by Tuvia Fogel
It must be said that Christian enthusiasm for reconquering the sepulchre was a shadow of the fervor of a hundred years earlier. No one seemed interested in taking the cross any more—unless, of course, it was for private gain. But 666 years had passed since the birth of Muhammad—which, being the number of the Beast, were the years he’d been allotted—and a rumor spread that a last heave would push the infidels back into the sterile deserts from where they’d emerged, screaming, on their camels.
For a year now, Cyprus had been a stage for ships and knights headed to and from the fifth campaign against the infidel. In January the previous year, when the armies had not yet attacked Egypt, Hugh I of Cyprus and his wife, Alice, left for Tripoli to attend the wedding of Bohemond IV with the beautiful Melisende. In a tragic twist like those that often plague royalty, young Hugh ruined everyone’s fun by dying at the celebrations, struck down by a fever at the age of twenty-three.
As a regent to govern the unruly island, his young widow Alice—little Henry I being just eight months old—had chosen her uncle, Philip of Ibelin, by all accounts more of a notary than a monarch. When Christian forces, a year earlier, finally became large enough to attack Egypt, the papal legate, Cardinal Pelagius Galvani, stopped on his way to Damietta in August. A few days after he arrived, news came that the tower in the Nile, which kept the Christians from reaching the city’s walls, had fallen. Fearing other military successes in his absence, Pelagius left forthwith.
Galatea underwent a subtle change in the week since arriving in Cyprus. Since the night Master Ezekiel fished her out of the lagoon, confirmations of the power of her visions abounded. After all, had she not found a beach for the Falcus to plow? Had she not, a week ago, helped the rabbi exorcise a malignant fog off the island, despite chanting different words from the ones he’d asked her to pronounce? The abbess started to wonder if the spiritual gifts of men had not been overestimated from way back when Christ chose only men as his apostles. Her “trust in women’s soul” turned into a determination to affirm what seemed right to her despite men’s opinions.
To Gudrun and Albacara, the behavior engendered by these thoughts seemed a lapse into the sin of pride, so common in those of noble birth. Since seeing the wealth on the island, for example, Galatea no longer wore a nun’s habit, not even the white one with blue borders, but only clothes fit for a countess of Tuscia, of which half her chest—Gudrun now saw why—was filled. The women also weren’t staying in a convent or in a hostel but in the villa of a French cousin of Galatea’s mother. But what most bothered the women, although in Cyprus it didn’t cause the scandal it had in the West, was that Galatea spent most of her time with the Jew.
The day of the High Court assembly was also market day in Limassol. The little fishermen’s town had become so rich that its alleys were too narrow and its market square too small. Men and beasts shoved each other in the little available space, and brawls broke out every few minutes. The market was stranger and more wonderful than any other Galatea had ever seen. Food and slaves were sold side by side. She saw Persian carpets, stained glass from Damascus, pelts from Rus, porcelain from Cathay, painted marble vases from Arabia, pearls from the Gulf, ivory from India and Kush. There were glassblowers, fortune-tellers, fire-eaters, snake charmers. She tasted a strange, delicious fruit shaped like a quarter moon, which showed a cross when cut, called banana. She saw bears, panthers, ostriches, and untold things so amazing her eyes burned from looking at them. Master Ezekiel said the smell was as nice as near Christmas in Montpellier, when the spice merchants ground their wares.
The abbess was surprised to discover how much she enjoyed spending time in places where she didn’t know a single soul. It was as if the spectacle of other people’s lives—full and engaging to them, but without any role for her—had the effect of satisfying her every desire.
“Surely this is a pleasure denied to my teacher,” she thought with a smile, “for there is no place in the world where Master Ezekiel wouldn’t meet someone he knows. . . .”
The guards approached them respectfully. The rabbi must follow them to the regent’s castle at once, and the Countess of Ardengheschi could come with them, if she so wished.
Half an hour later, the strange couple stood before the whole High Court of the kingdom of Cyprus.
