On 15 July 1099, after more than four and a half centuries of Muslim rule, Jerusalem fell to the army of the First Crusade and for the next 88 years it became once again a Christian city¹.

Populating the city

By the time the Crusaders took Jerusalem, it had lost virtually all its native residents. Much of the Christian population had either fled or been expelled during the Frankish advance on the city and in the final onslaught remaining Muslims and Jews were killed or held for ransom. A major difficulty facing the new rulers of the city, therefore, was how to repopulate it. During the siege, the Crusading army had numbered perhaps over 40,000 people, including women and children; but once the city was taken and Crusading vows fulfilled, the army quickly dispersed. A year later, King Baldwin I’s chaplain, Fulcher of Chartres, remarked that there were no more than 300 knights and as many foot-soldiers distributed between Jerusalem, Jaffa, Ramla and Haifa². The city’s population in the early years of the 12^th century may therefore have numbered hundreds rather than thousands.

The acute shortage of inhabitants was not helped by a law which forbade Muslims and Jews from resettling in the Holy City, though later in the century Muslims, including ʿAli al-Harawī and Usāmah Ibn Munqīdh³, were able to enter the Ḥaram al-Sharīf as pilgrims and Benjamin of Tudela records four Jewish families and a rabbi resident in the city in the 1160s⁴. Among the Westerners settled in Jerusalem by c.1165, John of Würzburg mentions French, Lorrainers, Normans, Provençals, Auvernois, Spaniards, Burgundians and Germans, while his list of those possessing chapels includes Greeks, Latins, Germans, Hungarians (or Bulgarians), Scots (or Irish?), Navarese, Bretons and English⁵.

As well as encouraging Westerners to stay in Jerusalem, another way of increasing the population was by encouraging local Orthodox Christians to settle in it. This policy was followed with some success by Baldwin I after his expedition in 1115 east of the Jordan to the region around Petra, where there was a significant Christian population. As William of Tyre says, many of these people came to Jerusalem “with their wives and children, with their flocks and herds, and their entire households”⁶. Other inducements were also tried. In 1120, for instance, Baldwin II, at the request of Patriarch Warmund, restored the customary charges for the use of official weights and measures and exempted from customs duty all basic foodstuffs entering the city gates, including wheat, beans, lentils and chickpeas, in order to reduce the cost of living⁷.

Such incentives seem to have borne some fruit. By October 1187, when Jerusalem was retaken by Saladin, its population had risen to perhaps as many as 60,000 - but this figure would have included a large number of refugees, who had fled there from elsewhere in the kingdom, following the battle of Ḥaṭṭīn. The size of the late 12^th century population may therefore have been closer to that of the mid-11^th century, perhaps around 20,000-30,000, that is to say roughly the same size as Acre, Tyre, Florence or London in the same period⁸.

The city’s defences

Medieval descriptions of Jerusalem and archaeological evidence both suggest that the walls of the city captured by the Crusaders followed more or less the same alignment as the present walls built by the Ottoman sultan Sulaymān II in the 1520s⁹. The walled city was therefore somewhat smaller than that enclosed by the empress Eudocia in the mid-5^th century¹⁰. By the 6^th century, the Byzantine walls enclosed on the south Mount Sion, Ophel (or the City of David) and the Pool of Siloam, but by the time of the siege of 1099 those areas lay outside the walls. The contraction of the defended area seems to have taken place in the early 11^th century, for, according to the Melkite historian Yaḥya ibn Saʿīd al-Anṭākī, when the Fatimid caliph al-Ẓāhir rebuilt the city walls in 1033, he made use of stone taken from the ruined churches outside them, including the church of Mount Sion, which had been destroyed by fire in May 996¹¹. One effect of this was that the Jewish community, whose quarter had previously been in the southern part of the city, was relocated to the north-eastern part (today’s Muslim quarter). In 12^th century sources that quarter was known as the Juiverie, even though at that time its inhabitants were not Jews but mostly Syrian Christians. According to William of Tyre, the Fatimid caliph al-Mustanṣir (1036-94) laid the burden of rebuilding the city wall around the patriarch’s quarter in the north-western part of the city on the Christian community living there. They completed the work in 1063, after appealing to the Byzantine emperor, Constantine X Ducas (1059-67), for financial help¹². After the Fatimids lost control of the city in 1073, the walls also seem to have been strengthened by the Seljuq Turks, to whom Ekkhard of Aura attributes the construction of the outer wall (antemurale)¹³, also referred to as a barbican (barbacana), which together with a ditch are mentioned in the accounts of the siege¹⁴. Frankish Jerusalem’s walls were therefore essentially those of the 11^th century, repaired and strengthened where necessary. In 1172, the German pilgrim ^Theoderic described them in these words:

