Jerusalem. The Biography

travelling to Jerusalem’, while even Muslims liked to say ‘no one is so corrupt as the residents of holy cities’.
    Meanwhile Mamluk sultans sometimes swept down on the city torepress Christians and Jews who already faced periodic lynchings by the Jerusalemite crowds.
    The corruption and disorder started at court in Cairo: the empire was still ruled by Caucasian sultans so, even though the Catholic Franciscans enjoyed European support, Christian Jerusalem was dominated by the Armenians and the Georgians who hated one another – and of course the Catholics. The Armenians, who were aggressively expanding their Quarter around St Jameses, managed to bribe the Mamluks to wrest Calvary from the Georgians, who then outbid them and won it back. But not for long. In the course of thirty years, Calvary changed hands five times.
    The bribes and profits were enormous because the pilgrimage had become wildly popular in Europe. Europeans did not feel that the Crusades were over – after all, the Catholic reconquest of Islamic Spain was a Crusade – but while there were no expeditions to liberate Jerusalem, all Christians felt they knew Jerusalem even if they had never been. Jerusalem appeared in sermons, paintings and tapestries. Many towns featured Jerusalem Chapels, founded by Jerusalem Brotherhoods made up of ex-pilgrims or people who could not make the trip. The Palace of Westminster had its Jerusalem Chamber and from Paris in the west to Prussia and Livonia in the east, many places now boasted these local Jerusalems. The only Jerusalem in England, a tiny village in Lincolnshire, dates from this revived enthusiasm. But thousands did travel there every year * and many of them were notoriously unsaintly: Chaucer’s saucy Wife of Bath had been to Jerusalem three times.
    Pilgrims had to pay repeated fines and tolls just to enter Jerusalem and then the Church where the Mamluks also controlled the Sepulchre inside. They sealed the Church every night so pilgrims, for a price, could be locked inside for days and nights if they wished. The pilgrims found that the Church resembled a bazaar-cum-barbershop with stalls, shops, beds and large quantities of human hair: many believed that illness would be cured if they shaved themselves and placed the hair in the Sepulchre. Many of the pilgrims spent much time carving their initials into every shrine they visited while artful Muslims serviced the relic industry: pilgrims claimed that stillborn Muslim babies were embalmed and then sold to rich Europeans as the victims of the Massacre of the Innocents.
    Some pilgrims were convinced that children conceived within the Church were specially blessed, and of course there was alcohol, so that the dark hours often became a candlelit, hard-drinking orgy in which good-natured hymn singing gave way to ugly brawls. The Sepulchre, said one disgusted pilgrim, was ‘a complete brothel.’ Another pilgrim, Arnold von Harff, a mischievous German knight, spent his time learning phrases in Arabic and Hebrew that give some clues to his preoccupations:
     
How much will you give me?
    I will give you a gulden.
    Are you a Jew?
    Woman, let me sleep with you tonight.
    Good madam, I am ALREADY in your bed.
     
    The Franciscans guided and welcomed Catholic visitors: their itinerary, retracing the footsteps of Christ, started at what they believed was Pilate’s Praetorium, on the site of the Mamluk governor’s mansion. This became the first station of The Lord’s Way, later the Via Dolorosa. Pilgrims were shocked to find Christian sites had been Islamicized, such as St Anne’s Church – the birthplace of the Virgin Mary’s mother – occupied by Saladin’s madrassa. The German friar Felix Fabri sneaked into this shrine, while Harff risked his life by penetrating the Temple Mount in disguise – and both recorded their adventures. Their entertaining travelogues revealed a new tone of inquisitive lightheartedness as well as reverence.
    However, Christians and Jews were never quite safe from the capricious Mamluk repression – and sanctity in Jerusalem was so infectious that when the two older religions started to fight for David’s Tomb on Mount Zion, the sultans claimed it for the Muslims.
    There was now a settled Jewish community of about 1,000 in what became the Jewish Quarter. They prayed in their Ramban synagogue, as well as around the gates of the Temple Mount (particularly at their study house by the Western Wall) and on the Mount of Olives, where