by Giles Milton
The oldest chapel in the monastery stands in a corner of the main courtyard. Inside, it was almost completely dark, the only light coming from three candles which sent a soft light dancing over the silver
The Riddle and the Knight
censers. Gradually my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, and a startling sight emerged. An ancient and blackened iconostasis cut the tiny room in two, and from it hung hundreds of templates of hands—all beaten from fine silver.
A young nun was tending the shrine, and I asked in a whisper what the hands were for.
"Many people come to this miraculous place," she said in broken English. "Christians and Muslims alike come to pray for their rheumatism to be cured. When these prayers are successful, they leave a silver imprint of their hand as a token of thanks. You see, it has worked for many people."
"And the icon by St. Luke?" I asked. "Is that still here."
"Yes, yes," she said. "It is here, right here." She pointed to a thick panel of silver in the centre of the iconostasis. Though my eyes had grown accustomed to the gloom, I still couldn't see the icon, and I asked her to point it out.
"You can't see it," she said. "It is kept hidden from view. No one has set eyes on it for many hundreds of years."
I remembered what Sir John had written: "In this church, behind the High Altar ... is a wooden panel on which a portrait of Our Lady was once painted . . . but that picture is now seen but little/' Here it was, still; still by the altar and seen by no one for centuries.
This icon was once so famous that scores of legends sprang up around it. The most persistent story is that it was the work of St. Luke, the first icon ever to be painted and the one which became the theological justification for all others. Since St. Luke lived at the same time as the Virgin and must therefore have known what she looked like, this icon—hidden away for centuries—is quite probably the only accurate portrait of her. If only it could be brought out for a moment, shown to the world for a few brief seconds, we might finally know what Mary actually looked like.
The road from Saidenaya continues to wind uphill for seven or eight miles towards the village of Maalula, famous for its churches and clustered beneath an enormous rockface that shelters it from the worst of the winter snows.
Nearly 90 per cent of Maalula's population is Christian, and an
Syria
enormous number of crucifixes and domes poke out from between the houses. At the top of the chff, exposed and buffeted by gales, is St. Serge, which claims to be the oldest continuously working church in the world. It is a tiny building—a small dome propped up by four ancient pillars and built of stone the colour of old straw. As I entered the deserted courtyard, a plumpish priest with a ruddy face and wispy beard came up to greet me.
"Father Michael," he said with a friendly smile. "How can I help?"
I explained how I'd become interested in a medieval pilgrim and was following his journey.
"Very fascinating," he said. "This is a subject I have been wanting to study for many years. It is sad that all the monks have left, for I no longer have time to do much reading. But the eyes of the medieval pilgrims are the only way to understand this region."
He asked me who else I had read, and I told him about Ludolph von Suchem, Burchard, and Felix Fabri. "Now, this is very fascinating indeed," he said with great enthusiasm. "You must write them down for me; the next time I go to Damascus I shall get them out of the library."
He then led me inside the church, rapping his hand on the thick stone. "This was here long before your knight," he said. "I am helping archaeologists to date the church, for it seems to be one of the oldest in the world. Carbon dating from the wooden beams suggests it dates from the fourth century, but the altar is even older. Look . . ." He led me to the altar, which was carved from a single sheet of marble.
"Run your hand around the rim," he said. "Feel it carefully. Can you notice anything?"
The marble was smooth as glass, and a rim ran right around the edge. "Can you feel a hole?" he asked.
"No .. . nothing," I said.
"Exactly . . . exactly. This is how we know it is a Christian and not a pagan altar. There is no drain for the blood yet the raised rim suggests it was modelled on the old pagan altars. Since the Roman government banned pagan sacrifice when the empire converted to Christianity, it must date from the earliest days of the Byzantine Empire. In fact, I've found documents showing that Maalula sent a bishop to the first ecumenical council in Nicea in 325 a.d., so this church must have been serving a thriving community even then."
