The Fools’ Crusade Read online

  For Poppy and Ringo, with love

  Contents

  Cover

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Contents

  Preface

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  Historical Note

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Epilogue

  Extract from Appetite

  Author Bio

  Also by Pip Vaughan-Hughes

  Copyright

  ‘Damn you, damn you,’ I was chanting under my breath. My head was spinning and my arms were suddenly as heavy as if they were sausage skins filled with sand. I had been cut somewhere on the head, for I could feel something warm trickling down my neck and back, but I did not remember the blow. The king and his companions were out of sight. ‘Oh, God,’ I moaned. I had to follow Louis. I had nowhere else to go. It was a terrible thought, but at that moment a sheet of flame sprang up in front of me as a whole thicket of reeds caught fire. The wounded Saracen screamed and his horse jumped through the fire. My own horse, terrified by the flames, gave a piercing whinny and flung herself after it. For an instant I was engulfed in searing red and orange, cupped in a firegiant’s hand, the fingers closing around me. Then I was out in the night once more, hurtling down the narrow path, the river on my left, darkness on my right. And then my horse stumbled.

  I felt myself flying through the air at an unearthly speed, faster than anything I had known before. The ground suddenly appeared. I remember seeing one broken reed stalk in perfect detail. And then nothing.

  Author’s Note

  In 1249 and 1250 Pope Innocent held long and secret negotiations with Richard Earl of Cornwall at Lyon; the chronicler Matthew Paris was convinced that Innocent was trying to persuade Richard to accept the crown of Sicily. After Emperor Frederick’s death in 1250, Innocent made the offer officially, twice, but Richard declined. Matthew Paris has him telling the pope: ‘You might as well say, “I make you a present of the moon – step up to the sky and take it down.” ’

  Pope Innocent spent enormous amounts of time and energy trying to woo the kings of Christendom to his side. He did send letters to Sultan Ayub in Cairo, trying to gain an alliance against Frederick von Hohenstaufen, but I have invented the scheme he and Earl Richard cook up in my story.

  King Louis’s crusade to Egypt was an unmitigated disaster. This did not prevent him trying again in 1270. This time he attacked Tunis, and while laying siege to Carthage he died of a fever. In 1298 Louis Capet was declared a saint by the Church.

  Michael Scotus was born in 1175. He was a great scholar who was instrumental in bringing the works of Aristotle back to light in Christian Europe, and he translated the works of Averroes and Avicenna into Latin. He was much admired by Frederick von Hohenstaufen, and was also a candidate for Archbishop of Canterbury. He is thought to have died in 1232, but there is no proof of where it happened or where he might be buried, and the name of Michael Scotus turns up in documents as late as 1290 …

  Acknowledgements

  My heartfelt thanks to Christopher Little and Emma Schlesinger for their hard work and friendship; to Jon Wood, for his constant encouragement and deft editing, and to Genevieve Pegg and Jade Chandler at Orion for keeping me on track; and as always to my long suffering family and particularly to Tara, who knows me better than I know myself.

  Historical Note

  In the middle of the thirteenth century, the Italian Peninsula had begun to divide deeply and bitterly along a political, ideological and spiritual fault-line. From Sicily to the Alps, Italy was split into many small dukedoms, princedoms and the newly emerging city states like Florence. But over this patchwork lay the presence of two great powers: the Holy Roman Empire and the Papacy. Church and State had existed for centuries side by side, an uneasy balancing act, but in the 1200s this became fatally disturbed. The Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II von Hohenstaufen, believed that the pope was overstepping his authority and trying to establish the Church as the main earthly as well as spiritual power-broker in Italy. The conflict that followed became open warfare that pitched Imperial armies against papal ones. In the towns and cities, the division became political. Supporters of pope and emperor split into factions: the Ghibbelines were for the emperor; the Guelphs were the pope’s faction. Street fighting, assassinations and mob rule destabilised almost every city. In Florence, as in other places, the balance of power often switched from one to the other and back again. These were not wars of religion, although both sides attacked each other’s orthodoxy in surprisingly modern propaganda campaigns, but territorial struggles about money and land. Italy itself took many centuries to recover. Outside the peninsula, the other Christian kings watched keenly. It was not in their best interests for the Church to claim kingly authority, but they did not want to be excommunicated. So, behind the scenes, tense rounds of diplomacy and whispered back-stabbing added to the tension. And despite all this confusion – and partly because of it – a new power began to arise: the banks.

