The Holiest Ground in the World

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After defeating the army of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem at the Horns of Hattin, west of the sea of Galilee, in 1187, the Egyptian sultan Saladin marched unopposed into Jerusalem. European Crusaders, mostly from the region of present-day France, had occupied the ancient city for almost a century, following 450 years of Arab rule. Saladin’s reclamation of one of Islam’s holiest sites, the Dome of the Rock on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, spurred the 028Arab historian Imad ad-Din to impressive heights of rhetoric:

The Rock, the object of pilgrimage, was hidden under constructions and submerged in all this sumptuous building. So the Sultan ordered that the veil should be removed, the curtain raised, the concealments taken away, the marble carried off, the stones broken, the structures demolished, the covers broken into. The Rock was to be brought to light again for visitors and revealed to observers, stripped of its covering and brought forward like a young bride. He wanted the pearl extracted from its shell, the full moon brought from behind the clouds, the prison torn down, the condemned ransomed, its beauty revealed, its blessed aspect allowed to shine, its true face made clear, its genuine honour brought to light, its fine state restored, its high honour and standing brought back. Surely it is something whose beauty consists in being unadorned, whose nakedness is clothing and whose clothing is nakedness. It was restored to its former state and the outstanding splendor of its beauty was brought into the open.¹

Saladin’s men cleared away the Crusader additions to the Dome of the Rock. Then the Temple Mount, called the Haram al-Sharif (Noble Sanctuary) by the Arabs, was purified with incense and rose water.²

This purging of reminders of Christian occupation complicates the task of understanding the works carried out by the Crusaders on the Temple Mount. Most of the Crusader remains are architectural fragments in secondary use, often with such offending elements as crosses and human faces chiseled off. However, we do have accounts by Crusaders, pilgrims and resident Arabs that provide a glimpse of 12th-century architectural activity on the Haram. From these accounts and the scant archaeological remains, we can see how medieval Europeans, armed with the holy scriptures and inspired by legends of apostles, saints and martyrs, confronted the physical fabric of an earthly Jerusalem.

The Crusaders found a city little changed 029by the centuries of Muslim domination. Jerusalem’s Muslim rulers had constructed their most important buildings on the Haram al-Sharif, a site that was (and remains today) extremely important in three of the world’s major religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In Jewish tradition this was Mt. Moriah, where Abraham prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac; similarly, in Islamic tradition the Haram was the site where Abraham prepared to sacrifice his son Ishmael. According to the Hebrew Bible, it was here that King Solomon built the First Temple to house the Ark of the Covenant, which was made by the early Israelites to contain the tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments. In the late first century B.C., the Judean king Herod the Great vastly expanded the site (to its present-day proportions) by constructing a huge platform to support the Second Temple, which was destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D.

For the next 600 years, during Roman (70–326) and Byzantine (326–638) rule, the Temple Mount was largely ignored. Things changed again in the seventh century, when Arab Muslims captured Jerusalem and reconverted the Haram into a holy sanctuary, this time of Islam. At its center, the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik (685–705) built the glimmering, octagonal Dome of the Rock over es-Sakhra—a rock outcropping where, according to early Muslim tradition, King David had prayed to God and King Solomon had built the Temple. (Later Muslim tradition identified es-Sakhra as the place from which the 030prophet Mohammed [c. 570–632] ascended to heaven after his night journey from Mecca.)³ In the early eighth century, the Umayyads built the large silver-domed Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Haram’s southern end. For Muslims, as for Jews and later for the Crusaders, the Haram/Temple Mount was closely associated with the presence of God.

When the Crusaders stormed Jerusalem on July 15, 1099, the Haram al-Sharif, among the holiest sites in the world, became a killing ground. After the Crusaders led by Tancred breached Jerusalem’s northern gate and gained the Haram, the Muslims fled to the al-Aqsa Mosque, where they surrendered to the Crusaders. The next morning, however, the Crusaders entered the mosque, slaughtered the Muslim prisoners and then moved on to kill thousands of Muslims and a number of Jews throughout Jerusalem. One observer recalled: “In the Temple and porch of Solomon, men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins.”⁴

