Jerusalem. The Biography

Bluebeard and his 4,000 Afghans, Albanians and Moors resisted vigorously.
    On 16 April, Napoleon defeated the Butcher’s cavalry and an Ottoman army at the Battle of Tabor Mountain. Afterwards, finding himself at Ramla, 25 miles from Jerusalem, he issued a pro-Zionist ‘Proclamation to the Jews’, mendaciously datelined, ‘General Headquarters, Jerusalem,20 April 1799’.
     
Bonaparte, Commander in Chief of the Armies of the French Republic in Africa and Asia, to the rightful heirs of Palestine – the unique nation of Jews who have been deprived of the land of your fathers by thousands of years of lust for conquest and tyranny. Arise then with gladness, ye exiled, and take unto yourselves Israel’s patrimony. The young army hasmade Jerusalem my headquarters and will within a few days transfer to Damascus so you can remain there [in Jerusalem] as ruler.
     
    The official French gazette,
Le Moniteur
, claimed that Napoleon had ‘already armed a great number [of Jews] to re-establish ancient Jerusalem’, but Napoleon could not seize Zion until Acre was his 2 and the Butcher was now reinforced by two Royal Navy ships-of-the-line under a maverick English commodore.
    SIR SIDNEY SMITH – ‘MOST BRILLIANT OF CHEVALIERS’
     
    Sidney Smith, the son of an eloping heiress and an adventurer, was ‘good looking with tremendous moustaches and penetrating black eyes’. He had joined the navy at thirteen, fought the American rebels and then, when he was seconded to the Swedish navy, Catherine the Great’s Russians. The King of Sweden knighted him, so English rivals mocked him as the ‘Swedish knight’. After the French Revolution, Smith raided France, but was captured and imprisoned in the dreaded Temple. Dashingly he escaped, taunting Bonaparte, whom he particularly despised, in a series of public letters. Not everyone was convinced by Smith: he was, wrote one observer, an ‘enthusiast, restlessly active, extravagantly vain with no fixed purpose save that of persuading mankind that Sidney Smith was the most brilliant of chevaliers’. But if he was preposterous in normal life, he was heroic in a crisis.
    Smith and the Butcher struck up a rapport. When the Englishman admired the gleaming Damascene sword that the Butcher kept beside him at all times, Jazzar boasted, ‘The one I carry never fails. It’s taken off dozens of heads.’ Smith wanted proof, whereupon the Butcher had an ox brought to him which he then beheaded with a single blow. Smith merged his eighty-eight sailors with the Butcher’s multinational garrison. Bonaparte launched three assaults on Acre but Smith and the Butcher managed to repel all three. As Ottoman reinforcements approached and the siege dragged into its third month, the French generals became restless.
    On 21 May 1799, with 1,200 troops dead and 2,300 sick or wounded, Napoleon led the retreat towards Egypt. However, 800 French soldiers lay ill in Jaffa. As they would slow the retreat, Napoleon ordered his wounded to be killed by his own doctors. When the French medics refused, a Turkish doctor administered fatal doses of laudanum to the patients. No wonder the French general Jean-Baptiste Kléber reflected, ‘We have committedin the Holy Land enormous sins and great stupidities.’ Two thousand mounted Jerusalemites under the command of the city’s governor pursued and harassed the retreating French. When the peasant fighters of Nablus broke into Jaffa, Smith managed to prevent a massacre of Christians by summoning the Jerusalemites to restore order.
    In Egypt, Napoleon, facing the reality of a disastrous campaign that could only be saved by shameless distortion of the truth, abandoned his men and sailed for home. General Kléber, left in command of Egypt, cursed Napoleon: ‘That bugger has deserted us with his breeches full of shit.’ But in France Napoleon was hailed as a returning conqueror, soon to seize power from the Directory as first consul, * and a romantic song about his expedition – ‘Partant pour la Syrie’ – became the Bonapartist anthem.
    The Christians of Jerusalem, particularly the Catholics, were in peril from Muslim reprisals. Addicted to grandiose gestures, Smith decided that only a show of English sangfroid would save his brethren. With permission from the Butcher and the sultan, he marched his sailors in dress uniform with beating drums from Jaffa to Jerusalem. Progressing through the streets, he hoisted the British flag over St Saviour’s Monastery,