A History of the World in 100 Objects (50 page)

As another demonstration of religious renewal, the friars were calling not just for good works but for a good war, and the Franciscans and Dominicans were among the most effective advocates of the Crusades. As St Hedwig drank her wine, the Crusades were in full swing. In 1217 her brother-in-law, the king of Hungary, took the cross and led an armed expedition to the Holy Land. The curious thing is that, despite this military activity – or perhaps because of it – trade seems to have flourished. David Abulafia, Professor of Mediterranean History at the University of Cambridge, elaborates:

The contact between Europe and the Middle East in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was built around some quite intense trading. The Venetians, Genoese, Pisans in particular, managed to carry on their business – this sometimes caused a certain amount of scandal as you can imagine, that they were still present in the port in Alexandria for instance, while Saladin was preparing his campaigns against the Christians in the Holy Land. The basis of this trade was the exchange of raw materials from the west for luxury goods which came out of the Islamic world, notably silks, glassware, ceramics, things like this, which could not be produced to anything like the same quality within western Europe.

It is this phenomenon of trade coexisting with war that explains one of the most extraordinary things about the Hedwig beaker.

The designs of the Hedwig beakers all feature similar images: a lion, a griffin, an eagle, flowers and geometric motifs. But this beaker is the only one that combines all these elements. There is a lion and a griffin each raising a paw in homage to the eagle that stands between them, and the deep-cut design runs all the way round the glass. A mould must have been pressed into the glass while it was still hot and soft, and details of the texture and pattern were then meticulously carved. There is a real sense of feather and fur, but, above all, there is a strong sense of style. I think many people, shown this without explanation, would think it was a great piece of 1930s Art Deco glass, possibly from Scandinavia. The Hedwig beakers certainly don’t look like anything produced in medieval Europe, which may well be why this extraordinary group of glasses was associated with a miracle.

These beakers clearly did not originate in the world in which they were found. The question of where they did originate is one people have been asking for more than 200 years. We may now be nearer an answer, because scientific analysis of this glass, and other Hedwig beakers, shows that they were made not out of the potash glass of European tradition but out of the soda ash glass of the coast of modern Israel, Lebanon and Syria. The Hedwig beakers are all so similar in shape, material and style that they must have been produced together, in a single workshop, and that workshop must have been in one of those coastal cities – the glass was almost certainly made by Muslim craftsmen. We know that at this period a lot of Islamic glass was made for export to Europe: ‘Damascus glass’ appears in the inventories of many medieval treasuries. Acre, the main trading centre of the Crusader kingdom of Jerusalem, was the principal port for this trade. Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith, a historian of the Crusades, sets the scene:

Acre, which is now in Israel, became the most important commercial port in the eastern Mediterranean, which meant that shipping from the West was bringing out European cloth and bringing back spices to the West. We have a fascinating list of commodities traded in the port of Acre in the middle of the thirteenth century, with the customs duties that were due on each commodity. It doesn’t actually mention these glass beakers, but it mentions Muslim pottery as one of the main items that would have been taxed. So the appearance or survival of beakers of this sort in Europe has to be seen in the context of the enormous trade between the West and the Levant, and further east to furthest Asia, that was passing through a Crusader port.

All this opens up an intriguing possibility. We know that Hedwig’s brother-in-law, the king of Hungary, spent some time in the city of Acre. Could he have commissioned the beakers while he was there? It would explain why they were later connected to Hedwig, the family saint, and how they came to central Europe. A fragment from a Hedwig beaker has been found in his royal palace in Budapest, so it is a realistic possibility. It can’t, of course, be any more than a guess, but it is a beguiling hypothesis, and it might just be the solution to the long-running puzzle of the Hedwig beakers.

Most people have thrown a coin or two into a wishing well or a fountain for luck. Every day at the famous Trevi Fountain in Rome, tourists throw in coins worth about 3,000 euros to secure good luck and a return visit to Rome. People have been throwing valuable things into water for thousands of years. It is an extraordinary compulsion, and it hasn’t always been coins tossed with a light-hearted wish; in the past, it was often a deadly serious plea to the gods. In rivers and lakes across Britain archaeologists regularly discover weapons, jewellery and precious metals that were given to the gods thousands of years ago. In the British Museum we have objects from all over the world that were once solemnly or joyously deposited in water. One of the most fascinating is a mirror thrown into a temple pool around 900 years ago in Japan.

In a famous Japanese history called
The Great Mirror
, written around 1100, the mirror not only has a voice, but the power to reveal Japan to itself:

I am a plain old-fashioned mirror from a bygone age, made of good white metal that stays clear without being polished … I am going to discuss serious matters now. Pay close attention, everyone. You should think, as you listen to me, that you are hearing the Chronicles of Japan …

The British Museum’s mirror was made at about the same time, although it’s only very recently that we’ve found out exactly where it came from and what that new information tells us about the Japan of 900 years ago. The story our mirror can now tell is about lovers and poets, court women and goddesses, priests and emperors.

The mirror is circular, about the size of a saucer, and it sits comfortably in my hand. There isn’t a handle, but it would originally have had a loop fixed to it so that you could hang it from a hook. It is not made of silvered glass – the modern, silver-backed mirror we are all familiar with didn’t come into use until around the sixteenth century. Early mirrors like this bronze one were all made of metal, which was then so highly polished that you could see your face in it.

