Fiore Furlano di Liberi was also an historical personage. Fiore is known to us now as the great sword master of the fourteenth century, and author of some of the earliest treatises on fighting, both in and out of armour, with sword, spear, poleaxe and lance, on horse and foot, as well as wrestling and dagger fighting. The most accessible of his manuscripts is in the Getty Museum and is known as MS Ludwig XV 13. From his manuscripts we can understand the whole art of Armizare, or knightly combat, in ways that had been completely lost. I practice Fiore’s art every day. I owe the maestro a huge debt of gratitude.
Rainerio I Acciaioli, Duke of Athens and Corinth (Nerio) is also an historical figure. The cousin, nephew, or just possibly bastard son of the incredibly rich and powerful Florentine banker and knight (a fascinating combination) Niccolò Acciaioli, Nerio carved a magnificent dukedom out of the remnants of Frankish Greece, fought with and against the Turks, and led a life of adventure and warfare that deserves a set of novels of its own. He began from more modest origins; certainly he was always rich, but he virtually sprang from the head of Zeus onto the world stage when he took Corinth sometime between 1367 and 1371 (an event which will feature prominently in Sword of Justice). It is my suspicion that rumours of Nerio created the character of Theseus in Chaucer’s ‘The Knight’s Tale’. His presence as one of Gold’s friends is a novelistic attempt to explain how Chaucer might have gotten to know so much about Acciaioli and the Duchy of Athens.
Miles Stapleton, the last of Gold’s close friends (of whom there are four, as a nod to Dumas and D’Artagnan, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis) is a fictional creation, but a representative one. Outremer was full of Englishmen in the late fourteenth century: there were Englishmen at Alexandria and a company of Englishmen is still remembered on Lesvos as serving the Gatelussi princess. The real-life Miles Stapleton was a generation older and died at Auray in 1364. Our character is (fictionally) his nephew and inheritor, while also being related to Lord Grey. Grey and Scrope and a number of other named Englishmen served at Alexandria and were later acquaintances and friends of Chaucer and Gower at the court of Richard II.
The principle events of The Green Count are historical. A party of knights including Englishmen did receive a pass to visit Jerusalem in the chaos after the fall of Alexandria; the Kingdom of Christian Armenia (Cilician Armenia) really did exist, as did the competing Turkish Sultanates, of which only the Ottoman Sultanate survived. Both Prince Francesco Gatelussi of Lesvos, former Genoese pirate and in-law of the emperor John V, and Amadeus, the Green Count of Savoy and also a relative of the Emperor, were real men; I have done my best to be faithful to what is known of them. I have been a little rough on the Green Count; perhaps in Sword of Justice the reader will see some evolution in his character, but it remains true that, like many modern politicians, leaders of the fourteenth century were often utterly confused by the realities of Middle Eastern politics, at least at first. But the character of the Green Count’s ‘crusade’, as well as the events surrounding the capture and release of the Emperor of Byzantium, are historical, although still debated, and the impression that the internecine politics of the Papacy, the Emperor of Byzantium, the Holy Roman Emperor, the Ottomans, the Karamanids, the Mamluks, the Venetians, the Genoese, the Milanese, the Florentines, the English and the French all loosely tied into a single international bundle of confusion, woe, war and diplomacy is, at its base, accurate.
I could never have attempted a subject this complex without reading some great scholarship. One man stands above all others in this field, the historian Kenneth Setton, without whose books there would be no William Gold. Setton’s magisterial, remarkable, superb work The Papacy and the Levant gives almost painless access to the translations of the Papacy concerning all of the crusades and with matters of trade and politics throughout the Latin East.
Almost as vital to my novels as Professor Setton is Professor William Caferro, whose invaluable work John Hawkwood: An English Mercenary in Fourteenth-Century Italy remains, to me, the single best primer on the life of Hawkwood, his world, and the finances and politics thereof.
Beyond the bare bones of history it is essential to understand, when examining this world of stark contrasts and incredible passions, that people believed very strongly in ideas – like Islam, like Christianity, like chivalry. Piety – the devotional practice of Christianity – was such an essential part of life that even most ‘atheists’ practised all the forms of Christianity. Yet there were many flavours of belief. Theology had just passed one of its most important milestones with the works of Thomas Aquinas, but Roman Christianity had so many varieties of practice that it would require the birth of Protestantism and then the Counter-Reformation to establish orthodoxy. I mention all this to say that to describe the fourteenth century without reference to religion would be completely ahistorical. I make no judgement on their beliefs – I merely try to represent them accurately. I confess that I assume that any professional soldier – like Sabraham or Gold – must have developed some knowledge of and respect for their opponents. I see signs of this throughout the work of the Hospitallers – but that may be my modern multiculturalism.
