In Patrick Leigh Fermor’s incomparable A Time of Gifts, he takes the occasion of his 1933 visit to Dürnstein castle in Austria as an opportunity to recount the story of Richard the Lionheart’s imprisonment there in 1193.

After lifting the siege of Acre in the Third Crusade, the story goes, Richard was offended by Leopold of Austria flying his standard too near to Richard’s.  They quarrelled and Leopold left for home.  Richard followed a year later, after reaching a truce with Saladin.

Travelling in disguise through Austria after being shipwrecked on a pirate ship at the head of the Adriatic, Richard was discovered by Leopold’s men either because of his good looks, his demand for roast chicken (supposedly a royal dish), or by the ‘careless splendor’ of his expensive gloves; accounts vary.

In any event, Richard was imprisoned in the castle at Dürnstein:

From the west barbican a long crenelated wall ran steeply up the mountainside to the tip of a crag that overhung both the town and the river… Lancets pierced the remains of the battlement walls, there were pointed arches and a donjon; but, except for the clustering stumps of the vaulting, all trace of a roof had gone and firs and hazel-saplings grew thick in the crumbing cincture.   This wreckage was the fortress where Richard Coeur de Lion had been imprisoned. (A Time of Gifts, pp. 184-185)

Leopold turned Richard over to his suzerein, Henry VI, the Holy Roman Emperor, who demanded an enormous ransom of 150,000 marks (the equivalant of 65,000 pounds of silver, several times Richard’s entire annual revenue) for his return.  His mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, raised the ransom at the same time that Richard’s brother, John, offered the emperor 80,000 marks to keep him captive.

Legend says that Blondel, Richard’s minstrel, rescued him by “singing outside of every likely prison until his friend’s voice answered with the second verse.”  Another legend says that Richard’s place was taken by a substitute hostage, Hugo de Morville, the murderer of Thomas a Becket on Richard’s father’s orders.  Subseqeuently, that legend holds, he introduced Pervical, Tristan, Lancelot, and Yseult into German mythology.

In the 1980s, a Hungarian immigrant to the US claimed that he had seen what is now called the Cloisers Cross in the Cistercian monastery at Zirc in the 1930s.  This incomparable little Romanesque masterpiece, intriciately carved from walrus ivory, is one of the glories of medieval art.

The immigrant’s account formed the basis of Norman Scarfe’s conjecture that the cross was a part of Richard’s ransom, since we know that Samson, the Abbot of Bury St. Edmond’s from 1180-1212, “was instrumental in raising the ransom, went to Dürnstein with many gifts, and contributed significant treasures from his own abbey church.”  (Parker & Little, p.16 )

(Zirc is about 300 km. east of Dürnstein.)

Thomas Hoving, the Metropolitan Museum curator who bought the cross — a story memorably recounted in his King of Confessors — always ascribed it to Bury St. Edmond’s but was never able to explain how the Yugoslav art dealer Topic Mimara acquired it or where it had been for the intervening nine hundred years.

Did Samson take it to Dürnstein to ransom Richard?

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Hoving, Thomas. King of the Confessors (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981)

McPhee, John. A Roomful of Hovings (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969)

Parker, Elizabeth C. & Charles T. Little. The Cloisters Cross (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994)

Scarfe, Norman. Suffolk in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 1986)

Wikipedia has a new capability to create books out of articles.  For example, a friend is on a trip this week to the Holy Land.  Based on her itinerary, I created a collection of articles that I thought might be relevant as background for her.

It’s quick and easy to do; you turn on the book creator function and then add links to your book.

There’s an option to export to .pdf, Open Office format (.odt), and even to a physical book publisher for a fee.  My book, which took only a few minutes to create, clocked in at over 500 pages and would have spanned two physical volumes.  I don’t think it’s worth it for the printed version — mine would have cost more than $50 — but for something like a Kindle or a netbook, an easy-to-read .pdf version would be a useful reference to have, I think.

More on the Basque country:

There’s an old beautiful rustic church,the ermita de San Adrián, located on a hillside outside of the town of Elorrio (near Durango).  “Ermita” literally means “hermitage,” so strictly translated it’s “Hadrian’s hermitage” but I think “the chapel of San Adrián” better captures the feel of this single-roomed church. Perhaps there were hermits associated with these little chapels that are so common in the Basque country, but I sort of doubt it.  A cluster of farmhouses might share an ermita, and today people visit them only on the feast day of the saint associated with the chapel.

Characteristic of medieval Basque churches/chapels, San Adrian has a red-tiled loggia around the building.  Supposedly, this served as a meeting place for the local community in the past.  Here, for another example, is the tenth century (i.e., roughly contemporaneous in time) “Basque Romanesque” church of San Pelaio between Bakio and Bermeo on the coast:

I don’t know why the ermita in Elorrio is associated with Saint Hadrian (Adrián), or even which Adrián it honors.  After a thousand years, it’s a wonder the physical thing is still standing.

