Now you know why our word ‘soldier’ comes from the Italian word for a silver coin, eh?
They’d all served at their own expense out in the Holy Land. But from Thessaloniki on, all our people were to be paid under contract with Nerio. Regular pay would improve morale, and also allow men to replace broken swords, expended arrows – our arrow supply was shockingly bad, with some men having only three shafts. We needed new saddles and bridles, and we had men who were using old bronze eating knives. I found a German cutler in Thessaloniki and I bought his entire stock of swords and daggers and handed them out to my archers.
Anyway, we were not a beautiful company when we rode out of Thessaloniki. But the first morning on the road, in sunny Thessaly, as we rested in an olive grove, I reminded them all that it was their first day under pay, and they cheered.
Ah, the life of being a soldier.
Three days out of Thessaloniki, we came to Thermopylae.
There are hot springs at Thermopylae, and while that may be obvious to a Greek speaker, I hadn’t expected the sulphur smell, or the restfulness of the ancient baths carved into the side of the steep cliffs that lower over the sea coast. Sir Giannis took us to see the low hill where the Spartan king made his stand, and we walked all over the place where the battle was fought, imagining King Leonidas and his three hundred Spartans facing a whole army of Turks.
Fiore found the place very exciting, and after he’d been up the hill twice, and looked at the sea, he proposed that we put our harnesses on and exchange some blows, to honour the Spartan king.
The Greeks, Giorgios and Giannis, who were usually uninterested in our ideas of martial honour, fell in with the suggestion immediately and hastened to put on their armour, and there we were, grilling in an early August sun on a flat salt pan where the king of Sparta tried to save Greece. Nerio and I shattered lances on each other; Sir Giorgios and I exchanged some hearty blows with the longsword, and Hector Lachlan and I swiped at each other with axes, although I was cautious and he caught my ankle with his hook and dumped me on the salt pan. The archers shot at marks, and volunteered to be the Persians for us, if we’d like to stand in a huddle together.
Giannis laughed aloud. ‘You are not enough to darken the sun,’ he said. ‘Nor would we be able to fight in the shade.’ Our two Jews laughed, as did Sir Giorgios. They all knew the quote – Giannis had to explain Herodotus to me. I agree that it was a capital joke, even when explained, and the Spartan king grew in my estimation. And indeed, as Sir Giannis recited to me bits of Spartan humour, his eyes seemed to grow brighter at the remembered valour of his ancestors.
We declined to allow our archers to make us targets, and later we bought fish from a dozen boats that came in, having seen our fires. The fishermen were delighted to take our hard silver. We built fires on the sand, and ate like kings and drank some terrible local wine, and imagined ourselves as the saviours of Greece while Giannis and Giorgios took turns telling the story of the battle and the sea battle at Artemisium that accompanied it.
It was a fine day. I’ll never forget it.
I was lying by the fire, with Nerio on one hand and Giannis on the other, and Giannis was telling us about the Spartans. And then he turned to me and raised his horn cup of wine. ‘Perhaps we will take Corinth,’ he said. ‘I think we should try. But only if Nerio swears he will uphold the Union of Churches. I will fight for that.’
And Giorgios raised his wine cup. ‘And I. Indeed, I have fought for it for ten years.’
Nerio sat up, a little more like a debauched satyr and less like a battle commander. And as he sat up, I caught his twisted smile. His contempt for the ‘Union’ and for all men who held deep convictions was clear enough.
But then he shook his head. ‘I swear to you by my father’s name and the cross on my hilt that if we take Corinth, I will uphold the Union and make my lands a model for the co-operation of our faiths.’
Giannis nodded. ‘For this, I will fight.’
Giorgios nodded. But to me, he muttered, ‘I do not see our Nerio as Leonidas.’
I have said before that my company of lances, the company that brought me real fame, was born in the darkness of the Holy Sepulchre. But it was not just the Holy Sepulchre, with its magical reminder of our morality and mortality, that changed us. It was war in Outremer. I have never met a race of men so nearly perfect in the art of war as the Turks, although the Mongols seem to equal it, and facing the Turks required a constant devotion to details, from upkeep of horse harness to minutiae of food and water, that war in France and Italy never demanded.
