The Jerusalem Parchment

by Tuvia Fogel

  “Ah, look who’s here, Arnald Arifat, the blond troubadour who fights Rome with Father Boson. What a pleasant surprise . . . and wearing a red cross! Tell me, how is the old sage in Narbonne?”

  “I don’t know, Father; he was well enough when I last saw him, five months ago. By the way, what is your name, Father? Or should I call you Old Man, like everyone seems to do?”

  “He, he . . . nice try, Arnald, but I’m not yet ready to reveal who I am—or rather, who I was. When I find the parchment, then I might be tempted to let my real name bask in some of that glory.”

  Arnald remembered the master of Provence calling the Old Man “a crafty bastard.”

  “What do you mean, when you find it? I brought you the Parchment ten years ago!” he blurted out.

  “Ahh, you’re right, of course, and I still have it,” wheezed the Old Man. “But unfortunately, the parchment you brought me, the one your Cathar bishops received from the Bogomils, is a Greek copy of the original!”

  “But it was drawn in Greek by Saint John himself!” exclaimed Arnald, trying to keep his voice down but visibly shaken by the demotion to “a copy” of a relic he considered holier than the True Cross.

  The Old Man leaned forward, smiling kindly. Arnald thought of smiling skulls in Sicilian crypts. “I’m sorry, Arnald,” he said. “I know how crucial those two circles are to your church’s view of history. But I’ve spent fifteen years chasing that map—I mean that parchment. I discovered the original was found near Jericho four hundred years ago. It was identical, but in Hebrew. You see, the original is a map, but once the words on it are translated into Greek . . . they no longer lead to anything!”

  Arnald took a step back and scratched his beard. “If the real Parchment is a map, what does it lead to? Why does everyone want it so badly?”

  The Old Man burned with the desire to unburden decades of secrets, but if the Cathar in front of him was certainly an enemy of Rome, he was now also a knight of the Temple. Pedro de Montaigue could make him repeat every word he was told.

  “And Pedro is not Guillaume,” the Old Man reminded himself. “But Pedro already knows what the map leads to. I must simply avoid telling Arnald anything I haven’t told the new master,” he thought.

  “All right, Arnald,” he said out loud, grinning in anticipation. “The Cathars’ version of the Parchment may not work as a map, but you and Boson trusted me enough to let me keep it for you, and it was helpful in my unfinished search for the original . . . so if you’ll follow me to my scriptorium, I’ll repay my debt to the Cathar church by telling you the story of the Parchment of Circles—and I mean the real story!”

  The two men crossed the courtyard, the Old Man taking short, determined little steps, to a long building on its western side that looked out on the sea. The scriptorium was on its first floor and was so full of books and parchments that Arnald thought it looked out of place in those bare military quarters.

  The chaplain sat him down by a window and went to fetch a Bible. “You’re a Cathar,” he began almost gleefully, “so you’ve always known that Jesus wasn’t the Son of God, but a man like you and me. A prophet, to be sure, as the Saracens also admit, but a man. And like all men, he did not come back from the dead!” He put down the Bible and whispered in the knight’s ear: “That is what everyone is after, Arnald: the written proof that there was no Resurrection!”

  Pleased with the knight’s wide open eyes, the Old Man turned to a worn page of the codex. “Did you ever read these verses?” He recited a passage from Matthew. “Some of the guards went into the city and reported to the chief priests everything that had happened. When the chief priests met with the elders and devised a plan, they gave the soldiers a large sum of money, telling them, “You are to say: ‘His disciples came during the night and stole him away while we were asleep.’ If this report gets to the governor, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble.” So the soldiers took the money and did as they were instructed. And this story has been widely circulated among Jews to this very day.”

  The Old Man paused for effect. “The Parchment of Circles leads to the confession by the thieves who stole the body. Its discovery would make the very foundations of Roman Christianity crumble to dust!”

  Something twigged in Arnald’s memory, but he couldn’t put a finger on it and didn’t want to lose a word of the Old Man’s account, so he said nothing. The chaplain went on.

