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

Gregory’s deposition of him by summoning a council of his bishops, and leaning on them to depose Gregory in turn. A whole array of crimes had been laid at the door of ‘Hildebrand’: warmongering, of course, and the inevitable simony, but also, and more originally, a taste for pornographic floor shows.

Nor was that the worst. Henry had also taken a further and still more threatening step. A new pope had been nominated: the Archbishop of Ravenna, a distant relative of the Countess Matilda by the name of Guibert. Not surprisingly, then, on the feast day of St Peter, 29 June, Gregory’s supporters waited with bated breath for this impostor to be struck down along with Henry; but nothing happened. Not only did the two men remain resolutely alive and flourishing, but it seemed to many, as summer turned to autumn, that the Almighty had adopted a policy of actively backing the anathematised king. On 15 October, for instance, as the Lady Matilda set out along the road to Ravenna in an attempt to kidnap her upstart relative, she and her army of knights were ambushed and so severely mauled that they had no choice but to retreat ignominiously to a nearby bolt hole.

Simultaneously, in Saxony, by the side of a swollen river south of Merseburg, an even worse calamity was befalling Gregory’s cause. Rudolf of Swabia, meeting Henry in yet another savage but indecisive battle, had his sword-hand hacked clean off, and within a matter of hours had bled to death. A maiming as just as it was awful, it appeared to his foes: for the fetal blow had been delivered to the hand with which the anti-king had once sworn to be Henry’s vassal. Gregory’s prophecy, ‘that in this year the false king would die’, now appeared all too grimly ironic. God had indeed delivered a judgement, it seemed – but it was not Henry who had been found wanting.

And even Gregory himself, who naturally scorned to share in this analysis, had been left by Rudolf’s death feeling perhaps just a measure of perplexity at the mysterious workings of the Almighty, and looking anxiously to the north. No matter that the Saxons remained as obdurately unpacified as they had ever been: they had also been left exhausted and leaderless, and Henry could afford to ignore them at last. The road to Rome lay open so, come the spring, he took it. By May, he and his army were camped out before the city’s gates. There, however, much to Henry’s frustration, they found themselves obliged to halt. No matter that the would-be emperor had made sure to bring Guibert with him, in anticipation of a coronation in St Peter’s: what he had neglected to bring were sufficient troops to intimidate the Romans, who had no desire for a swap of bishops. ‘Instead of candles, they met the king with spears; instead of singing clergy, with armed warriors; instead of anthems of praise, with reproaches; instead of applause, with sobs.’ Gregory, gazing out at his enemy’s camp from the battlements of the Castel Sant’Angelo, a brooding stronghold just across from St Peter’s, could afford to breathe a huge sigh of relief. By June, as the Roman marshlands shimmered pestilentially in the heat, the royal army had begun packing up its bags.

But for how long would Henry be gone? And if he did return in the new year, and in sufficient force to cow the Romans — what then? Although Gregory was buoyed by the solid backing of his flock, he could hardly help but reflect on the disappointing lack of support he had received from those better qualified, perhaps, to draw their swords in his defence. True, the Countess Matilda, ever loyal, ever valiant, had refused to submit to her royal cousin; but the effective limit of her resistance had been to hunker down in her Apennine strongholds, while being systematically despoiled of all her lowland possessions. Indeed, there was only one captain in Italy truly qualified to blunt the threat posed by Henry: that very same prince whose backing it had cost Gregory so much nose-holding to secure only the previous year. Robert Guiscard, however, despite all the increasingly frantic appeals sent to him from the Lateran, had shown a marked disinclination to rally to his overlord’s cause: for his concern, as it had ever been, was ultimately with no one’s prospects save his own. The Duke of Apulia had always been a man to follow his dreams — and these, by the summer of 1081, had attained a truly grandiose dimension. Rather than marching to combat Henry, Guiscard had instead been preoccupied with his most glamorous and spectacular stunt yet: nothing less than an invasion of the Byzantine Empire.

An ambitious project, certainly – but not a wholly vainglorious one, even so. Seven years had passed since the failure of Gregory’s planned expedition to Constantinople, and still the fortunes of the New Rome remained firmly locked in a downward spiral: ‘the Empire was almost at its last gasp’. Even as the Turks continued with their dismemberment of its Asian provinces, so a fresh wave of invaders, the inveterately savage Pechenegs, had arrived to darken the northern frontiers, while in the capital itself the treasury and barracks alike were almost bare. Indeed, to the demoralised Byzantines, it appeared ‘that no other state in living memory had plumbed such depths of misery’. Their ruin appeared almost total.

Yet Guiscard, even as his nostrils were flaring hungrily at the scent of blood borne to him from across the Adriatic, had fretted as well that the opportunity might be slipping him by to make a kill.

In Constantinople, after a wearying turnover of emperors in which no fewer than seven pretenders had laid claim to the throne in barely twenty years, a young general had recently come to power in the wake of yet another coup. Alexius Comnenus, however, unlike his predecessors, was a man of formidable political and military talents: an emperor who, given half