Illustrations

The Temple Mount – Har haBayit in Hebrew, Haram al-Sharif in Arabic, known in the Bible as Mount Moriah – is the centrepiece of Jerusalem. The Western Wall, the holiest shrine of Judaism, is part of Herod’s western supporting wall of the esplanade, the setting for the Islamic shrines, the Dome of the Rock and the Aqsa Mosque. To many, these 35 acres remain the centre of the world.

In 1994, archaeologists found this stele at Tel Dan on which Hazael, King of Aram-Syria, boasts of his victory over Judaea, the ‘house of David’, thereby confirming David’s existence.

The site of Solomon’s temple has been ravaged and rebuilt so often that little remains, except this ivory pomegranate inscribed ‘to the House of Holiness’. It was probably used as the head of a staff during religious processions in the First Temple.

In 701 BC, King Hezekiah fortified the city against the approaching Assyrian army. His so-called broad wall can be seen in today’s Jewish Quarter.

Meanwhile two teams of his engineers started digging the 533-metre-long Siloam Tunnel to provide water for the city: when they met in the middle, they celebrated with this inscription, which was discovered by a schoolboy in 1891.

Before he turned to Jerusalem, Sennacherib, master of the mighty, rapacious Assyrian empire, stormed Hezekiah’s second city Lachish. The bas-reliefs in his Nineveh palace depict the bloody siege and the punishments suffered by its citizens. Here Judaean families are led away by an Assyrian.

King Darius, seen here in a relief from his Persepolis palace, was the real creator of the Persian Empire that ruled Jerusalem for over two centuries. He allowed the Jewish priests to govern themselves, even issuing this Yehud (Judaea) coin.

After Alexander the Great’s early death, two Greek families vied to control his empire. Ptolemy I Soter hijacked Alexander’s corpse, founded a kingdom in Egypt and stormed Jerusalem. After a century under the Ptolemies, their Seleucid rivals grabbed Jerusalem. The effete, flamboyant King Antiochus IV polluted the Temple and tried to annihilate Judaism, provoking a revolt by Judah the Maccabee , whose family created the new Jewish kingdom that lasted until the arrival of the Romans.

The Roman strongman of the east, Mark Antony, backed a new ruler, Herod, but his mistress Cleopatra, the last Ptolemaic queen, wanted Jerusalem for herself.

Ruthless, murderous and brilliant, Herod the Great, half-Jewish and half-Arab, conquered Jerusalem, rebuilt the Temple (shown here in a model reconstruction) and created the city at its most splendid.

This ossuary, marked ‘Simon the builder of the Sanctuary’, probably contained the bones of his architect. The inscription in Greek from the Temple warning gentiles not to enter the inner courts on pain of death.

Most of the southern and western walls of the Temple Mount, including the shrine, the Wall, are Herodian. The impregnable south-eastern corner was the Pinnacle where Jesus was tempted by Satan. A seam in the wall (just visible on the far right of this picture) seems to show Herod’s giant ashlars to the left and the older, smaller Maccabean stones to the right.

Jesus’ Crucifixion, depicted by van Eyck in this painting, was almost certainly a Roman measure, backed by the Temple elite, to destroy any messianic threat to the status quo.

Herod the Great’s son Herod Antipas, ruler of Galilee, mocked Jesus but refused to judge him.

King Herod Agrippa was an urbane, happy-go-lucky adventurer and the most powerful Jew in Roman history. His friendship with the psychotic Emperor Caligula saved Jerusalem, and he later helped raise Claudius to the throne.

After four years of independence, Titus, the son of the new Roman Emperor Vespasian, arrived to besiege Jerusalem. The city and its Temple were destroyed in the savage fighting: archaeologists have discovered the skeletal arm of young girl trapped in a burned house and the heap of Herodian stones pushed off the Temple Mount by the Roman soldiers as they smashed Herod’s Royal Portico. The Arch of Titus in Rome celebrates his Triumph in which the candelbra, or menorah, symbol of the Maccabees, was displayed, and this coin, inscribed ‘Judaea Capta’, commemorates the victory.

Restless, petulant and talented, Emperor Hadrian banned Judaism and refounded Jerusalem as a Roman town, Aelia Capitolina, which provoked a Jewish rebellion led by Simon Bar Kochba (who issued this coin depicting the restored Temple.

This graffiti (Domine Ivimus ‘We go to the Lord’) was discovered by the Armenians beneath the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in 1978. Possibly dating from around ad 300, does it show that Christian pilgrims prayed beneath Hadrian’s pagan temple?

Constantine the Great was no saint – he murdered his wife and son – but he embraced Christianity and transformed Jerusalem, ordering the building of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which he sent his mother Helena to supervise.

Emperor and philosopher Julian overturned Christianity, restored paganism and gave the Temple Mount back to the Jews, before he was killed fighting the Persians.

The Byzantine emperor Justinian I and his wife Theodora, once a promiscuous showgirl, promoted themselves as universal Christian monarchs and built the colossal Nea Church in Jerusalem.

The Madaba Map shows the magnificence of Byzantine Jerusalem and ignores the Temple Mount which was kept as the symbolic rubbish-heap of Judaism. After the East fell to the Persians, Emperor Heraclius entered the city in 630 through the Golden Gate, which Jews, Muslims and Christians believe to be the setting for the Apocalypse.

Arab conquest: This illustration from Nizami’s poem Khamza shows Muhammad’s Night Flight (Isra) to Jerusalem, riding Buraq, his steed with the human face, followed by his Ascension (Miraj) to converse with Jesus, Moses and Abraham.

Caliph Abd al-Malik (seen here in one of the last Islamic coins to show human features) was the real formulator of Islam and a visionary statesman – yet it was said that his breath was so vile it could kill flies. In 691 he built the first surviving Muslim shrine, the Dome of the Rock, inscribed with the earliest quotations from the Koran.

Abd al-Malik’s Dome affirmed the supremacy of Islam and his Umayyad empire, challenged Christianity, outshone the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and emphasized the Muslims as successors to the Jews by building on the Rock, the foundation stone of the Jewish Temple.

In 1099, after four hundred years of Islamic rule, the Crusaders stormed Jerusalem with an orgy of killing. The city still stank of putrescent flesh six months later.

King of Jerusalem Baldwin I was a tireless warrior and worldly politician, but also a bigamist who was accused of indulging his fleshly appetites.

For the Christians of the Crusader era, Jerusalem was the centre of the world – as shown in many twelfth-century maps, such as this one from Robert the Monk’s Chronicle.

Crusader splendour: the city reached its apogee under Queen Melisende, here seen marrying Fulk of Anjou. He accused her of an affair with Hugh of Jaffa. This exquisite Psalter may have been his marital peace offering.

The curse of Jerusalem: the boy Baldwin IV shows his tutor William of Tyre how he feels no pain during games played with friends, the first sign of leprosy. The Leper King symbolized the decline of the kingdom.

Merciless when he needed to be, patient and tolerant when he could afford to be, Saladin created an empire embracing Syria and Egypt, annihilated the army of Jerusalem and then took the city.

Emperor Frederick II, known as Stupor Mundi – the Wonder of the World to some, the Anti-Christ to others – is seen here entering the Holy City. He negotiated a peace deal that divided Jerusalem between Christians and Muslims.

Saladin and his family re-Islamized Jerusalem often using Crusader spolia. Muslims regard the Dome of the Ascension, built in 1200 on the Temple Mount, as the site of Muhammad’s Miraj, yet it started life as the Crusader Templar baptistery. But it was the Mamluks who really created today’s Muslim Quarter. Sultan Nasir al-Muhammad built the Market of the Cotton Merchants in the distinctive Mamluk style; Sultan Qaitbay commissioned this fountain on the Temple Mount.

Suleiman the Magnificent: a Sultan to the Arabs, a Caesar to the Christians. He never visited Jerusalem but, regarding himself as the second Solomon, he rebuilt most of the walls and gates that we see today.

Suleiman used a Crusader sarcophagus and decoration to build the Fountain of the Gate of the Chain and asserted Ottoman splendour and legitimacy by adding mosaics to the Dome of the Rock.

Charismatic, schizhophrenic, Sabbatai Zevi was rejected in Jerusalem but the self-declared Jewish Messiah excited Jewish hopes – until the Ottoman Sultan forced his conversion to Islam.

The red-bearded Albanian generalissimo Ibrahim Pasha conquered Syria in 1831 and almost took Istanbul on behalf of his father Mehmet Ali. He crushed rebellious Jerusalem brutally and opened up the city to Europeans.

Mehmet Ali received the Scottish painter David Roberts on his way to Jerusalem: his paintings of Oriental scenes, such as this interior of the Church of the Holy Sepuchre, influenced the European view of Palestine.

The plutocrat and Jewish philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore visited Jerusalem seven times and was one of the first to build outside the Old City. In 1860, he started his windmill and cottages. He was what Victorians thought a ‘noble Hebrew’ should be like, but he had his secret scandals too: he fathered a child with his teenaged maid in his eighties.

Much of the Old City was surprisingly empty in this period. This photograph taken in 1861 by the pioneering photographer Yessayi, the Armenian Patriarch, shows the deserted landscape behind the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

From the 1830s, the Sephardic Arab-speaking Jews of Jerusalem were joined by Yiddish-speaking immigrants from the Russian Empire and more Sephardis from the Arab world. European visitors were appalled and fascinated by the squalor and exoticism of Yemenite and Ashkenazi Jews.

Jerusalem was also dominated by Russian Orthodox peasants, outside the Church at Easter), who prayed and caroused with equal fervour, while Jaffa Gate and David Street became the hub of European Jerusalem.

Theodore Herzl, assimilated Viennese journalist and brilliant publicist, was the organizer of political Zionism. In 1898, he approached Kaiser Wilhelm II who ordered Herzl to meet him in Jerusalem. Regarding himself as a German Crusader, the Kaiser wore a specially designed white uniform with a full-length veil attached to his pickelhauber.

The Kaiser visits the Tomb of Kings. In the archaeological race between the Great Powers, the Frenchman de Saulcy had claimed this was King David’s tomb. It is actually the tomb of the first-century Queen of Adiabene.

The American Colonists arrived as a millenarian Christian sect but they soon became beloved philanthropists: here, Bertha Spafford, a daughter of the founders, poses with Bedouin friends.

Jerusalem’s mayor Selim al-Husseini: the very model of an aristocratic Jerusalemite.

Ne’er-do-well aristocratic rogue and huckster, Montagu Parker, later Earl of Morley, whose three-year project to uncover the Ark of the Covenant ended in the sole riot in Jerusalem’s history to unite Jews and Muslims. He only just escaped with his life.

For almost half a century the fixer, aesthete, socialite and oud-player Wasif Jawhariyyeh knew everyone, saw everything, and recorded it all in his peerlessly vivid diary.

Jemal Pasha, the dictator of Jerusalem during the First World War, was a Turkish nationalist with a taste for cigars, champagne, beautiful Jewish courtesans and brutal executions.

Born in a Russian shtetl, Chaim Weizmann was at home with kings and lords. His passionate charm helped convert Britain’s imperial panjandrums, Lloyd George, Churchill and Balfour, to Zionism, while Lawrence of Arabia promoted the Arab cause.

Surrender, 1917: Hussein al-Husseini, mayor of Jerusalem (centre, with walking stick), tried six times to surrender to the British with a sheet tied to a broom.

Mandate: conqueror of Jerusalem, General ‘the Bull’ Allenby (right), and military governor Ronald Storrs celebrate the Fourth of July with Bertha Spafford (left) at the American Colony in 1918.

Lawrence of Arabia and Amir Abdullah follow Winston Churchill through the gardens of Augusta Victoria in 1921: the British Colonial Secretary created the new realm of Transjordan for the Hashemite Abdullah.

The glories of Imperial Jerusalem: Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught, son of Queen Victoria, hands out awards in Barracks Square, though he grumbled when some recipients wore Ottoman and German medals.

High Commissioner of Palestine Herbert Samuel (seated, centre) and Jerusalem governor Storrs (standing, fourth from the right) host the religious hierarchs of the city after a service to celebrate British liberation in 1924.

Sherif of Mecca, King of Hejaz, Hussein meets the early Palestinian nationalist leader Musa Kazem Husseini (left) in Jerusalem.

The sherif never forgave his ambitious sons, Faisal (left), king first of Syria then Iraq, and Abdullah (right), later king of Jordan (seen here in Jerusalem in 1931) for seizing kingdoms of their own.

David Ben-Gurion, working on new Jewish housing in 1924, emerged as the tough Zionist leader just as the Mufti, Amin al-Husseini, emerged as Arab nationalist leader: here he leads the annual Nabi Musa, Jerusalem’s main Islamic festival, on horseback in 1937.

The annual Easter ritual of the Holy Fire (seen from the dome of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre) was crowded, passionate and often fatal.

The prayers at the Western Wall in 1944 to commemorate the dead of the Holocaust show the tiny, constrained area permitted for Jewish worship.

Asmahan: Arab singer, Druze princess, Egyptian film star, spy and temptress of the wartime King David Hotel.

The Mufti Amin al-Husseini meets Hitler who admired his fair hair and blue eyes. His cousin, Abd al-Kadir Husseini, was an aristocratic warrior and Arab hero of 1947–8, whose death was a blow to Palestinian hopes. His funeral on the Temple Mount was a chaotic, tense occasion: some mourners were killed by guns fired in the air.

1946–8: as Arabs and Jews massacred each other’s civilians, Menachem Begin’s Irgun bombed the British headquarters in the King David Hotel. British General Bubbles Barker (bottom right on newspaper) already loathed the Jews, encouraged by his charming, exuberant mistress, the leading Palestinian hostess Katy Antonius.

The battle of Jerusalem in 1948,: Arab soldiers escorting a Jewish prisoner during the fight for the Jewish Quarter; a Jewish girl fleeing from the fighting; Arab Legionaries behind sandbag barricades.

The Arab victor of 1948 King Abdullah of Jordan waves to crowds in Jerusalem, but he paid with his life. His assassin lies dead in the Aqsa mosque. Abdullah’s grandson, King Hussein of Jordan prepares for war in 1967: he reluctantly and disastrously placed his forces under Egyptian command.

Israeli government in crisis: Israeli Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin (left) collapsed under the pressure and had to be sedated; Moshe Dayan (right), brought in as Defence Minister, seen here with Rabin at a cabinet meeting as the crisis intensifies in 1967. Dayan thrice warned Hussein not to attack but held back until Syria and Egypt were defeated.Israeli paratroopers advance towards Lions’ Gate.

Minutes after its capture in June 1967, Israeli soldiers pray at the Western Wall; the sheikh of the Haram al-Sharif watches from the Maghrebi Gate; behind him, Israeli jeeps fight across the Haram, before celebrating the reunification of Jerusalem in front of the Dome.

* The Egyptian Pharaohs aspired to rule Canaan at this time but it is not clear whether they actually did. They may have used these pottery symbols to curse the defiant rulers of their enemies or to express their aspirations. The theories about these fragments have changed several times, showing how archaeology is as much interpretative as scientific. It was long believed that the Egyptians smashed these vases or figures to curse or execrate the places named on them – hence they are known as the Execration texts.

* These are some of the 380 letters, written in Babylonian on baked clay tablets, by local chieftains to the heretic pharaoh Amenhotep IV (1352–1336), who instituted the worship of the sun, instead of the traditional pantheon of numerous Egyptian gods: he changed his name to Akhenaten. The royal archive of his foreign ministry, the House of Correspondence of Pharaoh, was discovered in 1887 at his new capital Akhetaten, now El-Amarna, south of Cairo. One theory suggests that the Habiru were the early Hebrews/Israelites, yet the word actually appears all over the Middle East at this time to describe these marauders – the word simply means ‘vagrant’ in Babylonian. It is possible that the Hebrews descended from a small group of Habiru.

* The Creation appears twice in Genesis 1.1–2.3 and 2.4–25. There are two genealogies of Adam, two flood stories, two captures of Jerusalem, two stories in which God changes Jacob’s name to Israel. There are many anachronisms – for example, the presence of Philistines and Arameans in Genesis when they had not yet arrived in Canaan. Camels as beasts of burden appear too early. Scholars believe the early Biblical books were written by separate groups of writers, one who emphasized El, the Canaanite god, and another who stressed Yahweh, the Israelite one God. yet invaluable source, often the only one available to us – and it is also, effectively, the first and paramount biography of Jerusalem.

* When the Temple stood in Jerusalem, only the high priest, once a year, could utter the tetragram YHWH, and Jews, even today, are forbidden to say it, preferring to use Adonai (Lord), or just HaShem (the unspeakable Name)

† The Israelite invasion of Canaan is a battlefield of complex, usually unprovable theories. But it seems that the storming of Jericho, whose walls were crumbled by Joshua’s trumpets, is mythical: Jericho was more ancient than Jerusalem. (In 2010, the Palestinian Authority celebrated its 10,000th anniversary – though the date is random.) However, Jericho was temporarily uninhabited and there is no evidence of collapsed walls. The Conquest Hypothesis is hard to take literally since the fighting (as recounted in the Book of Joshua) usually takes place in such a small area. Indeed Bethel near Jerusalem is one of the few conquered towns in the Book of Judges that was actually destroyed in the thirteenth century. The Israelites may have been far more peaceful and tolerant than they claimed.

* Just as the word ‘Philistine’ has, thanks to the Bible, entered the language to describe a lack of culture (despite their cultural sophistication), so the people of Gath, known at ‘Gits’, also entered the vernacular. But the Philistines gave their name to the land which became the Roman Palestina, hence Palestine.

† The sling was not then a child’s toy but a powerful weapon: slingers are shown in inscriptions in Beni Hasan in Egypt standing beside the archers in battle. Royal inscriptions in Egypt and Assyria show contingents of slingers were regular units of the imperial armies of the ancient world. It is believed skilled slingers could project specially smoothed stones the size of tennis balls at 100–150mph.

* Was ‘David’ a nom de guerre or regal name? The Bible tells the Goliath story twice, and in the second version it names the Israelite boy-hero as Elhanan: was this David’s real name?

* This is the world’s most excavated archaeological site. The present dig around the Spring by Professor Ronny Reich is the twelfth on this site and has revealed the Canaanite fortifications described in chapter one. In 1867, the English archaeologist Charles Warren discovered a shaft leading from Ophel down to the spring. It was long believed that Warren’s Shaft was man-made and that Jerusalemites lowered buckets to get water. But the most recent dig has changed all that: it seems Warren’s Shaft was natural. In fact, the water flowed to a man-made rock-cut pool, guarded by an enormous tower and walls.