Amid the heaped-up corpses, the Crusaders found three major Islamic buildings: the Dome of the Rock, standing on its own platform near the center of the mount, surrounded by shimmering arcades; the smaller Dome of the Chain, east of the Dome of the Rock; and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, at the southern edge of the mount. Numerous gates led to the sacred precinct, though the most monumental of them, the Golden Gate, traditionally the gate through which Jesus entered Jerusalem riding on a donkey, was most likely blocked at the time.⁵ Built into the southeast corner of the mount was a small underground mosque, which supposedly contained relics of Jesus’ infancy—the bed of the Virgin, as well as the crib and bath of the infant.⁶

The Crusaders considered the Haram a sacred place, even though the great platform had been built by a Jewish king, Herod the Great, and all its structures had been built by Muslims. Almost from the beginning of Christian rule over Jerusalem, Crusader texts and maps refer to the Dome of the Rock as the Templum Domini (Temple of the Lord) and to the Al-Aqsa Mosque as the Templum Salomonis (Temple of Solomon). This is in remarkable contrast to the earlier period of Byzantine rule, when the Christians left the Temple Mount in neglect. Why the sudden interest? Were the Crusaders, deluded by their passionate quest to reclaim holy ground, simply ignorant of the Haram/Temple Mount’s history?

During the periods of Byzantine and Arab rule, Jerusalem had been a destination for Christian pilgrims from the West. (Pilgrimage routes were kept open until the mid-11th century, when the Seljuk Turks took control of the Levant and closed them down.) In some accounts, pilgrims associate the Haram with Solomon’s Temple and describe its contemporaneous structures as having been built by Muslims.⁷ As a rule, however, Byzantine Christians and early Western pilgrims showed little interest in the site: If the Haram was indeed the site of the Jerusalem Temple, then, according to the Gospels, God himself had chosen to destroy it. Did not Jesus prophesy: “I will destroy this temple that is made with hands, and in three days I will build another, not made with hands” (Mark 14:58)? For early Christians, another site in Jerusalem had superseded the Temple Mount as the holiest of grounds: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which was built—supposedly over Jesus’ tomb—by the emperor Constantine (306–337 A.D.).

Once the Crusaders took control of Jerusalem, however, they began to reinterpret the significance of the Haram. A Russian pilgrim who visited Jerusalem in the early 12th century refers to the Dome of the Rock interchangeably as the “Mosque of Omar” and the “Church of the Holy of Holies.”⁸ Some Western pilgrims during the Crusader period seem to have believed that they were seeing the very Temple built by Solomon.⁹ Even writers somewhat familiar with the history of the site differ greatly over who built the Dome of the Rock. One anonymous Latin source, for example, records the several destructions of the Temple of Jerusalem—by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar (in 586 B.C.), by the Seleucid king Antiochus (281–261 B.C.) and by the Roman general Titus (70 A.D.)—and then goes on to speculate about the possible builders of the extant temple: Emperor Constantine (306–337) and his mother, Helena; Emperor Justinian (527–565) or Emperor Heraclius (610–641); or an Egyptian prince.¹⁰

By the time the Crusaders arrived in Jerusalem, it appears, Christians no longer cared who built the Dome of the Rock, or when it was done. What mattered was that the Temple—whether the work of Jews, Christians or Muslims—sat on a holy site sanctified by the Bible:

To the east, below Mt. Calvary, is the Temple of the Lord [the Dome of the Rock], in another part of the city, which was built by Solomon … In the middle of the Temple is a great mount [es-Sakhra] surrounded by walls, in which is the Tabernacle; there also was the Ark of the Covenant which, after the destruction of the Temple, was taken away to Rome by the Emperor Vespasian.¹¹

The earliest Crusader accounts indicate that the contents of the biblical Tabernacle would soon be found within the Dome of the Rock. Fulcher of Chartres, for example, the chaplain of Jerusalem’s first Crusader king, Baldwin I (1100–1118), describes the Europeans’ reaction to the rock in the midst of the Temple:

They claimed to know by divination that the Ark of the Covenant of the 031Lord with the urn and with the tablets of Moses were enclosed and sealed in it [es-Sakhra]. Josiah, King of Judah, ordered it to be placed there, saying: “You will in no wise carry it from that place.”¹²

Other writers state that the seven golden lamps of the Temple, the rod of Aaron, the altar of Jacob, the head of Zechariah and the urn of manna were physically present in the Templum Domini.¹³

Such references to relics mentioned in the Old Testament, however, largely disappear from the accounts after the first few years of Crusader rule. Instead, the later Crusader accounts associate the Dome of the Rock and its environs with the divine presence itself. The Crusaders even made this association concrete by altering the exterior of the Templum Domini. On each face of the octagonal structure, they added a Latin mosaic inscription taken from the liturgy that was commonly used for the dedication of a church. Proceeding counterclockwise from the Temple’s west face, the inscriptions read:

Eternal peace on this House be from God the Lord eternally.