“The city extends lengthwise from north to south, breadthwise from west to east, and on the heights of the mountain overlooking the valleys it is strongly fortified on all sides with towers, walls and bastions (propugnaculis). There is also a ditch or moat (vallum … sive fossatum), placed immediately outside the wall, fortified by a wall, bastions and crenellations (muro et propugnaculis atque minis), which they call a barbican (barbicana)”¹⁵.

By this period, however, maintenance of the defences seems to have become lax. After a section of the walls fell down in 1178, William of Tyre relates that the secular and ecclesiastical leaders agreed to set aside an annual sum of money for repairing them¹⁶. Among the new works paid for in this way may have been the “new tower, built by the brothers of the Hospital”, which is mentioned in a contemporary account of the siege of August 1187¹⁷.

The city had six main gates: David’s Gate on the west, St Stephen’s Gate on the north, the Jehoshaphat Gate and Golden Gate on the east, and the Tanners’ Gate and Mount Sion Gate on the south. There were also at least five posterns. One gate that has been investigated archaeologically is St Stephen’s (or the Damascus or Nablus) Gate, where the remains of the Crusader barbican may also still be seen. Excavations by the British School of Archaeology in the 1960s showed that below the Ottoman gate are the remains of the original Roman one, built between the mid-1^st and mid-3^rd centuries with a central archway flanked by a pair of smaller pedestrian gates and massive quadrangular towers¹⁸. By the 12^th century, only the central archway was in use. Early in that century, an outer gate, or barbican, containing a bent entrance, was built just in front of it on the line of the outer wall; and by the middle of the century, other buildings were constructed to either side of the street between the two gates. On the west these included a small chapel, built in the space between the Roman tower and the roadway. Its internal walls were covered with paintings, including on the east an Annunciation scene, executed in a style datable to around 1140¹⁹. Another feature of the chapel was a chute, opening through its east wall into a stone trough beside the roadway; this faced an identical one in the building opposite. These are rather like the feeding troughs for animals that are found in the stables of some Crusader castles; but here it seems that whatever was distributed from them was intended for humans rather than animals. As there are cisterns below the chapel and the building opposite, this may possibly have been water for thirsty travellers entering the gate; but since this was the principal gate of entry for pilgrims, it is also possible that they could have been used for distributing something else, such as pilgrimage tokens. By 1158, the whole complex around the gate belonged to the Benedictine abbey of St Mary Latin, though the gate itself would have remained subject to royal authority²⁰. In 1172, Theoderic also noted that within the gate there was a hospital or hospice, “which the Greeks call a xenodocheion”²¹. The chapel may possibly have formed part of this institution.

Centres of authority

Before the Crusader conquest, the principal centres of Muslim religious and secular authority in Jerusalem had been respectively the Ḥaram al-Sharīf, containing both the main Friday mosque of al-Aqṣā and the shrine of the Dome of the Rock (Qubbat al-Ṣakhra), and the Citadel, also known as David’s Tower. When the Crusaders stormed the city, these had been the last strongholds to fall - the former to Tancred and the latter to Raymond of St.-Gilles. Both Duke Godfrey and King Baldwin I resided at first in the Citadel, like the Fatimid governor before them. By 1101, however, Baldwin I was already making use of the former Aqṣā mosque as a royal palace.

The Aqṣā Mosque

The Ḥaram represented the precinct of the former Jewish Temple, destroyed by the Romans in ad 70, and the Franks identified the Aqṣā mosque, which occupied its south end, as the Temple or Palace of King Solomon. It was therefore perhaps natural as well as expedient that Baldwin I appropriated and adapted its massive aisled prayer hall as a formal setting for royalty. The king’s chaplain, Fulcher of Chartres, may have been alluding to the building works that transformed it into a royal palace when he describes Baldwin selling off the lead from the demolished parts of the roof. It was probably as a result of this that the mosque was reduced in size from fifteen aisles to only seven²².

