On Holy Saturday, Jerusalemites gathered at the Church for the Holy Fire. A Russian pilgrim watched ‘the crowd rush in, jostling and elbowing’, weeping, wailing and shouting, ‘Will my sins prevent the Holy Fire from descending?’ The king walked from the Temple Mount but, when he arrived, the crowd was so tightly packed, overflowing even the courtyard, that his soldiers had to clear a path for him. Once inside, the king, shedding ‘torrents of tears’, took his place on a rostrum before the Tomb, surrounded by his weeping courtiers, waiting for the Holy Fire. As the priest chanted vespers, the ecstasy intensified in the darkening church, until suddenly ‘the Holy Light illumined the Sepulchre, stunningly bright and splendid’. The patriarch emerged brandishing the fire, with which he kindled the royal lamp. The fire spread across the crowd, lantern to lantern – and was then borne across town like an Olympic flame across the Great Bridge to the Temple of the Lord.
Melisende embellished Jerusalem as both Temple shrine and political capital, creating much that we see today. The Crusaders had developed their own style, a synthesis of Romanesque, Byzantine and Levantine with round-headed arches, massive capitals, all carved with delicate, often floral motifs. The queen built the monumental St Anne’s Church, north of the Temple Mount, on the site of the Bethesda Pool – it stands today as the simplest and starkest example of Crusader architecture. Already used as a repository for discarded royal wives and more recently the home of Melisende’s sister Princess Yvette, its convent became the most richly endowed in Jerusalem. A few of the shops in the marketplaces are still marked ‘ANNA’ to show where their profits went; other shops, perhaps Templar-owned, are marked ‘T’ for the Temple.
A small chapel, St Giles, was built on the Great Bridge into the Temple Mount. Outside the walls, Melisende added to the Church of Our Lady of Jehoshaphat, the Virgin Mary’s tomb where she was later buried (her grave survives today), and built the Bethany Monastery, appointing Princess Yvette as abbess. In the Temple of the Lord, she added an ornate metal grille to protect the Rock (now mostly in the Haram Museum though a small section, still in situ, may have held a portion of Jesus’ foreskin,* and later enclosed hair from Muhammad’s beard).
On their state visit to see Fulk and Melisende, Usamah bin Munqidh and his master, the Atabeg of Damascus, were allowed to pray on the Temple Mount, where they encountered both the insularity and cosmopolitanism of their Frankish hosts.
USAMAH BIN MUNQIDH AND JUDAH HALEVI: MUSLIMS, JEWS AND FRANKS
Usamah had become friends with some of the Templars whom he had met in war and peace. Now they escorted him and Atabeg Unur on to the sacred esplanade, the thoroughly Christianized headquarters of the Templars.
Some Crusaders now spoke Arabic and built houses with courtyards and fountains like Muslim potentates; some even ate Arabic food. Usamah met Franks who did not eat pork and ‘presented a very fine table, extremely clean and delicious’. Most Franks disapproved of anyone going too native: ‘God has transformed the Occident into the Orient’, wrote Fulcher. ‘He who was a Roman or a Frank has in this land been made into a Galilean or a Palestinian.’ Similarly, there were limits to Usamah’s friendship with the Templars and to their open-mindedness. When one Templar was returning home, he cheerfully invited Usamah to send his son to be educated in Europe so that ‘when he returns he will be a truly rational man’. Usamah could scarcely contain his disdain.
As they prayed in the Dome of the Rock, one of the Franks approached the atabeg to ask: ‘Would you like to see God when he was young?’
‘Why yes,’ said Unur, at which the Frank led him and Usamah to an icon of Mary and the boy Jesus.
‘This is God when he was young,’ said the Frank, much to Usamah’s amused contempt.
Usamah then walked over to pray in the Temple of Solomon, formerly al-Aqsa, welcomed by his Templar friends, even though he was openly reciting ‘Allahu Akhbar – God is Greatest’. But then there was an unsettling incident when ‘a Frank rushed up to me and grabbed me and turned my face towards the east, “Pray like this!”’ The ‘Templars hurried towards him and took him away from me. “This man is a stranger,” the Templars explained, apologetically, “and has just arrived from the Frankish lands.”’ Usamah realized that ‘anyone recently arrived’ is ‘rougher in character than those who have become acclimatized and frequented the company of Muslims’. These new arrivals remained ‘an accursed race that will not become accustomed to anyone not of their own race’.
