Jerusalem: The Biography

A few days later, after welcoming the haj caravan from Mecca, he was struck down by a fever, probably typhoid. His doctors bled him, but he grew worse. When he asked for warm water, it was too cold. ‘Heavens above!’ he exclaimed. ‘Is nobody able to get the water just right!’ At dawn on 3 March 1193, he died listening to recitations of the Koran. ‘I and others would have given our lives for him,’ said Ibn Shaddad who reflected:

Then these years and their players passed away

As though they all had been merely dreams.

MUAZZAM ISA: THE OTHER JESUS

Saladin’s sons spent the next six years fighting among themselves in ever-changing combinations, mediated by their shrewd uncle Safadin. The three eldest sons, Afdal, Zahir and Aziz received Damascus, Aleppo and Egypt, while Safadin ruled Outrejourdain and Edessa.

Afdal, now twenty-two, inherited Jerusalem, which he cherished. He built the Mosque of Omar right next to the Church and settled north Africans in a Maghrebi quarter where he built the Afdaliyya Madrassa within a few metres of the Western Wall.

Afdal, drunk and inept, found it hard to inspire loyalty and Jerusalem was tossed between the warring brothers. Just when Aziz had won the war and emerged as sultan, he was killed out hunting. The surviving brothers Afdal and Zahir ganged up on their uncle, but Safadin defeated both and seized the empire, ruling as sultan for twenty years. Cold, elegant and dour, Safadin was no Saladin: not one contemporary describes him with affection, but everyone respected him. He was ‘brilliantly successful, probably the ablest of his line’. In Jerusalem, Safadin commissioned the double-gate – the Gate of the Chain and the Gate of Divine Presence, probably the site of the Crusaders’ Beautiful Gate – using exquisite Frankish spolia from the Templar cloister and featuring a twin-domed porch and capitals with carvings of animals and lions: this still forms the main western entrance to the Temple Mount. But even before he became sultan, in 1198, his second son, Muazzam Isa (Isa being the Arabic for Jesus), was given Syria.

In 1204, Muazzam made Jerusalem his capital, and Amaury’s palace his home. The most popular member of the family since his uncle Saladin, Muazzam was easy-going and open-minded. When he visited scholars to study philosophy and science, he simply walked to their houses like an ordinary student. ‘I saw him in Jerusalem,’ recalled the historian Ibn Wasil. ‘Men, women and boys were jostling him and no one pushed them away. In spite of his boldness and high sense of honour, he had little taste for ostentation. He rode without being accompanied by the royal standards, with only a small escort. On his head he wore a yellow cap and made his way through the markets and streets without a pathway being cleared for him.’

One of Jerusalem’s most prolific builders, Muazzam restored the walls, built seven hulking towers and converted the Crusader structures on the Temple Mount into Muslim shrines.^* In 1209, he settled 300 Jewish families from France and England in Jerusalem. When the Jewish poet of Spain, Judah al-Harizi, made his pilgrimage, he praised the dynasty of Muazzam and Saladin even as he mourned the Temple: ‘We went out every day to weep for Zion, we grieved her destroyed palaces, we ascended the Mount of Olives to prostrate ourselves before the Eternal One. What torment to see our holy courts converted into an alien temple.’ Suddenly, in 1218, Muazzam’s achievements were thrown into peril when John of Brienne, titular King of Jerusalem,^† led the Fifth Crusade to attack Egypt. The Crusaders besieged the port of Damietta. Safadin, now seventy-four years old, led out his armies but died when he heard that the Chain Tower of Damietta had fallen. Muazzam hastened from Jerusalem to Egypt to help his elder brother Kamil, the new Sultan of Egypt. But the brothers panicked and twice offered Jerusalem to the Crusaders if they would leave Egypt. In the spring of 1219, with the family empire in jeopardy, Muazzam took the heartbreaking decision to destroy all his fortifications in Jerusalem, arguing that ‘if the Franks took it, they would kill everyone there and dominate Syria’.

Jerusalem was left defenceless and half-empty – her inhabitants fled in droves. ‘Women, girls and old men gathered on the Haram, tore their hair and clothes and scattered in all directions’ as if it were ‘the Day of Judgement’. Yet the Crusaders foolishly refused the brothers’ offers of Jerusalem – and the Crusade itself fell apart.

Once the Crusaders had departed, Kamil and Muazzam, who had cooperated so well during the ultimate crisis, embarked on a vicious fraternal war for supremacy. Jerusalem did not really recover until the nineteenth century. Fabled before and afterwards for her walls, she was to be without them for three centuries. Yet the city was about to change hands again in a most unlikely peace deal.¹⁹

EMPEROR FREDERICK II: