Recent reads - Jack the Ripper (again), Britain in the early Seventies and a Biblical travelogue (of sorts)

I’ll start this post, about three factual works that I have recently read, by saying that I really should stop reading books about Jack the Ripper. It’s not exactly a healthy subject to obsess about. After the latest Ripper book, I think I’m done on that subject for now. It was Jack the Ripper: The 21^st Century Investigation by Trevor Marriott, an ex-copper who was bigged up by the blurb as a ‘top Murder Squad detective’ who ‘reveals the Ripper’s true identity at last’; that last bit is used, with slight variations, for the blurb on almost all books about the Whitechapel Murders of 1888 so I didn’t exactly have high hopes. There followed a re-hash of the murders (I really am not sure if there’s much new that can be said here, but every Ripper murder book must of course cover this very well-trod ground – although to his credit, Marriott does at least suggest that there were victims beyond the ‘canonical’ five) before an admittedly entertaining set of chapters about the more prominent suspects (Montague Druitt, James Maybrick, the Duke of Clarence, etc, etc) in which the cases against each of them were taken apart. Marriott was somewhat put out that he wasn’t able to use his police contacts to have a go on HOLMES, the modern crime-recording database – he must’ve hated the recent BBC documentary, Jack the Ripper: The Case Reopened, in which Emilia Fox was allowed to do just that. Marriott’s eventual hypothesis was that the murderer might have been a sailor on one of the many ships in London’s docks which were not far from Whitechapel – not original, but it’s interesting how he’s able to research this (there’s not as much evidence as he’d hoped) and I like how he brought in the international angle – there were reports in the years immediately after 1888 of similar crimes in Germany and Nicaragua, although how much of that may or may not have been true is debatable (as with any Ripper study, Marriott is as quick to disregard any evidence that doesn’t support his theory as he is solid in his defence of the evidence that does). The ‘Ripper’ in this study turned out to be a German sailor who murdered his landlady in New York in 1894 and who, after being found guilty, met his end in the electric chair two years later. Apparently his lawyer thought he might have been Jack the Ripper. I’m not really convinced – we’ve had theories about Ripper suspects ending up getting done for different murders before. This, ultimately, was not the best of Ripper reads (Patricia Cornwell’s Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper – Case Closed, which also tried to use modern investigatory techniques and came up with a very different but equally unprovable suspect, has the merit of being much better written), while I take my leave of Ripper speculation with a thought that maybe, given recent events involving Russia, the old one about the Ripper being a Russian agent acting to discredit the British police might be due a re-airing.

Moving to more recent history, I’ve encountered Dominic Sandbrook before. He’s the revisionist historian who wrote four books detailing British history – not just the politics, but a bit of everything including society, economics, popular culture, etc – between the Suez Crisis and the election of Mrs Thatcher. I read them out of order, of course, starting with the last one (Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain, 1974-1979). I liked that one so much that I went back to the beginning and enjoyed the first one (Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles), then immersed myself in the second (White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties). And so to the third – State of Emergency: The Way We Were, 1970-1974. The early Seventies in Britain were strange times indeed and Sandbrook, true to form, immerses the reader in this period which saw strikes, moral panics over the country’s youth (a recurring theme in Sandbrook’s books, the only thing apparently new about the skinheads being that they dressed different from the Teddy boys from just over a decade beforehand), all hell breaking loose in Northern Ireland, more strikes, a Home Secretary seemingly permanently drunk (stagger forward, Reggie Maudling), several decent sitcoms and massive cultural change while there was a PM who had a grand piano installed in Downing Street (Ted Heath, of whose various faults the worst seems by this account to have been a run of appallingly bad luck). Everything, right down to children’s TV shows (and the accompanying concern that kids were watching too much TV), football hooliganism and popular fiction (in particular Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man which, although published in ’75, is used as a prism here to explore radical chic) gets a look-in here; even life in the suburbs, much maligned at the time, gets a more positive going-over. As with Sandbrook’s other works, things draw to a grand climax in which events and themes previously mentioned draw together as a government teeters on the brink; here, it’s the Heath government declaring a state of emergency for the fourth time (yes, really) as Britain, in economic trouble even before the oil crisis of ’73, lurches into the Three-Day Week in which electricity was limited to conserve energy supplies (and, guess what, people panic-bought toilet paper). Worth a read, even if you haven’t read any other books in the series!

And then there’s Apostle: Travels to the Tombs of the Twelve by an American travel writer called Tom Bissell. The clue’s in the title – Bissell has taken it upon himself to visit the tombs (or sites of the tombs) of Jesus’s disciples. As travelogues go it’s an interesting challenge and Bissell – who kicks off by saying that he comes to this as a lapsed Catholic – has really done his homework in the arcane subject of who the twelve Apostles were (the four Gospels are not exactly in universal agreement here), what happened to them and where they ended up. Obviously in some cases their remains ultimately found their way to more than one place and some of this is highly disputed, but Bissell picks one site for each one and goes there to see what he can find out (the sites in question may raise some eyebrows – the site of an obscure monastery in Kyrgyzstan as opposed to Salerno Cathedral for St Matthew, for example, though what with several of the disciples being buried in Rome I guess he chose a site outside Italy for a bit of variation). On the way, he displays some impressively in-depth theological learning, sometimes perhaps too in-depth while in places he does tend to lose patience with the people he meets (his travels occurred over the course of several years, and at one point he notes that it was four years until he met ‘a person visiting a Christian church who knew something about Christianity’). He’s at his best in the first chapter, to be honest – visiting Jerusalem in an attempt to find the place where Judas Iscariot hanged himself – and by the end it seems like he’s running out of steam, devoting a mere four-and-a-bit pages to his pilgrimage to Santiago di Compostela. A promising premise and plenty of insights, overall it’s more solidly good than anything else.

