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

cut a pathetically broken figure, unable even to climb into his saddle. To many, the spectacle of the celebrated wayfarer lying in his litter was a salutary one. Even some of Leo’s closest allies had been appalled by his recourse to the sword. The Pope had sought to sanctify a policy of warfare — and the policy had been found terribly wanting. Surely, then, his critics asserted, it was God Himself who had pronounced the judgement.

Yet Leo, though sick and weary, had not abandoned his conviction that the attempt to cleanse southern Italy of the Normans had been a righteous one. No less desperately than Christian souls required purging of their sins, and the Church of simony, the sword-gashed world needed healing. So it was, in yet another startling innovation, that Leo pronounced the Swabians who had fallen at Civitate to have been martyrs; and so it was too, even in Benevento, that he had persisted in secret negotiations aimed at renewing an anti-Norman alliance. With Henry III, the Emperor of the West, distracted by unrest in Bavaria, there had been only one other Caesar to call upon. Accordingly, in the late winter of 1054, Leo had ordered an embassy to embark for Constantinople. The fullest measure of how seriously its mission was taken lay in the identity of its leader: none other than Cardinal Humbert.

By early April, even as the Lateran began to buzz with rumours that the Holy Father was near death, his ambassadors were nearing their destination. From afar, blazing like dots of fire, they began to make out a gleaming of golden roofs, until at length, as their ship passed into the narrow strait of the Bosporus, there rose stretched out before them on the northern shore a panorama of incomparable beauty and magnificence. Cardinal Humbert, that loyal servant of the Bishop of Rome, could now gaze out for the first time at an authentic capital of a Roman empire. Constantinople remained what she had been for seven hundred years: the Queen of Cities and the bulwark of Christendom. On her ancient and massive walls, twelve miles long in all, men still stood guard just as their ancestors had done, when they had served to withstand the fearsome lust for conquest of the Saracens. In her forum, proclamations issued by a Caesar were still read out to a Roman people. Along her streets, and through the massive space of her hippodrome, her armies had only a few years previously marched in a splendid triumphal procession: ‘a reminder to the Romans that ardour breathes new life into the dead’. Above all, dominating the cityscape, and putting even the promontory-clinging sprawl of the imperial palace in the shade, there rose the stupendous cupola of the largest cathedral in the world, the Church of Holy Wisdom, Hagia Sophia: a monument that had been hailed in triumph by its builder as surpassing the very Temple of Solomon.

All of which, no doubt, in a Christian bishop, should have inspired a sense of wonder and reverence – and yet Cardinal Humbert, if he felt any such emotions, did not care to betray them. An ambassador he might be – but he certainly had no wish to appear a supplicant. Treading the streets of the New Rome, he found himself all the more bristlingly conscious of the dignity of the Old. As well he might have done: for the pretensions of Constantinople were calculated to infuriate the tight-lipped scholar who had demonstrated to his own perfect satisfaction that his master ruled as the head of the universal Church. Not even through gritted teeth could Humbert bring himself to agree with his hosts that their Patriarch might rank as the peer of the Pope. Naturally, had he only been able to confine himself to the business of diplomacy, this would hardly have mattered. Both sides, after all, were desperate to secure a military alliance against their common foe; and the Basileus, Constantine IX, was a man celebrated for his affability and taste for the low brow. Listening to people with entertaining speech defects was his surest source of diversion – not debating theology.

Altogether sterner in his tastes, however, was the Patriarch himself, Michael Cerularius, a man of whom it was tactfully observed by one associate that ‘he had a taste for speaking his mind’. Prickly, irascible and intransigent, he was in every way a fitting opponent of the cardinal. Already, even before Humbert’s arrival in Constantinople, the two men had been firing off abusive letters to each other. When they were brought face to face, their insults grew progressively more vicious. Soon enough, to Constantine’s frustration and embarrassment, he found all his attempts to negotiate a coalition with Rome against the Normans drowned out by their din. The rival prelates, not content with arguing over the rights and wrongs of the claims of the Pope to pre-eminence, made a point of dredging up every point of disagreement that had ever existed between their churches: a strategy which gave them both plenty to row about.

It did not take long for relations between the two men to pass the point of no return. As Humbert began labelling his opponents pimps and disciples of Mohammed, Cerularius withdrew to his palace in an ostentatious sulk. By summer, with the Patriarch still maintaining his icy silence, the streets filling with angry mobs and any hope of forging a common policy against the Normans in ruins, what little remained of Humbert’s patience spectacularly snapped. On 16 July, dressed in the full splendid regalia of a prince of the Roman Church, he marched into the Cathedral of Hagia Sophia, accompanied by his fellow legates. Ignoring the massed ranks of the clergy who were gathered there to celebrate Mass, the cardinal strode with an awful solemnity beneath the flickering of a thousand candles, past a multitude of coloured columns, and up to the gilded altar. There, paying no attention to the rising hubbub of indignation from behind him, he slapped down a