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

by Tom Holland

  In the Book of Revelation, Saint John described his vision of how the world was set to end. Two scenes from it are represented here. In the top illustration, Satan is shown being bound by an angel within a bottomless pit; below it, “the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the Devil and Satan,” is shown breaking free after an imprisonment of a thousand years. From the socalled “Bamberg Apocalypse”: commissioned for imperial use in or just before the year 1000, the manuscript bears telling witness to the fascination with millennial themes at the very apex of Christendom.

  The conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine to Christianity was a defining moment in European history. In its wake, Christians would increasingly take for granted that a Caesar might rule on earth as the deputy of Christ. Nevertheless, by the time this representation of Constantine’s baptism was painted in the mid-twelfth century, people in the West had only the haziest notion as to who the first Christian emperor had actually been. (Morgan Library)

  Charlemagne: Frankish warlord, and restorer of the Roman Empire in the West. Two hundred years and more after his death, when this statue was sculpted, he remained the very model of a Christian king. (Réunion des Musées Nationaux)

  By the early tenth century, the empire forged by Charlemagne was splintering and crumbling away. Christendom itself appeared on the verge of ruin. Unsurprisingly, there were many, caught up in the savagery and violence of the times, who openly dreaded that “the last time of the world had dawned.” This biblical battle scene, drawn by a monk in the Low Countries, held up a fitting mirror to the anarchy of the age.

  The Holy Lance: a weapon of reputedly awesome power. Believed to have been owned by Constantine, and to be adorned by the very nails that had once pierced the hands and feet of Christ, it was said to guarantee its owner “perpetual triumph.” Its purchase in 926 by Henry the Fowler, the first Saxon king of the German Reich, served as a potent symbol of his status as the dominant figure in Christendom. (Kunsthorisches Museum)

  The marble coronation throne at Aachen cathedral. Dating back to the time of Charlemagne, it was where Otto I, in 936, sat to be crowned. “Drive away the enemies of Christ,” he was solemnly instructed by the officiating archbishop. “Establish an enduring peace for Christians everywhere.” Words that Otto would never forget. (Author photo)

  In 962, Otto I travelled to Rome for a second coronation: this time as emperor. Once again, after a vacancy of almost sixty years, the throne of the Roman Empire in the West had an occupant. From that moment on, whenever Otto’s documents needed to be stamped, it would be done with an authentically imperial seal.

  Otto II and Theophanu: Saxon Caesar and Byzantine princess. Their marriage in St. Peter’s was the most glamorous that Rome had staged for many centuries. As sophisticated as she was imperious, Theophanu would illumine her husband’s reign with a rare star quality. (Author photo)

  Among the Byzantines, distaste for the spilling of blood on battlefields was paralleled by a no less fervent conviction that Constantinople should rule the world. Despite widespread unease back in the capital, a succession of tenth-century emperors threw themselves with gusto into the task of pushing back the imperial frontiers. As the Millennium approached, the empire of the New Rome appeared more formidable than it had done for centuries. (Vatican Museum)

  With its Roman brickwork, its Visigothic arches, and its pillars plundered from a demolished cathedral, the Great Mosque of Córdoba was no less triumphantly Islamic for its wholesale cannibalisation of infidel traditions. As Mohammed himself had put it: “God desires that if you do something you perfect it.” (Commons.wikimedia.org)

  Otto III: the robes of a Caesar, the posture of Christ in heaven. Four women, representing Rome, France, Germany, and the lands of the Slavs, bring the Emperor gifts, while his attendants watch on, each with the hint of a smile. But no smile lightens the expression of Otto. Enthroned in majesty he may be, yet he has the look of a man burdened by the fearful conviction that he is ruling at the end of time. (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek/SuperStock)

  Astounding as Gerbert’s achievements appeared to his contemporaries, they appeared something altogether more sinister to subsequent generations. Surely, it was presumed, only the blackest magic could have brought a peasant to sit on Saint Peter’s throne? Here, in a fifteenth century illustration, Gerbert sports a sinister 5 o’clock shadow while beaming complacently at the Devil. (Wikipedia)

