The Riddle and the Knight

by Giles Milton

  He ordered two more beers and thanked me again for coming to the north half of the island. 'Tt is good that you wish to understand the history," he said, "for the only way of discussing the future is to look into the past.

  "Cyprus's problems go back many, many centuries. Ottomans . . . Byzantines . . . Muslims . . . Christians . . . who can say when it all began. Perhaps the last time the island was truly united was when your knight Mand . . ."

  "... deville."

  "... yes, when your knight Mandeville was here. For in his day Cyprus was one island under one ruler. My dream is to see this happen again, but I fear it will not be possible before I die. It is a very simple problem: in Greek Cyprus they have too much history. And in Turkish Cyprus, we have too little money."

  It was very different in Mandeville's day. At the time when he says he visited the island, Cyprus was one of the richest kingdoms on earth.

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  and the monuments that He scattered around the northern half of the island all date from that period. The country found itself in such an extraordinary position only after the Muslim armies recaptured the Holy Land from the crusaders. For while the Pope forbade direct trade with the infidel, he decreed that goods from Islamic countries could be bought and sold if they first passed through the hands of a middleman. These middlemen were based in Cyprus, and the wealth they accrued left them richer than many of Europe's monarchs.

  It was an extraordinary state of affairs presided over by an extraordinary succession of kings. The Lusignan family had bought Cyprus from Richard the Lionheart, and as they grew rich, they built cathedrals, sumptuous castles, and monasteries—Gothic edifices that still crown the mountaintops of Northern Cyprus.

  Not all their money went on cathedrals and monasteries. The lavish banquets they held, and their debauched parties and riotous living, became renowned throughout Europe. Monarchs, princes, and dukes flocked to the court of King Hugh IV, and the Lusignans gradually married their eligible offspring into all the royal houses of Europe: even Queen Elizabeth II has Lusignan blood coursing through her veins.

  The chroniclers of the time—many of them prudish monks—filled their writings with tales of over-indulgence. They were horrified and fascinated in equal measure, watching the debauchery as a child watches a horror movie—hands clapped over their eyes but fingers open to allow them the occasional peek. A few joined in the fun; after all, they could always atone for their sins when they reached Jerusalem.

  One straightlaced pilgrim, a German rector named Ludolph von Suchem, recounts many anecdotes about the wealth of the nobility. There was the tradesman's daughter who wore more jewels on her head than were owned by the King of France. There was the merchant who sold a golden orb to the Sultan for 60,000 florins but, regretting his decision, offered to buy it back a few days later for double the amount. Others sound more like Imelda Marcos than medieval knights: the Count of Jaffa owned 500 hounds and employed 250 servants to bathe, guard, and anoint them. And in one celebrated incident.

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  a wealthy merchant hosted a banquet for his friends and served powdered diamonds instead of salt and pepper.

  Despite his love of the good things in life, Sir John was filled with foreboding by such wanton extravagance, and following the loss to Islam of Jerusalem and Acre, he predicts the downfall of Cyprus as well. He even records an extraordinary conversation he had with the Egyptian Sultan, setting out why Christian countries are doomed:

  'The Sultan asked me how Christians governed themselves in our countries. And I said, 'Lord, well enough—thanks be to God.' And he answered and said, Truly, no. It is not so. For your priests do not serve God properly by righteous living as they should do. For they ought to give less learned men an example of how to live well, and they do the very opposite . . . [and] when people should go to church to serve God, they go to the tavern and spend all the day—and perhaps all the night—in drinking and gluttony . . .' "

  The attack lists dozens of reasons why Europe is on the decline, and is an impressive piece of rhetoric: so impressive, in fact, that another medieval writer called Caesar of Heisterbach copied the story word for word. Or so I thought. But I had hardly finished reading Heisterbach's manuscript when I spotted a problem. He wrote his book in 1235. Mandeville didn't write his Travels until the 1350s. It was Mandeville who had copied the speech from Heisterbach, and not the other way around.

  What on earth was he up to? Did he really know the situation in Cyprus, or had he gleaned it all from other books?

