Irresistible North

by Andrea Di Robilant

  Adventus Domini belonged, this much I could guess, to the trendy category known in the trade as the Nordic thriller. A kindly customer helped me piece together the book’s cockamamie plot, which went something like this:

  Hannis Martinsson, a private detective in Tórshavn, is called in to investigate the murder of Bertie Angleton, a high official of the Order of Malta, killed while on his way to the farmstead in Kirkjubur. Martinsson goes to see the farmer, who tells him the strange story of Messer Nicolò, a Venetian who had come to the Faroes in the fourteenth century to hide a rich treasure brought back from the Holy Land (it included the thirty silver pieces Judas received for betraying Jesus Christ). Messer Nicolò had specified in his will that if ever the story of his secret journey to the Faroes should come to light, the descendants of the farmer who had helped him hide the treasure should be informed about it. And so it was that after the publication of his book in 1558, Nicolò the Younger dutifully sent a copy to the family in Kirkjubur, with a cover letter revealing the truth about Messer Nicolò’s mission. Flash forward four and a half centuries: the farmer pulls out the dusty book and the Zen map and hands them to Detective Martinsson. Bertie Angleton had come to claim the treasure for the Order of Malta. But as the reader eventually discovers, the secret Order of the Templars has its eyes on it as well.

  The author of Adventus Domini had Messer Nicolò hide the treasure in the wall of the old church at Kirkjubur. I could not resist placing a call to Jóannes before leaving Tórshavn. He told me he knew about the book but had not read it and had never met the author.

  “What about the treasure?” I asked. “The book says it was hidden in the wall of the church.”

  Jóannes laughed at the other end of the line. “My grandfather did find a box buried in a hole in the wall. It’s still there. As far as I know it contains some relics of Saint Magnus.”

  * * *

  1 The Faroese and Icelandic languages use an extended Latin alphabet with characters that do not exist in English. Some place-names are common enough that there is a standard English transliteration, but other places in this book are so rarely mentioned in English that there is no usual Anglicization. In those cases, for ease of reading, I have given the name in its native language on the first use, and used my own transliteration throughout.

  2 These are (the place-names on the Prunes map are in parentheses): Porlanda (Porlanda), Sanestol (Sunifise), C. deria (C. deviya), Porti (Porti), Cabaru (Caruo), Spagia (Espraya), Aqua (Aqua), Forali (Forasi), Campa (Compo), Rodea (Radeal), Dossais (Dorasais), Godmec (Godinech), Sorand (Solanda). The source of the Prunes map, in turn, was probably a fifteenth-century Catalan chart depicting Fixlanda.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Zichmni

  AFTER LOADING the ships with supplies, Zichmni and his men headed home “triumphantly,” taking the newly knighted Messer Nicolò and the Venetians along with them. They sailed in a southeasterly direction and eventually reached an island that was “set in such a way as to form a great number of gulfs.” The small fleet entered one of the wider ones and Messer Nicolò saw it was teeming with fish, for everywhere he looked, fishermen were “hauling copious catches” onto cargo ships bound for the great markets of Flanders, England and the Norse countries. Zichmni’s boats proceeded toward the shore until “the principal city of the island” at last came into view.

  At this tantalizing moment, Nicolò the Younger interrupted the description of their arrival, and I was left with the impression that he had given all the details he had been able to glean from an old and damaged letter in his hands. The scene dissolved into a blur even before the ships reached the harbor and the Venetians could disembark and take stock of their new surroundings. Lost in the rising fog, I wondered where it was that Messer Nicolò and his men had actually arrived.

  Nicolò the Younger added to the confusion by stating that the name of this faceless city was also Frislanda; on the map, he placed it on the eastern coast of the island of Frislanda. This was not in itself surprising: Renaissance cartographers often gave towns they were not familiar with the name of the region. Some contemporary scholars have taken this to mean that Zichmni’s fleet sailed to today’s Tórshavn. But in medieval times there was not even a village where Tórshavn now stands, let alone a large and busy harbor at the center of a flourishing fishing trade. Besides, it didn’t make sense to me that they should depart “triumphantly” from the scene of their campaign (Sutheroy Fjord) only to sail a few miles up the coast (Tórshavn).

