Cathedral

by Ben Hopkins

  i looked closely, but this man could not be more than thirty summers old!

  “are you sure?” i asked

  “i know who i am,” quoth he, “but who are you, sir?”

  “i come from the Cathedral of Hagenburg” i said

  and held out the yellow glass

  and children!

  the man broke out into joyful laughter and clasped my shoulders in his big rough hands

  he said “i am Harrimann like my father and grandfathers before me!

  And my father Harrimann told me about the gentlemen from the Cathedral

  and the yellow glass

  and told me the secret of its making

  we have been waiting for you, Sir, for some forty years!”

  i smiled and said

  “until the Western Rose of the Cathedral is ready to receive your yellow glass,

  you will be waiting forty years more!

  we have not yet even finished the Nave . . . ”

  and so, with tears of joy and laughter in our eyes

  we sat down in his hut,

  and ate a hearty meal of rabbit and mushroom stew

  and that is how

  children

  the sun-yellow glass for the Rose was found

  † † †

  Achim von Esinbach, Renard Durand, Werlinus von Nordhausen, Konrad Illmann, Albrecht Kaibach, a chain of hands. In place of crown and crozier, they bear set-square and chisel, their brows are not anointed with Holy Oil but with mortar and dust.

  In turn they accept the task accorded them, to build the Temple, a place where harmony and order hold temporary reign over the unruly earth.

  Albrecht Kaibach’s hands are like maps of the world, veined and furrowed, roughened by stone. He folds them over his heart and waits for Death or, if the Lord should grant it, one more day on earth.

  The children have now gone, the room is silent. From outside, like the whispering of attending angels, the sound of the ever-falling rain.

  ANNO

  1262

  MONEYLENDERS’ LANE

  (ANNO 5022. YUDL BEN YITZHAK ROSHEIMER VIII)

  He used to be a tailor. He used to sell silks by the yard, sew tunics, embellish with ribbon and gold piping the garments of noble ladies. His fine shop in the Schneidergass proffered arrays of colour and the scent of cloves, the bolts of silk and samples of ribbon cascaded from the shelves like a peacock’s tail unfurled.

  And then Hagenburg’s Guild of Tailors was formed. And only members of the Guild might work as Tailors, and Jews might not be members of the Guild.

  And now Mannekint, an old man, sits huddled in tattered fur and sackcloth in the gloom of Moneylenders’ Lane.

  “This is no life for you, Yudl,” he says, blowing into his old, frozen hands.

  Yudl looks up at the slender corridor of pale blue sky between the gables. The sun is slowly edging round, gilding the cornices in sparkling gold.

  “I’m too old,” says Mannekint, “to find new ways, but you are still young. Why did you send your mother away? Go and join her in Prague. Or go to Kalisz and join your cousins. Here there is nothing for you anymore.”

  Yudl’s eyes are ringed with rheum, his face roughened by a winter spent on the Moneylenders’ bench. “Why say that, Mannekint? This war is good for our business.”—“And when the war is finally over? How many will be able to repay their loans?”—“That is the challenge. The trick, it seems to me,” says Yudl, “is to set the interest just right. Not so low as to let them pay off the loan too quickly, and not so high as to ruin them entirely. Just to keep them . . . just so. In constant repayment. That is the skill of the matter.” And his bitter grey eyes survey the sodden ground.

  Mannekint shakes his head. “Your uncle is turning in his grave.”

  “Let him turn. I lost his fortune.”

  Yudl closes his eyes. Naked came I out of my mother’s womb and naked shall I return thither. The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. The Book of Job, his Father’s favourite of the holy scriptures. Yudl has inherited his faded, ink-blotched, annotated copy. At night, in his crowded, noisy home, he tries to follow the red thread of his Father’s thought, tries to follow his Father’s footsteps through the maze of ink.

  And his days he spends in Moneylenders’ Lane. A dark, pitiful alley running between the busy Judengasse and the multitudes of Rheintorstrasse. Leaning two-storey wooden houses teem with the poor families of Jewish tinkers and hawkers, pawnshops present their melancholy displays; pots, pans, wedding rings and trinkets, dowry linen and thumb-blackened Books of Hours. And up crooked, narrow stairs, the cramped counters of the Moneylenders, where quill and ink wait ready to record the next hungry loan, the next part-payment scraped from the pittance of wages and the ever-empty housewife’s purse.

