Jerusalem: The Biography
Zahir and his successor welcomed Byzantine help to fund the rebuilding of the Church. Emperor Constantine IX Monomachus created a new Holy Sepulchre, finished in 1048, with its entrance now facing south: ‘a most spacious building capable of holding 8, 000 people, built most skilfully of coloured marbles adorned with Byzantine brocade working in gold with pictures,’ wrote Nasir-i-Khusrau, a Persian pilgrim. But it was much smaller than the Byzantine basilica. The Jews never managed to rebuild all their destroyed synagogues, even though the Jewish grand vizier in Cairo, Tustari, * supported the Jerusalem community.
Hakim’s persecutions seemed to inspire a fresh passion for Jerusalem – now a flourishing pilgrim city of 20, 000. ‘From the countries of the Greeks and other lands,’ noted Nasir, ‘Christians and Jews come up to Jerusalem in great numbers.’ Twenty thousand Muslims assembled annually on the Temple Mount instead of making the haj to Mecca. Jewish pilgrims arrived from France and Italy.
It was the changes in Christendom that helped make Jerusalem so alluring for Franks from the west, Greeks from the east. The Christianity of the Latins under the Catholic popes of Rome and the Orthodox Greeks under the emperors and patriarchs of Constantinople were now dramatically different. It was not just that they prayed in different languages and bickered about abstruse theological formulae. Orthodoxy, with its icons and elaborate theatricality, was more mystical and passionate; Catholicism, with its concept of original sin, believed in a greater divide between man and God. On 16 July 1054, in the middle of a service in Hagia Sofia, a Papal legate excommunicated the Byzantine Patriarch who furiously excommunicated the pope. This Great Schism, that still divides Christendom, encouraged competition between east and west for Jerusalem.
The Byzantine emperor Constantine X Doukas sponsored the first real Christian Quarter around the Church. Indeed there were so many Byzantine pilgrims and artisans in Jerusalem that Nasir heard mystical murmurings that the Emperor of Constantinople was in Jerusalem incognito. But there were also many western pilgrims – the Muslims called them all ‘Franks’ after Charlemagne’s people, though they were actually from all over Europe – that Amalfitan merchants built hostels and monasteries to house them. It was widely believed that the pilgrimage redeemed the sins of the baronial wars and as early 1001, Fulk the Black, Count of Anjou and founder of the Angevin dynasty that later ruled England, came on pilgrimage after he had burned his wife alive in her wedding-dress having found her guilty of adultery with a swineherd. He came three times. Later in the century, the sadistic Earl Sweyn Godwinson, brother of King Harold of England, set out barefoot for Jerusalem having raped the virginal Abbess Edwiga, while Robert, duke of Normandy, the father of William the Conqueror, abandoned his duchy to pray at the Sepulchre. But all three of them perished on the road: death was never far from the pilgrimage.
The Fatimids, beset with court intrigues, struggled even to hold Palestine, let alone Jerusalem, and the bandits preyed on the pilgrims. Death was so common that the Armenians created a title –mahdesi – for pilgrims who had seen death on the way, their equivalent of the Muslim haj.
In 1064, a rich caravan of 7, 000 German and Dutch pilgrims led by Arnold Bishop of Bamberg approached the city but was attacked by Bedouin tribesmen just outside the walls. Some of the pilgrims swallowed their gold to hide it from the brigands who eviscerated them to retrieve it. Five thousand pilgrims were slaughtered.20 Even though the Holy City had now been Muslim for four centuries, such atrocities suddenly seemed to place the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in peril.
In 1071, the new strongman of the east, Alp Arslan – Heroic Lion –defeated and captured the Byzantine emperor at Manzikert.* Alp Arslan was the leader of the Seljuks, Turkoman horsemen who had come to dominate the Baghdad caliphate and had been granted the new title of sultan – meaning ‘the power’. Now Heroic Lion, conquering an empire from Kashgar to modern Turkey, despatched his general Atsiz ibn Awak al-Khwarazmi, to gallop south – towards a terrified Jerusalem.
