Jerusalem. The Biography

Sepulchre, emphasizing the Holy City as the navel of the world.
    The king and queen held court in the Tower of David and its neighbouring palace, while the Patriarch’s Palace was the centre of Church affairs. Life for ordinary barons in Outremer Jerusalem was probably better than for kings in Europe, where even potentates wore unlaundered wool and lived in bare-stone draughty keeps with rough furniture. If few Crusader barons could live as grandly as John of Ibelin, later in the century, his palace in Beirut reveals the style: mosaic floors, marble walls, painted ceilings, fountains and gardens. Even bourgeois townhouses boasted rich carpets, damask wall-hangings, delicate faience, carved, inlaid tables and porcelain dishes.
    Jerusalem combined the rough edges of the frontier town with the luxurious vanities of a royal capital. Even in Jerusalem the less reputable women, such as the patriarch’s mistress, flaunted their jewels and silks to the disapproval of the more respectable. With her 30,000 inhabitants and streams of pilgrims, she was Holy City, Christian melting-pot and a military headquarters – dominated by war and God. The Franks, men and women, now bathed regularly – there were public baths on Furriers Street; the Roman sewerage was still working and it is likely most houses had lavatories. Even the most Islamophobic of Crusaders had to adaptto the east. At war, the knights wore linen robes and Arab
keffiyeh
over their armour to prevent the steel heating up in the sun. At home, the knights dressed like the locals, in silk burnous and even turbans. Jerusalemite ladies wore long underrobes with a short tunic or long robe-coats embroidered with gold thread; their faces were heavily painted; and they were usually veiled in public. Both sexes wore furs in winter, though this luxury was specifically banned for the austere Templars, who personified this capital of Christian holy war. The Knights of the Orders set the tone: the Templars in their belted and hooded red-crossed mantles, Hospitallers in their black mantles with white crosses on the breast. Every day, the 300 Templars clattered out of the Stables of Solomon to train outside the city. In the Valley of Kidron, the infantry practised their archery.
    The city thronged not only with French, Norwegian, German and Italian soldiers and pilgrims, but also with eastern Christians – short-bearded Syrians and Greeks, Armenians and Georgians with long beards and high hats, who stayed in the dormitories of hostels or the many small taverns. Street life was centred around the Roman Cardo, leading from St Stephen’s (now Damascus) Gate, passing the Sepulchre and Patriarch’s Quarter on the right and then entering the three parallel covered market streets, joined by crisscrossing alleyways, smelling of spices and cooked food. Pilgrims bought takeaways and sherbet drinks from the Street of Bad Cooking, Malcuisinat; changed money on Syrian Moneychangers Street close to the Sepulchre; bought trinkets from the Latin Goldsmiths, furs on Furriers Street.
    Even before the Crusades it was said that ‘No travellers are as evil as pilgrims to Jerusalem.’ Outremer was the medieval version of the Wild West: murderers, adventurers and whores came out to make their fortunes, but the prim chroniclers tell us little about Jerusalem’s night life. However, the local half-caste soldiers, the Turcopoles, second-generation poor and orientalized Latins known as
poulains
, Venetian and Genoese merchants and newly arrived knights needed the taverns and pleasures of any military town. Each tavern had a clunking chain across the entrance to stop boisterous knights riding into the bar. Soldiers could be seen gambling and rolling dice in the doorways of shops. European harlots were shipped out to service the soldiers of Outremer. Later the secretary of the sultan Saladin would gleefully describe one such boatload from the Muslim point of view:
     
Lovely Frankish women, foulfleshed and sinful, appearing proudly in public, ripped open and patched up, lacerated and mended, makinglove and selling themselves for gold, callipygian and graceful, like tipsy adolescents, they dedicated as a holy offering what they kept between their thighs, each trailed the train of her robe behind her, bewitched with her effulgence, swayed like a sapling, and longed to lose her robe.
     
    Most of them ended up in the ports of Acre and Tyre, with their streets filled with Italian sailors, and Jerusalem