Around 1120, however, the Aqṣā also became the principal residence of the Knights Templar. According to the 13^th century chronicle of Bernard the Treasurer, after the conquest of Jerusalem, a number of knights attached themselves to the Holy Sepulchre as lay brothers, under the authority of its prior; but eventually they tired of military inactivity, and asked the prior and the king, Baldwin II, for permission to elect themselves a master, who would lead them in defence of the kingdom. The prior released them from their vows and the king granted them lands, castles and towns. He also granted them the use of his palace in the Temple of Solomon, where they constructed a “fine and rich” residence next to the king’s, so that, if he should ever want his palace back, they could still continue to live there²³.

William of Tyre confirms that the Templars held the Aqṣā from the king, adding that the canons of the Lord’s Temple (or Dome of the Rock), who owned the entire Temple precinct, gave them some adjoining land in which to “practise their religion” - in other words land on which to establish their conventual buildings, including a church or chapel, a chapter house, dormitory, refectory and infirmary²⁴.

Visiting pilgrims describe the Templar area in some detail. Around 1165, John of Würzburg described the large and spacious buildings adjoining the palace, including a large new church, which was then under construction. He also mentions the underground stables, which were large enough to hold 2,000 horses or 1,500 camels. These were located in the vaults of the Umayyad or Abbasid period that supported the south-eastern part of the platform²⁵.

In 1172, another German pilgrim, Theoderic, described Solomon’s Palace as:

“oblong in shape like any church and supported inside by columns; and indeed, having one end laid out in the round and raised up with a large rounded dome like a sanctuary, it is arranged, as we have said, in the form of a church. This palace, with all its appurtenances, has passed into the ownership of the Knights Templar, who live and keep their stores of arms, clothing and food in it and the other houses attached to it … These buildings have below them stables for horses, which were built in former times by the same king next to the palace itself. Intricate in the variety of their wonderful workmanship, they are of vaulted construction, vaults and arches alternating in many different ways. We have borne witness that by our estimation they are able to hold 10,000 horses with their grooms. In short, no-one would be able to reach from one end of the building to the other, in length or in breadth, with a single arrow-shot from a crossbow. The area above is covered with houses, chambers and buildings, all of them suitable for various uses. Indeed, up above it abounds in galleries, gardens, courts, vestibules, places of assembly and rainwater reservoirs for refilling the cisterns, while the area below is excellently supplied with baths, store-houses, granaries, wood-piles and other stocks of necessities. On the other side of the palace, that is, towards the west, the Templars have built a new house. If I were able to relate its height, length, breadth, cellars, refectories, stairs and roof, which is raised in a high ridge contrary to the custom of that country, the listener would hardly believe any of it. For they have built there a new cloister, in the same way as they have the old one on the other side; moreover, there beside the outer court they are constructing a new church of wonderful size and workmanship”²⁶.

Most of these structures were swept away when the Aqṣā was converted back into a mosque by Saladin in 1187, though the central three bays of the present porch are a Templar addition, albeit later modified. On the east side, there also still survive a fine Romanesque rose window and the eastern apse of a 12^th century chapel, which is now walled up on the inside. On the west side of the mosque no trace now remains of the church that Theoderic saw under construction, though some of the buildings surrounding the site of the cloister appear to be Frankish in origin²⁷.

The Citadel

The principal strongpoint of the Citadel was a massive rectangular tower, one of three originally built by Herod the Great around what in his time had been the north-western corner of the city²⁸. The large bossed masonry of the tower made it stand out from the later constructions of the citadel and in the 12^th century it was referred to un-historically as the Tower of David. Already by 1099, this tower had come to form part of a small triangular-shaped fortress, with a solid cylindrical tower at its south-east corner, whose garrison of several hundred men surrendered to Raymond of St-Gilles. Excavations in the 1930s and 1980s suggest that this early citadel was first established by the Seljuq Turks in the 1070s, at a time when urban citadels were beginning to appear elsewhere in the Middle East - for example, in Raqqa and Damascus. Under the Franks the castle was enlarged. In 1172, for instance, Theoderic describes the Tower of David as having “an adjacent chamber and hall (solarium et palatium), newly built and strongly defended by barbicans”²⁹. A map of c.1150 now preserved in Cambrai also shows David’s Tower in schematic form with the Curia regis, represented by a hall and two towers, attached to its southern side³⁰. Remains of buildings that possibly once formed part of the royal palace were uncovered in 1971, some 125 m south of it³¹.

