A History of the World in 100 Objects (53 page)

Sixty-seven of the pieces are now in the British Museum; eleven are in the National Museums of Scotland. Between them, these much-loved pieces take us into the heart of the medieval world.

People have been playing board games for more than 5,000 years, but chess is a relative newcomer – it seems to have been invented in India at some point after the year 500. Over the next few hundred years, the game spread through the Middle East and on into Christian Europe, and in every place the chess pieces changed to reflect the society that played it. So, in India there are pieces named ‘war elephants’, while in the Middle East, Islamic reservations about the human image ensured that all the pieces were virtually abstract. European pieces, by contrast, are often intensely human, and the Lewis Chessmen not only seem to show us particular kinds of characters, but strikingly reflect the structures of the great medieval power game as it was fought out across northern Europe, from Iceland and Ireland to Scandinavia and the Baltic.

They are much bigger than the figures that most of us play with today; the king, for instance, is about 8 centimetres (3 inches) high, and he comfortably fills a clenched fist. Most of them are carved out of walrus tusks, although a few are made out of whales’ teeth. Some of the pieces would originally have been coloured red rather than the black that is more common today, but all of them are now a pale creamy brown.

Let’s begin with the pawns. One of the puzzles of the Lewis Chessmen is that there are lots of major pieces and very few pawns. We have pieces from several incomplete sets, but only nineteen pawns among them. The pawns are the only pieces that aren’t human; they’re simply small ivory slabs that stand upright like gravestones. In medieval society, these represent the peasants brutally conscripted on to the battlefield. All societies tend to think of the people at the bottom of the heap as interchangeably identical, and the foot soldiers here are shown with no individuality at all.

The main pieces, on the other hand, are full of personality: elite guards, knights on horseback, commanding kings and meditative queens. Pride of place goes to the ultimate source of legitimate power: the king – capture him, and all fighting stops. All the Lewis kings sit on ornate thrones, a sword across their knees. Guarding the kings are two kinds of specialist warrior. One is immediately familiar to us – the knight, fast-moving, versatile and mounted on horseback. From the very beginnings of chess in India, the mounted warrior is a constant: he is in every age and in every country and is largely unchanged today. But these familiar knights are flanked by something much more sinister. At the edges of the board where we now have castles are the ultimate shock troops of the Scandinavian world. They stand menacingly, some of them working themselves into a frenzy of bloodlust by chewing the tops of their shields.

These are the fighters called
berserkers
.
Berserker
is an Icelandic
word for a soldier wearing a shirt made of bearskin, and the word ‘berserk’ even today is synonymous with wild, destructive violence. More than any piece on this board, the berserkers take us to the terrifying world of Norse warfare.

Around 1200, the Isle of Lewis, on the north-west edge of what is now Scotland, was at the heart of this Norse world. It was part of the kingdom of Norway. The language was Norwegian and its archbishop had his cathedral in Trondheim, 250 miles north of Oslo. Trondheim was one of the great centres for carving walrus ivory, and the style of the Lewis Chessmen is very close to pieces made there. We know that similar chess pieces have also been found in Ireland, and Lewis was a staging-post on the thriving sea route between Trondheim and Dublin. The medieval historian Professor Miri Rubin elaborates:

I believe that they come from Norway and probably came from somewhere around Trondheim; they look like so much that’s produced there. But if we think of Great Britain not as very much connected to the central and southern European sphere, as it is now, but instead of the North Sea as a sort of ‘connector’ of regions, there is that whole North Sea region – that’s where the Vikings came from, that’s where the predecessors of the Normans who ultimately conquered England came from. So if we think of that as a sort of Commonwealth, a northern Commonwealth, that became rich because it had these amazing raw materials of wood and amber and fur and metals, then we can imagine better how something produced in Norway could end up on the west coast of Scotland.

The Lewis Chessmen were discovered in 1831, at Uig Bay on Lewis, in a small stone chamber concealed in a sandbank. By far the most likely explanation for their being there is that they were hidden for safety by a merchant, who may have been intending to sell them on Lewis itself. A thirteenth-century poem, for example, names a powerful figure, Angus Mór of Islay, as king of Lewis, and has him inheriting his father’s set of ivory chess pieces:

To you he left his position, yours his breastplate, each treasure … his slender swords, his brown ivory chessmen.

By playing chess, a ruler like Angus Mór indicated that although his power base was on the extreme outer edge of the continent, he was nonetheless part of an elite high culture that embraced all the courts of Europe. And the figure on the board which represents these European courts more than any other is the queen.

Unlike in Islamic society, where the rulers’ wives would generally have remained hidden from public view, the European queen enjoyed a public role and the high status of adviser to the king. In Europe, land and power could sometimes pass through the female line. So, whereas on the Islamic chessboard the king is accompanied by his male adviser, the vizier, on the European board the king sits beside his queen. In the Lewis chess pieces, the queens all sit staring into the distance, holding their chin in their right hand – permanently suggesting to their contemporaries intense thought and wise counsel, but looking to us comically glum.

Perhaps, though, these queens had something to be glum about. In medieval chess, the queen didn’t actually have much power – she could move only one diagonal space at a time. Her modern sister, on the other hand, is the most powerful piece on the board. Apart from the queen, surprisingly little has actually changed in chess since medieval times, least of all the formidable mathematics of the possible moves. This sedentary, cerebral game has always aroused passionate emotion. The writer Martin Amis has long been fascinated by both aspects:

The maths of chess is very interesting, in that after four moves each the possibilities are already in the billions. It is the supreme board game. Very occasionally you glimpse a combination that a great player would be seeing all the time; and suddenly the board looks tremendously rich – it seems to bristle with possibilities. And combative will is what you see in all the great players – they’ve all got the killer instinct.

