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

corpses on the battlefield – and one of them was Eberhard. Otto, obliged to appoint his successor, coolly nominated himself. Franconia, from that moment on, was to serve him like Saxony, as a personal power base. His vaunting claims to greatness, so crucial to his authority as king, could now be raised on an impregnable bedrock of lands and wealth. Those who had presumed to question his prestige had served only to burnish it to an even more brilliant sheen. As in his peacetime migrations, so amid the carnage and chaos of war, Otto never neglected an opportunity to enhance the glory of his name. Indeed, such was his talent for grandstanding that not even being caught out in a palpable blunder could throw him off balance for long. Trapped in the course of one campaign on the opposite side of the Rhine to his vastly outnumbered men, he had barely broken a sweat. Instead, ordering the Holy Lance to be planted on the river bank, he had fallen to his knees, and begun to pray before it with a flamboyant and ostentatious fervour. His troops, inspired by this edifying spectacle, had duly pulled off a startling victory. Warrior king and talisman washed in Christ’s holy blood: the two had proved themselves invincible together.

Henry, meanwhile, that fractious rebel against his brother’s authority, had been left to nurse not only his injured pride but an arm that had been almost severed clean off in the lighting. Only his heavy armour — now more than ever the surest mark of rank in East Francia – had served to keep him from permanent disfigurement.

Bruised in both body and mind, he proved sufficiently chastened by the final collapse of the rebellion to seek an accommodation with his brother – and Otto, with his customary imperious magnanimity, was content to grant it. ‘Be a lion in battle, but like a lamb when taking vengeance!’ So the wise advised – and besides, Henry’s days of fratricidal ambition appeared brought to a close at last. In 947, he was installed by royal decree as the new Duke of Bavaria – and this time, Otto’s gamble proved a sound one. Henry, although as restless and combative as ever, now had new opponents, and new horizons, in his sights.

For no sooner had he taken possession of his dukedom than he was leading his followers into the scorched and perilous no man’s land that marked Bavaria’s eastern frontier, and beyond which lay that breeding ground of pagan blood-drinkers, the plain of Hungary. An enterprise such as this was of an order to keep even Henry’s hands full: for no one had ever before presumed to beard the Hungarians in their own lair. Yet though the fighting was of a predictably relentless ferocity, it was not, as events would prove, an altogether reckless initiative that the new Duke of Bavaria had launched: for in 950, he succeeded in inflicting an unheard-of humiliation upon the Hungarian warlords. Just as they had always dealt with the Reich, so now he dealt with them: breaking through into their heartlands, abducting their women and children, despoiling them of their gold. Such a triumph could not be hailed by the Bavarians with a wholly unqualified enthusiasm, for they knew that what their duke had done was, in effect, to fling a stone at a hornets’ nest. The Hungarians, accustomed as they were to preying on their victims with impunity, were hardly the people now to turn the cheek themselves. A full-scale assault on the realm of the Eastern Franks would not be long postponed. The hour of reckoning was drawing near at last.

And it would be for Otto, as Christendom’s greatest king, to pass the fearsome test. Almost two centuries had passed now since the Saxons, the objects of Charlemagne’s mingled frustration and self- righteousness, had been brought to Christ at the point of his smoking sword; and still, by the Saxon aristocracy, it was taken for granted that warfare might be a Christian’s ultimate duty. It was true that numerous churchmen, in the years following the conversion of Saxony, had sought tirelessly to combat this presumption - not only foreign missionaries, but native scholars too, those who had actually studied the Gospels and pondered their unsettling, pacific teachings. These could not help but appear bizarre to most Saxons, yet there had been heroic attempts made to propagate them, even so. A monkish poet, back in the very earliest days of Saxon Christianity, had gone so far as to put words directly into the Saviour’s mouth: ‘If I wished to fight, then I would make the great and mighty God aware of it, so that He would send me so many angels wise in warfare that no human beings could stand up to the force of their weapons.’ So Christ had been imagined as telling Peter, at the moment of His arrest. ‘We are to bear whatever bitter things our enemies do to us.’ A message not unsuited, it might have been thought, to its earliest listeners, still bleeding as they were from the wounds of the Frankish conquest. But to a people such as the Saxons, blessed by Providence, had subsequently become? That was a quite different matter. Once, it was true, they had been compelled to swallow the gall of defeat, and to humble themselves, and to bow their necks before their conquerors – but they had not been left forever prostrated in the dust. God’s hand, manifesting itself through the irrefutable proof of all the great victories granted them, had restored to the Saxons their vanished glories – and multiplied them a hundredfold. And now a lord of Saxon blood sat on the Frankish throne, guarded about by his warriors, like ‘angels wise in warfare’ — and opposed to them were the hordes of a ravening paganism. Who was it, after all, who had entrusted the defence of East Francia to Otto, and endowed him with a martial splendour, and brought