The temple of the Lord is holy, God’s labor and sanctification.

This is the House of the Lord, firmly built.

Lord, in thy House all praise thy glory.

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Blessed be the glory of the Lord from this Holy Place.

Blessed are they who dwell in thy House, O Lord.

Truly the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.

Well founded is the House of the Lord on a firm rock.¹⁴

Unlike earlier Christians, who associated the Temple Mount with Jesus’ prophecy about the destruction of the Temple, the Christians of Crusader Jerusalem emphasized the continuity of tradition—from the earlier to the later dispensation, from the Old Testament Jewish Temple to the Christian Templum Domini. If the Templum Domini (the Dome of the Rock) was not the Jewish Temple, at least it occupied the site where the biblical Temple had stood: It signified the completion and fulfillment of the Old Law.

It is not surprising, then, that the Crusaders connected the Templum Domini with a particular passage in the Gospels: the presentation of Christ. In this story, when Mary and Joseph present Jesus in the Jerusalem Temple, a “righteous and devout” man named Simeon recognizes the youth as the Messiah. Simeon takes Jesus in his arms, praises God and declares to the congregation that Jesus is “a light for revelation to the Gentiles / and for glory to your people Israel” (Luke 2:22–38). Here the Crusaders were following medieval theologians in understanding the presentation of Christ as a nexus between the Old and New Covenants. Simeon, who serves God under the Old Law, recognizes in Jesus the incarnation of the New Law.

Inside the Templum Domini, the Crusaders hung a painting of the presentation of Christ. Accompanying the painting was a rhymed Latin inscription:

The Virgin’s Son, presented here,
The King of Kings, the boy most dear,
He makes this spot a holy place,
And this most rightly is the case.
The ladder Jacob saw was near
The altar he erected here—
This memory makes more precious yet
The holy place in which it’s set.¹⁵

As the poem suggests, such a “holy place” was the setting for other sacred events. The great rock inside the Templum Domini, for instance, was the stone pillow on which Jacob rested his head while he dreamed of the ladder climbed by God’s angels—again, like the Templum Domini, a meeting point of heaven and earth. One of the mosaic inscriptions on the Templum Domini—“Truly the Lord is in this place, 033and I did not know it”—consists of the very words spoken by Jacob when he awoke from his dream (Genesis 28:16).¹⁶

The grotto within the rock, reached by a stairway from the south side of the choir, was regarded as the “sanctuary of the Lord”—the place where the angel Gabriel announced the conception of John the Baptist to his father, the priest Zechariah (Luke 1:5–20). Somewhat incongruously, this cave was also believed to be the spot where Jesus absolved the adulteress; thus it became a pilgrimage destination where supplicants came to confess their sins.¹⁷

The Dome of the Chain, the open kiosk to the east of the temple, was consecrated as a chapel of St. James the Less (also called James the Just). This James, the eldest of Jesus’ four brothers, became the leader of the Jerusalem church in the years after Jesus was crucified. In 62 A.D. he was martyred by being cast down from the southeastern pinnacle of the Temple (other reports say that he was stoned to death). An inscription marked the building as his tomb:

Speak, stone and tomb, and answer

those

Who ask, “Whose bones do you

enclose?”

