by Giles Milton
The Riddle and the Knight
The church continued to serve the large expatriate community, but the Palestinian congregation gradually swelled until it reached the size it is today—nine thousand communicants, of whom a tiny minority are British. Most of the services are in Arabic, and many of the priests, like the bishop, are Palestinian. Small wonder that the sign welcoming visitors to St. George's is in Arabic.
All this has caused considerable difficulties for the Anglican Church; both its worshippers and leaders are generally supportive of the Palestinian cause, leading them into conflict with the authorities. And while the forms of discrimination against Christians have changed since Mandeville's day—they are no longed forced to wear blue turbans in pubUc—the resentment against them is much the same: ''Being a Palestinian church means that you totally identify with the hopes of the Palestinian people," explained the Reverend Tidy, "and this has caused us many problems with the Israeli government. The Ministry of Religious Affairs closely monitors our churches and has occasionally made life extremely difficult for the Arab clergy ... more tea ? . .. for it stops them moving around the country and has the power to refuse requests for visas. We never know if there is a man from the ministry standing at the back of the church listening to everything that is being said."
According to the Reverend Tidy, the government even monitors the church's day-to-day activities. "We know, for instance, that our phones are tapped," he said. "They are so amateur it's unbelievable. You can actually hear them on the other end of the line. And our faxes are often monitored as well—you can tell because they take twice as long to go through the machine. We have to be careful. They obviously want to know where the bishop is going and what he is saying.
"But we manage to survive the problems from the Israeli ministry," he said. "Their officials are not too bad. Things would have been a lot worse in Mandeville's day."
When I returned to Cyril's house that evening, he helped me translate a few more passages from difficult medieval Latin. Sir lohn's knowledge of Jerusalem impressed me greatly until I checked the writings of other pilgrims and discovered that many of his details were—as ever— Ufted wholesale. He copies lengthy passages from William of Tripoli,
Jerusalem
Vincent of Beauvais, and Albert of Aix, as well as borrowing freely from the renegade German friar William of Boldensele.
But while clearly indebted to Boldensele, he often differs from what the German wrote and at times disputes both his facts and his accuracy. He even takes the occasional sideswipe at the German, rubbishing his claim to have crossed the desert on horseback. And when Boldensele boasts about making the journey in record time, Mandeville comments on the unseemly haste of some travellers. Such witty asides endeared me to my medieval friend, for even if he had copied from other authors, he had at least infused their dry accounts with a sense of humour.
Father Baratto had suggested I look at the writings of Simon Fitzsimmons, a monk who left Britain the same year as Sir John and reached Jerusalem within twelve months. I managed to buy a copy of Fitzsimmons's account in the Franciscan bookshop, but when I began to flick through its pages, I found that it did little to clarify matters and often seemed to confuse them further. For while he visited many of the same places as Sir John, he all too often disagreed on details. Where Mandeville claims that the church on Mount Sion was still in use when he was in Jerusalem, Fitzsimmons assures his readers it was completely destroyed. Who was telling the truth? Since no other pilgrim mentions the church, it is impossible to know.
I tried a different approach, looking to see what Mandeville had neglected to mention in the hope that this might shed some light on his journey. But once again I was left scratching my head. Just as in Damascus he hadn't written about the tomb of St. John the Baptist, so in Jerusalem he doesn't mention Adam's skull, which was kept in the Holy Sepulchre and venerated by thousands of pilgrims. This was strange, for scores of medieval writers described this gruesome object. It was said to have been found in a deep hole along with a pile of bones which were sprinkled with blood from Christ's feet. Digging it out of the ground caused it to deteriorate rapidly, and by the time Felix Fabri saw it in the fifteenth century, it had lost all its hair.
This was not the only object that Mandeville overlooked. While visiting the Mount of Olives, he recalls seeing the stone that was supposedly imprinted with Christ's left foot as He ascended to Heaven. But why did he not mention that an identical stone, bearing Christ's
The Riddle and the Knight
right footprint, was housed at Westminster Abbey throughout his Ufe-time? Did he forget? Or had he never been to Westminster Abbey?
