were suborning the army, Herod liquidated 300 officers. The princes were taken back to Judaea and garrotted. The tragedy of their mother Mariamme, the curse of the Maccabees, had come full circle. Augustus was not amused. Knowing that Jews eschewed pork, he commented drily: ‘I’d rather be Herod’s pig than his son.’ But this was just the beginning of the Grand Guignol decay of Herod the Great.
HEROD: THE LIVING PUTREFACTION
The king, now in his sixties, was ailing and paranoid. Antipater was the sole named heir, but there were many other sons available to inherit the kingdom, and Herod’s sister Salome started to plot against him; she found a servant who claimed that Antipater was planning to poison Herod with a mysterious drug. Antipater, who was in Rome meeting with Augustus, rushed home and galloped to the palace in Jerusalem, but he was arrested there before he could reach his father. At his trial, the suspect drug was given to a convict who dropped down dead. More torture revealed that a Jewish slave belonging to the Empress Livia, Augustus’ own wife and herself an expert on poisons, had forged letters to frame Salome.
Herod sent the evidence to Augustus and drew up his third will, leaving the kingdom to another of his sons, Antipas, the Herod who would later encounter John the Baptist and Jesus. Herod’s illness distorted his judgement and weakened his grip on the Jewish opposition. He placed a gilded bronze eagle on the great gate of the Temple. Some students climbed on to the roof, abseiled down in front of the crowded courtyard and cut it down. The troops of the Antonia Fortress rushed into the Temple to arrest them. Paraded before Herod on his sickbed, they insisted they were obeying the Torah. The culprits were burned alive.
Herod collapsed, suffering an agonizing and gruesome putrefaction: it started as an itching all over with a glowing sensation within his intestines, then developed into a swelling of his feet and belly, complicated by ulceration of the colon. His body started to ooze clear fluid, he could scarcely breathe, a vile stench emanated from him, and his genitals swelled grotesquely until his penis and scrotum burst out into suppurating gangrene that then gave birth to a seething mass of worms.
The rotting king hoped he would recover in the warmth of his Jericho palace but, as his suffering increased, he was borne out to the warm sulphur baths at Callirhoe, which still exist on the Dead Sea, only for the suphur to aggravate the agony.* Treated with hot oil, he passed out and was carried back to Jericho where he ordered the summoning of the Temple elite from Jerusalem, whom he had locked en masse in the hippodrome. It is unlikely that he planned to slaughter them. Probably he wanted to finesse the succession while holding all troublemaking grandees in custody.
At around this time, a child named Joshua ben Joseph, or (in Aramaic) Jesus, was born. His parents were a carpenter, Joseph, and his teenaged betrothed, Mary (Mariamme in Hebrew), based in Nazareth, up in Galilee. They were not much richer than peasants, but it was said they were descended from the old Davidian house. They travelled down to Bethlehem where a child, Jesus, was born ‘that shall rule my people Israel’. After he had been circumcised on the eighth day, according to St Luke, ‘they brought him to Jerusalem, to present him to the Lord’ and make the traditional sacrifice in the Temple. A wealthy family would sacrifice a sheepor even a cow, but Joseph could afford only two turtle-doves or pigeons.
As Herod lay dying, Matthew’s Gospel claims, he ordered his forces to liquidate this Davidian child by massacring all newborn babies, but Joseph took refuge in Egypt until he heard that Herod had died. There were certainly messianic rumours afoot and Herod would have feared a Davidian pretender, but there is no evidence that the king ever heard of Jesus or massacred any innocents. It is ironic that this monster should be particularly remembered for the one crime he neglected to commit. As for the child from Nazareth, we do not hear of him again for about thirty years.*
ARCHELAUS: MESSIAHS AND MASSACRES
Emperor Augustus sent his reply to Herod: he had had Livia’s slave girl beaten to death and Herod was free to punish Prince Antipater. Yet Herod was now in such torment, he seized a dagger to kill himself. This fracas convinced Antipater, in his nearby cell, that the old tyrant was dead. He exuberantly called in his jailer to unlock the cell. Surely, finally, Antipater was King of the Jews? The jailer had heard the cries too. Hurrying to court, he found Herod was not dead, just demented. His servants had seized the knife from him. The jailer reported Antipater’s treason. This pustulous but living carcass of a king beat his own head, howled and ordered his guards to kill the hated son immediately. Then he rewrote his will, dividing the kingdom between three of his teenaged sons – with Jerusalem and Judaea going to Archelaus.
Five days later, in March 4 BC, after a reign of thirty-seven years, Herod the Great, who had survived ‘ten thousand dangers’, died. The eighteen-year-old Archelaus danced, sang and made merry as if an enemy, not a father, had died. Even Herod’s grotesque family were shocked. The body, wearing the crown and gripping the sceptre, was borne on a catafalque of purple-draped, bejewelled gold in a parade – led by Archelaus and followed by the German and Thracian guards, and by 500 servants carrying spices (the stink must have been pungent) – the 24 miles to the mountain fortress of Herodium. There Herod was buried in a tomb* that was lost for 2,000 years.44
Archelaus returned to secure Jerusalem, ascending a golden throne in the Temple, where he announced the softening of his father’s severity. The city was filled with Passover pilgrims, many of whom, certain that the king’s death heralded an apocalyptic deliverance, ran amok in the Temple. Archelaus’ guards were stoned. Archelaus, although he had just promised an easing of the repression, sent in the cavalry: 3,000 people were slaughtered in the Temple.
This teenage despot left his steady brother Philip in charge and sailed for Rome to confirm his succession with Augustus. But his younger brother, Antipas, raced him to Rome, hoping to win the kingdom for himself. As soon as Archelaus was gone, Augustus’ local steward, Sabinus, ransacked Herod’s Jerusalem Palace to find his hidden fortune, sparking more riots. The Governor of Syria, Varus, marched down to restore order but gangs of Galileans and Idumeans, arriving for Pentecost, seized the Temple and massacred any Romans they could find as Sabinus cowered in Phasael’s Tower.
Outside Jerusalem, three rebels – ex-slaves – declared themselves king, burned Herodian palaces and marauded in a ‘wild fury’. These self-appointed kings were pseudo-prophets, proving that Jesus was indeed born at a time of intense religious speculation. Having spent all of Herod’s reign awaiting such leaders in vain, the Jews found that three arrived at once: Varus defeated and killed all three pretenders,* but henceforth pseudo-prophets kept coming and the Romans kept killing them. Varus crucified 2,000 rebels around Jerusalem.
In Rome, Augustus, now sixty, listened to the squabbles of the Herodians and confirmed Herod’s will but, withholding the title of king, appointed Archelaus as ethnarch of Judaea, Samaria and Idumea with Antipas as tetrarch of Galilee and Peraea (part of today’s Jordan), and their half-brother Philipas tetrarch of the rest.† The life of the rich in the Roman villas of Archelaus’ Jerusalem was louche, Grecian and extremely unJewish: a silver goblet, buried nearby, lost for two millennia before it was bought in 1911 by an American collector, depicts explicit homosexual couplings – on one side, a man lowers himself using a pulley onto a catamite as a voyeur slave peeps through the door, while on the other two lithe boys intertwine on a couch. But Archelaus turned out to be so vicious, inept and extravagant that, after ten years, Augustus deposed him, exiling him to Gaul. Judaea became a Roman province, and Jerusalem was ruled from Caesarea on the coast by a series of low-ranking prefects; it was now that the Romans held a census to register taxpayers. This submission to Roman power was humiliating enough to provoke a minor Jewish rebellion and was the census recalled by Luke, probably wrongly, as the reason that Jesus’ family came to Bethlehem.
For thirty years, Herod Antipas ruled Galilee, dreaming of his father’s kingdom which he had almost inherited, until John the Baptist, a charismatic new prophet, burst out of the desert to mock and challenge him.45
JOHN THE BAPTIST AND THE FOX OF GALILEE
John’s parents, Zacharias, a priest in the Temple, and Elizabeth lived in the village of Ein Kerem, just outside the city. Zacharias was probably one of the humble priests who drew lots for their duties in the Temple, a far cry from the Temple grandees. But John would often have visited the Temple as a boy. There were many ways to be a good Jew and he chose to live ascetically in the wilderness as Isaiah had urged: ‘Prepare the way of Yahweh in the desert.’
In the late 20S AD, John started to win a following first in the deserts not far from Jerusalem – ‘all men mused in their hearts of John whether he were the Christ or not’ – and then later further north in Herod Antipas’ Galilee, where he had family. Mary was a cousin of John’s mother. When she was pregnant with her son Jesus, she stayed with John’s parents. Jesus came from Nazareth to hear his cousin preach and John baptized him in the Jordan. The cousins started to preach together, offering remission of sin in baptism, their new ceremony adapted from the Jewish tradition of ritual bathing in the mikvah. However, John also started to denounce Herod Antipas.
The Tetrarch of Galilee lived majestically, his luxuries funded by tax-collectors who were widely hated. Antipas constantly lobbied the new Roman emperor, Tiberius, Augustus’ morose stepson, to grant him his father’s full kingdom. He named his capital ‘Livias’ after Augustus’ widow, Tiberius’ mother, a friend of the family. Then in AD 18, he founded a new city on the Sea of Galilee named Tiberias. Jesus, like John, despised Antipas as a venal debauchee and Roman stooge: ‘that fox’, Jesus called him.
Antipas had married the daughter of the Nabataean Arab king Aretas IV, an alliance designed to ensure peace between Jewish and Arab neighbours. After thirty years on his little throne, the middle-aged Antipas fell fatally in love with his niece, Herodias. She was the daughter of Herod the Great’s executed son Aristobulos and was already married to a half-brother. Now she demanded that Antipas divorce his Arab wife. Antipas foolishly agreed, but the Nabataean princess did not go quietly. To huge crowds, John the Baptist taunted this adulterous couple as a latter-day Ahab and Jezebel until Antipas ordered his arrest. The prophet was imprisoned in Herod the Great’s Machaerus Fortress across the Jordan, 2,300 feet above the Dead Sea. John was not alone in these dungeons for there was another celebrity prisoner: Antipas’ Arab wife.
Antipas and his courtiers celebrated his birthday at a banquet with Herodias and her daughter, Salome, who was married to the tetrarch Philip. (The mosaic floors of Machaerus’ banqueting hall are still partly intact – as are some of the cells beneath.) Salome ‘came in and she danced and pleased Herod’, perhaps even performing a striptease of the seven veils,* so gracefully that he said: ‘Ask of me whatsoever thou wilt and I will give it thee.’ Prompted by her mother, Salome replied, ‘The head of John the Baptist.’ Moments later, the head was brought up from the dungeons, borne into the banquet on a charger and given ‘to the damsel and the damsel gave it to her mother’.
Jesus, realizing that he was in danger, escaped to the desert, but he frequently visited Jerusalem – the only founder of the three Abrahamic religions to have walked her streets. The city and the Temple were central to his vision of himself. The life of a Jew was based on study of the prophets, observance of the Laws and pilgrimage to Jerusalem, which Jesus called ‘the City of the Great King’. Although the first three decades of Jesus’ life are unknown to us, it is clear that he was steeped in knowledge of the Jewish Bible and everything he did was a meticulous fulfilment of its prophecies. As he was a Jew, the Temple was a familiar part of Jesus’ life and he was obsessional about the fate of Jerusalem. When he was twelve his parents took him to the Temple for Passover. As they left, Luke says he slipped away from them and after three worrying days ‘they found him in the temple sitting in the midst of the doctors, hearing them and asking them questions’. When he was tempted, the devil ‘setteth him on the pinnacle of the temple’. As he unveiled his mission to his followers, he stressed that the playing-out of his own destiny had to take place in Jerusalem: ‘From that time forth began Jesus to shew unto his disciples how he must go unto Jerusalem and suffer many things … and be killed and be raised again on the third day.’ But Jerusalem would pay for this: ‘And when ye shall see Jerusalem compassed with armies, then know that the desolation thereof is nigh … Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled.’
Supported by his Twelve Apostles (including his brother James), Jesus emerged again in his Galilean homeland, moving southwards as he preached what he called ‘the good news’, in his own subtle and homespun style, often using parables. But the message was direct and dramatic: ‘Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.’ Jesus left no writings and his teachings have been endlessly analysed, but the four Gospels reveal that the essence of his ministry was his warning of the imminent Apocalypse – Judgement Day and the Kingdom of Heaven.
This was a terrifying and radical vision in which Jesus himself would play a central part as the mystical semi-messianic Son of Man, a phrase taken from Isaiah and Daniel: ‘The Son of Man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity; and shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father.’ He foresaw the destruction of all human ties: ‘And the brother shall deliver up the brother to death, and the father the child: and the children shall rise up against their parents, and cause them to be put to death … Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.’
This was not a social or nationalistic revolution: Jesus was most concerned with the world after the Last Days; he preached social justice not so much in this world as in the next: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’ Tax-collectors and harlots would enter God’s kingdom before grandees and priests. Jesus shockingly evoked the Apocalypse when he showed that the old laws would no longer matter: ‘Let the dead bury their dead.’ When the world ended, ‘the Son of Man shall sit in the throne of his glory’ and all the nations would gather before him for judgement. There would be ‘everlasting punishment’ for the evil and ‘life eternal’ for the righteous.
However, Jesus was careful, in most cases, to stay within Jewish law and in fact his entire ministry emphasized that he was fulfilling biblical prophecies: ‘Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.’ Rigid adherence to the Jewish law though was not enough: ‘except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven’. Yet he did not make the mistake of directly challenging the Roman emperor, or even Herod. If the Apocalypse dominated his preaching, he offered a more direct proof of his sanctity: he was a healer, he cured cripples and raised people from the dead and ‘great multitudes were gathered together unto him’.
Jesus visited Jerusalem at least three times for Passover and other festivals before his final visit, according to John, and had two lucky escapes. When he preached in the Temple during Tabernacles, he was hailed by some as a prophet and by others as the Christ – though snobbish Jerusalemites sneered, ‘Shall Christ come out of Galilee?’ When he debated with the authorities, the crowd challenged him: ‘Then they took up stones to cast at him but Jesus hid himself and went out of the temple, going though the midst of them.’ He came back for Hanukkah (the Festival of Dedication), but when he claimed ‘I and my Father are one, then the Jews took up stones again to stone him … but he escaped’. He knew what a visit to Jerusalem would mean.
Meanwhile in Galilee, Antipas’ discarded Arab wife escaped from the dungeons of Machaerus to the court of her father, Aretas IV, the wealthiest King of Nabataea, the builder of the remarkable Khazneh shrine and royal tomb in ‘rose-red’ Petra. Furious at this insult, Aretas invaded Antipas’ principality. Herodias had first caused the death of a prophet and had now started an Arab–Jewish war which Antipas lost. Roman allies were not permitted to launch private wars: the Emperor Tiberius, who bathed in increasingly senile debauchery in Capri, was irritated by Antipas’ folly but backed him.
Herod Antipas now heard about Jesus. People wondered who he was. Some thought him ‘John the Baptist but some say Elias and others, one of the prophets’, while his disciple Peter believed he was the Messiah. Jesus was especially popular among women, and some of these were Herodians – the wife of Herod’s steward was a follower. Antipas knew of the connection to the Baptist: ‘It is John, whom I beheaded: he is risen from the dead.’ He threatened to arrest Jesus, but significantly some of the Pharisees, evidently friendly towards him, warned him: ‘Depart hence: for Herod will kill thee.’
Instead Jesus defied Antipas. ‘Go ye, and tell that fox’ that he would continue healing and preaching for two days and on the third he would visit the only place where a Jewish Son of Man could fulfil his destiny: ‘It cannot be that a prophet perish out of Jerusalem.’ His sublimely poetical message to the son of the king who had built the Temple is steeped in Jesus’ love for the doomed city: ‘O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which killest the prophets, and stonest them that are sent unto thee: how often would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings, and ye would not! Behold, your house is left unto you desolate.’46
JESUS OF NAZARETH: THREE DAYS IN JERUSALEM
At the Passover of AD 33,* Jesus and Herod Antipas arrived in Jerusalem at almost the same time. Jesus led a procession to Bethany on the Mount of Olives, with its spectacular view of the gleaming snowy mountain of the Temple. He sent his Apostles into the city to bring back an ass – not one of our donkeys but the sturdy mount of kings. The Gospels, our only sources, each give slightly different versions of what happened in the next three days. ‘All this was done’, explains Matthew, ‘that the scriptures of the prophets might be fulfilled’.
The Messiah was prophesied to enter the city on an ass, and as Jesus approached, his followers laid down palms before him and hailed him as ‘Son of David’ and ‘King of Israel’. He probably entered the city, like many visitors, through the southern gate near the Siloam Pool and then climbed to the Temple up the monumental staircase of Robinson’s Arch. His Apostles, Galilean provincials who had never visited the city, were dazzled by the grandeur of the Temple: ‘Master, see what manner of stones and what buildings are here!’ Jesus, who had often seen the Temple, replied, ‘Seest thou these great buildings? There shall not be left one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.’
Jesus expressed his love for and disappointment in Jerusalem but he foresaw the abomination of desolation. Historians believe that these prophecies were added later, because the Gospels were written after Titus had destroyed the Temple. Yet Jerusalem had been smashed and rebuilt before, and Jesus was reflecting the popular anti-Temple traditions.* ‘Destroy this Temple and I shall build another not made by human hands,’ he added, echoing his prophetic inspiration, Isaiah. Both saw beyond the real city to a heavenly Jerusalem that would have the power to shake the world, yet Jesus promised to rebuild the Temple himself in three days, perhaps showing that it was the corruption, not the Holy House itself, that he opposed.
By day, Jesus taught, and healed sick people at the Bethesda Pool just north of the Temple and at the Siloam Pool to its south, both crowded with Jewish pilgrims purifying themselves to enter the Holy House. At night he returned to his friends’ home in Bethany. On the Monday morning, he again entered the city but this time he approached the Royal Portico of the Temple.
At Passover, Jerusalem was at its most crowded and dangerous. Power was founded on money, rank and Roman connections. But the Jews did not share the Roman respect for military kudos or cold cash. Respect in Jerusalem was based on family (Temple magnates and Herodian princelings), scholarship (the Pharisee teachers) and the wild card of divine inspiration. In the Upper City, across the valley from the Temple, the grandees lived in Grecian-Roman mansions with Jewish features: the so-called Palatial Residence excavated there has spacious receiving-rooms and mikvahs. Here stood the palaces of Antipas and the high priest Joseph Caiaphas. But the real authority in Jerusalem was the prefect, Pontius Pilate, who usually ruled his province from Caesarea on the coast but always came to supervise Passover, staying at Herod’s Citadel.
Antipas was not the only Jewish royalty in Jerusalem. Helena, the Queen of Adiabene, a small kingdom in today’s northern Iraq,* had converted to Judaism and moved to Jerusalem, building a palace in the City of David, donating the golden candelabra over the doorway of the Temple sanctuary and paying for food when there were bad harvests. Queen Helena too would have been there for Passover, probably wearing the sort of jewellery recently discovered in Jerusalem: a large pearl inlaid in gold with two drop pieces, each with an emerald set in gold.
Josephus guessed that two and a half million Jews came for Passover. This is an exaggeration but there were Jews ‘out of every nation,’ from Parthia and Babylonia to Crete and Libya. The only way to imagine this throng is to see Mecca during the haj. At Passover, every family had to sacrifice a lamb, so the city was jammed with bleating sheep – 255,600 lambs were sacrificed. There was much to do: pilgrims had to take a dip in a mikvah every time they approached the Temple as well as buy their sacrificial lambs in the Royal Portico. Not everyone could stay in the city. Thousands lodged in the surrounding villages, like Jesus, or camped around the walls. As the smell of burning meat and heady incense wafted – and the trumpet blasts, announcing prayers and sacrifices, ricocheted – across the city, everything was focused on the Temple, nervously watched by the Roman soldiers from the Antonia Fortress.
Jesus now walked into the towering, colonnaded Royal Portico, the bustling, colourful, crowded centre of all life, where pilgrims gathered to organize their accommodation, to meet friends, and to change money for the Tyrian silver used to buy sacrificial lambs, doves, or, for the rich, oxen. This was not the Temple itself nor one of its inner courts but the most accessible and public section of the entire complex, designed to serve like a forum. In the Portico, Jesus attacked the Temple establishment: ‘Is this house, which is called by thy name, become a den of robbers?’ he said, overturning the tables of the money-changers while quoting and channelling the prophecies of Jeremiah, Zachariah and Isaiah. His demonstration attracted attention but not enough to warrant any intervention by Temple guards or Roman soldiers.
After another night in Bethany, he returned to the Temple† the next morning to debate with his critics. The Gospels cite the Pharisees as Jesus’ enemies, but this probably reflected the situation fifty years later when their authors were writing. The Pharisees were the more flexible and populist sect, and some of their teachings may have been similar to those of Jesus. His real enemies were the Temple aristocracy. The Herodians now challenged him about paying taxes to Rome, but he replied adeptly, ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.’
Yet he did not call himself the Messiah, emphasizing the Shema, the basic Jewish prayer to the one God, and the love of his fellow men: he was very much a Jew. But then he warned the excited crowds of the imminent Apocalypse that would of course take place in Jerusalem: ‘You are not far from the Kingdom of God.’ While Jews held various views on the coming of the Messiah, most agreed that God would preside over the end of the world, which would be followed by the creation of the Messiah’s kingdom in Jerusalem: ‘Sound in Zion the trumpet to summon the saints,’ declared the Psalms of Solomon, written not long after Jesus’ death, ‘announce in Jerusalem the voice of one bringing good news for the God of Israel has been merciful.’ Hence his followers asked him: ‘Tell us what shall be the sign of your coming and of the end of the world?’ ‘Watch therefore for ye know not what hour your Lord will come,’ he answered, but then he spelt out the coming Apocalypse: ‘Nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there shall be famines and pestilences and earthquakes,’ before they saw ‘the Son of Man coming in clouds of heaven with power and great glory’. Jesus’ inflammatory gambit would have seriously alarmed the Roman prefect and high priests, who, he warned, could expect no mercy in the Last Days: ‘Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?’
Jerusalem was always tense at Passover but the authorities were even more jumpy than usual. Mark and Luke state, in a couple of neglected verses, that there had just been some sort of Galilean rebellion in Jerusalem, suppressed by Pilate, who had killed eighteen Galileans around the ‘tower of Siloam’ south of the Temple. One of the surviving rebels, Barabbas, whom Jesus would soon encounter, had ‘committed a murder in the insurrection’. The high priests decided to take no chances with another Galilean predicting their destruction in an imminent Apocalypse: Caiaphas and Annas, the influential former high priest, discussed what to do. Surely it was better, argued Caiaphas in John’s Gospel, ‘that one man should die for the people and that the whole nation perish not’. They made their plans.
The next day Jesus prepared for Passover at the Upper Room – the Cenacle, or Coenaculum – on the western hill of Jerusalem (later known as Mount Zion). At the supper, Jesus somehow learned that his Apostle, Judas Iscariot, had betrayed him for thirty pieces of silver, but he did not change his plan to walk around the city to the tranquil olive groves of the Garden of Gethsemane just across the Kidron Valley from the Temple. Judas slipped away. We do not know if he betrayed Jesus out of principle – for being too radical or not radical enough – or out of greed or envy.
Judas returned with a posse of senior priests, Temple guards and Roman legionaries. Jesus was not instantly recognizable in the dark, so Judas betrayed him by identifying him with a kiss and received his silver. In a chaotic torchlit drama, the Apostles drew their swords, Peter lopped off the ear of one of the high priest’s lackeys and a nameless boy ran off stark naked into the night, a touch so eccentric, it rings of truth. Jesus was arrested and the Apostles scattered except for two who followed at a distance.
It was now almost midnight. Jesus, guarded by Roman soldiers, was marched around the southern walls through the Siloam Gate to the palace of the city’s éminence grise Annas, in the Upper City.* Annas dominated Jerusalem and personified the rigid, incestuous network of Temple families. Himself a former high priest, he was the father-in-law of the present incumbent Caiaphas and no less than five of his sons would be high priests. But he and Caiaphas were despised by most Jews as venal, thuggish collaborators, whose servants, complained one Jewish text, ‘beat us with staves’; their justice was a corrupt money-making scam. Jesus, on the other hand, had struck a popular chord and had admirers even among the Sanhedrin. The trial of this popular and fearless preacher would have to be conducted shiftily, by night.
Some time after midnight, as the guards built a fire in the courtyard (and Jesus’ disciple Peter thrice denied knowing his master), Annas and his son-in-law assembled their loyal Sanhedrin members – but not all of them, because at least one, Joseph of Arimathea, was an admirer of Jesus and never approved his arrest. Jesus was cross-examined by the high priest: had he threatened to destroy the Temple and rebuild it in three days? Did he claim to be the Messiah? Jesus said nothing but finally admitted, ‘ye shall see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven’.
‘He hath spoken blasphemy,’ said Caiaphas.
‘He is guilty of death,’ answered the crowd who had gathered despite the late hour. Jesus was blindfolded and spent the night being taunted in the courtyard until dawn, when the real business could begin. Pilate was waiting.47
PONTIUS PILATE: THE TRIAL OF JESUS
The Roman prefect, guarded by his auxiliary troops and watched by a tense crowd, held court on the Praetorium, the raised platform outside Herod’s Citadel, the Roman headquarters near today’s Jaffa Gate. Pontius Pilate was an aggressive, tactless martinet out of his depth in Judaea. He was already loathed in Jerusalem, notorious for his ‘venality, violence, theft, assaults, abuse, endless executions and savage ferocity’. Even one of the Herodian princes called him ‘vindictive with a furious temper’.
He had already outraged the Jews by ordering his troops to march into Jerusalem displaying their shields with images of the emperor. Herod Antipas led delegations requesting their removal. Always ‘inflexible and cruel’, Pilate refused. When more Jews protested, he unleashed his guards, but the delegates lay on the ground and bared their necks. Pilate then removed the offending images. More recently he had killed the Galilean rebels ‘whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices’.48
‘Art thou the King of the Jews?’ Pilate asked Jesus. After all, Jesus’ followers had acclaimed him king when he entered Jerusalem. But he answered, ‘Thou sayest it,’ and refused to add anything more. But Pilate did learn he was a Galilean. ‘As soon as he knew that he belonged unto Herod’s jurisdiction’, Pilate sent his prisoner to Herod Antipas as a courtesy to the ruler of Galilee, who had a special interest in Jesus. It was a short walk to Antipas’ palace. Herod Antipas, says Luke, ‘was exceeding glad’ for he had wanted to meet John the Baptist’s successor for a long time ‘and he hoped to have seen some miracle done by him’. But Jesus so despised the ‘fox’, killer of John, that he did not even deign to speak to him.
Antipas played with Jesus, asking him to perform his tricks, presented him with a royal robe and called him ‘king’. The tetrarch was hardly likely to try to save John the Baptist’s successor, but he appreciated the opportunity to interview him. Pilate and Antipas had long been enemies but now they ‘made friends together’. Nonetheless, Jesus was a Roman problem. Herod Antipas sent him back to the Praetorium. There, Pilate tried Jesus, two so-called thieves and Barabbas, who, says Mark, ‘lay bound with them that had made insurrection with him’. This suggests that a handful of rebels, who perhaps included the two ‘thieves’, were being tried with Jesus.
Pilate toyed with releasing one of these prisoners. Some of the crowd called for Barabbas. According to the Gospels, Barabbas was released. The story sounds unlikely: the Romans usually executed murderous rebels. Jesus was sentenced to crucifixion while, according to Matthew, Pilate ‘took water and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person’.
‘His blood be upon us and our children,’ replied the crowd.
Far from being a mealy-mouthed vacillator, the violent and obstinate Pilate had never previously felt the need to wash his hands before his blood-letting. In an earlier dispute with the Jews, he had sent his troops in civilian disguise among a peaceful Jerusalem crowd; at Pilate’s signal, they had drawn their swords and cleared the streets, killing many. Now Pilate, already faced with the Barabbas rebellion that week, clearly feared any resurgence of the ‘kings’ and ‘pseudo-prophets’ who had plagued Judaea since Herod’s death. Jesus was inflammatory in his oblique way, and he was undoubtedly popular. Even many years later, Josephus, himself a Pharisee, described Jesus as a wise teacher.
The traditional account of the sentencing therefore does not ring true. The Gospels claim that the priests insisted they did not have the authority to pass death sentences, but it is far from clear that this is true. The high priest, writes Josephus, ‘will adjudicate in cases of dispute, punish those convicted of crime’. The Gospels, written or amended after the destruction of the Temple in 70, blamed the Jews and acquitted the Romans, keen to show loyalty to the empire. Yet the charges against Jesus, and the punishment itself, tell their own story: this was a Roman operation.
Jesus, like most crucifixion victims, was scourged with a leather whip tipped with either bone or metal, a torment so savage that it often killed the victim. Wearing a placard reading ‘KING OF THE JEWS’ prepared by the Roman soldiers, many of them Syrian-Greek auxiliaries, and bleeding heavily after his flagellation, Jesus was led away, on what was probably the morning of 14th of Nisan or Friday 3 April 33. Along with the other two victims, he carried the patibulum, crossbar, for his own crucifixion, out of the Citadel prison and through the streets of the Upper City. His followers persuaded a certain Simon of Cyrene to help bear the crossbar while his women admirers lamented. ‘Daughters of Jerusalem,’ he said, ‘weep not for me but weep for yourselves and your children,’ because the Apocalypse was imminent – ‘the days are coming’.
Jesus left Jerusalem for the last time, turning left through the Gennath (Gardens) Gate into an area of hilly gardens, rock-cut tombs and Jerusalem’s execution hill, the aptly named Place of the Skull: Golgotha.*
JESUS CHRIST: THE PASSION
A crowd of enemies and friends followed Jesus out of the city to watch the macabre and technical business of execution, always a spectacle that fascinated. The sun had risen when he arrived at the execution place where the upright post awaited him: it would have been used before him and would be used again after him. The soldiers offered Jesus the traditional drink of wine and myrrh to steady his nerves, but he refused it. He was then attached to the crossbar and hoisted up the stake.
Crucifixion, said Josephus, was ‘the most miserable death’,† designed to demean the victim publicly. Hence Pilate ordered Jesus’ placard to be attached to his cross – KING OF THE JEWS. Victims could be tied or nailed. The skill was to ensure victims did not bleed to death. The nails were usually driven through the forearms – not the palms – and ankles: the bones of a crucified Jew have been found in a tomb in north Jerusalem with a 4½-inch iron nail still sticking through a skeletal ankle. Nails from crucifixion victims were popularly worn as charms, around the neck, by both Jews and gentiles to ward off illness, so the later Christian fetish for crucificial relics was actually part of a long tradition. Victims were usually crucified naked – with men facing outwards, women inwards.
The executioners were experts at either prolonging the agony or ending it quickly. The aim was to not kill Jesus too quickly but to demonstrate the futility of defying Roman power. He was most probably nailed to the cross with his arms outstretched as shown in Christian art, supported by a small wedge, sedile, under the buttocks and a suppedaneum ledge under the feet. This arrangement meant he could survive for hours, even days. The quickest way to expedite death was to break the legs. The body weight was then borne by the arms and the victim would asphyxiate within ten minutes.
Hours passed; his enemies mocked him; passers-by jeered. His friend Mary of Magdala kept vigil alongside his mother Mary and the unnamed ‘disciple whom he loved’, possibly his brother James. His supporter Joseph of Arimathea visited him too. The heat of the day came and went. ‘I thirst,’ Jesus said. His female followers dipped a sponge into vinegar and hyssop, and raised it to his lips on a reed so that he could suck on it. Sometimes he seemed to despair: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ he called out, quoting the appropriate scripture, Psalm 22. Yet what did he mean by God forsaking him? Was Jesus expecting God to unleash the End of Days?
As he weakened, he saw his mother. ‘Behold thy son,’ he said, asking the beloved disciple to care for her. If it was his brother, this made sense, for the disciple escorted Mary away to rest. The crowds must have dispersed. Night fell.
Crucifixion was a slow death from heat stroke, hunger, suffocation, shock or thirst, and Jesus was probably bleeding from the flagellation. Suddenly he gave a sigh. ‘It is finished,’ he said, and lost consciousness. Given the tension in Jerusalem and the imminent Sabbath and Passover holiday, Pilate must have ordered his executioners to accelerate matters. The soldiers broke the legs of the two bandits or rebels, allowing them to suffocate, but when they came to Jesus he already seemed dead, so ‘one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side and forthwith came blood and water’. It may have actually been the spear that had killed him.
Joseph of Arimathea hurried to the Praetorium to ask Pilate for the body. Victims were usually left to rot on their crosses, the prey of vultures, but Jews believed in swift burial. Pilate agreed.
Jewish dead were not buried in the earth during the first century but laid in a shroud in a rock tomb, which their family always checked, partly to ensure that the deceased were indeed dead and not merely comatose: it was rare but not unheard of to find that the ‘dead’ were awake the next morning. The bodies were then left for a year to desiccate, then the bones were placed in a bone-box, known as an ossuary, often with the name carved on the outside, in a rock-cut tomb.
Joseph and Jesus’ family and followers brought down the body and quickly found an unused tomb in a nearby garden where they laid him. The body was sweetened by expensive spices and wrapped in a shroud – like the first-century shroud found in a tomb a little south of the city walls in the Field of Blood, still bearing clumps of human hair (but unlike the famous Turin Shroud, which has now been dated to between 1260 and 1390). It is likely that the present Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which encloses both the place of crucifixion and the tomb, is the genuine site since its tradition was kept alive by local Christians for the next three centuries. Pilate posted guards around Jesus’ tomb at Caiaphas’ request ‘lest his disciples come by night and steal him away and say unto the people, He is risen from the dead’.
Up to this point, the story of Jesus’ Passion – from the Latin patior, to suffer – is based on our sole source, the Gospels, but no faith is required to believe in the life and death of a Jewish prophet and thaumaturge. However, three days after his crucifixion, on Sunday morning, according to Luke, some of Jesus’ female family and followers (including his mother and Joanna, the wife of Herod Antipas’ steward) visited the tomb: ‘They found the stone rolled away from the sepulchre and they entered in and found not the body of the Lord Jesus … As they were much perplexed, behold two men stood by them in shining garments and as they were afraid … they said unto them: Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here but is risen.’ The frightened disciples were in hiding on the Mount of Olives during the Passover week, but Jesus appeared several times to them and to his mother, saying to them, ‘Be not afraid.’ When Thomas doubted the Resurrection, Jesus showed him the wounds on his hands and in his side. After some days, he led them up to the Mount of Olives where he ascended to heaven. This Resurrection, which turned a sordid death into a transforming triumph of life over death, is the defining moment of Christian faith, celebrated on Easter Sunday.
For those who do not share this faith, the facts are impossible to verify. Matthew reveals what was surely the contemporary alternative version of events, ‘commonly reported among the Jews to this day’: the high priests immediately paid off the soldiers who were meant to be guarding the tomb and ordered them to tell everyone that ‘his disciples came by night and stole him away while we slept’.
Archaeologists tend to believe that the body was simply removed and buried by friends and family in another rock-cut tomb somewhere around Jerusalem. They have excavated tombs, with ossuaries that bear names such as ‘James brother of Jesus’ and even ‘Jesus son of Joseph’. These have generated media headlines. Some have been exposed as forgeries but most are genuine first-century tombs with very common Jewish names – and with no connection to Jesus.*
Jerusalem celebrated Passover. Judas invested his silver in real estate – the Potter’s Field on the Akeldama south of the city, appropriately in the Valley of Hell – where he then ‘burst asunder in the midst and all his bowels gushed out’.† When the disciples emerged from hiding, they met for Pentecost in the Upper Room, the Cenacle on Mount Zion, ‘and suddenly there came from heaven a rushing mighty wind’ – the Holy Spirit that allowed them to speak in tongues to the many nationalities who were in Jerusalem and to perform healing in the name of Jesus. Peter and John were entering the Temple through the Beautiful Gate for their daily prayers when a cripple asked for alms. ‘Rise up and walk,’ they said, and he did.
The Apostles elected Jesus’ brother as ‘Overseer of Jerusalem’, leader of these Jewish sectaries known as the Nazarenes. The sect must have grown because not long after Jesus’ death, ‘there was a great persecution against the church at Jerusalem’. One of Jesus’ Greek-speaking followers, Stephen, had denounced the Temple, saying that ‘the Most High dwelleth not in temples made with hands’. Proving that the high priest could order capital punishment, Stephen was tried by the Sanhedrin and stoned outside the walls, probably to the north of today’s Damascus Gate. He was the first Christian ‘martyr’ – an adaptation of the Greek word for ‘witness’. Yet James and his Nazarenes remained practising Jews, loyal to Jesus, but also teaching and praying in the Temple for the next thirty years. James was widely admired there as a Jewish holy man. Jesus’ Judaism was clearly no more idiosyncratic than that of the many other preachers who came before and after him.
Jesus’ enemies did not prosper. Soon after his crucifixion, Pilate was sunk by a Samaritan pseudo-prophet who preached to excited crowds that he had found Moses’ urn on Mount Gerizim. Pilate sent in the cavalry who culled many of his followers. The prefect had already driven Jerusalem to the edge of open revolt; now the Samaritans too denounced his brutality.
The Governor of Syria had to restore order in Jerusalem. He sacked both Caiaphas and Pilate, who was sent back to Rome. This was so popular that the Jerusalemites jubilantly welcomed the Roman governor. Pilate vanishes from history. Tiberius was meanwhile tiring of Herod Antipas.49 But this was not the end of that dynasty: the Herodians were about to enjoy an extraordinary restoration thanks to the most adventurous of the Jewish princes, who would befriend Rome’s demented emperor and regain Jerusalem.
HEROD AGRIPPA: CALIGULA’S FRIEND
Young Herod Agrippa grew up in Rome amid the imperial family and became best friends with the emperor Tiberius’ son Drusus. This charming, high-rolling extrovert – the grandson of Herod the Great and Mariamme, child of their executed son Aristobulos – amassed huge debts to keep up with the emperor’s son and the fast crowd.
When Drusus died young in AD 23, the heartbroken emperor could no longer face his son’s friends and Herod Agrippa, now broke, retreated to Galilee, ruled by Antipas who was married to his sister Herodias. Antipas gave him a drab job in Tiberias, but drabness was not Agrippa’s style and he fled to Idumea, the family’shomeland, and there contemplated suicide. With this prodigal rogue, however, something always turned up.
Around the time of Jesus’ crucifixion, Philip, the tetrarch of the family’s northern lands, died. Antipas asked the emperor to expand his principality. Tiberius had always liked Herod Agrippa; so he rushed to the emperor’s residence on Capri to stake his own claim and undermine his uncle’s. He found Tiberius residing gloomily at the Jupiter Villa, his jaded appetites, according to the historian Suetonius, fed by boys known as his ‘minnows’, trained to suck his privates as he swam in the pool.
Tiberius welcomed Agrippa – until he heard about the string of unpaid debts he had left around the Mediterranean. But Agrippa, a born gambler, persuaded his mother’s friend Antonia to lend him money and appeal to the emperor. Severe and chaste, Antonia, daughter of Mark Antony, was respected by Tiberius as the ideal Roman aristocrat. He took her advice and forgave the Jewish rascal. Agrippa used the cash not to pay off his debts but to give a generous present to another bankrupt princeling, Caligula, who with the child Gemellus, son of Agrippa’s late friend Drusus, was Tiberius’ joint heir. The emperor asked the Herodian to look after Gemellus.
Instead the opportunistic Agrippa became best friends with Gaius Caligula, who ever since being paraded before the legions as a child mascot in a mini-military uniform (including army boots, caligae – hence the nickname ‘Bootkins’), was beloved for being the son of the popular general Germanicus. Now twenty-five, balding and gangly, Caligula had grown up spoilt, dissolute and quite possibly insane, but he remained the people’s darling and he was impatient to inherit the empire. Caligula and Herod Agrippa are likely to have shared a life of extravagant debauchery, a million miles from the piety of the latter’s brethren in Jerusalem. As they rode around Capri, the two fantasized about Tiberius’ death, but their charioteer was listening. When Agrippa had him arrested for stealing, the charioteer snitched to the emperor. Agrippa was thrown into jail and bound in chains but, protected by his friend Caligula, he was allowed to bathe, receive friends and relish his favourite dishes.
When Tiberius finally died in March 37, Caligula, having murdered young Gemellus, succeeded as emperor. He at once released his friend, presented him with gold fetters to commemorate his time in real shackles and promoted him to king, giving him Philip’s northern tetrarchy. Quite a reversal of fortune. Simultaneously Agrippa’s sister Herodias and Jesus’ hated ‘fox’, Antipas, travelled to Rome to undo this decision and win their own kingdom. But A grippa framed them, alleging that they were planning a rebellion. Caligula deposed Antipas, the killer of John the Baptist – who later died in Lyons – and gave all his lands to Herod Agrippa.
The new king scarcely visited his kingdom, preferring to stay close to Caligula whose homicidal eccentricities rapidly turned him from Rome’s favourite to its oppressor. Lacking the military kudos of his predecessors, Caligula tried to bolster his prestige by ordering his own image to be worshipped across the empire – and in the Holy of Holies of the Temple. Jerusalem was defiant; the Jews prepared to rebel, with delegations telling the Governor of Syria that ‘he must first sacrifice the entire Jewish nation’ before they would tolerate such a sacrilege. Ethnic fighting broke out in Alexandria between Greeks and Jews. When the two parties sent delegations to Caligula, the Greeks claimed that the Jews were the only people who would not worship Caligula’s statue.
Fortunately, King Agrippa was still in Rome, ever more intimate with the increasingly erratic Caligula. When the emperor launched an expedition to Gaul, the Jewish king was one of his entourage. But, instead of fighting, Caligula declared victory over the sea, collecting seashells for his Triumph.
Caligula ordered Petronius, the Governor of Syria, to enforce his orders and crush Jerusalem. Jewish delegations, led by Herodian princes, begged Petronius to change his mind. Petronius hesitated, knowing that it was war to proceed and death to refuse. But King Herod Agrippa, the prodigal time-server, suddenly showed himself to be the surprising champion of the Jews, writing courageously to Caligula in one of the most astonishing letters written on behalf of Jerusalem:
I, as you know, am by birth a Jew and my native city is Jerusalem in which is situated the sacred shrine of the most high God. This Temple, my Lord Gaius, has never from the first admitted any figure wrought by men’s hands, because it is the sanctuary of the true God. Your grandfather [Marcus] Agrippa visited and paid honour to the Temple and so did Augustus. [He then thanks Caligula for favours granted but] I exchange all [those benefits] for one thing only – that the ancestral institutions be not disturbed. Either I must seem a traitor to my own or no longer be counted your friend as I have been; there is no other alternative.*
Even if the stark bravado of this ‘death or freedom’ is exaggerated, this was a risky letter to write to Caligula – yet the king’s intervention did apparently save Jerusalem.
At a feast, the emperor thanked King Agrippa for the help he had given him before his accession, offering to grant him any request. The king asked him not to place his image in the Temple. Caligula agreed.
HEROD AGRIPPA AND EMPEROR CLAUDIUS:
ASSASSINATION, GLORY AND WORMS
After recovering from a strange illness in late 37, the emperor became increasingly unbalanced. During the next years, the sources claim he committed incest with his three sisters, prostituted them to other men and appointed his horse as a consul. It is hard to assess the truth of these scandals, though his actions certainly alienated and terrified much of the Roman elite. He married his sister, then, when she became pregnant, supposedly ripped the baby out of her womb. Kissing his mistresses, he mused, ‘And this beautiful throat will be cut whenever I please’ and told the consuls, ‘I only have to give one nod and your throats will be cut on the spot.’ His favourite bon mot was ‘if only Rome had one neck’, but unwisely he also liked to tease his macho Praetorian Guards with saucy passwords such as ‘Priapus’. It could not go on.
At midday on 24 January 41, Caligula, accompanied by Herod Agrippa, was leaving the theatre through a covered walkway when one of the Praetorian tribunes drew his sword and cried, ‘Take this!’ The swordblow hit Caligula’s shoulder, almost filleting him in half, but he kept shouting, ‘I’m still alive.’ The conspirators cried, ‘Strike again,’ and finished him off. His German bodyguards marauded through the streets, the Praetorian Guardsmen ransacked the imperial palace on the Palatine Hill and murdered Caligula’s wife, dashing out the brains of his baby. The Senate mean-while tried to restore the republic, ending the despotism of the emperors.
Herod Agrippa took control of Caligula’s body, winning time by declaring that the emperor was still alive but wounded, while he led a squad of Praetorians to the palace. They noticed a stirring behind a curtain and discovered the lame, stammering scholar, Claudius, Caligula’s uncle and son of Agrippa’s family friend Antonia. Together, they acclaimed him as emperor, carrying him to their camp on a shield. Claudius, a republican, tried to refuse the honour, but the Jewish king advised him to accept the crown and persuaded the Senate to offer it to him. No practising Jew, before or since, even in modern times, has ever been so powerful. The new Emperor Claudius, who proved a steady, sensible ruler, rewarded his friend by presenting him with Jerusalem and the whole of Herod the Great’s kingdom, as well as granting him the rank of consul. Even Agrippa’s brother received a kingdom.
Herod Agrippa had left Jerusalem as a penniless ne’er-do-well; he returned as king of Judaea. He made a sacrifice in the Temple, and dutifully read Deuteronomy to the gathered people. The Jews were moved when he wept for his own mixed origins and dedicated Caligula’s gold fetters, the symbol of his good fortune, to the Temple. ‘The holy city’, which he saw as ‘the mother-city’ not just of Judaea but of Jews across Europe and Asia, was won over by this new Herod, whose coins called him ‘Great King Agrippa, Friend of Caesar’. Outside Jerusalem he lived like a Roman-Greek king, but when he was in the city he lived as a Jew and sacrificed each day in the Temple. He beautified and fortified the expanding Jerusalem, adding a Third Wall to enclose the new Bezetha suburb – the northern section of which has been excavated.
Yet even Agrippa struggled to manage Jerusalem’s tensions: he appointed three successive high priests in two years and acted against the Jewish Christians. This may have coincided with Claudius’ crackdown on the Jewish Christians in Rome – they were expelled for disorders ‘at the instigation of Chrestus’ (Christ). ‘Now about this time’, says the Acts of the Apostles, ‘Herod the king stretched forth his hands to vex certain of the church,’ and had James beheaded (not Jesus’ brother but the disciple of that name). He also arrested Peter, whom he planned to execute after Passover. Peter somehow survived: the Christians hailed this as a miracle but other sources suggest that the king simply released him, possibly as a gift to the crowds.
Agrippa’s making of emperors had gone to his head, for he called a summit of local kings to Tiberias without asking Roman permission. The Romans were alarmed and ordered the kings to disperse. Claudius halted the building of any more Jerusalem fortifications. Afterwards, Agrippa was holding court like a Greek god-king in gold-encrusted robes in the forum of Caesarea when he was taken ill with stomach pains: ‘he was eaten of worms’, says the Acts of the Apostles. The Jews sat in sackcloth praying for his recovery but in vain. Agrippa had the charisma and sensitivity to conciliate Jewish moderates, Jewish fanatics and Romans; there died the only man who might have saved Jerusalem. 50
HEROD AGRIPPA II: NERO’S FRIEND
The king’s death unleashed riots. Though his son and namesake Agrippa II was only seventeen, Claudius wanted to give him the kingdom, but he was advised that the boy was too young to govern his inflammable inheritance. Instead the emperor restored direct rule by Roman procurators and granted the late Agrippa’s brother, King Herod of Chalcis, the right to appoint high priests and manage the Temple. For the next twenty-five years, Jerusalem was run in an ambiguous partnership between Roman procurators and Herodian kings but they could not soothe the turbulence caused by a succession of prophetic charlatans, ethnic conflicts between Greeks, Jews and Samaritans, and the widening gap between the rich, pro-Roman grandees and the poorer, religious Jews.
The Jewish Christians, the Nazarenes, led by Jesus’ brother James, and their so-called presbyteroi or elders, survived in Jerusalem where the original disciples worshipped as Jews in the Temple. But Jesus was far from the last of the preachers who challenged Roman order: Josephus lists the eruption of one pseudo-prophet after another, most of them executed by the Romans.
The procurators did not help matters. Like Pilate, their reaction to this efflorescence of prophets was to massacre their followers while squeezing the province for profit. One year, at Passover in Jerusalem, a Roman soldier exposed his bottom to the Jews, causing a riot. The procurator sent in soldiers who started a stampede in which thousands suffocated in the narrow streets. A few years later, when fighting broke out between Jews and Samaritans, the Romans crucified many Jews. Both sides appealed to Rome. The Samaritans would have succeeded but young Herod Agrippa, who was being educated in Rome, won over Claudius’ powerful wife, Agrippina: the emperor not only backed the Jews but ordered the Roman tribune at fault to be humiliated in Jerusalem and then executed. Like his father with Caligula, Agrippa II was popular not only with Claudius but with his heir, Nero. When his uncle Herod of Chalcis died, Agrippa was made king of that Lebanese fiefdom with special powers over the Temple in Jerusalem.
In Rome, the now senile Claudius was poisoned by Agrippina,* supposedly with a plateful of mushrooms. The new teenaged emperor Nero awarded Agrippa II more territories in Galilee, Syria and Lebanon. Agrippa gratefully renamed Caesarea Philippi, his capital, Neronias and advertised his warm relations with Nero on his coins with the legend ‘Philo-Caesar’. However, Nero’s procurators tended to be corrupt and clumsy. One of the worst was Antonius Felix, a venal Greek freedman who, writes the historian Tacitus, ‘practised every kind of cruelty and lust, wielding the power of a king with the instincts of a slave’. As he was the brother of the secretary to Claudius and (for a time) to Nero, the Jews could no longer appeal to Rome. King Agrippa’s scandalous sisters personified the corruption of the elite. Drusilla, who ‘exceeded all women in beauty’, was married to the Arab king Azizus of Emesa, but Felix ‘conceived a passion for her. She being unhappy and wishing to escape the malice of her sister Berenice’ eloped with Felix. Berenice, who had been Queen of Chalcis (married to her uncle), left her latest husband, the King of Cilicia, to live with her brother: Roman rumours suggested incest. Felix milked Judaea for money while ‘a new species of bandit’ known as the Sicarii (after their short Roman daggers – the origin of the word ‘sickle’) started to assassinate Jewish grandees at festivals in the middle of Jerusalem – their first success was the killing of an ex-high priest. Faced with ethnic slaughter and repeated ‘pseudo-prophets’, Felix struggled to keepthe peace while enriching himself.
Amid this apocalyptic turbulence, the small sect of Jesus was now split between its Jewish leaders in Jerusalem and its gentile followers in the wider Roman world. Now the most dynamic radical of all Jesus’ followers, who more than anyone else would forge a new world religion, returned to plan the future of Christianity.
PAUL OF TARSUS: THE CREATOR OF CHRISTIANITY
Jerusalem was recovering from her latest spasm of apocalyptic violence. An Egyptian Jew had just led a mob up the Mount of Olives, announcing, with echoes of Jesus, that he was going to bring down the walls and take Jerusalem. The pseudo-prophet tried to storm the city, but the Jerusalemites joined the Romans in repelling his followers. Felix’s legions then killed most of them.51 There was a manhunt for the ‘sorcerer’ himself, as Paul arrived in the city he knew well.
Paul’s father was a Pharisee who prospered enough to become a Roman citizen. He sent his son – born about the same time as Jesus but in Cilicia (today’s Turkey) – to study in the Temple in Jerusalem. When Jesus was crucified, Saul, as he then was, supported the ‘threatenings and slaughter’: he held the cloaks of those who stoned Stephen ‘and was consenting to his death’. A tent-maker, this Greek-speaking Roman Pharisee served as an agent of the high priest until, around ad 37, on the road to Damascus, he experienced his ‘apocalypse’: ‘Suddenly there shined round him a light from heaven’ and he heard a voice ‘saying unto him: Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?’ The risen Christ commissioned him to become a thirteenth apostle to preach the good news to the gentiles.
James and the Christians in Jerusalem were understandably suspicious of this new convert, but Paul felt compelled to teach his message with all his obessional energy: ‘Woe is unto me if I preach not the Gospel.’ Finally, ‘James, the Lord’s brother’ accepted this new colleague. For the next fifteen years, this irrepressible firebrand travelled the east, dogmatically preaching his own version of Jesus’ Gospel that fiercely rejected the exclusivity of the Jews. ‘The Apostle to Gentiles’ believed that ‘for our sake’ God had made Jesus ‘a sin offering, who knew no sin, so that in him, we might become the righteousness of God’. Paul focused on the Resurrection, which he saw as the bridge between humanity and God. Paul’s Jerusalem was the Heavenly Kingdom, not the real Temple; his ‘Israel’ was any follower of Jesus, not the Jewish nation. He was, in some ways, strangely modern, for, contrary to the harsh ethos of the ancient world, he believed in love, equality and inclusiveness: Greeks and Jews, women and men, all were one, all could achieve salvation just by faith in Christ. His letters dominate the New Testament, forming a quarter of its books. His vision was boundless, for he wished to convert all people.
Jesus had won a few non-Jewish followers, but Paul was particularly successful among gentiles and the so-called God-fearers, those non-Jews who had embraced aspects of Judaism without undergoing circumcision. Paul’s Syrian converts in Antioch were the first to be known as ‘Christians’. Around AD 50, Paul returned to Jerusalem to persuade James and Peter to allow non-Jews into the sect. James agreed a compromise, but in the following years he learned that Paul was turning Jews against Mosaic Law.
An unmarried puritanical loner, Paul endured shipwrecks, robberies, beatings and stonings on his travels, yet nothing distracted him from his mission – to remodel the rustic Jewish Galilean into Jesus Christ, the saviour of all mankind who would imminently return in the Second Coming – the Kingdom of Heaven. Sometimes he was still a Jew himself and he may have returned to Jerusalem as many as five times, but sometimes he presented Judaism as the new enemy. In the earliest Christian text, his First Letter to the Thessalonians (Greek gentiles who had converted to Christianity), he ranted against the Jews for killing Jesus and their own prophets. He believed that circumcision, the Jewish Covenant with God, was a Jewish duty but irrelevant for gentiles: ‘Look out for the dogs! Look out for those who cut off the flesh! For we are the true circumcision who worship God in spirit and glory in Christ Jesus,’ he raged at Christian gentiles considering circumcision.
By now James and the elders in Jerusalem disapproved of Paul. They had known the real Jesus, yet Paul insisted: ‘I have been crucified with Christ. The life I live now is not my life but the life Christ lives in me.’ He claimed, ‘I bear the marks of Jesus branded on my body.’ James, that respected holy man, accused him of rejecting Judaism. Even Paul could not ignore Jesus’ own brother. In AD 58, he came to make peace with the Jesus dynasty.
THE DEATH OF JAMES THE JUST: THE JESUS DYNASTY
Paul accompanied James to the Temple to purify himself and pray as a Jew, but he was recognized by some Jews who had seen him preach on his travels. The Roman centurion, charged with keeping order in the Temple, had to rescue him from lynching. When Paul again started preaching, the Romans thought he was the fugitive Egyptian ‘sorcerer’, so he was clapped in chains and marched to the Antonia castle to be scourged. ‘Is it lawful for you to scourge a man that is a Roman?’ Paul asked. The centurion was dumbfounded to find that this wild-eyed visionary was a Roman citizen with the right to appeal to Nero for judgement. The Romans allowed the high priest and Sanhedrin to question Paul, watched by an irate crowd. His answers were so insulting that again he was almost lynched. The centurion calmed the mob by sending him off to Caesarea.52
Paul’s exploits may have tainted the Jewish Christians. In 62, the high priest Ananus, son of Annas who had tried Jesus, arrested James, tried him before the Sanhedrin and had him tossed off the wall of the Temple, probably from the Pinnacle where his brother had been tempted by the Devil. James was then stoned and given the coup de grâce with a mallet.* Josephus, who was living in Jerusalem, denounced Ananus as ‘savage’, explaining that most Jews were appalled: Jesus’ brother had been universally respected. King Agrippa II instantly sacked Ananus. Yet the Christians remained a dynasty: Jesus and James were succeeded by their cousin or half-brother Simon.
Meanwhile, Paul arrived as a prisoner in Caesarea: Felix the procurator received Paul alongside his Herodian wife, the former queen Drusilla, and offered to free him in return for a bribe. Paul refused. Felix had more pressing worries. Fighting broke out between Jews and Syrians. He slaughtered a large number of Jews and was recalled to Rome,† leaving Paul in jail. Herod Agrippa II and his sister Berenice, ex-queen of both Chalcis and Cilicia (and supposedly his incestuous lover), visited Caesarea to greet the new procurator, who offered the Christian case to the king, as Pilate had sent Jesus to Antipas before him.
Paul preached the Christian Gospel to the royal couple who reclined in ‘great pomp’, cleverly adapting his message for the moderate king: ‘I know thee to be an expert in all customs among the Jews. King Agrippa, believest thou the prophets? I know thou believest.’
‘Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian,’ replied the king. ‘This man might have been set at liberty if he had not appealed to Caesar.’ But Paul had appealed to Nero – and to Nero he must go.53
JOSEPHUS: THE COUNTDOWN TO REVOLUTION
Paul was not the only Jew awaiting judgement from Nero. Felix had also despatched some unfortunate priests from the Temple to be judged by the emperor. Their friend, a twenty-six-year-old named Joseph ben Matthias, decided to sail to Rome and save his fellow priests. Better known as Josephus, he was to be many things – rebel commander, Herodian protégé, imperial courtier – but above all, he was to be Jerusalem’s supreme historian.
Josephus was a priest’s son, descended from the Maccabeans, a Judaean landowner, raised in Jerusalem, where he was admired for his learning and wit. As a teenager he had experimented with the three major Jewish sects, even joining some ascetics in the desert, before returning to Jerusalem.
When he arrived in Rome, Josephus made contact with a Jewish actor in favour with the pernicious but thespian emperor. Nero had killed his wife and fallen in love with Poppaea, a married beauty with red hair and pale skin. Once she was empress, Poppaea gave Nero the confidence to kill his own malignant mother Agrippina. Yet Poppaea also became one of the semi-Jewish ‘God-fearers’. Through his actor friend, Josephus reached the empress, who helped free his friends. Josephus had done well, but when he and his friends returned home, they found Jerusalem pervaded ‘with high hopes of a revolt against the Romans.’ Yet revolt was not inevitable: Josephus’ acquaintance with Poppaea shows how the lines between Rome and Jerusalem were still open. The city filled annually with vast numbers of Jewish pilgrims with little sign of trouble despite the presence of only one auxiliary Roman cohort (600–1,200 men) in the Antonia. The rich Temple city existed ‘in a state of peace and prosperity’, run by a Jewish high priest appointed by a Jewish king. It was only now that the Temple was finally completed, causing the unemployment of 18,000 builders. So King Agrippa created more work for them by commissioning new streets.*
At any time, a more diligent emperor, a more just procurator, could have restored order among the Jewish factions. While the empire was run by Nero’s efficient Greek freedmen, his posturings as actor and athlete, even his blood purges, were tolerable. But when the economy started to fail, Nero’s ineptitude spread down to Judaea, where there was now ‘no form of villainy’ that his procurators ‘omitted to practise’. In Jerusalem, the latest incumbent ran a protection-racket, taking bribes from the grandees whose thuggish retinues competed with the Sicarii to terrorize the city. No wonder another prophet, ironically named Jesus, loudly cried in the Temple, ‘Woe to Jerusalem!’ Judged insane, he was scourged but not killed. Yet Josephus recounts little anti-Roman sentiment.
