When Constantinople fell in 1453, the grand princes of Muscovy had seen themselves as the heirs of the last Byzantine emperors, Moscow as the Third Rome. The princes adopted the Byzantine double-headed eagle and a new title, Caesar or Tsar. In their wars against the Islamic Crimean khans and then the Ottoman sultans, the tsars promoted the Russian empire as a sacred Orthodox crusade. In Russia, Orthodoxy had developed its own singularly Russian character, spread through its vastness both by tsars – and peasant hermits, all of whom specially revered Jerusalem. It was said that the distinctive onion-shaped domes of Russian churches were an attempt to copy those in paintings of Jerusalem. Russia had even built its own mini-Jerusalem* but every Russian believed that the pilgrimage to Jerusalem was an essential part of the preparation for death and salvation.
Nicholas I had imbibed this tradition – he was very much the grandson of Catherine the Great and heir of Peter the Great, both of whom had promoted themselves as protectors of the Orthodox and the Holy Places, and the Russian peasants themselves linked the two: when Nicholas’ elder brother Alexander I died unexpectedly in 1825, they believed that he had gone to Jerusalem as an ordinary hermit, a modern version of the Last Emperor legend.
Now Nicholas, harshly conservative, deeply anti-Semitic and shamelessly philistine in all matters artistic (he had appointed himself as Pushkin’s personal censor), regarded himself as answerable only to what he called ‘The Russian God’ in the cause of ‘Our Russia entrusted to Us by God.’ This martinet, who prided himself on sleeping on a military cot, ruled Russia like a stern drillmaster. As a young man, the strapping, blue-eyed Nicholas had dazzled British society where one lady described him as ‘devilish handsome, the handsomest man in Europe!’ By the 1840s, his hair was gone and a paunch bulged out of his still high-waisted and skintight military breeches. After thirty years happily married to his ailing wife, he had finally taken a mistress, a young lady-in-waiting – and for all Russia’s vast power, he feared impotence, personally and politically.
For years he had cautiously wielded his personal charm to persuade Britain to agree to the partition of the Ottoman empire, which he called ‘the sick man of Europe,’ hoping to liberate the Orthodox provinces of the Balkans and oversee Jerusalem. Now the British were no longer impressed. Twenty-five years of autocracy had desensitized him and made him impatient: ‘very clever, I don’t think him,’ wrote the shrewd Queen Victoria, ‘and his mind is an uncivilized one.’
In Jerusalem, the streets glittered with the gold braid and shoulder-boards of Russian uniforms, worn by princes and generals, while teeming with the sheepskins and smocks of thousands of peasant pilgrims, all encouraged by Nicholas who also despatched an ecclesiastical mission to compete with the other Europeans. The British consul warned London that ‘the Russians could in one night during Easter arm 10,000 pilgrims within the walls of Jerusalem’ and seize the city. Meanwhile the French pursued their own mission to protect the Catholics. ‘Jerusalem’, reported Consul Finn in 1844, ‘is now a central point of interest to France and Russia.’
GOGOL: THE JERUSALEM SYNDROME
Not all Russia’s pilgrims were soldiers or peasants and not all found the salvation they sought. On 23 February 1848, a Russian pilgrim entered Jerusalem who was both typical in his soaring religious fever and utterly atypical in his flawed genius. The novelist Nikolai Gogol, famed for his play The Inspector-General and for his novel Dead Souls, arrived by donkey in a quest for spiritual ease and divine inspiration. He had envisaged Dead Souls as a trilogy, yet he was struggling to write the second and third parts. God was surely blocking his writing to punish his sins. As a Russian, only one place offered redemption: ‘until I’ve been to Jerusalem,’ he wrote, ‘I’ll be incapable of saying anything comforting to anyone.’
The visit was disastrous: he spent a single night praying beside the Sepulchre, yet he found it filthy and vulgar. ‘Before I had time to pull my wits together, it was over.’ The gaudiness of the holy sites and the barrenness of the hills crushed him: ‘I have never been so little content with the state of my heart as in Jerusalem and afterwards.’ On his return, he refused to talk about Jerusalem but fell under the power of a mystic priest who convinced him that his works were sinful. Gogol manically destroyed his manuscripts then starved himself to death – or at least into a coma – for when his coffin was opened in the twentieth century, his body was found face down.
The special madness of Jerusalem had been called ‘Jerusalem fever’ but in the 1930s, it was recognized as Jerusalem Syndrome, ‘a psychotic decompensation related to religious excitement induced by proximity to the holy places of Jerusalem’. The British Journal of Psychiatry, in 2000, diagnosed this demented disappointment as: ‘Jerusalem Syndrome Subtype Two: those who come with magical ideas of Jerusalem’s healing powers – such as the writer Gogol.’12
In a sense, Nicholas was suffering from his own strain of Jerusalem Syndrome. There was madness in his family: ‘as the years have passed,’ wrote the French ambassador to Petersburg, ‘it is now the qualities of (his father Emperor) Paul which come more to the fore.’ The mad Paul had been assassinated (as had his grandfather Peter III). If Nicholas was far from insane, he started to display some of his father’s obstinately impulsive over-confidence. In 1848, he planned to make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem but he was forced to cancel when revolutions broke out across Europe. He triumphantly crushed the Hungarian revolt against his neighbour, the Habsburg emperor: he enjoyed the prestige of being the ‘Gendarme of Europe’ but Nicholas, wrote the French ambassador, became ‘spoiled by adulation, success and the religious prejudices of the Muscovite nation’.
On 31 October 1847, the silver star on the marble floor of the Grotto of Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity, was cut out and stolen. The star had been donated by France in the eighteenth century; now it had obviously been stolen by the Greeks. The monks fought in Bethlehem. In Istanbul, the French claimed the right to replace the Bethlehem star and to repair the roof of the Church in Jerusalem; the Russians claimed it was their right; each cited eighteenth-century treaties. The row simmered until it became a duel of two emperors.
In December 1851, the French president Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the inscrutably bland yet politically agile nephew of the great Napoleon, overthrew the Second Republic in a coup d’état and prepared to crown himself Emperor Napoleon III. This womanizing adventurer whose sharply-waxed moustaches could not distract attention from an oversized head and an undersized torso was in some ways the first modern politician and he knew his brash, fragile new empire required Catholic prestige and victory abroad. Nicholas, on the other hand, saw the crisis as the chance to crown his reign by saving the Holy Places for ‘the Russian God’. For these two very different emperors, Jerusalem was the key to glory in heaven and on earth.
JAMES FINN AND THE CRIMEAN WAR:
MURDERED EVANGELISTS AND MARAUDING BEDOUIN
The sultan, squeezed between the French and Russians, tried to settle the dispute with his decree of 8 February 1852, confirming the Orthodox paramountcy in the Church, with some concessions to the Catholics. But the French were no less committed than the Russians. They traced their claims back to the great Napoleon’s invasion, the alliance with Suleiman the Magnificent, the French Crusader kings of Jerusalem, and to Charlemagne. When Napoleon III threatened the Ottomans, it was no coincidence that he sent a gunboat called the Charlemagne. In November, the sultan buckled and granted the paramountcy to the Catholics. Nicholas was outraged. He demanded the restoration of Orthodox rights in Jerusalem and an ‘alliance’ that would reduce the Ottoman empire to a Russian protectorate.