Lion Heart (5 page)
His English is heavily accented.
‘Thank you. Thank you for taking the time to see me.’
‘I have time,
inshallah
. Now I am only employed to keep the archive, although I have my own projects. I am eighty-four years old.’
He is a small, neat man, with closely cropped grey hair; I picture him burrowing like a mole in archives and caves and parchment and rolls of vellum and tombs and shards of pottery. His face is childish – perhaps I mean childlike – although creased and sun-damaged. I know that he reads Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic, Anglo-Norman French, Occitan and the
langue d’oïl
. On the journey here I tried to imagine how he has passed the last forty or fifty years. He is wearing a grey habit rather than the Dominican white; under that I can see huge lace-up black shoes. The shoes seem to me at least as monkish as the habit.
‘Would you like to see the library where your father worked?’
We walk through a courtyard enclosed by colonnades, to create a sort of cloister. Forming one side of the courtyard is the library. Actually, it seems to be part library and part store. Scattered amongst the desks and the dark bookshelves are complete Roman and Jewish tombs – looking like the lead planters outside stately homes – sections of columns, Latin, Hebrew and Greek inscriptions on ancient stones, Roman busts, ossuaries – some decorated with rosettes and inscribed with the names of the person whose bones they contained – and many jars made from the ochre and pomegranate clay of the area. One of these, Father Prosper says, contained a scroll from Cave 7 at Qumran. It has a single word on it, possibly in Latin, ‘Roma’, which has exercised many scholars. He shows me a desk on which a terracotta head stands.
‘Your father worked here. When he was not in the field.’
He says this with a small smile, affectionate and perhaps complicit, as though we share some knowledge of my father and his habits.
‘What did he do while he was here?’
‘Well, he liked to go to the excavations, and also he was always looking for something in the library or in the Rockefeller Museum or in the Crusader castles. And Qumran.’
‘In his papers I see he believed Qumran was an early Christian settlement.’
‘There were many ideas at the time. Many. Your father was not the only one. William Gyngell, also English, believed it and he was a brilliant scholar. Your father and he went drinking. Later Gyngell had a mental breakdown, alcohol-related, you know. He made anti-Semitic remarks publicly. He hated Israel, because he felt it had stolen two thousand years of history and that it was trying to promote Judaism above Christianity. He believed in a thing he called “Christology” and he believed that the scrolls were about a struggle between the high priests of the temple and the followers of Christ. He influenced your father in this.’
Later I wondered if he meant that my father had also become anti-Semitic.
‘Did my father ever talk about King Richard the Lionheart?’
‘Yes, he did.’
He treats me to his understanding, innocent smile again. My father was obsessed with the Third Crusade, and tried to find documents of that period or casual inscriptions and works of art; he was forever asking Father Prosper to help him with translations; he says that my father became immersed in reports of lost messages sent between Richard and Saladin after they had fought each other to a standstill in 1192. He looked at hundreds of inscriptions and documents in the Rockefeller Museum, and he tried to find the cache of legal documents lost by the Latin Kingdom after Saladin took Jerusalem. The Latin Kingdom, Father Prosper tells me, was run like any medieval European state, with kings and nobility, knights, courts, bishoprics and councils which produced reams of documentation. He says that my father was sure that Saladin, who both feared and admired Richard, had secretly given him the True Cross as part of a deal which would cede Jerusalem, while allowing free access to the holy places by Christian pilgrims. Saladin had captured it in 1187, after it had been in the hands of the Primates of Jerusalem since
ad
328, when legend has it Helena, mother of Constantine, found it at Golgotha. What is certain is that the True Cross has vanished.
In the refectory, we have a lunch of hummus and peppers in oil, with a glass of red wine from a Trappist monastery near Latrun. Father Prosper asks me where I am staying; he says I can move to the guest rooms at the École Biblique free, as I am a legitimate researcher. I explain that I have paid for three weeks at the American Colony Hotel, and after that I will take him up gratefully on his offer. He says I may use the library to write my thesis; he will confirm this with the Prior. I don’t reveal that my project is a sinecure, possibly with undertones of unrequited Greek love.
