Jerusalem: The Biography

Such was Taki’s priapic over-indulgence that he started losing weight, energy and erection. He consulted his Jewish doctor Maimonides, who advised his own community against excessive ‘eating, drinking and copulation’ but treated his princely patients differently. The royal doctor wrote Saladin’s nephew a special work entitled On Sexual Intercourse, prescribing moderation, limited alcohol, women not too old nor too young, a cocktail of oxtongue plant and wine and, finally, a ‘wondrous secret’ of medieval Viagra: massage the royal penis for two hours before intercourse with oils mixed with saffron-coloured ants. Maimonides promised the erection would last long after the act.

Saladin loved Taki, whom he promoted to viceroy of Egypt, but was then exasperated by his nephew’s attempt to create his own fiefdom. He moved him to rule swathes of Iraq instead. Now this exuberant nephew and most of Saladin’s family arrived to enjoy the liberation of Jerusalem.¹⁶

SALADIN’S CITY

Saladin watched the Latin Christians leave Jerusalem for ever: the Jerusalemites had to pay a ransom of ten dinars per man, five per woman, one per child. No one could leave without a receipt of payment, but Saladin’s officials made fortunes as bribes were paid and Christians were lowered from the walls in baskets or escaped in disguise. Saladin himself had no interest in money and, though he received 220,000 dinars, much of the cash went astray.

Thousands of Jerusalemites could not afford their ransom. They were led away into slavery and the harem. Balian paid 30,000 dinars to ransom 7,000 poor Jerusalemites, while the Sultan’s brother Safadin asked for a thousand unfortunates and freed them. Saladin gave five hundred each to Balian and to Patriarch Heraclius. The Muslims were shocked to see the latter pay his ten dinars and leave the city laden with carts of gold and carpets. ‘How many well-guarded women were profaned, nubile girls married, virgins dishonoured, proud women deflowered, lovely women’s red lips kissed, untamed ones tamed,’ recalled Saladin’s secretary Imad al-Din with a rather creepy glee. ‘How many noblemen took them as concubines, how many great ladies sold at low prices!’

Under the eyes of the sultan, the two columns of Christians looked back one last time and wept at the loss of Jerusalem, reflecting, ‘She who was named the mistress of other cities had become a slave and handmaid.’

On Friday 2 October, Saladin entered Jerusalem and ordered the Temple Mount, known to Muslims as the Haram al-Sharif, to be cleansed of the infidel. The Cross over the Dome of the Rock was thrown down to cries of ‘Allahu Akhbar’, dragged through the city and smashed, the Jesus paintings torn out, the cloisters north of the Dome demolished, the cubicles and apartments within the Aqsa removed. Saladin’s sister arrived from Damascus with a camel caravan of rosewater. The sultan himself and his nephew Taki personally scrubbed the courts of the Haram with rosewater, accompanied by a cleaning-party of princes and amirs. Saladin brought Nur al-Din’s carved wooden minbar from Aleppo and set it up in al-Aqsa Mosque where it remained for seven centuries.

The sultan did not so much destroy and rebuild as adapt and embroider, reusing the gorgeous spolia of the Crusaders with their foliate patterns, capitals and wetleaf acanthus; his own architecture is thus constructed with the very symbols of his enemies, which makes it hard to distinguish between the buildings of the Crusaders and Saladin.

Every respected member of the ulema

, Muslim clergy and scholars, from Cairo to Baghdad, wanted to preach at Friday prayers, but Saladin chose the Qadi of Aleppo, giving him a black robe to wear: his sermon in al-Aqsa praised the fadail – the merits – of Islamic Jerusalem. Saladin himself had become the ‘light that shines in every dawn that brings darkness to the believers’ by ‘liberating the brother shrine of Mecca’. Saladin then walked to the Dome to pray in what he called ‘the jewel of the signet-ring of Islam’. Saladin’s love for Jerusalem was ‘as great as mountains’. His mission was to create an Islamic Jerusalem and he considered whether to destroy the Dungheap – the Holy Sepulchre. Some of his grandees called for its demolition, but he mused that the place would still remain holy whether or not the Church stood there. Citing Omar the Just, he closed the Church for only three days and then gave it to the Greek Orthodox. Overall, he tolerated most churches, but aimed to diminish the Christian Quarter’s non-Islamic character. Church bells were again banned. Instead, for hundreds of years right up until the nineteenth century, the muezzin held the monopoly of sound and the Christians announced prayers with the clack of wooden clappers and the clash of cymbals. He destroyed some churches outside the walls and commandeered many prominent Christian buildings for his own Salahiyya endowments – which still exist today.^*