CHAPTER 32
Mystics and Messiahs
1550–1705

THE SULTAN’S JEWISH DUKE:
PROTESTANTS, FRANCISCANS AND THE WALL

Suleiman assigned the taxes of Egypt to pay for his remodelled Jerusalem, and the man in charge of these revenues was Abraham de Castro, the Master of the Mint and tax-farmer who had proven his loyalty by warning the sultan when the local viceroy planned a rebellion. As his name suggests, Castro was a Jewish refugee from Portugal and his role did not come close to that of the super-rich Portuguese Jew who became Suleiman’s adviser and ultimately protector of Palestine and Jerusalem.

The Jewish migration marked the latest chapter in the religious wars. King Ferdinand of Aragon and Sicily and his wife, Queen Isabella of Castile, conquered Granada, the last Islamic principality of mainland Europe, on 2 January 1492. Radiating confidence after this triumph, the Catholic Majesties—the title awarded them by the Pope—celebrated their successful Crusade with two decisions that would have world-historical consequences. First, they summoned a white-haired sailor named Cristóbal Colón. A Genoese innkeeper’s son, this magnetic and obsessional maverick had for years been soliciting their backing for a voyage across the Atlantic to reach India and China. If one of his dreams was this passage westwards to the Indies, the other was the liberation of Jerusalem from the east. From the start he linked the two: “I protested to Your Highnesses that everything gained as a result of this voyage would be spent in the conquest of Jerusalem and Your Highnesses laughed and said the idea pleased them.”^a

The monarchs backed the enterprise on 17 April 1492, appointing Colón (better known by his anglicized name, Christopher Columbus) Admiral of the Ocean Sea. On 12 October, two months after setting off, Columbus discovered the isles of the West Indies and, during his third voyage, the coast of South America. He probably never realized that he had discovered the New World (which, in 1507, came to be named after the Florentine sailor who did, Amerigo Vespucci). Years later, as his gold-rich discoveries developed into the Spanish Empire, Columbus dreamed quixotically of the End Days, and wrote to the Catholic Majesties in his Book of Prophecies that Jerusalem and Mount Zion would be rebuilt by Spaniards. The gold of Ophir—or the Indies—would gild the restored Temple, the court of “the last world emperor.” But in legion ways unimaginable to Admiral Columbus, who died wealthy but as restless as ever in 1506, America and Jerusalem would indeed be interlinked.

On 29 April, twelve days after approving Columbus’s voyage, Isabella and Ferdinand turned to their Jewish problem. Many Jews had been forced to convert to Catholicism, but these conversos were distrusted: Catholics feared that the “devilish tricks and seductions” of secret Jews might taint the pure bloodstream of Christendom. The Inquisition, backed by the Catholic Majesties, had already convicted 13,000 people and burned 2,000 for secret Jewish deviations. Now its Inquisitor Tomás de Torqemarda advised them to offer the Jews a choice of conversion or expulsion. Isabella was a Crusader-queen, devout, grave, iron-willed; Ferdinand, a cynical, cunning and womanizing manipulator on a Christian mission, was Machiavelli’s ideal king. Together the couple, whose marriage created the kingdom of Spain, were the most successful rulers of their age. But in this they miscalculated. Ferdinand had hoped the Jews would convert sincerely. To his surprise, many—somewhere between 75,000 and 150,000—were instead expelled. He banished them from Naples too, and, in the next fifty years, much of western Europe followed suit. For seven centuries, Spain had been the home of a blossoming Arab-Jewish culture, and the center of the Jewish Diaspora.

Now, in the most searing Jewish trauma between the fall of the Temple and the Final Solution, these Sephardic Jews (Sepharad being Hebrew for Spain) fled eastwards to the more tolerant Holland, Poland-Lithuania and the Ottoman empire where they were welcomed by Suleiman, both to boost his economy and to expose how Christianity had denied its Jewish heritage. The Diaspora moved east. From now until the early twentieth century, the streets of Istanbul, Salonica and Jerusalem would ring with the lyrical tones of their new Judaeo-Spanish language, Ladino.

