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

sure, in a pointed one-off, to dress for the occasion in the distinctive torso-hugging tunic of a Frank. To the dukes and great lords who stood assembled before the royal chapel, gazing up at Otto as he sat in splendour upon the throne of Charlemagne, the point could hardly have been driven home any more forcibly: the traditional notion of kingship as something uniquely elevated, sacred even, was back.

Delight at this among the battle-hardened magnates who had grown accustomed to Henry’s more collegiate manner was, unsurprisingly, less than universal. Even as Otto, looking to celebrate his coronation in the by now traditional Saxon manner, headed eastwards across the Elbe to extort tribute and submission from the

Wends, so resentment was already festering among the great princes of the Reich. Particularly threatening was the mood in Franconia, where the aged Duke Eberhard had good cause to take umbrage at Otto’s high-handedness: for he it was, after all, back in 919, who had done much to secure the throne for the Liudolfings. Yet even Eberhard’s sense of disenfranchisement was as nothing compared with that of Otto’s bitterest enemy, and most malignant rival of all: Henry, his younger brother. The two had been jockeying for position since childhood; and Henry, denied all royal status by the terms of his father’s will, had responded to his exclusion with predictable fury. Indeed, so abusive had he become that Otto, rather than risk any disruption of his coronation, had ordered his brother to be imprisoned for the duration of the ceremony.

In general, however, naked though Henry’s indignation was, the new king showed himself strikingly reluctant to punish it. Instead – as though out of a guilty sense that it might even be justified — he worked hard to appease it. Only a few months after his coronation, Otto arranged for Henry to marry the most eligible heiress in the realm: Judith, the daughter of the Duke of Bavaria. This was to grant his troublesome sibling a rare dignity—for Bavaria, despite the depredations inflicted upon it by the Hungarians, was a duchy endowed with resources of an almost regal scope. Indeed, of all the princedoms of the East, only Saxony itself offered more to an ambitious ruler. Otto’s gamble in granting his brother the opportunity to put down roots there was, therefore, a considerable one — and doomed, it appeared, to failure. Henry, resolutely unmollified, continued to breathe sedition. His new in-laws, with reasons of their own to resent Otto’s imperious style of lordship, were more than happy to back the young pretender in his plotting. From the Alps to the North Sea, the whole of East Francia began to seethe with rebellion.

Yet Otto himself, for all the scruples that inhibited him in his handling of his brother, remained, in his dealings with the other magnates of the realm, magnificently self-assured. Rather than attempt to appease insubordination, he preferred to slap it down: not by inflicting savage tortures or brutal executions on those who presumed to defy him, but by the no less effective expedient of mocking them. When Duke Eberhard, pursuing a feud with one of his vassals, presumed to destroy a fortress sited on Saxon territory, Otto’s response was prompt. Having first whipped the Franks on the field of battle, he next summoned the venerable duke and his retainers to Magdeburg, where they were obliged to star in a great ritual of disgrace. To the raucous jeers of the whole town, a procession of warhorses was led up to the Hof, and presented with splendid ceremony to the king: a fitting – and hugely expensive – expression of ducal penitence. Yet mortifying though the sound of hoofs clopping through Magdeburg must have been to the duke, even worse was to follow: the yapping of hounds. The sight of the beasts, borne squirming and slavering in the arms of his red-faced henchmen, would have been the final rubbing of Eberhard’s nose in his own humiliation. There was, for a Frankish nobleman, no greater shame than to be witnessed in public carrying a dog.

To be sure, the deliberate humbling of a duke, on the eve of a possible Reich-wide rebellion, might have been thought not the most sensible of policies. Otto, however, had known what he was doing. To be seen as a man of honour, of strength, of magnanimity; to be the cynosure of watching, gawping crowds; to be enshrined in admiring talk as a hero truly worthy of his rank; this, in East Francia, was the very essence of lordship. Although the duties of governance were burdensome, even they were not so pressing as the need always to be on display. So it was that Otto, conscious of the need to look as well as behave like a king, had perfected an intimidating trick of throwing glances that were said to flash like lightning. He also worked at accentuating his prime physical asset: for he was, even by Saxon standards, quite magnificently hairy. Not only did he grow his beard out, but he made sure to display the ‘the shaggy lion’s mane’” which adorned his chest at every opportunity. Restlessly, from day to day, from stopover to stopover, Otto would grace his subjects with the roadshow of his majesty. The spectacle he had staged in Magdeburg, of a king enthroned in splendour, dispensing justice, in the full assurance of his power and physical strength, was one that he never tired of reprising. A great king, such as Otto aspired to be, had little choice but to promote himself as great.

True, there were some, Eberhard and his own brother Henry prominent among them, who aimed to call his bluff. In 938, they and their supporters finally rose in open revolt. Once again, however, Otto proved more than capable of turning a crisis to his own account. In 939, after a year of desperate struggle, he brought his enemies to crushing defeat on the banks of the Rhine, at Andernach. Two of the rebel dukes were left as