* While excavating the ancient Armenian Chapel of St Helena, Armenian archaeologists opened up a space (now the Varda Chapel) which contained the most intriguing graffito: a sketch of a boat and a phrase in Latin: ‘Domine ivimus’ (Lord we have come), a reference to Psalm 122 which starts ‘In domum domini ibimus’ (We’ll go the house of the Lord). This dates from the second century, proving that Christians were secretly praying beneath the Temple of Jupiter in pagan Aelia.
* Initially, Constantine identified the Unconquered Sun with the Christian God, placing crosses on some of his coins, the Sun on others, and remaining Pontifex Maximus (High Priest) of the pagan cults. In 321, Constantine declared Sunday – the day of the Sun – as the Christian version of the Sabbath. Mithraism was a Persian mystery religion with a following among Roman troops. As for Manichaeanism, the Parthian prophet Mani preached that existence was a perpetual struggle of light and dark, ultimately judged and enlightened by Jesus Christ. Now only the word survives to describe a world-view that sees life as a tournament between good and evil.
* In killing his son, Constantine joined an unsavoury crewof royal filicides that includes Herod the Great, Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Suleiman the Magnificent. Herod, the emperor Claudius and Henry VIII also executed their own wives.
† But she was not the first lady of Constantine’s family to be there. Eutropia, Fausta’s Christian mother, was already in Jerusalem, perhaps to supervise the emperor’s plans, when her daughter was killed. She shared her daughter’s downfall and was almost written out of history.
* We do not knowthe exact sequence of these buildings and discoveries. Eusebius of Caesarea, who provides the contemporary record, mentions only the orders of the emperor and the actions of Bishop Macarius in building the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (but nothing about Helena’s role in finding the Cross). Yet he gives her credit for the Ascension Church on the Mount of Olives. The story of Helena and the Cross is told later by Sozomen (also a local Christian). Some of Constantine’s walls can still be seen, within the Russian Alexander Nevsky Church: the stones contain the niches by which Constantine’s architects attached the marble. Constantinian churches were based not on pagan temples but the secular basilica, the audience-halls of emperors. Church rituals and clerical costumes were based on the imperial court to promote for the representatives of the King of Heaven a hierarchy parallel to that of the emperor.
* Up until Nicaea, Easter still fell on Passover, since it was at Passover that Jesus had been crucified. NowConstantine’s hatred of the Jews informed his decision to change this for ever. Constantine decreed that Easter should be fixed on the first full moon Sunday after the vernal equinox. This system remained universal until 1582 when the Eastern and Western calendars diverged.
† Arius was on his way through Constantinople after a meeting with Constantine when he felt a ‘relaxation of the bowels’. Before he could reach a convenience, wrote Socrates Scholasticus, Arius’ bowels burst in the middle of the Forum with his intestines, liver and spleen haemorrhaging out of him, a clear demonstration of the evil of his heresy. Yet Arianism lived on after Constantine’s death, supported by his heir Constantius II until condemned again by Theodosius I, who in 381 decreed that Jesus was equal to the Father in the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit and of the same substance.
* Nothing remains of this very short Jewish blossoming, but there may be one small clue. High on the Western Wall, a Hebrewinscription has been discovered reading: ‘And when you see this, your heart will rejoice, and your bones shall flourish like young grass.’ It was too high on the wall for the Second Temple but in this period the ground was much higher. Some scholars believe this expresses the joy of the Jews at Jerusalem’s restoration. More likely, it refers to a tenth-century cemetery: bones were found below this spot.
* Zion was originally the name of the citadel of David’s City, south of the Temple, but became synonymous with the Temple Mount. Now ‘Zion’ became the Christian name for the western hill. In 333, the Bordeaux Pilgrim already called it Zion. In 390, the Bishop of Jerusalem built the magnificent and colossal Zion, Mother of Churches there on the site of the Coenaculum. Jerusalem’s gift for dynamic reinvention and cultural theft is endless – but it does make names very confusing. Take this example: Hadrian’s Neapolis Gate with the huge column standing before it nowbecame St Stephen’s Gate for some centuries before the Arabs called it the Gate of the Column, and later the Nablus Gate (Neapolis being today’s Nablus); the Jews called it the Shechem Gate; the Ottomans called it today’s name, Damascus Gate. (Today’s St Stephen’s Gate is on the eastern side of the city.)
