In this short chapter I draw on the recent studies of Constantinople that have reinterpreted the most famous of imperial claims to have surpassed Solomon and his Temple. I close with some implications drawn from Romanos’ kontakion.

The old Hagia Sophia was destroyed in the Nika revolt of 532 CE; thirty thousand people were said to have died in the Hippodrome during the revolt. The church was rebuilt with startling speed [Colour Pl. XXI]. Its consecration in 537 is described in the Diegesis, a ninth-century account of the rebuilding:

Reference to Solomon had been a commonplace at the dedication of churches since Eusebius had described Constantine as ‘our Solomon’ in his ekphrasis of the church of Tyre, consecrated in 318 (HE 10.45, 9–10 above).

The church was dedicated once more in 562, after the earthquakes of 553 to 558, the dome’s collapse and the repair. A kontakion generally ascribed to Romanos praised this reconstruction, once more under Justinian: two hundred and fifty years had passed between the Temple’s destruction and the building of the Holy Sepulchre; Justinian had begun the rebuilding of H. Sophia the day after its destruction.

From Jerusalem To Aelia Capitolina

The first building that calls for our attention is the Holy Sepulchre as it was built by Constantine and perhaps finished by Constantius II. We need a brief survey of the literary and archaeological evidence in order to do justice, in the chapter’s second half, to the status implied by the building for Christ and for Constantine.

Jesus was crucified in April 30 or 33 CE. Joan Taylor has shown that ‘Golgotha’ was the area of a disused quarry just outside and to the north of the Gennath (Gardens) Gate. She argues that the site of Jesus’ tomb identified under Constantine, some 250m north of the gate, was authentic; but that Jesus had been crucified at the quarry’s southern end, immediately outside the gate on a spot prominently visible from two roads, leading west to Emmaus and Joppa, and north to Samaria. (Crucifixion was designedly public; it was a deterrent.) Fig. 2.2 shows a tomb in Bethany, of the kind likely to have been used for Jesus: a rock between the vestibule and kokhim-chamber will have kept out scavenging animals; kokhim or horizontal shafts were dug for several bodies in the central chamber, and on use will have been plugged with stone; the arcosolium was ready for the ultimate deposit of bones. Jesus was buried in haste by frightened followers; his body was probably left, as a temporary measure, on such a ledge as shown here in the chamber beneath the kokhim. Jerusalem’s walls were rebuilt and extended by Agrippa I between 41 and 44 CE; the quarry was now enclosed within the city.

In 70 CE, at the end of the Jewish rebellion against Rome, Jerusalem was sacked and the Temple destroyed. At least some Jewish life continued in and around the city. En route to Egypt, between 129 and 130 CE, the Emperor Hadrian (Publius Aelius Hadrianus) was adorning cities and celebrating games. Within this programme he determined to rebuild Jerusalem and to rename it Colonia Aelia Capitolina. According to a later summary of Dio Cassius, ‘in the place of the temple of the god he set up in opposition a new temple to Zeus’, and this triggered a second Jewish revolt. Archaeological finds confirm the extent of the destruction wrought in the revolt’s suppression between 132 and 135. Hadrian then expelled the Jews from the city.

The Drawings Of John Guillim (1560-1621), Folger Shakespeare Library, V.A.447, FF. 39-44

Robin Griffith-Jones

Dr Nigel Ramsay has recently discovered in the Folger Library, Washington DC, a set of eleven drawings by John Guillim (1560–1621) of the Temple Church effigies and gravestones. These drawings predate by many decades both the repositioning of the effigies in 1695 and the earliest representations previously known to survive, commissioned by Smart Lethieullier by 1736/7. The drawings require further detailed study. This preliminary account examines the evidence the drawings offer on the effigies’ layout, c. 1610, and in particular on a grave-slab that has since been lost. Philip Lankester (471–78 below) outlines the importance of these drawings for our knowledge of the effigies. We will focus on just one sheet [Fig. 22.5] with two drawings: of the effigy identified since the 1840s as of William Marshal II; and of a gravestone, now lost, with a lion rampant and an inscription round part of its border, ‘Miles eram Martis’.