Three recently-read modern thrillers

Here are a few of the books I’ve been reading recently. Funnily enough, although these are all modern works set in the modern world, John Buchan crops up in my thoughts on all three of them, sometimes incidentally as I do like to use his definition of a thriller – ‘shocker’ would’ve been the term he used – being a story that marches “just within the bounds of the possible”, although in one case I reckon there’s a nod to the man himself. The fact that I am currently reading The Gap in the Curtain is of course coincidental.

The Righteous Men by Sam Bourne (2006)

Will Monroe is a half-English, half-American journalist, raised mostly by his mother in England after his parents split up. After studying at Oxford, he goes to the land of his father (a judge) to be a post-grad at Columbia and then work for the New York Times. A reporting assignment on a seemingly routine murder in a dodgy part of Manhattan takes on a new angle when someone has something good to say about the victim, a pimp who on one occasion pawned most of his possessions in order to give money to a woman who would otherwise have become a prostitute. For his next assignment, Will’s off to the Pacific Northwest to report on some flooding although he ends up reporting on another murder – this time a survivalist nutter in Montana who, it turns out, had previously donated one of his kidneys anonymously. Although they were rather unsavoury characters, both victims had performed selfless acts of generosity that led them to be described as ‘righteous’. Then Will’s wife gets abducted. This leads him into the world of the insular Hasidic Jewish community in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where he’s introduced to an old Jewish legend about the well-being of the world being held up by thirty-six ‘righteous’ men who can exist anywhere in the world, and who often try to shield their inherent good nature; when one dies, a new one is born and so there are always thirty-six men making sure that the rest of us are OK. Trouble is, someone’s figured out who they are and is trying to murder them all between the Jewish holy days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in order to bring about the end of the world. This is the premise at the heart of The Righteous Men, a sub-Da Vinci Code thriller by Jonathan Freedland, a Guardian journalist writing under the somewhat Dan Brown-esque pseudonym of Sam Bourne. Will is aided by two friends, a computer geek and an ex-girlfriend called TC who he initially goes to because he needs to understand more about Judaism and she’s the only Jewish person he knows, but it just so happens that she was raised in Crown Heights before leaving that life behind to become a highly intelligent if slightly kooky artist (here I started to feel that the old Buchan rule about ‘shockers’ marching just within the bounds of the possible was being not so much stretched to the limit as broken). Amid a rising body-count, Will and TC try to figure out what’s going on via a series of cryptic text-messages sent by a person unknown (they think it’s someone Will met from within the Hasidic community, but after he gets killed the messages keep coming so it must be someone else). When the twists eventually come, they’re rather predicable but by this point I was over half-way through so I felt I had to carry on to the end – this is the sort of novel in which you just know that the people who Will initially thinks are behind the murders can’t possibly be the actual people responsible, and the climactic reveal of the Leigh Teabing figure who’s the evil genius behind it all doesn’t really come as much of a surprise, to be honest. Perhaps ‘generic’ is the word I’m looking for here, and at well over 500 pages it’s a tad over-long too. Would I be interested in anything else that this author has to offer? Probably not.

Shattered Icon by Bill Napier (2003)

Harry Blake is an antiquarian book-seller in Lincoln whose usual dull routine is interrupted by Sir Toby Tebbit, a minor aristocrat with whom he’s had dealings in the past, coming to him with an old manuscript that he’s inherited from a distant relative in Jamaica of whose existence he’d been unaware. As to the content of the manuscript, it’s been written in some sort of code. Unfortunately, some bad people are after said manuscript and will stop at nothing to get hold of it – before long, Sir Toby is dead (not by natural causes) and Harry becomes a fugitive as he tries to decode the manuscript with the help of Zola, an old friend of his (and an expert in maritime history, no less). As it gradually gets decoded, the manuscript becomes the story-within-the-story, relating to the adventures of a low-born but well-educated Scotsman called James Ogilvie who went to London and ended up as a sailor on the ill-fated Roanaoke expedition – a real-life unsuccessful early attempt to establish an English colony in what’s now North Carolina during the reign of Elizabeth I. It turns out, though, that there was an ulterior motive behind establishing said colony – all to do with a new calendar devised by the mathematician/astrologer/alchemist John Dee (an alternative to the Gregorian one; Dee, an advisor to Elizabeth I, really did come up with a Protestant alternative calendar although it was never implemented) which somehow required someone to be at the 77 degrees west line of longitude even though no-one knew how to figure out longitude back then. Into this mix is added a secret plot by England’s Catholics to wreck the whole thing, this act coinciding (they hope) with a successful outcome of the plot to put Mary Queen of Scots on the English throne. An ancient religious icon (a piece of wood that everyone believes to be a fragment of the cross on which Jesus was crucified) is at the heart of the mystery. Back in the present day, Harry and Zola are joined by Sir Toby’s daughter Debbie on a trip to Jamaica which becomes a race to find the icon before the afore-mentioned bad people – a group of decidedly nutty but seriously violent religious fanatics who are plotting an all-out religious war – can get their hands on it. At times, the plot twists are a tad eccentric, but they stretch rather than break the Buchan rule in the way that thrillers do these days thanks to Dan Brown even if this book, while being quite fun to read, wasn’t quite up to that standard. I did wonder if Napier had originally intended this to be an Elizabethan adventure, only for him to turn this into a story within a modern-day framework narrative, what with the prospect of religious war being a topical theme in the post-9/11 world and a modern plot concerning an ancient religious legend or (in this case) item being topical too in the early-to-mid-2000s thanks to The Da Vinci Code (which was published in the same year as Shattered Icon which, by the way, was published as Splintered Icon in the USA which makes more sense given what said icon is). But hey, it had me glued to the point where I was reading it into the wee small hours which is always a good sign where novels are concerned (assuming, of course, that I was genuinely interested and not just unable to sleep, not that I was really in a position to make a judgement call on that as it was too late, or rather too early, at the time). I was, though, amused to discover a discrete reference to Buchan himself amid the excitement – James, our Scottish Elizabethan sailor, hails from a Lowland village called Tweedsmuir, which was the title Buchan took when he was elevated to the peerage.

