The Long Sword

by Christian Cameron

  Miles Stapleton assumed we’d go directly from the rendezvous at Rhodes to assault Jaffa, the port for Jerusalem. He described this one night, and Fra Peter laughed aloud. He was sitting on a folding stool, checking the leather straps on his harness and rubbing oil into them to protect them against the salt air.

  ‘Jaffa isn’t so much a port as an open beach,’ he said. ‘It’s unprotected in bad weather.’

  Miles nodded. ‘Ah, but God will provide us good weather. And it is the closest port to Jerusalem.’

  Fra Peter shook his head. ‘We need a good port where we can take water and food; a port that can be defended from the Egyptian fleet.’

  One of the French Hospitallers looked up from his own armour. ‘Acre?’ he asked.

  The older men debated Acre and Tyre, both ports that had been held by Christians, almost within living memory. Acre had fallen almost eighty years before, to the Mamluks. Tyre had been lost through infighting and sheer foolishness.

  I had never even seen a map of the Holy Land. I suppose that I thought of the world as a vast plate with Jerusalem at its centre, and I assumed that, like any great city, it would be easy to reach.

  Fra Peter scratched his chin and went back to his leather. But another night, in a waterfront taverna on Corfu, he sat tapping his teeth with his thumb, clearly impatient at my poor geography. He took the hulls of pistachios for cities and used wine to draw coastlines.

  ‘Look,’ he said, as much to me as to Miles or Lord Grey. We were all shockingly ignorant of the Levant. ‘This is Anatolia, which juts like a sore thumb out of Asia. Two hundred years ago it was all in the hands of the Greeks and many Greeks live there yet. Here’s Greece and Romania … here’s Venice.’ He drew the coastlines in broad sweeps. ‘Under Anatolia’s thumb, the coast of Syria runs almost straight south.’ He placed pistachios. ‘Here is Venice, up in the armpit of the Adriatic. Here’s old Athens, out at the end of Greece. Here’s Constantinople, where Asia and Europe meet. The Dardanelles, the Pontic Sea, the Bosporus, the Euxine, which is ruled by Genoa and the Bulgarians, these days. Here to the south of the Dardanelles are a mess of Greek islands, some held by the schismatic Greeks, some by the Genoese, and a few by our Order – Lesvos, Chios, Rhodos. South on the coast of Asia-Syria is Tyre. South of Tyre is Acre. South of Acre is the open beach of Jaffa near Jerusalem.’ Fra Peter clicked down the last city, and a silence fell.

  Matteo Corner was nodding along. There were twenty of us sitting in the July heat, most of us the legate’s men. Corner put a finger on the pistachio hull for Jerusalem. ‘You have been?’ Corner asked.

  ‘I’ve made a dozen caravans,’ Fra Peter said. ‘It is the ultimate duty of our Order, to escort pilgrims to Jerusalem.’

  Corner smiled cynically. ‘I have been as well.’ He shrugged.

  His shrug was dismissive, and I was as shocked as if he’d blasphemed. ‘Surely, messire, it is a fine city?’

  Fra Peter sighed. ‘Do not confuse the earthly Jerusalem with the Heavenly, young William. The earthly city is neither very large nor very holy. And it’s only trade is the pilgrim trade.’

  But Fiore leaned forward. ‘And then comes Africa?’ he asked, tracing the outline of the Syrian coast in red wine on the table.

  Matteo Corner nodded. ‘Yes. This triangle is the Sinai.’

  I had a pleasant shock. To hear the names of places from the Bible as real landmarks!

  Corner kept sketching. ‘This is the Nile delta. The delta is enormous – a hundred leagues across, with several cities and three or four navigable branches. This is Cairo, where the Sultan lives, here at the base of the delta. Here is Alexandria.’ He placed another pistachio. ‘Here is Damietta, where Saint Louis met defeat.’

  Alexandria. If Jerusalem was the holiest city in the world, Alexandria was the greatest, founded by the mighty conqueror himself on the burning sands of Africa. I had grown to manhood listening to the Romance of Alexander; indeed, there were men singing verses from it in the fleet. And in Sienna, in Genoa, in Venice and in Verona we heard constantly from merchants who had sailed there of it’s fine harbour and magnificent waterfront, of the power of the Sultan, the ancient library and lighthouse, the early Christian churches now used by heretics.