It was not only Muslim leaders who visited Melisende’s Jerusalem. Muslim peasants came into town daily to sell their fruit and left in the evening. By the 1140s, the rules banning Muslims and Jews from Christ’s city had been relaxed – hence the travel writer Ali al-Harawi said, ‘I lived long enough in Jerusalem at the time of the Franks to know how the trick of the Holy Fire was achieved.’ There were already a few Jews in Jerusalem, but pilgrimage was still dangerous.
Just at this time, in 1141, Judah Halevi, a Spanish poet, philosopher and doctor, is said to have arrived from Spain. In his love songs and religious poetry, he craved ‘Zion perfect in beauty’ while suffering because ‘Edom [Islam] and Ishmael [Christianity] riot in the Holy City’. The Jew in exile was ‘the dove in a strange land.’ All his life, Halevi, who wrote poetry in Hebrew but spoke Arabic, believed in the return of the Jews to Zion:
O city of the world, most chastely fair,
In the far West, behold I sigh for thee.
Oh! had I eagles’ wings, I’d fly to thee,
And with my falling tears make moist thine earth.
Halevi, whose poems are still part of the synagogue liturgy, wrote as poignantly as anyone has ever written about Jerusalem: ‘When I dream of the return of thy captivity, I am a harp for thy songs.’ It is not clear if he actually made it to Jerusalem, but according to legend, as he walked through the gates, he was ridden down by a horseman, probably a Frank, and killed, a fate perhaps foreseen in his words: ‘I would fall with my face upon thine earth, and take delight in thy stones and be tender to thy dust. ’
This death would not have surprised Usamah, who studied the violence of Frankish laws. On his way to Jerusalem he had watched two Franks solving a legal question by combat – one smashed in the skull of another. ‘That was but a taste of their jurisprudence and their legal procedure.’ When a man was accused of murdering pilgrims, his trial was to be trussed up and dipped in a pool of water. If he sank he was innocent, but since he floated he was found guilty and, as Usamah put it, ‘they applied some kohl to his eyes’ – he was blinded.
As for their sexual customs, Usamah gleefully recounted how one Frank found another in bed with his wife but let him off with a mere warning, and how another ordered his male barber to shave off his wife’s pubic hair. In medicine Usamah described how while an Eastern doctor was treating a Frank’s leg abscess with a poultice, a Frankish doctor burst in with an axe and hacked off the leg, with the immortal question – would he prefer to live with one leg or die with two? But he died with one. When the Eastern doctor prescribed a special diet to a woman suffering ‘dryness of humours’, the same Frankish doctor, diagnosing a ‘demon inside her head’, carved a cross into her skull, killing her too. The best doctors were Arab-speaking Christians and Jews: even the kings of Jerusalem now preferred Eastern doctors. Yet Usamah was never simplistic – he cites two cases where Frankish medicine miraculously worked.
The Muslims regarded the Crusaders as brutish plunderers. But the cliché that the Crusaders were barbarians and the Muslims aesthetes can be taken too far. After all, Usamah had served the sadist Zangi and, if read in full, his account presents a picture of Islamic violence no less shocking to modern sensibilities: the collecting of Christian heads, the crucifying and bisections of their own soldiers and heretics, the severe punishments of Islamic sharia – and the story of how his father, in a rage, lopped off the arm of his page. Violence and similarly brutal laws ruled on both sides. The Frankish knight and the Islamic faris had much in common: they were both le
d by self-made adventurers such as the Baldwins and Zangi, who founded warrior dynasties. Both systems depended on the granting of fiefs of property or income-streams to leading warriors. The Arabs used poetry to show off, to entertain and to spread propaganda. When Usamah served the Damascene atabeg, he negotiated with the Egyptians in verse, while Crusader knights spun the poems of courtly love. Both knight and faris lived by similar codes of noble behaviour and shared the same obsessions – religion, war, horses – and the same sports.