Interestingly, the San Adrián chapel preserves a covered bowling alley, above, with a sloped dirt floor:

The bowling ball was a large round piece of wood, not the small cannonball sized balls used in the Italian and French versions.  Bowling is common enough across northern Spain but is especially associated with Leon, where my family’s from.

The church was locked the day we visited but I was able to take photos through a knothole in the door.  I was surprised by how well they came out:

But San Adrian is most famous for its enigmatic old cemetery, the necropolis of Argiñeta, a graveyard bounded by a fence of vertical stone slabs with above-ground stone burial chambers.  The chambers are plain rectangular stone sarcophogi, some with decorated round steles (you can see some of them in the interior photos of the church, too.)

Inscriptions on some of the sarcophogi, which are made of sandstone quarried on the nearby Mount Oiz, date them to the 9th century.  According to tradition, the remains in the graveyard were collected here from ermitas in the surrounding area.  Twenty are supposed to be of Visigothic nobles who died while fleeing, wounded, from Muslim armies.

The other three (or five?) are said to be pre-Christian tombs, with round steles, seen above.  One tomb is a double, probably indicating a married couple.  I’m not sure it that’s one of the Visigothic Christian ones or the supposed pre-Christian ones.  The local area figures prominently in Basque pre-Christian religious mythology; the goddess Mari’s home is on nearby Mt. Amboto.

(Surprisingly, the alphabet was only invented once and all alphabets are genetically related to each other, branches from this one root.  Devanagari is linked to Latin letters via Brahmi and Aramaic.)

But in order to write Sanskrit correctly, you need some Latin letters not used in English.  This is a common-enough situation; think of accent marks, or the French and Portuguese cedilla — ç — or the Spanish enye — ñ — or even Motörhead’s heavy metal umlaut.  So, for example, “Devanagari” ought to be written “Devanāgarī” and “Pali” should be “Pāḷi.”  The complete set of diacritics for Pali is: ā, ī, ū, ṁ, ṇ, ñ, ṭ, ḍ, ṅ, ḷ .

There’s another, separate but related, issue about when to use these ‘extra’ letters and marks; for native English readers, the argument goes, these ‘extra’ letters and marks — called diacritics — are distracting and make the words harder to read.

Specialists typically prefer to preserve diacritics, because losing them changes the meaning of the word in its original language.  The question comes down to: “when do these foreign words become English words?”  There’s an active debate going on now on H-Buddhism, an academic Buddhist studies mailing list on this very topic.  Dictionaries are split on the issue, with some words preserving diacriticals and others losing them: for more on this, see the list of Buddhist Terms Found in English Print Dictionaries and Gerald Jackson’s series on fonts and diacritics in academic publishing.

The problem arises when you need to write diacritics in your friendly word processing application.  This immediately leads to a technical conversation about Unicode and Unicode fonts.  Which is when things start to get hairy.

The best starting point for Unicode issues is Alan Wood’s page,  It’s worth reading for the introduction, as an overview of the topic of digital transcription.  More specifically, for the topic at hand, the Tibetan & Himalayan Digital Library has a good survey of Unicode fonts for transliterating “Indo-Tibetan” languages.

(By Indo-Tibetan they mean Indian languages for Buddhist studies, including Sanskrit, Pali, Gandhari, and so on, plus Tibetan.  “Indo-Tibetan” isn’t a language family like Indo-European but the term point to the very close relationship between Tibet and India.  Buddhist Tibetan is a specialized language unreadable to a native Tibetan, optimized a thousand years ago to translate Buddhist Sanksrit into Tibetan.  Smart people have been dealing with these issues for a long time.)

They make the point that not all Unicode fonts contain the necessary characters, so simply choosing a Unicode font isn’t enough: “To properly display all the diacritic marks used in Indo-Tibetan studies, a Unicode font must contain the following character ranges:

• Basic Latin: U+0000 – U+007F (View Unicode Chart)
• Latin-1 Supplement: U+0080 – U+00FF (View Unicode Chart)
• Latin Extended-A: U+0100 – U+017F (View Unicode Chart)
• Latin Extended-B: U+0180 – U+024F (View Unicode Chart)
• Latin Extended Additional: U+1E00 – U+1EFF (View Unicode Chart)”

From Wikipedia’s “Pali transliteration on computers.”

The Tibetan Digital Library people also have a good chart of relevant diacritics.

(In the distant past, like five years ago, there were various gnarly work-arounds, including the now-deprecated Times Norman / Normyn font.  Nobumi Iyanaga has written a useful library of scripts to convert from Times Norman / Normyn to ‘good’ Unicode.)

