Jerusalem: The Biography

* 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’