The Fifth Gospel by Ian Caldwell (2016)

I’d not previously heard of Ian Caldwell, and to be honest I only really picked up this book because it wasn’t long after I’d finished Conclave by Robert Harris (which I enjoyed right up to the last plot-twist, which I felt took things a step too far than they perhaps should have gone, violating the Buchan rule but not as much as Sam Bourne did) and quite fancied another Vatican-based thriller. This one doesn’t involve a papal conclave but I was intrigued by the information provided by the blurb on the back which stated that the protagonist is a Greek Catholic (Eastern liturgy but part of the worldwide Catholic church) priest who lives in the Vatican; that genuinely intrigued me. So – The Fifth Gospel. It is 2004. A mysterious exhibit is being planned in the Vatican Museum, but with a week to go before it opens the exhibit’s curator gets murdered at Castel Gandolfo, the Pope’s summer residence outside Rome. At the same time, the Vatican apartment of the victim’s one-time research partner is broken into. Said one-time research partner is our protagonist (and also narrator), Father Alex Angelou, who takes it upon himself to investigate who’s behind the murder and the break-in; also, his brother, who was largely responsible for his upbringing, has vanished and he reckons (correctly) that this is not coincidental. The brother, Simon, is also a priest – albeit a Roman Catholic, not a Greek Catholic, one (their family is of a mixed religious heritage; their father was a Greek Catholic priest, while on their mother’s side Uncle Lucio is a Roman Catholic cardinal). Thus are two brothers shown as a microcosm of the split in Christendom between Western Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy that forms the backdrop of this novel which also takes in the titular fifth gospel – a work known as the Diatessaron which combines elements of the four gospels and which the curator had been studying in some depth – and its links to a certain controversial holy relic. Father Alex’s quest for the truth takes him to all corners of the Vatican, including one memorable scene in the underground car park where he has to hide in the Popemobile! Admittedly that part sounds a bit ludicrous, but believe me Caldwell pulls off the trick of making it sound just about plausible or, if you prefer, within the bounds of the possible. This is compelling stuff, with Caldwell not just providing us with a highly believable murder mystery which is also religious thriller which has an interesting protagonist (Father Alex), in addition to which there’s a vivid picture of the insular world of the Vatican at the time when John Paul II’s papacy was drawing to a close (the ailing Pope himself is an unseen character until very late on, which works well). Even the persistent use of the present tense, which I sometimes find annoying, seems to work well here, and it definitely passed the reading-into-the-small-hours test. Out of the three books I’m looking at here, this is the one I would recommend the most, by some considerable distance.

Life of Brian: the Aberystwyth sub-plot

With Good Friday coming up, our thoughts turned to movies – how about a suitably Biblical film? We were thinking of going to see Mary Magdalene, but it would appear that that’s not showing anywhere near us (apart from a midday screening with subtitles down at the Phoenix), so perhaps not. I then thought that it would be fun to dig out a DVD from our collection – Life of Brian or, to give it its full title, Monty Python’s Life of Brian.

We’ve seen it loads of times, of course. The 1979 Monty Python film is a classic and I can quote quite a few of the lines should I so desire (“He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy”, “I’m Brian and so’s my wife”, etc, etc). I can tell you a few random facts about it, too: George Harrison put up the money for it (thus leading to the formation of Hand Made Films, through which the ex-Beatle also funded movies like Mona Lisa and Withnail & I);Spike Milligan made a cameo appearance after the Python team found out that he happened to be on holiday down the road from where they were filming; and Michael Palin later revisited the scene of his ‘crucifixion’ in Tunisia when doing his 2002 travelogue Sahara (or to give it its full title, Sahara with Michael Palin).

Life of Brian is about one Brian of Nazareth, an ordinary guy living in first-century Roman-occupied Judea who was born in the stable next to the one in which Jesus was born and who gets mistaken for the Son of God. Due to its content the film was highly controversial at the time – to many, it was seen to be blasphemous although that may well be based on the mistaken assumption that Brian was meant to be a send-up of Jesus. They are actually shown to be two different characters in the film (when Jesus is shown – as a minor character, like Hamlet in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead – he is played with respect in the Sermon on the Mount scene, with the humour coming from the people in the crowd who mis-hear what he says). This in turn leads one to assume that some of those who protested against the film, by way of picketing outside cinemas that were showing it, had not actually seen it. Michael Palin, by the way, was highly amused by the fact that the protesters included banner-carrying nuns, which makes one think of that episode of Father Ted where Ted and Dougal stage a half-hearted protest outside their local cinema when it shows a blasphemous film that’s been banned everywhere else, which only serves to let everyone know about the film and draw in the crowds. Certainly in the real-life case of Life of Brian, the protests did serve to give the film more publicity than it might otherwise have had.

Terry Jones, who directed Life of Brian, has always denied that it was blasphemous. He said that it was doubtless heretical, because it poked fun at religious dogma and the interpretation of religious belief, but not blasphemous as it didn’t attack religious belief itself.

