by Giles Milton
-^15
The Riddle and the Knight
dred in the fourteenth century to today's twenty, the way of Hfe continues as it always has done: an endless cycle of prayer and fasting.
It was not the first time I had stayed in a monastery. Only a year before, I had visited the monastic community of Mount Athos in northern Greece, staying in the great Byzantine monasteries that cling to the Aegean cUffs. But St. Catherine's is a very different place. Surrounded by desert and troubled for centuries by Bedouin, its life is contained entirely within its massive walls. There is only one entrance—and even that didn't exist until recent times. Early visitors were hauled over the walls in a bucket.
Within these walls, there are several churches, a mosque, a refectory, the library, the kitchens, and the living quarters of the monks. The collection of buildings has grown over the centuries, so that there is no order to the place. Tiny alleys twist around the church, and cobbled paths lead up steps, down steps, and round corners before ending in blank walls. The only way to orientate yourself is to make a mental note of the few open spaces—splashed with sunlight and decorated with brightly coloured flowerpots.
There is something intimidating about staying in a monastery, and it took me several days to adjust to the peculiar way of life. Each day began long before dawn, and the first few hours were spent in church listening to monotonous services in Greek. Even when the service came to an end, most of the monks—tired after a night in prayer—ignored me. Having no part to play in the community Ufe of the monastery, and feeling totally irrelevant, I wondered how to fill the long, empty hours of the day.
But after a day or two, the slower pace of life became more attractive. 1 woke up naturally at 4 a.m. because I had gone to bed at 8 p.m. The afternoons were spent reading. The absolute silence became appealing—intoxicating even—and soon every day rolled into one long, unchanging pattern of existence.
Only in the mornings was there any sign of life, for between 9 a.m. and noon the monastery's doors were flung open to tourists and the silence would be shattered by a babble of voices. Day-trippers would flood into the courtyard, chattering, laughing, and violating the sanctity of the place.
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I grew to resent these three hours and the noise they brought. Yet the monks remained patient. Bleary-eyed and hungry, they would watch impassively while camera-clicking day-trippers posed next to them. These tourists saw little of the monastery and even less of its life. They were only allowed to poke their heads around the entrance of the church, while all the rest of the buildings were strictly off-limits. I was lucky. Father John told me there were no restrictions on what I could and couldn't visit. The only problem, he said, was that he didn't think I should eat with the monks, explaining that the food was not so good. I was later told that the real reason was because I wasn't Orthodox.
At mealtimes I would leave the monastery and walk to the small pilgrims' hostel next door. On the first evening, the cook served me my meal, then handed me the bill, asking me with a puzzled expression if I was staying in the hostel. I explained that Father John had invited me to stay inside the monastery, and an immediate change came over him.
"Father John ...," he said. "In the monastery ... well of course you don't have to pay. If you'd told me Father John . . ."
And he handed me back my money.
Father Nicholas was the first to speak to me. "Morning," he called out in fluent English. "What brings you to St. Catherine's?"
I explained about Sir John, then asked where he learned such good English.
"Oh, I ayn English," he said. "I'm from Devon. But I've been living here for a few years now." I began to wonder if every Orthodox monastery in the Middle East had a quota of English monks.
Father Nicholas had come to St. Catherine's after a spiritual quest lasting several years. He grew interested in Orthodoxy while living in the West Country, had made a pilgrimage to Mount Athos, and was immediately taken by the monastic lifestyle.
"My mother was very worried when I went to Greece," he told me. "She said I'd become a monk and would never come back."
But he did go back, to give Devon one more chance. Yet still he wasn't happy, so when a friend suggested a holiday in Jerusalem, he jumped at the opportunity. The two of them visited the holy sites, then popped over to St. Catherine's monastery for a couple of days. And as
The Riddle and the Knight
soon as he arrived, Father Nicholas knew he wanted to stay. He was re-baptized—this time into the Orthodox faith—became a novice, and has been there ever since.*
After vespers, Father Nicholas offered to show me the library. St. Catherine's library is said to be the second most important in the world after the Vatican's. This is not because of the number of volumes it possesses—in fact, it only boasts about thirty-five hundred books—but because virtually every one is unique: ancient Bibles, codexes, writings of the desert fathers, and prayer books. The very foundations of Christianity were built upon the works contained in this library.