The Riddle and the Knight
When he had finished talking, I asked if there were any people in the village who still spoke Aramaic.
"Oh, indeed there are," he said. "You know about Aramaic? It's an old Semitic dialect, but it is only used by a few of the older people nowadays. It is a quite amazing survival—after all, several books of the Bible were written in Aramaic."
With that, he reached over and pressed the button on his ancient tape recorder, and a deep voice began reading the Lord's Prayer in Aramaic, a curious tongue which sounded like a blend of Arabic and Greek. This was the language Sir John would have heard, perhaps in this very church.
"And now," said Father Michael with a devious smile, "we must have a little wdne. The w^ine here is excellent."
I laughed and he asked me what was so amusing. Mandeville, I told him, had made exactly the same comment about the w^ine in these villages six centuries earlier.
"Well, he knew what he was talking about," said Father Michael as he poured the thick liquid into a tiny silver glass. We both drained the wine in a single gulp: it was sweet and heavy with the taste of over-ripe plums.
I would have liked more, but the cork was already back in the bottle.
A iKrfttPual (ElirontrU
There are no Books which I more dehght in than in Travels, especially those that describe remote Countries and give the Writer an Opportunity of showing his Parts without incurring any Danger of being examined or contradicted. Among the authors of this Kind, our renowned Countryman Sir John Mandeville has distinguished himself by the Copiousness of his Invention and Greatness of his Genius.
Tatler, No. 254, 23 November 1710
^1^ iecing together Mandeville's life became increasingly compli-Jhl cated, for the more fragments of evidence I unearthed, the more TT I found them to be either forgeries or fabrications. It was as if Mandeville's detractors had deliberately scattered my path with misleading clues in the hope that I would stumble, fall, or lose my way.
This was not the only problem; it was still extremely difficult to work out when Sir John himself was telling the truth and how much he had hammed up the role of knightly narrator. For all I knew, he could have invented not only his voyage but the story of his life as well. But if archaeologists can unravel the lifestyle of Palaeolithic man from a couple of teeth and the odd jawbone, I felt sure I could learn something about Sir John from the sixty-one leaves of vellum and the handful of documents that have survived the centuries.
Every once in a while, I would stumble across a new chronicle or manuscript that would open up new avenues and different possibilities. Often I found such documents by chance—in the footnote or index of some esoteric tome—and although these snippets didn't in themselves tell me a great deal, I was able to slot them one by one into the framework of Sir John's life. A picture slowly began to emerge—a picture
The Riddle and the Knight
that bore a remarkable similarity to the one that he himself had presented.
One such piece of evidence was buried in a huge folio written by Samuel Purchas and published in 1625. Called Purchas his Pilgrimes, it was an encylopedic catalogue of all Britain's great explorers and included a lengthy entry about Mandeville. It told me many things I already knew about Sir John, and several things I didn't. It repeated the mistake of his burial in Liege, but this was hardly surprising, for Jean d'Outremeuse's trick was widely believed to be true in the sevente
enth century. It also claimed that Sir John was a physician, but this, too, was a result of Outremeuse's fabrications.
Far more exciting was its claim to record a speech that Sir John had made in his lifetime. Purchas says that before Mandeville died, he had told people that "Vertue is gone, the Church is under foot, the Clergie is in error, the Devill raineth, and Simonie beareth the sway."
Had Sir John made such a speech or was it another fiction? It was impossible to verify, but it told me that by the seventeenth century people were beginning to recognize that the anti-papal sentiments scattered throughout The Travels had helped spread across Europe the mentality that paved the way for the Reformation. Long after Purchas's book was forgotten, writers and antiquarians were still quoting this speech in their accounts, and Mandeille's criticisms of the Pope came to be seen as more and more important.
Yet he was not as critical as many have suggested, perhaps because he was fearful of being excommunicated. Had Mandeville really wanted to launch an attack on the Pope, he could have found plenty of ammunition; Clement VI was one of the most outrageous and extravagant popes ever to occupy the papal throne. On his election, he was said to have uttered the words, "My predecessors did not know how to be popes."
