Crusader Gold

by David Gibbins

  “As if we needed spice after all this,” Jeremy said.

  “You thought you saw a woman on the wall-painting, a Viking,” Costas said to Jeremy, who suddenly nodded as he remembered.

  “For me, it’s the legend of the Valkyries,” Maria said. “Female riders from the spirit world who chose the slain in battle for Valhalla and then served them in the great feasting hall. I think Maria stayed with Harald to the end, a warrior princess, his thole-companion. She would have accompanied him to the afterlife.

  It was the Viking way. I think she’s up there now, feasting alongside him with the rest of his noble fellowship, the true félag.”

  “Maria, Queen of the Valkyries,” Costas said, deadpan. “From what I’ve seen, it suits you.”

  Jack grinned. “Time we sent someone else to join them.”

  The ship had been slowing down and was now motionless in the water, the last tendrils of its wake sloughing off in the swell to the south. The captain came clattering down the gangway from the bridge and joined them on the deck.

  “We’re in position, Jack,” he said. “Any time.”

  Jack nodded, looked appraisingly out to sea and then turned to a blanket-wrapped shape on the deck behind him. He carefully unrolled it and a dazzling object came into view. It was the mighty Varangian war axe they had taken from the longship, Halfdan’s prized weapon that had saved Jack and Costas from certain death in the ice. It was the first time Jack had held the axe since they had been winched away from their ordeal, and he felt a tingle down his spine as he clasped the oak haft and raised the gilded steel of the bit until it was level with his head. He slowly turned it from side to side, revealing the pendant shape of Thor’s hammer, Mjöllnir, with the wolf’s head in the apex, and above it the double-headed eagle of Rome and Constantinople, all picked out in gold. On the other side he brought his hand against the runic symbols of Halfdan himself, marks made a thousand years ago when Halfdan had served his beloved leader in the glory days of the Varangian Guard, in the greatest city the world had ever seen.

  The others moved wordlessly towards Jack and clasped their hands around the shaft. “Battle-luck,” Costas said.

  “Battle-luck,” Jack repeated quietly.

  Jack’s mind flashed back to the Golden Horn, to the extraordinary adventure that had brought them here. He thought again of Father O’Connor, of all he had done to keep the dark side of history at bay, of the terrible price he had paid.

  A sea mist had begun to swirl around them, cutting off the ship and the grey swell from the outside world, as if they had been caught in a time warp. Just over the horizon to the west lay Vinland, the farthest outpost of the Vikings. For a fleeting moment Jack thought he saw the ghostly stern of a longship slipping into the mist, its curving stern carved in the snarling form they had seen in the ice. It was as if they were poised at the place where reality became myth, where the Viking world ended and the spirit world began, a journey into darkness and terror more awful than Harald and his men could ever have imagined.

  Jack weighed the axe in his hands, then raised the cold steel and brushed it against his lips. Somewhere near here the last remnant of the iceberg would release Halfdan and his longship into the flow, the same stream that had taken his beloved king to the final showdown at the end of time. Halfdan would need to be girded well, fitted to stand proud alongside the companions of the battles he had fought when the Varangians had no equal in the world of men.

  Jack paced forward and with one graceful movement lowered the axe-head behind him and swung the haft high in the air, releasing it at the last moment as the weight pulled him forward. The axe arched high over the stern and began to tumble, catching a sunbeam through the mist and disappearing in a dazzling tumult of light. It was like a wayward bolt of lighting, a swirling flash of energy from the Age of Heroes. Then it sliced into the sea and was gone, leaving only the barest of ripples, soon lost in the swell. Jack felt strangely light-headed, as if a weight had been lifted from his soul, and he leaned against the stern railing and gazed at the grey surface of the sea as the others came up alongside. He found himself mouthing the hallowed words of Old Norse, words that had lost their sinister overtones and spoke of a history more extraordinary than he could ever have imagined.

  “Hann til ragnarøks.”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The Menorah.

