The second to the last fictional character from the Last Crusader Kingdom that I'd like to introduce is Ayyub the mason.
Ayyub enters the novel late and has only a cameo role, but he is
vitally important nevertheless. Although I take issue with the conventional
thesis that Cyprus was re-populated by during Guy de Lusignan’s short
reign and without opposition, the fact that many former inhabitants of the
Kingdom of Jerusalem found a new start on Cyprus is indisputable.
Significantly, the settlers were not all noblemen -- nor all Latin Christians.
The famous passage attributed to Ernoul describing the settlement of
Cyprus includes the following revealing passage:
The knights, sergeants and burgesses whom the Muslims had dispossessed…set
off and came to [Cyprus]…[The king] gave rich fiefs, both to the Greeks and the
knights he had brought with him and to shoemakers, masons and Arabic scribes….”
As I have said earlier, the account of the settling of Cyprus is
highly romanticized and severely abbreviated. That it should include such
explicit mention of such humble professions as shoemakers and masons ― not to
mention Arabic scribes, who were hardly needed on Cyprus ― is extremely
significant. Ernoul (or whoever wrote this account) clearly wanted to highlight
the fact that the dispossessed of all
classes and all communities emigrated
to Cyprus. It is particularly significant that he underlines the fact that Greeks
and the Arabic-speakers also took advantage of the new opportunities on Cyprus.
My character Ayyub is, like Lakis, a double representative. On the one hand, he is a man of
common birth, a tradesman not a knight or nobleman, yet no less impoverished by Saladin's victories. Obviously, not all of the dispossessed
of the lower classes had been slaves. Some were simply driven from their homes by the advancing
armies of Saladin. Yet, tens of thousands of working-class Christian men had gone into Saracen slavery. With Ayyub, I
wanted to connect back to Envoy of
Jerusalem and remind readers of the fate of the Christians who had fallen
into Saracen hands in the course of the collapse of the Kingdom of
Jerusalem.
On the other hand, Ayyub is a
representative of the non-Latin communities in the crusader states. Far too
many novels set in this period completely ignore the bulk of the population:
the Orthodox Christians of the Holy Land. Making Ayyub a Melkite Christian was
a means of reminding the reader of the large Melkite populations in the crusader
states.
By making Ayyub an Arabic speaker, I not only link directly to the
text above (that stresses the emigration of Arabic-speakers to Cyprus), but
remind readers that the many native Christians had adopted Arabic names and
spoke Arabic. It was this use of Arab names and language that has long confused
historians into believing that a larger portion of the population of the crusader states
had converted to Islam. Yet to this day there are tens of thousands of
Christians living in Syria and Lebanon, whose names sound Arabic to us and who’s language
is Arabic, yet whose religion is Christian.
But Ayyub is also Antonis because the Arab-speaking, Orthodox immigrants
to Cyprus evidently did not retain their Arabic names or language for long.
Sharing the same religious rites as the native Greek population to a greater extent than the Latin elites, they
integrated more rapidly, married local girls and soon adopted Greek.
Last but not least, by making Ayyub/Antonis a mason, I could emphasize
the extent to which Cyprus needed to be rebuilt. The roughly three-hundred
years of Frankish rule on Cyprus were a period of extensive and expensive
building. Cathedrals, castles,
monasteries and palaces were built across the island. Although earthquakes and
the Turks have managed to destroy most of what was built in this period, the
fragments remaining are monuments to the quality, ingenuity and artistic capabilities
of the engineers, masons, sculptors and glass-makers of the last crusader
kingdom.
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