† The Byzantines moved most of the Jewish traditions of the Temple Mount to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The reddish stone of the Temple Mount had been known as the ‘Blood of Zacharias’ (the priest murdered there as told in 2 Chronicles 24.21), but this site nowmoved to the Church as did the Creation, the burial place of Adam, the altars of Melchizedek and Abraham and Solomon’s devil-catching silver bowl. These joined the platter for John the Baptist’s head, the sponge that soothed Jesus on the cross, the column where he was scourged, the stone that killed St Stephen and, of course, the True Cross. The Temple had been the ‘centre of the world’ for Jews; no wonder this one-stop shrine of all biblical holiness, the Church, was now itself regarded as ‘a navel of the world’.
* Monastic women often had to disguise themselves as eunuchs, which led to some entertaining stories: a certain Marina shaved her head, donned a male tunic and joined a monastery as Marinos but was accused of fathering a child and expelled. She brought up the child and only on her death did the monks discover that she was unequipped to perpetrate the sin of which she had been accused.
* Eudocia was inspired by Psalm 51: ‘Do good in thy good pleasure [Greek: eudocia] unto Zion: build the walls of Jerusalem.’ She was advised by the celebrated Armenian monk Euphemius whose protégé Sabas later founded the hauntingly beautiful Mar Saba Monastery, today inhabited by twenty monks, in the Judaean mountains not far from Jerusalem. Armenia, in the Caucasus, had been the first kingdom to convert to Christianity in 301 (after the mythical conversion of King Abgar of Edessa), followed by its neighbour Georgia (known as Iberia) in 327. Eudocia was joined by her own protégé, Peter the Georgian, the king of Iberia’s son, who built a monastery outside the walls. This was the start of the Caucasian presence in Jerusalem that endures today.
* Nestorianism became popular in the East through the Assyrian Church of the East that converted some of the royal family of Sassanid Persia and later many of Genghis Khan’s family. Simultaneously, Monophysite Eastern Christians, rejecting Chalcedon, formed the Egyptian Coptic, Syriac Orthodox (known also as Jacobite after its founder Jacob Baradeus) and Ethiopian Churches. The latter developed a special link with Judaism –The Book of Glory of Kings celebrates the union of King Solomon and Sheba, as the parents of the ‘Lion of Judah’ King Menelik who brought the Ark of the Covenant to Ethiopia, where it is now said to rest in Axum. This link later created the House of Israel (Beta Israel), the Falashas, black Ethiopian Jews, who existed at least from the fourteenth century; in 1984, the Israelis airlifted them to Israel.
* One of Justinian’s earliest decisions in his uncle’s reign was to destroy the Arabian Jewish kingdom of Yemen. In the early fifth century, the Kings of Yemen (Himyara) had converted to Judaism. In 523, in response to Byzantine threats, the Jewish king Joseph – Dhu Nuwas Zurah Yusuf – massacred Christians in Yemen and forced neighbouring principalities to convert to Judaism. Justinian ordered the Christian king Kaleb of Axum (Ethiopia) to invade Yemen. King Joseph was defeated in 525 and committed suicide by riding into the sea on horseback. Yet many Jews remained in Yemen and Judaism did not disappear in Arabia: many of its tribes remained Jewish in Muhammad’s day; Yemenite Jews would start to settle in Jerusalem in the nineteenth century and emigrate to Israel after 1948. Only one village of Jews remains in Yemen in 2010.
* For years this immense complex w
as lost, but its foundations, stretching from the Jewish Quarter under the present walls to outside the Old City, were discovered in excavations by the archaeologist Nahman Avigad in 1973. Justinian built on a series of vaults constructed along the slope to support its weight. This inscription was found among them: ‘And this is the work carried out by the generosity of our most gracious Emperor Flavius Justinianus.’
* In 1884, a colourful mosaic was found on the floor of a Byzantine church in Madaba (in Jordan), inscribed ‘The Holy City of Jerusalem’, the first Jerusalem map to showthe Byzantine view of the city with its six main gates, churches and the Temple Mount scarcely worth showing at all. Yet the Temple Mount was not completely empty. It has never been excavated by archaeologists, but in the 1940s British engineers, restoring the Islamic holy sites, made shallowprobes and found Byzantine traces. Optimists hoped these might be the foundations of Emperor Julian’s (unbuilt) Jewish Temple. But these may be traces of the only Byzantine shrine on this site – the small Church of the Pinnacle marking Jesus’ temptation by the devil.
