When he entered the chapel, barely affected by the morning light filtered through the portico’s windowpanes and the narrow lateral skylights, brother Antoni Barral was convinced that that could be, must be, the last day of his life, the last one as well for the plaza paying the greatest price for the pride of having believed itself to be invincible, the most invulnerable. His gaze fixed forward, he advanced toward the small, white stone altar bathed by the languishing wax of burned-out candles that no one bothered to remove anymore. In the vaulted space behind the altar hung a polished wooden cross of garnet-colored cedar, as if painted with blood, under which reigned, sovereign and majestic, the magnificent and powerful image of Our Lady.
On the step that elevated the most sacred space from the rest of the temple, the knight set down his helmet, then moved the sword at his waist, and got down on his knees. With his hands united over the eight-pointed red cross displayed on his chest and his face in the direction of the effigy, he closed his eyes. He took several breaths to try to concentrate amid the subhuman shrieks of the besiegers pummeling his ears and the rhythmic commotion and penetrating infernal music, coming from the hundreds of drums, cymbals, and trumpets altering the rhythm of the beating. It was the sound and the fury of those who know they are the victors and implacably herald themselves in their proclaimed purpose, sworn on the Koran, of not stopping until they’d driven the last adept of the cross in the Prophet’s beloved Holy Land to the sea.
Convinced that there would be no other opportunity for him, Antoni Barral got ready to confess all of his sins to Her, for the spiritual release to alleviate his exit from a world of which he was no longer afraid since he felt that he could qualify the days of his life as well spent, offered up to a greater good, in which he believed and for which he was going to die. He prayed and swore to the Blessed Mother that his faith had never and would never waver. He prayed and remembered all the violence committed throughout many years, guided by the cross and sword, by love and a vocation to serve, the vows of chastity and poverty, the devotion to Her, and the faith in the Anointed with which he had made an oath and in whose exercise he’d assumed as just and holy the battle with which his arms had delivered so much death that it was now impossible to count. He prayed and meditated that with his convictions, actions, and goodwill, he had not managed to make the world a better place, but rather, the opposite: perhaps because of this, his last sacrifice was necessary. He prayed, cried, asked for forgiveness for his immortal soul if he had committed excesses, when, subtly, without fanfare, at an unspecified moment of his meditation, he had ceased to listen to the shrieks and clamor as he began to notice how his body was entering a pleasant refuge, all-encompassing, an unknown physical condition that made him light, safeguarded from the surrounding events, immune to the chaos of the final moments. Just when he felt most ensconced in that refuge, with his body even levitating a few inches in the air, his forehead felt the compact and unmistakable pressure of some warm fingers capable of making him lose his balance and fall on his back, causing the resounding sound of his offensive and defensive metal wear. Lying on his back, he opened his eyes and confirmed that, before him, was only, in the same place as always, the cross and the figure of the Blessed Mother, with Her black, brilliant face, inscrutable with its shining blue eyes, almost lifelike, from which, he could have sworn, at that moment he saw two tears sprout and flow. And Antoni Barral received the vibrant premonition that he still had tasks to complete in the kingdom of this world. All he knew was that he had received new strength from a superior power and would not die on that terrible day on which the last battle would be waged before the definitive loss of what had, for decades, been the most treacherous and shining city of the known world: the city which had condemned itself through its many sins. Knowing his mission, the higher objective for which he would remain alive, the knight stood up, replaced his helmet and sword, and walked toward the altar.
A few months before, brother Antoni Barral and a few of his brothers from the Order of the Temple, hungry and ragged, had arrived at Saint Jean d’Acre. They were the survivors, perhaps escaped by sheer miracle, from the implacable fury of the Saracens of the Mamluk Sultan Qala’un, author of the siege and devastation of the very rich Tripoli. The day of his arrival, the Catalan knight was carrying on his saddle the statue of the Virgin that had been part of the goods the temple knights were fighting over with the powerful Genovese and Venetian merchants of Tripoli, the voracious and mischievous owners of the beautiful city, the same ones who with their ambitions and excesses had invoked the rage of the Mamluk sultan. Because of that dispute, ever since the statue was brought from Jerusalem along with other relics when the sacred city ended up conquered by Saladin, the statue of the Virgin, who was already said to be miraculous, had remained sadly ensconced in the church of Saint Mark, one of the city’s richest, awaiting a definitive destination when the vulgar earthly debate over its ownership was resolved.
