After Saladin’s death in 1193, his vast empire ceased to exist. The heirs of the great emir divided it among themselves, thus following the historical constant of the Middle East, which consisted in rivalry and tense relations between the rulers of Syria (or Mesopotamia) and Egypt. The Ayyubid sultans, the heirs of Saladin, divided these two regions among themselves: Jerusalem went to the Cairo Ayyubid, al-Malik al-Kamil, who apparently inherited many of Saladin’s positive qualities. Wise, moderate in politics, and true to his word, he became famous both for his meeting with Francis of Assisi, which seems to have actually taken place, although it looks more like a legend in Western sources (although it is also mentioned in Muslim documents), and for the truce concluded after negotiations with one of the His neighbors and political and diplomatic correspondents were the German Emperor Frederick II. This emperor took the lead of the crusade, however, being the ruler of Sicily and southern Italy, he was very interested in friendly relations with the sultan; in addition, he shared some of his scientific interests.
In 1229, the sultan concluded a truce with Frederick II, which in practice provided for the following: the defenses of the Holy City were demolished, Christian shrines were returned to believers in Christ, and Muslim holy sites, that is, Haram al-Sharif, were transferred to Muslims. The solution is ideal because of its fairness: in 1240-1241, the brother of the English king Richard of Cornwall, who can be called a «peaceful crusader,» will once again turn to him.
The weak side of this decision, later called a model of diplomatic wisdom, was the instability of the situation that had developed in this way. After all, it assumed the inviolability of diplomatic relations between the Christian rulers interested in the Holy Land and the Ayyubid sultans of Cairo; however, the Christian rulers themselves did not get along well with each other, and external events — for example, the Mongol expansion throughout Eurasia — further complicated the overall picture. Therefore, some considered it advisable to form an alliance with the Ayyubids of Damascus, which changed the balance of political forces and forced the Cairo ruler to take retaliatory measures. One of these measures was the recruitment of about ten thousand Central Asian mercenaries from Khorezm, a territory in the lower reaches of the Amu Darya, on the border of modern Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. It was they who attacked Jerusalem in July 1244 and plundered it: the attack was accompanied by massacre and desecration of shrines.
I must say that Jerusalem has long had a large Jewish community, according to Muslim sources, with the assistance of Saladin. It consisted mostly of families who had fled France and England, where there was already a tendency towards harassment and persecution of Jews and where they were repeatedly accused of desecrating consecrated vestments and ritual infanticide. During the same period and for similar reasons, many Jews, primarily from France, fled to Muslim Spain. During the Crusades, famous Jews visited Jerusalem, such as the great Maimonides and Benjamin ben Jonah of Tudela; during the Ayyubid era, another native of Spain, Moshe ben Nachman, known as Nachmanides, played a prominent role in the cultural life of the Jews of Jerusalem.
The desecration of Khorezm in 1244 became one of the pretexts for King Louis IX of France to immediately launch a crusade against Ayyubid Egypt, a campaign that had long been in his plans. During it, the king was captured. In 1249, while in captivity, he witnessed a palace coup: the dynasty of sultans, descendants of Saladin, fell in Cairo, and new rulers took their place. These were guardsmen — slaves of Asian-Caucasian origin (Turks, Kurds, Circassians, Tatars), who were called «Mamluks» (from the Arabic Mamluk — «in possession», «slave»).
In Jerusalem, which the Mamluks firmly held, they initially established military rule. Using the contradictions and disputes in the Crusader camp (primarily between the Venetians, Pisans and Genoese, as well as the Templars and Hospitallers), the Mamluks defeated a coalition of Mongols and Crusaders in 1260 and launched a military campaign to destroy the last «Frankish» garrisons in Syria and Palestine, remaining only in a few coastal towns or castles occupied by orders of chivalry. Having succeeded in their intentions by the end of the century (the last citadel of the Crusaders, Acre, fell in 1291), the Mamluks began to systematically destroy port facilities, ravage agricultural land, and do everything to ensure that the caravan routes moved to other areas. In a few decades, the flourishing lands turned into a desert.
It was not a matter of carelessness or bad governance, but of a conscious political choice. The Mamluks were well aware that Christians were interested in Jerusalem for political and religious reasons; however, they also knew that for two centuries they had been interested in it from a commercial and economic point of view, which served as justification for the crusades. Thus, if it had been possible to reduce the economic and commercial attractiveness of this territory, the idea of the Crusades would have lost many supporters. In addition, dominating Egypt and, consequently, regulating the turnover of goods that reached the Nile delta and the port cities of Alexandria and Damietta via the Red Sea and the Nile, the Mamluks saw their competitors in the coastal cities of Syria and Palestine. If their value could be reduced to zero, the trade turnover on the Nile would increase significantly. Thus, guided by tactical, strategic and at the same time trade and economic considerations, the Mamluks became the culprits of the general, including demographic, decline that occurred in Syria and Palestine and continues to this day: only in recent decades have initiatives been taken that can radically change the situation.
As for Jerusalem, the slave rulers turned out to be zealous defenders of Islam, but at the same time they tried to respect the rights of Jews and Christians and behaved correctly towards the pilgrims. In the 13th–16th centuries, so many pilgrims arrived there that Venice even found it possible to organize «regular flights» by sea: the pilgrimage enriched the sultan’s treasury and the purses of Muslim merchants. The Mamluks also contributed to the improvement of the city by strengthening its walls, renovating the territory of Haram al-Sharif and building many religious schools — madrassas.
However, the Mamluks took every opportunity to turn the communities under their control against each other in order to manage them more conveniently. Out of respect for the truth, it must be said that they always did this in moderation, but still, for example, they patronized Christians to the detriment of Jews. They especially favored the Franciscans, who enjoyed the support of the rulers of Naples from the Angevin dynasty.: They saw the Cairo sultans as good neighbors. In 1309, the Sultan officially gave the Cathedral of the Holy Sepulchre, the temples on Mount Zion and in Bethlehem to the Franciscans. Later, in 1333, King Robert of Sicily acquired from the Sultan the rights to a house located just outside the southern walls of the city, in which, according to legend, the Last Supper took place. In 1342, he donated this building to the Franciscan Order.: this marked the beginning of the Franciscan guard in the Holy Land (the prior of the Franciscan monastery in Zion would later become the «Guardian of the Holy Land»); moreover, thanks to this, the Hall of the Last Supper acquired those beautiful Gothic forms that can still be admired. But the Mamluk rulers nevertheless zealously applied the Islamic law prohibiting the restoration of dilapidated religious buildings of non-Muslim communities. That is why many Christian churches appeared to pilgrims and wanderers in a rather deplorable state: in the 19th century, this delighted romantics, but in the 16th and 19th centuries it gave the landscape a sad spirit of abandonment, which is felt in many descriptions and drawings of that period.
However, during the 15th century, the Mamluk government became worse and worse, including for internal political reasons. The diaries of European pilgrims who visited the Holy Land from the middle of the 14th to the beginning of the 16th century give an idea of how Jerusalem gradually declined: the government became more inactive and corrupt, the population shrank and became poorer, and almost no measures were taken against natural disasters such as droughts, diseases, and earthquakes. It is estimated that the population of the city, which in the middle of the 13th century was almost fifty thousand, has decreased to ten thousand in two and a half centuries.