Jerusalem: The Biography

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 led 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.