The church of the Holy Sepulchre

The Holy Sepulchre was the principal goal of all Crusades and Christian pilgrimages to Jerusalem³². In the early 4^th century, at the time of the emperor Constantine I, the tomb of Christ was isolated from the natural rock into which it had originally been cut and was enclosed in a small aedicule, itself contained within a larger domed rotunda in the tradition of late Roman imperial mausolea. To the east of the rotunda lay an open two-storey peristyled court, containing chapels associated with Christ’s Passion and, at its south-east corner, the rock of Calvary itself. To the east of the courtyard stood a massive five-aisled basilica, which was entered from the main north-south street, or Cardo, through a propylaeum and atrium.

In 1009, this entire complex, including the Tomb of Christ, was destroyed by the deranged Fatimid caliph, al-Hākim. Rebuilding began within three years. It was carried on between 1014 and 1023, first under the patronage of al-Hākim’s own mother, Maryam (or Mary), who was herself Christian, and then, from 1020 onwards, under the patriarch of Jerusalem, Nicephorus I, who travelled to Constantinople in 1023 to report on progress to the emperor, Basil II. After the negotiation of a formal agreement between the emperor Michael IV and Caliph al-Mustanṣir in 1037-38, work resumed and continued until around 1040. Although William of Tyre later attributed the rebuilding to Michael IV’s successor, Constantine IX Monomachus³³, it now appears that the work was already substantially complete before Constantine became emperor in 1042.

The 11^th century building work concentrated on the aedicule and the rotunda enclosing the tomb, the chapels north and south of it, and the courtyard to the east containing Calvary and the places associated with the Passion. Constantine I’s great basilica was not rebuilt, but in compensation for its loss the rotunda was itself converted into a church by the addition of an eastern chancel and apse.

After the Crusader conquest of 1099, it must soon have become clear that the rebuilt church was too small accommodate the needs of Jerusalem’s new Latin kings and patriarchs, or the large numbers of pilgrims who were now flocking to the holy places, especially around Eastertime. In the early 12^th century, two important changes were therefore made: first, the church was enlarged by demolishing the chancel and apse and adding a new Romanesque transept and choir to the east, bringing all the holy sites under one roof; and secondly, to the east of this on the site of Constantine’s ruined basilica a monastic cloister was added to accommodate the canons serving the church, who in 1114 were regularized as Augustinians. The new choir and high altar were consecrated by Patriarch Fulcher on 15 July 1149, exactly fifty years after the fall of the city.

The final element to be built was the bell-tower, replacing an earlier one erected on the roof immediately after the conquest in 1099. The ringing of bells, banned by the Muslims, would have been a powerful statement of the city’s renewed Christian identity - and, although the mid-12^th century Cambrai map shows numerous church bell-towers scattered through the city, albeit improbably represented as cylindrical in form, it is perhaps significant that apart from the Holy Sepulchre’s tower only one other Crusader bell-tower, that of St Anne’s church, managed to survive the Muslim reconquest until an earthquake precipitated its destruction in 1834³⁴.

Other churches, shrines and hospitals

Apart from the Holy Sepulchre, which served as cathedral and parish church for the whole city, some 85 other churches and chapels are documented in 12^th century Jerusalem³⁵. These range from the churches of major religious houses down to small shrines and chapels. Many of these churches were associated with holy sites of the New Testament, and a number of them replaced earlier Byzantine churches that had fallen into ruin or had been demolished during the centuries of Muslim rule.

As well as restoring its churches, the process of re-establishing the city’s Christian identity also included the virtual obliteration of anything overtly Islamic. In Jerusalem we have little evidence for the fate of lesser Muslim buildings, which in other cities captured by the Franks, such as Caesarea, Acre and Ascalon, were often granted to Christian religious houses and adapted either as churches or for secular use³⁶. As already noted, however, the main concentration of Islamic religious activity in Jerusalem had been in and around the Ḥaram al-Sharīf, where the Franks converted the city’s principal Friday mosque, the Aqṣā, into a royal palace and subsequently the headquarters of the Templars

