Millennium

by Holland, Tom

  Certainly, to Bruno’s countrymen, secure behind the ramparts of the Reich, the names of the various barbarians whom he had laboured to win for Christ — the Pechenegs and Prussians, the Lithuanians and Swedes — appeared suggestive of a truly abhorrent savagery. Sinister temples ‘entirely decked out in gold’; altars splashed with blood; groves hung with the rotting corpses of humans, horses and dogs: such were the nightmare visions that haunted the Saxons, whenever they sought to imagine what horrors might be lurking on the margins of the world. Yet the exploits of men such as Bruno suggested that the optimism of St Adalbert remained well founded: that there was nowhere so steeped in darkness that it might not be penetrated by the light of Christ, nor any soul so fierce that it might not ultimately be won for Christendom.

  Indeed, there were some Saxons who went so far as to ponder whether the heathen, once safely converted, might not actually have some lessons to pass on to them in turn. The savagery that came naturally to barbarians did certainly appear to lend itself to ‘the strict enforcement of the law of God’. So reflected Thietmar, a friend of Bruno from childhood, and bishop of that same frontier town of Merseburg which Henry the Fowler, almost a century before, had garrisoned with bandits. Though Thietmar was proudly chauvinist, and had a contempt for the Poles, in particular, that knew few bounds, even he could not help but admire the robust manner in which their leaders ‘keep the populace in line, much as one would a stubborn ass’. Wistfully, he reflected on how a Polish bishop might encourage his flock to keep a fast by the simple expedient of punching out the teeth of anyone who broke it. Other moral standards were upheld in an even more no-nonsense way. A convicted prostitute, so Thietmar reported approvingly, was liable to have her genitals sliced off and hung from her doorpost; while a rapist, nailed by his scrotum to a bridge, would then, ‘after a sharp knife has been placed next to him’, be confronted with the unpleasant options of self-castration or suicide. Food for thought indeed. ‘For though such customs are undoubtedly harsh,’ pronounced Thietmar sternly, ‘yet they are not without their positive side.’

  Times, then, had clearly changed, when the cruelties of an alien people could be regarded, not as a menace, but as a potential buttress of Christendom. Within living memory, after all, there were those who had dreaded that the entire world of Christian order was doomed to collapse, shaken to fragments by the thunderous hoof beats of paganism, and consigned to its sacrilegious flames. Yet Christendom had not succumbed. Its laws, its rituals, its mysteries had endured. Rather, like a phantom dissolved upon the splashing of holy water or the singing of a psalm, it was the heathen assailants of Christendom who had found themselves, in the final reckoning, confounded, disarmed, transfigured. In Hungary, such a paragon of godliness was Caesar’s brother-in-law, King Stephen, that he would end up officially proclaimed a saint; in Gniezno, at the tomb of the blessed Adalbert, stupendous miracles continued to be performed, to the awe and wonder of all; even further east, on the very margin of the world, where Gog and Magog had once been believed to wait, there now sat a Christian prince within a Christian city, the fabulous stronghold of Kiev. Perhaps, then, in the cross-surmounted apple sent by the emperor to Odilo, there was to be found a symbol, not merely of hope, but of celebration. Already, it appeared, such was the golden brilliancy of the heartlands of Christendom that its glow was spilling outwards to the ends of the earth.

  Yet in truth, it was not along the limits of the Christian world, among distant barbarians, in lands with grotesque and unpronounceable names, that the most startling evidence of all was to be found of how a savage nation might be redeemed. Instead, it lay directly on the doorstep of the King of France himself. North-westwards out of Paris, that nerve centre of Capetian power, there wound a mighty river, the Seine; and as its currents flowed onwards to the sea, so they passed by ‘woods teeming with wild animals, fields ideal for growing corn and other crops, and meadows lush with cattle-fattening grass’. A province, in short, not to be surrendered idly; and sure enough, for many centuries, ever since the first coming of Clovis into Gaul, it had served as a prized adornment of the empire of the Franks. And yet, under the heirs of Charlemagne, the empire of the Franks had let it slip. So terminally, indeed, that with the dawning of the second millennium a new word was starting to be used to describe the region, a word that branded it the property, not of the Franks at all, but of barbarians who had long seemed, even more than the Hungarians or Saracens, a horror risen up from the most anguished depths of

  Christian nightmares. ‘Normandy’, people were coming to call it: the land of the ‘Nordmanni’ – the ‘Northmen’.