ATSIZ: THE BEASTLY SACKING
The Gaon and many of the Jews, who had been well treated under the Fatimids, fled Jerusalem to the Fatimid stronghold of Tyre. Atsiz camped outside the new walls but, as a pious Sunni Muslim, he claimed he would not harm Jerusalem. ‘It is God’s sanctuary,’ he insisted. ‘I will not fight it.’ Instead, in June 1073, he starved Jerusalem into surrender. He then headed south to Egypt, where he was defeated. This encouraged the Jerusalemites to rebel. They besieged the Turkomans (and Atsiz’s harem) in the Citadel.
Atsiz returned and when he was ready to attack, his concubines crept out of the Citadel and opened a gate for him. His Central Asian horde killed 3, 000 Muslims, even those who had hidden in the mosques. Only those who sheltered on the Temple Mount were spared. ‘They robbed and murdered and ravished and pillaged the storehouses; they were a strange and cruel people, girt with garments of many colours, capped with helmets black and red, with bow and spear and full quivers,’ reported a Jewish poet who encountered Atsiz’s men in Egypt. Atsiz and his horsemen ravaged Jerusalem: ‘They burned the heaped corn, cut down the trees and trampled the vineyards, and despoiled the graves and threw out the bones. They don’t resemble men, they resemble beasts, and also harlots and adulterers and they inflame themselves with males [and] cut off ears and noses and stole the garments, leaving them stark naked.’
The Heroic Lion’s empire immediately disintegrated as his family and generals seized their own fiefdoms. Atsiz was murdered and Jerusalem fell into the hands of another Turkish warlord, Ortuq bin Aksab. On arrival, he fired an arrow into the dome of the Sepulchre to show that he was the master. Yet he proved surprisingly tolerant, even appointing a Jacobite Christian as governor, and he invited Sunni scholars to return to Jerusalem.*
Ortuq’s sons Suqman and Il-Ghazi inherited Jerusalem. In 1093 ‘someone revolted against the governor’, wrote Ibn al-Arabi, a Spanish scholar, ‘and entrenched himself in the Tower of David. The governor attempted to assault him using his archers.’ While Turkoman soldiers fought pitched battles through the streets, ‘no one else cared. No market was closed, no ascetic left his place in al-Aqsa Mosque; no debate was suspended.’† But the monstrosities of Hakim, the defeat of the Byzantine emperor, the fall of Jerusalem to the Turkomans and the slaughter of pilgrims shook Christendom: the pilgrimage was in danger.21
In 1098, the Egyptian vizier was surprised to learn that a powerful army of Christian Europeans was advancing on the Holy Land. He presumed they were just Byzantine mercenaries, so he offered them a carve-up of the Seljuk empire: the Christians could take Syria; he would regain Palestine. When he discovered their object was Jerusalem, the vizier besieged the city ‘for forty days with forty catapults’ until the two sons of Ortuq fled to Iraq. Appointing one of his generals as iftikhar aldawla or governor of Jerusalem with a garrison of Arabs and Sudanese, the vizier returned to Cairo. The negotiations with the Franks continued into the summer of 1099 – the Christian envoys celebrated Easter in the Sepulchre.
The timing of the Frankish invasion was fortuitous: the Arabs had lost their empire to the Seljuks. The glory of the Abbasid Caliphate was now a distant memory. The Islamic world had fragmented into small warring baronies ruled by princelings dominated by Turkish generals – amirs – and regents known as atabegs. Even as the Christian armies marched south, a Seljuk princeling attacked Jerusalem but was repelled. Meanwhile the great city of Antioch had fallen to the Franks, who marched down the coast. On 3 June 1099, the Franks took Ramla and closed in on Jerusalem. Thousands of Muslims and Jews took refuge within the walls of the Holy City. On the morning of Tuesday 7 June, the Frankish knights reached the tomb of Nabi (the Prophet) Samuel, four miles north of Jerusalem. Having travelled all the way from western Europe, they now gazed down from Montjoie – the Mount of Joy – on the City of the King of all Kings. By nightfall, they were camped around Jerusalem.
PART FIVE
CRUSADE
Enter on the road to the Holy Sepulchre; wrest that land from the wicke
d race and subject it to ourselves.
Pope Urban II, Address at Clermont
Jerusalem is for us an object of worship that we could not give up even if there were only one of us left.
Richard the Lionheart, Letter to Saladin
Jerusalem is ours as much as yours – indeed it’s even more sacred to us.
Saladin, Letter to Richard the Lionheart
Have we any heritage save the sanctuaries of God?