Be that as it may, it’s reckoned that over 30 local authorities in the UK either banned it outright or insisted that the film carry an X-certificate, which amounted to the same thing (prior to 1982 in this country, an 18-certificate was called an X-certificate; Life of Brian had been given an AA-certificate, meaning that it could be seen by anyone who was 14 or over, and the distributors said it couldn’t be shown unless it had the original certification that had been given to it by the British Board of Film Censors). It’s been claimed that some of the councils which banned it didn’t actually have any cinemas within their boundaries, so as with those protesters who hadn’t seen the film there may well have been some righteous (or perhaps self-righteous) jumping-on-the-bandwagon going on. A few counties – most notably the Republic of Ireland and Norway – also banned it. Some of the bans lasted for decades, and it is arguable that the film got as much free publicity from the bans as it did from the protests.

One British local authority that banned Life of Brian was Torbay. It wasn’t until 2008 that the council permitted the film to be shown in the borough (which covers the Devon coastal towns of Torquay, Paignton and Brixham), and even then it was only because the film won an online vote at the English Riviera International Comedy Film Festival. A similar story followed in the Welsh seaside town of Aberystwyth. Like many a British local authority, Aberystwyth Town Council works on the ‘Buggins’s turn’ principal when it comes to the question of who gets to be the mayor, meaning that it’s done by rotation – if a councillor on the ruling party (or ruling coalition) is there for long enough, chances are that he or she will at some point get to serve as mayor for a year, after which it’s someone else’s turn.

In Aberystwyth in 2008, it was the turn of Cllr Sue Jones-Davies. Before going into local politics, she had been an actress – and, among other things, she’d been in Life of Brian as Judith Iscariot (a member of the People’s Front of Judea – not the Judean People’s Front – who becomes Brian’s love interest). On becoming the mayor, she found out that Life of Brian was apparently still banned in the town. Naturally, she decided to overturn the ban by showing a charity screening. As it happened, she had remained friends with Terry Jones and so invited him along; his response was to ask if he could bring Michael Palin along too, which was of course agreed to! The screening happened in March 2009 and a fun time was had by all (how could an event attended by Terry Jones and Michael Palin not be fun?), and as well as raising money for good causes it also had the benefit of generating some publicity for Aberystwyth.

Funnily enough, though, there’s a little twist. As Aberystwyth was getting ready for the screening and the visit of two ex-Pythons, someone at the university did a bit of research and found that Aberystwyth Town Council had never actually banned Life of Brian. Council records show that they discussed banning it, but in the end they didn’t enforce a ban. Life of Brian was in fact shown in an Aberystwyth cinema in 1981. Still, the story of an actress-turned-mayor overturning the decades-old ban of a film she was in is a good one – perhaps too good to let the facts get in the way. Actually, it brings to mind a quote from a different film entirely – “when the legend becomes fact, print the legend”.

Florence - in, up and under the Duomo

When in Florence, the first thing that jumps out at you is the cathedral, known as the Duomo. Yes, there are many famous pieces of art as well, but when you look out onto the city from a vantage-point like the car park at the Piazzale Michelangelo (the location of one of several Davids) on the hill to the south of the Arno, it is the Duomo with its red-tiled dome, bell tower and marble façade is what grabs the eye. That is what dominates any view of the city, one of Italy’s finest.

Strictly speaking, it is the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Flore (the Cathedral of St Mary of the Flower); built to replace an old church on the same site, work began on it in 1296 and it took around 150 years to complete, although the neo-Gothic marble façade on the western end was added in the nineteenth century. The famous dome was built by Filippo Brunelleschi, one of the key figures of Renaissance architecture, between 1420 and 1436; he modelled it on the Pantheon in Rome, and used over four million bricks to build both the inner and outer octagonal domes. Glimpses of his great work can be spotted throughout the city.

That said, I do think that Peter Moore is onto something when he points out (in the excellent Vroom with a View) that it, and Florence in general, has space issues:

“There’s just no sense of space. Take the Duomo, for example … smack bang in the centre of town and topped by the red-tiled dome that is to Florence what the Opera House is to Sydney. Here we have one of the most amazing buildings of the Renaissance, clad in white, green and pink Tuscan marble. It was designed by Brunelleschi to dwarf even the great buildings of ancient Rome and Greece, but you only have to walk 10 metres before you hit another building. The dome is the largest of its time built without scaffolding, but there’s just no room to appreciate its size. And what little room that’s there is filled with thousands of people trying to get into the cathedral and just as many Senegalese hawkers trying to sell them fake Louis Vuitton handbags.”

Rather than consider such matters, though, we wanted to explore the Duomo itself, along with everyone else who was visiting Florence on a hot day in June. Getting into the cathedral itself is free (all you have to do is queue), but the rest – the bell tower, the baptistry (separate buildings, as is the case with several other Italian cathedrals), the crypt and the top of that famous dome – are places you have to pay to get in, up or down to. A €15 ticket, valid for 48 hours, covers the lot.

After paying my €15 and acknowledging that climbing the dome was out because it was already fully booked (not that I minded, as I’d done the dome of the Duomo before, on a previous trip), I made my way up the campanile, as the bell tower is known. Designed in the mid-fourteenth century by the architect Giotto di Bondone (usually known simply as Giotto, just like his fellow-Florentine Dante Alighieri is usually just known by his first name), this slender square tower is slightly shorter than the cathedral dome (Giotto’s plans had included a spire which was to have made it 400 feet tall, but he died before his great work could be completed and his successors decided against the spire, leaving the tower just under 280 feet tall). It has 414 stairs. I am not usually one to turn down the chance to climb a tower, and despite the heat (the mercury was over 30°C for most of our short trip to Tuscany, an unusual occurrence for June which has the wine-growers rather worried about how their 2017 vintage is going to turn out) I was up for this one.

