JERUSALEM IN 1187 A. D.

REFERENCES

P = Postern G = Gate

THE POPULATION

The pilgrim could enter the Bethlehem Gate (now called the Jaffa Gate) freely; for the grievous toll was taken off by Baldwin II., at the request of the Latin patriarch Guarmund.[505] He saw on his right the “Tower of David,” or as it was called later the “Castle of the Pisans,” and in the market square, to its east, he mingled with a crowd such as had never before been seen in the Holy City.[506] Knights of four orders rode by on hardy Armenian or Cyprian steeds, clad in long hauberks of chain mail, with iron caps and shoes, and mail leggings, wielding the long Norman sword and the lance, their shields painted with simple blazons. Over the hauberk the Templars wore a long belted white dress with red cross, the Hospitallers wore black with a white eight-pointed cross, the Teutonic order white with black cross; and the Knights of St. Lazarus—who tended the lepers at their hospital outside the city—had black and white robes with a green cross. The tall noble from Normandy was dressed in silk and miniver (the skin of the grey Siberian squirrel); he wore his hair and beard long under his furred cap. The tall, slim Norman ladies were robed in white samite and cloth-of-gold. The pages with them had slashed doublets of yellow and crimson. The men-at-arms wore the quilted gambison which, when steeped in vinegar, was said to resist iron weapons; with them marched the Turcopoles—a mixed race, Turko-Greek, in origin—who made excellent light horsemen, not despised like the “Poulains,” or half-bred Syro-Greeks, who had an evil reputation as extortionate inn-keepers and cowards. The Europeans were mainly Franks and Italians, with a smaller proportion of Germans, but you might also see Hungarians, Navarese, Bretons, Scots, Englishmen, Ruthenians, Bohemians, Greeks, and Bulgarians,[507] mingling with the red-sashed Armenian in camlet cloth, the Georgian, the Nestorian, and the Syrian Christian, the Moslem Fellâḥ and the Arab from the desert who were contented serfs, the scowling Mullah, the Egyptian in his blue gown, the Persian and Hindu, with ruddy Maronites from Lebanon, and dark Copts from the Delta. All these were ruled, according to the feudal laws of the kingdom, in fiefs held by the Norman, Italian, Frank, and Provençal knights from Lorraine, Auvergne, Burgundy, Apulia, and Sicily. The peasant market was inspected by the mutaḥaseb or “accountant”; the traders from Venice, Genoa, Pisa, Amalfi, and Marseilles had their privileges and agreements with the king. The Church established in the kingdom was that of Rome, and its rites and vestments were Latin. The Oriental bishops were only at most recognised as suffragans, and bitterly resented the dominance of the “intruding” hierarchy from the West. But they too were under the protection of the king, like the Jewish dyer in his yellow turban, his hands stained blue with indigo, who still clung to his sacred city; “two hundred,” says Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela (in 1163 A. D.), “dwell in one corner of the city under the Tower of David.” But there must have been others, for the north-east quarter (the ancient Bezetha) was called the “Juiverie”—a ghetto transferred later to the present Jews’ quarter on the south-east.[508] The Jews were both Sephardim from Spain and Africa and also probably Ashkenazim from Eastern Europe. They were ranked lower than the Moslems, but the nobles were often in debt to Jewish bankers.

The new rulers brought with them a new and beautiful style of architecture from Italy and Sicily. It was distinguished by its lightness and its boldly carved ornamentation, with a finish to the hewn ashlar more perfect than any other. It was based on the Lombard Romanesque, but was influenced by Saracen art. The clustering pillars, groined roofs, and ribbed arches, the coupled dwarf columns, and even the “dog-tooth” moulding, of which a bold example remains in the west window of the cloister south of St. Mary Latin, had appeared earlier among Saracens, and—as we have seen—in some cases these were features of Arab art as early as the ninth century.[509] Fine examples of this Italian-Norman style—which we find also at Palermo in 1185 A. D.—are still to be seen at the south entrance of the Holy Sepulchre Cathedral, or in the Hospital close by, in the Templar’s porch added to the Aḳṣa Mosque, as well as at Gaza, Ramleh, Nâblus, Tortosa, and elsewhere in Palestine and in Syria. The arches at first were round, but after 1130 A. D. the pointed Saracenic arch was used. The general appearance was lighter than that of our Norman architecture in England: for the glories of the style wrongly called “Gothic” in France and Britain and Germany, developed (from this earlier art of Italians and Normans) in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The “mason’s marks,” or lucky signs on the stones, which distinguish Norman work in Palestine, are the same that we find in French and English cathedrals, after the return of Templars and others to the West, when Acre fell in 1291, and the orders were expelled from Syria.

THE STREETS

From the Bethlehem Gate, David Street descended east, leaving on its left Patriarch Street (now called “Christian Street”), named from the Patriarch’s house farther north; and farther east there were three roofed streets to the left, which are the present bazaars: they were called “Herb Street,” “Covered Street,” and “Malquisinat.”[510] In the latter cooked food was sold to pilgrims. The groined and ribbed vaulting over the bazaar is Norman work here still standing, and the short Latin text, “Sca Anna,” carved on a wall, shows that one of the shops once belonged to the Church of St. Anne.