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

by Tom Holland

  But not, however, to all. Sometimes, above the excited hubbub of the pilgrims, dark mutterings about idol worship might be overheard. Heretics, scornful of what they saw as the Church’s mummery, flatly refused to respect “the honour of God’s saints.”53 As a result, monks who wished to boost the profile of their relic holdings had to tread carefully. They could not afford to push their luck too shamelessly. Crowds who felt that they were being taken for a ride might very well turn ugly. Nothing better illustrated this than a particularly over ambitious attempt at self-promotion by the monastery in Limoges. The monks there, rather than grubbing up some new relics, had opted instead to promote the saint whose bones they already owned. St. Martial, it was grandly announced in the autumn of 1028, rather than the obscure missionary that everyone had previously assumed him to be, had in fact been one of the original apostles: the nephew of St. Peter, no less. Though this claim was wildly implausible, it had nevertheless secured a heavyweight supporter: Aquitaine’s leading historian, Adémar himself. For eight months, displaying yet again his inimitable talent for blending erudition with wilful distortion, the famous scholar cobbled together an impressive number of works designed to prove that St. Martial had indeed been an apostle. Finally, on 3 August 1029, the fateful day arrived when the whole campaign was officially to be blessed, at a special service in the cathedral of Limoges.

  Adémar, basking in the glow of his achievement, had even invited his parents to come and witness his hour of glory. Unfortunately, however, he had reckoned without the scepticism of an unexpected visitor: a rival scholar, an Italian from Lombardy by the name of Benedict. Ferociously, even as the service was about to begin, the Lombard denounced the whole farrago as an outrage – and Adémar himself as a fraudster. The people of Limoges, far from backing the campaign to proclaim their patron saint an apostle, promptly swung against it. When a panicky Adémar, hurrying out from the service to confront Benedict in public, attempted to press his case, they howled him down. Later that evening, in the monastery itself, the two scholars clashed again – and once again it was Adémar who was routed. The following morning, humiliated beyond all hope of recovery, he duly ceded the field to his conqueror and slunk away from Limoges, burning with shame, his reputation in ruins.54

  But still, despite it all, he could not bear to confess his defeat. Instead, over the next three years, Adémar persisted in arguing his ruined case. Hoax was piled upon hoax; forgery upon forgery. Everything he wrote, in the gathering frenzy of his bitterness, had only the single aim: to prove that St. Martial had indeed been a companion of Christ. Adémar, the same monk who in his youth had stood transfixed before a vision of his crucified Lord, now sought, with a phenomenal but twisted display of learning, to imagine himself back into the world in which the human Jesus had lived. A form of madness, no doubt; and yet, if so, it was one that he shared with multitudes beyond the bounds of his monastery, as the 1030s finally dawned. The one-thousandth anniversary of Christ’s Passion was now a mere three years away – and upon its approach “many wonders were made manifest.”55 And the greatest of them all, a wonder that appeared to “portend nothing other than the advent of the accursed Antichrist, who, according to divine testimony, is expected to appear at the end of the world,”56 was the resolve of people in unparalleled numbers to set out on a great pilgrimage, not to their local shrine, not to Santiago, not even to Rome, but to the very city which the blessed feet of their Saviour had trodden, and where He had been nailed to a cross, and risen from the dead: Jerusalem.

