Roxelana liked to endow charitable 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.2
a A legend grew up 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 saw that 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.
CHAPTER 32
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. King Ferdinand of Aragon and Sicily and his wife, Queen Isabella of Castile, conquered Granada, the last Islamic principality of mainland Europe, on 2 January 1492. Radiating confidence after this triumph, the Catholic Majesties—the title awarded them by the Pope—celebrated their successful Crusade with two decisions that would have world-historical consequences. First, they summoned a white-haired sailor named Cristóbal Colón. A Genoese innkeeper’s son, this magnetic and obsessional maverick had for years been soliciting their backing for a voyage across the Atlantic to reach India and China. If one of his dreams was this passage westwards to the Indies, the other was the liberation of Jerusalem from the east. From the start he linked the two: “I protested to Your Highnesses that everything gained as a result of this voyage would be spent in the conquest of Jerusalem and Your Highnesses laughed and said the idea pleased them.”a
The monarchs backed the enterprise on 17 April 1492, appointing Colón (better known by his anglicized name, Christopher Columbus) Admiral of the Ocean Sea. On 12 October, two months after setting off, Columbus discovered the isles of the West Indies and, during his third voyage, the coast of South America. He probably never realized that he had discovered the New World (which, in 1507, came to be named after the Florentine sailor who did, Amerigo Vespucci). Years later, as his gold-rich discoveries developed into the Spanish Empire, Columbus dreamed quixotically of the End Days, and wrote to the Catholic Majesties in his Book of Prophecies that Jerusalem and Mount Zion would be rebuilt by Spaniards. The gold of Ophir—or the Indies—would gild the restored Temple, the court of “the last world emperor.” But in legion ways unimaginable to Admiral Columbus, who died wealthy but as restless as ever in 1506, America and Jerusalem would indeed be interlinked.
On 29 April, twelve days after approving Columbus’s voyage, Isabella and Ferdinand turned to their Jewish problem. Many Jews had been forced to convert to Catholicism, but these conversos were distrusted: Catholics feared that the “devilish tricks and seductions” of secret Jews might taint the pure bloodstream of Christendom. The Inquisition, backed by the Catholic Majesties, had already convicted 13,000 people and burned 2,000 for secret Jewish deviations. Now its Inquisitor Tomás de Torqemarda advised them to offer the Jews a choice of conversion or expulsion. Isabella was a Crusader-queen, devout, grave, iron-willed; Ferdinand, a cynical, cunning and womanizing manipulator on a Christian mission, was Machiavelli’s ideal king. Together the couple, whose marriage created the kingdom of Spain, were the most successful rulers of their age. But in this they miscalculated. Ferdinand had hoped the Jews would convert sincerely. To his surprise, many—somewhere between 75,000 and 150,000—were instead expelled. He banished them from Naples too, 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 center of the Jewish Diaspora.
Now, in the most searing Jewish trauma between the fall of the Temple and the Final Solution, these Sephardic Jews (Sepharad 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.b
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.c
When after forty-five years on the throne Suleiman died on campaign with his army, his ministers propped him up like a waxwork in his carriage and showed him to his soldiers until the succession was safe for Selim, one of his sons by Roxelana. Selim II, known as the Drunkard, owed much to the intrigues of his friend, Joseph Nasi, the Great Jew, who, now living in splendour in his Belvedere Palace, rich from his monopolies of Polish beeswax and Moldavian wine, was promoted to Duke of Naxos. He almost became King of Cyprus. Such was his championing of persecuted or penurious Jews in Europe and Jerusalem that there were whisperings shortly before his death that this ducal Jewish Croesus must be the Messiah. But little came of his plans. Under Selim and his successors, the Ottoman empire was still expanding and, thanks to vast resources and superb bureaucracy, it remained awesomely powerful for another century—but its emperors soon struggled to control distant provinces ruled by overmighty governors and Jerusalem’s tranquillity was periodically shattered by bouts of violence.
In 1590, a local Arab rebel broke into Jerusalem and seized the city, killing the governor. The rebels were defeated and expelled. Jerusalem fell under the sway of two Balkan brothers, Ridwan and Bairam Pasha, Christian slaveboys converted to Islam and trained at the court of Suleiman, and their Circassian henchman, Farrukh. Their families dominated—and abused—Palestine for almost a century. When Farrukh’s son, Muhammad, found himself locked out of Jerusalem in 1625, he stormed the walls with 300 mercenaries, then, closing the gates, he proceeded to torture Jews, Christians and Arabs alike to extort money.
