Sibylla - A Play on First Crusade

While working on petrochemicals in Saudi Arabia and having a lot of spare time in the desert, over 1996-1998 I wrote a play called "Sibylla" (ISBN 0 75410 117 7). This came from my overall interest in history which perhaps I ought to have studied at university in 1955 instead of natural sciences. My interest was aroused by a book by Professor Norman Golb of the University of Chicago on the Dead Sea Scrolls where he mentioned the discovery by Solomon Schechter in 1898 of many very old letters and documents in the store room of the Jewish Synagogue of Fustat in Cairo. This treasure-trove of documents is now at Cambridge University.

One of these letters was 900 years old and had been written by the Jewish Rabbi of a town in Provence after what seems to have been a massacre of Jews by the passing of the Crusading Army en route to the Holy Land in 1096. The letter asked the Jewish community in Cairo to look after the destitute wife of one of the prominent citizens - I call her Sibylla - with her last remaining son, as the community had been decimated and the husband killed. The town may have been 'Monieux' but the name had been obscured on the document and may have been somewhere else. Monieux would certainly have been on one of the routes of the Provencal army.

Who was Sibylla? Apparently she was the daughter of a Norman knight in Normandy and therefore Christian. How was it that she had married the scion of a Jewish family from Narbonne in the south? I assume in the play a love affair, an elopement and the bad luck of moving to an obscure town, which just happened to be on one road to Jerusalem.

I went to Monieux in 1997 and spent four days wandering around the old village and climbing up to the medieval watchtower on the hill, with most of the town within fortifications on the hillside itself. I was quite moved to relive some of the history of a family now dead for 900 years. Anyway my play tells the story as I imagine it to have been. The country side was beautiful and I was struck by the color of the lavender fields, so dark a blue that they were almost black!

This ancient story is quite relevant to today when we have yet again sent a crusading army into the Middle East with our own leaders showing considerable ignorance of Arab and European history. In 1096, the Normans justified their massacre of Jewish communities by saying 'We desire to attack the enemies of the Lord after travelling eastward over great distances of land, while before our very eyes are the Jews, who of all people are the greatest enemies of the Lord'.

How sad that it is still all so familiar 1000 years later! We have not changed very much.