But besides military proficiency, there is also spirit, and spirit is bred in many ways: shared adventure, and shared experience. I have found that moments can define men (and women) and change the way they see themselves. That day at Thermopylae was one such. We came to Thermopylae as soldiers, but after games and a fish dinner, and the tales we told, we were a different kind of soldier. I think that we all felt connected, somehow, to King Leonidas and his knights. And games provide soldiers with incentive to excel. War can easily become a matter of barbaric survival. It takes extra effort to make it more than mere brutality. I was still learning all of that, then, with some difficult precepts of chivalry as guideposts and with the Turks and Greeks as exemplars. But I was determined – that is, I think, we were all determined, l’Angars and Fiore and Rob Stone and Hector Lachlan – to be something more than mere men of arms.
I offer this philosophical aside to explain what followed. It is a famous exploit; I’m sure it is the reason Froissart is so patient with me.
So, there we are, on the beach at Thermopylae, about three days’ ride from Corinth. Nerio came over to me and asked me if he could address the company.
I smiled. ‘We are your company, just now, patron.’
Nerio grinned. Then he gathered us all together; he stood on the stump of an old tree, and his back was to the fire, and he addressed the company.
‘Corinth is one of the mightiest fortresses in the world,’ he began. ‘It towers into the clouds, or so I’m told, and it is huge – more than a mile of walls. It is viewed by Franks and Turks alike as impregnable.’ He looked at all of us. ‘Yet I am paying all of you gentlemen to take it for me, because it is mine, and it has been stolen by a pack of Spaniards.’
I’ve mentioned it often enough, but I’ll say it again: we English and Gascons had more experience of taking towns by escalade than any group of soldiers anywhere. The one real area of warlike endeavour in which routiers excelled over all other soldiers was in the storming of towns. We had practised methods of breaking in; we practised the skills that could seize a gate or open a drawbridge and, frankly, we had better armour and better hand-to-hand fighting skills than most garrisons. These same men had taken both the outwalls and the citadel of Gallipoli in the face of a Turkish garrison; a bunch of Catalans didn’t sound like much of a threat. So men yawned, and someone wondered if there was more wine.
‘Men will have marked our leaving Thessaloniki,’ Nerio said. ‘I put out that we were going to Athens, or maybe Patras, but my greatest worry is that the men who have dispossessed me of my lands will guess that we are headed for Corinth, because the only weapon we have is surprise. Corinth is deemed impregnable by the Turks – you can imagine how tough a nut it must be. But we will crack it, and the way we will crack it is by being in position to take it two mornings from now, at daylight. We will move fast; we will eat cold food. It will not be pleasant. But we will outrun rumours of our arrival.’
That got everyone’s attention.
‘One hundred and twenty miles,’ Nerio said. ‘Six days’ travel for most travellers, and two sets of mountains. We have guides and food. We are going to fly.’
Men nodded. No one said, ‘Sweet Christ, that’s impossible’, or any such foolishness.
Nerio nodded to all of us. ‘I knew you were the right men for this task,’ he said. ‘We will
rise early and move at dawn. We will move as fast as the horses allow; everyone should be ready to change horses all day.’
‘Loot?’ called someone. I assume it was Gospel Mark.
‘None,’ Nerio said. ‘But double pay for the month if you take the citadel, and a five ducat a man bonus above that.’
‘That’s fair,’ another voice said. There was a rumble of assent.
That was it. We’d taken Gallipoli. We’d marched to Jerusalem. Corinth was just another day’s work.
Sir Giorgios took us inland almost immediately from Thermopylae, up into the hills that separated Boeotia from Thessaly, and we had a brush with some Greeks who shot arrows at our Kipchaks, wounding one man in the hand. Giannis rode off with his stradiotes for half a day while we pushed on; he visited the Greek bishop and put out the word that we were harmless, for Franks. Nerio rode to a castle that towered over the road and was well enough received. There was diplomacy at the local level. Romania, or Morea, was not like England at all; every lord was his own sovereign, so that a count or baron had his own tiny army, and his own rights of justice. Men tell me that England was this way once – certainly Italy can be so, at least around Rome and along the east coast. But it is terrible for the people of the land, and the peasants of Boeotia looked as poor, for the most part, as the Jacques of France during our chevauchées.