“They are of James the Just. He lies

beneath

This old memorial place of death.”¹⁸

The actual physical appropriation of the buildings of the Haram for Christian purposes seems to have been accomplished rather quickly after the conquest of the city. Fulcher of Chartres mentions in passing that only one week after the capture of the city, canons regular were installed “to serve in the Church of the Lord’s Sepulcher and in His Temple.”¹⁹ The architectural adaptation of the Templum Domini for the Latin Christian rite seems to have taken a bit longer. Fulcher gives an unusually detailed and precise description of the interior and its transformation:

In the middle of the Temple, when we first entered it, and for almost fifteen years afterwards, we saw kept a certain native rock … Since that rock disfigured the Temple of the Lord, afterwards it was entirely covered and encased in marble. Its present position is under the altar where the priest performs the rituals.²⁰

Before the covering of the rock and the erection of an altar in the center of the building, around 1114, the Templum Domini must have been an extraordinarily awkward setting for the celebration of Mass.

Further alterations to the Templum Domini are recorded only in later pilgrim accounts. A splendid wrought-iron screen stood around the circumference of the inner arcade, separating the choir from the laity; this screen was attested in about 1150, so it was probably associated with the formal dedication of the building in 1142.²¹ The cloister of the Augustinian 034canons was apparently well established by 1154, when an Arab visitor admired its luxuriant garden with all manner of trees.²²

Sometime before 1170, a large gilt iron cross was erected over the Dome. This constituted by far the most visible and weighty symbol of Christian domination, and its significance was not lost on the Muslim population:

The sign of the Holy Cross has been fixed to the top by Christians, which is annoying to the Saracens. They would be very glad to see it taken down, and have offered much of their own money. For even though they do not hold the faith in the passion of Christ they still revere this Temple, and wish to worship their Creator there.²³

Jerusalem’s Muslims extracted symbolic revenge after Saladin’s conquest of the city; they dragged the cross through the streets to the Tower of David, where Jerusalem’s Crusader kings had resided, and melted it down.²⁴

By the time Saladin captured the city in 1187, Imad ad-Din had described extensive additions to the interior of the Dome of the Rock:

They had adorned it with images and statues, set up dwellings there for monks and made it the place for the 035Gospel, which they venerated and exalted to the heights. Over the place of the Prophet’s holy foot they set an ornamented tabernacle with columns of marble, marking it as the place where the Messiah had set his foot; a holy and exalted place, where flocks of animals, among which I saw species of pig, were carved in marble.²⁵

Several pieces of Romanesque Crusader sculpture survive within the present Dome of the Rock, including the lintel over the portal leading down to the grotto. Other carvings, such as an octagonal tabernacle like the one described by Imad ad-Din, survive in the Minbar (Pulpit) of Qadi Burhan ad-Din, south of the temple.²⁶ These remains are too few and too jumbled in their reuse to show us how they were originally used, but it is clear that in Crusader times the Templum Domini’s rich Islamic decoration was overlaid with numerous Romanesque sculptures.

One intact Crusader structure is the Qubbat al-Miraj (Dome of the Ascension), just northwest of the Dome of the Rock. According to an Arabic inscription on its lintel, it was erected in 1200/1201 by the Muslims, but the capitals appear to be Crusader work of the 1140s or 1150s.²⁷ The architectural evidence suggests that the structure was originally an open pavilion, which was subsequently walled in and furnished with a mihrab (the niche faced by Muslims when they pray) on its south side. What, then, was this Crusader building? Probably built around the time of the formal dedication of the Templum Domini in 1142, it has conventionally been described as a baptistery. There is no textual record of a baptistery associated with the Templum Domini, however, nor should we expect to find one associated with what was a commemorative shrine, not a church.²⁸ It seems likely that the canopy was also a commemorative structure dedicated to some as-yet-unidentified sacred event or figure associated with the Temple Mount.

In contrast to the Templum Domini, the Templum Salomonis does not seem to have been a pilgrimage site. The Al-Aqsa Mosque, as the Crusaders found it, was a very large congregational mosque.²⁹ Immediately following the conquest, it served as the palace of the Latin kings of Jerusalem, and it continued as the royal dwelling even after Baldwin II gave part of it to the newly founded Knights Templars in 1119.³⁰ In 1128 Pope Honorius II officially recognized the knights as a military order, and they adopted a rule written for them by St. Bernard of Clairvaux. At that time the royal palace was moved to the Tower of David, and the Templars gained the whole mosque for their headquarters.³¹ The mosque itself was used as the Templars’ living quarters, and the Umayyad substructures under the platform, “Solomon’s Stables,” were used for their horses.³²