For the preservation of that wooden figure, brother Antoni had been on the verge of losing his life during Tripoli’s cruel devastation, which had been carried out by the long-haired, big-shot dervishes, the most fanatical and ferocious warriors among the Islamists, men who insisted on earning their glory by slitting the throats of Christians or having their throat slit by them—it was all the same.
Following several days of battle against the besieging forces who, both in men and in weapons, greatly surpassed the Christian defenders of the city, brother Antoni and some of his other brothers from the order had understood that the plaza’s fate was sealed and the only alternative was a sudden and humiliating retreat. But even amid absolute chaos, with Muslims running through the city streets, the knights had decided that they could not leave behind the order’s insignias and documents. Nor could they, as brother Antoni Barral told them, leave behind the statue of Our Lady whose ownership they had always claimed, since, according to the old knights, She had been found many years before amid the foundations of what had been for more than a century the Templars’ general barracks, located on the very site where the most trustworthy chronicles assured King Solomon’s Temple had been and where the Ark of the Covenant had been kept. Ever since Her fabulous discovery, the miracles and prodigies attributed to that Mater Dei, black as the oil flowed from deep within deserts, were several, like the prayers uttered to Her by the Knights Templar, Her most loyal devotees. And it was also the Templars who, to highlight Her beauty and make tangible Her power, had asked a Venetian master carver to liven up the effigy with colors and preserving Her with the best lacquers. For Her, Antoni Barral thought, it was worth risking his life. And thus he had decided with three of his brothers, whose swords, as they carried out the rescue, had made Muslim blood flow beyond the doors of the church of Saint Mark. Tasked by his confreres with transporting the Virgin given Her heft, as he was about to leave the sacred enclosure, Antoni had to watch how the three of his companions in arms and oaths, with barely a foot on the altar, fell under a storm of lances, rocks, arrows that flew over his head and by his sides without grazing him, as if the projectiles were avoiding him, he who was tasked with carrying the Virgin. Luck or a miracle? The Templar would ask himself this repeatedly and would again ask himself during the meditations in which he engaged on the day he thought would be the last one of his life, in the chapel of the Templar fortress of the condemned Saint Jean d’Acre.
With the Virgin on his back, Antoni Barral had crossed the vineyards and fields of olive trees that surrounded Saint Jean d’Acre and deservedly felt impressed by the magnitude and scale of the city. But when he passed through the magnificent double wall, through the door of Saint Anthony, the Templar had the unsettling feeling of having fallen into the most gigantic fair in the world. In the by then already-extinct Latin kingdoms of the Holy Land, all had always pondered the vitality of that city, the most populated, cosmopolitan, and rich of the Frankish possessions in Crusades territory, which had become the seat of the ancient kingdom of Jerusalem since the unlucky loss of the holy city. He always told himself, and Antoni Barral had the chance to confirm it with shock and surprise, that all of the riches and fantasies of the known world, all of its products and whims, any of its imaginable desires and luxuries, could be earned, purchased, or satisfied in that city and its port.
Within, above, against the majestic walls of Acre, men from a diversity of latitudes and races converged and mixed, from the pale Germanic Teutons, settled on their own street, to the very rich Genovese, Pisan, and Venetian merchants and artisans, each one of them with their own neighborhood, to the Catalan sailors, French, Lombard, and English crusaders, peoples from Byzantium, Greece, Cyprus, and even the far-off land of the Mongols, in addition to the ever-present Jewish merchants and bronze-skinned Libyan, Syrian, and Egyptian peasants, already converted to Christianity or still Muslim. Members of all religious and military orders had their general headquarters there and lived alongside dukes, counts, and even princes of possessions nearby or distant, real or fictitious, and with a high enough population of clerics destined to satisfy the demand for a cathedral, forty churches, several monasteries and hospitals, and countless internal chapels. And, of course, the city and its outskirts were also teeming with sailors, adventurers, professional warriors, scoundrels, and vagabonds, while an active army of all kinds of prostitutes, thousands of them, labored in its catacombs.
