Reign of Fire

By Jeff Koyen

Note: This article originally appeared in issue 18 of the Prague Pill.

Dragons – not nukes – and the end of the world.

Reign of Fire

Directed by Rob Bowman

Written by Gregg Chabot & Kevin Peterka and Matt Greenberg

Starring Christian Bale, Matthew McConaughey, Izabella Scorupco

Reign of Fire is Mad Max by way of Dungeons & Dragons. Not Dungeons & Dragons the disgraceful kid movie released two years ago, but the original role-playing game. D&D: the ultimate symbol of smart-guy disenfranchisement. An evergreen punch line that calls to mind a particular breed of teen nerdboy spending his weekends rolling for damage. And Mad Max: second only to The Blood of Heroes on the list of best post-apocalypse movies, and one of the few movies with a sequel as good as its predecessor. Clearly, director Rob Bowman and his scriptwriters respect both the fantasy and post-apoc genres.

The high concept is thus: What if dragons are real and were reawakened in the modern world? The film opens when a construction team punches into an uncharted cavern deep beneath the streets of London. Quinn, the scrappy son of the forewoman, is on hand and asks to hop into the hole to investigate the dank, creepy HR Giger-inspired chamber. Inside: an honest-to-god, fire-breathing dragon. Quinn’s mother dies in this first dragon encounter, with a good portion of humanity soon to follow.

Twenty years later, dragons rule the earth, and Quinn (Christian Bale) leads a small group of survivors who have turned an old castle into a stronghold. In a nearby valley, they carefully cultivate food, with Quinn trying desperately to convince his starving community not to harvest too soon. Do not feed from the crop until the seeds are mature enough, else we will all starve to death next season, he warns. They are ever watching the sky, and have no hope but to outlast the dragons as they deplete their own food supply, i.e., humanity.

In some movies, you shouldn’t see the bad guys because it’s a letdown. Signs fell apart completely when the mysterious aliens appeared early as lanky men in green leotards. Or take the 1998 Godzilla remake. Almost every monster scene was jittery, dark and rainy because it’s quicker and easier and therefore cheaper to render the computer-generated effects with less detail; somehow, the new American Godzilla was no more realistic than the original Japenese guy in a rubber suit. The Reign of Fire dragons are not hidden in twilight; they are full-frame, day and night. They are as beautifully rendered and as concrete as the best dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.

They’re also bad-ass. These are not fat-bellied, bulky majestics, tossing riddles and verse to frightened hobbits. They are not regal and magical. They are lean and swift omnivores – fire-breathing locusts that feed on death. They killed the dinosaurs by burning them and eating the ash. They soon rendered the planet barren and starved themselves. The strongest went into hibernation.

Once awakened, the small brood reproduce like insects and spread across the globe, consuming everything in their path. The fall of mankind is told by magazine clippings from Quinn’s scrapbook. The first sightings were treated like UFOs, but soon cities were in ruin. The Eiffel Tower and Big Ben are shown swarmed by dragons like bats fluttering around a gothic cathedral. They are the ultimate plague.

Enter the foil: Matthew McConaughey as Van Zan, a brusque, arrogant, cigar-chomping American rough rider, come to British soil to track down the granddaddy of all dragons. He rolls up in a tank with a unit of commandoes and a talent for dragon slaying. The pumped McConaughey – known first for Dazed and Confused and more recently for being arrested naked in his house for playing the bongos a bit too loudly – is pure America. He’s the would-be hero who shows up without being invited, determined to rescue the locals and save the world. Van Zan and his team are heading to London to slay the only male of the species, or so they think.

Reign of Fire is imaginative escapism. At times, even intelligent and imaginative escapism. You’ll see a dragon and a helicopter in a dogfight. You’ll see a man with an American Southern accent wielding a halberd. You’ll see dragons perched on the crumbling spires of a destroyed London skyline. It’s a 100-minute, pure-hearted action movie that, for once, doesn’t take a dragon-sized dump on its audience.

It's really the dragons that are most interesting about this game. All the while players are defending or chasing dragons, they're circling and firing at characters. They appear in several forms. The smallest of them are called Jackals, and they are wingless little creatures resembling Raptors. Apparently, as the dragons grow in size, they evolve from land-based creatures to massive winged beasts, which doesn't make too much sense because there are larger land-based dragons than some of the flying ones. The second land-based character is a massive, fledgling, fire-breathing dragon that quickly crawls around and breaths deadly fire on gamers. There is a small, quick airborne dragon as well as a massive, monster vulture attacker as well. Players will find variations on all of them as they progress through the game, and all are well modeled and textured.

On the other hand, the dragon levels are more fun to play. They control relatively well, with a bit of a learning curve, and they revolve around destroying a whole lot of stuff. Dragons deliver straight lines of fire for closer range attacks or they spout out long-distance fireball attacks. Dragons can also pick up human vehicles, which is a blast. They pick them up and drop them, a tactic around which a few levels are built. The dragon levels are undoubtedly more fun, yet still not explosively great -- just moderately good entertainment.

Camelot candidates – Viroconium

Wroxeter (or 'Viroconium' ) was the fourth largest city in Roman Britain. It began as a legionary fortress and later developed into a thriving civilian city, populated by retired soldiers and traders. Though much still remains below ground, today the most impressive features are the 2nd-century municipal baths, and the remains of the huge wall dividing them from the exercise hall in the heart of the city. The site museum and audio tour reveal how Wroxeter worked in its heyday, and the health and beauty practices of its 5,000 citizens. Dramatic archaeological discoveries provide a glimpse of the last years of the Roman city, and its possible conversion into the headquarters of a 5th-century British or Irish warlord.


In the early 2nd century CE, Viroconium (modern-day Wroxeter, in Shropshire) was the fourth biggest city in Roman Britain. Although it subsequently fell into decline, archaeological evidence suggests that it was reoccupied and heavily restored and fortified during the 480s, exactly the time when Arthur was said to be at large. In their book, King Arthur – the True Story, Graham Phillips and Martin Keatman propose that Viroconium was Camelot, and that the Arthur who dwelt there was the Welsh king Owain Ddantgwyn (‘Owen White Tooth’).

Owain ruled the kingdoms of Rhôs and Gwynedd at the end of the 5th century. He was killed by his nephew Maelgwyn in a battle at Camlan, while Arthur was killed by his nephew Mordred at Camlann. Owain’s father was known as the ‘Terrible Head Dragon’ because he was the pre-eminent British leader, or Dragon, of the period. In Welsh, this translates as Yrthyr pen- Dragon, and Arthur’s father was said to be Uther Pendragon. In addition, some sources refer to Owain’s son as ‘Son of the Bear’, indicating that Owain may have been known as ‘the Bear’ – which, in both Welsh and Latin, translates roughly as ‘Arthur’. In fact, the first ever mention of Arthur comes in a poem attributed to Owain’s tribe, the Gododdin.

In other words there is lots of evidence suggesting that Owain was the historical basis for Arthur. An engraved stone, dated to 480 CE, found at Viroconium records that the city was occupied by a king of the Cunedda family – Owain’s family. Was this king in fact Owain ‘the Bear’ himself, making Viroconium his Camelot?

Arthurian writer Mick Baker points out that of the major cities of post-Roman Britain, only Viroconium shows signs of rebuilding and fortification in the late 5th century, suggesting that it could have become the de facto national capital during this crucial ‘Arthurian’ period: a Camelot in all but name.