Philip greeted them courteously and explained the situation. “He’s a well-known Italian friar, you see, and he fainted while preaching in the square. I am told his sermons look like a tumbler’s shows, but he wins over many hearts. Just before passing out again, he told my chamberlain that after living in sin with Lady Poverty for ten years, he decided to marry her, so he can no longer accept gifts, because it would be adultery!”
“Ha, ha!” laughed Yehezkel. “I am a medicus, so I would try to revive him anyway, Your Excellency. This sounds like a friar I wouldn’t mind chatting with.”
“You will have at your disposal any herb or essence you may need, Master Ezekiel, but you must, you absolutely must revive that friar! The reputation of the kingdom is at stake!”
“And may I know the name of the poor preacher whose fate is so dear to you?”
“His name is Francesco. Francesco of Assisi,” said the regent.
OUTSIDE THE CHRISTIAN CAMP AT DAMIETTA, THE SAME 27TH JUNE 1219
As Yehezkel made his way to the chamberlain’s apartment in Limassol Castle, two of the most powerful men at the siege of Damietta walked alone outside the camp after telling their guards to wait for them but without losing sight of them.
The two were the masters of the Templar and the Teutonic orders, Pedro de Montaigu and Hermann von Salza. Their paths crossed in the camp every day, but they wished to discuss this delicate matter out of earshot.
“So what did your man tell you of my English knight, Hermann?” asked Pedro urgently. “Anything on what I need to know?”
Von Salza, as well as being a warrior monk, was an intellectual, a diplomat, and a friend of young Emperor Frederick II, a notorious atheist. He was cool to popes and to heretic hunters like Domingo of Guzman. When Pedro de Montaigue began to suspect that one of his knights had been recruited as a spy by the Spanish monk and decided that having Bois-Guilbert watched by another Templar would be too risky, he had turned to the German. Hermann agreed to assign one of his knights to accompany the suspect and report on his activities.
“Mmhh . . . indeed,” replied Hermann grimly. “You were right about the man. Near Carcassonne, at the end of April, your ‘brother’ Bois-Guilbert met with Domingo of Guzman.”
“That does it!” cried Pedro. “I’ll have him put in irons in the morning! The rest of what I want to know will come from his own lips, I assure you!”
From afar, the guards saw the black-crossed mantle hanging still while the red-crossed one danced in rage around Pedro’s shoulders.
“No, Pedro, that would be a mistake,” said Hermann quietly. “We can use him to find out who Domingo’s man in Acre is.”
“Praise be to the Baptist who sent you to help me in this race with that white-cloaked Spanish devil!” exclaimed Pedro. “How should we go about what you just suggested?”
“Simple,” said Hermann. “I’ll tell Brother Frutolf to stay with your knight, and you tell Brother Bois-Guilbert to go to Cyprus and Acre to recruit all the men he can find for the siege. Pelagius wants it done anyway. Just as he told me of the meeting with Domingo, Frutolf will tell me who Bois-Guilbert meets with in Acre.” Hermann smiled. “Do you know, my man is so dim he still hasn’t realized he is surveilling your knight, not assisting him!”
Pedro laughed. Then the two men gripped each other’s forearm and walked back to their escorts.
CHAPTER 16
HA-ME’OR HA-GADOL
The Bigger Light
LIMASSOL, 27TH JUNE 1219
Yehezkel caressed and squeezed his beard—first with one hand, then with the other—as he walked back and forth across the big room, the usual Talmudic debate going on in his head.
“There are,
after all, only four possible outcomes: if I cure him and he dies anyway, the goyim will say I failed their trust, if not worse. If I cure him and he recovers, they will say his sanctity was stronger than the Jew’s perfidy. If I don’t cure him and he dies, they will probably accuse me of poisoning him, and if I don’t cure him and he gets better anyway . . .” He stopped in his tracks.
“‘Don’t cure him?’ What am I saying? He is a sick man, and I am a medicus. I have no choice!”
