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

and ice of winter, he signed up to what appeared a humiliating peace, agreeing by its terms to demolish all his castles, and to restore Otto of Northeim to the full warmth of the royal favour. In truth, however, the king had gained far more than he had lost. Any prospect of a coalition between the ever-slippery Otto and the southern princes had now been successfully stymied. Even more promisingly, a wedge had been driven between the duke and the frustrated mass of the Saxon peasantry. In March, taking the law into their own hands, a great army of the ‘valgus’ — ‘the common people’ — stormed the Harzburg, then began tearing it to pieces block by block. Even the royal chapel was burned to the ground. Finally, in a climactic desecration, the grave of Henry’s stillborn eldest son was dug up, and his tiny bones slung out amid the cinders and rubble. News of this outrage, not surprisingly, inspired widespread horror among the great. The southern dukes might mistrust the king powerfully, but they detested rioting peasants even more. The flattening of the Harzburg, ironically enough, spelled disaster for the Saxon cause. In the summer of 1075, Rudolf and a host of other lords at last submitted to joining Henry in a full-scale expedition against the rebels. On 9 June, amid the nightmarish swirling of a dust-storm, the Saxons were routed, and the wretched ‘valgus’ put satisfyingly to the sword. By the autumn, Henry’s mastery of Saxony was sufficiently complete for him to order his castles there to be rebuilt. Even the most fractious of the princes appeared ready to bow their necks to the royal yoke. So it was, for instance, that the royal lieutenant installed in the Harzburg, and compelled to supervise its wholesale restoration, was none other than the captain who had led the initial assault on the castle: that inveterate turncoat and survivor, Duke Otto of Northeim.

Finally, after all the many setbacks and frustrations that had previously served to hobble him so grievously, it seemed that the young king was on the verge of securing what he had always regarded as his birthright: the chance to rule as his great father had done. Even as stone-masons and workmen returned to the Harzburg, and the great lords of the Reich hurried obediently to celebrate Christmas at the royal table, Henry was looking to set the seal on his victory. Some work still remained to be done, of course. Not everyone who had thought to challenge the royal authority over the years had yet been put sufficiently in his place. Indeed, dukes such as Rudolf and Otto might be overweening, but they were neither of them half so officious, nor half so condescending, as the jumped-up Tuscan monk who sat in the Lateran. To Henry, the son of a Caesar who had forced three papal abdications in the space of a week, the notion that any bishop, even a bishop of Rome, might pose as the leader of Christendom was grotesque and insufferable. He had affected to listen politely to Gregory’s fantastical scheme for an expedition to Constantinople, but it was with no little satisfaction that he tracked its ultimate abortion. Gregory himself, far from leading the warriors of Christendom to the Holy Sepulchre, had been left with nothing to show for all his plans except a lingering taint of failure and scandal. A salutary demonstration, Henry could reflect contentedly, that the duties of a Caesar were not easily usurped by anyone – the heir of St Peter included.

A point only emphasised by the peculiarly glaring contrast between the papal debacle and his own spectacular triumph. It was back in June 1074, exactly a year before Henry himself would lead the flower of the Reich to victory over the rebel Saxons, that Gregory had embarked on his expedition. First stop: a rendezvous with its somewhat improbable chief supporter. ‘My most beloved and loving daughter,’ Gregory was in the habit of addressing the Lady Matilda of Tuscany. For the Pope, there was no embarrassment in acknowledging his obligations to a woman who was not yet thirty. Though Matilda’s stepfather, Duke Godfrey the Bearded, had died back in 1069, her mother, the Countess Beatrice, had succeeded admirably in keeping all the broad dominions of the House of Canossa to herself- and in grooming her only child to inherit their rule. Spirited, beautiful and blonde, Matilda was hardly a typical lieutenant of reform - and yet already she had proved herself a most invaluable one. Raised by her chaste and devout mother to believe passionately in everything that the new pope stood for, she had not hesitated to offer him an army of thirty thousand knights, nor to commit to accompanying his proposed expedition herself. Gregory, far from trying to dissuade her, had been so enthused by her ‘sisterly aid’ that he had set about recruiting the venerable Empress Agnes to the venture as well. Soon enough, the Countess Beatrice had signed up too. Gregory’s opponents, however, rather than quaking in their boots at this impressive show of female backing, had responded with hilarity. Guiscard’s Normans, in particular, had been loud in their derision. Perhaps, had Gregory succeeded in crushing them before embarking for Constantinople, as had been his intention, the mockery would have been silenced – but he had not. Only a fortnight into the campaign, news had reached Beatrice and Matilda of an insurrection back in Tuscany. With their forced withdrawal, Gregory had found himself with little choice but to abandon the whole expedition. Then, once back in Rome, he had fallen ill. The Holy Sepulchre had been left to seem a very long way off indeed.

Nor, a year and more on from the fiasco, had the damage been wholly repaired. Taunts that the rule of the Church had been handed over to a gaggle of women were widespread. Lurid allegations too of’a most appalling scandal’. To many bishops in particular, fed up as they were