The Forge of Christendom: The End of Days and the Epic Rise of the West

by Tom Holland

  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.

  Yet Otto himself, for all the scruples that inhibited him in his handling of his brother, remained, in his dealings with the other magnates of the realm, magnificently self-assured. Rather than attempt to appease insubordination, he preferred to slap it down: not by inflicting savage tortures or brutal executions on those who presumed to defy him, but by the no less effective expedient of mocking them. When Duke Eberhard, pursuing a feud with one of his vassals, presumed to destroy a fortress sited on Saxon territory, Otto’s response was prompt. Having first whipped the Franks on the field of battle, he next summoned the venerable duke and his retainers to Magdeburg, where they were obliged to star in a great ritual of disgrace. To the raucous jeers of the whole town, a procession of warhorses was led up to the Hof, and presented with splendid ceremony to the king: a fitting – and hugely expensive – expression of ducal penitence. Yet mortifying though the sound of hoofs clopping through Magdeburg must have been to the duke, even worse was to follow: the yapping of hounds. The sight of the beasts, borne squirming and slavering in the arms of his red-faced henchmen, would have been the final rubbing of Eberhard’s nose in his own humiliation. There was, for a Frankish nobleman, no greater shame than to be witnessed in public carrying a dog.

  To be sure, the deliberate humbling of a duke, on the eve of a possible Reich-wide rebellion, might have been thought not the most sensible of policies. Otto, however, had known what he was doing. To be seen as a man of honour, of strength, of magnanimity; to be the cynosure of watching, gawping crowds; to be enshrined in admiring talk as a hero truly worthy of his rank; this, in East Francia, was the very essence of lordship. Although the duties of governance were burdensome, even they were not so pressing as the need always to be on display. So it was that Otto, conscious of the need to look as well as behave like a king, had perfected an intimidating trick of throwing glances that were said to flash like lightning. He also worked at accentuating his prime physical asset: for he was, even by Saxon standards, quite magnificently hairy. Not only did he grow his beard out, but he made sure to display the “the shaggy lion’s mane”11 which adorned his chest at every opportunity. Restlessly, from day to day, from stopover to stopover, Otto would grace his subjects with the roadshow of his majesty. The spectacle he had staged in Magdeburg, of a king enthroned in splendour, dispensing justice, in the full assurance of his power and physical strength, was one that he never tired of reprising. A great king, such as Otto aspired to be, had little choice but to promote himself as great.

  True, there were some, Eberhard and his own brother Henry prominent among them, who aimed to call his bluff. In 938, they and their supporters finally rose in open revolt. Once again, however, Otto proved more than capable of turning a crisis to his own account. In 939, after a year of desperate struggle, he brought his enemies to crushing defeat on the banks of the Rhine, at Andernach. Two of the rebel dukes were left as corpses on the battlefield – and one of them was Eberhard. Otto, obliged to appoint his successor, coolly nominated himself. Franconia, from that moment on, was to serve him like Saxony, as a personal power base. His vaunting claims to greatness, so crucial to his authority as king, could now be raised on an impregnable bedrock of lands and wealth. Those who had presumed to question his prestige had served only to burnish it to an even more brilliant sheen. As in his peacetime migrations, so amid the carnage and chaos of war, Otto never neglected an opportunity to enhance the glory of his name. Indeed, such was his talent for grandstanding that not even being caught out in a palpable blunder could throw him off balance for long. Trapped in the course of one campaign on the opposite side of the Rhine to his vastly outnumbered men, he had barely broken a sweat. Instead, ordering the Holy Lance to be planted on the river bank, he had fallen to his knees, and begun to pray before it with a flamboyant and ostentatious fervour. His troops, inspired by this edifying spectacle, had duly pulled off a startling victory. Warrior king and talisman washed in Christ’s holy blood: the two had proved themselves invincible together.

  Henry, meanwhile, that fractious rebel against his brother’s authority, had been left to nurse not only his injured pride but an arm that had been almost severed clean off in the fighting. Only his heavy armour – now more than ever the surest mark of rank in East Francia – had served to keep him from permanent disfigurement.

  Bruised in both body and mind, he proved sufficiently chastened by the final collapse of the rebellion to seek an accommodation with his brother – and Otto, with his customary imperious magnanimity, was content to grant it. “Be a lion in battle, but like a lamb when taking vengeance!”12 So the wise advised – and besides, Henry’s days of fratricidal ambition appeared brought to a close at last. In 947, he was installed by royal decree as the new Duke of Bavaria – and this time, Otto’s gamble proved a sound one. Henry, although as restless and combative as ever, now had new opponents, and new horizons, in his sights.

