by Holland, Tom
Meanwhile, in what had once been the very wellspring of pagan wisdom, the lands of the Romans, or Rum, all appeared decay and ignorance. In Constantinople, to be sure, there were still certain texts from antiquity preserved, the writings of ancient philosophers and savants; and some of these, on occasion, might even be dusted down and sent to the various capitals of the Caliphate as gifts. Yet the Rum, to Muslim eyes, appeared unworthy of their peerless heritage. Deep in the countryside beyond Constantinople, one ambassador reported, there stood a temple where the ancient pagans were said to have worshipped the stars, piled so high with manuscripts that it would have taken a thousand camels to carry them away; and all the manuscripts were crumbling into dust. Compared with the rest of Christendom, however, Constantinople appeared a veritable treasure house of learning. No books could be expected of the Saxon king, for instance. Abd al- Rahman, wishing to congratulate Otto I on his victory at the Lech, had sent him, not a rare manuscript, but gifts more calculated to impress a barbarian: ‘lions and camels, ostriches and apes’. Indeed, in the whole of western Christendom there were few libraries more than a thousandth of the size of the Caliph’s in Cordoba. So rare were books that the going rate for one on the black market might be a warhorse. Al-Hakam, had this been brought to his attention, would hardly have been surprised. Rather, it would have confirmed him in all his certitudes: that God had turned His back on the Christians; and that the House of Islam would inherit the world for sure. Without learning, after all, what hope for order—and without order, what hope for any empire?
Such questions haunted many in Christendom itself. Just as Queen Gerberga, in her desperation to find some pattern in the anarchy of the times, had looked to a famous scholar for answers, so were there famous scholars, oppressed by similar anxieties, who had turned to the books of pagans. The most celebrated of them all was a peasant, as upwardly mobile as he was precocious, by the name of Gerbert; and it was whispered by his detractors that he had actually studied in Cordoba. Whether indeed he had visited the Saracens in their very lair, it was certain that he was familiar with their learning; for Gerbert, despite being a native of the town of Aurillac, in the remotest Auvergne, had completed his education in a monastery in Spain. Here, on the outermost frontier of Christendom, he had mastered branches of knowledge so exotic that later generations would brand him a necromancer: from the strange Indian numerals used by the Saracens to the operation of an abacus. Yet Gerbert was no sorcerer. His passion – one which ‘boiled within him’ — was for the tracing of God’s order amid seeming chaos. So it was, as a teacher in Reims, that he had constructed out of delicate bronze and iron wires a series of fantastical instruments, designed to demonstrate to his pupils the orderly circling of the planets about the earth, and the turning of the universe on its poles. So it was too, in Rome, amid all the festivities for Otto’s wedding to Theophanu, that Gerbert had distinguished, as though they formed their own ‘ingenious mechanism’, the filigrees spun by God to encircle and order time itself. Once there had been a Christian empire that embraced all the world, and brought to humanity the inestimable fruits of order and peace; and so there would be again. This conviction was hardly original to Gerbert; but rarely had it been held by a man of such erudition and brilliance. Born a peasant he may have been; but Gerbert’s genius had served to win him the attention of emperors and kings. Back in 971, in Rome, he had tutored the young Otto II. A decade later, shortly before Otto left on his disastrous invasion of southern Italy, Gerbert had appeared before the imperial court again, this time in a formal debate with the Reich’s most formidable scholar, the head of the cathedral school in Magdeburg – and wiped the floor with him. In 983, with Otto licking his wounds back in Rome, Gerbert was formally appointed to the imperial service. At such a time of crisis for the Reich, the conviction of Christendom’s most famous scholar that a Roman Empire might still be restored was an asset not lightly to be overlooked.
Further calamities, however, would soon enough test even Gerbert’s optimism to the limit. In an empire laid claim to by a single ruler, an earthquake in southern Italy might reverberate as far as the forests of the distant North; and sure enough, in the summer of 983, the Wends rose suddenly in revolt, burning the cathedrals raised over their lands by their occupiers, pursuing the Saxons ‘as though they were deer’, and ravaging as far as Hamburg. Although Magdeburg itself stood firm amid the firestorm, and the line of the Elbe was eventually stabilised, all that lay beyond it, won with such effort by Otto’s father, was permanently lost. Otto himself, brought the news in Rome, was obliged to abandon his plans for further campaigns against the Saracens, and prepare wearily to head back north: a prospect rendered all the more agonising by the swollen state of his haemorrhoids. Before he could so much as mount his saddle, however, he fell ill with violent diarrhoea; and on 7 December Otto II Augustus, ‘Emperor of the Romans’, died.
