The city of Jerusalem

by C. R. Conder

There seemed—and then no more of Thee and me.”

The friendship of the three sceptics did not long endure. The vizier found out that Ḥasan was bent on supplanting him, and the latter was exiled to Ḳasbîn, near which was the castle of the “Eagle’s Nest,” where—according to Marco Polo—Ḥasan’s earthly Paradise was established, to lure the youths who vowed implicit obedience to his commands. The first victims of the new order were Nizâm el Mulk (who fell into disgrace), and Melek Shah himself. The Assassins organised a huge secret society which, in the twelfth century, spread from Khorasan to Syria, and was feared by Moslem and Christian alike. It was suppressed in 1254 A. D. by Mengku Khan, but yet later the “Sheikh of the Mountain” was powerful in the Lebanon. Saladin and Edward I. alike were marked as victims, and to the present day the Nuṣeirîyeh of Syria retain the mystic beliefs of the order founded by Ḥasan in 1090 A. D.

ITALIAN TRADE

Although we have no pilgrim diaries of the century during which the Turks became rulers of Western Asia, we know that the Latins were visiting the Holy City in ever-increasing numbers. Trade with Asia was carried on by French and Italian merchants.[489] A fair was held annually at Jerusalem on September 15, and the traders of Pisa, Venice, Genoa, and Marseilles bought cloves, nutmeg, and mace brought from India, pepper, ginger, and frankincense from Aden, silk from China—whether by overland caravan or by the Chinese junks[490] which appeared in the Red Sea during the Middle Ages—sugar from Syria, flax from Egypt, with quicksilver, coral, and metals, glass from Tyre, almonds, mastic, saffron, with rich stuffs and weapons, from Damascus. The Jews paid a heavy tax to secure the monopoly as dyers, and Jewish dyers still lived near the Tower of David in 1163 A. D., as mentioned by Benjamin of Tudela. The sugar-cane of Tripoli is noticed by Albert of Aix, and sugar-mills, set up by Moslems and afterwards used by the Franks, still remain in ruins at Jericho. Jerusalem was famous for its sugar as early, indeed, as the tenth century.

Among these traders were the merchants of Amalfi. The little town in the Bay of Salerno, south of Naples, had a port sheltered by the hills from the mighty tramontana—the north wind which blows with almost hurricane force in winter. They kept up the ancient hospital in Jerusalem founded by Charlemagne. They apparently built beside it a monastery for Benedictines in 1048 A. D., and a Benedictine nunnery was added later. These were close to the Church of St. Mary Latin, for the hospice was intended for Latin pilgrims. The patron saint was originally the Egyptian patriarch of the seventh century, St. John Eleemon, but afterwards St. John Baptist when the order of the Hospitallers grew out of the Benedictines as Knights of St. John. They retained the black Benedictine robe, with a white cross. Geraud of Amalfi, the first master of the order, was found presiding at the hospice when the Crusaders arrived.[491] Pope Paschal II. took this institution under his protection on February 15, 1113 A. D., and it is described as “the Hospice of Geraud in the city of Jerusalem, near the Church of St. John Baptist, instituted with all the properties which do or shall belong to the said hospice this side or beyond the sea.” It remained independent of the Latin patriarch down to 1120 A. D., and the order was always specially under the Popes.[492]

It was perhaps on account of the increased facilities for transit, afforded by the Italian fleets, that the numbers of the Latin pilgrims began now to increase so greatly. Europe was still plunged in Gothic ignorance, but the traders brought home tales which fired the imagination of artistic peoples such as the Provençals, the Normans, and the Kelts were by nature. They heard, as they sat in their grim castles frowning down on some walled village, of great cities in the East full of treasure, and brightened with glorious works of art. They contrasted the splendours of the sunny South, in Italy and in Syria, with the gloom of the North. They learned from the palmer, or the Jewish trader, wonderful legends of Indian and Arab origin, and heard of sacred places and miraculous relics. Palestine was a fairy-land to them; Damascus was a city to sack. They learned also that Christians in the East were persecuted, and trade obstructed, by savage Tartars who demanded endless taxes, who danced on the altar of the Holy Sepulchre, and pulled the patriarch by the beard. Their wrath was roused, and they desired to aid the emperor of Byzantium, who was appealing to them for help.

POPE HILDEBRAND

The Church also was recovering from the utter degradation into which it had fallen after the time of Charlemagne. Hildebrand appeared as a great Pope in 1073 A. D.—an Italian probably of Gothic origin, who reformed the Latin episcopacy, and freed himself, by aid of Normans, from the German emperor (whom he brought to his knees at Canossa), yet who died in exile at Salerno in 1085 A. D. The dreamers of dreams are the makers of history. Hildebrand dreamed of an united feudal Europe, under the Pope of Rome as its head. He saw the danger to Christendom of the great Moslem empire under Melek Shah which threatened Byzantium. He was the first to urge on princes the necessity of union, and of a “general passage” beyond the sea for the support of the Greek empire, and for the rescue of the holy places. Appeal had been made to Pope Sylvester II. as early as 1000 A. D., and he had written a letter[493] in favour of the Eastern Christians, but nothing could then be done. The dream of Hildebrand was fulfilled within a generation.

The Latin nations were still half savage, and the masses lived in fear of Hell, of the Last Day, and of the Pope—fears which were alike inculcated by their priests. It was expected that the world would come to an end in the year 1000 after the Nativity,[494] and wills and legal documents of the tenth century begin with the words “Appropinquante etenim mundi termino, et ruinis crescentibus jam certa signa manifestantur, pertimescens tremendi judicii diem.” Though the year passed without fulfilment of these fears, the idea of immediate ending of earthly history continued to be a real motive of action even at the close of the twelfth century, when Geoffrey de Vinsauf says that the world “waxes old.” The pilgrim received remission of his sins at the holy places, and if he died at Jerusalem he was ready to appear in the “Valley of Decision” on the day of doom.

Jerusalem, which then measured nearly a third of a square mile in area, seems a small town to us, but to the pilgrims from the West it must have appeared large and magnificent, though Damascus and Constantinople were much larger. In the middle of the twelfth century Winchester, as the capital of England, under king Stephen, was only a third of the size of the Holy City; and though the beauties of the Ḥaram buildings could not be seen, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, with its mosaics, its lamps of gold and silver, and many other gifts of princes, must have impressed the wild Normans with a sense of Oriental wealth. The Norsemen who accompanied Sigurd, soon after Jerusalem was taken by Godfrey, scorned to show their astonishment at the civilisation of Asia, yet even the smaller town of Sidon was a prize, as Halldor Skualldre sang.