by Tom Holland
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.”77 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.”78 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,”79 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.”80
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 pacific, 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.”81
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,”82 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 of 996 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.
The following spring, by the side of an icy lake, a bare day’s journey beyond the borders of Poland and the protection of Boleslav, its Christian duke, Adalbert was hacked to death. His killers were Prussians, a heathen and turbulent people, much given to tattooing themselves and downing pints of blood, who had scorned the missionary’s preaching as the sinister work of a “German god.”83 Otto, brought the news in Aachen, was predictably distraught. Yet even as he mourned his loss, miraculous things were already being reported of Adalbert’s death. An angel, it was said, sweeping down from heaven, had caught the martyr’s head as it was sent flying through the air by a Prussian axe, and later, reuniting it with the decapitated trunk, had left the corpse to be found on the far side of the lake. From there, it had been tenderly transported by two of Adalbert’s disciples back across the border, to safety, and the awestruck reverence of the Poles. Boleslav, delighted to find himself with such a potent relic in his possession, had promptly sealed his ownership of the martyr’s body by entombing it at Gniezno, the capital that he had inherited from his father, Duke Miesco. To his subjects, a people who only four decades previously had been quite as heathen as the Prussians, the shrine raised over Adalbert appeared an awesome and a wondrous thing, a beacon of blazing holiness, a joining of earth to heaven. It had needed no burning of villages to ensure this, no mass gibbets, no planting of Saxon garrisons. In death, if not in life, Adalbert had fulfilled his dearest wish. He had indeed helped to purge heathenism from the eastern wilds – and the only blood shed had been his own. A new people had been confirmed in their membership of Christendom. The Poles had been secured for Christ.
And for Otto as well? So he certainly trusted. Despite the loss of Adalbert, and despite the continued violence along the frontier with the Wends, the emperor’s sense of mission and self-confidence remained undimmed. Indeed, if anything, it was coming to shine more radiantly still. Adalbert was not the only inspirational figure to have entered Otto’s orbit the previous year. Gerbert too had been in Rome in the wake of the coronation. Struggling, as he had been doing ever since his brush-off by Theophanu, to secure an office worthy of his talents, he had travelled there originally to petition the Pope; but soon enough, having turned the full glare of his charisma on to Otto, had found himself being employed as the emperor’s secretary. Although this role had lasted only a few weeks, until Otto’s departure from Italy, Gerbert had had no intention of letting his opportunity slip. By October, he had successfully insinuated himself back into the emperor’s company.84 That autumn, both he and Adalbert had spent over a month closeted with Otto, “day and night,” as Gerbert later proudly boasted.85 It was never divulged which topic had proved so fascinating as to keep Christendom’s greatest ruler distracted from affairs of state for such an unusual length of time with two clerics; but events would soon serve to offer a hint.
In the summer of 997, Otto formally issued Gerbert with what the great scholar had long craved: a command to serve him as his mentor. “Demonstrate your distaste,” went the order, “for Saxon parochialism”86 – and Gerbert obliged with relish. Even as Otto laboured late into the campaigning season to secure the frontier of his homeland, his new counsellor was steeling him in a sense of the global role that it was his to play. “For you are Caesar Augustus,” Gerbert reminded him exuberantly: “Emperor of the Romans, sprung from the noblest blood of the Greeks,” the master of Italy, of Germany, and, yes, of “the brave lands of the Slavs” as well. “The Roman Empire – it is ours, ours!”87
So it was that Christendom’s most enduring spectre was summoned from its grave once again, and saluted as though it might be flesh and blood. Gerbert, as practical-minded as he was polymathic, could not have been oblivious to the tension between all his exultant sloganeering and the chaos that was the true state of the world. Neither – for he had spent the entire year of 997 bludgeoning the Wends out of Saxony – could Otto. Yet the bleeding state of things, far from tempering the bold talk of restoring a universal order, seems only to have made it more grandiloquent. In 998, the ambition would appear inscribed on Otto’s seal, pledging him, every time that he stamped a document, to the “renovatio” – the renewal – of the Roman Empire. A quixotic fantasy? So it might have seemed. No hint was offered, either by Gerbert or by Otto himself, as to what a programme of renovatio might actually mean – still less how it was to be achieved. Yet this silence, far from expressing any lack of purpose, almost certainly veiled the very opposite: a consciousness of mysteries too earth-shaking and arcane to be spoken of publicly, of a mission literally cosmic in its implications, and of a duty shaped by the patterns of the revolving centuries.