So, what are the practical options for a good font  for transliterating Sanskrit and Pali today?  It seems to me that there are at least five good choices:

Times Ext Roman

The Tibetan Digital Library people really like Times Ext Roman.  But the only source for it is the Bahá’i Computer & Communication Association and it’s not clear to me what license its published under so I would be reluctant to recommend it even though I trust that it’s technically valid.

Gentium

If you can get past SIL’s Christian missionary agenda, they do outstanding linguistics work and their Gentium font is well regarded, seems complete for the purposes of transliterating Sanskrit and Pali, is widely accepted, is under active development and is licensed under a good, if idiosyncratic, open source license.  It’s a nice-looking typeface, in my opinion.

IndUni

John Smith has recently updated this font family.  It’s exactly designed for the topic under discussion, “the representation of Indian-language (and similar) material in Roman script using the Unicode character set.”  But he’s just one, albeit committed, guy and I don’t know what license he’s publishing these under, so I worry about its long-term supportability.  But worth mentioning; sort of in the same category to me as Times Ext Roman.

TransIndic Transliterator

There’s also a commercial product, TransIndic Transliterator in Unicode, from Linguists Software that seems like it does the job, although I don’t know much about it.  It costs $100 per typeface (they have Times, Palatino, Arial, etc.) or $250 for the whole thing.  Commercial license.  Paying for it has the advantage of having someone on the hook to help you with it, not a small thing.

Gandhari Unicode

This nice-looking typeface was originally designed to transcribe the newly discovered Buddhist manuscripts from Afghanistan.  (Gandhari is another Middle Indic prakrit like Pali.)  Gandhari Unicode is under active development, which is good, and seems widely accepted.  (Main page, download.)

The license status of Gandhari Unicode is a little bit troubling; it’s based on work licensed under the “Aladdin Free Public License” which isn’t, despite the name, a free public license.  The Free Software Foundation considers it a non-free license.  Other parts of Gandhari Unicode are GPL-derived but I don’t understand which takes precedence.  Note that the link in Andrew Glass’s documentation to the Aladdin license (at Wisconsin) is out of date.

[26 August 2009 update: According to reliable reports, there are issues with Gandhari Unicode's spacing, especially italics, when printed.]

There isn’t an indigenous American sadhu tradition, ascetic wanderers on the (south Asia) Indian model.  But we do have, thanks to our vast open spaces, celebrated individual instances of semi-ascetic wanderers in the American West and Alaska.  Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild documented the life and death of Chris McCandless, for one, and discussed another, the poet and artist Everett Ruess (1914–1934), whose disappearance at the age of twenty added to his romantic mien the appeal of a good mystery.  Others in this category include, prototypically, John Muir, Edward Abbey, and Henry Thoreau, although Thoreau was a wimp compared to, say, Dick Proenneke or Daniel Suelo — who combines Indian sadhu experience with southern Utah sliprock country, like Ruess — or the Peace Pilgrims (I & II).  But it’s a category that has broad appeal, I think, and the most moving part to me of Krakauer’s book was the self-reflection (I can’t remember now if it was at the beginning or the end, but it involved a story about risky solo climbing in southern Alaska) piece in which Krakauer, like me, admitted to feeling some of what McCandless was after.

So: Everett Ruess.  He grew up in southern California and started taking long trips by himself from the age of sixteen in California and the desert southwest.  He knew Ansel Adams, Dorthea Lange,  and Edward Weston and wrote, painted, photographed, and made block prints, mostly of the natural world.

David Roberts has an excellent story about the search for Ruess, who was last seen alive in Escalante, Utah in the autumn of 1934, walking out of town with two little burros and a week’s worth of food, headed for the Hole in the Rock trail.  His family expected him back in two months’ time and when he didn’t return, they started searching.  They found his camp the next spring in Davis Gulch, a tributary of the Escalante River near the present-day Lake Powell.  His two burros were still in their pen but there was no sign of Ruess.  Roberts believed (in his 1999 article) that Ruess was killed by cattle rustlers and buried in a rough grave near his camp.

But recently, in 2008, an archeologist working on a Navajo reservation excavated a grave, located 77 miles east of Ruess’s last camp, with remains that matched Ruess’s.  Subsequent DNA testing with surviving family members suggested a genetic match, as well.  The site was excavated based on an account of an elderly Navajo who recalled his grandfather’s story of witnessing the murder of a young white man in 1934.  Roberts, the author of the previous story, revisits the case in a subsequent article, in which he concludes that the earlier accounts must be wrong  — the burros weren’t really there — and that this is indeed Ruess’s last resting place.

But the story doesn’t end there: the AP and the New York Times report that the Utah state archeologist has raised doubts about the findings, particularly a mis-match between the remains and Ruess’s known dental records.