In 1553, Suleiman’s Jewish doctor introduced him to Joseph Nasi, whose family had been forced into a fake conversion to Christianity before they fled via Holland and Italy to Istanbul. There, he won the sultan’s trust and became the confidential agent of his son and heir. Joseph, known to European diplomats as the Great Jew, ran a complex business empire, and served as a sultanic envoy and international man of mystery, an arbiter of war and finance, a mediator between East and West. Joseph believed in the return of the Jews to the Promised Land, and Suleiman granted him the lordship of Tiberias in Galilee where he settled Italian Jews, rebuilt the town and planted mulberry trees to foster a silk industry, the first Jew to settle Jews in the Holy Land. He would build his Jerusalem in Galilee because that ultra-sensitive connoisseur of power knew that the real Jerusalem was the reserve of Suleiman.

Nonetheless Joseph patronized the Jewish scholars in Jerusalem where Suleiman promoted the superiority of Islam and diminished the status of the other two religions with a meticulous care that still guides the city now. Suleiman was fighting Emperor Charles V so that his attitude to the Christians was somewhat tempered by the cynical requirements of European diplomacy. The Jews, on the other hand, mattered little.

They still prayed around the walls of the Temple Mount and on the slopes of the Mount of Olives as well as in their main synagogue, the Ramban, but the sultan favoured order in all things. Discouraging anything that diminished the Islamic monopoly on the Temple Mount, he assigned the Jews a 9-foot street along the supporting wall of King Herod’s Temple for their prayers. This made some sense, because it was adjacent to their old Cave synagogue and next to the Jewish Quarter where the Jews had started to settle in the fourteenth century, today’s Jewish Quarter. But the site was overshadowed by the Islamic Maghrebi neighbourhood; Jewish worship there was carefully regulated; and Jews were later required to have a permit to pray there at all. The Jews soon called this place ha-Kotel, the Wall, outsiders called it the Western or Wailing Wall and henceforth its golden, ashlar stones became the symbol of Jerusalem and the focus of holiness.

Suleiman brought the Christians down to size by expelling the Franciscans from David’s Tomb where his inscription declares: “The Emperor Suleiman ordered this place to be purged of infidels and constructed it as a mosque.” Sacred to all three religions, this Byzantine-Crusader site, an early Jewish synagogue and the Christian Coenaculum, now became the Islamic shrine of Nabi Daoud, the Prophet David, where Suleiman appointed a family of Sufi sheikhs called the Dajanis as hereditary guardians, a position they held until 1948.

The politics of the outside world would always reflect back onto the religious life of Jerusalem: Suleiman soon had reason to favour the Franciscans. In the battle for central Europe, he found that he needed Christian allies—the French—to fight the Habsburgs, and the Franciscans were backed by the kings of France. In 1535, the sultan granted France trading privileges and recognized the Franciscans as the custodians of the Christian shrines. This was the first of the so-called capitulations—concessions to European powers—that later undermined the Ottoman empire.

The Franciscans set up headquarters in St. Saviour’s, close to the Church which ultimately would become a colossal Catholic city-within-a-city, but their rise disturbed the Orthodox. The hatred between Catholics and Orthodox was already venomous but both claimed the paramount custodianship of the Holy Places: the praedominium. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was now shared between eight sects in a Darwinian struggle in which only the strongest could survive. Some were going up, some were going down: the Armenians remained powerful because they were well represented in Istanbul, the Serbs and Maronites were in decline—but the Georgians, who had lost their Mamluk patrons, went into total eclipse.^b

The epic conflict between the emperors of Islam and Christendom, the aggressive Catholicism of the Spanish, and the expulsion of the Jews inspired an unsettling feeling that something was not right in the firmament: people questioned their faith, searched for new mystical ways to get closer to God, and they expected the End Days. In 1517, Martin Luther, a theology professor in Wittenberg, protested against the Church’s sale of “indulgences” to limit people’s time in purgatory, and insisted God existed only in the Bible, not via the rituals of priests or popes. His brave protest tapped into the widespread resentment of the Church which many believed had lost touch with Jesus’ teaching. These Protestants wanted a raw, unmediated faith and, free of the Church, they could find their own way. Protestantism was so flexible that a variety of new sects—Lutherans, the Reform Church, Presbyterians, Calvinists, Anabaptists—soon thrived, while for Henry VIII, English Protestantism was a way to assert his political independence. But one thing united all of them: their reverence for the Bible, which restored Jerusalem to the very centre of their faith.^c

