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

for Frankish kings to leave behind them heirs in threes, and Lothar, before he died in 855, had carved up his own patrimony into thirds to meet the needs of his own progeny. This had left Louis, his eldest son and successor as emperor, with only the kingdom of Italy as his inheritance, a perilously attenuated base from which to claim the sway of the Christian world. Already, in a desperate attempt to shore up his prestige, Louis II had submitted to being crowned and anointed by the Pope, as both his father and grandfather, in similar moods of beleaguerment, had already done: for Charlemagne’s successors, lacking the brutal self-confidence of the first Frankish emperor, had increasingly craved the validation that it was felt only St Peter’s heir could provide. As a result, papal involvement in imperial coronations had become ever more a given, and all Charlemagne’s efforts to eliminate it lost to memory. A bare half-century on from the momentous Christmas Day of 800, and Leo’s shade could be well pleased. Only a pope, it was now accepted, had the power to bestow an imperial crown.

Yet a coronation, even one staged in Rome, was hardly sufficient in itself to make an emperor. In 871, a gloating missive from Constantinople arrived at Louis’ court, pointing this out in the most undiplomatic terms. No longer did the Basileus feel any call to kowtow to the Franks. The Romaioi, long pressed and harried by their enemies, were now everywhere back on the offensive. As their fortunes were resurrected from the nadir of the previous century, so also was their ancient birthright of regarding foreigners with contempt, which Charlemagne’s pre-eminence had briefly threatened, restored to them in all its traditional vigour. They naturally dismissed the shrunken figure of Louis II, a barbarian adorned in Roman robes, with a particular relish. No longer were they prepared to tolerate the right of anyone save their own master to the imperial title. The Basileus himself, in his letter to Louis, spelled this out in acerbic terms. There was, as there had always been, only the single empire – and the Franks had no claim to it.

Three decades on, and few even among the Franks themselves could deny that their imperial pretensions were in a state of chronic disrepair. The dominion raised to such heights of greatness only a century previously was everywhere collapsing. Kings and emperors ruled with all the authority of ghosts. The ancient wellsprings of prestige, drawn on to such effect by Charlemagne, appeared increasingly drained. In 901, the grandson of Louis II, determined to revive the fortunes of his house, had himself crowned emperor; four years later, and he had been captured by a rival warlord, blinded and banished to Burgundy, there to wither for the rest of his life. Never again would the family of Charlemagne lay claim to the dignity of an imperial title: a shrivelling of its fortunes rendered all the more terminal by the near-simultaneous extinction, in 911, of the royal line of East Francia. It was true that the great nobles of Germany, keen to perpetuate a sense of continuity with the glorious past, promptly looked for a replacement to Franconia, a princedom in the very heartlands of the kingdom – and whose duke was, as his title suggested, authentically and reassuringly a Frank.

This advantage aside, however, the newly elected king, Conrad I, brought few qualifications to the job: overshadowed by his peers, and increasingly, despite all his shrill protestations, ignored by them as well, he found his authority remorselessly bleeding away. Meanwhile, in the lands beyond his duchy, rival magnates sparred for advantage, warring with one another when not with their anointed king, all of them looking to profit from the confusion of the times. The kingdom itself, prey to such manoeuvrings, naturally enough continued to splinter. It appeared that half of the Frankish Empire was on the verge of a total disintegration.

And even in the western half, where a descendant of the line of Charlemagne still sat upon a throne, supposedly illuming his realm with the radiance of his prestige, a charisma granted of God Himself, the age was no less tempest-racked. The King of the Franks in the West, twin pillar of Christendom though he may have been, was quite as troubled by the ambitions of mighty princes as was his counterpart across the Rhine. Unsurprisingly so: for his kingdom had no settled borders, no shared institutions, not even a name. In many of the fairest principalities of the West-in Catalonia and Flanders, in Provence and Aquitaine – only the dimmest loyalty was still professed to the house of Charlemagne. Indeed, there were many among the leaders of the Franks, dukes with holdings quite as widespread as those of any king, and with treasure chests often deeper, who aspired to the royal dignity themselves. In a world without fixed frontiers, and an ever-weakening centre, there was much that seemed up for grabs. Wars duly blazed. In West Francia, as in the East, the shifting borders of great duchies were invariably traced with blood. Rare, however, was the struggle that proved more than local. Amid all the chaos and violence, a balance of power somehow held. ‘That this was so reflected not any lack of Frankish princes with the requisite nobility, courage and wisdom . required to rule, but rather their very dignity and power, which rendered them all so evenly matched. None was able to put the others in his shadow. None was able to command the ungrudging submission of his fellows.’ On such an inglorious basis, then, were the descendants of the house of Charlemagne, the ‘Carolingians’, enabled to keep their crown: the want of an alternative.

That a Christian land, if it were to flourish, did indeed require a king to rule over it was never for a moment doubted. Without one, so the wise had long taught, there could be no justice, no order, no peace. It was a king who served the