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ahead and by the time he joined them in Acre in September 1228, Muazzam was dead and Kamil had occupied Palestine—and withdrawn his offer.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 onto 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 gingerhaired 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.e
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 not 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 and burned yet their elaborate sarcophagi were somehow spared; 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.f Smouldering and smashed, Jerusalem would not be Christian again until 1917.23
In 1248, King Louis IX 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 powerg 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
a In 1187, Saladin himself sent a small piece of the Cross as a gift to Emperor Isaac Angelos in a Venetian ship. The ship was captured by a Pisan pirate named Fortis, who killed the entire crew and took the relic to Bonafacio in Corsica, whence it was seized by Genoese pirates. Sections of the Cross still survive in the reliquaries of Europe.
b On his way home, Richard was captured and handed over to the German emperor Henry VI, who imprisoned him for over a year, until England had paid a large ransom. He returned to fighting the French king, bringing home some Saracen soldiers and the secret of the Greek Fire. In 1199, besieging a minor French castle, he was killed by an archer’s bolt. “He was,” writes Steven Runciman, “a bad son, a bad husband and a bad king but a gallant and splendid soldier.”
c The foundations of six of his towers can be seen today. On the Temple Mount, he built the domed Grammar School and the glorious arches and domed entrance to al-Aqsa. He may have used Frankish spolia to build the octagonal Dome of Solomon, also known as the Kursi Isa—the Throne of Jesus (the Jesus may be Isa himself)—and the Dome of the Ascension; the latter has an inscription dating it to 1200–1201. But it is more likely that both were original Crusader buildings: indeed the baptismal font of the Dome of the Ascension with its Frankish capitals, topped with an elegant Frankish false lantern, may have originated in the Templum Domini. It was Muazzam who walled up the Golden Gate.
d Queen Isabella of Jerusalem was unlucky in marriage: her third husband Henry of Champagne ruled Acre as king of Jerusalem and fathered two more daughters by her—but, reviewing German Crusaders in 1197, he was distracted by his dwarf and stepped backwards out of a window. Then she married Amaury of Lusignan, King of Cyprus, who died of a surfeit of white mullet in 1205. On her death, her daughter Maria—now Queen of Jerusalem—married the knight John of Brienne, and they had a daughter Yolande.
e Frederick and Kamil maintained their friendship: the sultan sent the emperor a bejewelled planetarium, which was both a clock and a moving map of the heavens—and an elephant; Frederick sent Kamil a polar bear. Frederick spent the rest of his life in a constant war with the popes to defend his dual inheritance in Germany and Italy. It was the popes who stigmatized him as the Beast of the Apocalypse. His eldest son Henry King of the Romans betrayed him; Frederick imprisoned him for the rest of life, appointing Conrad King of Jerusalem, his son by Yolande, as his heir. The Wonder died of dysentery in 1250, and was buried in Palermo. Conrad died young, the crown of Jerusalem being inherited by Conrad’s baby son, Conradin who was himself beheaded aged 16. But Frederick’s reputation grew: as time passed, liberals celebrated his modern tolerance; while Hitler and the Nazis admired him as a Nietzschean superman.
f These Tartars were finally defeated by Saladin’s descendants in 1246. Drunk in battle, Barka Khan was beheaded, his head displayed in Aleppo. But his daughter married the Mamluk strongman Baibars, future sultan; his sons became powerful amirs who between 1260 and 1285 built the fine tomb, turba, that still stands on the Street of the Chain. There they buried their father: “This is the tomb of the servant needful of God’s mercy Barka Khan.” His sons were later buried with him. But when archaeologists inspected the tomb, there was no Barka inside. Perhaps his body never arrived from Aleppo. In 1846–47, the wealthy Khalidi family bought this building and indeed the entire street. Barka’s tomb is now the reading room of the Khalidi library, founded in 1900. It is still the home of Mrs. Haifa al-Khalidi and has a fine view of the Western Wall. As a quaint reminder of Jerusalem’s span of history, the extended house also contains a red British postbox from the Mandate.
g At times, Jerusalem was ruled from Syria, at times from Cairo where Shajar al-Durr made herself sultana in her own right. This was a feminine achievement unique in Islam and the source of many legends. As a young concubine, she had won the eye of the sultan by wearing a dress made entirely of pearls, hence Shajar al-Durr, Tree of Pearls. Now she needed male support so she married a mamluk officer, Aibeg, who became sultan. But the couple soon fell out and she had him stabbed in his bath. After eighty days’ reign the mamluks deposed her. Before she tried to escape, she ground her famous diamonds to dust so no other woman could wear them. When she was caught, Aibeg’s concubines (perhaps furious not to inherit the jewels) beat her to death with their clogs—the mamluk equivalent of death by stiletto.
PART SIX
Mamluk
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.
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—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
CHAPTER 29
Slave to Sultan
1250–1339
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.
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