by Jan Guillou
When Arn met Father Louis at the same place in the arcade just before lauds the next morning, he was given absolution in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Virgin. But just as they knelt to pray together in thanksgiving, Father Louis was disturbed by a great wailing in the midst of the pre-dawn silence. He had heard the sound before but had not yet asked what it was.
Arn, who saw his concern, calmed him by telling him that it was only the muezzin of the unbelievers calling his faithful to morning prayer by assuring them that God was great. Father Louis was then completely distracted in his prayers when he realized that the enemy unbelievers seemed to assume that it was the most natural thing in the world to hold their blasphemous prayers in the midst of God’s most holy city. But at the moment he did not want to address that problem.
Arn thanked God for His grace. Yet he did not seem so overwhelmed or even surprised that he had so easily received absolution for such a grave sin, and with only a week’s penance on bread and water.
In the past, Arn’s spiritual father Henri had seemed to forgive serious sins of that type with equal nonchalance. This was now the second time that Arn had received absolution of sin after having killed a Christian man. The first time, when Father Henri had forgiven him, Arn had been very young, hardly more than a child. Back then he had been consumed by fear, and because of his lack of experience when he defended himself against two peasants who were trying to kill him, he ended up slaying them both. It was explained to him that the sin could be forgiven because it had been the fault of those who were killed, and the Virgin Mary had intervened to save a young maiden’s love. There were other details that Arn could now hardly remember, but he had indeed been forgiven.
The only sin that hadn’t been quickly forgiven in his life was still the one that was reckoned the greatest: the fact that he had loved his betrothed Cecilia in the flesh only a short time before such a deed would have had God’s blessing. For that sin Arn had done almost twenty years of penance. But still he had never honestly been able to understand why this particular sin had been the one out of many that could not be forgiven.
Nor had he been able to understand God’s intention in sending him so far away to the Holy Land. He had killed many men, that was true. But could that have really been God’s sole purpose?
The new patriarch of Jerusalem, who held the highest position in Roman Christendom after the Holy Father himself, was a man who effortlessly exceeded his own evil reputation. The patriarch’s palace stood adjacent to the royal palace and was soon known throughout Jerusalem as the place where they had turned night into day. One of his most notorious lovers was soon called the Patriarchess, and people spat after her covered litter whenever she came to visit the holy city. The king’s mother Agnes de Courtenay did not object that her lover the patriarch had other women, simply because she also had other men.
Exactly how the appointment of the new patriarch had come about remained forever unclear. Archbishop William of Tyrus was believed to be the obvious successor to the high position by all who understood anything about the struggle for ecclesiastical power. But he had not merely lost the fight with the sinful fornicator Heraclius when it came to the patriarchal throne. He also had to endure the ignominy of being excommunicated almost immediately after his painful loss, supposedly because of a long series of alleged sins which he had not committed, as surely as the new patriarch Heraclius had done far worse.
Archbishop William of Tyrus, whom history made forever infamous even as it decorously drew a veil over the misdeeds of Heraclius, had to demean himself further by making the long, uncomfortable journey to Rome to persuade the Holy Father to rescind the excommunication. In everyone’s opinion, it was quite certain that he would be successful in his mission. At the same time many, including Heraclius himself, assumed that the knowledgeable and ecclesiastically skilful Archbishop William would no doubt be able to reveal certain things that would threaten the new patriarch’s position in Jerusalem.
Unfortunately for the Holy Land, William was poisoned shortly after his arrival in Rome, and the documents he had been carrying disappeared without a trace.
Hence Heraclius had now secured the throne for himself as Jerusalem’s patriarch. Not even Saladin understood how well this situation would play right into his hands.
The cease-fire that was in effect at the time of William of Tyrus’s murder was now broken, and for the most common of reasons. Reynald de Châtillon could not restrain himself when he saw all the richly loaded caravans traveling between Mecca and Damascus that passed by his fortress of Kerak in Oultrejourdain. He resumed his plundering raids.
It was soon demonstrated that the deathly ill king in Jerusalem could not control his vassal Reynald, and thus war with Saladin was inevitable.
Saladin then crossed the River Jordan above the Sea of Galilee and began to plunder his way south through Galilee in the hope of luring the Christian army into a decisive battle.
Because Guy de Lusignan, the fool with the flowing locks, was now married to the king’s sister, he was legally the successor to the throne. That meant he was also the supreme commander of the royal army, which he would have to lead against Saladin himself for the first time. His task was not an easy one. It wouldn’t have been easy even for Count Raymond of Tripoli, who put himself and his knights under Guy’s command, more or less reluctantly, just as the Templars and Hospitallers joined in with a large number of knights.
The Grand Master of the Templar Order had entrusted the command over all Templar knights to his friend Arn de Gothia. The Hospitallers were led by Grand Master Roger des Moulins.
When the Christian and Saracen forces had their first hostile encounter in the Galilee, the irresolute Guy de Lusignan was plied with contradictory advice from all sides.