In the southeast corner of the Haram, near the Templum Salomonis, were two commemorative spots. The first was the corner itself, known to Christian pilgrims as the Pinnacle of the Temple, where Jesus was tempted by Satan (see Matthew 4:5–7; Luke 4:9–12) and where St. James the Less was cast down to his death. Beneath this was a shrine, recorded as the “Mosque of Mary” in several Arab sources predating the Crusader conquest, evidently a Muslim shrine that was taken over for Christian use after 1099.³³

The Crusader alterations to the Al-Aqsa Mosque were extensive, but they are very difficult to sort out amid the later rebuildings and restorations. During the early years of Crusader rule, the building languished in a sad state of disrepair. The Templars, however, with their vast revenues from land holdings in Europe and the Levant, began a veritable building boom. A contemporary describes additions made by the knights in the 1170s:

On the other side of the palace, that is on the west, the Templars have built a new house, whose height, length and breadth, and all its cellars and 036refectories, staircase and roof, are far beyond the custom of this land … There indeed they have constructed a new Palace, just as on the other side they have the old one. There too they have founded on the edge of the outer court a new church of magnificent size and workmanship.³⁴

Although the additions erected on the east side of Al-Aqsa, including the church, were destroyed by Saladin, the buildings occupying the southwest corner of the Haram, including the knights’ refectory, largely survive in the present Jami an-Nisa (Women’s Mosque) and the Jami al-Maghariba (Moor’s Mosque). The Al-Aqsa Mosque itself also preserves a sculpture produced in the last two decades of Crusader rule by a sculptural workshop probably associated with the Temple Mount. For example, an entire rose window is preserved in the Mihrab Zakariyya, a chapel of Crusader workmanship on the east side of the mosque. In a room below the mihrab, the dikka (a rostrum used for Koranic readings) is composed almost entirely of Crusader spolia, including what may be columns from the cloister of the Templars’ garden.³⁵

One pervasive motif used by Crusader sculptors is the braided double column. This motif, which is found in both Byzantine and Romanesque art, was associated with the bronze pillars, called Jachin and Boaz, that Solomon erected at the portal of the First Temple (1 Kings 7:13–22).³⁶ Many pairs of such columns appear as spolia in the extant gates and fountains of the Haram. These braided columns were probably used as supports for cloisters on the Temple Mount, perhaps the cloister of the Augustinian canons at the Templum Domini or that of the Templars’ court at the Templum Salomonis.³⁷ Their association with King Solomon, much like the Latin inscriptions on the Templum Domini, asserted the Christians’ claim to be the legitimate successors of ancient Israel. The braided-column motif also appeared as part of the decoration on the Tomb of King Baldwin V (1185–1186), which stood in the Holy Sepulchre until the church was destroyed by fire in 1808. Here, too, a Latin king is associated with a Davidic king.

The Muslim reconquest of the city holds up an intriguing mirror to the Crusader occupation. After Saladin expelled the Franks from Jerusalem, Imad ad-Din tells us, he converted a number of the more important churches and monasteries into madrassas (schools) for the teaching of Islamic law and convents for Sufi mystics. The sultan was unsure what to do about the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, 037however. Some of his advisors urged him to destroy it completely, so that pilgrimages to it would cease, but wiser voices prevailed:

Demolishing and destroying it would serve no purpose, nor would it prevent the infidels from visiting it or prevent their having access to it. For it is not the building as it appears to the eyes but the home of the Cross and Sepulchre that is the object of worship. The various Christian races would still be making pilgrimages here even if the earth had been dug up and thrown into the sky.³⁸

So it was for the Crusaders. Regardless of how many times the Templum Domini had been leveled and rebuilt, it was at once Solomon’s Temple and the Temple of Christ’s Presentation.

After defeating the army of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem at the Horns of Hattin, west of the sea of Galilee, in 1187, the Egyptian sultan Saladin marched unopposed into Jerusalem. European Crusaders, mostly from the region of present-day France, had occupied the ancient city for almost a century, following 450 years of Arab rule. Saladin’s reclamation of one of Islam’s holiest sites, the Dome of the Rock on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, spurred the 028Arab historian Imad ad-Din to impressive heights of rhetoric: The Rock, the object of pilgrimage, was hidden under constructions and submerged in all this sumptuous […]