After the conquest of Jerusalem by Omar, it passed to the different Arab powers which succes sively had dominion in the East, and was from time to time snatched out of their hands by the Turks, the general name by which all the Tai tar tribes called themselves. Finally, in the year ro76 it was taken from the Fatitnite Arabs, who then possessed it, by Acsis, an officer of the Sultan Malek Shah, of the race of the Seljouk Turks. Pre viously to this it had been visited by many pilgrims, and had once been the scene of an interchange of courteous messages between Haroun-el-Raschid, the great Eastern ruler, and Charlemagne, the emperor of the West. But its Seljouk masters, a barbarous and cruel race, heaped wrongs and in sults upon the Christians, and these wrongs and insults awakened throughout Christendom that burning desire to possess the holy city which, during a period of 200 years, gave rise to seven crusades, conducted by the monarchs, the nobles, and the people of Europe, to effect or maintain its conquest. Jerusalem It as taken by the first Cru saders, A.D. Io99, after a fearful slaughter of its defenders—now again the Fatimites of Egypt, who had expelled the Seljouks eleven months before.
Godfrey de Bouillon was elected to be its king, notwithstanding the opposition of the bishops, who said—non clrbere ibi eligi Regem, ubi Deus passus et coronatur est ; the feudal system was adopted, and a code of laws, called the Assize of Jerusalem, drawn up for the government of its people. God frey was the first of a dynasty of thirteen Latin kings, nine of whom—ending in Guy de Lusignan, husband of Sybilla, great-grand-daughter of Bald win IL*—reigned successively in Jerusalem, till it was taken by Saladin, OCt. 2, 1187.
The possession of Jerusalem during this period by a Christian power gave birth to the two great orders of knighthood, that of the Temple and that of St. John of Jerusalem ; the former of which was distributed throughout Europe, and the latter—known also under the name of Knights Hospitallers—first fixed themselves at Rhodes, and afterwards dwindled down into the little society of the Knights of Malta. The Teu tonic order sprung up at Acre in 119r, and its grand masters, who became hereditary, were the ancestors of the house of Brandenburg, and the kings of Prussia. The capture of the city by Saladin produced the third crusade, but it was never retaken by the Christians, and the remaining kings of the series—ending in Jean de Brienne— were only titular, and resided at Tyre, Acre, or elsewhere in Palestine. In I229—during the life
time of Jean de Brienne—the Emperor Frederic II. of Germany entered and took possession of Jerusalem by virtue of a treaty with the Sultan of Egypt ; but ten years later it fell once more, through neglect, into the hands of the Moham medans. In 1241 it was again given up to the Christians by the Sultan of Damascus, to in duce them to help him against Egypt, but three years afterwards it was taken, after a battle of two days' duration, and the loss of the grand masters and most of the knights of the two great orders, by the K.harismians, a Tartar horde driven out of their country by more powerful tribes. The Kharismians were themselves dispos sessed of Jerusalem, and driven back to the Cas pian Sea by the Mohammedans of Syria, A.D. 1247.
The Ottoman Sultan Selim I. took possession of Jerusalem with the rest of Syria and Egypt in 1517, and his successor, Soliman the Magnificent, built its present walls in 1542. In 1832 Jerusalem became subject to Mohammed Ali, the Pasha of Egypt, re ceiving him without resistance within its gates. In 1841 he was deprived of all his Syrian possessions by European interference, and Jerusalem was again subjected to the government of the Ottoman Porte, and in the same year a bishopric of the Anglican church was established there by the combined movement of England and Prussia.
In 18.50 a dispute about the guardianship of the holy places between the monks of the Greek and Latin churches, in which Nicholas Emperor of Russia sided with the Greeks, and Louis Napoleon, Emperor of the French, with the Latins, led to a decision of the question by the Porte, which was unsatisfactory to Russia, and which resulted in a war of considerable magnitude between that coun try, on the one side, and the allied forces of Eng land and France on the other.
For the history of Jerusalem see History von Yerusalesn, S trasbourg 1518 ; Spalding, Gesch. d. Christl. Kiinigsreichs yerusalem, Berlin rSo3 ; Deyling, /Elie Capitolince Grigs. et Historia, Lips. 1743 ; Poujoulat, /Astaire de 7:nixie/It, Brux. 1842 ; Raumer's Pallistina ; Robinson's Bib. Re searches in Palestine; also Lightfoot ; Stanley's Sinai and Palestine ; .L'Art a'e Verifier les Dates ; Universal History Ancient ana' Modern; Gibbon's Decline and Fall, etc.—M. H.