You see these horrors at the fringe of war. Routiers rob and rape, and worse, and I’ve known men who eventually go dead inside, and rouse themselves by inflicting horror. I’ve heard Camus say that raped nuns make the best whores, and the Levantine pirates were of the same breed – men dead to anything but the false feeling of power. But when I looked around that afternoon, the dead Italians very fresh in my head, I saw that Nerio and Juan agreed with the admiral, whatever they might say. They did not believe in the crusade.
Perhaps no one did.
We raised Rhodos at the first breath of autumn. I didn’t know the Mediterranean then as I do now, but I knew a storm when it came, and we rowed, sailed under a scrap of brailed-up lateen on a short yard, and rowed again until our hold was awash with waves breaking over bulwarks amidships and the rowers were sitting in water and every man not rowing was bailing or manning the pumps. We were three days and two nights somewhere north and west of Rhodos, and when the oarsmen were exhausted and the water was gone, the admiral conned the ship himself, got into the lee of an islet and rested us in calm water until we were strong enough to beach stern first on a beach of gravel.
The Venetians are superb seamen. We didn’t lose a ship. I will spare you my thoughts, except to say I feared death more every moment during that storm than I ever had in mortal combat. I think that is because we fear that with is foreign, and not that which is familiar. The storm terrified me, so that when the sky was black and rent with fire, the timoneer struck me with his rope and pushed me to an oar. And I went.
Nor did I hold it against him.
At any rate, we raised Rhodos, and entered the ancient harbour – everything east of Venice is ancient. Rhodes had a great navy when Rome ruled the world, and now she does again: the ships of the Hospital are few, but well feared.
The harbour was packed with shipping the way a Bristol keg is packed with mackerel. Or perhaps the way Sherwood Forest is packed with trees – aye, that’s more apt, because their masts stood like a forest. There were more than a hundred ships in the harbour or on the beaches outside. There were forty fighting ships: from the Order, from Cyprus, from Genoa, from the Gattelussi. There were even two from the Emperor at Constantinople. With the Venetian galleys, there were almost sixty fighting sail, and another hundred round ships to carry the army and their horses.
And the horses! All Rhodos was covered in a carpet of warhorses. We had almost five thousand knights and men-at-arms, and most of them were mounted. The Order’s chancellor told me one night after Mass that he was feeding near four thousand chargers out of the Order’s farms and byres.
I didn’t see the horses at once, because as soon as we beached I went with my friends to see the legate. Marc-Antonio waited on me; his inflammation had gone down at sea, and the storm had, of all things, cured his fever. We found the legate in the English langue, the tavern devoted to the needs of English knights and squires within the Order.
I haven’t said as much as I might about the Order. When they found me, I was as uncritical as a man can be. I loved everything about the Order: the sense of community, the brotherhood, the religious devotion, the discipline, the training in arms. When I came to the Order, they seemed to me the very antithesis of the routiers, who had no spirit, no driving purpose beyond greed, no training, and no discipline. Who sold their own members for money.
By the crusade summer, I was more critical. Juan di Heredia’s combination of competence, intense ambition, lax morals and amoral piety had, despite my respect for the man, cost me something of my idealism. The realities of preparing the crusade – even my beloved Father Pierre’s open questioning of the uses of violence – all made me look more deeply at the Order. Fra Daniele didn’t shock me – his ilk existed in Avignon – but he helped insure that I would look at Rhodes with a careful eye.
At any rate, the Order – on Rhodes, and in any commanderie with multiple ‘nations’ or ‘languages’ – had inns to house and support them. In the earliest days in Jerusalem, I suspect this had been to comfort new knights, so that they could hear their own language spoken. By the crusade summer, some of the languages no longer had as many adherents, and other, new divisions had grown to divide langues and inns that formerly had been pillars of the Order. The French langue was deeply divided between French and Burgundian and Hainault; the Italian langue was bitterly divided between the knights of Genoa and the knights of Venice, with the Florentine and Neapolitan and Sianese and Veronese knights as a sort of third ‘side’. There was a German langue, and an English langue that included Scottish and Irish knights – two groups who did not view themselves as English any more than a Provençal knight was French or a Catalan knight was ‘Spanish’.