Night Pilgrims Read online

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  This book is for

  Deena and Jon,

  the best landpersons one could wish for.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Part I: Rakoczy, Sidi Sandjer’min

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part II: Sieur Horembaud du Langnor

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part III: Bondame Margrethe de la Poele of Rutland

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Epilogue

  By Chelsea Quinn Yarbro from Tom Doherty Associates

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  Northeastern Africa is one of the most tectonically active places on the planet. Three tectonic plates meet there, and are in the process of pulling a slice off the east side of the continent, beginning where the Red Sea meets the Indian Ocean, splitting Ethiopia and Kenya in two at the Great Rift Valley, continuing on through a series of mountain-backed lakes to the Zambezi River, where it enters the Indian Ocean. This long valley is the place which a very long time ago was home to the earliest humans, and a much longer time from now will be a sea. At the northeastern base of the Ethiopian Highlands on the northeast end of the rift, in a place now called the Danakil Depression, a cluster of volcanos punctuates the landscape, a stark, low-lying desert. To the west-southwest, the ancient crags of the Ethiopian Highlands rise up between the Great Rift Valley and the Nubian Desert in what is now Sudan. Even today the volcanos are remote, part of a blistering landscape that is almost as empty now as it was eight hundred years ago. The amount of travel across the Nubian Desert has increased in the intervening centuries; there are roads and oases throughout this territory in the disputed region between Ethiopia and Eritrea; there are scientific and commercial projects going on at this time that did not exist in the thirteenth century, but even in the distant past, the trade routes from oasis to oasis carried a great deal of traffic in spite of the harsh conditions of the region.

  It is in and around the north side of the Great Rift Valley and through the plateaux of the Ethiopian Highlands that a large number of underground Coptic churches are located: underground in this case is a literal description, for they are carved out of living rock below ground level, and are unique in Christian architecture. Many have the means to serve as cisterns and sluices as well as churches, suggesting that they were not only intended as places of worship, but of refuge. Built—or, more accurately, carved or excavated—about the same time that Europe was building major Gothic cathedrals—in the twelfth century and the first half of the thirteenth—these African churches were unknown to western Europeans until the Fifth Crusade, which was fought against Islam in Egypt, when occasional meetings with African Copts informed the Europeans of these remarkable structures, along with reports of most unusual peoples and animals rarely, if ever, seen in Europe at that time, among them two species of what the Crusaders called dog-monkeys and we call baboons, Ethiopian wolves, and African wild cats.

  In the thirteenth century, most Europeans had few opportunities to travel. Peasants and serfs were bound to the lands they farmed; artisans and builders rarely went far beyond their native towns and villages; even apothecaries and notaries and similar city-dwellers were rarely encouraged to wander. A few of the non-clergy scholars often traveled significant distances between the small group of recently founded universities, or to centers of learning in the Middle East and Egypt. Soldiers had the option of Crusading: the Crusades were military ventures promulgated by the Church with the supposed purpose of saving the Holy Land from the rising tide of Islam, but certainly were as much an exercise in rapine and pillage as they were in defending Christendom. As an adjunct to the Crusades, a small number of European Christians headed toward the Middle East in the wake of the armies; over the length of the Crusades, the number of pilgrims increased from a trickle to a steady stream. With the Crusades there also came an increase in trade and a fashion for silks and other fine fabrics among the European upper class, encouraging travel among merchants, and expanding pilgrimages to the limits of African Christianity.

  During the early Crusades—notably the First and Third—Jerusalem was the usual goal of pilgrims, with Bethlehem coming in a close second, and a great many other Christian holy sites in the Middle East saw a considerable increase in foreign Christian visitors, for although travel was dangerous, expensive, and time-consuming, when done for reasons of faith, it was acceptable to undertake faraway journeys. After the Fifth Crusade (1218–1222), the possibilities of more extensive pilgrimages lured many European Christians to Egypt, for the thrill of tourism and for spiritual exercises; the pilgrims expanded their travels into the partially Christian lands to the south of Egypt. Many of the Coptic religious buildings became destinations for penitents as well, in particular, the Chapel of the Holy Grail in Ethiopia—it is still there, by the way, and now, as then, only the senior priest of the chapel is allowed to enter the chapel and see the Grail. During the hectic pilgrimage years of the thirteenth century, the realization that pilgrims would not be allowed to enter the chapel led to unpleasant confrontations between priests and pilgrims, but that did not stem the tide of Europeans, as more holy sites were found that were rather more hospitable to European Christians than the Holy Land was, which in turn brought an increase in their presence. For the first time since the Roman Empire fell, parties of Europeans became relatively commonplace in northeastern Africa for a period of nearly twenty years, giving trade a boost and creating a small but profitable industry that we would today call tourism.