Otto’s sudden end left the Reich rudderless. His son and heir, the third Otto in succession, was only three years old. Taken to Aachen, the little boy was consecrated king, just as Charlemagne had been crowned emperor, on Christmas Day, but was then almost immediately abducted. The kidnapper, proving himself very much a chip off the old block, was none other than the son and namesake of Henry, Duke of Bavaria, whose endless machinations had caused so much trouble for Otto I. The second Henry, whose nickname of ‘the Quarreller’ was a fitting measure of the man, had already proved himself inveterately rebellious – but now, sniffing opportunity as a wolf scents blood, he surpassed himself. In 984, on Easter Day, he formally laid claim to the throne. The nobility, torn between their loyalty to Otto III and their dread of being ruled by a child, havered. It appeared that the Reich itself was on the verge of civil war.
‘Ruined, ruined,’ Gerbert wailed. ‘What hope can there possibly be?’ But he did not despair for long. As Theophanu, having buried her husband in St Peter’s, hurried northwards to beard the usurper in East Francia, Gerbert was already hard at work, writing to the princes and bishops of the Reich, stiffening them in their loyalty to their rightful king. So effective was his campaign that by the time Theophanu crossed the Alps, in May, Henry the Quarreller found that all his supporters had melted away. A month later, sulkily, he surrendered the infant Otto to his mother, and retired in high dudgeon to Bavaria.
Theophanu, ‘that ever august empress, always to be loved, always to be cherished’, was appointed regent on behalf of her son. In this role, she proved formidably effective. ‘Preserving her son’s rulership with a manly watchfulness, she was always benevolent to the just, but terrified and conquered rebels.’[]Three years after the crisis of984, she even obliged a fuming Henry, along with three other German dukes, to serve as waiters at Otto’s table, in full view of the Reich’s nobility, who had all gathered at court for the feast of Easter. Although she died in 991, while her son was still legally a minor, Theophanu had successfully secured the empire for Otto III. In September 994, he was presented with the arms of a warrior, and officially came of age. One year later, and he was leading his men in that traditional rite of passage for a Saxon king, a campaign against the Wends. By 996, the year of his sixteenth birthday, all that remained was to be crowned emperor – and so it was, that very spring, that Otto III announced his departure for Rome.
And all this Gerbert had followed with the keenest interest. Although Theophanu, with the ingratitude that was an empress’s proper prerogative, had failed to reward his services with commensurate patronage, the great scholar had not stinted in his loyalty to her or to her son. Mathematician, astronomer and historian, Gerbert could hardly have been oblivious to the date that was approaching. ‘It seems’, he had pronounced sensationally back in 991, ‘that Antichrist is at hand.’ He knew as well – for he was a friend of Adso, and owned a copy of the famous letter to Gerberga – that the end of days would lie presaged by a great convulsion in the affairs of the Roman Empire. And now, four years before the one-thousandth anniversary of the birth of Christ, a prince with
the blood of both West and East in his veins, of the twin halves of the ancient empire, so long divided, to the scandal of Christians everywhere and to the profit of its foes, was travelling to Rome.
Well might Gerbert have dreamed of meeting him: for he appreciated better than anyone that it was Otto’s destiny to rule in interesting times.
The Last Roman Emperor
Pilgrims heading southwards to worship at the tomb of St Peter knew that what awaited them was a cityscape like no other in the Latin West. ‘O Rome,’ went the song, ‘noble Rome, mistress of the globe, there is nowhere that can rival you, most excellent of cities!’ Even visitors from the great capitals of Islam might find themselves stupefied: one Muslim merchant, approaching Rome and seeing in the distance the city’s churches, mistook the green-grey lead of their roofs for the waves of a sea. On Christians from the North the impact was overpowering. Nothing in their own muddy homelands could have prepared them for the spectacle of the ancient capital of their faith. That a city might boast a population numbering some twenty-five thousand souls; that her walls might stretch for twelve miles; that these walls might contain a seemingly infinite number of shrines: all this had to be seen to be believed. Otto, as he arrived in Rome, would have felt himself entering a dreamlike realm of wonders.