  “I spoke with every sect that was in Jerusalem when the Jericho trove came to light. I even spoke with the keeper of Saracen records. I discovered that the rabbis prohibited Jews from revealing the true nature of the Parchment but that the Karaites, some years later, gifted a Greek translation of it to the Johannites, who were convinced it was the work of Saint John himself. That copy made its way to Thrace and ended up in the hands of Bogomil—who was, as you surely know—the Bulgarian founder of your religion.”

  Arnald nodded silently and then said, “But how can you be sure it was a translation, Father? Couldn’t the Jericho trove also have included a parchment drawn by Saint John in Greek?”

  “Mmh . . . the question of whether Saint John wrote in Hebrew or Greek is a fascinating one, Arnald, but the fact remains that the Parchment was drawn as a map, not written as a prophecy.”

  “Who says so?” By now Arnald was almost pleading. “If you haven’t found the Hebrew original, how do you know it is a map? Or that a Hebrew original even exists?”

  “That’s not a bad question,” said the Old Man, standing up slowly to put away the Bible. “Well, for a start, several people independently told me of a letter, written by the rabbis in Jerusalem who saw the Parchment at the time it was found. Apparently they wrote it was a map, which led to a document that would put an end to Christianity and that the Messiah would make use of it on his arrival. It seems that letter is somewhere in Egypt.”

  At the words “put an end to Christianity,” Arnald again felt the twinge of a distant memory. He made an effort to remember where he’d heard the phrase, but every Cathar perfectus he’d ever met believed Rome was Babylon and was always predicting the end of Christianity, so he soon gave up.

  The Old Man went on. “As for how I know that an original exists, I entered the Temple as a Cistercian chaplain in Montpellier thirty years ago, knowing nothing of any parchment, simply driven by a scholar’s desire, nurtured for years, to find the first circular map of Jerusalem, the one that must have given rise to the dozens I’d seen in Europe since my childhood in . . . never mind, where I was a child is not important.”

  He grinned and sat back down on the stool in front of Arnald. “What matters is what I discovered in Montpellier. A hundred years ago, when the Order of the Temple was founded, rumors were already rife that the real Parchment was somewhere in Jerusalem. The first nine knights, with the pretext of building their stables, spent eight years digging under the esplanade looking for it but found nothing.”

  The chaplain looked around as if to make sure no one could hear and whispered,

  “Then, in 1127, at the Council of Troyes, Saint Bernard convinced Honorius II that the order had found the Parchment and, through it, the confession. The concessions the Temple has extorted from popes ever since have been exorbitant. And you wonder why everyone wants that parchment so badly?”

  “Saint Bernard of Cîteaux lied to the pope?” asked Arnald, incredulous.

  “Listen, I met Bernard; in fact he was my first teacher, eighty years ago,” said the Old Man. “To save his Cistercian houses he would have sacrificed Rome, not just a pope—but Jerusalem, never! He wanted his Templars to hold it forever, or at least until Christ returns. He was lucky to die thirty years before Salah ad-Din took it from him.”

  “There’s just one thing I don’t understand, Father,” said Arnald. “You and I have our reasons to hate Rome; we know why Roma is the reverse of Amor. But the Temple is Saint Bernard’s and the pope’s creature . . . why on earth would they ever threaten the very survival of Christianity?”


  “Another far from stupid question. You see, after Godefroy took Jerusalem, Christian knights spent thirty years speaking with all kinds of heretics: Syriac monks, Jewish-Christian sects, Sufi brotherhoods, Manicheans of all sorts. Some of them began to contemplate a kind of synthesis of the three faiths, which would put an end to all wars, and soon found that if such a new religion could be spawned, the demotion of ‘Christ the Son of God’ to plain ‘Jesus the prophet’ was an obligatory step in constructing it.”

  Arnald smiled, thinking back to conversations with Yehezkel on whether such a truly ecumenical faith would ultimately be practicable. He suddenly wished his kabbalist friend could speak with the Old Man while the cleric was still alive. “I have a good Jewish friend in Languedoc,” he said, as though this had something to do with new religions, “a rabbi, medicus, and kabbalist. I wish he were here to help you in your quest. He’s supposed to be somewhere in Syria with my thirteen-year-old only son. I don’t know if he’d help you find the Parchment, but if you already had it, for sure he would be the man to understand what those Jerusalem rabbis understood four hundred years ago!”