  The swell of this great wave had been building for some decades. Although originally there had been few travellers from the West prepared to make the long and arduous journey to the Holy Land, the years around the Millennium had seen a startling upsurge of pilgrims setting out for Jerusalem. Most, such as that venerable expert on the end days, Adso of Montier-en-Der, were eminent and wealthy: travellers well able to afford a berth on a ship. Indeed, even celebrated princes had been known to make the trip. Fulk Nerra, for instance, taking time off from terrorising his neighbours, had ended up travelling to Jerusalem no fewer than four times. His second journey, made in 1009, had been his most heroic of all: for no sooner had he arrived outside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre than he had found himself caught up in the horrors of its desecration. Braving the dangers with his customary swagger, he had even succeeded in breaking off a fragment of Christ’s tomb, and bearing it back in triumphant piety to Anjou. This formidable achievement had confirmed his reputation as a near-legendary figure. Yet even Fulk was put in the shade by the sheer scale of the human tide inspired by the millennium of the Passion of Christ, a great flood of men and women who were not necessarily noblemen, or abbots, or bishops, but people of infinitely humbler stock: “an innumerable multitude, gathered from across the whole world, greater than any man before could have hoped to see.”57

  And among them was Adémar. Defeated, embittered, and no doubt conscience-stricken as he was, there was nothing to keep him in Aquitaine. Leaving his own monastery late in 1032, he travelled first to Limoges, where he deposited his forgeries in the library of St. Martial: a dossier so detailed and convincing that within a few decades it would serve to convince everyone of his case, and win for him a posthumous victory over all his critics. That done, Adémar then went back on to the open road, joining the throngs of other penitents who were similarly heading east. Most of these did not, as had for so long been the custom, take a ship for the Holy Land; for since the Millennium, and the conversion of the Hungarians, it had become possible to make the entire journey overland. True, Hungary itself was still not without its dangers: one monk from Regensburg, travelling across its plains in the early 1030s, was startled to see a dragon swooping menacingly overhead, “its plumed head the height of a mountain, its body covered with scales like shields of iron.”58 Nor were such monsters the limit of the perils that a pilgrim might be obliged to face: for beyond Hungary there awaited cheating Greeks, and officious Saracens, and thieving Bedouins. Yet it was in the very rigours of a pilgrimage that its truest value lay – and Adémar, arriving at length before the gates of the Holy City in the fateful year 1033, could only trust that he had proved himself worthy to witness whatever wonders might soon unfold.

  The heavens, however, remained resolutely empty. Antichrist did not appear. The end of the world stood postponed, and all those pilgrims who had assembled in such huge numbers on the Mount of Olives found themselves waiting in vain for their Saviour’s return.

  Soon enough, as 1033 became 1034, most of them set off back for home. But not all. There were some, whether through a surfeit of “indescribable joy,”59 as the pious proclaimed, or perhaps through despair, who would never leave Jerusalem – except for heaven. And Adémar was one of them. He died in 1034. “Come, eternal King,” he had implored, in a prayer that was probably the last thing he ever wrote, “come and watch over your kingdom, our sacrifice, our priesthood. Come, Lord ruler; come snatch away the nations from error. Come Lord, Saviour of the world.”60

  But the Lord had not come. And still the fallen world ran its course.

  Things Can Only Get Better

  There were those who felt relief. Even by the standards of the previous decades, the years preceding the millennium of Christ’s Passion had been terrible ones: fit, certainly, to give a foretaste of what Antichrist’s coming might actually have meant for the world. Rains had fallen without cease, famine had been universal, rumours of cannibalism too. In the Burgundian town of Tournus, it was said, ready-cooked human flesh had been sold openly in the marketplace. At Cluny, the granaries had stood empty; and Odilo, so as to raise funds for the starving, had been reduced to selling some of the monastery’s most famous treasures, including even the jewel-encrusted orb donated to it by the Emperor Henry II. Only wolves and castellans, both of them preying on the ruined poor, had profited from the horrors of the times. Yet miraculously, with the coming of 1033, everything seemed to improve. Rudolf Glaber, as assiduous as ever in tracing the t
ouch of God’s finger upon the world, marked from his monastery how the violent rainstorms had abruptly ceased. Instead, “the happy face of the sky shone and blew with gentle breezes, and with serenity proclaimed the magnanimity of the Creator. The whole surface of the earth began to flourish. The harvests promised to be splendid. Want itself was ended.”61