  It was a name fit to inspire terror. That the frozen rim of the world might make for danger had been appreciated since ancient times. ‘A hive of nations’: so one historian, writing in the early years of Constantinople, had termed the furthermost North. Centuries on, and a more detailed knowledge of the intimidating expanses of Scandinavia had done nothing to impair this judgement. Given their interminable winters, what else was there for the inhabitants to do, save to copulate and breed? It had certainly come as little surprise to venturesome missionaries to discover that many of the demons worshipped by the Northmen should have been prodigious fornicators: one of them, for instance, a giant-slaughtering hammer- wielder by the name of Thor, was a compulsively enthusiastic rapist; while a second, Frey, boasted a ‘phallus of truly enormous dimensions’. Alarming revelations, to be sure: for people capable of worshipping gods such as these, violent in their ambitions, insatiable in their lusts, could hardly help but prove a menace to Christendom, rather as lascivious promptings might beset a virtuous soul. The Northmen, certainly, were notorious for setting few limits on their ravening. To harvest women, ‘leading them down to a bright ship, fetters biting greedily into their soft flesh’; to deny their bodies to rivals; then to father on them a teeming plenitude of sons: these were held the surest proofs of manliness. ‘And so it is that these people soon grow too numerous for their native land to support them – and the consequence is that a war band of young men has to be selected by lot, according to an ancient custom, and these are then sent out into the world, to seize new lands for themselves at the point of a sword.’

  Such, at any rate, among Christian moralists, was the favoured explanation for the deadly waves of pirates from Scandinavia who, surging and withdrawing and then surging yet again, upon a seemingly endless tide, had been bloodying the shores of Christendom for more than two centuries, ever since the time of Charlemagne. Whether the theory was true or not, there was certainly a grim satisfaction to be had in believing it. Although the depredations of the Northmen were demoralising, the notion that it was mere bestial appetite which had propelled them across the sea did at least serve to reassure their victims that, inviolable amid all the rapine, the values of Christendom remained those of virtue and order. Women might be abducted, monasteries plundered, even whole cities burned – and yet the memory of such atrocities, growing ever more lurid with the retelling, only helped to confirm in most Christians an impregnable sense of their own superiority. Just as the monk murdered by a Northman could draw his last breath confident in the knowledge that he was bound for a throne in heaven, so could the warrior who unsheathed his sword against the pirates and stood to block their path know with an iron-forged certitude that he was performing the work of God.

  So it was that even by the time of the Millennium, a century after the worst of the firestorm had passed from France, great princes were still in the habit of flaunting battle honours won by their forefathers against the Northmen. A dynasty which lacked them, indeed, was felt to verge on the illegitimate. Nothing, for instance, had been more fatal to the martial reputation of the Carolingians than their failure, back in 886, to finish off an army of pirates who had presumed to lay siege to Paris; just as the Capetians, one of whose ancestors had performed prodigies of valour during the great assault on the city, never let anyone forget their own family’s heroic record as Northmen-fighters. ‘Swords
and spears slippery with bright blood’;” ‘skewered bodies sprawled as though asleep in town gate-ways’; ‘gobbets of carrion stuck to the claws and beaks of crows’: such were the scenes of carnage that had first served to fertilise Capetian greatness.

  And the greatness of many other Frankish dynasties too. It was no coincidence that many of the most formidable princedoms of the kingdom, from Flanders to Anjou, stood guard over broad-flowing estuaries: those fatal confluences where waters from the heart of France met and mingled with the sea. Just as it was the Seine which had enabled the Northmen, ‘oars thrashing, weapons crashing, shields striking shields’, to penetrate to the bridges of Paris, so too had other fleets thrust their way up the Loire, snaking deep into the very innards of the kingdom, so that even Orleans, back in 856, had been captured and brutally despoiled. On the lower reaches of the river, not surprisingly, the devastation had been more protracted: the county of Anjou, which by the year 1000 would stand so thriving, so puissant, so (air, had been, not much more than a century earlier, so infested with Northmen as to appear almost lost to Christendom. Angers, the proud city that would serve Fulk Nerra as his capital, had been repeatedly occupied by pirates, and transformed into their lair. Other towns, one jittery contemporary had wailed, ‘are emptied so utterly, alas, that they are become the habitation of wild beasts!’