Disfigured by the illness, Francesco raved softly, shivering with a fever that his brothers said rose in the afternoon and raged after sunset, often shaking him until he passed out. The rabbi observed. He was small, bone thin, and covered in ulcers. His breath was labored, and the sweat-soaked features were not handsome. Under a small tonsure, nose, cheekbones, and ears all jutted out provocatively, and his curly beard was short and full of holes.
Yehezkel resumed marching. “On the other hand, he is one of the zealot friars, like Domingo, who think that burning the Talmud is God’s work. If I put him back on his feet, I’ll be his accomplice.”
He reached the wall and turned around. “Then again, if I don’t cure him I’m an accomplice in his death, and not even saving the Talmud justifies contributing to someone’s death.”
The minute he’d entered the room, Yehezkel had called for a basin of boiled water and administered the vapors of an infusion that would have revived people with one foot in the grave, but to no effect. After feeling his pulse in both wrists at once, he’d concluded that the man’s life was in the hands of God.
Not knowing what else to try, he’d done the obvious thing. Guessing that if he came to, the friar would not allow it, he’d untied the knot in the rope around his waist and stripped him naked to wash him from head to toe. The edge of the gray-brown tunic was so encrusted with mud that at the rabbi’s touch it didn’t tear, it broke. He didn’t like Christians who afflicted their bodies to elevate their spirits, but when he saw Francesco’s poor naked body, his heart ached as it would before the embarrassed smile of a hungry child.
The water in the basin was still hot. The rabbi crumbled some herbs in it and began to rub Francesco’s body with a sponge. He cleaned the ulcers, taking particular care with the red swellings around the eyes, and then applied an ointment made by mixing the herbs fished out from the basin with an Egyptian balsam whose formula was known in the West to a privileged few.
As he gingerly lifted thin shoulders to slip the tunic back on, Francesco opened his eyes.
Yehezkel recognized him immediately. In those feverish, reddened eyes he saw the languor of the lover for his beloved and understood that Francesco was a zaddik, one of the thirty-six righteous men of his generation. Three months earlier in Torcello, Rav Eleazar had smiled at him once with that look, but it had been after a whole day of fasting and meditation, whereas this little monk just came to from a raging fever, and already he felt that kind of aching tenderness for the whole universe!
Yehezkel bent one knee without thinking and then slowly bent the other one, too. He lowered his head, took his patient’s hand in his, and placed his lips on the knuckles. Francesco raised his head and looked at his naked, clean, and medicated body.
“I . . . I don’t know who you are, messere, but Divine Providence sent you to put me back on the road. God bless you,” he murmured.
Despite his talent for languages, Yehezkel had trouble understanding the Umbrian dialect Francesco slipped into when excited or under duress.
“Sshhh . . .” whispered the rabbi, thanking God for his infinite mercy.
With a look that brooked no objections, he forced Francesco to drink a few sips of a concoction from a vial he kept in his medicus satchel. It was the middle of the night. Yehezkel thought that if the friar had broken his fever, he would survive. Then he remembered that he had yet to pray Ma’ariv.
In the corridors of the regent’s palace, Yehezkel heard people speak of Francesco of Assisi as the prophet announced by Gioacchino. The thirty-seven-year-old little Italian had performed miracles in many places. Ten years earlier, Innocent III had approved a rough rule for his mendicant order, a simple text obsessed with poverty as the one and only supreme proof of apostolic spirit.
At first the pope, repelled by the very appearance of the mystical youth, chased Francesco out of the Lateran, but then, that night, he’d dreamed that the same ragged tramp was holding up the entire crumbling structure of the church. He called him back, assigning him and his brothers the mission of contrasting with their sermons those of heretical preachers. In other words, in the same summer of 1209 in which the army of Christ massacred thousands of Cathars, Innocent asked Francesco to witness to the world that the church didn’t, in fact, have anything against love and charity.
Ten years had passed since those meetings, and Innocent had been dead for the last three. Francesco’s friars in the hundreds were spreading through the empire like Domingo’s. That year, the Holy Spirit instilled in Francesco the desire to pray at the Holy Sepulchre, and less than a month earlier he’d boarded a cog in Ancona with two brothers, Pietro Cattaneo and Illuminato of Rieti. In Limassol, they’d been joined by Friar Elia of Assisi, one of Francesco’s first disciples, who had been in Acre for two years.