The same care should be paid to all judgements on the past, especially facile judgements about chivalry. It is easy for the modern amoralist to sneer – the Black Prince massacred innocents and burned towns, Henry V ordered prisoners butchered. The period is decorated with hundreds, if not thousands, of moments where the chivalric warriors fell from grace and behaved like monsters. I loveth chivalry, warts and all, and it is my take – and, I think, a considered one – that in chivalry we find the birth of the modern codes of war and of military justice, and that merely to state piously that ‘war is hell’ and that ‘sometimes good men do bad things’ is rubbish. War needs rules. Brutality needs limits. These were not amateur enthusiasts, conscripts, or draftees. They were full-time professionals who made for themselves a set of rules so that they could function – in and out of violence – as human beings. If the code of chivalry was abused – well, so are concepts like liberty and democracy abused. Cynicism is easy. Practice of the discipline of chivalry when your own life is in imminent threat is nothing less than heroic – it required then and still requires discipline and moral judgment, confidence in warrior skills and a strong desire to ameliorate the effects of war. I suspect that in addition to helping to control violence (and helping to promote it – a double-edged sword) the code and its reception in society did a great deal to soften the effects of PTSD. My reading of the current scholarship suggests that, on balance, the practice of chivalry may have done more to promote violence than to quell it – but I’ve always felt that this is a massively ill-considered point of view – as if to suggest that the practice of democracy has been bad for peace based on the casualty rates of the twentieth century.
May I add – as a practitioner – that we as a society have chosen to ignore the reality of violence, and the hellish effect on soldiers and cops – and we have done so with such damning effectiveness that we have left them without any code beyond a clannish self-protection. Chivalry should not be a thing of the past. Chivalry is an ethic needed by every pilot, every drone controller, every beat cop and every SWAT team officer, every clandestine operator, every SpecOps professional. I often hear people say that such and such act of terror or crime justifies this or that atrocity. ‘Time to take off the gloves.’
Rubbish. If you take off the gloves, that’s who you are. Whether you do it with your rondel dagger or your LGB (Laser Guided Bomb) or your night stick. There need to be rules, and the men and women facing fire need to have some.
A word about the martial arts of the period. The world sees knights as illiterate thugs swinging heavy weapons and wearing hundreds of pounds of armour. In fact, the professionals wore armour that fitted the individual like a tailored steel suit, with weight evenly distributed over the body. We have several manuals of arms from this period, the most famous of which is by a character in this se
ries – Fiore di Liberi. The techniques are brutal, elegant and effective. They also pre-date any clear, unambiguous martial manual from the East, and are directly tied to combat, not remote reflections of it. I recommend their study, and the whole of Fiore’s MS in the Getty collection is available for your inspection at http://wiktenauer.com/wiki/Fior_di_Battaglia_MS_Ludwig_XV_13. If you’d like to learn more, I recommend the International Armizare Society http://www.armizare.org/.
Author’s Note
My greatest thanks still have to go, first and foremost, to Richard W. Kaeuper of the University of Rochester. The finest professor I ever had – the most passionate, the most clear, the most brilliant – Dr Kaeuper’s works on chivalry and the role of violence in society makes him, I think, the pre-eminent medievalist working today, and I have been lucky to be able to get his opinions and the wealth of his knowledge on many subjects, great and small. Where I have gone astray, the fault is all mine. To Professor Kaeuper’s work I must add the works of Professor Steven Muhlberger on chivalry and the minutiae of the joust and tournament, as well as the ethics of chivalry themselves. Several hours of conversations with Steve have not only been delightful but helped me with some of the themes of this book.
Not far behind these two, I need to thank Guy Windsor, who introduced me to the Armizare of Fiore di Liberi and profoundly informed my notions of what late-Medieval warfare was like among the skilled. I’d also like to thank the other two masters with whom I’ve studied and trained this last year – Sean Hayes of the Northwest Fencing Academy and Greg Mele of the Chicago Swordplay Guild. To these three modern masters this book is dedicated. I’d also like to thank all the people with whom I train and spar – the Compagnia mentioned below. Re-enacting the Middle Ages has many faces, and immersion in that world may not ever be a perfectly authentic experience, but inasmuch as I have gotten ‘right’ – the clothes, the armour, the food or the weapons – it is due to all my re-enacting friends, including Tasha Kelly (of La Cotte Simple, a superb web resource) Chris Verwijmeren, master archer, and Leo Todeschini, JT Pälikkö, Jiri Klepac and Aurora Simmons, master craftspeople. I cannot imagine writing these books without all the help I have received on material culture, and I’m going to add more craftspeople – all worth looking up – Francesca Baldassari and Davide Giuriussini of Italy, and Karl Robinson of England.
Throughout the writing of this series I have used (and will continue to use), as my standard reference to names, dates and events, the works of Jonathan Sumption, whose books are, I think, the best unbiased summation of the causes, events, and consequences of the Hundred Years’ War. I’ve never met him, but I’d like to offer him my thanks by suggesting that anyone who wants to follow the real events should buy Sumption’s books!
As Dick Kaeuper once suggested in a seminar, there would have been no Middle Ages as we know them without two things – the horse and Christianity. I owe my horsemanship skills largely to two people – Ridgely and Georgine Davis of Pennsylvania, both of whom are endlessly patient with teaching and with horseflesh in getting me to understand even the basics of mounted combat. And for my understanding of the church, I’d like first to thank all the theologians I know – I’m virtually surrounded by people with degrees in theology – and second, the work of F. C. Copleston, whose work A History of Medieval Philosophy was essential to my writing and understanding the period – as essential, in fact, as the writings of Chaucer, Gower, Boccaccio and Dante.
