And there were many Christians who came to the Holy Land not merely as visitors, but as settlers. Even Jerome, despite his occasionally sniffy attitude towards the local tourist industry, rejoiced in the multicultural character of Christian life there, and saw in it the fulfilment of God’s primordial promise: “What were His first words to Abraham? Go out, He says, from your land and from your kindred, and go to the land I will show you.”23 While Constantinople, “the second Jerusalem,”24 was ranked by Christians as the capital of the world, Jerusalem herself was prized as its centre. To walk the winding streets of the Holy City was to see people from every corner of the empire and beyond. In distant Sinai the monastery’s leaders were expected to be “learned in Latin, Greek, Syriac, Egyptian and Persian”25 —but in Jerusalem Gauls, Armenians and Indians might need translators, too. Some of them might be lepers, some aristocrats, some scholars. Even a bona fide empress—Eudocia, the wife of Theodosius II—moved to the Holy City for a couple of decades in the middle of the fifth century. Nowhere else in the empire, with the possible exception of Constantinople itself, was more thorough-goingly cosmopolitan. Yet if Jerusalem was a city of immigrants, it hardly ranked as multi-faith. Few who lived there were immune to the suggestive power of a place that had witnessed the passion of Christ. A public reading from a gospel might be all it took to reduce them to sudden tears, displays of grief that would then ripple through the crowded streets, filling the colonnades and squares with wails and sobs. Certainly, those who lived in Jerusalem, and especially those who had moved there, had no doubt that they were better Christians for it. The sheer quality of the city’s virgins, “like fair flowers or priceless gems,”26 was proof of that. Some, however, went further. By the sixth century, it had become a popular notion among the monks of Jerusalem, and of the Holy Land generally, that the rest of the faithful owed them a special debt of gratitude. Athletes of Christ, they served Him too as His particular bodyguards: “For, it is we, the inhabitants of this Holy Land, who keep it invulnerable and inviolable.”27
Perhaps—but not exclusively so. Jerusalem, centre of the world though it may have been, and object of universal Christian devotion, was also, as it had been for five centuries and more, a possession of the Caesars—a city in a province named Palestine. It was hardly to be expected, then, that its Christian rulers would neglect the defences of such an incomparable jewel. Sure enough, a century or so after the conversion of Constantine, a great ring of walls was built to gird the Holy City. Yet the surest defences, it went without saying, were those raised not against mortal adversaries, but against supernatural foes. Jerusalem, which had once been just as pagan a city as Ephesus or Athens, filthy with idols and the smoke of sacrifices, had been systematically scoured clean of the occupying demons. In place of their temples, a great host of churches had risen. The process of renovation seemed a perpetual one. For as long as anyone living in Jerusalem could remember, the blows of hammers and chisels had provided perpetual accompaniments to the clanging of bells and the chanting of hymns. Justinian, predictably, ordered a new church commissioned by Anastasius to be completed in a particularly overweening style: so massive did it end up that entire streets had to be demolished before the blocks used in its construction could be transported to the site.
Yet, not even Justinian could hope to rival the holiest and most precious monument founded in Jerusalem by a Christian emperor. Helena, in addition to uncovering the sepulchre of Christ, had excavated the rock of Golgotha—the “Place of the Skull”—where He had suffered death. Although tomb and excavation-ground alike had been buried for centuries beneath a shrine to a particularly noxious demon, there could be no doubting the identification: for Helena had been shown the site by an angel in a dream.b In 326, her son ordered a great domed church to be built over the site of Christ’s tomb, and nine years later it was consecrated: the Church of the Resurrection. Next to it, over the site of the crucifixion, another church was built. Together, these two edifices—pairing, as they did, the sites where Christ had died and then risen from the dead—constituted the absolute centre of the centre of the world: a single plot of earth around which the order of the cosmos, and time itself, revolved. Beneath a fissure in the rock of Golgotha, so Christians confidently believed, lay the tomb of Adam—the first man of all to suffer death. Abraham too, in obedience to a command from God that he should sacrifice Isaac, his beloved son, had journeyed to the same identical spot. But it had all been a test; and Abraham, even as he was raising his knife to strike Isaac where he lay bound upon an altar of stone, had been halted by an angel, who had provided him instead with a ram caught in a thicket. An unmistakable foreshadowing of what was to come: for aeons later, of course, it was not a ram that had been slain upon Golgotha, but the Son of God Himself. Who, then, could doubt that there was to be traced, in this awesome patterning of mysteries, the guiding hand of the Almighty? To stand before the rock of Golgotha, and to see there as well the altar on which Abraham had placed Isaac, and the tomb of the first man to die, was to know that there were contained many mirrors in the order of time: a truth that boded well for the future. A Christian Jerusalem at the heart of a Christian empire: here, surely, was the certain evidence of an order destined to endure until the end of things?