Jerusalem: The Biography (51 page)

The Christians hated each other much more than they hated the infidels – indeed Father Elzear Horn, a Franciscan, simply called the Greeks ‘The Vomit’. Each of the sects relished every squalid discomfort and penurious humiliation suffered by their rivals in the Church. Ottoman control and Christian competition meant the 300 permanent residents were locked inside each night; ‘more like prisoners’ than priests in Evliya’s view, living in a state of permanent siege. Food was passed through a hole in the door or winched up via a system of pulleys, to the windows. These monks – most of them Orthodox, Catholic or Armenian – camped in cramped, humid tension, suffering from ‘headaches, fevers, tumours, diarrhoea, dysentery.’ The latrines of the Sepulchre provided a special source of bitterness – and stench: every sect had its own lavatorial arrangements, but the Franciscans, claimed Father Horn, ‘suffer much from the smell’. The Greeks did not have lavatories at all. Meanwhile the poverty-stricken smaller sects, the Copts, Ethiopians and Syriacs, could afford their food only by performing servile tasks such as emptying the Greek slop-buckets. No wonder the French writer Constantin Volney heard Jerusalemites ‘have acquired and deserved the reputation of the most evil people in Syria’.

When France again won the
praedominium
for the Franciscans, the Greek Orthodox hit back. On the night before Palm Sunday 1757, the Greek Orthodox ambushed the Franciscans in the Rotunda of the Sepulchre, ‘with clubs, maces, hooks, poniards, and swords’ that had been hidden behind pillars and under their habits, smashing lamps and ripping tapestries. The Franciscans fled to St Saviour’s, where they were besieged. These Mafia tactics worked: the sultan switched back to the Greeks, giving them the dominant position in the Church which they still hold today.
⁹
Now Ottoman power collapsed in Palestine. Starting in Galilee in the 1730s, a Bedouin sheikh, Zahir al-Umar al-Zaydani, carved out a northern fiefdom, which he ruled from Acre – the only time, except for short-lived rebellions, when a native Palestinian Arab ruled an extended part of Palestine.

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE ‘KING OF PALESTINE’

In 1770, Ali Bey, an Egyptian general who gloried in the nickname the Cloudsnatcher (which he had won by defeating Bedouin, whom the Ottomans believed were as hard to catch as clouds), allied himself with Sheikh Zahir. Together they conquered most of Palestine, even taking Damascus, but the sultan’s pasha held out in Jerusalem. The Russian empress, Catherine the Great, was at war with the Ottomans and now she despatched a fleet to the Mediterranean, where it defeated the sultan’s navy. The Cloudsnatcher needed Russian help and Russia was only interested in one prize: Jerusalem. The Russian ships bombarded Jaffa then sailed up to attack Beirut. Zahir occupied Jaffa – but could he and the Cloudsnatcher deliver Jerusalem?

Sheikh Zahir sent his troops to invest the city but they were unable to make any impression on the walls. The Ottomans, defeated on all fronts, sued for peace with the Russians. In the peace treaty in 1774, Catherine and her partner Prince Potemkin forced the Ottomans to recognize Russian protection of the Orthodox – and ultimately the growing Russian obsession with Jerusalem would lead to a European war.
^*
The Ottomans could now retake their lost provinces: the Cloudsnatcher was assassinated and Sheikh Zahir, aged eighty-six, had to escape from Acre. As he rode away, he noticed that his favourite concubine was missing – ‘this is no time to leave a person behind,’ he said – and galloped back. As he scooped her up, the girl dragged her ancient lover from his horse and assassins stabbed and beheaded him. The pickled head of the ‘first King of Palestine’ was sent to Istanbul.
¹⁰
The anarchy now attracted the rising hero of Revolutionary France.

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE: ‘A KORAN I COMPOSED MYSELF’

On 19 May 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte, twenty-eight years old, pale and gaunt, with long lank hair, set off with 335 ships, 35,000 troops and an academy of 167 scientists to conquer Egypt. ‘I would found a religion’, he reflected with megalomaniacal arrogance, ‘I saw myself marching on the way to Asia, mounted on an elephant, a turban on my head, in one hand a new Koran I would have composed myself.’

