Jerusalem. The Biography

whose Franciscan superior declared that ‘every Christian in Jerusalem was under the greatest obligation to the English nation and particularly Smith by whose means they have been preserved from the merciless hand of Bonaparte’. In fact it was the Muslims whom they feared. Smith and his crew prayed at the Sepulchre, the first Frankish troops to enter Jerusalem since 1244. 3
    Sultan Selim III showered honours on the Butcher, who was appointed pasha of his native Bosnia as well as of Egypt and Damascus. After a short war with the pasha of Gaza, he again dominated Jerusalem and Palestine. But he had not mellowed, for he cut off his prime minister’s nose to spite a face that already lacked an ear and an eye. On his death in 1804, Palestine sank into chaos.
    Yet Napoleon and Smith had made the Levant fashionable. Among the adventurers who now started to explore the East and recount their exploits in bestselling books that beguiled the West, the most influential was a French vicomte who in 1806 found Jerusalem bedevilled by fire, rebellion and rapine, at its lowest ebb since the Mongols. 4

THE NEW ROMANTICS:
CHATEAUBRIAND AND DISRAELI
     

1806–1830
     
    THE VICOMTE OF THE ORDER OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE
     
    ‘Jerusalem overawes me’ declared François-René, Vicomte de Chateaubriand, even though this ‘deicidal city’ was ‘a heapof rubbish’ with the ‘confused monuments of a cemetery in the midst of a desert’. This bouffant-haired Catholic royalist embraced the romantic view of a shabby Gothic Jerusalem awaiting rescue by the ‘genius of Christianity’. To him, the more miserable Jerusalem was, the holier and more poetical she became – and the city was now desperate.
    Rebel pashas and hordes of Palestinian peasants repeatedly rebelled and seized a godforsaken Jerusalem which had to be stormed by the governors of Damascus who marched down annually with an army and treated the city as conquered enemy territory. The vicomte arrived to find the governor of Damascus camped outside the Jaffa Gate while his three thousand soldiers menaced the inhabitants. When Chateaubriand settled in the St Saviour’s Monastery, it was occupied by these ruffians who extorted cash from the friars. He strutted the streets armed with several pistols but in the Monastery, one of them caught him unawares and tried to kill him: he only survived by almost throttling the Turk. In the streets, ‘we met not a creature! What wretchedness, what desolation for most of the inhabitants had fled to the mountains. Shops are shut, people conceal themselves in cellars or withdraw to the mountains.’ When the pasha left, the garrison in David’s Tower numbered just a dozen and the city became even more eerie: ‘The only noise is the galloping of a steed of the desert – it’s a janissary who brings the head of a Bedouin or returns from plundering the unhappy peasants.’
    Now the Frenchman could revel in the squalid sacred mysteries of the shrines. Yet this enthusiastic gourmand, who gave his name to his recipe for steak, relished the banquets he shared with his famously plump Franciscan hosts, feasting on ‘lentil soup, veal with cucumbers and onions, broiled kid with rice, pigeons, partridges, game, excellentwine’. Armed with several pistols, he retraced every step of Jesus while mocking Ottoman monuments (‘not worth notice’) and the Jews who were ‘covered in rags, sealed in the dust of Zion, with vermin that devoured them’. Chateaubriand was astonished to ‘behold these rightful masters of Judaea living as slaves and strangers in their own country’.
    In the Sepulchre he prayed on his knees for half an hour, his eyes ‘riveted to the stone’ of Jesus’ tomb, dizzy with the incense, the clash of Ethiopian cymbals and chanting of the Greeks, before kneeling at the tombs of Godfrey and Baldwin, those French paladins who had defeated Islam, ‘a religion hostile to civilization that systematically favoured ignorance, despotism and slavery’.
    The Franciscans awarded Chateaubriand the Order of the Holy Sepulchre in a solemn ceremony. As they encircled the kneeling vicomte, attaching the spurs of Godfrey to his heels and knighting him with the Crusader’s sword, he experienced an almost ecstatic joy:
     
If it is considered that I was at Jerusalem, in the Church of Calvary, within a dozen paces of the tomb of Jesus Christ, and thirty from that of Godfrey de Bouillon, that I was equipped with the spurs of the Deliverer of