The Crusader's gold jh-2

by David Gibbins

  “The Horses of St. Mark’s,” Hiebermeyer said.

  “A few tourists would drop their cameras if they knew the truth about how these sculptures reached Venice.” Jack was in full stride now, his words tinged with anger. “The leaders of the Crusade needed someone to ship the knights and their equipment across the Mediterranean to the Holy Land. And who better than the Venetians, the greatest maritime power of the day? But the Venetians had other ideas up their sleeves. The Byzantine Empire based in Constantinople had begun to encroach on territory near Venice in the Adriatic Sea, and the Venetians didn’t like it. Venetian merchants in Constantinople had been murdered. The Venetian doge Dandolo had been imprisoned and blinded by the Byzantines years before and was secretly bent on revenge. Then the Crusaders proved unable to come up with the cash for their passage after they had embarked, which virtually enslaved them to the Venetians. Add to that a claimant to the Byzantine throne among the Crusader ranks, and the stage was set. Pope Innocent III found himself unwittingly sponsoring the sack of the second city of Christendom, the focal point of the Eastern Church. Once they arrived at Constantinople, the Crusaders forgot the Holy Cross and behaved like any other marauding army of the Middle Ages, only with a ferocity and barbarism unparalleled even for that period.”

  “What happened?”

  “Imagine if an army out of control landed in London and stripped all the public statues, desecrated Westminster Abbey, emptied the British Museum, burned the British Library. All the symbols of nationhood and the treasures of empire lost in a single blood-soaked rampage. In Constantinople the holy warriors applied their much-vaunted Christian zeal to the great churches, Hagia Sofia foremost among them, looting the hallowed relics of a thousand years of Christianity. They destroyed the libraries, descendants of the ancient libraries of Alexandria and Ephesus, an incalculable loss for civilisation. They stripped the Hippodrome, the ancient racing circus that was the focus of the city, leaving only the fragments of sculptures you see there today and a few monuments too large to pillage.”

  “The Egyptian obelisk of Thutmose III,” Hiebermeyer said, nodding.

  Jack gestured at the screen. “We know that Constantinople was the inheritor of all the greatest treasures of western civilisation. Priceless artefacts that had once been in Egypt and Greece and the Near East were first brought to Rome as the empire expanded. Then, when Constantine moved the capital, many of these treasures moved with him, shipped across the Mediterranean from Rome to Constantinople. The Horses of St. Mark’s may originally have been fifth-century BC Greek creations, perhaps embellishing the famous sanctuary at Olympia. Five centuries later they’re in Rome, on top of a triumphal arch of Nero in the Forum, part of a sculptural group showing the emperor drawing a four-horse quadriga. The arch was destroyed by Vespasian but the image survives on Nero’s coins. Four centuries after that they’re here in Constantinople, perhaps in the Hippodrome beside that obelisk. And remember, Constantinople had never been sacked before 1204. The treasures that, from eyewitness accounts, were plundered by the Crusaders can only hint at what was here. Some of the loot was melted down for bullion and coin. Other treasures, like the Horses of St. Mark’s, were shipped back to Venice and the Crusader homelands-France, Spain, the Low Countries, England-where they may still lie secreted away in the great cathedrals and monasteries. And other objects, especially antiquities with pagan symbolism, were desecrated and hurled into the Golden Horn.” He paused. “When Peter Howe and I first heard this story we became convinced that one of the greatest troves of ancient art anywhere in the world may lie on the sea floor below us now.”

  There was a sudden commotion behind them as Costas drew his chair up to the video screen. Hiebermeyer’s eyes remained on the image of the horses and he put his hand on his friend’s shoulder.

  “You say anything from ancient Rome could have been brought here,” he said quietly. “Last year after our little adventure on the Black Sea I was called to Rome to translate an Egyptian hieratic text found on the site of Vespasian’s Temple of Peace, near the spot where the fragments of the marble plan of the city were found. It proved to be one of a series of bronze plaques attached to the public colonnade of the precinct, each with an identical text in all of the main languages of the Roman Empire: Latin, Greek, Egyptian, Aramaic, you name it. They were proclamations listing Vespasian’s victories and Rome’s triumph. Their subject was the Jewish War.”

  Jack turned from watching Costas and looked Hiebermeyer full in the face, his dark eyes fathomless.

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Hiebermeyer asked haltingly.

  Jack remained silent.

  “My God.” Hiebermeyer’s German accent grew more pronounced, and his voice wavered. “The Jewish treasures of the Tabernacle. Vespasian had them consigned to the Temple of Peace, never to be paraded again. They passed into legend.” His voice became a whisper. “Could they have been secretly shipped to Constantinople before Rome fell?”