The three friars were outside the door now, kneeling in prayer on the stones of the corridor. Emerging from the room, Yehezkel reassured them on their founder’s condition. All three drew back, frightened by the bearded Jewish wizard.
Francesco recovered so quickly that the next morning it proved impossible to keep him in the palace, whose luxury was to him what contact with a snake was to people who didn’t share his bizarre love of all animals. Soon he was back in the square where the fever had interrupted his sermon.
The company was standing in the crowd that gathered almost immediately. Galatea had not been with Yehezkel the previous evening and so had not yet seen the friar. The abbess stood behind Aillil, hands on his shoulders, with Gudrun and the widow on either side and the armigers behind them. She stared at Francesco, captivated. The brownish tunic on his emaciated body was that of a monk, but the coarsely stitched patches and bare feet made him look more like one of the mystics who wandered through fairs and sanctuaries, elevating the crowds with sermons or entertaining them with songs.
Francesco was miming the adventures of Galahad. Galatea was bewitched by the range of expressions on his lean face, from the knight’s outrage over injustice to the tears at the memory of a heroic death, from the exaltation of battle to the anguish of sincere repentance. And all the while, the expressions on the faces of his audience followed his own as if they all felt the same emotions.
Yehezkel suddenly appeared beside her. She shushed him before he could say a word, for Francesco started speaking of the Holy Grail, and she didn’t want to miss a word. The rabbi, watching the performance from another point, asked himself if the man in whose eyes he had seen God’s Spirit the night before could be the same one pulling faces—at some points dancing—in a square. Rav Moshe’s words on Ezekiel echoed in his mind. “God forbid that his prophets be the object of ridicule and mockery by the ignorant, or engage in foolishness.”
The very moment the thought entered his head, Francesco turned toward him and, without interrupting his recital for an instant, looked at him with the same languor as the night before. A shiver ran down Yehezkel’s back.
When the crowd of Cypriots pleading for blessings and healings from Francesco, barely held back by his brothers, finally dispersed, Yehezkel introduced Galatea.
“Galatea degli Ardengheschi is a noblewoman from Tuscia, Brother Francesco, and also the abbess of a Cistercian convent in Torcello. But above all, she is a prophetess!” Then, as an afterthought, he murmured, “But were she married, she would be what we Jews call an eshet chail, a valorous wife.”
Francesco’s smile made Yehezkel blush, but the Egyptian rabbi was olive skinned, and no one noticed.
Only fifty leagues as the crow flies separate Assisi fr
om Montalcino, and Francesco, who’d often heard of the counts of Ardenga, guessed that this must be Orlando’s daughter. Then his eyes crossed Galatea’s, nearly a foot above his face.
Francesco’s soul was still devastated by the test the Lord put him through by sending him Chiara di Favarone. He had always taught his brothers to beware the sweet poison of women’s company, but since deciding not to visit Chiara in San Damiano, he suffered the purest pains of courtly love.
He hesitated for an instant and then lowered his eyes to the ground and never—except once, nine months later—fixed them on Galatea’s again. She noticed this reaction and, not for the first time in her life, wished she were not beautiful.
“Brother Francesco, your sermon was the most full of the Holy Spirit that I ever listened to!” she said.
“They’re simple people, Madonna,” said Francesco, his eyes on the red velvet belt around her waist. “You have to be doing something all the time, to keep their attention.”
Galatea told herself that from the next day she would wear her Cistercian habit again.
Francesco turned to Yehezkel with an almost naughty smile. “So you think my sermons lack dignity, do you, Master Ezekiel? Let me tell you a little story. One day a man was playing a flute so sweetly that everyone who heard started to dance. Anyone who came close enough to hear his flute started dancing. Then a deaf man came along, who didn’t even know what music was, and what he saw seemed to him in very bad taste, the senseless behavior of a deranged crowd.”