When after forty-five years on the throne Suleiman died on campaign with his army, his ministers propped him up like a waxwork in his carriage and showed him to his soldiers until the succession was safe for Selim, one of his sons by Roxelana. Selim II, known as the Drunkard, owed much to the intrigues of his friend, Joseph Nasi, the Great Jew, who, now living in splendour in his Belvedere Palace, rich from his monopolies of Polish beeswax and Moldavian wine, was promoted to Duke of Naxos. He almost became King of Cyprus. Such was his championing of persecuted or penurious Jews in Europe and Jerusalem that there were whisperings shortly before his death that this ducal Jewish Croesus must be the Messiah. But little came of his plans. Under Selim and his successors, the Ottoman empire was still expanding and, thanks to vast resources and superb bureaucracy, it remained awesomely powerful for another century—but its emperors soon struggled to control distant provinces ruled by overmighty governors and Jerusalem’s tranquillity was periodically shattered by bouts of violence.

In 1590, a local Arab rebel broke into Jerusalem and seized the city, killing the governor. The rebels were defeated and expelled. Jerusalem fell under the sway of two Balkan brothers, Ridwan and Bairam Pasha, Christian slaveboys converted to Islam and trained at the court of Suleiman, and their Circassian henchman, Farrukh. Their families dominated—and abused—Palestine for almost a century. When Farrukh’s son, Muhammad, found himself locked out of Jerusalem in 1625, he stormed the walls with 300 mercenaries, then, closing the gates, he proceeded to torture Jews, Christians and Arabs alike to extort money.

Such outrages only encouraged the strongest of the Christian sects, the Armenians, to canvass and bribe the sultans and brawl in the churches of Jerusalem, all part of their campaign to vanquish the Catholics and win the praedominium. In the first twenty years of the century, the sultans issued thirty-three decrees to defend the embattled Catholics and in just seven years, the praedominium changed hands six times. However, the Christians had become the most lucrative source of business in Palestine: every day, the Custodian of the Church, the chief of the Nusseibeh family, sat on a throne in the courtyard with his armed henchmen charging for access—and the income from the thousands of pilgrims was enormous. At Easter, which Muslims called the Festival of the Red Egg, the governor of Jerusalem set up his throne, and, accompanied by the qadi, the custodian and the entire fully-armed garrison, he charged each of the 20,000 “hell-destined infidels” ten gold pieces that was shared out among the Ottomans and the ulema.

Meanwhile something was afoot amongst the Jews. “Jerusalem,” wrote a Jewish pilgrim, “was more greatly populated than at any time since the first exile” and as Jerusalem’s “fame spread, it became known we lived in peace. Scholars flocked to the gates.” A caravan of Egyptian Jews arrived every Passover. Most of the Jews were Ladino-speaking Sephardis who were secure enough to build the “four synagogues” that became the centre of life in the Jewish Quarter, but some of the pilgrims were eastern Europeans from the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania, known as Ashkenazis (named for Ashkenaz, a descendant of Noah in Genesis, said to be the progenitor of the northern peoples). The turbulence of the world outside encouraged their mysticism: a rabbi named Isaac Luri was teaching the Kabbala, the study of the Torah’s secret codes that would bring them closer to the Godhead. Luri was born in Jerusalem but he made his base in the magical mountain city of Safed in Galilee. The trauma of the Spanish persecutions had forced many Jews to fake conversion to Christianity and live clandestine lives—indeed Kabbala’s holy text, the Book of Zohar, was written in thirteenth-century Castile. The Kabbalists sought Majesty, Fear and Trembling—“the ecstatic experience, the tremendous uprush and soaring of the soul to its highest plane, union with God.” On Fridays, the Kabbalists, wearing white robes, would greet the “bride of God,” the Shekinah, outside the city and then escort the divine presence back to their homes. But inevitably the Kabbalists speculated that the Jewish trauma along with their secret codes and incantations contained the key to redemption: surely the Messiah would soon come to Jerusalem?

