The Archer's Gold: Medieval Military fiction: A Novel about Wars, Knights, Pirates, and Crusaders in The Years of the Feudal Middle Ages of William Marshall ... (The Company of English Archers Book 7)

                                  The Archer's Gold

        The monk sighed as he put down his quill and began reading through the latest stack of parchments he had written. 

     
“Maybe after I send this one to London I should go back to being a priest somewhere and stop trying to write this history.  But will the bishop let me do that?  Probably not; he’s afraid of losing his position, isn’t he?”

                                         The Preface

       It all started in the huge Byzantine Empire some twenty or so years ago in 1182 when the Emperor in Constantinople gave in to the demands of his merchants and priests and launched what everyone now calls the “Massacre of the Latins.”  ‘Latins,’ of course, being what the Greeks call those of us who are true Christians and are led by our Holy Father, the Pope.

       In Constantinople the Greeks slaughtered and burned and drove away the "Latins" who were mostly Venetians.  Their slaughter and burning really had nothing to do with religion or the true church or the Pope or that the Pope’s priests and bishops speak Latin. 

     The Constantinople emperor’s problem was much simpler than that - the Venetians may look to Rome for spiritual guidance and practice the true religion as we do but they are just not as smart as we English.  They are great sailors and merchants, of course, but they have weak blood and absolutely no common sense. 

       Over time the Venetians had come to control much of the trade and commerce of the Byzantine empire.  By 1182, and even though they belong to another church, they basically controlled the supply of food and necessities in Constantinople and in many of the empire’s smaller cities. 

       Being successful merchants by itself might have been acceptable to the Byzantines and the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church which caters to the Byzantines' religious needs - but the Venetians aggravated the emperor and his people and their church by flaunting their wealth and demanding more and more concessions and privileges instead of being content to earn their coins and send them home to Venice.

       The Venetians even began establishing their own churches and bringing in their own priests.  That made things much worse because it particularly upset the Orthodox priests and bishops.  They, of course, are quite practical - they want the Orthodox church to provide all the religious services in the empire so they will get all the donations and the fees of the faithful.

       Even worse, the Venetians brought so many of their families to live in Constantinople that over the years they took over an entire section of the city and bribed and worked their way into getting total control of various markets and occupations. 

       Finally the Emperor and the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church responded to the growing outrage of their people and priests - and in 1182 got rid of Constantinople's Venetians in a great bloody massacre.

       Constantinople was not the only place in the empire where the Venetians had angered the local people with their arrogance and demands.  Little wonder then that the Emperor’s and the Orthodox Patriarch’s satisfaction with the events in Constantinople triggered similar attacks throughout the Byzantine empire. 

     As a result, in the year 1183 the Venetians were similarly violently forced out of Zara and other coastal cities all along the Adriatic Sea across from Roman Catholic Italy. 

       All this is not to suggest that the empire and its peoples became more prosperous and better governed when the Byzantines regained control of their own commerce and cities.  To the contrary; if anything, things got even worse and the empire continued to decline.  In fact it was run so poorly and so corrupt that a few years later the emperor’s brother was able to conduct a palace coup and depose him for being incompetent. 

       Unfortunately the coup against the old emperor and his corruption accomplished nothing – for the new emperor and others of his immediate supporters, in turn, promptly began similarly looting the empire for themselves.  If anything, they did it even more. 

       It is well known, for example, that to enrich himself the emperor’s chief admiral, his wife’s brother-in-law, sold the supplies and equipment of the empire's navy down to the very nails.

       This then is the status of things in the year 1193 when the Third Crusade to regain Jerusalem and the Holy Land comes to an end.  That’s when King Richard and many of the crusade’s nobles and clerics desert their surviving troops and retainers and desperately flee to escape the Saracens led by Saladin the Kurd.

       Richard and the other leaders flee in response to their military defeats even though the Christians and crusaders they abandon still hold all of the Holy Land ports and much of Holy Land except Jerusalem and Damascus – and are under great pressure from the Saracens who are constantly attacking them. 

       Indeed Saladin and his Saracens are so greatly heartened by the fleeing of King Richard and the crusade’s other leaders that they step up their attacks.  The result is that more Christian lands in the interior fall to the Saracens and more refugees flee the Christian ports along the Mediterranean in an effort to escape.

@@@@@

       It was into one of those still-remaining Christian ports that the eighteen exhausted survivors of a band of English archers straggle in 1193.  They were led into the port by a former English serf from Yorkshire by the name of William and his brother who is the archer company's priest. 

       What William and the eighteen archers then begin to do is an exciting story and quite significant even though no one grasped it at the time.  Among other things, they begin the long slow process of turning England into a great world power by founding what is now the British navy and the most fearsome fighting men in the world – the English speaking Marines who are trained to fight on both land and sea.

       The Venetians may have made a mistake in being arrogant and flaunting their wealth in Constantinople and elsewhere.  But the Byzantine Greeks headquartered in Constantinople were not very smart either.  They thought that all Latins are alike so that fighting against the English archers would be the same as fighting against the Venetians. 

       It was a bad mistake because to offset their small numbers William's English archers had recruited new archers to replace the men they lost to the Saracens and equipped them with the very latest in military weapons and tactics - long bows and Swiss pikes modified to add hooks and blades - and began systematically training their recruits in the best ways to use them. 

       The Byzantines quickly learned the difference between the English archers and the Venetians in 1195.  That's when they made the mistake of capturing some of William’s archers and holding them for ransom. 