Few soldiers, few novelists have captured the excitement and fun of war like Usamah. To read him is to ride in the skirmishes of Holy War in the Kingdom of Jerusalem. He gloried in his battlefield anecdotes of derring-do, devil-may-care cavaliers, miraculous escapes, terrible deaths, and the exhilaration of wild charges, flashing steel, sweating horses and spurting blood. But he was also a philosopher of Fate and God’s mercy: ‘Even the smallest and most insignificant of things can lead to destruction. ’ Above all, both sides believed that, in Usamah’s words, ‘victory in war is from God alone.’ Religion was everything. Usamah’s highest praise for a friend was: ‘a genuine scholar, a real cavalier and a truly devout Muslim’.
Now the tranquillity of Melisende’s Jerusalem was suddenly shattered by an accident caused by the sport shared by both Muslim and Frank grandees.
24
STALEMATE
1142–1174
ZANGI: HUBRIS AND NEMESIS
When he was not fighting or reading, Usamah hunted deer, lions, wolves, hyenas with cheetahs, hawks and dogs – and in this, he was no different from Zangi or King Fulk, who hunted as often as they could. When Usamah and the Atabeg of Damascus visited Fulk, they admired a goshawk, so the king gave it to them as a present.
On 10 November 1142, soon after Usamah’s visit to Jerusalem, King Fulk was riding near Acre when he spotted a hare and, spurring his horse, gave chase. His saddle girth suddenly snapped and he was thrown. The saddle flew over his head and fractured his skull. He died three days later. The Jerusalemites marched out to escort Fulk’s cortège to burial in the Sepulchre. On Christmas Day, Melisende had her twelve-year-old son crowned as Baldwin III, but she was the real ruler. In an age dominated by men, she was a ‘woman of great wisdom’ who, writes William of Tyre, ‘had risen so far above the normal status of women that she dared undertake important measures, and ruled the kingdom with as much skill as her ancestors’.*
At this bittersweet moment, disaster struck. In 1144, Zangi the Bloody captured Edessa, slaughtering Frankish men, enslaving Frankish women (though protecting Armenian Christians), and thereby destroying the first Crusader state and the cradle of the Jerusalem dynasty. The Islamic world was exultant. The Franks were not invincible and surely Jerusalem was next. ‘If Edessa is the high sea,’ wrote Ibn al-Qaysarani, ‘Jerusalem is the shore.’ The Abbasid caliph awarded Zangi the titles Ornament of Islam, Auxiliary of the Commander of the Believers, Divinely Aided King. Yet Zangi’s hard-drinking perversity caught up with him in his own boudoir.
At a siege in Iraq, a humiliated eunuch, perhaps one of those castrated for Zangi’s pleasure, crept into his heavily guarded tent and stabbed the drunken potentate in his bed, leaving him scarcely alive. A courtier found him bleeding, helplessly begging for his life: ‘He thought I was intending to kill him. He gestured to me with his index finger, appealing to me. I halted in awe of him and said, “My Lord, who’s done this to you?”’ There died the Falcon Prince.
His staff pillaged his belongings around the still-warm corpse and his two sons divided his lands: the younger of them, the twenty-eight-year-old Nur al-Din, tugged his father’s signet ring off his finger and seized the Syrian territories. Talented but less ferocious than his father, Nur al-Din intensified the jihad against the Franks. Shocked by the fall of Edessa, Melisende appealed to Pope Eugenius II, who called the Second Crusade.5
ELEANOR OF AQUITAINE AND KING LOUIS: SCANDAL AND DEFEAT
Louis VII, the saintly young King of France, accompanied by his wife Eleanor, Duchess of Aquitaine, and Conrad III, King of Germany, a veteran pilgrim, answered the pope’s call. But their German and French armies were mauled by the Turks as they crossed Anatolia. Louis VII only just made it to Antioch after a disastrous fighting march that must have been terrifying for Queen Eleanor, who lost much of her baggage – and any respect for her sanctimonious, inept husband.
