by Giles Milton
Mandeville was desperate to clear up the confusion over the relics before venerating them, but the more he investigates the history of the bones, the more puzzled he becomes. First he is told that John the Baptist was buried in the city of Sebastiyeh between the prophets Helizeus and Obadiah, but others disagree and assure Mandeville that he was beheaded beside the Dead Sea: "There Julian the Apostate, when he was emperor, had his bones exhumed and burnt and the ashes were scattered in the wind."
While this second story satisfactorily explains the decapitated body, it doesn't account for John the Baptist's head. Where had that been
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buried? "The head," Mandeville is told, "was enclosed in a wall in Se-bastiyeh but the Emperor Theodosius had it taken out, and found it wrapped in a bloody cloth."
Even this is not the end of the story. Mandeville records that half the head was sent to Constantinople, while the other half found its way to Rome, where it was stored in the church of St. Silvester.
Such confusion explains, perhaps, why Mandeville didn't visit the relics stored in the Umayyad Mosque. He didn't believe that this was the head of St. John the Baptist, and was in no mood to venerate a skull that he had already seen in Constantinople.
Sir John stumbles across a host of different Christian rehgions in Syria. He writes about the Syrian Church (w^hich still exists) and the Greek Orthodox Church (which also exists). He also mentions the Franciscans (who still have a church in Damascus), the Arians (who died out centuries ago), and the Nestorians.
The whol I had never heard of this last lot and wondered whether they still existed. If so, where did they live? What did they believe?
It is not just in Syria that Sir John writes about the Nestorians; the farther east he travels, the more he meets these peculiar people. In India he claims that the emperor himself is a Nestorian priest, while in China, huge communities of Nestorians are said to be scattered throughout the land. Had Mandeville invented such stories or simply repeated some garbled tale he had heard from another traveller? The further I delved into the history of the Nestorians, the more remarkable was the story that I uncovered. The Nestorians had indeed existed in Sir John's day and were, as he says. Christians—but they were Christians whose beliefs were dramatically different from those of the Catholic or Orthodox churches.
They had come into existence in the fifth century when a Patriarch of Constantinople named Nestorius—renowned for his melodious voice and mastery of rhetoric—repudiated several of the Orthodox Church's central tenets. He separated the God and Man in Christ and thereby threatened the Virgin Mary's position as the Mother of God.
For a Patriarch to be saying such things caused such appalling furore in the imperial capital that the emperor immediately summoned a great church council at Ephesus in 429 a.d. to decide if his teachings
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were correct. Nestorius was confident of winning his case; he already appeared to have gained the emperor's ear, and had gathered around him sixteen hke-minded bishops, as well as several hundred soldiers just in case things went wrong.
But right from the outset, the council did not go according to plan. His chief supporters failed to arrive in time for the meeting, and Nestorius, protesting the decision to begin without his allies, refused to appear. In the council's first session, Nestorius was condemned in absentia, deposed, and banished to a remote monastery in the Libyan desert. This should have spelled the end for his supporters, but it only succeeded in strengthening their convictions. A group of them founded their own theological school, and their teachings spread like wildfire through the Byzantine Empire, especially among those communities disaffected by the emperor's policies. Within a few decades, much of Persia had converted to Nestorianism and missions began springing up right across Asia. By the time Sir John was claiming to have travelled, the Nestorian Church was so mighty that their Patriarch, ruling from his palace on the banks of the Tigris, had half the world under his sway.
I wondered what had happened to these people, for they seemed to have vanished from the pages of history. And then I learned, to my great excitement, that it was just possible that a tiny community of Nestorians were still living in the remote north-eastern corner of Syria . . .
The town of Hassake stands guard over a slender finger of land that pokes insolently into the great desert of Iraq. The traveller coming from Damascus has little choice in how to reach Hassake. There is no airport, there is no train. The only way to arrive in this remote town is by bus—a wearisome seven-hour journey across the desert.