Camden, in the third edition of Britannia (1594), identified three of the Temple Church effigies as of the Marshals and added a marginal note:

That is: Camden read the hexameter in faded letters ‘on another tomb of these [Pembrokes]’, or perhaps ‘on the other tomb of these [Pembrokes]’, or (to paraphrase) ‘on one of these tombs [of the Pembrokes]’. Philémon Holland’s translation of Camden, in the 1637 edition, renders the note: ‘Upon William the Elder, his Tombe, I have some yeares since read in the upper part Comes Penbrochiae’. This is more precise than Camden’s own account; as we will see, the ascription resurfaces at the end of the seventeenth century, in Dingley.

William Dugdale wrote of the effigies (1666):

Robert Hillenbrand now ensures we do some justice to Islamic Jerusalem. He describes a deepening Muslim veneration for the city and in particular for the Dome of the Rock over several centuries following its completion in 691 to 692. Among his principal sources is The Merits of Jerusalem by the Baghdadi theologian Ibn al-Jauzi around 1200. Such Merits form a familiar genre from the ninth century onwards; Ibn al-Jauzi’s, however, here gets the attention it deserves for the first time.

Jerusalem has informed the Christian imagination from the time of Jesus himself: as the setting of events within human history which transcended and redirected all history; as the ‘New Jerusalem’, the final and longed-for home of the faithful, currently hidden in heaven and due at the last times to be realised on earth; as the representation in buildings of the living, human stones built by God into the present Church, herself already informed and animated by the spirit, the down-payment and seal of the New Creation; and therefore as the centre, symbol and goal of God’s action in the individual soul and throughout creation. Our first series of colour plates (I–X) introduces the two buildings in Jerusalem to which we will revert throughout the following pages: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; and the Dome of the Rock.

Much of this book is focused on architectural representations of the Holy Sepulchre, built on the supposed site of Jesus’ tomb.

Most of this volume will be dedicated to architectural and political history, in the designs, sculptures and patronage of buildings. In this opening chapter we will give some context to the architectural studies that follow, in a reminder of other forms – some far less grand and costly than the buildings, and far more widespread – in which the Holy Sepulchre and its relics were made pervasively present throughout Europe. We will see the ambiguities that inform these other representations, between the Jerusalems of earth and heaven, of past, present and future, of interior and exterior space.

This is a book of artistic rather than social history. Our focus will be largely (but not exclusively) on high-status buildings and artefacts, on their use, and on the ways in which they are likely to have guided, enriched and enlivened the liturgies and devotions of those who encountered them. How accessible and how often were these buildings and artefacts to people of what classes or education – and how much that ‘public’ mattered to the patrons – are questions underlying every page of the present chapter; and we will occasionally, here and later in the book, have good reason to articulate and address them. But on the page we will for the most part ask what the artefacts seem designed to effect or to make possible in unspecified individuals present ‘on their own’ within, before or in contact with them. At the book’s end, in the Epilogue, we will detach ourselves from these envisioned individuals and re-immerse them in the groups, crowds, processions and services in which priests and laity converged on Jerusalem, the earthbound version of the destination to which the elect were living out their lifelong pilgrimage.

The recovery – at the distance of many miles and centuries – of such sensibilities will never be more than tentative. Buildings, mosaics, reliquaries and oil-flasks do not speak for themselves. During the course of this chapter we will look at a handful of small objects, all linked more or less directly with the Holy Sepulchre and all seemingly designed to engage their users intensely; and we will ask if architectural recollections of the Sepulchre may have presupposed analogous sensibilities and offered analogous rewards.

‘I have defeated you, Solomon.’ Robin Griffith-Jones summarises the context and arguments, well known to scholars, which clarify Justinian’s boast over H. Sophia; and then asks if the kontakion of 562 in praise of the church was drawing a distinction between the Tabernacle and the Temple that has not generally been seen. Cecily Hennessy, Antony Eastmond and Robin Milner-Gulland now take us to Orthodoxy north of the Holy Land; David Phillipson and Emmanuel Fritsch southwards to the Ethiopian Church and Roha/Lālibalā.

Cecily Hennessy explores the sacred topography associated with St James, the Lord’s brother, in Jerusalem and Constantinople. The relics of St James, with those of Simeon and Zacharias, were taken to Constantinople in the sixth century, where the Chalkoprateia church, which housed the Virgin’s girdle, was rebuilt by Justin II (565–78) to include a chapel to James. The lower level of this chapel, with a painting of the murder of Zacharias, was rediscovered in 1953.

