The Jerusalem Parchment

by Tuvia Fogel

After the king left, two inebriated footmen talked by the fire.

  “What did you say? One-eyed Bohemond of Antioch, now he’s married to a Lusignan, could attack the king’s forces in Acre while he’s here? Pfff, the very idea of Bohemond attacking the king! A rabbit might as well attack a bear!”

  “Still, the king is old,” slurred the other. “What if he dies tomorrow? I’ve never lived through a king’s death, but everyone knows it can bring trouble, sometimes even war . . .”

  “Bring war? This is already a war, you dunce!” snapped the first footman.

  CHAPTER 20

  VE-OF YEOFEF

  And Let Birds Fly

  FIVE LEAGUES SOUTHWEST OF DAMIETTA, 29TH AUGUST 1219

  All eyes were fixed on the helms and brightly colored shields shining in the sun. High-pitched cries rose everywhere as thousands of fists shook threats at the infidels. It was the glorious, once-in-a-lifetime spectacle of the advancing Army of Christ.

  Above the troops, flying standards heralded nobility on the march, some banners so heavy that special, gigantic workhorses were brought to bear them—England’s leopards, France’s fleurs-de-lis, the Holy Roman Empire’s two-headed eagle, and behind them the coats of arms of all the great European houses, dozens of flags with vertical, horizontal, and oblique bands of all colors. At the head of the army, the count of Jaffa, the baron of Hebron, and the prince of Galilee flanked King John of Brienne. Over their heads, above all other banners, flew Jerusalem’s powerful five silver crosses—also the emblem of the Lusignans which would have accompanied the King of Cyprus had he not been but an infant.

  The king’s white Arab steed, walked by his squire, sniffed the air nervously, exchanging whinnies with a cadet’s horse. It trotted in full battle armor, heavy engraved iron plates covering its flanks and a strapped-down iron mask over its head. The king wore a hauberk of the finest chain mail, which reached below his knees but was split up to his waist, both in front and behind, to ease riding. His helm was not a vain, royal iron cylinder, just a simple pointed cap, but so shiny one couldn’t look straight at it.

  After reaching its lowest point a week earlier, the Nile had begun the buildup to September’s floods, overflowing its banks for the first time the day before. Twenty-thousand men marched in waterlogged sand under their lords’ colors. Horses slipped in the sludge, their hooves sinking in mud to the fetlocks, spraying armors and shields. The heat was unbearable, the sun beating on helms and hauberks.

  Their shirts and bodies soaked in sweat, skin one big blister, blood pulsing in their ears, the men shouted their war cry—“Hyerusalem et Sancta Crux!”—at the top of their voices, but it could hardly be heard over the clinking of armor and weapons, the shouts of squires, and the sucking of hooves pulled from the mud. The din was such that had God thundered, no one would have heard Him.

  In al-Kamil’s army they faced a formidable enemy. Salah ad-Din, conqueror of Jerusalem, founder of the Ayyubid Dynasty and uncle of the present sultan, formed and trained his army in Egypt back when he thought that to unify Egypt and Syria he’d have to fight Nur ad-Din, the last Zengid sultan. But his lord died, and within ten years Damascus was his.

  The core of Salah ad-Din’s force was the Turkish and Kurdish cavalries—the Arab regiments, mostly Bedouin, having auxiliary roles. Many warriors were not vassals of their emir—a kind of Saracen general—but proud independents, deployed in the middle of the battle formation. Behind them came the emirs with their mamluks, the sultan’s mamluks being only the third layer.

  After seeing the incensed, frequently reckless behavior of Christian regiments, the sultan’s emirs devised a classic ruse to be used if the infidels attacked the camp. When the Franks charged, the center of the Saracen front hastily retreated. Most Christians paused, unsure what to do, but a hundred Cypriots in the middle of the lineup, recently arrived and hungry for glory, were sucked in by the enemy’s false retreat. In an instant, the mamluks surrounded them and began slaughtering them.

