by Ed West
“Magic was an integral part of the later medieval mind,” wrote the great French historian Georges Duby, and all European societies had a fear of witches. The Vikings were obsessed with them, often vengeful females whose sexual advances had been refused. Their Kveldridur, sometimes called “night-riders” or “darkness riders,” might also appear as supernatural creatures, or wolves. Nordic witches might use henblane, or stinking nightshade, a poisonous plant that could be rubbed into the skin and which caused dizziness and cramps, and irritation in the throat, but also contained a narcotic called skopolamin which brought about hallucinations and in particular the illusion of being able to fly. It was also believed to be an aphrodisiac, witches often having a sexual hold, both arousing and repulsive at once.
Many females unfortunate enough to be accused of witchcraft were merely “cunning women” who had some knowledge of herbal medicine, some of it effective and some of it junk. Others had put faith in cranks for less than laudable reasons, such as the Parisian woman who in 1390 had employed the magical powers of another lady to render the lover who spurned her impotent. Both women were sent to the stake. In reality, unlike in Westeros, it was not the alleged witches doing the burning, but the poor unlucky women accused of witchcraft being burned; in Europe the vast majority of people killed as witches were female, the exception being parts of Scandinavia, where there was a particular cultural horror at men doing magic, something seen as effeminate.
In the fourteenth century, the Church had become increasingly interested in sorcery, and a bull issued in 1320 by Pope John XXII ordered that magic books be burned, but despite this, prosecutions for sorcery and demonology only took off toward the end of the century. The 1366 Council of Chartres had also ordered an anathema to be pronounced against sorcerers each Sunday at parish churches.
This fear only paradoxically took off in the early modern period, especially after the invention of printing was able to widen it, since this new technology made it easier to disseminate lies and half-truths. The papacy appointed new commissions dealing with witchcraft in 1494 and again in 1521 and 1522. In Geneva over 1515-6, some five hundred people were burned to death as witches, or for heresy aggravated by witchcraft. In Como in Lombardy, some one thousand supposed witches were killed just in one year, 1524.
Before 1420, most cases of witchcraft involved specifically the use of supernatural powers to harm enemies, or maleficium, but increasingly allegations involved sexual wrongoings, some curious hysteria having overtaken European civilization. The victims were accused of copulating with Satan, who took the form of a black cat or goat with flaming eyes or a “gigantic man with black skin, a huge phallus, and eyes like burning coals.”12
Fires went up across Europe as the witchcraft craze reached its peak from 1560 to 1630, and it even crossed into the New World, most infamously at Salem. Conventional estimates put the total number of European witch-burning victims at around fifty thousand.
Frenchman Nicholas Remy, a magistrate, Latin poet and historian, and a cultured renaissance man, recalled before his death in 1616 that he had sent three thousand people to their deaths. The witch craze in Germany was even more savage. Dietrich Flade, vice-governor of Trier and rector of the Rhineland city’s university, proposed reducing the scale of witch hunting and tried to get convicted witches banished instead of burned to death. Soon, and inveitably, a witch hunter accused him of being a witch, because why else would someone oppose a witch-hunt? Accused witches were found to implicate him, the poor, desperate women promised the chance of an easier death if they helped.13 Flade was arrested, strangled, and burned, a lesson for all of us—in the face of an irrational, violent mob bent on injustice, keep your head down.
*She appears in the sequel to the film 300.
30
THE SWORD IN THE DARKNESS
Night gathers, and now my watch begins. It shall not end until my death. I shall take no wife, hold no lands, father no children. I shall wear no crowns and win no glory . . .
—NIGHT’S WATCH OATH
The Temple church in the Holborn district of central London is all that remains of a huge complex once owned by an international order of knights tasked with defending civilization from its enemies. The Knights Templar were an elite band of brothers formed to protect Christian pilgrims on the way to the Holy Land, but they grew to control much of the region and became hugely rich until the failures of the crusade led their enemies at home to crush them.
Like the Watch, members of the Knights Templar referred to each other as brothers and were sworn to abstain from taking wives, indeed to avoid all physical contact with women, even relatives.1 Templars were expected to swear oaths of poverty, piety, and obedience, and their lives were every bit as tough as the Crows, although stationed in the blazing heat of the Middle East rather than the freezing cold of the north.
The organization grew out of the First Crusade (1095-1099), the background to which was increasing religious intolerance in the Middle East, and in the West a growing population with large numbers of young knights trained in violence and with nothing else to do. The Muslim conquerors of the Levant had initially been quite tolerant, but in 1004 the Fatimid caliph al-Hakin, ruler of North Africa, Palestine, and southern Syria, launched a fanatical anti-Christian campaign. Property was confiscated, crosses were burned, and churches were set on fire, or forcibly converted into mosques. There were also increasing numbers of pilgrims from western Europe visiting the Holy Land, and who were often threatened by bandits and murderers; in 1064, during the most infamous incident, a large German pilgrimage came under attack from locals in Palestine.
Western Europe’s population had begun to grow from 900 AD, an explosion that left large numbers of younger sons with little to do, and one way that incessesant violence could be reduced was by turning it outwards. The trigger for war came with the movement of Seljuk Turks into Anatolia in the eleventh century, much to the alarm of the Byzantines. Despite the tension between eastern and western Christianity—the two church leaders in Constantinople and Rome had mutually excommunicated each other briefly in 1053, leading to the schism between Orthodox and Catholic Christianity—when the Emperor appealed to the Pope for help there was widespread enthusiasm.
And so, in 1093 Pope Urban II made an impassioned appeal in the south of France, calling on western Christians to take up arms to liberate the Holy Land from the infidel. Villages emptied of men as Christians sought adventure in what were called “armed pilgrimages” at the time, but which were from the thirteenth century called “crusades,” from the Latin for “cross.”
It wasn’t quite the adventure they hoped for, and only one in three of those who had left western Europe with the main army were alive two years later. In the desert of Syria in 1098-99, the crusaders were in such dire straits that some impoverished Flemings ate the Turks they had killed.
Jerusalem finally fell the following July, after which the crusaders massacred most if not all of the city’s Muslims and Jews, and afterward, one of the crusade’s leaders, Godfrey of Bouillon, was elected as king; however, he thought the title blasphemous so he preferred the somewhat more modest Protector of the Holy Sepulchre. Godfrey was widely celebrated for his nobility and chivalry; on one occasion, after capturing the wife of a Muslim prince, he sent her back to her husband when he learned that she was pregnant. However, he lasted barely a year in the job before succumbing to one of the various illnesses westerners died of in the Middle East. Or perhaps poison.
“LOVE IS THE DEATH OF DUTY.”
The Knights Templar was founded twenty years later by the aging French knight Hugh de Payens, who had intended to retire to a monastery but was persuaded to instead create an order to protect Christian pilgrims. Along with eight other knights they became founding members of The Poor Fellow Soldiers of Christ.2
The Poor Fellows is also the name of an order in Westeros, who are sworn to the Faith of the Seven and also known as the Stars because of the seven-pointed star on their badge. The
y were mostly small folk, but there was also the Noble and Puissant Order of the Warrior’s Sons, a more aristocratic band of knights who wore uncomfortable hairshirts, just as many pious medieval Europeans like Thomas Becket did. (Members of both orders accompany Cersai during her Walk of Atonement.) But the most obvious resemblance is between the Night’s Watch and the Templars.
Godfrey’s successor Baldwin, who had fewer qualms about going by the title King of Jerusalem, allowed the group to use the city’s al-Asqa mosque, known as Templum Salomonis—the Temple of Solomon—and so they became commonly known as the Knights Templar. The knights had to “defend pilgrims against brigands and rapists” according to James of Vitry, a chronicler of the era, and also observe “poverty, chastity and obedience according to the rules of the ordinary priests.”3 De Payens had intended to become a monk and in every way, except their use of weapons, that is what the Templars were. They were particularly influenced by the Cistercians, a rather stern order set up by the charismatic twelfth century Churchman St Bernard of Clairvaux.