  I realized Zichmni himself, more than Nicolò the Younger, might help me discover the city where he had taken Messer Nicolò and the rest of the Venetians. But who was this Latin-speaking lord of Sorant and ruler of Porlanda “whose great valor and goodness,” the narrative said, “made him as worthy of immortal memory as any man who ever lived”?

  NICOLÒ THE Younger, this much was clear, had no idea. And no one bothered to find out for two hundred and some years following the publication of his book. Geographers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were obviously more interested in places than people. It was only in 1786 that a Scots-Prussian naturalist by the name of John Reinhold Forster came up with a solution to the puzzle, which, despite its detractors, seems to have weathered the test of time.

  Forster earned a footnote in the history of exploration by joining James Cook on his voyage to the Pacific aboard the Resolution. He was considered by his shipmates to be something of a pedant but he was endlessly curious, methodical and hard-working. After his return from the South Seas, he developed an interest in the history of cartography and became absorbed by the Zen voyages. While “employed on the subject,” to use his own words, he was “struck by the conjecture” that Zichmni might be Henry Sinclair, earl of Orkney and lord of Rosslyn.

  This Henry Sinclair was an ambitious Scotsman who lived at Rosslyn Castle, in the Esk Valley (Midlothian). He managed to leverage his family ties to the Norwegian Crown to gain influence in the Norse region at the end of the fourteenth century, around the time of Messer Nicolò’s arrival. According to Forster, “Zichmni” was a mistaken transcription of “Sinclair,” which was often spelled “Zincler” in the vernacular.

  Not everyone agreed. Jakob Hornemann Bredsdorff, a Danish geographer, thought “Zichmni” was a distortion of “Sigmund,” nephew of his better-known namesake Sigmund Bresterson, hero of the Færeyinga Saga. Another Danish writer, Father Krarup, claimed Henry de Siggens, marshal of the duke of Holstein’s army, was the real Zichmni. And the English critic Frederick Lucas asserted Zichmni “far more closely resembles Wichmannus,” a pirate described by Pontanus in his Rerum danicarum historia, whose “armed ships infested the shores and ports of Germany, France, Spain, Britain, Norway and Denmark.” But none of these alternatives gathered much support beyond that of their respective authors, and by the nineteenth century most historians and geographers were inclined to believe that Zichmni was indeed Henry Sinclair.

  I too felt the clues in the Zen narrative corroborated Forster’s proposition. “Sorant” sounded to me like a contraction of “Sutherland,” the northernmost county in mainland Scotland, where Henry Sinclair owned land. True, Nicolò the Younger writes that it was a region “near Scotland” rather than “in Scotland,” but I considered this a minor, excusable error (perhaps less excusable was the fact that he then set the place-name Sorand on his map of Frislanda).

  Even more significant was the indication that Zichmni “ruled over Porlanda, the richest and most populous islands in the region.” This particular place-name was very probably derived from “Pomona,” which was the old name for Mainland, Orkney’s largest island. And the Orkney Islands were, unmistakably, the richest and most populous islands in the region.

  In sum, I thought the reference to Sorant and Porlanda underscored Zichmni’s relationship to both Scotland and Orkney and strengthened Forster’s claim. And I was comforted by the fact that the biographer of the earls of Orkney, Dr. Barbara Crawford of the University of Saint Andrews, had also
concluded as recently as the 1970s that “a natural corruption of [the name] Sinclair [was] the most obvious” solution to the Zichmni enigma.

  I seized on it with relief. Forster’s “conjecture” was no proof that Zichmni was in fact Henry Sinclair, but the temptation to latch on to a figure of repute, a man of flesh and blood, was hard to resist in such an uncertain landscape. I knew that by identifying Zichmni as Henry Sinclair I was bound to interpret the narrative and the Zen map in a certain way—and that it might not always be the most accurate one. Still, I took my chances and pressed on with my quest.

