Crusader Gold Read Online Free PDF

the Byzantine throne among the Crusader ranks, and the stage was set. Pope Innocent III found himself unwittingly sponsoring the sack of the second city of Christendom, the focal point of the Eastern Church. Once they arrived at Constantinople, the Crusaders forgot the Holy Cross and behaved like any other marauding army of the Middle Ages, only with a ferocity and barbarism unparalleled even for that period.”
    “What happened?”
    “Imagine if an army out of control landed in London and stripped all the public statues, desecrated Westminster Abbey, emptied the British Museum, burned the British Library. All the symbols of nationhood and the treasures of empire lost in a single blood-soaked rampage. In Constantinople the holy warriors applied their much-vaunted Christian zeal to the great churches, Hagia Sofia foremost among them, looting the hallowed relics of a thousand years of Christianity. They destroyed the libraries, descendants of the ancient libraries of Alexandria and Ephesus, an incalculable loss for civilisation. They stripped the Hippodrome, the ancient racing circus that was the focus of the city, leaving only the fragments of sculptures you see there today and a few monuments too large to pillage.”
    “The Egyptian obelisk of Thutmose III,” Hiebermeyer said, nodding.
    Jack gestured at the screen. “We know that Constantinople was the inheritor of all the greatest treasures of western civilisation. Priceless artefacts that had once been in Egypt and Greece and the Near East were first brought to Rome as the empire expanded. Then, when Constantine moved the capital, many of these treasures moved with him, shipped across the Mediterranean from Rome to Constantinople. The Horses of St. Mark’s may originally have been fifth-century BC Greek creations, perhaps embellishing the famous sanctuary at Olympia. Five centuries later they’re in Rome, on top of a triumphal arch of Nero in the Forum, part of a sculptural group showing the emperor drawing a four-horse quadriga.
    The arch was destroyed by Vespasian but the image survives on Nero’s coins.
    Four centuries after that they’re here in Constantinople, perhaps in the Hippodrome beside that obelisk. And remember, Constantinople had never been sacked before 1204. The treasures that, from eyewitness accounts, were plundered by the Crusaders can only hint at what was here. Some of the loot was melted down for bullion and coin. Other treasures, like the Horses of St.
    Mark’s, were shipped back to Venice and the Crusader homelands—France, Spain, the Low Countries, England—where they may still lie secreted away in the great cathedrals and monasteries. And other objects, especially antiquities with pagan symbolism, were desecrated and hurled into the Golden Horn.” He paused. “When Peter Howe and I first heard this story we became convinced that one of the greatest troves of ancient art anywhere in the world may lie on the sea floor below us now.”
    There was a sudden commotion behind them as Costas drew his chair up to the video screen. Hiebermeyer’s eyes remained on the image of the horses and he put his hand on his friend’s shoulder.
    “You say anything from ancient Rome could have been brought here,” he said quietly. “Last year after our little adventure on the Black Sea I was called to Rome to translate an Egyptian hieratic text found on the site of Vespasian’s Temple of Peace, near the spot where the fragments of the marble plan of the city were found. It proved to be one of a series of bronze plaques attached to the public colonnade of the precinct, each with an identical text in all of the main languages of the Roman Empire: Latin, Greek, Egyptian, Aramaic, you name it.
    They were proclamations listing Vespasian’s victories and Rome’s triumph. Their subject was the Jewish War.”
    Jack turned from watching Costas and looked Hiebermeyer full in the face, his dark eyes fathomless.
    “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”