  As the morning wears on, the Sun glistens round the edges of the rooves, and Light creeps onto the edge of the Moneylenders’ bench. Yudl, in pride of place, blinks in the weak, wintry radiance. His vitality has been drained, leeched by Care. His Home is now a weary place, crowded by two families; his and a cattle trader’s, moved here from Schlettstadt, paying hard, much needed silver for the rent. His Wife, daughter of the great Kalonymus family of Mayenz, takes in washing for pennies, sews parchment scrolls in exchange for bread from the communal oven. The beauty of Israel is slain upon the high places: how are the mighty fallen.

  “Yudl, your debtors are here.” Mannekint’s voice wakes him from his sunwarmed daze.

  Yudl rubs his eyes, dazzled by the sun, and sees, crowned by winter’s midday, Widow Krämer and her two sons, escorted by two City Bailiffs.

  Widow Krämer kneels at Yudl’s feet, on the broken, filthy cobbles. Her trembling hands clutch together, raise imploringly. Her exhausted eyes are red with tears. “Please, Sir, please. Mercy. I have nothing left to give you. Please, please, write off the debt. As soon as I have found work, I will pay you. I beg you, Sir, have mercy.”

  Yudl looks at his hands. “No, madam. I cannot. That is not how it works. Do you know why?”—“Why, Sir, why?”—“For if I write off your debt, then the word will go out that one can be in debt to Rosheimer and escape the forfeit. And then who would pay me the money they owe me? Why should they? And if no one pays me, I have no capital. And if I have no capital, I can make no more loans. And you, madam. Has my loan not kept you from the streets these last months, has it not fed your children these last weeks?”—“It has. You have saved us, Sir. Now I beg you, have mercy, have patience . . . ”—“I have had patience, madam. But today the extension of the extension of the extension has played out, and I can do nothing more.”

  The Widow groans, a deep, animal cry of despair. Mocking, joyful sunlight brightens the tears in her eyes. “Sir, there must be something . . . ”

  Yudl shakes his head. She will be taken now to the Debtors’ Prison in the dungeon of the Rheintor Tower. Three months, on bread and water, in the crowded dark.

  She stands, her despair curdling into bile. “And my sons? Will you have them thrown to the streets?”—“The Church has charities.”—“All the monasteries and churches are closed!”—“In Hagenburg, madam. There are other places beyond the City Walls.”—“How should they go there? They are too young to travel alone!”

  Yudl stands, turns his face towards the wall. “You should have thought of that, madam.”

  She screams. A wail that harrows the eardrums. Her sons clutch at her tattered coat as the Bailiffs close in and grab her struggling arms. “You Devil! YOU DEVIL!” she screams at Yudl.

  A small crowd has gathered, as it always does when such scenes are played out. Some laugh, cruel and shameless laughter. Some cast down their eyes. One man screams, “BLOODSUCKING JEWS!”

  And she’s gone, dragged by the dogged Bailiffs, her children wailing behind her like beaten spaniels.


  The crowd disperses. The spectacle ends.

  The sun creeps over the beth midrash roof, and is gone.

  In the darkened alley, old Mannekint shakes his silver head, strokes his silver beard. “Look at us. Is this what we are now?”

  Yudl covers his face in his hands.

  He walks round the corner into the bright parade of the Judengasse. Hawkers cry, shopkeepers perch on stools in the brief, pale sunshine.

  At the door of the beth midrash, Yudl cries: “How goodly are thy tents O Jacob and thy tabernacles O Israel!”

  Pale faces look up at him in the studious gloom, startled by the sudden voice.

  Yudl heads to his lectern at the Rabbi’s right hand. Waiting for him, propped open by two stones, a worn and faded parchment scroll. The Book of Job.

  CHRIST IS RISEN

  (ANNO 1262. EUGENIUS VON ZABERN VIII)

  It is not the worst Mass I have attended. When I was the Bishop’s Treasurer, on my peregrinations through the more woeful districts of the Diocese, I was at times forced to attend services where the Priest hardly knew Latin and where the congregation did not know whether to kneel or stand. Once even, in a village church reeking of mould and goat tallow candles, just as the Priest held aloft the pyx, bellowing out his hoc est corpus meum, a sheep wandered up to the altar and richly defecated on the consecrated ground.