  If Zichmni was Henry Sinclair, I asked myself, where would he have sailed after his campaign in the Faroes? The likeliest answer is that he would have sailed back to Orkney, his home base. I checked the map of Frislanda and noticed that several place-names on the eastern coast had indeed a greater affinity with place-names in Orkney than with place-names in the Faroes. Offais, for example, brought to my mind today’s town of Orphir; Dui seemed a misspelling of the island of Hoy; Rodea evoked Ronaldsay; the island of Strome, long thought to be the island of Streymoy, in the Faroes, by Zen aficionados, now seemed to me more likely to be the small island of Stroma, in the Pentland Firth. Thus, while the names on the western coast of Frislanda seemed traceable to the Faroes, those on the eastern coast seemed to belong to Orkney. In the end I wondered whether Frislanda was not so much a clumsy misrepresentation of the Faroes as an even clumsier one of the Faroes and Orkney combined.

  Clearly I was disassembling Nicolò the Younger’s map to suit my own conjecture. But if Frislanda was indeed a combination of the Faroes and Orkney, it followed that when Zichmni set sail to “the city of Frislanda,” he was not headed to Tórshavn (which anyway did not exist except as an old meeting place of tribal chiefs during the earlier Viking days) but to Kirkwall, the main city in Orkney and the largest commercial harbor in the region.1

  SO THE fog lifted, as it were, and I saw in my mind’s eye the small fleet with the returning soldiers and their Venetian companions make its way into the bay, past the fishing boats and the cargo ships laden with stockfish. As they drew closer to shore, the great church of Saint Olaf came into view, standing proudly on the waterfront. The boats pulled right up to the steps in front of the church and the seamen took down the sails and unloaded their war booty to the sound of festive cheers. I imagined them filing into Saint Olaf to attend a Te Deum, the Venetians surely impressed by the finely carved crosses and the gold and silver calices and reliquaries. As customary, the soldiers’ return was celebrated with a boisterous victory banquet in a smoke-filled hall rich with the smell of roasted meats and ale.

  The town would still have had the vague appearance of an old Viking settlement. The waterfront, overlooking a wide firth, bustled with seamen, merchants and craftsmen. The main street ran parallel to it and was lined with gabled longhouses, most of which had a shop in the front and sleeping quarters in the back and a yard where hens and pigs scurried about. In the best houses the living quarters had wood paneling and tapestries on the walls and good, sturdy furniture.

  At the time, the earl of Orkney did not have a castle or a palace of his own—a fortress and a palace were constructed later. The largest building in Kirkwall, not counting the Church of Saint Olaf, was the Bishop’s Palace, a dark red sandstone structure built on a hill overlooking the town. Its last occupant was Bishop William, an avowed enemy of Henry Sinclair who had connived with the Scots to wrest control of Orkney from the king of Norway. Bishop William had been murdered in 1382, the year before Messer Nicolò’s arrival, and it was said that the earl of Orkney himself had had a hand in his death.

  There were many parts of Henry Sinclair’s life that would remain obscure to me, including his role in the bishop’s murder. But fortunately there were also facts and figures and historical records that I could rely on to reconstruct his life—as well as a fascinating document that shed light on his role in the complicated relations between Norway and Scotland in the fourteenth century.

  Henry Sinclair

  HENRY’S FATHER, William Sinclair, was a member of the minor Scottish nobility and a protégé of the powerful Ross clan. His mother, Isabella, was the second daughter of Malise Sperra, earl of Orkney and a vassal of the Norwegian Crown. This mixed heritage played an important role in shaping Henry’s life at a time—the second half of the fourteenth century—when Scottish influence in the North Sea was growing at the expense of the old Norse kingdom.

  At Rosslyn Castle, a beautiful spot in the Esk Valley, just south of Edinburgh, Henry received what was then a typical upbringing for a young Scottish nobleman. He was taught Latin, French and romance poetry. He learned to ride, to use a bow, to handle a spear and to fight with a sword—they say his favorite game was to pretend he was fighting the English at the battles of Roslin Moor and Bannockburn.

  When he was thirteen, his father died in Prussia fighting on the side of the Teutonic knights against the Turks (in this, Henry and Messer Nicolò were alike, both losing their fathers to the Turks when they were very young). Hard times followed for the Sinclairs of Rosslyn, and it was only thanks to Henry’s mother, Isabella, and her claim to the Earldom of Orkney, that the family fortunes were eventually reversed.