  In a stroke of incredibly bad luck—or, as the Saracens would have said, by the will of Allah—just as the knights closest to the Cypriots tried, unsuccessfully, to come to their aid, King John was seen turning with his men and galloping off toward Damietta. What happened was that he’d received a report that a band of Bedouin were attacking the Christian women bringing water from the river to the edge of the battlefield. Such cowardly, barbaric behavior infuriated the old king, who’d rushed to the riverbank in rage. But when the Roman contingent, already in shock from being next to the space where the Cypriots had been, saw the king in apparent full flight, they remembered Brother Francesco’s words and turned their backs on the enemy. Despite Pelagius and Jacques screaming their lungs out to stop the feckless Italians, panic soon spread among the crosses. That was when al-Kamil gave the order to attack.

  At most battles, spectators—sometimes dozens, other times thousands—stand at what they consider a safe distance from the fighting. During attempts to take a town, they cheer from high buildings with the enthusiasm of people whose lives literally depend on the outcome. In larger clashes, they often seek out nearby hills from which the movements of troops can be discerned. But however hard they try, they never grasp who is winning and who is losing. Worse, in the open, the high spot they chose may suddenly acquire tactical importance, and not a few spectators are known to have paid for their curiosity with their lives.

  On the left bank of the Nile, opposite the village of al-Huran, was just such an elevated place. The absence of bridges for several leagues made the spot enviably safe, as the armies would do battle on the other side of the river. The company, with nearly a hundred curious clerics and women, reached the rise before the clash between the armies began and watched the disastrous developments.

  “And now? What’s happening now?”

  Francesco’s eyes were too sick for him to make anything out from that distance, so he kept asking his brothers to tell him what was happening.

  “The Cypriots are lost, Father,” said Pietro. “And now the Romans . . . what are they doing? God have mercy on us all, they’re turning their backs on the mamluks!”

  When the shameful rout became clear, his brothers fell silent and Francesco began to weep, his example soon followed by nearly everyone on the sandy knoll.

  When they judged the tragic outcome of the attack on Färiskür to be irreversible, the onlookers made their way back to camp to look after the wounded—not as fast as the fleeing footmen on the other side of the river, but fast enough to watch the Saracen onslaughts being contained by the military orders, aided by many French and English knights, who took turns in a desperate rear guard action.

  The Templars assembled in platoons of ten or twelve and charged the oncoming mamluks, crying, “Non nobis, Domine, non nobis, sed tuo nomini da gloriam!”*46

  While they fought to the death, taking dozens of mamluks with them, the next platoon, this one of Teutonic knights, would gather for their charge. The operation to give cover to the retreating army was organized by King John, and it was only thanks to his efforts, though at the cost of dozens of knights, that the whole Latin campaign didn’t end in disaster on that 29th of August.

  Hundreds of footmen, especially among the newcomers, drank their whole ration of wine in one swig in the morning, to brace themselves before death. Many of them, in the chaotic rout, died from the force of the sun, baked drunk in their armor, without having delivered a single blow.

  More than three thousand footmen fell on that day, as did two hundred knights of the orders, plus a hundred other knights from various lands. Al-Kamil also took many important prisoners, among them the counts of Beauvais and Epoisse and Gautier de Némours, grand chamberlain of France. Later, it would be written that the best men of that generation met their death at the battle that Brother Francesco implored them not to fight.

  The bodies stretched endlessly in every direction. From afar, it looked like a swarm of giant locusts had settled on the dunes east of the Nile. The st
retch of desert was an immense open grave, the thousands of decaying corpses nothing if not a biblical vision of divine retribution.

  Aillil and the stretcher bearers followed Yehezkel as he stepped through the battlefield, looking for signs of life among the dead. Here and there, they thought they saw a leg or an arm move suddenly. The stench made the air unbreathable despite the cloth masks Yehezkel made for them. With each step, Aillil distracted hundreds of big flies from their gruesome banquets, his eyes following the emerald-green cloud as they took flight.

  Crows and jackals moved among the bodies as huge birds circled above the desolation, diving into the melee of scavengers, not caring if their claws dug into carcasses or live creatures. Huge black crows Aillil knew, but the other, horrid birds were like nothing else he’d ever seen. Enormous wings and long, fleshy necks with no feathers on them except for a collar round the base, and deadly looking hooked beaks. Monsters that should have been carved in stone looking down from the sides of cathedrals, not flapping their black wings before his eyes while tearing flesh from human corpses in that hellish landscape. Their discordant, raucous cries covered every other sound on the plain by the river.