Arn de Gothia, who again had authority to make use of his Bedouin scouts, said that he was sure that they could see only a small part of the enemy forces, and that an attack would thus be foolhardy and exactly what Saladin was hoping for. If, on the other hand, they held their position and took up a defensive posture, then the light Arabian cavalry would have a hard time attacking. Or, if they did attack out of impatience, they would be quickly defeated, because the Christians had come to rely increasingly on many footsoldiers with longbows. They could send swarms of arrows a long distance, in such numbers that the sky would grow dark. A light Arabian cavalry that rode in under such a black cloud of arrows would be annihilated before it reached the front lines.
Some of the worldly barons and Guy’s own brother Amalrik de Lusignan, who had become the highest commander of the royal army next to Guy himself, advocated an immediate attack with all the cavalry, since the enemy seemed clearly inferior in numbers. Guy’s mother-in-law’s brother, Joscelyn de Courtenay, had also been given a high post in the royal army, and he too wanted to attack at once.
The Grand Master of the Hospitallers, Roger des Moulins, would have been expected to disagree with whatever plan the Templars promoted, as expected. But since he and Arn de Gothia had had a private discussion, he was leaning toward the opinion that an attack would be foolhardy. There was a great danger, he thought, that they might be lured into the same trap as at Marj Ayyoun.
In this situation the unreliable courtier Guy de Lusignan could not make up his mind in favor of one plan or the other.
Over time the test of strength ran out into the sand, so that neither side won. Saladin failed in his attempt to persuade all the Christians’ heavy cavalry to rush out to seize the first small quarry so that he could then lure them into the waiting trap. On the other hand, he had no plans at all to carry out the reverse tactic, to attack a well-armored Christian army with light cavalry.
As far as Saladin was concerned, this war that did not happen was of little consequence. No one was threatening Saladin’s position of power in either Cairo or Damascus; he had no angry prince to whom he needed to justify a failed war. And he reckoned that eventually new opportunities would present themselves.
Home at the court in Jerusalem, Guy de Lusignan had a hard time defending himself against all those who had been part of the abortive siege and claimed they knew exactly how they could have defeated Saladin if only Guy had not been so stupid as to rely on cowardly Templars and Hospitallers. Guy had everyone against him; even his mother-in-law, Agnes, appeared to have acquired the knowledge of an experienced battlefield commander.
King Baldwin IV was now completely blind from leprosy and could no longer move. Nor could he defend himself from the lamentations that rose up around him. Guy de Lusignan was an indecisive and cowardly bungler, and it would be a disaster to have such a man as king.
Something had to be done, and time was short because death was breathing down the leprous king’s neck. He appointed his sister Sibylla’s six-year-old son, also named Baldwin, as successor to the throne. And he made Guy de Lusignan the count of Ashkelon and Jaffa, but with the condition that the count must live in Ashkelon and not make life miserable at the court in Jerusalem by his presence. With much gnashing of teeth and many harsh words, Guy de Lusignan moved to Ashkelon, taking with him Sibylla and her sickly son.
It was evident to all that the six-year-old prince regent was in ill health. The king’s stratagem of making the boy the successor to the throne was therefore mostly intended as a maneuver to prevent Guy de Lusignan from seizing power.
It was now in God’s hands as to which of the two would die first, the twenty-four-year-old King Baldwin or his six-year-old namesake.
Father Louis had been forced to wait for several months before a suitable occasion arose when the Grand Master of the Knights Templar, Arnoldo de Torroja, and Jerusalem’s Master Arn de Gothia could meet with him in Jerusalem at the same time. They were most often out traveling, the Grand Master because he had to make all the difficult decisions within the order from Christian Armenia in the north to Gaza in the south, and Arn de Gothia because as commander-in-chief he constantly had to visit the various fortresses of the order.
But Father Louis wanted to find a time when he could meet with them both, and in a situation of relative peace and quiet. The nature of his mission was such that it would weigh very heavily upon the shoulders of a single man, and two heads were always better than one. It could not be helped that his secret would be betrayed when he presented the matter; then it would be revealed that he was not some old monk on a pilgrimage but actually the Holy Father’s special envoy and informant.
He thought that Arn de Gothia may have already realized the truth, since the hospitality lavished on Father Louis in Jerusalem was far beyond what was normal. Father Louis had been allowed to take lodgings in the Templar quarter instead of resorting to the nearby Cistercian cloister on the Mount of Olives; so he was literally living in the heart of power, as every secret informant would prefer.
If Arn de Gothia had understood the real nature of Father Louis’s mission in the holy city, then it was no wonder that he extended the utmost hospitality. But Father Louis was unsure of how much Arn actually knew, for the strange knight seemed to have become quite attached to him. He often sought out Father Louis to have long conversations on both ecclesiastical and secular topics, much as he would have sought out his old confessor, Father Henri, in the faraway cloister in Western Götaland whose name Father Louis had forgotten.