  Prologue

  The Nile Delta, April 1250

  The outline of the door was a dazzling line of white light on a slab of darkness, and the dark itself was thick and dusty and full of the reek of sheep and chickens. I sat with legs drawn up tight against my chest, eyes streaming from the fetor that rose from the damp straw beneath me. My guts were clenching and unclenching as if a giant’s hand were milking them, but I had nothing left to give. My breeches were iron-stiff with my own filth. I had drunk nothing for a day and a night, and no food had passed my lips for more than two days, and now thirst had become my whole world. The hut was crawling with insects. They had got inside my clothes and my groin, and the backs of my knees were already welted and smarting as they gorged on my thin, sickly blood. ‘May it poison you,’ I muttered.

  ‘What did you say?’ The quavering voice of Matthieu d’Allaines came from somewhere on my left. Another man groaned softly in the blackness. There had been five of us yesterday. I had heard two lives gurgle to their ends in the night. Soon they would add their stink to the terrible air.

  ‘I was praying for the lice that are eating me alive,’ I said. ‘Their god must hate them, to have sent them a meal like me.’

  ‘You blaspheme,’ croaked Matthieu. ‘This is …’

  ‘Not the time? Are you sure?’

  There was a rustling and suddenly Matthieu’s fingers were clawing at my neck.

  ‘Give it me …’ he whispered suddenly. ‘Give it to me … I will destroy it. And then I will shrive your soul.’ I shoved him away and he rolled into the man lying further off in the black stink.

  ‘Hell-mouth is yawning for you! I can see it …’

  ‘You are mad, priest,’ I muttered.

  ‘Use your breath for repentance. Death is very near,’ he croaked.

  I could have told him that we had both been as good a
s dead since Shrove Tuesday, two months ago. We had been part of an army of walking corpses, our flesh rotting even as it clung to our bones, the stink of the living no different from that of the heaps of dead. I wondered if Jean had escaped, or the king, but I thought mostly of my wife, and of a little stream that ran beside the house in which I had been born, its cold, clear water dancing over golden rocks, nimble barred trout swimming and drinking, drinking, drinking …

  There was a sudden clashing of sound and the door burst open, drowning us in unbearable daylight. Loud, angry voices hacked at the vile air, and the chink and slither of drawn weapons. Great black shadows appeared in the doorway. The straw beside me churned as the sick man, whoever he was, tried to burrow out of sight. A leg, clad in mail and blue leather boots, stamped down next to me. He bent and shouted into my face.

  ‘Are you ill?’ It was a strange question, given that I was a living skeleton sprawled in my own shit, but I knew that he was not expecting an answer, for he had used his own tongue. The spear tip was already pointing at my sternum when I replied in Arabic.

  ‘I am as strong as you, my lord!’ The soldier squatted down before me, his nose wrinkling in surprise, or disgust. He was my age, with grey beginning to pattern his trimmed beard. The white of his turban was almost blinding me.

  ‘No, Frankish jackal, you are not.’ He had dropped the spear, and somehow a long, curved knife had appeared in his hand. The men behind him were all talking at once. I guessed they were demanding to know what I had said, what it was that had taken their captain by surprise. They were pushing into the hut, shoving against the man so that his knife wavered and jabbed at the air just in front of my breastbone.

