Jerusalem

  Yet the Mamluks were in a state of panic: if Damascus fell, so would Palestine and perhaps Cairo too. The old pedagogue and the boy-sultan hurried back to Cairo but the Mamluks decided to send the pair into Syria to negotiate with Tamurlane—and save the empire. At the same time, the Jerusalemites were debating what to do: how to save the Holy City from the invincible predator known as the Scourge of God?

  In January 1401, Tamurlane, encamped around Damascus, heard that Sultan Faraj and Ibn Khaldun awaited his pleasure. He had no interest in the boy but he was fascinated by Ibn Khaldun whom he immediately summoned. As a politician, Ibn Khaldun represented the sultan, but as a historian, he naturally longed to meet the supreme man of the era—even if he was not sure if he would emerge dead or alive. The two were almost the same age: the grizzled conqueror received the venerable historian in his palatial tent.

  Ibn Khaldun was awed by this “greatest and mightiest of kings” whom he found “highly intelligent and perspicacious, addicted to debate and argumentation about what he knows and also what he does not know.” Ibn Khaldun persuaded Tamurlane to release some Mamluk prisoners, but the Scourge of God would not negotiate: Damascus was stormed and sacked in what Ibn Khaldun called “an absolutely dastardly and abominable deed.” The road to Jerusalem was now open. The city’s ulema decided to surrender the city to Tamurlane and despatched a delegation with the keys of the Dome of the Rock. But when the Jerusalemites arrived in Damascus, the conqueror had instead ridden north to rout the rising power in Anatolia, the Ottoman Turks. Then, in February 1405, en route to conquer China, Tamurlane died and Jerusalem remained Mamluk. Ibn Khaldun, who had made it home to Cairo from his meeting with Tamurlane, died in his bed a year later. His pupil Sultan Faraj never forgot his eventful cultural tour: he frequently returned to Jerusalem, holding court on the Temple Mount, beneath the royal parasol, amid the yellow banners of the sultanate, handing out gold to the poor.

  There were only 6,000 Jerusalemites, with just 200 Jewish and 100 Christian families, in a small city with outsized passions. The city was dangerous and unstable: in 1405 Jerusalemites rioted against exorbitant taxes and chased the Mamluk governor out of town. The archives of the Haram give us a feel for Jerusalem’s dynasties of religious judges and Sufi sheikhs, exiled Mamluk amirs, and wealthy merchants in a world of Koran study, book-collecting, trade in olive oil and soap, and crossbow and sword practice. But now that Crusades were no longer a threat, Christian pilgrims were milked as the chief source of income. However, they were scarcely welcomed: they were frequently arrested on trumped-up charges until they paid arbitrary fines. “You will either have to pay,” one interpreter explained to his imprisoned Christian charges, “or be beaten to death.”5

  It was hard to say who was the more dangerous—the venal Mamluks, the disreputable pilgrims, the feuding Christians or the greedy Jerusalemites. Many pilgrims were so villainous that the locals and travellers were warned, “Protect yourself from anyone travelling to Jerusalem,” while even Muslims liked to say “no one is so corrupt as the residents of holy cities.”

  Meanwhile Mamluk sultans sometimes swept down on the city to repress Christians and Jews who already faced periodic lynchings by the Jerusalemite crowds.

  The corruption and disorder started at court in Cairo: the empire was still ruled by Caucasian sultans so, even though the Catholic Franciscans enjoyed European support, Christian Jerusalem was dominated by the Armenians and the Georgians who hated one another—and of course the Catholics. The Armenians, who were aggressively expanding their quarter around St. Jameses, managed to bribe the Mamluks to wrest Calvary from the Georgians, who then outbid them and won it back. But not for long. In the course of thirty years, Calvary changed hands five times.