  But this had been to overdo the pessimism. In truth, even at the height of the Northmen’s assault, outposts of Frankish rule had endured along the entire reach of the Loire; nor had the structures of governance there ever wholly collapsed. Proficient at carting off loot the pirates may have been — but they had signally failed to lay their hands on any effective levers of power. It had not taken long for the new masters of Angers, planted in the city after its final liberation in 886, to demonstrate the full scale of this error. By 929, the Vicomte of Angers had cheerfully promoted himself to the rank of ‘the Count of Anjou’; a few decades on, and even the greatest in the land had accepted his right to be reckoned their peer. Francia being what it was, an ancient and Christian realm, loot pilfered from its monasteries could never hope to compare as a long-term investment with lands and a glamorous title. Fulk Nerra’s ancestors, because they had instinctively appreciated this, had been able to raise a princedom that, by 1000, could stand comparison with any in France. The Northmen, because they had not, had long since been swept from the Loire back into the sea.

  And yet, to a menacing degree, they had always been fast learners. As pirates, living by their wits, they had needed to be. Whether it was raiding a monastery on the occasion of its saint’s day, or sweeping into a market place just as the stalls were going up, or mastering, perhaps, the unfamiliar Frankish arts of horsemanship, the Northmen had long shown themselves adept at profiting from an attentive study of their prey. They were certainly not oblivious to the underlying strengths possessed by a Christian state – nor to the threat that these presented to themselves. Along the lower reaches of the Seine, for instance, where the Northmen had settled to for more formidable effect than they ever had along the Loire, the props of Frankish power truly had been obliterated, and its foundations systematically smashed to pieces. By the early years of the tenth century, not only had the local nobility been destroyed, and all traces of native officialdom wiped out, but even the Church itself, as a functioning organisation, had begun to disintegrate.

  It was true that in Rouen, on the very mouth of the Seine, the local archbishop had somehow, against the odds, managed to cling to office; but all around him and his beleaguered flock, as palpable as a gathering twilight, there had been the sense of a deadly wasteland closing in. ‘Invia’, such a wilderness was properly termed by the learned: a dimension of trackless forests and bogs and scrubland, where no decent Christian would ever think to venture, but which had long been the haunts of the heathen, the theatre of their loathsome rituals and the womb of their ambushes. ‘Out in the field no man should move one foot beyond his weapons,’ the Northmen sang. ‘For a man never knows, travelling abroad, when he may need his spear.’ By 900, all the region of the Seine estuary had become invia: a wasted, rubble-strewn no man’s land, where it was indeed the spear alone which ruled, while fugitives from slavery and sacrifice and war watched over their shoulders, and slunk fearfully through weed-grown fields.

  And yet by the early years of the tenth century, the sheer scale of the ruin had come to threaten the outlanders no less than the wretched natives. Increasingly, with all the region of the Seine scavenged bare, the Northmen had been obliged to look ever further afield for pickings. In 911, leaving their coastal bases far behind them, they had plunged deep into enemy territory, as far as Chartres, some sixty miles south-west of Paris. Here, confronted by a Frankish army led by Hugh Capet’s grandfather, they had been brought to defeat – but not to destruction. The aftermath had left both sides in a mood for compromise. Even as the defeated war bands were retreating to lick their wounds on the banks of the Seine, messengers from the Frankish king had been following in their wake. Brought into the presence of the most fearsome and formidable of all the Northmen, a celebrated warlord by the name of Rollo, the ambassadors had proposed a bargain. The pirate chieftain was to abandon his heathen ways; he was to become the vassal of the Frankish king; he was to stand sentry against other pirates on the upper reaches of the Seine. In exchange, he was to be acknowledged as the rightful overlord of Rouen and all the lands around it: the peer, in short, of any native-born count. Rollo, no less shrewd than he was brutal, had immediately grasped what was being offered. Rouen was certainly worth a mass. The terms had been accepted. In 912, the new lord of the city, bowing his head, had duly received baptism at the hands of its no doubt highly relieved archbishop.

