Jerusalem. The Biography

Knights and infantry on ahead and by the time he joined them in Acre in September 1228, Muazzam was dead and Kamil had occupied Palestine – and withdrawn his offer.
    However, Kamil was now having to fight Muazzam’s sons as well as Frederick and his army. He could not handle both threats. Emperor and sultan were too weak to fight for Jerusalem so they opened secret negotiations.
    Kamil was as unconventional as Frederick. As a boy, Safadin’s son had been knighted by the Lionheart himself. While emperor and sultannegotiated the sharing of Jerusalem, they debated Aristotelian philosophy and Arab geometry. ‘I’ve no real ambition to hold Jerusalem,’ Frederick told Kamil’s envoy, ‘I simply want to safeguard my reputation with the Christians.’ The Muslims wondered if Christianity was ‘a game to him’. The sultan sent the emperor ‘dancing girls’ while the latter entertained his Muslim guests with Christian dancers. Patriarch Gerold denounced Frederick’s singing girls and jugglers as ‘persons not only of ill-repute but unworthy to be mentioned by Christians’, which of course he then proceeded to do. Between negotiating sessions, Frederick hunted with his falcons and seduced new mistresses, playing the troubadour to write to one of them: ‘Alas I didn’t think that separation from my lady would be so hard remembering her sweet companionship. Happy song, go to the flower of Syria, to her who holds my heart in prison. Ask that most loving lady to remember her servant who shall suffer from love of her until he has done all she wills him to do.’
    When the negotiations wavered, Frederick marched his troops down the coast to Jaffa in the footsteps of Richard, threatening Jerusalem. This did the trick and on 11 February 1229, he achieved the undreamable: in return for ten years’ peace, Kamil ceded Jerusalem and Bethlehem with a corridor to the sea. In Jerusalem, the Muslims kept the Temple Mount with freedom of entry and worship under their qadi. The deal ignored the Jews (who had mostly fled the city), but this treaty of shared sovereignty remains the most daring peace deal in Jerusalem’s history.
    Yet both worlds were horrified. In Damascus, Muazzam’s son Nasir Daud ordered public mourning. The throng sobbed at the news. Kamil insisted, ‘we’ve only conceded some churches and ruined houses. The sacred precincts and venerated Rock remain ours.’ But the deal worked for him – he was able to reunite Saladin’s empire under his crown. As for Frederick, Patriarch Gerold banned the excommunicate from visiting Jerusalem, and the Templars denounced him for not gaining the Temple Mount.
    On Saturday 17 March, Frederick, escorted by his Arab bodyguards and pages, his German and Italian troops, the Teutonic Knights, and two English bishops, was met at the Jaffa Gate by the sultan’s representative, Shams al-Din, the Qadi of Nablus, who handed him the keys of Jerusalem.
    The streets were empty, many Muslims had left, the Orthodox Syrians were sullen at this Latin resurgence – and Frederick’s time was short: the Bishop of Caesarea was on his way to enforce the patriarch’s ban and place the city under interdict. 20
    THE CROWNING OF FREDERICK II: GERMAN JERUSALEM
     
    After spending the night in the palace of the Master of the Hospitallers, Frederick held a special Mass in the Holy Sepulchre, empty of priests but filled with his German soldiery. He rested his imperial crown on the altar of Calvary then placed it on his own head, a crown-wearing ceremony designed to project himself as the universal and paramount monarch of Christendom. He explained to Henry III of England: ‘We being a Catholic Emperor wore the crown which Almighty God provided for us from the throne of His Majesty when of His especial grace He exalted us on high among the princes of the world in the house of His servant David.’ Frederick was not one to underestimate his own importance: his eerie, magnificent mise-en-scène was the crowning of a sacred king, a mystical Emperor of the Last Days, in the Church that he saw as King David’s temple.
    Afterwards, the emperor toured the Temple Mount, admiring the Dome and al-Aqsa, praising its beautiful
mihrab
, climbing on to Nur al-Din’s
minbar
. When he spotted a priest holding a New Testament trying to enter al-Aqsa, he knocked him over, shouting ‘Swine! By God if one of you comes here again without permission, I shall have his eyes!’
    The Muslim custodians did not know