As soon as the bus leaves Damascus, the landscape changes: the city is on the cusp of a fertile crescent, and the desert is forever knocking on its door. Within minutes of leaving the suburbs, we had entered a flat and inhospitable terrain, and for the next three hours there was nothing to break the monotony except shards of stone and the occasional scrap of litter caught by the wind. This was wasteland without grandeur; there were no sand dunes marching triumphantly into the wind, no green-fringed oases to brighten the horizon.
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We Stopped at Palmyra, the greatest ruined city of antiquity in the Middle East, and I stepped off the bus to be greeted by a blast of freezing air. It came from the north, chilled among the rocky peaks of Kurdistan before being sent shooting across the flat Syrian desert. I had no reason to visit Palmyra, for Sir John doesn't even mention the town. But the bus was going no farther, so I had no choice. I would have to stay overnight and wait for the next bus to Hassake.
It came as no surprise that Mandeville had not visited Palmyra, for by the fourteenth century the city was already in ruins and only the newly garrisoned fort atop the sugarloaf mountain marked the strategic significance of this outpost. Yet in the days of the Roman Empire, Palmyra had been an immensely rich caravan centre which lived off the taxes it gathered from merchants passing through its gates on their way to Damascus. Even in its ruined state, the city appears huge, spread over a vast pan of desert. At the eastern end of the great colonnade stands the Temple of Bel, a massive honey-coloured stone structure built to protect the central shrine within. The inner sanctum of this shrine, where bloody sacrifices to the gods were once made, is in a remarkable state of preservation; the cupola still displays a proud bust of Jupiter surrounded by the signs of the zodiac. From here, it is possible to get an overview of the colonnade which cuts through the town and leads the eye towards the Camp of Diocletian, reduced over the centuries to a pile of rubble. On the left, there is a theatre. On the right stands the temple of Bel-Shamin. And in every direction temples and homes poke out of the desert—tombstones on a truly epic scale.
I felt a twinge of excitement as I stumbled over these ruined temples and colonnades. Brushing my hands along the carved stone blocks, I sensed, like Sir John, that I was about to leave behind a familiar world and enter one entirely different: Asia Minor, the Unknown. For while these classical facades belonged firmly within the Graeco-Roman tradition, the sculptures and statues told a different story. The more I gazed at these faces and looked into their eyes, the more I saw that these people were not of Roman stock. They have long eyelids and shallow faces, ringlet beards and weird hats. These were Persians, Assyrians, Mesopotamians, whose statues and deities fill an entire room of the British Museum.
For the Romans, Palmyra was ultima thiile —the last outpost of the
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known world, beyond which lay the formidable Persian army. As I stood at this one-time border between civilization and barbarism, the elements suddenly unleashed themselves on the desert. It began to rain—furious sheets of water driven horizontal in the gale. It lashed the temples and columns, transforming static statues into weeping faces and threatening at any moment to turn to snow.
1 turned my back on the colonnaded main street of old Palmyra and, stumbling over a half-buried column, walked back into the new town. The red, green, and blue fairy lights that decorated the outside of the
Palmyra Restaurant provided a welcoming sight. Palmyra may no longer mark the end of the known world, but it still felt like a frontier town.
My spirits lifted when I entered the small museum, for the man selling tickets was a cheery chap, though surprised that I wanted to see the artefacts dug up from the site. "There's nothing to see here," he said. "It's only old stones. Come and watch the football instead."
His small office was crowded with seven young lads, all smoking and drinking tea. Aleppo was playing Damascus, and in the few brief moments when the television wasn't a haze of fuzz, it appeared that Damascus was winning. Three of the lads were happy about this, and each time there was a near goal, they went through a hand-slapping, give-me-five routine. The other four sat silently throughout the match, smoking endless cigarettes and slurping tea.
At halftime I asked my new friend if I could pop out and see the museum. "If you're not enjoying the football," he murmured with a shrug.
