by Holland, Tom
Almost five hundred years had passed now since the collapse of Rome’s dominion in the West. Ghoul-like, though, its spectre continued to haunt the dreamings of all those who sought to interpret God’s plans for the future of mankind. As in the age of Charlemagne, so in the infinitely more troubled age of Adso: no solution to the problems confronting Christendom could be conceived of saving a return to the long-vanished past. No climax to human history either. The shipwreck of things might be dreaded, yet it was simultaneously conceived of as a harbour: as the escape from innumerable tempests and violent waves. In the end would come a new heaven and a new earth, and the return of the Son of Man; but first, ‘although everywhere we look we see it lying in almost total ruin’, there would have to be the return to a Roman Empire.
It is hard to imagine a programme more expressive of paralysis and despair. Beyond the walls of Adso’s monastery, great princes feuded with one another, and fields were trampled by rival armies, and the borders of Christendom were lit by flames and dyed with blood. Still, as their only solution to this crisis of desolation, the subtlest and most learned minds in Francia whispered decrepit fantasies of global empire. Yet these same fantasies, even amid the general chaos of the times, had not entirely lost their ability to transfix kings as well as scholars. Adso, writing to Gerberga, had presumed that any future emperor was bound to be a Frank. The times, though, were changing—as Gerberga herself, a Saxon princess, might well have chosen to remind the abbot. For the Franks, even as Adso penned his letter, were no longer the only people to have been charged with the rule of a great dominion. To the east of their heartlands, on the very margins of Christendom, a new power was rising. A power capable, as time would prove, of securing the West against its most fearsome enemies, and of forging a new Roman Empire, even as all the while the Millennium drew ever nearer.
THE OLD ORDER CHANGETH ...
The Thousandth-Year Reich
Though Christendom was embattled, not all its frontiers were collapsing. In the marches of Saxony, along the banks of the Elbe, the broad-flowing river which served East Francia as its flank, Christian warriors stood on watchful sentinel, and dreaded no one. The Saxons, as they contemplated the heroic struggle to uphold God’s order, knew themselves in its vanguard. Beyond the Elbe to the east, in sinister groves adorned with idols and animal horns, Slav tribes, known collectively by the Saxons as the “Wends’, still worshipped demons and indulged in their ‘vain superstitions’; but westwards, the very landscape bore witness to the protecting hand of Christ. Wherever the soil was fertile, and the wilderness capable of being tamed, there the marks of His favour thrived: farms, and homesteads, and raw stone churches. Even on the Elbe itself, the border forts were prospering – and this despite the continued enthusiasm of Wendish war bands for crossing it in search of plunder.
The linchpin of the defences raised against such raids was the fortress of Magdeburg: originally founded by Charlemagne as a frontier station, where the bags of merchants travelling out of Christendom could be inspected for contraband armour and weapons,
it already ranked, by the early tenth century, as the capital of the eastern marches. Flush with the profits of trade, and a booming hinterland, it could boast churches, markets and even a ‘Hof – a court for the entertainment of Saxony’s duke. Meanwhile, beyond its haughty gatehouses, and the road which led eastwards over the Elbe, the pagans ‘lived in such brutish poverty that what in Francia would seem an insupportable burden is counted by them almost as a pleasure’. As it had been back in the earliest days of the Magdeburg customs post, even a mail shirt was held a wonder by many tribes. Indeed, such was the awe with which helmets and hauberks were regarded by the Wends that armour was likeliest to adorn, not their warriors, but their gods. Deep immured in forest shrines, their idols stood, blank-eyed and menacing, ‘fearsomely girt in mail’.