As he crossed the city, brother Antoni Barral had already perceived the vertigo of its commercial buzz and the frenetic rhythm of its peoples, clustered in the walled enclosure. From the Arab souk emanated the scent of perfumed oils mixed with myrrh, the aroma of meat roasting over the coals and sticky sweets, the stink of camel droppings, and the acidic smell of fermented milk, which neighbored the Jewish market where there shone the most coveted cloths while moneylenders, scriveners, and jewelers shouted out their professions, trying to impose their voices over the litany of their Moorish neighbors. Crowded streets led to the plaza where the also noisy Pisan and Genovese merchants offered their merchandise, sold spots on their very shiply ships toward all the ports in the Mediterranean, and even authenticated fragments of the True Cross and many bones belonging to saints and martyrs. Just across the street and in open competition with their neighbors, the always well-dressed Venetians devoted themselves to exalting the transparency of some recently imported, very fine glass cups, the quality of their mirrors, and the exclusivity of their latest products, in limited supply and also recently imported, originating in the Far East from where, they said, they had been brought by Marco Polo himself. A multitude of drunk and aggressive Lombards added to the chaos, as well as begging mutilated war veterans, Frankish soldiers stinking of lard and dried sweat, fanatics of the Torah, the Koran, and the Bible who were just as likely to announce the end of time as the arrival of the Redeemer in all of the languages escaped from the Tower of Babel.
Taken at last by the impressive fortress the order occupied in the far south of the city, close to the port’s breakwaters and the Iron Tower, brother Antoni Barral and his surviving colleagues had handed over the black statue of Our Lady to the order’s high chaplain. The brother, familiar with the history and majesty of the Virgin and the stories of Her miracles, had decided to give Her the best spot in the chapel, where the knights of the order usually prayed and in which, in recent years, they had carried out new initiations, old ceremonies about which envious and ill-spirited rumors had begun to propagate about indecent behaviors and heretical attitudes.
As the days passed, the initial sensation that Antoni Barral had regarding the illicit and unrestrained life in Saint Jean d’Acre went turning into a disquieting certainty. If at first he had thought that his judgment had been affected by the city’s luxury and rhythm, so foreign to his crude character as a plebeian born in a remote town in the Catalan mountains and his years of a nearly monk-like life in a post of the order close to the city of Tolosa, the daily behaviors of the inhabitants of Acre confirmed his initial assessment. Perhaps because of the knowledge that they were already sentenced to losing the richest and best-fortified city in the world to the hands of Muslim armies gathered under the leadership of the sultan Qala’un, all were engaged in frenetic dealings, scheming, swindling, and hoarding, while wine, saliva, and semen ran like the lava of an erupting volcano. No one there spoke of greater missions; all that mattered was gold and lust, this life, and not the next.
The plaza’s oldest inhabitants maintained that everything had been worse with the arrival of the Crusades contingent and who they called “the Italians,” made up of peasants and adventurers who came from the lands in the north of the peninsula, attracted more by the high wages promised than by the pure desire to combat the infidels and save for Christendom the biblical lands participating in a crusade that would never be. The straw that broke the camel’s back had been the violent inspections applied by “the Italians” to the Syrian and Libyan business owners and peasants, and almost any of the neighboring Muslims in the city. The expropriations, backed up by harassment, corporal punishment, and even several executions, had caused a rebellious attempt that forced the lax authorities to intervene and put the rabble-rousers in prison. But, in reality they were little disposed to punish some soldiers from the Church’s army and had returned “the Italians” to the streets with merely a scolding and, incidentally, had created the final excuse the Mamluks needed to break the truce with the city and initiate the military campaign that would decree its end.
The exception of that generalized debauchery that yelled to be punished offered the attitude of the members of the military religious orders, on whose backs often came down the difficult task of maintaining civil peace and preparing urgent military defense. But Templars, the Hospitallers, and the Teutons were well aware that their efforts were in vain and that their military abilities, even in combination with the city’s exceptional fortifications, could not withstand the already-announced massive attack. What they were not aware of, despite some veterans like Antoni Barral sensing it, was that their time in the lead and glory had passed. For them, there would be no future in Christian territories because they were arriving at the end of the days of the Latin kingdoms in the Holy Land, of the Crusades expeditions, and of the usefulness of the militias of Christ.
Among the princes, counts, dukes, maestros, bishops, and field marshals who rubbed elbows together in Saint Jean d’Acre, brother Antoni Barral met a man who, from the first encounter they maintained, seemed singular in his way of thinking, and he was dazzled by his character, which provoked both a strange feeling of empathy in him, because of how close he could seem, and of disquiet for how pragmatic and hard to grasp he also was.
