Jerusalem: The Biography (44 page)

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 SALADIN DYNASTY

1193–1250

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.