And into his destiny as well. ‘Rome, head of the world, and mistress of cities, alone makes emperors of kings.’ So the peoples of the North had long acknowledged. ‘Cherishing as she does in her heart the prince of saints, it is she who has the right, if she so wishes it, to enthrone a prince over all the lands of the earth.’ The irony of this – that it was the very blood spilled by the pagan Romans that had preserved their city’s title to the rule of the world – never ceased to delight the devout. The victory of St Peter over those who had martyred him was manifest wherever one looked in Rome. Monuments that had once proclaimed her Babylon the Great, ‘the devil’s own city’, were leprous with decay. Squalid hovels crowded the squares of forgotten emperors; around the Colosseum, which in ancient days had been ‘stained purple with saintly blood’, there now hung the haze of malarial swamps and the fumes of corpse-pits; on the Palatine Hill, nothing remained but rubble of the palace of the Caesars. Debris, as though the breath of an angel had swept the scene, lay everywhere; and where the debris ended open fields began.
Yet Rome endured, and more than endured: for though she was capital of the dead, yet it was not the shades of pagan emperors, howling to see cattle wander where once their chariots had rolled, whose presence animated the spectacle of her desolation, but rather the martyrs, whose holy bones were the city’s most priceless treasures. Everywhere, repositories of an awesome supernatural power, churches stood guard over them, their stonework suffused with the charisma of the departed saints themselves. Many shrines, like St Peter’s itself, were of a venerable antiquity; but from others there came hammering or the smell of drying plaster. Even amid her decay, Rome was forever renewing herself. “Daily, rising up out of the ruins of shattered walls and decayed temples, we see the fresh stonework of churches and monasteries.’ Here, then, perhaps, in the Holy City, lay a vision of how the world itself might be renewed.
Otto, certainly, was of a mind to think so. Still only fifteen when he first arrived in Rome, the emperor was as precocious as he was visionary, a young man of already luminous ambition. He was well schooled in all the attributes expected of a Saxon king, and his mother had sought to stamp him with something of Constantinople too. As his tutor—and godfather – she had duly appointed a Greek from southern Italy, one John Philagathos, an abbot who combined formidable learning with a ferocious self-assurance. Byzantine education was famously stern: its goal was to instil in children nothing less than the demeanour of saints. Theophanu, in her choice of teacher, had shown her customary eye for scholarly talent. The young emperor, though celebrated for his charm, had grown to manhood distinguished as well by a profound solemnity; a sense of the great and terrible charge which had been laid upon him since his earliest years. No less than any Basileus, Otto believed in the Roman Empire as the chosen agent of God’s will. It was a Roman emperor, after all, at the end of days, who was destined to obtain for Christ and His Church all the limits of the world – and who was to say, the times being what they were, that the end of days was not at hand?
Well might Otto have fixed his gaze beyond the horizons of Saxony. Already, looking to seal his rank as a prince of East as well as West, he had dispatched his old tutor, John Philagathos, to Constantinople, with instructions to arrange a marriage for him with the daughter of the Basileus. Meanwhile, in Rome itself, the papacy was being broken to his will. To a degree that even his father or his grandfather would have found startling, Otto regarded the Pope as his subordinate, to be nominated as he saw fit. Not even the customary fig leaf of an election was to be permitted the papal see. When news had reached Otto, as he was heading to Rome, that the reigning Pope was dead of a sudden fever, he had recognised in this accident the certain hand of God. At once, he had moved to foist his own candidate on the Holy City: not a Roman, not even an Italian, but a twenty-four-year-old Saxon, his cousin Bruno.
Early in May 996, the first German ever to sit on the throne of St Peter was duly consecrated as Pope Gregory V. Rome’s traditional power brokers, stunned by the sheer audacity of Otto’s manoeuvre, had found themselves impotent to counter it. The most feared of their number, a hardened strongman by the name of John Crescentius, was reduced to begging the young emperor not to send him into exile. Imperiously, and before the full gaze of Rome, Otto graced him with his mercy. No one was to be left in any doubt that the city – and indeed all of Christendom – now had an emperor who was Roman in more than name. On 21 May, Ascension Day, Otto was formally crowned in St Peter’s, ‘to the plaudits of all Europe’. His cousin, having first anointed him, then delivered a sword into his hand. On to the new emperor’s finger was slipped a ring: symbol of his union with the Christian people. From his shoulders there hung a cloak, and on it, ‘marked out in gold’, were scenes from the Book of Revelation: St John’s vision of the end of the world.
