Jerusalem: The Biography

That morning, the Bishop of Caesarea arrived with his interdict. The emperor left his garrison in the Tower of David and headed back to Acre where he was faced with the ungrateful hostility of barons and Templars. Now under papal attack in Italy, the emperor planned a secret departure, but at dawn on 1 May the Acre mob, collecting the offal of Butchers Street, bombarded him with entrails and giblets. On his ship home to Brindisi, Frederick pined for his ‘flower of Syria’: ‘Ever since I went away, I’ve never endured such anguish as I did on board the ship. And now I believe I shall surely die if I don’t return to her soon.’²¹

He had not stayed long and he never returned, but Frederick remained officially the master of Jerusalem for ten years. Frederick gave the Tower of David and Royal Palace to the Teutonic Knights. He ordered their master, Hermann of Salza and Bishop Peter of Winchester, to repair the Tower (some of this work survives today) and fortify St Stephen’s (today’s Damascus) Gate. Franks reclaimed ‘their churches and had their old possessions restored to them’. The Jews were again banned. Without walls, Jerusalem was insecure: weeks later, the imams of Hebron and Nablus led 15,000 peasants into the city while the Christians cowered in the Tower. Acre sent an army to eject the Muslim invaders and Jerusalem remained Christian.^*

In 1238, Sultan Kamil died, throwing the Saladin dynasty into further internecine wars, exacerbated by a new crusade under Count Thibault of Champagne. When the Crusaders were defeated, Muazzam’s son, Nasir Daud, galloped into Jerusalem and besieged the Tower of David for twenty-one days until it fell on 7 December 1239. He then destroyed the new fortifications, and the warring princes of the Saladin family took an oath of peace on the Temple Mount. But familial strife and the arrival of an English Crusade under Henry III’s brother, Richard, Earl of Cornwall, again forced the surrender of Jerusalem to the Franks. This time the Templars expelled the Muslims and regained the Temple Mount: the Dome and al-Aqsa became churches again. ‘I saw monks in charge of the Sacred Rock,’ recalled Ibn Wasil. ‘I saw on it bottles of wine for mass.’²² The Templars started to fortify the Holy City – but not fast enough: in order to fight his family rivals, the new sultan Salih Ayyub had hired a horde of freebooting Tartars, nomadic Central Asian horsemen displaced by the new Mongol empire. But he could now control them. To the horror of the Christians of Acre, 10,000 Khwarizmian Tartars rode towards Jerusalem.

BARKA KHAN AND THE TARTARS: CATASTROPHE

On 11 July 1244, the Tartar horsemen led by Barka Khan clattered into Jerusalem, fighting and hacking their way through the streets, smashing into the Armenian convent and murdering the monks and nuns. They destroyed churches and houses, plundering the Holy Sepulchre and setting it on fire. Coming upon the priests as they celebrated Mass the Tartars beheaded and disembowelled them at the altar. The bodies of the kings of Jerusalem were disinterred, their elaborate sarcophagi smashed; the stone at the door of Jesus’ tomb was shattered. The Franks, besieged in the Tower, appealed to Nasir Daud, who persuaded Barka to allow the garrison to leave in safety.

Six thousand Christians left for Jaffa but, seeing Frankish flags on the battlements and believing help had arrived, many turned back. The Tartars massacred 2,000 of them. Only 300 Christians reached Jaffa. When they had thoroughly destroyed Jerusalem, the Tartars galloped away.^*

Smouldering and smashed, Jerusalem would not be Christian again until 1917.²³

In 1248, King Louis XI led the last effective Crusade and once again, the Crusaders hoped to win Jerusalem by conquering Egypt. In November 1249 the Crusaders advanced on Cairo, where Sultan Salih Ayyub was already dying. His widow, the sultana, Shajar al-Durr, took control, summoning her stepson Turanshah back from Syria. The Crusaders overreached themselves and were routed by the mamluks, the crack regiments of military slaves. Louis was captured. But the new sultan Turanshah neglected his own soldiers: on 2 May 1250, he was holding a banquet to celebrate the victory, attended by many of the Crusader prisoners, when mamluks, led by a blond giant named Baibars, then aged twenty-seven, burst in, swords drawn.

Baibars slashed at the sultan who fled bleeding down to the Nile as the mamluks fired arrows into him. He stood wounded in the river begging for his life until a mamluk waded in, cut off his head and sliced open his chest. His heart was cut out and shown to King Louis of France at a banquet; no doubt he lost his appetite.