The Great Captain Roger de Flor maintained he had been born in Germanic lands, but no one was convinced this was true, since at some point, they had heard him say he was a native of Brindisi, and at other points, of Barcelona. Depending on where he came from, he assumed a different name, sometimes Roger van Blume, other times Rutger Blume, but most frequently Roger de Flor. He himself talked one day about his belonging to a line of Germanic nobles, another time that his ancestors had been rich Bavarian business owners or Catalan sailors, and sometimes, he even introduced himself as the son of an Italian cardinal who was very close to Pope Gregory X. He said he knew all of the ports in the Mediterranean, and he prided himself on being the best captain and sailor that had ever navigated those seas. He was able to retell his participation in the greatest battles of the century and said he was friends with the greater part of the princes of Christianity. Since he was not yet twenty-five years old, everyone knew he was an incorrigible liar, but they enjoyed his talk and company because they also knew that amid his lies there were some great truths, like his capacities as a sailor, his very refined manners, and his ability to express himself fluently in ten different languages. There was a reason that the Great Maestro of the Order of the Temple, resolved to use what he could from the young man, had initiated him as a lay brother and had given him the title of Great Captain and the command of the greatest vessel that had ever sailed the Mediterranean: the Falcon of the Temple, built in Genoa and anchored in those days at the best dock of the port of Saint Jean d’Acre.
Despite the two men having such different characters, perhaps the empathy that Antoni Barral felt for the Great Captain Roger de Flor was due to the famous navigator’s weakness for Catalan sailors and the rough Aragon soldiers who made up, almost entirely, the crew that led and the militia that protected the floating fortress that was the Falcon of the Temple. The young captain had established such a rapport with those violent warriors that he spoke with them only in Catalan (a language that, depending on the moment, he could confirm was his mother tongue), knowing himself thus more protected from possible infiltrations of the murky matters in which he always seemed to be involved.
It was during a conversation in that tongue with three of his sailors that Antoni Barral first approached Roger de Flor and spoke to him in his native language. Although they already knew each other due to the frequent councils carried out by the brotherhood’s knights in light of the plaza’s complicated military situation, on that occasion they maintained a long dialogue thanks to which Antoni felt for himself the snake-charming qualities of that young sailor.
The Falcon’s bridge was the place where, throughout the months they both lived in Acre, the Templar brother and the captain met several times. To Antoni Barral—who for the first years of his life saw only rocks, mountains, and jagged creeks, goats and wolves, poverty and rigor in that valley in the Pyrenees where he had been born—the sea always offered him a feeling of freedom and glory that he did not tire of enjoying. In addition, from the port, he had one of the best views of the city of two walls and twelve fortified towers, with its many walls of yellow rocks shining under the sun, its impassable moats, and the multicolored banners raised above the city by different military, religious, commercial, citizen, and sailing brotherhoods settled there in the most crowded chrysalis of the known world. Before them, a symbol of force and power, was the fort of the Temple knights on whose protecting walls four proud lions, painted in gold lacquer and the size of oxen, watched over the city and the sea.
Compared to young Roger de Flor’s possible real life, Antoni Barral considered his own vulgar and expendable. At forty years of age, he could tell only the stories of his life as a peasant boy who, through a twist of fate, had received shelter at a Templar post in Roussillon, the neighboring area where he had arrived as a guide and assistant to two wandering knights, off to enroll themselves in a crusade and who had hired the kid’s services. His mission completed, as Antoni was waiting for the end of winter to journey back through the mountains via the Coll dels Llops, the young man paid for his room by working in the post’s fields, where he also had the chance to learn to read and write with a quickness that surprised everyone. His manual skills and intelligence for learning were noted by a Castilian cleric named Juan de Mendoza, and Antoni was admitted as an auxiliary brother and granted access by the post’s maestro to bookish wisdom and even the diligent military training that distinguished the order. Thus, thanks to the skills he had quickly acquired, but especially to the critical situation in the Frankish cities in the Near East, and despite his plebeian origins, Antoni Barral was ordained a knight and sent to carry out his mission as a Templar in that turbulent and cosmopolitan corner of the Mediterranean where the powerful brotherhood of warrior monks had grown and fought, and where its reason for being as an institution was now at play.
The day that Antoni Barral revealed to Roger de Flor how he had left the church of Saint Mark in the lost Tripoli, carrying against his chest the statue of Our Lady who was now placed in the fort’s chapel, the captain of the Falcon surprised him with a question that Antoni thought he had not at first understood. “Had it been worth risking your life for a wooden statue who was only that, a beautiful wooden statue of the kind they usually carved in these lands?” Antoni Barral had never questioned his actions in those terms, for him it was not only a “beautiful wooden statue,” so he immediately answered that of course it had been worth it, it would always be worth it, and three of his brothers had not died in vain in that mission, since it was a very special statue of Our Lady, who was the guide and patron of the order in which they both served.
