Crusader Gold

by David Gibbins

  “That’s it,” she said. “We’re finished.”

  She carefully pulled back the angle-lamp to reveal the entire inscription, the product of more than a week of painstaking labour. With the patina of centuries removed, the letters stood out crisp and black as if they had been applied only days before.

  Tuz ki cest estorie ont. Ou oyront ou lirront ou ueront. Prient a ihesu en deyte.

  De Richard de haldingham o de Lafford eyt pite. Ki lat fet e compasse. Ki ioie en cel li seit done.

  The unfamiliar spelling of the Old French only served to deepen the mystery of the man who had composed it. After a moment of contemplation Maria turned encouragingly to her assistant, a willowy young man with steel-rimmed spectacles, who eagerly leaned forwards to make the translation.

  “All those who possess this work, or who hear, read or see it, pray to Jesus in his godhead to have pity on Richard of Holdingham or of Sleaford, who made it and set it out, that he may be granted bliss in heaven.”

  It seemed appropriate that Richard’s last words should also be theirs, that they should finish their task at the spot where the scribe had last lifted his quill from the parchment almost seven hundred years before.

  Twenty minutes later Maria stood in the centre of the room and gazed one last time at the map before it was sealed behind its protective glass covering. With the spotlight now removed, the low-intensity glow of the room seemed to accentuate the age-old appearance of the vellum, the shadows and undulations showing where the calfskin had shrunk and buckled with the passing of the years.

  Normally the job of cleaning manuscripts would be left to her technical staff at the institute in Oxford. But when the call came for a new programme of restoration on the Mappa Mundi in Hereford Cathedral, the temptation proved too great. It was the chance of a lifetime, the opportunity to work on the greatest extant thirteenth-century illuminated manuscript, to touch with her own hands the most important and celebrated medieval map in the world.

  As her eyes adjusted to the gloom, the familiar form began to take shape.

  Almost filling the immense squared parchment was an orb more than four feet wide. At the centre was Jerusalem, and below it the T-shape of the Mediterranean dividing Asia, Africa and Europe. Squeezed in at the lower left were the British Isles, and in the exergue beyond was the inscription she had been cleaning. Everywhere on the map were hundreds of miniature drawings with captions in Latin and French, some illustrating biblical stories and others depicting bizarre creatures and mythical places.

  It was a cornucopia of fact and fantasy, the supreme expression of the medieval mind. Yet it was also hemmed in by ignorance. In its order and confidence the map seemed the last statement on the world of men, yet beyond the thin strip of ocean that encircled Christendom lay nothing at all. To Maria the figure of Christ in the gable above seemed to be sitting in judgement not only on the dead but also on the living, on men with the hubris to think that the myriad wonders they had crammed into their map of the world represented anything like the entirety of God’s creation.

  “Dr. de Montijo. You must come at once.”

  The dapper figure in the clerical robe caught up to Maria as she made her way briskly across the cathedral forecourt, her umbrella raised against the perennial English drizzle. She was due back in Oxford that evening and had little time to spare if she was going to catch the train.

  “This had better be good,” she said, her slight Spanish accent giving a lilt to her voice. “I’m scheduled to give a seminar on Richard of Holdingham at my institute in about three hours and need time to prepare.”

  “That may just have to wait,” the little man wheezed excitedly. “The workmen in the old Chained Library have just made an extraordinary discovery. Your assistant is already with them.”

  Together Maria and the cleric approached the north porch of the cathedral. With its soft honey hue the weathered sandstone of the buttresses made Hereford seem less forbidding than many of the great cathedrals of England, yet even so the effect when they entered was awesome. Maria glanced down the nave to the altar and up at the cavernous space in between, her view framed by the massive pillars on either side that rose to the smaller arches of the clerestory and the spreading fans of the ceiling vault far above. As she followed the cleric up the north aisle she was assailed by the smell of damp stone and a faint hint of decay, as if the sickly reek of putrefaction which had permeated the cathedral for so long had left a lingering aura long after the last burial vaults had been sealed.

