Jerusalem: The Biography

Baldwin negotiated a profitable marriage with the rich Adelaide, widow of the Norman Count of Sicily: she arrived at Acre accompanied by three triremes of elegant courtiers, Arab bodyguards – and treasure. Outremer had never seen anything as magnificent as her cavalcade. The streets were bannered and carpeted as Baldwin escorted this ageing Cleopatra into a rejoicing Jerusalem. However, her haughtiness proved inconvenient, her charm insufficient and her wealth all too exhaustible. She disliked provincial Jerusalem, missing the luxuries of Palermo. When Baldwin fell dangerously ill, his bigamy began to trouble him and he despatched the Queen back to Sicily.

Meanwhile the king found a solution to the emptiness of Jerusalem. In 1115, he raided across the Jordan, building castles there but also encountering the poverty-stricken Syrian and Armenian Christians, whom he invited to settle in Jerusalem, ancestors of today’s Palestinian Christians.

The Crusaders of Jerusalem faced a strategic dilemma: should they expand northwards into Syria and Iraq or southwards into the fraying caliphate of Egypt? To secure the kingdom, Baldwin and his successors knew they had to conquer one of these territories. Their strategic nightmare was a union of Syria and Egypt. So in 1118 Baldwin raided Egypt, but, halting to catch fish in the Nile, he fell ill again. Carried back in a litter, he died at the border town of El-Arish, where the Bardawil lagoons are named after him. He was a gifted adventurer who had become a Levantine king, now surprisingly mourned by ‘Franks, Syrians and even the Saracens’.

On Palm Sunday, the Jerusalemites were solemnly parading their palms in the Kidron Valley when they were heartened to see from the north the arrival of the Count of Edessa. Only then did they observe, approaching from the south, the catafalque of their dead king, weaving closely through the Judaean hills guarded by his mourning army.²

BALDWIN II THE LITTLE

Once Baldwin was laid in the Church, the barons reviewed the candidates for the throne. But one faction simply elected the Count of Edessa and seized Jerusalem. The kingdom was fortunate in its choice. Baldwin II, the dead king’s cousin, known as the Little, in contrast to his lanky predecessor, had ruled Edessa through eighteen years of constant warfare and even survived four years of prison after being captured by the Turks. Wearing a long beard down to his chest, blond now streaked with silver, he was wholesomely married to an Armenian heiress, Morphia, with four daughters, and was so saintly that his knees were calloused from prayer. Baldwin was, even more than his predecessor, a Levantine as well as a Frankish king: he was at home in the Middle East, holding court in robes, seated cross-legged on cushions. The Muslims regarded him as ‘rich in experience’ with ‘good sense and the gift of kingship’ – high praise for an infidel.

In Jerusalem, Baldwin the Little lent his Temple of Solomon to a new military order of ‘God-fearing’ knights, ‘professing the wish to live perpetually in poverty, chastity and obedience’, who would take their name from their new home. The Templars started as nine guardians of the pilgrim route from Jaffa but grew into a crack military-religious order of 300 knights, wearing the red cross, granted them by the pope, and commanding hundreds of sergeants and thousands of infantry. The Templars converted the Islamic Haram al-Sharif into a Christian complex of shrine, arsenal and accommodation:^* al-Aqsa was already divided up into rooms and apartments but they added a capacious Templar Hall (of which traces still exist) around the south wall. Near the Rock, the Dome of the Chain became St James’s Chapel. The underground Mosque of Jesus’ Cradle became the Christian St Mary’s. Herod’s subterranean halls, which they called the Stables of Solomon, housed the Order’s 2,000 horses and 1,500 pack camels, accessed through a new single gate in the southern wall, all this protected to the south by a fortified barbican. North of the Dome, they built a canons’ cloister, their own bathhouse and a crafts workshop. On top of al-Aqsa, they created, says the German monk Theodorich who visited in 1172, ‘an abundance of gardens, courtyards, antechambers, vestibules and rain-water cisterns’.