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

of holiness. Above it there hung a metal dove, and inside the dove, placed within a golden dish, was kept the very body of Christ Himself: that same consecrated bread which, the scale of the new seating arrangements being what it was, could now be presented to the angelic monks in a single go. The setting too, lit by the wash of seven immense candles, was one of unprecedented beauty and magnificence: for whether it was the stonework of a second great altar situated beyond the first, or the delicate leafage which adorned the mighty capitals, or the ruby glimmer of the wax-painted frescoes on the distant walls, everything was designed to evoke for an awed sinner a sense of paradise. The shadow of the Last Judgement, which had haunted the imaginings of Cluny for the near two centuries of its existence, still appeared to its virgin brethren to lie dark across the world; and so it was, just as Odo and Odilo had done, that Hugh aimed to provide a haven from the gathering storm waves of that terrible day. ‘For we, who are placed upon the seas of this world, should always strive to avoid the currents of this life.””

Yet in truth, as the very splendour of the maior ecclesia served to trumpet, the circumstances of the Christian people had changed immeasurably since the founding of the abbey. After all, back in the days when there had been nothing to see at Cluny but a ducal hunting lodge, it had seemed to many that Christendom itself was on the verge of being submerged utterly, lost for good beneath the flood tides of blood and fire which for so long, and with such ferocity, had been breaking against it. Indeed, as late as 972, one of the monastery’s own abbots, Odilo’s predecessor, had been kidnapped and held to ransom by Saracen bandits. A century on, however, and the heartlands of Christendom appeared secure once and for all against heathen appetites. Former breeding grounds of paganism had long since been won for the Cross. Along the fir-darkened tracks of the North Way, where offerings to Odin had lately been hung from the trees, pilgrims now journeyed to bow their heads before the tomb of the martyred St Olaf; beside the Danube, Hungarians who still roamed its banks with tents or reeds for fashioning huts, just as their ancestors had always done, now dreaded to pitch a camp too far from a church, lest they be fined or else cursed by a saint. Indeed, a man might travel a thousand miles from Cluny, a thousand miles and even more, and still not pass the limits of Christendom.

To be sure, he would have needed to set out in the right direction first. Not all the one-time despoilers of the Church had been brought to repent of their depredations. If Cluny were indeed, as Urban pronounced, ‘the light of the world’, then so too, admittedly, did there remain certain benighted regions where its rays had failed to penetrate. Abbot Hugh himself, writing to a Saracen ruler in Spain, and pushing the argument that Mohammed had been an agent of the Devil, had found his letters being afforded a less than ecstatic reception.” His missionaries too. Back in 1074, for instance, after a monk from Cluny had travelled to al-Andalus and offered to walk through fire if his audience would only abandon their heresy, the Saracens had contemptuously ducked the challenge. So the monk, in high dudgeon, ‘had shaken the dust from his feet, turned on his heels, and set off back for his monastery’.”

At least, though, as he trudged home across the Pyrenees, he had been able to console himself with the reflection that he, at any rate, was unlikely to have a run-in with Saracen bandits. The monks of Cluny might have failed to win them for Christ – but conversion, as the events of the past century had served robustly to demonstrate, was not the only way to counter the menace of the Saracens. The days when an abbot on his travels might be kidnapped by one of their war bands were long since gone. Indeed, to a startling degree, the boot was now on the other foot. In 1087, for instance, a war fleet led by Pisan adventurers had taken belated revenge for the sacking of their city eighty-odd years before by descending on an African port, stripping it bare and carting off the proceeds in triumph to fund a new cathedral. Then, in 1090, a further famous victory: the last outposts of Saracen rule in Sicily had surrendered to Count Roger. One year on, and it had been the turn of the corsairs of Malta to submit to Norman rule, and be comprehensively cleaned out. Along with the gold, hundreds of Christian captives had been set free from the pirates’ warehouses. The slave trade to Africa, that centuries-old drain upon the strength of Italy, had been left comprehensively spiked. It was not only Sicily and Malta that had been secured for Christendom, but the waters beyond them. The sea lanes of the Mediterranean were safe at last for Christian shipping – and for Christian merchants, and Christian money-making ventures, above all.

‘God it is,’ as Urban reflected in wonder, ‘in His wisdom and strength, who takes away princedoms, according to His desire, and transforms utterly the spirit of the times.’ Christendom, which had once been bled almost to death, was starting to quicken at last. Blessed the poor might be – but riches too, if they could only be held to a proper purpose, were hardly to be scorned as instruments of heaven’s favour. The cathedral-builders of Pisa could certainly bear witness to that. So too, and even more gloriously, could Abbot Hugh himself. A church such as he had embarked upon, after all, needed to be paid for somehow. What a blessing it was, then, that the monks of Cluny had recently secured a patron well qualified to make