  I was fascinated by the tales of the Lusignan kings and had vain hopes that the Lusignan name might have lingered on until the present day in some remote mountain village, especially as the legacy of the Latin occupation of the island is still apparent in the many people with blue eyes and mousey hair. But if Lusignans did remain on the island they must have kept a low profile, for their name disappears altogether from the history books and I could find nothing more about them. Until, that is, I went to Lefkosa, the northern half of Nicosia, where 1 stumbled across an intriguing footnote to the Lusignan story.

  I had hired an interpreter named Mustafa, and as he drove me

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  through the dilapidated streets of the city, we passed his clubhouse and he suggested we stop for a beer. Housed in a nineteenth-century villa and with a tidy patio at the front, the Brotherhood Club was a retirement home for gentlemen, a place where elderly Turks could while away their final years in peace.

  As we sat swilhng bottles of Efes Pilsen, we were joined by a few of Mustafa's friends, and within a few minutes we were chatting about the Lusignans of Cyprus. I asked if there were any descendants of these fabulously wealthy monarchs left on the island, but they all shook their heads.

  "No," said one. "They disappeared centuries ago."

  "If there were any left," added another, "they would have disappeared in 1974."

  "There weren't any, even then," said a third. "They were sent packing by the Ottomans."

  But then there was a croaking noise which came from a table in the corner. A very old man, whose stunted chest, thick neck, and ancient suit gave him the look of a respectable frog, sat up and wagged his finger in the air.

  "There was a Lusignan," he said. "Sherki Lusignan. Don't you remember him?"

  A few men began to nod, scratching their heads as they tried to remember this Sherki and encouraging the man to continue.

  "Sherki came from Famagusta," he said. "He was a wild one—a real adventurer. No one really knew where he came from or who he was, for he never spoke of his past or about his family. In the war he volunteered to go to Crete at the time of the German invasion. Volunteered! He said he was a doctor and wanted to go to nurse the troops, but it later turned out he wasn't a doctor and didn't know the first thing about medicine . . ."

  The others in the bar had fallen silent, and the old man continued with his story. He knew he had a captive audience, and he chose his words with careful deliberation, pausing occasionally for dramatic effect.

  "He had a quick hand, did Sherki. People said he was forever stealing things—shpping papers and bills into his pocket when people weren't looking. All sorts of rumours went around. Some sounded

  I

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  plausible; others were clearly ridiculous. Well, one day he suddenly produced a series of documents claiming he was a direct descendant of the Lusignans. No one ever knew if these documents were stolen, or forged, or where they had come from. Everyone assumed they had been thieved from the archives. But what he said was true—he really did have the papers, and they really did seem to prove everything he claimed. They gave Sherki the right to be king of Cyprus, and from that day onwards, he liked to be known in all seriousness as king of the island.

  "We were young children at that time and, well, we all knew him as Sherki the Foolish. We teased him in the streets, followed him into the shops, and gave him a terrible time until one day Sherki vanis
hed and was never seen again. I later heard that he had gone to Paris to pursue his case through the French courts. But that failed as well, and he was said to have gone to live in England. When he finally died, he was over ninety. He left no children and no heirs; he was never married. With Sherki's death, that was the end of the last king of Cyprus."

  Everyone in the bar was silent for a moment as they waited to hear if there was more. Then one man began to speak. "You know, I think I do remember Sherki," he said. 'T remember him from when I was young."

  'T think I do too," added another. "He was a very odd man."

  Suddenly there was a chorus of similar recollections: I felt like adding that I remembered him as well.

  The Lusignan line, then, ended in a dubious claim from an untrustworthy eccentric, and memories of the kings who ruled Cyprus in Mandeville's day had drifted into legend. But many months later— when I was back in England—I read about a second claimant to the throne whose case seemed much stronger than Sherki's. She was an eccentric old lady named Miss Eliza de Lusignan, and she lived in Lower Edmonton near London at the end of the last century. According to records, she was quite content with her life as a governess, and although she enjoyed telling people she was descended from the Lusignans, she never pressed her claim to the throne.