Sir John, hke today's pilgrims, did not just visit the Via Dolorosa and Church of the Holy Sepulchre; he lists a vast array of Christian sites that he was taken to while in Jerusalem. There was the Temple of Solomon, the tomb of St. Simeon, the houses of Pilate and Herod, and the church of St. Saviour. Here the pilgrims would stop to venerate the left arm of St. John Chrysostom and fragments of St. Stephen's skull. Then they would walk slowly up to Mount Sion, where St. Peter wept after forsaking Christ, and were shown Caiaphas's house, the tree on which Judas hanged himself, and a chunk of marble which—they were told—was part of the table of the Last Supper.
Mandeville mentions all of these in passing, but he was especially keen on the church of St. Anne, a finely domed crusader church built out of smooth blocks of stone. Today's tourists come here in their hundreds, and as I sat admiring the simplicity of the architecture, no fewer than five pilgrim groups entered the church. Each sang hymns, read a communal prayer, then left. One group of evangelicals formed a ring outside and sang so loud that their voices pierced the thick stone walls of the church.
"Who is Jesus?"
"Jesus is the Lord." (clap, clap)
"Who is Jesus?"
"Jesus is the Lord." (clap, clap)
"Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus."
Clap. Clap. Clap. Clap.
"The Saviour of the world." (clap, clap)
"The Saviour of the world."
I'd come to St. Anne's in order to test Sir John, for he gives very precise details about the church—the burial site of Mary's father as well as of St. Anne herself.
"As you descend twenty-two steps from that church," he writes, "Joachim, Our Lady's father, lies in a stone tomb. Once Saint Anne lay beside him, but Saint Helena had her translated to Constantinople."
Jerusalem
Twenty-two steps. I walked over to the narrow stone stairwell that led down to the crypt, and as I began to descend, I also started to count. "One, two, three, four . . ." The stairs were roughly cut and very steep, and they turned sharply at this point until they were almost descending back on themselves. "Eight, nine, ten . . ." There was a crowd of Catholic pilgrims in front of me who were blocking the stairs. They were singing a hymn, led by a priest who had vanished out of sight. The hymn came to an end, and the group shuffled on while I continued counting. "Eighteen, nineteen, twenty ..." I was at the bottom now, and had still only counted twenty steps. But the tomb itself was in a separate little room, and that was down a further step. "Twenty-one . . ." All I needed now was one more stair. But there weren't any more—Sir John was wrong by one step.
But then I looked down at the floor and saw that its shiny marble surface differed from the stone surrounding the tomb. I realized that this floor was a new addition, and that once there would almost certainly have been a further step—and that made twenty-two.
Although it is the Jewish settlers in the old city who always make the headlines, the ultra-Orthodox area of Mea She'ariim in the new city is far more interesting. Resembling a central European ghetto, its small houses are home to several thousand Orthodox Jews. On weekdays, they wear long black cloaks and hats—the dress of sixteenth-century Poland—and on festivals they wear their shtreimals, or fur-trimmed hats.
Cyril and I took a short cut through these alleys, which were festooned with washing from wall to
wall and bore placards warning people to be properly dressed. When we reached the other side of the quarter, we passed through a crowded vegetable market and were back in the modern part of the new town. It is this area of Jerusalem that is home to some of the biggest churches in the city. If you don't fancy the First Baptist Bible Church, then you could try the Jerusalem Baptist Church. If you prefer something more gutsy, why not pay a visit to the Church of God? Or the Church of God Prophecy? Or the Church of God Seventh Day (House of Prayer for All People)? There are dozens of such churches in Jerusalem, but the one I decided to visit was the Narkis Street Baptist Congregation. This was a spanking new building
The Riddle and the Knight
just a stone's throw from the Sheraton, and its doors, which led into a Baptist bookshop, had been flung wide open to embrace all comers. The face of a young man appeared from a bookcase when I entered and gave me a beaming smile. He had a mop of ginger hair, wore Joe Ninety spectacles, and was only too happy to help. "What can 1 do for you?" he said. "If I can't help, then I'm sure I can find someone who can."
