For a while, our society has expressed itself in the form of novels. Once, it was the time of sagas, then of poetry, then of novels -- maybe as the result of the invention of printing that made bards not necessary anymore. Novels, today, are probably as obsolete as epic poems, but they are still part of our heritage and give us a window of the world, one of those dim mirrors that Saul of Tarsus describes. And, in the exploration of reality through the novel mirror, you discover all sorts of reflections.
So, I happen to meet a lady at a book fair. Her name is Elide Ceragioli and she writes novels. She wrote several of them and I already commented on her novel on Hildegard von Bingen. And I bought also her book, The Hawk and the Falcon, and I set for myself the task of reading the story of Roger de Flor, or Ruggero da Fiore, or Roger von Blum, 13th-century adventurer. And that set me on a journey that went well beyond this novel.
As Walt Whitman said, in a book there is a man. A man is a story, and that's true for Roger de Flor, whose life comes out of the novel with a certain strength, but also clouded in a world that, for us, is more remote than a Martian civilization could be. Ceragioli makes an interesting effort to penetrate the mind and the story of this man, a nearly impossible task in which she succeeds, at least in part. She doesn't make the mistakes that Poul Anderson makes with his novel, "Rogue Sword," set in the same age and places as Ceragioli's one. The main mistake that Anderson makes is to make his protagonist think like a 20th-century person. Ceragioli's effort does much better and the way she tells the story of the fall of Acre is simply memorable.
But the novel is long and it is about the life and death of Roger de Flor. What do we, 21st-century characters of a novel that someone may be writing, understand of this particular mirror? Something and nothing. Ceragioli's story is rich of events, the details many, but the great movement of people, ships, storms, wars, and battles of the novel remains somewhat 2-dimensional. We see things happening, but we need to know more, to understand more, to make the painting 3-dimensional, to see it from every side.
So, I had to read more on those times. Ceragioli's novel led me to re-read the chronicles of the Catalan company by Ramon Muntaner, "Baudolino" by Umberto Eco, and several more books dealing with the calamitous 13th century. In a sense, the pinnacle of the Middle Ages, the moment of maximum expansion of a world that had emerged from the cinders of the Western Roman Empire
You can understand this age if you see it as a great wave coming from the West and crashing on the Oriental beaches. It is a wave of people in search of power and riches, crusaders, adventurers, soldiers of venture. It had all started in the West, even before the dawn of the 12th century, with the first crusade. Like an adventure novel, it was a romp in the sand and a city taken as you pick an apple from a tree. Then, things had started getting tough and the West had started destroying itself with the crusade against the Albigensian and the massacre of the Cathars, one century later. And, almost in contemporary, there was the 4th crusade, the one that turned Greece into a wasteland, the one that destroyed the Byzantine Empire.
You can't understand Baudolino, nor Roger de Flor, nor Ramon Muntaner if you don't understand how the West had turned into a hungry beast that was devouring itself. When the Catalan fighters invaded Greece at their battle cry of Desperta Ferro! (awake, iron!) they were advancing into a vacuum, into a desert. There was nothing left of the once mighty Byzantine Empire. That explains how Ramon Muntaner describes the advance of the Catalans as nothing but a series of victories, one after the other, against feeble attempts by the Byzantines to hold their ground.
The beast that was Europe finished devouring itself with the Black Plague of the mid 14th century that killed maybe 30% of the population, maybe even more than that. An age was over, the age of the crusades. And, with it, there went the Templars, Roger de Flor had been one, the attempt of turning Europe into a unified transnational force -- they were both a bank and an army, not unlike our dying European Union (not even an army, though). The Templars were destroyed by the embryonic nation states that Europe was turned into -- dark and bloodthirsty beasts that went through their parable with the great witch hunts of the 16th century, and then forged in blood in the 30 years war in the 17th. Events almost forgotten today, but they ushered our age.
And so, who was Roger de Flor? A long lost shadow left to us nothing written but that somehow incarnated briefly in the mind of a 21st-century Italian woman who attempted to cross the barrier of the centuries. She partly succeeded, in part failed, in the great cycles of the universe, everything goes, everything returns, and the heavens declare the glory of the Lord.
