Jerusalem: The Biography

They still prayed around the walls of the Temple Mount and on the slopes of the Mount of Olives as well as in their main synagogue, the Ramban, but the sultan favoured order in all things. Discouraging anything that diminished the Islamic monopoly on the Temple Mount, he assigned the Jews a 9-foot street along the supporting wall of King Herod’s Temple for their prayers. This made some sense, because it was adjacent to their old Cave synagogue and next to the Jewish Quarter where the Jews had started to settle in the fourteenth century, today’s Jewish Quarter. But the site was overshadowed by the Islamic Maghrebi neighbourhood; Jewish worship there was carefully regulated; and Jews were later required to have a permit to pray there at all. The Jews soon called this place ha-Kotel, the Wall, outsiders called it the Western or Wailing Wall and henceforth its golden, ashlar stones became the symbol of Jerusalem and the focus of holiness.

Suleiman brought the Christians down to size by expelling the Franciscans from David’s Tomb where his inscription declares: ‘The Emperor Suleiman ordered this place to be purged of infidels and constructed it as a mosque.’ Sacred to all three religions, this Byzantine-Crusader site, an early Jewish synagogue and the Christian Coenaculum, now became the Islamic shrine of Nabi Daoud, the Prophet David, where Suleiman appointed a family of Sufi sheikhs called the Dajanis as hereditary guardians, a position they held until 1948.

The politics of the outside world would always reflect back onto the religious life of Jerusalem: Suleiman soon had reason to favour the Franciscans. In the battle for central Europe, he found that he needed Christian allies – the French – to fight the Habsburgs, and the Franciscans were backed by the kings of France. In 1535, the sultan granted France trading privileges and recognized the Franciscans as the custodians of the Christian shrines. This was the first of the so-called capitulations – concessions to European powers – that later undermined the Ottoman empire.

The Franciscans set up headquarters in St Saviour’s, close to the Church which ultimately would become a colossal Catholic city-within-a-city, but their rise disturbed the Orthodox. The hatred between Catholics and Orthodox was already venomous but both claimed the paramount custodianship of the Holy Places: the praedominium

. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was now shared between eight sects in a Darwinian struggle in which only the strongest could survive. Some were going up, some were going down: the Armenians remained powerful because they were well represented in Istanbul, the Serbs and Maronites were in decline – but the Georgians, who had lost their Mamluk patrons, went into total eclipse.^*

The epic conflict between the emperors of Islam and Christendom, the aggressive Catholicism of the Spanish, and the expulsion of the Jews inspired an unsettling feeling that something was not right in the firmament: people questioned their faith, searched for new mystical ways to get closer to God, and they expected the End Days. In 1517, Martin Luther, a theology professor in Wittenberg, protested against the Church’s sale of ‘indulgences’ to limit people’s time in purgatory, and insisted God existed only in the Bible, not via the rituals of priests or popes. His brave protest tapped into the widespread resentment of the Church which many believed had lost touch with Jesus’ teaching. These Protestants wanted a raw, unmediated faith and, free of the Church, they could find their own way. Protestantism was so flexible that a variety of new sects – Lutherans, the Reform Church, Presbyterians, Calvinists, Anabaptists – soon thrived, while for Henry VIII, English Protestantism was a way to assert his political independence. But one thing united all of them: their reverence for the Bible, which restored Jerusalem to the very centre of their faith.^*