by Tom Holland
And so it all came to pass. In 813, the aged Charlemagne crowned Louis, his son, as joint emperor: a pointed snub to the Pope, who was not even invited to the ceremony, and a seemingly ringing declaration that the future was to be as imperial as it was Frankish. Yet Charlemagne, despite passing on his dominions undivided, in the authentic manner of a Roman emperor, would rather not have done so. His original plans for the succession had been darkened bitterly by bereavement. Two sons, one after the other, had died only months previously. Had they lived, then Charlemagne, obedient to the primordial customs of his people, would certainly have divided his dominions into three. As it was, when he too, one year later, was summoned to meet his maker, he left behind him just the single heir. Louis ascended to the rule of the Frankish world unopposed. The empire of the West continued to acknowledge but a single master. Circumstance, for the while, had preserved it whole.
Yet still the potential for crisis festered. Despite the new king’s own best efforts, tensions between the fantasy of a Roman Empire and the very different realities of Frankish custom and society were not easily squared. Louis, like his father, was a prolific breeder; and his sons, unlike Charlemagne’s, tended to survive. Already, even before his death in 840, they had begun scrapping over their inheritance. After his death, they tore the West to pieces. In 843, Louis’ three surviving sons, Charles, Louis and Lothar, met in the town of Verdun, where this dismemberment was solemnly formalised. Charles received the western portion of Francia, while Louis received the German-speaking lands that stretched eastwards of the Rhine: a division that, in the long run, would prove an enduring and fateful one.
Lothar, meanwhile, the eldest son, had to be content with a peculiarly rackety inheritance: a tranche of disparate territories running from the Low Countries down through Burgundy and across the Alps into Italy. It was to Lothar as well that the imperial title had been awarded: a dignity already spectral, but soon to plum yet profounder depths of devaluation. Like father, like son: it was becoming the habit for Frankish kings to leave behind them heirs in threes, and Lothar, before he died in 855, had carved up his own patrimony into thirds to meet the needs of his own progeny. This had left Louis, his eldest son and successor as emperor, with only the kingdom of Italy as his inheritance, a perilously attenuated base from which to claim the sway of the Christian world. Already, in a desperate attempt to shore up his prestige, Louis II had submitted to being crowned and anointed by the Pope, as both his father and grandfather, in similar moods of beleaguerment, had already done: for Charlemagne’s successors, lacking the brutal self-confidence of the first Frankish emperor, had increasingly craved the validation that it was felt only St. Peter’s heir could provide. As a result, papal involvement in imperial coronations had become ever more a given, and all Charlemagne’s efforts to eliminate it lost to memory. A bare half-century on from the momentous Christmas Day of 800, and Leo’s shade could be well pleased. Only a pope, it was now accepted, had the power to bestow an imperial crown.
Yet a coronation, even one staged in Rome, was hardly sufficient in itself to make an emperor. In 871, a gloating missive from Constantinople arrived at Louis’ court, pointing this out in the most undiplomatic terms. No longer did the Basileus feel any call to kowtow to the Franks. The Romaioi, long pressed and harried by their enemies, were now everywhere back on the offensive. As their fortunes were resurrected from the nadir of the previous century, so also was their ancient birthright of regarding foreigners with contempt, which Charlemagne’s pre-eminence had briefly threatened, restored to them in all its traditional vigour. They naturally dismissed the shrunken figure of Louis II, a barbarian adorned in Roman robes, with a particular relish. No longer were they prepared to tolerate the right of anyone save their own master to the imperial title. The Basileus himself, in his letter to Louis, spelled this out in acerbic terms. There was, as there had always been, only the single empire – and the Franks had no claim to it.
