by Giles Milton
The Sinai Desert
serving the monastery in the twentieth century on the orders made by a Byzantine emperor some fourteen hundred years earher
I asked if his tribe worshipped St. Catherine in church, but Father George stopped me. "I am terribly sorry" he said, "but I cannot put these questions to Mohammed. Islam prohibits the worship of saints, and what you are asking about is an extremely sensitive subject, especially with the growth of fundamentalism in Egypt. I will put any question you like to Mohammed, but please, I cannot ask such things as these."
I had one last query. It was rumoured that the Jebeliyah accept the bishop of the monastery as the supreme head of their tribe. Was that the case?
"Indeed," said Mohammed. "We go to the bishop whenever we have a dispute over land or money. If two Bedouin are fighting one another, we take our case to the bishop. He solves all our problems."
One afternoon Father Nicholas said he would show me the church and the relics; the same that Sir John had seen all those centuries before.
And beside the High Altar are four steps leading up to the tomb of alabaster wherein the body of the holy virgin saint Katherine lies. And the prelate of the monks shows the relics of this virgin to pilgrims; with an instrument of silver he moves the bones of the virgin on an altar Then there comes out a little oil, like sweat; but it is like neither oil nor balm for it is blacker Of this liquid they give a little to pilgrims—for only a little comes out. After they show you the head of St. Katherine, and the cloth that it was wrapped in . . . and the cloth is still bloody and always will be.
The casket still stands in the same place, although there are no longer as many bones as there were in medieval times, for the monks, in their attempt to collect money for the monastery, travelled throughout Europe with the relics of St. Catherine and on arriving in Rouen sold half of them to the cathedral. To this day, Rouen possesses more of St. Catherine than the monastery itself.
The Riddle and the Knight
Many European pilgrims were inspired to come to the monastery by the huge quantity of myrrh that flowed from the bones of the saint, and early visitors describe monks spooning liquid myrrh out of the coffin. By Sir John's time, only a few drops could be scraped from the surface of the bones, and now they have dried up completely, although there are still traces of their former miraculous properties.
"Put your nose to the casket," said Father Nicholas. "Can you smell anything?"
I inhaled deeply and smelled a thick, perfumed scent coming from the alabaster box. It was sweet, like wood resin, and did indeed seem to come from the bones. I asked Father Nicholas if we could open the casket, but he shook his head. "I'm afraid not," he said. "The relics are only brought out on feast days."
But later that evening he had other bones to show me: the bones of long-deceased monks which are stored in the monastery's charnel house. In a small room as dry as old parchment are the bones of all the monks who have lived and died at St. Catherine's.
Every time a monk dies his body is buried for a few years to help it decompose. The bones are then dug up and separated, the skull is inscribed, and all are placed on to their respective piles in the charnel house, so that today there are vast mountains of tibia and fibia, skulls and vertebrae, stacked right up to the ceiling.
Strangest of all is the monk who guards these bones. Slumped in a chair and dressed in his black vestment is Father Stephanos—mummified. Ever since he died in the sixth century, this monk, who used to guard the gateway leading to the top of the mountain, has sat in the charnel house presiding over the remains of the monks. From the bottom of his vestments a mummified foot pokes out, while above his head a pile of tibias seem ready to come crashing down on top of him.
As I looked at this stockpile of bones, it struck me that somewhere in this grisly room were the remains of the monks that Sir John would have met and chatted with. Perhaps he had spoken to the very skull I was now looking at: the one at the bottom of a pile whose few remaining teeth were curved into a fixed grin? Perhaps he had shaken the mummified hand that was hanging over a small rail, swaying slightly in the breeze that filtered through the door?
Had these men been saints like St. Catherine? Had they sinned and
The Sinai Desert
confined themselves to a monastery as penance? It was impossible to know, for their stories were lost forever among this pile of bones. Here was a place to marvel at the continuity of St. Catherine's, for this desert monastery is utterly unchanged since the day Sir John came here: a place where ancient, medieval, and modern all roll into one endless continuum of history.
