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

terrorists. It was not enough that the Duke of Apulia, far from rallying to the support of his Christian brothers of Constantinople, had coolly taken advantage of the build-up to the Manzikert campaign to grab their last remaining outposts in Italy for himself. Even worse, Gregory darkly suspected him of plotting a push northwards — into papal territory. Initial attempts to smooth things over between the Pope and the Norman captain quickly petered out when Guiscard flatly refused to trust an offer of safe conduct. By the early months of 1074, Gregory had so lost patience with his menacing vassals that he had begun to rank them alongside the Turks as enemies of Christendom. In March, the breakdown in relations between Pope and duke was sealed by the latter’s excommunication. Yet while this drastic step had undoubtedly been prompted by Gregory’s determination not to be taken for a ride by Guiscard, so also did it reflect something far profounder: a fearsome struggle within himself.

The English and the Milanese, perhaps, would have laughed hollowly at the notion -- but Gregory himself never doubted that he was above all a man of peace. His wide-eyed relish for battle standards had always tended to outrun the dictates of his private conscience. No matter how justified he might feel in making blood-curdling appeals to the judgement of the sword, the grim realities of warfare never ceased at the same time to haunt and trouble him. The same hard- nosed politician who had urged Erlembald not to abandon the profession of arms also sternly affirmed that to be a knight was by its very nature to exist in a state of sin. The same seasoned strategist who had recognised more clearly than anyone that a threat to Constantinople was a threat to the whole of Christendom, and indeed had begun actively planning a military expedition to meet the peril, flinched from facing up to what such a mission might actually require. Gregory’s true wish was not for brutal and battle-hardened warriors such as Guiscard’s Normans, but for would-be martyrs. ‘For as Christ laid down His life for us, so should we lay down our own lives for our brothers.’ An injunction that came from the heart: for Gregory, whose courage was no less steely than his will, had every intention of riding at the head of his projected task force in person. Nor did Constantinople represent the limit of his ambitions, by any means. His ultimate hope, after repulsing the Turks, was to lead the armies of Christendom onwards, until at last they had reached that most fateful of all destinations: ‘the sepulchre of the Lord’.

And if there sounded something oddly familiar about this plan, then perhaps that was no coincidence, Jerusalem, after a lull of several decades, had begun to glimmer tantalisingly again on the horizon of many people’s dreamings. So too a dread—or anticipation—of the end of the world. In 1054, for instance, some three thousand pilgrims had set off for the Holy Land, prompted by the sudden and fearsome blazing of a mysterious star; ten years later, and an even larger expedition, twelve thousand in all, it was claimed, had repeated the journey, crosses sewn on to their cloaks, ‘deceived by a certain vulgar opinion that the day of Judgement was at hand’. Vulgar, perhaps; but not only the poor and credulous had made the journey: bishops, and archbishops, and great princes had gone along too. Indeed, prophecies of the end time had lately been circulating around the very summit of the Christian world. In Italy especially, among opponents of reform, great play had begun to be made once again of that hoary figure of fantasy, the last Roman emperor – and naturally enough, it was Henry IV whom they looked to cast in the role.

Times, however, had changed; and the heir of the Caesars was no longer alone in claiming the rule of Christendom. ‘Dux et pontifex’, ‘general’ as well as ‘pontiff,’ was what Gregory aspired to be. And something more besides? Certainly, amid all the troubles of the age, the Pope’s plan to lead an army to the Holy Sepulchre could hardly help but appear a pointed trampling on imperial toes. What earthly kings, and Henry IV especially, would make of Gregory’s ambitions, only time would tell. Gregory himself, however, as he prepared for the great challenges that lay ahead of him, could afford to feel sternly unconcerned. He was, after all, the heir of St Peter. The Almighty was on his side.

‘It does not escape us,’ he wrote a year after his accession, ‘how diverse are men’s opinions and judgements concerning us – for some, pointing to identical cases and actions, will think us cruel, others unduly mild. To all of them, however, we can give no truer or more appropriate answer than that of the Apostle: “But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court.’” All the world, so Gregory believed, had been given into his hands. To him been entrusted the fateful task of reordering it – nor, in the final reckoning, was there anyone entitled to stand in his path.

The Road to Canossa

‘That he is permitted to depose emperors.’ Perhaps it was just as well that Gregory chose to keep this particular proposition from the youthful Caesar. Henry IV, as befitted the heir of Constantine and Charlemagne, was hardly the man to accept that he could be deposed by anyone. King of the various princedoms of Germany, he also laid claim to the rule of Italy—Rome included. Yet it is doubtful that Henry, even had he been alerted to the new pope’s pretensions, would have been able to do much about them. Not straight away, at any rate. There was way too much already on the royal plate. Far from being in any position to contemplate a campaign in Italy, Henry was locked into a desperate struggle to maintain his