Beloved Jerusalem – Center of the World

In the eleventh

In the eleventh century BC C. Jewish King David conquered the city of Jebus, Jebusites bastion of the people, who inhabited one of Canaan. The bastion was fortified with strong walls around him. King David was built here and renamed Ir David (City of David). This place is actually situated southwest of the present Old City and is called Ophel Hill. It was discovered and excavated by the Palestine Exploration Fund between 1923 and 1925.
The son of David, Solomon, extended the construction of walls and besides building the temple that bears his name. The city was renamed Go Salomon (Salomon City) named in the Bible, Jerusalem. On the death of Solomon to 962 BC happened a split in the Jewish people and formed into two states: Israel, Samaria and Judah capital, capital Jerusalem.
The city resisted through the years the attacks of their powerful neighbors, as well as through various stages of allegiance to the year 587 BC C. during the reign of the last king of Judah, Zedekiah, when it was conquered and destroyed by King Nebuchadnezzar II. The kingdom of Judah it became a province of the Empire Babylonian or Chaldean Empire and most of the Jewish ruling class would be sent into exile in Babylon.
In the year 530 BC C. The Persian king Cyrus the Great conquered the Babylonian empire and allowed the return of deported Jewish communities, the province of Judah, these returned to Jerusalem and rebuild the city and the Temple of Solomon.
In 332 BC C. Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire and the city suffered destruction. At Alexander’s death, Judah or Judea, and Jerusalem became part of the Seleucid Empire, which in turn would be annexed to the Roman Empire, 64 BC C. by the Roman general Pompey, after defeating the Empire. Jerusalem suffered the siege and the Roman conquest, with the destruction of its walls and the annexation to the Roman Empire.
The city of Jerusalem was recovered during the tenure of General Marcus Agrippa Vipsanius, who ordered the construction of a new wall called the Third Wall, the city remained under the administration of a religious elite, the Ammonites, when there was a Jewish revolt that involves new the Roman siege of Jerusalem and the taking and destruction of the city the year 70. B.C. by the Roman general Titus.
The year 21 BC King Herod the Great restored the city and the Temple, still standing there a part called the Wailing Wall, of great importance in the Jewish religion.
Around the year 135, Emperor Hadrian decided to rebuild the city with the name of Aelia Capitolina, which led a new revolt among the Jews, which ended in 135 with the Roman victory and the expulsion and exile of most of the Jewish people, known as the Diaspora. The territory of Judea became the Roman province of Syria-Palestine or Palestine.
The fate of Jerusalem remained linked to successive conquests and conflicts, as part of the Eastern Roman Empire or Byzantine Empire, within which was one of the four venues of religious doctrine of Christianity, along with Constantinople, Antioch and Alexandria.
AD 326, Emperor Constantine the Great command to lift the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which became one of the main religious sites of Christianity.
The year 614 the Sassanid Empire conquered the city, rigiendola until the year 638, being displaced by the Muslim expansion that I am the incorporated city of Damascus the Umayyad Caliphate, the Abbasid caliphate and the Ottoman Empire on.
Between the years 687 and 691 are built the Dome of the Rock. In 710 was finished erecting the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Both temples are important religious points of the Muslim religion.
In 1095 Pope Urban II preached at the Council of Clermont led the First Crusade to conquer Jerusalem from the Muslims. The French nobleman Godfrey of Bouillon achieving this task and then carry out a slaughter conquered the city and created the Kingdom of Jerusalem which was his brother Baudouin I, the first representative with the title of King of Jerusalem. During the following years the presence of the Christian military orders in the city was intermittent, alternating with the presence of Muslim troops, among whom he distinguished Saladin, who besieged and finally conquered the city in 1244.
The walls of Jerusalem were destroyed and rebuilt many times. The existing walls were built in 1538 by the Ottoman Sultan Soliman the Magnificent and continued under Ottoman rule until the end of the First World War.
The walls have an approximate area of 4.5 km and its height varies between 5 and 15 m with a thickness of 3 m.