I had to leave the monastery the following day and went to thank Father John for his kindness after the morning liturgy. He nodded graciously and said he had something to give me. He opened his drawer and scratched around inside before looking at me with a smile.
"Here," he said as he handed me a ring. "This is for you to take back to England. We only give it to pilgrims who stay here in the monastery/'
I looked at it closely. It was a thick band of silver which had been inscribed in Greek with the words aiaikatepina —St. Catherine—with the beginning and end of the name decorated with tiny crosses. I thanked him again and was about to leave when Father Nicholas entered the room and said he also had something for me. It was a miniature glass phial filled with amber-coloured oil which was sealed with a tiny stopper.
"It's from the lamp that lights the relics of St. Catherine," he said. "It's not the same as the myrrh that Sir John would have taken home with him, but take it and keep it. It's precious."
"And did you discover whether your knight stayed here?" asked Father John.
I told him about the coat of arms and said I would have to wait until I got back to England to know for sure.
"Well, there's one more thing to say," he added. "If you ever need to return to Sinai, you are welcome to stay in St. Catherine's whenever you want."
(inmarh tn OIf|tna
Sir John Mandeville, knight and doctor in physick . . . left a book of his travels, which hath been honoured with the translation of many languages, and now continued above three hundred years; herein he often attesteth the fabulous relations of Ctesias, and seems to confirm the refuted accounts of antiquity.
Vulgar Errors, Sir Thomas Browne, 1646
Many, if not most, of these Ctesian fables in Sir J. Mandevill were monkish interpolations.
Notes on Sir Thomas Browne's Vulgar Errors, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 10 March 1804
ir John begins his book with the intention of visiting the Holy Land. He sets out his reasons for going on a pilgrimage, and includes a few pious sentiments and a selection of quotes from the Bible. It is only when he comes to list the places he visited that he tells the reader he travelled a good deal farther afield than Jerusalem. Unexpectedly, almost casually, he says that his thirty-four-year voyage actually took him halfway around the world.
Before describing this second leg of the voyage, he once again sets out his intentions and says that he hopes to visit the "diverse kingdoms, countries, and isles in the eastern part of the world, where live different kinds of men and animals, and many other marvellous things."
All these marvellous things—monsters, pygmies, and savages— found their way into The Travels, and as Sir John reaches the farthest-flung corners of the globe, the pious platitudes are replaced by lurid descriptions of an increasingly deformed troupe of animals.
Onward to China
To modern ears, Sir John's fabulous tales about Java, Sumatra, and Borneo sound more like fables than the eyewitness descriptions of a genuine traveller, but to his contemporaries such monsters v^ere very real creatures. His descriptions of the east v^ere treated as hard practical information, and cartographers filled the blank spaces on their maps w^ith not only the abominable creatures that Mandeville claims to have seen but also with pictures of the imperial palaces and eastern soldiers that he so vividly records. Two of the greatest sixteenth-century geographers, Ortelius and M
ercator, both acknowledged their debt to Mandeville when they came to draw their world maps. Ortelius was so impressed he even visited Sir John's supposed grave in Liege.
Mandeville's reputation only began to suffer when the great age of exploration began, for the long sea voyages of the Renaissance geographers seemed to prove once and for all that Sir John's stories of monsters, giants, and weird animals were nothing more than figments of his own imagination. It was concluded that his entire journey must have been a fiction, and The Travels was soon mocked as a worthless piece of writing and consigned to the literary dustbin.
Yet even Mandeville's tallest of tall tales deserve closer examination. The practice of burning Indian women alive on their husband's funeral pyre sounds like one of his more colourful inventions, yet suttee was certainly practised in Mandeville's time and, though now outlawed, occurs in remote Indian villages to this day. His lavish description of the pepper forests of Malabar sounds equally suspect, yet such forests were also reported by the prosaic Marco Polo. The trees that grow flour may be an invention, but they sound remarkably similar to the sago-palm; while those that bear poison could well refer to the noxious upas-tree. Even Mandeville's story of the reed-beds of Borneo—where precious jewels are said to grow on the branches of the plants—has a rational explanation: bamboo emits a siliceous concretion which could easily be mistaken for gemstones.
