Jerusalem: The Biography (48 page)

PART SEVEN

OTTOMAN

This noble Jerusalem has been the object of desire of the kings of all nations, especially the Christians who, ever since Jesus was born in the city, have waged all their wars over Jerusalem … Jerusalem was the place of prayer of the tribes of djinn … It contains the shrines of 124,000 prophets.

Evliya Celebi,
Book of Travels

Suleiman saw the Prophet in his dream: ‘O Suleiman, you should embellish the Dome of the Rock and rebuild Jerusalem.’

Evliya Celebi,
Book of Travels

The great prize contended by several sects is the Holy Sepulchre, a privilege contested with so much fury and animosity that they have sometimes proceeded to blows and wounds, at the door of the Sepulchre mingling their own blood with their ‘sacrifices’.

Henry Maundrell,
Journey

So part we sadly in this troublous world

To meet with joy in sweet Jerusalem.

William Shakespeare,
Henry VI, Part Three

Rather than walk about holy places we can thus pause at our thoughts, examine our heart, and visit the real promised land.

Martin Luther,
Table Talk

We shall find that the God of Israel is among us … for we must consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people upon us.

John Winthrop,
A Modell of Christian Charity

THE MAGNIFICENCE OF SULEIMAN

1517–1550

THE SECOND SOLOMON AND HIS ROXELANA

On 24 August 1516, the Ottoman sultan, Selim the Grim, routed the Mamluk army not far from Aleppo, the battle that decided Jerusalem’s destiny: most of the Middle East would remain Ottoman for the next four centuries. On 20 March 1517, Selim arrived to take possession of Jerusalem. The
ulema
handed him the keys of al-Aqsa and the Dome at which he prostrated himself and exclaimed, ‘I am the possessor of the first
qibla
.’ Selim confirmed the traditional tolerance of the Christians and Jews and prayed on the Temple Mount. Then he rode on to subjugate Egypt. Selim had defeated Persia, conquered the Mamluks and clarified any succession dilemmas by killing his brothers, his nephews and probably some of his own sons. So when he died in September 1520, he was survived by just one son.
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Suleiman was ‘only twenty-five years old, tall and slender but tough with a thin and bony face’ and he found himself the master of an empire that stretched from the Balkans to the borders of Persia, from Egypt to the Black Sea. ‘In Baghdad, I am the Shah, in Byzantine realms, the Caesar; and in Egypt, the Sultan,’ he declared and to these titles he added that of caliph. No wonder Ottoman courtiers addressed their monarchs as the Padishah – emperor – who was, one of them wrote, ‘the most honoured and respected sovereign the world over.’ It was said that Suleiman dreamed he was visited by the Prophet who told him that ‘to repulse the Infidels,’ he must embellish the Sanctuary (Temple Mount) and rebuild Jerusalem’, but actually he needed no prompting. He was only too aware of himself as the Islamic emperor and, as his Slavic wife Roxelana would repeatedly hail him, ‘the Solomon of his age.’

Roxelana shared in Suleiman’s projects – and that included Jerusalem. She was probably a priest’s daughter kidnapped from Poland and sold into the sultanic harem where she caught Suleiman’s eye, bearing him five sons and a daughter. ‘Young but not beautiful, although graceful and petite,’ a contemporary portrait suggests she was large-eyed, rose-lipped and round-faced. Her letters to Suleiman on campaign catch something of her playful yet indomitable spirit: ‘My Sultan, there’s no limit to the burning anguish of separation. Nowspare this miserable one and don’t withhold your noble letters. When your letters are read, your servant and son Mir Mehmed and your slave and daughter Mihrimah weep and wail from missing you. Their weeping has driven me mad.’ Suleiman renamed her Hurrem al-Sultan, the Joy of the Sultan, whom he described in poems attributed to him as ‘my love, my moonlight, my springtime, my woman of the beautiful hair, my love of the slanted brow, my love of eyes full of mischief’ and officially as ‘the quintessence of queens, the light of the eye of the resplendent caliphate’. She became a wily politician, intriguing successfully to ensure Suleiman’s son by another woman did not succeed to the throne: the son was strangled in Suleiman’s presence.

