Besides building this church and repairing the outer walls of the Temple, Justinian very probably enclosed the five acres on the north-east, which (as already said[437]) formed no part of Herod’s enclosure. He adorned the Double Gate with an arched cornice outside, and probably built the Golden Gate in the same style, as well as the fine gate-house within. The Ṣakhrah rock—as the site of the Jewish Temple—was purposely left desolate, as it was in Constantine’s time; but a Church of St. Sophia was built, and is described by Theodorus (who was perhaps the same person who built the church for Justinian) as being in the Prætorium. It is thus to be identified with the “Chapel of the Mocking,” which still exists inside the Turkish barracks on the Antonia scarp. Antoninus Martyr also describes it at the same site, and calls it a basilica.[438]
It is not clear from the account by Procopius where the two hospitals built by Justinian stood, nor are any remains of them known to exist. They flanked some entry, and may have been near the west central gate of the enclosure (now the “Gate of the Chain”), where the ancient causeway was repaired, and ran on Byzantine arches over the street leading from the Gate of St. Stephen to Siloam. Cyril of Scythopolis[439] mentions Justinian’s hospital for sick pilgrims as having one hundred beds, to which another hundred were added later. Procopius speaks of one hospice as being a lodging for visitors coming from a distance, and of the other as being a resting-place for the sick poor. Antoninus Martyr, forty years later, says: “From Sion we came to the Basilica of the Blessed Mary, where is a large company of monks, and where also are hospices for men and women. There I was received as a pilgrim: there were countless tables, and more than three thousand beds for sick persons.” The hospices may have been enlarged by his time, but Antoninus is not a very reliable writer, and is given to exaggeration, besides being extremely credulous.
To Justinian we may also, perhaps, ascribe the building of the underground chapel at Gethsemane, which was supposed to be the site of the Virgin’s Tomb. It is first mentioned by Theodorus, and though St. John of Damascus speaks of the Empress Pulcheria (after 450 A. D.) as desiring relics from this tomb, he only wrote three centuries later. Yet a third church in honour of the Virgin first appears in the accounts of Theodorus and Antoninus. This was close to the “Sheep Pool,” and its site is perhaps marked by the present Latin chapel of the “Flagellation.”
JERUSALEM IN 530 A. D.
KHOSRAU II.
After the death of Justinian, whose power held at bay the Vandals and the Goths, the Persians, and the Turks of the Volga, and after the peaceful times of his nephew, Justin II., and of Tiberius II., who married the widow of Justin, Maurice the Cappadocian—of Roman origin—was emperor for twenty years, till he was murdered in 602 A. D. by the centurion Phocas, elected emperor by the discontented army, and attacked by Khosrau II., the Sassanian ruler of Persia. The Byzantine empire had fallen on evil days, and Heraclius, the exarch of Africa, refused tribute to Phocas. Khosrau I. had conceived the ambitious idea of conquering Western Asia; but he was held in check by Justinian, who was allied to the Turks on his north and to the Sabean kings on the south. The grandson (Khosrau II.) took advantage of the weakness of Phocas, and attacked Aleppo and Antioch in 610 A. D., while Heraclius, son of the exarch, was besieging the upstart centurion in Byzantium. For ten years Khosrau II. held Chalcedon, and the Persian forces faced the new Greek emperor at Constantinople. The victorious Sassanian entered Alexandria, and in 614 A. D. the Persians besieged Jerusalem. Muhammad at Mekkah watched the war, and predicted that in spite of the defeat of the Greeks they would triumph a few years later.[440] Meanwhile, the Holy City fell to the Persians in June[441]; and, according to a contemporary account in the Paschal Chronicle, a terrible massacre of monks and nuns followed. The churches were laid in ruins; the Holy Sepulchre basilica, built by Constantine, was burned down; the Patriarch Zacharias and the True Cross were taken away to Persia as hostages. Mediæval writers state that the corpses of the martyrs were buried at the “Charnel House [or, Cave] of the Lion,” beside the Mâmilla Pool outside Jerusalem, on the west,[442] where a subterranean chapel still exists.
The prediction of Muḥammad was speedily fulfilled. Heraclius drove the Persians out of Asia Minor in 622 A. D.—the year of the Hejirah—and struck boldly at the heart of their empire. He advanced nearly to Ispahan, and in five years he so ruined Sassanian power as to leave Persia a prey to the Moslems ten years later. His advance forced Khosrau II. to retreat from Palestine, and early in 628 the latter was murdered by his son Siroes, who made an ignominious peace with the Byzantines. Thus, in the following year, Heraclius made a triumphal entry by the Golden Gate into Jerusalem, at the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross on September 14, and bore the sacred relic on his shoulder, while the patriarch, having died in captivity, was succeeded by Modestus, his vicar.
MODESTUS
Even before this last triumph of the Byzantine emperor, steps had been taken to rebuild the ruined churches, as soon as the Persians had retired. John Eleemon, Patriarch of Alexandria, raised funds and sent a thousand workmen from Egypt.[443] The monk Modestus, appointed vicar to the captive Patriarch Zacharias, superintended the building work.