In 64, Rome caught fire. Nero probably oversaw the fire-fighting and he opened his gardens to those who had lost their homes. But conspiracists claimed that Nero had started the fire to enable him to build a larger palace and that he had neglected to fight the fire because he was plucking on his lyre. Nero blamed the fast-spreading semi-Jewish sect, the Christians, many of whom he caused to be burned alive, torn to pieces by wild animals or crucified. Among his victims were two arrested in Jerusalem years earlier: Peter was said to have been crucified head down; Paul beheaded. Nero’s anti-Christian pogrom earned him his place in the Christian Book of Revelation, the last in the canon of what became the New Testament: Satan’s ‘beasts’ are Roman emperors and 666, the number of the beast, probably a code for Nero.*
The ‘exquisite tortures’ he devised for the Christians did not save Nero. At home, he kicked his pregnant empress Poppaea in the stomach, accidentally killing her. As the emperor killed enemies real and imagined while promoting his acting career, his latest procurator in Judaea, Gessius Florus, ‘ostentatiously paraded his outrages upon the nation’. The catastrophe started in Caesarea: Syrian Greeks sacrificed a cockerel outside a synagogue; the Jews protested. Florus was bribed to support the gentiles and then marched down to Jerusalem, demanding a tax of seventeen talents from the Temple. When he appeared at the Praetorium in the spring of 66, Jewish youths collected pennies and tossed them at him. Florus’ Greek and Syrian troops attacked the crowds. Florus demanded that the Temple grandees hand over the hooligans, but they refused. His legionaries ran amok, ‘plunged into every house and slaughtered the inhabitants’. Florus flagellated and crucified his prisoners, including Jewish grandees who were Roman citizens. This was the last straw: the Temple aristocrats could no longer count on Roman protection. The brutality of Florus’ local auxiliaries inflamed Jewish resistance. As his cavalry clattered through the streets with ‘a degree of madness,’ they even attacked King Agrippa’s sister, Queen Berenice. Her guards bundled her back into the Maccabean Palace but she resolved to save Jerusalem.54
JEWISH WARS: THE DEATH OF JERUSALEM
BERENICE THE BAREFOOT QUEEN: REVOLUTION
Berenice walked barefoot to the Praetorium herself – the same route Jesus would have taken from Herod Antipas back to Pilate thirty years earlier. The beautiful Berenice – daughter and sister of kings, and twice a queen – was on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, to thank God for her recovery from an illness, fasting for thirty days and shaving her head (surprising in this Romanized Herodian). Now she threw herself before Florus and begged him to stop, but he wanted vengeance and booty. As his reinforcements approached Jerusalem, the Jews were divided between those keen on reconciliation with the Romans and the radicals who were preparing for war, perhaps in the hope of winning a limited independence under Roman suzerainty.
The priests in the Temple paraded the holy vessels, sprinkling the dust of mourning in their hair, in a bid to restrain the young rebels. The Jews marched out peacefully to greet the Roman cohorts, but on Florus’ instructions the cavalry rode them down. The crowds ran for the gates but many suffocated in the stampede. Florus then charged towards the Temple Mount, hoping to seize the commanding Antonia Fortress. In response the Jews bombarded the Romans with spears from the rooftops, occupied the Antonia and cut down the bridges that led into the Temple, turning it into a fortress of its own.
Just as Florus left, Herod Agrippa arrived from Alexandria. The king called an assembly of the Jerusalemites in the Upper City beneath his Palace. As Berenice listened from the safety of the roof, Agrippa begged the Jews to stay the rebellion: ‘Don’t venture to oppose the entire empire of the Romans. War, if it be once begun, is not easily laid down. The power of the Romans is invincible in all parts of the habitable earth. Have pity, if not on your women and children, yet upon this metropolis – spare the Temple!’ Agrippa and his sister wept openly. The Jerusalemites shouted that they wished only to fight Florus. Agrippa told them to pay their tribute. The people agreed and Agrippa led them to the Temple to arrange these peaceful gestures. But on the Temple Mount, King Agrippa insisted the Jews obey Florus until a new procurator arrived, outraging the crowd all over again.
The priests, including Josephus, met in the Temple and debated whether to stop the daily sacrifice to the Roman emperor that signified loyalty to Rome. This decisive act of rebellion was approved – ‘the foundation of war with the Romans’, wrote Josephus, who himself joined the revolt. As the rebels seized the Temple and the moderate grandees took the Upper City, the Jewish factions bombarded each other with slingshot and spears.
Agrippa and Berenice left Jerusalem, sending 3,000 cavalry to back the moderates, but it was the extremists who triumphed. The Zealots, a popular party based around the Temple, and the Sicarii, the dagger-wielding brigands, stormed the Upper City and drove out King Agrippa’s troops. They burned the palaces of the high priest and the Maccabees as well as the archives where debts were recorded. For a short moment, their leader, a ‘barbarous, cruel’ warlord ruled Jerusalem until the priests assassinated him and the Sicarii escaped to the Masada fortress near the Dead Sea and played no further part until Jerusalem had fallen.
The priests were back in nominal control but from now on, the factions in Jerusalem and their warlords, often provincial opportunists and local adventurers as well as religious fanatics, embarked on a savage and chaotic Jewish civil war. Even Josephus, our sole source, fails to clarify who formed these factions and what they believed. But he traces the strain of religious anti-Roman zealotry all the way back to the Galilean rebellions after Herod the Great’s death: ‘they have a passion for liberty, which is almost unconquerable since they are convinced God alone is their leader’. They ‘sowed the seed from which sprang life’. During the next few years, he says, Jew fought Jew ‘in a perpetual slaughter’.
The Roman garrison of 600, still holding Herod the Great’s Citadel, agreed to give up their arms in return for safe passage out of the city but these Syrians and Greeks who had massacred so many innocent Jews were then ‘savagely butchered’. King Agrippa abandoned his attempts to mediate and threw in his hand with Rome. In November 66, the Roman Governor of Syria, backed by Agrippa and allied kings, marched down from Antioch and fought his way into Jerusalem. Yet he abruptly retired, perhaps having been bribed, and his retreat under ferocious Jewish attack cost the lives of more than 5,000 Roman soldiers, and the eagle of a legion.
The die was cast. Roman pride had to be avenged. The rebels chose the former high priest, Ananus, as the leader of independent Israel. He strengthened the walls, while the city echoed to the hammering and forging of armour and weapons. He also appointed generals, among them Josephus, the future historian, who now left the city as the commander of Galilee, where he found himself fighting a warlord, John of Gischala, more viciously than either of them fought the Romans.
The new Jewish coins celebrated ‘The Freedom of Zion’ and ‘Jerusalem the Holy’ – yet it seemed this was a liberation that not many had wanted and the city waited like ‘a place doomed to destruction’. Nero was in Greece to perform his songs and compete in chariot-races in the Olympic Games (he won even though he fell out of his chariot), when he heard that Israel had rebelled.
JOSEPHUS’ PROPHECY: THE MULETEER AS EMPEROR
Nero feared victorious generals, so he chose as the commander of his Jewish War a dogged veteran from his own entourage. Titus Flavius Vespasianus was in his late fifties and often annoyed the emperor by falling asleep during his theatrical performances. But he had made his name in the conquest of Britain and his nickname – The Muleteer – revealed his unglamorous dependability and the fortune he had made by selling mules to the army.
Sending his son Titus to Alexandria to collect reinforcements, Vespasian mustered an army of 60,000, four legions plus Syrian slingers, Arab archers and the cavalry of King Herod Agrippa. Then he marched down the coast to Ptolemais (Acre). In early 67, he methodically started to reconquer Galilee, resisted fanatically by Josephus and his Galileans. Finally, Vespasian besieged Josephus in his fortress of Jotapata. On 29 July that year, Titus crept through the shattered walls and seized the city. The Jews fought to the death, many of them committing suicide.
Josephus and some other survivors hid in a cave. When the Romans trapped them, they decided to kill themselves and drew lots to determine who would kill whom. ‘By the providence of God’ (or by cheating), Josephus drew the last lot and emerged alive from the cave. Vespasian decided to send him as a prize to Nero, which would entail an atrocious death. Josephus asked to speak to the general. When he stood before Vespasian and Titus, he said: ‘Vespasian! I come to you as a messenger of greater tidings. Do you send me to Nero? Why? It is you, Vespasian, who are and shall be Caesar and Emperor, you and your son.’ The dour Vespasian was flattered, keeping Josephus in prison but sending him presents. Titus, who was almost the same age as Josephus, befriended him.
As Vespasian and Titus advanced towards Judaea, Josephus’ rival, John of Gischala, escaped to Jerusalem – ‘a city without a governor’ engaged in a frenzy of self-destructive butchery.
JERUSALEM THE BROTHEL: THE TYRANTS JOHN AND SIMON
The gates of Jerusalem remained open to Jewish pilgrims, so religious fanatics, battle-hardened cut-throats and thousands of refugees poured into the city, where the rebels expended their energies in gang warfare, orgiastic pleasure-seeking and vicious witch-hunts for traitors.
Young, brash brigands now challenged the rule of the priests. They seized the Temple, overthrowing the high priest himself, electing by lot in his stead a ‘mere rustic’. Ananus rallied the Jerusalemites and attacked the Temple, but he hesitated to storm the inner courts and Holy of Holies. John of Gischala and his Galilean fighters saw an opportunity to win the entire city. John invited in the Idumeans, that ‘most barbarous and bloody nation’ from south of Jerusalem. The Idumeans broke into the city, stormed the Temple, which ‘overflowed with blood’, and then rampaged through the streets, killing 12,000. They murdered Ananus and then his priests, stripped them and stamped on the naked bodies, before tossing them over the walls to be eaten by dogs. ‘The death of Ananus’, says Josephus, ‘was the beginning of the destruction of the city.’ Finally, laden with booty and sated with blood, the Idumeans left a Jerusalem dominated by a new strongman, John of Gischala.
Even though the Romans were not far away, John gave free rein to his Galileans and Zealots to enjoy their prizes. The Holy House became a bawdy-house; but some of John’s supporters soon lost faith in this tyrant and defected to the rising power outside the city, a young warlord named Simon ben Giora, ‘not as cunning as John but superior in strength and courage’. Simon ‘was a greater terror to the people than the Romans themselves’. The Jerusalemites, hoping to save themselves from one tyrant, invited in a second – Simon ben Giora – who soon occupied much of the city. But John still held the Temple. Now the Zealots rebelled against him, seizing the Inner Temple so that, in the words of Tacitus, ‘there were three generals, three armies’ fighting each other for one city – even though the Romans were getting closer. When nearby Jericho fell to Vespasian, all three Jewish factions ceased fighting each other and worked to fortify Jerusalem, digging trenches and strengthening Herod Agrippa I’s Third Wall in the north. Vespasian prepared to besiege Jerusalem. But then all at once he stopped.
Rome had lost its head. On 9 June 68, Nero, beset by rebellions, committed suicide with the words: ‘What an artist the world is losing in me!’ In quick succession, Rome acclaimed and destroyed three emperors while three False Neros arose and foundered in the provinces – as if one real one had not been enough. Finally, the legions of Judaea and Egypt hailed Vespasian as their own emperor. The Muleteer remembered Josephus’ prophecy and freed him, granting him citizenship and appointing him as his adviser, almost his mascot, as he conquered first Judaea – and then the world. Berenice pawned her jewels to help fund Vespasian’s bid for the throne of Rome: the Muleteer was grateful. The new emperor headed via Alexandria to Rome and his son Titus, commanding 60,000 troops, advanced on the Holy City, knowing that his dynasty would be made or broken by the fate of Jerusalem.55
How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! how is she become as a widow! she that was great among the nations, and princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary! She weepeth sore in the night, and her tears are on her cheeks: among all her lovers she hath none to comfort her.
Lamentations, 1.1–2
Even while Jerusalem was still standing and the Jews at peace with us, the practice of their sacred rites was at variance with the glory of our empire and the customs of our ancestors.
Cicero, Pro L. Flacco
It is better for a person to live in the Land of Israel in a city entirely of non-Jews than to live outside the Land in a city entirely Jewish. He who is buried there it is as if he were born in Jerusalem and he who is buried in Jerusalem, it is as though he were born under the throne of glory.
Judah ha Nasi, Talmud
Ten measures of beauty descended upon the world, nine were given to Jerusalem and one to the rest of the world.
Midrash Tanhuma, Kedoshim 10
For the freedom of Jerusalem.
Simon bar Kochba, coins
Thus was Jerusalem destroyed on the very day of Saturn, the day which even now the Jews reverence most.
Dio Cassius, Roman History
TITUS’ TRIUMPH: JERUSALEM IN ROME
A few weeks later, once the city had been destroyed and he had completed his round of bloody spectacles, Titus again passed through Jerusalem, comparing her melancholy ruins with her vanished glory. He then sailed for Rome, taking with him the captured Jewish leaders, his royal mistress Berenice, his favourite renegade Josephus, and the treasures of the Temple – to celebrate the conquest of Jerusalem. Vespasian and Titus, crowned with laurel and clothed in purple, emerged from the Temple of Isis, were greeted by the Senate and took their places in the Forum to review one of the most extravagant Triumphs in the history of Rome.
The pageant of divine statues and gilded floats, three or even four storeys high, heaped with treasure, afforded the spectators both ‘pleasure and surprise’, noted Josephus drily, ‘for there was to be seen a happy country laid waste’. The fall of Jerusalem was acted out in tableaux vivants – legionaries charging, Jews massacred, Temple in flames – and on top of each float stood the Roman commanders of every town taken. There followed what was for Josephus the cruellest cut of all, the splendours of the Holy of Holies: the golden table, the candelabra and the Law of the Jews. The star prisoner, Simon ben Giora, was paraded with a rope around his neck.
When the procession stopped at the Temple of Jupiter, Simon and the rebel chieftains were executed; the crowds cheered; sacrifices were consecrated. There died Jerusalem, mused Josephus: ‘Neither its antiquity, nor its deep wealth, nor its people spread over the whole habitable world nor yet the great glory of its religious rites, were sufficient to prevent its ruin.’
The Triumph was commemorated by the construction of the Arch of Titus, which still stands in Rome.* Jewish spoils paid for the Colosseum and the Temple of Peace, where Vespasian displayed the prizes of Jerusalem – except for the Law scrolls and the purple veils of the Holy of Holies that were placed in the imperial palace itself. The Triumph and remodelling of central Rome celebrated not just a new dynasty but a rededication of the empire itself and victory over Judaism. The tax paid by all Jews to the Temple was replaced by the Fiscus Judaicus, paid to the Roman state to fund the rebuilding of the Temple of Jupiter, a humiliation fiercely enforced.* Yet most Jews, surviving in Judaea and Galilee, and in the populous communities of the Mediterranean and Babylonia, lived as they had lived before, accepting Roman or Parthian rule.
The Jewish War was not quite over. The Masada Fortress held out for three years, under Eleazar the Galilean, as the Romans raised a ramp to storm it. In April 73, their leader addressed his men and their families about the realities of this darknew world: ‘Where is this city that was believed to have God himself inhabiting therein?’ Jerusalem was gone and now they faced slavery:
We long ago my generous friends resolved never to be servants to the Romans nor to any other than God Himself. We were the first that revolted against them; we are the last that fight against them and I cannot but esteem it as a favour that God has granted us that it is still in our power to die bravely and in a state of freedom, in a glorious manner, together with our dearest friends. Let our wives die before they are abused and our children before they have tasted slavery.
So the ‘husbands tenderly embraced their wives, and took their children into their arms, giving the longest parting kisses to them with tears in their eyes’. Each man killed his wife and children; ten men were chosen by lot to slay the rest until all 960 were dead.
To most Romans, the Masada suicide confirmed Jews as demented fanatics. Tacitus, though writing thirty years later, expressed the conventional view that the Jews were ‘sinister and revolting’ bigots, with bizarre superstitions including monotheism and circumcision, who despised Roman gods, ‘rejected patriotism’ and ‘have entrenched themselves by their very wickedness’. Yet Josephus collected the details of Masada from the handful of survivors who hid during the suicide and could not conceal his admiration for Jewish courage.
BERENICE: THE JEWISH CLEOPATRA
Josephus lived in Vespasian’s old house in Rome. Titus gave him some of the scrolls from the Temple, a pension and lands in Judaea, and commissioned his first book, The Jewish War. The emperor and Titus were not Josephus’ only source. ‘When you come to me,’ wrote his ‘dear friend’ King Herod Agrippa, ‘I’ll inform you of a great many things.’ But Josephus realized that ‘my privileged position exacted envy and brought danger’: he needed the imperial protection he received up to the reign of Domitian, who solicitously executed some of his enemies. Yet even as Josephus basked in Flavian favour in his last years – he died around ad 100 – he hoped the Temple would be rebuilt, and his pride in the Jewish contribution to civilization surged: ‘We’ve introduced the rest of the world to a very large number of beautiful ideas. What greater beauty than inviolable piety? What higher justice than obedience to the Laws?’
Berenice, the Herodian princess, stayed in Rome with Titus but she offended the Romans with her flashy diamonds, her royal airs and the stories of her incest with her brother. ‘She dwelt in the palace cohabiting with Titus. She expected to marry him and was already behaving in every respect as if she were his wife.’ It was said that Titus had the general Caecina murdered for flirting with her. Titus loved her but the Romans compared her to Antony’s femme fatale, Cleopatra – or worse, since the Jews were now despised and defeated. Titus had to send her away. When he succeeded his father in 79, she returned to Rome, now in her fifties, but such was the outcry that he again separated from the Jewish Cleopatra, aware that the Flavians were far from secure on the throne. Perhaps she rejoined her brother, almost the last of the Herodians.*
Titus’ reign was short. He died two years later with the words: ‘I have only done one thing wrong.’ The destruction of Jerusalem? The Jews believed his early death was God’s punishment.1 For forty years, a tense exhaustion reigned over blighted Jerusalem before Judaea again exploded in a final and disastrous spasm of rage.
DEATH OF THE JESUS DYNASTY:
THE FORGOTTEN CRUCIFIXION
Jerusalem was the headquarters of the Tenth Legion, whose camp was set up in the present-day Armenian Quarter around the three towers of Herod’s Citadel – the base of the last of them, the Hippicus, stands today. The Legion’s rooftiles and bricks, always emblazoned with its anti-Jewish emblem, the boar, have been found all over the city. Jerusalem was not totally deserted but had been settled with Syrian and Greek veterans, who traditionally hated the Jews. This barren moonscape of gigantic rockheaps must have been eerie. But Jews must have hoped that the Temple would be rebuilt as it had been once before.
Vespasian allowed the rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai, who had escaped Jerusalem in a coffin, to teach the Law at Yavneh (Jamnia) on the Mediterranean, and the Jews were not formally banned from Jerusalem. Indeed many of the wealthier Jews had probably joined the Romans, as Josephus and Agrippa had done. Nonetheless, they were not allowed onto the Temple Mount. Instead, pilgrims bitterly mourned the Temple, praying next to the Tomb of Zechariah* in the Kidron Valley. Some hoped for the Apocalypse to restore God’s kingdom, but for ben Zakkai the vanished city assumed an immaterial mysticism. When he visited the ruins, his pupil cried, ‘Woe to us!’ ‘Be not grieved,’ replied the rabbi (according to the Talmud, compiled several centuries later). ‘We have another atonement. It is acts of loving-kindness.’ No one realized it at this time, but this was the beginning of modern Judaism – without the Temple.
The Jewish Christians, led by Simon son of Cleophas, Jesus’ half-brother or cousin, returned to Jerusalem where they started to honour the Upper Room, on today’s Mount Zion. Beneath the present building lies a synagogue, built probably with Herodian debris from the Temple. Yet the growing number of gentile Christians around the Mediterranean no longer revered the real Jerusalem. The defeat of the Jews separated them for ever from the mother-religion, proving the truth of Jesus’ prophecies and the succession of a new revelation. Jerusalem was just the wilderness of a failed faith. The Bookof Revelation replaced the Temple with Christ the Lamb. At the End of Days, golden, bejewelled Jerusalem would descend from heaven.
These sects had to be careful: the Romans were on guard against any signs of messianic kingship. Titus’ successor, his brother Domitian, maintained the anti-Jewish tax and persecuted the Christians, as a way of rallying support for his own faltering regime. On his assassination, the pacific, elderly Emperor Nerva relaxed the repression and the Jewish tax. Yet this was a false dawn. Nerva had no sons, so he chose his pre-eminent general as heir. Trajan, tall, athletic, stern, was the ideal emperor, perhaps the greatest since Augustus. But he saw himself as a conqueror of new lands and a restorer of old values – bad news for the Christians, and worse for the Jews. In 106 he ordered the crucifixion of Simon, the Overseer of the Christians in Jerusalem, because, like Jesus, he claimed descent from King David. There ended the Jesus dynasty.
Trajan, proud that his father had made his name fighting the Jews under Titus, restored the Fiscus Judaicus, but he was another Alexander hero-worshipper: he invaded Parthia, expanding Roman power into Iraq, home of the Babylonian Jews. During the fighting, they surely appealed to their Roman brethren. As Trajan advanced into Iraq, the Jews of Africa, Egypt and Cyprus, led by rebel ‘kings’, massacred thousands of Romans and Greeks, vengeance at last, possibly co-ordinated by the Jews of Parthia.
Trajan, fearing Jewish treason in his rear and attack from Babylonian Jews as he advanced into Iraq, ‘was determined if possible to destroy the nation utterly’. Trajan ordered Jews to be killed from Iraq to Egypt, where, wrote the historian Appian, ‘Trajan was destroying totally the Jewish race.’ The Jews were now seen as hostile to the Roman Empire: they ‘regard as profane everything we hold sacred,’ wrote Tacitus, ‘while they permit all we abhor’.
Rome’s Jewish problem was witnessed by the new Governor of Syria, Aelius Hadrian, who was married to Trajan’s niece. When Trajan died unexpectedly without an heir, his empress announced that he had adopted a son on his deathbed: the new emperor was Hadrian, who devised a solution to end the Jewish problem once and for all. He was a remarkable emperor, one of the makers of Jerusalem and one of the supreme monsters of Jewish history.2
HADRIAN: THE JERUSALEM SOLUTION
In 130, the emperor visited Jerusalem, accompanied by his young lover Antinous, and decided to abolish the city, even down to its very name. He ordered a new city to be built on the site of the old one, to be named Aelia Capitolina, after his own family and Jupiter Capitolinus (the god most associated with the empire), and he banned circumcision, the sign of God’s covenant with the Jews, on pain of death. The Jews, realizing that this meant the Temple would never be rebuilt, smarted under these blows, while the oblivious emperor travelled on to Egypt.
Hadrian, now aged fifty-four, born in Spain to a family rich from the production of olive oil, was a man seemingly designed to rule the empire. Blessed with a photographic memory, he could dictate, listen and consult simultaneously; he designed his own architecture and composed his own poetry and music. He existed in perpetual movement, restlessly travelling the provinces to reorganize and consolidate the empire. He was criticized for withdrawing from Trajan’s hard-won conquests in Dacia and Iraq. Instead he envisaged a stable empire, united by Greek culture, a taste so marked that he was nicknamed the Greekling. (His Greek beard and hairstyle were groomed with curling irons by specially trained slaves.) In 123, on one of his tours in Asia Minor, he met the love of his life, the Greek boy Antinous, who became almost his consort.* Yet this perfect emperor was also an unpredictable control-freak. In a rage, he once stabbed a slave in the eye with a pen; and he opened and closed his reign with blood purges.
Now in Jerusalem, on the wreckage of the Jewish city, he planned a classic Roman town, built around the worship of Roman, Greekand Egyptian gods. A splendid three-gated entrance, the Neapolis (today’s Damascus) Gate, built with Herodian stones, opened into a circular space, decorated with a column, whence the two main streets, the Cardines – axes – led down to two forums, one close to the demolished Antonia Fortress and the other south of today’s Holy Sepulchre. There Hadrian built his Temple of Jupiter with a statue of Aphrodite outside it, on the very rock where Jesus had been crucified, possibly a deliberate decision to deny the shrine to the Jewish Christians. Worse, Hadrian planned a shrine on the Temple Mount, marked by a grandiose equestrian statue of himself.* Hadrian was deliberately eradicating Jerusalem’s Jewishness. Indeed he had studied that other Philhellenic showman, Antiochus Epiphanes, reviving his plan to build an Olympian temple in Athens.
On 24 October, the festival in which the Egyptians celebrated the death of their god Osiris, Hadrian’s lover Antinous mysteriously drowned in the Nile. Did he kill himself? Did Hadrian or the Egyptians sacrifice him? Was it an accident? The usually inscrutable Hadrian was heartbroken, deifying the boy as Osiris, founding a town Antinopolis and an Antinous cult, spreading statues of his graceful face and magnificent physique all over the Mediterranean.
On his way home from Egypt, Hadrian passed through Jerusalem, where he probably ploughed the furrow around the city-limits of Aelia Capitolina. Outraged by the repression, the paganization of Jerusalem and the obligatory nudes of the boy Antinous, the Jews stashed weapons and prepared underground complexes in the Judaean hills.
Once Hadrian was safely on his way, a mysterious leader known as the Prince of Israel launched the most terrible of the Jewish wars.3
SIMON BAR KOCHBA: THE SON OF THE STAR
‘At first the Romans took no account of the Jews,’ but this time the Jews were well prepared under one capable commander, Simon bar Kochba, self-declared Prince of Israel and Son of the Star, the same mystical sign of kingship that marked the birth of Jesus, prophesied in Numbers: ‘There shall come forth a star out of Jacob, and a sceptre shall rise out of Israel and shall smite Moab.’ Many hailed him as the new David. ‘This is the King Messiah,’ insisted the respected rabbi Akiba (in the fourth-century Talmud), but not everyone agreed. ‘Grass will sprout on your chin, Akiba,’ answered another rabbi, ‘and the Son of David will still not have appeared.’ Kochba’s real name was bar Kosiba; sceptics punned that he was bar Koziba, the Son of the Lie.
Simon swiftly defeated the Roman governor and his two legions. His orders, discovered in a Judaean cave, reveal his harsh competence: ‘I shall deal with the Romans’ – and he did. He wiped out an entire legion. ‘He caught missiles on his knee then hurled them back and killed some of the enemy.’ The prince tolerated no dissent: ‘Simon bar Kosiba to Yehonatan and Masabala. Let all men from Tekoa and other places who are with you, be sent to me without delay. And if you shall not send them, you shall be punished.’ A religious zealot, he supposedly ‘ordered Christians to be punished severely if they did not deny Jesus was the Messiah’, according to Justin, a contemporary Christian. He ‘killed the Christians when they refused to help him against the Romans’, added a Christian, Eusebius, writing much later. ‘The man was murderous and a bandit but relied on his name, as if dealing with slaves, and claimed to be a giver of light.’ He was said to have tested his fighters’ dedication by asking each to cut off a finger.
The Son of the Star ruled his State of Israel from the fort of Herodium, just south of Jerusalem: his coins announced ‘Year One: The Redemption of Israel’. But did he rededicate the Temple and restore the sacrifice? His coins boasted ‘For the Freedom of Jerusalem’, and were emblazoned with the Temple, but none of his coins have been found in Jerusalem. Appian wrote that Hadrian, like Titus, destroyed Jerusalem, implying that there was something to demolish, and the rebels, sweeping all before them, would surely have besieged the Tenth Legion in the Citadel and worshipped on the Temple Mount if they had had the chance, but we do not know if they did.
Hadrian hastened back to Judaea, summoned his best commander Julius Severus all the way from Britain, and mustered seven or even twelve legions who ‘moved out against the Jews, treating their madness without mercy,’ according to Cassius Dio, one of the few historians of this obscure war. ‘He destroyed in heaps thousands of men, women and children and under the law of war enslaved the land.’ When Severus arrived, he adopted Jewish tactics, ‘cutting off small groups, depriving them of their food and shutting them in’ so that he could ‘crush and exterminate them’. As the Romans closed in, bar Kochba needed severe threats to enforce discipline: ‘If you maltreat the Galileans with you,’ he told a lieutenant, ‘I will put fetters on your feet as I did to ben Aphlul!’
The Jews retreated to the caves of Judaea, which is why Simon’s letters and their poignant belongings have been found there. These refugees and warriors carried keys to their abandoned houses, the consolation of those doomed never to return, and their luxuries – a glass plate, a vanity mirror in a leather case, a wooden jewellery box, an incense shovel. There, they perished, for the possessions lie beside their bones. Their fragmented letters record the terse semaphores of catastrophe: ‘Till the end … they have no hope … my brothers in the south … these were lost by the sword …’
The Romans moved in on bar Kochba’s last fortress, Betar, 6 miles south of Jerusalem. Simon himself died in the last stand at Betar, with a snake around his neck according to Jewish legend. ‘Bring his body to me!’ said Hadrian, and was impressed by the head and the snake. ‘If God had not slain him, who would have overcome him?’ Hadrian had probably already returned to Rome but, either way, he wreaked an almost genocidal vengeance.
‘Very few survived,’ wrote Cassius Dio. ‘Fifty of their outposts and 985 villages were razed to the ground. 585,000 were killed in battles’ and many more by ‘starvation, disease and fire’. Seventy-five known Jewish settlements simply vanished. So many Jews were enslaved that at the Hebron slave market they fetched less than a horse. Jews continued to live in the countryside, but Judaea itself never recovered from Hadrian’s ravages. Hadrian not only enforced the ban on circumcision but banned the Jews from even approaching Aelia, on pain of death. Jerusalem had vanished. Hadrian wiped Judaea off the map, deliberately renaming it Palaestina, after the Jews’ ancient enemies, the Philistines.
Hadrian received acclamation as imperator, but this time there was no Triumph: the emperor was tarnished and exhausted by his losses in Judaea. When he reported to the Senate, he was unable to give the usual reassurance, ‘I am well, and so is the army.’ Suffering from the arteriosclerosis (flagged by the split earlobes depicted on his statues), swollen with dropsy, Hadrian killed any possible successors, even his ninety-year-old brother-in-law, who cursed him: ‘May he long for death but be unable to die.’ The curse came true: unable to die, Hadrian tried to kill himself. But no autocrat has ever written as wittily and wistfully about death as Hadrian:
Little soul, little wanderer, little charmer,
Body’s guest and companion,
To what places will you set out for now?
To darkling, cold and gloomy ones —
And you won’t be making your usual jokes.
When he eventually died – ‘hated by all’ – the Senate refused to deify him. Jewish literature never mentions Hadrian without adding, ‘May his bones rot in hell!’
His successor, Antoninus Pius, slightly relaxed the persecution of Jews, allowing circumcision again, but Antoninus’ statue joined Hadrian’s on the Temple Mount* to emphasize that the Temple would never be rebuilt. The Christians, now fully separated from the Jews, could not help but crow. ‘The House of Sanctuary’, wrote the Christian Justin to Antoninus, ‘has become a curse, and the glory which our fathers blessed is burned with fire.’ Unfortunately for the Jews, the settled politics of the empire for the rest of the century discouraged any change in Hadrian’s policy.
Aelia Capitolina was a minor Roman colony of 10,000, without walls, just two-fifths of its former size, extending only from today’s Damascus Gate to the Gate of the Chain, with two forums, the Temple of Jupiter on the site of Golgotha, two thermal baths, a theatre, a nymphaeum (statues of nymphs around pools) and an amphitheatre, all decorated with colonnades, tetrapylons and statues, including a large one of the Tenth Legion’s very unkosher boar. Gradually the Tenth Legion was moved away from Jerusalem as the Jews, no longer a threat, came to be regarded more as an irritant. When the emperor Marcus Aurelius passed through on his way to Egypt, ‘being often disgusted with the malodorous and disorderly Jews’, he jokingly compared them to other rebellious tribes: ‘Oh Quadi, oh Samaritans, at last I have found a people more unruly than you!’ Jerusalem had no natural industries except holiness – and the absence of the Tenth Legion must have made her even more of a backwater.
When the peaceful succession in Rome ended in civil war in 193, the Jews, who now lived mainly in Galilee and around the Mediterranean coast, began to stir, either fighting their local enemies the Samaritans or perhaps rising in support of the ultimate winner of the throne, Septimus Severus. This led to a softening of anti-Jewish policy: the new emperor and his son Caracalla visited Aelia in 201 and seem to have met the Jewish leader, Judah haNasi, known as ‘the Prince’. When Caracalla succeeded to the throne, he rewarded Judah with estates in the Golan and Lydda (near Jerusalem) and with the hereditary power to adjudicate religious disputes and set the calendar, recognizing him as the community leader – the Patriarch of the Jews.
The wealthy Judah, who seems to have combined rabbinical scholarship with aristocratic luxury, held court in Galilee with a bodyguard of Goths while he compiled the Mishnah, the oral traditions of post-Temple Judaism. Thanks to Judah’s imperial connections, and to the passing of time, Jews were allowed, after bribing the garrison, to pray opposite the ruined Temple on the Mount of Olives or in the Kidron Valley. There, they believed, the shekinah – the holy spirit – resided. It is said that Judah won permission for a small ‘holy community’ of Jews to live in Jerusalem, praying in the one synagogue on today’s Mount Zion. Nonetheless, the Severan emperors never reconsidered Hadrian’s policy.
Yet the Jewish longing for Jerusalem never faltered. Wherever they lived in the following centuries, Jews prayed three times a day: ‘May it be your will that the Temple be rebuilt soon in our days.’ In the Mishnah, they compiled every detail of Temple ritual, ready for its restoration. ‘A woman may put on all her ornaments,’ instructed the Tosefta, another compilation of oral traditions, ‘but should leave out one small thing in remembrance of Jerusalem.’ The Passover seder dinner ended with the words: ‘Next Year in Jerusalem’. If they ever approached Jerusalem, they devised a ritual of rending their garments on catching sight of the ruined city. Even Jews who lived far away wanted to be buried close to the Temple so that they would be the first to rise again on Judgement Day. Thus began the Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives.
There was every chance that the Temple would be rebuilt – indeed it had been before and very nearly was again. While the Jews were still formally banned from Jerusalem, it was now the Christians who were seen as the clear and present danger to Rome.4
From 235, the empire suffered a thirty-year crisis, shattered from inside and out. In the east, a vigorous new Persian empire, replacing Parthia, challenged the Romans. During the crisis, the Roman emperors blamed the Christians for being atheists who refused to sacrifice to their gods and savagely persecuted them, even though Christianity was not so much a single religion as a bundle of different traditions.* But Christians agreed on the basics: redemption and life after death for those saved by Jesus Christ, confirming the ancient Jewish prophecies which they had commandeered and adopted as their own. Their founder had been killed by the Romans as a rebel, but the Christians rebranded themselves as a faith hostile to the Jews, not to the Romans. Hence Rome became their holy city; most Christians in Palestine lived in Caesarea on the coast; Jerusalem became‘the heavenly city’, while the actual place,Aelia, was just anobscure town where Jesus had died. Yet local Christians kept alive the tradition of the site of the Crucifixion and Resurrection, now buried under Hadrian’s Temple of Jupiter, even creeping inside to pray and scratch graffiti.*
At Rome’s nadir in 260, the Persians captured the emperor (who was forced to drink molten gold, and was then gutted and stuffed with straw) while the entire East, including the unwalled town of Aelia, was lost to a short-lived Palmyran empire led by a young woman, Zenobia. But within twelve years Rome had recovered the East. At the end of the century, the emperor Diocletian successfully restored Roman power and revived the worship of the old gods. But the Christians seemed to be undermining this resurgence. In 299, Diocletian was sacrificing to the gods at a parade in Syria when some Christian soldiers made the sign of the cross, at which the pagan diviners declared that the divination had failed. When Diocletian’s palace burned down, he blamed the Christians and unleashed a vicious persecution, martyring Christians, burning their books, destroying their churches.
When Diocletian abdicated in 305, dividing the empire, Galerius, new emperor of the East, intensified the butchery of Christians by axe, roasting and mutilation. But the emperor of the West was Constantius Chlorus, a sturdy Illyrian soldier, who assumed the purple in York. Already ill, he died soon afterwards but in July 306 the British legions hailed his young son, Constantine, as emperor. It would take him fifteen years to conquer first the West and then the East, but Constantine, like King David, would change the history of the world and the fate of Jerusalem with a single decision.5
Jerusalem – it is the city of the great King.
Jesus, St Matthew, 5.35
O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets and stonest them which are sent unto thee.
Jesus, St Matthew, 23.37
Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.
Jesus, St John, 2.19
As Judaea is exalted above all other provinces so is this city exalted above all Judaea.
St Jerome, Epistles
Jerusalem is now made a place of resort from all parts of the world, and there is such a throng of pilgrims of both sexes that all temptation is here collected together.
St Jerome, Epistles
CONSTANTINE THE GREAT: CHRIST, GOD OF VICTORY
In 312, Constantine invaded Italy and attacked his rival Maxentius just outside Rome. The night before battle, Constantine saw before him ‘in the sky the sign of a cross of light’ superimposed on the sun with the slogan: ‘By this sign you will conquer!’ So he emblazoned the shields of his soldiers with the Chi-Rho symbol, the first two letters of ‘Christ’ in Greek. The next day at the Battle of Milvian Bridge, he won the West. In this age of auguries and visions, Constantine believed he owed his power to the Christian ‘Supreme God’.
Constantine was a rough soldier, a holy visionary, a murderous autocrat and a political showman who slashed his way to power but, once at the pinnacle of human supremacy, he envisioned an empire unified under one religion, one emperor. He was a bundle of contradictions – he was bullnecked, aquiline-nosed and his paranoia often exploded in the sudden killing of friends and family. He wore his hair shoulder-length, sported gaudy bracelets and bejewelled robes, and relished the pageantry of power, the debates of philosophers and bishops and schemes of architectural beauty and religious boldness. No one knows why he embraced Christianity at that moment, though, like many brutally confident men, he adored his mother, Helena, and she was an early convert. If his personal conversion was as dramatic as Paul’s on the road to Damascus, his political embrace of Christianity was gradual. Most importantly, Christ had delivered victory in battle, and that was a language that Constantine understood: Christ the Lamb became the god of victory. Not that Constantine was in any way lamb-like himself: he soon presented himself as the Equal of the Apostles. There was nothing remarkable in his promotion of himself as a military commander with divine protection. Roman emperors, like Greek kings, always identified themselves with divine patrons. Constantine’s own father revered the Unconquered Sun, a step towards monotheism. But the choice of the Christ was not inevitable – it depended purely on Constantine’s personal whim. In 312, Manichaeanism and Mithraism were no less popular than Christianity. Constantine could just as easily have chosen one of these – and Europe might today be Mithraistic or Manichaean.*
In 313, Constantine and the Eastern emperor Licinius granted toleration and privileges to the Christians in their Edict of Milan. But it was only in 324 that Constantine, now aged fifty-one, defeated Licinius to unite the empire. He tried to impose Christian chastity across his domains and banned pagan sacrifices, sacred prostitution, religious orgies, and gladiatorial shows, replacing them with chariot-racing. That year, he moved his capital eastwards, founding his Second Rome on the site of a Greek town called Byzantium on the Bosphorus, a gateway between Europe and Asia. This soon became known as Constantinople with its own patriarch, who now joined the bishop of Rome and the patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch as the ruling powers of Christianity. The new faith suited Constantine’s new style of kingship. Christianity had from the earliest days of James, Overseer of Jerusalem, developed a hierarchy of elders (presbyteroi) and overseers / bishops (episkopoi)in charge of regional dioceses. Constantine saw that Christianity, with its hierarchy, paralleled the organization of the Roman empire: there would be one emperor, one state, one faith.
Yet he had no sooner bound his supremacy to his imperial religion than he discovered that Christianity was divided: the Gospels were vague about Jesus’ nature and his relationship to God. Was Jesus a man with some divine characteristics or God inhabiting the body of a man? Now that the Church was established, Christology became paramount, more important than life itself, for the right definition of Christ would decide whether a man would achieve salvation and enter heaven. In our secular era, the debates on nuclear disarmament or global warming are the closest equivalents in their passion and intensity. Christianity now became a mass religion in an age of fanatical faith and these questions were debated in the streets as well as in the palaces of the empire. When Arius, an Alexandrian priest who preached to huge crowds using popular jingles, argued that Jesus was subordinate to God and therefore more human than divine, this upset the many who regarded Christ as more God than man. When the local governor tried to suppress Arius, his followers rioted in Alexandria.
In 325 Constantine, infuriated and bemused by this doctrinal tumult, called the bishops to the Council of Nicaea and tried to impose his solution: that Jesus was divine and human, ‘of one substance’ with the Father. It was at Nicaea (present-day Isnik in Turkey), that Macarius, the Bishop of Aelia Capitolina (once called Jerusalem), brought the fate of his small and neglected town to Constantine’s attention. Constantine knew Aelia, probably having visited it as a boy of eight when he was in Emperor Diocletian’s entourage. Now keen to celebrate his success at Nicaea and project the sacred glory of his empire, he decided to restore the city and create what Eusebius (Bishop of Caesarea and the emperor’s biographer) called ‘The New Jerusalem built over against the one so famous of old’. Constantine commissioned a church that befitted Jerusalem as the cradle of the Good News. But the work was accelerated by the emperor’s murderous domestic troubles.
CONSTANTINE THE GREAT: THE FAMILY KILLINGS
Soon after Constantine’s victory, his wife Fausta denounced his eldest son (by an earlier marriage) Crispus Caesar for a sexual offence. Did she play on Constantine’s new Christian chastity by claiming that Crispus had tried to seduce her or that he was a rapist? Was it actually an affair turned sour? Crispus would not have been the first young man to have an affair with his stepmother nor the last to want one, but perhaps the emperor was already jealous of Crispus’ military successes. Certainly Fausta had every reason to dislike this obstacle to the rise of her own sons.
Whatever the truth, Constantine, outraged by his son’s immorality, ordered his execution. The emperor’s Christian advisers were disgusted and the most important woman in his life, his mother, now intervened. Helena had been a Bithnian barmaid and possibly never married his father, but she was an early convert to Christianity and was now the Augusta – empress – in her own right.
Helena convinced Constantine that he had been manipulated. Perhaps she revealed that Fausta had actually tried to seduce Crispus, not vice versa. Redeeming one unforgivable murder with another, Constantine ordered the execution of his wife, Fausta, for adultery: she was either scalded to death in boiling water or suffocated in an overheated steamroom, a particularly unChristian solution to a highly unChristian dilemma. But Jerusalem would benefit from this double murder,* scarcely mentioned by the embarrassed Christian eulogists.
Soon afterwards, Helena, securing carte blanche to embellish Christ’s city, set off for Jerusalem.† Her glory would be Constantine’s penance.1
HELENA: THE FIRST ARCHAEOLOGIST
Helena, septuagenarian empress, whose coins show her sharp face and her braided coiffuer and tiara, arrived in Aelia ‘with all the energy of youth’, and generous funds, to become Jerusalem’s most monumental builder and miraculously successful archaeologist.
Constantine knew that the place of Jesus’ Crucifixion and burial lay beneath Hadrian’s Temple with its statue of that ‘impure demon called Aphrodite, a dark shrine of lifeless idols’, as Eusebius put it. He had ordered Bishop Macarius to purify the place, demolish the pagan temple, excavate the original tomb within and build there a basilica that would be ‘the finest in the world’ with ‘the most beautiful structures, columns and marbles, the most precious and serviceable, ornamented in gold’.
Helena determined to find the actual tomb. The pagan temple had to be smashed, the paving stones lifted, the earth removed and the holy place located. The empress’s quest must have created an excited and lucrative search in small Aelia. A Jew, perhaps one of the remaining Christian Jews, produced documents that led to the discovery of the cave that was declared to be Jesus’ tomb. Helena also sought the site of the Crucifixion and even the Cross itself.
No archaeologist has ever approached her success. She discovered three wooden crosses, a wooden plaque that read ‘Jesus of Nazareth, King of Jews’, and the actual nails. But which cross was the right one? The empress and bishop are said to have borne these pieces of wood to the bedside of a dying woman. When the third was placed beside her, the invalid ‘suddenly opened her eyes, regained her strength and sprang well from her bed’. Helena ‘sent part to her son Constantine together with the nails’, which the emperor had set into the bridle of his horse. From now on, all Christendom craved the holy relics that usually originated in Jerusalem, and this Life-Giving Tree begat a forest of splinters of the True Cross, which started to replace the earlier Chi-Rho as the symbol of Christianity.
Helena’s discovery of the Cross was possibly a later invention, but she certainly changed the city for ever. She built churches of the Ascension and of the Eleona on the Mount of Olives. Her third church, that of the Holy Sepulchre, which took ten years to complete, was not one building but a complex of four parts, its façade facing eastwards, which was entered from the main Roman street, the Cardo. (Today’s church faces south.) The visitor climbed steps into an atrium that led via three entrances into the Basilica or Martyrium, a huge ‘church of wondrous beauty’, with five aisles and rows of pillars, which led in turn, through its apse, into the Holy Garden, a colonnaded courtyard where, in the south-eastern corner, stood the hill of Golgotha enclosed in an open chapel. The gold-domed Rotunda (the Anastasis) opened to the sky so that the light shone down on to Jesus’ tomb. Its splendour dominated Jerusalem’s sacred space, mocking the Temple Mount, where Helena levelled any pagan shrine and ‘ordered filth thrown in its place’ to show the failure of the Jewish God.*
Just a few years later, in 333, one of the first new pilgrims, an anonymous visitor from Bordeaux, found Aelia already transformed into a bustling Christian temple-city. The ‘wondrous’ Church was not finished but was rising fast, yet Hadrian’s statue still stood amid the ruins of the Temple Mount.
Empress Helena visited all the sites of Jesus’ life, creating the first roadmap for the pilgrims who slowly began to flock to Jerusalem to experience its special holiness. Helena was nearly eighty by the time she returned to Constantinople where her son kept parts of the Cross, despatching another splinter and the plaque to her aptly named Roman church, Santa Croce in Gerusalemme.
Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea, was jealous of Jerusalem’s new eminence, doubting that this Jewish city, ‘which after the bloody murder of the Lord had paid the penalty of its wicked inhabitants’, could be the city of God. After all, the Christians had paid little attention to Jerusalem for three centuries. Yet Eusebius had a point: Constantine had to confront the heritage of the Jews just as the creator of the New Jerusalem had to divert the holiness of the Jewish sites towards his new shrines.
When the Romans worshipped many gods, they tolerated others, providing they did not threaten the state, but a monotheistic religion demanded the recognition of one truth, one god. The persecution of the Jewish Christ-killers whose wretchedness proved Christian truth, thus became essential. Constantine ordered that any Jews who tried to stop their brethren from converting to Christianity were to be instantly burned.* Yet a small Jewish community had been living in Jerusalem, praying at a synagogue on Mount Zion, for over a century and Jews discreetly prayed on the deserted Temple Mount. Now‘ the detestable mob of Jews’, as Constantine called them, were banned from Jerusalem except once a year when they were allowed on to the Temple Mount, where the Bordeaux pilgrim saw them ‘mourn and rend their garments’ over the ‘perforated stone’ – the foundation-stone of the Temple, today enclosed by the Dome of the Rock.
Constantine decided to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of his accession in Jerusalem but was still struggling to control the controversy stirred up by the troublesome priest Arius – even after he had departed this world in a fecally explosive incident.† When Constantine ordered a synod ‘to free the Church from blasphemy and lighten my cares’, once again the Arians defied him, overshadowing the first Christian festival in Jerusalem, a gathering of bishops from across the world. But the emperor was too ill to come. Finally baptized on his deathbed in 337, he divided the empire among his three sons and two nephews. The only things on which they agreed were the continuation of the Christian empire and the promulgation of more anti-Jewish laws: in 339, they banned intermarriage with Jews, whom they called a ‘savage, abominable disgrace’.
Constantine’s heirs fought for twenty years, a civil war finally won by his second son Constantius. This turbulence unsettled Palaestina. In 351, an earthquake in Jerusalem led all the Christians to rush to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre ‘seized with awe’. When the Galilean Jews rebelled, led by a messianic king, they were so wantonly slaughtered by the emperor’s cousin Gallus Caesar that even the Romans were sickened. Yet the Jews now found sympathy in a surprising place: the Emperor decided to overturn Christianity – and rebuild the Jewish Temple.2
JULIAN THE APOSTATE: JERUSALEM RESTORED
On 19 July 362, the new emperor, Constantine’s nephew Julian, who was in Antioch on his way to invade Persia, asked a Jewish delegation: ‘Why do you not sacrifice?’
‘We aren’t allowed,’ replied the Jews. ‘Restore us to the city, rebuild the Temple and the Altar.’
‘I shall endeavour with the utmost zeal’, replied Julian, ‘to set up the Temple of the Most High God.’ The emperor’s astonishing reply was greeted with such Jewish enthusiasm that it was ‘as if the days of their kingdom had already arrived’.
Julian reversed the Hadrianic and Constantinian persecutions, restored Jerusalem to the Jews, returned their property, revoked the anti-Jewish taxes and granted power of taxation and the title praetorian prefect to their patriarch Hillel. Jews must have poured into Jerusalem from all over the Roman and Persian worlds to celebrate this miracle. They reclaimed the Temple Mount, probably removing the statues of Hadrian and Antoninus to raise a provisional synagogue, perhaps around the stones that the Bordeaux Pilgrim called the House of King Hezekiah.
Julian was shy, cerebral and awkward. A biased Christian recalled his ‘oddly disjointed neck, hunched and twitching shoulders, wild darting eye, swaying walk, haughty way of breathing down that prominent nose, that nervous and uncontrolled laughter, ever-nodding head and halting speech’. But the bearded, burly emperor was also decisive and single-minded. He restored paganism, favouring the family’s old divine patron, the Sun, encouraging the traditional sacrifices in pagan temples and dismissing Galilean (as he called Christian) teachers in order to diminish their effete, unRoman values.
Julian had never expected to rule the empire. He was just five when Constantius murdered his father and most of his family; only two survived, Gallus and Julian. In 349, Constantius appointed Gallus as Caesar only to behead him, partly for his inept suppression of a Jewish revolt. Yet he needed a Caesar in the West and there was now only one candidate left. Julian, then a student of philosophy in Athens, became Caesar, ruling from Paris. Understandably, he was nervous when the unpredictable emperor summoned him. Inspired by a dream about Zeus, he accepted the imperial crown from his troops. As he marched eastwards, Constantius died and Julian found himself ruler of the entire empire.
Julian’s rebuilding of the Jewish Temple was not just a mark of his tolerance but a nullification of the Christian claim to have inherited the true Israel, a reversal of the fulfilment of the prophecies of Daniel and Jesus that the Temple would fall, and a sign that he was serious in the overturning of his uncle’s work. It would also win the support of the Babylonian Jews during his planned Persian war. Julian saw no contradiction between Greek paganism and Jewish monotheism, believing that the Greeks worshipped the Jewish ‘Most High God’ as Zeus: Yahweh was not unique to the Jews.
Julian appointed Alypius, his representative in Britain, to rebuild the Jewish Temple. The Sanhedrin were nervous: was this too good to be true? To reassure them, Julian, setting off for the Persian front, wrote ‘To the Community of Jews’, repeating his promise. In Jerusalem, exhilarated Jews ‘sought out the most skilled artisans, collected materials, cleared the ground and embarked so earnestly on the task that even women carried heaps of earth and brought their necklaces to defray the expenses’. Building materials were stored in the so-called Stables of Solomon. ‘When they had removed the remains of the former building, they cleared the foundation.’
As the Jews took control of Jerusalem, Julian invaded Persia with 65,000 troops. But on 27 May 363 Jerusalem was struck by an earthquake that somehow ignited the building materials.
The Christians were delighted by this ‘wonderful phenomenon’, though they may well have helped it along with arson. Alypius could have continued the work, but Julian had crossed the Tigris into Iraq. In tense Jerusalem, Alypius decided to await Julian’s return. The emperor, however, was already in retreat. On 26 June in a confused skirmish near Samara, an Arab soldier (possibly a Christian) stabbed him in the side with a spear. Pierced in the liver, Julian tried to pull it out, shredding the sinews of his hand. Christian writers claimed that he died saying, ‘Vicisti, Galilaee!’, ‘Thou has conquered, Galilean!’. He was succeeded by the commander of his guard, who restored Christianity, reversed all Julian’s acts and again banned the Jews from Jerusalem: henceforth there would again be one religion, one truth. In 391–2 Theodosius I made Christianity the empire’s official religion and started to enforce it.*3
JEROME AND PAULA: SAINTHOOD, SEX AND THE CITY
In 384, a splenetic Roman scholar named Jerome arrived in Jerusalem with an entourage of wealthy Christian women. Obsessively pious, they nonetheless travelled under a cloud of sexual scandal.
Now in his late thirties, the Illyrian Jerome had lived as a hermit in the Syrian desert, always tormented with sexual longings: ‘Although my only companions were scorpions, I was mingling with the dances of girls, my mind throbbing with desires.’ Jerome then served as the secretary to Damasus I, the Bishop of Rome, where the nobility had embraced Christianity. Damasus felt confident enough to declare that the bishops of Rome served with divine blessing in direct apostolic succession from St Peter, a big step in their development into the supreme, infallible popes of later times. But now the Church had such patrician support, Damasus and Jerome found themselves entangled in some very worldly scandals: Damasus was accused of adultery, dubbed ‘the tickler of the ears of middle-aged women’, while Jerome was said to be having an affair with the rich widow Paula, one of the many such ladies who had embraced Christianity. Jerome and Paula were exonerated – but they had to leave Rome and so they set out for Jerusalem, accompanied by her daughter Eustochium.
The very presence of this teenaged virgin seemed to inflame Jerome who smelled sex everywhere and spent much of the trip writing tracts warning of its dangers. ‘Lust’, he wrote, ‘tickles the senses and the soft fire of sensual pleasure sheds its pleasing glow.’ Once in Jerusalem, Jerome and his pious millionairesses found a new city that was an entrepot of sanctity, trade, networking and sex. The piety was intense and the richest of these ladies, Melania (who enjoyed an annual income of 120,000 pounds of gold), founded her own monastery on the Mount of Olives. But Jerome was horrified by the sexual opportunities offered by the mixing of so many strange men and women crowded together in this theme park of religious passion and sensory excitement: ‘all temptation is collected here’, he wrote, and all humanity – ‘prostitutes, actors and clowns’. Indeed ‘there is no sort of shameful practices in which they don’t indulge’, observed another saintly but sharp-eyed pilgrim, Gregory of Nyssa. ‘Cheating, adultery, theft, idolatry, poisoning, quarrels and murder are everyday occurrences.’
Imperial patronage, monumental building and the stream of pilgrims now created a new calendar of festivals and rituals around the city, climaxing with Easter, and a new spiritual geography of Jerusalem, based on the sites of Jesus’ Passion. Names were changed,* traditions muddled, but all that matters in Jerusalem is what is believed to be true. Another female pioneer, Egeria, a Spanish nun, who visited in the 380s, described the ever-expanding panoply of relics in the Holy Sepulchre† that now included King Solomon’s ring and the horn of oil that had anointed David. These joined Jesus’ crown of thorns and the lance that pierced his side.
The theatre and sanctity drove some pilgrims into a delirium special to Jerusalem: the True Cross had to be specially guarded because pilgrims tried to bite off chunks when they kissed it. That curmudgeon Jerome could not bear all this theatrical screaming – hence he settled in Bethlehem to work on his masterpiece, translating the Hebrew Bible into Latin. But he visited frequently and was never shy about expressing his views. ‘It’s as easy to find the way to Heaven in Britain as in Jerusalem,’ he snarled in reference to the vulgar crowds of British pilgrims. When he watched his friend Paula’s emotive prayers before the Cross in the Holy Garden, he cattily claimed that she looked ‘as though she saw the Lord hanging upon it’ and kissed the tomb ‘like a thirsty man who had waited long and at last comes to water’. Her ‘tears and lamentations’ were so loud that they ‘were known to all Jerusalem or to the Lord himself whom she called upon’.
Yet one drama that he did appreciate took place on the Temple Mount, kept in desolation to confirm Jesus’ prophecies. On each 9th of Ab Jerome gleefully watched the Jews commemorating the destruction of the Temple: ‘Those faithless people who killed the servant of God – that mob of wretches congregates and, while the Church of Resurrection glows and the banner of His Cross shines forth from the Mount of Olives, those miserable people groan over the ruins of the Temple. A soldier asks for money to allow them to weep a little longer.’ Despite his fluent Hebrew, Jerome hated the Jews, who raised children ‘just like worms’, and relished this gratifying freak show that confirmed Christ’s victorious truth: ‘Can anyone harbour doubts when he looks upon this scene about the Day of Tribulation and Suffering?’ The very tragedy of the Jews’ plight redoubled their love for Jerusalem. For Rabbi Berekhah this scene was a ritual as sacred as it was poignant: ‘They come silently and go silently, they come weeping and go weeping, they come in darkness of the night and depart in darkness.’
Yet now Jewish hopes were to be raised again by the Empress who came to rule Jerusalem.4
BARSOMA AND THE PARAMILITARY MONKS
Empresses tended to be described by chauvinistic historians as hideous, vicious whores or serene saints, but unusually Empress Eudocia was especially praised for her exquisite looks and artistic nature. In 438, this beautiful wife of the Emperor Theodosius II came to Jerusalem and relaxed the rules against the Jews. At the same time, a synagogue-burning ascetic, Barsoma of Nisibis, arrived on one of his regular pilgrimages with a thuggish retinue of paramilitary monks.
Eudocia was a protector of pagans and Jews because she had been pagan herself. The striking daughter of an Athenian sophist, educated in rhetoric and literature, she came to Constantinople to appeal to the emperor after her brothers stole her inheritance. Theodosius II was a malleable boy, ruled by his pious and graceless sister, Pulcheria. She introduced Eudocia to her brother, who was instantly smitten and married her. Pulcheria dominated her brother’s government, intensifying the persecution of the Jews, who were now excluded from the army and public life, and condemned to be second-class citizens. In 425, Theodosius ordered the execution of Gamaliel VI, the last Jewish patriarch, to punish him for building more synagogues, and abolished the office for ever. Gradually, Eudocia became powerful and Theodosius promoted her to Augusta, equal in rank to his sister. A coloured stone inlay of her in a Constantinople church shows her regal style, black hair, slim elegance and delicate nose.
In Jerusalem, the Jews, facing intensifying repression from Constantinople, begged Eudocia for more access to the Holy City, and she agreed that they could openly visit the Temple Mount for their chief festivals. This was wonderful news, and the Jews declared that they should all ‘hasten to Jerusalem for the Feast of Tabernacles for our kingdom will be established’.
However, Jewish joy disgusted that other visitor to Jerusalem, Barsoma of Nisibis, a Syrian monk who was one of the new breed of militant monastic leaders. During the fourth century, certain ascetics started to react against the worldly values of society and the splendour of the clerical hierarchs and founded monasteries in the desert in order to return to the values of the earliest Christians. The hermits – from the Greek word for ‘wilderness’ – believed it was not enough to know the right formula for Christ’s nature, it was also necessary to live righteously, so they existed in hair-shirted, celibate simplicity in the deserts of Egypt and Syria.* Their self-flagellating feats of ostentatious holiness were celebrated, their biographies were written (the first hagiographies), their hermitages were visited and their discomforts became sources of wonder. The two St Simeons lived for decades, thirty feet up, atop columns and were known as the stylites (from stylos meaning ‘column’). One stylite, Daniel, was asked how he defecated: drily, like a sheep, he replied. Indeed, Jerome thought they were more interested in filth than in holiness. But these monks were far from peaceful. Jerusalem, which was now surrounded by new monasteries and contained many of its own, was at the mercy of these squadrons of street-fighting fanatics.
