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

monkish chroniclers, astounded by Charles’s continent-shaking exploits, would commemorate him as ‘le magne’, bastard Latin for ‘the great’: as ‘Charlemagne’.

Warfare had long been the activity of choice among the Franks. Back in the days of Childeric, it had served to win them Gaul, after all. Leaders who failed to provide their followers with the spoils of pillage rarely endured for long. No sooner had winter thawed into spring than the Frankish people, dusting down their spears, would prepare to follow their king out on campaign. Charlemagne, whose hunger for booty was insatiable, had inherited to the full the appetites of a primordial line of warrior-chiefs. Yet though he ruled as a Frank, and gloried in the name, Charlemagne was heir as well to traditions more awesome and sanctified still. like his father, he had been anointed with the dreadful power of the chrism, nor ever doubted that he was a new David, that mighty King of Israel, whose enemies the Almighty had broken ‘like a bursting flood’.’ It was in the perfect consciousness of this that Charlemagne made the wastes of Saxony to flow with pagan blood; that he spread even among the barbarous Slavs who swarmed on the outer reaches of the world awful rumours of the wrath and terror of his name; that he returned every autumn from his campaigns with lumbering wagon trains of booty, spoils with which to strengthen the Christian order throughout his vast domains. Just as he had taken it upon himself to push back the frontiers of Christendom, so also, within its boundaries, did he aim for its reform and purification — its‘ correctio’

Charlemagne himself had little doubt how this was best to be attained. God’s will obliged Christian men to show obedience to their earthly lords – and, above all, to their anointed king. There were few Franks disposed to contest this. Resentment of Charlemagne’s supremacy, although it never entirely faded away among the greatest of the Frankish lords, was strongly tempered by self-interest. Decades of lucrative warfare had brought Charlemagne unprecedented resources of patronage. The aristocracy, restraining a naturally rumbustious sense of independence, duly knuckled down to playing the part of loyal dependants.

The Frankish bishops too, eager to profit from the great labour of Christian reform, had no hesitation in proffering Charlemagne their submission. In 794, a council of Church leaders drawn from across the Latin West hailed him, in fateful terms, as ‘king and priest’. Such a formula was not original: it had long been applied to the emperor in Constantinople. Charlemagne, however, as master of Europe, and the Lord’s anointed to boot, felt no obligation to truckle to the exclusiveness of the distant Byzantines. Whereas they had merely preserved a Christian empire, he could argue, he was labouring to bring one back to life. After interminable centuries of chaos, it was the Franks who had restored to the West the benefits of order, and after darkness returned it to the light. ‘Once, the whole of Europe was stripped bare by the flames and swords of barbarians.’ So wrote Alcuin, a scholar originally from Northumbria, in the north of England, a kingdom far removed from the limits of the Prankish Empire, but who had nevertheless been attracted to Charlemagne’s side much like a moth drawn to a lamp. ‘Now, thanks to God’s mercy,’ he exulted, ‘Europe burns as brightly with churches as does the sky with stars.’

Even the Pope himself, St Peter’s own heir, had little choice but to acknowledge the Frankish king as head of ‘the Christian people’. Fifty years previously, the papacy had negotiated with Pepin almost as an equal – but its bargaining position, as the eighth century drew to a close, had been sorely eroded. Charlemagne, who instinctively regarded bishops as he did everyone else, as his servants, to be exploited and patronised as he saw fit, certainly made no exception for the Bishop of Rome. Back in 774, following his invasion of Italy, he had seized the heavy iron crown of the Lombards for himself, and, from that moment on, the ramshackle state entrusted by Pepin to St Peter had been repeatedly trimmed back in the interests of Lombardy’s new master.

So too, and perhaps even more hurtfully, had the papacy’s claims to responsibility for the Church. In 796, when news of the election of a new pope, Leo III, was brought to him, Charlemagne was blunt in spelling out how the balance of responsibilities between the two of them stood. His own role, he wrote to Leo, was to defend the Church against pagans, to protect it from heretics, and to consolidate it across the whole span of Christendom by everywhere promoting the Catholic faith. The Pope’s role was to lead prayers for the Frankish king’s success. ‘And in this way,’ Charlemagne concluded with gracious condescension, ‘Christians everywhere, Holy Father, will be sure to gain the victory over the enemies of God’s sacred name.’

The Holy Father himself, perusing this manifesto, may well have felt less than thrilled by it. Nevertheless, whatever his private disappointment at the attenuated role granted the papacy in Charlemagne’s scheme of things, Leo made sure to conceal it. No less than his brother bishops of the Frankish Church, he appreciated that obsequiousness might bring its due reward. Accompanying Charlemagne’s letter, for instance, there had rumbled into Rome wagons piled high with treasure, gold looted from the pagans, which Leo had immediately set about lavishing on Rome’s churches, and on his own palace of the Lateran. Three years later, in 799, and he had even more cause to bank on Charlemagne. Even though his election had been unanimous, Leo had enemies: for the papal office, which until recently had brought its holder only bills and overdrafts, was now capable of exciting the envious cupidity of the Roman aristocracy. On 25 April, as the heir of St Peter rode in splendid procession to Mass, he was set upon by a gang of heavies. Bundled off into a monastery, Leo succeeded in escaping before