  I also discovered that a handful of Lusignan descendants do still remain on Cyprus although they no longer bear the distinguished name, for they are merely scions of lesser lines. A female offspring of

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  the family married the commander of the Ottoman army in the sixteenth century, and her descendants now hve in Greek Cyprus, distinguishable by their blue eyes and fair skin.

  When I had arrived in Northern Cyprus, I had gone straight to the seaside town of Kyrenia, the only place in the north half of the island that could possibly be called a resort. Even so, it is only half-heartedly waking up to the potential of tourism, and at the time I was there, only a handful of guests were staying at the hotel. Three of these were matronly Itahan women who would nod pohtely to me at breakfast each morning before sitting themselves down at one of the seventy empty tables. Each was huge—three fortresses of flesh squeezed tightly into cotton dresses—and one by one they would help themselves to vast quantities of food from the buffet. Cold meats, cheeses, slabs of butter, sausages, boiled eggs, and toast would all be heaped on to their plates before they waddled back to their tables. And then the feast would begin: forks were lifted, mouths opened, and in a flash the piles of food were transferred from plate to mouth. Occasionally the women would groan slightly. Sometimes they would dab the beads of sweat from their foreheads. But only when the last morsels had been sucked up from their plates would the Italian chatter begin: ''Salsiccia . . . delizioso . . , cetriolino . . . buono ..."

  One morning, one of the women winked at me. I was horrified and immediately began reading my book. But when I looked up, she winked again, smiled, and stuffed a giant gherkin into her mouth. When the three had finally finished their breakfast, she led them out of the dining room, passing my table and rubbing my chair with a deliberate swing of her hips. And then she pointed at the empty seat opposite: "Perche?" she said. "Why?"

  I gave a wan smile and she winked again. "Kyrenia," she said, pointing at her bulging purse. They were off to the shops.

  Kyrenia was a fishing port long before Mandeville visited Cyprus, and its mellow stone buildings all face the sea, turning their backs on the grand chain of mountains that begin their ascent just outside the town. The town must look even more beautiful from the water, for a picturebook Venetian castle—rough-built from golden limestone—

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  Stands guard over the entrance to the harbour. I clambered up to the top of its castellated tower, from where there is a fine view of the mountains behind. Their lower flanks are covered in thick green vegetation, but as the rock turns towards the vertical, the trees and shrubs disappear, leaving exposed bluffs and crags. In the early evenings I would sit in one of the bars that surround the harbour and turn my chair towards these mountains. Towards six o'clock the bank of thin cloud that had rested on their shoulders for much of the day would slowly lift, and the limestone would be lit by the dying sun.

  For centuries it was these mountains that kept the Lusignans in power. Anyone who controlled their cloud-covered peaks also controlled the passes that led to the fertile plains at the island's heart. Little has changed in the intervening six centuries: when the Turkish army invaded in 1974, one of their first goals was the peak of Mount Didymos, where the ruined summer palace of the Lusignan kings still stands guard over the island.

  I asked a taxi driver to take me up to the summit and he jumped at the chance, for he hadn't had a client all morning. If he polished his Mercedes any more, he joked, the paint would start to wear thin.

  The road swung uphill as soon as we left the town. At first it curved around a series of sharp bends, but soon we joined the main Kyrenia-Lefko^a highway which sliced its way effortlessly through the mountain range. As we reached the highest point on the main road—though still far below the summit—we turned right on to a single-track lane and continued upwards, climbing steeply towards the castle of St. Hi-larion, which Sir John himself claims to have visited. In his day the approach to the castle would have been guarded by soldiers loyal to the Lusignans. Today the roadsides are cluttered with red skuU-and-crossbones signs—a reminder to drivers that the mountain range is overrun by the military. At one point we passed an army camp surrounded by reams of barbed wire. A young Turkish conscript, machine gun in hand, stood next to a sign warning askeri bolge — girilmez (Military Area—No Entry). A few minutes later we passed a family having a picnic under a similar sign. It seemed an odd place to stop for lunch.