To the Saxons, the folly of this demon-worship was all the more minatory for the fact that they had once shared in it themselves. A people who had learned to rejoice in the felling of trees and the raising of churches on root-cleared plains could not forget that they too, barely a century and a half before, had staged their most sacred rituals in the darkness of oaken glades. The dreadful rumours of what had been practised there still darkened the nightmares of Christian homilists. Prisoners, it was whispered, hung from the boughs of sacred trees, having been pierced through with spears: for the spear had been sacred to Woden, most far-seeing of the gods. To the initiates of this sacrifice, awful privileges had been owed: to those who harvested the blood of the still-writhing victims, and traced it over runes, the wisdom of Woden himself; and to those who consumed their beating hearts, a power over the dead. Charlemagne, storming the strongholds of this monstrous evil, had felt himself obliged to purge it thoroughly with axe and sword. Trees holy to Woden had been hacked down and the branches consigned to fire.
The Saxons themselves, as obdurate in their paganism as in their reluctance to accept the Frankish king, Christ’s own anointed, as their new master, had been treated with a matching ferocity. After one particularly savage rebellion, thousands of prisoners had been beheaded in a single dispatch; the populations of entire areas forcibly relocated; death introduced as the penalty for refusing baptism, for clinging to the ancient rites, even for eating meat during Lent. Not since the age of the Caesars had atrocities been committed on quite so imperious a scale—and never before with the goal of imposing the love of Christ.
There were many in Charlemagne’s train who had paled at the knowledge. To wage a war of aggression and conquest, even against heathens steeped ‘in the most idolatrous savagery, appeared to them the very opposite of the Christian ideal. ‘Faith’, as Alcuin had put it anguishedly, ‘arises from the will, not from compulsion. You can persuade a man to believe, but you cannot force him. You can haul him to the waters of baptism, but not to faith itself.’ Time, however, had proved this warning wrong. The Saxons, exhausted by their struggle against Charlemagne, had in due course been brought to acknowledge the full scale of their defeat. Woden had failed them. The Christ of the victorious Franks had proved Himself invincible. It could be held no shame to submit to such a god. And so the Saxons had duly submitted. Woden, toppled from his throne, had been banished from Middle Earth. On occasion, it was reported, at nightfall, he and his followers, she-wolves, carrion crows and the spirits of the dead, surrounded by black clouds, would return to intrude upon their ancient dominion, crashing through the woods, riding the icy winds; but there was nothing in such a superstition to impress the Saxon elite. Those on the margins of the retreating wilderness, peasants and pioneers, might sometimes bow their heads before the passage of the demon hunt; but never the aristocracy. They knew perfectly well what they owed to the favour of Christ. No longer wallowing as the Wends still did, in a brutish poverty, they were now the peers of anyone in Christendom – even their former conquerors. ‘For moulded by the Christian faith into brothers, they had become almost an identical people with the Franks.’
So much so, indeed, that by the early tenth century, and with the realm of East Francia on the brink of seeming collapse, men could even speak of the Duke of Saxony as a possible future king. Henry, head of the Liudolfing clan, fully merited such excited approbation. Since inheriting his title in 912, he had shown himself ‘a lord rich in wisdom, abounding in severity, and of righteous judgement’. To the pagans beyond his borders, he had proved a predictably stern and tireless foe. To the ambitions of the clans within them, he had been a more subtle, but no less effective, opponent. The great warlords of Saxony, whose instinct had always been to indulge themselves in murderous rivalries, had been systematically broken to his will: variously menaced, bought off and cajoled. Talents such as Henry could deploy, in a failed state such as East Francia was fast becoming, were not lightly to be ignored. Even Conrad, its prickly but increasingly hapless king, was finally brought to acknowledge as much. In 915, abandoning all his earlier efforts to check the ambitions of his unsettl
ingly able neighbour, he signed a truce that effectively appointed the Saxon duke his deputy. Three years later, as Conrad lay dying, he told his brother, Eberhard, to propose Henry as his successor. The following spring, in May 919, Eberhard dutifully followed up this deathbed advice. The Frankish nobility joined with their Saxon peers in acclaiming Henry as king. For the first time, the rule of East Francia was entrusted to a man who was not even a Frank.