Barsoma, who was said to be so holy that he never sat or lay down, was offended by the survival of Jewish and Samaritan ‘idolators’ and determined to cleanse Palaestina of them. He and his monks killed Jews and burned synagogues. The emperor banned the violence for reasons of order, but Barsoma ignored him. Now, in Jerusalem, Barsoma’s coenobite shock-troopers, armed with swords and clubs under monks’ robes, ambushed the Jews on the Temple Mount, stoning and killing many of them, tossing their bodies into water cisterns and courtyards. The Jews fought back, arrested eighteen attackers and handed them over to the Byzantine governor who charged them with murder. ‘These brigands in the respectable habits of monks’ were brought to Eudocia, the pilgrim empress. They were guilty of murder but when they implicated Barsoma, he spread rumours that noble Christians were to be burned alive. The mob turned in Barsoma’s favour, especially when he cited a timely earthquake as a sign of divine approval.
If the empress planned to execute Christians, Barsoma’s followers cried, then ‘we will burn the empress and all those with her’. Barsoma terrorized officials into testifying that the Jewish victims had no wounds: they had died of natural causes. Another earthquake added to the widespread fear. The city was slipping out of control. Eudocia had little choice but to acquiesce. ‘Five hundred groups’ of paramilitary monks patrolled the streets and Barsoma announced that ‘The Cross has triumphed’, a cry repeated across the city ‘like the roar of a wave’ as his followers anointed him with expensive perfumes, and the murderers were freed.
Despite this violence, Eudocia cherished Jerusalem, commissioning an array of newchurches, and she returned to Constantinople laden with newrelics. But her sister-in-law Pulcheria was plotting to destroy her.
EUDOCIA: EMPRESS OF JERUSALEM
Theodosius sent Eudocia a Phrygian apple. She gave it to her protégé, Paulinus, Master of the Offices, who then sent it as a present to the emperor. Theodosius, hurt by this, confronted his wife who lied and insisted that she had not given his present away to anyone but had eaten it. At that, the emperor produced the apple. This white lie suggested to Theodosius that what his sister had been whispering was true: Eudocia was having an affair with Paulinus. The story is mythical – apples symbolize life and chastity – but in its very human details it chronicles just the sort of accidental chain of events that can end badly in the hothouse courts of fraught autocracies. Paulinus was executed in 440, but the imperial couple negotiated a way for Eudocia to retire from the capital with honour. Three years later, she arrived in Jerusalem to rule Palaestina in her own right.
Even then Pulcheria tried to destroy her, despatching Saturnius, Count of the Imperial Bodyguard, to execute two of her entourage. Eudocia quickly had Saturnius murdered. Once this imperial skulduggery had died down, she was left to her own devices: she built palaces for herself and the city’s bishop and a hospice next to the Sepulchre that survived for centuries. She built the first walls since Titus, enclosing Mount Zion and the City of David – her sections of wall can be seen today in both places. The pillars of her multi-levelled church around the Siloam Pool still stand in the waters there.*
The empire was now disturbed by the reignited Christological dispute. If Jesus and the Father were ‘of one substance’, how could Christ combine both divine and human natures? In 428, Nestorius, the new Patriarch of Constantinople, tactlessly stressed Jesus’ human side and dual nature, claiming that the Virgin Mary should be considered not Theotokos, Bearer of God, but merely Christokos, Bearer of Christ. His enemies, the Monophysites, insisted that Christ had one nature which was simultaneously human and divine. Dyophysites fought their Monophysite protagonists in the imperial palaces and in the backstreets of Jerusalem and Constantinople with all the violence and hatred of Christological football hooligans. Everyone, noticed Gregory of Nyssa, had an opinion: ‘You ask a man for change, he’ll give you a piece of philosophy concerning the Begotten and the Unbegotten; if you enquire the price of a loaf, he replies “The Father is greater and the Son inferior”; or if you ask whether the bath is ready, the answer you receive is that the Son was made out of nothing.’
When Theodosius died, his two empresses faced each other across the Christological divide. Pulcheria, who had seized power in Constantinople, backed the Dyophysites, but Eudocia, like most Eastern Christians, was a Monophysite. Pulcheria duly expelled her from the Church. When Juvenal, the Bishop of Jerusalem, backed Pulcheria, the Monophysite Jerusalemites mobilized their monkish shock-troopers who drove him out of the city, a predicament he exploited. Christianity had long been ruled by the four great metropolitan bishoprics – Rome and the eastern patriarchates. But Jerusalem’s bishops had always campaigned for promotion to patriarch. Now Juvenal won this promotion as the prize for the loyalty that almost cost him his life. Finally in 451, at the Council of Chalcedon, Pulcheria enforced a compromise: in the Union of Two Natures, Jesus was ‘perfect in divinity, and perfect in humanity’. Eudocia agreed and became reconciled with Pulcheria. This compromise has lasted to this day in the Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant Churches, but it was flawed: the Monophysites and Nestorians, for precisely opposite reasons, rejected it and split off from Orthodoxy for ever.*
At a time when the Western Roman empire was being terrorized by Attila the Hun and hurtling toward its fatal collapse, the ageing Eudocia was writing Greek poetry and building her St Stephen’s basilica, now vanished, but just north of the Damascus Gate, where in 460 she was buried alongside the relics of the first martyr.5
SUNSET OF THE BYZANTINES: PERSIAN INVASION
JUSTINIAN AND THE SHOWGIRL EMPRESS: BYZANTINE JERUSALEM
In 518, aged thirty-five, Justinian found himself the real ruler of the eastern empire when his uncle Justin was raised to the throne. The elderly new emperor was an illiterate Thracian peasant and depended on his clever nephew Peter, who adopted the name Justinian.* He did not come to power alone: his mistress Theodora was the daughter of the Blue chariot-racing team’s bear-trainer, raised among the sweaty charioteers, louche bathhouses and bloody bearpits of the Constantinople hippodrome. Starting as a pre-pubescent burlesque showgirl, she was said to be a gymnastically gifted orgiast whose speciality was to offer all three orifices to her clients simultaneously. Her nymphomaniacal party piece was to spread-eagle herself on stage while geese pecked grains of barley from ‘the calyx of this passion flower’. The sexual details were no doubt exaggerated by their court historian, who must secretly have resented the sycophancy of his day job. Whatever the truth, Justinian found her life-force irresistible and changed the law so that he could marry her. Though her intrigues complicated Justinian’s life, Theodora often provided the will he lacked. When he had almost lost Constantinople during the Nika riots and was ready to flee, she said she would prefer to die in imperial purple than live without it and despatched his generals to massacre the rebels.
Thanks to their realistic portraits in the San Vitale Church at Ravenna, we know that Justinian was thin-faced and unprepossessing with a reddish complexion, while Theodora, delicate, pale and glacial, with dazzling eyes and pursed lips, stares at us witheringly as ropes of pearls bedeck her head and breast. They were a supreme political double-act. Whatever their origins, both were humourlessly, mercilessly serious about empire and religion.
Justinian, the last Latin-speaking emperor of the east, believed that his life’s mission was to restore the Roman empire and reunite Christendom: shortly before he was born, the last emperor of Rome had been driven from the city by a Germanic chieftain. Ironically, this enhanced the prestige of the bishops of Rome, soon to be known as popes, and the differences between east and west. Justinian achieved astounding success in promoting his universal Christian empire by war, faith and art. He reconquered Italy, north Africa and southern Spain, though he faced repeated invasions by the Persians who at times almost overran the East. The imperial couple promoted their Christian empire as ‘the first and greatest blessing of all mankind’, suppressing homosexuals, pagans, heretics, Samaritans and Jews. Justinian demoted Judaism from a permitted religion and banned Passover if it fell before Easter, converted synagogues into churches, forcibly baptized Jews, and commandeered Jewish history: in 537, when Justinian dedicated his breathtaking domed Church of Hagia Sofia (‘Holy Wisdom’) in Constantinople, he is said to have reflected, ‘Solomon, I have surpassed thee.’ Then he turned to Jerusalem to trump Solomon’s Temple.
In 543, Justinian and Theodora started to build a basilica, the Nea (New) Church of St Mary Mother of God,* almost 400 feet long and 187 feet high, with walls 16 feet thick, facing away from the Temple Mount and designed to overpower Solomon’s site. When Justinian’s general Belisarius conquered the Vandal capital of Carthage, he found there the candelabra, pillaged from the Temple by Titus. After being paraded through Constantinople in Belisarius’ Triumph, it was sent to Jerusalem, probably to embellish Justinian’s Nea Church.
The Holy City was ruled by the rituals of Orthodox Christianity.* Pilgrims entered through Hadrian’s gateway in the north and walked down the Cardo, a paved and colonnaded street, 40 feet wide, enough for two wagons to pass, lined with covered shops, extending down to the Nea Church. The well-to-do lived south and south-west of the Temple Mount in two-storeyed mansions set around courtyards. ‘Happy are those who live in this house’ was written in one of them. The houses, churches, even the shops, were decorated gloriously with mosaics: the Armenian kings probably commissioned the incandescent mosaic of herons, doves and eagles (dedicated ‘For the memory and salvation of all the Armenians whose names only God knows’). More mysterious is the vivid semi-Christian mosaic of a puckish Orpheus playing his lyre found at the turn of the century north of the Damascus Gate. Rich Byzantine women wore long Greek robes bordered in gold, red and green, red shoes, strings of pearls, necklaces and earrings. A gold ring has been unearthed in Jerusalem decorated with a gold model of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
The city was set up to host thousands of pilgrims: the grandees stayed with the patriarch; poor pilgrims in the dormitories of Justinian’s hospices which had beds for 3,000; and ascetics, in caves, often old Jewish tombs, in the surrounding hills. When the rich died, they were buried in sarcophagi; the sides of which were decorated with frescoes and equipped with bells for the dead to ward off demons. The cadavers of the poor were pushed into the anonymous mass tomb of the Field of Blood. The temptations that had outraged Jerome were always available: there was chariot-racing in the hippodrome, supported by the rumbustious Blue and Green factions of supporters. ‘Fortune of the Blues wins!’ cries an inscription found in Jerusalem. ‘Live long!’
Theodora died of cancer soon after the Nea was finished, but Justinian lived on into his eighties until 565, having ruled for almost fifty years. He had expanded the empire more than anyone except Augustus and Trajan, but by the end of the century it was overstretched and vulnerable. In 602, a general seized the throne and tried to hold on to it by unleashing the Blue chariot-racing faction against his enemies, who were supported by the Greens, and ordering the forcible conversion of the Jews. The Blues and Greens, always a dangerous combination of sporting fans and political bullyboys, fought for Jerusalem: ‘evil, malicious men filled the city with crime and murder.’ The Greens won, but Byzantine troops retook the city and crushed their rebellion.
This turbulence was irresistibly tempting to Khusrau II, the Persian shah. As a boy he had been helped back on to his throne by the Byzantine emperor Maurice, but when the latter was murdered, Khusrau had his pretext to invade the East, hoping to destroy Constantinople once and for all. Jerusalem was about to suffer a rollercoaster epoch that would see her ruled by four different religions in twenty-five years: Christian, Zoroastrian, Jewish and Muslim.6
THE SHAH AND THE ROYAL BOAR: THE FURY OF MAD DOGS
The Persians, spearheaded by the mailed first of their heavy cavalry, conquered Roman Iraq and then swooped into Syria. The Jews of Antioch, so long persecuted by the Byzantines, rebelled and, as the brilliant Persian commander, who gloried in the name Shahrbaraz – the Royal Boar – marched south, 20,000 Jews from Antioch and Tiberias joined him to besiege Jerusalem. Inside, the patriarch Zacharias tried to negotiate, but the chariot-racing bullyboys ruled the streets and refused. Somehow the Persians and Jews broke into the city.
Jerusalem, and virtually the entire Roman East, now belonged to the young Persian King of Kings, the Shah-in-Shah Khusrau II, whose new empire extended from Afghanistan to the Mediterranean. This shah was the grandson of the greatest of the Sassanid rulers who had burned Antioch during Justinian’s reign. But he had spent a humiliating boyhood as the helpless pawn of rival noble families and had grown up into a paranoid megalomaniac who imposed his power with extravagant gigantism: his tiger-skin banner was 130 feet long, 20 feet wide; he held court on the King’s Spring, a carpet of 1,000 square feet, inlaid in gold and brocade and depicting an imaginary royal garden; his shabestan – the cool underground apartments where the shahs kept their women – contained 3,000 concubines; and it was possibly he who built the colossal palace at his capital Ctesiphon (close to present-day Baghdad) with the world’s largest audience-hall. Riding his black horse, Midnight, his robes were woven in gold, encrusted in jewels, his armour gold-trimmed.
The shah, whose polyglot subjects included many Jews and Christians, was Zoroastrian, but he had married a lovely Nestorian Christian, Shirin, whom he had won, according to legend, by sending his rival to perform the impossible task of carving stairs out of the Behustan mountains.
Once Jerusalem had been taken, the shah’s general, the Royal Boar, moved on to conquer Egypt, but no sooner was he gone than the Jerusalemites rebelled against the Persians and Jews. The Royal Boar galloped back and besieged Jerusalem for twenty days, destroying the churches on the Mount of Olives and Gethsemane. The Persians and Jews mined under the north-eastern wall, always the most vulnerable place, and on the twenty-first day, in early May 614, they stormed Jerusalem ‘in great fury, like infuriated wild beasts’, according to the eyewitness Strategos, a monk. ‘The people hid in churches and there they destroyed them in great wrath, gnashing their teeth and slew all they found like mad dogs.’
In three days, thousands of Christians were massacred. The patriarch and 37,000 Christians were deported to Persia. As the survivors stood on the Mount of Olives ‘and gazed upon Jerusalem, a flame, as out of a furnace, reached up to the clouds and they fell to sobbing and lamenting’, dropping ashes in their hair for they saw the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Nea, the Mother of Churches on Mount Zion and the Armenian cathedral of St Jameses, consumed by the inferno. The Christian relics – the Lance, the Sponge and the True Cross – were sent to Khusrau, who gave them to his queen Shirin. She preserved them in her church in Ctesiphon.
Then, 600 years after Titus had destroyed the Temple, the Royal Boar gave Jerusalem to the Jews.
NEHEMIAH II: THE JEWISH TERROR
After centuries of repression, the Jews, led by a shadowy figure named Nehemiah, were keen to avenge themselves on the Christians who until weeks earlier had been persecuting them. The Persians imprisoned thousands of less valuable prisoners in the Mamilla Pool, a large reservoir, where, according to Christian sources, they were offered the same choice recently offered to the Jews: convert or die. Some monks converted to Judaism; others were martyred.* The joyous Jews may have started to reconsecrate the Temple Mount, for the Jews now ‘made sacrifices’* and messianic fervour vibrated through the Jewish world, inspiring the enthusiasm of the Book of Zerubbabel.
The Persian shah had conquered Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Asia Minor all the way to Constantinople. Only the city of Tyre still held out against the Persians, who ordered the Jewish commander Nehemiah to capture it. The Jewish army failed in this mission and fled from Tyre, but the Persians surely already realized that the more numerous Christians were more useful. In 617, after three years of Jewish rule, the Royal Boar expelled the Jews from Jerusalem. Nehemiah resisted but was defeated and executed at Emmaus near Jerusalem.
The city was returned to the Christians. Once again it was the Jewish turn to suffer. The Jews left the city by an eastern gate like the Christians before them, marching away towards Jericho. The Christians found the Holy City ravaged: Modestos, the priest in charge during the absence of the patriarch, energetically restored the shattered Holy Sepulchre, but the city never regained the magnificence of Constantine and Justinian.
Three times since Titus the Jews had grasped moments of free prayer among the rock heaps of the Temple – probably under bar Kochba, certainly under Julian and Khusrau – but Jews would not control the Temple again for 1,350 years. As for the triumphant Persians, they now faced a dynamic young Byzantine emperor who seemed to merit the name of Hercules.7
HERACLIUS: THE FIRST CRUSADER
Blond and tall, he looked the part of imperial saviour. The son of the governor of Africa and of Armenian descent, Heraclius had seized power in 610 when much of the east was already in Persian hands and it seemed that things could scarcely get worse – but they did. When Heraclius counterattacked, he was defeated by the Royal Boar who then conquered Syria and Egypt before attacking Constantinople itself. Heraclius sued for a humiliating peace that gave him time to rebuild Byzantine strength and plan his vengeance.
OnEasterMonday622,Heracliussailedwithanarmy, not(as expected) through the Black Sea to the Caucasus, but around the Ionian coast of the Mediterranean to the Bay of Issus whence he marched inland and defeated the Royal Boar. Even as the Persians threatened Constantinople, Heraclius was taking the war into their homeland. The next year, he repeated the trick, marching through Armenia and Azerbaijan towards Khusrau’s palace at Ganzak. The shah retreated. Heraclius wintered in Armenia and then in 625, in a Herculean display of military virtuosity, prevented three Persian armies uniting, before defeating each in turn.
In this war of wild gambles and global ambition, the shah turned the tables once again, despatching one general to seize Iraq and the Boar to link up with the Avars, a marauding, nomadic tribe, and take Constantinople. The shah, calling himself ‘Noblest of the Gods, King and Master of the Whole Earth’, wrote to Heraclius: ‘You say you trust in God; why then has He not delivered out of my hand Caesarea, Jerusalem, Alexandria? Could I not also destroy Constantinople? Have I not destroyed you Greeks?’ Heraclius despatched one army to fight in Iraq, another to defend the capital, while he himself hired 40,000 nomadic Turkic horsemen, the Khazars, to form a third.
Constantinople was besieged by the Persians and Avars on either side of the Bosphorus, but the shah was jealous of the Royal Boar. The over-weening arrogance and creative cruelties of the Master of the Whole Earth were already alienating his own noblemen. The shah sent a letter to the Royal Boar’s deputy ordering him to kill the general and take command. Heraclius intercepted it. Inviting the Boar to a meeting, he showed him the letter; they made a secret alliance. Constantinople was saved.
The Royal Boar withdrew to Alexandria to rule Syria, Palestine and Egypt. Heraclius sailed his army to the Caucasus via the Black Sea, and with his Khazar horsemen invaded Persia. He outmanoeuvred the Persian forces, challenged and killed three Persian champions in duels, then defeated their main army, stopping just outside the shah’s capital. Khusrau’s deluded intransigence destroyed him. He was arrested and placed in the dungeon, the House of Darkness, where his favourite son was butchered in front of him before he was himself tortured to death. The Persians agreed to restore the status quo ante bellum. The Royal Boar agreed to marry Heraclius’ niece and revealed the hiding-place of the True Cross. After tortuous intrigues, the Royal Boar seized the Persian throne – but was soon assassinated.
In 629, Heraclius set out from Constantinople with his wife (also his niece) to return the True Cross to Jerusalem. He pardoned the Jews of Tiberias, where he stayed in the mansion of a rich Jew, Benjamin, who accompanied him to Jerusalem, converting to Christianity on the way. The Jews were promised that there would be no vengeance and that they could reside in Jerusalem.
On 21 March 630, Heraclius, now sixty, exhausted and grey, rode up to the Golden Gate, which he had built for this special occasion. This exquisite gate became, for all three Abrahamic religions, Jerusalem’s most potently mystical gateway for the arrival of the Messiah on the Day of Judgement.* There the emperor dismounted to carry the True Cross into Jerusalem. It was said that when Heraclius tried to enter in his Byzantine robes the gate became a solid wall, but when he humbled himself it opened for his imperial procession. Carpets and aromatic herbs were spread as Heraclius delivered the True Cross to the Holy Sepulchre, now cleaned up by the patriarch Modestos. The catastrophe that had befallen the empire and the emperor’s return played into a new variant of the ever malleable vision of the Apocalypse in which a messianic Last Emperor would smash the enemies of Christianity and then hand power to Jesus who would rule until Judgement Day.
The Christians demanded vengeance on the Jews, but Heraclius refused until the monks took the sin of his broken oath to the Jews upon themselves as a fast of atonement. Heraclius then expelled any remaining Jews; many were massacred; he later ordered the forcible conversion of all Jews.
Far away to the south, the Arabians had noticed not so much Heraclius’ victory as his weakness. ‘The Romans have been defeated,’ declared Muhammad, the leader who had just united the Arabian tribes, in what became the sacred text of his new revelation, the Koran. While Heraclius was in Jerusalem, Muhammad despatched a raid up the King’s Highway to probe Byzantine defences. The Arabs encountered a Byzantine detachment – but they would soon return.
Heraclius would not have been too alarmed: the divided Arab tribes had been raiding Palaestina for centuries. The Byzantines and Persians had both hired Arab tribes as buffer states between the empires, and Heraclius had fielded large squadrons of Arab cavalry in his armies.
The next year, Muhammad sent another small detachment to attack Byzantine territory. But he was now old and his spectacular life was near its end. Heraclius left Jerusalem and headed back to Constantinople.
There seemed little to fear.8
Glory to Him who made His servant travel by night from the sacred place of worship to the furthest place of worship.
The Koran,17.1
The Apostle of Allah, accompanied by Gabriel, was transported to Jerusalem where he found Abraham and Moses and the other Prophets.
Ibn Ishaq, Sirat Rasul Allah
A ruler was not considered a caliph unless he reigned over both the Holy Mosque [Mecca] and the Jerusalem Mosque.
Sibani, Fadail
One day in Jerusalem is like a thousand days, one month like a thousand months, and one year like a thousand years. Dying there is like dying in the first sphere of heaven.
Kaab al-Ahbar, Fadail
A sin committed [in Jerusalem] is equal to a thousand sins and a good deed there to a thousand good deeds.
Khalid bin Madan al-Kalai, Fadail
Allah, may he be praised, said of Jerusalem. You are my Garden of Eden, my hallowed and chosen land.
Kaab al-Ahbar, Fadail
O Jerusalem,I shall send you my servant Abd al-Malik to rebuild and adorn you.
Kaab al-Ahbar, Fadail
MUHAMMAD: THE NIGHT JOURNEY
Muhammad’s father died before he was born and his mother died when he was just six. But he was adopted by his uncle, who took him on trading trips to Bosra in Syria. There he was taught about Christianity by a monk, studied the Jewish and Christian scriptures, coming to venerate Jerusalem as one of the noblest of sanctuaries. In his twenties, a wealthy widow named Khadija, much older than he, employed him to manage her caravan trading and then married him. They lived in Mecca, the home of the Kaaba and its black stone, the sanctuary of a pagan god. The city thrived on the pilgrims attracted by this cult and by caravan trading. Muhammad was a member of the Quraysh tribe, who provided its leading merchants and custodians of the sanctuary, but his Hashemite clan was not one of the more powerful.
Muhammad, described as handsome with curly hair and beard, possessed both an all-conquering geniality – it was said that when he shook someone’s hand he never liked to be the one to let go first – and a charismatic spirituality. He was admired for his integrity and intelligence – as his warriors later put it, ‘He was the best among us’ – and he was known as al-Amin, the Reliable.
As with Moses, David or Jesus, it is impossible now for us to divine the personal essence of his success, but like them, he came at the time he was needed. In the Jahiliya, the Time of Ignorance before his revelation, ‘there was nobody more destitute than we were,’ wrote one of his soldiers later. ‘Our religion was to kill one another and raid. There were those among us who would bury their daughters alive not wanting them to eat our food. Then God sent us a well-known man.’
Outside Mecca was the Cave of Hira where Muhammad liked to meditate. In 610, according to tradition, the Archangel Gabriel visited him there with his first revelation from the one God who had chosen him to be his Messenger and Prophet. When the Prophet received God’s revelations, his face was said to become flushed, he fell silent, his body lying limp on the ground, sweat poured down his face; he was engulfed by humming sounds and visions – and then he would recite his poetical, divine revelations. Initially he was terrified by this, but Khadija believed in his vocation and he started to preach.
In this rough military society where every boy and man bore arms, the literary tradition was not written but consisted of a rich spoken poetry that celebrated the deeds of honourable warriors, passionate lovers, fearless hunters. The Prophet was to harness this poetical tradition: his 114 sura – chapters – were initially recited before they were collated into the Koran, ‘The Recitation’, a compendium of exquisite poetry, sacred obscurity, clear instruction and bewildering contradiction.
Muhammad was an inspirational visionary who preached submission – Islam – to the one God in return for universal salvation, the values of equality and justice, and the virtues of pure living, with easily learned rituals and rules for life and death. He welcomed converts. He revered the Bible, and regarded David and Solomon, Moses and Jesus as prophets, but his revelation superseded the earlier ones. Importantly for the fate of Jerusalem, the Prophet stressed the coming of the Apocalypse that he called the Judgement, the Last Day or just the Hour, and this urgency inspired the dynamism of early Islam. ‘The knowledge of it is only with God,’ says the Koran, ‘but what will make you realize the Hour is near?’ All the Judaeo-Christian scriptures stressed that this could take place only in Jerusalem.
One night, his followers believed that, as he slept beside the Kaaba, Muhammad had a vision. The Archangel Gabriel awoke him and together they embarked on a Night Journey mounted on Buraq, a winged steed with a human face, to the unnamed ‘Furthest Sanctuary’. There Muhammad met his ‘fathers’ (Adam and Abraham) and his ‘brothers’ Moses, Joseph and Jesus, before ascending by a ladder to heaven. Unlike Jesus, he just called himself the Messenger or Apostle of God, claiming no magical powers. Indeed the Isra – Night Journey – and the Miraj – Ascension – were his only miraculous exploits. Jerusalem and the Temple are never actually mentioned but Muslims came to believe that the Furthest Sanctuary was the Temple Mount.
When his wife and uncle died, Muhammad was exposed to the disapproval of the richer families of Mecca, who depended on the Kaaba stone for their livelihoods. The Meccans tried to kill him. But he was contacted by a group from Yathrib, a date-palm oasis to the north founded by Jewish tribes but also the home of pagan artisans and farmers. They asked him to make peace between its feuding clans. He and his inner circle of believers departed on the Migration – Hijra – to Yathrib, which became Madinat un-Nabi, the city of the Prophet – Medina. There he fused his first devotees, the Emigrants, and new followers, the Helpers, and their Jewish allies, into a new community, the umma. It was 622, the beginning of the Islamic calendar.
Muhammad was a skilled conciliator of men and co-opter of ideas. Now in Medina, with its Jewish clans, he created the first mosque, * adopting the Jerusalem Temple as the first qibla, the direction of prayer. He prayed at Friday sundown – the Jewish Sabbath – fasted on the Day of Atonement, banned pork and practised circumcision. The oneness of Muhammad’s God rejected the Christian Trinity but other rituals – the prostration on prayer mats – owed much to Christian monasteries; his minarets were perhaps inspired by the pillars of the stylites; the festival of Ramadan resembled Lent. Yet Islam was very much his own.
Muhammad created a small state with its own laws, but he faced resistance from Medina and his old home Mecca. His new state needed to defend itself and to conquer: jihad – struggle – was both internal mastery of self and holy war of conquest. The Koran promoted not only the destruction of infidels but also tolerance if they submitted. This was relevant because the Jewish tribes resisted Muhammad’s revelations and his control. Hence he changed the qibla to Mecca and rejected the Jewish way: God had destroyed the Jewish Temple because the Jews had sinned so ‘they will not follow your qibla, Jerusalem’.
When he fought the Meccans, he could not afford disloyalty in Medina so he expelled the Jews and made an example of one Jewish clan: its 700 men were beheaded, its women and children enslaved. In 630, Muhammad finally took Mecca, spreading his monotheism across Arabia by conversion and force. Muhammad’s followers became ever more militant as they strove to live righteously to prepare for the Last Judgement. Now, having conquered Arabia, they encountered the sinful empires beyond. The Prophet’s early followers, the Emigrants and Helpers, formed his entourage – but he also welcomed former enemies and talented opportunists with equal enthusiasm. Meanwhile Muslim tradition recounts his personal life: he had many wives – Aisha, daughter of his ally Abu Bakr was his favourite – and took numerous concubines, including beautiful Jewesses and Christians; and he had children, most importantly a daughter named Fatima.1
In 632 Muhammad, aged about sixty-two, died and was succeeded by his father-in-law, Abu Bakr, who was acclaimed Amir al-Muminin, Commander of the Believers.* Muhammad’s realm tottered after his death, but Abu Bakr managed to pacify Arabia. Then he turned to the Byzantine and Persian empires, which the Muslims regarded as evanescent, sinful and corrupt. The Commander despatched contingents of warriors on camels to raid Iraq and Palestine.
KHALID IBN WALID: SWORD OF ISLAM
Somewhere near Gaza, ‘there was a battle between the Romans and the nomads of Muhammad’, writes Thomas the Presbyter, a Christian who in 640 was the first independent historian to mention the Prophet.† ‘The Romans fled.’ The Emperor Heraclius, still in Syria, prepared to smash these Arab armies who in turn asked Abu Bakr for reinforcements. He called for his best general, Khalid bin Walid, who was raiding Iraq. Riding six days across the waterless desert, Khalid arrived in Palestine just in time.
Khalid was one of the Meccan aristocrats who had fought against Muhammad but when he finally converted, the Prophet welcomed this dynamic commander and called him the Sword of Islam. Khalid was one of those swaggering generals who pay little attention to the orders of their political masters. The sequence of events is unclear but he joined up with the other Arab warlords, assumed command and then defeated a Byzantine detachment south-west of Jerusalem before storming Damascus. Far to the south in Mecca, Abu Bakr died and was succeeded by Omar, one of the Prophet’s first converts and closest confidants. The new Commander of the Believers distrusted Khalid, who was amassing a fortune, and a legend, and recalled him to Mecca: ‘Khalid,’ he said, ‘take your property out of our arse.’
Heraclius despatched an army to stop the Arabs. Omar appointed a new commander, Abu Ubayda, and Khalid rejoined the armies as his subordinate. After months of skirmishing, the Arabs finally lured the Byzantines to battle amidst the impenetrable gorges of the Yarmuk river between today’s Jordan, Syria and Israeli Golan. ‘This is one of God’s battles,’ Khalid told his men – and on 20 August 636, God delivered a duststorm that blinded the Christians who panicked and bolted helterskelter over the cliffs of the Yarmuk. Khalid cut off their retreat and by the end of the battle, the Christians were so exhausted that the Arabs found them lying down in their cloaks, ripe for the slaughter. Even the emperor’s brother was killed and Heraclius himself never recovered from this defeat, one of the decisive battles of history, that lost Syria and Palestine. Byzantine rule, weakened by the Persian war, seems to have collapsed like a house of cards and it is unclear whether the Arab conquest was more a triumphant series of raids. However intense the conquest really was, it was an astonishing achievement that these tiny contingents of Arabian cameleers, some of them as small as 1, 000 men, had smashed the legions of the Eastern Rome. But the Commander of the Believers did not rest; he sent another army northwards to conquer Persia which also fell to the Arabs.2
In Palestine, Jerusalem alone held out under Patriarch Sophronius, a Greek intellectual who praised her in his poetry as ‘Zion, radiant Zion of the Universe’. He could scarcely believe the disaster that had befallen the Christians. Preaching in the Church of the Sepulchre, he denounced the sins of the Christians and the atrocities of the Arabs, whom he called Sarakenoi in Greek – Saracens: ‘Whence come these wars against us? Whence multiply barbarian invasions? The slime of the godless Saracens has captured Bethlehem. The Saracens have risen up against us with a beastly impulse because of our sins. Let us correct ourselves.’
It was too late for that. The Arabs converged on the city which they called Ilya (Aelia, the Roman name). The first of their commanders to besiege Jerusalem was Amr ibn al-As, who after Khaled was their best general and another irrepressibly larger-than-life adventurer from the Meccan nobility. Amr, like the other Arab leaders, knew the area very well: he even owned land nearby and had visited Jerusalem in his youth. But this was not just a quest for booty.
‘The Hour has drawn nigh,’ says the Koran. The early Muslim Believers’ militant fanaticism was stoked by their belief in the Last Judgement. The Koran did not state this specifically but they knew from the Jewish-Christian prophets that it had to take place in Jerusalem. If the Hour was upon them, they needed Jerusalem.
Khaled and the other generals joined Amr around the walls but the Arab armies were probably too small to storm the city and there does not seem to have been much fighting. Sophronius simply refused to surrender without a guarantee of tolerance from the Commander of the Believers himself. Amr suggested solving this problem by passing off Khaled as the Commander but he was recognized so Omar was summoned from Mecca.
The Commander inspected the rest of the Arab armies at Jabiya in the Golan and Jerusalemites probably met him there to negotiate their surrender. The Monophysite Christians, who were the majority in Palestine, hated the Byzantines and it seems the early Moslem Believers were happy to allow freedom of worship to their fellow monotheists.* Following the Koran, Omar offered Jerusalem a Covenant –dhimma – of Surrender that promised religious tolerance to the Christians in return for payment of the jizya tax of submission. Once this was agreed, Omar set out for Jerusalem, a giant in ragged, patched robes riding a mule, with just one servant.
OMAR THE JUST: TEMPLE REGAINED
When he saw Jerusalem from Mount Scopus, Omar ordered his muezzin to give the call to prayer. After praying, he donned the white robes of the pilgrim, mounted a white camel and rode down to meet Sophronius. The Byzantine hierarchs awaited the conqueror, their bejewelled robes contrasting with his puritanical simplicity. Omar, the hulking Commander of the Believers, a wrestler in his youth, was an implacable ascetic who always carried a whip. It was said that when Muhammad entered a room, women and children would continue to laugh and chat, but when they saw Omar they fell silent. It was he who started to collate the Koran, created the Muslim calendar and much Islamic law. He enforced far more severe rules on women than the Prophet himself. When his own son got drunk, Omar had him scourged with eighty lashes which killed him.
Sophronius presented Omar with the keys of the Holy City. When the patriarch saw Omar and his ragged hordes of Arab cameleers and horsemen, he muttered that this was ‘the abomination of desolation’. Most of them were tribesman from the Hejaz or the Yemen; they travelled light and fast, draped in turbans and cloaks, living on ilhiz ( ground camel hair mixed with blood and then cooked). A far cry from the heavily armoured Persian and Byzantine cataphract cavalry, only the commanders wore chain-mail or helmets. The rest ‘rode shaggy stumpy horses, their swords highly polished but covered in a shabby cloth scabbard’. They carried bows and spears that were bound with camel sinews, and red cowhide shields resembling ‘a thick red loaf of bread’. They cherished their broadswords, their sayf, gave them names and sang poems about them.
Priding themselves on their uncouthness, they wore ‘four locks of hair’ stuck up like ‘the horns of a goat’. When they encountered rich carpets, they rode on to them and cut them up to make spear coverings, enjoying the booty – human and material – like any other conquerors. ‘Suddenly, I sensed the presence of a human form hidden under some covers,’ wrote one of them. ‘I tear them away and what do I find? A woman like a gazelle, radiant like the sun. I took her and her clothes and surrendered the latter as booty but put in a request that the girl should be alotted to me. I took her as a concubine.’* The Arab armies had no technical advantages, but they were fanatically motivated.
Sophronius, say the traditional Muslim sources, dating from much later, escorted the Saracen Commander to the Holy Sepulchre, hoping his visitor would admire or even embrace the perfect sanctity of Christianity. When Omar’s muezzin called his soldiers to prayer, Sophronius invited the Commander to pray there, but he is said to have refused, warning that this would make it a place of Islamic worship. Omar knew that Muhammad had revered David and Solomon. ‘Take me to the sanctuary of David,’ he ordered Sophronius. He and his warriors entered the Temple Mount, probably through the Prophets’ Gate in the south, and found it contaminated by ‘a dungheap which the Christians had put there to offend the Jews.’
Omar asked to be shown the Holy of Holies. A Jewish convert, Kaab al-Ahbar, known as the Rabbi, replied that, if the Commander preserved ‘the wall’ (perhaps referring to the last Herodian remains, including the Western Wall), ‘I will reveal to him where are the ruins of the Temple.’ Kaab showed Omar the foundation-stone of the Temple, the rock which the Arabs called the Sakhra.
Aided by his troops, Omar began to clear the debris to create somewhere to pray. Kaab suggested he place this north of the foundation-stone ‘so you will make two qiblas, that of Moses and that of Muhammad.’ ‘You still lean towards the Jews,’ Omar supposedly told Kaab, placing his first prayer house south of the rock, roughly where al-Aqsa Mosque stands today, so that it clearly faced Mecca. Omar had followed Muhammad’s wish to reach past Christianity to restore and co-opt this place of ancient holiness, to make the Muslims the legitimate heirs of Jewish sanctity and outflank the Christians.
The stories of Omar in Jerusalem date from over a century later when Islam had formalized its rituals in ways that were very distinct from those of Christianity and Judaism. Yet the story of Kaab and other Jews, which later formed the Islamic literary tradition of Israiliyyat, much of it about Jerusalem’s greatness, proves that many Jews and probably Christians joined Islam. We will never know exactly what happened in those early decades but the relaxed arrangements in Jerusalem and elsewhere suggest that there may have been a surprising amount of mingling and sharing amongst the Peoples of the Book.*
The Muslim conquerors were initially happy to share shrines with the Christians. In Damascus, they shared the Church of St John for many years and the Umayyad Mosque there still contains the tomb of St John the Baptist. In Jerusalem, there are also accounts of them sharing churches. The Cathisma Church outside the city was actually equipped with a Muslim prayer-niche. Contrary to the Omar legend, it seems that the early Muslims first prayed in or beside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre before arrangements could be made on the Temple Mount.
The Jews too welcomed the Arabs after centuries of Byzantine repression. It is said that Jews, as well as Christians, rode in the Muslim armies. Omar’s interest in the Temple Mount understandably excited Jewish hopes, because the Commander of the Believers not only invited the Jews to maintain the Temple Mount but also allowed them to pray there with the Muslims. A well-informed Armenian bishop, Sebeos, who wrote thirty years later, claims that ‘the Jews planned to build the Temple of Solomon and, locating the Holy of Holies, they built (the Temple) without a pedestal’ – and adds that Omar’s first governor of Jerusalem was Jewish. Omar certainly invited the leader of Tiberias’ Jewish community, the Gaon, and seventy Jewish families to return to Jerusalem where they settled in the area south of the Temple Mount.*
Jerusalem was still impoverished and plague-ridden after the Persian depredations and it remained overwhelmingly Christian for many years. Omar also settled Arabs here, especially the more sophisticated Quraysh who liked Palestine and Syria, which they called Bilad al-Shams. Some of the Prophet’s closest followers, known as the Companions, came to Jerusalem and were buried in the first Muslim cemetery just outside the Golden Gate, ready for the Day of Judgement. Two of the famous Jerusalem Families, who play such a prominent role in this story right into the twenty-first century, trace their descent from these earliest Arab grandees.†3
In Jerusalem, Omar was accompanied not only by his generals Khalid and Amr but also by a pleasure-loving but competent young man who could not have been more different from the whip-wielding Commander. Muawiya ibn Abi Sufyan was a son of Abu Sufyan, the Meccan aristocrat who had led the opposition to Muhammad. Muawiya’s mother ate the liver of the Prophet’s uncle Hamza after the Battle of Uhuh. When Mecca surrendered to Islam, Muhammad appointed Muawiya as his secretary and married his sister. After Muhammad’s death, Omar appointed Muawiya as governor of Syria. The Commander gave him a backhanded compliment: Muawiya, he said, was the ‘Caesar of the Arabs’.
THE UMAYYADS: THE TEMPLE RESTORED
MUAWIYA: ARAB CAESAR
Muawiya ruled Jerusalem for forty years, first as governor of Syria and then as the monarch of the vast Arab empire which was expanding eastwards and westwards with astounding speed. But in the midst of all of this success, a civil war about the succession almost destroyed Islam and it created a schism that still divides it today.
In644, Omar was assassinated and his successor was Othman, a cousin of Muawiya. After more than ten years, Othman was hated for his nepotism. When he too was assassinated, the Prophet’s first cousin, Ali, who was also married to his daughter Fatima, was chosen as Commander of the Believers. Muawiya demanded that Ali punish the assassins – but the new Commander refused. Muawiya feared that he would lose his domain in Syria. He won the ensuing civil war, Ali was killed in Iraq, and there ended the reign of the last of the so-called Righteous Caliphs.
In July 661, the grandees of the Arab empire gathered on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem to acclaim Muawiya as Commander of the Believers and pledge allegiance in the traditional Arab way – the bayah.* Afterwards the new Commander visited the Holy Sepulchre and the Virgin Mary’s Tomb, not as a pilgrim but to show the continuity of religions and his imperial role as protector of the holy places. He ruled from Damascus, but he adored Jerusalem which he advertised on his coins as ‘Iliya Filastin’ – Aelia Palestina. He was tempted to make her his capital and it is likely that he often resided here in one of the luxurious palaces just south of the Temple which he may have built. Muawiya borrowed Jewish traditions about the Temple Mount to declare that Jerusalem was the ‘land of ingathering and resurrection on Judgement Day’, and he added, ‘The area between the two walls of this mosque are dearer to God than the rest of the earth.’
Christian writers hailed his reign as just, peaceful and tolerant; Jews called him a ‘lover of Israel’. His armies contained Christians; indeed he cemented his alliance with Christian Arab tribes by marrying Maysun, the daughter of their sheikh, and she was allowed to remain Christian. Moreover, he ruled through Mansur ibn Sanjun (the Arab for Sergius), a Christian bureaucrat inherited from Heraclius. Muawiya had grown up beside the Jews of Arabia, and it is said that when he was visited by one of their delegations he first asked them if they could cook the delicious haris dish which he had so savoured back home. Muawiya settled more Jews in Jerusalem, permitting them to pray there on the site of the Holy of Holies; the traces of a menorah on the Temple Mount, dating from the seventh century, may be evidence of this.
Muawiya was probably the real creator of today’s Islamic Temple Mount. It was he who actually built the first mosque there, flattening the rock of the old Antonia Fortress, extending the esplanade and adding an open-sided hexagon, the Dome of the Chain: no one knows what it was for but since it is in the precise middle of the Temple Mount, it may celebrate the centre of the world. Muawiya, writes a contemporary, ‘hews Mount Moriah and makes it straight and builds a mosque there on the holy rock’. When a Gallic bishop named Arculf visited Jerusalem, he saw that ‘in the former place where the Temple stood, the Saracens now frequent an oblong house of prayer pieced together with upright planks and large beams over some ruined remains, said to hold 3, 000 people.’ It was scarcely yet recognizable as a mosque but it probably stood where al-Aqsa stands today.*
Muawiya personified hilm, the wisdom and patience of the Arab sheikh: ‘I apply not my sword when my lash suffices nor my lash when my tongue suffices. And even if but one hair is binding me to my fellow men, I don’t let it break. When they pull, I loosen, if they loosen I pull.’ This is almost a definition of statesmanship and Muawiya, the creator of Arab monarchy and the first of the Umayyad dynasty, is a much-neglected paragon of how absolute power does not have to corrupt absolutely. He expanded his realm into eastern Persia, Central Asia and north Africa and he took Cyprus and Rhodes, making the Arabs a maritime power with his new navy. He launched annual assaults on Constantinople, and on one occasion besieged it by land and sea for three years.
Yet Muawiya never lost the ability to laugh at himself, a quality that is rare amongst politicians, let alone conquerors. He became very fat (perhaps for this reason he became the first Arab monarch to recline on a throne instead of sitting on cushions) and teased another fat old grandee: ‘I’d like a slavegirl with legs like yours.’
‘And a bottom like yours, Commander of the Believers,’ retorted the old man.
‘Fair enough,’ laughed Muawiya. ‘If you start something, you have to take the consequences.’ He never lost his pride in his legendary sexual prowess but even there he could take some mockery: he was cavorting with a Khurasani girl in his harem when he was presented with another whom he took without further ado. When she had left, he turned back to the Khurasani girl, proud of his leonine performance: ‘How do you say “lion” in Persian?’ he asked her.
‘Kaftar,’ she replied.
‘I’m a kaftar,’ the Commander boasted to his courtiers until someone asked him if he knew what a kaftar was.
‘A lion?’
‘No, a lame hyena!’
‘Well done,’ Muawiya chuckled, ‘that Khurasani girl knew how to get her own back.’
When he died in his eighties, his heir Yazid, a debauchee always accompanied by a pet monkey, was acclaimed Commander on the Temple Mount but soon faced two rebellions in Arabia and Iraq, the start of Islam’s second civil war. His enemies taunted him: ‘Yazid of liquors, Yazid of whoring, Yazid of dogs, Yazid of monkeys, Yazid of wine-swoons.’
The Prophet’s grandson Hussein rebelled to avenge his father Ali’s death, but was beheaded at Karbala in Iraq, his martyrdom creating Islam’s great schism between the majority of Sunni and the Shia, ‘the party of Ali’.* But in 683 Yazid died young, at which the Syrian armies summoned his shrewd old kinsman Marwan to become the Commander. When Marwan died in April 685, his son Abd al-Malik was acclaimed as Commander in Damascus and Jerusalem. But his empire was fragile: Mecca, Iraq and Persia were controlled by rebels. Yet it was Abd al-Malik who gave Islamic Jerusalem the jewel in her crown.4
ABD AL-MALIK: THE DOME OF THE ROCK
Abd al-Malik did not suffer fools gladly. When a sycophant complimented him, he snapped, ‘Don’t flatter me. I know myself better than you.’ According to the image on his rare coins, he was severe, thin and hook-nosed. His hair was curly, shoulder length, and he wore long brocaded robes with a sword at his belt, but his critics later claimed that he had big eyes, eyebrows grown together, a protruding nose and a cleft lip. Yet here was another royal lover who liked to muse on eroticism: ‘He who wishes to take a slave girl for pleasure, let him take a Berber; to produce a child, take a Persian; as a domestic servant, a Byzantine.’ Abd al-Malik grew up in a rough school. At sixteen, he was commanding an army against the Byzantines; he witnessed the murder of his cousin, Commander of the Believers Othman; and matured into a sacred monarch never afraid to get his hands dirty. He started by reconquering Iraq and Iran. When he captured a leading rebel, he publicly tortured him in front of the Damascene crowds, placed a silver collar around his neck and led him around like a dog before ‘straddling his chest, butchering him and tossing his head out to his supporters’.
Mecca remained for the moment beyond his control, but he possessed Jerusalem, which he revered as much as Muawiya had. Abd al-Malik envisaged the creation of a united Islamic empire out of a second civil war, with Bilad al-Shams – Syria–Palestine – as its heart: he planned a highway between Jerusalem and Damascus.* Muawiya had planned to build over the Rock: now Abd al-Malik assigned seven years’ worth of his Egyptian revenues to create the Dome of the Rock.
The plan was exquisitely simple: a dome, 65 feet in diameter supported by a drum, all resting on octagonal walls. The Dome’s beauty, power and simplicity are equalled by its mystery: we do not know exactly why Abd al-Malik built it – he never said. It is not actually a mosque but a shrine. Its octagonal shape resembles a Christian martyrium, indeed its dome echoes those of the Holy Sepulchre and Hagia Sofia in Constantinople yet its circular walkways designed for circumambulation recall the Kaaba of Mecca.
The Rock was the site of Adam’s paradise, Abraham’s altar, the place where David and Solomon planned their Temple later visited by Muhammad on his Night Journey. Abd al-Malik was rebuilding the Jewish Temple for the true revelation of God, Islam.
The building has no central axis but is encircled thrice – first by the outside walls, next by the octagonal arcade and then right under the dome, bathed in sunlight, the arcade around the Rock itself: this declared that this place was the centre of the world. The dome itself was heaven, the link to God in human architecture. The golden dome and the lush decorations and gleaming white marble declared this was the new Eden, and the place for the Last Judgement when Abd al-Malik and his Umayyad dynasty, would surrender their kingdom to God at the Hour of the Last Days. Its wealth of images – jewels, trees, fruit, flowers and crowns – make it a joyful building even for non-Muslims – its imagery combined the sensuality of Eden with the majesty of David and Solomon.
The Dome’s message was therefore also imperial: since he had not regained Mecca from his rebels, he was declaring the grandeur and permanence of his dynasty to the Islamic world – and possibly, if he had not retaken the Kaaba, he might have made this his new Mecca. The gold dome projected his glory as an Islamic emperor. But it had a wider audience: just as Justinian’s Hagia Sofia in Constantinople had surpassed Solomon, so Abd al-Malik was surpassing Justinian, and Constantine the Great too, a rebuke of the Christian claim to be the new Israel. Ironically, the mosaics were probably the work of Byzantine craftsmen, lent to the Commander by Justinian II during a rare peace between the empires.
After it was finished in 691/2, Jerusalem was never the same again: Abd al-Malik’s astonishing vision seized the skyline of Jerusalem for Islam by building on the mountain, disdained by the Byzantines, which ruled the city. Physically the Dome dominated Jerusalem and overshadowed the Church of the Holy Sepulchre – and that was Abd al-Malik’s purpose, believed later Jerusalemites such as the writer al-Muqaddasi. It worked: henceforth right up into the twenty-first century, the Muslims mocked the Church of the Holy Sepulchre – the Kayamah in Arabic – calling it the Kumamah – the Dungheap. The Dome both complemented and vanquished the rival yet related claims of Jews and Christians, so Abd al-Malik confronted both with the superior novelty of Islam. Circling the building, he placed 800 feet of inscriptions that denounce the idea of the divinity of Jesus with a directness that hints at the close relationship between the two faiths of monotheists: they shared much but not the Trinity. The inscriptions are fascinating because they are our first glimpse at the text of the Koran which Abd al-Malik was having collated into its final form.
The Jews were less important imperially but more important theologically. The Dome was maintained by 300 black slaves assisted by twenty Jews and ten Christians. The Jews could not help but see the Dome with hope: was it their new Temple? They were still allowed to pray there and the Umayyads created an Islamic version of the Temple rituals of purification, anointment and circumambulation of the stone.*
The Dome has a power beyond all this: it ranks as one of the most timeless masterpieces of architectural art; its radiance is the cynosure of all eyes wherever one stands in Jerusalem. It shimmers like a mystical palace rising out of the airy and serene space of the esplanade which immediately became an enormous open-air mosque, sanctifying all the space around it. The Temple Mount became instantly – and still remains – a place for recreation and relaxation. Indeed the Dome created an earthly paradise that combined the tranquillity and sensuality of this world with the sanctity of the hereafter, and that was its genius. Even in its earliest years, there was, wrote Ibn Asakir, no greater pleasure than ‘eating a banana in the shade of the Dome of the Rock’. It ranks with the Temples of Solomon and Herod as one of the most sucessful sacred-imperial edifices ever built and, in the twenty-first century, it has become the ultimate secular touristic symbol, the shrine of resurgent Islam and the totem of Palestinian nationalism: it still defines Jerusalem today.
Soon after the Dome was built, Abd al-Malik’s armies recaptured Mecca and resumed the jihad to spread God’s kingdom against the Byzantines. He expanded this colossal empire westward across northern Africa and eastward into Sind (today’s Pakistan). But within his realm, he needed to unify the House of Islam as a single Muslim religion with an emphasis on Muhammad, expressed in the double shahada that now appeared on many inscriptions: ‘There is no God but God, and Muhammad is the apostle of God.’ The Prophet’s sayings –hadith – were collected and Abd al-Malik’s full edition of the Koran became the invincible source of legitimacy and holiness. Rituals became more rigidly defined; graven images banned – he stopped minting coins bearing his own image. Abd al-Malik now called himself Khalifat Allah, God’s Deputy, and henceforth Islamic rulers became the caliphs. The official versions of Muhammad’s earliest biography and the Muslim Conquest excluded the Christians and Jews from Islam. The administration was Arabized. Like Constantine, Josiah and St Paul rolled into one, Abd al-Malik believed in a universal empire of one monarch, one God, and it was he more than anyone who oversaw the evolution of Muhammad’s community into today’s Islam.
WALID: APOCALYPSE AND LUXURY
Jerusalem had a shrine in the Dome but not an imperial mosque, so Abd al-Malik and his son Walid, who succeeded him, next built the Further Mosque, al-Aqsa, Jerusalem’s mosque for ordinary Friday prayers, at the southern boundary of the Temple Mount. The caliphs saw the Temple Mount as the centrepiece of Jerusalem just as Herod had. For the first time since ad 70, they built a new Great Bridge across the valley for pilgrims to enter the Temple Mount from the west, over Wilson’s Arch, today’s Gate of the Chain. To enter from the south, they created the domed Double Gates, which matched the Golden Gate in style and beauty.*
This was a vibrant moment in Jerusalem. In the space of a few years, the caliphs had turned the Temple Mount into a holy Islamic shrine and Jerusalem into an imperial-Umayyad city and this once again unleashed the infectious competition for shrines and stories that characterizes Jerusalem even today. The Christians had commandeered many of the Jewish myths which were gradually placed at their central shrine, the Sepulchre. But now the raising of the Dome and al-Aqsa reinvigorated the old myths all over again: a footprint on the Rock that had once been shown to Christian pilgrims as the mark of Jesus became the footprint of Muhammad. The Umayyads covered the Temple Mount with new domes all linked to Biblical traditions from Adam and Abraham via David and Solomon to Jesus. Their scenario of the Last Judgement took place on the Temple Mount when the Kaaba would come to Jerusalem.* And it was not just the Temple Mount: the Muslims came to revere anything associated with David, so now they regarded the Citadel, which the Christians called David’s Tower, as David’s Mihrab (prayer-niche): they were not the last to mistake Herod’s grandeur for David’s. The Umayyads did not just build for God but also for themselves.
These caliphs were pleasure-loving and cultured: this was the apogee of their Arab empire – even Spain was now theirs – and though Damascus was their capital, they spent much time in Jerusalem. Just south of the Temple Mount, Walid I and his son built a complex of palaces, unknown until they were uncovered in the late 1960s: they stood three or four storeys high around cool courtyards and the caliphs even had a special royal entrance to al-Aqsa via a rooftop bridge. The remains reveal nothing more than the size of the palaces, but the survival of their desert palaces reveal how opulently they would have lived here.5
The most luxurious desert palace or qasr survives at Amra, in today’s Jordan, where the caliphs relaxed in private quarters and bathhouses decorated with mosaic floors and graphic paintings depicting hunting scenes, nude or half-dressed women, athletes, cupids, satyrs and a bear playing the lute. Walid I appears in the colourful fresco of Six Kings showing monarchs defeated by the Umayyads such as the emperors of Constantinople and China. These decadent, Hellenistic paintings seem distinctly unIslamic, but, like the Herods, they perhaps lived differently in public. Walid I ended the sharing arrangement with the Christians in Damascus, creating the glorious Umayyad Mosque there, and the language of government now changed from Greek to Arabic. Yet Jerusalem remained overwhelmingly Christian. Muslims and Christians mixed freely: both celebrated the feast of the Dedication of the Holy Sepulchre in September, attracting ‘a great crowd to Jerusalem’, the streets filling with ‘camels and horses, asses and oxen’. Christian pilgrims, now more Armenian and Georgian than Greek, scarcely noticed the Muslim sites, while Jews hardly mention the Christians. Henceforth visitors tended to be increasingly blinkered and uncurious pilgrims who saw no more than their own religion.
In 715, Walid’s brother, Suleiman, received the acclamation on the Temple Mount: ‘Never had one seen such richness that greeted the new Caliph. Seated under one of the domes that ornament the platform, he held an audience’ on a sea of carpets and cushions with his treasury piled around him to pay his soldiers. Suleiman, who made the last full-scale Arab assault on Constantinople (and almost captured it), ‘conceived the plan of living in Jerusalem and making it his capital and bringing together there great wealth and a considerable population’. He founded the city of Ramla as an administrative centre, but died before he could move to Jerusalem.
Jews, many of them from Iran and Iraq, settled in the Holy City, living together south of the Temple Mount, retaining the privilege of praying on (and maintaining) the Temple Mount. But in about 720, after almost a century of freedom to pray there, the new Caliph Omar II, who was, unusually in this decadent dynasty, an ascetic stickler for Islamic orthodoxy, banned Jewish worship – and this prohibition would stand for the rest of Islamic rule. Instead the Jews started to pray around the four walls of the Temple Mount and in a subterranean synagogue called ha-Meara – the Cave – at Warren’s Gate, almost beneath the Temple Mount near the Holy of Holies.
While the Umayyad caliphs enjoyed their Hellenistic palaces and dancing girls, the empire reached its limits for the first time. Islamic forces in Spain were already probing France, but in 732, a Frankish nobleman, Charles, Mayor of the Palace of the Merovingian kings, defeated a Muslim raid at Tours. Hailed as a Maccabee, he became Charles Martel – the Hammer.
‘Dynasties,’ writes the Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, ‘have a natural lifespan like individuals’ and now the decadent, worldly Umayyads had reached the end of theirs. In a village east of the Jordan lived the descendants of Abbas, the Prophet’s uncle who had long secretly opposed the hedonistic rule of the Umayyads, who were totally unrelated to Muhammad. ‘Woe to the House of Umayya,’ declared their leader Abu al-Abbas, ‘they preferred the ephemeral to the eternal; crime obsessed them; they possessed forbidden women.’ The discontent spread fast. Even the tribes of the loyal Syrian heartland rebelled – even Jerusalem. The last caliph had to storm the city and raze her walls. An earthquake shook Jerusalem damaging al-Aqsa and the palaces as if God was angry with the Umayyads. Christians and Jews dreamed that this was the Apocalypse. But so did Muslims, and the real threat to the Umayyads came from far away to the east.
In 748, in Khorasan, today’s eastern Iran and Afghanistan, a charismatic mystic named Abu Muslim demanded a sterner Islam and the rule by one of Muhammad’s descendants. The new Muslims of the borderlands joined his puritanical army, which dressed all in black and marched under black banners and hailed the coming of the imam, precursor of the Mahdi, * to redeem Islam. Abu Muslim led his triumphant armies westwards but he had not yet decided whether to back the family of Ali or the family of Abbas – and there were still many Umayyad princes around too. But it was Abu al-Abbas who defeated the last Umayyad ruler and solved this problem in a way that earned him his nickname.6
CALIPH SAFFAH: THE SLAUGHTERER
Abu al-Abbas declared himself caliph and invited the Umayyads to a banquet to declare his peaceful intentions. In the midst of the feast, the waiters drew out clubs and swords and butchered the entire family, tossing the bodies into the lamb stew. The Slaughterer himself died soon afterwards but his brother Mansur, the Victorious, systematically murdered the Alid family and then liquidated the overmighty Abu Muslim too. His perfumier, Jamra, later told how Mansur kept the keys of a secret storeroom which was to be opened only on his death. There his son later found a vaulted chamber filled with the bodies, each meticulously labelled, of the family of Ali from old men to infants, whom Mansur had killed, all preserved in the hot dry air.
Wiry with brown, weather-beaten skin and saffron-dyed hair, Mansur was the real father of the Abbasid dynasty that ruled for many centuries, but his power-base was to the east: he moved his capital to his new Round City, Baghdad.
Soon after seizing power, Mansur visited Jerusalem. There he repaired the damaged Aqsa, but paid for this work by melting the gold and silver doors of the Dome of the Rock given by Abd al-Malik. Mansur’s successors no longer bothered to visit. Just as the city diminished in the Islamic world, * a western emperor revived the Christian fascination with Jerusalem.7
THE EMPEROR AND THE CALIPH: CHARLEMAGNE AND HAROUN AL-RASHID
On Christmas Day 800, Charles the Great, known as Charlemagne, the King of the Franks, who ruled most of modern France, Germany and Italy, was crowned emperor of the Romans by the pope in Rome. This ceremony marked the new confidence of the popes and their western Latin-based Christianity that would become Catholicism – and their growing differences with the Greek-speaking Orthodox of Constantinople. Charlemagne was a merciless warrior-king hacking his way to ever-greater power, yet he was also fascinated with history, and as devout as he was ambitious: he saw himself as the heir to the missions of Constantine and Justinian to become the universal holy Roman emperor, and as a latter-day King David – and both these aspirations led to the Holy City. So earlier on the same Christmas Day, it was said that a delegation sent by the Patriarch of Jerusalem had presented him with the keys of the Holy Sepulchre. Rome and Jerusalem in one day was no mean feat.