I climbed up the steep stone steps, sometimes stopping to let people coming down go through (unlike the dome, which as I recall has separate ways up and down, it’s just the one staircase for the bell tower). Yes it was warm but it could be worse – ten years ago I went up the one at Pisa, which was a precarious experience not because it leans but because the steps of that one are made of marble, and it was raining at the time. Climbing the Florence campanile, there were occasional views out of the small windows – not just the cathedral dome, once again putting in an enticing appearance, but also the similar (albeit smaller) dome of the nearby church of San Lorenzo. 

I was grateful for the stops at the various levels. One had a view up through which you could see the people two levels above us standing on a metal grate; when I got to that level I naturally made sure to stand on said grate – which, I’m happy to report, has no problems with supporting 13-odd stone of English tourist.

Up top, I was not surprised to not that us successful climbers were encased in a metal cage through which we could look out over the city – most high towers have cage-like structures on the top. 

I could see across to the dome, which in my opinion makes the view from the bell tower a nicer one than the view from the dome, because by looking out over Florence from the dome you’re seeing Florence without its most famous landmark (rather like seeing Paris from the top of the Eiffel Tower, when you think about it). There was also the Palazzo Vecchio, Santa Croce (the big representation of the Star of David on the front of that church has a theological message – a six-point star formed of two interlocking triangles is an old symbol of creation, expressing the eternal nature of the Holy Trinity which is itself sometimes represented by an equilateral triangle), San Lorenzo and all those red-tiled roofs of Florence stretching out to where the city ends and the hills begin.

After making my way down, I joined the queue to get into the cattedrale itself.

A church or a cathedral is usually a good place to visit on a hot day as it’s usually fairly cool inside, and it looked as though quite a few others had had the same idea. It seemed fairly spartan inside, with any effect the high altar might have being off-set by the construction work going on behind it. 

The crowning glory of the Duomo’s interior, of course, is seen by looking up to the inside of Brunelleschi’s dome with its large depiction of the Last Judgement; Brunelleschi, apparently, envisaged it as being gold in colour, but after he died it was simply whitewashed and it fell to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, one of the Medici dynasty who ruled Medieval Florence, to decree that it be painted with a very big representation of the Last Judgement, a project that took 11 years to complete (it was started by two artists, Giorgio Vasari and Federico Zuccari, but after the former died six years into the project the latter got help from several others).

Down below next, for entry to the crypt was included in the €15 ticket. The crypt was excavated during the mid-to-late twentieth century, and contains remains going back to Roman times although for the most part it has the remains of the previous church that stood on the site of the Duomo, a (smaller) fifth-century church dedicated to St Reparata (a third-century Christian martyr) which was, apparently, in a somewhat parlous state by the time the Florentines decided to build the present-day Duomo. The old church was apparently where two eleventh-century popes were buried. A look around yielded several slabs from old tombs as well as the grave of Brunelleschi himself, buried (like Wren) underneath his greatest achievement. In a roped-off section there was also a recess in one of the walls containing what I took to be a saint’s relic of some sort, although there was nothing to indicate which saint; St Reparata, perhaps?

Back outside, there was one more thing to do and that was the baptistry. The Battistero di San Giovanni (Baptistry of St John) dates back to the eleventh century although bits of it are thought to be much older than that – there are Roman columns inside and it’s thought to have been built on the site of a Roman temple. The first thing to marvel at, before you even enter it, are the three sets of bronze-relief doors, the most famous of which are the eastern ones which were the work of one Lorenzo Ghiberti who won a competition to design them in 1401 (actually, he won it jointly with the afore-mentioned Brunelleschi, although the latter withdrew in a fit of pique because he hadn’t won outright). Michaelangelo was so impressed with the east doors, which depict scenes from the Old Testament, that he dubbed them the Porti del Paradiso (‘gates of paradise’) although the ones we see today are replicas, the originals being in a museum; Ghiberti, by the way, also did the north doors which have scenes from the Gospels as well as depictions of eight saints.

What’s truly impressive about it once you get inside is the glittering dome mosaics, the oldest of which are from the mid-thirteenth century. Even more impressive is the fact that pews are provided so weary, sweaty visitors (what can I say? It was a hot day and I’d already climbed the campanile!) can take a load off and look up at the mosaics without leaning back too far and falling over. I marvelled at the big depiction of the Last Judgement before trying to figure out passages from the Bible the other panels depicted (there was a fair bit from Genesis before the artists decided to skip to Jesus, the Virgin Mary and – appropriately enough, given the building’s dedication – John the Baptist). 

Then I looked around the rest of the building, and wondered why it is that the font is tucked away to one side, almost as an afterthought; given that this was a building constructed specifically for the purpose of baptism, I found that odd.

Another oddity, or at least something I perceived to be an oddity, is that the Baptistry has a tomb. While the crypt is believed to have been the place where two eleventh-century popes were buried, the Baptistry is most definitely the final resting-place of a fifteenth-century antipope. Baldassare Cossa is known to history as John XXIII, although he is not to be confused with the actual, twentieth-century pope of the same name and number. Although he was elected as pope in 1410, history does not regard him as a real pope because his (sort-of) papacy occurred at a time when there were three popes, each claiming to be the one true pope and each being recognised by different countries! This unholy mess was known as the Western Schism, and it was eventually sorted out at the Council of Constance, which declared that all three popes should abdicate so that a new, single pope could be elected. John’s lasting contribution to papal history, and the reason for his burial in Florence, is that it was he who enabled the Medici family – those Medieval rulers of Florence – to get into papal banking, which was what made them very rich indeed. Burying him in the Baptistry after his death in 1419, and getting Donatello to sculpt his tomb, was probably the least they could do as a posthumous thank-you.

And on that note, it was time to leave the baptistry and go off in search of some gelato. Well, we were in Florence, and it was a hot day.

