A Claim Filed in Four Documents
The Bureau’s Iberian desk has kept a file open since March on an order of knighthood that no chancery in Spain has ever heard of. Our correspondent, a gentleman of Zaragoza who signs himself only as the Keeper of the Fourth Rule, sent four documents and asked nothing in return except that we print them. There is a salvage account, dated to the winter of 1193, describing a ship broken on the Catalan shore and a cargo of dark beans carried up the beach by noblemen in their good cloaks. There is a charter, on parchment, in ink the correspondent states was made from melted chocolate. There is the standing order of a night watch kept over a covered cup. And there is an account of an action at a castle gate, fought after dark, in which the defenders went out in armour of solid chocolate and came back with a good deal less of it.
The Bureau prints all four in summary below and sets each against the record, as is its practice. It should be said at the outset that the difficulty with the file is not the armour. The armour is the second difficulty. The first is the calendar.
The Wreck, and the Question of the Date
The salvage account is the most circumstantial paper the correspondent holds. It names the beach, it names four families, it counts the crates at nineteen and states that two were lost in the undertow, and it gives the contents as beans, dark, bitter, and of great price. On its own evidence it is a good document. Its only defect is that the cargo could not have existed.
Cacao is a New World tree. Its domestication has been traced to about 3300 BC in what is now southeast Ecuador, and from there it went north into Mesoamerica and no further. The whole traffic in plants and animals between the hemispheres — the Columbian exchange — begins in 1492 and not before. The first European known to have looked at a cacao bean did so on 15 August 1502, when Columbus’s fourth voyage fell in with a Maya trading canoe in the Gulf of Honduras; the only thing the expedition thought worth writing down was that the crew scrambled after the beans when some were spilled, as though they were coins. Nobody aboard knew what they were for. Hernán Cortés may have been the first European to see the drink itself, at the court of Moctezuma II in 1520. The earliest documented appearance of chocolate at the Spanish court is 1544, when Dominican friars brought a party of Qʼeqchiʼ Maya nobles, and the beaten drink, to Spain. The first official shipment of cacao to Europe is recorded in 1585.
The Bureau places the correspondent’s wreck at 1193 and the first recorded sighting at 1502 and makes the interval three hundred and nine years. Invited to comment, the correspondent replied that the beans had come off a Moorish vessel. Asked where the Moorish vessel had got them, he replied: from Africa. Cacao reached Africa in the nineteenth century, when the Portuguese carried it to São Tomé from Brazil in 1824.
The Charter, and the Hand That Wrote It
The charter is the document our correspondent is proudest of, and it is the one the Bureau spent longest with. It is a single sheet carrying a heading and, beneath it, four rules: secrecy as to the groves, purity as to the ingredients, protection of the roads, and charity at the feasts. The Keeper describes it as the strictest rule ever imposed on a body of Spanish knights. That is a testable claim, because the rules of the Spanish orders survive and are not in the least difficult to consult.
The Order of Calatrava was founded in Castile in 1157 and confirmed by a bull of Alexander III on 26 September 1164. Thirty years later the general chapter at Cîteaux handed it a rule modelled on Cistercian usage for lay brothers: silence in the refectory, the dormitory and the oratory; abstinence on four days a week and fasts besides; a fixed count of paternosters against every hour of the Office; the white mantle with its scarlet cross fleur-de-lisée; and an obligation to sleep in their armour. The Order of Santiago, established in 1170 to guard the pilgrim road, took for its badge a red cross in the shape of a sword, hilt and arms ending in lilies, and was unusual among the great orders in admitting married men.
Set beside that, four rules of one line each are not a severe discipline; they are a motto. The Bureau notes further, and without drawing a conclusion, that an order founded on secrecy issued its constitution as a display sheet; that the hand is a heavy northern blackletter of a kind no Iberian chancery used; that the language is English, which was not spoken in Aragon by anybody the document could plausibly bind; and that the phrase Code of the Cocoa alliterates in English and in no other tongue available to the signatories. Against all of this, the chocolate ink is a small matter.
