ABSTRACT
During the first millennium of the Christian era, Jerusalem suffered many upheavals. Ruined and its temple burned in AD 70, it continued as a Jewish city until 132 when a second revolt of the Jews was launched against the Romans. Once this revolt was quelled, Caesar Aelius Hadrian refounded Jerusalem as a Roman city with a new name – Colonia Aelia Capitolina. It was the embracing of Christianity by Emperor Constantine I (315) that turned Aelia Capitolina, almost overnight, from a provincial city in the Roman Empire into one of the most important in the new Christian Empire and as a place sanctified by the presence of Christ himself. From that time onwards, public and state resources were mobilized to rebuild Jerusalem as a Christian city. As a result, during the Byzantine period (325-638), Jerusalem, with its beautiful new churches and the complex of Constantine’s great Church of the Holy Sepulchre at its very heart, became a major pilgrimage centre for pilgrims from both the Byzantine Empire and the Christian West. When the Moslems conquered the city in 628 (to remain under their rule until the crusader conquest in 1099), this disaster was seen as one of the events of the Last Days.