* The scale of David’s city is now much debated between the minimalists who claim that it was just a chieftain’s small citadel and the maximalists who embrace the imperial capital of traditional Bible stories. Until the Tel Dan inscription was uncovered, the extreme minimalists even hinted that David himself never existed, pointing to the lack of any archaeological evidence except the Bible. In 2005 Dr Eilat Mazor announced that she had discovered King David’s palace. This was widely doubted, but her excavations do seem to have uncovered a substantial tenth-century public building, which, along with the Canaanite fortifications and stepped structures, would have formed David’s citadel.

* The pyramid known as Absalom’s Pillar in the Kidron Valley was first mentioned by Benjamin of Tudela in AD 1170 and it does not date from 1000 BC. It is actually a first-century BC tomb. In the Middle Ages, the Jews, banned from the city and even from the Western Wall, prayed close to the Pillar. Even into the early twentieth century, passing Jews used to spit or throw stones at it to signify their disgust for Absalom’s disloyalty.

* Several hundred years later, John Hyrcanus, the Maccabean king, was said to have plundered David’s tomb to pay off a foreign conqueror. Two thousand years after that, during the Crusader Kingdom, workmen repairing the Cenacle on Mount Zion, where Jesus took his last supper, discovered a room that they thought was David’s tomb. This became a site revered by Jews, Christians and Muslims alike. But the real site of David’s tomb remains a mystery.

* Where was the Holy of Holies? This is now a politically explosive question and an intractable challenge for any Israeli–Palestinian peace deal sharing Jerusalem. There are many theories, depending on the size of the Temple Mount which was later extended by Herod the Great. Most scholars believe it stood atop the rock within the Islamic Dome of the Rock. Some argue that this mysterious yellow, twisted cavern was originally a burial cave of around 2000 BC, and there seem to be folk memories of this: when exiles returned from Babylon around 540 BC, they were said to have found Araunah the Jebusite’s skull. The Mishnah, the compilation of oral Jewish traditions of the second century ad, calls it the Tomb of the Abyss, hollowed for ‘fear of any grave in the depths’. The Muslims called it the Well of Souls. Jews and Muslims believe this was where Adam was created and Abraham almost sacrificed Isaac. It is likely that in AD 691, the caliph Abd al-Malik chose the site for the Dome at least partly to create an Islamic successor to the Temple. Jews regard the Rock as the foundation stone of the Temple.

* The Bible cites the fortresses of Megiddo, Gezer and Hazor as Solomon’s store-cities. But in the debates of the twenty-first century, revisionists, led by Professor Israel Finkelstein, argue that they are actually Syrian-style palaces built a hundred years later, leaving Solomon without any buildings. Other archaeologists challenge the revisionist dating. The black-onred pottery found at these sites belongs in the late tenth century BC, roughly the time of Solomon’s reign and Pharaoh Sheshonq’s invasion, nine years after the king’s death, while exciting new analysis of the buildings suggests they were indeed huge, tenth-century stables, and therefore plausibly evidence of Solomon’s cavalry power and Mediterranean horse-trading operations. The debate continues.

* The Kings of Israel and Judah marched together against Mesha, the rebellious Moabite king who, in a stele, declared that he sacrificed his own son and successfully repelled the invaders. Almost 3,000 years later, in 1868, some Bedouin showed a German missionary a black basalt stone which unleashed an archaeological race between Prussia, France and England, whose agents intrigued to win this prestigious imperial prize. One tribe of Bedouin tried to destroy the stone, but finally the French won. It was worth the struggle. Sometimes contradicting, sometimes confirming the Bible, Mesha admits that Israel had conquered Moab but states that he rebelled against King Ahab and then defeated Israel and Judah – which (according to the latest translation) he calls ‘House of David’, again confirming David’s existence. He then boasts that he took from a captured Israelite town ‘the vessels of Yahweh,’ the first mention of the Israelite God outside the Bible.

* The Bible portrays King Jehu of Israel as the restorer of Yahweh and smasher of the idols of Baal. But the Bible is more interested in his relations with God than in the power politics now revealed by archaeology: Jehu probably had help from Damascus because its king Hazael left the stele at Tel Dan in northern Israel boasting that he had defeated previous kings of the House of Israel and the House of the David, the archaeological proof that King David existed. But Jehu also had to become a vassal of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III. On the Black Obelisk, found at Nimrud, now in the British Museum, Jehu makes his low obeisance to Shalmaneser who sits, with his braided beard, diadem, embroidered robes and sword, before the winged symbol of Assyrian power, sheltered by a parasol held by a courtier. ‘I received’, says Shalmaneser, ‘silver, gold, a gold bowl, a gold vase, gold buckets, tin, a staff, hunting spears.’ This kneeling Jehu is the first historical image of an Israelite.

* The ancient Jewish communities of Iran and Iraq claim descent from the Ten Tribes of Israel deported by the Assyrians as well as from those deported later by the Babylonians. The latest genetic research proves that these Jews were indeed separated from other Jewish communities around 2,500 years ago. Yet the quest for these vanished Israelites has spawned a thousand fantasies and theories: the Ten Tribes have been ‘discovered’ in various unlikely places – from the Native Americans of North America to the English.

* Two new suburbs developed outside the walled City of David and the Temple Mount: the Makhtesh in the Tyropaean Valley that ran between Mount Moriah and the western hill, and another, the Mishneh, on the western hill itself, today’s Jewish Quarter. High officials were buried in the tombs around the city: ‘This is [the tomb] of [ … ]yahu, the Royal Steward,’ reads a tomb in Silwan village. ‘There is no gold or silver here, only his bones and the bones of his slavewife – cursed be anyone who opens this tomb.’ The curse did not work: the tomb was plundered and is today a chicken coop. But this royal steward may actually have been Hezekiah’s courtier criticized by Isaiah for building a grandiose tomb: the name could, read ‘Shebnayahu’.

* In 1880, Jacob Eliahu, aged sixteen, son of Jewish converts to Protestantism, invited a school friend to dive the length of the Siloam Tunnel. They were both fascinated by the biblical story of 2 Kings 20.20: ‘And the rest of the acts of Hezekiah, and all his might, and how he made a pool, and a conduit, and brought water into the city, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah?’ Jacob started from one end and his friend from the other, feeling the workers’ ancient chisel-marks with their fingers. When the marks changed direction Jacob realized he was at the place where the two teams had met and there he found the inscription. He emerged at the other end to find that his friend had long since given up; and he terrified the local Arabs who believed the Tunnel contained a djinn or dragon. When he told his headmaster, word spread and a Greek trader crept into the Tunnel and roughly cut out the inscription, breaking it. But the Ottoman police caught him; and the inscription is now in Istanbul. Jacob Eliahu then joined the evangelical American Colonists and was adopted by the Colony’s founding family, the Spaffords. Jacob Spafford became a teacher at their school, instructing his pupils about the Tunnel, never mentioning that he was the boy who had found the inscription.

* There are hints of child sacrifice in Genesis and Exodus, including Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac. Human sacrifice was long associated with Canaanite and Phoenician ritual. Much later, Roman and Greek historians ascribed this dastardly practice to the Carthaginians, those descendants of the Phoenicians. Yet very little evidence was discovered until the early 1920s, when two French colonial officials in Tunisia found a tophet, with buried urns and inscriptions in a field. They bore the letters MLK (as inmolok, offering) and contained the burned bones of children and the telling message of a victim’s father reading: ‘It was to Baal that Bomilcar vowed this son of his own flesh. Bless him!’ These finds may have coincided with the time of Manasseh, implying that the biblical stories were plausible. Molok (offering) was distorted into the biblical ‘moloch’, the definition of the cruel idolatrous god and, later in Western literature, particularly in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, one of Satan’s fallen angels. Gehenna in Jerusalem became not just hell, but the place where Judas invested his ill-gotten silver pieces and during the Middle Ages the site of mass charnel-houses.

* Josiah’s reforms were a vital stepin the development of Judaism. Two tiny silver scrolls were found in a Valley of Hinnom tomb of this period: inside was etched the priestly prayer of Numbers 6.24–6 which remains part of the Jewish service today. ‘For YHWH is our restorer and rock. May YHWH bless you and keepyou and make his face shine.’

* Royal courtiers lived and worked atopthe City of David. An archive of forty-five bullae – clay seals hardened by being burned in the destruction of the city – has been found in a house there, which archaeologists call the House of the Bullae. This was obviously a secretariat of the king: one bulla bears the inscription ‘Gemaraiah son of Shaphan’, the name of the royal scribe of King Jehoiakim in the Book of Jeremiah. Some time during the crisis, the king died, to be succeeded by his son, Jehoiachin.

* Shattered sherds bearing messages – known as ostraca – have been found by archaeologists buried in layers of ashes at the city gate of the fortress of Lachish: they give a human glimpse of the unstoppable Babylonian advance. Lachish and another fortress, Azekah, held out the longest, communicating with each other and Jerusalem by fire-signals. At Lachish, the beleaguered Judaean commander Yaush received reports from his outposts as they were gradually destroyed. His officer Hoshayahu soon noted that the fire-signals no longer came from Azekah. Then Lachish too was destroyed in heavy fighting.

* Nothing has been found of the Temple – except the tiny ivory head of a sceptre or staff used in processions, carved into the shape of a pomegranate, dating from the eighth century and inscribed: ‘Belonging to the house of holiness’ (though some claim this fragment is not authentic). But Jeremiah was surprisingly accurate: Nebuchadnezzar’s henchmen set up headquarters at the city’s Middle Gate to organize Judah, and their names in the Book of Jeremiah are confirmed by a text found in Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar appointed a royal minister, Gedaliah, as puppet ruler over Judah, but as Jerusalem was in ruins he ruled from Mizpah to the north, advised by Jeremiah. Judaeans rebelled and murdered Gedaliah, and Jeremiah had to flee to Egypt, where he vanishes from the story.

* Between 586 and 400 BC, the mysterious writers of the Bible, scribes and priests living in Babylon, refined and collated the Five Books of Moses, known as the Torah in Hebrew, combining the different traditions of God, Yahweh and El. The so-called Deuteronomists retold the history and recast the law to show the fecklessness of kings and the supremacy of God. And they incorporated stories inspired by Babylon such as the Flood, so similar to the Epic of Gilgamesh, the origins of Abraham in nearby Ur and of course the Tower of Babel. The Book of Daniel was written over a long period: some parts were definitely written in the early Exile, other parts later. We do not know if there was an individual named Daniel or whether he is a composite. But the book is also full of historical confusions that archaeologists have clarified with the helpof the evidence found in Babylon during nineteenth-century excavations.

* One of Cyrus’ decrees of tolerance, later found inscribed on a cylinder, won him the soubriquet Father of Human Rights, and a copy now stands at the entrance of the United Nations in New York. But he was no liberal. For instance, when the Lydian capital of Sardis rebelled, he slaughtered thousands of its inhabitants. Cyrus himself believed in Ahura Mazda, the winged Persian god of life, wisdom and light in whose name the prophet of the Aryan Persians, Zoroaster, had decreed that life was a battle between truth and lie, fire versus darkness. But there was no state religion, just this polytheistic vision of light and dark that was not incompatible with Judaism (and later Christianity). Indeed the Persian word for heaven –paridaeza – became our own ‘paradise.’ Their priests – the magi – gave us the word ‘magic’, and the three eastern priests said to have heralded the birth of Christ.

† This is a biblical exaggeration. Many thousands chose to live as Jews in Iraq and Iran. Babylonian Jews remained a rich, powerful and numerous community under the Seleucids, Parthians and Sassanids upto the Abbasid caliphate and the Middle Ages. Babylon became a centre of Jewish leadershipand learning almost as important as Jerusalem until the Mongol invasion. The community recovered under the Ottomans and British. But persecutions started in the 1880s in Baghdad (which was said to be one third Jewish) and intensified under the Hashemite monarchy. In 1948, there were 120,000 Jews in Iraq. When the shah was overthrown in 1979, there were 100,000 Iranian Jews. The majority of both communities emigrated to Israel. Twenty-five thousand Iranian Jews and a mere fifty Iraqi Jews remain today.

* Darius raided Central Asia east of the Caspian, and probed India and Europe, attacking Ukraine and annexing Thrace. He built his sumptuous palace-capital of Persepolis (in southern Iran), promoted the religion of Zoroaster and Ahura Mazda, organized the first world currency (the Daric), raised a navy of Greeks, Egyptians and Phoenicians, and created the first real postal service, setting up inns every 15 miles along the 1,678 miles of the King’s Road from Susa to Sardis. The achievements of his thirty-year reign make him the Augustus of the Persian empire. But even Darius reached his limits. Shortly before his death in 490 BC, he tried to push into Greece, where he was defeated at the Battle of Marathon.

* The Samaritans were already developing their separate semi-Jewish cult, based on a Judaism formed before the introduction of the new Babylonian rules. Under the Persians, Samaria was ruled by Sanballat’s dynasty of governors. Their exclusion from Jerusalem encouraged them to set up their own Temple at Mount Gerizim and they embarked on a feud with the Jews and Jerusalem. Like all family rivalries, it was based on the hatred of tiny differences. The Samaritans became second-class citizens, despised by the Jews as heathens, hence Jesus’ surprising revelation that there was such a thing as a ‘good Samaritan’. Around a thousand Samaritans still live in Israel: long after the destruction of the end of the Jewish cult of sacrifice, the Samaritans in the twenty-first century still annually sacrifice the Passover lamb on Mount Gerizim.

* Tanakh was a Hebrew acronym for Law, Prophets and Writings, the books which the Christians later called The Old Testament.

* Joseph’s family were Jews of mixed origin, perhaps descendants of a Tobiah the Ammonite who had opposed Nehemiah. His father Tobiah was a magnate close to Ptolemy II – the papyrus archive of a royal official named Zenon shows him trading with the king – and ruled huge estates in Amnon (today’s Jordan).

* Antiochus was the heir of the other great dynasty descended from the generals who carved up Alexander the Great’s empire. When Ptolemy I secured his own kingdom in Egypt, he backed Antiochus’ ancestor Seleucos, one of Alexander’s officers, in his bid to seize Babylon. As gifted as Ptolemy, Seleucos reconquered most of Alexander’s Asian territories – hence the Seleucid title King of Asia. Seleucos ruled from Greece to the Indus – only to be assassinated at his apogee. The family had been promised Coele-Syria, but Ptolemy had refused to hand it over: the result was a century of Syrian wars.

† This was the age of the war elephant. Ever since Alexander had returned from his Indian campaign with a corps of elephants, these armoured pachyderms had become the most prestigious (and expensive) weapons for any self-respecting Macedonian king – though they often trampled their own infantry instead of the enemy’s. Meanwhile in the west, the Carthaginians, descendants of Phoenicians from Tyre, and the Romans, were fighting for mastery of the Mediterranean. Hannibal, the brilliant Carthaginian general, invaded Italy, having marched his elephants over the Alps. Antiochus deployed Indian elephants, the Ptolemies had African elephants and Hannibal used the smaller, now extinct species from the Atlas Mountains in Morocco.

* Some historians believe Simon actually ruled under Ptolemy I. The sources are contradictory but he was, most likely, Antiochus the Great’s contemporary Simon II, who rebuilt the fortifications, repaired the Temple and added a giant cistern on the Temple Mount. His tomb stands north of the Old City in the Palestinian Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood. During the Ottoman centuries, a ‘Jewish picnic’ was held there annually which was celebrated by Muslims, Jews and Christians together, one of the festivals shared by all sects in the days before nationalism. Today, the tomb is a Jewish shrine at the centre of Israeli plans to build a nearby settlement. Yet the tomb, like so many sites in Jerusalem, is itself a myth: it is neither Jewish nor the resting-place of Simon the Just. Built 500 years later, it was the tomb of a Roman lady, Julia Sabina.

* The chief Jewish festivals – Passover, Weeks and Tabernacles – were still developing. Passover was the spring festival that now combined the two old feasts of the Unleavened Bread and the story of the Exodus. Gradually Passover replaced Tabernacles as the main Jewish festival in Jerusalem. Tabernacles survives today as Sukkot, when Jewish children still build a harvest hut decorated with fruit. Temple duties were divided by rota between the Levites, descendants of the tribe of Levi, and the priests (descendants of Moses’ brother Aaron, themselves a sub-group of the Levites).

* Jason fled again, taking refuge with his backer, Hyrcanus the Tobiad prince. Hyrcanus had ruled much of Jordan for forty years, remaining an ally of the Ptolemies even when they lost Jerusalem. He fought campaigns against the Arabians and built a luxurious fortress at Araq e-Emir with beautiful carvings and ornamental gardens. When Antiochus conquered Egypt and retook Jerusalem, Hyrcanus ran out of options: the last of the Tobiads committed suicide. The ruins of his palace are now a tourist site in Jordan.

* The Book of Daniel is a collection of stories, some from the Babylonian Exile, others from the persecutions of Antiochus: the fiery furnace may describe his tortures. Daniel’s new vision of an enigmatic ‘Son of Man’ inspired Jesus. The cult of martyrdom would be replayed in the early centuries of Christianity.

* His family is correctly known as the Hasmonean dynasty, but for simplicity they are identified in this book as the Maccabeans. The Maccabee became the medieval prototype for Christian chivalry alongside King Arthur and Charlemagne. Charles ‘Martel’ – the Hammer – who defeated the Arabs at the Battle of Tours in 732; Richard the Lionheart in the twelfth century and Edward I (1272–1303) promoted themselves as latterday Maccabees. Later, Rubens painted Judah the Maccabee; Handel wrote an oratorio dedicated to him. The Maccabees have especially inspired Israel, where many of the football teams are named after them. As the heroes of Hanukkah, Jews traditionally regard them as freedom-fighters against a genocidal tyrant, a precursor of Hitler. But some have suggested another view, inspired by today’s struggle between American democracy and jihadist terrorism, in which the Greeks are the civilized ones fighting Maccabee religious fanatics who resemble a Jewish Taleban.

* This new high priest was not even a member of the Zadokite House of Onias. Its rightful heir was Onias IV, who now fled with his followers to Egypt where he was welcomed by King Ptolemy VI Philometer. Philometer allowed him to build a Jewish temple on the site of a disused Egyptian shrine at Leontopolis in the Nile Delta, and there he created his own Jerusalem, still known as Tell al-Jahudiya – Hill of the Jews. These Jewish princes became powerful military commanders in Egypt. Onias’ temple lasted until Titus ordered its destruction in AD 70.