Within a few months, his court had become the most magnificent social centre in Europe—a place to rub shoulders with kings and princes, warlords and aristocrats. Clement believed that Christendom should be a feudal pyramid with the Pope at its head. Kings were vassals of the Pope, and the tribute they paid was the expression of their loyalty.
And so the courtly life began. A huge window was added to the
A Medieval Chronicle
chapel in Avignon through which Clement could bless the adoring crowd below, and church feasts—which under John XXII and Benedict XII had been subdued affairs—were now celebrated in the most extravagant manner possible. Merchants flocked to the court, and the papal cellars were soon filled with fine Beaune wines, silks from Damascus, objets d'art from Paris, spices from India, and gold from the Baltic. One visitor—a member of an Italian cardinal's entourage— rubbed his eyes in amazement:
The meal consisted of nine courses, each having three dishes. We saw brought in, among other things, a sort of castle containing a huge stag, a boar, kids, hares and rabbits . . . after the fifth course they brought in a fountain surmounted by a tree and pillar flowing with five types of wine. The margins of the fountain were decked with peacocks, pheasants, partridges, cranes and other birds. In the interval between the seventh and eighth courses there was a tournament, which took place in the banqueting hall itself . . . The day was brought to an end with singing, tournaments, dancing and, as a climax, a farce which the pope and cardinals found highly diverting.
Such a lifestyle was not without its critics, and stories abounded of dancing girls and tawdry affairs, at the centre of which was the figure of the Pope. Yet despite his love of the good things in Hfe, Clement was a consummate diplomat who genuinely cared for his subjects. During the disastrous plague of 1347-48, he did everything in his power to alleviate the suffering, and even took the remarkable step of condemning Jew-baiters. This, together with his political experience and natural charm, marks him as one of the most talented men of his time.
Although Clement's luxurious living proved to be ruinously expensive, the highly organized system of taxation that he devised soon enabled him to recoup the money. But such taxes were deeply unpopular, especially in England where many people suspected the money to be going to support the French armies in their war against England. Such a charge was not without foundation: after all, Clement VI had been the French king's chancellor before he became Pope.
Some Victorian scholars, not content with taking Mandeville's side-
The Riddle and the Knight
swipes at the Pope at face value, developed the idea that The Travels was nothing short of anti-papacy propaganda and came up with ever more startling theories to support their claims. Some went so far as to suggest that the alphabets which Sir John scattered throughout his book were, in fact, a series of secret codes containing anti-papal messages. Their evidence was hinged on the dubious notion that the Greek alphabet doesn't look much like Greek:
the Arabic looks very little like Arabic:
while the Chaldean looks like little more than a set of meaningless squiggles:
A Medieval Chronicle
This, they concluded, could only mean one thing: Mandeville was using his book to spread discord throughout the monasteries of Europe.
But there are strong objections to such a theory. If the alphabets really were a code, then there would surely be other documents in existence written in this same code? If so, not a single one has survived. More troubling is the fact that the alphabets proved so popular with scribes that every time a manuscript was copied these scribes took it upon themselves to invent a whole range of new alphabets. Less than a century after Sir John's death there were copies of The Travels containing dozens of such inventions, including a bizarre language called Pen-texiore, as well as an entire alphabet said to be known only to the chief of the Ismailites.
Could these be new codes containing new anti-papal conspiracies? Most unlikely, for each time these different alphabets were copied they were further distorted so that any opponent of the papacy would have been left scratching his head and wondering what on earth they might mean.
Far more likely than any conspiracy theory is that Sir John included the alphabets to increase the sense of wonder and mystery that surrounds his voyage. He himself admits that he was fascinated by foreign languages, and says he has recorded them so that "you may know the difference between these letters and the letters of other languages." And while his book is indeed critical of the papacy and the corruption in the Church, there is not a scrap of evidence to show that he wished to see the Pope overthrown. Such a theory, in fact, suggested that the Victorian critics had m.isread the book and, in doing so, had failed to solve the riddle at its heart.