We moved fast. The advantage of having reliable native guides was not lost on me; I’d already come to the conclusion that information was a better weapon than a sword, and a good captain always paid well for his guides. Hawkwood always paid for spies and guides, and paid well; even when he couldn’t pay his lances, Sir John paid his spies.
Sir Giannis and Sir Giorgios were better than spies or guides, though; they were friends and comrades who knew the land, and when they didn’t know the details of a route, they could ask. Even I, with my title of ‘Spatharios’ of the Emperor, enjoyed a certain status, and certainly as we crossed the plains of central Boeotia, through village after village, Nerio arranged that we flew the double-headed eagle at the head of our column, and priests came out and blessed us.
We came to the plain of Boeotia as the shadows were growing long, and Sir Giannis, who was leading us, took us well away from the town of Thebes on its lonely ridge. Thebes was held by the same Catalans who held Corinth. The sun was just setting in the west, and the fields of Boeotia were a fecund chequerboard of wheat and millet and rye, ten times as rich as the fields near Thermopylae, neatly laid out and irrigated. We went south and west, out of sight of the town, and we slipped over the dry bed of the Asopus.
I was busy shepherding our rearguard. We were tired: the bone-weariness of riding fast over rough country for two days without much rest and not enough food or water. The rearguard had not proven necessary at any time and the men in it, mostly archers, were ‘tired of playing soldier’ and tended to close up to the main body. I feared an ambush, feared a party out of Thebes, alerted to our presence, trying to have a snap at the column. In fact, one of the reasons I’m a good soldier, as opposed to merely a good knight, is that I’m so very good at being afraid.
At any rate, I got the rearguard onto the correct road with the help of John the Kipchak, and I left l’Angars in command of them and rode up a long, shallow ridge, to where I could see Nerio and Fiore and Sir Giannis with Benjamin the rabbi and his brother Isaac, all silhouetted against the pink sky. It was a beautiful evening, but then, Boeotia is itself beautiful.
Sir Giannis smiled his Greek smile as I came up.
‘I waited for you,’ he said.
I smiled. If I have done Giannis an injustice, I’m sorry. He was ordinarily a quiet man, who expressed himself in cautious smiles and very slight frowns and never committed himself too strongly. On occasion, passion for a subject, usually the history of Greece, would bring out a different man – forceful, even loud.
At any rate, the statement that he had waited for me was said in a level tone, but I knew that he meant it as an affirmation of friendship; he had truly waited, holding his passion in check, so that I would be there.
I had to grin. I liked him, even with his reserve. One of the best men I have known.
He waved a hand over the great plain.
‘This was called the Dance Floor of Ares,’ he said. ‘The plain of Boeotia was the site of many great battles in the ancient world; the greatest of all was the Battle of Plataea. Plataea is that village over there where the farmers are burning off their fields. See?’
I did see.
He waved. ‘The Greeks were over there,’ he said. ‘We’re sitting on the ridge where the Persians formed their army, or so I have always imagined it. A million Persians and a hundred thousand Greeks.’
Nerio shook his head. ‘A million? That’s not possible.’
Fiore shrugged. ‘Imagine feeding a million men?’ he asked.
I just shook my head. I was finding a hundred men a challenge. I couldn’t imagine a million men; even their latrines would be impossible. I tried to imagine the size of camp that they’d require.
And yet, it had happened.
Nerio was calculating, like the banker he was.
‘A million men …’ he said. ‘They would drink rivers dry.’
I was looking down at the green-lined banks of the dry ditch that was called Asopus. The river existed, in that the banks were green and the irrigation ditches ran into it, but there wasn’t enough water in it to water our horses, much less the horses of a vast army.
‘Who won?’ Fiore asked.
‘The Greeks,’ Sir Giannis said. ‘It was the day the Greeks won their freedom and avenged Leonidas.’