Like much else in Japanese culture, mirrors first came to Japan from China. Around 1,000 years ago, societies across Eurasia were vigorously trading goods and exchanging ideas and beliefs. Throughout the eighth and ninth centuries Japan had been an energetic participant in these exchanges, particularly with China. But lying right at the end of all the great Asian trade routes and isolated by sea, Japan, unlike almost any other culture, was able to opt out of this interconnected world. It is an option Japan has exercised several times in its history, as it did most strikingly in the year 894, when it stopped all official contact with China and effectively cut itself off from the rest of the world. Untroubled by outside influences or new arrivals, Japan turned inwards for several centuries, a decision which still resonates today, and developed its own highly idiosyncratic culture. At the court in Kyoto every aspect of life was constantly refined and aestheticized in the pursuit of ever more sophisticated pleasure. It was a society in which women played a key cultural role. It is also the era of the first significant literature written in Japanese – written, in fact, by women. As a result, it is a world we know quite a lot about, and it’s the world of our mirror. The person who first used it could well have been reading that first great Japanese novel – indeed one of the first great novels of the world –
The Tale of Genji
,
written by the court Lady Murasaki Shikibu. Ian Buruma, an author and expert on Japanese culture, fills in the background:

Lady Murasaki was a little bit like Jane Austen.
The Tale of Genji
gives an extraordinary insight into what life was like in that aristocratic hothouse of the Heian period.

One thing that distinguishes medieval Japanese culture is that it was extremely aestheticized; it turned beauty into a kind of cult. And that included everything in daily life; not just objects – like mirrors, or chopsticks
or whatever it was – but life itself, which was of course highly ritualized. In an aristocratic society it always is. That’s true of all aristocratic societies, but possibly the aristocracy of the Heian period went further than any other culture before or since. People communicated by writing poetry, they had incense-smelling contests, they were connoisseurs of every kind of aesthetic pursuit, and that included the relations between men and women. Of course, feelings came into it, and so that led to jealousies and all the normal forms of human behaviour which Murasaki recorded so beautifully.

We can see something of Lady Murasaki’s world of aesthetic refinement and incense-smelling contests in our mirror. On the back, the elegant decoration shows a pair of cranes in flight, their heads thrown back, their wings outstretched and pine branches in their beaks. Their necks curve to match exactly the curve of the circular mirror. On the outer edge are more decorative pine fronds. It’s a rigorously balanced, perfectly composed work of art. But as well as being beautiful, our mirror also had a meaning: cranes had a reputation for longevity – the Japanese believed that they lived for a thousand years. Lady Murasaki tells us of one of her contemporaries who, at a particular court event, wore a gown decorated with cranes on a seashore:

Ben-no-Naishi showed on her train a beach with cranes on it painted with silver. It was something new. She had also embroidered pine branches; she is clever, for all these things are emblematic of a long life.

The cranes also carry another meaning – these birds mate for life, and so are symbols of marital fidelity. The message on the back of our mirror is quite simply one of enduring love. At one point in
The Tale of Genji
the princely hero, before setting off for a long absence, takes a mirror, recites into it a passionate love poem and then gives it to his beloved, so that by holding the mirror once he is gone she will be able to hold both his message of love and within its polished surface the image of Genji himself. Our mirror with its faithful cranes would have been a particularly appropriate vehicle for such a declaration of love.

Japanese mirrors could also communicate darker messages, and not just between humans – through them we can enter the world of the spirits and indeed speak to the gods. Ian Buruma explains:

The mirror in Japanese culture does have several meanings, and some of them may seem contradictory. One is that it’s an object to ward off evil spirits, on the other hand it can also attract them, which is why if you go into a rather traditional household in Japan even today people often cover up their mirror when they don’t use it – they have a cloth that they hang in front of it because it might attract evil spirits. At the same time it’s a sacred object. In the holiest shrine in Japan, in Ise, the holiest of holy parts that nobody ever gets to see has one of the three great national treasures, which is indeed a mirror …

The mirror at Ise is in fact the mirror of the great Japanese sun goddess, Amaterasu. By ancient tradition, at the dawn of time Amaterasu ordered her grandson to descend from Heaven to rule over Japan, and to help him in this imperial task she gave him a sacred mirror that would give him and his successors perpetual access to the divine sun. To this day the sacred mirror of Amaterasu is used in the enthronement ceremonies of the Japanese emperor.

It is this particular ability of Japanese mirrors to allow humans to speak to gods that has ensured the survival of our mirror, which with eighteen others was given to the British Museum in 1927. All these mirrors are made of bronze and all have the same distinctive matt surface. But it was only in 2009 that a Japanese scholar researching in the British Museum was – for the first time – able to tell us why all nineteen mirrors look like this. It is because all of them came from the same place – all were found in a sacred pond beneath the mountain-shrine of Haguro-san in the north of Japan. At the beginning of the twentieth century this pond was drained in order to build a bridge for pilgrims. To the astonishment of the engineers, deep in the mud at the bottom of the pond they found around 600 mirrors (ours among them) which over the centuries had been consigned to the water. The visiting Japanese scholar, the archaeologist Harada Masayuki, sets the scene: