It sounds like a trick question. Eight hundred and twenty four years have passed since Saladin smoked the last Crusaders out of the holy city; seven hundred and twenty years since their descendants were pushed back into the sea. Yet unlikely though it seems, at least two uneasy heads still claim Jerusalem’s crown today.
The first is Karl von Habsburg, whose late father Otto was the last Crown Prince of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. (It was Otto’s obituaries that reminded me of this elephant pit of protocol.) Karl’s official style also features seven more kingdoms, an archduchy, nineteen duchies, eight principalites, four countships, three lordships, four margravates and a voivodeship. To be fair, all those titles are moot as well, since Austria-Hungary and its monarchy were dissolved in the aftermath of the First World War.
The Habsburgs are not the only royal family to claim Jerusalem as their birthright. The Dukes of Savoy, who became the kings of Italy until 1946, appended it to their titles for centuries. So did—and do—the Spanish Bourbons, which means that Karl von Habsburg’s main rival for the throne of Jerusalem is King Juan Carlos of Spain.
In my book Holy War, I suggest that the eschatological obsessions of successive European kings were a major factor in launching the entire Age of Discovery. King Manuel of Portugal, the sponsor of Vasco da Gama, was not alone in fantasising about reconquering Jerusalem from Islam, installing himself as the Last Christian Emperor of legend, and ushering in the End Days of the earth. Still, half a millennium has passed since then, and the survival of a claim defunct for 800 years is a striking thing. It’s a reminder, perhaps, that the notion of a Christian rebirth in Jerusalem is deeply embedded in the chivalric code that still lends a kind of atavistic glamor to European nobility.
The claims attract little controversy. Conspiracy theorists darkly murmur about the Illuminati who rule the world and the pretenders’ supposed seats at the inner table. Staunch republicans scoff that the honorific is a mere cockade on the hat, an empty echo of long-lost grandeur. Yet the real question is surely why anyone in their right mind would want to be king of Jerusalem. Could there conceivably be a more posioned chalice?
Comments 1
I believe the next king among man will be among man, but not particularly of mankind. Which means, in my opinion, if there is a first source of all intelligence or life an creation, then we may be near an appearance. Much energy has been placed towards an idea, so physics will award us that idea, whether we like it or not is another story.
I don’t believe in an Illuminati that control the world, the world controls the world, and always has, I advise all free-thinkers to occupy your mind with the expanding of ones mind, the most powerful mechanism in the matrix.
” for orchestrating the mind is essential, for the substance brings forth the invisible, that’s the principle law of any doctrine, on this humanity should be stocking.”
Daniel Moshe Johnson