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

then be left hanging in the balance. A second Manzikert, and everything would be lost. And so it was, looking around for reinforcements that might offer him a reasonable prospect of success, while also remaining safely expendable, that Alexius’s gaze had turned towards the West.

Where Urban, brooding on the global scale of Christendom’s problems, had his own agenda. To be sure, no less than Alexius, he dreaded that Constantinople might fall: for he shared in the anguished conviction of the Basileus that the collapse of the eastern front was a mortal danger to the Christian people everywhere. Simultaneously, however, he would not have forgotten what it was that Gregory, twenty years before, had identified in the self-same crisis: the symptoms of a universal disorder, and the stirrings of Antichrist. Clearly, then, although the great labour of reforming the world had already come far, it still had a long way to go. Whether it was to be seen in the trampling down of a Christian frontier by infidel horsemen, or in the pretensions of an excommunicated Caesar, or in the sweaty fumblings of a priest with his concubine, shadow still persisted everywhere across the fallen world.

Indeed, if anything, in that summer of 1095, it appeared to be thickening and threatening a truly cosmic darkness – for the universe itself had been taken sick. Back in the spring, even as delegates from the Council of Piacenza were heading homewards, bright stars, ‘all crowded together and dense, like hail or snowflakes’, had begun to plummet earthwards. ‘A short while later a fiery way appeared in the heavens; and then after another short period half the sky turned the colour of blood.’ Meanwhile, in France, along the very roads taken by the Pope, there were marks of famine to be seen everywhere, and reports of strange visions to be heard, and prophecies of fabulous wonders. ‘And this’, in the opinion of many, ‘was because already, in every nation, the evangelical trumpet was sounding the coming of the Just Judge.’

Where better, then, amid such feverish expectations, for Urban to pause and take stock of things than in the holy abbey of Cluny? On 25 October, one week after his first sighting of Abbot Hugh’s stupefying church, the Pope formally dedicated its two great altars to the service of God. Simultaneously, in solemn and ringing tones, he confirmed the abbey in its status as a bridgehead of the celestial on earth. Not just the abbey either – for the new altars, awesomely charged with the supernatural as they were, appeared to Urban a source of light fit to radiate far beyond the bounds of the church itself. Far beyond the valley in which they stood as well, far beyond Burgundy, far beyond France. Any assemblage of brick and mortar, in short, provided that it took Cluny as its head and model, could be reckoned to share in the fearsome blaze of its purity. So, at any rate, Urban pronounced – as perhaps, with his responsibilities to the whole of Christendom, he was bound to do. For if, as the Holy Father devoutly believed, Cluny offered to those who approached it a reflection of the heavenly Jerusalem, then why should not all the beleaguered Christian people, no matter where they might be, share in at least some of its power?

Yet to cast Cluny in such a role did rather beg a further question: what of the earthly Jerusalem? Abbot Hugh’s church might be gloriously qualified to serve as a light to the world, yet not even the altars of the maior ecclesia could compare for sheer holiness with the spot where Christ Himself had hung upon a cross and then risen in triumph over death. To Urban, listening to his former brethren as they filled Christendom’s most majestic space with the strains of their angelic singing, this reflection could hardly help but appear a troubling one. If it were true that monasteries far and wide derived their sanctity from that of Cluny, then so likewise did the world itself take its character from the holy city that stood at its head; a holy city that for centuries had been positively leprous with the pollution of pagan rule. How, then, to a pope who had devoted his entire life to the heroic labour of setting Christendom upon a proper order, could the knowledge of this not serve as both a torment and a ferocious reproach? Great things had certainly been achieved over the previous decades; but Urban, praying before the altars of the maior ecclesia, would have known deep within his soul that the cause of reform could never truly be completed until the Holy Sepulchre had been wrested from Saracen control. ‘For if the head is diseased, then there is not a limb but will suffer pain from its ailing.’ A great and terrible challenge – but not one, in the final reckoning, that Urban was prepared to duck.

And the time was fast approaching for him to demonstrate as much. A month after his dedication of the maior ecclesia, and Urban was presiding over his second council of the year: an even larger assembly of reform-minded bishops and abbots than Piacenza had seen. The setting was a potent one: the ancient town of Clermont, in the rugged heart of the Auvergne. Here, as the delegates to the council busied themselves with looking to the future of the Church, reminders of the past were all around them. Looming on the eastern horizon, for instance, there rose a great dome of volcanic rock, where a pagan temple still stood: a sobering memorial to a time when there had been no Christian people at all, but only worshippers of demons. Long and gruelling had been the task of reordering the world, and bringing it under the protection of Christ. In Clermont, as if to bear witness to the process by which Christendom had been fashioned, almost every church contained within its walls antique stonework, or columns, or sarcophagi. Nor