So Everett, like so many others, may still be out there.

I’d never heard of Malhār before, which goes to show you how much I know.   The site was excavated between 1975 and 1978, I think by the University of Sagar, but I haven’t found the excavation reports yet.  It’s clearly a large, important site; from the satellite imagery you can distinctly see several enormous circular moats surrounding large ruined structures.  The site may be synonymous with either or both of the ancient cities of Śarabhapura and Mallalapatana.  For more on this debate, see the Introduction to Ajay Mitra Shastri’s Inscriptions of the Śarabhapurīyas, Pāṇḍuvaṁśins, and Somavaṁśins, esp. p. 122 of the introduction, not the main volume.  (I’m still trying to get up to speed on my South Kōśala history, so please pardon the inevitable errors.)

Jitāmitra Prasāda Siṃhadeba’s Cultural Profile of South Kōśala mentions (p. 298)  ‘colossal’ images of the Jain Tirthankaras found there, and Byomakesh Tripathy’s survey article “Buddhist Remains in Western Orissa [.pdf] refers to images of the Buddha, Avalokitesvara, Manjusri, and Hevajra.  And Doris Meth Srinivasan, in her Many Heads, Arms and Eyes, describes a supposedly well-known large (5′) four-armed Vaisnava image found at Malhār.  So it shouldn’t be too surprising to find the Ājīvikas represented here, too.

The Pakistan Taliban war is being fought in areas that 1500 years ago were Buddhist. The districts of Dir, Buner, and especially Swat are rich with Buddhist ruins, a record of a time when they were part of the Gandharan Buddhist heartland centered on the ancient capital of Taxila, now on the outskirts of Islamabad/Rawalapindi. Padmasambhava, for instance, was from Swat, ancient Uddiyana, before he went on to convert Tibet to Buddhism. These were rich, sophisticated centers of learning and art, famous for their monasteries, now sadly the locus of much suffering.

[updated 13 May 2009 with the maps above; for more detail you're wanting John Huntington's gorgeous map.]

[22 June 2009: It turns out that the identification of Uddiyana with Swat is contested; it might instead refer to modern-day Orissa, in eastern India.]

(It’s not clear to me if the natural catastrophe of 1314 both wiped out Cranganore and created the port of Cochin, Vypin Harbor, or one or the other.  There may be two events, one of which is the flooding of the Periyar River in 1341 [1341, not 1314].  The other might have been an earthquake.)

Pictured is the far eastern edge of the Tabula Peutingeriana, what might be roughly described as a Roman map, where you can clearly see Muziris on the southern shore near the island of Taprobane (Sri Lanka) and on the edge of an inland lake — the Kerala backwater, presumably.

Did all this spring from nothing?  It seems that there were, in the first centuries after Christ, wandering bands of celibate renunciants in Syria.  And we know about sadhu-like movements and charismatic preachers throughout the world of late antiquity in the eastern Mediterranean.  Around this time there were also ‘philosophical schools,’ such as the Neopythagoreans, which had many characteristics that later came to be called monastic.  But there are many ’sadhu-like’ movements and philosophical schools and few monastic ones.

Only Christianity, Buddhism, and Jainism today have monastic traditions.  Islam never did, unless you count sadhu-like sufi orders.  Likewise Hinduism; definitional sadhus, no monasticism.  Neither did Judaism have monks or nuns, although the Essenes are fun to argue about.  Manicheaism did, and that might be a clue, since Mani lived just before Anthony.  But the Manichean elect were a different than the monastic orders of Christianity, Buddhism, and Jainism.

Buddhist (or Jain) connections to Christian monasticism cannot be proven and represent a bit of a third rail in the study of (at least Christian) monasticism.  I’ve always imagined that a place like Edessa, at the end of the Silk Road, or a cosmopolitan trading port like Alexandria would be good places to look for evidence.

A friend suggested the trade routes from India via Axum in Ethiopia and up the Nile but that got us talking, as we drank beer at Hanger 24, that a much simpler connection is via Syrian Christians on the south Indian coast.  The timing is right; Syriac Christians have lived in what is now Kerela since nearly the time of Christ and there has always been trade back and forth.  Syria is one of the two monastic centers from the early period.  And there were Buddhists in south India in the first centuries AD.  That’s no proof of anything, of course, but not a bad thesis to test either.

Lacking textual evidence, I think monastic architecture might be a good place to start; even within the Buddhist world it’s not obvious to me how the ruins of a Gandharan monastery in Pakistan are similar to those of a monastic complex in Japan or Tibet or Burma or Thailand or at other south Asian sites like Nalanda or Ajanta.  If you could develop a pattern language of monastic architecture to describe the Buddhist variety, you might be able to match that against the Christian variety and identify degrees of similarity or difference.