* Philometer’s successor was hostile to the Jews because Onias and the Alexandrian Jews had supported Philometer. Even by the family’s vicious standards, Ptolemy VIII Euergetes, nicknamed Fatso (Physkon) by the Alexandrian mob, was a monster. Fatso took revenge on the Jews in Egypt, massing his elephants to trample them, but, perhaps in a divine miracle, the elephants trampled the king’s entourage instead. The climax of his cruelties was the murder of his own fourteen-year-old son who totally trusted his father: Fatso had the boy’s head, legs and hands cut off and sent to his own mother, Cleopatra II. When another of the family, Cleopatra Thea who married the Syrian king Demetrius II, decided to murder her own son, she offered him a cup of poison. But the son forced the mother to drink it. Such was family life among the Ptolemies.

† No trace has been found of the Acra. Some scholars believe it stood just south of Temple Mount. Herod the Great was to extend the Temple Mount, so probably the razed hill of the Acra is now beneath the Temple platform where al-Aqsa Mosque stands. For those who question why so little survives from the reign of, say, King David, this demonstrates that enormous constructions can leave no archaeological trace.

* And with a new nickname, Hyrcanus, surely the result of his Parthian adventures, even though he never reached Hyrcania on the Caspian. He consolidated his power abroad with a new Roman alliance and in Jerusalem through the backing of the rich Temple elite, the Sadducees, descendants of the house of Zadok – hence their name.

* The city wall extended from the Temple Mount to the Siloam Pool and thence to the Citadel, where the foundations of his towers remain today, and where one can see little residential houses of Maccabean Jerusalem. Sections of his wall survive at various places: on the south slope of Mount Zion, just west of the Catholic Cemetery, there is a place where John’s wall still stands next to the bigger stones of Hezekiah’s and the much later ones of the Byzantine empress Eudocia. In 1985, Israeli archaeologists discovered a subterranean aqueduct and large pool built by John and the Maccabees. British, German and French archaeologists in the nineteenth century had uncovered this Struthion Pool underground in 1870 when the Sisters of Zion convent was built on the Via Dolorosa. The aqueduct reveals how the Struthion Pool was supplied and, beneath the Convent, close to the Via Dolorosa, visitors can walk along this aqueduct, now part of the Temple Tunnel. The Maccabees also built a bridge across the deepvalley between the Temple Mount and the Upper City. John himself resided in his Baris stronghold, north of the Temple, but he also probably started to build a palace in the expanding Upper City.

* When he attacked the Greek city Ptolemais, Ptolemy IX Soter, then ruling in Cyprus, intervened and defeated Alexander. But he was rescued by Jewish connections: Soter was at war with his mother Cleopatra III, Queen of Egypt, who feared her son’s power in Judaea. Cleopatra’s commander was the Jewish Ananias, the son of the ex-high priest Onias, who rescued the Maccabean king. Cleopatra considered annexing Judaea, but her Jewish general advised against this, and she was in no position to take on her own army.

* The Idumeans, the Biblical Edomites, tough pagan warriors based to the south of the Jerusalem, had been converted en masse to Judaism by John Hyrcanus. Antipater was the son of a convert to Judaism who had been appointed Governor of Edom by King Alexander, though the family originated from the Phoenician coastal cities.

* Pacorus was the son and heir-apparent of the Arsacid King of Kings, Orad II, who had defeated Crassus. The Parthians had expanded from their homeland east of the Caspian, breaking away from the Seleucids around 250 BC, to create a new empire that challenged Roman power. Pacorus’ army was spearheaded by his Pahlavan knights, who wore heavy armour and loose trousers and wielded 12-foot lances, axes and maces. Charging at full tilt, these cataphracts had smashed the Roman legions at Carrhae. They were supported by mounted archers famous for the speed and accuracy of their over-the-shoulder marks-manship–the ‘Parthian shot’. But Parthia had a feudal flaw: its kings were often at the mercy of its overmighty, insubordinate nobles.

† Antigonos, son of the late king Aristobulos II, used Greek and Hebrew names. His coins show the Temple menorah – the candelabra, his family’s symbol – with ‘King Antigonos’ in Greek; the reverse has the Temple shewbread table with ‘Mattathias the High Priest’ in Hebrew.

* The murdered counsellors were probably buried in the ornate Sanhedrin tomb that still stands north of the Old City, decorated with pomegranates and acanthus leaves. As for his mountain strongholds, the most famous are: Masada, where the last Jewish fighters against Rome committed mass suicide in AD 73; Machaerus, where John the Baptist was beheaded by one of Herod’s sons; and the man-made mountain of Herodium, where Herod and his sons were buried.

† These were some of the most valuable luxury brands of the ancient Mediterranean: Jericho palms produced date wine; the balsam groves produced Balsam of Gilead, prized for its cures for headaches and cataracts but also for its most expensive scent. Cleopatra also annexed most of the coast including Joppa (Jaffa), leaving Herod with Gaza as his only port.

* This Syrian Greek scholar became Herod’s confidant as well as Augustus’ personal friend. He must have been a supple courtier indeed to survive the murderous courts of both Cleopatra and Herod. He later wrote biographies of both Augustus and Herod, for which his chief source was Herod himself. Nikolaus’ Herodian biography has vanished but it provided Josephus’ main source and it is hard to imagine a better one. As for Nikolaus’ former royal pupils, Augustus had Caesarion, the son of Caesar and Cleopatra, murdered. But the other three children were brought upin Rome by the emperor’s sister, Antony’s ex-wife Octavia. The eventual fate of the boys is unknown but the girl, Cleopatra Selene, married Juba II, King of Mauretania. Her son King Ptolemy of Mauretania was executed by Caligula. There ended the Ptolemaic dynasty 363 years after Alexander the Great.

* This might have been named after a later wife, also called Mariamme. But it must have reminded him and everyone else of the Maccabean princess. Today’s Tower of David, which has nothing to do with David, is based on Herod’s Hippicus Tower. After Titus’ destruction of the city, it remained until Ottoman times the chief stronghold of Jerusalem. No other building in Jerusalem so reveals the embroidered nature of the city’s development as the Citadel, where archaeologists have uncovered Judaean, Maccabean, Herodian, Roman, Arab, Crusader, Mamluk and Ottoman ruins.

† Herod’s wealth came from his landholdings all over the Middle East. These produced sheep, cattle (raised in Jordan and Judaea), wheat and barley from Galilee and Judaea, fish, olive oil, wine and fruit, lilies and onions from Ashkelon (hence shallots are Ashkelon onions), pomegranates from Geba, north of Jerusalem, figs from Joppa, date palms and balsam from Jericho. Herod owned a half to two-thirds of his kingdom; he taxed and exported Nabataean spices; and he was also a mining magnate, paying Augustus 300 talents for rights to half the copper mines of Cyprus. While he exported his local wines, he himself drank the Italian vintages. Even on his death, after a lifetime of building and giving Rome huge sums, he still left over 1,000 talents or a million drachmas to Augustus, and there was much more than that for his family.

* Herod would have used the latest technology. The Egyptians had known how to move vast stones to build the pyramids as early as 4000 BC. The Roman engineer Vitruvius had created enormous devices – wheels, sledges and cranes – to transport such stones. Large wheels over 13 feet in diameter served as axles pulled by teams of oxen. Then there were winches – horizontal rotating beams with attached poles and cranks which enabled teams of ten men or fewer to use them. This way, eight men could lift 1½ tons.

* ‘Speak unto the children of Israel,’ said God to Moses and Aaron in Numbers 19, ‘that they bring thee a red heifer without spot, wherein is no blemish.’ The heifer would be sacrificed on a pyre of cedar and hyssop overlaid with a strand of scarlet thread and its ashes mixed with holy water. According to the Mishnah, this had only happened nine times, and on the tenth, the Messiah would come. Since the millennial excitement of the Israeli conquest of Jerusalem in 1967, fundamentalist Christian evangelists and Jewish redemptionists believe that two of the three essential preconditions for the Apocalypse and coming of the Messiah (or the Second Coming for the Christians) have been met: Israel has been restored and Jerusalem is Jewish. The third precondition is the restoration of the Temple. Some Christian fundamentalists and the tiny factions of redemptionist Orthodox Jews, such as those of the Temple Institute, believe that this is possible only when the Temple Mount is purified with the sacrifice of the red heifer. Therefore even today a Pentecostal preacher from Mississippi named Clyde Lott is, in alliance with Rabbi Richman of the Temple Institute, trying to breed the red heifer from a herd of 500 Red Angus imported from Nebraska to a farm in the Jordan Valley. They believe they will breed the ‘heifer that will change the world’.

* Herod’s family tree is complicated because the family were so endogamous, repeatedly intermarrying and remarrying within the Herodian and Maccabee clans trying to reconcile them: he married his brother Pheroras to Mariamme’s sister and his eldest son Antipater to the daughter of the last King Antigonos (beheaded at his request by Antony). But the marriages were interspersed with executions: Salome’s first two husbands were killed by Herod. Herodians also married into the royal families of Cappadocia, Emesa, Pontus, Nabataea and Cilicia, all Roman allies. At least two marriages were cancelled because the husband would not convert to Judaism and be circumcised.

* Doctors have debated his symptoms ever since. The most likely diagnosis is that Herod suffered hypertension and arteriosclerosis complicated by progressive dementia and by congestive heart and kidney failure. The arteriosclerosis led to venous congestion, aggravated by gravity, so that fluid collected in his feet and genitals, becoming so severe that the fluid bubbled through the skin; the blood flow became so poor that necrosis of the flesh – gangrene – developed. The bad breath and itching were caused by kidney failure. The penile/scrotal gangrene provided ideal material for the laying of eggs by flies that hatched as maggots. It is possible that the genital worms were hostile propaganda, symbolizing divine vengeance on an evil king: Antiochus IV Epiphanes, Herod’s grandson, Agrippa I, and many other sinners including Judas Iscariot, were assigned similar worm-infested, bowel- and scrotum-exploding exits.

* Jesus’ birth is historically challenging, the Gospels contradictory. No one knows the date but it was probably before Herod’s death, in 4 BC which means Jesus died in his early thirties if he was crucified in AD 29–30, forty if it was AD 36. The story of the census summoning the family to Bethlehem is not historical because Quirinius’ census took place after Herod’s successor, Archelaus, was deposed in AD 6, almost ten years after Jesus’ birth. In recounting the journey to Bethlehem and his Davidic genealogy, Matthew’s Gospel provides Jesus with royal birth and fulfilment of prophecy – ‘for thus it is written by the prophet.’ The Massacre of the Innocents and the escape to Egypt are clearly inspired by the Passover story: one of the Ten Plagues was the Killing of the First Born. Wherever Jesus was born, it is likely that the family did travel to the Temple for the sacrifice. Muslim tradition, expanded on by the Crusaders, believes that Jesus was raised in the chapel beneath al-Aqsa Mosque, Jesus’ Cradle. Jesus’ family is mysterious: after the birth, Joseph simply disappears from the Gospels. Matthew and Luke state that Mary remained a virgin and Jesus was fathered by God (an idea familiar in Roman and Greek theology, and also suggested in Isaiah’s prophecy of Emmanuel). But Matthew, Mark and John name Jesus’ brothers: James, Joses, Judas and Simon along with a sister, Salome. When Mary’s virginity became Christian dogma, the existence of these other children became inconvenient. John mentions ‘Mary the wife of Cleophas’. If Joseph died young, Mary may have married this Cleophas and had more children because, after the Crucifixion, Jesus was succeeded as leader first by his brother James then by ‘Simon son of Cleophas’.

* Herod’s tomb was discovered in 2007 by Professor Ehud Netzer who found an ornate red sarcophagus, decorated with flowers, smashed to pieces almost certainly by the anti-Herodian Jewish rebels of AD 66–70. Two other sarcophagi are white, decorated with flowers: do they belong to his sons? Herodium was another miracle of Herod’s construction – a man-made mountain 210 feet in diameter with a massive luxurious palace on top containing a domed bathhouse, towers, frescoes and pools. Herod’s pyramidal tomb was on the Herodium Hill below the eastern tower of the fortress, also destroyed in 66–70

* One of these ‘kings’ was Simon, a hulking slave belonging to Herod, soon beheaded by the Romans. Simon may be the subject of the so-called Gabriel’s Revelation, a stone inscription found in southern Jordan in which the Archangel Gabriel acclaims a ‘prince of princes’ called Simon who will be killed but will rise again ‘in three days’ when ‘you will know that evil will be defeated by justice. In three days you will live, I, Gabriel, command you.’ The details – resurrection and judgement three days after a prophet’s death – predate Jesus’ crucifixion by over thirty years. After killing Simon, Publius Quinctilius Varus commanded the German frontier. Some ten years later, in AD 9, he was ambushed, losing three legions. This disaster spoiled the last years of Augustus, who supposedly wandered his palace crying, ‘Varus, give me back my legions!’

† All three sons adopted the name ‘Herod’, causing much confusion in the Gospels. Archelaus was married but fell in love with Glaphyra, that daughter of the King of Cappadocia who had been married to Herod and Mariamme’s son Alexander. After Alexander was executed, she married King Juba of Mauretania and after his death returned to Cappadocia. Now she married Archelaus.

* Salome the dancer symbolizes cold-hearted caprice and female depravity, but the two Gospels Mark and Matthew never give her name. Josephus gives us the name of Herodias’ daughter in another context but simply recounts that Antipas ordered John’s execution without any terpsichorean encouragement. The dance of the seven veils was a much later elaboration. There were many Herodian Salomes (Jesus’ sister was also named Salome). But most probably the dancer was the wife of Herod Philip, Tetrarch of Trachonitis, until his death when she married another cousin who was later appointed king of Lesser Armenia: the dancer ended upas a queen. Ultimately John’s head would become one of the most prized of Christian relics. There would be at least five shrines claiming to have the original: the shrine of John’s head in the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus is revered by Muslims.

* No one knows exactly when Jesus came to Jerusalem. Luke starts Jesus’ ministry with his baptism by John, around AD 28–29, saying he was about thirty, suggesting that his death was between AD 29 and say AD 33. John says his ministry lasted one year; Matthew, Mark and Luke say it lasted three years. Jesus may have been killed in 30, 33 or 36. But his historical existence is confirmed not only in the Gospels but in Tacitus and Josephus, who also mentions John the Baptist. At the very least, we know that Jesus came to Jerusalem at Passover after Pilate’s arrival as prefect (26) and before his departure (36) during the reigns of Tiberius (died 37) and Antipas (before 39) and the high priesthood of Caiaphas (18–36): most likely between 29 and 33. Pilate’s character is confirmed by both Josephus and Philo Judaeus of Alexandria, and his existence confirmed by an inscription found in Caesarea.

* Such as those of the Essenes, probably an offshoot of the pious Hasidim who had originally backed the Maccabees. Josephus explained that they were one of the three sects of Judaism in the first century AD, but we learned more in the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in eleven caves at Qumran near the Dead Sea in 1947–56. These contain the earliest Hebrew versions of some of the biblical books. Christians and Jews had long debated the differences between the Septuagint Bible (translated into Greek, from a vanished Hebrew original and the basis of the Christian Old Testament, between the third and first centuries BC) and the earliest surviving Hebrew Bible (the Masoretic, dating from seventh to the tenth centuries AD. The Aleppo Codex is the oldest, but incomplete; the St Petersburg Codex is dated 1008, and it too is complete.) The Scrolls revealed differences but confirm that the Masoretic was fairly accurate. The Scrolls prove, however, that there were many versions of the biblical books in circulation as late as Jesus’ time. The Essenes were austere Jews who developed the apocalyptic ideas of Jeremiah and Daniel and saw the world as a struggle between good and evil ending in war and judgement. Their leader was a mystical ‘Teacher of Righteousness’; their enemy was the ‘Wicked Priest’ – one of the Maccabees. They feature in many crackpot theories about the origins of Christianity, but we can only say that John the Baptist may have lived with them in the desert and that Jesus may have been inspired by their hostility to the Temple and by their apocalyptic scenarios

* This Iraqi kingdom remained Jewish well into the next century. Queen Helena and her sons were buried just outside the old city of Jeruslaem under three pyramids; the ornate King’s Tomb survives today, north of the Damascus Gate on the Nablus Road that leads past the American Colony Hotel. In the nineteenth century, a French archaeologist excavated the site and announced it had belonged to King David. Adiabene was not the only Jewish fiefdom in that area: two Jewish rebels against Parthia, Asinaeus and Anilaeus, created an independent Jewish state around Babylon that lasted about fifteen years.

† The Golden Gate is the traditional gate by which Jesus entered the Temple, and in Jewish, Muslim and Christian mysticism, the Messiah will enter Jerusalem there. But Jesus would not have entered this way: the Gate was not built for another 600 years and the nearby Shushan Gate was not open to the public and only rarely used by the high priest himself. Another Christian tradition says Jesus entered through the Beautiful Gate, on the other side, today probably close to the Bab al-Silsila (Gate of the Chain) on the west. This is more likely. But the Beautiful Gate is also the place where Peter and John performed a miracle after Jesus’ death. The very name Golden Gate may be a muddled version of ‘beautiful’ since golden in Latin (aurea) and beautiful in Greek (oreia) are so similar. Jerusalem’s holiness is criss-crossed with such misunderstandings, and multiple legends applied to the same sites to enforce and embellish their sanctity

* Every event in this story was to develop its own geography in Jerusalem, though many of these sites are probably historically wrong. The Upper Room (Cenacle) on Mount Zion is the traditional site of the Last Supper; the real site was maybe closer to the cheaper houses around the Siloam Pool since Mark mentions ‘a man carrying a jar of water’ there. The Last Supper tradition developed later in the fifth century and even more strongly under the Crusaders. A stronger tradition suggests this site was where the Holy Spirit descended on the Apostles at Pentecost, after Jesus’ death: this is certainly one of the most ancient Christian shrines. Its holiness was so infectious that Jews and Muslims later revered it too. The traditional but plausible site of Annas’ mansion is under the Church of Holy Archangels in the Armenian Quarter. A stone weight inscribed ‘belonging to the house of Caiaphas’ in Aramaic has been uncovered in Jerusalem and in 1990 builders found a sealed burial case in which one ossuary was inscribed ‘Joseph son of Caiaphas’ – so these are possibly the high priest’s bones. The Gethsemane Garden with its ancient olive grove is believed to be the correct site

* This is a totally different route from the traditional Via Dolorosa. The Gennath Gate, mentioned by Josephus, was identified by the Israeli archaeologist Nahman Avigad in the northern part of the Jewish Quarter in a section of the First Wall. In the Muslim period, Christians wrongly believed that the Antonia Fortress was the Praetorium where Pilate had made his judgements. Medieval Franciscan monks developed the tradition of the Stations of the Cross along the Via Dolorosa, from the Antonia site to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre – almost certainly the wrong route. Golgotha derives from the Aramaic for ‘skull’, Calvary from the Latin for ‘skull’, calva.