  This High Mass, held in Hagenburg’s Merchants’ Church of St. Niklaus, in defiance of Bishop Walther’s ban, and at which I myself officiated, was not nearly so deficient. But my singing voice is hoarse and tuneless, my officiants, Hieronymus and two beggar friars—the only other clerics that could be found in the excommunicated City—had never officiated before, the altar is unconsecrated, the Church roof not yet completed, letting in sporadic rain, and the bells and chalices were borrowed from the Town Criers and the Tavern zur Sonne.

  Nevertheless, the nearly-completed Church was thick with incense and the perfume of the town’s multitude of merchants and traders, who crammed into every available cranny in their Easter finery. And they, and here one must credit them, despite the rain, my rasping crow’s voice and the improvised holy vessels, stayed in devout and respectful silence as we stumbled through the Easter Vigil liturgy.

  Now the Mass is over, they tweet and chatter like the swarms of swallows that wheel at dusk above the Cathedral Square. I cannot see them, but in my mind’s eye I think of a menagerie of peacocks and cockatoos, a rainbow of ostentatious silk.

  And they have cause to be buoyant, a right to chirp triumphantly to St. Niklaus’ half-built canopy. The war is starting to go their way.

  Since the end of last year’s Vintage, small armed bands on both sides of the conflict have ranged the Alsace and the Black Forest. At times they have skirmished, at times they have besieged the villages and smaller towns, but in the great main, they have merely plundered and vandalised the property of the opposing side. Vineyards, grainstores, estates have been burned up in conflagration, ransacked and despoiled.

  To begin with, if truth be told, this was theft and opportunistic brigandage, and nothing more. The granaries of Hagenburg’s merchants in the Rhine Harbour were brimming with the Diocese’s stolen grain, the city markets inundated with pigs and cattle rustled from the Bishop’s pastures; episcopal meat normally sold by statute at a premium now slaughtered in the Market Square by city butchers and sold cut-price to the cheering crowd.

  On the other side, the Bishop’s men have razed Baron Volmar’s estates by Illingen, burned the city vintners’ vines, and von Kolzeck’s men, dressed duplicitously in Habsburg colours, have retaken Colmar which last year pledged itself to Rudolf von Habsburg’s shield.

  But slowly, Habsburg and Kronthal have rallied control over their exuberant, ill-disciplined men, over their bands of brigands and mercenaries, and have consolidated and strategised. Field by field, village by village, vineyard by vineyard, they have cleared the land around our City of the Bishop’s vassals, emptied abbeys and monasteries of loyal clerics, forced the bailiffs of the Bishop’s estates to change sides and pledge themselves to the City’s cause.

  And now, for leagues around the City, not one pennant or standard is raised in the Kolzeck colours. And the inference and challenge is clear.

  If Bishop von Kolzeck wishes to be Lord of this City, he must come and take it. He must come, and come soon, in force, to the Hagenburg plain.

  † † †

  The Paschal candle has been lit. And from it, one by one, the congregation come with their own lamps and tapers to take flame from the Holy Light. Christ is risen, and the Merchants’ Church is festive and bright.

  “A thousand flickering flames, my Lord. A pretty sight!” whispers an awed Hieronymus in my inclined ear. “And an auspicious, Holy one, God willing,” he adds, from fear. Hieronymus, however he tries, cannot shake his mortal dread that he has transgressed against the Holy See, served Mass in an excommunicated City, broken his obedience to his Bishop, and thereby, to Rome.

  It is a fear with which I myself can mainly dispense. My soul’s loyalty is to God, and not to any worldly Lord. And does the Creator of this magnificent Universe cavil over tavern chalices and unconsecrated altars? And does the Lord of the World uphold the edicts of the vain fool Walther von Kolzeck when he, in schoolboy pique, casts his own citizens into darkness excommunicate?

  I, for one, cannot credit it.

  “My Lord,” Hieronymus whispers in my ear. “The worshippers. They want your blessing.”

  “What, all of them?”

  “Yes, My Lord, I think so.”

  “Well I don’t think so, Hieronymus. Let us leave.”

