THE RISE AND FALL OF THE ‘KING OF PALESTINE’
In 1770, Ali Bey, an Egyptian general who gloried in the nickname the Cloudsnatcher (which he had won by defeating Bedouin, whom the Ottomans believed were as hard to catch as clouds), allied himself with Sheikh Zahir. Together they conquered most of Palestine, even taking Damascus, but the sultan’s pasha held out in Jerusalem. The Russian empress, Catherine the Great, was at war with the Ottomans and now she despatched a fleet to the Mediterranean, where it defeated the sultan’s navy. The Cloudsnatcher needed Russian help and Russia was only interested in one prize: Jerusalem. The Russian ships bombarded Jaffa then sailed up to attack Beirut. Zahir occupied Jaffa – but could he and the Cloudsnatcher deliver Jerusalem?
Sheikh Zahir sent his troops to invest the city but they were unable to make any impression on the walls. The Ottomans, defeated on all fronts, sued for peace with the Russians. In the peace treaty in 1774, Catherine and her partner Prince Potemkin forced the Ottomans to recognize Russian protection of the Orthodox – and ultimately the growing Russian obsession with Jerusalem would lead to a European war.* The Ottomans could now retake their lost provinces: the Cloudsnatcher was assassinated and Sheikh Zahir, aged eighty-six, had to escape from Acre. As he rode away, he noticed that his favourite concubine was missing – ‘this is no time to leave a person behind,’ he said – and galloped back. As he scooped her up, the girl dragged her ancient lover from his horse and assassins stabbed and beheaded him. The pickled head of the ‘first King of Palestine’ was sent to Istanbul.10 The anarchy now attracted the rising hero of Revolutionary France.
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE: ‘A KORAN I COMPOSED MYSELF’
On 19 May 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte, twenty-eight years old, pale and gaunt, with long lank hair, set off with 335 ships, 35,000 troops and an academy of 167 scientists to conquer Egypt. ‘I would found a religion’, he reflected with megalomaniacal arrogance, ‘I saw myself marching on the way to Asia, mounted on an elephant, a turban on my head, in one hand a new Koran I would have composed myself.’
His adventure was inspired by revolutionary science, cold politics and crusading romance. Everyone in Paris had read the bestselling travelogue by the philosophe, Constantin Volney, who described the ‘battered ruins of Jerusalem’ and the decay of the Ottoman Levant as ripe for conquest by the civilizing reason of the Enlightenment. The French Revolution had tried to destroy the Church and replace Christianity with reason, liberty and even a new cult of the Supreme Being. However, Catholicism had endured and Napoleon aspired to heal the wounds of Revolution by fusing together monarchy, faith and science – hence the many scientists on board. Yet it was also about empire: France was at war with England The expedition was the brainchild of the louche, lame ex-bishop and foreign minister, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, who hoped it would win control of the Mediterranean and cut off British India. If Bonaparte succeeded, all well and good but if he failed, Talleyrand would destroy a rival. As would happen so often in the Middle East, the Europeans expected the orientals to be grateful for their well-intentioned conquest.
Napoleon landed successfully in Egypt, which was still ruled by a caste of hybrid mamluk–Ottoman officers. He swiftly defeated them at the Battle of the Pyramids, but the English admiral Horatio Nelson obliterated the French fleet at Aboukir Bay. Bonaparte had won Egypt, but Nelson had trapped his army in the East and this encouraged the Ottomans to defy him in Syria. If Napoleon was to survive in Egypt, he had to march north and secure Syria.
In February 1799, he invaded Palestine with 13,000 men and 800 camels. On 2 March, as he advanced on Jaffa, his cavalry under General Damas carried out a raid just three miles from Jerusalem. General Bonaparte fantasized about the conquest of the Holy City, reporting to the revolutionary Directorate in Paris: ‘By the time you read this letter, it’s possible I will be standing in the ruins of Solomon’s Temple.’
PART EIGHT
EMPIRE
How I should like to visit Jerusalem some time.
Abraham Lincoln, in conversation with his wife
The theatre of the most memorable and stupendous events that have ever occurred in the annals of the world.
James Barclay, City of the Great King
No-where is the arch of heaven more pure, intense and cloudless than above the proud heights of Zion. Yet if the traveller can forget he is treading on the grave of the people from whom his religion has sprung, there is certainly no city he will sooner wish to leave.
W. H. Bartlett, Walks
Yes I am a Jew and when the ancestors of the Rt. Hon. Gentleman were living as savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the Temple of Solomon.
Benjamin Disraeli, speech in the House of Commons
See what is done here in the name of religion!
Harriet Martineau, Eastern Life
NAPOLEON IN THE HOLY LAND
1799–1806
THE BLUEBEARD OF ACRE
There was nothing between Napoleon and the conquest of Jerusalem – except the Butcher, Ahmet Jazzar Pasha, the warlord of Ottoman Palestine. He had adopted the name Jazzar – Butcher – as a young man and had built his career on the principle that fear motivated men more than anything else.
The Butcher terrorized his territories by mutilating anyone suspected of the slightest disloyalty. An Englishman who visited him at his capital in Acre noticed that he was ‘surrounded by persons maimed and disfigured. The persons officiating or standing by the doors’ were all missing a limb, nose, ear or eye. His Jewish minister, Haim Farhi, ‘had been deprived of both an ear and an eye’ just to be sure. ‘The number of faces without noses and ears strikes everyone who has visited this part of Syria.’ The Butcher called them his ‘marked men’. He sometimes had his victims’ feet shod with horseshoes. He had walled up some local Christians alive pour encourager les autres and once gathered fifty corrupt officials, ordered them to strip naked, and had his troops hack them into pieces. When he suspected his harem of treason, he killed seven of his own wives, becoming notorious as ‘the tyrant of Acre, the Herod of his time, the terror of all surrounding nations, the story of Bluebeard realized’.
The Butcher impressed Europeans with his long white beard, his simple robes, the bejewelled dagger at his belt and his rather delicate habit of cutting flowers out of paper which he liked to give as presents. He radiated a macabre charm, telling visitors with a slight smirk: ‘I trust you found my name respected, even beloved, notwithstanding my severity.’ At night, he locked himself in his harem which starred eighteen Slavic blondes.* This old man now faced Napoleon in his prime. The French besieged Jaffa which was the port of Jerusalem and only 20 miles away. Jerusalem was in panic: the Families armed the Jerusalemites; a mob plundered Christian monasteries; the monks had to be imprisoned for their own safety. Outside the walls, General Damas asked Bonaparte for permission to attack the Holy City.1
NAPOLEON: ‘GENERAL HEADQUARTERS, JERUSALEM’
Napoleon replied that he had to conquer Acre first and then ‘come in person and plant the tree of Liberty at the very spot where Christ suffered, and the first French soldier who fell in the attack would be buried in the Holy Sepulchre’. But Bonaparte and his troops clearly regarded their expedition against the Muslims as falling outside the rules of civilized conduct. When he stormed Jaffa, his ‘soldiers hacked to pieces, men and women – the sights were terrible’, wrote one of the French scientists, shocked by ‘the sound of shots, shrieks of women and fathers, piles of bodies, a daughter being raped on the cadaver of her mother, the smell of blood, the groans of the wounded, the shouts of victors quarrelling about loot’. Finally the French themselves rested, ‘sated by blood and gold, on top of a heap of dead’.