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

demon-worship was all the more minatory for the fact that they had once shared in it themselves. A people who had learned to rejoice in the felling of trees and the raising of churches on root-cleared plains could not forget that they too, barely a century and a half before, had staged their most sacred rituals in the darkness of oaken glades. The dreadful rumours of what had been practised there still darkened the nightmares of Christian homilists. Prisoners, it was whispered, hung from the boughs of sacred trees, having been pierced through with spears: for the spear had been sacred to Woden, most far-seeing of the gods. To the initiates of this sacrifice, awful privileges had been owed: to those who harvested the blood of the still-writhing victims, and traced it over runes, the wisdom of Woden himself; and to those who consumed their beating hearts, a power over the dead. Charlemagne, storming the strongholds of this monstrous evil, had felt himself obliged to purge it thoroughly with axe and sword. Trees holy to Woden had been hacked down and the branches consigned to fire.

The Saxons themselves, as obdurate in their paganism as in their reluctance to accept the Frankish king, Christ’s own anointed, as their new master, had been treated with a matching ferocity. After one particularly savage rebellion, thousands of prisoners had been beheaded in a single dispatch; the populations of entire areas forcibly relocated; death introduced as the penalty for refusing baptism, for clinging to the ancient rites, even for eating meat during Lent. Not since the age of the Caesars had atrocities been committed on quite so imperious a scale—and never before with the goal of imposing the love of Christ.

There were many in Charlemagne’s train who had paled at the knowledge. To wage a war of aggression and conquest, even against heathens steeped ‘in the most idolatrous savagery, appeared to them the very opposite of the Christian ideal. ‘Faith’, as Alcuin had put it anguishedly, ‘arises from the will, not from compulsion. You can persuade a man to believe, but you cannot force him. You can haul him to the waters of baptism, but not to faith itself.’ Time, however, had proved this warning wrong. The Saxons, exhausted by their struggle against Charlemagne, had in due course been brought to acknowledge the full scale of their defeat. Woden had failed them. The Christ of the victorious Franks had proved Himself invincible. It could be held no shame to submit to such a god. And so the Saxons had duly submitted. Woden, toppled from his throne, had been banished from Middle Earth. On occasion, it was reported, at nightfall, he and his followers, she-wolves, carrion crows and the spirits of the dead, surrounded by black clouds, would return to intrude upon their ancient dominion, crashing through the woods, riding the icy winds; but there was nothing in such a superstition to impress the Saxon elite. Those on the margins of the retreating wilderness, peasants and pioneers, might sometimes bow their heads before the passage of the demon hunt; but never the aristocracy. They knew perfectly well what they owed to the favour of Christ. No longer wallowing as the Wends still did, in a brutish poverty, they were now the peers of anyone in Christendom – even their former conquerors. ‘For moulded by the Christian faith into brothers, they had become almost an identical people with the Franks.’

So much so, indeed, that by the early tenth century, and with the realm of East Francia on the brink of seeming collapse, men could even speak of the Duke of Saxony as a possible future king. Henry, head of the Liudolfing clan, fully merited such excited approbation. Since inheriting his title in 912, he had shown himself ‘a lord rich in wisdom, abounding in severity, and of righteous judgement’. To the pagans beyond his borders, he had proved a predictably stern and tireless foe. To the ambitions of the clans within them, he had been a more subtle, but no less effective, opponent. The great warlords of Saxony, whose instinct had always been to indulge themselves in murderous rivalries, had been systematically broken to his will: variously menaced, bought off and cajoled. Talents such as Henry could deploy, in a failed state such as East Francia was fast becoming, were not lightly to be ignored. Even Conrad, its prickly but increasingly hapless king, was finally brought to acknowledge as much. In 915, abandoning all his earlier efforts to check the ambitions of his unsettlingly able neighbour, he signed a truce that effectively appointed the Saxon duke his deputy. Three years later, as Conrad lay dying, he told his brother, Eberhard, to propose Henry as his successor. The following spring, in May 919, Eberhard dutifully followed up this deathbed advice. The Frankish nobility joined with their Saxon peers in acclaiming Henry as king. For the first time, the rule of East Francia was entrusted to a man who was not even a Frank.

No wonder that the fateful moment would later be enshrined in legend. Messengers sent to inform the new king of his elevation, it was said, had been unable to find him at first, and only after several days had he finally been tracked down to a wild marshland, where Henry, an avid huntsman, had been painstakingly setting traps for ducks. It was an apt reflection, certainly, of the predatory cool and patience that ‘the Fowler’ now brought to the task of redeeming East Francia. Careful not to aggravate the great dukes of his tottering realm, men who still regarded themselves, at the very least, as his peers, Henry forwent the self-indulgence of being anointed. Yet even as he colluded in the dimming of the royal aura, and promoted himself, not as the heir of Charlemagne, but rather as something altogether more modest, as merely a first among equals, he was stalking his opponents. Over the next few years, a succession of potential rivals were methodically humbled,