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

a chance, might even succeed in setting the empire back on its feet. Guiscard, resolved not to give Alexius any chance at all, had duly struck as hard and fast as he could. In June, having crossed the Adriatic, he placed the Albanian coastal stronghold of Durazzo under siege. In October, attacked by a Byzantine relief force led by the Basileus himself, and including in its ranks a sizeable contingent of English Varangians, all of them naturally eager for vengeance on the compatriots of their conqueror, he won a crushing victory. The English, having taken sanctuary in a church, were reduced efficiently and satisfyingly to ashes after Robert had their refuge set on fire. Shortly afterwards, Durazzo itself was betrayed into his hands. It appeared that the Normans were on the brink of yet another conquest.

But Alexius was not finished yet. Reverting to time-honoured Byzantine strategy, he frantically dredged up what few reserves of treasure were still left to him – and dispatched them to Henry. ‘And so it was that he incited the German king to enmity against Robert.’ Simultaneously, he set about fostering a revolt in Apulia—and to such effect that Guiscard, faced with the prospect of losing his power base, had little alternative but to abandon all his dreams of winning Constantinople and hurry back to Italy. For the next two years, preoccupied as he was with stamping out the flames of insurrection in his own dukedom, he would have no reserves spare to send to Gregory— and this despite the fact that Henry, subsidised by Byzantine gold, was by now a permanent presence in Italy, a standing menace to the Normans as well as to the Pope. It was true that Rome herself, protected by her ancient walls, continued to defy all his attempts to take her, blockades and assaults alike; but by 1083, after three years of intermittent siege, the pressure was starting to tell. Then abruptly, on 3 June, a calamity. A breach was made in the fortifications that encircled the Vatican, across the Tiber from the rest of the city; Henry’s forces flooded through the gap; St Peter’s cathedral was captured. Gregory, standing on the battlements of Sant’Angelo, had to watch in impotent horror as his great enemy took possession of the holiest shrine in Christendom: the last resting place of the Prince of the Apostles.

This was a seemingly decisive moment: for there appeared nothing now to stop Henry from being crowned emperor. Yet the king, despite his capture of St Peter’s, and despite having Guibert on hand to do the imperial honours, still hesitated. No matter the vituperations of his pet bishops, it was Gregory, in the opinion of the vast mass of the Christian people, and of the Romans above all, who remained the one true Pope. Accordingly, rather than force through a coronation that his enemies would be able to dismiss as illegitimate, and in the hope of taking full possession of a still defiant Rome, Henry sought compromise.

As before, the man entrusted with attempting to negotiate this was that instinctive peacemaker, the Abbot of Cluny: for Hugh, amid all the convulsions and calamities that had followed Canossa, had somehow succeeded in keeping a foot still in both camps. Indeed, ever since 1080, when Gregory had written to him to ask if there was anyone he could recommend for the cardinalate, there had been a permanent touch of Cluny at the papal court: for the nominated candidate, a Frenchman by the name of Odo, had been the abbey’s number two, its ‘major prior’. But in 1083, as opposed to 1077, Hugh’s attempts at conciliation were doomed to failure: Gregory sent him packing. Only a few months on, however, as Henry’s noose around Rome continued to tighten, and a succession of well-directed bribes began to sap the city’s resistance at last, even Gregory had begun to suspect that the writing might be on the wall. By the autumn, it was the Pope who was hoping to open negotiations. Yet still the two sides remained as for apart as ever. That November, when Odo was sent by Gregory to explore terms, Henry was so enraged by what he saw as the continuing inflexibility of the papal bottom line that he briefly had the cardinal flung into prison.

Soon enough, however, and the royal blood pressure had begun to drop; and come the new year, Henry could afford positively to relax. What had previously been a trickle of defections from the ranks of Gregory’s supporters was fast becoming a flood. Deacons, papal officials, even the odd cardinal: all were crossing over to Henry’s side. Even more significantly, a majority of the Roman people were finally prepared to abandon their bishop as well. On 21 March 1084, a group of them unbolted the gates of their city — and Henry, after four years of waiting, rode into his ancient capital at last. Nor was he alone in laying claim to a much-anticipated inheritance. After all, with Gregory still bottled up in the Castel Sant’Angelo, the Lateran had been left standing vacant: the ideal opportunity, then, for a new tenant to move in. So it was, a bare three days after Henry’s entry into Rome, that Guibert adopted the name Clement III and was formally enthroned as Pope. Shortly afterwards, over Easter, it was Henry’s turn to be graced with the very grandest of promotions. Flanked by the Holy Lance, that ancient relic of awful power, he was first anointed by Clement, and then, the following day, crowned emperor: the heir of Charlemagne, of Otto the Great, of his own father. Rome, after a wait of many decades, could hail a consecrated Caesar once again.

But not for long. Even as Henry, resolved to finish off Gregory once and for all, was settling down to the siege of the Castel Sant’Angelo, disturbing news was brought to him from the south. Robert Guiscard and his brother, Count Roger of Sicily, were on the march at long last. The