† Crucifixion originated in the east – Darius the Great crucified Babylonian rebels – and was adopted by the Greeks. As we have seen, Alexander the Great crucified the Tyrians; Antiochus Epiphanes and the Jewish king Alexander Jannaeus crucified rebellious Jerusalemites; the Carthaginians crucified insubordinate generals. In 71 BC the Roman suppression of the Spartacus slave revolt culminated in a mass crucifixion. The wood for the cross is said to have come from the site of the fortified eleventh-century Monastery of the Cross, near today’s Israeli Knesset. The monastery was long the headquarters of the Georgian Orthodox Church in Jerusalem

* The Gospel of Peter, a Gnostic codex dating from the second or third century, discovered in nineteenth-century Egypt, contains a mysterious story about the removal of the body. The oldest Gospel, Mark, written forty years later around AD 70, ends with Jesus being laid in his tomb, never mentioning the Resurrection. Mark’s account of the resurrection was a later addition. Matthew, written about AD 80, and Luke are based on Mark and another unknown source. Hence these three are known as the Synoptics – from the Greek meaning ‘seen together’. Luke minimized the role of Jesus’ family at the Crucifixion, but Mark mentions Mary mother of James, Joses and Jesus’ sister. John, the latest Gospel, written probably at the end of the century, portrays a more divine Jesus than the others but has other sources, giving more detail on Jesus’ earlier visits to Jerusalem.

† Acts of the Apostles tells this story, but Matthew has another version: the remorseful Judas threw away his silver in the Temple at which the high priest (who could not put it into the Temple treasury because it was blood money) invested it in the Potter’s Field ‘to bury strangers in’. Then he hanged himself. The Akeldama – Field of Blood – remained a burial place into the Middle Ages.

* ‘It fell to me’, Agrippa wrote as a Maccabee and a Herodian, ‘to have for my grandparents and ancestors, kings, most of whom had the title High Priest, who considered their kingship inferior to the priesthood. Holding the office of High Priest is as superior in excellence to that of king as God surpasses men. For the office of one is to worship God, of the other to have charge of men. As my lot is cast in such a nation, city and Temple, I beseech you for them all.’

* Claudius was unlucky in his marriages: he killed one wife and the other killed him. He executed his unfaithful teenaged wife Messalina for treason then married his niece, Julia Agrippina, the sister of Caligula, who started to promote Nero, her son by an earlier marriage, as heir. Claudius made Nero joint heir with his own son Britannicus, named to celebrate his conquest of Britain. On his accession, Nero murdered Britannicus.

* James’ head was buried alongside another Jacobite head – that of the St James killed by Agrippa I – in what became the Cathedral of the Armenian Quarter. Hence its name is the very plural St Jameses’ Cathedral.

† Felix and Drusilla had a son who lived in Pompeii. When the town was destroyed by the volcano in 79, the son and his mother Drusilla died in the ash.

* The street that survives right beside the Western Wall was his – and so was another pavement that can be seen on Mount Zion.

* If the Greek form of ‘Nero Caesar’ is transliterated into Hebrew consonants and the consonants are replaced by their numerical equivalent, the resulting figures added together equal 666. Revelation was probably written during the persecutions of Emperor Domitian in 81–96. In 2009, papal archaeologists discovered a hidden tomb beneath the Church of St Paul Outside the Walls in Rome, always reputed to be the place of Paul’s burial. The bones were carbon-dated to the first to third centuries – they could be the remains of Paul.

* As for Vespasian, he is best remembered in Italy for creating public lavatories, which are still known as vespasianos.

* * Vespasian’s coins boasted ‘JUDAEA CAPTA’ with the female figure of Judaea seated, bound, at the foot of a palm tree while Rome leaned on his spear above her. The fate of the Jerusalem treasures is mysterious. In 455, Genseric, King of the Vandals, sacked Rome and tookthe Temple treasures to Carthage, where they were later captured by Emperor Justinian’s general Belisarius, who in turn brought them to Constantinople. Justinian sent the candelabra backto Jerusalem, but it must have been looted by the Persians in 614; at any rate, it vanished. The Arch of Titus, completed by Titus’ brother Domitian, shows the arms of the candelabra lengthened and turned upwards to resemble a trident: it may have been altered or it may be the artist’s mistake. Ironically the Romanized candelabra (except the pagan symbols) became the basis for the modern Jewish menorah, the candelabra used at Hanukkah and as the insignia of Israel.

* ^{* Herod Agrippa II was rewarded with an expanded kingdom in Lebanon. Perhaps he was not tempted to rule the ruins of Judaea but he may have played with the idea of a political career in Rome. When he visited in 75 for the inauguration of the Temple of Peace (exhibiting some of the Temple vessels), he was granted the rankof praetor. Having reigned under ten emperors, he died around AD 100. His relatives became kings of Armenia and Cilicia and ultimately even Roman consuls.}

* This is an unfinished family tomb. Its family probably perished in the siege, so it was an appropriate place for Jews to gather to mourn the Temple. These pilgrims carved the Hebrew inscriptions that are still visible today.

* This displeased the Romans. Greek love was conventional and not regarded as effeminate: Caesar, Antony, Titus and Trajan were all what we would call bisexual. However, in a reversal of morality today, Romans believed it was acceptable to have sex with boys but not with adults. Yet even when Antinous became a man, Hadrian ignored his wife and treated his lover as his partner.

* Hadrian’s buildings survive in some odd places: Zalatimo’s Sweet Shop, 9 Hanzeit Street, incorporates the remains of the gate of Hadrian’s Temple of Jupiter and the entrance to the main forum. The shop was opened in 1860 by Muhammad Zalatimo, an Ottoman sergeant; it is still run by the family patriarch of this Palestinian cake dynasty, Samir Zalatimo. Hadrian’s walls continue into another old Palestinian family business – the fruit-juice store of Abu Assab – and then into the Russian Alexander Nevsky Church. The archway of Hadrian’s lesser forum survives on the Via Dolorosa, which many Christians mistakenly believe is where Pilate presented Jesus to the crowd with the words ‘Ecce homo’ (Here is the man). In fact, the arch did not exist until a hundred years later. The base of the Damascus Gate has been excavated to reveal its Hadrianic glory. Today’s main street Ha-Gai or El Wad follows the route of Hadrian’s Cardo, which has been excavated in the Western Wall plaza. The historian Cassius Dio and the later Christian source Chronicon Paschale suggest that a Temple of Jupiter was built on the Temple Mount. This is possible, but no traces have been found.

* Upside down just above the decorated section of the Double Gate in the southern wall of the Temple Mount is an inscription that reads ‘TO THE EMPEROR CAESAR TITUS AELIUS HADRIANUS ANTONINUS AUGUSTUS PIUS’, almost certainly the base of the equestrian statue of Antoninus Pius that also stood on the Temple Mount. It must have been looted and then reused by the Umayyad caliphs who built the gate.

* The Gnostics were one of these strands: they believed that the divine sparkwas released only to an elite few with special knowledge. In 1945, the discovery by Egyptian peasants of thirteen codices hidden in a jar and dating from the second or third centuries has revealed much more – and generated many bad movies and novels. In the Apocalypse of Peter and the First Apocalypse of James, it is a substitute who is crucified in place of Jesus. In the Gospel of Philip, there are fragmentary references to Jesus kissing Mary Magdalene, encouraging the idea that they may have married. The Gospel of Judas, which emerged in 2006, appears to present Judas as Jesus’ assistant in accomplishing the Crucifixion, rather than traitor. The texts were probably hidden in the fourth century when the Christian emperors started to crackdown on heresies, but the word ‘Gnostic’, based on the Greekfor knowledge, was coined in the eighteenth century. The Jewish Christians survived in tiny numbers as the Ebionites – the Poor Ones – rejecting the Virgin Birth and revering Jesus the Jewish prophet into the fourth century. As for the mainstream Christians, though relatively small in numbers, their sense of community and mission gave them a growing disdain for the gentiles whom they called bumpkins –pagani, hence pagan.

* While excavating the ancient Armenian Chapel of St Helena, Armenian archaeologists opened up a space (now the Varda Chapel) which contained the most intriguing graffito: a sketch of a boat and a phrase in Latin: ‘Domine ivimus’ (Lord we have come), a reference to Psalm 122 which starts ‘In domum domini ibimus’ (We’ll go the house of the Lord). This dates from the second century, proving that Christians were secretly praying beneath the Temple of Jupiter in pagan Aelia.

* Initially, Constantine identified the Unconquered Sun with the Christian God, placing crosses on some of his coins, the Sun on others, and remaining Pontifex Maximus (High Priest) of the pagan cults. In 321, Constantine declared Sunday – the day of the Sun – as the Christian version of the Sabbath. Mithraism was a Persian mystery religion with a following among Roman troops. As for Manichaeanism, the Parthian prophet Mani preached that existence was a perpetual struggle of light and dark, ultimately judged and enlightened by Jesus Christ. Now only the word survives to describe a world-view that sees life as a tournament between good and evil.

* In killing his son, Constantine joined an unsavoury crewof royal filicides that includes Herod the Great, Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Suleiman the Magnificent. Herod, the emperor Claudius and Henry VIII also executed their own wives.

† But she was not the first lady of Constantine’s family to be there. Eutropia, Fausta’s Christian mother, was already in Jerusalem, perhaps to supervise the emperor’s plans, when her daughter was killed. She shared her daughter’s downfall and was almost written out of history.

* We do not knowthe exact sequence of these buildings and discoveries. Eusebius of Caesarea, who provides the contemporary record, mentions only the orders of the emperor and the actions of Bishop Macarius in building the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (but nothing about Helena’s role in finding the Cross). Yet he gives her credit for the Ascension Church on the Mount of Olives. The story of Helena and the Cross is told later by Sozomen (also a local Christian). Some of Constantine’s walls can still be seen, within the Russian Alexander Nevsky Church: the stones contain the niches by which Constantine’s architects attached the marble. Constantinian churches were based not on pagan temples but the secular basilica, the audience-halls of emperors. Church rituals and clerical costumes were based on the imperial court to promote for the representatives of the King of Heaven a hierarchy parallel to that of the emperor.

* Up until Nicaea, Easter still fell on Passover, since it was at Passover that Jesus had been crucified. NowConstantine’s hatred of the Jews informed his decision to change this for ever. Constantine decreed that Easter should be fixed on the first full moon Sunday after the vernal equinox. This system remained universal until 1582 when the Eastern and Western calendars diverged.

† Arius was on his way through Constantinople after a meeting with Constantine when he felt a ‘relaxation of the bowels’. Before he could reach a convenience, wrote Socrates Scholasticus, Arius’ bowels burst in the middle of the Forum with his intestines, liver and spleen haemorrhaging out of him, a clear demonstration of the evil of his heresy. Yet Arianism lived on after Constantine’s death, supported by his heir Constantius II until condemned again by Theodosius I, who in 381 decreed that Jesus was equal to the Father in the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit and of the same substance.

* Nothing remains of this very short Jewish blossoming, but there may be one small clue. High on the Western Wall, a Hebrewinscription has been discovered reading: ‘And when you see this, your heart will rejoice, and your bones shall flourish like young grass.’ It was too high on the wall for the Second Temple but in this period the ground was much higher. Some scholars believe this expresses the joy of the Jews at Jerusalem’s restoration. More likely, it refers to a tenth-century cemetery: bones were found below this spot.

* Zion was originally the name of the citadel of David’s City, south of the Temple, but became synonymous with the Temple Mount. Now ‘Zion’ became the Christian name for the western hill. In 333, the Bordeaux Pilgrim already called it Zion. In 390, the Bishop of Jerusalem built the magnificent and colossal Zion, Mother of Churches there on the site of the Coenaculum. Jerusalem’s gift for dynamic reinvention and cultural theft is endless – but it does make names very confusing. Take this example: Hadrian’s Neapolis Gate with the huge column standing before it nowbecame St Stephen’s Gate for some centuries before the Arabs called it the Gate of the Column, and later the Nablus Gate (Neapolis being today’s Nablus); the Jews called it the Shechem Gate; the Ottomans called it today’s name, Damascus Gate. (Today’s St Stephen’s Gate is on the eastern side of the city.)

† The Byzantines moved most of the Jewish traditions of the Temple Mount to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The reddish stone of the Temple Mount had been known as the ‘Blood of Zacharias’ (the priest murdered there as told in 2 Chronicles 24.21), but this site nowmoved to the Church as did the Creation, the burial place of Adam, the altars of Melchizedek and Abraham and Solomon’s devil-catching silver bowl. These joined the platter for John the Baptist’s head, the sponge that soothed Jesus on the cross, the column where he was scourged, the stone that killed St Stephen and, of course, the True Cross. The Temple had been the ‘centre of the world’ for Jews; no wonder this one-stop shrine of all biblical holiness, the Church, was now itself regarded as ‘a navel of the world’.

* Monastic women often had to disguise themselves as eunuchs, which led to some entertaining stories: a certain Marina shaved her head, donned a male tunic and joined a monastery as Marinos but was accused of fathering a child and expelled. She brought up the child and only on her death did the monks discover that she was unequipped to perpetrate the sin of which she had been accused.

* Eudocia was inspired by Psalm 51: ‘Do good in thy good pleasure [Greek: eudocia] unto Zion: build the walls of Jerusalem.’ She was advised by the celebrated Armenian monk Euphemius whose protégé Sabas later founded the hauntingly beautiful Mar Saba Monastery, today inhabited by twenty monks, in the Judaean mountains not far from Jerusalem. Armenia, in the Caucasus, had been the first kingdom to convert to Christianity in 301 (after the mythical conversion of King Abgar of Edessa), followed by its neighbour Georgia (known as Iberia) in 327. Eudocia was joined by her own protégé, Peter the Georgian, the king of Iberia’s son, who built a monastery outside the walls. This was the start of the Caucasian presence in Jerusalem that endures today.

* Nestorianism became popular in the East through the Assyrian Church of the East that converted some of the royal family of Sassanid Persia and later many of Genghis Khan’s family. Simultaneously, Monophysite Eastern Christians, rejecting Chalcedon, formed the Egyptian Coptic, Syriac Orthodox (known also as Jacobite after its founder Jacob Baradeus) and Ethiopian Churches. The latter developed a special link with Judaism –The Book of Glory of Kings celebrates the union of King Solomon and Sheba, as the parents of the ‘Lion of Judah’ King Menelik who brought the Ark of the Covenant to Ethiopia, where it is now said to rest in Axum. This link later created the House of Israel (Beta Israel), the Falashas, black Ethiopian Jews, who existed at least from the fourteenth century; in 1984, the Israelis airlifted them to Israel.

* One of Justinian’s earliest decisions in his uncle’s reign was to destroy the Arabian Jewish kingdom of Yemen. In the early fifth century, the Kings of Yemen (Himyara) had converted to Judaism. In 523, in response to Byzantine threats, the Jewish king Joseph – Dhu Nuwas Zurah Yusuf – massacred Christians in Yemen and forced neighbouring principalities to convert to Judaism. Justinian ordered the Christian king Kaleb of Axum (Ethiopia) to invade Yemen. King Joseph was defeated in 525 and committed suicide by riding into the sea on horseback. Yet many Jews remained in Yemen and Judaism did not disappear in Arabia: many of its tribes remained Jewish in Muhammad’s day; Yemenite Jews would start to settle in Jerusalem in the nineteenth century and emigrate to Israel after 1948. Only one village of Jews remains in Yemen in 2010.

* For years this immense complex was lost, but its foundations, stretching from the Jewish Quarter under the present walls to outside the Old City, were discovered in excavations by the archaeologist Nahman Avigad in 1973. Justinian built on a series of vaults constructed along the slope to support its weight. This inscription was found among them: ‘And this is the work carried out by the generosity of our most gracious Emperor Flavius Justinianus.’

* In 1884, a colourful mosaic was found on the floor of a Byzantine church in Madaba (in Jordan), inscribed ‘The Holy City of Jerusalem’, the first Jerusalem map to showthe Byzantine view of the city with its six main gates, churches and the Temple Mount scarcely worth showing at all. Yet the Temple Mount was not completely empty. It has never been excavated by archaeologists, but in the 1940s British engineers, restoring the Islamic holy sites, made shallowprobes and found Byzantine traces. Optimists hoped these might be the foundations of Emperor Julian’s (unbuilt) Jewish Temple. But these may be traces of the only Byzantine shrine on this site – the small Church of the Pinnacle marking Jesus’ temptation by the devil.

* Christian accounts make the exaggerated claim that 10,000 to 90,000 Christians were murdered by the Jews and buried by Thomas the Gravedigger. Christian legend claims the victims were buried in the Mamilla cemetery of the Lions’ Cave, so named because survivors hid in the cave until they were saved by a lion. The Jews claim that it was Jewish victims of a Christian massacre who were saved by the lion.

* Some traces of a building at the Temple Mount’s south-west corner seem to show a menorah painted over a cross, possibly a Christian shrine inherited for a short time by Jews. But this may date from the early Islamic period.

* The Golden Gate, actually two gates, is directly and precisely aligned with the Tomb itself in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the place to which Heraclius took the Cross. The place had further symbolism, as we have seen, because the Byzantines mistakenly believed it also marked the Beautiful Gate where Jesus entered on Palm Sunday and where his apostles performed a miracle after his death. Nonetheless some scholars believe the gate was actually built by the Ummayad caliphs. The Gate soon assumed mystical significance for the Jews who called it the Gate of Mercy.

* The word ‘mosque’ derives from the Arabic masjid, which led to the Spanish mezquita and the French mosquée.

