The Rope!

Few centuries have been more troubling to western civilization than the 11th, and nowhere was this more obvious than among its spiritual leaders, the popes. Benedict IX, was deposed twice before his third election secured his title.

Gregory VII—or Saint Gregory—was driven from Rome to die in exile. His successor, Victor III, only reigned 16 months before he too died. Thus, the Cardinals meeting in 1088 to elect a pope sought more than a mere mortal; they wanted a political genius; someone who could whip the feuding secular princes into a military force that would depose the despised antipope sitting in Rome as Clement III. And they found him in the Cardinal Bishop of Ostia, Oro of Legery.

Six years of bitter fighting passed before the Cardinal Bishop entered the Eternal City as Pope Urban II, but even that hadn’t put an end to his rival, and the new pope’s thoughts turned to eliminating this competitor for the papacy permanently, and no way seemed more promising than that of stripping away Clement’s allies in yet another war, and if there was a question, it was: Where should that war be fought?

Centuries of Islamic incursions into Christendom had left most of the Iberian Peninsula, Turkey and the Holy Lands in Moslem hands, but by Urban’s time these attacks had stalled at every point, and any victory along that line would benefit the local lords, not the papacy, so he wondered where he might roll the Muslims back to his advantage: a place that would bring fame and glory to all of those participating while handing any land or power gained to himself, and he found it: All of Christendom would unite in a great Crusade to free the holy city of Jerusalem! And he proposed this in a sermon delivered to the Council of Clermont on Tuesday, November 27, in the year of our Lord, 1095.

Little is known of Urban’s plan other than that he asked Europe’s Christian nobles to be on the road to Constantinople the following August with all the forces they could muster. And—as Urban forgave his adventurers in advance for any and all sins they might commit while fighting his ‘holy war’—the roads leading eastward out of Europe in the year 1096 were crowded with the scurviest human beings imaginable.

This First Crusade swept all before it in a three-year orgy of murder, rape and mayhem that reached its zenith on July 15th, 1099 when Jerusalem fell—a feat they celebrated, in the name of a most merciful Christ, by demonstrating their new-found skills of murder and torture on as many of the city’s inhabitants as they could, but after a week or so of unmitigated debauchery, they awoke to find the place devoid of a single living citizen to further sin against. So they offered up a great Te Deum, thanking God for their success, elected Godfrey of Bouillon protector of the area, collected their loot, and headed home.

Not all the relics trickling back to Europe with them were authentic of course, but among those eventually winding up behind bullet-proof glass were: the Spear of Longinus—the spear allegedly thrust into Christ’s side while he was on the cross. It now resides in several European museums with one in Austria being particularly touchy about theirs being the only authentic one; the Shroud of Turin—which took centuries to be proven a medieval fraud; enough fragments of the True Cross to build a fleet of arks; saints’ bones by the ton; and perhaps one other item, and it is of this that I speak.

Jerusalem was also rumored to have contained the era’s only satanic relic: The rope used by Judas Iscariot to hang himself. But with the city’s entire intelligentsia slaughtered, the rumor was not verifiable. Thus, if the rope ever actually existed and managed to survive the 11 centuries separating Christ from the First Crusade, all traces of it have vanished with one possible exception: In an age when kings and nobles tended to be buried where they died, one ordinary knight, Sir Geoffrey of Beaconaught, was given a funeral that’s arrangements were extraordinary unto the unique.

When Sir Geoffrey’s body was prepared for its return to Europe in the year 1114—and there is a quaint lacking of the word ‘death’ in mentioning this event—the local bishop ordered that his body, and all attached to it, be sown into a linen shroud totally covered with interlocking embroidered crosses. The body was then placed in a stone sarcophagus whose surfaces—both interior and exterior—had been covered with engraved crosses. And when this had been done, the bishop himself sealed the sarcophagus by encircling it with seven chains with crosses cast onto each link; and these were bound with seven cross shaped locks. And within the cross carved into the stone lid over the knight’s heart, the bishop affixed a metallic cross inscribed with a warning in Latin, Greek, and Coptic, “Beware the Seven Seals.” On the cross’ obverse, in an alphabet obscure even at that time, were further inscriptions. And at each of the cross’ four corners a pool of blood red wax was poured into which the bishop’s seal was imprinted.