The Source

by James A. Michener

  Young Volkmar stood fascinated as the strange man walked slowly through the streets, bearded, cap on head, shuffling a little, looking for something or somebody. The Mameluke called out to him in Arabic, and the man came over to the knights. His Arabic was not good, but he was able to explain that he had come from France.

  “Why?” the mustachioed governor asked.

  “Because this city is holy to the Jews,” the man replied.

  “Why?” Volkmar inquired.

  “Because the Bible was written down in this city and because the Jerusalem Talmud was, too.”

  “What’s the Talmud?” the knights asked.

  “The Jewish book of law,” the man explained, and he was allowed to walk on.

  For a perverse reason Volkmar was pleased that his son had finally seen a Jew, for none had stopped in Ma Coeur for two hundred years, yet when the boy grew older and read the chronicles he would surely come upon that cryptic passage that had caused the Volkmars so much irritation. An unknown priest had put his suspicions into writing, nearly two hundred years before:

  And after a while men reasoned thus: On her deathbed the Countess Volkmar said only that the religion of Christ and the religion of Muhammad were folly, and in the great halls the rumor circulated that this was because she was herself Jewish, in a secret way, and it was recalled that often friends had asked her, “Why do you not drop your name Taleb and take a Christian name?” and she had oft replied, “Because I was born Taleb and it would be foolish to change.” And then others remembered that her father, known as Luke—for he did take a Christian name—had borne all the signs of a true Jew. He was good in medicine. He ate no fat of the meat. He could read and write. He knew mysterious matters. And he was unusually skilled in handling money, which he did for Count Volkmar so long as the count lived, then for Sir Gunter. And the suspicion grew and it was for this reason that some of the great houses like Antioch and Jerusalem refused to marry with the Volkmars, but others, seeing how the principality prospered, above all others, were in great speed to ally themselves with it.

  Count Volkmar laughed at the old tale and recalled “the great houses” which had refused to intermarry with his ancestors. “Where are they now?” he asked. “They vanished so long ago.” Then he chuckled. “Taleb is about as perfect an Arab name as you can find. She wasn’t Jewish. She was stubborn, and would to God her descendants had been more stubborn that night when they allowed the idiots to argue them into fighting at the Horns of Hattin.” He shook his head as if loose things—ideas, memories—were floating therein, unconnected, and then he fell back in his chair and stared at the lake.

  From Tabarie the pilgrims rode north to Capharnaum, a lovely deserted spot where rich fields drifted down to the water and where Jesus Christ had fed the multitudes by hundreds and by fifties, with only five loaves of bread and two small fishes: “And they did all eat, and were filled. And they took up twelve baskets full of the fragments, and of the fishes. And they that did eat of the loaves were about five thousand men.”

  “Could it have happened?” the boy asked.

  Volkmar looked at his son in astonishment. “Of course!” he said. “If you had caught a fish from the lake you’d have seen that it was only half a fish, swimming around with a piece bitten out. It was thrown back into the lake by Jesus after the fragments were collected. Of course these things happen. That’s why we come on pilgrimages.”

  The boy studied Capharnaum with new interest, whereupon his father explained, “The five thousand men were seated here. The two fish were carried in a basket up that path. And Jesus stood exactly where the altar of that ruined church used to be. When I was a boy you could see on the floor of the church a picture of the fish,” and he led the knights into the ruined sanctuary and rummaged about the rubble until he found the mosaic which once had been kept polished by priests of Byzantium; and the two stone fish were as real to him as the living flowers of the fields outside. Here Jesus had stood. Here He had fed the five thousand with the two fish represented in the panel.

  “This is why our land is called holy,” he said quietly, and the knights resumed their climb into the steep hills until they came at last to the mountain village of Saphet, where they were to meet Muzaffar coming his own way from Damascus.