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WILLIAM OF MALMESBURY AND THE LEGEND OF SYLVESTER II

Of the twelfth-century chroniclers who tackled the summoning up of spirits, William of Malmesbury had the most to say about it. He drew out the idea of the churchman trapped by inquiry into the dangerous knowledge of the east in his version of the legend of Sylvester II (or Gerbert of Aurillac as he was before coming to St Peter’s chair). He patterned the narrative in part on the story of Theophilus (who sold his soul to the devil in return for magical powers) but he wove through it many contemporary fears about the dark arts: the renegade churchman, the magical agency of a Saracen, the practice of divination, the lure and lustre of occult knowledge and, of course, the inevitable commerce with demons. According to William, Sylvester travelled to Toledo, the renowned point of contact between Christian and Arab learning, in order to ‘learn astrology and other such arts from the Saracens’. William suggested that Sylvester was drawn into progressively more dangerous forms of this ‘technical’ knowledge but concentrated in particular on divination and astral magic. In his early studies, Sylvester ‘surpassed Ptolemy with the astrolabe, and Alexandreaus in astronomy, and Julius Firmicus in astrology’. He also ‘acquired the art of calling up ghostly forms from Hell’ as he steadily uncovered ‘whatever harmful or salutary human curiosity has discovered’. Ultimately he stole a magical book owned by a Saracen and forged a pact with the devil. We later learn that he had used his new knowledge to cast ‘a head of a statue, by a certain inspection of the stars when all of the planets were about to begin their courses, which did not speak unless spoken to, but then pronounced the truth either in the affirmative or the negative’. By such means, Sylvester intended to capitalise on his magical skills, acquire wealth and fame and guard against sudden death. True to the form of such tales, his confidence was misplaced and the devils which seemed to have submitted themselves so freely to him tricked Sylvester at the last, lured him to an early death and laid claim to his soul.

William’s story was a variation on old themes. Augustine had warned that men who desired evil things were subjected to illusion and deception as the reward, snared by the activities of the fallen angels. But the variations on the theme are important. First, William’s tale is filled with the fear that the search for knowledge about the future coupled with new divinatory learning might pave the way to hell. But secondly, and curiously, it also suggests that some of this new learning might not be dangerous, that it might even be useful. Even in this bluntly didactic piece William admitted that while many of the new things Sylvester discovered in Toledo were harmful, some of them might be salutary. William did not want to anathematise everything that emerged from the Islamic world even as he feared its intellectual and spiritual ramifications. To understand this ambivalence we need to understand the way in which knowledge originating from that world, and particularly astrological learning, was received in Benedictine communities.

The intellectual context in which William of Malmesbury existed helps to explain his measured phraseology and why he needed to draw a distinction between the useful and dangerous uses of scientia from the east rather than damning it all. William’s house at Malmesbury was fairly close to, and in communication with, other religious communities, at Malvern, Hereford and Worcester in which astrological learning was being cultivated. William himself clearly knew something about astrological books, alleging that Sylvester had read ‘Alexandreaus’ on astronomy and ‘Ptolemy’ on the astrolabe. He may well have been drawing on his own local knowledge to flesh out his version of the Gerbert legend, mapping the experiences of west-country scholars onto the life of the pope for, although the historical Sylvester had never travelled to Toledo for his studies, Adelard of Bath and others in the twelfth century had made that journey. Similarly, William assumed that Sylvester was a product of Fleury (rather than Aurillac) probably because Fleury was a known hub of astrological and related learning. Its connections with English Benedictine houses are proclaimed by the significant numbers of eleventh- and twelfth-century copies of the Alhandrean collection and the Mathesis in their monastic libraries, both of which have Fleurian affinities. For William, Fleury may have appeared the epicentre of astrological knowledge.

William’s careful balancing of the harmful and dangerous aspects of this new learning is also explained by his great respect for a number of its English practitioners. Walcher, prior of Malvern, was deeply interested in Arabic learning, and astrology in particular, but, for all his skill with the astrolabe, was still in William’s eyes a ‘very reverend man’ whose words were always to be trusted. William was also generally upbeat in his assessment of Robert Losinga, bishop of Hereford (d. 1095), who was similarly famed as an astrologer. Much might lie therefore behind that reference to knowledge which was salutary. William was sensitive to the problem of the learned man whose name was blackened by charges of demonic conspiracy and appreciated that some of his readers might reject his tale of Sylvester as ‘a popular fiction’ because ‘public opinion often wounds the reputation of learned men, maintaining that one whom they have seen excel in some department converses with the devil’. And William dutifully explored the possibility that Sylvester’s knowledge was purely God given, suggesting that Solomon had been gifted knowledge of like kind. But William did not want to push this point, arguing that God ‘could have given Sylvester this power’ but ‘I do not say he did so’. For William, the argument that demonic rather than divine agency lay behind Sylvester’s special learning was clinched by the gruesome manner of the pope’s death and his frantic deathbed search for forgiveness.

So the quest for knowledge could be dangerous, even soul-imperilling, but where exactly did the line between ‘salutary’ and ‘harmful’ knowledge lie? How was it to be determined? For William, matters of healthy inquiry were the traditional subjects of the schools (arithmetic, music, astronomy and geometry) while the dark arts which William chose not to enumerate, or simply did not know enough about to list, were locked up in the pages of secret books owned originally by skilled Jews and Saracens. Indeed, William seems to have pinned many of his suspicions down to certain mysterious and dangerous books which were now circulating among the religious. This seems to have been one way in which he imagined a line might be drawn between licit and illicit. Initially, he singled out the Mathesis of Julius Firmicus as fraught with danger, visiting a special condemnation on Archbishop Gerard of York in his Gesta Pontificum because a copy of the Mathesis had been found beneath the prelate’s pillow after his death. The subject of this work certainly had a bad press and was bound up in the minds of many twelfth-century writers with necromantic efforts to divine the future. John of Salisbury even argued that ‘the will of God is the first cause of all things and mathesis is the way of damnation’. But there was a final twist here. William was prepared to reconsider his view of Gerard’s bedtime reading – seemingly in the light of his own experience. The work of Julius Firmicus may have been anathema to him when he first wrote the Gesta but he later revisited the folio and excised the passage. Exactly what impelled him to make this revision is obscure, but it does seem, as Rodney Thomson has suggested, that between making the entry and altering it he may actually have read the Mathesis and satisfied himself that it did not transmit the ‘harmful’ knowledge which he so feared. Indeed, such a supposition is strengthened by the appearance of an excerpt from the text in William’s own Polyhistor.

The moral here, clichéd though it may be, is that the half-understood or unknown features of the new Arabic scientia did most to excite the fears of men like William. He retained that Augustinian suspicion of worldly knowledge and this could only have been sharpened by the Islamic associations of so much of the astrology and mathematics which was spreading through many of the surrounding Benedictine houses. Yet experience of the new learning could demystify it and soften William’s view. What was initially novel, shadowy and threatening could be assimilated and normalised once William had grasped it. Once William had done this, danger could not be so confidently traced to particular identifiable books. Rather it inhered more exclusively in the way that a scholar tried to apply new knowledge and the extent to which he allowed it to blot out the truths of the faith and thought for the soul. And Sylvester II, or Gerbert as he was when he engaged in his supposed Toledan studies, was the archetype of the learned churchman who twisted his knowledge of sacred and temporal things to gratify worldly desires. In holding stereotypes of the necromancer before the scholar, the church was able to warn against a new configuration of dangers.

Manx Kingship in Its Irish Sea Setting, 1187-1229: King Rognvaldr and the Crovan Dynasty.