I explained that I was very keen to learn more about the Baptists, and he gave me a knowing smile. "Another one who's seen the light," he said with a chuckle before excusing himself and disappearing behind a pile of books. He returned with the deacon, a man named Alan, who said he wished to have a little chat with me and give me a tour around the building—a sort of getting-to-know-you session.
The new chapel had only recently been completed, and the smell of fresh paint still lingered. It was a pristine new building, unadorned with the usual clutter of churches. A drum set and guitars stood in the corner, and bright sunlight filtered in through windows in the ceiling.
"For years there were only a handful of people coming here," explained Alan, "but in the 1970s there was a sudden outpouring of the Holy Spirit and a huge rise in the congregation. Perhaps that is why you have come?"
I shrugged my shoulders and asked if they had built the new building to accommodate the ever-increasing numbers, but Alan shook his head.
"No," he said. "The old chapel was burned down by an arsonist. We had many difficulties trying to rebuild it but finally got permission from the Supreme Court."
When I asked more questions about the fire, he clammed up. "If you want to know what happened," he said, "you must talk to Joseph. I am not able to speak about this."
Joseph was the treasurer of the church, but he, too, was unwilling to tell me about the fire. "Of course I know the person who burned down the building, but I'm afraid I am unable to talk about it," he said. "I have received many death threats over this, and the government did absolutely nothing."
"Death threats?"
Joseph gave a cynical laugh. "There are many people . . . Orthodox Jews . . . who wish we were not here," he said. "They'd like to see the
Jerusalem
back of us. Even the government wanted to move us out of the city. This is valuable land. They don't like us being here. We are Christians, and as Christians they try to block our every move."
It is not just the Orthodox Jews who are antagonistic towards the Baptists. Many Israelis don't like them because of the way in which they are said to have a systematic plan to convert the Russian Jews to Christianity. These Russians are lonely when they first arrive in Israel. They are often in need of help and are unfamiliar with the ways of their adopted homeland. The Baptists—who have a Russian-speaking pastor as well as services in Russian—are only too eager to help.
"We only want to help them, not convert them," explained Alan. "We are not trying to substitute circumcision for baptism or anything like that. The Jews are welcome to remain as Jews and to accept the Lord Jesus as the Saviour. That fits the Scriptures exactly."
"So you're missionaries?" I said.
"You ask so many questions . . . missionary is not a word we like to use. We have outreach programmes. We do help these people. But we are not trying to convert."
The two men began looking at their watches, and Joseph told me he had a meeting to go to. "It's difficult to talk about such matters," he said. "But I am extremely glad that you are so interested in the Baptists and hope you might come on Sunday. Then you'll see all the good work we do."
As I walked back up the Nablus Road, the sun was melting into the old city, and the gilded roof of the Dome of the Rock had turned the colour of burnished copper. I wondered what Sir John would have made of the Baptists and the Anglicans. Most probably, they would have been his first port of call, for he was fascinated with any faith that differed from his own. To him, they were like a strange and highly prized new wine: something to be examined, savoured, and described to people back home.
alir Ktng'fi parbnn
On investigating the sources of the book it will presently be obvious that part at least of the personal history of Mandeville is mere invention. Under these circumstances the truth of any part of that history, and even the genuineness of the compiler's name, become matter for serious doubt.
Encyclopaedia Britannica, Ninth Edition, 1883
Jn researching the history of the Mandevilles, I had ploughed through church archives, monastic records, and medieval chronicles. What I hadn't so far looked at were wills, for I assumed that few in the Middle Ages would have bothered to record their possessions. On the whole, this was the case, and there was no trace of a wdll belonging to a John Mandeville in Hertfordshire's County Records Office. To my great surprise, however, I did find two short references to items that had apparently once belonged to Sir John. The first was a sapphire ring which he was said to have bequeathed to St. Albans Abbey on his death. It was recorded in a fifteenth-century inventory of the possessions of the abbey and was described as "One gold ring adorned with a good and precious sapphire of large size, supported with tiny grips of gold. A gift of Sir John Mandeville."
