The Road to Jerusalem by Jan Guillou

The Road to Jerusalem by Jan Guillou

I am just starting on The Templar Knight, which is the second book of Jan Guillou’s Crusades Trilogy to be published in English, just this year. The Road to Jerusalem came out maybe two years ago in English. The whole trilogy was first published in Swedish a decade ago and I think it is fascinating, judging from the Road to Jerusalem, that a book so favourable to Medieval Christianity should come from writer such as Guillou.
But maybe his positive view of Christianity will become more negative in the second and third books as the book moves from pagan and primitive (brutal, short) Scandinavia to the Holy Land.
As a stand–alone swashbuckler, Road is excellent. But it is more. In recounting the nurturing, and spiritual and martial training that Arn Magnusson receives at the hands of French monks who have only just established themselves in Sweden of the 12th Century, he provides what I take to be a quite accurate, detailed, (anecdotal rather than systematic) description of the process of Church as civilizer, humanizer and light-bearer.
We see the monks introducing basic sanitation, harnessing of wind and water power, advanced musical forms, literacy and so on. In the schooling of young Arn, we listen in as the precocious youth debates just war theory with his learned abbot.
We see the baneful effects of hard living in a rugged environment on the Swedes’ economic thinking. Why improve sanitation? the nobility wonders. That will simply mean more serfs survive, meaning more mouths to feed. The monks’ idea that more serfs mean more production and more wealth all-round is shown at the beginning of its revolutionary spread into Scandinavia.
From what I have read (most recently, in The Triumph of Reason, by Rodney Stark) this is a a valid depiction of the monastic movement’s impact on Europe: the foundation layers for capitalism, in his telling)
Of course, this is a swashbuckler. One of the monks is an ex-Crusader and a master of many weapons. I’m not so sure about how likely such a martial artist would have been in that culture; it seems a more Asian model,a nd a Hollywood Asian model at that. The Crusaders were practical and classist. The knights were heavily-armoured lance- and sword-bearers. Archers were for yeomen who fought on foot and wore little armour. Occasionally a strong leader and wise tactician—Richard the Lionhearted, for example—correctly combined the two elements on the battlefield: but their combination in one and the same person, I’m guessing, was not so common in the West. (However, the Turks and Saracens quite happily employed horse-borne archer/knights and, to fight them, so did the Byzantines).
Guillou interweaves his story of Arn’s upbringing to full knighthood and proficiency at arms with a social history the bloody, vengeful competition for power among rival nobles, in which marriages were arranged for policy and murders justified by the slimmest of moral technicalities.
Arn of course finds himself a love match but (this is a trilogy, after all) it is thwarted by powerful forces. So far.
In all of this the Church appears as a mostly benign, uplifting force. This would be surprising enough these days, but Guillou’s own background makes it doubly so. A left-wing investigative journalist, he exposed a Swedish government domestic spy ring (infiltrating leftwing organizations) and went to jail for a year. Later he was himself exposed as a paid operative of the Soviets; not quite a spy himself. In another series of novels, his hero is a contemporary Swedish special ops agent who counters activities of the Americans.
Any mature Swede who thought the Soviets were his country’s friends and the U.S. its enemies would, on the face of it, seem deeply delusional.
And yet, there is this book suggesting a different way of thinking entirely.
Whether Guillou avoids stereotypes in the Holy Land (which his hero reaches in Book Two) I will let you know. But he does so impressively in the Road to Jerusalem. It is a well-researched, well-written adventure story with the bonus of giving the Church its due.