St Bernard and Hugh de Payens came up with the Rule for the Knights Templar, based on the Benedictine laws, and St Bernard warned:
We believe it to be a dangerous thing for any religious to look too much upon the face of woman. For this reason none of you may presume to kiss a woman, be it widow, young girl, mother, sister, aunt or any other; and henceforth the Knighthood of Jesus Christ should avoid at all costs the embraces of women, by which men have perished many times, so that they may remain eternally before the face of God with a pure conscience and sure life.4
Or as Master Aemon put it: “Love is the death of duty.”
Just as the Night’s Watch have rangers, builders, and stewards, the Templars had three divisions: knights, sergeants, and chaplains. Only about one in ten of the twenty thousand or so Templars were actually knights, and only they wore its white surcoat, while the sergeants, often local Syrian Christians, dressed in black or brown. The Sergeants, like the Stewards on the wall, provide logistical support—the ratio of one soldier on the front line to ten personnel in support is not unlike a modern army—while Master Aemon has a role similar to that of chaplin.
White was only worn, according to St Bernard, “so that those who have abandoned the life of darkness will recognise each other as being reconciled to their creator by the sign of their white habits; which signifies purity and complete chastity.”5 (In Westeros the Kingsguard are also known as the White Cloaks.)
Templars lived harsh lives; they slept four hours a night, attended Mass seven times a day, and fasted three times a week. The Knights rose at 4 a.m. for Matins, or morning prayer, and then from 6 a.m. attended services and trained and groomed horses. They were not even allowed to wear fur or pointed shoes and shoe-laces “for it is manifest and well known that these abominable things belong to pagans.”6 In their conversation they were to avoid “idle words and wicked bursts of laughter”7 nor could they talk about their previous acts of courage or sexual conquests.
They also had to cut their hair short, while also sporting beards—they couldn’t shave—although the strictest rules concerned behavior in battle. According to an anonymous pilgrim of the time: “Should any of them for any reason turn his back to the enemy, or come forth alive [from a defeat], or bear arms against the Christians, he is severely punished; the white mantle with the red cross, which is the sign of his knighthood, is taken away with ignominy, he is cast from the society of brethren, and eats his food on the floor” like a dog.8 Other punishments for wrongdoing included whipping and being placed in irons9 the same sanctions monks faced for breaking their code. Like the Kingsguard in Westeros, they were forbidden from fathering children, taking a wife, or owning land.10
The Templars were not the only order at the time; there were the Knights Hospitaller (also known as the Knights of Rhodes or Malta), as well as the Teutonic Knights, who had started as a German breakaway from the Hospitallers. Then, like with the Night’s Watch, the Teutonic Knights switched missions, going off to fight Mongols in Hungary and then launching a crusade to Christianize pagans in Prussia and the Baltic Sea. This brutal campaign took two hundred years, and the chronicles of the Knights detail the savagery of the Prussians, seen as people beyond civilization, and who would “roast captured brethren alive in their armor, like chestnuts, before the shrine of a local god.”11 During the fighting in Livonia—today’s Latvia—crusaders established another military order, the Sword Brothers, to pursue the crusade, who were often promised the land of the pagans they were to conquer. For most members of sworn orders, however, there was little in the way of material gain; heavenly reward and earthly prestige was enough.
To start with, or at least in theory, anyone could become a Templar, although acquiring the training would have put it beyond the reach of any poor man. However, by the mid-twelfth century a Templar had to be the son of a knight or descended from one, and so this is where it diverges from fiction, where the brothers on the wall are better characterized as “Raper, raper, horse thief, ninth-born son, raper, thief, thief AND raper.”12 People like that joined the common infantry.
One attraction of the Night’s Watch, and they are thin on the ground, is that once a man takes the black then the slate is wiped clean, which is why it’s filled with criminals, as well as men just unlucky enough to be poor, or to have fallen out with their families. And so, while the Templars were often high-born, they did also attract people who hoped their sins would be forgiven. This had the effect of drawing in some dubious individuals to the Holy Land—the knights who murdered Thomas Beckett in 1170 did fourteen years service in the Templars. As with the later French Foreign Legion, there are also recorded cases of people joining because of romantic disappointment.