Then how should we forget His Holy Mount?
Have we either in the East or the West
A place of hope wherein we may trust
Except the land that is full of gates
Towards which the gates of Heaven open.
Judah Halevi
When I took up my theme and said
When I to Zion from Spanish exile went
My soul from depths to heaven made ascent
Greatly rejoicing that day, God’s hill to see
The day for which I longed since I had come to be.
Judah al-Harizi
21
THE SLAUGHTER
1099
DUKE GODFREY: THE SIEGE
It was the high summer of 1099 in the arid Judaean hills; the Holy City was well defended by Egyptian troops backed by a militia of Jerusalemite Jews and Muslims. They were well stocked with provisions and the cisterns were full of water, whereas the wells of the parched countryside had been posioned. Jerusalem’s Christians were expelled. The citizens, 30,000 at the most, could comfort themselves that the Egyptian vizier was marching north to rescue them, and they were well armed: they even possessed the secret flame-throwing weapon, Greek Fire.* Behind Jerusalem’s formidable walls, they must have disdained their attackers.
The Frankish army was too small, just 1,200 knights and 12,000 soldiers, to surround the walls. In open battle, the lightly armoured Arab and Turkish cavaliers could not withstand the awesome charges of the Frankish knights, who formed a fist of thundering steel mounted on hulking destrier warhorses. The knights each wore a helmet, a cuirass and hauberk chain-mail over a gambeson (a padded quilt undergarment) and were armed with lance, broadsword, mace and shield.
Yet their Western horses had long since perished or been eaten by the hungry army. In the blistered gorges around Jerusalem, charges were impossible, horses useless and armour too hot: this exhausted force of Franks had to fight on foot, while their leaders feuded constantly. There was no supreme commander. Pre-eminent among them, and also the richest, was Raymond, Count of Toulouse. A courageous but uninspiring leader, noted for obstinacy and lack of tact, Raymond initially set up camp in the west opposite the Citadel but after a few days moved south to besiege the Zion Gate.
Jerusalem’s weak spot was always in the north: the young, capable Duke Robert of Flanders, the son of a veteran Jerusalem pilgrim, camped opposite what is now Damascus Gate; Duke Robert of Normandy (son of William the Conqueror), brave but ineffectual and nicknamed Curthose (short-shanks) or just Fatlegs, covered Herod’s Gate. But the driving spirit was Godfrey of Bouillon, the strapping, blond Duke of Lower Lorraine, aged thirty-nine, ‘the ideal picture of a northern knight’, admired for his piety and chastity (he never married.) He took up positions around today’s Jaffa Gate. Meanwhile the twenty-five-year-old Norman Tancred de Hauteville, eager to conquer a principality of his own, galloped off to seize Bethlehem. When he had returned, he joined Godfrey’s forces at the north-western corner of the city.
The Franks had lost legions of men and travelled thousands of miles across Europe and Asia to reach the Holy City. All realized that this would either be the apogee or the apotheosis of the First Crusade.
POPE URBAN II: GOD WILLS IT
The Crusade had been the idea of one man. On 27 November 1095, Pope Urban II had addressed a gathering of grandees and ordinary folk at Clermont to demand the conquest of Jerusalem and the liberation of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
Urban saw his life’s mission as the restoration of the power and reputation of the Catholic Church. He devised a new theory of holy war to reinvigorate Christendom and the papacy, justifying the cleansing liquidation of the infidel in return for the remission of sins. This was an unprecedented indulgence that created a Christian version of Muslim jihad, but it dovetailed with the popular reverence for Jerusalem. In an age of religious fervour, a time of holy signs, Jerusalem was Christ’s city, seen as both supreme shrine and celestial kingdom, yet familiar to every Christian, evoked in sermons, in tales of pilgrimages, in passion plays, paintings and relics. But Urban also passionately stoked the rising anxiety about the security of the Holy Sepulchre, citing the massacre of pilgrims and the Turkoman atrocities.
