Jerusalem. The Biography

quintessence of queens, the light of the eye of the resplendent caliphate’. She became a wily politician, intriguing successfully to ensure Suleiman’s son by another woman did not succeed to the throne: the son was strangled in Suleiman’s presence.
    Suleiman inherited Jerusalem and Mecca and believed that his Islamic prestige demanded that he beautify the sanctuaries of Islam: everything about him was on a grand scale, his ambitions boundless, his reign almost half a century long, his horizons vast – he fought almost continental wars from Europe and north Africa to Iraq and the Indian Ocean, from the gates of Vienna to Baghdad. His achievements in Jerusalem were so successful that the Old City today belongs more to him than anyone else: the walls look ancient and to many people they define the city as much as Dome, Wall or Church – but they and most of the gates were the creation of this contemporary of Henry VIII, both to secure the city and add to his own prestige. The sultan added a mosque, an entrance and a tower to the Citadel; he built an aqueduct to bring water into the city and nine fountains from which to drink it – including three on the Temple Mount; and finally he replaced the worn mosaics on the Dome of the Rock with glazed tiles decorated with lilies and lotus in turquoise, cobalt, white and yellow as they are today. *
    Roxelana liked to endowcharitable foundations close to her husband’s projects, she commandeered a Mamluk palace to establish her al-Imaraal-Amira al-Khasaki al-Sultan, a foundation known as the Flourishing Edifice that included a mosque, bakery, fifty-five-room hostel and soup-kitchen for the poor. Thus they made the Temple Mount and Jerusalem their own.
    In 1553 Suleiman, soi-disant ‘Second Solomon and King of the World’, decided to inspect Jerusalem, but his far-flung wars intervened and, like Constantine before him, the man who had transformed the city never got to see his achievement. The Sultan’s enterprise was on an imperial scale but he clearly supervised it from afar. As the walls arose, the viceroy of Syria presided, Suleiman’s imperial architect Sinan probably inspected the work on his way home from Mecca: thousands of workers laboured, new stones were quarried, old stones purloined from ruined churches and Herodian palaces, and the ramparts and gates carefully fused with the Herodian and Umayyad walls around the Temple Mount. The retiling of the Dome required 450,000 tiles, so Suleiman’s men created a tile factory next to al-Aqsa to make them, and some of his contractors built mansions in the city and stayed. The local architect founded a dynasty of hereditary architects that reigned for the next two centuries. The city must have resounded with the unfamiliar sounds of hammering masons and the clink of money. The population almost tripled to 16,000 and the number of Jews doubled to 2,000, boosted by the constant arrival of refugees from the west. A vast, anguished movement of the Jews was in progress, and some of these new arrivals contributed directly to Suleiman’s enterprise. 2

1550–1705
     
    THE SULTAN’S JEWISH DUKE:
PROTESTANTS, FRANCISCANS AND THE WALL
     
    Suleiman assigned the taxes of Egypt to pay for his remodelled Jerusalem, and the man in charge of these revenues was Abraham de Castro, the Master of the Mint and tax-farmer who had proven his loyalty by warning the sultan when the local viceroy planned a rebellion. As his name suggests, Castro was a Jewish refugee from Portugal and his role did not come close to that of the super-rich Portuguese Jew who became Suleiman’s adviser and ultimately protector of Palestine and Jerusalem.
    The Jewish migration marked the latest chapter in the religious wars. In 1492, King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile had conquered Granada, the last Islamic principality in Spain, and celebrated their successful Crusade * by purging Spain of Moslems and Jews. Obsessed with the danger of secret Jewish blood seeping into the pure stream of Christendom, and advised by Tomás Torquemada’s Inquisition, they expelled between 100,000 and 200,000 Jews, and in the next fifty years, much of western Europe followed suit. For seven centuries, Spain had been the home of a blossoming Arab-Jewish culture and the centre of the Diaspora, the Jews dispersed outside Zion.
    Now, in the most searing Jewish trauma between the fall of the Temple and the Final Solution, these Sephardic Jews (
Sapharad
being