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The Temple Mount viewed from the Mount of Olives

Perchè la guerra omai non si rinnova, a liberar Gerusalemme oppressa?

Why is the war still not renewed, to free oppressed Jerusalem?

Count Godfrey to a Papal nuncio. Torquato Tasso, La Gerusalemme Liberata, 1575, Canto Primo Verse XII.

There were two Jerusalems.

Charlemagne had travelled there according to legend, and the Caliph Haroun al-Rashid had sent him the keys to the city. The sword he had carried at his side, Joyeuse, had hidden within its hilt the tip of Longinus’ lance that had pierced Christ’s flank. This was the holy and spiritual Jerusalem that lay high above the dross of this world.

This Jerusalem was fixed firmly in the minds of medieval Christians. Wibald, the Bishop of Eichstadt, did not complain over the seven years it took him to complete his pilgrimage to the holiest of cities.

There are five major versions of Urban II’s sermon in which he called upon the warriors of Europe to save the Eastern Christians. The Gesta Francorum version does not mention Jerusalem but its writer was an anonymous Crusader of Bohemond of Taranto’s army, and in the version of Robert of Rheims, who may very well have been present at Clermont, Urban called upon the memory of Charlemagne’s destruction of the pagans and roused his audience to expel the Persians from the confines of Jerusalem and to ‘let the holy sepulchre of the Lord our Saviour, which is possessed by unclean nations, especially incite you!’

Whether the kings, lords and common folks of the eleventh century should have listened to the clerics is a moot point. They did, as a contemporary and cynical rhyme made clear:

If you go to hear the preachers

Do beware of clever teachers

Who can with their style and gloss

Make you a captive of the Cross

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Of the ‘real’ Jerusalem in the 1090s we can say this. The Fatimid Empire had recovered the city and its environs from the Saljuqs in 1098 amid the collapse of Saljuq power in Palestine and the khutba or Friday sermon was called in their name and in that of the Shia Muslim faith, but there was little time to fortify the city and its Turkish garrison had done little to make the city defendable during their tenure. Indeed the Fatimids had practically walked into the city, as the Turks got generous terms for leaving. Palestine had become an unpleasant posting with a continuance of poor harvests.

Perhaps the departing Turks were doubly fortunate. For an enemy was now forming that had been inflamed by the Pope, according to Guibert of Nogent’s recording, to expel the Antichrist from Jerusalem. For the enemy of Christ had now fixed ‘his tents on the Mount of Olives; and it is certain, for the apostle teaches it, that he sits at Jerusalem in the Temple of the Lord, as though he is God …’.

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