Notwithstanding occasional anti-Christian riots, Bedouin ambushes and the extortion of Ottoman governors, the city was left to her own rituals. Yet the feuding of the Orthodox, Armenians and Catholics in this Ottoman backwater only served to confirm the prejudices of a new breed of visitor, part-pilgrim, part-merchant-adventurer: the Protestants had arrived. They tended to be English traders, burning with hostility towards the Catholics, and often with links to the new colonies in America.³

When the English sea captain and merchant Henry Timberlake arrived, the Ottoman governors had never heard of Protestantism or his Queen Elizabeth and he was thrown into jail next to the Holy Sepulchre, released only on payment of a fine. The exuberant memoir of his adventures, A True and Strange Discourse, became a bestseller in Jacobean London. Another of these audacious Englishmen, John Sanderson, factor of the Levant Company, paid his fee to the Turks to enter the Church but was attacked by the Franciscan monks, whose padre “accused me to be a Jew.” The Turks then arrested him, tried to convert him to Islam and took him before the qadi, who searched him and then released him as a Christian.

Acts of fanaticism, both Christian and Muslim, unleashed violence that reveals the real limits of the much-vaunted Ottoman tolerance: the Ottoman governor forcibly closed down the beloved Ramban synagogue at the request of the ulema: Jews were forbidden to pray there and it was converted into a warehouse. When the Franciscans quietly extended their Mount Zion property, rumours spread that they were burrowing to Malta to let in the Christian armies: they were attacked by the qadi and the mob and only rescued by the Ottoman garrison. A Portuguese nun who baptized Muslim children and denounced Islam was burned on a pyre in the courtyard of the Church.^d4

At Easter 1610, a young Englishman arrived who represented not only the new Protestantism but the New World too.

GEORGE SANDYS: THE FIRST ANGLO-AMERICAN

George Sandys, son of the Archbishop of York and a scholar who translated Virgil into English, was appalled by the decay of Jerusalem—“much of which lies waste, old buildings all ruined, the new, contemptible.” Sandys was half-repulsed, half-amused by the Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jews he saw at the Western Wall: “their fantastical gestures exceed all barbarity with ridiculous nodding,” and he thought it “impossible not to laugh.” The God-fearing Protestant was even more disgusted by what he regarded as the vulgar hucksterism of the Orthodox and Catholics. The city was “once sacred and glorious, elected by God for his seat,” but she was now merely a “theatre of mysteries and miracles.”

That Easter, Sandys was horrified by Christians and Muslims alike: he saw the pasha of Jerusalem on his throne outside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Sandys watched as thousands of pilgrims, each carrying pillow and carpet, flocked to spend the night in the Church. On Good Friday, he followed the procession of the padre of the Franciscans, who carried a life-sized waxen model of Jesus on a sheet along the Via Dolorosa before fixing it to a cross. As thousands filled the Church and camped in its courtyard, he watched the ceremony of the Holy Fire, “the savage clamours,” the clash of cymbals, the “women whistling”—conduct “befitting better the solemnities of Bacchus.” When the Fire emerged, the pilgrims ran around “like madmen thrusting the flame among their clothes and into their bosoms, persuading strangers it will not burn them.”

Yet this composer of hymns was a passionate Protestant who revered Jerusalem just as much as the Catholics and Orthodox. Returning to the fundamentals of the Bible itself, he prayed passionately at the tomb of Christ and the graves of the Crusader kings. On his return, he dedicated his book, A Relation of a Journey Begun AD 1610, to the young Charles, Prince of Wales, whose father James I had recently commissioned fifty-four scholars to create an English Bible that was entirely accessible to all. In 1611, the scholars delivered their Authorized Version, which, fusing earlier translations by William Tyndale and others, brought the divine scriptures to life in a masterpiece of translation and of poetical English. This Bible became the spiritual and literary heartland of Anglicanism, England’s singular Protestantism. The Bible became what one writer called “the national epic of Britain,” a story that placed the Jews and Jerusalem at the very heart of British and, later, American life.

