City of God
Page 37
Interestingly, there is no mention of the use of Greek fire in the siege. Given how much of Byzantine military history revolved around this dreadful and still largely misunderstood weapon, I decided I needed to add it – for colour if nothing more. Given the state of the ruined Byzantine fleet, I figured that perhaps something similar had happened to Greek fire. My descriptions of its use come from Anna Komnena’s almost contemporary description: ‘This fire is made by the following arts. From the pine and certain such evergreen trees inflammable resin is collected. This is rubbed with sulphur and put into tubes of reed, and is blown by men using it with violent and continuous breath. Then in this manner it meets the fire on the tip and catches light and falls like a fiery whirlwind on the faces of the enemies.’
Some readers might have been thrown by the name ‘Waring Guard’. Yes, this is another spelling of the famous Varangian Guard. They were once drawn from the Scandinavian and Rus peoples exclusively. By this time, though, they were almost entirely populated by men from England, Anglo-Saxons who were disenfranchised by Norman oppression from the mid-eleventh century onwards. Many Saxon English who wanted to live free fled to Constantinople to join the Guard. Names like Octa and Redwald are English. The Guard were fanatically loyal to the emperor, and converted to Orthodoxy when they joined.
I’m going to leave you alone to mull this over in a moment, but I want to explore something else before I go. Part of what drove me to write this book was my abiding desire to make this series different and explore new and intriguing aspects with each volume, other than merely Templars on Crusade or Templars with weird occult leanings. Realising that just a few years after the date of the second book, the city of Constantinople suffered this fate, meant I really wanted to explore it. Although I would be limited to writing the specific timeline of the war, I felt it was worth attacking. Because – and bear with me here – though the Templars are not noted as being in the city at the time, it is certainly possible that they were. Imagine if you will the moral quandaries faced by a Templar in the midst of this war. Would it be much different from my approach? Who knows?
In terms of bibliography, I would point you in the direction of two fictional Templar series: Michael Jecks’s Puttock and Baldwin novels, and the Brethren trilogy by Robyn Young. Branching out from that, I would recommend Gordon Doherty’s Strategos series, which is set in the Byzantine world around a century earlier, and Prue Batten’s Gisborne books, which cover much of this territory over similar times. As well as a slew of Osprey military history books and numerous texts on Constantinople I already owned, I would particularly recommend Ernle Bradford’s The Great Betrayal for the Fourth Crusade. For my favourite Spanish Templars, perhaps look to Judi Upton-Ward’s The Catalan Rule of the Templars and for slightly less academic angles on this particular plot, Barbara Frale’s The Templars and the Shroud of Christ.
Most of all, I would recommend a visit to Istanbul. Nothing will bring this tale to life like walking around the sites.
Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed the book. If you did, please leave a review as they really do keep authors afloat. And keep an eye out for book four, which is already in process. The Winter Knight will see Arnau de Vallbona in Germany, dealing with the legacy of his old friend Lütolf of Ehingen.
Simon Turney, February 2019
First published in the United Kingdom in 2019 by Canelo
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Copyright © S.J.A. Turney, 2019
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