  “But why does God do such things?” asked Aillil in a small voice.

  “If you start asking that sort of question,” answered Yehezkel, “you can end up in the most frustrating confusion, Aillil. Still, I’m glad you asked it . . .”

  Hours later, the little group turned to accompany the last stretcher, bearing the fifth wounded knight Yehezkel decided might survive, back to camp. The worst of the wounded were taken to the tent where his friend Ugo had set a priority among the stricken warriors, so that urgent care would go to those who had, by his discernment, the highest likelihood of surviving their wounds.

  Ugo de’ Borgognoni was a medicus from Lucca of about Yehezkel’s age. The son of nobles, he taught surgery at the university in Bologna and decided that a war would be a good place to widen direct experience of wounds. Ugo and Yehezkel argued endlessly all through August over the best approach to embedded arrowheads, and a jovial camaraderie—fed by the dark humor that physicians at war often use to cope with their grim surroundings—grew between them.

  Yehezkel had learned his medicine in Fustat from Moshe ben Maimon, who was a follower of what physicians would later call the dry method of treating wounds, which consisted of washing them in boiled water and the strongest available liquor, stitching them up immediately, and wrapping them in clean dry linens. The results this method achieved in the days after the battle converted Ugo de’ Borgognoni to Saracen medicine once and for all.

  Most wounded were entrusted to the care of monks and nuns, and the only moments of relief the Italian medicus enjoyed in those exhausting first days of September were the exhilarating flare-ups between Master Ezekiel and the monks over most of the patients in the big tent. One morning, in the presence of Ugo and Mother Galatea, a Benedictine monk called Brother Gerard was attempting to draw blood from a wounded English knight. Yehezkel wouldn’t hear of it.

  “I tell you I know what this man needs: a good bleeding!” cried Gerard. “Can’t you see how flushed his face is? Experience has taught me that when all else fails, a purifying draining of blood, and then another one, and one more, is what brings healing to the body!”

  Yehezkel’s smile told Ugo that the thunderstorm he’d been looking forward to was about to break. “Believe me, my good monk,” began the rabbi sweetly, “this man needs all the blood the Saracens were good enough to leave inside his body. I’ve nothing against drawing blood from a congested patient, but the color you see in his face is only due to the heat in this tent. This knight will have much greater problems recovering, if you leech him now.”

  Brother Gerard, hands on his hips and the truth necessarily, since he was arguing with a Jew, on his side, defended the tradition the Salerno school transmitted to him. “I’m no village priest, sir! I am aware that there are circumstances when drawing blood is discouraged. But both moon and tides have been growing for three days, and bleeding a patient is only normal . . . whatever they may think of it in the synagogue!”

  Yehezkel’s nostrils widened imperceptibly to all—except for Galatea. “Since I’ve lived in Christian lands, Brother Gerard,” he said, voice nearly making the tent cooler, “I’ve seen unspeakable horrors passed off as ‘medicine.’ I witnessed limbs hacked off with axes to cure ulcers that would have healed with a simple poultice! I saw a woman’s head cracked open and her brains spilled because they said she was possessed by a demon, when the poor wretch was only suffering from nightmares and should have changed her diet.” Yehezkel caught himself and exhaled to calm down.

  “I could go on, Brother, but there isn’t any point. I can’t stop you bleeding this poor man, but perhaps Master Ugo will, as he is in charge in this tent.” Yehezkel turned and marched off, fuming.

  One of the wounded Templar knights who spent some days in the tent was Iňigo Sanchez. From him, when he’d recovered enough to speak, Aillil discovered that André de Rosson was dead, struck by an arrow during a rear guard charge.

  “I’ll miss him,” wheezed Iňigo as Aillil bent over him, “but at least he’d already achieved his greatest ambition . . . to be called a brave man by established brave men.”

  He coughed up a little blood. “I shouldn’t complain . . . he earned his martyrdom, saved his soul. If I think of the eternal flames he’s been spared, I couldn’t ask more for him . . . but what can I do? The flesh is weak, and I had grown fond of the young fool!”