It only requires a shift from a rational to a lateral train of thought to find an explanation for many of Mandeville's more outlandish descriptions. Giant snails sound implausible—especially when Mandeville claims that "three or four men can shelter in their shells"—until you realize he is referring to giant tortoises. Dog-faced men, too, sound
The Riddle and the Knight
monstrous unless they are descriptions of baboons, which do indeed have snouts Uke dogs. And while there are certainly no pygmies on the Asian mainland, Sir John's race of midgets sound remarkably like the warrior pygmies who inhabit the highlands of New Guinea.
While none of these explanations proves that Sir John did travel, his claim to have visited the Far East cannot be dismissed out of hand. That the road to China was still open in the fourteenth century is demonstrated by a trickle of European travellers who did indeed reach the east and returned to tell the tale. Marco Polo had set out on his famous voyage in 1271, less than three decades before Mandeville was born, and the Nestorian monks Sawma and Markos had survived the journey in the other direction. Although the route was fraught with the perils of drought, starvation, and murderous brigands, men did hazard the long journey and live to tell the tale.
If Sir John did make his journey east, he would have been one of the very last Europeans to travel overland to China until the nineteenth century, for within a few years of his death, the Mongol Emperor Tamberlaine the Great swept out of China with his army and plunged Asia into anarchy for the next five centuries.
Mandeville does more than simply list monsters and pygmies in the second half of his Travels; he also presents concrete details about the places he visits. In India he gives precise descriptions of the emperor's army and how it does battle. In China he claims to have been welcomed by the Great Khan himself, and recalls how he stayed in his palace for many months. In Tibet he recounts in great detail the burial rituals of the Tibetans. But as with the first part of the book. Sir John pillaged from every available source for his supposedly truthful narrative. Two writers in particular provided him with many of his tales from the Far East, two exceptionally brave men whose accounts lie gathering dust in the British Library. The truth about Mandeville's voyage can only be judged in relation to theirs, not simply because he borrowed their stories, but because they really did make the journey and documented the perils and hardships of the road.
The first was a Franciscan monk called John of Piano Carpini who was dispatched by the Pope on the three-thousand-mile journey to China in 1245. He was hopelessly ill-equipped for the task. Immensely
Onward to China
fat, sixty-five years old, and with no knowledge of Oriental languages, he had to bandage his body from head to foot in order to endure the pain of fifteen hours' riding every day. His account of the voyage not only includes an eyewitness account of the Mongol court but also gives a painfully graphic description of the hardships of the overland voyage: "We were so weak we could hardly ride. During the whole of that Lent our food had been nothing but millet with water and salt, and it was the same on other fast days, and we had nothing to drink except snow melted in a kettle . . . We feared that we might be killed by the Tartars . . . [for] we came across many skulls and bones of dead men lying on the ground like dung."
Despite the terrible hardship of the journey, this corpulent monk delivered the Pope's letter to the ungracious emperor, returned to Europe, and survived for just long enough to write up his travels before dropping dead from exhaustion.
The second traveller to whom Sir John was indebted was Friar Odoric, another Franciscan, who travelled through Turkey, Iraq, Persia, India, Sumatra, and Borneo before landing in China, where he baptized twenty thousand people. He, too, survived to tell the tale in his Itine-rariiis, and although his book has long been forgotten, Odoric was assured eternal remembrance when the Pope beatified him in 1755.
Mandeville lifted scores of stories from Friar Odoric's book, yet he stops short of copying Odoric's more ludicrous tales. Whereas Sir John's monstrous snails fit the description of giant tortoises, Odoric describes the shells of such "snails" bigger than the dome of St. Anthony's Church in Padua—more than forty feet in diameter.
