Jerusalem. The Biography

work.
    On 18 May 1291, the Mamluks stormed the Frankish capital Acre and slaughtered most of the defenders, enslaving the rest (girls were sold for just one drachma each). The title King of Jerusalem was now united with that of King of Cyprus. But it survived only as a picturesque ornament –and it remains so today. There ended the Kingdom of Jerusalem. * Even the real Jerusalem only just survived – less a city, more of a senescent village, unwalled and half-deserted, raided at will by Mongol horsemen.
    In 1267, a pilgrim, the old Spanish rabbi known as Ramban, mourned her eclipse:
    I compare you, my mother, to the woman whose son died in her lap and painfully there is milk in her breasts and she suckles the pups of dogs. And despite all that, your lovers abandoned you and your enemies desolated you, but faraway they remember and glorify the Holy City. 2
    RAMBAN
     
    Rabbi Moses ben Nachman, known by his Hebrew acronym RAMBAN or just Nahmanides, was amazed to find that there were only 2,000 inhabitants left in Jerusalem, just 300 Christians and only two Jews, brothers, who were dyers like the Jews under the Crusades. The sadder Jerusalem seemed to the Jews, the more sacred it became, the more poetical: ‘Whatever is more holy’, thought Ramban, ‘is more ruined.’
    The Ramban was one of the most inspiring intellectuals of his time, a doctor, philosopher, mystic and Torah scholar. In 1263, he had defended Barcelona’s Jews so adeptly against Dominican accusations of blasphemy that King James of Aragon remarked, ‘I’ve never seen a man defend a wrong cause so well,’ and gave Ramban 300 gold pieces. But the Dominicans then tried to have Ramban executed. As a compromise, the septuagenarian was banished – and set out on his pilgrimage.
    He believed that Jews should not just mourn Jerusalem but return, settle and rebuild before the coming of the Messiah – what we might call religious Zionism. Only Jerusalem could soothe his homesickness:
     
I left my family, I forsook my home, my sons and daughters. I left my soul with the sweet and dear children whom I’ve brought up on my knee. But the loss of all else is compensated for by the joy of a day in thy courts, O Jerusalem! I wept bitterly but I found joy in my tears.
     
    The Ramban commandeered ‘a broken-down house built with marble columns and a handsome dome. * We took it for a prayer house because the city is a shambles and whoever wants to appropriate ruins does so.’ He also retrieved the Torah scrolls hidden from the Mongols, but soon after his death, the raiders were back. 3
    But this time there was a difference: some of them were Christians. In October 1299, the Christian King of Armenia, Hethoum II, galloped into Jerusalem with 10,000 Mongols. The city quaked before yet another barbaric sacking and the few Christians ‘hid in caverns out of fright.’ The Mongol Il-Khan had recently converted to Islam yet the Mongols had little interest in Jerusalem for they left her to Hethoum who rescued the Christians, held ‘festivities in the Holy Sepulchre’ and ordered the Armenian St Jameses and the Virgin’s Tomb to be repaired – and then, strangely, after just two weeks, he headed back to see his Mongol master in Damascus. However the century-long duel between Mamluks and Mongols was over and once again the magneticism of Jerusalem’s sanctity drew the world back. In Cairo, a new sultan came to the throne who revered Jerusalem – amongst other things, he called himself ‘Sultan al-Quds.’ Nasir Muhammad dubbed himself The Eagle; his people called him The Exquisite – and as the leading historian of this period writes, ‘he was perhaps the greatest Mamluk sultan’ but also ‘the nastiest.’
    NASIR MUHAMMAD: THE EXQUISITE EAGLE
     
    Ever since he was eight, he had been humiliatingly tossed like a royal doll between the warlords of the Mamluk junta. Twice he had been raised to the throne and twice discarded. He was the younger son of a slave who had risen to become a great sultan and his elder brother, the conqueror of Acre, had been assassinated, so when Nasir Muhammad seized the throne for the third time at the age of twenty-six, he wasdetermined to keep it. His sultanic eagle suited his style – aesthetic splendour, aquiline paranoia and the swoop of sudden death. His companions were promoted and enriched – but then strangled, bisected, poisoned without warning and he seemed to prefer horses to people: the limping sultan could