No wonder that the fateful moment would later be enshrined in legend. Messengers sent to inform the new king of his elevation, it was said, had been unable to find him at first, and only after several days had he finally been tracked down to a wild marshland, where Henry, an avid huntsman, had been painstakingly setting traps for ducks. It was an apt reflection, certainly, of the predatory cool and patience that ‘the Fowler’ now brought to the task of redeeming East Francia. Careful not to aggravate the great dukes of his tottering realm, men who still regarded themselves, at the very least, as his peers, Henry forwent the self-indulgence of being anointed. Yet even as he colluded in the dimming of the royal aura, and promoted himself, not as the heir of Charlemagne, but rather as something altogether more modest, as merely a first among equals, he was stalking his opponents. Over the next few years, a succession of potential rivals were methodically humbled, or else seduced with high-sounding titles and offers of marriage into the Liudolfing house. Soon enough, the princes of East Francia found themselves hopelessly entangled in a delicate mesh of dependency and obligation. By 935, when Henry met at a summit with his brother kings of Burgundy and West Francia, he did so not merely as their equal, but as the dominant figure in Christendom. There was certainly no one now to dispute the right of a Saxon to rule as ‘King of the Franks’: as the lord of what his subjects, in their own language, termed their ‘Reich’.
It was a startling achievement – and yet Henry, even while breaking in the fractious dukes of East Francia, had simultaneously been keeping his eye on more threatening game. It was not sufficient to haul the Reich back from the brink of internal collapse; it also had to be preserved from the onslaughts of those who would bleed it to death from without. The Hungarians, whether the outriders of Antichrist or not, had somehow to be confronted—and Henry the Fowler, as ever playing a long game, was patiently preparing his traps. In 926, trading temporary humiliation for future advantage, he agreed to pay tribute in return for a truce. Warriors, like hawks or hunting dogs, needed to be trained for the kill. Those among his followers who could afford the costs of a warhorse were encouraged to invest as well in the even more crippling expense of a mail coat, to transform themselves into ‘loricati’: men of iron. Poorer levies, meanwhile, were set to work raising fortresses along the Reich’s eastern frontier, bases suited not merely to defence, but also to the launch of counter-offensives. Even criminals were summoned to the cause. At Merseburg, a stronghold some seventy miles south of Magdeburg, a legion of thieves and bandits was installed, and instructed to train itself for battle by launching expeditions against those perennial objects of Saxon prowess, the Wends. In 929, when a Wendish army, stung by such aggravation, presumed to launch a counter-raid across the Elbe, it was met in open battle, and annihilated. Warriors on horseback, newly coated in their expensive shirts ofiron, provided the shock force. Three years later, feeling sufficiently confident at last to bait his snare, the Fowler cancelled his tribute payments to the Hungarians, sending them, instead of gold, a tailless and crop-eared dog. The Hungarians, responding to provocation just as the Wends had done, dispatched a raiding party to pillage Saxony: it too was cornered, confronted and wiped out. Once again, it was the heavy cavalry, singing to the Almighty as they rode, who led the slaughter.
The victory, it was true, had hardly been decisive. Already, Henry had to assume, beyond the frontiers of the Reich, in the great plain of the Danube, that teeming womb of pagans, a dreadful vengeance was being planned. The supreme test, one that would witness either the Hungarians destroyed as a threat for ever, or else the ruination of East Francia, was still to come. Yet now at least there seemed hope for Christendom. In 936, as Henry, succumbing at last to age and weariness, prepared to meet his maker, he set the seal on a lifetime’s labours by refusing to sanction the carve up of his legacy. Instead, in a pointed reversal of Frankish custom, he bequeathed it entire to Otto, his eldest son: ‘a great and far-spreading dominion – not one that had been handed down to him by his forefathers, but won instead by his own exertions, bestowed upon him by God alone’.
