Siege of Heaven
Page 46
We put into Cyprus and Rhodes, then turned north. One day we sailed past Patmos, the island where Saint John the Divine received his revelation of the world’s end. I stared at it, a rocky outcrop barely distinguishable from the mainland behind, and wondered how much evil had come from the visions he saw in that cave. I was glad to see it slide into the distance behind us. The days were getting shorter now, the winds fresher: the sea was crowded with ships all hurrying to their harbours before the onset of autumn. The urgency affected all of us, and instead of watching the wake or the waves we began to gather in the bow, staring at the sea ahead.
At the beginning of October, we reached the port of Tenedos. According to some authorities, it was where the Greeks had hidden their fleet during the siege of Troy, but there were few ships there now – only a gaggle of merchantmen waiting for the wind to change so they could navigate through the Hellespont and up to Constantinople. Here, Saewulf announced, he would leave us.
‘I could spend a month waiting for the wind to change,’ he explained. ‘And another month waiting to get out again. You can get a boat to the mainland and be home in half that time.’
I looked at the grey sky and the white wavecaps beyond the harbour. ‘But you can’t take to the seas again now. I thought they were closed in winter.’
He grinned. ‘The seas are never closed to an Englishman. And I’ve been away from home too long. Even if it’s cold and wet and stinks of Normans.’
His was not the only farewell we had to make on Tenedos – nor the hardest. On the night before we parted, I was sitting by the mast with Everard on my knee, pointing out the constellations to him, when Sigurd and Saewulf came on deck. In a few short words, Sigurd told me his plans.
‘I’m not going back to Constantinople.’
I looked up in surprise. ‘Where will you go?’
‘To England – with Saewulf.’
On my knee, Everard tugged at the sleeve of my tunic, peeved to find himself forgotten. I ignored him. The delicate peace in my soul, so patiently stitched together on the voyage, was torn apart again. ‘To England?’ I stared from one to the other. Neither looked happy with the decision. ‘I thought you swore you would never return while the Normans ruled.’ Every atrocity, every insult, every obloquy that I had ever heard against the Normans raced through my mind, and I wanted to hurl each one back at him. ‘You’re a captain of the palace guard. Would you give all that up to live the life of a peasant in a captive land?’
Sigurd sighed. ‘The emperor doesn’t need me – any more than he needed Aelfric or Thomas or Nikephoros – or even you. If anyone asks, tell them I died at Jerusalem.’
Saewulf looked no happier than I did. ‘It’ll break your heart,’ he warned. ‘The country you remember vanished a long time ago. Better to stay here and cherish it as it was.’
Sigurd shook his head. ‘If you believed that, you wouldn’t have gone back yourself.’
‘But Constantinople is your home,’ I said.
‘Constantinople is your home,’ he corrected me. ‘It was mine, too, for a time. Now I must go back. When you get to Constantinople, find my family and tell them to follow as soon as they can. They’ll understand.’
I realised then that I could not dissuade him. I pulled myself to my feet and embraced him. As ever, it was like putting my arms around an oak tree.
‘Try not to kill the first Norman you see.’
He grunted. ‘Try to keep out of trouble yourself. Remember you won’t have me to protect you any more.’
They sailed away next morning. I sat on the quay, watching the ship diminish until it slipped over the horizon. Then, surrounded by my family, I turned east and set out on the final stage.
***
Those last two weeks were the happiest of the entire journey. Though we were late in the year, the weather blessed us with a succession of clear days, each more brilliant than the last. The sun shone, and in the evenings a dewy haze descended to cloak the world in soft mystery. All around us we could see the world gathering itself in for the winter. Fields had been harvested and ploughed, flocks brought down from the summer pasture, firewood piled up ready for burning. If we did not speak much now, it was because we did not need words to describe how we felt. Each of us was seized with hope, and with sweet anticipation.
It was evening when we arrived at Constantinople. We came over a hill and there it was – the eastern suburbs of Chrysopolis falling away to the Bosphorus beneath us, and the domes and towers of the city rising in their splendour across the shining water. I could see Ayia Sophia, majestic on its promontory, and the many terraces of the palace cascading down the hill. The autumn sun was setting behind a cloud in the west, casting the sky, the water, the city, the whole world in molten gold. From across the strait, I thought I could hear the chant of the priests at vespers.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen it from this side before,’ murmured Helena. ‘It’s beautiful.’
We went down to the water’s edge, and waited for the boatman to ferry us across.
Tελos
Historical Note
The capture of Jerusalem by the First Crusade in 1099 stands as one of the great cataclysms of history. Through a potent combination of zealotry, pent-up frustration and greed, the crusaders massacred more or less every man, woman and child in the city, depopulating it for generations to come and leaving a legacy of hatred whose effects are still being felt today.
