Part 6 (1/2)
The following are translations of these doc.u.ments:--
”The Old Man of the Mountain to Limpold, Duke of Austria, greeting.
Since several kings and princes beyond sea accuse Richard, King of England, and lord, of the death of the marquis, I swear by the G.o.d who reigneth for ever, and by the law which we hold, that he had no guilt in his death; for the cause of the death of the marquis was as follows.
”One of our brethren was coming in a s.h.i.+p from Satelia (_Salteleya_) to our parts, and a tempest chancing to drive him to Tyre the marquis had him taken and slain, and seized a large sum of money which he had with him. But we sent our messengers to the marquis, requiring him to restore to us the money of our brother, and to satisfy us respecting the death of our brother, which he laid upon Reginald, the Lord of Sidon, and we exerted ourselves through our friends till we knew of a truth that it was he himself who had had him put to death, and had seized his money.
”And again we sent to him another of our messengers, named Eurisus, whom he was minded to fling into the sea; but our friends made him depart with speed out of Tyre, and he came to us quickly and told us these things. From that very hour we were desirous to slay the marquis; then also we sent two brethren to Tyre, who slew him openly, and as it were before all the people of Tyre.
”This, then, was the cause of the death of the marquis; and we say to you in truth that the lord Richard, King of England, had no guilt in this death of the marquis, and these who on account of this have done evil to the lord King of England have done it unjustly and without cause.
”Know for certain that we kill no man in this world for any hire or money, unless he has first done us evil.
”And know that we have executed these letters in our house at our castle of Messiat, in the middle of September. In the year from Alexander M. D.
& V.”
”The Old Man of the Mountain to the princes of Europe and all the Christian people, greeting.
”We would not that the innocence of any one should suffer by reason of what we have done, since we never do evil to any innocent and guiltless person; but those who have transgressed against us we do not, with G.o.d to aid, long suffer to rejoice in the injuries done to our simplicity.
”We therefore signify to the whole of you, testifying by him through whom we hope to be saved, that that Marquis of Montferrat was slain by no machination of the King of England, but he justly perished, by our will and command, by our satellites, for that act in which he transgressed against us, and which, when admonished, he had neglected to amend. For it is our custom first to admonish those who have acted injuriously in anything to us or our friends to give us satisfaction, which if they despise, we take care to take vengeance with severity by our ministers, who obey us with such devotion that they do not doubt but that they shall be gloriously rewarded by G.o.d if they die in executing our command.
”We have also heard that it is bruited about of that king that he has induced us, as being less upright and consistent (_minus integros et constantes_), to send some of our people to plot against the King of France, which, beyond doubt, is a false fiction, and of the vainest suspicion, when neither he, G.o.d is witness, has. .h.i.therto attempted anything against us, nor would we, in respect to our honour, permit any undeserved evil to be planned against any man. Farewell.”
We will not undertake to maintain the genuineness of these two epistles, but we may be permitted to point out the futility of some of the objections made to them. Hammer p.r.o.nounces the first of them to be an undoubted forgery because it commences with swearing by the law, and ends by being dated from the era of the Seleucides. Both, he says, were equally strange to the Ismalites, who precisely at this time had begun to trample the law under foot, and had abandoned the Hejra, the only era known in Mohammedan countries, for a new one commencing with the reign of Ha.s.san II. He further sees, in the circ.u.mstance of a letter from the Old Man of the Mountain (_Sheikh-al-Jebal_) being dated from Ma.s.syat, a proof of the ignorance of the Crusaders respecting the true head and seat of the Ismalite power. These objections are regarded by Wilken as conclusive. They will, however, lose much of their force if we bear in mind that the letters are manifestly translations, and that the chief of Ma.s.syat at that time was Sinan, who some years before had offered to become a Christian, and who does not seem at all to have adopted the innovations of Ha.s.san the Illuminator. Sinan might easily have been induced by the friends of the King of England, one of the most steady of whom was Henry of Champagne[54], who succeeded Conrad of Montferrat in the kingdom, to write those letters in his justification, and it is very probable that the translations were made in Syria, where the Arabic language was of course better understood than in Europe, and sent either alone or with the originals. The translator might have rendered the t.i.tle which Sinan gave himself by _Senex de Monte_, which would be better understood in the west, and he may also have given the corresponding year of the era of the Seleucides (the one in use among the Syrian Christians) for the year of the Hejra used by the Ismalite chief, or indeed Sinan may have employed that era himself. In this case there would remain little to object to the genuineness of the letter to the Duke of Austria. Hammer regards the expression _our simplicity_ (_simplicitas nostra_) as being conclusive against the genuineness of the second letter. We must confess that we can see no force in the objection. Sinan might wish to represent himself as a very plain, simple, innocent sort of person. It might further be doubted if a European forger would venture to represent the prince of the a.s.sa.s.sins--the formidable Old Man of the Mountain--in such a respectable light as he appears in these two epistles[55].
[Footnote 54: An instance of Henry's intimacy with the a.s.sa.s.sins has been given in p. 81.]
[Footnote 55: Sir J. Mackintosh (History of England, i. 187) seems to regard the letters as genuine.]