R. Andrew McDonald. Manx Kingship in Its Irish Sea Setting, 1187-1229: King Rognvaldr and the Crovan Dynasty. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007. 254 pp. Plates. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-84682-047-2.

Reviewed by Ian Beuermann
Published on H-Albion (October, 2008)
Commissioned by Margaret McGlynn

New British History Focusing on the Isle of Man

R. Andrew McDonald’s book belongs to the relatively recent and growing field of “New British History.” Decidedly non-anglocentric, these publications not only focus on what used to be labeled the periphery, but they also frequently set out to overcome the limitations of modern national historiographical writing. Although the Kingdom of Man and the Isles as ruled by the Guðrøðarsons from 1079 to 1265 is a prime candidate for New British History, surprisingly, it has been rather overlooked even within this field. McDonald is, therefore, to be congratulated for his analysis of Manx politics within their wider geographical context during the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. Taking the reign of King Rǫgnvaldr Guðrøðarson as a starting point, McDonald intends to give us “a case study that illuminates important themes in medieval British history, including the dynamic interplay of English, Scottish and Norwegian power in the western seaways in the century after 1160, as well as the receptivity of the marginal regions of the British Isles to contemporary trends in kinship structures, marriage, inheritance, kingship, government, administration, and even architecture” (p. 18).

The structure of the book reflects these aims. Chapter 1, discussing the run-up to Rǫgnvaldr's reign, rightly stresses the importance of maritime power and the need to secure areas with timber for shipbuilding, especially for the warlord-turned-founding-father of the new dynasty, Guðrøðr I Crob-bán (1079-95--but why does McDonald only here anglicize, using “Crovan”?). McDonald is also correct in his evaluation of the ensuing period of consolidation under Guðrøðr I’s son Óláfr I (1103x14-53) as “the real foundation of Manx kingship in many regards” (p. 66). The author then ends this introductory analysis regarding the relative role of military and diplomatic means in Manx politics with Rǫgnvaldr’s father, Guðrøðr II (1153-87).

Chapters 2, 3, and 4 focus on the great themes that can be distilled from Rǫgnvaldr’s reign. Chapter 2 discusses internal politics--“Family, Succession and Kin-strife”--while chapters 3 and 4 analyze Rǫgnvaldr’s foreign relations, with a sensible division around 1200. Lastly, chapter 5 examines the type of kingship Rǫgnvaldr and his dynasty exercised. It is in these four chapters that the strengths and weaknesses of the book become apparent.

To praise the book’s strengths first, McDonald presents us with a detailed yet clearly written discussion of convoluted and interconnected historical developments that crisscross the British Isles. The eventually fratricidal war between Rǫgnvaldr and his brother Óláfr II in the early thirteenth century is the starting point for an analysis of all internal Guðrøðarsons’ quarrels during the whole 286 years of their kingdom. In his examination of Rǫgnvaldr’s foreign relations, McDonald offers a welcome and rare discussion of Manx-Welsh affairs, a traditional one of Manx-Irish and Manx-Gallovidian affairs, and a partly new one of Manx-Orcadian/Scottish affairs. All this is convincingly placed into the context of Rǫgnvaldr’s maneuvers between England, Norway, Scotland, and the papal curia. Also, the evaluation of Manx kingship with its focus on the implications of the “rex dei gratia” formula, of the change from “King of Man” to “King of Man and the Isles,” of the attempted changes to succession-practice in 1187, and of the relations between kings and the church is thorough and well argued.

McDonald bases this very accessible historical narrative on a wide range of sources, including previously unquoted texts, and he offers interesting new thoughts on the main source, the Cronica Regum Mannie et Insularum. Rǫgnvaldr and Óláfr’s quarrels ended with Rǫgnvaldr’s killing in 1229, but after Óláfr’s reign (1229-37), warfare flared up again in the next generation. The main part of the Cronica was finished in 1257, during the reign of Oláfr II’s son and eventual successor Magnús (1252-65), and it is assumed that he commissioned the work.[1] McDonald’s conclusions, therefore, that the Cronica “played a role in legitimizing the kingship of Magnús and his line, perhaps in the face of ongoing opposition,” and that it “may be regarded as a product as well as a narrative of kin-strife within the Crovan dynasty” are very convincing (p. 100).

Yet it is also with regard to sources that weaknesses appear. On the one hand, McDonald is rather generous in what he admits as evidence for twelfth- and thirteenth-century Man. For example, in his discussion of kingship, McDonald correctly notes that no contemporary sources exist to show us how the Manx kings were inaugurated. McDonald, as a result, draws on the fifteenth-century Manx statutes and the rather questionable seventeenth-century History of the McDonalds as a basis for a long discussion of inauguration practices, arguing that “it is possible--indeed probable--that these [Manx] documents in fact reflect much older practice,” and that the Hebridean “ceremonies may have been derived, at least in part, from Manx procedure” (pp. 174, 181).

On the other hand, when McDonald points out that the regal status of the Manx kings was universally accepted, he overlooks vital evidence in the Scandinavian material. He is correct with his claim that the Icelandic sources consistently refer to the Manx rulers as kings, but he seems unaware that the contemporary Norwegian Historia Norwegie does to the Manx rulers precisely what McDonald only discerns for the descendants of Sumarliði: relegate them to the status of reguli.[2] Whether the Manx kings enjoyed “unquestionably sovereign status” in the eyes of their Norwegian overlords--as opposed to those of their English, Irish, and Scottish neighbors, and Icelandic sympathizers--is therefore far more doubtful than McDonald thinks (p. 164).

In fact, McDonald seems generally less than well informed about Scandinavian sources and literature (the Fornmanna Sögur edition of Bǫglinga sǫgur that he uses, for example, is not a reliable diplomatic edition). In a book entitled Manx Kingship in its Irish Sea Setting, this might be excusable, but as quoted, in the beginning McDonald announces his intention to include Norwegian aspects in his analysis. Unfortunately, his judgment there is frequently erroneous. To give another example: citing accepted scholarship, McDonald rightly explains that medieval Irish society knew multiple marriages and had rather vague notions of illegitimacy. However, he is wrong when he concludes that the equally relaxed attitudes of the Manx kings “provide significant evidence for the adoption of Gaelic practice within the Crovan dynasty”; and that “the assimilation of Manx rulers into patterns of Gaelic matrimony adds strength to the observation that in dealing with the Crovan kings we are dealing not with purely ‘Norse’ or ‘Scandinavian’ rulers but rather with Gaelic- or Hiberno-Norse kings who are representative of a mixed cultural and ethnic milieu in Dublin and the Isles” (p. 77). While there is no doubt that the Manx kings ruled in a culturally mixed milieu, matrimonial practices and concepts of legitimacy cannot be taken as indicators, because in this field a distinction between Irish and Scandinavian practices is all but impossible. A look at twelfth-century Norwegian royal succession yields exactly the same “'galaxy of sons, born of women of varying origin and status,'” succeeding to and quarrelling over the kingship there as in Ireland or Man (p. 74).[3] In short, McDonald appropriately discusses the Irish Sea setting. The problem is that he then draws wider conclusions, which are based on uninformed assumptions regarding Scandinavia.