As always, I have tried to be as faithful as possible to the facts and chronology of established events, while putting my own interpretation on the motives, meanings, and the gaps in the record. If the story seems to meander in places, it may be because the crusaders, who had been so brutally single-minded in rampaging across Asia Minor and grinding out victory at Antioch, dithered for months when the road to Jerusalem lay open. The princes seemed to lose interest completely, preferring to nurse their jealousies and quarrel over the spoils they had won that far. Even when they did manage to move on, first to Ma’arat and then to Arqa, they quickly stalled.
In those circumstances, the emergence of Peter Bartholomew as the angry voice of the frustrated poor is hardly surprising. My own sense, which I have tried to convey in the book, is that he was a charlatan who stumbled onto an unexpectedly successful ploy, who grew ever more extreme as he tested the limits of his newfound power, and who eventually came to believe his own hype, to suicidal effect.
But Peter had tapped into one of the most powerful forces at work in the crusade The historical debate over the crusaders’ motives is as energetic as it is futile, but it seems clear that a strong thread of millenarianism inspired many of them. The key biblical text used to preach the crusade – ‘If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me’ (Matthew 16:24) – is drawn from a passage where Jesus foretells the imminent second coming, and several chroniclers of the crusade show the link was clear in their minds when they begin their narratives with the omnious phrase, ‘When that time [i.e., the last days] had already come . . .’ The recapture of Jerusalem by God’s elect has always been seen as a precondition for the end of the world (which is why Christian Zionists today encourage the Jewish diaspora’s return to Israel), and in 1099 the time must have seemed particularly ripe. To the cosmopolitan armies of the crusade, fighting an exotic range of Turks, Arabs, Armenians, Berbers and Africans, it must truly have felt as though God had gathered up all the nations of the earth to wage war for Jerusalem. The fact that they were actually fighting to liberate the city from the forces of Babylon (as Cairo was inaccurately known) only added to the sense of destiny. In this context, Duke Godfrey’s decision to leave the assault just as the city fell, strip off his armour and enter the city through the Golden Gate on the Mount of Olives looks less like humility and more like a conscious evocation – or consummation – of Ezekiel’s prophecies: this was how Christ would return at the end of time.
The First Crusade effectively ended with the victory at Ascalon, thre
e weeks after the capture of Jerusalem. But that was merely the opening chapter in the two-century story of the crusaders’ attempts to master the Holy Land – and, some historians have argued, a far longer saga of western conquest and colonisation generally. Today’s map of the Middle East contains plenty of borders as artificial and fragile as those of the crusader kingdoms, while from Tehran to Baghdad to Jerusalem, the region still draws zealots of many faiths trying to build their paradises on earth. At the time of writing, none has yet succeeded.
Acknowledgements
This was not an easy book to write, but it would have been infinitely harder without the tremendous generosity of others. I owe an enormous debt to my editor, Oliver Johnson, who watched deadlines fly by with cheerful stoicism, and managed to keep my head when I was in danger of losing it. His insights on the first draft were key to shaping the final book, and gave me one of my most enjoyable days working on it (and a fine lunch to boot). Meanwhile, it would need more words than are in this book to justly describe how much my wife Marianna contributed to it: from tramping around Jerusalem to teasing out plot tangles, she endured every step of the journey with good humour and much-tested patience. I was and am lucky to have her with me.
I’m grateful as ever to the British Library, both in London and at their Boston Spa redoubt, and to the Minster Library in York. Susan Edgington generously supplied a pre-publication copy of her translation of Albert of Aachen’s chronicle, which once again gave me access to a wealth of material that would have been otherwise unavailable. The prophecy in the book is adapted from a variety of contemporary sources, but chiefly from translations of the letter of Adso of Montier-en-Der and the Revelations of Pseudo-Methodius by Bernard McGinn. The biblical excerpts are generally adapted from the New Revised Standard Version, whose copyright is held by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA.
Ariel and Sigal Knafo were wonderful hosts on my research trip to Israel, while Emma Pointon kindly showed me her holiday snaps. When inspiration ran dry at home, I found a happy substitute in the Danish Kitchen tearoom in York. Particular thanks go to my agent, Jane Conway-Gordon, and to all the people at Century who worked on giving form to the book: Charlotte Haycock, Richard Ogle, Rodney Paull, Alison Tulett and especially Steve Stone for his magnificent artwork.
The First Crusade ended in victory, but the crusaders’ work had barely begun. The atrocity at Jerusalem left a hunger for revenge across the Muslim world, while in Europe a new order had begun to assert itself. Demetrios’ journey may have ended, but the story goes on.
Tom Harper
July 2006
tom@tom-harper.co.uk
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