And that the Almighty had indeed blessed the Saxons, and granted to them a role of fateful moment in His plans for Christendom, could be witnessed by virtue of a heavenly proof. Back in 926, the same year that had seen the truce signed with the Hungarians, Henry’s attentions had been devoted to browbeating his brother king of Burgundy. By the terms of a treaty signed that year, Henry had agreed to hand over a chunk of the province of Swabia — what is now Switzerland and Alsace — in exchange for a treasure ‘infinitely precious’: a spear of terrible power. No one doubted that it was the Saxon king who had secured the bargain by this arrangement. Men claimed that the weapon had long ago belonged to Constantine — and that it had won for him the empire of the world. As well it might have done: for upon the head of the spear were crosses fashioned out of nails, those very same spikes of iron that had once pierced the hands and feet of Christ, ‘joining the realm of the mortal to that of heaven’. The Saxons, whose ancestors, in their vulgar credulity, had imagined Woden swaying the world with a spear, could now contemplate with wonder an authentically earth-shaking relic. For such a weapon, in the hands of a great king, would surely render him as invincible as Constantine had been: ‘certain of victory against all his enemies, visible and invisible, assured of perpetual triumph’. And so for Henry it had proved.
But now he was dead; and the peoples of the Reich waited with bated breath to gauge the measure of their new king. Certainly, Otto could have had no illusions as to the full weight of the burden that was being laid upon his youthful shoulders: for at his coronation, it was made manifest to all Christendom. ‘Drive away the enemies of Christ,’ the Archbishop of Mainz instructed him in dreadful tones, handing him a sword. ‘Establish an enduring peace for Christians everywhere.’ Yet if the trust being placed in the new king was awesome, then so too were the rituals that pronounced him worthy of it. Unlike his father, Otto had no compunction about being anointed with holy oil; nor in laying claim, very obviously, to the mantle of Charlemagne. Not only was the ceremony staged at the great emperor’s capital of Aachen, but the Saxon king even made sure, in a pointed one-off, to dress for the occasion in the distinctive torso-hugging tunic of a Frank. To the dukes and great lords who stood assembled before the royal chapel, gazing up at Otto as he sat in splendour upon the throne of Charlemagne, the point could hardly have been driven home any more forcibly: the traditional notion of kingship as something uniquely elevated, sacred even, was back.
Delight at this among the battle-hardened magnates who had grown accustomed to Henry’s more collegiate manner was, unsurprisingly, less than universal. Even as Otto, looking to celebrate his coronation in the by now traditional Saxon manner, headed eastwards across the Elbe to extort tribute and submission from the
Wends, so resentment was already festering among the great princes of the Reich. Particularly threatening was the mood in Franconia, where the aged Duke Eberhard had good cause to take umbrage at Otto’s high-handedness: for he it was, after all, back in 919, who had done much to secure the throne for the Liudolfings. Yet even Eberhard’s sense of disenfranchisement was as nothing compared with that of Otto’s bitterest enemy, and most malignant rival of all: Henry, his younger brother. The two had been jockeying for position since childhood; and Henry, denied all royal status by the terms of his father’s will, had responded to his exclusion with predictable fury. Indeed, so abusive had he become that Otto, rather than risk any disruption of his coronation, had ordered his brother to be imprisoned for the duration of
the ceremony.
In general, however, naked though Henry’s indignation was, the new king showed himself strikingly reluctant to punish it. Instead – as though out of a guilty sense that it might even be justified — he worked hard to appease it. Only a few months after his coronation, Otto arranged for Henry to marry the most eligible heiress in the realm: Judith, the daughter of the Duke of Bavaria. This was to grant his troublesome sibling a rare dignity—for Bavaria, despite the depredations inflicted upon it by the Hungarians, was a duchy endowed with resources of an almost regal scope. Indeed, of all the princedoms of the East, only Saxony itself offered more to an ambitious ruler. Otto’s gamble in granting his brother the opportunity to put down roots there was, therefore, a considerable one — and doomed, it appeared, to failure. Henry, resolutely unmollified, continued to breathe sedition. His new in-laws, with reasons of their own to resent Otto’s imperious style of lordship, were more than happy to back the young pretender in his plotting. From the Alps to the North Sea, the whole of East Francia began to seethe with rebellion.