* Muhammad’s successors used the title Commander of the Believers. Later the Heads of State were known as Khalifat Rasul Allah – Successor to the Messenger of God – or caliph. Abu Bakr may have used this title but there is no evidence it was again used for another seventy years, until the reign of Abd al-Malik. Then it was applied retrospectively: the first four rulers became known as the Righteous Caliphs.

† The early history of Islam, including the surrender of Jerusalem, is mysterious and contested. The pre-eminent Islamic historians wrote one or two centuries later and far from Jerusalem or Mecca: Ibn Ishaq,Muhammad’s first biographer, wrote in Baghdad, dying in 770; al-Tabari, al-Baladhuri and al-Yaqubi all lived in late-ninth-century Persia or Iraq.

* The early Muslims seem to have called themselves ‘Believers’ – the word appears 1,000 times in the Koran while ‘Muslim’ appears about 75 times – and as we will see in Jerusalem, they were certainly not yet hostile to their fellow monotheists,Christians or Jews. Professor Fred M. Donner, an authority on early Islam, takes this further: ‘There is no reason to believe’, he writes, ‘that the Believers viewed themselves as a new or separate religious confession. Some of the early Believers were Christians or Jews.’

* There is no contemporary account of the fall of Jerusalem but the Arab historians describe the armies that simultaneously invaded Persia and this is based on those sources.

* Jews and most Christians would not have had a problem with the earliest versions of the Muslim statement of faith – the shahada – which read ‘There is no God but God’, as it may not have been until 685 that they added ‘Muhammad is the apostle of God’. Jewish and Muslim names for Jerusalem overlap: Muhammad called Palestine ‘The Holy Land’ in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. The Jews called the Temple Beyt ha-Miqdash (the Holy House) which the Muslims adapted: they called the city herself Bayt al-Maqdis. The Jews called the Temple Mount Har ha-Beyt (the Mount of the Holy House); Muslims initially called it Masjid Bayt al-Maqdis, the Mosque of the Holy House, and later also Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary. Ultimately Muslims had seventeen names for Jerusalem; Jews claimed seventy, and both agreed ‘a multiplicity of names is a sign of greatness’.

* The traditional text of the Covenant or Pact of Omar with the Christians claims Omar agreed to ban the Jews from Jerusalem. This is Christian wishful thinking or a later forgery because we know that Omar welcomed the Jews back in Jerusalem, that he and the early caliphs allowed Jewish worship on the Temple Mount and that the Jews did not leave again as along as Islam held sway. The Armenians were already a large Christian community in Jerusalem with their own bishop (later patriarch). They established close relations with the Muslims and received their own Covenant. For the next millennium and a half,Christians and Jews were dhimmi, people of the Covenant, tolerated but inferior, sometimes left to themselves, sometimes viciously persecuted.

† Omar ordered the retirement of Khaled, victor of Yarmuk, after hearing about a wine-soaked bathhouse orgy in which a poet sang of the general’s heroics. Khaled died of plague though today’s Khalidi family claim descent from him. One of Muhammad’s early supporters had been a woman named Nusaybah who lost two sons and a leg fighting for the Prophet. Now Nusaybah’s brother,Ubadah ibn al-Samit, arrived with Omar, who is said to have appointed him as a judge in Jerusalem, and custodian of the Holy Sepulchre and of the Rock. His descendants, the Nusseibeh family, are still Custodians of the Holy Sepulchre in 2010 (see the Epilogue).

* This was a handshake which meant a contract to render obedience: the word comes from baa – to sell.

* The modern mosque contains both a mihrab, a prayer-niche facing Mecca, and a minbar, the pulpit. Muawiya’s prayer-hall had the mihrab but probably not yet a minbar because early Islam was too egalitarian to have a pulpit. However, according to the historian Ibn Khaldun, Muawiya’s imperial reign changed that. His Egyptian governor, the general Amr, invented the minbar in his mosque in Egypt and Muawiya started to use it to give the Friday sermon, adding a latticed enclosure around it to protect him from assassins.

* Iran remains a Shiite theocracy. Shiites are a majority in Iraq and a large minority in Lebanon. Hussein’s brother Hasan bin Ali remained in retirement, though he too may have been murdered. His direct descendants include today’s royal dynasties of Morocco’s Alouite and of Jordan’s Hashemite kings. The Twelve Shiite Imams, the Fatimid dynasty, the Aga Khans and the Jerusalemite Family the Husseinis all trace their roots back to Hussein. Their descendants are often known as the Nobility, the Ashraf (the singular is Sherif usually addressed as Sayyid).

* In 1902, one of Abd al-Malik’s milestones was found east of Jerusalem with an inscription that defined the way the caliph saw his power in relation to that of God: ‘There is no God but God alone. Muhammad is the messenger of God… Abd al-Malik, the Commander of the Faithful and servant of God, had ordered the repair of this road and construction of this milestone. From Ilya [Jerusalem] to here is seven miles…’

* ‘O People of the Book do not go beyond the bounds of your religion and do not speak anything about God except the truth,’ read the inscriptions around the Dome. ‘Indeed the Messiah Jesus son of Mary was only a messenger of God so believe in God and in his messengers and do not say “three”… It is not for God to take a son.’ This seems more an attack on Trinitarianism than on Christianity as a whole. As for the Jews, the bi-weekly service there referred strongly to the Jewish Temple: ‘On every Tuesday and Thursday, they order saffron and they prepare with musk, ambergris and sandalwood perfumed with rosewater. Then the servants (who were Jews and Christians) eat and enter the bath to purify themselves. They go to the wardrobe and come out with new red and blue clothes and bands and belts. Then they go to the Stone and anoint.’ As the scholar Andreas Kaplony writes, this was ‘a Muslim service, the Temple service as the Muslims think it should be. To cut a long story short, this is the Former Temple rebuilt, the Koran is the new Torah and the Muslims are the true people of Israel.’

* As always in Jerusalem, the builders borrowed from elsewhere, so Aqsa’s wooden beams were taken from a Christian site, still marked in Greek with the name of a sixth-century Patriarch (now in the Rockefeller and Haram Museums). The Double and Triple Gates to the south, matching the Golden Gate to the east, all of them now closed, are the most beautiful in Jerusalem, built using the stones of earlier Herodian and Roman buildings. It was there that the wall contains the upside-down inscription to Emperor Antoninus Pius from his equestrian statue on the Temple Mount.

* ‘Every soul shall taste death and you will be paid in full only on the Day of Resurrection,’ says the Koran. The Muslims created a geography of Apocalypse around Jerusalem. The forces of evil perish at the Golden Gate. The Mahdi – the Chosen – dies when the Ark of the Covenant is placed before him. At the sight of the Ark, the Jews convert to Islam. The Kaaba of Mecca comes to Jerusalem with all those who ever made the pilgrimage to Mecca. Heaven descends on the Temple Mount with Hell in the Valley of Hinnom. The people assemble outside the Golden Gate on the Plain – al-Sahira. Israfil the Archangel of Death (one of the Dome’s gates is named after him) blows his trumpet: the dead (especially those buried close to the Golden Gate) are resurrected and pass through the Gate, the portal to the End of Days (with its two little domed Gates of Mercy or that of Repentance), to be judged in the Dome of the Chain where the scales of justice hang.

* An imam is the leader of a mosque or community but in Shia, imams can be spiritual leaders, chosen by God and blessed with infallibility. The Twelver Shiites of Iran believe in the first twelve imams descended from Muhammad’s son-in-law Ali and his daughter Fatima and that the Twelfth Imam was ‘occulted’ – hidden by God – and will return as the Madhi, the Chosen messianic redeemer of Judgement Day. The Islamic Republic of Iran was founded by Ayatollah Khomeini on this millenarian expectation: the clergy rule only until the Imam’s return.

* Jerusalem’s importance lessened as Mecca’s grew: if Jerusalem had perhaps at one point approached Mecca and Medina as part of the haj –‘You shall only set out for the three mosques Mecca,Medina, and al-Aqsa,’ declared one of the hadith of al-Khidri – now under the Abbasids,Jerusalem was reduced to a ziyara, a pious visit.

* The Abbasids, particularly Maamun, regularly requested copies of Greek classics from the Byzantines, securing for posterity Plato,Aristotle,Hippocrates,Galen,Euclid and Ptolemy of Alexandria. The Arabs developed an entire new vocabulary of science that entered the English language: alcohol, alembic, alchemy, algebra, almanac are just some of the words thus borrowed. Al-Nadim’s famous Index shows that they also produced 6,000 new books. Paper was now replacing parchment scrolls: in one of history’s decisive battles, the Abbasids had defeated an invasion by the Chinese Tang emperors, ensuring the Middle East would be Islamic not Chinese and also capturing the secrets of Chinese paper-makers.

* The Jewish communities of the world were ruled by the two hereditary gaons of the Jerusalem Academy and the Babylonian/Iraqi Academy, whose seat was in Baghdad. The Karaites spread throughout the Jewish world, building up large communities from the Crimea to Lithuania that survived up to the Holocaust, when most of them were annihilated. This led to one of the strangest anomalies of the Nazi repression: in the Crimea, some Karaites were of Turkic rather than Semitic origin, so the Nazis actually ordered the protection of this Jewish sect.

† The Khazars – shamanist Turkic nomads, ruling the steppes from the Black Sea to Central Asia – formed the last Jewish state before the creation of Israel. In about 805, their kings converted to Judaism, taking names such as Manasseh and Aaron. When the Jerusalemite writer Muqaddasi passed through Khazaria he laconically observed, ‘Sheep, honey and Jews exist [there] in large quantities.’ By the 960s, this Jewish empire was in decline. However, writers from Arthur Koestler to the recent Shlomo Sand have claimed that much of European Jewry are actually descended from these Turkic tribesmen. If true, this would undermine Zionism. But modern genetics refutes the theory: the two latest surveys suggest that modern Jews, both Sephardic and Ashkenazi, are around 70 per cent descended from Middle Eastern genes of 3,000 years ago and around 30 per cent from European stock.

* Recent rulers of Jerusalem had also been buried there, believing, like the Jews, that burial in Jerusalem would mean they would be resurrected first on the Day of Judgement. The closer to the Temple Mount, the sooner they would rise again. The Ikhshid tombs have never been found but are believed to have been just on the northern edge of the Temple Mount. A Palestinian historian showed this author how History has so often been invented in Jerusalem by all three religions for political reasons only to gain its own sacred momentum. When there was talk of Israeli building just north of the Temple Mount, the historian suggested simply putting up a plaque identifying this as the site of the Ikhshid tombs, which has become the accepted shrine. The new building was cancelled.

* Al-Quds first appeared on Maamun’s coins in 832. Henceforth Jerusalemites were known as people from Quds: qudsi, or in slang, ‘utsi’.

* Khidr is the most fascinating of Islamic saints, closely associated with Jerusalem where he was said to celebrate Ramadan. Khidr the Green Man was a mystical stranger, eternally young but with a white beard, cited in the Koran (18.65) as Moses’ guide. In Sufism – Islamic mysticism – Khidr is the guide and illuminator of the holy path. The Green Man seems to have inspired the Green Knight in the Arthurian epic Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. But he is chiefly identified with the Jewish Elijah and the Christian St George, a Roman officer executed by Diocletian. His shrine at Beit Jala near Bethlehem is still revered by Jews,Muslims and Christians.

* Not all the synagogues had been destroyed. The Jewish synagogue in Fustat,Old Cairo, contained one of the key historical resources of the Middle Ages: the Cairo Geniza. In those times, all three Peoples of the Book revered the paper on which holy language was written because words had spiritual life like people. The Jews kept papers received in synagogues in a geniza or storehouse for seven years at which point they were buried in a cemetery or stowed in a special attic. For over 900 years, the Cairo Geniza was not emptied, preserving 100,000 papers showing Jewish Egyptian life, its connections with Jerusalem, and the Mediterranean world in all its aspects, sealed and forgotten until 1864 when a Jerusalemite scholar first penetrated it. In the 1890s,Geniza documents started to emerge, bought by English,American and Russian scholars, but it was only in 1896 that two eccentric Scottish ladies showed some Geniza documents to Professor Solomon Schechter, who recognized the earliest Hebrew text of Ben Sira’s Ecclesiasticus. Schechter collected the priceless hoard, which enabled S. D. Goitein to produce his six-volume Mediterranean Society.

* 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.

* 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.

* At least he seems to have loved Theodora longer than the others. When she was captured by the emperor, Andronikos surrendered and was forgiven. Then the emperor died, and the preposterous cad seized power in 1182 and became one of the most despicable emperors in the history of Constantinople. During his reign of terror, he killed most of the imperial family including the women. Aged sixty-five but still boyishly handsome, he married a thirteen-year-old princess. When he was overthrown, the mob tortured him to death in the most horrible way, an arm cut off, an eye gouged, hair and teeth torn out, his face burned with boiling water to ruin his famous looks. Theodora’s fate is unknown.

* This palace appears on the fairly realistic map of Jerusalem created in Cambrai around this time. Theodorich saw the palace in 1169. It was given to the German Crusaders in 1229, but it vanished, probably destroyed by the raiding Khwarizmian Turks in 1244. Archaeologists found parts of its foundations in 1971 and 1988 under the Armenian Garden and the Turkish barracks.

* The Jewish traveller Benjamin of Tudela visited Jerusalem just after Maimonides. While he was there, workmen refurbishing the Cenacle on Mount Zion discovered a mysterious cavern that was hailed as King David’s Tomb. The Crusaders added a cenotaph which, in the contagious religious atmosphere of Jerusalem, made this Christian site holy for Jews and Muslims too. Benjamin claimed he travelled on to Iraq. Either way, he recorded the drama playing out in Baghdad where a young Jew named David el-Rey (the King) or Alroy declared himself the Messiah, promising to fly the local Jews on wings ‘to conquer Jerusalem.’ The Jews of Baghdad waited on their rooftops but never achieved lift-off, much to the amusement of their neighbours. Alroy was later murdered. When Benjamin Disraeli visited Jerusalem in the nineteenth century, he started to write his novel, Alroy.

* After four centuries as a Jewish synagogue under Islam, the Crusaders sealed up the ‘Cave’ in the tunnels next to the western wall, turning it into a cistern. So it is unlikely Maimonides prayed there.

* Leprosy was common. Indeed Jerusalem had its own Order of St Lazarus for leprous knights. Leprosy is hard to catch: the child must have had months of contact, perhaps with a wetnurse suffering mild symptoms. The disease is caused by bacteria passed through droplets in sweat and touch. Baldwin’s adolescence triggered lepromatous leprosy. In the film Kingdom of Heaven he is shown wearing an iron mask to conceal his utterly ravaged, noseless face, but actually he refused to hide himself as king even as the disease consumed him.

* It was now that William of Tyre ‘wearied by the sad disasters, in utter detestation of the present, resolved to abandon the pen and commit to the silence of the tomb the chronicle of events that can serve only to draw forth lamentations and tears. We lack the courage to continue. It is therefore time to hold our peace.’ His Outremer chronicle survives, his Islamic history is lost. He argued with Patriarch Heraclius, who excommunicated him. William appealed to Rome but died just as he was leaving for Italy. Possibly he was poisoned. In 1184, Heraclius, bearing the keys of Jerusalem, toured England and France in a quest for an heir to the leper-king or at least more funds and knights. He tried to interest Henry II of England. Instead his youngest son John wanted to accept the throne of Jerusalem, but his father refused to let him. It is hard to imagine that John, later known as Softsword and one of England’s most inept kings, would have saved Jerusalem.

* A fictional version of Balian (played by Orlando Bloom) is the hero of the movie Kingdom of Heaven, where he has an affair with Queen Sybilla (Eva Green).

* Saladin was the Crusaders’ shorthand for Salah al-Dunya al-Din (the Goodness of the World and the Faith). Saladin’s brother, known by the Crusaders as Safadin, was born Abu Bakr ibn Ayyub, adopting the honorific Safah al-Din (Sword of the Religion) and later the royal name al-Adil (The Just) by which he is called in most histories. Two of Saladin’s courtiers wrote biographies: Imad ad-Din, his secretary, wrote The Lightning of Syria and then Ciceronian Eloquence on the Conquest of the HolyCity, characterized by purple passages. In 1188, Baha al-Din Ibn Shaddad, an Islamic scholar from Iraq, visited Jerusalem and was appointed by Saladin first as qadi (judge) of the army and then as overseer of Jerusalem. On Saladin’s death he served as chief qadi for two of his sons. His biography, Sultanly Anecdotes and JosephlyVirtues (a reference to his first name Yusuf, Joseph), is a rounded portrait of a warlord under pressure.

* In Jerusalem an old man had the temerity to sue the sultan himself over some property. Saladin came down from his throne to be judged equally, and won the case, but then loaded the claimant with gifts.

* Saladin held court sometimes in the Hospital and sometimes in the Patriarch’s Palace, where there was a wooden hut on the roof where he liked to sit up late at night with his entourage. His brother Safadin resided in the Cenacle complex on Mount Zion. Saladin decided to give the Patriarch’s Palace to his own Salahiyya Sufi convent, or khanqah. Today it remains the Salahiyya khanqah (as its inscription declares) and the bedroom with its fine Crusader capitals where Saladin (and the patriarchs) slept is today the bedroom of Sheikh al-Alami, a member of one of Jerusalem’s prominent families. The patriarchs had special entrances from their Palace to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and Saladin blocked these though they can still be seen behind the tills of today’s shops. He also took over St Mary’s Latina for his Salahiyya Hospital and commandeered St Anne’s as his Salahiyya madrassa, religious school. Now it is a church again but it is still inscribed to Saladin as ‘Reviver of the Empire of the Commander of the Believers’.

* The new Queen of Jerusalem was Sibylla’s half-sister, Isabella, daughter of King Amaury and Queen Maria. Isabella divorced her husband to marry Conrad of Montferrat. He thus became by marriage the titular king of Jerusalem.

* The oldest pub in England, the Journey to Jerusalem, in Nottingham, dates from Richard’s Crusade.

* In April 1192, Richard finally realized that Guy, who had been king of Jerusalem only by marriage to his late wife, was a busted flush. Instead he recognized Conrad of Montferrat, husband of Queen Isabella, as king of Jerusalem. But days later, Conrad was killed by the Assassins. Henry, Count of Champagne, a nephew of both Richard of England and Philip of France, married Queen Isabella of Jerusalem, still aged only twenty-one, pregnant with Conrad’s child and already on her third husband. He became King Henry of Jerusalem. In order to compensate Guy, Richard sold him Cyprus, which his family ruled for three centuries.

