Jerusalem

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  MOTHER VERSUS SON: MELISENDE VERSUS BALDWIN III

  Melisende offered him the rich ports of Tyre and Acre, but kept Jerusalem for herself. The “still smouldering fire was rekindled” when Baldwin raised his own forces to seize the kingdom. Melisende sped from Nablus to Jerusalem with Baldwin in pursuit. Jerusalem opened its gates to the king. Melisende retreated into the Tower of David where Baldwin besieged her. He “set up his engines for assault,” firing bolts and ballista stones at her for several days. Finally the queen resigned power—and Jerusalem.

  Baldwin had scarcely seized his birthright when Antioch was again attacked by Nur al-Din. While the king was once more in the north, the Ortuq family that had ruled Jerusalem from 1086 to 1098 marched from their Iraq fiefdom to seize the Holy City, massing on the Mount of Olives, but the Jerusalemites sortied out and massacred them on the Jericho road. Morale boosted, Baldwin led his army and the True Cross to Ashkelon, which fell after a long siege. But in the north, Damascus finally succumbed to Nur al-Din, who became the master of Syria and eastern Iraq.

  Nur al-Din, “a tall swarthy man with a beard, no moustache, a fine forehead and pleasant appearance enhanced by melting eyes,” could be as cruel as Zangi, but he was more measured, more subtle. Even the Crusaders called him “valiant and wise.” He was beloved by his courtiers who now included that political weathervane Usamah bin Munqidh. Nur al-Din so enjoyed polo that he played at night by the light of candles. But it was he who channelled the Islamic fury at the Frankish conquest into a Sunni resurgence and a new military confidence. A fresh stream of fadail works extolling Jerusalem promoted Nur al-Din’s jihad to “purify Jerusalem from the pollution of the Cross”—ironically since the Crusaders had once called the Muslims “polluters of the Holy Sepulchre.” He commissioned an elaborately carved minbar or pulpit to stand in al-Aqsa when he conquered the city.

  Baldwin was locked in stalemate with Nur al-Din. They agreed a temporary truce while the king sought Byzantine help: he married the emperor Manuel’s niece, Theodora. At the marriage and crowning in the Church, “the bridal outfit of the maiden in gold and gems, garments and pearls” brought the exotic splendour of Constantinople to Jerusalem. The marriage was still childless when Baldwin fell ill in Antioch, finally dying a few weeks later on 10 February 1162.

  The funeral cortège travelled from Beirut to Jerusalem amid unprecedented scenes of “deep and poignant sorrow.” The kings of Jerusalem, like the other veteran Crusader families, had become Levantine grandees so that now, observed William of Tyre, “there came down from the mountains a multitude of infidels who followed the cortège with wailing.” Even Nur al-Din said that the “Franks have lost such a prince that the world has not known his like.”7

  AMAURY AND AGNES:

  “NO QUEEN FOR A CITY AS HOLY AS JERUSALEM”

  The disreputable reputation of a woman now almost derailed the succession of Jerusalem. Baldwin’s brother Amaury, Count of Jaffa and Ashkelon, was the heir, but the patriarch refused to crown him unless he annulled his marriage to Agnes, claiming that they were too closely related—even though they already had a son together. The real problem was that “she was no queen for a city as holy as Jerusalem,” noted one prissy chronicler. Agnes had a bad reputation for promiscuity, but it is impossible to know if she deserved it since the historians were all so prejudiced against her. Nonetheless, she was clearly a much-desired trophy and, at various times, her lovers were said to include the seneschal, the patriarch and four husbands.

  Amaury dutifully divorced her and was crowned at the age of twenty-seven. Already awkward in manner—he stammered and had a gurgling laugh—he soon became “excessively fat with breasts like those of a woman hanging down to his waist.” Jerusalemites mocked him in the streets, which he ignored “as if he had not heard the things said.” Despite the man-breasts, he was both an intellectual and a warrior who now faced the most daunting strategic challenge since the founding of the kingdom. Syria was lost to Nur al-Din, but Baldwin III’s conquest of Ashkelon had opened the gateway to Egypt. Amaury would need all his energy and manpower to fight Nur al-Din for that supreme prize.