Mandeville's borrowings are always selective. Some of his stories are copied from Solinus, Isidore of Seville, and Vincent of Beauvais. Several are lifted from Pliny, while his tale of the gold-digging ants of present-day Sri Lanka is taken straight from the pages of Herodotus. He must have chuckled to himself when he included the tale of the thirty-foot-high giants he met in the east, for it is taken verbatim from Juhus Caesar's account of the ancient Britons.
But not all Sir John's flights of the imagination have such obvious sources. Neither Friar Odoric not John of Piano Carpini describe the Indian court or the protocol that surrounded an appearance by the em-
The Riddle and the Knight
peror, while many of his descriptions of China seem far more hkely than the accounts of his peers.
By the time he reached India, Sir John says he was weary from travel-hng. The overland journey had taken its toll, and he had suffered great hardship. But as soon as he arrived at the emperor's court, he found an unexpected delight, for after travelling halfway across Asia, he found himself in a land rich in food, well-populated, civilized, and superbly governed by a wise ruler named Prester John.
Although Mandeville doesn't say how long he stayed with Prester John, it must have been some considerable length of time; he gives a detailed description of his kingdom and its chief cities, as well as describing the richness and beauty of the imperial palace in the city of Susa:
That palace is so wealthy, so noble, so full of dehghts that it is a marvel to tell of. For on top of the main tower are two balls of gold, in each of which are two great fair carbuncles, which shine very brightly in the night. The chief gates of the palace are of precious stones, which men call sardonyx, and the bars are of ivory. The windows of the hall and the chambers are all of crystal. All the tables they eat off are of emeralds, amethysts and, some, of gold, set with precious stones . . . the steps up which the Emperor goes to his throne are bordered with fine gold, set full of pearls and other precious stones on the sides and edges.
This was not all: Prester John's power was as unlimited as his retinue was immense. He had 7 kings serving under him, 72 dukes to oversee his every wish and whim, and 360 earls living at court in case he might need their support. But far more important than this—and the factor that mattered to Sir John—was that Prester John was Christian: a powerful emperor ruling over a vast area of land. He had a massive army and endless resources, and al
l his vassals and client kingdoms were Christian too.
Every time he went into battle he carried not banners, like western knights, but three huge crosses made of solid gold. Each one, says Sir John, was guarded by ten thousand men-at-arms and more than one
Onward to China
hundred thousand foot soldiers. And although he had so far confined his battles to fighting the Persians, he had plans to wrest the Holy City of Jerusalem from the infidel.
What relief Sir John must have felt to arrive in India and find himself feted by a generous Christian ruler. Except of course, for one important point: it is most unlikely that Sir John ever went to India, and even more unlikely that he met the ruler of this Christian empire. For unbeknown to Mandeville, Prester John never existed.
He was not the only one to believe the stories he had heard about Prester John. Every monarch, nobleman, and priest across medieval Europe believed that the Indian continent was ruled by a powerful Christian emperor called Prester John, and all expected him—as Sir John himself writes—to march on Jerusalem with his huge army. Unfortunately, it was not to be. For the letter that brought the news of this emperor to Europe some two centuries earlier was a hoax—perhaps the greatest hoax ever perpetrated in history.
It was the evening of 27 September 1177, and Pope Alexander III had just finished writing a most important letter. It was a reply to a long missive he had recently received from the King of India—a king he had only vaguely heard of—and it concerned a topic close to his heart: the recapture of Jerusalem. The Pope thanked this distant monarch for the letter, expressed his total support for the ideas it contained, and sent his papal blessing, addressing the ruler as "the illustrious and magnificent king of the Indies and beloved son of Christ."
The letter from India had taken several years to reach the papal palace in Vitterbo, and when it did arrive, no one could quite explain who had brought it or how it had been delivered. It was twelve pages long, written in good Latin, and contained the most startHng information. For it related precise details of the strongest and most powerful Christian state on earth—an empire ruled by a priest-king who now wished to perform his religious duty by recovering the Holy City from the infidel. This is how it began:
