* This was the age of Jewish ministers for Islamic monarchs. In Egypt, the scion of a trading family of Persian Karaites,Abu Saad al-Tustari became a purveyor of luxuries to Zahir, to whom he then sold a black slave girl. On the caliph’s death in 1036, she became the Walida, mother of Caliph Mustansir, with Tustari as the power behind the throne. He amassed colossal wealth, once giving al-Walida a silver ship and tent worth 130,000 dirhams. He never converted to Islam. The poet Rida ibn Thawb wrote: ‘People of Egypt,I have good advice for you / Turn Jew, for Heaven itself has become Jewish.’ In 1048,Tustari was murdered by Turkish troops, much mourned by the Goan of Jerusalem. Meanwhile the vizier of Islamic Granada in Spain was another patron of Jerusalem: Samuel ibn Nagrela, ‘The Prince’, a polymathic doctor, poet,Talmudic scholar and general, perhaps the only practising Jew to command Islamic armies in battle. His son succeeded him but was murdered in 1066 in a massacre of Jews in Granada.
* When the captive emperor was brought before the victorious Alp Arslan, whose moustaches were so long he draped them over his shoulders, asked, ‘What would you do if I was brought before you as a prisoner?’ ‘Perhaps I’d kill you, or exhibit you in the streets of Constantinople,’ replied Romanos IV Diogenes. ‘My punishment is far heavier,’ replied Alp Arslan. ‘I forgive you, and set you free.’ But the Lion did not last long himself. When he saw the approach of an assassin, he waved aside his bodyguards in order to display his skill as an archer by bringing down the attacker. But his foot slipped, and the asssassin stabbed him. Dying, he warned his son Malik Shah, ‘Remember well the lessons learned, and do not allow your vanity to overreach your good sense.’ His tomb in Merv reads with Ozymandian irony: ‘O those who saw the sky-high grandeur of Alp Arslan, behold! He is under the black soil now.’
* A dispute over the Fatimid succession gave rise to a murderous breakaway sect of Ismaili Shiites led by Hassan al-Sabbah. He and his Nizaris fled to Persia, where he seized the mountain fortress of Alamut and later they gained fortresses in Lebanon. He made up for his small numbers by launching a spectacular campaign of terrorism against his Sunni enemies. His team of killers, who terrorized the Middle East for over a century, were supposedly under the influence of hashish, and came to be called the Hashishim, or Assassins. The Muslims, though, called them Batini, seekers after secret esoteric knowledge.
† In 1095, the Sunni philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazali sought refuge in Jerusalem from the Assassins. ‘I shut myself up in the precinct of the Dome of the Rock,’ he said, in a tiny chamber atop the Golden Gate, to write the Revivification of the Science of Religion. This reinvigorated Sunni Islam by separating the logic of philosophy – Greek metaphysics – from the ecstatic revelation of religious truth, while giving each its due. Ultimately his demolition of scientific cause and effect (in his Incoherence of the Philosophers) in favour of divine revelation ended the golden age of Arabic learning in Baghdad and helped undermine Arab science and philosophy.
* 70,000 is the traditional figure for Jerusalem’s population but this is an implausible exaggeration. In the eleventh century, Constantinople had 600,000 inhabitants; Baghdad and Cairo, the great cities of Islam: 400,000–500,000; Rome, Venice and Florence 30,000–40,000; Paris and London 20,000. As for the Greek Fire, ‘God’s flame’, a petroleum-based concoction fired through siphons, had once saved Constantinople. Now the Muslims, not the Christians, had it.
* The laws of warfare stated that no quarter was expected after bitter sieges, yet the Frankish eyewitnesses went further in advertising their butchery and claiming that no one was spared. But some of their descriptions are inspired directly by the Book of Revelation. They did not specify numbers. Later, Muslim historians claimed 70,000 or even 100,000 were killed, but the latest research suggests that the massacre was smaller, perhaps around 10,000, considerably less than the future Muslim massacres of Edessa and Acre. The best-placed contemporary, Ibn al-Arabi, who had recently lived in Jerusalem and was in Egypt in 1099, cited 3,000 as killed in al-Aqsa. Nor were all the Jews killed. There were certainly Jews and Muslims left alive. Unusually, it seems that the Crusader chroniclers, for propaganda and religious purposes, hugely exaggerated the scale of their own crimes. Such was holy war.
* The round Temple Church in London, consecrated by Heraclius, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, in 1185 and made famous in Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code, is surely modelled on the Temple of the Lord, the Dome of the Rock, which they believed to have been built by Solomon. But there are scholars who assert it is based on the double-domed Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
* At times of crisis the Life-Giving Tree, which was tended in the church by the scriniarius, the relic-keeper, in a bejewelled chest, was carried before the king by four bearers.
* The original Crusaders overwhelmingly spoke the northern French dialect langue d’oie, totally different from the Provencal langue d’oc. But it was langue d’oc that became Outremer’s chief dialect.
* The Melisende Psalter, with its carved ivory covers, studded with turquoise, ruby and emerald stones, was crafted by Syrian and Armenian artists in the Holy Sepulchre scriptorium. Its Byzantine, Islamic and Western styles show how Crusader and Eastern art fused during the reign of this half-Armenian, half-Frankish queen.
* Fulk was not the first king of Jersualem Usamah had known. In 1124, Baldwin II had been a prisoner at Shaijar, Usamah’s family castle. He was treated so hospitably that the Crusaders came to respect Usamah and the family. The ruins of Shaijar castle can still be seen in Syria.
* An Orthodox and a Latin church were built atop their respective Akeldama charnel-houses where bodies were dropped through holes in the roof: it was believed that the bodies decomposed within twenty-four hours with no smell. Last used for burials in 1829, the Latin charnel-house is filled with earth but the Greek Orthodox pit is visible today. Peering through a small opening, one can see the white bones. Neither of the churches exists, probably destroyed by Saladin.
† The holy Golden Gate was opened just twice a year. The cemetery outside the Golden Gate, probably attached to the Templar convent, was a special resting-place. It was here that the murderers of Thomas Becket were reported buried. A few important Frankish knights were buried inside on the Temple Mount. In 1969, James Fleming, an American Bible student, was photographing the Gate when the earth gave way and he fell into a hole 8 feet deep. He found himself standing on a heap of human bones. The hole revealed what appeared to be a neat arch of Herodian ashlars. The bones may belong to Crusaders (Frederick of Regensburg was buried there in 1148; the archaeologist Conrad Schick found bones there in 1891). Before and after the Crusades, the Muslims used this as a special cemetery. Either way, Fleming was unable to check because the Muslim authorities swiftly cemented it over.