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G. B. W. about his life in antiquity

I was born in the 1st Century of the Common Era. My parents witnessed the crucifixion of Jesus and passed their eyewitness accounts on to me. When I came of age I moved north to the uneventful Roman province of Thracia where I settled into a humble abode in the city of Byzantium, hearing of the turmoil coming out of Rome with Emperors such as Caligula. I soon became concerned when I - and others - began to notice my lack of aging. To head that off, I turned to the sea and began trading from the northern Black Sea to Lusitania and Britannia in the far western Empire.

My identity soon became obscured enough that I had a decent enough life, though all the turmoil coming from Rome was enough to weary me. When Trajan seemed on the verge of toppling Parthia once and for all, then Hadrian gave Mesopotamia back and settled the Empire onto a defensive footing while the rebellions continued back in Palestine, I felt that the Empire was finally in the process of falling apart after all the years of Imperium. I settled in Londinium for a time and had high hopes when Marcus Aurelius arose as Emperor, but those hopes were quickly dashed when Commodus soon followed. I tired of Rome, but beyond its borders were a sea of barbarians. I felt trapped.

I'm afraid I turned to despair for quite a while afterwards. There were a couple of occasions in which I was discovered and 'killed' as I got sloppy, which merely added to my despair. Dying, no matter by which method, really hurts. I found myself on the Rhine when the Vandals invaded Gaul, and over the years I fled ahead of them all the way to North Africa and heard what they and the other Germans were doing to the Empire. I soon went into the desert on a horse I never bothered to name; it just felt good to be away from humanity as a whole.

I was something of a wonder when I emerged from the Sahara among the more primitive peoples of West Africa. They'd heard of people like me through Berber traders, but had rarely seen anyone from the lands around the Mediterranean. The spread of iron working and increasing urbanization in the region gave me hope, for I felt this was how the fallen world I had left behind must have started as it grew into its golden age. I still had to move around, of course, but the darkness of my despair lightened for the next centuries. I lived in the city of Koumbi Saleh when the Ghana Empire arose in the 8th Century. Feeling like Alexander or Augustus, I fought with their armies in the founding of their new Empire under the guises of various Berber mercenaries.

However, the desert followed me into Ghana and the growing cities I had been proud to see began overtaxing the region. I felt as if my coming here had blighted the rise of a new Rome. I sought to ignore the signs of yet another collapsing Empire, and was rudely awakened when some new barbarians called Arabs showed up waging their jihad against the unbelievers of Ghana. To my surprise, they followed a religion called Islam that was derived from the cult that had sprung up after Jesus' crucifixion. Christianity had taken hold in the Roman Empire, which was ruled from a Byzantium that had been refounded as Constantinople. While the western Empire had fallen to the Germans, apparently the east had survived and thrived.

I rode a camel along the trans-Saharan trade routes and eventually made my way to Carthage where I took to the sea for the first time in centuries. I felt the desert sands blow off of me in the Mediterranean breeze. I arrived in Constantinople and was mightily impressed with what I saw. How it had grown! But the Romans I remembered were long gone. Such arguments about seemingly the smallest things in Christianity I had never heard. Religion, it appeared, had become a much more serious business since I'd been away. I soon became wary as religious riots broke out at frequent intervals. The pace of this new Rome was far different than the old one, and much different from Ghana…

G. B. W. about his life in the Byzantine Empire

I had arrived in the Eastern Roman Empire at a pivotal moment, it had appeared. The Emperor Romanus IV had lost a battle against the Muslim Turks at the town of Manzikert in Armenia and Anatolia was failing rapidly. I was used to the betrayals and intrigue of Rome, but the intrigues taking place in Constantinople was dizzying. Generals and even peasants could aspire to become Emperor if they were canny enough. It was a far cry from the days of the patricians and hand-picked successors.

Having tired of my land warring of the past centuries, and realizing just how much I had missed the sea during my extended residence in landlocked Ghana, I joined the navy and became a sailor on one of the feared Roman dromons with its infamous Greek fire. I fought in the west against the Normans of Italy under the Guiscards and was unfortunately sunk off of the island of Corfu, towards which I made a long swim. It was a bit of a novelty, really; I had never been in a sea battle with fairly even opponents before. The barbarians weren't quite as barbarous as they used to be. I thus changed my identity and went back to the land.

I'm afraid I then got caught up in the frenzy of the time when the Turks defiled the Holy Sepulcher and Pope Urban II called for the First Crusade. “Deus Vult!”, we cried. “God wills it!” I was swept along as the Westerners swarmed towards the East, and my experience in cavalry warfare in arid West Africa helped me greatly. I became quite rich from the pillage of several cities and the ransom of some well-to-do Muslims, but I pushed onward to Jerusalem where I was appalled by the bloodshed after the fall of the city. “…the slaughter was so great that our men waded in blood up to their ankles..” While the quote was slightly exaggerated, it wasn't by much. The frenzy that had taken me died as the Kingdom of Jerusalem was born. I lived a quiet life in the area where I had first grown up, feeling the years upon me as haughty men in armor wore the symbol of a crucifixion and professed belief in teachings I had told to me by my parents in the dusty floor of our home over 1000 years ago. Without quite realizing it, I had passed the millenium mark.

As I wondered what set me apart from the normal run of Men, and even began to question whether there were others like me, my years of idleness finally caught up with me. Once again I was discovered but, to my surprise, I was seized instead of murdered and dragged in chains before of representative of His Holiness. Look down upon if you will, but in the ensuing unpleasantness I let spill some of my past experiences. The holy man was one of that special breed of men that had an open mind and he took my story seriously. What truly floored him was my recounting of the tales of the crucifixion that I had once been told. Apparently it did not mesh completely with what they had come to believe. I found myself once more upon the sea, going towards a city I had visited several times in the past despite my attempts to avoid it: Rome.

I spent the next couple centuries in the dubious hospitality of the Lateran Palace, where the Popes of the time resided. It was in 1270 that I was abruptly freed from my captivity by some mysterious benefactors; it was this event that, I think, led to Nicholas III moving the papal seat from the Lateran to the more easily defended Vatican. I never truly did find out whom they were, but it was the first time I had seen sunlight in quite a while. I fled north to the merchant city of Venice from which I could travel to points across Europe and the Mediterranean. I soon discovered an opportunity I couldn't pass up when I met two brothers named Niccolo and Maffeo, and Niccolo's teenage son Marco, of the Polo family. The brothers had voyaged to the fabled land Cathay in the Far East to the Great Khan's court, and they were headed there again with young Marco. I tagged along more as hired help than as a true colleague and I suppose was ignored by those of higher station when they put quill to their chronicles.

The world opened up for me on that trip. I had never gone further east than the Levant before, and here I was passing through Persia, the astoundingly flat plains of Central Asia, and on to Khanbaliq in Cathay, what we would call Beijing today. So many different peoples, so many customs. The smells of foreign foods, the sights of foreign buildings and people. I resided among the Italian community in the city of Yangzhou while Marco was appointed governor of the place by Kublai Khan. For the first time in centuries, I felt truly alive…

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