  There was no one in the France of the Millennium more proficient in the revolutionary new art of castle building than Fulk Nerra, “the Black,” Count of Anjou. His princedom was studded with fortifications—with some, like this keep at Loches, so cutting-edge as to be constructed entirely out of stone. By 1035, it reached thirty-six metres high. (Author photo)

  If forests were places to be feared as the haunts of wolves and demons, then so also could they provide peasants with ready storehouses: ones that did not depend on the ploughing and harvesting of fields. Here, in an English work calendar from the early eleventh century, hogs are shown sniffing the September air for the scent of acorns. (British Library)

  Of all a peasant’s possessions, the most precious were his oxen. Keep them, and he would preserve his freedom. Lose them, and he was almost guaranteed to lose his freedom as well. (British Library)

  If castles were one mark of the gathering tide of social upheaval that afflicted many regions in France in the approach to the Millennium, then so too were the gangs of mail-clad thugs employed to garrison them. Cnichts, they were called in English, or “knights”: a novel and menacing order.

  Indeed, without dhimmi taxes, it might prove hard to pay for an army at all. This was why, in a seeming paradox, it was those states with the largest number of Christians that could most readily afford jihad. In Sicily, for instance, which had finally been secured for Islam only in 902, the emirs regarded their vast population of infidel subjects with a cagey ambivalence. Devout Muslims that they were, and naturally mistrustful of those who did not share their faith, they were regular sponsors of new mosques and mass circumcisions across the Christian heartlands; but they also had to reckon with the need to husband their tax base. By the time of the expedition against Otto II, the Muslim population of Sicily was nudging perhaps a third of the island’s total, and it appeared that the perfect balance of manpower and revenue had been attained. Bureaucracy had fused with banditry to forge a state that was lethally primed for war. The corpses left on the beach by Cotrone had borne sufficient witness to that.

  Yet the notion that tax collectors might present quite as grave a threat to Christendom as corsairs was profoundly alien to the Saxons. Otto, master of a far-spreading dominion though he was, had no great reservoir of bureaucrats on which to call, no elaborate system for keeping track of his subjects, not even a capital. Indeed, to those Muslim leaders who deigned so much as to note its existence, the Reich appeared barely to qualify as a functioning state at all. One of them, addressing an envoy sent to his court by Otto I, had been open in his scorn. “Why does your king not concentrate power in his own hands?” the ambassador had been asked in withering tones. “Why does he allow his subjects to have such a share of it? He doles out the various regions of his empire among them, expecting in that way to win their loyalty and submission, but he is deluding himself. For all he fosters is rebellion and pride!”53

  Here had spoken a man whose own sense of what was due to him had never needed the slightest boosting. Abd al-Rahman bin Mohammed bin Abd Allah, not content with the rank of emir that he had inherited from his grandfather, had even laid claim to that very ultimate in honorifics, the title of Caliph. No less than his peers in Baghdad and Egypt, Abd al-Rahman had made sure to justify his pretensions to global dominion with a truly spectacular display of wealth and power. Otto’s ambassador, an abbot from the Rhineland by the name of John, had certainly never seen anything to compare. The Caliph’s palace, he reported years later in still breathless tones, stretched for miles. Everywhere he had looked, there were soldiers standing to
menacing attention, or riding on horseback, staging intimidating manoeuvres, “filling our party with consternation, such was their arrogance and swagger.” Even the dustiest gatehouse had been adorned “with carpets and precious fabrics.”54

  It was all in startling contrast with the décor of a monastery; but even those visitors who were not Frankish abbots might well be stupefied. Abd al-Rahman had regarded it as below his dignity to deal in anything but the most extravagant superlatives. Twelve thousand loaves of bread, it was claimed, were required to feed his fish alone. Indoors, away from the draped courtyards, the flower-scented lawns and the moated zoo, silks blended with stucco, precious metals with patterned tiles. At the very heart of the fabulous complex, in the great reception hall, there stood a pool of mercury, capable, when stirred, of sending shivers of reflected sunlight dancing across the marble walls; while above it, suspended from the gold and silver roof, there hung a giant pearl.