But there is another account of the death of the Marquis of Montferrat, which is probably much better known to the generality of readers than any of the preceding ones. The far-famed author of ”Waverley” has, in his romantic tale of the ”Talisman,” made Conrad to be wounded and vanquished in the lists by the son of the King of Scotland, the champion of king Richard, and afterwards slain by the dagger, not of the a.s.sa.s.sins, but of his confederate in villany the Master of the Temple, to prevent his making confession of their common guilt!
Yielding to none in rational admiration of the genius of Sir W. Scott, we cannot avoid expressing a wish that he had ceased to write when he had exhausted that rich field of national feelings and manners with which he was alone familiar, and from which he drew the exquisite delineations of ”Waverley” and its Scottish brethren. All his later works, no doubt, exhibit occasional scenes far beyond the power of any of his imitators; but when his muse quits her native soil, she takes leave of nature, truth, and simplicity. Even the genius of a Scott is inadequate to painting manners he never witnessed, scenery he never beheld.
The tale of the ”Talisman” is a flagrant instance. Topography, chronology, historic truth, oriental manners, and individual character, are all treated with a most magnanimous neglect, indeed, even, we might say, with contempt; for, careless, from ”security to please,” as the author is known to have been, his vagaries must sometimes have proceeded from mere wilfulness and caprice. It would, we apprehend, perplex our oriental travellers and geographers to point out the site of the fountain named the Diamond of the Desert, not far from the Dead Sea, and yet lying half-way between the camp of the Saracens and that of the Crusaders, which last, we are told, lay between Acre and Ascalon, that is, on the sea-coast, or to show the interminable sandy desert which stretches between the Dead Sea and the Mediterranean. As to historic truth, we may boldly say that there is hardly a single circ.u.mstance of the romance in strict accordance with history; and as to the truth of individual character, what are we to say to the grave, serious, religious Saladin, but the very year before his death, being in the flower of his age, rambling alone through the desert, like an errant knight, singing hymns to the Devil, and coming disguised as a physician to the Christian camp, to cure the malady of the English monarch, whom he never, in reality, did or would see[56]? We might enumerate many additional instances of the violation of every kind of unity and propriety in this single tale[57].
[Footnote 56: May it not be said that real historic characters should not be misrepresented? Sir W. Scott was at full liberty to make his Varneys and his Bois Gilberts as accomplished villains as he pleased; he might do as he pleased with his own; but what warrant had he from history for painting Conrad of Montferrat and the then Master of the Templars under such odious colours as he does?]
[Footnote 57: The author invariably writes _Montserrat_ for _Montferrat_. The former is in Spain, and never was a marquisate. As it were to show that it was no error of the press, it is said, ”The s.h.i.+eld of the marquis bore, in reference to his t.i.tle, a serrated and rocky mountain.” We also find _naphtha_ and _bitumen_ confounded, the former being described as the solid, the latter as the liquid substance.]
Let not any deem it superfluous thus to point out the errors of an ill.u.s.trious writer. The impressions made by his splendid pages on the youthful mind are permanent and ineffaceable, and, if not corrected, may lead to errors of a graver kind. The ”Talisman” moreover affects a delusive show of truth and accuracy; for, in a note in one part of it, the author (ironically, no doubt) affects to correct the historians on a point of history. The natural inference, then, is that he has himself made profound researches, and adhered to truth; and we accordingly find another novelist, in what he terms a history of chivalry, declaring the ”Talisman” to be a faithful picture of the manners of the age. Sir W.
Scott, however, has himself informed us, in the preface to ”Ivanhoe,” of his secret for describing the manners of the times of Richard Coeur de Lion. With the chronicles of the time he joined that of Froissart, so rich in splendid pictures of chivalric life. Few readers of these romances perhaps are aware that this was the same in kind, though not in degree, as if, in his tales of the days of Elizabeth and James I., he had had recourse to the manner-painting pages of Henry Fielding; for the distance in point of time between the reign of Richard I. and that of Richard II., in which last Froissart wrote, is as great as that between the reigns of Elizabeth and George II.; and, in both, manners underwent a proportional change. But we are in the habit of regarding the middle ages as one single period of unvarying manners and inst.i.tutions, and we are too apt to fancy that the descriptions of Froissart and his successors are equally applicable to all parts of it.
CHAPTER X.
Jellal-ed-deen--Restoration of Religion--His Harem makes the Pilgrimage to Mecca--Marries the Princess of Ghilan--Geography of the Country between Roodbar and the Caspian--Persian Romance--Zohak and Feridoon--Kei Kaoos and Roostem--Ferdoosee's Description of Mazanderan--History of the Shah Nameh--Proof of the Antiquity of the Tales contained in it.
The unhallowed rule of Mohammed II. lasted for the long s.p.a.ce of thirty-five years, during which time all the practices of Islam were neglected by the Ismalites. The mosks were closed, the fast of Ramazan neglected, the solemn seasons of prayer despised. But such a state can never last; man must have religion; it is as essential to him as his food; and those pseudo-philosophers who have endeavoured to deprive him of it have only displayed in the attempt their ignorance and folly. The purification of the popular faith is the appropriate task of the true philanthropist.