* On his way home, Richard was captured and handed over to the German emperor Henry VI, who imprisoned him for over a year, until England had paid a large ransom. He returned to fighting the French king, bringing home some Saracen soldiers and the secret of the Greek Fire. In 1199, besieging a minor French castle, he was killed by an archer’s bolt. ‘He was’, writes Steven Runciman, ‘a bad son, a bad husband and a bad king but a gallant and splendid soldier.’

* The foundations of six of his towers can be seen today. On the Temple Mount, he built the domed Grammar School and the glorious arches and domed entrance to al-Aqsa. He may have used Frankish spolia to built the octagonal Dome of Solomon, also known as the Kursi Isa – the Throne of Jesus (the Jesus may be Isa himself) – and the Dome of the Ascension; the latter has an inscription dating it to 1200–1. But it is more likely that both were original Crusader buildings: indeed the baptismal font of the Dome of the Ascension with its Frankish capitals, topped with an elegant Frankish false lantern, may have originated in the Templum Domini. It was Muazzam who walled up the Golden Gate.

† Queen Isabella of Jerusalem was unlucky in marriage: her third husband Henry of Champagne ruled Acre as king of Jerusalem and fathered two more daughters by her – but, reviewing German Crusaders in 1197, he was distracted by his dwarf and stepped backwards out of a window. Then she married Amaury of Lusignan, King of Cyprus, who died of a surfeit of white mullet in 1205. On her death, her daughter Maria – now queen of Jerusalem – married the knight John of Brienne, and they had a daughter Yolande.

* Frederick and Kamil maintained their friendship: the sultan sent the emperor a bejewelled planetarium, which was both a clock and a moving map of the heavens – and an elephant; Frederick sent Kamil a polar bear. Frederick spent the rest of his life in a constant war with the popes to defend his dual inheritance in Germany and Italy. It was the popes who stigmatized him as the Beast of the Apocalypse. His eldest son Henry King of the Romans betrayed him; Frederick imprisoned him for the rest of life, appointing Conrad King of Jerusalem, his son by Yolande, as his heir. The Wonder died of dysentery in 1250, and was buried in Palermo. Conrad died young, the crown of Jerusalem being inherited by Conrad’s baby son, Conradin who was himself beheaded aged 16. But Frederick’s reputation grew: as time passed, liberals celebrated his modern tolerance; while Hitler and the Nazis admired him as a Nietzschean superman.

* These Tartars were finally defeated by Saladin’s descendants in 1246. Drunk in battle, Barka Khan was beheaded, his head displayed in Aleppo. But his daughter married the Mamluk strongman Baibars, future sultan; his sons became powerful amirs who between 1260 and 1285 built the fine tomb, turba, that still stands on the Street of the Chain. There they buried their father: ‘This is the tomb of the servant needful of God’s mercy Barka Khan.’ His sons were later buried with him. But when archaeologists inspected the tomb, there was no Barka inside. Perhaps his body never arrived from Aleppo. In 1846–7, the wealthy Khalidi family bought this building and indeed the entire street. Barka’s tomb is now the reading room of the Khalidi library, founded in 1900. It is still the home of Mrs Haifa al-Khalidi and has a fine view of the Western Wall. As a quaint reminder of Jerusalem’s span of history, the extended house also contains a red British postbox from the Mandate.

* At times,Jerusalem was ruled from Syria, at times from Cairo where Shajar al-Durr made herself sultana in her own right. This was a feminine achievement unique in Islam and the source of many legends. As a young concubine, she had won the eye of the sultan by wearing a dress made entirely of pearls, hence Shajar al-Durr,Tree of Pearls. Now she needed male support so she married a mamluk officer,Aibeg, who became sultan. But the couple soon fell out and she had him stabbed in his bath. After eighty days’ reign the mamluks deposed her. Before she tried to escape, she ground her famous diamonds to dust so no other woman could wear them. When she was caught,Aibeg’s concubines (perhaps furious not to inherit the jewels) beat her to death with their clogs – the mamluk equivalent of death by stiletto.

* Baibars’ Sufi guru, Sheikh Khadir, became so powerful that he was able to seduce the wives, sons and daughters of the Mamluk generals in a reign of terror. It only ended when they presented Baibars with such full evidence that he had to order Khadir’s arrest for sodomy and adultery. He was spared death only because he predicted that Baibars’ death would rapidly follow his own.

* By 1268, the rump Kingdom was in such peril that the pope called a new Crusade. In May 1271, the heir to the English throne, Edward Longshanks, arrived at Acre which he helped defend against Baibars. But when Acre negotiated a truce with the sultan, Edward objected and it seems Baibars ordered his assassination: he was stabbed with a poisoned dagger. Having survived this, Edward tried in vain to organize a new alliance: the Crusaders would help the Mongols fight Baibars in return for Jerusalem. When he returned to England as Edward I, he promoted himself as Hammer of the Scots, illustrating his Painted Chamber at Westminster with scenes of the Maccabees. Yet he forced English Jews to wear yellow stars and finally expelled them from England. They did not return for three centuries. At his death, Edward was mourned as ‘Jerusalem’s flower of chivalry’

* Many of the royal houses of Europe, including the Bourbons, the Habsburgs and the Savoyards, claimed the title. In 1277, Charles of Anjou bought it from Mary of Antioch, one of its claimants, after which kings of Naples or Sicily claimed it and it descended via the Savoyards to the Italian kings. The King of Spain still uses it. Only one English monarch used the title. When Mary I, daughter of Henry VIII, married Philip II of Spain, in Winchester in 1554, she was declared, among other Habsburg titles, to be queen of Jerusalem. The title was used by the Habsburg emperors until 1918.

* Its fate tells the story of the Jews in Jerusalem. The first synagogue was probably on Mount Zion but soon moved to the Jewish Quarter. Under the Mamluks, a mosque and al-Yehud (Jewish) minaret were built next to it, extended in 1397. When the synagogue collapsed in 1474, Muslims demolished it and refused to permit its reconstruction. But the penultimate Mamluk sultan Qaitbay allowed it to be rebuilt. It was closed again by the Ottomans in 1587. A synagogue was then opened in the neighbouring building until the Ramban and the next-door synagogue were united and reopened in 1835. But in the early twentieth century the Ramban was taken over by the Muslims, used as storage until it again became a synagogue. It was deliberately destroyed by the Arab Legion in 1948. In 1967, it was reopened.

* 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, awaqf, 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.

† These clans were known in English as the Notables, to the Turks as the Effendiya, to the Arabs as the Aya. The Nusseibehs were Custodians of the Church; the Dajanis presided over David’s Tomb; the Khalidis ran the sharia lawcourts; the Husseinis usually dominated as Naqib al-Ashraf, Mufti and Sheikh of the Haram as well as leading the Nabi Musa festival. The Abu Ghosh, warlords of the mountains around Jerusalem, guardians of the pilgrim route from Jaffa, were allies of the Husseinis. Only recent research by Professor Adel Manna has revealed the true story of how the Ghudayyas took over the identity of the Husseinis. The Nusseibehs changed their name from Ghanim; the Khalidis from Deiri; the Jarallahs (who competed for the muftiship with the Husseinis) from Hasqafi. ‘It is disorienting and perplexing to have to endure a change of name,’ admits one of these grandees, Hazem Nusseibeh, ex-Foreign Minister of Jordan, in his memoir The Jerusalemites, ‘ even though it occurred seven centuries ago.’

* The powerful Vali (Governor) of the Vilayet (Province) of Damascus usually ruled Jerusalem and was often the Amir al-Haj, Commander of the annual caravan to Mecca which he funded through his dawra, an armed expedition. At other times, Jerusalem was controlled by the Vali of Sidon who ruled from Acre. Jerusalem was a small district, a Sanjak, under a Sanjak Bey or Mutasallim. Yet Jerusalem’s status changed repeatedly over the next centuries, sometimes becoming an independent district. Ottoman governors ruled with the aid of the qadi, a city judge appointed in Istanbul, and the mufti (the leader appointed by the Grand Mufti of the empire, the Sheikh al-Islam in Istanbul, who wrote fatwa judgements on religious questions) drawn from Jerusalem’s Families. The pashas of Damascus and Sidon were rivals who sometimes fought mini-wars for control of Palestine.

* Potemkin devised the ‘Greek Project’ for Catherine – the Russian conquest of Constantinople (which Russians called Tsargrad) to be ruled by Catherine’s grandson, especially named Constantine. Catherine’s partitioning of Poland brought millions of Jews into the Russian empire for the first time, most of whom were confined in miserable poverty to a Pale of Settlement. But Potemkin, one of the most philo-Semitic leaders in Russian history, was a Christian Zionist who saw the liberation of Jerusalem as part of his Greek Project. In 1787, he created the Israelovsky Regiment of Jewish cavalry to take Jerusalem. A witness, the Prince de Ligne, mocked these ringleted cavalrymen as ‘monkeys on horseback’. Potemkin died before he could put his schemes into action.

* * He was a Christian slaveboy from Bosnia who, escaping after committing a murder, sold himself to the slave-markets of Istanbul. There he was bought by an Egyptian ruler who converted him to Islam and used him as his chief executioner and hitman. He began his rise as governor of Cairo but made his name defending Beirut against Catherine the Great’s navy. Beirut was honourably surrendered to the Russians after a long siege and the sultanrewarded the Butcher with promotion to Governor of Sidon, and sometimes also that of Damascus. He visited Jerusalem, unofficially in his sphere of influence, where the Husseinis owed him allegiance.

* Napoleon blamed his defeat on Smith, ‘the man who made me miss my destiny’, but he left one legacy in Jerusalem. On taking Jaffa, his sick soldiers (those whom he later had killed) were nursed by Armenian monks, whom he thanked by presenting them with his tent. The Armenians converted it into chasubles, now used in St Jameses Cathedral in Jerusalem’s Armenian Quarter

* Godfrey’s spurs and sword, along with a brick from his French chateau, hang today in the Latin sacristy of the Holy Sepulchre. As for the Crusader tombs, only fragments of the sarcophagus of the boy-king Baldwin V survived this act of sectarian vandalism

* In 1804, William Blake, poet, painter, engraver and radical, opened his poem Milton with the prefatory verses ‘And did those feet in ancient times…’ which ends ‘Till we have built Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.’ The poem, printed in about 1808, praises the brief heyday of a heavenly Jerusalem in pre-industrial England, inspired by the mythical visit of young Jesus accompanying Joseph of Arimathea to inspect the latter’s Cornish tin-mines. The poem remained little known until 1916 when the Poet Laureate Robert Bridges asked the composer Sir Hubert Parry to set it to music for a patriotic meeting. Edward Elgar later orchestrated it. King George V said he preferred it to ‘God Save the King’, and it has become an alternative anthem, with universal appeal to plangent patriots, churchgoers, Promenaders, sports fans, socialist idealists and generations of drunken, floppy-haired undergraduates. Blake never called it ‘Jerusalem’ for he also wrote an epic entitled Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion

* In 1818, on Suleiman Pasha’s death, Abdullah had taken power in Acre and executed the very wealthy, one-eyed, one-eared and noseless Haim Farhi, who had effectively run much of Palestine for thirty years. Abdullah ruled until 1831. The Farhi family still live in Israel

* During his voyage home, a fearsome storm struck the Montefiores’ ship. The sailors feared that the vessel would sink. Montefiore carried, for luck, from the previous year’s Passover, a piece of unleavened matzah, known as the afikoman, which, at the height of the tempest, he cast into the waves. The sea instantly became miraculously quiet. Montefiore believed that this was God’s blessing on a Jerusalem pilgrimage. The Montefiore family today read his account of this event every Passover

* His ideal character, featured in his best novel Coningsby, was Sidonia, a Sephardic millionaire who is friends with the emperors, kings and ministers in all the cabinets of Europe. Sidonia was an amalgam of Lionel de Rothschild and Moses Montefiore, both of whom Disraeli knew well

* The Wahabis were the followers of an eighteenth-century fundamentalist Salafi preacher Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahab who in 1744 allied himself with the Saudi family. Despite their setback at the hands of Mehmet Ali, the Saudis soon re-established a small state. During the First World War and the 1920s, their chieftain Abdul-Aziz ibn Saud, funded by British subsidies and backed by his fanatical Wahabi army, reconquered Mecca and Arabia. In 1932, he proclaimed himself king of Saudi Arabia, where Wahabi Islam still rules. Ibn Saud fathered at least seventy children and his son Abdullah became king in 2005

* William Thomson later wrote one of the Evangelical classics that encouraged the American obsession with Jerusalem. The Land and the Book, reprinted in thirty editions, presented Palestine as a mystical Eden where the Bible was alive.

* Anthony Ashley-Cooper, descendant of the first earl, that shrewd minister who had served everyone from Cromwell to William III, still held the courtesy title Lord Ashley and sat in the House of the Commons, succeeding as the 7th earl in 1851. But for simplicity we call him Shaftesbury throughout

* Shaftesbury borrowed the notorious phrase ‘a land without a people’ from a Scottish minister, Alexander Keith, and it was later attributed (probably mistakenly) to Israel Zang-will, a Zionist who did not believe in settling Palestine, precisely because it was already inhabited by Arabs

* The Albanians never again held Jerusalem but they ruled Egypt for a century, first as khedives (nominally Ottoman viceroys but actually independent), then as sultans of Egypt and finally as kings. When Mehmet Ali became senile, Ibrahim became his regent but he himself died in 1848 just before his father. The last of the Albanian dynasty was King Farouk who was overthrown in 1952

* William Miller was one of the most popular of these new American prophets. An ex-army officer from Massachusetts, he calculated that Christ would come again in Jerusalem in 1843: 100,000 Americans became Millerites. He converted the assertion in Daniel 8.14 that the ‘sanctuary would be cleansed’ in ‘two thousand and three hundred days’ into years by claiming that a prophetic day was really a year. Hence starting in 457 BC, which Miller believed was the date of Persian King Artaxerxes I’s order to restore the Temple, he arrived at 1843. When nothing happened that year, he suggested 1844. The Millerite successor churches, the Seventh Day Adventists and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, still number fourteen million members worldwid

* In 1658, Patriarch Nikon built the New Jerusalem Monastery in Istra, near Moscow, to promote the universal mission of Russian Orthodoxy and Autocracy. Its centrepiece was a replica of the actual Sepulchre in Jerusalem which is valuable since the original was destroyed in the fire of 1808. In 1818, before he ascended the throne, Nicholas I visited the New Jerusalem and was deeply moved, ordering its restoration. The Nazis damaged it but it is now being restored

* * The Crimean war saw another attempt to arm the Jews. In September 1855, the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz travelled to Istanbul to organize Polish forces known as Ottoman Cossacks, to fight the Russians. These included the Hussars of Israel, recruited from Russian, Polish and Palestinian Jews. Mickiewicz died three months later and the Hussars were never tested in the valley of death

* * The seat of the Ottoman governors was al-Jawailiyya, built by one of Nasir Mohammad’s Mamluk amirs, on the site of Herod’s Antonia Fortress and the first station of the Via Dolorosa. Under Crusader rule, the Templars had built a chapel there and part of its domed porch stood until the 1920s. A modern school stands there today.

* * These writers were following a fashion for oriental travelogues. Between 1800 and 1875, about 5,000 books were published in English about Jerusalem. Many of these works are remarkably similar, either breathless repetitions of biblical stories by evangelicals (sometimes reinforced by archaeology) or travelogues mocking Ottoman incompetence, Jewish wailing, Arab simplicity and Orthodox vulgarity. The witty Eothen by Alexander Kinglake, who later reported on the Crimean War, is probably the best

* Dorr’s young master, plantation owner Cornelius Fellowes, decided to set off on a three-year tour of the world from Paris to Jerusalem. Fellowes offered a deal to his intelligent and literate young slave. If Dorr served him on the trip, he would be freed on his return. In his effervescent travelogue, Dorr recorded everything from the gorgeous ladies of Paris to the ‘scarce towers and charred walls’ of Jerusalem. On his return, his master refused to manumit him so Dorr escaped to the north and in 1858 publishedAColored Man Round the World by a Quadroon. It was the American Civil War, which started soon afterwards, that finally gave him his freedom. The winner of that war, President Abraham Lincoln, was not formally religious, but longed to visit Jerusalem, perhaps because as a young man he had lived in one of the American Jerusalems, New Salem, Illinois; he knew the Bible by heart and he had probably heard the stories of his Secretary of State, William H. Seward who had visited Jerusalem on his world tour. On the way with his wife to Ford’s Theatre, on 14 April 1865, he proposed a ‘special pilgrimage to Jerusalem’. At the theatre, moments before he was shot, he whispered: ‘How I should like to visit Jerusalem.’ Afterwards Mary Todd Lincoln decided he ‘was in the midst of the Heavenly Jerusalem’

* * Practising Jews could not sit in the House of Commons until 1858. Then a new Act of Parliament finally allowed Lionel de Rothschild to take his seat as the first practising Jew ever to sit in the House. Interestingly, Shaftesbury had repeatedly spoken against this – as a Christian Zionist, his interest was really in the return and conversion of the Jews in preparation for the Second Coming. But much later he graciously proposed to Prime Minister William Gladstone, ‘It would be a glorious day for the House of Lords when that grand old Hebrew (Montefiore) were enrolled on the lists of the hereditary legislators of England.’ But it was too soon. The first Jewish peerage was awarded to Lionel Rothschild’s son, Nathaniel, in 1885, after Montefiore’s death.

† On the way to St Petersburg he was welcomed to Vilna, a semi-Jewish city filled with so many Talmudic scholars that it was known as ‘the Jerusalem of Lithuania’, by thousands of enthusiastic Jews, but Nicholas did not moderate his polices and as Jewish life worsened, Montefiore later returned to meet Alexander II. It was said that every Jewish shack in Russia had a portrait, almost a Jewish icon, of their champion. ‘At breakfast (in Motol, a village near Pinsk) my grandpa used to tell me stories of the deeds of mighty figures,’ wrote Chaim Weizmann, a future Zionist leader. ‘I was particularly impressed by the visit of Sir Moses Montefiore to Russia, a visit only a generation before my birth but the story was already a legend. Indeed Montefiore was himself, though then still living, already a legend.’