Suleiman inherited Jerusalem and Mecca and believed that his Islamic prestige demanded that he beautify the sanctuaries of Islam: everything about him was on a grand scale, his ambitions boundless, his reign almost half a century long, his horizons vast – he fought almost continental wars from Europe and north Africa to Iraq and the Indian Ocean, from the gates of Vienna to Baghdad. His achievements in Jerusalem were so successful that the Old City today belongs more to him than anyone else: the walls look ancient and to many people they define the city as much as Dome, Wall or Church – but they and most of the gates were the creation of this contemporary of Henry VIII, both to secure the city and add to his own prestige. The sultan added a mosque, an entrance and a tower to the Citadel; he built an aqueduct to bring water into the city and nine fountains from which to drink it – including three on the Temple Mount; and finally he replaced the worn mosaics on the Dome of the Rock with glazed tiles decorated with lilies and lotus in turquoise, cobalt, white and yellow as they are today.
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Roxelana liked to endowcharitable foundations close to her husband’s projects, she commandeered a Mamluk palace to establish her al-Imara al-Amira al-Khasaki al-Sultan, a foundation known as the Flourishing Edifice that included a mosque, bakery, fifty-five-room hostel and soup-kitchen for the poor. Thus they made the Temple Mount and Jerusalem their own.

In 1553 Suleiman, soi-disant ‘Second Solomon and King of the World’, decided to inspect Jerusalem, but his far-flung wars intervened and, like Constantine before him, the man who had transformed the city never got to see his achievement. The Sultan’s enterprise was on an imperial scale but he clearly supervised it from afar. As the walls arose, the viceroy of Syria presided, Suleiman’s imperial architect Sinan probably inspected the work on his way home from Mecca: thousands of workers laboured, new stones were quarried, old stones purloined from ruined churches and Herodian palaces, and the ramparts and gates carefully fused with the Herodian and Umayyad walls around the Temple Mount. The retiling of the Dome required 450,000 tiles, so Suleiman’s men created a tile factory next to al-Aqsa to make them, and some of his contractors built mansions in the city and stayed. The local architect founded a dynasty of hereditary architects that reigned for the next two centuries. The city must have resounded with the unfamiliar sounds of hammering masons and the clink of money. The population almost tripled to 16,000 and the number of Jews doubled to 2,000, boosted by the constant arrival of refugees from the west. A vast, anguished movement of the Jews was in progress, and some of these new arrivals contributed directly to Suleiman’s enterprise.
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MYSTICS AND MESSIAHS

1550–1705

THE SULTAN’S JEWISH DUKE:
PROTESTANTS, FRANCISCANS AND THE WALL

Suleiman assigned the taxes of Egypt to pay for his remodelled Jerusalem, and the man in charge of these revenues was Abraham de Castro, the Master of the Mint and tax-farmer who had proven his loyalty by warning the sultan when the local viceroy planned a rebellion. As his name suggests, Castro was a Jewish refugee from Portugal and his role did not come close to that of the super-rich Portuguese Jew who became Suleiman’s adviser and ultimately protector of Palestine and Jerusalem.

The Jewish migration marked the latest chapter in the religious wars. In 1492, King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile had conquered Granada, the last Islamic principality in Spain, and celebrated their successful Crusade
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by purging Spain of Moslems and Jews. Obsessed with the danger of secret Jewish blood seeping into the pure stream of Christendom, and advised by Tomás Torquemada’s Inquisition, they expelled between 100,000 and 200,000 Jews, and in the next fifty years, much of western Europe followed suit. For seven centuries, Spain had been the home of a blossoming Arab-Jewish culture and the centre of the Diaspora, the Jews dispersed outside Zion.

Now, in the most searing Jewish trauma between the fall of the Temple and the Final Solution, these Sephardic Jews (
Sapharad
being Hebrew for Spain) fled eastwards to the more tolerant Holland, Poland-Lithuania and the Ottoman empire where they were welcomed by Suleiman, both to boost his economy and to expose how Christianity had denied its Jewish heritage. The Diaspora moved east. From now until the early twentieth century, the streets of Istanbul, Salonica and Jerusalem would ring with the lyrical tones of their new Judaeo-Spanish language, Ladino.

