Jerusalem: The Biography (159 page)

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This was the age of Jewish ministers for Islamic monarchs. In Egypt, the scion of a trading family of Persian Karaites,Abu Saad al-Tustari became a purveyor of luxuries to Zahir, to whom he then sold a black slave girl. On the caliph’s death in 1036, she became the Walida, mother of Caliph Mustansir, with Tustari as the power behind the throne. He amassed colossal wealth, once giving al-Walida a silver ship and tent worth 130,000 dirhams. He never converted to Islam. The poet Rida ibn Thawb wrote: ‘People of Egypt,I have good advice for you / Turn Jew, for Heaven itself has become Jewish.’ In 1048,Tustari was murdered by Turkish troops, much mourned by the Goan of Jerusalem. Meanwhile the vizier of Islamic Granada in Spain was another patron of Jerusalem: Samuel ibn Nagrela, ‘The Prince’, a polymathic doctor, poet,Talmudic scholar and general, perhaps the only practising Jew to command Islamic armies in battle. His son succeeded him but was murdered in 1066 in a massacre of Jews in Granada.

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When the captive emperor was brought before the victorious Alp Arslan, whose moustaches were so long he draped them over his shoulders, asked, ‘What would you do if I was brought before you as a prisoner?’ ‘Perhaps I’d kill you, or exhibit you in the streets of Constantinople,’ replied Romanos IV Diogenes. ‘My punishment is far heavier,’ replied Alp Arslan. ‘I forgive you, and set you free.’ But the Lion did not last long himself. When he saw the approach of an assassin, he waved aside his bodyguards in order to display his skill as an archer by bringing down the attacker. But his foot slipped, and the asssassin stabbed him. Dying, he warned his son Malik Shah
, ‘
Remember well the lessons learned, and do not allow your vanity to overreach your good sense.’ His tomb in Merv reads with Ozymandian irony: ‘O those who saw the sky-high grandeur of Alp Arslan, behold! He is under the black soil now.’

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A dispute over the Fatimid succession gave rise to a murderous breakaway sect of Ismaili Shiites led by Hassan al-Sabbah. He and his Nizaris fled to Persia, where he seized the mountain fortress of Alamut and later they gained fortresses in Lebanon. He made up for his small numbers by launching a spectacular campaign of terrorism against his Sunni enemies. His team of killers, who terrorized the Middle East for over a century, were supposedly under the influence of hashish, and came to be called the Hashishim, or Assassins. The Muslims, though, called them Batini, seekers after secret esoteric knowledge.

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In 1095, the Sunni philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazali sought refuge in Jerusalem from the Assassins. ‘I shut myself up in the precinct of the Dome of the Rock,’ he said, in a tiny chamber atop the Golden Gate, to write the
Revivification of the Science of Religion
. This reinvigorated Sunni Islam by separating the logic of philosophy – Greek metaphysics – from the ecstatic revelation of religious truth, while giving each its due. Ultimately his demolition of scientific cause and effect (in his
Incoherence of the Philosophers
) in favour of divine revelation ended the golden age of Arabic learning in Baghdad and helped undermine Arab science and philosophy.

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70,000 is the traditional figure for Jerusalem’s population but this is an implausible exaggeration. In the eleventh century, Constantinople had 600,000 inhabitants; Baghdad and Cairo, the great cities of Islam: 400,000–500,000; Rome, Venice and Florence 30,000–40,000; Paris and London 20,000. As for the Greek Fire, ‘God’s flame’, a petroleum-based concoction fired through siphons, had once saved Constantinople. Now the Muslims, not the Christians, had it.

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The laws of warfare stated that no quarter was expected after bitter sieges, yet the Frankish eyewitnesses went further in advertising their butchery and claiming that no one was spared. But some of their descriptions are inspired directly by the Book of Revelation. They did not specify numbers. Later, Muslim historians claimed 70,000 or even 100,000 were killed, but the latest research suggests that the massacre was smaller, perhaps around 10,000, considerably less than the future Muslim massacres of Edessa and Acre. The best-placed contemporary, Ibn al-Arabi, who had recently lived in Jerusalem and was in Egypt in 1099, cited 3,000 as killed in al-Aqsa. Nor were all the Jews killed. There were certainly Jews and Muslims left alive. Unusually, it seems that the Crusader chroniclers, for propaganda and religious purposes, hugely exaggerated the scale of their own crimes. Such was holy war.

