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

in gratitude. Come the great crisis of Agnes’s regency, and even a prominent kinsman of the infant king, the formidably blue-blooded Duke Rudolf of Swabia, had shown himself perfectly content to turn his back upon the empress — despite the fact that it was she who had originally raised him to the eminence of his dukedom. Other favourites had behaved even more shabbily. Prominent among the lords directly responsible for Henry’s abduction, for instance, had been a second prince who owed a dukedom to the empress: a count from Northeim, in lower Saxony, by the name of Otto, appointed only six months previously to the rule of Bavaria. Justifying their treachery, Duke Otto and his fellow conspirators had shown a particularly fine line in hypocrisy. Agnes, they charged, despite every appearance to the contrary, was in truth a giddy creature of whim and sensuality — so much so that all her rule of the kingdom had been governed by nothing more elevated than ‘her private passions’. A particularly vicious libel: for it had served to cast all the empress’s attempts at diplomacy as the merest feminine teasing and seduction. Such was the kind of mud that any powerful lady might expect to have flung at her – but for the devout Agnes, it was a particular agony. In the wake of her son’s kidnapping, and the signal failure of the great lords of the Reich to rally to her support, the empress had been left to wring her hands over the ruin of more than merely her political authority. Something infinitely precious had been dragged through the mire too: her reputation for pious living. A terrible blow —so terrible, indeed, that the despairing Agnes judged that it could only have been a punishment delivered upon her for her sins by the Almighty.

For the next three years, an irresolute and anguished figure, the empress would haunt the scenes of her humiliation, torn between anxiety for her son and ‘a yearning to renounce the world[].’’ For as long as Henry remained legally her charge, she could not bring herself to abandon the court altogether – but then, shortly after Easter in 1065, at a splendid ceremony in Worms, a sword was belted around the young king’s waist, and at last he ranked as a man. Almost his first action after coming of age, a pointed demonstration of muscle flexing, was to dismiss as his principal adviser the same man whose ship had borne him away three years previously: the Archbishop of Cologne. It was gratifying in the extreme for Agnes to witness the disgrace of the man who had brought about her own downfall – but proof as well that Henry no longer had any need of her. So it was, obeying the promptings of her own hag-ridden conscience, that she finally took to the road. ‘The knowledge of my sins terrifies me,’ she had confessed three years earlier, ‘more than any ghost, more than any vision.’ That autumn, one among the great multitude of pilgrims seeking to cast aside their old lives, to ready themselves for the hour of judgement, to secure a new beginning, she entered Rome. Humbly, as befitted a penitent, she approached the tombs of the apostles on a broken-down nag, dressed in clothes of the roughest grey sack-doth, and ‘clutching not a sceptre but a psalter’. Yet in one respect, at least, the empress remained an empress still. Seeking spiritual comfort, she did not bother to scout around for it. Instead, imperious in her very humility, Agnes went directly to St Peter’s and summoned a cardinal.

And not just any cardinal. In 1065, with the formidable Humbert having died four years earlier, the man chosen by the empress to serve as her confessor ranked as perhaps the most intellectually dazzling of all the leaders of the Roman Church. Originally raised to the cardi- nalate back in the winter of 1057, at the prompting of the inevitable Hildebrand, Peter Damian had brought qualities to the papal cause that were very much his own. Less steely than the archdeacon, less awesomely focused and competent, he was also far bolder in the flights of his imagination, more creative, more brilliant. Indeed, rare was the innovation so radical that he could not take it to some provocative new extreme. Well, then, might Hildebrand have pushed for his promotion: for Peter, with his genius for thinking the unthinkable, was ideally qualified to serve as the outrider of reform. Sure enough, with papal ministers struggling to convince other churches that the Bishop of Rome did indeed possess a universal lordship over them, the new cardinal had gone straight for the jugular: anyone who denied it, he had declared flatly, was a heretic. A most portentous doctrine: for it had promised to the Pope an authority such as not even a Caesar had presumed to claim. To his ministers too, of course – and they, at any rate, had already shown themselves perfectly happy to muscle in on imperial prerogatives. In 1059, moving to usurp a power that Henry III had always jealously maintained as his own, the cardinals had laid claim to a truly momentous dignity: the right to choose a pope. Peter, letting joyous rip, had responded to this decree with an exuberant immodesty. He and his fellow cardinals, he proclaimed, were nothing less than ‘the spiritual senators of the universal Church’. Here was a stirring allusion: for once, back in ancient times, it was a Senate formed of the wisest and noblest of the Roman people that had guided its city to the mastery of the world. Now, Peter argued, it was the duty of the cardinals to aim at a yet greater feat of conquest. ‘For this is the endeavour to which they should devote all their talents: the subjugation of the entire human race to the laws of the one true emperor – Christ.’ It was just the kind of clarion call that Hildebrand had surely been hoping