  Or so Glaber enthused. In truth, his sudden mood of optimism was no less unbalanced, perhaps, than had been his earlier obsession with terrifying portents of doom. The skies might well have cleared – but on earth there was still violence and lawlessness and oppression. To those who had imagined that the convulsions of the age might spell the imminence of the end days, and who had laboured mightily in the expectation of their coming, the failure of the New Jerusalem to descend could hardly be regarded as a cause for unconfined rejoicing. Profound and desperate emotions had been stirred. The penitents journeying to the Holy Land, the crowds flocking to the peace councils, the heretics retiring to the woods: all had dared to hope that they might see Christ descend in His glory, and set the world to rights. Now that hope was gone. Among the poor, no doubt, whose yearning for a reign of saints the Church had sought to orchestrate as well as to temper, the sense of disappointment was especially devastating. Even Glaber could not help noting how, for all the sunny weather, the menace of knightly violence had, if anything, only darkened. “Like dogs returning to their vomit or pigs to wallowing in their mire,”62 the castellans had not forsaken their taste for robbery, no matter the pious oaths they might have sworn. The Millennium had passed, and the earthly order, by which the strong were set above the weak, had not dissolved. Still, on its rocky outcrop, the castle continued to lower.

  Yet if it was the poor who had most cause to feel despair, then they were not alone. Bishops and monks too had yearned to believe in the possibilities of an authentic peace of God: a peace, not of iron, but of love. Now, even if they could not readily admit to it, many found themselves oppressed by a sense of loss. The passage of the years, which previously had struck them as pregnant with mystery and meaning, appeared abruptly leached of both. Time had lost its edge. To a degree unprecedented in the history of the West, the Christian people felt themselves poised on the brink of a new beginning: a sensation that many found disturbing rather than any cause for exhilaration. The past, which had always been valued by them as the surest guide to their future, had suddenly come to appear, in the wake of time’s failure to end, a place remote and alien. In truth, the gulf which separated the new millennium from the wreckage of the old had not opened up overnight. Years, decades, centuries of transformation had served to create a landscape in the West that Charlemagne, let alone Constantine, would have found unrecognisable. Yet the consciousness of this, the consciousness of change, was indeed something new. “Such is the dispensation of the Almighty – that many things which once existed be cast aside by those who come in their wake.”63

  So reflected Arnold of Regensburg: the same monk who, a few years earlier, had seen the great dragon swooping above the plains of Hungary. Evidently a man with a taste for the sensational, Arnold openly disdained the past as a wilderness, one fit to be tamed and cleared, just as the dark forests, with their idol-haunted, corpse-hung groves, had been hacked down by Christian axes to make way for churches and spreading fields. His was a startling perspective, certainly – and yet less exceptional than it might have been only a few decades before. “The new should change the old – and the old, if it has no contribution to make to the order of things, should be utterly jettisoned.”64 There were many, during the feverish and expectant years of the millennium of Christ’s life, who had come to share in this opinion. Nor had the spirit of reform died in 1033. If anything, indeed, the opposite: for the failure of Christ to establish His kingdom on earth had left many reformers all the more determined to do it for Him.