  This was the most painful moment of the trip, more so even than the silent Horns of Hattin, for that battle had occurred a century before, whereas the loss of Saphet was still a gaping wound in Crusader memory, and after the knights had presented their safe-conduct to the Mameluke garrison they passed into the courtyard of what once had been a notable Christian castle. High on a hill, with precipitous falls on each side, the soaring castle of Saphet had been a beacon to the surrounding countryside. From its battlements one could see the Sea of Galilee far below, and the plains of the north. It commanded the road from Damascus to Acre and dominated a dozen lesser passes. When the signal fires on its highest turrets were lighted they were seen on the seacoast, and Acre could be assured that all was well along the eastern marches. It was the hilltop castle par excellence, and in 1266 one of the real tragedies of the Crusades had occurred here—one that still struck terror in the European heart.

  The first Mameluke sultan had laid siege to Saphet, and after a brilliant initial resistance the defenders were driven to realize that the winds of history had changed and that they would no longer be able to hold such outposts. Gallantly they offered to surrender so that no more lives need be lost, and terms were faithfully agreed upon: open the gates and each man would receive safe-conduct to Acre. The Mameluke sultan gave his binding oath, and the long siege ended. But not according to the pact. As soon as the sultan was within the gates his men pinioned the defenders and every knight was beheaded on the spot. “We wanted them to know the kind of enemy they faced,” one of the Mameluke generals explained, and thus the war of extermination was launched.

  Now Saphet was a ghost town. The lovely settlement that had once clung to the flanks of the hill, outside the fortress walls, had been erased by the Mameluke attackers and had not yet been rebuilt, so that the fortress stood alone, its massive walls beginning to crumble. “We’ll pull them down one of these days,” the officer-in-charge stated. He seemed a likable person, not one given to beheading prisoners. His head was shaven and bore a deep scar at which young Volkmar stared. He ordered refreshments to be served on the battlements, where cool breezes drifted across the mountains.

  “It’s a marvelous spot,” one of the garrison said in Arabic as he pointed to a village that nestled below on the flank of a hill. “I often wonder about that village. In all the wars that have been fought over Saphet I suppose it’s never been touched. But up here … battles … bugles … beheadings.” He looked directly at Volkmar as if he regretted the facts of history.

  Crusaders and Mamelukes enjoyed two fine days at Saphet. Archery contests were held, with the Mamelukes winning by a consistent margin, but in sword play the Crusaders prevailed. “That’s how I got my scar,” the Mameluke officer explained to the boy. “One of your swords at Tyr.” Horse races were arranged within the castle walls, and here the smaller Turkish mounts had such advantage that the Crusaders could scarcely keep up on their lumbering beasts. “But on a long march to be followed immediately by a battle,” Volkmar said, “our horses are better every time.”

  The baldheaded Mameluke replied, “For your tactics, yes. For the quick dash and retreat of our warfare, your horses would be too heavy to handle.” The men traded a big horse for one of the swift Turkish animals, and young Volkmar was given the beast to ride back to Ma Coeur.

  Then the Mameluke captain asked a most bold question: “How long do you suppose the sultan will allow your fortress and Acre to exist?”

  Volkmar scratched his clean-shaven chin and said slowly, “The truce agreed upon last year runs beyond the end of the century. I would suppose …”

  “Do you think a truce can be observed that long?” the Mameluke persisted.

  “Yes, I rather d
o. After all, both you and we gain real advantage from having Acre available to ships …”

  “Agreed!” the Mameluke replied whole-heartedly. “You and I know that we ought to prolong the truce. Between us there’s no trouble. But we’ve been told by the Genoese … I heard it myself in Cairo from a sea captain’s lips … Your Pope is preaching a new Crusade.”

  “Yes,” Volkmar said disgustedly. “Back there they don’t understand …”

  “And if ten shiploads of knights eager for battle …”

  The two leaders looked glumly down at the waters of Galilee, now red, now green, and a younger Mameluke broke the silence by observing, “I doubt the truce can last ten years.”

  “I doubt it, too,” Volkmar concurred gloomily.

  In the morning the old castle sounded as it must have in days past, for men were shouting on the battlements, and all came out to see the first camels of Muzaffar’s caravan picking their way along the mountain road. There was cheering, for his arrival meant that the garrison would have fresh food, and the gates were thrown open to admit the seventy-odd beasts and their armed attendants. True to his word Muzaffar appeared on a fine horse, from which he dismounted as if he were a young man. Moving easily across the stones in his long robes he saluted the garrison commander, then embraced Volkmar and kissed his son.