In 1553, Suleiman’s Jewish doctor introduced him to Joseph Nasi, whose family had been forced into a fake conversion to Christianity before they fled via Holland and Italy to Istanbul. There, he won the sultan’s trust and became the confidential agent of his son and heir. Joseph, known to European diplomats as the Great Jew, ran a complex business empire, and served as a sultanic envoy and international man of mystery, an arbiter of war and finance, a mediator between east and west. Joseph believed in the return of the Jews to the Promised Land, and Suleiman granted him the lordship of Tiberias in Galilee where he settled Italian Jews, rebuilt the town and planted mulberry trees to foster a silk industry, the first Jew to settle Jews in the Holy Land. He would build his Jerusalem in Galilee because that ultra-sensitive connoisseur of power knew that the real Jerusalem was the reserve of Suleiman.

Nonetheless Joseph patronized the Jewish scholars in Jerusalem where Suleiman promoted the superiority of Islam and diminished the status of the other two religions with a meticulous care that still guides the city now. Suleiman was fighting Emperor Charles V so that his attitude to the Christians was somewhat tempered by the cynical requirements of European diplomacy. The Jews, on the other hand, mattered little.

They still prayed around the walls of the Temple Mount and on the slopes of the Mount of Olives as well as in their main synagogue, the Ramban, but the sultan favoured order in all things. Discouraging anything that diminished the Islamic monopoly on the Temple Mount, he assigned the Jews a 9-foot street along the supporting wall of King Herod’s Temple for their prayers. This made some sense, because it was adjacent to their old Cave synagogue and next to the Jewish Quarter where the Jews had started to settle in the fourteenth century, today’s Jewish Quarter. But the site was overshadowed by the Islamic Maghrebi neighbourhood; Jewish worship there was carefully regulated; and Jews were later required to have a permit to pray there at all. The Jews soon called this place ha-Kotel, the Wall, outsiders called it the Western or Wailing Wall and henceforth its golden, ashlar stones became the symbol of Jerusalem and the focus of holiness.

Suleiman brought the Christians down to size by expelling the Franciscans from David’s Tomb where his inscription declares: ‘The Emperor Suleiman ordered this place to be purged of infidels and constructed it as a mosque.’ Sacred to all three religions, this Byzantine-Crusader site, an early Jewish synagogue and the Christian Coenaculum, now became the Islamic shrine of Nabi Daoud, the Prophet David, where Suleiman appointed a family of Sufi sheikhs called the Dajanis as hereditary guardians, a position they held until 1948.

The politics of the outside world would always reflect back onto the religious life of Jerusalem: Suleiman soon had reason to favour the Franciscans. In the battle for central Europe, he found that he needed Christian allies – the French – to fight the Habsburgs, and the Franciscans were backed by the kings of France. In 1535, the sultan granted France trading privileges and recognized the Franciscans as the custodians of the Christian shrines. This was the first of the so-called capitulations – concessions to European powers – that later undermined the Ottoman empire.

The Franciscans set up headquarters in St Saviour’s, close to the Church which ultimately would become a colossal Catholic city-within-a-city, but their rise disturbed the Orthodox. The hatred between Catholics and Orthodox was already venomous but both claimed the paramount custodianship of the Holy Places: the
praedominium
. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was now shared between eight sects in a Darwinian struggle in which only the strongest could survive. Some were going up, some were going down: the Armenians remained powerful because they were well represented in Istanbul, the Serbs and Maronites were in decline – but the Georgians, who had lost their Mamluk patrons, went into total eclipse.
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The epic conflict between the emperors of Islam and Christendom, the aggressive Catholicism of the Spanish, and the expulsion of the Jews inspired an unsettling feeling that something was not right in the firmament: people questioned their faith, searched for new mystical ways to get closer to God, and they expected the End Days. In 1517, Martin Luther, a theology professor in Wittenberg, protested against the Church’s sale of ‘indulgences’ to limit people’s time in purgatory, and insisted God existed only in the Bible, not via the rituals of priests or popes. His brave protest tapped into the widespread resentment of the Church which many believed had lost touch with Jesus’ teaching. These Protestants wanted a raw, unmediated faith and, free of the Church, they could find their own way. Protestantism was so flexible that a variety of new sects – Lutherans, the Reform Church, Presbyterians, Calvinists, Anabaptists – soon thrived, while for Henry VIII, English Protestantism was a way to assert his political independence. But one thing united all of them: their reverence for the Bible, which restored Jerusalem to the very centre of their faith.
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