Jerusalem: The Biography

King of Jerusalem Baldwin I was a tireless warrior and worldly politician, but also a bigamist who was accused of indulging his fleshly appetites.

For the Christians of the Crusader era, Jerusalem was the centre of the world – as shown in many twelfth-century maps, such as this one from Robert the Monk’s Chronicle.

Crusader splendour: the city reached its apogee under Queen Melisende, here seen marrying Fulk of Anjou. He accused her of an affair with Hugh of Jaffa. This exquisite Psalter may have been his marital peace offering.

The curse of Jerusalem: the boy Baldwin IV shows his tutor William of Tyre how he feels no pain during games played with friends, the first sign of leprosy. The Leper King symbolized the decline of the kingdom.

Merciless when he needed to be, patient and tolerant when he could afford to be, Saladin created an empire embracing Syria and Egypt, annihilated the army of Jerusalem and then took the city.

Emperor Frederick II, known as Stupor Mundi – the Wonder of the World to some, the Anti-Christ to others – is seen here entering the Holy City. He negotiated a peace deal that divided Jerusalem between Christians and Muslims.

Saladin and his family re-Islamized Jerusalem often using Crusader spolia. Muslims regard the Dome of the Ascension, built in 1200 on the Temple Mount, as the site of Muhammad’s Miraj, yet it started life as the Crusader Templar baptistery. But it was the Mamluks who really created today’s Muslim Quarter. Sultan Nasir al-Muhammad built the Market of the Cotton Merchants in the distinctive Mamluk style; Sultan Qaitbay commissioned this fountain on the Temple Mount.

Suleiman the Magnificent: a Sultan to the Arabs, a Caesar to the Christians. He never visited Jerusalem but, regarding himself as the second Solomon, he rebuilt most of the walls and gates that we see today.

Suleiman used a Crusader sarcophagus and decoration to build the Fountain of the Gate of the Chain and asserted Ottoman splendour and legitimacy by adding mosaics to the Dome of the Rock.

Charismatic, schizhophrenic, Sabbatai Zevi was rejected in Jerusalem but the self-declared Jewish Messiah excited Jewish hopes – until the Ottoman Sultan forced his conversion to Islam.

The red-bearded Albanian generalissimo Ibrahim Pasha conquered Syria in 1831 and almost took Istanbul on behalf of his father Mehmet Ali. He crushed rebellious Jerusalem brutally and opened up the city to Europeans.

Mehmet Ali received the Scottish painter David Roberts on his way to Jerusalem: his paintings of Oriental scenes, such as this interior of the Church of the Holy Sepuchre, influenced the European view of Palestine.

The plutocrat and Jewish philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore visited Jerusalem seven times and was one of the first to build outside the Old City. In 1860, he started his windmill and cottages. He was what Victorians thought a ‘noble Hebrew’ should be like, but he had his secret scandals too: he fathered a child with his teenaged maid in his eighties.

Much of the Old City was surprisingly empty in this period. This photograph taken in 1861 by the pioneering photographer Yessayi, the Armenian Patriarch, shows the deserted landscape behind the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

From the 1830s, the Sephardic Arab-speaking Jews of Jerusalem were joined by Yiddish-speaking immigrants from the Russian Empire and more Sephardis from the Arab world. European visitors were appalled and fascinated by the squalor and exoticism of Yemenite and Ashkenazi Jews.

Jerusalem was also dominated by Russian Orthodox peasants, outside the Church at Easter), who prayed and caroused with equal fervour, while Jaffa Gate and David Street became the hub of European Jerusalem.

Theodore Herzl, assimilated Viennese journalist and brilliant publicist, was the organizer of political Zionism. In 1898, he approached Kaiser Wilhelm II who ordered Herzl to meet him in Jerusalem. Regarding himself as a German Crusader, the Kaiser wore a specially designed white uniform with a full-length veil attached to his pickelhauber.

The Kaiser visits the Tomb of Kings. In the archaeological race between the Great Powers, the Frenchman de Saulcy had claimed this was King David’s tomb. It is actually the tomb of the first-century Queen of Adiabene.

The American Colonists arrived as a millenarian Christian sect but they soon became beloved philanthropists: here, Bertha Spafford, a daughter of the founders, poses with Bedouin friends.

Jerusalem’s mayor Selim al-Husseini: the very model of an aristocratic Jerusalemite.

Ne’er-do-well aristocratic rogue and huckster, Montagu Parker, later Earl of Morley, whose three-year project to uncover the Ark of the Covenant ended in the sole riot in Jerusalem’s history to unite Jews and Muslims. He only just escaped with his life.

For almost half a century the fixer, aesthete, socialite and oud-player Wasif Jawhariyyeh knew everyone, saw everything, and recorded it all in his peerlessly vivid diary.