  The Old Man looked seriously interested. “A kabbalist? Yes, I heard of those ‘Jewish Sufis’ before, in Montpellier, but I confess I don’t know much about them. They pronounce names of God, don’t they? What is this rabbi’s name, anyway?”

  “Yehezkel ben Yoseph, Father, but back in Provence everyone calls him Master Ezekiel.”

  “And why did my speaking of knights who wish to inspire a new religion that will truly bring peace remind you of your Jewish friend?”

  “Because he sometimes claims to be an Averroist—you know, a follower of the Saracen philosopher who holds that no religion possesses the whole truth. But do I detect a trace of sympathy in your words for the plans of those enlightened knights, Father?”

  The chaplain grinned. “You do indeed, Arnald. I’ve promoted them for decades and made enemies in the process, both here and in Rome.” His collapsed features twisted in disgust. “Rome gives off a truly bad smell, Arnald,” he said bitterly. “Greed, arrogance, simony, and sodomy reign there, but what do its popes worry about? Heretics! Domingo and his friars wrap the hands of heretics around hot coals, tear out their nails and beards to convince them that the way they think about God is mistaken. It’s all so . . . stupid!”

  Arnald let him vent a little and then turned back to the Parchment. “Do you think the original never left Jerusalem?”

  “I don’t just think so, I’m sure of it. A hundred years ago, circular maps of Jerusalem began to be seen in Europe. North and south were often differently placed, but they all bore the same mistakes with respect to the real city, so they obviously shared the same original. And at the time, your Greek version had been far from here for centuries. Clearly, a copy of the Hebrew original was made.”

  “Have you found no indication of where in the city the original might be?” asked Arnald.

  “I’ve been concentrating on the records from the days of the first king, Baldwin I, but . . . ”

  The name Baldwin finally shifted something in Arnald’s memory and he let out a short cry. “HA! I have it. It was Robert de Bassonville!”

  “Uh? What are you talking about?” said the chaplain.

  “I just remembered who used the phrase ‘put an end to Christianity!’ Abbot Boson once told me the story of a convert, a Frankish noble from Dieppe, Robert de Bassonville, who became a Cathar believer in his old age, thirty or forty years ago. He married Adelisa, an illegitimate daughter of Roger II of Sicily, but one the king loved so much it seemed he’d told her a secret, which Adelisa revealed to her husband, and he later confided to Abbot Boson.”

  The Old Man had never heard of any of them—except Roger of Sicily, of course—but listened intently all the same, hoping for a clue, any clue, to the whereabouts of the Parchment.

  “Well, what Roger told his daughter,” Arnald went on, “concerned his own mother, Adelaide of Vasto, the woman Baldwin I took for his wife in a second marriage.”

  The chaplain let out a short gasp. “Uh, I know all about that story! Arnulf, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, was deposed because he officiated that wedding despite knowing that Baldwin was bigamous, because Arda of Armenia, his first wife, was still alive! When the king fell ill, he got so scared that he had the marriage annulled and Adelaide sent back to Sicily!”

  “Exactly! Her son Roger never forgave the kingdom for the slight! Thirty years later, he refused to join half the kings of Europe in the second campaign against the Saracens.”

  The Old Man urged him on: “So what was the secret Roger learned from his mother?”

  “She’d read Baldwin’s private diary and told her son the king found a document that, in his own words, ‘would put an end to Christianity!’ Roger told Adelisa of the diary to perpetuate the knowledge of its existence, since finding that document was his only hope of avenging his mother’s humiliation.”

  The Old Man was euphoric. He got up and started pacing the room, short steps and hunched back making him look like a piece on a chessboard. A hooded bishop, thought Arnald.

  “King Baldwin chose to hide it! I should have guessed,” the chaplain was murmuring. “This time I have it! Just when I thought I wouldn’t live long enough to set eyes on it . . . ”

  “I admit it sounds like Baldwin was talking of the confession,” said Arnald, “but Roger said nothing to his daughter of where it might be.”