  Long the crown jewel of the Norse kingdom, the Earldom of Orkney was at the center of a power struggle between rising Scotland and declining Norway. Earl Malise Sperra, Henry’s grandfather on his mother’s side, died around 1350. He had one daughter, Matilda, from his first marriage, and four from his second marriage, among whom was Henry’s mother, Isabella. He willed the earldom to Isabella, his favorite, rather than to Matilda, the eldest. But King Haakon VI of Norway had the last word, and he vetoed Malise’s transmission of the title because he wanted to choose the new earl himself to make sure the ties of Orkney to the mother country did not loosen any further and the earldom didn’t fall under Scottish influence.

  In the belief that a Scandinavian would prove more reliable than a Scot, King Haakon entrusted the earldom to Erengisle Suneson, the Swedish husband of Henry’s aunt Agneta. But Suneson turned out to be a scheming, unreliable governor and was soon dismissed. For several years, the king sent ineffectual Norwegian emissaries to collect taxes and handle properties. The Crown’s authority steadily declined as the power-hungry bishop of Orkney, William IV, increased his hold on the islands and made life impossible for the king’s envoys.

  Young Henry, encouraged by his mother, began to cultivate his Norse heritage with a keen eye on the earldom. In 1362, at the age of eighteen, he sailed to Copenhagen to attend the wedding of King Haakon. The bride was the daughter of King Waldemar of Denmark, ten-year-old Margaret, who would grow up to rule all of Scandinavia. King Haakon was gracious to Henry, even recognizing the validity of his mother’s claim to Orkney. Still, he refused to bestow the title on her.

  Henry got on with his life. He married Janet, the daughter of wealthy Lord Halyburton of Dirleton Castle, who lived twenty miles from Rosslyn Castle. They had at least six children: three boys and three girls. The marriage strengthened Henry’s position within the Scottish nobility and increased the family landholdings in Scotland, but his attention remained fixed on the Earldom of Orkney.

  In 1375 King Haakon appointed Henry’s cousin Alexander de Ard, son of Earl Malise’s first daughter, Matilda, as his representative in Orkney. The term was only for a year: the king wanted to test his ability to rein in the unruly Bishop William and manage the collection of taxes more efficiently. But Alexander was not up to the task and the appointment was not renewed.

  Henry finally stepped into the breach, skillfully negotiating not just a limited appointment but the title to the earldom itself. The contract is one of few documents from that period to have survived and provides a useful window on the politics of the region at the time.

  Henry’s primary responsibility was to ensure the collection of taxes on the Crown’s properties. In exchange, he was allowed to keep the revenue from the fines he levied for missed or l
ate payments. His main income, of course, would come from the taxes raised on the earl’s personal properties. Orkney being the richest land in the Norse realm, Henry stood to make a fortune.

  The title, however, came with a long list of obligations. Henry was to protect the islanders and defend Orkney. He could not break the king’s peace by going off to war, but if the king requested his help outside the earldom, he would have to serve him with “up to a hundred armed men.”

  The contract made it clear that he was holding the islands in trust. He could not sell them or even pledge them to obtain loans, he was to receive the king and his followers with great hospitality, and he was not allowed to build fortifications because they could be used to keep the Crown’s forces from landing in Orkney.

  It followed that Henry’s heirs would not automatically inherit the earldom and that he himself would lose the title if he was found in breach of his oath of fealty. Still, it was a notable coup on Henry’s part because it suddenly elevated him to a position of considerable influence in the region.

  The king had evidently concluded that Henry would be more effective than either his uncle Erengisle Suneson or his cousin Alexander de Ard. But that alone would not have done the trick: in the end, Henry had to agree to deposit “one thousand golden pieces of English money” into the coffers of cash-strapped King Haakon the following year before the Feast of Saint Martin.

  Henry sailed to Norway in the summer of 1379. An elaborate ceremony was held in the town of Marstrand, near Göteborg, attended by the royal family, the court dignitaries and Church officials. He rendered his oath of fealty to the king, kissed his hands and then kissed him on the mouth, as was the custom. King Haakon, in turn, inducted him into the royal council and bestowed upon him the title of earl of Orkney, a position of the highest rank in the Norwegian Kingdom, immediately following the royal princes and the archbishop of Trondheim.