Jerusalem: The Biography

Nasir found Jerusalem – or at least the Muslim Quarter – in dust and cobwebs and left her in marble, so when Ibn Battutah visited, he found a city that was ‘large and imposing’. Islamic pilgrims poured into al-Quds, exploring from the hell of Gehenna to the paradise of the Dome and reading the books of fadail that told them ‘a sin committed in Jerusalem is the equivalent of a thousand sins and a good work there equal to a thousand’. He who lived there ‘is like a warrior in the jihad’ while to die there ‘is like dying in heaven’. Jerusalem’s mysticism blossomed to such an extent that Muslims started to circumambulate, kiss and anoint the Rock as they had not done since the seventh century. The fundamentalist scholar Ibn Taymiyya railed against Nasir and these Sufi superstitions, warning that Jerusalem ranked only as a pious visit – a ziyara – not the equivalent of the haj to Mecca. The sultan imprisoned this puritanical dissident six times but to no avail and Ibn Taymiyya provided the inspiration for the harsh Wahabiism of Saudi Arabia and today’s Jihadists.

The Exquisite sultan no longer trusted the Turkish Mamluks who had become the elite so he started to buy Georgian or Circassian slaveboys from the Caucasus to provide his bodyguard and they influenced his decisions in Jerusalem: he granted the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to the Georgians. But the Latins had not forgotten her either: in 1333, he allowed King Robert of Naples (and Jerusalem) to repair parts of the Church and take possession of the Cenacle on Mount Zion where he started a Franciscan monastery.

The ailing tiger is the most dangerous. The sultan fell ill but he had made his friend Tankiz ‘so powerful he became afraid of him’. In 1340, Tankiz was arrested and poisoned. Nasir himself died a year later, succeeded by his many sons. But ultimately, the new Caucasian slaves overthrew the dynasty, founding a new line of sultans who favoured the Georgians in Jerusalem. On the other hand, the Catholic Latins – the heirs of the hated Crusaders – were there on sufferance under the repressive Mamluks whose paroxysms of violence terrorized Christians and Jews alike. When the Cypriot king attacked Alexandria in 1365, the Church was closed down and the Franciscans dragged off to be publicly executed in Damascus. The Franciscan order was allowed to return but the Mamluks built minarets overshadowing the Church and the Ramban Synagogue to emphasize the supremacy of Islam.

In 1399, the dread Central Asian conqueror Tamurlane captured Baghdad and smashed into Syria just as a Mamluk boy-sultan and his tutor set out on their pilgrimage to Jerusalem.⁴

DECLINE OF THE MAMLUKS

1399–1517

TAMURLANE AND THE TUTOR: PILGRIM CITY

The royal tutor was the most celebrated scholar in the Islamic world. Now aged around seventy, Ibn Khaldun had served the monarchs of Morocco, then (after a spell in prison) Granada, Tunisia and finally (after another spell in prison) the Mamluk sultan. In between spells in power and in prison, he wrote his masterpiece, the Muqaddimah, a world history that still sparkles today. The sultan therefore appointed him tutor to his son, Faraj, who succeeded to the throne as a child.

Now, as the peppery historian showed Jerusalem to the ten-year-old sultan, Tamurlane besieged Mamluk Damascus. Timur the Lame – known as Tamurlane – had risen to power in 1170 as a local warlord in Central Asia. In thirty-five years of incessant warfare, this harsh genius, of Turkic descent, had conquered much of the Near East, which he ruled from the saddle, promoting himself as the heir to Genghis Khan. In Delhi, he slaughtered 100,000; at Isfahan, he killed 70,000, building twenty-eight towers of 1,500 heads each, and he had never been defeated.

Yet Tamurlane was not just a warrior. His palaces and gardens in Samarkand displayed his sophisticated taste; he was an ace chessplayer and a history-buff who enjoyed debates with philosophers. Not surprisingly, he had always wanted to meet Ibn Khaldun.

Yet the Mamluks were in a state of panic: if Damascus fell, so would Palestine and perhaps Cairo too. The old pedagogue and the boy-sultan hurried back to Cairo but the Mamluks decided to send the pair into Syria to negotiate with Tamurlane – and save the empire. At the same time, the Jerusalemites were debating what to do: how to save the Holy City from the invincible predator known as the Scourge of God?