“Very heroic,” Roger de Flor continued, “but you are speaking to me of two different things: of the divine being and all of Her representation. You saved a representation. Another one could always be made, right?”
Antoni smiled and said, “The representation embodies the divine, the sacred. Besides, that specific statue has been proven to possess high powers, everyone says so. In a representation, the essence of that which is represented can reside.”
Roger de Flor looked toward the city and continued, “Do you know that those Muslims advancing on us now do not believe in representations, on the contrary, they forbid them? And that in the ancient scriptures, God condemned all form of representing the divine and the belief in the supposed powers of idols and effigies?” The young man continued and Antoni Barral had to admit he was right, but he did not concede:
“Our religion changed things. We are neither heretical Jews nor unfaithful Muslims … The statue’s value lies in what it represents, and for us, She incarnates the divine Mother of God.”
Roger smiled. “And was Our Lady Black?”
Now it was Antoni who smiled. “The color is not important, it’s the material,” he maintained. “What is decisive is faith, which is the essential.”
Roger nodded: “You mix everything, brother Antoni, and you mix it because that statue that you rescued under the price of putting your life in danger is the fruit of those mixtures.”
Antoni didn’t understand. “What mixtures?”
Roger de Flor explained himself: “She is Black like the Osiris of the ancient Egyptians of the pharaohs, and She is Black like the Mother Earth of the old Celtic sagas of my country … And we, Christians, say She is Mary. All mixed in a beautiful carving of wood that could not have been buried for centuries in Solomon’s Temple because Her divine power is not great enough to overcome the weaknesses of the material: She would have turned to dust, my brother.”
“That is Her first miracle. Are there not incorrupt bodies? Couldn’t a Virgin be one?” Antoni Barral countered, although in reality, he understood less and less. Roger de Flor’s disquisitions surpassed his capacities of scholastic reasoning, but he did not stop: “What about the miracles?” Was it not enough that he and others like him believed, had faith, and received the benefits of miracles that were sometimes inexplicable? Roger watched him with his falcon’s eyes.
“Do you know that the French King Louis, whom some even claim is a saint, took a dozen Black Virgins like the one you rescued from these lands?”
No, Antoni did not know.
“Well he took them to Paris because they’re beautiful and because only here do they carve them so exquisitely and with such a great sense of Her power,” the sailor continued. “With them, the king aimed not only to adorn the churches of his kingdom devoted to Our Lady, but also to remind posterity of his Crusades in the Holy Land, which, as you know, in reality, were a military disaster. That was why he wanted these representations, solely to feed his legend and vanity.” Antoni Barral thought that perhaps the sailor was right, or partially right, but his convictions refused to accept it.
Roger de Flor retrieved a bottle of Bordeaux wine from his cabin along with two Venetian glasses. After taking the first sip, the captain pointed at Acre’s walls and towers with his outstretched arm and asked, “Do you know what is really being decided with the fate of this marvelous city?”
Antoni was surprised by the turn in the conversation.
“What is being decided is the fate of the Latin kingdoms in the Levant, the Christian presence in the Holy Land,” the Catalan Templar responded.
“Well, that’s what the propaganda of the faith says, the public and official version,” Roger de Flor began. “Remember that to satisfy that faith, another king, Richard of England, just one hundred years ago ordered the decapitation of thousands of Muslim prisoners in this same city because God gave him the license to kill infidels without homicide being a sin. And remember, by the way, that your beloved Saint Bernard was the one who offered the justification to the Lionheart, endorsed even by a pope, to promulgate that this is a holy war in which killing others does not constitute an offense against the Creator, but rather one more reason to approach glory. God save us!… But the truth, the truth, my friend, is that here, now, what is decided is the control of the most important commercial route in the world, the source of many riches, and that is why they are running around there with their swords and banners, those very well remunerated mercenaries of the Venetian, Genovese, and Pisan merchants. And the Church’s army of the violent Lombards … What is being decided is the possession of these marvelous lands, of their forests and valleys planted with grapevines, olive trees, and cedars, the control of the roads for the caravans that go toward the east, the control of dozens of ports, like the one where we are … At play is the ownership of the riches that will spell greatness, like Alexander, like the Caesars and the pharaohs, for whomever possesses them, in the name of Jesus or of Muhammad, of God or of Allah, which is all the same … And knowing this, you want to fight and you were willing to die for a piece of carved wood? Do you know that too many times already, many men died for material riches thinking in good faith that they were fighting in the name of some celestial glory? Do you know that that will soon happen here, in front of and behind those magnificent walls? And that it will happen many, many times throughout the centuries in which men live on this earth? Do you have any idea how faith, the search for good, a truth that does not allow alternatives, manipulated and exacerbated, can be a covering for hate unleashed in the name of God, of a prince, or of an idea? That while we Christians kill Muslims, the Muslims will kill and kill Christians, and that both groups will soon kill each other before this city and on this land, which they say is holy, and we will continue doing so for centuries and centuries always in the name of the faith, but in reality because of its riches, because of the quest for power?”
