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

Not that Cluny had profited from the winning of Toledo in terms of plunder alone. In 1086, one of its own brothers, a saintly but astute monk by the name of Bernard, had been appointed archbishop of the captured city. Abbot Hugh, writing to congratulate him, had urged Bernard never to forget that he was now a captain serving directly on Christendom’s front line. His responsibilities, therefore, were not merely to the Christian people, but to their enemies as well. ‘Do good, live irreproachably, be true to the highest moral standards, and your example will do more to inspire and convert the infidels than any number of sermons.’ Here, of course, between Hugh and his more cynical patron, was revealed a telling divide. To Christians far removed from the peculiar multicultural circumstances of Spain, any notion of maintaining pagans in their faith, merely so that their wealth might be extorted from them more legitimately, was a monstrous one. What was their gold when compared with the potential harvest of their souls? Better by far, in Hugh’s opinion – and in Urban’s—that the flow of treasure from Spain be turned off altogether than that the great cause of cleansing, and purifying, and transforming humanity be compromised. War might be justified – but only if it were in the service of the reform of all the world.

Alarmingly, however, and despite the giddy hopes that had been roused by the capture of Toledo, it was already becoming evident, a mere decade on from that great victory, that the winning of Spain for Christ was not going entirely according to plan. Urban, during his stay at Cluny, would have heard, every morning without fail, the same psalm being chanted by the monks: a request to God for the King of Leon to continue victorious in battle. But God, for whatever reason, seemed for the moment to have stopped listening. The fortunes of war had recently turned against Alfonso. The fractious potentates of al- Andalus, desperate to find some way of reining in his ambitions, had found themselves reduced to taking the same desperate step that already, only a few decades previously had proved so fatal to the Caliphate: inviting in the Berbers. Still, as the King of Seville put it, better to run the risk of ending up a camel-herd than looking after pigs. Sure enough, steeled by their reinforcements from Africa, the princelings of al-Andalus had been able to bring Alfonso, at last, to defeat--and then promptly found their kingdoms being swallowed up by their erstwhile allies. For Alfonso himself, the second development had been scarcely less of a setback than the first. The Berbers, as hardy, ascetic and enthusiastic for jihad as ever, were altogether more formidable opponents than those with whom he had hitherto happily been toying. Although Toledo remained securely his, and although his centre just about held, the onward advance of Christian arms towards Gibraltar had been brought to a sudden and juddering halt. Unsurprisingly, then, back in Cluny, where there was a massive church still standing half completed, the news had been greeted with some alarm.

In papal circles as well. To Urban, as it had done previously to Gregory, a concern with the frontiers of Christendom, and the lands that lay beyond them, came instinctively. As how, indeed, could it not have done? Papal authority was nothing, after all, unless it were global. Such, at any rate, over the previous decades, was the presumption that Gregory and his supporters had come increasingly to take for granted. Now, in turn, the sheer scale of what they had dared -- and of what they had achieved as well -- had fortified Urban in a peculiarly vaunting notion: that the whole world might be his to shape. Not even all the energies he had devoted to smashing the authority of emperor and Anti-pope had served to distract him from keeping a lordly eye on broader horizons. So it was, for instance, back in 1089, that Urban had actively sought to promote colonisation within the ruins of Tarragona, a long-abandoned city just inside al- Andalus itself: for it was his hope to see erected there ‘a barrier and a bulwark to defend the Christian people’. So it was too, at the Council of Piacenza, that he had taken time out from parading Henry’s estranged queen to consult with diplomats from Constantinople. Spain, after all, was not the only front where Christian fortunes were directly menaced. Embattled Alfonso might be, but he was not half so embattled as the Basileus.

True, things did not appear quite as terminal for Alexius Comnenus as they had done at the start of his reign. The young emperor, clawing the fortunes of his people back from the very brink, had recovered well from his initial defeat at the hands of Robert Guiscard. Total ruin had been averted. It helped that Guiscard himself had died on campaign back in 1085, a bare two months after Gregory VII; and it had helped that the nomadic Pechenegs, whose talent for spreading mayhem was second to none, had been brought in 1091 to a resounding defeat. Even the Turks, those most menacing adversaries of all, had lately begun to show an encouraging taste for in-fighting. Alexius, tracking developments carefully from beyond the Bosphorus, had been positively itching to capitalise on their squabbling. With Turkish settlers digging in along the length of the Aegean coast, and one warlord even established inside Nicaea, within striking distance of the Queen of Cities herself, he was painfully aware that the opportunity for staging an imperial comeback in the East might soon have passed him by for good. Yet Alexius could not afford to take any risks. The raising of an army large enough to storm Nicaea, let alone attempt the recovery of the lost provinces beyond it, would require the stripping of every last reserve from the rest of the empire. The very survival of Constantinople would