This was not a bid for possession because the patriarch had the blessing of Jerusalem’s ruler, Caliph Haroun al-Rashid whose reign, recounted in the Thousand and One Nights, was the apogee of the Abbasid empire. Charlemagne and the caliph had been exchanging envoys for three years: Haroun was probably keen to play off the Franks against his enemies in Constantinople and Jerusalem’s Christians needed Charlemagne’s help.
The caliph sent Charlemagne an elephant and an astrolabe water clock, a sophisticated device that showed off Islamic superiority – and alarmed some of the primitive Christians as a contraption of diabolical sorcery. The two emperors did not sign a formal treaty, but Christian property in Jerusalem was listed and protected, while Charlemagne paid the entire poll tax for the city’s Christians – 850 dinars. In return Haroun allowed him to create a Christian quarter around the Holy Sepulchre, with a convent, library and pilgrims’ hostel, staffed by 150 monks and seventeen nuns. ‘The Christians and pagans’, noted one pilgrim, ‘have this kind of peace between them.’ This generosity generated the story that Charlemagne had covertly visited Jerusalem, making him the heir of Heraclius, and playing into the mystical legend of the Last Emperor whose reign would herald the End Days. This was widely believed, particularly in the age of the Crusades, but Charlemagne never did visit Jerusalem.8
When Haroun died, the civil war between his sons was won by Maamun. The new caliph was an enthusiastic student of science, founding the famous literary-scientific academy, the House of Wisdom, commissioning a world map and ordering his sages to calculate the circumference of the globe.* In 831, arriving in Syria to organize a campaign against Constantinople, Maamun probably visited Jerusalem, where he built new gates on the Temple Mount, but he erased Abd al-Malik’s name in the Dome to emphasize the superiority of the Abbasids and had it replaced with his own. He did not just take his name, he also purloined his gold from the Dome which remained a grey lead colour for over a thousand years. It got its gold back in the 1960s – but Abd al-Malik never got his name back and Maamun’s remains there to this day.9
This sleight of hand did not alter the slippage of Abbasid power. Just two years later, a peasant rebel leader was welcomed in Jerusalem by all three religions until, in 841, he pillaged the city, at which most of the inhabitants fled. The Sepulchre was saved only by a bribe from the patriarch. But the Arab caliphs had lost their grip. In 877, Ahmed ibn Tulun, the son of a Turkish slave who had become ruler of Egypt under the nominal aegis of the caliph, retook Jerusalem.10
KAFUR: THE SCENTED EUNUCH
Ibn Tulun was one of the Turks who gradually replaced the Arabs as the power in the Islamic empire. Maamun’s successor Mustasim had started to recruit slave boys – they were known as ghulam, pageboy – from among the newly Muslim Turkish horse-archers of Central Asia. These warriors of Asiatic appearance became first the praetorian guard, then the strongmen of the caliphate.
After Ibn Tulun’s son and heir was assassinated by his eunuchs, 11 a Turkish strongman Muhammad ibn Tughj, known by the Central Asian title of prince – al-Ikhshid – came to rule Egypt and Jerusalem. The political instability intensified religious competition. In 935, an annexe to the Holy Sepulchre was forcibly converted into a mosque. Three years later, Muslims attacked Christians celebrating Palm Sunday, looting and damaging the Church. The Jews were now split between the traditional Rabbanites, led by the scholar-judges known as the gaons, who lived by the Talmud, the oral traditions, and the Karaites, a new sect who rejected any law except the Torah (hence their name means the ‘readers’) and believed in a return to Zion.* These Turkish rulers favoured the Karaites, and just to complicate matters there was also a new community of Khazars† with their own synagogue in the Jewish Quarter. When the Ikhshid died in 946, aged sixty-four, he was buried in Jerusalem and his power passed to a negro eunuch whose soubriquet derived from his taste for perfume and make-up.
Abul-Misk Kafur, who was to rule Egypt, Palestine and Syria for over twenty years, was an Ethiopian slave bought as a child by the Ikhshid. Deformed, obese and malodorous, he splashed on so much white camphor and black musk that his master renamed him after them. His rise began when some exotic animals arrived for the Ikhshid. All the other servants rushed to admire them, but the African boy never took his eyes off his master, awaiting the slightest command. The Ikhshid appointed him tutor to his sons, then commander of the armies that conquered Palestine and Syria, and finally regent with the title of the Master. Once in power, the eunuch cultivated Islamic piety, restoring the walls of the Temple Mount, while patronizing the arts. However, to the north, the Byzantines had been reinvigorated by a succession of outstanding soldier-emperors who raided southwards towards Syria, threatening to take Jerusalem, which set off anti-Christian riots. In 966, Kafur’s governor started to squeeze the Christians, demanding ever-greater payments from Patriarch John, who appealed to Kafur. But when John was caught corresponding with Constantinople, the governor, supported by the Jews (who hated Byzantines), attacked the Sepulchre and burned the patriarch at the stake.
In Cairo, the fragrant eunuch was now ailing. After the death of the last of the Ikhshids, Kafur ascended the throne in his own right. The first Muslim king to be born a slave – or for that matter to be a eunuch – employed a Jewish minister who would become the mastermind of an Islamic revolution and of a new empire over Jerusalem.12
THE FATIMIDS: TOLERANCE AND LUNACY
IBN KILLIS: THE JEWISH VIZIER AND THE FATIMID CONQUEST
The son of a Jewish merchant from Baghdad, Yaqub ben Yusuf, known as Ibn Killis, had enjoyed a rollercoaster career, from bankrupt mountebank in Syria to financial adviser to Kafur in Egypt. ‘Were he a Muslim,’ said Kafur, ‘he’d have been the right man for vizier [chief minister].’ Ibn Killis took the hint and converted, but the eunuch died, being buried in Jerusalem, * and Ibn Killis was imprisoned. Having bribed his way out of jail, he secretly travelled westwards to the Shiite kingdom in modern Tunisia ruled by the Fatimid family. The ever-flexible Ibn Killis converted to Shia and advised the Fatimid caliph Muizz that the time was ripe to take Egypt.13 In June 969, Muizz’s general Jawhar al-Siqilli conquered Egypt and then advanced north to take Jerusalem.14
PALTIEL AND THE FATIMIDS: JEWISH DOCTOR-PRINCES AND THE LIVING IMAMS
The messianic Fatimids, the new masters of Jerusalem, were unlike any other Islamic dynasty for they not only declared themselves caliphs, they were also sacred kings, the Living Imams, almost suspended between man and heaven. Visitors to their courts were shown through courtyards of increasingly eye-watering luxury before they came to a gold-curtained throne at which they prostrated themselves and the curtains were drawn to reveal the Living Imam in golden robes. Their sect was secretive, their beliefs mystical, redemptionist and esoteric, and their rise to power mysterious, clandestine and filled with adventure. In 899, a rich merchant in Syria, Ubayd Allah, declared himself the Living Imam, direct descendant of Ali and Fatima, the Prophet’s daughter, via the Imam Ismail, hence they were known as Ismaili Shiites. His secret agents, the so-called dawa, fanned out across the east, conquering Yemen and converting some Berber tribesmen in Tunisia; but the Abbasids tried to kill him, so he vanished. Some years later, he or someone claiming to be him reappeared in Tunisia as al-Mahdi, the Chosen, founding his own caliphate which started to conquer a new empire with a sacred mission: to overthrow the false Abbasids of Baghdad and redeem the world. In 973, the Caliph Muizz, now ruler of swathes of north Africa, Sicily, Egypt, Palestine and Syria, moved to his new capital, al-Qahira al-Muizziyya – the Conquest of Muizz, known today as Cairo.
His successor, Aziz, appointed their consigliere, Ibn Killis, as grand vizier, chief minister of the empire which he ruled until his death almost twenty years later. Apart from his immense wealth – he owned 8, 000 female slaves, he was a scholar who debated religion with Jewish and Christian clerics and his career personifies the tolerance of the Fatimids, being sectarians themselves, towards Jews and Christians that was immediately felt in Jerusalem.
The Jews in Jerusalem were divided, poor and desperate, while their Egyptian brethren flourished under the Fatimids. They started to provide the doctors for the caliphs of Cairo: these were more than just royal physicians. They tended to be scholar-merchants who became influential courtiers and were usually appointed chief of the Jews of the Fatimid empire, a post known as the nagid, the prince. A Jew of mysterious origins named Paltiel was probably the first of these doctor-courtier-princes. A protégé of Jawhar, the Fatimid conqueror of Jerusalem, he immediately intervened to help the Jews in the Holy City.
After years of Abbasid neglect and the inconsistent patronage of Turkish rulers, Jerusalem was diminished and unstable. The constant wars between the caliphs of Cairo and Baghdad discouraged pilgrims; Bedouin raids sometimes overran the city for short periods; and in 974, the dynamic Byzantine Emperor John Tzimiskes captured Damascus and galloped into Galilee, promising his ‘intent to deliver the Holy Sepulchre of Christ our God from the bondage of the Muslim’. He was close; Jerusalem waited, but he never came.
The Fatimids encouraged the pilgrimages of their fellow Ismailis and Shiites to the Mosque of Jerusalem but the wars against Baghdad cut off the city from Sunni pilgrims. The very isolation of Jerusalem somehow intensified her sanctity: Islamic writers now compiled more popular anthologies of Jerusalem’s ‘merits’ – the Fadail – and they gave her new names: she was still Iliya and Bayt al-Maqdis, the Holy House, but she now became al-Balat, the Palace, too. Yet Christian pilgrims were becoming richer and more numerous than the ruling Muslims – Franks sailed from Europe and rich caravans arrived every Easter from Egypt.
The Jews too looked to their saviours in Cairo where Paltiel now persuaded the Caliph to pay a subsidy to the impoverished gaon and Academy of Jerusalem. He won the right for Jews there to buy a synagogue on the Mount of Olives, to gather close to Abolsom’s Pillar and also to pray at the Golden Gate on the eastern wall of the Temple Mount. At festivals the Jews were allowed to encircle the old Temple seven times but their main synagogue remained ‘the inner altar of the sanctuary at the western wall’: the Cave. The Jews had been scarcely tolerated under the Abbasids but now, poor as they were, they had more freedom than they had enjoyed for two centuries. Sadly, the Rabbanites and Karaites, who were specially favoured by the Fatimids, fellow sectarians, held separate services on the Mount of Olives that led to scuffles and soon these threadbare scholars were at war with each other in the dusty, ramshackle synagogues and holy underground caverns of Jerusalem. And their freedoms only exacerbated Muslim frustration.
When Paltiel died in 1011, his son brought his body to be buried in Jerusalem but the rich cortège was attacked by Muslim ruffians. Even after Paltiel, the Jews of Cairo despatched caravans with money to fund the Academy and a mystical sect called the Mourners of Zion who prayed for the restoration of Israel, in effect, religious Zionists. But the help was never enough: ‘the city is widowed, orphaned, deserted and impoverished with its few scholars,’ wrote a Jewish Jerusalemite in a fundraising letter. ‘Life here is extremely hard, food scarce. Help us, save us, redeem us.’15 Now the Jews were ‘a pitiful assembly, constantly harassed’.
Yet the Sunni Muslims were increasingly scandalized by the excesses and liberties of the infidels. ‘Everywhere, the Christians and Jews have the upper hand,’ grumbled Muqaddasi, the travel writer whose very name means ‘Born in Jerusalem’.
MUQADDASI: THE JERUSALEMITE
‘All the year round, never are her streets empty of strangers.’ Around 985, at the height of Fatimid rule, Muhammad ibn Ahmed Shams al-Din al-Muqaddasi had come home to the city he called al-Quds, the Holy.* Now in his forties, he had been travelling for twenty years, ‘seeking knowledge’ through travel that was so much part of the training of every Islamic savant, combining piety with the scientific observation practised in the House of Wisdom. In his masterpiece The Soundest Divisions for Knowledge of the Regions, he reveals his irrepressible curiosity and sense of adventure:
There is nothing that befalls travellers of which I did not have my share except begging and grievous sin. At times I’ve been pious, at times I’ve eaten impure foods. I’ve been close to drowning, my caravans have been waylaid on the highroad. I’ve spoken to kings and ministers, accompanied the licentious, been accused of being a spy, thrown into jail, I’ve eaten porridge with mystics, broth with monks and pudding with sailors. I’ve seen war in battleships against the Romans [Byzantines] and the ringing of church bells at night. I’ve worn the robes of honour of kings and many times I’ve been destitute. I’ve owned slaves and carried baskets on my head. What glory and honour I’ve been granted. Yet my death was plotted more than once.
Wherever he was, nothing dimmed his pride in Jerusalem:
One day, I sat in the council of the judge in Basra [in Iraq]. Egypt [Cairo] was mentioned. I was asked: which city is nobler? I said: ‘Our city.’ They said: Which one is sweeter? ‘Ours.’ They said: Which is better? ‘Ours.’ They said: Which is more bountiful? ‘Ours.’ The council were surprised at this. They said, ‘You are a man of conceit. You have claimed that which we cannot accept from you. You are like the owner of the camel during the Haj.
Yet he was honest about Jerusalem’s faults: he admitted that ‘the meek are molested and the rich are envied. You won’t anywhere find baths more filthy than those in the Holy City, nor heavier fees for their use.’ But Jerusalem produced the best raisins, bananas and pinenuts; she was the city of many muezzins calling the faithful to prayer – and no brothels. ‘There’s no place in Jerusalem where you cannot get water or hear the call to prayer.’
Muqaddasi described the holy places on the Temple Mount dedicated to Mary, Jacob and the mystical saint, Khidr.* Al-Aqsa was ‘even more beautiful’ than the Church of the Holy Sepulchre but the Dome was peerless: ‘At the dawn when the light of the sun first strikes the Dome and the drum catches the rays, then is this edifice a marvellous sight and one such that in all of Islam I have not seen the equal, neither in pagan times.’ Muqaddasi was only too aware that he lived in two Jerusalems – the real and the celestial – and this was the place of the Apocalypse: ‘Is she not the one that unites the advantages of This World with those of the Next? Is this not to be the sahira – the plain – of marshalling on the Day of Judgement where the Gathering Together and the Appointment will take place? Truly Mecca and Medina have their superiority but on the Day of Judgement, they will both come to Jerusalem and the excellence of them all will be united here.’
Yet Muqaddasi still complained about the lack of Sunnis and the noisy confidence of Jews and Christians: ‘scholars are few and Christians numerous and rude in public places.’ The Fatimids after all were sectarians and local Muslims even joined in with Christians’ festivals. But things were about to take a terrifying turn: by the time Muqaddasi died at the age of fifty in 1000, a child had succeeded to the throne of the Living Imam who would seek to destroy Christian and Jewish Jerusalem.16
HAKIM: THE ARAB CALIGULA
When the Caliph Aziz lay dying, he kissed his son and then sent him away to play. Soon afterwards he died, and no one could find the eleven-year-old Living Imam. After frantic searching, he was discovered inauspiciously at the top of a sycamore tree. ‘Come down, my boy,’ a courtier begged the child. ‘May God protect you and us all.’
The gorgeously clad courtiers gathered at the bottom of the tree. ‘I descended,’ recalled the new caliph, Hakim, and the courtier ‘placed on my head the turban adorned with jewels, kissed the ground before me, and said: “Hail to the Commander of the Believers, with the mercy of God and his blessing.” He then led me out in that attire and showed me to all the people, who kissed the ground before me and saluted me with the title of Caliph.’
Son of a Christian mother whose brothers were both patriarchs, Hakim grew into a broad-shouldered youth, his blue eyes speckled with gold. At first, advised by ministers, he pursued his family’s Ismaili mission, tolerating Jews and Christians. He adored poetry and founded his own House of Wisdom in Cairo for the study of astronomy and philosophy. He prided himself on his asceticism, eschewing the diamond turban for a plain scarf, and he even traded jokes with poor Cairenes in the streets. But when he started to rule in his own right, there were soon signs that this mystical autocrat was unbalanced. He ordered the killing of all the dogs in Egypt, followed by all the cats. He forbade the eating of grapes, watercress and fish without scales. He slept by day and worked at night, ordering all Cairenes to follow his strange hours.
In 1004, he started arresting and executing Christians, closing churches in Jerusalem and converting them into mosques. He banned Easter and the drinking of wine, a measure aimed at Christians and Jews. He ordered Jews to wear a wooden cow necklace to remind them of the Golden Calf, and bells to alert Muslims of their approach. Christians had to wear iron crosses. Jews were forced to choose between conversion or leaving the country. Synagogues were destroyed in Egypt and in Jerusalem. But it was the growing popularity of a Christian ritual that drew Hakim’s attention to Jerusalem. Every Easter Christian pilgrims from the West and East poured into Jerusalem to celebrate the city’s own Easter miracle: the Descent of the Holy Fire.17
On Holy Saturday, the day after Good Friday, thousands of Christians spent the night in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre where the Tomb was sealed and all lamps extinguished until, amid emotional scenes, the patriarch entered the Tomb in the darkness. After a long interval of spine-tingling anticipation, a spark seemed to descend from above, a flame flickered, brightness flared and the patriarch emerged with a mysteriously lit lamp. This sacred flame was distributed from candle to candle through the crowd to screams of joy and acts of wild abandon. The Christians regarded this relatively new ritual, first mentioned by a pilgrim in 870, as divine confirmation of Jesus’ Resurrection. The Muslims believed this was a spectacle of fairground hucksterism achieved by trickery – the smearing of the wire holding the lamp with resinous oil. ‘These abominations’, wrote a Muslim Jerusalemite, ‘make one shudder with horror.’18
When Hakim heard about this and observed the sheer wealth of the Christian caravan setting out for Jerusalem, he burned the Jewish Quarter of Cairo – and ordered the total destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. In September 1009, his henchmen obliterated the Church ‘stone by stone’, ‘razed it completely except those parts impossible to destroy’, and started to demolish the city’s synagogues and churches. Jews and Christians pretended to convert to Islam.
The caliph’s antics convinced some Ismailis that ‘Hakim had the personified God within him’. In the frenzy of his own holy revelations Hakim did not discourage this new religion, and started to persecute Muslims; he banned Ramadan and terrorized Shiites as well as Sunnis. He became so hated by Muslims that he needed the support of the Christians and Jews in Cairo, whom he allowed to rebuild their synagogues* and churches.
By this time, the psychopathic caliph was wandering in trances through the streets of Cairo, often heavily medicated by doctors. Hakim purged his court, ordering the killing of his own tutors, judges, poets, cooks and cousins, and the cutting off of the hands of female slaves, often himself playing the butcher.
HAKIM: THE VANISHING
Finally, in the middle of one night in February 1021, the demented caliph, still only thirty-six years old, rode out of Cairo into the hills and vanished so mysteriously that his devotees were convinced ’Hakim was not born of woman and did not die’. Since his donkey and some bloodied rags were discovered, he had probably been murdered by his sister who arranged the succession of his little son, Zahir. Hakim’s devotees were slaughtered by the Fatimid troops, but a few escaped to found a new sect which survives to this day as the Druze of Lebanon.19
The scars of Hakim’s insanity never healed in Jerusalem: the Church of Constantine was never fully rebuilt in its original form. As if Hakim was not bad enough, an earthquake in 1033 devastated the city, shattering the Byzantine walls and the Umayyad palaces; the old Umayyad Aqsa collapsed in ruins; the Jewish Cave was damaged.
Caliph Zahir, who revered Jerusalem, restored the tolerance of his ancestors, promising protection to both the Jewish sects, and on the Temple Mount he rebuilt al-Aqsa, the inscription on its delicately decorated triumphal arch linking himself, his Jerusalem and the Night Journey of the Prophet, though his mosque was far smaller than the original. He rebuilt the city walls, but around a smaller city, roughly as we see it today, leaving Mount Zion and the ruined Umayyad palaces outside.
Zahir and his successor welcomed Byzantine help to fund the rebuilding of the Church. Emperor Constantine IX Monomachus created a new Holy Sepulchre, finished in 1048, with its entrance now facing south: ‘a most spacious building capable of holding 8, 000 people, built most skilfully of coloured marbles adorned with Byzantine brocade working in gold with pictures,’ wrote Nasir-i-Khusrau, a Persian pilgrim. But it was much smaller than the Byzantine basilica. The Jews never managed to rebuild all their destroyed synagogues, even though the Jewish grand vizier in Cairo, Tustari, * supported the Jerusalem community.
Hakim’s persecutions seemed to inspire a fresh passion for Jerusalem – now a flourishing pilgrim city of 20, 000. ‘From the countries of the Greeks and other lands,’ noted Nasir, ‘Christians and Jews come up to Jerusalem in great numbers.’ Twenty thousand Muslims assembled annually on the Temple Mount instead of making the haj to Mecca. Jewish pilgrims arrived from France and Italy.
It was the changes in Christendom that helped make Jerusalem so alluring for Franks from the west, Greeks from the east. The Christianity of the Latins under the Catholic popes of Rome and the Orthodox Greeks under the emperors and patriarchs of Constantinople were now dramatically different. It was not just that they prayed in different languages and bickered about abstruse theological formulae. Orthodoxy, with its icons and elaborate theatricality, was more mystical and passionate; Catholicism, with its concept of original sin, believed in a greater divide between man and God. On 16 July 1054, in the middle of a service in Hagia Sofia, a Papal legate excommunicated the Byzantine Patriarch who furiously excommunicated the pope. This Great Schism, that still divides Christendom, encouraged competition between east and west for Jerusalem.
The Byzantine emperor Constantine X Doukas sponsored the first real Christian Quarter around the Church. Indeed there were so many Byzantine pilgrims and artisans in Jerusalem that Nasir heard mystical murmurings that the Emperor of Constantinople was in Jerusalem incognito. But there were also many western pilgrims – the Muslims called them all ‘Franks’ after Charlemagne’s people, though they were actually from all over Europe – that Amalfitan merchants built hostels and monasteries to house them. It was widely believed that the pilgrimage redeemed the sins of the baronial wars and as early 1001, Fulk the Black, Count of Anjou and founder of the Angevin dynasty that later ruled England, came on pilgrimage after he had burned his wife alive in her wedding-dress having found her guilty of adultery with a swineherd. He came three times. Later in the century, the sadistic Earl Sweyn Godwinson, brother of King Harold of England, set out barefoot for Jerusalem having raped the virginal Abbess Edwiga, while Robert, duke of Normandy, the father of William the Conqueror, abandoned his duchy to pray at the Sepulchre. But all three of them perished on the road: death was never far from the pilgrimage.
The Fatimids, beset with court intrigues, struggled even to hold Palestine, let alone Jerusalem, and the bandits preyed on the pilgrims. Death was so common that the Armenians created a title –mahdesi – for pilgrims who had seen death on the way, their equivalent of the Muslim haj.
In 1064, a rich caravan of 7, 000 German and Dutch pilgrims led by Arnold Bishop of Bamberg approached the city but was attacked by Bedouin tribesmen just outside the walls. Some of the pilgrims swallowed their gold to hide it from the brigands who eviscerated them to retrieve it. Five thousand pilgrims were slaughtered.20 Even though the Holy City had now been Muslim for four centuries, such atrocities suddenly seemed to place the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in peril.
In 1071, the new strongman of the east, Alp Arslan – Heroic Lion –defeated and captured the Byzantine emperor at Manzikert.* Alp Arslan was the leader of the Seljuks, Turkoman horsemen who had come to dominate the Baghdad caliphate and had been granted the new title of sultan – meaning ‘the power’. Now Heroic Lion, conquering an empire from Kashgar to modern Turkey, despatched his general Atsiz ibn Awak al-Khwarazmi, to gallop south – towards a terrified Jerusalem.
ATSIZ: THE BEASTLY SACKING
The Gaon and many of the Jews, who had been well treated under the Fatimids, fled Jerusalem to the Fatimid stronghold of Tyre. Atsiz camped outside the new walls but, as a pious Sunni Muslim, he claimed he would not harm Jerusalem. ‘It is God’s sanctuary,’ he insisted. ‘I will not fight it.’ Instead, in June 1073, he starved Jerusalem into surrender. He then headed south to Egypt, where he was defeated. This encouraged the Jerusalemites to rebel. They besieged the Turkomans (and Atsiz’s harem) in the Citadel.
Atsiz returned and when he was ready to attack, his concubines crept out of the Citadel and opened a gate for him. His Central Asian horde killed 3, 000 Muslims, even those who had hidden in the mosques. Only those who sheltered on the Temple Mount were spared. ‘They robbed and murdered and ravished and pillaged the storehouses; they were a strange and cruel people, girt with garments of many colours, capped with helmets black and red, with bow and spear and full quivers,’ reported a Jewish poet who encountered Atsiz’s men in Egypt. Atsiz and his horsemen ravaged Jerusalem: ‘They burned the heaped corn, cut down the trees and trampled the vineyards, and despoiled the graves and threw out the bones. They don’t resemble men, they resemble beasts, and also harlots and adulterers and they inflame themselves with males [and] cut off ears and noses and stole the garments, leaving them stark naked.’
The Heroic Lion’s empire immediately disintegrated as his family and generals seized their own fiefdoms. Atsiz was murdered and Jerusalem fell into the hands of another Turkish warlord, Ortuq bin Aksab. On arrival, he fired an arrow into the dome of the Sepulchre to show that he was the master. Yet he proved surprisingly tolerant, even appointing a Jacobite Christian as governor, and he invited Sunni scholars to return to Jerusalem.*
Ortuq’s sons Suqman and Il-Ghazi inherited Jerusalem. In 1093 ‘someone revolted against the governor’, wrote Ibn al-Arabi, a Spanish scholar, ‘and entrenched himself in the Tower of David. The governor attempted to assault him using his archers.’ While Turkoman soldiers fought pitched battles through the streets, ‘no one else cared. No market was closed, no ascetic left his place in al-Aqsa Mosque; no debate was suspended.’† But the monstrosities of Hakim, the defeat of the Byzantine emperor, the fall of Jerusalem to the Turkomans and the slaughter of pilgrims shook Christendom: the pilgrimage was in danger.21
In 1098, the Egyptian vizier was surprised to learn that a powerful army of Christian Europeans was advancing on the Holy Land. He presumed they were just Byzantine mercenaries, so he offered them a carve-up of the Seljuk empire: the Christians could take Syria; he would regain Palestine. When he discovered their object was Jerusalem, the vizier besieged the city ‘for forty days with forty catapults’ until the two sons of Ortuq fled to Iraq. Appointing one of his generals as iftikhar aldawla or governor of Jerusalem with a garrison of Arabs and Sudanese, the vizier returned to Cairo. The negotiations with the Franks continued into the summer of 1099 – the Christian envoys celebrated Easter in the Sepulchre.
The timing of the Frankish invasion was fortuitous: the Arabs had lost their empire to the Seljuks. The glory of the Abbasid Caliphate was now a distant memory. The Islamic world had fragmented into small warring baronies ruled by princelings dominated by Turkish generals – amirs – and regents known as atabegs. Even as the Christian armies marched south, a Seljuk princeling attacked Jerusalem but was repelled. Meanwhile the great city of Antioch had fallen to the Franks, who marched down the coast. On 3 June 1099, the Franks took Ramla and closed in on Jerusalem. Thousands of Muslims and Jews took refuge within the walls of the Holy City. On the morning of Tuesday 7 June, the Frankish knights reached the tomb of Nabi (the Prophet) Samuel, four miles north of Jerusalem. Having travelled all the way from western Europe, they now gazed down from Montjoie – the Mount of Joy – on the City of the King of all Kings. By nightfall, they were camped around Jerusalem.
Enter on the road to the Holy Sepulchre; wrest that land from the wicked race and subject it to ourselves.
Pope Urban II, Address at Clermont
Jerusalem is for us an object of worship that we could not give up even if there were only one of us left.
Richard the Lionheart, Letter to Saladin
Jerusalem is ours as much as yours – indeed it’s even more sacred to us.
Saladin, Letter to Richard the Lionheart
Have we any heritage save the sanctuaries of God?
Then how should we forget His Holy Mount?
Have we either in the East or the West
A place of hope wherein we may trust
Except the land that is full of gates
Towards which the gates of Heaven open.
Judah Halevi
When I took up my theme and said
When I to Zion from Spanish exile went
My soul from depths to heaven made ascent
Greatly rejoicing that day, God’s hill to see
The day for which I longed since I had come to be.
Judah al-Harizi
DUKE GODFREY: THE SIEGE
It was the high summer of 1099 in the arid Judaean hills; the Holy City was well defended by Egyptian troops backed by a militia of Jerusalemite Jews and Muslims. They were well stocked with provisions and the cisterns were full of water, whereas the wells of the parched countryside had been posioned. Jerusalem’s Christians were expelled. The citizens, 30,000 at the most, could comfort themselves that the Egyptian vizier was marching north to rescue them, and they were well armed: they even possessed the secret flame-throwing weapon, Greek Fire.* Behind Jerusalem’s formidable walls, they must have disdained their attackers.
The Frankish army was too small, just 1,200 knights and 12,000 soldiers, to surround the walls. In open battle, the lightly armoured Arab and Turkish cavaliers could not withstand the awesome charges of the Frankish knights, who formed a fist of thundering steel mounted on hulking destrier warhorses. The knights each wore a helmet, a cuirass and hauberk chain-mail over a gambeson (a padded quilt undergarment) and were armed with lance, broadsword, mace and shield.
Yet their Western horses had long since perished or been eaten by the hungry army. In the blistered gorges around Jerusalem, charges were impossible, horses useless and armour too hot: this exhausted force of Franks had to fight on foot, while their leaders feuded constantly. There was no supreme commander. Pre-eminent among them, and also the richest, was Raymond, Count of Toulouse. A courageous but uninspiring leader, noted for obstinacy and lack of tact, Raymond initially set up camp in the west opposite the Citadel but after a few days moved south to besiege the Zion Gate.
Jerusalem’s weak spot was always in the north: the young, capable Duke Robert of Flanders, the son of a veteran Jerusalem pilgrim, camped opposite what is now Damascus Gate; Duke Robert of Normandy (son of William the Conqueror), brave but ineffectual and nicknamed Curthose (short-shanks) or just Fatlegs, covered Herod’s Gate. But the driving spirit was Godfrey of Bouillon, the strapping, blond Duke of Lower Lorraine, aged thirty-nine, ‘the ideal picture of a northern knight’, admired for his piety and chastity (he never married.) He took up positions around today’s Jaffa Gate. Meanwhile the twenty-five-year-old Norman Tancred de Hauteville, eager to conquer a principality of his own, galloped off to seize Bethlehem. When he had returned, he joined Godfrey’s forces at the north-western corner of the city.
The Franks had lost legions of men and travelled thousands of miles across Europe and Asia to reach the Holy City. All realized that this would either be the apogee or the apotheosis of the First Crusade.
POPE URBAN II: GOD WILLS IT
The Crusade had been the idea of one man. On 27 November 1095, Pope Urban II had addressed a gathering of grandees and ordinary folk at Clermont to demand the conquest of Jerusalem and the liberation of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
Urban saw his life’s mission as the restoration of the power and reputation of the Catholic Church. He devised a new theory of holy war to reinvigorate Christendom and the papacy, justifying the cleansing liquidation of the infidel in return for the remission of sins. This was an unprecedented indulgence that created a Christian version of Muslim jihad, but it dovetailed with the popular reverence for Jerusalem. In an age of religious fervour, a time of holy signs, Jerusalem was Christ’s city, seen as both supreme shrine and celestial kingdom, yet familiar to every Christian, evoked in sermons, in tales of pilgrimages, in passion plays, paintings and relics. But Urban also passionately stoked the rising anxiety about the security of the Holy Sepulchre, citing the massacre of pilgrims and the Turkoman atrocities.
The moment was ripe for thousands of people, high and low, to answer Urban’s call: ‘violence held sway among the nations, fraud, treachery and chicanery overshadowed all things,’ observed the Jerusalemite historian William of Tyre. ‘All virtue had departed, every kind of fornication was practised openly, luxury, drunkenness and games of chance.’ The Crusade offered personal adventure, the removal of thousands of troublemaking knights and freebooters, and escape from home. But the modern idea, promoted in Hollywood movies and in the backlash after the disaster of the 2003 Iraqi war, that crusading was just an opportunity for enrichment with sadistic dividends, is wrong. A handful of princes created new fiefdoms and a few Crusaders made their careers, whereas the costs were punishing and many lives and fortunes were lost in this quixotic and risky but pious enterprise. A spirit was abroad that is hard for modern people to grasp: Christians were being offered the opportunity to earn the forgiveness of all sins. In short, these warrior-pilgrims were overwhelmingly believers seeking salvation on the battlements of Jerusalem.
The crowds at Clermont answered the pope: ‘Deus le volt! God wills it!’ Raymond of Toulouse was one of the first to take the Cross. Eighty thousand people, some in disciplined contingents led by princes, some in rampaging gangs led by adventurers, and others in pious crowds of peasants under holy hermits, took the Cross. As the first wave crossed Europe heading for Constantinople, they forced the conversion or massacred thousands of Jews in vengeance for the killing of Christ.
The Byzantine Emperor Alexios, half-horrified by these Latin ruffians, welcomed them – and hurried them on towards Jerusalem. Once in Anatolia, hordes of European peasants were killed by the Turks, but the organized, committed and experienced knights of the main armies routed the Seljuks. The enterprise was a triumph of faith over experience and reason: from the beginning but with rising intensity as they neared the Holy Land, the military campaign was guided and encouraged by divine visions, angelic visitations and the discovery of sacred signs that were just as important as military tactics. But fortunately the Europeans were attacking a region that was fatally divided between warring caliphs, sultans and amirs, Turks and Arabs, who placed their own rivalries above any concept of Islamic solidarity.
The fall of Antioch was the Crusaders’ first real success, but they were then besieged inside the city. Faced with starvation and stalemate, the Crusade almost ended there. At the height of the crisis at Antioch, Peter Bartholomew, one of Count Raymond’s men, dreamed that the Holy Lance lay under a church: they dug down and duly found the Lance. Its discovery boosted morale. When Bartholomew was accused of being a fraud, he underwent an ordeal by fire. He survived his walk across what was usually nine feet of red hot irons and claimed no ill effects. But he died twelve days later.
The Crusaders survived Antioch and, as they marched southwards, the Turkish and Fatimid amirs of Tripoli, Caesarea and Acre made deals with them. The Fatimids abandoned Jaffa, and the Crusaders cut inland towards Jerusalem. When the contingents were establishing themselves around the walls, a hermit on the Mount of Olives, inspired by a vision, told the Crusader warlords to attack immediately. On 13 June, they attempted to storm the walls but were easily repulsed, suffering heavy losses. The princes realized that success required better planning, more ladders, catapults and siege-engines, but there was not enough wood to build them. They got lucky. On the 17th, Genoese sailors docked at Jaffa and hauled the timbers of their dismantled ships to Jerusalem to build wheeled siege-machines equipped with catapults.
The princes were already bickering over the spoils. The two ablest had grabbed their own principalities: Bohemond of Taranto had been left to hold Antioch while Godfrey’s dynamic brother Baldwin had seized Edessa, far away on the Euphrates. Now the rapacious Tancred demanded Bethlehem for himself, but the Church laid claim to the site of the Nativity. The heat was unforgiving, the sirocco blew, water was short, men too few, morale low, and the Egyptians were approaching. There was no time to lose.
A divine message saved the day. On 6 July, a visionary priest announced that he had (not for the first time) been visited by Adhemar of Le Puy, a revered bishop who had died at Antioch, but whose spirit now urged the Franks to hold a procession around the walls as Joshua had around Jericho. The army fasted for three days then on 8 July, led by priests bearing holy relics, they marched barefoot around the walls of Jerusalem, ‘with trumpets, banners and arms’, as the Jerusalemites mocked them from the battlements, hurling insults at the crucifixes. The Joshuan circuit completed, they assembled on the Mount of Olives to be addressed by their chaplains and to witness the reconciliations of their leaders. Ladders, siege-engines, mangonels, missiles, arrows, fascines – everything had to be ready, and everyone worked day and night. Women and old men joined the effort by sewing the animal hides for the siege-engines. The choice was stark: death or victory on the ramparts of the Holy City.
TANCRED: CARNAGE ON THE TEMPLE MOUNT
By night on 13 July, the Crusaders were ready. Their priests preached them into a ferment of ferocious and sanctimonious determination. Their mangonels catapulted cannonballs and missiles at the walls, from which the defenders had suspended sacks of cotton and hay to soften the blows until the ramparts resembled giant washing lines. The Muslims fired their own mangonels. When the Christians discovered a spy in their midst, they catapulted him alive over the walls.
The Crusaders worked all night to fill the ditches with fascines. Three siege-machines were brought forward in parts, then assembled like giant flatpacks, one for Raymond on Mount Zion, the other two in the north. Raymond was the first to position his siege-machine against the walls, but the Egyptian governor, commanding the southern sector, put up determined resistance. At almost the last moment, Godfrey of Bouillon identified the weakest point in the defences (east of today’s Herod’s Gate, opposite the Rockefeller Museum). The Dukes of Normandy and Flanders, along with Tancred, swiftly moved their forces to the northeastern corner. Godfrey himself ascended his siege-tower as it was pushed forward at the ideal spot: he emerged at the top wielding a crossbow as the armies traded salvoes of arrows and bolts, and the mangonels rained missiles on the walls.
As the sun rose, the princes used flashing mirrors on the Mount of Olives to co-ordinate their moves. Simultaneously Raymond attacked to the south and the Normans in the north. At dawn on Friday the 15th, they renewed their attacks. Godfrey rode the rickety wooden tower, shooting bolts over the walls while the defenders unleashed their Greek Fire – but not enough to stop the Franks.
At midday, Godfrey’s engine finally closed on the walls. The Franks threw planks across and two brothers climbed into the city, with Godfrey following them. They claimed to have seen the late Bishop Adhemar fighting among them: ‘Many testified he was the first to scale the wall!’ The dead bishop ordered them to open the Gate of the Column (Damascus Gate). Tancred and his Normans burst into the narrow streets. To the south, on Mount Zion, the Count of Toulouse heard the cheering. ‘Why do you loiter,’ Raymond scolded his men. ‘Lo, the Franks are even now within the city!’ Raymond’s men broke into Jerusalem and pursued the governor and garrison to the Citadel. The governor agreed to surrender to Raymond in return for the lives of his garrison. Citizens and soldiers fled to the Temple Mount, pursued by Tancred and his men. In the fray, the Jerusalemites slammed shut the gates of the Temple Mount and fought back, but Tancred’s warriors smashed their way on to the sacred esplanade, crowded with desperate people.
The fighting raged there for hours; the Franks went berserk, and killed anyone they encountered in the streets and alleyways. They cut off not only heads but hands and feet, glorying in the spurting fountains of cleansing infidel blood. Although carrying out a massacre in a stormed city was not unprecedented, the sanctimonious pride with which the perpetrators recorded it possibly was. ‘Wonderful sights were to be seen,’ enthused one eyewitness, Raymond of Aguilers, the Count of Toulouse’s chaplain: ‘Our men cut off the heads of their enemies, others shot them with arrows so that they fell from the towers, others tortured them longer by casting them into the flames. Piles of heads, hands and feet were to be seen on the streets. It was necessary to pick one’s way over the bodies of men and horses.’
Babies were seized from their mothers, their heads dashed against the walls. As the barbarity escalated, ‘Saracens, Arabs and Ethiopians’ – meaning the black Sudanese troops of the Fatimid army – took refuge on the roofs of the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa. But, as they fought their way towards the Dome, the knights hacked a path across the crowded esplanade, killing and dicing through human flesh until ‘in the Temple [of Solomon, as the Crusaders called al-Aqsa], they rode in blood up to their bridles. Indeed it was a just and splendid judgement of God that this place should be filled with the blood of unbelievers.’
Ten thousand people, including many Muslim clergy and Sufi ascetics, were killed on the Temple Mount, including 3,000 packed into al-Aqsa. ‘Our gladiators’, wrote the chronicler Fulcher of Chartres, started shooting down the Muslims on the roof of al-Aqsa with their bows. ‘What more shall I relate? None were left alive, neither women nor children were spared.’ But Tancred sent his banner to the remaining three hundred people on the roof of al-Aqsa, signifying protection. He halted the killing, took some valuable prisoners and was shown the treasures of the Temple Mount. He then plundered the huge golden lanterns that hung in the shrines there. The Jews sought refuge in their synagogues, but the Crusaders set them on fire. The Jews were burned alive, almost a climactic burnt offering in Christ’s name. Godfrey of Bouillon took off his sword and with a small entourage circled the city and prayed, before making his way to the Holy Sepulchre.
Next morning, to Tancred’s fury, Raymond’s men nervously climbed onto the roof of al-Aqsa, surprised the huddled Muslims and beheaded the men and women in another spasm of killing. Some of the Muslims leaped to their deaths. A respected female scholar from Shiraz in Persia took refuge with a crowd of women in the Dome of the Chain – they too were slaughtered. A ghoulish delight was taken in the dismemberment of the victims, which was treated almost as a sacrament. ‘Everywhere lay fragments of human bodies, headless bodies and mutilated limbs, strewn in all directions.’ There was something even more dreadful in the wild-eyed, gore-spattered Crusaders themselves, ‘dripping with blood from head to foot, an ominous sight that brought terror to all who met them’. They searched the streets of the bazaars, dragging out more victims to be ‘slain like sheep’.
Each Crusader had been promised possession of any house marked by his ‘shield and arms’: ‘consequently the pilgrims searched the city most carefully and boldly killed the citizens’, culling ‘wives, children, whole households,’ many of them ‘dashed headlong to the ground’ from high windows.*
On the 17th, the pilgrims (as these slaughterers called themselves) were finally sated with butchery and ‘refreshed themselves with the rest and food they greatly needed’. The princes and priests made their way to the Holy Sepulchre where they sang in praise of Christ, clapping joyously and bathing the altar in tears of joy, before parading through the streets to the Temple of the Lord (the Dome of the Rock) and the Temple of Solomon. Those streets were strewn with body parts, decaying in the summer heat. The princes forced the surviving Jews and Muslims to clear the remains away and burn them in pyres, after which they were themselves butchered and presumably joined their brethren on the fires. The Crusaders who died were buried in the Cemetery of the Lion at Mamilla or in the sacred earth just outside the Golden Gate, already a Muslim cemetery, ready to arise at the Last Day.
Jerusalem was so full of treasures, ‘gems, raiments, gold and silver’ and valuable prisoners that the Franks held slave-auctions for two days. Some respected Muslims had been saved for ransom: a thousand dinars was demanded for the Shafii scholar Sheikh Abd al-Salam al-Ansari, but when no one paid he was killed. Surviving Jews and 300 Hebrew books (including the Aleppo Codex, one of the earliest Hebrew Bibles that partially survives today) were ransomed to Egyptian Jews. The ransoming of prisoners was to be one of the most lucrative industries of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. But not all the human giblets could be collected, and Jerusalem literally stank for long afterwards – even six months later, when Fulcher of Chartres returned: ‘Oh what a stench there was around the walls, within and without, from the rotting bodies of the Saracens, lying wherever they had been hunted down.’ Jerusalem was not yet secure: the Egyptian army was approaching. The Crusaders urgently needed a commander-in-chief – the first King of Jerusalem.
GODFREY: ADVOCATE OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE
The higher nobles and clergy made inquiries into the morals of the candidates for the crown. They felt they had to offer the throne to the senior prince, the unpopular Raymond, but did so grudgingly. Raymond obligingly turned it down, insisting he could not be a king in Jesus’ city. They then offered it to their real choice, the chaste and worthy Duke Godfrey, who accepted a newly coined title: Advocate of the Holy Sepulchre.
This outraged Raymond who, realizing he had been tricked, refused to give up the Tower of David until the bishops mediated. Triumphant as their arms were, these warrior-pilgrims did not find it easy to enforce the morality expected in a city ruled by Jesus himself. They elected the Norman chaplain, Arnulf, as patriarch but he soon had to defend himself for adultery and fathering a child by an Arab woman.
Arnulf placed bells in the churches (the ringing of church bells had always been banned by the Muslims). This was to be a Latin, Catholic Jerusalem. Now he demonstrated how vicious the schism was: he placed the Latin priests in charge of the Holy Sepulchre, banishing the Greek patriarch and clergy. He thereby started the unseemly conflict among Christian sects that continues to scandalize and amuse visitors to this day. Yet Arnulf could not find the main section of the True Cross and the Orthodox priests refused to reveal its hiding-place. The patriarch tortured them; a Christian torturing Christians to procure the Life-Giving Tree of the Lamb of God. They finally conceded.
On 12 August, leaving Jerusalem almost undefended, Advocate Godfrey led the entire Crusader army out towards Ashkelon where he defeated the Egyptians. When Ashkelon offered to surrender to Raymond, Godfrey refused to accept unless it was ceded to him: Ashkelon was lost – only the first of many self-inflicted wounds caused by the feuding of Jerusalem’s leaders. But Jerusalem was secure – if empty.
The Dukes of Normandy and Flanders and many of the Crusaders now returned home, leaving Godfrey with a putrid, devastated city peopled by just 300 knights and 2,000 infantry, and scarcely enough citizens to fill a quarter. Raymond of Toulouse recovered from his sulk and set about reducing the Lebanese coast, finally founding his own dynasty as Count of Tripoli. There were four Crusader states – the Principality of Antioch, the Counties of Edessa and Tripoli, and the Kingdom of Jerusalem. This idiosyncratic patchwork of interrelated fiefdoms became known as the land of Outremer, ‘Across the Sea’.
Yet the reaction of the Islamic world – divided between the weakened caliphs of Sunni Baghdad and Shiite Cairo – was surprisingly muted. Only a few preachers called for jihad to liberate Jerusalem, and there was little reaction among the all-powerful Turkish amirs, who remained preoccupied with their personal feuds.
On 21 December, Baldwin, Godfrey’s brother, who was Count of Edessa, and the flaxen-haired Prince Bohemond of Antioch arrived to spend Christmas in Jerusalem. But Godfrey struggled to defend himself against the Church. The pope’s representative, an overweening Pisan named Daimbert, was now appointed patriarch (to replace the sinful Arnulf). Determined to establish a theocracy to be ruled by himself, he forced Godfrey to cede the city and Jaffa to the Church. In June 1100, Godfrey collapsed in Jaffa, probably with typhoid. Borne home to Jerusalem, he died on 18 July and was buried five days later, like all his successors, at the foot of Calvary in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.1
Daimbert took control of the city, but Godfrey’s knights refused to surrender the Citadel, and instead summoned the late advocate’s brother, Baldwin. The Count of Edessa was fighting to defend northern Syria, however, and received no message until late August. On 2 October Baldwin set out with 200 knights and 700 troops, and found that he had to fight all the way to Jerusalem, facing repeated Islamic ambushes. On 9 November, with less than half his original force, he at last entered the Holy City.
BALDWIN THE BIG: THE F IRST KING
Two days later, Baldwin was acclaimed king and Daimbert was forced to recognize his accession. Almost at once Baldwin set off to raid Egypt. On his return, he was crowned ‘King of the Latins in Jerusalem’ in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem by Patriarch Daimbert.
The first King of Jerusalem was not as saintly as his brother but he was far more able. Baldwin had an aquiline nose, light skin, dark beard and hair, a prominent upper lip and a slightly receding chin. He had studied for holy orders as a boy and never lost the contemplative air of a clergyman, always wearing a clerical cloak around his shoulders. He married out of political necessity, risking bigamy for the sake of expediency, left no children and may not have consummated any of his marriages. However, he ‘struggled in vain against the lustful sins of the flesh yet so circumspectly did he conduct himself in the indulgence of these vices’ that he offended no one. Some have claimed he was gay, but the nature of his peccadilloes remains mysterious.
Relentless war was his urgent duty and true passion. His chaplain called him ‘the arm of his people, the terror of his enemies’. This wily warrior of almost superhuman energy devoted himself to securing and expanding the kingdom, repeatedly fighting the Egyptians outside Ramallah. Once they defeated him, but he escaped on his horse, Gazala, to the coast and, hitching a lift with a passing English pirate, sailed to Jaffa where he landed, mustered his knights and vanquished the Egyptians again. His forces were so small, probably no more than 1,000 knights and 5,000 infantry, that he recruited local auxiliaries (some possibly Muslim) who were known as Turcopoles. A flexible diplomat, he played on the rivalries of the Muslim chieftains, and allied himself with Genoese, Venetian and English fleets to conquer the Palestinian coast from Caesarea to Acre and Beirut.
In Jerusalem, Baldwin managed to depose the overmighty Daimbert as patriarch, defeating the main challenge to his authority. The Crusaders had destroyed the people of Jerusalem but mercifully they commandeered the sacred places of al-Quds rather than razing them – probably because they believed they were the biblical originals. Baldwin fortified the Citadel, long known to Christians as the Tower of David, which became palace, treasury, prison, and garrison: its Crusader arches are still visible. When in 1110 and again in 1113 Egyptian raids threatened the city, the trumpets blared from the Tower of David to call the citizens to arms. In 1104, Baldwin made al-Aqsa Mosque into the royal palace.
Many Crusaders believed that the Dome and al-Aqsa really had been built by King Solomon or at least by Constantine the Great, though some knew perfectly well that they were Islamic. A cross was placed atop the Dome of the Rock which was now known as Templum Domini, the Temple of the Lord. Like every conqueror of Jerusalem, the Franks used the spolia of other builders to create their own monuments: Baldwin stripped the lead roof of his Aqsa palace to refit the Holy Sepulchre.
In 1110, Sigurd, the teenage King of Norway, who had fought his way around the Mediterranean massacring infidels, landed at Acre with his 60-ship fleet. Baldwin escorted Sigurd, the first king to visit, into what the Norsemen called Jorsalaborg on roads covered with carpets and palms. Baldwin offered Sigurd a splinter of the True Cross if he would help him storm Sidon with his fleet. Sidon fell – and the Norwegians spent the winter in Jerusalem.
Baldwin repelled invasions by the atabegs of Damascus and Mosul: it was a life of unending warfare and wheeler-dealing for which this king was well suited. Early in the Crusade, he had married Arda, daughter of an Armenian potentate, an alliance that had helped him seize Edessa as his own county. But Arda was excess to requirements in Jerusalem. He confined her to St Anne’s monastery just north of the Temple Mount, unchivalrously claiming that she had seduced (or been raped by) Arab pirates on the way to Antioch. She decamped to Constantinople, where her subsequent pleasures suggest it was the former rather than the latter that was the true account.
Baldwin negotiated a profitable marriage with the rich Adelaide, widow of the Norman Count of Sicily: she arrived at Acre accompanied by three triremes of elegant courtiers, Arab bodyguards – and treasure. Outremer had never seen anything as magnificent as her cavalcade. The streets were bannered and carpeted as Baldwin escorted this ageing Cleopatra into a rejoicing Jerusalem. However, her haughtiness proved inconvenient, her charm insufficient and her wealth all too exhaustible. She disliked provincial Jerusalem, missing the luxuries of Palermo. When Baldwin fell dangerously ill, his bigamy began to trouble him and he despatched the Queen back to Sicily.
Meanwhile the king found a solution to the emptiness of Jerusalem. In 1115, he raided across the Jordan, building castles there but also encountering the poverty-stricken Syrian and Armenian Christians, whom he invited to settle in Jerusalem, ancestors of today’s Palestinian Christians.
The Crusaders of Jerusalem faced a strategic dilemma: should they expand northwards into Syria and Iraq or southwards into the fraying caliphate of Egypt? To secure the kingdom, Baldwin and his successors knew they had to conquer one of these territories. Their strategic nightmare was a union of Syria and Egypt. So in 1118 Baldwin raided Egypt, but, halting to catch fish in the Nile, he fell ill again. Carried back in a litter, he died at the border town of El-Arish, where the Bardawil lagoons are named after him. He was a gifted adventurer who had become a Levantine king, now surprisingly mourned by ‘Franks, Syrians and even the Saracens’.
On Palm Sunday, the Jerusalemites were solemnly parading their palms in the Kidron Valley when they were heartened to see from the north the arrival of the Count of Edessa. Only then did they observe, approaching from the south, the catafalque of their dead king, weaving closely through the Judaean hills guarded by his mourning army.2
BALDWIN II THE LITTLE
Once Baldwin was laid in the Church, the barons reviewed the candidates for the throne. But one faction simply elected the Count of Edessa and seized Jerusalem. The kingdom was fortunate in its choice. Baldwin II, the dead king’s cousin, known as the Little, in contrast to his lanky predecessor, had ruled Edessa through eighteen years of constant warfare and even survived four years of prison after being captured by the Turks. Wearing a long beard down to his chest, blond now streaked with silver, he was wholesomely married to an Armenian heiress, Morphia, with four daughters, and was so saintly that his knees were calloused from prayer. Baldwin was, even more than his predecessor, a Levantine as well as a Frankish king: he was at home in the Middle East, holding court in robes, seated cross-legged on cushions. The Muslims regarded him as ‘rich in experience’ with ‘good sense and the gift of kingship’ – high praise for an infidel.
In Jerusalem, Baldwin the Little lent his Temple of Solomon to a new military order of ‘God-fearing’ knights, ‘professing the wish to live perpetually in poverty, chastity and obedience’, who would take their name from their new home. The Templars started as nine guardians of the pilgrim route from Jaffa but grew into a crack military-religious order of 300 knights, wearing the red cross, granted them by the pope, and commanding hundreds of sergeants and thousands of infantry. The Templars converted the Islamic Haram al-Sharif into a Christian complex of shrine, arsenal and accommodation:* al-Aqsa was already divided up into rooms and apartments but they added a capacious Templar Hall (of which traces still exist) around the south wall. Near the Rock, the Dome of the Chain became St James’s Chapel. The underground Mosque of Jesus’ Cradle became the Christian St Mary’s. Herod’s subterranean halls, which they called the Stables of Solomon, housed the Order’s 2,000 horses and 1,500 pack camels, accessed through a new single gate in the southern wall, all this protected to the south by a fortified barbican. North of the Dome, they built a canons’ cloister, their own bathhouse and a crafts workshop. On top of al-Aqsa, they created, says the German monk Theodorich who visited in 1172, ‘an abundance of gardens, courtyards, antechambers, vestibules and rain-water cisterns’.
A little earlier in 1113, Pope Paschal II granted the area just south of the Holy Sepulchre to another new order, the Hospitallers, who later became a holy army even richer than the Templars. At first they wore black tunics with white crosses; later the pope granted them the red surcoat with a white cross. They built their own quarter including a hostel with a thousand beds and the huge Hospital, where four doctors inspected the sick twice a day, checked their urine and let their blood. New mothers each received a cot. But there were limits to its comforts, so each patient received a sheepskin coat and boots to wear to the latrine. Jerusalem echoed with many languages including French, German and Italian – Baldwin granted the Venetians trading privileges – but it was still a Christian reserve: he allowed Muslim traders into the city, but they were not permitted to spend the night in Christ’s capital.
Soon afterwards, Il-Ghazi, once ruler of Jerusalem, now master of Aleppo, attacked Antioch and killed its prince. King Baldwin raced north, bearing the True Cross* with his army, and defeated him. But in 1123 the king was captured by Il-Ghazi’s nephew Balak.
While Baldwin remained a prisoner of the Ortuq family and the Crusader armies besieged Tyre, the Egyptians advanced from Ashkelon hoping to seize a Jerusalem bereft of king and defenders.3
MELISENDE AND FULK: A ROYAL WEDDING
The Jerusalemites, commanded by the constable, Eustace of Grenier, twice saw off the Egyptians. To universal joy, Baldwin was ransomed: on 2 April 1125, the entire city turned out to welcome the king home. Baldwin’s imprisonment had concentrated his mind on the succession. His heiress was his daughter Melisende, whom he now married to the capable and experienced Fulk, Count of Anjou, descendant of the depraved serial-pilgrim Fulk the Black and son of the delightfully named Fulk the Repulsive, and himself already a veteran Crusader.
In 1131, Baldwin fell ill in Jerusalem, and, withdrawing to die in the Patriarch’s Palace as a humble supplicant, he abdicated in favour of Fulk, Melisende and their baby son, the future Baldwin III. Jerusalem had evolved its own coronation ritual. Assembling at the Temple of Solomon, wearing embroidered dalmatics, stoles and the crown jewels, Fulk and Melisende mounted gorgeously caparisoned horses. Led by the chamberlain brandishing the king’s sword, followed by the seneschal with the sceptre and the constable with the royal standard, they rode through the cheering city – the first Jerusalemite monarchs to be crowned in the rotunda of the Holy Sepulchre, already being rebuilt.
The patriarch administered the royal oath then asked the congregation thrice to confirm that these were the lawful heirs: Oill! Yes! shouted the crowd.* The two crowns were borne towards the altar. The royal couple were anointed from a horn of oil before Fulk was given the ring of loyalty, the orb of dominion and the sceptre for punishment of sinners, and girded with the sword of war and justice. They were then both crowned and kissed by the patriarch. Outside the Sepulchre, the marshal helped King Fulk mount his horse and they rode back to the Temple Mount. At the banquet in Templum Domini, the king offered to return the crown and then retrieved it, a tradition based on the story of Jesus’ circumcision when it was said that Mary brought him to the Temple, offered him to God and bought him back for a lamb or two pigeons. Finally the burgesses brought the food and wine, served to the royals by the seneschal and chamberlain as the marshal held the banner over them. After much singing, music and dancing, the constable escorted the king and queen to their suite.
Melisende was the queen regnant but at first Fulk expected to rule in his own name. He was a squat forty-year-old soldier with red hair, ‘like King David’ as William of Tyre put it, and a poor memory, always a flaw in kings. Accustomed to ruling his own realm, he found it hard to manage, let alone charm, his imperious queen. Melisende, slim, dark and intelligent, was soon spending too much time with her handsome cousin and childhood playmate Count Hugh of Jaffa, the richest magnate in Jerusalem. Fulk accused them of having an affair.
QUEEN MELISENDE: THE SCANDAL
Melisende’s flirtation started as gossip but rapidly became a political crisis. As queen she was unlikely to be punished; but, by Frankish law, if a couple were found guilty of adultery, the woman suffered rhinotomy (nose-slitting), the man castration. One way to prove innocence was single combat: now a knight challenged Count Hugh to prove his innocence by duel. But Hugh fled to Egyptian territory, where he stayed until the Church negotiated a compromise by which he would go into exile for three years.
On his return to Jerusalem, Hugh was sitting playing dice in a tavern on Furriers Street one day when a Breton knight stabbed him. Somehow he survived, but Jerusalem was ‘shaken at the outrage; a great crowd assembled’ and the rumour spread that Fulk had ordered his rival’s murder. Now it was the king who needed to prove his innocence: the Breton was tried and sentenced to be dismembered and have his tongue cut out. But Fulk ordered that his tongue remain intact to show he was not being silenced. Even when the Breton had been totally dismembered with only head, torso (and tongue) left, he still asserted Fulk’s innocence.
It is not surprising that the evident sleaziness of Outremer politics became notorious in Europe. Ruling Jerusalem was a challenge: the kings were really first among equals, contending with Crusader princelings, ambitious magnates, thuggish adventurers, ignorant new arrivals from Europe, independent military-religious orders of knights and intriguing churchmen, before they were even able to face their Islamic enemies.