  He had a dozen bits of news. He, too, had heard that a new Crusade was being preached in Europe. “Will they never learn?” he expostulated. “Seriously, this may be the last trip I’ll dare to risk. And when you see all the goods in Damascus waiting to be traded and all the things that the Genoese ships are bringing to Acre …” He spat into the wind. “We’re all fools.”

  The baldheaded Mameluke wanted the old trader to stay with them for several days, for he was like a troubadour, filled with gossip, but he refused: “I’ve got to get the camels to Acre.” Then he suggested, “But I could do this. If you’ll send a guard as far as Ma Coeur, I’ll send the camels off now and I’ll stay here overnight and we can ride to Starkenberg in the morning.”

  It was agreed, and two young Mamelukes who wanted to see Ma Coeur were dispatched with the caravan while its owner relaxed on the sunny terrace, chatting about the rumors of empire. “What we can’t understand in Damascus,” the old man remarked, “is why the Pope should cry for a Crusade from Europe when he has a perfectly good one alive right here in Asia and does nothing to support it.”

  “You mean the Mongols?” the Mameluke captain asked.

  “Yes!” the old Arab insisted. “The other day I was talking with a Mongol trader down from Aleppo. He says the whole swarm of them are ready to become Christians if the Pope says the word, and they’d be an army of hundreds of thousands smashing at you Mamelukes from the back door while the Europeans hammer at the seaports. They’d have you caught in a trap.” He squeezed his wrinkled hands together with force.

  “We used to worry about that,” the Mameluke confessed, rubbing his scar. “For years we wondered when the Mongols and the Christians would combine against us. But now we don’t worry. It can never happen.”

  “Why not?” the old man asked.

  “It’s difficult to explain,” the Mameluke answered. “Look how the Turks let us steal their empire. We were one man in ten thousand and slaves at that. At any point they could have stamped us out, but now we own the world. I suppose you’ve heard that Tripoli has fallen.”

  “Yes,” Volkmar said with the sensation of doom settling upon him.

  “Look down there,” the Mameluke said, pointing to the hillside village over which a cloud was passing while the rest of the world remained in sunlight. “We can see the shape and direction of the cloud, but the villagers can’t, because they’re in it. We can also see what the Pope ought to do, but he can’t, because he’s in it.” The cloud drifted off.

  “I’m really worried,” the old trader broke in. “When the recent truce was arranged I thought: I’ll be trading with Acre for the rest of my days. But with Tripoli gone, with the Christians behaving so blindly …” He rose in agitation. “I’m afraid you Mamelukes will destroy Acre within the year.”

  “We may have to,” the captain agreed, and as he spoke Muzaffar saw that, undetected, young Volkmar had approached the group and was listening.

  Next morning Muzaffar and the two Volkmars rode north to Kafr Birim, where a settlement of Jews returned from Spain clustered about the ruins of that once-noble synagogue, and while the boy ran about gawking at the first group of Jews he had seen, his father spoke secretly with Muzaffar: “On your trip back to Damascus would you take my son with you? Get him to Constantinople and somehow to Germany?”

  “You’re so concerned?” Muzaffar whispered.

  “I am.”

  “Then I’ll confess what I’ve told no one else. This is my last trip, old friend.”

  “You think the Mamelukes will strike so soon?”

  The Arab nodded, and the company started mournfully westward across the finest hills of Galilee, but at Starkenberg they found only ruins. That fair, poetic castle, perched on its crag like a solitary eagle, had once been the beau ideal of Crusader castles, but it had been overwhelmed by the Mamelukes, and now its jagged turrets and crumbling walls seemed like the broken teeth one finds in a weathering skull. Count Volkmar rode apart from the others to study the ruins, for here as a boy he had come to meet the Germans whose companionship his father enjoyed. Here he had learned to speak German and had kissed his first girl, and the lustful knights had followed the young couple as they tried to lose themselves in the surrounding hills, asking them when they returned, “Did you? Did you?” Impregnable Starkenberg—castle that could never be subdued—how had it fallen? Sheer cliffs protected it on three sides and on the fourth the Crusaders had chopped their own cliff, down through living rock, until the castle was protected on that flank, too. The German knights had seemed so powerful and their cisterns so deep—forty feet cut into the heart of rock and splashing with sweet water—how had such defenses crumbled? For some time the count spoke with the ghosts of those he had known, and then the horsemen headed south.

