Jerusalem: The Biography

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.