Jerusalem: The Biography

* In Jerusalem an old man had the temerity to sue the sultan himself over some property. Saladin came down from his throne to be judged equally, and won the case, but then loaded the claimant with gifts.

* Saladin held court sometimes in the Hospital and sometimes in the Patriarch’s Palace, where there was a wooden hut on the roof where he liked to sit up late at night with his entourage. His brother Safadin resided in the Cenacle complex on Mount Zion. Saladin decided to give the Patriarch’s Palace to his own Salahiyya Sufi convent, or khanqah. Today it remains the Salahiyya khanqah (as its inscription declares) and the bedroom with its fine Crusader capitals where Saladin (and the patriarchs) slept is today the bedroom of Sheikh al-Alami, a member of one of Jerusalem’s prominent families. The patriarchs had special entrances from their Palace to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and Saladin blocked these though they can still be seen behind the tills of today’s shops. He also took over St Mary’s Latina for his Salahiyya Hospital and commandeered St Anne’s as his Salahiyya madrassa, religious school. Now it is a church again but it is still inscribed to Saladin as ‘Reviver of the Empire of the Commander of the Believers’.

* The new Queen of Jerusalem was Sibylla’s half-sister, Isabella, daughter of King Amaury and Queen Maria. Isabella divorced her husband to marry Conrad of Montferrat. He thus became by marriage the titular king of Jerusalem.

* The oldest pub in England, the Journey to Jerusalem, in Nottingham, dates from Richard’s Crusade.

* In April 1192, Richard finally realized that Guy, who had been king of Jerusalem only by marriage to his late wife, was a busted flush. Instead he recognized Conrad of Montferrat, husband of Queen Isabella, as king of Jerusalem. But days later, Conrad was killed by the Assassins. Henry, Count of Champagne, a nephew of both Richard of England and Philip of France, married Queen Isabella of Jerusalem, still aged only twenty-one, pregnant with Conrad’s child and already on her third husband. He became King Henry of Jerusalem. In order to compensate Guy, Richard sold him Cyprus, which his family ruled for three centuries.

* On his way home, Richard was captured and handed over to the German emperor Henry VI, who imprisoned him for over a year, until England had paid a large ransom. He returned to fighting the French king, bringing home some Saracen soldiers and the secret of the Greek Fire. In 1199, besieging a minor French castle, he was killed by an archer’s bolt. ‘He was’, writes Steven Runciman, ‘a bad son, a bad husband and a bad king but a gallant and splendid soldier.’

* The foundations of six of his towers can be seen today. On the Temple Mount, he built the domed Grammar School and the glorious arches and domed entrance to al-Aqsa. He may have used Frankish spolia to built the octagonal Dome of Solomon, also known as the Kursi Isa – the Throne of Jesus (the Jesus may be Isa himself) – and the Dome of the Ascension; the latter has an inscription dating it to 1200–1. But it is more likely that both were original Crusader buildings: indeed the baptismal font of the Dome of the Ascension with its Frankish capitals, topped with an elegant Frankish false lantern, may have originated in the Templum Domini. It was Muazzam who walled up the Golden Gate.

† Queen Isabella of Jerusalem was unlucky in marriage: her third husband Henry of Champagne ruled Acre as king of Jerusalem and fathered two more daughters by her – but, reviewing German Crusaders in 1197, he was distracted by his dwarf and stepped backwards out of a window. Then she married Amaury of Lusignan, King of Cyprus, who died of a surfeit of white mullet in 1205. On her death, her daughter Maria – now queen of Jerusalem – married the knight John of Brienne, and they had a daughter Yolande.

* Frederick and Kamil maintained their friendship: the sultan sent the emperor a bejewelled planetarium, which was both a clock and a moving map of the heavens – and an elephant; Frederick sent Kamil a polar bear. Frederick spent the rest of his life in a constant war with the popes to defend his dual inheritance in Germany and Italy. It was the popes who stigmatized him as the Beast of the Apocalypse. His eldest son Henry King of the Romans betrayed him; Frederick imprisoned him for the rest of life, appointing Conrad King of Jerusalem, his son by Yolande, as his heir. The Wonder died of dysentery in 1250, and was buried in Palermo. Conrad died young, the crown of Jerusalem being inherited by Conrad’s baby son, Conradin who was himself beheaded aged 16. But Frederick’s reputation grew: as time passed, liberals celebrated his modern tolerance; while Hitler and the Nazis admired him as a Nietzschean superman.