  The nave had changed little since Richard of Holdingham last passed this way.

  She brushed against a pillar and felt a sudden thrill of intimacy, as if she had reached back in time to shadow the great man’s footsteps. In his day the ponderous masonry of the Normans had been in place for only a century, yet a minster had stood on this spot since the time of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia. It had been the Cathedral Church of St. Ethelbert, the king of East Anglia who had been foully murdered nearby. In Richard’s day it also attracted pilgrims who came from far and wide to pay homage to Thomas Becket, the archbishop martyred at Canterbury, whose enamel reliquary had also survived through the centuries, another of the cathedral’s great treasures alongside the Mappa Mundi.

  After passing the north transept they reached the choir aisle where the map had been displayed over the past century before being moved to its present home in a purpose-built museum outside. Immediately opposite the blank space on the wall was a low doorway into the outer structure of the cathedral. Through it the beginning of a spiral staircase could be seen.

  “The reconstruction work is almost complete,” the cleric said. “This is just a precaution.” He passed Maria a yellow safety helmet and put one on himself, its appearance incongruous above his brown clerical cassock. As she followed him up the steeply corkscrewing steps, his words resounded with a muffled echo.

  “A sandstone cathedral is like a wooden ship,” he explained. “Keep an old hull in service long enough and all the timbers will need to be renewed. Like HMS

  Victory. Sandstone isn’t the most durable building material. When we moved the library we took the opportunity for some much-needed stone replacement.”

  They were nearing the chamber which had once held Hereford’s world-renowned chained library, a fabulous collection including rare incunabula, books printed before 1500, as well as 227 manuscript volumes, beginning with the priceless Hereford Gospels of the eighth century. Both the books and the cases to which they had been chained were now reconstituted in the museum which housed the Mappa Mundi, itself once also stored in the library.

  After ascending to the clerestory level, they squeezed past a stack of freshly quarried blocks and stood at the entrance to the chamber. In the thin rays of daylight cast through the slit windows they could just make out the paler patches along the walls where the bookcases had once been. Instead of a library, the chamber now looked like a medieval stonemason’s workshop, with cutting tools and fragments of decayed masonry piled all over the floor.

  At the far end a group of workmen were huddled over a patch of bright light in the wall. It came from a hole where two blocks of masonry had been removed, leaving a space just wide enough for a slender form to get through. At that moment a head appeared upside-down, its tousled blond hair and glasses caked in dust.

  “Maria! You’re not going to believe this.”

  Jeremy Haverstock had been her best-ever doctoral student, a virtuoso in early Germanic languages, but he had been cloistered in Oxford writing his dissertation and was clearly revelling in the sense of adventure. She had invited him along to Hereford to give him a break, and to share in the unique experience. Since his arrival from America she had encouraged him to travel widely to visit early monastic libraries, yet he still had the infectious enthusiasm of a tourist touching history for the first time. She smiled in spite of herself as she and the cleric picked their way across the debris and pulled down the dust masks from their helmets.

  �
�It’s your career on the line,” she said. “Anything less than an Augustinian Bible and you’ll be doing the seminar single-handed.”

  “It’s better than that. Far better.” As they approached she could see his face was streaked with sweat despite the chill of the room. He heaved one of the blocks aside and withdrew out of sight into the wall. “Follow me.”

  Moments later Maria was squeezed in beside him, her wavy brown hair and leather jacket covered with dust. Any irritation she may have felt instantly evaporated when she saw what lay before them. The workmen had broken through into a three-foot-wide space within the massive exterior wall of the cathedral. From Maria’s hunched position she could see they were squatting above a ruined spiral staircase, a relic of some previous building phase, which had long ago been blocked off. Three steps below them the well of the staircase was clogged with debris, jumbled chunks that looked like eroded sandstone covered with a pall of red dust. With her body bent double Maria sidled down for a closer look, the spotlight angled directly behind her head.

