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

It was a sensational assertion – but one arrived at on the back of flawless logic, nevertheless. After all, if it was the Roman Empire that had served as the bulwark against Antichrist’s coming, and the Franks who were the heirs of the Roman Empire, then what could the collapse of their kingdom possibly spell if not the end of the world? Morale-boosting though Adso might have imagined this conclusion to be, it hardly served to ease the burden of responsibility on the shoulders of the Frankish king. Nor was the abbot done yet with piling on the pressure. ‘What I say is not a product of my own thoughts or fancy,’ he insisted, ‘but due to my diligent research’ – and Adso, in his library, had been studying St Methodius. The vision of the ancient martyr, with its prophecy of a Roman emperor who would conquer the world before travelling to Jerusalem, laying down his crown upon the hill of Golgotha, and setting in train the Second Coming, had originally been translated into Latin in the eighth century; but it was only in Adso’s time that its implications had-been fully grasped by scholars in the West. How arrogant the Greeks had been, how arrogant and grotesquely wrong, to have imagined that it was one of their emperors who would lay claim to Jerusalem! Rather, a Frank was destined [to] ‘in the last of days, be the greatest and last of all kings’. So Adso, with all the weight of his great scholarship, pronounced. ‘And this will be the end and the consummation of the Roman Empire – which is to say, the Empire of the Christians.’

Almost five hundred years had passed now since the collapse of Rome’s dominion in the West. Ghoul-like, though, its spectre continued to haunt the dreamings of all those who sought to interpret God’s plans for the future of mankind. As in the age of Charlemagne, so in the infinitely more troubled age of Adso: no solution to the problems confronting Christendom could be conceived of saving a return to the long-vanished past. No climax to human history either. The shipwreck of things might be dreaded, yet it was simultaneously conceived of as a harbour: as the escape from innumerable tempests and violent waves. In the end would come a new heaven and a new earth, and the return of the Son of Man; but first, ‘although everywhere we look we see it lying in almost total ruin’, there would have to be the return to a Roman Empire.

It is hard to imagine a programme more expressive of paralysis and despair. Beyond the walls of Adso’s monastery, great princes feuded with one another, and fields were trampled by rival armies, and the borders of Christendom were lit by flames and dyed with blood. Still, as their only solution to this crisis of desolation, the subtlest and most learned minds in Francia whispered decrepit fantasies of global empire. Yet these same fantasies, even amid the general chaos of the times, had not entirely lost their ability to transfix kings as well as scholars. Adso, writing to Gerberga, had presumed that any future emperor was bound to be a Frank. The times, though, were changing—as Gerberga herself, a Saxon princess, might well have chosen to remind the abbot. For the Franks, even as Adso penned his letter, were no longer the only people to have been charged with the rule of a great dominion. To the east of their heartlands, on the very margins of Christendom, a new power was rising. A power capable, as time would prove, of securing the West against its most fearsome enemies, and of forging a new Roman Empire, even as all the while the Millennium drew ever nearer.

THE OLD ORDER CHANGETH ...

The Thousandth-Year Reich

Though Christendom was embattled, not all its frontiers were collapsing. In the marches of Saxony, along the banks of the Elbe, the broad-flowing river which served East Francia as its flank, Christian warriors stood on watchful sentinel, and dreaded no one. The Saxons, as they contemplated the heroic struggle to uphold God’s order, knew themselves in its vanguard. Beyond the Elbe to the east, in sinister groves adorned with idols and animal horns, Slav tribes, known collectively by the Saxons as the “Wends’, still worshipped demons and indulged in their ‘vain superstitions’; but westwards, the very landscape bore witness to the protecting hand of Christ. Wherever the soil was fertile, and the wilderness capable of being tamed, there the marks of His favour thrived: farms, and homesteads, and raw stone churches. Even on the Elbe itself, the border forts were prospering – and this despite the continued enthusiasm of Wendish war bands for crossing it in search of plunder.

The linchpin of the defences raised against such raids was the fortress of Magdeburg: originally founded by Charlemagne as a frontier station, where the bags of merchants travelling out of Christendom could be inspected for contraband armour and weapons,

it already ranked, by the early tenth century, as the capital of the eastern marches. Flush with the profits of trade, and a booming hinterland, it could boast churches, markets and even a ‘Hof – a court for the entertainment of Saxony’s duke. Meanwhile, beyond its haughty gatehouses, and the road which led eastwards over the Elbe, the pagans ‘lived in such brutish poverty that what in Francia would seem an insupportable burden is counted by them almost as a pleasure’. As it had been back in the earliest days of the Magdeburg customs post, even a mail shirt was held a wonder by many tribes. Indeed, such was the awe with which helmets and hauberks were regarded by the Wends that armour was likeliest to adorn, not their warriors, but their gods. Deep immured in forest shrines, their idols stood, blank-eyed and menacing, ‘fearsomely girt in mail’.

To the Saxons, the folly of this