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

by Tom Holland

  And this, as a bargain, was one that even the peasants themselves were increasingly too punch-drunk to resist. Better a master bound by the strictures of the Peace of God, perhaps, and a storehouse well stocked for the winter, than liberty and a pile of smoking rubble. Not that the master necessarily had to be a castellan. The men and women who toiled in the fields around Cluny as the serfs of St. Peter were far from the only peasants to have ended up the dependants of a great monastery. The concern of churchmen for the poor – though it might be heartfelt – was likely as well, at least in part, to reflect a concern for their own finances. No less than the castellans, great abbots and bishops stood to profit handsomely from the wholesale enserfment of the peasantry – as long as order and the rule of law could be upheld. Once, of course, the peace campaigners would have looked to the king to provide them with their security; but it was a mark of how utterly everything changed, how it had been utterly turned upside down, that the king was now looking to them. By 1016, Robert Capet had finally crushed his enemies in Burgundy. Concerned to see order established in his new domain, he toured it that same summer amid a great show of magnificence – and among the towns that he visited was Verdun-sur-le-Doubs. Over the succeeding years, he would repeatedly demonstrate his approval of what the peace campaigners were attempting to achieve – even to the extent of hosting his own councils, and affecting an ostentatious religiosity. So it was that the king, just as though he were a saint, would feed the poor at his own table; hand out his robes to them; even have it whispered that he could cure them of leprosy. That he was in truth a warlord just as rapacious for land as any castellan, and had even managed to end up excommunicated by the Pope for marrying his cousin, mattered not a jot. “Robert the Pious” he came to be called. The King of France, in short, had taken to aping the Abbot of Cluny.

  There were many among the Frankish elite who were duly appalled. Bishops, in particular, haughty grandees from the ancient royal heartlands, the very cockpit of the traditional order, loathed Odilo and everything that he stood for. The Peace of God they dismissed as dangerous rabble-rousing; the claims of Cluny’s monks to be heaven’s shock troops as a grotesque blasphemy; and Odilo himself as a puffed-up castellan, “the lord of a warlike order,”63 shamelessly usurping the prerogatives of his betters. King Robert himself was serenely unperturbed. Amid all the continuing agonies of his kingdom, he had no doubt that he possessed in Cluny a truly priceless attribute, a spiritual powerhouse to illumine the present, and light the way to the future. What that future might be – whether the destruction of the world or its renewal – only time would tell. But that change was inevitable – indeed, was already irreversible – even Odilo’s bitterest critics had little choice but to acknowledge. “The laws of the land melt away, and the reign of peace is no more.” So mourned Adalbero, the aged Bishop of Laon, whose scheming, decades earlier, had helped to secure the throne for Hugh Capet. Yet even as he sought to roll back the years, to warn King Robert against the blandishments of Cluny and to resurrect the Carolingian order that he himself had helped consign to its grave, he knew that his cause was doomed. The past was gone for ever. Well might Adalbero lament: “Changed are all the orders of society! Changed utterly are the ways of men!”64

  * Halley’s Comet. It would be seen next in 1066.

  * The family name ‘Capetian’ actually derived from Hugh Capet himself, but in the interests of clarity, I have chosen to apply it retrospectively to his forefathers as well. Properly, these should be termed “Robertians,” “Robert” being a name that looms large in the early pages of the family’s history.

  * And yet anachronistic it remains. Tracing the evolution of the phrase “Regnum Francorum,” “the Kingdom of the Franks,” into the modern French word “France” is a notoriously complex business. It was not until the thirteenth century that the formula “Roi de France,” “King of France,” was first used in royal documents, with its implication that there was a territory, rather than simply a people, of which to be the king. Nevertheless, even though the phrase that I have been using, “West Francia,” is nothing but a historian’s convenience, people did have, from the mid-tenth century on, a sense of a West Frankish kingdom that was distinct and independent from what had become the empire to the east. The old sense of Frankish commonality was gone, and in its place were the two distinct entities that would ultimately become France and Germany. Chroniclers at the time of the Millennium may still have employed the phrase “Regnum Francorum,” but what they meant by that was clearly what would later be known as France. It is that, most historians feel, which justifies the use of the word to describe the lands which acknowledged the early Capetians as kings.

  * “Servus,” even more than “pauper,” is a word with a complex history. Originally, it meant “slave”; and the course of evolution by which it came to mean “serf” remains intensely controversial. At the time of the Millennium, it could still be used with both meanings.

