Jerusalem: The Biography

Just north-west of the walls, the Sultan built a lodge for his favourite order of Sufis. Like many of the Mamluks, he was a patron of the populist mysticism of the Sufis who believed that passion, chants, saintly cults, dances and self-mortification could bring Muslims closer to God than rigid traditional prayer. Baibars’ closest adviser was a Sufi sheikh with whom he would recite and dance the Sufi zikr. Baibars implicitly trusted the sheikh and did nothing without his approval while allowing him to organize the looting of churches and synagogues and the lynching of Jews and Christians.^* It was a new era: Baibars and his Mamluk successors, who were to rule Jerusalem for the next 300 years, were harsh, intolerant military dictators or juntas. The old age of Islamic chivalry, personified by Saladin, was gone. The Mamluks were a Turkish master-caste who forced Jews to wear yellow turbans, while the Christians had to wear blue. For both, but especially the Jews, their days as protected dhimmi

were past. The Turkish-speaking Mamluks disdained Arabs too and only Mamluks were allowed to wear furs or armour or ride a horse in towns. At their gaudy court, the sultans awarded their courtiers colourful titles such as Bearer of the Royal Polo Stick and Amir-to-be-Serenadedby-Music – the game of politics there was as often lethal as it was lucrative.

Baibar’s symbol was a prowling panther which he used to mark his victories – eighty of them have been found on inscriptions between Egypt and Turkey and in Jerusalem, and they still prowl the Lions’ Gate. No symbol was more appropriate for this terrifying predator with the white eye who now embarked on a spree of conquests.

When he had inspected Jerusalem, he attacked Acre which withstood the attack but he was to return often. Meanwhile, one by one, he stormed the other Crusader cities, killing with deranged, sadistic rapture. He received Frankish ambassadors surrounded by Christian heads, crucified, bisected and scalped his enemies, and built heads into the walls of fallen towns. He enjoyed taking risks like scouting incognito into enemy cities, negotiating with his enemies in disguise, and even when he was in Cairo he inspected his offices in the middle of the night, so restless and paranoid that he suffered insomnia and stomach-aches.

Acre alone defied him^*

but he marched north to conquer Antioch, whence he chillingly wrote to its prince ‘to tell you what we’ve just done. The dead were heaped up, you should have seen your Muslim enemy trample on the place you celebrate mass, cutting the throats of the monks on the altar, the fire running through your palaces. If you’d been there to see it, you’d have wished you’d never been alive!’ He marched into Anatolia and crowned himself Sultan of Rum. But the Mongols had returned and Baibars rushed back to defend Syria.

On 1 June 1277, he fell victim to his own macabre ingenuity, when he prepared a drink of poisoned qumiz – fermented mare’s milk, relished by Turks and Mongols – for a guest, but then forgetfully drank it himself.¹ His successors finished his work.

On 18 May 1291, the Mamluks stormed the Frankish capital Acre and slaughtered most of the defenders, enslaving the rest (girls were sold for just one drachma each). The title King of Jerusalem was now united with that of King of Cyprus. But it survived only as a picturesque ornament –and it remains so today. There ended the Kingdom of Jerusalem.^*

Even the real Jerusalem only just survived – less a city, more of a senescent village, unwalled and half-deserted, raided at will by Mongol horsemen.

In 1267, a pilgrim, the old Spanish rabbi known as Ramban, mourned her eclipse:

I compare you, my mother, to the woman whose son died in her lap and painfully there is milk in her breasts and she suckles the pups of dogs. And despite all that, your lovers abandoned you and your enemies desolated you, but faraway they remember and glorify the Holy City.²

RAMBAN

Rabbi Moses ben Nachman, known by his Hebrew acronym RAMBAN or just Nahmanides, was amazed to find that there were only 2,000 inhabitants left in Jerusalem, just 300 Christians and only two Jews, brothers, who were dyers like the Jews under the Crusades. The sadder Jerusalem seemed to the Jews, the more sacred it became, the more poetical: ‘Whatever is more holy’, thought Ramban, ‘is more ruined.’

The Ramban was one of the most inspiring intellectuals of his time, a doctor, philosopher, mystic and Torah scholar. In 1263, he had defended Barcelona’s Jews so adeptly against Dominican accusations of blasphemy that King James of Aragon remarked, ‘I’ve never seen a man defend a wrong cause so well,’ and gave Ramban 300 gold pieces. But the Dominicans then tried to have Ramban executed. As a compromise, the septuagenarian was banished – and set out on his pilgrimage.