  Matteo Corner shook his head. ‘When I first saw Alexandria, I thought I was seeing the heavenly Jerusalem,’ he said. ‘It must be ten times the size of Venice.’

  Fra Peter nodded. ‘You could fit London in it over and over,’ he said. ‘The whole of the new city is walled, and the walls have forty great gates, and every one of them as well-fortified as the gate castles of London, or better.’

  Sabraham nodded. ‘Their customs take is greater than the whole income of the order,’ he said. ‘I know.’

  Nerio leaned back. ‘Have you gentlemen read any of the crusading manuals?’

  It turned out that most of the Knights of the Order had, although I had not. I had read Llull, though.

  Fra Jean, a Provençal knight, nodded, and leaned forward eagerly. ‘Saint Louis thought the same as the author, that the Holy Land could only be conquered by way of Egypt.’

  Fra Peter said nothing, but tapped his teeth with his thumb and stared at the candle on the table.

  Nerio smiled his careful smile. He flicked a look at me and when he spoke his voice dripped with an entirely false adolescent innocence. ‘Is it possible we will attack Alexandria?’ he asked.

  I thought Fra Peter might break his teeth, he tapped them so hard.

  Fra Jean shrugged. ‘We do not have the men, even if we had God’s fortune and the best knights in the world, to take Alexandria.’

  Lord Grey, who was usually the most reticent of English gentlemen, leaned forward with enthusiasm. ‘I believe, gentlemen, that with such a legate and such a king to lead us, we might accomplish something.’

  Fra Ricardo Caracciolo joined us and added his weight to the argument. ‘The best crusade launched in a hundred years – and we will fall like a lightning bolt wherever we land,’ he said.

  Fra Peter glanced at me. ‘What happened when you attacked Florence last year, Sir William?’ he asked.

  I was knighted. But I knew where his thoughts lay. ‘We had fewer than four thousand men-at-arms, and we assaulted the barricades,’ I said.

  Every head turned.

  ‘We seized the barricades of one gate, and held them for a time,’ I went on. ‘But Florence is a city with fifty thousand men in her, and so great that we could not be serious about a siege; we could not surround her walls, nor seriously threaten her. Had her population sallied, we might all have been taken or killed.’ I smiled at Ser Nerio, because I knew the Florentine had been present.

  He laughed. ‘Indeed, unless one was told that the English were at the gates, it was hard to know. Farmers brought their goods, the wine was cheap, and the money markets almost unaffected.’ He shrugged and smiled at me. ‘I mean no offence.’

  ‘None taken,’ I said.

  Fra Peter nodded. ‘But this is what I meant. Six thousand men do not even offer a threat to a city of a hundred thousand or more. I suspect even Acre is out of our reach. We might do better seizing a city or two on the Asian shore to secure the Order’s islands.’

  Nerio smiled cynically. ‘The king would like that,’ he said.

  Fra Peter narrowed his eyes.

  Nerio shrugged. ‘The King of Cyprus has made his reputation seizing small Turkish ports in Cilician Armenia and the Levant,’ he said. ‘It is good for Cyprus, good for trade.’ He sighed, blowing out his cheeks theatrically. ‘You needn’t worry – Alexandria is safe from the force of our arms. Genoa is sending a contingent, and Genoa is the Sultan’s ally. The Genoese would never allow us to attack Egypt.’

  Indeed, the Genoese contingent did not meet us at Corfu, as they had promised, but sailed for the Peloponnesus and thence to the Genoese possessions on the coast of Asia. We
discovered this while lying in a small port on the west coast of the Morea, my first visit to Greece.

  It was fine country, with rich farms and splendid weather, if hotter than a blacksmith’s shop, yet dry and with a breeze. And Nerio took us all to see the ruins of an ancient temple close by the beach where out ships floated.

  When we returned to the beach, several of the Venetian ships were like beehives for their activity. Venetian oarsmen are citizens, and they camp on shore under awnings when they can, and it takes time to unrig these awnings.

  I found Fra Peter with the legate and the king. He waved me to him, and I approached them, made my bows, and received Father Pierre’s warm smile as a reward.

  ‘The very man,’ Fra Peter said.

