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

communion with the supernatural, one that could provide victory in battle to their men, fertility to their women and fruitful harvests to their fields: a magical power dependent upon his having a luxuriant head of hair. It was hardly a belief calculated to delight scrupulous churchmen – but such considerations, back in the turbulent times of Clovis, had not weighed heavily. Two and a half centuries on, however, and the Franks had become a far more dutifully Christian people. The pagan affectations of their kings now struck many of them as an embarrassment. Few protests were raised when Pepin, having first snipped off Childeric’s resplendent locks, immured him and his son in a monastery. The usurper, however, wishing to affirm his legitimacy as well as his brute power, moved quickly to cover his back. A great assembly of his peers was summoned. The letter from the Pope was brandished in their faces. Pepin was elected king.

And yet election alone was insufficient to assure him of the authentic charisma of royalty. Although the Franks were Christian, they had never entirely abandoned their ancestral notion that kings were somehow more than mortal. Childeric’s dynasty, which claimed descent from a sea monster, had flaunted its bloodline as something literally holy: a blatant foolishness, bred of an age of barbarism, which only the gullible and ignorant had continued to swallow. Yet Pepin too, in laying claim to the kingship of the Frankish people, needed to demonstrate that his rule had been transfigured by the divine. The solution – naturally enough, for God had imprinted the pattern of the future as well as the past upon its pages – lay in the Bible. The ancient Israelites, oppressed by the depredations of their enemies, had called upon the Almighty for a king, and the Almighty, duly obliging, had given them a succession of mighty rulers: Saul, and David, and Solomon. As the mark of his elevation, each one had been anointed with holy oil; and Pepin, faithful son of the Church, now laid claim to a similar consecration. He would rule not by virtue of descent from some ridiculous merman, as Childeric had done, but ‘gratia Dei”-‘by the grace of God’. The very same unction that served to impregnate a bishop with its awful and ineffable mystery would now imbue with its power the King of the Franks. Pepin, feeling the chrism sticky upon his skin, would know himself born again and become the mirror of Christ Himself on earth.

A momentous step indeed – and one that brought immediate benefits to all involved. If Pepin was clearly a winner, then so too was the Church that had sanctioned it – and especially that oppressed and twitchy cleric, the Bishop of Rome. In the late autumn of 754, a pope travelled for the first time into the wilds of Gaul. Ascending the Alps amid gusts of snow, Stephen II toiled up an ancient road left cracked and overgrown by centuries of disrepair, travelling through a wilderness of thickening mists and ice, until finally, reaching the summit of the pass, he found himself at the gateway of the Kingdom of the Franks. Below the road, beside a frozen lake, there stood the ruins of a long-abandoned pagan temple: a scene of bleak and menacing desolation. Yet Stephen, no matter what emotions of apprehension may temporarily have darkened his resolve, would soon have found his spirits reviving as he began his descent: for the way-stop ahead of him, his very first in Francia, offered spectacular reassurance that he was indeed entering a Christian land. Agaunum, where four and a half centuries previously the Theban Legion had been executed for their faith, was now the Abbey of St Maurice: a reliquary raised in stone above the sanctified remains of Maurice himself. No people in the world, the Franks liked to boast, were more devoted to the memory of those who had died for Christ than them: for ‘the bodies of the holy martyrs, which the Romans had buried with fire, and mutilated by the sword, and torn apart by throwing them to wild beasts, these bodies they had found, and enclosed in gold and precious stones’. The Pope, arriving in the splendid abbey, breathing in its incense, listening to the chanting of its monks, would have known himself among a people ideally suited to serve as the protectors of St Peter, that most blessed martyr of them all.

Nor was Stephen to be disappointed in his expectations. Six weeks ‘ after heading onwards from the Abbey of St Maurice, he finally met with the Frankish king. Bursting into floods of ostentatious tears, the Pope begged Pepin to march to the protection of St Peter, and then, just for good measure, reapplied the chrism. The Franks he ringingly endorsed as latter-day Israelites: ‘a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people’. Nor did Pepin, self-assured in a way that came naturally to a warlord anointed of God, stint in fulfilling his own side of the bargain. In 755, Lombardy was invaded, and its king briskly routed. Two years later, when the Lombards made the mistake of menacing Rome a second time, Pepin inflicted on them an even more crushing defeat. The territories that the Lombards had conquered from Byzantium were donated in perpetuity to St Peter. Arriving in Rome, Pepin personally and with a great show of sententiousness laid the keys of the cities he had conquered upon the apostle’s tomb. And as caretaker of this portfolio of states, he appointed – who else? — St Peter’s vicar: the Bishop of Rome.

This was, for the papacy itself, a spectacular redemption from the jaws of catastrophe. That God in His infinite wisdom had ordained it appeared irrefutable. It was true, most regrettably, that there were a few too blinkered to recognise this, with officials from what remained of Byzantine territory in southern Italy voluble among them — but a succession of popes, confident in Pepin’s backing, blithely dismissed every demand