  Aillil didn’t feel the aching void he’d felt when Don Sancio died, but later he remembered André’s outrage for small injustices and once more agreed with the perfecti in Montréal: when it comes to the young, death always picks those who least deserve to die.

  The day after the disaster, as physicians and scavengers roamed the battlefield, Pelagius seethed with rage at the Italian friar whose doom-saying caused the Roman contingent’s dishonorable conduct. In truth, the cardinal was secretly pleased by the outcome of the battle: now the nobles would quit harassing him and press on with the siege, as he wanted, and as the Mohammedan book of prophecies indicated was the only way to victory.

  But the friar’s defeatist words had to be punished. Pelagius hadn’t wanted a famous holy man to suffer martyrdom under his watch, but now he had a vision of his journey back to Italy. The papal legate’s ship, destined for legend, the precious casket with the body of the soon-to-be-sainted martyr on her deck. This led his mind to the problem of how to secure the body from the Saracens after they were done burning, or beheading, or dismembering, or hanging poor Brother Francesco.

  The cardinal thought of the fame the Italian’s Imitatio Christi—after all, his most ardent wish—would procure for Pelagius Galvani. He smiled. Not to speak of the information the Jew promised to deliver in exchange for an honorable discharge. If al-Kamil was really weak, as soon as Damietta fell he would march on al-Kahira. There would be no limit to what the church could demand from Venice and Genoa for such a prize! He had to seem distraught by the disaster, but not everything was as bad as it looked.

  Pelagius summoned Yehezkel and Francesco, and soon the tall Jew and short friar stood before him. “I wrongly interpreted the prophecies in the Arabic translation,” he said. “In hindsight, as is often the case with prophecy, I understand that both Francesco’s mission to the sultan and the rumors of an army massacring the Saracens in the east are events described in the book. I just hadn’t recognized them!”

  Yehezkel’s heart missed a beat. His curiosity made him speak out of place. “I’ve not come across this rumor, Your Eminence. Can you tell us more?”

  Pelagius would normally have scorned the brazen request, but the Jew was now in his employ. “Hordes of savages on small horses attacked the Khwarezmian Empire from the east,” he said with ill-disguised delight. “They kill everyone, including women and children, in every city they take. A letter I just received says Samarkand has fallen, and the s
ultan fears they’ll ride on Baghdad next.”

  The cardinal beamed at the vision of the enemies of the Cross defeated in every corner of the world. “The letter from Rome says these must be the armies of Prester John, the powerful eastern king who became Christian and wrote a letter to the emperor in the Polis fifty years ago . . . well, maybe it’s his son. Anyway, now I see that this menace in the east is also foretold in the book.”

  Yehezkel had heard of the famous Prester John in Montpellier, but having spoken with enough Jewish merchants back in Egypt who traveled to the farthest eastern lands, he knew that no such king ever existed, and the only Christians that far east were a few scattered followers of the heretic Nestorius. He thought of the recent fever among Jews over the imminent arrival of the Messiah of David and couldn’t help wondering if the warriors laying waste to Mohammedan lands in the east might be the ten lost tribes of Israel coming home as the prophecies said they would in the last days.

  Pelagius interrupted his messianic musings. “Anyway, that is not why I called you two. I’ve decided to allow you to cross the lines to Färiskür.”

  Before he could say another word, Francesco was on his knees, kissing the hem of his crimson robe. “God bless you, good Father, for being humble enough to open your eyes to His plan!”

  Pelagius stepped back from the ragged heap of cloth. “So far, your visions have proved their power as a curse, Brother Francesco!” he sneered. “Now we’ll see if they can shine as a blessing. If the sultan accepts Christ, I swear I’ll give up my cardinalate and become a penitent friar of your order!” His laugh was harsh. Then he turned to Yehezkel.

  “As for you . . . I don’t trust you, Rabbi, but you live in Provence, so remember: if you don’t bring back the goods you promised, you’ll be hunted down as a deserter. Unless, that is, you decide to stay in Egypt. But even then, watch your step, Master Ezekiel. I could come after you in al-Kahira, you never know . . .”