A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [134]
The anonymous faces of the girls and boys of Samarra were never meant to be viewed by anyone other than the familiars of a caliph. They have survived as a rare record of the people of the Abbasid age, and they now remain to look at us, as we look at them. Ironically, and rather wonderfully, instead of the images of the grand caliphs who built Samarra we see their slaves and their servants – retrieved from Hollywood cartoon caricature to poignant historical reality.
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Lothair Crystal
Rock crystal depicting Susanna and the Elders, probably made in Germany
AD 855–869
Royal divorces generally mean political trouble. The marital problems of Henry VIII plunged England into decades of religious strife, and when Edward VIII wanted to marry a divorced woman it caused a constitutional crisis that cost him his throne. This object is associated with a king whose protracted attempts to divorce his queen were intended to safeguard the kingdom. His failure to do so probably killed him, and it certainly led to the termination not only of his line but of his kingdom as well. The object, an engraved rock crystal, tells us his name. Written in Latin, the inscription reads: ‘Lothair, king of the Franks, caused me to be made’.
The Lothair Crystal, also known as the Susanna Crystal, is a flat disc of rock crystal about 18 centimetres (7 inches) in diameter, and carved into it is a biblical (or in some traditions an apocryphal) story in eight separate scenes, like a crystal cartoon strip. It is a story based in Babylon, where the beautiful young Susanna is the wife of a rich merchant. While she is bathing in her husband’s orchard, two older men intrude and try to bully her into having sex with them. She calls her servants for help, and the furious elders falsely claim that they saw her in the act of adultery. We then see Susanna being led away to almost certain death by stoning, but at that point the brilliant young prophet Daniel intervenes and challenges the evidence for her conviction. Separating the elders, Daniel asks each of them one searching question in a classic courtroom drama: under what kind of tree did they see Susanna having sex? The men give conflicting answers, their story is exposed as fabricated, and it is they who are stoned to death, for perjury. In the final scene Susanna is declared innocent and gives thanks to God. I asked Lord Bingham, former Lord Chief Justice and Senior Law Lord, to give us a lawyer’s perspective on the story:
Daniel did what Rumpole of the Old Bailey would do if he thought he was cross-examining witnesses who were telling lies. In real life Daniel would have been extremely lucky to have been thought to have demolished the witnesses and to demonstrate their dishonesty by asking them one question each, but the principle is quite clear, and Daniel was clearly a very skilful cross-examiner.
Each scene on the crystal is a masterpiece of miniature carving, and in every scene the artist has also found space for a small text in Latin, explaining what is going on. In the final scene is the ringing phrase Et salvatus est sanguis innoxius in die illa – ‘And that day, innocent blood was saved’. It’s around this scene that we find the text naming King Lothair.
The king who commissioned the Susanna Crystal was descended from one of the great figures of medieval Europe – Charlemagne. Around the year 800, Charlemagne, King of the Franks, had created an empire that covered most of western Europe, including northern Italy, western Germany and modern France. It was the largest state western Europe had seen since the fall of Rome,