  “Es estupendo.” The words of her native Spanish came out involuntarily as she stared open-mouthed in disbelief.

  “See what I mean?” Jeremy slid down eagerly beside her. “It’s like Aladdin’s cave.”

  The debris was not discarded masonry, as she’d assumed, but a great mass of brown and yellowed parchment, some compacted like papier-mâché but much of it well preserved with letters still plainly visible.

  “It looks like a clean-out of the library,” Jeremy said. “Torn fragments, books damaged beyond repair. It’s all handwritten manuscript, and none of it looks later than the thirteenth century. The architectural historian reckons this staircase became redundant and was sealed up some time before the completion of the north transept in the fourteenth century.”

  Maria shifted sideways and pointed to the spot where her head had obscured the centre in shadow. She was suddenly trembling with excitement.

  “Look,” she exclaimed. “It isn’t all fragments. There’s an intact folio volume.”

  Jeremy reached over with his longer arms and carefully extracted the leather-bound book from its bedding of parchment fragments. While he held it Maria gently blew off the dust and opened the hoary brown cover.

  “Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum.”

  She read out the words slowly, her mind reeling in astonishment. “The Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. And in Latin, which means one of the original copies. Ninth, maybe eighth century.”

  Jeremy peeled off a sheaf of parchment that had become stuck to the back of the volume. With the musty leaves balanced on his hands he began humming quietly to himself, his eyes darting to and fro across the writing. Maria watched bemusedly as he suddenly became silent.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Incredible,” he whispered. “A twelfth-century continuation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. It mentions King Henry II and King John. It must be the latest document anywhere in Old English, the language the Normans tried so hard to suppress. It clinches my thesis once and for all, that the Anglo-Saxon tradition was kept alive in the secret scriptoria of the cathedrals well into the medieval period. If this doesn’t get me my doctorate, nothing will.”

  Maria surveyed the scene in front of them, noting several more intact volumes poking out where they had removed the Bede.

  “This was more than just a clean-out,” she asserted quietly. “It’s always been a mystery why these two seminal works of Anglo-Saxon history were missing from the Hereford library, in a collection with liturgical manuscripts going back to the eighth century. It may have been an overzealous librarian keeping up with the times, making space for more recent works. But it may have been more than that, a deliberate culling of works of Anglo-Saxon history from the library, an attempt to conceal anything the Norman aristocracy saw as subversive.”

  She carefully closed the book and cradled it in her arms, at the same time looking with concern at the fragments of parchment which had broken off and crumbled where Jeremy had extracted the volume from its resting place.

  “We’ll take the Bede and those pages of the Chronicle,” she instructed. “But everything else must remain in situ and the entrance resealed until we can assemble a full conservation team. We can’t afford to expose any more parchment to air.” She peered again at Jeremy, who was cleaning his glasses with a serious look on his face. “And I forgive you.” She grinned. “You may just have stumbled on the greatest treasure trove of early English history ever discovered.”

  As they swivelled round to go, Jeremy caught sight of an anomalous shape protruding from the sea of parchment fragments. It was one end of a wound scroll, something that might be even older than the bound manuscript volumes.

  Unable to restrain himself, he leaned back to extract it just as Maria was beginning to crawl out.

  He cleared his throat suggestively and Maria looked back towards the bright tungsten light. She saw his guilty expression and then the metre-long scroll perched on top of the Chronicle pages.

  “We must leave it,” she said sharply.

  “Not if you still want to do that seminar this evening.”

  Maria’s curiosity was piqued and she crawled back towards him. Jeremy had unravelled about ten centimetres of the scroll and was holding it so she could see. The radius of a large inscribed circle was visible, and within it she could make out faint forms that looked like outline drawings and tightly written inscriptions.