The Vigil Over the Cup
Here, for the first and nearly the last time, the record is obliging. Men standing over a covered cup of chocolate at unsocial hours, treating it as something between a medicine and a sacrament, is not an absurd picture. It is very close to what actually happened, once the substance arrived. Chocolate came to Spain as a hot drink, sweetened and spiced to local taste, and it was the cup, not the slab, that Europe took up. The Habsburg court took it first as physic: Francisco Hernández, royal physician to Philip II, reported home on the range of complaints he believed it could treat, and sixteenth-century Spain regarded the stuff primarily as a medicine. By the seventeenth century Madrid held something in the region of seven hundred thousand pounds of cacao. Whatever else is true, it was worth setting a watch on.
The rest of Europe received it the same way — by the cup, from a shop. Mrs. White’s Chocolate House opened off Curzon Street in Mayfair in 1693, kept by an Italian named Francesco Bianco, selling theatre tickets on the side; it is now London’s oldest club, and it became a byword for ruinous gambling within a generation. What it never sold was a bar.
The plate the correspondent supplied shows one man holding the cup up on its stem before a castle. The Bureau put him to a herald. He carries no device at all: not the sword-cross of Santiago, not the cross fleur-de-lisée of Calatrava, nothing a chancery could register. Asked which order the man belonged to, the Keeper answered that he belongs to the Fourth Rule, and that the Fourth Rule does not explain itself.
The Arithmetic of a Harness
The Bureau now comes to the armour, and proposes to do the arithmetic in the order a quartermaster would: weight, then temperature, then form. Only one of the three is a close-run thing, and it is not the one the correspondent worries about.
Weight first. A complete harness of plate armour in well-tempered steel is generally put at fifteen to twenty-five kilograms, spread evenly over the whole body so that no single joint carries the load; the man inside stays agile enough to jump, run and otherwise move freely, which is the entire point of the design. When physiologists at Leeds, Oxford and Milan put volunteers on a treadmill in replica fifteenth-century field armour they were loading them rather more heavily than that — thirty-five kilograms of harness, near half the wearer’s own body mass — and at that weight they measured the net cost of walking at 2.1 to 2.3 times the unloaded figure and running at 1.9 times, more than the same mass strapped to the trunk would explain, the surplus going into swinging armoured limbs and into breathing inside a closed cuirass. Armour is expensive to wear. It is not prohibitive, and twenty-odd kilograms of anything else would be no worse.
Temperature second, and the Bureau proposes to do this sum in full, including the term that tells against it. Cocoa butter — the fat that makes chocolate a solid rather than a paste — melts at roughly 34 to 38 °C. It is polymorphic: the crystal form confectioners work for, form V, gives out at 33.8 °C, and the most stable form of all, which appears only after long storage, at 36.3 °C. A living man runs at about 37 °C at the core, and 37 °C is above all six polymorphs; but no plate is ever laid against a man’s core. It is laid, over a padded arming doublet, against his skin, and skin on the trunk has been measured at 33.5 to 36.9 °C. The Bureau writes the awkward end of that range down rather than step over it: 33.5 °C is three-tenths of a degree below form V, and a cuirass buckled onto a cool man standing still in a cold hall is, on the figures, just about a solid. That is the best case the Keeper will ever be offered, and it is worth three-tenths of a degree. The 33.5 is bare skin in open air, free to lose heat by radiation and by the evaporation of sweat; a closed cuirass over a doublet is an insulator laid across the one surface the body has for shedding heat, and what it stops it holds against the plate. The top of the same measured range — 36.9 °C, on a man doing nothing whatever — is already past form VI, the most stubborn crystal the material possesses. And the Leeds figures say that the moment he walks he is working at better than twice the rate of a man carrying nothing, and making the heat to match, a good part of it inside that sealed cuirass. The margin is not comfortable. It is that same three-tenths of a degree, in the coldest room he can find, standing perfectly still. Chocolate armour does not fail in the charge. It fails crossing the courtyard, and the squire is still close enough to catch it.