Samuel Purchas is Mandeville's last heavyweight champion: while he draws the line at believing the tales of monsters and giants, he defends the rest of Sir John's book and even argues that unscrupulous scribes had added all the more outrageous stories. Purchas also dismisses Mandeville's claim to have returned to England after his voyage, believing Jean d'Outremeuse's story that he had settled in Liege and almost certainly died there. But there were still a handful of writers in the seventeenth century who believed that Sir John really had died in St. Albans—and some had evidence to prove it.
The Riddle and the Knight
One such author—an antiquarian named John Weever—wrote a book in 1631 cataloguing every one of Britain's thousands of funeral monuments, and although exhaustively dull, it held out the promise of accurate information about Mandeville's tomb in its page upon page of burial inscriptions.
After flicking through hundreds of pages, I finally came to St. Albans, and had John Weever been standing beside me, I would have shaken him by the hand, for he provided me with the first concrete evidence to suggest that Sir John was telling the truth about his return to the town:
This Tow^ne vaunts her selfe very much of the birth and buriall of Sir John Mandevill Knight, the famous Travailer, who writ in Latine, French, and in the EngUsh tongue, his Itinerary of three and thirty yeares. And that you may beleeve the report of the Inhabitants to bee true, they have lately pensild a rare piece of Poetry, or an Epitaph for him, upon a piller; neere to which, they suppose his body to have beene buried . ..
By the time Weever came here—some 250 years after Sir John's death—the good folk of St. Albans were clearly no longer certain as to whether or not Mandeville had been buried in their abbey. But they were happy enough to accept the local tradition, and sufficiently sure his bones lay under its flagstone floor to inscribe an epitaph commemorating his life and his travels. This epitaph was an earlier version of the one I had seen in the abbey, and it contained an additional (and significant) four lines:
As the Knights in the Temple, crosse-legged in marble, In armour, with sword and with sheeld, So was this Knight grac't, which time hath defac't, That nothing but ruines doth yeeld.
These lines, then, make the claim that the abbey had once contained a marble effigy of Sir John: an effigy that had been destroyed by the passing of the centuries. I soon discovered that Weever was not the only person to have believed in such a story. Several other accounts
A Medieval Chronicle
supported his claim about an effigy of Mandeville, and one, dated 1598, even described it as standing directly over Sir John's tomb.
While such records were interesting, they had one major flaw: all were written nearly three centuries after Sir John had gone on his supposed travels. If only I could find something—some tiny scrap of evidence—that had been written during Mandeville's lifetime.
And then, working late one evening in the British Library, I stumbled across an account of him that took me far back into the past. I had spent the entire day searching through journals, antiquaries, and calendar rolls—anything, in fact, that contained a reference to Sir John— but all to no avail. I picked up the last volume on my desk, a monastic chronicle which was for the most part a daily record of local happenings in the 1390s. But it also commented on local men who had achieved things of note, and on one of the pages, there was a fascinating entry, the significance of which even my schoolboy Latin could detect:
Eodem anno, Johannes de Mandavilla, miles Anglicus, in villa Sancti Albani oriundus, postquam in 36 annis per universum fere orhem pertransisset. . . scripsit de omnibus mirabilibus or-bis, quae in ipsa peregrinatione }6 annorum cognoverat, volu-men unum, et ipsum dicto Edwardo regi Angliae destinavit.
It spoke of Sir John Mandeville, and more importantly, it was written just a few years after his death. It recorded his travels, and although it didn't say he died in St. Albans, it confirmed that he was born in the town. But there was something distinctly odd about this entry. For it was contained in a chronicle from Meaux Abbey—an account of local events in a few square miles of Yorkshire. Why on earth would a remote abbey, far from St. Albans, have had any interest in Sir John Mandeville?