  The bribes and profits were enormous because the pilgrimage had become wildly popular in Europe. Europeans did not feel that the Crusades were over—after all, the Catholic reconquest of Islamic Spain was a Crusade—but while there were no expeditions to liberate Jerusalem, all Christians felt they knew Jerusalem even if they had never been. Jerusalem appeared in sermons, paintings and tapestries. Many towns featured Jerusalem Chapels, founded by Jerusalem Brotherhoods made up of ex-pilgrims or people who could not make the trip. The Palace of Westminster had its Jerusalem Chamber and from Paris in the west to Prussia and Livonia in the east, many places now boasted these local Jerusalems. The only Jerusalem in England, a tiny village in Lincolnshire, dates from this revived enthusiasm. But thousands did travel there every yeara and many of them were notoriously unsaintly: Chaucer’s saucy Wife of Bath had been to Jerusalem three times.

  Pilgrims had to pay repeated fines and tolls just to enter Jerusalem and then the Church where the Mamluks also controlled the Sepulchre inside. They sealed the Church every night so pilgrims, for a price, could be locked inside for days and nights if they wished. The pilgrims found that the Church resembled a bazaar-cum-barbershop with stalls, shops, beds and large quantities of human hair: many believed that illness would be cured if they shaved themselves and placed the hair in the Sepulchre. Many of the pilgrims spent much time carving their initials into every shrine they visited while artful Muslims serviced the relic industry: pilgrims claimed that stillborn Muslim babies were embalmed and then sold to rich Europeans as the victims of the Massacre of the Innocents.

  Some pilgrims were convinced that children conceived within the Church were specially blessed, and of course there was alcohol, so that the dark hours often became a candlelit, hard-drinking orgy in which good-natured hymn singing gave way to ugly brawls. The Sepulchre, said one disgusted pilgrim, was “a complete brothel.” Another pilgrim, Arnold von Harff, a mischievous German knight, spent his time learning phrases in Arabic and Hebrew that give some clues to his preoccupations:

  How much will you give me?

  I will give you a gulden.

  Are you a Jew?

  Woman, let me sleep with you tonight.

  Good madam, I am ALREADY in your bed.

  The Franciscans guided and welcomed Catholic visitors: their itinerary, retracing the footsteps of Christ, started at what they believed was Pilate’s Praetorium, on the site of the Mamluk governor’s mansion. This became the first station of The Lord’s Way, later the Via Dolorosa. Pilgrims were shocked to find Christian sites had been Islamicized, such as St. Anne’s Church—the birthplace of the Virgin Mary’s mother—occupied by Saladin’s madrassa. The German friar Felix Fabri sneaked into this shrine, while Harff risked his life by penetrating the Temple Mount in disguise—and both recorded their adventures. Their entertaining travelogues revealed a new tone of inquisitive lightheartedness as well as reverence.

  However, Christians and Jews were never quite safe from the capricious Mamluk repression—and sanctity in Jerusalem was so infectious that when the two older religions started to fight for David’s Tomb on Mount Zion, the sultans claimed it for the Muslims.

  There was now a settled Jewish community of about 1,000 in what became the Jewish Quarter. They prayed in their Ramban Synagogue, as well as around the gates of the Temple Mount (particularly at their study house by the Western Wall) and on the Mount of Olives, where they began to bury their dead ready for Judgement Day. But they had come to revere the Christian shrine of David’s Tomb (which had nothing to do with the real David but dated from the Crusades), part of the Cenacle, controlled by the Franciscans. The Christians tried to restrict their access, so the Jews complained to Cairo—with unfortunate consequences for both. The sultan of the day, Barsbay, outraged to discover that the Christians held such a site, travelled up to Jerusalem, destroyed the Franciscan chapel and instead built a mosque inside David’s Tomb. A few years later, one of his successors, Sultan Jaqmaq, seized the whole of Mount Zion for Islam. And it got worse: old restrictions were enforced, new ones devised. The size of Christian and Jewish turbans was limited; in the baths men had to wear metal neck-rings like cattle; Jewish and Christian women were banned from the baths altogether; Jaqmaq forbade Jewish doctors to tre
at Muslims.b After the collapse of the Ramban Synagogue in a storm, the qadi banned its rebuilding, claiming it belonged to the neighbouring mosque. When Jewish bribes overturned the decision, the local ulema demolished it.