The other principal Muslim building in the Ḥaram was the Dome of the Rock, or Qubbat al-Ṣakhra. This had been built by the Umayyad caliph ʿAbd al-Malik from ad 691-692 onwards as a centre for Muslim pilgrimage, celebrating Muḥammad’s “night journey” and mysterious ascent to heaven. Its construction also had a political motive, to outshine the centre of Christian devotion represented by the dome of the Holy Sepulchre. Although the Franks were fully aware that the Dome of the Rock was a Muslim building, occupying the site of the former Jewish Temple, they effectively Christianized it, by converting it into a church, known as the Lord’s Temple (Templum Domini) and dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Within it were recalled the presentations of Mary and of her son Jesus in the Temple, as well as a number of other events associated with the Temple in the Old and New Testaments. The building was capped by a golden cross and most - though not all - of the mosaic inscriptions in Arabic decorating its exterior and interior were reworked in Latin to proclaim its Christian identity. Augustinian canons were installed to serve it, and the exposed rock at its centre, held to represent the site of the Holy of Holies, was paved over, partly to prevent pilgrims chipping it away for souvenirs but also to support a choir and high altar, enclosed by a wrought-iron chancel screen. The canons’ cloister adjoined the building on the esplanade to the north, while the smaller Umayyad Dome of the Chain (Qubbat al-Silsila), which stood immediately west of it, was repurposed as a chapel dedicated to St James the Less, the brother of Jesus, who had been martyred by being clubbed to death after being cast down from the pinnacle of the Temple³⁷.

The double Golden Gate, on the east side of the Ḥaram, also seems to have been part of ʿAbd al-Malik’s original building scheme. This the Franks also made into a church, though the gates themselves were normally kept walled up for reasons of security. However, they were unblocked twice a year: first on Palm Sunday, to celebrate Christ’s entry into Jerusalem that day, seated on a donkey; and again on the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, because, after defeating the Persians in 627, it was through this gate that the emperor Heraclius was supposed to have entered Jerusalem, bearing the relic of the Holy Cross brought back from Persia. Although the gate itself retains its original early Umayyad form, the two domes on raised drums that cover its eastern bays may well represent Frankish additions. At any rate, there must have been some form of opening in the roof by that time, since according to Jerusalem’s 12^th century Latin liturgy for Palm Sunday, when the procession from Bethany reached the gate, the boy choristers of the Holy Sepulchre would go on to the roof and sing alternate verses and responses with the precentor and clergy gathered inside the gate below³⁸.

The second largest church in Jerusalem, also served by Augustinian canons, was St Mary of Mount Sion, commemorating the Dormition, or Falling Asleep, of the Virgin Mary. This replaced a large Byzantine church, which had been mostly destroyed by earthquakes and stone-robbing for rebuilding the city walls in the 11^th century. The new church appears to have been similar in style to some of the larger Romanesque churches of the West, such as St Sernin in Toulouse, with a high vaulted nave and galleries above the aisles. In an intermediate gallery in the south aisle, overlooking the sanctuary, was the chapel of the Holy Spirit, commemorating the room of the Last Supper and the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. This was rebuilt in an early Gothic style a little before 1187³⁹.

Since Byzantine times, the burial place of the Virgin Mary had been venerated in a crypt below a centrally-planned church in the Kidron Valley (or Valley of Jehoshaphat), between the city and the Mount of Olives. Reconstruction of the destroyed upper church and monastic buildings was begun by the Benedictines around 1112. The crypt was provided with a monumental staircase, whose walls and vaults were decorated with paintings and texts illustrating Mary’s burial and assumption. This stair would have allowed pilgrims to visit the tomb without having to enter the monastery and disturb the monks. To either side of the stair there were also chapels containing the tombs of two queens of Jerusalem: Morphia, the wife of Baldwin II, on the left, and Melisende, the wife of Fulk of Anjou, on the right⁴⁰.

Within the city immediately south of the Holy Sepulchre were another two Benedictine abbeys, which had originally been founded in the 11^th century by merchants from Amalfi: St Mary Latin for men, and St Mary Magdalene (later known as St Mary Parva or Major) for women⁴¹. It was from the hospitaller functions associated with these two houses that the Latin Hospital developed in the later 11^th and early 12^th century, taking as its chapel a former 6^th century Greek church of St John the Baptist. In the early years of the Crusader kingdom, the hospital came to be more closely associated with the canons serving in the Holy Sepulchre. In February 1113, however, Pope Paschal II took it under his own protection and the following year it severed its connection with the Holy Sepulchre and developed as a separate order of the church. In the 1170s, the Hospital is described as being like a palace, containing beds for more than 1,000 sick people⁴². Like the Templars, the Hospitallers of St John had also developed by this time into a military order and one of the most powerful landowners in the kingdom, besides possessing valuable estates overseas⁴³.