  ‘I can stand, lord,’ I was telling him. And indeed, like a dying crane-fly at the end of summer, I was struggling upright, the jagged stones of the wall scoring my back. The Saracen watched me, whether in amusement or revulsion I could not tell. As soon as I was roughly standing he grabbed my ankle and pulled me down and the stones flayed my back once more.

  ‘Keep still, you revolting cur! You are a priest! Say it! You are an infidel priest!’ The other voices were snarling now, egging the man on. The whites of his eyes were showing. And the knife, cool and silver as a fish in a Devon stream, was at my throat. He could slice me now, and let the coolness in. Then I would drink for ever.

  ‘Lord, I am not,’ I told him. The soldiers were gripping their captain’s shoulders now, and I could see the rage growing in him. I had seen it many times, and I had felt it myself. I understood, somehow, that this Saracen was not a bad man, just a tired, overworked soldier with men who needed to have some fun. Matthieu was praying. I heard the fear in his voice, and the anger, the self-righteous anger. To bring his god into this place … What kind of man would invoke the god of love in a charnel house, with rage in his voice? My head was swimming. This was Hell-mouth, then.

  ‘Why are you not praying, priest?’ the Saracen was barking at me like a dog.

  ‘Because I am not a priest, lord.’

  ‘Do Franks not pray when death comes for them? Why is your friend praying, then?’

  ‘Him? Not my friend, lord. He thinks this is hell, and that you are Shaitan come for my soul.’ I giggled, and tasted blood in my throat.

  ‘Does he? Does he, the dog? The worm?’ The Saracen leaped to his feet and grabbed Matthieu by the tunic. The rag tied round Matthieu’s head fell off and revealed his stubbly tonsured scalp, scabbed with ringworm. The soldiers in the doorway all cried out at once: Priest! Priest! There was a confusion, a rush, and many hands clawed at Matthieu and dragged him out. I glimpsed his heels jouncing over the dried dung, and then I was seized as well.

  The sunlight was white-hot needles thrusting into my eyeballs. I cringed, and the men laughed and shook me until my teeth rattled. Through bloody tears a world took shape: a dusty courtyard – no, a threshing floor between low, whitewashed buildings thatched with reeds. Spears were stacked against walls and a green standard had been thrust into the thatch of one hut. A lop-eared goat chewed on something as it watched us with its lizard eyes. Men – soldiers in dusty chain mail and white robes, with helmets or white turbans on their heads – leaned against walls or squatted in the narrow strips of shade. They were hooting and cursing at Matthieu, who was being hauled into the middle of the threshing floor. The Saracens pulled him up until he was kneeling, face towards the sun. His eyes were squeezed shut but his lips were still moving in prayer. He fumbled inside his ragged clothes and brought out a silver cross, which he clasped tightly. The Saracens were all jeering now, and their captain was strutting to and fro, stiff with rage. He bent and said something to Matthieu, and in answer, the friar raised his clasped hands as high as the chain of his cross would allow. He called out in a cracked, trembling voice:

  ‘Pater, in manus tuas commendo spiritum meum …’ And the Saracen drew his long, curved sword, raised it backhanded across his body and with a hissing slash brought it down upon the friar’s neck. A lovely stroke it was, the wrist loose, one finger curved over the hilt, the left hand extended delicately to one side. The flesh of Matthieu’s neck cleaved and I saw the neat white ring of bone flash before the blood, one thick gout of it, sprayed out. There was a hollow crack as his head struck the packed clay of the threshing floor. The soldiers hooted as their captain bent and wiped his blade on Matthieu’s back. Then he swung, loose as a dancer, pivoting on his heel, to face me. His face was set, indifferent. He gestured with the point of his blade and my guards jerked me forward. The goat was running to the end of its rope again and again, panicked by the yells and the smell of blood. But the circle of the threshing floor was empty save for the Saracen and the corpse of Matthieu. The soldiers shoved me onto the hard clay and stepped back. I stood, swaying. The sky was deep blue, the threshing floor pale as butter, the huts blazing white. The Saracen captain was ordering me to do something, but I could not make out the words, just the sounds of his language, and into my mind drifted the face of a man I had known when we had sailed together, and the songs he had sung. There was a good one, about dying. ‘The One You Kill, Lord …’ And then the hand of memory, fickle servant that he is, had found me the very song. I shuffled forward, smiled reassuringly at the Saracen, and began to sing.

