Jerusalem: The Biography

The Christians hated each other much more than they hated the infidels – indeed Father Elzear Horn, a Franciscan, simply called the Greeks ‘The Vomit’. Each of the sects relished every squalid discomfort and penurious humiliation suffered by their rivals in the Church. Ottoman control and Christian competition meant the 300 permanent residents were locked inside each night; ‘more like prisoners’ than priests in Evliya’s view, living in a state of permanent siege. Food was passed through a hole in the door or winched up via a system of pulleys, to the windows. These monks – most of them Orthodox, Catholic or Armenian – camped in cramped, humid tension, suffering from ‘headaches, fevers, tumours, diarrhoea, dysentery.’ The latrines of the Sepulchre provided a special source of bitterness – and stench: every sect had its own lavatorial arrangements, but the Franciscans, claimed Father Horn, ‘suffer much from the smell’. The Greeks did not have lavatories at all. Meanwhile the poverty-stricken smaller sects, the Copts, Ethiopians and Syriacs, could afford their food only by performing servile tasks such as emptying the Greek slop-buckets. No wonder the French writer Constantin Volney heard Jerusalemites ‘have acquired and deserved the reputation of the most evil people in Syria’.

When France again won the praedominium for the Franciscans, the Greek Orthodox hit back. On the night before Palm Sunday 1757, the Greek Orthodox ambushed the Franciscans in the Rotunda of the Sepulchre, ‘with clubs, maces, hooks, poniards, and swords’ that had been hidden behind pillars and under their habits, smashing lamps and ripping tapestries. The Franciscans fled to St Saviour’s, where they were besieged. These Mafia tactics worked: the sultan switched back to the Greeks, giving them the dominant position in the Church which they still hold today.

⁹ Now Ottoman power collapsed in Palestine. Starting in Galilee in the 1730s, a Bedouin sheikh, Zahir al-Umar al-Zaydani, carved out a northern fiefdom, which he ruled from Acre – the only time, except for short-lived rebellions, when a native Palestinian Arab ruled an extended part of Palestine.

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE ‘KING OF PALESTINE’

In 1770, Ali Bey, an Egyptian general who gloried in the nickname the Cloudsnatcher (which he had won by defeating Bedouin, whom the Ottomans believed were as hard to catch as clouds), allied himself with Sheikh Zahir. Together they conquered most of Palestine, even taking Damascus, but the sultan’s pasha held out in Jerusalem. The Russian empress, Catherine the Great, was at war with the Ottomans and now she despatched a fleet to the Mediterranean, where it defeated the sultan’s navy. The Cloudsnatcher needed Russian help and Russia was only interested in one prize: Jerusalem. The Russian ships bombarded Jaffa then sailed up to attack Beirut. Zahir occupied Jaffa – but could he and the Cloudsnatcher deliver Jerusalem?

Sheikh Zahir sent his troops to invest the city but they were unable to make any impression on the walls. The Ottomans, defeated on all fronts, sued for peace with the Russians. In the peace treaty in 1774, Catherine and her partner Prince Potemkin forced the Ottomans to recognize Russian protection of the Orthodox – and ultimately the growing Russian obsession with Jerusalem would lead to a European war.^* The Ottomans could now retake their lost provinces: the Cloudsnatcher was assassinated and Sheikh Zahir, aged eighty-six, had to escape from Acre. As he rode away, he noticed that his favourite concubine was missing – ‘this is no time to leave a person behind,’ he said – and galloped back. As he scooped her up, the girl dragged her ancient lover from his horse and assassins stabbed and beheaded him. The pickled head of the ‘first King of Palestine’ was sent to Istanbul.¹⁰ The anarchy now attracted the rising hero of Revolutionary France.

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE: ‘A KORAN I COMPOSED MYSELF’

On 19 May 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte, twenty-eight years old, pale and gaunt, with long lank hair, set off with 335 ships, 35,000 troops and an academy of 167 scientists to conquer Egypt. ‘I would found a religion’, he reflected with megalomaniacal arrogance, ‘I saw myself marching on the way to Asia, mounted on an elephant, a turban on my head, in one hand a new Koran I would have composed myself.’