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

No wonder, then, following such a cavalcade of successes, that he had felt sufficiently confident of his grip on Italy to risk travelling onwards into southern France. Indeed, as his partisans delighted in pointing out, the fact that he had the freedom of much of Christendom, while the emperor remained humiliatingly penned up in Lombardy, was in itself yet another stunning boost to the Pope’s prestige. More were to follow almost daily over the course of Urban’s tour of France: for he had found himself being greeted there with an enthusiasm, a rapture even, that far exceeded even his own expectations. In part, no doubt, this reflected the fact that he was himself a Frenchman; and in part as well the meticulousness with which the visit had been planned. Yet something more was afoot. Not since Leo IX’s brief trip to Reims had a pope been seen north of the Alps — and during that half-century the affairs of Christendom had been convulsed from top to bottom. Now, with a Vicar of St Peter actually treading French soil once again, the people of the various princedoms of the south, from Burgundy to Aquitaine, had been able to deliver their judgement on the developments of the past fifty years – and they were doing so with relish. Not only princes and abbots, either. Men and women who once, back in the shadow of the Millennium, might have flocked to see the relics of saints in fields, or else taken to the woods, there to attempt to live as the apostles had done, now gathered to glimpse the Pope. No wonder, over the half-century and more since 1033, that the peace movement had faded away, and heresy too: for both, in effect, had served their turn. The cause of those who had dreamed of a reordering of the fallen world, and demanded a cleansing of everything in human affairs that was most spotted and polluted, was now the cause of the Roman Church.

And Urban, taking the road that led to Cluny, and looking about him that October morning of 1095, would doubtless have marked in what he saw a blessed and mighty reassurance: that his life’s great mission, to tame what had been most savage, and to consecrate what had been most damnable, was one shared by the great mass of the Christian people. Indeed, unmistakable proofs of their efforts would have been observable to him along the entire course of his travels: for everywhere, in recent times, ‘places which were once the haunt of wild beasts and the lairs of robbers had come to resound to the name of God, and the veneration of the saints’.” It was around Cluny, however, above all other places in France perhaps, that this great work of reclamation was most gloriously evident: for there the felling of woods, and the draining of marshes, and the settling of wastelands had been continuous for more than a century, so that to those who travelled past them the very fields appeared reformed. Yet they in turn could merely hint at the true wonder which still awaited the pilgrim; and even Urban himself, familiar as he was with the approach to his old abbey, would surely have reined in his horse as he breasted the eastern hill above Cluny and paused in stupefaction. For there below him was a sight unlike anything he had ever seen: a building better suited to serve as a symbol of his labours than any other in Christendom.

Abbot Hugh had ordered work begun on it some two decades previously. The need had been pressing: for while in heaven there was no limit to the number of angelic voices that might practicably be raised in praise of God, at Cluny, unfortunately, there had been. No longer was the church that had played host to the devotions of the abbey’s brethren back in the heroic decades before the Millennium remotely fit for purpose. Fifty monks, over the course of a century, had become two hundred and fifty – and still their ranks were swelling. Accordingly, rather than bow to the constraints set upon him, and settle for compromise or insufficiency or retreat, Abbot Hugh had boldly set himself to meet the challenge head on. A new church, its outline vaster than any church previously built, its half-completed roofs already towering over the old, and the ribs of its massive vault seeming to heave and reach for heaven, had begun to rise up from the valley.

True, the project still had a long way to go -- but already, even as it stood, the great edifice was one fit to take the breath away. And Urban’s breath, perhaps, especially. For fifteen years previously, as he had set out from Cluny for Rome, there had been nothing but half- dug foundations to see where massive domes and towers now rose; and Urban too, during those fifteen years, had been engaged upon his own great labour of reconstruction. Between the universal Church that it was his duty, as the heir of St Peter, to rebuild and improve and extend, and the church being raised at Cluny which was designed to serve as the ‘maior ecclesia’, or ‘principal church’, of Christendom, there was a difference, perhaps, only of degree. How telling it was that the Prince of the Apostles, that same celestial guardian to whom the Pope, as his earthly vicar, most naturally looked for assistance and protection, had been spotted performing the occasional maintenance check on the building works at Cluny. Urban and Abbot Hugh were men with a conjoined ambition. Their goal as architects: ‘a dwelling-place for mortals that would please the inhabitants of heaven’.”

To the Pope, then, entering the massive space that the builders had already completed, the experience could hardly help but be an inspiring one. An immense and exquisitely carved altar stood before him, radiant, overpowering even, with a sense