In addition to these sources and Scandinavian issues, the book shows a number of inconsistencies, and they sometimes prevent a discussion of the critical points. For example, McDonald accepts Archibald Duncan’s new reading of the original manuscript of Roger of Howden’s Chronica. With this, the vexed problem of which Rǫgnvaldr--the son of Sumarliði of Argyll or the son of Guðrøðr of Man--intermittently ruled Caithness in alliance with King William of Scotland in the 1190s is solved in favor of the latter. But the implications of Rǫgnvaldr of Man’s takeover of Caithness are lost to McDonald, due to a somewhat careless consideration of the evidence. McDonald accepts Orkneyinga Saga’s clearly wrong claim that Rǫgnvaldr’s mother was a daughter of an earl of Orkney, although he earlier is aware that, if anything, Rǫgnvaldr’s grandmother might have been Orcadian, and even earlier presents the most likely scenario of Rǫgnvaldr having a Gallovidian rather than an Orcadian grandmother. The issue is important because to curb the power of the Orkney earls, Scottish kings had frequently given Caithness to their own candidates with a dynastic claim to Orkney. McDonald is familiar with this background, but his inconsistencies rob him of the chance to discuss the significance of Rǫgnvaldr of Man’s rule: the first Scottish-backed ruler of Caithness without any dynastic connection to the Orkney earls. McDonald, therefore, merely ends with a rather weak statement of the obvious: “yet there is nothing in the saga to suggest that Rǫgnvaldr was actually installed as jarl” (p. 111).

Lastly, sometimes McDonald’s penchant to define clear camps leads him astray. He has, for example, in previous publications (including his two monographs, The Kingdom of the Isles: Scotland’s Western Seaboard, c.1100-c.1336 [1997] and Outlaws of Medieval Scotland: Challenges to the Canmore Kings, 1058-1266 [2003]) presented Sumarliði of Argyll and his descendants as steadfast opponents of the Scottish crown, and he now fits “Rǫgnvaldr’s cooperation with King William into a broader framework of interactions between Manx and Scottish rulers, who may have recognized the spirit of the old axiom that ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’” (p. 113). To support this view, McDonald argues that already Rǫgnvaldr’s father Guðrøðr II must have received “a sympathetic ear from the Scottish king” Malcolm IV, when Guðrøðr was looking for help against Sumarliði in 1159 (p. 113). McDonald ignores here that Guðrøðr II remained an exiled fugitive for another five years, eventually seeking aid in Norway, while Sumarliði and Malcolm shortly afterward agreed on a concordia.[4] More examples of Manx-Scottish frictions (see the warfare between the Manx Bishop Wimund and King David I) and Argyll-Scottish cooperation (see Dubgall son of Sumarliði accompanying King William to Durham) should have been considered here, all of which foil any attempt to paint an orderly picture of alliances and enmities.

Despite these weaknesses, McDonald distinguishes clearly enough between his primary and secondary sources, and his own interpretations, for careful readers to benefit from the detailed discussions on British and Irish late Scandinavian and medieval history, while not necessarily following all of the author’s conclusions. There is no doubt that the book succeeds to a large extent in what it mainly sets out to do: analyzing twelfth- and thirteenth-century Manx kingship in an Irish Sea setting. It also remains one of the very few books to examine this kingship, is a highly readable introduction to late Scandinavian Manx history, and is a welcome contribution to our understanding of medieval kingship for undergraduates and specialists alike.

Notes

[1]. George Broderick, ed. and trans., Cronica Regum Mannie et Insularum: Chronicles of the Kings of Man and the Isles. BL Cotton Julius Avii (Douglas: Manx National Heritage, 1995), vii.

[2]. Inger Ekrem and Lars Boje Mortensen, eds., Historia Norwegie,trans. Peter Fisher (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2003), 64-65. An anonymous ideological work in favor of a secular greater Norway, it was probably written in eastern Norway, and it has been dated to c.1150-c.1220, most recently to c.1160-75.

[3]. Robin Frame, The Political Development of the British Isles, 1100-1400 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 112.

[4]. Geoffrey Wallace Stuart Barrow, ed., Regesta Regum Scottorum vol. I: The Acts of Malcolm IV, King of Scots 1153-1165 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1960), 175.

CRUSADE AGAINST THE GRAIL

The Romantic period of the 1840s, which saw revolutions sweep across Europe in 1848, coincided with the 600th anniversary of the fall of the Cathar fortress of Montsegur. Many republican revolutionaries saw the Cathars as the forerunners of the anticlerical radicals who stormed the Bastille in 1789. Momentarily freed from the censorship of reactionary Catholicism, many academics took a fresh look at the Cathars' tragic story, and this renewed interest in the Albigensian crusade provided Rahn with several important cornerstones for his book.

Prominent among these works are the monumental five volumes of L'Histoire des Albigeois (1870-1881) by Napoleon Peyrat (1809-1881).6 An authentic Romantic historian in the tradition of Michelet, the Ariege-born Peyrat became a Protestant pastor in 1831, and was close to the anticlerical poet Beranger. His first major work, Les Pasteurs du desert (1842), deals with the revolt of the Protestant camisards and cevenols in the seventeenth century. Curiously, just like Otto Rahn, Peyrat was convinced that he was descended from Cathar heretics. This obsession led him to spend forty years researching and writing the history of the Cathars (the last volume of L'Histoire des Albigeois was published posthumously). Although Peyrat certainly popularized the fortress of Montsegur as the symbol of Cathar resistance, his works, like Rahn's book, are well supported by solid research in the archives of the Inquisition that are still kept in Carcassonne.

Rahn's theological ideas were greatly influenced by Ernest Renan (1823- 1892). The beliefs he expressed in his series, L'Histoire des Origines du Chretianisme [The History of the Origins of Christianity], which included his most famous work, La Vie de Jesus (1863), were quite close to the liberal Protestant school (David Friedrich Strauss and others). A tremendous success, La Vie de Jesus sold nearly 5,000 copies per week. But Catholics were enraged: between 1863 and 1864, an incredible 300 books and booklets were published denouncing his "blasphemy" and "mistakes." But the book was published again and again; today, forty-five different editions have come out, with the most recent appearing in 2005.

Another important source from this period was Beitrage zur Sektengeschichte des Mittlealters [Essays on the History of Sects in the Middle Ages] (1890) by the Bavarian theologian Ignaz von Dollinger (1799-1890). The son of a medical professor, Dollinger was elected in 1848 to the liberal National Assembly in Frankfurt, where he defended the separation of church and state. Vehemently opposed to the doctrine of Papal infallibility, he took part in the first Vatican Council in 1869-1870. Although the Pope excommunicated Dollinger on April 17,1871, he was named rector of the Munich University in 1872. Today, he is remembered as a pioneer of the German ecumenical movement.

Otto Wilhelm Rahn was born in 1904 in Michelstadt in the German state of Hesse, an area brimming with tales of medieval chivalry. Rahn's father Karl introduced his son to the legends of Parzival, Lohengrin, and naturally Siegfried and the Nibelungenlied during their walks in the Odenwald forest. Rahn later explained, "My ancestors were pagans, and my grandparents were heretics." His family's home was not far from Marburg am Lahn, where the insidious Inquisitor Konrad had terrorized the court of the Landgrave of Thiiringia in the thirteenth century. Rahn long considered writing a historical novel about the "magister," who was responsible for (among other things) beating the Landgrave's wife (later Saint) Elizabeth of Hungary to death and burning hundreds of German Cathars at the stake before a group of knights killed him.

Rahn's favorite professor, Baron von Gall, a lecturer in theology at the University of Giessen, greatly impressed him with his descriptions of the tragedy of Catharism. Rahn wrote, "It was a subject that completely captivated me." After obtaining his bachelor's degree in 1922 and pursuing further studies at the Universities of Heidelberg, Giessen, and Freiburg, Rahn was ready to begin his travels abroad. When a French family invited him to visit Geneva in 1931, he gravitated to the French Pyrenees to begin his own investigations.

