Pillars of Light (58 page)

It has also been argued that the change in emphasis from the darker, weightier Romanesque to more fluid, light-filled total design of the Gothic came about at around the same time as the introduction of Arabic numerals from Spain in the early twelfth century. Moving from the Roman numeral system to the Arabic numerals we still use today represented a revolution in thinking. Multiplication and division became easier and more comprehensible—and also more transferable—so the greater complexities of Gothic design became possible to encompass, and masons who had been working in the Muslim tradition were able to travel to work alongside European craftsmen and exchange ideas freely, thus
enabling the spread of this fusion of East and West. As evidence of this, a set of Arabic numerals used to mark up timbers for assembly were quite recently discovered in the roof of Salisbury Cathedral.

But to my knowledge, no one has discovered the fragment of the True Cross that John and the Moor buried beneath a pillar in the cathedral at Wells: that is my own invention. Indeed, what happened to the large relic carried by the Bishop of Acre before the Christian army at the disaster at Hattin remains a mystery to this day. The bishop was killed and it fell into the hands of Salah ad-Din, who sent part of it to the Caliph of Baghdad, who buried it in June 1189 beneath the Bab en-Nuby, to be trodden beneath Muslim feet. But Baha ad-Din states in his chronicle that it was exhibited at Salah ad-Din’s camp in the hills above Acre; and that after the failed negotiation for the hostages it was sent as a gift to Isaac the Emperor of Constantinople (Istanbul). Yet Hubert of Salisbury is said to have been allowed by Salah ad-Din to see it in Jerusalem in September 1192. And then there is the tale of the Franj soldier who went out to the battlefield at Hattin and after three days dug it up. Or the report of Richard being shown a fragment of the Cross by the Abbot of St. Elias at Beyt Nuba before he gave up the crusade (without regaining Jerusalem) and returned (by a circuitous route) to England in October 1192.

There were without doubt many faked relics and fragments of the True Cross. As the sixteenth-century theologian John Calvin famously said: “There is no town, however small, which has not some morsel of it.… If all the pieces which could be found were collected into a heap, they would form a good shipload.” Even as recently as 2013 there were reports of a fragment being discovered, in a church in Turkey.

I started working on
Pillars of Light
before the revolt against the Assad regime and the arrival of Daesh—the so-called Islamic State group—in Syria and Iraq. Writing the book while the current
tragedy of this riven area plays out has been both painful and apposite. There have been times I’ve had to stop work, as stories of the destruction and violence suffered by the ordinary people of Syria eclipsed the historical events I was trying to recapture. In particular, witness accounts of the siege in Homs paralleled so closely the worst details of the siege at Acre that it was hard not to despair at mankind’s inability to develop empathy and decency down the ages. Likewise, the vile beheadings carried out by Daesh in the full glare of modern publicity, so reminiscent of the crazed fundamentalism of the Hashshashin, also mirror uncomfortably the cold-blooded execution of the Acre hostages by Richard II, deliberately within view of the Muslim army. Terrorism is nothing new and is not limited to a single culture or religion. There is a tendency for the modern reader to look back on people of the past and dismiss them as less cultivated, less civilized than we are. But if history teaches us anything it must surely be that we rarely learn from the mistakes and atrocities of the past.

Jane Johnson, London, July 2015

I have many people to thank for their aid and support in seeing
Pillars of Light
into the world. First of all my husband Abdellatif, who has put up with my obsession with this period of history and with disturbed nights as I scribble sudden thoughts in my notebook, as well as his invaluable help with translating from Arabic sources. I must also thank Emma Coode, Ben Kane, Jane Willow Bennett, Francijn Suermondt and Essie Fox for reading various drafts of the text and for their encouragement to
just keep going
! My fine editors Nita Pronovost, Zoe Maslow and Barbara Heinzius for the work they put into this book: it is far better as a result of their efforts, for which I am hugely grateful. And finally I must thank my agent Danny Baror for believing in this book against all the odds.