       It was really quite a foolish thing to do since the archers had only been in Constantinople acting as merchants - selling safe and dependable transportation on the galleys the English archers had come to own by capturing them from the Moorish pirates who infest the Mediterranean Sea.

       William, the former serf who had become the archer's captain and his Marines, as the archers were beginning to be called because they fought both on land and on sea, refused to pay the ransom. 

       Instead, although greatly outnumbered, William and his Marine archers responded by immediately attacking and taking a large number of prizes from the incompetently led Byzantine fleet anchored in Constantinople's harbor - and then fighting and winning a pitched battle against the ill equipped and badly led Byzantine army in front of Constantinople’s walls.

       The result was inevitable - the captured archers were freed.

@@@@@

       This is the story, in the words of the archers themselves, about what happened after the English archers fought in front of the walls of Constantinople.  It is the seventh of the parchment books about the experiences of the archers.  Similar to the six that preceded it, the seventh book is the telling in their own words of what the archers did after they devastated the Byzantine fleet and fought in front of the walls at Constantinople. 

       This latest tale of the archers' wars and adventures, like those before it, was translated from parchments scribed by an unknown monk at a monastery in Oxford, particularly those parchments which contained first person accounts of what happened.

       As he had done for his unknown patron with the previous six stories, the monk pieced this seventh exciting story together using the participants' own words from the various parchments and fragments of a great number of the participants' letters, reports, and memoirs describing both their actions and their thoughts and emotions while they were doing whatever it was that they were doing.

       What the unknown monk continued to make clear is that England and the known world at the beginning of the thirteenth century is a crude and dangerous place governed by crude and dangerous men - and slowly changing even though the people involved don't realize it at the time.

@@@@@

       The events chronicled in this seventh book actually start in January of 1198 when Pope Celestine III dies.  Lotario de Conti de Segni buys the papacy of the Roman Church for forty mule loads of gold and then, as Pope Innocent III, calls for a fourth and final crusade to restore Jerusalem to Christian control. 

       Calling for a crusade is easier said than done because things have changed on the ground for the Christians of the true church since the crusades started a century earlier in 1095 – the Moslems, and particularly the Kurds under Saladin, have gotten stronger, much stronger. 

        Crusaders in first two crusades marched overland from France and Germany to Jerusalem through Anatolia and the Kurdish lands along the mountains.  Unfortunately that route has become too dangerous to use these days because it, along with Baghdad, Damascus and Jerusalem, is now controlled by Saladin and his fellow Kurds.

      The dangers inherent in the overland route is significant.  It means the fourth crusade, like the third, will have to travel to the Holy Land by sea.

@@@@@

       In 1199 the fourth crusade was organized at a tournament in France with Thibaut of Champagne as its initial leader. 

       Unfortunately for him, Thibaut is killed by one of the English archers, Thomas the priest of the original eighteen archers and now a bishop.  This occurred when Thibaut attempted to prevent Thomas from delivering a cautionary message from the Pope to the crusaders who have begun to gather in Venice. 

       Thibaut's replacement as the new leader of crusade is an Italian noble, Boniface of Montferrat.  His first and most pressing problem is to find a way to transport his crusaders to the Holy Land so they can regain Jerusalem and make their fortunes.

       Boniface finally solves his problem.  In 1201 the blind and elderly Doge of Venice agrees to transport Boniface and the new crusaders to the Holy Land via Egypt in return for a huge payment for the use of Venice's ships and men. 

       This results in the crusaders having another problem - although the Venetians may look to Rome for their spiritual needs, they're not fools.  They've had experience dealing with crusaders and their priests so they insist on being paid in full before they sail. 

       The Venetians also have long memories and a great animosity towards Constantinople, Zara, and the other cities that expelled and massacred Venetians twenty or so years earlier.

       What the elderly ruler of Venice, the Doge, proposes to the crusaders is quite clever - that they get the coins they need to pay for their transportation to the Holy Land by collecting the huge amount unpaid taxes and tribute Venice claims it is due from Zara and other smaller port cities along the Adriatic.  

       It's been more than twenty years since the orthodox believers in the port cities threw the Venetians out and stopping paying their taxes and tribute to Venice.  The Venetians are claiming they're owed a lot of money. 

       The crusaders, to say the least, are interested in the money even though Venice's claim to be owed taxes and tribute is quite questionable.  Collecting the money, however, will not be easy.  It almost certainly means threatening the cities that threw the Venetians out twenty years ago - and backing up their threats by attacking those that don't pay.

       The Pope hears of the Doge's proposal and is furious.  He sends a letter via one of the archers' galleys threatening to excommunicate any Christian who participates in an attack on a Christian city.  This results in Thibaut getting killed by the archers' priest when Thibaut tries to stop the priest from delivering the Pope's letter. 

       Thanks to the archers' priest the Pope's letter is successfully delivered to the crusader leadership despite Thibaut's efforts to prevent its delivery - and is immediately suppressed by the Pope's own papal nuncio to the crusaders, Cardinal Capua.

       Cardinal Capua disobeys the pope and conceals the contents of the Pope's threatening letter from all but a handful of men in the very top ranks of the crusaders.  Capua wants Jerusalem liberated even if he is excommunicated and loses his soul, a prospect which doesn't bother him or most of the crusade's leaders - they're interested in power today, not salvation later.   

        "There is nothing about excommunication and losing one's soul in the bible" Cardinal Capua assures the nobles leading the crusade.