Jerusalem: The Biography (160 page)

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The new Queen of Jerusalem was Sibylla’s half-sister, Isabella, daughter of King Amaury and Queen Maria. Isabella divorced her husband to marry Conrad of Montferrat. He thus became by marriage the titular king of Jerusalem.

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The oldest pub in England, the Journey to Jerusalem, in Nottingham, dates from Richard’s Crusade.

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In April 1192, Richard finally realized that Guy, who had been king of Jerusalem only by marriage to his late wife, was a busted flush. Instead he recognized Conrad of Montferrat, husband of Queen Isabella, as king of Jerusalem. But days later, Conrad was killed by the Assassins. Henry, Count of Champagne, a nephew of both Richard of England and Philip of France, married Queen Isabella of Jerusalem, still aged only twenty-one, pregnant with Conrad’s child and already on her third husband. He became King Henry of Jerusalem. In order to compensate Guy, Richard sold him Cyprus, which his family ruled for three centuries.

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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.’

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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 built 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 1200–1. 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.

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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.

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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.

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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 1846–7, 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.

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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.

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Baibars’ Sufi guru, Sheikh Khadir, became so powerful that he was able to seduce the wives, sons and daughters of the Mamluk generals in a reign of terror. It only ended when they presented Baibars with such full evidence that he had to order Khadir’s arrest for sodomy and adultery. He was spared death only because he predicted that Baibars’ death would rapidly follow his own.

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By 1268, the rump Kingdom was in such peril that the pope called a new Crusade. In May 1271, the heir to the English throne, Edward Longshanks, arrived at Acre which he helped defend against Baibars. But when Acre negotiated a truce with the sultan, Edward objected and it seems Baibars ordered his assassination: he was stabbed with a poisoned dagger. Having survived this, Edward tried in vain to organize a new alliance: the Crusaders would help the Mongols fight Baibars in return for Jerusalem. When he returned to England as Edward I, he promoted himself as Hammer of the Scots, illustrating his Painted Chamber at Westminster with scenes of the Maccabees. Yet he forced English Jews to wear yellow stars and finally expelled them from England. They did not return for three centuries. At his death, Edward was mourned as ‘Jerusalem’s flower of chivalry’

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Many of the royal houses of Europe, including the Bourbons, the Habsburgs and the Savoyards, claimed the title. In 1277, Charles of Anjou bought it from Mary of Antioch, one of its claimants, after which kings of Naples or Sicily claimed it and it descended via the Savoyards to the Italian kings. The King of Spain still uses it. Only one English monarch used the title. When Mary I, daughter of Henry VIII, married Philip II of Spain, in Winchester in 1554, she was declared, among other Habsburg titles, to be queen of Jerusalem. The title was used by the Habsburg emperors until 1918.

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Its fate tells the story of the Jews in Jerusalem. The first synagogue was probably on Mount Zion but soon moved to the Jewish Quarter. Under the Mamluks, a mosque and al-Yehud (Jewish) minaret were built next to it, extended in 1397. When the synagogue collapsed in 1474, Muslims demolished it and refused to permit its reconstruction. But the penultimate Mamluk sultan Qaitbay allowed it to be rebuilt. It was closed again by the Ottomans in 1587. A synagogue was then opened in the neighbouring building until the Ramban and the next-door synagogue were united and reopened in 1835. But in the early twentieth century the Ramban was taken over by the Muslims, used as storage until it again became a synagogue. It was deliberately destroyed by the Arab Legion in 1948. In 1967, it was reopened.

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It was now that most of Herod’s wall along the west side of the Temple disappeared behind the new Mamluk buildings. But it reappears once, down a hidden alleyway in a courtyard of the Muslim Quarter: it is one of Jerusalem’s secret places. Just as Jews revered the famous Western Wall to the south, so small numbers of Jews prayed and still pray at this, the Little Wall

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The Mamluks built in a distinctive style that can be seen all over the Muslim Quarter: stalactite corbelling called
muqarna
and the alternating of dark and light stones known as
ablaq
. Perhaps the finest example of the Mamluk style is Tankiz’s Tankiziyya palace-madrassa built over the Gate of the Chain: altogether there are twenty-seven madrassas, all marked with the blazons of the Mamluk amirs – Tankiz as Cupbearer marks his buildings with a cup. The typical Mamluk amir in Jerusalem would endow a charitable trust, a
waqf
, partly to maintain his madrassa, partly to provide a home and job for his descendants in case his power and wealth were lost in the frequent power struggles. Each tomb or
turba
was usually downstairs in a room with green-latticed windows so that passers-by could hear the prayers being recited – and they too can be seen. These buildings were much later assigned to Jerusalem’s Arab families who endowed them as trusts so that today many are still family homes.