Glastonbury, place of myth and legend

To Somerset, the ancient ‘Summer Land’ in the West Country and a county of endless fascination to historians. This was where Alfred the Great hid out in the marshes in early 878 after the Vikings had taken him by surprise and raided his stronghold at Chipenham; he took refuge in an old woman’s hut and, so legend has it, forgot to keep his eye on the cakes while thinking about how he could overcome his enemies (which he did, triumphing over them at Ethandun – modern-day Edington in Wiltshire – later that same year). This was also where the Duke of Monmouth’s ill-fated rebellion against James II came to an end in 1685 at the battle of Sedgemoor (an illegitimate son of Charles II and an experienced military leader, Monmouth knew that his peasant rabble was no match for the regular army and so went for a night attack, which failed). In the far north-east of the county, there’s the old Roman spa of Aquae Sulis (modern-day Bath).

And then there is Glastonbury.

Where to begin? Let’s start with the landmark that can be seen for miles around. Glastonbury Tor, the hill just outside the modern town, is topped by a distinctive tower that is all that’s left of a fourteenth-century church (itself built on the site of an earlier church). It’s dedicated to St Michael and it can be reached after a half-hour walk from the town. The Tor appears to have been called Ynys Afalon by the Ancient Britons, a name which translates as the Isle of Avalon which has led many to associate it with the mythical island of that name; certainly there was a time when the Tor was indeed an island, or at least high ground surrounded by marshland. “At the beginning of the Christian era”, writes Geoffrey Ashe in Mythology of the British Isles, “the Glastonbury hill-cluster was almost an island in times of high tide and flooding. Vessels could reach it from the Bristol Channel.” The views from the top are quite spectacular.

Down in the town, there’s the ruins of the monastery. Glastonbury Abbey dates back to at least the early eighth century, although in Medieval times it claimed to be much, much older. What can be in no doubt is that it produced one of the great English statesmen of the Dark Ages, St Dunstan, who was the Abbot of Glastonbury before becoming the Archbishop of Canterbury, in which capacity he served under King Edgar whom he crowned at Bath Abbey in 973. Glastonbury, then, was clearly an important place and it was a major destination for pilgrims before the Reformation; even now it retains a reputation as a place of great spirituality steeped in myth and legend (appropriately, Glastonbury is twinned with Lalibela in Ethiopia, a fascinating place which I will write about one day). The abbey ruins themselves are quite majestic, giving visitors a very good idea of just how imposing the abbey would have been in its Medieval heyday.

Glastonbury Abbey grew rich on the wool trade, that staple of the Medieval English economy, after the monks drained the surrounding marshland in order to create grazing-land for sheep. The earliest actual date for which we have documentary evidence about Glastonbury Abbey is 712, when King Ine of Wessex endowed a community of monks there, although some would have it that the abbey had been established prior to this royal endowment. The stories about Glastonbury Abbey’s origins certainly go back further than the conversion of the English in the late sixth and early seventh centuries; there were places on the island of Britain, especially in the West Country, where Christianity existed before St Augustine landed in Kent in 597. Christianity had originally come to these isles in Roman times, and when they left some traces of it stayed here (Bede, for example, refers to the post-Roman British leader Ambrosius beating the Anglo-Saxons at Badon Hill “with God’s help”, as well as noting that the “Pelagian heresy” had “seriously infected the faith of the British church”). St Patrick, who lived in the fifth century, is said to have become the leader of a group of hermits in Glastonbury after returning from Ireland. According to the plaque at the ruined St Michael’s Tower atop the Tor, he “discovered an ancient ruined oratory on the summit after climbing through a dense wood”.

The monks of Glastonbury, though, claimed a much older foundation for their monastery. They propagated a quite extraordinary legend, involving a person from the Bible. Christianity at Glastonbury, so the story goes, went right back to the origins of Christianity itself. Joseph of Arimathea is the man in the Gospels who convinces Pontius Pilate to let him take care of Jesus’s body after the Crucifixion; it was in the sepulchre (rock-cut tomb) that was presumably meant for Joseph that Jesus’s body was placed, and from which it had vanished by the time Mary Magdalen went there on the third day.

After the Resurrection, so the Glastonbury legend goes, Joseph travelled to Britain, to the Isle of Avalon to be exact, bringing with him the cup used at the Last Supper and his staff which had been cut from the same thorn bush which had provided the Crown of Thorns. At Avalon he founded and built a Christian church; if true, this would make Glastonbury the location of not just the first Christian church in Britain but the location of one of the first anywhere. It’s said that when he planted his staff in the ground, it flowered, and there are to this day various thorn bushes in the vicinity that are off-shoots of the original Glastonbury Thorn (which is said to have been destroyed by the Puritans in the seventeenth century). 

The cup – the Holy Grail – he buried, and in time the place where he apparently buried it would come to be called the Chalice Well (so maybe Indiana Jones was looking in the wrong place for the Holy Grail as well as the Ark of the Covenant).

The full story goes even further back, for as an addendum to this we have the notion, not mentioned in the Bible, that Joseph of Arimathea was related to Jesus – specifically, he was the Virgin Mary’s uncle and thus Jesus’s great-uncle (the notion of his being related to Jesus is not inconceivable, offering at the very least an explanation as to how he was able to persuade Pilate to give him the body after the Crucifixion). He was a merchant – evidently a successful one, since he was rich – who travelled to Britain on business. This too is not inconceivable, for it is a matter of historical record that, even though Britain didn’t become a Roman colony until 43 AD (a decade or so after the Crucifixion), merchants and traders from the Eastern Mediterranean had for some time been coming to Britain to buy local products, most notably the tin which has been mined in the West Country for millennia (it is under the name of the ‘Tin Isles’ that the British Isles crop up in Herodotus’s The Histories). And on one of his trips to pre-Roman Britain, he took his great-nephew with him.