  The Fifth Crusade, conducted primarily in Egypt, had a second military presence to compete for the military attention of the Ayyubid (Sons of Job) Sultanate: Jenghiz Khan and his Mongols were moving into Islamic territory from the east, and headed toward eastern Europe through the Crimea, causing much unrest in the loosely federated Emirates and Sultanates throughout the Middle East, and causing many eastern European rulers to keep a good portion of their armies at home rather than lending them to the Church for the Crusade; there was a marked effort to kick the Crusaders out of Islamic territory so that the forces of Islam could turn their attention to the impending threat of the Mongols. Crusaders no longer served as pilgrims’ escorts. The Knights of Saint John Hospitallers, whose mandate was the protection of pilgrims, were dragooned into fighting the Islamic forces, leaving the pilgrims to find their own guides and guards. While the Knights of the Rose in this novel are fictitious, there were a number of military monkish Orders that operated clandestinely in Islamic territory, most of them as spies and assassins. The Poor Knights of the Temple of Jerusale
m, otherwise called the Templars, always battle-ready, were often placed at the lead of Crusading armies, where they could do the most damage if they got near enough to the Islamic cavalry to engage it. Templar knights constituted roughly 10 percent of the membership of their Order, which included foot-soldiers and engineers as well as financial officers, since the Templars handled monies for all manner of travelers. After the Fifth Crusade, guide and guard duties no longer applied for the Templars any more than they did for other European combat troops; the Hospitallers continued guarding some but not all pilgrims.

  And guides and guards were needed: not only were the pilgrims crossing deserts to reach the Ethiopian Copts, they were prey to robbers, slavers, and kidnapers, subject to being killed, sold, or held for ransom. One of the reasons for the extreme vulnerability of the pilgrims was that they were not allowed to carry weapons of war or defense, only hunting weapons—simple spears, bows and arrows, slings, hatchets, and small knives or daggers; no swords, crossbows, maces, lances, pikes, halberds, caltrops, morningstars, battle-hammers, battle-axes, mauls, armor (human and horse), or shields were allowed. As a result, most pilgrims traveled in groups, or joined other groups, undertaking the dangerous journey across the Nubian Desert. Many trading-merchants—meaning those going overland from market to market rather than those using the sea for a highway, as did Venice, and Genoa in the Mediterranean, and the Hanseatic League in the Baltic and North Seas—took advantage of foreign travelers, offering to allow the pilgrims to travel in their company, and then refusing to release them without receiving a significant bribe. Travel itself, when the pilgrims left the Nile, was done on camels, horses, and asses. For desert crossings, asses, usually ridden unsaddled and unbridled, were given pack-saddles for cargo; riders used a blanket to keep the sand from rubbing their clothes to bits against the asses’ backs, and the asses were provided reined halters, not unlike modern hackamores (bitless bridles) for the journeys, which were linked together. Standard bridles were used with horses, which were usually Arabs and Barbs, not the heavier European breeds, for since the pilgrims were not permitted to have armor, the smaller, lighter desert breeds could carry the pilgrims more easily through the sands, were lighter keepers (they ate less than European war horses), and were bred to accommodate the heat more readily than their European cousins.

  Not all of the scattered villages along the ill-defined pilgrims’ route were willing to receive Christians, being populated by followers of Islam, for although Ethiopia was mostly Christian, Islam was making steady inroads from what is now Sudan into the territory that was the last Coptic Christian stronghold of the largely collapsed Empire of Axum. There were even a few settlements of Jews who were reluctant to receive Christian pilgrims due to their excess of zeal; pilgrims had been known to kill Jews in a demonstration of the depth of their faith. In addition, the weather was never mild; heat and sand made travel slow as well as enervating, and although most pilgrims followed the Nile a good portion of the way and therefore had water to drink, finding enough to eat while traveling was difficult; in the eyes of the Christian Churches of the time, this added to the spiritual value of the exercise; danger, rationed food and water, and general suffering were commendable risks for pilgrims to endure. Occasionally pilgrims enlarged the difficulties of their pilgrimages when recounting them, resulting in accounts of low reliability, but exciting adventure. Although some of the villages along the Nile retained their names from the days of the Pharaohs, by the time of this story, a few of these villages had both Arabic as well as older, Egypto-Coptic ones; sometimes the old names remained but the villages were relocated, as in the case of Syene Philae, originally two separate towns, at the First Cataract, or Dofunj, which was a trading village that had once been an important trade center. Its exact location is unknown, so I situated it at a place convenient to the story but within the stretch of the Nile where accounts of the period place it.

  There were less dangerous but equally important problems to such travel: for one, the need to carry a fair amount of money, most food for humans, all food for animals, all shelter, sufficient clothing for conditions which ranged from heat that rivaled Death Valley and cold that was numbing, and such medicines as were available at the time. Pilgrims took oaths to maintain their virtue while traveling on pilgrimage; the punishments for failure to do this were quite severe: adultery was punished by stoning the woman and, occasionally, castrating the man. Sodomy, which at the time was numbered among the Seven Deadly Sins, earned abandonment, which was tantamount to a death sentence. Pope Honorius III, who promulgated the Fifth Crusade, was particularly strict about upholding pilgrims’ oaths, and insisted that special clergy accompany all pilgrims in order to report upon them at a later time.