* Christian accounts make the exaggerated claim that 10,000 to 90,000 Christians were murdered by the Jews and buried by Thomas the Gravedigger. Christian legend claims the victims were buried in the Mamilla cemetery of the Lions’ Cave, so named because survivors hid in the cave until they were saved by a lion. The Jews claim that it was Jewish victims of a Christian massacre who were saved by the lion.
* Some traces of a building at the Temple Mount’s south-west corner seem to show a menorah painted over a cross, possibly a Christian shrine inherited for a short time by Jews. But this may date from the early Islamic period.
* The Golden Gate, actually two gates, is directly and precisely aligned with the Tomb itself in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the place to which Heraclius took the Cross. The place had further symbolism, as we have seen, because the Byzantines mistakenly believed it also marked the Beautiful Gate where Jesus entered on Palm Sunday and where his apostles performed a miracle after his death. Nonetheless some scholars believe the gate was actually built by the Ummayad caliphs. The Gate soon assumed mystical significance for the Jews who called it the Gate of Mercy.
* The word ‘mosque’ derives from the Arabic masjid, which led to the Spanish mezquita and the French mosquée.
* Muhammad’s successors used the title Commander of the Believers. Later the Heads of State were known as Khalifat Rasul Allah – Successor to the Messenger of God – or caliph. Abu Bakr may have used this title but there is no evidence it was again used for another seventy years, until the reign of Abd al-Malik. Then it was applied retrospectively: the first four rulers became known as the Righteous Caliphs.
† The early history of Islam, including the surrender of Jerusalem, is mysterious and contested. The pre-eminent Islamic historians wrote one or two centuries later and far from Jerusalem or Mecca: Ibn Ishaq,Muhammad’s first biographer, wrote in Baghdad, dying in 770; al-Tabari, al-Baladhuri and al-Yaqubi all lived in late-ninth-century Persia or Iraq.
* The early Muslims seem to have called themselves ‘Believers’ – the word appears 1,000 times in the Koran while ‘Muslim’ appears about 75 times – and as we will see in Jerusalem, they were certainly not yet hostile to their fellow monotheists,Christians or Jews. Professor Fred M. Donner, an authority on early Islam, takes this further: ‘There is no reason to believe’, he writes, ‘that the Believers viewed themselves as a new or separate religious confession. Some of the early Believers were Christians or Jews.’
* There is no contemporary account of the fall of Jerusalem but the Arab historians describe the armies that simultaneously invaded Persia and this is based on those sources.
* Jews and most Christians would not have had a problem with the earliest versions of the Muslim statement of faith – the shahada – which read ‘There is no God but God’, as it may not have been until 685 that they added ‘Muhammad is the apostle of God’. Jewish and Muslim names for Jerusalem overlap: Muhammad called Palestine ‘The Holy Land’ in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. The Jews called the Temple Beyt ha-Miqdash (the Holy House) which the Muslims adapted: they called the city herself Bayt al-Maqdis. The Jews called the Temple Mount Har ha-Beyt (the Mount of the Holy House); Muslims initially called it Masjid Bayt al-Maqdis, the Mosque of the Holy House, and later also Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary. Ultimately Muslims had seventeen names for Jerusalem; Jews claimed seventy, and both agreed ‘a multiplicity of names is a sign of greatness’.
* The traditional text of the Covenant or Pact of Omar with the Christians claims Omar agreed to ban the Jews from Jerusalem. This is Christian wishful thinking or a later forgery because we know that Omar welcomed the Jews back in Jerusalem, that he and the early caliphs allowed Jewish worship on the Temple Mount and that the Jews did not leave again as along as Islam held sway. The Armenians were already a large Christian community in Jerusalem with their own bishop (later patriarch). They established close relations with the Muslims and received their own Covenant. For the next millennium and a half,Christians and Jews were dhimmi, people of the Covenant, tolerated but inferior, sometimes left to themselves, sometimes viciously persecuted.