Form third, and this is where the plates give the game away. The correspondent’s campaign table and his ration accounts both describe flat slabs, scored into squares, that snap. A scored slab is a manufactured object with a date on it. Chocolate cannot be moulded at all until it carries something like a quarter of its weight in cocoa butter, and the butter could not be got out of the bean in quantity until Casparus van Houten patented his hydraulic press in 1828, which took nearly half the fat out of the liquor and left a cake fit to be milled. J. S. Fry & Sons of Bristol moulded the first eating bar in 1847. Rodolphe Lindt built his conche at Bern in 1879 and ran it for days on end, and only then did the trade have a chocolate with any smoothness or shine to it. Every tablet on that map table postdates the siege it is being used to plan by six hundred years, to the year.
The Harness As Reported, Against the Record
What the Keeper of the Fourth Rule describes, set beside what steel and chocolate are measured to do.
| Reported from Zaragoza | Recorded | |
|---|---|---|
| Material | Solid chocolate, cast in plate | Steel; in Europe chocolate was drunk, and the moulded bar is 1847 |
| Weight | Not stated; described as light | 15 to 25 kg of plate, spread over the whole body |
| Cost of wearing it | Not raised | 2.1 to 2.3 times unloaded walking, measured in 35 kg of it |
| Gives out at | Prolonged sunlight | 34 to 38 °C — and the wearer runs at 37 °C |
| Earliest possible date | Winter of 1193 | 1502, when a European first saw a cacao bean |
| Scored slabs | Rations, and counters for the map table | Not before the press of 1828 and Fry’s bar of 1847 |
| Surviving pieces | None; eaten at the victory feast | Complete harnesses, in museum collections across Europe |
The Sortie at the Gate
The engagement is dated to a night in 1247 and placed at a castle in the Pyrenees which the correspondent declines to name, on the grounds of the first rule. The Bureau can find no siege, no castle answering the description and no chronicle entry within a decade either side. It observes in passing that the man in the plate is wearing the articulated plate harness of the fifteenth century — the equipment of two hundred years after the night in question — and that the formation which actually made Spanish soldiers feared — the tercio — was not constituted until 1534, when the tercio of Lombardy was raised, with Naples and Sicily following in 1536 under Charles V’s Genoa ordinance. Pike and arquebus, on foot, three centuries downstream of the date in the file.
One detail survives inspection, and the Bureau records it in fairness. Asked why a garrison holding a strong position would go out at night rather than at first light, the Keeper answered: because of the heat of the day. A night in the high Pyrenees, in the month he names, would have sat comfortably below 34 °C. That is a necessary condition. It is not a sufficient one, the wearer having carried his own 37 °C out through the gate with him. Our correspondent has, once, and to all appearances by accident, reasoned in the right direction.
What the Bureau Is Able to Certify
The Bureau is able to certify that cacao is a real tree, that chocolate was a real and jealously guarded drink, that Spain kept orders of knighthood under rules of genuine severity — men who abstained four days in the week and slept in their harness — and that a man in twenty kilograms of steel could run in it. It is not able to certify that any of these things ever met.
We wrote once more to Zaragoza and asked for a single surviving piece of the harness: a gauntlet, a besagew, a strap end, anything at all that could be weighed. The reply came within the week. The armour was eaten at the victory feast, every plate of it, down to the greaves, and the Keeper of the Fourth Rule offers this as evidence of the order’s celebrated frugality. He adds that the Fourth Rule forbids waste, and that we would understand this better if we were permitted to read it.
The file remains open.
Plates: the Zaragoza File
The remainder of the correspondent’s plates, printed as received. The Bureau vouches for none of them.