Although most of the area covered by the Hospital was built over in the early 20^th century, a set of plans of the medieval remains was made by the Swiss architect Conrad Schick in 1902. These indicate that the Hospital extended around two and a half sides of the urban block lying south of the Holy Sepulchre. Immediately facing the south door of the Sepulchre church stood the new conventual church of St John and its bell-tower, with the living area of the brothers probably immediately south of it. The old church of St John lay to the south of that; and the eleven wards of the hospital as well as the women’s ward and an orphanage probably extended along David Street on the south side, with kitchens and services along part of the east side. There were also extensive latrines, which emptied into pits or into the stone-lined drains below the surrounding streets⁴⁴.

In the 12^th century, perceptions of Jerusalem’s religious geography underwent some significant changes, at least from a western perspective. In was in this period, for example, that the present-day Way of the Cross, or Via Dolorosa, came to be established. In earlier times the sites of Christ’s trial and condemnation had been located on Mount Sion, where the Praetorium and house of Caiaphas were still being shown beside the church of Sion in the 12^th century. Evidence from pilgrimage texts, however, shows that before the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin in 1187 there was also an alternative “Way of the Cross”, involving sites associated with the former Roman Antonia fortress on the north side of the Temple area. The starting point for this was the Sheep Pool near St Anne’s church where, according to tradition, the wood from which the Cross was made had lain since the time of Solomon. A little further east, against the north wall of the Temple was the chapel of the Repose or Prison of Christ, where Jesus was supposedly imprisoned after his arrest in Gethsemane; and near this was the church of the Flagellation, on the supposed site of Pilate’s Praetorium. From there the Way of the Cross shown to pilgrims seems to have passed through the Temple court, leaving it by the Sorrowful Gate on the west and proceeding across Street of the Valley to the Holy Sepulchre. After the initial loss of Jerusalem in 1187 and definitively after 1244, the Way of the Cross changed to its present route north of the Ḥaram al-Sharīf, since it was no longer possible for Christians to enter the precinct itself⁴⁵.

The Frankish conquest of Jerusalem also provided opportunities for the eastern Christian communities to rebuild and develop their churches. Principal among these were the Armenian cathedral of St James the Great, which was rebuilt by the time of the visit to Jerusalem by King Toros around 1165, and the Jacobite cathedral of St Mary Magdalene, of which only the vaulted foundations now survive below the Maymūniyya Muslim Girls’ School⁴⁶. The Greek Orthodox, albeit now theoretically subject to the Latin patriarch, also maintained a number of churches and monasteries grouped around the church of the Holy Sepulchre⁴⁷.

Houses, shops and workplaces

Describing the domestic buildings of Jerusalem, Theoderic writes:

“The houses, reaching up on high with laboriously constructed walls, have roofs that are not raised up to a ridge after our fashion but are level and flat in form. When it pours with rain, people collect the rainwater from them into their cisterns and store it for their own use, for they have the use of no other water, because they have none. Wood suitable for buildings or for burning is scarce there, because Mount Lebanon, which alone abounds in cedar, cypress and fir, is far distant from them” ⁴⁸.

Charter evidence suggests that a number of houses, particularly those predating the 12^th century, were of the eastern Mediterranean type, with a central courtyard containing a cistern⁴⁹. Others, like those described by Theoderic, were of a more western urban style, with one or more storeys of living rooms (or solars) built above store-rooms or shops opening on to the street⁵⁰. In 1143, for example, the canons of the Holy Sepulchre sold some houses in Mount Sion street to Arnulf, the son of Bernard the Syrian. They were located above the vaults of the Hospitallers’ money exchange, which in turn were above a bakery, also belonging to the canons. A condition of the sale was that if at any time anyone should add another storey and wish to sell it, the canons should have the right to purchase it at a price of one mark less than the proposed sale price⁵¹. Remains of shops of just this type, with separate doorways that once led to now-vanished to upper floors, survive just south of the intersection of the city’s two principal streets.