Sometimes, it is literally the killer instinct: an English court record from 1279 tells us that when one David de Bristol was playing chess against a certain Juliana le Cordwaner, they quarrelled so violently that he struck her in the thigh with a sword and she died immediately.

There’s one piece I have not mentioned yet, but which is perhaps the most fascinating figure of all the Lewis Chessmen, one that gives a crucial insight into the society that made it. It is the bishop, who in medieval Europe was one of the great powers of the state, not only controlling spiritual life but also commanding land and men. The Archbishop of Trondheim would have been a real force in Lewis. The bishops of the Lewis Chessmen are the oldest in existence, powerful reminders that across the whole of Europe the church was an essential part of any state’s war machine. The story of the Crusades to the Holy Land and the role that the church played in them is well known, but at the same time there was also a northern crusade, led by the Teutonic knights, which conquered and Christianized parts of eastern Europe; while in the south, Castile and central Spain, with bishops playing a prominent part, were being reclaimed for Christendom from their Islamic rulers.

It is from that Spain, newly Christian but with Muslim and Jewish citizens, that the next object comes – the versatile, multifunctional smart phone of its time, the astrolabe.

This is a portable model of the heavens, in the shape of an exquisite, circular brass instrument, which looks a bit like a large brass pocket watch. It’s an astrolabe, and with it in my hands I can tell the time, do some surveying, or work out my position in the world by sun or stars and, if I have enough information, cast your horoscope.

Although familiar to ancient Greeks, the astrolabe was an instrument that was particularly important for the Islamic world, as it allowed the faithful to find the direction of Mecca, so it is not surprising that the oldest astrolabe to survive is an Islamic one from the tenth century. But the astrolabe pictured here is a Jewish one made about 650 years ago in Spain. It is inscribed with Hebrew lettering, but it also contains Arabic and Spanish words, and it combines both Islamic and European decorative elements. It is not just an advanced scientific instrument, but also an emblem of a very particular moment in Europe’s religious and political history.

We don’t know exactly who owned this particular Hebrew astrolabe, but it tells us a great deal about how Jewish and Islamic scholars revitalized science and astronomy by developing the inheritance of Classical Greece and Rome. The instrument speaks of a great intellectual synthesis, and about a time when the three religions – Christianity, Judaism and Islam – coexisted peacefully. There was no religious synthesis, but the three faiths lived together in fruitful friction, and between them they made medieval Spain the intellectual powerhouse of Europe.

An astrolabe makes accessible in compact form the sum total of medieval astronomical lore. Like the latest developments today, this was must-have technology, a demonstration that you were right at the cutting edge. There is a wonderfully funny and touching letter written by Chaucer to his ten-year-old son Lewis, who was obviously like techie boys in every generation and clamouring to get to grips with an astrolabe. As well as writing him a letter, Chaucer also wrote him a little instruction manual, telling the boy how to use the instrument and warning him just how difficult he was going to find it – although I suspect that, like most children today, Lewis quickly left his father behind.

Little Lewis, I have perceived well thy ability to learn sciences touching numbers and proportions; and I have also considered thy earnest prayer specially to learn the Treatise of the Astrolabe. Here is an Astrolabe of our horizon and a little treatise to teach a certain number of conclusions appertaining to the same instrument.

Trust well that all the conclusions that can be found, or else possibly might be found in so noble an instrument as an Astrolabe, are not perfectly understood by any mortal man in this region, and I have seen that there be some instructions that will not in all things deliver their intended results; and some of them be too hard for thy tender age of ten years to understand …

At first sight this astrolabe looks like an outsized old-fashioned pocket watch with an entirely brass face. It is a gleaming assemblage of interlocking brasswork, with five wafer-thin discs, one on top of another, held together by a central pin. On top of this are several pointers that can be lined up with various symbols on the discs to give you astronomical readings or help you to determine your position. An astrolabe like this one is designed for the particular latitude in which it is going to be used – the five discs here will allow you to get an accurate reading from any position between the latitudes of the Pyrenees and North Africa. In the middle of that range are the latitudes for the Spanish cities of Seville and Toledo.

This tells us that this astrolabe was almost certainly made for somebody based in Spain, who might travel between North Africa and France, and the writing on the astrolabe tells us clearly what kind of person must have been using it. The owner is Jewish and is learned.

Dr Silke Ackermann, the curator of scientific instruments here at the British Museum, has spent a lot of time studying this astrolabe:

The inscriptions are all in Hebrew – you can see the finely engraved Hebrew letters quite clearly. But what’s so intriguing about the piece is that not
all
the words are Hebrew. Some of them have Arabic origins and some are medieval Spanish. So, for example, beside a star in the constellation that we call Aquila – the eagle – we can see written in Hebrew
nesher me’offel
– ‘the flying eagle’. But other star names are given in their Arabic form: so Aldabaran in Taurus has its Arabic name
al-dabaran
written in Hebrew letters. And when you read out the Hebrew letters for the names of the months, they give you the medieval Spanish names like October, November, December. So what you have here is the knowledge of the Classical Greek astronomers who charted the heavens, combined with the contributions of Muslim, Jewish and Christian scholars – and all in the palm of your hand.