  Lord Contarini was one of the two Venetian admirals in charge of the ships. He was remarkably old for a knight, with one eye milk white, a long brown scar across his forehead and wispy white hair. He was sixty-five years old. He turned his good eye on me.

  Father Pierre caught my hand. ‘Listen, Sir William. The Turks are at sea – indeed, they have taken a series of towns facing Negroponte. A Venetian colony.’

  Contarini laughed. ‘Not a colony, or I’d have more authority there. An ally.’

  Fra Peter nodded. ‘Be that as it may, the Venetians feel that they need to—’

  Father Pierre shook his head gently. ‘Venice, the Emperor of the East and the Pope have a treaty for the mutual protection of Christians in the East,’ Father Pierre said. ‘I helped to negotiate this treaty, and now, I’m afraid, we need to give it some …’ he paused.

  ‘Teeth,’ snapped the King of Cyprus and Jerusalem. He grinned at me. ‘The Venetians would like to take their galley fleet and sweep for the Turks. They swear they will still make the rendezvous at Rhodes.’

  ‘What of the pilgrims? And the soldiers?’ I asked. In fact, I cared little for the mercenaries in the holds of the great Venetian round ships, packed like armoured cordwood. But I was worried about Emile, who was aboard one of the two ships that carried non-combatants, most of whom were wives of the crusaders.

  King Peter nodded. ‘They should go the shortest route to Rhodes, my lords.’ He glanced at me. ‘The Venetians don’t want to pay the routiers. So they won’t take them to relieve Negroponte.’

  Ah, Christendom. We had an army of excellent professional soldiers under our hatches, but Venice didn’t want to pay. Venice wanted the Pope to pay.

  I bowed to Fra Peter. Very softly, I said, ‘I can’t see how this involves me, Sir Peter.’

  He scratched under his chin, thought the better of it in such august company, and looked at Father Pierre. And tapped his teeth with his thumb.

  The legate nodded his head to Lord Contarini.

  The elderly Venetian sighed. ‘Misericordia! You gentilhommes would like the Serenissima to pay your mercenaries, and I, too, would like such an army, but I have not been given a ducat. I am commanding the largest fleet that Venice has one the seas, and if you gentlemen,’ he nodded to me, ‘would volunteer, I believe that I could run the Turks out of the Ionian. At least for long enough to cover the rendezvous of the allied fleet at Rhodes.’ He shrugged. ‘If they are left uncontested, surely it is to the disadvantage of all of us?’

  ‘There is the Roman fleet at Constantinople,’ the legate put in.

  ‘Six galia sottil,’ Contarini said with something like contempt. ‘In bad repair. They will cower inside the Golden Horn until their brothers, the Genoese, come to rescue them.’

  Father Pierre showed some of the strain he was feeling by shrugging. He rarely indulged in displays of temper or even impatience, but the near-defection of the Genoese contingent, sailing its own route to the rendezvous with an unknown number of French and Imperial men-at-arms, and now the possible desertion of the Venetian military fleet, was sapping even his boundless good humour.

  I bowed to Lord Contarini. ‘May I have leave to consult with my friends?’ I asked. I looked pointedly at Fra Peter, who followed me out of the meeting. To my surprise, so did the king.

  I found Fiore, Miles, and Juan at a fire, cooking bacon on sticks. Nerio’s squire was doing it for him – Nerio was watching a woman bathe.

  There was some consternation when my friends discovered that they had the king and Philip de Mézzières in attendance. We provided wine as well we could. In the background, our galia grossa was repacking her stores at a great rate, surrounded by a fleet of small craft who were loading bulk cargo over the side. The oarsmen were assembled on the beach in neat rows, every man with his javelins and his sword and coat of mail. Venetian oarsmen are excellent soldiers as well as providing the motive force for their fleet.

  ‘The Venetians are mounting a subordinate expedition to chastise the Turks who are attacking Christian shipping,’ I said.

  ‘Where?’ asked Nerio, suddenly interested.

  I probably showed the depth of my ignorance on my face, having little idea where Negroponte was. But the king came to my aid.

  We recreated the wine-shop map with sand and pebbles. ‘East of Attica is an island that is rich and well-castled,’ he said. ‘It is allied to Venice.’

  Nerio whistled. ‘My father has manors there,’ he said. ‘By the devil, gentlemen, I have a manor there, on the coast of Thebes facing Euboea.’