Three decades on, and few even among the Franks themselves could deny that their imperial pretensions were in a state of chronic disrepair. The dominion raised to such heights of greatness only a century previously was everywhere collapsing. Kings and emperors ruled with all the authority of ghosts. The ancient wellsprings of prestige, drawn on to such effect by Charlemagne, appeared increasingly drained. In 901, the grandson of Louis II, determined to revive the fortunes of his house, had himself crowned emperor; four years later, and he had been captured by a rival warlord, blinded and banished to Burgundy, there to wither for the rest of his life. Never again would the family of Charlemagne lay claim to the dignity of an imperial title: a shrivelling of its fortunes rendered all the more terminal by the near-simultaneous extinction, in 911, of the royal line of East Francia. It was true that the great nobles of Germany, keen to perpetuate a sense of continuity with the glorious past, promptly looked for a replacement to Franconia, a princedom in the very heartlands of the kingdom – and whose duke was, as his title suggested, authentically and reassuringly a Frank.
This advantage aside, however, the newly elected king, Conrad I, brought few qualifications to the job: overshadowed by his peers, and increasingly, despite all his shrill protestations, ignored by them as well, he found his authority remorselessly bleeding away. Meanwhile, in the lands beyond his duchy, rival magnates sparred for advantage, warring with one another when not with their anointed king, all of them looking to profit from the confusion of the times. The kingdom itself, prey to such manoeuvrings, naturally enough continued to splinter. It appeared that half of the Frankish Empire was on the verge of a total disintegration.
And even in the western half, where a descendant of the line of Charlemagne still sat upon a throne, supposedly illuming his realm with the radiance of his prestige, a charisma granted of God Himself, the age was no less tempest-racked. The King of the Franks in the West, twin pillar of Christendom though he may have been, was quite as troubled by the ambitions of mighty princes as was his counterpart across the Rhine. Unsurprisingly so: for his kingdom had no settled borders, no shared institutions, not even a name. In many of the fairest principalities of the West – in Catalonia and Flanders, in Provence and Aquitaine – only the dimmest loyalty was still professed to the house of Charlemagne. Indeed, there were many among the leaders of the Franks, dukes with holdings quite as widespread as those of any king, and with treasure chests often deeper, who aspired to the royal dignity themselves. In a world without fixed frontiers, and an ever-weakening centre, there was much that seemed up for grabs. Wars duly blazed. In West Francia, as in the East, the shifting borders of great duchies were invariably traced with blood. Rare, however, was the struggle that proved more than local. Amid all the chaos and violence, a balance of power somehow held. “That this was so reflected not any lack of Frankish princes with the requisite nobility, courage and wisdom required to rule, but rather their very dignity and power, which rendered them all so evenly matched. None was able to put the others in his shadow. None was able to command the ungrudging submission of his fellows.”52 On such an inglorious basis, then, were the descendants of the house of Charlemagne, the “Carolingians,” enabled to keep their crown: the want of an alternative.
That a Christian land, if it were to flourish, did indeed require a king to rule over it was never for a moment doubted. Without one, so the wise had long taught, there could be no justice, no order, no peace. It was a king who served the Lord of the Heavens as His deputy, and whose duty it was, a most fearsome and burdensome one, to uphold for Him the world. Even in his very travails, if these were endured for the good of a suffering people, there might be glimpsed an imitation of the Passion of Christ Himself. And yet there was, for this reason, in the steady collapse of the royal authority established by Charlemagne, much more at stake than the future of the Frankish crown alone. To many Christians, the troubled condition of kingship in Francia appeared to speak of a sickness that might sap the order of the very universe, and menace God’s people wherever they lived. Only
human sinfulness, poisoning the world so that “men behave like monsters of the deep, blindly devouring all those weaker than themselves,”53 could explain the evident scale of heaven’s anger. The landscape of Christendom, which under Charlemagne had been compared to a tapestry of blazing stars, appeared increasingly to be returning to blackness. As the tenth century since the Incarnation continued to darken, so men looked at the world about them, and dreaded the portents that they read there.