Such outrages only encouraged the strongest of the Christian sects, the Armenians, to canvass and bribe the sultans and brawl in the churches of Jerusalem, all part of their campaign to vanquish the Catholics and win the praedominium. In the first twenty years of the century, the sultans issued thirty-three decrees to defend the embattled Catholics and in just seven years, the praedominium changed hands six times. However, the Christians had become the most lucrative source of business in Palestine: every day, the Custodian of the Church, the chief of the Nusseibeh family, sat on a throne in the courtyard with his armed henchmen charging for access—and the income from the thousands of pilgrims was enormous. At Easter, which Muslims called the Festival of the Red Egg, the governor of Jerusalem set up his throne, and, accompanied by the qadi, the custodian and the entire fully-armed garrison, he charged each of the 20,000 “hell-destined infidels” ten gold pieces that was shared out among the Ottomans and the ulema.
Meanwhile something was afoot amongst the Jews. “Jerusalem,” wrote a Jewish pilgrim, “was more greatly populated than at any time since the first exile” and as Jerusalem’s “fame spread, it became known we lived in peace. Scholars flocked to the gates.” A caravan of Egyptian Jews arrived every Passover. Most of the Jews were Ladino-speaking Sephardis who were secure enough to build the “four synagogues” that became the centre of life in the Jewish Quarter, but some of the pilgrims were eastern Europeans from the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania, known as Ashkenazis (named for Ashkenaz, a descendant of Noah in Genesis, said to be the progenitor of the northern peoples). The turbulence of the world outside encouraged their mysticism: a rabbi named Isaac Luri was teaching the Kabbala, the study of the Torah’s secret codes that would bring them closer to the Godhead. Luri was born in Jerusalem but he made his base in the magical mountain city of Safed in Galilee. The trauma of the Spanish persecutions had forced many Jews to fake conversion to Christianity and live clandestine lives—indeed Kabbala’s holy text, the Book of Zohar, was written in thirteenth-century Castile. The Kabbalists sought Majesty, Fear and Trembling—“the ecstatic experience, the tremendous uprush and soaring of the soul to its highest plane, union with God.” On Fridays, the Kabbalists, wearing white robes, would greet the “bride of God,” the Shekinah, outside the city and then escort the divine presence back to their homes. But inevitably the Kabbalists speculated that the Jewish trauma along with their secret codes and incantations contained the key to redemption: surely the Messiah would soon come to Jerusalem?
Notwithstanding occasional anti-Christian riots, Bedouin ambushes and the extortion of Ottoman governors, the city was left to her own rituals. Yet the feuding of the Orthodox, Armenians and Catholics in this Ottoman backwater only served to confirm the prejudices of a new breed of visitor, part-pilgrim, part-merchant-adventurer: the Protestants had arrived. They tended to be English traders, burning with hostility towards the Catholics, and often with links to the new colonies in America.3
When the English sea captain and merchant Henry Timberlake arrived, the Ottoman governors had never heard of Protestantism or his Queen Elizabeth and he was thrown into jail next to the Holy Sepulchre, released only on payment of a fine. The e
xuberant memoir of his adventures, A True and Strange Discourse, became a bestseller in Jacobean London. Another of these audacious Englishmen, John Sanderson, factor of the Levant Company, paid his fee to the Turks to enter the Church but was attacked by the Franciscan monks, whose padre “accused me to be a Jew.” The Turks then arrested him, tried to convert him to Islam and took him before the qadi, who searched him and then released him as a Christian.
Acts of fanaticism, both Christian and Muslim, unleashed violence that reveals the real limits of the much-vaunted Ottoman tolerance: the Ottoman governor forcibly closed down the beloved Ramban synagogue at the request of the ulema: Jews were forbidden to pray there and it was converted into a warehouse. When the Franciscans quietly extended their Mount Zion property, rumours spread that they were burrowing to Malta to let in the Christian armies: they were attacked by the qadi and the mob and only rescued by the Ottoman garrison. A Portuguese nun who baptized Muslim children and denounced Islam was burned on a pyre in the courtyard of the Church.d4
At Easter 1610, a young Englishman arrived who represented not only the new Protestantism but the New World too.
GEORGE SANDYS: THE FIRST ANGLO-AMERICAN
George Sandys, son of the Archbishop of York and a scholar who translated Virgil into English, was appalled by the decay of Jerusalem—“much of which lies waste, old buildings all ruined, the new, contemptible.” Sandys was half-repulsed, half-amused by the Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jews he saw at the Western Wall: “their fantastical gestures exceed all barbarity with ridiculous nodding,” and he thought it “impossible not to laugh.” The God-fearing Protestant was even more disgusted by what he regarded as the vulgar hucksterism of the Orthodox and Catholics. The city was “once sacred and glorious, elected by God for his seat,” but she was now merely a “theatre of mysteries and miracles.”