The royal marriage became extremely frosty, but if Melisende had lost her love, she had regained her power. To thaw the queen, Fulk gave her a special present – the sumptuous Psalter that bears her name.* But as the kingdom enjoyed its golden age, Islam was mobilizing.
ZANGI THE BLOODY: THE FALCON PRINCE
In 1137, Zangi, Atabeg of Mosul and Aleppo (in today’s Iraq and Syria), attacked first the Crusader city of Antioch and then Muslim Damascus: the fall of either of these cities would be a blow for Jerusalem. For nearly four decades, the loss of Jerusalem had made surprisingly little impression on the divided and distracted Islamic world. As so often in Jerusalem’s history, religious fervour was inspired by political necessity. Zangi now started to harness a rising fury, religious and political, at Jerusalem’s loss, calling himself ‘Fighter of Jihad, tamer of atheists, destroyer of heretics’.
The caliph awarded this Turkish atabeg the title ‘King of Amirs’ for restoring Islamic pride. For the Arabs he called himself the Pillar of the Faith; for fellow-Turks, the Falcon Prince. Poets, vital ornaments for every ruler in that poetry-loving society, flocked to his court to sing of his glories, but the feral Zangi was a harsh master. He skinned and scalped important enemies, hanged minor ones, and crucified any of his troops who trampled on crops. He castrated his boy lovers to preserve their beauty. When he exiled his generals, he reminded them of his power by castrating their sons. Demented with drink, he divorced one of his wives and then had her gang-raped by his grooms in the stables – while he watched. If one of his soldiers deserted, remembered one of his officers, Usamah bin Munqidh, Zangi would order the two neighbouring men to be cut in half. His cruelties are recorded by Muslim sources. As for the Crusaders, they (in a pun worthy of a tabloid-newspaper headline) nicknamed him Zangi the Sanguine.
Fulk hurried to confront him but Zangi defeated the Jerusalemites, trapping the king in a nearby fortress. William, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, led the army to his rescue, brandishing the True Cross. Zangi, realizing that relief was on its way, offered to free Fulk in return for the fortress. After this close escape, Fulk and Melisende were reconciled, but Zangi, now in his early sixties, kept up the pressure, threatening not only the Crusader cities of Antioch and Edessa but renewing his attack on Damascus, which was so alarmed that its ruler, Unur, allied himself with infidel Jerusalem.4
In 1140, Unur, the Atabeg of Damascus, set off for Jerusalem accompanied by his worldly adviser, a Syrian aristocrat and the century’s finest Muslim writer.
USAMAH BIN MUNQIDH: GREAT EVENTS AND CALAMITIES
Usamah bin Munqidh was one of those ubiquitous players who know everyone who matters at a certain time or place in history and always find themselves at the centre of events. During his long career, this Zeligesque courtier, warrior and writer managed to serve all the great Islamic leaders of his century, from Zangi and the Fatimid caliphs to Saladin, and to know at least two of the kings of Jerusalem.
A member of the dynasty that ruled the Syrian fortress of Shaizar, Usamah lost the succession, and his family was then wiped out in an earthquake. After these blows, he became a cavalier – a faris – ready to serve whichever ruler offered him the best opportunities, and, now aged forty-five, he was serving Unur of Damascus. Usamah lived for fighting, hunting and literature. His accident-prone pursuit of power, wealth and glory was both bloody and farcical: the phrase ‘yet another disaster’ appears frequently in his memoirs, which are entitled Great Events and Calamities. But he was also a natural chronicler: one senses that, even as his schemes collapsed, this aesthetic Arab Quixote knew the stories would make great material for his witty, sharp, melancholic writings. Usamah was a master adib – the refined Arab belle-lettrist par excellence – writing books and poems on the delights of women, male manners (The Kernels of Refinement), eroticism and warfare. In his hands, a history of walking sticks was really an essay on ageing.
Atabeg Unur now arrived in Jerusalem with his exuberant courtier, Usamah: ‘I used to travel frequently to visit the King of the Franks during the truce,’ wrote Usamah, whose relations with Fulk were surprisingly courteous.* King and cavalier bantered about the nature of knighthood. ‘They told me you were a great knight,’ said Fulk, ‘but I hadn’t really believed it.’ ‘My lord, I am a knight of my race and people,’ answered Usamah. We do not know anything about Usamah’s appearance, but it seems that the Franks were impressed with his physique.
During his trips to Jerusalem, Usamah enjoyed studying the inferiority of the Crusaders, whom he regarded as ‘mere beasts, possessing no other virtues but courage and fighting’ – even though his works reveal that many Muslim traditions were just as savage and primitive. Like every good reporter, he recorded opposites – good and bad things about both sides. When he looked back as an old man at the court of Saladin, he must have reflected that he saw Jerusalem at the height of the Crusader kingdom’s glory.
MELISENDE’S JERUSALEM: HIGH LIFE AND LOW LIFE
Melisende’s Jerusalem was regarded by many Christians as the true centre of the world, very different from the empty, stinking Frankish conquest of forty years before. Indeed, in the maps of the city from this time, Jerusalem is shown as a circle with the two main streets serving as the arms of the cross with its centre on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, emphasizing the Holy City as the navel of the world.
The king and queen held court in the Tower of David and its neighbouring palace, while the Patriarch’s Palace was the centre of Church affairs. Life for ordinary barons in Outremer Jerusalem was probably better than for kings in Europe, where even potentates wore unlaundered wool and lived in bare-stone draughty keeps with rough furniture. If few Crusader barons could live as grandly as John of Ibelin, later in the century, his palace in Beirut reveals the style: mosaic floors, marble walls, painted ceilings, fountains and gardens. Even bourgeois townhouses boasted rich carpets, damask wall-hangings, delicate faience, carved, inlaid tables and porcelain dishes.
Jerusalem combined the rough edges of the frontier town with the luxurious vanities of a royal capital. Even in Jerusalem the less reputable women, such as the patriarch’s mistress, flaunted their jewels and silks to the disapproval of the more respectable. With her 30,000 inhabitants and streams of pilgrims, she was Holy City, Christian melting-pot and a military headquarters – dominated by war and God. The Franks, men and women, now bathed regularly – there were public baths on Furriers Street; the Roman sewerage was still working and it is likely most houses had lavatories. Even the most Islamophobic of Crusaders had to adapt to the east. At war, the knights wore linen robes and Arab keffiyeh over their armour to prevent the steel heating up in the sun. At home, the knights dressed like the locals, in silk burnous and even turbans. Jerusalemite ladies wore long underrobes with a short tunic or long robe-coats embroidered with gold thread; their faces were heavily painted; and they were usually veiled in public. Both sexes wore furs in winter, though this luxury was specifically banned for the austere Templars, who personified this capital of Christian holy war. The Knights of the Orders set the tone: the Templars in their belted and hooded red-crossed mantles, Hospitallers in their black mantles with white crosses on the breast. Every day, the 300 Templars clattered out of the Stables of Solomon to train outside the city. In the Valley of Kidron, the infantry practised their archery.
The city thronged not only with French, Norwegian, German and Italian soldiers and pilgrims, but also with eastern Christians – short-bearded Syrians and Greeks, Armenians and Georgians with long beards and high hats, who stayed in the dormitories of hostels or the many small taverns. Street life was centred around the Roman Cardo, leading from St Stephen’s (now Damascus) Gate, passing the Sepulchre and Patriarch’s Quarter on the right and then entering the three parallel covered market streets, joined by crisscrossing alleyways, smelling of spices and cooked food. Pilgrims bought takeaways and sherbet drinks from the Street of Bad Cooking, Malcuisinat; changed money on Syrian Moneychangers Street close to the Sepulchre; bought trinkets from the Latin Goldsmiths, furs on Furriers Street.
Even before the Crusades it was said that ‘No travellers are as evil as pilgrims to Jerusalem.’ Outremer was the medieval version of the Wild West: murderers, adventurers and whores came out to make their fortunes, but the prim chroniclers tell us little about Jerusalem’s night life. However, the local half-caste soldiers, the Turcopoles, second-generation poor and orientalized Latins known as poulains, Venetian and Genoese merchants and newly arrived knights needed the taverns and pleasures of any military town. Each tavern had a clunking chain across the entrance to stop boisterous knights riding into the bar. Soldiers could be seen gambling and rolling dice in the doorways of shops. European harlots were shipped out to service the soldiers of Outremer. Later the secretary of the sultan Saladin would gleefully describe one such boatload from the Muslim point of view:
Lovely Frankish women, foulfleshed and sinful, appearing proudly in public, ripped open and patched up, lacerated and mended, making love and selling themselves for gold, callipygian and graceful, like tipsy adolescents, they dedicated as a holy offering what they kept between their thighs, each trailed the train of her robe behind her, bewitched with her effulgence, swayed like a sapling, and longed to lose her robe.
Most of them ended up in the ports of Acre and Tyre, with their streets filled with Italian sailors, and Jerusalem would have been policed by officials keen to enforce Christian morals, but all humanity was there.
When pilgrims fell ill, the Hospitallers nursed them in the Hospital, which could hold 2,000 patients. Surprisingly, they also nursed Muslims and Jews and even had a kosher/halal kitchen so that they could eat meat. But death was always on their minds: Jerusalem was a necropolis where old or sick pilgrims were content to die and be buried until the Resurrection. For the poor, there were free charnel-pits in the Mamilla graveyard and the Akeldama in the Valley of Hell. During one epidemic later in the century, fifty pilgrims died each day and carts collected bodies each night after vespers.*
Life revolved physically around the two temples – the Holy Sepulchre and the Temple of the Lord – and chronologically around a calendar of rituals. In this ‘intensely theatrical age in which every technique was used to heighten public feelings through display,’ writes the historian Jonathan Riley-Smith, Jerusalem’s shrines resembled stage-sets and were constantly remodelled and improved to intensify the effect. The capture of the city was celebrated every 15 July when the patriarch led virtually the entire city from the Sepulchre to the Temple Mount where he prayed outside the Temple of Solomon and then led his procession through the Golden Gate – through which that first Crusader, Emperor Heraclius, had borne the True Cross in 630 – to the place on the northern wall, crowned with a huge cross, where Godfrey had broken into the city. Easter was the most exciting set piece. Before sunrise on Palm Sunday, the patriarch and clergy, holding the True Cross, walked from Bethany towards the city, while another procession bearing palms came from the Temple Mount to meet the patriarch in the Valley of Jehoshaphat. Together they then opened the Golden Gate† and processed around the sacred esplanade before praying in the Temple of the Lord.
On Holy Saturday, Jerusalemites gathered at the Church for the Holy Fire. A Russian pilgrim watched ‘the crowd rush in, jostling and elbowing’, weeping, wailing and shouting, ‘Will my sins prevent the Holy Fire from descending?’ The king walked from the Temple Mount but, when he arrived, the crowd was so tightly packed, overflowing even the courtyard, that his soldiers had to clear a path for him. Once inside, the king, shedding ‘torrents of tears’, took his place on a rostrum before the Tomb, surrounded by his weeping courtiers, waiting for the Holy Fire. As the priest chanted vespers, the ecstasy intensified in the darkening church, until suddenly ‘the Holy Light illumined the Sepulchre, stunningly bright and splendid’. The patriarch emerged brandishing the fire, with which he kindled the royal lamp. The fire spread across the crowd, lantern to lantern – and was then borne across town like an Olympic flame across the Great Bridge to the Temple of the Lord.
Melisende embellished Jerusalem as both Temple shrine and political capital, creating much that we see today. The Crusaders had developed their own style, a synthesis of Romanesque, Byzantine and Levantine with round-headed arches, massive capitals, all carved with delicate, often floral motifs. The queen built the monumental St Anne’s Church, north of the Temple Mount, on the site of the Bethesda Pool – it stands today as the simplest and starkest example of Crusader architecture. Already used as a repository for discarded royal wives and more recently the home of Melisende’s sister Princess Yvette, its convent became the most richly endowed in Jerusalem. A few of the shops in the marketplaces are still marked ‘ANNA’ to show where their profits went; other shops, perhaps Templar-owned, are marked ‘T’ for the Temple.
A small chapel, St Giles, was built on the Great Bridge into the Temple Mount. Outside the walls, Melisende added to the Church of Our Lady of Jehoshaphat, the Virgin Mary’s tomb where she was later buried (her grave survives today), and built the Bethany Monastery, appointing Princess Yvette as abbess. In the Temple of the Lord, she added an ornate metal grille to protect the Rock (now mostly in the Haram Museum though a small section, still in situ, may have held a portion of Jesus’ foreskin,* and later enclosed hair from Muhammad’s beard).
On their state visit to see Fulk and Melisende, Usamah bin Munqidh and his master, the Atabeg of Damascus, were allowed to pray on the Temple Mount, where they encountered both the insularity and cosmopolitanism of their Frankish hosts.
USAMAH BIN MUNQIDH AND JUDAH HALEVI: MUSLIMS, JEWS AND FRANKS
Usamah had become friends with some of the Templars whom he had met in war and peace. Now they escorted him and Atabeg Unur on to the sacred esplanade, the thoroughly Christianized headquarters of the Templars.
Some Crusaders now spoke Arabic and built houses with courtyards and fountains like Muslim potentates; some even ate Arabic food. Usamah met Franks who did not eat pork and ‘presented a very fine table, extremely clean and delicious’. Most Franks disapproved of anyone going too native: ‘God has transformed the Occident into the Orient’, wrote Fulcher. ‘He who was a Roman or a Frank has in this land been made into a Galilean or a Palestinian.’ Similarly, there were limits to Usamah’s friendship with the Templars and to their open-mindedness. When one Templar was returning home, he cheerfully invited Usamah to send his son to be educated in Europe so that ‘when he returns he will be a truly rational man’. Usamah could scarcely contain his disdain.
As they prayed in the Dome of the Rock, one of the Franks approached the atabeg to ask: ‘Would you like to see God when he was young?’
‘Why yes,’ said Unur, at which the Frank led him and Usamah to an icon of Mary and the boy Jesus.
‘This is God when he was young,’ said the Frank, much to Usamah’s amused contempt.
Usamah then walked over to pray in the Temple of Solomon, formerly al-Aqsa, welcomed by his Templar friends, even though he was openly reciting ‘Allahu Akhbar – God is Greatest’. But then there was an unsettling incident when ‘a Frank rushed up to me and grabbed me and turned my face towards the east, “Pray like this!”’ The ‘Templars hurried towards him and took him away from me. “This man is a stranger,” the Templars explained, apologetically, “and has just arrived from the Frankish lands.”’ Usamah realized that ‘anyone recently arrived’ is ‘rougher in character than those who have become acclimatized and frequented the company of Muslims’. These new arrivals remained ‘an accursed race that will not become accustomed to anyone not of their own race’.
It was not only Muslim leaders who visited Melisende’s Jerusalem. Muslim peasants came into town daily to sell their fruit and left in the evening. By the 1140s, the rules banning Muslims and Jews from Christ’s city had been relaxed – hence the travel writer Ali al-Harawi said, ‘I lived long enough in Jerusalem at the time of the Franks to know how the trick of the Holy Fire was achieved.’ There were already a few Jews in Jerusalem, but pilgrimage was still dangerous.
Just at this time, in 1141, Judah Halevi, a Spanish poet, philosopher and doctor, is said to have arrived from Spain. In his love songs and religious poetry, he craved ‘Zion perfect in beauty’ while suffering because ‘Edom [Islam] and Ishmael [Christianity] riot in the Holy City’. The Jew in exile was ‘the dove in a strange land.’ All his life, Halevi, who wrote poetry in Hebrew but spoke Arabic, believed in the return of the Jews to Zion:
O city of the world, most chastely fair,
In the far West, behold I sigh for thee.
Oh! had I eagles’ wings, I’d fly to thee,
And with my falling tears make moist thine earth.
Halevi, whose poems are still part of the synagogue liturgy, wrote as poignantly as anyone has ever written about Jerusalem: ‘When I dream of the return of thy captivity, I am a harp for thy songs.’ It is not clear if he actually made it to Jerusalem, but according to legend, as he walked through the gates, he was ridden down by a horseman, probably a Frank, and killed, a fate perhaps foreseen in his words: ‘I would fall with my face upon thine earth, and take delight in thy stones and be tender to thy dust. ’
This death would not have surprised Usamah, who studied the violence of Frankish laws. On his way to Jerusalem he had watched two Franks solving a legal question by combat – one smashed in the skull of another. ‘That was but a taste of their jurisprudence and their legal procedure.’ When a man was accused of murdering pilgrims, his trial was to be trussed up and dipped in a pool of water. If he sank he was innocent, but since he floated he was found guilty and, as Usamah put it, ‘they applied some kohl to his eyes’ – he was blinded.
As for their sexual customs, Usamah gleefully recounted how one Frank found another in bed with his wife but let him off with a mere warning, and how another ordered his male barber to shave off his wife’s pubic hair. In medicine Usamah described how while an Eastern doctor was treating a Frank’s leg abscess with a poultice, a Frankish doctor burst in with an axe and hacked off the leg, with the immortal question – would he prefer to live with one leg or die with two? But he died with one. When the Eastern doctor prescribed a special diet to a woman suffering ‘dryness of humours’, the same Frankish doctor, diagnosing a ‘demon inside her head’, carved a cross into her skull, killing her too. The best doctors were Arab-speaking Christians and Jews: even the kings of Jerusalem now preferred Eastern doctors. Yet Usamah was never simplistic – he cites two cases where Frankish medicine miraculously worked.
The Muslims regarded the Crusaders as brutish plunderers. But the cliché that the Crusaders were barbarians and the Muslims aesthetes can be taken too far. After all, Usamah had served the sadist Zangi and, if read in full, his account presents a picture of Islamic violence no less shocking to modern sensibilities: the collecting of Christian heads, the crucifying and bisections of their own soldiers and heretics, the severe punishments of Islamic sharia – and the story of how his father, in a rage, lopped off the arm of his page. Violence and similarly brutal laws ruled on both sides. The Frankish knight and the Islamic faris had much in common: they were both led by self-made adventurers such as the Baldwins and Zangi, who founded warrior dynasties. Both systems depended on the granting of fiefs of property or income-streams to leading warriors. The Arabs used poetry to show off, to entertain and to spread propaganda. When Usamah served the Damascene atabeg, he negotiated with the Egyptians in verse, while Crusader knights spun the poems of courtly love. Both knight and faris lived by similar codes of noble behaviour and shared the same obsessions – religion, war, horses – and the same sports.
Few soldiers, few novelists have captured the excitement and fun of war like Usamah. To read him is to ride in the skirmishes of Holy War in the Kingdom of Jerusalem. He gloried in his battlefield anecdotes of derring-do, devil-may-care cavaliers, miraculous escapes, terrible deaths, and the exhilaration of wild charges, flashing steel, sweating horses and spurting blood. But he was also a philosopher of Fate and God’s mercy: ‘Even the smallest and most insignificant of things can lead to destruction. ’ Above all, both sides believed that, in Usamah’s words, ‘victory in war is from God alone.’ Religion was everything. Usamah’s highest praise for a friend was: ‘a genuine scholar, a real cavalier and a truly devout Muslim’.
Now the tranquillity of Melisende’s Jerusalem was suddenly shattered by an accident caused by the sport shared by both Muslim and Frank grandees.
ZANGI: HUBRIS AND NEMESIS
When he was not fighting or reading, Usamah hunted deer, lions, wolves, hyenas with cheetahs, hawks and dogs – and in this, he was no different from Zangi or King Fulk, who hunted as often as they could. When Usamah and the Atabeg of Damascus visited Fulk, they admired a goshawk, so the king gave it to them as a present.
On 10 November 1142, soon after Usamah’s visit to Jerusalem, King Fulk was riding near Acre when he spotted a hare and, spurring his horse, gave chase. His saddle girth suddenly snapped and he was thrown. The saddle flew over his head and fractured his skull. He died three days later. The Jerusalemites marched out to escort Fulk’s cortège to burial in the Sepulchre. On Christmas Day, Melisende had her twelve-year-old son crowned as Baldwin III, but she was the real ruler. In an age dominated by men, she was a ‘woman of great wisdom’ who, writes William of Tyre, ‘had risen so far above the normal status of women that she dared undertake important measures, and ruled the kingdom with as much skill as her ancestors’.*
At this bittersweet moment, disaster struck. In 1144, Zangi the Bloody captured Edessa, slaughtering Frankish men, enslaving Frankish women (though protecting Armenian Christians), and thereby destroying the first Crusader state and the cradle of the Jerusalem dynasty. The Islamic world was exultant. The Franks were not invincible and surely Jerusalem was next. ‘If Edessa is the high sea,’ wrote Ibn al-Qaysarani, ‘Jerusalem is the shore.’ The Abbasid caliph awarded Zangi the titles Ornament of Islam, Auxiliary of the Commander of the Believers, Divinely Aided King. Yet Zangi’s hard-drinking perversity caught up with him in his own boudoir.
At a siege in Iraq, a humiliated eunuch, perhaps one of those castrated for Zangi’s pleasure, crept into his heavily guarded tent and stabbed the drunken potentate in his bed, leaving him scarcely alive. A courtier found him bleeding, helplessly begging for his life: ‘He thought I was intending to kill him. He gestured to me with his index finger, appealing to me. I halted in awe of him and said, “My Lord, who’s done this to you?”’ There died the Falcon Prince.
His staff pillaged his belongings around the still-warm corpse and his two sons divided his lands: the younger of them, the twenty-eight-year-old Nur al-Din, tugged his father’s signet ring off his finger and seized the Syrian territories. Talented but less ferocious than his father, Nur al-Din intensified the jihad against the Franks. Shocked by the fall of Edessa, Melisende appealed to Pope Eugenius II, who called the Second Crusade.5
ELEANOR OF AQUITAINE AND KING LOUIS: SCANDAL AND DEFEAT
Louis VII, the saintly young King of France, accompanied by his wife Eleanor, Duchess of Aquitaine, and Conrad III, King of Germany, a veteran pilgrim, answered the pope’s call. But their German and French armies were mauled by the Turks as they crossed Anatolia. Louis VII only just made it to Antioch after a disastrous fighting march that must have been terrifying for Queen Eleanor, who lost much of her baggage – and any respect for her sanctimonious, inept husband.
Prince Raymond of Antioch urged Louis to help him to capture Aleppo but Louis was determined to make his pilgrimage to Jerusalem first. The worldly Raymond was Eleanor’s uncle and ‘the handsomest of princes’. After the miserable journey, Eleanor ‘disregarded her marriage vows and was unfaithful to her husband’, according to William of Tyre. Her husband was puppyishly besotted with her, but regarded sex, even in marriage, as indulgent. No wonder Eleanor called him ‘more monk than man’. Yet Eleanor, acutely intelligent, dark-haired, dark-eyed and curvaceous, was the richest heiress in Europe, brought up at the sensual Aquitanian court. Priestly chroniclers claimed that the blood of sin coursed through her veins because her grandfather was William the Troubadour, a promiscuous warrior-poet, while her grandmother on the other side was her grandfather’s mistress, nicknamed La Dangereuse. This came about because the Troubadour had facilitated his access to La Dangereuse by marrying her daughter to his son.
Whether Eleanor and Raymond committed adultery or not, their behaviour was provocative enough to humiliate the husband and launch an international scandal. The King of France solved his marital problem by kidnapping Eleanor and heading off to join the German king who had arrived in Jerusalem. When Louis and Eleanor approached the city, ‘all the clergy and people went out to meet him’ and escort him to the Sepulchre ‘to the accompaniment of hymns and chants’. The French couple stayed along with Conrad in the Temple of Solomon, but Eleanor must have been carefully watched by the French courtiers. She was stranded there for months.
On 24 June 1148, Melisende and her son Baldwin III called a council at Acre that approved the target of the Crusade: Damascus. The city had recently been Jerusalem’s ally, but it was still a sensible target because it would only be a matter of time before it fell to Nur al-Din. On 23 July, the kings of Jerusalem, France and Germany fought their way into the orchards on the west side of Damascus but two days later mysteriously moved camp to the east. Four days after that, the Crusade fell apart and the three kings ignominiously retreated.
Unur, Atabeg of Damascus, may have bribed the Jerusalemite barons, convincing them that the Western Crusaders wanted the prize for themselves. Such duplicitous venality was all too credible but, more likely, the Crusaders simply learned that Nur al-Din, Zangi’s son, was advancing with a relief army. Now Jerusalem wilted under the strain of this disaster. Conrad sailed home; Louis, bathing in ascetic penitence, stayed to celebrate Easter in the Holy City. They could not leave fast enough for Eleanor: the marriage was annulled on their return.*6
When they had gone, Queen Melisende celebrated her greatest triumph and suffered her greatest humiliation. On 15 July 1149, she and her son reconsecrated their new Church of the Holy Sepulchre, then – and now – the masterpiece and dazzling holy stage-set of Crusader Jerusalem. The architects, finding a cluttered labyrinth of chapels and shrines in the complex built in 1048 and restored in 1119, solved this challenge with astonishing boldness. They roofed over the compound with a soaring rotunda and united all its sites in one magnificent Romanesque building, expanding into the old Holy Garden in the east. They opened up the eastern wall of the Rotunda to add chapels and a huge ambulatory. On the site of Constantine’s Basilica, they placed a large cloister. They kept the 1048 southern entrance, creating a Romanesque façade with two portals (one is now bricked up) topped with sculpted lintels (now in the Rockefeller Museum). The peerless carvings of the staircase leading up to the Chapel of the Hill of Calvary are perhaps the most exquisite of all Crusader art.
Melisende’s son resented her and demanded his full powers. Now twenty years old and acclaimed for his brains and flaxen-haired brawn, Baldwin III was said to be the perfect Frankish king – with a few vices. He was also known as a gambler and seducer of married women. But a northern crisis showed that Jerusalem needed an active warrior-king in the saddle: Zangi’s son, Nur al-Din, defeated the Antiochenes and killed Eleanor’s uncle Raymond.
Baldwin raced northwards in time to save Antioch but when he returned his mother Melisende, now forty-seven, resisted his demand that he be crowned at Easter. The king decided to fight.
MOTHER VERSUS SON: MELISENDE VERSUS BALDWIN III
Melisende offered him the rich ports of Tyre and Acre, but kept Jerusalem for herself. The ‘still smouldering fire was rekindled’ when Baldwin raised his own forces to seize the kingdom. Melisende sped from Nablus to Jerusalem with Baldwin in pursuit. Jerusalem opened its gates to the king. Melisende retreated into the Tower of David where Baldwin besieged her. He ‘set up his engines for assault’, firing bolts and ballista stones at her for several days. Finally the queen resigned power – and Jerusalem.
Baldwin had scarcely seized his birthright when Antioch was again attacked by Nur al-Din. While the king was once more in the north, the Ortuq family that had ruled Jerusalem from 1086 to 1098 marched from their Iraq fiefdom to seize the Holy City, massing on the Mount of Olives, but the Jerusalemites sortied out and massacred them on the Jericho road. Morale boosted, Baldwin led his army and the True Cross to Ashkelon, which fell after a long siege. But in the north, Damascus finally succumbed to Nur al-Din, who became the master of Syria and eastern Iraq.
Nur al-Din, ‘a tall swarthy man with a beard, no moustache, a fine forehead and pleasant appearance enhanced by melting eyes’, could be as cruel as Zangi, but he was more measured, more subtle. Even the Crusaders called him ‘valiant and wise’. He was beloved by his courtiers who now included that political weathervane Usamah bin Munqidh. Nur al-Din so enjoyed polo that he played at night by the light of candles. But it was he who channelled the Islamic fury at the Frankish conquest into a Sunni resurgence and a new military confidence. A fresh stream of fadail works extolling Jerusalem promoted Nur al-Din’s jihad to ‘purify Jerusalem from the pollution of the Cross’ – ironically since the Crusaders had once called the Muslims ‘polluters of the Holy Sepulchre’. He commissioned an elaborately carved minbar or pulpit to stand in al-Aqsa when he conquered the city.
Baldwin was locked in stalemate with Nur al-Din. They agreed a temporary truce while the king sought Byzantine help: he married the emperor Manuel’s niece, Theodora. At the marriage and crowning in the Church, ‘the bridal outfit of the maiden in gold and gems, garments and pearls’ brought the exotic splendour of Constantinople to Jerusalem. The marriage was still childless when Baldwin fell ill in Beirut and died on 10 May 1162, probably of dysentery.
The funeral cortège travelled from Beirut to Jerusalem amid unprecedented scenes of ‘deep and poignant sorrow’. The kings of Jerusalem, like the other veteran Crusader families, had become Levantine grandees so that now, observed William of Tyre, ‘there came down from the mountains a multitude of infidels who followed the cortège with wailing’. Even Nur al-Din said that the ‘Franks have lost such a prince that the world has not known his like’.7
AMAURY AND AGNES: ‘NO QUEEN FOR A CITY AS HOLY AS JERUSALEM’
The disreputable reputation of a woman now almost derailed the succession of Jerusalem. Baldwin’s brother Amaury, Count of Jaffa and Ashkelon, was the heir, but the patriarch refused to crown him unless he annulled his marriage to Agnes, claiming that they were too closely related – even though they already had a son together. The real problem was that ‘she was no queen for a city as holy as Jerusalem’, noted one prissy chronicler. Agnes had a bad reputation for promiscuity, but it is impossible to know if she deserved it since the historians were all so prejudiced against her. Nonetheless, she was clearly a much-desired trophy and, at various times, her lovers were said to include the seneschal, the patriarch and four husbands.
Amaury dutifully divorced her and was crowned at the age of twenty-seven. Already awkward in manner – he stammered and had a gurgling laugh – he soon became ‘excessively fat with breasts like those of a woman hanging down to his waist’. Jerusalemites mocked him in the streets, which he ignored ‘as if he had not heard the things said’. Despite the man-breasts, he was both an intellectual and a warrior who now faced the most daunting strategic challenge since the founding of the kingdom. Syria was lost to Nur al-Din, but Baldwin III’s conquest of Ashkelon had opened the gateway to Egypt. Amaury would need all his energy and manpower to fight Nur al-Din for that supreme prize.
This was one reason why he welcomed to Jerusalem the most notorious rogue of the day, Andronikos Komnenos, a Byzantine prince ‘attended by a large retinue of knights’, useful reinforcements. At first his knights were ‘a source of much comfort’ in Jerusalem. A cousin of the Emperor Manuel, Andronikos had seduced the emperor’s niece, was almost murdered by her furious brothers and spent twelve years in jail before being forgiven and appointed Governor of Cilicia. He was then sacked for incompetence and disloyalty, and fled to Antioch where he seduced Philippa, the daughter of the ruling prince, and had to flee again – to Jerusalem. ‘But like a snake in the bosom or a mouse in the wardrobe,’ recalled Amaury’s courtier, William of Tyre, ‘he proved the truth of the saying, “I fear the Greeks even when bearing gifts.”’
Amaury gave him Beirut as his lordship, but Andronikos, now almost sixty, dumped Princess Philippa and seduced Baldwin III’s lissom widow, Theodora, the Dowager Queen of Jerusalem, who was only twenty-three. Jerusalem was outraged: Andronikos had to escape yet again. Abducting Theodora, he defected with her to Nur al-Din in Damascus.* No one was sorry to see this ‘snake’ go, least of all Amaury’s favourite clergyman, William of Tyre, who had been born in Jerusalem. After studying in Paris, Orleans and Bologna, William returned to become Amaury’s most trusted adviser. Over twenty years, as Archbishop of Tyre and later Chancellor, William was the intimate witness of the unbearable royal tragedy that now coincided with Jerusalem’s most grievous crisis.8
WILLIAM OF TYRE: THE BATTLE FOR EGYPT
King Amaury commissioned William to write the histories of the Crusader and the Islamic kingdoms, quite a project. William had no problem writing the history of Outremer but, though he knew some Arabic, how was he to write about Islam?
By now, Fatimid Egypt was falling apart. There were rich pickings for the sharp opportunist – so naturally Usamah bin Munqidh was in Cairo. There, the power games were lethal but lucrative. Usamah made his fortune and built up a library; inevitably, however, it went wrong and he had to flee for his life. But he sent his family, his gold and his cherished library by ship. When it was shipwrecked off Acre, his treasure was lost and his library confiscated by the King of Jerusalem: ‘The news that my children and our women were safe made it easier to take the news about all the wealth lost. Except the books: 4,000 volumes. A heartache that lasted all my life.’ Usamah’s loss proved to be William’s gain for he inherited Usamah’s books and made good use of them to write his Islamic history.
Meanwhile Amaury plunged into the battle for Egypt, launching no fewer than five invasions. The stakes were high. In the second invasion, Amaury seemed to have conquered Egypt. If he had succeeded in keeping the riches and resources of that country, the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem would probably have endured and the entire history of the region would have been different. Instead the deposed Egyptian vizier fled to Nur al-Din, who sent his Kurdish general, the vigorous yet rotund Shirkuh, to conquer Egypt. Amaury defeated Shirkuh, taking Alexandria, but instead of consolidating he accepted tribute and returned to Jerusalem.
Thanks to his Egyptian booty, Amaury’s capital flourished. The elegant Gothic room in the Cenacle on Mount Zion was built at this time and the king raised a new royal palace, porticoed with a gabled roof, a small domed tower and a large circular one, south of the Tower of David.* But Egypt was far from cowed.
Mired in this expensive conflict, Amaury sought help from the emperor Manuel in Constantinople, marrying his great-niece Maria and despatching his historian William to negotiate military co-operation –but the timing of war and aid never dovetailed. In Egypt, Amaury and his Egyptian allies were about to take Cairo when Nur al-Din’s commander Shirkuh returned. The king retreated on the promise of further payments.
When Amaury sickened in Gaza, he asked his Egyptian allies to send him their best doctor – the king was an admirer of Eastern medicine. The Egyptians offered this job to one of the caliph’s Jewish doctors, who by chance had just returned from Jerusalem.9
MOSES MAIMONIDES: THE GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED
Maimonides refused to treat the Crusader king, probably a shrewd move since he had only recently arrived in Fatimid Egypt, where the alliance with Jerusalem was short-lived. Maimonides was a refugee from Muslim persecution in Spain, where the golden age of Jewish–Muslim civilization was very much over. It was now split between aggressive Christian kingdoms in the north, and the Muslim south, which had been conquered by fanatical Berber tribesmen, the Almohads. They had offered Jews the choice of conversion or death. Young Maimonides pretended to convert but in 1165, he escaped and set off on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. On 14 October, during Tishri, the month of the Jewish New Year and the Day of Atonement, a favourite season for pilgrimages to Jerusalem, Maimonides stood on the Mount of Olives with his brother and father. There he first set eyes on the mountain of the Jewish Temple, and ritually rent his garments – he later specified exactly how much tearing (and later restitching) should be practised by the Jewish pilgrim and when it should be done.
Entering the city through the eastern Jehoshaphat Gate, he found a Christian Jerusalem from which Jews were still officially banned – though there were actually four Jewish dyers living near the Tower of David, under royal protection.* ruins, its sanctity endures’. Then ‘I entered the great and holy temple and prayed.’ It sounds as if he was allowed to pray at the Rock in the Temple* of the Lord (just as Muslims such as Usamah bin Munqidh had been), though he later forbade any visit to the Temple Mount, a rule still obeyed by some Orthodox Jews.
Afterwards, he settled in Egypt where, known to the Arabs as Musa ibn Maymun, he won fame as a polymathic scholar, producing works on subjects varying from medicine to Jewish law, among them the masterpiece The Guide for the Perplexed, which wove together philosophy, religion and science; he also served as royal doctor. But Egypt was in chaos as Amaury and Nur al-Din fought for supremacy over the beleaguered Fatimid caliphate. Amaury was tireless – but unlucky.
In 1169, the master of Syria, Nur al-Din completed the encirclement of Jerusalem when his amir Shirkuh won the Battle of Egypt. Shirkuh was aided by his young nephew: Saladin. When the obese Shirkuh died in 1171, Saladin took over Egypt for himself, appointing Maimonides as Rais al-Yahud, Chief of the Jews – and his personal physician. Back in Jerusalem, the plight of the royal heir placed medicine centre-stage.10
WILLIAM OF TYRE: THE ROYAL TUTOR
King Amaury appointed William of Tyre as tutor to his son, Baldwin. William adored the prince:
The boy, then about nine, was committed to my care to be instructed in liberal studies. I devoted myself to my royal pupil. He was comely of appearance and continued to make progress in pursuit of letters and gave ever-increasing promise of developing a loveable disposition. He was an excellent horseman. His intellect was keen. He had a retentive memory.
‘Like his father,’ added William, ‘he eagerly listened to history and was well-disposed to follow good advice’ – William’s advice no doubt. The boy was playful and that was how his tutor discovered his plight.
He was playing with his companions when they began, as playful boys often do, to pinch each other’s arms and hands with their nails. But Baldwin endured it altogether too patiently as if he felt nothing. After this had occurred several times, it was reported to me. When I called him, I discovered that his right arm and hand were particularly numb. I began to be uneasy. The lad’s father [the king] was informed, physicians consulted. In the process of time, we recognized the early symptoms. It is impossible to refrain from tears.11
THE DISEASE OF BALDWIN IV
William’s delightful pupil was a leper* – and the heir to an embattled kingdom. On 15 May 1174, the strongman of Syria and Egypt, master-mind of the new jihad, Nur al-Din, died. Even William admired him as a ‘just prince and a religious man’.
King Amaury sped north to exploit Nur al-Din’s death, but on 11 July, he caught dysentery. He was just thirty-eight but, as Arab and Frankish doctors argued about remedies, he died in Jerusalem. The ‘loveable’ new king Baldwin IV excelled at his studies with William, but he had to endure a variety of treatments – blood-lettings, oil-rubs in ‘saracenic ointment’ and enemas. His health was supervised by an Arab doctor, Abu Sulayman Dawud, whose brother taught Baldwin to ride with one hand as the disease advanced.
It is hard to find a case of nobler courage and grace under fire than this doomed young king who was closely watched by his devoted tutor: ‘Day by day, his condition became worse, the extremities of his face were especially attacked so that his faithful followers were moved with compassion when they looked at him.’ He had been brought up apart from his mother but now the louche Agnes returned to support her son, always accompanying him on campaign. She unwisely placed the king in the hands of an arrogant minister who served as seneschal. When he was assassinated in Acre, Jerusalem politics began to assume the menace of a Mafia family in decline.
The king’s cousin Count Raymond III of Tripoli demanded the regency and restored stability, appointing the royal tutor, William, as chancellor. But the strategic nightmare that had always haunted Jerusalem now materialized: Saladin, strongman of Cairo, seized Damascus, gradually but steadily uniting Syria, Egypt, Yemen and much of Iraq into one powerful sultanate, encircling Jerusalem. Raymond of Tripoli, one of those urbane Levantine dynasts who spoke Arabic, bought time by agreeing a truce with Saladin. But it bought time for Saladin too.
Baldwin showed his mettle by raiding up into Syria and Lebanon, but during his frequent illnesses the magnates feuded around the sickbed. The Master of the Templars was increasingly insubordinate, while the Hospitallers were waging a private war against the patriarch, even firing arrows inside the Sepulchre. Meanwhile a new arrival, the veteran knight Reynald of Chatillon, Lord of Kerak and Outrejourdain, across the Jordan, was both asset and liability, radiating aggressive confidence and reckless swagger.
Saladin started to probe the kingdom, attacking Ashkelon and riding towards Jerusalem, whose citizens panicked and fled into the Tower of David. Ashkelon was about to fall when in late November 1177 the leper-king, Reynald and a few hundred knights attacked Saladin’s 26,000 troops at Montgisard, north-west of Jerusalem. Inspired by the presence of the True Cross and sightings of St George on the battlefield, Baldwin won a famous victory.
GRACE UNDER PRESSURE: VICTORY OF THE LEPER-KING
The leper-king returned in triumph while Saladin only just escaped on a camel. But the sultan was still master of Egypt and Syria, and he soon raised new armies.
In 1179, during a raid into Saladin’s Syria, Baldwin was ambushed, his horse bolted and he escaped thanks only to the courage of the old Constable of the Kingdom who gave his life to save the boy. Recovering with characteristic pluck, he again led his forces against Saladin’s raiders. Close to the Litani river, he was unhorsed and horribly exposed: his spreading paralysis prevented him mounting again. A knight had to carry him off the battlefield on his back. The young king could never marry – it was thought that leprosy could be passed sexually and now he could scarcely lead his armies. He expressed his personal distress – and the need for a strong new king from Europe – to Louis VII of France: ‘To be deprived of the use of one’s limbs is little help to one in carrying out the work of government. If only I could be cured of the disease of Naaman but I have found no Elisha to heal me. It’s not fitting that a hand so weak should hold power when Arab aggression presses upon the Holy City.’ The sicker the king, the hotter the fight for power. The king’s decline matched the political and moral rot. When Count Raymond of Tripoli and Prince Bohemond of Antioch rode towards the city with a cavalry squadron, the king angrily suspected a coup d’état, again buying time with a truce with Saladin.
When the patriarch died, the queen mother Agnes passed over William, Archbishop of Tyre, and appointed Heraclius of Caesarea, said to be her lover. Favouring rich silks, glittering with jewellery and wafting on a cloud of expensive scent, this ecclesiastical gigolo kept a Nablusite draper’s wife, Paschia de Riveri, as his mistress. She now moved to Jerusalem, and even bore him a daughter: Jerusalemites called her Madame la Patriarchesse.
The King would soon die. Agnes had to settle the succession.
GUY: FLAWED HEIR
Agnes therefore arranged a marriage between the king’s sister-heiress Sibylla and Guy of Lusignan, the attractive twenty-seven-year-old brother of her latest lover, the Constable of the Kingdom. Princess Sibylla, a young widow who had a son by her first marriage, was the only person who was delighted with the match. To most of the barons, her new husband seemed neither experienced nor high born enough to handle Jerusalem’s existential crisis. Guy, now Count of Jaffa and Ashkelon, was a well-born Poitevin baron, but he certainly lacked authority. He divided the kingdom just as it most needed to be united.
Reynald of Kerak broke the truce by attacking the caravans of pilgrims en route to Mecca. There was no duty more sacred for a Muslim ruler than the protection of the haj. Saladin was incandescent. But Reynald next outfitted a fleet and raided down the Red Sea, landing on the coast nearest to Mecca and Medina. Taking the war to the enemy was an impressive but also dangerous game. Reynald was defeated on land and sea and Saladin ordered the throats of captured Frankish sailors to be cut in public outside Mecca. He then raised another army from his ever-expanding empire. As for Reynald, Saladin swore, in his own words, ‘to shed the blood of the tyrant of Kerak’.
Baldwin, his ‘extremities diseased and damaged, unable to use hands and feet’, fell ill with a fever: he appointed Guy as regent, keeping Jerusalem as his royal fief.* Guy could not but glory in his rise, until in September 1183, Saladin invaded Galilee. Guy mustered 1,300 knights and 15,000 infantry near the fountain of Sephoria but either feared – or was unable – to attack Saladin, who finally marched way to attack the fortress of Kerak across the Jordan. Baldwin ordered the beacon lit on the Tower of David to signal Kerak that help was on its way. Valiantly, heartbreakingly, the leper-king – borne on a litter, blind, grotesque and decaying – led out his army to rescue Kerak.
On his return, the king sacked Guy, appointed Raymond as regent and had his eight-year-old nephew, son of Sybilla, crowned as Baldwin V. After the coronation, the child was carried from the Sepulchre to the Temple on the shoulders of the tallest magnate, Balian of Ibelin. On 16 May 1186, Baldwin IV died aged twenty-three. But the new child-king Baldwin V reigned just a year, buried in an ornate sarcophagus depicting Christ flanked by angels and decorated with wetleaf acanthus.12
Jerusalem needed an adult commander-in-chief. In Nablus, Raymond of Tripoli and the barons gathered to prevent Guy’s return, but in Jerusalem the throne belonged to Sibylla, now queen regnant – and she was married to the despised Guy. Sibylla persuaded Patriarch Heraclius to crown her, promising to divorce Guy and nominate another king. But during the coronation, she summoned Guy to be crowned as king beside her. She had outwitted everyone, but the new king and queen were unable to restrain Reynald of Kerak and the Master of the Templars, who were both spoiling for a fight with Saladin. Despite the truce, Reynald ambushed a haj caravan from Damascus, capturing Saladin’s own sister, mocking Muhammad and torturing his prisoners. Saladin appealed for compensation to King Guy, but Reynald refused to pay it.
In May, Saladin’s son raided Galilee. The Templars and the Hospitallers recklessly attacked him, but they were slaughtered at the springs of Cresson, the Master of the Templars and three knights being the only ones to escape. This disaster brought temporary unity.
KING GUY: TAKING THE BAIT
On 27 June 1187, Saladin, at the head of an army of 30,000, marched on Tiberias, hoping to lure the Franks out and strike ‘a tremendous blow in the jihad’.
King Guy mustered 12,000 knights and 15,000 infantry at Sephoria in Galilee, but, at a council in the red tent of the kings of Jerusalem, he agonized over the unpalatable alternatives facing him. Raymond of Tripoli urged restraint even though his wife was besieged in Tiberias. Reynald and the Master of the Templars responded by calling Raymond a traitor and demanded battle. Finally Guy took the bait. He led the army across the baking-hot Galilean hills for a day until, harassed by Saladin’s troops, overwhelmed by scorching heat and paralysed by thirst, he pitched camp on the volcanic plateau of the twin-peaked Horns of Hattin. They then went looking for water – but the well there was dry. ‘Ah Lord God,’ said Raymond, ‘the war is over; we are dead men; the kingdom is finished.’
When the Crusaders awoke on the morning of Saturday 4 July, they could hear prayers in the Muslim camp below. They were already thirsty in the summer heat. The Muslims lit the scrubland. Soon it was burning all around them.13
SALADIN: THE BATTLE
Saladin did not sleep, but spent the night organizing his forces and supplies, positioning his two wings. He had surrounded the Franks. The Sultan of Egypt and Syria was determined not to waste this opportunity. His multinational army, with its contingents of Kurds, Arabs, Turks, Armenians and Sudanese, was an awesome sight, relished by Saladin’s excitable secretary, Imad al-Din:
A swelling ocean of whinnying chargers, swords and cuirasses, iron-tipped lances like stars, crescent swords, Yemenite blades, yellow banners, standards red as anemones and coats of mail glittering like pools, swords polished white as streams of water, feathered bows blue as birds, helmets gleaming over slim curvetting chargers.
At dawn, Saladin, commanding the centre on horseback, accompanied by his young son Afdal, and protected as always by his bodyguard of devoted Turkish mamluks (slave-soldiers), started his attack, showering the Franks with arrows and directing the charges of his cavaliers and horse-archers to keep the heavily armoured Franks at bay. For Guy, everything depended on maintaining the shield of infantry around his mounted knights; for Saladin, everything depended on separating them.
As the Bishop of Acre raised the True Cross before the king, Guy’s army repelled the first charges, but soon the thirsty Frankish soldiers fled to higher ground, leaving the knights exposed. Guy’s knights launched their charges. As Raymond of Tripoli and Balian of Ibelin galloped towards the sultan’s forces, Saladin simply ordered his nephew Taki al-Din, commanding the right wing, to open his ranks: the Crusaders galloped through. But the Muslim ranks closed again, tightening the net. Their archers, mostly Armenians, picked off the Frankish horses with ‘clouds of arrows like locusts’, stranding the knights, and ‘their lions became hedgehogs’. On that ‘burningly hot day’, unhorsed and exposed, swollen-mouthed with thirst, tormented by the infernal brushwood, unsure of their leadership, Guy’s soldiers perished, fled or surrendered as his order of battle disintegrated.
He retreated to one of the Horns and there pitched his red tent. His knights surrounded him for a last stand. ‘When the Frankish king had withdrawn to the hilltop,’ recalled Saladin’s son Afdal, ‘his knights made a valiant charge and drove the Muslims back upon my father.’ For a moment, it seemed as if Frankish courage would threaten Saladin himself. Afdal saw his father’s dismay: ‘He changed colour and pulled at his beard then rushed forward crying, “Give the devil the lie!”’ at which the Muslims charged again, breaking the Crusaders, ‘who retreated up the hill. When I saw the Franks fleeing, I cried out with glee, “We’ve routed them!”’ But ‘tortured by thirst’, they ‘charged again and drove our men back to where my father stood’. Saladin rallied his men, who broke Guy’s charge. ‘We’ve routed them,’ cried Afdal again.
‘Be quiet,’ snapped Saladin, pointing at the red tent. ‘We haven’t beaten them so long as that tent stands there!’ At that moment, Afdal saw the tent overturned. The Bishop of Acre was killed, the True Cross was captured. Around the royal tent, Guy and his knights were so exhausted that they lay in their armour helpless on the ground. ‘Then my father dismounted,’ said Afdal, ‘and bowed to the ground, giving thanks to God with tears of joy.’
Saladin held court in the lobby of his resplendent tent, which was still being pitched as his amirs delivered their prisoners. Once the tent was up, he received the King of Jerusalem and Reynald of Kerak. Guy was so desiccated that Saladin offered him a glass of sherbet iced with the snows of Mount Hermon. The king slaked his thirst then handed it to Reynald at which Saladin said: ‘You’re the one who gave him the drink. I give him no drink.’ Reynald was not offered the protection of Arab hospitality.
Saladin rode out to congratulate his men and inspect the battlefield, with the ‘limbs of the fallen, naked on the field, scattered in pieces, lacerated and disjointed, dismembered, eyes gouged out, stomachs dis-embowelled, bodies cut in half,’ the carnage of medieval battle. On his return, the sultan recalled Guy and Reynald. The king was left in the vestibule; Reynald taken inside: ‘God has given me victory over you,’ said Saladin. ‘How often have you broken your oaths?’
‘This is how princes have always behaved,’ replied the defiant Reynald.
Saladin offered him Islam. Reynald refused disdainfully, at which the sultan sprang up, drew a scimitar and sliced off his arm at the shoulder. The guards finished him off. The headless Reynald was dragged feet first past Guy and thrown out at the tent door.
The King of Jerusalem was led inside. ‘It’s not customary for kings to kill kings,’ said Saladin, ‘but this man crossed the limits so he suffered what he suffered.’
In the morning, Saladin bought all the 200 Templars and Hospitaller knights from his men, for fifty dinars each. The Christian warriors were offered conversion to Islam, but few accepted. Saladin called for volunteers from the Sufi mystics and Islamic scholars, to whom he gave the order to kill all the knights. Most begged for the privilege, though some appointed substitutes out of fear that they would be mocked for bungling the job. As Saladin watched from his dais, this messy and amateurish butchery now destroyed what remained of the might of Jerusalem. The bodies were left where they fell. Even a year later, the battlefield remained ‘covered with their bones’.
Saladin sent the King of Jerusalem to Damascus along with the True Cross, hung impotently upside down on a lance, along with prisoners so plentiful that one of Saladin’s retainers saw ‘a single person holding a tent-rope pulling by himself thirty prisoners’. Frankish slaves cost just three dinars and one was bought for a shoe.14
The sultan himself advanced to conquer the rest of Outremer, capturing the coastal cities of Sidon, Jaffa, Acre and Ashkelon but failing to take Tyre when the courageous Conrad, Marquis of Montferrat (whose brother had been briefly married to Sybilla) arrived just in time to rescue this key fortress-port. Instead, Saladin’s Egyptian viceroy, his brother, Safadin, advised him to go post-haste towards Jerusalem in case he fell ill before taking the Holy City: ‘If you die of a colic tonight, Jerusalem will stay in the hands of the Franks.’
SALADIN’S SIEGE: SLAUGHTER OR SURRENDER?
On Sunday 20 September 1187, Saladin surrounded Jerusalem, first setting up camp on the west outside the Tower of David then moving to the north-east, where Godfrey had stormed the walls.
The city was crowded with refugees but there were only two knights left to fight under the patriarch and the two queens of Jerusalem, Sibylla and King Amaury’s widow Maria, now married to the magnate Balian of Ibelin. Heraclius could scarcely find fifty men to guard the walls. Fortunately Balian of Ibelin arrived, under Saladin’s safe-conduct, to rescue his wife Queen Maria and their children. Balian had promised Saladin not to fight, but now the Jerusalemites begged him to take command. Balian could not refuse and writing as one knight to another, he apologized to Saladin, who forgave this bad faith. The sultan even arranged an escort for Maria and the children. Giving them bejewelled robes and treating them to feasts, the sultan sat the children on his knees and began to weep, knowing they were seeing Jerusalem for the last time. ‘The things of this world are merely lent to us,’ he mused.
Balian* knighted every noble boy over sixteen and thirty bourgeois, armed every man, launching sorties. As Saladin started to attack, the women prayed at the Sepulchre, shaving their heads in penance, and monks and nuns paraded barefoot under the walls. By 29 September, Saladin’s sappers were undermining the wall. The Franks prepared to die as holy martyrs, but Heraclius discouraged them, saying that this would leave the women to be harem slaves. Syrian Christians, who resented the Latins, agreed to open the gates for Saladin. On the 30th, as the Muslim forces attacked the city, Balian visited Saladin to negotiate. The sultan’s flag was even raised on the walls, but his troops were repulsed.
‘We shall deal with you just as you dealt with the population of Jerusalem [in 1099] with murder and enslavement and other savageries,’ Saladin told Balian.
‘Sultan,’ replied Balian, ‘there are very many of us in the city. If we see death is inevitable, we shall kill our children and our wives, and pull down the Sanctuary of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque.’
At this, Saladin agreed on terms. He graciously freed Queen Sibylla and even the widow of Reynald, but the rest of the Jerusalemites had to be either ransomed or sold into slavery.15
SALADIN: THE MAN
Saladin was never quite the liberal gentleman, superior in manners to the brutish Franks, portrayed by Western writers in the nineteenth century. But by the standards of medieval empire-builders he deserves his attractive reputation. When he gave one of his sons advice about how he had built an empire, he told him: ‘I have only achieved what I have by coaxing people. Hold no grudge against anyone for Death spares nobody. Take care in your relations with people.’ Saladin did not look impressive and lacked vanity. When his silken robes were spattered by a courtier riding through a puddle in Jerusalem, Saladin just burst out laughing. He never forgot that the twists of fate that had brought him such success could just as easily be reversed. While his rise had been bloody, he disliked violence, advising his favourite son Zahir: ‘I warn you against shedding blood, indulging in it and making a habit of it, for blood never sleeps.’ When Muslim raiders stole a baby from a Frankish woman, she crossed the lines to appeal to Saladin who, moved to tears, immediately had the baby found and returned it to its mother. On another occasion, when one of his sons asked to be allowed to kill some Frankish prisoners, he reprimanded him and refused, lest he get a taste for killing.
Yusuf ibn Ayyub, son of a Kurdish soldier of fortune, was born in 1138 in Tikrit (today’s Iraq – Saddam Hussein was also born there). His father and his uncle, Shirkuh, served Zangi and his son Nur al-Din. The boy grew up in Damascus, enjoying the life of wine, cards and girls. He played nocturnal polo by candlelight with Nur al-Din, who made him police chief of Damascus. He studied the Koran but also the pedigrees of horseflesh. In the struggle for Egypt, Nur al-Din despatched Shirkuh, who took along his nephew, Yusuf, now aged twenty-six.
Together, leading a mere 2,000 foreign horsemen and overcoming desperate odds, this Kurdish uncle and nephew managed to steal Egypt from the armies of the Fatimids and Jerusalem. In January 1169, Yusuf, who took the honorific name Saladin,* assassinated the vizier whom his uncle then succeeded. But Shirkuh died of a heart attack. At thirty-one, Saladin became the last Fatimid vizier. In 1071, when the last caliph died, Saladin dismantled the Shiite caliphate in Egypt (which has remained Sunni ever since), and massacred the overmighty Sudanese guards in Cairo, while adding Mecca, Medina, Tunisia and Yemen to his growing realm.
When Nur al-Din died in 1174, Saladin headed north and took Damascus, gradually expanding his empire to embrace much of Iraq and Syria as well as Egypt, but the link between the two territories was today’s Jordan, which was partly controlled by the Crusaders. War with Jerusalem was not just good theology, but good imperial politics too. Saladin preferred Damascus, regarding Egypt as his cash-cow: ‘Egypt was a whore,’ he joked, ‘who’d tried to part me from my faithful wife [Damascus].’
Saladin was no dictator.* His empire was a patchwork of greedy amirs, rebellious princelings and ambitious brothers, sons and nephews, to whom he doled out fiefdoms in return for loyalty, taxes and warriors. He was always short of cash and soldiers. Only his charisma held it all together. Frequently defeated by the Crusaders, he was not an outstanding general, but ‘shunning his womenfolk and all his pleasures’, he was tenacious. He spent most of his life fighting other Muslims but now his personal mission, the Holy War to win back Jerusalem, became his ruling passion. ‘I’ve given up earthly pleasures,’ he said. ‘I’ve had my fill of them.’
Once when walking by the sea during the war, he told his minister Ibn Shaddad, ‘I have it in my mind that, when God has allowed me to conquer the rest of the coast, I shall divide my lands, make my testament and set sail on this sea to pursue them there until there no longer remain on the face of the earth any who deny God – or die in the attempt.’ But he enforced Islam more strictly than the Fatimids. When he heard of a young Islamic heretic preaching in his lands, he had him crucified and left hanging for days.
He was happiest sitting up at night with his entourage of generals and intellectuals, receiving messengers while chatting. He admired scholars and poets, and his court was not complete without Usamah bin Munqidh, now ninety, who recalled how ‘he sought me out across the land. By his goodwill, from misfortune’s fangs was I snatched. He treats me like family.’ Saladin was lame and often ill, cared for by twenty-one doctors – eight Muslim, eight Jewish (including Maimonides) and five Christian. When the sultan rose for prayer or ordered the candles, his courtiers recognized the sign that the evening was over. If he himself was above reproach, his hedonistic and ambitious relatives more than made up for his restraint.
DANCING-GIRLS AND APHRODISIACS: THE COURT OF SALADIN
The young princes, according to the satirist al-Wahrani, held orgies where the hosts ran naked on all fours howling like dogs and sipped wine from the navels of singing girls while cobwebs took over in the mosques. In Damascus, the Arabs grumbled about Saladin’s rule. The writer Ibn Unain mocked Saladin’s Egyptian officials, particularly the black Sudanese: ‘If I were black with a head like an elephant, bulky forearms and a huge penis, then you would see to my needs.’ Saladin exiled him for this impertinence.
Saladin’s nephew Taki al-Din was his most talented general, but also the most ambitious and debauched of the princes. His hobbies were so notorious that it was said his words were ‘sweeter than a beating with a prostitute’s slipper’. The satirist Wahrani suggested ironically, ‘If you resign from the government, you could turn away from repentance and collect the prostitutes of Mosul, the panders of Aleppo and the singing-girls of Iraq.’
Such was Taki’s priapic over-indulgence that he started losing weight, energy and erection. He consulted his Jewish doctor Maimonides, who advised his own community against excessive ‘eating, drinking and copulation’ but treated his princely patients differently. The royal doctor wrote Saladin’s nephew a special work entitled On Sexual Intercourse, prescribing moderation, limited alcohol, women not too old nor too young, a cocktail of oxtongue plant and wine and, finally, a ‘wondrous secret’ of medieval Viagra: massage the royal penis for two hours before intercourse with oils mixed with saffron-coloured ants. Maimonides promised the erection would last long after the act.