The principal grain market of Frankish Jerusalem lay just inside David’s Gate, in front of the Citadel. The pork market was to the north of it, presumably because in early Islamic Jerusalem it had been in the Christian quarter, which was located in that area. Other butchers, however, practised their trade around the Tanners’ Gate, in the south-east of the city. Of the city’s market streets, Theoderic tells us that “almost all … are paved underfoot with great stones, and overhead many of them are vaulted in stone, with windows arranged here and there to let in light”⁵². A number of markets specializing in particular products are also mentioned in the sources, principal among them being the Triple Market (or sūq) built - or rebuilt - by Queen Melisande in 1152 and incorporating the remains of the colonnaded street and covered pavements of the north-south Byzantine cardo⁵³. In the central aisle was the street of “Bad Cookery”, or “Restaurants”, while flanking it on the west were the vegetable and herb markets and on the east the “Covered Street” containing the cloth market. At the north end was the fish market and the market for poultry, eggs and cheese, from which another market street containing the shops of Latin and Syrian goldsmiths led westwards past St Mary Latin to the south door of the Holy Sepulchre⁵⁴. Inscriptions indicate that some of the shops in the sūq belonged to St Anne’s abbey, of which Queen Melisende was a known patron⁵⁵. Other specialist markets in 12^th century Jerusalem included those of the furriers and saddlers⁵⁶.

Tombs and cemeteries

Important people in Frankish Jerusalem might sometimes be buried inside a church, but most people would have been buried in extra-mural cemeteries. John of Valenciennes, for example, whose tombstone is now preserved beside St Anne’s church, was buried in the cemetery attached to the church of Mount Sion. The only church with full parochial rights, including that of burial, was the Holy Sepulchre, whose cemetery was located on the north-western side of the city near the Mamilla Pool, where some Crusader tomb-chests may still be seen reused as Muslim grave-markers⁵⁷. Poor or destitute pilgrims, however, could be guaranteed a Christian burial free of charge in a vast charnel pit below the church of St Mary in Akeldama, belonging to the order of St John. This stood in the Field of Blood or burial place for strangers that had been bought with the money paid to Judas for betraying Jesus⁵⁸. Other burials took place in and around the Temple area, particularly around the Golden Gate⁵⁹.

1187: The Muslim reconquest

Jerusalem was retaken by Saladin on 2 October 1187. A week later the sultan attended Friday prayers in the Aqṣā mosque, with the qādī Muḥyī al-Dīn al-Qurashī acting as preacher and imām. He subsequently installed a preacher and imām, and ordered the mosque to be restored. The accounts of what was then done shed light on what the Franks had done to the building. The miḥrāb had been obscured by the walls of a granary, or by latrines according to some, and to the west of the mosque the Franks had built a high church. These constructions were removed and the court around the mosque was cleared. A minbar was erected, the walls that the Franks had built between the columns were demolished, and their precious carpets were replaced with prayer mats. The golden cross that the Franks had erected on the Dome of the Rock was also taken down, dragged through streets and smashed. Inside the building, the high altar and paving were removed from the rock and the rock itself washed with rose water⁶⁰.

Although the Orthodox Christians were allowed to keep their churches and a Greek Orthodox patriarch was installed again in the Holy Sepulchre, most of the Latin churches were converted into mosques or found other uses. The Latin patriarch’s residence became a khanqa for Sufis and St Anne’s church a madrasa for Shafiʿite lawyers (1192). Saladin also converted the women’s abbey of St Mary the Great into a Muslim hospital, or bimaristan, and he may also have been responsible for turning its sister house for men, St Mary Latin, into another Shafiʿite madrasa. In the Hospital area, the original church of St John was given back to the Greeks, but the Hospitallers’ new church was converted into a mosque by Saladin’s son, al-Malik al-Afḍal ʿAlī, while the rest of the conventual area became a zāwiya⁶¹. Many of the churches outside the walls, including those of St Stephen, St Saviour in Gethsemane, St Mary in Jehoshaphat and the great church of St Mary of Mount Sion, were demolished, their stone being used for rebuilding the town walls, though Mary’s tomb below the church of St Mary in Gethsemane and the tomb of David on Mount Sion were preserved as Muslim shrines. Much of the rich decoration from the demolished buildings, including mosaic tesserae and sculpture, was saved for reuse in building projects carried out by Saladin’s successors in and around the Ḥaram al-Sharīf⁶².

Although in Ayyubid, Mamluk and Ottoman times Jerusalem was no longer as exclusively Christian a city as it had been in 12^th century - returning to its previous status as a Muslim city with significant communities of Eastern Christians and Jews - the city’s built fabric even today owes much to that relatively brief period in the 12^th century, when it occupied a significant position at the very centre of Christian European consciousness.