Jerusalem. The Biography

greatest of the Sassanid rulers who had burned Antioch during Justinian’s reign. But he had spent a humiliating boyhood as the helpless pawn of rival noble families and had grown up into a paranoid megalomaniac who imposed his power with extravagant gigantism: his tiger-skin banner was 130 feet long, 20 feet wide; he held court on the King’s Spring, a carpet of 1,000 square feet, inlaid in gold and brocade and depicting an imaginary royal garden; his
shabestan –
the cool underground apartments where the shahs kept their women – contained 3,000 concubines; and it was possibly he who built the colossal palace at his capital Ctesiphon (close to present-day Baghdad) with the world’s largest audience-hall. Riding his black horse, Midnight, his robes were woven in gold, encrusted in jewels, his armour gold-trimmed.
    The shah, whose polyglot subjects included many Jews and Christians, was Zoroastrian, but he had married a lovely Nestorian Christian, Shirin, whom he had won, according to legend, by sending his rival to performthe impossible task of carving stairs out of the Behustan mountains.
    Once Jerusalem had been taken, the shah’s general, the Royal Boar, moved on to conquer Egypt, but no sooner was he gone than the Jerusalemites rebelled against the Persians and Jews. The Royal Boar galloped back and besieged Jerusalem for twenty days, destroying the churches on the Mount of Olives and Gethsemane. The Persians and Jews mined under the north-eastern wall, always the most vulnerable place, and on the twenty-first day, in early May 614, they stormed Jerusalem ‘in great fury, like infuriated wild beasts’, according to the eyewitness Strategos, a monk. ‘The people hid in churches and there they destroyed them in great wrath, gnashing their teeth and slew all they found like mad dogs.’
    In three days, thousands of Christians were massacred. The patriarch and 37,000 Christians were deported to Persia. As the survivors stood on the Mount of Olives ‘and gazed upon Jerusalem, a flame, as out of a furnace, reached up to the clouds and they fell to sobbing and lamenting’, dropping ashes in their hair for they saw the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Nea, the Mother of Churches on Mount Zion and the Armenian cathedral of St Jameses, consumed by the inferno. The Christian relics – the Lance, the Sponge and the True Cross – were sent to Khusrau, who gave them to his queen Shirin. She preserved them in her church in Ctesiphon.
    Then, 600 years after Titus had destroyed the Temple, the Royal Boar gave Jerusalem to the Jews.
    NEHEMIAH II: THE JEWISH TERROR
     
    After centuries of repression, the Jews, led by a shadowy figure named Nehemiah, were keen to avenge themselves on the Christians who until weeks earlier had been persecuting them. The Persians imprisoned thousands of less valuable prisoners in the Mamilla Pool, a large reservoir, where, according to Christian sources, they were offered the same choice recently offered to the Jews: convert or die. Some monks converted to Judaism; others were martyred. * The joyous Jews may have started toreconsecrate the Temple Mount, for the Jews now ‘made sacrifices’ * and messianic fervour vibrated through the Jewish world, inspiring the enthusiasm of the Book of Zerubbabel.
    The Persian shah had conquered Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Asia Minor all the way to Constantinople. Only the city of Tyre still held out against the Persians, who ordered the Jewish commander Nehemiah to capture it. The Jewish army failed in this mission and fled from Tyre, but the Persians surely already realized that the more numerous Christians were more useful. In 617, after three years of Jewish rule, the Royal Boar expelled the Jews from Jerusalem. Nehemiah resisted but was defeated and executed at Emmaus near Jerusalem.
    The city was returned to the Christians. Once again it was the Jewish turn to suffer. The Jews left the city by an eastern gate like the Christians before them, marching away towards Jericho. The Christians found the Holy City ravaged: Modestos, the priest in charge during the absence of the patriarch, energetically restored the shattered Holy Sepulchre, but the city never regained the magnificence of Constantine and Justinian.
    Three times since Titus the Jews had grasped moments of free prayer among the rock heaps of the Temple – probably under bar Kochba, certainly under Julian and Khusrau – but Jews would not control the Temple again for 1,350 years. As for the