  Another camp, more picnickers, and we swung around a huge bend

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  in the road. And there before us—chnging for dear Ufe to the uppermost reaches of Mount Didymos—stood the ruins of St. Hilarion Castle.

  Sir John mentions both the castle and the relics of St. Hilarion that were kept here, but he refers to the place as the Castle of Amours. This puzzled me until I found that other writers called it Dieu d'Amour, which was itself a corruption of the Greek name for the mountain. Perhaps Sir John had picked up the abbreviated name from the locals?

  Little is known about St. Hilarion: the few surviving records of him agree that he was a seventh-century hermit who had a neurotic passion for solitude. He fled the Holy Land for the deserts of Libya, but finding even the sandy wastes too noisy, took ship to Cyprus and lived out the rest of his long life on a diet of fifteen figs a day.

  When the castle was first built, his tomb was enclosed within its walls, and Sir John says it was looked after with great honour. But the walls of the shrine, as well as those of the castle, have suffered over the last six centuries. Rain and wind have buffeted the ramparts. The towers have crumbled and the chapels slowly broken apart. It is only near the mountain's summit—a steep climb from the roadway—that a few traces of car'ed stone remain to hint at the palace's former luxury.

  The queen's chamber has lost its roof and three of its walls, leaving a pair of Gothic windows which stare westwards across the plunging countryside below. I sat on the narrow window ledge where Queen Eleanor must once have sat; the warm sandstone curved upwards to form a window frame, carefully chiselled into arches and decorated with fine tracery. It was hard to imagine that this shell was once the most comfortable room in the royal palace, yet in Sir John's day it would have been adorned with tapestries and silken cushions, glassware from the east and manuscripts from France.

  My vision was rudely shattered by the babble of voices. "That's Margaret's house down there . . . and that is George's over there."

  A group of English ex-pats had appeared and were showing their friends where they had set up home.

  "Isn't Margaret's garden a mess?" said one. "She really ought to get someone in to help her."<
br />
  "George's isn't much better," said another. "Of course, you know his daughter's getting divorced . . ."

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  I scrambled up the broken walls above the royal bedchamber and onto a narrow ledge which dropped away sharply on either side. At one point my foot slipped, dislodging a stone, and I watched it bounce off a rockface and fall hundreds of feet to the road below. Finally I reached the highest point, a square-walled tower from which the paranoid Prince John of Antioch massacred his Bulgarian bodyguards. He had been warned by Queen Eleanor that they were planning to assassinate him and, fuming with rage, made them jump the twenty-five hundred feet to their deaths. The queen, it was later revealed, had invented the story, but by the time John discovered their innocence it was too late. Their last view, at least, must have turned their thoughts heavenwards, for the tower commands a fantastic panorama. On a clear day you can even see the Turkish mainland.

  Sir John also visited the abbey of Bellapais, which sits upon a bluff of rock thousands of feet below. He was not alone in describing the famous abbey; many medieval pilgrims travelled to Bellapais, on their way to Jerusalem, in order to venerate a piece of the crucifix. The abbey grew wealthy from the royal patronage it enjoyed, and with the steady increase in the number of pilgrims it found an even more lucrative source of income. Successive kings granted the abbots the rare privilege of wearing golden spurs—a custom normally reserved for the knights of court—as well as the right to keep a large town house in Nicosia.

  Few records survive from the peacable times when Mandeville was visiting, but as soon as things began to go wrong at Bellapais, the chroniclers reached for their pens and the whole sordid tale galloped into the history books. First the prior was jailed for disobeying his archbishop, and then the Genoese sacked the place and carted off its treasures. But this was only the beginning: by the sixteenth century, life here was more akin to a brothel than a monastery, for the monks had abandoned their vows of chastity, and the cloisters of Bellapais— which for centuries had heard only the solemn chanting of prayers— now echoed with the laughter of debauchery. Most of the monks married: some, not content with monogamy, took two or three wives. It all added to the fun.