One set of drawings and two buildings from northern Europe, c. 680 to 850, raise an insistent question: what influenced the form of an imitation beyond the architecture and decoration of its prototype? This needs to be refined: in one vital case we are speaking of a supposed prototype. Charlemagne’s chapel at Aachen was linked with Solomon’s Temple by the panegyrists of his court, and has been linked with both the Temple and the Holy Sepulchre in one strand of modern scholarship. But any such link is uncertain. The uncertainty adds to Aachen’s value for our own enquiry. What architectural, political or theological features, c. 800, might have marked the chapel out, for whom, as being a copy or evocation of Jerusalem’s buildings at all?

Arculf, Iona And The Holy Places

In the winter of 679 to 680 Arculf, a bishop from Gaul, was in Jerusalem. On his homeward journey he was cast onto the west coast of Britain by a storm. He gave an account of his travels to Adomnán, abbot of Iona, who wrote down his visitor’s account and made a copy of Arculf’s own drawings of four sites: in Book 1 the Holy Sepulchre, the basilica on Mount Sion and the Imbomon or Church of the Ascension; and in Book 2 Jacob’s Well in Samaria. Adomnán writes that he questioned Arculf especially about the Sepulchre and the church built over it, ‘and Arculf drew its shape for me on a wax tablet’. Adomnán’s account of the Holy Places, De Locis Sanctis (hereafter DLS), survives in over twenty manuscripts. (Bede embedded in his History an abridgement of Adomnán’s account of the places of Christ’s own life, and reworked DLS into his own work of the same name.) At least nine known manuscripts preserve Adomnán’s plans.

In the rotunda, wrote Adomnán, ‘three walls rise from the foundations, and the distance between one wall and the next is about the width of a street’ (DLS 1.2.3). We reproduce the plan in the Vienna MS [Colour Pl. XXXII]. The drawings’ division of space, as defined by the rings of colours and lines, is not obvious. Heitz read them as follows.

It is a commonplace that twelfth-century devotion became more vividly and immediately linked with the pathos of Jesus’ life and death on earth. This may have been fostered by – and was certainly consonant with – the accessibility of the holy sites in Jerusalem. In this chapter we turn to the more particular circumstances of the Templars and of their Marian rotunda in London. What difference and how much did it make to whom that the Templars’ nave in London was round? Within the first decades of its use (to go no further) it will have been seen by the London Templars, their priests, sergeants and servitors, some of whom will have been to Jerusalem, others not; by royal, diplomatic and political visitors, and Templars from other English and continental houses; by clients of the Templars’ banking services; by pilgrims to the church and to its tombs; by members of crafts and trades doing business in and around the Temple and using its access to the river; by the Temple’s own tenants, doing business with their landlords; and by local lay people using the church – to make and witness oaths, for instance – as they used other churches. Pilgrim-visitors could win an indulgence from being there. Nicole Hamonic, in the present volume, brings back to light the indulgences recorded in Cotton Nero E VI, which show no clear link to the Holy Land.

In its direct architectural links with Jerusalem, the Temple was not alone in London. Catherine Hundley evokes in her chapter other recollections of the Sepulchre in and around the city: at the Old Temple; at the Hospitallers’ rotunda in Clerkenwell; and at the parish church – with a large parish – of St Sepulchre. London did not generate – as Winchester did – an ordered constellation of churches recalling the sites and layout of Jerusalem; but Jerusalem, the Holy Land and their guardians were a pervasive presence.

After the disastrous Second Crusade (1145–49), donations to the Order were falling. The Templars needed a bold statement to impress dignitaries living in or visiting London, to confirm the Order’s standing and to attract further benefactions.

We begin with the Holy Sepulchre, from Constantine in the early fourth century through to the crusaders in the twelfth. Griffith-Jones surveys the early literary and archaeological evidence, and is among those who view Eusebius’ account with some caution. When completed, under Constantine or his son, the complex as a whole will have been of overwhelming grandeur: the eastern stairs, portico and entrance; westwards into the basilica; through to the courtyard; and finally, at the western end, the rotunda.