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In 1393, Henry Bolingbroke came on pilgrimage to Jerusalem and when he seized the throne as Henry IV, he was told that he would return there to die. He managed to fulfil this prophecy on his deathbed: he had himself placed in the Jerusalem Chamber at Westminster. His son Henry V shared this devotion: on his deathbed, the victor of Agincourt wished he had made the pilgrimage to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem.

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Yet Sultan Jaqmaq, who terrorized the Latins, protected the Armenians: his inscription promising his favour can still be read just inside the gate of the Armenian Monastery

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* In the last years of Mamluk Jerusalem, at the same time as those Jewish travellers were weeping on the Mount of Olives, Mujir al-Din compiled his loving, punctilious study of Jerusalem and Hebron. He must have been respected: he was buried in the elegant domed monument that now stands just above the Virgin’s Tomb.

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A legend grewup that Suleiman considered levelling Jerusalem until he dreamed that lions would eat him if he did so, hence he built the Lions’ Gate. This is based on a misunderstanding: he did build the Lions’ Gate but its lions are actually the panthers of Sultan Baibars from 300 years earlier, borrowed from his Sufi
khanqah
that once stood north-west of the city. Suleiman used the spolia of Jerusalem: his Gate of the Chain fountain is topped with a Crusader rosette and the trough is a Crusader sarcophagus. The new walls did not enclose Mount Zion. It was said that Suleiman was so furious when he looked into a magic cup and sawthat David’s Tomb was outside the city that he executed the architects. Tour guides point out their graves close to the Jaffa Gate – but this too is a myth: the graves belong to two scholars from Safed.

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When Christopher Columbus departed on his expedition to America the same year, he wrote to his Most Catholic monarchs, ‘I propose to Your Majesties that all the profit derived from this enterprise be used for the recovery of Jerusalem.’ Their son Emperor Charles V, Suleiman’s rival and titular King of Jerusalem, inherited his parents’ crusading tradition, and his talk of a Crusade against Jerusalem was one reason that Suleiman rebuilt the walls.

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They had to sell their monastery St Saviour’s to the Franciscans and that was just the beginning. In 1685, the impoverished Georgians lost their headquarters, the Monastery of the Cross, said to be the origins of the wood for Jesus’s cross, to the Orthodox. After the fall of Crusader Jerusalem in 1187, Queen Tamara of Georgia had sent an official, Shota Rustaveli, the author of the national epic,
The Knight in the Panther Skin
, to embellish the Monastery: he is probably buried there and his portrait appeared in its frescoes. But in 2004, Rustaveli’s berobbed, white-bearded and high-hatted portrait was vandalized just as the Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili arrived on a state visit to inspect it. The Russian Orthodox were suspected but nothing was proved. The Serbs passed their last monastery to their Greek brethern in the seventeenth century. The Maronites still maintain a convent near the Jaffa Gate, though the Georgians, Maronites and Serbs have all long since lost their share of the Church.

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Both Jews and Christians were infected by apocalyptic expectations. In 1523, a dwarfish young Jew, David Reuveni, caused a stir in Jerusalem by declaring himself an Arabian prince leading the Ten Tribes back to Zion, but the Islamic qadi spared him as a lunatic and he then sailed to Rome, where the pope received him, but ultimately Christendom proved less tolerant than Islam and he died in the early 1530s in a Spanish dungeon. In 1534 a radical Protestant sect of Anabaptists seized the German town of Munster which they declared to be the New Jerusalem. Their leader John of Leiden, an illegitimate tailor’s apprentice, pronounced himself King of Jerusalem, heir to King David. After eighteen months, this new Zion was recaptured and the Anabaptist leaders executed.

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These human bonfires in the courtyard of the Church were not infrequent. In 1557 a Sicilian monk, Brother Juniper, twice invaded the Aqsa before he was killed by the qadi himself – and then incinerated before the Church. A Spanish Franciscan denounced Islam inside al-Aqsa and was beheaded on the Temple Mount before another bonfire. Yet as the case of Reuvent had shown, death was not always the end of the story, and Christianity in Europe was no more civilized: almost 400 heretics were burned in England during the sixteenth century.