  For no sooner had he taken possession of his dukedom than he was leading his followers into the scorched and perilous no man’s land that marked Bavaria’s eastern frontier, and beyond which lay that breeding ground of pagan blood-drinkers, the plain of Hungary. An enterprise such as this was of an order to keep even Henry’s hands full: for no one had ever before presumed to beard the Hungarians in their own lair. Yet though the fighting was of a predictably relentless ferocity, it was not, as events would prove, an altogether reckless initiative that the new Duke of Bavaria had launched: for in 950, he succeeded in inflicting an unheard-of humiliation upon the Hungarian warlords. Just as they had always dealt with the Reich, so now he dealt with them: breaking through into their heartlands, abducting their women and children, despoiling them of their gold. Such a triumph could not be hailed by the Bavarians with a wholly unqualified enthusiasm, for they knew that what their duke had done was, in effect, to fling a stone at a hornets’ nest. The Hungarians, accustomed as they were to preying on th
eir victims with impunity, were hardly the people now to turn the cheek themselves. A full-scale assault on the realm of the Eastern Franks would not be long postponed. The hour of reckoning was drawing near at last.

  And it would be for Otto, as Christendom’s greatest king, to pass the fearsome test. Almost two centuries had passed now since the Saxons, the objects of Charlemagne’s mingled frustration and self-righteousness, had been brought to Christ at the point of his smoking sword; and still, by the Saxon aristocracy, it was taken for granted that warfare might be a Christian’s ultimate duty. It was true that numerous churchmen, in the years following the conversion of Saxony, had sought tirelessly to combat this presumption – not only foreign missionaries, but native scholars too, those who had actually studied the Gospels and pondered their unsettling, pacific teachings. These could not help but appear bizarre to most Saxons, yet there had been heroic attempts made to propagate them, even so. A monkish poet, back in the very earliest days of Saxon Christianity, had gone so far as to put words directly into the Saviour’s mouth: “If I wished to fight, then I would make the great and mighty God aware of it, so that He would send me so many angels wise in warfare that no human beings could stand up to the force of their weapons.” So Christ had been imagined as telling Peter, at the moment of His arrest. “We are to bear whatever bitter things our enemies do to us.”13 A message not unsuited, it might have been thought, to its earliest listeners, still bleeding as they were from the wounds of the Frankish conquest. But to a people such as the Saxons, blessed by Providence, had subsequently become? That was a quite different matter. Once, it was true, they had been compelled to swallow the gall of defeat, and to humble themselves, and to bow their necks before their conquerors – but they had not been left forever prostrated in the dust. God’s hand, manifesting itself through the irrefutable proof of all the great victories granted them, had restored to the Saxons their vanished glories – and multiplied them a hundredfold. And now a lord of Saxon blood sat on the Frankish throne, guarded about by his warriors, like “angels wise in warfare” – and opposed to them were the hordes of a ravening paganism. Who was it, after all, who had entrusted the defence of East Francia to Otto, and endowed him with a martial splendour, and brought into his hands the Holy Lance, if not the Almighty Himself? A cloistered virtue, at such a moment, could hardly be relied upon for the saving of Christendom.

  Anno Domini 954, and the storm broke at last. The Hungarians had chosen their moment well. Feuding among members of the Liudolfing clan, kept in check since the defeat of Henry’s revolt, had recently erupted into flames once again. The principal agitator against Otto this time, however, was not his brother, but Liudolf, his eldest son – and the rebellion was directed as much against the Duke of Bavaria as against the king. Liudolf, resentful of his elders, and quite as impatient as his uncle had ever been for power, had secured allies for himself as far afield as Italy, and with these had succeeded in capturing Regensburg, the site of Henry’s palace and treasury, and convulsing all of Bavaria. Henry himself, humiliated and fast sickening, had found himself impotent to retrieve the situation.

  Simultaneously, on the borders of Saxony itself, where Otto’s iron rule had brought his subjects there a measure of peace, the Wends were displaying an alarming upsurge of enthusiasm for their traditional pastimes: the slaughter of garrisons, the abduction of women, the lighting up of the Elbe by fire. Depredations such as these, which Otto had trusted stamped out for ever, spoke to a beleaguered East Francia of a peril even more menacing than the seemingly bottomless capacity of barbarism to renew itself; for the Wendish leader, a warlord of bloody reputation by the name of Stoinef, had recruited as his lieutenants two Saxon renegades. Wichmann and Ekbert were brothers: prominent noblemen, offshoots of the royal line, men who should properly have been fighting at the side of their lord. Darkness, it appeared, might shadow the souls of Christians as well as pagans. Evil might rise from within as well as without the realm of an anointed king.

