Millennium by Holland, Tom (any book recommendations txt) 📕

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 jt 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,’ 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’.

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 no 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-jnfected 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 Ademar, 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. As early as 970, a crucifix had been erected in the cathedral of Cologne that portrayed something truly shocking: an image of the Saviour Himself, His eyes closed, His head lolling in death, His feet and hands nailed to the instrument of his execution. Half a century on, and the notion of ‘fastening to Christ’s Cross the picture of a dying man’ remained a horrifying one to many Christians – and yet already the custom had spread as far as England. God Himself was being rendered human. Indeed, a model of imitation: for fascination with the grisly details of Christ’s sufferings invariably shaded, among the leaders of the imperial reform movement, into a yearning to