  This was one reason why he welcomed to Jerusalem the most notorious rogue of the day, Andronikos Komnenos, a Byzantine prince “attended by a large retinue of knights,” useful reinforcements. At first his knights were “a source of much comfort” in Jerusalem. A cousin of the Emperor Manuel, Andronikos had seduced the emperor’s niece, was almost murdered by her furious brothers and spent twelve years in jail before being forgiven and appointed Governor of Cilicia. He was then sacked for incompetence and disloyalty, and fled to Antioch where he seduced Philippa, the daughter of the ruling prince, and had to flee again—to Jerusalem. “But like a snake in the bosom or a mouse in the wardrobe,” recalled Amaury’s courtier, William of Tyre, “he proved the truth of the saying, ‘I fear the Greeks even when bearing gifts.’ ”

  Amaury gave him Beirut as his lordship, but Andronikos, now almost sixty, dumped Princess Philippa and seduced Baldwin III’s lissom widow, Theodora, the Dowager Queen of Jerusalem, who was only twenty-three. Jerusalem was outraged: Andronikos had to escape yet again. Abducting Theodora, he defected with her to Nur al-Din in Damascus.c No one was sorry to see this “snake” go, least of all Amaury’s favourite clergyman, William of Tyre, who had been born in Jerusalem. After studying in Paris, Orleans and Bologna, William returned to become Amaury’s most trusted adviser. Over twenty years, as Archbishop of Tyre and later Chancellor, William was the intimate witness of the unbearable royal tragedy that now coincided with Jerusalem’s most grievous crisis.8

  WILLIAM OF TYRE: THE BATTLE FOR EGYPT

  King Amaury commissioned William to write the histories of the Crusader and the Islamic kingdoms, quite a project. William had no problem writing the history of Outremer but, though he knew some Arabic, how was he to write about Islam?

  By now, Fatimid Egypt was falling apart. There were rich pickings for the sharp opportunist—so naturally Usamah bin Munqidh was in Cairo. There, the power games were lethal but lucrative. Usamah made his fortune and built up a library; inevitably, however, it went wrong and he had to flee for his life. But he sent his family, his gold and his cherished library by ship. When it was shipwrecked off Acre, his treasure was lost and his library confiscated by the King of Jerusalem: “The news that my children and our women were safe made it easier to take the news about all the wealth lost. Except the books: 4,000 volumes. A heartache that lasted all my life.” Usamah’s loss proved to be William’s gain for he inherited Usamah’s books and made good use of them to write his Islamic history.

  Meanwhile Amaury plunged into the battle for Egypt, launching no fewer than five invasions. The stakes were high. In the second invasion, Amaury seemed to have conquered Egypt. If he had succeeded in keeping the riches and resources of that country, the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem would probably have endured and the entire history of the region would have been different. Instead the deposed Egyptian vizier fled to Nur al-Din, who sent his Kurdish general, the vigorous yet rotund Shirkuh, to conquer Egypt. Amaury defeated Shirkuh, taking Alexandria, but instead of consolidating he accepted tribute and returned to Jerusalem.

  Thanks to his Egyptian booty, Amaury’s capital flourished. The elegant Gothic room in the Cenacle on Mount Zion was built at this time and the king raised a new royal palace, porticoed with a gabled roof, a small domed tower and a large circular one, south of the Tower of David.d But Egypt was far from cowed.

  Mired in this expensive conflict, Amaury sought help from the emperor Manuel in Constantinople, marrying his great-niece Maria and despatching his historian William to negotiate military co-operation—but the timing of war and aid never dovetailed. In Egypt, Amaury and his Egyptian allies were about to take Cairo when Nur al-Din’s commander Shirkuh returned. The king retreated on the promise of further payments.

  When Amaury sickened in Gaza, he asked his Egyptian allies to send him their best doctor—the king was an admire
r of Eastern medicine. The Egyptians offered this job to one of the caliph’s Jewish doctors, who by chance had just returned from Jerusalem.9

  MOSES MAIMONIDES: THE GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED

  Maimonides refused to treat the Crusader king, probably a shrewd move since he had only recently arrived in Fatimid Egypt, where the alliance with Jerusalem was short-lived. Maimonides was a refugee from Muslim persecution in Spain, where the golden age of Jewish–Muslim civilization was very much over. It was now split between aggressive Christian kingdoms in the north, and the Muslim south, which had been conquered by fanatical Berber tribesmen, the Almohads. They had offered Jews the choice of conversion or death. Young Maimonides pretended to convert but in 1165, he escaped and set off on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. On 14 October, during Tishri, the month of the Jewish New Year and the Day of Atonement, a favourite season for pilgrimages to Jerusalem, Maimonides stood on the Mount of Olives with his brother and father. There he first set eyes on the mountain of the Jewish Temple, and ritually rent his garments—he later specified exactly how much tearing (and later restitching) should be practised by the Jewish pilgrim and when it should be done.

