Pillars of Light
Page 43
There were without doubt many faked relics and fragments of the True Cross. As the sixteenth-century theologian John Calvin famously said: “There is no town, however small, which has not some morsel of it.… If all the pieces which could be found were collected into a heap, they would form a good shipload.” Even as recently as 2013 there were reports of a fragment being discovered, in a church in Turkey.
I started working on Pillars of Light before the revolt against the Assad regime and the arrival of Daesh—the so-called Islamic State group—in Syria and Iraq. Writing the book while the current tragedy of this riven area plays out has been both painful and apposite. There have been times I’ve had to stop work, as stories of the destruction and violence suffered by the ordinary people of Syria eclipsed the historical events I was trying to recapture. In particular, witness accounts of the siege in Homs paralleled so closely the worst details of the siege at Acre that it was hard not to despair at mankind’s inability to develop empathy and decency down the ages. Likewise, the vile beheadings carried out by Daesh in the full glare of modern publicity, so reminiscent of the crazed fundamentalism of the Hashshashin, also mirror uncomfortably the cold-blooded execution of the Acre hostages by Richard II, deliberately within view of the Muslim army. Terrorism is nothing new and is not limited to a single culture or religion. There is a tendency for the modern reader to look back on people of the past and dismiss them as less cultivated, less civilized than we are. But if history teaches us anything it must surely be that we rarely learn from the mistakes and atrocities of the past.
Jane Johnson, London, July 2015
Source Material
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Acknowledgments
I have many people to thank for their aid and support in seeing Pillars of Light into the world. First of all my husband Abdellatif, who has put up with my obsession with this period of history and with disturbed nights as I scribble sudden thoughts in my notebook, as well as his invaluable help with translating from Arabic sources. I must also thank Emma Coode, Ben Kane, Jane Willow Bennett, Francijn Suermondt and Essie Fox for reading various drafts of the text and for their encouragement to just keep going! My fine editors Nita Pronovost, Zoe Maslow and Barbara Heinzius for the work they put into this book: it is far better as a result of their efforts, for which I am hugely grateful. And finally I must thank my agent Danny Baror for believing in this book against all the odds.