I had vain hopes that there might be some record of Sir John's stay here: an early visitor's book, perhaps, or records left behind by western knights. But Father Nicholas said it was most unlikely. All the books, manuscripts, and documents are religious works, and even if Sir John had left anything behind, it would not have survived the centuries.
The library, built high into the back wall of the monastery, looks as old as the buildings that surround it, yet it was built as recently as 1951. Father Nicholas unlocked the door and we stepped into the thick musty atmosphere. Shelves reached up to the high ceiling and were stacked with leather-bound volumes, but when I took a closer look at these shelves, I got quite a surprise. There was John Buchan's The Thirty-nine Steps, Nigel Balchin's The Small Back Room, and Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility.
Father Nicholas laughed when I pointed them out. "Most were left behind by visiting Anglican vicars," he said. 'And when vicars write novels, they often send a copy to us. But come over here ... have a look at these."
He pulled out an eleventh-century Bible, beautifully illustrated on every page. I turned the thick vellum with care: the swirling illuminations were in golds, cobalts, and lapis blues—rich colours that hadn't faded in nine hundred years. When Sir John came to the monastery, this book had already been in the collection for three centuries.
*Only the monastery of St. Catherine's and those on Mount Athos rebaptize Christians converting to Orthodoxy. It is regarded as controversial by many in the Orthodox Church because, in the words of the Creed, " acknowledge one Baptism for the remission of sins . . ."
I
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''Now, this item here is very interesting/' said Father Nicholas, pointing to a document framed behind glass. It was a long sheet of parchment handwritten in Arabic and bearing the print of someone's hand.
"It's a letter from Mohammed," he said. "There's an old legend that relates how he visited the monastery and gave the place his own letter of protection guaranteeing that neither the buildings nor the monks would ever be harmed by Muslims."
"And this is the original?" I asked.
"No, when Selim became Sultan of Constantinople in the sixteenth century, he had twenty copies of the letter made for each of the monastery's dependent establishments. This is one of those copies. The original has sadly disappeared."
Original or not, this document was of great importance for the survival of Christianity in the Middle East. Over the centuries it has been used to save churches from destruction and protect local Christian communities. Indeed, it is said not only to have saved the Patriarch of Constantinople's job after the fall of the city to the Turks in 1453, but also to have protected many of the city's churches. More importantly, it has helped to spare the monastery of St. Catherine and its fabulous library.
There have, however, been dark periods in the library's history, the blackest moment of all being when a German scholar named Constan-tine Tischendorf visited t
he monastery in the 1840s. Tischendorf was one of the great nineteenth-century scholar-travellers. Hugely erudite, wily, and with a keen sense of humour, he found a basket of old parchment in the library which, he was told, were about to be used to light the bread oven.
On closer examination, Tischendorf discovered—to his astonishment—that this parchment was a fourth-century manuscript of the Bible, one of the rarest books in the world. He managed to leave the monastery with a few scraps of the book and had them published in Germany. His sensational discovery set off a race among the scholars of Europe to acquire the rest of this Bible, but Tischendorf was not going to be outdone by Lord Curzon or Henry Tattam: with the support of the Russian government, he returned to St. Catherine's and began a desperate search for the rest of the manuscript. He couldn't find it in
The Riddle and the Knight
the library, and the monks he questioned denied all knowledge of it. But just by chance Tischendorf spotted it in one of the monks' cells, surrounded by old teacups and scraps of food. He later recalled:
I unrolled the cover and discovered to my great surprise not only those fragments which fifteen years before I had taken out of the basket, but also other parts of the Old Testament, the New Testament complete, and, in addition, the Epistle of Barnabas and a part of the Pastor of Hermas . . . Full of joy, which this time I had the self command to conceal from the steward and the rest of the community, I asked, as if in a careless way, for permission to take the manuscript into my sleeping chamber to look over it more at leisure. There by myself I could give way to the transport of joy I felt. I knew that I held in my hand the most precious Biblical treasure in existence—a document whose age and importance exceeded all the manuscripts which I had ever examined during twenty years' study of the subject.