Antoni Barral looked at the Great Captain disquietingly as he shot out his insidious questions, and when he was able to process what he had heard, he said, “You speak like a heretic. No, worse still: like a necromancer who aims to race ahead of celestial designs … You say upsetting things. You are dangerous, Roger de Flor. Are you really who you say you are and from where you say you come from?”
The sailor took a drink from his very fine crystal glass and turned to face the ocean, golden in the late afternoon: “I come from there, the sea. The mystery of it is my faith.”
The spring brought to the plains surrounding Saint Jean d’Acre the armies of Muslim infantry and knights called upon by the young Sultan Khalil al-Ashraf, the heir to the throne of his father, the deceased Qala’un, whose mission the prince had decided to complete and whose death he wanted to avenge. For the Saracen leaders, there was no doubt that the sudden death of the great Qala’un had been the work of poisoning that the disciples of the Old Man of the Mountain did with such skill and frequency, the dissidents and mercenaries who were members of the sect of the Assassins, whose services had been bought by the nobles of Saint Jean d’Acre with the hope of thus saving the city. If they had carried out that procedure with the powerful Turkic sultan Baibars, poisoned in Damascus a few years prior, then they certainly had also carried it out with his own father, the young Khalil had said. And he, the warrior proclaimed, would very soon prove how mistaken the Christians were if they thought they would resolve their issue with a crime. A few weeks later, the sole contemplation from the Hugh, Henry, or Accursed towers of the plains inundated by the white covering of the most formidable of the Islamist armies, provoked terror and hurried a manifest destiny.
The city’s defenders had, for several days, watched the spectacle of seeing the advance, like ants, of armies coming from Damas and from the country of Misir, from Hama, and the rest of Syria, also those coming with the sultan from far-off Egypt. The estimates of the most trained warriors came to be fixed at 60,000 knights and 160,000 infantry dressed in white, who surrounded the city, accompanied by one hundred war machines among which stood out the most powerful catapult ever built: named “The Furious,” it required ten yoke of oxen to be moved and, as the defenders of Acre would soon find out, it had the power to launch projectiles of several quintals, with the ability to remove the most solid of walls. On April 5, 1291, the great purple tent of the Sultan al-Ashraf rose over a hill on which the crescent moon banner was already waving: the siege of the richest and most coveted Christian city on earth had begun.
On the morning following the start of the siege, Antoni Barral attended, along with all of his brothers, the mass held by the order’s Grand Master Guillaume de Beaujeu in the chapel of the Templar fortress. Once the liturgical rituals were concluded and Communion was taken, the leader of the knights began his rally speech: since reinforcements were not coming from the European Christian kingdoms, King Henry was in hiding and remained in Cyprus, and the supposedly central command of the city’s defense was proving itself to be incapable and generated little confidence, so they, the Templars, should assume the leadership that was theirs in principle. They would fight in the sector that had been assigned to them, to the north of the city, but they would respond without hesitation to the bastion that most needed them, which seemed to be that of the Accursed Tower, in front of the Royal Citadel, before which the procedures had placed several war machines. Enemy forces were so superior in number and weapons that the aspiration to a victory was naïve, he proclaimed. But each one of them, their oaths made on the cross and before Our Lady, should battle to the death in that holy war. There was no other mandate or decision. The order’s vocation and History demanded thus.
Captain Roger de Flor and his Catalan-Aragon militia would remain posted on the Falcon of the Temple, the Grand Master also ordered. If military luck was against them, his mission would be to take to Cyprus or the European coast all the wounded, women, and children who had not yet been evacuated and the priests with the churches’ treasures. Despite the ship being able to transport up to a thousand souls and a hundred horses, its space was going to be insufficient and, as such, the Grand Master concluded, none of the Templar brothers could escape on the ship. By their oath and honor, they must fight to their deaths to defend the bastion from the imminent attack by infidels.