This would have been at some point during the big gap in Jesus’s life between when he went to the Temple at the age of 12 and when he started his ministry at around 30, a period of some eighteen years in the life of the Son of God about which the Bible tells us nothing. As well as Glastonbury, which would have been an island (Avalon) back then, there are also a couple of places in Cornwall that claim to have been visited by a young Jesus. They’re not alone, for there are quite a few other places in the world that have been suggested as places which Jesus travelled to during this time (evidently there is an urge for him to have been doing something a bit more interesting than the obvious explanation, that he was working as a carpenter in the Nazareth area). The Glastonbury legend has even inspired a famous song – the hymn ‘Jerusalem’.

But is this true? There are many, drawn to the myths of Glastonbury, who would happily believe it. It’s telling, though, that Bede, who is happy to mention the battle of Badon Hill (an event so shrouded in myth and mystery that no-one can say with absolute certainty where it was fought, with that British victory usually being attributed to King Arthur – of whom more shortly), doesn’t mention anything in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People about Joseph of Arimathea bringing a young Jesus to Britain, or of the former coming back after the latter’s death and resurrection. In fact, he doesn’t even mention Glastonbury (which, if we accept the 712 date, was founded in his lifetime) at all. “As to the actual date of Glastonbury's first Christian presence,” writes Ashe, “it remains a mystery. There may have been individual residents, or scattered hermits, before there was anything like a monastery. The monastic legends, however, grew around a material fact. While Joseph himself could hardly have built a church as such – buildings for Christian worship were unknown till much later – the church which he was alleged to have built did exist. Fire destroyed it in 1184; the Lady Chapel today marks the site. Before that it had stood within the precinct from time immemorial, so long that there was no written record of its foundation. It was a simple structure of wattle-work, twigs bound with clay, plus reinforcements of timber and lead. Understandably it was known as the Old Church ... Its dedication, unparalleled in Britain till long after, was to the Virgin Mary, a fact that may hint at pre-Christian Glastonbury having been a goddess sanctuary.”

Finally, no account of Glastonbury can be complete without mentioning the once and future King of the Britons, for the Isle of Avalon is indelibly associated with the legends of King Arthur. And, since his knights were involved in various quests to find the Holy Grail, it make senses (sort of) for Glastonbury to have a legend about that too (see above). One of the places you can see from the top of the Tor is Cadbury Castle, an Iron Age hill-fort which some reckon to have been the location of Arthur’s court, Camelot. Avalon’s main Arthurian association, though, comes with the final part of Arthur’s story. When Arthur was wounded at the battle of Camlann (the one in which he defeated the treacherous Sir Mordred), he was taken to Avalon, an island that was said to have healing properties.  

The association of Avalon with Glastonbury was cemented in the year 1191. In that year, the monks of Glastonbury Abbey were digging in an old cemetery during the rebuilding of their monastery (following the afore-mentioned fire of 1184) when they unearthed a lead cross. The Latin inscription on it read Hie Jacet Sepultus Inclytus Rex Arthurus In Insula Avalonia, which is translated into English as ‘here lies interred in the Isle of Avalon the renowned King Arthur’. The monks, so the story goes, dug deeper and found two human skeletons, one male and one female, which they assumed to be those of Arthur and Guinevere. This may have a dubious ring to it, especially when one takes into consideration that this was the same monastery that claimed to have been founded by someone from the Bible, but what’s evidently important here is not necessarily what the remains were but what they were believed to be. The historical record shows that in 1278 these remains were reburied amid much pomp and circumstance (and in the presence of King Edward I and his queen, Eleanor of Castile) close to the high alter of the abbey church; Glastonbury Abbey’s status as a major pilgrimage venue was assured. The tomb survived until the abbey’s dissolution in 1539, and to this day the site of it can still be seen amid the majestic ruins of this once-great monastic establishment.

Raiding, and learning about, the lost Ark

The other night, Raiders of the Lost Ark was on BBC3, the digital channel which occasionally justifies its existence by showing films like this. This film, which I was astounded to note was released in 1981 (meaning that it’s the same age as my brother), is the first Indiana Jones adventure, and concerns everyone’s favourite university professor’s quest to find the Ark of the Covenant, while battling with his nemesis Belloq – who’s in cahoots with the Nazis, naturally – and romancing Marion Ravenwood to the accompaniment of a large runaway boulder, early-Eighties special effects, a Nazi-saluting monkey, many snakes, Denholm Elliott and a somewhat anachronistic prototype Luftwaffe aircraft. Archaeology and action – what’s not to like?

The Indiana Jones films constitute my second-favourite movie series (James Bond’s always hard to beat) and while my favourite is The Last Crusade (probably because I got taken to see it in the cinema, back when Edgware still had one of those, although the presence of Sean Connery as Indy’s dad is no doubt a factor too), Raiders is a film that I can happily watch again and again even though I do have a couple of issues with it.

The main one was the afore-mentioned aircraft – the one from the scene where Indy and the character credited as ‘First Mechanic’ have a fight which ends in the latter’s bloody demise by way of the propeller. It always frustrated me that I could never find such a plane in any book about the aircraft of Nazi Germany and/or the Second World War, and it was only after the advent of the Internet that I realised it was fictional! It was based on a glider that was developed into a prototype jet towards the end of the war. But even if it wasn’t real, what on Earth was such an advanced-looking military aircraft doing in British-controlled Egypt in 1936, given that the Nazis presumably wouldn’t have wanted to draw attention to themselves while they searched the ruins of Tanis for the Ark? That said, though, US intelligence had already figured out what they were up to, which is of course how Indy comes to be involved.