* Montefiore was the most famous but not the richest of Jerusalem’s philanthropists. He was often the channel for Rothschild money and his almshouses were funded by Judah Touro, an American tycoon from New Orleans who in 1825 had backed a Jewish homeland on Grand Island in the Niagara river, upstate New York. The project failed and in his will, he left $60,000 for Montefiore to spend in Jerusalem. In 1854, the Rothschilds built a much-needed Jewish hospital. During his 1856 visit, Montefiore created a Jewish girls’ school, to the disapproval of the Orthodox Jews, and this was later taken over by his nephew Lionel de Rothschild who renamed it after his late daughter Evelina. But the greatest project was the Tiferet Israel Synagogue close to the Hurva in the Jewish Quarter. Funded by Jews all over the world, but chiefly by the Reuben and Sassoon families of Baghdad, this splendidly domed synagogue, the highest building in the Jewish Quarter, became the centre of Palestinian Jewry until it was destroyed in 1948. Meanwhile the Armenians had their own Rothschilds: the oil-rich Gulbenkian family regularly came on pilgrimage and created the Gulbenkian Library in the Armenian Monastery

* The Russian Compound contained the consulate, a hospital, the multidomed Holy Trinity Church with four belltowers, the archimandrite’s residence, apartments for visiting aristocrats and pilgrim hostels, to house over 3,000 pilgrims. Its buildings resembled huge but elegant modern fortresses and during the British Mandate they served as military strongholds.

* Edward Robinson, a missionary and Professor of Biblical Literature in New York, yearned to uncover the geography of the Bible. He used his knowledge of other sources such as Josephus to make some astonishing finds. In 1852, he noticed, at ground level, the top of what he guessed was one of the monumental arches across the valley into the Temple – known ever since as Robinson’s Arch. Another American, Dr James Barclay, a missionary to convert the Jews and an engineer advising the Ottomans on the preservation of the Mamluk buildings, spotted the lintel that had topped one of Herod’s gates – today’s Barclay’s Gate. The two Americans might have started as Christian missionaries, but as archaeologists they proved that the Muslim Haram al-Sharif was the Herodian Temple.

* After Jerusalem, Warren became famous as the inept Metropolitan Police Commissioner who failed to catch Jack the Ripper and as a dud military commander during the Boer War. His successors, Lieutenants Charles Conder and Herbert Kitchener (the latter subsequently the conqueror of Sudan), surveyed the country so successfully that General Allenby used their maps to conquer Palestine in 1917.

* Montefiore died in 1885 aged over 100. He and Judith were buried with Jerusalem earth in their own Rachel’s Tomb in Ramsgate. The Montefiore Windmill still stands and the Montefiore Quarter, know as Yemin Moshe, is one of the city’s most elegant Neighbourhoods and one of five named after him. His baronetcy was inherited by his nephew Sir Abraham who was childless (his wife went insane on their wedding night) but Moses left his estates to his Moroccan-born nephew Joseph Sebag who became Sebag-Montefiore. The Ramsgate mansion burned down in the 1930s. An almost forgotten figure (except in Israel), his tomb was neglected for a long time, threatened by urban sprawl and graffiti, but in the twenty-first century, his tomb has become a shrine: thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews make a pilgrimage there on the anniversary of his death.

* Ironically Twain stayed in the Mediterranean Hotel in the Muslim Quarter, the very building which the Israeli Likud leader and general Ariel Sharon bought in the late 1980s in his bid to judaize the Muslim Quarter. Today it is a Jewish seminary. Twain’s bookThe Innocents Abroad was an instant classic for sceptics: when ex-President Ulysses Grant visited Jerusalem, he used it as his guidebook.

* The Hasidim – ‘the pious’ in Hebrew – are a growing presence in Jerusalem. The inheritors of seventeenth-century mysticism they still wear the distinctive black garb of that era. In the 1740s, a faith-healer in Ukraine named Israel ben Eliezer, adopting the name Baal Shem Tov (Master of the Good Name), created a mass movement that challenged Talmudic studies, advocating trance-like movements in prayer, singing, dancing and mystical practices to get closer to God. Their chief opponent was the Vilna Gaon who rejected all this as folk superstition and stressed the need for traditional Talmudic studies. Their conflict resembles that between the mystical Sufis and the harsh Islamic conservatives of, say, the Saudi Wahabis.

* Ever since the 1760s, the Khalidis had been forming a library – collecting 5,000 Islamic books, some dating from the tenth century, and 1,200 manuscripts. In 1899, Raghib Khalidi merged his collection with those of Yusuf and his cousins and opened the Khalidi Library the next year around the Mamluk tomb of Barka Khan on Silsila Street, where it remains.

* Guided around Jerusalem by Captains Charles Wilson and Conder, archaeologists of the Palestine Exploration Fund, the princes attended a Sephardic Passover dinner, and were ‘much impressed by the complete domesticity’ of this ‘happy family gathering’. They were even more excited by their tattoos. ‘I was tattooed’, wrote Prince George, ‘by the same man who tattooed Papa [the Prince of Wales].’

† The sign outside Cook’s office read: ‘Thomas Cook and Son have the largest staff of dragomans and muleteers, the best landaus, carriages, camp, saddlery etc in Palestine!’ The building of the Grand New Hotel revealed Roman remains: a part of the Second Wall, tiles inscribed with the Tenth Legion’s insignia and a column erected by a legate of Augustus, used for decades as the base of a streetlamp.

* The German architect and archaeologist Conrad Schick was the most prolific architect of his time, but his buildings defy any pigeon-holing – his home, Thabor House, and chapel contain vestiges of Germanic, Arab and Graeco-Roman styles.

† The Husseinis and the other Families such as the newer Nashashibis became much richer, embracing the commercial boom; one of the Husseinis provided the wooden sleepers for the new railway. In 1858, the Ottoman Land Law privatized many of the ancientwaqfs, which suddenly made the Families into rich landowners and traders in grain. The losers were the Arab fellahin, the peasants, now at the mercy of feudal absentee landlords. Hence Rauf Pasha, the last Hamidian governor, called the Families ‘parasites’.

* His year in Jerusalem was cut short by the Mahdi’s rebellion in Sudan. Recalled to govern Sudan, Gordon was besieged and then killed in Khartoum, reputedly holding his Bible. The Garden Tomb was not the only archaeological achievement of the Colony: as we saw much earlier, it was Jacob Eliahu, the child of a Jew converted by the London Jews Society who defected to the Colony, who found the inscription left by the workers in the Siloam tunnel.

* This word was coined in 1879 by Wilhelm Marr, a German journalist, in his book The Victory of Judaism over Germandom, in time to describe the new racial breed of hatred that was replacing the old religious version.

* Sergei’s House remained technically owned by Sergei until President Putin admired it on his 2005 visit to Israel and was said to have been so moved that he wept. Israel returned the hostel to Russia in 2008.

† Alexander III died in 1894 and was succeeded by his inexperienced, inept and unlucky son Nicholas II, who shared his father’s rigid belief in autocracy. He liked and trusted ‘Uncle Sergei’. As governor-general, Sergei was responsible for the coronation festivities in Moscow during which thousands of celebrating peasants died in a stampede. Sergei advised his nephew to continue with the celebrations and evaded responsibility.

* Jerusalem’s so-called ‘Polish Jews’ were mainly Hasidim from the Russian empire but some of their sects were opposed to Zionism, believing it was sacrilege for mere men to decide God’s timing for the Return and Judgement Day.

* Wilhelm’s unpredictable behaviour frequently alarmed his own entourage. His early sex life with its outré tastes, including glove-wearing and sado-masochistic fetishes, had to be concealed. One courtier, a middle-aged Prussian general, died of a heart attack while dancing for the Kaiser in nothing but a tutu and feather-boa, and another entertained him dressed as a begging poodle ‘in shaved tights with, under a real poodle-tail, a marked rectal opening. I can already see His Majesty laughing with us.’ Ultimately his friend Eulenburg was destroyed in a sex scandal when his secret gay life was exposed. Yet Wilhelm was also a priggish Victorian when it came to the morals of others: he never spoke to Eulenburg again.

* The Kaiser’s Teutonic gigantism changed the modern Jerusalem skyline. His Augusta Victoria Hospice, a German medieval fortress with a hideous tower so high that it was visible from the Jordan, dominated the Mount of Olives, and his Catholic Dormition Church, on Mount Zion, modelled outside on Worms Cathedral and inside on Charlemagne’s chapel at Aachen, had ‘massive towers more suited to the Rhine Valley’.

* It was around this time that one of the tsar’s top secret policemen, the Okhrana director in Paris, Piotr Rachkovsky, ordered the forging of a book claiming to be a secret record of Herzl’s Congress in Basle in 1897: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was adapted (and much of it lifted directly) from an 1844 French satire against Emperor Napoleon III and an 1868 anti-Semitic German novel by Hermann Goedsche. The Protocols was a preposterous though diabolical plan for Jews to infiltrate governments, churches and the media and incite wars and revolution, in order to create a world empire ruled by a Davidic autocrat. Published in 1903, it was designed to provoke anti-Semitism within Russia where tsardom was threatened by Jewish revolutionaries.

* There would be at least thirty-four different plans in locations as diverse as Alaska, Angola, Libya, Iraq and South America. The plan for Alaska during the Second World War was satirized by Michael Chabon in his thriller, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. Politicians from Churchill and FDR to Hitler and Stalin pursued other plans: before attacking the Soviet Union in 1941, Hitler planned to deport the Jews to a death-colony in Madagascar. During the 1930s and 1940s, Churchill proposed a Jewish homeland in Libya while in 1945, his colonial secretary Lord Moyne suggested East Prussia for the Jews. As we will see, Stalin actually set up a Jewish homeland and during the 1940s considered a Jewish Crimea.

* Ironically, while Westerners reread the superficial memoirs of European visitors, this superlative chronicle of the city, covering forty years up to the creation of Israel and beyond, is still published only in Arabic.

* Sergei himself, patron of the Russian presence, was long dead. In 1905, he finally resigned his post as governor-general of Moscow, but was blown to smithereens by terrorists within the Kremlin. His wife Ella rushed outside and crawled across the ground collecting the body parts of her husband, though only an armless chunk of torso and a fragment of the skull and jaw were identifiable. She visited his killer in prison before his execution. Afterwards she succeeded Sergei as president of the Palestine Society, which Nicholas II now personally supervised. But Ella fell out with her sister Empress Alexandra over the growing power of Rasputin. And tragically, she would return to Jerusalem (see footnote on p. 444).

* On his return to Russia, Rasputin resumed his intimate role in the imperial family. He published My Thoughts and Reflections: Brief Description of a Journey to the Holy Places in the midst of the Great War in 1915 when Nicholas II was commanding the Russian army, leaving Alexandra, advised by Rasputin, as effective ruler of the home front – with disastrous consequences. He was illiterate; the book reads as if it had been dictated, and it was said that the empress herself corrected it. Designed to promote his image as a respectable pilgrim when he was at the height of his power and unpopularity, it was too late: he was assassinated shortly afterwards.

* Parker’s friends were Captain Clarence Wilson, Major Foley, who had participated in the Jameson Raid in Transvaal, the Hon. Cyril Ward, third son of the Earl of Dudley, Captain Robin Duff, cousin of the Duke of Fife, and Captain Hyde Villiers, cousin of the Earl of Jersey, along with the Scandinavians Count Herman Wrangel and a certain van Bourg, a mystic who irritated the group when he suggested that the treasure might actually be on Mount Ararat, not in Jerusalem at all.

* The full story of Parker is told here for the first time, based not only on his letters and accounts but also Juvelius’ prophecies. Even in 1921, Parker’s agents in Jerusalem were still suing him for unpaid fees. The Flashman-esque Parker skulked at headquarters and avoided the trenches in the Great War, never married but kept multiple mistresses, inherited the earldom of Morley and the stately home in 1951 and proudly told his family that he meant to spend every penny of his inheritance. Even in old age, he remained in the words of one of the family ‘a vain, venal, unreliable blacksheep who left nothing, a namedropper and boaster’. He lived until 1962, but he never mentioned Jerusalem and there were no papers – until in 1975 the Parker lawyers found a file that they returned to the Sixth Earl of Morley. For many years, the papers were forgotten, but the earl and his brother Nigel Parker kindly made them available to this author. Juvelius, becoming a librarian in Vyborg, wrote a novel based on the story and died of cancer in 1922. This episode left little trace in Jerusalem, but in the tunnels of Ophel, now the site of Ronny Reich’s excavation of those huge Canaanite towers, a small cave leads to an abandoned bucket that once belonged to Monty Parker.

* Ruhi Khalidi died of typhoid later that year and many were convinced that he had been poisoned by the Young Turks.

* Jemal loathed Jewish nationalism or anything that threatened Turkish dominance but at the same time, he tried to court Jewish support: he offered Henry Morganthau, US ambassador to Istanbul, the chance to buy the Western Wall and repeated the offer to Jerusalem’s Jews.

* Leah Tennenbaum later married a Christian lawyer, Abcarius Bey, who built her a mansion, Villa Leah, in Talbieh; she was thirty years younger than him. She left him, but he rented the Villa Leah to the exiled Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie. Later the house belonged to Moshe Dayan.

* They took the name of the dynasty from Hashem, great-grandfather of the Prophet. They were descended from Muhammad through his daughter Fatima and grandson Hassan, hence their title of sherif. They called themselves the Hashemites, the British called them the Sherifians.

* At first Sykes had considered giving Jerusalem to Russia whose pilgrims had dominated the city until the war. Russia had already been promised Istanbul to which Sykes–Picot added swathes of eastern Anatolia, Armenia and Kurdistan.

* Hoess, the future SS Commandant of Auschwitz, where millions of Jews were gassed and cremated during the Holocaust, was considering a career in the Catholic priesthood. Jerusalem ‘played a decisive part in my subsequent renunciation of my faith. As a devout Catholic, I was disgusted by the cynical manner in which trade in allegedly holy relics was carried on by the representatives of the many churches there.’ Wounded in the knee and awarded the Iron Cross, Hoess, who ‘shunned all demonstrations of affection’, was seduced in Jerusalem by one of his German nurses: ‘I fell under the magic spell of love.’ He was hanged in April 1947. By coincidence an ‘obstreperous’ young German boy, helping the American Colony with its Casualty Clearing Station near the Notre Dame, was the son of the German Vice Consul: Rudolf Hess was the future deputy Führer of Nazi Germany, who flew to Scotland on an insane peace mission in 1941 and spent the rest of his life as a prisoner.

* In one of Disraeli’s most popular novels, Tancred, a duke’s son travels to Jerusalem where a Jew says, prophetically, ‘The English will take this city; they will keep it.’

* Lloyd George’s mission was to win the war and everything else was subordinate to that. So it was no surprise that he was also considering a fourth Middle Eastern option: he was negotiating indirectly and very secretly with the Three Pashas over a separate Ottoman peace that would betray Jews, Arabs and French by leaving Jerusalem under the sultan. ‘Almost the same week that we’ve pledged ourselves to secure Palestine as a national home for the Jewish People,’ wrote an exasperated Curzon, ‘are we to contemplate leaving the Turkish flag flying over Jerusalem?’ The talks came to nothing.

* Jemal returned to Istanbul in 1917, but on the Ottoman surrender the following year he fled to Berlin where he wrote his memoirs. He was assassinated by Armenians in Tbilisi in 1922 as revenge for the Armenian genocide, even though he claimed, ‘I was convinced the deportations of all Armenians was bound to cause great distress,’ and it may well be true, as he said, that ‘I was able to bring nearly 150,000 to Beirut and Aleppo.’ Talaat was also assassinated; Enver was killed in battle, leading a Turkic revolt against the Bolsheviks in Central Asia.

* On 3 December, Ottoman secret police raided the house of Sakakini, who was hiding the Jewish adventurer and spy, Alter Levine, a kindness that was almost the last example of the old Ottomanist tolerance between Jews and Arabs. Both were arrested and despatched to Damascus: they had to walk the whole way.

† Two years later, the Colonists were still trying to get their carriage returned or the cost reimbursed, writing to Military Governor Storrs: ‘On 8th December 1917 the late Governor borrowed our wagon complete with oil, cloth cover and spring seat, whip, pole and two horses.’

* The Arab boy holding the historic bedsheet stuck the broomstick into the ground, but it was purloined by the Swedish photographer. The British threatened to arrest him at which he surrendered it to Allenby, who gave it to the Imperial War Museum, where it remains.

* One of Allenby’s officers was Captain William Sebag-Montefiore MC, aged thirty-two, great-nephew of Sir Moses Montefiore, who used to tell how, near Jerusalem, he was beckoned by a beautiful Arab woman who led him to a cave where he found and arrested a group of Ottoman officers.

* When the Nusseibehs showed Allenby round the Church, they claimed that he asked for the keys. ‘Now the Crusades have ended,’ he said. ‘I return you the keys but these are not from Omar or Saladin but from Allenby.’ Hazem Nusseibeh, Jordanian foreign minister in the 1960s, tells the story in his memoirs, published in 2007.

* Storrs made an exciting discovery in the Church. Much to the fury of the Greek priests, he found the last Crusader grave at the south door – that of a signatory of Magna Carta and tutor to Henry III named Philip d’Aubeny, a three-times Crusader who died in Jerusalem in 1236 during the rule of Frederick II. Storrs had the grave guarded by English soldiers.

* The Husseinis were prospering; they now owned over 12,500 acres of Palestine. Mayor Husseini was popular with Arabs and Jews alike. Storrs liked Mufti Kamil al-Husseini. Until then, the mufti was actually only leader of the Hanafi school of Islamic law (favoured by the Ottomans); there are four such schools. Storrs now promoted him to Grand Mufti not just of all four schools in Jerusalem but of all Palestine. The mufti requested that his younger brother Amin al-Husseini join Prince Faisal in Damascus when the city fell; Storrs agreed.

* When the Protocols was published in English, it became influential in Britain and America (backed by Henry Ford), until in August 1921 the London Times exposed it as a forgery. It had been published in German in 1919, and Hitler believed that it contained the truth about the Jews, explaining in Mein Kampf that the forgery claim ‘is the surest proof they are genuine’. When it was published in Arabic in 1925, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem recommended the book to his congregants.

† The Greeks argued with the Armenians over the division of the Virgin’s Tomb. The Armenians feuded with the Syriac Jacobites over the cemetery on Mount Zion and ownership of the St Nicodemus Chapel in the Church, where the Orthodox and Catholics fought over the use of the northern staircase at Calvary and ownership of a strip floor at the eastern arch between the Orthodox and the Latin chapels there. The Armenians fought the Orthodox over the ownership of the staircase on the east of the main entrance – and over the right to sweep it. The Copts fought the Ethiopians over the latter’s precarious rooftop monastery.