  And this, at its most radical, was a dream of liberty. The example of Cluny, which owed a duty of obedience to no lord save St. Peter, continued to serve reformers as the most luminous one of all. There was nothing that more dazzlingly proclaimed the supernatural purity of the monastery than its freedom from the bullying of officious outsiders. And yet, in reality, Cluny was not wholly exempt from mortal supervision. Although St. Peter was a mighty patron, his protection could only ever be as effective as that provided by his earthly vicar, the Pope. A not altogether comforting reflection, it might have been thought – for Rome was many miles from Cluny, and the papacy invariably racked by scandal. Nevertheless, over the decades, a succession of popes had proved themselves unexpectedly muscular guardians of Odilo and his monastery. Letters dispatched from the Lateran, warning the local bishops and princes to keep their hands off Cluny and to respect its independence, had proved surprisingly effective. Rather to its own surprise, the papacy had found itself able to snap its fingers and watch the great men of Burgundy jump. Tentatively at first, and then with an increasing peremptoriness, it had sought to take advantage of this hitherto unsuspected power. As a result, the papal defence of Cluny had begun to seem to many an increasingly suggestive one. If the Bishop of Rome could poke his nose into the affairs of Burgundy, then why not those of everywhere else? To be sure, a pope such as Benedict IX, who had bribed his way to the papal throne in 1032 at the scandalously youthful age of eighteen, was generally far too busy indulging his insatiable sexual appetites to explore the full implications of this question; but there were those prepared to do it for him. The papacy might be sunk in depravity, yet there were many in the ranks of the reformers prepared to view it, nevertheless, as the best hope for a tainted and tottering world. Only a pope, the heir of St. Peter, could possibly hope to secure for the entire Church what had already been secured for Cluny. Only a pope could properly serve as the champion of its liberty.

  Which in turn made the restoration of the papacy to a fitting state of grace a matter of the utmost – indeed cosmic – urgency. No longer could it be permitted to serve as the plaything of vicious Roman dynasts. Yet as the rumours that swirled around Pope Benedict grew steadily more scandalous, fetid with tales of sorcery, bestiality and murder, so the notion that the papacy might ever reform itself appeared grotesquely far fetched. How fortunate it was, then, for the spiritual health of the Christian people, that the Holy Father was not their only potential leader. “It is in the king and emperor that we possess the supreme defender on earth of our liberty,”65 the princes of Germany and Italy had solemnly declared, in praise of Conrad II. The conceit of Otto III, who had believed it his God-given duty to redeem the world, still flourished mightily at the court of his successors. Vicar of St. Peter a pope might be, but an emperor, at his coronation, would be hailed as something even more spectacular: the representative of Christ Himself. What monarch could possibly doubt, then, having listened to such an awesome salute, that he had an absolute duty to intrude upon the dimensions of the spiritual and offer his leadership to the Church? Impregnated as he had been by the fearful power of the chrism, he was no longer merely a king but “a sharer in the priestly ministry.”66

  Certainly, within the limits of the Reich itself, no emperor had ever hesitated to treat even the grandest bishops as his subordinates. All were subject to him; all had depended for their original election upon his say-so. As both symbol and demonstration of this, it was the emperor himself who would preside over a bishop’s investiture, handing the nominated candidate a staff shaped like a shepherd’s crook, and obliging him to swear a ferocious oath of loyalty. If such a ritual struck many as not wholly dissimilar to the submission of a vassal to his lord, then perhaps this was only fitting. In the Reich, far more than in any other Christian realm, bishops had a formal duty to uphold the royal order. Indeed, there were many of them who ruled in the place of dukes or counts over immense swaths of imperial territory. They served the emperor as his counsellors; they provided men for his armies; they administered his estates. Take away the bishops, and the empire would barely have a government at all.

  Yet if the emperor had n
o compunction about putting the Church to work for him, then the Church, in turn, naturally expected the emperor to serve it as its protector. Such a duty, in the early years of the new millennium, had come to appear an ever more pressing one. As in France, so in Germany: a concern to secure bridgeheads of the supernatural upon a sin-infected earth had become a veritable obsession of anxious Christians. Perhaps this was hardly surprising: for Cluny lay no great distance beyond the Reich’s western border. Yet if Odilo was as much the favourite of emperors as he was of popes and kings, then he was far from being the only one. In the monasteries of the Low Countries and the Rhineland especially, the roots of reform reached back many decades, and owed little to the example of Cluny. Above all, over the course of the decades on either side of the Millennium, they had served to foster a novel and unsettling obsession: one with which Adémar, at any rate, might have empathised. What in Aquitaine, however, was confined to visions and feverish dreams could be found displayed for all to see in the naves of prominent churches in the Rhineland.