At Magdeburg, when first summoned there by Otto, Gerbert had dazzled the assembled courtiers by demonstrating to them that it was possible, with the proper learning, and a fantastical instrument named the astrolabe, to track and measure the stars. Ancient sages had known this, and Saracen astronomers too; but never before had it been demonstrated with such brilliance by a Christian philosopher. God’s creation, it appeared, might indeed be apprehended through a grasp of mathematics: “for numbers both encode the origins of the universe,” as Gerbert had put it, “and serve to explain its functioning.”88 What significance, then, in the lengthening shadow of the Millennium, that year which “surpasses and transcends all other years,”89 did he identify in the magical number 1000? Infuriatingly, intriguingly, we have no certain answer. Not a single mention of it appears in all the surviving writings of Christendom’s greatest and most enquiring mathematician: a silence so profound, in the circumstances, as to be deafening. Formidable scholar that he was, and devout Christian, Gerbert would have been well aware of Augustine’s teachings on the end days. He would have known how sternly it had been forbidden to speculate as to their possible timing. Did he, as a consequence, scorn to pay any attention to the imminence of the Millennium? Or did he, encouraged by his imperial patron, secretly dare to follow the more dangerous course, and consider that perhaps Augustine had been wrong, and that the one thousand years spoken of by St. John, after which evil was to triumph across the world, might, just might, have been meant literally? After all, if anyone had the sanction to engage in such perilous enquiries, then surely it was Otto III, the Roman emperor whose dominion was the single bulwark capable of being raised against the coming of Antichrist, and whose fate it was to be ruling with the one-thousandth anniversary of the Incarnation just a couple of years away?
Certainly, the nearer the Millennium drew, the more Otto seems to have felt oppressed by a sense of urgency – as though the passing of days itself were a flood stream to be breasted. If it were true that time was indeed running out, then the challenge of securing the Roman Empire was evidently not to be a simple one – not in the face of all that a transcendent and gathering malice appeared to be hurling against him. No matter that the Wends, by the end of 997, had been pacified at last. A fresh and more insidious threat to Otto’s ambitions was already looming. Alarming news had arrived from the very heart of the great project of renovatio: Rome herself. The city’s erstwhile tyrant, John Crescentius, unappeased by the pardon granted him following Otto’s coronation, had made a sudden power grab. Pope Gregory, who had originally pleaded with his cousin to grant Crescentius mercy, had himself been served with exile. As his replacement upon the throne of St. Peter, and the willing stooge of his Roman sponsors, there had emerged blinking into the limelight a most unexpected figure: Otto’s own godfather, one-time tutor and ambassador to Constantinople, John Philagathos. No matter that his attempt to secure a princess from the Basileus had ended in failure – the embassy had evidently done nothing to diminish his co
nceit. Indeed, if anything, it appeared to have boosted it; for Byzantine diplomats, despite their private scorning of Philagathos as “slime, the son of perdition, worthy of every curse, a pile of steaming excrement, obese, a man whose true god protrudes just below his wobbling paunch,”90 had cheerfully puffed him up in his ambitions, keen as they were to see a Greek as the Bishop of Rome. Crescentius too, whose family had long had close affiliations with Constantinople, was widely suspected of being an agent of the Basileus. Meanwhile, Philagathos himself, as the countryman of one Roman emperor and the godfather of a second, was sublimely confident of securing the support of both men for his papacy. This was a reasonable enough calculation, perhaps; except that neither he nor any of the conspirators had quite grasped what Otto believed to be at stake.
In February 998, the Holy Lance was planted before the walls of Rome. Behind it there spread the massed ranks of the imperial army, the hardened veterans of a thousand bloody skirmishes in the forests and bogs of the North, a sight fit to strike terror into the heart of any southerner. Philagathos, discovering too late the full, horrendous scale of his misjudgement, had already fled the city. Crescentius, equally appalled by what he had drawn down upon himself, was holed up in his private fortress, in the shadow of St. Peter’s, waiting for the storm to pass. But it did not pass. The emperor and his army remained implacable. In desperation, after several weeks of the siege, Crescentius disguised himself in a monk’s cowl and slipped out from his stronghold, to throw himself on Otto’s mercy. Coldly, Otto sent him back to his doom. Shortly afterwards, once Easter was past, the deployment of immense siege engines enabled the citadel to be stormed. Crescentius himself, taken prisoner, was briskly decapitated. His headless corpse, so as to warn others against being “deceived by the devil’s wiles,” was first flung into a ditch, and then “hung by the feet from a gibbet, on the highest precipice of the fortress.”91