In the sky, for instance, phantom hordes might sometimes be seen, their ranks formed of swirling fire; and yet, since the turning of the century, there had been deadlier signs, and more terrifying hordes, unleashed upon the groaning earth itself. Back in 899, wild squadrons of horsemen, so strange and savage as to seem a sudden eruption from the nightmares of every civilised Christian, had descended upon the plain of Lombardy, and stripped it bare. “Of disgusting aspect, with deep-set eyes and short stature,”54 the invaders were rumoured even to have drained their victims of their blood. One year later, and the hoof beats of the mysterious barbarians had made all Bavaria shake. Soon, they were being heard as far west as Provence. Every year, somewhere in the decaying Frankish Empire, new fields, new villages, new monasteries were scoured and plundered utterly.
Against foes such as these, clouds of monstrous hornets, possessed of such speed as to seem barely human and the devilish ability to fire arrows even while on the gallop, resistance seemed futile. Not until the earth split open, the invaders were reported to have boasted, would they ever be brought to defeat. Their wretched victims were inclined to agree. Certainly, there were few among the local princes who seemed capable of making a stand. Even when the raiders were at their most vulnerable, withdrawing to their lairs on the Danube along rutted and muddy trails, their wagons piled high with loot, their trains encumbered by tethered and stumbling captives, they were rarely confronted. To survivors of their razzias, the scenes of devastation that were their inevitable aftermath – the countryside blackened, the churches still smoking, the corpses of those not fit to be enslaved left fly-blown amid the ashes – appeared visions conjured up from hell. That the invaders were in truth not demons but rather tribesmen from the outer limits of the world, a people known as the Hungarians, was widely acknowledged. Yet so too, among the overwhelming majority of those who bore the brunt of their attacks, was the notion that such a plague was in itself the symptom of an evil more than human. “For they say that this is the last time of the age, and the end of the world is near, and therefore the Hungarians are Gog and Magog. Never were they heard of before – but now, behold, it is the end of time, and they have materialised!”55
The monk who recorded these opinions did so in order to refute them. He wrote with a self-assurance that came naturally, perhaps, to a man ensconced at a safe distance from the devastation, in Auxerre, in northern Burgundy. Those more directly in the Hungarians’ path tended to be less sanguine. It was not only “the frivolous,” wild tongued prophets from beyond the ranks of the priesthood, who dreaded that “the last time of the world has dawned.”56 The Burgundian monk, attempting to calm such fears, did so in response to a letter from a bishop, no less, the Primate of Verdun, whose flock had repeatedly suffered from the depredations of the Hungarians. Surely, the bishop had asked in a tone of high panic, the end of the world was drawing near? The brethren of the monastery in Auxerre, famed as they were for their learning in the study of Revelation, were growing used to such anxious enquiries. Patiently, although with more than a hint of the long-suffering schoolmaster, they would admonish those who presumed to imagine that the mysteries of God’s plans for the future could ever be fathomed. “For to grieve over the end of the world,” as the Bishop of Verdun was reminded pointedly, “is the business only of Him who plants the roots of His heart in the love of the world.”57 The orthodoxy of the Church, as it had been formulated many centuries previously by Augustine, still held. The terrors of the age were a summons, not to panic, but to repentance. They should be met, not with wild prophecies, but with prayer, and contrition, and penance, and good works. To imagine otherwise was the very height of sacrilege.
So it was that there was set up in the souls of dutiful Christians everywhere an excruciating tension. On the one hand, it was all too clear to them that “great calamities, the fruits of divine judgement, are everywhere increasing, heralding the end of the age of men.”58 Not since the very earliest days of the Church, when the return of Christ had been hourly expected, had a sense of the imminence of the end of days so utterly possessed the ranks of the faithful. That the world was hurtling towards the fiery ruin so long prophesied for it appeared to most Christians, amid all the violent tribulations of the century, self-evident.
