The Marvellous King the Bible Could not Ignore

Placed under the heading ‘De alexandro Incipit primus liber machabeorum’, this picture from a codex of Peter Comestor’s twelfth-century Historia Scholastica is unrelated to the text it illustrates, for the episode depicted is not recounted by Comestor or anywhere else in the Bible. It shows a crowned Alexander sitting in a casket drawn by two griffins, which—enticed by the meat placed on the two skewers held by Alexander above their heads—are lifting him up in the air.

In the Middle Ages, ‘the Flight to the Heavens with Griffins’ was by far the most famous of all the marvellous adventures told in the Alexander Romance, a text which, in its many versions, played a paramount role in the transmission of the myth of Alexander.

In the Romance, the ancient conqueror is transformed into a fabled hero and fearless explorer, who travels to the end of the world among monsters, dangers, and wonders beyond belief. For this Alexander, not even the earth was enough. Having explored the ocean in a purpose-built submarine vessel, he was taken by the desire to explore the heavens—a task he carried out in his griffin-powered flying machine, only to be sent back to the earth by a divine being (which some versions of the Romance identify with the Christian God).

The Getty Alexander is a remarkable example of the astounding popularity that the episode of the Flight enjoyed in medieval Europe, when it was represented in nearly every artistic medium, including tapestries, sculpted reliefs, floor mosaics, and misericords. As Chiara Frugoni once noted, for the illuminator of the Getty manuscript, given the task of providing a visual commentary on the scriptural passage in 1 Maccabees 1 concerning the Macedonian, the choice was obvious: ‘[it] is, must be, Alexander with the griffins, who was regarded as inseparable from his most famous and widespread adventure’ (Frugoni 1973: 227; own translation).

References

Frugoni, Chiara. 1973. Historia Alexandri elevati per griphos ad aerem: origine, iconografia e fortuna di un tema (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il Medio Evo)

This lavishly decorated two-volume Bible comprises over six hundred richly illuminated sheets and is rightly considered the most precious book of the Italian Renaissance. Today in Modena, it was created between 1455 and 1461 for Borso d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara, by a team of artists led by Taddeo Crivelli and Franco dei Russi.

Placed in the lower register of folio 110r, in the second volume of the Bible, this illumination signals the opening page of the First Book of Maccabees and is an almost literal depiction of an event recorded in verses 5–6 of chapter 1: Alexander the Great summoning the Diadochi, his generals and successors, to his deathbed and dividing his empire among them. The last deed performed by the Macedonian conqueror in his short life is highlighted here on account of the fateful consequences it had. It resulted in the creation of the Seleucid Empire and eventually led to the dominion of Antiochus IV Epiphanes over Judaea. And from that ensued the events that are recounted in the First and Second Book of Maccabees: Antiochus’s persecution of the Jews and the Maccabean Revolt that followed it.

Although the accompanying text states that the Diadochi were the same age as Alexander (‘[they] had been brought up with him from youth’; 1 Maccabees 1:6), they are depicted here as young courtiers, while Alexander is portrayed as an aged, white-bearded king. This iconography is openly in contrast with the fact that Alexander died very young, but is well attested in the fifteenth century, when Alexander tended to assume the physical attributes of wisdom, most notably a beard.

In addition, his appearance in the Borso Bible may reflect the description of him as a sickly, weak man that is given in 1 Maccabees 5: having conquered and subdued most of the known world, Alexander ‘fell sick and perceived that he was dying’.

Framed by the initial E illuminated on a manuscript page, a brutal assassination is happening before our eyes: two fully-armoured, helmeted warriors are facing each other, the man on the left plunging his sword into the face of the one on the right, who is wearing a crown that identifies him as a king.

The attacker on the left can surely be identified as Alexander the Great, and the warrior on the right as the King of Persia, Darius III, whose blood-covered face leaves us in no doubt as to his imminent death.

Yet the murder represented in this image, which marks the beginning of the First Book of Maccabees in the Breviary of Pope Martin V (r. 1417–31), never in fact happened. Rather, it is the result of an interesting misinterpretation of the text it illustrates. In the Latin version of the Vulgate, the text of Maccabees begins by saying that Alexander ‘percussit’, i.e. ‘defeated’, Darius (1 Maccabees 1:1). Between the fourth and the twelfth century, authors commenting or relying on this passage, such as Jerome (c. 347–419/420), Rabanus Maurus (c.780–856), and Honorius of Autun (c.1080–c.1140), misinterpreted the verb ‘percussit’ as ‘occidit’, giving rise to the idea that Alexander ‘killed’ Darius and transmitting to some later writers the notion of Alexander being directly responsible for Darius’s death.

Ancient sources do tell us that Darius was murdered; not, however, by his enemy Alexander, but rather by his own satrap and kinsman Bessus, who briefly usurped his throne before being executed on Alexander’s orders.

The erroneous idea that Alexander was Darius’s killer continued to have currency in medieval exegetical works and encyclopaedic compilations throughout the Middle Ages. Despite this, however, it is notable that in the visual tradition pictures of Alexander murdering Darius are rarely found. This makes the image in the Breviary of Pope Martin V all the more extraordinary, on account of both its beauty and rarity.