Jerusalem. The Biography

Church. Unusually, that year the Orthodox and Catholic Easters fell on the same day. The monks were not just priming their incense-burners: they smuggled in pistols and daggers, secreting them behind the pillars and under robes. Who would hold their service first? The Greeks won the race to place their altar-cloth on the altar of Calvary. The Catholics were just behind them – but too late. They challenged the Greeks: did they have the sultan’s authority? The Greeks challenged the Catholics – where was their sultanic
firman
giving them the right to pray first? There was a stand-off. Fingers must have hovered over trigger sunder chasubles. Suddenly, the two sides were fighting with every weapon they could improvise from the ecclesiastical paraphernalia at their disposal: they wielded crucifixes, candlesticks and lamps until cold steel flashed and the shooting started. Ottoman soldiers waded in to stop the fighting but forty lay dead around the Holy Sepulchre.
    The killing resounded around the world but above all in St Petersburg and Paris: the aggressive confidence of the coenobite brawlers reflected not just the religions but the empires behind them. New railways and steamships had eased the journey to Jerusalem from all over Europe but particularly by sea from Odessa to Jaffa: the vast majority of the 20,000 pilgrims were now Russians. A French monk noticed that in a typical year, out of 4,000 Christmas pilgrims, only four were Catholics, the rest being Russian. This Russian adoration flowed from the devout Orthodoxy to be found from the very bottom of society, the shaggy peasants in the smallest, remotest Siberian villages, to the very top, the Emperor-Tsar Nicholas I himself. The Orthodox mission of Holy Russia was shared by both.
    When Constantinople fell in 1453, the grand princes of Muscovy had seen themselves as the heirs of the last Byzantine emperors, Moscow asthe Third Rome. The princes adopted the Byzantine double-headed eagle and a new title, Caesar or Tsar. In their wars against the Islamic Crimean khans and then the Ottoman sultans, the tsars promoted the Russian empire as a sacred Orthodox crusade. In Russia, Orthodoxy had developed its own singularly Russian character, spread through its vastness both by tsars – and peasant hermits, all of whom specially revered Jerusalem. It was said that the distinctive onion-shaped domes of Russian churches were an attempt to copy those in paintings of Jerusalem. Russia had even built its own mini-Jerusalem * but every Russian believed that the pilgrimage to Jerusalem was an essential part of the preparation for death and salvation.
    Nicholas I had imbibed this tradition – he was very much the grandson of Catherine the Great and heir of Peter the Great, both of whom had promoted themselves as protectors of the Orthodox and the Holy Places, and the Russian peasants themselves linked the two: when Nicholas’ elder brother Alexander I died unexpectedly in 1825, they believed that he had gone to Jerusalem as an ordinary hermit, a modern version of the Last Emperor legend.
    Now Nicholas, harshly conservative, deeply anti-Semitic and shamelessly philistine in all matters artistic (he had appointed himself as Pushkin’s personal censor), regarded himself as answerable only to what he called ‘The Russian God’ in the cause of ‘Our Russia entrusted to Us by God.’ This martinet, who prided himself on sleeping on a military cot, ruled Russia like a stern drillmaster. As a young man, the strapping, blue-eyed Nicholas had dazzled British society where one lady described him as ‘devilish handsome, the handsomest man in Europe!’ By the 1840s, his hair was gone and a paunch bulged out of his still high-waisted and skintight military breeches. After thirty years happily married to his ailing wife, he had finally taken a mistress, a young lady-in-waiting – and for all Russia’s vast power, he feared impotence, personally and politically.
    For years he had cautiously wielded his personal charm to persuade Britain to agree to the partition of the Ottoman empire, which he called ‘the sick man of Europe,’ hoping to liberate the Orthodox provinces of the Balkans and oversee Jerusalem. Now the British were no longer impressed. Twenty-five years of autocracy had desensitized him andmade him impatient: ‘very clever, I don’t think him,’ wrote the shrewd Queen Victoria, ‘and his mind is an uncivilized one.’
    In Jerusalem, the streets glittered with the