  ‘Kindly do not swear by the devil while you wear the cross of Saint John,’ Fra Peter said.

  Nerio flashed an eyebrow. ‘But of course, and I was foolish to speak so,’ he said in a tone that robbed his words of any conviction.

  I looked at the king.

  Mind you, you must imagine my friends all bowing or kneeling in the sand.

  He glanced at Nerio. I think he was amused by the young Florentine’s bluster. Perhaps it was like calling to like. His mouth wrinkled in a wry smile, almost like a sneer.

  ‘I would like you gentlemen to stay with the Venetians as volunteers,’ he said. ‘I would esteem is as a great favour – the more especially if, having chastised the Turks, you ensured that Lord Contarini continued to Rhodes. Without these galleys, I lack the strength at sea to accomplish anything of this empris.’

  I snuck a glance at Fra Peter, but there was no help coming from that quarter. Fra Peter didn’t have to worry about King Peter’s attempts to woo Emile; on the other hand, he was charged with protecting the legate, which was probably a more worthy concern.

  ‘Your Grace,’ I said. ‘Yet I am a mere knight, and not a great magnate of France or England. I have not power to keep a lord of Venice to his promise.’

  Fra Peter allowed himself a smile. ‘You are, however, the officer of all my volunteers, and if I send you – or rather, if the legate sends you, and the other volunteers of the order, it seems to me unlikely that the admiral will maroon you or strand you far from the crusade.’ He nodded to me. ‘Sir William, you have a famous name. Contarini asked for you.’

  Well. There’s fame for you.

  Nerio nodded vehemently. ‘Is this a council of war? Sir William, are you asking my humble opinion?’

  The king and Fra Peter frowned at Nerio’s open derision. But I nodded.

  Nerio bowed. ‘I, for one, would be delighted.’

  Fiore made an Italianate motion of his head, one that had as much pitch and toll as a ship in a storm. ‘If there is fighting?’ he said, as if that summed up all that needed to be said.

  Miles Stapleton grinned. ‘Against the Turks?’ he said.

  Juan beamed. ‘I will fight the Turks,’ he said.

  In fact, we had twenty more donats, knights and men-at-arms. But their enthusiasm was unanimous.

  Nerio and Fiore went to the great ships, the round ships, to see if we couldn’t find a few ‘volunteers’ from among the so-called ‘crusaders’, the routiers and mercenaries in the holds of the great ships. Men like me. Or like the man I had been.

  I returned to
Contarini and swore to follow his orders. We brought him almost forty armoured men, stiffening his marines. They were a mixed bag of crusaders, routiers and volunteers, and included some famous men – we had the Baron Roslynn from Scotland, who is today the Earl of Orkney.

  I didn’t see the king again. As you can imagine, I had some thought that I had been used as Uriah by King Peter. I tried to get aboard the pilgrim ship to see Emile, but there wasn’t time. Lord Contarini ordered me aboard his flag, the Christ the King, a galia grossa of magnificent size, with the broadest top deck of any galley I had ever seen. Her hull was scarlet, and she had enough gold-work on her sides to support every gilder in London for a year. He took all five of us and our squires and pages to augment his marines.

  As an aside, a Venetian usually ships noble ‘marines’ from Venice; gentlemen-marines are allowed cargo space and decent living quarters. But to press more of the crusaders aboard, Lord Contarini had left all but three of his gentleman-marine berths open.

  He put to sea with fourteen galia sottil and two more galia grossa stretching away behind us down the coast of the Morea. I saw Emile and waved.

  She blew me a kiss. She said something, and I couldn’t hear it, and we were past. I watched her for as long as I could, but our deep rudder turned us out of the line and I lost her behind Turenne’s galia sottil. And there on the bow was the Hungarian from Mestre, with his long hair wrapped in pearls. I would not have seen him except that I was staring after Emile. And then he too was gone.

  I had thought the admiral a quiet, dignified old gentleman, but on board his flagship he was a tartar. He was always on deck; often, he would take the helm of his ship and steer her personally. Of course, as I knew, it was his ship – he owned the vessel, her cargo, and most of the standing rigging, the arms, and tools. It was from watching him, and talking to him, when the mood was on him, that I learned how little he relished taking the Venetian squadron to sea in pursuit of the Turks.