I promised I'd come back afterwards and was about to walk away when he motioned me to come nearer.
"Perhaps you would like . . ."—his voice dropped to a whisper— ". .. to buy some of the exhibits?"
I laughed but saw that he wasn't joking. "Jewellery .. . coins . .. you must only ask."
When I returned half an hour later, having seen everything in the museum, I told him I'd like to buy a couple of mummies.
His face fell for a moment before he realized I was joking. "The pots are very nice," he said. "What's wrong with the pots?"
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It was bitterly cold at night, and I sat in bed with the blankets around my ears. My hotel was in the new part of town, and was a newer building than most. It had three windows missing, the back wall had yet to be built, and the corridor to my room was ankle-deep in gravel and sand.
In the flickering electric light, I began reading a fascinating book I had brought with me. It was called The Moriks of Kublai Khan, which rd mistakenly thought was a history of the Nestorian Church. But when I looked closer, I saw that it was a translation of a Syriac document which told the extraordinary story of two Nestorian monks who had travelled along exactly the same route as Sir lohn—except in reverse. It had been written in the last decade of the thirteenth century, just a few years before Sir John's journey, and threw a flood of light on both the Nestorian communities in the Middle East and Mandeville's claims to have visited these communities.
The story began in China, where an interesting rumour had just reached the ears of the great Mongol emperor Kublai Khan (of Xanadu fame). He had heard that two Nestorian monks from his lands were planning to undertake a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and he immediately summoned them to his palace in Peking. Their names were Sawma and Markos, and the reason for their journey—if their own account can be believed—was to seek absolution for their sins in Jerusalem. But right from the outset, their voyage was shrouded in mystery. As soon as Kublai Khan heard of their intentions, he decided to put these two monks to good use: he had long dreamed of capturing Jerusalem but had always lacked intelligence information. There could be no better people to send on a clandestine spying mission than two simple monks whose object was to pray at the holy places and whose travels would arouse no suspicion. To this end, he provided them with special permits which would allow them to travel unmolested through all the lands under his suzerainty.
Although Sawma and Markos found themselves welcomed by all the local rulers as they crossed China on their journey westwards, the journey stretched their endurance, and it was only after great hardship that they reached Kashgar, Khorasan, and finally Baghdad.
At this point they were within striking distance of Jerusalem, but their mission was suddenly stopped in its tracks. The Nestorian Patri-
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arch in Baghdad died, and an assembly of bishops met to decide on his replacement. The fame of these monks from China had preceded them, and Markos's holiness drew the attentions of many in the Church. The assembly argued that his spirituality outshone all others and that he should be confirmed as supreme head of the Nestorian Church. It was a political decision; Markos was well acquainted with the manners and customs of the Mongols and would prove extremely useful as an adviser to the Persian king—a fellow Nestorian.
He turned the job down but was immediately overruled and given the honorary name Yahbh-Allaha, or "God given." Sawma, too, was honoured. He was awarded the title of Visitor General, which gave him the right to travel anywhere in the world in the name of the king.
He was soon ordered to do so. The King of Persia also harboured dreams of capturing Jerusalem and felt that he was now in a position to do so. He sent Sawma to the Emperor of Byzantium, as well as the kings of Italy, France, and England, and the Pope in Rome, in order to enlist their support.
Sawma was treated nobly in Constantinople and then headed to Rome, where he was showered with vast quantities of gold, jewels, and relics. In France he was taken by the king to see the Crown of Thorns, and in Gascony he was granted an audience with King Edward I of England. Edward was delighted by the idea of retaking Jerusalem and told Sawma: "We the kings of these cities bear upon our bodies the sign of the Cross, and we have no subject or thought except this matter. And my mind is relieved on the subject about which I have been thinking, when I hear that King Arghon thinketh as I think."