The offensive siege against the city had been going on for five weeks already and, despite the many losses suffered by each group, more regrettable for the Christians, Saint Jean d’Acre was resisting. Never had those enemy armies, led by manifestations of irreconcilable fate, fought with such ardor. On the European side, as was expected, the lead had been taken by the Temple knights, under the direction of their indefatigable Grand Master and their skillful field marshal, Pierre de Servey. But the situation for the defenders was getting more and more desperate by the hour, since having just received the reinforcement of two thousand soldiers arrived from Cyprus, the city’s defense had been overtaken by the aggressions of the Muslim attackers and their war machines. All of the battle’s participants, on one side or the other of the wall, knew what the irrevocable ending would be.
In the battles at the foot of the wall or in some of the incursions to open land carried out by the Templars, Antoni Barral had again proven his abilities as a warrior. His sword and lance had plunged into so many Muslim bodies that it was impossible for him to make an estimate, and more than once, he thought that if all of that effort was going to be useless, wouldn’t it be preferable for the heavens to at last send him to his death and thus conclude all his dealings?
On the morning of May 18 of the year of our Lord 1291, Antoni Barral had nodded off due to the exhaustion accumulated in battle and the long hours of surveillance carried out in King Hugh’s tower when he was suddenly shaken awake. It was just getting light over the valleys to the east of the city, but brother Antoni could make out movement in the white mass, like a gigantic avalanche from which the beating of drums, the clanging of cymbals, and the sounding of trumpets and fifes made up the most terrifying war hymn, destined to provoke the attackers’ ardor and the confusion of the besieged. In front of the Muslims went the warriors who were carrying large, tall shields, followed by those tasked with launching apocalyptic projectiles of “Greek fire,” the feared ceramic containers loaded with a mixture of gas and petroleum that ignited when a wick was lit and that, upon exploding, was only possible to extinguish with vinegar. These were followed by the skilled javelin throwers and then came the squads of archers who, in a few minutes, darkened the pale sky with a cloud of arrows. Before the battalions of knights tasked with closing the offensive came the artillery units that made the already weakened city walls start shaking with the rounds of projectiles launched by the catapults. No effort seemed possible to stop the demolishing final advance: not the catapults of the besieged, or the boiling water, or the hot sand they threw from the heights of the Accursed Tower, from King Henry’s tower, and from that of King Hugh. The exaltation of the Muslims was such that the big-shot dervishes, like in Tripoli, were immolating themselves to block off the city’s moats with their own bodies and allow the advance of their army and the entrance to the plaza.
When the entire sector of the Saint Anthony watchtower came down, panic spread within the walls and those remaining in the city began to run toward the port, in search of the only possible escape. But the thick sea had been unleashed; perhaps the attackers had counted on it as a new ally, since it was impossible for the fugitives and the goods they did not want to abandon to board ships. Nonetheless, between the scimitars and the waves, many preferred to fight against nature and threw themselves to the sea, which voraciously swallowed them.
All seemed lost when somebody yelled that the Templar Grand Master, Guillaume de Beaujeu, was among those who fled. The only thing that prevented everyone from disbanding was the reappearance of the knight, dying on a stretcher due to an arrow wound in his left armpit. With what little strength he had left, the Grand Master managed to stand up and launched his agonizing clamor that the battle continue, since Our Lady the Mother of God would protect the faithful and reward them with an ascent to glory.
And the miracle occurred: the besieged withstood and on that afternoon the attackers, even those who had entered the city, returned to their kingdoms. For the moment, Saint Jean d’Acre, semidestroyed and licked by the inextinguishable flames of Greek fire, continued being Christian.
Before entering the chapel, on the day that, he was convinced, would be his last day on earth, Antoni Barral had climbed the wall of the Templar fortress and contemplated the city landscape. What a few months before had been a jumble of people and merchandise, all extended as protection against the rain and the sun, a lively and colorful souk like no other in the world, a brilliant city of dense glass skylights, libertine and arrogant, was just smoking ruins. The victors, dizzy with triumph and fed by their own hate, devoted themselves to destroying everything that could be destroyed, to lighting everything flammable, to profaning the sacred and the mundane, roused by the infernal rhythms of their musical instruments of war. That day in Saint Jean d’Acre, only the Templar fortress withstood as Christian territory where some two hundred brothers and several hundred terrified civilians waited for the painful denouement: in total, just about a thousand Christians from the more than 40,000 who took shelter and sinned in that city. Antoni saw behind him, at the port’s mouth, at a distance that protected it from catapults and arrows, the silhouette of the Falcon of the Temple, weighed down with passengers and bundles to the masts, willing to take the last survivors of the desperate final resistance to any safe destination. That was if any survived, and if it was possible to rescue the coveted treasure of the Templars that, despite Roger de Flor’s insistence, Marshal Pierre de Servey still refused to evacuate.