  Hieronymus’ arm reaches out to help me to stand. Immediately a chorus of protest rings out in the nave. “Lord Canon! Don’t leave! Bless us! Bless us!”

  “Bless me!” calls out a loud, ringing, woman’s voice.

  Grete Gerber.

  “Let me be the first to receive your blessing, My Lord!”

  My hand, feeling its way in front of me in the darkness as we try to descend the steps from the altar, is obstructed by something soft, warm, encased in cloth. A woman’s head.

  The woman’s hand grasps mine, and plants a kiss upon my ringed fingers. Then takes once again my hand and places it back upon her inclined forehead. “Bless me, My Lord. Bless all of us,” says Grete Gerber. “It is nearly a year that we have been in the ban of the Church.”

  Then her voice lowers an octave and she whispers. “Thank you, My Lord Eugenius. The City will not forget this, so long as you live.”

  THE CHRONICLE OF WALTHER VON KOLZECK: PART II

  (ANNO 1262. WALTHER VON KOLZECK II)

  As his army crossed the Rhine at Taubensand and marched north-west towards Hagenburg, von Kolzeck was certain of victory. The position of Bishop of Hagenburg still claimed unswerving loyalty amongst the majority of the Lords of Alsace and the Upper Rhine, and his army was both more numerous and more experienced in warfare than that of his opponents. The Bishop’s army comprised a greater number of horsemen, a greater number of heavy-armoured knights and a greater number of professional soldiers and mercenaries. The City army, in contrast, was made up of von Kronthal and von Habsburg’s core troops—admittedly experienced and effective warriors—plus some rather diffident and opportunistic mercenaries, and, making up nearly half the host, mere citizens of Hagenburg called to the fray by the bells of the city, poorly armed with a medley of weapons more suitable for farming, tanning and animal husbandry than for warfare.

  The morning of the battle was bright and sunny. Von Habsburg and von Kronthal had taken position on the gentle slope that rises beside the village of Wolfsbergen, a hamlet of some twenty houses a short ride from the city walls.

  Bishop von Kolzeck, seeing that the opposing side seemed unwilling to leave its position, and judging that the very modest hillock on which they were ranged offered no real advantage
to the enemy, gave a brief, spurring speech, and ordered the attack.

  His knights and cavalry charged. It was a fearsome sight at which many of the Hagenburgers baulked and fled. Sensing victory, the Bishop’s liegemen, comprising the flower of chivalry and knighthood of the Alsace, charged on towards the crest of the small hillock on which the main unit of von Habsburg and von Kronthal’s troops was gathered. Here, fierce fighting was engaged, with the Bishop’s army gaining the upper hand.

  What happened next is frightful to relate. Von Habsburg, knowing the comparative weakness of his army against the Bishop’s, had hit upon a lowly and unchivalrous strategy to weigh the odds in his favour. He had instructed the citizens of the city, as soon as fighting had been engaged and the charge of the enemy had slowed to a walk, to enter the fray, and with their knives, scythes, pitchforks and clubs, to maim and kill the enemy’s horses.

  This they then did, with terrible, bloody efficacy. Butchers, tanners, merchants and porters slithered between the hocks and hooves of the fighting knights’ chargers, and plunged their blades into the horses’ chests, used their woodaxes to cut at the horses’ fetlocks, slicing and sawing and hacking, until the field of Wolfsbergen was awash with equine blood.

  Naturally, as soon as the Bishop’s Knights’ steeds were cut away from under them, they plunged, in their heavy armour, into the mess of blood and mud underfoot. Here, trampled by their own dying, flailing horses, several died. But the greater number were grabbed by the common hands of the citizens, and dragged to the edge of the battlefield, where they were cudgelled and pummelled into submission.

  † † †

  Bishop Walther von Kolzeck, who had remained in the rearguard to survey the battle, and who had planned to charge with his smaller troop at a crucial moment to turn the tide of victory, remained, for a short while, paralysed with shock and terror. He and his companions witnessed their company’s stirring charge on the enemy troops, and then watched on with incomprehension as their great Knights, one by one, were cut down from their steeds, and fell into the bloody hands of the lowly fortune hunters. Von Habsburg and von Kronthal’s hardened warriors then moved into the fray to complete the slaughter of the Bishop’s now bewildered troops.