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

up any shortfall. Indeed, so prodigious had been the sums on offer from him that Abbot Hugh, back in 1090, had travelled all the way to Burgos in far-away Spain to negotiate the handover in person. Alfonso VI, the fearsome King of Leon, had good cause to be generous to the famous monastery. Back at the darkest moment of his career, with his brother still firmly on the throne, and himself locked up in a dungeon, he had prayed to St Peter for deliverance. That he had been set free almost immediately afterwards, and that his fortunes, from that moment on, had taken a quite spectacular upswing, Alfonso attributed entirely to the intercession with the apostle of the monks of Cluny. And who was Abbot Hugh to argue with that?

Perhaps, had Alfonso’s coffers been filled with treasure looted

*at the time of the Millennium

from fellow Christians, he might have hesitated, even so. Fortunately, however, there had been no need for any abbatial qualms. No less than the Hautevilles, the King of Leon was a man with a great facility for defeating Saracens – and for bleeding them dry. Over the course of only a few decades, the haughty predators of al-Andalus, like those of Sicily, had become, to their natural horror, the prey of their one-time victims. With the Caliphate an ever-fading memory, the great city of Cordoba still pockmarked with rubble and weeds, and the dominion it had once ruled shattered into a mosaic of petty kingdoms, the balance of power in the peninsula, for the first time since the original coming of the Saracens to Spain, had shifted decisively. True, it had taken most Christians a while to have their eyes fully opened to this: for the afterglow of the vanished Caliphate, like light from an exploded star, still illumined the scenes of its former greatness. Alfonso himself, however, had not been dazzled: for to the penetrating gaze of a natural pathologist he had brought an insider’s specialist knowledge. Though the courts of al-Andalus might still glitter, there was a weakness festering beneath their surface, which Alfonso, as a young man, had been able to detect and observe in person. Back in 1071, after his release from his brother’s dungeon, and before seizing the throne of Leon for himself, he had fled across the no man’s land that marked the limit of Christendom and sought refuge at a court inside al-Andalus. And not just any court but the one which had appeared to stand supreme, in the wake of Cordoba’s ruin, as the wealthiest and most luminous in all Spain: Toledo.

The memories of his term of exile there were to stay with Alfonso throughout his life. Devoted son of the Roman Church he might have been – but not all his militant piety could detract from his profound appreciation, and even love, of his enemies’ glamour. From clothes to calligraphy to concubines, his private tastes often veered towards the Saracen/Toledo too, learned, elegant and unabashedly luxurious, was destined always to hold a cherished place in his heart – and as something more than just the holy city of his ancestors. Yet Alfonso was no sentimentalist. If he was far from immune to the attractions of al-Andalus, then so too had he made a most profitable and incisive study of those strategies of extortion that had always been the dark side of Saracen greatness, just as the Muslims, in the first flush of their own victories, had gloried in the number of Christians subjected to their yoke, and shrunk from any thought of converting them to Islam lest the tax base be impaired, so, and for an identical reason, had Alfonso held off from any grand policy of conquest. Rather than overthrow the various kings of al-Andalus, it had been his policy instead to humiliate and debilitate them by extorting regular payments of tribute. The heirs of the Umayyad Caliphate, proud Muslims one and all, had found themselves being treated, in effect, as the dhimmis of a Christian master.

Nor, such was Alfonso’s mood of confidence, had he shown the slightest compunction about rubbing Saracen noses in the role reversal. One of his agents, for instance, dropping in on the King of Granada, a city in the far south of al-Andalus, had been brutally upfront about his lord’s intentions. ‘Now that the Christians are strong and capable,’ he had acknowledged cheerily, ‘they desire to take back what they have lost by force. This can only be achieved by weakening and encroaching on al-Andalus. In the long run, when it has neither men nor money, we will be able to recover it in its entirety without difficulty.’

As evidence for this the Muslims had only to look at the sobering example ofToledo: for in due course, so anaemic had its regime ended up that its prince had been reduced to the desperate expedient of inviting in the King of Leon. The juiciest plum in the entire Iberian peninsula had simply dropped into Alfonso’s lap; the strategically vital heartlands extending all around it as well. Not a region of al-Andalus, from that moment on, but its flank had lain directly exposed to the iron-shod trampling of Christian horsemen. Well, then, from far afield, might Urban have hailed Toledo’s fall as a triumph for all Christendom. ‘We rejoice with a most joyful heart, and we give great thanks to God, as is worthy, because in our time He has deigned to give such a victory to the Christian people.’” And to the monks of Cluny, perhaps, especially so. Certainly, it was hard not to see in the steady rumbling of treasure carts from Spain to Burgundy a mark of the inexorable and awful character of heaven’s judgement. For just as the Great Mosque in Cordoba, the only place of worship in western Europe that could possibly compare in size with the maior ecclesia, had been adorned with the loot of Santiago, so now, when Abbot Hugh paid his workmen, did he