His adventure was inspired by revolutionary science, cold politics and crusading romance. Everyone in Paris had read the bestselling travelogue by the
philosophe
, Constantin Volney, who described the ‘battered ruins of Jerusalem’ and the decay of the Ottoman Levant as ripe for conquest by the civilizing reason of the Enlightenment. The French Revolution had tried to destroy the Church and replace Christianity with reason, liberty and even a new cult of the Supreme Being. However, Catholicism had endured and Napoleon aspired to heal the wounds of Revolution by fusing together monarchy, faith and science – hence the many scientists on board. Yet it was also about empire: France was at war with England The expedition was the brainchild of the louche, lame ex-bishop and foreign minister, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, who hoped it would win control of the Mediterranean and cut off British India. If Bonaparte succeeded, all well and good but if he failed, Talleyrand would destroy a rival. As would happen so often in the Middle East, the Europeans expected the orientals to be grateful for their well-intentioned conquest.

Napoleon landed successfully in Egypt, which was still ruled by a caste of hybrid mamluk–Ottoman officers. He swiftly defeated them at the Battle of the Pyramids, but the English admiral Horatio Nelson obliterated the French fleet at Aboukir Bay. Bonaparte had won Egypt, but Nelson had trapped his army in the East and this encouraged the Ottomans to defy him in Syria. If Napoleon was to survive in Egypt, he had to march north and secure Syria.

In February 1799, he invaded Palestine with 13,000 men and 800 camels. On 2 March, as he advanced on Jaffa, his cavalry under General Damas carried out a raid just three miles from Jerusalem. General Bonaparte fantasized about the conquest of the Holy City, reporting to the revolutionary Directorate in Paris: ‘By the time you read this letter, it’s possible I will be standing in the ruins of Solomon’s Temple.’

PART EIGHT

EMPIRE

How I should like to visit Jerusalem some time.

Abraham Lincoln, in conversation with his wife

The theatre of the most memorable and stupendous events that have ever occurred in the annals of the world.

James Barclay,
City of the Great King

No-where is the arch of heaven more pure, intense and cloudless than above the proud heights of Zion. Yet if the traveller can forget he is treading on the grave of the people from whom his religion has sprung, there is certainly no city he will sooner wish to leave.

W. H. Bartlett,
Walks

Yes I am a Jew and when the ancestors of the Rt. Hon. Gentleman were living as savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the Temple of Solomon.

Benjamin Disraeli, speech in the House of Commons

See what is done here in the name of religion!

Harriet Martineau,
Eastern Life

NAPOLEON IN THE HOLY LAND

1799–1806

THE BLUEBEARD OF ACRE

There was nothing between Napoleon and the conquest of Jerusalem – except the Butcher, Ahmet Jazzar Pasha, the warlord of Ottoman Palestine. He had adopted the name Jazzar – Butcher – as a young man and had built his career on the principle that fear motivated men more than anything else.

The Butcher terrorized his territories by mutilating anyone suspected of the slightest disloyalty. An Englishman who visited him at his capital in Acre noticed that he was ‘surrounded by persons maimed and disfigured. The persons officiating or standing by the doors’ were all missing a limb, nose, ear or eye. His Jewish minister, Haim Farhi, ‘had been deprived of both an ear and an eye’ just to be sure. ‘The number of faces without noses and ears strikes everyone who has visited this part of Syria.’ The Butcher called them his ‘marked men’. He sometimes had his victims’ feet shod with horseshoes. He had walled up some local Christians alive
pour encourager les autres
and once gathered fifty corrupt officials, ordered them to strip naked, and had his troops hack them into pieces. When he suspected his harem of treason, he killed seven of his own wives, becoming notorious as ‘the tyrant of Acre, the Herod of his time, the terror of all surrounding nations, the story of Bluebeard realized’.

The Butcher impressed Europeans with his long white beard, his simple robes, the bejewelled dagger at his belt and his rather delicate habit of cutting flowers out of paper which he liked to give as presents. He radiated a macabre charm, telling visitors with a slight smirk: ‘I trust you found my name respected, even beloved, notwithstanding my severity.’ At night, he locked himself in his harem which starred eighteen Slavic blondes.
^*
This old man now faced Napoleon in his prime. The French besieged Jaffa which was the port of Jerusalem and only 20 miles away. Jerusalem was in panic: the Families armed the Jerusalemites; a mob plundered Christian monasteries; the monks had to be imprisoned for their own safety. Outside the walls, General Damas asked Bonaparte for permission to attack the Holy City.
¹

NAPOLEON: ‘GENERAL HEADQUARTERS, JERUSALEM’