  Few, on either side, had expected the bargain to stick for long. Enthusiasts for the new regime would later make much play of Rollo’s born-again piety – but more disturbing rumours had never ceased to swirl around his name. Once, at least, he had returned to his old ways, leading raids across his borders with an authentically piratical abandon; while on his deathbed, it was darkly whispered, he had cast all inhibitions aside, ‘and ordered a hundred Christian captives beheaded before him in honour of his native gods’. Calumny or not, neighbouring lords had long persisted in regarding the upstart county as a nest of heathenish vipers. In 942, when Rollo’s son, William Longsword, had travelled to a parley with the Count of Flanders, he had done so unarmed, as befitted a Christian lord meeting with a fellow prince; and the Count of Flanders, as befitted a Christian lord meeting with a dangerous pirate, had ordered him hacked to death. Twenty years on, and Richard, the murdered Longsword’s son, had found himself so menaced by a coalition of his Frankish neighbours that he had been reduced, in his desperation, to calling in assistance from across the seas. His appeal had been answered with a ferocious enthusiasm; squadrons of dragon-headed ships had come gliding into the Seine; ‘foaming streams had blushed with blood, warm gore had smoked above the grass’; and the Franks had been repulsed. Yet the Count of Rouen himself, even with his frontiers stabilised, had remained on his guard. The Frankish world beyond him had still appeared hostile and menacing, one vast and yawning mouth, waiting to swallow him and all his princedom; and so Richard, in his concern to preserve the distinctive character of his lands, had continued to encourage immigration from across the realms of the North.

  The result, over the succeeding decades, had been such an influx of settlers that by 996, when Richard, after a long and triumphant reign, finally died, the mongrel character of his subjects could be hailed as their defining glory. For Rollo, it would be claimed, long before ever landing on the banks of the Seine, had been granted a dream of a mighty flock of birds, ‘each one of a different breed and colour’, but all of them distinguished by having a left wing the colour of blood: the mark of warriors, of peerless warlords, brought together to share in a common purpose, and a common destiny. ‘One nation fashioned out of a mixture of different ones’: such was the boast of those who
had already come to see themselves as a unique and glorious people—the Normans.

  Perhaps it was not surprising, then, that their neighbours, almost a century after Rollo’s baptism, should have persisted in regarding the county ruled by his grandson as somehow sinister and alien: a lair of pirates still. Despite the fact that only Flanders among the great princedoms of the kingdom could boast a more venerable pedigree, the Norman state had never entirely lost its aura of the alien. In Rouen, for instance, the harbour remained as thronged with shipping from across the northern seas as it had ever been; flush with ‘profits from the trade borne on the surging tides’, the port was precisely the kind of stronghold that had always been most treasured by the Northmen. Even away from the Seine, the county remained a place where sea-wanderers might feel at home: in the west of Normandy especially, there were many who still spoke their language; while at Richard’s court, a praise-singer from Scandinavia would always be assured of a welcome. Violence, and slaughter, and gloating, and bragging: these were the invariable themes of a poem composed by a Northman.

  Elsewhere too, escaped from the limits of song, hints of a primordial heathenism were rumoured to linger. The winter gales which screamed across the woods and fields of Normandy were notorious for being ridden by demonic huntsmen; and leading the hunt, men whispered, was none other than the ancient king of the gods himself. The same demon whose sacred groves in Saxony had long since been torched by Charlemagne was still worshipped by the Northmen under the name of ‘Odin’: a cloaked and one-eyed figure, the master of magic, a pacer of the realms of the night. Perhaps, in the final years of Richard’s rule, it was a certain resemblance to the fabled ‘All-father’ that helped to explain the awe with which the aged count had come to be regarded: for just like Odin, he was bright-eyed and long-bearded, and it was said that after dark he would wander the streets of Rouen, cloaked and alone, and fight with the shades of the dead. Certainly, when he died at last, the grave in which he was buried appeared almost a spectre itself, conjured up from the mists of his forefathers’ past: an earthen mound, looking out to sea.