My sister-in-law, Nancy Watt, provided early comments, criticism, and copy-editing while I worked my way through the historical problems – and she worked her way through lung cancer. I value her commitment extremely. As this is her favourite of my series, I’ve done my best for her. I’m pleased to say that after five years, she is still alive and reading – and working.
And finally, I’d like to thank my friends who support my odd passions, and my wife and child, who are tolerant, mocking, justly puzzled, delighted, and gracious by turns as I drag them from battlefield to castle and as we sew like fiends for a tournament in Italy.
Three years ago, we formed the ‘Compagnia della Rosa nel Sole’ and we now have 120 members to recreate a company like John Hawkwood’s that fought in Italy in the late fourteenth century. Our company has given me (already) an immense amount of material and I thank every member. We’re always recruiting. Interested? Contact us at www.boarstooth.net.
William Gold is, I think, my favorite character. I hope you like him. He has a long way to go.
Christian Cameron
Toronto, 2017
Extract from Killer of Men
1
The thing that I remember best – and maybe it’s my first memory, too – is the forge. My father, the smith – aye, he farmed too, because every free man in Boeotia counted his wealth in farmland – but Pater was the bronze-smith, the best in our village, the best in Plataea, and women said that he had the touch of the god upon him, because he had a battle wound that made him lame in his left foot, and because his pots never leaked. We were simple folk in Boeotia, not fancy boys like Athenians or joyless killers like the men of Sparta – we valued a man who made a pot that didn’t leak. When Pater pounded out a seam, that seam held. And he liked to add more – he was always a man to give more than he got, so that a housewife who paid him ten hard-won drachmas and a bowl of potted rabbit might find that Pater had put a carefully tooled likeness of Demeter or Hecate beneath the rim of the pot, or worked her name into the handle of the cauldron or tripod.
Pater did good work and he was fair. What’s more, he had stood his ground twice in the storm of bronze, so that every man knew his measure. And for all that, he was always ready to share a cup of wine, so the front of the smithy had become a gathering place for all the men of our little village on a fair day when the ploughing was done – and sometimes even a singer or a minstrel, a rhapsode. The smithy itself was like a lord’s hall, as men brought Pater their quarrels – all except his own bloody family, and more of that later – or came to tell him their little triumphs.
He was not much as a father. Not that he hit me more than a dozen times, and every one deserved, as I still remember. I once used my father’s name to buy a knife in the polis – a foolish thing, but I wanted that knife. It broke in my hand later – yet another tale, lass – but I meant no harm. When Pater learned that I had pledged his name for a simple blade he’d have made me himself, he struck me with the whole weight of his fist. I cried for a day from the shame.
He had the raising of us all to himself, you see. My mother was drunk from the time I first remember her – drinking away the forge, Pater would say when the darkness was on him. She’s your grandmother, lass – I shouldn’t speak ill of her, and I’ll try to tell her true, but it’s not pretty.
She was the daughter of a lord, a real lord, a basileus from down the valley in Thespiae. They met at the Great Daidala in the year of the Olympics, and the rumour of my youth had it that she was the wildest and the most beautiful of all the daughters of Apollo, and that Pater swept her up in his great arms and carried her off in the old way, and that the basileus swore a curse on their marriage.
I respect the gods – I’ve seen them. But I’m not one to believe that Hera comes to curse a woman’s womb, nor Ares to push a spear aside. The gods love them that love themselves – Mater said that, so she wasn’t a total failure as a mother, I reckon. But she never did aught to love herself, and her curse was her looks and her birth.
She had three children for Pater. I was the middle one – my older brother came first by a year, and he should have had the smithy and maybe the farm besides, but I never faulted him for it. He had red hair and we called him ‘Chalkidis’, the copper boy. He was big and brave and all a boy could want in an older brother.
I had a sister, too – still do, unless Artemis put an arrow into her. My mother gave her the name of Penelope, and the gods must have been listening.
I know nothing
of those first years, when Pater was as handsome as a god, and Mater loved him, and she sang in the forge. Men say they were like gods, but men say a great many things when an event is safely in the past – they tell a lot of lies. I’ll no doubt tell you a few myself. Old man’s prerogative. I gathered that they were happy, though.
But nothing ended as my mother expected. I think she wanted something greater from my father, or from herself, or perhaps from the gods. She began to go up in the hills with the maenads and ran wild with other women, and there were words in the forge. And then came the first of the Theban years – when the men of Thebes came against us.
What do you know of Thebes? It is a name in legend to you. To us, it was the curse of our lives – poor Plataea, so far from the gods, so close to Thebes. Thebes was a city that could muster fifteen thousand hoplites, while we could, in an emergency and freeing and arming our most trustworthy slaves, muster fifteen hundred good men. And this is before we made the Great Alliance with Athens. So we were a lonely little polis with no friends, like a man whose plough is broken and none of his neighbours have a plough to loan.
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