  All this splendour, however, had provided merely the setting for the palace’s truest jewel. Alone on a cushion-laden dais, “like a god accessible to none or very few,”55 there had reclined the Caliph, Abd al-Rahman himself. Dumpy he may have been, and prone to melancholy, confiding to his diary that in all the forty-nine years of his reign, he had known only fourteen days of happiness – and yet he and his family, the Umayyads, provided a living link to Islam’s most heroic age. Like the Fatimids, they could trace their bloodline back to the time of the Prophet. Unlike the Fatimids, they could also lay claim to an even more exclusive status: that of Islam’s first-ever dynasty of caliphs. From their capital of Damascus, in Syria, they had witnessed Muslim armies besiege Constantinople, cross the Indus and raid deep into Francia. For almost a century, from 661 to 750, they had been the most powerful family on earth. Abd al-Rahman, in short, had pedigree.

  Yet though the Umayyads’ blood undoubtedly was blue, so also, by the tenth century, were their eyes. Their skin was pale; Abd al-Rahman himself, concerned to appear properly a son of the desert, had been obliged to dye his beard black. Much had befallen the Umayyads over the previous two centuries. Toppled from power in 750 by the dynasty that would subsequently transfer the capital of the Caliphate to Baghdad, most had been systematically eliminated, often amid grotesque brutalities: the tongue of the ruling Caliph, for instance, had been hacked out and fed to a cat. Indeed, of all the Umayyad princes, only one had succeeded in escaping the bloodbath – and he had done so by fleeing to the far ends of the earth. Never again would the Umayyads return to their beloved capital.

  Over the centuries, to be sure, they had done their best to assuage their abiding sense of homesickness. Abd al-Rahman’s entire palace, so commanding, so sumptuous, so exquisite, appeared to visitors from Damascus like a fantasy conjured up from their city’s golden age. Raised as it had been upon tiers carved out of the gently sloping foothill of a mountain, it was possible to look out from one of its many levels and see, in the valley below, a landscape that likewise appeared transplanted from the Umayyads’ much-missed homeland: a vision of almond blossom, date palms and pomegranate trees. Travel beyond the palace and scenes even more evocative of Syria might be found, plains adorned with glittering fretworks of irrigation, fed by the groaning of immense hydraulic wheels, and nourishing fields of fantastical plants: figs and oranges, rice and sugar cane. Yet these were not Syrian fields. Damascus was more than two thousand miles away. Abd al-Rahman’s palace stood not in the Near East but in that abode of exile that was the furthest west, on the very edge of the world – in Spain.

  The Ornament of the World

  Muslim armies had first crossed from Africa into Europe long previously, back in 711. Beyond the straits of what would ultimately, after the general who had led the invasion, be known as “Tariq’s Mountain,” or “Jabal Tariq” – “Gibraltar” – there had lain the kingdom of a people named the Visigoths. These, like the Franks, had originally been invaders from beyond the frontiers of the Roman Empire: fiercely, even violently Christian, their kings had ruled from the craggy heights of Toledo, in the very heart of the peninsula, which they had adorned with splendid churches, and termed with soaring pride a “new Jerusalem.” Indeed, believing themselves, to a degree exceptional even by the standards of the times, a chosen people, and aiming to overawe their native subjects, it was the Visigoths, long before Pepin, who had first presumed to anoint their kings with holy oil. All to no avail. For reasons that would later be much debated – an epidemic of sodomy being the favoured explanation – the Visigoths had been abandoned by God. Their armies had been shattered upon the Muslim advance. Their kingdom had been delivered up into the hands of the invaders. Only in the bleakest wilds of the peninsula, in the poverty-stricken mountains of Galicia, in the farthest north-west, had there been left so much as the rump of a Christian state. Secure in their remote fastnesses, the men of this tiny kingdom had succeeded not only in keeping the Muslims at bay, but even, with a painful effort, at clawing back lost territory. Two and a half centuries after it had seemed as though the whole of the peninsula might fall to the invaders, upwards of a third of it had been redeemed for Christendom. The nerve centre of Christian resistance was no longer to be found in the mountains, but further south, on an open plain, within the walls of the ancient Roman fortress of León. Toledo, its crags now as adorned with minarets as they had once been with bell-towers, stood almost on the front line.

