Jerusalem

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  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.c 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 synagoguesd 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 col
lapsed 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,e 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 so 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 as 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.f 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.g

  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.”h 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 al-dawla 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 Muslim
s 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.

  a Recent rulers of Jerusalem had also been buried there, believing, like the Jews, that burial in Jerusalem would mean they would be resurrected first on the Day of Judgement. The closer to the Temple Mount, the sooner they would rise again. The Ikhshid tombs have never been found but are believed to have been just on the northern edge of the Temple Mount. A Palestinian historian showed this author how History has so often been invented in Jerusalem by all three religions for political reasons only to gain its own sacred momentum. When there was talk of Israeli building just north of the Temple Mount, the historian suggested simply putting up a plaque identifying this as the site of the Ikhshid tombs, which has become the accepted shrine. The new building was cancelled.

  b Al-Quds first appeared on Maamun’s coins in 832. Henceforth Jerusalemites were known as people from Quds: qudsi, or in slang, “utsi.”

  c Khidr is the most fascinating of Islamic saints, closely associated with Jerusalem where he was said to celebrate Ramadan. Khidr the Green Man was a mystical stranger, eternally young but with a white beard, cited in the Koran (18.65) as Moses’ guide. In Sufism—Islamic mysticism—Khidr is the guide and illuminator of the holy path. The Green Man seems to have inspired the Green Knight in the Arthurian epic Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. But he is chiefly identified with the Jewish Elijah and the Christian St. George, a Roman officer executed by Diocletian. His shrine at Beit Jala near Bethlehem is still revered by Jews, Muslims and Christians.