Napoleon replied that he had to conquer Acre first and then ‘come in person and plant the tree of Liberty at the very spot where Christ suffered, and the first French soldier who fell in the attack would be buried in the Holy Sepulchre’. But Bonaparte and his troops clearly regarded their expedition against the Muslims as falling outside the rules of civilized conduct. When he stormed Jaffa, his ‘soldiers hacked to pieces, men and women – the sights were terrible’, wrote one of the French scientists, shocked by ‘the sound of shots, shrieks of women and fathers, piles of bodies, a daughter being raped on the cadaver of her mother, the smell of blood, the groans of the wounded, the shouts of victors quarrelling about loot’. Finally the French themselves rested, ‘sated by blood and gold, on top of a heap of dead’.

Before he marched on towards Acre, Bonaparte ordered the slaughter in cold blood of at least 2,440 but probably more like 4,000 of the Butcher’s troops, killing them in batches of 600 a day. On 18 March 1799, he laid siege to Acre, still under the command of the Butcher, whom Napoleon superciliously called ‘an old man whom I don’t know’. Yet Bluebeard and his 4,000 Afghans, Albanians and Moors resisted vigorously.

On 16 April, Napoleon defeated the Butcher’s cavalry and an Ottoman army at the Battle of Tabor Mountain. Afterwards, finding himself at Ramla, 25 miles from Jerusalem, he issued a pro-Zionist ‘Proclamation to the Jews’, mendaciously datelined, ‘General Headquarters, Jerusalem,20 April 1799’.

Bonaparte, Commander in Chief of the Armies of the French Republic in Africa and Asia, to the rightful heirs of Palestine – the unique nation of Jews who have been deprived of the land of your fathers by thousands of years of lust for conquest and tyranny. Arise then with gladness, ye exiled, and take unto yourselves Israel’s patrimony. The young army has made Jerusalem my headquarters and will within a few days transfer to Damascus so you can remain there [in Jerusalem] as ruler.

The official French gazette,
Le Moniteur
, claimed that Napoleon had ‘already armed a great number [of Jews] to re-establish ancient Jerusalem’, but Napoleon could not seize Zion until Acre was his
²
and the Butcher was now reinforced by two Royal Navy ships-of-the-line under a maverick English commodore.

SIR SIDNEY SMITH – ‘MOST BRILLIANT OF CHEVALIERS’

Sidney Smith, the son of an eloping heiress and an adventurer, was ‘good looking with tremendous moustaches and penetrating black eyes’. He had joined the navy at thirteen, fought the American rebels and then, when he was seconded to the Swedish navy, Catherine the Great’s Russians. The King of Sweden knighted him, so English rivals mocked him as the ‘Swedish knight’. After the French Revolution, Smith raided France, but was captured and imprisoned in the dreaded Temple. Dashingly he escaped, taunting Bonaparte, whom he particularly despised, in a series of public letters. Not everyone was convinced by Smith: he was, wrote one observer, an ‘enthusiast, restlessly active, extravagantly vain with no fixed purpose save that of persuading mankind that Sidney Smith was the most brilliant of chevaliers’. But if he was preposterous in normal life, he was heroic in a crisis.

Smith and the Butcher struck up a rapport. When the Englishman admired the gleaming Damascene sword that the Butcher kept beside him at all times, Jazzar boasted, ‘The one I carry never fails. It’s taken off dozens of heads.’ Smith wanted proof, whereupon the Butcher had an ox brought to him which he then beheaded with a single blow. Smith merged his eighty-eight sailors with the Butcher’s multinational garrison. Bonaparte launched three assaults on Acre but Smith and the Butcher managed to repel all three. As Ottoman reinforcements approached and the siege dragged into its third month, the French generals became restless.

On 21 May 1799, with 1,200 troops dead and 2,300 sick or wounded, Napoleon led the retreat towards Egypt. However, 800 French soldiers lay ill in Jaffa. As they would slow the retreat, Napoleon ordered his wounded to be killed by his own doctors. When the French medics refused, a Turkish doctor administered fatal doses of laudanum to the patients. No wonder the French general Jean-Baptiste Kléber reflected, ‘We have committed in the Holy Land enormous sins and great stupidities.’ Two thousand mounted Jerusalemites under the command of the city’s governor pursued and harassed the retreating French. When the peasant fighters of Nablus broke into Jaffa, Smith managed to prevent a massacre of Christians by summoning the Jerusalemites to restore order.