The moment was ripe for thousands of people, high and low, to answer Urban’s call: ‘violence held sway among the nations, fraud, treachery and chicanery overshadowed all things,’ observed the Jerusalemite historian William of Tyre. ‘All virtue had departed, every kind of fornication was practised openly, luxury, drunkenness and games of chance.’ The Crusade offered personal adventure, the removal of thousands of troublemaking knights and freebooters, and escape from home. But the modern idea, promoted in Hollywood movies and in the backlash after the disaster of the 2003 Iraqi war, that crusading was just an opportunity for enrichment with sadistic dividends, is wrong. A handful of princes created new fiefdoms and a few Crusaders made their careers, whereas the costs were punishing and many lives and fortunes were lost in this quixotic and risky but pious enterprise. A spirit was abroad that is hard for modern people to grasp: Christians were being offered the opportunity to earn the forgiveness of all sins. In short, these warrior-pilgrims were overwhelmingly believers seeking salvation on the battlements of Jerusalem.
The crowds at Clermont answered the pope: ‘Deus le volt! God wills it!’ Raymond of Toulouse was one of the first to take the Cross. Eighty thousand people, some in disciplined contingents led by princes, some in rampaging gangs led by adventurers, and others in pious crowds of peasants under holy hermits, took the Cross. As the first wave crossed Europe heading for Constantinople, they forced the conversion or massacred thousands of Jews in vengeance for the killing of Christ.
The Byzantine Emperor Alexios, half-horrified by these Latin ruffians, welcomed them – and hurried them on towards Jerusalem. Once in Anatolia, hordes of European peasants were killed by the Turks, but the organized, committed and experienced knights of the main armies routed the Seljuks. The enterprise was a triumph of faith over experience and reason: from the beginning but with rising intensity as they neared the Holy Land, the military campaign was guided and encouraged by divine visions, angelic visitations and the discovery of sacred signs that were just as important as military tactics. But fortunately the Europeans were attacking a region that was fatally divided between warring caliphs, sultans and amirs, Turks and Arabs, who placed their own rivalries above any concept of Islamic solidarity.
The fall of Antioch was the Crusaders’ first real success, but they were then besieged inside the city. Faced with starvation and stalemate, the Crusade almost ended there. At the height of the crisis at Antioch, Peter Bartholomew, one of Count Raymond’s men, dreamed that the Holy Lance lay under a church: they dug down and duly found the Lance. Its discovery boosted morale. When Bartholomew was accused of being a fraud, he underwent an ordeal by fire. He survived his walk across what was usually nine feet of red hot irons and claimed no ill effects. But he died twelve days later.
The Crusaders survived Antioch and, as they marched southwards, the Turkish and Fatimid amirs of Tripoli, Caesarea and Acre made deals with them. The Fatimids abandoned Jaffa, and the Crusaders cut inland towards Jerusalem. When the contingents were establishing themselves around the walls, a hermit on the Mount of Olives, inspired by a vision, told the Crusader warlords to attack immediately. On 13 June, they attempted to storm the walls but were easily repulsed, suffering heavy losses. The princes realized that success required better planning, more ladders, catapults and siege-engines, but there w
as not enough wood to build them. They got lucky. On the 17th, Genoese sailors docked at Jaffa and hauled the timbers of their dismantled ships to Jerusalem to build wheeled siege-machines equipped with catapults.
The princes were already bickering over the spoils. The two ablest had grabbed their own principalities: Bohemond of Taranto had been left to hold Antioch while Godfrey’s dynamic brother Baldwin had seized Edessa, far away on the Euphrates. Now the rapacious Tancred demanded Bethlehem for himself, but the Church laid claim to the site of the Nativity. The heat was unforgiving, the sirocco blew, water was short, men too few, morale low, and the Egyptians were approaching. There was no time to lose.
A divine message saved the day. On 6 July, a visionary priest announced that he had (not for the first time) been visited by Adhemar of Le Puy, a revered bishop who had died at Antioch, but whose spirit now urged the Franks to hold a procession around the walls as Joshua had around Jericho. The army fasted for three days then on 8 July, led by priests bearing holy relics, they marched barefoot around the walls of Jerusalem, ‘with trumpets, banners and arms’, as the Jerusalemites mocked them from the battlements, hurling insults at the crucifixes. The Joshuan circuit completed, they assembled on the Mount of Olives to be addressed by their chaplains and to witness the reconciliations of their leaders. Ladders, siege-engines, mangonels, missiles, arrows, fascines – everything had to be ready, and everyone worked day and night. Women and old men joined the effort by sewing the animal hides for the siege-engines. The choice was stark: death or victory on the ramparts of the Holy City.