  Entering the city through the eastern Jehoshaphat Gate, he found a Christian Jerusalem from which Jews were still officially banned—though there were actually four Jewish dyers living near the Tower of David, under royal protection.e Maimonides grieved for the Temple: “in ruins, its sanctity endures.” Then “I entered the great and holy temple and prayed.” It sounds as if he was allowed to pray at the Rock in the Templef of the Lord (just as Muslims such as Usamah bin Munqidh had been), though he later forbade any visit to the Temple Mount, a rule still obeyed by some Orthodox Jews.

  Afterwards, he settled in Egypt where, known to the Arabs as Musa ibn Maymun, he won fame as a polymathic scholar, producing works on subjects varying from medicine to Jewish Law, among them the masterpiece The Guide for the Perplexed, which wove together philosophy, religion and science; he also served as royal doctor. But Egypt was in chaos as Amaury and Nur al-Din fought for supremacy over the beleaguered Fatimid caliphate. Amaury was tireless—but unlucky.

  In 1169, the master of Syria, Nur al-Din completed the encirclement of Jerusalem when his amir Shirkuh won the Battle of Egypt. Shirkuh was aided by his young nephew: Saladin. When the obese Shirkuh died in 1171, Saladin took over Egypt for himself, appointing Maimonides as Rais al-Yahud, Chief of the Jews—and his personal physician. Back in Jerusalem, the plight of the royal heir placed medicine centre-stage.10

  a Melisende was the third queen to rule Jerusalem in her own right—after Athaliah, Jezebel’s daughter, and Alexandra, widow of Alexander Jannaeus in Maccabean times. She was crowned three times, once with her father in 1129, then with Fulk in 1131 and again with her son in 1143. Despite the low status of women on both sides, Usamah bin Munqidh tells of both Islamic and Crusader women who in times of peril pulled on armour and fought the enemy in battle. Melisende did not forget her Armenian roots. After the fall of Edessa, she settled its Armenian refugees in Jerusalem and in 1141 the Armenians started to rebuild St. James’s Cathedral near the royal palace.

  b As soon as she was free, Eleanor married Henry, Duke of Normandy and Count of Anjou, the grandson of King Fulk of Jerusalem, who soon succeeded to the English throne as Henry II. Their children included King John and the future Crusader, King Richard the Lionheart.

  c At least he seems to have loved Theodora longer than the others. When she was captured by the emperor, Andronikos surrendered and was forgiven. Then the emperor died, and the preposterous cad seized power in 1182 and became one of the most despicable emperors in the history of Constantinople. During his reign of terror, he killed most of the imperial family including the women. Aged sixty-five but still boyishly handsome, he married a thirteen-year-old princess. When he was overthrown, the mob tortured him to death in the most horrible way, an arm cut off, an eye gouged, hair and teeth torn out, his face burned with boiling water to ruin his famous looks. Theodora’s fate is unknown.

  d This palace appears on the fairly realistic map of Jerusalem created in Cambrai around this time. Theodorich saw the palace in 1169. It was given to the German Crusaders in 1229, but it vanished, probably destroyed by the raiding Khwarizmian Turks in 1244. Archaeologists found parts of its foundations in 1971 and 1988 under the Armenian Garden and the Turkish barracks.

  e The Jewish traveller Benjamin of Tudela visited Jerusalem just after Maimonides. While he was there, workmen refurbishing the Cenacle on Mount Zion discovered a mysterious cavern that was hailed as King David’s Tomb. The Crusaders added a cenotaph which, in the contagious religious atmosphere of Jerusalem, made this Christian site holy for Jews and Muslims too. Benjamin claimed he travelled on to Iraq. Either way, he recorded the drama playing out in Baghdad where a young Jew named David el-Rey (the King) or Alroy declared himself the Messiah, promising to fly the local Jews on wings “to conquer Jerusalem.” The Jews of Baghdad waited on their rooftops but never achieved lift-off, much to the amusement of their neighbours. Alroy was later murdered. When Benjamin Disraeli visited Jerusalem in the nineteenth century, he started to write his novel Alroy.

  f After four centuries as a Jewish synagogue under Islam, the Crusaders sealed up the “Cave” in the tunnels next to the western wall, turning it into a cistern. So it is unlikely Maimonides prayed there.

  CHAPTER 25

  The Leper-King

  1174–1187

  WILLIAM OF TYRE: THE ROYAL TUTOR

  King Amaury appointed William of Tyre as tutor to his son, Baldwin. William adored the prince:

  The boy, then about nine, was committed to my care to be instructed in liberal studies. I devoted myself to my royal pupil. He was comely of appearance and continued to make progress in pursuit of letters and gave ever-increasing promise of developing a loveable disposition. He was an excellent horseman. His intellect was keen. He had a retentive memory.