  Then there was the problem of languages: most of Lower Egypt—the part in the north—spoke Arabic and some Greek—Upper Egypt—the part in the south—spoke some Arabic and some Coptic, a tongue descended from the languages of ancient Egypt. It was not too difficult to find a translator who knew these languages and Church Latin, but once the pilgrims passed the Second Cataract, the picture changed: the Nubians had a language of their own, as well as their own version of Coptic, and many secondary groups within Nubia had regional languages, most without a written version of the language. Arabic was spoken, at least secondarily, by the steadily enlarging Islamic population, but once the Christian communities were reached, languages and dialects became a much greater jumble, even among those religious communities. The Coptic language could be found among a large number of those communities, but often as a secondary language, as Church Latin was in many parts of Europe, or English is in much of the world today. The demands on translators often exceeded their capabilities, and so chains of translators became necessary as the European pilgrims entered the Ethiopian Highlands.

  European languages were also more chaotic then than now; spelling had not been regularized since the Roman Empire gave way to Gothic invaders, and all writing was phonetic, which often meant considerable variations in vocabulary from region to region, with extensive variances not only in dialects, but in spellings and pronunciation of place and personal names. Even Church Latin was more irregular than Imperial Latin had been, and subject to regional idiosyncracies; in many parts of Europe, written language combined elements of Church Latin with local dialects, which complicated communications among Crusaders and pilgrims alike. In terms of pronunciation, the phonetic approach is closer to the conventions of the time than following modern rules: basically, if the letter is present, pronounce it. Due to the strong central control of Constantinople, Byzantine Greek was somewhat more cohesive, but equally subject to regional variations, and to influences of the Orthodox Church.

  Although some Orthodox Christians undertook pilgrimages into Africa at this time, by far the largest group of pilgrims were Europeans, constituting more than two-thirds of the non-Africans venturing into the farthest extent of Christianity in that continent. It is likely that the reason for this can be directly linked to the Crusades, and their promulgation by the Roman Popes with the participation of European military forces. Seafaring states, such as the Republics of Venice and Genoa, used the Crusades not to stop the spread of Islam, but to expand their regions of trade and to broaden their markets throughout the Mediterranean; the increased popularity of luxury fabrics from India and the Middle East in Europe was directly connected to the markets opened up as an offshoot of the Crusades. Venice in particular, and Genoa to a lesser degree, increased their fortunes by carrying Crusaders and pilgrims as well as cargo on their galleys; the Venetians accommodated the Crusaders to the extent that they created a special ship for the transportation of horses, since armed knights were too heavy for the small, quick Middle Eastern horses, and the Crusaders had to bring their larger, heavier mounts with them, and all the tack and bard (horse armor) required in battle.

  In the thirteenth century, Christians as well as Moslems kept slaves, and the slave trade was a highly successful enterprise throughout most o
f Europe, Africa, and Asia. It was understood that slaves were necessary to maintain not only social order but to provide for the time-consuming-but-boring-yet-essential domestic routines that most of us today assign to appliances. In traveling, slaves did the preparation and clean-up for everything from meals to campsites to procuring food, drink, and other supplies as well as looking after the welfare of their owners. Among Europeans, servants, or paid staff, were usually the supervisors of slaves; in the economic structure of Islamic culture at that time, which had a larger use of slaves at all levels, servants as such were comparatively rare, that function belonging to a socially higher order of slaves, ones who often owned slaves themselves, something not often seen in the Christian West, but occasionally encountered among pagan Europeans.

  About titles: the title Sidi is Middle Eastern, and means, roughly, lord or master. The Moorish invaders of Spain gave the title to the warlord Ruy Diaz de Bivar, conqueror of Valencia, and we know him by that title to this day—El Cid. The title Sieur is French and Anglo-French, and given to knights; it was not associated with specific fiefs or grants of land, which had other titles for minor landholders, although a knight, a Sieur, could also have titles to fiefs and estates. The title Vidame is French and is the equivalent of Baron, but was bestowed by the Church on those men of noble birth who managed Church estates for a cut of the wealth generated by those estates; the title and position could pass through several generations, but would never convey title to the land—the Vidamie—to the Vidame.

  Coptic Christianity at that time, while distinct from other forms of Christianity, had more in common with the Greek Orthodox Church and the Gnostics than it did with Roman Catholicism—though all these Churches have changed their liturgy and rituals through time: upper-class Catholics no longer ride their horses into cathedrals and churches for Mass, Greek Orthodox penitents do not crawl on hands and knees from church to church to gain absolution for usury, and Copts no longer chant the Gospel of Thomas and dance to it on major holy days as some communities of monks did in the thirteenth century. Reconstructing these by-gone religious exercises has not been easy, and I freely admit that there are many sources that contradict one another in regard to the particulars in various communities. Where there is uncertainty or differing ceremonies, I have chosen the rites that best suit the purposes of this book and followed their descriptions when presenting some of the rites of the Copts at that time.