Chapter five

The Christianization of the

The early years of the eleventh century have been described as the only period to witness official persecution of and Christians by Muslims during Arab rule in .1 The Fatimid caliph Al-Hakim (996–1021), responsible for the persecution, terrorized Muslims as well. Al-Hakim, known to be deranged, called for the destruction of synagogues and churches, and had the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem razed in 1009.2 How- ever, one year before his death in 1021, this madman changed his attitude and allowed Jews and Christians to rebuild their churches and synagogues. The Jews did not find it easy to rebuild; even the Christians did not com- plete the reconstruction of the Holy Sepulcher until 1048, and then only with the help of Byzantine emperors.3 The destruction initiated by the mad caliph was cited by Urban II decades later when, in 1096, he rallied his warring Frankish to avenge the “ruination” of the Christian altars by Muslims in the . Though by the al-Hakim was long dead, and the Holy Sepulcher rebuilt and once again in Christian hands, Urban used the earlier events in service of his desire to quell the civil strife among the western knights. Some months after receiving a plea from Emperor Alexius I to help defend Byzantium from the Seljuk Turks, Urban called upon his knights to cease their greedy, internecine feuds and fight instead to regain control over the Holy Land—to remove the “pollution of paganism” that stained the holy city. In Balderic of Dol’s version of the speech, Urban called for the strik- ing down of the “idols” which the barbarous nations had placed in what Urban called the “Temple of Solomon, nay of the Lord,” and for cleansing the “abominations” to which the Holy Sepulcher had been subjected.4 The entrance of the Franks into Jerusalem is recorded by Fulcher of Chartres, Chaplain to Baldwin I, first Frankish . Fulcher

1 Shlomo D. Goitein, “Jerusalem in the Arab Period (638–1099),” in The Jerusalem Cathe- dra, ed. Lee I. Levine, (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi Institute, 1982), 185. 2 Goitein, “Jerusalem in the Arab Period,” 185. 3 Goitein, “Jerusalem in the Arab Period,” 185. 4 August C. Krey, The (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1921), 33–36. 76 chapter five was an eye-witness to the conquest, though he wrote a couple of decades after the events. He reports that in 1099 led his army into the city, and that the inhabitants, who were Jews and Eastern Chris- tians as well as Muslims, fled to the Dome of the Rock (which in this text the crusaders called , Temple of Our Lord) and to the al-Aqsa Mosque (which Fulcher calls the Temple of Solomon). There the Jerusalemites made their final stand in what became a bloody massacre. Fulcher knew the Dome of the Rock had been, before the crusaders, a Muslim holy site, and he presumed that it had been the site of Solomon’s Temple as well. In the same city [Jerusalem] is the Temple of the Lord, round in shape, built where Solomon in ancient times erected the earlier magnificent Temple. Although it can in no way be compared in appearance to the former build- ing, still this one is of marvelous workmanship . . . In the middle of the Tem- ple, when we first entered it and for fifteen years thereafter, was a certain native rock. It was said that the Ark of the Lord’s Covenant along with the urn and tables of Moses was sealed inside of it.5 Fulcher tells the biblical story (2 Samuel 24:15–16) of how the angel of the Lord had stood upon the Rock and foretold the destruction of the people that would take place because of David’s enumeration of the popu- lation. Then, he writes, “This rock, because it disfigured the Temple of the Lord, was afterwards covered over and paved with marble [by the crusaders]. Now an altar is placed above it, and there the clergy have fit- ted up a choir.”6 Fulcher believed the Rock marked the site of the Temple of Solomon. He implicitly recognized that a Muslim structure had been built upon the site, a structure he had seen converted into a church by the crusaders. Throughout, he calls it the Temple of the Lord, Templum Domini. This nomenclature was so vigorously promoted by Christian reli- gious authorities at the time that Achard of Arrouaise, the prior of the Templum Domini from 1112 to 1136, wrote a poem in which he attempted to establish that the Templum Domini was actually a Christian shrine built by one of the Byzantine emperors, Justinian or Heraclius. Most Christians at that time simply ignored the fact that it had been constructed as a Muslim shrine.7

5 Fulcher, History of the Expedition of Jerusalem (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1969), 117–118. 6 Fulcher, History of the Expedition, 118. 7 Benjamin Z. Kedar and Denys Pringle, “1099–1187: The Lord’s Temple (Templum Domini) and Solomon’s Palace (Palatium Salomonis),” in Where Heaven and Earth Meet, ed. Oleg Grabar and Benjamin Z. Kedar (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi Press, 2009), 136.