  Yet the Caliph and his advisers, though hardly complacent in the face of this Christian resurgence, felt no great cause for alarm. The men of León, long confined to mountains and desolate plains as they had been, appeared to the Muslims like wolves: dangerous certainly, but only if permitted to intrude from the wilderness that was properly their home. So it was that everywhere along the frontier, raised to stand bristling proof against Christian predators, there loomed battlements and mighty watchtowers: fortifications that the Muslims termed “husun.” North of these, drear and savage, the House of War; south of them, as blooming a garden as any in the House of Islam, rich with crops, studded with great cities, and adorned with the arts of peace, a “paradise” hailed even by her Christian enemies as “the ornament of the world,”56 the land known to its inhabitants as “al-Andalus.”*

  Indeed, such was the flourishing condition of Spain’s Muslims that they had long since ceased to depend for their prosperity upon the exploitation of infidels. This was just as well; for increasingly, under the lengthy rule of Abd al-Rahman and of his able and sophisticated son al-Hakam, al-Andalus had come to lose its character as a frontier society. Conversions to Islam, once a trickle, had become a flood. At the start of the tenth century, it has been estimated, the population of al-Andalus was only one-fifth Muslim; by the time al-Hakam died, in 976, that percentage had been reversed.57 The status of Christians in Islamic Spain had always been a second-class one; and certainly, burdened as they were by extra taxes, banned from employment in the state bureaucracy, and saddle-sore, no doubt, from perpetually riding mules, they had hardly lacked for incentives to abandon their ancestral faith. Yet while to be a dhimmi in the House of Islam had always been both expensive and a source of petty humiliations, so also, by the tenth century, had it become something even more debilitating: unfashionable. The Church in al-Andalus had long been thundering against the passion of its flock for Saracen chic; but increasingly, whether translating the scriptures into Arabic, or adopting Muslim names for themselves, or dancing attendance on the Caliph at his court, even bishops were succumbing to its allure.

  Only in the countryside, far removed from the wealth and glamour of city life, did sizeable numbers of Christians still endure; and they, in the opinion of Muslim sophisticates, were little better than wild beasts. “For when they cast off the yoke of obedience,” so one complained, “it is hard to make them return to it, unless they are exterminated – and that is a difficult, prolonged process.”58 In al-Andalus, the days of living off the fruits of extortion, whether plunder or taxes, were gone for good.

  There were many Mus
lims, nostalgic for the time when their ancestors “were admirable and excellent, determined in jihad and eager for God’s rewards, throwing themselves on the Christians in warfare and siege,”59 who regretted this; but the majority were too busy making money in less strenuous ways to care. The Caliphate may have been politically fractured, but it still offered, to the ambitious merchant, a free-trade area like no other in the world. Far eastwards of al-Andalus it extended, to Persia and beyond, while in the markets of the great cities of Islam were to be found wonders from even further afield: sandalwood from India, paper from China, camphor from Borneo. What was Christian Spain, with her flea-bitten little villages, to compare? Why, unlike their equivalents in Italy, they were not even good for slaves! The Andalusis, whose ancestors, back in the valiant first flush of conquest, had once dispatched thirty thousand prisoners to Damascus in a single train, had long since lost their taste for grubbing around after human prey. Now it was they who were the importers; and a swarm of Christian suppliers, with little else to offer which might serve to tickle Andalusi palates, had competed to corner the market no less eagerly than their Muslim competitors. The fair hair of the Umayyad caliphs, bred of concubines from the distant North, was only one proof of their success. A second was the palace guards who had so alarmed Abbot John; for these were not native Andalusis, but “Saqaliba” – Slavs. In Arabic, as in most European languages, the word was becoming, by the tenth century, increasingly synonymous with human cattle: a reflection of how widely, when demand required it, the tendrils of trade might extend beyond the House of Islam, even to the limits of the House of War.