None, perhaps, should have been surprised at the speed and daring that had brought Otto to this spectacular coronation. Young he might have been – but he had already been well instructed in the demands of power upon a king. He had seen the villages of his own people burned and corpse-strewn, and he had torched the villages of the Wends in turn; he had ridden across blood-soaked fields, and trampled his slaughtered foes underfoot. Such was the doom of sinful man, on Middle Earth: to suffer and wither and die. Yet Otto, crashing through the Wendish forests with his loricati, had also stared into a profounder darkness. Trees were already reclaiming the churches planted there by the Saxons. Walls were crumbling away which had once sheltered the body and blood of Christ. The Wends, unlike the Saxons themselves, had refused to accept the Prince of Peace at the point of a conqueror’s sword. What, then, confronted by such obduracy, was Otto to do? He knew that above the fallen world, invisible but effulgent, its radiance brighter than even the most interminable pagan forest was steeped in darkness, there soared the City of God – and that it was his duty, as a Roman emperor, to bring the heathen to acknowledge its glory. Yet he could never forget either, even as he looked to shape Christendom and the realms beyond it to God’s purpose, what Christ Himself had taught His followers: to love their enemies, to turn their cheeks, to sheathe their swords. Otto, as sensitive to his own moral failings as he was insistent upon his godlike dignity as a Caesar, never ceased to be tormented by the resulting tension. ‘Outwardly he assumed a cheerful expression; but within his conscience groaned under the weight of many misdeeds from which, in the silence of night, he continually sought to cleanse himself through vigils, earnest prayers, and rivers of tears.’
Perhaps it was hardly surprising, then, that Otto should have found himself peculiarly obsessed by Rome. In the fabulous juxtaposition that it presented of the vaunting and the humble, the martial and the pa
cific, the mortal and the eternal, the city must have appeared to him like a mirror held up to his soul. Lingering there after his coronation, he could admire details on antique columns which portrayed the slaughter of barbarians by stern-faced emperors; just as he could attend, ‘day and night’, to a very different lesson, one taught him by a monk who was famous, notorious even, for his scorning of worldly titles, an admonishment that Otto should ‘regard himself not as one of the great, not as a Caesar, but as a mortal man, and therefore destined, all his great beauty notwithstanding, to end up as ashes, rottenness, and food for worms’.
The name of this spiritual pundit was Adalbert. Though he was cloistered in a Roman monastery, across the valley from the ruins on the Palatine, far distant from the marches of the Reich, he was nevertheless profoundly sensitive to the pressures weighing on Otto’s shoulders. This was because, to a degree, he had shared in them himself – and buckled beneath them too. Born in Bohemia of aristocratic parents, educated in Magdeburg, appointed by Otto II to the bishopric of Prague, Adalbert properly ranked as one of the great men of the Reich. Far from revelling in his high office, however, he had grown so troubled by the compromises required of him that it was said he had forgotten, such was his unhappiness, how to laugh. Run out of town after his attempts to halt the slave trade had threatened the income of the local duke, Adalbert ‘had laid the dignity of his bishop’s office aside, and become a humble brother’. Yet even as ‘merely one among many’, he had continued to stand out from the crowd. Take off dirty shoes at his monastery, for instance, and Adalbert would immediately swoop to clean them: a display of humility striking enough in any monk, let alone one who still ranked officially as a prince of the Church. Other bishops, needless to say, were appalled by such eccentricities; but Otto, who had been brought up to admire holy men, and actively to seek them out, preferred to regard it as the mark of saintliness. Adalbert, who had only to pray and the croaking of frogs in the Roman marshes would mysteriously be silenced, was evidently a man with a formidable talent for instilling serenity in the troubled – and Otto was certainly troubled. With news reaching him in the summer of996 that the banks of the Elbe were once again ablaze, Adalbert seemed to offer him what he most craved: a way through the darkness ahead. Otto was not the only man, amid the stifling summer heat of Rome, to have his thoughts fixed on the wilds of the East. Adalbert too was planning to leave for there. He would travel, though, not in the pomp of his ecclesiastical vestments, but in his tattered habit; not as a prince, but as a humble missionary. Yes, he insisted, it was indeed possible for the pagans to be brought to see the City of God – and it did not have to be done at the point of a sword.