Father Prosper tells me that my father spent five days walking all over the battlefield of Hattin, where, on 4 July 1187, Saladin was said to have captured the True Cross. My father slept on the ground at night. Perhaps he was trying to sense through mystic channels the real truth. But I am also beginning to understand that Israel is a place where every rock and wadi is invested with significance; the difficulty is that they are semaphoring different messages to different people.
Still, I can also see why my father might have camped out on the Horns of Hattin: the terrible loss of the Crusader forces at Hattin, and the capture of Jerusalem a few weeks later, were a call to arms that the red-haired, red-garbed, six-foot-five Richard the Lionheart, King of England, Duke of Normandy, Count of Poitou, the poster-boy of the belligerents, could not resist. That year he took the cross: his mind was inflamed with the dream of taking back Jerusalem from the infidel.
4
I have spent
the night in my sleeping bag on the spot where Guy de Lusignan, the King of Jerusalem, pitched his red tent (red seems to have been fashionable among the Frankish Crusaders) up on the Horns of Hattin, overlooking the Lake of Galilee. Down below, along the water, was Saladin’s vast encampment. Like Guy – like my father – I am facing east. In our world-view, all trouble comes from the east. Down there, the lake is taking on the battered sheen of old cutlery.
It is not a profound thought, but I am aware that the lake would have looked exactly the same eight hundred years ago, and exactly the same when my father spent his three nights here. Now the surface of this biblical water is being brushed with a gleaming molten wash, applied in broad strokes. The sky above the low hills beyond the lake is touched with silver, shot with pink, but the sun proper is still some way off. These shards of colour are the heralds of what is to come. I think of the banners and flags of an approaching army. Or of a sophisticated ice cream.
King Guy’s forces had moved out to Sephoris where there was plenty of water when news came that Saladin had crossed the Jordan and was heading for Tiberias. Saladin was incensed because Reynald de Châtillon, Master of Kerak, had attacked and plundered a caravan from Mecca, despite the truce the Latin Kingdom and Saladin’s caliphate had made. Saladin wanted revenge. The Grand Master of the Temple, Gerard de Ridfort, in his ceremonial white, emblazoned with a huge red cross, tried to persuade King Guy to move towards Tiberias. One of those besieged was the wife of Count Raymond of Tripoli and she had sent a messenger asking for help. Despite this, Raymond advised against moving towards Tiberias. The besieged, he said, were in no immediate danger: Saladin was preparing a trap; the Crusader army was twenty miles away from Tiberias; it would not last long in the parched countryside. It was up to Saladin to move.
Both Grand Master Gerard and Reynald de Châtillon accused Raymond of Tripoli of being a coward or in league with Saladin. They cited chivalric duty, pointedly. For all that, Raymond’s advice was accepted by the council. But Guy, who always listened to the last opinion he was offered, changed his mind when Grand Master Gerard crept into his tent and asked, ‘Sire, are you going to trust a traitor?’ Guy decided to advance; the heralds were sent out, trumpets blaring. In appalling heat the vast army of one thousand two hundred knights and fifteen thousand infantry marched all day over the Galilean hills until the Knights Templars, the hard men, themselves said their horses could go no further without water. The well they were relying on proved to be dry and Saladin had ordered all the other wells en route poisoned; now he blocked the route to the water below.
Raymond of Tripoli said, ‘Ah, Lord God, the war is over. We are dead men. The kingdom is finished.’
The Christian army made uneasy camp on the Horns of Hattin, horribly exposed. The army was made up of large and small contingents of Genoese, Greeks, Germans, Dalmatians, Serbs, Sicilians, French, English, Pisans, Patzinaks, Poitevins, Russians, Bulgars, Langobardians, Lombardians, Provençals, Venetians, Tuscans, Bretons, Brabançons, Flemings, Gascons, Spaniards, Burgundians and Normans. Down below was an army of Egyptians, Kurds, Arabs, Turks, Armenians and Sudanese numbering thirty thousand.
