History as Told in Novelspace: Roger de Flor and the Waning of the Middle Ages

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.

How do you Write a Novel set in the 13th Century? Simple: you use Magic

A good front cover for a novel -- Hildegard and the Mystery of the Archer -- that faces a gigantic challenge: describing the world of the time of Hildegard von Bingen, the 12th century in Europe. Despite some stylistic problems, the author, Elide Ceragioli, succeeds in mastering her task: the novel works. It is the magic of narrative.

My explorations of Novel-space are leading me to discover vast spaces where the unknown reigns. It is truly a travel among sideral archipelagos. In my latest report, I told you about how the sexual habits of Plutonians could be related to waitresses who talk with God every day - not a small twist in the space-time fabric.

Here, let me tell you of how Hildegard of Bingen, Christian intellectual of the 12th century, materialized in the suburbs of my town, Florence, in the work of Ms. Elide Ceragioli who also materialized in front of me for a brief encounter just a couple of weeks ago: the mysteries of sidereal archipelagos.

Writing a novel set in the past is extremely difficult for the simple reason that you never lived there -- and with the best of good will, you never will (unless you are a mad professor who invents a time machine). Then, the more you go backward in the past, the more difficult it is. Could you write a novel set in ancient Sumeria, 5000 years ago? Some people do, one day I'll read one of the novels set in Sumeria by Jesse Hudson and report about that to you, but the task is truly nightmarish.

The task that Elide Ceragioli set for herself is gigantic: a novel where the protagonist is Hildegard Von Bingen (1098-1179), Medieval intellectual, writer, poet, nun, and mystic. Fascinating, but an unbelievably difficult task for someone who is not a Medieval nun.

So, how does Ms. Ceragioli succeed? Well, let's say first of all that the novel has serious problems in style and structure. In terms of style, it illustrates my opinion that the "Omniscient Point of View" (POV) in a novel worked well for Leon Tolstoy, but if one is not Leon Tolstoy it is better not to attempt it. The narrative thread in "Ildegarda" wanders from one character to the other, often providing classic examples of the problem that's called sometimes "head hopping." Omniscient POV is simply tiresome for the reader and that's what happens here.

But, curiously, whereas we know the inner thoughts of every character of the story, we never glimpse what Hildegard herself is thinking. Which is good: it makes Hildegard a little aloft, but it gives focus to the whole story, with all the other characters sort of orbiting around the strong figure of the benevolent abbess.In addition, despite the head-hopping that pervades the text, we do have a "narrative voice" -- unfortunately intermittent, but effective. It is the character of Eunice, the healer nun who "is a little mad, speaks with stones, with plants, and also with bones." I have met Ms. Ceragioli only once and for no more than 10 minutes, but that was sufficient for me to understand that Eunice is her alter-ego in the novel. All novels have an alter-ego of the author, this one is no exception. Whenever Eunice is on stage, the plot gains focus, speed, and interest.

There would be more to be said about the structure of the novel: it has more defects: excessive violence and blood, the slow advancing of the plot, some characters who are just not believable, such as the murderer archer, the attempt of setting a murder-mystery plot in a cultural situation where it wasn't even conceivable, and the plot split into two novels, one following the other.

But all that doesn't detract from the fact that the novel works. That's the miracle of narrative: if an author really feels for what he/she is telling, then even a slow-moving novel can't fail. This is the essential point of Hildegard and the Mystery of the Archer. If you read it, you can't avoid being taken it by the deep fascination of story-telling. Novel writing means to work magic and this novel is an example of it. True magic.