Jerusalem: The Biography

* These Tartars were finally defeated by Saladin’s descendants in 1246. Drunk in battle, Barka Khan was beheaded, his head displayed in Aleppo. But his daughter married the Mamluk strongman Baibars, future sultan; his sons became powerful amirs who between 1260 and 1285 built the fine tomb, turba, that still stands on the Street of the Chain. There they buried their father: ‘This is the tomb of the servant needful of God’s mercy Barka Khan.’ His sons were later buried with him. But when archaeologists inspected the tomb, there was no Barka inside. Perhaps his body never arrived from Aleppo. In 1846–7, the wealthy Khalidi family bought this building and indeed the entire street. Barka’s tomb is now the reading room of the Khalidi library, founded in 1900. It is still the home of Mrs Haifa al-Khalidi and has a fine view of the Western Wall. As a quaint reminder of Jerusalem’s span of history, the extended house also contains a red British postbox from the Mandate.

* At times,Jerusalem was ruled from Syria, at times from Cairo where Shajar al-Durr made herself sultana in her own right. This was a feminine achievement unique in Islam and the source of many legends. As a young concubine, she had won the eye of the sultan by wearing a dress made entirely of pearls, hence Shajar al-Durr,Tree of Pearls. Now she needed male support so she married a mamluk officer,Aibeg, who became sultan. But the couple soon fell out and she had him stabbed in his bath. After eighty days’ reign the mamluks deposed her. Before she tried to escape, she ground her famous diamonds to dust so no other woman could wear them. When she was caught,Aibeg’s concubines (perhaps furious not to inherit the jewels) beat her to death with their clogs – the mamluk equivalent of death by stiletto.

* Baibars’ Sufi guru, Sheikh Khadir, became so powerful that he was able to seduce the wives, sons and daughters of the Mamluk generals in a reign of terror. It only ended when they presented Baibars with such full evidence that he had to order Khadir’s arrest for sodomy and adultery. He was spared death only because he predicted that Baibars’ death would rapidly follow his own.

* By 1268, the rump Kingdom was in such peril that the pope called a new Crusade. In May 1271, the heir to the English throne, Edward Longshanks, arrived at Acre which he helped defend against Baibars. But when Acre negotiated a truce with the sultan, Edward objected and it seems Baibars ordered his assassination: he was stabbed with a poisoned dagger. Having survived this, Edward tried in vain to organize a new alliance: the Crusaders would help the Mongols fight Baibars in return for Jerusalem. When he returned to England as Edward I, he promoted himself as Hammer of the Scots, illustrating his Painted Chamber at Westminster with scenes of the Maccabees. Yet he forced English Jews to wear yellow stars and finally expelled them from England. They did not return for three centuries. At his death, Edward was mourned as ‘Jerusalem’s flower of chivalry’

* Many of the royal houses of Europe, including the Bourbons, the Habsburgs and the Savoyards, claimed the title. In 1277, Charles of Anjou bought it from Mary of Antioch, one of its claimants, after which kings of Naples or Sicily claimed it and it descended via the Savoyards to the Italian kings. The King of Spain still uses it. Only one English monarch used the title. When Mary I, daughter of Henry VIII, married Philip II of Spain, in Winchester in 1554, she was declared, among other Habsburg titles, to be queen of Jerusalem. The title was used by the Habsburg emperors until 1918.

* Its fate tells the story of the Jews in Jerusalem. The first synagogue was probably on Mount Zion but soon moved to the Jewish Quarter. Under the Mamluks, a mosque and al-Yehud (Jewish) minaret were built next to it, extended in 1397. When the synagogue collapsed in 1474, Muslims demolished it and refused to permit its reconstruction. But the penultimate Mamluk sultan Qaitbay allowed it to be rebuilt. It was closed again by the Ottomans in 1587. A synagogue was then opened in the neighbouring building until the Ramban and the next-door synagogue were united and reopened in 1835. But in the early twentieth century the Ramban was taken over by the Muslims, used as storage until it again became a synagogue. It was deliberately destroyed by the Arab Legion in 1948. In 1967, it was reopened.

* It was now that most of Herod’s wall along the west side of the Temple disappeared behind the new Mamluk buildings. But it reappears once, down a hidden alleyway in a courtyard of the Muslim Quarter: it is one of Jerusalem’s secret places. Just as Jews revered the famous Western Wall to the south, so small numbers of Jews prayed and still pray at this, the Little Wall