  “Aah, but the king almost certainly wrote that in his diary!” cried the chaplain.

  “And where do you plan to look for King Baldwin’s hundred-year-old private diary?” asked Arnald.

  “But in the Royal Treasure, of course,” said the Old Man. “Where else?”

  CHAPTER 23

  VAYEHI EREV

  And There Was Evening

  THE SULTAN’S CAMP AT FÄRISKÜR, 16TH SEPTEMBER 1219

  Galatea bent down to straighten her sirwâl.*52 A mamluk caught a glimpse of a slim ankle and thought, “See how Allah is merciful, even to depraved sinners like me!”

  On her first night in the camp, al-Kamil ordered that she be taken not to the prostitutes’ tents, but to the one housing the wives of several emirs. The women there, quickly taken with her noble demeanor, crowded around and lent her clothes, which quite became her, despite being a little short, since the tallest of the Turkish and Kurdish ladies there barely came up to her chin.

  A loose, long-sleeved dress with a short slit in the front and an ornate belt fell just below her knees. Colored bands of Arabic inscription adorned its arms and the hem of the skirt. Under it, she wore a white ankle-length sirwâl, lined in red, and low black slippers. Finally, a veil went over her head and round her neck. Seeing her walk around the camp dressed as an Egyptian woman—not so differently, that is, from the way his Naomi used to dress—Yehezkel found Galatea more feminine than when she’d worn a nun’s habit or the extravagant dresses of a Tuscan countess. Glimpsing the contours of her body now sparked the same stirring in his loins that he’d felt while holding her senseless in his arms in Torcello and on the Falcus.

  Communication with the women being limited to a few courteous hand gestures, Galatea’s days in the camp were a time of isolation and silent contemplation, both second nature to a Cistercian nun, but to which she had devoted precious little time during the heady events of the last six months. In the light of the little Kabbalah she learned, she reflected on Brother Francesco turning out to be the man in her vision. It occurred to her that this was the perfect occasion to question Aillil, who visited the ladies’ tent every day, about the true beliefs of Cathars.

  She did, and the doctrines Aillil learned from perfecti as a child soon made her understand why the heresy won so many Christian hearts. After all, neither Christians nor Jews, as far as she knew, had a really satisfying explanation for human evil. Neither were prepared to admit that Satan was the equal of God, both insisting instead that he, too, was a fallen angel. How much easier and free of
contradictions it must be to consider God wholly good, but faced with a wholly evil uncreated adversary, a Satan so powerful it was actually he who created the whole bloodied, unjust universe around us, in which all are, in effect, prisoners!

  After witnessing al-Kamil’s placid response to Brother Francesco’s missionary fervor, Galatea became enough of an Averroist herself to refrain from trying to correct Aillil’s Cathar view of the world. Let him believe what he’d been taught, even if it was that there isn’t one God, but two! That it would make any difference to the fate of his soul was something—may God forgive her!—she no longer felt sure of.

  By now it was clear, she thought. They all preached the same thing: Gioacchino, Francesco, Sufis, and Cathars all preached a coming era of love! In those lonely days she became intimately convinced, with the wordless certainty of dreams, that in Francesco what was taking place was not simply an Imitatio Christi, but the Second Advent itself!

  Then she suddenly thought, “But if Jesus Christ has returned like he promised, and fifteen years ago I was solemnly declared a Bride of Christ, then . . . then Francesco is my husband!”

  She gasped. “Now how did that thought enter my head? Are priests, and not Hildegard, right about women after all? Oh, Mother of God, stop me thinking, for I am made of flesh and cannot help sinning!”

  Six days after Francesco returned to the Christian camp, Yehezkel was summoned to the sultan’s tent.

  “Get up off your knees, Tabib,” said al-Malik with a wide grin. “The Franks, like you predicted, have accepted the truce and asked for more time to consider the new offer. But tell me, what will happen to you now if you set foot in a kingdom where the long arm of that ‘cardinal’ can reach you?”