Out of old habit Arnoldo de Torroja and Arn de Gothia now sat down with their guest out in the arcade in the twilight after completorium. They began to joke about the city’s mixture of holy and less holy odors and sounds, so that the tone of the conversation was at first indecorously merry and not appropriate to what Father Louis wished to discuss.
Yet when he saw the two high Templars sitting next to each other he was also deeply moved. Outwardly they were very different from each other: one tall with dark eyes and black hair and beard, mercurial in his temperament, jocular and witty like a man at any of the greatest courts in the world. The other was blond with an almost white beard and pale blue eyes, his figure almost slight in contrast to the stocky de Torroja, his demeanor thoughtful and many of his comments brusquely gruff. So they were like the symbol of the immiscible: the fiery south and the cold north, yet both equally devoted to the cause, possessing no personal property, with no other reasons for waging war than to defend Christianity and God’s Grave. Saint Bernard must be laughing in Heaven upon seeing these two together, thought Father Louis. It would be impossible to get any closer than this in the material world to Bernard’s dream of the new knighthood that would sacrifice everything for God.
Then there was the side of the matter that Father Louis had the hardest time understanding. Both these men were experienced in courtly and spiritual matters. If their beards were shaved and their warlike white mantle with the red cross was replaced with a monk’s white habit, they would be able to sit quite naturally in any arcade in any cloister together with Father Henri.
Yet there was something inexplicable that set them apart. These men were among the best warriors in the world. They were fearsome on the battlefield; everyone who understood military questions could testify to that. And yet they presented these kindly looks, these cautious smiles, and this quiet speech. That, precisely that, was probably the clearest manifestation of blessed Saint Bernard’s vision.
In order to put a stop to the lighthearted tone of the conversation in which they were engaged, Father Louis fell silent and said a short prayer with his head bowed. The other two instantly took the hint and unconsciously settled in to listen. Both knights fell silent.
Now was the time for Father Louis to speak.
He began by telling them the truth, that he was the special envoy of the Holy Father. He explained that all the Cistercians who had come and gone since the first monk he had brought with him, Pietro de Siena, had all traveled to Rome, taking letters directly to the Holy Father.
Both of his listeners remained stone-faced as he spoke; it was impossible to tell whether they had already guessed the secret or whether it was unexpected news to them.
Naturally letters came back in reply from the Holy Father and his chancellery in Rome. And a particularly unpleasant matter had now come to light. The patriarch of Jerusalem, Heraclius, had a man in his service named Pleidion who was apparently a runaway servant from the heretical church in Constantinople. Exactly what sort of work this Pleidion did for Heraclius was not entirely possible to ascertain; he seemed to take care of a multitude of tasks, especially in connection with the unmentionable nightly activities that often took place at the patriarch’s palace.
Only now did Father Louis’s account cause both listeners to raise their eyebrows in mild surprise, whether it was because of the news itself about Pleidion or because Father Louis had managed to learn what this less than reputable individual was up to.
Father Louis now came to the unpleasant part. Archbishop William of Tyrus had been poisoned to death when he was in Rome, just before he was to have an audience with the Holy Father. It had long been known that this death was murder; the evidence found in the dead man’s room as well as the color of his face when he was discovered had told its tale all too well.
But now they knew who had visited him during the hour before he died. It was none other than Pleidion. That also explained the mysterious disappearance of all the documents that Archbishop William had brought with him to present at his audience with the Pope.
As far as the Holy See was concerned, there was no longer any doubt about the truth of this matter. Heraclius’s minion Pleidion had been given the assignment to murder Archbishop William of Tyrus.
Some research had been done into the background of this Heraclius. He was born in Auvergne around 1130 to a family of meager means; he had served as a singer in the village church, but otherwise had not been consecrated as either a priest or a monk, which m
ight explain why the man couldn’t speak Latin. He had come with the mobs of adventurers to the Holy Land but preferred to use lies and deceit rather than to fight to gain favor. Father Louis did not have all the details about Heraclius’s path to power, but he had basically acquired influence through the many lovers he had bedded. The most important one, of course, was the king’s mother, Agnes de Courtenay. But her predecessor, Pasque de Riveri, the woman called “Madame la Patriarchesse,” had surely meant a great deal for the man’s ascent to the second highest ecclesiastical office in the world.
Summa summarum. The patriarch of Jerusalem was a deceiver and a poisoner.
There Father Louis concluded his account without mentioning anything about the Holy Father’s decision in the matter.
“What you have told us, Father,” said Arnoldo de Torroja, “is most disquieting. Something of this man’s evil talents was known to both me and Brother Arn. But the awful truth that he ordered the venerable William of Tyrus poisoned is an utter surprise to us. And that, of course, brings me to the obvious question. Why are you telling us this now, and what do you, or your exalted principal, want us to do with this knowledge?”
“It is my task simply to convey this information, but you may not share it with anyone outside the rank that you both hold,” said Father Louis tensely, because he found this part of his instructions difficult to impart. “If someone succeeds Arn de Gothia, you Arnoldo shall inform his successor of this matter. And the same applies to you, Arn de Gothia.”