  Yet Otto did not despair. Rather, as was ever his habit in moments of crisis, he laid on a spectacular masterclass in the art of turning weakness into strength. Neglecting for the moment the Wendish threat to his own duchy, he marched instead for Bavaria, where he loudly accused his son of being in league with the Hungarians. The charge, true or not, had an immediate and devastating effect on Liudolf’s fortunes. As the Hungarians withdrew from the Reich with their customary trains of looted treasure and stumbling captives, the revolt against Otto imploded. With summer fading into autumn, Liudolf himself was brought to surrender. With winter melting into spring, the last outposts of the revolt followed him in submitting to their lawful duke. In April, Regensburg was finally restored to a now grievously ill Henry, and Bavaria could stand united once again.

  And not a moment too soon. That summer of 955, even as eastern Saxony burned, grim news was brought to Otto from his dying brother. The Hungarians, swarming across the frontier, had returned to the Reich – and in numbers never seen before. The unprecedented scale of the invasion force, not to mention the presence in its train of siege engines, suggested a chilling possibility: that the Hungarians, after decades of contenting themselves with hit-and-run raids against Bavaria, had resolved at last upon its outright conquest. And yet, as Otto’s entire reign had demonstrated, in peril might lie opportunity – and in the very ambitions of his enemies their potential ruin. Always, for as long as the Hungarians had been preying upon Christendom, they had delighted in outpacing the cumbersome armies of the Germans; but now at last, it seemed, they might be tempted into open battle. News that warfare on Saxony’s frontier with the Wends was reaching an unprecedented pitch of ferocity would certainly have been brought to their leaders; and they had clearly calculated that Otto, if he did dare to confront them, would be able to summon only a fraction of the potential manpower of East Francia to his banner. And so it proved.

  No more than a small bodyguard of Saxon horsemen could be spared for the desperate expedition to Bavaria. There were other duchies that sent no contingents at all. Of those princes who did answer Otto’s summons, there were many who had been in open revolt against him only the previous summer. And yet still, with perhaps some three thousand warriors in his train, Swabians, Franconians and Bavarians as well as Saxons, and the Holy Lance borne proudly aloft, Otto did ride to war; and on 9 August, as he advanced southwards along the bank of the River Lech, a tributary of the Danube, he saw on the horizon ahead of him black smoke, and caught on the breeze a smell of death.

  A few miles distant lay the city of Augsburg. There, in the fields before its eastern gate, the cathedral garrison had been desperately attempting to stave off the Hungarians’ assault, while behind them men laboured to repair the crumbling ramparts, and women walked in procession, raising up tearful prayers. That the Almighty had heard these, and in the very nick of time too, even as the siege engines of the Hungarians were crawling towards the walls, was confirmed for the Augsburgers when the great pagan host, pausing in its assault, broke up abruptly and started streaming northwards. News that the King of East Francia had come against them did not, as it would once have done, prompt the Hungarians to turn tail and seek to elude him; instead, reassured that Otto was indeed grievously outnumbered, they prepared themselves to wipe him out. Twilight was already darkening over the Lech as they closed in on the tiny royal army. Halting for the night by the side of the river, they fed their horses, made sure of their bow strings and waited with a fierce expectancy for the dawn.

  Otto’s warriors, meanwhile, having spent the day in prayer and fasting, were looking forward to the morning with no less confidence. At sunrise, they swore solemn oaths of fellowship to one another, and then began their advance along the western bank, their heavy mail shirts glinting, their banners fluttering, their warhorses trampling down the dew-wet grass. It was Otto’s intention to take the Hungarians by surprise; and yet, as had happened to him many years previously, in the war against his brother, it was he and his men who were
ambushed first. The enemy, as lethally mobile as ever, emerged seemingly from nowhere, and fell upon their rearguard; three of the seven divisions under Otto’s command were routed; only desperate resistance by a fourth, the Franconian, prevented the fighting from being over almost before it had begun. The king, granted a crucial breathing space by the valour of the Franks, frantically marshalled what remained of his host into the semblance of a battle line; and then, above the hissing of arrows, the screaming of the wounded and the keening “hiu-hiu” of the Hungarians, he cried out to his men, calling on them in the name of God to unsheathe their “invincible swords.” “For who are we, to submit to such an enemy? We, who should blush at the very idea! We, who are the lords of almost all of Europe!”14

  So it was, at the great tipping point of his reign, that Otto spoke not as a Saxon, not even as King of East Francia, but as the defender of all Christendom; and it was as a Christian that he now urged his followers into battle. Wheeling his horse round to face the enemy, he reached for the Holy Lance; and then, answering the harsh ululations of the Hungarians with a proud war cry of his own, he led the charge. Behind and all around him, the hoofs of their great warhorses making the field of the Lech to shake, there galloped his cavalry, the loricati, the men of iron: a strike force of killers long forged for such a moment. Although their numbers were sorely diminished even from the host that had left camp at dawn, there was to be no withstanding Otto’s warriors that day. With a surging crash, the steel-armoured tide flooded over the hordes of the enemy, hacking and spearing and trampling them down; for against the loricati, trapped at close quarters, the unarmoured Hungarians found themselves defenceless.