THE WATCHERS ON THE WALL
The Templars were prestigious figures, but they paid with their blood. Six of twenty-three Grand Masters died in battle or captivity; at least twenty thousand brothers were killed either fighting or in captivity after refusing to renounce their faith.
And soon the war between Christians and Muslims was reignited, in what later became known as the Second Crusade (1147–1149), and which ended with a stalemate and growing hatred and tension between various Christian groups. Then, in 1187, fresh attacks by the Muslims led to the reconquest of Jerusalem, sparking renewed warfare; weeks before that disaster, at the Battle of Cresson, some 130 Knights Templar rode into battle against 7,000 Muslim horsemen, three of them riding out again, and afterwards the heads of the Templars were fixed to polls outside the city. The horsemen were Mamelukes, a terrifying army of captured slaves raised to be killers.
The Third Crusade featured the two most charismatic leaders of the long holy war, Saladin and Richard the Lionheart. The latter was blessed “with the figure of a Greek god, he was tall, immensely strong, fair-haired and so handsome that he fascinated both his friends and his enemies” and yet also “a man of some psychological instability, tending to fly from one emotional extreme to the other.”13 (In the Ridley Scott film, Kingdom of Heaven, Richard is played by Scottish actor Iain Glen, aka Jorah Mormont.)
Saladin was famed for his great chivalry; on one occasion while attacking a crusader fortress he ordered his men not to bombard one corner of the castle where a wedding was taking place. He also sent fruit to his opponent Richard while he was recovering from a fever to enable him to get well so they could fight again. But both men were ruthless at times; Richard executed 2,700 Muslims in Jerusalem in one notorious incident, which Islamic sources claim included women and children. The massacre had a military rationale, since guarding his prisoners would have tied up his army as Saladin’s forces approached, but it was certainly unforgiving. On one occasion Saladin had 230 Templars “decapitated by the ecstatic sufis”14 who had begged the Muslim leader to let them kill the Christian knights; he also executed Hospitallers in cold blood and ordered the crucifixion of Shia opponents in Egypt. Likewise, throughout the crusades Christians were still at war with other Christia
ns and Muslims continued fighting other Muslims. So much had the eastern and western Christians now fallen out that when Saladin captured Jerusalem in 1187, the Byzantine emperor Isaac Angelos sent a message of congratulations.
Constantinople at the time was home to a large number of western Christians, Venetians, Genoans, and Pisans, but in 1182 there was a pogrom of these Italians in the city, of whom there had been eighty thousand. There was growing hostility to the “Latins,” who had been showed preferential treatment by the previous emperor, and “men, women and children, the old and the young, the healthy and the sick, were all attacked and many slaughtered, their houses and churches burned.”15 And so in 1204, in the most squalid incident of the whole crusades, the western Christians sacked Constantinople, capital of the empire they had once claimed to protect. In the ensuing destruction the Latins slaughtered vast numbers and stole priceless relics, while a prostitute sat on the seat of the patriarch at the Hagia Sophia cathedral. One western abbot found the store of relics at the Church of Christ the Pantocrator and, after threatening to kill a Greek priest if he didn’t tell him their location, ran off laughing, taking them back to the ship, never to be returned.
Like the Watch, which began to fight the undead but evolved to keep out Wildlings, the Templars also changed the nature of their service, from protectors of the faithful to a sort of armed bank, the order growing rich through patronage and support across western Christendom. Visiting pilgrims in any large city could deposit their wealth with the nearest Templar house upon arrival and receive notes of credit, so that the money could be safely taken out from another, like a modern bank. Although the Catholic Church officially prohibited lending at interest, there were plenty of ways to get around it, such as calling it “expenses” or “administration” or charging below a 12 percent maximum.16 Sometimes they didn’t gain from money-lending but did so for reasons of prestige or to be owed favors.
