Jerusalem: The Biography

Pilgrims had to pay repeated fines and tolls just to enter Jerusalem and then the Church where the Mamluks also controlled the Sepulchre inside. They sealed the Church every night so pilgrims, for a price, could be locked inside for days and nights if they wished. The pilgrims found that the Church resembled a bazaar-cum-barbershop with stalls, shops, beds and large quantities of human hair: many believed that illness would be cured if they shaved themselves and placed the hair in the Sepulchre. Many of the pilgrims spent much time carving their initials into every shrine they visited while artful Muslims serviced the relic industry: pilgrims claimed that stillborn Muslim babies were embalmed and then sold to rich Europeans as the victims of the Massacre of the Innocents.

Some pilgrims were convinced that children conceived within the Church were specially blessed, and of course there was alcohol, so that the dark hours often became a candlelit, hard-drinking orgy in which good-natured hymn singing gave way to ugly brawls. The Sepulchre, said one disgusted pilgrim, was ‘a complete brothel.’ Another pilgrim, Arnold von Harff, a mischievous German knight, spent his time learning phrases in Arabic and Hebrew that give some clues to his preoccupations:

How much will you give me?

I will give you a gulden.

Are you a Jew?

Woman, let me sleep with you tonight.

Good madam, I am ALREADY in your bed.

The Franciscans guided and welcomed Catholic visitors: their itinerary, retracing the footsteps of Christ, started at what they believed was Pilate’s Praetorium, on the site of the Mamluk governor’s mansion. This became the first station of The Lord’s Way, later the Via Dolorosa. Pilgrims were shocked to find Christian sites had been Islamicized, such as St Anne’s Church – the birthplace of the Virgin Mary’s mother – occupied by Saladin’s madrassa. The German friar Felix Fabri sneaked into this shrine, while Harff risked his life by penetrating the Temple Mount in disguise – and both recorded their adventures. Their entertaining travelogues revealed a new tone of inquisitive lightheartedness as well as reverence.

However, Christians and Jews were never quite safe from the capricious Mamluk repression – and sanctity in Jerusalem was so infectious that when the two older religions started to fight for David’s Tomb on Mount Zion, the sultans claimed it for the Muslims.

There was now a settled Jewish community of about 1,000 in what became the Jewish Quarter. They prayed in their Ramban synagogue, as well as around the gates of the Temple Mount (particularly at their study house by the Western Wall) and on the Mount of Olives, where they began to bury their dead ready for Judgement Day. But they had come to revere the Christian shrine of David’s Tomb (which had nothing to do with the real David but dated from the Crusades), part of the Cenacle, controlled by the Franciscans. The Christians tried to restrict their access, so the Jews complained to Cairo – with unfortunate consequences for both. The sultan of the day, Barsbay, outraged to discover that the Christians held such a site, travelled up to Jerusalem, destroyed the Franciscan chapel and instead built a mosque inside David’s Tomb. A few years later, one of his successors, Sultan Jaqmaq, seized the whole of Mount Zion for Islam. And it got worse: old restrictions were enforced, new ones devised. The size of Christian and Jewish turbans was limited; in the baths men had to wear metal neck-rings like cattle; Jewish and Christian women were banned from the baths altogether; Jaqmaq forbade Jewish doctors to treat Muslims.^* After the collapse of the Ramban Synagogue in a storm, the qadi banned its rebuilding, claiming it belonged to the neighbouring mosque. When Jewish bribes overturned the decision, the local ulema demolished it.

On 10 July 1452, the Jerusalemites launched an anti-Christian pogrom, digging up the bones of Christian monks and tearing down a new balustrade in the Sepulchre which was borne in triumph to al-Aqsa. Christians were sometimes insanely provocative. In 1391, four Franciscan monks shouted in al-Aqsa that ‘Muhammad was a libertine, murderer, glutton’ who believed ‘in whoring’! The qadi offered them the chance to recant. When they refused, they were tortured and beaten almost to death. A bonfire was built in the courtyard of the Church where, ‘almost drunk with rage’, the mob hacked them into pieces ‘so that not even a human shape remained’, and then kebabbed them.⁶

However, deliverance was at hand and, when a more tolerant sultan came to power, it was a dish of French cuisine that would change the destiny of Christian Jerusalem.

THE SULTAN AND THE CHRISTIAN OMELETTES