But tragedy was about to beset the two monks. First Sawma died, exhausted from his travels. Then the Persian king dropped dead, and his country was plunged into civil war. The fanatical Muslims rose up and massacred thousands of Nestorians, and local warlords carved out private fiefdoms. Most notorious of all was a warrior-leader called Nawruz, who made the annihilation of the Nestorian Church the cen-trepoint of his policies. "The churches shall be uprooted," he decreed, "and the altars overturned, and the celebrations of the Eucharist shall cease, and the hymns of praise, and the sounds of calls to prayer shall be abolished; and the chiefs of the Christians, and the great men among them, shall be killed." The very night of this decree a band of brigands
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broke into the Patriarch's cell and tortured him. Markos was lucky to escape with his life.
When the civil war finally came to an end, things had never looked bleaker for the Nestorians. The new king favoured Islam over Christianity, and by the time Markos died in 1317—^just five years before Sir John left England—the Nestorian Church was in a critical position.
It wasn't long before its death knell was ringing right across Asia. In 1392 the Mongol emperor Tamberlaine the Great swept westwards and captured Baghdad, massacring all the Christians in the city. Only a handful escaped, fleeing for their lives into the desolate mountains of Kurdistan.
The Nestorian Church had been broken. Within less than a century, this vast Christian community—which had stretched from the Yangtze River in China to the shores of the Black Sea, from Siberia in the north to the present Sri Lanka in the south—had shrunk to a pathetic and persecuted community of a few thousand living in terror in the snow-covered wilderness of Kurdistan. Never before in history had a faith and a people been so totally annihilated in such a short space of time. Sir John, it seemed, had been one of the last westerners to meet them.
And that, it was assumed, was the end of the Nestorian Church. But in 1820 a certain Claudius James Rich, a Resident of the British East India Company in Baghdad, decided to visit the ancient site of Nineveh. While on this trip, he made a most astonishing discovery. He stumbled upon a remote and backward people who still spoke the language of Christ and who—he was convinced—were the last remnants of the ancient Nestorian Church.
The discovery was an accident. He had sent his Tartar servant to Constantinople to deliver a letter, and on the return journey, this Tartar took a shortcut across the mountains and stumbled across a ruthlessly hostile Christian population. "These Christians were a ferocious, vindictive, and capricious set," Rich later wrote, "extremely irritable withal,
and that the slightest offence might be his destruction ... his march was one scene of difficulties; they plundered him of his money and arms and told him they refrained from further violence for the sake of Zebeer Pasha's letter of recommendation."
Any further investigation was going to be dangerous in the extreme; Nestorians were renowned for their ruthlessness. They shared
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their territory with the devil-worshipping Yezids, and were surrounded by tribes of Kurds who murdered for sport. But Rich had thrown down the gauntlet, and within a few years, an American missionary called Dr. Asahel Grant took up the challenge, despite being warned by the Pasha of Mosul that he would never return alive from these desolate mountains: "To the borders of their country 1 will be responsible for your safety. You may put gold upon your head, and you will have nothing to fear; but I warn you that I can protect you no further. These mountain infidels acknowledge neither pashas nor kings, but from time immemorial every man has been his own king."
Grant was not to be deterred: he climbed high into the mountains and found, to his amazement, that these few villages were indeed inhabited by Nestorian Christians who worshipped God in the way they had done for centuries. Grant couldn't believe what he found:
Here, in the munition of rocks, has God preserved, as if for some great end in the economy of his Grace, a chosen remnant of his ancient church, secure from the beast and the false prophet, safe from the flames of persecution and the clamour of war. My thoughts went back to the days when the Nestorian missionaries were spread abroad throughout the East, and for more than one thousand years continued to plant and sustain the standard of the cross throughout the remote and barbarous countries of Central Asia, Tartary, Mongolia and China ... I looked at them in their present state, sunk down into the ignorance of semi-barbarism, and the light of vital piety almost extinguished upon their altars, and my heart bled for their condition.