  THE MAGNIFICENT GOLD LAMPSTAND FROM THE JEWISH Temple in Jerusalem, looted by the Romans in AD 70, remains one of the greatest lost treasures of history, ranked alongside the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant. The only known depiction of the Temple menorah is on the Arch of Titus in Rome. The triumphal procession shown on the arch is vividly described by Josephus, a Jewish eyewitness and confidant of the emperor Vespasian. Among the spoils of the Temple was a lampstand made of gold: “Affixed to a pedestal was a central shaft, from which there extended slender branches, arranged trident-fashion, a wrought lamp being attached to the extremity of each branch; of these there were seven, indicating the honour paid to that number by the Jews” (Jewish War VII, 149–50). Josephus says little about the fate of the Jewish prisoners—he only describes the execution of their leader, Simon—but he affirms that some of the spoils, at least, survived being melted down: in his new Temple of Peace, Vespasian “laid up the vessels of gold from the Temple of the Jews, on which he prided himself” (VII, 161–62). Other treasure provided bullion for the famous

  “Judaea Capta” coins, the obverse showing a vanquished female Judaea beneath a Roman standard, above the word IVDAEA.

  There are no further eyewitness descriptions of the Temple menorah. However, compelling evidence that it survived—perhaps removed to a secret chamber, such as one actually discovered in the Arch of Titus itself—is provided by the historian Procopius (ca. AD 500–62), in his firsthand account of the spoils taken by the Byzantine general Belisarius when he defeated the Vandals at Carthage in AD 534. They included objects looted by the Vandal king Giseric when he sacked Rome in AD 455, “the treasures of the Jews, which Titus, the son of Vespasian, together with certain others, had brought to Rome after the capture of Jerusalem” (History of the Wars IV, ix, 5–10). According to Procopius, Belisarius brought the treasures to Constantinople—present-day Istanbul—and displayed them in the Hippodrome for the emperor Justinian. Procopius then claims that a Jew persuaded Justinian to return them to “the sanctuaries of the Christians in Jerusalem.” The fact that Procopius describes the arrival of the treasures in Constantinople suggests that the account is authentic, as many of his intended readers would themselves have witnessed the triumph, but his story of their return to Jerusalem seems implausible and a typical embellishment to highlight Justinian’s Christian virtues. There is no credible evidence that the menorah was ever again in Jerusalem after AD 70–71.

  The Fourth Crusade.

  The lost treasures of the Jewish Temple may therefore have survived hidden away in Constantinople into the medieval period. The survival of many other antiquities in the city is attested by the list of objects destroyed or looted by the Crusaders in 1204, including the famous quadriga, shipped to Venice to become the Horses of St. Mark’s. Some of the Crusaders would already have been on pilgrimages to Rome, and it is possible that their leader, Baldwin of Flanders, had seen the extraordinary image on the Arch of Titus and had read Procopius.

  Contemporary accounts of the sack of Constantinople are overlain by pious justifications, but the truth may be that the allure of loot proved too great, and Baldwin desperately needed to find a way to pay the Venetians for shipping his Crusaders towards the Holy Land.

  Harald Hardrada.

  Whether the Jewish treasures survived in Constantinople as late as 1204 is an open question. A century and a half before the Fourth Crusade, the fabled Varangian bodyguard of the Byzantine emperor had been led by the towering figure of Harald Sigurdsson, known to history as Hardrada, “hard-ruler,” “the ruthless.” Harald was a Viking mercenary, the exiled son of a king of Norway who would
return to claim the throne and become the most feared of all the Norse warlords. During his years with the Varangians he became a latter-day Belisarius, campaigning for the emperor in Sicily and North Africa and amassing a huge personal fortune. To the Saracens he was “Thunderbolt from the North,”

  and he succeeded where the Fourth Crusade would not: he entered Jerusalem, pacified the Holy Land, bathed in the river Jordan and gave treasure to the shrine at Christ’s grave. The expedition to Jerusalem probably took place in 1036

  or 1037, making Harald Hardrada the first and most successful of all the Crusaders, albeit on behalf of the Byzantine emperor rather than the Church in the West.

  Back in Constantinople, Harald was allowed to take part in palace-plunder, helping himself to treasure as a reward for his endeavours. One night in 1042 he kidnapped the empress Zoe’s niece Maria—whom he had wished to marry, but been refused by her aunt—and escaped with his Varangian companions in two ships over the great chain that bound the entrance to the Golden Horn, the harbour of Constantinople. The sole account of this escapade has Maria being returned to the city once they were safely out, but perhaps she did accompany Harald back to Norway and through the rest of his extraordinary life, including his marriage to the Kievan princess Elizabeth and his relationship with at least one other woman, Thora, which produced his son and heir, Olaf. According to his biography, Harald had a “daughter,” oddly enough called Maria, who accompanied him on his last voyage and supposedly died suddenly “on the very day and at the very hour that her father had been killed” (King Harald’s Saga, Heimskringla 98).