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The round Temple Church in London, consecrated by Heraclius, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, in 1185 and made famous in Dan Brown’s novel
The Da Vinci Code
, is surely modelled on the Temple of the Lord, the Dome of the Rock, which they believed to have been built by Solomon. But there are scholars who assert it is based on the double-domed Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

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At times of crisis the Life-Giving Tree, which was tended in the church by the
scriniarius
, the relic-keeper, in a bejewelled chest, was carried before the king by four bearers.

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The original Crusaders overwhelmingly spoke the northern French dialect
langue d’oie
, totally different from the Provencal
langue d’oc
. But it was
langue d’oc
that became Outremer’s chief dialect.

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The Melisende Psalter, with its carved ivory covers, studded with turquoise, ruby and emerald stones, was crafted by Syrian and Armenian artists in the Holy Sepulchre scriptorium. Its Byzantine, Islamic and Western styles show how Crusader and Eastern art fused during the reign of this half-Armenian, half-Frankish queen.

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Fulk was not the first king of Jersualem Usamah had known. In 1124, Baldwin II had been a prisoner at Shaijar, Usamah’s family castle. He was treated so hospitably that the Crusaders came to respect Usamah and the family. The ruins of Shaijar castle can still be seen in Syria.

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An Orthodox and a Latin church were built atop their respective Akeldama charnel-houses where bodies were dropped through holes in the roof: it was believed that the bodies decomposed within twenty-four hours with no smell. Last used for burials in 1829, the Latin charnel-house is filled with earth but the Greek Orthodox pit is visible today. Peering through a small opening, one can see the white bones. Neither of the churches exists, probably destroyed by Saladin.

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The holy Golden Gate was opened just twice a year. The cemetery outside the Golden Gate, probably attached to the Templar convent, was a special resting-place. It was here that the murderers of Thomas Becket were reported buried. A few important Frankish knights were buried inside on the Temple Mount. In 1969, James Fleming, an American Bible student, was photographing the Gate when the earth gave way and he fell into a hole 8 feet deep. He found himself standing on a heap of human bones. The hole revealed what appeared to be a neat arch of Herodian ashlars. The bones may belong to Crusaders (Frederick of Regensburg was buried there in 1148; the archaeologist Conrad Schick found bones there in 1891). Before and after the Crusades, the Muslims used this as a special cemetery. Either way, Fleming was unable to check because the Muslim authorities swiftly cemented it over.

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The Holy Prepuce was just one of a panoply of medieval relics. Charlemagne presented a section to Pope Leo before his coronation in 800, but there were soon between 8 and 18 such relics in the Christian world. Baldwin I sent one to Antwerp in 1100 but Melisende possessed another section. Most of the relics were lost or destroyed in the Reformation.

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Melisende was the third queen to rule Jerusalem in her own right – after Athaliah, Jezebel’s daughter, and Alexandra, widow of Alexander Jannaeus in Maccabean times. She was crowned three times, once with her father in 1129, then with Fulk in 1131 and again with her son in 1143. Despite the low status of women on both sides, Usamah bin Munqidh tells of both Islamic and Crusader women who in times of peril pulled on armour and fought the enemy in battle. Melisende did not forget her Armenian roots. After the fall of Edessa, she settled its Armenian refugees in Jerusalem and in 1141 the Armenians started to rebuild St James’s Cathedral near the royal palace.

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As soon as she was free, Eleanor married Henry, Duke of Normandy and Count of Anjou, the grandson of King Fulk of Jerusalem, who soon succeeded to the English throne as Henry II. Their children included King John and the future Crusader, King Richard the Lionheart.

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At least he seems to have loved Theodora longer than the others. When she was captured by the emperor, Andronikos surrendered and was forgiven. Then the emperor died, and the preposterous cad seized power in 1182 and became one of the most despicable emperors in the history of Constantinople. During his reign of terror, he killed most of the imperial family including the women. Aged sixty-five but still boyishly handsome, he married a thirteen-year-old princess. When he was overthrown, the mob tortured him to death in the most horrible way, an arm cut off, an eye gouged, hair and teeth torn out, his face burned with boiling water to ruin his famous looks. Theodora’s fate is unknown.

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This palace appears on the fairly realistic map of Jerusalem created in Cambrai around this time. Theodorich saw the palace in 1169. It was given to the German Crusaders in 1229, but it vanished, probably destroyed by the raiding Khwarizmian Turks in 1244. Archaeologists found parts of its foundations in 1971 and 1988 under the Armenian Garden and the Turkish barracks.