Saladin loved Taki, whom he promoted to viceroy of Egypt, but was then exasperated by his nephew’s attempt to create his own fiefdom. He moved him to rule swathes of Iraq instead. Now this exuberant nephew and most of Saladin’s family arrived to enjoy the liberation of Jerusalem.16
SALADIN’S CITY
Saladin watched the Latin Christians leave Jerusalem for ever: the Jerusalemites had to pay a ransom of ten dinars per man, five per woman, one per child. No one could leave without a receipt of payment, but Saladin’s officials made fortunes as bribes were paid and Christians were lowered from the walls in baskets or escaped in disguise. Saladin himself had no interest in money and, though he received 220,000 dinars, much of the cash went astray.
Thousands of Jerusalemites could not afford their ransom. They were led away into slavery and the harem. Balian paid 30,000 dinars to ransom 7,000 poor Jerusalemites, while the Sultan’s brother Safadin asked for a thousand unfortunates and freed them. Saladin gave five hundred each to Balian and to Patriarch Heraclius. The Muslims were shocked to see the latter pay his ten dinars and leave the city laden with carts of gold and carpets. ‘How many well-guarded women were profaned, nubile girls married, virgins dishonoured, proud women deflowered, lovely women’s red lips kissed, untamed ones tamed,’ recalled Saladin’s secretary Imad al-Din with a rather creepy glee. ‘How many noblemen took them as concubines, how many great ladies sold at low prices!’
Under the eyes of the sultan, the two columns of Christians looked back one last time and wept at the loss of Jerusalem, reflecting, ‘She who was named the mistress of other cities had become a slave and handmaid.’
On Friday 2 October, Saladin entered Jerusalem and ordered the Temple Mount, known to Muslims as the Haram al-Sharif, to be cleansed of the infidel. The Cross over the Dome of the Rock was thrown down to cries of ‘Allahu Akhbar’, dragged through the city and smashed, the Jesus paintings torn out, the cloisters north of the Dome demolished, the cubicles and apartments within the Aqsa removed. Saladin’s sister arrived from Damascus with a camel caravan of rosewater. The sultan himself and his nephew Taki personally scrubbed the courts of the Haram with rosewater, accompanied by a cleaning-party of princes and amirs. Saladin brought Nur al-Din’s carved wooden minbar from Aleppo and set it up in al-Aqsa Mosque where it remained for seven centuries.
The sultan did not so much destroy and rebuild as adapt and embroider, reusing the gorgeous spolia of the Crusaders with their foliate patterns, capitals and wetleaf acanthus; his own architecture is thus constructed with the very symbols of his enemies, which makes it hard to distinguish between the buildings of the Crusaders and Saladin.
Every respected member of the ulema, Muslim clergy and scholars, from Cairo to Baghdad, wanted to preach at Friday prayers, but Saladin chose the Qadi of Aleppo, giving him a black robe to wear: his sermon in al-Aqsa praised the fadail – the merits – of Islamic Jerusalem. Saladin himself had become the ‘light that shines in every dawn that brings darkness to the believers’ by ‘liberating the brother shrine of Mecca’. Saladin then walked to the Dome to pray in what he called ‘the jewel of the signet-ring of Islam’. Saladin’s love for Jerusalem was ‘as great as mountains’. His mission was to create an Islamic Jerusalem and he considered whether to destroy the Dungheap – the Holy Sepulchre. Some of his grandees called for its demolition, but he mused that the place would still remain holy whether or not the Church stood there. Citing Omar the Just, he closed the Church for only three days and then gave it to the Greek Orthodox. Overall, he tolerated most churches, but aimed to diminish the Christian Quarter’s non-Islamic character. Church bells were again banned. Instead, for hundreds of years right up until the nineteenth century, the muezzin held the monopoly of sound and the Christians announced prayers with the clack of wooden clappers and the clash of cymbals. He destroyed some churches outside the walls and commandeered many prominent Christian buildings for his own Salahiyya endowments – which still exist today.*
Saladin brought many Muslim scholars and mystics to the city; but Muslims alone could not repopulate Jerusalem, so he invited back many Armenians, who became a special community that endures today (they call themselves the Kaghakatsi); and many Jews – ‘the entire race of Ephraim’ – from Ashkelon, Yemen and Morocco.17
Saladin was exhausted but he reluctantly left Jerusalem to mop up the last Crusader fortresses. He took the great sea base of Acre. Yet he never finished off the Crusaders: he chivalrously released King Guy and failed to conquer Tyre, which left the Christians with a vital seaport from which to plan a counter-attack. Perhaps he underestimated the reaction of Christendom but the news of Jerusalem’s fall had shocked Europe, from kings and popes to knights and peasants, and mobilized a powerful new Crusade, the Third.
Saladin’s mistakes would cost him dear. In August 1189, King Guy appeared before Acre with a small force and proceeded to besiege the city. Saladin did not take Guy’s brave exploit too seriously but sent a contingent to swat his little army. Instead Guy fought Saladin’s men to a standstill and rallied the Crusader fightback. Saladin besieged Guy but Guy besieged Acre. When Saladin’s Egyptian fleet was defeated, Guy was joined by shiploads of German, English and Italian Crusaders. In Europe, the kings of England and France and the German Emperor took the Cross; fleets were being collected; armies mustered to join the battle for Acre. This was the start of a grindingly bloody two-year struggle, soon joined by the greatest kings of Europe who were determined to win back Jerusalem.
First came the Germans. When Saladin heard that the red-bearded Emperor Frederick Barbarossa was already marching to the Holy Land with a German army, he finally summoned his forces and called for a jihad. But then came better news.
In June 1190, Barbarossa drowned in a Cilician river; his son, Duke Frederick of Swabia, boiled the body and pickled it in vinegar, burying the flesh in Antioch. But he then marched to Acre with his army and his father’s bones which he planned to bury in Jerusalem. Barbarossa’s death played into the eschatalogical legend, that the Emperor of the Last Days was asleep, one day to rise again. The Duke of Swabia himself died of the plague outside Acre and the German Crusade was broken. But after many months of desperate fighting with thousands killed by the plague (including Heraclius the patriarch and Sibylla, Queen of Jerusalem),* Saladin received the bad news that the outstanding warrior of Christendom was on his way.
THE THIRD CRUSADE: SALADIN AND RICHARD
LIONHEART: CHIVALRY AND SLAUGHTER
On 4 July 1190, Richard the Lionheart, King of England, and Philip II Augustus, King of France, set out on the Third Crusade to liberate Jerusalem. The thirty-three-year-old Richard had just inherited his father Henry II’s Angevin empire – England and half of France. Possessed of abundant vitality, red-haired and athletic, he was as brash and extrovert as Saladin was patient and subtle. He was a man of his time, both a writer of saucy troubadour songs and a pious Christian who, overcome with his sinfulness, threw himself naked before his clergy and scourged himself with whips.
Eleanor of Aquitaine’s favourite son showed little interest in women, but the nineteenth-century claim that he was homosexual has been discredited. War was his real love and he ruthlessly squeezed the English to pay for his Crusade, joking, ‘I’d have sold London if there’d been a buyer.’ As England vibrated with Crusader revivalism,* the Jews were targeted in the cull that culminated in the mass-suicide of York, the English Masada. By then, Richard had departed. He sailed for Jerusalem and wherever he landed he presented himself as the personification of the royal warrior. He always wore scarlet, the colour of war, and brandished a sword that he claimed was Excalibur. In Sicily, he rescued his sister, the widowed Queen Joanna, from the new king, and sacked Messina. When he reached Cyprus, ruled by a Byzantine prince, he simply conquered the island and then sailed for Acre with twenty-five galleys.
On 8 June 1191, Richard landed and joined the King of France at the siege, where bouts of fighting alternated with interludes of fraternizing between the camps. Saladin and his courtiers watched his arrival and were impressed with the ‘great pomp’ of ‘this mighty warrior’ and with his ‘passion for war’.
The battlefield had become a plague-ridden shanty encampment of royal marquees, filthy huts, soup kitchens, markets, bathhouses and brothels. That the prostitutes fascinated the Muslims is evident from the account of Imad, Saladin’s secretary, who visited Richard’s camp and exhausted even his reservoir of pornographic metaphors as he ogled these ‘singers and coquettes, tinted and painted, blue-eyed with fleshy thighs’, who ‘ plied a brisk trade, brought their silver anklets up to touch their golden earrings, invited swords to sheath, made javelins rise toward shields, gave birds a place to peck with their beaks, caught lizard after lizard in their holes, [and] guided pens to inkwells’.
If even Imad admitted that ‘a few foolish mamluks slipped away’ to sample these Frankish coquettes, many must have done so. Richard’s energy changed the nature of the war. Saladin was already ill; soon both the European kings fell sick too, but even on his sickbed Richard brandished a crossbow, firing bolts at the enemy camp while fleet after fleet delivered the cream of European knighthood.
Saladin, like ‘a bereft mother, on horseback urging people to perform their jihad duty’ was outmanned and outfought. After the early departure of the jealous Philip Augustus, Richard took command – ‘I rule and nobody rules me’ – but his forces too were suffering. He opened negotiations, Saladin sending his worldly but more aloof brother Safadin as his envoy, though these pragmatists were still shadow-boxing with everything to play for. They were evenly matched, each fielding 20,000 men, both struggling to impose their will on their insubordinate, troublesome grandees and polyglot armies.
Meanwhile Acre could hold out no longer and its governor started to negotiate surrender. ‘More affected than a distracted lovesick girl’, Saladin had little choice but to acquiesce in Acre’s capitulation, promising the return of the True Cross and the release of 1,500 prisoners. But his priority was to defend Jerusalem. He dragged his feet on the terms in order to encourage divisions among the Crusaders, save money and delay their campaign. But Lionheart meant business and called Saladin’s bluff.
On 20 August, he shepherded 3,000 bound Muslim prisoners on to the plain in view of Saladin’s army and then butchered the men, women and children. So much for the legend of chivalry. The horrified Saladin sent in his cavalry, but it was too late. Afterwards, he beheaded all Frankish prisoners who fell into his hands.
Five days later, Richard marched down the coast towards Jaffa, the port of Jerusalem, his army chanting ‘Sanctum Sepulchrum adjuva! Help us, Holy Sepulchre!’ On 7 September, Lionheart found Saladin and his army blocking the way at Arsuf. Richard’s challenge was to use massed infantry to exhaust Saladin’s waves of charging, curveting cavaliers and horse-archers until he could unleash the thundering power of his knights. Richard held back until a Hospitaller galloped forward. Then he led the full charge that smashed into the Muslims. Saladin desperately threw in his royal guard of mamluks – known as the Ring. Faced with a ‘complete rout’, the sultan withdrew just in time, his army ‘conserved for the protection of Jerusalem’. At one point, he was guarded by just seventeen men. Afterwards he was wrung out and too downhearted even to eat.
Saladin rode to Jerusalem to celebrate Ramadan and prepare her defences. Richard knew that while Saladin’s army and empire were intact, the Crusaders could not hold Jerusalem even if they captured her – which made it sensible to negotiate. ‘The Muslims and the Franks are done for,’ Richard wrote to Saladin, ‘the land is ruined at the hands of both sides. All we have to talk about is Jerusalem, the True Cross and these lands. Jerusalem is the centre of our worship which we shall never renounce.’ Saladin explained what al-Quds meant to the Muslims: ‘Jerusalem is ours just as much as yours. Indeed for us it is greater than it is for you, for it is where Our Prophet came on his Night Journey and the gathering place of the angels.’
Richard was willing to learn. Flexible and imaginative, he now proposed a compromise: his sister Joanna would marry Safadin. The Christians would get the coast and access to Jerusalem; the Muslims the hinterland, with Jerusalem the capital of King Safadin and Queen Joanna under Saladin’s sovereignty. Saladin agreed to this in order to draw out Richard but Joanna was indignant: ‘How could she possibly allow a Muslim to have carnal knowledge of her?’ Richard claimed it was a joke, and then told Safadin: ‘I shall marry you to my niece.’ Saladin was bemused: ‘Our best course is to fight on with the jihad – or die ourselves.’
On 31 October, Richard set off slowly towards Jerusalem while continuing to negotiate with the urbane Safadin. They met in magnificent tents, exchanged gifts and attended each other’s feasts. ‘We must have a foothold in Jerusalem,’ insisted Richard. When he was criticized for the negotiations by his French knights, he beheaded some Turkish prisoners and ghoulishly posed their heads around the camp.
At this fraught moment, Saladin received bad news: his dissolute nephew, Taki al-Din, who had been trying to build his own private empire, was dead. Saladin hid the letter, ordered his tent cleared, then ‘wept bitterly, choked by his tears’, before washing his face with rosewater and returning to the command: it was no time to show weakness. He inspected Jerusalem and her new Egyptian garrison.
On 23 December, Richard advanced to Le Thoron des Chevaliers (Latrun) where he, his wife and his sister celebrated Christmas in splendour. On 6 January 1192, amid rain, cold and mud, Richard had reached Bayt Nuba, 12 miles from the city. The French and English barons wanted Jerusalem at any cost but Richard tried to convince them that he did not have the men for a siege. Saladin waited in Jerusalem hoping that the rain and snow would discourage the Crusaders. On 13 January, Richard retreated.*
It was stalemate. Saladin used fifty stonemasons and 2,000 Frankish prisoners to refortify Jerusalem, demolishing the higher floors of Our Mary of Jehoshaphat at the foot of the Mount of Olives and the Coenaculum on Mount Zion to provide the stones. Saladin, Safadin and their sons themselves worked on the walls.
Richard meanwhile captured and fortified Ashkelon, the gateway to Egypt, offering Saladin a partition of Jerusalem, with Muslims keeping the Haram and Tower of David. But these talks, almost comparable in complexity to those between Israelis and Palestinians in the twenty-first century, were in vain: both still hoped to possess Jerusalem totally. On 20 March, Safadin and his son Kamil visited Richard with an offer of access to the Sepulchre and the return of the True Cross: in the classic beau geste of chivalry, Lionheart dubbed young Kamil, girding him with the belt of knighthood.
Yet this theatre of chivalry was unpopular with the mutinous French knights, who demanded the immediate storming of Jerusalem. On 10 June Richard led them back to Bayt Nuba, where they proceeded to set up camp in the parching heat and for three weeks argued about what to do next. Richard relieved the tension by riding out on reconnaissance, at some point reaching Montjoie, where he dismounted to say his prayers but held up his shield to hide the glory of Jerusalem, supposedly saying, ‘Lord God, I pray thee not to let me see thy Holy City that I could not deliver from thine enemies!’
Lionheart employed spies in the sultan’s army who now informed him that one of Saladin’s princes was leading a caravan of reinforcements from Egypt. Richard, sporting Bedouin dress, led out 500 knights and 1,000 light cavalry, to ambush the Egyptians. He dispersed the troops, captured the caravan, bagging 3,000 camels and ample packhorses of supplies – enough perhaps to march on Jerusalem or Egypt. ‘This was grievous to Saladin’s heart,’ said his minister Ibn Shaddad, ‘but I tried to calm him.’ Within a fraught Jerusalem, Saladin was close to panic, his stress unbearable. He poisoned the wells around the city and positioned his meagre contingents under the command of his sons. His armies were inadequate and he anxiously recalled Safadin from Iraq.
On 2 July, he convened a council of war, but his amirs were just as unreliable as Richard’s barons. ‘The best thing we can do,’ said Ibn Shaddad, opening the meeting, ‘is assemble at the Dome of the Rock to prepare ourselves for death.’ Then there was silence, the amirs sitting so still it was ‘as though there were birds on their heads’. The council debated whether the leader should make a last stand within the city or avoid being trapped in a siege. The sultan himself knew that without his own presence his henchmen would soon surrender. Finally Saladin said, ‘You’re the army of Islam. Turn your reins away and they’ll roll up these lands like a scroll. It’s your responsibility – that’s why you’ve been funded by the treasury all these years.’ The amirs agreed to fight, but the next day they returned to say they feared a siege like that of Acre. Was it not better to fight outside the walls and at worst, temporarily lose Jerusalem? The generals insisted that Saladin or one of his sons had to stay in Jerusalem or else his Turks would fight his Kurds.
Saladin stayed – and his spies kept him well informed about Richard’s problems. As 15 July, the anniversary of the capture of Jerusalem in 1099, approached, the Crusaders discovered yet another fragment of the True Cross, a timely miracle which elated the ranks. But the French under the Duke of Burgundy and the Anglo-Angevins under Richard were almost at daggers drawn, taunting each other with silly slogans and filthy ditties. Richard, the troubadour, penned a jingle of his own.
Saladin was almost sick with the tension: on the night of Thursday 3 July, Ibn Shaddad was so worried that he prescribed the comfort of prayer: ‘We are in the most blessed place we could be on this day.’ At Friday prayers the sultan should make two ritual rakas, bows from the waist then two full prostrations. Saladin performed these rituals and openly wept. By nightfall, his spies reported that the Franks were packing up. On 4 July, Richard led the retreat.
Saladin was exuberant, riding out to meet his favourite son Zahir, kissing him between the eyes and escorting him into Jerusalem, where the prince stayed with his father in the palace of the Master of the Hospitallers. But both sides were exhausted: Richard was receiving reports that back in England his brother John was close to open rebellion. If he wished to save his lands, he needed to return home soon.
Encouraged by Richard’s problems, on 28 July Saladin sprang a surprise attack on Jaffa, which he swiftly captured after a bombardment by his mangonels. While Ibn Shaddad was negotiating the surrender, his son Zahir fell asleep on watch. Suddenly Richard the Lionheart appeared offshore in a scarlet-flagged galley. He had arrived just in time: some Franks were still holding out. Firing an arbalest crossbow, he waded on to the beach – ‘red haired, his tunic red, his banner red.’ Without even time to take off his waders and don his armour, wielding a Danish battleaxe, accompanied by just seventeen knights and a few hundred infantry, Richard managed to retake the town in a stupendous display of flamboyant shock-fighting.
Afterwards, he teased Saladin’s minister: ‘This sultan of yours is a great man [yet] how is it he departed merely because I arrived? I only had my seaboots on and not even my breastplate!’ Saladin and Safadin were said to have sent Arabian horses to Lionheart as a gift, but such chivalry was often a delaying tactic for they soon counter-attacked. Richard repulsed them and then challenged the Saracens to single combat. He galloped with his lance up and down the ranks – but there were no takers.
Saladin ordered another attack, but his amirs refused. He was so enraged that he considered a Zangi-style crucifixion of his mutinous generals. However, he calmed himself and then invited them to share some juicy apricots that had just arrived from Damascus.
The king and the sultan had fought themselves to a standstill. ‘You and we together are ruined,’ Richard confided to Saladin. As they negotiated, both the warlords collapsed, desperately ill, their resources and wills utterly exhausted.
THE DEATH OF THE SULTAN
On 2 September 1192, sultan and king agreed the Treaty of Jaffa, the first partition of Palestine: the Christian kingdom received a new lease of life with Acre as its capital, while Saladin kept Jerusalem, granting full Christian access to the Sepulchre.
On the way back to Jerusalem, Saladin met his brother Safadin who kissed the ground to thank God, and they prayed together at the Dome of the Rock. Though Richard refused to visit Islamic Jerusalem, his knights flocked there to make their pilgrimages and were received by Saladin. The sultan showed them the True Cross, but afterwards that ultimate relic was lost – and vanished for ever. When the king’s adviser Hubert Walter was in Jerusalem, he discussed Richard with Saladin who offered the view that Lionheart lacked wisdom and moderation. Thanks to Walter, Saladin allowed Latin priests back into the Sepulchre. When the Byzantine emperor Isaac Angelus demanded it for the Orthodox, Saladin decided that they must share it under his supervision and appointed Sheikh Ghanim al-Khazraji as Custodian of the Church, a role still performed today by his descendants, the Nusseibeh family.
The two protagonists never met. On 9 October, Richard sailed for Europe.* ’Saladin appointed Ibn Shaddad, whose memoirs have been such a vivid source, to oversee his plans in Jerusalem. Presently Saladin left for Damascus.18
There, the joys of family life awaited him – he had seventeen sons – but he was now fifty-four and worn out. His son Zahir could not bear to leave his father, perhaps sensing they would never meet again: touchingly, he kept saying goodbye, then riding back to kiss Saladin again. At the palace, Ibn Shaddad found the Sultan playing with one of his baby sons in a portico amid his gardens while Frankish barons and Turkish amirs awaited an audience.
A few days later, after welcoming the haj caravan from Mecca, he was struck down by a fever, probably typhoid. His doctors bled him, but he grew worse. When he asked for warm water, it was too cold. ‘Heavens above!’ he exclaimed. ‘Is nobody able to get the water just right!’ At dawn on 3 March 1193, he died listening to recitations of the Koran. ‘I and others would have given our lives for him,’ said Ibn Shaddad who reflected:
Then these years and their players passed away
As though they all had been merely dreams.
MUAZZAM ISA: THE OTHER JESUS
Saladin’s sons spent the next six years fighting among themselves in ever-changing combinations, mediated by their shrewd uncle Safadin. The three eldest sons, Afdal, Zahir and Aziz received Damascus, Aleppo and Egypt, while Safadin ruled Outrejourdain and Edessa.
Afdal, now twenty-two, inherited Jerusalem, which he cherished. He built the Mosque of Omar right next to the Church and settled north Africans in a Maghrebi quarter where he built the Afdaliyya Madrassa within a few metres of the Western Wall.
Afdal, drunk and inept, found it hard to inspire loyalty and Jerusalem was tossed between the warring brothers. Just when Aziz had won the war and emerged as sultan, he was killed out hunting. The surviving brothers Afdal and Zahir ganged up on their uncle, but Safadin defeated both and seized the empire, ruling as sultan for twenty years. Cold, elegant and dour, Safadin was no Saladin: not one contemporary describes him with affection, but everyone respected him. He was ‘brilliantly successful, probably the ablest of his line’. In Jerusalem, Safadin commissioned the double-gate – the Gate of the Chain and the Gate of Divine Presence, probably the site of the Crusaders’ Beautiful Gate – using exquisite Frankish spolia from the Templar cloister and featuring a twin-domed porch and capitals with carvings of animals and lions: this still forms the main western entrance to the Temple Mount. But even before he became sultan, in 1198, his second son, Muazzam Isa (Isa being the Arabic for Jesus), was given Syria.
In 1204, Muazzam made Jerusalem his capital, and Amaury’s palace his home. The most popular member of the family since his uncle Saladin, Muazzam was easy-going and open-minded. When he visited scholars to study philosophy and science, he simply walked to their houses like an ordinary student. ‘I saw him in Jerusalem,’ recalled the historian Ibn Wasil. ‘Men, women and boys were jostling him and no one pushed them away. In spite of his boldness and high sense of honour, he had little taste for ostentation. He rode without being accompanied by the royal standards, with only a small escort. On his head he wore a yellow cap and made his way through the markets and streets without a pathway being cleared for him.’
One of Jerusalem’s most prolific builders, Muazzam restored the walls, built seven hulking towers and converted the Crusader structures on the Temple Mount into Muslim shrines.* In 1209, he settled 300 Jewish families from France and England in Jerusalem. When the Jewish poet of Spain, Judah al-Harizi, made his pilgrimage, he praised the dynasty of Muazzam and Saladin even as he mourned the Temple: ‘We went out every day to weep for Zion, we grieved her destroyed palaces, we ascended the Mount of Olives to prostrate ourselves before the Eternal One. What torment to see our holy courts converted into an alien temple.’ Suddenly, in 1218, Muazzam’s achievements were thrown into peril when John of Brienne, titular King of Jerusalem,† led the Fifth Crusade to attack Egypt. The Crusaders besieged the port of Damietta. Safadin, now seventy-four years old, led out his armies but died when he heard that the Chain Tower of Damietta had fallen. Muazzam hastened from Jerusalem to Egypt to help his elder brother Kamil, the new Sultan of Egypt. But the brothers panicked and twice offered Jerusalem to the Crusaders if they would leave Egypt. In the spring of 1219, with the family empire in jeopardy, Muazzam took the heartbreaking decision to destroy all his fortifications in Jerusalem, arguing that ‘if the Franks took it, they would kill everyone there and dominate Syria’.
Jerusalem was left defenceless and half-empty – her inhabitants fled in droves. ‘Women, girls and old men gathered on the Haram, tore their hair and clothes and scattered in all directions’ as if it were ‘the Day of Judgement’. Yet the Crusaders foolishly refused the brothers’ offers of Jerusalem – and the Crusade itself fell apart.
Once the Crusaders had departed, Kamil and Muazzam, who had cooperated so well during the ultimate crisis, embarked on a vicious fraternal war for supremacy. Jerusalem did not really recover until the nineteenth century. Fabled before and afterwards for her walls, she was to be without them for three centuries. Yet the city was about to change hands again in a most unlikely peace deal.19
EMPEROR FREDERICK II:
WONDER OF THE WORLD, BEAST OF THE APOCALYPSE
On 9 November 1225, at the cathedral in Brindisi, Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Sicily, married Yolande, fifteen-year-old Queen of Jerusalem. As soon as the wedding was over, Frederick assumed the title of king of Jerusalem ready to set off on his Crusade. His enemies claimed that he proceeded to seduce his new wife’s ladies-in-waiting while cavorting with his harem of Saracen odalisques. This appalled his father-in-law John of Brienne and upset the pope. But Frederick was already the most powerful monarch in Europe – he was later to be known as Stupor Mundi, the Wonder of the World – and he did everything in his own way.
Frederick of Hohenstaufen, green-eyed and ginger-haired, half-German and half-Norman, had been raised in Sicily and there was nowhere else in Europe quite like his court in Palermo, which combined Norman, Arab and Greek cultures in a unique blend of the Christian and the Islamic. It was this upbringing that made Frederick so unusual and he certainly flaunted his eccentricities. His entourage usually featured a sultanic harem, a zoo, fifty falconers (he wrote a book called The Art of Hunting with Birds), an Arab bodyguard, Jewish and Muslim scholars and often a Scottish magician and hierophant. He was certainly more Levantine in culture than any other king in Christendom but that did not stop him ruthlessly suppressing Arab rebels in Sicily – he used his own spur to rip open the belly of their captured leader. He deported the Arabs from Sicily but built them a new Arab town in Lucera with its own mosques and a palace which became his favourite residence. Similarly he enforced anti-Jewish laws while he patronised Jewish savants, welcomed Jewish settlers and insisted they be fairly treated.
Yet it was power not exotica that consumed Frederick, who devoted his life to defending his vast inheritance, stretching from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, against envious popes who excommunicated him twice, denounced him as the Anti-Christ and blackened him with the most outlandish calumnies. He was alleged to be a secret atheist or Muslim who said Moses, Jesus and Muhammad were frauds. He was portrayed as a medieval Dr Frankenstein who had sealed a dying man in a barrel to see if his soul could escape; who had dis-embowelled a man to study his digestion; and locked children in isolation-cells to see how they developed language.
Frederick took himself and his family’s rights very seriously: he was actually a conventional Christian who was convinced that as emperor he should be a universal holy monarch on the Byzantine model and that as the descendant of generations of Crusaders and the heir to Charlemagne, he must liberate Jerusalem. He had already taken the Cross twice but kept delaying his departure.
Now that he was king of Jerusalem, he planned his expedition in earnest – but of course after his own fashion. He deposited his pregnant queen of Jerusalem in his Palermo harem, promising the pope that he was departing on Crusade – but Yolande, aged sixteen, died after giving birth to a son. Since Frederick was king of Jerusalem by marriage, his son now assumed the title. But he was not going to let that detail interfere with his new approach to crusading.
The Emperor hoped to win Jerusalem by exploiting the rivalries of the House of Saladin. Indeed Sultan Kamil offered him Jerusalem in return for help against Muazzam who held the city. Frederick finally set off in 1227, only to fall ill and return – at which Pope Gregory IX excommunicated him, which was more than an inconvenience for a Crusader. He sent his Teutonic Knights and infantry on ahead and by the time he joined them in Acre in September 1228, Muazzam was dead and Kamil had occupied Palestine – and withdrawn his offer.
However, Kamil was now having to fight Muazzam’s sons as well as Frederick and his army. He could not handle both threats. Emperor and sultan were too weak to fight for Jerusalem so they opened secret negotiations.
Kamil was as unconventional as Frederick. As a boy, Safadin’s son had been knighted by the Lionheart himself. While emperor and sultan negotiated the sharing of Jerusalem, they debated Aristotelian philosophy and Arab geometry. ‘I’ve no real ambition to hold Jerusalem,’ Frederick told Kamil’s envoy, ‘I simply want to safeguard my reputation with the Christians.’ The Muslims wondered if Christianity was ‘a game to him’. The sultan sent the emperor ‘dancing girls’ while the latter entertained his Muslim guests with Christian dancers. Patriarch Gerold denounced Frederick’s singing girls and jugglers as ‘persons not only of ill-repute but unworthy to be mentioned by Christians’, which of course he then proceeded to do. Between negotiating sessions, Frederick hunted with his falcons and seduced new mistresses, playing the troubadour to write to one of them: ‘Alas I didn’t think that separation from my lady would be so hard remembering her sweet companionship. Happy song, go to the flower of Syria, to her who holds my heart in prison. Ask that most loving lady to remember her servant who shall suffer from love of her until he has done all she wills him to do.’
When the negotiations wavered, Frederick marched his troops down the coast to Jaffa in the footsteps of Richard, threatening Jerusalem. This did the trick and on 11 February 1229, he achieved the undreamable: in return for ten years’ peace, Kamil ceded Jerusalem and Bethlehem with a corridor to the sea. In Jerusalem, the Muslims kept the Temple Mount with freedom of entry and worship under their qadi. The deal ignored the Jews (who had mostly fled the city), but this treaty of shared sovereignty remains the most daring peace deal in Jerusalem’s history.
Yet both worlds were horrified. In Damascus, Muazzam’s son Nasir Daud ordered public mourning. The throng sobbed at the news. Kamil insisted, ‘we’ve only conceded some churches and ruined houses. The sacred precincts and venerated Rock remain ours.’ But the deal worked for him – he was able to reunite Saladin’s empire under his crown. As for Frederick, Patriarch Gerold banned the excommunicate from visiting Jerusalem, and the Templars denounced him for not gaining the Temple Mount.
On Saturday 17 March, Frederick, escorted by his Arab bodyguards and pages, his German and Italian troops, the Teutonic Knights, and two English bishops, was met at the Jaffa Gate by the sultan’s representative, Shams al-Din, the Qadi of Nablus, who handed him the keys of Jerusalem.
The streets were empty, many Muslims had left, the Orthodox Syrians were sullen at this Latin resurgence – and Frederick’s time was short: the Bishop of Caesarea was on his way to enforce the patriarch’s ban and place the city under interdict.20
THE CROWNING OF FREDERICK II: GERMAN JERUSALEM
After spending the night in the palace of the Master of the Hospitallers, Frederick held a special Mass in the Holy Sepulchre, empty of priests but filled with his German soldiery. He rested his imperial crown on the altar of Calvary then placed it on his own head, a crown-wearing ceremony designed to project himself as the universal and paramount monarch of Christendom. He explained to Henry III of England: ‘We being a Catholic Emperor wore the crown which Almighty God provided for us from the throne of His Majesty when of His especial grace He exalted us on high among the princes of the world in the house of His servant David.’ Frederick was not one to underestimate his own importance: his eerie, magnificent mise-en-scène was the crowning of a sacred king, a mystical Emperor of the Last Days, in the Church that he saw as King David’s temple.
Afterwards, the emperor toured the Temple Mount, admiring the Dome and al-Aqsa, praising its beautiful mihrab, climbing on to Nur al-Din’s minbar. When he spotted a priest holding a New Testament trying to enter al-Aqsa, he knocked him over, shouting ‘Swine! By God if one of you comes here again without permission, I shall have his eyes!’
The Muslim custodians did not know what to make of this ginger-haired maverick: ‘Had he been a slave, he wouldn’t have been worth 200 dirhams,’ mused one of them tactlessly. That night Frederick noticed the silence of the muezzins: ‘O Qadi,’ he said to the sultan’s representative, ‘why didn’t the muezzins give the call to prayer last night?’
‘I recommended the muezzins not to give the call out of respect for the king,’ said the qadi.
‘You did wrong,’ replied Frederick. ‘My chief aim in passing the night in Jerusalem was to hear the muezzins and their cries of praise to God during the night.’ If his enemies saw this as Islamophilia, Frederick was probably more interested in making sure his unique deal worked. When the muezzins called the midday prayer, ‘all his valets and pages as well as his tutor’ prostrated themselves to pray.
That morning, the Bishop of Caesarea arrived with his interdict. The emperor left his garrison in the Tower of David and headed back to Acre where he was faced with the ungrateful hostility of barons and Templars. Now under papal attack in Italy, the emperor planned a secret departure, but at dawn on 1 May the Acre mob, collecting the offal of Butchers Street, bombarded him with entrails and giblets. On his ship home to Brindisi, Frederick pined for his ‘flower of Syria’: ‘Ever since I went away, I’ve never endured such anguish as I did on board the ship. And now I believe I shall surely die if I don’t return to her soon.’21
He had not stayed long and he never returned, but Frederick remained officially the master of Jerusalem for ten years. Frederick gave the Tower of David and Royal Palace to the Teutonic Knights. He ordered their master, Hermann of Salza and Bishop Peter of Winchester, to repair the Tower (some of this work survives today) and fortify St Stephen’s (today’s Damascus) Gate. Franks reclaimed ‘their churches and had their old possessions restored to them’. The Jews were again banned. Without walls, Jerusalem was insecure: weeks later, the imams of Hebron and Nablus led 15,000 peasants into the city while the Christians cowered in the Tower. Acre sent an army to eject the Muslim invaders and Jerusalem remained Christian.*
In 1238, Sultan Kamil died, throwing the Saladin dynasty into further internecine wars, exacerbated by a new crusade under Count Thibault of Champagne. When the Crusaders were defeated, Muazzam’s son, Nasir Daud, galloped into Jerusalem and besieged the Tower of David for twenty-one days until it fell on 7 December 1239. He then destroyed the new fortifications, and the warring princes of the Saladin family took an oath of peace on the Temple Mount. But familial strife and the arrival of an English Crusade under Henry III’s brother, Richard, Earl of Cornwall, again forced the surrender of Jerusalem to the Franks. This time the Templars expelled the Muslims and regained the Temple Mount: the Dome and al-Aqsa became churches again. ‘I saw monks in charge of the Sacred Rock,’ recalled Ibn Wasil. ‘I saw on it bottles of wine for mass.’22 The Templars started to fortify the Holy City – but not fast enough: in order to fight his family rivals, the new sultan Salih Ayyub had hired a horde of freebooting Tartars, nomadic Central Asian horsemen displaced by the new Mongol empire. But he could now control them. To the horror of the Christians of Acre, 10,000 Khwarizmian Tartars rode towards Jerusalem.
BARKA KHAN AND THE TARTARS: CATASTROPHE
On 11 July 1244, the Tartar horsemen led by Barka Khan clattered into Jerusalem, fighting and hacking their way through the streets, smashing into the Armenian convent and murdering the monks and nuns. They destroyed churches and houses, plundering the Holy Sepulchre and setting it on fire. Coming upon the priests as they celebrated Mass the Tartars beheaded and disembowelled them at the altar. The bodies of the kings of Jerusalem were disinterred, their elaborate sarcophagi smashed; the stone at the door of Jesus’ tomb was shattered. The Franks, besieged in the Tower, appealed to Nasir Daud, who persuaded Barka to allow the garrison to leave in safety.
Six thousand Christians left for Jaffa but, seeing Frankish flags on the battlements and believing help had arrived, many turned back. The Tartars massacred 2,000 of them. Only 300 Christians reached Jaffa. When they had thoroughly destroyed Jerusalem, the Tartars galloped away.* Smouldering and smashed, Jerusalem would not be Christian again until 1917.23
In 1248, King Louis XI led the last effective Crusade and once again, the Crusaders hoped to win Jerusalem by conquering Egypt. In November 1249 the Crusaders advanced on Cairo, where Sultan Salih Ayyub was already dying. His widow, the sultana, Shajar al-Durr, took control, summoning her stepson Turanshah back from Syria. The Crusaders overreached themselves and were routed by the mamluks, the crack regiments of military slaves. Louis was captured. But the new sultan Turanshah neglected his own soldiers: on 2 May 1250, he was holding a banquet to celebrate the victory, attended by many of the Crusader prisoners, when mamluks, led by a blond giant named Baibars, then aged twenty-seven, burst in, swords drawn.
Baibars slashed at the sultan who fled bleeding down to the Nile as the mamluks fired arrows into him. He stood wounded in the river begging for his life until a mamluk waded in, cut off his head and sliced open his chest. His heart was cut out and shown to King Louis of France at a banquet; no doubt he lost his appetite.
There ended the dynasty of Saladin in Egypt, a downfall that condemned Jerusalem, now half-deserted, half-ruined, to ten chaotic years tossed between different warlords and princelings as they fought for power* while a fearsome shadow fell across the Middle East. In 1258, the Mongols, the shamanist hordes from the Far East who had already conquered the largest empire the world had ever known, sacked Baghdad, massacring 80,000 people and killing the caliph. They took Damascus and galloped as far as Gaza, raiding Jerusalem on the way. Islam would need a ferocious champion to defeat them. The man who rose to the challenge was Baibars.24
Before the end of the world, all prophecies have to be fulfilled – and the Holy City has to be given back to the Christian Church.
Christopher Columbus, Letter to King Ferdinand and
Queen Isabella of Spain
And she [the Wife of Bath] had thrice been to Jerusalem.
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
In Jerusalem, there is not a place one calls truly sacred.
Ibn Taymiyya, In Support of Pious Visits to Jerusalem
The practice [of the Holy Fire] is still going on. There occur under the eyes of Muslims a number of hateful things.
Mujir al-Din, History of Jerusalem and Hebron
The Greeks [are] our worst and atrocious enemies, the Georgians are the worst heretics, like the Greeks and equal in malice; the Armenians are very beautiful, rich and generous, [and] the deadly enemies of the Greeks and Georgians.
Francesco Suriano, Treatise on the Holy Land
We beheld the famous city of our delight and we rent our garments. Jerusalem is mostly desolate and in ruins and without walls. As for the Jews, the poorest have remained [living] in heaps of rubbish, for the law is that a Jew may not rebuild his ruined house.
Rabbi Obadiah of Bertinoro, Letters
BAIBARS: THE PANTHER
Baibars was a fair-haired and blue-eyed Turk from Central Asia sold as a child to a Syrian prince. But, despite his towering barrel-chested physique, he had an unsettling defect: a white cataract on the iris of one of his eyes which led his owner to sell him on to the sultan in Cairo. Salih Ayyub, Saladin’s great-nephew, bought Turkish slaves ‘in batches like sandgrouse’ to form his mamluk regiments. He could not trust his own family but thought ‘one slave is more loyal than 300 sons’. Baibars, like all these pagan slaveboys, was converted to Islam and trained as a slave-soldier, a mamluk. He excelled with the arbalest steel crossbow, winning the nickname the Arbalestier and joined the Bahriyya regiment, the crack soldiers who defeated the Crusaders and became known as the Turkish Lions and the Islamic Templars.
When Baibars had won the trust of his master, he was manumitted – released from slavery – and climbed the ranks. The mamluks were loyal to their masters and even more loyal to each other – but ultimately each of these orphan-warriors owed nothing to anyone except himself and Allah. After his role in the killing of the sultan, Baibars lost out in the power struggle and fled to Syria where he offered his crossbow to the highest bidder in the civil wars raging between the local princelings. At one point, he seized and plundered Jerusalem. But the power was in Egypt and Baibars was finally recalled there by the latest general to seize the crown, Qutuz.
When the Mongols raided Syria in force, Baibars commanded the vanguard that hurried north to stop them. On 3 September 1260, Baibars defeated the Mongol army at Goliath’s Spring (Ain Jalut) near Nazareth. The Mongols would return and even reach Jerusalem again, but they had been halted for the first time. Much of Syria fell under Cairo’s rule and Baibars was hailed as the Father of Victory and the Lion of Egypt. He expected a reward – the governorship of Aleppo – but Sultan Qutuz refused. One day, while the sultan was hunting, Baibars (literally) stabbed him in the back. The junta of mamluk amirs granted him the crown as the man who had killed the monarch.
As soon as he took power, Baibars set about the destruction of the rump Crusader kingdom surviving on the Palestinian coast. In 1263, on his way to war, he arrived in Jerusalem. The Mamluks revered the city and Baibars began the Mamluk mission to resanctify and embellish the Temple Mount and the area around it, today’s Muslim Quarter. He ordered the Dome and al-Aqsa to be renovated and in order to compete with Christian Easter, he promoted a new festival, possibly started under Saladin, by building a dome over the tomb of the Prophet Moses near Jericho. For the next eight centuries, Jerusalemites celebrated Nabi Musa with a procession from the Dome of the Rock to Baibars’ shrine where they would gather for prayers, picnics and parties.
Just north-west of the walls, the Sultan built a lodge for his favourite order of Sufis. Like many of the Mamluks, he was a patron of the populist mysticism of the Sufis who believed that passion, chants, saintly cults, dances and self-mortification could bring Muslims closer to God than rigid traditional prayer. Baibars’ closest adviser was a Sufi sheikh with whom he would recite and dance the Sufi zikr. Baibars implicitly trusted the sheikh and did nothing without his approval while allowing him to organize the looting of churches and synagogues and the lynching of Jews and Christians.* It was a new era: Baibars and his Mamluk successors, who were to rule Jerusalem for the next 300 years, were harsh, intolerant military dictators or juntas. The old age of Islamic chivalry, personified by Saladin, was gone. The Mamluks were a Turkish master-caste who forced Jews to wear yellow turbans, while the Christians had to wear blue. For both, but especially the Jews, their days as protected dhimmi were past. The Turkish-speaking Mamluks disdained Arabs too and only Mamluks were allowed to wear furs or armour or ride a horse in towns. At their gaudy court, the sultans awarded their courtiers colourful titles such as Bearer of the Royal Polo Stick and Amir-to-be-Serenadedby-Music – the game of politics there was as often lethal as it was lucrative.
Baibar’s symbol was a prowling panther which he used to mark his victories – eighty of them have been found on inscriptions between Egypt and Turkey and in Jerusalem, and they still prowl the Lions’ Gate. No symbol was more appropriate for this terrifying predator with the white eye who now embarked on a spree of conquests.
When he had inspected Jerusalem, he attacked Acre which withstood the attack but he was to return often. Meanwhile, one by one, he stormed the other Crusader cities, killing with deranged, sadistic rapture. He received Frankish ambassadors surrounded by Christian heads, crucified, bisected and scalped his enemies, and built heads into the walls of fallen towns. He enjoyed taking risks like scouting incognito into enemy cities, negotiating with his enemies in disguise, and even when he was in Cairo he inspected his offices in the middle of the night, so restless and paranoid that he suffered insomnia and stomach-aches.
Acre alone defied him* but he marched north to conquer Antioch, whence he chillingly wrote to its prince ‘to tell you what we’ve just done. The dead were heaped up, you should have seen your Muslim enemy trample on the place you celebrate mass, cutting the throats of the monks on the altar, the fire running through your palaces. If you’d been there to see it, you’d have wished you’d never been alive!’ He marched into Anatolia and crowned himself Sultan of Rum. But the Mongols had returned and Baibars rushed back to defend Syria.
On 1 June 1277, he fell victim to his own macabre ingenuity, when he prepared a drink of poisoned qumiz – fermented mare’s milk, relished by Turks and Mongols – for a guest, but then forgetfully drank it himself.1 His successors finished his work.
On 18 May 1291, the Mamluks stormed the Frankish capital Acre and slaughtered most of the defenders, enslaving the rest (girls were sold for just one drachma each). The title King of Jerusalem was now united with that of King of Cyprus. But it survived only as a picturesque ornament –and it remains so today. There ended the Kingdom of Jerusalem.* Even the real Jerusalem only just survived – less a city, more of a senescent village, unwalled and half-deserted, raided at will by Mongol horsemen.
In 1267, a pilgrim, the old Spanish rabbi known as Ramban, mourned her eclipse:
I compare you, my mother, to the woman whose son died in her lap and painfully there is milk in her breasts and she suckles the pups of dogs. And despite all that, your lovers abandoned you and your enemies desolated you, but faraway they remember and glorify the Holy City.2
RAMBAN
Rabbi Moses ben Nachman, known by his Hebrew acronym RAMBAN or just Nahmanides, was amazed to find that there were only 2,000 inhabitants left in Jerusalem, just 300 Christians and only two Jews, brothers, who were dyers like the Jews under the Crusades. The sadder Jerusalem seemed to the Jews, the more sacred it became, the more poetical: ‘Whatever is more holy’, thought Ramban, ‘is more ruined.’
The Ramban was one of the most inspiring intellectuals of his time, a doctor, philosopher, mystic and Torah scholar. In 1263, he had defended Barcelona’s Jews so adeptly against Dominican accusations of blasphemy that King James of Aragon remarked, ‘I’ve never seen a man defend a wrong cause so well,’ and gave Ramban 300 gold pieces. But the Dominicans then tried to have Ramban executed. As a compromise, the septuagenarian was banished – and set out on his pilgrimage.
He believed that Jews should not just mourn Jerusalem but return, settle and rebuild before the coming of the Messiah – what we might call religious Zionism. Only Jerusalem could soothe his homesickness:
I left my family, I forsook my home, my sons and daughters. I left my soul with the sweet and dear children whom I’ve brought up on my knee. But the loss of all else is compensated for by the joy of a day in thy courts, O Jerusalem! I wept bitterly but I found joy in my tears.
The Ramban commandeered ‘a broken-down house built with marble columns and a handsome dome.* We took it for a prayer house because the city is a shambles and whoever wants to appropriate ruins does so.’ He also retrieved the Torah scrolls hidden from the Mongols, but soon after his death, the raiders were back.3
But this time there was a difference: some of them were Christians. In October 1299, the Christian King of Armenia, Hethoum II, galloped into Jerusalem with 10,000 Mongols. The city quaked before yet another barbaric sacking and the few Christians ‘hid in caverns out of fright.’ The Mongol Il-Khan had recently converted to Islam yet the Mongols had little interest in Jerusalem for they left her to Hethoum who rescued the Christians, held ‘festivities in the Holy Sepulchre’ and ordered the Armenian St Jameses and the Virgin’s Tomb to be repaired – and then, strangely, after just two weeks, he headed back to see his Mongol master in Damascus. However the century-long duel between Mamluks and Mongols was over and once again the magneticism of Jerusalem’s sanctity drew the world back. In Cairo, a new sultan came to the throne who revered Jerusalem – amongst other things, he called himself ‘Sultan al-Quds.’ Nasir Muhammad dubbed himself The Eagle; his people called him The Exquisite – and as the leading historian of this period writes, ‘he was perhaps the greatest Mamluk sultan’ but also ‘the nastiest.’
NASIR MUHAMMAD: THE EXQUISITE EAGLE
Ever since he was eight, he had been humiliatingly tossed like a royal doll between the warlords of the Mamluk junta. Twice he had been raised to the throne and twice discarded. He was the younger son of a slave who had risen to become a great sultan and his elder brother, the conqueror of Acre, had been assassinated, so when Nasir Muhammad seized the throne for the third time at the age of twenty-six, he was determined to keep it. His sultanic eagle suited his style – aesthetic splendour, aquiline paranoia and the swoop of sudden death. His companions were promoted and enriched – but then strangled, bisected, poisoned without warning and he seemed to prefer horses to people: the limping sultan could supposedly cite the bloodlines of all his 7,800 racehorses and often paid more for a horse than for the most gorgeous slaveboy. Yet everything The Exquisite did – his marriage to a descendant of Genghis Khan, his twenty-five children, his 1,200 concubines – he did with the meticulous magnificence he brought to Jerusalem.
In 1317, he himself arrived on pilgrimage and proceeded to demonstrate to his generals that their sacred duty was to embellish the Temple Mount and the streets around it. Assisted by his best friend and Syrian viceroy, Tankiz, the sultan refortified the Tower of David, adding a Friday mosque for the garrison, and raised monumental colonnades and madrassas on the Temple Mount, reroofing the Dome and al-Aqsa, adding the minaret at the Gate of the Chain, and the Gate of the Cotton-sellers and Cotton-Sellers Market – all of which can be seen today.
Nasir favoured the Sufi route to reach God and built five convents for his orders of mystics. In their gleaming new lodges, they restored some of the holy magic to Jerusalem with their dancing, singing, trances and sometimes even self-mutilation, all to achieve the soaring emotion necessary to reach up towards God.
The sultan’s men got the message: he and his successors exiled outof-favour amirs to Jerusalem where they were expected to spend their ill-gotten wealth on sumptuous complexes that contained palaces, madrassas and tombs. The closer to the Temple Mount, the sooner they would arise on Judgement Day. They constructed enormous arched substructures and then built on top of them. These buildings* were ingeniously squeezed onto the roofs of earlier ones around the gates of the Noble Sanctuary.†
Nasir found Jerusalem – or at least the Muslim Quarter – in dust and cobwebs and left her in marble, so when Ibn Battutah visited, he found a city that was ‘large and imposing’. Islamic pilgrims poured into al-Quds, exploring from the hell of Gehenna to the paradise of the Dome and reading the books of fadail that told them ‘a sin committed in Jerusalem is the equivalent of a thousand sins and a good work there equal to a thousand’. He who lived there ‘is like a warrior in the jihad’ while to die there ‘is like dying in heaven’. Jerusalem’s mysticism blossomed to such an extent that Muslims started to circumambulate, kiss and anoint the Rock as they had not done since the seventh century. The fundamentalist scholar Ibn Taymiyya railed against Nasir and these Sufi superstitions, warning that Jerusalem ranked only as a pious visit – a ziyara – not the equivalent of the haj to Mecca. The sultan imprisoned this puritanical dissident six times but to no avail and Ibn Taymiyya provided the inspiration for the harsh Wahabiism of Saudi Arabia and today’s Jihadists.
The Exquisite sultan no longer trusted the Turkish Mamluks who had become the elite so he started to buy Georgian or Circassian slaveboys from the Caucasus to provide his bodyguard and they influenced his decisions in Jerusalem: he granted the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to the Georgians. But the Latins had not forgotten her either: in 1333, he allowed King Robert of Naples (and Jerusalem) to repair parts of the Church and take possession of the Cenacle on Mount Zion where he started a Franciscan monastery.
The ailing tiger is the most dangerous. The sultan fell ill but he had made his friend Tankiz ‘so powerful he became afraid of him’. In 1340, Tankiz was arrested and poisoned. Nasir himself died a year later, succeeded by his many sons. But ultimately, the new Caucasian slaves overthrew the dynasty, founding a new line of sultans who favoured the Georgians in Jerusalem. On the other hand, the Catholic Latins – the heirs of the hated Crusaders – were there on sufferance under the repressive Mamluks whose paroxysms of violence terrorized Christians and Jews alike. When the Cypriot king attacked Alexandria in 1365, the Church was closed down and the Franciscans dragged off to be publicly executed in Damascus. The Franciscan order was allowed to return but the Mamluks built minarets overshadowing the Church and the Ramban Synagogue to emphasize the supremacy of Islam.
In 1399, the dread Central Asian conqueror Tamurlane captured Baghdad and smashed into Syria just as a Mamluk boy-sultan and his tutor set out on their pilgrimage to Jerusalem.4
TAMURLANE AND THE TUTOR: PILGRIM CITY
The royal tutor was the most celebrated scholar in the Islamic world. Now aged around seventy, Ibn Khaldun had served the monarchs of Morocco, then (after a spell in prison) Granada, Tunisia and finally (after another spell in prison) the Mamluk sultan. In between spells in power and in prison, he wrote his masterpiece, the Muqaddimah, a world history that still sparkles today. The sultan therefore appointed him tutor to his son, Faraj, who succeeded to the throne as a child.
Now, as the peppery historian showed Jerusalem to the ten-year-old sultan, Tamurlane besieged Mamluk Damascus. Timur the Lame – known as Tamurlane – had risen to power in 1170 as a local warlord in Central Asia. In thirty-five years of incessant warfare, this harsh genius, of Turkic descent, had conquered much of the Near East, which he ruled from the saddle, promoting himself as the heir to Genghis Khan. In Delhi, he slaughtered 100,000; at Isfahan, he killed 70,000, building twenty-eight towers of 1,500 heads each, and he had never been defeated.
Yet Tamurlane was not just a warrior. His palaces and gardens in Samarkand displayed his sophisticated taste; he was an ace chessplayer and a history-buff who enjoyed debates with philosophers. Not surprisingly, he had always wanted to meet Ibn Khaldun.
Yet the Mamluks were in a state of panic: if Damascus fell, so would Palestine and perhaps Cairo too. The old pedagogue and the boy-sultan hurried back to Cairo but the Mamluks decided to send the pair into Syria to negotiate with Tamurlane – and save the empire. At the same time, the Jerusalemites were debating what to do: how to save the Holy City from the invincible predator known as the Scourge of God?
In January 1401, Tamurlane, encamped around Damascus, heard that Sultan Faraj and Ibn Khaldun awaited his pleasure. He had no interest in the boy but he was fascinated by Ibn Khaldun whom he immediately summoned. As a politician, Ibn Khaldun represented the sultan, but as a historian, he naturally longed to meet the supreme man of the era – even if he was not sure if he would emerge dead or alive. The two were almost the same age: the grizzled conqueror received the venerable historian in his palatial tent.
Ibn Khaldun was awed by this ‘greatest and mightiest of kings’ whom he found ‘highly intelligent and perspicacious, addicted to debate and argumentation about what he knows and also what he does not know’. Ibn Khaldun persuaded Tamurlane to release some Mamluk prisoners, but the Scourge of God would not negotiate: Damascus was stormed and sacked in what Ibn Khaldun called ‘an absolutely dastardly and abominable deed’. The road to Jerusalem was now open. The city’s ulema decided to surrender the city to Tamurlane and despatched a delegation with the keys of the Dome of the Rock. But when the Jerusalemites arrived in Damascus, the conqueror had instead ridden north to rout the rising power in Anatolia, the Ottoman Turks. Then, in February 1405, en route to conquer China, Tamurlane died and Jerusalem remained Mamluk. Ibn Khaldun, who had made it home to Cairo from his meeting with Tamurlane, died in his bed a year later. His pupil Sultan Faraj never forgot his eventful cultural tour: he frequently returned to Jerusalem, holding court on the Temple Mount, beneath the royal parasol, amid the yellow banners of the sultanate, handing out gold to the poor.
There were only 6,000 Jerusalemites, with just 200 Jewish and 100 Christian families, in a small city with outsized passions. The city was dangerous and unstable: in 1405 Jerusalemites rioted against exorbitant taxes and chased the Mamluk governor out of town. The archives of the Haram give us a feel for Jerusalem’s dynasties of religious judges and Sufi sheikhs, exiled Mamluk amirs, and wealthy merchants in a world of Koran study, book-collecting, trade in olive oil and soap, and crossbow and sword practice. But now that Crusades were no longer a threat, Christian pilgrims were milked as the chief source of income. However, they were scarcely welcomed: they were frequently arrested on trumped-up charges until they paid arbitrary fines. ‘You will have either have to pay,’ one interpreter explained to his imprisoned Christian charges, ‘or be beaten to death.’5
It was hard to say who was the more dangerous – the venal Mamluks, the disreputable pilgrims, the feuding Christians or the greedy Jerusalemites. Many pilgrims were so villainous that the locals and travellers were warned, ‘Protect yourself from anyone travelling to Jerusalem’, while even Muslims liked to say ‘no one is so corrupt as the residents of holy cities’.
Meanwhile Mamluk sultans sometimes swept down on the city to repress Christians and Jews who already faced periodic lynchings by the Jerusalemite crowds.
The corruption and disorder started at court in Cairo: the empire was still ruled by Caucasian sultans so, even though the Catholic Franciscans enjoyed European support, Christian Jerusalem was dominated by the Armenians and the Georgians who hated one another – and of course the Catholics. The Armenians, who were aggressively expanding their Quarter around St Jameses, managed to bribe the Mamluks to wrest Calvary from the Georgians, who then outbid them and won it back. But not for long. In the course of thirty years, Calvary changed hands five times.
The bribes and profits were enormous because the pilgrimage had become wildly popular in Europe. Europeans did not feel that the Crusades were over – after all, the Catholic reconquest of Islamic Spain was a Crusade – but while there were no expeditions to liberate Jerusalem, all Christians felt they knew Jerusalem even if they had never been. Jerusalem appeared in sermons, paintings and tapestries. Many towns featured Jerusalem Chapels, founded by Jerusalem Brotherhoods made up of ex-pilgrims or people who could not make the trip. The Palace of Westminster had its Jerusalem Chamber and from Paris in the west to Prussia and Livonia in the east, many places now boasted these local Jerusalems. The only Jerusalem in England, a tiny village in Lincolnshire, dates from this revived enthusiasm. But thousands did travel there every year* and many of them were notoriously unsaintly: Chaucer’s saucy Wife of Bath had been to Jerusalem three times.
Pilgrims had to pay repeated fines and tolls just to enter Jerusalem and then the Church where the Mamluks also controlled the Sepulchre inside. They sealed the Church every night so pilgrims, for a price, could be locked inside for days and nights if they wished. The pilgrims found that the Church resembled a bazaar-cum-barbershop with stalls, shops, beds and large quantities of human hair: many believed that illness would be cured if they shaved themselves and placed the hair in the Sepulchre. Many of the pilgrims spent much time carving their initials into every shrine they visited while artful Muslims serviced the relic industry: pilgrims claimed that stillborn Muslim babies were embalmed and then sold to rich Europeans as the victims of the Massacre of the Innocents.
Some pilgrims were convinced that children conceived within the Church were specially blessed, and of course there was alcohol, so that the dark hours often became a candlelit, hard-drinking orgy in which good-natured hymn singing gave way to ugly brawls. The Sepulchre, said one disgusted pilgrim, was ‘a complete brothel.’ Another pilgrim, Arnold von Harff, a mischievous German knight, spent his time learning phrases in Arabic and Hebrew that give some clues to his preoccupations:
How much will you give me?
I will give you a gulden.
Are you a Jew?
Woman, let me sleep with you tonight.
Good madam, I am ALREADY in your bed.
The Franciscans guided and welcomed Catholic visitors: their itinerary, retracing the footsteps of Christ, started at what they believed was Pilate’s Praetorium, on the site of the Mamluk governor’s mansion. This became the first station of The Lord’s Way, later the Via Dolorosa. Pilgrims were shocked to find Christian sites had been Islamicized, such as St Anne’s Church – the birthplace of the Virgin Mary’s mother – occupied by Saladin’s madrassa. The German friar Felix Fabri sneaked into this shrine, while Harff risked his life by penetrating the Temple Mount in disguise – and both recorded their adventures. Their entertaining travelogues revealed a new tone of inquisitive lightheartedness as well as reverence.
However, Christians and Jews were never quite safe from the capricious Mamluk repression – and sanctity in Jerusalem was so infectious that when the two older religions started to fight for David’s Tomb on Mount Zion, the sultans claimed it for the Muslims.
