Wordless…

Friday, 26 April 2019, 11:59

From Nikitas Choniates, 12th century Byzantine writer:

Thus the wretched Andronicus was arrested, bound, and thrown into a boat together with the women…

He was confined in the so-called prison of Anemas with two heavy chains weighing down his proud neck, the iron collar used to fetter caged lions, and his feet were painfully shackled. Bound in this fashion he was paraded before Emperor Isaakios (Isaac II Angelos – his cousin)…

He was slapped in the face, kicked on the buttocks…his teeth pulled out…he was even battered by women who struck him in the mouth with their fists…

Afterwards his right hand was cut off by an axe, he was cast again into the same prison without food and drink, tended by no one.

…one of his eyes was gouged out, and seated upon a mangy camel, he was paraded through the agora.

…there was no evil which they did not inflict wickedly on Andronikus. Some struck him on the head with clubs…some using foul language reviled his mother and all their forebears. There were those who pierced his ribs with spits…pelted him with stones…

There was no one who did not inflict some injury on Andronikus.

To those who poured forth one after another and struck him, he turned and said no more than, ‘Lord have mercy,’

Removing the short tunic they assaulted his genitals. A certain ungodly man dipped his long sword into his entrails by way of the pharynx…

…raised their swords with both hands…they brought them down, making trial as to whose cut was deepest.

After so much suffering, Andronikus broke the thread of life, his right arm extended in agony and brought around to his mouth so that it seemed to many that he was sucking out the still warm blood dripping from the recent amputation.

From mysterioustimes.com Jan 2019:

“On the Holy Shroud – the professor adds – I have counted 370 flagellate wounds, without taking into account the lateral ones, which the canvas does not offer because it only enveloped the anterior and posterior part of the body. But we can launch the hypothesis of about 600 hits. In addition, the three-dimensional reconstruction has allowed us to reconstruct that at the time of death, the man of the Sindone was bent to the right because the right shoulder was so severely dislocated that it had injured the nerves “

The Ravens of Dinefwr Chronicles

The Ravens of Dinefwr is the first in a series of novels-in-progress set in the early 12th century. It follows the dispossessed members of the South Wales House of Dinefwr from their origins in Deheubarth to the centre of the known world, Jerusalem. Come and be my fellow Far-Farer. Come travelling and unravelling with me through Wales, Norway, Ireland, England, Scotland, France, Russia, Constantinople, Italy, the Balkans, the Holy Land. Come and Far-Fare through every degree on my 12th century compass.