1250–1339

BAIBARS: THE PANTHER

Baibars was a fair-haired and blue-eyed Turk from Central Asia sold as a child to a Syrian prince. But, despite his towering barrel-chested physique, he had an unsettling defect: a white cataract on the iris of one of his eyes which led his owner to sell him on to the sultan in Cairo. Salih Ayyub, Saladin’s great-nephew, bought Turkish slaves ‘in batches like sandgrouse’ to form his mamluk regiments. He could not trust his own family but thought ‘one slave is more loyal than 300 sons’. Baibars, like all these pagan slaveboys, was converted to Islam and trained as a slave-soldier, a mamluk. He excelled with the arbalest steel crossbow, winning the nickname the Arbalestier and joined the Bahriyya regiment, the crack soldiers who defeated the Crusaders and became known as the Turkish Lions and the Islamic Templars.

When Baibars had won the trust of his master, he was manumitted – released from slavery – and climbed the ranks. The mamluks were loyal to their masters and even more loyal to each other – but ultimately each of these orphan-warriors owed nothing to anyone except himself and Allah. After his role in the killing of the sultan, Baibars lost out in the power struggle and fled to Syria where he offered his crossbow to the highest bidder in the civil wars raging between the local princelings. At one point, he seized and plundered Jerusalem. But the power was in Egypt and Baibars was finally recalled there by the latest general to seize the crown, Qutuz.

When the Mongols raided Syria in force, Baibars commanded the vanguard that hurried north to stop them. On 3 September 1260, Baibars defeated the Mongol army at Goliath’s Spring (Ain Jalut) near Nazareth. The Mongols would return and even reach Jerusalem again, but they had been halted for the first time. Much of Syria fell under Cairo’s rule and Baibars was hailed as the Father of Victory and the Lion of Egypt. He expected a reward – the governorship of Aleppo – but Sultan Qutuz refused. One day, while the sultan was hunting, Baibars (literally) stabbed him in the back. The junta of mamluk amirs granted him the crown as the man who had killed the monarch.

As soon as he took power, Baibars set about the destruction of the rump Crusader kingdom surviving on the Palestinian coast. In 1263, on his way to war, he arrived in Jerusalem. The Mamluks revered the city and Baibars began the Mamluk mission to resanctify and embellish the Temple Mount and the area around it, today’s Muslim Quarter. He ordered the Dome and al-Aqsa to be renovated and in order to compete with Christian Easter, he promoted a new festival, possibly started under Saladin, by building a dome over the tomb of the Prophet Moses near Jericho. For the next eight centuries, Jerusalemites celebrated Nabi Musa with a procession from the Dome of the Rock to Baibars’ shrine where they would gather for prayers, picnics and parties.

Just north-west of the walls, the Sultan built a lodge for his favourite order of Sufis. Like many of the Mamluks, he was a patron of the populist mysticism of the Sufis who believed that passion, chants, saintly cults, dances and self-mortification could bring Muslims closer to God than rigid traditional prayer. Baibars’ closest adviser was a Sufi sheikh with whom he would recite and dance the Sufi zikr. Baibars implicitly trusted the sheikh and did nothing without his approval while allowing him to organize the looting of churches and synagogues and the lynching of Jews and Christians.^* It was a new era: Baibars and his Mamluk successors, who were to rule Jerusalem for the next 300 years, were harsh, intolerant military dictators or juntas. The old age of Islamic chivalry, personified by Saladin, was gone. The Mamluks were a Turkish master-caste who forced Jews to wear yellow turbans, while the Christians had to wear blue. For both, but especially the Jews, their days as protected dhimmi were past. The Turkish-speaking Mamluks disdained Arabs too and only Mamluks were allowed to wear furs or armour or ride a horse in towns. At their gaudy court, the sultans awarded their courtiers colourful titles such as Bearer of the Royal Polo Stick and Amir-to-be-Serenadedby-Music – the game of politics there was as often lethal as it was lucrative.

Baibar’s symbol was a prowling panther which he used to mark his victories – eighty of them have been found on inscriptions between Egypt and Turkey and in Jerusalem, and they still prowl the Lions’ Gate. No symbol was more appropriate for this terrifying predator with the white eye who now embarked on a spree of conquests.

When he had inspected Jerusalem, he attacked Acre which withstood the attack but he was to return often. Meanwhile, one by one, he stormed the other Crusader cities, killing with deranged, sadistic rapture. He received Frankish ambassadors surrounded by Christian heads, crucified, bisected and scalped his enemies, and built heads into the walls of fallen towns. He enjoyed taking risks like scouting incognito into enemy cities, negotiating with his enemies in disguise, and even when he was in Cairo he inspected his offices in the middle of the night, so restless and paranoid that he suffered insomnia and stomach-aches.

Acre alone defied him^* but he marched north to conquer Antioch, whence he chillingly wrote to its prince ‘to tell you what we’ve just done. The dead were heaped up, you should have seen your Muslim enemy trample on the place you celebrate mass, cutting the throats of the monks on the altar, the fire running through your palaces. If you’d been there to see it, you’d have wished you’d never been alive!’ He marched into Anatolia and crowned himself Sultan of Rum. But the Mongols had returned and Baibars rushed back to defend Syria.

On 1 June 1277, he fell victim to his own macabre ingenuity, when he prepared a drink of poisoned qumiz – fermented mare’s milk, relished by Turks and Mongols – for a guest, but then forgetfully drank it himself.¹ His successors finished his work.

On 18 May 1291, the Mamluks stormed the Frankish capital Acre and slaughtered most of the defenders, enslaving the rest (girls were sold for just one drachma each). The title King of Jerusalem was now united with that of King of Cyprus. But it survived only as a picturesque ornament –and it remains so today. There ended the Kingdom of Jerusalem.^* Even the real Jerusalem only just survived – less a city, more of a senescent village, unwalled and half-deserted, raided at will by Mongol horsemen.

In 1267, a pilgrim, the old Spanish rabbi known as Ramban, mourned her eclipse:

RAMBAN

Rabbi Moses ben Nachman, known by his Hebrew acronym RAMBAN or just Nahmanides, was amazed to find that there were only 2,000 inhabitants left in Jerusalem, just 300 Christians and only two Jews, brothers, who were dyers like the Jews under the Crusades. The sadder Jerusalem seemed to the Jews, the more sacred it became, the more poetical: ‘Whatever is more holy’, thought Ramban, ‘is more ruined.’

The Ramban was one of the most inspiring intellectuals of his time, a doctor, philosopher, mystic and Torah scholar. In 1263, he had defended Barcelona’s Jews so adeptly against Dominican accusations of blasphemy that King James of Aragon remarked, ‘I’ve never seen a man defend a wrong cause so well,’ and gave Ramban 300 gold pieces. But the Dominicans then tried to have Ramban executed. As a compromise, the septuagenarian was banished – and set out on his pilgrimage.

He believed that Jews should not just mourn Jerusalem but return, settle and rebuild before the coming of the Messiah – what we might call religious Zionism. Only Jerusalem could soothe his homesickness:

I left my family, I forsook my home, my sons and daughters. I left my soul with the sweet and dear children whom I’ve brought up on my knee. But the loss of all else is compensated for by the joy of a day in thy courts, O Jerusalem! I wept bitterly but I found joy in my tears.

The Ramban commandeered ‘a broken-down house built with marble columns and a handsome dome.^* We took it for a prayer house because the city is a shambles and whoever wants to appropriate ruins does so.’ He also retrieved the Torah scrolls hidden from the Mongols, but soon after his death, the raiders were back.³

But this time there was a difference: some of them were Christians. In October 1299, the Christian King of Armenia, Hethoum II, galloped into Jerusalem with 10,000 Mongols. The city quaked before yet another barbaric sacking and the few Christians ‘hid in caverns out of fright.’ The Mongol Il-Khan had recently converted to Islam yet the Mongols had little interest in Jerusalem for they left her to Hethoum who rescued the Christians, held ‘festivities in the Holy Sepulchre’ and ordered the Armenian St Jameses and the Virgin’s Tomb to be repaired – and then, strangely, after just two weeks, he headed back to see his Mongol master in Damascus. However the century-long duel between Mamluks and Mongols was over and once again the magneticism of Jerusalem’s sanctity drew the world back. In Cairo, a new sultan came to the throne who revered Jerusalem – amongst other things, he called himself ‘Sultan al-Quds.’ Nasir Muhammad dubbed himself The Eagle; his people called him The Exquisite – and as the leading historian of this period writes, ‘he was perhaps the greatest Mamluk sultan’ but also ‘the nastiest.’

NASIR MUHAMMAD: THE EXQUISITE EAGLE

Ever since he was eight, he had been humiliatingly tossed like a royal doll between the warlords of the Mamluk junta. Twice he had been raised to the throne and twice discarded. He was the younger son of a slave who had risen to become a great sultan and his elder brother, the conqueror of Acre, had been assassinated, so when Nasir Muhammad seized the throne for the third time at the age of twenty-six, he was determined to keep it. His sultanic eagle suited his style – aesthetic splendour, aquiline paranoia and the swoop of sudden death. His companions were promoted and enriched – but then strangled, bisected, poisoned without warning and he seemed to prefer horses to people: the limping sultan could supposedly cite the bloodlines of all his 7,800 racehorses and often paid more for a horse than for the most gorgeous slaveboy. Yet everything The Exquisite did – his marriage to a descendant of Genghis Khan, his twenty-five children, his 1,200 concubines – he did with the meticulous magnificence he brought to Jerusalem.

In 1317, he himself arrived on pilgrimage and proceeded to demonstrate to his generals that their sacred duty was to embellish the Temple Mount and the streets around it. Assisted by his best friend and Syrian viceroy, Tankiz, the sultan refortified the Tower of David, adding a Friday mosque for the garrison, and raised monumental colonnades and madrassas on the Temple Mount, reroofing the Dome and al-Aqsa, adding the minaret at the Gate of the Chain, and the Gate of the Cotton-sellers and Cotton-Sellers Market – all of which can be seen today.

Nasir favoured the Sufi route to reach God and built five convents for his orders of mystics. In their gleaming new lodges, they restored some of the holy magic to Jerusalem with their dancing, singing, trances and sometimes even self-mutilation, all to achieve the soaring emotion necessary to reach up towards God.

The sultan’s men got the message: he and his successors exiled outof-favour amirs to Jerusalem where they were expected to spend their ill-gotten wealth on sumptuous complexes that contained palaces, madrassas and tombs. The closer to the Temple Mount, the sooner they would arise on Judgement Day. They constructed enormous arched substructures and then built on top of them. These buildings^* were ingeniously squeezed onto the roofs of earlier ones around the gates of the Noble Sanctuary.^†

Nasir found Jerusalem – or at least the Muslim Quarter – in dust and cobwebs and left her in marble, so when Ibn Battutah visited, he found a city that was ‘large and imposing’. Islamic pilgrims poured into al-Quds, exploring from the hell of Gehenna to the paradise of the Dome and reading the books of fadail that told them ‘a sin committed in Jerusalem is the equivalent of a thousand sins and a good work there equal to a thousand’. He who lived there ‘is like a warrior in the jihad’ while to die there ‘is like dying in heaven’. Jerusalem’s mysticism blossomed to such an extent that Muslims started to circumambulate, kiss and anoint the Rock as they had not done since the seventh century. The fundamentalist scholar Ibn Taymiyya railed against Nasir and these Sufi superstitions, warning that Jerusalem ranked only as a pious visit – a ziyara – not the equivalent of the haj to Mecca. The sultan imprisoned this puritanical dissident six times but to no avail and Ibn Taymiyya provided the inspiration for the harsh Wahabiism of Saudi Arabia and today’s Jihadists.

The Exquisite sultan no longer trusted the Turkish Mamluks who had become the elite so he started to buy Georgian or Circassian slaveboys from the Caucasus to provide his bodyguard and they influenced his decisions in Jerusalem: he granted the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to the Georgians. But the Latins had not forgotten her either: in 1333, he allowed King Robert of Naples (and Jerusalem) to repair parts of the Church and take possession of the Cenacle on Mount Zion where he started a Franciscan monastery.

The ailing tiger is the most dangerous. The sultan fell ill but he had made his friend Tankiz ‘so powerful he became afraid of him’. In 1340, Tankiz was arrested and poisoned. Nasir himself died a year later, succeeded by his many sons. But ultimately, the new Caucasian slaves overthrew the dynasty, founding a new line of sultans who favoured the Georgians in Jerusalem. On the other hand, the Catholic Latins – the heirs of the hated Crusaders – were there on sufferance under the repressive Mamluks whose paroxysms of violence terrorized Christians and Jews alike. When the Cypriot king attacked Alexandria in 1365, the Church was closed down and the Franciscans dragged off to be publicly executed in Damascus. The Franciscan order was allowed to return but the Mamluks built minarets overshadowing the Church and the Ramban Synagogue to emphasize the supremacy of Islam.

In 1399, the dread Central Asian conqueror Tamurlane captured Baghdad and smashed into Syria just as a Mamluk boy-sultan and his tutor set out on their pilgrimage to Jerusalem.⁴