  On 10 July 1452, the Jerusalemites launched an anti-Christian pogrom, digging up the bones of Christian monks and tearing down a new balustrade in the Sepulchre which was borne in triumph to al-Aqsa. Christians were sometimes insanely provocative. In 1391, four Franciscan monks shouted in al-Aqsa that “Muhammad was a libertine, murderer, glutton” who believed “in whoring”! The qadi offered them the chance to recant. When they refused, they were tortured and beaten almost to death. A bonfire was built in the courtyard of the Church where, “almost drunk with rage,” the mob hacked them into pieces “so that not even a human shape remained,” and then kebabbed them.6

  However, deliverance was at hand and, when a more tolerant sultan came to power, it was a dish of French cuisine that would change the destiny of Christian Jerusalem.

  THE SULTAN AND THE CHRISTIAN OMELETTES

  Qaitbay, a Circassian slaveboy who became a Mamluk general, had spent years of exile in Jerusalem. Since he was banned from entering a Muslim household, he befriended the Franciscans who introduced him to a French dish: it seems he remained nostalgic about their vegetable omelettes when he ascended the Mamluk throne in 1486, for he welcomed the friars to Cairo and allowed them to build in the Church—and gave them back Mount Zion. They wanted vengeance on the Jews, whom Qaitbay therefore banned from ever approaching the Church or the convent on Mount Zion: Jews were routinely lynched and often killed even for absentmindedly passing the Church, a situation that lasted until 1917. But the sultan also allowed the Jews to rebuild their Ramban Synagogue. And he did not neglect the Temple Mount either: when he visited in 1475, he commissioned his Ashrafiyya madrassa that was so beautiful it was described as “the third jewel of Jerusalem” while his fountain there, a bellshaped dome resplendent in red and cream ablaq, remains the most gorgeous in the whole city.

  But for all Qaitbay’s interest, the Mamluks were losing their grip. When the qadi of the city, Mujir al-Din, watched the daily sunset parade at the Tower of David, “it was completely neglected and disorganized.” In 1480, Bedouin attacked Jerusalem, almost capturing the governor who had to gallop across the Temple Mount and out through the Jaffa Gate to escape. “Jerusalem is mostly desolate,” observed Rabbi Obadiah of Bertinoro, just after the Bedouin attack. From the distance, “I saw a ruined city,” agreed one of his disciples, with jackals and lions loping across the hills. Yet Jerusalem was still breathtaking. When Obadiah’s follower viewed it from the Olivet, “my spirit overflowed, my heart mourned and I sat down and wept and rent my garments.” Mujir al-Din, who loved his city, thought it was “filled with brilliance and beauty—one of the famous wonders.”c

  In 1453, the Ottomans finally conquered Constantinople, inheriting the splendour and ideology of the universal Roman empire. For generation after generation, the Ottomans were bedevilled by wars of succession and the challenge of a resurgent Persia. In 1481, Qaitbay welcomed the fugitive Ottoman prince, Jem Sultan. Hoping that a dissident Ottoman kingdom would divide the dynasty, Qaitbay offered Jem the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The gambit led to ten years of wasteful warfare. Meanwhile both empires were threatened by rising powers—the Mamluks by Portuguese advances in the Indian Ocean, the Ottomans by the new Persian shah, Ismail, who united his country by imposing the Twelver Shiism that is still revered there. This pushed the Ottomans and Mamluks together in a short-lived, pragmatic embrace: it was to prove the kiss of death.7

  a 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.

  b 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.

  c 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.

  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

  CHAPTER 31

  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.1

  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. Now spare 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.a