Another, more of a slow burner it must be said, was the question of whether everyone was looking for the Ark of the Covenant – that Biblical chest containing the stone tablets on which the Ten Commandments were inscribed – in the right country. If it exists at all (and, let’s be honest, that’s a very big ‘if’), isn’t it supposed to be in Ethiopia?

When I went travelling in Africa – ten years ago, I note with surprise – I visited a town in northern Ethiopia called Aksum. It’s part of the ‘northern circuit’ – other towns on this are the medieval capital of Gondar, the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela and, on the shores of Lake Tana, Bahar Dar. These are all popular tourist destinations and as such are accessible by plane from Addis Ababa. I, however, visited all of these by bus during my African journey, starting with Gondar (a day’s journey from the Sudanese border), then up north to Aksum, down and across to Lalibela and on to Bahar Dar before heading south to Addis. Ethiopian public transport, I should point out, is not for the faint-hearted; on almost all of the buses I was on, I was the only faranju (‘white man’ – the Amharic equivalent of mzungu).

Although somewhat dusty and nondescript-looking at first glance, Aksum is said to be one of the oldest continually-inhabited places in Africa, with ruins of palaces and underground tombs littered across the town amid the donkeys, the market-traders and the farmers. It’s the home of the Stelae, tall stone obelisks believed to have been carved and erected in the fourth century AD. Decorated with multi-story false windows and doors, they are believed to be markers for underground burial chambers (plenty of those in Aksum) and they are some of the largest monoliths in the world (one of them was stolen during the Italian occupation in the 1930s and was on public display in Rome for many years before being returned in pieces in 2005 and put back together and re-erected in Aksum three years later).

Local legend has it that the Queen of Sheba, the Biblical monarch who visited King Solomon, came from Aksum; one of the ruined palaces is called the Queen of Sheba’s Palace (although her ‘bath’ is in fact a modern reservoir).

Then there’s the church. St Mary of Zion (actually two churches, one built in the seventeenth century and the other in the twentieth) is Ethiopia’s holiest shrine, for this is where Ethiopian Christians believe the Ark to be located today, it having been taken to Ethiopia by King Menelik, the Queen of Sheba’s son by Solomon and the ancestor of the Ethiopian Kings.

The Ark itself is – so I was told – located not in either of the churches but in a separate building between them called the Chapel of the Tablet. Access to this building is strictly forbidden to everyone with the exception of one elderly monk. Only he may look upon the Ark, for reasons which will become apparent if you’ve read the relevant parts of the Old Testament and/or have watched the ending of Raiders.

For me, Aksum was part of a crash-course in Ethiopian history (with particular emphasis on the religious aspects) which had began in a church I visited in Gondar (said to be the only church in which the Prophet Mohamed is depicted on the walls) and would continue with the frankly unbelievable churches of Lalibela that are carved out of solid rock – a place that is for the most part several centuries behind the rest of the world.

By the time I got to Bahar Dar, I was quite literally ‘churched out’ and as a result probably less appreciative of the island monasteries of Lake Tana than I might otherwise have been.

Amid all of that, the story of the Ark got merged in with everything else – the Ethiopian version of how it got there is indelibly tied up with the wider story of the Ethiopian variant of Christianity (one of the world’s oldest), the heartland of which is the highlands of the north that I had visited before heading to the capital; the southern lowlands are mostly Muslim, and have been since the Aksumites were driven back to the mountains in the seventh century AD. All of the Ethiopian kings, down to and including Haile Selassie (the last one, deposed by the Communists in 1974), claimed descent from King Solomon as a result of the legend about how the Ark got to Ethiopia.

Anyone looking for more details about the Ark, and how it (apparently) came to rest in Ethiopia, is advised to get hold of a copy of Graham Hancock’s book The Sign and the Seal which was published in1992, not long after the Indiana Jones movies. A journalist with plenty of previous experience of the region, Graham Hancock (who at around the same time made a cameo appearance in the Ethiopia section of that superb Michael Palin travelogue Pole to Pole) set out on a quest to discover the whereabouts of the Ark of the Covenant. This took the Old Testament as a starting-point, and moved onto various Medieval texts from diverse places, the Knights Templar and several locations in the Middle East, Northern Africa, France and Scotland.

Hancock’s theory is that the Ark was removed from  Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem in or around 650BC, and that it subsequently spent a couple of centuries in Egypt before it was taken to Ethiopia by way of the Nile and was kept on an island on Lake Tana for around 800 years before being taken to Aksum. The Knights Templar come into the story in the 13^th century when, having searched for the Ark on the site of Solomon’s Temple (present-day Temple Mount), they somehow figured out that it was in Ethiopia; they travelled there, where they may have had a hand in building the churches of Lalibela before the Ethiopians, fearful of losing the Ark, got in touch with Pope Clement V; his fear of the Knights Templar acquiring the power of the Ark is given as a key reason for his suppression of the  Knights Templar in the early fourteen century.

Readers of a serious disposition should bear in mind that this is no scholarly work. No academic would dream of making such assumptions as Hancock makes here based on very scant evidence, what I strongly suspect is a fairly fast-and-loose interpretation of certain historical texts and a ready willingness to resort to outright speculation based on the author’s own assumptions wherever the facts dry up. Which they do ... frequently. That said, this is a work that is part-travelogue, part historical detective work that quickly captures the reader (this reader anyway; perhaps unsurprisingly given that I’m a fan of the Indiana Jones movies and have been to Aksum, I was hooked after the first chapter) and leads us on such a fascinating journey that I for one was prepared to forgive Hancock his various foibles.

Perhaps they were all digging in the wrong place...