David Gibbins - The Crusader's gold

The fictional jungle temple with its wall-painting is based on a remarkable discovery in 1946 by two American adventurers in the Yucatan, at a place which became known as Bonampak, Maya for “painted walls.” Inside an overgrown corbelled building they found a narrative wall-painting of extraordinary power, showing a jungle battle, the torture and execution of prisoners and victory celebrations, including white-robed Maya ladies drawing blood from their own tongues. The painting dates from the height of the Maya period, about AD 800, but another painting, in the Temple of the Warriors at Chichen Itza, dates from the time when the Toltecs swept into power in the eleventh century. It shows canoe-borne Toltec warriors reconnoitering the Maya coast, a great pitched battle on land and the heart-sacrifice of the captured Maya leaders.

If you visit the ruins of Chichen Itza today, you are likely to be told that the stories of human sacrifice were exaggerated by the Spanish or relate only to the Toltecs, not the Maya, whose descendants still occupy the Yucatan. You can reach your own conclusion at the Tzompantli, the Platform of the Skulls, where you can look past the sculpted rows of decapitated heads towards the sacrificial altar on the Temple of the Warriors and then gaze down the ceremonial way to the Sacred Cenote, the Well of Sacrifice. Many of the depictions of torture and execution in Maya and Aztec art pre-date the arrival of the Spanish, and the latest techniques of forensic science are, almost literally, adding flesh to the picture: archaeologists in Mexico have discovered that the floors of Aztec temples are soaked with iron, albumen and genetic material consistent with human blood.

In the Yucatan, the most telling evidence comes from underwater archaeology. The Well of Sacrifice at Chichen Itza, dredged between 1904 and 1911 and excavated by divers in the 1960s, contained hundreds of human skeletons-men, women and children-as well as a treasure trove of artefacts: gold discs, carved jade pendants, a human skull made into an incense burner, a sacrificial knife, numerous votive wooden figurines and other offerings. The story is similar at other cenotes in the Yucatan, including several in the ring of sinkholes that formed over a huge meteorite impact site close to the north coast. Many of these cenotes remain unexcavated and are vulnerable to looters. The fictional cenote in this book is based on my own experience exploring these sites, and especially diving in the spectacular caverns and passageways of Dos Ojos, “Bat Cave,” near the Maya coastal stronghold of Tulum.

The story of the last days of the Maya kings, almost two centuries after the Spanish conquest, is based on the account of Father Andres de Avendano y Loyola (Relation of two trips to Peten, made for the conversion of the heathen Ytzaex and Cehaches), who was eyewitness to this extraordinary scene beside the remote jungle lake of Peten in 1695 or 1696. A further fragment of this account came to light in the 1980s, and is quoted in Chapter 21. The true source of Maya gold, as described by Avendano and found by archaeologists in the Well of Sacrifice at Chichen Itza, remains a mystery.

The quote at the beginning of the book is from Josephus, Jewish War VII, 148-62, translated from the Greek by H. St. J. Thackeray (Loeb Edition, Harvard University Press). Old French quoted in Chapter 2 is the actual inscription visible in the lower left-hand corner of the Hereford Mappa Mundi. The Bible quote in Chapter 4 is an abridgement of Exodus 25: 31-40, King James Version. In Chapter 5, the two quotes from King Harald’s Saga, part of the Heimskringla by Snorri Sturluson, were translated by Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Palsson (Penguin, 1966). The poetry in Chapter 13 is from Morte d’Arthur by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-92). In Chapter 15, the sentence in Old Norse describing Harald’s sea voyage is fictional, but the phrases that make it up are taken verbatim from the thirteenth century Eirik’s Saga, describing the Norse voyages to Vinland. The Old Norse phrase par liggr hann til ragnaroks, “there he lies until the end of the world,” comes from the poetic Edda (Gylfaginning 34) also by the prolific Snorri Sturluson, written down some time in the early thirteenth century.

The two silver coins described in Chapter 15-and one of them in the Prologue-truly exist, and can be seen along with other images from this book at www.davidgibbins.com.