Sandys was one link between the real city and the Jerusalem of the New World. In 1621, he set off for America as treasurer of the Virginia Company. During his ten years in Jamestown, he led the raid against the Algonquin Native Americans during which he slaughtered a considerable number: Protestants were no less capable of killing defiant infidels than any other seventeenth-century faith. Sandys was not the only Jerusalem pilgrim-adventurer to be there: Henry Timberlake was in Virginia at the same time. Their pilgrimages to the new Promised Land of America were at least partly inspired by the Protestant vision of the heavenly Jerusalem.

Sandys’ and Timberlake’s Virginians were conservative Anglicans of the sort favoured by James I and his son, Charles. However, the kings could not keep a lid on the expectations of a new fervent, radical Protestantism: the Puritans embraced the fundamental truth of the Bible but with immediate messianic expectations. The Thirty Years War between Catholics and Protestants only intensified the feeling that Judgement Day was near. These were strange times which encouraged wild mystical excitement in all three religions. Harvests failed. The grim reaper, in the guise of epidemics, starvation and religious war, scythed through Europe, killing millions.

Thousands of Puritans escaped Charles I’s Church to found new colonies in America. As they sailed across the Atlantic to seek religious freedom, they read of Jerusalem and the Israelites in their Bibles and saw themselves as the Chosen People blessed by God to build a new Zion in the wilderness of Canaan. “Come let us declare in Zion the word of God,” prayed William Bradford as he disembarked from the Mayflower. The first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, believed “the God of Israel is amongst us” and paraphrased Jeremiah and Matthew to hail his settlement as “a city on a hill”—America as the new Jerusalem. Soon there would be eighteen Jordans, twelve Canaans, thirty-five Bethels and sixty-six Jerusalems or Salems.

The fear of catastrophe and the anticipation of redemption rose together: civil wars scarred France and England while simultaneously in eastern Europe, the Jews of Poland and Ukraine were slaughtered in tens of thousands by the Cossacks of the marauding Hetman Khmelnytsky. In 1649, Charles I was beheaded and Oliver Cromwell emerged as Lord Protector, a millenarian soldier convinced that his Puritans, like their brethren in New England, were the new Chosen People:

“Truly you are called by God as Judah was, to rule with Him and for Him,” he said. “You are at the edge of Promises and Prophecies.” Cromwell was a Hebraist who believed that Christ could not come again unless the Jews returned to Zion and then converted to Christianity. Effectively, the Puritans were the first Christian Zionists. Joanna and Ebenezer Cartwright even suggested the Royal Navy should “transport Izrael’s sons and daughters in their ships to the Land promised by their forefathers for an everlasting Inheritance.”

Many Jews earnestly studied the Kabbala, dreaming that the Messiah would transform their Ukrainian tragedy into redemption. A Dutch rabbi, Menasseh ben Israel, petitioned the Lord Protector, pointing out that the Bible stated Jews had to be scattered to all corners of the world before their Return to Zion would set off the Second Coming—yet they were still banned from England. Therefore Cromwell convened a special Whitehall Conference that ruled it was wrong to exclude “this mean and despised people from the light and leave them among false teachers, Papists and idolators.” Cromwell allowed the Jews to return. After his death, the monarchy was restored and his Puritanic messianism lost its power but its message endured in the American Colonies and amongst the English Nonconformists ready to blossom again in the evangelical awakening two hundred years later. Just after the Restoration, manic excitement convulsed the Jewish world: the Messiah was in Jerusalem—or was he?⁵

THE MESSIAH: SABBATAI ZEVI

He was Mordecai, the unbalanced son of a Smyrnan poultry-dealer who studied the Kabbala. In 1648 he declared himself the Messiah by uttering the Tetragrammaton. This was the unspeakable name of God based on the Hebrew letters YHWH, only spoken once a year on the Day of Atonement by the high priest in the Temple itself. Now he changed his named to Sabbatai Zevi and proclaimed that Judgement Day would come in 1666. He was expelled from Smyrna but gradually as he worked as a trader around the Mediterranean, he won the devotion of a network of wealthy backers. In 1660, he moved first to Cairo and then travelled on to Jerusalem where he fasted, sang songs, handed sweets to children, and performed strange and unsettling acts.

