To God be the glory
MY BUCKET list is mostly cathedrals and ports — God and trade; so I was delighted by a recent excursion to Seville Cathedral, and then by train to Cádiz. I am proud of Ely Cathedral, local to me, but stunned by the height of Seville, demonstrably the architecture of heaven.
From the bell-tower of Cádiz Cathedral, you can see across a city of stalks: the merry towers of houses where merchants watched their ships come in. Not all of them made it, since the English “pirate” Sir Francis Drake managed to intercept ships returning from the Americas and, of course, destroyed the Armada as it set sail in fury to invade England.
The link between God and trade is partly that merchants set prices on their souls. The Hanseatic League, which spanned four centuries, was responsible for the profusion of grand churches in small villages in Norfolk. A couple of years ago, I followed a route from King’s Lynn to Lübeck, Visby, and the Baltic states — a medieval trading route that produced sensational churches and cathedrals.
Et in terra pax
WITH glory came power. The German city of Lübeck, for instance, was pivotal. The future Pope Pius II wrote in Germania, in 1458: “Among all the cities, Lübeck stands out, because it is dotted with beautiful buildings and richly ornamented churches. The authority of the city is such that with a single nod it can instal or depose the rulers of the mighty kingdoms of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway.”
It is the city perhaps best known now for Thomas Mann and his creation of the Buddenbrook family, wealthy merchants from Lübeck for whom “business is really a fine, gratifying calling, respectable, satisfying, industrious, comfortable.”
I sought out the Mann house, of which only the façade is left, after the rest was destroyed by Allied bombs, along with other German cities. War is the enemy of both God and trade. The Victorian radical Richard Cobden described free trade as “God’s diplomacy”, because there was “no other way of uniting people in bonds of peace”.
Theme and variations
I UNDERTOOK my favourite God-and-trade journey in 2019, when I traced the route of the Queen of Sheba on her way to Solomon for a BBC World Service programme: “. . . And she came to Jerusalem with a very great train, with camels that bare spices and very much gold and precious stones. . .”
She was a queen in her own right, and her name resonates across the Abrahamic faiths and in different geographies. Yemen and Ethiopia both claim her, and there is even a theory that she might have been the Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut. Perhaps the journey of the Queen of Sheba was based on the expedition to Punt, which brought back riches from the Horn of Africa, and which is depicted on the walls of Hatshepsut’s temple at Luxor.
I conflated the Queen of Sheba’s journey with the frankincense route, and hitched a ride on a UK warship going from the port of Salalah in Oman up the Red Sea. Then I travelled from Eilat through the Negev to Jerusalem.
On a later visit to Saudi Arabia, I heard that the world heritage site of AlUla, an oasis city in Medina, could have been an alternative desert route for the Queen of Sheba.
Different interpretations of Bible history, but without acrimony.
Not news to them
THE Ethiopian version of the story is perhaps the most compelling, because it gives Solomon and the Queen of Sheba a son, Menelik, who brought the Ark of the Covenant to Aksum, in Ethiopia, and thus moved the centre of Christian civilisation.
This had unexpected contemporary repercussions for the Band Aid song in 1984, to raise money for the famine in Ethiopia. The lyrics “Do they know it’s Christmas time at all?” received a stiff response from Ethiopian political leaders, because one thing the cradle of Christianity would know about is Christmas.
We have learned about the world through merchants and pilgrims; so the imposition of tariffs and protectionism feels like drawbridges going up and the richness of stories receding.
Benefit of hindsight
RECENTLY, I watched Sir Chris Whitty, the Government’s chief medical officer, give a lecture about pandemics past and possibly future. While that familiar, calm delivery of apocalyptic facts recalled a time that we would rather forget — who would wish to be reminded of the R factor, and its exponential rise (“Next slide, please”)? — it is interesting to reflect on societal attitudes. As Sir Chris dryly observed, the pattern of public response is traditionally fear, followed by anger and blame.
While there is a revisionist view of lockdowns and vaccines, in 2020, 92 per cent of the public supported isolation: would it really be different next time? What if the next respiratory virus affected the young? Who would not sacrifice the economy to protect our children? What other sacrifice would we bear? Would we close the churches again?
In Cádiz Cathedral, a painting from 1621 by Andrea Ansaldi, The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, alludes to 15th-century Cádiz, when an Italian ship affected by plague landed on an islet off the coast of the city, and placed its crew and passengers in quarantine in an old watchtower off the harbour. They built a hermitage in that place dedicated to San Sebastian, saint protector of epidemics. The saint appears swaying, expressing martyrdom as pain, as an angel garlands him with flowers.
Serious house
IT WOULD be careless to talk of cathedral bucket lists without mentioning Canterbury Cathedral, described by Sir Simon Jenkins as “the noblest church in England”. I drove there recently to hear The Sixteen perform “The Deer’s Cry”, a programme of sacred music pairing William Byrd with the contemporary composer Arvo Pärt.
The director and founder of The Sixteen, Harry Christophers, was a boy chorister at Canterbury at the same time as my late brother, Kit Hesketh-Harvey, and he remembers the magical acoustics of treble voices soaring through arches. Kit wrote an account of a performance of Mozart’s Laudate Dominum, in which the musical phrases blended into the Gothic sweeps and curves of the cathedral, which was mother and universe to the choristers. I listened to the purity of Pärt’s “The Deer’s Cry” in wonderment at the transcendent acoustics.
Canterbury Cathedral has taken some fire for its current graffiti art installation, “putting profound questions to God” (News, 17 October). In this place of awe, you really do not need to stick graffiti questions on to the pillars. Stone and voices suffice. The graffiti look puerile and transient in comparison with what Sir Simon called a “history book of stone”.
Sarah Sands is a journalist and author. Her book Constellations and Consolations is available on Audible, while her book In Search of the Queen of Sheba is available in print.