All night the exhausted and dehydrated Crusaders were harassed and kept awake; before dawn they could hear the calls to prayer from below where the thirty thousand were readying themselves for battle. These were the same calls that I had heard from Room 6 in the American Colony Hotel.
As the sun suddenly stripped the darkness off the hills like used sheets, the Crusaders were offered a terrifying sight, described by Saladin’s secretary or
kdtib
, Imad ad-Din al-Isfahani:
A swelling ocean of whinnying chargers, swords and cuirasses, iron-tipped lances like stars, crescent swords, Yemenite blades, yellow banners, standards red as anemones and coats of mail glittering like pools, swords polished bright as streams of water, feathered bows as blue as hummingbirds, helmets gleaming above curveting chargers.
The Crusaders were in the trap.
Now the Saracens set light to the dry scrub, sending choking clouds of smoke up the hill, blinding the Christians as the Saracens took up battle stations, with Saladin at the centre, surrounded by his loyal Mamelukes. The Bishop of Acre, standing in for the Patriarch of Jerusalem, raised the True Cross. The Saracens sent wave after wave of cavalry against the Franks who repulsed them, each time more weakly. King Guy had his tent moved to the summit of the hill. He ordered Raymond of Tripoli to break through to the water: a surcoat over his armour, emblazoned with a red cross on a yellow background, Raymond mounted his horse. Balian of Ibelin, his surcoat decorated with a white cross, immediately followed. They led their knights in a charge down the hill; but Saladin ordered Taki ed-Din to open their ranks, so that Raymond and Balian galloped harmlessly and futilely through. They could not attack from behind the lines, and headed for Tripoli, so escaping the massacre that was to follow. Armenian archers sent showers of arrows – ‘clouds of locusts’ – at the Frankish army. Although tormented by thirst and aware that they were doomed, the Crusaders kept on attacking. A Muslim chronicler, Baha ad-Din ibn Shaddad, wrote:
They were closely beset as in a noose, while still marching on as though being driven to a death that they could see before them, certain of their doom and destruction and knowing that the following day they would be visiting their graves.
Now I hear the armies. It is cold: I am still in my sleeping bag. I can hear a great roar, the clashing of armour, the shouts of
Dieu lo vult – God wills it
, and
Allahu Akbar – God is great
, and C
aelum denique – Heaven at last
rising with the Templar cry,
Le Beau-séant
, honouring their black over white banner. I can hear the ringing of swords, the thundering of galloping knights, the wasp-music of the arrows, the blacksmith collisions of the knights, the whinnying agony of the wounded, blameless horses, the incoherent appeals to God of the injured – all unanswered. There were said to have been rivers of blood. Did the blood really cascade down the hill, across the Roman road, which to this day follows the shoreline, and into the reedy fingers of the lake? I think it must be a figure of speech. The thin soil would certainly have sucked it up.
Thirty thousand died in a few hours. In his red tent, King Guy surrendered and was taken down the hill towards Saladin’s pavilion.
Imad ad-Din al-Isfahani, who was present, wrote:
Saladin invited the King [Guy] to sit beside him, and when Arnat [Reynald] entered in his turn, he seated him next to his king and reminded him of his misdeeds. ‘How many times have you sworn an oath and violated it? How many times have you signed agreements you have never respected?’ Reynald answered through a translator, ‘Kings have always acted thus. I did nothing more.’ During this time King Guy was gasping with thirst, his head dangling as though drunk, his face betraying great fright. Saladin spoke reassuring words to him, had cold water brought, and offered it to him. The King drank, then handed what remained to Reynald, who slaked his thirst in turn. The Sultan then said to Guy: ‘You did not ask permission before giving him water. I am therefore not obliged to grant him mercy.’ After pronouncing these words, the Sultan smiled, mounted his horse, and rode off, leaving the captives in terror. He supervised the return of the troops, and then came back to his tent. He ordered Reynald brought there, then advanced before him, sword in hand, and struck him between the neck and the shoulder blade. When Reynald fell, he cut off his head and dragged the body by its feet to the King, who began to tremble. Seeing him thus upset, Saladin said to him in a reassuring tone, ‘This man was killed only because of his maleficence and perfidy.’