  The one You kill,

  Lord,

  Does not smell of blood,

  And the one You burn

  Does not reek of smoke.

  He You burn laughs as he burns

  And the one You kill,

  As You kill him,

  Cries out in ecstasy.

  I had learned it in Arabic, so I sung it in that tongue as my feet faltered towards the black stain spreading around the friar. A hand caught me under the arm and I knelt obediently. The man’s sharp face appeared before mine, very close. I smiled: I knew he would do a good job. I felt nothing now, and that was wonderful. The Saracen was speaking urgently to me, and so I stopped singing and cocked my head drunkenly to catch his words.

  ‘What are you doing? How do you know those words? Frankish man, why do you sing the words of Sheikh al-Ansari?’

  ‘I’m sorry … I will stop. Please do your work, lord.’ My head was growing intolerably heavy, so I let my chin drop to my chest. The sun was flooding me, even as I closed my eyes it seeped in until my skull was filled with it, breaking into fragments like stars, like bees, buzzing, buzzing … Then the buzzing became, for a moment, the voices of men, and hands reached for me as I pitched forward into the tumult.

  Chapter One

  Florence, two years earlier

  Enough. I had had enough of this. I pushed back the vast ledger, heavy as a grave marker, and stood up carefully. Three years as a banker had put a bend in my spine, and I felt I must be creaking like an unoiled hinge as I stretched wearily towards the painted beams of the ceiling. Wincing, for one of my legs had gone to sleep into the bargain, I limped out of the reading room and called for my cloak. A young clerk, new to us – I had forgotten his name already, if anyone had even
bothered to tell me what it was – brought it, holding it out to me gingerly, as if I were some large and unpredictable dog: might bite, might not. I did not bite, not often, but I was rarely in a good temper these days, especially here. I made an effort to smile and thank him, but he just stood there. He would have had the same look on his face if a stone statue in his church had wished him good day. Once I would have paused and taken a little time to draw him out. I could still recognise that look in his eyes, a young man’s terrified fascination with the world that is engulfing him. I could have told him how I had once been young, a monk from the country, and that the world has many rows of sharp teeth and may take you in its jaws, but if you are clever and lucky it may not chew you up and gulp you down.

  But I did not. And I didn’t stop to bid goodnight to my old friend Isaac of Toledo, head of the Florence branch of the Banco di Corvo Marino. I would see him tomorrow, and though I loved him, he would want to discuss the Uberti loan and some papers that had arrived from Lyon, and I only wished for some food, a drink of wine and bed.

  It was not as late as I had thought, however, for I stepped out into dazzling sunlight. The reading room was like a tomb, windowless and airless, the atmosphere a thick, nose-worrying mist of dust, mouldering vellum, tangy ink and candle-grease. I leaned on one of the pillars that stood on either side of the door, letting my eyes get used to the glare. Jesus, I was becoming a bat, a leathery old bat with ink blots on its wings. Should I go back to my toil? No, I hadn’t simply left, I had escaped. The ledgers would have me again tomorrow. I took a deep breath and stepped out into the Via dei Tavolini. With nowhere to be, no one needing me, I felt almost dizzy with the freedom of it all. What to do?

  Perhaps some shoes. I had heard of a bootmaker near Santa Maria who, his customers said, would surely go straight to heaven when he died, to make shoes for the angels. Try as I might I could not imagine why angels would need them, but Iselda, waiting patiently for me at home in Venice, would like a pair of Florentine shoes, and perhaps he could measure me as well.