Jerusalem: The Biography

* 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.

* The Holy Prepuce was just one of a panoply of medieval relics. Charlemagne presented a section to Pope Leo before his coronation in 800, but there were soon between 8 and 18 such relics in the Christian world. Baldwin I sent one to Antwerp in 1100 but Melisende possessed another section. Most of the relics were lost or destroyed in the Reformation.

* Melisende was the third queen to rule Jerusalem in her own right – after Athaliah, Jezebel’s daughter, and Alexandra, widow of Alexander Jannaeus in Maccabean times. She was crowned three times, once with her father in 1129, then with Fulk in 1131 and again with her son in 1143. Despite the low status of women on both sides, Usamah bin Munqidh tells of both Islamic and Crusader women who in times of peril pulled on armour and fought the enemy in battle. Melisende did not forget her Armenian roots. After the fall of Edessa, she settled its Armenian refugees in Jerusalem and in 1141 the Armenians started to rebuild St James’s Cathedral near the royal palace.

* As soon as she was free, Eleanor married Henry, Duke of Normandy and Count of Anjou, the grandson of King Fulk of Jerusalem, who soon succeeded to the English throne as Henry II. Their children included King John and the future Crusader, King Richard the Lionheart.