Jerusalem: The Biography

1517–1550

THE SECOND SOLOMON AND HIS ROXELANA

On 24 August 1516, the Ottoman sultan, Selim the Grim, routed the Mamluk army not far from Aleppo, the battle that decided Jerusalem’s destiny: most of the Middle East would remain Ottoman for the next four centuries. On 20 March 1517, Selim arrived to take possession of Jerusalem. The ulema handed him the keys of al-Aqsa and the Dome at which he prostrated himself and exclaimed, ‘I am the possessor of the first qibla.’ Selim confirmed the traditional tolerance of the Christians and Jews and prayed on the Temple Mount. Then he rode on to subjugate Egypt. Selim had defeated Persia, conquered the Mamluks and clarified any succession dilemmas by killing his brothers, his nephews and probably some of his own sons. So when he died in September 1520, he was survived by just one son.¹

Suleiman was ‘only twenty-five years old, tall and slender but tough with a thin and bony face’ and he found himself the master of an empire that stretched from the Balkans to the borders of Persia, from Egypt to the Black Sea. ‘In Baghdad, I am the Shah, in Byzantine realms, the Caesar; and in Egypt, the Sultan,’ he declared and to these titles he added that of caliph. No wonder Ottoman courtiers addressed their monarchs as the Padishah – emperor – who was, one of them wrote, ‘the most honoured and respected sovereign the world over.’ It was said that Suleiman dreamed he was visited by the Prophet who told him that ‘to repulse the Infidels,’ he must embellish the Sanctuary (Temple Mount) and rebuild Jerusalem’, but actually he needed no prompting. He was only too aware of himself as the Islamic emperor and, as his Slavic wife Roxelana would repeatedly hail him, ‘the Solomon of his age.’

Roxelana shared in Suleiman’s projects – and that included Jerusalem. She was probably a priest’s daughter kidnapped from Poland and sold into the sultanic harem where she caught Suleiman’s eye, bearing him five sons and a daughter. ‘Young but not beautiful, although graceful and petite,’ a contemporary portrait suggests she was large-eyed, rose-lipped and round-faced. Her letters to Suleiman on campaign catch something of her playful yet indomitable spirit: ‘My Sultan, there’s no limit to the burning anguish of separation. Nowspare this miserable one and don’t withhold your noble letters. When your letters are read, your servant and son Mir Mehmed and your slave and daughter Mihrimah weep and wail from missing you. Their weeping has driven me mad.’ Suleiman renamed her Hurrem al-Sultan, the Joy of the Sultan, whom he described in poems attributed to him as ‘my love, my moonlight, my springtime, my woman of the beautiful hair, my love of the slanted brow, my love of eyes full of mischief’ and officially as ‘the quintessence of queens, the light of the eye of the resplendent caliphate’. She became a wily politician, intriguing successfully to ensure Suleiman’s son by another woman did not succeed to the throne: the son was strangled in Suleiman’s presence.

Suleiman inherited Jerusalem and Mecca and believed that his Islamic prestige demanded that he beautify the sanctuaries of Islam: everything about him was on a grand scale, his ambitions boundless, his reign almost half a century long, his horizons vast – he fought almost continental wars from Europe and north Africa to Iraq and the Indian Ocean, from the gates of Vienna to Baghdad. His achievements in Jerusalem were so successful that the Old City today belongs more to him than anyone else: the walls look ancient and to many people they define the city as much as Dome, Wall or Church – but they and most of the gates were the creation of this contemporary of Henry VIII, both to secure the city and add to his own prestige. The sultan added a mosque, an entrance and a tower to the Citadel; he built an aqueduct to bring water into the city and nine fountains from which to drink it – including three on the Temple Mount; and finally he replaced the worn mosaics on the Dome of the Rock with glazed tiles decorated with lilies and lotus in turquoise, cobalt, white and yellow as they are today.^*

Roxelana liked to endowcharitable foundations close to her husband’s projects, she commandeered a Mamluk palace to establish her al-Imara al-Amira al-Khasaki al-Sultan, a foundation known as the Flourishing Edifice that included a mosque, bakery, fifty-five-room hostel and soup-kitchen for the poor. Thus they made the Temple Mount and Jerusalem their own.

In 1553 Suleiman, soi-disant ‘Second Solomon and King of the World’, decided to inspect Jerusalem, but his far-flung wars intervened and, like Constantine before him, the man who had transformed the city never got to see his achievement. The Sultan’s enterprise was on an imperial scale but he clearly supervised it from afar. As the walls arose, the viceroy of Syria presided, Suleiman’s imperial architect Sinan probably inspected the work on his way home from Mecca: thousands of workers laboured, new stones were quarried, old stones purloined from ruined churches and Herodian palaces, and the ramparts and gates carefully fused with the Herodian and Umayyad walls around the Temple Mount. The retiling of the Dome required 450,000 tiles, so Suleiman’s men created a tile factory next to al-Aqsa to make them, and some of his contractors built mansions in the city and stayed. The local architect founded a dynasty of hereditary architects that reigned for the next two centuries. The city must have resounded with the unfamiliar sounds of hammering masons and the clink of money. The population almost tripled to 16,000 and the number of Jews doubled to 2,000, boosted by the constant arrival of refugees from the west. A vast, anguished movement of the Jews was in progress, and some of these new arrivals contributed directly to Suleiman’s enterprise.²