There was now a settled Jewish community of about 1,000 in what became the Jewish Quarter. They prayed in their Ramban synagogue, as well as around the gates of the Temple Mount (particularly at their study house by the Western Wall) and on the Mount of Olives, where they began to bury their dead ready for Judgement Day. But they had come to revere the Christian shrine of David’s Tomb (which had nothing to do with the real David but dated from the Crusades), part of the Cenacle, controlled by the Franciscans. The Christians tried to restrict their access, so the Jews complained to Cairo – with unfortunate consequences for both. The sultan of the day, Barsbay, outraged to discover that the Christians held such a site, travelled up to Jerusalem, destroyed the Franciscan chapel and instead built a mosque inside David’s Tomb. A few years later, one of his successors, Sultan Jaqmaq, seized the whole of Mount Zion for Islam. And it got worse: old restrictions were enforced, new ones devised. The size of Christian and Jewish turbans was limited; in the baths men had to wear metal neck-rings like cattle; Jewish and Christian women were banned from the baths altogether; Jaqmaq forbade Jewish doctors to treat Muslims.* After the collapse of the Ramban Synagogue in a storm, the qadi banned its rebuilding, claiming it belonged to the neighbouring mosque. When Jewish bribes overturned the decision, the local ulema demolished it.
On 10 July 1452, the Jerusalemites launched an anti-Christian pogrom, digging up the bones of Christian monks and tearing down a new balustrade in the Sepulchre which was borne in triumph to al-Aqsa. Christians were sometimes insanely provocative. In 1391, four Franciscan monks shouted in al-Aqsa that ‘Muhammad was a libertine, murderer, glutton’ who believed ‘in whoring’! The qadi offered them the chance to recant. When they refused, they were tortured and beaten almost to death. A bonfire was built in the courtyard of the Church where, ‘almost drunk with rage’, the mob hacked them into pieces ‘so that not even a human shape remained’, and then kebabbed them.6
However, deliverance was at hand and, when a more tolerant sultan came to power, it was a dish of French cuisine that would change the destiny of Christian Jerusalem.
THE SULTAN AND THE CHRISTIAN OMELETTES
Qaitbay, a Circassian slaveboy who became a Mamluk general, had spent years of exile in Jerusalem. Since he was banned from entering a Muslim household, he befriended the Franciscans who introduced him to a French dish: it seems he remained nostalgic about their vegetable omelettes when he ascended the Mamluk throne in 1486, for he welcomed the friars to Cairo and allowed them to build in the Church – and gave them back Mount Zion. They wanted vengeance on the Jews, whom Qaitbay therefore banned from ever approaching the Church or the convent on Mount Zion: Jews were routinely lynched and often killed even for absentmindedly passing the Church, a situation that lasted until 1917. But the sultan also allowed the Jews to rebuild their Ramban Synagogue. And he did not neglect the Temple Mount either: when he visited in 1475, he commissioned his Ashrafiyya madrassa that was so beautiful it was described as ‘the third jewel of Jerusalem’ while his fountain there, a bellshaped dome resplendent in red and cream ablaq, remains the most gorgeous in the whole city.
But for all Qaitbay’s interest, the Mamluks were losing their grip. When the qadi of the city, Mujir al-Din, watched the daily sunset parade at the Tower of David, ‘it was completely neglected and disorganized’. In 1480, Bedouin attacked Jerusalem, almost capturing the governor who had to gallop across the Temple Mount and out through the Jaffa Gate to escape. ‘Jerusalem is mostly desolate’, observed Rabbi Obadiah of Bertinoro, just after the Bedouin attack. From the distance, ‘I saw a ruined city’, agreed one of his disciples, with jackals and lions loping across the hills. Yet Jerusalem was still breathtaking. When Obadiah’s follower viewed it from the Olivet, ‘my spirit overflowed, my heart mourned and I sat down and wept and rent my garments’. Mujir al-Din, who loved his city, thought it was ‘filled with brilliance and beauty – one of the famous wonders.’*
In 1453, the Ottomans finally conquered Constantinople, inheriting the splendour and ideology of the universal Roman empire. For generation after generation, the Ottomans were bedevilled by wars of succession and the challenge of a resurgent Persia. In 1481, Qaitbay welcomed the fugitive Ottoman prince, Jem Sultan. Hoping that a dissident Ottoman kingdom would divide the dynasty, Qaitbay offered Jem the kingdom of Jerusalem. The gambit led to ten years of wasteful warfare. Meanwhile both empires were threatened by rising powers – the Mamluks by Portuguese advances in the Indian Ocean, the Ottomans by the new Persian shah, Ismail, who united his country by imposing the Twelver Shiism that is still revered there. This pushed the Ottomans and Mamluks together in a short-lived, pragmatic embrace: it was to prove the kiss of death.7
This noble Jerusalem has been the object of desire of the kings of all nations, especially the Christians who, ever since Jesus was born in the city, have waged all their wars over Jerusalem … Jerusalem was the place of prayer of the tribes of djinn … It contains the shrines of 124,000 prophets.
Evliya Celebi, Book of Travels
Suleiman saw the Prophet in his dream: ‘O Suleiman, you should embellish the Dome of the Rock and rebuild Jerusalem.’
Evliya Celebi, Book of Travels
The great prize contended by several sects is the Holy Sepulchre, a privilege contested with so much fury and animosity that they have sometimes proceeded to blows and wounds, at the door of the Sepulchre mingling their own blood with their ‘sacrifices’.
Henry Maundrell, Journey
So part we sadly in this troublous world
To meet with joy in sweet Jerusalem.
William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part Three
Rather than walk about holy places we can thus pause at our thoughts, examine our heart, and visit the real promised land.
Martin Luther, Table Talk
We shall find that the God of Israel is among us … for we must consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people upon us.
John Winthrop, A Modell of Christian Charity
THE SECOND SOLOMON AND HIS ROXELANA
On 24 August 1516, the Ottoman sultan, Selim the Grim, routed the Mamluk army not far from Aleppo, the battle that decided Jerusalem’s destiny: most of the Middle East would remain Ottoman for the next four centuries. On 20 March 1517, Selim arrived to take possession of Jerusalem. The ulema handed him the keys of al-Aqsa and the Dome at which he prostrated himself and exclaimed, ‘I am the possessor of the first qibla.’ Selim confirmed the traditional tolerance of the Christians and Jews and prayed on the Temple Mount. Then he rode on to subjugate Egypt. Selim had defeated Persia, conquered the Mamluks and clarified any succession dilemmas by killing his brothers, his nephews and probably some of his own sons. So when he died in September 1520, he was survived by just one son.1
Suleiman was ‘only twenty-five years old, tall and slender but tough with a thin and bony face’ and he found himself the master of an empire that stretched from the Balkans to the borders of Persia, from Egypt to the Black Sea. ‘In Baghdad, I am the Shah, in Byzantine realms, the Caesar; and in Egypt, the Sultan,’ he declared and to these titles he added that of caliph. No wonder Ottoman courtiers addressed their monarchs as the Padishah – emperor – who was, one of them wrote, ‘the most honoured and respected sovereign the world over.’ It was said that Suleiman dreamed he was visited by the Prophet who told him that ‘to repulse the Infidels,’ he must embellish the Sanctuary (Temple Mount) and rebuild Jerusalem’, but actually he needed no prompting. He was only too aware of himself as the Islamic emperor and, as his Slavic wife Roxelana would repeatedly hail him, ‘the Solomon of his age.’
Roxelana shared in Suleiman’s projects – and that included Jerusalem. She was probably a priest’s daughter kidnapped from Poland and sold into the sultanic harem where she caught Suleiman’s eye, bearing him five sons and a daughter. ‘Young but not beautiful, although graceful and petite,’ a contemporary portrait suggests she was large-eyed, rose-lipped and round-faced. Her letters to Suleiman on campaign catch something of her playful yet indomitable spirit: ‘My Sultan, there’s no limit to the burning anguish of separation. Nowspare this miserable one and don’t withhold your noble letters. When your letters are read, your servant and son Mir Mehmed and your slave and daughter Mihrimah weep and wail from missing you. Their weeping has driven me mad.’ Suleiman renamed her Hurrem al-Sultan, the Joy of the Sultan, whom he described in poems attributed to him as ‘my love, my moonlight, my springtime, my woman of the beautiful hair, my love of the slanted brow, my love of eyes full of mischief’ and officially as ‘the quintessence of queens, the light of the eye of the resplendent caliphate’. She became a wily politician, intriguing successfully to ensure Suleiman’s son by another woman did not succeed to the throne: the son was strangled in Suleiman’s presence.
Suleiman inherited Jerusalem and Mecca and believed that his Islamic prestige demanded that he beautify the sanctuaries of Islam: everything about him was on a grand scale, his ambitions boundless, his reign almost half a century long, his horizons vast – he fought almost continental wars from Europe and north Africa to Iraq and the Indian Ocean, from the gates of Vienna to Baghdad. His achievements in Jerusalem were so successful that the Old City today belongs more to him than anyone else: the walls look ancient and to many people they define the city as much as Dome, Wall or Church – but they and most of the gates were the creation of this contemporary of Henry VIII, both to secure the city and add to his own prestige. The sultan added a mosque, an entrance and a tower to the Citadel; he built an aqueduct to bring water into the city and nine fountains from which to drink it – including three on the Temple Mount; and finally he replaced the worn mosaics on the Dome of the Rock with glazed tiles decorated with lilies and lotus in turquoise, cobalt, white and yellow as they are today.*
Roxelana liked to endowcharitable foundations close to her husband’s projects, she commandeered a Mamluk palace to establish her al-Imara al-Amira al-Khasaki al-Sultan, a foundation known as the Flourishing Edifice that included a mosque, bakery, fifty-five-room hostel and soup-kitchen for the poor. Thus they made the Temple Mount and Jerusalem their own.
In 1553 Suleiman, soi-disant ‘Second Solomon and King of the World’, decided to inspect Jerusalem, but his far-flung wars intervened and, like Constantine before him, the man who had transformed the city never got to see his achievement. The Sultan’s enterprise was on an imperial scale but he clearly supervised it from afar. As the walls arose, the viceroy of Syria presided, Suleiman’s imperial architect Sinan probably inspected the work on his way home from Mecca: thousands of workers laboured, new stones were quarried, old stones purloined from ruined churches and Herodian palaces, and the ramparts and gates carefully fused with the Herodian and Umayyad walls around the Temple Mount. The retiling of the Dome required 450,000 tiles, so Suleiman’s men created a tile factory next to al-Aqsa to make them, and some of his contractors built mansions in the city and stayed. The local architect founded a dynasty of hereditary architects that reigned for the next two centuries. The city must have resounded with the unfamiliar sounds of hammering masons and the clink of money. The population almost tripled to 16,000 and the number of Jews doubled to 2,000, boosted by the constant arrival of refugees from the west. A vast, anguished movement of the Jews was in progress, and some of these new arrivals contributed directly to Suleiman’s enterprise.2
THE SULTAN’S JEWISH DUKE:
PROTESTANTS, FRANCISCANS AND THE WALL
Suleiman assigned the taxes of Egypt to pay for his remodelled Jerusalem, and the man in charge of these revenues was Abraham de Castro, the Master of the Mint and tax-farmer who had proven his loyalty by warning the sultan when the local viceroy planned a rebellion. As his name suggests, Castro was a Jewish refugee from Portugal and his role did not come close to that of the super-rich Portuguese Jew who became Suleiman’s adviser and ultimately protector of Palestine and Jerusalem.
The Jewish migration marked the latest chapter in the religious wars. In 1492, King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile had conquered Granada, the last Islamic principality in Spain, and celebrated their successful Crusade* by purging Spain of Moslems and Jews. Obsessed with the danger of secret Jewish blood seeping into the pure stream of Christendom, and advised by Tomás Torquemada’s Inquisition, they expelled between 100,000 and 200,000 Jews, and in the next fifty years, much of western Europe followed suit. For seven centuries, Spain had been the home of a blossoming Arab-Jewish culture and the centre of the Diaspora, the Jews dispersed outside Zion.
Now, in the most searing Jewish trauma between the fall of the Temple and the Final Solution, these Sephardic Jews (Sapharad being Hebrew for Spain) fled eastwards to the more tolerant Holland, Poland-Lithuania and the Ottoman empire where they were welcomed by Suleiman, both to boost his economy and to expose how Christianity had denied its Jewish heritage. The Diaspora moved east. From now until the early twentieth century, the streets of Istanbul, Salonica and Jerusalem would ring with the lyrical tones of their new Judaeo-Spanish language, Ladino.
In 1553, Suleiman’s Jewish doctor introduced him to Joseph Nasi, whose family had been forced into a fake conversion to Christianity before they fled via Holland and Italy to Istanbul. There, he won the sultan’s trust and became the confidential agent of his son and heir. Joseph, known to European diplomats as the Great Jew, ran a complex business empire, and served as a sultanic envoy and international man of mystery, an arbiter of war and finance, a mediator between east and west. Joseph believed in the return of the Jews to the Promised Land, and Suleiman granted him the lordship of Tiberias in Galilee where he settled Italian Jews, rebuilt the town and planted mulberry trees to foster a silk industry, the first Jew to settle Jews in the Holy Land. He would build his Jerusalem in Galilee because that ultra-sensitive connoisseur of power knew that the real Jerusalem was the reserve of Suleiman.
Nonetheless Joseph patronized the Jewish scholars in Jerusalem where Suleiman promoted the superiority of Islam and diminished the status of the other two religions with a meticulous care that still guides the city now. Suleiman was fighting Emperor Charles V so that his attitude to the Christians was somewhat tempered by the cynical requirements of European diplomacy. The Jews, on the other hand, mattered little.
They still prayed around the walls of the Temple Mount and on the slopes of the Mount of Olives as well as in their main synagogue, the Ramban, but the sultan favoured order in all things. Discouraging anything that diminished the Islamic monopoly on the Temple Mount, he assigned the Jews a 9-foot street along the supporting wall of King Herod’s Temple for their prayers. This made some sense, because it was adjacent to their old Cave synagogue and next to the Jewish Quarter where the Jews had started to settle in the fourteenth century, today’s Jewish Quarter. But the site was overshadowed by the Islamic Maghrebi neighbourhood; Jewish worship there was carefully regulated; and Jews were later required to have a permit to pray there at all. The Jews soon called this place ha-Kotel, the Wall, outsiders called it the Western or Wailing Wall and henceforth its golden, ashlar stones became the symbol of Jerusalem and the focus of holiness.
Suleiman brought the Christians down to size by expelling the Franciscans from David’s Tomb where his inscription declares: ‘The Emperor Suleiman ordered this place to be purged of infidels and constructed it as a mosque.’ Sacred to all three religions, this Byzantine-Crusader site, an early Jewish synagogue and the Christian Coenaculum, now became the Islamic shrine of Nabi Daoud, the Prophet David, where Suleiman appointed a family of Sufi sheikhs called the Dajanis as hereditary guardians, a position they held until 1948.
The politics of the outside world would always reflect back onto the religious life of Jerusalem: Suleiman soon had reason to favour the Franciscans. In the battle for central Europe, he found that he needed Christian allies – the French – to fight the Habsburgs, and the Franciscans were backed by the kings of France. In 1535, the sultan granted France trading privileges and recognized the Franciscans as the custodians of the Christian shrines. This was the first of the so-called capitulations – concessions to European powers – that later undermined the Ottoman empire.
The Franciscans set up headquarters in St Saviour’s, close to the Church which ultimately would become a colossal Catholic city-within-a-city, but their rise disturbed the Orthodox. The hatred between Catholics and Orthodox was already venomous but both claimed the paramount custodianship of the Holy Places: the praedominium. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was now shared between eight sects in a Darwinian struggle in which only the strongest could survive. Some were going up, some were going down: the Armenians remained powerful because they were well represented in Istanbul, the Serbs and Maronites were in decline – but the Georgians, who had lost their Mamluk patrons, went into total eclipse.*
The epic conflict between the emperors of Islam and Christendom, the aggressive Catholicism of the Spanish, and the expulsion of the Jews inspired an unsettling feeling that something was not right in the firmament: people questioned their faith, searched for new mystical ways to get closer to God, and they expected the End Days. In 1517, Martin Luther, a theology professor in Wittenberg, protested against the Church’s sale of ‘indulgences’ to limit people’s time in purgatory, and insisted God existed only in the Bible, not via the rituals of priests or popes. His brave protest tapped into the widespread resentment of the Church which many believed had lost touch with Jesus’ teaching. These Protestants wanted a raw, unmediated faith and, free of the Church, they could find their own way. Protestantism was so flexible that a variety of new sects – Lutherans, the Reform Church, Presbyterians, Calvinists, Anabaptists – soon thrived, while for Henry VIII, English Protestantism was a way to assert his political independence. But one thing united all of them: their reverence for the Bible, which restored Jerusalem to the very centre of their faith.*
When after forty-five years on the throne Suleiman died on campaign with his army, his ministers propped him up like a waxwork in his carriage and showed him to his soldiers until the succession was safe for Selim, one of his sons by Roxelana. Selim II, known as the Drunkard, owed much to the intrigues of his friend, Joseph Nasi, the Great Jew, who, now living in splendour in his Belvedere Palace, rich from his monopolies of Polish beeswax and Moldavian wine, was promoted to Duke of Naxos. He almost became King of Cyprus. Such was his championing of persecuted or penurious Jews in Europe and Jerusalem that there were whisperings shortly before his death that this ducal Jewish Croesus must be the Messiah. But little came of his plans. Under Selim and his successors, the Ottoman empire was still expanding and, thanks to vast resources and superb bureaucracy, it remained awesomely powerful for another century – but its emperors soon struggled to control distant provinces ruled by overmighty governors and Jerusalem’s tranquillity was periodically shattered by bouts of violence.
In 1590, a local Arab rebel broke into Jerusalem and seized the city, killing the governor. The rebels were defeated and expelled. Jerusalem fell under the sway of two Balkan brothers, Ridwan and Bairam Pasha, Christian slaveboys converted to Islam and trained at the court of Suleiman, and their Circassian henchman, Farrukh. Their families dominated – and abused – Palestine for almost a century. When Farrukh’s son, Muhammad, found himself locked out of Jerusalem in 1625, he stormed the walls with 300 mercenaries then, closing the gates, he proceeded to torture Jews, Christians and Arabs alike to extort money.
Such outrages only encouraged the strongest of the Christian sects, the Armenians, to canvass and bribe the sultans and brawl in the churches of Jerusalem, all part of their campaign to vanquish the Catholics and win the praedominium. In the first twenty years of the century, the sultans issued thirty-three decrees to defend the embattled Catholics and in just seven years, the praedominium changed hands six times. However, the Christians had become the most lucrative source of business in Palestine: every day, the Custodian of the Church, the chief of the Nusseibeh family, sat on a throne in the courtyard with his armed henchmen charging for access – and the income from the thousands of pilgrims was enormous. At Easter, which Muslims called the Festival of the Red Egg, the governor of Jerusalem set up his throne, and, accompanied by the qadi, the custodian and the entire fully-armed garrison, he charged each of the 20,000 ‘hell-destined infidels’ ten gold pieces that was shared out among the Ottomans and the ulema.
Meanwhile something was afoot amongst the Jews. ‘Jerusalem’, wrote a Jewish pilgrim, ‘was more greatly populated than at any time since the first exile’ and as Jerusalem’s ‘fame spread, it became known we lived in peace. Scholars flocked to the gates.’ A caravan of Egyptian Jews arrived every Passover. Most of the Jews were Ladino-speaking Sephardis who were secure enough to build the ‘four synagogues’ that became the centre of life in the Jewish Quarter, but some of the pilgrims were eastern Europeans from the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania, known as Ashkenazis (named for Ashkenaz, a descendant of Noah in Genesis, said to be the progenitor of the northern peoples). The turbulence of the world outside encouraged their mysticism: a rabbi named Isaac Luri was teaching the Kabbala, the study of the Torah’s secret codes that would bring them closer to the Godhead. Luri was born in Jerusalem but he made his base in the magical mountain city of Safed in Galilee. The trauma of the Spanish persecutions had forced many Jews to fake conversion to Christianity and live clandestine lives – indeed Kabbala’s holy text, the Book of Zohar, was written in thirteenth-century Castile. The Kabbalists sought Majesty, Fear and Trembling – ‘the ecstatic experience, the tremendous uprush and soaring of the soul to its highest plane, union with God’. On Fridays, the Kabbalists, wearing white robes, would greet the ‘bride of God’, the Shekinah, outside the city and then escort the divine presence back to their homes. But inevitably the Kabbalists speculated that the Jewish trauma along with their secret codes and incantations contained the key to redemption: surely the Messiah would soon come to Jerusalem?
Notwithstanding occasional anti-Christian riots, Bedouin ambushes and the extortion of Ottoman governors, the city was left to her own rituals. Yet the feuding of the Orthodox, Armenians and Catholics in this Ottoman backwater only served to confirm the prejudices of a new breed of visitor, part-pilgrim, part-merchant-adventurer: the Protestants had arrived. They tended to be English traders, burning with hostility towards the Catholics, and often with links to the new colonies in America.3
When the English sea captain and merchant Henry Timberlake arrived, the Ottoman governors had never heard of Protestantism or his Queen Elizabeth and he was thrown into jail next to the Holy Sepulchre, released only on payment of a fine. The exuberant memoir of his adventures, A True and Strange Discourse, became a bestseller in Jacobean London. Another of these audacious Englishmen, John Sanderson, factor of the Levant Company, paid his fee to the Turks to enter the Church but was attacked by the Franciscan monks, whose padre ‘accused me to be a Jew’. The Turks then arrested him, tried to convert him to Islam and took him before the qadi, who searched him and then released him as a Christian.
Acts of fanaticism, both Christian and Muslim, unleashed violence that reveals the real limits of the much-vaunted Ottoman tolerance: the Ottoman governor forcibly closed down the beloved Ramban synagogue at the request of the ulema: Jews were forbidden to pray there and it was converted into a warehouse. When the Franciscans quietly extended their Mount Zion property, rumours spread that they were burrowing to Malta to let in the Christian armies: they were attacked by the qadi and the mob and only rescued by the Ottoman garrison. A Portuguese nun who baptized Muslim children and denounced Islam was burned on a pyre in the courtyard of the Church.*4
At Easter 1610, a young Englishman arrived who represented not only the new Protestantism but the New World too.
GEORGE SANDYS: THE FIRST ANGLO-AMERICAN
George Sandys, son of the Archbishop of York and a scholar who translated Virgil into English, was appalled by the decay of Jerusalem – ‘much of which lies waste, old buildings all ruined, the new, contemptible.’ Sandys was half-repulsed, half-amused by the Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jews he saw at the Western Wall: ‘their fantastical gestures exceed all barbarity with ridiculous nodding’, and he thought it ‘impossible not to laugh’. The God-fearing Protestant was even more disgusted by what he regarded as the vulgar hucksterism of the Orthodox and Catholics. The city was ‘once sacred and glorious, elected by God for his seat’, but she was now merely a ‘theatre of mysteries and miracles’.
That Easter, Sandys was horrified by Christians and Muslims alike: he saw the pasha of Jerusalem on his throne outside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Sandys watched as thousands of pilgrims, each carrying pillow and carpet, flocked to spend the night in the Church. On Good Friday, he followed the procession of the padre of the Franciscans, who carried a life-sized waxen model of Jesus on a sheet along the Via Dolorosa before fixing it to a cross. As thousands filled the Church and camped in its courtyard, he watched the ceremony of the Holy Fire, ‘the savage clamours’, the clash of cymbals, the ‘women whistling’ – conduct ‘befitting better the solemnities of Bacchus’. When the Fire emerged, the pilgrims ran around ‘like madmen thrusting the flame among their clothes and into their bosoms, persuading strangers it will not burn them’.
Yet this composer of hymns was a passionate Protestant who revered Jerusalem just as much as the Catholics and Orthodox. Returning to the fundamentals of the Bible itself, he prayed passionately at the tomb of Christ and the graves of the Crusader kings. On his return, he dedicated his book, A Relation of a Journey begun ad 1610, to the young Charles, Prince of Wales, whose father James I had recently commissioned fifty-four scholars to create an English Bible that was entirely accessible to all. In 1611, the scholars delivered their Authorized Version, which, fusing earlier translations by William Tyndale and others, brought the divine scriptures to life in a masterpiece of translation and of poetical English. This Bible became the spiritual and literary heartland of Anglicanism, England’s singular Protestantism. The Bible became what one writer called ‘the national epic of Britain,’ a story that placed the Jews and Jerusalem at the very heart of British and, later, American life.
Sandys was one link between the real city and the Jerusalem of the New World. In 1621, he set off for America as treasurer of the Virginia Company. During his ten years in Jamestown, he led the raid against the Algonquin native Americans during which he slaughtered a considerable number: Protestants were no less capable of killing defiant infidels than any other seventeenth-century faith. Sandys was not the only Jerusalem pilgrim-adventurer to be there: Henry Timberlake was in Virginia at the same time. Their pilgrimages to the new Promised Land of America were at least partly inspired by the Protestant vision of the heavenly Jerusalem.
Sandys’ and Timberlake’s Virginians were conservative Anglicans of the sort favoured by James I and his son, Charles. However, the kings could not keep a lid on the expectations of a new fervent, radical Protestantism: the Puritans embraced the fundamental truth of the Bible but with immediate messianic expectations. The Thirty Years War between Catholics and Protestants only intensified the feeling that Judgement Day was near. These were strange times which encouraged wild mystical excitement in all three religions. Harvests failed. The grim reaper, in the guise of epidemics, starvation and religious war, scythed through Europe, killing millions.
Thousands of Puritans escaped Charles I’s Church to found new colonies in America. As they sailed across the Atlantic to seek religious freedom, they read of Jerusalem and the Israelites in their Bibles and saw themselves as the Chosen People blessed by God to build a new Zion in the wilderness of Canaan. ‘Come let us declare in Zion the word of God,’ prayed William Bradford as he disembarked from the Mayflower. The first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, believed ‘the God of Israel is amongst us’ and paraphrased Jeremiah and Matthew to hail his settlement as ‘a city on a hill’ – America as the new Jerusalem. Soon there would be eighteen Jordans, twelve Canaans, thirty-five Bethels and sixty-six Jerusalems or Salems.
The fear of catastrophe and the anticipation of redemption rose together: civil wars scarred France and England while simultaneously in eastern Europe, the Jews of Poland and Ukraine were slaughtered in tens of thousands by the Cossacks of the marauding Hetman Khmelnytsky. In 1649, Charles I was beheaded and Oliver Cromwell emerged as Lord Protector, a millenarian soldier convinced that his Puritans, like their brethren in New England, were the new Chosen People:
‘Truly you are called by God as Judah was, to rule with Him and for Him,’ he said. ‘You are at the edge of Promises and Prophecies.’ Cromwell was a Hebraist who believed that Christ could not come again unless the Jews returned to Zion and then converted to Christianity. Effectively, the Puritans were the first Christian Zionists. Joanna and Ebenezer Cartwright even suggested the Royal Navy should ‘transport Izrael’s sons and daughters in their ships to the Land promised by their forefathers for an everlasting Inheritance’.
Many Jews earnestly studied the Kabbala, dreaming that the Messiah would transform their Ukrainian tragedy into redemption. A Dutch rabbi, Menasseh ben Israel, petitioned the Lord Protector, pointing out that the Bible stated Jews had to be scattered to all corners of the world before their Return to Zion would set off the Second Coming – yet they were still banned from England. Therefore Cromwell convened a special Whitehall Conference that ruled it was wrong to exclude ‘this mean and despised people from the light and leave them among false teachers, Papists and idolators.’ Cromwell allowed the Jews to return. After his death, the monarchy was restored and his Puritanic messianism lost its power but its message endured in the American Colonies and amongst the English Nonconformists ready to blossom again in the evangelical awakening two hundred years later. Just after the Restoration, manic excitement convulsed the Jewish world: the Messiah was in Jerusalem – or was he?5
THE MESSIAH: SABBATAI ZEVI
He was Mordecai, the unbalanced son of a Smyrnan poultry-dealer who studied the Kabbala. In 1648 he declared himself the Messiah by uttering the Tetragrammaton. This was the unspeakable name of God based on the Hebrew letters YHWH, only spoken once a year on the Day of Atonement by the high priest in the Temple itself. Now he changed his named to Sabbatai Zevi and proclaimed that Judgement Day would come in 1666. He was expelled from Smyrna but gradually as he worked as a trader around the Mediterranean, he won the devotion of a network of wealthy backers. In 1660, he moved first to Cairo and then travelled on to Jerusalem where he fasted, sang songs, handed sweets to children, and performed strange and unsettling acts.
Sabbatai radiated a reckless but deranged magnetism – he was clearly a manic depressive who swung between bouts of infectious self-belief, desperate melancholia and euphoric exaltation that led him to perform demonic, sometimes shamelessly erotic antics. At any other time, he would have been condemned as an obscene and sinful madman but in those catastrophic days, many Jews were already in a state of Kabbalist anticipation. His craziness was surely the true mark of the sacred.
The Jerusalemite Jews were impoverished by Ottoman taxes so they asked Sabbatai to raise funds from his Cairene patrons, which he did. He succeeded in his mission, but not everyone was convinced as he prepared to declare himself Messiah in Jerusalem. After much debate, the rabbis placed him under a ban. Furious, he moved to Gaza which he chose as his sacred city instead of Jerusalem and then launched his messianic ministry in Aleppo.
If his revelation had started as a slow burn, his fame now exploded and spread like quickfire. Jews across the Diaspora, from Istanbul to Amsterdam, celebrated the arrival of the Messiah. In Ukraine, a pretty Jewish girl named Sarah was orphaned by the Cossack massacres but rescued by Christians and taken to Livorno. There she worked as a prostitute which did not shake her conviction that she was destined to marry the Messiah. When Sabbatai heard about her, he married her and the two toured the Mediterranean together while Jews across Europe were divided between sceptics and frenzied fans who packed their belongings for the journey to greet the Messiah in Jerusalem, whipped themselves, fasted, and rolled naked in mud and snow. In late 1666, the messianic couple rolled into Istanbul where Jews hailed them, but Sabbatai’s ambition to wear the sultan’s crown led to his arrest and forced conversion to Islam.
For most, this apostasy* marked the death of the dream even before Sabbatai died in Montenegrin exile – and Jerusalem’s Jews were happy to see the back of this disruptive charlatan.6 The era of Cromwell and Sabbatai was also the golden age of Islamic mysticism in Jerusalem where the Ottoman sultans were patrons of all the leading orders of Sufis whom the Turks called Dervishes. We have seen how Christians and Jews saw the city. Now a most unconventional Ottoman courtier, Dervish scholar, raconteur and bon vivant named Evliya lovingly describes the city’s idiosyncracies from the Islamic angle with the often hilarious flair that makes him probably the greatest of all Islamic travel-writers.
EVLIYA: THE OTTOMAN PEPYS AND FALSTAFF
Even then, Evliya must have been utterly unique: this wealthy traveller, writer, singer, scholar, and warrior was the son of the sultan’s goldsmith, born in Istanbul, raised at court, educated by the imperial ulema, who was advised by Muhammad in a dream to travel the world. He became, in his own words, ‘The World Traveller and Boon Companion to Mankind’ and travelled not only the length of the vast Ottoman realm but into Christendom too, obsessively chronicling his adventures in an astonishing ten volumes. Just as Samuel Pepys was writing his diaries in London, Evliya, whether in Istanbul, Cairo or Jerusalem, was compiling his Book of Travels, ‘the longest and fullest travel account in Islamic literature, perhaps in world literature’. No Islamic writer wrote as poetically about Jerusalem, or as wittily about life.
Evliya lived literally on his wits for he won the favour of Mehmet IV with his irresistible jokes, rhyming couplets, mischievous songs and wrestling and he was able to travel by joining the entourages of Ottoman grandees who recruited him for his religious knowledge and for his exuberant entertainment. His books are partly almanacs of amassed facts, partly anthologies of amazing stories: Evliya Celebi (a title that just means ‘gentleman’) both fought the Habsburgs and met the Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna, impressing him with his personal knowledge of Jerusalem’s Holy Sepulchre. In battle, he self-deprecatingly recorded his own Falstaffian flight – ‘fleeing is also an act of courage’ – and probably the most ‘strange and comic’ scatological scene in military history.*
He never married, and refused to take any job in the imperial service that interfered with his free-spirited travelling. He was often given slave-girls and was as witty about sex as he was about everything else: he called it ‘the sweet calamity,’ and the ‘nice wrestling-match,’ cheerfully recording his bout of impotence which was finally cured by an Egyptian snakebroth. He daringly joked that sex was the ‘greater jihad’, and the most striking thing about him to the modern reader is that here was a devout Muslim who constantly made jokes about Islam that would be unthinkable today.
Though this scholar could recite the entire Koran in eight hours and act as muezzin, unusually he was clean-shaven, irreverent, open-minded and an enemy of fanaticism, whether Islamic, Jewish or Christian. As a ‘wandering Dervish,’ he was fascinated by Jerusalem ‘the ancient qibla’ which ‘is at present the Kaaba of the poor (or of the dervishes)’ – the capital, the very Mecca of Sufism: he counted seventy Dervish convents, with the largest near the Damascus Gate, varying in origin from India to the Crimea, and described how a contingent from each order performed ecstatic songs and dances of the zikr all night until dawn.
Evliya wrote that the city, which boasted 240 prayer-niches and forty madrassas, was ‘the object of desire of the kings of all nations’ but he was most dazzled by the breathtaking beauty and sanctity of the Dome: ‘This humble one has travelled for thirty-eight years through seventeen empires and viewed countless buildings but I’ve never seen one that so resembled paradise. When a person enters, one stands dumbfounded and amazed with finger to mouth.’ In al-Aqsa, where the preacher mounted the pulpit every Friday brandishing the sword of Caliph Omar and the rituals were serviced by a staff of 800, Evliya observed how the mosaics reflected the rays of the sun so that ‘the mosque becomes light upon light and the congregants’ eyes shine with reverence as they pray’.
In the Dome ‘all pilgrims circumabulate the Rock outside the railing’, while the Temple Mount had become a ‘promenading place embellished with roses, hyacinths, myrtle filled with the intoxicating twitter of nightingales’ and he happily embraced most of its legends – that King David had started building al-Aqsa while Solomon ‘being Sultan of all creatures ordered the demons to complete the construction’. Nonetheless, when he was shown ropes that Solomon had supposedly woven 3,000 years earlier, he could not resist exclaiming to the ulema: ‘Do you mean to tell me that the ropes used to bind the demons haven’t rotted?’
Naturally he visited the Church at Easter where his reaction resembled that of the English Protestants. He worked out the secret of the Holy Fire, claiming that a hidden zinc jar of naphtha was dripped down a chain by a hidden monk to deliver the annual miracle. The festival itself was just ‘pandemonium’ and the Church ‘ lacks spirituality, more like a tourist attraction’ but he chatted to a Protestant there who blamed it on the Orthodox Greeks, ‘a stupid and credulous people’.
Evliya returned several times before he retired to finish his books in Cairo but he never saw anything to compare with the Dome of the Rock – ‘verily a replica of a pavilion in paradise’. Not everyone agreed: conservative Muslims were horrified by all the Sufi dancing, miracle-working and the saintly cults that Evliya so enjoyed. ‘Some of the women unveil their faces, displaying their beauty, their ornaments and perfumes. By God, they were sitting cheek-to-jowl among men!’ observed Qashashi, denouncing ‘excited clamours and dancing’, the playing of tambourines and merchants selling sweets. ‘These are the days of the wedding-feast of Satan.’
The Ottomans were now in full decline, the sultans shoved back and forth between the demands of European powers, each of them backing their own Christian sect. When the Catholic Austrians and French won the praedominium for the Franciscans, the Russians, a brash new power in Europe and in Jerusalem, lobbied and bribed the Ottomans until they had regained it for the Orthodox. The Franciscans soon got it back again, but three times actual fighting broke out in the Church.* In 1699, the Ottomans, defeated on the battlefield, signed the Treaty of Karlowitz, which allowed the Great Powers to protect their brethren in Jerusalem – a disastrous concession.7
Meanwhile Istanbul’s governors had so repressed Palestine that the peasants rebelled. In 1702, the new Governor of Jerusalem crushed the rebellion and decorated the walls with the heads of his victims. But when he destroyed a village owned by the religious leader – the mufti – of Jerusalem, the city’s qadi denounced him at Friday prayers in al-Aqsa and opened the gates to the rebels.
THE HUSSEINIS: THE REVOLT OF THE NAQIB AL-ASHRAF
AND THE CANINE POGROM
Armed peasants marauded through the streets. The qadi – the chief judge – backed by the garrison, stormed the prison and took command of Jerusalem. In one of her stranger moments, the city found herself independent: the qadi, in return for bribes, appointed Muhammad ibn Mustafa al-Husseini as head of the city.
Husseini was the chief of Jerusalem’s pre-eminent clan who had risen on the coat-tails of the Farrukhs a century earlier, but he was also the Naqib al-Ashraf, the leader of the families descended from the Prophet, via his grandson Hussein: only the Ashraf could wear the green turban and be addressed as Sayyid.
The Ottomans despatched troops to suppress the revolt who camped outside the walls. Husseini showed that he was ready for a siege, and the troops retreated to Gaza. Inside Jerusalem the rebellion had replaced one tyranny with another. Jews were forbidden to wear white on the Sabbath or Muslim headgear or to have nails in their shoes; Christians suffered similar sartorial restrictions; and both had to make way for Muslims in the streets. Outrageous fines were collected with violence. A messianic sect of 500 Polish Jews from Grodno, led by Judah the Pious, had just arrived. But their rabbi died, and they spoke only Polish or Yiddish, leaving them particularly helpless. They were soon impoverished.
When a stray dog wandered on to the Temple Mount, the qadi ordered the killing of every canine in Jerusalem. As a special humiliation, every Jew and Christian had to deliver dead dogs to a collection point outside the Zion Gate. Gangs of children killed dogs and then gave the carcasses to the nearest infidel.
When a stronger Ottoman army approached, the garrison and the Sufi mystics turned against the rebellion and seized the Tower of David. Husseini fortified himself in his mansion, and they fired arrows at each other for three days. In the ensuing battle, the northern streets of the Old City were strewn with corpses – and Husseini lost more support. Outside, the Ottomans bombarded the Temple Mount. In the middle of the night on 28 November 1705, Husseini realized his game was up and escaped, pursued by the Ottomans. The reign of extortion continued under the new governor. Many Jews, robbed again, simply left, and the Polish Ashkenazis were broken, finally in 1720 facing imprisonment, banishment and bankruptcy, their synagogue in the Jewish Quarter burned down.* The Sephardis – the small, old Jewish community at home in the Arab and Ottoman world – survived.
Husseini was captured and beheaded. After much dynastic rivalry, the Husseinis were later succeeded as naqib by Abd al-Latif al-Ghudayya whose family changed its name sometime in the century and purloined that of the prestigious Husseinis. The Ghudayyas became the new Husseinis, the most powerful of Jerusalem’s ruling families – right up into the twenty-first century.8
THE HUSSEINIS: RISE OF THE FAMILIES
Anyone important who came to Jerusalem during the eighteenth century wished to stay with the chief of this clan, who held open house for peasants, scholars and Ottoman officials alike; it was said he had eighty guests for dinner every night. ‘Everyone visits him from near and afar,’ wrote one such guest to the ‘palace’ of Abd al-Latif al-Ghudayya who dominated Jerusalem. ‘Strangers find refuge in his home, residing there as they like.’ Abd al-Latif’s visitors left Jerusalem escorted by a squadron of his horsemen.
The resurgence of the Husseinis marked the rise of the great Jerusalem Families. Virtually every position of honour in Jerusalem was hereditary. Most of the Families were descended from Sufi sheikhs who had been favoured by one conqueror or another. Most changed their names, invented grandiose genealogies and alternately feuded and intermarried – not unlike their Western equivalents. Each fiercely defended and strived to expand its own lucrative power-base.†
But wealth would have been vulgar without scholarship; pedigree powerless without wealth, and position impossible without Ottoman patronage. Sometimes the Families fought it out: two Nusseibehs were ambushed and killed by a Husseini posse near Abu Ghosh, but, typically, the families made peace by marrying the surviving Nusseibeh brother of the victims to the sister of the Mufti of Jerusalem.
Yet even the Families could not ensure prosperity in a Jerusalem scarred by intermittent fighting between the 500-strong Ottoman garrison notorious for its debauchery, raiding Bedouin, rioting Jerusalemites and venal governors. The population shrank to 8,000, preyed upon by the Governor of Damascus who descended on the city annually with a small army to collect the taxes.*
The Jews, without any European backing, suffered bitterly. ‘The Arabs’, wrote Gedaliah, an Ashkenazi from Poland, ‘often wrong the Jews publicly. If one of them gives a Jew a blow, the Jew goes away cowering. While an angry Turk would beat a Jew shamefully and dreadfully with his shoes and not one would deliver the Jew.’ They lived in squalor, banned from repairing their houses. Two hundred Jewish families took flight: with ‘the persecutions and extortions increasing every day’, wrote a Jewish pilgrim in 1766, ‘I had to flee from the city at night. Every day somebody was flung into prison.’
The Christians hated each other much more than they hated the infidels – indeed Father Elzear Horn, a Franciscan, simply called the Greeks ‘The Vomit’. Each of the sects relished every squalid discomfort and penurious humiliation suffered by their rivals in the Church. Ottoman control and Christian competition meant the 300 permanent residents were locked inside each night; ‘more like prisoners’ than priests in Evliya’s view, living in a state of permanent siege. Food was passed through a hole in the door or winched up via a system of pulleys, to the windows. These monks – most of them Orthodox, Catholic or Armenian – camped in cramped, humid tension, suffering from ‘headaches, fevers, tumours, diarrhoea, dysentery.’ The latrines of the Sepulchre provided a special source of bitterness – and stench: every sect had its own lavatorial arrangements, but the Franciscans, claimed Father Horn, ‘suffer much from the smell’. The Greeks did not have lavatories at all. Meanwhile the poverty-stricken smaller sects, the Copts, Ethiopians and Syriacs, could afford their food only by performing servile tasks such as emptying the Greek slop-buckets. No wonder the French writer Constantin Volney heard Jerusalemites ‘have acquired and deserved the reputation of the most evil people in Syria’.
When France again won the praedominium for the Franciscans, the Greek Orthodox hit back. On the night before Palm Sunday 1757, the Greek Orthodox ambushed the Franciscans in the Rotunda of the Sepulchre, ‘with clubs, maces, hooks, poniards, and swords’ that had been hidden behind pillars and under their habits, smashing lamps and ripping tapestries. The Franciscans fled to St Saviour’s, where they were besieged. These Mafia tactics worked: the sultan switched back to the Greeks, giving them the dominant position in the Church which they still hold today.9 Now Ottoman power collapsed in Palestine. Starting in Galilee in the 1730s, a Bedouin sheikh, Zahir al-Umar al-Zaydani, carved out a northern fiefdom, which he ruled from Acre – the only time, except for short-lived rebellions, when a native Palestinian Arab ruled an extended part of Palestine.
THE RISE AND FALL OF THE ‘KING OF PALESTINE’
In 1770, Ali Bey, an Egyptian general who gloried in the nickname the Cloudsnatcher (which he had won by defeating Bedouin, whom the Ottomans believed were as hard to catch as clouds), allied himself with Sheikh Zahir. Together they conquered most of Palestine, even taking Damascus, but the sultan’s pasha held out in Jerusalem. The Russian empress, Catherine the Great, was at war with the Ottomans and now she despatched a fleet to the Mediterranean, where it defeated the sultan’s navy. The Cloudsnatcher needed Russian help and Russia was only interested in one prize: Jerusalem. The Russian ships bombarded Jaffa then sailed up to attack Beirut. Zahir occupied Jaffa – but could he and the Cloudsnatcher deliver Jerusalem?
Sheikh Zahir sent his troops to invest the city but they were unable to make any impression on the walls. The Ottomans, defeated on all fronts, sued for peace with the Russians. In the peace treaty in 1774, Catherine and her partner Prince Potemkin forced the Ottomans to recognize Russian protection of the Orthodox – and ultimately the growing Russian obsession with Jerusalem would lead to a European war.* The Ottomans could now retake their lost provinces: the Cloudsnatcher was assassinated and Sheikh Zahir, aged eighty-six, had to escape from Acre. As he rode away, he noticed that his favourite concubine was missing – ‘this is no time to leave a person behind,’ he said – and galloped back. As he scooped her up, the girl dragged her ancient lover from his horse and assassins stabbed and beheaded him. The pickled head of the ‘first King of Palestine’ was sent to Istanbul.10 The anarchy now attracted the rising hero of Revolutionary France.
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE: ‘A KORAN I COMPOSED MYSELF’
On 19 May 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte, twenty-eight years old, pale and gaunt, with long lank hair, set off with 335 ships, 35,000 troops and an academy of 167 scientists to conquer Egypt. ‘I would found a religion’, he reflected with megalomaniacal arrogance, ‘I saw myself marching on the way to Asia, mounted on an elephant, a turban on my head, in one hand a new Koran I would have composed myself.’
His adventure was inspired by revolutionary science, cold politics and crusading romance. Everyone in Paris had read the bestselling travelogue by the philosophe, Constantin Volney, who described the ‘battered ruins of Jerusalem’ and the decay of the Ottoman Levant as ripe for conquest by the civilizing reason of the Enlightenment. The French Revolution had tried to destroy the Church and replace Christianity with reason, liberty and even a new cult of the Supreme Being. However, Catholicism had endured and Napoleon aspired to heal the wounds of Revolution by fusing together monarchy, faith and science – hence the many scientists on board. Yet it was also about empire: France was at war with England The expedition was the brainchild of the louche, lame ex-bishop and foreign minister, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, who hoped it would win control of the Mediterranean and cut off British India. If Bonaparte succeeded, all well and good but if he failed, Talleyrand would destroy a rival. As would happen so often in the Middle East, the Europeans expected the orientals to be grateful for their well-intentioned conquest.
Napoleon landed successfully in Egypt, which was still ruled by a caste of hybrid mamluk–Ottoman officers. He swiftly defeated them at the Battle of the Pyramids, but the English admiral Horatio Nelson obliterated the French fleet at Aboukir Bay. Bonaparte had won Egypt, but Nelson had trapped his army in the East and this encouraged the Ottomans to defy him in Syria. If Napoleon was to survive in Egypt, he had to march north and secure Syria.
In February 1799, he invaded Palestine with 13,000 men and 800 camels. On 2 March, as he advanced on Jaffa, his cavalry under General Damas carried out a raid just three miles from Jerusalem. General Bonaparte fantasized about the conquest of the Holy City, reporting to the revolutionary Directorate in Paris: ‘By the time you read this letter, it’s possible I will be standing in the ruins of Solomon’s Temple.’
How I should like to visit Jerusalem some time.
Abraham Lincoln, in conversation with his wife
The theatre of the most memorable and stupendous events that have ever occurred in the annals of the world.
James Barclay, City of the Great King
No-where is the arch of heaven more pure, intense and cloudless than above the proud heights of Zion. Yet if the traveller can forget he is treading on the grave of the people from whom his religion has sprung, there is certainly no city he will sooner wish to leave.
W. H. Bartlett, Walks
Yes I am a Jew and when the ancestors of the Rt. Hon. Gentleman were living as savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the Temple of Solomon.
Benjamin Disraeli, speech in the House of Commons
See what is done here in the name of religion!
Harriet Martineau, Eastern Life
THE BLUEBEARD OF ACRE
There was nothing between Napoleon and the conquest of Jerusalem – except the Butcher, Ahmet Jazzar Pasha, the warlord of Ottoman Palestine. He had adopted the name Jazzar – Butcher – as a young man and had built his career on the principle that fear motivated men more than anything else.
The Butcher terrorized his territories by mutilating anyone suspected of the slightest disloyalty. An Englishman who visited him at his capital in Acre noticed that he was ‘surrounded by persons maimed and disfigured. The persons officiating or standing by the doors’ were all missing a limb, nose, ear or eye. His Jewish minister, Haim Farhi, ‘had been deprived of both an ear and an eye’ just to be sure. ‘The number of faces without noses and ears strikes everyone who has visited this part of Syria.’ The Butcher called them his ‘marked men’. He sometimes had his victims’ feet shod with horseshoes. He had walled up some local Christians alive pour encourager les autres and once gathered fifty corrupt officials, ordered them to strip naked, and had his troops hack them into pieces. When he suspected his harem of treason, he killed seven of his own wives, becoming notorious as ‘the tyrant of Acre, the Herod of his time, the terror of all surrounding nations, the story of Bluebeard realized’.
The Butcher impressed Europeans with his long white beard, his simple robes, the bejewelled dagger at his belt and his rather delicate habit of cutting flowers out of paper which he liked to give as presents. He radiated a macabre charm, telling visitors with a slight smirk: ‘I trust you found my name respected, even beloved, notwithstanding my severity.’ At night, he locked himself in his harem which starred eighteen Slavic blondes.* This old man now faced Napoleon in his prime. The French besieged Jaffa which was the port of Jerusalem and only 20 miles away. Jerusalem was in panic: the Families armed the Jerusalemites; a mob plundered Christian monasteries; the monks had to be imprisoned for their own safety. Outside the walls, General Damas asked Bonaparte for permission to attack the Holy City.1
NAPOLEON: ‘GENERAL HEADQUARTERS, JERUSALEM’
Napoleon replied that he had to conquer Acre first and then ‘come in person and plant the tree of Liberty at the very spot where Christ suffered, and the first French soldier who fell in the attack would be buried in the Holy Sepulchre’. But Bonaparte and his troops clearly regarded their expedition against the Muslims as falling outside the rules of civilized conduct. When he stormed Jaffa, his ‘soldiers hacked to pieces, men and women – the sights were terrible’, wrote one of the French scientists, shocked by ‘the sound of shots, shrieks of women and fathers, piles of bodies, a daughter being raped on the cadaver of her mother, the smell of blood, the groans of the wounded, the shouts of victors quarrelling about loot’. Finally the French themselves rested, ‘sated by blood and gold, on top of a heap of dead’.
Before he marched on towards Acre, Bonaparte ordered the slaughter in cold blood of at least 2,440 but probably more like 4,000 of the Butcher’s troops, killing them in batches of 600 a day. On 18 March 1799, he laid siege to Acre, still under the command of the Butcher, whom Napoleon superciliously called ‘an old man whom I don’t know’. Yet Bluebeard and his 4,000 Afghans, Albanians and Moors resisted vigorously.
On 16 April, Napoleon defeated the Butcher’s cavalry and an Ottoman army at the Battle of Tabor Mountain. Afterwards, finding himself at Ramla, 25 miles from Jerusalem, he issued a pro-Zionist ‘Proclamation to the Jews’, mendaciously datelined, ‘General Headquarters, Jerusalem,20 April 1799’.
Bonaparte, Commander in Chief of the Armies of the French Republic in Africa and Asia, to the rightful heirs of Palestine – the unique nation of Jews who have been deprived of the land of your fathers by thousands of years of lust for conquest and tyranny. Arise then with gladness, ye exiled, and take unto yourselves Israel’s patrimony. The young army has made Jerusalem my headquarters and will within a few days transfer to Damascus so you can remain there [in Jerusalem] as ruler.
The official French gazette, Le Moniteur, claimed that Napoleon had ‘already armed a great number [of Jews] to re-establish ancient Jerusalem’, but Napoleon could not seize Zion until Acre was his2 and the Butcher was now reinforced by two Royal Navy ships-of-the-line under a maverick English commodore.
SIR SIDNEY SMITH – ‘MOST BRILLIANT OF CHEVALIERS’
Sidney Smith, the son of an eloping heiress and an adventurer, was ‘good looking with tremendous moustaches and penetrating black eyes’. He had joined the navy at thirteen, fought the American rebels and then, when he was seconded to the Swedish navy, Catherine the Great’s Russians. The King of Sweden knighted him, so English rivals mocked him as the ‘Swedish knight’. After the French Revolution, Smith raided France, but was captured and imprisoned in the dreaded Temple. Dashingly he escaped, taunting Bonaparte, whom he particularly despised, in a series of public letters. Not everyone was convinced by Smith: he was, wrote one observer, an ‘enthusiast, restlessly active, extravagantly vain with no fixed purpose save that of persuading mankind that Sidney Smith was the most brilliant of chevaliers’. But if he was preposterous in normal life, he was heroic in a crisis.
Smith and the Butcher struck up a rapport. When the Englishman admired the gleaming Damascene sword that the Butcher kept beside him at all times, Jazzar boasted, ‘The one I carry never fails. It’s taken off dozens of heads.’ Smith wanted proof, whereupon the Butcher had an ox brought to him which he then beheaded with a single blow. Smith merged his eighty-eight sailors with the Butcher’s multinational garrison. Bonaparte launched three assaults on Acre but Smith and the Butcher managed to repel all three. As Ottoman reinforcements approached and the siege dragged into its third month, the French generals became restless.
On 21 May 1799, with 1,200 troops dead and 2,300 sick or wounded, Napoleon led the retreat towards Egypt. However, 800 French soldiers lay ill in Jaffa. As they would slow the retreat, Napoleon ordered his wounded to be killed by his own doctors. When the French medics refused, a Turkish doctor administered fatal doses of laudanum to the patients. No wonder the French general Jean-Baptiste Kléber reflected, ‘We have committed in the Holy Land enormous sins and great stupidities.’ Two thousand mounted Jerusalemites under the command of the city’s governor pursued and harassed the retreating French. When the peasant fighters of Nablus broke into Jaffa, Smith managed to prevent a massacre of Christians by summoning the Jerusalemites to restore order.
In Egypt, Napoleon, facing the reality of a disastrous campaign that could only be saved by shameless distortion of the truth, abandoned his men and sailed for home. General Kléber, left in command of Egypt, cursed Napoleon: ‘That bugger has deserted us with his breeches full of shit.’ But in France Napoleon was hailed as a returning conqueror, soon to seize power from the Directory as first consul,* and a romantic song about his expedition – ‘Partant pour la Syrie’ – became the Bonapartist anthem.
The Christians of Jerusalem, particularly the Catholics, were in peril from Muslim reprisals. Addicted to grandiose gestures, Smith decided that only a show of English sangfroid would save his brethren. With permission from the Butcher and the sultan, he marched his sailors in dress uniform with beating drums from Jaffa to Jerusalem. Progressing through the streets, he hoisted the British flag over St Saviour’s Monastery, whose Franciscan superior declared that ‘every Christian in Jerusalem was under the greatest obligation to the English nation and particularly Smith by whose means they have been preserved from the merciless hand of Bonaparte’. In fact it was the Muslims whom they feared. Smith and his crew prayed at the Sepulchre, the first Frankish troops to enter Jerusalem since 1244.3
Sultan Selim III showered honours on the Butcher, who was appointed pasha of his native Bosnia as well as of Egypt and Damascus. After a short war with the pasha of Gaza, he again dominated Jerusalem and Palestine. But he had not mellowed, for he cut off his prime minister’s nose to spite a face that already lacked an ear and an eye. On his death in 1804, Palestine sank into chaos.
Yet Napoleon and Smith had made the Levant fashionable. Among the adventurers who now started to explore the East and recount their exploits in bestselling books that beguiled the West, the most influential was a French vicomte who in 1806 found Jerusalem bedevilled by fire, rebellion and rapine, at its lowest ebb since the Mongols.4
THE NEW ROMANTICS:
CHATEAUBRIAND AND DISRAELI
THE VICOMTE OF THE ORDER OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE
‘Jerusalem overawes me’ declared François-René, Vicomte de Chateaubriand, even though this ‘deicidal city’ was ‘a heapof rubbish’ with the ‘confused monuments of a cemetery in the midst of a desert’. This bouffant-haired Catholic royalist embraced the romantic view of a shabby Gothic Jerusalem awaiting rescue by the ‘genius of Christianity’. To him, the more miserable Jerusalem was, the holier and more poetical she became – and the city was now desperate.
Rebel pashas and hordes of Palestinian peasants repeatedly rebelled and seized a godforsaken Jerusalem which had to be stormed by the governors of Damascus who marched down annually with an army and treated the city as conquered enemy territory. The vicomte arrived to find the governor of Damascus camped outside the Jaffa Gate while his three thousand soldiers menaced the inhabitants. When Chateaubriand settled in the St Saviour’s Monastery, it was occupied by these ruffians who extorted cash from the friars. He strutted the streets armed with several pistols but in the Monastery, one of them caught him unawares and tried to kill him: he only survived by almost throttling the Turk. In the streets, ‘we met not a creature! What wretchedness, what desolation for most of the inhabitants had fled to the mountains. Shops are shut, people conceal themselves in cellars or withdraw to the mountains.’ When the pasha left, the garrison in David’s Tower numbered just a dozen and the city became even more eerie: ‘The only noise is the galloping of a steed of the desert – it’s a janissary who brings the head of a Bedouin or returns from plundering the unhappy peasants.’
Now the Frenchman could revel in the squalid sacred mysteries of the shrines. Yet this enthusiastic gourmand, who gave his name to his recipe for steak, relished the banquets he shared with his famously plump Franciscan hosts, feasting on ‘lentil soup, veal with cucumbers and onions, broiled kid with rice, pigeons, partridges, game, excellent wine’. Armed with several pistols, he retraced every step of Jesus while mocking Ottoman monuments (‘not worth notice’) and the Jews who were ‘covered in rags, sealed in the dust of Zion, with vermin that devoured them’. Chateaubriand was astonished to ‘behold these rightful masters of Judaea living as slaves and strangers in their own country’.
In the Sepulchre he prayed on his knees for half an hour, his eyes ‘riveted to the stone’ of Jesus’ tomb, dizzy with the incense, the clash of Ethiopian cymbals and chanting of the Greeks, before kneeling at the tombs of Godfrey and Baldwin, those French paladins who had defeated Islam, ‘a religion hostile to civilization that systematically favoured ignorance, despotism and slavery’.
The Franciscans awarded Chateaubriand the Order of the Holy Sepulchre in a solemn ceremony. As they encircled the kneeling vicomte, attaching the spurs of Godfrey to his heels and knighting him with the Crusader’s sword, he experienced an almost ecstatic joy:
If it is considered that I was at Jerusalem, in the Church of Calvary, within a dozen paces of the tomb of Jesus Christ, and thirty from that of Godfrey de Bouillon, that I was equipped with the spurs of the Deliverer of the Holy Sepulchre; and had touched that sword, both long and large, which so noble and so valiant an arm had once wielded, I couldn’t remain unmoved.5
On 12 October 1808, an Armenian sacristan fell a sleep by the stove in the Armenian gallery on the second floor of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The stove caught fire, burned him to death and then spread. The Tomb of Jesus was destroyed. In the ensuing chaos, the Christians invited Hassan al-Husseini, the mufti, to campin the courtyard of the Church to prevent looting. The Greeks accused the Armenians of arson. England and Austria were fighting to contain the apparently invincible Emperor Napoleon so the Greeks, backed by Russia, were able to consolidate their control over the Church. They built the rococo aedicule that stands around the Tomb today. They celebrated by smashing the graves of the Crusader kings: Chateaubriand, now back in France, was the last outsider to see them.* A Muslim mob attacked the builders restoring the Church; the garrison mutinied, and the Butcher’s successor and son-in-law, Suleiman Pasha – who was known as the Just (though anyone would have seemed clement after his predecessor) – captured the city: forty-six rebels were executed, their heads decorating the gates.6
As the real Jerusalem decayed, the imaginary Jerusalem ignited Western dreams, encouraged by Napoleon’s nasty little Middle Eastern war, the decline of the Ottomans – and the book that Chateaubriand wrote when he got home. His Itinerary from Paris to Jerusalem set the tone of the European attitude to the Orient with its cruel but inept Turks, wailing Jews, and primitive but ferocious Arabs who tended to congregate in picturesque biblical poses. It was such a bestseller that it launched a new genre and even his valet, Julien, wrote his memoirs of the trip.* In London, Sir Sidney Smith’s boasting about his Levantine exploits caught the imagination of his royal mistress – and inspired the most absurd of royal tours.
