over, in contrast to Cairo, Mecca, Damascus, and
Baghdad, it lacked significant centers of learning
and famous scholars.
Eventually, word of al-Hakim’s harsh measures
against Christians in Jerusalem reached Europe
and provoked the launching of the First Crusade
in 1099, which sought to place Jerusalem and
the Holy Land under European Christian rule.
The crusaders took the city on July 15, 1099,
with much loss of life and destruction of prop-
erty. Eyewitness accounts describe the wholesale
slaughter of men and women, Muslims and Jews
alike, by the crusader warriors. City streets were
said to have run red with blood. In the aftermath
of the crusader victory, Muslims and Jews were
banned from the city, and even Eastern Chris-
tians (Greeks, Armenians, Nestorians, Georgians)
were expelled from its holy places. The crusaders
converted the Aqsa Mosque into a palace and the
Dome of the Rock into a church that they named
the “Temple of the Lord.”
The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem the crusad-
ers founded lasted until 1187, when the Kurd-
ish Muslim warrior prince s
aladin
(d. 1193)
reconquered the city and pushed the crusaders to
the coastal areas of Palestine and Syria. Saladin,
who founded the Ayyubid dynasty (1169–1260),
restored the Muslim holy sites in the Noble Sanc-
tuary and reopened Jerusalem to Muslims, Jews,
and Eastern Christians. Some of the churches and
convents built by the crusaders were transformed
into mosques,
madrasa
s, and Sufi hospices, which
attracted Muslim scholars, students, and mystics
belonging to many of the leading Sufi orders to the
city. Christians were permitted to maintain control
of the Church of the Resurrection, and even Latin
pilgrims were allowed to come. In 1229, during a
time of political feuding within Muslim ranks, the
sultan al-Kamil (r. 1218–38), Saladin’s nephew,
allowed Latin crusaders to reoccupy Jerusalem
under the command of Frederick II (d. 1250), the
Holy Roman Emperor and enlightened monarch
from Sicily. Once again, non-Christians had little
if any access to the holy city. This interlude was
short-lived, however. After Frederick II departed,
Turkish troops allied with the Ayyubids attacked
both Damascus and Jerusalem in 1244, bringing
death and ruin in their wake. The crusading came
to an end, but one of its significant outcomes was
to enhance Jerusalem’s importance as a sacred
symbol among Muslims, Christians, and Jews.
This is when much of the Muslim devotional liter-
ature concerning Jerusalem’s praiseworthy quali-
ties was composed and when pious Jews dreamed
of returning and reclaiming their sacred land.
Despite its holiness, or perhaps partly because of
it, Muslim rulers did not allow the city to have its
own defensive walls, a standard feature for cities
that had political or strategic importance. The
three religious communities were intermingled;
there was little if any ghettoization of religious
minorities.
After the fall of the Ayyubids, Jerusalem came
under the control of the Mamluks, a dynasty of
slave-soldiers that ruled from Cairo and Damascus
between 1250 and 1517. The city prospered under
their patronage. It is estimated that only about 70
Jewish families, divided into Sephardic (Spanish
and “Oriental”) and Ashkenazi (European) com-
munities, lived there at this time, while many Jews
lived in the Galilee to the north. Mamluk control
was ended in 1517, when Ottoman armies con-
quered the region and incorporated it into their
expansive empire, which was based in the city
of i
stanbUl
(Constantinople), the former capital
of the Byzantines that the Ottomans had taken
in 1453. Jerusalem enjoyed the patronage of the
Ottomans, who built the great wall known as
Suleyman’s Wall in 1537–41, which now defines
the “Old City,” and continued to support the
funding of its Islamic institutions. The Ottoman
millet system of governance, which favored the
formation of communities on the basis of religious
and ethnic identity, led to the appearance of reli-
giously aligned neighborhoods in Ottoman cities.
This explains the division of Jerusalem into 18
quarters divided among 4 groups: Jewish (2 quar-
ters), Muslim (4 quarters), Armenian Christian (4
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