Prince Raymond of Antioch urged Louis to help him to capture Aleppo but Louis was determined to make his pilgrimage to Jerusalem first. The worldly Raymond was Eleanor’s uncle and ‘the handsomest of princes’. After the miserable journey, Eleanor ‘disregarded her marriage vows and was unfaithful to her husband’, according to William of Tyre. Her husband was puppyishly besotted with her, but regarded sex, even in marriage, as indulgent. No wonder Eleanor called him ‘more monk than man’. Yet Eleanor, acutely intelligent, dark-haired, dark-eyed and curvaceous, was the richest heiress in Europe, brought up at the sensual Aquitanian court. Priestly chroniclers claimed that the blood of sin coursed through her veins because her grandfather was William the Troubadour, a promiscuous warrior-poet, while her grandmother on the other side was her grandfather’s mistress, nicknamed La Dangereuse. This came about because the Troubadour had facilitated his access to La Dangereuse by marrying her daughter to his son.
Whether Eleanor and Raymond committed adultery or not, their behaviour was provocative enough to humiliate the husband and launch an international scandal. The King of France solved his marital problem by kidnapping Eleanor and heading off to join the German king who had arrived in Jerusalem. When Louis and Eleanor approached the city, ‘all the clergy and people went out to meet him’ and escort him to the Sepulchre ‘to the accompaniment of hymns and chants’. The French couple stayed along with Conrad in the Temple of Solomon, but Eleanor must have been carefully watched by the French courtiers. She was stranded there for months.
On 24 June 1148, Melisende and her son Baldwin III called a council at Acre that approved the target of the Crusade: Damascus. The city had recently been Jerusalem’s ally, but it was still a sensible target because it would only be a matter of time before it fell to Nur al-Din. On 23 July, the kings of Jerusalem, France and Germany fought their way into the orchards on the west side of Damascus but two days later mysteriously moved camp to the east. Four days after that, the Crusade fell apart and the three kings ignominiously retreated.
Unur, Atabeg of Damascus, may have bribed the Jerusalemite barons, convincing them that the Western Crusaders wanted the prize for themselves. Such duplicitous venality was all too credible but, more likely, the Crusaders simply learned that Nur al-Din, Zangi’s son, was advancing with a relief army. Now Jerusalem wilted under the strain of this disaster. Conrad sailed home; Louis, bathing in ascetic penitence, stayed to celebrate Easter in the Holy City. They could not leave fast enough for Eleanor: the marriage was annulled on their return.*6
When they had gone, Queen Melisende celebrated her greatest triumph and suffered her greatest humiliation. On 15 July 1149, she and her son reconsecrated their new Church of the Holy Sepulchre, then – and now – the masterpiece and dazzling holy stage-set of Crusader Jerusalem. The architects, finding a cluttered labyrinth of chapels and shrines in the complex built in 1048 and restored in 1119, solved this challenge with astonishing boldness. They roofed over the compound with a soaring rotunda and united all its sites in one magnificent Romanesque building, expanding into the old Holy Garden in the east. They opened up the eastern wall of the Rotunda to add chapels and a huge ambulatory. On the site of Constantine’s Basilica, they placed a large cloister. They kept the 1048 southern entrance, creating a Romanesque façade with two portals (one is now bricked up) topped with sculpted lintels (now in the Rockefeller Museum). The peerless carvings of the staircase leading up to the Chapel of the Hill of Calvary are perhaps the most exquisite of all Crusader art.
Melisende’s son resented her and demanded his full powers. Now twenty years old and acclaimed for his brains
and flaxen-haired brawn, Baldwin III was said to be the perfect Frankish king – with a few vices. He was also known as a gambler and seducer of married women. But a northern crisis showed that Jerusalem needed an active warrior-king in the saddle: Zangi’s son, Nur al-Din, defeated the Antiochenes and killed Eleanor’s uncle Raymond.
Baldwin raced northwards in time to save Antioch but when he returned his mother Melisende, now forty-seven, resisted his demand that he be crowned at Easter. The king decided to fight.
MOTHER VERSUS SON: MELISENDE VERSUS BALDWIN III
Melisende offered him the rich ports of Tyre and Acre, but kept Jerusalem for herself. The ‘still smouldering fire was rekindled’ when Baldwin raised his own forces to seize the kingdom. Melisende sped from Nablus to Jerusalem with Baldwin in pursuit. Jerusalem opened its gates to the king. Melisende retreated into the Tower of David where Baldwin besieged her. He ‘set up his engines for assault’, firing bolts and ballista stones at her for several days. Finally the queen resigned power – and Jerusalem.