CAROLINE OF BRUNSWICK AND HESTER STANHOPE:
QUEEN OF ENGLAND AND QUEEN OF THE DESERT
Princess Caroline, estranged wife of the English Prince Regent (later King George IV), was much taken with the dashing Smith, and regularly invited his cousin, Lady Hester Stanhope, niece of Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger, to provide cover for their brazen affair.
Lady Hester loathed the coarse, deluded and lecherous Princess Caroline, who showed off to Smith by ‘dancing about, exposing herself, like an opera girl’ and even gartering below the knee: ‘an impudent woman, a downright whore! So low! So vulgar!’ Caroline’s marriage to the Prince Regent had been a disaster and the so-called ‘Delicate Investigation’ into her love-life at that time later revealed at least five lovers including Smith, Lord Hood, the painter Thomas Lawrence and various servants. But Smith’s stories of Acre and Jerusalem at least found their mark: both women quite separately decided to travel to the East.
Lady Hester had her own Jerusalem destiny. Richard Brothers, an ex-sailor and radical Calvinist, had declared himself a descendant of King David who would be the Ruler of the World until the Second Coming of Christ. His book Plan for New Jerusalem revealed that God had ‘pre-ordained me to be the King and Restorer of the Jews’, and Brothers also asserted that the British people were descended from the Lost Tribes: he would lead them back to Jerusalem. He designed gardens and palaces for the Temple Mount, and uniforms and flags for his new Israelites, but he was eventually imprisoned as a lunatic. This Anglo-Israelite vision was an eccentric one. Yet within thirty years a belief in a sacred return of the Jews to accelerate the Second Coming was almost British government policy.
Brothers expected a heavenly lady to assist in this enterprise and selected Lady Hester Stanhope to be his ‘Queen of the Jews’. When she visited him in Newgate Prison, he predicted that ‘she would one day go to Jerusalem and lead back the Chosen People!’ Stanhope did indeed visit Jerusalem in 1812, dressed fetchingly in Ottoman costume, but Brothers’ predictions did not materialize. She stayed in the East – and her fame helped to promote European interest. Most satisfyingly of all, she beat the despised Caroline to Jerusalem by three years.
On 9 August 1814, the princess, aged forty-six, departed on a scandalous Mediterranean tour. Inspired by Smith, Stanhope and the pilgrimages of various crusading ancestors, Caroline declared that ‘Jerusalem is my great ambition’.
In Acre, the princess was greeted by Suleiman the Just’s ‘prime minister, a Jew who wants an eye, an ear and a nose’ – for the pasha had inherited not only the Butcher’s fiefdom but also his Jewish adviser, Haim Farhi. Ten years after the Butcher’s death, Caroline’s courtiers were amazed how many ‘persons one sees in the streets without noses’. But the princess relished the ‘barbarous pomp of Eastern mores’. She arrived with an entourage of twenty-six including a foundling, Willie Austin, whom she had adopted (though he was possibly her own child), and her latest lover, an Italian soldier named Bartholomeo Pergami, sixteen years her junior. Now a baron and her chamberlain, he was ‘a man six feet high with a magnificent head of black hair, pale complexion and moustaches that reach from here to London!’ as one lady swooningly described him. By the time Caroline left for Jerusalem, her retinue of 200 ‘presented the appearance of an army’.
She entered Jerusalem on a donkey like Jesus, but she was sufficiently fat to need a servant propping her up on each side. The Franciscans escorted her on her ass to her suite at St Saviour’s. ‘It would be impossible to paint the scene,’ remembered one of her courtiers. ‘Men, women and children, Jews and Arabs, Armenians, Greeks, Catholics and infidels all received us. “Ben venute!” they cried!’ Illuminated by burning torches, many fingers extended towards the Royal Pilgrim’ with shouts of ‘That’s her!’ No wonder: Caroline often sported ‘a wig (curled at the sides nearly as high as the topof the bonnet), artificial eyebrows (nature having denied her any) and false teeth’, with a scarlet dress, cut low at front and back and far too short, scarcely hiding the ‘immense protuberance of her ventre’. A courtier had to admit that her entry was both ‘solemn and certainly laughable’.
Proud of being the first Christian princess to visit for six centuries, Caroline sincerely wanted to leave ‘a proper feeling of her elevated status’, so she established an Order of St Caroline with its own banner – a red cross with a riband of lilac and silver. Her lover Pergami was the Order’s first (and last) ‘Grand Master’. On her return, she commissioned a painting of her pilgrimage: The Entry Queen Caroline into Jerusalem.
The future Queen of England handed out generous donations to the Franciscans, and on 17 July 1815 (three weeks after Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo) ‘quit Jerusalem amid the thanks and regrets of all ranks and degrees’ – hardly surprising given the state of the place.
When Damascus trebled the taxes in 1819, the city revolted again. This time, Abdullah Pasha,* the strongman of Palestine, the Butcher’s grandson, attacked Jerusalem and when it was captured, the city governor personally strangled twenty-eight rebels – the rest were beheaded the next day, all the bodies lined up outside Jaffa Gate. In 1824, the savage depredations of the Ottoman pasha known as Mustafa the Criminal led to a peasants revolt. Jerusalem achieved independence for some months until Abdullah bombarded it from the Mount of Olives. By the late 1820s, Jerusalem was ‘fallen, desolate and abject’, wrote a brave English traveller, Judith Montefiore, visiting with her wealthy husband, Moses. ‘Not a single relic’, she said, remained of ‘the city that was the joy of the whole earth’.
The Montefiores were the first of a new breed of powerful and proud European Jews, determined to help their benighted brethren in Jerusalem. They were fêted by the city’s governor but stayed with a Moroccan former slave-trader within the walls and started their philanthropic work by restoring Rachel’s Tomb near Bethlehem, Judaism’s third holiest shrine after the Temple and the Patriarch’s Tombs in Hebron, but, like the other two, also holy to Islam. The Montefiores were childless and Rachel’s Tomb was said to help women conceive. Jerusalem’s Jews welcomed them ‘almost like the coming of the Messiah’, but begged them not to give too much because the Turks would simply cripple them with higher taxes after they had gone.
Moses Montefiore arrived as an Italian-born, self-made English gentleman and international financier, brother-in-law of Nathaniel Rothschild, but he was not particularly religious. The trip to Jerusalem changed his life. He left as a reborn Jew, having prayed all through his last night there. For him Jerusalem was simply ‘the city of our forefathers, the great and long-desired object of our wishes and journey’. He believed it was every Jew’s duty to make the pilgrimage: ‘I humbly pray to the God of my forefathers that I may henceforth become a more righteous and better man as well as a better Jew.’* He would return to the Holy City many times and he henceforth contrived to combine the life of an English grandee with that of an Orthodox Jew.7
No sooner had Montefiore left than a Byronic poseur rode into town: both men were English Sephardic Jews of Italian descent. They did not yet know about each other – but one day both would promote Britain’s advance into the Middle East.
DISRAELI: THE SACRED AND THE ROMANTIC
‘You should see me in the costume of a Greek pirate. A blood red shirt with silver studs as big as shillings, an immense scarf, girdle full of pistols and daggers, a red cap, red slippers, blue broad striped jacket and trousers. Excessively wicked!’ This was how Benjamin Disraeli, the twenty-six-year-old fashionable novelist (already author of The Young Duke), failed speculator and aspiring politician, dressed on his Oriental tour. Such jaunts were the new version of the eighteenth-century Grand Tour, combining romantic posturing, Classical sightseeing, the smoking of hookah pipes, avid whoring and visits to Istanbul and Jerusalem.
Disraeli had been raised as a Jew but was baptized at thirteen. He regarded himself, he later told Queen Victoria, as ‘the blank page between the Old and New Testaments’. He looked the part. Slim and pale with a head of black ringleted hair, Disraeli rode through the Judaean hills, ‘well mounted and well armed’. When he saw the walls:
I was thunderstruck. I saw before me apparently a gorgeous city. In the front is the magnificent mosque built on the site of the Temple with its beautiful garden and fantastic gates – a variety of domes and towers arise. Nothing can be conceived more wild and terrible and barren than the surrounding scenery. I never saw anything more essentially striking.
Dining on the roof of the Armenian Monastery, where he was staying, Disraeli was enraptured by the romance of Jewish history as he gazed out at ‘Jehovah’s lost capital’ and was intrigued by that of Islam: he could not resist trying to visit the Temple Mount. A Scottish physician and later an Englishwoman had both penetrated the esplanade – but only in strict disguise. Disraeli was less adept: ‘I was detected and surrounded by a crowd of turbaned fanatics and escaped with difficulty!’ He regarded the Jews and the Arabs as one people – the Arabs were surely ‘Jews on horseback’ – and he asked the Christians: ‘Where is your Christianity if you don’t believe in their Judaism?’
While he was in Jerusalem, he started to write his next novel, Alroy, about the doomed twelfth-century ‘Messiah’ whose uprising he called a ‘gorgeous incident in the annals of that sacred and romantic people from whom I derive my blood and name’.
His Jerusalem visit helped him refine his unique hybrid mystique as a Tory aristocrat and exotic Jewish panjandrum,* convinced him that Britain had a role in the Middle East – and let him dream of a return to Zion. In his novel, David Alroy’s adviser declares, ‘You ask what I wish. My answer is a national existence. You ask what I wish. My answer is Jerusalem.’ In 1851, Disraeli the rising politican reflected that ‘restoring the Jews to their land, which could be bought from the Ottomans, was both just and feasible’.
Disraeli claimed Alroy’s adventure was ‘his ideal ambition’ but actually he was far too ambitious to risk his career for anything Jewish: he wanted to be prime minister of the greatest empire on earth. Over thirty years later when he had reached the ‘topof the greasy pole’, Disraeli did guide British power into the region by gaining Cyprus and buying the Suez Canal.8
Not long after Disraeli had returned to embark on his political career, an Albanian warlord who was the ruler of Egypt conquered Jerusalem.
IBRAHIM THE RED
In December 1831, the Egyptian army marched through the city as ‘happy and delighted’ Jerusalemites ‘celebrated with illuminations, dancing and music in every street. For the five days Muslims, Greeks, Franciscans, Armenians and even Jews made merry.’ But already the Muslims were worried by the sight of the Egyptian soldiers in ‘tight trousers, carrying terrible firearms, music instruments and moving in formation after the European fashion’.
Jerusalem’s new master was the Albanian soldier Mehmet Ali, who created a dynasty that still ruled Egypt when the State of Israel was founded over a century later. Now forgotten, he dominated international Near Eastern diplomacy for fifteen years and almost conquered the entire Ottoman empire. The son of a tobacco trader, he was born in what is now Greece, in the same year as Napoleon, and contemporaries saw him as an Eastern Bonaparte: ‘Alike distinguished for military genius, the characters of these chieftains are equally marked by insatiable ambition, and unreposing activity.’ The white-bearded Albanian, now in his sixties, always dressed simply in white turban, yellow slippers and blue-green gown, ever puffing on a gold and silver seven-foot tall diamond-studded pipe, had a ‘Tartar face with high cheekbones’, and a ‘strange wild fire’ in his ‘dark grey eyes [which] beam brightly with genius and intelligence’. His power was based on the curved scimitar that always rested by his side. He had arrived in Egypt in time to command his Albanian troops on behalf of the Ottomans against Napoleon. When the French departed, he took advantage of the ensuing power vacuum and seized Egypt. He then summoned his able son (or some say his nephew), Ibrahim, who lured the mamluk–Ottoman elite to a military ceremony and slaughtered them. The Albanians next plundered and raped their way through Cairo, but the sultan appointed Mehmet Ali as vali of Egypt. He needed only four hours’ sleepa night and claimed to have learned to read at the age of forty-five. Each night, his favourite concubine read him Montesquieu or Machiavelli, and this brutal modernizer started to create a European army, 90,000 strong, and a fleet.
At first, the Ottoman sultan, Mahmoud II, was glad to exploit this rising power. Embarrassed that the puritanical Wahabi sect, led by the Saudi family, had seized Mecca, the sultan asked for Mehmet Ali’s help. The Albanians duly retook Mecca and despatched Abdullah al-Saud’s head to Istanbul.* When in 1824 the Greeks rebelled against the sultan, Mehmet Ali sent his forces, which savagely repressed the Greeks. This so alarmed the European Powers that in 1827 the British, French and Russians together destroyed Mehmet Ali’s fleet at the Battle of Navarino and sponsored Greek independence. But this did not stop the Albanians for long: encouraged by that earlier visitor to Jerusalem, now French foreign minister, Vicomte de Chateaubriand, they coveted their own empire.
In late 1831, Mehmet Ali conquered present-day Israel, Syria and most of Turkey, defeating every army the sultan threw at him. Soon his armies were poised to take Istanbul. Finally the sultan recognized Mehmet Ali as ruler of Egypt, Arabia and Crete with Ibrahim as governor of greater Syria. This empire now belonged to the Albanians: ‘I have now conquered this country with the sword,’ declared Mehmet Ali, ‘and by the sword will I preserve it.’ His sword was his generalissimo, Ibrahim, who had commanded his first armies and organized his first massacres as a teenager. It was Ibrahim who had defeated the Saudis, ravaged Greece, conquered Jerusalem and Damascus and marched victoriously almost to the gates of Istanbul.
Now in spring 1834, Ibrahim, known as The Red, and not just for the colour of his beard, set up his headquarters in the palatial compound of David’s Tomb. Shocking Muslims by sitting on a European throne instead of cushions and openly drinking wine, he set about reforming Jerusalem. He eased the repression of Christians and Jews, promising them equality under the law, and ended the fees that had to be paid by all pilgrims to the Church: they could now wear Muslim clothes, ride horses in the street and no longer had to pay the jizaya tax for the first time in centuries. Yet as Turkish-speaking Albanians, they despised Arabs above all: Ibrahim’s father called them ‘wild beasts’. On 25 April, Ibrahim met the leaders of Jerusalem and Nablus on the Temple Mount to order the conscription of 200 Jerusalemites. ‘I want this order carried out without delay, starting here in Jerusalem,’ said Ibrahim. But Jerusalem was defiant: ‘It’s better to die than give our children to everlasting slavery,’ retorted the Jerusalemites.
On 3 May, the Albanian presided over Orthodox Easter: 17,000 Christian pilgrims filled a seething city on the verge of outright revolt. On Good Friday night, the crowds packed the Church of the Holy Sepulchre ready for the Holy Fire, watched by Robert Curzon, an English traveller who left a vivid memoir of what happened next. ‘The behaviour of the pilgrims was riotous in the extreme. At one point, they made a racecourse around the Sepulchre and some, almost in a state of nudity, danced about with frantic gestures, yelling and screaming as if possessed.’
Next morning, Ibrahim entered the Church to witness the Holy Fire but the crowd was so dense that the guards cleared the way ‘with the butt-ends of their muskets and whips’ while three monks played ‘crazy fiddles’ and women started to ululate ‘with a very peculiar shrill cry’.
IBRAHIM: HOLY FIRE, HOLY DEATh
Ibrahim was seated. Darkness fell. The Greek patriarch, in ‘magnificent procession’, entered the aedicule. The crowd awaited the divine spark. Curzon saw the flicker then the flame of the Miracle which was passed to the pilgrim ‘who had paid the highest sum for this honour’, but ‘a furious battle’ broke out for the Fire; pilgrims fell to the floor in ecstatic faints; blinding smoke filled the Church; three pilgrims fell to their deaths from the higher galleries; an old Armenian lady died in her seat. Ibrahim tried to leave the Church but could not move. His guards, attempting to beat a way through the crowd, started a stampede. By the time Curzon ‘got as far as the place where the Virgin stood during the Crucifixion’, the stones felt soft under his feet.
There was actually a great heap of bodies on which I trod. All dead. Many of them quite black with suffocation and others all bloody and covered with brains and entrails, trodden to pieces by the crowd. Soldiers with their bayonets killed a number of fainting wretches, the walls splattered with the blood and brains of men who had been felled like oxen.
The frenzied stampede became a ‘desperate and savage’ fight for survival – Curzon saw people dying all around him. Ibrahim only just escaped with his own life, fainting several times until his guards drew their swords and sliced a path through human flesh.
Bodies were ‘lying in heaps even upon the Stone of Unction’. Ibrahim stood in the courtyard ‘giving orders for the removal of the corpses and making his men drag out the bodies of those who appeared to be alive’. Four hundred pilgrims perished. When Curzon escaped, many of the bodies were actually ‘standing upright quite dead’.
IBRAHIM: THE PEASANTS REVOLT
As news of this disaster spread throughout a shocked Christendom, the Families of Jerusalem, Nablus and Hebron raised the rebellion. On 8 May, 10,000 armed fellahin attacked Jerusalem, but were repulsed by Ibrahim’s troops. On 19 May, in a scene that recalled King David’s taking of Jerusalem, the villagers of Silwan, below the City of David, showed the rebels a secret tunnel through which they crawled into the city and opened the Dung Gate set in the southern wall. The peasants pillaged the bazaars, the troops attacked them, only to join in the plundering. The Bimbashi – garrison commander – arrested the leaders of the Jerusalemite Families, the Husseinis and Khalidis. But 20,000 peasants were now rampaging through the streets and besieging the Tower. Two young American missionaries, William Thomson and his pregnant wife Eliza, cowered in their digs: he left her to seek help in Jaffa while she locked herself in their room, amid ‘the roar of cannon, falling walls, shrieks of the neighbours, terror of the servants and the expectation of massacre’. She gave birth to a boy, but by the time her husband made it back to Jerusalem she was dying. He soon left ‘this wreck of a country’.*
Ibrahim, who had retreated to Jaffa, now fought his way across the hills, losing 500 men. On 27 May, encamped on Mount Zion, he attacked, killing 300 rebels. But he was ambushed near the Pools of Solomon, and besieged in David’s Tomb. The rebellion flared again led by the Husseinis and the Abu Ghosh. Ibrahim called his father for help.
Mehmet Ali himself and 15,000 reinforcements sailed into Jaffa: ‘a fine looking old man’, bowing regally on a ‘splendid horse, natural, dignified and in perfect keeping with the character of a great man’. The Albanians crushed the rebels and retook Jerusalem; the Husseinis of Jerusalem were exiled to Egypt. The rebels rose again, but Ibrahim the Red slaughtered them outside Nablus, sacked Hebron, despoiled the countryside, beheaded his captives – and launched a reign of terror in Jerusalem. Returning to the city, he appointed the chieftain Jaber Abu Ghosh as a poacher-turned-gamekeeper governor, and beheaded anyone found with a weapon. The walls were bedecked with severed heads; prisoners rotted in the new Kishleh jail near the Jaffa Gate, since used by the Ottomans, British and Israelis.
The Albanians were enthusiastic modernizers who needed European backing if they were to conquer the Ottoman empire. Ibrahim allowed the minorities to repair their smashed buildings: the Franciscans restored St Saviour’s; the Sephardic Jews started to rebuild the ben Zakkai Synagogue, one of the four synagogues of the Jewish Quarter; the Ashkenazis returned to the Hurva Synagogue, destroyed in 1720. Although the Jewish Quarter was now poverty-stricken, a few Russian Jews, persecuted at home, started to settle there.
In 1839, Ibrahim made his bid for Istanbul, smashing the Ottoman armies. King Louis Philippe’s France backed the Albanians, but Britain feared French and Russian influence if the Ottomans fell. The sultan and his enemy Ibrahim both bid for Western support. The teenaged Sultan Abdulmecid issued a Noble Rescript promising equality for minorities, while Ibrahim invited the Europeans to establish consulates in Jerusalem – and, for the first time since the Crusades, permitted the ringing of church bells.
In 1839, the first British vice-consul, William Turner Young, arrived in Jerusalem not only to represent London’s new power but to convert the Jews and accelerate the Second Coming.
PALMERSTON AND SHAFTESBURY: THE IMPERIALIST AND THE EVANGELIST
The diplomatic policy relating to Jerusalem was the work of Lord Palmerston, the foreign secretary, but the Godly mission was the achievement of his evangelical stepson-in-law, the Earl of Shaftesbury.* Palmerston, aged fifty-five, was not a Victorian prig or evangelical but an unrepentant Regency buck known as Lord Cupid for his sexual escapades (which he jovially recorded in his diary), as Lord Pam for his jaunty vigour, and as Lord Pumicestone for his gunboat diplomacy. Indeed Shaftesbury joked that Palmerston ‘didn’t know Moses from Sir Sidney Smith’. His interest in the Jews was pragmatic: the French advanced their power by protecting the Catholics, the Russians by protecting the Orthodox, but there were few Protestants in Jerusalem. Palmerston wanted to diminish French and Russian influence, and saw that British power could be advanced by protecting the Jews. The other mission – the conversion of the Jews – was the result of his son-in-law’s evangelical ardour.
Shaftesbury, thirty-nine years old, curly haired and bewhiskered, personified the new Victorian Britain. A pure-hearted aristocrat dedicated to improving the lives of workers, children and lunatics, he was also a fundamentalist who believed that the Bible ‘is God’s word written from the very first syllable down to the very last’. He was sure that dynamic Christianity would promote a global moral renaissance and an improvement of humanity itself. In Britain, Puritan millenarianism had long since been overwhelmed by the rationalism of the Enlightenment but it had survived among the Nonconformists. Now it returned to the mainstream: the French Revolution with its guillotine, and the Industrial Revolution with its mobs of workers, had shaped a new British middle class that welcomed the certainties of piety, respectability and the Bible, the antidote to the raging materialism of Victorian prosperity.
The London Society for Promoting Christianity Among the Jews, known as the Jews Society, founded in 1808, now flourished, thanks in part to Shaftesbury. ‘All the young people are growing mad about religion,’ grumbled another elderly Regency roué, Lord Melbourne, prime minister at Queen Victoria’s accession in 1837. Convinced that eternal salvation was attainable through the personal experience of Jesus and his good news (evangelion in Greek), these evangelicals expected the Second Coming. Shaftesbury believed, like the Puritans two centuries before, that the return and conversion of the Jews would create an Anglican Jerusalem and the Kingdom of Heaven. He prepared a memorandum for Palmerston: ‘There’s a country without a nation and God in his wisdom and mercy directs us to a nation without a country.’*
‘It will be part of your duty’, Palmerston instructed Jerusalem vice-consul Young, ‘to afford protection to the Jews generally.’ At the same time he told his ambassador to the Sublime Porte that he should ‘strongly recommend [the sultan] to hold out every just encouragement to the Jews of Europe to return to Palestine’. In September 1839, Young founded the Jerusalem branch of the London Jews Society. Shaftesbury was exultant, noting in his diary, ‘The ancient city of the people of God is about to resume a place among the nations. I shall always remember that God put it into my head to conceive the plan for His honour, gave me the influence to prevail with Palmerston, and provided a man for the situation, who can remake Jerusalem in her glory.’ Shaftesbury’s signet ring was inscribed ‘Pray for Jerusalem’, while (as we have seen) another zealous Victorian fixated with Jerusalem – Sir Moses Montefiore – added Jerusalem to his new coat of arms and inscribed it like a talisman on his carriage, his signet ring and even his bed. Now, in June 1839, Montefiore and his wife Judith returned to Jerusalem, armed with pistols to protect the cash they had raised in London.
Jerusalem was ravaged by the plague, so Montefiore camped outside on the Mount of Olives where he held court, receiving over 300 visitors. When the plague was ebbing, Montefiore entered the city on a white horse, lent him by the governor, and proceeded to hear petitions and distribute alms to the poverty-stricken Jews. He and his wife were welcomed by all three religions in Jerusalem, but while they were visiting the Sanctuary in Hebron to the south, a Muslim mob attacked them. They only escaped with their lives thanks to the intervention of Ottoman troops. Montefiore was not discouraged. As he left, this reborn Jew and dedicated imperialist celebrated a similar though of course different messianic fervour as Shaftesbury: ‘O Jerusalem,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘may the city soon be rebuilt in our days. Amen.’
Shaftesbury and Montefiore both believed in the divine providence of the British empire and the Jewish return to Zion. The righteousness of evangelical zeal and the reborn passion of Jewish dreams of Jerusalem dovetailed neatly to become one of the Victorian obsessions, and it happened that the painter David Roberts returned from Palestine in 1840 just in time to show the public his hugely popular romantic images of a flamboyantly Oriental Jerusalem ripe for British civilization and Jewish restoration. The Jews were in urgent need of British protection because the competing promises of tolerance issued by the sultan and the Albanians provoked a deadly backlash.
JAMES FINN: THE EVANGELICAL CONSUL
In March 1840, seven Jews in Damascus were accused of killing a Christian monk and his Muslim servant to use their blood for a human sacrifice at Passover. This imaginary scenario was the notorious ‘blood libel’ that had first appeared in Oxford at the time of the Second Crusade in the twelfth century. Sixty-three Jewish children were arrested and tortured to force their mothers to reveal the ‘hiding place of the blood’.
Even though he had only just returned to London, Sir Moses Montefiore, backed by the Rothschilds, led the campaign to rescue the Damascene Jews from this medieval persecution. Joining forces with the French lawyer Adolphe Cremieux, Montefiore dashed to Alexandria where he canvassed Mehmet Ali to free the prisoners. But only weeks later, there was another case of the ‘blood libel’ in Rhodes. Montefiore sailed from Alexandria to Istanbul where he was received by the sultan whom he persuaded to issue a decree that categorically denied the truth of the ‘blood libel.’ It was Montefiore’s finest hour – but his success was due as much to his nationality as to his often ponderous diplomacy. It was a fine time to be an Englishman in the Middle East.
Both the sultan and the Albanians were frantically bidding for British favour as the very existence of the Ottoman empire hung in the balance. Jerusalem remained under Ibrahim the Red who ruled much of the Middle East. While France backed the Albanians, Britain tried to satisfy their appetite while preserving the Ottomans. They offered Palestine as well as Egypt if Ibrahim would withdraw from Syria. It was a good offer but Mehmet Ali and Ibrahim could not resist the supreme prize: Istanbul. Ibrahim defied Britain so Palmerston put together an Anglo-Austrian-Ottoman coalition and despatched his gunboats, under Commodore Charles Napier, cannons blazing. Ibrahim crumbled before British might.
Ibrahim the Red had opened up Jerusalem to the Europeans and changed her for ever but now, in return for hereditary rule in Egypt, he abandoned Syria and the Holy City.* The French, humiliated by Palmerston’s triumph, considered a ‘Christian Free City at Jerusalem’, the first proposal for an internationalized Zion, but on 20 October, 1840, the sultan’s troops marched back into Jerusalem. Within the walls, a third of the city was wasteland, covered in thickets of prickly-pear cacti, and there were only 13,000 inhabitants, but 5,000 of them were now Jews, their numbers boosted by Russian immigrants and refugees from an earthquake that had struck Safed in Galilee.9
Even when Palmerston lost the Foreign Office to Lord Aberdeen, who ordered the vice-consul to desist from evangelical Jewish schemes, Young continued regardless. When Palmerston returned to power he ordered the Jerusalem consul to ‘receive under British Protection all Russian Jews who apply to you’.
Meanwhile Shaftesbury had persuaded the new prime minister, Robert Peel, to back the creation of the first ever Anglican bishopric and church in Jerusalem. In 1841, Prussia (whose king had proposed a Christian international Jerusalem) and Britain jointly appointed the first Protestant bishop, Michael Solomon Alexander, a Jewish convert. British missionaries became increasingly aggressive in their Jewish mission. In 1841, at the opening of the very English Christ Church near the Jaffa Gate, three Jews were baptized in the presence of Consul Young. The Jewish plight in Jerusalem was pitiful: the Jews lived ‘like flies who have taken up their abode in a skull’, wrote the American novelist Herman Melville. The swelling Jewish community lived in almost theatrical poverty without any medical care, but they did have access to the free doctors provided by the London Jews Society. This tempted a few converts.
‘I can rejoice in Zion for a capital,’ mused Shaftesbury, ‘in Jerusale for a church and in Hebrew for a King!’ Jerusalem went overnight from a benighted ruin ruled by a shabby pasha in a tawdry seraglio to a city with a surfeit of gold-braided and bejewelled dignitaries. There had not been a Latin patriarch since the thirteenth century and the Orthodox patriarch had long resided in Istanbul, but now the French and the Russians sponsored their return to Jerusalem. However, it was the seven European consuls, puffed-up minor officials representing imperial ambitions, who could scarcely contain their high-handed grandiosity. Escorted by towering bodyguards, the kavasses, wearing bright scarlet uniforms, wielding sabres and heavy gold wands that they banged on the cobbles to clear the streets, the consuls paraded solemnly through the city, craving any pretext to impose their will on the beleaguered Ottoman governors. Ottoman soldiers even had to stand in the presence of the consul’s children. The pretensions of the Austrian and Sardinian consuls were all the haughtier because their monarchs claimed to be kings of Jerusalem. But none were more arrogant or petty than the British and the French.
In 1845, Young was replaced by James Finn, who for twenty years was almost as powerful as the Ottoman governors, yet this sanctimonious meddler offended everyone from English lords and Ottoman pashas to every other foreign diplomat. Regardless of orders from London, he offered British protection to the Russian Jews but never ceased his mission to convert them. When the Ottomans allowed foreign purchase of land, Finn bought and developed his farm at Talbieh and then another at Abraham’s Vineyard, funded by a Miss Cook of Cheltenham, and aided by a team of dedicated English evangelical ladies, as a means to proselytize more Jews by teaching them the joys of honest work.
Finn regarded himself as a cross between imperial proconsul, saintly missionary and property magnate, unscrupulously buying lands and houses with suspiciously large amounts of money. He and his wife, another fanatical evangelical, learned fluent Hebrew and the widely spoken Ladino. On one hand, they aggressively protected the Jews, who were brutally oppressed in Jerusalem. Yet at the same time his pushy mission provoked violent Jewish resistance. When he converted a boy called Mendel Digness, he caused mayhem as ‘the Jews climbed over the terraces and made great disturbances’. Finn called the rabbis ‘fanatics’, but back in Britain, the powerful Montefiore, hearing that the Jews were being harassed, sent a Jewish doctor and pharmacy to Jerusalem to foil the Jews Society, which in turn founded a hospital on the edge of the Jewish Quarter.
In 1847, a Christian Arab boy attacked a Jewish youth who threw back a pebble which grazed the Arab boy’s foot. The Greek Orthodox traditionally the most anti-Semitic community, quickly backed by the Muslim mufti and qadi, accused the Jews of procuring Christian blood to bake the Passover biscuits: the blood libel had come to Jerusalem, but the sultan’s ban, granted to Montefiore after the Damascus affair, proved decisive.10
Meanwhile the consuls were joined by perhaps the most extraordinary diplomat in American history. ‘I doubt,’ observed William Thackeray, the English author of Vanity Fair, who was visiting Jerusalem, ‘that any government has received or appointed so queer an ambassador.’
WARDER CRESSON, US CONSUL:
THE AMERICAN HOLY STRANGER
On 4 October 1844, Warder Cresson arrived in Jerusalem as the US consul-general of Syria and Jerusalem – his chief qualification for the job being his certainty that the Second Coming was due in 1847. Cresson took the consular hauteur of his European colleagues to a new level: he galloped around Jerusalem in a ‘cloud of dust’ surrounded by ‘a little American army’ who belonged in a ‘troop of knights and paladins’ from a Walter Scott novel – ‘a party of armed and glittering horsemen led by an Arab followed by two Janissaries with silver maces shining in the sun’.
At his interview with the pasha, Cresson explained that he had arrived for the coming Apocalypse and the return of the Jews. A Philadelphian landowner, child of rich Quakers, Cresson had spent twenty years spinning from one apocalyptic cult to another: after writing his first manifesto, Jerusalem, the Centre of the Joy of the Whole World, and abandoning his wife and six children, Cresson persuaded Secretary of State John Calhoun to appoint him consul: ‘I left everything near and dear to me on earth in pursuit of truth.’ The US president John Tyler was soon informed by his diplomats that his first Jerusalem consul was a ‘religious maniac and madman’, but Cresson was already in Jerusalem. And he was not alone in his apocalyptic views: he was an American of his time.
The American Constitution was secular, carefully not mentioning Christ and separating state and faith, yet on the Great Seal, the Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin, had depicted the Children of Israel led by cloud and fire towards the Promised Land. Cresson personified how that cloud and fire were attracting many Americans to Jerusalem. Indeed the separation of Church and state liberated American faith and generated a blossoming of new sects and fresh millennial prophecies.
The early Americans, inheriting the Hebraist fervour of the English Puritans, had enjoyed a Great Awakening of religious joy. Now, in the first half of the nineteenth century, a Second Awakening was driven by the evangelical energy of the frontier. In 1776, some 10 per cent of Americans were church-goers; by 1815, it was a quarter; by 1914, it was half. Their passionate Protestantism was American in character – gritty, exuberant and swashbuckling. At its heart was the belief that a person could save himself and accelerate the Second Coming by righteous action and heartfelt joy. America was itself a mission disguised as a nation, blessed by God, not unlike the way Shaftesbury and the English evangelicals saw the British empire.
In little wooden churches in one-horse mining towns, farmsteads on boundless prairies and gleaming new industrial cities, the preachers in the New Promised Land of America cited the literal biblical revelations of the Old. ‘In no country,’ wrote Dr Edward Robinson, an evangelical academic who became the founder of biblical archaeology in Jerusalem, ‘are the Scriptures better known.’ The first American missionaries believed that the Native Americans were the Lost Tribes of Israel and that every Christian must perform acts of righteousness in Jerusalem and help the Return and Restoration of the Jews: ‘I really wish the Jews again in Judaea an independent nation,’ wrote the second US president John Adams. In 1819, two young missionaries in Boston prepared to put this into action: ‘Every eye is fixed on Jerusalem,’ preached Levi Parsons in Boston, ‘indeed the centre of the world.’ Their congregation wept as Pliny Fisk announced: ‘I go bound in spirit to Jerusalem.’ They made it there but their early deaths in the east did not discourage others because ‘Jerusalem’, insisted William Thomson, the American missionary whose wife died there during the revolt of 1834, ‘is the common property of the whole Christian world.’
Consul Cresson had ridden the wave of this flowering of prophecies: he had been a Shaker, a Millerite, a Mormon and a Campbellite before a local rabbi in Pennsylvania convinced him that ‘salvation was of the Jews’ whose return would bring the Second Coming.* One of the first to arrive in Jerusalem was Harriet Livermore. Daughter and granddaughter of New England congressmen, she set off in 1837, after years preaching to the Sioux and Cheyenne tribes that they were the Lost Tribes of Israel who should accompany her back to Zion. She rented rooms on Mount Zion to prepare her sect, the Pilgrim Strangers, for the Apocalypse that she expected in 1847 – but it did not come and she ended up begging in Jerusalem’s streets. At the same time, Joseph Smith, prophet of the new revelation of Latter Day Saints – the Mormons – sent his Apostle to Jerusalem: he built an altar on the Olivet to prepare ‘to restore Israel with Jerusalem as capital.’
By the time Cresson became the US consul, a growing number of American evangelists were visiting Jerusalem to prepare for the End Days. The US government eventually dismissed him, but he continued defiantly to issue visas of protection to Jews for several years and then, changing his name to Michael Boaz Israel, converted to Judaism. For his long-abandoned wife this was a revelation too far. She sued to have Cresson declared insane, citing his pistol-waving, street-haranguing, financial incompetence, cultic eclecticism, plans to rebuild the Jewish Temple and sexual deviance. He sailed back from Jerusalem for the Inquisition of Lunacy in Philadelphia, a cause célèbre, for Mrs Cresson was challenging the constitutional right of American citizens to believe whatever they wished, the essence of Jeffersonian liberty.
At the trial Cresson was found to be insane, but he appealed and was awarded a retrial. Mrs Cresson had to ‘deny either her Saviour or her Husband’ while he had to deny ‘either the One, Only God or My Wife’. The wife lost the second case, confirming American freedom of worship, and Cresson returned to Jerusalem. He created a Jewish model farm near the city, studied the Torah, divorced his American wife and married a Jewess, all the while completing his book The Key of David. He was honoured by local Jews as ‘the American Holy Stranger’. On his death he was buried in the Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives.
Jerusalem was now so overrun by apocalyptic Americans that the American Journal of Insanity compared its hysteria to the California Gold Rush. When Herman Melville visited, he was fascinated yet repulsed by the ‘contagion’ of American Christian millenarianism – ‘this preposterous Jewmania’, he called it, ‘half-melancholy, half-farcical’. ‘How am I to act when any crazy or distressed citizen of the US comes into the country?’ the American consul in Beirut asked his secretary of state. ‘There are several of late going to Jerusalem with strange ideas in their heads that Our Saviour is coming this year.’ But Melville grasped that such majestic world-shaking hopes were impossible to satisfy: ‘No country will more quickly dissipate romantic expectations than Palestine particularly Jerusalem. To some the disappointment is heart-sickening.’11
Jerusalem was essential to the American and English evangelical vision of the Second Coming. Yet even their urgency was dwarfed by the obsessive Russian passion for Jerusalem. Now in the late 1840s, the Russian emperor’s aggressive ambitions were about to place Jerusalem at what the English visitor, William Thackeray, called ‘the centre of the world’s past and future history’ and ignite a European war.
THE GENDARME OF EUROPE AND THE SHOOT-OUT
IN THE SEPULCHRE: THE RUSSIAN GOD IN JERUSALEM
On Good Friday, 10 April 1846, the Ottoman governor and his soldiers were on alert at the Church. Unusually, that year the Orthodox and Catholic Easters fell on the same day. The monks were not just priming their incense-burners: they smuggled in pistols and daggers, secreting them behind the pillars and under robes. Who would hold their service first? The Greeks won the race to place their altar-cloth on the altar of Calvary. The Catholics were just behind them – but too late. They challenged the Greeks: did they have the sultan’s authority? The Greeks challenged the Catholics – where was their sultanic firman giving them the right to pray first? There was a stand-off. Fingers must have hovered over trigger sunder chasubles. Suddenly, the two sides were fighting with every weapon they could improvise from the ecclesiastical paraphernalia at their disposal: they wielded crucifixes, candlesticks and lamps until cold steel flashed and the shooting started. Ottoman soldiers waded in to stop the fighting but forty lay dead around the Holy Sepulchre.
The killing resounded around the world but above all in St Petersburg and Paris: the aggressive confidence of the coenobite brawlers reflected not just the religions but the empires behind them. New railways and steamships had eased the journey to Jerusalem from all over Europe but particularly by sea from Odessa to Jaffa: the vast majority of the 20,000 pilgrims were now Russians. A French monk noticed that in a typical year, out of 4,000 Christmas pilgrims, only four were Catholics, the rest being Russian. This Russian adoration flowed from the devout Orthodoxy to be found from the very bottom of society, the shaggy peasants in the smallest, remotest Siberian villages, to the very top, the Emperor-Tsar Nicholas I himself. The Orthodox mission of Holy Russia was shared by both.
When Constantinople fell in 1453, the grand princes of Muscovy had seen themselves as the heirs of the last Byzantine emperors, Moscow as the Third Rome. The princes adopted the Byzantine double-headed eagle and a new title, Caesar or Tsar. In their wars against the Islamic Crimean khans and then the Ottoman sultans, the tsars promoted the Russian empire as a sacred Orthodox crusade. In Russia, Orthodoxy had developed its own singularly Russian character, spread through its vastness both by tsars – and peasant hermits, all of whom specially revered Jerusalem. It was said that the distinctive onion-shaped domes of Russian churches were an attempt to copy those in paintings of Jerusalem. Russia had even built its own mini-Jerusalem* but every Russian believed that the pilgrimage to Jerusalem was an essential part of the preparation for death and salvation.
Nicholas I had imbibed this tradition – he was very much the grandson of Catherine the Great and heir of Peter the Great, both of whom had promoted themselves as protectors of the Orthodox and the Holy Places, and the Russian peasants themselves linked the two: when Nicholas’ elder brother Alexander I died unexpectedly in 1825, they believed that he had gone to Jerusalem as an ordinary hermit, a modern version of the Last Emperor legend.
Now Nicholas, harshly conservative, deeply anti-Semitic and shamelessly philistine in all matters artistic (he had appointed himself as Pushkin’s personal censor), regarded himself as answerable only to what he called ‘The Russian God’ in the cause of ‘Our Russia entrusted to Us by God.’ This martinet, who prided himself on sleeping on a military cot, ruled Russia like a stern drillmaster. As a young man, the strapping, blue-eyed Nicholas had dazzled British society where one lady described him as ‘devilish handsome, the handsomest man in Europe!’ By the 1840s, his hair was gone and a paunch bulged out of his still high-waisted and skintight military breeches. After thirty years happily married to his ailing wife, he had finally taken a mistress, a young lady-in-waiting – and for all Russia’s vast power, he feared impotence, personally and politically.
For years he had cautiously wielded his personal charm to persuade Britain to agree to the partition of the Ottoman empire, which he called ‘the sick man of Europe,’ hoping to liberate the Orthodox provinces of the Balkans and oversee Jerusalem. Now the British were no longer impressed. Twenty-five years of autocracy had desensitized him and made him impatient: ‘very clever, I don’t think him,’ wrote the shrewd Queen Victoria, ‘and his mind is an uncivilized one.’
In Jerusalem, the streets glittered with the gold braid and shoulder-boards of Russian uniforms, worn by princes and generals, while teeming with the sheepskins and smocks of thousands of peasant pilgrims, all encouraged by Nicholas who also despatched an ecclesiastical mission to compete with the other Europeans. The British consul warned London that ‘the Russians could in one night during Easter arm 10,000 pilgrims within the walls of Jerusalem’ and seize the city. Meanwhile the French pursued their own mission to protect the Catholics. ‘Jerusalem’, reported Consul Finn in 1844, ‘is now a central point of interest to France and Russia.’
GOGOL: THE JERUSALEM SYNDROME
Not all Russia’s pilgrims were soldiers or peasants and not all found the salvation they sought. On 23 February 1848, a Russian pilgrim entered Jerusalem who was both typical in his soaring religious fever and utterly atypical in his flawed genius. The novelist Nikolai Gogol, famed for his play The Inspector-General and for his novel Dead Souls, arrived by donkey in a quest for spiritual ease and divine inspiration. He had envisaged Dead Souls as a trilogy, yet he was struggling to write the second and third parts. God was surely blocking his writing to punish his sins. As a Russian, only one place offered redemption: ‘until I’ve been to Jerusalem,’ he wrote, ‘I’ll be incapable of saying anything comforting to anyone.’
The visit was disastrous: he spent a single night praying beside the Sepulchre, yet he found it filthy and vulgar. ‘Before I had time to pull my wits together, it was over.’ The gaudiness of the holy sites and the barrenness of the hills crushed him: ‘I have never been so little content with the state of my heart as in Jerusalem and afterwards.’ On his return, he refused to talk about Jerusalem but fell under the power of a mystic priest who convinced him that his works were sinful. Gogol manically destroyed his manuscripts then starved himself to death – or at least into a coma – for when his coffin was opened in the twentieth century, his body was found face down.
The special madness of Jerusalem had been called ‘Jerusalem fever’ but in the 1930s, it was recognized as Jerusalem Syndrome, ‘a psychotic decompensation related to religious excitement induced by proximity to the holy places of Jerusalem’. The British Journal of Psychiatry, in 2000, diagnosed this demented disappointment as: ‘Jerusalem Syndrome Subtype Two: those who come with magical ideas of Jerusalem’s healing powers – such as the writer Gogol.’12
In a sense, Nicholas was suffering from his own strain of Jerusalem Syndrome. There was madness in his family: ‘as the years have passed,’ wrote the French ambassador to Petersburg, ‘it is now the qualities of (his father Emperor) Paul which come more to the fore.’ The mad Paul had been assassinated (as had his grandfather Peter III). If Nicholas was far from insane, he started to display some of his father’s obstinately impulsive over-confidence. In 1848, he planned to make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem but he was forced to cancel when revolutions broke out across Europe. He triumphantly crushed the Hungarian revolt against his neighbour, the Habsburg emperor: he enjoyed the prestige of being the ‘Gendarme of Europe’ but Nicholas, wrote the French ambassador, became ‘spoiled by adulation, success and the religious prejudices of the Muscovite nation’.
On 31 October 1847, the silver star on the marble floor of the Grotto of Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity, was cut out and stolen. The star had been donated by France in the eighteenth century; now it had obviously been stolen by the Greeks. The monks fought in Bethlehem. In Istanbul, the French claimed the right to replace the Bethlehem star and to repair the roof of the Church in Jerusalem; the Russians claimed it was their right; each cited eighteenth-century treaties. The row simmered until it became a duel of two emperors.
In December 1851, the French president Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the inscrutably bland yet politically agile nephew of the great Napoleon, overthrew the Second Republic in a coup d’état and prepared to crown himself Emperor Napoleon III. This womanizing adventurer whose sharply-waxed moustaches could not distract attention from an oversized head and an undersized torso was in some ways the first modern politician and he knew his brash, fragile new empire required Catholic prestige and victory abroad. Nicholas, on the other hand, saw the crisis as the chance to crown his reign by saving the Holy Places for ‘the Russian God’. For these two very different emperors, Jerusalem was the key to glory in heaven and on earth.
JAMES FINN AND THE CRIMEAN WAR:
MURDERED EVANGELISTS AND MARAUDING BEDOUIN
The sultan, squeezed between the French and Russians, tried to settle the dispute with his decree of 8 February 1852, confirming the Orthodox paramountcy in the Church, with some concessions to the Catholics. But the French were no less committed than the Russians. They traced their claims back to the great Napoleon’s invasion, the alliance with Suleiman the Magnificent, the French Crusader kings of Jerusalem, and to Charlemagne. When Napoleon III threatened the Ottomans, it was no coincidence that he sent a gunboat called the Charlemagne. In November, the sultan buckled and granted the paramountcy to the Catholics. Nicholas was outraged. He demanded the restoration of Orthodox rights in Jerusalem and an ‘alliance’ that would reduce the Ottoman empire to a Russian protectorate.
When Nicholas’ bullying demands were rejected, he invaded the Ottoman territories on the Danube – today’s Rumania – advancing towards Istanbul. Nicholas had convinced himself that he had charmed the British into agreement, denying he wanted to swallow Istanbul, let alone Jerusalem, but he fatally misjudged both London and Paris. Faced with Russian menace and Ottoman collapse, Britain and France threatened war. Nicholas stubbornly called their bluff because, he explained, he was ‘waging war for a solely Christian purpose, under the banner of the Holy Cross’. On 28 March, 1853, the French and British declared war on Russia. Even though most of the fighting was far away in the Crimea, this war placed Jerusalem at the centre of the world stage where she has remained ever since.*
As Jerusalem’s garrison marched off to fight the Russians, James Finn watched them present arms on the Maidan parade ground outside the Jaffa Gate where the ‘Syrian sun glistened along the moving steel for they marched with fixed bayonets’. Finn could not forget that the ‘kernel of it all lay with us in the Holy Places’ and that Nicholas ‘aimed still at an actual possession of [Jerusalem’s] Sanctuaries’.
Instead of the usual devout Russians, a new breed of often sceptical Western visitors – 10,000 a year, by 1856 – poured into the city to see the Holy Places that had sparked a European war. Yet a visit to Jerusalem was still an adventure. There were no carriages, just covered litters. She possessed virtually no hotels or banks: visitors stayed in the monasteries, the most comfortable being the Armenian with its elegant, airy courtyards. However in 1843, a Russian Jew named Menachem Mendel founded the first hotel, the Kaminitz, which was soon followed by the English Hotel; and in 1848 a Sephardic family, the Valeros, opened the first European bank in a room up some stairs off David Street. This was a still a provincial Ottoman town, usually governed by a scruffy pasha who resided in a ramshackle seraglio – residence, harem and prison – just north of the Temple Mount.* Westerners were ‘astonished at the beggarly meanness of that mansion,’ wrote Finn, and repulsed by the mangy concubines and ‘ragamuffin officials’. As visitors sipped coffee with the pasha, they could hear the clank of prisoners’ chains and groans of the tortured from the dungeons below. During the war, the pasha tried to ensure tranquillity in Jerusalem – but the Greek Orthodox monks attacked the newly appointed Catholic patriarch and herded camels into his residence, all to the delight of the great writers who came to see those very shrines for which so many soldiers were dying in the grinding battles and putrid hospitals of the Crimea. They were not impressed.
THE WRITERS: MELVILLE, FLAUBERT AND THACKERAY
Herman Melville, then aged thirty-seven, had made his name with three novels based on his own breathtaking whaling adventures in the Pacific but Moby Dick, published in 1851, had sold just 3,000 copies. Melancholic and tormented, not unlike Gogol, he arrived in Jerusalem in 1856 to restore his health – and to investigate the nature of God. ‘My object – saturation of my mind with the atmosphere of Jerusalem, offering myself as a passive subject to its weird impressions’ – and he was stimulated by the ‘wreck’ that was Jerusalem, beguiled by the ‘unleavened nakedness of desolation’. As we saw earlier, he was fascinated by the ‘fanatical energy and spirit’ and ‘Jewmania’ of the many ‘crazy’ Americans. They inspired his epic Clarel – at 18,000 lines, the longest American poem, which he wrote when he got home as he toiled in the US Customs Office.
Melville was not the only novelist looking for restoration and consolation for literary disappointment in the Orient: Gustave Flaubert, accompanied by his wealthy friend Maxime du Camp, and funded by the French government to report on trade and agriculture, was on a cultural and sexual tour to recover from the reception of his first novel. He saw Jerusalem as a ‘charnelhouse surrounded by walls, the old religions rotting in the sun’. As for the Church, ‘a dog would have been more moved than me. The Armenians curse the Greeks who detest the Latins who execrate the Copts.’ Melville agreed that the Church was a ‘half-ruinous pile of mouldering grottoes that smelled like death’ but recognized that wars were started in what he called the ‘thronged news-room and theology exchange of Jerusalem’.*
The coenobite fighting was only one aspect of the violent theatre of Jerusalem. The tensions between the new visitors – Anglo-American evangelicals and Russian Jews and Orthodox peasants on one hand, and the older world of the Ottomans, Arab Families, Sephardic Jews and Bedouin and fellahin on the other – led to a series of murders. One of James Finn’s evangelical ladies, Mathilda Creasy, was found with her head smashed in; and a Jew was found stabbed down a well. The poisoning of a richrabbi, David Herschell, led to a sensational court case but the suspects, who were his own grandsons, were acquitted for lack of evidence. The British consul James Finn was the most powerful official in Jerusalem at a time when the Ottomans were so indebted to Britain, hence he took it upon himself to intervene wherever he saw fit. Considering himself to be the Sherlock Holmes of the Holy City, he set about investigating each of these crimes, but despite his powers of detection (and the aid of six African necromancers), no killers were ever found.
Finn was the courageous champion and proselytizing irritant for the Jews who still needed his protection. Their plight was, if anything, getting worse. Most of the Jews lived in the ‘stinking ruins of the Jewish Quarter, venerable in filth’, wrote Thackeray, and their ‘wailings and lamentations of the lost glory of their city’ haunted Jerusalem on Friday nights. ‘None equals the misery and suffering of the Jews at Jerusalem,’ Karl Marx wrote in the New York Daily Tribune in April 1854, ‘inhabiting the most filthy quarter, constant object of Musulman oppression and intolerance, insulted by the Greeks, persecuted by the Latins.’ A Jew who walked past the gate leading to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, was, as Finn reported, ‘beaten by a mob of pilgrims’ because it was still illegal for a Jew to pass it. Another was stabbed by an Ottoman soldier. A Jewish funeral was attacked by Arabs. In each case, Finn swooped on the Ottoman governor and forced him to intervene and see British justice done.
The pasha himself was more interested in controlling the Palestinian Arabs whose rebellions and clan wars, partly a response to the centralizing reforms of the Ottoman empire, were often fought out with the gallop of camels, the swish of spears and the whistle of bullets around the walls of Jerusalem. These thrilling scenes played into the European view of Palestine as a biblical theatre crossed with a Wild West stage set, and they gathered on the walls to spectate the skirmishes which to them must have resembled surreal sporting events – with the added spice of the occasional fatality.
THE WRITERS: DAVID DORR, AN AMERICAN SLAVE ON TOUR
At their Talbieh evangelical farm for converting Jews, the Finns frequently found themselves caught in the crossfire. As bullets flew, Mrs Finn was often amazed to identify women amongst the warriors. She did her best to negotiate peace between the sheikhs. But the Bedouin were only part of the problem: the sheikhs of Hebron and Abu Ghosh fielded private armies of 500 warriors and fought full-scale wars against the Ottomans. When one of these sheikhs was captured and brought to Jerusalem in chains, the dashing warrior managed to escape and gallop away to fight again, like an Arab Robin Hood. Finally Hafiz Pasha, the aged governor of Jerusalem, had to lead an expedition with 550 troops and two brass field-guns to suppress the warlord of Hebron.
Yet despite such melodrama, on summer evenings, Jerusalemites of all creeds – Muslim and Christian Arabs along with the Sephardic Jews – picnicked on the Damascus road. The American explorer, Lieutenant William Lynch, observed a ‘picturesque scene – hundreds of Jews enjoying the fresh air, seated outside the walls under enormous olive trees, the woman all in white shrouds, the men in broad-brimmed black hats’. James Finn and the other consuls, preceded by Ottoman soldiers and kavasses with silver-mounted batons, promenaded with their wives. ‘As the sun set, everyone hurried inside the walls that were still locked every night.’
‘Ah the sadness of Jerusalem,’ sighed Finn who had to admit that the city seemed ‘monastically dull to a person imbued with the gay habits of other places. French visitors have been known to utter the ejaculation which ever accompanies the shrug of the shoulders at the contrast between Jerusalem and Paris.’ This was certainly not the sort of ejaculation which the priapic Flaubert expected and he expressed his frustration at the Jaffa Gate, ‘I let a fart escape as I crossed the threshold,’ even if ‘I was annoyed by the Voltaireanism of my anus.’ That sexual gourmand Flaubert celebrated escape from Jerusalem with a five-girl orgy in Beirut: ‘I screwed three women and came four times – three times before lunch and once after dessert. Young Du Campcame only once, his member still sore with the remnant of a chancre given him by a Wallachian whore.’
One unique American visitor, David Dorr, a young black slave from Louisiana who called himself a ‘quadroon’, agreed with Flaubert: on tour with his master, he arrived ‘with submissive heart’ filled with awe for Jerusalem but soon changed his mind: ‘When I heard all the absurdities of these ignorant people, I was more inclined to ridicule right over these sacred dead bodies and spots than pay homage. After seventeen days in Jerusalem, I leave never wishing to return again.’*
Yet for all their irreverence, the writers could not help but be awed by Jerusalem. Flaubert considered her ‘diabolically grand’. Thackeray sensed ‘there’s not a spot at which you may look but where some violent deed has been done, some massacre, some visitors murdered, some idol worshipped with bloody rites.’ Melville almost admired the ‘plague-stricken splendour’ of the place. Standing at the Golden Gate, gazing out at Muslim and Jewish cemeteries, Melville saw a ‘city besieged by armies of the dead’ and asked himself: ‘is the desolation the result of the fatal embrace of the Deity?’13
As Russian forces were repeatedly defeated in the Crimea, Nicholas fell ill under the strain and died on 18 February 1855. In September, the Russian naval base at Sebastopol fell to the British and French. Russia had been thoroughly humiliated. After staggering military incompetence on all sides in a campaign that cost 750,000 lives, the new Russian emperor, Alexander II, sued for peace, surrendering his imperial ambitions for Jerusalem, but winning at least a restoration of the dominant Orthodox rights in the Sepulchre, the status quo that still remains in force today.
On 14 April 1856, the cannons of the Citadel saluted the signing of peace. But twelve days later, James Finn, attending the Holy Fire, watched ‘Greek pilgrims, provided with sticks, stones and cudgels, concealed beforehand behind the columns and dropped from the gallery,’ attack the Armenians. ‘Dreadful conflict ensued,’ he observed, ‘missiles were flung upwards to the galleries, demolishing rows of lamps, glass and oil pouring down upon heads.’ When the pasha rushed down from his throne in the gallery, he ‘received blows to the head’ and had to be carried out before his soldiers charged in with fixed bayonets. Minutes later, the Orthodox patriarch appeared with the Holy Fire to screams of exultation, the beating of chests, and flickering of flames.
The garrison celebrated the sultan’s victory with a parade on the Maidan which was ironic because soon afterwards, Alexander II bought this parade ground, once the site of Assyrian and Roman camps, to build a Russian Compound. Henceforth Russia would pursue cultural dominance in Jerusalem.
The victory was bitter sweet for the Ottomans, their weak Islamic realm saved by Christian soldiers. To show his gratitude and keep the West at bay, Sultan Abdulmecid was forced, in measures known as Tanzimat – reform – to centralize his administration, decree absolute equality for all minorities regardless of religion, and allow the Europeans all manner of once-inconceivable liberties. He presented St Anne’s, the Crusader church that had become Saladin’s madrassa, to Napoleon III. In March 1855, the Duke of Brabant, the future King Leopold II of Belgium, exploiter of the Congo, was the first European allowed to visit the Temple Mount: its guards – club-wielding Sudanese from Darfur – had to be locked in their quarters for fear they would attack the infidel. In June, Archduke Maximilian, the heir to the Habsburg empire – and ill-fated future Emperor of Mexico – arrived with the officers of his flagship. The Europeans started to build hulking imperial-style Christian edifices in a Jerusalem building boom. Ottoman statesmen were unsettled and there would be a violent Muslim backlash but, after the Crimean War, the West had invested too much to leave Jerusalem alone.
In the last months of the Crimean War, Sir Moses Montefiore had bought the trains and rails of the Balaclava Railway, built specially for British troops in the Crimea, to create a line between Jaffa and Jerusalem. Now, endowed with all the prestige and power of a British plutocrat after the Crimean victory, he returned to the city, the harbinger of her future.14
MOSES MONTEFIORE: ‘THIS CROESUS’
On 18 July 1855, Montefiore ritually ripped his clothes when he saw the lost Temple and then set up his camp outside the Jaffa Gate where he was mobbed by thousands of Jerusalemites firing off guns in the air and cheering. James Finn, whose schemes to convert Jews he had repeatedly foiled, tried to undermine his reception but the liberal-minded governor, Kiamil Pasha, sent an honour guard to present arms. When Montefiore became the first Jew to visit the Temple Mount, the pasha had him escorted by a hundred soldiers – and he was borne in a sedan-chair so he would not break the law
The intimate history of Jerusalem through the lives of the men and women who ruled it and created it. Jerusalem lacks a biography. It lacks a secret history. Simon Sebag Montefiore’s account is seen through kings, conquerors, emperors, soldiers, Moslems, Jews, Christians, Macedonians, Romans and Greeks, Palestinians and Israelis, from King David, via Nebachunezzar, Alexander, Herod, Caesar, Cleopatra, Jesus, Saladin, to King Hussein, Anwar Sadat and Ariel Sharon.
Jerusalem is the centre of the world, the capital of three faiths, the prize of many conquerors, the jewel of many empires, the eye of the storm of today’s battle of civilisations.
Sebag Montefiore has been going to Jerusalem all his life. There is a special family connection: Sir Moses Montefiore, his nineteenth century great-great uncle, is the founder of the new city of Jerusalem – and so a character in this book. The Montefiore Quarter and its Montefiore Windmill, which he built in 1836, are still at the city’s centre.
Jerusalem has, says Sebag Montefiore, always been a magical city but in terms of its history, the obsession with three faiths and its mystique, have ignored the story of the real city, a gritty, dirty, violent story about power, empire, love, vanity, luxury, death, not always a clash of civilisations and faiths.