As we watched, the lights flickered out in Plataea.
Nerio had a fly-whisk riding whip he’d bartered from a Turk, and he used it to point at the distant villages. ‘It’s terrible, when you think of it,’ he said.
‘What is terrible?’ asked Fiore, clearly annoyed.
Nerio frowned. ‘The Greeks were enslaved by the Persians. The Athenians freed themselves at Marathon, and then had to fight again and again to preserve their freedom. Yet no sooner did they gain it than they fought among themselves for supremacy, like victors squabbling over spoils. Alexander conquered the world, so men say, and yet his empire did not outlive him because his generals squabbled among themselves, and eventually the Romans conquered it all, and the Greeks were a conquered people. And yet … in the end, the language of the Roman Empire was Greek, not Latin; the philosophy and architecture of the Roman Empire were Greek.’
‘Indeed,’ Sir Giannis said, ‘we still call ourselves Romans.’
‘You read Greek?’ asked the rabbi.
‘A little,’ Nerio said, with uncharacteristic modesty.
‘Herodotus was from Halicarnassus,’ Benjamin said. ‘His people fought the Greeks. Thucydides was Athenian. His people lost. Yet a generation later, Athens had an empire again and Sparta was nothing.’
‘So what is victory?’ Nerio asked.
The Jew smiled. ‘To a Jew, victory is survival,’ he said.
Sir Giannis smiled too. ‘Thus might speak a Greek, as well,’ he said.
We camped in the ruins of the once mighty city of Plataea, below the little village, a village that Giannis assured me was full of Vlachs and where no one but the priest spoke any Greek at all. Yet the next day, when we clattered through their little town at the very break of day, there were dozens of men in tall fur hats in the streets, and they waved, and two little girls threw flowers, and when Giannis mentioned the name of Thebes, the men turned and spat.
‘Thebes was, of old, their enemy,’ Sir Giorgios said. ‘It is something that these northerners continue to hate Thebes, when they are from Albania and the Thebans are all Spaniards.’
L’Angars was a more thoughtful man than his brutish face proclaimed him, and he shook his head as we clattered along. ‘If a man is a
Gascon,’ he said, as if chewing his words carefully, ‘and he gives his word to serve the King of France, is he then a Frenchman? Or if he then, in turn, gives his word to serve the King of England, is he then an Englishman?’
‘He’d have to speak English,’ Gospel Mark said.
‘Nah, that’s daft,’ Rob Stone said. ‘You speak French well enough, Mark.’
‘So if an Albanian comes to Plataea, what makes him Greek?’ Mark asked.
L’Angars nodded, agreeing with the question. ‘Sir Giannis says these men do not speak Greek,’ he said.
‘And they dress differently, and they herd sheep, where the men on the plain grow wheat.’
‘The men on the plain are Greek?’ Lachlan asked.
‘Partly Greek and partly Catalan and …’
‘And everything else in the world,’ Lachlan said. ‘Except Erse. I don’t think the Erse have made it here.’
L’Angars shrugged. ‘So who is Greek?’
Gospel Mark made a wry face. ‘Who is English, my lord?’ he asked. ‘Normans and Gascons and Irish and Saxons … Lachlan barely speaks English …’
‘I’m not English!’ Lachlan spat. ‘I’m a Scot.’
Sir Giorgios smiled. ‘But to me, a Greek, you are English.’
Gospel Mark laughed. ‘Ye’re daft,’ he said. ‘Sir Hector is no Englishman!’
And Lachlan looked as if he’d been stung.
But I looked at Sir Giorgios and understood him – that in addition to the way a man might feel about who he was, there was also how other men identify you.
I never asked these questions when I was cooking for Prince Edward’s archers in Gascony. It was all simple then. But now I am a baron of Cyprus; I hold a parcel of lands from the Prince of Lesvos, and through him, from the Greek Emperor. And I hold lands from the Count of Savoy, who is in turn a vassal of the King of France. I accept money from a Florentine banker to fight his enemies in Outremer, and from Venice to fight Genoa. I have no knight’s fee in England, no English wife, nor so much as a house or a field there.
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