It was, it later transpired, one of fifty Bibles that the Byzantine Emperor Constantine had commissioned to celebrate the founding of the new imperial capital of Constantinople. It was brought here when the monastery was founded and had survived the centuries, although even by Sir John's day, its significance had almost certainly been forgotten.
After lengthy negotiations with the monastery, Tischendorf was given permission to take the manuscript to Cairo to have it fully tran-scripted, but first he had to sign a pledge that he was borrowing "under the form of a loan" as well as write a long letter guaranteeing that "this manuscript I promise to return safely."
He didn't. He had long since decided that the monks of St. Catherine's had forfeited their right to possess such a priceless treasure, and took considerable relish in recounting his deception: "I set out from Egypt early in October and on the 19th of November I presented to their Imperial Majesties in the Winter Palace my rich collection of old Greek, Syrian, Coptic, Arabic and other manuscripts in the middle of which the Sinaitic Bible shone like a crown."
The monks—only now aware of its value—were furious and tried
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to recover the book, but to this day they have never set eyes on it again. The Bible remained in Moscow until 1933, when the Soviets sold it to the British Museum for the massive sum of £100,000. The monastery could do nothing but protest. The monks had Tischendorf's promissory letter mounted and framed and hung it in a prominent place. Tischendorf is known to this day as "the thief," and ever since his visit, it has been extremely difficult to get access to the library of St. Catherine's.
The British Museum's acquisition of the Bible seemed to mark the end of the Tischendorf story, but one spring day in 1975 there was a small fire in one of the monastic churches. As the monks were clearing up the debris, they unearthed an old cell filled with dust and rubble.
"One of the monks peered through the dust," said Father Nicholas, "and saw thousands of manuscripts just lying there, as they had lain for centuries."
As these newly found treasures were lifted from the rubble, the full scale of the find became apparent. There were over three thousand manuscripts, including another section of the Tischendorf Bible and scores of unique manuscripts from the seventh to ninth centuries— known as the "period of silence" because of the lack of any biblical records. There were sixty further Bibles dating back to the fourth century, along with texts in Syriac, Arabic, Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopic, Georgian, Latin, and Slavonic, which provided a link between the first years of Christianity and the dawn of the Middle Ages.
No one knows why they had been hidden, but the discovery caused a sensation, for never before had such an important haul of treasure come to life.
At the time Mandeville claims to have visited the monastic community of St. Catherine's, the ruling dynasty in Egypt was in turmoil, and the quest for the throne had degenerated into a bitter struggle between rival brothers, eunuchs, and slave girls.
The Mamelukes were slave soldiers who were brought back from military campaigns abroad, given a superb military training, then sold in the great slave auctions in Cairo. The best of these troops were employed by the Sultan to enforce his authority, but it was not long be-
The Riddle and the Knight
fore they harboured dreams of wielding power themselves, and they eventually usurped the throne and estabhshed their own nding line that controlled Egv-pt, Jerusalem, and Damascus from 1250 to 1517.
