Jerusalem: The Biography

Finally, in the middle of one night in February 1021, the demented caliph, still only thirty-six years old, rode out of Cairo into the hills and vanished so mysteriously that his devotees were convinced ’Hakim was not born of woman and did not die’. Since his donkey and some bloodied rags were discovered, he had probably been murdered by his sister who arranged the succession of his little son, Zahir. Hakim’s devotees were slaughtered by the Fatimid troops, but a few escaped to found a new sect which survives to this day as the Druze of Lebanon.¹⁹

The scars of Hakim’s insanity never healed in Jerusalem: the Church of Constantine was never fully rebuilt in its original form. As if Hakim was not bad enough, an earthquake in 1033 devastated the city, shattering the Byzantine walls and the Umayyad palaces; the old Umayyad Aqsa collapsed in ruins; the Jewish Cave was damaged.

Caliph Zahir, who revered Jerusalem, restored the tolerance of his ancestors, promising protection to both the Jewish sects, and on the Temple Mount he rebuilt al-Aqsa, the inscription on its delicately decorated triumphal arch linking himself, his Jerusalem and the Night Journey of the Prophet, though his mosque was far smaller than the original. He rebuilt the city walls, but around a smaller city, roughly as we see it today, leaving Mount Zion and the ruined Umayyad palaces outside.

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.