  “The thought had occurred to me,” Jack replied quietly.

  Hiebermeyer took off his little round glasses and mopped his forehead. “The sacred vessels of the inner sanctum. The golden table. The menorah.” The last word was a hoarse gasp. “Do you have any idea what we could be getting into?”

  “Yes,” said Jack.

  “We’re not just talking fabulous treasures here. We’re talking major present-day ramifications. The menorah is the symbol of the modern state of Israel. Any hint that we’re on to the lost treasure of the Jewish Temple and the result could be explosive. Literally.”

  “It doesn’t go beyond these four walls,” Jack said firmly.

  At that moment there was a whoop and a joyful string of expletives from the other console. Jack and Hiebermeyer quickly returned to their positions behind Costas, and the ship’s second officer appeared beside them. Jack glanced curiously at the man and then reverted to the screen. They could immediately see why Costas was jubilant. The screen had transformed into a fantastic multicoloured image, the lines and contours of the scan as sharp as a 3-D computer drawing. In the centre were unmistakable signs of human agency, a dark twisted mass embedded in the sediment of the sea floor. It was an immense metal link, at least a metre long, a figure-eight shape crudely welded at the waist. A second link was looped through it and extended off-screen to the right, but the loop to the left was scarred and buckled where the adjoining link had sheared off.

  “Fantastic!” Jack clapped Costas on the back. He was overjoyed, his mind already racing forward to the next stage of the search, but his eyes remained glued on the screen as the camera panned forward to the edge of the exposed metal. Wedged into the final loop was a fragmentary mass of wood, evidently ship’s timbers, a section of overlapping hull strakes with lines of regularly spaced dark protrusions where the iron rivets had been preserved for more than eight hundred years in the anaerobic ooze. Jack and Hiebermeyer both gasped as they realised what was woven through the link, a mass of white that looked like denuded branches from a tree. It was a crushed human skeleton, its arms pinned at grotesque angles through the metal, the skull distorted and barely recognisable but still covered with a rusty brown stain where there had once been a close-fitting conical helmet with a nose-guard.

  “There’s your chain, and one of its casualties,” Costas said. “Now it’s time to get out of here.”

  Costas activated a control to cast off the ferret’s umbilical just as the ship’s engines began to throb. Jack left Hiebermeyer with him and followed the Estonian officer out of the navigation room to join York on the bridge. He would broadcast the news of the discovery to the crew during the hour that Sea Venture would have off-site before the shipping lane was accessible to them again. He looked out of the window beyond the ore-carrier waiting to traverse the passage and to the low arches of the Galata Bridge, its road bustling with morning traffic and its balustrades lined with hopeful fishermen, oblivious to the true treasures that might lie beneath them. The choppy waters once plied by the
pleasure barges of emperors and sultans now shone again, the result of a massive cleanup operation in the past decade. As Jack looked beyond the bridge to the radiant skyline, he felt again the allure that had drawn him and Katya to seek out Istanbul’s deepest secrets. For all its chaos and dark history, this city had come to symbolise hope; it was the place where Jack had revived his passion for the mysteries of the past that had driven him since childhood.

  He looked down as the sparkling waters off Sea Venture’s bow erupted in turmoil from the vessel’s water jet stabilisers. He was exhilarated beyond belief that they had made a discovery that could vindicate his dream, a stepping-stone to even more sensational finds over the coming days. The chain put them right at the key moment in history, and showed they were at the outer limits of the harbour where the spoils from the Sack of Constantinople had been dumped. All they had to do now was work their way into the Golden Horn and they should hit pay dirt. But as usual Jack’s jubilation was tempered by anxiety. The pressure was now on. They still had a long way to go. He knew they would have to keep coming up with the goods for the authorities to continue boxing in the sea lane for them; the gun and the chain had proved him right but would also raise expectations. He looked again at the waters of the Golden Horn, shielding his eyes against the brilliance of the glare, and prayed fervently that it would live up to its name.

  2

  Maria De Montijo shifted almost imperceptibly on her stool and briefly shut her eyes. It had been their longest day in the cathedral precinct so far, and despite the adrenaline that had sustained her hour after hour she knew her concentration would soon begin to wane. Outside, the dull grey English afternoon was beginning to darken, and she could hear the insistent patter of rain on the windowpanes. She straightened her back, blinked hard and raised the palette with her cleaning tools to the edge of the frame. In the utter silence of the room, time seemed to stand still, and all attention was focused on the intricate pattern of ink revealed by the microlight only inches from her face. She breathed slowly and deliberately, at the end of each exhalation bringing her brush to bear with a steadiness born of years of experience. After fifteen minutes she rocked backwards and handed the palette to her assistant.

  “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.