  Almost everything we know about Harald Hardrada comes from the Heimskringla, an account of the Norse kings written in the early thirteenth century by the Icelandic poet and historian Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241). Eagle and wolf imagery abound in the passages of verse included in the text. The Heimskringla and a few sentences in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle provide virtually all we know of the Battle of Stamford Bridge near York, where a Norwegian army under Harald was defeated on 25 September 1066 by the English King Harold Godwinsson, who in turn was defeated a few weeks later by the Normans. Stamford Bridge was a catastrophe for the Norse and to many signalled the end of the Viking Age; of some three hundred ships that had sailed to England, only twenty-four are said to have returned. The last description of Harald Hardrada alive is of him fighting “two-handed” in the thick of the battle, perhaps wielding a great battle-axe of the Varangians, surrounded by his loyal bodyguard.

  Two of Harald’s Varangian companions who escaped with him from Constantinople were Halldor and Ulf, both Icelanders. Another may have been Halfdan—perhaps even Harald’s brother of this name—whose runic graffito can be seen on a balustrade inside the church of Hagia Sofia in Istanbul. Fragments of the chain that crossed the Golden Horn still exist. Elsewhere evidence for Harald’s exploits is elusive, but there is enough to give substance to the life recounted in the Heimskringla. In Jerusalem, near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, I have seen a cross carved in the rock that seemed to have the shape of Mjøllnir, Thor’s hammer, a symbol that remained potent for the Norse under Christian domination as far away as Iceland and Greenland, kept alive along with all the legends of Loki and Fenrir and Valhalla.

  The Mappa Mundi.

  The wonderful thirteenth-century map described in Chapter 2 can be seen today in a purpose-built museum next to Hereford Cathedral, alongside the famous chained library. When I first visited the cathedral as a boy, the library was still in the muniment room above the north transept aisle, where archives and treasures were stored at the time the map was drawn. The apparent absence of a spiral staircase in the northeast corner of the transept leading up to the gallery has always struck me as odd, so that is where I have placed the fictional discovery in this book. Richard of Holdingham was a true historical character, named in the lower left-hand corner of the map, though very little is known of his life. I have imagined him “apprenticed” in the fictional félag to Jacobus de Voragine, Archbishop of Genoa, also a true-life character. Richard’s absence at the dedication of the map is indicated by the mis-labelling of Europe and Africa, a glaring error that a scholar of his calibre would surely never have tolerated.

  A félag, or fellowship, was a Viking institution, and could be a band of warriors owing allegiance to a lord, bound by oaths of loyalty. Sworn enemies could suffer the dreaded blódörn, the “blood-eagle.” Snorri Sturluson, thirteenth-century biographer of the Norse kings, described how one victim had an eagle carved on his back by an enemy, who “stuck his sword into the body next to the spine, cut away all the ribs down to the loins, and dragged out his lungs.” The idea of a secret félag in medieval England is based on the antipathy of the English towards their Norman overlords, and on the Norse heritage which remained strong in parts of Britain where the Vikings had settled. One area where this influence was clearest was the western isles of Scotland, and today on the holy isle of Iona you can see the gravestones of Viking lords among the early Christian relics of the monastery.

  The fascination of the Nazis with the Vikings is well known. The ultimate Nazi félag was the SS, complete with the infamous double-sig runic insignia. The mission of the SS became the subjugation of eastern Europe, of the lands once ruled by the Viking kings of Rus and Kiev, where the activities of the SS

  Einsatzgruppen—some of their members locally recruited—included the murder of over a million Ukrainian Jews. The Einsatzgruppen “Operational Situation Report USSR No. 129a” quoted in Chapters 12 and 20, is a fictional addendum to true-life Report No. 129, with the wording changed only to include mention of the fictional Reksnys and his death toll. The Nazi atrocity in this novel is based on my visit to the ravine of Babi Yar in Kiev, where thousands of Jewish families were stripped and shot, and on images and eyewitness accounts in the Museum of the Great Patriotic War in Kiev. Today Babi Yar is a beautiful children’s park, surmounted by a giant stone sculpture of the menorah.