† Omar ordered the retirement of Khaled, victor of Yarmuk, after hearing about a wine-soaked bathhouse orgy in which a poet sang of the general’s heroics. Khaled died of plague though today’s Khalidi family claim descent from him. One of Muhammad’s early supporters had been a woman named Nusaybah who lost two sons and a leg fighting for the Prophet. Now Nusaybah’s brother,Ubadah ibn al-Samit, arrived with Omar, who is said to have appointed him as a judge in Jerusalem, and custodian of the Holy Sepulchre and of the Rock. His descendants, the Nusseibeh family, are still Custodians of the Holy Sepulchre in 2010 (see the Epilogue).
* This was a handshake which meant a contract to render obedience: the word comes from baa – to sell.
* The modern mosque contains both a mihrab, a prayer-niche facing Mecca, and a minbar, the pulpit. Muawiya’s prayer-hall had the mihrab but probably not yet a minbar because early Islam was too egalitarian to have a pulpit. However, according to the historian Ibn Khaldun, Muawiya’s imperial reign changed that. His Egyptian governor, the general Amr, invented the minbar in his mosque in Egypt and Muawiya started to use it to give the Friday sermon, adding a latticed enclosure around it to protect him from assassins.
* Iran remains a Shiite theocracy. Shiites are a majority in Iraq and a large minority in Lebanon. Hussein’s brother Hasan bin Ali remained in retirement, though he too may have been murdered. His direct descendants include today’s royal dynasties of Morocco’s Alouite and of Jordan’s Hashemite kings. The Twelve Shiite Imams, the Fatimid dynasty, the Aga Khans and the Jerusalemite Family the Husseinis all trace their roots back to Hussein. Their descendants are often known as the Nobility, the Ashraf (the singular is Sherif usually addressed as Sayyid).
* In 1902, one of Abd al-Malik’s milestones was found east of Jerusalem with an inscription that defined the way the caliph saw his power in relation to that of God: ‘There is no God but God alone. Muhammad is the messenger of God… Abd al-Malik, the Commander of the Faithful and servant of God, had ordered the repair of this road and construction of this milestone. From Ilya [Jerusalem] to here is seven miles…’
* ‘O People of the Book do not go beyond the bounds of your religion and do not speak anything about God except the truth,’ read the inscriptions around the Dome. ‘Indeed the Messiah Jesus son of Mary was only a messenger of God so believe in God and in his messengers and do not say “three”… It is not for God to take a son.’ This seems more an attack on Trinitarianism than on Christianity as a whole. As for the Jews, the bi-weekly service there referred strongly to the Jewish Temple: ‘On every Tuesday and Thursday, they order saffron and they prepare with musk, ambergris and sandalwood perfumed with rosewater. Then the servants (who were Jews and Christians) eat and enter the bath to purify themselves. They go to the wardrobe and come out with new red and blue clothes
and bands and belts. Then they go to the Stone and anoint.’ As the scholar Andreas Kaplony writes, this was ‘a Muslim service, the Temple service as the Muslims think it should be. To cut a long story short, this is the Former Temple rebuilt, the Koran is the new Torah and the Muslims are the true people of Israel.’
* As always in Jerusalem, the builders borrowed from elsewhere, so Aqsa’s wooden beams were taken from a Christian site, still marked in Greek with the name of a sixth-century Patriarch (now in the Rockefeller and Haram Museums). The Double and Triple Gates to the south, matching the Golden Gate to the east, all of them now closed, are the most beautiful in Jerusalem, built using the stones of earlier Herodian and Roman buildings. It was there that the wall contains the upside-down inscription to Emperor Antoninus Pius from his equestrian statue on the Temple Mount.
* ‘Every soul shall taste death and you will be paid in full only on the Day of Resurrection,’ says the Koran. The Muslims created a geography of Apocalypse around Jerusalem. The forces of evil perish at the Golden Gate. The Mahdi – the Chosen – dies when the Ark of the Covenant is placed before him. At the sight of the Ark, the Jews convert to Islam. The Kaaba of Mecca comes to Jerusalem with all those who ever made the pilgrimage to Mecca. Heaven descends on the Temple Mount with Hell in the Valley of Hinnom. The people assemble outside the Golden Gate on the Plain – al-Sahira. Israfil the Archangel of Death (one of the Dome’s gates is named after him) blows his trumpet: the dead (especially those buried close to the Golden Gate) are resurrected and pass through the Gate, the portal to the End of Days (with its two little domed Gates of Mercy or that of Repentance), to be judged in the Dome of the Chain where the scales of justice hang.