Ilja Pfeijffer - La Superba

It was called La Superba, and even though you weren’t inside its walls yet, you understood exactly why this was. You stand in front of the Porta Soprana, the tall, elegant city gate flanked by two tall towers. The whole thing is so perfectly in proportion it looks more like the façade of a cathedral than an impregnable bulwark. It is said that the dimensions and proportions of the gate were calculated by a secret order of monks and that the magic of their mathematics protects the gate and paralyzes enemies of the city. Banners bearing the religious insignia flutter from the proud towers, the blood-red cross, as fiery as the burning belief in the holy cause, on lily-white ground, as white as the pale innocence of pure intentions. You are part of the holy army and you’ve finally reached the holy city, which is the gate to the holy land. The powerful army of crusaders has returned home to the crusade’s most powerful city so that it can finally sally forth. In Genoa, it will board thousands of galleons with billowing sails to head east in the name of the one true belief with the flaming swords of the only true God to free Jerusalem from the dark hordes with their scimitars, kneeling before a false prophet. Good will defeat evil. God will triumph over the devil. And you, a simple shield-bearer, will be part of the holy mission to steer the history of the cosmos onto the right path.

The golden king of France and the English king with the heart of a lion line up on their horses between their troops and the closed gate. The golden king recites each of his hundred honorary titles and greets the city. His horn blower gives the signal. His drummers beat their biggest kettledrums. The doors to the mighty gate swing open. The two kings give the order. The biggest army the world has ever seen enters the city.

Hundreds of thousands of knights on horseback, followed by a seething horde of foot soldiers, lancers, archers, chaplains, servants, and shield-bearers goes through Porta Soprana along Via San Lorenzo, past the cathedral, and down toward the port. The sound of hoofbeats, tinkling metal, footsteps, drums, and trumpets echoes between the city’s high buildings. You can’t believe your eyes. The streets are made of stone. You’ve never seen anything like it. The towering marble palaces are decorated with the most blinding ornaments. They have large windows of transparent glass. There are banners with the holy insignia all over the place. You can hardly take in the cathedral for all of its beauty. It’s the biggest building you’ve ever seen. It is built of different colors of marble in white and gray stripes. The façade is an overwhelming display of sculptures, columns, mosaics, and ornaments in different colors. A people capable of building a thing like that must be the richest and wisest on earth. The last palace before the port is decorated with a towering mural, so colorful and true to life that you’re almost afraid of it. It is of Saint George. He is dressed in a suit of armor and seated on horseback, wearing a cloak, and carrying a shield with the holy insignia. He is the patron saint of the crusaders. His lance pierces the throat of a terrifying dragon, exactly like this army’s swords will pierce the black throats of Satan’s monster with its hundreds of thousands of heads, the Moors, worshippers of the false god, in Jerusalem.

But the people make the greatest impression, the city folk who have gathered along the route to see the army with their own eyes. You might think that such a large army might instill fear, even with its good intentions. But there’s not a trace of fear to be seen in Genoa’s eyes. The people exude something impenetrable. They recognize no superior. Dressed in tasteful costumes made of the finest and most expensive fabrics, they look lofty, haughty almost. It is as though they know that the mightiest army the world has ever seen is nothing more than a temporary guest and will have to pay for its sojourn in this eternal city with many chests filled with silver. But the women make the greatest impression. You can see them hanging out of the windows of their palaces or on their marble balconies. The women you have known in your life were farm girls or shepherdesses. They had coarse hands, coarse tongues, and two udders you could squeeze for a farthing. The women of Genoa are aristocratic and as slender as princesses, as finely cut as an ivory trinket, with large knowing eyes, their gazes fiery and arrogant. They know no superior. When they speak, they sing, and when they are silent, they recite poetry.

And then all of a sudden you see her. For the first time in your life you see the sea. A big blue reflective surface that reaches out cool and impenetrable to the horizon. You feel like you are going to faint, but luckily you manage to stay on your feet.

12.

But soon you grow to hate the city. There was no space to erect the tents at the port. The knights slept on satin cushions in the many palaces in the city, while their craggy, silent hosts arranged girls to waft coolness over their well earned resting beds with their rustling fans for a small surcharge. They were in less and less of a hurry to leave. You slept with the foot soldiers on the quayside using your empty knapsack as a pillow. You felt yourself being fileted and pickled by the burning sun. It was an enormous operation, embarking such a large army. Troops were regularly rowed over to the black, heaving galleons in the distance, but there were so many of you. You began to do the math. At this rate, it would take weeks, not to say months, to get everyone onboard. By now you were hungry. But the impenetrable, superior Genoese who had admired your entrance into the city turned out to be even more arrogant and shrewd than you thought. They perceived your hunger as merchandise. With thousands of starving foot soldiers on their doorstep, they raised the price of bread by three cents. Dried fish were sold by auction. By now the sanitation was inadequate. To put it mildly. There were outbreaks of illness. Good men died of coughing or blackfoot. The Genoese implemented a ban on leaving the overheated quays and placed soldiers in the shadows to stop you going into the cool alleys to steal water from the fountains. The warm, salty water at the port didn’t taste nice, not even in combination with soup made from shoe soles and horse droppings. The silent Genoese folk didn’t even smile. They took no malicious pleasure in this, that much you’d understood. They stood and watched. They silently raised their prices. Rats scratched around your improvised bunk. You began to wonder what they’d taste like. One evening you tasted one and what you vomited up in disgust was greedily scooped up by your bedmate.

It wasn’t much better onboard the ship. At least on the Genoan quay you’d had fresh air, however relative that concept was in close proximity to hundreds of thousands of sweating, dying foot soldiers from the biggest army the world had ever seen. The smell of sulfur left by Lucifer himself permeated the galleon’s hold. Lucifer, the prince of utter darkness, who tried to suffocate the soldiers of the army of angels with their own breath. Thin shit streamed along the joists. The planks creaked.

13.

The disembarkation in Palestine was coupled with a great display of power. Above deck, the flags were raised and the trumpets blown, while below deck, you lay in your own vomit and shit, green with misery, among the stinking bodies of your comrades-in-arms. Your lord and master was the first to jump ship in his shining suit of armor, just like all the other lords and masters in their shining suits. It wasn’t until their empty words had died away in the wind that you could stagger, more dead than alive, up the beach. And while, at a full gallop with a drumroll and a fanfare of trumpets, an immediate advance was made on the holy city of Jerusalem, which had fallen into Muslim hands, the biggest enemies of your God and of civilization, you needed a moment to recover from the journey. There were palm trees and shade. There was a sea breeze. You managed to get away from the others. You needed a little rest before fighting the soldiers of evil and spitting in the face of Satan himself, sword raised. Just a moment. Five minutes of rest. You fell into a deep sleep.