ALMOST 2000 years ago, in 70 AD, the Roman general Titus – son of the Emperor Vespasian – besieged the city of Jerusalem. Inside the walls were trapped half a million starving Jews: including members of the small Jewish cult of Christianity.

Outside the city walls were scenes that must have resembled hell. “Thousands of bodies putrefied in the sun,” writes the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore in his remarkable ‘biography’ of the holy city. “The stench was unbearable. Packs of dogs and jackals feasted on human flesh. In the preceding months, Titus had ordered all prisoners or defectors to be crucified. Five hundred Jews were sacrificed each day. The Mount of Olives and the craggy hills around the city were so crowded with crucifixes that there was scarcely room for any more, nor trees to make them.”

There is very good evidence that the horrific scenes described by Sebag Montefiore actually happened. The Jewish historian Josephus, on whose account he draws, was a contemporary of the events described.

Titus was, by the standards of the times, apparently not a cruel man. Yet the city was sacked, much of the population slaughtered, and the Temple burned.

It wasn’t the first or the last time this would happen. Throughout its 3,000-odd years of history, from the semi-mythical time of King David onwards, Jerusalem has been repeatedly invaded, besieged, ransacked and fought over.

In his magnificent biography, Sebag Montefiore follows the city’s story – from the time of the “poet, conqueror, murder (and) adulterer” King David, who created “sacred Jerusalem”, to the modern city today: tragic, beautiful and bitterly divided.

Sebag Montefiore’s history isn’t for the faint-hearted. Throughout its history, he writes, Jerusalem has been the focus of the struggle between the three Abrahamic religions, and the strategic battlefield of clashing civilisations. He doesn’t shirk from bringing the city’s bloody history to, life.

But he writes beautifully. “Jerusalem is the Holy City,” he tells us in the preface, “yet it has always been a den of superstition, charlatanism and bigotry; the desire and prize of empires…; the cosmopolitan home of many sects, each of which believes the city belongs to them alone…”

Magnificent.