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

to the realm of the dead, where angels or demons, heaven or hell, awaited the soul. No longer did people trust themselves to aid their departed kin as they embarked on this last dread journey. Only through the celebration of the Holy Mass, the Church had pronounced, could there be any hope of helping souls in the other world – and only a priest could conduct a Holy Mass.

Why, even the words he spoke while performing this miraculous ritual served to elevate him as a man apart; for in the West, unlike the East, whose missionaries thought nothing of translating their holy texts into any number of barbarous tongues, there was but a single sacred language. This was Latin; and its use was no less incumbent upon the clergy in Ireland or in the lands beyond the Rhine, where Roman rule had never penetrated, than it was upon their brethren in the former heartlands of the empire. For all the babel of jabberings spoken on the outer limits of forest or ocean, yet even Northumbrians or Thuringians or Frisians, if they had been properly consecrated to the service of Christ, could share in the common language that marked them out as priests.

Indeed, scholars from England who crossed the Channel were shocked to discover that the Latin spoken in Gaul appeared vulgar and decayed compared with the exquisitely frozen language that they had imbibed with such care from their school books. Even to those who had always fancied themselves native speakers of the ‘Roman tongue’, the antique Latin penned by Church fathers such as Augustine was becoming something dead. This, among priests who had the opportunity to learn it, only added to its appeal. A tongue unmangled by laymen could be reckoned all the more satisfyingly holy. As a result, even as the use of Latin as a spoken language declined in Italy, in Gaul, in Spain, to be replaced by bastard dialects, so the study of it by churchmen continued to flourish and spread. For the first time since the fall of Rome, an elite deployed across a vast extent of Europe could share in a common vocabulary of power. The Church in the West was becoming a Latin Church.

But not by any means a Roman one. True, Christian lands were formed of an immense patchwork of dioceses – and the boundaries of these dioceses, in the old imperial heartlands at any rate, dated all the way back to the time of the Caesars. It was true as well that when bishoprics were established in newly converted territories, beyond the borders of the ancient empire, it had become the custom to look to Rome for permission to establish supremos – ‘arch-bishops’ – capable of co-ordinating them. Yet the Bishop of Rome himself, although widely acknowledged as the most senior churchman in the West, was no Constantine. He might command the respect of kings, but not their obedience; he might send them letters of guidance or advice or solace, but not instruction. Even had he aspired to impose his authority on Christendom, he lacked the means. ‘When all things are good,’ Augustine had once written, ‘the question of order does not arise.’ But shadow lay everywhere across the fallen world, even across dominions ruled by Christian kings — and so the question of order was one that the Church could hardly avoid. Chaos in a soul and chaos in a kingdom both sprang from the same self-evident cause: human evil. Robbery and oppression of the weak were bred of anarchy; and anarchy was bred of Satan, whose other name was Belial, a word which meant, learned doctors taught, ‘without a yoke’. Only at sword point, in a society collapsing into violence, could Satan be restrained, and the yoke of the law be restored.

Beyond all doubt, then, the trampling down of malefactors was to be reckoned a Christian duty – and yet it was still, even so, one hardly befitting a man of God. A bishop presided over his diocese as its father, not its constable. That role had to be shouldered instead by another, one better qualified to handle sword and spear – as indeed had been the case since the very earliest days of the Church. That Rome’s empire had splintered into nothingness did not diminish this regrettable truth. If anything, indeed, it made it more pressing. For centuries, the Church had been obliged to accommodate itself to a bewildering array of warlords. The more rulers it had converted, the more it had mutated in response to their various styles of rule. Though it claimed to be universal, it was the very opposite of a monolith. Like the West itself, it constituted instead a kaleidoscope of differing peoples, traditions and beliefs.

Even in Rome herself, the very mother of the Church, the pressures of worldly circumstance never ceased to weigh upon the city’s bishop. Back in the sixth century, armies dispatched from Constantinople had invaded Italy and restored to the empire its ancestral heartland. ‘The ancient and lesser Rome’ had been incorporated into the dominion of ‘the later, more powerful city’, and her bishop had humbly acknowledged himself the subject of the far-off emperor. A Byzantine governor had moved into the city of Ravenna, on the Adriatic coast, administering as a province the emperor’s conquests in northern Italy, the Eternal City included; Byzantine titles and gewgaws had been lavished upon the Roman aristocracy; Byzantine fashions had become all the rage. The bishop himself, every time he celebrated a Mass, would pray for his absent master in Constantinople. Every time he wrote a letter, he would date it by an emperor’s regnal year.

And yet a sense of his own dignity never left him. Although excessive uppitiness might on occasion be punished by exile or threats of execution, the pre-eminence of Rome’s bishop as ‘the head of all Churches’ was something that had been long and ringingly proclaimed by Byzantine law. Despite his best efforts, not even the Patriarch of Constantinople, leader of