Aelia Capitolina

Aelia Capitolina (full name in Colonia Aelia Capitolina ) was a Roman colony founded during Emperor Hadrian's visit to Judaea in 129/130 AD, centered around Jerusalem, which had been almost totally razed after the siege of 70 AD.

A sanctuary to Roman god Jupiter was built on the Temple Mount, and statues of Roman deities were erected in the city, and Jews were forbidden entrance to the city. The ban on Jews was maintained until the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem in 636. The Aelia part of the name was used in Arabic as Īlyāʾ during the Umayyad Caliphate.

Name
Aelia came from Hadrian's Aelia gens, while Capitolina meant that the new city was dedicated to Jupiter Capitolinus, to whom a temple was built. The Latin name Aelia is the source of the much later term Īlyāʾ (إيليا), a seventh-century early Islamic name for Jerusalem.

Foundation
Jerusalem, once heavily rebuilt by Herod the Great, was still in ruins following the decisive siege of the city in 70 CE as part of the First Jewish–Roman War.

The Roman emperor Hadrian decided to rebuild the city as a colonia that would be inhabited by his legionaries. Hadrian's new city was to be dedicated to himself and certain Roman gods, in particular Capitoline Jupiter.

There is controversy as to whether Hadrian's anti-Jewish decrees followed the Bar Kokhba revolt or preceded it and were the cause of the revolt. The older view is that the Bar Kokhba revolt, which took the Romans three years to suppress, enraged Hadrian, and he became determined to erase Judaism from the province. Circumcision was forbidden and Jews were expelled from the city. Hadrian renamed the province of Judaea to Syria Palaestina, dispensing with the Jewish-associated name.

Jerusalem was renamed Aelia Capitolina and rebuilt in the style of its original Hippodamian plan, although adapted to Roman use. Jews were prohibited from entering the city on pain of death except for one day each year: during the fast day of Tisha B'Av. Taken together, these measures (which also affected Jewish Christians) essentially secularized the city. Historical sources and archaeological evidence indicate that the rebuilt city was now inhabited by veterans of the Roman military and immigrants from the western parts of the empire.

According to Eusebius, the Jerusalem church was scattered twice, in 70 and 135, with the difference that from 70 to 130 the bishops of Jerusalem have evidently Jewish names, whereas after 135 the bishops of Aelia Capitolina appear to be Greeks. Eusebius' evidence for continuation of a church at Aelia Capitolina is confirmed by the Bordeaux Pilgrim.

Byzantine period
The ban against Jews was maintained until the Muslim conquest in 636. Christians had been allowed to visit the city since the 4th century, when the emperor Constantine the Great ordered the construction of Christian holy sites in the city, including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Burial remains from the Byzantine period are exclusively Christian, suggesting that the population of Jerusalem in Byzantine times probably consisted only of Christians.



In the fifth century the emperor based in Constantinople maintained control of the city, but following Sasanian emperor Khosrow II's early seventh century advance through Syria, his generals Shahrbaraz and Shahin Vahmanzadegan attacked Jerusalem, aided by the Jews of Palaestina Prima, who had risen against the Byzantines. In 614, after 21 days of siege, Jerusalem was captured. Byzantine chronicles relate that the Sasanian and Jewish forces slaughtered tens of thousands of Christians in the city, many at the Mamilla Pool, and destroyed their monuments and churches, including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The conquered city would remain in Sasanian hands for some fifteen years. It was reconquered by emperor Heraclius in 629.

Byzantine Jerusalem was conquered by the armies of Umar ibn al-Khattab in 636, which resulted in the removal of the restrictions on Jews living in the city. In this era, it was referred to in Arabic as Madinat Bayt al-Maqdis, 'City of the Temple', a name restricted to the Temple Mount. The rest of the city was called Ilyā, reflecting the Roman name Aelia.

Plan of the city
The city was without walls, protected by a light garrison of the Tenth Legion, during the Late Roman period. The detachment at Jerusalem, which apparently encamped all over the city's western hill, was responsible for preventing Jews from returning to the city. Roman enforcement of this prohibition continued through the 4th century.

Layout and street pattern
The urban plan of Aelia Capitolina was that of a typical Roman town wherein main thoroughfares crisscrossed the urban grid lengthwise and widthwise. The urban grid was based on the usual central north–south road (cardo maximus) and central east–west route (decumanus maximus). However, as the main cardo ran up the western hill, and the Temple Mount blocked the eastward route of the main decumanus, the strict pattern had to be adapted to the local topography; a secondary, eastern cardo, diverged from the western one and ran down the Tyropoeon Valley, while the decumanus had to zigzag around the Temple Mount, passing it on its northern side. The Hadrianic western cardo terminated not far beyond its junction with the decumanus, where it reached the Roman garrison's encampment, but in the Byzantine period it was extended over the former camp to reach the southern, expanded margins of the city.

The two cardines converged near the Damascus Gate, and a semicircular piazza covered the remaining space; in the piazza a columnar monument was constructed, hence the Arabic name for the gate, Bab el-Amud ("Gate of the Column"). Tetrapylones were constructed at the other junctions between the main roads.

This street pattern has been preserved in the Old City of Jerusalem to the present. The original thoroughfare, flanked by rows of columns and shops, was about 73 ft wide, but buildings have extended onto the streets over the centuries, and the modern lanes replacing the ancient grid are now quite narrow. The substantial remains of the western cardo have now been exposed to view near the junction with Suq el-Bazaar, and remnants of one of the tetrapylones are preserved in the 19th century Franciscan chapel at the junction of the Via Dolorosa and Suq Khan ez-Zeit.

Western forum
As was standard for new Roman cities, Hadrian placed the city's main forum at the junction of the main cardo and decumanus, now the location for the (smaller) Muristan. Adjacent to the forum, Hadrian built a large temple to Venus, at a site later used for the construction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; several boundary walls of Hadrian's temple have been found among the archaeological remains beneath the church.

Valley cardo and eastern forum
The Struthion Pool lay in the path of the northern decumanus, so Hadrian placed vaulting over it, added a large pavement on top, and turned it into a secondary forum; the pavement can still be seen under the Convent of the Sisters of Zion.

Ecce homo arch
Near the Struthion Pool, Hadrian built a triple-arched gateway as an entrance to the eastern forum of Aelia Capitolina. Traditionally, this was thought to be the gate of Herod's Antonia Fortress, which itself was alleged to be the location of Jesus' trial and Pontius Pilate's Ecce homo speech as described in John 19:13. This was due in part to the 1864 discovery of a game etched on a flagstone of the pool. According to the nuns of the convent, the game was played by Roman soldiers and ended in the execution of a 'mock king'. It is possible that following its destruction, the Antonia Fortress's pavement tiles were brought to the cistern of Hadrian's plaza.

When later constructions narrowed the Via Dolorosa, the two arches on either side of the central arch became incorporated into a succession of more modern buildings. The Basilica of Ecce Homo now preserves the northern arch. The southern arch was incorporated into a zawiya (Sufi monastery) for Uzbek dervishes of the Naqshbandi order in the 16th century, but these were demolished in the 19th century in order to found a mosque.