The Warring States (The Wave Trilogy)
Page 44
34 The sensual peoples of the East will pay ridiculous sums for spices unknown to them.
35 Account-books breathlessly list ‘jacinths, chrysoltes, emerauds, and pearls as large as peeled onions’.
36 The scandalous history of Oltremare’s first century suggests it was the latter.
37 The Khazarian Reconquista is outside the scope of this work but the northeast quarter recovered sooner.
38 The Author is no theologian but the Curia’s doctrine, that the Ebionites were schismatics who had corrupted the one true faith, is obviously simplistic. In many ways, the Rabbis retain a purer version of Mary’s message. Few Concordian scholars would dispute the Ebionite characterisation of Etrurian Madonna-worship as idolatry.
39 Met by a remilitarised Radinate, the Second Crusade failed. This was to become a wearingly repetitious pattern.
40 The innovative mood extended to religion. Intermingling flavours of heresy made Oltremare’s Faith a strange stew. The cult of death, epitomised in the grim Madonna Muerta, outrages both Ebionite and Etrurian sensibilities.
41 The Fraticelli had by now been domesticated and enfolded (smothered, some would say) within the cloak of Mother Church. The movement had given the declining Curia some much-needed creditability, but perhaps the cardinals believed that Gubbio’s holy fool had reached the end of his usefulness and that a suitably pathetic martyrdom would restore faith in the discredited cause of Crusade.
42 This prodigy may owe more to Alexandria’s long-standing rivalry with Byzant than to the Saint’s powers of persuasion. Whatever the truth, possession of the Egyptian bread-basket saved Oltremare from extinction.
43 Ebionite for ‘the Spring of Goliath’ – an appropriate venue for giant-slaying.
44 Oltremarines still use clappers and cymbals in memory of this victory. The custom originates in the second Ebionite occupation of Jerusalem: Marians were allowed to pray on the Mount, but they were forbidden to ring bells.
45 When Oltremare conquered Byzant, the Ariminumese merchants in the city assumed the existing arrangement would continue. They were shocked to be expelled along with the Ebionites.
46 Those who chose the safety of Oltremarine cities paid the price in the degrading trades allowed to them: servants, tanners and blacksmiths, horse traders, executioners and accountants.
47 Meanwhile, far from Akka’s influence, Byzant persued its own destiny. Though Marian now, Byzant’s traditional cycle of war and trade with her neighbours went on exactly as before. As time passed, and Byzant’s spheres of influence drifted westwards, Akka’s seniority became but a legal fiction.
48 The other contender is how a scheme designed to bolster the Curia finally destroyed it. The legal innovation of selling Atonement, concocted to finance the Crusades, opened the floodgates for a wave of corruption. When the flood of opprobrium subsided, the cardinals had been replaced by engineers and the world upended.