* Storrs called Rutenberg, a Russian Socialist Revolutionary whom Kerensky had in 1917 appointed Deputy Governor of Petrograd, ‘the most remarkable of them all’. He had commanded the Winter Palace before it was stormed by Trotsky’s Red Guards. Rutenberg was ‘thickset, powerful, dressed always in black, head strong as granite, utterances low and menacing, brilliant and fascinating’ but also ‘versatile and violent.’ In 1922, Churchill supported Rutenberg, an engineer, in his bid to found the hydroelectric works that powered much of Palestine.

* The word ‘Palestinian’ came to mean the Palestinian Arab nation, but for the first half of the twentieth century the Jews there were known as Palestinians or Palestinian Jews; the Arabs known as Palestinian Arabs. In Weizmann’s memoirs (published 1949) when he writes ‘Palestinian’ he means Jewish. A Zionist newspaper was called Palestine, an Arab one Filistin.

* The ageing Hussein became the King Lear of Arabia, obsessed with filial ingratitude and British perfidy. Lawrence, on his last mission, was sent to persuade the bitter king to compromise with Anglo-French hegemony or lose his British funding. He wept, raged and refused. Soon afterwards, Hussein was defeated by Ibn Saud and abdicated in favour of his eldest son, who became King Ali. But the Saudis conquered Mecca, Ali was ejected and Ibn Saud declared himself king of Hejaz, then of Saudi Arabia. The two kingdoms are still ruled by their families – Saudi Arabia and Hashemite Jordan.

* The twenty-five-year-old American Lowell Thomas of Colorado made his fortune launching Last Crusade, a travelling show that told the legendary adventures of ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. A million people saw it in London alone and even more in America. Lawrence despised and loved it, watching the show five times. ‘I saw your show and thank god the lights were out,’ he wrote. ‘He’s invented some silly phantom thing, a matinee idol in fancy dress.’ Lawrence finished his memoirs, using that old title, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, a creamily baroque yet poetical work that was a mix of history, confession and mythology – ‘I prefer lies to truth, particularly where they concern me,’ he joked. Yet for all its faults it is surely a masterpiece. Afterwards, Lawrence changed his name, joined the air force and retired into obscurity, dying in a motorcycle accident in 1935.

† Lord Randolph Churchill became friends with the Rothschilds and others when this was still risqué amongst aristocrats. When he arrived at a house party, an aristocrat greeted him, ‘What Lord Randolph, you’ve not brought your Jewish friends?’ at which Randolph replied, ‘No I didn’t think they’d be amused by the company.’

* The Nashashibis claimed descent from a thirteenth-century Mamluk potentate, Nasir al-Din al-Naqashibi, who had served as Superindentant of the Two Harams (Jerusalem and Hebron). In fact they were descended from eighteenth-century merchants who manufactured bows and arrows for the Ottomans. Ragheb’s father had made a huge fortune and married a Husseini.

* He was aided by von Papen, the officer who in 1917 had so wanted to save Germany’s reputation in Jerusalem. Papen, who had already served as chancellor, advised President Hindenburg to appoint Hitler, convinced he and his aristocratic camarilla could control the Nazis: ‘Within two months, we’ll have pushed Hitler so far in the corner, he’ll squeak.’ Papen became Hitler’s vice-chancellor but soon resigned, becoming German ambassador to Istanbul. He was tried at Nuremburg, served a few years in prison, and died in 1969.

* As the British contemplated limiting immigration to Zion, Joseph Stalin was building his own Soviet Jerusalem. ‘The Tsar gave the Jews no land but we will,’ he announced. His views on the Jews were contradictory. In a famous 1913 article on nationality, Stalin declared that Jews were not a nation but ‘mystical, intangible and otherworldly’. Once in power, he banned anti-Semitism, which he called ‘cannibalism’, and in 1928, approved the creation of a secular Jewish homeland with Yiddish and Russian as official languages. Inaugurated in May 1934, Stalin’s Zion, the Jewish Autonomous Region, was a wasteland, Birobidzhan, on the Chinese border. After the Second World War and the Holocaust, his foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and others backed the creation of another Jewish homeland in the more attractive Crimea – a Stalinist California – which ultimately aroused Stalin’s vicious anti-Semitism. Yet by 1948 Birobidzhan contained 35,000 Jews. Today it survives with a few thousand Jews and all its signs still in Yiddish.

* The Woodhead Commission of 1938 stated that between 1919 and 1938, the Arab population of Palestine had increased by 419,000; the Jewish population by 343,000.

* Antonius, son of a rich Christian Lebanese cotton-trader, born in Alexandria and educated at Victoria College and Cambridge and a friend of E. M. Forster, was assistant education director for the Mandate. He was chronicling the Arab Revolt and the British betrayal in his book the The Arab Awakening, one of the seminal texts of Arab nationalism. Antonius advised both the mufti and the British high commissioners. Antonius’ daughter Soraya later wrote probably the best novel about this period based on her parents’ milieu Where the Jinn Consult.

* Jerusalem was still filled with White Russians but one Grand Duchess returned post-humously. In 1918, the widow of Grand Duke Sergei, Ella, who had become a nun, was arrested by the Bolsheviks. Her skull was smashed in and she was tossed down a mineshaft in Alapaevsk, just hours after the Bolsheviks had also murdered her sister, Empress Alexandra, Emperor Nicholas II and all their children. When the Whites took Alapaevsk, they discovered the bodies: Ella’s had scarcely decayed. Her body and that of her devoted fellow nun Sister Barbara travelled via Peking, Bombay and Port Said to Jerusalem where they were received in January 1921 by Sir Harry Luke who had to change their route through the city to avoid pro-Bolshevik protests by Jewish immigrants. ‘Two unadorned coffins were lifted from the train. The little cavalcade wound its way sadly, unobtrusively to the Olivet’, wrote Louis, Marquess of Milford Haven who, with his wife Victoria, helped bear the coffins. ‘Russian peasant women, stranded pilgrims, sobbing and moaning, were almost fighting to get some part of the coffin.’ The Milford Havens were the grandparents of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. Elizabeth the New Martyr was canonized and rests in a glass-topped white marble sarcophagus in the Church of Mary Magdalene she and her husband had built. Some of her saintly relics have been returned to her Martha and Mary Convent in Moscow.

* He was a member of one of the grandest Families. The Alamis’ house remains the most extraordinary in Jerusalem: in the seventeenth century the family bought a house right next to the Church which actually shares and owns part of its roof; the view from there is astonishing. The building, with Byzantine, Crusader and Mamluk vestiges, is still owned by Mohammad al-Alami. A cousin still serves as sheikh of Saladin’s Salahiyya khanqah next door.

† Hamas, the Islamic Palestinian organization in Gaza, was inspired by Qassam hence it named its armed wing the Qassam Brigade, and its missiles are Qassam rockets.

* Wingate had made his name in Palestine. He was admired by Churchill who later backed his career. In 1941, Wingate’s Gideon Force helped liberate Ethiopia from the Italians and then as a major general, he created and commanded the Chindits, the largest Allied special forces of the war, to fight behind Japanese lines in Burma. He was killed in a plane crash in 1944.

* In Greece, a princess with a special link to Jerusalem was one of those brave gentiles who protected Jews. Princess Andrew of Greece, born Princess Alice of Battenberg, great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, risked her life by hiding the Cohen family of three while 60,000 Greek Jews were murdered. In 1947, her son Prince Philip, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, married Princess Elizabeth, who succeeded to the throne four years later. Princess Andrew became a nun and founded her own order, like her aunt Grand Duchess Ella. She lived in London but decided to be buried in Jerusalem. When her daughter grumbled that this was a long trip for visitors, the princess retorted, ‘Nonsense, there’s a perfectly good bus service from Istanbul!’ She died in 1969, but not until 1988 was she buried in the Church of Mary Magdalene close to her aunt Ella. In 1994, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, attended the ceremony at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, that honoured his mother as one of the ‘Righteous among the nations’.

* ‘He entered into the Nazis’ criminal delirium about “the Jews”’, writes Professor Gilbert Achcar in his book Arabs and the Holocaust, ‘as it burgeoned into the greatest of all crimes against humanity.’ Achcar adds, ‘it is undeniable that the mufti espoused the Nazis’ anti-Semitic doctrine which was easily compatible with a fanatical anti-Judaism cast in the Pan-Islamic mould.’ In a speech in Berlin on the 1943 anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, he said ‘they live rather as parasites amongst the peoples, suck their blood, pervert their morals … Germany has very clearly resolved to find a definitive solution for the Jewish danger that will eliminate the scourge that the Jews represent in the world.’ In his memoirs written in his Lebanese exile, he revelled in the fact that Jewish ‘losses in the course of the Second World War represented more than 30 per cent of the total number of their people whereas the Germans’ losses were less significant’ and, citing the Protocols and the World War One ‘stab in the back’ myth, he justified the Holocaust since there was no other way to scientifically reform the Jews.

* In the 1930s, the emperor, known as Ras Tafar before his accession, inspired the Rastafarians, founded in Jamaica and made famous by the reggae singer Bob Marley, who hailed him as the Lion of Judah and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Ethiopia and Africa were the new Zion. Haile Selassie was murdered by the Marxist Dergue in 1974.

* The description is that of Arthur Koestler, the writer who had come to Jerusalem as a Revisionist Zionist in 1928 but had soon left. In 1948, Koestler returned to cover the War of Independence and interviewed Begin and Ben-Gurion.

* That summer, Churchill wrote to Stalin suggesting an allied conference in Jerusalem – ‘There are first class hotels, Government houses etc. Marshal Stalin could come by special train with every form of protection from Moscow to Jerusalem’ – and the British prime minister helpfully enclosed the route: ‘Moscow Tbilisi Ankara Beirut Haifa Jerusalem’. Instead they met (with President Roosevelt) at Yalta.

* This is now a museum to the Jewish resistance fighters who were imprisoned there. The Nikolai Hostel was the last Russian pilgrim hostel to be built, with room for 1,200 pilgrims, opened by the Romanov Prince Nikolai in 1903.

* One of those killed was Julius Jacobs, a cousin of the author and a British civil servant who happened to be Jewish.

* Farran remained a war hero to British security forces. He failed to win a Scottish seat in Parliament as a Conservative in 1949 and then moved to Canada. There he took up farming, was elected to the Alberta legislature, becoming minister of telephones, solicitor-general and a professor of political science. He died in 2006 aged eighty-six. A street in East Talpiot, Jerusalem, was recently named after Rubowitz.

* Two Husseini cousins served as foreign and defence ministers, Anwar Nusseibeh as cabinet secretary – and the mufti as president of the Palestine National Council.

* In a classic example of Jerusalem’s religious competitiveness and its ability to create sanctity out of necessity, Jewish pilgrims, robbed of the Wall, prayed at the Tomb of David on Mount Zion and created the country’s first Holocaust Museum there.

* But Ragheb Nashashibi was dying of cancer. The king visited him in the Augusta Victoria Hospital. ‘In this building,’ said Abdullah, ‘in the spring of 1921, I had my first meeting with Winston Churchill.’ In April 1951, Nashashibi died and was buried in a small tomb near his villa – which was later knocked down to build the Ambassador Hotel.

* The largest court, the Ger, named after a village in Poland and ruled by the Alter family, wear shtreimel fur hats; the Belzers, from Ukraine, wear kaftans and fur hats; the Breslavers worship with mystic and exhibitionistic dancing and singing, and are known as the ‘Hasidic hippies’.

* In 1957, Yad Vashem, ‘A Place and a Name’, the memorial to the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust, was created on Mount Herzl. In 1965, the Israel Museum was opened, followed by the new Knesset, both funded by James de Rothschild who had helped recruit the Jewish Legion in Allenby’s army.

* Arafat claimed to have been born in Jerusalem. His mother was a Jerusalemite, but he was in fact born in Cairo. In 1933, at the age of four, he went to live with relatives for four years in the Maghrebi Quarter next to the Wall.

* As the tension rose, an old man visited the city for the last time and the world scarcely noticed: Haj Amin Husseini, the ex-mufti, prayed at al-Aqsa and then returned to his Lebanese exile, where he died in 1974.

* Kollek, born in Hungary, raised in Vienna, and named after Theodor Herzl, had specialized in secret missions for the Jewish Agency, liaising with the British secret service during the campaign against the Irgun and the Stern Gang, and then buying arms for the Haganah. He then served as director of Ben-Gurion’s private office.

* The chief academic work on Jerusalem madness describes the typical patients as ‘individuals who strongly identify with characters from the Old or New Testament or are convinced they are one of these characters and fall victim to a psychotic episode in Jerusalem.’ Tour guides should look out for ‘1. Agitation. 2. Split away from group. 3. Obsession with taking baths; compulsive fingernail/toe-nail clipping. 4. Preparation, often with aid of hotel bed-linen, of toga-like gown, always white. 5. The need to scream, sing out loud biblical verses. 6. Procession to one of Jerusalem’s holy places. 7. Delivery of a sermon in a holy place.’ The Kfar Shaul Mental Health Centre in Jerusalem, which specializes in the Syndrome, is said to stand on the site of the village of Deir Yassin.

* Faisal Husseini, the son of Abd al-Kadir, emerged as one of the leaders of the Intifada. Husseini had trained as a Fatah explosives expert and spent years in Israeli jails, the essential badges of honour for any Palestinian leader, but, released from prison, he was one of the first to come round to talks with the Israelis, even learningHebrew to put his case more clearly. Husseini attended the Madrid talks and now became Arafat’s Palestinian minister for Jerusalem. When the Oslo Accords fell apart, the Israelis confined him to Orient House before eventually closingit down. When he died in 2001, buried like his father on the Haram, the Palestinians lost the only leader who could have replaced Arafat.

† Archaeologists had started exploring tunnels beneath the Arab homes that bordered the entire western wall of the Temple Mount duringthe 1950s and Professor OlegGrabar, the future doyen of Jerusalem scholars, remembers how they would frequently appear as if by magic out of the floors in the kitchens of the surprised residents. Under Israeli archaeologists, the tunnel yielded – and continues to do so – the most breathtaking finds from the immense stones of the foundations of Herod’s Temple, via Maccabee, Roman, Byzantine and Umayyad buildings, to a new Crusader chapel. But the tunnel also contained the place closest to the Temple’s Foundation Stone where Jews could now pray–and it united Jerusalem by linkingthe Jewish and Muslim Quarters.

* These struggles reveal the complexities of both sides, sometimes bringing Israelis and Arabs together: when Rabbi Goren tried to commandeer the Khalidi house overlooking the Wall for a yeshiva, Mrs Haifa Khalidi was defended in Israeli courts by two Israeli historians, Amnon Cohen and Dan Bahat, and still lives today in her house above the famous Khalidiyyah Library. When religious Jews tried to expand their digs and settlement in Silwan below the City of David, they were stopped by lawsuits brought by Israeli archaeologists.

* In 2009/2010, the population of Greater Jerusalem was 780,000: 514,800 Jews (who include 163,800 ultra-Orthodox) and 265,200 Arabs. There were around 30,000 Arabs in the Old City and 3,500 Jews. There are around 200,000 Israelis living in new suburbs in eastern Jerusalem.

* In Israel’s dysfunctional democracy, with weak coalition governments, national-religious organizations have become ever more powerful in questions of Jerusalem’s planning and archaeology. In 2003, Israeli building started in the vital East One (E1) section, east of the Old City, which would have effectively cut off east Jerusalem from the West Bank, underminingthe creation of a Palestinian state. Israeli liberals and America persuaded Israel to stop this, but plans to build Jewish settlements in the Arab neighbourhoods of Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan continue. The latter stands next to the much-excavated ancient City of David where a Jewish nationalist-religious foundation, Elad, funds the invaluable archaeological excavations and runs a visitors’ centre telling the story of Jewish Jerusalem. It also plans to move Palestinian residents to nearby housingto make way for more Jewish settlers and a King David park called the King’s Gardens. Such situations can challenge archaeological professionalism. Archaeologists, writes Dr Raphael Greenberg, a historian who has campaigned against this project, represent ‘a secular academic approach’, yet their backers hope for ‘results that legitimise their concepts of the history of Jerusalem’. So far his fears have not materialized. The integrity of the archaeologists is high and as we saw earlier, the present dighas uncovered Canaanite not Jewish walls. Nonetheless these sites have become flashpoints for protests by Palestinians and Israeli liberals.

* The Russian reverence for Jerusalem has been modernized to suit the authoritarian nationalism fostered by Vladimir Putin who in 2007 oversaw the reunion of the ex-Soviet Moscow Patriarchate and the White Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia. Thousands of singing Russian pilgrims again fill the streets. The Holy Fire is flown back to Moscow on a plane, chartered by an organization called the Centre for National Glory and the Apostle Andrei Foundation, headed by a Kremlin potentate. A kitsch life-sized golden statue of ‘Tsar David’ has appeared outside David’s Tomb. An ex-prime minister, Stephan Stepashin, is the chief of the restored Palestine Society: ‘a Russian flagin the centre of Jerusalem,’ he says, ‘is priceless.’

* The Families remain important in Jerusalem. After the death of Faisal Husseini, Arafat appointed the philosopher Sari Nusseibeh (cousin of Weejah), as Palestinian representative in Jerusalem, but sacked him after he rejected suicide bombings. The founder of al-Quds University, Nusseibeh remains the city’s intellectual maverick, admired by both sides. At the time of writing, the Palestinian representative for Jerusalem is Adnan al-Husseini; another cousin, Dr Rafiq al-Husseini, advises President Abbas. As for the Khalidis, Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University in New York, advises Barack Obama.

* On a last visit to Jerusalem in 1992 before his death, Edward Said called the Church ‘an alien, run-down, unattractive place full of frumpy middle-aged tourists milling about in a decrepit and ill-lit area where Copts, Greeks, Armenians and other Christian sects nurtured their unattractive ecclesiastical gardens in sometimes open combat with each other’. The most famous sign of that open combat is a little ladder belonging to the Armenians on the balcony outside the right-hand window in the façade of the Church which tour guides claim can never be moved without other sects seizingit. In fact, the ladder leads to a balcony where the Armenian superior used to drink coffee with his friends and tend his flower garden: it is there so that the balcony can be cleaned.