The Frederick-Al-Kamil compromise of 1229 David Abulafia

Opinion, August 2003, www.aljazeerah.info

The Frederick-Al-Kamil compromise of 1229

David Abulafia

The Daily Star, 8/13/03

Aljazeerah.info Editorial Note:

Aljazeerah.info does not endorse the author's opinion concerning Jerusalem. Arab East Jerusalem is an occupied territory and it has to be the capital of the Palestinian State. However, readers will benefit from reading this historical incident about Jerusalem.

The view is often expressed that one should learn from the lessons of history. The Middle East, where historic claims and counter-claims stretching back to Abraham are so closely interwoven with present-day politics, may be the best place in which to apply the lessons of the past in order to secure a safer future.
Of all cities in the region, Jerusalem is the most contested, and there is a temptation to see its history as a succession of conquests by Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar, Romans under Titus, Muslims under Omar, Crusaders under Godfrey de Bouillon, to go no further than 1100. Setting aside the period from 1948, when the city was divided between Israel and Jordan, has Jerusalem ever been peacefully shared between those who competed for its rule?
The answer is that in 1229 an extraordinary and highly suggestive compromise was achieved between a crusading army, led by the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Sicily, Frederick II of Hohenstaufen (1194-1250), and the Ayyubid masters of Egypt and Syria, led by Sultan al-Kamil.
The political circumstances were strangely familiar, with politicians on both sides anxious to win public approval, and under enormous pressure to reach a speedy solution. Frederick had promised to deliver Jerusalem from the heirs of Saladin when, as a young man, he was crowned German ruler, an impetuous promise that led the pope to threaten him with excommunication, exclusion from all the rites of the Catholic Church, the longer he delayed his great crusade.
By the time he set out for the Holy Land he was indeed excommunicated, and aware that the pope might launch an invasion of his Italian lands in his absence. Al-Kamil, too, was under pressure. His brother had been acting disobediently in Damascus, and Al-Kamil needed strong external support in order to establish his authority in Syria. He thought that the Crusaders might turn into useful allies, for he had exchanged embassies with Frederick in Sicily and was aware that the emperor took an interest in Arabic culture, in the tradition of the kings of Sicily, who ruled over Greek and Latin Christians, Muslims and Jews.
This was thus a rare crusade in which barely an arrow was fired. Frederick and Al-Kamil negotiated a ten-year treaty that restored to Christian rule Bethlehem and Nazareth, linked by corridors to the tiny Crusader kingdom perched on the coast of Palestine. More importantly, Frederick gained Jerusalem on certain conditions. He was not to rebuild its shattered walls, making it into a Christian fortress. He was not to receive what Christians and Jews call the Temple Mount and Muslims the Noble Sanctuary the Haram al-Sharif.
When the Crusaders had ruled Jerusalem, before Saladin’s conquest of 1187, the Mosque of Omar and the Al-Aqsa Mosque had been converted into churches, and the famous military order of the Templars had its head offices in Al-Aqsa. This was not to be permitted. Indeed, when Frederick visited the esplanade on which the mosques stand, he berated a priest who was tactlessly carrying a Bible into Al-Aqsa. His Sicilian Muslim bodyguards prostrated themselves in his presence when they heard the call to prayer of the muezzins. Indeed, he remarked on how much he missed the sound when, out of courtesy, the muezzins were requested not to issue the call to prayer while he was in Jerusalem. It was a sound familiar to him from his youth in Sicily.
Frederick knew that, for Christians, the great prize in Jerusalem was not the mosques but the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. He knew there were limits to what he could demand of Al-Kamil, whose assent to the treaty certainly caused anger in some quarters. Nor was everyone in Europe happy at Frederick’s treaty. There was a solid phalanx of warriors who considered that the best way to confront Islam was on the battlefield. But the treaty brought a new level of peace to the Holy Land.
There are surely lessons to be learned. Most importantly, there is the principle of sharing Jerusalem so that different sides receive what they value most. Perhaps we can go beyond that. The idea of the outright possession by human beings of holy places dedicated to God, whether they are holy to Jews, Christians, Muslims or all three, is questionable. The issue is who administers them day by day, not whether the sovereign power is the State of Israel or the Palestinian Authority.
Secular governments can never be more than custodians, looking after God’s property. The holy places do not need flags of blue and white, or of red white black and green. They cannot be part of a state: This makes them into museums of history, rather than spiritual centers that rise above politics.

David Abulafia is professor of Mediterranean history at Cambridge University. He wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR

Earth, a planet hungry for peace

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).