* It was now that most of Herod’s wall along the west side of the Temple disappeared behind the new Mamluk buildings. But it reappears once, down a hidden alleyway in a courtyard of the Muslim Quarter: it is one of Jerusalem’s secret places. Just as Jews revered the famous Western Wall to the south, so small numbers of Jews prayed and still pray at this, the Little Wall
† The Mamluks built in a distinctive style that can be seen all over the Muslim Quarter: stalactite corbelling called muqarna and the alternating of dark and light stones known as ablaq. Perhaps the finest example of the Mamluk style is Tankiz’s Tankiziyya palace-madrassa built over the Gate of the Chain: altogether there are twenty-seven madrassas, all marked with the blazons of the Mamluk amirs – Tankiz as Cupbearer marks his buildings with a cup. The typical Mamluk amir in Jerusalem would endow a charitable trust, a waqf, partly to maintain his madrassa, partly to provide a home and job for his descendants in case his power and wealth were lost in the frequent power struggles. Each tomb or turba was usually downstairs in a room with green-latticed windows so that passers-by could hear the prayers being recited – and they too can be seen. These buildings were much later assigned to Jerusalem’s Arab families who endowed them as trusts so that today many are still family homes.
* In 1393, Henry Bolingbroke came on pilgrimage to Jerusalem and when he seized the throne as Henry IV, he was told that he would return there to die. He managed to fulfil this prophecy on his deathbed: he had himself placed in the Jerusalem Chamber at Westminster. His son Henry V shared this devotion: on his deathbed, the victor of Agincourt wished he had made the pilgrimage to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem.
* Yet Sultan Jaqmaq, who terrorized the Latins, protected the Armenians: his inscription promising his favour can still be read just inside the gate of the Armenian Monastery
* * In the last years of Mamluk Jerusalem, at the same time as those Jewish travellers were weeping on the Mount of Olives, Mujir al-Din compiled his loving, punctilious study of Jerusalem and Hebron. He must have been respected: he was buried in the elegant domed monument that now stands just above the Virgin’s Tomb.
* A legend grewup that Suleiman considered levelling Jerusalem until he dreamed that lions would eat him if he did so, hence he built the Lions’ Gate. This is based on a misunderstanding: he did build the Lions’ Gate but its lions are actually the panthers of Sultan Baibars from 300 years earlier, borrowed from his Sufi khanqah that once stood north-west of the city. Suleiman used the spolia of Jerusalem: his Gate of the Chain fountain is topped with a Crusader rosette and the trough is a Crusader sarcophagus. The new walls did not enclose Mount Zion. It was said that Suleiman was so furious when he looked into a magic cup and sawthat David’s Tomb was outside the city that he executed the architects. Tour guides point out their graves close to the Jaffa Gate – but this too is a myth: the graves belong to two scholars from Safed.
* When Christopher Columbus departed on his expedition to America the same year, he wrote to his Most Catholic monarchs, ‘I propose to Your Majesties that all the profit derived from this enterprise be used for the recovery of Jerusalem.’ Their son Emperor Charles V, Suleiman’s rival and titular King of Jerusalem, inherited his parents’ crusading tradition, and his talk of a Crusade against Jerusalem was one reason that Suleiman rebuilt the walls.
* They had to sell their monastery St Saviour’s to the Franciscans and that was just the beginning. In 1685, the impoverished Georgians lost their headquarters, the Monastery of the Cross, said to be the origins of the wood for Jesus’s cross, to the Orthodox. After the fall of Crusader Jerusalem in 1187, Queen Tamara of Georgia had sent an official, Shota Rustaveli, the author of the national epic, The Knight in the Panther Skin, to embellish the Monastery: he is probably buried there and his portrait appeared in its frescoes. But in 2004, Rustaveli’s berobbed, white-bearded and high-hatted portrait was vandalized just as the Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili arrived on a state visit to inspect it. The Russian Orthodox were suspected but nothing was proved. The Serbs passed their last monastery to their Greek brethern in the seventeenth century. The Maronites still maintain a convent near the Jaffa Gate, though the Georgians, Maronites and Serbs have all long since lost their share of the Church.
* Both Jews and Christians were infected by apocalyptic expectations. In 1523, a dwarfish young Jew, David Reuveni, caused a stir in Jerusalem by declaring himself an Arabian prince leading the Ten Tribes back to Zion, but the Islamic qadi spared him as a lunatic and he then sailed to Rome, where the pope received him, but ultimately Christendom proved less tolerant than Islam and he died in the early 1530s in a Spanish dungeon. In 1534 a radical Protestant sect of Anabaptists seized the German town of Munster which they declared to be the New Jerusalem. Their leader John of Leiden, an illegitimate tailor’s apprentice, pronounced himself King of Jerusalem, heir to King David. After eighteen months, this new Zion was recaptured and the Anabaptist leaders executed.
* These human bonfires in the courtyard of the Church were not infrequent. In 1557 a Sicilian monk, Brother Juniper, twice invaded the Aqsa before he was killed by the qadi himself – and then incinerated before the Church. A Spanish Franciscan denounced Islam inside al-Aqsa and was beheaded on the Temple Mount before another bonfire. Yet as the case of Reuvent had shown, death was not always the end of the story, and Christianity in Europe was no more civilized: almost 400 heretics were burned in England during the sixteenth century.
* Some of this followers regarded this as the ultimate sacred paradox – and their Sabbatarian Judaeo-Islamic sect, the Donmeh (Turncoats, though they called themselves Mamin, the Believers), particularly the many who lived in Salonica, were to play a role in the Young Turk revolutions between 1908 and the First World War. They still exist in Turkey
* During one of the battles in Transylvania against the Habsburgs, he slipped away from the fray to evacuate his bowels only to be ambushed by an Austrian soldier, ‘so I plopped right into my own filth.’ As they fought, they rolled ‘topsy-turvy’ in our hero’s excrement until ‘I almost became the shitty martyr.’ Evliya finally killed the infidel, and managed to pull up his pantaloons ‘but I was soaked in blood as well as shit and I had to laugh, seeing that I’d become the shitty Ghazi (Islamic warrior).’ Afterwards he presented the Austrian’s head to his Pasha, who said, ‘My Evliya, you smell strangely of shit!’ The officers ‘laughed uproariously’ and the Pasha gave him fifty gold pieces and a silver turban-crest.
* Henry Maundrell, Chaplain of the English Levant Company, who visited in 1697, watched the ‘fury’ of the monks as they fought bloodily in the Church. He also described the mania of the Holy Fire as even more demented than it had been a century earlier when Sandys visited: the pilgrims ‘began to act in such an indecent manner as to expose their nudities, they tumbled about the Sepulchre after the manner of tumblers on stage’ lighting their beards – it was ‘like Bedlam itself’. As for the priests, Maundrell just called them ‘miracle-mongers’
* This became known as the Ruin – Hurva – Synagogue, and remained a wreck for over a century. It was reconstructed in the nineteenth century – but destroyed by the Jordanians in 1967.