  She knew what she was looking at even before she reached him. In her own doctoral thesis a decade earlier she had argued that the Hereford Mappa Mundi was a copy, the work of a remarkable artist but not a scholar. It was the only way to account for its most glaring error, the word AFFRICA written across Europe and EUROPA across Africa. The Bishop of Hereford had commissioned the map from Richard of Holdingham, who had prepared a blueprint in his home cathedral of Lincoln, but the final version had been completed in his absence by an artisan at Hereford skilled in calligraphy and illumination but not very literate or accurate. His ignorance was revealed in the finer detail, from small licences he had taken for aesthetic purposes at the expense of credibility to peculiarities in the spelling and geography.

  Now to her astonishment she knew she was looking at the sketch prepared by Richard himself, the cartographer and monk whose vision of the world had fascinated her since her student days. She stared with reverence at the precise, confident hand which had created captions all over the map. Just below Jeremy’s left hand were the faded letters EUROPA, correctly placed over France and Italy.

  Beside his right hand where he had pulled the scroll open was the elongated form of the British Isles, with Hereford and Lincoln prominently displayed.

  As Jeremy moved the fingers of his right hand to the edge of the parchment she noticed something odd.

  “My God,” she breathed. “The exergue. It’s missing.”

  The elaborate decoration which filled the space between the orb of the world and the square edges of the parchment on the finished Mappa Mundi had clearly been the creation of the artisan alone, a place for decorative features of less interest to Richard, embellishments which could have been tailored to the whim of the cathedral authorities. It explained the bizarre parade of images, from huntsmen and clerics to references to the Roman emperors, which the artisan must have drawn together haphazardly from other maps and manuscripts he had seen.

  In the corner Maria saw that the dedication she had so painstakingly cleaned on the Mappa Mundi was also missing, so it too must have been the work of the artisan rather than the master himself. Richard must have visited the cathedral to discuss the commission but had clearly not been present at the dedication. It solved the mystery of how the misnamed continents had been allowed to remain, mistakes Richard would surely never have countenanced. She felt a pang of disappointment as she looked at the blank space, a sense that Richard was no longer so securely in her grasp, that he had stepped back into the shadow
lands of the past.

  As Jeremy shifted slightly, she realised that the mottled brown and yellow of the parchment where the dedication should have been held a defined shape.

  “Angle it towards the light,” she said. “There’s something here.”

  The faded image of a drawing came into view. It was another landmass, an irregular image not much larger than the British Isles wedged into the corner of the parchment.

  “It’s beyond the outer ocean surrounding the world, so it can’t be part of the map,” she said. “It must be Richard’s sketch for one of the continents. Look, you can see where he used his knife to scrape away the ink to try to erase it.”

  Jeremy was craning his head over for a better view, his lank blond forelock hanging directly in front of Maria’s face.

  “I’m not so sure,” he murmured. “It’s somehow vaguely familiar, but not from the Mappa Mundi. Perhaps if I saw it the right way up I might get a better…”

  As his words trailed off they both looked up at each other in astonishment.

  “The Vinland Map,” Maria whispered.

  With her heart racing, she pulled out her magnifying glass and began scrutinising the lines. Only a few weeks earlier they had attended a conference at Yale University on the latest dating evidence for the famous Vinland Map, a drawing now thought to have been a forgery but based on a lost map that predated Columbus by some fifty years, a map which showed a shoreline said to have been discovered by the Vikings centuries earlier to the west of Greenland.

  “It’s incredible,” she exclaimed. “It’s exactly the same. There’s the river leading to the lake and the large inlet lower down. And the legend looks identical, in medieval Latin.”

  With the magnifying glass the faint smudge at the top became legible: Vinlanda Insula a Byarno repa et Leipho socijs.

  “Island of Vinland,” Jeremy murmured. “Discovered by Bjarni and Leif in company.”

  “It proves the authenticity of the image on the Vinland Map beyond doubt!”