Sabbatai radiated a reckless but deranged magnetism—he was clearly a manic depressive who swung between bouts of infectious self-belief, desperate melancholia and euphoric exaltation that led him to perform demonic, sometimes shamelessly erotic antics. At any other time, he would have been condemned as an obscene and sinful madman but in those catastrophic days, many Jews were already in a state of Kabbalist anticipation. His craziness was surely the true mark of the sacred.

The Jerusalemite Jews were impoverished by Ottoman taxes so they asked Sabbatai to raise funds from his Cairene patrons, which he did. He succeeded in his mission, but not everyone was convinced as he prepared to declare himself Messiah in Jerusalem. After much debate, the rabbis placed him under a ban. Furious, he moved to Gaza which he chose as his sacred city instead of Jerusalem and then launched his messianic ministry in Aleppo.

If his revelation had started as a slow burn, his fame now exploded and spread like quickfire. Jews across the Diaspora, from Istanbul to Amsterdam, celebrated the arrival of the Messiah. In Ukraine, a pretty Jewish girl named Sarah was orphaned by the Cossack massacres but rescued by Christians and taken to Livorno. There she worked as a prostitute which did not shake her conviction that she was destined to marry the Messiah. When Sabbatai heard about her, he married her (in order to emulate the prophet Hosea, who wed a prostitute) and the two toured the Mediterranean together while Jews across Europe were divided between sceptics and frenzied fans who packed their belongings for the journey to greet the Messiah in Jerusalem, whipped themselves, fasted, and rolled naked in mud and snow. In late 1666, the messianic couple rolled into Istanbul where Jews hailed them. Assuming imperial-universal authority, the King of the Jews had appointed his brothers as kings of Rome and Turkey. Now Sabbatai’s ambition to wear the sultan’s crown led to his arrest. The Sultan made the “King of the Jews” an offer he could not refuse: either to perform the miracle of surviving a volley of arrows or to convert to Islam. He chose conversion.

For most, this apostasy^e marked the death of the dream even before Sabbatai died in Montenegrin exile—and Jerusalem’s Jews were happy to see the back of this disruptive charlatan.⁶ The era of Cromwell and Sabbatai was also the golden age of Islamic mysticism in Jerusalem where the Ottoman sultans were patrons of all the leading orders of Sufis whom the Turks called Dervishes. We have seen how Christians and Jews saw the city. Now a most unconventional Ottoman courtier, Dervish scholar, raconteur and bon vivant named Evliya lovingly describes the city’s idiosyncracies from the Islamic angle with the often hilarious flair that makes him probably the greatest of all Islamic travel-writers.

EVLIYA: THE OTTOMAN PEPYS AND FALSTAFF

Even then, Evliya must have been utterly unique: this wealthy traveller, writer, singer, scholar and warrior was the son of the sultan’s goldsmith, born in Istanbul, raised at court, educated by the imperial ulema, and was advised by Muhammad in a dream to travel the world. He became, in his own words, “The World Traveller and Boon Companion to Mankind” and travelled not only the length of the vast Ottoman realm but into Christendom too, obsessively chronicling his adventures in an astonishing ten volumes. Just as Samuel Pepys was writing his diaries in London, Evliya, whether in Istanbul, Cairo or Jerusalem, was compiling his Book of Travels, “the longest and fullest travel account in Islamic literature, perhaps in world literature.” No Islamic writer wrote as poetically about Jerusalem, or as wittily about life.

Evliya lived literally on his wits for he won the favour of Mehmet IV with his irresistible jokes, rhyming couplets, mischievous songs and wrestling and he was able to travel by joining the entourages of Ottoman grandees who recruited him for his religious knowledge and for his exuberant entertainment. His books are partly almanacs of amassed facts, partly anthologies of amazing stories: Evliya Celebi (a title that just means “gentleman”) both fought the Habsburgs and met the Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna, impressing him with his personal knowledge of Jerusalem’s Holy Sepulchre. In battle, he self-deprecatingly recorded his own Falstaffian flight—“fleeing is also an act of courage”—and probably the most “strange and comic” scatological scene in military history.^f

He never married, and refused to take any job in the imperial service that interfered with his free-spirited travelling. He was often given slave-girls and was as witty about sex as he was about everything else: he called it “the sweet calamity,” and the “nice wrestling-match,” cheerfully recording his bout of impotence which was finally cured by an Egyptian snakebroth. He daringly joked that sex was the “greater jihad,” and the most striking thing about him to the modern reader is that here was a devout Muslim who constantly made jokes about Islam that would be unthinkable today.