Watching the landscape of unleashed hate, vengeance, theft, fear, and pain, Antoni Barral thought in the final sense of his life. Why had Providence brought him to that place and juncture? How much had his personal decisions contributed? Or was it what some called the inevitable, luck, fate, the weight of History? If, so many years before that it seemed to have occurred in another life, he had not led those two crusading knights from the Catalan mountains to Roussillon, would his luck have been any better? In reality, Antoni Barral did not complain of the life that he been given to spend. In his land, he would have been a shepherd or a soldier under the king, like his father, his grandfather, his great-grandfather, always poor, illiterate, dead before turning forty in some battle against the Moorish armies or infected by the fever of the time. He, at least, had seen some of the most sparkling places in the known world: the city of Constantinople, rich Venice, the port of Marseille, the walls of Jerusalem, the beautiful Tripoli, the exuberant city of Acre. Only, seeing it all from this moment, which he recognized to be historic, he wondered if at some point in his life journey there existed a mistake or perhaps an unfathomable predestination to which what his fate had been was due. Ruled by that uncertainty, he got down from the castle wall and entered the deserted chapel, to kneel and pray before going out to kill and die.
With all of the delicacy and respect of which he was capable, even in that extreme circumstance, Antoni Barral kissed the Virgin’s outstretched hand before hugging Her and lifting Her from the altar. She seemed heavier than on the day in which he had removed Her from the church of Saint Mark, in Tripoli, but he credited this to his weakness and accrued exhaustion. And it was at that precise moment when he had the enlightened certainty that everything in his life had been organized so that he could fulfill this specific mission. Until then, without asking his will, fate or History had led him, as it had taken him to a church in Tripoli and allowed him to leave the place without receiving a single wound, while his brothers fell one on top of the other. A greater plan, of inextricable purposes, had organized it all. And he knew that he would live, that the Black Virgin would be saved from the attackers’ religious hate, and that Her celestial figure would accompany the faith of some men for many centuries.
When he left the chapel’s atrium, the veteran warrior saw a scene that was the closest match possible to the Bible’s descriptions of the Apocalypse: the front wall of the fortress had ceded to the Muslim sappers, and below the mountain of rocks, over which two of the magnificent sculptures of golden lions lay in agony, defenders and attackers, like in infernal vision, were bleeding out and burning, all apparently surprised by the collapse. The thundering music of the Mamluks continued, floating over the sweet smell of charred flesh. But, save for the dust and the flames sprouting from the fallen rocks and the blood that was running alongside the rocks on the ground, everything seemed frozen.
Amid that cataclysm, as if he were the last inhabitant of the city and the world, Antoni Barral walked toward the opening in the wall. Climbing over rocks and the bodies of friends and enemies, rebalancing himself to not lose his precious cargo, he searched amid the flames for an exit toward the nearby port. When he had crossed the ruins and taken the path that led to one of the still-surviving docks, the man needed to readjust the weight of the Virgin, since he could no longer hold Her with only his arms. He made an effort and managed to lift Her over his right shoulder, so She could rest there, against his neck. And when he made the first step in traveling forward again, he heard the whistle and felt the impact, but did not stop. With his left hand, he looked for the source of what had yanked him and touched the polished wood of an arrow that had sunken into the Virgin’s side, precisely at the level of Her carrier’s throat. Antoni Barral did not have time at that moment to think about what the confluence of actions meant: only that, due to having changed the position of the Virgin, he was still alive, fulfilling his mission. With that thought in mind, he moved forward to the end of the breakwater, from where he saw the port abandoned by vessels, although full of corpses that the tide moved, like the remains of a macabre shipwreck. And, in the distance, unreachable, the Falcon of the Temple with its sails already unfurled to the wind. Then he again placed the statue over his chest and, without thinking of his possibilities, Antoni Barral handed himself over to his fate: he allowed himself to fall into the sea just as a gigantic wave was breaking against the rocks that caused a shower of foam darkened by blood that was running from the devastated city. On the crest of the wave, they floated for a few moments, trapped in an embrace, a man and a representation of the Blessed Mother who, together, had to continue on a long path through the inextricable spirals of time.