This was the only reference I could find, and it was presumably lost during the Reformation when St. Albans' treasures were carted off and dispersed.
The other object was altogether more curious, and the story of its mystical properties was set down on paper in the sixteenth century by an antiquary called John Leland, who compiled a massive book called The Laboryouse journey and Serche of Johan Leylande, for Englandes
The King's Pardon
Antiquitiees. Leland never completed his work; he went mad and died long before it was published, but he left behind thousands of pages of notes. In these notes he claims to have travelled to Canterbury Cathedral and seen a souvenir that Mandeville himself had donated to the cathedral—a souvenir that, just possibly, he had brought back from his travels. "At Canterbury, the capital of Kent, I found an uncorrupted apple inside a hollow crystal globe, in the midst of the consecrated treasures of Thomas Becket. When I asked the clerk what kind of miracle this was, he answered that in the past this httle gift was given to the martyr by Sir John Mandeville."
I checked the cathedral archives to see what happened to this gift, but the relevant records had either been lost or destroyed. There was a tantalizing reference to an inventory of Thomas a Becket's shrine dated 1441 which might have shed more light on the gift, but the inventory itself had long ago been torn out and lost.
Could the stories about these items possibly be true? It was feasible that Mandeville had bought such items in Syria, the great marketplace for curiosities from the east, but unfortunately I had only Leland's word to go on, and since he was suffering from a debilitating mental disorder when he wrote his book, he was hardly the most reliable of sources.
This was not the only strange story about Mandeville to have been accepted as fact. Some scholars—keen to impose their medieval fantasies on The Travels —concluded that Sir John's jovial exterior was merely a disguise which concealed a sinister fascination with black magic. Such ideas were due, in part, to the fact that the manuscript at Chantilly is bound together with four others which deal with the magic arts and sciences; the sciences of "augurie, sytrille, pyromanchie, ydromanchie, geomanchie, phyzo
nomie, cyromanchy." Book Four includes a section on the magic properties of herbs, while Book Five's tract on gemstones is compiled "according to the opinion of the Indians from whom all the sciences of stones comes."
It is most unlikely that Sir John had anything to do with these books. They appear with no other manuscript and bear all the hallmarks of Jean d'Outremeuse. But there is other evidence to suggest
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that Sir John had a dubious interest in magic; several manuscripts on alchemy survive in Oxford which purport to be written by a Johannes de Magna Villa.
But for all their medieval charm, none of these pseudo-scientific tracts contains any proof to show they were written by Sir John Man-deville, the author of The Travels, as many have suggested. There were any number of Mandevilles alive in the medieval era—including several John Mandevilles—and any one of them could just as feasibly have been the author of such manuscripts.
Most of the medieval documents describing Sir John as a doctor can also be discounted. Antwerp used to possess a treatise On Things Medical by a Mandeville, while one medieval chronicler went so far as describing him as a man excelling in "the art and genius of healing." But such descriptions were all written in France, where Outremeuse's deceits had long been accepted as fact. The chroniclers were merely multiplying these lies.
One particular John Mandeville interested me greatly. He was clearly forging a successful career in the diplomatic field; in 1320 he was sent by the king on an important mission to Robert Bruce, the King of Scotland, who had annihilated King Edward II's army at the battle of Ban-nockburn six years earlier. This expedition was recorded in diplomatic archives and dated 7 January:
Safe conduct for the undermentioned envoys of Robert de Brus, viz:
Sir William de Soules Sir Robert de Keth Sir Roger de Kirkpatrik Sir Alisaundre de Seton Sir William de Mountffichet