  4

  Go West

  Normandy Landings

  Robert Capet was not the only Christian ruler to have identified in Cluny the radiance of an awesome and potent mystery. In 1014, messengers arrived at the abbey from Rome, bringing with them a remarkable gift. The man who had sent it was Henry II: “King of the Germans, Emperor of the Romans, Augustus.”1 It had taken Otto III’s successor more than a decade to be daubed with the imperial chrism, and the Pope, to mark the occasion of the delayed coronation, had presented to Henry a dazzling reminder of what still officially remained his global mission: an orb shaped like an apple, divided into four by precious jewels and surmounted by a golden cross. Dispatched to Cluny, along with the emperor’s coronation robes, his sceptre and his crown, the presence within the abbey walls of this spectacular array of imperial regalia suggested just how far the monastery’s horizons were widening. It certainly required no great penetration to fathom the prophecy encoded within the emperor’s gift. Just as the apple was divided into four quarters, so too, according to the learned, was the globe; and just as a cross surmounted the apple, so had it been foretold that the Cross of Christ was to redeem all the world. Peoples everywhere would be brought to follow it. None, no matter how savage or remote, was to be left behind. Odilo, taking possession of the orb, was so delighted by its message that he ordered it put on display whenever a major festival was celebrated: a reassurance, etched in gold and jewels, that the conversion of the heathen was at hand.

  Cluny might have been far removed from the wastelands of paganism, yet such were the reservoirs of spiritual power that it had generated, and such the efficacy of all the psalms and anthems sung within its walls, that even those demons skulking beyond the frontiers of Christendom, haunting the foul sump of their own darkness, had been dazzled by the blaze of its holiness. This, at any rate, was what Henry himself was evidently banking on. As a Roman emperor, stationed at the very edge of time, he naturally needed all the supernatural assistance that he could obtain. Like his predecessor, he had no doubt that he had been charged directly by God with the bringing of barbarians to Christ. So it was that he had married his own sister to Stephen, the King of the Hungarians. So it was too that he had lavished endowments upon the Church, with the stated goal of “destroying the paganism of the Slavs.”2 Nevertheless, the trampling down of demons was not Henry’s only responsibility. As a Caesar, it was his duty as well to keep the Roman Empire together. Sometimes, regrettably, this might require him to dirty his hands. One problem, festering beyond the eastern frontiers of the Reich, was a particular irritant. Boleslav, the same Duke of Poland who had been awarded the title of “friend of the Roman people” by Otto III, had recently begun to prove himself a good deal less than amiable. Henry, resolved to slap down the high-aiming Pole, had been obliged to scout around for allies. In due course, and to the horror of Christians everywhere, he had settled upon the most monstrous choice imaginable.

  In 1003, on Easter Day, the holiest festival of the year, Christendom’s greatest king had signed a
formal treaty of friendship with the Wends: a people who still unashamedly worshipped idols, offered up human sacrifices, and decided policy by putting questions to a horse. Even with the backing of his new allies, however, Henry had been unable to land a killer blow on Boleslav. The hostilities had continued to smoulder. In 1015, one year after Henry’s coronation in Rome, they burst into flames again. As the newly anointed emperor rode to war against the Duke of Christian Poland, the Holy Lance borne ahead of him, and anthems sounding in his ears, so were the Wends, marching beneath the banners of their goddess, still massed in all their unregenerate paganism at his side.

  A scandal, certainly. And yet, for all Henry’s undoubted equivocations, the dream of St. Adalbert – that the wilds of the heathen East might be tamed and transformed into a garden of the City of God – still endured. Even in lands far removed from the front line of the Reich, Christians were moved and haunted by its implications. “The gospel must be proclaimed throughout the whole world,” demanded one English bishop in urgent tones, “and it must be done before the world’s end. So books tell us – and afterward the end will be as soon as God wishes.”3 Missionaries, risking death no less boldly than Adalbert himself had done, duly continued to follow in the martyr’s footsteps, tramping over dusty plains, through dripping forests, along the banks of ice-locked rivers. The most brilliant of them all, a Saxon monk by the name of Bruno, even managed to end up murdered precisely as his master had done, beheaded beside a lake by a war band of angry Prussians; but only after he had spent years preaching to other tribes, from the Balkans to the Baltic, no less menacing than his killers. Indeed, following several months of sermons, he had even succeeded in converting thirty Pechenegs: nomads who haunted the steppes above the Black Sea, and who were notoriously the most savage people in the world.

  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”;4 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.”5

  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.”6 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”:7 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.”8Alarming 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 North men, 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”;9 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.”10


  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 North man 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.