Though this scholar could recite the entire Koran in eight hours and act as muezzin, unusually he was clean-shaven, irreverent, open-minded and an enemy of fanaticism, whether Islamic, Jewish or Christian. As a “wandering Dervish,’ he was fascinated by Jerusalem “the ancient qibla” which “is at present the Kaaba of the poor (or of the dervishes)”—the capital, the very Mecca of Sufism: he counted seventy Dervish convents, with the largest near the Damascus Gate, varying in origin from India to the Crimea, and described how a contingent from each order performed ecstatic songs and dances of the zikr all night until dawn.

Evliya wrote that the city, which boasted 240 prayer-niches and forty madrassas, was “the object of desire of the kings of all nations” but he was most dazzled by the breathtaking beauty and sanctity of the Dome: “This humble one has travelled for thirty-eight years through seventeen empires and viewed countless buildings but I’ve never seen one that so resembled paradise. When a person enters, one stands dumbfounded and amazed with finger to mouth.” In al-Aqsa, where the preacher mounted the pulpit every Friday brandishing the sword of Caliph Omar and the rituals were serviced by a staff of 800, Evliya observed how the mosaics reflected the rays of the sun so that “the mosque becomes light upon light and the congregants’ eyes shine with reverence as they pray.”

In the Dome “all pilgrims circumambulate the Rock outside the railing,” while the Temple Mount had become a “promenading place embellished with roses, hyacinths, myrtle filled with the intoxicating twitter of nightingales” and he happily embraced most of its legends—that King David had started building al-Aqsa while Solomon “being Sultan of all creatures ordered the demons to complete the construction.” Nonetheless, when he was shown ropes that Solomon had supposedly woven 3,000 years earlier, he could not resist exclaiming to the ulema: “Do you mean to tell me that the ropes used to bind the demons haven’t rotted?”

Naturally he visited the Church at Easter where his reaction resembled that of the English Protestants. He worked out the secret of the Holy Fire, claiming that a hidden zinc jar of naphtha was dripped down a chain by a hidden monk to deliver the annual miracle. The festival itself was just “pandemonium” and the Church “lacks spirituality, more like a tourist attraction” but he chatted to a Protestant there who blamed it on the Orthodox Greeks, “a stupid and credulous people.”

Evliya returned several times before he retired to finish his books in Cairo but he never saw anything to compare with the Dome of the Rock—“verily a replica of a pavilion in paradise.” Not everyone agreed: conservative Muslims were horrified by all the Sufi dancing, miracle-working and the saintly cults that Evliya so enjoyed. “Some of the women unveil their faces, displaying their beauty, their ornaments and perfumes. By God, they were sitting cheek-to-jowl among men!” observed Qashashi, denouncing “excited clamours and dancing,” the playing of tambourines and merchants selling sweets. “These are the days of the wedding-feast of Satan.”

The Ottomans were now in full decline, the sultans shoved back and forth between the demands of European powers, each of them backing their own Christian sect. When the Catholic Austrians and French won the praedominium for the Franciscans, the Russians, a brash new power in Europe and in Jerusalem, lobbied and bribed the Ottomans until they had regained it for the Orthodox. The Franciscans soon got it back again, but three times actual fighting broke out in the Church.^g In 1699, the Ottomans, defeated on the battlefield, signed the Treaty of Karlowitz, which allowed the Great Powers to protect their brethren in Jerusalem—a disastrous concession.⁷

Meanwhile Istanbul’s governors had so repressed Palestine that the peasants rebelled. In 1702, the new Governor of Jerusalem crushed the rebellion and decorated the walls with the heads of his victims. But when he destroyed a village owned by the religious leader—the mufti—of Jerusalem, the city’s qadi denounced him at Friday prayers in al-Aqsa and opened the gates to the rebels.