Before leaving for the south of France, Rahn asked a Swiss friend, Paul- Alexis Ladame (1909-2000), to accompany him because Ladame had some experience in speleology and mountaineering. He was also descended from an old Cathar family (the name was originally La Dama) that escaped from Beziers to Switzerland during the crusade. We owe a lot to him. Long after his friend's death, Ladame wrote down his vital recollections of Rahn and their Pyrenean explorations in several entertaining works. His last work, Quand le Laurier Reverdira, recalled a Cathar adage: "In 700 years, when the laurel grows green again" [al cap de set cent ans, lo laurel verdejara]—the final words of the last Cathar Perfectus, Guilhem de Belibaste, before he was burned alive.

Accompanied at times by Rahn's friend and mentor, Antonin Gadal, they conducted extensive explorations of the Montsegur area. In the grottoes of the Sabarthes they were thunderstruck when they visited a huge cavern called "the Cathedral" by the locals. In it were a large stalagmite called "The Altar" and another known as "The Tomb of Hercules." The forest around the legendary castle of Muntsalvaesche was called Briciljan. Near Montsegur is a small forest called the Priscilien Wood. As evidence accumulated, the Wagnerian mists cleared: Wolfram had based his story on fact. Rahn confidently proclaimed that the fortress castle of Montsegur in the French Pyrenees was the Temple of the Grail, and that mystical Cathar Christianity, based on the veneration of the Holy Spirit as symbolized by the Mani, was the Church of the Holy Grail. The gates of Lucifer's kingdom had been thrown open; the result was Crusade Against the Grail.

Soon the book came to the attention of the leaders of the Third Reich. According to Ladame, Rahn explained that he had received a mysterious telegram while he was in Paris. As usual, he was depressed because he was having difficulty finding backers for a French translation of Crusade. The person who wrote the telegram did not give his name, but offered Rahn 1,000 Reichsmarks per month to write a sequel to the book. A little later, money was wired to Paris so that he could settle his affairs in France and return to Germany to a specific address in Berlin: 7, Prinz Albrechtstrasse. When Rahn finally turned up, he was shocked to learn that the telegram's sender was none other than Heinrich Himmler! The head of the SS welcomed him personally and invited the young author to join the SS as a civilian historian and archeologist. Rahn later told Ladame, "What was I supposed to do? Turn him down?"

In an effort aimed at reinforcing National Socialist ideology, the SS was organizing expeditions all over the globe to trace the origins of the Indo- Europeans. Dr. Ernst Schafer led a famous German-Himalayan expedition to prove that Tibet was the cradle of the Arya, and to investigate the legend of the "Abominable Snowman." Another expedition visited the South Pole and studded the polar cap with small swastika flags. An elderly colonel in the former Austro- Hungarian army, Karl Maria Wiligut, better known as "Weisthor," became Himmler's esoteric "lord" of runology. At Wiligut's insistence, Rahn participated in a German expedition to Iceland to research the origin of the Eddas and the birthplace of Stalde Snorri Sturluson—despite the fact that he was becoming disaffected with the Nazi elite.

Thanks to his position as Himmler's archaeologist specializing in the legend of the Grail, Rahn had become a sort of Nazi shooting star, giving lectures and radio talks about his explorations. But gradually, almost imperceptibly, he began to move in circles that were openly opposed to the regime. This came to the attention of Adolf Hitler at least once, when Rahn invited regime opponents like the post- Romantic composer Hans Pfiztner to the 1938 inauguration of the Haus der deutsche Kunst in Munich. Rahn's friendship with Adolf Frise must have also come to Himmler's attention; Frise, whose real name was Adolf Altengartner, was the publisher of Robert Musil's famous novel A Man Without Qualities. The author was living in exile in Switzerland, bitterly opposed to the Nazis and Hitler's Anschluss that had incorporated their Austrian homeland into the Nazi Reich.

Rahn's second book, Luzifers Hofgesind, eine Reise zu den guten Geistern Europas [Lucifer's Court, a Journey to Europe's Good Spirits], appeared in Leipzig in 1937; it remains controversial to this day. The intinerary of his European journey included Bingen, Paris, Toulouse, Marseille, Milan, Rome, Verona, Brixen, Geneva, Worms, Michelstadt, Burg Wildenberg near Amorbach, Giessen Marburg Goslar, Cologne, Berlin, Warnemunde, Edinburgh, Reykyavik, and Reykholt. In the book, Rahn does not identify Lucifer with the Devil; for him, Lucifer was the Pyrenean Abellio or the Greek God Apollo—all bearers of light.

Nevertheless, the book contains at least one passage that is openly anti- Semitic, which led Paul Ladame to conclude that the Nazis had tampered with the final draft of the manuscript. Many years later he was quoted as saying, "Otto Rahn would never have written that." Apparently, Rahn dictated much of the book to his secretary, who was keeping an eye on his activities for Himmler.

More and more, Rahn yearned for a golden renaissance of traditional values based on the unity of France and Germany under neo-Cathar beliefs, and opposed the pernicious policies that were leading Europe to war. He was convinced that the intolerance inherent in the Old Testament was essentially responsible for the constant cycles of ethnic and genocidal violence throughout history. In fact, there is a strange symmetry between Hitler's war, which resulted in the Holocaust, and the Papal crusade against the Cathars, which obliterated Occitan civilization. After apparently quarreling with Himmler (which led to a tour of duty as a camp guard as punishment), amid accusations of homosexuality and possible Jewish heritage, he resigned from his post early in 1939. He wrote, "There is much sorrow in my country. Impossible for a tolerant, liberal man like me to live in the nation that my native country has become."

Trapped and overpowered by a malicious culture, Otto Wilhelm Rahn died in the snow of the Wilderkaiser on March 13, 1939, almost the anniversary of the fall of Montsegur. An apparent suicide, he ended his life in the style of the ritual Cathar endura. When he learned of Rahn's death, Antonin Gadal wrote, "Otto Rahn's suffering was over." Rahn was buried in 1940 in Darmstadt. As Karl Rittersbacher concluded, "the transit of this soul, in eternal search for a new and desired spirituality that he could not find on Earth, reminds me as if a benevolent angel of death had brought him the consolamentum."

As he explains in his prologue to Crusade, Otto Rahn did not wish to point an accusing finger. For multiple reasons he wanted to chart a new path toward the future—and come to terms with human destiny. By addressing such problems as our own mortality, so essential to the human condition, Crusade contains a powerful message for our greedy and narcissistic society. "For some time now, I have resided in the mountains of the Tabor. Often, deeply moved, I have wandered through the crystal halls and marble crypts of the caves of the heretics, moving aside the bones of 'Pure Ones' and knights fallen in 'the fight for the spirit,' my steps echoing on the wet floor in the emptiness. Then I stop—listening— half expecting a troubadour to sing a sonnet in honor of the supreme Minne, that sublime love that converted men into gods."

Perhaps it shouldn't come as a surprise, but Rahn's medieval world resembled that of his time, and our own, in its moral hypocrisy. With a remarkable sense of drama, he shows how the Cathars' genuine values were totally irrelevant to the despotic Pope and his power-hungry henchmen. He constantly contrasts the depravity of the Holy See and Saint Dominic's instrument for repression—the Inquisition—with the symbolic purity of the Grail. And yet, throughout the book, the mystery of the Cathar Mani or "Gral" lacks a single, sharply defined description. What was it?

