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

or else seduced with high-sounding titles and offers of marriage into the Liudolfing house. Soon enough, the princes of East Francia found themselves hopelessly entangled in a delicate mesh of dependency and obligation. By 935, when Henry met at a summit with his brother kings of Burgundy and West Francia, he did so not merely as their equal, but as the dominant figure in Christendom. There was certainly no one now to dispute the right of a Saxon to rule as ‘King of the Franks’: as the lord of what his subjects, in their own language, termed their ‘Reich’.

It was a startling achievement – and yet Henry, even while breaking in the fractious dukes of East Francia, had simultaneously been keeping his eye on more threatening game. It was not sufficient to haul the Reich back from the brink of internal collapse; it also had to be preserved from the onslaughts of those who would bleed it to death from without. The Hungarians, whether the outriders of Antichrist or not, had somehow to be confronted—and Henry the Fowler, as ever playing a long game, was patiently preparing his traps. In 926, trading temporary humiliation for future advantage, he agreed to pay tribute in return for a truce. Warriors, like hawks or hunting dogs, needed to be trained for the kill. Those among his followers who could afford the costs of a warhorse were encouraged to invest as well in the even more crippling expense of a mail coat, to transform themselves into ‘loricati’: men of iron. Poorer levies, meanwhile, were set to work raising fortresses along the Reich’s eastern frontier, bases suited not merely to defence, but also to the launch of counter-offensives. Even criminals were summoned to the cause. At Merseburg, a stronghold some seventy miles south of Magdeburg, a legion of thieves and bandits was installed, and instructed to train itself for battle by launching expeditions against those perennial objects of Saxon prowess, the Wends. In 929, when a Wendish army, stung by such aggravation, presumed to launch a counter-raid across the Elbe, it was met in open battle, and annihilated. Warriors on horseback, newly coated in their expensive shirts ofiron, provided the shock force. Three years later, feeling sufficiently confident at last to bait his snare, the Fowler cancelled his tribute payments to the Hungarians, sending them, instead of gold, a tailless and crop-eared dog. The Hungarians, responding to provocation just as the Wends had done, dispatched a raiding party to pillage Saxony: it too was cornered, confronted and wiped out. Once again, it was the heavy cavalry, singing to the Almighty as they rode, who led the slaughter.

The victory, it was true, had hardly been decisive. Already, Henry had to assume, beyond the frontiers of the Reich, in the great plain of the Danube, that teeming womb of pagans, a dreadful vengeance was being planned. The supreme test, one that would witness either the Hungarians destroyed as a threat for ever, or else the ruination of East Francia, was still to come. Yet now at least there seemed hope for Christendom. In 936, as Henry, succumbing at last to age and weariness, prepared to meet his maker, he set the seal on a lifetime’s labours by refusing to sanction the carve up of his legacy. Instead, in a pointed reversal of Frankish custom, he bequeathed it entire to Otto, his eldest son: ‘a great and far-spreading dominion – not one that had been handed down to him by his forefathers, but won instead by his own exertions, bestowed upon him by God alone’.

And that the Almighty had indeed blessed the Saxons, and granted to them a role of fateful moment in His plans for Christendom, could be witnessed by virtue of a heavenly proof. Back in 926, the same year that had seen the truce signed with the Hungarians, Henry’s attentions had been devoted to browbeating his brother king of Burgundy. By the terms of a treaty signed that year, Henry had agreed to hand over a chunk of the province of Swabia — what is now Switzerland and Alsace — in exchange for a treasure ‘infinitely precious’: a spear of terrible power. No one doubted that it was the Saxon king who had secured the bargain by this arrangement. Men claimed that the weapon had long ago belonged to Constantine — and that it had won for him the empire of the world. As well it might have done: for upon the head of the spear were crosses fashioned out of nails, those very same spikes of iron that had once pierced the hands and feet of Christ, ‘joining the realm of the mortal to that of heaven’. The Saxons, whose ancestors, in their vulgar credulity, had imagined Woden swaying the world with a spear, could now contemplate with wonder an authentically earth-shaking relic. For such a weapon, in the hands of a great king, would surely render him as invincible as Constantine had been: ‘certain of victory against all his enemies, visible and invisible, assured of perpetual triumph’. And so for Henry it had proved.

But now he was dead; and the peoples of the Reich waited with bated breath to gauge the measure of their new king. Certainly, Otto could have had no illusions as to the full weight of the burden that was being laid upon his youthful shoulders: for at his coronation, it was made manifest to all Christendom. ‘Drive away the enemies of Christ,’ the Archbishop of Mainz instructed him in dreadful tones, handing him a sword. ‘Establish an enduring peace for Christians everywhere.’ Yet if the trust being placed in the new king was awesome, then so too were the rituals that pronounced him worthy of it. Unlike his father, Otto had no compunction about being anointed with holy oil; nor in laying claim, very obviously, to the mantle of Charlemagne. Not only was the ceremony staged at the great emperor’s capital of Aachen, but the Saxon king even made