  “Like his father,” added William, “he eagerly listened to history and was well-disposed to follow good advice”—William’s advice no doubt. The boy was playful and that was how his tutor discovered his plight.

  He was playing with his companions when they began, as playful boys often do, to pinch each other’s arms and hands with their nails. But Baldwin endured it altogether too patiently as if he felt nothing. After this had occurred several times, it was reported to me. When I called him, I discovered that his right arm and hand were particularly numb. I began to be uneasy. The lad’s father [the king] was informed, physicians consulted. In the process of time, we recognized the early symptoms. It is impossible to refrain from tears.11

  THE DISEASE OF BALDWIN IV

  William’s delightful pupil was a lepera—and the heir to an embattled kingdom. On 15 May 1174, the strongman of Syria and Egypt, mastermind of the new jihad, Nur al-Din, died. Even William admired him as a “just prince and a religious man.”

  King Amaury sped north to exploit Nur al-Din’s death, but he caught dysentery. Although he was just thirty-eight, as Arab and Frankish doctors argued about remedies, he died in Jerusalem on 11 July. The “loveable” new king Baldwin IV excelled at his studies with William, but he had to endure a variety of treatments—blood-lettings, oil-rubs in “saracenic ointment” and enemas. His health was supervised by an Arab doctor, Abu Sulayman Dawud, whose brother taught Baldwin to ride with one hand as the disease advanced.

  It is hard to find a case of nobler courage and grace under fire than this doomed young king who was closely watched by his devoted tutor: “Day by day, his condition became worse, the extremities of his face were especially attacked so that his faithful followers were moved with compassion when they looked at him.” He had been brought up apart from his mother but now the louche Agnes returned to support her son, always accompanying him on campaign. She unwisely placed the king in the hands of an arrogant minister who served as seneschal. When he was assassinated in Acre, Jerusalem politics began to assume the menace of a Mafia family i
n decline.

  The king’s cousin Count Raymond III of Tripoli demanded the regency and restored stability, appointing the royal tutor, William, as chancellor. But the strategic nightmare that had always haunted Jerusalem now materialized: Saladin, strongman of Cairo, seized Damascus, gradually but steadily uniting Syria, Egypt, Yemen and much of Iraq into one powerful sultanate, encircling Jerusalem. Raymond of Tripoli, one of those urbane Levantine dynasts who spoke Arabic, bought time by agreeing a truce with Saladin. But it bought time for Saladin too.

  Baldwin showed his mettle by raiding up into Syria and Lebanon, but during his frequent illnesses the magnates feuded around the sickbed. The Master of the Templars was increasingly insubordinate, while the Hospitallers were waging a private war against the patriarch, even firing arrows inside the Sepulchre. Meanwhile a new arrival, the veteran knight Reynald of Chatillon, Lord of Kerak and Outrejourdain, across the Jordan, was both asset and liability, radiating aggressive confidence and reckless swagger.

  Saladin started to probe the kingdom, attacking Ashkelon and riding towards Jerusalem, whose citizens panicked and fled into the Tower of David. Ashkelon was about to fall when in late November 1177 the leper-king, Reynald and a few hundred knights attacked Saladin’s 26,000 troops at Montgisard, north-west of Jerusalem. Inspired by the presence of the True Cross and sightings of St. George on the battlefield, Baldwin won a famous victory.

  GRACE UNDER PRESSURE: VICTORY OF THE LEPER-KING

  The leper-king returned in triumph while Saladin only just escaped on a camel. But the sultan was still master of Egypt and Syria, and he soon raised new armies.

  In 1179, during a raid into Saladin’s Syria, Baldwin was ambushed, his horse bolted and he escaped thanks only to the courage of the old Constable of the Kingdom who gave his life to save the boy. Recovering with characteristic pluck, he again led his forces against Saladin’s raiders. Close to the Litani river, he was unhorsed and horribly exposed: his spreading paralysis prevented him mounting again. A knight had to carry him off the battlefield on his back. The young king could never marry—it was thought that leprosy could be passed sexually and now he could scarcely lead his armies. He expressed his personal distress—and the need for a strong new king from Europe—to Louis VII of France: “To be deprived of the use of one’s limbs is little help to one in carrying out the work of government. If only I could be cured of the disease of Naaman but I have found no Elisha to heal me. It’s not fitting that a hand so weak should hold power when Arab aggression presses upon the Holy City.” The sicker the king, the hotter the fight for power. The king’s decline matched the political and moral rot. When Count Raymond of Tripoli and Prince Bohemond of Antioch rode towards the city with a cavalry squadron, the king angrily suspected a coup d’état, again buying time with a truce with Saladin.