For even if it were granted that the Hungarians might not be Gog and Magog, then what could the more general savagery of the times possibly portend if not the imminence of Antichrist? There were certain signs, after all, that not even the most sceptical could dispute. The empire of the Romans, refounded by Charlemagne to serve Christendom as its watchtower and its bulwark, was everywhere dissolving back into chaos. No other barrier to the coming of Antichrist existed. Whether the Son of Perdition would be born to the union of Satan and a virgin, as most presumed, or of a Jew and his daughter, as other learned men argued, the time of his triumph was certainly approaching fast. But when precisely? The yearning to pose this question was all the more terrible for the fact that the fate of all humanity so clearly hung upon the answer. Yet it could not be asked. The veil drawn by God across the future was not to be parted by mortal sinners. Even the angels were forbidden to know. The more palpable the proofs that a universal conflagration was at hand, the more strenuously it behoved good Christians to refrain from adducing the hour.
True, there were some who found the temptation too great to resist. One seeming clue, more than any other, haunted the calculations of these imprudent souls. St. John it was, in his vision of the binding of Satan, who had reported how the angel responsible for throwing the Evil One into a pit had “shut it and sealed it over him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years were ended.” “The thousand years”: how was this figure best to be interpreted? Abstractly, as Augustine had so forcefully argued, and the Church continued to affirm? Or, was it possible, some dared to wonder, that St. John had meant the number literally, after all? To Christians grown increasingly comfortable with dating years from anno Domini, this question was far more pressing than it might otherwise have been. Nine hundred years and more had passed since the blessed feet of Christ had walked the earth; and now the thousandth was drawing near.
No wonder, then, that there were those even in the ranks of the priesthood who looked at the approaching Millennium with a mingled dread and anticipation – and were prepared to admit as much. In one cathedral, for instance, in Paris, a thriving market town, there was a preacher who stood up in the presence of the entire congregation, and bluntly warned all present that Antichrist would be upon them “the moment that one thousand years are completed.”59 A second priest, startled by this dramatic lurch into unorthodoxy, moved quickly to demolish his colleague’s claim with multiple and learned references to Holy Scripture; but still the prophecies came, “and rumour filled almost all the world.”60
And rumour bred rumour in turn. Certainly, there existed no firm consensus as to the likeliest date of Antichrist’s birth. Whether as nervous whisperings, or as claims made in public letters, or as enquiries posted to learned monks, new hypotheses were regularly being floated. Ambiguity had haunted even the seemingly ringing pronouncement of the preacher in Paris: for was the Millennium to be measured from Christ’s coming into the world, or from His ascension into heaven? A perilous question to put to public debate – and an irrelevant one too, perhaps. For if the coming of Antichrist were truly at hand, then it little mattered whether it would occur on the anniversary of Christ’s birth or of His Resurrection. What did matter, and awesomely so, was the widespread sense that the rhythms of
human life, and of the seasons, and of the very earth itself, which had continued unchangingly since the Creation, lay under a sentence of imminent termination: that at some point, either on or shortly after anno Domini 1000, all things would be brought to a fiery end. “The sons of mankind come and go in sequence, the old die, and the young who take their place wax older in their turn – and this is what it is to be human in this world, this Middle Earth.”61 But not, perhaps, for very much longer. Whether as a leaden anxiety, or as a tormenting apprehension, or as a passionate expectation, this conviction abided, and would not go away.
To many, indeed, in an age afflicted by seemingly insoluble crises, it promised a resolution. History, by the mid-tenth century, had become a nightmare from which the Christians of Francia were struggling to awake. Confidence in their ability to shape their own future had been largely abandoned. This was true not only of the poor, the hungry, the oppressed, but even of those in power. At the court of the King of the Western Franks, concerns about the imminence of Antichrist went right to the very top. By the late 940s, it seemed as though his arrival could not be long postponed. Signs of the ruin of West Francia appeared everywhere lit up by fire. Not only had the Hungarians, sweeping well beyond their customary haunts, penetrated almost to the far northeast of the kingdom, where the royal capital of Laon stood, but aristocratic feuding, savage as ever, had attained fresh peaks of sacrilege.
