Jerusalem. The Biography

supposedly cite the bloodlines of all his 7,800 racehorses and often paid more for a horse than for the most gorgeous slaveboy. Yet everything The Exquisite did – his marriage to a descendant of Genghis Khan, his twenty-five children, his 1,200 concubines – he did with the meticulous magnificence he brought to Jerusalem.
    In 1317, he himself arrived on pilgrimage and proceeded to demonstrate to his generals that their sacred duty was to embellish the Temple Mount and the streets around it. Assisted by his best friend and Syrian viceroy, Tankiz, the sultan refortified the Tower of David, adding a Friday mosque for the garrison, and raised monumental colonnades and madrassas on the Temple Mount, reroofing the Dome and al-Aqsa, adding the minaret at the Gate of the Chain, and the Gate of the Cotton-sellers and Cotton-Sellers Market – all of which can be seen today.
    Nasir favoured the Sufi route to reach God and built five convents for his orders of mystics. In their gleaming new lodges, they restored some of the holy magic to Jerusalem with their dancing, singing, trances and sometimes even self-mutilation, all to achieve the soaring emotion necessary to reach up towards God.
    The sultan’s men got the message: he and his successors exiled outof-favour amirs to Jerusalem where they were expected to spend their ill-gotten wealth on sumptuous complexes that contained palaces, madrassas and tombs. The closer to the Temple Mount, the sooner they would arise on Judgement Day. They constructed enormous arched substructures and then built on top of them. These buildings * were ingeniously squeezed onto the roofs of earlier ones around the gates of the Noble Sanctuary. †
    Nasir found Jerusalem – or at least the Muslim Quarter – in dust and cobwebs and left her in marble, so when Ibn Battutah visited, he found a city that was ‘large and imposing’. Islamic pilgrims poured into al-Quds, exploring from the hell of Gehenna to the paradise of the Dome and reading the books of
fadail
that told them ‘a sin committed in Jerusalem is the equivalent of a thousand sins and a good work there equal to a thousand’. He who lived there ‘is like a warrior in the jihad’ while to die there ‘is like dying in heaven’. Jerusalem’s mysticism blossomed to such an extent that Muslims started to circumambulate, kiss and anoint the Rock as they had not done since the seventh century. The fundamentalist scholar Ibn Taymiyya railed against Nasir and these Sufi superstitions, warning that Jerusalem ranked only as a pious visit – a
ziyara –
not the equivalent of the
haj
to Mecca. The sultan imprisoned this puritanical dissident six times but to no avail and Ibn Taymiyya provided the inspiration for the harsh Wahabiism of Saudi Arabia and today’s Jihadists.
    The Exquisite sultan no longer trusted the Turkish Mamluks who had become the elite so he started to buy Georgian or Circassian slaveboys from the Caucasus to provide his bodyguard and they influenced his decisions in Jerusalem: he granted the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to the Georgians. But the Latins had not forgotten her either: in 1333, he allowed King Robert of Naples (and Jerusalem) to repair parts of the Church and take possession of the Cenacle on Mount Zion where he started a Franciscan monastery.
    The ailing tiger is the most dangerous. The sultan fell ill but he had made his friend Tankiz ‘so powerful he became afraid of him’. In 1340, Tankiz was arrested and poisoned. Nasir himself died a year later, succeeded by his many sons. But ultimately, the new Caucasian slaves overthrew the dynasty, founding a new line of sultans who favoured the Georgians in Jerusalem. On the other hand, the Catholic Latins – the heirs of the hated Crusaders – were there on sufferance under the repressive Mamluks whose paroxysms of violence terrorized Christians and Jews alike. When the Cypriot king attacked Alexandria in 1365, the Church was closed down and the Franciscans dragged off to be publicly executed in Damascus. The Franciscan order was allowed to return but the Mamluks built minarets overshadowing the Church andthe Ramban Synagogue to emphasize the supremacy of Islam.
    In 1399, the dread Central Asian conqueror Tamurlane captured Baghdad and smashed into Syria just as a Mamluk boy-sultan and his tutor set out on their pilgrimage to Jerusalem. 4

1399–1517
     
    TAMURLANE AND THE TUTOR: PILGRIM CITY
     
    The royal tutor was the most celebrated scholar in the