Jerusalem: The Biography

The visit was disastrous: he spent a single night praying beside the Sepulchre, yet he found it filthy and vulgar. ‘Before I had time to pull my wits together, it was over.’ The gaudiness of the holy sites and the barrenness of the hills crushed him: ‘I have never been so little content with the state of my heart as in Jerusalem and afterwards.’ On his return, he refused to talk about Jerusalem but fell under the power of a mystic priest who convinced him that his works were sinful. Gogol manically destroyed his manuscripts then starved himself to death – or at least into a coma – for when his coffin was opened in the twentieth century, his body was found face down.

The special madness of Jerusalem had been called ‘Jerusalem fever’ but in the 1930s, it was recognized as Jerusalem Syndrome, ‘a psychotic decompensation related to religious excitement induced by proximity to the holy places of Jerusalem’. The British Journal of Psychiatry

, in 2000, diagnosed this demented disappointment as: ‘Jerusalem Syndrome Subtype Two: those who come with magical ideas of Jerusalem’s healing powers – such as the writer Gogol.’¹²

In a sense, Nicholas was suffering from his own strain of Jerusalem Syndrome. There was madness in his family: ‘as the years have passed,’ wrote the French ambassador to Petersburg, ‘it is now the qualities of (his father Emperor) Paul which come more to the fore.’ The mad Paul had been assassinated (as had his grandfather Peter III). If Nicholas was far from insane, he started to display some of his father’s obstinately impulsive over-confidence. In 1848, he planned to make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem but he was forced to cancel when revolutions broke out across Europe. He triumphantly crushed the Hungarian revolt against his neighbour, the Habsburg emperor: he enjoyed the prestige of being the ‘Gendarme of Europe’ but Nicholas, wrote the French ambassador, became ‘spoiled by adulation, success and the religious prejudices of the Muscovite nation’.

On 31 October 1847, the silver star on the marble floor of the Grotto of Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity, was cut out and stolen. The star had been donated by France in the eighteenth century; now it had obviously been stolen by the Greeks. The monks fought in Bethlehem. In Istanbul, the French claimed the right to replace the Bethlehem star and to repair the roof of the Church in Jerusalem; the Russians claimed it was their right; each cited eighteenth-century treaties. The row simmered until it became a duel of two emperors.

In December 1851, the French president Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the inscrutably bland yet politically agile nephew of the great Napoleon, overthrew the Second Republic in a coup d’état and prepared to crown himself Emperor Napoleon III. This womanizing adventurer whose sharply-waxed moustaches could not distract attention from an oversized head and an undersized torso was in some ways the first modern politician and he knew his brash, fragile new empire required Catholic prestige and victory abroad. Nicholas, on the other hand, saw the crisis as the chance to crown his reign by saving the Holy Places for ‘the Russian God’. For these two very different emperors, Jerusalem was the key to glory in heaven and on earth.

JAMES FINN AND THE CRIMEAN WAR:

MURDERED EVANGELISTS AND MARAUDING BEDOUIN

The sultan, squeezed between the French and Russians, tried to settle the dispute with his decree of 8 February 1852, confirming the Orthodox paramountcy in the Church, with some concessions to the Catholics. But the French were no less committed than the Russians. They traced their claims back to the great Napoleon’s invasion, the alliance with Suleiman the Magnificent, the French Crusader kings of Jerusalem, and to Charlemagne. When Napoleon III threatened the Ottomans, it was no coincidence that he sent a gunboat called the Charlemagne. In November, the sultan buckled and granted the paramountcy to the Catholics. Nicholas was outraged. He demanded the restoration of Orthodox rights in Jerusalem and an ‘alliance’ that would reduce the Ottoman empire to a Russian protectorate.