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The Jewish traveller Benjamin of Tudela visited Jerusalem just after Maimonides. While he was there, workmen refurbishing the Cenacle on Mount Zion discovered a mysterious cavern that was hailed as King David’s Tomb. The Crusaders added a cenotaph which, in the contagious religious atmosphere of Jerusalem, made this Christian site holy for Jews and Muslims too. Benjamin claimed he travelled on to Iraq. Either way, he recorded the drama playing out in Baghdad where a young Jew named David el-Rey (the King) or Alroy declared himself the Messiah, promising to fly the local Jews on wings ‘to conquer Jerusalem.’ The Jews of Baghdad waited on their rooftops but never achieved lift-off, much to the amusement of their neighbours. Alroy was later murdered. When Benjamin Disraeli visited Jerusalem in the nineteenth century, he started to write his novel,
Alroy
.

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After four centuries as a Jewish synagogue under Islam, the Crusaders sealed up the ‘Cave’ in the tunnels next to the western wall, turning it into a cistern. So it is unlikely Maimonides prayed there.

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Leprosy was common. Indeed Jerusalem had its own Order of St Lazarus for leprous knights. Leprosy is hard to catch: the child must have had months of contact, perhaps with a wetnurse suffering mild symptoms. The disease is caused by bacteria passed through droplets in sweat and touch. Baldwin’s adolescence triggered lepromatous leprosy. In the film
Kingdom of Heaven
he is shown wearing an iron mask to conceal his utterly ravaged, noseless face, but actually he refused to hide himself as king even as the disease consumed him.

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It was now that William of Tyre ‘wearied by the sad disasters, in utter detestation of the present, resolved to abandon the pen and commit to the silence of the tomb the chronicle of events that can serve only to draw forth lamentations and tears. We lack the courage to continue. It is therefore time to hold our peace.’ His Outremer chronicle survives, his Islamic history is lost. He argued with Patriarch Heraclius, who excommunicated him. William appealed to Rome but died just as he was leaving for Italy. Possibly he was poisoned. In 1184, Heraclius, bearing the keys of Jerusalem, toured England and France in a quest for an heir to the leper-king or at least more funds and knights. He tried to interest Henry II of England. Instead his youngest son John wanted to accept the throne of Jerusalem, but his father refused to let him. It is hard to imagine that John, later known as Softsword and one of England’s most inept kings, would have saved Jerusalem.

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A fictional version of Balian (played by Orlando Bloom) is the hero of the movie
Kingdom of Heaven
, where he has an affair with Queen Sybilla (Eva Green).

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Saladin was the Crusaders’ shorthand for Salah al-Dunya al-Din (the Goodness of the World and the Faith). Saladin’s brother, known by the Crusaders as Safadin, was born Abu Bakr ibn Ayyub, adopting the honorific Safah al-Din (Sword of the Religion) and later the royal name al-Adil (The Just) by which he is called in most histories. Two of Saladin’s courtiers wrote biographies: Imad ad-Din, his secretary, wrote
The Lightning of Syria
and then
Ciceronian Eloquence on the Conquest of the HolyCity
, characterized by purple passages. In 1188, Baha al-Din Ibn Shaddad, an Islamic scholar from Iraq, visited Jerusalem and was appointed by Saladin first as qadi (judge) of the army and then as overseer of Jerusalem. On Saladin’s death he served as chief qadi for two of his sons. His biography,
Sultanly Anecdotes and JosephlyVirtues
(a reference to his first name Yusuf, Joseph), is a rounded portrait of a warlord under pressure.

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In Jerusalem an old man had the temerity to sue the sultan himself over some property. Saladin came down from his throne to be judged equally, and won the case, but then loaded the claimant with gifts.

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Saladin held court sometimes in the Hospital and sometimes in the Patriarch’s Palace, where there was a wooden hut on the roof where he liked to sit up late at night with his entourage. His brother Safadin resided in the Cenacle complex on Mount Zion. Saladin decided to give the Patriarch’s Palace to his own Salahiyya Sufi convent, or
khanqah
. Today it remains the Salahiyya
khanqah
(as its inscription declares) and the bedroom with its fine Crusader capitals where Saladin (and the patriarchs) slept is today the bedroom of Sheikh al-Alami, a member of one of Jerusalem’s prominent families. The patriarchs had special entrances from their Palace to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and Saladin blocked these though they can still be seen behind the tills of today’s shops. He also took over St Mary’s Latina for his Salahiyya Hospital and commandeered St Anne’s as his Salahiyya madrassa, religious school. Now it is a church again but it is still inscribed to Saladin as ‘Reviver of the Empire of the Commander of the Believers’.