  The SS Ahnenerbe, the “Department of Ancestral Heritage,” existed as described in this novel. In recent years, extraordinary new evidence has come to light concerning Ahnenerbe activities in the 1930s, including expeditions to South America and Tibet, where Nazi scientists carried out craniological measurements.

  They believed that remote populations might preserve evidence of an Aryan master race, one they associated with the legend of Atlantis and the bizarre Welteislehre, or World Ice Theory. Heinrich Himmler, architect of the SS, believed that the Aryan birthplace was Iceland, and Ahnenerbe expeditions were sent there in 1936 and 1938. The Ahnenerbe expedition to Ilulissat in this novel is fictional, as are its two members, but Greenland is only one step from Iceland, and Himmler would undoubtedly have been intrigued by the accounts of the famous Greenlandic explorer Knud Rasmussen and his studies of Inuit culture.

  The Ilulissat icefjord, a UNESCO World Heritage site along with L’Anse aux Meadows and Chichén Itzá, may provide one of the clearest indications of global warming today, and has been extensively studied by glaciologists and climatologists. The ancient Inuit site of Sermermiut, “the place of the glacier people,” exists as described in this novel, along with Kællingekløften, “suicide gorge.” The description of the iceberg is based on my own experience at the Ilulissat icefjord and diving under ice in Canadian waters. Divers have entered natural fissures inside icebergs, and the technology exists for the kind of penetration described in this novel.

  Timbers, textiles and gilded metal can survive almost indefinitely in ice. The idea that a Norse warrior might be preserved in this way came from the extraordinarily well-preserved bodies of two members of Sir John Franklin’s illfated expedition to the Canadian Arctic in 1845, exhumed from permafrost on Beechey Island in 1984. For the Norse, ship burials were a well-established funerary rite. The burning of a ship is famously described by the tenth-century Arab traveller Ibn Fadlan, who witnessed the funeral of a Rus chieftain on the river Volga in which a woman joined her lord on the pyre. Snorri Sturluson
gives us another account in which a burning ship filled with weapons and bodies was cast out to sea after a battle, carrying with it the mortally wounded Viking lord who had supervised the construction of his own funerary pyre.

  The image of the ship in the ice is drawn from the spectacular Gokstad and Oseberg ship burials in Norway, though Harald’s fictional ship would have been a more practical design. According to Snorri Sturluson, the two ships in which Harald escaped from Constantinople were “Varangian galleys,” oared longships (King Harald’s Saga, Heimskringla 15). The best evidence for Viking ship types comes from almost exactly the date of the fictional voyage in this novel, from a group of vessels sunk in the 1070s near Skuldelev, in Denmark, to restrict the entrance to Roskilde Fjord. One was a robust, deep-hulled vessel suitable for open ocean sailing. The feasibility of Norse voyages to the Americas has been amply demonstrated by modern experiments, including the sailing of replica ships to L’Anse aux Meadows to celebrate the thousandth anniversary of the arrival of Leif Eiriksson in the New World.

  The northernmost Viking settlement in Greenland was Vestribygδ, the “western settlement,” located some five hundred miles south of the Ilulissat icefjord.

  However, the region of the icefjord and farther north, Norδrseta, was frequented by the Norse and vital to their economy. The only runestone found in Greenland comes from the island of Kingigtorssuaq, almost four hundred miles north of the icefjord, and can be seen today in the museum at nearby Upernavik. It was placed in a cairn by three Norse adventurers—Erling, Bjarne and Eindride—

  probably in the early fourteenth century. My own explorations along this coast suggest that remote sites may contain further evidence of Norse activity. It is an extraordinary fact that Norse hunters in this extreme environment—seeking walrus ivory, whale, polar bear hides and narwhal tusk, the “unicorn horn” seen on medieval maps—helped to pay for the Crusades, through a tax imposed after the Norwegian king Sigurd Jorsalfar, “The Crusader,” established an episcopal see in Greenland in 1124. The Church exerted a tenacious hold over the Greenlanders, and the impossibility of paying Church taxes may well have been a factor in the disappearance of the Norse from Greenland by the fifteenth century.