In Parzival, Wolfram describes how a Kabbalistic astronomer named Flegetanis described the Gral as a "stone from the stars" to another Minnesinger named Kyot who in turn related the story to Wolfram. Frequently, I have deliberately left the spelling of "Grail" in its middle German equivalent to emphasize that we are dealing with the legend of a "grail," and not the Holy Grail, the chalice that Joseph of Arimathea used to catch the blood of Jesus when he died on the cross. Like many others, Rahn was convinced that the founders of the church simply Christianized a pagan symbol. In Crusade, Rahn develops the Grail into an icon for the survival of the human soul. In this way, he is able to convey its dazzling yet indefinable power over the Cathars. Robert Graves wrote, "Symbolism or allegory is 'truer' than realism in that the former allows more possibilities or interpretations. And more possibilities—implying greater freedom and less context dependence—translate to a greater truth. Accordingly, it has been said, 'The more numerous the poetic meanings that could be concentrated in a sacred name; the greater was its power.'" In this way, the Gral is perhaps the most powerful symbol of all for a simple reason: nobody has ever seen it.

CHRISTOPHER JONES

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THE GREAT PYRAMID AND THE BIBLE

(EARTH’S MEASUREMENTS)
Petko Nikolic Vidusa

THE ANCIENT BASE-BREADTH

" …in 1799, cleared away the hills of sand and debris at the northeast and north-west corners, and reached beneath them the leveled surface of the living rock itself on which the Pyramid was originally founded. There, discovering two rectangular hollows carefully and truly cut into the rock, as if for "sockets" for the basal corner-stones, the said Academician measured the distance between those socket with much geodesic refinement, and found it to be equal to 763,62 English feet. The same distance being measured thirty-seven years afterwards by Colonel Howard-Vyse, guided by another equally sure direction of the original building, as 764,0 English feet, - we may take for the present solution of our problem, where a proportion is all that is now required, the mean, or 763,81 feet, as close enough for a first approximation only to the ancient base-breadth." *

The original ancient base-breadth was 760,9208333 present feet = 9.131,05 inches = 23.192,867 centimeters = 365,242 Sacred Cubits. The differences between the originally and the present measurements were caused by the earthquakes and by the meteorological reasons: the Sun's heat and the night's coldness: the most sun exposed south side of the present Pyramid's base is the longest side, and the north side, mostly in a shadow, is shortest.

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The lost army of Cambyses -Redux

Cambyses II was the emperor of Persia (ruled 530–522 BCE) and successor to Cyrus the Great. Eager to emulate his father’s deeds of conquest, and to extend Persian rule across all the known nations (ie civilisations) of the world, Cambyses invaded Egypt in 525 BCE, defeating the last true Egyptian pharaoh Psammetichus III. Yet today he is remembered not for his feats of conquest, but for his lost army – a force of 50,000 warriors, dispatched to conquer a tiny oasis kingdom, that vanished into the desert and was lost without a single survivor or the slightest trace being discovered for more than 2,000 years.

Desert explorers and adventurers including Count László Almásy – the model for the English patient in the book and film of the same name – have sought to uncover their final resting place and solve their mysterious disappearance.

Herodotus and Cambyses

The primary source for the tale of Cambyses and his lost army is the ancient Greek traveller and historian Herodotus, an intrepid man who travelled all over Egypt just 75 years after the Persian invasion. Herodotus followed in Cambyses’ footsteps and recorded the local tales and histories of the invader.

Unfortunately his impartiality is questionable; he had the typical ancient Greek antipathy towards the Persians and his Histories slander Cambyses remorselessly, painting him as a despot, madman and general ne’er-do-well.

Herodotus first recounts how Cambyses managed to cross the difficult Sinai desert region and meet the Egyptians with his army intact, which is relevant because it shows that the Persians were capable of coping with desert transits. They recruited Arabian tribes to create water depots at regular spots along the route – in effect, artificial oases – and in this manner were able to arrive at the battle site in good order and defeat Psammetichus.

Later, Cambyses travelled to the major Egyptian cult centres to be crowned pharaoh but, according to Herodotus, made only a perfunctory effort to learn about or pay respect to their customs. He then decided to launch military expeditions against the Ethiopians (to the south), the Carthaginians (along the coast to the west) and the ‘Ammoniums’ – ie the inhabitants of the Siwa Oasis, a small fertile enclave deep within the Western Desert, which was famous for the Oracle of the Temple of Ammon (the Siwan name for the Egyptian god Amun-Ra, whom the Greeks equated with Zeus). The priests of the temple were used to commanding respect from Egypt’s rulers, who were supposed to obtain ‘divine’ favour to legitimise their overlordship. Alexander the Great made sure to do this when he conquered Egypt 200 years later, but Cambyses, it seems, failed to follow the proper forms and disdained the Siwans.

The Siwan expedition

Cambyses took his army south along the Nile to launch his Ethiopian expedition, stopping at Thebes to detach a force to send to Siwa in 524 BCE. According to Herodotus, in Book III of his Histories, an army of 50,000 men was ordered to ‘enslave the Ammonians and burn the oracle of Zeus’. Led by guides, the army set off into the desert, reaching ‘the city of Oasis’, known to the Greeks as ‘The Isles of the Blest’ (modern-day Kharga), seven days’ march to the west. After this, they were never seen again, although the Siwans themselves were somehow able to give Herodotus a rough account of what happened next:

this is what the Ammonians themselves say: when the Persians were crossing the sand from the Oasis to attack them, and were about midway between … [Siwa] and the Oasis, while they were breakfasting a great and violent south wind arose, which buried them in the masses of sand which it bore; and so they disappeared from sight. Such is the Ammonian tale about this army.

This is the full extent of what we know about the lost army, which has led many scholars to doubt the episode ever happened. Perhaps Herodotus was simply inventing the tale to make Cambyses look more foolish. Why would the Persian emperor waste his time launching a strike on Siwa? Why would he send such a huge army to conquer such a small place (probably only a few thousand residents at most)? Above all, why would he send them via such a perilous route with so little preparation or precaution?

Herodotus himself suggests, albeit indirectly, some of the answers. A possible motive for the expedition is that Cambyses was angered by the attitude of the priests of the Temple of Ammon, who – themselves angry at a perceived lack of due deference – may have been spreading the word that his kingship was illegitimate. They may even have predicted his death. Herodotus also drives home the point that Cambyses was an irascible drunk, given to fits of spite and cruel rage, and quite capable of nursing a lethal grudge. He was also unhinged enough to doom his men with inadequate planning and preparation.

An alternative explanation is that Siwa was only intended as a way point on a longer journey. Perhaps the real targets were lands further to the west. Cambyses’ intended assault on Carthage had been called off because the Phoenicians who provided his navy refused to move against their kin who had set up the colony at Carthage. Perhaps he intended to approach them by land instead – this would account for the apparently disproportionate size of the expeditionary force.

If Herodotus is right, the Persian army met a bleak end. The region they were travelling across includes barren depressions of bare rock and boulders; wind-sculpted buttes; plains of salt and dust; vast sand seas of impassable dunes; searing desert winds hotter than 40°C that blow for days on end; massive sand storms that will bury anything that stands still; and an utter absence of water. How the Ammonians knew the fate of the lost army is unclear, given that they specifically told Herodotus that not one soldier had reached Siwa, but perhaps they simply assumed the most likely scenario.