  There had always been a sense of excitement as one rode home from Starkenberg, for the path was mountainous and the horses kept coming to one rise after another, and at each summit the rider was certain that this time he must see Ma Coeur, but always some new hill interceded until … “It’s there!” the boy cried, and on his swift Turkish horse he dashed down the trail, throwing sparks, and through his dust the knights with longing in their eyes saw the tall round towers of Ma Coeur.

  • • • THE TELL

  John Cullinane, brooding one day as he sat on the walls of Akko, trying to reconstruct the city as it must have been during Crusader days, thought: Everyone I know studies the wrong men when they want to understand that period. They take Richard the Lion Heart to represent the Christian side and Saladin to be the noble Muslim. They contrast the two and end with nothing. But I was lucky. When I was a boy doing my first reading about the Crusades I came upon the two men whose lives sum up the whole business, and I wish Plutarch had lived long enough to compare them. I’m certain he wouldn’t have used Richard and Saladin. He’d have used my friends.

  Frederick the German, the Holy Roman Emperor, was a grandson of the noble Barbarossa, with whom he had nothing in common. After shrewdly gaining control of Sicily and much of Italy, he found himself without a wife and looked around for a likely match, hitting upon the idea of wedding the fourteen-year-old queen of the moribund kingdom of Jerusalem; and on their wedding night she found him seducing her cousin. Frederick, after a few days with his child-bride, packed her off to his harem in Sicily, where she had a baby and died, leaving him Jerusalem, if he could get it from the infidel. Was there ever a worse king than Frederick? And for a place that called itself the Holy Land? He was short, fat, bald and myopic. He was humpbacked and had watery green eyes. As a young man he had sworn to go crusading to recapture Jerusalem, but he was so cowardly that he deferred year after year
until at last the Pope had to excommunicate him, which enraged him so much that in 1228 he finally made the long trip to Acre, where the local barons found to their astonishment that he respected Islam just about as much as he did Christianity. He brought with him a Muslim counselor to whom he spoke Arabic, and he preferred Muslim customs. He was also suspected of being in the pay of Jews, for when plotters came with the oft-circulated myth that “two Christian children were found this morning dead outside a synagogue,” he disappointed them by refusing to sanction a massacre. Said he, “If the children are dead, bury them.” As he had suspected, there were no dead children. Frederick was a difficult man to understand because he understood so much. Wherever he went his shrewd, inquiring mind sought information about history, architecture, medicine, philosophy and local custom. He was the most brilliant church historian of his day and a radical improviser in economics and government, and by force of personality he bulled through the founding of the University of Naples. He had a rude, German honesty but was one of the most sexually corrupt men of his time, and his knights said of him, “He studied Islam and learned all the wrong things.” Early in his stay at Acre he accepted as hostages two young sons of a local lord, waited till their father was gone, then strung them up to an iron cross so that they could not move and kept them there until their father honored his promises. His own son he drove to suicide. Because he was excommunicated his colleagues despised him, and no more pathetic man ever came crusading than this watery-eyed German. Nor did the Muslims respect him. In spite of his numerous gestures of friendship they described him in their chronicles as a red-faced, myopic little fellow who didn’t have the manhood to grow a beard and who would bring no more than a few bezants in a slave market. They also suspected him of being an atheist, since they had heard him proclaim that his study of history had pretty well convinced him that Moses, Jesus and Muhammad were impostors. This impiety also repelled his own people, so that when he inherited the kingdom of Jerusalem after his child-bride’s death, he could find neither churchman nor knight who would place the crown on his head; he went almost alone to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, had a servant put the crown upon the altar, from which he raised it with his own hands, announcing that he was crowning himself King of the Holy Land. He was an arrogant man, self-seeking, ugly in manner and in all conceivable aspects a travesty of the crusading spirit.