By the fourteenth century, the Mamelukes were entering their twi-Ught years, and Mande-ille's description of their internecine warfare has been used by many to prove that he must have visited the countn.-since no other western source recounts the period in such detail. Although he certaiiJy copied some details from an Armenian book called Fleur des Histoires d'Orient, this account only deals with the history^ of Egypt up to the reign of Sultan al-Nasir. Mandeville is unique in naming the two rulers who followed, claiming that Sultan al-Nasir was follow^ed by Sultan Mader, and that he, in turn, was replaced by Sultan Madabron. But there is a problem. Scribal errors have distorted the names to such a great extent that it is difficult to know who—of the dozens of claimants to the throne—Sir John is referring to. "Sultan Mader" probably refers to Mad-al-din, who was crowned in 1342, w^hile Madabron (the on is a suffix) could easily be a phonetic rendering of Mudhaffar, the ruler who succeeded in 1346. Unfortunately, neither of these men followed directly after al-Xasir. In the scramble for succession, they were the fourth and sixth Sultans, briefly to assume the throne before being deposed.
With characteristic bravura. Sir John never betrays the sHghtest doubts as to where he came by his information: "I should know the organisation of his court pretty welf he writes, "for I lived a long time with the Sultan [and] he w^ould have arranged a rich marriage for me with a great prince's daughter, and given me many great lordships if I had forsaken my faith and embraced theirs: but 1 did not want to."
If Sir John arrived in Egypt in 1341—as is suggested by his account of the reigning Sultans—he w^ould already have been travelhng for some nineteen years. This in itself would be enough to earn him a place in the historv' books, yet at no point does Mandeville find the length of his journey in the sUghtest bit remarkable. Days, months, and years drift through his narrative without comment, and it is left to the reader to work out when he visited the towTis and cities on his route.
Had he arrived in ^gypt just a few years earlier, he would have found himself in a golden age, for the reigning Sultan, al-Nasir, had
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been in power—on and off—since 1293 and had gradually eliminated all his enemies.
Al-Nasir was one of the most extravagant and outrageous characters of the whole dynasty. Fat, lame, and half-blind in one eye, he had a passion for beauty and never tired of lavishing money on ornaments and trinkets. As he toured his kingdom, he did so in ostentatious splendour, trailing vanities behind him.
On his return from one trip, he laid out more than four thousand rugs for his horse to inspect. No one recorded what his horse thought of them. While travelling across the Arabian desert on holy pilgrimage—a time when the devout abstained from all but the bare essentials—al
-Nasir kept his table supplied with fresh fruit and vegetables grown in a travelling garden slung between forty camels. His son's wedding feast was an occasion for even greater excess. Lavishing gargantuan quantities of food upon his guests, he fed the wedding party with twenty thousand animals and eighteen thousand sugar loaves, and lit the glittering affair with more than three thousand candles.
Not content with adorning his own court, he next decided to adorn his country, beautifying his land with public buildings. When told about the difficulties of travelling from Alexandria to Cairo, his solution was to build a vast canal. To ensure a constant supply of fresh water to Cairo's citadel, he constructed a huge aqueduct. He founded mosques, baths, and schools, and built himself an exquisite new palace modelled on one he had taken a fancy to in Damascus. It cost five hundred million silver pieces.
Despite encouraging extravagance in his court. Sultan al-Nasir himself lived a Jekyll and Hyde existence. He amassed thousands of jewels yet never wore any himself. He adored the pageantry of falconry yet never took part himself. He lavished gifts on his favourites yet preferred an ascetic lifestyle. He was an absolute despot—autocratic, iron-willed, arrogant, and vengeful. On gaining the throne, he bow-strung one of his enemies who, years before, had refused to roast him a goose. Another enemy, the former viceroy, was condemned to death by starvation. As he lay in fetters and was tortured with hunger pains. Sultan al-Nasir relented and sent him three covered dishes. But it was a cruel deceit: when the viceroy opened them, he discovered that they contained gold, silver, and jewels.
The Riddle and the Knight
Yet despite the barbarism, al-Nasir's reign was a period of unparalleled magnificence. His glittering court and outlandish public buildings mark him as one of the most brilliant rulers of the Middle Ages, and ambassadors from all over the world flocked to salute him. Mongols, Persians, Byzantines, and Moroccans all sent envoys, soon to be followed by those of the Sultan of Hindustan, the King of Aragon, the Pope, and King Philip VI of France.