The army in the desert

Apart from being a great unsolved mystery, the miserable desert fate of the lost army of Cambyses also presents the intriguing likelihood that there could be a huge find of skeletons, armour, clothing, weapons and equipment from the ancient Persian era awaiting discovery. The army would have included in its number soldiers from many different parts of the antique world. In the uniquely arid conditions, with the possibility that sand may have covered and protected, the remains could be amazingly well preserved. There could be an archaeological treasure trove somewhere in the Sahara.

Hard target

Herodotus provides a few clues about the possible location of the lost army, describing the army’s route from the oasis known as ‘Island of the Blest’, which is today a major agricultural town known as Kharga. From here they would presumably have tried to follow the traditional caravan route to Siwa, which goes via the oases at Dakhla (a few hundred kilometres to the west) and then Farafra (a few hundred more to the north-west). From Herodotus’ account it sounds as though the Persians may have got to Dakhla or even Farafra, but were then lost as they attempted to complete the final leg of the journey. Even narrowing it down this far, however, leaves a dauntingly vast area to examine. If the Persians got lost out of Dakhla and started going in the wrong direction they could have ended up pretty much anywhere in the Western Desert.

The Western Desert is one of the hardest places in the world to be looking for lost relics. It is vast, covering about two-thirds of modern-day Egypt: an area of 680,000 square kilometres (263,000 square miles), equal to the combined size of Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Greece, the Netherlands, Norway and Switzerland. The conditions, as described above, are incredibly harsh and desolate. Even modern vehicles with four-wheel drives and special equipment cannot cope with some of the dunes found in the sand seas. Much of the area is restricted owing to the security issues of the region: millions of landmines from World War II, the proximity of the border with Libya and sensitivities about oil operations and terrorism. And there is always the likelihood that any finds that are stumbled across will soon be covered up by the shifting desert sands, never to be seen again.

The enigmatic Count Almásy

Undaunted, many desert adventurers have dreamed of solving the mystery of the lost army. Probably the most famous was the Austro-Hungarian playboy, pilot and desert explorer Count László Almásy, whose life and times provided the model for the Ralph Fiennes character in The English Patient. Almásy started off as a self-taught dabbler in the exotic world of desert discovery, but his expertise with motor vehicles and his reckless disregard for personal safety led him to pull off some amazing escapades.

During the 1930s he was part of a crowd mainly composed of genteel British officers interested in desert travel and exploration, who were primarily fixated on locating the semi-legendary Zerzura, the Oasis of Little Birds, alluded to in medieval writings. Almásy amazed the other members of the Zerzura Club, as they had named themselves, by successfully discovering this hidden oasis, but his search for Cambyses’ army was less successful and even more dangerous.

Almásy was an avid fan of Herodotus, and in 1936 determined to follow the tracks of the army as described by the ancient Greek. His journey is described by Saul Kelly in the book The Lost Oasis: The Desert War and the Hunt for Zerzura. Kelly tells how on a previous expedition Almásy had discovered pottery fragments that suggested how the Persians had hoped to cross the waterless desert. By burying huge caches of amphorae (jars) along the intended route, and employing local tribesmen to ferry water to them, they could effect a similar operation to their successful crossing of the Sinai.

This at least was Almásy’s theory, but when he ventured into the desert from Farafra on his 1936 expedition, he discovered not caches of jars but a series of cairns that he described as ‘ancient hollow, circular pyramids of stone about the height of a man’, which seemed to mark the route across the forbidding sand seas. Perhaps the Persians had employed scouts to build them, hoping to follow them all the way to Siwa.

Kelly relates that the Almásy party then ran into problems that gave him an insight into the probable fate of Cambyses’ force. Their progress was halted by impassable giant dunes, and the hot desert wind called the khamsin (or khamaseen) blew up, whipping their vehicles with scalding, 44°C+ storm-force winds. All but one of the vehicles broke down and they were lucky to make it out of the desert alive in the third, following a corridor between two towering dunes until they reached Siwa four days later. Almásy planned a further expedition, but war broke out and he never got another chance.

Disputed discoveries

In the last decade there have been some slightly confused reports about discoveries in the Western Desert that sound almost too good to be true. According to Professor Mosalam Shaltout, chairman of the Space Research Center at the Desert Environment Research Institute of Egypt’s Minufiya University, an Italian-led expedition in December 1996 which was surveying for meteorites stumbled across archaeological remains in the El Bahrein Oasis area of the Western Desert. Aly Barakat, a geologist with the team, found a dagger blade and hilt, pottery shards, apparently human bone fragments, burial mounds, arrowheads and a silver bracelet, which, on the basis of a photograph, was identified as ‘most likely belonging to the Achaemenid period’ (ie ancient Persian).

Meanwhile, in 2000 there were widespread reports that a team of oil-prospecting geologists, said to be from Helwan University, in Cairo, had stumbled across similar finds in the same area, spotting scattered arrow heads and human bones.

In 2003 geologist Tom Bown led an expedition to the area, accompanied by archaeologist Gail MacKinnon and a film crew, to follow up Aly Barakat’s discoveries, which they, controversially, said had been suppressed by the Egyptian authorities. Bown claimed to have found remains at the same site, near the El Bahrein Oasis, at a place later named Wadi Mastour, the Hidden Valley. In fact he reportedly went as far as describing seeing thousands of bones littering the desert.

Yet another follow-up expedition in 2005, however, cast serious doubt on the claims of both Barakat and Bown. A team from the University of Toledo, in Ohio, together with British and Egyptian associates, travelled to the site near El Bahrein. They located a broken pot found by both Barakat and Bown, although they identified it as Roman, but they failed to find any other suggestive remains beyond a few burial sites, which they claim are common in the desert. Instead of fields of scattered human bones they found large numbers of fragments of fossilised sand dollars (sea urchin-like creatures that leave distinctive round calcite cases), which are apparently easy to mistake for human bones and could explain the previous claims.

Can Herodotus be trusted?

So despite tantalising claims and hints, the lost army of Cambyses has apparently not been found yet, nor any definitive proof that it really existed. The cairns and pottery found by Almásy and the weapons and bones allegedly seen by Barakat and Bown may not be what they seem, or perhaps they simply belong to some of the many other groups who have made the perilous desert crossing – for instance, the notorious Forty Days Road slave caravan used to follow the route through the Western Desert via Kharga.

Ultimately the credibility of the tale comes down to Herodotus. In this sense he was not highly regarded even by other ancient writers, some of whom felt the sobriquet ‘the Father of History’ bestowed upon him by Cicero should be changed to ‘the Father of Lies’. As already noted, he was biased against the Persians and his portrait of Cambyses has a touch of the pantomime villain. In fact it seems from other contemporary sources that many groups in Egypt welcomed the invader, and an inscription specifically records Cambyses as honouring the Egyptian religion and customs in a praiseworthy manner. This does not mean that Herodotus made up the story about the lost army, or even that his sources deceived him, but it does add another layer of uncertainty to an already difficult search.

Should you choose to believe him, however, you may be able to join the hunt yourself. In 2004 a tour operator called Aqua Sun Desert set up a desert safari to explore the Western Desert area around Dakhla, Farafra, Siwa and El Bahrein and to look for evidence of the lost army. It was reported at the time that the tours would continue for five years. As Aqua Sun manager Hisham Nessim says, ‘If we discover anything about the lost army, it will be the discovery of the century.’

THE WHITE SHIP

Appearance of the Cog (which is probably what the White Ship was an early example of) in the beginning of the XII Century was an important milestone in shipbuilding. Crusaders used them for their marches to the Holy Land, merchants of the Hanza union transported goods from Palestine and Africa to Europe. Cogs took part in all naval battles during the following three centuries

The year 1120 saw one of the most significant shipwrecks in English history; a tragedy that cost the lives of the flower of English nobility and would eventually plunge the nation into two decades of chaos and misrule – a period that has become known as The Anarchy. The heir to the throne of England and hundreds of scions of noble families perished when the White Ship, one of the most advanced vessels of the time, was lost with all hands. Its wreck and the potentially priceless cargo (in terms of historical and material value) it carried have never been located.

Between two kingdoms

Following the Norman Conquest of 1066, England was ruled by the dukes of Normandy. As overlords of two lands divided by the English Channel, it was routine for the Norman kings of England to shuttle back and forth between their dominions as they sought to preserve their territories on the Continent and in Britain. In 1120, Henry I, third of the Norman kings of England and youngest son of William the Conqueror, had been forced to travel to Normandy to confront the King of France, Louis VI. Accompanying him was his heir and only legitimate son, 17-yearold William Adelin. ‘Adelin’ is a latter-day rendering of ‘Atheling’ (the Saxon term for king) – he was named William the Atheling to show how the royal houses of the Saxons and Normans were unified in his person.

Henry had successfully resolved his dispute with Louis, gaining recognition for his son as the de facto Duke of Normandy, and was returning to England via the Norman port of Barfleur, from where his father had embarked for the invasion of England less than 60 years previously. The mood of the party was festive, especially since young William was habitually accompanied by a kind of ‘youth court’ – a youthful mirror version of his father’s court, which included many of the most important heirs and offspring of the noble houses of England and Normandy. With the party were his own half-brother and sister – Henry I was the most prolific father of illegitimate children in the history of the English monarchy. Despite this, William was his only legitimate son (one of only two legitimate children), and was therefore absolutely central to Henry’s dynastic ambitions.

Le Blanche Nef

On 25 November Henry was preparing to embark at Barfleur when he was approached by Thomas FitzStephen, master of the Blanche Nef, or White Ship, a fine new vessel of the highest specifications. FitzStephen’s father Airard had captained the Mora, the flagship of William the Conqueror’s invasion fleet, and now he himself begged William’s son for the honour of bearing him across the Channel in his splendid ship. Henry declined, as his own travel arrangements were already well in hand, but suggested that FitzStephen could carry his son, William Adelin, and his company. Henry boarded his own ship and departed not long afterwards, safely making the passage back to England.

Meanwhile William and his companions were feasting and drinking prodigiously, and their own departure was delayed while all the available casks of wine in port were loaded onto the White Ship. Once aboard, the partying continued, with the captain and crew apparently joining in. The company grew so inebriated that when a party of clerics led by the Bishop of Coutance arrived they were driven off with howls of derision. At least one of the passengers disembarked at this time: Stephen of Blois – possibly as a result of an attack of diarrhoea, or possibly because of an attack of common sense given the carryings on. It was a decision that would have fateful consequences.

Disaster strikes

By the time the White Ship was ready to depart everyone aboard was roaring drunk and night had fallen. On board were around 300 people, including 140 noblemen and at least 18 noblewomen. In relative terms, the Channel crossing was not especially dangerous – Henry had done it many times, while his father had made the crossing 17 times as king. But in the 12th century naval technology was still crude, and any sea journey was dangerous, particularly with a drunken crew, captain and pilot. To make matters worse, young William was keen to catch up with his father and get home first, and insisted that FitzStephen take the quickest route home.

This was to prove fatal. The correct route to take out of Barfleur harbour was to the south, avoiding dangerous shoals, after which the vessel would swing north towards England. The ship’s drunken pilot tried to cut corners by heading directly north, but succeeded only in driving the ship onto a rock called the Quilleboeuf, about 2.4 kilometres (1.5 miles) out of the harbour.

The ship began to sink, but all was not lost for William. He was quickly hustled aboard the only ‘lifeboat’, but as he was rowed to safety he heard the piteous cries of his half-sister, Matilda, Countess of Peche, imploring him not to abandon her. William ordered the boat to turn back, but as it neared the sinking ship it was overwhelmed by the number of people who tried to climb aboard and it too was lost.

This at least was the tale told by a butcher of Rouen named Berthold, who had only gone aboard to chase up a debt. He clung to one of the masts that projected above the waves, and was rescued the next morning. He was the sole survivor: few people of that era could swim, and in the dark, amidst the waves and strong currents, a watery grave was inevitable. When the news reached England none of the barons or high officers of the court dared to tell the king; it was left to a child to tell him the terrible tidings. It is said that he fainted away, and that he never smiled again.

The lost generation

The impact on the world of power politics in north-western Europe must have been tremendous, not to mention the personal toll on bereaved parents. The feeling that might have been prevalent is well captured by Winston Churchill in his account of the disaster in A History of the English Speaking People:

Two men remained afloat, the ship’s butcher and a knight. ‘Where is the Prince?’ asked the knight above the waves. ‘All are drowned,’ replied the butcher. ‘Then,’ said the knight, ‘all is lost for England,’ and threw up his hands [thereby casting himself into the waves].

The disaster has been likened to the sinking of the Titanic, which carried many rich and important people and had a colossal impact on Edwardian Britain. A more modern parallel might be the Thames’ Marchioness disaster of 1989.

For 12th-century England the sinking of the White Ship was to have grim consequences. Despite his extra-marital fecundity, Henry was unable to produce another legitimate male heir. Although he forced his barons to swear allegiance to his legitimate daughter, also called Matilda, the idea of a female ruler simply would not wash with the medieval mindset. When Henry died in 1135 most of the English barons promptly ignored their oaths and acclaimed Stephen of Blois, Matilda’s cousin and the same man who had so fortuitously stepped off the White Ship before it sailed to disaster, as king. Matilda was able to rally some support and attempted to reclaim the crown, plunging the country into nearly 20 years of civil war. It was a lawless and unstable time, when, in the memorable words of the contemporary Peterborough Chronicle, ‘Crist and alle his sayntes slept.’

12th-century treasure trove

The wreck of the White Ship represents a potential gold mine of archaeological and material significance. William Adelin and his party would have been richly caparisoned and loaded with jewels. He would probably have been accompanied by a considerable treasury of plates, goblets and other loot. Discovering this today would amount to a unique record of courtly life in the early 12th century. The ship itself would also be of tremendous importance. As the cutting edge of naval technology it could reveal fascinating insights into the evolution of ship-building, from the longships used by William the Conqueror to the medieval galleons with their high fore and rear castles.

The real issue, however, is whether there might be anything of the wreck or its contents left. Some, if not most, of the treasure aboard was probably salvaged at the time. The strong currents and tides in the area may well have washed away much of the rest. It is known, for instance, that many of the bodies were swept away to be cast ashore along the coast of Normandy for weeks afterwards. Possibly the same forces may have done considerable damage to the wreck, while shipworms and other aquatic organisms would have reduced the wooden parts of the ship unless it was quickly covered in preserving silt.

In other words, the prospects for significant salvage are not great, but the potential archaeological interest makes even a slim chance worth pursuing. Despite this, and despite the apparent agreement of all sources that it is known where the ship was wrecked, there is no record of anyone having mounted a search or exploratory dive. The local conditions would make such an undertaking difficult and perhaps dangerous, but with modern technology such as side-scan sonar and ROVs it is worth at least a preliminary investigation. Perhaps, lying in a sandy hollow beneath a sheltering rock, the bejewelled bones of William Adelin himself await discovery.

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